Introducing Greek Conversation Analysis

This chapter discusses the representation of older lesbian, gay and bisexual identities; a category of people who are similar yet different from older heterosexuals. It discusses this identification, considering insights from queer theory, the post-structuralist feminism of Judith Butler, together with the sociological perspectives of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. While the sociological study of sexuality can be traced back some 40 years, sociological studies and considerations of older lesbian, gay and bisexual adults did not appear until the early 1980s. Queer theorists maintain that adopting taken-for-granted categories of identity, whether they are considered the product of an essential biology or a process of social construction, has the effect of obscuring differential experiences and re-affirming existing inequalities. Enabling the investigation of 'culture-in-action', embership categorisation analysis shows how cultural understandings are carried by discourse and are reproduced and transformed in the use. It has been used to analyse gender, crime, organisational structures and stigmatised identities, amongst other topics.

Conversation analysis is a distinctive approach to research on language and communication that originated with Emanuel Schegloff, Harvey Sacks, and Gail Jefferson. It assumes a systematic order in the minute details of talk as it is used in situ. That orderliness is understood to be the result of shared ways of reasoning and means of doing things. Conversation analytic studies aim to identify and describe how people produce and interpret social interaction. For example, the interpretation and response to the question, “How are you” differs depending on whether it is asked by a doctor in a medical consultation or a friend during a casual conversation. Overwhelmingly, data are naturalistic audio (for telephone-mediated talk) or video recordings (for copresent interactions). The recordings are transcribed using conventions first established by Gail Jefferson. They have been further developed since to better capture features such as crying and multimodality. Specialized notations are used to highlight features of talk such as breathiness, intonation, short silences, and simultaneous speech. Analyses typically examine how everyday actions are done over sequences of two or more turns of talk. Greetings, requests, and complaints are actions that have names; others don’t. Studies may examine a range of linguistic, embodied, and environmental phenomena used in coordinated action. Research has been conducted in a broad range of mundane and institutional settings. Medical interaction is one area where conversation analysis has been most applied, but others include psychotherapy and classroom interaction. A conversation analytic perspective on identity is also distinctive. Typically, approaches to intergroup communication presuppose a priori the importance of social identities such as age, gender, and ethnicity. They are theorized as independent variables that impact language behaviors in predictable and measurable ways. This view strongly resonates with common sense and underpins popular questions about gender-, race- or age-based differences in language use. In contrast, a conversation analytic approach examines social identities only when they are observably and demonstrably relevant to what participants are doing and saying. The relevance of an identity category rests on it being clearly consequential for what is happening in a particular stretch of talk. Conversation analysis approaches identity as a type of membership categorization. The term “member” has ethnomethodological roots that recognizes a person is a member from a cultural group. Categories can be invoked, used and negotiated in the flow of interaction. Membership categorization analysis shows there is a systematic organization to category work in talk. Using conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, discursive psychology studies how social identity categorizations have relevance to the business at hand. For example, referring to your wife as a “girl” or a “married woman” invokes different inferences about socially acceptable behavior.

