Alignement, affiliation et trajectoire interactionnelle dans la conversation

Abstract

The dynamic deployment of talk-in-interaction has been studied mainly from the perspective of collaboration and/or convergence. In both linguistics and psycholinguistics, the authors have mainly tried to show that due to a strong predictability (psycholinguistics) or projection/projectability (Conversational Analysis, Interactional Linguistics) of the utterances, achieved in particular on the linguistic level thanks to projection cues allowing to anticipate what is going to happen, the conversation is a joint activity in which the search for convergence (alignment) proves to be central. This search for convergence would result in an almost continuous collaboration during the interaction. Various phenomena (feedback items, collaborative statements, among others) tend to support this conception according to which the conversation is first and foremost collaboration and the explicit manifestation of this collaboration to his/her partner. The partners would therefore constantly be aligning themselves in order to achieve an optimal mutual understanding. While it is true that the collaboration of participants greatly facilitates conversation, or even that conversation is 'so easy' because we are constantly aligning onto each other, through the most automatic processes possible (Garrod & Pickering, 2004), this collaborative vision of conversation needs to be nuanced. Indeed, the analysis of various excerpts from conversational corpora shows that this notion of collaboration does not make it possible to account for the richness of the conversation, which is linked to its intrinsic dynamism. Thus, we can sometimes observe a superficial collaboration or even an absence of collaboration. Thus, while an interaction calls upon a large repertoire of practices (repetition, statement completion, thematic transition, feedback, humor, etc.), we wish to show that the collaboration of the participants is only one of the possible ways of exploiting this large repertoire, and that it coexists with other, less collaborative, or even non-collaborative forms, on which this article will focus. Through the study of non-expected (non-predictable) utterances, characterized as disaligned and/or disaffiliated in some of our work (Bertrand & Priego-Valverde, 2017, Priego-Valverde, 2021), we wish to emphasize the impact they can have on interactional dynamics. Thus, some of these utterances may simply be refused or ignored because taking them into account would lead to a change in the interactional trajectory initiated by one of the participants. On the other hand, other utterances, although unexpected, may be accepted and integrated into the ongoing conversation. It is therefore crucial to uncover the constraints to which the participants must adhere (“what to do”) turn by turn to allow the “successful” continuation of the interaction. We therefore also wish to show that conversations are not necessarily doomed to failure if collaboration in the strict sense is not total. Thus, these unexpected utterances would be the occasion to introduce new possibilities, allowing us to think that conversation would be made of both these already present (codified) forms/patterns and new emerging 'possibilities', in line with the work of Grammar in Interaction (Ochs et al., 1996; Auer, 2005).We propose to 'track' the emergence of these 'new possibilities': when do they appear? What is their nature? What are the consequences for the interaction in progress? To this end, we analyze five extracts from conversational corpora through the prism of the interactional trajectories that the participants take. Thus, the first example we will analyze perfectly illustrates this notion of collaborative activity accepted in many works on dialogue and inter-individual interactions (Sacks et al., 1974; Clark, 1996, Sidnell & Stivers, 2013; Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018) to qualify the conversation. While we do not contest this notion of collaboration which is inherent to interactions, we aim to show that underneath this relatively consensual notion, 'lurk' diverse practices and processes, which ultimately make it a relatively fuzzy notion. In support of the other examples, we will show in this article that concepts such as progressivity, interactional trajectories, alignment or affiliation, allow us to better understand what we consider as a successful interactional achievement, which goes through different moments during which the participants can be more or less collaborative. The detailed analysis of these different examples will allow us to show that the dynamism of interactions is a crucial entry point for revealing their functioning in all its complexity. Furthermore, it encourages us to reflect on the paradigms that can be used to study the impact of these unexpected forms on conversational trajectories in an experimental framework.

Keywords

• conversation
• dynamism
• interactional trajectory
• (dis)alignement
• (dis)affiliation