The phenomenon of laughter has intrigued many philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and – most recently – linguists. While laughter is conventionally thought of as a component of the phenomenon of humor, this paper seeks to empirically illustrate how laughter may be used in unconventional ways, i.e. in response to nonhumorous (and in fact discordant) sequences in conversation. The term coping laughter refers to laughter that attempts to remedy, correct, reframe, or distract from something that is undesirable in a conversation. This paper proposes that there are two types of coping laughter (IN-laughter and RE-laughter) that accomplish different functions based on who initiates the laughter. Eight data samples are analyzed within the analytical frameworks of politeness and conversational framing with special treatments of the evolution of laughter and the structure of conflict. / text

This thesis approaches classroom interaction in association with Bakhtin and conversation analysis (CA). The four studies presented in this thesis seek to highlight different aspects of classroom interactional encounters between the students and teachers of a secondary school class. Through these studies, the thesis addresses the following challenges: How can analysts account for ‘multilingual’ communicative practices in a way which respects the views and orientations of the participants? How may dialogism be relevant for classroom interaction? How can we move beyond the representational (in)sufficiency of an oral language focus on (classroom) communication for analysis of human meaning making practices? The studies arise from ethnographic fieldwork at an independent secondary school with a ‘bilingual’ educational profile where data of everyday instructional life was generated through participant observation and video recordings. Methodologically, the studies have been enabled by Bakhtinian concepts and conversation analytic conventions amplified for analysis of the complex range of modalities composing classroom interaction. Study 1 examines the way participants’ use of two (or more) languages in a ‘foreign’ language classroom throw light on each other in processes of lexical orientation which challenge the privileging or the subordination of any one language in language learning. Study 2 demonstrates the consequences for understanding the participants’ sense-making efforts of making representationally (in)visible integral aspects of their multimodal cooperations. Study 3 focuses on whole-class task instructions as interactionally complex by showing some of the mutual orientations through which teacher and students coordinate each other’s stances and consequently craft instructions collaboratively. Study 4 examines the concept of languaging critically in the light of Bakhtin’s penetrating perception of the utterance and underscores that while we may be able to language when communicating, we are also languaged communicators. / <p>The research is a part of Swedish Research Council project LISA-21</p>

This study employs conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA) in an exploration of the interactional organization of talk between doctors and the mothers (or the female guardians acting as “proxy mothers”) of HIV-positive child patients being treated at a paediatric hospital in the Western Cape, South Africa, in 2003. The analysis focuses on how the HIV paediatric consultation is co-constructed between the doctor and the mother/guardian, and how interactional choices on the part of the participants shape the course of the consultation. Specific attention is placed on how participants orient to, hear, respond to and coconstruct the category of “mother”, along with the emergent inferences of what constitutes “good mothering” in the context of pursuing the wellbeing of the HIV-positive child who - as it emerges in certain cases - has evidently been infected by the mother in the first instance. As its core focus, this study examines how orienting to “good mothering” is done - in a moment-bymoment, collaborative and co-constructed manner – in the immediate course of the doctor/mother/guardian consultation. This involves considering the interplay of shifts in orientations to “motherly responsibility” and “doctorly responsibility”, and how these shifts are collaboratively activated, negotiated and responded to, as the consultation proceeds.

The Internet represents an abundant source material for linguistic research, which continues to pose new challenges and opportunities on how language is used by its speakers. Its personal naming system, for example, has remained largely unexplored. Of the many facets of names on the Internet awaiting closer scrutiny, the phenomenon of usernames is perhaps the most fundamental. This thesis investigates the role they play in online life, the most suitable methods to approach them, and how they compare with the names used offline and where their place is in onomastics in general. With people’s names inevitably connected with one or another aspect of identity, this work focuses on the relationship between usernames and online identities. The data has been gathered from a forum on the Russian-speaking sector of the Internet (RuNet) and comprises all registered usernames (676 at the time of collection) as well as an extensive and methodically selected sample of users’ conversations. As a general analytical framework, it utilises Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology, which conceptualises identity as a result of the ongoing interaction that people negotiate and achieve in everyday life rather than a set of inherent inner qualities. More specifically, the following methodological tools devised by Sacks (e.g. 1995, 1984a, 1984b) have been used to perform the analysis: Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) to categorise the usernames of the forum participants, and Conversation Analysis (CA), to observe how usernames contribute to the construction of individual identities. Finally, the concept of Stance, as presented by Du Bois (2007), has been used as a lens to identify relevant evidence in the conversation samples. The analysis has demonstrated the need for a systematic categorisation of usernames. The way in which they associate sets of attributes, facilitates the allocation of named entities as members of certain categories of persons. Both linguistic and typographic elements of usernames contribute to how they are perceived and what impression they create. It is also argued that usernames have an important role to play in the active and ongoing construction of individual identities. The study concludes that CMC participants operate their usernames as meaningful linguistic devices to construct and co-construct each other’s identities. CA and MCD are confirmed to be relevant methods to analyse onomastic data. This study has generated a reliable body of evidence for the assertion that usernames are far from meaningless, and demonstrates, moreover, how their meanings are established. In so doing, it constitutes an important contribution to onomastic theory with the potential to shed new light on personal naming in general.

