Seminar 4 Alignment & affiliation
Maintaining progressivity in the interaction…
“could have made things awkward and difficult for the conversation to continue”
Where is the other-initiated repair done in the Louis Theroux interview?
Alignment and affiliation
How do we know what goes next in conversation? Conditional relevance (Alignment)
How can speakers know the hearer is on side? (Affiliation)
How does our understanding of alignment and affiliation provide insights for professional practice?
Activity: What does Tony think of the new logo?
Affiliation
Alignment
Align with the project of the talk.
Affiliate with the speaker.
Activity
Come up with a list of actions that hearers display to the speaker.
In other words, how do you do listening? Add your ideas here.
Stivers, T. (2008). Stance, alignment, and affiliation during storytelling: When nodding is a token of affiliation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41(1), 31-57.
“Thus, the concepts of structural alignment and social affiliation are separate interactional issues and are managed by different response tokens.”
Steensig, J. (2020). Conversation analysis and affiliation and alignment. In C. Chapelle (Ed.), The concise encyclopedia of applied linguistics. London: Wiley. (p.4)
Activity: So what's the difference between alignment and affiliation?
In this topic, we have seen that alignment and affiliation are managed through the sequential organisation of talk, the management of repair, and preference organisation. Essentially, we are starting to see how the building blocks of the content in the subject so far equip us with the tools to investigate how people use language to achieve specific social action.
Let's use the example of 'telling jokes' as social action, to consider what is necessary for alignment and what constitutes affiliation.
The questions for you to resolve are:
What is the conditionally relevant next action to a question-answer designed joke?
Can you find an example of where the joke recipient does alignment and affiliation?
Can you find an example where the joke recipient does alignment and disaffiliation?
Can you find an example where the joke recipient does affiliation but not alignment?
Can you find an example of disaffiliation and disalignment?
Watch the clip below for as many times as you need to to be able to answer the questions!
Activity
The following story is the basis of Stivers' analysis of alignment and affiliation (from this topic reading).
Identify: What demonstrates alignment with the story? What demonstrates affiliation with the stance of the storyteller?
Summary
Preference for alignment (interactionally). But we are wary of attributing status to actions... (e.g. is laughter always affiliative?)
Multiple resources speakers and listeners draw on to demonstrate alignment and/or affiliation.
Attuned responses are the key to productive (professional) interaction.
