Meetings differ from ordinary conversation in that they have an agenda that specifies in advance the topics to be addressed during the meeting. However, the introduction of these topics needs to be locally accomplished and recognized by the participants as agenda items. This article presents some characteristic practices used for introducing agenda-based topics. It shows that they rely on the known-in-advance status of the items, and are presented by the chair as unilateral announcements. They exploit and invoke the written agenda (...) in several ways. The announcements are often short phrasal constructions, just citing the written title of the agenda point. Furthermore, a gaze down at the written document is used as a public display that the introduction is related to the agenda. In contrast to this practice of introducing agenda items, topics not specified by the agenda are introduced by suggestions and questions that present the introduction as contingent on acceptance by the co-participants. The analysis sheds light on the ways in which institutional talk-in-interaction is permeated by the formulations and logic of written documents. (shrink)

In this article, other-repetition after informing statements is investigated in a corpus of institutional encounters between native Norwegian clerks and non-native clients. Such repetition is used to display receipt of information. A plain repeat with falling intonation is described as a display of hearing, whereas a repeat plus a final response particle, ‘ja’, constitutes a claim of understanding. Repeats with high-tone response particles in addition display emotional stance, such as surprise or interest, and these are primarily exploited for the purposes (...) of topic organization. In the cross-linguistic context of the current encounters, the native speakers are shown to use receipts as embedded corrections of the non-native speaker’s utterances. The repeats also have certain formal features that are characteristic of the situation, such as less pronominalization and ellipsis, and this is explained as a procedure to ensure the joint construal of linguistic form. (shrink)

A major part of police work consists in providing services and information to the general public. A stated goal of such police work is to be service-minded and contribute to a positive encounter. This article analyses service requests in calls to the duty desk of a large police station and focuses on how officers deal with requests that have to be rejected. It reveals a general pattern in which officers produce the rejection in a dispreferred format and include displays of (...) empathy, accounts for the rejection and suggestions for alternative solutions. However, in certain types of requests the rejections are not infrequently produced in a direct and unmitigated fashion, without accounts or explanations.This is especially notable in requests that touch upon institutional constraints, such as professional secrecy. And in certain cases the rejections are even delivered in an aggravated form, involving an explicit or implicit challenge to the legitimacy of the request. These rejections cast the caller in an oppositional role, infringing the professional constraints of the police. However, the constraints in question may not be accessible to the callers. The officers will consequently be experienced as hostile and will subvert their own objectives of showing service-mindedness. (shrink)

This conversation analytic study investigates how couples manage conflicting knowledge claims when one of the persons has dementia. The data are video-recordings of 16 couples talking with a third party. The analysis focuses on the negotiation of epistemic rights, more precisely how partners initiate repair and correct claims made by the PWD on matters belonging to the latter’s epistemic domain. We identified three main practices for correcting the PWD: correcting the statement, thereby claiming epistemic authority for oneself and denying it (...) to the PWD, inviting the PWD to self-correct, thereby attributing some epistemic authority to the PWD, and disagreeing and providing reasons for one’s alternative claim, establishing a more symmetric epistemic gradient. The PWDs responses to the corrections displayed different degrees of acceptance, ranging from self-denigration to resistance and insistence. (shrink)