The epistemics of advice-giving sequences: Epistemic primacy and subordination in advice rejection

Although advice is routinely offered in ordinary conversation, commentators and analysts have treated it as a special or delicate type of action, noticing a number of challenges associated with both providing and receiving it. In this article, I first describe the most basic social-sequential context for giving advice and explicate how the formulations speakers use to offer advice are adapted to the distinct epistemic configurations (and other characteristics) that characterize that context. Drawing on Jefferson and Lee’s (1992) observations regarding ‘troubles tellings’, I argue that speakers typically offer advice when a co-participant reports an insoluble trouble or problem to one who (may or claims to) possess special knowledge about the domain of trouble. I show how this epistemic configuration constitutes a ‘home environment’ for advice-giving (i.e. a place where advice may be relevantly offered) and discuss how speakers vary the design of their advice (e.g. using different grammatical forms) to adapt to the sequential environments that entail different epistemic configurations. Finally, I consider how alternative, contrasting responses to advice manage (e.g. by ratifying or challenging) the epistemic framework set in motion by advice-giving.

Human-like Communication

The most famous grand challenge for machine intelligence is human-like communication. This chapter explores two problem that need to be solved in order for machines to meet this challenge. The first is the technical difficulties posed by ordinary conversation. Production and comprehension in conversation are: multimodal, multi-person, incremental, concurrent, and jointly managed. The fine-grained complexity of these aspects of human interaction are beyond the current state of the art but should, ultimately, be tractable. The second set of problems are foundational. Models that assume human communication is underwritten by a shared language are unable to account for the ubiuquitous and systematic role misunderstanding plays in everyday interaction. As a result they also fail to explain how people adapt their language use to each new person and new situation in real time. This capability is essential for any machine that aims to engage constructively with human diversity.

Classroom teasing: Institutional contingencies and embodied action

This article compares the sequential position, action, and design of teasing sequences in classroom and mundane interaction. This collection of teases comes from a university Geosciences classroom, and the analysis demonstrates that, like teases in ordinary conversation, classroom teases are sequentially bound and designed in extreme fashions. Nonetheless, classroom teasing sequences are unique in terms of the actions and precise designs of teasables and teases as well as the sequential contingencies that create opportunities for teasing. This paper contributes to past conversation analysis research showing how teases as sequences of embodied action are subject to local contingencies and constraints.

Improvement of presentation performance through feedback

Presentation is a type of public speaking which requires special skills besides language competency. Presentation skill in English is a lesson or subject which can be found in some educational institutions in Indonesia. Besides presentation, public speaking can be in a form of speech, debate, and meeting. In public speaking, a speaker can face more than two people or even hundreds or thousands of people. While in ordinary conversation, the speakers and the listener called interlocutors are limited to only a few people. Presentation class is meant to improve the students’ performance in English public speaking. Feedback is usually given after a presentation activity is completed. In this case, the students who were trained were given feedback by the teacher. Feedback is given thoroughly on the language, content, and method of presentation. Research on feedback or assessment on oral presentation is underexplored. The present research is proof supported with empirical data which suggests that the role of feedback is important and statistically assessed as significant in making the later performance better. The main factor that determines the quality of a presentation is language skill. However, there are other aspects that are quite decisive such as the material or topic of the presentation and the presentation method.

A Review of RAY WILKINSON, JOHN P. RAE, GITTE RASMUSSEN (eds.), ATYPICAL INTERACTION: THE IMPACT OF COMMUNICATIVE IMPAIRMENTS WITHIN EVERYDAY TALK. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, XXIII+470 pp.

The collection of articles under review includes conversation analytic studies of interactions involving the participation of at least one person with communicative impairments (aphasia, dementia, dysarthria, etc.). The authors concentrate on how these impairments influence interaction—the organization of repair in particular—as well as on issues of participants’ adaption to impairments, collaboration, the agency of people with impairments, and practices of face maintenance. Three more general issues connected to this field of study are discussed in the review. The first issue is a choice of analytic categories and the application of the category of repair. This category seems justified since participants frequently have to clarify the meaning of their partners’ actions. However, this choice may appear problematic if one does not take into account that interactions with people with impairments have their own progressivity, which differs from the progressivity of ordinary conversation. The second issue is the role of nonverbal actions, which is crucial in circumstances where some of the participants lack verbal resources. The third issue concerns the problem of the understanding which participants try to achieve in the course of interaction and which researchers try to achieve in the course of analysis. This task becomes more challenging in comparison to ordinary conversations. On the one hand, actions of persons with impairments are sometimes ambiguous and require special interpretative efforts from their partners. On the other hand, there is always a risk that the partner will interpret actions of impaired person inadequately.

