The recent surge of interest in explainability in artificial intelligence (XAI) is propelled by not only technological advancements in machine learning, but also by regulatory initiatives to foster transparency in algorithmic decision making. In this article, we revise the current concept of explainability and identify three limitations: passive explainee, narrow view on the social process, and undifferentiated assessment of understanding. In order to overcome these limitations, we present explanation as a social practice in which explainer and explainee co-construct understanding on the microlevel. We view the co-construction on a microlevel as embedded into a macrolevel, yielding expectations concerning, e.g., social roles or partner models: Typically, the role of the explainer is to provide an explanation and to adapt it to the current level of understanding of the explainee; the explainee, in turn, is expected to provide cues that guide the explainer. Building on explanations being a social practice, we present a conceptual framework that aims to guide future research in XAI. The framework relies on the key concepts of monitoring and scaffolding to capture the development of interaction. We relate our conceptual framework and our new perspective on explaining to transparency and autonomy as objectives considered for XAI.

Our article investigates grammatical and prosodic aspects of turn construction in ‘Türkendeutsch’ (Turkish German), a new ethnic variety of German that is spoken mainly by Turkish adolescents. In our approach, Turkish German is regarded as a style of speaking that is systematically used as a resource for the organization of natural conversational interaction.On the basis of interactional linguistic theory and conversation-analytic methodology, we investigate pre-positionings and post-positionings of turn constructional units, short prosodic units, and principles of accent placement on word and utterance level. In Turkish German, pre-positionings of temporal adverbs – with following V2-clauses – are often packaged in separate prosodic units with primary accents. Such prosodically exposed pre-positionings are used as focusing devices in narratives. Some kinds of post-positionings are formated according to particular rules of Turkish German which are influenced by Turkish principles of accentuation. They are deployed to shift the focus to the very end of the turn-constructional unit and thus create suspense and/or focus each bit of information separately.Accentuation principles on both word and utterance level have been found to differ from Standard German accentuation rules in specific contexts. A speaker may playfully shift a word accent (word stress) to create ironic distance; in other instances, primary accents of utterances are shifted to constitute rhythmic coherence with prior utterances rather than to signal the focus of the utterance.To sum up, grammatical and prosodic resources are shown to be systematically used for the organization of talk-in-interaction.

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Interactional linguistics is grounded on the premise that language should not be analyzed in terms of context‐free linguistic structures but as a resource for the accomplishment of actions in social interaction. With this in mind, interactional linguistics takes an interdisciplinary approach to a linguistic analysis that aims at an understanding of how language is both shaped by and itself shapes the actions it is used for. Interactional linguistics combines an interest in linguistic phenomena and structures with the theory and methodology of conversation analysis (CA) and contextualization theory (CT). It is conceptualized as an interface between linguistic analysis and the analysis of social interaction.

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