In this paper, I analyse a piece of interaction during which the participants seem to have trouble arriving at an agreement in a series of affective evaluations. The sequence does not contain other initiations of repair, third position repairs or fourth position repairs, places in which problems of intersubjectivity become visible in the conversation analytic tradition. I show that these problems are due to the fact that the participants do not share an understanding of the nature of the conversation, their respective roles in it, or their mutual relationship. In the end, I discuss my analysis in light of the Schuetzian (1953) understanding of intersubjectivity and suggest that initiating and accomplishing repair are not the only means for restoring intersubjectivity in interaction.
This chapter concerns expressions which seem internally contradictory because they consist of both a recognitional and a non-recognitional element. They contain both the Finnish demonstrative se ‘that, the’, a recognitional, as in se ihminen ‘that/the person’, and one of the indefinite determiners yksi ‘one’, semmonen ‘such’, and joku ‘some’, all of which are non-recognitionals, resulting in expressions such as se joku ihminen ‘that/the some person’. The chapter shows that each of these expressions has its own home environment and expresses a distinct epistemic stance. The main findings are that these expressions constitute a fine-grained resource for the negotiation of relative epistemic status and are tools for building intersubjective common ground in interaction.
In this paper, we discuss turn design as a locus of intersubjectivity. We focus on two types of directives in Finnish interactions, turns formatted with second-person imperative and turns that contain zero person. Neither of these turn designs contains a separate subject phrase explicating the person(s) referred to, nor does either indicate when the action nominated is to take place. We study the kinds of assumptions these two turn designs make and present as shared, and the interplay of the assumptions in relation to the sequential and activity context of the turn. The design of turns and actions in sequences of interaction thus allows us to see intersubjectivity at work, even when repair does not take place.
In this chapter, we discuss design features of second assessments in German and Swedish conversation. We focus on opinion-verb constructions (finden, tycka) in full and reduced clausal formats. The study shows that reduced formats are followed by sequence closure while full formats are followed by more talk on the topic. We explain this finding by arguing that by using reduced formats, second speakers claim less agency and display low affiliation with the first assessment, whereas full formats work in the opposite way. The full and reduced opinion-verb constructions represent standardized action patterns with recognizable implications, leading to predictable interactional trajectories and coordinated intersubjective behavior.
This paper examines address inversion in classroom interactions in Arabic. Address inversion, found in various languages, is an address practice where the speaker addresses the recipient with the same address term that the recipient would normally use to call the speaker. Inverted address is a denotationally incongruent, asymmetric address used by speakers who claim cultural seniority. By analyzing the position of address inversion in interaction (in turns, sequences, and activities) and utilizing the notion of stance, this paper examines the ways in which address inversion manages intersubjectivity by constructing the shifting relationships between the participants in classroom interaction. The data are classroom interactions video recorded in Palestinian territories.
This chapter examines multilingual interactions where bilingual participants engage in advancing mutual understanding between other participants by language brokering (e.g. Bolden 2012) requests and offers from Finnish to Brazilian Portuguese. Brokering turns involve either (i) declarative statements regarding the prior speaker’s volition towards the requested/offered matter or (ii) questions concerning the recipient’s volition. The use of these formats displays the broker’s intersubjective interpretation of locally relevant features of the action, such as the distribution of benefits and agency, and contingencies in its realization. The investigation of language brokering in this context also contributes to research on requests, offers and related social actions (e.g. Couper-Kuhlen 2014), action ascription (Levinson 2013; Deppermann & Haugh forthcoming), and on verbs expressing volition (Sacks 1992: 181; Schulze-Wenck 2005).
Decisions are often made in a two-part sequence, consisting of a proposal by one party and an aligning response from others. While this sequence is well established, less is known about the preparatory work that may precede it. This chapter studies decision-making in the context of complex service selling. It demonstrates that and how salespeople and a prospective customer collaboratively and incrementally establish a decision over a multi-sequence course of action, in which a sequence implements a stage and the next sequence implements a next step or outcome of the prior stage. Thus, the chapter sheds light on how the groundwork for a proposal is laid. The conversation analytic study is based on 17 video-recorded business-to-business sales meetings in Finland.
The experience of suffering may result in a breakdown of commonly shared meaning, namely the disintegration of intersubjectivity. This article investigates patients’ expressions of suffering and professionals’ attempts to maintain intersubjective understanding in interactions that are conducted in psychiatric outpatient care. The analysis demonstrates that patients’ expressions of suffering involve a strong emotional experience and a particular kind of passivity: tolerance of agonising pain and endurance of what is unbearable. For their part, professionals attempt to verbalise and explain the patient’s experience in order to build a shared world of meaning. The article argues that by locating suffering in the symptoms of an illness, professionals structure suffering into a medical problem. This enables them to suggest appropriate treatment options aimed at eliminating suffering.
Drawing on video data and ethnomethodological conversation analysis, the study focuses on sequences of human action and interaction in which participants orient to small wildlife within their nature-related activities outdoors. The participants are family members, friends or participants on organized outings, and they engage in activities such as trekking, foraging and fishing. The study examines moments when small wildlife become the focus of the participants’ talk and other action and when the relationship between human beings and the natural world is thus constructed in situ. The study considers how participants in such moments display, pursue and achieve shared understandings about what the appropriate ways of treating other living beings and, more generally, conducting oneself in nature are.
This paper explores other-initiated repair, or more specifically, extended repair sequences. In extended cases, the repair turn does not immediately resolve the trouble, and the speaker needs to produce a new repair initiation.
Drawing on a collection of 458 other-initiations of repair in naturally occurring everyday interaction in Finnish, we show how the distribution of the outcomes of different types of initiations clearly differs. Typically, candidate understandings and open class repair initiations do not lead to extended sequences, whereas repeats (with question words) are more often followed by a second repair initiation. The type of trouble, as well as the typological specificity of different initiations, explains the outcomes of the repair sequences.
This study examines video-recorded, naturally occurring Finnish dyads focusing on lapses (inter-sequential silences). During most lapses, participants undertake bodily activities or behaviors (Hoey 2015). Adding to previous work, this study describes “comfortable” silences where participants share the moment with no bodily activities or mutual gaze, inhabiting the silence with simple co-presence. The analysis suggests that instead of the gathering/encounter dualism, participant behavior in social situations is better described as a continuum of orientations. Also during the “comfortable” silences, understanding of behavioral involvements is intersubjectively created and maintained. Thus, even outside of sequences that allegedly create and maintain the “architecture of intersubjectivity” (Heritage 1984), social organization is jointly negotiated and achieved, most importantly by mutual monitoring and reciprocation of (bodily) orientations.
Intersubjectivity is a crucial issue not only for how participants in social interaction communicate and coordinate shared projects, but also for how they engage in sensing the material world around them while they are jointly acting in that world. This paper offers an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic study of sensoriality that provides for a multimodal interactional analysis of sensory practices. On the basis of a video-recorded beer tasting session, I show how, far from being limited to individual and neuro-physiological processes, situated activities of sensing are a collective accomplishment here and now, emerging within joint activities of searching, finding, and sharing relevant features of taste, building agreements, and overcoming divergent views.
Conversation analytical studies on emotion show how expression of emotion is part of the intersubjective experience. Emotions, however, are as much physiological as experiential events. Physiological processes pertaining to emotion involve changes in cardiovascular activity, in the activation of sweat glands, and in muscular activity. The dyadic systems theory by Beebe and Lachmann (2002) suggests that actions that regulate social interaction also serve in the regulation of internal emotional states of interacting subjects. Drawing from this theory, our overall research questions was: how is the expression of emotion in social interaction linked to physiological responses in the participants? Our main result was that thorough conversational affiliation, the participants share the emotional load in the interaction.
In this chapter, we consider movement synchrony from two different perspectives. On the one hand, we report a small-scale empirical study to test the hypothesis that movement synchrony is a sequential phenomenon, which serves as a demonstration of how conversation analytically informed research on participants’ unconscious tendencies to synchronize their body movements could proceed in practice. On the other hand, we consider movement synchrony through three closely related, yet essentially different, conceptual lenses: conditional relevance, dialogic resonance, and affordance. We suggest that a specific combination of the insights provided by these three conceptual tools would make conversation analytically informed study of movement synchrony both possible and fruitful.
