Interactional Linguistics - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2024

This article examines the sanctioning of problem behavior during family breakfasts. Such sanctionings are commonly initiated with declarative TCUs. These declarative TCUs work as a vehicle for flagging the problem, and thereby occasion behavior modification ‘indirectly’. While declaratives canonically ‘inform’, it will be shown that not all declarative TCUs in sanctioning turns are well analyzed as ‘informing’. What they share is an orientation to the wrongdoer’s agency: They give space for the other person to adjust their behavior ‘themselves’, without having been told to. The prioritization of flagging a problem (as opposed to telling the other what to do) is explored on the basis of sanctioning moves that are built with both an imperative and a declarative TCU. Both distributional and qualitative (self-repair) data support the analysis of a preference for self-direction (Hepburn, 2020). Data are in German and come from the Parallel European Corpus of Informal Interaction.

This paper offers a multimodal approach to grammatical aspect, traditionally seen in linguistics as a verbal-morphological category. Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, we take as our object of study turn completions done with bodily movements and non-lexical vocalizations, focusing on the aspectual information they construct, and how this information is oriented to as relevant to the trajectory of action underway. We argue that the aspectual information constructed through the practice of completing a turn with bodily movements and non-lexical vocalizations is part of demonstrating the speaker’s experiential knowledge relevant to the epistemic claims being made, in the service of securing some form of affiliative uptake from the recipient regarding those claims. Pursuits designed in this way provide the recipient access to the speaker’s “way of viewing the internal temporal constituency of [the] situation” (Comrie 1976: 3). Furthermore, we show that the aspectual information conveyed (i) by bodily movements, and (ii) co-occurring non-lexical vocalizations, are somewhat distinct from each other. Our study is the first that we are aware of to examine the category of grammatical aspect in turn completions and in this embodied and social-interactional way. Data are in American English.

Everyday discourse involves interpreting composite utterances like speech-with-gesture composites. Taking a multimodal and discourse-pragmatic perspective, this single-case study explores the complexity of meaning-making by considering the interweaving of gesture-speech composites and discursive strategies in talk-in-interaction. Specifically, the paper examines various pragmatic functions of kiss-teeth (i.e., a conventionalised sound gesture) when combining it with other multimodal resources. The data for this study was derived from an interview conducted during ethnographic fieldwork in Suriname in 2022. The results show that kiss-teeth has several discourse-pragmatic functions in various contexts, including (1) conveying a reprimand, (2) participating in flirtatious teasing and (3) engaging in gossip. While the research suggests that the meaning of kiss-teeth is closely tied to various multimodal resources, the study also considers the participant’s uses of viewpoint constructions for perspective-taking in demonstrations of kiss-teeth as diverse social actions. The analysis illustrates that the participant indexes distinct gesture functions through viewpoint constructions which rely on descriptions, depictions, and composite utterances. By analysing viewpoint construction, the study does not only aim to scrutinise the gesture’s meanings but also how kiss-teeth contributes to the interaction as a whole. Ultimately, the findings point to the importance of gesture-speech composites and narrative discourse strategies in talk-in-interaction.