Anssi Peräkylä

Marja-Leena Sorjonen

Emotion in Interaction offers a collection of original studies that explore emotion in naturally occurring spoken interaction.

Emotion in Interaction

Ritva Laury

Jan Lindström

Intersubjectivity is a precondition for human life – for social organization as well as for individual development and well-being. Through empirical examination of social interactions in everyday and institutional settings, the authors in this volume explore the achievement and maintenance of intersubjectivity. The contributions show how language codes and creates intersubjectivity, how interactants move towards shared understanding in interaction, how intersubjectivity is central to phenomena and experiences often considered merely individual, and how intersubjectivity evolves through learning. While the core methodology of the studies is Conversation Analysis, the volume highlights the advantages of using several methods to tackle intersubjectivity.

Studies in language and social interaction

Intersubjectivity in Action

John Heritage

The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable growth of interest in what are variously termed discourse markers or discourse particles. The greatest area of growth has centered on particles that occur in sentence-initial or turn-initial position, and this interest intersects with a long-standing focus in Conversation Analysis on turn-taking and turn-construction. This volume brings together conversation analytic studies of turn-initial particles in interactions in fourteen languages geographically widely distributed (Europe, America, Asia and Australia). The contributions show the significance of turn-initial particles in three key areas of turn and sequence organization: (i) the management of departures from expected next actions, (ii) the projection of the speaker's epistemic stance, and (iii) the management of overall activities implemented across sequences. Taken together the papers demonstrate the crucial importance of the positioning of particles within turns and sequences for the projection and management of social actions, and for relationships between speakers.

Turn-initial particles across languages

Between Turn and Sequence

Arnulf Deppermann

Emma Betz

Lorenza Mondada

OKAY has been termed ‘a spectacular expression’ and ‘America’s greatest invention.’ This volume offers an in-depth empirical study of the uses that have resulted from its global spread. Focusing on actions and interactional practices, it investigates OKAY in a variety of settings in 13 languages. The collected work showcases the importance of a holistic analysis: prosodic realization and the placement of OKAY in its larger sequential and multimodal context emerge as constitutive for distinct uses in individual languages. An inductive approach makes it possible to identify practices not previously documented, for example OKAY used for ‘qualified acceptance’ or as a ‘continuer’, and to document a core of recurrent, similar uses across languages. This work also outlines new research directions for comparative analysis by offering first insights into the diachronic development of OKAY’s uses and the relationship of OKAY to other particles in specific languages.

Toward a comparative approach to its use in talk-in-interaction

OKAY across Languages

This book concerns particles that are used as responses in conversations. It provides much needed methodological tools for analyzing the use of response particles in languages, while its particular focus is Finnish. The book focuses on two Finnish particles, nii(n) and joo, which in some of their central usages have "yeah" and "yes" as their closest English counterparts. The two particles are discussed in a number of sequential and activity contexts, including their use as answers to yes-no questions and directives, as responses to a stance-taking by the prior speaker, and in the midst of an extended telling by the co-participant. It will be shown how there is a fine-grained division of labor between the particles, having to do with the epistemic and affective character of the talk and the continuation vs. closure-relevance of the activity. The book connects the interactional usages of the particles with what is known about their historical origins, and in this fashion it is also of interest to linguists doing research on processes of grammaticalization and lexicalization.

Marja-Leena Sorjonen

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