The article presents an analysis of actual, recorded social interactions between close familiars with the goal to describe discursive practices involved in showing engagement with the other party, or other-attentiveness. Focusing on the deployment of the discourse markers ‘‘so’’ and ‘‘oh’’ in utterances that launch new conversational topics, the article demonstrates that ‘‘so’’ overwhelmingly prefaces other-attentive topics, whereas ‘‘oh’’ prefaces self-attentive topics. We consider the interactional implications of this distribution and how the basic meanings of these linguistic objects are employed in the service of communicating interpersonal involvement.

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Little Words That Matter: Discourse Markers “So” and “Oh” and the Doing of Other-Attentiveness in Social Interaction

This chapter describes the maturation of comparative political communications as a subdiscipline and defines its conceptual core. It then lays out the concept of “political communication system”. At the macro-level, this model captures the patterns of interaction between media and politics as social systems; at the micro-level it captures the interactions between media and political actors as individuals or organizations. Comparative research in this tradition focuses on the structure of political communication systems, its culture, the construction and dissemination of messages, and the effects of those messages. A wealth of empirical studies is systematized according to the dimensions of this heuristic and evaluated in terms of their contribution to a better overall understanding of comparative political communication. Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-76143 Published Version Originally published at: Pfetsch, Barbara; Esser, Frank (2012). Comparing Political Communication. In: Esser, Frank; Hanitzsch, Thomas. Handbook of Comparative Communication Research. London: Routledge, 25-47. INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION (ICA) HANDBOOK SERIES Robert T. Craig, Series Editor Selected titles include: Cheney/May/Munshi-The Handbook of Communication Ethics Wahl-Jorgensen/Hanitzsch-The Handbook of Journalism Studies Stromback!Kaid-The Handbook of Election News Coverage Around the World Esser/Hanitzsch-The Handbook of Comparative Communication Research HANDBOOK OF COMPARATIVE COMMUNICATION RESEARCH Edited by Frank Esser Thomas Hanitzsch

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Handbook of comparative communication research

Abstract In this paper I argue for a different standard to assess the quality of communicative conduct in local governance meetings. Rather than seeing public talk occasions as needing politeness or civility, a better norm, I suggest, is “reasonable hostility”. Emotionally marked criticism of the past and future actions of public persons (i. e., reasonable hostility), I show, is necessary for the able functioning of democratic bodies. Following a critique of politeness theories, including a claim for why Goffman's concept of face is more suitable for exploring situated communicative practices, background on U.S. school governance practices and the particular U.S. school board meetings that are the focus of this paper are provided. Then, I illustrate and analyze recurrent, ordinary kinds of face-attack that occurred in the community's public meetings and provide evidence that meeting participants judged the remarks to be face-attacking. In the paper's concluding section, I describe the situation and face-attack features that distinguish reasonable hostility from unreasonable forms.

“Reasonable Hostility”: Situation-appropriate face-attack

This chapter spotlights communication accommodation theory (CAT: see Giles, Coupland & Coupland, 1991) -- a longstanding framework (Gallois, Ogay & Giles, 2005: Giles, 1973) that has been heralded as one of the most prominent in the social psychology of language (Tracy & Haspel, 2004) and one that has captured cross-disciplinary imaginations (Coupland & Jaworski, 1997). The theory has had a hsitory of application to an array of organizational contexts (e.g. Bourhis, 1991) and, herein, we add another exciting possibility, namely its relevance for a more incisive appreciation of understanding police-civilian relations. After a brief discussion about what images people hold of police officers, we introduce CAT with particular attention to its face and identity concerns, whilst we distil the theoretical essence of CAT down to four key principles, underscoring its potential for developing not only an innovative reserach agenda for the future, but also for suggesting new theoretical propositions to test in this applied domain.

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Accommodating a New Frontier: The Context of Law Enforcement

Rhetorical scholarship has relied upon textual criticism as a method of examining discourse. However, in the critical turn, rhetorical theory and praxis have been reconsidered, especially in regard to the types and locations worthy of rhetorical examination. Looking toward vernacular rhetorical discourses, rhetorical scholars examine locally situated discourses as they articulate against oppressive macrocontexts. In this essay, I offer critical-rhetorical ethnography as a method for exploring such discourses in the field of argumentation, using the concepts of invention, kairos, and phronesis. The method offers rhetorical scholars a set of theoretical and methodological guidelines for observing and participating within vernacular advocacy. Finally, I use my time with the health advocacy group, DanceSafe, as an exemplar of the method, illustrating its ability to gauge rhetorical effects, advocacy, and learned wisdom.

Critical-Rhetorical Ethnography: Rethinking the Place and Process of Rhetoric

Les As. proposent une revue des etudes sur le role de l'interaction sociale dans la construction du sens du langage. Ils retracent l'historique de ce champ d'etudes et decrivent les traits caracteristiques des principales directions de recherche qui s'y sont developpees

Language and Social Interaction: Its Institutional Identity, Intellectual Landscape, and Discipline‐Shifting Agenda

This book examines political rhetoric at the grassroots level. Starting from a position that "Democracy depends on details, or else remains a formal abstraction," editors Karen Tracy, James P. McDaniel, and Bruce Gronbeck argue that a true understanding of the democratic body politic becomes most intelligible through a close study of its parts. An academic preference for grandiose, abstract political theory, the editors contend, undervalues and masks the patterns of social interaction, strategic discourse, and vernacular rhetorical resources - a public language, in short - to be found at the grassroots level and at the core of "ordinary democracy." Each essay focuses on the same local controversy. In 2001, in a predominantly white Colorado community, a third-grade girl submitted an experiment to the school science fair. She asked 30 adults and 30 fifth-graders which of two Barbie dolls was prettier. One doll was black, the other white, and each wore a different colored dress. All of the adults picked the Barbie in the purple dress, while nearly all of the fifth graders picked the white Barbie. When the student's experiment was banned by school administrators from the science fair for violating the district's nondiscrimination policy, an uproar resulted that spread from a local cable channel to a metropolitan newspaper, the Associated Press, and the national media. A series of school board meetings and other public exchanges highlighted the potent intersection of local and national social concerns: education, censorship, science, racism, and tensions between foundation values such as liberty, democracy, and free speech. For the authors of these essays, who focus principally on speech (verbal exchanges as symbolic action), the events surrounding "Barbiegate" illustrate how individual acts and communal interpretations of customs, policies, and ideologies are connected and are fundamental to our understanding of civic judgment in a democratic state. In addition to the introduction and essays, appendixes supply transcripts of fourteen key speeches by citizens and school board members involved in the debates, as well as a URL where speeches may be viewed.

Kathleen Haspel

Papers

Language and Social Interaction: Its Institutional Identity, Intellectual Landscape, and Discipline‐Shifting Agenda

The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy