Papers by Danielle Pillet-Shore
Research on children and social interaction, Sep 3, 2023
This article advances our understanding of institutional interaction by showing when and how it c... more This article advances our understanding of institutional interaction by showing when and how it can be advantageous for professionals to treat addressed recipients as non-unique. Examining how teachers talk about children-as-students during parent-teacher conferences, this investigation illuminates several specific interactional methods that teachers use to depersonalize the focal student's trouble, delineating as among these the novel practice of 'routinizing'-citing first-hand experience with other similar cases. Analysis demonstrates how teachers use routinizing to enact their expertise, both responsively as a vehicle for attenuating and credentialing their advice-giving to parents/caregivers, and proactively to preempt parent/ caregiver resistance to their student assessments/evaluations. This research thus reveals how routinizing licenses teachers' authority vis-à-vis the focal student's trouble by making salient the epistemic basis for their claims.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL, 2023
Registering refers to the linguistic and embodied action of calling joint attention to a selected... more Registering refers to the linguistic and embodied action of calling joint attention to a selected, publicly and concurrently perceivable referent so others shift their attention to it. As a sequence-initial/initiating action, registering projects the relevance of coparticipants’:
(i) displayed sensorial attention to, and shared awareness of, the target referent—including visible, audible, palpable, and olfactible features of the setting and its participants; and
(ii) display of achieved “intersubjectivity” (Heritage, 1984:254–256; Scheff, 2005) by sharing their understandings of the local meaning and value of the target referent (Pillet-Shore, 2021:33).
Because the action of registering treats the target referent as its source, it can launch a “retro-sequence” (Schegloff, 2007:217-19). Registering is a pervasive social action that participants to interaction use to introduce a new topic/sequence of interaction, including during conversation openings (Pillet-Shore, 2008; 2018; 2021) and at a places of possible sequence completion.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL, 2023
The term ‘preferred’ is used in conversation analytic research on preference to describe how peop... more The term ‘preferred’ is used in conversation analytic research on preference to describe how people systematically time/position and design their social actions in interaction when there are relevant alternatives possible. ‘Preferred’ has been used to refer to:
• an action that structurally aligns and cooperates with a prior conversational turn’s initiated course of action/project/activity;
• the design of an action—both sequence-initiating (FPP), and sequence-responding (SPP)—that is straightforward and fluent, and delivered at the earliest moment when it may be initially relevantly performed.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL, 2023
The term preference (as in "preference organization" or "conversational preference") is used in c... more The term preference (as in "preference organization" or "conversational preference") is used in conversation analytic research to describe how people systematically time/position and design their social actions in interaction when there are relevant alternatives possible.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL, 2023
The term noticing is used to describe:
(i) a private, individual, perceptual/cognitive action of ... more The term noticing is used to describe:
(i) a private, individual, perceptual/cognitive action of bringing one’s attention or conscious awareness to a target phenomenon/experience (e.g., a yoga class instruction to ‘notice your breath,’ or becoming aware of a strong smell as one enters a new space);
(ii) a public, social action of calling joint attention to a target referent.
