S. Gonzalez, K. Skogmyr Marian, L. Volpin, F. Gfeller, L ...

Institut des sciences du langage et de la

communication

T R A V A U X N E U C H Â T E L O I S D E L I N G U I S T I Q U E

2018 | No 68

S. Gonzalez, K. Skogmyr Marian, L. Volpin, F. Gfeller, L. Bietti & A. Bangerter (éds.)

Conference proceedings of the young researchers conference of the center for research on social interactions (CRIS-YR)

TRANEL (Travaux neuchâtelois de linguistique)

La revue TRANEL fonctionne sur le principe de la révision par les pairs. Les propositions de

numéros thématiques qui sont soumises au coordinateur sont d'abord évaluées de manière

globale par le comité scientifique. Si un projet est accepté, chaque contribution est transmise

pour relecture à deux spécialistes indépendants, qui peuvent demander des amendements.

La revue se réserve le droit de refuser la publication d'un article qui, même après révision,

serait jugé de qualité scientifique insuffisante par les experts.

Responsables de la revue Claudia Ricci email: [email protected]

Mélanie Sandoz email: [email protected]

Klara Skogmyr Marian email: [email protected]

Comité scientifique de la revue Marie-José Béguelin, Simona Pekarek Doehler, Louis de Saussure, Geneviève de Weck,

Marion Fossard, Corinne Rossari, Federica Diémoz, Martin Hilpert, Hélène Carles, Juan

Pedro Sánchez Méndez, Katrin Skoruppa et Elena Smirnova (Université de Neuchâtel)

Secrétariat de rédaction Florence Waelchli, Revue Tranel, Institut des sciences du langage et de la communication,

Université de Neuchâtel, Rue Pierre-à-Mazel 7, CH-2000 Neuchâtel

Les anciens numéros sont également en accès libre (archive ouverte / open access) dans la

bibliothèque numérique suisse romande Rero doc. Voir rubrique "Revues":

http://doc.rero.ch/collection/JOURNAL?In=fr

© Institut des sciences du langage et de la communication, Université de Neuchâtel, 2018 Tous droits réservés ISSN 2504-205X

Travaux neuchâtelois de linguistique

N° 68, 2018 • ISSN 2504-205X

Table des matières

Fabienne GFELLER, Sylvia GONZALEZ, Klara SKOGMYR MARIAN & Letizia VOLPIN

Avant-propos ........................................................................................ 1-6

Sara GRECO

Designing dialogue: argumentation as conflict management in social interaction ........................................................ 7-15

Rebecca G. SCHÄR

On the negotiation of the issue in discussions among young children and their parents ...................................................... 17-25

Klara SKOGMYR MARIAN

"Qu'est-ce que maman dit?": l'accomplissement des directives en français L2 par un jeune homme au pair ...................... 27-38

Cécile PETITJEAN

Le pouvoir des rires: des interactions en face à face aux conversations par texto ...................................................................... 39-50

Elizaveta CHERNYSHOVA

Explicitation sequences in conversation: some considerations on formulations, candidate inferences and grounding ................................................................................... 51-58

Christina BRANDENBERGER & Christoph HOTTIGER

Sharing perception when using hands-on exhibits in science centres: the case of vocal depiction ..................................... 59-68

Klaus ZUBERBÜHLER

Intentional communication in primates .............................................. 69-75

Daniel DUKES

Apprentissage social affectif et appréciation de l'émotion: structuration des interactions socio-émotionnelles ..................................................................................... 77-84

IV

Sunny AVRY & Gaëlle MOLINARI

Sharing emotions impacts computer-supported collaborative processes: effect of an emotion awareness tool ..................................................................................................... 85-96

Hazbi AVDIJI & Stéphanie MISSONIER

A design approach to team coordination ......................................... 97-106

Ottilie TILSTON & Gillian SANDSTROM

Is the power of weak ties universal? A cross-cultural comparison of social interaction in Argentina and Canada .......................................................................................... 107-112

Fan HUA

Art versus amusement: what do photos allow people to do? ................................................................................................. 113-119

Michèle GROSSEN

Interaction ou inter-actions? Deux conceptions de la notion d'interaction ......................................................................... 121-128

Alain PERUSSET

Comment peut-on formaliser une pratique? Une approche sémiotique ..................................................................... 129-135

Adresses des auteurs ............................................................................ 137-138

Travaux neuchâtelois de linguistique, 2018, 68, 1-6

Introduction

Fabienne GFELLER1, Sylvia GONZALEZ2, Klara SKOGMYR MARIAN3 & Letizia VOLPIN3

1 Institute of psychology and education, University of Neuchâtel 2 Institute of work and organizational psychology, University of Neuchâtel 3 Institute of language sciences and communication, University of Neuchâtel

On February 16-17, 2017, the first Young Researchers conference of the Centre for Research on Social Interactions (CRSI-YR) was held at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The conference brought together scholars from various academic fields and different levels of research experience with a shared interest for the study of social interaction. The program included invited talks and keynote presentations given by more advanced researchers, as well as oral and poster presentations primarily authored by young researchers. In line with the general ideas of the Centre for Research on Social Interactions1, the CRSI-YR conference aimed at promoting interdisciplinary dialogue. The event thus provided researchers at the beginning of their academic career with a concrete opportunity to discover and discuss innovative research topics and methodologies, to partake in scientific debates from various strands of social interaction research, and to benefit from the experience of more advanced researchers. Since a detailed report of the conference has been presented elsewhere2, we will not provide more details here than specifying that the complete list of the 36 (oral and poster) presentations of the conference can be found in the aforementioned publication.

This TRANEL issue offers a glimpse into the richness of the exchange that took place during the CRSI-YR conference by publishing a subset of the presented papers in the form of short articles. In line with the broad theme of the conference, the articles included in the issue address a diverse set of activities, situations and contexts in which social interactions occur. Sending a message filled with emoticons, going to the museum with a friend, asking for another piece of cake, warning one's group members of a danger, arguing in an attempt to

1 The Centre for Research on Social Interactions (CRSI) was founded in 2014 as a consortium

of researchers from different disciplines working on issues related to interpersonal interaction processes, in order to support research on these issues and to foster interdisciplinary collaboration.

2 Volpin, L., Skogmyr Marian, K., Gfeller, F., Gonzalez, S., & Bangerter, A. (2017): Young researchers conference of the Centre for Research on Social Interactions. Conference Report. In: Studies in Communication Sciences, 17(2), 263-270. Available at: https://doi.org/ 10.24434/j.scoms.2017.02.012.

2 Introduction

solve a conflict - these are only a few examples of situations investigated by the conference presenters that illustrate the pervasive nature of social interaction in our daily lives. In studying these situations, researchers examine a wide range of questions such as: What makes these interactional encounters possible? How are they mediated, and notably what is the impact of new technologies? What are the skills and competences involved in social encounters and how do they develop? What is the role of emotions in all this? The complexity of social interaction makes this phenomenon an intrinsically multidisciplinary object of study. Thus, this TRANEL issue groups contributions from researchers working in such varied fields as linguistics, psychology, sociology, biology, and many more.

Whilst these researchers all share an interest for social interaction, it is important to note that the ways of understanding and studying this phenomenon – the theoretical, methodological and epistemological approaches used – are diverse and differently linked to the various disciplines. In the present issue, we have tried to organize the contributions according to the nature of the processes studied by the authors, in an attempt to highlight the diversity of study objects. Indeed, some of these contributions focus on an understanding of interactional processes observably manifested at the surface level of social interaction. In this first group of studies, we mainly find research from the field of conversation analysis and from the study of argumentation. Another set of papers comes from a more cognitive research tradition, and primarily addresses the cognitive and emotional skills involved in social interaction. One author draws on socio-cultural psychology and focuses on artefacts and the psychological processes they arouse. Finally, on a more conceptual level, two articles provide reflections about the conceptual and epistemological questions involved in research on social interaction. In what follows, we summarize the contributions in the order in which they appear in the issue, reflecting the different foci of study mentioned above.

In a situation of disagreement, conflict escalation is common but not inevitable. Sara Greco's paper seeks to demonstrate how important the argumentative micro-analysis of conflict resolution is to maintain and reinvigorate relationships in the everyday life of individuals. In order to explore how to deal with disagreement in argumentative dialogue, Greco presents people's discursive argumentative practices in social interaction, showing and developing the main features of argumentative dialogue (e.g. decentration, critical attitude of all parties, etc.) as well as the concept of communication design. She finally discusses the impact of dispute mediators on the partaking in argumentative dialogue.

Also situated in the vast field of argumentation studies, Rebecca G. Schär's contribution aims to gain an in-depth understanding of the process of issue negotiation in argumentative discussions between children and their parents. To

F. Gfeller, S. Gonzalez, K. Skogmyr Marian & L. Volpin 3

do so, Schär analyzes the emergence and the negotiation of an issue in a case where the issue is not completely shared between the participants of the argumentative discussion. The data collected for this study are naturally occurring discussions in everyday family interaction and the analysis is conducted based on the pragma-dialectical model of critical discussion. The results, demonstrating the child's ability to negotiate the issue throughout the emergence of different arguments, contribute to a better understanding of negotiation processes in child-adult interaction.

Also focusing on child-adult interaction, Klara Skogmyr Marian's conversation analytic study investigates the ability of a young au pair and second language (L2) speaker of French to give directives to the host family children in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The analysis is based on a corpus of 79 sequences of directives and their responses, and documents changes in the L2 speaker's interactional methods for accomplishing these directives during the four-month stay. Such changes include for example an increased ability to adapt the methods to the local circumstances of the situation. The results are discussed in terms of the speaker's development of L2 interactional competences.

In a similar epistemological and methodological vein as the previous contribution, Cécile Petitjean's article focuses on the role of laughter in text-based and face-to-face institutional interaction. The paper provides an overview of a number of studies done by the author and her colleagues on this topic. Some of these studies take a purely qualitative conversation analytic approach; others combine this framework with quantitative analyses. The studies demonstrate how participants use laughter in a highly coordinated manner to accomplish particular social actions in various types of interaction. Specifically, Petitjean shows how laughter can be used to manage interactional trouble for example in the classroom or in a speech therapy session. Based on the cumulative evidence from the different studies, the author argues that laughter constitutes an integral part of speakers' interactional competences.

Another practice that may also be considered in terms of interactional competences is people's ways of making things explicit in interaction. This is the focus of Elizaveta Chernyshova's conversation analytic study. She examines two types of practices used in these 'explicitation sequences': formulations, and candidate inferences. Drawing on ordinary conversation in French, the author demonstrates a difference in usage between the two types of practices. While both formulations and candidate inferences display an inference based on what was said prior in the conversation, only the latter practice adds new informational content, or 'articulates the unsaid', in the author's words. Chernyshova discusses these observations in terms of information processing and common ground, and comments on the interactional import of these different practices on topic development.

4 Introduction

Even if the previous conversation analytic contributions have all, to some extent, considered other semiotic resources than merely verbal ones, Christina Brandenberger and Christoph Hottiger's research has a more clearly defined interest in multimodality. Their paper focuses on the multimodal practices used by participants in interaction to share sensory perceptions with their co-participants. The authors analyze a short sequence taking place between two visitors at a science center, in which one of the visitors vocally depicts her tactile experiences in manipulating an exhibit. The study relies on both video recordings and eye-tracking data of the interaction. The analysis demonstrates the finely coordinated way in which language, tactile perception, proprioception, and vision, are used by the participant in order to make her experience available to the co-participant. The study thus highlights the important role of different semiotic resources in the way we communicate with each other and the necessity of investigating these issues from a holistic perspective.

The following contributions introduce a shift in perspective, with a focus that is more centered on the socio-cognitive skills underlying interactional phenomena. One of the main current scientific interests concerns questions relating to evolutionary origins of cognitive abilities, such as those relating to language. Starting from well-established results suggesting the presence of basic referential capacity in animal communication, Klaus Zuberbühler presents a set of studies on the communication of great apes. Based on Dennett's intentional stance's theoretical framework used to assess animal behavior in relation to the levels of intentionality present in human communication, the author highlights that monkeys do not use vocal or gestural signals automatically, but rather in an intentional, social and goal-oriented way. But although great apes are able to adapt to a recipient and seem to understand that a signal refers to something specific, Zuberbühler nevertheless concludes that the ability of shared intentionality seems to be exclusively human.

Daniel Dukes' paper introduces a new concept called emotional social learning that takes into account social context in the emotional interpretation of others. According to Dukes, it is this cognitive structure that allows the individual to acquire knowledge about the world (e.g., physical objects, concepts). In the paper, the author identifies the various processes implicated in this structure, and describes its functioning as mainly based on the appraisal of others' feelings. Through various experiments, he shows that emotion recognition is not only based on emotional facial expression. Instead he argues that the appraisal process, which he calls emotion appreciation, incorporates both emotional and contextual information. Based on these findings, Dukes encourages researchers in affective sciences to take into account contextual information (e.g., body language and gestures) in their studies.

Based on the consensus that emotions play a central role in successful collaboration, Sunny Avry and Gaëlle Molinari have tested Emotion

F. Gfeller, S. Gonzalez, K. Skogmyr Marian & L. Volpin 5

Awareness Tools (EATs) as a technological solution to access emotional cues in remote computer-supported collaboration. The authors used an inter-group design (EATs group vs. control group) to assess the effect of the EATs on the verbal interactions of dyads performing a collaborative computer-mediated task and by taking into account the gender variable. Analyzing collaborative units from verbal interaction, the authors show that EATs had a positive effect on the management of relational aspects (on the mutual modelling of emotions) and on the cognitive dimensions of collaboration. Their results also show different trends between women and men in the way they used relational and problem-solving processes.

Hazbi Avdiji and Stéphanie Missonier present the use of a different tool, the Team Alignment Map (TAM), to understand how teammates coordinate in uncertain and changing situations such as innovation projects. The authors have developed this collective tool on the basis of a theory assimilating language as a joint activity and a concept of joint inquiry. The TAM, which is in the form of a poster containing columns related to the theoretical postulates, was evaluated in an ecological situation using an approach to design science research and semi-directed interviews with teammates. Through a thematic analysis, the authors highlight the effectiveness of the device and show for example that it allows team members to better coordinate and adapt to changing situations.

Ottilie Tilston and Gillian Sandstrom's contribution also articulates emotions and intragroup relations, but with an interest in larger groups than the previous paper. Starting from the results of a previous study in a Canadian context showing that strong and weak ties have an impact on our subjective wellbeing and sense of belonging to a community, the authors examine the link between the cultural context and the type of ties in an attempt to better understand the universality of the "weak tie effect". Relying on self-report data, they analyze the number and nature of social encounters experienced by 40 Latin American participants, considered as living in a collectivist non-Western culture. Preliminary results suggest that the Latin American sample had more weak tie interactions than the Canadian sample of the previous study, but a similar number of interactions per day. The authors discuss these results in terms of the relationship between the sense of community of Latinos and their weak tie interactions.

Fan Hua's paper certainly occupies a particular place in this special issue, as this author focuses more on objects (photographs) than directly on interactions between human beings. Drawing on Vygotsky's work on art, she proposes a socio-cultural psychological approach of the making and use of photography. Analyzing the work of a photographer as well as considering digital photos taken by smartphones and portable cameras, she examines the psychological processes involved in art experiences in contrast to those in amusement. This discussion contributes to the understanding of social interaction by highlighting

6 Introduction

the presence of artefacts, such as art works, in social dynamics. These objects are used by people as mediums allowing them to act both on themselves and on others, as, according to Vygotsky, art is a mean to participate in the shaping of society and to orient its evolution.

Now, it is sometimes necessary to take a step back and examine the concepts and categories we use in order to conduct research with a solid epistemological and conceptual background. The two following papers both contribute to this kind of reflexive work. Through the careful examination of different understandings of what interaction actually is, Michèle Grossen contributes to a conceptual clarification of the notion of "interaction". She proposes a distinction between interactions apprehended as a sequence of several actions acting one upon each other and interactions understood as one single action created by several actors. She then highlights the implications of these definitions on the theoretical and methodological levels, which she illustrates with the example of a study conducted in schools. Doing this, she draws our attention to the epistemological level of research and underlines the concrete consequences epistemological choices have in the research process.

While the previous contribution is a reflection by a social psychologist on the uses of the notion of interaction in psychology and other social sciences, Alain Perusset draws on semiotics to propose a functional conceptualization of practices. The formalization he presents is based on the distinction between the different actants (operator, operatio, operans and operandum) which are part of any practice. Perusset then discusses different types of existential attitudes, before highlighting the presence of what he calls a transcendental authority, which characterizes the commitment in the practice. The categories of this formalization, he argues, provide a useful analytical tool for social scientists who work on interactional practices.

Finally, before leaving you to read the articles in this issue, we would like to thank the CRSI and the University of Neuchâtel for making the CRSI-YR conference possible, the TRANEL committee for supporting the creation of this issue, the colleagues who participated in the review process, all participants at the conference, and in particular the contributors to this issue, who filled the frame that we set out for them with engaging content.


Designing dialogue: Argumentation as conflict management in social interaction1

Sara GRECO USI – Università della Svizzera italiana

The escalation of disagreement into overt conflict in social interaction can be avoided, if disagreement is managed through argumentative dialogue. This paper explores the characteristics of argumentative dialogue and presents the role of third parties who design spaces for others' dialogue. After discussing the prototypical example of dispute mediators, this contribution considers other informal third parties who have a similar role. This opens up a new perspective on informal third parties who work as designers of dialogue and build spaces to manage disagreement in social interaction.

1. Introduction

There is a widespread feeling in our society that we have arrived at an era of political and social turmoil, in which political engagement seems more influenced by polemical fighting than by collaboration and reasonable dialogue. Recent confused political campaigns followed by confusing votes (such as the Brexit and the 2016 US election, to name but two) exacerbate that feeling and raise an urgent question: in the face of different ideas and positions, is it still possible to discuss and debate in a reasonable way? Is there any possibility of approaching differences through dialogue, considering opposing positions, and carefully weighing arguments on both sides? Or are we bound to entrench polarised positions, every time we voice a disagreement?

Similarly, at a micro-level, one might feel disheartened when disagreement occurs in interpersonal social interactions. Any time two persons disagree, as will happen in any relationship, inevitably the question arises: will that relationship founder as a consequence of the disagreement?

It is evident that any disagreement has the potential to escalate into overt or even violent conflict. Metaphors such as the conflict ladder (Glasl 2004) have been employed to describe the phenomenon of a simple misunderstanding or difference of opinion deteriorating into hostile interpersonal conflict (Greco Morasso 2011); in some cases, this can even turn into intractable conflict (Bar-Tal 2013).

1 I have adopted the metaphor of design-architecture as applied to communication and dialogue

from Aakhus (2007), Jackson (2015a, 2015b), Perret-Clermont (2015).

8 Designers of dialogue

This paper argues that the escalation of disagreement into conflict is neither necessary nor inevitable. If we want to maintain and reinvigorate social relationships, it is crucial to understand how to deal with disagreement through dialogue. Creating a space for argumentative dialogue helps solve disagreement in a reasonable fashion, promotes quality communication in social interaction and restores broken relationships. In this sense, argumentation offers a means of reasonably managing disagreement in social interaction.

2. Argumentative dialogue

In this paper, argumentation is seen as a social and dialogic process of discussion. From this perspective, an ideal argumentative discussion is aimed at the resolution of a difference of opinion between individuals (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1984). Resolving a difference, in this model, means making a well-founded decision based on the merits of the case, having taken into account the viewpoints and arguments of all parties in an ideally reasonable dialogue2. In this, argumentation can be seen as an alternative to the escalation of conflict and a means of managing disagreement in social interaction.

Not every type of dialogue produces this effect; it is unique to an argumentative dialogue. The main features of argumentative dialogue are set out briefly below.

Firstly, each party must accept that his or her position on a given subject is not the only possible one; and that there might be alternative positions. This capacity to accept that people have different perspectives is called decentration (cf. the discussion in Muller Mirza et al. 2009). Accepting that there might be different viewpoints on a subject does not imply acceptance of relativism. Argumentative dialogue is best understood within the framework of a moderate socio-constructivism; this position acknowledges that reality is always complex and, therefore, facts are always interpreted and, to some extent, co-constructed through social interaction. Particularly in the case of conflict, it might be that different parties see different aspects of a complex problem, as they experience their own individual, differing stories of the conflict and, more often than not,

2 This represents the description of an ideal argumentative discussion. Argumentation is seen

as a constellation of speech acts functional to the resolution of a difference of opinion (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004). This does not mean that argumentative dialogue always results in a complete resolution of the difference; nor do parties always behave in a reasonable way. Normative models of argumentation, such as the one proposed by van Eemeren and Grootendorst (2004), offer a blueprint of how argumentation should unfold if parties want to solve their disagreement on its merits. Real-life discussions can be compared to this ideal standard, in order to understand how much they have been based on argumentation, and how much they were conducive to the resolution of a difference of opinion. I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

Sara Greco 9

simply ignore certain aspects of the other's story. This explains why different viewpoints emerge.

Secondly, the difference of opinion is not seen as a problem in argumentation; on the contrary, differences of opinion are not the endpoint but the starting point of dialogue. Some authors speak of collaborative argumentation to indicate a "reasoned collective handling of disagreement" (Schwarz & Baker 2017: 134, footnote 1): in this view, argumentative dialogue is a means of reaching a common reasoned resolution of disagreement. Ideally, in argumentative dialogue, the difference is a positive; and the other person, who brings a different (contradictory) perspective, is a resource. Indeed, differences potentially allow the parties involved to take a step forward in cognitive and relational terms (see the studies on the phenomenon of socio-cognitive conflict; in particular, Carugati & Perret-Clermont 2015).

Thirdly, argumentative dialogue entails that all parties adopt a critical attitude. This means that parties try to find a reasonable solution to their disagreement. The adjective reasonable, in this context, assumes a meaning broader than merely rational: in complex decision-making processes, such as those typical of social interaction, there are many aspects to be pondered with a nuanced attitude. Reasonableness in argumentation includes taking into account the parties as human beings – people, with emotions and feelings – in the bigger picture of a decision. But being reasonable in argumentation also means being critical and evaluating all positions, considering all relevant aspects. Agreement in argumentative dialogue is achieved through the resolution of a difference of opinion on the merits of the case (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1984) rather than through manipulation, deception or violence. Consequently, participants will subject their opinions to critical scrutiny and put forward arguments to support their positions rather than merely enunciating those positions; and they will be ready to change their opinion, if persuaded to do so.

Approaching disagreement through argumentation, i.e. in a critical way, is the only way to really resolve it. When a resolution is reached through other means – for example, if a boss (or a teacher!) imposes a decision without explaining it, or if someone surreptitiously coerces someone else into conceding a point by means of threats – disagreement will remain. Even if the parties settle the specific problem, if the disagreement has not been tackled through reasonable dialogue, it will persist. In fact, whoever has been forced into doing something, or has been deceived, will not be persuaded to accept the other's position3. In the long run, a relationship in which disagreement is papered over or hidden but never quite resolved will inevitably deteriorate. Parties will hold on to a tacit disappointment; this is a heavy burden for social relationships and one that

3 In this sense, compliance with a proposal is not a measure of its reasonableness.


erodes trust. By contrast, research on conflict resolution has proven that solutions achieved in mediation, because they take the parties' interests into account, are more durable (see for example Mitchell 2003; Kelman 2009: 75).

It is worth noting that the critical attitude promoted through argumentative dialogue is not an abstract, cognitive and "cold" solution, as opposed to a nuanced appreciation of human relationships. On the contrary, when the resolution of a difference of opinion happens through argumentative dialogue, the human relationship between the parties will improve (Bush & Folger 1994): parties, in fact, will have learnt how to deal with differences and how to solve problems through reasonable discussion (Greco Morasso 2011). Kressel (2006: 730) describes the ameliorative impact of mediation (on relationships), which has been proven in different fields. For example, he refers to studies in environmental mediation, in which respondents report "improvements in their capacity to discuss controversial issues, to work more productively with the others, and to resolve differences more easily" (Dukes 2004, q.td in Kressel 2006: 730). Comparable findings are reported in labour disputes and divorce mediation (see the discussion in Kressel 2006: 730)4.

Ultimately, argumentative dialogue allows for relationships to become more solid. This is reflected in some dialogue-based approaches to conflict resolution being described as transformative approaches (see Folger & Bush 1994). These approaches acknowledge that learning how to solve disagreement through dialogue means not only solving one specific problem, but improving the way of approaching problems in general; and, thus, improving the human relationships that have been affected by those problems. As a consequence, parties feel more confident and able to disagree in a constructive way without fear of losing their relationships with their opponents (be they spouses, friends, colleagues, or others).

3. Designing spaces for argumentative dialogues

In many situations and contexts, argumentative dialogues of the type described in section 2 arise naturally as part of conversations (see for example Schär & Greco 2016). Nonetheless, there are cases where parties are not able to engage in an argumentative discussion for a variety of reasons. For example, their common starting points might be too limited; or their disagreement might be too strong or too escalated for them to handle by themselves. In these cases, a well-designed intervention by a third party who designs a space for argumentative

4 These positive results for relationships have been proven despite the fact that it is not easy to

find indicators to measure mediation outcomes, as these might involve different aspects in the short and long term (see the discussion in Herrman, Hollett & Gale 2006: 46-47).

Sara Greco 11

dialogue can help. The concept of communication design in argumentation has recently attracted scholarly attention (Aakhus 2007; Jackson 2015a, b). In the words of Jackson (2015: 227), "a design perspective suggests that societies try out ideas about how to reach conclusions and agreements embodying them in techniques and technical systems". Jackson (2015a) notes that every argumentative setting or practice is partially the result of design hypotheses. When these no longer fit the ecology of a context, "it is also possible to engage in theoretically motivated redesign of argumentation" (Jackson 2015b: 244). The design perspective, we might say, has the merit of showing that it is not a given that argumentative dialogue will develop in a healthy way: more often than not, spaces for dialogue are (at least partially) designed. Therefore, it is possible to reflect on how functional they are and how they can be improved.

Similarly, studies in socio-cultural psychology have made the case for the necessity of designing safe spaces for social interaction and dialogue. In order to clarify this concept, Perret-Clermont (2015) introduces the metaphor of the "architecture of social relationships": third parties build spaces to improve socio-cognitive dialogical exchanges in social interaction. Grossen & Perret-Clermont (1992: 288) speak of these third parties in terms of being the "guardians" of safe spaces for thinking and social interaction.

3.1 Mediators as architects of argumentative dialogue

An exemplary case of dialogue design is the work that dispute mediators do in dealing with conflicts without imposing a solution on them. Mediators create a space for argumentative discussion. Discursive and argumentative approaches to dispute mediation have the "value of looking closely at actual talk" (Glenn & Susskind 2010: 118) and enable us to look at micro-patterns of discourse in interaction (Putnam 2010: 153). These micro-approaches explain how communicative micro-choices made by mediators impact on the construction of a dialogical space for the parties involved.

Research on argumentation in mediation has highlighted various aspects through which a mediator constructs the parties' dialogical space. The first aspect is the management of the issues under discussion (see for example Aakhus 2003). Mediators organise the issues around which the parties' discussion will develop. They rule out discussion that is not conducive to a reasonable solution of the conflict or that will result in an impasse (Aakhus 2003). They lead the parties through an in-depth analysis of their conflict, rejecting unproductive deviations from a resolution-oriented discussion and identifying the issues that lie at the origin of the conflict (Greco Morasso 2011). In a more advanced phase of mediation, they bring the parties to a discussion about the options for conflict resolution, purposefully shifting the discussion from the origin of the conflict to its resolution (Greco Morasso 2011).


Because of their neutral role, mediators cannot advance argumentation on how to solve the parties' conflict directly. Nevertheless, it has been shown that they often advance argumentation at a meta-level: they use argumentation to convince disputants that the conflict is worth resolving; or persuade reluctant parties to orientate their discussion towards one or several particular issues (Greco Morasso 2011). They use questions and formulations to guide the discussion whilst avoiding direct advocacy for one position or another (van Eemeren et al. 1993). More recent research demonstrates how mediators design the parties' discussion by selecting a zone of initial agreement based on appropriate starting points (van Bijnen, in preparation), which set the stage for the parties' argumentation. Other studies explain how reframing, i.e. modifying the parties' original interpretation of the conflict, is used strategically by mediators within the construction of the parties' argumentative discussion for the resolution of their conflict (Greco 2016; Martinez Soria, in preparation).

The case of mediators is a clear instance of how a third neutral party might intervene in the design of argumentative spaces. All the interventions described above show that the mediator is a non-canonical participant in an argumentative discussion (Greco Morasso 2011) or, in other words, a designer of the others' discussion. As a rule, architects and designers prepare spaces for others to inhabit. In this case, it is a dialogical space that is designed for others to find a solution to their conflict through reasonable dialogue.

3.2 Mediators with no label

Unlike dispute mediators, not all designers of dialogue have a specific label. There are cases in which the design of the others' discussion for the management of disagreement goes unnoticed. This task is part and parcel of different professional profiles, as for example in the case of teachers, social workers or other facilitators5. Students or other parties will learn to deal with disagreement in a reasonable fashion to the extent that these "mediators without a label" have been able to create dialogical spaces for them to handle their disagreement. For example, through a decades-long research and training programme in the UK, Neil Mercer and colleagues have shown the importance of dialogical spaces in the classroom and other educational contexts (see Dawes, Mercer & Wegerif 2004; Higham 2016; Hennessy et al. 2016). They have proved that a careful design of the rules and contexts for interaction enable what they call exploratory talk (Littleton and Mercer 2013), which is very close to the concept of argumentative dialogue outlined in this paper. The role of the

5 On this point, see Greco, Mehmeti & Perret-Clermont (2017), who suggest the comparison

between teachers and dispute mediators as regards their role in constructing argumentative discussions for others.

Sara Greco 13

teacher is fundamental, as he or she is "someone who can use dialogue to orchestrate and foster the development of a community of enquiry in the classroom in which individual students can take a shared, active and reflective role in building their own understanding" (Mercer & Littleton 2007: 74). In a different context, Psaltis, Carretero and Čehajić-Clancy (2017) discuss the role of history education in conflict transformation; amongst other aspects, they explore the role of teachers who guide this process. These findings open new perspectives on the role of informal third parties who work as architects of dialogue.

4. Conclusions and openings

This paper has argued that, in social interaction, there is room for a formal or informal dialogue design operated by third parties who create spaces for others' discussion. Whether created through the work of professional mediators or through the intervention of other facilitators, these spaces ideally allow for the management of disagreement through argumentative dialogue, avoiding escalation into interpersonal conflict. Thus, if well managed, disagreement may contain a positive potential for the development of social interaction.

This paper has taken the role of mediators as a prototype of the design work necessary to create the possibility for others to engage in argumentative dialogue. Although this paper, for reasons of space, has not delved into specific analyses, most of the results presented in sections 3.1 and 3.2 are based on empirical, interaction-based research that takes into account micro-sequences of dialogue, often through a discursive analytical lens. This type of approach permits a nuanced view of the different discursive elements that concretely facilitate the creation of dialogical spaces. In this sense, the research that has been conducted on argumentative dialogue in mediation (section 3.1) could serve as a blueprint for other domains of dialogue design. Indeed, some of the discursive strategies identified in the case of mediators could be of use in understanding how to design dialogical spaces in other social contexts and professional domains.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their comments, which have helped improve this manuscript; and to Judy Nagle for language editing.

I would also like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for grant n. 10001C_170004, which supports the project "The inferential dynamics of reframing within dispute mediators' argumentation" (Applicant: S. Greco, PhD researcher: C. Martinez Soria). Some of the recent advances in the research on dispute mediation discussed in this paper have been possible thanks to this support.


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Eemeren, F.H., van, & Grootendorst, R. (1984): Speech acts in argumentative discussions. Dordrecht (Foris).

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Greco, S. (2016): Framing and reframing in dispute mediation: An argumentative perspective. In M. Danesi & S. Greco (eds), Case studies in Discourse Analysis. Munich (Lincom Europe), 353-379.

Greco, S., Mehmeti, T., & Perret-Clermont, A.-N. (2017): Do adult-children dialogical interactions leave space for a full development of argumentation? A case study. Journal of Argumentation in Context, 6(2), 193-219.

Grossen, M., & Perret-Clermont, A.-N. (1992) (eds.): L'espace thérapeutique. Cadres et contextes. Lausanne (Delachaux et Niestlé).

Hennessy, S., Rojas-Drummond, S., Higham, R., Torreblanca, O., Barrera, M.J., Marquez, A.M., García Carrión, R., Maine, F., & Ríos, R.M. (2016): Developing an analytic coding scheme for classroom dialogue across educational contexts. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 9, 16-44.

