30.1182, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Hansen, Reiter (2018)

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Subject: 30.1182, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Hansen, Reiter (2018)

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Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2019 15:06:18
From: Boudjemaa Dendenne [dendenneboudjemaa at gmail.com]
Subject: The Pragmatics of Sensitive Activities in Institutional Discourse

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-2753.html

EDITOR: Maj-Britt  Mosegaard Hansen
EDITOR: Rosina  Márquez Reiter
TITLE: The Pragmatics of Sensitive Activities in Institutional Discourse
SERIES TITLE: Benjamins Current Topics 96
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Boudjemaa Dendenne

SUMMARY 

The ‘Pragmatics of sensitive activities in institutional discourse’ (Benjamins
Current Topics, 96) is co-edited by two informed scholars in the field of
pragmatics and readers in French and Spanish linguistics, respectively:
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Rosina Márquez Reiter. Moreover, they are not
new to the business of book editing (e.g. Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005;
Mosegaard Hansen & Visconti, 2012). This volume was originally published as a
special issue of ‘Pragmatics and Society’ (2016, 7:4), under a roughly similar
title: ‘(Co-)Constructing interpersonally sensitive activities across
institutional settings.’ The book (194 pages) aims to examine relational work
and negotiation of interests and identities while performing interpersonally
sensitive acts in institutional situations. Eleven authors have amalgamated to
investigate different institutional encounters in a number of languages. The
authors have investigated conversations in already well-documented settings
(Chapters 2, 3, 6, 7) and also in arenas that have hardly ever (if not never)
been explored (Chapters 1, 4, 5). In this regard, the volume under review
intends to enrich the existing literature and to put to the test some
well-established theories and methodologies on data drawn from institutional
talk  (p. 2). 

The ‘Introduction’ (pp. 1-5), by the editors, lays the foundation to the
chapters to come. Based on Goffman’s (1967) conceptualization of face,
sensitive activities are defined as “activities which regularly, in some case
even routinely, imply potential threats to the face needs of one or more
interactants” (p. 1). Performance and response to such face-threatening acts
(Brown & Levinson, 1987) in institutional environments, among supposedly
cooperative participants, may have adverse effects that range from mere
irritation to the almost complete failure of the act of communication. After
elaborating on the unit of analysis (sensitive activities) and the diversity
of the institutional environments targeted by the authors, the editors go on
to present the main issues tackled by the volume’s seven articles. Given the
varied approaches applied, the editors call for “interdisciplinary dialogue”
among scholars working on verbal interaction at the intersection of research
perspectives within, but also outside, the field of linguistics. The editors
are further encountered later in the body of the book as co-/authors (Chapters
2 and 6, for Rosina Márquez Reiter; Chapter 7, for Maj-Britt Mosegaard
Hansen).

The first chapter, by Rosina Márquez Reiter, Kristina Ganchenko, and Anna
Charalambidou, is entitled ‘Requests and counters in Russian traffic police
officer-citizen encounters: Face and identity implications’ (pp. 7–33). The
authors analyse videotaped interactions taking place between traffic police
officers (TPOs) and drivers on traffic stops in Russia. The focus is on the
so-called “counter-requests” uttered by drivers in response to the TPOs’
request for identification. Particularly, the authors address the recipient’s
(i.e. TPO) face and identity susceptibility to such verbal behaviour (i.e. the
counter-request). The authors elaborate on the practice of installing
dashboard cameras by Russian motorists, the Russian traffic legislations, and
literature on police-citizen encounters. Despite the preponderance of such
type of studies on the latter, the authors aim at a less explored aspect,
which is the request-counter-request sequence in such institutional,
goal-oriented, and asymmetrical interactions. Adopting concepts of ‘activity
type,’ ‘face,’ and ‘transportable identities,’ the authors suggest that
drivers’ counter-requests tend to redirect the TPO’s talk to an opposite
direction, cast doubt on his professionalism, and show reluctance to ratify an
identity of a request complier. Therefore, the TPO is obliged to react to the
driver’s challenge so as to avoid face loss (e.g. “what what?”/“Why
so?”/“Didn’t get it?”, as “an open repair initiator” ). For instance, he
appears to pay little attention to the counter-request and to redirect the
initial request (e.g. “uh huh please show me your documents?”). And when the
TPO anticipates that the driver will be non-cooperative, he will engage in
“pre-emptive facework” to avoid any confrontational stance. He may even choose
to deliver a compliment to the counter-request-response adjacency pair if the
driver is proven guilty of traffic law infringement prior to getting him to
stop.  In a similar token, the PTO resorts to working out the driver’s
‘transportable identity’ (age and locality: “how old are you?”/ “where are you
from?”) as an aid to index the driver’s unjustified discourse role of a
counter-request producer. This is manifested in linguistic preferences like
T-forms and imperatives that endorse the PTO’s discourse (as a law agent) and
situational identity (as liable for requesting the driver’s ID). The authors
conclude that face and identity are fundamentally entwined as suggested by the
mutual challenging via the request/counter-request dynamics.     

The second chapter, by Lars Fant and Annika Denke, is entitled ‘Negotiating
with the boss: An inter- and cross-cultural perspective on problematic talk’
(pp. 35–63). The authors examine the socio-cultural traits in three
linguacultures (British English, Chilean Spanish, and Swedish) and two
non-native speaker groups (Swedish L2 English/Spanish) while negotiating with
the boss (asking for two days off over phone). Unlike other papers in the
volume, the authors opt for elicited data gathered via an open role-play,
which allows the authors, among others, to control the study’s variables, an
advantage that the natural input could ill-afford. Relying on “Hofsted et
al.’s (2010) framework,” “Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map”, pragmatic transfer,
and (in)directness/(im)politeness research, the authors investigate the
argumentative devices employed during three phases: preparatory, negotiation,
and increment. On the socio-cultural differences among the three native
groups, the general tendency shows that the Swedish are close to the English
(e.g. avoiding a “cutting to the chase” style of talk as it is perceived as
rude) and distant from the Chilean (e.g. perceiving aggravated implicitness as
“having something up one’s sleeve” and even lacking sincerity). This narrow
socio-cultural gap between the Swedish and the English is what makes the
“non-native-to-native alignment” to the target community’s norms more
observable in L2 English than in L2 Spanish. Thus, the interactions seem to go
more confrontational in Swedish-Spanish than in Swedish-English talk.
Nonetheless, variance, vis-à-vis the degrees of directness/explicitness in the
three groups, is attested. Besides, theses disparities should not hide points
of conversion (e.g. favouring factual over emotional arguments). L2 speakers
are able to accommodate to the target norms (e.g. the use of argumentative
strategies during the negotiation phase), keeping instances of resorting to 
L1 to the minimum, despite very few instances of what “could be clearly
labelled as transfer.”

The third chapter, by Ariel Vázquez Carranza, is entitled ‘Evading and
resisting answering: An analysis of Mexican Spanish news interviews’ (pp.
65–89). This study examines Mexican politicians/public officers’ reactions to
questions that cast doubt on their wealth and evoke susceptibility to corrupt
behaviour. The author discusses the “folk characterization” of politicians as
‘corrupt’, interactional roles and patterns in news interviews, and the
evasive behaviour of politicians. Adapting a conversation analytic
perspective, the author observes different news-generating strategies in the
interviewers’ (IRs) questions, like calling into question a
contradiction/statement and inviting the interviewee (IE) to react, asking for
information, and  uttering self-standing statements as the, unexpectedly, more
confrontational strategy (e.g. “but you spend  a lot and you have a lot of
money”) . Overall, the IEs manage to elude the IR’s questions and their
evasiveness is mainly signalled via “non-type-conforming answers” (“I am
someone that, has always a comfortable life …”) or withstanding questions by
means of “type-conforming answers” (addressing the question while supplying
fewer details possible as a face-saving technique, e.g., “I have always been a
businessman in the building sector”). The IEs’ “counter-attacks” aim to cast
doubt on the newsworthiness of the story brought by the IR and go on, even
further, to attack the journalist in person, as someone who lacks
professionalism (e.g. “and why you describe me in that way without having not
even one piece of evidence…”). Being fully aware of this, the IR seeks to mark
his neutrality via an array of tactics like talking on behalf of the people
and, thus, setting a “‘tribune-of-the-people’ stance” (e.g. “people want to
know how does Mr Salinas make his living…”). 

