English linguistics: analysis of spoken interaction
Chapter 1
Why focus on spoken interaction?
It took a long time to become a recognized field because of a few reasons:
1. Privilege of written text
o Philological inheritance (academic tradition of inheriting, interpreting and critically
editing historical, literary and linguistic texts) -> favours the written word
2. Saussure’s linguistic legacy of langue and parole
o Parole was seen as lesser, not worth studying
o Language should only be studied as a language system
His ideas remained dominant
3. Failure to disseminate early 20th dialogic perspectives on language use
o A Russian scholar (Volosinov) already took interest in spoken language
Vološinov’s theoretical universe:
The study of language becomes the study of language use.
The unit of analysis is the utterance, and not the written sentence.
The relationship between an utterance and the preceding utterance
which it responds to is evaluative, responsive and fundamentally
social.
o But (soviet repression) it didn’t reach the rest of the world
o He also studied dialogue in literature (still a big difference with spontaneous speech)
4. Key theoretical concepts developed outside of the field of linguistics (mostly in sociology)
Analysis of spoking interaction came into being in the 60s because of these significant developments:
1. Speech act theory
o Austin: the performative aspect of an utterance
o Nowadays: a widened and more generalized perspective on language use as social
action is being adopted
2. The sociology of the everyday and the mundane
o The human and social sciences developed more of an interest in the mundane and
everyday
o Schutz: “how do people make sense of the social world”
Ethnomethodology
o A debate within sociology: is there an existing hierarchy, existing norms? Or do we
create those by interacting with each other?
Schutz: social order does not precede action
3. Early “sociolinguistics”
o New cross-disciplinary alliances (study of language variation, speech act theory,…)
Later: a divergence into separate specialisms (variationist sociolinguistics, e.g.
Labov, interactional perspectives, CA-inspired sociology, etc.)
4. Technological developments in 20th and 21st century
o Development and spread of technologies of recording speech
From mechanical and electronic to digital
From “sound recording” to “ audio-visual caption”
, o Gradually: lower cost, greater portability, etc.
Social relevance: talk is central to the creation of social facts, categories and realities that come into
being in the course of social activities.
Social interaction
Language use = an important form of social action
- It produces symbolic and representational value: language is used to establish identity,
create/manage relationships, maintain a culture, …
- Its is used to get things done: utterances are acts, they coordinate “steps” in sequences of
social activity
But: language use is by no means exhaustive of social activity
- Bodies align and interact in particular ways
o They interact with material objects in a situation
o They act within a spatial environment
Different views of interaction
-Tradition and restricted view
o Content is exchanged through language
- The body actional
o Content is exchanged through bodies which relate to one another
Facial expression, gaze, posture, gesture
- The material
o Content is exchanged through interactions with tools, objects, technologies
Most of the time: these are intertwined
Key concepts of interaction
- Interaction: “interdependent action” (coordinated)
- Interaction unfolds “sequentially”: it unfolds in real time, in steps; it is “performative”
- Interaction is responsive and anticipatory
Move 2: responds in some way to previous move + creates expectations for the next
move
- Interaction is “relation” and hence “social”
o Verbal interaction can be means to an end but it is often a social end in itself (‘phatic
communion’)
o Interaction has social effects (outcomes of talk)
o How people interact is intimately connected with ‘who they are’ as shown in ‘how
they act’ (doing being x)
- The study of interaction overlaps with the study of variation in language, but it also entails
more
o Overlap: a number of questions in common
, o Non-overlap: a set of additional questions, beyond language use -> e.g. how do we
know when it’s our turn to speak?
Context
The problem of “context”
A traditional and more static view
1. Meaningful language use is accomplished in a context which it ‘reflects’
2. Context is layered: it has a ‘nested’ structure
o Context =
Co-text (surrounding text)
Immediate situation
Institution
Society
Culture
Transnational exchange
The globe
A later and more dynamic view
1. Language use not only ‘reflects’ but ‘responds to’ context, hence it ‘shapes’ context
o Context is both input and outcome of an interaction
2. Context is both a backdrop to action and a momentary accomplishment within a sequence of
action
3. The context of meaningful talk includes an idea of what participants focus on while
interaction
What is in the forefront of attention (-> focal context)
This shifts all the time
4. The context for meaningful talk includes an environment in which participants behave in
some way
o The body as a pivotal entity (-> behavioural context)
5. The macro context (culture, society, world) is not only a backdrop
o It is also a potential focus of ‘micro meaning’
In moment-by-moment interaction: people actively bring broader social
meanings into play
The wider socio-cultural understandings count as enacted (rather than being
just there in the background)
E.g. French-English interaction: the context that this is happening in a
bilingual city is very important to understand the language switch
A more general observation is that interaction is constantly about “being positioned” and “doing
positioning work”
Not only true for the values that are being expressed, but also for what you can do next
and how this will be interpreted
Important questions while doing conversation analysis
- How much context is needed to understand what is going on?
