When students resist answering sensitive questions, teachers face dual pragmatic challenges: eliciting a response while mitigating the face-threat acts. This study conceptualizes teachers’ use of approximation elicitors, strategies to reformulate and approximate their initial questions. Based on the analysis of 26 recorded interactions, this study identifies three types of approximation elicitors: (1) authority-grounded elicitors, which frame the elicitation within institutional roles to legitimize the request; (2) logic-guided elicitors, which reduce the imposition on students’ negative face by scaffolding the response; (3) affective-alignment elicitors, which primarily address students’ positive face wants by demonstrating empathy, understanding, and solidarity, embodying the friendliness maxim. Furthermore, this study reveals a matching pattern between the choice of approximation elicitors and topical contexts, demonstrating that teachers’ pragmatic choices are highly sensitive to specific contexts. These approximation elicitors, grounded in Chinese style of politeness, offer a nuanced understanding of how teachers navigate sensitive communications beyond the classroom.

This Special Issue brings together a collection of seven articles that aim to expand our understanding of relationship building and socialisation practices in family discourse with the key focus on the interactional accomplishment of “doing family.” Exploring video-recorded face-to-face, digitally-mediated and hybrid interactions, they examine a variety of family conversations – parent-child, sibling (brother-brother; sister-sister), married couples and in-laws – in different languages (Chinese, English, Japanese, Russian, Spanish), including some code-switching. The Special Issue also illustrates the use of the key discourse analytic approaches to interactional data analysis, ranging from interactional pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics to membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis.

This study examines the social accountability of displaying to burn oneself during naturally occurring joint cooking activities. The sequential, multimodal analysis of responding actions to burn displays allows to discuss publicly available displays of perceptual experiences as related to social action. The study specifies three sequential trajectories following displays of heat-occasioned experiences, including (i) orienting to the unfortunate character of the event, (ii) orienting to issues of responsibility and (iii) questioning the validity of burn displays. The study shows that the question of what observable conduct is physiological and what is social is a members’ problem, including whether, how and to what extent the burn display is proportional to the object’s thermic features, and the sequential and moral implications that the burn display makes relevant. The study contributes to our understanding of retrosequences as a sequence organization that incorporates the relevance of sensorial practices in and for social interaction and of how an EMCA approach to the study of sociality can be particularly productive for further investigating the intricate relation between physiological experiences and the social accountability of action. The participants speak French, Swiss-German and German as first and second language.

This paper examines how chatbot-mediated self-inquiry reflects and reproduces neoliberal discourses of emotional regulation and personal responsibility. The study analyses chatbot-mediated self-inquiry sampled from LMSYS-CHAT-1M and WildChat, two large datasets of human–chatbot conversations, to understand the kinds of social relations enacted. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and specifically the tenor framework, the paper traces how chatbots manage interpersonal alignment. Focusing on tuning , a subsystem of tenor concerned with modulating interpersonal tone and risk, the findings reveal a consistent pattern of affiliative but non-committal alignment, in which chatbots render modalised support through lowered stakes , collectivised scope , and warmed spirit . These linguistic choices foster emotional reassurance while reframing structurally induced affect, such as burnout, rejection, or despair, as individualised challenges to be managed through personal resilience and self-regulation. By showing how chatbot discourse privileges normative adaptation over structural critique, the study contributes to broader debates about the social implications of AI-mediated communication and the ethical design of conversational technologies.

While the human quest for meaning in life is widely studied across various disciplines, research examining how children discursively construct and communicate this concept remains underexplored. Extensive cognitive linguistic research on meaning in life has primarily focused on the use of metaphors in adults. This study moves beyond figurative language to explore the broader range of linguistic features used by 10-year-old Hebrew native speakers ( N = 10) when discussing life’s meaning during semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Using Cognitive Discourse Analysis (CODA) of rich interview data, we find that children navigated their understanding of meaning in life through polar oppositions, as well as metaphors involving opposing directional spatial relationships (e.g. a rollercoaster and a Ferris wheel). Crucially, in recounting significant life events, participants frequently adopted thematic positions characterized by affectedness rather than agentivity. This pattern suggests that, for children, meaning is derived from social recognition and appreciation. The detailed analysis of children’s discourse concerning existential concepts in this study exemplifies CODA’s potential for gaining insights into meaning-making processes.

In this article, we examine how recruiters and applicants talk about personality tests, reflecting presuppositions about personality and its accessibility. Using video-recorded data from 21 Finnish job interviews, we show how the personality test functions as a discursive object for managing stakes in the recruitment process. When applicants referred to the test after receiving positive evaluations, they emphasized its ability to reveal their personality, thus reinforcing the evaluation. In these moments, both recruiters and applicants treated the test as structured and purposeful. When test talk occurred before receiving results, applicants highlighted the test’s limitations in accessing their personality, creating space to reinterpret outcomes. Recruiters, in contrast, treated the test as a reliable tool, emphasizing its role in identifying inconsistencies in applicants’ conduct. Our findings show that personality tests can both enable and constrain participants’ ability to manage stakes, contributing to the impression of objectivity and truth-finding during job interviews.