The fourth chapter, by James Murphy, is entitled ‘Apologies made at the
Leveson Inquiry: Triggers and responses’ (pp. 91–113). This paper looks at the
apologies performed mainly by UK politicians in a public enquiry on their
potential involvement in  unethical media conduct, known as the “Leveson
Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press” The author sheds
light on some commonalities and differences between courtroom trials and the
inquiries. In the latter, apologies are not expected to appear as part of a
rigid adjacency pair; they rather appear as “action chains”. In this way,
failure to respond to an apology – given its sequential position – by one
participant is “unmarked” behaviour; otherwise marked if it appears in an
adjacency pair where the recipient is urged to react. Looking at apologies as
an action chain evokes the possibility to insert other elements before the
apology – a compliment, in this study. The infractions that warrant an apology
are talk offences (e.g. interrupting, talking too quickly), misspeaks (not
classified within talk offences), document offences, requests for
clarification, and evidence offences as the most grave ones. Apologies are
called upon by self-awareness of a potential infraction more often than in
response to a prompt; that is, not as part of complaint-apology adjacency
pair, as noticed especially in case of erroneous evidence. Overall,
politicians’ apologies are meant to compensate for interaction-related rather
than real infringements. The author discusses contexts wherein apologies fail
to retain their apologetic force, when the apology functions as a repair
strategy carrying pragmatic enrichments vis-à-vis the apologiser’s attitude
towards the hearer/discourse. For example, the answerer may apologise while
asking the questioner to paraphrase a previous question in a more intelligible
way. The apology in this context plays the role of a request mitigator – not
necessarily indexing the accountability of the apologiser. The author also
elaborates on responses to apologies and future research avenues, regarding
the ‘pragmaticalisation’ of the act of apology and other interpersonally
sensitive tasks in the Inquiry. 

The fifth chapter, by Anna Claudia Ticca and Véronique Traverso, is entitled
‘When questioners count on recipients’ lack of knowledge: A recurring
‘question-answer’ format in guided tours’ (pp. 115–133), which is one of the
studies where “an orientation to interpersonal sensitivity” is less expected,.
>From an interactional linguistics’ perspective, the authors seek to
disentangle question-answer sequences in guided tours elicited via
video-recording in France and Italy, from a non-contrastive orientation. In
this type of questions, the questioner appeals to the addressee’s’ ignorance
(e.g. about a displayed object) as a preparatory strategy (position 1) to
forward his own informative answer (position 3). This peculiarity makes
questioning in this setting such “a risky gambit” to the visitors, in the
first place, and to the guide who counts on the answerer’s ignorance.
Unexpectedly correct answers run counter to the guide’s plans for further
elaboration, and as such, render his professional face susceptible to damage.
Generally speaking, the talk flows into two distinctive paths. The first path
is the possibility that visitors provide no answer (which they index by
silence, “I don’t know,” hesitators, or inaudible talk) or a wrong one. In
such cases, the guide does not provide a straightforward answer and, instead,
he/she attempts to elicit answers from the visitors. Being concerned with the
face-loss of the visitor answering wrongly, guides strive to show the
reasonableness of the response or just abandon it to deliver feedback. As for
the second path, a right answer in position 2 means that the development of
the guide’s activity is jeopardized – as hypothesised. However, the data does
not support this (despite some very rare cases). To cope with this unexpected
development, guides are likely to respond to the potential face-loss with a
restating-elaborating strategy. Besides, guides do not always exhibit full
control of the situation; they may be challenged by the visitors who can be
upset if they feel they are being looked at as ignorant (cf. File & Schnurr,
in press, on professional athletes and coaches’ failed humour during TV
interviews). The researchers give utmost importance to the relevance of
non-verbal behaviour via the inclusion of ten captioned photographs (pp.
21-22; 24-26). 

‘When routine calls for information become interpersonally sensitive’ (pp.
135–160) is the title of chapter six, by Sara Orthaber and Rosina Márquez
Reiter. It analyses inquiry calls to a Slovenian public transportation
company. The authors targeted incompatibility in interactional asymmetries:
“participation, epistemic status, and roles”, which are costly to the
maintenance of progressive talk and the agent’s time and energy. The agent’s
verbal outbreak (or annoyance as revealed by prosodic cues like “hearable
in-breaths, increased volume, and speech rate”) in such encounters is highly
likely, due to customers’ lack of awareness of the institutionalised
procedure, their assertive talk, and the agents’ repetitive heavy workload. To
challenge the customer’s claim of “epistemic status”, the agent supplies
technical information, in technical terms, as an attempt to appeal to the
institutional characteristic and “re-enter the state of talk and re-establish
the service frame on an even keel (p. 147).” This tone is enhanced sometimes
by formal and distant address terms (e.g. gospa /Madamn) and discourse markers
(e.g. well, okay, look). In a similar fashion, the agent urges callers to be
precise and concise via resorting to interruption at just the right moment
(e.g. “Ok then…”). Thus, claiming an epistemic status seems less tolerated in
service call encounters than in other institutional settings (e.g. Fioramonte
& Vásquez, 2019, in “multi-party non-geriatric and non-paediatric” medical
encounters). On his/her part, the customer may be implicitly critical via
questioning the professionalism of the company and delivering negative
assessments. Hence, agents do not hesitate to signal their callers’ behaviour
as troublesome and refuse to attend to their stance, but they may sometimes
choose to align with the caller’s behaviour and offer available alternatives.
Callers react to the agent by showing “defensive behaviour” like insisting on
the occurrence of misunderstanding. The interplay of the above factors merge
to evoke claims of impoliteness. Therefore, arriving at a concession seems
hard to achieve, given that every side sticks to his/her way of talking,
refusing to give way to his/her counterpart. From the reviewed chapters,
attacking the interlocutor’s professional face is a constituent defensive
strategy in institutional talk, which deserves specific attention in future
research.          
              
