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In everyday interaction, subtle manifestations of sexism often pass unacknowledged and become internalised and thus perceived as “natural” conduct. The introduction of new vocabularies for referring to previously unnamed sexist conduct would presumably enable individuals to start problematising hitherto unchallengeable sexism. In this paper, we investigate whether and how these vocabularies empower people to speak out against sexism. We focus on the use of the term “mansplaining” which, although coined over 10 years ago, remains controversial and contested. Using Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis, this paper excavates the interactional methods individuals use to formulate, in vivo, some prior spate of talk as mansplaining. In doing so, speakers necessarily reformulate a co-participant’s social action to highlight its sexist nature. Accusations of mansplaining are accomplished by invoking gender (and other) categories and their associated rights to knowledge. In reconstructing another’s conduct as mansplaining, speakers display their understanding of what mansplaining is (and could be) for the purpose at hand. Thus, the paper contributes to the well-established body of interactional research on manifestations of sexism by documenting how the normativity of epistemic rights is mobilised as a resource for bringing off accusations of mansplaining.

In this introductory article to the special issue on Resistance in Talk-in-Interaction, we review the vast body of research that has respecified resistance by investigating it as and when it occurs in real-life encounters. Using methodological approaches such as ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology, studies of resistance “in the wild” treat social interaction as a sequentially organized, joint enterprise. As a result, resistance emerges as the alternative to cooperation and therefore, on each occasion, resistant actions are designed to deal with the sequential and moral accountabilities that arise from the specifics of the situation. By documenting the wide array of linguistic, prosodic, sequential, and embodied resources that individuals use to resist the requirements set by interlocutors’ prior turns, this article provides the first comprehensive overview of existing research on resistance as an interactional accomplishment.

When people argue they routinely challenge the opinions, views, and attitudes of one another, they seek to cast the other as the aggressor or party at fault, and otherwise exert social control. This article illustrates how members work to hamper challenges, evade control or avoid being negatively characterized by systematically blocking access to a turn in the third position and stopping their opponent’s agenda. Examining 100 hours of public disputes (public transport, protestor interactions and radio call-ins) in varieties of English, I use membership categorization analysis and conversation analysis to unpack resistance as part of the structural organization of disputes. I identify two methods of resisting an agenda: (1) passively, whereby a responsive turn stalls the progressivity of the interaction, and (2) actively, whereby a responsive turn disaligns to outrightly suspend the progressivity of the interaction. I discuss how resistance sequentially unfolds across sequential positions, and as an interactional phenomenon which solves the trouble of a challenge. Overall, this article contributes to social interaction research on resistance, public disputes and how social order is constituted in and through talk-in-interaction.

Investigating the lexico-grammatical resources of a non-native user of English: The case of can and could in email requests Abstract: Individual users of English as a first or second language are assumed to possess or aspire to a monolithic grammar, an internally consistent set of rules which represents the idealized norms or conventions of native speakers. This position reflects a deficit view of L2 learning and usage, and is at odds with usage-based approaches to language development and research findings on idiolectal variation. This study problematizes the assumption of monolithic ontologies of grammar for TESOL by exploring a fragment of genre-specific lexico-grammatical knowledge (the can you/could you V construction alternation in requests) in a single non-native user of English, post-instruction. A corpus sample of the individual's output was compared with the input he was exposed to and broader norms for the genre. The analysis confirms findings in usage-based linguistics which demonstrate that an individual's lexico-grammatical knowledge constitutes an inventory of constructions shaped in large part by distributional patterns in the input. But it also provides evidence for idiosyncratic preferences resulting from exemplar-based inertia in production, suggesting that input is not the sole factor. Results are discussed in the context of a "plurilithic" ontology of grammar and the challenges this represents for pedagogy and teacher development.