A Hepburn
Biographic Data
| ID | 57106 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Hepburn |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Hepburn |
| SIGNATURE | HEPBURN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Loughborough University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6564-6310 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 588 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Coping with distressing research: Emotional engagement and researcher well-being
In this Note, we address various aspects of researchers’ emotions when studying sensitive topics. Drawing on our own experiences and a workshop involving 30 researchers at various career stages, we explore how emotional engagement arises at different points in the research process. We argue that while general ethical codes and practices emphasize participant welfare, they often neglect the emotional labor that researchers themselves perform, rega…
From Diplomacy to Disrespect: Conversational Polarization in the Oval Office
The Visible Politics of Intersubjectivity: Constructing Knowledge as Shared to Manage Resistance in News Interviews
This paper describes one practice of “resistance” to challenging interviewees in television news interviews. Interviewers use turn medial tags when working with field reporters to display shared knowledge to an overhearing audience. In contrast, analysis focuses on examples in which tag questions are issued midturn, e.g., “You put your finger on the button didn’t you.=when you said ...”. In this practice knowledge and understanding are built as s…
The distinctive uses of right in British and American English interaction
The Benefits of a Jeffersonian Transcript
Over the past 6 decades, researchers in conversation analysis have repeatedly shown that everyday social activities such as inviting a friend over, interviewing a police suspect, teaching a class, or cross-questioning in a courtroom–are achieved in orderly and reproducible ways. Jeffersonian transcription has been refined to both capture and crystallize the interactionally relevant specifics of how such tasks get done. Conversation analytic work …
Questions and Interrogatives
Conversation analysts distinguish between the terms “interrogative” and “question.” Interrogative is a grammatical term describing the syntactic form of a turn at talk. “Question” describes the type of action – requesting information – that a speaker can do. From a conversation analytic perspective, questions project a relevant next action in the form of a response, for which the answerer is accountable. The design of a question can set an agenda…
Transcribing for Social Research
Rethinking attitudes and social psychology – Issues of function, order, and combination in subject-side and object-side assessments in natural settings
This paper overviews limitations in both the way attitude function has been conceptualized in social psychology, and in the empirical basis for the claims made. We suggest that the premise that attitudes are expressed for cognitive/motivational reasons is an untested artefact of the methodological procedures commonly used. In contrast, an investigation of ‘attitudes’ in the wild (assessments, evaluations, judgements) is offered as an alternative …
How and why children instigate talk in pediatric allergy consultations: A conversation analytic account
Involving children in their healthcare encounter is a national and international priority. While existing research has examined the ways in which children are recruited to participate in the consultation, no work has examined whether and how children instigate talk, and the extent to which their contributions are successful. This paper presents a conversation analysis of a selection of 10 out of 30 video recordings in which children aged 4-10 yea…
The preference for self-direction as a resource for parents’ socialisation practices
This paper focuses on practices that parents employ when they seek to forward some course of action for their child and manage children’s resistance to these attempts. Combining conversation analytic tools with discursive psychological insights, it will argue that more coercive and invasive behaviour management practices can be systematically deferred in favour or actions that give children the opportunity to develop their own solutions to proble…
Subversive Completions: Turn-Taking Resources for Commandeering the Recipient’s Action in Progress
This article explores the practice of “subversive completions,” whereby one speaker produces a grammatically fitted completion of another speaker’s unfolding turn so as to subvert the action of the unfolding turn and the ongoing sequence. We show that subversive completions may derail or exaggerate the action in progress, typically for comedic or teasing effect. We also introduce three related turn-taking practices that can be used to accomplish …
What do displays of empathy do in palliative care consultations
Empathy is an important way for doctors to demonstrate their understanding of patients’ subjective experiences. This research considers the role of empathy in 37 doctor-patient palliative or end-of-life care consultations recorded in a hospice. Specifically, it focuses on four contexts in which there is a disparity between patients’ displayed experience of their illness and the doctor’s biomedical, expertise-driven perspective on their illness. T…
How clients solicit medication changes in psychiatry
In psychiatry, practitioners are encouraged to adopt a patient-centred approach that emphasises shared decision-making. In this article, we investigate how clients with severe mental illnesses (e.g. schizophrenia) advocate for their treatment preferences in psychiatric consultations. The study uses Conversation Analysis to examine audio-recorded medication check appointments in a comprehensive treatment programme known as assertive community trea…
