Papers by Lorenza Mondada
Plurilingual practices in call centres considered as ‘glocal’ workplaces
International audienc
Sequence organization and embodied mutual orientations: openings of social interactions between baboons
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Human interactions are organized in sequence, which is a key component of Levinson's ‘interac... more Human interactions are organized in sequence, which is a key component of Levinson's ‘interaction engine.’ Referring back to the field where it originated, conversation analysis, we discuss its relevance within the interaction engine, before moving on to show how sequence organization is actually oriented to not only humans in social interaction, but also to non-human animals. On the basis of video-recorded encounters between baboons ( Papio anubis) , we study canonical sequences constituting openings and, within them, greetings. Openings are the locus where future interactants adjust to each other to coordinately enter in interaction, thus achieving a common definition of their context, activity, and relationships. The analysis shows that the ways individuals spatially approach each other provide systematic interactional affordances for how the first sequences of actions in the opening are formatted, initiated, and responded to. Adopting sequential multimodal analysis, we demon...
Travaux neuchâtelois de linguistique
Action Ascription in Interaction
Cahiers du Centre de Linguistique et des Sciences du Langage
Le code-switching comme ressource organisationnelle parmi d’autres, mobilisées avec d’autres déta... more Le code-switching comme ressource organisationnelle parmi d’autres, mobilisées avec d’autres détails par les locuteurs en tant qu’acteurs sociaux pour accomplir un contexte, une activité, un ordre interactionnel dans des situations de travail, a été relativement peu étudié.
Dans la perspective de l'analyse conversationnelle, cet article offre une analyse détaillée d'une... more Dans la perspective de l'analyse conversationnelle, cet article offre une analyse détaillée d'une pratique consistant à mettre en cause le positionnement séquentiel d'une action « maintenant » et à la reporter à un autre moment. En cela l'article discute d'un des principes fondamentaux de l'analyse séquentielle, qui est l'orientation des participants vers la question "why that now?" (Schegloff & Sacks 1973) lors de leur interprétation de toute action au sein du déroulement de l'interaction sociale. En particulier, l'article s'intéresse à la manière dont les participants traitent une action à la fois dans son positionnement séquentiel "ici et maintenant" et en tant que pouvant être repositionnée "plus tard", voire lors d'une interaction future. Ce faisant, l'analyse montre comment les participants s'orientent à la fois vers le présent et vers l'historicité de leurs interactions, en tenant compte de différents niveaux d'organisation et de leurs temporalités à la fois connectées et distinctes. L'analyse est fondée sur un corpus de réunions de politique participative au cours desquelles des citoyens sont invités à proposer des idées pour un projet d'aménagement urbain. Lors de ces réunions, le modérateur-mais aussi d'autres participants-peuvent proposer qu'une suggestion, une idée, une proposition ne soit pas traitée et discutée lorsqu'elle est formulée ("maintenant") mais à d'autres moments de la rencontre ou lors d'une rencontre ultérieure : de cette manière ils mettent en cause son positionnement séquentiel et sa légitimité, tout en reconnaissant sa pertinence possible "plus tard" au fil d'une série de rencontres ou d'un projet, s'orientant ainsi vers un agenda institutionnel plus vaste. L'article offre une analyse systématique des pratiques par lesquelles ces post-positions sont accomplies ainsi que les accounts qui en construisent la justification et l'intelligibilité publiques.
In this article we pursue a systematic and extensive study of overtaking in traffic as an interac... more In this article we pursue a systematic and extensive study of overtaking in traffic as an interactional event. Our focus is on the accountable organisation and accomplishment of overtaking by road ...
The ways participants treat an object vary, depending on the type of activity they are involved i... more The ways participants treat an object vary, depending on the type of activity they are involved in, and the way the object features in it, making relevant a diversity of orientations towards its location, its materiality, its qualities and its specificities. The object's features ultimately depend on the relevance set by the action dealing with them, and are revealed by the way this action is formatted. In this paper, I examine how the object's features are revealed and at the same time established within the action of requesting it – on the basis of a video recorded corpus of shop encounters in which customers request a food product. Requests are multimodally formatted in such a way that they include not only verbal formats and embodied conducts, but also sensorial orientations towards the object. The paper discusses first requests made without any orientation to the location or visibility of the object, contrasted with requests co-occurring with visual actions such as sear...
