Bilingual speech in Jaru–Kriol conversations: Codeswitching, codemixing, and grammatical fusion

Aims and objectives: Language contact in the Yaruman community of Western Australia has led to prevalent bilingual practices between the endangered language Jaru and the creole language Kriol. This study examines ordinary conversations in the community and investigates whether the observable bilingual practices are interactionally relevant, and whether codemixing has led to the emergence of a conventionalised mixed language. Approach: The research is based on a qualitative analysis of bilingual speech in natural conversation. The approach combines the methodological framework of interactional linguistics with an analysis of the grammatical structures of conversational data. Data and analysis: The analysed data consist of two hours and thirty minutes of transcribed video recordings, comprising 13 casual multi-party conversations involving all generations in the Yaruman community. The recordings were made using lapel microphones and two high-definition cameras. Findings: Bilingual Jaru–Kriol speakers use codeswitching as an interactional resource for a range of conversational activities. In many cases, however, speakers’ code choices are not interactionally relevant. Instead, codemixing is often oriented to as a normative way of speaking and participants exploit their full linguistic repertoire by relatively freely combining elements from both languages. There are also signs of morphological fusion in the mixed speech of younger Jaru speakers, who more frequently combine Kriol verb structure and Jaru nominal morphology. However, this morphological split is not fully conventionalised and variation is still substantial. Originality: The bilingual speech continuum is supported by the analysis of conversational data in a situation of language shift. This article shows that fusion involving core grammatical categories can occur among a subgroup of speakers without developing into a community-wide mixed language. Significance: The study contributes to a better understanding of community bilingualism and bilingual practices in a situation of language shift. It demonstrates how codeswitching, codemixing, and grammatical fusion can co-exist in a bilingual community.

Multimodal Gestalts and Their Change Over Time: Is Routinization Also Grammaticalization?

Recently, the claim was put forward that grammar emerges from embodied conduct. This has led to a discussion in multimodal conversation analysis and interactional linguistics whether the routinization of embodied actions can be described in terms of grammar and grammaticalization. While particular items such as exophoric demonstratives and gestures are routinely delivered as multimodal constructions, i.e., as part of grammar, it is debatable whether this also holds for other candidates: e.g., loose couplings of verbal and embodied conduct, locally routinized, or ephemeral gestalts that do not endure beyond the context of their use. My paper contributes to this discussion by proposing a distinction between two kinds of multimodal gestalts: socially sedimented multimodal gestalts (multimodal constructions), and locally assembled, ephemeral multimodal gestalts. To this end, I examine sedimented couplings of demonstratives and embodied practices in instructions, and the change of a locally assembled format over time. The data are in German and come from 12 h of video-recordings of self-defense trainings for young women. In the course of the participants’ interactional history, the multimodal format of the participants’ actions changes. The changes concern formal and functional aspects of the resources used to accomplish those actions, their multimodal orchestration, and the temporality of their delivery. The paper makes four claims: 1. In their primordial use in co-present interaction, demonstratives are coupled with embodied practices and request addressees’ attention to the speaker’s body, i.e., they are tightly and intercorporeally coupled with the embodied conduct of the participants; 2. gesturally used demonstratives are socially sedimented multimodal gestalts, i.e., multimodal constructions; 3. multimodal gestalts may be subject to transformations in the course of multiple repetitions; 4. in my data, the transformations lead to the emergence of a new, reduced format, which, while being locally routinized, is neither grammatical nor grammaticalized.

The Grammar of Obviousness: The Palm-Up Gesture in Argument Sequences

This paper investigates the body’s role in grammar in argument sequences. Drawing from a database of public disputes on language use, we document the work of the palm-up gesture in action formation. Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, we show how this gesture is an interactional resource that indexes a particular epistemic stance—namely to cast the proposition being advanced as obvious. In this report, we focus on instances in which participants reach what we refer to as an ‘impasse’, at which point the palm up gesture becomes a resource for reasserting and pursuing a prior position, now laminated with an embodied claim of ‘obviousness’ that is grounded in the sequentiality of the interaction. As we show, the palm up gesture appears with and in response to a variety of syntactic and grammatical structures, and moreover can also function with no accompanying verbal utterance at all. This empirical observation challenges the assumption that a focus on grammar-in-interaction should begin with, or otherwise be examined in relation to, ‘standard’ verbal-only grammatical categories (e.g., imperative, declarative). We conclude by considering the gestural practice we focus on alongside verbal grammatical resources (specifically, particles) from typologically distinct languages, which we offer as a contribution to ongoing discussions regarding an embodied conceptualization of grammar—in this case, epistemicity.

Multimodal Practice for Mobilizing Response: The Case of Turn-Final Tu Vois ‘You See’ in French Talk-in-Interaction

One of the most frequent verbal expressions that people use when interacting with each other in French is tu vois ‘you see’ (Cappeau, 2004). Drawing on interactional linguistics and multimodal analysis, we examine the interactional functioning of this verbal expression when occurring in turn-final position. Previous studies on tu vois ‘you see’ in this position document only its use for marking the end of an utterance or for turn-yielding. The following aspects have thus far remained unexplored: The interactional environment in which the construction occurs, how it is connected to the speaker’s embodied conduct, the way in which it contributes to mobilizing a response from the recipient, as well as the nature of this response. Our paper addresses these issues and shows that turn-final tu vois ‘you see’ is systematically produced with a final rising intonation and coupled with the speaker’s gaze directed to the recipient. This multimodal practice is recurrently deployed in turns conveying the speaker’s emotional stance, in turns performing a dispreferred action, like disagreeing, and in turns claiming insufficient knowledge. The response that is invited using this multimodal practice is distinctly tailored to each of these actions: an affiliative response, an aligning response, and a response addressing the prior speaker’s claim of insufficient knowledge from the recipient’s own point of view. By presenting an in-depth study of the action sequences in which tu vois ‘you see’ is employed, as well as of its multimodal packaging, this contribution highlights the prospective, i.e., response-mobilizing potential of this interactional resource and shows that its use entails sequential implications even when it accompanies actions that project only weakly a response from the recipient.

Concordar em discordar: análise discursivo-pragmática da polémica verbal em textos de opinião sobre o Acordo Ortográfico de 1990

The main goal of this study is to analyze the construction of the polemical discourse, from a corpus composed by opinion texts concerning the Orthographic Agreement of 1990 (from now on OA90), taking into account the perspective of Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Rhetoric, Argumentation and Interactional Linguistics. The analysis of the corpus allows us to conclude that the speakers manipulate several strategies in the construction of their arguments, always with the intention of provoking and perpetuating the dissent.

Semantic relations and prosodic features of ranhou in spontaneous Mandarin conversation

Ranhou ‘then’ is traditionally defined as a conjunction, indicating succession of two events. Adopting the methodology of Interactional Linguistics, this study explores semantic relations of ranhou in Mandarin face-to-face and telephone conversations. An examination of the data shows that besides succession, ranhou can express other nine semantic relations, including causality, progression relation, coordinating relation, adversative relation, additive relation, enumeration, hypothesis, alternative relation, concession and be no practical meaning as well. Meanwhile, prosodic features of ranhou are explored with the help of software Praat and Audacity. It is suggested that eleven semantic relations vary in mean pitch range and mean length. Although each token of ranhou differs from each other in prosody, with respect to loudness, ranhou can be stressed on ran, or hou and also be articulated without loudness. But in a whole, loudness of ranhou is mostly put on hou.

