This chapter looks at how people vocally display bodily strain. While strain sounds can be a “leakage” of an individual bodily effort, they can also be performed without tension beyond what is necessary for their production, and acted upon by co-present others. The study re-specifies the pioneering but impressionistic account of response cries by Goffman (1978) through analyzing the minute mutual temporalities of vocal and bodily strain in the recordings of naturally occurring strain grunts during physical work and body instruction. The chapter argues that strain grunts are regularly produced alongside bodily effort, with variable phonetic characteristics, with outbreaths reflecting tension release, and at moments when the success of the effort is at risk. This leads to local (re)configuration of embodied participation in the task at hand and the emergence of strain displays as having been informative.

While the lexico-grammatical and embodied practices in various instructional activities have been explored in-depth (Keevallik, 2013; Simone & Galatolo, 2020), the vocal capacities deployed by instructors have not been in focus. This study looks at how a Pilates instructor coaches student bodies by modulating the prosodic production of verbal instructions and adjusting vocal quality in reflexive coordination with the students ongoing movements. We show how the body of one participant can be expressed and enhanced by anothers voice in a simultaneous assembly of action and argue for the dialogical conceptualization of a speaker. These voice-body assemblies constitute evidence of how actions were brought about jointly rather than constructed individually.

Standard models of language and communication depart from the assumption that speakers encode and receive messages individually, while interaction research has shown that utterances are composed jointly (C. Goodwin, 2018), dialogically designed with and for others (Linell, 2009). Furthermore, utterances only achieve their full semantic potential in concrete interactional contexts. This SI investigates various practices of human sounding that achieve their meaning through self and others ongoing bodily actions. One person may vocalize to enact someone elses ongoing bodily experience, to coordinate with another body, or to convey embodied knowledge about something that is ostensibly only accessible to anothers individual body. This illustrates the centrality of distributed action and collaborative agency in communication.

This study investigates the practice of "sounding for others," wherein one person vocalizes to enact someone elses putatively ongoing bodily sensation. We argue that it constitutes a collaborative way of performing sensorial experiences. Examples include producing cries with others strain or pain and parents sounding an mmm of gustatory pleasure on their infants behalf. Vocal sounds, their loudness, and duration are specifically deployed for instructing bodily experiences during novices real-time performance of various activities, such as tasting food for the first time or straining during a Pilates exercise. Vocalizations that are indexically tied to the body provide immediate displays of understanding and empathy that may be explicated further through lexicon. The existence of this practice challenges the conceptualization of communication as a transfer of information from an individual agent - even regarding assumedly individual body sensations - instead providing evidence of the joint nature of action and supporting dialogic theories of communication, including when language-marginal vocalizations are used.

Expressions of disgust have typically been studied as isolated faces or voices but rarely as embodied practices in everyday interaction. Building on multimodal interactional research on emotions and sensoriality, this paper addresses disgust as a unique topic at the intersection between psychological theory and interactional facts. A case of an adult enacting post-consumption disgust is analysed, detailing the transformation of the facial, auditory, and embodied expressions across interactional sequences and in collaboration with others. The paper showcases the variability of disgust expressions and their involvement in social actions such as displaying stamina or stoicism toward challenges.

This paper asks whether there are any pseudo-cleft structures in Estonian. Grammars do not account for them, but we found fitting examples from both spoken and written usage, in particular from public speeches. Functionally, they are similar to what has been described in other languages: what-initial constructions project longer explanations and launch new topics, thereby structuring discourse and (re-)engaging participants. Since studies on pseudo-clefts in spoken interaction have revealed a high degree of structural variability even in languages that make prolific use of them, such as French and Hebrew, we suggest that they are also grammaticized in Estonian.

In this course you will learn how to use video data for prototyping. The course provides hands-on training in working with video clips, including transcription and identification of relevant actions. You will familiarize with core interaction analytic concepts (grounded in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis) and will learn how to do an action-by-action analysis. Working on the design case of everyday interaction with automatic doors, you will learn how video interaction analysis can be embedded in an iterative design process.

