LSI NCA 2013
Thursday, 11/21 2013
8:00 AM - 9:15 AM: Cultural Explorations of Discourse
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Virginia B - Lobby Level
Chair: Russell M. Parks, University of Colorado, Boulder

Bridging the language gap in discourse analysis: Examples in Pashto and Farsi (Mariah Yager, NSI)
Bridging the language gap is a perennial problem in language studies. A researcher is minimally
constrained by his or her requirement to report meanings of a vernacular in a formal, academic
language, often not even the language that was studied. Since it is rare that a researcher can
achieve a truly native capability in a language, there is a need for bridging the language gap in a
systematic and scientifically defensible manner. NSI has fielded research questions regarding
language and meaning in non-English languages that were not spoken by any current on-staff
researchers. In answering these questions, we developed a methodology that could rapidly
generate culturally-valid understanding of language use and meaning in an unfamiliar
vernacular, while maintaining as rigorous as possible standards of scientific inquiry to facilitate
replicable and reliable research. Our approach combines methodological elements from
discourse analysis, narrative analysis, and the ethnography of communication to overcome the
language gap. This methodology combines focus groups, native-speaking reader commentary,
analyst coding, and the creation of a structured database to elicit and capture information about
a corpus of texts. This methodology is not limited in scope and has been applied to different
languages (Arabic, Pashto, Farsi), textual genres (news feeds, blogs, prose, poetry, political
writings, fiction), and domains (reporting, arts and literature, persuasive argumentation).
Specific examples include evaluating social distance in Afghan insurgent writings from the 1980s
and recent Taliban discourse, and the expression of trust in Persian (Farsi) in historical, literary,
and political writings. Key findings include: Arabic and Pashto speakers employ similar, but not
identical means to establish group alignment; Afghan insurgent writings tend to be more polar
about in- and out-groups compared to their Taliban-era counterparts; and Persian speakers cite
informal language, intimacy, and language bias or objectivity as explanations for trusting or not
trusting a text.

Religious Language Ideology in American Public Discourse: Traditional Holiday Greetings (Jacqueline
Bruscella, University of Oklahoma)
Religious talk, and talk of religious talk, has become increasingly confused and contested in
American public discourse. This confusion, however, lies not in whether or not religious talk is
pervasive in American public discourse-as the answer to that question is overwhelmingly
affirmative. Instead, the question at hand is where to place that religious talk within public
discourse at large. Through this research, I hope to delineate the ways in which individuals use
and negotiate their understanding of religion's place in public discourse, specifically through the
lens of these "controversial" holiday greetings. I will look at the reasons as to why (and why not)
the use of certain greetings, such as those mentioned above, have become a source of
contention and discussion throughout the season, identifying the ways in which individuals (co)construct the meanings of holiday greeting rituals and how religious perspectives are negotiated
through their use.

Taking a Cultural Approach to People First Language (Jessica Hughes, University of Colorado,
Boulder)
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People first language (PFL), that is, the discursive practice of referring to 'people with
disabilities' as opposed to 'disabled people,' is a speech code (Philipsen, Coutu, & Covarrubias,
2005), a set of "socially-constructed symbols and meanings, premises, and rules, pertaining to
communicative conduct" (p. 57) that has helped to connect the disability community and define
the disability rights movement in the US. A prescriptive code that emerged out of the early selfadvocacy movement in the US, PFL aims to eliminate social stigma attached to disability by
stressing personhood over and above disabled identities. In the present discourse analysis, I
work to rationally reconstruct discursive practices around PFL, to trace the connections between
stances for and against person first language, and the intertextual links across texts about PFL
and disability. I aim to uncover cultural meanings around disability and personhood evident in
public discourse about PFL, and to draw out implications that these cultural meanings have for
disability rights advocacy, disability studies, and communication theory as a field.
9:30 AM - 10:45 AM: Perspectives on Language in Social and Political Contexts
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Virginia B - Lobby Level
Chair: Robert Green, Purdue University

Euphemisms for Terrorism: How Dangerous Are They? (Jonathan Matusitz, University of Central
Florida)
This paper examines euphemisms for terrorism that have pervaded the English language for the
past few decades. On the whole, a euphemism refers to an agreeable expression that has
replaced a more unpleasant one, even though the latter is more accurate and truthful. This
analysis attempts to answer the following question: Do euphemisms for terrorism help the
international community? A major conclusion is that euphemisms are dangerous because they
constitute language manipulation and separate the message from the meaning. By calling
terrorists "radicals," "insurgents," or "rebels," Western media and governments operate on the
principle of semantic deviance and deflect attention away from reality. This could cause citizens
to lower their guard in times where they should feel in danger.

Excentering our analytical position: The dialogicity of things (Letizia Caronia, University of Bologna &
François Cooren, University of Montreal)
In their edited book "Embodied interaction: Language and body in the material world," Streeck
et al. (2011) rightly remind us that our analytical frameworks should allow us to (1) recognize
"the diversity of semiotic resources used by participants in interaction" (p. 2) and (2) take into
account "how these resources interact with each other to build locally relevant action" (p. 2).
Because of their "excentric positionality" (Plessner, 1975), humans have progressively learned to
surround themselves with artifacts, tools, technologies and architectural elements to help them
adapt to a hostile environment in which they were essentially misfits. The overwhelming
presence of these things that humans built, therefore, needs, according to these authors and
many others (Suchman, 2007; Luff, Hindmarsh & Heath, 2000; Lynch, 1993; Hutchins, 1995), to
be taken into account in our analyses. Otherwise, we risk missing the key role that artifacts,
tools and other things play in the conduct of our daily activities.
In this paper, we propose to go one step further by acknowledging what things actually do in the
settings that we, as analysts, endeavor to study. Although Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005)
is briefly acknowledged in Streeck et al's (2011) introduction, it remains that analyses of
embodied interaction still appear to explicitly or implicitly defend a human-centered approach
to language and body in the material world. We thus propose to excenter or decentralize our
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analytical position by acknowledging what artifacts, tools and architectural elements contribute
to human activities and practices. Starting from a "ventriloqual" perspective on communication
(Cooren, 2010, 2012), we demonstrate that the accountable character of people's activities
presupposes a form of material agency (Pickering, 1995) that tends to be neglected in our
analyses. Far from neglecting human beings' contributions to their own activities, we show that
this approach allows us to acknowledge their capacity to skillfully react and respond to what
things indicate, say, or tell them to do. It is, we contend, in this back and forth process of actions
and reactions (Weigand, 2006) that a certain dialogicity of things can be recognized.

Resisting Questions on Hydrofracking: Answers and Assessments of Environmental Risk During an
Inter-governmental Hearing (Richard Buttny, Syracuse University)
An inter-governmental Hearing on hydrofracking for natural gas is critically examined. The
Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) recently released an Environmental Impact
Statement (EIS) and during the Hearing they are questioned by members of the New York State
Assembly's Environmental Conservation Committee. Several of the Assembly members'
questions pose problems with the EIS or with hydrofracking. The DEC's responses frequently do
not address the question as asked, but rather rework or reframe the question in a way that can
be more readily answered from the DEC perspective. The DEC representatives seem to stick to
their talking points and stay on message about hydrofracking. This study examines how these
discursive practices of "staying on message" are accomplished, and what kind of responses they
receive. Assembly members assess evasive answers in critical ways, the most forceful being the
implied attribution of bias or lack of balance in the EIS. These third-turn assessments contain not
only conflicting claims, but also question components which then lead to further responses from
the DEC. The Hearing is largely an argument over the dangers of hydrofracking fitted into a
question-answer format.

“The Country of Peasant Terikati”: Emigration and the Bulgarian National Identity Struggles
(Nadezhda Sotirova, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Through Bucholtz and Hall's (2005) suggested approach to identity, the study offers insights into
the identity struggles Bulgarians experience as the nation makes its way from a past of
communism, agricultural socio-economic focus, and the cultural consequences of Ottoman
dominance into a European, "modernized" future.
12:30 PM - 1:45 PM: Shaping Action in Interaction: Time, Memories, and Alignment
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Virginia B - Lobby Level
Chair: Charlotte M. Jones, Carroll College

A Taxonomy of Time Reference in Interaction (Chase Wesley Raymond, UCLA & Anne Elizabeth
Clark White, UCLA)
While the sociology and anthropology of time have received much attention from a variety of
perspectives, relatively few authors have examined how time is referenced in naturalistic talkin-interaction. The present study demonstrates that time reckoning is not merely an abstract
notion, but rather -- much like person and space reference -- in fact pervades on-the-ground
social interaction. Through a taxonomy of reference to time (termed "Absolute" and "EventRelative", each with subcategories), we describe how individuals mobilize time references to
perform a wide variety of social actions. We explore the ways in which situating experiences on
a timeline allows interactants to co-construct and maintain intersubjectivity as well as manage
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their interpersonal relationships. It is argued, therefore, that time is social not only in its
construction, but also in its everyday use.

