The Language and Social Interaction Working Group

The way I got into conversation analysis and the study of laughter goes back to the University of Texas where I started my PhD in communication. I took a class with the late Robert Hopper. Robert was a gifted teacher and scholar. When I studied with him in 1984, he had just made a ‘conversion’ to work with Gail Jefferson and Paul Drew to study conversation closely. I was immediately taken by the close attention to real interaction, and I continue to feel fascinated by the dr...ama of small moments of life. In terms of laughter, I had long been interested in play, and I had another visionary professor as an undergraduate who taught a Shakespeare course and had us read As You Like It and also Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life about the theatrical metaphor applied to everyday life. Those were eye-opening to me. When I started working with Robert Hopper, I wanted to study play. He quite sensibly said, ‘play is really hard to identify. How about looking at laughter?’ And that’s what I did and have been doing ever since. Phillip Glenn - Emerson College #lansi2019 #HumansofLANSI See more

I was at a LANSI data session over the the summer and it was a really great experience. We then started a German-speaking data analysis group in Switzerland and we adopted the same rhythm of analysis. We would look at a segment of the transcript for an amount of time and take turns to give our comments and go into deeper discussions. It was really great. How we would do it was inspired by the LANSI data session. Johanna Quiring - Pädagogische Hochschule St.Gallen (PHSG) #lansi2019 #HumansofLANSI

When I was studying sociology for my masters, I found classic sociology to be very interesting but at the same time we were always trained that we had to use theories to study social phenomena. I wasn’t very keen on using theories to explain people’s mind. When I started learning ethnomethodology, I was very surprised that it not only emphasized the participants’ perspective but we were also given a systematic way to investigate it. Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis provide us with the tools to do both. Yumei Gan - The Chinese University of Hong Kong #lansi2019 #HumansofLANSI

Now that I work with a lot of international students, I feel like I spend a lot of time just thinking about ‘what would that interaction mean from different perspectives?’ Those fundamental questions: ‘What’s going on here?’; ‘Why that now?’ Those are things that I feel like are very present in my day-to-day life, not just my scholarship. Anne Pomerantz, U. Penn #lansi2019 #HumansOfLANSI @TCAandH @TCalandtesol

Please disregard any posts or comments on the lansi Facebook page that provide a link to today’s virtual lecture by Leelo Keevallik. These are spam. Please attend the lecture via the instructions sent to your email upon registration.Please disregard any posts or comments on the lansi Facebook page that provide a link to today’s virtual lecture by Leelo Keevallik. These are spam. Please attend the lecture via the instructions sent to your email upon registration.

Photo credits: Xu Feng, Tinglei (Sunshine) Huang, and Hansun Zhang Waring

For a few years now I've been working with data on political discourse - the sorts of interactive performances that take up a lot of space on television news cycles, showing politicians in the act of "doing" politics...As part of this work I ended up writing a paper on positioning techniques used among participants within a President Trump press conference. My adviser thought the paper was worthwhile, and she had presented at LANSI last year. So she recommended that I try se...nding it in. And luckily the LANSI folks liked this project as much as she did! From what my adviser had told me, the conference was a really great collaborative space, and I was excited to see what the rest of the LANSI community thought about this. This is my first time both attending and presenting at an academic conference, and I've been having a lot of fun. -Nicole Tanquary, Syracuse University #humansoflansi #lansi2019 See more

My transition to the study of language and social interaction began as a graduate student at UCLA where I took Charles Goodwin's graduate course which focused on reported talk and request. The class covered a broad range of matters from interactive footing, participation framework, gesture, storytelling, assessment, and more. Chuck’s view of language and interaction inspired me to see linguistics beyond just the structure of language, but as an integral part of human interact...ion. My first time at LANSI this year took me back to Chuck's discourse lab, where everyone felt so welcomed and supportive of any topic people wanted to discuss and understand. As always, it is the people who make a conference worthwhile. The intimate setting makes LANSI a special place to talk and learn about conversation, and more importantly, to easily meet and converse with new friends and colleagues. Hope to attend LANSI again soon! - Mary Kim, University of Hawaii #lansi2019 #HumansofLANSI See more

It has been a gradual process transitioning into interactional linguistics. I guess it was in the 80s or 90s when I was hired for a research project with Peter Auer on contextualization in the John Gumperz sense. We were looking at prosodic contextualization and he was using Conversation Analysis this was my introduction to CA. Then we organized conferences, had group meetings, and familiarized ourselves with the literature, and I deepened my exposure to CA. So when I moved... into my professorship, and I found that I had to teach English grammar, phonetics, and semantics after becoming so deeply involved in CA, I just couldn’t bring myself to put all that aside and do traditional grammar. So I began to think maybe I can combine my interest with my job and that led me to think how can I teach English grammar from a conversation analytic perspective? And then the same thing happened with respect to phonetics and prosody. How can I do this type of teaching and bring in interaction? So that led me to a new way of thinking about language and linguistics that is based on interaction. -Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki #lansi2019 #humansoLANSI See more

The article that got me hooked was the paper by Schegloff and Sacks called Opening Up Closings. And I know from talking with other conversation analysts that for for many people, especially in my generation, that article got people hooked. There’s something about that article that gets people in. I think one thing about it is that it’s examining something that we all do every time we make a phone call, which is we have to bring it to a close. It describes the process that’s ...involved and how you have to prepare for the goodbye’s. And it’s such a powerful thing that once you’ve heard that, the next time you make a phone call, you are very aware of the closing. And what’s amazing is that, even though you are aware of it, you can’t do it any other way. You can’t escape it. I was blown away by that feeling. I felt that this method captures something about the social world that’s real and powerful and I wanted to do it. So that was my inspiration. It was that particular article. Steven Clayman - UCLA #lansi2019 #HumansofLANSI See more