Jakob Cromdal, Linköping university
2007-2013

The chief aim of this project was to "describe emergency call interactions including aspects which restrict as those that enhance successful communication". A series of in-depth sequential analyses were performed drawing on a corpus of real-life calls to the emergency number 112. The corpus holds over 160 reports of different type of emergency incidents, mainly involving paramedic assistance and/or fire rescue and police operations. Approximately half of the calls were phoned in by callers who lack native command of Swedish. The corpus also holds ten English as lingua franca calls, were both parties participate as nonnative speakers.
Drawing on this corpus, the project set out to "specifically narrow the knowledge gap concerning emergency reports in native-nonnative encounters" as well as "concretely contribute to emergency operators' work in linguistically troublesome calls".

Main findings

1. Most importantly, we conclude that joint problems of understanding between operators and nonnative callers arise on a daily basis. Occasionally, considerable time is devoted to clarifying the operators' questions as well as callers' answers, so as to allow for safe and efficient interventions. Several analyses target the operators' routine handling of important phases of the calls, including opening exchanges (publications 2, 3, 4), medical interrogations (13, 14, 15), locational matters (11) as well as exchanges dealing with person- and geographical names (1, 5).

2. Finding emergency operators commonly engaging in repair procedures is not surprising. A much less predictable outcome was to find operators routinely projecting interactional trouble and working to waive such trouble through minute interactional means. Several analyses in the project seek to flesh out such procedures in considerable detail, thus identifying a set of "good practices" as well as highlighting their routine features in the work of emergency operators (2, 4, 5, 7, 18).

3. Interactional trouble occurs for a number of reasons - it is not a straightforward result of linguistic competence, but a contingent feature of emergency calls and can emanate from situational, emotional as well as other matters. For instance, local epistemologies may lead to erroneous presuppositions about what the other party can, ought to or is unlikely to know or understand. This alters the premises for intersubjectivity. This kind of trouble - in contrast to more clear-cut problems of linguistic aptitude - can be difficult to detect and may involve for their remedy a considerable interactional effort (6, 14, 16).


Novel research issues

The extended fieldwork as well as the empirical analysis gave rise to a set of research questions that have not been specified from the outset. Calls which involve an interpreter are a case in point. The call-taking and dispatch system allows for professional interpreters to act as mediators in the ongoing emergency calls. While this poses a whole set of important new issues, we have been forced to postpone such inquiry in order to stay with the projects' focus and timeline.

Another altogether unexpected line of inquiry led us to conduct a comparative analysis of two different routines for opening emergency calls. While emergency call openings comprise a well-ploughed furrow in conversation analysis, a historical corpus of calls was made available to us, allowing us to compare current opening routines with those taking place prior to 1994, when the emergency dispatch protocol was changed to meet European standards (2, 4, 10).

Two core publications

The article titled "Comprehension checks, clarifications, and corrections in an emergency call with a nonnative speaker of Swedish", published in the International Journal of Bilingualism (5) reports on an analysis of two interactional practices through which the participants can be seen to pursue mutual understanding. The first type of practice involves the participants' orientation toward potential or projected problems of comprehension and should therefore be understood in terms of preemptive management of mutual understanding. This is chiefly accomplished by either party (a) making sure that the other party has understood; (b) checking the correctness and adequacy of one's own understanding; and finally (c) displaying one's own understanding of the other party en passant, that is, without requiring the other party's confirmation. The second type of practice, commonly known as conversational repair, is used to deal with established problems of comprehension. The methods through which these problems are managed involve (d) repeating and paraphrasing preceding turns or their problematic fragments; (e) finding alternative ways of talking about demonstrably non-comprehended information; and finally (f) postponing such problematic exchanges. The study demonstrates that despite the institutionally asymmetric character of emergency calls, both participants are actively engaged in working toward intersubjectivity, and the analysis identifies several different ways through which the parties orient to and handle interactional trouble so as to secure mutual comprehension in a socially smooth yet efficient manner.

A forthcoming study focusing on interactional trouble bears the preliminary title "'Where do you want to call?' - a case of misalignment between trouble description and service identification in an emergency call with a nonnative speaker of Swedish" (16). The target phenomenon - analysed comparatively against other calls in the corpus - is an extended case of mutual misunderstanding having to do with the parties lack of alignment concerning the interactional business at hand: while the caller is shown to be occupied with trying to describe - in spite of great linguistic challenge - the nature and location of the incident, the operator can be seen to try to determine what type of call s/he is dealing with by asking the caller to specify the service he is calling for. The trouble then rests on the incommensurability of the two interactional projects: description of trouble vs. identification of the organisation wanted. The misunderstanding is eventually resolved as a relative of the caller, who proves considerably more fluent in Swedish, takes over the phone. This process nonetheless takes some elaborate interactional work, leading us to conclude that once firmly established across a number of turns at talk, a misunderstanding is not easily resolved, particularly given the emotional strain and participants orientation to time concerns in emergency situations.

