Volume 34, Issue 4

Arrangement making is understood to be a “closing-relevant action” (Schegloff and Sacks 1973), but little attention has been given to how people arrive at mutually acceptable plans for the future. Telephone conversations between clients and staff of community and home care (CHC) services were studied to identify how arrangements for future services were made. A recurrent sequence was observed in which clients were informed of future arrangement and were prompted to reply with “response solicitation” (Jefferson 1981). Response solicitations were observed at two points: either tagged to the end of an informing, or following a recipient's response to the informing. We show how response solicitations are routinely used in instances where recipients have some discretion in relation to the arrangement under discussion. They are a means by which an informing party can display to their interlocutor that they, as recipient, have some discretion to exercise in the matter. These findings are discussed with reference to prior research on arrangement making in other settings, which suggests the general nature of this practice.

The public debate on the highly contested issue of climate change is characterized by a multitude of voices as well as position taking by the social actors involved. Studies involving the climate issue have emanated from many fields, notably media science. To date, few linguistics-based studies on climate-related newspaper texts have been undertaken. This paper presents a theoretical framework – the Scandinavian theory of linguistic polyphony – which we argue is particularly well suited to analyze contested issues. To demonstrate how the theory can be operationalized, we present a case study involving four texts from The Guardian . Linguistic polyphony rests on the assumption that all texts are multivoiced. The case study focuses on the interaction of the journalist’s voice and external voices, and considers the extent to which implicit (hidden) voices are present in the analyzed texts. The analysis reveals a complex interaction of different voices, integrated in the journalist’s own argumentation and positioning.

Drawing on a video ethnography at a pediatric unit at a Swedish children's hospital, this study presents analyses of “How are you” (HAY) routines and problem elicitations. Such conversational openings are ambiguous in that they can either be read as casual greetings, or as genuine questions about the patient's health. Moreover, there is a double ambiguity in that the doctor, at times, employs third person pronouns (e.g., “How is Elinor?”) or second person plurals (e.g., “So how are you doing?”) which means that there is a second type of ambiguity, an ambiguity around who is addressed: the child and/or the parent(s). This study also shows that there is a great variation in conversational openings according to the age of the child in that the odds that the doctor might invite the child as a conversational partner increase with the child's age. The preschool children almost never respond to the doctor's HAY, and it does not matter if it is an ambiguous or unambiguous question. If they answer, it is in the form of a minimal uptake or after a whole series of questions. In contrast, the schoolchildren always respond to the doctors' HAY and offer quite elaborate and detailed responses.

This paper applies practically oriented discourse analysis to focus group interviews using conversation analytic principles to show how interactional qualities demonstrably different to analysts are also treated as such by participants. We take a grounded practical theory perspective to claim that the empirical and practical distinction is an exploitable resource for participants, with important implications for the goals of research interviewing, interviewee participation in focus groups, and analyses thereof. We identify participant techniques for doing and attending to conversational and institutional interaction formats, including turn-taking organization, embodied acts, addressivity, and emotion displays, and how those techniques allow participants to co-construct emergent stances alongside answering questions.

Closing arguments in Dutch trials are representative of the adversarial part of the Dutch criminal justice system. The prosecutor and the defense lawyer design these arguments to persuade the judges of their opposing versions of the criminal events. Both parties draw on written documents such as the police record and on the interrogations during trial to present their perspectives on the case. References to these prior statements often take the form of reported speech. Prosecutors and defense lawyers subtly frame and change these statements. In this article I draw on insights from conversation analysis and discursive psychology to explore the way direct quotations are used to present a point of view. Most importantly, I will demonstrate how direct quotations are framed and embedded in a three-step rhetorical structure by prosecutors and defense lawyers.

Speakers use intonation in order to group spoken sentences together into larger units. One such grouping is often referred to as “paragraph intonation.” One of its principal characteristics is that the beginning of a new speech paragraph is marked with a high pitch level at the beginning of the first spoken sentence. This phenomenon is called “pitch reset.” The present article discusses the role of the pitch reset in Finnish data coming from two situations where conference-like monologous presentations are being interpreted by professional print interpreters. “Print interpreting” is a mode of communication where the speech is being simultaneously transferred into written form so that deaf and hard-of-hearing people can have access to it. The study shows, on the one hand, that the pitch reset phenomenon can be found also in Finnish data. On the other hand, the results show that the pitch reset constitutes a prosodic sign that almost always leads to a paragraph division in the written target text. This implies that the print interpreters treat speech paragraphs as topical units, and that the pitch reset plays an important role in the structuring of discourse. The study is mainly based on Wichmann's (2000) approach, which constitutes an interface between discourse analysis and intonation studies.