Tanya Stivers

Lorenza Mondada

Jakob Steensig

Each time we take a turn in conversation we indicate what we know and what we think others know. However, knowledge is neither static nor absolute. It is shaped by those we interact with and governed by social norms - we monitor one another for whether we are fulfilling our rights and responsibilities with respect to knowledge, and for who has relatively more rights to assert knowledge over some state of affairs. This book brings together an international team of leading linguists, sociologists and anthropologists working across a range of European and Asian languages to document some of the ways in which speakers manage the moral domain of knowledge in conversation. The volume demonstrates that if we are to understand how speakers manage issues of agreement, affiliation and alignment - something clearly at the heart of human sociality - we must understand the social norms surrounding epistemic access, primacy and responsibilities.

The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation

Asta Cekaite

Rooted in multimodal conversation analysis and based on video recordings of naturally occurring social interactions, this book presents a novel analytical perspective for the study of touch. The authors focus on how different forms of touch are interactionally organized in everyday, institutional, and professional practices, showing how touch is multimodally achieved in social interaction, how it acquires its significance, how it is embedded in the current activity and in its social context, and how it is systematically intertwined with talk, facial expressions, and body posture. Including work by a wide range of renowned researchers, this volume provides rich visual illustrations of situations featuring touch as a social and intersubjective practice. The studies make a compelling contribution to the field by clearly examining and demonstrating the social meaning of touch for the participants in social interaction in a broad range of contexts. Presenting a new methodology for the study of touch, this is key reading for all researchers and scholars working in conversation analysis, multimodality, and related areas.

Touch, Language, and Body

Touch in Social Interaction

Mathias Broth

Eric Laurier

The last two decades have seen a rapid increase in the production and consumption of video by both professionals and amateurs. The near ubiquity of devices with video cameras and the rise of sites like YouTube have lead to the growth and transformation of the practices of producing, circulating, and viewing video, whether it be in households, workplaces, or research laboratories. This volume builds a foundation for studies of activities based in and around video production and consumption. It contributes to the interdisciplinary field of visual methodology, investigating how video functions as a resource for a variety of actors and professions.

Video at Work

Studies of Video Practices

Arnulf Deppermann

Marja-Leena Sorjonen

Emma Betz

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 holistic analysis: prosodic realization and the placement of OKAY in its larger sequential and multimodal context emerge as constitutive for distinct uses in individual languages. An inductive approach makes it possible to identify practices not previously documented, for example OKAY used for ‘qualified acceptance’ or as a ‘continuer’, and to document a core of recurrent, similar uses across languages. This work also outlines new research directions for comparative analysis by offering first insights into the diachronic development of OKAY’s uses and the relationship of OKAY to other particles in specific languages.

Toward a comparative approach to its use in talk-in-interaction

OKAY across Languages

Lorenza Mondada

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