Who better to write a concluding commentary on a collection of Scandinavian studies than an Australian living in Japan? While I was honored to be asked, my immediate reaction was, What do I know about Scandinavia? My entire experience with the region to date consists of a week in Sweden and a 2-h stopover in Copenhagen. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that an outsider could perhaps offer a broadening perspective on the question of how Scandinavian bilingual and second-language users interact; after all, sometimes, you have to stand back in order to get a better view. My own research is based on Japanese bilingual speakers and learners of English, but on reading the articles in this collection, I realized that there is a lot more in common with my situation than I first thought. While this is a collection of articles based in Finnish, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian contexts, the microcontext of bilingual interaction has plenty of implications for other pairs and for second speakers all over the world.The authors make use of conversation analysis (CA)-an approach that began with the work of Sacks in the United States in the 1960s.1 Although the vast majority of CA research today has been carried out among L1 speakers of English, recent years have seen considerable advances in CA studies in non-English contexts, many of which have been made by Scandinavian researchers (e.g. Cromdal, 2003; Kangasharju, 1996; Kurhila, 2006; Lindstrom, 1994; Steensig, 2000). CA has its roots in sociology, so rather than focusing on per se, it is first and foremost interested in how people accomplish a variety of actions by and through talk. Some of the actions highlighted in the current collection, for example, include reformulations (Svennevig), receipts (Foegtmann), clarifications (Osvaldsson et al.), explanations (Slotte-Luttge et al.), and disagreements (Cekaite and Bjork-Willen).CA's radically emic approach enables analysts to observe talk from the perspective of speakers themselves. Central to the analysis is a holistic, bottom-up approach to looking at naturally occurring interaction, allowing the analyst to document a variety of practices that participants use to achieve intersubjectivity, or mutual understanding, including such features as the organization of sequence, turn-taking, repair, and preference.The CA approach has been used to examine bilingual interaction for over 25 years now, beginning with Peter Auer's groundbreaking work on code-switching (Auer, 1984). This generated a variety of CA investigations into other pairs, including those by Li Wei (1994), Alfonzetti (1998), Sebba and Wooffitt (1998), Bailey (2000, 2002), Torras (2005), Cashman (2005), Cromdal (2001, 2004), and Gafaranga (1999, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007). Generally speaking, these authors have been interested in the way that alternation can be used to achieve various socio-interactional functions and the part it plays in the discursive display of identity. Justifying their findings through the next-turn proof procedure, CA studies of bilingual interaction have focused on real-time participant displays of understanding, which led Gafaranga and Torras (2002) to respecify code-switching as interactional otherness, suspending the notion of language until a point in the talk when the participants themselves orient to their languages.Applied linguists, on the other hand, have only relatively recently begun to recognize the potential of the CA approach for analyzing second-language talk. Two Denmark-based researchers, Firth and Wagner (1997), called for a reconceptualization of second-language learning-one that dedicates itself to the sociointeractional rather than the cognitive. This article was met with considerable debate, but it has also led to a renewed interest in the use of CA as a methodological approach for documenting second-language learner talk, including a variety of edited collections and special issues (Gardner & Wagner, 2004; Hua, Seedhouse, Wei, & Cook, 2007; Markee & Kasper, 2004; Richards & Seedhouse, 2005) and a recent special issue of The Modern Language Journal that looks at the effect of Firth and Wagners' call 10 years on (Wagner & Firth, 2007). …

This article examines the way male suspects deny accusations of assaulting women in interrogations by police officers. It draws on a large corpus of British police interrogation materials, and uses conversation analysis to shed light on the location and design of, and responses to, suspects’ ‘category-based denials’ that they are not ‘the kind of men who hit women’. Two sections of analysis identify how, first, such denials routinely follow police officers’ direct questions about violent behaviour, and, second, how they become embedded in extended narratives that are not directly describing violence. In contrast to other discourse-analytic studies of men’s accounts of violence towards women, the article unpacks the component features that comprise what others might label grossly as the ‘discourse of gendered violence’. Rather than see how such ‘discourses’ operate in interview contexts, it shows how suspects construct, in a high-stakes setting for a particular purpose, different categories of men, claiming membership in one (who do not hit women) by recruiting the notion of the other (who do). Thus, in addition to its contribution to the study of gender and violence, the article takes new steps in the ongoing development of membership categorization and conversation analysis, showcasing a type of systematic sequential analysis that can be done with membership categories.

This study explores how pre-adolescent boys of immigrant and working-class backgrounds stage insults and, as part of this process, mobilize categorizations. Data are drawn from ethnographic research combined with detailed analysis (conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis) of video records from peer interactions in an elementary school in Sweden. It was found that the boys deploy multiple resources (of syntactic and phonetic shapes) provided by the talk of the prior speaker and the turn structure of different activities (i.e. games, ridiculing, gossiping) and transform this talk (shifting emphasis, substituting insult terms and pronouns, recycling arguments, repeating striking parts, code-crossing) to collaboratively stage a counter to insults. A variety of negative characteristics (concerning linguistic, social and economic standards) are invoked and negotiated in the boys’ insult talk, which both colludes with and transgresses local norms of conduct and institutional discourses. Overall, this study demonstrates the political character of pre-adolescent children's everyday talk in terms of its orientation towards dominant language ideologies and the place that gender, ethnicity and social class occupy within it.

