Discourse StudiesPub Date : 2024-05-25DOI: 10.1177/14614456241252950
Andrew Chalfoun
{"title":"Shifting responsibility onto coparticipants: Disaffiliative accounts in request sequences","authors":"Andrew Chalfoun","doi":"10.1177/14614456241252950","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456241252950","url":null,"abstract":"Accounts—verbal explanations for conduct—are normally understood to do affiliative work by mitigating or disavowing negative inferences generated by problematic or dispreferred actions. Using conversation analysis, this paper identifies an alternative accounting practice whereby speakers use accounts to actively disaffiliate from coparticipants. In such cases, the account serves as a vehicle for criticizing or challenging a coparticipant’s behavior. I find that speakers use these accounts to shift responsibility for the focal action by treating it as caused by or responsive to the targeted coparticipant’s (putative) misbehavior. This practice indicates that accounts can be used not only to expiate the speaker but also to police others’ behavior, although such moves are vulnerable to retaliation. Data are taken from video recordings of everyday interaction in American and British English.","PeriodicalId":47598,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Studies","volume":"58 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141145875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Discourse StudiesPub Date : 2024-05-06DOI: 10.1177/14614456241242945
Hanna Svensson
{"title":"Requesting another to taste: Passing food and the distribution of agency in the organization of bodily trajectories","authors":"Hanna Svensson","doi":"10.1177/14614456241242945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456241242945","url":null,"abstract":"This paper offers an analysis of the organizational features of passing food objects as a commonplace embodied social practice to accomplish requests to another to taste food during joint cooking activities. Situated within the cognate frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology, the sequential, multimodal analysis details and explains the formal features of passing food from hand to hand and from hand to mouth as distinct practices with distinct micro-sequential organizations. The study draws on a corpus of 14 hours of video-recordings of naturally occurring joint cooking activities in which the participants speak German, Swedish, and English. Focusing on the projectable aspects of bodily trajectories, the analysis reveals how the request sequences are achieved through the participants’ early projection of how to pass the food objects and their stepwise mutual adjustments to their conjoint action trajectory. In progressively establishing who does what next and how during the food transfer, the participants orient to the relevance and distribution of interactional agency. When the normative organization of the step-by-step transfer is disregarded, an ambiguity emerges concerning what action the practice is doing, which prompts the participants to engage in significant interactional work to re-negotiate on what terms the transfer can resume. This shows how issues of interactional agency are exerted and exhibited in and through the sequential organization of social interaction. The results contribute to, and elaborate, prior findings on requests and advances our understanding for the close attention that participants to interaction pay to the detailed aspects of multimodally formatted actions and the normative expectancies that make up to their intelligibility, reflexively elaborating each other.","PeriodicalId":47598,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140888904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Discourse StudiesPub Date : 2024-04-20DOI: 10.1177/14614456241241206
Christian Licoppe, Nicolas Rollet, Luca Greco
{"title":"‘I know what it is’. An interactional study of sex discovery in prenatal ultrasound examinations","authors":"Christian Licoppe, Nicolas Rollet, Luca Greco","doi":"10.1177/14614456241241206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456241241206","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most exciting moments in a prenatal ultrasound session is learning the sex of the baby.Following a conversation analysis perspective, we present a multimodal analysis of sequences of interaction between patient and practitioner at the time the foetus’ sex is the focus of attention. Based on video data collected from maternity wards and private practitioners, we report on two types of sequences, which illustrate the different ways of responding to the perceptually-occasioned formulation of the foetus’ sex: as a telling or as a noticing (in which case participants orient towards jointly seeing). While the possibility of both response is inherent to the sequential properties of noticing-based claims in general, we will discuss how the production of both types of sequences is sensitive and articulated to the distribution of epistemic authority as a practical achievement in this medical setting, along two dimensions: expert versus ordinary knowledge, and professional vision versus lay gaze.","PeriodicalId":47598,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140626935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Discourse StudiesPub Date : 2024-04-16DOI: 10.1177/14614456241241186
Guodong Yu, Lijun Xin