This study sets out to explore how people who took part in mass protests in Russia produce and negotiate accounts of their protest involvement in talk. Although there has been a proliferation of research on protest in Russia, especially after the first mass demonstration in December 2011, the existing literature tends to prioritise the role of structural and demographic factors in mobilising dissent. However, there has been little investigation into how protesters themselves account for protest involvement and how they make such factors relevant. In addition, no in-depth social psychological exploration of protesters’ views has been conducted in Russia to date. This thesis addresses these gaps by offering a detailed empirical investigation of autobiographical accounts produced by Russian protesters regarding the reasons and motives for taking part in active protest and the subjective interpretations of what being a protester means. Semi-structured interviews with 48 Russian participants were collected, transcribed and translated. The data were analysed within the framework of discursive social psychology (DP). The analysis focused on how particular descriptions were used by protesters in talk to justify and contest certain versions of reality, and on the social actions thereby accomplished. The analysis led to novel insights into how protesters in Russia construct the causes and motives of their dissent, negotiate problematic identity categories and manage issues revolving around accountability and blame. For example, the analysis illustrated the potentially problematic nature of defining protesters’ interests and objectives as ‘political’. That is, when asked about their political attitudes, the interviewees actively justified these as not intentional. They mobilised various discursive resources to imply that they did not intend to become interested in politics and protest, but rather experienced situations that ‘naturally’ led to the acquisition of political interest. Similarly, when talking about motives for active protest participation, protesters tended to downplay explicitly political motivations. Instead, they portrayed their actions as a logical consequence of the deteriorating situation: some participants justified their involvement in terms of duty to defend their loved ones and the country in general, while others defended the appropriateness of active resistance through invoking powerful negative emotions. Such accounts functioned to protect protesters from being seen as motivated by personal or economic concerns, and warranted active protest as the only available means to address the unjust state of affairs in the country. Furthermore, I have shown that identifying with the label of ‘opposition’ is problematic for protesters, with oppositional membership being either denied or delimited in a number of ways. For example, the analysis demonstrated how respondents accomplished denials by making claims about the activities and attributes associated with the category of ‘member of the opposition’ and by invoking the negative connotations of the very term ‘opposition’. The instances of self-ascription of opposition membership further illustrated the sensitive nature of the topic: affirmation accounts were often modified to delimit the extent and nature of membership, with it being portrayed as a logical consequence of a speaker’s views, rather than in terms of emotional or psychological basis, such as shared identity or desire to belong. Finally, my study focused on the arguments relating to the people who do not protest. Interestingly, I found that, despite routinely warranting rationality and necessity of active protest, respondents portrayed the passive members of the public as not blameworthy. The behaviour of non-protesters was justified through attributing it to various practical hindrances and to specific cultural/generational mindsets, thereby placing it outside of peoples’ control. Overall, my thesis contributes to the social psychological literature on protest, by providing a complementary model of contention through the prism of protesters’ own orientations. The study demonstrated that, for protesters in Russia, protest experiences appear to be closely linked with interpersonal and normative considerations, with dissent being manufactured as a necessary and inherently moral act aimed at protecting Russia and its people. The study thus illustrated the utility of putting people’s accounts at the forefront of the analysis and treating them as valuable in their own right. In adopting a novel methodological approach to exploring protest realities as products of interaction, this thesis created an opportunity for a better understanding of the complexities and challenges of popular protest in Russia.

