Studies across different languages over the past three decades have claimed that compliments are formulaic in nature, realized by only a few syntactic and semantic formulae. Much of the research employs elicitation or ethnographic field notes data, which biases the analysis to single utterance, explicit and formulaic compliments. However, my observations of Chinese compliments in naturally occurring conversation paint a different, much more sophisticated, picture. The current study investigates the realization of spontaneous Chinese complimenting behavior in the speech communities of Shanghai and other cities in China. Over 200 speakers from different walks of life were audio-recorded in a vast array of natural settings. Three hundred compliment-response sequences were selected for analysis. Adopting a combination of the pragmatic speech act analytic approach and the discursive pragmatic analytic approach, the current study examines the pragmatic-discursive structure of Chinese complimenting in conversation sequences over multiple turns involving two or more parties. Results of the study reveal that Chinese compliments and compliment responses are not isolated, single utterance acts, but rather multi-turn discursive events. Chinese compliments operate as pragmatic-discursive strategies working together over the discourse in a core and support relationship. Among the 3,835 compliment strategies identified, 525 are core strategies and 3,310 are support strategies. The core compliment strategy is normally the first general summative statement initiating a compliment topic. Seven major support compliment strategies—agreement, comment, example, repetition, intensification, quote, and comparison—fulfill three major pragmatic-discursive functions: to align with, to elaborate, or to emphasize the core or another support strategy. The seven major support compliment strategies are further realized by a wide variety of substrategies and linguistic forms with no formulaicity and predictability in lexical or syntactic distribution. The different pragmatic-discursive strategies interact such that the participants negotiate and “co-construct” the compliment event. The analysis indicates that context, both interaction-external and interaction-internal, is crucial in the construction and interpretation of a compliment action.

This thesis investigated how clients and therapists discuss the means by which clients can work towards their therapeutic goals. Cooper et al. (2016) termed such discussions meta-therapeutic communication or meta-therapeutic dialogue and Cooper and McLeod (2011) recommend carrying them out since outcomes are robustly related to whether the client accepts the therapeutic strategy as appropriate for their needs (e.g. Horvath et al., 2011). This thesis undertook the first discovery-oriented, Conversation Analysis (CA) study of how clients and therpaists actually carry out meta-therapeutic discussions. It represents a sustained attempt to bridge the practice-research gap and highlights the conceptual and practical challenges in doing so. 42 audio-recorded pluralistic therapy sessions were sampled across seven therapist-client pairs. Before carrying out the CA study proper, it was necessary to conceptually link broad descriptions of meta-therapeutic dialogue to participants’ concrete actions in therapy sessions. This involved a review of related concepts (Chapter Two), as well as a detailed conceptualization of how therapists’ stocks of interactional knowledge (SIKs) (Peräkylä & Vehviläinen, 2003) regarding meta-therapeutic dialogue might demonstrably link with their concrete actions as described by CA findings (Chapters Three through Five). Therapists’ questions to clients about what might be helpful were selected as a likely site for meta-therapeutic dialogue and were subjected to an in-depth CA investigation of the practical issues participants themselves treated as important in their interactions around these questions (Chapters Six through Eight). Findings show how some apparent opportunities for meta-therapeutic dialogue are less facilitative of clients’ independent input, and can sometimes be interactionally coercive. There is evidence that facilitating dialogical opportunities for talking about what might be helpful may require the therapist to move back-and-forth between opposing positions, such as treating the client as potentially unknowing but still also holding open a space for their contribution. These findings extend existing SIKs regarding meta-therapeutic dialogue by specifying some concrete considerations therapists orient to during such endeavours. Some practical similarities between meta-therapeutic dialogue and problem-solving/solution-focused approaches are also highlighted.

