#conversation analysis

A semantic map of the different actions achieved with the Danish response tokens ja ‘yes’, nej ‘no’, nå ‘oh’, okay and mm.

Lingthusiasm Episode 51: Small talk, big deal 

“Cold enough for ya?” “Nice weather for ducks.” 

Small talk is a valuable piece of our social interactions -- it can be a way of having a momentary exchange with someone you don’t know very well or a bridge into getting to know someone better by figuring out which deeper conversational topics might be of mutual interest. 

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the science behind small talk: how we pick topics for small talk conversation, the fine art of media references from memes to movies, and our own tested strategies for dodging awkward small talk questions while keeping the conversation flowing, such as when you’re having a not-great time but don’t want to talk about it, and that ubiquitous linguist question “so, how many languages do you know?” 

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements Crash Course Linguistics videos are available now and coming out weekly! Keep an eye out for them around 2pm North American Eastern Time on Fridays for the rest of 2020 (except a few holiday Fridays) and into early 2021. If you want to get an email each week with some further reading and practice exercises on each topic, you can also check out the companion issues of Mutual Intelligibility. Become a Patron and get access to the Crash Course channel in the Lingthusiasm Discord to chat about each episode!

This month’s bonus episode is a Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster! Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic with Emily about the process of making dictionaries, based on your patron questions. We also talk about how lexicography has changed since dictionaries went online and in the era of social media, and the extremely esoteric process of getting lexicography jobs. Get all your lexicography questions answers, as well as access to 45 other bonus episodes by becoming a Patron! Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

Lingthusiasm Episode 11: Layers of meaning - Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims

Lingthusiasm Episode 39: How to rebalance a lopsided conversation

Lingthusiasm Episode 46: Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics 

Why we love to quote our favourite films and TV shows

Playing out loud: Videogame references as resources in friend interaction for managing frames, epistemics, and group identity

Sylvia Sierra

The magically effective way to respond to "so you're a linguist, how many languages do you know?"

A Mission to Make Virtual Parties Actually Fun - Gretchen’s article for Wired on proximity chat 

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Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

An interesting paper about the pragmatics of emoji, by Agnese Sampietro in the Journal of Pragmatics. Abstract: 

Emoji are a set of pictographs available on several electronic platforms and applications, which are gradually replacing emoticons (sequences of punctuation marks representing facial expressions). Over the last decade, researchers have proposed that emoticons not only convey emotional content in computer-mediated communication, but they may also perform pragmatic functions, such as signaling the illocutionary force of the utterance (Dresner and Herring, 2010), mitigating threatening formulations (Wilson, 1993), or strengthening expressive speech acts (Skovholt et al., 2014). 

Despite their growing popularity, little pragmatic research to date specifically addresses emoji. The present paper bridges this gap by exploring the functions of emoji in a corpus of WhatsApp chats written in Spanish. Drawing on Spencer-Oatey's (2000, 2005) rapport management framework, the analysis shows that emoji are used across different domains in the corpus: they not only upgrade or downgrade different speech acts (illocutionary domain), as pointed out by previous research, but they also contribute to achieving a successful interaction by signaling closing sections or by helping to negotiate openings (discourse domain), as well as serving as a way to frame playful interactions (stylistic domain). This study also shows that some practices related to the use of emoji may be influenced by Spanish culture.

Journal citation (paywalled) - Full text (pre-print)

It’s really astonishing that human conversation happens at all. People respond to questions more quickly than they should be able to think of their answers, and our decisions about whether someone is being helpful or not can be based on millisecond differences in their responses.

Nick Enfield’s 2017 book How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation summarises some of the key work he has undertaken on how conversation works, with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. The book situates this work in some of the key research from the field of Conversation Analysis in the last 50 years. Topics covered include looking at how silences of different lengths gets interpreted, how people repair their speech as they go along, and how ‘um’ in English has correlations in enough other languages that Enfield refers to it as a ‘universal’ word. All of this is framed throughout the book with the metaphor of the ‘conversation machine’, which is a delightful commercial model of the ‘interaction engine’ in Nick’s 2006 book with Stephen Levinson (which I found tremendously helpful back when I was conceptualising my PhD research).

There’s lots to like about this book, and the presentation of research. I particularly like the commitment to ensuring that it is not only the ol’ regulars like English that are included in analysis. You’ll get to learn about the differences in conversational features in languages like Lao (Laos), Murrinhpatha (Australia) and Siwu (Ghana) too - or perhaps more astoundingly, the similarities between them.

This book is a great example of how research can be presented in a clear way that is engaging for a non-expert reader. It’s for the quick-minded non-expert, who is ok with acquiring (or ignoring) a bit of jargon along the way, but if you want an exercise in good pop-science writing, sit down with one of these chapters and the original research on which it is based. I did hope the larger question of ‘why this work?’ would be answered; Enfield is diligent about making sure all of the researchers are given a research-area title, but it is intriguing to ponder why conversation intrigues psychologists, linguists and sociologists alike. 