Recycling topics and activities across dinner gatherings as a means for establishing social alignment
through epistemic balance (Elizabeth Strong, Alabama Public Schools & Felicia Roberts, Purdue
University)
From longitudinal data (dinner gatherings over a 1 year time span) this paper examines how
topics and activities are (re)introduced to connect new dinner guests with prior activities. We
examine how a topic may be brought back even though -- and perhaps precisely because -- not
all participants are the same at each dinner. The utterances introducing the "recycled" topic
deal with something other than what is packaged in the immediately preceding turn, bringing
epistemic imbalance (Heritage, 2012) into focus, and overtly providing instruction or
information relevant to previous group activities or understandings. In this way, group boundary
permeability is highlighted and made relevant for connecting "others" with the group.

Reference to shared past events and memories (Hie-Jung You, University of Illinois)
This conversation analytic study examines how speakers make reference to events and
memories they presume to be shared by their co-participants. By analyzing recognition checks
with (do you) remember X in American English, this paper focuses on how remembering is
elicited and how reference problems are resolved by participants in everyday talk. In terms of
sequence organization, recognition checks with remember are found in pre-sequences and
incidental sequences as part of a larger action. The reference to the past event may be
embedded in the do you remember X construction, or it may follow in a separate turn or TCU.
Furthermore, (do you) remember recognition checks occur in different action environments
which include counter-challenges, accounts and descriptions and serve interactional functions
such as establishing common ground among participants and marking epistemic territories and
knowledge domains. Therefore, this study discusses the role of epistemic knowledge reflected in
the use of recognition checks with remember and its implications for participants engaged in
talk-in-interaction.

Stance as a therapeutic object in psychotherapy (Alan Zemel, Univ at Albany, SUNY, Tessa Prattos,
International Trauma Center, Tessa Prattos, International Trauma Center , & Frances Yoeli, Life
Energy Center)
In this paper, we consider how a client-centered form of therapy, Intensive Integrative
Reprocessing Therapy, is organized to allow clients to use both the singular experience of
reprocessing in conjunction with post-reprocessing narratives to produce alternative stances
toward troublesome or traumatic matters addressed in therapy. Reprocessing involves bilateral
sensory stimulation and eye-gaze manipulation as the client focuses on a troublesome matter.
Upon completion of a round of reprocessing, clients are called on to report on memories or
sensations experienced during reprocessing. This procedure is repeated during the course of
four-hour therapy sessions. Post-reprocessing narratives afford the client the opportunity to
find alternative ways of making sense of these troublesome matters. Each round of postreprocessing client narration conveys the client's understanding or stance with regard to these
troublesome matters. Upon completion of the client's narrative, the therapist offers no
assessment or evaluation but calls for resumption of reprocessing. We contend that the absence
of post-narrative evaluation by the therapist is a noticeable absence that marks the client's
stance as worthy of continued examination and review by the client during reprocessing. In this
way, stance becomes a therapeutic object. In essence, by withholding a display of affiliation or
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disaffiliation upon completion of a client's story, the therapist uses a breach in the sequential
organization of storytelling to make the stance conveyed by the story an object of therapeutic
interest for the client and the therapist.
The data used for this investigation are video recordings from a corpus of recording of Intensive
Integrative Reprocessing Therapy sessions. Conversation analytic methods were used.
2:00 PM - 3:15 PM: Some Considerations of Situated Language Use
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Virginia B - Lobby Level
Chair: Felicia Roberts, Purdue University

Engaging the Discourse of Language Identification: A Critical Discourse Analysis of ISO 639-3 Sign
Language Change Requests (Elizabeth S. Parks, University of Washington)
Linguistic ideologies have become important social constructs shaping current language and
cultural expression yet are often left unquestioned and unexplored. These unstated ideologies
can contribute to inequality made real in decisions about languages and the people who use
them. One of the primary bodies of knowledge guiding the international development of
language categories and language policies is the ISO 639-3 Registry of Languages. Its influence as
a primary information source used by leading international organizations involved with language
rights and cultural preservation among marginalized minority groups cannot be
overemphasized. In this paper, I explore linguistic ideology impacting international language
classification through analysis of the changes made between 2006 and 2012 in the ISO 639-3
related to a specific type of minority language: signed language. Through a Critical Discourse
Analysis of the discourse of sign language identification and naming in the ISO 639-3, I describe
key social actors involved in the international discourse, rationale used to argue for the
recognition of new sign language entities, linguistic affiliation and language contact, patterns for
preferred naming of distinct signed languages, and ways in which these sign language
identification and naming processes are creating social reality for language users around the
world. Finally, I highlight several silent assumptions implicit in the discourse and argue that new
ISO 639-3 procedures are needed to create a more socially just reality.

If There’s No Connection, There’s No Discussion: Design Elements in Classroom Interaction (Heidi L.
Muller, University of Northern Colorado)
This paper examines the centrality of connection in interactions that participants experience as
classroom discussion. In this practical theorizing project, the data examined is taken from a
grounded practical theory investigation of IFCCD (instructor facilitated collegiate classroom
discussion) in three discussion-based courses. Ethnographic, discourse, interview, and focus
group data collected using action-implicative (ethnographically informed) discourse analysis
from three classrooms is analyzed through the theoretical lens of felt, experiential space as
created through artistic design. The differences in interaction experienced as discussion in two
of the classes and the experienced interactional tension in the third are analyzed as linked to
content-based or materials-based design and the instructor talk techniques/design elements
used within these three classrooms. The emergent conclusion is that to experience classroom
interaction as discussion is to experience connection as the felt, experiential space of the
classroom. This conclusion provides for potentially informative reflection on grounded practical
theory and practical theorizing.

Interviewing on Talk Shows: A Comparison with Hard News Interview Practices (Laura Loeb, UCLA)
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For the past two decades technology has shifted, rapidly increasing the number of television
channels available to viewers. Public figures who wish to communicate with those viewers have
begun to move away from traditional news programs and toward highly rated talk shows, both
in daytime and late-night. Most strikingly, with each campaign season presidential candidates
spend more and more time on these talk shows. Using the method of conversation analysis to
examine a sample of interviews from the United States' 2012 Presidential campaign and the
proceeding Republican primary, this presentation will describe some of the practices of
interviewing on talk shows. It will illustrate how these practices contrast with those used on
hard news programs. Finally, it will describe how the rise of the personalized style of talk show
interaction changes what audiences are likely to hear from politicians, and more broadly
exploring how this changes political communication in the public sphere.