Herrman, M. S., Hollett, N., & Gale, J. (2006): Mediation from beginning to end: A testable model. In M. S. Herrman (ed.), Handbook of mediation: Bridging theory, research, and practice. Malden/MA (Blackwell Publishing), 19-78.

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Jackson, S. (2015a): Deference, distrust and delegation: Three design hypotheses. In F. H. van Eemeren & B. Garssen (eds.), Reflections on theoretical issues in Argumentation theory. Cham (Springer), 227-243.

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On the negotiation of the issue in discussions among young children and their parents

Rebecca G. SCHÄR Università della Svizzera italiana

When analyzing argumentative discussions between young children and adults, it emerged that in some cases, adults and children do not share the same issue at the beginning of an interaction. The present contribution makes a first step in investigating how issues are negotiated among the discussants so that this diverging understanding can be overcome. To do so, an example from a corpus of everyday discussions in a family is analyzed. For the reconstruction of the argumentation, the pragma-dialectical model of a critical discussion will be used. Furthermore, the analysis of the implicit contextual-material premises on which the discussants base their reasoning will contribute to a better understanding of the interaction.

1. Introduction

In the literature, children's argumentative skills are discussed from different perspectives (e.g. linguistic, psychological, educational). The existence of young children's argumentative skills is acknowledged throughout the literature. However, depending on the basis of comparison (i.e. if compared to an adult or a child) these skills are in some cases described as ‘not fully developed' (Golder 1996: 120; see also Rapanta et al. 2013: 488). Nonetheless, when children's argumentation is studied in informal settings, in which the children are given space to discuss, they prove to be competent and clever discussants (see e.g. Arcidiacono & Bova 2015; Völzing 1982 for children's argumentation in the home). In order to gain an in-depth understanding of young children's contributions to argumentative discussions, the research project "Analysing children's implicit argumentation: reconstruction of procedural and material premises" (ArgImp)1 studies the implicit in children's argumentation.

The present paper was developed within the ArgImp project. It starts from a positive case, in which children actively engage in argumentative discussions. Its focus lies on the concept of issue in argumentative discussions between young children (from 2 to 6 years of age) and adults. The issue is a central concept in argumentation theory. It describes the subject around which argumentative discussions revolve (Schär & Greco 2018). Studying the issue

1 The ArgImp project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (contract n. 100019-

156690/1, 2015-2018), Applicants: Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont, Sara Greco, Antonio Iannaccone, Andrea Rocci.

18 On the negotiation of the issue in discussions among young children and their parents

and its evolution in a discussion furthermore allows gaining insights on how and why a discussion comes into place.

The issue has been studied by several ancient authors, like Aristotle, whereas it has received comparatively little attention in recent times. Plantin (2005) perceives the issue as a question that occurs "par la contradiction discours / contre-discours" (ibid., 57). Argumentation scholar Jean Goodwin (2002) highlights furthermore that the issue is "a more or less determinate object of contention" (ibid., 86). This observation is especially important for the purpose of this paper as it aims to study the negotiation of issues in argumentative discussions among children and their parents. Put differently, this paper analyzes the emergence of the issue and its evolution within an argumentative discussion. It has the objective to understand how discussions can evolve in case the issue is not (entirely) shared among the discussants. This research interest emerged during the exploration of a corpus of argumentative discussions that occurred in a family setting. The corpus features discussions in which the issue may not be, only partially or supposedly shared among an adult and a child. In fact, sometimes the discussants seem to lead ‘two different discussions', or typically the child, ‘modifies' the issue in order to better accommodate the adult's request, his or her own perspective on the discussed facts or to indirectly support the standpoint taken on the main issue. The following analysis aims at shedding light on where the ‘problem' of the incompatible issues lies.

2. Methodology

The argumentative discussion will be reconstructed by means of a slightly modified version of the analytical overview2 (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1992: 93–95) taken from the pragma-dialectic approach to argumentation (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1984, 2004). In Pragma-Dialectics, argumentation is perceived as a social and communicative interaction. With the analytic overview, it provides a heuristic grid for the reconstruction of argumentative sequences within interaction.

Furthermore, the Aristotelian concept of endoxon (Tredennick & Forster 1960: 273–275) will be used for the analysis of the negotiation of the issue. The endoxon is a component of the material-contextual premise of a person's reasoning that is often left implicit in the actual discussion. The term endoxon designates "opinions that are accepted by everyone or by the majority […]" (Rigotti & Greco Morasso 2009: 45). In the present case, an endoxon can be

2 The analytical overview taken from van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1992) was modified in

order to give a greater emphasis on the issue and to clearly display the temporal sequence in which the contributions occurred.

Rebecca G. Schär 19

specific to one family (i.e. be a rule or a specific habit that is shared among all the family members, but not necessary among people that do not belong to the family).

3. Corpus

The case chosen for this paper stems from a corpus of everyday discussions in family, collected in three different linguistic regions of Switzerland at the beginning of 2016. The discussions between the children and adults (in most cases one or both of their parents) have not been induced. The researcher visited the families at their homes, observing and audiotaping their conversations without giving them specific tasks or instructions about what to do during the researcher's visit. The registered discussions, therefore, naturally occurred in everyday family interactions such as playing, eating a meal together or doing household related tasks. Even though it is not possible to rule out that the presence of the researcher had an influence on the children's behavior, bilateral conversation with the parents confirmed that the children's behavior during the researcher's visit did not differ from their usual behavior in family.

4. Analysis

In the following paragraphs the negotiation of the issue in a discussion between Ladina (4:11 years old) and her mother will be analyzed. The discussion takes place in the family's kitchen at around 10:00 o'clock in the morning. The original language is a variety of Swiss German. At the beginning of the transcript, Ladina and her mother both refer to the researcher (R.). Later in the conversation, Ladina also refers to her friends Rahel, Anna and Lisa who will visit her in the afternoon. Ladina's brother Flurin (2:2 years old) intervenes in turn 9, but his mother and sister do not consider his contribution.

Turn Speaker Transcript My translation (0:08:40.5)

1 Ladina mami hüt isch ja d R. da und ((flüstert der mutter etwas ins ohr)) schoggistängeli ((flüstert)

mummy today R is here and ((whispers something in the mother’s ear)) chocolate bar ((whispers))

2 Mother will d R. da isch wetsch du es schoggistängeli↑ mm ((verneint)) weisch wieso↑ will das han ich dir no welle zeige du hesch mich gfrogt was ich gkäuft ha wenn d für wenn d Rahel chunnt

because R is here you would like to have a chocolate bar ↑ mm ((negates)) you know why↑ because i wanted to show you you asked me what i bought for when Rahel will come

3 Ladina aha ah 4 Mother lue iz das da ((nimmt eine

packung mit süssgebäck zum küchenschrank heraus))de düemer scho öppis süesses

look ((takes out a package of pastry out of the cupboard)) we will already eat something sweet as an afternoon snack


zum zvieri ässe lueg das sind madeleines

look these are french madeleines

5 Ladina ((schaut die madeleines an))(3.0)w wieviel döf jede

((looks at the french madeleines)) (3.0) h how many can each one of us have

6 Mother eh wosch mal zelle↑ (1.0) eh do you want to count↑ (1.0) 7 Ladina xxx xxx 8 Mother zell du mal= have a go 9 Flurin will au zelle i want to count too 10 Ladina eis zwei drei vier (3.0)

füf sächs one two three four (3.0) five six

11 Mother mhm weisch ä wie viel mer sind↑ (1.0) hüt namitag↑

mhm do you also know how many we will be↑ (1.0) this afternoon↑

12 Ladina eis zwei drü (2.0) vier füf (3.0)

one two three (2.0) four five (3.0)

13 Mother chumm zell nomal d Anna come on count once again Anna 14 Ladina mhm (1.0) d Rahel ich du

(1.0) dr Flurin (2.0) und (1.0) d Lisa (2.0) aber d Lisa cha ja no nüt süesses ässe

mhm (1.0) Rahel me you (1.0) Flurin (2.0) and (1.0) Lisa (2.0) but Lisa cannot yet eat sweets

15 Mother i weiss es nid d Lisa isch scho gross jetz mir chö mirmnd mir müed froge ich weiss es nid (1.0)

i don’t know Lisa is already grown up now we ca we need to ask i don’t know (1.0)

16 Ladina aber jetz sind ja süsch z chli ich wett ja öppis grosses ässe

but (they) are yeah too small i want to eat something big

17 Mother aber lueg mal jetz wenn alli döfe eins ässe denn längts für jede grad eins (1.0) gäll (4.0)

but see if everyone is allowed to have one there will be just one for each of us (1.0) you see (4.0)

18 Ladina aber wiso chani nid es halbs mitem Flurin (3.0)((spricht vom schoggistängeli))

but why can’t i share half with Flurin (3.0) ((she is talking about the chocolate bar))

19 Mother wötsch kei ganzes oder wie↑ (1.0) ((spricht von den madeleines))

don’t you want an entire one↑ (1.0) ((is talking about the french madeleines))

20 Ladina schoggistängeli xxx chocolate bar xxx 21 Mother ne iz düemer ä kä

schoggistängeli ässe Ladina weisch mir händ zum znacht scho süesses und mir düen am wuchenend süesses ässe mir händ ganz vil wär het am wuchenend geburtstag↑

no now we don’t have chocolate bars Ladina you know we will have sweets for dinner and we will eat sweets on the weekend too we have a lot who has her birthday on the weekend↑

22 Ladina i:ch me: (0:10:24.6)

Figure 1: transcript of the discussion between Ladina (4:11 years) and her mother

Throughout this discussion, it becomes clear that Ladina does not seem to spare any expense to reach her goal: the chocolate bar. In fact, within the main discussion, several sub discussions, some of them argued, can be identified. In the following analytical overview that was slightly adapted from van Eemeren & Grootendorst (1992: 93–95), only the argued issues that are necessary for the analysis of the negotiation of the issue are represented.


Issue: (Can Ladina have a chocolate bar?) Ladina, Standpoint 1 Mother, Standpoint 2 T. 1 1 (yes) T. 2 2 no Arguments in support of Standpoint 1 Arguments in support of Standpoint 2 T. 1 1.1 R. is here T. 4 2.1 we will already eat

something sweet as an afternoon snack

Sub issue°: (Are the madeleines enough?)

Ladina Standpoint°1 T. 16 °1 (no) Arguments in support of Standpoint°1 T. 16 °1.1a the madeleines are too

small

°1.1b I want to eat something big

T. 21 2.2a we will have sweets for

dinner already T. 21 2.2b we will eat sweets at the

weekend T. 21 2.3 we will have a lot of

sweets Figure 2: analytical overview of the discussion between Ladina and her mother

As figure 2 shows, the discussion is initiated by Ladina, who proposes the main issue "Can I have a chocolate bar?" and is also responsible for the introduction of the following sub issue "Are the madeleines enough?". Ladina's request, which becomes the main issue of this discussion, would not be argumentative as such. However, it seems that Ladina is aware from the start that she will need to support her (implicit) standpoint with arguments. She therefore, together with her standpoint, puts forward argument 1.1 "R. is here". Her mother does not agree with Ladina's standpoint and gives a counterargument that she visually supports by showing the French madeleines to Ladina. So, even though the mother would have the possibility to immediately shut down the discussion, thanks to her parental authority, she dedicates herself to this rather lengthy discussion with her daughter. Figure 3 illustrates the ongoing discussions on the different issues, as well as the endoxa the discussants respectively base their reasoning on.


Issue (Ladina): Can I get a

chocolate bar?

Ladina, Standpoint 1 Mother, Standpoint 2 1 (Yes, I can get a chocolate bar)

2 No, (you cannot get a chocolate bar)

Argument supporting Standpoint 1

Arguments supporting Standpoint 2

1.1 R is here 2.1 we will already eat something sweet as an afternoon snack

Sub issue (Ladina): (Are the madeleines enough?)

Ladina, Standpoint on sub issue

Mother, Standpoint on sub issue

°1 (No) °2 (Yes) Arguments supporting standpoint on sub issue

Arguments supporting Standpoint 2

°1.1 the madeleines are too small

2.2a we will have sweets for dinner already

°1.2 I want to eat something big

2.2b we will eat sweets at the weekend

2.3 we will have a lot of sweets

Figure 3: analysis of the negotiation of the issue

Family Endoxon 2: One should not eat too many sweets.

Ladina’s interpretation of Endoxon 1: We are allowed to have exceptional sweets for every visit we get.

Ladina’s interpretation of Endoxon 2: A madeleine is not enough.

Family Endoxon 1: If visitors are coming to our house, the children are allowed to have things they usually aren’t.

Mother’s interpretation of Endoxon 1: The children are allowed to have exceptional sweets, if we have visitors with a daily maximum of 1.

Mother’s interpretation of Endoxon 2: A madeleine is the right amount of sweets


As the upper part of figure 3 shows, underlying this main discussion is an endoxon shared in the family: "If visitors are coming to our house, the children are allowed to have things they usually aren't". In the present situation, however, Ladina and her mother do not interpret this endoxon the same way. Ladina's version is more prone to support her standpoint 1: "Yes, I can have a chocolate bar", whereas the mother's interpretation is tied to her role of a caring mother that watches over her children's eating behavior. On the basis of these dissimilar starting points Ladina and her mother discuss the main issue raised by Ladina "Can I get a chocolate bar?". When Ladina senses that her argumentation will not be successful, she opens up a sub issue in turn 16, questioning whether the French madeleines will be enough and giving two arguments in order to support her implicit standpoint that one French madeleine is not enough. By shifting the discussion to the sufficiency of the French madeleines and supporting her standpoint that the French madeleines are not enough, Ladina indirectly supports her standpoint on the main issue on the chocolate bar. Ladina may sense that her mother will not agree with her standpoint, potentially explaining her interpretation of the second family endoxon explicitly in turn 16. The mother continues the discussion without argumentatively responding to Ladina's sub issue on the French madeleines. However, she puts forward arguments that support her initial standpoint, on the chocolate bar issue (turn 21).

The analysis of this seesaw on the issue shows that an argumentative discussion that at first glance sometimes seems to be incoherent, is in fact very coherent. Because of diverging starting points and personal interpretations of endoxa the discussants need to negotiate the issue. In fact, in a critical discussion, every party tries to persuade the other party of his or her standpoint (see e.g. van Eemeren & Grootendorst 2004). In the present case, this is displayed in each party's interpretation of the family endoxa, which is used to support the respective position. Furthermore, the analysis shows that Ladina's argumentation and her interpretation of the family endoxa are not wrong. Ladina builds her arguments on an interpretation of the family endoxa that differs from her mother's. Moreover, she ‘compensates' for this divergent interpretation with her engagement in the discussion and proves to be a clever discussant.

5. Conclusion and openings for further research

In the present paper, a single case of negotiation of the issue in a discussion between a child and her mother was analyzed. The discussion between Ladina and her mother demonstrates that a young child can lead and actively engage in an argumentative discussion that is complex. The analysis furthermore shows that children are able to negotiate on an issue that is not, or not entirely shared between themselves and an adult. Hence, the presented case illustrates very well Goodwin's (2002) point that an issue is not always entirely determined (ibid., 86). In fact, the negotiation on the issue takes place when opening up sub issues and supporting the respective issues with several arguments. One


reason for the negotiation of an issue to occur are divergent implicit premises of the discussants. In the analyzed case, the issue negotiation emerged due to different starting points and diverging interpretations of endoxa supposedly shared among the discussants. The analysis of the implicit contextual-material premises allows for a better understanding of misaligned premises that lead to diverging starting points (see Greco et al. 2017). Hence, an analysis of the negotiation of the issue also allows a better understanding of the elements that trigger the negotiation process.

More research is needed on the negotiation of issues. For instance, it would be interesting to understand whether a negotiation is always related to implicit premises that are not shared among the discussants or whether there are other phenomena that lie at the basis of an issue negotiation.

Bibliography

Arcidiacono, F. & Bova, A. (2015): Activity-bound and activity-unbound arguments in response to parental eat-directives at mealtimes: Differences and similarities in children of 3-5 and 6-9 years old. Learning. Culture and Social Interaction, 6, 40-55.

Golder, C. (1996): La production de discours argumentatifs : revue de questions. Revue Française de Pédagogie, 116, 119-134.

Goodwin, J. (2002): Designing issues. In F. H. van Eemeren & P. Houtlosser (eds.), Dialectic and rhetoric: The warp and woof of argumentation analysis. Dordrecht (Kluwer Academic Publishers), 81-96.

Greco, S., Perret-Clermont, A.-N., Iannaccone, A., Rocci, A., Convertini, J. & Schär, R. (2017): Analyzing implicit premises within children's argumentative inferences. Presented at the 2nd European Conference on Argumentation, Fribourg.

Plantin, C. (2005): L'argumentation. Paris (Presses Universitaires de France).

Rapanta, C., Garcia-Mila, M. & Gilabert, S. (2013): What is meant by argumentative competence? An integrative review of methods of analysis and assessment in education. Review of Educational Research, 83, 483-520.

Rigotti, E. & Greco Morasso, S. (2009): Argumentation as an object of interest and as a social and cultural resource. In N. Muller Mirza & A.-N. Perret-Clermont (eds.), Argumentation and education. New York, NY (Springer), 1-61.

Schär, R. G. & Greco, S. (2018): The emergence of issues in everyday discussions between adults and children. International Journal of Semiotics and Visual Rhetoric, 2(1), 29-43.

Tredennick, H. & Forster, E. S. (ed.). (1960): Aristotle Posterior Analytics Topica. (Tredennick, H. & Forster, E. S., Trans.), Cambridge MA, London UK (Harvard University Press).

van Eemeren, F. H. & Grootendorst, R. (1992): Argumentation, Communication, and Fallacies, A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective. Hillsdale (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

van Eemeren, F. H. & Grootendorst, R. (2004): A Systematic Theory of Argumentation: The Pragma-Dialectical Account. Cambridge (Cambridge University Press).

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Völzing, P.-L. (1982): Kinder argumentieren. Die Ontogenese argumentativer Fähigkeiten. Paderborn (Schöningh).


Attachments: Transcription signs

sign description

raising intonation

(( )) nonverbal component

(1.0) pause of 1 second

xxx non understandable utterance

= immediately following turn


"Qu'est-ce que maman dit ?": l'accomplissement des directives en français L2 par un jeune homme au pair

Klara SKOGMYR MARIAN Centre de Linguistique Appliquée, Université de Neuchâtel

This conversation analytic study investigates how Vicente, a young au-pair and second language speaker of French, gives directives to the host family children in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The study specifically analyzes a set of directive sequences occurring toward the end of Vicente's four-month stay, in which he invokes through questions and threats the mother's superior authority in pursuing directives after non-aligning responses from the children. In doing so, Vicente displays his increased ability to tailor his interactional conduct to the local situational circumstances and thus his increased L2 interactional competences.

1. Introduction

La présente étude rejoint les travaux en Analyse Conversationnelle (AC) qui examinent comment les locuteurs d'une langue seconde (L2) développent leurs compétences d'interaction, c'est-à-dire leurs procédures interactionnelles systématiques pour accomplir des actions sociales dans la L2 (pt. 2). Nous nous intéressons ici à l'accomplissement d'une action sociale précise, qui a été peu étudiée chez les locuteurs L2: les directives dans la parole-en-interaction1 (pt. 3). Nous étudions comment Vicente, jeune homme au pair et apprenant débutant de français L2, développe sa capacité à donner des directives aux enfants de la famille d'accueil pendant son séjour d'environ quatre mois en Suisse romande. L'analyse se focalise spécifiquement sur une pratique interactionnelle utilisée par Vicente vers la fin de son séjour pour poursuivre l'activité directive dans les cas où les enfants ne s'alignent pas directement à la première directive: l'invocation des règles formulées par la mère d'accueil (pt. 5). Nous retraçons comment Vicente invoque, à travers des questions et des menaces, l'autorité de la mère et parvient ainsi à faire obéir les enfants, et discutons finalement comment ces actions témoignent d'un développement plus général des compétences d'interaction en français L2 (pt. 6).

1 Nous entendons par ce terme le discours oral spontané, non-élicité.

28 L'accomplissement des directives en français L2

2. Le développement des compétences d'interaction

La notion de compétence d'interaction a notamment été développée dans les travaux en AC portant sur des questions liées à l'apprentissage des L2. Le terme désigne l'ensemble des procédures interactionnelles routinisées, ou "méthodes" au sens ethnométhodologique du mot (Garfinkel 1967), que les locuteurs mobilisent pour gérer l'interaction, coordonner leurs conduites mutuelles et ainsi établir l'intercompréhension (Hellermann 2008, 2011; Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger 2015). Ces compétences verbales et non-verbales impliquent par exemple la capacité à prendre des tours de parole de manière et à des moments appropriés dans l'interaction, à initier un récit ou à exprimer un accord ou un désaccord.

Pour des raisons méthodologiques, les études empiriques sur le développement des compétences d'interaction se focalisent typiquement sur une seule action ou activité, comme celles mentionnées ci-dessus. Considérées ensemble, ces études indiquent que le développement des compétences d'interaction implique la diversification progressive des méthodes pour agir, et une capacité croissante à adapter ces méthodes aux aspects circonstanciels de l'interaction (voir p. ex. Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger 2015 et Skogmyr Marian, Petitjean & Pekarek Doehler 2017). Le développement des ressources linguistiques (grammaticales, lexicales, etc.) fait partie du développement des compétences d'interaction, mais l'apprentissage seul de ces ressources ne suffit pas pour développer des méthodes pour agir. C'est seulement en interagissant avec autrui dans la L2 que le locuteur peut développer sa capacité à accomplir des actions sociales dans la L2 et "recalibrer" les méthodes qu'il a développées dans sa langue première (Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger 2015).

3. Les directives dans la parole-en-interaction

Les directives sont des actions par lesquelles le locuteur dit, ou signifie non-verbalement, à l'interlocuteur de faire quelque chose ou de cesser de faire quelque chose (Craven & Potter 2010; Goodwin 2006; Goodwin & Cekaite 2014). Elles constituent la première partie de paires adjacentes de type action-réaction, dont la deuxième partie, la réponse, n'est pas forcément verbale. En produisant une directive, le locuteur s'oriente vers un positionnement lui donnant le droit de faire faire quelque chose à l'interlocuteur, et projette comme réponse de la part de l'interlocuteur l'accomplissement de l'action visée. Une caractéristique typique des directives qui les distingue d'autres premières parties de paires adjacentes est qu'elles sont normalement formatées de manière à ce qu'elles ne montrent pas d'orientation vers la capacité ou l'incapacité, voire le désir ou non, de l'interlocuteur d'accomplir l'action demandée (Craven & Potter 2010).

Klara Skogmyr Marian 29

Les directives peuvent demander que l'interlocuteur accomplisse des actions immédiatement ("NOW-directives", Vine 2009), ou dans le futur. Dans ce dernier cas, la deuxième partie de la paire adjacente consiste en une promesse de la part de l'interlocuteur d'accomplir l'action demandée (Thompson, Fox & Couper-Kuhlen 2015). Ici nous nous intéressons aux directives se référant aux actions immédiates, comme celles données par un parent à un enfant pendant le repas pour l'inciter à manger. Ce type de directives est typiquement produit sans délai, sans modalisation et sans marqueurs de politesse, par exemple sous forme impérative (voir p.ex. Cekaite 2010 et Craven & Potter 2010 pour les interactions en famille, Mondada 2011, 2013 pour les interactions entre des adolescents jouant à des jeux vidéo, et Mondada 2014 pour les interactions chirurgicales).

Dans le cas d'une réponse qui ne s'aligne pas immédiatement à la directive, l'activité directive continue. Pour les "NOW-directives", les répétitions et les recyclages partiels de la première directive sont fréquents, souvent avec une emphase prosodique; avec ces ressources, le locuteur augmente la pression de la directive et diminue la possibilité pour l'interlocuteur de refuser de s'y conformer (Craven & Potter 2010). Dans les interactions adultes-enfants, les adultes peuvent aussi utiliser en dernier recours des moyens corporels pour assurer l'accomplissement de l'action (p.ex. en escortant l'enfant dans la salle de bain pour qu'il se brosse les dents, Cekaite 2015).

Comme discuté ci-dessus, les directives ont été étudiées dans une grande variété de contextes sociaux. Dans les interactions familiales, elles constituent une ressource importante pour la gestion du comportement d'autrui et donc pour le déroulement des activités familiales quotidiennes. Pourtant, il n'existe à notre connaissance aucune étude sur l'accomplissement de directives en L2 (à part les observations préliminaires présentées dans Skogmyr Marian, Petitjean & Pekarek Doehler 2017). Dans la présente étude, nous étudions ainsi comment un jeune homme au pair et locuteur L2 débutant développe sa capacité à donner des directives aux enfants de sa famille d'accueil.

4. Méthodologie et données

Conformément à la plupart des travaux en AC sur le développement des compétences d'interaction, cette étude se base sur un dispositif longitudinal impliquant une collection de cas apparaissant à différents moments dans le temps. Notre collection se compose de 79 séquences de directives avec leurs réponses,2 adressées par Vicente (17 ans) aux enfants de la famille d'accueil

2 Nous définissons une séquence de directives comme une ou plusieurs directives qui renvoient

à la même source de problème accompagnées de la réponse de l'interlocuteur, jusqu'à ce que l'action demandée ait été accomplie ou le projet interactionnel abandonné.


(Mathieu, 7.5 ans et Maëlle, 5 ans) pendant ses quatre mois de séjour3. A son arrivée, Vicente, bilingue portugais et suisse-allemand, était un apprenant débutant du français; son niveau avait été évalué à A1 sur l'échelle CECRL au début du séjour. Les enfants sont bilingues en français et suisse-allemand, le français étant la langue principale de la famille. Les interactions ont été enregistrées par Vicente à intervalles réguliers (en moyenne dix fois par mois) avec un enregistreur audio, lors des repas avec les enfants ou avec la famille entière. Les interactions ont été transcrites selon des conventions de transcription usuelles en AC (voir p.ex. Jefferson 2004), et les séquences des directives ont été analysées séquentiellement.

5. Analyse

L'analyse résume d'abord les pratiques interactionnelles déployées par Vicente pour produire des premières directives et les relancer suite au non-alignement des enfants au début (pendant les deux premiers mois, pt. 5.1) ainsi qu'à la fin (les deux derniers mois, pt. 5.2) de son séjour. Ensuite, nous analysons en détail une pratique particulière que Vicente utilise vers la fin du séjour (pt. 5.3). Enfin, nous présentons un résumé de l'analyse (pt. 5.4).

5.1 Les directives et les relances au début du séjour

Au début du séjour, Vicente accomplit des directives surtout (1) à travers des formes impératives en un mot comme mange ou arrête, parfois combinées avec le nom de l'enfant, l'expression s'il te plaît, et plus rarement avec un complément d'objet, ou (2) avec un simple appel direct des enfants, des non isolés, ou des interjections lexicales ou non-lexicales comme stop, attention, mm-hm et uh-uh. Si les enfants ne s'alignent pas immédiatement à la directive, Vicente répète souvent entièrement ou partiellement la première directive, ou bien il a recours à l'un des autres moyens susmentionnés, parfois en ajoutant une emphase prosodique clairement perceptible à l'oreille. L'extrait 1 sert à montrer un exemple typique d'une séquence au début du séjour de Vicente:

3 Les données ont été recueillies dans le cadre du projet de recherche TRIC-L2, "Tracking the

development of interactional competence in a second language", financé par le Fonds national suisse de la recherche scientifique (no. 100012_126868/1).


Ex.1, 100316_Vic5, 03:38 1 (3.2) ((musique, son des couverts)) 2 MAË: °>£ah hahaha£< tu danses parce que t’es amoureux°. 3 (2.3) ((musique, des bruits)) 4 VIC: mathieu assieds-toi: s'il te plaît. 5 MAË? ohh. 6 (1.2) ((musique)) 7 MAË: £hmm .hh hmm .hhhh [hhuh hhh£] 8 VIC: [mathieu. ] 9 (1.5) ((musique)) 10 MAË: +((tousse)) [((tousse))+] ((bruit de chaise)) 11 VIC: [ mer]ci. 12 (3.4) ((musique))

Ici Vicente (VIC) adresse d'abord (l.4) la directive impérative assieds-toi s'il te plaît à Mathieu (MAT), qui semble être débout en train de danser (voir le tour de Maëlle (MAË), l.2). Face à l'absence de réaction de l'enfant, Vicente interpelle à nouveau Mathieu par son prénom, cette fois avec emphase sur la première syllabe (l.8), après quoi on entend le bruit d'une chaise (l.10) et un remerciement de la part de Vicente (l.11).

5.2 Les directives et les relances à la fin du séjour

Alors que de façon générale, Vicente produit toujours une grande partie des directives avec les moyens interactionnels susmentionnés (formes impératives simples, apostrophes, interjections), plus tard pendant son séjour ces ressources se trouvent complétées par d'autres ressources qui permettent à Vicente de davantage varier le formatage des directives et des relances. Ces ressources incluent l'utilisation d'un nouveau format grammatical (des constructions déclaratives), quelques nouvelles constructions fixes, ainsi que l'utilisation de menaces et de questions renvoyant aux instructions données par la mère d'accueil aux enfants. Ci-dessous nous nous concentrons sur quatre séquences de directives produites par Vicente lors d'un seul repas vers la fin de son séjour, dans lesquelles il déploie ces deux dernières pratiques pour poursuivre l'activité directive.

5.3 L'invocation d'une autorité supérieure

Les extraits 2-5 sont tous issus d'un repas ayant lieu environ 3 mois après le premier enregistrement. Vicente mange seul avec les enfants:

Ex. 2, 100611_VIC4, 01:24 1 (2.1) ((sons de couverts, claquement fort)) 2 VIC: non mathieu. 3 (.) 4 VIC: ra[conte ça.] 5 MAT: [+(icky) ] (ricky chacky)+ ((chante, claquements)) 6 [+(ché ah-) ] (aow).+ ((chante)) 7 VIC: [tu arrêtes.] 8 (0.2) 9 MAT: +(mini couca ah,)+ ((chante))


10 (0.3) 11 VIC: mathieu [qu’est-ce qui ta maman] (0.3) dit? 12 MAT: [+(x x: ah:).+ ] ((chante)) 13 (2.1) ((sons de couverts)) 14 MAT: obéi::r. 15 (0.2) 16 MAË: oui, 17 (0.6) 18 MAT: na::h [j’ai pas ou]blié. 19 VIC: [maintenant. ] 20 (0.3) 21 MAT: j’ai pas oublié. 22 (1.0) 23 MAT: et on n’est pas corrects, 24 VIC: si [tu pa:s- <si tu:> ] 25 MAT: [ce soir on peut pas] regarder le match. 26 VIC: oui:, 27 (0.8)

Dans cet extrait4, Vicente invoque les instructions de la mère après plusieurs tentatives infructueuses pour faire taire Mathieu avec non mathieu (l.2), la construction impérative raconte ça (même s'il est difficile de savoir à quoi ce tour renvoie, l.4), et le tour déclaratif tu arrêtes (l.7). A la ligne 11, Vicente produit alors la question mathieu qu'est-ce qui ta maman (0.3) dit ?. Au lieu de continuer à faire des bruits, Mathieu arrête la chanson (l. 12) et produit, après une pause de 2.1 secondes (l.13), la réponse verbale obéi::r (l.14). Ce faisant, Mathieu manifeste qu'il n'a pas oublié l'instruction de sa mère, qu'il explicite ensuite (l.18). Peut-être en réponse à la vocalisation nah:: au début du tour de Mathieu, Vicente produit maintenant (l.19), soulignant ainsi davantage encore l'urgence de la directive (Aronsson & Cekaite 2011; Craven & Potter 2010). Mathieu répète ensuite qu'il n'a pas oublié ce qu'a dit sa mère (l.21): ils n'ont pas le droit de regarder le match (de foot à la télé) s'ils ne se comportent pas correctement (l.23; 25). Vicente produit en chevauchement ce qui semble être le début d'une menace reformulant la conséquence d'un comportement inadéquat des enfants (l.24), et confirme ensuite la conséquence énoncée par Mathieu (l.26).

L'extrait 3 a lieu seulement une minute plus tard, quand Mathieu produit à nouveau des bruits (l.1 et 3-5) au lieu de participer aux activités normatives autour de la table (manger sans faire des bruits, passer la mayonnaise, cf. l.2 et 6):

4 Cet extrait a également été analysé dans Skogmyr Marian, Petitjean & Pekarek Doehler

(2017).


