Footing

In the world of technology-mediated communication (TMC), the involvement of audiences with media texts takes very diverse forms. The participation is shaped by multiple factors ranging from the genre of the media text (e.g., the news article as opposed to the radio phone-in program), the general participatory situation (e.g., before/after a story or event and within/outside of the text), to the interactive affordances of the individual media platforms (print, radio, TV, online).
Adopting a combined media linguistic and socio-pragmatic perspective, this chapter explores the types of interactivity and interaction that occur in the media. Focusing on online news media, it explains how media interactivity can translate into actual interaction with the recipients, thereby affecting the overall participation framework of the media discourse event. Finally, the chapter outlines several current trends (customization of content, remediation, dispreferred participation, etc.) and points out some potential problems associated with these participatory phenomena.

Tinder, a primarily mobile-based free social dating application (Gatter & Hodkinson, 2016), is a highly controversial platform. It is most known for its design: users connect their Facebook account to the app to create a profile, and they then are presented with profiles of other users on which they can “swipe” right (to show they are interested) or left (if they are not interested). Users who “swiped right” on each other are then able to message each other (match). The application receives its share of criticism and praise for this approach to online dating. There is a lot of discussion about what the app promotes with this system (Bilton, 2014) and what it ends up being used for (Seidman, 2017) but there appear to be no studies about how interactions happen within the app itself. The aim of this paper is to study those interactions through the analysis of the conversations themselves, the frame of the interactions and the footing of users. The analysis is done mostly based on Erving Goffman's theories of frame analysis and footing.

The presence of some high voltage towers in flood stream is one of the most important problems that may lead to the collapse of these towers. The main reason for collapse is the soil erosion around the tower foundation during flood. The shape of the foundation is a vital factor in scouring process. This research is focused on studying different shapes of a tower foundation and its effect on the maximum scour depth. A sediment scour model has been investigated by using Flow 3D V 11.2 Program. The numerical simulation results of the maximum scour depth surrounding a single square pile model have been assured using prior experimental findings and showed good agreement. After that, different four shapes of footing and five values of the inclination angle for pyramid and cone footing have been investigated. The results of cuboid footing have been used as a reference to compare with different shapes. Seventy-two numerical runs have been carried out considering the wide range of Froude number ranging from 0.26 to 0.50 under clear water condition. It is found that, for pyramid and cone footing, the lager the inclination angle, the smaller the scour depth will be and vice versa. The cone footing is better than the other footing shapes. An empirical equation has been developed by using the nonlinear regression to predict the relative maximum scour depth around the footing.

We describe the building and testing of a museum audio tour with content recorded as spontaneous interactive dialogue between two curators as they walked around an art gallery. The aim was to produce a guide which would increase the amount of topically relevant talk shared by people visiting a museum in groups of two or more. Conversation analysis is used to show how a pair of visitors engaged more with the content of the guide than they would have with audio produced as traditional scripted monologue. Examples of a variety of engagement types are detailed and a supporting rationale drawing on Goffman's theory of 'footing' is discussed. The approach potentially offers a low cost way for organisations involved in informal learning to produce flexible in-house audio content for mobile and e-learning, which improves visitor engagement both with the content and with one another, and leads to a more enjoyable visitor/learner experience than traditional forms of audio.

This paper deals with the phenomenon of the ‘microphone gaffe’ in the context of sports broadcast talk. This peculiar communicative event is characterized by the public mediation of live talk to media audiences without the speakers being aware that they are actually on air. Adopting a general pragmatic perspective, this paper analyses the microphone gaffe in terms of its specific participation framework and discusses its humorous potential. It is argued that the key element underlying these communicative situations consists of the momentary non-acknowledgement of the media audiences by the speakers. The audience, repositioned as non-participants, actually find themselves in the role of the ‘eavesdropper’ on a private conversation. On the production side of the communicative scheme, the mistaken belief in enjoying this momentary ‘private’ speech event is accompanied by a shift of footing, where the commentators’ institutional identities become replaced with their non-public personas, evidenced by forms of backstage talk that contrasts with their frontstage performance. This paper proposes that in case of microphone gaffes, humorous effect arises from the various incongruities between the actual and the presumed footings, as well as from the subsequent recontextualizations that enclose the original communicative act within an additional communicative level. The aim of the paper is to propose and elaborate a general theoretical framework for the analysis of unintended humour in media discourse.