In this course you will learn how to use video data for prototyping. The course provides hands-on training in working with video clips, including transcription and identifcation of relevant actions. You will familiarize with core interaction analytic concepts (grounded in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis) and will learn how to do an action-by-action analysis. Working on the design case of everyday interaction with automatic doors, you will learn how video interaction analysis can be embedded in an iterative design process.

In this case study we investigate the role of transnational networks and language brokering in labour migration within the European Union. By describing the working days of Estonians hired by a city maintenance company in Sweden, we demonstrate how language skills and network ties of a manager enable work migration in the local context. Most of the recruited workers belong to the managers circle of family and friends. The manager is thus both capitalising on his social relationships and reinforcing a social support network in the receiving country for the individuals involved. The article promotes our understanding of the interface between migration, multilingualism, and language brokering in the understudied blue-collar workplaces and dissects the social and economic values of linguistic resources in work migration across the Baltic Sea. The data consist of ethnographic observations of daily work routines, video recordings of interaction, and interviews.

Communicative action can be carried out by not only verbal but also embodied means. People regularly use multimodal resources to make sense for each other. Consider a mundane activity, such as a greeting. In addition to the choice of lexical items to fit the relationship, such as “hi,” “yo,” or “good morning, Mister Smith,” extreme prosody featuring high pitch, increased loudness, and extensive lengthening on a “hi” may be necessary for your friend to feel recognized and truly appreciated. In some contexts and relationships, a handshake, a bow, or a hug may be mandatory, while the appropriate duration of those behaviors, the adequate spatial distance, and the exact positions of touch are culturally significant. Across activity settings, bodily behavior is regularly treated as meaningful by coparticipants, as it plays a role in action formation alongside the use of lexicon and grammar. Qualitatively different semiotic resources are juxtaposed so that they mutually elaborate each other and constitute actions within the locally emerging interactional sequences, as understood by the current participants. Aspects such as gaze, gesture, posture, objects, and movement are all potentially recruited to achieve social action, depending on the praxeological context. It is, for example, crucial to pay attention to a specific area in the surrounding space when someone does a pointing gesture or to adjust one’s pace when interacting on the go. We are held socially accountable for our embodied behavior, be it designed for others or not, and the body is constantly interpreted in regard to its action import. Social actions can furthermore be exclusively carried out by the bodies within their spatial, material, and praxeological settings.

In this article we investigate spoken professional interaction at construction sites in Sweden, where workers from Poland, Ukraine and Estonia are temporarily employed as carpenters, ground workers and kitchen installers. We study how the workers use resources associated with different languages and how these resources are mobilized along with embodied resources for meaning-making. The analysis aims at investigating what social space the workers construct by going between or beyond different linguistic structures, as defined in the theory of translanguaging. The study is based on Linguistic Ethnography and Conversation Analysis is used for close analysis. We focus on instances of translanguaging, such as Swedish-sounding institutionalized keywords, practices of receptive multilingualism and the search for communicative overlaps in repertoires. The findings from busy construction sites show that the stratifying aspect gives some workers a voice in the organization, while others remain silent. Hence, it is primarily professionals functioning as team leaders, who talk to different occupational categories and use resources associated with different languages. The data provide an opportunity to investigate the theory of translanguaging and its transformative power in relation to professional settings that are linguistically diverse, but also strictly hierarchical.

Conceptualizing agency is a long-standing theoretical concern. Taking an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective, we explore agency as the oriented to capacity to produce situationally and sequentially relevant action. Drawing on video recordings of families interacting with the Cozmo toy robot, we present a multimodal analysis of a single episode featuring a variety of rapidly interchanging forms of robotic (non-)agency. We demonstrate how agency is ongoingly constituted in situated interaction between humans and a robot. Describing different ways in which the robot’s statuses as either an agent or an object are interactionally embodied into being, we distinguish “autonomous” agency, hybrid agency, ascribed agency, potential agency and non-agency.

Tasting as a social practice can be enacted on behalf of others through precisely positioned nonlexical vocalizations as gustatory mmms. This paper uses multimodal interaction analysis to detail the coordination of parents and infants while starting to feed solid foods; data are from families in Scotland. The analysis focuses on the organization of parental mmms in relation to eye gaze, sequentiality, and the temporal coordination of hands, food, and mouths to demonstrate their use in beginning, continuing, and refocusing on taste. The paper proposes that in order to fully understand the sociality of tasting, infant feeding research should include real-time vocal and embodied behavior, which is also key to the functional analysis of sensoriality-related vocalizations at the margins of language.

