Grammatical structures and action affordances: Dealing with household work in English, Polish, and 'mixed' families

Does the particular language you speak make a difference to the way you lead your life? The project addresses this question using video-recorded interactions dealing with household work in English, Polish, and 'mixed' English-Polish families.
The fellow's work so far has established the distinct actions that are made possible by certain grammatical structures of Polish. One particularly interesting grammatical difference between English and Polish is that Polish has modal verbs for asserting necessity that are impersonal, i.e. they cannot be marked for person, such as trzeba, roughly 'one has to'. We have found that turns that have the format 'trzeba (one has to) x' are used very differently than turns that have the format 'we have to/need to/must x' (or the Polish equivalent 'musimy x'). Whereas these person-marked formulations are used to raise potential household work, and lead to negotiations of how the job will be done, the Polish 'trzeba (one has to) x' is part of dealing with household work: it claims the objective presence of a household necessity, and is, wherever possible, responded to by immediately carrying out the referenced action. Overall, our results suggest that negotiating personal assessments is prominent in English family interactions dealing with household work, whereas pointing to objective necessities is prominent in Polish household work interactions. The action resourced by 'trzeba (one has to) x'-turns in Polish systematically differs from actions that occur in other wise similar English interactional contexts, such as directives, suggestions, or necessity claims.
Our research is the first to investigate the implications of diverse linguistic structures for accomplishing basic activities of everyday life (such as dealing with household work). The current fellowship will explore how different languages are used to accomplish household work interactions in more detail. Specifically, we wil investigate:
1) How particular values of family life - such as family members' personal autonomy or intimacy among family members - are realised in interactions;
2) How couples with different native languages deal with any misunderstandings that can arise due to different habits of talking;
3) and how conflict in dealing with household work can emerge and is dealt with by couples.
The fellowship will result in a series of papers submitted to anthropological and sociological journals.

1) Who will benefit from this research?
The fellowship will benefit primarily academic, but also wider audiences. The fellow's work is the first to analyse Polish video-recorded data within the framework of Conversation Analysis. It therefore contributes to establishing the field of Conversation Analysis in Poland. This will directly benefit academic audiences, such as sociologists, psychologists, and linguists. However, there is considerable scope for potential benefit beyond academia: Conversation Analysis has successfully been used in the English-speaking world to enhance trainings for people working on telephone help lines, health care professionals, and professionals in other sectors.
The proposed work can, in the longer perspective, also be disseminated to wider audiences and thereby make a contribution towards the integration of the Polish community into English life, and towards a better public appreciation of cross-cultural differences as well as the openness of 'other' ways of living to change. It can benefit professionals in the UK who regularly come into contact with Polish 'service users' at sites that have the potential for cultural integration, such as catholic churches.

2) How will they benefit from this research?
Sociologists, psychologists, and linguists in Poland can benefit from this research in so far as it exemplifies the potential of using Conversation Analysis to study Polish interactions. In the longer run, establishing Conversation Analysis in Poland can have consequences for the ways in which trainings are offered toa wide variety of professionals, and can therefore make a substantial impact on practices for improving quality of life in a wide range of professional contexts.
Catholic churches in the UK are multicultural, and Polish communities now make up a substantial section of many catholic communities in the UK. Professionals have to negotiate a course between, on the one hand, providing opportunities for the respective communities to practice their form of catholicism, and, on the other hand, ensuring an integration into the community as a whole. The results of this work can in the future inform social events aimed to integrate, e.g., different communities within the church.

3) What will be done to ensure that they have the opportunity to benefit from this research?
The direct aims of the fellowship are to disseminate the results of research to academic audiences. However, in the process of that work, the potential for engaging wider audiences will develop. The fellow is maintaining a webpage which keeps academic and non-academic audiences informed about the ongoing work. Wider academic audiences in Poland - sociologists, psychologists, and linguists - can benefit from the introduction of Conversation Analysis to the study of Polish interaction data by participating in a workshop in Warsaw which the fellow will organise as part of his visit to the Polish Academy of Sciences. The fellow has had good working relationships with Prof Bartminski for many years which makes it possible to predict that the workshop in Warsaw will be organised efficiently and will attract a good number of researchers.
The fellow has a track record of working with St John's Catholic Cathedral in Portsmouth to organise events that integrate the Polish with other groups within the catholic community. At such events, video-recorded data have been used successfully to illustrate the shared values at the heart of different practices of interaction. The development of the academic work during the fellowship will make it possible to further engage members of the catholic community in Portsmouth in similar workshops.