Doubles contraintes et injonctions paradoxales: « mais pourquoi faites-vous des » corpus et bases de données de LPI !
International audienc
Calidoscópio, 2021
Adopting the perspective of multimodal conversation analysis, the paper shows the methodic organi... more Adopting the perspective of multimodal conversation analysis, the paper shows the methodic organization of an action, making suggestions, achieved by sellers in response to customers’ requests for recommendations in shop encounters, and involving the showing and listing of available products. This focus on a specific sequential environment and institutional ecology, enables an exemplary discussion of how this action is multimodally formatted, embedded in its context, and shaped in relation to objects as discursive referents as well as materialities to be pointed at, looked at, touched and sensed in multiple ways. More generally, this focus enables to address two sets of issues: on the one hand, it elucidates the nexus between action, institutionality and materiality, including the role of multisensoriality in engaging with the qualities of buyable objects. On the other hand, it addresses the nexus between action and referential practices for introducing and presenting new referents,...
Discourse Studies, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic has affected not only the health of populations but also their everyday soc... more The Covid-19 pandemic has affected not only the health of populations but also their everyday social practices, transformed by orienting to risks of contagion and to health prevention discourses. This paper emanates from a project investigating the impact of Covid-19 on human sociality and more particularly the situated and embodied organization of social interactions. It discusses how Covid-19 impacts the design of ordinary actions in social interaction, how this is made publicly accountable by the participants orienting to the pandemic in formatting their actions and in responding to the actions of others. Adopting an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective, the analyses focus on a particular social activity: paying. The organization of payments in shops and services has been affected by the pandemic, not only by official regulations, favoring some modes of payment over others, but also in how sellers and customers situatedly adapt their practices to imperatives ...
Langage et société, 2021
HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific re... more HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 2002
Journal of Language and Politics, 2017
Institutional settings in which larger groups of people interact constitute a perspicuous setting... more Institutional settings in which larger groups of people interact constitute a perspicuous setting for the study of how a diversity of voices, opinions, and positions are expressed and addressed among the participants. The paper studies how multiple recipiency is bodily and practically organized by the participants in a situated manner, with a particular focus on chairmen, facilitators, animators in charge of the management of the encounter. More specifically, the paper studies the linguistic and embodied organization of local orientations to multiple participants and parties, to the difference between recipients and addressees, and to the lamination of different voices in single embodied turns at talk. Within a conversation analytic perspective, the paper offers a detailed analysis of the actions of a facilitator mediating grass-root political meetings among citizens. In this context, after a proposal has been uttered by a citizen, the facilitator formulates it again for the all of the participants, both orienting towards different co-present participants and different voices and towards a collectivization of the proposal. Through the analysis of the emergent progressivity of the facilitator's reformulations and the way they are multimodally designed for multiple recipients, I offer empirical evidence for a reflection about relationships between recipiency, participation and multiparty interactions.
Journal of Pragmatics, 2017
Service encounters at the counter are a social arena in which unacquainted people come to interac... more Service encounters at the counter are a social arena in which unacquainted people come to interact together, without a priori knowing the language of the other. In multilingual institutional settings, such as places where immigrants, mobile workers, cosmopolitan clients, and tourists gather to ask for services, this is a common configuration. These settings are exemplary for investigating how relevant linguistic resources are emergently discovered, negotiated, and established in the course of the interaction. Instead of supposing that shared linguistic resources are a necessary condition for social interaction to happen, the detailed analysis of these settings invites the researcher to study how participants orient to other available linguistic resources, identify and recognize them, and finally negotiate and select the appropriate and adjusted ones to progress within the encounter. Based on conversation analysis, the paper describes the opening of encounters as a locus where linguistic choices are guessed, checked, requested, and negotiated among participants. The main focus is on greetings, as a practice used to establish and possibly negotiate the language of the encounter. The data come from video recordings at two federal institutions in Switzerland-counters offering services at the border and at railway stations-considered exemplary sites for observing multilingual exchanges among customers and clerks.
