The interactional history of examples and parentheses

Abstract

In this article, we set out to examine how participants organize their note-taking while engaged in multiparty interaction. We first describe the collective display of affiliation as an interactional practice that allows note-takers to identify recordables and to legitimize their writing. We then focus on the use of examples (e.g.) and parentheses in the written notes. While style guides recommend the use of examples and parentheses to indicate subsidiary information, we describe the interactional history that leads to such scriptorial practices in collaborative writing. The analyses show that both examples and parentheses may originate from various interactional practices (e.g. listing, instruction, epistemic disputes) and that they may relate to highly salient topics of the interaction. We use the methods developed in conversation analysis, which we extend to the analysis of multimodal phenomena of interaction.