{"title":"Acknowledging and legitimizing the embarrassment: Responding to embarrassment-telling","authors":"Guodong Yu, Lijun Xin","doi":"10.1177/14614456241241186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456241241186","url":null,"abstract":"Sharing embarrassing experiences is an ordinary and recurrent social phenomenon, and this article carries out a conversation analytic study on how embarrassment-telling is interactionally co-constructed in talk-in-interaction. It is found that embarrassment-telling is delivered as an incident that should not have happened happens by accident to the teller due to the embarrassment-teller’s unintended violation of a normative practice. In response, the co-interactant acknowledges the experience’s being embarrassing, while legitimizes the teller’s being embarrassed, thus making the response to embarrassment-telling a nuanced issue by maneuvering between affiliation and disaffiliation with the teller. Data are in Mandarin Chinese with English translation.","PeriodicalId":47598,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Studies","volume":"302 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140610098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Discourse StudiesPub Date : 2024-04-15DOI: 10.1177/14614456241237378
Qingxin Xu
{"title":"Identifying disputants’ attitudinal variations in family mediations: A data mining approach","authors":"Qingxin Xu","doi":"10.1177/14614456241237378","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456241237378","url":null,"abstract":"This article combines linguistic analysis and data mining methods to explore variations in speakers’ evaluative meaning-making in conflict talks. It focuses on conflict style construction through evaluative language, specifically how disputants advance attitudes. The corpus consists of 230 minutes of family mediation talks involving 12 divorcing spouses. The research draws from the Appraisal framework to analyse evaluative meaning-making at a discourse semantics level, capturing both explicit and implicit attitudes, as well as the scaling and dialogic framing of attitudes. Data exploration uses clustering algorithms via RStudio to identify variations in disputants’ discursive behaviour. The findings uncover three conflict styles based on disputants’ preference for attitude advancement formulations, with varying degrees of assertiveness and forcefulness. This study’s contributions include a holistic treatment of evaluative meaning-making, the marriage of digital tools to nuanced linguistic annotation, and a novel interpretation for conflict style. The findings offer fresh insights into disputants’ discursive self-presentation in confrontational exchanges.","PeriodicalId":47598,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Studies","volume":"58 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140562312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Discourse StudiesPub Date : 2024-04-08DOI: 10.1177/14614456241241157
Geert Jacobs, Julia Valeiras
{"title":"Whose questions? Ventriloquation in entrepreneurial podcasts","authors":"Geert Jacobs, Julia Valeiras","doi":"10.1177/14614456241241157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456241241157","url":null,"abstract":"While interaction is a signature feature of podcasts, new research on selected entrepreneurial podcasts has shown how they are de-dramatized as part of the leadership branding project, indexing the genre’s transition from a homespun to a corporate medium and echoing the notion of media re-colonization. This article reports on a case study of the use of questions in a single entrepreneur’s six-episode podcast series. We set out to identify and analyse what we see as ‘re-dramatization’ strategies, creating a sense of interaction and heteroglossia in what is essentially a monologue. Next, triangulating with insights from multimodal discourse analysis and linguistic ethnography, our analysis points to ventriloquation. Through questions that are presented as reported (i.e. referring back to questions that were raised on some earlier occasion), the entrepreneur makes himself or others say something, staging a specific past situation (real or imagined) where questions were asked and thus creating an enhanced sense of author-ity. As for questions that are presented as asked at the moment of speaking (we call them direct questions), the results of our inquiry indicate that the entrepreneur is ventriloquating either what he believes the listener might want to ask him or what he himself was previously asked by the podcast producer. We suggest that the entrepreneur is accommodating more actively to his listenership than it seems at first sight and conclude by reflecting on how this sheds new light on the entrepreneurial podcast as a tool of leadership communication as part of the wider digital mediascape, on the interactive use of questions in general and on the potential of our multi-method approach.","PeriodicalId":47598,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Studies","volume":"300 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140598107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Discourse StudiesPub Date : 2024-03-18DOI: 10.1177/14614456241232043
Fadhila Hadjeris
