Dr. Virginia Calabria
University of Oxford, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, Transcriber and Data Manager
I am currently a Post Doctoral Research Associate at Durham University (UK), in the Moving Social Work project (https://getyourselfactive.org/project/moving-social-work/). The often invisible and underrepresented (in policies and social discourse) experiences of disabled people with physical activity and movement and the crucial role of social workers in empowering people by having conversations about movement are the foci of this co-produced research. In my role, I take the lead in the Conversation Analysis work package, where I will analyse naturally-occurring interactions, and develop training to help social workers navigate conversations around physical activity with disabled people. I will explore how barriers and social limitations perceived by disabled people to do physical activity are actually brought up in conversation; and how social workers can face this resistance and give opportunistic advice in conversation focused on the benefits and pleasurable elements of physical activity, and the social justice component embedded in exercising the right to live a full and healthy life, regardless of people's circumstances and background.
In my prior position as a Transcriber, data manager and Qualitative Researcher in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care at Oxford University, I truly got to appreciate how qualitative research frameworks (e.g., Conversation Analysis) can offer a unique perspective that is truly co-produced, involves the actual people and can be fair and respectful of people's lived experience.
For my PhD, awarded in 2023, I investigated Collaborative Turns: how people mobilise linguistic, pragmatic and embodied resources to finish or continue each other's turns and how this related to clause combination. I used Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis to analyse what I called Collaborative Grammar.
I am a strong advocate for community making and building and research accessibility and dissemination to all parts of society.
My research interests broadly cover Conversation Analysis, Ethnomethodology, Interactional Linguistics, Syntax, Applied Linguistics, Clinical and Medical linguistics, Qualitative Methods, Transcription Practices, How emotions, well-being and mental health-related topics emerge in conversation, and Disability.
Supervisors: Brett Smith, Jack Joyce, Charlotte Albury, Elwys De Stefani, and Simona Pekarek Doehler
In my prior position as a Transcriber, data manager and Qualitative Researcher in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care at Oxford University, I truly got to appreciate how qualitative research frameworks (e.g., Conversation Analysis) can offer a unique perspective that is truly co-produced, involves the actual people and can be fair and respectful of people's lived experience.
For my PhD, awarded in 2023, I investigated Collaborative Turns: how people mobilise linguistic, pragmatic and embodied resources to finish or continue each other's turns and how this related to clause combination. I used Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis to analyse what I called Collaborative Grammar.
I am a strong advocate for community making and building and research accessibility and dissemination to all parts of society.
My research interests broadly cover Conversation Analysis, Ethnomethodology, Interactional Linguistics, Syntax, Applied Linguistics, Clinical and Medical linguistics, Qualitative Methods, Transcription Practices, How emotions, well-being and mental health-related topics emerge in conversation, and Disability.
Supervisors: Brett Smith, Jack Joyce, Charlotte Albury, Elwys De Stefani, and Simona Pekarek Doehler
less
InterestsView All (34)
Uploads
Papers by Dr. Virginia Calabria
Scopo del lavoro è stato elaborare una grammatica della lingua, approfondendone il lessico e delineandone un breve profilo storico, a partire dal materiale già presente.
Talks by Dr. Virginia Calabria
The grammatical dependence of the extension on the prior host turn does not emerge syntactically, but instead through morphologic, deictic, and lexical resources, as well as through the prosodic design of the contributing TCU, and the body and gaze orientation of the contributing speaker. I argue that Italian, by being a flection language, allows speakers to visibly and audibly integrate their TCUs together in the collaborative building of a shared participative dimension, doing “speaking together”. From a grammatical perspective, these other-extensions emerge as combined in transphrastic relationships (cf. Italian "periodo") occasioning a multi-unit turn that is shared among more than one speaker. They, thus, offer an example of the emergence of clause combination in spoken language from the inter-actional needs of the interactants.
In the context of multi-party interaction, an unaddressed speaker may (re)complete a first speaker’s turn-in-progress, or a (re)completion can be ratified by a participant who is not the first speakers. This contribution aims to conduct a preliminary investigation of gaze and head movements in these cases. I focus on the participants’ gaze behaviour (e.g., as a resource for recipient selection and for self-selection; Goodwin 1979) and on their nods (e.g., as a display of recipiency and co-participation; Schegloff 1987; Stivers 2008). Along with specific syntactical resources, embodied resources are, in fact, devices that allow the speakers to analyse turns-in-progress ‘online’ (Auer 2009), as they unfold, enabling them to construct turns together.
