Personal training is a new form of institutional interaction that has not been extensively studied as regards language. Still, alongside embodied interaction, language is central in this activity. In this paper, phrasal utterances are studied as a resource for instructing in personal training. The data consist of 7 h 23 min of video recordings of training sessions with Swedish-speaking participants from Finland and Sweden, which are supplemented with field notes. The theoretical-methodological framework includes interactional linguistics, ethnography of communication, and variational pragmatics. Results show that participants use all semiotic information at hand when they produce and understand phrasal instructions during personal training. This process involves the overall activity, the participants' institutional roles as trainer and client, their body positions and movements, and trajectories of earlier interaction and embodied elements of the instructions themselves. Phrasal instructions are short; thus, they are focused and easily integrated into the ongoing physical activity. Certain differences are observed between the data from Finland and from Sweden, e.g., Finnish data have more phrasal instructions, whereas the Swedish data have more third-turn follow-ups, which may indicate cultural differences in this domain. The article concludes that phrasal utterances are not only useful as instructions in personal training but also well-suited for the activity type.

This study examines other-repetitions in Finland Swedish talk-in-interaction: their sequential trajectories, prosodic design, and lexicogrammatical features. The key objective is to explore how prosody can contribute to the action conveyed by a repetition turn, that is, whether it deals with a problem of hearing or understanding, a problem of expectation, or just registers receipt of information. The analysis shows that large and upgraded prosodic features (higher onset, wider pitch span than the previous turn) co-occur with repair- and expectation-oriented repetitions, whereas small, downgraded prosody (lower onset, narrower pitch span than the previous turn) is characteristic of registering. However, the distinguishing strength of prosody is mostly gradient (rather than discrete), and because of this, other concomitant cues, most notably the speakers’ epistemic positions in relation to the repeated item, are also of importance for ascribing a certain pragmatic function to a repetition. (Repetition, other-repetition, action ascription, prosody in conversation, repair, epistemics, conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, Finland Swedish)*

No abstract

Kuronen, M., P. Lintunen & T. Nieminen (toim.) . Näkökulmia toisen kielen puheeseenInsights into second language speech. AFinLA-e. Soveltavan kieli eteen tutkimuksia / n:o . -.

This study examines noun phrases in a specific sequential context: otherrepetitions in Swedish conversation, including everyday as well as institutional interaction. Repeating the previous speaker's words can have various interactional functions, e.g., initiating repair, indicating surprise or challenge, or registering information. Our distributional results show that the NP is the typical item in repetition turns. The original structures targeted by repetitions vary from a single NP to clausal units housing NPs. The analysis shows that the identification of the interactional function of other-repetitions builds on their sequential position, prosodic design, and contextual information. Other-repetitions serve the general function of promoting intersubjectivity and participation in conversation, and the NP is demonstrably a central vehicle for this.