Beyond Cognitivism

Applying Conversation Analysis, 2005

The aims of this concluding chapter are to tie together a number of themes which have emerged from the chapters in the collection and to reflect on the processes of research manifested in the chapters, positioning these in relation to linguistic and social science research paradigms. A frequent complaint by researchers outside CA is that CA practitioners tend not to make their methodology and procedures comprehensible and accessible to researchers from other disciplines. It has sometimes been acknowledged by CA practitioners (Peräkylä 1997) that more could be done in this respect. A full explication of CA methodology and procedures would start with a discussion of the ethnomethodological principles underpinning CA. Considerations of space prohibit such a discussion here; however, see Bergmann (1981), Heritage (1984b) and Seedhouse (2004). Similarly, this chapter cannot provide an introduction to CA methodology; however, see Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998; Psathas 1995; Seedhouse 2004; ten Have 1999. In this first section I will focus on two areas relevant to this collection, namely the CA view of language and the emic perspective. 2 CA's origins in sociology and specifically ethnomethodology entail a different perspective on the status and interest of language itself from that typical of linguistics. CA's primary interest is in the social act and only marginally in language, whereas a linguist's primary interest is normally in language. In descriptivist linguistics, the interest is in examining how aspects of language are organized in relation to each other. CA, by contrast, studies how social acts are organized in interaction. As part of this, CA is interested in how social acts are packaged and delivered in linguistic terms. The fundamental CA question 'Why this, in this way, right now?' captures the interest in talk as social action, which is delivered in particular linguistic formatting, as part of an unfolding sequence. The CA perspective on the primacy of the social act is illustrated by chapters in this collection. For example, Gafaranga and Britten found that general practitioners systematically use different 'social' opening sequences to talk different professional relationships into being and hence to establish different professional contexts. This is an example of CA analysts' interest in linguistic forms; not so much for their own sake, but rather in the way in which they are used to embody and express subtle differences in social actions with social consequences. The distinction between emic and etic perspectives is vital to the argument in this chapter. The distinction originated in linguistics and specifically in phonology, namely in the difference between phonetics and phonemics. Pike's definition of etic and emic perspectives broadened interest in the distinction in the social sciences: The etic viewpoint studies behaviour as from outside of a particular system, and as an essential initial approach to an alien system. The emic

2023

The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Editors: Gee & Handford), 2011

2020

The thesis provides insight into the communication challenges of daily life for an individual with acquired brain injury in an institution. The thesis creates a new analysis perspective that can identify areas of attention for health professionals and thus contribute to improving the quality of life for the individual with acquired brain injury. The main contribution of this thesis is aligning methodology from ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) with theoretical principles from integrational linguistics, promoting a quality of life-focused analytical approach to acquired brain injury (ABI) and aphasia in the context of everyday institutional life. While a pure EMCA approach focuses on the joint construction of meaning and identity through a lens of social order, the integrational perspective can add a critical analysis of the content of the interaction, centering the analysis on the perspective of one participant: the individual with impairments’ participant perspective. In the first part of the thesis, the extent to which the two approaches can be combined is under scrutiny, investigating theoretically how they may be applied in order to investigate the participants’ experience empirically. By singling out the perspective of the individual who has impairments in the social ensemble, the analysis aims at enhancing life quality, seen from the perspective of the individual who has impairments in accordance with the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF; World Health Organization [WHO], 2001, 2013). The second part of the thesis investigates the participant’s experience in an analysis of interactional conditions between individuals who have impairments due to ABI and their neurotypical co-participants in everyday life at a care home. The study used video ethnography to record institutional life using several cameras, both stationary cameras and portable (GoPro Hero) cameras. The analysis of this thesis approaches interaction in a fine-grained analysis, drawing on video analysis with the tools from EMCA, and theoretical principles from integrational linguistics. This new approach is discussed thoroughly as divergences and agreements between the two are being analyzed. An illustrative analysis probes this new analytical perspective to elaborate on combining the two approaches in investigating the interactional consequences of living with ABI and aphasia for one case participant. In this thesis, a single-case study examines the (joint)interaction between one individual who has functional impairment and the co-present participants. This case participant uses a wheelchair to move around with help from assistant therapists (due to partial paralysis and spasticity from traumatic ABI years prior) and their speech has aphasia characteristics. The co-participants include other individuals who have impairments due to ABI, occupational therapists, pedagogues, students of occupational therapy and the participant researchers. The study focuses on the trajectory of the case participant’s participation during three significant recording days during the data collection. In the fall of 2012, a series of meetings, breaks between meetings and one excursion were video recorded (30 hours). These pilot phase recordings form part of a larger study on routines of everyday institutional life with ABI. In the analysis, the innovative approach identifies a novel discrepancy between the case individual and the therapists in what interaction analysis refers to as “trouble-talk,” meaning the organization of the conversation regarding problematic issues/talk about problems in understanding, which was often characterized by several repairs possibly without agreeing. Through detailed description and analysis, both the case participant and their display are characterized as competent. This is contrasted with the therapists conveying and responding to the participant as incompetent (i.e. non-ratified participant) in encounters due to their impairments. Seemingly, they perceive and orient to the case participant as someone who does not understand the situation correctly, sometimes merely complaining about institutional life. This asymmetrical relationship conceptualizes the case participant as a non-ratified participant, resulting in the case participant’s recurrent withdrawal from dialogues. This is deemed an undesired institutional ramification due to an uneven relationship between individuals who have impairments and individuals who do not have impairments. However, the analysis also demonstrates the individual’s creative participation and demonstrable “integrational proficiency” (Harris, 2009a, p. 71) in their drawing on other situated resources than “language” (Goode, 1994b) to express themself and participate creatively, such as gesture, repetition of others’ and own contributions and gaze. The contrast demonstrated in the gatekeeping of participation and the identifiable integrational proficiency demonstrates by use of the new participant’s perspective that the case individual competently participates, resulting in a deep analysis of participation with ABI and aphasia. The combination of EMCA tools and integrational linguistic theory thus offers a novel empirical insight into the workings of communication and language and its institutional ramifications. With the new participant’s perspective, this thesis considers practices as complex and entangled with recurrent inclusion/exclusion practices in interaction that professional practitioners could pay more attention to by downgrading the force of apparent misalignments in gatekeeping trouble-talk consciously e.g. with a “let it pass strategy” (Wilkinson, 2011) as focal point. This thesis has the form of a monograph, drawing on three background publications (Klemmensen, 2018; Nielsen, 2015; Raudaskoski & Klemmensen, 2019). Parts of Klemmensen (2018) significant to answer the research question are adapted to this thesis. The book chapter (Nielsen, 2015) and the research article (Raudaskoski & Klemmensen, 2019) are discussed at relevant places. However, the latter two are not submitted for the assessment of this thesis. Listen to radio features with Charlotte Klemmensen about the findings (in Danish) https://www.dr.dk/radio/p1/p1-morgen/p1-morgen-2020-10-28#!00:27:25