Russian Toasting and Drinking as Symbolic Speech Act (Elena Nuciforo, University of Massachusetts)
This paper applies Cultural Discourse Analysis to studying toasting and drinking acts in Russian
culture. Based on the analysis of 149 instances of Russian toasting and drinking from real life
and television series, the paper identifies the symbolic phrasing and cultural sequence of
toasting speech acts. Symbolic phrasing is based on drinking "to you," "to us," and "so that"
important things happen and desires come true. The modal particle "davai(te)" serves to
facilitate and urge the act of joint drinking. The cultural sequence during toasting and drinking
involves unsolicited contributions, side conversations, personal comments, and emotional
responses on the part of the participants of the drinking act. Deep cultural meanings encoded in
the Russian people's communication while they drink involve those of (1) personhood: a person
is valuable because he/she is an integral part of the group (2) relationships: one's relationships
with other people are reconfirmed and strengthened through correct performance of drinking
acts; (3) actions: cultural experiences unfold through a sequence that is familiar to all the
participants who are expected to follow this sequence in order to confirm their cultural
membership; (4) emotions: participants demonstrate feelings of togetherness, belonging to the
group, and experiencing "tuning in" to the "soulful" state of all those drinking together; and (5)
place: the sense of temporary dwelling for the drinking group is created through the emotional
atmosphere of giving up obligations and demands of the outside world in order to feel the
moment of togetherness in toasting and drinking.
2:00 PM - 3:15 PM: Scholar to Scholar: Bodily and Embodied Communication
Sponsor: Scholar to Scholar
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Room: Hall B - Exhibit Level
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09. Cognitive relativity, gender, culture, and face needs (Tae-Seop Lim, University of
Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Junghyun Kim, Chung-Ang University; Sang-Yeon Kim, University
of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Hiroshi Ota, Aichi Shukutoku University; Kikuko Omori,
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Nathanael England, University of Wisconsin,
Milwaukee)
In studying the impacts of culture and gender on face needs, this study attempted to
demystify face, culture, and gender by identifying the substructure of face and
examining the extent to which cognitive relativity, a personal disposition, explains the
differences observed between cultural and gender groups. Americans and Koreans, and
males and females shared a variety of face needs, which were subsumed under thirteen
factors. Females claimed more face than males for all 13 elements. Americans and
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o
Koreans claimed face differently for some elements and similarly for other elements.
Cognitive relativity was a significant predictor of face need, and mediated the effect of
culture on face, but not that of gender.
37. Where Communication Acts Intersect the Soul (Charity Jernigan, Oklahoma Baptist
University)
Body motion always contains some type of meaning, yet, this meaning depends on the
context in which the body motion is expressed (Birdwhistell, 1970). There are numerous
studies on nonverbal behavior; however, there has been little to no research conducted
on the meaning behind nonverbal expressions in a worship context, especially the
worship context of higher education academic institutions. Therefore, this study
attempts to compare and assess the nonverbal expressions in two very different, but
similar worship contexts, Oklahoma Baptist University (OBU) and Oral Roberts
University (ORU). To shed light on this issue, literature was assessed on kinesics,
nonverbal behavior (nonverbal communication), intergroup relations, and Social Identity
Theory (SIT) (organizational identity). An expert interview was conducted, and a focus
group interview with students at OBU as well as a focus group interview with students
at ORU were conducted. Ultimately, the results indicated that nonverbal behaviors in a
worship context are found to serve as an expression of social identity.
3:30 PM - 4:45 PM: Cross-linguistic perspectives for managing understanding in German, Russian, and
Persian Conversation
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Virginia B - Lobby Level
Chair: Stephen DiDomenico, Rutgers University

"nu(n)" in Standard German: Objections and Overcoming Objections (Andrea Golato, University of
Illinois)
Using a conversation analytic approach, this paper explores the function of nu(n) in mundane
standard German. Nun/ 'now' is typically analyzed as a temporal adverbial; however, nun (and
its variant nu) is also frequently used in instances when it does not have a temporal function and
is used as a discourse marker. It is the difference in interactional function between temporal
nun and discourse marker nu(n) that this chapter seeks to explain. Specifically, I will show that
discourse marker nu(n) occurs when speakers are dealing with "objections or obstacles". As the
data analysis demonstrates, this happens in three different interactional environments: a)
speakers are objecting to (a prior disagreement from) the coparticipant(s), b) speakers are
expecting an objection from the coparticipant and are pre-emptively dealing with it, and c)
speakers are explaining how they have overcome or will overcome (non-linguistic) real-world
obstacles to some planned course of action. With the nu(n) turn, the speaker appeals to general
knowledge or knowledge shared specifically by the two participants to irrevocably deal with the
objection or obstacle and thereby attempt to bring the sequence to closure.

Indexing Talk in Prior Turn as Assumed and Expected Knowledge: The Case of “dige” in Persian
Conversation (Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm, Ohio State University)
This paper is a conversation analytical examination of the function of dige in everyday Persian
conversation. Digar in standard Persian and dige in spoken Persian is an adverb that may have
different meaning such as 'other', 'else', 'next time'. Dige as an adverb may also occur in postposition to the noun. For example, nimsâate dige/ 'half an hour another/in half an hour'.
However, in everyday Persian conversation dige is frequently used in instances where it does
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not have an adverbial function. After providing a discussion on some of the recent research on
knowledge in interaction and ways speakers display and negotiate knowledge (for example,
speaker's relative authority and differential rights and responsibilities) (Heritage and Raymond
2005; Stivers, Mondada, and Steensig 2011), the paper offers an analysis of dige, its prosodic
features and its specific sequential positioning and how they work together to mark what is said
in prior turns as assumed and expected knownledge. Furthermore, the paper will provide a
discussion of how this particular element may index alignment and disalignment between
coparticipants.

Negotiating understanding in “intercultural moments” in conversation (Galina Bolden, Rutgers
University)
The paper analyzes the organization of "intercultural moments" in conversation – moments
during which cultural or linguistic differences between conversationalists become an oriented-to
feature of interaction. The goal is to describe some recurrent conversational practices used to
construct such moments, focusing specifically on sequences in which participants deal with
actual or potential problems of understanding. I use the methodology of Conversation Analysis
to examine a large corpus of naturally occurring, video-recorded everyday interactions in
Russian American immigrant families. The paper describes the following three trajectories. First,
an interlocutor displays an assumption that the addressee will not understand a word or a
cultural reference and repair it. Second, an interlocutor checks the addressee's knowledge of a
word (e.g., "Do you know what X is?"), thereby orienting to the possibility that the addressee
may lack relevant expertise. Third, an interlocutor initially acts on the assumption of the
addressees' competency in the relevant domain and then visibly revises this assumption
following an other-initiated repair (e.g., "What?"). In all of these situations, participants suspend
the conversational activity in progress in order to deal with a potential or actual nonunderstanding in such a way as to ascribe to their co-conversationalist the identity of a cultural
outsider or novice and, thereby, highlight cultural and linguistic differences between them. The
paper also discusses interactional payoffs of these practices for resolving ostensible
intersubjectivity problems.

The scope of confirmation: Responsive 'stimmt', 'richtig', and 'eben' in German (Emma Betz,
University of Waterloo)
Responses are a central resource for displaying perception, knowledge, and understanding in
conversation (Goodwin 1986). This paper is concerned with confirmation tokens in German and
focuses on three tokens: 'stimmt', 'richtig', and 'eben' ('right', 'exactly').
Recent work in different languages has shown that speakers make reference to knowledge and
relationships through responsive tokens. They receipt information, index epistemic rights, and
align or agree with previous actions. Response tokens may also carry out disaffiliating and
disaligning moves.
This conversation analytic study is based on 48 examples taken from audio- and video-recorded
interaction. It shows that confirmation is not a fundamentally aligning action. All three tokens
indicate at least momentary disalignment, and richtig sustains it. The three tokens are also
distinguishable according to (1) epistemic status and epistemic stance, (2) target of reference,
(3) scope of reference. For example, while richtig targets just-stated facts, stimmt targets a
presupposition. Eben emphasizes the relevance of what it confirms, whereas richtig crucially
withholds such a confirmation.
This paper enhances our understanding of the action of confirming and illustrates the centrality
of epistemics in language-in-interaction.
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Friday, 11/22 2013
8:00 AM - 9:15 AM: Affiliation in interaction: Managing stance displays in conversation and
institutional talk
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Maryland B - Lobby Level
Chair: Joshua Raclaw, Metropolitan State University of Denver

Affective affiliation in speed-dating interactions (Neill Korobov, University West Georgia)
This paper collapses findings from three discursive studies on the establishment of affective
stance affiliation in first-time interactions between potential romantic partners. The guiding
interest, stated colloquially, involves examining how a 'connection' happens in first-time
encounters between potential romantic partners. Drawing on a corpus of 72 speed-dates
involving 24 participants (12 male; 12 female), a conversation analytic methodology was used to
identify and analyze interactional sequences where mutual affective affiliation was proffered
and formulated between speakers. Three conspicuous trends are presented. First, preliminaries
for affective participant stance alignment generally took the form of inferentially elaborative
probes (i.e., speculative questions that extend the putative content of disclosures) deployed in
response to queries about mate-preferences, attraction, or desire. Participants affiliated when
they were able to coordinate inferential conjectures about each other's desires, which were
often jocular and playfully provocative. Second, the use of two particular types of impropriety,
[i]negative category attributions of non-present others[/i] and [i]insults to the present
conversational partner[/i], tended to promote affiliation. The general, albeit surprising, finding is
that far from being adversarial, these types of impropriety tended to be useful for pursuing
intimacy precisely because they presented interactive trouble. Successfully navigating these
episodes of interactive trouble seemed to increase mutual displays of affiliation. And finally,
desires that were formulated as gender-normative rarely promoted an environment of mutual
affiliation, whereas desire-talk that displayed resistance to gender-normativity often functioned
as a preliminary for affective affiliation. Social scientists interested in the establishment of close
relationships would benefit from up-close, interactionally-focused research on the
establishment of affective affiliation.

