Enacting ‘Being with You’

Pragmatics ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Pepe Droste ◽  
Susanne Günthner
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Context Sensitivity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Interactional Linguistics ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Everyday Interaction

Abstract The German second person personal pronoun du is commonly described as a deictic “shifter” or a T-address term, which is incorporated as an argument of a predicate. Exploring the ways in which participants use pronouns in everyday interaction, however, shows that these are not the only uses of du. In this paper, we examine vocative uses of du in German everyday interaction. Drawing on methods of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, we will show that speakers use vocative du for the management of being ‘with’ the other in terms of alignment as well as affiliation. What du locally accomplishes, however, is sensitive to its positioning within the temporal unfolding of turns and sequences as well as to the sequential environments in which it is used. Our findings demonstrate the context-sensitivity of du and underscore the importance of linguistic resources for the interactional establishment and maintenance of social togetherness and sociability.

scholarly journals Distributing Agency and Experience in Therapeutic Interaction: Person References in Therapists' Responses to Complaints

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marja Etelämäki ◽  
Liisa Voutilainen ◽  
Elina Weiste
Keyword(s):  
Past History ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Social Unit ◽  
Interactional Linguistics ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Therapeutic Interaction ◽  
Grammatical Subject ◽  
Primary Means

The primary means for psychotherapy interaction is language. Since talk-in-interaction is accomplished and rendered interpretable by the systematic use of linguistic resources, this study focuses on one of the central issues in psychotherapy, namely agency, and the ways in which linguistic resources, person references in particular, are used for constructing different types of agency in psychotherapy interaction. The study investigates therapists' responses to turns where the client complains about a third party. It focuses on the way therapists' responses distribute experience and agency between the therapist and the client by comparing responses formulated with the zero-person (a formulation that lacks a grammatical subject, that is, a reference to the agent) to responses formulated with a second person singular pronoun that refers to the client. The study thus approaches agency as situated, dynamic and interactional: an agent is a social unit whose elements (flexibility and accountability) are distributed in the therapist-client interaction. The data consist of 70 audio-recorded sessions of cognitive psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, and the method of analysis is conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. The main findings are that therapists use the zero-person for two types of responses: affiliating and empathetic responses that distribute the emotional experience between the client and the therapist, and responses that invite clients to interpret their own experiences, thereby distributing control and responsibility to the clients. In contrast, the second person references are used for re-constructing the client's past history. The conclusion is that therapists use the zero-person for both immediate emotional work and interpretative co-work on the client's experiences. The study suggests that therapists' use of the zero-person does not necessarily attribute “weak agency” to the client but instead might strengthen the clients' agency in the sense of control and responsibility in the long term.

scholarly journals Women write the rights of woman: the sexual politics of the personal pronoun in the 1790s

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Hodson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
Analysis Programme ◽  
Political Pamphlets

This article investigates patterns of personal pronoun usage in four texts written by women about women's rights during the 1790s: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Hays' An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (1798), Mary Robinson's Letter to the Women of England (1799) and Mary Anne Radcliffe's The Female Advocate (1799). I begin by showing that at the time these texts were written there was a widespread assumption that both writers and readers of political pamphlets were, by default, male. As such, I argue, writing to women as a woman was distinctly problematic, not least because these default assumptions meant that even apparently gender-neutral pronouns such as I, we and you were in fact covertly gendered. I use the textual analysis programme WordSmith to identify the personal pronouns in my four texts, and discuss my results both quantitatively and qualitatively. I find that while one of my texts does little to disturb gender expectations through its deployment of personal pronouns, the other three all use personal pronouns that disrupt eighteenth century expectations about default male authorship and readership.

