scholarly journals From turn-by-turn to larger chunks of talk: An exploratory study in psychotherapeutic micro-processes using conversation analysis

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael B. Buchholz ◽  
Horst Kächele
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Theoretical Orientation ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Process Research ◽  
Psychotherapy Process ◽  
Middle Phase ◽  
Behavioral Treatments ◽  
The Common

Independent of theoretical orientation therapies of all kind are talk-in-interaction. Influential overall conceptualizations (as e.g. intervention) belong to a certain model of medicalizing the psychotherapeutic endeavor. Talk-in-interaction is the base for applying Conversation Analysis (CA) in psychotherapeutic process research. CA is a powerful tool originating from social science taking data, hypotheses and theories from careful observing in a similar way as infant observers did. The common discovery is that conversation precedes language. Some features of infantile proto-conversation survive in adult life. CA has directed careful attention to processes like turn-taking, repair, conditional relevances, etc. in observing the rules of interaction. However, in studying psychotherapy process turn-by-turn analysis alone does not suffice. It can be completed by a new model of common ground activities and package-by-package analysis turning attention to new objects of observation in therapeutic conversation (allusions, metaphorical framing activities). We propose a methodology for both kinds of analyses based on transcribed examples from the CEMPP-Project. This exploratory designed project (Conversation analysis of empathy in Psychotherapy Process; supported by the Khler Foundation, Germany) compared psychoanalytic, psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral treatments in five dyads each taking transcribed sessions from the beginning, the middle phase and the end; our database includes 45 transcribed sessions.

scholarly journals Conversational Errors and Common Ground Activities in Psychotherapy—Insights from Conversation Analysis

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael B. Buchholz
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Psychotherapy Process ◽  
The Common ◽  
Professional Practitioners ◽  
Problematic Situations ◽  
Suicidal Patients ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Therapy Sessions

<p>Many patients leave psychotherapy although in need. What can professional practitioners and researchers assume what happened? Trying to receive a response from these patients we too often are left without an answer. In this paper I introduce to psychotherapy discourse some concepts taken from linguistics and Conversation Analysis (CA). The reason is that what psychotherapists of every kind do is “talk-in-interaction”. During such talk Typical Problematic Situations (TPS) appear which are well known in a macro-analytic perspective (if a patient comes late to the session, does not talk or blackmails the therapist with suicide threat). However, there are many TPS that can be detected by a micro-analytic perspective only. CA is a tool helping to idenfity this type of TPS. One relevant CA-concept is Common Ground, a psychological and linguistic concept which requires special activity from both participants in an interaction. Conversational “errors” that risk to tear the Common Ground often go unnoticed. Presenting segments of transcribed therapy sessions I want to direct attention to the details of how ‘errors’ in Common Ground activity happen, how they are noticed and dealt with by skillfull therapists or how they can become repaired. Among others I use transcription details of two suicidal patients. The transcripts are from the CEMPP-Project (Conversation analysis of Empathy in psychotherapy process), conducted at IPU, Berlin. Thanks to a grant by Köhler-Stiftung, Germany.</p>

Negotiation of Wit in Facebook Humour

2016 ◽  
pp. 20-37
Author(s):  
Akin Odebunmi ◽  
Simeon Ajiboye
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Ground Theory ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Cultural Experiences ◽  
The Common ◽  
Asymmetrical Relationships

This chapter unpacks the humorous contents of selected Facebook-based Akpos jokes which have received inadequate attention in the scholarship with respect to wit negotiation which mostly indexes the jokes. Six out of fifteen sampled jokes have been analysed with the theoretic aid of Istvan Kecskes' Socio-Cognitive Approach (SCA), aspects of the common ground theory, aspects of conversation analysis and elements of selected humour theories. The analysis shows three forms of wit negotiation: negotiation of mis-oriented twists, negotiation of dis-preference and negotiation of un-designed twists. In the respective cases, the talk initiating speakers have their logic flawed by recipient speakers, usually Akpos, and consequently get outsmarted; earlier sequentially dispreferred social choices are re-negotiated as preferred options in the light of new discursive realities; and the interactive designs or expectations of talk initiating participants receive undersigned or unexpected sequential responses in symmetrical or asymmetrical relationships. The paper argues that the joke characters' situationally adaptive orientation to apriori or emergent common ground and intention demonstrates the Akpos jokes' recontextualisation of particular Nigerian social and cultural experiences through the characters' socio-cognitive designs in the mediated encounters. It concludes that while these designs offer the relaxant effects jokes are naturally meant to yield, their negotiation mechanisms provide resources for the application of Kecskes' SCA in Facebook humour and produce sarcasm with a wing of moral lessons.

