Marta Kirilova (keynote presenter)
Linguistic and Cultural Alignments in Multilingual Institutional Talk

A common statement in socio- and psycholinguistic research is that every linguistic act is also an act of identity. Interactional studies have successfully explored how interlocutors position themselves through language to express different attitudes, intentionality and social relations (see e.g. Jaffe 2009 for a sociolinguistic perspective on stance). However, when it comes to pinning down the relationship between language, culture and ideology things seem more blurred and less straightforward. ‘Culture’ is sometimes used as an umbrella term to explain differences in stances but we may wonder how exactly ‘the cultural stuff’ in interaction manifests itself and what it looks like. My talk will exemplify and discuss some interesting connections between language, culture and ideology in multilingual gatekeeping interaction. More specifically, I focus on two types of interactional affiliations in job interview data which I call topical affiliations and formulaic affiliations. Topical affiliations are most commonly negotiated in relation to a topic of common interest to the participants of the interaction. Formulaic affiliation is a category that is manifested through the use of speech formulae (or idioms, standard lexical units or chunks). I would argue that formulaic affiliations in particular provide a novel take on the way shared (cultural) norms are co-constructed and negotiated as they highlight the often invisible connection between language, culture and ideology. We will also talk about possible pitfalls in the study of culture in interaction and discuss how different types of data can be used to back up and supplement each other.