Volume 35, Issue 6 - Special Issue: Represented talk across activities and languages, Guest Editors: Matthew T. Prior and Gabriele Kasper

This paper investigates how speakers who are about to produce, or in the midst of producing, reported speech and thought (RT), temporarily abandon the production of RT to include other material. Using Conversation Analysis, we identify three positions in which RT is abandoned temporarily and describe the resources employed by speakers to make recognizable to the recipient that what is about to be produced is something other than the projected RT. We then demonstrate how such inclusions are done to recalibrate the larger context of RT, to ensure that the recipient of RT is able to interpret the speaker’s underlying interactional project. We conclude by discussing how the inclusions we have identified and described relate to other practices that can be employed by speakers to adjust the design of talk in ways that best scaffold the interactional purpose of that talk.

This paper uses conversation analysis to examine when Vietnamese speakers explicitly mark the source of represented talk or thought (RT) and when they may omit the RTs source in narratives in dyadic and multiparty family conversations. In Vietnamese, a pro-drop, non-inflectional language, RTs may be introduced by a verb of speaking and its subject, a verb of speaking without the subject, or no verb of speaking and no subject. The analysis focuses on how these three choices are employed in the sequential organization of narrative series, narrative participation frameworks, and narrative dramatization. The findings contribute to current understandings about source marking through linguistic devices as an interactional practice in conversations in addition to other resources such as voicing and embodied actions.

Drawing from a corpus of telephone and face-to-face Korean conversational data, this study investigates cases of represented talk (RT) that routinely occur in second position as a response to a prior turn that the speaker finds problematic and in need of repair. The speaker finds problems in the way the recipient interprets or represents certain events, situations, or the interlocutors themselves, and the speaker seeks to rectify these (mis)conceptions and (mis)representations through RT. The speaker reports a former locution, which demonstrates the recipient’s understanding to be incorrect or insufficient. At such delicate interactional junctures, the speaker begins a quote as direct reported speech (DRS) and closes the same quote as indirect reported speech (IRS). The unique design of combining DRS and IRS allows Korean speakers to negotiate what to show (DRS) and what to tell (IRS) according to the importance and relevance of the current interaction and current recipients. The study further discusses why this particular design of RT is readily observed in Korean conversation and how it fits within its interactional task of reconstructing matters according to the speaker’s perspective.

This paper presents a study of participants’ use of direct reported speech (DRS) in storytelling during dinner table conversation in French. Focusing on reported dialogues, the analysis corroborates earlier conversation analytic findings showing that speakers regularly use linguistic, prosodic and paralinguistic resources to stage the characters whose speech is being reported; thereby speakers display their stance on behalf of those characters and their conduct. Additionally, the analysis documents that speakers use DRS within reported dialogues as a powerful means for depicting their own adequate conduct in the face of a purportedly “deviant” conduct of a third party. In the specific context of our data, in which an au-pair interacts with her host family, such direct reported dialogues are used both by the mother and the au pair as a means to enact shared expectations about the appropriateness of a caregiver’s conduct in the face of the “deviant” conduct of a child. In light of these findings, the representation of past dialogues by means of DRS appears as a practical resource by means of which participants enact identities such as mother and caregiver and thereby reflexively construct and negotiate the related epistemic entitlements.

This paper examines a topic that has not gained much analytic attention in research on represented talk: how recipients respond, and how their responses shape the ongoing interaction. Using conversation analysis, we investigate responses to represented talk in complaint stories told in autobiographical interviews. Supportive recipient actions are the most common, but on occasion the recipient other-initiates repair on the quoted talk. These other-initiations of repair are done as candidate understandings, formatted as positive declarative questions, and regularly locate the specific trouble source in the represented talk through prosodic emphasis. In some instances, they do no more than seeking confirmation of the story recipient’s uncertain understanding, but often, the other-initiations of repair are produced or understood as questioning the acceptability of the represented talk. For the most part tellers reaffirm, defend, and reinforce their claim that the talk happened as previously portrayed. By rejecting the recipient’s challenge, the tellers show that they expect a more empathetic stance from the story recipient. Finally, we consider what the participants may accomplish with the observed practices in the autobiographic interview as an institutional activity.

This discourse analytic study investigates the strategic use of represented talk and thought in Hawai‘i stand-up comedy performances. Utilizing the methods and findings of membership categorization, and stylization, I analyze how Local comedians make discursive contrasts by deploying Pidgin (Hawai‘i Creole) to voice Locals and by deploying “Haole” ( ‘white’ ) or racially parodied, mock English to voice non-Locals. Findings show that Local comedians and their audiences collaboratively manipulate and display their understanding of these culturally specific indexicals to co-create and localize humor. Analysis further shows that Local humor is a highly political act that is selectively designed for a particular sociolinguistic and cultural audience and sociopolitical context.