This study examines intersubjective development of children’s requests in home interactions of Finnish-speaking 1–5-year-old children with their caregivers, siblings and peers. Children’s early requests emerge sequentially through the caregivers’ co-construction of the children’s early vocalizations, word-gesture combinations and two-word utterances. Children’s first linguistically explicit requests, imperatives, also rely on intersubjective understanding between the child and the caregiver. Children start to use conditional verb forms and interrogatives as social adaptations for making requests to equal peers. Between one and five years, children’s requesting develops from embodied, co-constructed action to distinct linguistic formulations. Caregiver interaction supports the children’s reliance on co-participants’ co-operation in fulfilling requests whereas peer interaction enhances children’s intersubjective understanding of co-participants’ varying commitment and entitlement to grant the request.
This paper investigates how a group of young adults participating in theatre rehearsals construct a spontaneous improvised scene. The analysis shows how the youths construct a fairly coherent scene in a situation in which the interactional moves and the interactional frame emerges. We analyse how the improvisation is initiated, how it is carried forward, and how the scene is discussed afterwards. After the improvised scene, it emerged that the participants had differing conceptions of what exactly they had been doing. However, these differing conceptions did not hinder them from participating and contributing to the scene in coherent ways and were thus sufficiently similar for practical purposes. In our analysis, we focus on how the youths constructed the scene by recycling lexemes, syntactic forms and embodied actions.
This chapter explores the potential existence of interactional reciprocity in human–dog interactions by analyzing experimental data on situations where dog owners fail to produce reciprocally modified actions for two minutes. We found that their dogs soon realized the strangeness of the situation. While they pursued missing feedback with touch, gaze and vocalizations, they also addressed other humans and requested their attention. Therefore, the dogs oriented to the lack of reciprocity and attempted to repair it. We demonstrate that interactional reciprocity in human–dog interactions can be breached, thus proving its existence. Moreover, we show that it also returned when the experiment ended. The findings are compared with mother–infant experiments where evidence of interactional reciprocity has also been found.
In this paper, I analyse a piece of interaction during which the participants seem to have trouble arriving at an agreement in a series of affective evaluations. The sequence does not contain other initiations of repair, third position repairs or fourth position repairs, places in which problems of intersubjectivity become visible in the conversation analytic tradition. I show that these problems are due to the fact that the participants do not share an understanding of the nature of the conversation, their respective roles in it, or their mutual relationship. In the end, I discuss my analysis in light of the Schuetzian (1953) understanding of intersubjectivity and suggest that initiating and accomplishing repair are not the only means for restoring intersubjectivity in interaction.
This chapter concerns expressions which seem internally contradictory because they consist of both a recognitional and a non-recognitional element. They contain both the Finnish demonstrative se ‘that, the’, a recognitional, as in se ihminen ‘that/the person’, and one of the indefinite determiners yksi ‘one’, semmonen ‘such’, and joku ‘some’, all of which are non-recognitionals, resulting in expressions such as se joku ihminen ‘that/the some person’. The chapter shows that each of these expressions has its own home environment and expresses a distinct epistemic stance. The main findings are that these expressions constitute a fine-grained resource for the negotiation of relative epistemic status and are tools for building intersubjective common ground in interaction.
In this paper, we discuss turn design as a locus of intersubjectivity. We focus on two types of directives in Finnish interactions, turns formatted with second-person imperative and turns that contain zero person. Neither of these turn designs contains a separate subject phrase explicating the person(s) referred to, nor does either indicate when the action nominated is to take place. We study the kinds of assumptions these two turn designs make and present as shared, and the interplay of the assumptions in relation to the sequential and activity context of the turn. The design of turns and actions in sequences of interaction thus allows us to see intersubjectivity at work, even when repair does not take place.
In this chapter, we discuss design features of second assessments in German and Swedish conversation. We focus on opinion-verb constructions (finden, tycka) in full and reduced clausal formats. The study shows that reduced formats are followed by sequence closure while full formats are followed by more talk on the topic. We explain this finding by arguing that by using reduced formats, second speakers claim less agency and display low affiliation with the first assessment, whereas full formats work in the opposite way. The full and reduced opinion-verb constructions represent standardized action patterns with recognizable implications, leading to predictable interactional trajectories and coordinated intersubjective behavior.
