Emma M. Betz

• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Professor (Associate) at University of Waterloo

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...

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,...

The contributions to this Special Issue employ conversation analysis to illustrate how detailed analysis of language use can lead to the identification of assessable features of second/foreign language Interactional Competence (L2 IC) and the development of institutional testing instruments and practices. L2 IC has been the focus of much research a...

This conversation analytic study examines responsive echt (“really”), which is commonly associated with “newsmarks,” in co-present German interaction. Across uses, echt-turns are a practice for topicalizing, however briefly, something in another participant’s just-prior turn. But this topicalization shapes the response space in systematically diffe...

OKAY has been termed ‘a spectacular expression’ and ‘America’s greatest invention.’ This volume offers an in-depth empirical study of the uses that have resulted from its global spread. Focusing on actions and interactional practices, it investigates OKAY in a variety of settings in 13 languages. The collected work showcases the importance of a hol...

OKAY has been termed ‘a spectacular expression’ and ‘America’s greatest invention.’ This volume offers an in-depth empirical study of the uses that have resulted from its global spread. Focusing on actions and interactional practices, it investigates OKAY in a variety of settings in 13 languages. The collected work showcases the importance of a hol...

OKAY has been termed ‘a spectacular expression’ and ‘America’s greatest invention.’ This volume offers an in-depth empirical study of the uses that have resulted from its global spread. Focusing on actions and interactional practices, it investigates OKAY in a variety of settings in 13 languages. The collected work showcases the importance of a hol...

Okay is used in different sequential environments for a variety of interactional functions across languages, but the range of context-specific uses of the particle is not yet fully explored. This conversation analytic study focuses on turn-initial okay in English, specifically in responses to questions where okay does not itself constitute the answ...

This chapter discusses three different actions speakers can employ to move between two concurrently ongoing activities, playing cards and talking. Specifically, we describe three turn formats that mobilize another participant to perform the next move in a card game: (1) turns including the discourse marker "so", (2) imperatives, and (3) second-pers...

Requesting, recruitment, and other ways of mobilizing others to act have garnered much interest in Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. This volume takes a holistic perspective on the practices that we use to get others to act either with us, or for us. It argues for a more explicit focus on ‘activity’ in unpacking the linguistic an...

This workshop introduces participants to the concept of “interactional competence” and offers guidance on how to translate findings from research on interaction practices into teaching targets for the language classroom. We first demonstrate the relevance of integrating authentic interaction in the language classroom through work with (1) language...

The goal of this paper is to enhance the quality of language teaching and improve language teacher training by making spoken interaction research accessible to practitioners. Research on teacher cognition has shown that basic beliefs and assumptions about language affect language teacher training programs and language teachers' priorities in the cl...

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...

Researchers have observed that in spoken German, the conjunctions weil and obwohl commonly occur with verb-second (V2) instead of verb-final (Vf) word order (Gaumann, 1983; Gänthner, 1993, 1996; Uhmann, 1998). Current findings document that this syntactic variant of weil/obwohl-structures has an alternative interactional meaning and function, namel...

Responses are central to managing understanding in interaction. Response formats and tokens make reference to prior talk, index epistemic rights, and align or agree with previous actions. Lexical choice and grammatical alternatives are important for understanding responding actions.This conversation analytic study describes two formats of responsiv...

This entry introduces Levinson's notion of activity type and its usefulness in connecting micro- and macrolevel descriptions of discourse. Research in this area views language forms as embedded in discourse and activity contexts. Grammar is connected to activity types because communicative activity types are enacted as well as constituted through t...

This conversation analytic study investigates pivot constructions used as frames for quotation in German. Specifically, it describes the use of a systematic lexical final boundary for reported speech (an 'unquote'). German has various resources to mark boundaries of quotes but is said to lack overt grammaticalized ways of 'unquoting' (e.g., encliti...

English abstract Using conversation analysis, this paper describes the function of repeats in spoken German. Its analytic focus is repeats in third position to two-part sequences. Such sequence-expanding repeats do not (primarily) initiate repair; instead, they present and explicitly register just-retrieved, new, or corrected information. We discus...

Using conversation analytic methodology, this article examines the use of the German tokens ach ‘oh’ and achso ‘oh I see’ in the uptake of repair. While achso has been studied from a functional-pragmatic perspective, no contrastive study of ach and achso exists. We investigate two questions: Do different forms of ach occur in the same sequential po...

Using conversation analytic methodology, in this article, we examine two prosodic variants of the German response token achja and their use in everyday interaction. Whereas achJA, with prosodic prominence (in form of higher amplitude) on the second syllable, is used to claim remembering of relevant but just now recalled information, achja, with pro...