Withholding and pursuit are well-documented phenomena in talk between adults and in talk with children. They have been described as working to perform various functions that emerge locally between speakers in a variety of interactional contexts both in ordinary conversation and in institutional talk.In this paper I explore further the actions of pursuit and withholding in interaction between parents and their very young children, first described in Filipi (2003, 2009) by going beyond description and by examining how these features might (...) be implicated in learning. Longitudinal change is thus a focus of the analysis. Examples of talk are drawn from one child aged from 11 to 24 months interacting with members of her family.Applying the microanalytic approach of Conversation Analysis, the study reports four contexts in which pursuit emerges as an important resource. They are pursuit relevant to sequence structure, linguistic pursuit, pursuit of understanding and pursuit of a particular response token. Analysis shows that while the adults orient to the need to move the action forward, particularly observable in the Summons/Response adjacency pair, withholding of completion can occur at any time in order for parent and child to work on particular skills. Finally, I argue that the micro details of the actions of withholding and pursuit provide a particularly useful lens with which to observe the dynamic qualities of asymmetry. Keywords: parent child interaction; Conversation Analysis; language development; asymmetry; withholding; pursuit. (shrink)

Withholding and pursuit are well-documented phenomena in talk between adults and in talk with children. They have been described as working to perform various functions that emerge locally between speakers in a variety of interactional contexts both in ordinary conversation and in institutional talk.In this paper I explore further the actions of pursuit and withholding in interaction between parents and their very young children, first described in Filipi by going beyond description and by examining how these features might be implicated (...) in learning. Longitudinal change is thus a focus of the analysis. Examples of talk are drawn from one child aged from 11 to 24 months interacting with members of her family.Applying the microanalytic approach of Conversation Analysis, the study reports four contexts in which pursuit emerges as an important resource. They are pursuit relevant to sequence structure, linguistic pursuit, pursuit of understanding and pursuit of a particular response token. Analysis shows that while the adults orient to the need to move the action forward, particularly observable in the Summons/Response adjacency pair, withholding of completion can occur at any time in order for parent and child to work on particular skills. Finally, I argue that the micro details of the actions of withholding and pursuit provide a particularly useful lens with which to observe the dynamic qualities of asymmetry. Keywords: parent child interaction; Conversation Analysis; language development; asymmetry; withholding; pursuit. (shrink)

Drawing on a corpus of eight task-based interactions involving a map task ), this article seeks to focus on how speakers orient to directional terms in an interactional context, and in so doing, to add to features that can be deemed to characterize this speech exchange system. Analysis of the data using conversation analysis showed that features of the talk were confirmation and clarification checks, which provided an opportunity to check understanding and the accuracy of the instruction leading to a (...) correction, acknowledgement or further information; modulated repair and mitigated criticism, resulting in the maintenance of an affiliative stance towards the other speaker; and avoidance of problems that viewpoints or directional terms might cause. Problems with the directional terms in this corpus confirm prior research that the confusion between east and west, and left and right are the terms that cause problems for speakers. (shrink)