ABSTRACT
Interactional approaches to language view social relations of solidarity, friendship and affiliation, or hostility and disaffiliation from people and opinions, as intimately linked with participation frameworks: these refer to the roles and statuses that participants assume in communication (Goffman, 1981). The assumption is that social relations are signaled through semiotic and sequential choices. Studies of everyday conversations have amply documented these close links. Conversation Analysis and discursive psychology often use the term alignment to describe interactional processes of relationship building. With alignment, speakers signal, linguistically, paralinguistically and in embodied ways, their understanding of their interlocutors’ positions. A typical feature of alignment, as documented within Conversation Analysis, consists in creating contributions that are lexically, syntactically, grammatically and sequentially similar to previous contributions (Stivers, 2008; Guardiola & Bertrand, 2013). Such similar sequences are viewed as the linguistic manifestation of convergent relations and behaviors, a sign within psychological research of affiliation with another. Although the exact relations between doing alignment vis-à-vis the communicative action of a speaker’s prior contribution and expressing affiliation with the speaker and his or her stances are a matter of some dispute (see Guardiola & Bertrand, 2013), a prevalent position in Conversation Analysis is that alignment is a prerequisite for affiliation (Stivers, 2008): aligning with what and how a speaker communicates signals display of support and endorsement of their conveyed stance.
