Språkligt arbete i nödsamtal 67 Språkligt arbete i nödsamtal En kunskapsöversikt med forskningsutblickar Av DANIEL PERSSON THUNQVIST, KARIN OSVALDSSON och JAKOB CROMDAL Abstract Persson Thunqvist, Daniel, persson.thunqvist@liu.se, Senior Lecturer; Oswaldsson, Karin, karin.oswaldsson@liu.se, Senior Lecturer; Cromdal, Jakob, jakob.cromdal@liu.se, Associate Pro- fessor; Tema Barn (Child Studies), Linköping University, Sweden: “Linguistic work in emergency calls. A survey and review of ongoing research”. Språk och stil 18, 2008, pp. 67–93. Emergency calls are an important public service and comprise the first step in an emergency re- sponse. This service is essentially mediated through talk. The article presents a review of conver- sation analytic studies of the interaction taking place in real-life emergency calls. Some of these studies focus on analyzing the highly specialized conversational structure of calls to the emergency services. Others explore a variety of routine interactional troubles, including, for instance, misun- derstandings arising from the asymmetries in knowledge about the institutional setting, as well as different expectations the parties bring to the interaction. A further subset of studies includes ana- lyses of deviant cases, in which emergency calls not only evinced interactional troubles but also proved seriously consequential for the response operation. The present review reveals that there is a lack of studies targeting emergency calls with certain specific categories of callers that may prove communicatively problematic, such as non-native callers and children. An analysis of a few ex- changes between an immigrant child and the operator serves to illustrate some specific language- related sources of interactional trouble. This demonstrates, more broadly, the need for analytic re- search to highlight the procedures through which the parties work to manage and remedy such in- teractional problems, thus allowing for the accomplishment of a successful emergency assistance. Keywords: emergency calls, Conversation Analysis (CA), institutional interaction, interactional trouble, Swedish. Denna artikel är en delstudie i projektet: »Barn ringer SOS: Om meningsskapande i samtal med larmcentraler» som möjliggjorts genom ett forskningsanslag från FAS (Forskningsrådet för arbets- liv och socialvetenskap), projektnummer 2005-0236. Ur Språk & stil NF 18, 2008