In this paper we examine how participants multimodal conduct maps onto one of the basic organizational principles of social interaction: preference organization - and how it does so in a similar manner across five different languages (Czech, French, Hebrew, Mandarin, and Romanian). Based on interactional data from these languages, we identify a recurrent multimodal practice that respondents deploy in turn-initial position in dispreferred responses to various first actions, such as information requests, assessments, proposals, and informing. The practice involves the verbal delivery of a turn-initial expression corresponding to English I dont know and its variants (dunno) coupled with gaze aversion from the prior speaker. We show that through this multimodal assembly respondents preface a dispreferred response within various sequence types, and we demonstrate the cross-linguistic robustness of this practice: Through the focal multimodal assembly, respondents retrospectively mark the prior action as problematic and prospectively alert co-participants to incipient resistance to the constraints set out or to the stance conveyed by that action. By evidencing how grammar and body interface in related ways across a diverse set of languages, the findings open a window onto cross-linguistic, cross-modal, and cross-cultural consistencies in human interactional conduct.

This chapter on Estonian and Polish OKAY focuses on complying responses to high entitlement directives. The responses are built of two parts, the verbal OKAY that completes the adjacency pair and an embodied compliance that ensues. The OKAY provides an immediate verbal notification and acceptance of the suggested action trajectory, which is relevant for the co-participants’ continuing coordination of activities in progress, while the projected embodied compliance is necessarily deferred. By looking at two genetically and historically unrelated languages and showing a similar response pattern in them, we hope to illustrate the general interactional potential of the particle OKAY, and perhaps begin to understand some of its cross-linguistic allure.

The lip-smack is a communicative sound object that has received very little research attention, with most work examining their occurrence in nonhu- man primate interaction. The current paper aims to dissect the social poten- tial of lip-smacks in human interaction. The analysis examines a corpus of 391 lip-smack particles produced by English-speaking parents while feeding their infants. A multimodal interaction analysis details the main features: (1) rhythmical production in a series, (2) facial-embodied aspects, and (3) tem- poral organisation. Lip-smacks occurred in prosodically grouped chains of mostly 3 or 5 particles, with accompanying facial expressions, and were co- ordinated with the infants’ chewing. They highlight the mechanics of chew- ing while framing eating as a pleasant interactional event.

The paper contributes not only to the distinctly social functions of a sound object hitherto ignored in linguistics but also to research on interac- tional exchanges in early childhood and their potential connection to the sociality of nonhuman primates.

Robot sound spans a wide continuum, from subtle motor hums, through music, bleeps and bloops, to human-inspired vocalizations, and can be an important means of communication for robotic agents. This first workshop on sound in HRI aims to bring together inter- disciplinary perspectives on sound, including design, conversation analysis, (computational) linguistics, music, engineering and psychology. The goal of the workshop is to stimulate interdisciplinary exchange and to form a more coherent overview of perspectives on how sound can facilitate human-robot interaction. During the half-day workshop, we will explore (1) the diverse application opportunities of sound in human-robot interaction, (2) strategies for designing sonic human-robot interactions, and (3) methodologies for the evaluation of robot sound. Workshop outcomes will be documented on a dedicated website and are planned to be collected in a special issue.

People speak not only under relaxed conditions but also during strenuous activities, and grammatical resources can be used to achieve displays of strain. This study looks at the relationship between progressivity of talk and bodily strain, focusing on the practice of temporarily suspending syntax while the speaker is accomplishing a physically challenging task. Based on examples from two different physical activities, rock climbing and opera rehearsals, the paper argues that the practice of suspending syntax is a resource available across contexts to render prominence to the strained body and highlight ongoing movement or other bodily action. By placing the strain-based display of incapacity to talk at a moment when the emerging syntactic structure is incomplete, participants maintain rights to resume talk while also presenting themselves as possessing the physical capacity to do so. Suspending syntax is shown to be a minutely timed speakers technique that takes advantage of the emergent nature of syntax and that demonstrates how speakers organize language in relation to the sensing and moving body.

The present paper takes an interactional approach to the problem of communicating pain. We ask how a shared understanding of this subjective and internal experience is accom- plished. The focus is on the multimodal features of pain displays and the way they emerge and progress at the micro level of turn construction and sequence organisation within health care interactions. The setting of the study is family doctor-patient primary care consultations. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we show the emergent, temporal unfolding nature of pain displays. Initially there is an embodied reflex-like action where an immediately prior cause can be attributed retrospectively. An interjection or non-lexical vocalization may follow. An expression of stance on the pain is routinely made as talk is resumed. The other party’s understanding can be shown early in the pain display shaping its unfolding with empathetic vocalizations and/or comforting touch which results in a jointly produced change in the trajectory of action. The implications of the findings for theoretical understandings of sound objects, language and communication, and for clinical practice, are discussed.

Language is believed to be a central device for communicating meaning and knowledge between humans. It is superb in its capacity to code abstract ideas and displaced information, which can be conveyed from person to person, sometimes across centuries. When it comes to instructing a bodily skill in co-present situations, language is used along with other multimodal resources. This paper focuses on the role of vocalizations in dance teaching, syllables that express simultaneous body movement rather than abstract lexical content. While being essentially a vocal resource, the meaning of vocalizations arises in the simultaneously moving bodies. By carrying indexical and only partially conventionalized meaning, vocalizations constitute a puzzle for linguistic theory that preferably targets the arbitrary, symbolic and conventionalized aspects of human vocal production. The meanings conveyed from one body to another through a vocalization are experiential rather than intellectual. Vocalizations provide a solution to the problem of transferring body knowledge from one autonomous organism to another, and can even be embedded in syntax. The analysis is based on an occasion of teaching a jazz routine to a larger group of students.

This study targets conventional mutual touch in dance hold positions and shows how dancers orient to extended out-of-dance holds as being awkward and illegitimate. It focuses on transitions from teacher instruction to practice in classes of Lindy Hop that recurrently pose practical problems for the students: when to take a hold of the prospective dance partner and how to let go, in case the projection of an upcoming practice is suspended through further teacher talk. The paper documents practices of diverting and releasing touch and shows that they involve various types of self-grooming, as well as steps and shifts in balance away from the prospective partner. A dance hold release is a distinct social achievement that is accomplished jointly as soon as possible after the prospect of a dance is delayed.

This paper explores how humans interpret displays of emotion pro- duced by a social robot in real world situated interaction. Taking a multimodal conversation analytic approach, we analyze video data of families interacting with a Cozmo robot in their homes. Focusing on one happy and one sad robot animation, we study, on a turn-by-turn basis, how participants respond to audible and visible robot behavior designed to display emotion. We show how emotion animations are consequential for interactional progres- sivity: While displays of happiness typically move the interaction forward, displays of sadness regularly lead to a reconsideration of previous actions by humans. Furthermore, in making sense of the robot animations people may move beyond the designer’s re- ported intentions, actually broadening the opportunities for their subsequent engagement. We discuss how sadness functions as an interactional "rewind button" and how the inherent vagueness of emotion displays can be deployed in design.

Studying interaction as embodied means that, in addition to verbal information, we take into account the contribution of the participants’ bodies. On the one hand, speaking itself is embodied, as language is produced in the vocal tract and with a variety of functional prosodies. On the other hand, we also use gesture, posture, gaze and movement to make sense to each other, often with the support of the materialities in the environment. Embodied interaction analysis centrally targets the question how human beings use their available bodily and material resources to bring about social action that is treated as meaningful by other participants (Streeck, Goodwin and LeBaron 2011). It dissects both the verbal and embodied methods of action formation at various occasions, and thus does not inevitably treat language as the most important vehicle of meaning. This approach accounts for a wider range of human activity, by covering the embodied aspects of everyday conversation, but also by elucidating the role of language in highly embodied activities.

This paper looks at the Estonian coordinating conjunction ja ‘and’ in video- recorded Pilates classes, focusing on the instructors’ practical problem of making the students perform proper movement sequences. It shows how grammatical coordination emerges within a multimodal activity in which the instructor’s talk both directs and responds to student performance. As opposed to the frequent juxtaposition of clauses without connectors, explicit coordination with ja isused for the overall structuring of the class as well as the temporal extensionof talk to achieve synchronicity of vocal and embodied behavior. In contrast to formal theories that consider grammar as a device for coherent expression of pre-planned propositions, this study argues that grammatical structure emerges as part of practical action across participants and modalities.