Este trabalho tem como objetivo pesquisar, demonstrar e analisar de que modo os aspectos da oralidade se manifestam no texto escrito jornalístico, mais precisamente em manchetes e títulos de notícias no Jornal da Tarde. Para tal proposta, buscamos verificar inicialmente o perfil do leitor de jornais e suas preferências de assuntos em uma época de informações rápidas e superficiais. Aliado a essa pesquisa, fizemos um estudo sobre a linguagem jornalística que, de forma recorrente, apresenta linguagem cotidiana vinculada aos fenômenos da língua falada e da língua escrita, que são bem explorados pelo jornal. Concentramos, assim, nosso trabalho em estudos específicos sobre a manchete e títulos de notícias que dão visibilidade às notícias veiculadas pelos jornais e têm o propósito de chamar a atenção do leitor. Selecionamos as manchetes e títulos de notícias que tiveram como base, frases proverbiais. Essas fórmulas fixas, entretanto, sofreram adaptações que chamamos de reenunciação e retextualização (détournement). Essa retextualização provoca efeito de humor, crítica ou ironia ao parodiar o provérbio original que é uma das formas de se empregar a linguagem mais distensa para chamar a atenção do leitor. Todo esse processo de pesquisa e análise baseou-se na Análise do Discurso, na Análise da Conversação, estudos sobre a linguagem jornalística e trabalhos sobre provérbios. Como os provérbios são perpetuados na memória coletiva, ao serem retextualizados evidenciam a criatividade do enunciador das manchetes e títulos de notícias que transforma o perene, o previsível no inusitado para surpreender o leitor como é o caso do Jornal da Tarde. / The aim of this paper is to research, demonstrate and analyze in which way the aspects of orality are expressed in the journalist written text, more precisely in headlines and news titles from Jornal da Tarde. For such proposal, we initially intend to verify the profile of newspaper readers and their subject preferences in a time of fast and superficial information. Within this research, a study about journalistic language has been made, which presents. The current language joined to the spoken and written language phenomena which are well explored by the newspaper. Our paper is concentrated in specific studies about the headline and news titles which give sight to the news printed by the newspaper and have the aim of calling the readers attention. The headlines and news titles, which were based on proverbial sentences, have been selected. However, these fixed formulas got adapted, which is called reenunciation and retextualization (détournement). This retextualization provokes humor, critic or ironic effect in parodying the original proverb which is a way of using the looser language to call the readers attention. All this research and analyze process was based in Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis, studies about journalistic language and papers about proverbs. As the proverbs are perpetuated in people memory, as soon as they are retextualized, they evidence the creativity of the headline and news titles announcer which changes the perennial, the predictable to the unexpected to surprise the reader, as seen in Jornal da Tarde.

La présente recherche se situe dans une approche ethnographique du terrain orientée vers une approche interactionnelle, à partir de données audio-visuelles recueillies pendant trois ans, constituant un corpus assez riche pour documenter l’objet empirique sur lequel elle porte : préparation, entrainement et véritable entretien d’embauche. Il s’agit ainsi d’analyser les pratiques langagières structurées à la fois par, pour et dans leur contexte de production, plutôt que leur discours ou bien les représentations ou les attentes normatives qui s’en dégagent. Je développe des exemples d’analyse qui nourrissent des réflexions sur les pratiques d’apprentissage mises en œuvre durant la formation au français à visée professionnelle au sein d’une association parisienne dont une des activités aide les migrants à préparer les entretiens d’embauche. Le terrain ainsi conçu est approfondi à travers l’attention que je porte au lien réflexif entre ses différentes composantes : préparation, simulation et entretiens réels. Le but là, est d’observer l’écart entre le modèle (simulation) et les vrais entretiens d’embauche, de comprendre l’évolution de la figure du recruteur d’un entretien à l’autre, et de caractériser les solutions que les participants co-construisent. Ce faisant, ce travail de recherche ouvre un espace d’intersection entre une activité associative de formation des migrants, la rencontre de ceux-ci avec des employeurs et le regard universitaire sur ces faits. Le produit de cette intersection est analysé de façon à documenter l’écart entre les attentes du recruteur et les réponses des candidats dans un terrain peu exploré jusqu’à présent : celui d’un monde solidaire. / Based on three years’ worth of audio-visual recordings, the research presented in this paper represents a rich corpus of ethnographic fieldwork oriented towards an interactional approach. This research therefore documents the very empirical object which it seeks to interrogate: the job interview (including preparation and training job interviews, as well as actual interviews). The research presented here analyses language practices that are structured by, for and in their context of production, rather than by any discourses, cultural preconceptions or expectations we might have about job interviews themselves. In the research I develop examples which shed light on learning practices employed by one Parisian organisation which assists migrants to prepare for a professional life in France. Further, the analyses I propose are deepened through the focus I bring to bear on the reflexive link between the three different components: interview preparation, mock job interviews and real interviews. The aim here is to observe the ‘gap’ between the model (i.e. the simulation) and real job interviews, to understand the evolution of the figure of the recruiter from one interview to another, and also to identify solutions that participants co-construct. In doing so, this research opens a line of enquiry into the intersection between community level training of migrants, their encounters with employers and the academic take on these facts. The product of this intersection is analysed in such a way as to document the gap between the expectations of recruiters and the responses of candidates in a field that has been little explored until now: the world of social activism.