Drawing on Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974) and Interactional Linguistics (Selting & Couper-Kuhlen 2001; Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018), in my project I analyse collaborative turns produced in multi-party interactions in Italian. I zoom in both on the syntactic resources that participants use in the accomplishment of collaborative turn sequences and on co-occurring embodied practices to describe grammar-in-interaction as a thoroughly embodied phenomenon. Therefore, I investigate the relationship between the emergent online syntax (Auer 2009) of turns-at-talk and the action that speakers accomplish with the proposed other-completion (which I call the ‘candidate completion’), contributing to the analysis of clause-combination from an interactional and praxeological perspective.
The workshop is based on video data of multi-party interactions (9,5 hours), collected in Milan in ordinary (a dinner party involving 3-5 participants) and institutional (two business meetings involving 3-5 participants) settings.
The workshop will address two sets of problems: We will first discuss the transcript (Italian with English translation) and the participants will collectively identify prototypical and unclear cases of collaborative turn sequences; we will then discuss the analytical parameters that can be used for the analysis of collaborative turn sequences, i.e.:
1) the syntactic environment and relation of a speaker’s unfolding TCU to a subsequently emerging candidate completion (and the utility of the notion of “other-increment”);
2) other formal features of the first speaker’s unfolding turn and the subsequent speaker(s) syntactically symbiotic continuation (e.g., presence of overlap, prosody, lengthenings, hesitations);
3) the sequential projectability of the candidate completion (invited or not?);
4) the action accomplished by speakers of the candidate completion (providing a candidate to a word search; displaying understanding, alignment, shared expertise and responsibility; collaborative narration; subversion, see Bolden et al. 2019);
5) the presence/absence of response (issue of (multi-)authorship in multi-party conversations);
6) co-occurring embodied conduct.
Previous studies show an array of terminological and conceptual variation, which correlates with different ways of conceptualizing among other things, the turn-constructional unit (TCU) and the syntactic features of the talk produced.
Drawing on Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974) and Interactional Linguistics (Selting & Couper-Kuhlen 2001; Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018), in this contribution I analyse collaborative turns produced in multi-party interactions in Italian. I zoom in both on the syntactic resources that participants use in the accomplishment of collaborative turn sequences and on co-occurring embodied practices.
The analysis is based on video data of multi-party interactions collected in ordinary (a dinner party involving 3-5 participants) and institutional (two business meetings involving 3-5 participants) settings. The data have been collected in Milan and total 9,5 hours of recording.
In this contribution I analyse the relationship between the turn-in-progress (by speaker A) and the other-completion (by speaker B) in three sets of questions: 1) How do speakers collaboratively shape their utterances in syntactically dependent or independent ways? What is the syntactic relation that ties the turn-in-progress to its other-completion? Can other-completions of this kind be conceptualised as other-increments (see Ono & Couper-Kuhlen 2007, Schegloff 2016)? 2) Which actions do participants accomplish through collaborative turn sequences? Preliminary analyses show that other-completions occur as candidate solutions to a word-search, as displays of shared expertise, responsibility or understanding, or as displays of (mis)alignment). 3) Is there a response to other-completions, e.g. ratification – which may be accomplished by talk alone or with embodied resources?
The findings emerging from these questions enable me to discuss the notion of increment (Ono & Couper-Kuhlen 2007, Schegloff 2016), which has so far been mainly described as a same-speaker phenomenon, and to suggest the notion of other-increment.
My analyses confirm that participants orient to the clause as a locus of interaction (Thompson & Couper-Kuhlen 2005). Therefore, I investigate the relationship between the emergent online syntax (Auer 2009) of turns-at-talk and the action that speakers accomplish with other-completions. This paper is thus a contribution to the analysis of clause-combination from an interactional and praxeological perspective. Moreover, since collaborative turn sequences have only scarcely been studied on the basis of Italian data, it is also a contribution to how incrementing is achieved in Italian talk-in-interaction. Finally, by taking into account the embodied resources participants deploy, I describe grammar-in-interaction as a thoroughly embodied phenomenon.
