The chair’s use of address terms in workplace meetings
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Innhwa Park
Innhwa Park obtained her PhD in Applied Linguistics from UCLA and is currently Associate Professor of TESOL in the Department of Languages and Cultures at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. She uses conversation analysis to examine language and social interaction, together with its applications in the fields of applied linguistics and education. Her research interests include meeting interaction, educational discourse, and second language use. She has recently published her research in
Discourse Studies ,Journal of Pragmatics , andLanguage and Communication .
Abstract
This conversation analytic study investigates the chair’s practice of addressing participants in multiparty meeting interaction. Paying close attention to the participants’ verbal and embodied actions, I examine 12 h and 30 min of video-recorded faculty meetings in a U.S. school district. I focus on how the meeting chair uses terms of address (e.g., first name, occupational title) during the meetings. The analyses show that when the chair uses an address term, she not only establishes a recipient, but also invokes and makes her institutional identity relevant as a meeting chair. In particular, the chair uses an address term while carrying out actions such as 1) opening or closing a topic, 2) managing the floor for different speakers, and 3) conducting relational work (e.g., welcoming a new member). The findings show that the address terms facilitate the chair’s actions that promote progressivity – between and within (a) topic(s) in the meeting agenda – and foster social solidarity by displaying affect toward individual participants. This study contributes to research on address terms and their functions, as well as to meeting interaction, particularly with regard to chairing practices.
About the author
Innhwa Park obtained her PhD in Applied Linguistics from UCLA and is currently Associate Professor of TESOL in the Department of Languages and Cultures at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. She uses conversation analysis to examine language and social interaction, together with its applications in the fields of applied linguistics and education. Her research interests include meeting interaction, educational discourse, and second language use. She has recently published her research in Discourse Studies, Journal of Pragmatics, and Language and Communication.
Acknowledgments
I am extremely grateful to the study participants. I also would like to thank the journal editor and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the previous draft.
Appendix: Transcription conventions
The transcription conventions used in this article are adapted from Gail Jefferson’s work (see Jefferson 1984, ix–xvi). Embodied actions are transcribed according to the conventions developed by Mondada (2019).
| bold | target address term(s) |
| [word | overlapping speech or speech/action |
| (word) | transcriptionist doubt |
| ((word)) | non-speech action |
| :: | prolongation of the preceding sound |
| = | latching (no break/gap) |
| . | falling intonation |
| ? | rising intonation |
| , | continuing intonation |
| (#.#) | a pause of the length in parentheses |
| (.) | a micro-pause (less than 0.2 s) |
| °word° | speech that is quieter than the surrounding speech |
| >word< | speech that is quicker than the surrounding speech |
| <word> | speech that is slower than the surrounding speech |
| word | speech that is stressed |
| wo- | abrupt cut-off |
| .hh | audible in-breath |
| hh | audible out-breath/laughter |
| >> | marks action that begins before the excerpt’s beginning |
| --->> | marks action described continues after the excerpt’s end. |
| --- | marks that action is maintained |
| *---> | marks that action continues across subsequent lines |
| -->* | marks the completion of action begun on prior line |
| (until the same symbol (*) is reached) |
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Enacted category claims and tacit orientations to older identities in the telling of a sexually-explicit anecdote
- Teacher talk in primary school science: a focus on the exploration phase
- The chair’s use of address terms in workplace meetings
- Development of a translation device for axiological-semantic density in political news articles: wording and charging
- Engagement and constructiveness in online news comments in English and Russian
- Multiactivity in adult-child interaction: accounts resolving conflicting courses of action in request sequences
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Enacted category claims and tacit orientations to older identities in the telling of a sexually-explicit anecdote
- Teacher talk in primary school science: a focus on the exploration phase
- The chair’s use of address terms in workplace meetings
- Development of a translation device for axiological-semantic density in political news articles: wording and charging
- Engagement and constructiveness in online news comments in English and Russian
- Multiactivity in adult-child interaction: accounts resolving conflicting courses of action in request sequences