Ex. 3, 100611_Vic6, 02:36 1 (5.9) ((bruits divers, claquements)) 2 MAË: °(x xx x)° [s'il te plaît (0.2) la mayoNNAI:::SE.] 3 MAT: [+(ihaha::::::::::::::::::::::::)+ ] ((crie)) 4 MAT: +(a: a-uh-uh)+ ((crie/chante)) 5 MAT: +(x x) [(x x.)]+ ((chante)) 6 MAË: [ MA:]::T. 7 (0.3) 8 VIC: mathieu. 9 MAË: t'es +↑SOU+[::rd?] ((claquement fort)) 10 VIC: [ MAT]ieu tu (0.3) obeyer, 11 ou nous va pas regarder le match. 12 (0.6) ((claquement)) 13 VIC: maintenant. 14 (0.7) 15 MAT: mais c'est maëlle: [qui c]rie:. 16 VIC: [no:n.] 17 (2.0)

Après avoir interpellé Mathieu par son prénom et avec emphase (l.8), Vicente lance une menace sous la forme d'une directive déclarative suivie par la conséquence négative en cas de non-alignement (l.10-11): MAThieu tu (0.3) obeyer ou nous va pas regarder le match. Suite à une brève pause (l.12), il souligne encore l'urgence de la directive avec maintenant (l.13). Alors que Mathieu verbalise sa résistance (l.15), il semble en réalité s'aligner avec la directive puisqu'il arrête de chanter et de faire du bruit (cf. le dernier claquement, l.12). Dans cet extrait, Vicente ne fait donc pas explicitement référence à la mère, mais en formulant la conséquence négative d'une éventuelle désobéissance de Mathieu, il invoque indirectement les instructions que Mathieu a lui-même verbalisées juste avant (cf. extrait 2).

L'extrait 4 se produit environ 8.5 minutes après l'extrait 3:

Ex.4, 100611_Vic10, 09:01 1 (0.8) 2 MAË: vicente? 3 VIC: mhm? 4 MAË: je vais vite chercher quelque chose. 5 (0.3) 6 VIC: non >non non non< [maëlle, ] 7 MAT: [NON NON,] 8 VIC: [ma- maëlle, ] 9 MAT: [NON NON NON,] 10 VIC: [viens.] 11 MAT: [NO:N, ] 12 (0.4) 13 VIC: (a)ssieds-toi. 14 MAË: ↑AH::, 15 (0.9) ((trois claquements)) 16 MAË: ((tousse)) [((tousse)) ] 17 MAT: [SUR LA [ (CHAI]::SE). ] 18 VIC: [>non non] non non<] arrête. 19 (0.5) 20 VIC: arrête maëlle aussi. 21 (0.3) 22 MAË? +(X: X: XX XX:) ((chante/crie))+ 23 VIC: qu'est-ce que maman (.) dit?= 24 MAT: =OUI::,


25 VIC: faut pas (des), 26 (0.6) 27 MAT: (xx x). 28 (0.2) 29 MAT: moi avec maëlle contre [(x) ] 30 MAË: [£moi] je joue (x x xx:)£. 31 (1.0) 32 MAË: £EHh hhh£ 33 (1.0)

Cette fois-ci, les premières directives de Vicente répondent au fait que Maëlle quitte la table (cf. l.4). Ses tentatives pour faire revenir Maëlle (l.6, 8, 10, 12) sont accompagnées par des NON criés en répétition par Mathieu (l.7, 9, 11), qui augmentent le caractère désordonné de la situation. Vicente dit alors à Mathieu d'arrêter (l.18), après quoi il étend la directive à Maëlle (l.20). Le manque d'alignement des enfants (cf. cris à la ligne 22) amène Vicente à invoquer à nouveau les instructions de la mère, cette fois-ci à travers la question qu'est-ce que maman (.) dit? (l.23). Mathieu répond à haute voix avec OUI:: (l.24), peut-être pour signaler qu'il se souvient de ce qu'a dit sa mère. Vicente commence ensuite à formuler ce qui semble être l'instruction de la mère (faut pas (des), l.25), mais s'arrête avant de compléter son tour. L'activité directive est ensuite abandonnée, les enfants parlant maintenant plus calmement de ce qui semble être un jeu (l.29-30).

Presque immédiatement après l'extrait 4, Vicente invoque pour la dernière fois pendant l'enregistrement de ce repas les instructions de la mère:

Ex. 5, 100611_Vic11, 10 :28 1 MAT: t’enlèves ton bras maëlle? 2 (0.6) 3 MAT: maë::lle. 4 (0.2) 5 VIC: uh [>uh-uh.<] 6 MAË? [(e:h) ] ou::[i,] 7 VIC: [ a]ttends. 8 (0.8) 9 VIC: arrête. 10 (.) 11 VIC: maëlle aussi. 12 (1.0) 13 VIC: non, 14 (0.5) 15 VIC: maë:lle, mathieu, 16 (.) 17 MAË? +(mhrai:[rh:)+ ] ((bruits de gorge)) 18 VIC: [qu’est-ce ] que c’est avec? 19 MAT: oBÉI::R:. 20 (0.2) 21 VIC: obéir.= 22 MAT: =+SINON PAS REGARDER MATCH.+ ((chante)) 23 [+SINO:N PAS] REGARDER+ ((chante)) 24 VIC: [mm-mm. ] 25 MAT: +MAT[CH! ] ((chante))+ 26 VIC: [oui.] 27 (0.8) 28 MAT: +(x:) (veux) regarder <↓le ↓ma::tch.> ((chante))+


Après plusieurs tentatives inefficaces pour arrêter le comportement des enfants à travers des interjections, apostrophes, impératifs etc. (l.5, 7, 9, 11, 13 et 15), Vicente produit la question qu'est-ce que c'est avec? (l.18). Cette question, malgré son formatage elliptique, mobilise immédiatement la réponse obéi::r: de Mathieu (l.19), produite avec emphase et une prosodie marquée. La réponse est suivie par une confirmation de Vicente (l.21), après quoi Mathieu formule la conséquence sinon pas regarder match en chantant à haute voix. L'activité est ensuite abandonnée, et les participants continuent le repas.

5.4 Résumé de l'analyse

Les extraits 1-5 montrent différentes pratiques interactionnelles que Vicente utilise pour lancer et relancer des directives aux enfants. L'extrait 1 illustre comment Vicente, au début de son séjour, s'appuie surtout sur un répertoire limité de ressources pour produire des premières directives et des relances, comme des impératifs simples, des apostrophes, et des interjections. Les extraits 2-5 illustrent quelques ressources alternatives utilisées par Vicente vers la fin de son séjour, à savoir des questions et des menaces se référant aux instructions de la mère. Dans l'extrait 2, Vicente produit la question mathieu qu'est-ce qui ta maman (0.3) dit?, qui, malgré sa nature rhétorique, n'est pas traitée comme telle par Mathieu, qui répond obéi::r suivi d'une formulation de la conséquence négative si l'enfant n'obéit pas à Vicente. Immédiatement après, Vicente reformule lui-même cette instruction sous forme de menace (extrait 3). Dans l'extrait 4 Vicente invoque encore une fois les instructions de la mère à travers la question qu'est-ce que maman (.) dit?, ce qui mobilise la réponse OUI:: de l'enfant. Finalement, dans l'extrait 5, Vicente fait pour la dernière fois appel à l'autorité de la mère. Cette fois-ci, la question qu'est-ce que c'est avec? suffit pour engendrer la réponse immédiate oBÉI::R:.

6. Discussion et conclusion

Les cinq extraits analysés ci-dessus illustrent comment Vicente parvient à gérer un problème pratique et délicat lié à ses tâches de jeune homme au pair: faire accomplir aux enfants les actions demandées après un premier non-alignement de leur part. Les pratiques déployées vers la fin de son séjour, à savoir l'utilisation de questions et de menaces renvoyant aux instructions de la mère, contrastent avec ses pratiques au début du séjour. Même si nos observations sont basées sur des données limitées, elles indiquent un développement longitudinal du répertoire des méthodes dont Vicente dispose pour donner des directives et pour les relancer en cas de manque d'alignement des enfants.

En produisant des questions et des menaces rappelant les instructions de la mère, Vicente montre sa capacité croissante à adapter ses pratiques interactionnelles aux aspects circonstanciels de la situation. Dans les extraits 2-5, au lieu de recycler le format de la première directive ou de s'appuyer sur l'une


des autres ressources fréquemment utilisées comme il le fait au début du séjour (cf. extrait 1), Vicente utilise des pratiques de natures très différentes. Les questions posées par Vicente, bien que "rhétoriques" de nature, sont formatées de manière à ce qu'elles puissent aussi être interprétées comme des questions demandant des informations sous la forme d'une réponse verbale. Comme le montrent les réponses des enfants dans les extraits 2, 3 et 5, ceci est bien le cas: au lieu de continuer leurs activités perturbatrices, les enfants s'arrêtent pour répondre verbalement aux questions de Vicente. Cette pratique diffère alors des autres directives produites par Vicente qui ne demandent que l'accomplissement, souvent non-verbal, d'une action. L'invocation des instructions de la mère à travers une pratique interactionnelle particulière s'avère alors localement efficace et montre la capacité croissante de Vicente à adapter ses pratiques pour accomplir des buts interactionnels précis.

La capacité de Vicente à produire des questions et des menaces plus tard pendant son séjour est en partie due à l'élargissement du répertoire de ses ressources linguistiques. Avec plus de ressources, Vicente parvient plus facilement à formuler des tours plus complexes, comme les phrases interrogatives utilisées dans les questions. Mais en plus, en invoquant spécifiquement les instructions de la mère, Vicente mobilise aussi une autre ressource qu'il a maintenant à sa disposition pour faire obéir les enfants, à savoir l'histoire interactionnelle partagée entre les participants. L'invocation des instructions de la mère atteste de la capacité de Vicente à se référer aux expériences précédentes que les participants ont en commun et de tenir les enfants pour responsables de celles-ci 5. Ce n'est qu'après avoir fait ensemble l'expérience de la mère donnant des instructions aux enfants que Vicente peut invoquer ces instructions en sachant que les enfants savent à quoi il réfère. Les pratiques interactionnelles mobilisées par Vicente dans les extraits 2-5 témoignent alors d'enjeux sociaux plus vastes entourant le développement de la compétence d'interaction (cf. Pekarek Doehler & Berger à paraître), comme l'évolution des relations sociales et des savoirs communs. Dans le cas de Vicente, les savoirs communs concernant des règles normatives établies dans la famille6 deviennent une ressource interactionnelle que Vicente peut utiliser pour gérer le comportement des enfants.

En somme, les changements observés dans la manière dont Vicente relance les directives lorsque les enfants ne font pas preuve d'alignement montrent une diversification progressive des méthodes pour agir. Cette diversification ne

5 Cette pratique ressemble aussi à l'invocation des "contrats d'activité" (activity contracts,

Aronsson & Cekaite 2011) concernant l'accomplissement futur des tâches quotidiennes établies entre des parents et des enfants par des séquences de négociation.

6 Pour une discussion de la famille comme institution et du repas familial comme lieu des "politiques familiales", voir Ochs et Taylor (1992).


semble pas seulement être liée à une augmentation générale des ressources linguistiques permettant la construction de tours plus complexes ou à la capacité à appliquer des ressources grammaticales existantes pour accomplir de nouvelles actions, mais aussi à la capacité de Vicente à s'appuyer sur l'histoire interactionnelle partagée des participants et sur l'autorité supérieure de la mère d'accueil pour engager les enfants dans une routine interactionnelle qui les amène à arrêter leur comportement perturbateur. La diversification des méthodes pour accomplir et poursuivre les directives permet à Vicente de mieux adapter ses pratiques aux contingences de l'interaction et, peut-être, de mieux accomplir ses tâches de jeune homme au pair.

Remerciements

Je remercie Simona Pekarek Doehler ainsi que deux relecteurs anonymes pour leurs commentaires critiques et constructifs sur des versions antérieures de cet article.

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Pekarek Doehler, S. & Berger, E. (à paraître): On the reflexive relation between developing L2 interactional competence and evolving social relationships: A longitudinal study of word-searches in the 'wild'. In J. Hellermann, S. Eskildsen, S. Pekarek Doehler & A. Piirainen-Marsch (éds.), Conversation analytic research on learning-in-action: The complex ecology of L2 interaction in the wild. Springer.

Pekarek Doehler, S. & Pochon-Berger, E. (2015): The development of L2 interactional competence: evidence from turn-taking organization, sequence organization, repair organization and preference organization. In T. Cadierno, & S. Eskildsen (eds.), Usage-based perspectives on second language learning. Berlin (De Gruyter), 233-268.

Skogmyr Marian, K., Petitjean, C. & Pekarek Doehler, S. (2017): Le développement de la compétence d'interaction en langue seconde: état des lieux et illustrations empiriques. Revue française de linguistique appliquée, 2017/2 (Vol. XXII), 127-145.

Thompson, S. A., Fox, B. A. & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2015): Grammar in everyday talk: Building responsive actions. Cambridge (Cambridge University Press).

Vine, B. (2009): Directives at work: Exploring the contextual complexity of workplace directives. Journal of Pragmatics 41, 1395-1405.


Le pouvoir des rires: des interactions en face à face aux conversations par texto

Cécile Petitjean Centre de linguistique appliquée, Université de Neuchâtel

This article focuses on the interactional achievement of laughter by providing an overview of the studies we carried out on various types of settings, including institutional interactions and text-based conversations. Using a conversation analytic approach (Sacks et al. 1974), we shed light on how participants finely and systematically mobilize laughter in order to jointly achieve specific social actions such as softening corrections, producing requests or managing topic trajectories. We also show that participants recurrently laugh so as to manage the interactional troubles emerging from the ongoing talk, both in institutional and online settings. By revealing to what extent participants manage to adapt their laughing procedures to the situational and technical contingencies of the interaction in which they are involved, this article aims to promote laughter as a central part of participant's interactional competences.

Les travaux menés depuis une quarantaine d'années dans l'optique de l'Analyse Conversationnelle d'orientation ethnométhodologique (Sacks et al. 1974) ont empiriquement invalidé la représentation selon laquelle le rire ne serait qu'une réaction individuelle reflétant un état mental et émotionnel (Jefferson 1979, 1984; Glenn 2003; Glenn & Holt 2015). Loin de n'être qu'une réponse involontaire à un événement humoristique, le rire résulte d'un véritable travail d'horloger sur le plan interactionnel, conjointement et minutieusement accompli par les coparticipants dans le déroulement moment par moment de leurs échanges (cf. Glenn & Holt 2013 pour un panorama). L'extrait suivant (Jefferson 1997, cité dans Drew 2005: 164) est à ce propos particulièrement éclairant. Phil (PHI dans la transcription) évoque le fait que sa fille ne consacrera à sa famille qu'une seule semaine de ses vacances (l.1).

40 Le pouvoir des rires

La réponse initiale de Lesley (LES dans la transcription) est minimale (yes, l.3-4). Ce n'est qu'après que Phil ait commencé à produire des particules de rire (l.5) que celle-ci se met à rire à son tour (l.6). Sachant qu'aucun événement ne s'est produit entre sa première réponse exempte de rire et le rire subséquent, on en déduit ici que Lesley rit car elle est interactionnellement invitée à le faire par Phil (cf. Drew 2005 pour une analyse détaillée, cf. aussi Jefferson 1979 sur les rires invités). La manière dont Phil et Lesley synchronisent leurs rires montre donc clairement que les rires ne se limitent ni à la manifestation d'un état émotionnel ni à l'expression de quelque chose jugé amusant. Les rires s'apparentent au contraire à des conduites méthodiquement mobilisées par les participants pour rendre visibles et compréhensibles les actions qu'ils accomplissent (ici la modulation d'une plainte suite au faible degré d'affiliation du partenaire, cf. Jefferson 1984; Holt 2012). Holt (2010) montre par exemple que les rires jouent un rôle central dans la gestion des trajectoires topicales: le fait de ne pas répondre aux rires de son partenaire permet ainsi au locuteur de poursuivre l'élaboration du topic en cours tandis que la production de rires partagés permet aux participants de s'orienter vers une clôture du topic. D'autres études identifient de la même façon des patterns récurrents dans la manière dont les rires participent à la gestion de l'alternance des tours de parole (Ikeda & Bisouth 2013; cf. aussi Glenn 2010).

Notre objectif ici est de poursuivre cette ligne de recherche en proposant un panorama des travaux que nous avons réalisés sur le rôle des rires dans des contextes institutionnels où cette ressource a été peu ou pas étudiée (i.e. les interactions en classe, les séances de logopédie et les appels téléphoniques entre infirmières à l'hôpital) ainsi que dans un type radicalement différent d'interactions, à savoir les échanges par texto. Parce qu'ils témoignent d'un travail constant d'adaptation de nos conduites communicationnelles à celles de nos partenaires et aux contingences situationnelles, les rires permettent d'assurer la visibilité d'actions clés concourant à la gestion des troubles interactionnels émergeant dans la gestion de nos interactions, qu'elles se déroulent dans des environnements institutionnels ou numériques. Nos travaux identifient ainsi le rire comme une composante centrale de nos compétences d'interaction (cf. au sujet de cette notion: Pekarek Doehler & Petitjean 2017; Skogmyr Marian et al., à paraitre).

1. Le rôle des rires dans la gestion des troubles interactionnels: des interactions en classe aux appels téléphoniques en contexte professionnel

Nos recherches1 portent sur des environnements qui représentent autant de moments clés dans la trajectoire des adolescents de l'école à leur entrée dans 1 Nos recherches, ainsi que les données utilisées, émanent du projet IC-You, un projet de

recherche interdisciplinaire et interuniversitaire financé par le Fonds national suisse de la recherche scientifique (CRSII1_136291, 2012-2016).

Cécile Petitjean 41

le monde du travail: les interactions en classe, les séances de thérapie logopédique et les appels téléphoniques entre jeunes infirmières nouvellement diplômées à l'hôpital. Résultant de l'analyse séquentielle d'enregistrements audio-vidéos de données interactionnelles naturelles (i.e. non-élicitées à des fins de recherche), nos résultats convergent vers une même observation, à savoir le fait que le rire constitue une ressource précieuse pour gérer les moments problématiques émergeant dans le cours des interactions institutionnelles.

Notre étude sur les interactions en classe (Petitjean & González-Martínez 2015)2 montre que les élèves mobilisent les sourires et les rires lorsqu'ils sont confrontés à un problème de nature interactionnelle (ex. ne pas pouvoir répondre à une question de l'enseignant ou produire une réponse incorrecte). Nous avons identifié trois patterns récurrents dans la manière dont les élèves produisent ces rires. Le premier pattern inclut un sourire ou un rire produit par l'élève en début de tour de parole, lui permettant d'anticiper le caractère problématique de ce qu'il s'apprête à faire (ex. lorsque l'élève est invité par l'enseignant à exprimer une opinion susceptible de générer de la désaffiliation de la part de ses camarades; cf. aussi Degoumois et al. 2017). Dans ce cas-là, les autres participants ne rient pas, s'orientant ce faisant vers la minimisation du problème annoncé. Concernant le second pattern, le locuteur sourit ou rit durant un tour problématique ou immédiatement après sa complétion (ex. lorsque l'élève produit une réponse incorrecte) avant que les autres participants ne se joignent à ses rires. Cette procédure permet au locuteur d'indexer son tour comme n'étant pas réellement sérieux, d'en moduler ce faisant le caractère problématique et donc d'œuvrer à la résolution rapide du problème. Dans le cas du troisième pattern, alors que le locuteur responsable du trouble ne produit ni sourire ni rire (ex. lorsque l'élève n'est pas capable de répondre à la question de l'enseignant), ce sont les autres élèves qui accomplissent un rire "choral". Ce faisant, les camarades projettent une évaluation bienveillante du trouble généré par l'élève "fautif", limitent les opportunités pour l'enseignant d'évaluer négativement l'élève en question3 et accélèrent ainsi la clôture de l'incident. Par ailleurs, l'un des résultats de cette étude est de montrer que sourire et rire, loin d'être des ressources interchangeables, sont méthodiquement mobilisés par les élèves pour indexer la gravité du problème rencontré: un sourire rend visible un 2 Cette recherche repose sur un corpus composé d'interactions aux Secondaires 1 et 2

recueillies en Suisse romande (6h de données). 3 Sur le plan séquentiel, le fait que les élèves aient d'ores et déjà produit une action

séquentiellement appropriée (i.e. une évaluation) limite la possibilité pour l'enseignant de produire à son tour une action similaire (ou tout du moins d'étendre une action préalablement accomplie et de ralentir ce faisant la progression de l'échange). En produisant un rire choral, les élèves amènent donc davantage l'enseignant à se positionner par rapport à cette première évaluation qu'à accomplir une évaluation en tant que telle. Par ailleurs, le rire choral rend visible un certain degré d'affiliation avec l'élève "fautif" (de par le fait que le rire permet de minimiser le caractère sérieux de la faute en question) et limite ce faisant (sans l'interdire pour autant) une franche désaffiliation de l'enseignant, laquelle serait dirigée non pas seulement à l'encontre de l'élève pris en faute, mais aussi et surtout à l'encontre de l'ensemble de la classe.


problème présenté comme moins grave que s'il ne l'avait été par l'entremise d'un rire (cf. aussi Haakana 2010 sur les liens entre rire et sourire; cf. aussi Sert & Jacknick 2015). Cette étude permet ainsi d'invalider la représentation selon laquelle le rire témoignerait d'un manque de discipline chez les élèves. Bien au contraire, les élèves monitorent conjointement et méthodiquement leurs sourires et leurs rires de manière à répondre en temps réel aux problèmes interactionnels rencontrés, promouvant ainsi la progressivité des activités de la classe.

De manière intéressante, on retrouve ce même lien entre rire et gestion des troubles interactionnels dans le contexte des séances de thérapie logopédique. Basée sur des analyses quantitatives et micro-séquentielles d'interactions dyadiques entre des adolescents présentant des troubles du langage et leurs thérapeutes4, notre étude (Petitjean & Cangemi 2016) montre que les adolescents produisent en général plus de rires que les logopédistes, mais que cette tendance est plus marquée dans un type spécifique d'activité, à savoir les séquences de correction5, où les rires sont majoritairement non-partagés. Ce pattern récurrent est illustré dans l'extrait suivant, où la logopédiste (LOG dans la transcription) est en train d'aider Mathieu (MAT dans la transcription) à corriger une liste de mots. Mathieu a fait une erreur en orthographiant le mot "discothèque", utilisant l'accent aigu au lieu de l'accent grave.

À la ligne 7, la logopédiste corrige ouvertement la réponse candidate proposée par Mathieu (ben non accent grave). Mathieu rit durant la dernière partie de l'hétéro-correction produite par la thérapeute (l.9), sans confirmer ni rejeter la

4 Nos recherches portent sur deux dyades (3h de données). Ces données ont été recueillies en

Suisse romande. 5 Sur la différence entre correction et réparation, cf. e.g. Schegloff et al. 1977; Jefferson 1987;

MacBeth 2004.


correction en question. La logopédiste clôt la séquence sans se joindre aux rires de l'adolescent. D'après nos analyses, en riant de son erreur, l'adolescent revalorise son positionnement épistémique en minimisant la gravité de celle-ci. En riant sans parler, l'adolescent répond à la correction de la thérapeute tout en évitant d'élaborer sur la correction en question6, minimisant ainsi la visibilité interactionnelle de son erreur. En ne se joignant pas aux rires de l'adolescent, la thérapeute reste centrée sur l'activité de correction qu'elle promeut ce faisant comme la tâche prioritaire à ce moment donné de l'interaction. Nous avons toutefois cherché également à comprendre pourquoi, dans certains cas, la logopédiste répond à l'invitation à rire de l'adolescent. Nos analyses montrent que la thérapeute, en se joignant aux rires de son partenaire, reconfigure rétroactivement la trajectoire de correction qu'elle a initiée (en validant le caractère non-sérieux de l'erreur) et promeut proactivement un retour à une activité (ex. discuter du contenu d'un livre) qu'elle indexe ce faisant comme étant la plus importante en termes d'objectifs thérapeutiques. En produisant un rire partagé, les participants se rendent mutuellement visible la manière dont ils hiérarchisent les tâches en cours, minimisant de concert la pertinence de l'activité de correction à certains moments de la séance. Ainsi, alors que de précédentes études révèlent que le positionnement séquentiel de la correction indexe le degré d'importance de l'erreur à corriger (cf. Mazeland 1987), nous montrons que la "centralité" d'une erreur est également rendue visible par le biais de l'organisation séquentielle des rires. Par ailleurs, la manière dont la logopédiste et l'adolescent synchronisent leurs rires met en lumière le fait qu'une erreur n'est pas grave en soi, mais que sa "gravité" dépend de l'activité au cours de laquelle elle se produit. Cette observation est particulièrement précieuse pour les adolescents présentant des troubles du langage: en leur permettant de relativiser leurs erreurs, le rire les amène à gagner en confiance et à préserver leur estime de soi (cf. aussi Wilkinson 2007 sur le rôle des rires dans les interactions avec des locuteurs aphasiques).

Ces procédures sous-jacentes à la co-production des rires dans les séances de thérapie logopédique permettent ainsi aux participants de manifester leur orientation vers l'accomplissement de tâches institutionnelles (rires unilatéraux) ou vers la gestion d'épisodes plus "conversationnels" (rires partagés). Mais on observe également certaines similarités entre les contextes scolaire et logopédique, notamment la manière dont l'élève et le jeune patient mobilisent les rires pour adoucir l'impact d'une correction sur leurs statuts épistémiques (cf. aussi Sert & Jacknick 2015). Les rires font ainsi intrinsèquement partie des ressources conversationnelles grâce auxquelles se manifeste la dimension éducative propre à ces deux contextes institutionnels.

6 Suite à une hétéro-correction, la réponse projetée consiste à produire des marques

d'acceptation, des excuses ou à exprimer une justification de l'erreur commise (cf. Drew 1981; Sidnell 2010).


Le fait que le rire soit une ressource particulièrement puissante dans la gestion des moments interactionnellement délicats ne se limite pas aux seuls contextes éducatifs. Ainsi, notre étude sur le rôle des rires dans les appels téléphoniques entre infirmières nouvellement diplômées à l'hôpital (González-Martínez & Petitjean 2016) 7 montre que celles-ci mobilisent de manière récurrente les rires pour adoucir le caractère potentiellement problématique des demandes qu'elles sont amenées à faire auprès d'autres membres du personnel hospitalier (ex. réitérer une demande faite à un médecin de passer voir un patient; commander tardivement un repas auprès du diététicien). Les rires sont unilatéraux, composés de brèves particules produites de manière discrète et ne répondent pas à un événement humoristique. Ces rires permettent aux jeunes infirmières d'annoncer tout en le minimisant le caractère délicat de leurs demandes, mais aussi de rendre interactionnellement visible une forme de cordialité, invitant le partenaire à satisfaire rapidement la requête, ce qui permet in fine d'assurer la progressivité de l'activité en cours. Les rires semblent donc représenter une dimension centrale des compétences d'interaction des jeunes infirmières: en mobilisant adéquatement les rires dans le déroulement de leurs appels, elles assurent une relation cordiale avec leurs collègues, ce qui facilite en retour la satisfaction de leurs demandes.

Ces trois études montrent au final comment les participants parviennent à mobiliser les rires de manière à assurer une gestion optimale de moments clés propres au contexte institutionnel dans lequel ils sont engagés, comme fournir une réponse dans le contexte de la classe, corriger dans les séances de logopédie ou encore produire une demande dans les appels téléphoniques à l'hôpital. On voit par ailleurs se dessiner une certaine continuité dans la transition entre contextes éducatifs et professionnels. Les rires mobilisés par les élèves pour gérer des moments délicats vont l'être aussi par les jeunes infirmières, de manière certes adaptée aux contingences contextuelles mais avec comme point de mire les mêmes finalités interactionnelles, à savoir assurer au mieux le caractère "aérodynamique" d'actions centrales pour le bon déroulement de l'interaction (cf. Heritage et Clayman 2010: 46).

Les résultats de nos recherches attestent ainsi de la centralité des rires dans la gestion des interactions en contexte institutionnel (cf. aussi e.g. Osvaldsson 2004; Jacknick 2013; Glenn 2013), complétant ainsi les observations faites dans de précédents travaux sur l'importance des rires dans le monitorage des conversations ordinaires (e.g. Potter & Hepburn 2010; Holt 2012). Il est donc d'autant plus saisissant de constater que ces mêmes rires sont également omniprésents dans des situations aujourd'hui largement répandues mais radicalement différentes de celles précédemment investiguées, à savoir les "face à face à l'écrit" (Morel 2016) que sont les conversations par texto.

7 Cette étude repose sur un corpus de 374 appels téléphoniques passés ou reçus par de jeunes

infirmières durant leur première année d'engagement à l'hôpital après l'obtention de leur diplôme (Corpus NTH-3; CRSII1_136291).


2. Le rôle des rires "transcrits" dans la gestion des conversations par texto

Si les conversations par texto rencontrent aujourd'hui un succès grandissant, les recherches actuelles montrent qu'elles ne vont pas sans poser un certain nombre de problèmes aux utilisateurs, notamment aux niveaux de l'alternance des prises de messages et des risques de rupture dans la contiguïté séquentielle entre les messages du fil de discussion (Herring 1999; Spagnolli & Gamberini 2007; Denouël 2008; Hutchby & Tanna 2008; cf. Paulus et al. 2016 pour un panorama). Dans le même temps, d'autres études – pour la plupart quantitatives – révèlent l'omniprésence des rires "transcrits" (i.e. hahaha) comparativement à la place des émoticônes et des acronymes tels que lol ou mdr (Tagliamonte & Denis 2008; Varnhagen et al. 2010). Inspirée par les apports des études sur le rôle des rires dans la gestion des interactions en face à face (cf. section 2), nous avons cherché à comprendre comment et pourquoi les scripteurs transcrivaient les particules de rires dans leurs messages, alors même qu'ils ont à disposition d'autres ressources graphiques (ex. les emoji).

Notre étude (Petitjean & Morel 2017)8 repose sur l'analyse de 43 conversations WhatsApp recueillies en Suisse romande (Schwitter et al., 2011; base de données sms4science). Nous avons relevé 132 occurrences de rires que nous avons ensuite analysées en mobilisant une approche multi-méthodologique combinant analyse conversationnelle et analyse quantitative9. Ces analyses nous ont ensuite permis d'identifier deux patterns récurrents dans la manière dont les utilisateurs mobilisent les rires dans leurs conversations WhatsApp. Le premier pattern inclut un rire unilatéral isolé qui répond à un message du partenaire et précède un message du même locuteur ayant produit le rire, message dans lequel celui-ci accomplit une évaluation positive du partenaire ou de l'événement discuté. Cette organisation séquentielle donne lieu à une clôture de la séquence et du topic en cours. Ce pattern est illustré dans l'extrait suivant.

8 Cette étude s'inscrit dans le projet interuniversitaire Sinergia What's up, Switzerland? financé

par le Fonds national suisse de la recherche scientifique (CRSII1_160714). 9 Pour une description détaillée du dispositif analytique, cf. Petitjean & Morel 2017. Pour une

discussion concernant la quantification en Analyse Conversationnelle, cf. de Ruiter 2013; Petitjean & Cangemi 2016.


Ex.3 "Betterave" (Petitjean & Morel 2017: 7)

Le second pattern inclut lui aussi un rire unilatéral mais positionné en début de message. Ici aussi le rire est suivi par une action évaluative, mais, contrairement au premier pattern, ils sont produits au sein d'un seul et même message. Le message composé d'un rire en position initiale, s'il répond aussi à un message du partenaire, annonce par contre un changement de locuteur dans le message subséquent, permettant au partenaire de poursuivre l'élaboration du topic. Ce second pattern est illustré dans l'extrait suivant.

Ex.4 "Bonne humeur" (Petitjean & Morel 2017: 13)

Nos analyses montrent que les rires dans les conversations WhatsApp sont majoritairement produits de manière unilatérale. Les messages incluant ces rires accomplissent systématiquement des actions réactives répondant à un message du partenaire. Selon leur position dans le message et dans la séquence de messages, les rires apparaissent comme des ressources particulièrement efficientes pour gérer l'alternance des prises de messages et les trajectoires topicales. Ainsi, lorsque le rire compose l'intégralité d'un message, il annonce de manière récurrente un maintien du même locuteur dans


le message subséquent (cf. ex.3) tandis que lorsque le rire est positionné en début de message, il offre au partenaire l'opportunité de prendre la parole et d'écrire le message suivant (cf. ex.4). De la même manière, lorsque le rire et l'action évaluative sont produits dans deux messages séparés, ils permettent aux partenaires de s'orienter vers une clôture de la séquence et du topic en cours. Inversement, lorsque le rire et l'action évaluative sont produits dans un seul et même message, ils indiquent au partenaire la possibilité de poursuivre l'élaboration du topic dans le message subséquent (pour une discussion concernant les liens avec le rôle des rires dans la gestion des topics dans les interactions en face à face, cf. Petitjean & Morel 2017: 16-17). En résumé, similairement à ce qui a été observé dans les interactions en face à face, le rire n'est pas seulement une manière de s'orienter vers la dimension humoristique de l'échange, mais une ressource permettant aux participants de s'entendre sur une compréhension partagée des actions qu'ils accomplissent moment par moment dans le fil de discussion. Ainsi, outre le fait qu'ils participent à la gestion de moments clés tels que l'alternance des prises de messages et la négociation des topics, les rires, notamment ceux produits de manière isolée, sont également mobilisés par les utilisateurs pour monitorer les moments problématiques qui peuvent émerger dans le cours de l'échange (cf. Petitjean & Morel 2017: 11). On voit donc là apparaitre une remarquable continuité avec les fonctionnalités des rires telles que nous avons pu les observer dans les interactions en contexte institutionnel.