- How much of context can be gleaned from textual data?
, - How much of context needs to be studies separately from/before undertaking textual
analysis?
- How do we work with a view in which the unnecessary, strict boundaries between action and
situation are dissolved dynamically?
“The elephant in the room” -problem
1. A key contextual assumption which doesn’t show in what is said
2. Everyone present is very aware of it
3. It is not mentioned explicitly but it affects the interpretation of what is said
Some key aspects of context remain invisible in talk and are accessible only to insiders
who are privy to a particular situation
Makes it harder for analysists
Addendum
The bodily actional
Dimensions
1. Posture
2. Gaze
3. Gesture
4. Facial expression
5. Speech
A greater focus on ‘multimodality’
- Growing attention to multimodality in interactional research
o Early work mainly focused on verbal and paralinguistic resources (recording
limitations)
o Early calls for integration non-verbal resources into interaction analysis
Building on Goffmann (1959) and kendon’s (1967) work on gaze
o Conversation analysts demonstrated how embodied actions contribute to interaction
o Interest in embodied interaction grew alongside advances in video-recording
technology
Result: multimodal conversation analysis has become a research domain
Body-actional behaviour, alongside verbal behaviour
Why we gesture, Mcneill (2016)
- Gesture is not ornamental. The core is gesture and speech together. We gesture to
orchestrate speech.
- In this, humans mimic one another unconsciously
o Intercorporeity: a shared dynamic system in which we “share a body”
Hence: the importance of mural awareness of each other’s meaningful
behaviour
Posture
- Anchorage of the body
- Echoing on another’s posture (relative symmetry)
Chapter 1
Why focus on spoken interaction?
It took a long time to become a recognized field because of a few reasons:
1. Privilege of written text
o Philological inheritance (academic tradition of inheriting, interpreting and critically
editing historical, literary and linguistic texts) -> favours the written word
2. Saussure’s linguistic legacy of langue and parole
o Parole was seen as lesser, not worth studying
o Language should only be studied as a language system
His ideas remained dominant
3. Failure to disseminate early 20th dialogic perspectives on language use
o A Russian scholar (Volosinov) already took interest in spoken language
Vološinov’s theoretical universe:
The study of language becomes the study of language use.
The unit of analysis is the utterance, and not the written sentence.
The relationship between an utterance and the preceding utterance
which it responds to is evaluative, responsive and fundamentally
social.
o But (soviet repression) it didn’t reach the rest of the world
o He also studied dialogue in literature (still a big difference with spontaneous speech)
4. Key theoretical concepts developed outside of the field of linguistics (mostly in sociology)
Analysis of spoking interaction came into being in the 60s because of these significant developments:
1. Speech act theory
o Austin: the performative aspect of an utterance
o Nowadays: a widened and more generalized perspective on language use as social
action is being adopted
2. The sociology of the everyday and the mundane
o The human and social sciences developed more of an interest in the mundane and
everyday
o Schutz: “how do people make sense of the social world”
Ethnomethodology
o A debate within sociology: is there an existing hierarchy, existing norms? Or do we
create those by interacting with each other?
Schutz: social order does not precede action
3. Early “sociolinguistics”
o New cross-disciplinary alliances (study of language variation, speech act theory,…)
Later: a divergence into separate specialisms (variationist sociolinguistics, e.g.
Labov, interactional perspectives, CA-inspired sociology, etc.)
4. Technological developments in 20th and 21st century
o Development and spread of technologies of recording speech
From mechanical and electronic to digital
From “sound recording” to “ audio-visual caption”
, o Gradually: lower cost, greater portability, etc.
Social relevance: talk is central to the creation of social facts, categories and realities that come into
being in the course of social activities.
