On The Pragmatics Of Social Interaction

The core of this book is a set of five lectures delivered byHabermas at Princeton in 1971 under the title 'Reflections on theLinguistic Foundation of Sociology'. These lectures offer apreliminary view of what would become The Theory of CommunicativeAction, and they form an excellent introduction to Habermas's ideasabout communication and society. They lay out the generalparameters of Habermas's project in an accessible way, and situatehis work in relation to other theories of society, particularlythose of Edmund Husserl, Wilfrid Sellars, and LudwigWittgenstein. Two additional essays elaborating the themes of the lectures arealso included in this volume. 'Intentions, Conventions, andLinguistic Interactions' is an essay in the philosophy of actionthat focuses on the validity of social norms and examines theconceptual connections between rules, conventions, norm-governedaction, and intentionality. 'Reflections on CommunicativePathology' addresses the question of deviant processes ofsocialization and contains an analysis of the formal conditions ofsystematically distorted communication. This book was designed as a companion to On the Pragmatics ofCommunication (1998), which took pieces from Habermas's later workto create a systematic introduction to his theory of formalpragmatics.

This Handbook stands as the premier scholarly resource for Language and Social Interaction (LSI) subject matter and research, giving visibility and definition to this area of study and establishing a benchmark for the current state of scholarship. The Handbook identifies the five main subdisciplinary areas that make up LSI--language pragmatics, conversation analysis, language and social psychology, discourse analysis, and the ethnography of communication. One section of the volume is devoted to each area, providing a forum for a variety of authoritative voices to provide their respective views on the central concerns, research programs, and main findings of each area, and to articulate the present or emergent issues and directions. A sixth section addresses LSI in the context of broadcast media and the Internet. This volume's distinguished authors and original content contribute significantly to the advancement of LSI scholarship, circumscribing and clarifying the interrelationships among the questions, findings, and methods across LSI's subdisciplinary areas. Readers will come away richer in their understanding of the variety and depth of ways the intricacies of language and social interaction are revealed. As an essential scholarly resource, this Handbook is required reading for scholars, researchers, and graduate students in language and social interaction, and it is destined to have a broad influence on future LSI study and research.

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, social, cultural, variational, or discursive angles, this fourth volume is dedicated to the empirical investigation of the way human beings organize their interaction in natural environments and how they use talk for accomplishing actions and their contexts. Starting from Goffman’s observation that interaction exhibits a structure in its own right that cannot be reduced to the psychological properties of the individual nor to society, it contains a selection of articles documenting the various levels of interactional organization. In addition to treatments of basic concepts such as sequence, participation, prosody and style and some topical articles on phenomena like reported speech and listener response, it also includes overviews of specific traditions (conversation analysis, ethnomethodology) and articles on eminent authors (Goffman, Sacks) who had a formative influence on the field.

This anthology brings together for the first time, in revised or new translation, ten essays that present the main concerns of Jürgen Habermas's program in formal pragmatics. Jürgen Habermas's program in formal pragmatics fulfills two main functions. First, it serves as the theoretical underpinning for his theory of communicative action, a crucial element in his theory of society. Second, it contributes to ongoing philosophical discussion of problems concerning meaning, truth, rationality, and action. By the "pragmatic" dimensions of language, Habermas means those pertaining specifically to the employment of sentences in utterances. He makes clear that "formal" is to be understood in a tolerant sense to refer to the rational reconstruction of general intuitions or competences. Formal pragmatics, then, aims at a systematic reconstruction of the intuitive linguistic knowledge of competent subjects as it is used in everyday communicative practices. His program may thus be distinguished from empirical pragmatics--for example, sociolinguistics--which looks primarily at particular situations of use. This anthology brings together for the first time, in revised or new translation, ten essays that present the main concerns of Habermas's program in formal pragmatics. Its aim is to convey a sense of the overall purpose of his linguistic investigations while introducing the reader to their specific details, in particular to his theories of meaning, truth, rationality, and action.

This book advances our understanding of change over time in human social conduct, and represents the first consolidated effort to reveal how micro-analytic studies of social interaction address such issues. The book presents a collection of longitudinal studies drawing on conversation analysis across a variety of settings, practices, languages and timescales, and analyses the ways in which participants produce and deal with practices changing over time. This edited collection will interest students and scholars of conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, interactional linguistics and pragmatics.

This book offers an alternative approach in focusing on the ways in which face is both constituted in and constitutive of social interaction, and its relationship to self, identity and broader sociocultural expectations.

The second volume of this introduction to discourse studies focuses on the fundamental interactional, social, political and cultural functions of text and talk, and shows that discourse is not merely form and meaning, but also action.