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Page 1 of 3

  • 8 - Action Ascription and Deonticity in Everyday Advice-Giving Sequences

  • from Part II - Practices of Action Ascription
  • Edited by Arnulf Deppermann, Universität Mannheim, Germany, Michael Haugh, University of Queensland
  • Book:
    Action Ascription in Interaction
    Published online:
    17 February 2022
    Print publication:
    24 February 2022, pp 183-207

  • Summary

    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.

  • The prosody of other-repetition in British and North American English

  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
  • Journal:
    Language in Society / Volume 49 / Issue 4 / September 2020
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    16 April 2020, pp. 521-552
    Print publication:
    September 2020

  • This study explores the link between prosody and other-repetition in a moderately large collection from everyday English talk-in-interaction (n = 200). British English and North American English cases were analysed separately in order to track possible varietal differences. Of initial interest was the question whether focal pitch accents might disambiguate among other-repetition actions, both those related to repair and those that go beyond repair. The results indicate that only two out of six possible other-repetition actions are associated with distinct focal pitch contours in the two varieties. For all other repair and beyond-repair actions speakers use many of the same pitch contours nondistinctively. Overall, falling contours appear more frequently in British other-repetitions, while rising contours are more frequent in North American other-repetitions. In conclusion, it is argued that in addition to pitch contour, prosodic features such as pitch span, loudness, and timing are crucial in distinguishing other-repetition actions, as are nonprosodic factors such as epistemic access (often reflected in oh-prefacing) and visible behavior. (Repair initiation, surprise, challenge, registering, pitch accents, oh-preface, epistemics)*

  • Chapter 9 - Implications for Language Theory

  • from Conclusion
  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp 541-555

  • Summary

    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):

    Many of the objects we work with would not be accepted as a base for theorizing if they were urged as imagined.

    We can then come to see that a warrant for using close looking at the world as a base for theorizing about it is that from close looking at the world we can find things that we couldn't, by imagination, assert were there. One wouldn't know they were “typical”. One might not know that they ever occurred.

    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.

  • Part I - How is Interaction Conducted with Linguistic Resources?

  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp 27-30

  • Summary

    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.

  • Chapter 6 - Sentences, Clauses, and Phrases

  • from Part II - How are Linguistic Resources Deployed in Interaction?
  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp 359-425

  • Summary

    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.

  • Preface

  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp xiii-xiv

  • Summary

    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.

  • Chapter 3 - Repair

  • from Part I - How is Interaction Conducted with Linguistic Resources?
  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp 112-209

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Interaction normally proceeds apace, that is, it is not held up or halted for any particular reason: this is known as progressivity. But sometimes progressivity is compromised: due to our own or the other's lapse of attention we may fail to produce the next word or to hear what the other said. Or our tongue may slip and we come out with the wrong word. Spoken talk-in-interaction – once it is produced – is out there, for others to hear: there is no eraser. Occasions on which we wish to revise something we have just said, or do not hear or understand something that our interlocutor says, are typical and omnipresent in interaction. As Schegloff et al. (1977) have shown, the ways in which we remedy such everyday trouble in talk-ininteraction are highly organized: taken together they are known as the practices of “repair”. Yet not every “objective” mistake or error is repaired, and what gets repaired need not be a “real” mistake at all (see Schegloff 2007a:100).

    Repair is important for the maintenance of intersubjectivity: it enables speakers to accomplish, sustain, and defend mutual understanding in talk (Sidnell 2010:136). Schegloff et al. (1977) conceive of the repair system as a “selfrighting mechanism” that allows talk-in-interaction to keep itself going in the face of problems (see Schegloff 1992:1337ff.). Like the turn-taking mechanism, the repair mechanism is conceived of as being both context-free, i.e., so general that its basic organization will be relevant everywhere, and context-sensitive, i.e., adaptable to the particularities of specific contexts, situations, and languages.

    We will argue that repair is not only a sequential self-righting mechanism but also one that allows participants, for whatever purpose or contingency, to negotiate both the trouble source and the repair, often in a preferred order.

