Browsing by Subject "intersubjectivity"
Now showing items 1-10 of 10
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(2020)Evans et al. (2018a,b) introduce the notion of 'engagement' as a new grammatical domain related to intersubjective coordination of knowledge. The present paper applies this notion to data from the Australian Aboriginal language Ungarinyin. It identifies three markers/construction types in the language as expressions of engagement and develops a descriptive framework rooted in Bakhtinian Dialogism in order to demonstrate why these expressions represent the category. It is argued that the main problems that arise in the analysis of engagement are very similar to those that have been encountered in the description of (other) TAME-categories as well, and that these may be overcome by applying Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of 'addressivity'. It concludes that a better understanding of the category of engagement that explores its relation to addressivity may contribute to the development of an approach to grammar in which sociality takes priority, a Dialogic linguistics.
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(2016)The concept of recognition is increasingly gaining in importance in political and social philosophy as a means of explaining and dealing conceptually with the problems of multiculturalism. Nevertheless, the phenomena which this concept signifies, namely human capacities for intersubjectivity, belong to human beings even before the development of the modern concept. This article explores how the content of the concept of recognition plays a role in two Platonic philosophies of Late Antiquity, those of the Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus and the Christian philosopher, monk and lay theologian Maximus the Confessor. It is shown that their versions of a metaphysics of the Good provides the foundation for a moral and ethical vision of human life which makes recognitive judgments – which make acts of recognition possible – a necessity for human action. Although proper recognition pertains to the rational recognition of the First Cause as the true end of all human action, nevertheless Proclus and Maximus make recognitive judgments not only possible but a necessary function of even the lower, irrational faculties of soul. In this way, they explain how human beings have an innate capacity at all levels of cognition for recognizing things and other people as goods to be pursued or avoided.
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(2018)Intersubjectivity is a concept central to human interaction, broadly understood as the sharing of minds. There is a rich diversity of conceptualizations of intersubjectivity, but detailed operationalization for its component processes in social interactions are scarce. We propose a novel approach to examine detailed variation in intersubjectivity in interaction. Our approach combines two previously formulated frameworks: the hierarchically organized developmental levels of intersubjectivity put forth in the field of developmental psychology, and three domains or orders of social interaction - affect, deontics, and epistemics - discussed in conversation analytic research literature. The interdisciplinary integration of these two frameworks allows a more crystallized view of intersubjectivity, which will benefit our understanding of the fine-scale social interaction processes as they vary in the course of the moment-to-moment unfolding of social action, across different stages of human social development, and between individuals belonging to different clinical groups and even to different species.
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(2017)The pesent study investigates the interplay between language, materia land embodied resources in one specific type of service encounters: interactions at theatre box offices. The data consist of video recorded interactions in Swedish at three box offices, two in Sweden and onei n Finland. Cases representative of the interactions are selected for a multimodal micro-analysis of the customer -- seller interactions involving artefacts from the institutional and personal domain. The study specifically aims at advancing our understanding of the role of artefacts for structuring and facilitating communicative events in (institutional) interaction. In this way, it contributes to the growing research interest in the interactional importance of the material world. Our results show that mutual interactional focus is reached through mutual gaze in strategic moments, such as formulation of the reason for the visit. Artefacts are central in enhancing intersubjectivity and mutual focus in that they effectively invite the participants for negotiation, for example, about a seatingplan which can be made visually accessible in different ways. Verbal language can be sparse and deictic in these moments while gaze and pointing to an artefact does more specific referential work. Artefacts are also a resource for signalling interactional inaccessibility, the seller orienting to the computer in order to progress a request and the customer orienting to a personal belonging (like a bag) to mirror and accept such a temporary non-accessibility. We also observe that speech can be paced to match the deployment of an artefact so that a focal verbal item is produced without competing, simultaneous physical activity.
