Volume 32, Issue 4 - Stance, Affect, and Intersubjectivity in Interaction: Sequential and Dialogic Perspectives

This paper explores the domain of affect and emotion as they arise in interaction, from the perspective of stance, sequence, and dialogicality. We seek to frame the issue of affective display as part of a larger concern with how co-participants in interaction construct the socioaffective and sociocognitive relations that organize their intersubjectivity, via collaborative practices of stance taking. We draw mainly on two research traditions, conversation analysis and the dialogic turn in sociocultural linguistics, focusing on their treatments of affect, emotion, and intersubjectivity. Key ideas from the respective approaches are the role of sequence in shaping the realization and interpretation of stance, and dialogic resonance as a process of alignment between subsequent stances. We present a view of stance as a triplex act, achieved through overt communicative means, in which participants evaluate something, and thereby position themselves, and thereby align with co-participants in interaction. Alignment is argued to operate as a continuous variable rather than a dichotomy, as participants subtly monitor and modulate the “stance differential” between them, while often maintaining a strategic ambiguity. Finally, we comment on the rich contributions to the study of stance, affect, and intersubjectivity in interaction made by the collaborators in this special issue.

This paper explores the conversation-analytic notion of preference as it applies to the set of affect displays made relevant by the unequivocal rejection of a request or proposal in everyday English conversation. Findings so far indicate that different affect displays on rejection finalizers are realized inter alia via different prosodic and paralinguistic vocal features, and that following rejection, speakers have a choice among a set of relevant affects as to which one they make a display of. Following up on Sacks's remark that when affects “go in the same place” it is meaningful to ask what their relationship is to one another preferentially , the paper investigates rejection contexts in which a speaker initially displays one affect, although another one is arguably available and indeed later comes to be displayed in a more covert fashion. It argues that displays of irritation are dispreferred over displays of disappointment in responses to rejection and are also dispreferred over the withholding of a negative affect display altogether.

This paper argues that stanced digressions, or inserts, produced by speakers in the midst of extended (multi-unit) turns, are not primarily designed to get a response from the recipient(s). The paper shows that speakers employ various linguistic, prosodic, and embodied resources that make the digression recognizable as such, i.e., of subsidiary status in the talk, and therefore as not in need of a response. A lack of response is treated as unproblematic by both the digression speaker and by the recipients, as both parties primarily orient to the turn as a multi-unit turn still in progress. The paper first examines audio data and keeps the linguistic format relatively constant, by focusing on inserts prefaced by I guess and consisting of explicitly evaluative or epistemic material. It subsequently opens up the analysis to video data and also to other kinds of stanced digressions.

This paper concerns a particular grammatical construction, extraposition, and its use for assessments at points of transition between activities and topics by speakers of Finnish in ordinary conversation. A basic assumption taken here is that “recurrent clausal constructions of a language are social action formats for that language” (Thompson 2006), and that grammatical constructions such as clause types are learned and therefore routinized responses to certain types of interactional contingencies, and, at the same time, emergent from the current local context (Hopper 1987; Helasvuo 2001). The paper combines the two central perspectives developed in this issue, sequential design and dialogicality, with the study of grammar-in-interaction. It shows that the grammatical form of the Finnish extraposition construction emerges from its use by speakers for the creation of intersubjectivity through reproduction of prior talk and for the projection of stance taking to follow.

This study investigates resonance (Du Bois 2003, 2007) in second stories as a method of anchoring the second telling to the previous telling and as a resource of stance taking. It takes a closer look at the exact ways in which second stories are structurally shaped through initial (first) tellings by examining the resonating elements (of the first stories) that the second tellers recycle in their second stories, i.e., resonating lexico-syntactic, structural, prosodic, and semantic elements. Tellers legitimize, firstly, their tellings by tying back to the previous story and, secondly, their stance by positioning themselves in view of the stance displayed in the previous story. The resonating second story as such can manifest the recipients' interpretation of what they make of the first story and provide a new angle on the first telling, either reinforcing, redefining, or rejecting the gist of the initial telling. Resonance in second stories manifests the fundamental social cohesion that conversationalists uphold, among other ways, by tying back to each other's words.

This paper investigates (Finnish) classroom interaction and explores the displays of stance and the rules of emotion in this institutional multi-party setting. The main focus of the analysis is on teacher's imitation of students' talk. The starting point is to analyze stance as a situated practice in the sequential organization of interaction, in particular in sequences that contain criticism. Although it is quite common for teachers and students to criticize each other's activities during (pedagogic) interaction, criticism is treated more or less as a delicate issue. Participants deal with the emotional elements of criticism by using, for example, various prosodic practices, including prosodic imitation. Prosodic imitation is a frequent practice among students, but the teachers imitate students' turns quite rarely and only in specific sequential environments. Teachers repeat and imitate the prosodically marked students' answers that occur subsequent to teachers' critical comments on students' behavior, and the students' self-selected turns that mimic teacher-talk and convey implicit criticism in their prosody. With the help of these prosodic practices the participants are able to receive and deal with a critical stance without jeopardizing the norms, frameworks, and “rules of emotion” valid in this specific institutional setting.