This chapter addresses action ascription in everyday advice-giving sequences, with a focus on those sequences in which advice has not been solicited as such. We argue that for action ascription in both second and third positions, the design (‘composition’) and the sequential location (‘position’) of the prior turn are crucial. Advice-giving typically emerges in the environment of a complaint or troubles-telling; in second position, the recipient must then decide whether or not it warrants advice. In third position, the recipient of a piece of advice must decide how exactly it was meant: as a binding prescription or injunction, or as a mild suggestion for a possible way forward? This is relevant for the advice-recipient in deciding how to deal with the advice: whether to accept or reject/resist it, or to join the other in brainstorming about how to remedy the situation. Relatively strong deontic formats position advice-givers as experts who know best what their interlocutor ‘needs’, and tend to be resisted; weaker formats call on the recipient not so much to accept or reject the advice given as to acknowledge or agree that the action in question would be a possible course of action with beneficial effects.

Our survey of how interaction is conducted with linguistic resources (Part I) and how linguistic resources are deployed in interaction (Part II) would be incomplete were we not to consider the implications of these findings for language theory. What characterizes language in this view? What new light can Interactional Linguistics cast on age-old questions concerning language structure, language variation, language diversity, and language universals? These are some of the issues we address in this chapter.

Language in an Interactional Linguistic Perspective

For interactional linguists language is above all a form of social behavior. It is an inherently interactional activity observable in social encounters between human beings. It not only exists in the minds of its users but is materialized in their communication with one another. As one means of communication, language in this understanding is deployed along with other resources (visible, haptic, olefactive) in a semiotic ecology for communicative purposes.

As a form of social behavior, language is discoverable through “close looking at the world”. This was one of the earliest insights of Sacks (cited in Jefferson 1985:26–27):

Sacks’ point is that observable fact is far richer than anything researchers could ever imagine. If we were to present imagined “observations” as findings, we would be constrained by what others consider plausible. But if our observations on language are based on what happens in the real world – and we can point to the conversational record to document them – they are empirical, and no longer constrained by plausibility.

Preface

We start from the assumption that social interaction in informal conversation between family members and friends is organized in fundamentally similar ways in the languages and cultures of the world (Stivers et al. 2009). For our examination of how interaction is conducted with linguistic (and other) resources, we can thus rely on the descriptive categories developed in conversation analytic studies of talk-in-interaction. These serve as a tertium comparationis (basis of comparison) and can be underpinned with detailed studies of the linguistic (and other) resources deployed to realize them. This is what practitioners of Interactional Linguistics have been doing since about the middle of the 1990s, for English and other languages.

In this part of the book we begin with interaction and ask how it is conducted with linguistic (and other) resources, comparing as far as possible the organizational details of talk in different languages. We start with the most basic mechanisms of conversation: turn construction and turn taking (Chapter 2) and repair (Chapter 3). We then turn to action formation and ascription (Chapter 4), followed by topic management and sequence organization (Chapter 5). In addition, in Online-Chapter B we deal with preference, and in Online-Chapter C we examine the display of stance and footing. In Online-Chapter D we discuss an interactional linguistic perspective on storytelling as a “big package”.

Prior to embarking on these topics, however, a clarification of terminology is in order.

If we assume that participants’ construction and co-construction of actions is what interaction is primarily about, what, then, is an action? Do all utterances in talk-in-interaction perform actions? If not, what other categories do we need? (For more detail on actions and action formation see Chapter 4.) Conversation Analysis distinguishes actions from the practices that are used to accomplish them (Schegloff 1997a). The action of initiating repair, for instance, is ordinarily associated with the use of questioning items such as huh?, who?, etc. and certain forms of repeats. When such formats are deployed for initiating repair, this is described as a practice.

As Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson note, turn-constructional units (TCUs) are formed, inter alia, by syntactic units such as sentences, clauses, and phrases (1974:720). In this chapter we will systematically explore these structures as resources for building turns and implementing actions in talk-in-interaction.

Analyzing Sentences, Clauses, and Phrases in Talk-in-interaction

In linguistics, the sentence has traditionally been viewed as the basic unit of description, as the largest syntactic entity that can be captured with traditional linguistic tools, and as the unit with respect to which smaller component units such as embedded clauses and phrases function (morpho)syntactically. Linguistics, however, has often had a fundamental bias toward written language (see, e.g., Linell 2005). It has dealt primarily with written texts, which are fully present in a visual medium and are prototypically produced well before they are read, in the absence of direct interaction between writer and reader. Spoken language, however, is by nature fleeting and ephemeral; in talk-in-interaction it arises from a continual moment-by-moment exchange between participants, who have little time to think or plan between contributions. Thus, the syntactic units deployed in conversational turns – sentences, clauses, and phrases – need to be fundamentally flexible, adaptable to the local exigencies of interaction. If we deal with these units here, it is not because linguists have traditionally thought them relevant, but because they have been shown to be oriented to as relevant by participants in social interaction.

When referring to sentence and/or clause, researchers in general mean to denote a grammatical unit formed with a predicate, most often a verb or a verb complex, and the grammatical constituents or phrases that need to accompany it in order for it to be interpreted as complete. Yet the terms sentence and clause do not have the same status in the grammars of all languages. Different linguistic traditions may have reason to make different distinctions. To take English and German as examples, English grammarians generally conceive of sentence as a superordinate category only, and refer to the simple sentence with a special term, namely clause (see Figure 6.1). For analyses of syntactic units in English, thus, clause is the basic term.

Putting this book together has been a long and arduous journey, but we have had help along the way from many friends and colleagues around the world. Our special thanks go to Peter Auer (University of Freiburg), Dagmar Barth-Weingarten (University of Potsdam), Auli Hakulinen (University of Helsinki), Kobin Kendrick (MPI Nijmegen), Maxi Kupetz (University of Potsdam), Marja-Leena Sorjonen (University of Helsinki), and Sandra A. Thompson (University of California Santa Barbara) – all of whom have spent precious time talking through the issues with us and reading pre-versions of the chapters. We have profited tremendously from their input and hope that the final version will do justice to their concerns. All remaining errors are our own.

Our deepest appreciation goes as well to Helen Barton (CUP), who has been ever so accommodating and supportive in helping us adapt our output to Cambridge University Press standards. The end result is as much to her credit as to ours. For reasons of space some chapters had to be “extraposed” as online chapters; in the Table of Contents they appear in their original position.

We are grateful to the VolkswagenStiftung, who generously funded the writing of this volume with an opus magnum grant (“Interactional Linguistics”, AZ.: 86 281) to Margret Selting.

We dedicate our book to instructors and students alike, who will hopefully be as excited as we were to discover the extraordinary power of studying everyday language through a social interactional lens.