Arnulf Deppermann

Institute for the German Language · Pragmatics

The article describes the practices through which patients’ self-presentations are challenged in psychotherapy. Based on the analysis of thirty-eight instances from psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, analyzed with methods of conversation analysis, narrative analysis, and coding, this article reports on how therapists challenge patients...

In multi-lingual workplace interaction involving L2-speakers with different levels of proficiency, L1-speakers can be seen to use self-translation of their own prior contributions as a repair-practice to restore intersubjectivity. This paper shows that self-translations are produced in three environments: (a) in response to repair-initiation by rec...

This collection of original papers illustrates recent trends and new perspectives for future research in Interactional Linguistics (IL). Since the research program was started around the turn of the century, it has prospered internationally. Recently, however, new developments have opened up new perspectives for interactional linguistic research. I...

In request for confirmation (RfC) sequences, interlocutors negotiate their social positions regarding access and rights to knowledge. The article presents an overview of a quantitative analysis of 200 RfCs and their responses in German conversations to highlight the relevant linguistic resources speakers of the language deployed to position themsel...

While requests for confirmation (RfCs) make a yes/no-response relevant, recipients often produce more than a mere confirmation. Our paper explores expanded responses to RfCs in German talk-in-interaction. We focus on responses consisting of a confirmation and an additional TCU /action. Drawing on video data from mundane and institutional settings,...

This editorial to the Special Issue on “Meaning in Interaction” introduces to the approach of Interactional Semantics, which has been developed over the last years within the framework of Interactional Linguistics. It discusses how “meaning” is understood and approached in this framework and lays out that Interactional Semantics is interested in ho...

In social interaction, different kinds of word-meaning can become problematic for participants. This study analyzes two meta-semantic practices, definitions and specifications, which are used in response to clarification requests in German implemented by the format Was heißt X (‘What does X mean?’). In the data studied, definitions are used to conv...

Using multimodal conversation analysis, we investigate how novices learning the “inner body” acting technique in the context of a community theater project share their experiences of the bodily exercises through verbal and embodied conduct. We focus on how verbal description and bodily enactment of the experience mutually elaborate each other, and...

In workplace settings, skilled participants cooperate on the basis of shared routines in smooth and often implicit ways. Our study shows how interactional histories provide the basis for routine coordination. We draw on theater rehearsals as a perspicuous setting for tracking interactional histories. In theater rehearsals, the process of building p...

In theater as a bodily-spatial art form, much emphasis is placed on the way actors perform movements in space as an important multimodal resource for creating meaning. In theater rehearsals, movements are created in series of directors' instructions and actors' implementations. Directors' instructions on how to conduct a movement often draw on embo...

Der Beitrag illustriert die Nutzung des Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch (FOLK) für interaktionslinguistische Fragestellungen anhand einer exemplarischen Studie. Zunächst werden die Stratifikation (Datenkomposition) des Korpus, das zugrundeliegende Datenmodell und dessen Annotationsebenen sowie Typen von Untersuchungsinteressen vorge...

Deppermann, A. & Egbert, M. (2012). Conclusions and Future Perspectives for Application and Innovation. In: Egbert, M. & Deppermann, A. (Eds.) (2012). Hearing Aids Communication. Integrating Social Interaction, Audiology and User Centered Design to Improve Communication with Hearing Loss and Hearing Technologies. Verlag für Gesprächsforschung. Mann...

Schegloff (1996) has argued that grammars are “positionally-sensitive”, implying that the situated use and understanding of linguistic formats depends on their sequential position. Analyzing the German format Kannst du X? (corresponding to English Can you X? ) based on 82 instances from a large corpus of talk-in-interaction (FOLK), this paper shows...

Pointing gestures in a changing and transient environment: Driving lessons Among Charles Goodwin’s many contributions to the study of social interactions, his work on pointing gestures (1986, 2003, 2007) and professional vision (1994) represents an achievement of great consequence. Following Goodwin’s lead, we examine pointing gestures made by driv...

Research on multimodal interaction has shown that simultaneity of embodied behavior and talk is constitutive for social action. In this study, we demonstrate different temporal relationships between verbal and embodied actions. We focus on uses of German darf/kann ich? (“may/can I?”) in which speakers initiate, or even complete the embodied action...

Mock fiction is a genre of humorous, fictional narratives. It is pervasive in adolescents’ peer-group interaction. Building on a corpus of informal peer-group interaction among 14 to 17 year-old German adolescents, it is shown how mock fiction is used to sanction identity-claims of peer-group co-members that are taken to be inadequate by the teller...

Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study. Bringing together an international team of leading editors and contributors, it provides a comprehensive, cutting-edge overview of the key concepts, topics, settings and methodologies involved in sociopragmatic research. The chap...

Taking the use of the esthetic term wabi sabi (Japanese compound noun) in a series of German- and English-language theater rehearsals as an example, this article studies the emergence of shared meanings and uses of an expression over an interactional history. We track how shared understandings and uses of wabi sabi develop over the course of a seri...

How do people’s interactional practices change over time? Can conversation analysis identify those changes, and if so, how? In this introductory article, we scrutinize the novel insights that can be gained from examining interactional practices over time and discuss the related methodological challenges for longitudinal CA. We first retrace CA’s in...

In psychotherapy, therapists often formulate interpretations of clients' prior talk which are ‘unilateral’ in the sense that therapists index that they are themselves the author of an interpretive inference which may not be acceptable to the client. Based on 100 German-language recordings of brief psychodynamic psychotherapy (4 clients with 25 sess...

Our study deals with early bodily responses to directives (requests and instructions, i.e., second pair parts [SPPs]) produced before the first pair part (FPP) is complete. We show how early bodily SPPs build on the properties of an emerging FPP. Our focus is on the successive incremental coordination of components of the FPP with components of the...

This special issue investigates early responses—responsive actions that (start to) unfold while the production of the responded-to turn and action is still under way. Although timing in human conduct has gained intense interest in research, the early production of responsive actions has so far largely remained unexplored. But what makes early respo...

Using video-recordings from one day of a theater project for young adults, this paper investigates how the meaning of novel verbal expressions is interactionally constituted and elaborated over the interactional history of a series of activities. We examine how the theater director introduces and instructs the group in the Chekhovian technique of a...

According to Positioning Theory, participants in narrative interaction can position themselves on a representational level concerning the autobiographical, told self, and a performative level concerning the interactive and emotional self of the tellers. The performative self is usually much harder to pin down, because it is a non-propositional, ena...

This paper studies practices of indexing discrepant assumptions accomplished by turn-constructional units with ich dachte (‘I thought’) in German talk-in-interaction. Building on the analysis of 141 instances from the corpus FOLK, we identify three sequential environments in which ich dachte is used to index that an assumption which a speaker (has)...

Der Beitrag stellt zunächst die drei grundlegenden methodischen Verfahren der Konversationsanalyse und der mittlerweile deren Vorgehen folgenden diskursiven Psychologie dar: die Transkription, die detaillierte Sequenzanalyse am Einzelfall und die (komparative) Analyse von Datenkollektionen. Nach einer Übersicht über grundlegende Befunde zur Organis...

This article deals with narratives of traumatic experiences of parental violence in childhood, told by adult narrators in the context of clinical adult attachment interviews. The study rests on a corpus of interviews with 20 patients suffering from fibromyalgia, who were interviewed in the context of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Nine of the patient...

Der Beitrag stellt zunächst die drei grundlegenden methodischen Verfahren der Konversationsanalyse und der mittlerweile deren Vorgehen folgenden diskursiven Psychologie dar: die Transkription, die detaillierte Sequenzanalyse am Einzelfall und die (komparative) Analyse von Datenkollektionen. Nach einer Übersicht über grundlegende Befunde zur Organis...

Dieser Band bringt so verschiedene Disziplinen wie die Soziologie, die Kommunikationswissenschaft, die Linguistik, die Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie sowie die Psychologie und die Medienwissenschaft miteinander ins Gespräch, und zwar über die Frage, ob die Untersuchung von Kommunikationsprozessen in Grenzbereichen des Sozialen ein Überdenken zentr...

Kultur ist nicht nur zu einem Schlusselbegriff der Geisteswissenschaften geworden, sondern wird auch entterminologisiert als Alltagsbegriff benutzt. In diesem Beitrag wird untersucht, wie der Ausdruck Kultur (einschlieslich Derivationen und Komposita) in der mundlichen Interaktion verwendet wird. Auf Basis von 82 Instanzen im Korpus FOLK des IDS Ma...

This article examines a recurrent format that speakers use for defining ordinary expressions or technical terms. Drawing on data from four different languages—Flemish, French, German, and Italian—it focuses on definitions in which a definiendum is first followed by a negative definitional component (‘definiendum is not X’), and then by a positive d...

Dieser Artikel gibt einen Überblick darüber, wie grundlegend Wissen als Voraussetzung, Gegenstand und Produkt von Verständigungsprozessen für die Organisation von Gesprächen ist. Zunächst wird ein kognitivistischer Zugang zu Wissen mit einem sozialkonstruktivistischen kontrastiert. Es werden zum einen kommunikative Gattungen, die auf die Kommunikat...

