" I FEEL LIKE A BAG LADY " : PERSONAL INTERSTICES, SELF-DISCLOSURES AND EMPATHETIC AFFILIATION DURING WORKPLACE MEETINGS (original) (raw)
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Multilingua-journal of Cross-cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 2006
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This paper is concerned with the indexical meaning of the pronoun ‘I’, in its marked use, in Italian work-meeting conversation. The hypothesis driving the study is that, in a context in which situated identities are manifold, marking the pronoun is a device to highlight the most official of one's selves, thus changing the status of the utterance containing the marker. A typology of I-marked utterances is presented and the relative frequency of use is shown to vary with the organizational role of the participants. Detailed analysis of epistemic and performative I-marked utterances shows how role-identities are variously manipulated and mitigated through conversational devices such as self-repair, word delay, and metaphorical work. The discussion highlights how indexical meaning is a property of situated conversational practices and how marked pronouns can foreground selected identities in the cluster of selves that members of a work group can present to each other.
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Conversation analysts often examine everyday interaction for the micro-features that comprise talk. Often, these micro-features are labeled and transcend any one instance. Some genres of talk have been examined to see if patterned speech occurs within that genre. For instance, a typical business event, such as a meeting or strategic planning process, may indicate particular ways of speaking. In Drew and Heritage’s (1992) edited volume, Talk at Work, each chapter employs CA to detail features of talk in a variety of institutional settings. Schwartzman’s (1989) work on the business meeting illustrates clearly the boundaries of what counts as a meeting, and how the participants and their various roles work to create this demarcation. Finally, in The Business of Talk, Boden (1994) uses CA to closely examine the turns that members take that influence the outcome of meetings. I have followed the road that these scholars have paved in order to understand how individual utterances contribut...
Multilingua, 2023
Since the nineties, the idea that narratives are essential for an efficient communication has massively spread in management, marketing and politics, supported by the profuse publication of storytelling guides and criticized by a number of social commentators. Nevertheless, little is known about how reflexive activities specific to professional communication partake in the visibility and solidification of this specific way of conceiving the use of stories. Drawing on semiotic-inspired works in linguistic anthropology, studies on talk-in-interaction and narrative analysis, this article analyzes how reflexive activities contribute to the construction of specific conceptions of what narratives are and what they do in professional communication. To achieve this, the article relies on a single case study that details the kind of ready-made stories and contextualization devices a storytelling guide provides for its readers. The analysis shows that the storytelling guide builds up a cultural model that is both archiving past narrative situations (a model-of action) and potentially generating new narrative situations (a model-for action). By doing so, the storytelling guide not only singles out specific communicative resources but also fuels a metapragmatic model in which accomplished storytellers are at the top of the social structure.