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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 843

Part of Session 197: Urban multilingualism in a context of international mobility (Other abstracts in this session)

"Maybe we can try with a Swiss?" - Multilingual solutions to lexical problems in international professional interactions

Authors: Oloff, Florence
Submitted by: Oloff, Florence (University of Basel, Switzerland)

This paper aims at investigating how participants in international professional settings use multilingual and multimodal resources in order to resolve lexical problems. By analyzing the details of the interactional practices mobilized in this kind of repair sequences, it will be shown that participants orient to the relevance of various ethnic/cultural and linguistic categories. Thus, lexical problems are a highly interesting phenomenon in order to study identity issues within international settings.

Using the framework of Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974, Schegloff 2007), this paper suggests a sequential approach to multilingual practices that arise from lexical problems having been triggered by clarification questions. Repair sequences concerning lexical problems, especially word searches, are not specific to multilingual interactions, but are also frequent in "monolingual" conversations (Goodwin & Goodwin 1986, Goodwin 1987). However, in international settings, participants may mobilize several languages when trying to overcome problems of mutual understanding.

Choosing either the group's lingua franca or an alternative language for solving these problems has different implications for the participants' identities. Indeed, while word searches can be solved individually ('private search', Goodwin 1987), speakers may also turn to a specific co-participant (or a group of co-participants) in order to find a solution, thus establishing a specific participation framework (Goodwin & Goodwin 2004, Mondada 2007). By gaze, posture, and language choice, this public way of handling a lexical problem makes relevant various language competences within the group. In a more subtle way, those choices display also different ethnic categories participants within this type of international setting orient to (Sacks 1972, Egbert 2004, Markaki et al. 2010). Problems of understanding in multilingual settings are therefore moments where participants can explicitly display their orientation to linguistic and ethnic specificities within the group. Those locally emerging identity displays and attributions (Antaki & Widdicombe 1998) show how participants exploit cultural and linguistic diversity as a tool in order to achieve mutual understanding.

The analyses are based on video recordings of several international work meetings of a pharmaceutical multinational corporation. During workshops and presentations, participants from several European countries are using mainly English as a Lingua franca, but also other languages such as French, German, Italian, etc. The 40 hours of data have been collected within the framework of the European project DYLAN (www.dylan-project.org).