Kommunikation brukar förknippas med språk i någon form. För att kommunicera med svensktalande personer behöver man behärska ord på svenska och veta hur man kombinerar dessa på ett begripligt sätt. Men språket i sig räcker inte för att vi ska förstå varandra i varje konkret situation. Om jag säger "Ta bort den där" så måste du koppla ihop uttrycket "den där" med en gest och koppla gesten till ett objekt i rummet, för att förstå vad jag menar och hur du kan reagera på mitt önskemål. Multimodal interaktionsanalys utgår ifrån att talarna förenar grammatiska resurser - ord, morfologi och syntax - med relevanta aspekter av kontexten, och därmed kan visa hur förståelsen uppnås mellan dig och mig i stunden. I detta kapitel fokuseras grammatikens roll i denna komplexa verklighet.

Some language patterns appear fixed at a certain time, enabling their description as grammatical structures. Semi-fixed patterns that routinely accomplish specific social actions constitute more of an analytical challenge. This chapter targets the phrase ma saan aru ‘I understand’ in Estonian together with the ensuing other-attentive formulation ‘2nd person expression + a cognitive concept’ and argues that it is a semi-fixed expression, a “claim to the intersubjective”, that manages a misalignment between participants. While claiming to have successfully accessed the other’s motives or feelings, the speaker regularly advances her own agenda through the formulation of the other. This suggests a systematic relationship between cognitive lexicon, grammatical structure, and interactional function, and calls for a language theory that incorporates semi-fixedness.

This chapter targets grammar in the interactive process between a Pilates teacher and the exercising students, an activity context in which instruction and compli- ance can be designed to merge in time. It shows how linguistic structure, such as counts, formula, and phrases, emerges step-by-step sensitively to the others’ cur- rently moving bodies. At the same time, the situation-designed structures direct the students through the partially known moves. In contrast to formal theories that consider grammar as a device for coherent expression of propositions, this study argues that grammatical structure emerges through recurrent use in a spe- cific activity context. The video-recorded data is in Estonian.

Multimodal interaktionsanalys syftar till att förstå människors agerande genom att studera naturligt förekommande aktiviteter där deltagarna gör något tillsammans. Multimodal betyder att man i sin kommunikation använder sig av flera modaliteter, såsom språket, ansiktet, händerna och övriga kroppen; interaktion syftar på samspel, det som händer när människor deltar i en gemensam aktivitet och med analys avses här att göra beskrivningar av hur, i detalj, deltagare i aktiviteter åstadkommer det de gör. I detta första kapitel redogör vi för fältets grunder.

In co-present interaction, our bodies are continuously available for sense- making. Linguists, however, have generally analyzed grammatical patterns, such as noun phrases, separately from the rest of human behavior. This chapter looks at a collection of cases in Swedish, English, and Estonian, where the speaker initiates a noun phrase but completes it with an embodied demonstration. Other participants treat this multimodal structure as complete and comprehensible. Building on earlier research on syntactic-bodily units (Keevallik 2013, 2017) this study calls into question the analytic boundary between language and the body and argues that grammatical projection cross-cuts modalities even within the assumedly robust noun phrase.

Vi är dagligen beroende av olika teknologier som är programmerade för att interagera med människor. Robotar är förkroppsligade artificiella agenter som hjälper oss att hitta vägen på flygplatsen, undervisar barn i att räkna och tar hand om våra äldre. Det är självklart viktigt att sådan uppdrag sköts med finkänslighet och att någon slags "förståelse" uppnås mellan människa och maskin.

What do people do with sniffs, lip-smacks, grunts, moans, sighs, whistles, and clicks, where these are not part of their language’s phonetic inventory? They use them, we shall show, as irreplaceable elements in performing all kinds of actions—from managing the structural flow of interaction to indexing states of mind and much more besides. In this introductory essay we outline the phonetic and embodied interactional underpinnings of language and argue that greater attention should be paid to its nonlexical elements. Data are in English and Estonian.

