Volume 27, Issue 3

Meetings are a place where shared understanding is paramount and must be done in an economical manner in line with the goals of most institutional interactions. Drawing from classic work in conversation analysis, this paper reports on an examination of a corpus of eight hours of video-recorded meeting interactions from a medical school. Mostly, meetings involve knowledge sharing and an orientation to decision making. Common agreement is highly important where elaborate effort may be invested by the chair to get agreement to what the outcomes were. In the data studied there are marked orientations toward common agreement. A particular subclass of formulations is one device employed to these ends by the chair—candidate preclosings (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970). This paper focuses on these particular formulations—types of repeat utterances that are designed to be recognized as linked to previous discussions but completely gloss the preceding talk. The analysis focuses on the sequential environment embodied by this glossing practice, demonstrating the basic format of production and its interactional consequences. In conclusion it is argued that these formulations are used by chairpersons to close the business-at-hand and facilitate the move on to the next topic. They also help to establish, record, and preserve shared understanding incrementally in a time-limited task-focused environment.

The current study measures laypeople's uses of um , uh , you know , and like , including folk notions of meanings, self-assessments of use, history of discussing use, and attitudes toward the words. Unlike the prevalent idea in the popular press that these discourse markers are interchangeable speaker production flaws, respondents in this study demonstrated that people do possess folk notions of meanings and uses that dramatically distinguish markers from each other. Um and uh were thought to indicate production trouble, you know was thought to be used in checking for understanding and connecting with listeners, and like defied definition. The folk notions of um , uh , and you know accord well with researchers' ideas about the meanings of these words. The use of like may be too subtle for laypeople to articulate. Most researchers' views of like involve some kind of discrepancy between what's said and what's meant. Even if they cannot state a meaning, people do treat the different markers differently.

In this paper we describe and analyze the development of a psychotherapist's reformulations of one client's initial agentless problem narration. The concept ‘agentless’ refers to the use of impersonal constructions—passive voice, nominalizations, zero-person construction, and iterative verbs— which all imply having no control over the described actions. ‘Agentless talk’ is viewed in this paper as a strategy to escape full personal responsibility and thus as a strategy to save one's moral face (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987; Goffman 1955). In this case, the therapist approached the dilemma between protecting the client's face and fulfilling the institutional goal of helping the client by varying the footing in his reformulations of problem descriptions. Delicateness in the therapist's reformulations, as found in the data, can thus be seen as more than conversational etiquette; it is a necessary therapeutic tool. To account for the changes taking place in the therapeutic process, no reference to models of inner psychological structures or organization was needed, which poses a question of the quality of ‘therapeutic change’.

With an emphasis on the linguistic experiences of rape victims in the legal system, this paper is a consideration of recent innovations in semantic analysis that offer important methodological tools for the analysis of legal encounters. The concepts to be discussed include metaphor and frames, within the context of how questions are used in legal settings. Metaphor captures cultural stereotypes, encoded in a speaker's choice of descriptors, and is a powerful tool in the investigation of speaker attitudes. Frames are culturally accepted information sets surrounding every lexical term. The appropriateness of the chosen frame is also of key importance to ‘smuggling information’, a term used when (negative) information is covertly inserted into the witness's testimony. We look at how such linguistic manipulation can weaken the witness's account by suggesting that she is to blame and/or is lying, and perhaps, in part, explain why rape victims tend not to be believed in court.

This paper describes the transcription process and the development of transcription skills in a research project using recorded spoken interaction as its main data. The spoken data was transcribed using intonation units, and the paper traces the development of the first author's skills in identifying such intonation units. Intertranscriber checks of transcription, involving three researchers, were used to highlight ways in which the identification of intonation units could be improved. Subsequent re-transcription of the data highlighted stretches of talk that included many hesitations, false starts, and speech used to regulate ongoing spoken interaction. These features were linked to low levels of intertranscriber agreement. It is argued that the existing literature on intonation units does not address how to best deal with this quality of spontaneous spoken interaction. The paper concludes with an agenda that may be used to improve the quality of transcription in similar research projects, and to develop the transcription skills of the researchers that are responsible for transcription.