Question-declaration coupling in a university meeting talk: Discourse of social inequality and collegiality

Conversation Analysis (CA) deals with the description of the microscopic and corpus-driven data in an ‘unmotivating looking’ analytical fashion. As long as there are new, interesting, or deviant features from the data, they are always worthy of a micro analysis. For this paper, we report the ‘question-declaration coupling’ in meeting talks as a new feature and explicate it through the discourse of social inequality and collegiality in the academe. The data came from a total of five recorded meetings from three departments, such as Education, Arts Science, and Social Work, in a private university in Manila, Philippines. The meetings lasted for five hours and 50 minutes. From adjacency pairs of question-answer, the sequential pattern shows that the questions deserve conspicuous answers from the subordinates, but the Chair automatically couples them with declarative sentences and other utterances that serve as continuers. The pattern is categorised as a strategic turn-suppressing mechanism to hold back the members from possibly challenging the existing policies of the institution. It is also seen as a strategic mechanism to deprive the members of extending the litanies of possible counter-arguments. From a positive perspective, we argue that it is through the air of social inequality and collegiality that people are able to know their boundaries in an ongoing interaction. Toward the end, we state the implications of the results for teaching and learning socio-pragmalinguistics. We also recommend future cross-linguistic comparisons for these microscopic features under study, considering the small corpus of this study.

‘Who decided this?’: Negotiating epistemic and deontic authority in systemic family therapy training

In this article we illustrate how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic authority within systemic family therapy training. Adult education principles and postmodern imperatives have challenged trainers’ and trainees’ asymmetries regarding knowledge (epistemics) and power (deontics), normatively implicated by the institutional training setting. Up-to-date, we lack insight into how trainers and trainees negotiate epistemic and deontic rights in naturally occurring dialog within training. Drawing from discursive psychology and conversation analysis, we present an analysis of eight transcribed, videotaped training seminars from a systemic family therapy training program, featuring three trainers and eleven trainees. Our analysis highlights the dilemmatic ways in which participants resist and affirm the normatively implicated trainers’ deontic and epistemic authority. Trainers are shown as mitigating directives and trainees as resisting them, with both displaying (not)knowing, while attending to concerns about (a)symmetry. We discuss our findings’ implications for systemic family therapy training.

Walking through the city soundscape: an audio-visual analysis of sensory experience for people with psychosis

This article discusses how an aspect of urban environments – sound and noise – is experienced by people walking in the city; it particularly focuses on atypical populations such as people diagnosed with psychosis, who are reported to be particularly sensitive to noisy environments. Through an analysis of video-recordings of naturalistic activities in an urban context and of video-elicitations based on these recordings, the study details the way participants orient to sound and noise in naturalistic settings, and how sound and noise are reported and reexperienced during interviews. By bringing together urban context, psychosis and social interaction, this study shows that, thanks to video recordings and conversation analysis, it is possible to analyse in detail the multimodal organization of action (talk, gesture, gaze, walking bodies) and of the sensory experience(s) of aural factors, as well as the way this organization is affected by the ecology of the situation.

Analisis Strategi Inovasi Pelayanan & Inovasi Kebijakan Pada Pusat Pengembangan Produktivitas Daerah (P3D) DKI Jakarta Untuk Mengawal Peningkatan Produktivitas & Daya Saing Provinsi DKI Jakarta

Studi ini mendeskripsikan penerapan Strategi Inovasi Pelayanan dan Inovasi Kebijakan pada Pusat Pengembangan Produktivitas Daerah (P3D) DKI Jakarta Untuk Mengawal Peningkatan Produktivitas & Daya Saing Provinsi DKI Jakarta. Metode penelitian menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif deduktif. Objek penelitian ini adalah Pusat Pengembangan Produktivitas (P3D) DKI Jakarta dengan preposisi yaitu deskripsi strategi inovasi pelayanan & kebijakan, yang mendorong peningkatan produktivitas dan daya saing DKI Jakarta. Teknik pemilihan sampel yang digunakan yaitu purposeful sampling dengan Subjek yaitu dua orang Instruktur Produktivitas Pusat Pengembangan Produktivitas (P3D) DKI Jakarta. Sumber data menggunakan sumber data primer yang diperoleh dari wawancara dan studi kepustakaan. Analisis data kualitatif yang digunakan yaitu metode analisis percakapan (conversation analysis). Strategi inovasi pelayanan sebagai suatu hal utama sangat perlu dilakukan oleh sector public khususnya P3D DKI Jakarta kaitannya untuk meningkatkan produktivitas & daya saing DKI Jakarta. Sedangkan untuk Strategi inovasi kebijakan di Organisasi P3D lebih kepada inovasi yang mempengaruhi proses pembuatan atau perumusan kebijakan. Strategi Inovasi Pelayanan dan Inovasi Kebijakan yang dilakukan oleh P3D DKI Jakarta memiliki hubungan yang positif terhadap peningkatan produktivitas dan daya saing DKI Jakarta. Dilihat dari tren Pengukuran produktivitas tenaga kerja Provinsi DKI Jakarta dari tahun 2012 -2018 yang cenderung kearah positif dari tahun ke tahun

‘Sorry everything’s in bags’: The accountability of selling bread at a market during the COVID-19 pandemic

Societies are undergoing enormous upheavals in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. High levels of psychological distress are widespread, yet little is known about the exact impacts at the micro-level of everyday life. The present study examines the ordinary activity of buying bread to understand changes occurring early in the crisis. A dataset of over 50 social interactions at a community market stall were video-recorded, transcribed and examined in detail using multi-modal conversation analysis. With COVID-19 came an orientation to a heightened risk of disease transmission when selling food. The bread was placed in bags, a difference which was justified as a preventative measure and morally normalised by invoking a common-sense prohibition of touching produce. Having the bread out of immediate sight was a practical challenge that occasioned the expansion of turns and sequences to look for and/or confirm what was for sale, highlighting a normative organisation between seeing and buying. The analysis shows how a preventative measure related to the pandemic was adjusted to interactionally. More broadly, this research reveals the small changes to daily life that likely contribute to the overall negative impacts on health and well-being that have been reported.

Conversation Analysis and the Negotiation of Gender Identity in Pakistani Multilingual Context

The current study attempts to address the negotiation of gender identity in the Pakistani multilingualcontext to explore the gender identity of male and female speakers through conversation features ofopening, topic shifting, interruptions, and silence. The recorded and transcribed data of six peers in anacademic setting in the University of Sargodha, Punjab, Pakistan, is analyzed in the light of the list ofcommonly occurring features of masculine and feminine talk suggested by Holmes (2006). The studyreveals that men and women exhibit varied verbal behavior and negotiate their identities throughdiscourse. The stance taken in this paper is that of respecting the differences among genders withoutlabeling their talk as inferior or superior. The paper lays an early brick to the present repository ofresearch in gender and language because the conversation analysis in the Pakistani multilingual contextis still an area that needs further exploration.