4. Conclusion

Les travaux que nous venons de présenter illustrent le rôle central que jouent les rires dans la communication humaine. Toutefois, on observe également la production de rires chez d'autres espèces de mammifères, telles que les rats ou les primates (Provine 2016). Pourtant, si le rire n'est pas le propre de l'homme, les travaux actuellement menés sur l'organisation des interactions sociales pointent le fait que ce sont la précision et la systématicité avec lesquelles l'humain rit dans ses échanges avec autrui qui rendent cette conduite spécifique à l'espèce humaine. Ainsi, ce n'est pas le rire en tant que tel mais la manière de le produire qui est le propre de l'homme. Loin de n'être qu'une réaction à un événement humoristique, le rire est une ressource conversationnelle qui est minutieusement et méthodiquement mobilisée par les participants, témoignant d'une adaptation constante de leurs conduites à celles de leurs partenaires et aux contraintes situationnelles, et leur permettant d'accomplir des actions tout à fait sérieuses telles que résoudre un trouble interactionnel, prendre la parole ou s'entendre sur une trajectoire topicale. Le rire constitue donc une formidable fenêtre d'observation sur nos compétences d'interaction et sur notre capacité à les reconfigurer en temps réel en fonction des contingences situationnelles et techniques auxquelles nous sommes confrontés.


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Explicitation sequences in conversation: some considerations on formulations, candidate inferences and grounding

Elizaveta CHERNYSHOVA ICAR, Labex ASLAN, Université Lumière Lyon 2

This conversation analysis study focuses on sequences where speakers make a piece of information explicit (explicitation sequences). Among others, formulations (Heritage & Watson 1979) and candidate inferences (turns submitting an inference and requiring a confirmation in a second position) can initiate an explicitation. Based on a short analysis of conversational data in French this study shows that, despite their similarities, formulations and candidate inferences have different impacts on the grounding processes in conversation (Clark & Brennan 1991). More generally, this paper is concerned with the questions of inference and information in the co-construction of meaning in interaction.

1. Introduction

As Garfinkel (1967) pointed out, when we talk, we inevitably convey an infinite quantity of information and background knowledge that we supposedly share with our interlocutor. As a result of this process, most of what we refer to and communicate to others is left unsaid. That is, we inevitably infer information as the conversation goes on.

This study raises precisely the question of inferential processes in ordinary conversation. More specifically, it deals with explicitation sequences where participants articulate a content, which has been left unsaid or indirectly conveyed in a prior turn. By providing an analysis of a corpus of spoken French data of conversations among friends, this paper aims to show how an account of information processing contributes to describing the emergence of meaning in ordinary conversation. Two particular conversational practices are at stake here: formulations and candidate inferences (see section 3).

2. Making a content explicit in conversation

As participants talk, they sometimes encounter moments in their interaction when a particular bit of information needs to be articulated in an explicit way. Participants are able to infer that bit of information based on what has already been conveyed in prior talk. In some cases, they formulate that inference. The conversational sequence initiated by such a proposal of inference is what I call an explicitation sequence (Chernyshova 2017, ongoing).

52 Explicitation sequences in conversation

In order to illustrate this kind of phenomenon, let us first consider excerpt (1). Here, JUD and PAT meet for a drink. PAT talks about a Halloween party: (1) Glasgow [00:01:52-00:02:01]1

01 PAT et euh voilà bon on a pas tenu longtemps en fait and uh that's it well we didn't last for long really

02 parce qu'on a commencé assez tôt because we started quite early

03 (0.5) 04 PAT [et euh: ] and uh 05 JUD [ah ouais/] oh yeah 06 PAT ouais\ (0.4) du coup dimanche c'était yeah so Sunday it was 07 un peu dur en plus de tout nettoyer mais .h a bit hard and we had to clean everything up but 08 JUD [ah dans ton appart] vous avez fait ça/ oh in your apartment you did that 09 PAT [(inaud.) ] 10 PAT non chez nina/ no at Nina's

In line 8 JUD produces a question containing a candidate answer (Pomerantz 1988). The candidate answer ("in your apartment") displays an inference JUD made concerning the location of the Halloween party, information that has been left unmentioned up to this point. This turn is followed by a negative response bringing new elements about the issue (line 10).

This sequence is a repair-like sequence: JUD displays that some information is 'missing' in order to interpret correctly what PAT is telling her about the party. JUD's turn submits a particular understanding and projects, in a subsequent position, a confirmation that the inferred information is correct (if PAT had to clean after the party, then the party must have taken place at PAT's apartment).

In conversation analysis literature, similar configurations have been described by Bolden (2010), who defines the action of 'articulating the unsaid'. Bolden gives four main features of this particular action:

first, by 'articulating the unsaid', the speaker performs a repair operation in the form of a request for confirmation ; second, what is being offered for confirmation is a 'missing' or unarticulated element of the addressee's preceding talk, which is typically an extended informing of some sort (i.e. a turn consisting of more than one turn constructional unit that informs the addressee of something, […]); third, the offered formulation is (claimably) inferable from the addressee's talk; fourth, the formulation is (claimably) done on the addressee's behalf, extending the addressee's course of action. Bolden (2010: 7).

Explicitation sequences fall into this particular action category and can be sequentially defined as follows: such sequences are initiated by a turn displaying an inference performed by the speaker, which is followed by a

1 This excerpt, like others presented here, is extracted from the spoken French database CLAPI

(http://clapi.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr).

Elizaveta Chernyshova 53

(dis)confirmation of the inference (Chernyshova, ongoing). The present study focuses on the information processing aspect of explicitation sequences and on the cues of the inferences made by the participants.

3. Processing information in conversation Inference is traditionally defined as the process (or the result of the process) of reaching a conclusion starting from a premise. Hence, understanding how inference works in conversation implies understanding how participants select information from what is available in the conversation, or beyond it, in order to build a particular interpretation of what has been said. More largely, this issue relates to the issue of the co-construction of mutual understanding in interaction.

The model we call on here is that of Clark and Brennan (1991), according to which, in order to reach mutual understanding in conversation, speakers rely on a common ground : "that is, mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs, and mutual assumptions" (1991: 222). The constant 'updating' of the common ground is accomplished through the process of grounding in conversation (Clark and Brennan 1991). In other words, grounding is the process through which participants progressively establish what has been understood from prior talk and make those elements part of their shared knowledge.

Grounding implies for participants to 'operate' on information. Participants can in fact not only 'deliver' and 'receive' information while talking, but also 'select' information from previous talk. As a matter of fact, since each turn in conversation is linked to what has previously occurred, participants 'update' their common ground by selecting and activating informational elements already mentioned in previous talk. Furthermore, they can mobilize informational elements that are part of their common ground beyond the conversation. In the process of 'putting all the pieces together', participants sometimes need to infer information: thus, as they respond to previous talk, they somehow display the conducted inference. In this perspective, inference appears as a process of transforming given information (i.e. available in the common ground).2

4. Informational aspects of formulations and candidate inferences

In this section I propose to consider formulations and candidate inferences, which are two particular practices involved in explicitation sequences, and show their impact on the grounding processes in conversation.

2 The model presented here is part of an ongoing research and aims to describe 'information

management' in conversation (Chernyshova, ongoing).


4.1 Some definitions

When initiating an explicitation sequence, participants submit a particular inference they were able to make based on previous talk. Two conversational practices seem to be implied in the articulation of an inference: formulations and candidate inferences.

First described by Garfinkel and Sacks, formulation is a conversational practice where participants "describe [the] conversation, [...] explain it, or characterize, or explicate, or translate, or summarize, or furnish the gist of it" (1970: 350). Further studies on formulations have restricted this practice to responsive actions that require a confirmation (Heritage and Watson 1979) and consider formulations as semantic transformations of what has been said (Deppermann 2011). In a nutshell, formulations are produced by the recipient and 'transform' previous talk by displaying a particular understanding of it.

Similarly, practices like candidate understadings (Heritage 1984; Antaki 2012) and candidate answers (Pomerantz 1988) can also be involved in displaying an inference. We can define a category grouping these cases of candidate understandings and candidate answers: candidate inferences. Candidate inferences are turns submitting an inference made by the speaker and calling for a (dis)confirmation of the inferred information (Chernyshova 2016, ongoing).

Formulations and candidate inferences seem quite alike. Indeed, just like formulations, candidate inferences are produced by the recipient as a responsive action to what has previously occurred in conversation. They both call for confirmation and display a particular inference conducted by the speaker. In what follows, I will show how formulations and candidate inferences differ from the point of view of their impact on the informational aspect of conversation. I present the analysis of two cases extracted from a collection of explicitation sequences in a corpus of conversations among friends in French.

4.2 Formulation: 'recycling' information

To begin, let us consider two examples of formulations. In the following excerpt, ELI, BEA and MAR are gathered at ELI's apartment for a drink. In this excerpt, ELI mentions some issues she has with the heating system. (2) Kiwi [00:01:52-00:02:01]

01 ELI du coup/ euh\ j` suis obligée de l` mettre à fond and so uh I have to turn it all the way up 02 autrement elle marche pas donc/ euh\

otherwise it doesn't work so uh 03 c'est [un peu ] la loose/ quoi\

it's a bit of a bummer 04 BEA [ah mince] oh man 05 BEA c'est soit à fond soit zéro\


it's either all the way up or completely off 06 MAR moi [c'est] pareil chez moi it's the same at my place 07 ELI [ouais] yeah 08 (0.4) 09 BEA ((à MAR)) du coup tu dois l` mett` [à fond ] ((to MAR)) so you have to turn it up all the way 10 ELI [ah mais] well yeah 11 du [coup ] c'est trop chiant quoi so it really sucks 12 MAR [ouais]

yeah

In her first turn, ELI delivers new information concerning the heating system at her apartment (line 1), that she expands as the turn continues (lines 2 and 3). BEA responds by a change-of-state token (Heritage 1984) showing her affiliation with ELI (line 4): this turn 'registers' the information delivered by ELI. In her subsequent turn, BEA continues by producing a formulation (line 5): she re-states what ELI has just said, thus displaying her understanding of it. In fact, BEA's turn shows that she made the following inference: if ELI has to put the heater all the way up and if otherwise it doesn't work, then there is no intermediary position for the heater, and so "it's either all the way up or completely off". Even if this inference may appear quite trivial, BEA's formulation is followed by a confirmation (line 7), which shows that her turn in line 5 has been treated as projecting a responsive action. ELI's confirmation overlaps a turn produced by MAR stating that her heater works the same way (line 6). After a short silence (line 8), BEA produces a new formulation (line 9) initiated by du coup, indicating a relation of consequence with previous talk (Bruxelles et al. 2014). In this turn, BEA delivers, once again, inferred information: if MAR's heater works the same way as ELI's, then in order to make it work correctly MAR also has to turn it all the way up. This new formulation is also followed by a confirmation (line 11).

The two explicitation sequences are here initiated by formulations which are followed by a confirmation. Hence, they are treated as requesting a confirmation of a particular understanding and a validation of a particular inference. Like other formulations in the corpus, they display an inference without delivering new informational elements but rather 'recycle' information that is already in the common ground. Furthermore, these formulations fall within sequences of small talk (Coupland 2003), which makes their informational contribution to the co-construction of shared knowledge less crucial than that of candidate inferences, as we are about to see.


4.3 Candidate inferences: introducing new informational elements

In the following excerpt, the configuration is different. Here, JUL receives a couple ANN and ROM at her place for a drink. The three friends are talking about grocery stores and ANN says that there are none in the countryside where she lives. (3) Pois [00:12:33-00:12:47]

01 ANN mais même euh la premiè:- le premier supermarché and even uh the first the first supermarket 02 j` pense il est à:: (0.8) dix minutes en voiture/ I think is at a ten minute drive 03 ROM [hm] 04 JUL [ah] °ouais::° oh yeah 05 ANN ouais yeah 06 (0.4) 07 JUL en fait tu peux rien faire sans (.) sans caisse/ actually you can't do a thing without without a ride 08 quoi `fin then I mean 09 ANN ben ouais\ [ah c'est clair ouais .H: ] well yeah oh that's for sure yeah 10 ROM [ouais ouais ah ouais °c'est clair°] yeah yeah oh yeah that's for sure 11 ANN moi si j'ai pas ma voiture mais j` peux pas aller if I don't have my car well I can't go 12 travailler j` peux rien faire\ to work I can't do anything

After ANN mentions that the first supermarket is quite far away (lines 1-2), JUL first 'registers' this information by acknowledging it (line 4) and then offers a candidate inference (line 7) initiated by the marker en fait that expresses here a connection with previous talk (just like du coup in the previous excerpt). By doing so, JUL displays the following inference: if there are no grocery stores where ANN lives and if the closest supermarket is at a ten minute drive, then ANN has to take her car every time she needs to go somewhere. JUL's turn brings new elements into the conversation: the issue is now not only the lack of accessibility to supermarkets, but also to other places near ANN's. Finally, ANN marks this understanding as being adequate to what she just said and thus confirms the candidate inference (line 9). She then expands the topic in her following turn (line 11-12).

Similarly to the previous excerpt, in this second excerpt the participants are making a piece of information explicit, they 'articulate the unsaid'. However, a new element is here added to the shared knowledge. This is indeed the case for all instances of candidate inferences in the corpus. Moreover, candidate inferences also have a specific effect on the expansion of conversational topics: as a matter of fact, the new informational elements brought by candidate


inferences are frequently exploited by the participants as a basis for developing a conversational topic.

6. Concluding remarks

This study addressed the issues of inference and information in conversation by considering a particular conversational sequence: the explicitation sequence. It offered the description of two practices initiating explicitation sequences, namely formulations and candidate inferences. It shows that these two configurations operate differently on the grounding processes in conversation. In fact, whereas formulations seem to 'recycle' already available information without introducing new elements to the shared knowledge, candidate inferences do bring new information. The study also gives a brief insight on the topical role of these two practices: whereas formulations tend to 'state the obvious' based on previous talk, candidate inferences have a stronger impact on the topic development in conversation.

The presented analyses are part of an ongoing research, but they nevertheless show that an account for information processing in conversation is relevant when describing the 'inferential work' of the participants. By closely considering the ways in which speakers build their turns in talk based on what has been previously said, it appears that the process of inference becomes accountable (Garfinkel 1967). This perspective on conversational data contributes to the study of the co-construction of meaning and mutual understanding in conversation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Antaki, C. (2012): Affiliative and disaffiliative candidate understandings. Discourse Studies, 14(5), 531-

547.

Bolden, G. (2010): 'Articulating the unsaid' via and-prefaced formulations of others' talk. Discourse Studies, 12(1), 5-32.

Bruxelles, S., Jouin-Chardon, E., Traverso, V., Guinamard, I. (2014): 'Du coup' dans l'interaction orale en français: description de ses usages situés à partir d'une base de données multimedia, et considérations didactiques. In I. Guinamard, M. Rispail, V. Traverso, T.D. Thai (eds.), Corpus de langue parlée, situations sociales et outils pour l'enseignement / apprentissage du français. Paris (L'Harmattan), 131-153.

Chernyshova, E. (ongoing): Les contenus implicites dans les interactions verbales (Doctoral Dissertation, Université Lumière Lyon 2, Lyon, France).

Chernyshova, E. (2017): Achieving mutual understanding by explicitating indirectly conveyed information. Oral communication at the Intersubjectivity. In Action conference, University of Helsinki, Finland.

Chernyshova, E. (2016): La resolution de problemes inferentiels dans un corpus de repas entre amis: une approche conversationnaliste de phenomenes relevant de l'implicite. Signes, Discours & Sociétés, 17. URL: http://ec2-52-11-162-110.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/lodel/revue-signes/docannexe/file/132/09_chernyshova_160718.pdf


Clark, H.H. & Brennan, S. (1991): Grounding in communication. In L.B. Resnik, J.M. Levine, S.D. Teasley (eds.), Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition. Washington (American Psychological Association), 127-149.

Coupland, J. (2003): Small Talk: Social Functions. Research on Language and Social Interaction, Special issue, 36(1), 1-6.

Deppermann, A. (2011): The Study of Formulations as a Key to Interactional Semantics. Human Studies, 34, 115-128.

Garfinkel, H. & Sacks, H. (1970): On Formal Structures of Practical Actions. In J.C. McKinney, E.A. Tiryakian (eds.), Theoretical Sociology. New York (Appleton-Century Crofts), 337-366.

Garfinkel, H. (1967): Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge (Polity Press).

Heritage, J. (1984): A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In J.M. Atkinson, J. Heritage (eds.), Structures of Social Action: Studies of Conversation Analysis. Cambridge (Cambridge University Press), 299-345.

Heritage, J. & Watson, R. (1979): Formulations as conversational objects. In G. Psathas (ed.), Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology. New York (Irvington), 123-162.

Pomerantz, A. (1988): Offering a candidate answer: An information seeking strategy. Communication Monographs, 55, 360-373.


Sharing perception when using hands-on exhibits in science centres: The case of vocal depiction

Christina BRANDENBERGER & Christoph HOTTIGER URPP Language and Space, University of Zurich1

There are various situations in our daily lives in which we share sensory perceptions in interaction, but research on how exactly we do this is relatively scarce and has often focused primarily on the visual and auditory channels. In this paper, we suggest an approach based on the methods of multimodal conversation analysis which also considers other perceptual fields, especially touch. By means of an example from an interaction between two visitors of a science centre and the way they handle an exhibit, we illustrate how one can approach the analysis of the techniques participants use to make their sensory perceptions available to their interactive partners. We will focus on one such technique, namely the vocal depiction of tactile perceptions.

1. Introduction

In our daily lives, moments in which we share our sensory perceptions in interaction are frequent and diverse. However, there are social occasions during which the practice of sharing sensory perceptions is even more essential than usual. Among these, one could list wine tastings or cultural events, such as film screenings, but also visits to museums, and, in particular, so-called science centres. What is crucial about the latter is that, in order to make sense of the exhibits, visitors must manipulate them. In this process, sharing one's sensory perceptions – be they visual, tactile, proprioceptive2, auditory or even olfactory – with one's co-visitors is of paramount importance: Only based on this interactive activity can a collaborative process of sense-making and knowledge construction based on the exhibit take place.

It is precisely the process of sharing multisensorial experiences in interaction which is the core interest of this paper. Our data, which stems from our corpus of over 30 hours of video and (partially) eye-tracking recordings of naturally occurring visitor interactions at the Swiss Science Center Technorama in Winterthur, Switzerland, indicate that visitors to the exhibition clearly have a desire to share their sensory perceptions with their co-visitors as they evoke

1 This paper was written as part of the SNSF-funded project 'Interactive discoveries: A video and

eye-tracking based study of knowledge construction in science centres' (project number 162848). 2 According to Mine et al. (1997: 19), proprioception can be defined as "a person's sense of the

position and orientation of his [or her] body and limbs", or their movement.

60 Sharing perception when using hands-on exhibits in science centres

their perceptions very frequently. But how exactly do they do this? There is a broad range of linguistic and embodied resources which visitors use to share their sensory experiences. However, in this article, we will focus on only one of them, namely that which we will call vocal depiction of tactile perception.3 We wish to illustrate this technique by presenting a case study of a brief excerpt of a young couple's visit to the Technorama.

2. Methodology

Our analysis will draw on the methods developed in conversation analysis and multimodal interaction analysis (for a brief overview of this approach cf. Heath & Luff 2008). Analyses in this tradition stick strictly to the sequentiality of the unfolding events and adhere to resources which are available to the interactants themselves. The following quote summarises the most important tenets of such an approach to analysing human interaction with a special emphasis on multimodality:

This methodology represents an empirical analysis of the sequential organization of human action, i.e. how participant actions build on prior actions and events, and through their design display how these actions and events are interpreted. In this approach language is seen as one possible modality that is used to perform and deliver actions. Since social interactants use language simultaneously with multiple semiotic resources (including gestures, the body and features of the material context) for producing and responding to actions and for interacting with each other, the analysis focuses on the integratedness of these resources, and how interactants use them together for communicating understandings of events and actions as they occur moment by moment in their real-life and everyday contexts […]. (Haddington 2013: 411f.)

A conversation analytical approach with an emphasis on multimodality, as described above, provides a useful framework for a detailed qualitative investigation of visitors' actual use of – and interactions at – exhibits in museums, as has been demonstrated in previous research (cf. e.g. Heath & vom Lehn 2001; Heath & vom Lehn 2008; Heath, vom Lehn & Osborne 2005).

3. Previous Research

Previous (video-based) research in a conversation analytical tradition has explored the question as to how interactants share individual sensory perceptions in interaction. In the context of museums, the work of Heath and vom Lehn is highly relevant for our question. However, the focus of their work is mostly on how visual perception is made available among interactants (vom Lehn & Heath 2007; Heath & vom Lehn 2001; vom Lehn et al. 2001). For

3 This issue seems to be attracting researchers' interest lately (cf. for instance Keevallik in press

for an analysis of the non-lexical vocalisations participants use to coordinate their actions while they are mucking out a sheep stable).

Christina Brandenberger & Christoph Hottiger 61

instance, vom Lehn and Heath (2007: 148) show how visitors assimilate their perspectives through social interaction in art galleries. They note that visitors often go to great lengths to point out some particularities of an exhibit they observe and thereby enable their partners to make the same (or at least similar) experiences (cf. vom Lehn & Heath 2007: 155). This is achieved by using verbal and embodied means within an intricate temporal organisation (cf. vom Lehn & Heath 2007: 156). Thus, visitors can be said to configure their ways of seeing an exhibit for themselves and for each other (cf. vom Lehn & Heath 2007: 160). In a broader context, Goodwin (1994) analyses how visual perceptions are shared in certain professional fields. He points out that, for instance among archaeologists, there are techniques through which they can structure a complex perceptual field in order to "divide a domain of scrutiny into a figure and a ground, so that events relevant to the activity of the moment stand out" (Goodwin 1994: 610). In a similar vein, such interactive techniques are employed during surgery by "team members […] to interpret the visual field in congruent ways […] for the purposes of the work at hand" (Koschmann et al. 2011: 521). These examples out of the professional world (and many more, cf. Hindmarsh & Heath 2000) clearly show that participants' efforts to assimilate their perspectives constitute a critical part of collaborating on a task.

As mentioned above, most of the previous conversation analytical studies on sharing sensory perceptions in interaction focus on the interactive configuration of vision. However, a preliminary analysis of our video data shows that, apart from visual perception, visitors' collaborations at the hands-on exhibits also frequently involve the exchange of other sensory perceptions, such as touch, proprioception, or hearing. The use of hands-on exhibits evidently provides more multisensorial experiences than traditional pieces of art, and, consequently creates more need for visitors to exchange those diverse experiences in interaction. However, as soon as more than one field of perception is available and potentially relevant to what the participants are doing, they may be faced with the interactive problem (cf. Hausendorf 2015: 55ff.) of evoking one of these fields in particular. This can be particularly challenging if the relevant field of perception is not visual, as, according to Nishizaka (2000; 2011), "what is talked about and dealt with in interaction is to be found first of all in the common visual field" (2011: 506, italics in the original). In this context, Nishizaka (2011: 506) explains that the participants in his study would sometimes close their eyes "to indicate […] that the current operand and referent is located and operated on in some field other than the visual". However, in our setting the visual field is accessed by all participants. Therefore, investigating techniques of communicating multisensorial experiences through multimodal resources promises to be particularly rewarding in the context of science centres. By focusing on vocal depiction as one such embodied technique of sharing multisensorial experiences, our analysis takes into account how visitors use their verbal and bodily resources, as well as the exhibits at hand, to make their multisensorial experiences available to each other. In doing


so, our analysis takes a step towards a domain to which research has not paid much attention yet (but see, e.g., attempts to establish a "sensory ethnography", Pink 2009).

4. Data and Participants

Our analysis will focus on vocal depiction as a technique of sharing tactile experiences in interaction. This will be done by means of an example drawn from our corpus of visitor interactions in the Swiss Science Center Technorama. In this extract, a young couple, Stella and Milo, are handling an exhibit which consists of a large bowl with two magnets placed in its centre (cf. figure 1). The magnets are bent towards each other and appear to form an interrupted semi-circle, that is to say they are not touching each other. In addition to this, a large number of small metal discs is lying in the bowl. These are attracted by the magnets and can be used – among other things – to bridge the gap between the two magnets.

Figure 1: Bowl with magnets and magnetic discs.

To exemplify how tactile perceptions can be made interactively available by means of vocal depiction, the analysis that follows scrutinises a single utterance by Stella as well as the way she manipulates the exhibit during this utterance. The excerpt is located about midway in the couple's interaction at the given exhibit and shown below as both a sequence of stills from Milo's eye-tracking data and a verbal transcript, which anchors the stills. This representation is used as the most compact way to present the most relevant aspects of the excerpt for our analysis, as the original data consists of four simultaneous data streams (two eye-trackers, two camcorders) arranged in a split screen, which is not suited to being presented in a small amount of space. It is important to note, however, that the stills we chose show only a part of the actual eye-tracking video in order to increase the visibility of the relevant phenomenon. This particular eye-tracking stream was chosen to illustrate the analysis at hand because, out of the four streams, it provides the best view of the participants' manipulation of the exhibit. While both of Milo's hands are visible in the lower part of the pictures in figure 2, the hand in the upper part of the images (with a


tattoo on the lower part of the arm) belongs to Stella (STE). The red cross hair represents the focus of Milo's gaze as measured and calculated by the eye-tracking software (D-Lab/Ergoneers). The verbal transcription follows the conventions of the transcription system called GAT2 by Selting et al. (2009). In addition, numbered hashtags were used to indicate the precise moment at which a still was taken relative to the verbal utterance. This approach is adapted from Kesselheim (2012).

5. Analysis

At the beginning of our extract, Stella grabs the 'bridge' of metal discs, which was set up between the two magnets, with two fingers (#1). At this point, she separates the 'bridge' (#2), but there are no discs in her hand when she withdraws it. Next, Stella grabs the remaining chain of discs (#3). Here, she starts her utterance as soon as her hand touches the chain of discs, which is attached to the big magnet on the right. This time she manages to separate the chain of discs from the magnet and takes away some of the discs (#4). Shortly afterwards, Stella brings back the same hand to get the discs which are still stuck to the big magnet (#5 and #6). She finishes her utterance slightly before managing to remove them from the magnet (#7). Then, Stella pulls back her hand (#8) and keeps the discs in it.

Eye-tracking Milo

#1 #2 #3 #4

#5 #6 #7 #8

140 (0.4)#1(0.7)#2(1.3)

141 STE: #3chasch gar ned #4RICH(.)tig#5 (.) usenand#6 neh

nochher;#7

you can't really separate them afterwards

142 (1.5)#8(2.5)

Figure 2: Verbal transcription of Stella's utterance and stills of Milo's eye-tracking.


The following analysis will scrutinise Stella's second grab (#3), by which she removes some of the discs from the chain. The discs separate from the chain while Stella pronounces the word 'richtig' (really). Stella's exact sequence of manipulation while she is uttering 'richtig' is illustrated in figure 3, this time with extracts of stills of both Stella's and Milo's eye-tracking data. Stella emphasises the first syllable and even produces a micro pause between the first and the second syllable (RICH(.)tig). The discs, which Stella grabs while she is uttering the first syllable, remain stuck to the chain at first (#9), but then come loose from the other part of the chain before the end of the syllable (#10). After the micro pause, she utters the second syllable (tig) while pulling back her hand (#11).

Eye-tracking Stella

#9.14

The discs remain stuck to the

magnet.

#10.1

Before the end of the syllable,

the discs separate from the

chain.

#11.1

Stella pulls back her hand.

#9RI#10CH(.)tig#11

Eye-tracking Milo

#9.2 #10.2 #11.2

Figure 3: Verbal transcription of Stella's utterance and stills of Stella's and Milo's eye-tracking.

4 The eye-tracking images labelled #9.1 and #9.2 show the exact same point in time, but #9.1 is

drawn from Stella's glasses while #9.2 comes from Milo's glasses. The same holds for the stills labelled #10.1/#10.2 and #11.1/#11.2.


This sequence (figure 3) is highly interesting with respect to the techniques Stella uses to share her sensory perceptions. Remember, her whole utterance translates as you can't really separate them afterwards. Given the fact that she is manipulating the discs which are stuck to the large magnet while uttering these words, Stella's utterance can be interpreted as a reference to said discs, which she describes as hard to separate. Thus, the lexical content of her utterance already comments on the tactile and proprioceptive experience the manipulation of the exhibit provides. What is more, the simultaneity of speech and the manipulation of the exhibit means that the exact way Stella pronounces and structures her utterance can be thought of as an illustration of her bodily actions and the way she perceives them, not just visually but also in terms of her tactile and proprioceptive perceptions. Let us examine the structure of the decisive part of this utterance in detail while also considering Stella's simultaneous embodied actions: Stella stresses the first syllable of the word 'richtig' (RICH(.)tig) while she is pulling on the chain of discs (and before the discs separate from the large magnet). Therefore, the stress on the first syllable can be read as a verbal 'illustration' of the 'force' she has to apply to separate the discs from the magnet due to the counterforce of the magnet. Next, Stella produces a micro pause before she finishes the word 'richtig'. This micro pause does not precisely coincide with the rupture of the chain of discs, but follows with a very minor 'delay' (RI#10CH(.)tig).5 Thus, Stella's way of pronouncing the word 'richtig' can be heard as displaying the observation of counterforce and rupture she made immediately before. In a similar vein, the micro pause can be said to illustrate the sudden release of the discs from the chain of magnets. Overall, the precise way Stella structures her utterance in conjunction with her simultaneous bodily actions (separating the discs from the magnet) can be interpreted as a vocal depiction of the tactile and proprioceptive dimension of her observation of rupture, by which this perception is made interactively available to her partner. It is important to add here that it is not the case that the manipulation of the exhibit at hand requires a lot of force. Consequently, Stella's vocal depiction of her tactile perception and proprioception simply provides additional information to what her partner perceives visually and through his own manipulations. Simultaneously, her vocal depiction may also function as a means for Stella to structure her perception towards herself.

In addition, this example shows that through her way of structuring her utterance Stella can also emphasise the tactile dimension of her experience vis-à-vis the visual dimension. Obviously, the resistance and rupture of the disc of magnets can be perceived visually too. Nevertheless, in this case, the full potential of the experience is not limited to the visual field. This is precisely what Stella's vocal depiction manages to display: Even if Milo sees her actions and knows through

5 Remember that the stills at #10 show the moment of the chain's rupture.


his own experience what the discs feel like, Stella's vocal depiction allows Milo (and the analyst) to recognize that, despite the dominance of the visual field in interaction noted by Nishizaka (2000; 2011), she emphasises the tactile domain. Indeed, Milo's next actions after this utterance seem to validate this reading: He manipulates the metal discs several times in a way that allows him to make tactile and proprioceptive experiences that are similar to the one evoked by Stella and, thereby, to reduce the "epistemic gradient" (Heritage 2012: 4) between him and his partner and acquire "primary access" (Raymond/Heritage 2006: 684) to that particular tactile experience.

A final point to consider is that the fact that Stella applies a vocal depiction allows her to share her perception (be it visual, tactile, or proprioceptive6) with her partner, even if the latter does not have the exact same domain of scrutiny at the very moment of her utterance. Milo's eye-tracking video indicates that at the moment when Stella is pronouncing 'richtig' (see figure 3: #9.2, #10.2, #11.2 above), Milo is occupied with his own manipulation of the exhibit and not focusing on the discs Stella is talking about. Even if it is very likely that he can still perceive Stella's manipulations without focusing on them,7 she can improve her partner's awareness of what she is doing by vocally depicting her perception of a procedure he is not looking at directly8 and not experiencing through touch. Stella's vocal depiction, therefore, has at least two effects: It presents an experience to Milo and it provides him with details of a domain of scrutiny other than his own.

