Affiliation and alignment in responding actions

Lee, Seung Hee; Tanaka, Hiroko

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2016.05.008

Cited by 22 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 29 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Forms of alignment and disalignment, fittedness and unfittedness, agreement and disagreement, affiliation and disaffiliation between the first and the second are all vectors through which dynamic interactional relations are configured between participants (Lee & Tanaka, 2016;Pomerantz, 1984;Raymond, 2003;Stivers, 2008). The informal or institutional nature of the encounter materializes through types of first actions and specific constraints on second actions, as well as through who has the right and obligation to perform these actions; these elements can be considered the building blocks of social order and institutions.…”

Section: Sequentialitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Responses: An Introduction

Deppermann

Mondada

Doehler

2021

Discourse Processes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This special issue investigates early responses-responsive actions that (start to) unfold while the production of the responded-to turn and action is still under way. Although timing in human conduct has gained intense interest in research, the early production of responsive actions has so far largely remained unexplored. But what makes early responses possible? What do such responses tell us about the complex interplay between syntax, prosody, and embodied conduct? And what sorts of actions do participants accomplish by means of such early responses? By addressing these questions, the special issue seeks to offer new advances in the systematic analysis of temporal organization in interaction, contributing to broader discussions in the language and cognitive sciences as to the social coordination of human conduct. In this introductory article, we discuss the role of temporality and sequentiality in social interaction, specifically focusing on projective and anticipatory mechanisms and the interplay between multiple semiotic resources, which are crucial for making early responses possible.

show abstract

Section: Sequentialitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Responses: An Introduction

Deppermann

Mondada

Doehler

2021

Discourse Processes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…While the concept of interactional roles is concerned with what could be called the meso-level of interaction -since the focus is mostly on what is done cooperatively, less on how this is done -the concept of alignment (Stivers, 2008;Lee and Tanaka, 2016) allows us to focus on the microlinguistic level of interaction. Alignment refers to the activity in progress and can be used to investigate whether the participants are taking part in the same kind of activity.…”

Section: Analytic Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

First Encounters in Psychotherapy: Relationship-Building and the Pursuit of Institutional Goals

Scarvaglieri

2020

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines how therapists and patients start building and managing relationships and pursue institutional goals at the same time. Based on a corpus of 6 audio-recorded therapies (client-centered therapy and psychodynamic therapy), I investigate first encounters between therapists and patients as the starting points of any therapeutical process and the place where a relationship between the interactants is established for the first time. Following a microlinguistic qualitative approach and applying methods from conversation analysis and discourse analysis, I show how therapists, on the one hand, try to align with patients to build a positive working alliance and, on the other hand, work to fulfill specific interactive tasks of therapeutic discourse which demand disaligning with the patients’ communicative activity and their interactive expectations. Specific interactive “jobs” that need to be fulfilled in psychotherapy are identified, namely the performance of institutional roles by the interactants, the establishment of an interaction structure and the pursuit of helpful change in the patient. I show at which places in the interaction therapists (dis-)align with the patients’ projected communicative activity and how aligning and disaligning are related to the interactive process and the establishment and performance of these interactive jobs. The analysis shows that, at the beginning of therapy, alignment and disalignment are both important processes for the following reasons: Aligning with the patient contributes to a positive relationship, which has been shown to be vital for successful psychotherapy, while disaligning introduces the patient to the specific discursive mechanisms that characterize therapeutic discourse and constitute the basis for its effectiveness. Overall, the paper argues that reducing therapy to a dichotomy between relationship and “technique” seems overly simplistic, as both aspects need to be handled and managed at the same time.

show abstract

“…But though cooperationand with this also alignment and affiliationis seemingly considered one of the most basic underlying dimensions of interaction and human sociality, there is as yet a strong paucity of work that specifically addresses how affiliation and alignment can be defined and distinguished and whether these concepts have any actual analytical relevance in contributing to our understanding of social cooperation. In practice, affiliation and alignment are typically employed in the conversation analytic literature as descriptions of how particular turns-at-talk can be more or less cooperative (e.g., Couper-Kuhlen, 2012;Gorisch et al, 2011;Heritage, 2011;Kaukomaa et al, 2013;Lee and Tanaka, 2016 and the articles in that special issue; Steensig and Larsen, 2008) and the two terms are sometimes used even interchangeably (see, e.g., Steensig and Drew, 2008 for a discussion of this). This somewhat muddled landscape is reflected by the fact that two recent handbook entries on affiliation and/or alignment explicitly call for "continued research […] of how affiliation and alignment play out in different types of activities and sequential contexts" (Lindström and Sorjonen, 2013: 367; see also Steensig, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In practice, affiliation and alignment are typically employed in the conversation analytic literature as descriptions of how particular turns-at-talk can be more or less cooperative (e.g. Couper-Kuhlen, 2012; Gorisch et al, 2011; Heritage, 2011; Kaukomaa et al, 2013; Lee and Tanaka, 2016 and the articles in that special issue; Steensig and Larsen, 2008) and the two terms are sometimes used even interchangeably (see, e.g. Steensig and Drew, 2008 for a discussion of this).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On affiliation and alignment: Non-cooperative uses of anticipatory completions in the context of tellings

Etelämäki

Heinemann²,

Vatanen

2021

Discourse Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, we address the larger notion of cooperation in interaction and its underlying dimensions as defined in Conversation Analysis: alignment and affiliation. Focusing on three cases from three different languages (Danish, Estonian and Finnish) we investigate a specific practice, that of anticipatory completions, in a particular context, that of storytelling, and show that the practice of completing another speaker’s turn in an anticipatory manner is not de facto definable as either an aligning or non-aligning action, nor can it be said to be either affiliating or non-affiliating. Through our analyses, we aim to distinguish and illustrate the manifold layers of and perspectives to alignment and affiliation and argue for their relevance for studies of interactional phenomena. We conclude that the notion of cooperation and its implementation through affiliating and/or aligning actions is a multi-layered and complex issue, the intricacies of which are best understood and captured through detailed sequential analyses.

show abstract

Affiliation and alignment in responding actions

Cited by 22 publications

References 29 publications

Early Responses: An Introduction

Early Responses: An Introduction

First Encounters in Psychotherapy: Relationship-Building and the Pursuit of Institutional Goals

On affiliation and alignment: Non-cooperative uses of anticipatory completions in the context of tellings

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About