Restrictiveness, exclusivity, adversativity, and mirativity

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-Fang Wang ◽  
Mei-Chi Tsai ◽  
Wayne Schams ◽  
Chi-Ming Yang
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Spoken Discourse ◽  
Interactional Linguistics ◽  
English Only ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Turn Taking

Mandarin Chinese zhishi (similar to English ‘only’), comprised of the adverb zhi and the copula shi, can act as an adverb (ADV) or a discourse marker (DM). This study analyzes the role of zhishi in spoken discourse, based on the methodological and theoretical principles of interactional linguistics and conversation analysis. The corpus used in this study consists of three sets of data: 1) naturally-occurring daily conversations; 2) radio/TV interviews; and 3) TV panel discussions on current political affairs. As a whole, this study reveals that the notions of restrictiveness, exclusivity, and adversativity are closely associated with ADV zhishi and DM zhishi. In addition, the present data show that since zhishi is often used to express a ‘less than expected’ feeling, it can be used to indicate mirativity (i.e. language indicating that an utterance conveys the speaker’s surprise). The data also show that the distribution of zhishi as an adverb or discourse marker depends on turn taking systems and speech situations in spoken discourse. Specifically, the ADV zhishi tends to occur in radio/TV interviews and TV panel news discussions, while the DM zhishi occurs more often in casual conversations.

scholarly journals INITIATION OF INTERACTION AS THE BEGINNING OF SOCIAL PARTICIPATION: CONVERSATION ANALYSIS OF A JAPANESE SENIOR CLUB

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S173-S174
Author(s):  
Eri Sakai ◽  
Akihiko Kamesawa ◽  
Riko Nakayama ◽  
Jihoon Kim ◽  
Akizuki Yuri ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Social Participation ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Senior Citizens ◽  
Participation Rate ◽  
The Other ◽  
Teaching Materials ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Difference

Abstract The rate of social participation of senior citizens in a senior club’s activities is not equal to the rate of desire for the said participation. Earlier studies mainly examined personal and social factors which influence the participation rate, overlooking the practical methods by which senior citizens can overcome barriers to participating in club activities. Our study aims to clarify the features of a club activity as a resource by analyzing the activity’s interactions. Our study is based on data extracted from videotaped recordings of a senior calligraphy club in Kanto, Japan. In September 2018, one lecturer and 11 participants were videotaped for 3 hours, and the video underwent conversation analysis, which elucidates how people organize activities under specific circumstances. We analyzed how a female newcomer to the activity initiated face-to-face interaction, which is considered the first step of social participation. She talked to other participants who were familiar with the exercise several times by inquiring how to read kanjis on teaching materials. These findings suggest that visualization of skill relative to the other creates an environment for initiating face-to-face interaction. In this case, the newcomer utilized the difference in skill denoted by teaching materials and was given the rational reason to talk to the others already engaging in the activity. Therefore, designing teaching materials that assign the learning level of each participant may be effective in promoting social participation in senior study clubs.

Translanguaging and linguistic landscapes

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 54-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durk Gorter ◽  
Jasone Cenoz
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
School Settings ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
San Sebastian ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Neighborhood Level

In this article we discuss the concept of translanguaging in relation to a holistic view of linguistic landscapes that goes beyond the analysis of individual signs. On the one hand, we look at instances of multilingual signage as a combination of linguistic resources. On the other hand, at the neighborhood level the individual signs combine, alternate and mix to shape linguistic landscapes as a whole. We expand our “Focus on Multilingualism” approach from school settings to the multilingual cityscape. One bookshop and its surrounding neighborhoods in Donostia-San Sebastián illustrate how readers navigate between languages and go across linguistic borders. Through translanguaging we foreground the co-occurrence of different linguistic forms, signs and modalities. At the level of neighborhood emerges the space in which translanguaging goes outside the scope of single signs and separate languages. We conclude that translanguaging is an approach to linguistic landscapes that takes the study of multilingualism forward.

