Although internet chat is a significant aspect of many internet users’ lives, the manner in which participants in quasi-synchronous chat situations orient to issues of social and moral order remains to be studied in depth. The research presented here is therefore at the forefront of a continually developing area of study. This work contributes new insights into how members construct and make accountable the social and moral orders of an adult-oriented Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel by addressing three questions: (1) What conversational resources do participants use in addressing matters of social and moral order? (2) How are these conversational resources deployed within IRC interaction? and (3) What interactional work is locally accomplished through use of these resources? A survey of the literature reveals considerable research in the field of computer-mediated communication, exploring both asynchronous and quasi-synchronous discussion forums. The research discussed represents a range of communication interests including group and collaborative interaction, the linguistic construction of social identity, and the linguistic features of online interaction. It is suggested that the present research differs from previous studies in three ways: (1) it focuses on the interaction itself, rather than the ways in which the medium affects the interaction; (2) it offers turn-by-turn analysis of interaction in situ; and (3) it discusses membership categories only insofar as they are shown to be relevant by participants through their talk. Through consideration of the literature, the present study is firmly situated within the broader computer-mediated communication field. Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis were adopted as appropriate methodological approaches to explore the research focus on interaction in situ, and in particular to investigate the ways in which participants negotiate and co-construct social and moral orders in the course of their interaction. IRC logs collected from one chat room were analysed using a two-pass method, based on a modification of the approaches proposed by Pomerantz and Fehr (1997) and ten Have (1999). From this detailed examination of the data corpus three interaction topics are identified by means of which participants clearly orient to issues of social and moral order: challenges to rule violations, ‘trolling’ for cybersex, and experiences regarding the 9/11 attacks. Instances of these interactional topics are subjected to fine-grained analysis, to demonstrate the ways in which participants draw upon various interactional resources in their negotiation and construction of channel social and moral orders. While these analytical topics stand alone in individual focus, together they illustrate different instances in which participants’ talk serves to negotiate social and moral orders or collaboratively construct new orders. Building on the work of Vallis (2001), Chapter 5 illustrates three ways that rule violation is initiated as a channel discussion topic: (1) through a visible violation in open channel, (2) through an official warning or sanction by a channel operator regarding the violation, and (3) through a complaint or announcement of a rule violation by a non-channel operator participant. Once the topic has been initiated, it is shown to become available as a topic for others, including the perceived violator. The fine-grained analysis of challenges to rule violations ultimately demonstrates that channel participants orient to the rules as a resource in developing categorizations of both the rule violation and violator. These categorizations are contextual in that they are locally based and understood within specific contexts and practices. Thus, it is shown that compliance with rules and an orientation to rule violations as inappropriate within the social and moral orders of the channel serves two purposes: (1) to orient the speaker as a group member, and (2) to reinforce the social and moral orders of the group. Chapter 6 explores a particular type of rule violation, solicitations for ‘cybersex’ known in IRC parlance as ‘trolling’. In responding to trolling violations participants are demonstrated to use affiliative and aggressive humour, in particular irony, sarcasm and insults. These conversational resources perform solidarity building within the group, positioning non-Troll respondents as compliant group members. This solidarity work is shown to have three outcomes: (1) consensus building, (2) collaborative construction of group membership, and (3) the continued construction and negotiation of existing social and moral orders. Chapter 7, the final data analysis chapter, offers insight into how participants, in discussing the events of 9/11 on the actual day, collaboratively constructed new social and moral orders, while orienting to issues of appropriate and reasonable emotional responses. This analysis demonstrates how participants go about ‘doing being ordinary’ (Sacks, 1992b) in formulating their ‘first thoughts’ (Jefferson, 2004). Through sharing their initial impressions of the event, participants perform support work within the interaction, in essence working to normalize both the event and their initial misinterpretation of it. Normalising as a support work mechanism is also shown in relation to participants constructing the ‘quiet’ following the event as unusual. Normalising is accomplished by reference to the indexical ‘it’ and location formulations, which participants use both to negotiate who can claim to experience the ‘unnatural quiet’ and to identify the extent of the quiet. Through their talk participants upgrade the quiet from something legitimately experienced by one person in a particular place to something that could be experienced ‘anywhere’, moving the phenomenon from local to global provenance. With its methodological design and detailed analysis and findings, this research contributes to existing knowledge in four ways. First, it shows how rules are used by participants as a resource in negotiating and constructing social and moral orders. Second, it demonstrates that irony, sarcasm and insults are three devices of humour which can be used to perform solidarity work and reinforce existing social and moral orders. Third, it demonstrates how new social and moral orders are collaboratively constructed in relation to extraordinary events, which serve to frame the event and evoke reasonable responses for participants. And last, the detailed analysis and findings further support the use of conversation analysis and membership categorization as valuable methods for approaching quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication.