Childhood Psychopathology and Psychotic Phenomena in Adults

1974 ◽  
Vol 124 (583) ◽  
pp. 556-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Signs And Symptoms ◽  
Childhood Psychopathology ◽  
Neurotic Disorders ◽  
Important Field ◽  
The Common ◽  
Child Psychiatrists

The tendency of adult and child psychiatrists to go their separate ways has led to neglect of the common ground which exists between the psychopathology of childhood and that of the psychoses of adult life. The purpose of this paper is to rekindle interest in what once was regarded as an important field for research into the psychoses. In this paper the phenomena which are to be found in children who suffer from neurotic disorders, ‘borderline’ states and psychoses will be compared with the signs and symptoms of adult psychoses and the significance of the similarities assessed. In both children and adults the data to be presented consists of the symptomatology observable at the onset of the illness and the phenomena which appear during the course of the illness and during psychotherapy.

scholarly journals Why Walking the Common is more than a Walk in the Park

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nike Romano ◽  
Veronica Mitchell ◽  
Vivienne Bozaleck
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Theoretical Orientation ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Coffee Shop ◽  
The Past ◽  
Heritage Site ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
The Common ◽  
South African Higher Education

For the past few years, as concerned academics and educators in South African higher education, we have come together to meet/think/drink coffee/eat/discuss our research and teaching practices in a coffee shop that overlooks the Rondebosch Common, a public space and national heritage site. The Common invited us to take our thoughts for a walk and we embarked on numerous walking encounters that affected and troubled us in many ways. Our walks became research-creation events that surfaced the implicatedness of our white settler privilege. As we grappled with the complexities and ambivalences grounded in our relationality with this contested site, we were prompted to explore hauntology as a theoretical orientation for our pedagogical practices. Walking with/through the demarcated land that is surrounded by privilege in terms of buildings, services and residences enacted and materialised entanglements of the past/present/future histories. We felt an exchange of affect between those present, the ghosts of colonial and apartheid histories, and the implications for our ongoing teaching. Following Haraway's (2016) ‘staying with the trouble’ and Tsing et al.'s (2017) ‘how to live on a damaged planet’, the relationships between human and non-human continue to haunt us, as we grapple with the im/possibility of finding common ground in a country devastated by colonial and apartheid violences.

The Semantics of Evidentials

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Common ◽  
Issue Content

This book gives a compositional, truth‐conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentials set in a theory of the semantics for sentential mood. Central to this semantics is a proposal about a distinction between what propositional content is at‐issue, roughly primary or proffered, and what content is not‐at‐issue. Evidentials contribute not‐at‐issue content, more specifically what I will call a not‐at‐issue restriction. In addition, evidentials can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. Building on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, the proposed semantics does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, I argue that all sentences make three contributions: at‐issue content, not‐at‐issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At‐issue content is presented, made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground. Not‐at‐issue content directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary relation uses the at‐issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type (e.g., declarative, interrogative), can trigger further updates. Empirical support for this proposal comes from Cheyenne (Algonquian, primary data from the author’s fieldwork), English, and a wide variety of languages that have been discussed in the literature on evidentials.

Can Groups Assert That P?

2019 ◽  
pp. 326-344
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Constitutive Rule ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Declarative Statement ◽  
John Macfarlane

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.

Person reference and recognition in shift handovers: An analysis of interactions between Japanese and international care workers

Multilingua ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Junko Mori ◽  
Chiharu Shima
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Healthcare Facility ◽  
Learning Activity ◽  
Professional Activity ◽  
Dual Purpose ◽  
Care Workers ◽  
Person Reference ◽  
Central Mode

AbstractThe current study examines how Japanese and international care workers at a geriatric healthcare facility in Japan manage one of the most fundamental elements of handover interactions – person reference and recognition to identify a particular care receiver and discuss their specific conditions and needs. By using Conversation analysis (CA) as a central mode of inquiry, this study examines how the participants approach the establishment of referential common ground while simultaneously attending to the progressivity of ongoing activity, and how written records on care receivers are incorporated into the process. The juxtaposition of three international care workers’ performances effectively illustrates how the international care workers’ performative competence is co-constructed with their Japanese colleagues in this interactive process and how the participants exhibit different kinds of orientations towards the activity arranged for the dual purpose of actual handover and for the international care workers’ language learning and socialization. As a contribution to a growing body of CA studies of second language talk at work, this study considers possible tensions between engaging in a language-learning activity regarding specific linguistic elements during a particular professional activity and learning to become a competent actor in the particular activity.

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