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2016
This article reflects on recent challenges emerging from the study of language and the body in so... more This article reflects on recent challenges emerging from the study of language and the body in social interaction. There is a general interest in language and the body across disciplines that has invited a reconceptualization of the broader issues relative to action, cognition, culture, knowledge, social relations and identities, spatiality and temporality. The study of social interaction focuses on how multimodal resourcesincluding language and bodily movementsare holistically and situatedly used in building human action. This article discusses some consequences and challenges of putting the body at the center of attention: it repositions language as one among other modalities, and invites us to consider the involvement of entire bodies in social interaction, overcoming a logo-centric vision of communication, as well as a visuo-centric vision of embodiment. These issues are developed through a series of conversation analytic studies, firstly of classic topics in linguistics like deixis, then of more recent topics, such as mobility and sensoriality. Cet article offre une r eflexion sur des enjeux r ecents emergeant de l' etude du langage et du corps dans l'interaction sociale. Un int erêt g en eral pour les rapports entre langage et corps est apparu a travers les disciplines des sciences sociales et cognitives, qui a invit e a re-conceptualiser des enjeux fondamentaux touchant a l'action, la cognition, la culture, la connaissance, les relations sociales et les identit es, la spatialit e et la temporalit e. L' etude de l'interaction sociale y r epond en se focalisant sur la mani ere dont les ressources multimodalesincluant le langage et le corpssont mobilis ees de mani ere holiste et situ ee dans l'organisation de l'action humaine. L'article discute d'un certain nombre d'enjeux et cons equences issus de la remise du corps au centre de l'attention : cela repositionne le langage comme une modalit e parmi d'autres, et invite a se pencher sur l'engagement du corps entier des participants dans l'interaction sociale, d epassant ainsi une vision logo-centrique de la communication, ainsi qu'une vision visio-centrique de la corpor eit e. Ces enjeux sont d evelopp es dans une s erie d' etudes en analyse conversationnelle portant sur d'abord sur des th emes classiques en linguistique, comme la deixis, puis sur des probl ematiques plus r ecentes, comme la mobilit e et la sensorialit e. [French]
Zeitschrift für qualitative Bildungs-, Beratungs- und Sozialforschung, Oct 15, 2005
Pragmatics, 1998
Over the last decade, therapy interactions have become a common field for linguists, interaction ... more Over the last decade, therapy interactions have become a common field for linguists, interaction analysts, psychologists and clinicians alike. On the one hand, some linguists and conversationalists have turned their attention to the subject as a field of inquiry leading to questions which are then also posed and elaborated on in other contexts. It was in this way, for example, that the pioneering work of Labov and Fanshel (1977) led to their developing a general model for discourse analysis. From this standpoint, therapy interactions are just one kind of social interaction among others, where, while respecting the specificities of their institutional and professional context, dynamics which can then be generalized are observed (the fact that Labov and Fanshel's work, mentioned above, is subtitled Psychotherapy as Conversation is not coincidental). On the other hand, psychologists' and clinical practitioners' perspectives on therapy interactions aim not simply at describing the ways in which this type of interaction is organized, but more at structuring this description using questions linked to the assessment and improvement of therapy methods. The latter approach leads, for example, to an improved understanding of patients and thence to a better diagnosis, or to more accurate assessment of the effects of therapy (see, for example, Gale 1991). The specificity of the therapy context is fundamental in this case. The analyses of therapy interactions collected in this issue also reflect the different trends mentioned above, a tendency which can be observed in the diversity of the literature concerning this interdisciplinary field. Given the number and diversity of the types of corpora studied, together with the analytical approaches and the objectives aimed at, the articles published here indeed raise questions as to the specificity of these interactionspresupposing the existence of a certain homogeneity in their form and structure-and as to their relationships with other kinds of interaction. The question is, therefore: what are the results and the consequences, both theoretical and descriptive, of analyses of specific therapy interactions (analyses such as those presented in this issue)?
13. Conversation analysis: Talk and bodily resources for the organization of social interaction
Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK) 38/1, 2013
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Papers by Lorenza Mondada