L1-L2 speaker interaction in a study abroad setting

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail McMeekin
Keyword(s):  
Study Abroad ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Eye Gaze ◽  
Communication Strategies ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Host Family ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Sequential Organization ◽  
Construct Meaning

Abstract Analyzing approximately nine hours of video-recorded naturally-occurring conversations over eight weeks of study abroad between three L2 speakers of Japanese and their L1 speaker host family members, the present study uses conversation analysis to explore how the participants manage intersubjectivity using communication strategies in word searches. Specifically the study explores the following: (a) how participants deploy, manipulate, and respond to communication strategies as interactional resources used to co-construct meaning and progressively disambiguate the referent sought; (b) how strategies are used within the sequential organization of word searches to guide the trajectory of the search on a turn-by-turn basis; (c) how linguistic and non-linguistic resources such as intonation and eye gaze are used in conjunction with strategies to organize participant structure and relevant action in the unfolding talk; and (d) how a microanalytic, interactional approach can redefine our understanding of how strategic mechanisms are used and labeled in interaction.

scholarly journals The interpretation of German personal pronouns and d-pronouns

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-190
Author(s):  
Markus Bader ◽  
Yvonne Portele
Keyword(s):  
Bayesian Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Syntactic Function

Abstract Three experiments investigated the interpretation and production of pronouns in German. The first two experiments probed the preferred interpretation of a pronoun in contexts containing two potential antecedents by having participants complete a sentence fragment starting either with a personal pronoun or a d-pronoun. We systematically varied three properties of the potential antecedents: syntactic function, linear position, and topicality. The results confirm a subject preference for personal pronouns. The preferred interpretation of d-pronouns cannot be captured by any of the three factors alone. Although a d-pronoun preferentially refers to the non-topic in many cases, this preference can be overridden by the other two factors, linear position and syntactic function. In order to test whether interpretive preferences follow from production biases as proposed by the Bayesian theory of Kehler et al. (2008), a third experiment had participants freely produce a continuation sentence for the contexts of the first two experiments. The results show that personal pronouns are used more often to refer to a subject than to an object, recapitulating the subject preference found for interpretation and thereby confirming the account of Kehler et al. (2008). The interpretation results for the d-pronoun likewise follow from the corresponding production data.

The Introduction and Extension of the -st Ending in Old High German

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katerina Somers
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Formal Analogy ◽  
The One

This article seeks to explain the synchronic variation found in the second person singular inflectional ending (attested both as -s and -st) in the Old High German Evangelienbuch, while at the same time pro-viding a diachronic account of the introduction and extension of the -st ending in German. In order to achieve these goals, in my analysis I rely on the notions of cliticization and formal analogy, arguing that the innovative and original endings correlate with different syntactic environments (V1/V2 versus Vfinal), on the one hand, and different formal shapes (is versus ôs/ês), on the other. After presenting an account of the development of -st in OHG, I draw conclusions regarding the broader question of how clitics become (part of) inflection, a discussion which in turn has implications for the theories scholars use to describe and explain language change, specifically that of grammaticalization.*

CONTEXT-SENSITIVITY OF TWO-DIMENSIONAL REGULAR ARRAY GRAMMARS

1989 ◽  
Vol 03 (03n04) ◽  
pp. 295-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
YASUNORI YAMAMOTO ◽  
KENICHI MORITA ◽  
KAZUHIRO SUGATA
Keyword(s):  
Context Sensitivity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Regular Array ◽  
Nonterminal Symbol ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Context Free ◽  
Rewriting Rules

Regular array grammars (RAGs) are the lowest subclass in the Chomsky-like hierarchy of isometric array grammars. The left-hand side of each rewriting rule of RAGs has one nonterminal symbol and at most one "#" (a blank symbol). Therefore, the rewriting rules cannot sense contexts of non-# symbols. However, they can sense # as a kind of context. In this paper, we investigate this #-sensing ability. and study the language generating power of RAGs. Making good use of this ability, We show a method for RAGs to sense the contexts of local shapes of a host array in a derivation. Using this method, we give RAGs which generate the sets of all solid upright rectangles and all solid squares. On the other hand. it is proved that there is no context-free array grammar (and thus no RAG) which generates the set of all hollow upright rectangles.

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