Upgrade

Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Upgrade
Author(s):	Rasmus Persson (Uppsala University, Sweden) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7253-9636)
To cite:	Person, Rasmus. (2023). Upgrade. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: []

The term upgrade (or upgrading, upgraded) is used in a variety of related but different senses within conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. In its most general sense, 'upgrading' refers to a turn or action that is somehow made stronger or more powerful, either with respect to some prior turn/action or with respect to some other normative, baseline turn design. A number of subsenses can be identified:

(i) In both conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, ‘upgrading’ often has the more specific sense of producing a strengthened version compared with an interlocutor’s prior turn. In particular, it has frequently been used as a description of subsequent assessments through which participants accomplish strong agreement with a prior assessment, by ascribing the referent essentially the same properties as in prior assessments, but to a higher degree (e.g. Pomerantz 1984). This has typically been understood as implemented through lexical means, such as a semantically stronger evaluative descriptor (e.g., adorable as an upgrade of cute) and/or a modifier that intensifies the previously used evaluation term (e.g. awfully modifying the term nice). The following two extracts (from Pomerantz 1984) illustrate both methods of upgrading an assessment:

[MC:1] (Pomerantz 1984)

01  A:   Isn't he cute
02  B:   O::h he::s a::DORable

[SBL:2.1.8.-5] (Pomerantz 1984)

01  B:   She seems like a nice little [lady
02  A:                                [Awfully nice little person.

Some researchers (e.g., Kasper 2004) have used the term ‘upgraded’ for any formulations that make use of such lexical resources, without the requirement that they be compared with a prior first version produced by someone else (whereas others have employed the term high-grade in such cases; e.g., Antaki 2002). Aside from second assessments, other types of responsive turns have also been described as lexically upgraded with respect to the terms of the initiating turn, for instance responses to inquiries (Heritage 1998).

(ii) The term ‘upgrading’ has also been applied to participants’ (modified) redoings of their own prior initiating actions, in order to pursue response to, e.g., summonses (Schegloff 2007: 51–52; Sikveland 2019), directives (Craven & Potter 2010), accusations (Clift & Pino 2020), attempts to launch new activities (Local, et al. 2010), among others (see, e.g., Hoey, et al. 2021; Stivers & Rossano 2010). In such cases, lexical or phonetic upgrading of the turn design to a strengthened form may be understood to imbue the redoing with a sense of insistence or escalation. Relatedly, some self-initiated same-turn self-repairs, increments, and other turn-continuations may also be analysed as doing work to upgrade the recognisable action import of the turn-so-far (e.g., Imo 2015; Lerner & Kitzinger 2019; Raymond 2013).

(iii) In interactional linguistics, ‘upgrading’ has also been used as a label for a cluster of strictly phonetic features. It then refers to some or all of the following features (relative to some specific prior stretch of talk): increased pitch span or higher pitch placement in the speaker’s range, increased loudness, longer durations of segments, and closer and tenser (or otherwise altered) articulatory settings (Couper-Kuhlen 2012; Curl 2002; Ogden 2006; Plug 2014). At least for some researchers, this label for phonetic patterns is just that, and it may or may not serve a function of (in some sense) upgrading some prior action (Walker 2014). For instance, in other-initiated repair sequences, phonetic upgrading is systematically applied to self-repetitions (redoings) of the trouble-source turn in order to retrospectively treat the trouble-source turn itself as sequentially fitted – whereas non-upgraded self-repetition presents the trouble-source turn as sequentially disjunct (Curl 2002). Thus, the interactional work accomplished by phonetically upgrading the repair solution self-repetition does not follow from, and is not summed up by, the term ‘upgrading’.

(iv) Some studies have also used the term ‘upgraded’ to simply mean strengthened or more emphatic, relative to an unmarked alternative turn design: Stivers (2019) identifies a class of upgraded interjection answers in English (e.g. of course, absolutely, definitely), that are compared with unmarked interjection answers (e.g. yes, yeah, mm hm), among others. Similarly, Sorjonen (2001) describes repetitional answers in Finnish as an upgraded form of confirmation, relative to confirmation with the response particle nii ‘yes’. Here, as in (iii) above, the upgraded form is seen strictly as a turn design feature, without implying that the action import has anything to do with escalating, insisting or surpassing someone else; the action import of these practices is a separate issue.

