Guest blog: Leelo Keevallik on making grammar real

As a featured debate article in ROLSI vol 51(1), I invited Leelo Keevallik to showcase her argument that traditional conceptions of grammar needed to change: to take the body, and its deployment in the unfolding of turns, seriously. I’m delighted that she also accepted an invitation to write a guest blog, reflecting on how she came to this challenging, and tantalising, new conception.

Leelo Keevallik

Leelo Keevallik, Linköping University

My training as a linguist started behind the Iron Curtain according to a very traditional philological curriculum and no course literature in English. But I was fascinated by the neat grammatical paradigms, the prudent morphology tables, and the precise categorizations of parts-of-speech. Continue reading →

Guest blog: Talking with Alexa at home

I imagine that many interaction researchers will have been curious about how a voice-activated internet-connected device might be integrated (or not) into conversations at home.  Martin Porcheron along with Stuart Reeves,  Joel Fischer and Sarah Sharples (all at the University of Nottingham) went the next step, and did the research. Here Martin and Stuart explain how the research was done…

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Martin Porcheron

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Stuart Reeves

Voice-based ‘smartspeaker’ products, such as the Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod have become popular consumer items in the last year or two. These devices are designed for use in the home, and offer a kind of interaction where users may talk to an anthropomorphised ‘intelligent personal assistant’ which responds to things like questions and instructions. Continue reading →

Guest blog: Melisa Stevanovic and Elina Weiste on impossible content analysis

Two of Finland’s most active and productive young Conversation Analysis researchers, Melisa Stevanovic and Elina Weiste,  tried their hand at an intriguing experiment: analysing what people said about doing CA. The result was a thoughtful article (not in ROLSI) but clearly there was more to it than that, so I was delighted when they agreed to do a guest blog here.

The title they suggested was “On the impossibility of conducting content analysis: Back story of our data-session paper”, which sets the scene tantalisingly…

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Dr Melisa Stevanovic, Helsinki University

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Dr Elina Weiste, Helsinki University

Continue reading →

Guest blog: Jason Turowetz on “I just thought…”

“I just thought… ” is one of those phrases whose meaning we think we know, but there are intriguing subtleties in what people do with it in conversation. In a recent article for the journal, Jason Turowetz delved into some of its main uses. Here he gives the background to the story. 

Jason Turowetz

My article on ‘I just thought formulations’ has its origins in a study of speed dating I conducted with a colleague, Matthew Hollander, in 2009, when we were graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It seems a long way back, but that shows how a phenomenon can lodge in your head and inspire a continuing thread of research. Continue reading →

Guest blog: Gareth Walker on how acoustic data are represented

Quite often a ROLSI article touches on a matter than will interest a very wide range of readers, and Gareth Walker‘s account of how acoustic data is represented is a very good example. The range of representations is wide, and not all are equally good for the same things; some may even be misleading. I’m delighted that Gareth has agreed to go into some of the thinking that prompted him to write the piece. Continue reading →

Guest Blog: The 8th biannual EM/CA Doctoral Network meeting

Twice a year, UK postgraduates meet to thrash out issues in ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, generously hosted by staff at a University. The second meeting this year was held at Newcastle. Jack Joyce tells the story, and Marc Alexander muses on the pros and cons of parallel sessions.

Jack Joyce, Loughborough DARG

The 8th biannual EMCA Doctoral Network event was hosted at Newcastle University. It brought the marvellous event to the land of Applied Linguistics, and gave us EMCA researchers a further opportunity to explore different ways with which EMCA is employed around the UK. The collegial and supportive spirit highlighted at past EMCA Doctoral Networks was again, present, giving us the chance to meet old friends and make new connections. Continue reading →

Guest blog: Jack Joyce on Loughborough’s “Resistance Day”

The community of interactional researchers in Loughborough’s Discourse and Rhetoric Group occasionally put on an informal themed day of presentations and data sessions. In September this year the theme was “Resistance”, meant to encompass all kinds of practices. Doctoral student Jack Joyce takes up the story.

Jack Joyce, Loughborough DARG

On 13 September 2017, the first ‘Resistance in Talk-in-Interaction’ seminar day was hosted at Loughborough University as a joint-DARG event, funded by the Loughborough Doctoral College. Continue reading →

Why ROLSI uses double-blind review

Many journals in our field, perhaps most, anonymise the submissions they send out for review, and pass comments back to authors anonymised in turn: a “double-blind” system.  This has always been ROLSI’s practice  (at least, it has been under the editorship of the last five editors). But occasionally a reader or potential reviewer raises the question as to why this is preferable to signed reviews, or indeed submissions with the author’s name attached.

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Charles Antaki, ROLSI Editor

I thought readers might be interested in a recent e-mail dialogue with a reader on just these issues. Continue reading →

Guest blogs: Reflections on IPrA 2017, Belfast (part 2)

In this, the second report on the busy International Pragmatics Association conference, we have the reflections of the organiser, Catrin Rhys, intercontinental visitor Chase Raymond, and Twitter follower Saul Albert.

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Catrin Rhys, University of Ulster

The organiser’s view: Catrin Rhys #IPrA2017

Hosting IPrA begins with creating the bid and an appropriate theme and ends, after everyone has left, with report writing for the local sponsors. In between is a three-year rollercoaster with periods of intense busy-ness and quiet periods where you wake up in the middle of the night panicking that you’ve forgotten something. Continue reading →

Guest blogs: Reflections on IPrA 2017, Belfast (Part 1)

IPrA opning sot.pngEvery two years the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) holds a huge conference – this year some 1,300 people gathered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for a jamboree of language scholarship. As ever, it was a bazaar of wonders, from historical pragmatics through to eye-tracking experiments, with everything in between, in dozens  of languages. Conversation Analysis was well represented; I asked a number of colleagues to send their reflections, and in this, the first of two Guest Blogs, Liz Stokoe, Melisa Stevanovic and Marina Cantarutti tell us what it was like for them.


The Plenarist: Liz Stokoe @LizStokoe Continue reading →