Members Forum Newsletter #5 Apr 2021

April 28, 2021 Leave a comment

The year has been off to quite an inauspicious start. While vaccine rollouts show promise for life possibly returning back to normal at some point this year in some parts of the world, the state of the pandemic still means that most of our teaching and research will remain at least partly remote for a while yet. What this means for conferences, such as the International Pragmatics Conference, which is supposed to take place in Switzerland in June/July, remains to be seen. Will we move to a hybrid system or will we stick to a virtual conference?

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The emergence of CORE-ILCA as an interactionally organized social phenomenon

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By Virginia Calabria, PhD candidate at KU Leuven and University of Neuchâtel & Sophia Fiedler, PhD candidate at University of Neuchâtel and Hamburg

This paper analyzes CORE-ILCA (virtual community of early career researchers – ECRs – in Interactional Linguistics, Ethnomethodology & Conversation Analysis – ILEMCA) as a social phenomenon. On an international level, ECRs often do not have many opportunities to interact except for large conferences. These are often expensive and not easily attainable for everyone, let alone on a regular basis. In times of Covid-19, networking has become even harder and many ECRs lack intellectual exchange and social contact with their peers.

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Some preliminary observations on epistemic asymmetry in a Mexican fruit and vegetable shop

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By Dr Ariel Vázquez Carranza, lecturer at University of Guadalajara

Epistemic asymmetry may be considered as a defining characteristic of institutional talk (Drew 1991; Drew and Heritage 1992): it is common to find institutional contexts where one of the participants has (professional) expertise in the business at hand; and such organisation of knowledge between the participants (i.e., one knowing more, K+, than the other, K-) outlines the sequential and linguistic design of the interaction (Heritage and Raymond 2005; Heritage 2013; Drew 2018). For instance, this has been described for medical encounters (e.g., Strong 1979; Silverman 1987; Maynard 1991; Heath 1992, inter alia), courtroom interactions (e.g., Drew 1992; Komter 1995; inter alia), guided tours (Mondada 2013), service encounters (Lee 2016), etc. In the present analysis I look at instances of epistemic asymmetry in a 25-hour corpus of commercial interactions in a Mexican fruit and vegetable shop. I focus on how the epistemic congruence is maintained.

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