We plan to have four practice presentations for conferences to be held in July and August.
Pomerantz (1984) famously demonstrated that self-deprecations prefer disagreement to agreement as a response. However, we do not have a systematic description of what makes an utterance a self-deprecation. This study investigates the recognizability of self-deprecations by examining Japanese conversational data. The paper reports two key features that make a comment recognizable as a self-deprecation: the referent and the valence of the comment. The referent of the comment needs to be the speaker her/himself or an object or a person that belongs to her/him in some way. Second, the valence of the comment has to be hearable as negative and undesirable. The analysis reveals participants' shared but tacit orientation to what/who belongs to whom and what is considered to be an undesirable feature of a person or an object.
This paper explores the other-initiated repair operation in the domain of request action at a service encounter in Japanese. In case of open-class repair initiator such as “What?” or “Huh?” (Drew, 1997; Schegloff, 2004; Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1979), it has been argued that since it could be heard as potential disagreement, which could cost interactionally and socially to remedy (Pomerantz, 1984; Schegloff, 2007; Sorjonen, 1996), the recipients of such other-initiated repairs are less in favor of treating it as an understanding problem than as a problem with hearing (Svennevig, 2008), and thus blame themselves for the responsibility (Robinson, 2006). Thus, there is a hierarchical order on which the recipients of other-initiated repairs try to repeat what they said instead of changing the original utterance. In so doing, they may dispense with some part of the original utterance when they are responding to requests to repeat (Schegloff, 2004). This means that they are given time to reassess the comprehensibility and acceptability of the original utterance (Svennevig, 2008).
The current analysis involves the conversational practice used to initiate an open-class repair and how it is responded to in an ordering sequence at a sushi restaurant, in Japanese. In particular, when a chef receives an order from a customer, he sometimes initiates an open-class repair to indicate difficulty regarding a prior turn. Customer then usually repeat the ordered item name alone by dispensing with other parts of the original request. That is, a polite verb ending of a canonical request such as X wo kudasai ('please give me X') is dispensed with and only the item name is used, often accompanied by a case marking particle (wo), which is critical for the request action. This way, the customer treats the repair initiator as an indication of trouble with hearing rather than comprehensibility or acceptability. This helps us understand the participant's orientation toward an ordering action―that is, to communicate what they want as well as reduce responsibility in progressing the activity. Hence, the orientation to the social deference indexed by a polite verb phrase, kudasai ('please give me'), is dispensed with over the activity orientation. Routinized work of requesting is manifested in the way that a customer treats the chef's open-class repair as a hearing problem and accepts more speaking responsibility.
I will examine how commonsense knowledge is used for legal reasoning in criminal court through the analysis of the jury's conversation in deliberations in a mock trial.
In this case, the defendant (juvenile) was charged with rape and murder, and the issue of the court (i.e., question for the jury) was whether he was punishable by death penalty. For the discussion of the applicability of death penalty, two kinds of interpretational practice are required: first, interpretation of the criteria of death penalty (called "Nagayama criteria" in Japan), and second, interpretation of the actions by the defendant. In this case, the jury engaged in such practices with commonsense reasoning about human "personality". That is, on the one hand, in fact finding, the crime of the defendant was interpreted as "not planned" because of his "immature" personality. However, on the other hand, in sentencing, his "immature" nature was interpreted as "impossibility of his correction" and reasonable ground for death penalty.
Through the analysis of the jury's practice leading to these seemingly inconsistent interpretations, I will illustrate how "a law" (criteria which should be applied to the fact) and "the fact itself (to which the law will apply)" are mutually articulated and become intelligible in the real-time ongoing process of deliberation.
The aim of this study is to explore an aspect of the organization of participation, that is, the organization of the appropriate distribution of parties' orientations, through the analysis of 32 video-recordings of prenatal ultrasound examinations. Ultrasound examinations are distinctive in that the major orientational fields are spatially distanced and modally distinct. In this environment, it is very rare for healthcare providers to look at the pregnant woman's face. I elucidate the procedural grounds for the production of this rare conduct by healthcare providers, and argue that the conduct is a practice of specifically being responsive to the pregnant woman's move locally or more globally, and is usable to transform the way of participation. Ultrasound examinations are a "perspicuous site" for the investigation of the organization of participation.
If anybody is interested in bringing their own data, analyses, observations, arguments, or whatever, to a next meeting to discuss together, please contact Aug Nishizaka at augnish(a)soc.meijigakuin.ac.jp.