Language and Cognition, 2015

abstractUsage-based theories hold that the sole resource for language users’ linguistic systems is language use (Barlow & Kemmer, 2000; Langacker, 1988; Tomasello, 1999, 2003). Researchers working in the usage-based paradigm, which is often equated with cognitive-functional linguistics (e.g., Ibbotson, 2013, Tomasello, 2003), seem to widely agree that the primary setting for language use is interaction, with spontaneous face-to-face interaction playing a primordial role (e.g., Bybee, 2010; Clark, 1996; Geeraerts & Cuyckens, 2007; Langacker, 2008; Oakley & Hougaard, 2008; Zlatev, 2014). It should, then, follow that usage-based models of language are not only compatible with evidence from communication research but also that they are intrinsically grounded in authentic, multi-party language use in all its diversity and complexities. This should be a logical consequence, as a usage-based understanding of language processing and human sense-making cannot be separated from the study of i...

International Journal of English Studies (IJES), 2003

This paper addresses the broad question of how work in sociolinguistics should be related to social theory, and in particular the assumptions about cognition that can underpin that relation. A discursive psychological approach to issues of cognition is pressed and illustrated by a reworking of Stubb's review of work on language and cognition. A discursive psychological approach is offered to the topics of racist discourse, courtroom interaction, scientific writing, and sexism. Discursive psychology rejects the approach to 'cognition' as a collection of more or less stable inner entities and processes. Instead the focus is on the way 'mental phenomena' are both constructed and oriented to in people's practices.

Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2015

The study entitled. "Language and Interactional Discourse: Deconstructing the Talk-Generating Machinery in Natural Conversation," is an analysis of spontaneous and informal conversation. The study, carried out in the theoretical and methodological tradition of Ethnomethodology, was aimed at explicating how ordinary talk is organized and produced, how people coordinate their talk-in-interaction, how meanings are determined, and the role of talk in the wider social processes. The study followed the basic assumption of conversation analysis which is, that talk is not just a product of two 'speakers-hearers' who attempt to exchange information or convey messages to each other. Rather, participants in conversation are seen to be mutually orienting to, and collaborating in order to achieve orderly and meaningful communication. The analytic objective is therefore to make clear these procedures on which speakers rely to produce utterances and by which they make sense of other speakers' talk. The datum used for this study was a recorded informal conversation between two (and later three) middle-class civil servants who are friends. The recording was done in such a way that the participants were not aware that they were being recorded. The recording was later transcribed in a way that we believe is faithful to the spontaneity and informality of the talk. Our finding showed that conversation has its own features and is an ordered and structured social day by-day event. Specifically, utterances are designed and informed by organized procedures, methods and resources which are tied to the contexts in which they are produced, and which participants are privy to by virtue of their membership of a culture or a natural language community.

2011

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2015

The order of influence from thesis to hypothesis, and from philosophy to the social sciences, has historically governed the way in which the abstraction and significance of language as an empirical object is determined. In this paper, an argument is made for the development of a more reflexive intellectual relationship between ordinary language philosophy (OLP) and the social sciences that it helped inspire. It is demonstrated that, and how, the social scientific traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis press OLP to re-consider the variety of problematic abstractions it has previously made for the sake of philosophical clarity, thereby self-reinvigorating.