When we need more than one turn-constructional unit (Sacks et al., 1974) to speak our minds, we can project continuation (Schegloff, 1980; Streeck, 1995; Ford & Thompson, 1996; Auer, 2005) into multi-unit-turns and Big Packages (Sacks, 1992ab). Such lengthy stretches of same-speaker talk require the recipient to collaborate through structurally aligning with a temporary asymmetry in who has the floor (Schegloff, 1982; Stivers, 2008; Mandelbaum, 2012). There is reason to believe that such structural alignment, aiming for later (affective) affiliation, is a universal relational phenomenon (cf. Stivers, 2022, p. 22).

However, the resources we use to do or signal such structural alignment may vary with language and culture (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018, p. 61). My studies of extensive databases of everyday conversation in Norwegian and in (Peninsular) Spanish indicate structural alignment with projected continuation as language-culture-specifically routinized as divergent practices. In the Norwegian data structural alignment is predominantly done through vocal continuers, mostly m᷉m with the intonational pattern of the East Norwegian second tonal accent (Sbertoli-Nielsen, 2023). In the Spanish data, however, vocal continuers of any form are rare (Sbertoli-Nielsen, forthcoming); when participants project continuation, usually recruiting floor-holding gestures, recipients structurally align predominantly through gazing directly at speaker (jf. Schegloff, 1982; Rossano et al., 2009; Fant, 1989). There is thus reason to investigate whether such divergent practices may have an impact on (affective) affiliation in intercultural second-language interaction.

In Danish, the particular combination of the hesitation marker øh(m) ‘uh(m)’ with the positive response particle ja ‘yes’ has been described as signaling that an upcoming response to a polar question is not straight-forward and might demand some further qualification or explanation, often resulting in turn expansions such as accounts (Sørensen et al. 2019). However, in some cases, øh ja occurs in a turn of its own with no further expansion. Furthermore, the immediately preceding turns are, in these cases, not always polar questions.

My initial observations suggest that these instances of øh ja are used to show agreement, but are made from a K+ position (Heritage & Raymond 2005) with the øh ja-speaker marking the preceding utterance as presenting something obvious.

In this paper, I investigate this use of øh ja as a practice, focusing specifically on the social action(s) it performs, its sequential context, and its possible prosodic and embodied variations. I also draw comparisons to similar practices in other languages, in particular English. Using Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, I will present analyses of excerpts from a collection of about 30 instances found in more than 60 hours of data of naturally occurring Danish talk-in-interaction. The paper aims to directly contribute to the grammar-writing project Samtalegrammatik.dk (e.g., Steensig et al. in press), and to further nuance our understanding and knowledge of the particle ‘ja’ in Danish talk-in-interaction.

References:
Sørensen, S. S., Bruun, A., Jørgensen, M., Miltersen, E. H. & Steensig, J.. 2019. 'Øh(m)' i Samtalegrammatik.dk. In: Goldshtein, Y., Hansen, I. S. & Hougaard, T. T. (Eds):17. Møde om Udforskningen af Dansk Sprog. Aarhus: Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet, pp. 523-534

Steensig, J., Jørgensen, M., Lindström, J. K. , Mikkelsen, N., Suomalainen, K., & Sørensen, S. S. (Eds.). In press. Grammar in Action: Building comprehensive grammars of talk-in-interaction
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. (Studies in Language and Social Interaction)

This paper investigates the phonetic and social organization of laughter in conversation, expanding on Jefferson, Sacks, and Schegloff's (1987) view of laughter as a structured, co-produced event. We argue that seemingly variable phonetic details (Bachorowski et al., 2001) are crucial for participants to predict laughter completion and synchronize their own laughter. Using Conversation Analysis and phonetic analysis of English, Spanish, and Finnish conversations, we examine how participants manage laughter in real-time.