Transcribing for Social Research
Introduction to the Special Issue on Apologies in Discourse
The studies in this special issue focus not so much on apologies in public discourse, in the media, or in the world of public affairs but rather on those made in everyday social interactions, for the (usually) slight but nonetheless significant moments when someone treads on another’s toes, literally or metaphorically, and causes some (usually) minor inconvenience or harm. The frequency and significance of such moments are associated with the mor…
Absent Apologies
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Discourse Processes on 14 Jun 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2015.1056690
Children’s Sensations as Interactional Phenomena: A Conversation Analysis of Children’s Expressions of Pain and Discomfort
Psychological research has typically studied pain by using participant indirect reports. The current study starts to build an alternative and complementary approach by directly studying pain expressions and displays, and the way they operate in interaction. It will focus on children’s pain expressions in a corpus of 71 video recordings of British English speaking family mealtimes. We distinguish four relevant components of pain expressions: (a) l…
Advice-implicative actions: Using interrogatives and assessments to deliver advice in mundane conversation
Work on advice has concentrated on institutional settings where there are restrictions on roles, actions and their organisation. This article focuses on advice giving in mundane settings: interactions between mothers and their young-adult daughters in a corpus of 51 telephone calls. Analysis reveals a range of designs that can be ‘advice implicative’ including advice-implicative interrogatives and advice-implicative assessments. Recipients orient…
Intervening With Conversation Analysis in Telephone Helpline Services: Strategies to Improve Effectiveness
This article overviews the way conversation analytic work on telephone helplines can make an impact in practical situations. It takes three illustrative themes in helpline research: (a) the giving, receiving, and resisting of advice; (b) the expression of strong emotion and its identification, management, and then coordination with helpline goals; and (c) how helplines’ policies and practices shape the interactions between caller and call taker. …
Managing the Moral Implications of Advice in Informal Interaction
What does advice giving look like among family members? Most conversation analytic research on advice has been in institutional settings, which constrain what speakers can do. Here we analyze advice in the apparently freer environment of telephone calls between mothers and their young adult daughters. We concentrate on how the advice is received. Our analysis shows that the position of “advice recipient” is a potentially unwelcome identity to occ…
Reference Recalibration Repairs: Adjusting the Precision of Formulations for the Task at Hand
This report examines what is involved when a speaker overtly selects one formulation over another by employing a repair operation that reformulates a reference in a way that adjusts or recalibrates it, rather than abandons the original referent altogether. Focusing primarily on references to persons, we show that, beyond the narrowing of a reference—increasing its precision—that results in an improved fit between a person reference and other comp…
Repairing Self- and Recipient Reference
There are dedicated reference terms—in English—for self- and recipient reference (I and its grammatical variants for self; you and its grammatical variants for recipient). These terms are invariant across occasions of reference and, as such, are repaired much less commonly than are references to third persons. In this article, we focus on four types of “trouble” addressed by repair to self- and recipient reference: (a) indexing the wrong referent…
Threats: Power, family mealtimes, and social influence
One of the most basic topics in social psychology is the way one agent influences the behaviour of another. This paper will focus on threats, which are an intensified form of attempted behavioural influence. Despite the centrality to the project of social psychology, little attention has been paid to threats. This paper will start to rectify this oversight. It reviews early examples of the way social psychology handles threats and highlights key …
Designing the Recipient: Managing Advice Resistance in Institutional Settings
In this paper we consider a collection of conversational practices that arise when a professional is faced with extended resistance to their offered advice. Our data is comprised of telephone calls to a UK child protection helpline. The practices we identify occur repeatedly across our corpus of advice resistance sequences and involve (1) the repackaging of resisted advice in more idiomatic form; (2) the combination of that advice with a tag ques…
Advice-implicative Interrogatives: Building “Client-centered” Support in a Children’s Helpline
Interactional research on advice giving has described advice as normative and asymmetric. In this paper we examine how these dimensions of advice are softened by counselors on a helpline for children and young people through the use of questions. Through what we term “advice-implicative interrogatives,” counselors ask clients about the relevance or applicability of a possible future course of action. The allusion to this possible action by the co…
Qualitative interviews in psychology: Problems and possibilities
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in \nQualitative Research in Psychology on 21/07/2008, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/1478088705qp045oa
Putting aspiration into words: Laugh particles', managing descriptive trouble and modulating action
Crying: Notes on Description, Transcription, and Interaction
In this article, I am concerned with the description and transcription of crying. I con-sider the ways crying has been dealt with in general psychological research and in interactional research. In general psychological research, crying has typically been studied by way of self-report questionnaires that treat crying as a unitary and self-evi-dent category. Although interaction work is more focused on the interactional role of crying, it is uncom…
Crying Receipts: Time, Empathy, and Institutional Practice
In this article, we focus on the activities done by the recipients of crying. In the analysis, we work with a corpus of calls from a child protection helpline in which the caller shows features of crying (14 calls, or about 10% of the total). Our focus is on two kinds of crying receipts made by child protection officers (CPOs) that are rare in noncrying calls but recurrent in crying calls: take-your-times (TYTs) and empathic receipts (ERs). TYTs …
"I'm a Bit Concerned"--Early Actions and Psychological Constructions in a Child Protection Helpline
This article analyzes early actions in 50 calls reporting cases of abuse to a national child protection helpline in the UK (the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Helpline, NSPCC). It focuses on the early turns in the caller's reason for call, in particular, a class of constructions in which the caller describes himself or herself as "concerned about x" (or similar). Analysis of the corpus of calls suggests concern constru…
Advice-implicative Interrogatives: Building “Client-centered” Support in a Children’s Helpline
Interactional research on advice giving has described advice as normative and asymmetric. In this paper we examine how these dimensions of advice are softened by counselors on a helpline for children and young people through the use of questions. Through what we term “advice-implicative interrogatives,” counselors ask clients about the relevance or applicability of a possible future course of action. The allusion to this possible action by the co…
Designing the Recipient: Managing Advice Resistance in Institutional Settings
In this paper we consider a collection of conversational practices that arise when a professional is faced with extended resistance to their offered advice. Our data is comprised of telephone calls to a UK child protection helpline. The practices we identify occur repeatedly across our corpus of advice resistance sequences and involve (1) the repackaging of resisted advice in more idiomatic form; (2) the combination of that advice with a tag ques…
Managing the Moral Implications of Advice in Informal Interaction
What does advice giving look like among family members? Most conversation analytic research on advice has been in institutional settings, which constrain what speakers can do. Here we analyze advice in the apparently freer environment of telephone calls between mothers and their young adult daughters. We concentrate on how the advice is received. Our analysis shows that the position of “advice recipient” is a potentially unwelcome identity to occ…
Developments in discursive psychology
Discursive psychology is the broad title for a range of research done in different disciplinary contexts – communication, language, sociology and psychology. It moves the theoretical and analytic f
You can hear a lot through the walls: Noise formulations in neighbour complaints
In this article, we explore noise formulations as they are played out in two institutional contexts: neighbour dispute mediation and neighbours' calls to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) helpline. The data were transcribed and analysed using a discursive psychological approach. Our interest was in the salience of 'noise' description in our data and its formulation as a participants' concern. We found that est…
Reference Recalibration Repairs: Adjusting the Precision of Formulations for the Task at Hand
This report examines what is involved when a speaker overtly selects one formulation over another by employing a repair operation that reformulates a reference in a way that adjusts or recalibrates it, rather than abandons the original referent altogether. Focusing primarily on references to persons, we show that, beyond the narrowing of a reference—increasing its precision—that results in an improved fit between a person reference and other comp…
Advice-implicative actions: Using interrogatives and assessments to deliver advice in mundane conversation
Work on advice has concentrated on institutional settings where there are restrictions on roles, actions and their organisation. This article focuses on advice giving in mundane settings: interactions between mothers and their young-adult daughters in a corpus of 51 telephone calls. Analysis reveals a range of designs that can be ‘advice implicative’ including advice-implicative interrogatives and advice-implicative assessments. Recipients orient…
Intervening With Conversation Analysis in Telephone Helpline Services: Strategies to Improve Effectiveness
This article overviews the way conversation analytic work on telephone helplines can make an impact in practical situations. It takes three illustrative themes in helpline research: (a) the giving, receiving, and resisting of advice; (b) the expression of strong emotion and its identification, management, and then coordination with helpline goals; and (c) how helplines’ policies and practices shape the interactions between caller and call taker. …
Subversive Completions: Turn-Taking Resources for Commandeering the Recipient’s Action in Progress
This article explores the practice of “subversive completions,” whereby one speaker produces a grammatically fitted completion of another speaker’s unfolding turn so as to subvert the action of the unfolding turn and the ongoing sequence. We show that subversive completions may derail or exaggerate the action in progress, typically for comedic or teasing effect. We also introduce three related turn-taking practices that can be used to accomplish …
Teacher Stress and the Management of Accountability
In this article we explore how teachers can draw upon the language of stress to perform strategically important and often politically sensitive social acts. Our aim will be to show that the description of teaching problems as a matter of ‘stress’ has important social and political implications for teachers. To do this we draw upon interviews with Scottish secondary school teachers; these interviews have been subjected to close textual analysis, i…
Teachers and Secondary School Bullying: A Postmodern Discourse Analysis
This paper analyses a set of accounts from within a postmodern discursive framework. Interviews were conducted with secondary school teachers and were semi-structured, focusing on school bullying. The aim of analysis was to tackle the problem of bullying at a discursive level. This marks a shift away from seeing bullying as something situated within the interpersonal relations of pupils, or explained in terms of fixed personality traits. This pap…
Rethinking attitudes and social psychology – Issues of function, order, and combination in subject-side and object-side assessments in natural settings
This paper overviews limitations in both the way attitude function has been conceptualized in social psychology, and in the empirical basis for the claims made. We suggest that the premise that attitudes are expressed for cognitive/motivational reasons is an untested artefact of the methodological procedures commonly used. In contrast, an investigation of ‘attitudes’ in the wild (assessments, evaluations, judgements) is offered as an alternative …
What do displays of empathy do in palliative care consultations
Empathy is an important way for doctors to demonstrate their understanding of patients’ subjective experiences. This research considers the role of empathy in 37 doctor-patient palliative or end-of-life care consultations recorded in a hospice. Specifically, it focuses on four contexts in which there is a disparity between patients’ displayed experience of their illness and the doctor’s biomedical, expertise-driven perspective on their illness. T…
How clients solicit medication changes in psychiatry
In psychiatry, practitioners are encouraged to adopt a patient-centred approach that emphasises shared decision-making. In this article, we investigate how clients with severe mental illnesses (e.g. schizophrenia) advocate for their treatment preferences in psychiatric consultations. The study uses Conversation Analysis to examine audio-recorded medication check appointments in a comprehensive treatment programme known as assertive community trea…
The preference for self-direction as a resource for parents’ socialisation practices
This paper focuses on practices that parents employ when they seek to forward some course of action for their child and manage children’s resistance to these attempts. Combining conversation analytic tools with discursive psychological insights, it will argue that more coercive and invasive behaviour management practices can be systematically deferred in favour or actions that give children the opportunity to develop their own solutions to proble…
Repairing Self- and Recipient Reference
There are dedicated reference terms—in English—for self- and recipient reference (I and its grammatical variants for self; you and its grammatical variants for recipient). These terms are invariant across occasions of reference and, as such, are repaired much less commonly than are references to third persons. In this article, we focus on four types of “trouble” addressed by repair to self- and recipient reference: (a) indexing the wrong referent…
Life is out there: A comment on Griffin
Open-ended interviews remain the default data generation technique for qualitative psychology and sociology. This commentary raises questions with Griffin's understanding of naturalistic materials and the emic/ etic distinction. It reiterates problems in the use of open-ended interviews, and repeats the case for more considered support for their use
Introduction to the Special Issue on Apologies in Discourse
The studies in this special issue focus not so much on apologies in public discourse, in the media, or in the world of public affairs but rather on those made in everyday social interactions, for the (usually) slight but nonetheless significant moments when someone treads on another’s toes, literally or metaphorically, and causes some (usually) minor inconvenience or harm. The frequency and significance of such moments are associated with the mor…
Size matters: Constructing accountable bodies in NSPCC helpline interaction
The focus on body size or weight has become an increasing source of concern in western society, yet few studies have looked at how people invoke body size in various settings, and the practices to which such talk might be related. Hence this study examines instances in everyday and institutional interaction in which body size is treated as a relevant concern for speakers. A discursive psychological approach is used to examine five extracts from t…
How and why children instigate talk in pediatric allergy consultations: A conversation analytic account
