Handbook of Language and Social Interaction

Kristine L. Fitch, Robert E. Sanders, Kristine L. Fitch, Robert E. Sanders

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135634148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

1

Introduction: LSI as Subject Matter and as Multidisciplinary Confederation

Robert E. Sanders

University at Albany, SUNY

“Language and Social Interaction” (LSI) refers to both a subject matter and to a multidisciplinary confederation of research communities assembled within the field of Communication. This handbook is intended to provide a scholarly resource about LSI's subject matter and research, as well as to give visibility and definition to this multidisciplinary confederation.

As noted in the volume's preface, this handbook departs from the traditional model in that we did not identify a series of key research topics and enlist authorities on each topic to contribute a chapter. Instead, we identified the main subdisciplinary areas that are confederated in LSI and arranged for different authoritative voices within each of those subfields to provide their respective views of their subfield's central concerns, its research program and main findings, and its present or emergent issues and directions.

The five subfields we identified are Language Pragmatics, Conversation Analysis, Language and Social Psychology, Discourse Analysis, and the Ethnography of Communication. They have in common an interest in the meaningfulness of what persons say, in particular circumstances, to particular others. They differ in terms of what they take into account as having an influence on the meaningfulness of such situated (contextualized) talk. The above ordering of the subfields (and the corresponding order of sections of the handbook) is based on how extensively, from least to most, the analytic work of each subfield goes beyond the form and content of the talk itself, and takes into account such additional matters as the social identities and relations of speakers and hearers, the organization of the interaction in progress, participants' psychological states, participants' cultural identities, and the activity or business at hand in which participants are jointly engaged.

The second part of this Introduction focuses on this confederation of subfields and how, collectively, it adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. But first a preliminary exposition of our subject matter is in order, although as one that cuts across the diverse work of our subfields, it is bound to be imperfect. For one thing, this representation of our subject matter is necessarily an abstract one that does not capture the work's concrete aspect and thus misses what probably matters most to LSI researchers across the subfields: the fascination and even pleasure that comes from discovering the intricacy and often the art of everyday talk—the fineness or complexity of the details of the talk that is constitutive of or consequential for what happens between people. In addition, I have taken a somewhat conservative view, one that might be more restrictive about LSI's subject matter than some of my colleagues would agree to. But it is a formulation of our subject matter that interconnects the subfields of LSI as represented in the chapters of this Handbook, and thus it captures what is most central and shared, but may not perfectly express what researchers in individual subfields might say about LSI through the lens of that subfield. We have provided more tailored overviews of each subfield's subject matter and what relevant chapters have to say in prefaces to each section of the Handbook.

LSI'S SUBJECT MATTER

It is axiomatic in LSI that when persons interact with each other, language meaning is a critical element but not a determinant of speaker meaning or social meaning (i.e., the significance that speakers' utterances have for what comes next). In fact, it is even possible for the utterance of a linguistically meaningful sentence to be incoherent in the moment if its social meaning is unrecoverable (e.g., when a stranger passing another on the street says, “My car has cloth upholstery on the seats.”). LSI thereby problematizes the commonplace and seemingly unremarkable fact that people mean something by what they say and that their meaning is recoverable from what they say by the people they address (and by most overhearing others, including LSI analysts). It is worth investigating how people accomplish this. That people succeed far more often than not in saying things that are coherent entails that they make them coherent by speaking in such a way, at such junctures, to and among such people, as to make their meaning recoverable. In this regard, LSI equates the meaningfulness of talk in situ with its functionality, with what difference an utterance (or more broadly, a discursive practice) makes to some current state of affairs, given details of its content, wording, syntax, and intonation, and the social circumstances of its utterance. In some subfields of LSI, this equation translates to a focus on what action it counts as to produce that talk just then to those hearing it. Hence, the earlier example of the stranger's utterance that his or her car seats are upholstered with cloth seems incoherent insofar as its functionality, or value as an action, is not apparent.

