The ‘parent’ category as an interactional resource in a sibling dispute over sharing
Prof. Valeria Sinkeviciute (The University of Queensland, Australia)
18. März 2025, 14:00 Uhr
IDS Mannheim, Raum 1.28, 1. OG
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Abstract:
Drawing on a combination of the analytical tools from interactional pragmatics and membership categorisation analysis, this paper explores a specific type of everyday family life – a sibling dispute, and how the ‘parent’ category is invoked as an interactional resource by parents and children during oppositional talk over sharing. The data comes from spontaneous video-recorded conversations in a Russian-speaking family living in Australia that includes two siblings, aged 2;10 and 5;7. Based on three stages of the dispute, the ndings demonstrate how, through category labels, predicates and category-implicative social actions, (1) children negotiate their relationships and exploit the ‘parent’ category to mobilise their support or denounce the other’s reportable transgression, and (2) parents intervene in the dispute and socialise children into sharing, gradually moving from suggestions and directives to a threat.
Dr. Valeria Sinkeviciute is Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her main research interests lie in the eld of pragmatics of social interaction in face-to-face and online settings with a focus on identity construction, membership categorisation, family talk, conversational humour and linguistic (im)politeness. She is the author of numerous papers on these topics in journals and edited volumes, and her monograph Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness: A Pragmatic Analysis of Social Interaction (John Benjamins). She is Associate Editor in the Journal of Pragmatics and the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics journal.
Zur Person:
Valeria Sinkeviciute is currently working on her long-term research project on family talk in multilingual Australia, where she explores how families from non-Anglophone backgrounds construct their life through (parent-parent-, parentchild and sibling) conversations at home. During her Fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS), she aims to (1) identify a range of interactional and pragmatic phenomena in the video-recordings, (2) start creating collections of recurrent multimodal practices as well as (3), using this invaluable opportunity, discuss her research project with the IDS members who have expertise working with language other than English and family discourse.
Dr. Valeria Sinkeviciute (The University of Queensland, Australien) arbeitet derzeit an einem Langzeitforschungsprojekt über Familiengespräche im mehrsprachigen Australien, in dem sie untersucht, wie Familien mit nicht-anglophonem Hintergrund ihr Leben durch häusliche Gespräche (Eltern-Eltern-, Eltern-Kind- und Geschwistergespräche) konstruieren. Während ihres Fellowships am Leibniz-Institut ür Deutsche Sprache (IDS) möchte sie (1) eine Reihe von interaktionellen und pragmatischen Phänomenen in den Videoaufzeichnungen identifizieren, (2) mit der Erstellung von Sammlungen wiederkehrender multimodaler Praktiken beginnen und (3) diese wertvolle Gelegenheit nutzen, um ihr Forschungsprojekt mit den IDS-Mitgliedern zu diskutieren, die sich mit anderen Sprachen als Englisch und Familieninteraktionen auskennen.