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen’s concluding chapter is entitled ‘Patterns of
thanking in the closing section of UK service calls: Marking conversational
macro-structure vs managing interpersonal relations’ (pp. 161-189). One might
wonder how the act of thanking can be a sensitive endeavour. At “the perhaps
more unexpectedly sensitive end of the spectrum (p. 2)”, thanking after some
interactional problems have arisen (“mutual thanking”) and thanking carrying
apologetic force (when uttered by the agent rather than the caller) are
tackled. The author draws the attention to the scarcity of studies on the
thanking speech act in pragmatics literature and the need to study thanking
formulae in the closing part of telephone calls, per se, with regard to the
issues raised in the call. The analysis of 94 calls made to a UK housing
association aims to go beyond the conventionalised character of thanking
formulae, in British English, as discourse markers for “imminent closing”.
Thus, thanking formulae display “a well-motivated adaptation to the particular
institutional context in which these calls take place (p. 187)”. Moreover,
they are expected from one side if the “calls are institutionally and
interactionally unmarked [non-conflictive]”. If thanking formulae are not
generated by an a priori assumed face-threatening behaviour, they will then
show consciousness of and repair to an unexpectedly deviated situation, on the
one hand, or signal a proceeding talk as merely “business-as-usual”, on the
other. Regarding this, thanking in this setting appears to follow stratified
patterns: callers’ thanking is evidently in correspondence with the
“interactional unmarkedness” of the call as a whole. Meanwhile, mutual
thanking stretching over two turns (only fairly distinct from “unilateral
thanking”) or three/more turns (as embedded in “marked calls”) evokes
interactional markedness. The default scenario suggests that callers initiate
thanks as they request information or action. Yet, the agent may unpredictably
reverse this situation and initiate thanks denoting apologetic force, whenever
“role-misalignment” occurs. 


EVALUATION 

The volume is ecumenical when it comes to the approaches adopted, and appeals
to a wide readership that goes well beyond the scope of linguistics; as
suggested by the editors themselves, the audience ranges from readers
interested in interactional discourse analysis, interactional linguistics, and
(ethnomethodological) conversation analysis to (im)politeness and pragmatics.
Conspicuously, a conversation analytic perspective (Schegloff, 2007) is
dominant along with notions of face and politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987;
Goffman, 1967). Another merit is that contributors to the volume analyse
naturally occurring conversations (except from Chapter 2). The analysis tends
to be qualitative in nature, with the exception of Chapters 2, 4 and, to a
lesser degree, Chapter 7. Statistics could have added to the reliability of
the already compelling conclusions.        

Obviously, the focus on face-threatening acts is what unites the volume’s
papers and, hence, makes it plausible that the papers could have been ordered
differently. For example, the editors could have organised the papers in two
sections: Face-to-face communication (Chapters 1, 3, 4, 5) and Mediated
communication (Chapters 2, 6, 7), instead of letting readers wonder what basis
the book’s papers (which are not in abecedarian sequence) have been organised
on.

The book is a must-read for researchers interested in discourse/conversation
analysis and the interfaces between face/(im)politeness and negotiation of
identities in verbal interaction, from the sociopragmatic, rather than, the
pragmalinguistic standpoint. The book also may well be perceived outside the
realm of applied linguistics by those interested in
cross-cultural/intercultural communication and sociology; besides, the
findings discussed may be very insightful to business and public service
managers. The fact that the models of analysis adopted are not explained in
detail reveals that the book’s audience are supposed to have adequate
background knowledge of various areas of discourse and pragmatics. Those who
do not may find it hard to read  smoothly.      

In comparison with other volumes on pragmatics (e.g. Poggi & Capone, 2017;
Trosborg, 2010), the volume under review appears very concise. Of course,
there is no harm in that as long as the work, to a greater extent, achieves
the pre-set aims, which are “to deepen existing knowledge and to test the
validity of assumptions and methodologies developed within the study of verbal
interaction on new kinds of materials (p. 2)” as regards “how, and possibly
why, activities can be (co-)constructed as interpersonally sensitive in
interaction (p. 3)”. Still, the volume could have been enriched by the
inclusion of some more under-represented settings, phenomena, or languages.
Interestingly, recently published studies like File and Schnurr (in press)
and, to a lesser degree, Fioramonte and Vásquez (2019) could have fitted
perfectly well into the reviewed volume.      