This article analyzes the tacit norms of embodied turn-taking in a specific dance activity, Lindy Hop jam circles. Building on an extensive tradition of scrutinizing turn-taking in conversation, it shows how dancing couples negotiate the right to a next turn by visual means. Using multimodal interaction analysis, the article dissects the behavior of the exiting couple, the next dancing couple, and the spectators. The analysis shows that music is but one factor in turn-taking, and that maximally three publicly visible steps are necessary for a successful entrance: displaying “couplehood,” displaying imminent entrance, and occupying the exclusive central space. In a case of competition the dancers’ speed and determination are decisive.

This paper looks at responsive actions built with different word orders, targeting the element kyl(lä) in Finnish and küll in Estonian, two close relatives. Depending on the action sequence and syntax, kyl(lä)/küll expresses intensity or speaker certainty, thus epistemically “reinforcing” the proposition. Historically the same lexical item, even though a noun, meaning roughly ‘abundance, plentiness’ (German ‘Menge’, ‘Reichtum’), kyl(lä)/küll currently occurs in conventionalized patterns which reveal the interface of word order and social action. In both languages, the intensifying kyl(lä)/küll initiates reactive assessments. In Finnish, it is also used as an epistemic adverb that marks speaker certainty, building affirming answers in both unit-initial and unit final positions. In Estonian, the epistemic küll initially formats consoling responses, while in unit-final positions, it is a regular part of a formulaic (dis)affirmation and functions almost like a clitic.  The paper argues that word order regarding what have traditionally been seen as syntactically peripheral elements, such as adverbs and particles, can be constitutive of units implementing social actions. It suggests that the sequential analysis of action is a perfect method for revealing subtle semantic and pragmatic differences between the uses of historically close items in related languages.

This chapter discusses preferred responses that are delayed by the initial particle no in Estonian. It demonstrates that the turn-initial time-space may be employed for a display of “making up one’s mind”, either weighing matters outside the conversation or something already discussed in the talk. The paper argues that besides the dichotomous choice between the preferred and the dispreferred answer format, there are individual contingencies to consider in committing to future actions as made relevant in requests, proposals and suggestions. The particle no prefaces preferred second actions that are associated with high contingency for the concerned parties, or are framed as such. Examples of high contingency include receiving a guest, attending a potentially unpleasant meeting, and faking a signature. The no-prefacing pattern is valid across response types, from partial to full repeats and independently formatted responses which reflect other social dimensions of talk-in-interaction, such as independent agency, commitment, and degree of assent/confirmation. By marking a transition from prior resistance to current compliance with a no-preface, the speaker makes salient that she is currently considering whether to proceed to a complying or non-complying answer, as well as indexes a more global transition between these two standpoints. The resulting turn gives an appearance of a carefully considered and therefore socially cohesive response.

This study investigates comments on the physical surroundings while a group of people are shoveling dung in a sheep stable. In this setting, where the auditory space is mostly open for talk, some comments launch a conversational sequence, while others are treated as self-talk. The article discusses how the speakers body posture, speech volume, and gaze, as well as the nature of the referent, contribute to attracting a response. Comments treated as self-talk are typically uttered with low volume, while the speaker is bending forwards with his or her gaze toward the ground. Comments that launch a sequence and achieve a focused interaction are instead spoken out loud, with the speakers body oriented toward the other participants, and deploy the recipients current attention focus. Furthermore, the timing of the comment just before an upcoming activity junction from shoveling to a brief rest increases the chances of a conversational sequence being developed. The data are in Estonian with an English translation.

Based on talk-oriented activities, there seems to be a consensus that turn-taking is organized to minimize gaps between turns. This study looks at a conversational sequence that evolved in a multi-party setting during a joint cleaning of a sheep stable, and analyzes how nextness is accomplished in a nonproblematic manner after extensive silences. It argues that due to the non-cognitive but physically straining nature of the activity in a confined space, chatting is almost constant but response relevance is reduced. It discusses the moral orders of talk and work in this multiactivity setting, where urgency is not an issue, and suggests that data collection for sequence analysis be more attentive to the systematic differences between talk-oriented and other settings.

This article navigates the findings of conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, and related multimodal studies to summarize what we know about the grammar-body interface. It shows how grammar is fitted to sequences and trajectories of embodied activities, as well as deployed interchangeably with bodily displays, resulting in truly multimodal patterns that emerge in real time. These findings problematize both the paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures documented in verbal-only linguistics. They call for a reconceptualization of grammar as an assembly of routinized methods for the organization of vocal conduct, capable of incorporating aspects of participants bodily behavior. Data are in Estonian, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Swedish.

The paper studies the semantic-pragmatic and syntactic development of the negation verb/word ei + the adverb kaas ’together, also’ into an epistemic marker and particle ega. Ega has been described as a coordinating conjunction, a marker of negation and a question word in Estonian grammars and we will show how these diverse usages come together on a timeline from the earliest written sources to present-day conversation. Ega has first been grammaticalized into a conjunction and then into an emphatic epistemic marker indicating speaker certainty as well as opposition with prior discourse. It is now being reanalyzed as a question word in cases where the negative proposition concerns matters that belong to the interlocutor’s area of competence. The study shows that inter- actional sequencing of actions may provide a crucial clue for the process of (inter)subjectification. It also proposes a novel cline of grammaticalization for a question word, and thus illustrates the benefits of combining the methods of conversation analysis and historical linguistics. 

This study looks at offer sequences in Estonian with an analytical focus on answers in the imperative form. “Telling someone to do something” has traditionally been considered an initiating action, typically an order. In this study, however, Estonian speakers are shown to produce “orders” in second position, i.e., in response to an initiating action. These imperative responses are grammatically fitted to first actions in at least two ways. First, they reuse the verbs in the first actions, thus constituting one type of verb repeat response that is common in Estonian conversation. Second, they are grammatically restricted to positions after turns formatted in 1^st person, termed my-side offers in this study. With the adjacency pair my-side offer – imperative response participants are shown to navigate the landscape of interpersonal deontics. It is a crucial feature of my-side offers that the speaker defines the future from her own perspective, formulating what she herself will do, albeit with clear consequences for, and obligations by, the recipient. The originator of the offer thus claims deontic rights over the future course of activities that concern both parties, and displays a strong expectation of acceptance by the other. Imperative responses, however, challenge these rights. Instead of merely accepting the offer, they redefine the current speaker as the deontic authority. The analysis is based on phone calls between mothers and young adult daughters – a relationship where entitlement to services, as well as respective deontic rights, can be an issue. It is overwhelmingly mothers who produce offers in these calls, and daughters who answer them in the imperative form. The paper argues that the daughters thereby reclaim agency and rights to independently decide upon their future in the ongoing process of becoming a responsible adult. 

This article targets action formation in multimodal sequences. It shows how nonpolar interrogatives in Estonian are used for noticing breaches in others’ embodied conduct, focusing on kes (“who”)-interrogatives. In contrast to information questions with kes, a “noticing of a breach” does not seek an informative answer, which would be an identification of the grammatical actor of the action depicted in the interrogative. The actor is instead the addressee of the turn, often called by name, and thus clear to everyone present. These “rhetorical” kes-interrogatives formulate a just-observed conduct as problematic, and attribute responsibility for it. Since they call for either a remedy of the (embodied) conduct or a contesting of the blame as the next action, noticing breaches marginally qualify as directive actions. At the same time, they do not explicitly provide any guidelines for the future. The study argues that to determine function in language, it is necessary to study grammatical structures in their temporally emerging and embodied activity contexts. The data are Estonian with English translation.

This paper studies the claim ma ei tea, lit. I not know, often pronounced as maitea in Estonian conversation. In contrast to earlier findings on I dont know as an epistemic hedge and non-answer (based on, among others, English data) the current study shows that maitea accomplishes a specific non-epistemic function in Estonian conversation, as a means of recovering from dead ends in real time. It is deployed for abandoning units-in-progress and discarding stalled topical sequences, and then contingently launching new ones. The paper demonstrates how the meaning of maitea emerges differently in sequential contexts where displays of knowledge have been made relevant, as opposed to when they have not, and thus contributes to the theoretical understanding of meaning as a situated achievement, in particular when it comes to ephemeral cognitive concepts such as "knowing". (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.