Affiliation after disaffiliation: Practices for managing incongruent stance displays (Joshua Raclaw,
Metropolitan State University of Denver)
This paper examines how speakers manage displays of affiliation in the environment of one type
of potential trouble: where they have already produced or projected a disaffiliative stance
toward the issue at hand. As Emmertsen & Heinemann (2010) show in their analysis of
retrospective affiliation in Danish conversation, speakers in similar positions often do significant
interactional work to ensure that their displays of affiliation are heard as affiliative. In the cases
of English conversation examined here, such work takes the form of two concurrently produced
response practices: the use of a 'no'-preface followed by an explicit claim to (rather than an
enactment of) the speaker's affiliation with their recipient. These practices are illustrated in the
following excerpt, in which two friends (Sally and Laura) discuss Laura's recent first date with her
(now) boyfriend, David.
[b](1) SALLY AND LAURA (4:46 Was it Awkward)[/b]
13 S: Like it's wei:rd (…) how fa:st it's happened
14 L: No I I agree I kind of was like,
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Prior to this sequence, Sally had produced several negative assessments of different aspects of
Laura's first date as "awkward" and "weird", each of which were rejected by Laura. Sally's
negative assessment at line 13 is thus aimed at a recipient whose upcoming affiliation is
unlikely, given that Laura's prior disaffiliative responses hearably project her further
disaffiliation with negative assessments of the date. By contrast, Laura's talk at line 14 goes on
to display her affiliation with Sally, doing so through the type of marked turn shape described
above. First, though Laura displays her agreement with a positive polarity utterance, she does so
through a 'no'-prefaced response. Additionally, Laura's talk here produces a claim to her
affiliation ("I agree") rather than displaying it through a partial repeat or second assessment (in
scalar terms, both stronger ways of "doing" affiliation; see Pomerantz 1984).
As Raclaw (2012, 2013) has shown, 'no'-prefaced responses may be deployed to not only reject
or disagree with a prior turn (its "canonical" function; see also Schegloff 2001), but to index and
deny an inferential or off-record component of that turn. In the instances of affiliation discussed
in this paper, I argue that 'no'-prefaced affiliative turns do similar indexical work, denying that
the speaker's own stance differs from that of the recipient despite prior talk that reflects
evidence to the contrary. Within such turns, claims to (rather than stronger enactments of)
affiliation further display an unambiguous affiliative stance produced with epistemic primacy.
Though an analysis of naturally occurring face-to-face and telephone interaction, I discuss how
such response practices manage incongruencies between a speaker's prior disaffiliative stance
and their affiliation-in-progress, thereby avoiding the potential trouble that this may bring to the
talk.

Exploring the clinical heterogeneity of schizophrenia in talk-in-interaction: Extended turns and
minimal responses as practices of disaffiliation (Lisa Mikesell, Rutgers University)
This paper examines the marked heterogeneity in the behavioral profiles of schizophrenia and
suggests that these heterogeneous behaviors that are clinically described in contrastive terms
(e.g. pressured speech versus poverty of speech) share the commonality of demonstrating
disaffiliative stances. Based on video recordings of interactions with nine individuals with
schizophrenia (IwS) who participated in a video ethnographic study, this paper uses
conversation analysis and ethnographic insights to discuss observed interactional practices that
were experienced and treated by interlocutors as being disaffiliative. Following the classification
of Cretchley et al. (2010), a subgroup of participants demonstrating interactional impairment
are classified as "high activity speakers" while another subgroup are classified as "low activity
speakers." High activity speakers produced a considerable number of extended, multi-unit turns
leading them to dominate the conversation while low-activity speakers produced minimal turns,
leading their interlocutor to carry the conversation. Specific practices used by high activity
participants to hold onto turns included short intonational phrasing and expressive pitch
variation, within turn pauses, and position of discourse markers --practices that have been
associated with formal, monologic speech (Duez, 1982, 1997). Practices used by low activity
speakers included little uptake on topic proffers, absent second assessments when assessments
were employed to initiate (as opposed to close; see Goodwin & Goodwin, 1987) an interactional
sequence, and orienting towards noninstrumental interactions as vehicles for information
exchange. Interlocutors responded to these high- and low-activity practices with sets of
practices that attempted to create more balanced turn-taking. Importantly, brief instrumental
(non-affiliative) exchanges, in which IwS often employed the same interactional practices as
described above, were treated by interlocutors as unproblematic for both low- and high-activity
speakers. Exploring how these practices demonstrate disaffiliative stances provides insights
about the nature of affiliation: how (dis)affiliation can be performed through a range of
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practices – from prosodic to sequential and pragmatic – and how (dis)affiliation is negotiated
and managed in natural interactions.

“I thought”-initiated turns: Addressing discrepancies in first and second-hand knowledge and
remediating disaffiliative events in interpersonal relationships (Mick Smith, UCLA)
When interactions occur within ongoing relationships, a participant's behavior is analyzable not
only for its accountability to the immediate setting, but also to the historical biography that
comprises that particular relationship. Discrepancies that arise in participant knowledge that is
"putatively mutual," or otherwise presumed by a participant as shared in common, is a
potentially divisive and disaffiliative event. This study reports on the use of one particular
action-format – turns-at-talk initiated with "I thought" – for their use in identifying and solving
discrepancies between second and first-hand knowledge. The analysis shows that in
interpersonal contexts, "I thought"-prefaced turns routinely mark an emergent or incipient
discrepancy in the prior talk, inviting the addressed recipient to account for that discrepancy
and thus providing a means for remediating potentially divisive or disaffiliative events within
relationships. This not only affords participants one means for identifying and remediating
discrepancies in what they take to be their shared history, but also allows participants to show
their interlocutors, "...I can see the sorts of changes that have been made since I last visited you,
and show them to you. I can find things that have changed in 'our time,' i.e., time that is only
marked by our relationship" (Sacks, 1995, Lectures II, p. 167). As such, "I thought"-initial turns
find an important use in the epistemic and affective maintenance of social relationships.
9:30 AM - 10:45 AM: Language and Social Interaction Division Business Meeting
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Marriott Salon 1 - Lobby Level
11:00 AM - 12:15 PM: Language and Social Interaction: Top Four Papers
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Marriott Salon 1 - Lobby Level
Chair: Heidi Kevoe-Feldman, Northeastern University

Doing ‘How I’m Coming Here’: Displaying a State of Being when Opening Face-to-Face Interaction
(Danielle Pillet-Shore, University of New Hampshire)
How – and why – do we display the 'state' that we are 'in' when we encounter others? This
article closely examines video-recorded naturally occurring openings of face-to-face interactions
between English-speaking persons coming together to socialize and/or work to answer these
questions, presenting an analysis of the systematic interactional practice of doing 'how I'm
coming here'. Through this practice, participants 'just now' arriving to a setting enact a display of
entering into interaction in a marked state of being, accounting for what has produced that
state by formulating selected previous activities in which they were engaged en route to
establishing copresence with addressed-recipients. After first describing how arrivers
recognizably build this practice using multimodal expressive resources to embody a negative or
positive stance towards their previous activities, this article examines the sequential positions
into which arrivers can deploy its different components, showing that an arriver's enacted
nonverbal display of a marked state of being can shape the course of later talk. This article
ultimately elucidates the social actions that coparticipants accomplish through the sequences
engendered by this practice, showing them to be an interactional 'birthing' process – a method
through which arrivers achieve delivery from some 'there-and-then' with 'them' to the 'here-
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and-now' with 'us'. A key finding of this research is that parties use doing 'how I'm coming here'
sequences to achieve social solidarity in the earliest moments of face-to-face encounters.

“Can I ask you a question?”: Confronting ethnographer identity in “interview flipping” (Lydia Reinig,
University of Colorado, Boulder)
My essay asks:
1. What are the complexities of studying themes about cultural practices and experience where I
am personally implicated in field study?
2. How do I assign meaning to these moments as a researcher and as a prior and presently
negotiated community member?
In response to my guiding questions, I turn to what I have colloquially deemed "interview
flipping" experiences. While it was not uncommon for my identity outside the researcher role
(i.e., friend, classmate, daughter of my parents, young person, community member) to be
interpellated by interlocutors through references to my personal history/our shared knowledge,
in two instances, I was subject to the "interview flip"-when the roles of the interview were
switched. In these instances my interlocutors began asking me questions about my experiences
living in another state and being a graduate school student.
In the paper I reflect on interview excerpts where my own practices of "going" and "returning"
become the topic of conversation. I argue that in my interactions with young people my identity
as a graduate student living in Colorado (i.e., an understanding of self seemingly devoid of the
rural community) was confronted with a need to acknowledge and assert my identity as a
someone who grew up, cares/d about, remembers, and appropriates the proper community
ways of being, knowing, and speaking (i.e., the Lydia that they knew historically and locally). In
these interactions my (previous) paralleled life experiences and personal familiarity draws me
out of a researcher role and into a personal negotiation of how we understand/understood each
other in situ during interviews. Ultimately, I seek to augment previous conceptual frameworks
regarding positionality and reflexivity by addressing the complexities surrounding my own field
experiences.

