Interactional Linguistics - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2022

Format ties, “partial repetitions of prior talk” (Goodwin & Goodwin 1987, p. 207), are interesting from an interactional perspective with respect to their functions relating to, for example, (dis-) agreement/alignment or humour, and for scholars of Language Variation and Change because they offer uniquely comparable phonological contexts in naturalistic speech. The present paper investigates the distribution of the sociolinguistic variable ing in format ties in a set of dyadic interviews of six speakers from the North-East of England who were recorded two or three times throughout their twenties – those career-building years during which we often see a change from the predominant use of the alveolar variant (“in’”) to the velar (“ing”).

The analysis offers possible interactional and stylistic explanations for the community-level stability and the speaker-level variation and change of ing by focusing on contexts in which speakers format tie. It shows that the use of the highly frequent and thus less marked alveolar variant tends to occur in aligning contexts, while the few velar cases occur in moments where speakers disalign on some level. This argument contributes to work combining interactional and variationist endeavours, in particular with respect to the variable ing.

In this paper we aim to determine whether temporal clauses can be shown to be insubordinate in everyday American English interaction. In order to investigate grammatical insubordination in conversation, we operationalize the notion of ‘insubordination’ as a specific practice for designing a turn-at-talk and implementing a social action. That is, we treat as ‘insubordinate’ a clause with a grammatically subordinate form that (a) is freestanding, that is, forms a prosodic unit of its own, (b) implements a discrete social action in its sequential context, and (c) has an independent interpretation, that is, is interpretable and actionable in the absence of a main clause. We then examine five different types of freestanding temporal clauses in conversation which might be considered candidate insubordinate uses. Our data show that in some cases both criteria (b) and (c) are lacking, while in others it is criterion (c) that is absent. In none of these cases are all three criteria satisfied at once. We conclude that temporal clauses do not exhibit insubordination in English conversation as do other adverbial clauses such as those with ’if’.

Participants in conversation have a range of options for referring to co-conversationalists – lexical, grammatical, embodied – regardless of their language. Personal pronouns have been described as the most unmarked way of achieving reference, where little else is accomplished other than the action of referring. We demonstrate that speakers in a multi-party conversation whose language distinguishes between second and third-person pronouns, or between inclusive and exclusive pronouns, are constantly attributing and managing participation roles when referring to co-participants, even when using the default reference forms. Grammatical contrasts within pronoun inventories are recruited, often in conjunction with points and gaze, to indicate which co-participants are being addressed and which are being referred to. Address is constantly recalibrated through practices of reference. Speakers also draw on more marked referential expressions in order to emphasise the attribution of participation roles more explicitly. This study is based on a corpus of casual multi-party conversations in Jaru, an endangered Australian language with a dual pronominal system which encodes three grammatical numbers (singular, dual, and plural) and specifies whether the referents of first-person dual and plural pronouns exclude or include the addressee(s).