Other-repetition in conversation across languages: Bringing prosody into pragmatic typology

In this article, I introduce the aims and scope of a project examining other-repetition in natural conversation. This introduction provides the conceptual and methodological background for the five language-specific studies contained in this special issue, focussing on other-repetition in English, Finnish, French, Italian, and Swedish. Other-repetition is a recurrent conversational phenomenon in which a speaker repeats all or part of what another speaker has just said, typically in the next turn. Our project focusses particularly on other-repetitions that problematise what is being repeated and typically solicit a response. Previous research has shown that such repetitions can accomplish a range of conversational actions. But how do speakers of different languages distinguish these actions? In addressing this question, we put at centre stage the resources of prosody—the nonlexical acoustic-auditory features of speech—and bring its systematic analysis into the growing field of pragmatic typology—the comparative study of language use and conversational structure

The Development of L2 Interactional Competence

This book presents unique insights into the development of L2 interactional competence through the lens of complaining, demonstrating how a closer study of complaining as a social activity can enhance our understanding of certain aspects of language learning with implications for future L2 research. The volume employs a multimodal, longitudinal conversation analytic (CA) approach in its analysis of data from video-recorded interactions of several elementary and advanced L2 speakers of French as they build their interactional competence, understood as the ability to accomplish social actions and activities in the L2 in context-dependent and recipient-designed ways. Skogmyr Marian calls attention to three key dimensions of complaining in these conversations – its structural organization, the interactional resources people use when they complain, and how speakers’ shared interactional histories and changing social relationships affect complaint practices. The volume underscores the fundamentally multimodal, socially situated, and co-constructed nature of L2 interactional competence and the socialization processes involved in its development, indicating paths for new work on interactional competence and L2 research more broadly. This book will be of appeal to students and scholars interested in second language acquisition, social interaction, and applied linguistics

Shifting voices with participant roles: Voice qualities and speech registers in Mesoamerica

Although an increasing number of sociolinguistic researchers consider functions of voice qualities as stylistic features, few studies consider cases where voice qualities serve as the primary signs of speech registers. This article addresses this gap through the presentation of a case study of Lachixio Zapotec speech registers indexed though falsetto, breathy, creaky, modal, and whispered voice qualities. I describe the system of contrastive speech registers in Lachixio Zapotec and then track a speaker on a single evening where she switches between three of these registers. Analyzing line-by-line conversational structure I show both obligatory and creative shifts between registers that co-occur with shifts in the participant structures of the situated social interactions. I then examine similar uses of voice qualities in other Zapotec languages and in the two unrelated language families Nahuatl and Mayan to suggest the possibility that such voice registers are a feature of the Mesoamerican culture area

The artistic infant directed performance: a mycroanalysis of the adult’s movements and sounds

Intersubjectivity experiences established between adults and infants are partially determined by the particular ways in which adults are active in front of babies. An important amount of research focuses on the “musicality” of infant-directed speech (defined melodic contours, tonal and rhythm variations, etc.) and its role in linguistic enculturation. However, researchers have recently suggested that adults also bring a multimodal performance to infants. According to this, some scholars seem to find indicators of the genesis of the performing arts (mainly music and dance) in such a multimodal stimulation. We analyze the adult performance using analytical categories and methodologies of analysis broadly validated in the fields of music performance and movement analysis in contemporary dance. We present microanalyses of an adult-7 month old infant interaction scene that evidenced structural aspects of infant directed multimodal performance compatible with music and dance structures, and suggest functions of adult performance similar to performing arts functions or related to them.Facultad de Arte

Politeness strategies in giving and responding to compliments: a sociopragmatics study of compliments in “the devil wears prada”

This research was conducted to discover the way the characters employ compliment also compliment responses and the politeness strategies employed by the characters in giving and responding to compliment in the movie entitled “The Devil Wears Prada”. Five major theories mainly used are Holmes’s Social Dimension’s of Communication, Hymes’ SPEAKING theory, Chaika’s theory of kinesics, and Herbert’s theory of compliment responses, and Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness strategies. This research applies a socio-pragmatic approach as the way of analysis. This research is arranged using a descriptive qualitative method. All the dialogs containing compliment and compliment responses were taken as data. The results of the analysis can be seen as follows: First, the compliments delivered by characters come along with combination of non-verbal acts. The addressees respond to compliments in various ways. Four types of compliment responses were delivered by the characters. The responses are appreciation token, scale down, question, and disagreement. The characters respond to the compliment with a combination of verbal and non-verbal acts or only non-verbal acts. Second, all characters employ positive politeness in delivering compliments. In responding compliment, the characters employ different strategies. The strategies are positive politeness, negative politeness, and saying nothing or do not do FTA