This paper examines address inversion in classroom interactions in Arabic. Address inversion, found in various languages, is an address practice where the speaker addresses the recipient with the same address term that the recipient would normally use to call the speaker. Inverted address is a denotationally incongruent, asymmetric address used by speakers who claim cultural seniority. By analyzing the position of address inversion in interaction (in turns, sequences, and activities) and utilizing the notion of stance, this paper examines the ways in which address inversion manages intersubjectivity by constructing the shifting relationships between the participants in classroom interaction. The data are classroom interactions video recorded in Palestinian territories.
This chapter examines multilingual interactions where bilingual participants engage in advancing mutual understanding between other participants by language brokering (e.g. Bolden 2012) requests and offers from Finnish to Brazilian Portuguese. Brokering turns involve either (i) declarative statements regarding the prior speaker’s volition towards the requested/offered matter or (ii) questions concerning the recipient’s volition. The use of these formats displays the broker’s intersubjective interpretation of locally relevant features of the action, such as the distribution of benefits and agency, and contingencies in its realization. The investigation of language brokering in this context also contributes to research on requests, offers and related social actions (e.g. Couper-Kuhlen 2014), action ascription (Levinson 2013; Deppermann & Haugh forthcoming), and on verbs expressing volition (Sacks 1992: 181; Schulze-Wenck 2005).
Decisions are often made in a two-part sequence, consisting of a proposal by one party and an aligning response from others. While this sequence is well established, less is known about the preparatory work that may precede it. This chapter studies decision-making in the context of complex service selling. It demonstrates that and how salespeople and a prospective customer collaboratively and incrementally establish a decision over a multi-sequence course of action, in which a sequence implements a stage and the next sequence implements a next step or outcome of the prior stage. Thus, the chapter sheds light on how the groundwork for a proposal is laid. The conversation analytic study is based on 17 video-recorded business-to-business sales meetings in Finland.
The experience of suffering may result in a breakdown of commonly shared meaning, namely the disintegration of intersubjectivity. This article investigates patients’ expressions of suffering and professionals’ attempts to maintain intersubjective understanding in interactions that are conducted in psychiatric outpatient care. The analysis demonstrates that patients’ expressions of suffering involve a strong emotional experience and a particular kind of passivity: tolerance of agonising pain and endurance of what is unbearable. For their part, professionals attempt to verbalise and explain the patient’s experience in order to build a shared world of meaning. The article argues that by locating suffering in the symptoms of an illness, professionals structure suffering into a medical problem. This enables them to suggest appropriate treatment options aimed at eliminating suffering.
Drawing on video data and ethnomethodological conversation analysis, the study focuses on sequences of human action and interaction in which participants orient to small wildlife within their nature-related activities outdoors. The participants are family members, friends or participants on organized outings, and they engage in activities such as trekking, foraging and fishing. The study examines moments when small wildlife become the focus of the participants’ talk and other action and when the relationship between human beings and the natural world is thus constructed in situ. The study considers how participants in such moments display, pursue and achieve shared understandings about what the appropriate ways of treating other living beings and, more generally, conducting oneself in nature are.
This paper explores other-initiated repair, or more specifically, extended repair sequences. In extended cases, the repair turn does not immediately resolve the trouble, and the speaker needs to produce a new repair initiation.
Drawing on a collection of 458 other-initiations of repair in naturally occurring everyday interaction in Finnish, we show how the distribution of the outcomes of different types of initiations clearly differs. Typically, candidate understandings and open class repair initiations do not lead to extended sequences, whereas repeats (with question words) are more often followed by a second repair initiation. The type of trouble, as well as the typological specificity of different initiations, explains the outcomes of the repair sequences.