6. Conclusion

Our analysis has shown one technique of how non-visual perceptions can be made available in interaction. What is striking about Stella's vocal depiction of her tactile perception is the intricate way it is tied to the sequentiality of her manipulation of the exhibit and the way it links language, tactile perception, proprioception and vision. Therefore, the example at hand is a case in point of why it is important not to isolate the ways interactants share sensory perceptions, but instead to consider how multiple sensory perceptions are shared while participants are interacting in a particular physical environment.

6 Research in biology suggests that touch and proprioception, which are usually understood as

being separate "modalities", are in fact interrelated both on the perceptual and on the physiological level, even if they can still be distinguished in terms of their "neural coding" (Ricon-Gonzalez et al. 2001: 490).

7 The frame of the eye-tracking pictures is not a reliable reference for the field of vision of the participants. The eye-tracking software detects the participants' focus, but does not give evidence of what participants perceive in their peripheral vision.

8 This is not to say that Stella can know exactly what Milo is focussing on and thus uses a vocal depiction on purpose.


Bibliography

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Keevallik, L. (in press): The temporal organization of conversation while mucking out a sheep stable. In A. Deppermann & J. Streeck (éds.), Time in embodied interaction: Synchronicity and sequentiality of multimodal resources. Amsterdam/Philadelphia (John Benjamins), 97-122

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Nishizaka, A. (2000): Seeing what one sees: perception, emotion, and activity. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7(1-2), 105-123.

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Ricon-Gonzalez, L., Warren, J. P., Meller, D. M., Helms Tillery, S. (2011): Haptic interaction of touch and proprioception: implications for neuroprosthetics. IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 19(5), 490-500.

Selting, M., Auer, P., Barth-Weingarten, D., Bergmann, J., Bergmann, P., Birkner, K., Couper-Kuhlen, E., Deppermann, A., Gilles, P., Günthner, S., Hartung, M., Kern, F., Mertzlufft, C., Meyer, C., Morek, M., Oberzaucher, F., Peters, J., Quasthoff, U., Schütte, W., Stukenbrock, A. & Uhmann, S. (2009): Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2 (GAT 2). Gesprächsforschung – Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion, 10, 353-402.


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vom Lehn, D., Heath, C. & Hindmarsh, J. (2001): Exhibiting interaction: conduct and collaboration in museums and galleries. Symbolic Interaction, 24(2), 189-216.


Intentional communication in primates

Klaus ZUBERBÜHLER University of Neuchâtel

Human communication, including language, is the product of underlying intentions that are purposely expressed, epistemically monitored and flexibly interpreted. A main question in science has been about the evolutionary origins of this cognitive capacity. One way to address the problem is by studying the natural communication of animals, particularly non-human primates. As everything in biology, evolutionary transitions are gradual events, suggesting that intention may also have evolved in different stages as a function of increasing brainpower and cognitive complexity. In this chapter, I review empirical work on primate communication, which suggests that goal-directed intentional communication is well within the scope of animals, while simple mind-directed intentionality may be restricted to great apes and humans and shared intentionality may be an exclusively human capacity.

1. Introduction

Scientific interest in primate communication has emerged as a mainstream research programme in the 1960s, particularly with pioneering fieldwork on vervet monkeys, which documented unprecedented complexity in vocal communication (Struhsaker 1967). A particularly important finding was that this species was capable of producing acoustically distinct alarm calls to different predators, which elicited distinct behavioural reactions in recipients, as if the calls were meaningful to them (Seyfarth, Cheney & Marler 1980). This basic finding has since been replicated to other species, suggesting that basic referential capacities are a general feature of animal communication (Zuberbühler & Neumann 2017).

The wider implications of these findings, however, have caused considerable debate. For instance, it became rapidly clear that primates, and animals in general, possess species-specific call repertoires, with different signals used in clearly defined situations, suggesting a strong genetic component. The contrast to human language turned out to be immense, with no signs of arbitrarily structured, culturally determined, and socially conventionalised utterances in any animal communication system. At the same time, the results of various artificial language projects demonstrated that some animals were very able to acquire and use symbols to communicate with their human caretakers and sometimes with each other e.g. (Segerdahl, Fields & Savage-Rumbaugh 2005). Also, recent studies of spontaneous gesturing in great apes demonstrated high levels of production flexibility with clearly identifiable social goals (Call & Tomasello 2007). Overall, these findings created somewhat of a theoretical conundrum: How could the same individual, be able to produce visual signals in flexible, symbolic and intentional ways on the one hand, and on the other hand be so bound by hardwired and inflexible vocal signals (Seyfarth & Cheney 2011)?

70 Intentional communication in primates

2. Intentionality in animal communication

There are at least two different notions of intentionality (Zuberbühler & Gomez in press). First, intentionality has been defined as aboutness, or "the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) (Searle 1983). Second, in developmental psychology intentionality is usually defined in terms of a commitment to carrying out an action with planning and forethought. This view has also been adopted by philosophers of language, who have pointed out that in human language the literal meaning of a linguistic utterance is often superseded by an underlying intended meaning (Grice, 1969). In this view, intentional communication is conceptualised as goal-directedness, with our without reference to mental states.

3. The intentional stance

3.1 Levels of intentionality

One particularly influential way of distinguishing between different types of intentionality has been proposed by (Dennett 1983). In human language speakers communicate to their social partners by producing highly structured vocal utterances to convey mental representations of objects or events. Different languages do this in different ways, but they are all capable of conveying and transmitting roughly the same mental content, either directly by literal meaning or indirectly by invoking intentions.

Although vervet monkey alarm calls are undoubtedly part of this species' communicative repertoire, they share interesting properties with human language. In particular, playbacks of alarm calls given to eagles, leopards, and pythons cause others to respond in ways that suggest that the calls are meaningful to them. For instance, after hearing a snake alarm, monkeys respond by bipedally scanning the surrounding area, as if trying to locate the putative snake. Yet, these findings cannot determine whether monkeys delivered their signals with an intention to inform others, or as part of an inbuilt mechanism. To address this, Dennett (1983) proposed a theoretical framework, the 'intentional stance', to assess animal behaviour in relation to levels of intentionality, as seen in human communication (table 1).

Klaus Zuberbühler 71

Intention Content

0 order A recognises x

1st order A wants B to x

2nd order A wants B to recognize x

3rd order A wants B to recognize that A wants B to x

4th order A wants B to recognize that A wants B to recognise x

5th order ….

Table 1: Dennett's (1983) levels of intentionality in animal communication

According to Dennet's model, 0-order intentionality attributes no intentionality to a monkey giving eagle alarm calls. Instead, the caller may simply react automatically to the perception of an eagle, which may trigger a distinct flavour of anxiety, linked to the production of a distinct signal, the eagle alarm. Due to the tight link between external event and signal, listeners can form simple associations, allowing them to react appropriately. Signallers and recipients, in other words, are not mentally connected during such events, and what looks like deliberate communication is nothing but an evolved system.

3.2 First order intentionality

However, if monkeys produced alarm calls with the specific purpose to influence each other's behaviour, they may be granted with first order intentionality. Several studies have suggested that this level is well within the cognitive capacities of non-human animals. In one striking example, male Thomas langurs produced alarm calls to a tiger model and continued to produce alarm calls until every group member had responded with an alarm call, as if to ensure that the predator had been perceived (Wich & de Vries 2006). Similarly, female Diana monkeys continue to alarm call to a predator, until their own male also produced his own matching alarm calls, in response to which they stop their vocal behaviour (Stephan & Zuberbuhler 2016).

For great apes, there is also good evidence for first order intentional signalling. For instance, wild chimpanzee that are victims of aggression have been observed to "exaggerate" their victim screams, but only in the presence of high-ranking audiences, as if to persuade them to come for help (Slocombe & Zuberbühler 2007). Also, prior to travel, chimpanzees sometimes produce distinct 'travel hoos' as part of a complex departure behaviour that includes audience checking and other signs of goal-directed behaviour (Gruber & Zuberbuehler 2013).

Great apes also possess a rich repertoire of gestures, mostly produced during social interactions. These signals are delivered with some awareness of the audience, in the sense that they are socially directed and often produced with


goal-oriented persistence. For example, when shown the location of hidden food, one captive chimpanzee was able to direct a searching and ignorant human with gestures to the correct location (Roberts, Vick, Roberts & Menzel 2014). In natural communication, bonobos use beckoning gestures to persuade sexual partners to follow them to a desired location, also with persistence and signal elaboration (Genty & Zuberbuhler 2014). Such goal-directed intentional signalling is also present in facial expressions, such as chimpanzee lip-smacking during grooming, which is linked to longer and more reciprocal grooming bouts (Fedurek, Slocombe, Hartel & Zuberbuhler 2015).

These results and other studies indicate that primate alarm calls are not just automatic and direct responses to external events, but the product of at least first-order intentionality, according to Dennett's (1983) scale.

3.3 Second-order intentionality: Communication as mental state attribution

The evidence reviewed so far is consistent with the idea that primates are at least capable of first-order intentionality, which is particularly visible during ape gesturing but also in some vocal behaviour. But are primates also able to take into account each other's mental states when producing and understanding signals? The fact that signallers are sometimes influenced by the presence of specific audiences does not provide very strong evidence, as this could be explained by subconscious 'implicit' rather than conscious, goal-directed cognition. To this end, it would be necessary to demonstrate that signallers not only show signs of 'wanting' a recipient to do something specific, but also of wanting to be understood. Behavioural evidence for this requires monitoring and acting upon an addressee's mental state, such as a percept, desire or belief.

There is relatively strong evidence that great apes at least can make judgments about what others can or cannot see. For example, before gesturing, great apes sometimes try to attract the attention of an addressee, suggesting that they are aware of the other's visual attention (Hostetter, Cantero & Hopkins 2001). Other studies suggest that great apes can go beyond mere visual perception and attribute knowledge to others. For example, when interacting with a familiar or unfamiliar human caretaker, and when reluctant to hand over food, bonobos were more likely to repeat their gestures to a familiar keeper and more likely to elaborate their gestures to an unfamiliar one, as if taking into account their knowledge differences (Genty, Neumann & Zuberbuhler 2015). In the vocal domain, the most progress has been made with chimpanzees reacting to snake models. In one study, it was shown that alert calls to snakes were more common if signalers were in the company of unaware audiences compared to knowledgeable ones (Crockford, Wittig, Mundry & Zuberbuhler 2012; Crockford, Wittig & Zuberbuhler 2015).


In sum, there is some evidence that great apes at least are able to take into account the mental states of others when communicating to them. Higher orders of intentionality, such as the active desire to instill a mental state, however, may be beyond the cognitive capacities of animals.

3.4 Intention as aboutness

As outlined before, there is another sense of intentionality, intention as aboutness. In this view, a signal is emitted or understood as being about an object. In the vervet monkey example, a receiver may interpret an eagle alarm call as indicating, not just that there is an eagle, but also that a caller has found an eagle and that the alarm call is about the eagle (Zuberbühler & Gomez in press). Obviously, it is much more challenging to find clear behavioural indicators for signal processing at this level. There is some evidence that some primates perceive intentionality in the communication behaviour of others, but this only partially fulfils the required criteria. For example, free-ranging baboons can distinguish between calls directed at themselves and calls directed at other individuals (Engh, Hoffmeier, Cheney & Seyfarth 2006). In chimpanzees, victims of aggressions will retreat from the playback of aggressive barks given by an ally of the former opponent, but ignore the same barks if given by other group members, even hours after the conflict (Wittig, Crockford, Langergraber & Zuberbuhler 2014). In sum, when witnessing vocal signals, baboons, chimpanzees and probably other primates seem to understand something about the targeted recipient, an ability required to recognize others' intentions and motives.

3.5 Shared intentionality

A recent proposal has been that humans are not only capable of higher orders of intentionality, but that they are additionally able to perceive others' intentions and align them with their own (Tomasello & Moll 2010). This ability to share goals and intentions when participating in collaborative activities has been linked with powerful forms of mindreading and a motivation to share mental states with others, to enter some kind of shared cognitive representation of joint intentions (Zuberbühler & Gomez in press). The proposal is that the implications of this ability are enormous, by enabling subjects to create linguistic conventions, social norms and social institutions. Although great apes understand the basics of intentional action, and may use communicative signals to affect others' intentions, they do not appear to reach the level of shared intentionality. The primary reason may well be that sharing intentions necessitates an ability to not only perceive the mental states of others, but also to have a desire to change them in ways that enable joint intention.

4. Conclusions


There is good evidence that primates and possibly many other groups of animals use vocal and gestural signals in a goal-directed, first-order intentionality sense, as proposed by Dennett (1983). The evidence is less strong for second-order intentionality in communication, although numerous other studies have shown that great apes at least are able to attribute mental states to others, suggesting that this capacity should also reveal itself during acts of communication. However, there is no clear evidence that any animal has the capacity to want to influence another's mental state, which may prevent them from sharing intentionality with each other.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Crockford, C., Wittig, R. M., Mundry, R., & Zuberbuhler, K. (2012): Wild Chimpanzees Inform Ignorant Group Members of Danger. Current Biology, 22(2), 142-146.

Crockford, C., Wittig, R. M., & Zuberbuhler, K. (2015): An intentional vocalization draws others' attention: A playback experiment with wild chimpanzees. Animal Cognition, 18(3), 581-591.

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Fedurek, P., Slocombe, K. E., Hartel, J. A., & Zuberbuhler, K. (2015): Chimpanzee lip-smacking facilitates cooperative behaviour. Scientific Reports, 5.

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Slocombe, K. E., & Zuberbühler, K. (2007): Chimpanzees modify recruitment screams as a function of audience composition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104, 17228-17233.

Stephan, C., & Zuberbuhler, K. (2016): Persistent Females and Compliant Males Coordinate Alarm Calling in Diana Monkeys. Current Biology, 26(21), 2907-2912.

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Apprentissage social affectif et appréciation de l'émotion: structuration des interactions socio-émotionnelles

Daniel DUKES Psychology Research Institute, Université de Amsterdam, Pays-Bas Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, Université de Genève, Suisse

This paper highlights a novel concept that focuses on obtaining knowledge through the observation of others. In the same way as social learning is concerned with learning from others how to use objects in the environment through various forms of imitation, what we have called 'affective social learning' is concerned with learning how to value objects in the environment through the emotional expressions of others. This paper also looks to highlight the importance of taking a relational view of emotion recognition – what I have called emotion appreciation. This concept offers a more holistic approach than just focusing on facial emotion recognition and, in my opinion, is more likely to help the infant or the newcomer understand how to value the objects in their new environment.

1. Introduction

Lorsque l'on observe un individu en action, il semble naturel et quasi-automatique d'interpréter son comportement (Gilbert 1997). Nous pouvons ainsi découvrir comment utiliser un objet pour une tâche définie et, en imitant les actions d'une personne envers ledit objet, apprendre à le manier. Ce processus a été appelé apprentissage social (Bandura 1977). Nous pouvons par ailleurs découvrir la valeur d'un objet sur la base d'une expression faciale: on peut déduire d'un sourire, par exemple, que le tournevis fonctionne, d'une expression de dégoût que la nourriture est mauvaise ou d'une expression d'intérêt que les informations sont pertinentes (Clément & Dukes 2013). Bien sûr, il est parfaitement possible de découvrir les caractéristiques (e.x. dangers vs. bienfaits) de nombreux objets de notre environnement par nous-mêmes (Piaget 1937). Cependant, certaines connaissances doivent être acquises des autres (à leur insu ou non) soit de façon directe (Harris 2012), à travers un récit – comme l'histoire familiale - soit indirectement, en utilisant des évaluations non-verbales (c'est-à-dire émotionnelles (Manstead & Fischer 2001)). Apprendre des autres a pour avantage de permettre une investigation relativement sans risque (Olsson & Phelps 2007). Il est préférable, par exemple, de comprendre qu'un objet est dangereux par l'expression de peur qu'il provoque chez un tiers, plutôt qu'en s'y confrontant personnellement.

Dans cet article, je décris un nouveau concept regroupant certains phénomènes liés à l'utilisation des émotions des autres afin de guider nos ressentis et nos actions. Ce concept a déjà contribué à structurer la littérature sur les réactions

78 Apprentissage social affectif et appréciation de l'émotion

socio-émotionnelles, en fournissant un cadre et une nouvelle dynamique à ce domaine de recherche (Clément & Dukes 2017; Dukes & Clément 2017; Dukes & Clément à paraître). En accord avec ce qui précède, je soutiens que l'identification du ressenti d'un individu vis-à-vis d'un objet - comment il l'évalue - nécessite beaucoup plus que le simple recours à une expression d'émotion faciale.

1.1 Apprentissage social affectif

L'idée que nous utilisons les émotions d'autres personnes pour guider notre comportement n'est pas nouvelle : une des recherches phares en psychologie du développement parle du 'référencement social' et du paradigme de la falaise visuelle dans lequel des nourrissons âgés de 12 mois pouvaient s'élancer dans un vide apparent en fonction de l'expression faciale de leur mère (Sorce, Emde, Campos & Klinnert 1985). Ainsi, quand leur mère exprimait de la joie, 14 enfants sur 19 traversaient la 'falaise'; néanmoins, lorsque la mère exprimait de la peur, aucun des 17 enfants ne traversait. L'explication proposée est que les enfants utilisaient l'expression faciale de leur mère pour évaluer le risque de traverser la falaise.

Une autre notion, très répandue en psychologie sociale, également liée à l'idée d'utiliser les expressions émotionnelles des autres comme guide, est 'l'évaluation sociale' (Manstead & Fischer 2001). Ce concept décrit spécifiquement comment nous tenons compte du ressenti des autres vis-à-vis d'un objet dans notre propre évaluation de cet objet. Le terme lui-même a été inventé par Campos & Stenberg (1981) lorsqu'ils ont examiné la façon avec laquelle nous évaluons les objets dans notre environnement. Il a ensuite été repris et formalisé, environ vingt ans plus tard, par Manstead et Fischer afin de motiver les chercheurs en sciences affectives à considérer les aspects sociaux de l'émotion (Manstead & Fischer 2001). Campos a également joué un rôle déterminant dans la recherche sur le référencement social, en étudiant, tel que mentionné plus haut, la manière dont les enfants utilisent les expressions émotionnelles des adultes pour réguler leur comportement (Klinnert et al. 1983; Sorce et al. 1985).

Il existe clairement un chevauchement entre ces deux concepts mais, dans un article récent, nous avons soutenu la nécessité de les distinguer par souci de clarté (Clément & Dukes 2017). Parmi les caractéristiques distinctives que nous avons soulignées, la plus importante est peut-être qu'il y a des situations d'évaluation sociale où l'on peut apprendre de l'expression émotionnelle des autres à leur insu, alors que le référencement social se réfère plutôt à des situations interpersonnelles où les deux acteurs sont conscients de la présence de l'autre et de son état émotionnel. Selon notre distinction, l'évaluation sociale renvoie donc à une notion plus générale que le référencement social (mais voir Walle, Reschke & Knothe 2017, pour l'argument alternatif selon lequel

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l'évaluation sociale et le référencement social sont essentiellement identiques).

Notons que la première réflexion scientifique considérant l'expression faciale comme un moyen qui nous permet de savoir comment les autres se sentent remonte peut-être à Charles Darwin (1872/1955). Ainsi, qu'est-ce qui justifierait de proposer un nouveau concept en plus de celui de l'évaluation sociale ?

Nous avons proposé le terme d'apprentissage socio-affectif (Clément & Dukes 2017; Dukes & Clément 2017) pour structurer les différents processus interpersonnels définissant la façon dont nous apprenons à partir des expressions affectives des autres. Ce terme inclut, non seulement le référencement social (Campos & Sternberg 1981) et l'évaluation sociale (Manstead & Fischer 2001), mais aussi la contagion émotionnelle (Hatfield, Cacioppo & Rapsen 1993) et la pédagogie naturelle (Csibra & Gergely 2009). Si nous classons tous ces phénomènes au niveau de l'interaction sociale, cadre nécessaire à leur déroulement, la contagion émotionnelle est à un extrême du classement de l'apprentissage social affectif et la pédagogie naturelle à l'autre extrême.

L'idée principale dans la contagion émotionnelle (Hatfield et al. 1993), réside dans le fait que l'enfant peut être à la fois conscient de la présence de l'adulte, mais aussi de son état émotionnel, et ce, même s'il ignore ce qui en est la cause. Par exemple, un bébé jouant dans sa chambre entend son père crier de peur depuis la cuisine, ce dernier saigne après s'être coupé le doigt. Par le biais de la contagion émotionnelle, l'enfant 'attrape' l'état affectif de son père et est à son tour apeuré bien qu'il ne soit pas conscient de la cause du cri. Dans cet exemple, il n'y pas de co-conscience de l'objet : seul le père pourrait identifier la vue du sang comme l'objet de sa peur. Comme le soulignent Parkinson & Simons (2009), la co-conscience de l'objet, ou l'absence de celle-ci, marque la distinction entre contagion émotionnelle et évaluation sociale.

A l'autre extrême du classement de l'apprentissage social affectif, la co-sensibilisation (et même l'attention conjointe) sont des éléments cruciaux pour la pédagogie naturelle. La pédagogie naturelle est un concept qui souligne d'une part, le fait que les adultes bénéficient de compétences à la fois vocales (motherese - Fernald, 1985) et comportementales (motionese - Brand, Baldwin & Ashburn 2002) préprogrammées facilitant la transmission de connaissances, et d'autre part, que les enfants semblent détenir très jeunes des capacités socio-cognitives pour recevoir ce type de communication (Csibra & Gergely 2009). Bien que les auteurs n'aient pas été explicites sur le rôle de l'émotion dans la pédagogie naturelle, il semble clair que l'émotion peut jouer une part importante quant à la façon avec laquelle une information particulière est communiquée. En effet, beaucoup d'expériences sur ce concept incluent une composante émotionnelle essentielle (par ex. Egyed, Kiraly & Gergely 2013, Kovács, Téglás, Gergely & Csibra 2016). Nous estimons que la pédagogie naturelle est le point final de l'apprentissage social affectif car elle définit la situation la plus socialement interactive, c'est-à-dire durant laquelle les objets sont définis de


façon explicite avec ou sans contenu verbal.

Ces composantes de l'apprentissage social affectif ne recouvrent pas tous les phénomènes possiblement impliqués dans les interactions sociales et la communication. Cependant, après avoir identifié les processus délimitant cette nouvelle structure (contagion émotionnelle et pédagogie naturelle) et les principaux piliers qui la constituent (différents types d'évaluation sociale), nous estimons avoir fourni les bases d'un concept qui peut à présent être construit et développé (Clément & Dukes 2017; Dukes & Clément 2017).

Il s'agit désormais d'expliquer comment nous apprenons des expressions des autres. Afin d'identifier la façon dont les autres appréhendent les objets dans leur environnement, il semble crucial d'évaluer dans un premier temps leurs expressions, et, dans un second temps, de comprendre comment nous y parvenons. Dans la section suivante, je présente le concept d'appréciation de l'émotion permettant d'amener un nouvel éclairage sur ce problème longtemps débattu. Pour ce faire, j'illustrerai mon point de vue en décrivant le cas de l'émotion de l'intérêt. En effet, l'intérêt tient une place particulièrement importante puisque, en utilisant les expressions des autres, il permet de déterminer si un objet mérite d'être observé avec plus d'attention. De plus, les dernières recherches sur l'expression de l'intérêt démontrent une fois encore les limites à n'utiliser que les expressions faciales quand il s'agit de reconnaître une émotion chez les autres.

1.2 Évaluation de l'émotion

La position classique sur la reconnaissance de l'émotion est que nous pouvons juger de manière fiable comment quelqu'un se sent grâce à son expression faciale. Paul Ekman, sans doute le plus fervent partisan de la théorie de l'émotion basique et de l'importance de l'expression du visage, soutient que l'intérêt n'est pas une émotion (Ekman & Cordaro 2011). Cette conclusion tient probablement au fait qu'il n'a pas réussi à découvrir une expression faciale universelle de l'intérêt (Ekman 1993). Mais il existe de plus en plus de preuves que l'importance donnée à l'expression faciale de l'émotion est erronée et il semble que certains théoriciens des émotions basiques soient prêts à accepter que la reconnaissance de l'émotion ne dépende pas uniquement de l'expression du visage. Nous pouvons notamment citer Tracy et son travail sur la reconnaissance universelle des expressions corporelles de l'émotion de la fierté (par ex. Tracy & Robins 2004; 2007). Plus récemment, nous avons fourni des preuves soutenant le point de vue d'Ekman, à savoir que les expressions d'intérêt sont très difficiles à reconnaître lorsqu'elles sont présentées sous une forme plus traditionnelle, c'est-à-dire sur un visage statique. Nous avons également montré des taux de reconnaissance plus élevés pour l'expression de l'intérêt, de même que pour des émotions traditionnellement testées (expressions faciales de : colère, dégoût, peur, bonheur, tristesse et surprise),

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lorsqu'elles étaient présentées de manière dynamique, ou avec une vue complète du corps (Dukes, Clément, Audrin & Mortillaro 2017). Ainsi, nous constatons qu'en utilisant des stimuli plus complexes, il est possible d'identifier de manière fiable un plus grand nombre d'expressions comme étant représentatives d'une émotion.

Par ailleurs, il a été montré que l'information contextuelle fournie par le corps à un visage peut être déterminante dans la façon dont une expression du visage est comprise. Par exemple, l'expression faciale de ‘dégoût' d'Ekman a été reconnue comme telle par 81% des participants lorsque présentée sur un corps qui était contextuellement congruent à l'émotion - le corps tenait une couche sale. En revanche, 78% des participants ont reconnu cette expression du visage comme étant une expression de fierté quand elle a été placée sur un corps fournissant un contexte non-congruent – un corps de bodybuilder avec les mains sur les hanches. Dans ce cas, aucun des participants n'a reconnu cette expression comme une expression de dégoût. (Aviezer, Hassin, Ryan et al. 2008). Les auteurs expliquent que, "le contexte n'influence pas simplement la perception de l'émotion en surface ; mais conduit à des changements radicaux de catégories" (Hassin, Aviezer & Bentin 2013: 60).

Ainsi, bien que l'expression faciale statique d'une émotion est parfois suffisante pour que l'émotion soit identifiée, il faut la considérer comme un moyen imparfait d'identification pour plusieurs raisons. Tout d'abord, identifier (et pouvoir nommer les émotions) à partir d'une expression faciale statique ne correspond aucunement à la réalité d'une interaction sociale. Ensuite, on ne sait pas à quelle fréquence les visages stéréotypés qu'Ekman a présentés comme universellement reconnaissables (Ekman & Friesen 1978) sont effectivement générés dans la vie réelle (Wagner, MacDonald & Manstead 1986; Scherer & Ceschi 1997). Enfin, le contexte fourni par le corps donne des indications précieuses. Comme des études antérieures l'indiquent, il augmente la facilité de la reconnaissance des expressions faciales, et va même jusqu'à déterminer quelle est l'émotion identifiée.

En lien avec ce qui précède, nous avons récemment fait valoir aux chercheurs de ce domaine, l'intérêt de se pencher davantage sur la manière dont les individus reconnaissent les sentiments accordés par autrui aux objets de leur environnement (Reschke, Walle & Dukes 2017). Cette appréciation émotionnelle (permettant aussi l'anticipation de réactions subséquentes) est plus complexe que l'identification passive d'une expression faciale particulière. Ainsi, selon nous, l'expression faciale est mieux identifiée lorsque l'on comprend la signification de la relation personne-objet-contexte. L'appréciation de l'émotion est donc une reconnaissance de la relation que la personne a avec un objet, compte tenu d'un contexte particulier.

Pour illustrer notre propos, nous avons réinterprété des expériences classiques de la cognition sociale chez le petit enfant et mis en évidence une composante affective qui a été, au mieux, sous-estimée par les auteurs originaux. Par


exemple, dans une étude classique du comportement altruiste, des enfants de 18 mois ouvraient la porte pour un individu qui portait un tas de livres et essayait, sans succès, de les mettre dans un placard fermé (Warneken & Tomasello 2006). Quelle que soit la nature, altruiste ou autre, du comportement des enfants, nous proposons qu'ils réagissent certainement à la relation affective entre la personne et ses objectifs (ouvrir la porte du placard), par le biais d'une appréciation de la frustration générée chez l'autre par la situation. Dans une deuxième expérience classique (Meltzoff 1995), des enfants de 18 mois voyaient un adulte essayer mais échouer d'effectuer une action simple sur un objet (par exemple, une action similaire à celle de retirer le bouchon d'un stylo). L'adulte confiait ensuite l'objet à l'enfant. L'objectif était de déterminer si les enfants reproduiraient exactement l'action dont ils avaient été témoins (échouer à enlever le bouchon) ou s'ils allaient accomplir l'action jusqu'à son aboutissement, ayant compris l'intention de l'adulte (enlever le bouchon). Les résultats montrent que les enfants effectuent avec succès l'action, même s'ils n'avaient jamais vu l'adulte l'accomplir. Selon l'auteur, ce résultat semble être la preuve que les enfants comprennent l'intention de l'adulte. Nous soutenons que le fait de répéter des tentatives sans réussir à accomplir une action peut être interprété comme un signe de frustration de la même manière que de se retrouver face à une porte fermée (Reschke et al. 2017). L'enfant est peut-être capable de comprendre l'intention de l'adulte, mais, selon nous, c'est probablement parce qu'il a, dans un premier temps, reconnu un sentiment de frustration à travers les tentatives répétées.

Ce raisonnement nous a conduit à entreprendre une nouvelle ligne de recherches expérimentales démontrant que les enfants de 18 mois sont en effet sensibles à ces signaux émotionnels, même en l'absence d'expression faciale (Reschke, Walle & Dukes in prep). Dans une étude qui reprend le protocole utilisé par Meltzoff (1995), nous avons testé des enfants plus jeunes afin de voir s'ils accomplissent l'action lorsqu'elle est présentée avec une expression positive (par exemple la joie) plutôt que négative (la frustration). Notre hypothèse est que, dans ce cas, les enfants devraient mimer l'action effectuée par l'adulte plutôt que l'accomplir. Nous espérons ainsi rendre les chercheurs du domaine attentifs au fait que même les nourrissons sont sensibles à des expressions affectives plus subtiles que les expressions faciales classiquement utilisées dans les expériences de cognition sociale.

2. Conclusion

Dans cet article, j'ai introduit le concept d'apprentissage social affectif comme modèle rassemblant des processus liés à l'interaction sociale et la communication à valeur émotionnelle (intentionnelle ou non). La description de ces différents processus a permis de clarifier les similitudes et les différences du référencement social et de l'évaluation sociale. Ce nouveau concept a déjà fait l'objet d'un symposium international, et ouvre maintenant de nouvelles pistes

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de réflexion (Dukes & Clément, éds. à paraître). De plus, les mises en évidences théoriques et expérimentales de cet article me permettent d'avancer que l'utilisation d'un modèle relationnel pour expliquer la façon dont nous apprenons à apprécier les expressions des autres est plus puissante que la seule utilisation des expressions faciales. Par exemple, selon le contexte, un mouvement répétitif peut signaler une frustration à autrui sans que la personne n'exprime d'émotion faciale (Reschke et al. 2017). Nous espérons que le concept d'apprentissage social affectif permettra de fournir un cadre théorique pour la recherche sur l'évaluation sociale et plus généralement sur la communication affective, et que le concept d'appréciation de l'émotion servira de guide pour les recherches empiriques futures.

Remerciements

Ce travail a été réalisé en partie grâce au soutien du Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique, projet P2NEP1_178584.

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Sharing Emotions Impacts Computer-Supported Collaborative Processes: Effect of an Emotion Awareness Tool

Sunny AVRY & Gaëlle MOLINARI TECFA, University of Geneva & Distance Learning University Switzerland (UniDistance)

There is a large consensus among researchers on the significant role of emotions in group effectiveness and performance. Emotion awareness tools (EATs) have been developed in recent years allowing members of a group to identify with their own- and their partner's emotions through a computer-mediated collaboration. In this study, we report the impact of an EAT on socio-cognitive and relational processes, and its differential effect depending on gender. This study shows that the EAT was beneficial for processes contributing to the quality of working relationships and the mutual modeling process, by which group members gain a better awareness of their partner's knowledge.

1. Introduction

Roschelle and Teasley defined collaboration as "a coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem" (Roschelle & Teasley 1995: 70). In the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) field, it is well accepted that the success of collaboration depends on the occurrence of specific forms of social interactions, namely constructive and productive interactions such as processes by which collaborative partners a) construct and update a shared understanding (grounding; Dillenbourg, Traum, & Schneider 1996), b) collect relevant problem-based information from each other (knowledge elicitation; Cooke 1994), and c) build on their respective contributions to the problem (transactivity; Berkowitz & Gibbs 1983).