In this paper, I analyse how expertise is discursively negotiated in TV documentary programmes. While previous research has explored the relationship between the ‘lay’ and the ‘expert’ dimensions in various public participation programmes, this paper focuses on a TV programme format that is based on the cooperative interaction between professionals who differ in the extent of their knowledge and experience. The paper notes that while expertise is unevenly distributed between the voiceover, the presenter and the expert, these parties complement each other in explaining complex phenomena for the benefit of the audience. Using data from the documentary series How Britain Worked, I argue that as long as the presenter possesses some technical expertise, he may be positioned as a semi-expert between the true expert and the lay audience, even when he simultaneously acts in other contexts as a novice acquiring the specialized expertise needed for his quest. Thus, rather than demonstrating his own knowledge and skills, the presenter mediates expertise for the benefit of the audience. The mediating role is attested by the presenter׳s frequent shifts of footing in and out of the conversational interaction with the true expert, who may end up assuming a background role of expert support.

In this paper, we study the discursive construction of the process of language shift (“muda”), i.e. the process by which a language other than that of the speaker’s initial socialization becomes the dominant language in various areas of life. This shift emerges as the key element which shapes the interlacing of life and language trajectories among young people from a migrant background who are new speakers of Spanish and enrolled in universities in Madrid. Through the analysis of oral histories, we explore how these two trajectories merge and impact on the subjects’ access to university. The discourse of these new speakers reflects the changes experienced in their social position and in their status as speakers, following the “muda”. Our analysis also highlights the reconfiguration of their identities as multilingual speakers and the transformations experienced in terms of agency and self-esteem, in accordance with the management of language resources by these new speakers and by the institution of which they form a part. However, in spite of the fact that this sift is a process presented in the oral stories produced by all the interviewed, the linguistic ideologies evoked in the presentation of this process are multiples and diverse, and they range from traditional and hegemonic ideologies to some emergent ones.

Keywords: New Speakers, Native speaker, Linguistic shift, Linguistic Trajectories, Habitus, Linguistic Ideologies, Chronotope, Interactional Stance, footing, oral history

Public speaking is generally conceived as pre-planned, read-aloud, onesided monologue with minimal opportunities for audience response except as feedback showing approval (or disapproval). Previous work in the area of talkas-interaction has only identified audience and speaker orientation to audience applause and laughter. However, this paper investigates the interactive character of public speaking where both Speaker,(S), and Audience, (A), orient to each other's contributions. This interactive character is manifested through 1) audience collective and individual responses, and 2) Speaker's "footing" shifts (à la Goffman 1979) (including improvisation, and marked by diglossic code-switching, gaze, pauses, etc.), with both contributions forming a web of exchanges, thus characterizing public speaking as an interactional activity, jointly produced by Speaker and Audience (both collectively and individually).

A new simple and practical strut-and-tie model (STM) for predicting the shear strength of RC pile caps is proposed in this paper. Two approaches are adopted to take into account the concrete softening effect. In the first approach, a concrete efficiency factor based on compression field theory is employed to determine the effective strength of a concrete strut, assumed to control the shear strength of the whole member. The second adopted Kupfer and Gerstle’s biaxial failure criterion of concrete to derive the simple nominal shear strength of pile caps containing the interaction between strut and tie capacity. The validation of these two methods is investigated using 110 RC pile cap test results and other STMs available in the literature. It was found that the failure criterion approach appears to provide more accurate and consistent predictions, and hence is chosen to be the proposed STM. Finally, the predictions of the proposed STM are also compared with those obtained by using seven other STMs from codes of practice and the literature, and were found to give better accuracy and consistency.

A method is presented that makes it possible to reduce foundation and soil vibrations significantly. The approach is based on vibration transmitting behaviour of a soil layer over bedrock. To obtain the effects of bedrock an obstacle consisting of stiff material is placed in the soil. The effect resulting from the stiffness of the obstacle is presented. The effectiveness of the presented approach is shown by comparing the screening capacity with that of a stiff wall as a vibration barrier.