How to do things with requests: Requesting at the family dinner table (Jenny S. Mandelbaum,
Rutgers University)
Requests for food and other things at the family dinner table generally run off smoothly,
without "breaking the surface" of interaction. That is, in an environment of multiple concurrent
involvements (Lerner & Raymond, nd), requesting and granting food or other things usually only
momentarily suspends or delays the progressivity of other concurrent activities. This
conversation analytic study examines requests in which interactants do "more" than just
requesting. Drawing on videotaped Thanksgiving, Easter and Passover dinners of nine families in
the Northeastern United States, 92 requests (mainly for food) were collected. I show how at
each position in the unfolding of a request, opportunities may be taken to implement some
other action. That is, requests may be formulated in such a way as to do more than requesting
(e.g., they may enact impatience, implement a complaint about the requested item, or treat an
interlocutor as noncompliant). Responses to requests may be produced in such a way as to do
more than fulfilling the request (e.g., they may enact attentiveness, critique being asked for the
item, teach proper norms of conduct, or even perform a "tit for tat"). In third position also,
appreciations or acknowledgements of fulfilled requests may do more than appreciating or
acknowledging (e.g., they may be designed to acknowledge an impropriety in the fulfilling of the
request). Findings indicate how the formulation, fulfillment and acknowledgement of requests
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may provide a structure through which norms of food consumption and distribution, family
relationships and personhood may be enacted and negotiated.

Identity, Authenticity and Political Discussion as Performed in the Israeli Online Commenting Arena
(Gonen Dori Hacohen, University of Massachusetts, Amherst & Nimrod Shavit, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst)
Online political websites constitute an emergent arena in which researchers have access to
participation of ordinary people in public affairs. Our analysis focuses on Israeli online political
comments in attempt to scrutinize the relations between identities as "presentation of the self"
in the internet and democratic discourse on a perceivably actual public sphere. We demonstrate
how participants use practices that reflect and create an arena in which identities are
meaningless. When participants try to create meaningful identities, for rhetorical or other
reasons, these attempts of using authentic identities triggers mimicry, ridicule, and challenges
for their chosen self-presentations. Our analysis suggests that participants may rhetorically use
the inability to create an authentic identity to undermine any expressed position. Therefore, we
conclude that constructing and maintaining an impression of authenticity, especially in online
public discussions, is essential to democratic deliberation in this arena and that this condition is
not met in the Israeli environment, leading to the inability to create meaningful political
discussion.
2:00 PM - 3:15 PM: Exploring the DNA of social interaction: Celebrating the career of Anita Pomerantz
on the occasion of her retirement
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Marriott Salon 1 - Lobby Level
Chairs: Jenny S. Mandelbaum, Rutgers University & Gene Lerner, University of California, Santa Barbara
Respondent: Anita Pomerantz, Univ at Albany, SUNY

Grappling with Particulars: Turning from Theory to Noticing and Inductive Claim Building (Karen
Tracy, University of Colorado, Boulder)
In the early 1980s when Anita Pomerantz became my colleague, I was a coding researcher.
Drawing on theory I developed and operationalized categories of communicative action, which I
then sought to count to determine if the categories varied with other factor in the social world
(race, gender, role). Anita Pomerantz was a focal person in my personal transformation to a very
different kind of researcher. Though our heated arguments about the meanings of categorizing
and counting, I came to rethink what counted as desirable knowledge and the best methods to
construct that knowledge. In this panel I will discuss how Pomerantz's interactional stance as a
colleague, along with her recurring arguments about people and meaning-making led me to
develop action-implicative discourse analysis and grounded practical theory, a discourse analytic
method and a meta-theoretical approach. In this talk I make clear the influence of her ideas on
these conceptions, as well as where our ideas went in different directions.

Looking Under the Surface of the Term “Message” and Finding There’s Nothing There (Robert
Sanders, University at Albany)
I met Anita at a 1986 conference at UC Santa Barbara jointly sponsored by the university's
departments of Sociology and Communication. In her presentation there, Anita spoke as a
newcomer to the Communication discipline, having just recently been hired by Temple
University, and discussed some of the conceptual issues she had run into. One of these centered
on the term, "message." She explained that she was having much difficulty understanding what
the concept "message" applies to, or more precisely, what "we" (in Communication) are talking
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about when we use the term "message." She didn't go much further into it, but those remarks
stuck with me, and I've given the matter much thought since. I have only commented on it
briefly once in print, citing Anita's remarks, in a chapter in John Greene's 1997 collection,
"Message Production," where I began by saying that "The term "message" is not analytically
neutral" and that "it is debatable whether objects of that kind exist at all, or at least whether
people typically pro¬duce such objects when they communi¬cate." I will go much further here,
exposing the vagueness and ambiguity of the concept "message," pointing out that this is why
much work in LSI avoids the term entirely. But avoiding it is not enough, because we need a
term that covers some of that conceptual terrain, and so I will propose concepts and terms that
do some of the work that the term "message" does without its liabilities. In this way, I will
celebrate Anita's ability to penetrate --and her impatience with-- theoretical and conceptual
abstractions, and instead foreground the concrete particulars that are at the center of her
contributions to our discipline. ´

Second Thoughts about Second Assessments (John Heritage, UCLA)
This paper reviews Anita Pomerantz's contributions to epistemic aspects of social interaction,
and comments on her work on assessments, question design, indirect solicitations of
information, and hedged presentations of knowledge claims. It is argued that this body of work
represents a coherent and systematic oeuvre systematically introducing generations of
conversation analysts to epistemic issues in conversation.

Self-repair and the normative character of (the design of) social actions (Paul Drew, Loughborough
University, UK)
In this talk I'm going to be considering the following:
• CA is essentially comparative
• Self-repair gives us access to the work it takes to design a turn – self repairs bring to the
interactional surface the work in which speakers engage in order to construct an action
• An action is constructed with respect to its interactional environment and sequential
placement or position
• Self-repairs provide the evidence that speakers orient to what are, and what are not,
appropriate forms for doing that action in that sequential position – that is, to the normative
character of constructing social actions
Therefore I'll be taking a rather different approach to self-repair than is generally taken in CA.
CA research has tended to focus on the mechanisms and practices for managing self-repair;
however, I'm focusing on what is managed, systematically, though self-repair (which might
come closer to the 'substance' or content of self-repair, rather than 'form'). This approach is
congruent, I think, with Anita Pomerantz's interests in the normative character of social
conduct. These issues will be illustrated in the context of recent research into specific social
actions such as offering, requesting and so on.
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3:30 PM - 4:45 PM: The impact and legacy of Gerry Philipsen: Ethnography of communication from
1972 into the future
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Virginia A - Lobby Level
Chair: Kristine Munoz, University of Iowa
Presenters:
 Donal A. Carbaugh, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
 Daniel Chornet, Saint Louis University, Madrid
 Lisa Coutu, University of Washington
 Tabitha Hart, San Jose State University
 Evelyn Y Ho, University of San Francisco
 Tamar Katriel, Haifa University
Respondent
 Gerry F. Philipsen, University of Washington
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Saturday, 11/23 2013
8:00 AM - 9:15 AM: The Crafting of Action in the Design of Adjacency-Pair Firsts and Seconds
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Delaware A - Lobby Level
Chair: Jeffrey Robinson, Portland State University

Epistemic Presupposition and Action Formation: The Practice of 'Or'-Terminating Solicitations of
Information in Ordinary and Medical Contexts (Jeffrey D. Robinson, Portland State University)

Preference Organization in Question Design (John Heritage, UCLA).