Further dissemination of project findings

Studies in the project were presented at several international conferences and symposia (cf. list of publications). The project has further generated two accessible reviews of prior research (1, 6) to the benefit of professionals in the field of emergency communications, as well as students and lay actors. We have received some attention in the media, which has helped spreading news of the project. Several research publications are still under way. Finally, we have held continuous meetings with operative staff and SOS-Alarm officials discussing the project results and finding ways of informing current call-taking practice.

Publications

1. Persson-Thunqvist, D., Osvaldsson, K, & Cromdal, J. (2008). Språkligt arbete i nödsamtal: En
kunskapsöversikt med forskningsutblickar. Språk & Stil, 18, 67-93

2. Cromdal, J., Landqvist, H., Persson-Thunqvist, D. & Osvaldsson, K. (2012). Finding out what’s
happened: Two procedures for opening emergency calls. Discourse Studies, 14, 371-397.

3. Cromdal, J., Persson-Thunqvist, D. & Osvaldsson, K. (2012). SOS one-one-two what has
occurred?: Managing openings in children’s emergency calls. Discourse, Context & Media, 1, 183-202.

4. Lanqvist, H., Cromdal, J., Persson-Thunqvist, D. & Osvaldsson, K. (2012). Om man frågar får man
svar. Två öppnings procedurer i SOS-ärenden och deras konsekvenser  för samtalen.  Språk och Stil, 22, 127-152.

5. Osvaldsson, K., Persson-Thunqvist, D. & Cromdal, J. (2013). Comprehension checks, clarifications, and corrections in an emergency call with a nonnative speaker of Swedish. International Journal of Bilingualism, 16,  DOI: 10.1177/1367006912441420

6. Cromdal, J. (2013). Conversation analysis and emergency calls. In: C. Chapelle, (ed.)     The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

7. Cromdal, J., Osvaldsson, K. & Persson-Thunqvist, D. (forthcoming). Getting it right in emergency
calls with children. To appear in: P. Drew, L. Mondada, G. Fele, J. Bergmann & M. Buscher (Eds.), Mobilizing help: Talk and interaction in emergency calls. (prel title) Bokvolym för John Benjamins.



Conference and symposia papers

8. Cromdal, J., Persson-Thunqvist, D. & Osvaldsson, K. (2008). Managing diagnostic formulations in
emergency calls. 17th Sociolinguistics Symposium, Amsterdam, 6-9 April 2008

9. Cromdal, J. (2008) Plenarföredrag samt metodworkshop om främmandespråkiga nödsamtal. First DYLAN Spring School, Lyon, April 14-16, 2008

10. Cromdal, J & Persson-Thunqvist, D (2008). Forskningspresentation vid europeiskt nätverk om Emergency Communication vid Universita Degli Studio di Trento, Italien, 3-7 juni, 2008.

11. Cromdal, J (2009). Trouble locating trouble: How problems of locating accidents are dealt with in mobile phone emergency calls. International Pragmatics Association, Melbourne, 5-12 July, 2009

12. Cromdal, J. & Arminen, I (2009). Thematic panel: “The pragmatics of emergency communication”. International Pragmatics Association, Melbourne, 5-12 July, 2009

13. Cromdal, J. (2010). Clarification activities in foreign-language calls for emergency rescue. 7th Australasian Symposium on Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis. Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, November 24-25, 2010.

14. Cromdal, J. (2010). Some features of trouble in diagnostic interrogations in medical emergency calls. Transcript and Analysis Group, Griffith University, Australia, November 10, 2010.

15. Cromdal, J. (2012). Trouble in diagnostic interrogations in medical emergency calls. NORDISCO 2012, Linköping, November 21-23, 2012.



Kommande publikationer

16. Cromdal, J., Persson-Thunqvist, D. & Osvaldsson, K. (forthc). “’Where do you want to call?’ – a case of misalignment between trouble description and service identification in an emergency call with a nonnative speaker of Swedish”. Manuscript

17. Cromdal, J. Osvaldsson, K. & Persson-Thunqvist, D. (forthc). Some features of trouble in diagnostic interrogations in medical emergency calls. Manuscript.

18. Cromdal, J. Osvaldsson, K. & Persson-Thunqvist, D. (forthc).  Some sequential aspects of questions with candidate answers in emergency calls . Manuscript.