Out of context: an intersection between domestic life and the workplace, as contexts for (business) talk.

This paper explores the intersection between two very different contexts - domestic life and the workplace - and the membrane which lies between them. This membrane is manifest in the practices through which participants come to treat certain of their identities as salient for the present interaction. This is explored through close examination of a conversation, the beginning of which happens to offer a kind of ‘natural laboratory’: the failure by a husband to recognise his wife’s voice when she calls him at work affords us the opportunity to see how each manages the talk as being, respectively, ‘workplace’ or ‘domestic’

Equivocal invitations (in English)

Examining a corpus of invitations made in telephone calls, in English (US and UK), there is evidently some variation in the design of turns in which the invitations are made, in their lexico-grammatical format. The variations in the forms through which these invitations are delivered are associated, broadly speaking, with two intersecting contingencies; the sequential and interactional circumstances (environment) in which the invitation is being made, and the kind of occasion that is represented in the invitation. The ways in which the design form(at) of an invitation is shaped by its interactional environment and represents a particular ‘kind of occasion’ is explored here. However, there is something further which, across the variations in their specific lexico-grammatical design, these designs tend to have in common – that is, that they are variations of equivocal forms of invitation (in contrast to grammatically ‘assertive’ forms); that is there is an uncertainty, a tentativeness in asking, amounting to a kind of cautiousness. This paper reports these equivocal forms through which invitations are most commonly made

Quit talking while I'm interrupting: a comparison between positions of overlap onset in conversation

Quit talking while I'm interrupting: a comparison between positions of overlap onset in conversatio

Figures of speech : figurative expressions and the management of topic transition in conversation

In conversation, speakers occasionally use figurative expressions such as “had a good innings,” “take with a pinch of salt,” or “come to the end of her tether.” This article investigates WHERE in conversation such expressions are used, in terms of their sequential distribution. One clear distributional pattern is found: Figurative expressions occur regularly in topic transition sequences, and specifically in the turn where a topic is summarized, thereby initiating the closing of a topic. The paper discusses some of the distinctive features of the topic termination/transition sequences with which figurative closings are associated, particularly participants' orientation to their moving to new topics. Finally, the interactional use of figurative expressions is considered in the context of instances where their use fails to secure topical closure, manifesting some conflict (disaffiliation, etc.) between the participants

Positive evaluation of student answers in classroom instruction

Within the context of teacher/whole-class instruction sequences, researchers have associated teacher evaluation of pupils' answers to forms of traditional pedagogic discourse, also referred to as 'triadic dialogue', 'monologic discourse', 'recitation' and 'Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequences'. Teacher evaluation has also been associated with pupils' low levels of participation. Explanations and solutions offered by prior research are mainly based on functional categories of actions, characterizing forms and functions of teacher questions and follow-up moves in IRE sequences. Using Conversation Analysis to investigate collections of positive evaluations in video-recorded lessons in two primary school classes, we propose an interactional explanation of the phenomenon and of its predominant use. We show that teachers systematically select the formats of their positive third-turn receipts not only to evaluate pupils' answers for their abstract truth value, but also with respect to the role of each question-answer in the whole activity. We demonstrate that, in this way, teachers convey judgements about the question within the activity; thus, adding a constitutive property to the pedagogic practice and providing students with interpretive resources for a common understanding of pedagogic goals and procedures. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis

Recruitment : Offers, Requests, and the Organization of Assistance in Interaction

In this article, we examine methods that participants use to resolve troubles in the realization of practical courses of action. The concept of recruitment is developed to encompass the linguistic and embodied ways in which assistance may be sought – requested or solicited – or in which we come to perceive another’s need and offer or volunteer assistance. We argue that these methods are organized as a continuum, from explicit requests, to practices that elicit offers, to anticipations of need. We further identify a class of subsidiary actions that can precede recruitment and that publicly expose troubles and thereby create opportunities for others to assist. Data in American and British English

4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community

We present two studies of online ephemerality and anonymity based on the popular discussion board /b/ at 4chan.org: a website with over 7 million users that plays an influential role in Internet culture. Although researchers and practitioners often assume that user identity and data permanence are central tools in the design of online communities, we explore how /b/ succeeds despite being almost entirely anonymous and extremely ephemeral. We begin by describing /b/ and performing a content analysis that suggests the community is dominated by playful exchanges of images and links. Our first study uses a large dataset of more than five million posts to quantify ephemerality in /b/. We find that most threads spend just five seconds on the first page and less than five minutes on the site before expiring. Our second study is an analysis of identity signals on 4chan, finding that over 90% of posts are made by fully anonymous users, with other identity signals adopted and discarded at will. We describe alternative mechanisms that /b/ participants use to establish status and frame their interaction

Searching for Trouble: Recruiting Assistance through Embodied Action

The recruitment of assistance constitutes a basic organizational problem for participants in social interaction. The methods of recruitment that we have identified include embodied displays of trouble which create opportunities for others to give or offer assistance. In this report, we examine one coherent set of such embodied displays in detail: visible searches of the environment. We first distinguish between looking and searching as different forms of embodied action and then describe the specific embodied practices that participants use to produce visible searches