New Adventures In Language And Interaction

In this book sixteen international scholars of language and social interaction describe their distinct frameworks of analysis. Taking conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics as their points of departure and investigating ordinary conversation as well as institutions such as health care, therapy, and city council meetings, they often incorporate gesture, prosody, and the listener's behavior in the analysis of talk. While some approaches are grounded in a critique of the major schools of interaction analysis, others integrate the interactionist perspective with ideas from fields such as systemic-functional linguistics, distributed cognition, and the sociology of knowledge. Each chapter combines a statement of the terms and methods of analysis with an exemplary analysis of a moment of interaction. "New Adventures in Language and Interaction" gives an excellent overview of the novelty and diversity of interaction-focused perspectives on language and of the heterogeneity of approaches that have evolved from the pioneering work of Sacks and Schegloff, Gumperz, and their co-workers.

As Ragnar Rommetveit put it forty years ago, dialogue is “the architecture of intersubjectivity”: a tool not only for maintaining yet also constantly transforming our life-worlds. The volume advances and empirically illustrates the role of talk-in-interaction in displaying, ratifying, creating yet also defying the crucial dimensions of the world we live in. This process is particularly noticeable in children’s primary social worlds, i.e. home and school where they are socialized to becoming competent members of the communities they (will) live in. Drawing on fifty years of research on children's socialization through language and social interaction, the volume provides new multidisciplinary insights and updated empirical data on the process through which cultures, identities, and knowledge are brought into being through the everyday dialogues that animate children’s life at home and school. The volume addresses a specialized readership and its interdisciplinary framework ensures that it will be of great interest to scholars from different academic fields, such as social and developmental psychology, anthropology, education, developmental linguistics, sociolinguistics and developmental pragmatics.

Leading international scholars provide a coherent framework for analyzing body movement and talk in the production of meaning.

The Japanese sentence-final particles, "ne," "yo" and "yone" have proved notoriously difficult to explain and are especially challenging for second language users. This book investigates the role of the particles in talk-in-interaction with the aim of providing a comprehensive understanding that accounts for their pragmatic properties and sequential functions and that provides a sound basis for second language pedagogy. This study starts by setting up an original particle function hypothesis based on the figure/ground "gestalt," and then tests its validity empirically with unmarked, marked and native/non-native talk-in-interaction data. The analysis illustrates not only expectable but also unexpected or strategic use of particles, as well as the problems posed for native speakers by non-native speakers whose use of particles is idiosyncratic. The study demonstrates that the proposed hypothesis is capable of accounting for all the uses of particles in the extensive and varied data set examined. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in pragmatics and CA and to teachers of Japanese as a foreign language.

The book provides a new angle for the study of otherwise amply discussed discourse and interactional phenomena. The new perspective consists in addressing the interconnections between resonance, stance, represented discourse and joking in Mexican conversational discourse. In so doing, it contributes to a better understanding of the interplay between collaboration, intersubjectivity and emergence, among other relevant issues. Scholars and advanced students concerned with dialogic syntax theory, stance theory and Spanish, will find the present analysis interesting and innovative. However, the writing and methodology, based on clearly discussed and presented examples from selected conversational excerpts, including graphic representations of linguistic and discourse data, makes the analysis easy to follow also to non-specialists. The book is thus interesting to a broad circle of readers, whether they are concerned with any of the issues dealt with or with their mutual connections, whether they are specialists or not.

This work gives a thorough revision of history through a psychological approach to verbal interaction between listeners and speakers. This book offers a large amount of information on the psychology of language and on psycholinguistics, and focuses on a new direction for a psychology of verbal communication. Empirical research includes media interviews, public speeches, and dramatic performances.

This book investigates the ways that advanced speakers of Korean as a second language perceive, use and learn the complexities of the Korean honorifics system. Despite their advanced proficiency in Korean, the study shows that the honorifics use of these speakers diverges in crucial ways from native speaker norms. It is argued that, rather than reflecting the language competence of these speakers as such, this usage is linked to questions of the identity of “language learners” and “foreigners” in Korean society. In addition, it shows the influence of conflicting ideologies regarding the “meaning” of “politeness”. This argument is backed up by rich data collected through mixed methods (discourse completion tests, role-plays, natural interactions, introspective interviews), allowing for a detailed picture of how the honorifics use of second language speakers emerges in context. The book concludes by discussing the implications of the study for politeness research, interlanguage pragmatics and language pedagogy.

The fourteen contributions in this collection come from different approaches in pragmatics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and dialogue analysis; the name given to what is studied ranges from spoken language and conversation to interaction, dialogue, discourse and communication. What the articles have in common is a similar starting point: they are informed by a form of linguistic understanding which has emerged within what could be called the interactional turn. The materials investigated come from several different languages, representing a variety of interactions: private and public, written and spoken, historical and present-day. While studies of such diverse materials naturally differ in their starting points, goals and aims, engaging them in a dialogue can help reveal where old beliefs may be challenged and new understandings may emerge. The interactional approaches to discourse presented in this volume show that there are several discourses on interaction: interconnected, parallel, but also varying and even divergent.