30.338, Review: Discourse Analysis; Sociolinguistics: Couper-Kuhlen, Selting (2017)

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Subject: 30.338, Review: Discourse Analysis; Sociolinguistics: Couper-Kuhlen, Selting (2017)

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Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2019 10:06:05
From: Karolina Grzech [karolina.grzech at ling.su.se]
Subject: Interactional Linguistics

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-98.html

AUTHOR: Elizabeth  Couper-Kuhlen
AUTHOR: Margret  Selting
TITLE: Interactional Linguistics
SUBTITLE: Studying Language in Social Interaction
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Karolina Zofia Grzech, Stockholm University, Sweden

SUMMARY

The book is, as stated on its back cover ‘the first textbook dedicated to
interactional linguistics’. It is a comprehensive resource, comprising not
only 9 very thorough chapters in the printed version, but also six online
chapters. The latter can be accessed online, but the table of contents in the
printed version of the book also includes them, making it easy for the reader
to follow the discussion of the different topics in the order envisaged by the
authors. 

The book begins with a discussion aimed at defining Interactional Linguistics
as a discipline. Chapter 1 describes historical foundations for the
development of Interactional Linguistics, tracing it back to functional
linguistics under its different guises, Conversation Analysis, and linguistic
anthropology. An online chapter (A) that follows presents a transcript of a
dialogue, so as to illustrate why and in what ways the interactional
perspective comes in useful for the analysis of language in use. 

The reminder of the volume is divided into two parts. The first one deals with
‘how interaction is conducted with linguistic resources’, while the second
part reverses this perspective, focusing on ‘how linguistics resources are
deployed in interaction’.

The first part comprises four printed chapters (2-5), and three online ones
(B-D). Chapter 2 introduces the basic notions pertinent to analysis of
talk-in-interaction. It focuses on turn construction and turn-taking, with
detailed discussion of turn construction units (TCUs), turn-relevant places
(TRPs), and strategies related to turn-taking and turn expansion. The
discussion builds heavily on the work of authors such as Schegloff and Sacks,
while staying true to what had been said in the previous chapter - that
Interactional Linguistics is more ‘linguistically’-minded, while Conversation
Analysis is more focused on the social aspects of interaction. Thus, the
authors give examples from different languages to illustrate the different
linguistic strategies for carrying out the communicative tasks they describe,
with particular attention given to syntax and prosody. 

Chapter 3 focuses on repair. The self- and other-initiated repairs are
discussed in turn, and different subtypes of the two are examined. The chapter
includes syntactic analysis of repairs in different languages, varying in word
order and the extent to which they use head- vs. dependent-marking. The
authors mention both the aspects of repair that are specific to particular
languages, and those that appear to be universal. 

Chapter 4 deals with action formation and ascription. Drawing on Levinson
(2013), action formation is defined as ‘how forms are assembled by speakers
into configurations designed to be recognizable as implementing some
particular action' (p.210). Action ascription, on the other hand, deals with
‘how such forms are (…) understood by recipients to be carrying out a
particular action’. The authors explore the context of ‘(social) action’,
pondering what counts as action within the interactional linguistics
framework. They draw on conversation-analytical work on adjacency pairs,
Austin’s Speech Act Theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) and Gricean pragmatics
(e.g. Grice 1967). The discussed actions include (1) questions and their
responses, (2) offers, requests and their responses, (3) news deliveries,
informing and their responses, (4) assessments, compliments, self-deprecations
and their responses.

The following Online Chapter (B), entitled ‘Preference and Other Asymmetric
Alternatives’, deals with the preferred and dispreferred ways of initiating or
responding to the interactional actions discussed in the previous chapter. It
also mentions ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ responses (cf. Schegloff 2007), and
type-conformity (e.g. Raymond 2003). 

Chapter 5 focuses on ‘Topic and Sequence’. Topics, sequences, coherence and
cohesion of texts are analysed in turn. Particular attention is granted to the
syntactic, lexical and prosodic resources for maintaining and changing topics
in discourse, as well as for achieving sequentiality of talk – initiating and
closing a sequence, or marking misplaced sequences. 

The ensuing Online Chapter C deals with ‘Stance and Footing’. It discusses the
two notions, and is mostly dedicated to how epistemic, deontic and affective
stance is conveyed in interaction. For each of the three, the authors provide
a short theoretical introduction, followed by the discussion of what
linguistic resources are deployed to express a given type of stance in
English. The discussion of epistemic and deontic stance also includes
linguistic means used in ‘other languages’, with examples drawn from Japanese,
Finnish, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Italian and Polish. Footing is discussed on
the example of reported speech and thought, as situations which depart from
the default footing, in which the three interactional participant roles
(animator, author and principal, cf. Goffman 1979) are embodied by the same
referent. 

What follows is the online Chapter D, which focuses on storytelling as an
example of ‘big package’ (cf. Sacks 1992; Jefferson 1988), i.e. an action that
is pursued in multi-unit turns.  The chapter touches on the issues pertinent
to both the production and the reception of storytelling. When it comes to
telling the story, the aspects granted most attention include linguistic means
(syntax, prosody, lexical choices) used for story prefacing, distinguishing
background and foreground information, dramatization, or introducing reports,
and conveying the climax of the story. The discussion of responses to
storytelling, on the other hand, divides the different responses with regard
to the point of the story at which they occur (mid-telling, post-climax), and
shows how they can be used to display affiliation or non-affiliation with the
storyteller, and how their nature is affected by context. 

The second part of the book, as mentioned above, focuses on how linguistic
resources are deployed in interaction. The authors are cautious not to
overgeneralise, and make reference to ‘comparative concepts’ (Haspelmath 2010)
to talk about categories that can be compared across various languages. This
‘restrict[s] the discussion to languages where there is enough isomorphism
between them [linguistic categories] to justify using one and the same label
for the phenomena in question’ (p. 356), and underlies the heavy focus of this
part of the book on English and German. The chapters included in this section
discuss linguistic resources such as sentences, clauses and phrases (Chapter
6), clause combinations (Chapter 7) and particles and one-word constructions
(Chapter 8). Online chapters discuss prosody and phonetics (Online Chapter E)
and a range of other linguistic practices, such as e.g. repetition (Online
Chapter F). 

Chapter 6 analyses sentences, clauses and phrases within the interactional
perspective, tracing this approach back to Schegloff (1979). The authors
conceptualize syntactic structure as emerging in real-time (Goodwin 1979; Auer
2005). According to this view, discussed in some detail early in the chapter,
linguistic units are constantly re-adapted and re-analysed for ongoing
interaction. When discussing internal organisation of clauses, the authors
devote much attention to the concept of pivots (Franck 1985; Scheutz 2005) and
their interactional relevance, including how they are used for constructing
multi-functional TCUs in English, German Swedish and French. The authors also
discuss the pre-posing, left-dislocation, right-dislocation and
post-positioning, as well as ‘non-normative’ clause-types departing from the
established patterns. 

Chapter 7, entitled ‘Clause Combinations’, is mostly concerned with paratactic
and hypertactic combinations of clauses, and how those are systematically used
in interaction to achieve a wide variety of communicative goals. The
discussion here is strongly - though not exclusively - based on English, and
on the use of  connectives (and, or, because) and fixed expressions to combine
clauses through linguistic and logical links. Some attention is also devoted
to complement and relative clauses, and to clausal combinations such as
pseudoclefts and extrapostions. The chapter ends with a short discussion
emphasising the interactional relevance of the different clause-combining
devices. 

 Chapter 8 focuses on particles, understood as ‘one-word constructions’. The
discussion is centred around the different positions they can have in the turn
(turn-initial or turn-final),  how they can be combined e.g. with prosody, and
how their use serves  different interactional purposes. The types of
expressions granted the most attention are positive and negative particles, 
change of state tokens (cf. e.g. Heritage 1985), tokens of acknowledgement,
agreement and affiliation, and continuers (Schegloff 1982). 

The Online Chapter E concentrates on the interactional relevance of the
different prosodic and phonetic resources. The discussion is devoted in
particular to (1) pitch and loudness, (2) duration, pause and syllable timing,
and (3) articulation, and their role in interactional phenomena such as turn
construction, turn transition, turn projection or turn yielding. Phonation,
airstream mechanisms, breathing and the interaction between prosody and
phonetics are discussed briefly towards the end of the chapter. 

The final chapter of part two is the Online Chapter F, ‘Further practices with
Language’. It introduces a range interactional devices that did not fit neatly
in the previous chapters, but which authors consider relevant to the
discussion of talk-in-interaction. These include various types of person and
place reference, terms of address, interactional use of repetition,  listing,
preliminaries, my-side tellings (Pomerantz 1980) and reporting and
formulations. 

In the concluding Chapter 9, the authors discuss the implications of
interactional linguistic research for language theory. They reiterate their
view of language as a dynamic process, which results in accomplishments of
actions (cf. ‘interactional constructivism’ Levinson 2005).  The book’s final
idea is that interactional research might lead us to discovering
‘interactional’ language universals. Authors mention some of such ‘universals’
described to date. These include both quite concrete expressions - like the
interjection huh? (cf. Dingemanse et al. 2013), and much more abstract general
principles that govern linguistic interaction (Schegloff 2006). While
Couper-Kuhlen and Selting subscribe to the view that principles governing
language practice might be universal, they point out that it remains to be
determined how the emergence of such common principles can be explained. 

EVALUATION

‘Interactional Linguistics’ was written as a textbook, and the textbook
character of the volume is evident: the treatment of the presented notions is
very thorough, and the writing style  assumes readers would have no or little
knowledge of the discussed issues. The linguistic analysis is stated in basic
enough terms that it can be easily understood by students, and the
descriptions are clear and detailed. The authors dedicate it to ‘students and
instructors alike’, most likely referring to students and instructors of
postgraduate courses on any aspect of language-in-use. 

The book undoubtedly is a great resource for such an audience, as well as for
researchers from other fields of linguistics willing to learn more about both
interactional linguistics and conversation analysis. The authors have gone to
great lengths to ensure that the most important topics are covered in detail,
and that the book engages with both the classics of the field and the most
recent literature. Having read the book, one feels truly up to date with the
development of the discipline, and aware of the issues that still remain to be
investigated, pointed out by the authors across the different chapters. 

However, the robustness of the volume might also discourage the less motivated
audience. The printed book has 617 pages, and the online chapters comprise
further 292 pages. The level of detail might also be discouraging at times.
The instructors will likely have to pick and choose relevant sections for
their students to read, as most of the chapters - especially in the first part
of the book - span 70 to 100 pages. On the other hand, each major section is
equipped with a text-box, summarising its main points. The text boxes often
also outline the state of the art, and mention the topics that would benefit
from more research in the future. These summaries stand out from the
surrounding text, and make it easier to navigate the longer chapters. Overall,
however, given that this is a textbook intent on giving a general overview of
the discipline, it might have benefited from excluding some of the more
marginal topics, which are mentioned for the sake of completeness, but not
discussed in great detail.

