Call-outs: A multimodal study into a practice for formulating objectionable conduct

On occasions in face-to-face interaction there can be explicit overt conflict between interactants, for example when one calls-out the other for some aspect of their conduct that they consider reprehensible. Calling someone out is a practice that is present in many forms of interaction with the expression being used on social media and on television, in newspapers and on blogs; however, little is known about the extent to which call-outs occur, if they do occur, in everyday face-to-face interaction. By using multimodal conversation analysis to analyse video-recordings of naturally occurring conversation between English-speaking university students, this dissertation confirms that call-outs do exist as a practice for treating the conduct of an addressee as reprehensible in everyday interaction. Through an exploration of call-outs this study shows that they, first and foremost, are a serious action that can take different formats; can be designed by a speaker to be recognisably serious by using negatively connotative figurative expressions; and can be upgraded by a speaker to pursue a response when one is forthcoming but has not been provided. Interestingly, this dissertation also provides evidence for call-outs having a non-serious usage as the practice can be deployed by a speaker to tease or mock an addressee in a playful manner, or to treat possibly reprehensible conduct non-seriously. Through analysis this study will contribute first to the understanding of conflict in interaction and second to the understanding of calling someone out, a practice that has to an extent become a modern-day trend and part of the current zeitgeist.