Constructing Resistant Responses in Russian Conversation: An Investigation into the Turn-Initial
Particle nu (Galina Bolden, Rutgers University)

Action Interruption as a Practice and Resource: On the Post-Beginning Reformation of Responding
Actions in Conversation (Gene Lerner, UCSB)
9:30 AM - 10:45 AM: Medical Interaction: Inquiries, Treatment, and Uncertainty
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Virginia B - Lobby Level
Chair: Galina Bolden, Rutgers University

The Blood Sugar Solicitation Sequence: An Opening Inquiry to the Diabetic Patient about Relative
Blood Sugar (Leah Wingard, San Francisco State University; David Olsher, San Francisco State
University; Christina Sabee, San Francisco State University; Ilona Vandergriff, San Francisco State
University; Christopher J. Koenig, Univ of California, San Francisco)
This paper analyzes a recurrent opening sequence in the type II diabetic visit between doctors
and patients in which the doctor asks the patient about his or her current blood sugar levels. We
call this sequence the: Blood Sugar Solicitation (BSS) sequence. The BSS sequence occurs at the
beginning of the visit or at the start of the diabetes component of the visit and is consequential
because it initiates talk about diabetes by topicalizing the patient's own measurement of blood
sugar. When patients respond with normative blood sugar levels by providing evidence of
having regularly checked blood sugar levels or a log with the numbers, and physicians can assess
these levels as medically unproblematic, the physician is likely to move to a next activity,
thereby closing the sequence and forwarding the overall progressivity of the visit. However,
when patients respond to the inquiry with an assessment rather than the numbers themselves,
or demonstrate not knowing the day-to-day blood sugar levels, the sequence is expanded.
Through analysis of this sequence, we show that the BSS sequence is one technique that
physicians regularly use to pursue a biomedical agenda and assess the patient's blood sugar
levels. In this work we consider how the expansion of the sequence can be relevant for enacting
patient centeredness in the diabetic visit as physicians assess and discuss blood sugar numbers
with patients and help patients manage the complexities of life with a chronic illness.

Uncertainty as an Emergent Process: Providers’ Discursive Practices and Patient Uncertainty (Elaine
Hsieh, University of Oklahoma & Alaina Zanin, University of Oklahoma)
This study extends the literature on uncertainty management by exploring the coordinated,
collaborative, and goal-oriented nature of uncertainty in discourse. We recruited 29 patients
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and 3 oncologists to participate in video-recorded medical encounters and included 44
segments (553.25 minutes) of the first medical visits for this study. Using constant comparative
analysis, we argued that providers (intentionally or unintentionally) employed discursive frames
that can shape patient uncertainty, highlighting the unique characteristics of oncologist
narratives. The four themes are: (a) patient-centered contextualization, (b) the nature of
medicine, (c) pragmatic ambiguity, and (d) institutional roles and responsibilities. We then
explored the reasons, functions, and impacts of uncertainty as it emerges in the discursive
processes of provider-patient interactions. Successful uncertainty management in discourse
requires all participants to effectively and appropriately coordinate their discursive frames to
develop the shared meanings of uncertainty.
11:00 AM - 12:15 PM: Moving the conversation forward: Bridging studies of new media and
interaction research using LSI principles and approaches
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Thurgood Marshall Ballroom North - Mezzanine Level
Chair: Stephen DiDomenico, Rutgers University

Communication Technology as a Resource for (Meta)discourse (Jessica S. Robles, University of
Washington)
The judgments people make about the role of technology and media in everyday discoursewhether right or wrong-offer important insights into norms and ideals for communicative
practice. This paper analyzes the affordances which technological modalities offer participants in
interaction as a resource for accomplishing, assessing, and accounting for communication. The
analysis proposes that metadiscursive comments about technologically mediated
communication constitute a practice through which participants reconstruct local and situated
norms and ideals while positioning themselves morally and relationally.
The data analyzed come from a 21-minute recording between two college-age women who are
close friends, roommates, and sorority sisters. The conversation takes place in one woman's
bedroom on a Sunday evening and was recorded with the built-in webcam of a laptop
computer. The majority of the conversation covers the topic of their romantic relationships and
takes the form of "troubles talk" (Jefferson, 1988). All of the recording was transcribed
according to Jeffersonian transcription conventions. The method employed is discourse analytic
and draws on grounded practical theory, social constructionist/cultural discourse analysis, and
conversation analysis approaches to interaction.
Preliminary findings indicate that while many technological modalities and communicative
forms are employed unproblematically to do social actions, the implicit and explicit invocations
of these modalities as "different" from ordinary face-to-face conversation renders them open to
critique. As taken-for-granted and "invisible" as technology may appear to skilled users, it is
nonetheless distinguished. The construction of this distinction in talk is revelatory of
participants' sociocultural ideologies of communicative conduct and moral judgments of selves
and others in interpersonal relationships.

Coordinating affordances, bridging modalities: Managing mobile devices and the “text-based”
summons during co-present conversation (Stephen DiDomenico, Rutgers University)
In this research I bridge the differing theoretical orientations of mobile communication studies
and Conversational Analysis (CA) by examining mobile phone use that occurs during in-person
conversation. In doing so I focus on two main objectives. First, I show concretely how mobile
phone use and mobile phone devices are woven into everyday conversations. Second, the
primarily in-person perspective of CA is extended to show how attention to mobile phones, and
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technology more generally, increases our understanding of "the ways in which social processes
and technological artifacts are interrelated and intertwined" (Hutchby, 2002, p. 15).
This work builds on the research program laid out by Hutchby (2002), which argues that using a
CA perspective to understand the social implications of technology is important because allows
scholars to show, "the precise details of how artifacts become involved in everyday conduct" (p.
30). Grounded in the perspectives of participants through close analysis of video-taped
recordings of quasi-naturally occurring interaction, CA focuses on how individuals use language
as a tool to accomplish a range of identity, relational, and institutional-level activities in talk-in
interaction (Heritage, 1984). Using a collection of video-based conversational data, I will explore
these phenomena in detail. Preliminary findings have shown that the text message related
noises that are emitted from mobiles may function as a way of "summoning" (Schegloff, 1968)
interactants to different, non-copresent interactions via mobile technology (in many cases,
while they are already engaged in a co-present one). Implications for future research regarding
mobiles in the mundane conduct of day-to-day life will be suggested.

Digital discourse in context: The evolution of "like" on Facebook (Laura West, Georgetown
University)
Social media has quickly become an important means of social interaction with Facebook
emerging as the most popular among new media platform (in October 2012, creator Mark
Zuckerberg announced that the site had reached one billion members). In February of 2013, the
site celebrated its ninth year in existence. The Facebook platform and the discourse taking place
there have evolved together during the past near-decade to support and promote more social
interaction, and users continue to negotiate Facebook meaning and norms as they communicate
on the site.
This study focuses on a particular discursive element native to Facebook - the "like" function –
and explores how it has been employed by users over time to serve social needs. The feature did
not appear until the site's fifth year in existence, but it has become an indispensible part of
communication on the site and is now found throughout the internet. While Facebook meant
the feature to mean "I like this" (official Facebook blog 2009), users adapted the feature to serve
a myriad of communicative functions. In general, "liking" is now the most common way a
member "decline[s] or accept[s] the position of listener" (Goodwin & Heritage 1990), and more
specifically, "like" can serve as a convenient second-pair part (Schegloff & Sacks 1973) to yes-no
questions posted on the site.
As with most communicative functions, there are norms around how users employ "like"; some
norms seem to depend on the social relationships of the participants and may also revolve
around topic and even format (whether the information being responded to is a memberauthored status update or a Facebook-generated notification). Only by analyzing online
interactions in specific contexts, like Facebook, can research begin to shed light on how
individuals are accomplishing conversations on new media and why this has social significance.

Some considerations regarding natural language processing in designing argumentation support
(Mark Aakhus, Rutgers University)
Natural language processing (NLP) research and design that aims to model and detect
opposition in text for the purpose of opinion classification, sentiment analysis, and meeting
tracking, generally excludes the interactional, pragmatic aspects of online text. We propose that
a promising direction for NLP is to incorporate the insights of pragmatic, dialectical theories of
argumentation to more fully exploit the potential of NLP to offer sound, robust systems for
various kinds of argumentation support. While argument in its simplest form is pure opposition
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it also involves the classic sense of making arguments and is most interesting when having and
making arguments occur together in a manner tailored to the circumstances of the collective
and the activities in which they are engaged. We argue that the integration of insights from NLP
(i.e., lexical well formed grammars) and argumentation theory (i.e., disagreement space) call for
a response-centered meta-ontology for discovering argumentative relations among
contributions to a discourse. Such an undertaking should pursue some high-level design
requirements in developing socially intelligent systems to augment human reasoning and
interaction:
• Operate at the level of collective reasoning as generated and performed by groups,
organizations, communities and networks of actors.
• Be based on a pragmatic understanding of argument as statements about the world and
commitments about action.
• Provide enough formality to exploit the power of computation while avoiding a degree of
inflexibility that obscures the actual interaction and reasoning practices of collectives.
• Build representations of argumentation sensitive to the surface level playing out of the
argument and to the underlying assumptions and overarching perspectives.