ABSTRACT: Growing human population has caused the increase in the tempo of construction activity world wide.Since new techniques are either available or constantly emerging the sites which have been deemed unsuitable are being put to use for the construction of new and challenging structures. The foundations for the residential buildings in paddy fields and marshy land with water table near the ground level are constructed in the dense or medium dense sand layers found at shallow depth. The commonly used fill materials are sea sand, river sand gravel or plain cement concrete. Although this method is practiced greatly in rural areas, fewer load tests have been conducted to study its effectiveness especially in the case of residential buildings. In this present study, an attempt has been made to study the effectiveness of using lateral confinement to improve the ultimate bearing capacity of shallow foundation. Model of confined footing using a FEM package, PLAXIS was developed and ana...

We describe the building and testing of a museum audio tour with content recorded as spontaneous interactive dialogue between two curators as they walked around an art gallery. The aim was to produce a guide which would increase the amount of topically relevant talk shared by people visiting a museum in groups of two or more. Conversation analysis is used to show how a pair of visitors engaged more with the content of the guide than they would have with audio produced as traditional scripted monologue. Examples of ...

The paper adopts a usage-based perspective on the grammar of Russian talk-in-interaction and analyzes specific patterns relying on govorit’ (‘to say’) in the ORD corpus. Combining ideas from Construction Grammar and Interactional Linguistics, the patterns are analyzed in terms of constructions which meet recurrent communicative needs and which are associated with specific usage contexts. The focus is on constructions with govorit’ (‘to say’), which indicate a shift of footing (Goffman). This covers various ways in which speakers detach themselves from their utterances and manipulate the degree of responsibility for their talk. In doing so, two aims are pursued, a theoretical and a practical one. On a theoretical level, Construction Grammar is tested as a framework for the analysis of linguistic patterns in talk-in-interaction. From this perspective, it is scrutinized as a grammar for the description of spoken language. On the level of application, the analysis of the constructions in which one of the most frequent verbs in Colloquial Russian occurs, reveals ongoing processes of language change; this nurtures the argument that grammar (at least grammatical structures of talk-in-interaction) emerges from and is adapted to discourse routines. This is underscored by the analysis revealing the network of constructions allowing speakers to detach themselves from what they say, where each construction is tailored to a specific usage context.

espanolEn este articulo, estudiamos la construccion discursiva del proceso de "muda linguistica", proceso por el cual una lengua distinta de aquella en la que se produjo la primera socializacion pasa a ser la lengua dominante en diversos ambitos de la vida de las personas. La muda se configura asi como el elemento clave que articula las trayectorias de vida y las trayectorias linguisticas de los nuevos y nuevas hablantes del castellano de origen migrante, matriculados en la universidad en la region de Madrid. A traves del analisis de historias de vida, exploramos como ambas trayectorias cristalizan en el propio acceso a la universidad. Las estudiantes universitarias que estudiamos producen un discurso en el que dan cuenta de los cambios que han experimentado en su posicion social y en su estatus de hablantes a partir de la "muda". El analisis muestra tambien como se hace patente la reconfiguracion de las identidades en tanto hablantes multilingues y las transform...

In this paper, I take the research direction of incorporating empirical findings in counseling with LGBT clients (Bieschke et al, 2007), and heed Weiste and Peräkylä’s (2015) call for the application of epistemics in Conversation Analysis to therapeutic discourse. I empirically examine the therapist-client interaction in a 3-minute video clip for online commercial use, extracted from a psychotherapy session with a same-sex couple. In the data, I explore how participants epistemically position one another to establish goals and frame the discussion. The analysis demonstrates how the key concepts in epistemics such as epistemic access, primacy and responsibility (Stivers et al, 2011), epistemic status and stance (Heritage, 2013) can be combined with Goffman’s (1981) idea of footing and production format. The theoretical constructs elucidate the framing activity in the session, i.e. negotiation over what the discussion is about.
According to Goffman (1981), footing implies participant alignments and in turn shapes the frame, or the definition of a situation. I argue that participants in the session take up multiple footings as they relationally position each other and take different epistemic stances with respect to the knowledge domain. The therapist, for example, takes an unknowing stance to position one of the clients as the principal, assigning him more responsibility to identify the problem and set the goal. The other client “reframes” (Tannen, 2006) the discussion by creating different alignments as he positions himself as more knowledgeable. Whether the therapist notices the reframing through epistemic positioning has influences on goal-achieving in the session.