<div>© The Author(s) 2019. Society has a moral obligation to help victims, but who is recognised as a victim is a contentious issue. Social interaction is a key site where shared understandings of victimisation are built. This article analyses calls to a Victim Support helpline using conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis. Callers described experiences of crimes to account for requesting help. Call-takers claimed the rights to describe and assess callers’ experiences in terms of institutional constraints. Call-takers disavowed the category crime to deny callers’ requests and ascribed the category crime to accountably offer help. Participants negotiated their respective rights to describe callers’ experiences and determine the kind of help needed. The analyses demonstrate how participants’ different understandings of victimisation were consequential for the delivery or withholding of support.</div><div><br></div><div>Contribution has been accepted for publication in the journal.</div>

Contemporary research indicates that Indigenous people are under-represented in the Australian higher education sector and that on-campus university relations and communications between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous persons may be a problem. However, actual talk in interaction between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians in university settings has not been examined. Drawing on Ethnomethodology (EM) and its analytic methods, Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA), this study examines interaction between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous persons, who are participating in a focus group activity discussing experiences of university in a university setting in Australia. Data are audio-recordings of non-contrived focus group interaction between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous persons. These are transcribed using the Jeffersonian transcription system. This study’s examination of linguistic, conversational and categorial resources shows that race matters to experiences of university. Application of the inclusive/exclusive distinction to an examination of ‘we’ in retrospective accounts distinguishes the categories of person that participants include in their experiences of university. Primarily it shows that these Indigenous participants report sharing university experiences with racial co-members, that is, with other Indigenous persons. On rare occasions when Indigenous participants did include Non-Indigenous persons as co-members in shared experiences, they did so to emphasise their isolation within racial cross-member tutorial-classes. In contrast, these Non-Indigenous participants report sharing university experiences with persons from a range of categories. Non-Indigenous participants were found shifting the talk from race matters to non-race matters. This allowed Non-Indigenous participants a turn-at-talk, and was found to diffuse potentially adverse consequences resulting from using race as a category in recounting experiences. Further, the study shows Non-Indigenous participants distance and disalign themselves from the problem of Non-Indigenous people, and therefore from assuming responsibility for racist actions reportedly perpetrated by members of their own racial groups. As these Indigenous and Non-Indigenous participants discuss sensitive race matters, they manage to align and agree with each other. They accomplish this by organising their talk with a preference for agreement; all the while, assembling a social world in which race matters in significant and sundry ways.

Informed by interaction-based work on affect and identity in conversation analysis, discursive psychology, membership categorization analysis, and stylization studies, this chapter contributes to contemporary humor research by investigating discursive practices in comedy performances in Hawai‘i. Set within this multilingual and multiethnic context, analysis explicates how stand-up comedy, a popular local institution, not only entertains but functions as a highly collaborative site where performers and their audiences reproduce and challenge social-linguistic ideologies and practices distinguishing “Locals” (those born and raised in Hawai‘i, Hawai‘i Creole speakers) from “non-Locals” (e.g., white, Standard English speakers). By coordinating laughter and affective and epistemic stances around these two identity categories, participants draw on shared history, language, and culture to maintain a Local community in the present.

In everyday interaction, subtle manifestations of sexism often pass unacknowledged and become internalised and thus perceived as “natural” conduct. The introduction of new vocabularies for referring to previously unnamed sexist conduct would presumably enable individuals to start problematising hitherto unchallengeable sexism. In this paper, we investigate whether and how these vocabularies empower people to speak out against sexism. We focus on the use of the term “mansplaining” which, although coined over 10 years ago, remains controversial and contested. Using Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis, this paper excavates the interactional methods individuals use to formulate, in vivo, some prior spate of talk as mansplaining. In doing so, speakers necessarily reformulate a co-participant’s social action to highlight its sexist nature. Accusations of mansplaining are accomplished by invoking gender (and other) categories and their associated rights to knowledge. In reconstructing another’s conduct as mansplaining, speakers display their understanding of what mansplaining is (and could be) for the purpose at hand. Thus, the paper contributes to the well-established body of interactional research on manifestations of sexism by documenting how the normativity of epistemic rights is mobilised as a resource for bringing off accusations of mansplaining.