Third person interpretation and the sociolinguistics of verbal communication

PhD ThesisThis thesis is addressed to analysts of talk in social scenes. Its principal aim is to develop a framework for systematically investigating third person interpretations of what communicates and what is communicated in the data products of everyday verbal exchange. The programme of research that is designed to meet this aim is based on analytic and descriptive techniques adopted from a wide range of disciplines concerned with the study of verbal communication, and particularly those associated with the work of John Gumperz (1982a; 1982b). By focussing on the nature of third person descriptions of what goes on and who is involved in various tape recorded products of talk, the research seeks to explore the nature of members' interpretive resources for recovering and warranting communicative norms that are not normally verbalised as talk is in progress. The investigative method developed for this purpose provides professional observers with an empirical means of citing evidence in support of their own analytic claims about what participants are doing in talk. It also provides an enabling device for generating and testing hypotheses about the communicative salience of different sociolinguistic factors, much as Gumperz (1982a) suggests. On the basis of the work presented, it is argued that whatever the disciplinary motivation of the analyst or the sociolinguistic contexts in which talk occurs third person interpretive methods offer a powerful descriptive tool. The research potential of this tool is evaluated in terms of its utility for not only investigating the interpretive resources of different individuals within a specific culture, but also for developing culturally sensitive theories of communicative language use in general

Teacher smiles as an interactional and pedagogical resource in the classroom

In classroom settings, laughter and smiles are resources for action that are available to both teachers and students. Recent interactional studies have documented how students use these resources to deal with trouble of various kind, but less is known about the sequential and activity contexts of teachers' laughter-relevant practices, as well as their pedagogical functions. We use multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to investigate the interactional unfolding and pedagogical orientations of teacher smiles during instructional IRE (initiation-response-evaluation) sequences in a corpus of 37 bilingual lessons collected in schools in Finland and Spain. In analysing the focal smiles, we pay attention to their temporal relationships to students' preceding and subsequent facial expressions and the unfolding of on-going talk. We argue that smiling can index teachers' affiliative and pedagogical responsiveness to troubles and competences implied by prior student actions. The analysis of selected data fragments shows how smiling is part of multimodal action packages through which teachers manage momentary action disalignments and restore a sense of students as competent actors. The findings contribute towards recent CA research on the embodied and interactional nature of teaching and learning by showing some ways in which smiling is a situated practice used for professional purposes. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V

“THIS IS A STUNNING, STUNNING NIGHT”: NEWS MEDIA CONSTRUCTIONS OF EMOTIONAL REALITY

The news media is one of the main influences of people’s perception, especially during elections. It can have an influence on a voter’s perception during and after the results of an election. One of the issues that arises is that news reports are biased, which affects viewers’ perceptions and interpretations of the information reported. This paper presents an analysis of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the genre of news media and further shows that prosodic features is another layer of analysis in CDA. I am looking specifically at how news broadcasts construct information after the 2016 election results. News media that represent either conservative liberal or Right-wing both use strategies to manipulate information even when the viewer wants to think of news media as neutral. In this paper, nine news reports that represent either conservative liberal or Right-wing from four leading news broadcasts were analyzed: Fox News, ABC News, NBC News, and CNN Breaking News. A transcription key organized the notes made of the micro element patterns seen in each report, which the patterns are color-coded. Observations were made through differences in the visual content shown, word choices, face-threatening acts, phonetic features, and prosodic features. Vowels and intonation was analyzed through the program Praat, a free computer software package for the scientific analysis of speech in phonetics, which spectrograms are included to show the patterns that are evident. The patterns revealed that news media presents information based on the side they represent and leave out information that contradicts their representation of reality. The phonetic features also show that there is a construction of emotional speech, which in turn affects how the audience perceives the information