Pragmatics and Society - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2015

This paper reports on a micro-ethnography of social interaction in an urban plaza in Colombia, focusing on the plaza’s role as an arena for the acquisition of interaction skills. We investigate how children of different ages initiate and sustain interactions with same-age and older peers and the efforts they make to be recognized and ‘visible’. We interpret our data in light of three theories of socialization: Corsaro’s (1997) conception of childhood as “interpretive reproduction”, Vygotsky’s (1978) model of the “zone of proximal development”, and the “structural approach” to social cognition and development (Damon 1977; Younnis 1984). While a social form like the plaza, which is collectively enacted by members of all age groups of the local community, provides children with an extraordinarily rich array of opportunities to develop social communication skills by interacting with older and younger peers, our analysis also demonstrates that children, as they are building zones of proximal development for themselves, play a central role in assembling, integrating, and sustaining the neighborhood as a face-to-face society. In this fashion, the paper illustrates how the micro-analysis of social interaction can contribute to the analysis of social ‘macro’ forms.

This investigation examines ‘teasing’ of non-combatant children by US military service personnel in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. The majority of existent investigations of teasing and related practices place significant conceptual importance on the intentions of the teaser – such that a target can understand that the tease is not true. However, in data examined here it appears that targets (children) do not understand the language in which the teasing is undertaken. Drawing from publicly available video footage posted on the video sharing website Liveleak, we provide an ethnomethodological (e.g., Garfinkel 1967) and conversation analytic informed (e.g., Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974; Schegloff 2007) examination of how persons initiating teasing (soldiers) strategically exploit asymmetries in the sequential and preferential organization of interactions when tease recipients (children) do not have sufficient English skills to redress (or understand) the negative assessments being made of them. Three types of candidate teasing practices are identified: soldier initiated negative other-assessments; target parroting negative other-assessments; and offer-withdrawal games. Analysis examines how such interactions effectively fail as teases and explores how children can resist soldiers’ pursuit of degrading responses.

This paper presents a single case-study of a longitudinal shared reading programme that took place in Dutch kindergartens with first language speakers of 4 to 6 years old. As will be shown, children participate both in a traditional instructional structure and in a participation framework characterised by a more or less free discussion. These structures establish an optimal learning environment both together and in relationship to each other. Our case study demonstrates how the teacher and the pupils participate in these successive frameworks and how this supports the construction of conceptual knowledge. It will be shown that participation during shared reading of picture books at kindergarten is directly linked to interactional learning opportunities.

Drawing on a corpus of telephone conversational data, this study examines a collection of self-deprecations in Korean conversations. Detailed analyses of self-deprecations in larger fragments than minimal adjacency pair sequences illustrate the multifaceted nature of self-deprecation. Self-deprecation entails not only deprecatory assessments, but complaint or trouble talk about one’s shortcomings, reenactment of experiences or moments that support the deprecation, and discussion of how to remedy problems. The study further shows that self-deprecation is not a solitary but an interactionally organized practice. The speaker’s repeated self-deprecations elicit a series of different responses from the recipient, such as positive reframing, downgrading the deprecator’s problem, and recommending solutions to the deprecator’s problem. Many instances of self-deprecation suggest that it can be an important resource for building motivation, responsibility, and a sense of affiliation and solidarity with other social members.

In this paper we analyze the use of swearwords in Greek teenage storytelling. Our research is based on the analysis of conversational narratives that occurred in two conversations between male adolescents who belong to different social groups. Our analysis shows that the use of swearing in the story performances enables the narrators (1) to construct for themselves the identity of the powerful members of a group who share strong friendship bonds and challenge authorities in the first conversation, and (2) to project the identity of individuals who conform to mainstream values in the second conversation. Therefore, we suggest that swearing can be an effective linguistic tool for the construction and negotiation of diverse youth identities, i.e. the acceptance of or the departure from social norms, in the unfolding of narrative speech.

Power in meetings may be enacted in many ways, ranging from democratic and collaborative through to authoritative and didactic, with the exact positioning on this continuum typically under the control of the chair. By contrast with the focus of most previous research on the behaviour of institutionally ratified chairs of intact teams, this paper examines how volunteer chairs of small focus groups in public meetings use the power associated with that role to manage the discussion and to encourage or discourage explicit expression of disagreement. Our analysis identifies ways in which these arbitrarily assigned chairs influence and facilitate the small group discussions through a range of discourse practices. By separating the chair role from its typical co-occurrence with institutional hierarchy we are able to demonstrate the inherent influence and power of the position in the decision making process.