Thesis Chapters by Dr. Virginia Calabria
La scelta è ricaduta su quest’opera poiché essa condensa le concezioni letterarie, storiche, umanistiche dello scrittore, nel ventennio che va dagli anni Quaranta agli anni Sessanta e quindi permette di riflettere tanto sulla società quanto sulla letteratura italiana di metà Novecento.
Le motivazioni che spingono a mettere in luce l’attività di critico dello scrittore
romano sono legate a l’idea che tra la sua prosa narrativa e la sua prosa saggistica
intercorra, senza soluzione di continuità, un rapporto profondo; ma è attraverso
quest’ultima che l’autore chiarisce la prima, guadagna una posizione nel panorama
critico ed esorcizza molti timori avvertiti anche dalla sensibilità di altri scrittori e intellettuali a lui contemporanei, quali il pericolo atomico, la mercificazione dell'arte, la reificazione dell'uomo.
Nei capitoli di questo elaborato, tramite l'analisi dei 14 + 1 saggi che compongono la raccolta, si proverà a rispondere al quesito sollevato sin dal principio e cioè se la letteratura risultasse per Moravia, ancora e già negli anni Sessanta, un valido antidoto alla strumentalizzazione dell’uomo sempre più mezzo e sempre meno fine.
Si traccerà un quadro della patologia dal punto di vista medico, delineandone caratteristiche sintomatologiche e alcune ipotesi eziologiche; dal punto di vista linguistico, riassumendo e definendo le principali caratteristiche del linguaggio schizofasico e la terminologia tecnica; dal punto di vista bibliografico, presentando tipologie differenti di approcci al rapporto tra psicosi e linguaggio al fine di comprendere eventuali limiti delle metodologie e punti di forza che sono utili per questo lavoro.
La metodologia utilizzata per l’analisi del corpus è l’Analisi della Conversazione, sviluppata negli anni Settanta da Sacks, Schegloff e Jefferson. L’AC è praticata in differenti campi, dalla sociologia alla psicologia, dall’antropologia alla linguistica e permette un approccio multidisciplinare, che è ciò che ci si propone di adottare in questo elaborato.
Il numero esiguo di applicazioni dell’Analisi della Conversazione al parlato “schizofasico” e l’idea che l’analisi microstrutturale, cioè a livello intrafrasale, non dia una chiave di lettura esaustiva dell’impairement linguistico nei parlanti affetti da psicosi, hanno spinto nella direzione di questo tipo di indagine. L’Analisi della Conversazione si colloca, infatti in una dimensione tranfrastica, analizzando un testo nella sua interezza, oltre il vincolo frasale.
Il corpus è composto da tre conversazioni con tre soggetti che presentano tipologie differenti di schizofrenia. Dopo aver registrato i colloqui avvenuti tra i parlanti e la ricercatrice, secondo il formato dell’intervista libera, le conversazioni sono state trascritte, utilizzando il metodo di trascrizione jeffersoniano, sul software ELAN (Linguistic Annotator), al fine di consentire un approccio multimodale ai dati, la possibilità di archiviare e al tempo stesso rendere fruibile per future analisi il corpus, e sviluppare semplici considerazioni statistiche.
L’analisi vera e propria è stato condotta corpus driven, mettendo in evidenza, grazie agli strumenti dell’AC, i fenomeni salienti che emergevano man mano dalle conversazioni.
Lo scopo è stato operare delle analisi qualitative delle tre conversazione e comparare i tre parlanti al fine di rinvenire differenze linguistiche e soprattutto pattern da correlare con i sintomi proposti per la tipologia di schizofrenia coinvolta. Si è, in ultima istanza, voluto riflettere su concetti come “intersoggettività”, “negoziazione”, “cooperazione”, per cercare di comprendere meglio da questa prospettiva i nodi problematici legati alla comprensibilità di un testo schizofasico.
Il contributo risiederà nell’avere raccolto dati empirici e naturalistici originali di parlato schizofasico e nell’aver applicato una metodologia poco utilizzata a questi dati. Infine nell’aver tentato di gettare una luce sul complesso rapporto tra schizofrenia e linguaggio di cui si occupa la linguistica clinica.