However, working together does not always guarantee better learning gains. Even if teamwork can contribute to improved performance, it can sometimes have the opposite effect, degrading performance and discouraging learners. Barron (2003) showed that quantitative variables like the group's prior knowledge, the number of turns, and even the number of correct ideas generated during interaction are not sufficient to explain differences between groups in terms of problem-solving scores. She pointed out that more subtle variables like how learners react to their collaborative partners' proposals (by accepting/discussing or conversely rejecting/ignoring them) are more significant to consider when explaining the underperformance of groups with similar characteristics at the cognitive level. Barron therefore claims that there is a need to understand collaboration as a dual-problem space, where participants must

86 Sharing Emotions Impacts Computer-Supported Collaborative Processes

engage with each other in the development of both a cognitive space (solving the problem itself) and a relational space (maintaining a positive and motivating working relationship; see also Andriessen, Baker, & van der Puil 2011). Based on Barron's (2003) dual-space model, the present study investigates interactive processes that occur during a computer-supported collaborative design task, and focuses on both cognitive and relational aspects.

This study also concerns the sharing of emotions in remote collaboration. Collaboration is a challenging and demanding task, and people continuously experience and express (either verbally or non-verbally) positive and negative emotions when working towards a common goal. The relations between emotions and cognition, more specifically reciprocal linkages between emotions, learning processes, strategies, and outcomes are currently well documented. For example, Pekrun (2006) demonstrated that the learners' positive emotions like enjoyment relate positively to the self-regulation of learning and academic achievement, whereas negative emotions like boredom relate negatively to processes and outcomes. Improving our understanding and further addressing the role of emotions in collaborative settings is still a necessity, predominantly their effects on both cognitive and relational processes of collaborative learning.

In recent years, a growing interest in this research topic has emerged. Formerly research focused specifically on the role of emotional expression during face-to-face interaction. Previous research showed that expressing positive emotions such as happiness increases the approach behavior, promotes interpersonal trust, affiliation, group cohesion and cooperation (Barsade 2002; Fredrickson & Branigan 2011; Kelly & Barsade 2001). In contrast, negative emotions such as anger provoke avoidance behavior, reduce cooperation and can have a detrimental effect on group performance (Van Kleef, Dreu, & Manstead 2010). Rimé (2015) also found that individuals may benefit from sharing their emotions with others because it allows them to better understand themselves and makes them feel accepted by others. Finally, there is also research that focuses specifically on the divergences of emotion-related processes between women and men. Women are more likely to express their emotions, and score higher than men on measures of social sensitivity (Kring & Gordon 1998; Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone 2010).

A large variety of verbal strategies combined with nonverbal and paralinguistic mechanisms (e.g. facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice) can be used to express emotions. The access to these non-verbal cues is limited in remote computer-supported collaboration (CMC). Such a limitation may be detrimental to the mutual awareness and understanding of emotions experienced during interaction. Furthermore, discrepancies between expressed and perceived emotions are more frequently observed in CMC settings. These may provoke negative feelings and be detrimental to the partner modeling process and the collaboration experience (Gauducheau 2008). Two studies by Eligio, Ainsworth

Sunny Avry & Gaëlle Molinari 87

and Crook (2012) specifically investigated the effect of sharing emotions in CMC settings among women participants. The results of the first study highlight the difficulty of computer-mediated collaborators in accurately assessing their partner's emotions. In the second study, results show that being made aware of the partner's emotions may positively impact group climate and performance. This study leads to the hypothesis that emotion awareness tools (EATs) can be viewed as a technological solution in improving the mutual modeling of emotions in a group. EATs are part of Group Awareness Tool (GATs; Buder, 2011), systems that provide users with real-time and/or retrospective feedback on their own- and their partners' activity, which aim at promoting regulation during collaborative tasks (see e.g. Molinari, Sangin, Dillenbourg, & Nüssli 2009; Sangin, Molinari, Nüssli, & Dillenbourg 2011). EATs are exclusively designed to provide collaborators with information about their own emotions, their partner's emotions and/or the group's emotions (Cernea, Ebert & Kerren 2014; Chanel, Bétrancourt, Pun, Cereghetti & Molinari 2013; Feidakis, Daradoumis, Caballé & Conesa 2013; Molinari, Chanel, Bétrancourt, Pun & Bozelle 2013).

In Molinari et al. (2013), participants worked remotely in dyads, where the common goal was to design a slogan against violence in schools. Half of the 30 dyads were provided with an EAT (i.e. the EAT condition compared to a control condition without the EAT). Thanks to the EAT, participants could communicate their emotions to their partner using interface buttons corresponding to 10 positive emotions (e.g. interested, satisfied, amused, etc.) and 10 negative emotions (e.g. frustrated, anxious, unsatisfied, etc.) at any time during the collaborative task. The EAT also offered them the possibility to simultaneously visualize their own emotions and that of their partner during the interaction. The effect of the EAT was investigated on the perceived quality of collaboration. More precisely, a 57-items questionnaire was used to measure the way participants perceived the interaction with their partner, and an exploratory factor analysis was performed on the obtained responses, to extract underlying factors. Eight factors corresponding to 8 collaborative dimensions were found: (1) mutual understanding, (2) conflict management, (3) interpersonal convergence, (4) co-construction, (5) confrontation of points of view, (6) communication of emotions, (7) mutual modeling of emotions and (8) transactivity. Analyses of variance were conducted to investigate the main effect of the EAT and its interaction with gender on each collaborative dimension. A positive main effect was found on the mutual modeling of emotions. The tool motivated the participants to compare between their own emotional state with that of their partner. This also led them to understand and anticipate their partner's behavior based on the emotional response received. In other words, the value of the EAT lies in promoting both emotion awareness and emotional perspective taking. A positive relation was also observed in the EAT condition between the mutual modeling of emotions and the perceived degree of transactivity, that is, the time spent building on the partner's ideas. Finally, results also showed that the effect of the EAT on the perceived transactivity


varied based on gender. The EAT led to a significant increase in transactivity for women (EAT > control), whereas it led to a decrease for men (this decrease was non-significant). For women, expressing and receiving emotions would have the effect of encouraging them to reason using ideas obtained from their partner. In contrast, it would have generated discomfort and an extra-cognitive load in men (Swaab & Swaab 2009).

2. Research Questions and Hypotheses

The verbal interaction data collected from the Molinari et al. (2013) study described above is analyzed. The aim is to further understand how the EAT may shape participant interaction between each other on both the cognitive and relational sides. We also investigate how the effect of the EAT on collaboration processes may vary based on gender. We approach these questions from an exploratory approach, where our main hypotheses are as follows: 1) the EAT modulates the use of some interactive processes, in particular those involving the modeling of the partner and his/her emotions (H1); 2) there are differences between women and men with respect to the use of some collaborative processes irrespective of the use of the EAT (H2); 3) the EAT differently impacts the use of some collaborative processes by men and women, especially in terms of transactivity processes (H3).

3. Method

3.1 Participants, Experimental Conditions and Collaborative Task

The verbal interaction analysis presented in this paper was performed on a sample of 38 participants (24 women and 14 men; M = 24.05 years, SD = 9.55) taken from the study of Molinari et al. (2013). This sample is smaller than the total sample (60 participants working in 30 same-gender dyads) due to technical issues when recording the dyads' verbalizations. Twenty-two participants were in the EAT condition (12 women/6 dyads and 10 men/5 dyads) and the remaining 16 participants in the Control condition (12 women/6 dyads and 4 men/2 dyads). The asymmetry in the number of women and men dyads in the Control condition needs to be considered when interpreting the obtained results.

All dyads performed a remote collaborative design task. They were asked to co-create a violence prevention slogan using the DREW argument graph tool (Lund, Molinari, Séjourné, & Baker 2007). The task was divided into 3 steps: 1) "brainstorm" as many slogan ideas as possible; 2) evaluate each slogan based on 4 criteria (persuasive, original, suited to audience, emotional appeal); 3) select the best slogan. The participants communicated with each other through microphone headsets during the task, and their verbal exchanges were recorded. In the EAT condition, the dyad members were invited to use the EAT for sharing their emotions at any time during the interaction. The EAT was


composed of three parts, one for the self-assessment of emotions, one for the visualization of the participants' own emotions and one for the visualization of their partner's emotions. A complete description of the task and a picture of the EAT can be found in Molinari et al. (2013).

3.2 Analysis of Collaborative Verbal Acts

3.2.1 Coding Scheme

Our coding scheme was designed to focus on the cognitive and relational processes described in Barron's (2003) dual-space model of collaboration. It is composed of 7 categories (C1-Outside activity; C2-Social relation; C3-Interaction management; C4-Information sharing; C5-Transactivity; C6-Task management; C7-Tool discourse). As depicted in Table 1, categories C2 to C5 were also divided into sub-categories (4 for C2; 7 for C3 and C4; 8 for C5 for a total of 26 sub-categories).

Four out of the seven categories (C1, C2, C3 and C6) come from the RAINBOW model for the analysis of computer-mediated pedagogical debates (Baker, Andriessen, Lund, van Amelsvoort & Quignard 2007). In the RAINBOW model, C2 and C3 are considered as non-task focused communicative acts. Specifically, C2 consists of acts that contribute to the circulation of task-related emotions between partners, whereas C3 consists of acts to keep the dialogue on track. Furthermore, some subcategories of C2 and C3 refer to group processes from the positive (show solidarity, agree) and negative (show hostility, disagree) socio-emotional areas in Bales' (1950) Interaction Process Analysis (IPA). Relax atmosphere and use social convention (subcategories from C2) are also part of the affective and cohesive categories in the social presence coding scheme described in Hughes, Ventura and Dando (2007). C4 to C6 refer to socio-cognitive acts involved in the problem resolution process, and were defined based on other coding schemes (Meier, Spada, & Rummel 2007; Noroozi, Teasley, Biemans, Weinberger, & Mulder 2012). C4 and C5 describe specific acts recognized as playing a crucial role for learning, namely acts used to gain awareness about a partner's knowledge (e.g. elicit partner-information), to build a shared understanding (e.g. give explanation), to engage in transactive discussion (e.g. contradict, incorporate) and argumentation (e.g. give opinion against). The coding scheme we obtained provides a functional classification (each category is related to a process) covering a large amount of exchanges.


Sub-categories Examples

C2

Show solidarity We are a good team!

Show hostility We are too bad!

Relax atmosphere Oh, I'm not sure they'll understand what we did there (laughs)

Use social convention Nice to meet you!

C3

Check reception Can you hear well?

Check comprehension Do we have to write this in a new box? What box?

Show active listening Hm hm; Yes…

Show hesitation/reflection Um…/eeh…; Maybe we can…

Coordinate teamwork Do you take notes? I think about that during that time

Agree Can you write this? Yes, ok

Disagree Ok, I take notes. Eeh no, I prefer doing that

C4

Give task-information Actually, the goal is to sensitize the teenagers not the parents

Give explanation Actually, I meant that perhaps it's more persuasive like that

Elicit task-information Violence, with what it rhymes?

Give self-information I didn't remember why I said that

Elicit partner-information Have you ever done tasks like that?

Give recall What did you say? I said: Be stronger than violence

Elicit recall What did you tell me about that already?

C5

Give proposition I have thought about something like: All our children are concerned, stop violence!

Give opinion for But we have to say the word violence? Yes or we can suggest it

Give opinion against It's better if it's short to be persuasive? No, I think the size is not very important

Elicit proposition Do you have some ideas or not?

Elicit opinion I like this slogan,what about you?

Accept Ok, I agree with your ideas

Contradict I'm sorry but our slogan have to target teenagers not parents

Incorporate I have thought about something like: All our children are concerned, stop violence! Ok, we have the persuasive side but it's not very original. Maybe, stop violence, it's up to all of us!

Table 1: Subcategories for Social Relation (C2), Interaction Management (C3), Information Sharing (C4) and Transactivity (C5) with Examples. (Examples in italic refer to what has been said previously by the other partner for a better comprehension)


3.2.2 Coding Procedure

For each dyad, the whole verbal interaction content was first transcribed with the ELAN software (Sloetjes & Wittenburg 2008). Pauses and turn-taking served as a basis for segmenting the verbal interaction into collaborative units. Two independent coders were trained to apply the coding scheme previously described. They were provided with the verbal transcriptions combined with audio (voice) and video (face) recordings of the dyad members. The verbal interactions of all the dyads were analyzed by a first coder, while the second coder oversaw the coding interactions of only 10 dyads. The inter-coder reliability of Cohen's kappa was equal to 0.47. This moderate agreement (Viera & Garrett 2005) may be because it is calculated based on a high number of subcategories. Another explanation is that reliabilities across categories are not homogeneous. We found substantial agreements (from 0.62 to 0.73) for the Information sharing, Interaction management, Transactivity categories and moderate agreements (from 0.52 to 0.53) for the Task management, Tool discourse, Social relation categories. Therefore, results from categories with moderate inter-coder reliability must be interpreted carefully.

4. Results

The coding scheme was applied to 4580 units in the EAT condition and to 3750 units in the Control condition (a mean of 219 units per participant). A series of 2 (EAT) x 2 (Gender participant) ANOVAs was performed on the use rate for each type of collaborative process, which was calculated as the proportion of units of each subcategory out of the total number of units that had been coded.

The EAT had a positive main effect for the Use social convention, Give self-information and Elicit-partner information processes (Table 2). Specifically, the use rate was higher in the EAT condition than in the Control condition for Use social convention (F(1, 34) = 4.75, p = .003, η2 = 0.12), Give self-information (F(1, 34) = 6.92, p = .012, η2 = 0.16) and Elicit partner-information (F(1, 34) = 5.43, p = .002, η2 = 0.13). The EAT also presented a negative effect for Coordinate teamwork with a higher use rate in the Control condition than in the EAT condition (F(1, 34) = 3.85, p = .057, η2 = 0.10; see Table 2).


EAT condition Control condition

Use social convention M = 0.96, SD = 0.56 M = 0.52, SD = 0.60

Give self-information M = 4.71, SD = 2.54 M = 2.89, SD = 2.24

Elicit partner-information M = 0.81, SD = 0.12 M = 0.36, SD = 0.57

Coordinate teamwork M = 2.04, SD = 1.59 M = 2.89, SD = 1.28

Table 2: Mean Use Rates and Standard Deviations for the Use Social Convention, Give Self-Information, Elicit Partner-Information and Coordinate Teamwork Subcategories in the EAT (with the Emotion Awareness Tool) and Control (without the Emotion Awareness Tool) Conditions.

Gender had a main effect on four processes (see Table 3). The use rate was higher for women than for men for three out of four processes, namely: Show solidarity (F(1, 34) = 4.81, p = .035, η2 = 0.12), Give recall (F(1, 34) = 12.00, p = .001, η2 = 0.26) and Tool discourse (F(1, 34) = 5.21, p = .028, η2 = 0.13). On the other hand, men had a higher use rate than women for Give proposition, F(1, 34) = 8.64, p = .005, η2 = 0.20.

Women Men

Show solidarity M = 0.70, SD = 0.78 M = 0.20, SD = 0.35

Give recall M = 4.06, SD = 1.8 M = 1.99, SD = 1.76

Tool discourse M = 7.09, SD = 5.92 M = 3.47, SD = 2.25

Give proposition M = 6.18, SD = 3.16 M = 9.23, SD = 4.28

Table 3: Mean Use Rates and Standard Deviations for the Show Solidarity, Give Recall, Tool Discourse and Give Proposition Subcategories for Women and Men.

The EAT by Gender interaction was significant for Relax atmosphere (F(1, 34) = 6.59, p = .014, η2 = 0.16) and Give opinion against (F(1, 34) = 7.65, p = 0.009, η2 = 0.18) (Table 4). Post-Hoc tests showed that men produced more Relax atmosphere acts and fewer Give opinion against acts in the EAT condition than in the control condition. By contrast, the EAT did not influence the use of the Relax atmosphere and Give opinion against acts for women.


EAT condition Control condition

Men

Relax atmosphere M = 6.35, SD = 3.35 >* M = 0.92, SD = 1.16

Give opinion against M = 0.92, SD = 1.26 <** M = 3.43, SD = 1.05

Women Relax atmosphere M = 4.75, SD = 2.96 ≈ M = 4.20, SD = 2.27

Give opinion against M = 1.52, SD = 1.14 ≈ M = 1.55, SD = 1.06

Table 4: Mean Use Rates and Standard Deviations for the Relax Atmosphere and Give Opinion Against Subcategories for Women and Men in the EAT and Control Conditions (*p<.05; ** p<.01).

5. Discussion and Conclusion

The goal of this study was to understand the impact of using an emotion awareness tool (EAT), capable of providing methods for sharing emotions during a computer-supported collaborative effort, on the cognitive and relational dimensions of collaboration.

First, results showed that on the one hand, the EAT increased the use of relational acts (use social convention) that contribute to intragroup dynamics such as group formation and group cohesion, which participate in the maintenance of social presence (Hughes et al. 2007). On the other hand, the EAT positively impacted the use of socio-cognitive acts such as Give self-information and Elicit partner-information that correspond to mutual modeling processes enabling the participants to gain a higher awareness of their partner's knowledge (Sangin et al. 2011; Molinari et al. 2009). These results are consistent with H1.

Second, we found that encouraging the dyad members to focus on their respective emotions negatively impacted the use of coordination processes. The reason for this may be twofold. The negative effect on Teamwork coordination might relate to the specific tool constraints, rather than the emotion sharing process itself. For instance, one may expect participants to struggle in selecting (from the lists) the specific emotion label that ideally represents their feeling, while at the same time performing the task. Another explanation may be that a more efficient method of sharing personal information between partners in the EAT condition could potentially lead to lesser interpersonal coordination.

Third, consistent with H2, some collaborative processes were used differently between men and women irrespective of the use of the EAT. The women showed more solidarity towards their partner in comparison to the men. This is consistent with previous research, where women have been found more likely to use verbal expression to give or seek emotional support than men (Tamres, Janicki, & Helgeson 2002). Furthermore, the women were more inclined to


repeat what was already expressed during interaction (Give recall) and therefore more likely to refine ideas and consolidate their common ground. Contrarily, the men focused more on providing new ideas (Give proposition). Therefore, results suggest that men and women differ on how they use relational and socio-cognitive processes. The women showed more positive socio-emotional behavior. They also tended to work together to achieve the task guided by a strategy of deepening existing ideas, while the men were more likely to follow the strategy of externalizing new ideas. Overall, these results suggest that compared to men, women tend to collaborate in a more transactive way, at both the emotional and cognitive levels.

Finally, the EAT encouraged the men to interact with their partner in a more friendly and relaxed way, discouraging them from arguing against and modifying their partner's ideas. In other words, the possibility for men to share emotions during interaction positively impacts the quality of the relationship with their partner. However, this relational benefit appears to be counterbalanced by a greater difficulty for men in engaging in argumentative interactions. This result is consistent with H3 and with previous findings (Molinari et al. 2013) that showed a negative (but non-significant) effect of the EAT on the perceived transactivity for men. One may thus assume that prompting men to focus on emotions when interacting would be in opposition with their tendency to behave in competitive and assertive ways during negotiations (Mazei, Hüffmeier, Freund, Stuhlmacher, Bilke, & Hertel 2015). By contrast, there was no significant effect of the EAT on the way the women collaborate with each other on both the relational and cognitive planes. Since it tends to be easy for women to identify and communicate feelings (Kring & Gordon 1998), one may assume that they do not need technological support to effectively manage emotional information during collaboration. Despite this non-significant finding, one can however note that the EAT positively affected the women's perception of the quality of the interaction with their partner, specifically the extent to which they engaged in transactive discussions (Molinari et al. 2013). It is noteworthy that these gender results should be interpreted with caution due to the small number of men dyads used in the verbal interaction analysis. Limitations of our study also include the moderate intercoder reliability for the social relation dimension. Despite this, our results tend to support the hypothesis of a beneficial effect of an emotion awareness tool on relational and socio-cognitive processes. They also improve our understanding of emotions and its role in computer-supported collaborative learning/problem-solving, providing guidelines in the development of affective collaborative e-learning systems.

Acknowledgement

This study was conducted within the EATMINT (Emotion Awareness Tools for Mediated INTeraction) project. It was a project of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research in Affective Sciences, funded by the Swiss National


Science Foundation and leaded by Mireille Bétrancourt (TECFA, University of Geneva) and Thierry Pun (CVML, University of Geneva). Guillaume Chanel (CISA, University of Geneva) also took part in this project.

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A design approach to team coordination

Hazbi AVDIJI & Stéphanie MISSONIER Faculté des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC), Université de Lausanne

Team coordination over long time scales has been analyzed through two dominant perspectives: the contingency approach and the discursive approach. While they produced extensive theoretical contributions, these two perspectives are not well-suited to understand team coordination in changing and uncertain situations such as innovation projects. In this paper, we propose a design approach to coordination, which we define as the joint inquiry and construction by teams of their common ground. We instantiated our conceptual model into a tool called the Team Alignment Map, which allows team members to design their interdependencies. We evaluated the effectiveness of the tool within 22 innovation projects in two different settings. Our findings suggest that the tool facilitated the creation of shared understanding between team members, and allowed them to coordinate flexibly and welcome the shifting requirements of their projects. These findings suggest that conceptualizing coordination as a design process is well-suited to innovation projects.

1. Motivation

Coordination is a topic that has received extensive attention by scholars as it plays a pervasive role in our everyday lives. Academic developments on coordination have had two distinct units of analysis: real-time coordination in the here-and-now of face-to-face encounters (e.g. when two or more people coordinate to move a desk outside a room), coordination across time and space, especially in organizational settings (e.g. when work teams hold a meeting for a web development project to coordinate everyone's individual contributions). In this paper, we focus on team coordination across space and time.

In such settings, team coordination is the process through which a group of individuals form action plans to integrate and align their contributions, knowledge, and objectives (Rico, Sánchez-Manzanares, Gil & Gibson 2008). Team coordination is one of the main and enduring issues in innovation projects such as the development of new products or software (Espinosa, Kraut, Slaughter, Lerch & Herbsleb 2002). Such projects stress the need for effective coordination as they are characterized by shifting or uncertain requirements, low visibility over the future course of action, and partial knowledge being spread across participants (Edmondson & Harvey 2017). The complexity of innovation projects cannot be addressed by single individuals. Therefore, they require the collaboration of multiple individuals with diverse roles, resources, and domains of expertise.

As innovation projects usually last from several weeks to several years, they are structured around an extensive number of recurrent project meetings during

98 A design approach to team coordination

which team members integrate everyone's previous contributions (i.e. what actions everyone has performed until the meeting), monitor the situation, and plan the actions that everyone must perform until the next meeting. Team members can also rely on additional coordination devices such as objects (e.g. PowerPoint presentations or contracts) or conventions (e.g. organizational hierarchies) to align their interdependent individual contributions (Klein, Feltovich, Bradshaw & Woods 2005; Tylén, Philipsen & Weed 2009).

Scholars have produced an extensive number of studies to analyze what makes team coordination effective, producing two dominant theoretical perspectives (Avdiji, Missonier & Mastrogiacomo 2015; Zackrison, Seibold & Rice 2015).

The first is the contingency approach, which is concerned with finding the coordination devices for individuals to manage specific types of interdependencies (Espinosa, Lerch, Kraut, Salas & Fiore 2004; Okhuysen & Bechky 2009). This approach was initiated by Malone & Crowston (1990), who considered that coordination is effective when there is a match between the situation individuals face and the coordination devices they use. For example, when the activity of one participant depends on the output of the activity of another, the authors suggest that ordering activities sequentially will allow for effective coordination. However, as projects are prone to emerging requirements, continuous change and low visibility (Henderson & Clark 1990), it is difficult for individuals to identify and manage interdependencies between participants and use the right coordination devices (Sosa, Eppinger & Rowles 2004). In sum, this approach fails to address the complexity and the need for flexible interpredictions during innovation projects.

The second theoretical perspective is the discursive approach. This approach stresses that managing innovation projects is about performing non-recurrent activities, i.e. activities that have very little or no routine aspects or in which routines change. In such cases, teams need to resort to discursive coordination because dependencies between participants can no longer be managed in a predictable and programmed way (Bechky & Okhuysen 2011). Most studies on the coordinative power of language have focused on the here-and-now of simple interactions (often) between two individuals (e.g., Clark & Brennan 1991; Gardner & Levy 2010). Other studies have underlined the importance of communication for high-level team coordination (Bechky & Okhuysen 2011; Minssen 2006; Wittenbaum & Stasser 1998), but they do not explain what makes communication in teams effective. In fact, discursive coordination is not innate and is difficult to ensure for activities involving multiple participants across time and space (Minssen 2006; Sewell 1998). Very often people are not able to create a shared understanding during their conversation because of their different representations, language, and responsibilities (Kleinsmann & Valkenburg 2008). This difficulty increases as the requirements and goals of the joint activity continuously change and are difficult to predict, as is characteristic of innovation projects (Badke-Schaub, Neumann, Lauche & Mohammed 2007).

Hazbi Avdiji & Stéphanie Missonier 99

Therefore, communication in teams still often leads to ineffective coordination, i.e. participants experience coordination breakdowns, misunderstandings, perception gaps, and wrong predictions, mainly due to the team's inability to create shared understanding (Bittner & Leimeister 2014; Mastrogiacomo, Missonier & Bonazzi 2014). As noted by Zackrison and colleagues (2015), most communication researchers have focused on coordinating language, interpersonal interactions, and social ties (e.g., Fusaroli & Tylén 2012; Pearce & Pearce 2000).

We assume that a design approach to coordination can overcome the limitations (i.e. lack of interpredection flexibility and shared understanding) of both the contingency and the discursive approach in innovation projects. Such an approach would be more effective than traditional accounts to encompass the increasingly important characteristics of innovation projects. For these reasons, we seek in this paper to answer the following question: How can a design approach to team coordination be effective in innovation projects?

For that, we develop a conceptual model based on Clark (1996)'s psycholinguistic theory on joint activities and Dewey (1927, 1929)'s concept of joint inquiry, which has recently been applied to design thinking (Steen 2013). We instantiate the conceptual model into a tool that teams use to design their coordination through discussions during team meetings.

2. Conceptual model for the design approach

To derive our design approach to team discursive coordination, we turn to two theories that have been used in teamwork. Psycholinguist Herbert Clark (1996) has described how people use language to coordinate in joint activities. His approach specifies the cognitive conditions necessary for effective coordination. For two or more individuals to coordinate on a joint project, they must have common ground on four requirements (Mastrogiacomo, Missonier & Bonazzi 2014): joint objectives, joint commitments, joint resources, and joint risks.

In this paper, we propose to complement Clarks' approach with Dewey's (1927, 1929) process of inquiry, which is particularly relevant in co-design and design thinking (Steen 2013). Dewey proposed inquiry as a process that starts from a problematic situation, in which actors combine doing and thinking to move to the resolution of the problem. When problems have shifting or uncertain requirements and the future course of actions required by individuals is difficult to foresee (low visibility), actors proceed iteratively through exploration and evaluation. They discuss to define the problem and evaluate possible solutions. This process of exploration and evaluation has recently been outlined as important for innovation projects, through the creation of shared and visual problem spaces where individuals can proceed iteratively by prototyping, trying out and selecting alternative solutions (Avdiji, Elikan, Missonier & Pigneur 2018; Osterwalder & Pigneur 2013).


Our conceptual model addresses coordination specifically for the challenges of innovation projects: Clark's theory of common ground on the four requirements addresses the distributed and partial knowledge characteristic (shared understanding), while Dewey's iterative process of exploration and evaluation addresses the need to cope with shifting requirements and low visibility over the course of action (need for interprediction flexibility).

3. Methodology

Our methodology is based on Hevner, March, Park, and Ram's (2004) approach to design science research (DSR). In DSR, researchers design an artifact to solve an organizational problem faced by practitioners. To do so, researchers draw from sound theoretical knowledge or feedback from the practitioners.

Research setting

We instantiated our conceptual model into the Team Alignment Map (Figure 1): a collective tool that we developed to support team members when discussing and organizing their joint activity during innovation projects. It is in the form of a F4 World format print poster that is placed against a wall of the project meeting room (Figure 2). The Map contains four columns that depict the requirements of common ground according to Clark (1996). The standard and promoted use of the Team Alignment Map recommends that all participants to the joint project be present and follow a procedure that we drew from Dewey's joint inquiry.

Figure 1: The Team Alignment Map


Participants fill in the four columns of the map from the left to the right to define each requirement. Using sticky notes, participants write down how they consider the joint objectives of the joint project should answer the question: what are we supposed to achieve together? They then aggregate all their answers by presenting each sticky note in order to discuss, explore, and define the problem collectively. They negotiate the joint objectives and remove, amend, or add sticky notes as they see fit. They can thus proceed through trial-and-error and prototyping to explore and evaluate alternative solutions as they see fit. Once they agree on the joint objectives, they define the joint commitments answering the question: who is doing what for whom? Participants write what joint objectives they commit to individually. Every joint objective should correspond with at least one commitment. Again, participants discuss and negotiate the commitments as they see fit. They do so iteratively for the joint resources (what resources are we missing?) and the joint risks (what might prevent us from succeeding?).

Figure 2. The Team Alignment Map in use

We tested the usability and utility of the Team Alignment Map in two settings: a hospitality management school (HMS) and an innovation company (IC). Both contexts were chosen as they had contacted us to help them solve coordination problems for their innovation projects. In the HMS, 24 teams of 6 students were mandated and financially supported by external clients ranging from local businesses to international companies. Examples of projects include creating a new branding strategy, elaborating proofs of concept for new services, and developing business plans for new ventures. The innovation company (IC) is mandated by clients to support them in developing new business opportunities and redesign their organizations and business models. Our analysis includes 10 teams of 5 to 10 individuals working on four different projects. Examples of such


projects include developing new products, and testing and validating a new product for a competitive advantage.

Data collection and analysis

Qualitative data analysis is well-suited to analyze complex social processes and phenomena, and perform exploratory research as our research question calls for (Eisenhardt & Graebner 2007). Interview remained the chief source of data collection in agreement with Walsham's (1995: 78) observation that "it is through this method that the researcher can best access the interpretations that participants have regarding the actions and events which have or are taking place, and the views and aspirations of themselves and other participants".

We evaluated the Team Alignment Map through semi-structured interviews with users from both cases. We analyzed whether the Team Alignment Map supported teams in coordinating effectively. For that, we inquired on two propositions drawn from the characteristics and challenges of innovation projects, as mentioned earlier: (Proposition 1) to what extent it supported individuals in creating shared understanding, (Proposition 2) increased the team's visibility of their future course of action (flexibility).

The data was analyzed using qualitative methods (Flick 2007; Yin 2013). We conducted thematic analysis (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane 2006) in which we both coded the data based on categories relating to the functions of the tool (e.g. support shared understanding, visual support). These categories served only as a foundation for the iterative process which involved going back and forth between the data and the categories. For the purpose of this study, we focused on the codes that pertained to shared understanding and flexibility.

4. Findings

In this section, we report excerpts from the main categories that emerged in our data analysis (Table 1). We chose excerpts from both cases but due to space constraints, we cannot outline all the supporting claims for our propositions and focus on the quotes that can be understood easily without contextual information.

For 33 out of 34 respondents, the Map supported their team in creating a shared understanding on the joint activity (Proposition 1). Shared understanding was supported by three functions of the tool: its ability to help team members clarify and make explicit the content of the four domains, it made thoughts tangible as they were written on sticky notes so that teams did not merely rely on mental representations, and the creation of shared expectations on the project often through social commitments to what they put on the sticky notes. The shared visualization of the Map improved the team members' ability to reach shared


understanding at the end of team meetings. Team members' understanding and intentions for future contributions were aligned.

Table 1. Propositions and excerpts from interviews

Proposition Functions of the

TAM

Supporting excerpts

P1: The Team

Alignment Map

supports

individuals in

creating shared

understanding.

Clarifies and

makes explicit

the four domains

(joint objectives,

joint

commitments,

joint resources,

joint risks)

"Basically, the way I looked at [the tool] was "here are our

goals, here are our commitments, here are the resources and

here are the risks" and just having an open conversation with

the company and the team about each of those and making

sure that we were all aligned on what those were." IC Team 1

"[The tool] helped us avoid misunderstandings. Without it, we

would have had problems communicating effectively." HMS

Team 18

Makes thoughts

tangible

"I definitely like using the tool to make my way of thinking and

my way of seeing the project explicit." IC Team 6

"It is easier to think about our activity when it is physically

there." HMS Team 9

Creates shared

expectations

"[The tool is] really helpful because we can get to a next level

of clarity and expectations and, you know, does and don'ts

and what makes sense and what doesn't make sense." IC

Team 5

"I found it super helpful […] for everyone to be on the same

page."

P2: The Team

Alignment Map

increases the

team's visibility

over their future

course of

action.