The central tenet shared across the subfields of LSI is that the meaningfulness (functionality) of both what is said/done and of interaction itself, albeit situated and potentially ephemeral, has a systematic basis that it is the project of LSI research and theory to reveal. The key difference among the subfields is what that basis is thought to be. A second commonality among LSI's subfields is that they regard the functionality of utterances or discursive practices as being co-constructed, although they differ in how centrally they are concerned with this aspect. This presumption of co-construction is that the meaningfulness (functionality) of what someone says—the utterance per se or the discursive practice it comprises, such as use of an address term that is formal versus familiar—is not up to the speaker alone; it does not depend solely on what option he/she takes regarding the form, content, and the discursive and social environment of the utterance/discursive practice. Its functionality depends as well on what difference the utterance/discursive practice evidently makes to the hearer(s) and what they do about it in the subsequent course of the interaction. (Hereafter I will use “utterance,” “discursive practice,” or both to refer to units of situated talk that are of analytic interest, or the more generic term “situated talk,” depending on which term best fits the particular subject matter at that point.)

As noted, the central difference among LSI's subfields lies in the way an utterance's or discursive practice's functionality is assessed, because of differences in what states situated talk is analyzed as changing or contributing to. The functionalities of utterances or discursive practices (situated talk) that LSI research in different subfields addresses include the following: their bearing on the social state in that moment between speaker and hearer or the current informational state between them; their bearing on the interaction's sequential organization; their bearing on attributions, stereotypes, and related perceptions of persons; their bearing on the coherence of discourse; and their bearing on cultural speech events, a speaker's cultural identity, or the relational state or activity state between speaker and hearer. A second difference among LSI's subfields is the proportion of effort each puts into the empirical work of recording and analyzing situated talk and the functionalities of its components (although in all of our subfields this aspect accounts for the majority of research effort) and the proportion devoted to revealing the underlying systematics of the composition, utterance, and interpretation of situated talk.

Although each of LSI's subfields analyzes situated talk in terms of its functionality, each attends to different kinds of functionalities. Thus each brings to light the importance of different compositional details for distinguishing the functionalities of different utterances or discursive practices. Details of utterance that distinguish a promise from a threat (of interest in Language Pragmatics) are different from those details of utterance that distinguish speakers as members of one stereotype category or another (of interest in Language and Social Psychology), and those in turn are different from details of the discursive practices in particular cultural settings that distinguish “harmless” gossip from malicious gossip (of interest in the Ethnography of Communication). From the accretion of work along these lines in each LSI subfield, the multifunctionality of details of utterance composition becomes apparent. So does the potential for speakers to encounter conflicts or confounds in the way they compose utterances: For example, a speaker whose details of utterance are associated with an out-group (Language and Social Psychology), and who composes an utterance so as to implicate a compliment through actually speaking an insult (Language Pragmatics), may be misinterpreted as producing an insult because of his or her association with an out-group. The value of LSI as a confederation of subfields is that it promises to expose researchers to work in other subfields that both complicates and enriches their own.

Before proceeding, it should be noted that LSI's subject matter potentially extends beyond discursive practices to the meaningfulness (functionality) of nonlinguistic practices as well, at least in Language and Social Psychology, Conversation Analysis, and the Ethnography of Communication. Bodily expression (facial expression, gesture, intonation) that accompanies speaking obviously bears on what utterances mean, and has gotten attention within LSI (Kendon, 1990; McNeill, 1985; McNeill, Cassell, & McCullough, 1994), and bodily and other nonlinguistic practices at times are independent components of interactions that have been considered in LSI (Goodwin, 1981; Kendon, 1994; Streeck, 1994). Beyond that, Moerman (1990–1991) has observed that talk is not the primary modality in some interactions; it is sometimes secondary to or supportive of nonlinguistic practices in which interacting people are engaged. Goffman (e.g., 1959), Hymes (e.g., 1974), and Latour (1994, 1996) have each shown that material components of social interaction such as costumes, tools and other equipment, furnishings, infrastructure, and the like are as meaningful and consequential for an interaction's organization, trajectory, and progress as what is said. But even though these nonlinguistic practices and materials have received attention in a variety of research, LSI on the whole remains predominantly focused on language and social interaction. One reason for this focus may be the longstanding emphasis on language in each of LSI's subfields. A second reason may be that there are practical, and to a diminishing extent, technological obstacles in the way of having a good, accessible corpus of data (especially recordings) showing nonlinguistic components of and their bearing on social interaction. A third reason may be that a shared approach to analyzing these nonlinguistic phenomena has not yet coalesced.