If you did linguistics but never got to study Conversation Analysis, or you want a whistlestop tour of some of the most interesting work to come out of the field in the last couple of decades, this book is certainly worth a visit.

Buy: Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link

Rights and Responsibilities in Calls for Help: The Case of the Mountain Glade Fire

By: Geoffrey Raymond and Don Zimmerman

Published by: Research on Language and Social Interaction Volume 40, Issue 1 Pages 33-61

LL Abstract:

In this article, Raymond and Zimmerman use a corpus of 40 calls to 911 about the same event - a fire on the Pacific coast - to examine how callers and call-takers negotiate rights and responsibilities in their talk and the ways these rights affect actions and trajectories of 911 calls. They identify problems in managing these calls that occur over time, showing how callers and call-takers cannot avoid the institutional constraints posed by the format of an emergency call. Suggesting that institutional resistance to change may stem from such routinized and embodied practices, the authors further consider the impact on emergency services due to shifting presuppositions in multiple calls produced during community-wide events.

LL Summary:

Raymond and Zimmerman begin by describing the emergency captured by their call corpus: a mountainside fire in a coastal community on the Pacific Coast that affected thousands of residents, allowing the researchers to track an ordered series of calls about the same event. They describe the questions driving their research, outlining their focus on the practices that organize calls and the ways that these practices embody an alignment of identities between a service seeker and service provider. Identifying a directionality to the information flow in emergency calls (where practices are designed to facilitate information into a dispatch center), they introduce three ways that these practices are altered over multiple calls: information flow is reversed, complication of the service seeker/provider relationship, and complication in the rights and responsibilities of that relationship. In the next section of the article, the authors review prior research on the organization and production of emergency calls, beginning with how calls generally have a monofocal character leading to brevity and order as callers are constrained to present service-appropriate matters. They describe the ways that callers are aligned to report problems and answer questions, while call-takers receive the report and ask questions, resulting in the a division of rights and responsibilities that provide the directionality of information they previously discuss. As deviations from the orientations, presuppositions, and activities have consequences for the emergency call, the authors note how the first two turns of a call set up the responsibilities for each party while positioning them to engage in a specific type of activity: reporting an event for the purpose of obtaining help for that problematic event. Using the first call about the fire, Raymond and Zimmerman show how the organization of 911 calls allow callers to use their first turn as a “slot” for presenting the trouble that led them to call (the “caller’s problem). Noting the compact opening and closing sequences of the first call, the authors illustrate the sequencing inherent in emergency calls that facilitates the orientations, presuppositions, and activities that enable callers to report emergencies. Next, Raymond and Zimmerman use examples from several calls to show how callers departed from the norms of an emergency call in reversing the directionality of the calls as the fire emergency progressed, demonstrating that both callers and call-takers maintained a tangential alignment with these norms despite these deviations. Here both call-takers and callers are shown modifying their practices in an effort to see if their call matches previously delivered information, resulting in modified service announcements and orientations to a caller’s right to report an emergency (e.g. when a caller’s first turn opens with a request for a call taker to confirm they already know about the fire, or a call taker provides “candidate locations” for the emergency). In addition to calls where reporting is sustained as the overall activity, the authors next examine calls where other projects are pursued, such as information or advice seeking calls. Here they show that callers orient to their limited rights as reporters yet presuppose that call takers know more about the event in question than the caller, reversing the activities in a typical emergency call. In calls seeking advice, the authors demonstrate that callers use location formulations to establish their proximity to the fire as a basis for pursuing information and advice. They conclude their analysis with two examples of calls where call takers struggled with requests for advice, as in these cases the call takers faced institutional limits on their own rights to provide information or advice (such as encouraging a caller to evacuate). The article ends with a discussion of how the calls systematically changed over time, from reporting the fire to seeking advice or information about the emergency, and the authors note that both the organization and distribution of rights and responsibilities in these calls changed as a result. Despite these changes, they underscore that callers and call takers attempted to preserve the ordinary structure of these calls, suggesting that institutional constraints make resistance to change problematic in such situations.

LL Recipe Comparison:

This article reminds me of the recipe for Feisty Shrimp Linguine:

While the authors of this article discuss different linguistic responses to a fiery situation, you will find yourself loving the fiery flavor of this linguine dish! The shrimp and red pepper of this recipe are a nice twist on the traditional seafood linguine approach, and the thick tomato sauce can be adjusted to your own heat preferences. Even though callers and call takers must deal with problems if an emergency steps outside the norm, you won’t face any problems putting this easy dinner idea together. Good Cooking!

So happy with myself. And I’m going to get started on the very short 750 word assignment for the same module before I start on the SPSS bullshit which will fry the fuck out of my brain. Best get all my actual essays done first before I start looking at numbers. I worry if I look at numbers I’ll start avoiding school work again. 

I should get my new medication tomorrow. The new medication being introduced is one I have to take in the mornings so this’ll be a new thing for me. I’m sure I’ll be fine, and Dale will no doubt help to remind me. I just need to remember not to actually get out of bed for the day until I’ve taken my pills.