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(John Benjamins, 2021)Pragmatics and Beyond New SeriesIntersubjectivity is a complex concept, and some central approaches to it have been discussed in areas of, for example, philosophy (based on e.g. early work by Schuetz 1953), developmental psychology (Trevarthen & Aitken 2001), neuroscience (Iacoboni 2008) and primatology (Tomasello 2008; Tomasello, Carpenter & Hobson 2005). In the realm of the interactional approach that the chapters in this volume represent we can initially note the following. Intersubjectivity is a precondition for all human life: for social organization as well as for individual development and well-being. A primordial site for its creation and maintenance is human interaction. By focusing on the creation and maintenance of intersubjectivity, the authors of this book approach the topic from the perspectives of turn and action design, action attribution, challenges in achieving shared understanding, embodied practices in meaning-making and synchronized participant conduct, as well as developmental aspects of intersubjectivity. The core theoretical and methodological framework is Conversation Analysis, combined with methods of interactional linguistics and multimodal interaction analysis as well as the study of gesture and psychophysiology. This research promotes an understanding that intersubjectivity involves joint understanding and sharing of experience between humans (see e.g. Linell 2017). Intersubjectivity in interaction requires referential common ground, shared understanding of the meaning of linguistic forms, shared understanding of actions and sequences of action and shared understanding of the expression of emotion in sequences of action.
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(John Benjamins, 2021)Pragmatics and Beyond New SeriesIn this chapter, we discuss design features of second assessments in German and Swedish conversation. We focus on opinion-verb constructions (finden, tycka) in full and reduced clausal formats. The study shows that reduced formats are followed by sequence closure while full formats are followed by more talk on the topic. We explain this finding by arguing that by using reduced formats, second speakers claim less agency and display low affiliation with the first assessment, whereas full formats work in the opposite way. The full and reduced opinion-verb constructions represent standardized action patterns with recognizable implications, leading to predictable interactional trajectories and coordinated intersubjective behavior.
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(2016)This paper explores issues of intersubjectivity and shared understanding as they arise in dyadic spoken interaction. Using data from Swedish conversations, we approach the topic by focusing on the functions of a reactive construction that occurs in situations when a linguistic expression (x) has been used in a prior utterance, and this expression is found to be only partially acceptable in the situation at hand. It is therefore reacted to by one of the interlocutors, and negotiated in a new turn initiated by x-°a-x, i.e. a unit in which two identical copies of x are conjoined by °a ‘and’, and then expanded by a supporting argument. The pragmatic functions of the construction include that of suggesting a sufficient clarification of what should be a reasonable situated meaning and an intersubjective basis for ensuing talk.
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(Sage Publications, 2010)Despite the acknowledged importance of strategic planning in business and other organizations, there are few studies focusing on strategy texts and the related processes of their production and consumption. In this paper, we attempt to partially fill this research gap by examining the institutionalized aspects of strategy discourse: what strategy is as genre. Combining textual analysis and analysis of conversation, the article focuses on the official strategy of the City of Lahti in Finland. Our analysis shows how specific communicative purposes and lexico-grammatical features characterize the genre of strategy and how the actual negotiations over strategy text involve particular kinds of intersubjectivity and intertextuality.
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(University of Vaasa, 2018)Vaasan yliopiston tutkimuksia"Nog" is a common clausal adverbial or modal particle in Swedish. The word had historically a meaning of ‘enough’, but has developed into an epistemic marker of subjective certainty which can also be used intersubjectively, for example, to ask for the hearer’s consent. In this article we investigate how the particle was used around the turn of the last century in correspondence between the Finland-Swedish art collector Paul Sinebrychoff and various people in Sweden from whom he bought art pieces. Our study shows that there are no referential uses (corresponding to ‘enough’) in the material, even though we can still find them today (as we show in examples from dramatic dialogue from the 1990s in the corpus Svensk Dramadialog). We have mainly found subjective modal uses, and we see that there are slightly more intersubjective uses in the Finland-Swedish letters. However, we claim that this is not likely to be due to a difference in the varieties; rather, this is the result of the participation framework. It is the Finland-Swedish art collector who is seeking agreement, concessions and services from his addressees, and this outward orientation shades into the functions of nog in his letter writing.
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(2020)This article scrutinizes the trajectory of an evaluation of the visual appearance of an artistic installation, during a conversation between a visual artist and a critic. The study analyzes how the artist receives and responds to the critic’s evaluations of the artwork in three different phases of evaluative discourse: an initial, an elaborating, and a concluding one. The artist’s responses change from minimal responses and hypothetical solutions, via repeating utterances, to overt agreements and outspoken explanations. The development of the artist’s response to the critic’s evaluations reflects an increase in the participants’ shared intersubjective understanding and in the artist’s strengthened epistemic position: the critique can be accepted only after the artist has gone through interactional phases that lead up to an appreciation of the critique that thus can be commented on and partly transformed.
