Browsing by Subject "Conversation analysis"
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Item Achieving similarity: An examination of footing, second stories and preference organization in discipleship talk(2007-05) Gibson, Mary LeAnne; Hughes, Patrick C.; Williams, David E.; Gring, Mark A.Although many studies have examined religious communication, there are relatively few that focus on the everyday practices involved in religious communication. Specifically, there is a lack of research that examines conversation about religion and faith. Many churches are currently implementing "discipleship programs" into their ministries in order to encourage growth and maturity within the congregation. These discipleship relationships emphasize conversation and interaction, and should be considered worthy of study. In order to study discipleship, four conversations between discipleship dyads were audio-recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed. The current research utilized conversation analysis in order to understand how footing, second stories, and dispreferred turns function within discipleship conversations. Additionally, the analysis focuses on how speakers and recipients achieve similarity and agreement in discipleship conversations.Item Conversational narrative: a meta-analysis of narrative analysis(2003) Carbon, Susan Elizabeth; Blyth, Carl S. (Carl Stewart), 1958-This dissertation is a meta-analysis of the narrative analysis methodologies of Labov and Waletzky (1967), Labov (1972, 1997, 2001, 2002), Polanyi (1985) and Ochs and Capps (2001) using data from the Minnesota Corpus (Barnes, 1984) to test the usefulness of these methodologies. Conversational narrative was first a subject of analysis in the late 60's when Labov and Waletzky, working under the influence of structural linguistics, decided that in order to better understand narrative, one must understand its most basic form, which they felt resided in oral versions of personal experience. Since their groundbreaking 1967 study, the field of conversational narrative analysis has been dominated by structural approaches to narrative that seek to define the structural components of a narrative and formulate an analysis based on these components. Only recently with the introduction of Ochs and Capps' methodology in 2001 has an alternative which values both the context and the interactive nature of narrative and seeks to describe the co-participant's influences on narrative been put forth. This meta-analysis suggests that there are positive and negative qualities to each of the methodologies at issue and that different methodologies are more or less appropriate for different types of data. While the structural approaches to conversational narrative suggested by Labov and Polanyi do not provide an adequate means to analyze interactive narratives, Ochs and Capps' methodology requires more extensive ethnographic information than what were available from the Minnesota corpus data. While the Ochs and Capps' approach seems overall to be the best suited for the type of data at issue in the Minnesota corpus, there are also clear benefits to be derived from applying a more structural approach. Specifically, an analysis of a narrative's Non-Storyworld clauses (as defined by Polanyi) seems to provide important insights. Moreover, these clauses can help the analyst address how interlocutors make sense of the relevance of narrative in coversational discourse, something hinted at by both Labov and Polanyi. I suggest that a combination of elements from both structural and ethnographic approaches provides a more complete methodology with which to analyze interactive narrative data.Item Designing the debate turns: microanalysis of the 2008 U.S. presidential debates(2009-12) Han, Ji Won, 1978-; Streeck, Jurgen; Maxwell, Madeline M.This thesis examines interactional dimensions of the 2008 U.S. presidential debates based on the conversation analytic concepts of sequence organization and turn management. Drawing on the video recordings of the three 2008 presidential debates, I investigate features of turn design and interactional strategies that candidates employ during the debates and compare stylistic differences between John McCain and Barack Obama. I first examine how candidates design their first-turn responses to the moderator’s question in terms of placement of two different actions, answer and attack. Secondly, I focus on design of the second-turn responses and examine how candidates show responsiveness to both the moderator’s question and the opponent’s prior turn by incorporating multiple actions (e.g., attack, defense, and answer) in their second turns. I also examine direct exchanges between McCain and Obama, particularly concerning their strategic use of the record and their interactional practices in claiming turns and managing overlapping talk in confrontation sequences. My analysis shows that some stylistic differences exist between McCain’s and Obama’s turns. I provide detailed description of how Obama makes a systematic transition from answer to attack in his first-turn responses, which is distinguished from McCain’s first turns in which attacks are inserted in his answer as relevant topics are brought up. My analysis of the second-turn responses shows that McCain frequently produces an attack at turn beginning or responds to an attack with a reciprocal attack before producing a defense, while Obama tends to produce a defense first and then move to an attack. Lastly, I discuss how both Obama and McCain manage their turns and use turn-taking techniques to avoid direct references to their own record and shift the focus of the talk to the opponent’s stance on a related issue.Item Everyday (re)enactment: reporting strategies in non-narrative talk-in-interaction(2006) Henning, Kathryn Hickerson; Streeck, JürgenItem Identity-as-context : sequential and categorical organization of interactions on A Chinese microblogging website(2013-05) Huang, LulingThis study seeks to investigate this core research topic: how identity is involved in everyday interactions between Chinese microblogging website users? By understanding identity as an element in the interaction context of discursive practices, the investigation is achieved through the analysis of naturally occurring text-based online data. Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) are used to do the analysis. The former will focus on the interaction structure while the latter will be used to make some of the contents in the interactions relevant. This study seeks to make the “orderliness” (Sacks, 1972) and “members’ methods” (Garfinkel, 1967) under a particular context describable and analyzable. The sequential and categorical organization described in this study shows how members are oriented to identities in the in situ context when they exchange their ideas on a sensitive topic, and on a microblogging website.Item Imagining the scenario: emergency training simulations and embodied action(2015-12) Suy, Melissa Lynne; Streeck, Jürgen; Ballard, DawnaThis thesis is a microanalytic investigation of embodied resources used to complete imaginary emergency scenarios in paramedic simulation training exercises. Emergency simulations present an intriguing site for investigating the process of imagination in that cognitive processes are displayed through human action. I examine training from both a multimodal perspective and also as an embodied cognitive process. I found that the students employ a number of communicative strategies to anchor themselves physically in the imagined space of the scenario. First, I examine how the fictional frame is embedded in the instructional frame, particularly focusing on how the lead student designs utterances in relation to the fictional component of the scenario. I argue that the routine activities serve as scaffolding and recognizable actions throughout the simulation grounding the students physically in the simulation. Secondly, I found that there is never a point in the laboratory exercises where the simulated action becomes automated; rather, the students must continually work at building action in the scenario. I also examine how sensory exploration, specifically looking and touching, allow students to rehearse future embodied action. Lastly, I argue that the students are not only developing intellectual knowledge of treating and stabilizing a patient in the field, they are also training their bodies as the main source of action.Item Negotiating story entry : a micro-analytic study of storytelling projection in English and Japanese(2011-05) Yasui, Eiko; Streeck, Jürgen; Maxwell, Madeline; McGlone, Matthew; Keating, Elizabeth; Hayashi, MakotoThis dissertation offers a micro-analytic study of the use of language and body during storytelling in American English and Japanese conversations. Specifically, I focus on its beginning and explore how a story is projected. A beginning of an action or activity is where an incipient speaker negotiates the floor with co-participants; they pre-indicate their intention to speak while informing the recipients of how they are expected to listen to the following talk. In particular, storytelling involves a specific need to secure long turn space before it begins since unlike other types of talk, a story usually requires more than an utterance to complete. Drawing on conversation analysis, I investigate how various communicative resources, including language, gesture, gaze, and body posture, manage such negotiation of the floor during entry into a story. This study involves two focuses. First, it examines not only vocal means, but also non-vocal devices. Thus, I explore the linguistic resources employed to project the relationship between a forthcoming telling and ongoing talk. Specifically, I investigate how coherence and disjunction are projected differently – some stories are continuous with prior talk while others may start as a new activity. I also investigate the vocal resources for projection of a return to an abandoned story. Specifically, I demonstrate how a continuation and resumption are projected differently. Finally, I investigate the employment of non-vocal devices relevant to the projection of story entry. Secondly, this study takes a cross-linguistic perspective. By examining conversations in two typologically different languages, American English and Japanese, I investigate how linguistic resources are consequential to the way projection is accomplished. Also, since only few studies have been conducted on storytelling in Japanese conversation, I aim to contribute to a better understanding of how the previous findings from English storytelling can be applied to Japanese conversations. Storytelling is an important activity for human social life; telling of what we did, saw, heard about, or know helps us build good relationships with our interactants. This dissertation thus aims to explore how interactants co-construct a site for an important interpersonal activity in everyday interaction.Item Pursuing a therapeutic agenda: conversation analysis of a marital therapy session(Texas Tech University, 1989-05) Gale, Jerry Edward.Item Same-turn self-repair practices in peer-peer L2 conversational dyads(2016-08) Kusey, Crystal Lyn; Palmer, Deborah K.; Sardegna , Veronica G; Horwitz , Elaine K; Schallert , Diane L; Streeck , Jürgen KThis dissertation presents microanalyses of same-turn self-initiated self-repair practices employed by 17 advanced-level English language learners as they engaged in a naturally occurring conversation task in their Listening and Speaking class. Drawing on videotaped interactions involving dyads from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, I investigated learners’ self-repair practices using a Conversation Analytic (CA) framework, specifically Schegloff’s (2013) ten operations in self-initiated, same-turn repair: replacing, inserting, deleting, searching, parenthesizing, aborting, sequence-jumping, recycling, reformatting, and reordering. Using CA, I examined the moment-by-moment unfolding interaction, focusing on the kinds of same-turn self-initiated self-repair operation types and subtypes that emerged in the data along with their relative distributional frequency and technologies. Technologies are the techniques that learners employ as they carry out various repair operations (e.g., hesitation markers, gesture, etc.). This study provides a detailed description of first (primary role) and second order (supporting role) operation types and subtypes, and technologies employed by the language learners during conversation. Sometimes, a repair operation functions as a technology within another repair operation. For example, recycling may be used as a first order operation to gain time, but can also be used as a second order operation as a framing device to locate the trouble source. The results of this study suggest that same-turn self-initiated self-repairs provide language learners with opportunities to progress the conversation, as well as opportunities to construct various action types (e.g., preempting an upcoming misunderstanding, obviate a potential disagreement, remove responsibility due to lack of certitude, etc.). The results also support language learners’ preference for progressivity, where they utilized various technologies to help them manage this preference. There appeared to be many similarities and a few differences between the analyzed data and native speaker data. The findings revealed a multi-dimensional view of repair that highlights students’ linguistic, communicative, and interactional competence, not their deficits. This study addresses methodological and pedagogical implications, as well as future research directives.Item The sounds of social life: exploring students' daily social environments and natural conversations(2004) Mehl, Matthias Richard; Pennebaker, James W.Recently, concerns have been raised that psychology has lost contact with naturally-occurring social life and that the discipline would benefit from a course correction towards more context- and culture-sensitive research. What do people do over the course of a day? What psychological factors account for the different lives they live? These questions aim at rather basic issues in psychology. Yet surprisingly little is known about how individuals behave, select situations, and interact with their environments in the real world. We have recently introduced the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) as a research tool for sampling behavioral data in naturalistic settings. The EAR records 30-second snippets of ambient sounds in participants’ immediate environments approximately every 12 minutes. This dissertation used three major EAR data sets to reveal how students’ social lives are related to basic psychological processes that traditionally have been at the heart of the discipline. Study 1 laid the methodological foundations by showing that the EAR is generally tolerated well by students, perceived as fairly unobtrusive, and worn with high levels of compliance. Study 2 provided a quantitative ethnography of students’ daily lives. It established the base rates and the degree of interindividual variability in their social environments and natural conversations. It further tested for gender and ethnic differences in social life. Finally, it identified systematic circadian fluctuations in students’ daily lives. Study 3 investigated the role that everyday social life plays in interpersonal perception. Following Brunswik’s lens-model paradigm, the analyses showed that unacquainted observers formed fairly accurate personality impressions about a target person on the basis of the person’s EARrecorded social life. With regard to the underlying perceptual paths, the analyses revealed that observers’ impressions were shaped by various cues derived from the targets’ daily interactions, locations, activities, moods and language use. Taken together, the three studies identified the ways people select and interact with their everyday environments as powerful behavioral markers of individual differences. On a broader level they laid the foundation for a psychological study of naturalistic person-situation interactions that offers a new look at basic conceptual questions in personality psychology.Item Why we laugh when nothing's funny: the use of laughter to cope with disagreement in conversation(2010-05) Warner-Garcia, Shawn Rachel; Epps, Patience, 1973-; Hinrichs, LarsThe 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.