In Belgium, an estimated 38.726 people experience homelessness (Koning Boudewijnstichting, 2024). There are of course many initiatives to help these people, both temporary (e.g. during the winter months) and more structural ones. In this presentation, we will zoom in on recordings of authentic coaching sessions within the context of such a structural initiative, namely a Brussels’ homeless shelter. In particular, we aim to tease out how homeless people and their mentors linguistically navigate the tension between independence and guidance during decision-making episodes. We analyzed such episodes in six authentic coaching sessions using multimodal discourse analysis and we particularly focused on the negotiation of epistemic and deontic stances (Heritage, 2012; Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012). Our findings reveal two contrasting patterns. First, when discussions concern the shelter’s internal regulations, mentors adopt a high deontic stance, enforcing strict institutional rules with minimal negotiation. Second, when discussions focus on mentees’ external plans — such as employment or housing — interactions allow for more negotiation, with a more nuanced epistemic and deontic stance. This results in more shared decision-making (Landmark et al., 2015), thus orienting more to the shallow side of the deontic gradient (Landmark et al., 2015) in their formulations. In sum, our study uncovers the challenges that the coaching towards the re-integration of homeless people entails in this center’s specific context, as shown through the balancing act – between institutional constraints and the shared aim to develop the homeless people’s independence – that emerges when analyzing how decision-making episodes are talked into being during these coaching sessions.

References

Heritage, J. (2012). Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45(1), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2012.646684

Koning Boudewijnstichting. (2024). Dak- en thuisloosheid: nieuwe tellingen onthullen de omvang van de problematiek. Retrieved January 10, 2025, from https://kbs-frb.be/nl/dak-en-thuisloosheid-nieuwe-tellingen-onthullen-de-omvang-van-de-problematiek

Landmark, A. M. D., Gulbrandsen, P., & Svennevig, J. (2015). Whose decision? Negotiating epistemic and deontic rights in medical treatment decisions. Journal of Pragmatics, 78, 54–69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.11.007

Stevanovic, M., & Peräkylä, A. (2012). Deontic Authority in Interaction: The Right to Announce, Propose, and Decide. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45(3), 297–321. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2012.699260

In the UK, mental health helpline services provide support and guidance to callers with a range of health concerns, including those who express suicidal ideation. Despite receiving training to manage these challenging environments, call-takers face the recurring interactional dilemma of navigating the transition from empathic listening to the implementation of new institutional tasks (e.g., risk assessments, signposting to other services). Using conversation analysis allied with discursive psychology, we investigated recordings of telephone calls to a British mental health charity helpline, focusing on how interactants oriented to and managed moments in calls where suicide talk became manifest. We found that call-takers regularly produced affective inferences (Ekberg et al., 2016; cf. Hepburn & Potter, 2007) that attended to callers’ emotional states, in turn prefacing the initiation of new action sequences. By explicitly orienting to callers’ affective status, call-takers’ affiliative displays hearably act as conversational pivots, preparing the ground for new, sometimes disaligning institutional activities (callers can resist call-takers’ moves to different action sequences). The ways in which this transition device facilitates a shift between activities in a uniquely urgent, high-stakes institutional setting offers new insights into how mental health formulations feature in the institutional management of empathy, affiliation, and immediate, possibly risk-oriented, tasks (cf. Jefferson & Lee, 1981). Findings from this study can be developed into evidence-based training resources.

This study focuses on reportative evidentiality in French institutional interactions, i.e. when participants signal information as second-party. The collection contains 106 turns expressing reportative evidentiality in telephone interactions between emergency call-takers from Fire & Rescue and/or Emergency Medical Services (EMS). While the caller is on hold, a first call-taker has a short telephone conversation with a second call-taker to present the case before transferring the caller to them.
The most common evidential reportatives are quotatives (elle dit qu'il arrive pas à lui parler ‘she says he can’t speak to her’), the conditional (il serait inconsciente ‘he’s said to be unconscious’), and adverbial ‘apparemment’ (elle respire apparemment ‘she’s breathing apparently’). Reportative evidentials have been analyzed as markers of non-commitment, by which speakers withhold their own endorsement of a proposition originating from someone else (Dendale 2002, Kronning 2018). This study shows that during emergency call transfer, this on-record meaning of neutrality can be titled towards doubt. Indexing doubt can work in the caller’s favor when the call-taker harbors the suspicion that the situation is more serious than the caller described. However, explicitly flagging information as second-hand can also undermine the caller’s reliability, as observed in the subsequent interactions with second call-takers.
This study contributes to research on evidentials and epistemics in talk-in-interaction (Clift 2006, Fox 2001), especially during clinical handover (Mori et al. 2017). Despite substantial interactional literature on emergency calls, little attention has been devoted to practices surrounding call transfer (Kevoe Feldman & Pomerantz 2018) and the institutional co-construction of knowledge.

Nowadays, many helplines offer clients various media channels to reach out for information or advice. When providing single-session counseling through telephone or chat, counselors face the challenge of building a relationship with their client in the absence of the non-verbal and paralinguistic resources that are available in face-to-face communication. Previous conversation analytic research has demonstrated that, across a range of institutional settings, compliments are a commonly occurring practice for relational and other interactional work. Given that compliments may occur both in spoken and written interaction, we use conversation analysis to study the ways in which compliments are used in single-session counseling interactions in chat and phone calls. The data consist of 57 chat logs and 48 phone recordings of counseling sessions on an alcohol and drugs information service. We explore the sequential environments in which compliments are produced, alongside the actions they are used for within the overall organization of the counseling session. As part of this, our analysis demonstrates how counsellors adapt the turn design of the compliment through resources like discourse markers, amongst others, to fit these environments and actions. Focusing on complimenting in a specific setting, but across different media, we also shed light on the interconnection between compliments and the affordances of the communication medium.