In:Producing and Managing Restricted Activities: Avoidance and withholding in institutional interaction
Edited by Fabienne H.G. Chevalier and John Moore
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 255] 2015
► pp. 305–336
Talking to/through the baby to produce and manage disaffiliation during well-child visits
Esther González-Martínez | University of Fribourg & University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Switzerland
Published online: 27 March 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.255.10zan
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.255.10zan
Relying on multimodal conversation analysis, this chapter examines the sequential and collaborative deployment of talking to/through the baby to produce and manage disaffiliation during well-child visits. We argue that this practice is oriented to and constitutes disaffiliation as a restricted activity preempted, mitigated and limited by the participants of the visits. It makes relevant and conciliates the medical, interactional and relational constraints of the visits and contributes to their institutional specificity. The chapter concentrates on three nurse-baby-mother interaction sequences drawn from a corpus of video recordings of well-child visits at a healthcare centre in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland.
References (52)
Aronsson, Karin, and Bengt Rundström. 1989. “Cats, Dogs, and Sweets in the Clinical Negotiation of Reality: On Politeness and Coherence in Paediatric Discourse.”
Language in Society
18 (4): 483–504.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, Carly, Susan Danby, and Michael Emmison. 2014. “Avoiding Giving Advice in Telephone Counselling for Children and Young People: Empowerment as Practical Action.” In Producing and Managing Restricted Activities: Avoidance and Withholding in Institutional Interaction, ed. by Fabienne Chevalier, and John Moore. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cahill, Patricia. 2010. “Children’s Participation in their Primary Care Consultations.” In Analysing Interaction in Childhood: Insights from Conversation Analysis, ed. by Hilary Gardner, and Michael Forrester, 128–145. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Clayman, Steven E. 1993. “Booing: The Anatomy of Disaffiliative Response.” American Sociological Review 58 (1): 110–130.
Coulter, Jeff. 1990. “Elementary Properties of Argument Sequences.” In Interaction Competence, ed. by George Psathas, 181–203. Lanham: University Press of America.
Gardner, Rod. 2001. When Listeners Talk: Response Tokens and Listeners Stance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gardner, Hilary, and Michael Forrester (eds). 2010. Analysing Interaction in Childhood: Insights from Conversation Analysis. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Gill, Virginia T., and Douglas W. Maynard. 1995. “On ‘Labelling’ in Actual Interaction: Delivering and Receiving Diagnoses of Developmental Disabilities.”
Social Problems
42 (1): 11–37.
Heinemman, Trine, and Ben Matthews. 2014. “Concessions in Audiology.” In Producing and Managing Restricted Activities: Avoidance and Withholding in Institutional Interaction, ed. by Fabienne Chevalier, and John Moore. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2002. “Ad Hoc Inquiries: Two Preferences in the Design of Routine Questions in an Open Context.” In Standardization and Tacit Knowledge: Interaction and Practice in the Survey Interview, ed. by Douglas W. Maynard, H. Houtkoop-Steenstra, N.C. Schaeffer, and J. van der Zouwen et al., 313–334. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Heritage, John, and Anna Lindström. 1998. “Motherhood, Medicine, and Morality: Scenes from a Medical Encounter.”
Research on Language & Social Interaction
31 (3–4): 397–438.
. 2012. “Knowledge, Empathy, and Emotion in a Medical Encounter.” In Emotion in Interaction, ed. by Anssi Peräkylä, and Marja-Leena Sorjonen, 256–273. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heritage, John, and Marja-Leena Sorjonen. 1994. “Constituting and Maintaining Activities across Sequences: And-Prefacing as a Feature of Question Design.” Language in Society 23 (1): 1–29.
Heritage, John, and Rod Watson. 1979. “Formulations as Conversational Objects.” In Everyday Language. Studies in Ethnomethodology, ed. by George Psathas, 123–162. New York: Irvington.
Heritage, John, and Sue Sefi. 1992. “Dilemmas of Advice: Aspects of the Delivery and Reception of Advice in interactions between Health Visitors and First-Time Mothers.” In Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. by Paul Drew, and John Heritage, 359–416. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Heritage, John, and Tanya Stivers. 1999. “Online Commentary in Acute Medical Visits: A Method of Shaping Patient Expectations.”
Social Science & Medicine
49 (11): 1501–1517.
Hutchby, Ian. 2001. “‘Oh’, Irony and Sequential Ambiguity in Arguments.” Discourse & Society 12 (2): 123–140.
Hydén, Lars-Christer, and Christina Baggens. 2004. “Joint Working Relationships: Children, Parents and Child Healthcare Nurses at Work.”
Communication & Medicine
1 (1): 71–83.
Jefferson, Gail. 1978. “Sequential Aspects of Storytelling in Conversation.” In Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, ed. by Jim Schenkein, 219–248. New York: Academic Press.
