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From the perspective of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA), the concept of positioning may offer a compellingly rich metaphor for understanding identity and relations. There appears, however, to be no such analytical concept in EM/CA. Instead, the EM/CA approach offers concepts such as alignment-affiliation, identities and membership categories — all of them based on actional resources on the micro-level of talk. The aim of this article is to inquire if EM/CA tools for the analysis of identities and relations in talk might be considered interesting from the perspective of positioning theory. To do so, we offer EM/CA analyses of narrative and non-narrative data in which the in situ negotiation of identities and relations plays a major role.

Membership categorization analysis (MCA) deals primarily with the way we use categories to make sense of and for each other in social interaction. As such, it is one means of explicating the practically oriented, commonsensical, and cultural reasoning of people as they go about their social lives. In particular it focuses on the recognizability of people as certain sorts of people or, more specifically, people as certain sorts of members of society, and how this recognizability is a resource for members in their dealings with each other. And as one of the primary ways in which we “deal” with each other is through language, MCA is often brought to bear on the analysis of how people use language in situations of everyday life.

The present study investigates the development of grammatical aspects of narrative structure in child L1 and adult L2 acquisition in a comparative perspective. The narratives were elicited through a picture story task. In the theoretical part of the study, this task is analyzed in semantic and psycholinguistic terms. In the empirical part of the study, it is demonstrated that narratives relating to an early phase of adult L2 acquisition show strong global cohesion, whereas narratives by child L1 learners tend to have very weak cohesion up to around 5 years of age. In a second developmental phase, however, the situation is observed to be the reverse: whereas child L1 learners become very much concerned with narrative structure and accomplish very strong cohesion, adult L2 learners tend to experience a dip in performance. The observed developmental asymmetry is interpreted as indicative of a difference in cognitive resources and sociocommunicative skills between the two types of learners.

This paper deals with the touching, grasping, moving and handling of relatively small physical objects within spates of talk-in-interaction. We are interested in the organization of such actions and the distribution of the objects amongst interactants in their unfolding activities, specifically in relation to how interactants, analogously, organize and distribute their turns at talk. Unlike previous work, we attend less to objects as referred-to objects or as components of topic development. Instead, our focus is on objects as transactional in the ways in which they support fundamental infrastructure of interaction, namely that turns at talk and objects are taken or possessed in some sense and this is signaled and collaboratively organized by participants.