Many ‘minor’ inconsistencies are observed in the volume under review. First,
Chapter 1 includes ‘Bibliography’ that ‘awkwardly’ stretches over more than
six pages while the other chapters contain a ‘concise’ list of ‘References’.
Second, the labelling of the concluding section exhibits disparity among the
papers: ‘Conclusion’ (Chapters 2, 4, 5, 7), ‘Concluding remarks’ (Chapters 1,
6), and ‘Conclusions’ (Chapter 3). In a similar vein, Chapter 5 lacks the
‘Introduction’ heading. Third, the transcription conventions used in the
papers are not unified (e.g. marking rising/falling intonation, laughter),
which makes dealing with the transcribed texts, somehow, a burden for those
who will read the book in its entirety, though the authors adopted mainly
Jefferson (2004) (Chapters 1, 3, 4) (also ICOR Group’s guidelines, Chapter 6).
It is noted also that some papers include the transcription conventions in the
Appendix (Chapters 3, 5, 6, 7) while others do not. In Chapter 2, the authors
guide the reader to the appendix for Table 3 (p. 46), while the table is,
actually, in page 50. The editors should have spent more effort in reshaping
the content previously published as a journal’s special issue into a book’s
format in order to ensure a smoother reading. Or, at least, they should have
drawn the reader’s attention to these inconsistencies in the volume’s
introduction. For example, consistent transcription conventions should have
been inserted at the very beginning of the book. Nevertheless, the book is
excellently edited as it is kept error-free, except from very few instances
that do not affect reading. In page 39, ‘from’ could be used in lieu of ‘for’
in this sentence: “Drawing on data gathered for English and Hebrew, she
argues…” A keyboard slip is noticed in page 53 (EN-NSS instead of EN-NNS) and
in page 164 in the footnote (‘behaviouur’ in lieu of ‘behaviour’). 

Chapters 2, 4, 7 are particularly very insightful to EFL (English as a Foreign
Language) teachers/learners as they make available data on three speech acts
as performed in native-English to peruse for classroom explicit pragmatic
instruction or in textbooks. They also contribute to counterbalance findings
in interlanguage pragmatics research in an EFL context, which are
predominantly gained via the Discourse Completion Task/Test (Labben, 2016). 

The above highlighted shortcomings, though very few, are never meant to
deprive the book of its value as a must-read source on the pragmatics of
delicate institutional talk for researchers and academics in the field. 

REFERENCES 

Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in
language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

File, Kieran, A. & Stephanie Schnurr. in press. That match was “a bit like
losing your virginity”. Failed humour, face and identity construction in TV
interviews with professional athletes and coaches. Journal of Pragmatics.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.10.012  

Fioramonte, Amy & Camilla Vásquez. 2019. Multi-party talk in the medical
encounter: Socio-pragmatic functions of family members’ contributions in the
treatment advice phase. Journal of Pragmatics 139. 132-145.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.10.012 

Goffman, Erving. 1967. On face work. In Interactional ritual, 5-45. Chicago:
Aldine.

Labben, Afef. 2016. Reconsidering the development of the discourse completion
test in interlanguage pragmatics. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the
International Pragmatics Association (26)1. 69-91. 

Márquez Reiter, Rosina & Maria E. Placencia (eds.). 2005. Current trends in
the pragmatics of Spanish. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.

Mosegaard Hansen, Maj-Britt & Jacqueline Visconti (eds.). 2012. Current trends
in diachronic semantics and pragmatics. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

Poggi, Francesca & Alessandro Capone (eds.). 2017. Pragmatics and law:
Practical and theoretical perspectives. Cham: Switzerland Springer
International Publishing  

Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007. Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in
conversation analysis (Vol. 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Trosborg, Anna. (ed.). 2010. Pragmatics across languages and cultures. Berlin,
Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Boudjemaa Dendenne received his PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University
of Constantine 1 (Algeria). He is a lecturer in linguistics and translation at
École Normale Supérieure (ENS-Sétif, Algeria). His research interests include
cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics, teaching pragmatics in instructed
EFL context, application of pragmatic theories on Algerian Colloquial Arabic,
translation, and Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Boudjemaa has published in
journals like Revue Sciences Humaines, Journal of Language and Linguistic
Studies, and Revue Académique des Études Humaines et Sociales. He also
participated in a number of national and international conferences organised
by many Algerian universities.





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