This study presents empirical research to contribute to the ongoing debate between Writing Center (WC) scholars concerning theoretical conceptions and perceptions of tutor and tutee roles and identities as peers, novices, and/or experts. The study explores how symmetrical (peer) and asymmetrical (expertnovice) identities are locally co-constructed and reconstructed in turn-by-turn utterances between WC tutors and tutees. Audio-recorded data of 30-minute WC conferences were collected and micro-analyzed within the parameters of Conversation Analysis. The data reveal that, contrary to the label of peer tutoring, tutors and tutees more frequently reinforced their macro-level statuses as experts and novices, respectively. For tutors, expert identities were co-constructed by using tag questions, controlling turn and topic allocations, less frequently ratifying tutee’s contributions, and by rejecting the tutee’s contributions—either what the tutee wrote or said—more frequently; at the same time, tutees co-constructed their own noviceness by more frequently ratifying the tutor’s contributions, more frequently boosting ratification, less frequently rejecting the tutor’s contributions, less frequently controlling turn and topic allocations, and by not asking tag questions. Where the macro-level expert-novice dichotomy was more easily reinforced micro-interactionally, achieving peer identities involved cooperative coconstruction by the tutor and the tutee. The data suggest that peer identities required the following conditions to exist: (1) tutors who wished to distributeagency to their tutees in order to co-construct a more symmetrical—or peer— relationship had to less frequently employ interactional strategies that index their own expertise; (2) tutees had to accept the agency that tutors distributed to them, which contributes to tutee empowerment; (3) tutees had to use interactional strategies that typically indexed expertise for tutors—such as turn and topic control and use of tag questions—and decrease the frequency of interactional strategies that index their own noviceness, such as frequent ratification and boosting; (4) tutors and tutees had to share evenly balanced frequencies of the interactional strategies that index both expertise and noviceness; (5) tutors and tutees continued to re-establish conditions 1-4 throughout the conference to maintain a symmetrical power relationship. Shifting the agency from the more powerful tutor to the less powerful tutee accomplishes two things: tutee empowerment and establishing a more symmetrical power relationship between the tutor and the tutee. This study contributes to the small, but growing branch of research that seeks to better understand how scholars’ theoretical perceptions of tutor and tutee identities as experts or peers compare to the in-the-moment representations of tutors and tutees that empirical research reveals.

In this thesis I employ insights from Conversation Analysis and Embodied Cognition Theory to examine the discursive practices of a group of interactants who operate in what I describe as a group cognitive system. While studies on embodied cognition have been done on both individuals and groups involved in various concrete physical tasks and situated cognition studies have been done on many types of socially situated conversations, my aim is to combine these two theoretical frameworks to observe people’s embodied interactions in informal everyday conversation as they engage in ongoing learning processes. My research question revolves around understanding how the group’s shared cognition unfolds and how new paradigms of thought and purpose are generated in the process of their interactional practices. I employ Conversation Analysis methodology in the collection and analysis of data with attention on how learners interact with each other and their environment via verbal communication. In addition, I focus on non-verbal embodied actions as they function to form a cognitive system where new realities are mentally simulated and brought to materiality via information feedback loops.