Involving children in their healthcare encounter is a national and international priority. While existing research has examined the ways in which children are recruited to participate in the consultation, no work has examined whether and how children instigate talk, and the extent to which their contributions are successful. This paper presents a conversation analysis of a selection of 10 out of 30 video recordings in which children aged 4-10 yea…
The Pit Alignment at Eskbank Nurseries
Eskbank Nurseries, a market garden allotment some 200 m long and 30 to 40 m wide, lies at approximately 70 m OD on a relatively level terrace overlooking the south bank of the river North Esk (fig. 1). The excavated area is centred on NT320660 and lies within the two superimposed Roman camps first noted as crop marks by St Joseph in 1965 and subsequently excavated by Maxfield in 1972. Her excavation areas I and II were sited to investigate a pit …
Teachers and Secondary School Bullying: A Postmodern Discourse Analysis
This paper analyses a set of accounts from within a postmodern discursive framework. Interviews were conducted with secondary school teachers and were semi-structured, focusing on school bullying. The aim of analysis was to tackle the problem of bullying at a discursive level. This marks a shift away from seeing bullying as something situated within the interpersonal relations of pupils, or explained in terms of fixed personality traits. This pap…
Derrida and Psychology: Deconstruction and its Ab/uses in Critical and Discursive Psychologies
This paper assesses the role of deconstruction as an important orientation for critical and discursive psychologists. In order to understand what deconstruction involves, key aspects of Jacques Derrida's work are highlighted and explained, notably `undecidables' such as the trace, the supplement, differance. The ways in which undecidability can be incorporated into, and used to develop, critical and discursive work are explored. Previous attempts…
On the Alleged Incompatibility between Relativism and Feminist Psychology
This paper addresses the claim that research which makes relativist epistemological assumptions is incompatible with the moral and political commitments of feminism. This claim is treated as resting on four related but distinct arguments, that relativist feminist researchers: (a) have no basis for choosing between different accounts; (b) have no way to encompass real, material, worldly phenomena; (c) are unable to express commitment to a politica…
Teacher Stress and the Management of Accountability
In this article we explore how teachers can draw upon the language of stress to perform strategically important and often politically sensitive social acts. Our aim will be to show that the description of teaching problems as a matter of ‘stress’ has important social and political implications for teachers. To do this we draw upon interviews with Scottish secondary school teachers; these interviews have been subjected to close textual analysis, i…
"I'm a Bit Concerned"--Early Actions and Psychological Constructions in a Child Protection Helpline
This article analyzes early actions in 50 calls reporting cases of abuse to a national child protection helpline in the UK (the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Helpline, NSPCC). It focuses on the early turns in the caller's reason for call, in particular, a class of constructions in which the caller describes himself or herself as "concerned about x" (or similar). Analysis of the corpus of calls suggests concern constru…
Contested Cities in the Modern West
Cities are close-knit communities. When rival ethnic groups develop which refuse to concede predominance, deep conflicts may occur. Some have been managed peacefully, as in Brussels and Montreal. Othe
Crying: Notes on Description, Transcription, and Interaction
In this article, I am concerned with the description and transcription of crying. I con-sider the ways crying has been dealt with in general psychological research and in interactional research. In general psychological research, crying has typically been studied by way of self-report questionnaires that treat crying as a unitary and self-evi-dent category. Although interaction work is more focused on the interactional role of crying, it is uncom…
Qualitative interviews in psychology: Problems and possibilities
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in \nQualitative Research in Psychology on 21/07/2008, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/1478088705qp045oa
You can hear a lot through the walls: Noise formulations in neighbour complaints
In this article, we explore noise formulations as they are played out in two institutional contexts: neighbour dispute mediation and neighbours' calls to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) helpline. The data were transcribed and analysed using a discursive psychological approach. Our interest was in the salience of 'noise' description in our data and its formulation as a participants' concern. We found that est…
Size matters: Constructing accountable bodies in NSPCC helpline interaction
The focus on body size or weight has become an increasing source of concern in western society, yet few studies have looked at how people invoke body size in various settings, and the practices to which such talk might be related. Hence this study examines instances in everyday and institutional interaction in which body size is treated as a relevant concern for speakers. A discursive psychological approach is used to examine five extracts from t…
Developments in discursive psychology
