Topics treated in the articles include combining physical actions and verbal announcements in everyday conversation, linking of verbal and nonverbal actions as well as verbal linkages between nonverbal actions by dance teachers building pedagogical activity. Other topics concern the mediation of questions through informal translating in multilingual conversation in order to organize participation, and the ways in which student requests for clarification and confirmation create learning occasions in a foreign language classroom. Still other articles concern the on-line emergence of alternative questions with the Finnish particle vai 'or', delayed completions of unfinished turns, the transforming of requests and offers into joint ventures, and the ways in which direct quotations are created in written journalism from the original talk in the spoken interview.
Most of the papers employ Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics as a theoretical framework. The languages used as data are Finnish, English, Estonian, French, Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish.
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-
Ritva Laury, PhD, is professor emerita of Finnish at the University of Helsinki and professor emerita of Linguistics at the California State University. Her research has focused on the emergence of grammar from interaction, and has dealt with issues of reference, indexicality, grammaticalization and clause combining, and, most recently, embodied activities in conversation. She is a team leader in the Helsinki Center of Excellence for Research on Intersubjectivity in Interaction.
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-
Marja Etelämäki, FT (Doctor of Philosophy), is Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Oslo. Her research concerns the relation of grammar to social interaction. In particular, she has worked on indexical elements such as pronouns and particles, and on particular forms of requests. Lately, her interests have also included the ways in which agency and experience are construed in the course of interaction.
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-
Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, Dr. habil, Dr. h.c. professorships in English linguistics at the Universities of Konstanz and Potsdam and was Distinguished Professor for Interactional Linguistics at the University of Helsinki from 2009–2103. She is currently associated with the Helsinki Center of Excellence for Research on Intersubjectivity. She has published widely on prosody and grammar in interaction.