Allows for the

team to adapt to

changing

situations

"Because we might find out later that something I committed

to might be pointless or it's just a waste of time for me to even

be doing it in the first place. But if I commit to it, I feel like I

have to do it, you know? So I think that, that's where going

back and revisiting it would be really really helpful." IC Team 2

"It was easy to see the full picture and realize that we needed

to add this objective to that and change that one

commitment." HMS Team 8

Facilitates the

monitoring of

progress

"Because what helps is the visual representation of having

that discussion at the end of the workshop and it's a

grounding force in order to say "okay where are we now

compared to where we were when we started this workshop

or when we first started this process? What has changed?

What is the team alignment map looking like?" IC Team 3

"And that's cool cause you can go back to it at the end of the

project and be like "alright, let's look at this" and you know, do

we make it to what we want it to? What we originally set out to

do?" IC Team 12


Also, 22 out of 34 respondents outlined the prototyping affordance of the tool (Proposition 2). Sticky notes could easily be removed, displaced, added to explore and evaluate alternative solutions. The shared visualization also helped team members monitor the progress they had made since the previous meeting and change their action plans accordingly. The Map thus addressed the need for flexibility on interpredictions that is required during innovation projects, as requirements and contingencies can change rapidly.

5. Conclusion

Our findings indicate that the Team Alignment Map supports team coordination during innovation projects by facilitating the creation of shared understanding between participants and allowing them to define and adapt their future course of action. Our study thus suggests that the design approach derived from Clark's (1996) and Dewey's (1927; 1929) theories provides an interesting approach to team coordination that is particularly well-suited for innovation projects. We conceive coordination as an activity in which the team constructs (designs) its joint activity collectively and iteratively. Participants try out and negotiate a variety of combinations of the four requirements, and agree on the one they see fit.

Our approach complements the dominant perspectives on coordination in two ways. Firstly, as outlined before, studies in the discursive approach have failed to provide concrete and actionable guidance on how teams should coordinate. Our approach structures the content (the four columns) and the process (forward and backward pass) of coordinative conversations. Secondly, the contingency approach is not suited for innovation projects, as requirements and situations change frequently, which leaves practitioners with a difficulty in constantly updating the match between new situations and the right coordination devices. Our approach supports flexible interpredictability through one main coordination device in the form of a physical coordination problem space (i.e., Team Alignment Map).

We suggest that further research is required to assess our findings, as our approach is nascent. Future studies should make use of direct observation of team meetings, as we mainly relied on interviews and thematic coding. Such observations could allow for the identification of conversational strategies and behaviors specific to the design approach of coordination. In general, we invite communication scholars to address coordination at the level of teams, as most developments focus on real-time and micro-level coordination (Zackrison, Seibold & Rice 2015). We believe that pragmatics can make a great contribution to the analysis of team conversations and the development of actionable and practical guidance that organizational and management scholars have had difficulties to provide.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Avdiji, H., Missonier, S. & Mastrogiacomo, S. (2015): Understanding IS team coordination in real time: A process approach to coordination. Proceedings of the Thirty-Sixth International Conference on Information Systems.

Avdiji, H., Elikan, D., Missonier, S. & Pigneur, Y. (2018): Designing tools for collectively solving ill-structured problems. Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Badke-Schaub, P., Neumann, A., Lauche, K. & Mohammed, S. (2007): Mental models in design teams: A valid approach to performance in design collaboration?.CoDesign, 3(1), 5-20.

Bechky, B., Okhuysen, G. (2011): Expecting the unexpected? How SWAT officers and film crews handle surprises. Academy of Management Journal, 52(2), 239-261.

Bittner, E. & Leimeister J. (2014): Creating shared understanding in heterogeneous work groups: Why it matters and how to achieve it. Journal of Management Information Systems, 31(1), 111-143.

Clark, H. (1996): Using language. Cambridge, MA (Cambridge University Press).

Clark, H., Brennan, S. (1991): Grounding in communication. Perspectives on social shared cognition, 127-149.

Dewey, J. (1927): The public and its problems. Denver, CO (Alan Swallow).

Dewey, J. (1929): Experience and nature. La Salle, IL (Open Court).

Edmondson, A. & Harvey J.-F. (2017): Cross-boundary teaming for innovation: Integrating research on teams and knowledge in organizations. Human Resource Management Review, in press.

Eisenhardt, K. & Graebner M. (2007): Theory building from cases: Opportunities and challenges. Academy of Management Journal, 50(1), 25-32.

Espinosa, A., Lerch, J., Kraut, R. E., Salas, E. & Fiore, S. (2001): Explicit vs. implicit coordination mechanisms and tasks dependencies: One-size does not fit all. Team cognition: Understanding the factors that drive process and performance, 107-129.

Espinosa, J. A., Kraut, R., Slaughter, S., Lerch, J. & Herbsleb, J. (2002): Shared mental models, familiarity and coordination: A multi-method study of distributed software teams. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Conference on Information Systems, 425-433.

Fereday, J. & Muir-Cochrane, E. (2006): Demonstrating rigor using thematic analysis: A hybrid approach of inductive and deductive coding and theme development. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5(1), 93-104.

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Fusaroli, R. & Tylén, K. (2012): Carving language for social coordination: A dynamic approach. Interactional studies, 12, 103-124.

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Klein, G., Feltovich, P. Bradshaw, J. & Woods, D. (2005): Common ground and coordination in joint activity. Organizational simulation, 139-184.

Kleinsmann, M. & Valkenburg, R. (2008): Barriers and enablers for creating shared understanding in co-design projects. Design Studies, 29(4), 369-386.

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Is the power of weak ties universal? A cross-cultural comparison of social interaction in Argentina and Canada

Ottilie TILSTON1 & Gillian SANDSTROM2 1Université de Neuchâtel 2University of Essex

Although we interact with a wide range of people on a daily basis, the social psychological literature has primarily focused on interactions with close friends and family (i.e. strong ties). Recent research carried out on Canadian students suggests emotional benefits to interacting with acquaintances (i.e. weak social ties). The present study investigates whether this 'weak tie effect' holds in non-Western cultures, using a Latin American sample to broaden our understanding of collectivism. Participants reported daily how many strong and weak ties they greeted in person, as well as a daily subjective wellbeing questionnaire. Preliminary analyses suggest weak tie interaction is related to a sense of community, and indicate distinct patterns of social interaction among Latinos.

1. Introduction

Recent research suggests that mere acquaintances (i.e. weak ties) can boost our subjective wellbeing and sense of belonging (Sandstrom & Dunn 2014). This challenges the social psychological literature suggesting that only close bonds can satisfy our fundamental 'need to belong' (Baumeister & Leary 1995). However, evidence for the 'power of weak ties' has so far only been found among a student population in one cultural setting (Canadian). Are these findings relevant to off-campus populations and different cultural groups? This study replicates Sandstrom and Dunn's (2014) research but uses instead non-student samples living in Canada and Argentina. Previous naturalistic observational research suggests that Latin Americans have more face-to-face social interactions per day than their North American counterparts (Ramirez-Esparza et al. 2009). However, no hispanic research has thus far differentiated strong and weak ties, nor measured subjective wellbeing in relation to social interactions. We hypothesise that the Argentines will on average experience more daily weak tie interactions than Canadians do, as well as more social interactions per day overall (i.e. both strong and weak ties combined). We also hypothesise that weak tie interaction enhances wellbeing in both samples.

A key aspect of this research is that it broadens the concept of collectivism. Cross-cultural psychologists often use Hofstede's (2001, 2010) distinction between individualism and collectivism to conceptualise differences between countries. According to this framework, those in individualist countries perceive relationships to be voluntary, valuing independence and self-reliance, while in

108 Is the power of weak ties universal?

collectivist countries relationships tend to be perceived as lasting, as mutual dependence is the norm. In social psychological research, Far Eastern samples (for example, Chinese and Japanese participants) have often been taken as representative of collectivism generally, leading to the creation of an implicit East-West paradigm. However, Asian cultures are not the only ones where the importance of the group prevails – in fact the five most extremely collectivistic countries on Hofstede's original scale are all Latin American (Hofstede 2001). The current research will therefore attempt to redress this imbalance by investigating one of collectivism's lesser understood cultural manifestations.

2. Method

2.1 Participants

The Latino sample was composed of 40 participants (18 female) with an average age of 28.93 (SD = 5.75). The Canadian sample was composed of 41 participants (30 female), aged 25+ (selected from an age range). Both groups of participants were community members, i.e. non-students and lived in urban areas (Toronto and Buenos Aires).

2.2 Procedure

The participants received a pair of mechanical tally counters ("clickers") that they were asked to carry with them at all times during 3 consecutive weekdays on one week, and 3 consecutive weekdays on another week to count their daily face-to-face interactions. They were told to use a plastic coloured clicker to count weak ties, and metal clickers to count strong ties, one click per interaction. The participants received detailed instructions on how to distinguish between weak ties and strong ties. The criteria were as follows (but translated into Spanish): Strong tie = "someone you are close to", "someone who you know really well (and knows you really well)" or "someone who you confide in or talk to about yourself or your problems." Weak tie = "someone you are not very close to", "someone who you don't know really well (and who doesn't know you really well)" or "someone who you consider a friend, but would be unlikely to confide in." (Sandstrom & Dunn 2014). The participants counted every time they greeted someone in person regardless of the length of the interaction. At the end of each day they reported their tallies and completed a pen-and-paper questionnaire, before resetting their clickers for the next day's interactions.

2.3 Measures

All measures were kept consistent with Sandstrom and Dunn's (2014) original study, but translated into Spanish for the Latino sample. They included : number of interactions, subjective wellbeing (Cronbach's α= .81) and belonging

Ottilie Tilston & Gillian Sandstrom 109

(Cronbach's α= .79). Subjective wellbeing was measured by assessing affect using the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (Diener et al. 2010), and by assessing subjective happiness using the Subjective Happiness Scale (Lyubormirsky & Lepper 1999). Examples include completing the phrase "In general I consider myself…" with numbers on a scale from 1 (An unhappy person) to 7 (A very happy person).

Belonging was assessed using several different measures: the Social Connectedness Scale (Lee, Draper & Lee 2001), the Interpersonal Support Evaluation List (Cohen, Mermelstein, Kamarck & Hoberman 1985), the UCLA Loneliness Scale, version 3 (Russell, 1996) and the Sense-of-Community Scale (Davidson & Cotter 1986). Examples include rating agreement with the following statements on a scale of 1 to 4: "I feel I belong here", "If I became ill I could easily find someone to help me with my daily chores" and "How frequently do you feel alone?". All of these measures were adapted by Sandstrom and Dunn (2014), to which the reader is referred for additional details.

3. Results

Figure 1: Average strong and weak tie interaction per day for Latino and Canadian participants

3.1 Daily interactions

As hypothesised, Latinos interacted with significantly more weak ties per day, t(78) = 3.39, p = .001, (see Fig.1). Unexpectedly, the Latino sample interacted with fewer strong ties per day than the Canadians did, t(50) = 1.98, p = 0.05. When considering the mean number of social interactions per day (i.e. both strong and weak ties combined), the Latinos did not report significantly more

4.77

16.97

6.7

9.82

0123456789

10111213141516171819

Strong ties Weak ties

Average in

teractions per day

LatinosN=40

CanadianN=41


interactions (M = 21.79, SD = 11.20) than the Canadians (M = 18.10, SD = 14.98), t(79) = 1.26, p = 0.21). This does not support our hypothesis that Latinos would have more social interactions.

3.2 Happiness and Belonging

The Latinos did not differ significantly from Canadians on any of these measures apart from sense of community, (M Latino = 3.0, SD = 0.39, M Canadian = 2.3, SD = 0.4), t(79) = 7.94, p < .001.

When correlational analyses were run to investigate any possible relationships between average weak/strong tie interactions per day and the happiness and belonging measures, no relationships were found for either sample, with one exception: For the Latino sample, average strong tie interactions per day and negative affect were positively correlated, r (39) = .32, p = .05. In other words, Latinos reported feeling more negative on days when they had had more strong tie interactions.

4. Discussion

The results of the current study suggest a different pattern of daily social interaction in Latin American countries. These findings help us broaden the concept of collectivist social networks as observed by Markus and Kitayama (1991) in East Asian samples. For example, despite being exposed to a greater number of acquaintances on a daily basis than Canadians, this is not reflected in an increased amount of close tie interaction. This suggests Latinos maintain prescriptive and impermeable social boundaires, much like other collectivists (Gheorghiu et al. 2009).

Interacting with those close to you appears to have a higher emotional cost in Argentina than it does in Canada. In contexts where you are less able to move between relationships, one must continue relationships with negative feelings, even if there are costs to maintain them. This is known as low relational mobility (Schug et al. 2010), and it may explain why Latinos reported more negative affect on days with more strong tie interactions.

This study cannot yet provide evidence that the power of weak ties is generalizable outside of a Canadian student population but this may be due to the type of analysis performed. Observations are nested within participants as a result of the repeated measures design, so multilevel analyses may be necessary to reveal any effect. The Latinos did however report a stronger sense of community alongside higher levels of weak tie interaction, supporting Granovetter's (1973) assertion that weak ties build communities and hinting that the weak tie effect may exist.

Perhaps the positive impact of weak tie interaction is more evident in the student context of the original study, when individuals can generally choose who they

Ottilie Tilston & Gillian Sandstrom 111

want to be friends with. This is described as high relational mobility (Schug et al. 2010). Both samples used for this study were not students and consequently may have had their weekday social interactions pre-determined by their working life. They may have experienced 'emotional labour' - a sociological term referring to the negative effects of having many social interactions during working hours, due to managing the expectations and feelings of others (Ashforth & Humphrey 1993). This may have obscured the positive effects of weak ties.

This research is limited by its correlational nature and the sensitivity of its measures (e.g. a passing greeting and a deep discussion are both recorded as one greeting). As with all cultural studies, it is a quasi-experiment as one's cultural background is an important independent variable that can never be experimentally manipulated. It is of course possible that factors other than cultural difference may have affected the number of daily interactions. However the study investigates an area that could have important implications. Sense of community, of which Latinos reported significantly higher levels in this study, is increasingly recognised as providing health benefits, especially to the elderly (Eschbach et al. 2004). A deeper understanding of the relationship between social interaction and health would help combat social isolation.

The lack of a significant difference between the overall number of daily interactions for each sample is striking given the cultural distance between the two samples. Perhaps there is a universal psychologically optimal number of daily interactions similar to Dunbar's number of 150 – the cognitive limit to the number of friends an individual can have (Dunbar 1992). Much more cross-cultural research is needed to substantiate this claim, but this study is an important first step towards understanding how peripheral members of our social networks affect our wellbeing in different contexts.

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Art versus amusement: What do photos allow people to do?

Hua FAN Institut de psychologie et éducation, Université de Neuchâtel

When discussing the aesthetic reaction, Vygotsky used a formula as an explanation: in a work of art, the form is always in conflict with the content, and the artist always overcomes content with form. Vygotsky unfolded the formula mostly in literature, however, he claimed that the formula can be applied to all other art forms. In this article, Vygotsky's formula is employed to photography. Through analyzing the dialectic contradiction between form and content in roll film snapshots and digital photos, we have reached the conclusion that photos could be a medium of art, where the contrasting feelings of ephemerality and permanence, nostalgia and modernity, proximal experiences and distal experiences meet each other. When less emotion and imagination are involved, photos could also be reduced to a medium of amusement. And the available medium to a culture has a significant influence on cultural and social preoccupations.

In his book The Psychology of Art, Lev Vygotsky addressed a fundamental aesthetic problem of art: How are raw materials transformed into a work of art? Vygotsky (1971: 61) believed that the essence of art was "the dialectic contradiction between content and form". In other words, the true psychological meaning of aesthetic reaction is not from the harmony of content of form, but from the inner incongruity between them. Vygotsky analyzed this formula through some classic forms of literature – the fable, the novel, and Shakespeare's tragedies. He also demonstrated briefly that the formula can be applied to all other art forms, such as theater, drawing, sculpture and architecture.

Vygotsky didn't mention the art of photography in his book. In this article, we will apply Vygotsky's formula of art to photography. From the Kodak snapshots to digital photos, both the content and the form of photography have changed a lot. We will firstly analyze Vygotsky's ideas on the formula of art, and then turn to the different aesthetic reactions when we are facing roll film snapshots and digital photos.

1. Vygotsky's formula of art

In The Psychology of Art, Vygotsky employed a new method called "objective-analytic method". He believed that the basis for aesthetic analysis should be "the work of art, rather than its creator or its audience", because for psychologists, "any work of art is a system of stimuli, consciously and intentionally organized in such a way as to excite an aesthetic reaction" (Vygotsky 1971: 23). Since photography involves more than one process

114 Art versus amusement: What do photos allow people to do?

concerning the photographer, the one being photographed and the audience, Vygotsky's ideas provide us with a new perspective on studying photography: focusing on the photographs themselves. In this article, we will study the aesthetic or non-aesthetic reaction brought by the photos, and what people choose to do to themselves and to the audience with photos.

According to Vyacheslav Ivanov's scholarly comments on The Psychology of Art, Vygotsky (1971: 278) used the words "form" and "content" in a different way from their contemporary interpretation: "Content is identical here with material, that is, those elements of the work of art which existed prior to its complete realization", and "form is identical with the processing, the formation, of this material". In this article, we will use the two concepts, "content" and "form", in this sense. To avoid misunderstanding, we will use "material/content" instead of Vygotsky's "content".

With the examples of fable, tragedy, and short story, Vygotsky (1971: 160) discovered that "a work of art always contains a certain amount of contradiction, a certain inner incongruity between the material and the form". For example, in the fable "The Crow and the Fox", the material/content is that the fox despises the crow and tries to get his piece of cheese. The form is that the fox flattered the crow with the adulation. Finally the crow sings and loses his cheese, to which point both the adulation and the mockery reach the apex.

To create a work of art, the artist always "overcomes" the materials/content with the form (Vygotsky 1971: 214). This is the formula from The Psychology of Art. For instance, in Shakespeare's Hamlet, the material/content is that Hamlet revenged his father's death on his uncle. It should be the direction toward which the story moves, and the audience is expecting the joy of the revenge. However, the form of this tragedy is that Hamlet hesitates many times. In the last scene, Hamlet is even slashed by the poison blade. The audience is more and more strained and miserable. At the end, the tragedy ends with the death of the hero and his sublime triumph simultaneously. The emotions generated by the material/content and the form develop in opposite directions but reach annihilation at the point of termination. Through the complex transformation of emotions, the affective contradiction finds its solution, and the form of the tragedy has successfully dominated the material/content.

Besides literature, Vygotsky believed that his formula could also be applied to other domains of art. As in sculpture, when the artist uses marble or metal to represent a human or animal body, the artistic form (marble or metal sculpture) keeps distance with the content (a living figure), and overcomes it. In the last chapter of his book, Vygotsky (1971: 213) discussed the social significance of art. He considered art as catharsis, a "short-circuiting" of the conflicting emotions. Only when the act of overcoming the original feeling, resolving it, conquering it, can we reach the birth of art.

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2. The art of roll film photos

For a century, photography had struggled to be identified as a form of art. Susan Sontag (2005: 116) claimed that photography is not an art form, but a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. When facing certain photos, not necessarily professional art photos in galleries, we experience rich imaginations and conflicting feelings. The medium of photos has potential for bringing aesthetic experience, no matter whether they are taken by artists or ordinary people.

Many photographers and critics have held the point that the artistic charm of photography comes from its relation with time. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1952: 76), founder of the theory of "the decisive moment", said that "of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time". Susan Sontag (2005: 127) considered that "the force of a photograph is that it keeps open to scrutiny instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces".

In the era of roll film photos, cameras were not so easily accessible to everybody and films were expensive. Normally, before taking a photo, the photographer would carefully find the view and evaluate secretly if it was worth taking. And he might hold the camera for a while, to adjust the aperture and the shutter speed, and to wait for "the decisive moment". Thus the material/content of photos is some memorable thing floating in the time-flow, such as a special place or object, a milestone of life or family, a remarkable event... The photographer seizes one moment and freezes it into the film. Finally the form of a photo is a small piece of paper with that static moment inside.

We will explain the contradiction between the material/content and the form with a photo taken by a Chinese photographer in 1998. It is chosen from a famous series of photographs called "My Father and My Mother". The material/content is the continuous daily life of the old couple in a Chinese village. The form is a piece of photo with the moment and the view chosen by the photographer: Kneeling on the bed, the old couple were re-organizing the family photos (Fig.1).


Figure 1: Series Photos: My father and My Mother, No.19 "When new year is coming, my parents are re-organizing the photos of the children in the frame. It is also a way of family reunion" (1998).1

In this photo, the contradiction exits in at least three aspects. Firstly, in the chronological time-flow, an opportune moment is seized by means of the photo. This moment gets rid of the irreversible time-flow, making itself an independent, timeless image. Time is still relentlessly melting and the old parents passed away, but the photo is always there, conferring on the beloved persons a kind of immortality (and importance) they would never otherwise have enjoyed (Sontag 2005: 8). In this aspect, the emotions generated by the material/content are the fears and pities of the ephemerality of life in the passing time. And the form has overcome it with a long-lasting image out of the time-flow.

Secondly, the affective contradiction is between nostalgia and the feeling of reality. A piece of photo could help us keep the relation with the past. In this photo, we can see a corner of a Chinese village house with an earthen bed, a wall calendar with a pin up lady, a telephone, a thermos bottle, a photo frame, which is a typical view of home for many Chinese people who have spent their childhood in the village and left for big cities. The hometown has been totally changed and the good old days will never come back. The break with the past is traumatic. The memory is fading out but the photo with all the details is still at

1 The picture is downloaded from http://www.cpanet.org.cn/zhuanti/11jinxiangjiang/detail

_image_105693.html

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hand, which certificates "the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (that-has-been)" (Barthes 1981: 96). The form of photos has successfully picked something from the messing past and brought it to the present.

Thirdly, photos have given us a chance to go beyond the horizon of here and now. As thin slices of space and time, photos could be arranged and combined arbitrarily. The photo of the old couple organizing their photo frame could be seen together with other photos, such as the photos of their wedding, the photos of another Swiss couple.... Actually, if we look at this photo carefully, we can see that the old Chinese couple was also arranging pictures in a photo frame. The pictures might be photos of themselves, their children and grand-children, taken in different places and times. However, they were all put together as resources for imagination. In this aspect, the material/content of a photo is always the one scene just before the eyes. However, the form of the photos could overcome the here-and-now limitation, establishing connections across different time-space dimensions.

Many people have been deeply touched by this series of "My Father and My Mother". When the audience is reading these photos again and again with rich imagination and big tears, it is undeniable that these photos have caused aesthetic reaction. From Vygotsky's (1971: 209) point of view, if psychologists attempt to explain art, they should proceed from "the irrefutable association that exists between emotion and imagination". In our case, the photo of the old couple has activated the audience's imagination of their own parents, their own family, and their impression of the villages in China and the Chinese people. And their complex emotions about time and life have exploded by means of short-circuiting contrasting feelings of ephemerality and permanence, nostalgia and modernity, proximal experiences and distal experiences (Zittoun & Gillespie 2016: 35).

3. The art of digital photos

From Daguerre's Daguerreotype to roll film photos, from digital cameras to smart phones with both front and rear cameras, people's preferences for different kinds of camera are changing gradually. In the last section, the roll film photos we were talking about are primarily personal photos taken in domestic life. In this section, we are going to reflect on ubiquitous digital photos taken by smart phones and portable digital cameras. Among this kind of digital photos, the material/content includes all visible things. Because the camera is always at hand and the digital photos are nearly at zero cost, a trillion photos are produced per year. For Chinese young people, the most taken photos are selfies, tourist photos and photos of food.2 With the development of the technology of photography, the form of a photo has also 2 Research Report on APP Usage of Teenagers (2015), http://www.sohu.com/a/36077452

_132560.


changed a lot. It is no longer a touchable, long-lasting piece of paper, but an ethereal series of digital information.

There is almost no need to wait for "the decisive moment", because of the technology of burst shot, real-time imaging and Photoshop. In the digital era, people shoot every thing and produce so many photos that they even don't have time to look at them again. Thus, some scholar claimed that "photography appears everywhere and nowhere simultaneously" (Liser 2013: 5). If there is too much information at present, people might not have lots of time to look back to the past, as they often did in the era of roll film photos.

Nowadays, when people are facing a digital photo, it is not easy to fall into the complex feelings on time and emotions that Barthes (1981: 116) described: "In each of them, inescapably, I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die...". It is not expected that the audience could experience aesthetic reaction with their emotions and imaginations when he glanced a photo in half a second. The unnatural performance and settings in front of the camera is also "a defense against the visualization of the actual feelings and emotions" (Barthes 1981: 50). Without the involvement of emotions, imagination and the contradictions about time, we could draw the conclusion that certain kinds of digital photo, that is the great majority, could not be considered as a medium of works of art. It is a medium in which pleasure is made, a medium of amusement.

Different from the traditional roll film photos, it is argued that the theory of photography must be drawn into a theory of computation and network, as they are the agents that are responsible for the dissolution of all physical media while ensuring their continuation (Liser 2013: 6). Social Networks have brought new rules and values for digital photography. A digital photo could be sent to any corner of the world in no time and it is expecting an immediate response. The huge number of photos would weaken the joys of sense and more stimulation is required. In order to attract attention, some people try to post photos of every aspect of their life. The domain of private and domestic life is more and more exposed to the public, joining in the great data flow.

According to Neil Postman (2005: 9), the medium of communication available to a culture is a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupation. Photographs could be used both as the medium of art and amusement. Vygotsky (1971: 248) claimed that the social significance of art is that it is "an indispensable discharge of nervous energy and a complex method of finding an equilibrium between our organism and the environment", while amusement could offer us "castles in the air", in which we try to live, without thinking about the real world (Postman 2005: 77). So the question is not "what do photos allow people to do", but "what people choose to do to themselves and to others with photos".

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Bibliography

Barthes, R. (1981): Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Richard Howard (Tran.). Farrar Straus & Giroux; Auflage (Pbk).

Bates, D. (2016): Photography: The Key Concepts. London, New York, Sydney and Delhi (Bloomsbury Publishing).

Benjamin, W. (1972): A Short History of Photography. Screen, 13(1), 5-26.

Cartier-Bresson, H. (1952): The Decisive Moment: Texts and Photographs by Cartier-Bresson. New York, NY (Simon & Schuster).

Harari, Y. N. (2016): Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. New York, NY (HarperCollins Publishers).

Liser, M. (2013): The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. Abingdon (Routledge).

Postman, N. (2005): Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. London (Penguin Books).

Sontag, S. (2005): On Photography. New York, NY (RosettaBooks LLC).

Vygotsky, L. S. (1971): The Psychology of Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London (MIT Press).

Zittoun, T. & Gillespie, A. (2016): Imagination in Human and Culture Development. London (Routledge).


Interaction ou inter-actions? Deux conceptions de la notion d'interaction

Michèle GROSSEN Université de Lausanne

This article aims at discussing two main definitions of the concept of interaction: the first one assumes that an interaction is the sum of individual actions (inter-actions) while the second one assumes that interaction is an inseparable unit of analysis. They constitute what can be called a factorial vs. dialogical conception of interaction. After having presented these two conceptions and shown some gaps between theoretical assumptions and methodological practices, we discuss what methodological consequences for research a dialogical conception of interaction may have, provide the example of a study which tried to take these consequences into account, and conclude with some challenges that have to be faced in future research.

Le but de cet article est double: il s'agit d'une part de discuter d'un concept, simple à première vue, celui d'interaction, d'autre part de montrer les conséquences d'une définition dialogique de l'interaction sur nos objets d'étude. Je prendrai pour ce faire l'exemple d'une recherche portant sur les liens entre les savoirs acquis dans la vie quotidienne et ceux qui sont enseignés à l'école en littérature, philosophie et culture générale. Je terminerai par quelques questions ouvertes.

1. L'interaction: un objet d'étude transdisciplinaire

Le concept d'interaction fait partie de ces concepts scientifiques qui semblent d'autant plus simples qu'ils appartiennent au vocabulaire quotidien. Les travaux mobilisant ce concept ne prenant pas toujours la peine de le définir, ce n'est parfois qu'à partir des méthodes d'analyse des données utilisées par les chercheurs que l'on peut inférer leur conception de l'interaction. De plus, on a affaire à un concept transdisciplinaire qui relève de la psychologie (où elle a une longue tradition), de la sociologie interactionniste, des sciences du langage ou de l'anthropologie. Or chaque discipline a ses propres objets d'étude et, en conséquence, met l'accent sur des aspects différents de l'interaction, par exemple l'analyse des mécanismes conversationnels et de la co-construction de significations partagées, l'analyse des dynamiques interactives (très fréquente en psychologie), l'étude des processus cognitifs dans l'interaction sociale (voir par exemple Trognon, Batt & Marchetti 2011). Les buts poursuivis, les définitions explicites ou implicites du concept et les méthodes d'analyse des données présentent donc une très large variété. Le concept d'interaction apparaissant alors comme faussement fédérateur, je précise que les réflexions

122 Interaction ou inter-actions ?

qui suivent prennent leur source dans les travaux menés dans le champ de la psychologie socioculturelle, initialement inspirée par Lev Vygotski (1934/1985) et enrichie au cours des années 80 par les travaux de Mikhaïl Bakthine (1978), un théoricien du langage, contemporain de Vygotski.

2. Qu'est-ce qu'une interaction?

Mon but n'est pas de faire une revue des différentes définitions du concept d'interaction, mais de formuler dans leurs grandes lignes deux divergences définitoires qui ont toutes deux trait à l'unité d'analyse retenue pour étudier l'interaction. La première divergence concerne l'interprétation même du préfixe inter- accolé au terme action, la seconde ce que j'appellerai faute de mieux le "périmètre" de l'interaction.

2.1 Inter-actions ou interaction?

Une première divergence concerne l'interprétation même de la relation entre le préfixe inter- et le terme action. Faut-il comprendre que deux ou plusieurs actions agissent les unes sur les autres (inter-actions) ou qu'on a affaire à une seule action créée à deux ou plusieurs (interaction)? La question n'est pas anodine. En effet, dans l'histoire de la psychologie des groupes, un des apports principaux de Kurt Lewin (1964) et ses collaborateurs a été de montrer qu'une interaction n'est pas l'addition d'actions individuelles mais donne lieu à un produit original. Lewin (1948) considère ainsi le groupe comme un champ de forces qui peut être défini comme « a dynamic whole based on interdependance rather than on similarity » (p. 184, souligné par l'auteur).

L'affaire semble donc entendue, si ce n'est que l'observation des pratiques d'analyse des interactions montre que ces dernières sont souvent traitées comme une suite d'actions individuelles. C'est le cas notamment des grilles d'analyse qui codent chaque tour de parole (ou acte de langage, énoncé, etc.) des locuteurs, à la manière initiée par Bales (1950) à la suite des travaux de Lewin. L'exemple de Bales est toutefois intéressant car, même s'il admet qu'une interaction est une action qui commence chez l'un et se termine chez l'autre, donc une unité d'analyse à part entière, Bales propose une grille en douze catégories qui codent des unités correspondant aux actions de chaque participant (par exemple "soutient autrui"). Par l'addition des actions de chacun, la grille offre une représentation globale du fonctionnement du groupe et des rôles de chacun. Depuis Bales, cette démarche s'est diversifiée et reste extrêmement fréquente, dans le domaine de la psychologie en particulier. On la trouve par exemple dans les recherches sur l'évaluation des effets de la psychothérapie où parfois, à l'instar de la Comprehensive Psychotherapeutic Interventions Rating Scale (Trijsburg et al. 2002), seules les actions du thérapeute sont codées (pour une discussion sur ce type de grille, voir Linell &

Michèle Grossen 123

Marková 1993; Meystre 2015). Mais on la trouve aussi fréquemment dans les études sur les interactions maître-élèves ou entre élèves. Cette démarche suppose que le codeur interprète les actions de chaque participant pour les classer dans une catégorie de la grille mais ne dit rien sur la manière dont chaque locuteur a interprété les actions de l'autre. Elle considère le langage comme une information que chaque participant doit traiter et décrit l'interaction comme une succession d'actions, ce que la définition classique suivante, donnée par un psychologue, illustre bien:

L'interaction a lieu lorsqu'une unité d'action produite par un sujet A agit comme stimulus d'une unité-réponse chez un autre sujet B, et vice versa. Ainsi l'interaction constitue-t-elle un processus circulaire; elle peut d'ailleurs se produire, non seulement entre deux individus, mais entre un individu et un groupe ou entre deux groupes (Maisonneuve 1990: 49)

On soulignera que dire que le processus est "circulaire" ne change rien au fait que chaque action est considérée comme une action individuelle. A cette conception de l'interaction, qu'on appellera factorielle parce qu'elle considère l'environnement comme un facteur susceptible d'affecter l'individu (Marková 2007), s'en oppose une autre qui, en phase avec la définition que Lewin a donnée du groupe et avec des approches dialogiques du langage, insiste sur le fait que: "Il y a une efficacité du dialogue qui fait que ce qui se produit dépasse ce que chaque locuteur aurait pu produire séparément." (Salazar Orvig 1999: 163). Les méthodes d'analyse cherchent alors à rendre compte de cette production collective, en se centrant par exemple sur les enchaînements conversationnels. Elles examinent les mécanismes d'intercompréhension entre participants et la construction des significations qui en découle. Cette seconde définition de l'interaction, dite conception dialogique (Grossen 2010), montre qu'on a affaire à un produit original qui ne relève ni tout à fait d'un locuteur, ni tout à fait d'un autre. Sur le plan psychologique, elle pose que l'interdépendance Moi-Autrui est le fondement même de l'individu (Marková 2016) et s'accompagne d'une conception de l'individu qui considère que l'Autre est constitutif de l'individu et que le self est dialogique (ou selon les termes de Bruner [2002] transactionnel), c'est-à-dire intimement constitué par la multiplicité et l'hétérogénéité des personnes avec lesquelles l'individu interagit tout au long de sa vie (voir aussi Grossen & Salazar Orvig 2011a; Raggatt 2014).