. 2004. “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction.” In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene H. Lerner, 13–31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Komter, Martha L. 1994. “Accusations and Defences in Courtroom Interaction.” Discourse & Society 5 (2): 165–187.
Lerner, Gene H. 1996. “On the ‘Semi-Permeable’ Character of Grammatical Units in Conversation: Conditional Entry into the Turn Space of Another Speaker.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Sandy Thompson, and Manny Schegloff, 238–276. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.
Mangione-Smith, Rita. 2003. “Online Commentary during the Physical Examination: A Communication Tool for Avoiding Inappropriate Antibiotic Prescribing?”
Social Science & Medicine
56 (2): 313–320.
Maynard, Douglas W. 2003. Bad News, Good News: Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Clinical Settings. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Mitchell, Robert W. 2001. “Americans’ Talk to Dogs: Similarities and Differences with Talk to Infants.”
Research on Language & Social Interaction
34 (2): 183–210.
Monzoni, Chiara, and Marcus Reuber. 2014. “Linguistic and Interactional Restrictions in an Outpatient Clinic: The Challenge of Delivering the Diagnosis and Explaining the Aetiology of Functional Neurological Problems.” In Producing and Managing Restricted Activities: Avoidance and Withholding in Institutional Interaction, ed. by Fabienne Chevalier, and John Moore. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Moore, John. 2014. “Assessments, Interrogatives, and Semi-Scripted Talk in Managing a Restriction on Advising.” In Producing and Managing Restricted Activities: Avoidance and Withholding in Institutional Interaction, ed. by Fabienne Chevalier, and John Moore.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Mozingo, Tracy A. 2009. “Well-Child Care: A Check-Up for Success.” Healthy Children (Summer/Back to School): 17–18.
Raymond, Geoffrey, and John Heritage. 2006. “The Epistemics of Social Relations: Owning Grandchildren.”
Language in Society
35 (5): 677–705.
Roberts, Felicia. 2004. “Speaking to and for Animals in a Veterinary Clinic.”
Research on Language & Social Interaction
37 (4): 421–446.
Sacks, Harvey. 1974. “An Analysis of the Course of a Joke’s Telling in Conversation.” In Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, ed. by Richard Bauman, and Joel Sherzer, 337–353. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1992. “On Talk and its Institutional Occasions.” In Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. by Paul Drew, and John Heritage, 101–134. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1996. “Confirming Allusions: Toward an Empirical Account of Action.”
American Journal of Sociology
102 (1): 161–216.
. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Silverman, David. 1987. Communication and Medical Practice: Social Relations in the Clinic. London: Sage.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen. 2000. “Rapport Management: A Framework for Analysis.” In Culturally Speaking. Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures, ed. by Helen Spencer-Oatey, 11–46. London: Continuum.
Steensig, Jakob, and Birte Asmuß. 2005. “Notes on Disaligning ‘Yes but’ Initiated utterances in German and Danish Conversations: Two Construction types for Dispreferred Responses.” In Syntax and Lexis in Conversation: Studies on the Use of Linguistic Resources in Talk-in-Interaction, ed. by Auli Hakulinen, and Margret Selting, 349–373. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Steensig, Jakob, and Paul Drew. 2008. “Introduction: Questioning and Affiliation/Disaffiliation in Interaction.” Discourse Studies 10 (1): 5–15.
Stivers, Tanya. 1998. “Prediagnostic Commentary in Veterinarian-Client Interaction.”
Research on Language & Social Interaction
31 (2): 241–277.
. 2007. Prescribing Under Pressure: Parent-Physician Conversations and Antibiotics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 2008. “Stance, Alignment and Affiliation during Storytelling: When Nodding is a Token of Affiliation.” Research on Language & Social Interaction 41 (1): 31–57.
Stivers, Tanya, and Jack Sidnell. 2005. “Introduction: Multimodal Interaction.” Semiotica 156 (1–4): 1–20.
Strong, Philip M. 1979. The Ceremonial Order of the Clinic: Patients, Doctors, and Medical Bureaucracies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Tannen, Deborah. 2003. “Power Maneuvers or Connection Maneuvers? Ventriloquizing in Family Interaction.” In Linguistics, Language, and the Real World: Discourse and Beyond, ed. by Deborah Tannen, and James E. Alatis, 50–62. Washington: Georgetown University Press.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Miao, Grace Qiyuan & Tanya Stivers
Caronia, Letizia & Federica Ranzani
Ranzani, Federica
2023. The pediatrician’s normalizing practice in well-child visits. In A Pragmatic Agenda for Healthcare [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 338], ► pp. 227 ff.
Monzoni, Chiara M. & Markus Reuber
2015. Linguistic and interactional restrictions in an outpatient clinic. In Producing and Managing Restricted Activities [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 255], ► pp. 239 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.