'You can't' but 'I do': Rules, ethics and the significance of shifts in pronominal forms for self-positioning in talk
Frontotemporal dementia, sociality, and identity: Comparing adult-child and caregiver-frontotemporal dementia interactionsMulhaüsler and Harré contend that pronoun systems set out fields of expression ‘within which people can be . . . presented as agents of one kind or another’. Despite interest in pronominal forms by various discourse researchers, analysis of pronouns-in-use from this perspective remains underdeveloped. This article undertakes such an analysis, drawing on Rees’s theories about the ‘distance from the self ’ encoded in different pronouns. Our data, from interviews analysed as talk-in-interaction, show participants shifting between pronominal registers as a way of presenting their social world and positioning themselves as agents within it. ‘Fourth-person’ pronouns allow the distancing of reports of lack of agency from the deictic centre of self and express a ‘deontic modality’ through which one can position oneself in relation to moral imperatives. Along with shifts into and out of the first-person register, this is notably used to maintain an agentive self-positioning in talk about situations of relative powerlessness.
Directives: Entitlement and contingency in actionFrontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a neurodegenerative disease that affects the prefrontal cortex, and impairs various aspects relevant to social cognition. Such impairments can emerge as a visible phenomenon in social interaction and therefore can have very real consequences for those who interact with the afflicted (Goodwin, 2003). In this article, I examine how attitudes toward FTD patients are indexed through speech features employed by their interlocutors. I focus on three different speech features typically employed by adults and directed towards subordinates or children: directives, let’s/we framed sequences, and initiation-response-evaluation sequences. These forms are used as strategies to affect and guide FTD patient behaviors, and index how FTD patients are socially constructed as ‘child-like’ and in need of assistance and guidance though not necessarily warranted. Thus, FTD patients may be subject to a diminished status as a result of their social impairments.
Repetitional responses in frontotemporal dementia discourse: Asserting agency or demonstrating confusion?This article is focused on the nature of directives. It draws on Curl and Drew’s (2008) analysis of entitlement and contingency in request types and applies this to a corpus of directives that occur in UK family mealtimes involving parents and young children (three—eight-year-olds). While requests are built as contingent to varying degrees on the recipient’s willingness or ability to comply, directives embody no orientation to the recipient’s ability or desire to perform the relevant activity. This lack of orientation to ability or desire may be what makes them recognizable as directives. When examining directives in sequence the contingencies were successively reduced or managed during the delivery of the directive, thereby treating contingencies as a resource of the speaker rather than of the recipient. In a sense the entitlement claimed is ‘to tell’ rather than ‘to ask’. In sequences involving multiple/repeated directives, non-compliance led to upgraded (more entitled and less contingent) directives. The difference in the entitlement claimed, the response options available and the trajectory of multiple requests/directives suggests that participants orient to requests and directives as different actions, rather than more or less forceful formulations of the same.
Book review: Teun A. van Dijk, Society and Discourse: How Social Contexts Influence Text and Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. x + 287 pp., GB{pound}55.00/US$99.00 (hbk)Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a young-onset neurodegenerative dementia that primarily affects social behaviors. This paper examines the use of repetitional responses in FTD discourse, finding that patients often use repeats to assert agency or epistemic authority (i.e. to claim rights to knowledge). For example, repetitional responses are often used by patients to exert some autonomy when their interlocutors display a belief about the patients’ lack of knowledge about basic functioning. FTD has been associated with echolalia, the meaningless use of repetition; however, this analysis shows that the use of repetitional responses in FTD discourse can be meaningful and thus suggests that, at least in early stages of the dementia, echolalia is not always an accurate characterization of FTD patients’ use of repetitional responses.
Preference organization of sequence-initiating actions: The case of explicit account solicitations
Book review: Georgeta Cislaru, Frederic Pugniere-Saavedra and Frederique Sitri (eds), Les Carnets du Cediscor, 10. Analyse de Discours et Demande Sociale: Le Cas des Ecrits de Signalement. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2008. 180 pp. ISBN 978 2 87854 430 5 (pbk)This article extends prior conversation analytic research on the preference organization of sequence-initiating actions. Across two languages (English and Russian), this article examines one such action: explicitly soliciting an account for human conduct (predominantly with why-type interrogatives). Prior work demonstrates that this action conveys a challenging stance towards the warrantability of the accountable event/conduct (Bolden and Robinson, forthcoming). When addressees are somehow responsible for the accountable event/conduct, explicit solicitations of accounts are frequently critical of, and thus embody disaffiliation with, addressees. This article demonstrates that, when explicit solicitations of accounts embody disaffiliation, they are systematically ‘withheld’ and, thus, can be characterized as ‘dispreferred’ actions. This article also examines: a) deviant cases, where account solicitations are not withheld, which is a practice for embodying aggravated disaffiliation; and b) negative cases, where account solicitations actually embody affiliation , and as such are typically treated as preferred actions and not withheld.
