Constituting and maintaining activities across sequences:And-prefacing as a feature of question design

Abstract

The role of the connective and is here considered as a preface to questions in spoken interaction. Using data from informal medical encounters, it is argued that and-prefacing is used to link a question to a preceding question/answer pair or pairs. In such contexts, and-prefacing indicates that the questions it prefaces have a routine or agenda-based character. This in turn can be a resource which invokes and sustains an orientation to an activity or course of action that is implemented through a series of question/answer pairs, but transcends any individual pair. The general characteristics of and-prefaced questions are contrasted with “contingent” or “follow-up” questions, which are not normally and-prefaced. Some strategic uses of and-prefaced questions are described, and the role of the device within the more general sociolinguistic context of the data is discussed. (Connectives, conversation analysis, discourse, institutional interaction, medical encounters, turn design)

Finger dialogue: The embodied accomplishment of learnables in instructing grammar on a worksheet

“…Participants: Teacher (Tea) and Student (Stu) In some detail, the teacher's utterance starts with å (and) which is a connective discourse marker -an indicator of the contiguity of the forthcoming action(s) in relation to the previous activity (Heritage and Sorjonen, 1994). It immediately gets followed by 'så' (so) which arguably foreshadows that what emerges next, even though as a new product/sequence/action is concomitant with, and ensues from, the previous 13 action(s).…”

Non-antibiotic treatment recommendations: delivery formats and implications for parent resistance

“…Central to this procedure is that analysts' understandings of participants' social actions can be validated through an examination of interactants' responses. The significance of practices can be understood in terms of (1) the immediate sequences in which they occur (e.g., Pomerantz, 1984), (2) the larger activities in which they are embedded (Heritage & Sorjonen, 1994), and (3) the overall organization of the phases in the interaction (Drew & Heritage, 1992b). The latter two levels of organization are of particular significance when CA is used to analyze interaction in institutional contexts because in many of these contexts, the participants are oriented to an overarching goal/task which is often accomplished through an extended course of interaction embodying many sequences and phases (Drew & Heritage, 1992b).…”

Accomplishing continuity across sequences and encounters: No(h)-prefaced initiations in Estonian

“…However, it is remarkable for Estonian that an item that has never functioned as a conjunction or adverb can be used as a turn-initial connective within and across human encounters. Functionally somewhat similar conversational particles reported in the literature include the Dutch 'but' (Mazeland and Huiskes, 2001), the English 'and' (Heritage and Sorjonen, 1994), 'so' (Bolden, 2008(Bolden, , 2009, 'anyway' (Lenk, 1998:53-100), and the Korean 'but, and, so' (Park, 1999). All of them are usable in a grammatically conjunctive or adverbial function in the respective languages, while the Estonian no(h) has always only functioned as a pragmatic particle.…”

“…It is thereby similar to conjunctions (such as and in English, Jefferson, 1972:319;Heritage and Sorjonen, 1994;Turk, 2004) and dissimilar from misplacement markers (such as by the way or listen in English, Jefferson, 1972:319;Sidnell, 2007 or ota in Estonian, Keevallik, 2003b: 126-140). The no(h)-preface is a straightforward connective that does not necessarily mark continuity with the immediately prior turn, or just some prior event.…”