Narrative identity has achieved a scientific status as an elaborate concept of the storied nature of human experience and personal identity. Yet, many questions remain as to its empirical substrate. By exploring the pragmatic aspect of narrative research interviewing, i.e., the performative and positioning aspects of the narrative situation and the narrative product, as well as its particular autoepistemological and communicative tasks, this article tries to bridge the gap between the theoretical concept of narrative identity and the act of constructing identity in research interviewing.Research data generated by autobiographical interviews are usually regarded and analyzed as monological narratives drawn from autobiographical memory. Narrative research interviewing, however, is always a dialogical, pragmatic activity: Narrator and researcher establish an interpersonal relationship made up of institutional, imaginative, socio-categorial and other communicative frames which are enacted by both partners during the interview. This pragmatic constitution of the interview as an interactive process calls for a communicative and constructivist approach to oral narratives which reveals different levels of the listener’s conceptions of himself or herself and the research situation in the narrator’s story. Along with the different voices and identity constructions, the narrator also constructs different recipients in his or her discursive positioning of the listener.By using the concept of positioning, we propose both a conceptual framework and the corresponding analytical tools for identifying textual indicators and contextual interpretative resources for a discursive approach to narrative identity constructions in research interviewing. This option allows insight into the strategies narrators employ to negotiate their identities in the situation itself, which may be fruitful for many research contexts that use the concept of narrative identity. (Narrative, Autobiography, Research Interviewing, Conversation Analysis)

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This paper studies how the turn-design of a highly recurrent type of action changes over time. Based on a corpus of video-recordings of German driving lessons, we consider one type of instructions and analyze how the same instructional action is produced by the same speaker (the instructor) for the same addressee (the student) in consecutive trials of a learning task. We found that instructions become increasingly shorter, indexical and syntactically less complex; interactional sequences become more condensed and activities designed to secure mutual understanding become rarer. This study shows how larger tem poral frameworks of interpersonal interactional histories which range beyond the interactional sequence impinge on the recipient-design of turns and the deployment of multimodal resources in situ.

As an Introduction to the Special Issue on ''Formulation, generalization, and abstraction in interaction,'' this paper discusses key problems of a conversation analytic (CA) approach to semantics in interaction. Prior research in CA and Interactional Linguistics has only rarely dealt with issues of linguistic meaning in interaction. It is argued that this is a consequence of limitations of sequential analysis to capture meaning in interaction. While sequential analysis remains the encompassing methodological framework, it is suggested that it needs to be complemented by analyzing semantic relationships between choices of formulation in the interaction, ethnography, and structural techniques of comparing selected options with possible alternatives. The paper describes the methodological approach taken to interactional semantics by the papers in the Special Issue, which analyse practices of generalization and abstraction in interaction as they are accomplished by formulations of prior versions of reference and description.

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A b s tra c tBased on German speaking data from various activity types, the range of multimodal resources used to construct turn-beginnings is reviewed. It is claimed that participants in talk-in-interaction need to deal with four tasks in order to construct a turn which precisely fits the interactional mom ent of its production:1. Achieve joint orientation: The accomplishm ent of the socio-spatial prerequisites necessary for producing a turn which is to become part of the participants' common ground. 2. Display uptake: Next speaker needs to display his/her understanding of the interaction so far as the backdrop on which the production o f the upcoming turn is based. 3. Deal with projections from prior talk: The speaker has to deal with projections which have been established by (the) previous tum (s) with respect to the upcoming turn. 4. Project properties of tum-in-progress: The speaker needs to orient the recipient to properties o f the turn s/he is about to produce.Turn-design thus can be seen to be informed by tasks related to the multimodal, embodied, and interactive contingencies of online-construction o f turns. The four tasks are ordered in terms of prior tasks providing the prerequisite for accomplishing a later task.Keywords: Turn construction; Turn-beginnings; Multimodal interaction; Understanding in interaction; Projection Research question and claimsThis paper deals with the question: How do turns begin and which factors account for the way turn-beginnings are designed?1 I will claim that there are two major determinants: • There are four tasks which participants have to deal with when designing a turn as a contribution to an ongoing interactional encounter: to achieve joint attention to the upcoming turn, to display uptake of prior turn(s), to deal with projections emanating from them, and to project properties of the upcoming turn. Published in: Journal of Pragmatics vol. 46 (2013) no. 1, pp. 91-121. POSTPRINT 2 • The interactional structure achieved at the moment a turn is to be launched, in particular the immediately prior turn, provides for options and restrictions of how a next turn can be designed as a locally sensitive continuation.Taken together, these factors are seen as structural, interactional and functional motivations of what Schegloff (1996:63) has called " positionally sensitive grammars" . The paper will sketch some general properties of such grammars with respect to German data.2 It will be shown that an adequate treatment of turn-construction has to adopt a multimodal perspective, because dealing with tasks of turn-construction necessarily involves the simultaneous and sequential combination of various modal resources.In what follows, I will first review the literature and develop a multimodal perspective on turn-construction (1.). After a short discussion of the notions " turn" and "turn-beginning" (2.) and observations about the distribution of grammatical forms at turn-beginnings (3.), I will try to show that there are four generic tasks speakers have to deal with when b...