Pragmatics - Volume 34, Issue 3, 2024

This study explores the identity construction of female-to-male (FtM) transgender individuals, utilizing membership categorization analysis and multimodal conversation analysis. ‘Identity’ in this study indicates a person’s display of category membership or ascription to category membership, which emerges in social actions. The study illustrates how participants make categories and associated features visible in their social actions through the use of multimodal resources. In particular, the study focuses on the participants’ orientation to Pn-adequate devices, particularly gender as a binary. The analysis shows that the participants’ orientation to gender ideologies, such as gender’s Pn-adequacy, plays a significant role in how they construct their FtM transgender identities.

This study contributes to theorizing about the semantic characteristics of verbal irony. Specifically, we investigate the function of the modal particles ja (lit. ‘yes’) and aber (lit. ‘but’) that often occur in ironic utterances in German, cf. Das war aber ein aufregender Film (‘That was prt a thrilling movie’). Our main claim is that modal particles are used in ironic utterances to reflect the speaker’s intention to pretend surprise and produce a mockery effect by manifesting the utterance as an echo. Modal particles require some mutual knowledge to be contained in the common ground, and we link this notion to the interplay between echoic mention and pretense in interpreting an utterance as ironic. In an empirical approach to our claim, we report on results from an online questionnaire study, in which we test whether the presence of a modal particle leads to a higher perception of pretense in ironic reactions. While the data generally confirm our prediction, we found that only aber affects pretense perception but not ja, which can be explained by the former’s contrastive nature. The view we pursue implies that attitudinal content is a graded feature and that such a notion is applicable to surprise and pretense involved in verbal irony.

This study focuses on one type of audible gesture, designedly single claps (DSCs), as used by different people at an educational institution. The institution is designed to provide second language English users with opportunities to use English in various situations. Through the use of Multimodal Conversation Analysis, the analysis first focuses on the shape of DSCs and what makes them visible as not projecting further claps. Next, the analysis focuses on how DSCs are used within their sequential context. DSCs can take a variety of shapes, in that there are different ways not to project further claps; they can be used to attract attention of multiple recipients, and thus as one resource to manage interaction; and they are used as such a resource by representatives of the educational institution, who take on teacher roles within the interaction, with responsibility and deontic authority to manage shifts in activity and participation framework.

The paper explores the social interaction that takes place during the initial phases of videoconferences. The focus is on the problem of absent participants, which is often considered a reason for delaying the official beginning of the meeting. One of the resources that the participants have is to reach the absent participant by cellphone. We observed a recurrent pattern of action whereby one of the participants disengages from the video meeting to reach the missing person by phone. This negotiation process moves through four steps: (1) the detection of the problem, (2) the offer to call the missing person by one participant, (3) the acceptance of this offer by the moderator, and (4) the temporary absence of the participant from the video meeting to make the phone call. Our data concern videoconferencing in the context of international teacher training in German as a foreign language (LEELU project, https://www.leelu.eu/english/).

In contemporary organisations, managerial expertise is increasingly viewed as an ability to reflect on activities, processes and human relations within organisational life in order to gain a systemic understanding of the workings of the organisation. This article examines the interactional practices of a consultant-led management training where steering groups of an organisation have a task of gaining such expertise. The article investigates how managerial expertise is constructed and negotiated in training interaction as the groups categorise their managerial actions through a specific coding scheme. The analysis shows that the use of the coding scheme is contingent on being able to display access to organisational processes and activities, connecting general managerial knowledge to specific, local knowledge of the organisation and moving from ‘knowing-that’ to ‘knowing-how’ type of knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the forms and functions of answers to proposals for joint action, implemented through polar interrogatives, in Greek telephone calls. Our analysis indicates a distinct functional distribution of three types of accepting answers to such proposals. Particle-type answers do ‘simple’ acceptance of the proposal, i.e. they only display the respondent’s willingness to take on the proposed action and nothing else, while repetition-type answers display the speaker’s epistemic/deontic stance towards additional aspects of the proposal. With a third type of responses, speakers accept the proposal in a mitigated manner. Our findings align with Enfield et al.’s (2019) conclusion that particles serve as pragmatically unmarked polar answers. They do not, however, evince the prevalence of this type of answer to proposals to the same extent as to epistemically oriented polar interrogatives.