Drafts by Dr. Virginia Calabria
Una guida essenziale (in italiano e inglese) per iniziare a trascrivere con lo strumento di annotazione ELAN (https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan)
Peer-reviewed papers by Dr. Virginia Calabria
whereby a speaker self-selects and expands the prior speaker’s talk with a
grammatically dependent turn prefaced by e anche ‘and also’. The practice is used either to affiliate or disaffiliate with prior talk, and occurs in different gaze constellations: (1) a speaker may gaze at the prior speaker and subsequently initiate an e anche-prefaced other-expansion, thus receiving the prior speaker’s gaze; (2) speakers may establish mutual gaze before, or precisely at the moment at which the other-expansion is articulated. Such gaze behavior is sensitive to the action speakers accomplish. This chapter offers advances in Interactional Linguistics by examining a previously neglected grammatical resource (e anche) and concomitant gaze-behavior in multi-person interaction.
equal epistemic status. Our entry point is ‘Collaborative Turns’ (CTs), an umbrella term for two practices: co-constructions and other-extensions. We explore how participants constitute themselves in parties (based on the epistemic dimension, i.e., being informed about work-related facts) thanks to the achievement of a CT. By looking at resources and social
actions related to knowledge, we answer two main questions: what resources do participants deploy to display their epistemic access to ‘expert’ coparticipants’ turns? What interactional goals do participants achieve when demonstrating their epistemic stance in institutional settings? Forming parties proves to be effective in managing participants’ relative authority in the process of negotiating different rights and responsibilities, which is typical of multiparty institutional settings.
Posters by Dr. Virginia Calabria
PhD Thesis by Dr. Virginia Calabria
Scopo del lavoro è stato elaborare una grammatica della lingua, approfondendone il lessico e delineandone un breve profilo storico, a partire dal materiale già presente.
The grammatical dependence of the extension on the prior host turn does not emerge syntactically, but instead through morphologic, deictic, and lexical resources, as well as through the prosodic design of the contributing TCU, and the body and gaze orientation of the contributing speaker. I argue that Italian, by being a flection language, allows speakers to visibly and audibly integrate their TCUs together in the collaborative building of a shared participative dimension, doing “speaking together”. From a grammatical perspective, these other-extensions emerge as combined in transphrastic relationships (cf. Italian "periodo") occasioning a multi-unit turn that is shared among more than one speaker. They, thus, offer an example of the emergence of clause combination in spoken language from the inter-actional needs of the interactants.
In the context of multi-party interaction, an unaddressed speaker may (re)complete a first speaker’s turn-in-progress, or a (re)completion can be ratified by a participant who is not the first speakers. This contribution aims to conduct a preliminary investigation of gaze and head movements in these cases. I focus on the participants’ gaze behaviour (e.g., as a resource for recipient selection and for self-selection; Goodwin 1979) and on their nods (e.g., as a display of recipiency and co-participation; Schegloff 1987; Stivers 2008). Along with specific syntactical resources, embodied resources are, in fact, devices that allow the speakers to analyse turns-in-progress ‘online’ (Auer 2009), as they unfold, enabling them to construct turns together.
Drawing on Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974) and Interactional Linguistics (Selting & Couper-Kuhlen 2001; Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018), in my project I analyse collaborative turns produced in multi-party interactions in Italian. I zoom in both on the syntactic resources that participants use in the accomplishment of collaborative turn sequences and on co-occurring embodied practices to describe grammar-in-interaction as a thoroughly embodied phenomenon. Therefore, I investigate the relationship between the emergent online syntax (Auer 2009) of turns-at-talk and the action that speakers accomplish with the proposed other-completion (which I call the ‘candidate completion’), contributing to the analysis of clause-combination from an interactional and praxeological perspective.
The workshop is based on video data of multi-party interactions (9,5 hours), collected in Milan in ordinary (a dinner party involving 3-5 participants) and institutional (two business meetings involving 3-5 participants) settings.
