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- Volume 10, Issue 3, 2019
Pragmatics and Society - Volume 10, Issue 3, 2019
Volume 10, Issue 3, 2019
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Categorization in multilingual storytelling
Author(s): Matthew T. Prior and Steven Talmypp.: 329–336 (8)More Less
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Multimodal membership categorization and storytelling in a guided tour
Author(s): Matthew Burdelski and Chie Fukudapp.: 337–358 (22)More LessAbstractThis study examines multimodal membership categorization and storytelling in Japanese at an Okinawan culture center in Hawai‘i. Based on audiovisual recordings of a guided tour (112 minutes), it examines ways the guide and visitors use explicit and implicit means in constructing the membership category “immigrants of Okinawan descent in Hawai‘i” and terms of this category, such as “women of the first generation” and “children of the second generation.” The analysis focuses on visitors’ contributions to membership categorization and storytelling through posing questions, relating personal experience, and displaying stance in touching and handling objects. The findings show how practices of membership categorization and storytelling are co-constructed, and how participants draw upon multimodal resources including talk, the body, and objects in practices of membership categorization in situated interaction.
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Membership categorization and storytelling
Author(s): Dennis Day and Susanne Kjærbeckpp.: 359–374 (16)More LessAbstractIn this paper, we demonstrate how the collaborative and sequential unfolding of a story ties into the constitution of a membership categorization device which we have glossed as ‘us and them’. The data come from a focus group activity where first and second generation immigrants to Denmark have been asked to discuss their situation in Denmark. Using Ethnomethodological Conversation and Membership Categorization Analysis, we present one story which involves a story-teller and his family and an elderly Danish couple living in the same block of flats. In the telling of the story, co-participants align and affiliate, and disalign and disaffiliate, at sequentially relevant junctions. We will argue that not only do such phenomena indicate listenership and possible agreement to the moral of the story in its telling, but also to the morally implicative categorical work involved in the story’s telling.
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Place and membership categorization in a Hawaiian language radio show
Author(s): Toshiaki Furukawapp.: 375–398 (24)More LessAbstractRecent articles by prominent scholars of discourse and interaction have renewed the debate over the relationship between membership categorization analysis (MCA) and conversation analysis (CA). Many consider CA and MCA as mutually informing, and that is the position I take in this paper. MCA has been conducted mainly with monolingual data, but in this study I examine Hawaiian language media talk by multilingual speakers. Place formulation is often intertwined with membership categorization, and I investigate how place is used to categorize people. Taking an MCA approach, I analyze the stories co-constructed by a radio show’s host, guest, and callers, all of whom speak predominantly in Hawaiian but occasionally switch into English. The goals of the paper are twofold: (1) to illustrate the procedural consequentiality of initiating, maintaining, and terminating an “ultra-rich topic” (Sacks 1992: 75), that is, place; and (2) to show how place is used to do categorial work.
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Constructing desirable brides
Author(s): Priti Sandhupp.: 399–422 (24)More LessAbstractThis paper utilizes Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) and Conversation Analysis (CA) to examine the entwined relationships among interaction, storytelling, and membership categorization. While demonstrating how a storytelling event in a qualitative research interview and the categories constructed within it are skillfully wielded by the teller to meet interactional exigencies, this single case analysis shows how members do culture-in-action (Hester and Eglin 1997) related to arranged marriage negotiations in the Indian context. A close examination of the emic categories produced in the interview reveals how the interactants collaboratively co-construct the social structures surrounding arranged marriages and the notion of ‘desirable’ brides. Illustrating the salience of medium-of-education (MoE) in these emic constructions of desirable brides, the analysis reveals the marginalization of Hindi-medium-educated (HME) women in the arranged marriage sphere.
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“I am an adult now”
Author(s): Matthew T. Priorpp.: 423–451 (29)More LessAbstractThis narrative-based study employs membership categorization analysis to address the following question: How does a victim of abuse formulate and manage various categories and related descriptive details to story past trauma in ways that bring about new endings or insights in the present? Drawing on data taken from a larger research project on immigrant identity, the analysis centers on a Cambodian-Vietnamese man’s narrative of childhood abuse and adulthood confrontation. It shows how the teller, by recalibrating person (e.g., ‘father-son’, ‘victim-abuser’), age (e.g., ‘young-old’), place (e.g., ‘North America-Vietnam’), and other categorial resources, re-stories people and events and their psycho-social and moral inferences and outcomes. By tracing how this narrative teller reconstitutes himself from ‘victim’ to ‘hero’, this study offers insight into how a local interactional event (e.g., a research interview) may be transformed into a therapeutic exchange. Insights for therapeutic (re)storying, narrative research, and second language (L2) research are discussed.
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The importance of borrowing across disciplines
Author(s): Roger W. Shuypp.: 452–469 (18)More LessAbstractOver the years, linguists have borrowed from other allied fields, including speech events from cultural anthropology, schema theory from psychology, speech acts from philosophy, and conversational strategies from rhetoric. In analyzing large and continuous chunks of conversational data, the first and most important of these borrowings is the speech event, for it sets the stage in which the other language elements are embedded and provides a useful sequence for analyzing everything else, including the conventional linguistic tools of the grammar and lexicon.
The present paper represents the optimal sequence of analysis as an Inverted Pyramid, starting with the speech event and then moving down the order to schemas, agendas, speech acts, conversational strategies, and finally to the grammar and lexicon that are embedded within each other. Two prominent criminal law investigations are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Inverted Pyramid approach for understanding this evidence.
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Cornelia Ilie and Neal R. Norrick (eds.), Pragmatics and its Interfaces
Author(s): Belinda Crawford Camiciottolipp.: 486–491 (6)More LessThis article reviews Pragmatics and its Interfaces
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