Absent appreciation in Mandarin Chinese interaction

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongyan Liang
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Research Methodology ◽  
Sequential Analysis ◽  
Complete Sequence ◽  
Normative Expectation ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
The Social

When receiving something beneficial, interlocutors are expected to express their appreciation in the second pair part (SPP) or the sequence-closing third position with linguistic resources such as ‘thanks’ and ‘thank you’, thus forming an adjency pair or a complete sequence. However, under some circumstances, relevant or appropriate appreciation is expected but does not appear. Adopting conversation analysis as the research methodology, this article examines the absence of appreciation in ordinary Mandarin interactions where gratitude and appreciation are often socially prescribed. Its sequential analysis of talks demonstrates that at times a verbal appreciative response in situations such as offering and requesting does not occur until a later conversational turn rather than in the preferred second pair part, whereas at other times the social action, although expected, is actually absent in social interaction. The analysis of the data shows that when interlocutors transgress the normative expectation of appreciation, the expected pattern of action and interactional organisation will be evidenced circumstantially within the ongoing interaction itself. The present study proves that deviations from standard forms in the interactional organisation can give rise to additional accounts or other visible interactional behaviour.

Displays of concession in university faculty meetings

Pragmatics ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Saft
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Sequential Analysis ◽  
University Faculty ◽  
Japanese University ◽  
Cultural Concepts ◽  
Faculty Meetings ◽  
Do So

In light of the tendency in studies of Japanese discourse and communication to account for patterns of social interaction in terms of cultural concepts such as wa (“harmony”), omoiyari (“empathy”), and enryo (“restraint”), this report sets out to demonstrate how much of an endogenously produced, local achievement social interaction can be in Japanese. To do so, the techniques and principles of conversation analysis are employed to describe how a particular social action, the expression of concession to statements of opposition, is produced by participants in a set of Japanese university faculty meetings. Although it is suggested that the very direct and explicit design of the concession displays could be explained in terms of concepts such as wa and/or enryo, it is nonetheless argued that the interactional significance of this action can be best understood by undertaking a detailed, sequential analysis of the interaction. The analysis itself is divided into two parts: First it is demonstrated that the concessions are products of the participants’ close attendance to and monitoring of the details of the unfolding interaction; second it is shown that instead of turning to pre-determined cultural concepts to account for the trajectory of the interaction, it is possible to understand the concession displays by situating them within the flow of the interaction itself.

The sequential environments of positive assessments as responsive actions in Mandarin daily interaction

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-321
Author(s):  
Yanhong Zhang ◽  
Guodong Yu
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Research Methodology ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
Chinese Speakers ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Daily Interactions ◽  
Positive Assessment

This article, adopting conversation analysis as the research methodology, investigates the sequential environments that normally and sequentially project the occurrence of positive assessments (PAs) in Mandarin daily interactions. Based on the collected data, six different types of sequential environments are identified: they are performing the social actions of self-praise, self-deprecation, troubles-telling, self-PA-implicative conducive yes/no question, offering/granting a request, and informing respectively. When responding to one of these six social actions, interlocutors normally provide a positive assessment as a response. It is demonstrated that these six actions have different degrees of projectability for the occurrence of positive assessments. In addition, their varying degrees of projectability constitute a continuum. Self-praise, self-deprecation, and self-PA-implicative conducive yes/no questions have the highest degrees of projectability, informing has the least, with troubles-telling and offer/granting a request positioning in between. The present study contributes to our understanding of the sequential environments in which Mandarin Chinese speakers make positive assessments to support the social solidarity.

Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis

Sociology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Commonsense Reasoning ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
Mathematics Problems ◽  
The Social ◽  
Information Studies ◽  
Scientific Experiments

Ethnomethodology (literally people’s methodology) is the study of practices through which members of a society collectively organize and sustain their activities. As the term suggests, ethnomethodology treats methodology as a widespread social phenomenon in addition to being a specialized set of practices in a science or other professional undertaking. Consequently, for ethnomethodology, the development and practical use of methods is a topic of sociological investigation rather than an exclusive disciplinary resource. Harold Garfinkel (b. 1917–d. 2011) coined the term “ethnomethodology” and founded the field that goes by that name. He studied under Talcott Parsons (b. 1902–d. 1979), but radically transformed the structural-functionalist theory of action that Parsons developed in the 1930s and 1940s. Garfinkel’s distinctive empirical approach to social action and interaction drew upon Edmund Husserl’s (b. 1859–d. 1938) phenomenological analysis of the everyday life-world, which Alfred Schutz (b. 1899–d. 1959) developed for sociology. Garfinkel gave relatively little mention of the philosophy of ordinary language arising from the later philosophical work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (b. 1889–d. 1951), and developed in reference to the social sciences by Peter Winch (b. 1926–d. 1997), but others have drawn linkages between them. Ethnomethodological research describes the organization of situated activities, including commonsense reasoning and ordinary language use, as well as more specialized practices of playing music, solving mathematics problems, or performing scientific experiments. Although ethnomethodology initially developed as part of sociology, and is still recognized as a sociological subfield, it has made inroads into philosophy of social science, social anthropology, communication and information studies, education studies, and science and technology studies. The allied field of Conversation Analysis, founded by Harvey Sacks (1935–1975) and developed by his students and colleagues, has also made strong inroads into sociolinguistics and related areas of research on social interaction.

