Presentation

This fall MAINLY school will provide advanced training on the analysis of interaction. It will not only be a high-level training opportunity for researchers and PhD students in this domain, it should also further the consolidation of a strong and visible European research network on interaction via networking among the school’s participants.

Research on interaction has expanded greatly over the last two decades, with the development of interactional linguistics, and is being renewed by the ever more systematic attention paid to the multimodal dimensions of linguistic and interactional practices. During this period, syntax occupied a key place in the research, notably through the interest for turn construction (Ochs, Schegloff and Thompson 1996, Auer, Couper-Kuhlen, Müller 1999, Selting and Couper-Kuhlen 2002). This has led to refined analyses taking into account very fine-grained phenomena in their temporal and sequential environment. In parallel, these developments have favored a rethinking of the pragmatic and actional aspects of interaction which were at the origin of this research field.

The MAINLY school focuses on social actions as embodied, situated and multimodal phenomena (i.e. not only achieved through linguistic devices).

The action formation will be approached from two standpoints: firstly, via the participants’ mutual understanding, alignment and affiliation, and secondly, via the multimodal realization of actions. The school will examine these aspects based on multidimensional (prosodic, syntactic, lexical, pragmatic), sequential (taking into account temporality, projection and retro-action) and multimodal analyses (talk, gaze, gestures, objects, spaces).

Organizers

The LIS team of the laboratory ICAR (led by V. Traverso) has played an important role an important role in the development of French research in social interaction, in France as well as inside and outside Europe, over the last twenty years. It has developed recognized skills on both the analytical side (cf. Langue Française 175, 2012/2013) and the fieldwork and corpora collecting methodology. This team has organized a series of summer schools and workshops since 2007 on various aspects of interaction analysis[1].

The school also results of an ongoing collaboration with researchers of several European universities: University of Loughbourough, Paul Drew and Alexa Hepburn; Universities of Bologna and Perugia, Renata Galatolo, Piera Margutti and Rosa Pugliese; University of Leuven, Elwys De Stefani; University of Paris 3, Luca Greco. It will take place as part of a series of workshops organized in collaboration with this group of researchers (E. De Stefani, P. Drew, R. Galatolo, A. Hepburn, P. Margutti, A.C. Ticca, V. Traverso): March 2013 in Bologna "Advanced course in conversation analysis"; January and May 2014 in Lyon.

Objectives

The school will provide advanced training for PhD students and researchers on:

–  Interaction analysis with a focus on the construction of social actions, i.e. in which the description of talk-in-interaction is tightly articulated with the realization of the actions that participants carry out in social situations;

–  The elaboration of appropriate forms of representations (transcriptions, images, etc.) to render visible the phenomena and the procedures identified;

–  The elaboration of research issues, grounded in the theoretical background of conversation analysis and through data-driven practical realizations;

–  The entire analysis workflow: identification of a research issue out of the data, building of a collection of cases for the study of this issue, multimodal analysis of the collection, design of a slide show which will be presented the last day of the school.