The under-reporting of family violence is a global problem. Multiple barriers to help-seeking have been identified, including some associated with social identities like race, age and gender. This discursive psychology study examines identity and help-seeking in social interaction. We analysed 200 calls classified by police call-takers as family harm using conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis. We found that callers oriented to a locally generated identity category 'the one who called police' as problematic. Callers sought anonymity or proposed cover stories to avoid being identified by others. Anonymity raised practical problems for recording callers' names and cover stories raised questions about the legitimacy of alternative accounts for police contact. We found callers' concerns with being identified create a dilemma produced through competing moral judgements tied to coexisting institutional and relational identity categories. Participants display understandings that calling the police may be the right thing to do as a help-seeker, but the wrong thing to do as a friend or family member. Our findings reveal how a locally generated identity category was observable as a force shaping help-seeking in real-time high-stakes encounters.

Autobiographic research interviews have become an accepted and valued method of qualitative inquiry in TESOL and applied linguistics more broadly. In recent discussions surrounding the epistemological treatment of autobiographic stories, TESOL researchers have increasingly called for more attention to the ways in which stories are embedded in interaction and thus are bound up with the social contexts of their production. This paper advances these efforts by demonstrating an empirically grounded approach to storytelling as interaction. Drawing on the research tradition on storytelling in conversation analysis, the article offers a sample analysis of a story produced in an L2 English interview with an adult immigrant in the United States. By engaging sequential conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis, and occasioned semantics, it examines the interactional practices through which the storyteller and story recipient launch, produce, and end the telling of a story that furthers the purpose of the autobiographic interview. By following closely the participants' coordinated actions as they unfold in time, we trace how the parties accomplish the storytelling as an intelligible and meaningful activity through sequence organization and turn design. We conclude with recommendations for extending storytelling research in TESOL to meet the evolving needs and interests of the field.

Verbal microaggressions perpetuate inequalities and negatively impact wellbeing. Yet, there is little work on microaggressions in situ. We address this gap, connecting microaggressions research with scholarship concerning prejudice and discrimination in situated interaction, and focusing on (hetero)sexist microaggressions. Conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorisation analysis (MCA) are applied to excerpts of naturally-occurring and focus group conversation to determine what (hetero)sexist microaggressions look like in practice; how they affect conversations; and whether they map onto well-documented CA/MCA phenomena. Findings suggest that when people produce microaggressive utterances, they use various devices (e.g. pre-sequences, idioms, humour) to mitigate accountability. Furthermore, concerning recipients’ reactions, the treatment of an utterance as microaggressive can involve hallmarks of dispreferred turns including hesitation and/or indirect challenges involving deletion/repair initiation. We therefore propose that such features are criteria for an utterance/sequence to be considered microaggressive. Moreover, such strategies suggest that speakers/recipients are agentic in the (re)production of (hetero)sexism, and therefore may be agentic in effecting change. OPEN ACCESS CC BY-NC-ND: INV PAID

This chapter addresses issues in membership categorization, one of Sacks’s key contributions to ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (Sacks, 1972a, 1992). The chapter discusses the relevance of visual and embodied resources in the situated establishment, maintenance, and challenge of relevant categories. It does so by elaborating on how multimodal resources are exploited by participants to make sense of their categories, moment by moment, and on how this contributes to Sacks’s membership categorization analysis. On the basis of video-recorded guided visits, I reflect on how the detailed organization of embodied practices such as walking both exhibits and achieves the categories of the walkers. In this activity, the way in which the “guide” versus “guided” organize their walking, looking around, and talking accountably manifests their categories and, at the same time, reflexively contributes to establishing them. Here, I focus on embodied category-bound practices of walking as a perspicuous phenomenon.

“And how old are you?”: Age reference as an interpretative device in radio counselling

Selective formulations and selective reporting of facts in political news are deliberately used to create particular identities of different political sides. This becomes evident in media dialogue reporting about political conflicts. In contrast to most NLP-based studies of linguistic bias, we engage critically with its nature, aiming at a later de-biasing or at least raising awareness about linguistic bias in political news. We found inspiration in conversation analysis (CA), membership categorisation analysis (MCA) and a game-theoretic approach to discourse called epistemic message exchange (ME) games. We identified three types of bias: selective reports about facts, selective formulations when reporting about the same facts, and different histories built up by the differences in the first two. We extend the epistemic ME games model with findings from a qualitative study.