Critical Discourse Studies of Language and Sexuality

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronika Koller
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Relative Lack ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Critical Discourse Studies ◽  
Discourse Studies ◽  
Queer Discourse

This chapter looks at how sexuality, including sexual identity, has been addressed in critical discourse studies. It will first review previous work (e.g., Marko 2008; Morrish and Sauntson 2011) and point out the relative lack of relevant studies in this area, given that research into language and sexuality is mostly indebted to anthropology, sociolinguistics, and conversation analysis. Building on queer discourse studies (Motschenbacher and Stegu 2013), the chapter suggests a way of critically analyzing discourses on sexuality, where discourse is defined as textually mediated social action, with text producers utilizing linguistic resources and sociocognitive representations to establish, maintain, or challenge power relations. Critical discourse studies combine the description of linguistic features with their interpretation and explanation in context and ultimately make transparent the way in which language and discourse either construct and reinforce, or challenge and subvert, normativity. The chapter closes with an illustrative example of the discursive construction of lesbian identities.

scholarly journals How grammar grows out of social interaction: From multi-unit to single-unit question

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 837-864
Author(s):  
Simona Pekarek Doehler
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Single Unit ◽  
Sequential Analysis ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Single Turn ◽  
Usage Patterns ◽  
Prosodic Boundaries

Abstract This article scrutinizes interactional motivations for the sedimentation of grammatical usage patterns. It investigates how multi-unit questioning turns may have routinized into a single-unit social action format. Multimodal sequential analysis of French conversational data identifies a recurrent pattern in which a question-word question is followed by a candidate answer (formally: [question-word question + phrase/clause]). The data show a continuum of synchronic usage, the pattern being implemented as either two or one turn-constructional unit(s), with intermediate cases displaying fuzzy boundaries. In usage (i), a candidate answer emerges in response to the recipient’s lack of uptake as a way of pursuing response; in (ii) the candidate answer occurs immediately after the question, with fuzzy prosodic boundaries between the two units; in (iii) the pattern is produced as a single turn-constructional unit, showing important lexico-syntactic and prosodic consistency. It is argued that the integrated format (iii) originates in the repeated interactional sequencing of two subsequent actions, as in (i), and serves as a resource for proffering a highly tentative guess: It is the routinized product of frequent combinations in use, emerging from the interactionally motivated two-unit format. The findings support an understanding of interaction as a driving force for the routinization of patterns of language use.

scholarly journals Pandemic morality-in-action: Accounting for social action during the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652110232
Author(s):  
Katie Ekberg ◽  
Stuart Ekberg ◽  
Lara Weinglass ◽  
Susan Danby
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Global Public Health ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Public Health Crisis ◽  
Paediatric Palliative Care ◽  
Rapid Changes

Global health pandemics (such as COVID-19) can result in rapid changes to sanctionable behaviour, impacting society and culture in a multitude of ways. This study examined how pandemic culture and accompanying moral order was produced within and through social interaction during the first and second waves of COVID-19 in Australia. The data consisted of a corpus of 29 video-recorded paediatric palliative care consultations and were analysed using conversation analysis. Analysis showed how adherence to pandemic rules became morally expected, and moral concerns about actual or potential violations to these rules became relevant in and through social interaction during this period. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a natural experiment for how accountable actions and a moral order are negotiated in and through our social interactions when our taken-for-granted ‘natural facts of life’ change in response to a global public health crisis.

Objects that matter

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Letizia Caronia ◽  
Vittoria Colla
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
School Culture ◽  
Learning Environment ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Learning Activity ◽  
Multiple Resources ◽  
Pedagogical Issue ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Turn

Abstract It has been two decades since the social-material turn in social interaction studies proved the heuristic limits of a logocentric analytical geography. In this paper, we focus on the performative function of objects in an underexplored learning activity: parent-assisted homework. Adopting a Conversation Analysis informed approach complemented by the ventriloquial perspective on communication, we illustrate how parent-assisted homework is accomplished through the multiple resources in the semiotic field. Particularly, we show how participants orient to and exploit the agency of materiality in interaction. In the conclusion we raise a socio-pedagogical issue concerning the cultural capital embedded in the learning environment as well as the parents’ competence in recognizing and exploiting it in ways that are aligned with the school culture.

scholarly journals Eye-tracking Recordings as Data in EMCA Studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Dalby Kristiansen ◽  
Gitte Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Video Camera ◽  
Analytic Procedure ◽  
Social Conduct ◽  
Mobile Eye Tracking

The article contributes to the ongoing discussion of the potential of using eye-tracking recordings in ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) by exploring to what extent and under what circumstances such recordings may be useful for EMCA studies of multimodal social interaction. For this purpose, it analyzes examples of social conduct recorded by one video camera and one set of eye-tracking glasses. The article concludes that while eye-tracking recordings may, in some specific cases, provide new analytic possibilities for studying social action, they are by no means indispensable for EMCA research in multimodal social interaction, and making use of mobile eye-tracking equipment and recordings may compromise the data as well as the analytic procedure.

scholarly journals Category-Sensitive Actions in Interaction

2020 ◽  
pp. 019027252094459
Author(s):  
Giovanni Rossi ◽  
Tanya Stivers
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Social Category ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
The Social

This article is concerned with how social categories (e.g., wife, mother, sister, tenant, guest) become visible through the actions that individuals perform in social interaction. Using audio and video recordings of social interaction as data and conversation analysis as a method, we examine how individuals display their rights or constraints to perform certain actions by virtue of occupying a certain social category. We refer to actions whose performance is sensitive to membership in a certain social category as category-sensitive actions. Most of the time, the social boundaries surrounding these actions remain invisible because participants in interaction typically act in ways that are consistent with their social status and roles. In this study, however, we specifically examine instances where category boundaries become visible as participants approach, expose, or transgress them. Our focus is on actions with relatively stringent category sensitivity such as requests, offers, invitations, or handling one’s possessions. Ultimately, we believe these are the tip of an iceberg that potentially includes most, if not all, actions.

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