Based on a collection of video recordings, this book offers a micro-analysis of the visual and vocal aspects of the interaction between doctors and patients. Using actual examples, Christian Heath explores the moment-by-moment coordination of body movement and speech by and between doctor and patient. This study makes a major contribution both to our understanding of doctor-patient communication, and to the growing body of research on face-to-face interaction.
The ten volumes of "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, social, cultural, variational, or discursive angles, this fourth volume is dedicated to the empirical investigation of the way human beings organize their interaction in natural environments and how they use talk for accomplishing actions and their contexts. Starting from Goffman s observation that interaction exhibits a structure in its own right that cannot be reduced to the psychological properties of the individual nor to society, it contains a selection of articles documenting the various levels of interactional organization. In addition to treatments of basic concepts such as sequence, participation, prosody and style and some topical articles on phenomena like reported speech and listener response, it also includes overviews of specific traditions (conversation analysis, ethnomethodology) and articles on eminent authors (Goffman, Sacks) who had a formative influence on the field."
In this volume leading academics in Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis consider the notion of units for the study of language and interaction. Amongst the issues being explored are the role and relevance of traditionally accepted linguistic units for the analysis of naturally occurring talk, and the identification of new units of conduct in interaction. While some chapters make suggestions on how existing linguistic units can be adapted to suit the study of conversation, others present radically new perspectives on how language in interaction should be described, conceptualised and researched. The chapters present empirical investigations into different languages (Danish, English, Japanese, Mandarin, Swedish) in a variety of settings (private and institutional), considering both linguistic and embodied resources for talk. In addressing the fundamental question of units, the volume pushes at the boundaries of current debates and contributes original new insight into the nature of language in interaction.
This textbook provides an in-depth introduction to the theoretical perspectives and methods of doing conversation analysis, an approach to the study of talk in interaction which grew out of the work of Garfinkel, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson. This book is unique in that it provides comprehensive instruction in both interaction in ordinary conversations in everyday life as well as talk in institutional settings and a wide range of workplace and business interactions, while teaching both major research findings and how to conduct conversation analytic research. The book is designed to be useful for students of linguistics, sociology, and communication studies, and is written in clear and accessible prose. The Companion Website provides additional resources for instructors, such as questions and data excerpts for tests and in class exercises, audio and video clips for transcription practice, and guides for instructors on a range of topics covered in the course.
Silence takes on meaning based on the contexts of its occurrence. This is especially true in social interactions: consider the difference between silence after "lemme think," and silence after "will you marry me?" This book examines a particular form of silence, the conversational lapse. These regularly appear in conversations when all interactants pass up the opportunity to speak, and are moments when talk seems to falter or give way to matters extraneous to the conversation. What are these silences for the participants who, by virtue of not speaking, allowed them to develop? Elliott M. Hoey here offers the first in-depth analysis of lapses in conversation. Using methods from Conversation Analysis, the author explores hundreds of lapses in naturally occurring social occasions with each chapter focusing on a different aspect of how participants produce and locate order in lapses. Particular emphasis is given to how lapses emerge, what people do during the silence, and how they restart conversation afterwards. This research uncovers participants' methods for organizing lapses in their everyday affairs such that those silences are rendered as understandable periods of non-talk. By articulating participants' understandings of when and where talk is relevant, necessary, or appropriate, the research brings into focus the borderlines between talk-in-interaction and other realms of social life. This book shows lapses to be a particular and fascinating kind of silence with unique relevancies for the social situations of which they are a part.
Based on socio-cultural approaches to research on language learning and classroom video recordings, this book documents language learning as an epiphenomenon of peer face-to-face interaction. This book provides web links so the reader can see the data from the classroom that is the subject of the analyses.
The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600 ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking, such as its timing, are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages – with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals – do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This Research Topic contributes to advancing our understanding of these problems by summarizing recent work from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialog and conversation analysis, linguists, phoneticians, and comparative ethologists.
This edited book revisits the concept of social ‘activities’ from an interactional perspective, examining how verbal, vocal, visual-spatial and material resources are deployed by participants for meaning-making in social encounters. The eleven original chapters within this volume analyse activities based on video recordings of naturalistic and naturally occurring social encounters from face-to-face and mediated settings in Chinese, Dutch, English, French, and German. Informed primarily by the methodological approaches of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, the authors study embodiment in space and time in three distinct types of situations: objects in space, complex participation frameworks, and affiliation and alignment. Moreover, the book includes a theoretical and methodological discussion of how activities are constituted and visibly embodied in interaction. It will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology and linguistics in general, and face-to-face and mediated interaction in particular.
The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Methods in Health Research is a comprehensive and authoritative source on qualitative research methods. The Handbook compiles accessible yet vigorous academic contributions by respected academics from the fast-growing field of qualitative methods in health research and consists of: - A series of case studies in the ways in which qualitative methods have contributed to the development of thinking in fields relevant to policy and practice in health care. - A section examining the main theoretical sources drawn on by qualitative researchers. - A section on specific techniques for the collection of data. - A section exploring issues relevant to the strategic place of qualitative research in health care environments. The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Methods in Health Research is an invaluable source of reference for all students, researchers and practitioners with a background in the health professions or health sciences.
This volume addresses the issue of pragmatic meaning and interpretation in communication contexts regarding health and does so by combining a series of diverse and complementary approaches, which together highlight the relevance of successfully shared understanding to achieve more accessible, inclusive, and sustainable healthcare systems. The volume is divided into five thematic sections: 1) Analytical approaches to health communication, 2) Intercultural and mediated communication, 3) Negotiation and meaning construction, 4) Expertise and common ground, 5) Uncertainty and evasive answers, bringing together a group of top scholars on the much-debated issue of shared understanding both at the micro-level of dialogues between professionals and patients, and the macro-level of institutional communication. In the variety of its contributions, it represents an ambitious attempt at setting pragmatics at the core of healthcare communication research and practice, by combining conceptual reflections on core topics in the field of pragmatics (among which are speech acts, common ground, ambiguity, implicitness), with discourse and linguistic analysis of real-world examples exploring various problems in health communication.
