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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 453

Part of Session 115: Discursive Construction of Emotion in Multilingual Interaction (Other abstracts in this session)

On-line and retrospective orientations to someone else's display of emotion in dinner table conversations

Authors: Fasel Lauzon, Virginie; Pochon-Berger, Evelyne
Submitted by: Pochon-Berger, Evelyne (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland)

This paper aims at describing how orientations to a co-participant's display of emotion are accomplished during dinner table conversations involving au pair girls and members of their host families. It will provide detailed insights about how participants interpret each other's actions as displaying emotions and how they deal with these displays. It will also show how these orientations can be related to how participants interpret and construct their mutual identities and roles within the family.

Our data consist of 40 hours of audio-recorded and finely transcribed social interactions involving au pair girls (German / Swiss German L1, French L2) and members of their host families, i.e. parents and/or children (French L1). The au-pair girls, who could decide when to do the recordings, regularly chose to record dinner table conversations involving the children and/or the parents, during which the participants routinely tell each other anecdotes about their daily lives as well as past experiences. Such tellings may involve 'live' displays of emotions and/or reports of past displays of emotions.

Anchored within the conversation analytic framework (EM/CA), our analyses will show that on-line and retrospective displays of emotions, like any other verbal actions, are oriented to and interpreted by the participants as sequentially relevant and as consequential. What a display of emotion 'means' and why it is displayed are questions that can be answered without intramental hypotheses, in an emic perspective, through a close observation of how the participants themselves treat such displays. This chapter will specifically focus on the au-pair girls orientations to their co-participants' displays of emotion by looking at two contexts:

'on-line' orientations to 'live' displays of emotions – usually taking place right after the co-participant's display of emotion;

retrospective orientations to displays of emotions reported within the au-pairs story-tellings – the au-pairs reacting or presenting how they reacted, in the past, to somebody else's display of emotion.

Our analyses will provide detailed descriptions of the resources used by the au-pair girls to accomplish on-line and retrospective orientations to someone else's display of emotion. They will show that such orientations index the speaker’s affiliation or disaffiliation with the emotion that is displayed: orientations may entails displaying sharing the same emotion, displaying empathy, or displaying feeling a non-corresponding emotion / no emotion. The on-line and retrospective orientations may come with direct or indirect assessments of the legitimacy of the displayed emotion (treated as legitimate or illegitimate within its context of production). Finally, the paper will discuss how the au-pair girls' on-line or retrospective orientations to someone else's display of emotion may be understood as resources for participating in conversations with their host families and for constructing their identity as concerned co-participants but also as concerned caregivers.