Rules at Play: Correcting Projectable Violations of Who Plays Next

This study examines the situated use of rules and the social practices people deploy to correct projectable rule violations in pétanque playing activities. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, and using naturally occurring video recordings, this article investigates socially organized occasions of rule use, and more particularly how rules for turn-taking at play are reflexively established in and through interaction. The alternation of players in pétanque is dependent on and consequential for the progressivity of the game and it is a practical problem for the players when a participant projects to break a rule of “who plays next”. The empirical analysis shows that formulating rules is a practice for indicating and correcting incipient violations of who plays next, which retrospectively invoke and establish the situated expectations that constitute the game as that particular game. Focusing on the anticipative corrections of projectable violations of turn-taking rules, this study revisits the concept of rules, as they are played into being, from a social and interactional perspective. We argue and demonstrate that rules are not prescriptions of game conduct, but resources that reflexively render the players’ conducts intelligible as playing the game they are engaging in.

"Te:mos o serra cura::do, temos o ni:sa, temos o serpa do:p." Suggesting products to buy, shaping materiality and multisensoriality in shop encounters

Adopting the perspective of multimodal conversation analysis, the paper shows the methodic organization of an action, making suggestions, achieved by sellers in response to customers’ requests for recommendations in shop encounters, and involving the showing and listing of available products. This focus on a specific sequential environment and institutional ecology, enables an exemplary discussion of how this action is multimodally formatted, embedded in its context, and shaped in relation to objects as discursive referents as well as materialities to be pointed at, looked at, touched and sensed in multiple ways. More generally, this focus enables to address two sets of issues: on the one hand, it elucidates the nexus between action, institutionality and materiality, including the role of multisensoriality in engaging with the qualities of buyable objects. On the other hand, it addresses the nexus between action and referential practices for introducing and presenting new referents, within an interactional perspective locating these grammatical practices and their systematic features within their praxeological context. On the basis of video data recorded in a gourmet shop in Lisbon, Portugal, this double focus targets issues of sensoriality and socialization in food culture, as well as issues of grammar in interaction, casting some light on situated uses of the verb ter for introducing new referents. Keywords: Social Interaction; Shop Encounters; Multimodality and Multisensoriality.

How to Hold Unjust Structures Responsible in International Relations

Recent public discourse and political theory center on “structural” approaches of assigning responsibility for injustice in contrast to an “interactional” perspective. The interactional approach corrects discrete harms between agents to return to a just baseline, whereas the structural approach casts a wider net implicating agents in harmful structures for systemic transformation. This theory note advances the understanding of structural responsibility in international relations by defending it against common critiques of underspecification and lack of targeted accountability. We argue that structural arguments are better understood as constituting a framework on the nature of injustice rather than a theory or descriptor of particular harms. We present a “framework, theory, action” heuristic, drawing from constructivism's evolution from a theory (like realism and liberalism) when it first appeared to a framework (like rationalism) more recently. Our framework heuristic makes available a fuller range of conceptual tools to hold unjust structures responsible, including through targeted blame and liability, and discards the need to invent new actions to discharge structural responsibility. Rather than settle on one definition of structural responsibility—what it means, where it is located, and how it is discharged—we direct scholars to the numerous ways structural responsibility may be theorized and enacted.

Possible Mechanisms of Hypnosis from an Interactional Perspective

In this paper, utilizing the interactional research paradigm developed by Éva Bányai, we discuss the hypnotic relationship from the viewpoint of interactional synchrony. Based on our three decades of empirical studies of an interactional paradigm, we propose the analogy between hypnosis and mother–child interaction. Hypnosis is considered as a potential corrective/reparative possibility when the real childhood experiences appear to be unfavourable. Possible neuroanatomical and neurochemical mechanisms are also suggested in the right hemispheric orbitofrontal cortex and central oxytocin system.

Examination of Speaking Test Performance in Structured Group Tasks

This chapter explores the use of structured group tasks in the testing of speaking skills in the context of a tertiary level first year speaking course. Participants included undergraduate university students from the department of English translation and interpreting at a state university located in Central Turkey. The structured task used in the study guided students into a group discussion during the speaking exam. The discussions in the exam sessions were video-recorded and transcribed. The transcriptions were analyzed from an interactional perspective. The students were also given an open-ended questionnaire to reveal their opinions about the ins and outs of the speaking test task tried out in the study. The questionnaire consisted of two parts. The first part required students to fill out their demographic information, and the second part inquired students' opinions about the group speaking task. The results of the analysis and questionnaire responses revealed additional opportunities provided by the use of structured tasks in speaking exams.

Sí que als polyphone Struktur im gesprochenen Spanisch

The paper studies the use of sí que in spoken Spanish from an interactional perspective. It argues that sí que utterances have a polyphonic meaning structure in the sense that they express different points of view which can be attributed to different enunciators (Ducrot 1982, 1984) and are characterized by a specific kind of adversative relation. The paper studies the specific polyphonic structure of sí que utterances examining (a) to which kinds of enunciators the respective points of view can be attributed, (b) in which kind of semantic relation they stand to each other, and (c) how they become manifest within the discourse. It is argued that a description within a theory of polyphony can not only account for cases in which an opposing position is rejected by the use of sí que, but also for the more interesting cases in which no rejection of an alternative proposition is involved.