The workshop will address two sets of problems: We will first discuss the transcript (Italian with English translation) and the participants will collectively identify prototypical and unclear cases of collaborative turn sequences; we will then discuss the analytical parameters that can be used for the analysis of collaborative turn sequences, i.e.:
1) the syntactic environment and relation of a speaker’s unfolding TCU to a subsequently emerging candidate completion (and the utility of the notion of “other-increment”);
2) other formal features of the first speaker’s unfolding turn and the subsequent speaker(s) syntactically symbiotic continuation (e.g., presence of overlap, prosody, lengthenings, hesitations);
3) the sequential projectability of the candidate completion (invited or not?);
4) the action accomplished by speakers of the candidate completion (providing a candidate to a word search; displaying understanding, alignment, shared expertise and responsibility; collaborative narration; subversion, see Bolden et al. 2019);
5) the presence/absence of response (issue of (multi-)authorship in multi-party conversations);
6) co-occurring embodied conduct.
Previous studies show an array of terminological and conceptual variation, which correlates with different ways of conceptualizing among other things, the turn-constructional unit (TCU) and the syntactic features of the talk produced.
Drawing on Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974) and Interactional Linguistics (Selting & Couper-Kuhlen 2001; Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018), in this contribution I analyse collaborative turns produced in multi-party interactions in Italian. I zoom in both on the syntactic resources that participants use in the accomplishment of collaborative turn sequences and on co-occurring embodied practices.
The analysis is based on video data of multi-party interactions collected in ordinary (a dinner party involving 3-5 participants) and institutional (two business meetings involving 3-5 participants) settings. The data have been collected in Milan and total 9,5 hours of recording.
In this contribution I analyse the relationship between the turn-in-progress (by speaker A) and the other-completion (by speaker B) in three sets of questions: 1) How do speakers collaboratively shape their utterances in syntactically dependent or independent ways? What is the syntactic relation that ties the turn-in-progress to its other-completion? Can other-completions of this kind be conceptualised as other-increments (see Ono & Couper-Kuhlen 2007, Schegloff 2016)? 2) Which actions do participants accomplish through collaborative turn sequences? Preliminary analyses show that other-completions occur as candidate solutions to a word-search, as displays of shared expertise, responsibility or understanding, or as displays of (mis)alignment). 3) Is there a response to other-completions, e.g. ratification – which may be accomplished by talk alone or with embodied resources?
The findings emerging from these questions enable me to discuss the notion of increment (Ono & Couper-Kuhlen 2007, Schegloff 2016), which has so far been mainly described as a same-speaker phenomenon, and to suggest the notion of other-increment.
My analyses confirm that participants orient to the clause as a locus of interaction (Thompson & Couper-Kuhlen 2005). Therefore, I investigate the relationship between the emergent online syntax (Auer 2009) of turns-at-talk and the action that speakers accomplish with other-completions. This paper is thus a contribution to the analysis of clause-combination from an interactional and praxeological perspective. Moreover, since collaborative turn sequences have only scarcely been studied on the basis of Italian data, it is also a contribution to how incrementing is achieved in Italian talk-in-interaction. Finally, by taking into account the embodied resources participants deploy, I describe grammar-in-interaction as a thoroughly embodied phenomenon.
La scelta è ricaduta su quest’opera poiché essa condensa le concezioni letterarie, storiche, umanistiche dello scrittore, nel ventennio che va dagli anni Quaranta agli anni Sessanta e quindi permette di riflettere tanto sulla società quanto sulla letteratura italiana di metà Novecento.
Le motivazioni che spingono a mettere in luce l’attività di critico dello scrittore
romano sono legate a l’idea che tra la sua prosa narrativa e la sua prosa saggistica
intercorra, senza soluzione di continuità, un rapporto profondo; ma è attraverso
quest’ultima che l’autore chiarisce la prima, guadagna una posizione nel panorama
critico ed esorcizza molti timori avvertiti anche dalla sensibilità di altri scrittori e intellettuali a lui contemporanei, quali il pericolo atomico, la mercificazione dell'arte, la reificazione dell'uomo.
Nei capitoli di questo elaborato, tramite l'analisi dei 14 + 1 saggi che compongono la raccolta, si proverà a rispondere al quesito sollevato sin dal principio e cioè se la letteratura risultasse per Moravia, ancora e già negli anni Sessanta, un valido antidoto alla strumentalizzazione dell’uomo sempre più mezzo e sempre meno fine.
