Research

My research is grounded in conversation analytic principles and methods. I analyze actual episodes of social encounters, build collections of particular phenomena, and describe the methodic procedures by which people organize their settings with and for one another in interaction through the use of talk, bodily movement, and other resources. My engagement with these materials is also informed by findings and concerns from functional linguistics, cognitive science, and linguistic anthropology.

2018    Conversation analysis (chapter in Research Methods in Psycholinguistics and the Neurobiology of Language: A Practical Guide, with K. H. Kendrick)

2020    Managing conversation analysis data (chapter in The Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management, with C. W. Raymond)

2022    Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (chapter in SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Design)

2022 Harvey Sacks: Connections, references, differences (Goffman Handbuch, with A. W. Rawls)

forth. Data collection (chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Conversation Analysis Methods, with J. Webb)

Silences

Conversation analytic research has discovered a great deal about the organization of pauses and gaps (roughly, intra- and inter-turn silences). Much less work has concerned lapses, which are periods of non-talk that emerge when all speakers refrain from speaking. Unearthing this organization was the main focus of my dissertation work, for which I analyzed over 500 lapses from diverse activities (breakfast, studying, bicycle repair, library counter, driving, watching television, etc.). I've explored how participants arrive at places where lapsing out of talk is possible; the kinds of things they do as and once a lapse emerges; and the resources they draw on in restarting talk afterwards.

2021    Sacks, silence, and self-(de)selection (chapter in volume On Sacks)

2020    When Conversation Lapses (book published with Oxford University Press)

2017    Lapse organization in interaction (PhD thesis)

2018    How speakers continue with talk after a lapse in conversation (ROLSI paper)

2016    Sequence recompletion: A practice for managing lapses in conversation (Journal of Pragmatics paper)

2015    Lapses: How people arrive at, and deal with, discontinuities in talk (ROLSI paper)

2015    Lapse management and lapse resolution in sustained and incipient states of talk (ASA conference paper)

Multimodal participation

Interactants rely not only on speaking and vocalizing when participating in social activities, but also on bodily movement and manipulation of the material world. My research on multimodality has concerned how participants integrate various resources to recognizably produce the social occasions of which they are a part. I've analyzed how conversationalists coordinate the mutually exclusive acts of drinking and speaking. I've also looked at how children use imitation in organizing seemingly chaotic episodes of locomotor play.

forth. Ambulatory openings (Complexity of interaction: Studies of multimodal conversation analysis)

2022 Anticipatory initiations: The use of a presumed reason-for-the-interaction in face-to-face openings (Journal of Pragmatics)

2020    Gaze (entry in The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology)

2020    Waiting to inhale: On sniffing in conversation (Research on Language and Social Interaction paper)

2018    Imitation in children's locomotor play (Research on Children and Social Interaction paper, with D. DeLiema, R. Chen, & V. Flood)

2018    Drinking for speaking: The multimodal organization of drinking in conversation (Social Interaction: Video-based Studies of Human Sociality paper)

Emotion

Emotion is central to the organization of social interaction as it informs the production and comprehension of action. My work in this area includes an analysis of sighing in social situations, the turn-design of actions that elicit empathy, and the sequential environments where participants use constructions like where the fuck are my keys?.

2021 Using expletive insertion to pursue and sanction in social interaction (Journal of Sociolinguistics, with P. Hömke, E. Löfgren, T. Neumann, W. L. Schuermann, and K. H. Kendrick)

2017    Eligibility and bad news delivery: How call-takers reject applicants to university (Linguistics and Education paper, with E. Stokoe)

2017    Transcribing sighing (contribution to Transcribing for Social Research)

2014    Sighing in interaction: Somatic, semiotic, and social (ROLSI paper)

2014    Empathic encounters and the calibration of social distance (ICCA conference paper)

Turkmen

An interest in Turkmen (and Turkic languages broadly) emerged from my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkmenistan from 2007-09. My master's thesis is a grammatical sketch of the language that expands upon the existing grammar by Clark (1998) with analyses of discourse and interactional data. I've also examined aspects of turn-projection in conversational Turkmen. In 2014, I conducted fieldwork in Turkey, collecting over 20 hours of naturally occurring interactions in Turkmen, Uzbek, and Turkish.

2013    Grammatical sketch of Turkmen (MA thesis)

2012    Prosody and turn-projection in conversational Turkmen (CLIC conference slides)