When to make the sensory social: Registering in copresent openings

This article provides the first detailed empirical analysis of naturally-occurring videorecorded openings during which participants make the sensory social through the action of registering – calling joint attention to a selected, publicly perceivable referent so others shift their sensory attention to it. Examining sequence-initial actions that register referents for which a participant is regarded as responsible, this study elucidates a systematic preference organization which observably guides when and how people initiate registering sequences sensitive to both referent ownership and referent value. Analysis shows how choosing to register an owned referent puts involved participants’ face, affiliation, and social relationship on the line

When to Make the Sensory Social: Registering in Face-to-Face Openings

This article analyzes naturally occurring video-recorded openings during which participants make the sensory social through the action of registering—calling joint attention to a selected, publicly perceiv- able referent so others shift their sensory attention to it. It examines sequence-initial actions that register referents for which a participant is regarded as responsible. Findings demonstrate a systematic preference organization which observably guides when and how people initiate registering sequences sensitive to ownership of, and displayed stance toward, the target referent. Analysis shows how registering an owned referent achieves intersubjectivity and puts involved participants’ face, affiliation, and social relationship on the line. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/rNL70vawG3

Being a Good Parent in Parent-Teacher Conferences

This research advances our understanding of what constitutes a good parent in the course of actual social interaction. Examining video-recorded naturally occurring parent-teacher conferences, this article shows that, while teachers deliver student-praising utterances, parents may display that they are gaining knowledge; but when teachers’ actions adumbrate student-criticizing utterances, parents systematically display prior knowledge. This article elucidates the details of how teachers and parents tacitly collaborate to enable parents to express student-troubles first, demonstrating that parents display competence -- appropriate involvement with children’s schooling -- by asserting their prior knowledge of, and/or claiming/describing their efforts to remedy, student-troubles. People (have to) display competence generically in interaction. By explicating how parents display competence, this article offers insights for several areas of communication research

Preference Organization

Conversation analytic research on “preference organization” investigates recorded episodes of naturally occurring social interaction to elucidate how people systematically design their actions to either support or undermine social solidarity. This line of work examines public forms of conduct that are highly generalized and institutionalized, not the private desires, subjective feelings or psychological preferences of individuals. This article provides a detailed and accessible overview of classic and contemporary conversation analytic findings about preference, which collectively demonstrate that human interaction is organized to favor actions that promote social affiliation (through face-preservation) at the expense of conflict (resulting from face-threat). While other overviews on this topic exist, the present article is the first to synthesize findings about the preference organization of responding and initiating actions, elucidating key preference principles distilled from over 45 years of conversation analytic work, including the preferences for: (i) recipient design, (ii) contiguity and agreement, (iii) progressivity, (iv) offers over requests, (v) recognition over self-identification, (vi) self-correction over other-correction, (vii) self-criticism over other-criticism (avoiding other-criticism), and (viii) other-praise over self-praise (avoiding self-praise)

Arriving: Expanding the Personal State Sequence

When arriving to a social encounter, how and when can a person show how s/he is doing/feeling? This article answers this question, examining personal state sequences in copresent openings of casual (residential) and institutional (parent-teacher) encounters. Describing a regular way participants constitute—and move to expand—these sequences, this research shows how arrivers display a nonneutral (e.g., negative, humorous, positive) personal state by both (1) deploying interactionally timed stance-marking embodiments that enact a nonneutral state, and (2) invoking a selected previous activity/experience positioned as precipitating that nonneutral state. Data demonstrate that arrivers time their nonneutral personal state displays calibrated to their understanding of their relationship with coparticipants. Analysis reveals that arrivers use this action to proffer a firsthand experience as a self-attentive first topic that works as a bid for empathy, inviting recipients to collaborate in expanding the personal state sequence and thereby cocreate an empathic moment. Data in American English

Danielle Pillet-Shore, Associate Professor of Communication, COLA travels to Northern Ireland

Professor Pillet-Shore received an invitation to present a research paper at the International Pragmatics Association conference, which centers on the study of language use