Conversation analytic work examines noticing as a social/interactional event, which “need not be engendered by a perceptual/cognitive one. And many (perhaps most) perceptual/cognitive noticings do not get articulated interactionally at all. But one key normative trajectory is an interactional noticing presented as occasioned by a perceptual/cognitive one” (Schegloff, 2007:87). As an action-in-conversation, noticing involves the selection and presentation of a target referent—some feature of the setting and/or its participants that is publicly and concurrently perceivable (Pillet-Shore, 2021; Schegloff, 2007:219) and thus available for mutual scrutiny (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2012). Though many studies examine the action of noticing visible referents (e.g., while driving in a car, Goodwin & Goodwin, 2012; in a classroom, Kääntä, 2014), others also examine the action of noticing (or otherwise commenting upon) referents that are audible, olfactible, palpable (Pillet-Shore, 2021) and/or tasteable (e.g., Mondada, 2012; Vannini, Ahluwalia-Lopez, Waskul & Gottschalk, 2010).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL, 2023
The term 'dispreferred' is used in conversation analytic research on preference to describe how p... more The term 'dispreferred' is used in conversation analytic research on preference to describe how people systematically time/position and design their social actions in interaction when there are relevant alternatives possible. 'Dispreferred' has been used to refer to:
• an action that does not structurally align or cooperate with a prior conversational turn's initiated course of action/project/activity;
• the design of an action-both sequence-initiating (FPP), and sequence-responding (SPP)-with delay(s), speech dysfluencies, and other mitigating features including accounts, appreciations, apologies, qualifications and/or uncertainty markers.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL, 2023
The terms announcing and announcement are used to describe a declarative utterance presented by i... more The terms announcing and announcement are used to describe a declarative utterance presented by its speaker as an intended recipient-informing about something noteworthy. (‘Announcing’ is a speaker-side term, while ‘informing’ is a recipient-side term.) Announcing is a social action done by speakers displaying a knowing epistemic stance. It is not, however, criterial “that speakers know in fact that their intended recipients have not heard the impending news” (Terasaki, 2004 [1976]:175). A speaker’s announcement may report on:
(i) a unilaterally-experienced event asymmetrically within the speaker’s epistemic domain which may be temporally and/or spatially dislocated from the here-and-now conversation;
(ii) a multilaterally-experienceable, publicly and concurrently perceivable referent that is temporally and spatially located in the here-and-now conversation.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Research on Children and Social Interaction, 2023
This article advances our understanding of institutional interaction by showing when and how it c... more This article advances our understanding of institutional interaction by showing when and how it can be advantageous for professionals to treat addressed recipients as non-unique. Examining how teachers talk about children-as-students during parent-teacher conferences, this investigation illuminates several specific interactional methods that teachers use to depersonalize the focal student's trouble, delineating as among these the novel practice of 'routinizing'-citing first-hand experience with other similar cases. Analysis demonstrates how teachers use routinizing to enact their expertise, both responsively as a vehicle for attenuating and credentialing their advice-giving to parents/caregivers, and proactively to preempt parent/ caregiver resistance to their student assessments/evaluations. This research thus reveals how routinizing licenses teachers' authority vis-à-vis the focal student's trouble by making salient the epistemic basis for their claims.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Research on Children and Social Interaction, 2023
Conversation analysts are interested in child-focused interactions due to their special capacity ... more Conversation analysts are interested in child-focused interactions due to their special capacity to reveal significant aspects of children's social and educational lives...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Cambridge Handbook of Methods in Conversation Analysis, 2024
Position matters. As a conversation analyst examining any form of recorded synchronous human inte... more Position matters. As a conversation analyst examining any form of recorded synchronous human interaction – be it casual or institutional – I constantly monitor for, and organize my collections of target phenomena around structural position: Where on a transcript and when in an unfolding real-time encounter does a participant enact some form of conduct? Because conversation analysis (CA) is primarily focused upon action sequences, I use CA methods to examine the ways in which participants’ audible utterances and visible body-behaviors accomplish particular social actions due at least in part to their positioning within a sequence of interaction – an ordered series of moves between different participants (Heritage, 1984:245).
This chapter attests to the importance of paying close attention to structural position as requisite for understanding how participants design their conduct to be recognizable as particular social actions in interaction. To detail a range of positional issues, this chapter first considers how to tackle the task of identifying the position of participant conduct, and then presents several forms of evidence that an action takes on different meaning based upon how it is positioned – where/when it is done. In the central section, “Position, Action, and Meaning,” I discuss: (i) how the position of a silence affects its meaning; (ii) the reflexive relationship between position and turn design; and (iii) the position of an action within a sequence. I expand this last section by explicating how CA work on preference organization necessitates analyses of structural position, detailing how participants position both their sequence-initiating and sequence-responding actions. Across two sub-sections, I focus on describing how I have gone about analyzing participants’ positioning of sequence-initial actions in both institutional and casual interactions to exemplify how structural position can serve as a key avenue leading directly to findings about the orderliness of human action.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Sociology of Health & Illness, 2021
What happens when a friend starts talking about her own substance use and misuse? This article pr... more What happens when a friend starts talking about her own substance use and misuse? This article provides the first investigation of how substance use is spontaneously topicalized in naturally occurring conversation. It presents a detailed analysis of a rare video-recorded interaction showing American English-speaking university students talking about their own substance (mis)use in a residential setting. During this conversation, several substance (mis)use informings are disclosed about one participant, and this study elucidates what occasions each disclosure, and how participants respond to each disclosure. This research shows how participants use casual conversation to offer important substance (mis)use information to their friends and cohabitants, tacitly recruiting their surveillance. Analysis also uncovers how an emerging adult peer group enacts informal social control, locally (re-)constituting taken-for-granted social norms and the participants' social relationships, to on the one hand promote alcohol use while, on the other hand endeavouring to prevent one member from engaging in continued pain medication misuse. This article thus illuminates ordinary peer conversation as an important site for continued sociological research on substance (mis)use and prevention.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Research on Language and Social Interaction, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Research on Language and Social Interaction, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Discourse Studies, 2017
It is commonly assumed that teasing is restricted to encounters among intimates or close acquaint... more It is commonly assumed that teasing is restricted to encounters among intimates or close acquaintances. As a result of examining initial interactions among (American and Australian) speakers of English, however, this article shows that teasing also occurs between persons who are becoming acquainted. Analysis reveals that tease sequences unfold across three actions that constitute the tease as an invitation to intimacy: a teasable action on the part of the target, the tease proper and a moment of interactionally generated affiliation. Given teasing is one way of criticising another, it constitutes a potential breach of tact or interactional propriety. In initial interactions, however, participants can construe this potential impropriety as an invitation to intimacy, as it involves the proposal of a shared ironic stance that may be either accepted or declined by the target of the tease.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Social Psychology Quarterly, 2010
In our everyday interactions as they unfold in real time, how do we do including? This article ex... more In our everyday interactions as they unfold in real time, how do we do including? This article examines a specific set of interactional moments when the potential to be included (or not) recurs: when a newcomer arrives to some social scene where two or more already-present persons are actively engaged in some activity and that newcomer displays interest in joining into their activity. I show how arriving newcomers bodily display that they want to join into the pre-present party’s interaction, and I analyze a key utterance-based practice that pre-present speakers use to include newcomers into their interaction—the practice of previous activity formulating. Through this practice, speakers summarize the activities or conversational topics in which they were engaged before establishing copresence with arrivers, thereby making way and making sense for them so they can join into their interaction. By showing that participants treat pre-present speakers’ offers of formulations as preferred...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Language in Society, 2016
As the principal occasion for establishing cooperation between family and school, the parent-teac... more As the principal occasion for establishing cooperation between family and school, the parent-teacher conference is crucial to the social and educational lives of children. But there is a problem: reports of parent-teacher conflict pervade extant literature. Previous studies do not, however, explain how conflict emerges in real time or how conflict is often avoided during conferences. This article examines a diverse corpus of video-recorded naturally occurring conferences to elucidate a structuralpreference organizationoperative during parent-teacher interaction that enables participants to forestall conflict. Focusing on teachers' conduct around student-praise and student-criticism, this investigation demonstrates that teachers do extra interactional work when articulating student-criticism. This research explicates two of teachers' most regular actions constituting this extra work:obfuscating responsibilityfor student-troubles by omitting explicit reference to the student, ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Communication, 2015
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Research on Language & Social Interaction, 2012
ABSTRACT This article examines the social action of greeting in naturally occurring face-to-face ... more ABSTRACT This article examines the social action of greeting in naturally occurring face-to-face interaction, paying special attention to how people prosodically produce their very first vocalized utterances. Close analysis of a corpus of 337 video recorded openings shows that participants recipient design greetings on the level of prosody, tailoring them to each addressee and thus hearably displaying a stance toward the current state and character of their social relationship. Documenting the discovery of a prosodic continuum along which parties fine-tune their greetings, this article elucidates two distinct clusters of prosodic features with which participants recurrently design their greetings. Analysis demonstrates that parties use each prosodic cluster to display a different stance toward encountering the addressed recipient, with prosodically “large” greetings displaying a positive stance of approval and prosodically “small” greetings displaying (no more than) a neutral stance.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Communication Monographs, 2011
... In doing this, Astrid shows that what she has just realized is that she was the only known-in... more ... In doing this, Astrid shows that what she has just realized is that she was the only known-in-common person in the room, and that what she has done wrong is fail to fulfill her duty as the known-in-common person to launch an introduction between Lilly and the ... Am I Danielle? ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers by Danielle Pillet-Shore
(i) displayed sensorial attention to, and shared awareness of, the target referent—including visible, audible, palpable, and olfactible features of the setting and its participants; and
(ii) display of achieved “intersubjectivity” (Heritage, 1984:254–256; Scheff, 2005) by sharing their understandings of the local meaning and value of the target referent (Pillet-Shore, 2021:33).