“He’s got a right to be upset if your phone is in your face when he’s trying to spend time with you”:
Intertextuality and cultural discourses in a weight-loss app’s online discussion forum (Cynthia
Gordon, Syracuse University)
Mobile phone applications (apps) for weight loss are amongst the increasingly popular
Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) that now constitute part of everyday
communication. Through data entry (e.g., of foods consumed, calories burned through
exercise), these apps involve human-computer interaction (HCI). Many also (optionally) involve
computer-mediated communication (CMC) in that they are linked to online discussion forums,
where users can interact with each other. While extant studies consider the role of textmessaging in romantic relationships (e.g., Gershon, 2010) and how friendships are forged on
platforms such as Facebook (e.g., Jones, Schieffelin, & Smith, 2011), we know little about how
ICTs that entail HCI and CMC impact the everyday communication behaviors, face-to-face and
otherwise, through which people negotiate interpersonal relationships. My case study uses web
content analysis (Herring, 2008) and discourse analysis to investigate interconnections between
couples' communication and uses of weight-loss mobile phone apps and their affiliated website
tools.
Specifically, I analyze one online discussion board thread (274 postings) on the website of
MyFitnessPal, a widely used weight-loss app. This thread was started by a woman who reports
arguing with her partner about her use of the app. I draw on two primary analytic concepts:
"cultural discourses" (Carbaugh, 1988)--which refers to how ways of using language are linked to
shared, culturally-inflected understandings of personhood and communication--and the theory
of textual interconnections/transformations known as "intertextuality" (Kristeva, 1980). Analysis
reveals how multiple cultural discourses--pertaining to how relationships function, appropriate
communication, purposes of ICT use, and how weight loss works--are linguistically created and
interwoven in the thread, especially through metacommunication, quotation, and repetition.
First, ICTs are constructed as potentially disruptive of face-to-face conversations, and therefore
damaging to relationships; for instance using an app during dinner is described by a poster as
"obsessive and intrusive." Second, ICT use (and the activity of weight loss) is viewed as related
to inherent relationship tensions, notably regarding partners' needs for independence and
connection (c.f., Tannen, 2005); a partner "may just feel left out." Third, different
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understandings of a single ICT--as a tool for self-monitoring versus for creating social
connections, for example--can lead to miscommunication amongst well-intentioned partners.
In lending insight into how people adapt ICTs into their everyday lives and how these adaptions
are viewed as impacting couples' communication, this study contributes to our growing
understanding of how language, relationships, and new media intersect; how different modes of
communication are perceived as interrelated; and intertextuality in discourse.
12:30 PM - 1:45 PM: Making Connections: Stories and Narratives in Public and Private Discourse
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Washington Room 4 - Exhibit Level
Chair: Jessica S. Robles, University of Washington

It’s like, ‘I’ve never met a lesbian before!' Personal Narratives and the Construction of Diverse
Femininities in a Lesbian Counterpublic (Natasha Shrikant, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
This paper uses membership categorization analysis to illustrate how five women invoke
multiple female gender and sexuality identity categories in personal narratives to construct the
device of womanhood. The five racially diverse women include four self-identified lesbians and
one heterosexual and range in age from mid-twenties to early forties. Analysis of their two hour
audio recorded interaction illustrates that gender and sexuality cannot be understood as a
binary difference between men and women. These women use revolutionary categories,
defined on their own terms rather than by outsiders, to characterize women they encounter in
their personal experience (lesbian and otherwise). The revolutionary categories exemplify a
diversity of female gender and sexuality identities and ultimately challenge heteronormative
conceptions of femininity while simultaneously constructing a lesbian counterpublic. Thus, the
personal experiences of these women turn out to be highly political.

Re-connecting with the Ummah through personal storytelling: “Piety Stories” by Muslim Tatar
Women (Liliya Karimova, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Focusing on piety stories of Muslim Tatar women in the central Russian republic of Tatarstan,
this paper explores culturally-shared premises and social meanings behind the communicative
practice of sharing paths to Muslim piety. I suggest that, in addition to allowing women to
perform their identities and negotiate group memberships, the stories provide a discursive way
for the speaker to practice being a Muslim and for the audience, a blueprint for becoming one,
enabling the speaker and the listeners to (re)connect with the Ummah, the community of
Muslims around the world united by their faith. By doing so, these piety stories serve as a
source of agency for both personal and social transformation. My analysis of the piety stories is
informed by research on conversion narratives (Stromberg, 1993) and life stories (Linde 1993).

Small Stories as Group Resources in Public Deliberation (Leah Sprain, University of Colorado, Boulder
& Jessica Hughes, University of Colorado, Boulder)
Scholars are increasingly recognizing that narratives are vital to public deliberation. We analyze
small stories in focus groups on immigration to understand how small stories offer resources for
group interaction. This analysis reveals two new functions of small stories in deliberation. When
participants share first-person narratives relevant to the issue, they construct an emergent
interactional identity as an expert. Attending to elicited stories reveals social categories that are
particularly relevant to an issue. Our analysis also demonstrates that some participants did not
have personal stories relevant to discussing immigration. This empirical finding raises a
normative question: If narratives are vital to public deliberation, what happens when some
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people have stories to tell and others do not? We suggest how small stories research can help
deliberative theorists address this question.

Speaking like a queen in RuPaul's Drag Race: Towards a speech code of American drag queens
(Nathaniel Simmons, Ohio University)
Imploring Speech Codes Theory (Philipsen, Coutu, & Covarrubias, 2005) as my theoretical
framework, I examine communicative practices and beliefs as to what it means to speak like a
drag queen as portrayed within the reality TV show RuPaul's Drag Race (RPDR): Season Four.
Examining this particular population increases knowledge on how marginalized populations use
talk to construct rules of conduct for a coherent identity. Members uphold drag queen speech
codes by revealing what it means to speak like a queen. Such items include to look like a "fish,"
don't be "hungry," be humble, resist negativity, don't complain, and exude professionalism.
These are qualities and characteristics of communication that a drag queen must perform,
uphold, and repeat in order to uphold drag family values, thus fulfilling the code of sisterhood
that comes with the performance of drag. These are evident within beliefs and everyday talk as
portrayed within RPDR.
12:30 PM - 1:45 PM: Scholar to Scholar: Education, Leadership and Social Support
Sponsor: Scholar to Scholar
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Room: Hall B - Exhibit Level
o
18. LIWC Validation Study: The OSLO I Accords (William A. Donohue, Michigan State
University; Daniel Druckman, George Mason University; Yuhua (Jake) Liang, Chapman
University)
The purpose of this paper is to outline a validation strategy for creating new LIWC
(Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) dictionaries. The context used for this validation
study is an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian rhetoric preceding the 1993 Oslo I accords
by Donohue and Druckman (2009). In that study, coders were trained to code six
constructs in the text: looking forward, looking backward, power, affiliation, trust and
mistrust. For the current study, six new dictionaries of words tapping these constructs
were developed and given to a group of participants to evaluate in terms of fit with the
construct. Several data reduction strategies were used to identify the most relevant
words pertaining to the constructs. These reduced dictionaries were correlated with the
coder results from the Donohue and Druckman research. Only one construct, forwardlooking, emerged as a significant correlate with the forward looking coder rating across
all data reduction techniques and the full dictionary list. Factor analysis, on the other
hand, produced a near significant correlation for power. No other constructs across data
reduction techniques produced significant correlation between coder and LIWC data.
The implications of this approach in establishing the validity of the LIWC process were
then discussed.
3:30 PM - 4:45 PM: How Narratives Facilitate Personal, Cultural, and Societal Change
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Virginia B - Lobby Level
Chair: Julien C. Mirivel, University of Arkansas, Little Rock

Accounting for Success: The Narrative Dilemma of Achieving Major Weight Loss (Jone Brunelle,
University of Colorado, Boulder)
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Benoit notes that individuals tell success stories to construct identities in ways that demonstrate
and subscribe to cultural values. Athletes, for example, may provide narratives describing their
contributions to a big win, enhancing their reputations and emphasizing cultural values of
competitiveness and winning. In cases of personal transformation as success, however,
individuals can face unique challenges in recounting their achievements. People who have lost a
substantial amount of weight, for instance, face a situation where the new, socially accepted
self is juxtaposed to the former stigmatized identity. In this paper, I draw upon actionimplicative discourse analysis and narrative analysis to examine four interviews with former
contestants of reality weight loss show The Biggest Loser (BL). These contestants not only
publicly transform their bodies, but are also prompted to talk about their weight loss successes
long after the show. While they must take some personal responsibility for the actions leading
to weight loss in order to acclaim success, they must also resist individual blame for weight gain
in order to save face and reject the notion that they were once bad or immoral. After explaining
individual and societal frames of responsibility for obesity, I argue that these individuals must do
work to navigate the tension between acclaiming success and managing stigma. I illuminate
some strategies used by both former contestants and interviewers to co-construct narratives
that attempt to balance playing into larger societal discourses about weight loss and rejecting
the negative attributes assigned to the stigmatized obese self.