Bibliography: leaves 457-478. / xx, 478 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Psychology, 1997?

Doctor of Philosophy / Successful communication hinges on keeping track of who and what we are talking about. For this reason, person reference sits at the heart of the social sciences. Referring to persons is an interactional process where information is transferred from current speakers to the recipients of their talk. This dissertation concerns itself with the work that is achieved through this transfer of information. The interactional approach adopted is one that combines the “micro” of conversation analysis with the “macro” of genealogically grounded anthropological linguistics. Murriny Patha, a non-Pama-Nyungan language spoken in the north of Australia, is a highly complex polysynthetic language with kinship categories that are grammaticalized as verbal inflections. For referring to persons, as well as names, nicknames, kinterms, minimal descriptions and free pronouns, Murriny Patha speakers make extensive use of pronominal reference markers embedded within polysynthetic verbs. Murriny Patha does not have a formal “mother-in-law” register. There are however numerous taboos on naming kin in avoidance relationships, and on naming and their namesakes. Similarly, there are also taboos on naming the deceased and on naming their namesakes. As a result, for every speaker there is a multitude of people whose names should be avoided. At any one time, speakers of the language have a range of referential options. Speakers’ decisions about which category of reference forms to choose (names, kinterms etc.) are governed by conversational preferences that shape “referential design”. Six preferences – a preference for associating the referent to the co-present conversationalists, a preference for avoiding personal names, a preference for using recognitionals, a preference for being succinct, and a pair of opposed preferences relating to referential specificity – guide speakers towards choosing a name on one occasion, a kinterm on the next occasion and verbal cross-reference on yet another occasion. Different classes of expressions better satisfy particular conversational preferences. There is a systematicity to the referential choices that speakers make. The interactional objectives of interlocutors are enacted through the regular placement of particular forms in particular sequential environments. These objectives are then revealed through the turn-by-turn unfolding of conversational interaction.

Doctor of Philosophy / Successful communication hinges on keeping track of who and what we are talking about. For this reason, person reference sits at the heart of the social sciences. Referring to persons is an interactional process where information is transferred from current speakers to the recipients of their talk. This dissertation concerns itself with the work that is achieved through this transfer of information. The interactional approach adopted is one that combines the “micro” of conversation analysis with the “macro” of genealogically grounded anthropological linguistics. Murriny Patha, a non-Pama-Nyungan language spoken in the north of Australia, is a highly complex polysynthetic language with kinship categories that are grammaticalized as verbal inflections. For referring to persons, as well as names, nicknames, kinterms, minimal descriptions and free pronouns, Murriny Patha speakers make extensive use of pronominal reference markers embedded within polysynthetic verbs. Murriny Patha does not have a formal “mother-in-law” register. There are however numerous taboos on naming kin in avoidance relationships, and on naming and their namesakes. Similarly, there are also taboos on naming the deceased and on naming their namesakes. As a result, for every speaker there is a multitude of people whose names should be avoided. At any one time, speakers of the language have a range of referential options. Speakers’ decisions about which category of reference forms to choose (names, kinterms etc.) are governed by conversational preferences that shape “referential design”. Six preferences – a preference for associating the referent to the co-present conversationalists, a preference for avoiding personal names, a preference for using recognitionals, a preference for being succinct, and a pair of opposed preferences relating to referential specificity – guide speakers towards choosing a name on one occasion, a kinterm on the next occasion and verbal cross-reference on yet another occasion. Different classes of expressions better satisfy particular conversational preferences. There is a systematicity to the referential choices that speakers make. The interactional objectives of interlocutors are enacted through the regular placement of particular forms in particular sequential environments. These objectives are then revealed through the turn-by-turn unfolding of conversational interaction.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Linguistics & Psychology, Department of Linguistics, 2006. / Bibliography: p. 319-326. / Introduction: the complex tale of self in psychotherapy -- Literature review -- Introduction to the corpora and general linguistic analysis -- Introduction to the lexicogrammatical analysis of scripts, chronicles and narratives -- Chronicles: this is my normality: the complex tale of the everyday -- Scripts: I am not normal: the complex tale of alienation -- Narratives: this is how I would like normal to be: the complex tale of normality as imagination and memory -- A complex tale of normality: lexicogrammatical features across scripts, chronicles and narratives -- The contexts of psychotherapy -- Generic structure -- A complex tale of self. / This thesis investigates the complex tales of self which emerge from conversations between psychotherapists and patients with borderline personality disorder. These patients struggle in establishing a border between themselves and significant others, which is itself fundamental to a deeper construal of their own existence. They are being treated within the Conversational Model of psychotherapy. The model is strongly oriented to techniques based on language and linguistic evidence and thus offers a linguistic site at which the study of the complex interaction of self and language can be made tractable.--Within a broad corpus of transcribed audio recordings of patient-therapist discourse, the principal focus of my linguistic study is the Conversational Model's claims about three conversational types-Scripts, Chronicles and Narratives. According to Meares, they present 'self as shifting state in the therapeutic conversation' (1998:876). The thesis investigates a selection of texts to represent these three conversational types, which I have chosen according to the claims in the Conversational Model literature. It tests the evidence of Meares' claims concerning the semantic characteristics which distinguish the three conversational types, as well as the linguistic evidence concerning the claims of change in the self in particular the presentation of 'self as shifting state' (1998:876). To achieve the levels of complexity required for this linguistic study of self, this thesis uses Systemic Functional Linguistics, which has a social, interactional orientation and a multidimensional and in particular, multistratal approach. The research demonstrates that therapeutically relevant aspects of the self can be productively described, across linguistic strata, in a consistent and reproducible way as a construction of meaning. The meanings which speakers offer in wordings can provide a reliable index for evaluating the emergence and maintenance of self. The Conversational Model's 'conversations' are confirmed as linguistically distinguishable text types and the research further shows that key terms of the Conversational Model can be defended theoretically on the basis of linguistic evidence, for example, the contrastive linearlnon-linear. Together the findings describe the complexity in the tale of self.--This investigation of the Conversational Model data also tests the claims of a functional linguistics at the same time that it evaluates the Conversational Model with respect to that model's consistent appeals to language as evidence. It establishes an opportunity to extend the dialogue between linguists and practitioners of the Conversational Model: the tools of the one group increase the reflective capabilities of the other. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / xx, 385 p. ill