Discursive psychology is the broad title for a range of research done in different disciplinary contexts – communication, language, sociology and psychology. It moves the theoretical and analytic f
Getting Closer at a Distance: Theory and the Contingencies of Practice
In general it is very hard to document clear applications of the content of psychological theory. While deconstruction reveals the binary organization and contingency of accounts of theory and application in psychology, nevertheless there is a desire to be useful to the organizations that we engage with as researchers. This dilemma is illustrated through a personal narrative of my involvement as a researcher with a UK charitable organization—the …
The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy
This book examines political rhetoric at the grassroots level. Starting from a position that Democracy depends on details, or else remains a formal abstraction, editors Karen Tracy, James P. McDaniel, and Bruce Gronbeck argue that a true understanding of the democratic body politic becomes most intelligible through a close study of its parts. An academic preference for grandiose, abstract political theory, the editors contend, undervalues and mas…
Crying Receipts: Time, Empathy, and Institutional Practice
In this article, we focus on the activities done by the recipients of crying. In the analysis, we work with a corpus of calls from a child protection helpline in which the caller shows features of crying (14 calls, or about 10% of the total). Our focus is on two kinds of crying receipts made by child protection officers (CPOs) that are rare in noncrying calls but recurrent in crying calls: take-your-times (TYTs) and empathic receipts (ERs). TYTs …
Life is out there: A comment on Griffin
Open-ended interviews remain the default data generation technique for qualitative psychology and sociology. This commentary raises questions with Griffin's understanding of naturalistic materials and the emic/ etic distinction. It reiterates problems in the use of open-ended interviews, and repeats the case for more considered support for their use
Interrogating Tears
Psychology, sociology and interaction: Disciplinary allegiance or analytic quality? — a response to Housley and Fitzgerald
Psychology, sociology and interaction: disciplinary allegiance or analytic quality? - a response to Housley and Fitzgerald
Advice-implicative Interrogatives: Building “Client-centered” Support in a Children’s Helpline
Interactional research on advice giving has described advice as normative and asymmetric. In this paper we examine how these dimensions of advice are softened by counselors on a helpline for children and young people through the use of questions. Through what we term “advice-implicative interrogatives,” counselors ask clients about the relevance or applicability of a possible future course of action. The allusion to this possible action by the co…
Putting aspiration into words: Laugh particles', managing descriptive trouble and modulating action
Threats: Power, family mealtimes, and social influence
One of the most basic topics in social psychology is the way one agent influences the behaviour of another. This paper will focus on threats, which are an intensified form of attempted behavioural influence. Despite the centrality to the project of social psychology, little attention has been paid to threats. This paper will start to rectify this oversight. It reviews early examples of the way social psychology handles threats and highlights key …
Designing the Recipient: Managing Advice Resistance in Institutional Settings
In this paper we consider a collection of conversational practices that arise when a professional is faced with extended resistance to their offered advice. Our data is comprised of telephone calls to a UK child protection helpline. The practices we identify occur repeatedly across our corpus of advice resistance sequences and involve (1) the repackaging of resisted advice in more idiomatic form; (2) the combination of that advice with a tag ques…
Reference Recalibration Repairs: Adjusting the Precision of Formulations for the Task at Hand
This report examines what is involved when a speaker overtly selects one formulation over another by employing a repair operation that reformulates a reference in a way that adjusts or recalibrates it, rather than abandons the original referent altogether. Focusing primarily on references to persons, we show that, beyond the narrowing of a reference—increasing its precision—that results in an improved fit between a person reference and other comp…
Repairing Self- and Recipient Reference
There are dedicated reference terms—in English—for self- and recipient reference (I and its grammatical variants for self; you and its grammatical variants for recipient). These terms are invariant across occasions of reference and, as such, are repaired much less commonly than are references to third persons. In this article, we focus on four types of “trouble” addressed by repair to self- and recipient reference: (a) indexing the wrong referent…
Managing the Moral Implications of Advice in Informal Interaction
What does advice giving look like among family members? Most conversation analytic research on advice has been in institutional settings, which constrain what speakers can do. Here we analyze advice in the apparently freer environment of telephone calls between mothers and their young adult daughters. We concentrate on how the advice is received. Our analysis shows that the position of “advice recipient” is a potentially unwelcome identity to occ…
Psychology (34 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (32 works) · Social Psychology (22 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (17 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Linguistics (15 works)