Interactional Linguistics - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2024

This article presents a longitudinal study of a second language (L2) French speaker’s (Aurelia) use of the construction tu vois (‘you see’) over 15 months. Research on first language (L1) French has shown that tu vois has been subject to grammaticalization, whereby the construction in spoken language frequently serves as a discourse marker rather than a complement-taking predicate construction expressing visual perception. Drawing on longitudinal Conversation Analysis, I qualitatively and quantitatively analyze Aurelia’s use of tu vois in relation to its turn position and interactional purposes. I document a similar change happening in Aurelia’s use of the construction over time as what has been observed in L1 French: While she initially deploys tu vois exclusively in its ‘literal’ sense of visual perception and with a complement (tu vois X, ‘you see X’), she eventually starts using it as a semantically bleached discourse marker for interaction-organizational and interpersonal purposes. A few ‘hybrid’ cases demonstrate the progressive nature of this change, and indicate further similarities between L2 acquisition and L1 grammaticalization processes. I discuss possible reasons for the documented change and address implications of the findings for research on both the development of L2 grammar-for-interaction and language change more generally.

Verbs of perception are known for their prolific use in various non-literal functions that are usually argued to have developed from their denotational semantics (San Roque, Kendrick, Norcliffe & Majid 2018). In this study we document interactional practices involving the Estonian 2nd person verb form näed ’you see’ to demonstrate that its usage is anchored in face-to-face situations where the speaker guides a co-present other’s visual attention. Through multimodal analysis we show how näed is coordinated with the participants’ body orientations, gestures, and gazes to point to visually available proof for one’s current arguments, rendering it an evidential meaning even in its most “literal” uses of seeing, when a co-participant is invited to consider the visual evidence. We argue that the spatially anchored uses constitute a natural habitat of verbs of seeing, as visual perception is a mutually calibrated interactional accomplishment. Relevant syntactic constructions emerge in real time conversation where näed, calling for a visual orientation, is either preceded or followed by clausal specifications of what is to be seen, which makes it look like a particle. This challenges the argument that perception verbs start out as syntactic predicates in full clauses to then develop other uses.

Research on L2 interactional competence (IC) has become increasingly focused on how L2 speakers develop and recalibrate linguistic resources to do interactional work, i.e., how L2 speakers develop a grammar-for-interaction (Pekarek Doehler 2018). In this paper, I use interactional linguistics to track one L2 German speaker’s IC development over 11 months by analyzing her use of German also (English ‘so’) in formulations (see Deppermann 2011; Heritage & Watson 1979, 1980). In initial months, the L2 speaker uses also exclusively to do work on her own prior talk, e.g., in upshots, consequences, and unpackings. The L2 speaker’s initial also uses contribute to moves that maintain intersubjectivity by ensuring her co-interactant’s understanding of her own talk. In later months, the L2 speaker diversifies her uses of also, including uses oriented to co-interactants’ prior talk that address manifest problems of intersubjectivity: to preface an other-correction of an incorrect candidate understanding, and to preface turns addressing a co-interactant’s problem of understanding. The L2 speaker’s changing also uses demonstrate her ability to contribute to interactional organization in increasingly diverse ways, evidencing a developing grammar-for-interaction. I end by calling for more research on the L2 development of linguistic resources that primarily serve interactional functions, such as particles.

This paper shows how horse-riding instructors vocally depict, and thereby co-design and mobilize the unfolding progression of horses’ and riders’ actions through gradually escalating prosody. Escalating prosody involves the stepwise raising of a speaker’s overall pitch across a series of turn components, often accompanied by increases in overall loudness and occasionally by changes in voice quality. Escalating prosody can accompany instructed activities from beginning to end or only during certain phases of the activity. The prosodic delivery mirrors the building and subsequent sustaining of physical effort expected of the horse-rider pair. It can occur with lexical instructions to perform series of actions or with repeated directives to sustain the current activity. It can also occur with repeated praise as a successful performance unfolds, and with repeated corrections, which temporally frame moments of trouble. Prosody is shown to be a resource for co-designing the actions of others, specifically, their mobility, physical effort, and sequential progression. The data are horse-riding lessons recorded in the UK and in Germany.