"November 2001". / Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Linguistics and Psychology, Dept. of Linguistics, 2002. / Bibliography: p. 285-291. / Introduction -- Language from a systemic functional perspective -- Social networks: a review of literature relevant to the Scotland Island study -- Methodology -- Analysing relational ties: a social network perspective -- A systemic functional approach to analysing social reality -- Discussion and conclusion. / This research is concerned with the study of language and the social order. Working within the systemic functional theory of language, and utilising the concept of a social network to model the social order, the primary aim is to put on display the relationship between the linguistic system and social order, between language and culture. Systemic functional grammar (Halliday, 1995; Halliday and Hasasn, 1985/9; Halliday and Matthiesen, 1997; Eggins and Slade 1997), with its emphasis on language as a social semiotic, is used to analyse the language used by a group of four women engaged in casual conversation in a small Australian island community. Here the analysis reveals how the women negotiate their social reality when speaking to each other. It shows how their social relations are shaped within a text (Hasan, 1996), and explores the notion that, despite the seemingly trivial, unconscious nature of casual interactions, power and solidarity are continually being negotiated by the participants (Halliday, 1994; Eggins and Slade, 1997). More specifically, this research examines the notion that through lexico-grammatical and semantic selections participants are able to negotiate dominant positions in interaction. Social Network analysis has been used to examine the relationship between the individual and the group. It offers a quantifiable analytical tool for describing the character of an individual's everyday social relationships (Milroy, 1987). A social network analysis is used in the present study to map the social relationships in the tight-knit network, or speech fellowship, of these women (creating a map of the context of situation in SFL terminology). Change in the social relationships and language choices is modeled by revisiting the participants 15 months later in a contextually similar environment and re-analysing the network and linguistic options. Systemic functional linguistics is then used to highlight the interdependency of language and social order. Through systematic accounts of language and the context in which it is embedded this reciprocal nature is displayed and language and social order can be seen, not as two distinct entities, but rather as one phenomena seen from two different perspectives (Halliday, 1978; Mathiessen, 1993). / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / v, 291 p. ill

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [199]-206).

Thesis (Ph. D)--University of Alberta, 2009. / "A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Linguistics, Modern Languages and Cultural Studies." Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on July 14, 2009). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 470-482).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 321-350).