    Basic Terminology

    Most conversation analysts use the term repair to refer to “practices for dealing with problems or troubles in speaking, hearing, and understanding the talk in conversation” (Schegloff 2000c:207). Repair halts the progressivity of interaction so that participants can address, handle, and potentially resolve problems in producing talk themselves, or in hearing or understanding a co-participant's talk. All repairs, however small, break the continuity of talk and constitute a digression from the action being carried out. Repair is conceived of as an action that is implemented through an orderly organization of practices (2000c:207).

  • Chapter 4 - Action Formation and Ascription

  • from Part I - How is Interaction Conducted with Linguistic Resources?
  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp 210-311

  • Summary

    In this chapter we broach a further system of organization for the conduct of conversation, this time concerning the formation and ascription of actions through turns at talk. As in prior chapters, our focus will be on linguistic resources and their mobilization, primarily in ordinary conversation and across different languages.

    As participants take turns at talk, they implement social actions. It has been said that one of the most central concerns of recipients in interaction is to figure out “What is the speaker doing by that?” (Schegloff 1997a:506), “that” referring to the formal features of a just observed piece of verbal behavior. But it is equally crucial for speakers to know how to mobilize linguistic and other semiotic resources in order to be understood as carrying out a particular social action. How forms are assembled by speakers into configurations designed to be recognizable as implementing some particular action is what is known as action formation. How such forms are actually understood by recipients to be carrying out a particular action has been referred to as action ascription (Levinson 2013b). The following sections will first cover some preliminaries in the study of action formation and ascription, and then examine how language and linguistic structures are mobilized for the implementation of selected initiating actions and their responses, including questions (requests for information and confirmation); offers and requests for action; news deliveries and informings; and finally assessments, compliments, and selfdeprecations. In each case our discussion will be motivated by the current state of the art and will incorporate interactional linguistic findings from a variety of languages.

    Preliminaries

    The problem of action formation has been characterized by Schegloff in the following way:

    … how are the resources of the language, the body, the environment of the interaction, and position in the interaction fashioned into conformations designed to be, and to be recognized by recipients as, particular actions – actions like requesting, inviting, granting, complaining, agreeing, telling, noticing, rejecting, and so on – in a class of unknown size?

    (2007a:xiv)

  • Chapter 1 - What is Interactional Linguistics?

  • from Introduction
  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp 3-26

  • Summary

    Throughout much of the twentieth century, modern linguistics suffered from a written language bias (Linell 2005): the general thinking about language, as well as the descriptive concepts and categories developed for linguistic research, were tailored to language as it appears in writing. Interactional Linguistics, by contrast, grew out of an interest in spoken language and a desire to see it studied in its natural habitat: in social interaction. Interactional linguists took seriously the observation that “some of the most fundamental features of natural language are shaped in accordance with their home environment in co-present interaction, as adaptations to it, or as part of its very warp and weft” (Schegloff 1996b:54). They pursued this observation to its logical conclusion: namely, that as a consequence language must be analyzed in the home environment of co-present interaction. The idea was to apply the same empirical methods that had been so successful in revealing the structure and organization of everyday conversation, the methods of ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis, to explore the structure and organization of language as used in social interaction. From the cumulative results of such exploration, it was hoped, a new theory of language would emerge.

    Naturally, in order to explore language in its home environment, Interactional Linguistics needed and continues to need an appreciation of the structure and organization of interaction. For this, it is heavily indebted to Conversation Analysis, whose practitioners over the years have laid bare the structural underpinnings of coordinated interaction in social contexts. However, as the “founder” of Conversation Analysis, Harvey Sacks, explained early on, he was not interested in ordinary conversation because he had any “large interest in language,” but rather simply because it was easy to record and because these recordings could be listened to again and again (Sacks 1984:26). Conversation analysts are primarily interested in understanding how interaction works, in uncovering the mechanisms of, for example, how turns at talk are coordinated, how actions are constructed and recognized, and how they are made to cohere in sequences of interaction. Interactional linguists, by contrast, do have a “large interest” in language, because they believe that turns, actions, and sequences are accomplished and made interpretable by the systematic use of linguistic resources; consequently, they make the linguistic forms deployed by ordinary speakers in everyday and institutional encounters the focus of their attention.