{"title":"Deconstructing gender stereotypes in standardized English language school textbooks in Algeria: Implications for equitable instructional materials","authors":"Fadhila Hadjeris","doi":"10.1177/14614456241232043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456241232043","url":null,"abstract":"The pressing need to promote gender equality in today’s globalized society is underscored in Sustainable Development Goals and juxtaposed with the goal of cultivating global citizenship. Despite these efforts, mainstream post-colonial discourse on Maghrebi women categorizes them as less citizens neglecting ‘the complexity’ of their lives and experiences. The scarcity of research that depicts Algerian women’s experiences along with the treatment of the topic of gender as ‘taboo’ restricted opportunities on researching this important category of society. While there are numerous studies conducted in the Algerian context on female’s stereotypical depiction and invisibility in school textbooks, the discussion of the topic remains ahistorical. It relegates the status of women as ‘the oppressed’ which runs the risk of reproducing colonial epistemologies. Guided by Goffman’s gender stereotype theory and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis conceptual framework, the paper draws on data collected from four standardized English language school textbooks that are currently used in Algeria. The textbooks content affirms the ‘subaltern’ categorization of Algerian women through emphasizing their deagentialization, dependence, and disempowerment. These findings have implications for gender equity in Algeria, the Maghreb, and the broader North Africa contexts.","PeriodicalId":47598,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140170033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Discourse StudiesPub Date : 2024-03-12DOI: 10.1177/14614456241229874
Sarah Hitzler
{"title":"Doing being ordinary nonetheless: Navigating social expectations in a peer support group","authors":"Sarah Hitzler","doi":"10.1177/14614456241229874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456241229874","url":null,"abstract":"Peer support groups offer spaces where individuals with similar problems can gather to offer each other support and understanding. Successions of narratives have been described as very effective instruments in building shared understanding in such groups. This article adds to these findings by analyzing a single case in an obesity support group. It shows that successions of narratives can be used to question social assumptions of ordinariness which are exclusionary toward the group’s members. In their place, the group jointly develops and establishes an alternative and specifically inclusionary understanding of ordinariness. This redefinition offers members a sense of belonging with respect to those exact aspects which may be grounds for exclusionary experiences in other situations and equips them with alternative interpretations of such encounters. In the analysis, Sacks’ concept of ordinariness is drawn on to denote a dynamic, situated and relational accomplishment based on experience rather than norms.","PeriodicalId":47598,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Studies","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140117322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Discourse StudiesPub Date : 2024-03-07DOI: 10.1177/14614456241235075
Timothy Appignani, Jacob Sanchez
{"title":"AI and racism: Tone policing by the Bing AI chatbot","authors":"Timothy Appignani, Jacob Sanchez","doi":"10.1177/14614456241235075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456241235075","url":null,"abstract":"This paper looks at the way that Bing AI uses tone policing and racial gaslighting in its conversations with users as a method of disciplining them away from critical anti-racist ideological engagement and towards an ethos of white supremacy. We use a critical discourse analysis to examine the conversations produced through our use of Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot to find that through both the content it generates and the mechanisms through which it responds the Bing AI chatbot polices the tone of its users in a variety of ways.","PeriodicalId":47598,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Studies","volume":"135 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140073737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Discourse StudiesPub Date : 2024-03-05DOI: 10.1177/14614456231194845
Susy Macqueen, Luke Collins, Gavin Brookes, Zsófia Demjén, Elena Semino, Diana Slade
{"title":"Laughter in hospital emergency departments","authors":"Susy Macqueen, Luke Collins, Gavin Brookes, Zsófia Demjén, Elena Semino, Diana Slade","doi":"10.1177/14614456231194845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456231194845","url":null,"abstract":"For patients, hospital emergency departments (EDs) are unfamiliar, institutional contexts involving high-stakes communication in heightened emotional circumstances. This study examines laughter, as one expression of emotion, in an existing 649,631-word corpus of naturally occurring clinician-patient interactions recorded in five Australian hospitals. A mixed methods approach revealed (1) the spread, frequency and producers of laughter, and (2) the functions of laughter in unfolding interactional contexts. First, a corpus analysis showed that laughter in the ED was most frequently produced by nurses and patients, but relatively infrequently by doctors. Secondly, two case studies comprising all the interactions of two patients for the whole duration of their ED visits were analysed in detail to explore the individuals’ contrasting patterns of laughter. The analysis revealed how laughter can be a cue to the affective dynamics of patient-clinician interactions about serious matters, for example, signalling difficult topics and managing anxiety in the ED context. Laughter, and any related humour, can indicate the achievement of mutuality, which is considered a cornerstone of genuine shared decision-making and patient participation in their own care. Therefore, the findings suggest that a sensitive responsiveness to patient-initiated laughter, and any associated humour, may promote patient-centred relationships in clinical interactions.","PeriodicalId":47598,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Studies","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140046785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}