2.2 Le périmètre de l'interaction

Une seconde divergence dans la définition du concept d'interaction porte sur la question suivante: quels sont les éléments qui font ou non partie d'une interaction? A première vue, la réponse est simple: font partie de l'interaction les personnes qui y participent et les divers éléments du cadre (notamment les éléments matériels) qui organisent leurs actions. Cette réponse est congruente avec la notion de cadre participatif qui désigne le fait que chaque locuteur


contribue d'une certaine manière à l'interaction, c'est-à-dire a un certain "statut de participation" (Goffman 1987: 9).

D'autres réponses sont toutefois possibles, qui puisent à diverses sources théoriques mais que j'emprunterai pour ma part à Bakhtine dont les travaux, précisons-le, portent sur des textes littéraires et non pas sur des interactions. Dans sa théorie du langage, Bakhtine (1978) pose que tout énoncé fait suite à d'autres énoncés prononcés avant et ailleurs, et que, par conséquent, tout discours porte en lui les échos d'autres discours ou, dans ses termes, fait résonner des voix distantes. C'est ce qui porte Frédéric François (2005) à distinguer le dialogue en présence du dialogue en absence. Ce dernier désigne le fait que les échanges entre participants présents ont des résonances avec des discours lointains, que ce soit leur propre discours tenu ailleurs avec d'autres interlocuteurs, le discours d'autres locuteurs avec lesquels ils ont interagi, ou tout type de discours qui circule dans la société. Ainsi, lorsqu'un locuteur cite le discours d'un participant absent (discours rapporté), il fait en quelque sorte entrer ce participant dans le cadre participatif. Et, plus complexe encore, lorsqu'il cite un proverbe, une locution devenue à la mode, reprend des discours médiatiques, etc., il fait entrer d'autres participants dans l'espace interactif sans qu'il soit toujours possible de déterminer de quelles voix il s'agit, ni même de s'apercevoir que cette voix vient d'ailleurs, tant elle s'est fondue dans celle du locuteur (Grossen & Salazar Orvig 2011b).

Dans ces conditions, déterminer le périmètre exact d'une interaction s'avère impossible. Bruno Latour, dans sa critique de la notion d'intersubjectivité et à partir d'une position de sociologue des sciences, l'a également relevé:

On dit (…) que nous interagissons en face à face. Certes, mais l'habit que nous portons vient d'ailleurs et fut fabriqué il y a longtemps; les mots que nous employons n'ont pas été formés pour la situation; les murs sur lesquels nous nous appuyons furent dessinés par un architecte pour un client et construits par des ouvriers, toutes personnes aujourd'hui absentes bien que leur action continue à se faire sentir. La personne même à laquelle nous nous adressons provient d'une histoire qui déborde de beaucoup le cadre de notre relation. (Latour 1994/2007: 40)

En soulignant la dimension temporelle (et donc historique) de l'interaction, Latour défend une position congruente avec le point de vue dialogique, à savoir que:

L'interaction (…) a la forme contradictoire d'un cadre (qui permet de circonscrire) et d'un réseau (qui disloque la simultanéité, la proximité, la personnalité) (Latour 1994/2007: 40)

Selon cette acception, l'interaction est davantage qu'une co-construction qui s'opère dans le hic et nunc, elle est davantage qu'un contexte créé sous l'effet du travail interactif des participants, elle constitue un espace dialogique tissé de dialogues en présence dans lesquels se mêlent des voix absentes (Salazar Orvig 1999), lesquelles ne sont pas toujours identifiables sur le plan méthodologique, mais peuvent constituer des ressources dans la gestion de


l'interaction, par exemple des ressources argumentatives (Greco Morasso 2013).

En bref, on constate que la définition du concept d'interaction ne relève pas d'une simple querelle méthodologique, mais renvoie plus fondamentalement à des présupposés épistémologiques différents sur la nature des relations entre l'individu et son environnement social, et le concept même d'individu.

3. Quelles conséquences pour l'appréhension des objets d'étude?

On se demandera maintenant si l'adoption d'une conception dialogique de l'interaction a des conséquences sur le choix des objets d'étude et sur la manière de les appréhender. J'indiquerai rapidement deux conséquences qui découlent de mes propres recherches et orientations théoriques (voir par ailleurs Grossen 2009).

La première conséquence est un déplacement de l'attention du centre à la périphérie de l'interaction. L'accent se porte alors sur les frontières entre situations d'interaction, ceci dans le but d'examiner la manière dont les individus gèrent l'hétérogénéité des situations auxquelles ils participent et de travailler sur les tensions dialogiques entre situations, c'est-à-dire sur les différences, les contradictions, les conflits qui surgissent de la mise en relation entre plusieurs situations d'interaction.

La seconde conséquence découle de l'objet d'étude ainsi redéfini et est d'ordre méthodologique. Pour travailler sur les frontières, on peut recourir à différentes méthodes de recueil des données, non pas pour assurer la validité des résultats (voir à ce propos Flick, [2017] sur l'usage des méthodes mixtes), mais pour mettre au jour des tensions dialogiques entre situations d'interaction et montrer comment la personne y fait face. Les méthodes d'analyse des données doivent elles aussi permettre de faire émerger ces tensions. Par exemple, alors qu'une analyse de contenu présente les "contenus" ou thèmes discutés de manière statique et en attribue l'origine à tel ou tel participant (typiquement: qui a dit quoi?), une analyse dialogique du discours (voir par exemple Dialogical Discourse Analysis développée par Linell, [2009], voir aussi Marková et al. 2007) peut permettre d'identifier les tensions et contradictions qui se dessinent chez une personne ou dans un groupe (Engeström 2008; Ros 2015).

De nombreuses recherches travaillent aujourd'hui sur les frontières entre différentes situations d'interaction et les tensions dialogiques qui les lient (voir par exemple Muller Mirza et al. 2014 ; Muller Mirza 2016; Psaltis, Gillepsie, & Perret-Clermont 2015). On citera à ce propos un exemple tiré du projet SYRES1

1 Projet codirigé par Tania Zittoun et Michèle Grossen, avec la collaboration d’Olivia Lempen, Christophe

Matthey, Sheila Padiglia et Jenny Ros (FNS n° 100013-116040).


(Zittoun & Grossen 2013, 2017) qui portait sur l'enseignement-apprentissage de la philosophie, la littérature et la culture générale, et a été mené dans deux lycées et une école professionnelle. Le but de ce projet était d'étudier les liens que les élèves font (ou ne font pas) entre les savoirs enseignés en classe et les savoirs et expériences acquis dans la vie quotidienne. Autrement dit, nous avons travaillé sur les tensions dialogiques entre différentes sphères d'expérience des élèves (Zittoun & Gillespie 2016). Diverses données ont été récoltées (questionnaires, entretiens, focus groups, observations en classe) et l'analyse de ces données a consisté à repérer et analyser des séquences de mise en lien entre un objet de savoir enseigné en classe et des événements, expériences, connaissances de la vie quotidienne (Grossen, Zittoun & Ros 2012). On observe alors que parfois le travail effectué en classe (par exemple la lecture de Germinal de Zola) permet à l'élève de donner un sens nouveau à un événement survenu dans l'une de ses sphères d'expérience extrascolaires (en l'occurrence un conflit sur le lieu de l'apprentissage). Ici, le travail fait en classe soutient une sphère d'expérience de l'élève en dehors de l'école. Dans d'autres situations toutefois, la mise en lien entre différentes sphères d'expérience peut se révéler plus délicate. Dans un cas, par exemple, le visionage en classe d'un film sur les reporters de guerre suscite chez un élève une réaction différente de celle attendue par l'enseignant. L'élève, au lieu d'être touché par les situations de guerre relatées dans le film, reste assez indifférent, considérant de telles images comme monnaie courante. Le dialogue qui s'engage entre l'enseignant et l'élève se révèle alors difficile et prend un ton très émotionnel. De tels exemples montrent qu'en tant qu'espace dialogique, la classe est à la fois un contexte donné (par la situation et le dispositif didactique), un contexte construit sous l'effet du travail interactif des participants et un réseau dans lequel se confronte selon différentes modalités un ensemble de discours hétérogènes (par exemple, le discours de l'enseignant, celui des élèves mais aussi divers discours tenus en dehors de l'école).

4. Conclusion

Les deux conceptions de l'interaction présentées dans cet article sont, j'espère l'avoir montré, plus qu'une simple querelle définitoire. Elles sont sous-tendues par des présupposés épistémologiques différents sur les liens entre individu et environnement, sur les liens entre les individus et sur le concept même d'individu. Dans l'état actuel des recherches, reste toutefois, me semble-t-il, un décalage important entre les développements théoriques proposés, notamment dans le domaine de la psychologie socioculturelle, et les méthodes qui permettent de satisfaire ces exigences théoriques. Du côté des méthodes, plusieurs questions surgissent: comment identifier les dialogues à distance, les voix constitutives de tout discours? Comment travailler sur les frontières de sorte à rendre compte des tensions dialogiques? Comment mieux inclure la


dimension temporelle, si difficile à saisir sur le plan méthodologique? Et aussi, si l'on préconise l'utilisation de plusieurs méthodes de récolte des données, lesquelles faut-il combiner et comment? Quelle place donner au langage? Ces questions sont loin d'être exhaustives mais suffisent à montrer l'ampleur du chantier.

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Comment peut-on formaliser une pratique? Une approche sémiotique

Alain PERUSSET Institut des sciences du langage et de la communication, Université de Neuchâtel

The aim of this paper is to show how, from a semiotic point of view, it is possible to conceptualize a practice. More specifically, we'll identify, then present the actants necessarily presupposed by any action's path. In conclusion, we'll clarify the difference that matters to operate between the concepts of event, practice and interaction.

1. Introduction

La sémiotique, comme étude du sens et de la signification, est connue pour être une discipline des plus hermétiques. On ne peut en effet pas dire que son accès soit aisé, mais cette image peu reluisante que la discipline véhicule nous semble pour le moins exagérée, elle qui aujourd'hui, de façon assez efficace, offre des outils fort utiles et intuitifs pour l'analyse de corpus en lettres et sciences sociales. C'est en tout cas ce que nous tâcherons d'illustrer dans le présent travail en montrant comment la sémiotique peut relativement simplement proposer une conceptualisation fonctionnelle (une formalisation) des pratiques sociales qui puisse ensuite être exploitée par des disciplines aussi variées que la sociologie, l'anthropologie, voire les sciences de l'information et de la communication.

À cet égard, précisons d'entrée de jeu trois points: d'abord, que la sémiotique est une discipline des sciences de la culture qui se propose de décrire la façon dont les individus produisent du sens en situation, entendu que pour la sémiotique le sens d'un objet ou d'une expérience n'est pas prédéterminé, mais émerge hic et nunc dans le cours d'action. Ensuite, disons que ce que nous présenterons ici sera une synthèse personnelle – enrichie par nos observations – des propositions théoriques développées par Jacques Fontanille (2008) et Eric Landowski (2009) sur les pratiques1. Enfin, soulignons que dans ce texte nous distinguerons l'interaction de la pratique en ce que la première relève de la seconde. En effet, alors que le terme de pratique permet de qualifier l'usage général qu'un individu peut faire du monde, celui d'interaction cerne, lui, un usage particulier, orienté non pas vers la transformation d'états de choses

1 Faute de place, nous exploiterons directement les conclusions des deux sémioticiens sans

nous attarder sur le cheminement théorique dont elles procèdent.

130 Comment peut-on formaliser une pratique?

(clouer, découper, manger…), mais d'états d'âme (danser, enseigner, débattre…). C'est pourquoi nous emploierons plus volontiers le terme générique de pratique, mais sans jamais oublier que celle-ci, selon les cas, pourra aussi être envisagée comme une interaction. Dans notre conclusion, nous reviendrons cependant sur cette distinction.

2. De l'évènement à la pratique

Pour qui s'intéresse à l'activité de l'homme dans le monde, il importe d'être conscient que seuls certains types de situations de la vie peuvent être considérés comme des pratiques. En effet, dans le monde, ce dont nous faisons prioritairement l'expérience ce sont des évènements: qu'on observe un tsunami dévaster un bord de mer, une voiture percuter accidentellement un piéton, un guépard courir après une gazelle, un bébé crier devant sa maman ou un boucher découper une carcasse de bœuf, à chaque fois, nous avons affaire à des évènements faisant se rencontrer divers substrats, différents corps matériels: des animaux, des humains, des véhicules ou des substances telles que de l'eau ou des fréquences acoustiques.

Une première chose à faire donc, si on veut formaliser une pratique, c'est voir que la pratique est un type particulier d'évènement et que sa particularité réside dans le fait qu'on est capable d'identifier, à son origine, une intentionnalité, c'est-à-dire une tension vers une fin. C'est sous cette condition non négociable que les accidents ne pourront être considérés comme des pratiques, puisque par principe les accidents résultent d'aléas et non d'une quelconque intention: l'accident de la route n'est pas produit, mais se produit, de façon totalement impersonnelle. De la même façon, une catastrophe naturelle ne sera pas une pratique, puisqu'en 'bons naturalistes' que nous sommes

2, on saura que les

catastrophes, tels les tsunamis, sont le seul fait de coïncidences, répondant de lois naturelles.

Les cas du guépard et du nourrisson sont en revanche plus difficiles à trancher, car il s'agit de déterminer dans quelle mesure ces individus agissent de manière intentionnelle. En effet, en deçà d'une course de guépard ou d'un cri de bébé, n'a-t-on pas à l'œuvre un processus naturel (physiobiologique) plutôt qu'une pratique? Autrement dit, ces deux évènements ne sont-ils pas davantage programmés que décidés? À ces questions, nous répondrons que malgré les apparences, nous avons bien affaire, dans les deux cas, à des pratiques, mais dont la particularité réside dans le fait qu'elles ne sont pas conscientisées; ce sont bien deux évènements produits intentionnellement, dans la mesure où une

2 Sur le mode d'identification anthropologique naturaliste, nous renvoyons à l'ouvrage de

Philippe Descola Par-delà nature et culture (2005).

Alain Perusset 131

fin est visée (besoin de se nourrir chez le guépard, besoin de protection – par exemple – chez le nourrisson), mais sans distance critique; le félin ainsi que le bébé agissent sur un mode réactif, instinctif.

3. Les instances opérationnelles

Les observations consignées au point précédent nous amènent à reconnaître qu'une pratique est déjà conditionnée par la présence de deux éléments: il faut qu'il y ait une instance qui commande l'action (un operator3) et un objectif-résultat (une operatio) qui serait, pour les pratiques prises en exemple: 'chasser une gazelle', 'hurler' et 'découper de la viande'. Or, la seule présence d'un operator ne suffit pas pour rendre compte formellement d'une pratique. Dans une pratique, sont également présentes deux autres instances irréductibles: l'operans et l'operandum.

L'operans d'abord, c'est cet actant – ce rôle – qui, dans une pratique, exécute l'action décidée par l'operator. En effet, dans le cadre de sa sémiotique de l'action (2009), Landowski envisage l'opérateur de la pratique comme une entité bipartite qui aurait, d'une part, une conscience (un cerveau) et, d'autre part, un partie exécutante en contact direct avec le monde: un membre (une main, un bras, des jambes…), un organe (la voix, les yeux…) ou un outil (un stylo, des ciseaux). Dans le détail, le cerveau (qui figurerait métonymiquement l'opérateur dans son entier4) serait l'operator et tiendrait la fonction cognitive de centre de décisions alors que les membres, les organes extérieurs et les outils feraient office d'operans, du fait que ce sont eux qui transforment pragmatiquement le monde. En reprenant nos exemples, on verrait alors que le guépard, pour courir derrière la gazelle, aura besoin de mobiliser tout son corps et en particulier ses pattes, que le nourrisson s'aidera de sa voix pour manifester un besoin, enfin que le boucher utilisera un couteau pour accomplir sa tâche.

Cela étant dit, il est bien évident que l'operans n'exécute pas les ordres de l'operator dans le vide. Bien au contraire, il opère toujours sur quelque chose ou sur quelqu'un. Plus techniquement, il s'agit de voir que si l'operator a certes

3 La terminologie latine, ici retenue, est empruntée à Landowski (2009). 4 Comme le note Landowski, "il y aurait donc une partie ou une instance constitutive du sujet

qui serait en quelque sorte plus authentiquement lui-même que cette main dont il est pourtant le 'possesseur' et, en tant que son supposé 'mandant' (ou 'commettant'), le maître. Que désigne donc cette expression, le sujet 'lui-même'? Comment se le représenter en tant que distinct de la partie agissante de son propre corps? Pour rendre compte de cette relation étrange, on peut être tenté de convoquer un agent supplémentaire — une instance originaire responsable de ce que fait ce qu'on appelle trop indistinctement la 'personne' — mais qui, peut-être, n'est qu'une figure ad hoc bien que son rôle semble aller de soi: le cerveau. N'est-ce pas en effet une évidence que durant l'opération la main de celui qui opère doit rester sous contrôle, 'guidée par le cerveau', figure métonymique du sujet à la fois intentionnel et sensible?" (2009: 17).


prise sur l'operans, l'operans a, à son tour, aussi prise sur une instance: l'operandum. Dans la syntaxe fonctionnelle de Landowski, l'operandum est défini comme l'actant qui se voit transformé par l'action de l'operans. Il est ce qui subit une transformation d'état, il est la 'chose' pratiquée: en l'occurrence, est operans, la gazelle qui doit déguerpir pour échapper aux griffes et aux crocs du guépard, la maman qui doit chercher un moyen pour apaiser son enfant, enfin, la pièce de viande qui se déchire sous la pression du couteau de boucher.

4. L'attitude expérientielle

Comme nous venons de l'expliciter, du point de vue opérationnel, un opérateur5 se présente toujours comme une entité bipartite avec un centre de décision interne (l'operator) et une prise tournée vers l'extérieur (l'operans). Si le lien entre ces deux instances est inextricable, parce qu'organique, voire quasi organique (pour ce qui est des outils), il demeure que leur liaison peut être sujette à variation et ainsi laisser transparaître différentes attitudes expérientielles6. En effet, on peut sans problème s'imaginer un boucher découpant une carcasse de bœuf, mais selon la façon dont il manœuvrera son couteau (à savoir selon l'attitude expérientielle qu'il manifestera), différentes intentions pourront lui être imputées. Par exemple, si le boucher a le geste hésitant, on pourra le considérer comme un novice, car il présentera au niveau de l'attitude expérientielle de nombreux points de tensions (stress, tremblements…); à l'inverse, s'il exécute sans anicroche chaque mouvement de découpe, il pourra être traité comme un maestro, car il fera preuve, au niveau tensif, d'une totale décontraction.

Maintenant, si on s'intéresse au guépard et au nourrisson, on retrouvera certes de telles variations tensives, mais on pourra plus difficilement les considérer comme parfaites ou imparfaites, dans la mesure où on considérera qu'ils pratiquent leur 'art' avec naturel. À vrai dire, si les pratiques animales et infantiles peuvent difficilement être axiologisées, c'est parce qu'on estime qu'elles ne procèdent d'aucun calcul, qu'elles ne font qu'exprimer les compétences sémio-esthésiques des protagonistes (la sensibilité, les émotions, l'instinct…). À l'inverse, une pratique réalisée par un humain adulte pouvant répondre de ses actes pourra toujours être suspectée d'être stratégique, et c'est cette opacité qui nous autorise à produire un jugement moral.

5 Il importe de bien distinguer l'"opérateur" (l'individu social, l'acteur de la pratique) de

l'"operator", qui est une pure fonction actantielle. 6 L'attitude expérientielle est une notion que nous avons proposée dans notre thèse de doctorat.

Elle sert à qualifier l'attitude corporelle qu'un individu manifeste lorsqu'il agit, lorsqu'il fait l'expérience de quelque chose.

Alain Perusset 133

Ainsi, si nous sommes capables de reconnaître une attitude expérientielle au boucher, c'est non seulement parce qu'il présente superficiellement un certain style tensif, mais aussi parce qu'on peut le suspecter d'agir de façon stratégique. C'est donc parce que les pratiques humaines ont toujours quelque chose de mystérieux qu'elles ne peuvent jamais être d'emblée considérées comme parfaites et que, toujours, on leur prêtera un sens: le premier boucher est-il vraiment novice ou joue-t-il la comédie? Le second boucher est-il un véritable expert ou un grand illusionniste? La recherche du sens pratique naît de ces possibles écarts, et ces écarts sont ce qui donne aux pratiques "un certain coefficient d'imperfection"

7, ainsi que le résume Fontanille dans Formes de vie

(2015: 50):

La présence sensible ne donne lieu à des formes sémiotiques, a fortiori des formes de vie, que si elle est affectée d'un certain coefficient d'imperfection. Cette imperfection, en effet, est le ressort à la fois de l'émergence d'une intentionnalité dans les formes perçues, car elles paraissent alors échapper aux déterminations naturelles, et de la dynamique de transformation qui s'en suit.

5. Les Autorités transcendantales

On vient de le voir, à partir de l'interprétation d'une attitude expérientielle, il est possible de révéler différentes formes de vie8: celles de l'amateur, du comédien, du maestro ou encore de l'illusionniste… Plus exactement, ce qui nous a permis d'établir ces formes de vie, c'est la prise en compte du caractère stratégique (ou non) de l'attitude expérientielle.

Néanmoins, lorsqu'on cherche à identifier une forme de vie, un second paramètre doit aussi être pris en compte, celui relatif à l'engagement. En effet, en sémiotique, on part du principe que la réalisation d'une pratique suppose toujours un engagement (Fontanille 2015: 49) qui, selon nous, ne fait rien d'autre qu'honorer une Autorité transcendantale (Perusset 2018). Par Autorité transcendantale, syntagme que nous avons proposé dans notre thèse, nous entendons une instance imaginaire, idéalisée, qui symbolise une forme de "Bien suprême"9.

En termes moins techniques et pour que cela soit plus clair, disons que lorsqu'on observe un individu agir, on pourra toujours identifier deux tendances:

7 Nous renvoyons évidemment aussi à l'ouvrage incontournable de Greimas intitulé, fort à

propos, De l'imperfection (1989). 8 La forme de vie peut être définie comme une valeur morale que l'on attribue à un acteur social

et qui lui confère une certaine place dans l'espace social (normalité, familiarité, marginalité, etc.). En sémiotique, on reconnaît donc qu'un individu manifeste toujours une forme de vie en accomplissant une pratique.

9 L'usage de la majuscule à Autorité transcendantale vise à faire écho à celle présente dans le concept de Bien suprême introduit par Aristote pour qualifier le bonheur pratique (Aristote, Éthique à Nicomaque).


ou une tendance à agir pour plaire (même maladroitement) ou une tendance à agir pour se faire plaisir (et dans ce dernier cas, le plaisir pourra être soit sensuel soit spirituel). Selon l'interprétation de la pratique que l'on produira, ce seront alors trois Autorités transcendantales que nous pourrons identifier: l'autorité du Milieu, dans le cas où on estimera que l'opérateur agit pour plaire à la morale sociale; l'autorité du Corps, dans le cas où on estimera que l'opérateur agit en n'écoutant que ses envies; enfin, l'autorité de la Raison, dans le cas où on estimera que l'opérateur agit pour rester fidèle à une éthique, distincte de la bienséance.

Sans entrer dans le détail, nous pourrions finalement dire que selon l'Autorité transcendantale identifiée, les pratiques observées seront diversement valorisées: les pratiques où le Corps s'exprime seront évidemment socialement moins bien appréciées que celles respectant l'autorité du Milieu. Et les pratiques où s'appliqueront une Raison seront beaucoup plus éclatantes que celles ressortant de la doxa du Milieu, qui elles sont beaucoup trop convenues.

6. Conclusion

L'un des principaux enseignements à tirer de ce travail est qu'une pratique prend véritablement forme dès lors que l'observateur identifie, dans une situation donnée, une instance à laquelle peuvent être rattachés une intention et un engagement en faveur d'une Autorité transcendantale. C'est seulement une fois que cette figure de l'opérateur est actée que l'on peut alors commencer à construire ou reconstruire le sens de la pratique, en identifiant bien évidemment toutes les autres instances discutées.

Enfin, pour ouvrir la discussion sur les pratiques interactionnelles, disons que dans sa sémiotique de l'action (2009) Landowski opère une nuance en déclarant que l'operandum peut en fait être de deux natures; soit un operandum pur et dur soit un co-operans. La distinction ici faite concerne plus spécifiquement les compétences de la 'chose' pratiquée, laquelle peut soit subir les effets de l'action sans rien produire chez l'opérateur soit au contraire altérer cet opérateur à mesure qu'il agit.

Dans le premier cas, la 'chose pratiquée' sera bien un operandum, dans le second, il sera plus justement un co-operans. Néanmoins, pour pouvoir juger du statut de cette 'chose', il ne suffira pas de s'en remettre à l'attitude de l'opérateur; il faudra aussi regarder ce que cette 'chose' fait. Ainsi, la décision d'envisager cette instance pratique comme un operandum ou un co-operans dépendra toujours de la dynamique relationnelle à l'œuvre entre les deux instances en présence. Concrètement, la 'chose pratiquée' sera un operandum si 1) l'opérateur la traite comme un 'vulgaire objet' et 2) si, de son côté, cette 'chose' ne parvient pas à surprendre l'opérateur par ses qualités intrinsèques. À l'inverse, cette instance pourra être considérée comme un co-operans si 1) l'opérateur fait preuve de suffisamment d'ouverture et de disponibilité pour

Alain Perusset 135

accepter de se laisser surprendre, en cours d'action, et 2) si, de son côté, la 'chose' présente suffisamment de qualités immanentes pour amener l'opérateur à la traiter avec considération, comme un 'véritable partenaire'.

En définitive, c'est en envisageant l'operandum comme un co-operans que l'on peut spécifier la pratique pour en faire une interaction. Et on pourra même dire que l'interaction rend en fait compte, non pas d'une, mais de deux pratiques dans lesquelles chaque opérateur sera pour l'autre un co-operans. Sur ce dernier point, on fera remarquer que si, communément, on considère comme pouvant être co-operans un autre être humain, voire un animal, dans le cadre de la sémiotique, on partira du principe que potentiellement toute 'chose' peut prétendre au statut de co-operans pour autant que les conditions mentionnées ci-dessus soient remplies. C'est cette perspective que retient Landowski lorsqu'il se met à gloser la pratique du piano en termes interactionnels (2009: 10):

Un piano, par exemple, fonctionne incontestablement selon des régularités bien programmées : à chaque touche du clavier correspond une note et aucune autre. De ce point de vue, c'est un instrument des plus sûrs, qu'on peut parfaitement utiliser, sur cette seule base, pour "pianoter". Mais il faut reconnaître que cela n'est pas vraiment — vraiment pas ! — ce qu'on peut appeler "jouer du piano". On a donc là un objet utilisable mais qui n'en demande pas moins d'être pratiqué. Au point que se contenter de l'utiliser, ce serait en fait le maltraiter — raison pour laquelle, pour notre part, nous le classerions volontiers, par respect, parmi les objets inutilisables, comme à vrai dire tous ceux qui nous sont les plus chers (le planeur, le cheval et quelques autres), si chers sans doute justement parce qu'ils deviennent pour nous davantage que des "objets" dès que nous en faisons les partenaires de nos pratiques.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Aristote (1977): Éthique à Nicomaque. Paris (Vrin).

Descola, Ph. (2005): Par-delà nature et culture. Paris (NRF).

Fontanille, J. (2008): Pratiques sémiotiques. Paris (PUF).

Fontanille, J. (2015): Formes de vie. Liège (Presses universitaires de Liège).

Greimas, A.-J. (1989): De l'imperfection (Pierre Fanlac).

Landowski, E. (2009): Avoir prise, donner prise. Actes sémiotiques, 112.

Perusset, A. (2018): Le plaisir de plaire. Actes sémiotiques, 121.


Adresses des auteurs

Hazbi AVDIJI, [email protected] Faculté des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC), Université de Lausanne 1015 Lausanne, Suisse Sunny AVRY, [email protected] TECFA, Université de Genève & Distance Learning University Switzerland (UniDistance) 24, rue du Général-Dufour, 1211 Genève 4, Suisse Christina BRANDENBERGER, [email protected] URPP Language and Space, University of Zurich Schönberggasse 15, 8001 Zürich, Suisse Elizaveta CHERNYSHOVA, [email protected] Université Lumière Lyon 2, ICAR, Labex ASLAN 15, parvis René Descartes, BP 7000, 69342 Lyon Cedex 07, France Daniel DUKES, [email protected] Psychology Research Institute, Université de Amsterdam, Pays-Bas Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, Université de Genève Campus Biotech, Rue des Mines 9, 1202 Genève Hua FAN, [email protected] Institut de psychologie et éducation, Université de Neuchâtel Espace Louis-Agassiz 1, 2000 Neuchâtel, Suisse Fabienne GFELLER, [email protected] Institut de psychologie et éducation, Université de Neuchâtel Espace Louis-Agassiz 1, 2000 Neuchâtel, Suisse Sylvia GONZALEZ, [email protected] Institut de psychologie du travail et des organisations, Université de Neuchâtel Rue Emile-Argand 11, 2000 Neuchâtel, Suisse Sara GRECO, [email protected] Istituto di Argomentazione, Linguistica e Semiotica, USI - Università della Svizzera italiana Via Buffi 6, 6900 Lugano, Suisse Michèle GROSSEN, [email protected] Institut de psychologie, Université de Lausanne Quartier UNIL-Mouline, Bâtiment Géopolis, 1015 Lausanne, Suisse

138 Adresses des auteurs

Christoph HOTTIGER, [email protected] URPP Language and Space, University of Zurich Schönberggasse 15, 8001 Zürich, Suisse Stéphanie MISSONIER, [email protected] Faculté des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC), Université de Lausanne 1015 Lausanne, Suisse Gaëlle MOLINARI, [email protected], gaë[email protected] TECFA, Université de Genève & Distance Learning University Switzerland (UniDistance) 24, rue du Général-Dufour, 1211 Genève 4 Alain PERUSSET, [email protected] Institut des sciences du langage et de la communication, Université de Neuchâtel Rue Pierre-à-Mazel 7, 2000 Neuchâtel, Suisse Cécile PETITJEAN, [email protected] Centre de linguistique appliquée, Université de Neuchâtel Rue Pierre-à-Mazel 7, 2000 Neuchâtel, Suisse Gillian SANDSTROM, [email protected] Department of psychology, University of Essex Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, United Kingdom Rebecca G. SCHÄR, [email protected] Institute of Argumentation, Linguistics and Semiotics, Università della Svizzera italiana Via G. Buffi 13, 6904 Lugano, Suisse

Klara SKOGMYR MARIAN, [email protected] Centre de linguistique appliquée, Université de Neuchâtel Rue Pierre-à-Mazel 7, 2000 Neuchâtel, Suisse Ottilie TILSTON, [email protected] Institut de psychologie du travail et des organisations, Université de Neuchâtel Rue Emile-Argand 11, 2000 Neuchâtel, Suisse Letizia VOLPIN, [email protected] Chaire de logopédie I, Université de Neuchâtel Rue Pierre-à-Mazel 7, 2000 Neuchâtel, Suisse Klaus ZUBERBÜHLER, [email protected] Laboratoire de cognition comparée, Université de Neuchâtel Rue Emile-Argand 11, 2000 Neuchâtel, Suisse

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