Capturing and studying the moments in psychotherapy that clients find most important can help us understand more about how psychotherapy works, what the curative ingredients are, and by what processes they are mediated. Qualitative research in this area has, so far, mainly focused on describing, and categorizing clients’ experiences of important factors and events. The methods employed to analyse the data have been rather limited in variation and are usually based on a realist epistemology, according to which data are basically treated as reflections of the clients’ actual experiences. This entails a risk of overlooking and obscuring other aspects of therapy and the therapy process that are equally important to explore, for example the microprocesses of interaction within important events, or how clients’ accounts of their experiences are shaped and limited by the context in which they are produced. The overall aim of this licentiate thesis was to explore client-identified important events in psychotherapy with a focus on studying therapy talk and talk about therapy from a social constructionist point of view, which would allow a closer exploration of the understudied areas mentioned above. In Study I, Conversation Analysis was used to explore the interaction taking place between seven client-therapist dyads in 16 client-identified important events collected from their third sessions. The analysis identified that 12 of the events contained clients’ expressions of disagreement. Three different ways that the therapists handled the disagreement were discerned: The first, and most common, way was to orient to the client’s cues of disagreement by inviting the client to elaborate on his or her point of view and to establish a shared understanding acceptable to both participants. The second way was to orient to the client’s disagreement cues but define the therapist’s own point view as more relevant than the client’s, and the third way was a single case in which the therapist did not in any way orient to the client’s disagreement cues. In Study II, two qualitative methods based on different epistemologies were used to analyse the same set of eight clients’ accounts of 18 important events. The aim was to first identify what types of events clients describe as important, and then explore how their accounts of these events were contextually shaped and  organized, and the consequences of this. The first analysis, a content analysis, yielded descriptions of five different types of events, which were similar to the ones found in previous research on important events. The second analysis, a discourse analysis, demonstrated how clients’ accounts were not only influenced by the participants’ ability to accurately remember and report their experience, but also by what was sayable within the context of the research interview. In conclusion, the two studies demonstrate how qualitative methods based on a socialconstructive perspective can contribute to our understanding of clientidentified important events by highlighting and describing participants’ use of language in interaction, and its forms and  functions within therapy sessions and in research interviews. The findings point out the need to broaden the range of qualitative methods used in psychotherapy research in general and indicate the potential value of methods like CA and DA to psychotherapy process research and research on important events in particular.

This dissertation examines the discourse produced by beginning learners of Spanish using social media. Specifically, it looks at the use and development of interactional resources during two video-mediated conversations. Through a combination of Conversation Analysis tools and quantitative data analysis, the use of turn-taking strategies, repair trajectories, and alignment moves was examined to discover how beginning language learners manage videoconferencing exchanges and develop their interactional capabilities in this new interactional setting. The goal of this investigation was twofold: 1) to describe and explain how students construct, manage and maintain conversations via videoconferencing, and 2) to gain a better understanding of the links between technology-based social media and language learning. The results of this study indicate that instructional videoconferencing conversations display their own clearly delimited and idiosyncratic organization of interactional features. In terms of turn-taking, the results of the analyses demonstrate that beginning learners are fully capable of participating competently in speaker selection to manage a conversation with a peer of similar proficiency level. In the area of repair, the analyses show that, during instructional videoconferencing exchanges, beginning learners orient to both the communication of personal meaning and the accuracy of their discourse. They enact this orientation through the use of self-initiated self-repair. Finally, with regard to the use of alignment moves, the analyses reveal that, in tune with their nascent linguistic and interactional abilities, beginning learners use primarily acknowledgement moves.