Where the Action Is: Positioning Matters in Interaction

Position matters. As a conversation analyst examining any form of recorded synchronous human interaction – be it casual or institutional – I constantly monitor for, and organize my collections of target phenomena around structural position: Where on a transcript and when in an unfolding real-time encounter does a participant enact some form of conduct? Because conversation analysis (CA) is primarily focused upon action sequences, I use CA methods to examine the ways in which participants’ audible utterances and visible body-behaviors accomplish particular social actions due at least in part to their positioning within a sequence of interaction – an ordered series of moves between different participants (Heritage, 1984:245). This chapter attests to the importance of paying close attention to structural position as requisite for understanding how participants design their conduct to be recognizable as particular social actions in interaction. To detail a range of positional issues, this chapter first considers how to tackle the task of identifying the position of participant conduct, and then presents several forms of evidence that an action takes on different meaning based upon how it is positioned – where/when it is done. In the central section, “Position, Action, and Meaning,” I discuss: (i) how the position of a silence affects its meaning; (ii) the reflexive relationship between position and turn design; and (iii) the position of an action within a sequence. I expand this last section by explicating how CA work on preference organization necessitates analyses of structural position, detailing how participants position both their sequence-initiating and sequence-responding actions. Across two sub-sections, I focus on describing how I have gone about analyzing participants’ positioning of sequence-initial actions in both institutional and casual interactions to exemplify how structural position can serve as a key avenue leading directly to findings about the orderliness of human action

Depersonalizing Troubles in Institutional Interaction: Routinizing in Parent-Teacher Conferences

This article advances our understanding of institutional interaction by showing when and how it can be advantageous for professionals to treat addressed-recipients as non-unique. Examining how teachers talk about children-as-students during parent-teacher conferences, this investigation illuminates several specific interactional methods that teachers use to depersonalize the focal student’s trouble, delineating as among these the novel practice of “routinizing”—citing firsthand experience with other similar cases. Analysis demonstrates how teachers use routinizing to enact their expertise, both responsively as a vehicle for attenuating and credentialing their advice-giving to parents/caregivers, and proactively to preempt parent/caregiver resistance to their student-assessments/evaluations. This research thus reveals how routinizing licenses teachers’ authority vis-à-vis the focal student’s trouble by making salient the epistemic basis for their claims

Peer conversation about substance use

What happens when a friend starts talking about her own substance use and misuse? This article provides the first investigation of how substance use is spontaneously topicalized in naturally occurring conversation. It presents a detailed analysis of a rare video-recorded interaction showing American English-speaking university students talking about their own substance (mis)use in a residential setting. During this conversation, several substance (mis)use informings are disclosed about one participant, and this study elucidates what occasions each disclosure, and how participants respond to each disclosure. This research shows how participants use casual conversation to offer important substance (mis)use information to their friends and cohabitants, tacitly recruiting their surveillance. Analysis also uncovers how an emerging adult peer group enacts informal social control, locally (re-)constituting taken-for-granted social norms and the participants’ social relationships, to on the one hand promote alcohol use while, on the other hand endeavouring to prevent one member from engaging in continued pain medication misuse. This article thus illuminates ordinary peer conversation as an important site for continued sociological research on substance (mis)use and prevention. https://youtu.be/zFRuqgtKSQ

How to Begin

This article introduces the special issue of Research on Language and Social Interaction organized around the theme “Opening and Maintaining Face-to-Face Interaction.” The contributions to this special issue collectively consider “how to begin” – either a new encounter, or a new sequence after a lapse in conversation. All articles analyze naturally-occurring, videorecorded episodes of casual and/or institutional copresent interaction using multimodal conversation analytic methods. Though the opening phase of a face-to-face encounter may elapse in a matter of seconds, this article shows it to house a dense universe of phenomena central to sustaining our human sense of self and our social relationships in everyday life. Before introducing the individual contributions to this special issue, this article elucidates state-of-the-art findings from conversation analytic research on how people begin encounters, delineating the modular components that people regularly use to constitute the copresent opening phase of interaction. Data in American Englis