This study examines video-recorded, naturally occurring Finnish dyads focusing on lapses (inter-sequential silences). During most lapses, participants undertake bodily activities or behaviors (Hoey 2015). Adding to previous work, this study describes “comfortable” silences where participants share the moment with no bodily activities or mutual gaze, inhabiting the silence with simple co-presence. The analysis suggests that instead of the gathering/encounter dualism, participant behavior in social situations is better described as a continuum of orientations. Also during the “comfortable” silences, understanding of behavioral involvements is intersubjectively created and maintained. Thus, even outside of sequences that allegedly create and maintain the “architecture of intersubjectivity” (Heritage 1984), social organization is jointly negotiated and achieved, most importantly by mutual monitoring and reciprocation of (bodily) orientations.
Intersubjectivity is a crucial issue not only for how participants in social interaction communicate and coordinate shared projects, but also for how they engage in sensing the material world around them while they are jointly acting in that world. This paper offers an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic study of sensoriality that provides for a multimodal interactional analysis of sensory practices. On the basis of a video-recorded beer tasting session, I show how, far from being limited to individual and neuro-physiological processes, situated activities of sensing are a collective accomplishment here and now, emerging within joint activities of searching, finding, and sharing relevant features of taste, building agreements, and overcoming divergent views.
Conversation analytical studies on emotion show how expression of emotion is part of the intersubjective experience. Emotions, however, are as much physiological as experiential events. Physiological processes pertaining to emotion involve changes in cardiovascular activity, in the activation of sweat glands, and in muscular activity. The dyadic systems theory by Beebe and Lachmann (2002) suggests that actions that regulate social interaction also serve in the regulation of internal emotional states of interacting subjects. Drawing from this theory, our overall research questions was: how is the expression of emotion in social interaction linked to physiological responses in the participants? Our main result was that thorough conversational affiliation, the participants share the emotional load in the interaction.
In this chapter, we consider movement synchrony from two different perspectives. On the one hand, we report a small-scale empirical study to test the hypothesis that movement synchrony is a sequential phenomenon, which serves as a demonstration of how conversation analytically informed research on participants’ unconscious tendencies to synchronize their body movements could proceed in practice. On the other hand, we consider movement synchrony through three closely related, yet essentially different, conceptual lenses: conditional relevance, dialogic resonance, and affordance. We suggest that a specific combination of the insights provided by these three conceptual tools would make conversation analytically informed study of movement synchrony both possible and fruitful.
This study examines intersubjective development of children’s requests in home interactions of Finnish-speaking 1–5-year-old children with their caregivers, siblings and peers. Children’s early requests emerge sequentially through the caregivers’ co-construction of the children’s early vocalizations, word-gesture combinations and two-word utterances. Children’s first linguistically explicit requests, imperatives, also rely on intersubjective understanding between the child and the caregiver. Children start to use conditional verb forms and interrogatives as social adaptations for making requests to equal peers. Between one and five years, children’s requesting develops from embodied, co-constructed action to distinct linguistic formulations. Caregiver interaction supports the children’s reliance on co-participants’ co-operation in fulfilling requests whereas peer interaction enhances children’s intersubjective understanding of co-participants’ varying commitment and entitlement to grant the request.
This paper investigates how a group of young adults participating in theatre rehearsals construct a spontaneous improvised scene. The analysis shows how the youths construct a fairly coherent scene in a situation in which the interactional moves and the interactional frame emerges. We analyse how the improvisation is initiated, how it is carried forward, and how the scene is discussed afterwards. After the improvised scene, it emerged that the participants had differing conceptions of what exactly they had been doing. However, these differing conceptions did not hinder them from participating and contributing to the scene in coherent ways and were thus sufficiently similar for practical purposes. In our analysis, we focus on how the youths constructed the scene by recycling lexemes, syntactic forms and embodied actions.
This chapter explores the potential existence of interactional reciprocity in human–dog interactions by analyzing experimental data on situations where dog owners fail to produce reciprocally modified actions for two minutes. We found that their dogs soon realized the strangeness of the situation. While they pursued missing feedback with touch, gaze and vocalizations, they also addressed other humans and requested their attention. Therefore, the dogs oriented to the lack of reciprocity and attempted to repair it. We demonstrate that interactional reciprocity in human–dog interactions can be breached, thus proving its existence. Moreover, we show that it also returned when the experiment ended. The findings are compared with mother–infant experiments where evidence of interactional reciprocity has also been found.