Cynthia Gordon
Aligning as a Team: Forms of Conjoined Participation
in (Stepfamily) Interaction
This paper is a part of my ongoing analysis of interaction in the context of family. In it I analyze excerpts from two audiotaped stepfamily mealtime conversations, illustrating how teams form and function moment by moment. I also demonstrate in what ways extra-interactional characteristics of interlocutors can serve as a basis for creating particular alignments at particular moments in conversation. Though much of my research considers data drawn from a larger family discourse study, for this paper, I analyze conversations I recorded among members of my own family. My interests in family discourse include the negotiation of alignments and frames, intertextuality, and the interactional construction of identities.
Cynthia Gordon received her PhD in Linguistics from Georgetown University in May 2003.