Negotiating Intercultural Differences in Narrative: A Comparison of Quaker and Blackfeet Spiritual
Stories (Donal A. Carbaugh, University of Massachusetts, Amherst & Elizabeth Molina-Markham,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
The logic of a story's unfolding and the context in which it is told represent, and in the moment
recreate, cultural assumptions about the world and the storyteller's place in it. In this paper, we
will draw on instances of narrative telling to explore the means by which storytelling can both
emphasize and bridge different cultural understandings and practices, modeling and imparting
cultural knowledge. Specifically, our focus is on a narrative told by a member of the Religious
Society of Friends (Quakers) in the United States, which we will compare with the telling of a
narrative by a member of the Blackfeet Indian Nation. Both narratives were told as parts of
interviews during ethnographic work in these communities. We adopt an ethnography of
communication and cultural discourse theory perspective in analyzing the elements of the
narrated event as well as the situated interactional significance of the narrative telling. Parallels
between the narratives can be found in terms of the structure and key ideas of the stories-for
example in the occurrence of a unique kind of spiritual communication and of movement
between cultures-as well as in how the stories function as resources for problem solving, both
for the tellers and potentially for other community members. We show that in these contexts,
the sharing of stories can be understood as a communicative means of teaching others about
the significance of participating in a particular community and of negotiating cultural
differences.

Packaging and Positioning Personal Experience in Public Arguments: Uses of Citizen Storytelling in
Media Discourse (Kathleen C. Haspel, Fairleigh Dickinson University)
Narrative, as a consequential construction of experience, seems a most logical means of
integrating the purposive character of argument with the progressive character of public
discourse. It can be a way of staking claim to a place, however ephemeral, in the evolving
landscape of some ongoing debate or ineluctable dilemma. This paper looks at some structures
and functions of narrative communication in mediated public spheres, paying particular
attention to the personal stories of ordinary citizens. Cases taken from multiple media sites (call22
LSI NCA 2013
in talk shows; political reporting in roundtable and print journalism; a public relations campaign
on television and YouTube) are examined to show how the personal stories of individuals are
produced adjudicatively within public discourses, that is, organized in such ways so as to
position them rhetorically in relationship to the discourses to which they are contributing.
Particular constructions of personal experience narrative are isolated for explanation and
discussion: those in contrastive, inverse, and subversive relationships with narratives told by the
discourses within which they are embedded. The extent to which the public narratives frame
the personal narratives is discussed as a matter of the 'footing' of the narrators (for whom they
are telling their stories), and the audience design of their narratives (to whom they are telling
their stories). Certain structural features of the narratives such as gaps, temporal shifts, and
reported speech are then analyzed as possible indications of their rhetorical purpose and
engines of their illocutionary force.

Storied-Arguments and Societal Change: The Case of Legislative Hearings about Marriage Laws (Ruth
L. Hickerson, University of Colorado, Boulder & Karen Tracy, University of Colorado, Boulder)
The legal scholar Delgado commented that storytelling is for oppositionists: "Outgroups, groups
whose marginality define the boundaries of the mainstream, whose voice and perspective―
whose consciousness―has been suppressed, devalued and abnormalized" are the ones that like
and use stories frequently. Such has been the case in the public hearings occurring in legislative
bodies around the United States as judicial committees consider whether to move forward to
their Houses or Senates bills that would extend the rights of marriage to couples of the samesex. Citizens speaking in favor of these bills tell personal stories, often detailed and moving, to
argue why this should happen. In this paper we analyze the similarities and differences in
storied-arguments offered by speakers advocating passage of civil union bills five years apart in
two different state legislative hearings. After explaining what we mean by storied argument and
providing background on the hearings, we advance two claims. First we identify three kinds of
stories presented by testifiers in both hearings and describe typical linkages each category of
story built between discursive particulars and larger societal discourses. Second, we describe an
argumentative framing for the individual stories that occurred in the 2011 hearing that was only
minimally present in the 2006 hearing. The frame for the 2011 stories appealed to legislators to
be on "the right side of history." This frame, we argue, was made possible by earlier stories but
in turn contributes to the persuasiveness of subsequent stories and the speed of social change.
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Sunday, 11/24 2013
8:00 AM - 9:15 AM: Codes and Rituals in Organizational and Family Settings
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Virginia A - Lobby Level
Chair: Evelyn Y Ho, University of San Francisco

Language and social interaction of routines: Embodiment, power and fluidity (Alex Wright, The Open
University Business School)
This paper addresses the charge that communication theory has neglected that most common
of organizational processes, the routine. Drawing from an illustration of an anesthetic routine
taken from a UK hospital, a communicative constitution framing of routines is argued for. Two
contributions are claimed. First, our knowledge of language and social interaction is extended by
highlighting communication as an embodied phenomena, that requires power to be exercised
for organization to unfold. Second, routines theorizing is enhanced through challenging current
notions of them as oriented toward stability and change, and replacing this with a
characterization that emphasizes their fluidity. Some advice for research in this area is offered.

Talk, family, and nationhood: The Spanish ritual of la sobremesa (Kristine Munoz, University of Iowa
& Daniel Chornet, Saint Louis University, Madrid)
This paper is part of a larger study of Spanish ways of speaking carried out by a native/nonnative ethnographic team between 2008-2013. It focuses on an interaction ritual referred to by
Spaniards as la sobremesa, literally the-over-the-table. Culturally ,the term refers to an
extended time - sometimes several hours - of social interaction, usually after lunch or dinner .
Hymes' SPEAKING framework is used to describe the patterns of talk and meaning observed
over 11 occurrences of the ritual, a corpus of data enriched by descriptions and evaluations of la
sobremesa from blogs, online news and opinion articles, and other ethnographic analyses of the
practice. This case study is situated within literature on other cultural rituals of everyday talk
such as griping (Katriel, 1990) and salsipuedes (Fitch, 1990), and other culturally-driven studies
of dinner table talk specifically. Implications of the study include consideration of what
distinguishes a symbolically laden act sequence from a universal canonical sequence, and how
the tension between discourses of globalization and local practices of identity and social life are
played out in mass media.

The artful use of shared codes: A case study of the work of one communication organization (Louisa
Edgerly, University of Washington)
This case study reports findings from a pilot study of the work of a non-profit group that
produces communication projects on the topics of health and environmental conservation in
several central African countries. Using the methodological framework of ethnography of
communication, the study examines the application of the discursive force proposition of
speech codes theory (SCT) to communicative practices in global health and development
settings. Through analysis of three empirical examples, this study concludes that at the level of
project content, project implementation, and inter-organizational communication, the artful use
of shared codes both describes and explains the production of successful communication
projects. It also suggests that research and practice that seeks to develop "culture-centered"
health and environmental communication projects should engage with theories of
communication that directly address the role of culture in communicative conduct. Likewise,
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LSI NCA 2013
SCT and the ethnography of communication would be enriched through extension into these
areas of research and practice.

The Grip of Language Ideology in Communication Education of Deaf Children (Madeline M. Maxwell,
University of Texas, Austin)
An ethnographic study showing how the strong grip of language ideology in deaf education
blinds professionals to communication patterns and needs of deaf children. The use of sign
language in education was supposed to revolutionize teaching, but the strength of the ideology
that language is atomistic, symbolic and performance rather than communicative, interactive
and social has greatly curtailed effective change.
9:30 AM - 10:45 AM: Conversation Analysis Data Session
Location: Marriott Wardman Park, Virginia A - Lobby Level
Chair: Charlotte M. Jones, Carroll College
Presenters:
 Wayne A. Beach, San Diego State University
 Galina Bolden, Rutgers University
 Phillip J. Glenn, Emerson College
 Charlotte M. Jones, Carroll College
 Mardi J. Kidwell, University of New Hampshire
 Jeffrey Robinson, Portland State University
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