(v) Finally, a slightly different subsense of upgrading relates to epistemic positioning: epistemically upgrading a turn amounts to claiming comparatively more certain or more direct knowledge of the state of affairs referred to, or stronger rights to assess a referent (Raymond & Heritage 2006). Here again, both first-off initiating actions and responsive actions may be described as epistemically upgraded (or alternatively downgraded) compared with some neutral or normative turn design in that sequential position. Upgrading may also refer to deontic claims; for instance, a proposal for a future action (e.g., Would it be good if we did X?) might be responded to with an announcement of a unilateral decision (I’ll do X) instead of an acquiescing positive assessment (Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2012). In such cases, the respondent upgrades their deontic rights, relative to the rights they find themselves allocated in second position after such a proposal, and the upgrade is achieved through selection of an authority-boosting response option compared with a normative, acquiescing response in that place in sequence (Stevanovic 2018).

Additional Related Entries:

• Downgrade
• Extreme case formulation
• Deontics
• Epistemics
• Assessment

Cited References:

Antaki, C. (2002). “Lovely”: Turn-initial high-grade assessments in telephone closings. Discourse Studies, 4(1), 5–23.

Clift, R., & Pino, M. (2020). Turning the tables: Objecting to conduct in conflict talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 53(4), 463–480.

Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2012). Exploring affiliation in the reception of conversational complaint stories. In M.-L. Sorjonen & A. Peräkylä (Eds.), Emotion in Interaction (pp. 113–146). Oxford University Press.

Craven, A., & Potter, J. (2010). Directives: Entitlement and contingency in action. Discourse Studies, 12(4), 419–442.

Curl, T. S. (2002). The phonetics of sequence organization: An investigation of lexical repetition in other-initiated repair sequences in American English. University of Colorado.

Heritage, J. (1998). Oh-prefaced responses to inquiry. Language in Society, 27(3), 291–334.

Hoey, E. M., Hömke, P., Löfgren, E., Neumann, T., Schuerman, W. L., & Kendrick, K. H. (2021). Using expletive insertion to pursue and sanction in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 25(1), 3–25.

Imo, W. (2015). Temporality and syntactic structure: Utterance-final intensifiers in spoken German. In A. Deppermann & S. Günthner (Eds.), Temporality in Interaction (pp. 147–171). John Benjamins.

Kasper, G. (2004). Participant orientations in German conversation-for-learning. The Modern Language Journal, 88(4), 551–567.

Lerner, G. H., & Kitzinger, C. (2019). Well-prefacing in the organization of self-initiated repair. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 52(1), 1–19.

Local, J., Auer, P., & Drew, P. (2010). Retrieving, redoing and resuscitating turns in conversation. In D. Barth-Weingarten, E. Reber, & M. Selting (Eds.), Prosody in Interaction (pp. 131–159). Benjamins.

Ogden, R. (2006). Phonetics and social action in agreements and disagreements. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(10), 1752–1775.

Plug, L. (2014). On (or not on) the ‘upgrading–downgrading continuum’. In D. Barth-Weingarten & B. Szczepek Reed (Eds.), Prosodie und Phonetik in der Interaktion – Prosody and Phonetics in Interaction (pp. 70–86). Verlag für Gesprächsforschung.

Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp. 57–101). Cambridge University Press.

Raymond, G. (2013). At the intersection of turn and sequence organization: On the relevance of ‘slots’ in type-conforming responses to polar interrogatives. In B. Szczepek Reed & G. Raymond (Eds.), Units of Talk – Units of Action (pp. 169–206). Benjamins.

Raymond, G., & Heritage, J. (2006). The epistemics of social relations: Owning grandchildren. Language in Society, 35(5), 677–705.

Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction. Cambridge University Press.

Sikveland, R. O. (2019). Failed summons: Phonetic features of persistence and intensification in crisis negotiation. Journal of Pragmatics, 150, 167–179.

Sorjonen, M.-L. (2001). Responding in Conversation: A Study of Response Particles in Finnish. Benjamins.

Stevanovic, M. (2018). Social deontics: A nano-level approach to human power play. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 48(3), 369–389.

Stevanovic, M., & Peräkylä, A. (2012). Deontic authority in interaction: The right to announce, propose, and decide. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45(3), 297–321.

Stivers, T. (2019). How we manage social relationships through answers to questions: The case of interjections. Discourse Processes, 56(3), 191–209.

Stivers, T., & Rossano, F. (2010). Mobilizing response. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 43(1), 3–31.

Walker, T. (2014). Form ≠ function: The independence of prosody and action. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 47(1), 1–16.

Additional References: