Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur en lärare organiserar ett samtal om ordsammansättning i en förskoleklass där lejonparten av eleverna har svenska som andraspråk. Närmare bestämt undersöks hur hon åstadkommer konkretiseringav ord och ordsammansättningssystem, elevgenereringav ord samt orditerationgenom sin organisering av kunskaper och kunskapspositioner. Materialet utgörs av en sekvens ur en videoinspelad lektion om sammansatta ord. Interaktionen i sekvensen analyseras med CA-metoden. Resultaten visar att läraren åstadkommer konkretiseringgenom att låta eleverna visuellt och spatialt förnimma ordens referenter, elevgenerering av ord genom att nominera eleverna till lösare av en ordbildningsformel, positionera de som nomineras som kunniga (K+) och vid behov vägleda dem mot självreparation samt orditerationgenom initiativ till elevreparation och genom itereringar av elevernas svar. Vidare åskådliggör läraren det svenska språkets flexibilitet vid ordsammansättningar genom ett lånande av kroppsdelar som bildligt sett skiljs från resten av individens kropp för att häfta vid olika föremål, så att sammansättningar med nya betydelser uppstår. Av elevernas gensvar att döma, entusiasmerar upplägget dem. Mot denna bakgrund utgör studien ett bidrag till ådagaläggandet av sinnrika undervisningsmetoder i svenska som andraspråk. 

This case study aims to give an understanding of what actions health professionals' castings of patients into the category ‘old’ perform on a medical and social level as well as what actions patients' interactional management of these castings perform. Particularly, this study aims to bring to the fore the negotiability of health professionals' perspectivating age ascriptions. This is done with the conversation analytic method (CA) according to which altercasting is a mutual construction performed turn by turn and shaped by the reactions of the interlocutor who can approve, resist, or modify the identity in question. The data are drawn from two Swedish television documentaries on health encounters. Three major findings are presented. Firstly, the castings of the patients into the category ‘old’ are in several cases embedded in metaphors that either position the patient's body in the role of a victim of old age or in the role of a machine to routinely check. Secondly, the castings with a fateful approach to old age are ambivalent; whereas they serve as resources for the health professionals' normalizing of medical projects and perspectives, they can constitute sources of problems for the patients' doctorability and/or agency. Thirdly, the health professionals' perspectivating age ascriptions are negotiable; their design facilitates resistance to them, and the patients accept, modify, interrupt or reverse them.

This study examines the social framework of screen-focused silence in institutional calls. Calls to insurance companies, social care centres and other institutions which keep computerised documentation are likely to entail moments when the call-taker has to focus on the screen at the expense of interacting with the caller. This study examines how the transitions are organised between human–human–screen interaction and human–screen interaction. The analysis shows that both call-taker and caller indicate clear agreement on the period when the call-taker will be temporarily out of contact, and that the latter delivers contextualisation cues at the beginning and end of the period of this screen-focused silence which contribute to a new set of expectations.

That society divides its members into females and males is the point of departure for much research on gender and language and yet the situated accomplishment of the primordial sex categorisation of the newborn child has not attracted much scholarly attention. The present study fills this research gap by exploring the interactional organisation of sex assignment in a corpus of 67 video recordings of Swedish hospital births. We present quantitative and qualitative support for the idea that sex assignment is a prioritised activity during the first minutes after childbirth. Contrary to descriptions and assumptions in previous research, we find that sex assignment typically is sequentially accomplished in the social interaction between parents and medical staff. Our analysis reveals a normative preference that selects parents (rather than medical staff) as the ones who should discover and declare sex. We also provide tentative evidence that sex assignment may be a gendered practice that prioritises the father (rather than the mother) as the individual entitled to assign sex.

This CA study unpacks some of the tacit knowledge that underpins the emotional work of the midwife. The analysis departs from four televised video-recordings of interaction during secondstage labor where the woman in labor expresses discouragement or despair. The aim is to show how expressions of emotions in a painful physical situation may be responded to in multiparty interaction. The expressions of discouragement, and eventually despair, are responded to in both affiliating and solution-oriented ways. This variation of approaches is facilitated by the presence of several participants. Through physical closeness, the partner may perform a supporting intimacy role. Thus the midwife can concentrate on being solution-oriented. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the partner helps her in her solution-oriented interaction with the woman in labor. In accordance with an earlier study, this study also suggests that the midwife’s breaking of the interaction pattern and giving of new instructions have positive effects on women in despair during second-stage labor.

The general aim of this article is to provide research about rites a new methodological perspective and to reintroduce rite as an analytical concept to linguistics, by showing how conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA) can reveal the rituality of an act from a member’s point of view. CA and MCA give insight into the dependence on the orientations of the participants and their cooperation in constructing an act as a rite. In this sense, the article fulfills the appeal of the sociologist Andrew Roth for a new consideration of the situated and dynamic circumstances of rites.

The specific aim is to investigate how the ritual dimension of the man’s cutting of the umbilical cord is manifested in the interplay between the participants in the delivery room. In Swedish delivery wards fathers are routinely asked whether they would like to cut the umbilical cord of their newborn child. In previous anthropological research, which has been based on interviews and questionnaires, the character of the cut as a paternity rite has been discussed. Yet, there has been no study about what actually happens in the delivery room; there has been no proof that the participants in real time orient to the act as something more than a mere cut. The present study draws on a corpus of 16 videorecordings from the delivery room that captures the interaction surrounding the cut in real time.

The linguistic microanalysis shows that the participants, by different means, elevate the man’s cutting of the cord as a valued act that is imbued with symbolism. It is shown that the cutting of the cord is a category-bound activity, reserved for the man and connected to the speaking forth of the category daddy.

This thesis explores the social construction of birth by analyzing the interaction between the participants present in the delivery room. The data is drawn from 79 video recordings of birth. Six are unedited research recordings and the remaining 73 were edited for pedagogical, documentary and entertaining purposes. The theoretical and analytical perspective is Conversation Analysis. With this microanalytic method, a detailed insight is given to the interaction in the delivery room which should be of linguistic, anthropologic and midwifery interest.

The thesis demonstrates how different situations are shaped during labor and the first 15 minutes after birth. It reveals how the identities child, girl, boy, mother, father, woman and man are constructed and negotiated in the unfolding interaction between the participants. In this sense, the thesis uncovers the construction of family roles in the delivery room during a delicate interaction between the private persons and the institutional representatives. The latter are charged with the complex task of safeguarding the physical wellbeing of mother and child while also promoting the development of parental identities. The thesis highlights the existence of a social birth work; the institutional interactants make use of a range of linguistic resources to demarcate the progression from second stage labor to birth and to position the newborn as an endeared social creature. Birth is an important liminal situation and is therefore forcefully spoken forth, and, as the thesis shows, enhanced with more or less ritual utterances and actions. Birth is also a matter of bodies, the body in labor, the supporting body of the partner and the appearance of the body of the newborn. The thesis gives insight into how these bodies are managed and stylized in interaction. Further the thesis makes visible the midwife’s use of interactional resources to instill strength into the body of the woman in labor. The results are discussed in light of the socio-cultural circumstances for hospital birth in Sweden.