Margret Selting to visit UW CA Community

Dr. Margret Selting (Potsdam University) will share her current research on interactional linguistics, Research from a project of the Cluster of Excellence ‚Languages of Emotion’ (FU Berlin)

Friday, May 8th
4:00-5:30 PM
Sewell Social Sciences 8146

*Sponsored by Sociology, English and the Applied Linguistics Student Association: Abstract: Emotive involvement in conversational storytelling I will report on some of my recent work on emotive involvement in conversational storytelling. After a few words on the project in general, I will present some case studies of storytelling with affect displays in telephone and face-to-face conversations. I will analyse in detail the display and handling of affectivity by both storyteller and story recipient. In particular, I will look at the following kinds of resources: - the verbal and segmental display: rhetorical, lexico-semantic, syntactic, phonetic-phonological resources; - the prosodic and suprasegmental vocal display: resources from the realms of prosody and voice quality; - non-verbal or "multimodal" resources from the realms of body posture and its changes, head movements, gaze, and hand movements and gestures. It will be shown that the display of affectivity is organized in orderly ways in sequences of storytelling in conversation. I will try to reconstruct (a) how segmental, prosodic and non-verbal cues are deployed in co-occurrence in order to make affectivity in general and specific affects in particular interpretable for the recipient and (b) how in turn the recipient responds and takes up the displayed affect. As a result, affectivity is shown to be managed by teller and recipient in storytelling sequences in conversation, involving both the reporting of affects from the story world as well as the negotiation of in-situ affects in the here-and-now of the storytelling situation.

In addition to her presentation, Dr. Selting will be meeting with students and colleagues for a brown bag conversation on May 8th from 12-1, in White 7101.

Dr. Selting is a leading scholar in interactional linguistics. She has made significant contributions to the study of prosody and interaction, sociolinguistic style variation, and the study of linguistic units for interaction, working primarily with forms of contemporary spoken German. Many of us have drawn on Margret's innovative and careful research on turn construction, as represented in "On the interplay of syntax and prosody in the constitution of turn-constructional units and turns in conversation". Pragmatics 6,3 / (1996). and "The construction of units in conversational talk." Language in Society (2000). Dr. Selting has edited and contributed to numerous foundational collections that have recently bridged linguisitics and conversation analysis. Among these are Prosody in Conversation: Interactional Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1996), Studies in Interactional Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins (2001), and Syntax and Lexis in Conversation.Amsterdam: Benjamins (2005).