When Your Conference Presentation Takes An Atypical Turn: Audience’s Question(ing) Design in Question & Answer Sessions.

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2023-07-01

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Topal, Pınar
Işık Güler, Hale

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“Asking a question is not an innocent thing to do,” as inquiries into what the recipient has said or done may involve potential disaffiliation (Steensig and Drew, 2008, p.7). Conference Question & Answer (Q&A) sessions, in particular, crystallize this interactional phenomenon as a nexus for submitting one’s work to the inspection of academia. In line with this notable point, the present study explores a hitherto neglected field of research within the domains of academic discourse: the language of conferencing. The production of ‘talk for an overhearing audience’ is a prominent characteristic of conference Q&As, as the audience members vigilantly attend to their institutional role-related rights: the entitlement to appraise the focal participants’ turns. The focal participants (i.e., the presenter and the enquirer audience members) may at any time “depart from formal turn-taking” and its typical manifestation as a result of this characteristic (Drew and Heritage, 1992, p.27). Correspondingly, while the typical design of audience interrogatives is ascribed as information-seeking, genuine questions, Q&A sessions also host atypical instances of objections to and questionings of presented works. Such departures from typical information-seeking questions towards questions that convey disagreement make conference Q&As a paramount site of struggle over academic identities, as they open the face of the presenter to threats by the negative evaluations that might come under the disguise of questions. In these sequences, the audience’s attempts at policing and gatekeeping, as well as the presenters’ means of resisting and accepting, are displayed through interactional-pragmatic phenomena. Our analysis offers a discursive account of the video recordings of 25 Turkish Q&A sessions held during a Linguistics conference, in an attempt to explore the appraisal resources (Martin & White, 2005) and the rapport management (Spencer-Oatey, 2002) orientations that the presenters and audience members employ in their atypical turns. Features of the audience’s atypical turn design, such as disaffiliative and evaluative question design, as well as the presenters’ strategies to restore routine conduct during conference Q&A sessions, are micro-analysed. The findings indicate that the members of the audience actively enact their here-and-now position as an information-receiving audience (and the K- epistemic stance that this role assumes) in the formation of genuine, information-seeking questions. Questioning, however, is found to instantiate the audience’s relative epistemic status (e.g., a senior with credentials of a potentially higher role in academia) against the presenting academic (e.g., an early-career researcher) in the larger context of academia through evaluative language. The study offers insights into the institutional ‘fingerprints’ of the professional community of academia, saturated in conference Q&A talk. The findings are conducive to the discursive literature on evaluative language and the institutional impoliteness embedded in the language of conferencing and have potential implications for our understanding of spoken academic discourse.References Drew, P., & Heritage, J. (1992). Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings. Cambridge University Press. Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan. Steensig, J., & Drew, P. (2008). Introduction: Questioning and affiliation/disaffiliation in interaction. Discourse Studies, 10(1), pp.5-15.

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https://pragmatics.international/resource/collection/BF65CD43-2965-4B93-BB41-68CD05ADB893/Abstracts_book.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/105783

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Conference / Seminar