If-Clauses, Their Grammatical Consequents, and Their Embodied Consequence: Organizing Joint Attention in Guided Tours

In linguistics, if-clauses have attracted the interest of scholars working on syntax, typology and pragmatics alike. This article examines if-clauses as a resource available to tour guides for reorienting the visitors’ visual attention towards an object of interest. The data stem from 11 video-recorded tours in Italian, French, German and Dutch (interpreted into Flemish Sign Language). In this setting, guides recurrently use if-clauses to organize a joint focus of attention, by soliciting the visitors to bodily and visually rearrange. These clauses occur in combination with verbs of vision (e.g., to look), or relating to movement in space (e.g., to turn around). Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, this study pursues three interrelated objectives: 1) it examines the grammatical relationship that speakers establish between the if-clause and the projected main clause; 2) it analyzes the embodied conduct of participants in the accomplishment of if/then-constructions; 3) it describes if-clauses as grammatical resources with a twofold projection potential: a vocal-grammatical projection enabling the guide (or the addressees) to achieve a grammatically adequate turn-continuation, and an embodied-action projection, which solicits visitors to accomplish a situationally relevant action, such as reorienting gaze towards an object of interest. These projections do not run independently from each other. The analysis shows how, while producing an if-clause, guides adjust their emerging talk—through pauses, expansions and restarts—to the visitors’ co-occurring spatial repositioning. These practices are described as micro-sequential adjustments that reflexively affect turn-construction and embodied compliance. In addressing the above phenomena and questions, this article highlights the fundamentally adaptive, situated and action-sensitive nature of grammar.

WIR im interaktionalen Gebrauch: Zur Verwendung des Pronomens der 1. Person Plural in der institutionellen Kommunikation – am Beispiel onkologischer Aufklärungsgespräche

This empirically oriented article focuses on uses of the pronoun “wir” (‘we’) in medical interaction – more precisely, in oncological consultations. After a brief presentation of major research on the 1st person plural pronoun in German, I will – based on methods of Interactional Linguistics – analyze interactional uses of this deictic pronoun in institutional doctor-patient conversations. This article aims at contributing to research of how grammar is used in response to local interactional needs within social interaction (Auer/Pfänder 2011). As the data show, participants in these institutional settings make use of various types of “wir” – beyond the prototypical forms of usage (a) “self and person addressed”; (b) “self and person or persons spoken of” and (c) “self, person or persons addressed, and person or persons spoken of” (Boas 1911: 39). These “alternative”, non-prototypical uses of “wir”, which partly override the “residual semanticity” (Silverstein 1976: 47), are found to be related to the way in which they are embedded within the particular “social field” (Hanks 2005: 18). Thus, the indexical anchoring of “wir” proves to be rather flexible and responsive to interactional contingencies.

Duelling contexts: how action misalignment leads to impoliteness in a courtroom

This paper investigates linguistic and non-linguistic markers of negative evaluations of situated behaviours, termed impoliteness (Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. In Drew Paul, Marjorie H. Goodwin, John J. Gumpertz & Deborah Schiffrin (eds.), Studies in interactional linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The paper takes an interactional pragmatic approach to a fixed institutional setting (a courtroom) to investigate how (not why) a series of reprimands and sanctions unfolded. It shows that the key participants, the judge and the defendant, orient to separate interactional cues from their unshared overhearing audiences (their unshared contexts), whilst orienting to each other’s institutional interaction turns (their shared context). This paper suggests that their contexts create competing architectures of intersubjectivity, termed duelling contexts, because the participants are not co-locative (in separate rooms connected through closed circuit TV).

Collaborative construction of turn constructional units in responsive positions of question-answer sequences in Mandarin conversation

This paper explores the features and interactional functions of collaboratively constructed TCUs (CCTs) in responsive positions of question-answer sequences in Mandarin daily conversations. Adopting the methodologies of Conversation Analysis, Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Analysis, the study explores the sequential features of the CCTs and bodily-visual resources co-occurring with the CCTs, such as gaze orientations and gestures. Two categories have been identified based on the participants’ roles in the question-answer sequences. First, the answerer initiates the response to the question, and the questioner collaboratively completes the response. The analysis shows that the questioners are not conveying the action of answering the question but assuming the answer to the question. Second, one answerer initiates the response to the question, and another one collaboratively completes the response. The data demonstrates that this type of CCTs usually involves the two question-recipients with more or less equal epistemic access to the referent.