This dissertation centers on the under-researched construct of interactional competence, which refers to features of jointly constructed discourse. When applied to the testing of speaking skills in a second language, interactional competence refers to features of the discourse that the two students produce together; rather than the speaking ability or performance of each person individually. This dissertation describes the construct of interactional competence in a low-stakes, paired speaking test setting targeted at students in their second year of German instruction at the college level. The purpose of this study is two-fold. First, the study analyzes the conversational resources that are co-constructed in the test discourse to maintain mutual understanding, which is considered the basis for interactional competence. Second, the study examines the impact of task (jigsaw task and discussion task) and speaking ability-level combination (same and different ability) in the test-taker pair on the co-constructed test discourse and thus on the deployment of the conversational resources to maintain intersubjectivity. In that respect, this study also seeks to analyze how the identified conversational resources are involved in establishing and negotiating language ability identities that are displayed in the test discourse. Conversation analytic conventions were used to investigate the interactional resources that test takers deploy to maintain mutual understanding. The procedures of repair (self-repair in response to other-initiated repair, inter-turn delays, and misunderstandings as well as other-repair in conjunction with word search activities) that emerged from the inductive analysis of the test discourse have broadened the conceptualization of interactional competence in the context of paired speaking assessments. Frequency distributions of the interactional resources were created to provide a better understanding of the impact of task and ability-level combination on the co-constructed repair procedures. The rationale behind this analysis is the general understanding of language testers that both resources and context influence test performance. The findings from the quantitative analysis suggest that there are more similarities than differences in repair use across the jigsaw task and the discussion task. In addition, even though some trends in the co-construction of repair procedures may be attributed to the higher or lower speaking ability of the test takers, the relationship between the ability-level combination in the pair and the use of repair seems to be rather variable. Finally, to learn more about the interrelationship between test takers’ speaking ability and interactional competence, this dissertation also approached speaking ability in terms of test takers’ co-constructed language ability identities that are displayed in the test discourse. By means of single case analyses, the study provided a detailed picture of the relationship between language ability identities and the procedures of repair, both of which are co-constructed at the discourse level. The findings from the conversation analysis show that the speaker who provides the repair is usually able to position himself or herself as the more competent or proficient speaker in the test discourse.

The research question for this study is “Can concepts from complex adaptive systems and conversation analysis be used to research consumer behaviour?" This is, primarily, a theoretical question. After a wide-ranging literature search no scholarly publications linking the qualitative aspects of complex adaptive systems theory to marketing or consumer research were located. In addition, there appear to be few papers on consumer research which use conversation analysis. A theory for the research methodology was developed. It was argued that the production of a research theory and methodology to test the relevance and appropriateness of two very different theories - complex adaptive systems and conversation analysis was the major undertaking of this thesis. The problem of combining an essentially scientific perspective (complex adaptive systems) with an essentially qualitative one (ethnomethodology and conversation analysis) was resolved as part of the research process. A bridging theory was developed through the common ground offered by the sociology of scientific knowledge on the one hand and social-constructionist theory on the other. This methodology was successful in supporting the choice of conversation analysis as the data-collection method and provided the rationale for observing five characteristics of a complex adaptive system. The methodology was tested empirically and, in keeping with exploratory work, iteratively. It is not intended that this type of research will have predictive value. The complex adaptive system studied was consumers in a small group. There were two research locations with six data-collection sessions in each. The first location collected data from organisational groups. The second collected data from groups of consumers convened in a meeting room. / Data were transcribed and analysed for all sessions according to the conventions of conversation analysis. In the meeting-room sessions, data were also collected by electronic-group-support-systems technology and subjected to a modified form of content analysis. The broad findings showed the following. The assumption that there was little evidence of interest in complex adaptive systems among consumer behaviour researchers was confirmed. Apart from one paper calling for the use of conversation analysis in consumer behaviour research, there appeared to have been no subsequent reports of its adoption. The potential for conversation analysis in consumer research has probably not been understood because it was seen as a data-collection method only within an ethnomethodological perspective. The discursive theoretical perspective, which gives a prime position to conversation analysis in the construction of factual accounts, was found to be an innovative way to study consumer behaviour. A discursive theoretical research perspective could have provided a more robust theoretical justification for the fieldwork carried out in this study than the theory of the methodology that was first developed for this study. Conversation analysis did meet the five criteria proposed for surfacing a complex adaptive system in a small group but in an unexpected way. It met these criteria through the research process. In other words, by setting up an appropriate research environment and using conversation analysis, it was shown that a complex adaptive system was in operation. / An outcome of employing complex adaptive systems theory and conversation analysis is a new way of seeing groups of consumers as a self-organised, nonlinear, interactive entity. Conversation analysis has proven to be a method of empirically observing this entity, whilst preserving the consumer groups' complex adaptiveness. There were three conclusions. The first is that the discursive paradigm appears to be an alternative paradigm for consumer behaviour research that is appropriate for certain applications. For example, marketing communications and word-of-mouth communication. The second conclusion is that when small-group talk-in-interaction is recorded and analysed using conversation analysis, the characteristics of a complex adaptive system theorised in this study seem evident to the researcher. The third is that complex adaptive systems appear to be capable of being researched in the field, but more work is needed on defining the characteristics to be researched.