We propose a four-phase schema (Chafe, 2007) to describe laughter episodes: the initiating pulse, variable exhalation sequence, glottal reset, and inhalation. Our analysis details how participants utilize phonetic features like pitch, rhythm, and amplitude within these phases to signal the onset and termination of laughter, and to coordinate with each other and surrounding talk. For instance, an initiating pulse can signal a laugh-able moment, prompting others to join, while the exhalation sequence facilitates alignment through matched phonetic features.

By demonstrating how participants orient to these phonetic phases, we illustrate how laughter's rhythmic and melodic organization, rooted in respiration, provides the resources for coordination. This highlights the social significance of detailed phonetic features in joint laughter and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of laughter's role in managing social interaction.

The topic of this presentation is the duration of laughter and the factors that affect it.
The early studies on laughter examined everyday conversations, revealing that laughter occurs in both non-serious (Schenkein 1972; Jefferson 1972) and problematic situations (Jefferson 1984). Similar findings have been observed in institutional interactions (Lavin, Maynard 2001; Haakana 2010). However, the connection between the situation that laughter occurs in and the duration of laughter has not been studied in naturally occurring conversations.
My research question is: How is the duration of laughter affected by the type of interaction (everyday vs. institutional), the situation at hand (non-serious vs. problematic), and the action performed by laughter (mitigating the meaning of speaker’s turn vs. reacting to previous speakers’ turn)?
The data consist of institutional and everyday interactions from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian of the University of Tartu and from two Estonian TV talk shows. Collection includes 472 instances of laughter. Analysis draws on conversation analysis.
Findings indicate that laughter tends to be shorter in institutional interaction and longer in everyday conversations. Additionally, the situation in which laughter occurs (non-serious or problematic) affects its duration in institutional settings but not in everyday interactions.

References
Haakana, Markku 2010. Laughter and smiling: Notes on co-occurrences. – Journal of Pragmatics, kd 42, nr 6, lk 1499–1512. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.01.010.
Jefferson, Gail 1979. A technique for inviting laughter and its subsequent acceptance/ declination. – Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology, pp. 79–96.
Jefferson, Gail 1984. On the Organization of Laughter in Talk About Troubles. – Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversational Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 346–369. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511665868.021.
Lavin, Danielle; Maynard, Douglas W. 2001. Standardization vs. Rapport: Respondent Laughter and Interviewer Reaction during Telephone Surveys. – American Sociological Review, 66(3), pp. 453. https://doi.org/10.2307/3088888.
Schenkein, James 1972. Toward an Analysis of Natural Conversation and the Sense of Heheh. – Semiotica, 6(4), pp. 344–377. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1972.6.4.344.

When a child produces a request while the parent is occupied with another activity, the parent may respond with a suspension, such as hetkinen ‘a moment’, kohta ‘just a sec/soon’, wait or hang on (Vatanen & Haddington 2024; see also Keisanen et al. 2014). Our talk focuses on how children respond to parents’ suspension turns. The analysis shows that children can respond to parents’ suspension turns in different ways. Children may simply comply and wait for the adult to resume the suspended action/activity, sometimes even by visibly and hearably ‘doing waiting’ (cf. Svinhufvud 2018), for example, by humming. In some cases, children resist the suspension and its implications: they may continue to pursue their original request or explicitly resist the suspension (e.g., älä anna kohta vain nyt ‘don’t give soon but now’). Children may also start to cry or whine after a suspension. Children’s responses to parents’ suspensions can therefore display various kinds of affect. More generally, the analysis suggests that, similar to repair initiations, suspensions do not provide what was sequentially implicated in the prior turn. They seem to initiate an insertion sequence of sorts, during which the sequential implicativeness of the initial request still holds. In our talk, we analyze the sequential implicativeness of suspensions, exploring also how responses to suspensions relate to preference organization and the building of social harmony in families. The data is video-recorded naturally occurring family interaction in Finnish and English. We use Conversation Analysis as our method.