This paper studies how the turn-design of a highly recurrent type of action changes over time. Based on a corpus of video-recordings of German driving lessons, we consider one type of instructions and analyze how the same instructional action is produced by the same speaker (the instructor) for the same addressee (the student) in consecutive trials...

Germany faces enormous challenges in the coming years. With the influx of just under 1.5 million refugees in the years 2014 to 2017 alone, there are major integration tasks in almost every area of society, and especially in the sectors of education and work. Steven Vertovec, head of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Multiethni...

This article reports on a study of instructional interaction in two professional training measures for refugees. This kind of measure is now widely used in Germany in order to prepare refugees for the German labour market. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we use a multimodal interaction approach to analyse video-recorded instructional sequences. Ou...

This paper argues that conversation analysis has largely neglected the fact that meaning in interaction relies on inferences to a high degree. Participants treat each other as cognitive agents, who imply and infer meanings, which are often consequential for interactional progression. Based on the study of audio- and video-recordings from German tal...

Response particles manage intersubjectivity. This conversation analytic study describes German eben (“exactly”). With eben, speaker A locally agrees with the immediately prior turn of B (the “confirmable”) and establishes a second indexical link: A relates B’s confirmable to a position A herself had already displayed (the “anchor”). Through claimin...

In this article we pursue a systematic and extensive study of overtaking in traffic as an interactional event. Our focus is on the accountable organisation and accomplishment of overtaking by road users in real-world traffic situations. Data and analysis are drawn from multiple research groups studying driving from an ethnometh-odological and conve...

This paper asks whether and in which ways managing coordination tasks in traffic involve the accomplishment of intersubjectivity. Taking instances of coordinating passing an obstacle with oncoming traffic as the empirical case, four different practices were found. 1. Intersubjectivity can be presupposed by expecting others to stick to the traffic c...

How do people communicate in mobile settings of interaction? How does mobility affect the way we speak? How does mobility exert influence on the manner in which talk itself is consequential for how we move in space? Recently, questions of this sort have attracted increasing attention in the human and social sciences. This Special Issue contributes...

en Building on a corpus of 70 hours of German driving lessons, this paper studies the use of declaratives vs. imperatives for instruction. It shows how these linguistic resources are adapted to different praxeological, temporal and participant‐related environments. Declaratives are used for first instructions, task‐setting and post‐trial discussion...

Der Beitrag stellt zunächst die drei grundlegenden methodischen Verfahren der Konversationsanalyse und der mittlerweile deren Vorgehen folgenden diskursiven Psychologie dar: die Transkription, die detaillierte Sequenzanalyse am Einzelfall und die (komparative) Analyse von Datenkollektionen. Nach einer Übersicht über grundlegende Befunde zur Organis...

In the management of cooperation, the fit of a requested action with what the addressee is presently doing is a pervasively relevant consideration. We present evidence that imperative turns are adapted to, and reflexively create, contexts in which the other person is committed to the course of action advanced by the imperative. This evidence comes...

Definitions as multimodal actions for practical purposes: The case of instructions in driving school Drawing on a corpus of 70 hours of video-recordings from driving school lessons in German, this paper studies the design of definitions of technical terms by driving school instructors. Definitions are produced for all practical purposes, tied to le...

This paper attempts a critique of the notion of ‘dialogue’ in dialogue theory as espoused by Linell, Markova, and others building on Bakhtin’s writings. According to them, human communication, culture, language, and even cognition are dialogical in nature. This implies that these domains work by principles of other-orientation and interaction. In o...

Au cours des instructions dans les leçons d'auto-école (cf. De Stefani & Gazin 2014), le moniteur introduit parfois des expressions plus ou moins techniques (montant B, point de patinage, point mort, etc.). Ces expressions jouent un rôle important dans les processus d'instruction et d'apprentissage. Elles désignent des objets ou elles expriment des...

Drawing on a corpus of 70 hours of video-recordings from driving school lessons in German, this paper studies the design of definitions of technical terms by driving school instructors. Definitions are produced for all practical purposes, tied to learning goals concerning the correct handling of the car. It is shown that the activity of defining in...

Our paper deals with the use of ICH WEIß NICHT (‘I don’t know’) in German talk-in-interaction. Pursuing an Interactional Linguistics approach, we identify different interactional uses of ICH WEIß NICHT and discuss their relationship to variation in argument structure (SV(O), (O)VS, V-only). After ICH WEIß NICHT with full complementation, speakers e...

