About

Gene Lerner is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her academic specialization includes conversation analysis, social aspects of grammar, and the social life of very young children. She is associated with the Applied Linguistics program within the Department of Education at UCSB. Her work focuses on understanding the social dimensions of language use and development, particularly how social interactions influence grammatical structures and the early socialization of children. Her contributions have advanced the understanding of the social aspects of linguistic behavior and the role of conversation in social life.

Research topics

• Computer science
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Communication
• Sociology

Selected publications

• When personal names are mentioned in conversations

  Pragmatics Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) · 2026-01-27

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Sacks and Schegloff ( 1979 ; Schegloff 1996 ) identify a preference for recognitional references to persons over non-recognitional forms of references. Furthermore, they identify as a subsidiary preference that, among recognitional forms, personal names are preferred over recognitional descriptors. However, as Sacks and Schegloff indicate, these preferences in no way limit the use of names to conclusively recognizable persons, nor do they even inhibit references to persons by name when recognition is not at all practicable. In this report, we first describe those practices that manage (and thereby exhibit) levels of confidence regarding the recognizability of personal names. We then examine several environments in which personal names are employed in introducing persons as previously unknown to recipients, and we describe one family of practices for doing so. Finally, we identify storytelling as a principal environment in which personal names are used, and we describe where unknown persons are introduced by storytellers.

  PublisherDOI

• On the communicative affordances of instrumental action: Offering meal service to others, whilst serving oneself

  Journal of Pragmatics · 2023-03-24 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author
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• When simple self-reference is too simple: Managing the categorical relevance of speaker self-presentation

  Language in Society · 2021-04-13 · 13 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Membership categories such as ‘doctor’, ‘customer’, and ‘girl’ can form a set of alternative ways of referring to the same person. Moreover, speakers can select from this array of correct alternatives that term best fitted to what is getting done in their talk. In contrast, self-references alone ordinarily do not convey category membership, unless the speaker specifically employs some sort of category-conveying formulation. This report investigates how speakers manage the categorical relevance of these simplest self-references (e.g. ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’) as a practical means of self-presentation. We first describe how speakers forestall recipient attribution of membership categories. We then consider cases where simple self-references are subjected to subsequent elaboration—via self-categorization—in the face of possible recipient misreading of the speaker's category membership. Thereafter, we introduce the practice of contrastive entanglement , and describe how speakers employ it to fashion tacitly categorized self-references that serve the formation of action. (Person reference, conversation analysis, membership categorization devices, race, gender)*

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Body Trouble: Some Sources of Difficulty in the Progressive Realization of Manual Action

  Research on Language and Social Interaction · 2021-07-03 · 20 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This report examines interactional troubles that find their source, not in talk, but in manual action. First, we introduce the intertwined character of two fundamental features of most, if not all emergent human conduct: The ongoing structural projection of an action-in-progress along with its continuing progressive realization. We then identify two sources of body-behavioral trouble that interfere with the action implication of emerging manual action, and result in remedial action by its recipient. Manual actors sometimes 1) foreshorten the “preparation phase” of emerging manual action, or 2) interrupt manual action before it comes to completion. Additionally, we demonstrate how misconstruing the action implication of emerging manual action can also result in body trouble that leads to recipient remediation, even when there is no reduction of its structural projectability or interruption of its progressive realization. For each circumstance, we describe the adjusting actions that remediate such body troubles. [Occasionally, English is spoken.]

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• Referring to somebody: Generic person reference as an interactional resource

  Journal of Pragmatics · 2020-04-02 · 26 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• When Someone Other than the Addressed Recipient Speaks Next: Three Kinds of Intervening Action After the Selection of Next Speaker

  Research on Language and Social Interaction · 2019-10-02 · 23 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Although speakers in conversation have ways to indicate which one of their recipients ought to speak next, who actually comes to speak next is not an automatic result. There are circumstances in which a participant other than the addressed recipient of a sequence-initiating action speaks next. Here, practices aimed at allocating turns at talk form a local, moment-to-moment normative sequential environment for other-than-addressed participant intervention. Other participants can intervene: to implement the implicated sequence-responding action, to intercede on behalf of the addressed recipient by blocking the continued relevance of a response, or to interject a supplemental action that expands the sequence before a response is produced. These sequence-organizational practices both underpin and expose such culturally prescribed grounds for intervention as personal entitlement, social obligation, and group solidarity among others. Data (happen to be) in several varieties of English found in the United States.

  PublisherDOI

• Well-Prefacing in the Organization of Self-Initiated Repair

  Research on Language and Social Interaction · 2019-01-02 · 29 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This report describes the use of well as a preface to repair solutions in self-initiated repair segments. It extends our previous work on repair prefacing, which showed that repair prefaces cast a relationship between a projected repair solution and its trouble source, with each preface type casting this relationship in a distinctive way. Based on analysis of our collection of 135 recorded instances of the phenomenon, we find that well-prefacing is a practice speakers use to overtly cast a repair solution as a noteworthy revision of the inadequate (but not wholly wrong) formulation it is moving away from. We then compare well-prefacing to no-prefacing and introduce the practice of double prefacing by describing well+no-prefacing. We conclude by describing three kinds of repair common among the well-prefaced repairs in our collection. Data are in British and American English.

  PublisherDOI

• On the practical re-intentionalization of body behavior

  Pragmatics & beyond. New series · 2017-03-30 · 33 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Body behavior can be both observable and recognizable as realizing a particular action in interaction with others. In addition, participants have a range of ways to conspicuously adjust their actions to coordinate or synchronize their actions with others. For instance, there are methods to suspend or abandon handing off an object to another and methods to suspend or abandon pointing at an object in preparing to request it. In addition to such conspicuous action adjustments, participants sometimes employ more or less covert methods of suspension and abandonment that seem to be aimed at pivoting from the originally begun action into another action so that the ensuing action appears to be what they were doing all along. These are, in effect, practices aimed at re-intentionalizing action in interaction.

  PublisherDOI

• Schegloff and the founding of a discovering discipline

  Pragmatics & beyond. New series · 2017-03-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• <i>Or</i> -Prefacing in the Organization of Self-Initiated Repair

  Research on Language and Social Interaction · 2015-01-02 · 34 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This report identifies a distinct, and distinctly positioned, element of the repair segment—the repair preface—and focuses on or-prefacing to introduce the practice of repair prefacing and to develop an analysis of one preface type. Although or-prefaced repairs do substitute one formulation for another, the or-preface shows that the trouble source formulation is not being discarded altogether, thereby mitigating the reparative character of the repair operation. We also examine expanded or-prefaced repair segments for what they reveal about the part or-prefacing plays in repair. Additionally, and as part of our explication of repair prefacing, we show how some same-TCU repairs (with and without or-prefaces) can be mounted without progressivity-disrupting hitches or alerts. Data are in American and British English.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Geoffrey Raymond

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  7 shared

• Kevin A. Whitehead

  7 shared

• Celia Kitzinger

  6 shared

• Makoto Hayashi

  Kyoto University

  5 shared

• Paul Drew

  University of York

  2 shared

• Jörg Zinken

  Leibniz Institute for the German Language

  2 shared

• Jenny Mandelbaum

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  2 shared

• Douglas W. Maynard

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  University of California Irvine

  1987