Galina Bolden

• PhD, UCLA
• Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Conversation Analysis (CA) is one of the predominant methods for the detailed study of human social interaction. Bringing together thirty-four chapters written by a team of world-renowned experts, this Handbook represents the first comprehensive overview of conversation-analytic methods. Topics include how to collect, manage, and transcribe data; h...

This book is about one of the most fundamental action sequences found across human societies and socio-cultural contexts: polar questions and their responses. Question–answer sequences are among the most basic building blocks for sequences of action in interaction and are ubiquitous among the languages of the world. Among different types of questio...

This book is about one of the most fundamental action sequences found across human societies and socio-cultural contexts: polar questions and their responses. Question–answer sequences are among the most basic building blocks for sequences of action in interaction and are ubiquitous among the languages of the world. Among different types of questio...

When repairing a problem in their talk, speakers sometimes do more than simply correct an error, extending the self-correction segment to comment on, repeat, apologize, and/or reject the error. We call this “over-exposed self-correction.” In over-exposing the error, speakers may manage (and reflexively construct) a range of attributional troubles t...

This paper examines the situated use of expressions of gratitude and demonstrates how their precise timing matters for coordinating actions and managing relationships in social interaction. Focusing on activities that involve object passing, we introduce the concept of the gratitude opportunity space, a standard time for expressing gratitude. We ex...

This chapter explores how psychiatrists and clients negotiate treatment regimens by analyzing how medication decisions unfold when clients with severe mental illnesses (schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, etc.,) advocate for their treatment preferences. The focus is on how the psychiatrist responds to clients’ requests for changes in their medication...

This article examines the organization of interpreter-mediated communication and demonstrates that interpreters, as autonomous social actors, continuously monitor and analyze the unfolding interaction and make moment-by-moment decisions about their actions. Drawing on a larger conversation-analytic study of audio- and video-recorded consultations (...

In psychiatry, practitioners are encouraged to adopt a patient‐centred approach that emphasises shared decision‐making. In this article, we investigate how clients with severe mental illnesses (e.g. schizophrenia) advocate for their treatment preferences in psychiatric consultations. The study uses Conversation Analysis to examine audio‐recorded me...

This paper explores the practice of "subversive completions," whereby one speaker produces a grammatically fitted completion of another speaker's unfolding turn, so as to subvert the action of the unfolding turn and the ongoing sequence. We show that subversive completions may derail or exaggerate the action in progress, typically for comedic or te...

This chapter examines the Russian particle nu, focusing on its use in responses to polar and question-word questions. I show that nu prefaces responses that are, in some way, misaligned vis-à-vis the initiating action. First, nu may preface non-type-conforming responses, i.e., responses that " depart from the constraints embodied in the grammatical...

This article provides an empirical demonstration of the saliency of epistemics to two core conversational organizations, turn-taking and repair. To that end, I examine cases in which a participant of a multiparty conversation intervenes into a repair sequence to respond to a repair initiation addressed to the trouble-source speaker, that is, in vio...

This chapter examines interactional dimensions of requests for material objects and other immediate practical actions in Russian conversation, focusing on the most common form these requests take – imperative verb constructions. Even though the Russian language has a rich variety of constructions for performing requests, imperative requests are ubi...

We examine I know as a responding action, showing that it claims to accept the grounds of the initiating action, but either resists that action as unnecessary or endorses it, depending on the epistemic environment created by the initiating action. First, in responding to actions that presume an unknowing addressee (e.g., correcting, advising), spea...

The article examines the organization of the treatment recommendation phase in psychiatric consultations for individuals with chronic and serious psychiatric conditions. Recommending treatment in chronic psychiatric care is a complex course of action that involves building a case for a treatment recommendation, eliciting an acceptance of the propos...

How can we capture the words, gestures and conduct of study participants? How do we transcribe what happens in social interactions in analytically useful ways? How could systematic and detailed transcription practices benefit research? Transcribing for Social Research demonstrates how best to represent talk and interaction in a manageable and acad...

Taking its inspiration in " Opening Up Closings " by Schegloff and Sacks (1973), the chapter investigates how the activity of closing a conversation is initiated in Russian telephone conversations. Two distinct practices for initiating closings – tacit and explicit closings initiations – are examined, in terms of their lexical and prosodic composit...

This collection offers a multifaceted view of the life, research and impact of Emanuel A. Schegloff, the co-originator, with Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, of Conversation Analysis (or CA), and its leading contemporary authority. The first section introduces Schegloff’s life and work, and, using a series of interviews with him, provides a concise...

Memory is a central epistemic resource, yet the interactional organization of shared remembering is largely unexplored. Drawing on a large corpus of video-and audio-recorded interactions in English and Russian, we examine a collection of over 50 cases in which participants are engaged in the activity of co-remembering. We show that memory formulati...

Memory is a central epistemic resource, yet the interactional organization of shared remembering is largely unexplored. Drawing on a large corpus of video- and audio-recorded interactions in English and Russian, we examine a collection of over 50 cases in which participants are engaged in the activity of co-remembering. We show that memory formulat...

Interdisciplinary teams are a common organisational form in community mental health treatment (see also Pino, Chapter 34, this volume), particularly for adults with serious and persistent mental illness. Assertive community treatment (ACT) is the most widely known team model (Simmonds, Coid, Joseph, Marriott, & Tyrer, 2001). The ACT model was origi...

This article examines affirming answers to polar (yes/no) questions in Russian, that is, responses that confirm or agree with the propositional content of the question. Drawing on a corpus of telephone conversations and using the methodology of Conversation Analysis, I analyze question-answer sequences that are initiated by polar interrogatives who...

Moore (2015/this issue) discusses possibilities afforded by state-of-the-art automated transcription technologies for conversation analytic (CA) research. Since these technologies may become attrac- tive to conversation analysts, their impact should be carefully considered. In this commentary, I offer some words of caution about adopting automated...

To appear in P. Auer & Y. Maschler (Eds.), Nu and its relatives: A discourse marker across the languages of Europe and beyond. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

The term discourse markers refers to a class of linguistic devices that includes words and phrases, such as, anyway, well, you know, I mean, oh, so, like, and uh. Language and social interactional scholarship on discourse markers is concerned with how discourse markers are used as resources for social action, and, consequently, how they are deploye...

This article aims to advance an interactionally sensitive, emic view of intercultural communication by exploring the organization of “intercultural moments” in conversation—moments during which cultural and linguistic differences between people become exposed. Field video recordings of ordinary face-to-face interactions in Russian–American immigran...

The term discourse markers refers to a class of linguistic devices that includes words and phrases, such as, anyway, well, you know, I mean, oh, so, like, and uh. While exemplars of discourse markers might be easily recognizable, the category as a whole defies a clear definition. Scholars disagree about what items should (and should not) be include...

Goffman's work on footing has paved the way to specifying the analytic concepts of speaker and hearer in social interaction. This article empirically examines participants' moment-by-moment negotiated understandings of speakerhood in the context of conversational repair-sequences of talk dedicated to resolving problems of hearing, speaking, or unde...

JürgenStreeck, CharlesGoodwin & CurtisLeBaron (eds.), Embodied interaction: Language and body in the material world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 308. Hb. $99. - Volume 41 Issue 5 - Galina B. Bolden

tacit referring This paper examines one aspect of interplay between grammar and social interaction: how speakers of different languages explicate referents that had been referred to tacitly, i.e., without using an explicit referential expression. The focus is on situations when speakers go on to explicate the referent in the transition space, after...

Prior conversation analytic research has demonstrated that when, following a sequence-initiating action, a response is relevantly missing (or is forthcoming but is apparently inadequate), speakers may use a range of practices for pursuing a response (or a more adequate response). These practices—such as response prompts, preference reversals, or tu...

This report examines what is involved when a speaker overtly selects one formulation over another by employing a repair operation that reformulates a reference in a way that adjusts or recalibrates it, rather than abandons the original referent altogether. Focusing primarily on references to persons, we show that, beyond the narrowing of a referenc...

This article examines the interactional construction of language competence in bilingual immigrant communities. The focus is on how participants in social interaction resolve problems of understanding that are demonstrably rooted in their divergent linguistic and cultural expertise. Using the methodology of conversation analysis to examine mundane...

This article examines a previously undocumented way in which the presence of more than two interlocutors matters for the organization of repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 197756. Schegloff , E. A. , Jefferson , G. and Sacks , H. 1977. The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53: 361–382. [C...

This article investigates the action of directly soliciting accounts with why-interrogatives (e.g., Why did you do that?). Using conversation analysis, this article argues that why-interrogatives are Janus-faced. On one hand, as types of questions, they index an epistemic gap between questioners and answerers and thus the possibility that answerers...

This article extends prior conversation analytic research on the preference organization of sequence-initiating actions. Across two languages (English and Russian), this article examines one such action: explicitly soliciting an account for human conduct (predominantly with why-type interrogatives). Prior work demonstrates that this action conveys...

This article provides a conversation analytic description of a previously unstudied conversational action: ‘articulating the unsaid’ via and-prefaced formulations of other people’s talk. Contributing to the extant research on formulations and on interactional functions of discourse markers, the article shows that and-prefaced formulations accomplis...

This chapter describes a language-specific solution to a generic and likely universal interactional issue – how to show that the current utterance is occasioned by and should be understood by reference to something other than the immediately preceding talk. While the default way of connecting an utterance to a prior one is by placing it immediately...

The article presents a conversation analytic investigation of one technique for responding to questions in naturally occurring social interactions: repeating the question verbatim in part or as a whole before providing a required response. A close examination of production features of repeat prefacing in Russian demonstrates that it is used by conv...

The discourse marker ‘so’ is most commonly described as indexing inferential or causal connections. However, recordings of everyday talk show that these are not its only functions. The article uses the methodology of conversation analysis and examines a large corpus of recorded conversations to explicate the role of ‘so’ in implementing incipient a...

n this article, I use conversation analytic methods to analyze interactional junctures in which transitions to the first conversational topic are accomplished. I examine several ways in which parties in ordinary (and especially telephone) conversations coordinate the launching of first “talkables,” focusing specifically on environments in which suc...

The article examines how the goals of maintaining and reaffirming interpersonal relationships are accomplished through the details of talk during closing sections of social encounters. On the basis of Russian language telephone conversations between close familiars, the article explicates ways in which interactions may be reopened and, more specifi...

The article presents an analysis of actual, recorded social interactions between close familiars with the goal to describe discursive practices involved in showing engagement with the other party, or other-attentiveness. Focusing on the deployment of the discourse markers “so” and “oh” in utterances that launch new conversational topics, the articl...

Vita. Thesis (Ph. D)--UCLA, 2005. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 567-590).

This article investigates ways in which direct reported speech is set apart from the current speaker's own talk. Drawing on a corpus of conversational Russian materials, the article examines ways in which the onset and the offset of reported speech are marked in ordinary talk. The analysis shows that in most cases quotations are separated from othe...

The article investigates resources used by parties in interaction to successfully complete each others’ utterances. Among the different ways in which recipients can demonstrate their understanding, collaborative completions are the most convincing since they display not only recipients’ understanding of the stance or the import of a turn-in-progres...

The paper examines the role of medical interpreters in structuring interaction between physicians and their patients. Through a detailed analysis of interpreters’ involvement in history taking part of actual medical consultations, it is demonstrated that interpreters’ participation in this activity is organized by their understanding of its goals r...

Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 1998. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-69).