This article presents a revised version of GAT, a transcription system first developed by a group of German conversation analysts and interactional linguists in 1998. GAT tries to follow as many principles and conventions as possible of the Jefferson-style transcription used in Conversation Analysis, yet proposes some conventions which are more com...

Language planning and language codification try to define what is to count as ‘standard language’. However, codified norms as macro-level phenomena are often at odds with the micro level of people’s linguistic usage, even in situations in which speakers can be expected to use standard variants and sometimes contrary to what language users themselve...

conversation analysis, understanding, intesubjectivit, German

Die Pragmatik hat sich im Lauf der letzten 40 Jahre fest als linguistische Teildisziplin etabliert. Schon relativ früh hat sich ein Kanon von Fragestellungen und Konzepten herausgebildet, der den Gegenstandsbereich der Pragmatik z.B. in Lehrbüchern und Enzyklopädien ausmacht. Die kanonischen Gegenstände (v.a. Sprechakte, Implikaturen, Präsuppositio...

Speakers' dialogical orientation to the particular others they talk to is implemented by practices of recipient-design. One such practice is the use of negation as a means to constrain interpretations of speaker's actions by the partner. The paper situates this use of negation within the larger context of other recipient-designed uses of negation w...

Günter Mey: Ich möchte mit Blick auf die hier am Podium versammelte Runde nur einige wenige Anmerkungen einstimmend vornehmen. Anliegen des seit dem 1. Berliner Methodentreffen durchgeführten Veranstaltungselements Symposium ist es, för qualitativ Forschende zentrale Themen anzusprechen und (mehr oder weniger kontrovers) zu diskutieren. Zurückliege...

Seit Anbeginn der qualitativen Sozialforschung haben Interviews Konjunktur (vgl. Merton & Kendall 1946); bei grober Betrachtung könnte man fast meinen, qualitative Sozialforschung sei im Wesentlichen gleichbedeutend mit Interviewforschung. So groß die Spannweite von Interviewformen ist (vgl. Mey & Mruck 2010), so unterschiedliche Auffassungen beste...

This article advocates an understanding of ‘positioning’ as a key to the analysis of identities in interaction within the methodological framework of conversation analysis. Building on research by Bamberg, Georgakopoulou and others, a performative, interaction-based approach to positioning is outlined and compared to membership categorization analy...

Das Interview ist nach wie vor das beliebteste sozialwissenschaftliche Verfahren des Datengewinns. Ökonomie der Erhebung, Vergleichbarkeit und die Möglichkeit, Einsicht in Praxisbereiche und historisch-biografische Dimensionen zu erhalten, die der direkten Beobachtung kaum zugänglich sind, machen seine Attraktivität aus. Zugleich mehren sich Kritik...

The paper studies how the German connectives also and dann are used as displays of understanding in talk-in-interaction. It is shown that the use of also at turn-beginnings in pre-front-field position is a routine practice to explicate implicit meanings of the prior turn of the partner, which is presented for confirmation. Also thus indexes that ex...

Based on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional moment of its production:1.Achieve joint orientation: The...

This special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics has its origins in the International Conference on Conversation Analysis 10 (ICCA10), which took place in Mannheim (Germany) in July 2010. More than 650 scholars attended the conference, whose theme was ‘‘multimodal interaction’’. This volume includes papers based on the four plenary talks given at IC...

Der vorliegende Aufsatz untersucht, wie Negationen in Gesprächen verwendet werden können, um Interpre-tationen des Sprecherhandelns durch den Partner zu beeinflussen und zu steuern. Zunächst werden die dafür benötigten theoretischen und methodischen Werkzeuge vorgestellt: die interaktionsanalytischen Konzepte des Adressatenzuschnitts und des common...

Conversation Analysis (CA) and Discursive Psychology (DP) reject the view that assumptions about cognitive processes should be used to account for discursive phenomena. Instead, cognitive issues are respecified as discursive phenomena. Discursive psychologists do this by studying discursive practices of talking about mental phenomena and using ment...

As an Introduction to the Special Issue on “Formulation, generalization, and abstraction in interaction,” this paper discusses key problems of a conversation analytic (CA) approach to semantics in interaction. Prior research in CA and Interactional Linguistics has only rarely dealt with issues of linguistic meaning in interaction. It is argued that...

This paper analyses one specific conversational practice of formulation called ‘notionalization’. It consists in the transformation of a description by a prior speaker into a categorization by the next speaker. Sequences of this kind are a “natural laboratory” for studying the differences between descriptions and categorizations regarding their sem...