Sourire pour négocier des transitions thématiques de conversations en Français

International audienceThis study focuses on participants’ smiling behavior as a resource for negotiating topic transitions in French conversations. The smile will be analyzed as a resource during topic transitions: through its intensities and its development. This study will show that the speaker’s smiling dynamic contributes to initiating a transition and that the hearer tends to synchronize his/her smile with the speaker to ratify it

How funny it is when everybody gets going! A case of co-construction of humor in conversation

Humor is built and co-constructed by the participants in conversation, by means of terms and / or attitudes. The paper shows the effects of humor and its co-construction on the interaction itself and on the relationship of the participants to each other. The qualitative analysis of a short sequence carried out emerges into a theoretical reflection about both the functioning of humor itself and about familiar conversation in general

Listing Practice in French Conversation: From Collaborative Achievement to Interactional Convergence

Listing practice is an activity requiring a multi-unit turn produced by one single speaker. In this article, and following previous works within the conversation analysis framework, we will focus on lists elaborated by two participants, thus, describing lists as a “collaborative achievement”. In a first time, we will present the relevant features which make list construction a good candidate for illustrating such a collaborative achievement. But in a second time, we will investigate to what extent this collaborative achievement can be considered a true interactional convergent construction. Using a sequential and qualitative analysis, we investigate lists in a French conversational corpus. In a two-step analysis, we will first extract a list item provided by recipient within list. This item, considered a specific feedback response (Bavelas et al., 2000) illustrates the active collaboration from the recipient. In Stivers’ term (2008), this specific feedback aligns and affiliates with prior turn. Secondly, we will show that, depending on how the speaker orients to the feedback, this latter can be more or less accepted, hence, the hearer’s collaboration to the construction of the list. Thus, this work enables to confirm the proactive nature of feedback (Tolins & Fox Tree, 2014). Moreover, this would provide new insights into interactional convergence that cannot be reduced to a collaborative achievement.Faire des listes est une activité qui requiert des unités de tours multiples de la part d’un seul locuteur. Dans la continuité de quelques travaux en analyse conversationnelle, nous examinons ici les listes élaborées par deux participants, c’est-à-dire accomplies collaborativement. Nous présentons d’abord les caractéristiques pertinentes qui font de ce type de liste un bon candidat pour illustrer un tel accomplissement collaboratif. Mais nous analysons ensuite jusqu’à quel point ce dernier peut renvoyer à une réelle convergence interactionnelle. Grâce à une analyse séquentielle et qualitative, nous examinons les listes dans un corpus de français conversationnel. Nous menons une analyse en deux temps : 1/ l’item de liste produit par l’interlocuteur au sein de la liste est considéré comme un feedback spécifique (Bavelas et al., 2000) illustrant la collaboration active de l’interlocuteur ; selon Stivers (2008), il est aligné et affilié avec le tour précédent ; 2/ selon la manière dont le locuteur oriente sa réponse par rapport au feedback, celui-ci apparaît comme étant plus ou moins accepté, ce qui a une incidence sur la collaboration initiée par l’interlocuteur pour construire la liste. Ce travail permet ainsi de confirmer la nature proactive des feedback (Tolins et Fox Tree, 2014). De plus, il offre un nouvel éclairage sur la convergence interactionnelle non réductible à un simple accomplissement collaboratif