Facts into faults: The grammar of guilt in jury deliberations

Jurors customarily do their work with very little by way of instruction from the court, other than about the law. This suggests that they enter the jury room with the relevant cognitive and interactional tools at the ready, drawn from everyday life. This paper focuses on a specific conversational device jurors use to do their work: conditional-contrastive inculpations (CCIs), whereby the defendant’s actions are compared unfavorably to what a normal, innocent person would have done, with the implication that the discrepancy indicates guilt. We examine the logic, variants, sequential precursors, and immediate consequences of this phenomenon in two real-life American criminal juries deliberating the same charges. This study offers a rare glimpse into the operation of real (rather than mock) juries, and specifically the way in which they appropriate a practice from ordinary conversation in order to perform the unordinary work demanded of them by the legal system.

Fiction and importation

Importation in fictional discourse is the phenomenon by which audiences include information in the story over and above what is explicitly stated by the narrator. This paper argues that importation is distinct from generation, the phenomenon by which truth in fiction may outstrip what is made explicit, and draws a distinction between fictional truth and fictional records. The latter comprises the audience’s picture of what is true according to the narrator. The paper argues that importation into fictional records operates according to principles that also govern ordinary conversation. An account of fictional records as a species of common ground information is proposed. Two sources of importation are described in detail, presupposition accommodation and conversational implicatures. It is shown that presuppositions are both mandatorily imported and mandatorily generated. By contrast, conversational implicatures are neither mandatorily imported nor mandatorily generated. The paper distinguishes conversational implicatures from contextual inferences. Both rely on background assumptions, yet conversational implicatures moreover depend on assumptions concerning Gricean cooperation.

Are you talking to me? A case of specific reply by means of election campaign advertisements

The article aims at an analytic description of a specific type of exchange occurring during political campaigns. The candidates often engage in a virtual dialogue; that is, an exchange of points made by means of campaign advertisements. The specific type of exchange or reply is, in certain aspects, no different to an ordinary conversation. However, what influences it most is the context of public/mass communication. The main concern of the presentation is to investigate, within the framework of Relevance Theory, ways in which a candidate’s reply to the opponent’s advertisement is actually a message to the viewers and prospective voters rather than to the rival themselves. The analysis is carried out on selected advertisements for Mitt Romney and Barack Obama broadcast during the U.S. presidential election campaign in 2012.

Models of Lifelong Learning

Lifelong learning is a familiar concept in ordinary conversation and in public policy discourses. Though the history and various meanings of lifelong learning are noble, it has in more recent times been identified with functional interests, economic goals, and one-dimensional interpretations. This chapter identifies the genesis and grounding of lifelong learning in psychology and adult education, disciplines that establish the foundations for our understanding of learning. Classical and current learning theories are outlined, including behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism from psychology. Adult education learning theory contributes andragogy, self-directed learning, experiential learning, multiple intelligences, and transformative learning. Insights from critical pedagogy are added in order to suggest models of lifelong learning that transcend functional models. This more critical interpretation contributes to a better understanding of lifelong learning that has an interest in enhancing communities and society and promoting the democratic and emancipatory goals of education.

The principle of proportionality

In Mandarin conversation, utterances about future actions with severe consequences are observed to correlate with bigger promises, marked by devices indicating greater illocutionary force, as compared with those about actions with less serious consequences. Applying the principle of proportionality proposed by Goffman (1971), I argue that participants’ design of promise is proportional to the severity of the action consequences, which is evaluated by the participants on a moment-by-moment basis. The ad hoc construction of promises shows that promising is a dynamic process, rather than a one-time action. The proportionality principle may also account for the differences between promises in institutional discourse and ordinary conversation.