Drawing on a dataset of currently 9 hours of video recordings from 4 construction sites of a mid-sized steel construction company operating in Germany, this paper examines how foremen instruct workers in multilingual construction teams.
The preliminary inspection of the collected data shows that the interactions on construction sites are mostly task-related and material-driven, involving verbal language and gestures, pointing, and the handling of tools (Lilja et al., 2024; Lilja et al., 2025; Urbanik, 2021; Urbanik, 2024). Furthermore, directives are central components of construction work, as foremen must provide precise, sequenced instructions to ensure that the assembly work is done safely, on time, and in accordance with the contractual requirements. Additionally, linguistic asymmetries - particularly, limited German proficiency among some workers - can create challenges in achieving intersubjectivity.
Based on these observations, my paper examines how foremen instruct workers with limited or no German proficiency. I will use Multimodal Conversation Analysis (Mondada, 2019) to explore how foremen and workers mobilize verbal, embodied, and material resources to issue and respond to instructions. The analysis focuses on instances where repair practices or language brokering are necessary to resolve interactional trouble and contrasts these with cases where mutual understanding seems to be achieved seamlessly.
By examining the interactional challenges that linguistic diversity poses in blue-collar workplaces, the study contributes to research on intercultural professional communication (Kahlin et al., 2022; Svennevig, 2018; Theodoropoulou, 2020). It also adds to CA research by showing how multimodal resources, including material resources, support mutual understanding in multilingual workplace environments (Goodwin, 2017).

In conversation, recipients continuously provide feedback to their interlocutor(s), signaling the presence or absence of conversational trouble and contributing to the flow of interaction (Allwood et al., 1992; Schegloff, 1982; Tolins & Fox Tree, 2014, Dingemanse et al., 2022). This feedback is inherently multimodal, incorporating embodied behaviors such as head movements and smiles (Brunner, 1979; Allwood & Cerrato, 2003; Stivers, 2008; Bauer et al., 2024). However, is this the case to the same extent across languages? Or do languages differ regarding the design of multimodal feedback in conversation? To address these questions, we conduct a comparative study of six typologically diverse spoken languages: German (Indo-European, Germanic), Datooga (Nilotic, Tanzania), Khoekhoe (Khoe-Kwadi, Namibia), Russian (Indo-European, Slavic), Ruuli (Bantu, Uganda), and Yurakaré (isolate, Bolivia). Using multimodal conversational corpora with uniform annotations, we compare multimodal feedback signals across these languages. Our findings reveal a striking pattern: speakers of the Indo-European languages in our sample extensively use head movements as feedback signals, while speakers of the non-Indo-European languages exhibit a stronger reliance on verbal forms. These results suggest that speakers of different languages organize their multimodal feedback repertoires in distinct ways. This study highlights the cross-linguistic variability in the design space of multimodal feedback. Our findings align with prior research demonstrating variability in vocal feedback strategies across languages and language varieties (Tottie, 1991; Clancy et al., 1996), offering new insights into the interplay between language, culture, and interactional behavior.

References
Allwood, Jens & Cerrato, Loredana. 2003. A study of gestural feedback expressions. In First Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication, 7–22. Copenhagen: Gothenburg University Publications.
Allwood, Jens, Nivre, Joakim & Ahlsén, Elisabeth. 1992. On the semantics and pragmatics of linguistic feedback. Journal of Semantics 9(1). 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/9.1.1
Bauer, Anastasia, Kuder, Anna, Schulder, Marc & Schepens, Job. 2024. Phonetic differences between affirmative and feedback head nods in German Sign Language (DGS): A pose estimation study. PLoS ONE 19(5). e0304040. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304040
Brunner, Lawrence J. 1979. Smiles can be back channels. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37(5). 728–734. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.5.728
Clancy, Patricia M., Thompson, Sandra A., Suzuki, Ryoko & Tao, Hongyin. 1996. The conversational use of reactive tokens in English, Japanese, and Mandarin. Journal of Pragmatics 26(3). 355–387. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(95)00036-4
Dingemanse, Mark, Liesenfeld, Andreas & Woensdregt, Marieke. 2022. Convergent cultural evolution of continuers (mhmm). In The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE), 160–167). Nijmegen: JCoLE.