Social interaction
Language use = an important form of social action
- It produces symbolic and representational value: language is used to establish identity,
create/manage relationships, maintain a culture, …
- Its is used to get things done: utterances are acts, they coordinate “steps” in sequences of
social activity
But: language use is by no means exhaustive of social activity
- Bodies align and interact in particular ways
o They interact with material objects in a situation
o They act within a spatial environment
Different views of interaction
-Tradition and restricted view
o Content is exchanged through language
- The body actional
o Content is exchanged through bodies which relate to one another
Facial expression, gaze, posture, gesture
- The material
o Content is exchanged through interactions with tools, objects, technologies
Most of the time: these are intertwined
Key concepts of interaction
- Interaction: “interdependent action” (coordinated)
- Interaction unfolds “sequentially”: it unfolds in real time, in steps; it is “performative”
- Interaction is responsive and anticipatory
Move 2: responds in some way to previous move + creates expectations for the next
move
- Interaction is “relation” and hence “social”
o Verbal interaction can be means to an end but it is often a social end in itself (‘phatic
communion’)
o Interaction has social effects (outcomes of talk)
o How people interact is intimately connected with ‘who they are’ as shown in ‘how
they act’ (doing being x)
- The study of interaction overlaps with the study of variation in language, but it also entails
more
o Overlap: a number of questions in common
, o Non-overlap: a set of additional questions, beyond language use -> e.g. how do we
know when it’s our turn to speak?
Context
The problem of “context”
A traditional and more static view
1. Meaningful language use is accomplished in a context which it ‘reflects’
2. Context is layered: it has a ‘nested’ structure
o Context =
Co-text (surrounding text)
Immediate situation
Institution
Society
Culture
Transnational exchange
The globe
A later and more dynamic view
1. Language use not only ‘reflects’ but ‘responds to’ context, hence it ‘shapes’ context
o Context is both input and outcome of an interaction
2. Context is both a backdrop to action and a momentary accomplishment within a sequence of
action
3. The context of meaningful talk includes an idea of what participants focus on while
interaction
What is in the forefront of attention (-> focal context)
This shifts all the time
4. The context for meaningful talk includes an environment in which participants behave in
some way
o The body as a pivotal entity (-> behavioural context)
5. The macro context (culture, society, world) is not only a backdrop
o It is also a potential focus of ‘micro meaning’
In moment-by-moment interaction: people actively bring broader social
meanings into play
The wider socio-cultural understandings count as enacted (rather than being
just there in the background)
E.g. French-English interaction: the context that this is happening in a
bilingual city is very important to understand the language switch
A more general observation is that interaction is constantly about “being positioned” and “doing
positioning work”
Not only true for the values that are being expressed, but also for what you can do next
and how this will be interpreted
Important questions while doing conversation analysis
- How much context is needed to understand what is going on?
- How much of context can be gleaned from textual data?
, - How much of context needs to be studies separately from/before undertaking textual
analysis?
- How do we work with a view in which the unnecessary, strict boundaries between action and
situation are dissolved dynamically?
“The elephant in the room” -problem
1. A key contextual assumption which doesn’t show in what is said
2. Everyone present is very aware of it
3. It is not mentioned explicitly but it affects the interpretation of what is said
Some key aspects of context remain invisible in talk and are accessible only to insiders
who are privy to a particular situation
Makes it harder for analysists
Addendum
The bodily actional
Dimensions
1. Posture
2. Gaze
3. Gesture
4. Facial expression
5. Speech
A greater focus on ‘multimodality’
- Growing attention to multimodality in interactional research
o Early work mainly focused on verbal and paralinguistic resources (recording
limitations)
o Early calls for integration non-verbal resources into interaction analysis
Building on Goffmann (1959) and kendon’s (1967) work on gaze
o Conversation analysts demonstrated how embodied actions contribute to interaction
o Interest in embodied interaction grew alongside advances in video-recording
technology
Result: multimodal conversation analysis has become a research domain
Body-actional behaviour, alongside verbal behaviour
Why we gesture, Mcneill (2016)
- Gesture is not ornamental. The core is gesture and speech together. We gesture to
orchestrate speech.
- In this, humans mimic one another unconsciously
o Intercorporeity: a shared dynamic system in which we “share a body”
Hence: the importance of mural awareness of each other’s meaningful
behaviour
Posture
- Anchorage of the body
- Echoing on another’s posture (relative symmetry)