Si traccerà un quadro della patologia dal punto di vista medico, delineandone caratteristiche sintomatologiche e alcune ipotesi eziologiche; dal punto di vista linguistico, riassumendo e definendo le principali caratteristiche del linguaggio schizofasico e la terminologia tecnica; dal punto di vista bibliografico, presentando tipologie differenti di approcci al rapporto tra psicosi e linguaggio al fine di comprendere eventuali limiti delle metodologie e punti di forza che sono utili per questo lavoro.
La metodologia utilizzata per l’analisi del corpus è l’Analisi della Conversazione, sviluppata negli anni Settanta da Sacks, Schegloff e Jefferson. L’AC è praticata in differenti campi, dalla sociologia alla psicologia, dall’antropologia alla linguistica e permette un approccio multidisciplinare, che è ciò che ci si propone di adottare in questo elaborato.
Il numero esiguo di applicazioni dell’Analisi della Conversazione al parlato “schizofasico” e l’idea che l’analisi microstrutturale, cioè a livello intrafrasale, non dia una chiave di lettura esaustiva dell’impairement linguistico nei parlanti affetti da psicosi, hanno spinto nella direzione di questo tipo di indagine. L’Analisi della Conversazione si colloca, infatti in una dimensione tranfrastica, analizzando un testo nella sua interezza, oltre il vincolo frasale.
Il corpus è composto da tre conversazioni con tre soggetti che presentano tipologie differenti di schizofrenia. Dopo aver registrato i colloqui avvenuti tra i parlanti e la ricercatrice, secondo il formato dell’intervista libera, le conversazioni sono state trascritte, utilizzando il metodo di trascrizione jeffersoniano, sul software ELAN (Linguistic Annotator), al fine di consentire un approccio multimodale ai dati, la possibilità di archiviare e al tempo stesso rendere fruibile per future analisi il corpus, e sviluppare semplici considerazioni statistiche.
L’analisi vera e propria è stato condotta corpus driven, mettendo in evidenza, grazie agli strumenti dell’AC, i fenomeni salienti che emergevano man mano dalle conversazioni.
Lo scopo è stato operare delle analisi qualitative delle tre conversazione e comparare i tre parlanti al fine di rinvenire differenze linguistiche e soprattutto pattern da correlare con i sintomi proposti per la tipologia di schizofrenia coinvolta. Si è, in ultima istanza, voluto riflettere su concetti come “intersoggettività”, “negoziazione”, “cooperazione”, per cercare di comprendere meglio da questa prospettiva i nodi problematici legati alla comprensibilità di un testo schizofasico.
Il contributo risiederà nell’avere raccolto dati empirici e naturalistici originali di parlato schizofasico e nell’aver applicato una metodologia poco utilizzata a questi dati. Infine nell’aver tentato di gettare una luce sul complesso rapporto tra schizofrenia e linguaggio di cui si occupa la linguistica clinica.
Una guida essenziale (in italiano e inglese) per iniziare a trascrivere con lo strumento di annotazione ELAN (https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan)
whereby a speaker self-selects and expands the prior speaker’s talk with a
grammatically dependent turn prefaced by e anche ‘and also’. The practice is used either to affiliate or disaffiliate with prior talk, and occurs in different gaze constellations: (1) a speaker may gaze at the prior speaker and subsequently initiate an e anche-prefaced other-expansion, thus receiving the prior speaker’s gaze; (2) speakers may establish mutual gaze before, or precisely at the moment at which the other-expansion is articulated. Such gaze behavior is sensitive to the action speakers accomplish. This chapter offers advances in Interactional Linguistics by examining a previously neglected grammatical resource (e anche) and concomitant gaze-behavior in multi-person interaction.
equal epistemic status. Our entry point is ‘Collaborative Turns’ (CTs), an umbrella term for two practices: co-constructions and other-extensions. We explore how participants constitute themselves in parties (based on the epistemic dimension, i.e., being informed about work-related facts) thanks to the achievement of a CT. By looking at resources and social
actions related to knowledge, we answer two main questions: what resources do participants deploy to display their epistemic access to ‘expert’ coparticipants’ turns? What interactional goals do participants achieve when demonstrating their epistemic stance in institutional settings? Forming parties proves to be effective in managing participants’ relative authority in the process of negotiating different rights and responsibilities, which is typical of multiparty institutional settings.