Accordingly, the subject matter of LSI should be defined in terms of the title itself, Handbook of Language and Sodai Interaction. On one level, we are concerned with a whole that is formed in the moment by persons interacting—the composite facts of the language they use coupled with and embedded in the type of interaction at hand and its particulars (to borrow from Hymes, the interaction's setting; participant structure; component actions, activities, and sequences; emotional valence; genres, etc.). This views language use coupled with particulars of the social interaction holistically, as occurrences in the ongoing lives of persons, communities, and institutions. When particular people in particular moments engage in language and social interaction, there is at the same time a history and a future involved on a personal, interpersonal, interactional, institutional, and cultural level. However, LSI's subfields differ as to how the past and (anticipated or desired) future make themselves felt in the present and how important it is that they do so.

At the same time, on a second level, the subject matter of Language and Social Interaction involves an interest in the analytic decomposition of the bilateral relationship between language and social interaction. Language use is examined with reference to the social interactions that comprise it, and social interactions are examined with reference to the language use that forms and organizes them. This bilateral relationship involves the following two propositions for research. First, to shed light on the production and meaningfulness of details of language use—their meaningfulness from the perspective of speakers and hearers in the moment—we have to examine the social interactions and activities, or more broadly, the larger discursive wholes that occasioned those expressive particulars. Second, to shed light on the functionality, occurrence, and meaningfulness of structures, boundaries, constraints, trajectories, co-construction, and the like of interactions (and related kinds of social activity), we have to examine the linguistic (or more broadly, expressive) components that constitute them.

More precisely, then, the subject matter of LSI across its subfields is the situational bases (plural) of the meaningfulness of details of language and language use in the moment, and the bases of the meaningfulness of the practices, rituals, and interactions and their component details that are contingent on those details' psychological, interpersonal, interactional, ritual, communal, or institutional functioning in the moment. This subject matter is captured by three main questions LSI researchers ask, although these are by no means the only questions. One question focuses on the meaningfulness of language and asks how the kind of interaction or social activity or practice taking place—and the (perceived or implicated or nominal) identity, status, power, and relationships of the participants—influences the details of the language that participants produce and how their language is interpreted. The second question focuses on the meaningfulness of interactions and asks how the composition and interpretation of many of the details of language, including staples of the language system per se (syntax, lexicon, and phonology), are adapted to and expressive of the kind of interaction or social activity or practice of which they are a part. Finally, the third question also focuses on the meaningfulness of interactions and asks how interactions comprising such details of language, sequentially organized in that way, involving those participants in that setting, have the interpersonal, institutional, or cultural meaning they do.

This brings us to a definition of LSI's subject matter. LSI's subject matter most concretely consists of the linguistic, psychological, interactional, institutional, and cultural resources that each have a disciplining influence on the content and form of the situated talk that people produce and its interpretation, whether face-to-face or mediated. More broadly, in an article discussing LSI's state of the art (Sanders, Fitch, & Pomerantz, 2000), it was proposed that work within LSI's subfields emphasizes the discursive practices through which people construct or produce the realities of social life. It was further proposed that this emphasis rests on an interest in “understanding what persons do, on what basis, to produce socially meaningful action and achieve (or fail to achieve) mutual understanding.” From an LSI perspective, this approach contravenes any view that extrinsic factors such as attitudes, skills, relational history, task requirements, goals, and institututional imperatives that people bring with them to their interactions translate directly to the language and interaction that the people involved produce. Language and social interaction make their own demands (and from some perspectives within LSI, the problematics of language and social interaction subsume and reify any other influence on what happens between people). This view places our concerns and our findings at the core of the study of human communication and, more broadly, human sociality.

LSI AS A CONFEDERATION OF SUBDISCIPLINES

The subject matter of LSI is too complicated to be claimed or examined, or even to have been formulated as a subject matter, by a single community of researchers. Instead it is a subject matter that has been fragmented among several independent subdisciplines, principally (alphabetically) within the disciplines of Anthropology, Communication, Linguistics, Psychology, and Sociology. As delineat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• LEA'S COMMUNICATION SERIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Transcription Symbols
• Preface
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction: LSI as Subject Matter and as Multidisciplinary Confederation
• I: LANGUAGE PRAGMATICS
• II: CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
• III: LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
• IV: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
• V: ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMUNICATION
• VI: EXTENSIONS OF TECHNOLOGY
• Author Index
• Subject Index