  • Chapter 2 - Turn Construction and Turn Taking

  • from Part I - How is Interaction Conducted with Linguistic Resources?
  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp 31-111

  • Summary

    In contrast to monologues or institutionally regulated interaction, it is the local management and negotiation of turn exchange that is crucial for the organization of conversation. In conversation the issue of who takes a turn at what point in time is not predetermined, but is negotiated between the participants at the moment when it becomes relevant in the interaction. In general, there is a normative orientation to a next speaker taking the turn “on time”, i.e., not too early and not too late, with minimal overlap and minimal gap, after the prior speaker has ended his or her turn. Taking over the floor too early or too late can give rise to inferences concerning possible reasons for noticeably deviating from normative expectations. But how is it possible for turn taking to work so smoothly?

    The basic mechanism of turn taking was reconstructed in the seminal paper by Sacks et al. (1974). According to their model, turn taking is organized in two components:

  • i. a turn-constructional component, dealing with the construction of basic units called “turn-constructional units” (TCUs); and

  • ii. a turn-allocation component, dealing with the distribution of turns at the end of each TCU for the next such unit.

    • The system is described as abstract, i.e., context-free, and at the same time adaptable to all kinds of contingencies, thus context-sensitive, locally managed, and party-administered (for an overview see also Levinson 1983 and Sidnell 2010).

    In order to explain how smooth turn taking is possible, Sacks et al. assume that TCUs are projectable, i.e., their first possible completion point can be predicted by the recipient in advance of its occurrence. Such a possible completion point is referred to as a “transition-relevance place” (TRP) (Sacks et al. 1974:703). It is here that the rules of the turn-allocation component become relevant and result either in the transfer of speakership or in a continuation by the same speaker. According to this model, then, the continuation of the same speaker after a first TRP is an interactional achievement resulting from the fact that other participants have refrained from taking the turn themselves.

  • Part II - How are Linguistic Resources Deployed in Interaction?

  • Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki, Margret Selting, Universität Potsdam, Germany
  • Book:
    Interactional Linguistics
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017, pp 355-358

  • Summary

    Preface

    Before the reader embarks on the second part of this book, a word of caution is in order. As pointed out earlier, Interactional Linguistics advocates a cross-linguistic approach to the study of language in social interaction. Yet when examining linguistic resources and their use in interaction, how can we be sure we are talking about the same resource across languages? To take an example, the term clause in English has no satisfactory equivalent in German. If we try to compare an English clause to a German Satz (“sentence”), we will find ourselves comparing two very unlike entities. Moreover, the characteristics of clauses vary significantly across languages: whereas in English, clauses can be either finite or non-finite (Quirk et al. 1985:1120), the Finnish lause (“clause”) is by definition finite (Hakulinen et al. 2004:827). Branching out even further to include other non-Indo-European languages, what we know as, for example, a “relative clause” in English – i.e., a clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase and is introduced by a relative pronoun linking it to its antecedent – does not exist in Japanese, since Japanese places modifying clauses directly before the word they modify as adjective-like attributive verbs without a relative pronoun: tempura-o tsukutta hito “tempura-OBJ made person” (Kuno 1973). The crux of the matter then is that categories developed for the description of one language do not necessarily transfer to other languages, much less to all other languages.

    Language typologists have thought long and hard about this dilemma. Far from claiming that linguistic categories are universal, they would instead advocate comparing, for example, grammatical relations across languages in terms of comparative concepts: concepts that rely on very basic, general, even primitive notions that can be established independently of specific languages. The comparative concept of relative clause, for instance, might be described as “a clause that is used to narrow the reference of a referential phrase and in which the referent of the phrase plays a semantic role” (Haspelmath 2010:672). This understanding would make it possible to treat both (English) the man who came to dinner and (Japanese) tempura-o tsukutta hito “tempura-OBJ made person”4 as conceptually comparable. The label used to refer to them can be considered of secondary importance.

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