Since the book draws heavily on previous research in Conversation Analysis, it
is not surprising that most of the examples come from languages on which
previous conversation-analytical work has been done. Most of the discussion
throughout the book is based on English examples, but there are also numerous
examples from German, Japanese, Swedish, or Finnish. Chinese, Estonian, Dutch,
French, Italian, Korean, Lao, Polish, Russian, and Spanish are also present to
varying extents. However, all these are languages that are (relatively) widely
spoken, and the sample is not very genealogically diverse. The only two
lesser-spoken languages exemplified in the book are Caribbean Creole and Yélî
Dyne (Papua New Guinea). In Part Two, the authors decided to limit the
discussion to languages that exhibit ‘enough isomorphism (..) to justify using
one and the same label for the phenomena in question’ (p.356). While this is a
practical decision, it would have been interesting to see a wider sample of
languages represented in the discussion. This is, in my opinion, particularly
relevant to Chapter 8 (‘Particles’). It does include data from  Japanese and
Finnish, but leaves aside e.g. substantial body of work done on Romance (e.g.
Bolly & Degand 2009; Estellés & Albelda 2014), as well as
interactionally-minded studies of lesser-described languages (cf. e.g. Blass
1990; Gipper 2011; Grzech 2016; Schultze-Berndt 2017), even though some of it
(Gipper 2011) was referenced elsewhere in the volume. Overall, the reader can
appreciate that the authors have made an effort to incorporate
cross-linguistic variation in the description of interactional devices and
strategies. However, the discussion remains focused on well-known languages,
with emphasis on English.

As mentioned above, the book consists of both printed and online chapters.
Given that an online platform was available for the authors, it is surprising
that it does not include any audio-visual resources. Such a solution - adding
online audio-visual resources to a printed book - is not unprecedented (cf.
Uzendoski and Calapucha-Tapuy 2014). Recordings of communicative situations
could help illustrate the described phenomena, and would make the book much
more interactive, emphasising interactional-linguistic focus on studying
talk-in-interaction. I am aware of ethical issues related to sharing such
data, but even a small number of sound-clips, transcriptions or images of
wave-form and pitch trace would be useful for illustrative purposes. This is
particularly relevant to the Online Chapter D on storytelling, and the Online
Chapter E on prosody and phonetics. In chapter D, the authors have included a
picture of the storyteller and the audience. Being able to actually hear the
story would have definitely enhanced the audience’s interaction with the
chapter. 

In sum, ‘Interactional Linguistics. Studying Language in Social Interaction’
is a monumental and well-executed effort, as well as a timely one. Currently,
more and more  attention granted to corpus-based work, and technology is
available for relatively easy creation and annotation of corpora. Thus, a
resource such as this one, focusing on systematising the methodology for
studying language-in-interaction is most definitely needed. It will be
interesting to see how the field develops, and whether the future editions of
the book will have interactional research from many more languages to draw on.

REFERENCES

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Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 25(1).
doi:10.1515/text.2005.25.1.7. 

Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Blass, Regina. 1990. Relevance Relations in Discourse: A Study with Special
Reference to Sissala. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bolly, Catherine & Liesbeth Degand. 2009. Quelle(s) fonction(s) pour donc en
français oral ?: Du connecteur conséquentiel au marqueur de structuration du
discours. Lingvisticae Investigationes 32(1). 1–32. doi:10.1075/li.32.1.01bol.

Dingemanse, Mark, Francisco Torreira & Nick J. Enfield. 2013. Is “Huh?” a
Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of
Linguistic Items. (Ed.) Johan J. Bolhuis. PLoS ONE 8(11).
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Estellés, Maria & Marta Albelda. 2014. Evidentials, politeness and prosody in
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Goodwin, Charles. 1979. The Interactive Construction of a Sentence in Natural
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Schegloff, Emanuel. 2006. Interaction: the infrastructure for social
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which culture is enacted. In Nich J. Enfield & Stephen C. Levinson (eds.),
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International Symposium Series), 70–96. New York: Berg.

Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in
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University Press.

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& Margret Selting (eds.), Studies in Discourse and Grammar, vol. 17, 103–128.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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spoken word: Amazonian storytelling and shamanism among the Napo Runa.
Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm
University, working within the General Linguistics/Linguistic Diversity
research group. My work focuses on evidentiality and epistemicity, with an
emphasis on epistemic marking systems in South American languages. I am
particularly interested in how and to what end such markers are used in
interaction, and use both corpus-based an experimental methods to explore
these issues. My general research interests include semantics, pragmatics,
language endangerment and methodology of linguistic fieldwork. I am also
interested in mimetic language, multilingualism and language mapping. I am a
founding co-director of Language Landscape, an organisation dedicated to
raising awareness of linguistic diversity.





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