The well-established sociolinguistic literature on complimenting claims that compliments are formulaic (Manes and Wolfson 1981). The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that the claim is invalid, to describe an alternative approach to the study of compliments, and to draw on an extensive collection of compliments in order to show that complimenting is a diverse, interactive process. A prerequisite for such work is a means of deciding whether a given utterance is a compliment, but this issue is neglected in the literature. The conversation analytic notion of preference appeared capable of providing this criterion, but research revealed that it was too ill-defined to serve such a purpose. The thesis was, therefore, obliged to clarify the notion of preference before applying it to a study of compliments. The necessary clarification was found in the enthnomethodological roots of conversation analysis, and the thesis provides a clear and consistent means of determining whether utterances are preferred to dispreferred. The criteria used in the determination of preference are applied, in the final chapter, to the study of compliments. The results of the study contrast markedly with those of the sociolinguistic researchers, and they provide significant grounds for rejecting the claim that compliments are formulaic.

This work is centred on the ethnomethodological concern that all texts can be respecified, as situated accomplishments of members' practical action and practical reasoning. Using, as a foundation, the work of Garfinkel (1967) and Sacks (I 992a; 1992; b) it undertakes the explication of members' methods of understanding and maldng sense of news reportage concerning airliner crashes. Methodologically it is grounded in Sacks' work on membership categories, devices and category bound activities. It is the assertion of this work that the study of the language of the news media should not be motivated by theoretical concerns and finthermore that the subject matter be considered as formally located in the occaisioned particulars of its Use.

Ce travail de thèse est consacré à la réalisation télévisée de matches de football diffusés en direct. Il est le fruit d’un travail d’enquête vidéo-ethnographique mené auprès des équipes techniques de Canal + durant la diffusion de matches du championnat de France de football. Plutôt que de s’intéresser au document filmique comme résultat et support d’interprétation, cette thèse adopte le point de vue des techniciens de la régie en proposant une analyse empirique des activités de perception, de filmage et de montage propres à la réalisation de l’événement en direct. Une telle optique, attentive au déroulement de l’action, montre qu’il se produit un ajustement réflexif entre le travail des opérateurs et l’environnement filmé. Elle met donc à mal un schéma selon lequel on distinguerait un événement d’une part, et sa production médiatique de l’autre – schéma qui contribuerait par ailleurs à essentialiser l’événement. À travers cette enquête sur la réalisation d’un match de football, il s’agit donc ici d’étudier la médiatisation en train de se faire. Par l’analyse vidéo des interactions des techniciens au travail, cette thèse replace le programme télévisé dans son environnement technologique, collaboratif et incarné de production. La perspective praxéologique adoptée ici prend en compte les spécificités de la réalisation en direct. Elle décrit comment émerge l’événement à travers les écrans et les enceintes de la régie et comment les interactions du match sont réflexivement rendues observables par le montage en temps-réel. / This PhD dissertation develops an approach to live soccer TV-production defined as a practical accomplishment, based on a fieldwork observation of real-time editing in the control-room during matches of the French championship (Ligue 1) broadcasted by Canal +. Instead of focusing on the broadcast as a result and a resource for interpretation, this thesis analyses the activities of perception, filming and editing exhibited by the participants of the control-room. By a video-analysis of operators’ interactions, it considers the TV-broadcast from the technological, collaborative and embodied environment of its production. This praxeological perspective takes into account the visual and temporal characteristics of real-time multi-cameras editing. It describes the emergence of the remote event from the screens and the speakers of the control-room. Thus, it examines how, by real-time editing, the participants of the control-room order, reflexively and visually, the interactions of the match they watch. This emic perspective shows that there is a reflexive and temporal adjustment between operators at work and the environment they produce. The televised broadcast is considered as an account of the soccer match and of the social and moral phenomena taking place in it. Instead of adopting a critical perspective on “sport shows”, this dissertation proposes an empirical analysis of the endogenous dynamics of the activity of operators in the recent development of sport events.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2006. / Document formatted into pages; contains v, 109 p. Includes bibliographical references.

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Viewing sport coaching as complex and relational, this thesis used the writings of Harold Garfinkel, who developed ethnomethodological inquiry, as an alternative social theorist to better understand the activity. The aim of this study was to explore and deconstruct the everyday interactions of coaches, through paying specific attention to the context under which such behaviours occur. Accepting that coaching is a social activity, the purpose was to examine the ‘taken-for-granted’ social rules that the coaches and players of Bayside Rovers F.C. (pseudonym), a semi-professional football club, utilised to achieve desired ends. In doing so, the study adopted an ethnomethodologically informed ethnography to observe, participate and describe how the coaches managed, manipulated and influenced others through their ‘social competencies’ (Lemert, 1997). The data were collected over the course of a full domestic season (10 months). Through adopting an iterative approach, the data were subject to a light ethnomethodological analysis, principally drawing upon the work of Harold Garfinkel (1967, 2002, 2006). What is presented then, are four codes that were used to describe and explain the behaviour patterns observed. The codes included; ‘play well’, ‘fitting-in’, the ‘brotherhood’ and ‘respecting space’. More specifically, the ethnomethodological analysis demonstrated how coaches and players ‘actualised’ the codes (Wieder, 1974). In this respect, Garfinkel’s writings are used as a ‘respecification’ of some fundamental aspects of coaches’ everyday work that is ‘seen but unnoticed’ (Garfinkel, 1967). From this perspective, the findings contribute to the increasingly refined body of research acknowledging coaching as a social activity, further highlighting the principal link between sociology and sport coaching.

This is a study of the ways in which citizens construct sense in the voting booth while voting. The experimental design is a pretest posttest control group. The driving theory is that citizens want to convince themselves that they have made sense of the information presented to them. This is their singular value. The reason why this is upheld as the singular value is because without the capacity to construct sense in the voting process, voters would otherwise feel disenfranchised (i.e. deprived of the right to vote) and subsequently feel alienated (i.e. deprived of the rewards that can come from voting). Citizens will be given an opportunity to present bills; they will evoke certain keywords and phrases. The citizen will later evoke varied terminology when confronted with voting patterns from "Senators". The test for the citizen in this experiment will be to remove those Senators who are voting at random and provide reasons for either reelection to or removal from office. There are two anticipated results: 1) Senators voting in random patterns will be removed from office in an equal or lesser proportion than remaining Senators, and 2) responses to non-random voting patterns will evoke lesser variation in terminology employed.

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