Nota Bene - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2025

The compatibility of conversation analysis and quantification has been the subject of considerable debate. However, the question seems to be shifting from whether to how a combination of the two approaches can be as fruitful and empirically valid as possible. The “CA-based action coding cycle” (“CABAC cycle”) I present in this paper contributes to answering this question. It traces four steps in the development of a scheme for coding conversational actions: initial and embedding in previous observations, systematization, extensive sequential analysis, and application of the coding scheme. It becomes clear that the fundamental tools of conversation analysis provide a particularly sound basis for coding actions. Furthermore, the “CABAC cycle” shows that special attention should be paid to the corpus characteristics and the associated research questions when creating a coding scheme. Finally, the great potential of quantifying actions is emphasized, especially for the field of applied conversation analysis.

This paper explores integrating quantitative methods into Conversation Analysis (CA) to examine psychological reactance in face-to-face interactions. Although extensively studied in mediated contexts, psychological reactance – a motivational state triggered by perceived threats to autonomy – remains underexplored in natural conversations. Addressing this gap, the study investigates how reactance manifests and affects conversational dynamics, such as stance-taking and disalignments. Video-recorded interactions were collected where participants faced reactance-inducing conditions (e.g., limiting smartphone use). Using GAT2 transcription and multimodal annotations, a systematic triple manual coding was used to identify markers of reactance. For statistical tests, the averages of the coding decisions were used to utilize the interpretative flexibility inherent in coding. Quantitative analyses showed significant relationships: reactance correlated positively with perceived freedom restriction, negatively with stance, and predicted conversational disalignment. Findings demonstrate that integrating quantitative methods into CA enhances its capacity to analyze complex phenomena like reactance, linking interactional practices with psychological concepts and advancing methodological discussions within CA.

This paper discusses opportunities and challenges of a mixed-methods research model building on linguistic and psychological methods, to document, analyze and evaluate questioning sequences as agents of effectiveness in business coaching. It details the disciplinary needs of expansion and reduction in the context of the development of a typology of questions and question sequences as part of the interdisciplinary project Questioning Sequences in Coaching. The aim is to illustrate how negotiating and integrating qualitative linguistic needs, resulting from a descriptive-phenomenological approach, and quantitative psychological needs, resulting from a theory-guided approach, can be productive for bringing together interaction and effectiveness in the context of (appropriate) responsiveness. Alongside the focus on integrating qualitative linguistic and quantitative psychological research, the paper exemplifies the added value for linguistic research of combining them in the context of a comparative case study on the longitudinal development of questions generating solutions.

This paper examines the role of argumentation topoi in discourse analysis, focusing on their identification, annotation, and automated classification. While topos analysis is a well-established method for uncovering collective patterns of reasoning in public discourse, its application in large-scale digital discourse analysis poses methodological challenges. This study investigates the so-called utility topos in bioethical debates, which encompasses both medical and economic arguments about benefit. We collaboratively developed annotation guidelines to ensure consistency and measured inter-annotator agreement. We then trained a BERT-based model on the gold-standard annotations and used it to classify utility topoi in German texts. The results indicate that while explicit argument structures are detectable, implicit and context-dependent reasoning remains difficult to capture. These findings highlight the need for refined annotation guidelines and contextual modelling in automated discourse analysis. The study contributes to the integration of qualitative and computational methods in argument analysis.

Quantitative approaches are increasingly applied in traditionally qualitative linguistic subdisciplines, such as discourse analysis in German studies. Building on Angermüller’s definition of German discourse analysis, which integrates hermeneutics, pragmatics, and structuralism, and aligning with Foucault’s discourse theory, this paper explores the challenges and synergies of combining quantitative and qualitative methods. We examine discourses on organ donation in Germany using temporal word embeddings and topic modeling alongside qualitative analysis to detect trends and discursive shifts. The study highlights themes of individual autonomy and societal solidarity, with proponents advocating legal obligations to enhance democratic legitimacy and opponents emphasizing bodily autonomy while critiquing enforced solidarity. Analyzing linguistic strategies in German media, Bundestag debates and publications of interest groups since 1990, we offer insights into the evolving public discourse on organ donation. The combination of quantitative tools and qualitative analyses demonstrates the complementarity of both approaches in understanding discourse.

This paper shows that the combination of qualitative and (basic) quantitative methods is a fruitful approach in the case of a semantic analysis of comparable and parallel corpus data. This point is illustrated through a comparison of two close French dynamic prepositions with a medial polarity, i.e. à travers and au travers de ‘across, through, by means of’ (often considered to be synonyms) with their intuitive equivalent in Dutch, door ‘through, by’. The study relies on corpus data stemming from the Dutch Parallel Corpus 2.0. The results offer new insights (i.e. an important difference in distribution of concrete and abstract uses in French and Dutch) and contradict some existing (lexicographic) descriptions and intuitions, viz. a nonexistent mutual correspondence between au travers de and door, and an unexpected preference for Dutch via as equivalent for French à travers in abstract configurations.

After more than a decade of constructionist research on multimodal phenomena, it is still not clear if and how para- and non-verbal layers should be integrated in Construction Grammar. One major issue is the frequency of co-occurrence of the different modes of expression: even though it is increasingly accepted in Construction Grammar that frequency is hard to operationalize as a criterion for construction status, especially opponents of multimodal approaches use low co-occurrence rates as an argument against the idea of a multimodal construction. But proponents of multimodal Construction Grammar who do not see frequency as decisive also tend to reduce frequency to mere numbers, without paying sufficient attention to all the factors that may influence frequency values. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the problem and to show that it is even more important in multimodal than in unimodal Construction Grammar to interpret frequency rates in the context of the data that are used for the analysis, focusing especially on external factors that influence gesturing and on the issue of the appropriate degree of abstraction.