Because the action of registering treats the target referent as its source, it can launch a “retro-sequence” (Schegloff, 2007:217-19). Registering is a pervasive social action that participants to interaction use to introduce a new topic/sequence of interaction, including during conversation openings (Pillet-Shore, 2008; 2018; 2021) and at a places of possible sequence completion.
• an action that structurally aligns and cooperates with a prior conversational turn’s initiated course of action/project/activity;
• the design of an action—both sequence-initiating (FPP), and sequence-responding (SPP)—that is straightforward and fluent, and delivered at the earliest moment when it may be initially relevantly performed.
(i) a private, individual, perceptual/cognitive action of bringing one’s attention or conscious awareness to a target phenomenon/experience (e.g., a yoga class instruction to ‘notice your breath,’ or becoming aware of a strong smell as one enters a new space);
(ii) a public, social action of calling joint attention to a target referent.
Conversation analytic work examines noticing as a social/interactional event, which “need not be engendered by a perceptual/cognitive one. And many (perhaps most) perceptual/cognitive noticings do not get articulated interactionally at all. But one key normative trajectory is an interactional noticing presented as occasioned by a perceptual/cognitive one” (Schegloff, 2007:87). As an action-in-conversation, noticing involves the selection and presentation of a target referent—some feature of the setting and/or its participants that is publicly and concurrently perceivable (Pillet-Shore, 2021; Schegloff, 2007:219) and thus available for mutual scrutiny (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2012). Though many studies examine the action of noticing visible referents (e.g., while driving in a car, Goodwin & Goodwin, 2012; in a classroom, Kääntä, 2014), others also examine the action of noticing (or otherwise commenting upon) referents that are audible, olfactible, palpable (Pillet-Shore, 2021) and/or tasteable (e.g., Mondada, 2012; Vannini, Ahluwalia-Lopez, Waskul & Gottschalk, 2010).
• an action that does not structurally align or cooperate with a prior conversational turn's initiated course of action/project/activity;
• the design of an action-both sequence-initiating (FPP), and sequence-responding (SPP)-with delay(s), speech dysfluencies, and other mitigating features including accounts, appreciations, apologies, qualifications and/or uncertainty markers.
(i) a unilaterally-experienced event asymmetrically within the speaker’s epistemic domain which may be temporally and/or spatially dislocated from the here-and-now conversation;
(ii) a multilaterally-experienceable, publicly and concurrently perceivable referent that is temporally and spatially located in the here-and-now conversation.
This chapter attests to the importance of paying close attention to structural position as requisite for understanding how participants design their conduct to be recognizable as particular social actions in interaction. To detail a range of positional issues, this chapter first considers how to tackle the task of identifying the position of participant conduct, and then presents several forms of evidence that an action takes on different meaning based upon how it is positioned – where/when it is done. In the central section, “Position, Action, and Meaning,” I discuss: (i) how the position of a silence affects its meaning; (ii) the reflexive relationship between position and turn design; and (iii) the position of an action within a sequence. I expand this last section by explicating how CA work on preference organization necessitates analyses of structural position, detailing how participants position both their sequence-initiating and sequence-responding actions. Across two sub-sections, I focus on describing how I have gone about analyzing participants’ positioning of sequence-initial actions in both institutional and casual interactions to exemplify how structural position can serve as a key avenue leading directly to findings about the orderliness of human action.
(i) displayed sensorial attention to, and shared awareness of, the target referent—including visible, audible, palpable, and olfactible features of the setting and its participants; and
(ii) display of achieved “intersubjectivity” (Heritage, 1984:254–256; Scheff, 2005) by sharing their understandings of the local meaning and value of the target referent (Pillet-Shore, 2021:33).
Because the action of registering treats the target referent as its source, it can launch a “retro-sequence” (Schegloff, 2007:217-19). Registering is a pervasive social action that participants to interaction use to introduce a new topic/sequence of interaction, including during conversation openings (Pillet-Shore, 2008; 2018; 2021) and at a places of possible sequence completion.
• an action that structurally aligns and cooperates with a prior conversational turn’s initiated course of action/project/activity;
• the design of an action—both sequence-initiating (FPP), and sequence-responding (SPP)—that is straightforward and fluent, and delivered at the earliest moment when it may be initially relevantly performed.
(i) a private, individual, perceptual/cognitive action of bringing one’s attention or conscious awareness to a target phenomenon/experience (e.g., a yoga class instruction to ‘notice your breath,’ or becoming aware of a strong smell as one enters a new space);
(ii) a public, social action of calling joint attention to a target referent.
Conversation analytic work examines noticing as a social/interactional event, which “need not be engendered by a perceptual/cognitive one. And many (perhaps most) perceptual/cognitive noticings do not get articulated interactionally at all. But one key normative trajectory is an interactional noticing presented as occasioned by a perceptual/cognitive one” (Schegloff, 2007:87). As an action-in-conversation, noticing involves the selection and presentation of a target referent—some feature of the setting and/or its participants that is publicly and concurrently perceivable (Pillet-Shore, 2021; Schegloff, 2007:219) and thus available for mutual scrutiny (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2012). Though many studies examine the action of noticing visible referents (e.g., while driving in a car, Goodwin & Goodwin, 2012; in a classroom, Kääntä, 2014), others also examine the action of noticing (or otherwise commenting upon) referents that are audible, olfactible, palpable (Pillet-Shore, 2021) and/or tasteable (e.g., Mondada, 2012; Vannini, Ahluwalia-Lopez, Waskul & Gottschalk, 2010).
• an action that does not structurally align or cooperate with a prior conversational turn's initiated course of action/project/activity;
• the design of an action-both sequence-initiating (FPP), and sequence-responding (SPP)-with delay(s), speech dysfluencies, and other mitigating features including accounts, appreciations, apologies, qualifications and/or uncertainty markers.
(i) a unilaterally-experienced event asymmetrically within the speaker’s epistemic domain which may be temporally and/or spatially dislocated from the here-and-now conversation;
(ii) a multilaterally-experienceable, publicly and concurrently perceivable referent that is temporally and spatially located in the here-and-now conversation.
This chapter attests to the importance of paying close attention to structural position as requisite for understanding how participants design their conduct to be recognizable as particular social actions in interaction. To detail a range of positional issues, this chapter first considers how to tackle the task of identifying the position of participant conduct, and then presents several forms of evidence that an action takes on different meaning based upon how it is positioned – where/when it is done. In the central section, “Position, Action, and Meaning,” I discuss: (i) how the position of a silence affects its meaning; (ii) the reflexive relationship between position and turn design; and (iii) the position of an action within a sequence. I expand this last section by explicating how CA work on preference organization necessitates analyses of structural position, detailing how participants position both their sequence-initiating and sequence-responding actions. Across two sub-sections, I focus on describing how I have gone about analyzing participants’ positioning of sequence-initial actions in both institutional and casual interactions to exemplify how structural position can serve as a key avenue leading directly to findings about the orderliness of human action.