Le CID - Corpus of Interactional Data -: protocoles, conventions, annotations

L'analyse du langage et de la parole repose sur l'étude de domaines variés allant de la phonétique à la pragmatique, tout en prenant en compte les modalités de leur expression. Pour la linguistique moderne, si chaque domaine dispose d'un certain niveau d'autonomie, il ne peut être expliqué que dans son interaction avec les autres : l'information linguistique est le produit de la convergence de multiples sources d'information, information aussi contrainte par l'environnement où le message a été produit. L'analyse linguistique ne peut donc se faire qu'en tenant compte des différentes modalités d'expression de l'information. Mais à ce jour, aucune théorie ne traite de manière intégrée des informations issues des différents niveaux de la chaîne linguistique, qui est par essence un contenu perceptuel multimodal. Bien que de nombreux projets d'annotation se soient développés ces dernières années, des problèmes subsistent: les ressources multimodales annotées n'existent quasiment pas pour le français ; les standards d'annotation ne répondent pas complètement aux besoins et les outils ne sont pas adaptés. Or, le développement de ce type de ressources est utile à plusieurs titres,entre autres la description des informations de chacun des domaines et de leurs interactions. Nous présentons le Corpus of Interactional Data (CID), corpus audio et vidéo comptant actuellement 8h de dilogue en français, les annotations à l'étude (phonétique, prosodique, morphosyntaxique, mimo-gestuelle) et leur état de réalisation

Testing, stretching, and aligning:Using ‘ironic personae’ to make sense of complicated issues

Irony and humor play an important role in both organizing and organizations, because they both help to collide and contrast ideas as well as mitigate and moderate criticism. Our empirical observations of a senior management team suggest participants frequently use verbal irony and aggressive conversational humor through ‘ironic personae’ – a cast of characters, real or imaginary – as a vehicle for pragmatically making sense of complicated topics. We show how ironic personae perform three functions: (i) testing new positions on topics in a non-committal way; (ii) stretching the frame of comparison of a group; and (iii) aligning shared understanding and commitment. Thus, our analysis sheds light on an underexplored and undertheorised pragmatic vehicle for the expression of humorous verbal irony and aggressive conversational humor

Spread of a SARS-CoV-2 variant through Europe in the summer of 2020.

Following its emergence in late 2019, the spread of SARS-CoV-21,2 has been tracked by phylogenetic analysis of viral genome sequences in unprecedented detail3–5. Although the virus spread globally in early 2020 before borders closed, intercontinental travel has since been greatly reduced. However, travel within Europe resumed in the summer of 2020. Here we report on a SARS-CoV-2 variant, 20E (EU1), that was identified in Spain in early summer 2020 and subsequently spread across Europe. We find no evidence that this variant has increased transmissibility, but instead demonstrate how rising incidence in Spain, resumption of travel, and lack of effective screening and containment may explain the variant’s success. Despite travel restrictions, we estimate that 20E (EU1) was introduced hundreds of times to European countries by summertime travellers, which is likely to have undermined local efforts to minimize infection with SARS-CoV-2. Our results illustrate how a variant can rapidly become dominant even in the absence of a substantial transmission advantage in favourable epidemiological settings. Genomic surveillance is critical for understanding how travel can affect transmission of SARS-CoV-2, and thus for informing future containment strategies as travel resumes. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited

Post-Franco Theatre

In the multiple realms and layers that comprise the contemporary Spanish theatrical landscape, “crisis” would seem to be the word that most often lingers in the air, as though it were a common mantra, ready to roll off the tongue of so many theatre professionals with such enormous ease, and even enthusiasm, that one is prompted to wonder whether it might indeed be a miracle that the contemporary technological revolution – coupled with perpetual quandaries concerning public and private funding for the arts – had not by now brought an end to the evolution of the oldest of live arts, or, at the very least, an end to drama as we know it

Longitudinal study of contents and elements in the scientific Web environment

The aim of this work is the longitudinal study of the evolution and the state of 738 web sites in two different points in time (1997 and 2004). It tries to establish the rate of growth and decay of the Web and all the web elements. To this end, the structure and the contents of these web sites are extracted through a crawler and compared at the two different moments in time. The main results confirm a growth of web contents and elements in the web, although there is also a high degree of web content decay. The results suggest that in the seven year period covered by this study the web is characterized by both strong dynamism and instability

Book review: Winter Froemel, Esme and Zirker Angelika (eds.) (2015), Enjeux du jeu de mots. Perspectives linguistiques et littéraires [Stakes of wordplay. Linguistic and literary perspectives

International audienc