Almost 25 years ago, Clawson, Bostrom, and Anson (1993) drew attention to the fact that the ability to facilitate diverse human and technological interactions will be one of the most essential skills for leading and contributing to all levels of the organization in the future (p. 547). Today, there is an increased interest in studying facilitated meetings, wherein facilitation is most commonly understood as the process of helping groups work effectively to accomplish shared outcomes. Nevertheless, little of the existing research has provided empirically-grounded insights into the practice of facilitation. This thesis aims to close this gap by means of providing a detailed analysis of how facilitators go about doing facilitation work in facilitated computer-supported workplace meetings. The data comprise 53 hours of audio- and video-recorded multi-party interactions among facilitator(s) and participants, occurring during facilitated meetings in a business setting. The data were analysed using conversation analysis to examine the talk and embodied conduct of facilitators and meeting participants, as these unfold sequentially. The first analytic chapter reveals the macro-organization of the facilitated meetings, and it contrasts the practice view with the theoretical approach towards the organization of the facilitated meetings. The second analytic chapter investigates the interactional practices used by the facilitators to unpack participation that has already been elicited, captured, and displayed graphically on the public screen via the use of technology. In the third analytic chapter, I explore how the facilitators use computer software to build visual representations of the participants contributions. In the final analytic chapter, I investigate the practices of decision-making in meeting settings with multiple participants. Overall, this thesis makes innovative contributions to our understanding of the practice of facilitated computer-supported workplace meetings. It challenges existing literature on facilitation by finding that facilitators can orchestrate participant input, questioning the facilitator s role as content-neutral , as proposed by leading practitioners in the field of facilitation (e.g., Kaner et al., 2014). At the same time, it shows how the manipulation of computer software is an accountable action and how the decision-making process occasions or constrains the production of alignment between participant(s) and facilitator(s). The thesis also contributes to conversation analytic research on questioning, as well as the action of unpacking participation. I show that the notion that open-ended questions better elicit participation than interrogatives is generally not supported empirically, at least in this context. The thesis contributes to existing literature on multi-party meeting interaction, showing how the departure from the canonical next-speaker selection technique which involves the use of address terms and address positions in an utterance takes place. Further, it enhances our understanding of how computer software constrains and/or affords progressivity in interaction. In this sense, I enhance our understanding of the concept of agency of artefacts. Finally, I contribute to knowledge on group decision-making, an under-researched yet core activity in facilitated and other types of meetings. Here, I contribute to the body of work on the interplay between deontics and epistemics in interaction. This thesis shows the applicability of conversation analysis to the study of facilitation. By analysing talk and embodied conduct, communicative practices for accomplishing successful facilitated meetings are revealed and these should be of core interest to both professional and novice facilitators.

Politeness Phenomena and Mild Conflict in Japanese Casual Conversation

<p>Personer med afasi får sin språkförmåga nedsatt på flera olika sätt vilket kan försvåra för dem att delta i samtal. De kan då använda sig av olika strategier för att hantera dessa problem. En sådan strategi är skratt. Denna uppsats syftar till att studera hur personer med afasi använder sig av skratt vid vardaglig interaktion. Föreliggande studie har utgått från videofilmer där en kvinna med afasi interagerar med olika personer i olika miljöer. Samtalen har transkriberats och analyserats enligt principer från Conversation Analysis. Studien har identifierat tre typer av situationer då kvinnan använder sig av skratt: skratt vid anomi, skratt vid genans samt skratt vid skämt. Det har visat sig att hon skrattar dels för att kompensera svårigheter med tal men även vid helt vanliga humoristiska situationer som vilken person som helst. Många av de tillfällen där Maja skrattar ignoreras eller får inte ett skratt som respons.</p>

The thesis deals mainly with the following four points: - similarities and differences between repair in everyday talk-in-interaction and repair in the context of theater rehearsals - asymmetrical relationship between director, prompter, and actors - impact of the asymmetrical relationship between director and actors on their specific repair behavior - change of the relative amount of self-repair and other-repair over the time span of the rehearsal period. The analyses are undertaken according to the conversation analytic approach. Furthermore, there is an quantitative analysis of the repair development over time.

Personer med afasi får sin språkförmåga nedsatt på flera olika sätt vilket kan försvåra för dem att delta i samtal. De kan då använda sig av olika strategier för att hantera dessa problem. En sådan strategi är skratt. Denna uppsats syftar till att studera hur personer med afasi använder sig av skratt vid vardaglig interaktion. Föreliggande studie har utgått från videofilmer där en kvinna med afasi interagerar med olika personer i olika miljöer. Samtalen har transkriberats och analyserats enligt principer från Conversation Analysis. Studien har identifierat tre typer av situationer då kvinnan använder sig av skratt: skratt vid anomi, skratt vid genans samt skratt vid skämt. Det har visat sig att hon skrattar dels för att kompensera svårigheter med tal men även vid helt vanliga humoristiska situationer som vilken person som helst. Många av de tillfällen där Maja skrattar ignoreras eller får inte ett skratt som respons.