30.1680, Review: Sociolinguistics: Seuren (2018)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1680. Wed Apr 17 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 30.1680, Review: Sociolinguistics: Seuren (2018)
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Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2019 21:28:23
From: Geraldine Bengsch [geraldine_be at hotmail.com]
Subject: The Interactional Accomplishment of Action
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AUTHOR: Lucas Seuren
TITLE: The Interactional Accomplishment of Action
SERIES TITLE: LOT Dissertation Series
PUBLISHER: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT)
YEAR: 2018
REVIEWER: Geraldine Bengsch, King's College London
With “The interactional accomplishment of action”, Lucas M. Seuren, a
postdoctoral researcher at the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen,
Netherlands, presents his doctoral research thesis at The Netherlands Graduate
School of Linguistics. Seuren uses Conversation Analysis (CA) as key method to
focus on how interactants utilize the grammar of their language to design
social actions. He argues that analyzing what people do in conversations
should take precedence over how they achieve it. Building on substantial
literature in linguistics and related fields that have addressed
conventionalized turns at talk, the author proposes that action ascription
follows a similar pattern and is supported by grammar.
SUMMARY
The introduction not only demonstrates a firm grasp of relevant literature,
but also recognizes and effectively organizes the provenance of different
schools of thought. The introductory chapter constitutes a substantial piece
of theoretical work that shows great engagement with, and in depth knowledge
of, the literature. It is by far the longest chapter in the book and with 60
pages occupies nearly a third of the dissertation. Notably, Seuren writes in a
conversational and accessible tone while maintaining the strict use of
technical terminology expected in Conversation Analysis. He utilizes
illustrative, if made up, examples to further explain concepts from the
literature. Seuren clearly identifies a focus on declarative questions in
Dutch in the piece of work and attempts to position it within the literature.
Writing from a linguistics perspective, Seuren struggles somewhat to integrate
some of the classical sociology literature which acquaints the reader with the
problematic, often contradictory concepts and motivates the study. While the
chapter makes for an interesting read that provides the reader with some
insights on Seuren’s thought processes, the relevance for the dissertation is
sometimes unclear and the overall lengthiness leads to arguments being
unnecessarily repeated in places, and a “rehashing” of information. For
example, he introduces Interactional Linguistics as a separate field and while
it appears that he is promoting a combination of this and CA as a frame for
his own research, this approach does not seem to be followed through in the
studies included where a preference for CA prevails.
Chapters Two, Four, Five and Six consist of modified versions of (mainly
co-authored) articles utilizing the same corpus, with varying sets of data
thereof. The corpus comprises 21.5 hours of phone and Skype recordings in
Dutch of students at Utrecht University recorded a couple of years prior to
Seuren’s beginning his PhD studies at the University of Groningen. As such, it
demonstrates clearly the value and re-usability of a data corpus for studies
in CA. A brief summary of each chapter/study is provided below.
Chapter Two: Confirmation or elaboration: what do yes/no declaratives want?
(co-authored with M. Huiskes)
The authors demonstrate that declarative word order can make both confirmation
and elaboration relevant as a next action.
The authors note that English and Dutch share structural sequences. However,
while in English inversion of subject and verb promotes a condition for a
yes/no-interrogative, they observe that this is not true in Dutch. For
speakers of Germanic languages, this is apparent, since inversions occur to
keep the finite verb in second position in a main clause, which seems to make
a CA based argument in this case redundant and not particularly useful to
illustrate how this affects the analysis (Koster, 1975; De Vogelaer, 2007).
The following examples contrast excerpts used to elicit confirmation or
elaboration. The authors find that there is no difference in the
morphosyntactic design of the turns, but that they can be distinguished by
sequential placement and epistemic context.
Chapter Three: Getting into topic talk: a classification of topic proffers
The chapter seamlessly continues the importance of sequence in action
formation from the previous chapter (the latter part already introduces the
notion of topic proffers) and introduces additional functions of YNDs:
challenging a prior turn or developing a new topic. Seuren presents an
overview of previous work on topic transitions in the literature and concludes
that there is still little known on how topics are initiated. Seuren presents
examples introduced with misplacement markers, yes/no-type
interrogatives/declaratives and completed/upcoming activities, finding that
they are associated with specific syntactic practices.
Chapter Four: Remembering and understanding with oh-prefaced yes/no
declaratives in Dutch (co-authored with T. Koole)
The authors move to issues of epistemic access as a further function of YND
declaratives that become available to participations through a preface, here,
“oh”. The authors find that “Oh”-prefaced yes/no declaratives orient to
independent epistemic access, whereas an “Oh ja”-preface claims dependent
epistemic access, as has also been demonstrated for the similar German
prefaces “ach/ach ja”.
Chapter Five: Resolving knowledge-discrepancies in informing sequences
(co-authored with M. Huiskes and T. Koole)
The chapter continues “oh”-prefaced responses and contrasts them to cases that
lack such a preface, showing that the practices are utilized to implement
different and distinctive actions, which the authors refer to as counter
expectation remarks. They note that actions are achieved not merely through
isolated practices, but a combination of them and their placement within a
sequence.
Chapter Six: Assessing answers: Action ascription in third position.
In this sole-authored paper, Seuren moves from adjacency pairs to evaluative
and deontic assessments found in third positions, finding that interactants
may mark both understanding and ascribe an action. He argues that an
evaluative assessment is often specifically fitted to the sequential context;
proposals are often marked by a specific practice.
In the concluding chapter, Seuren reflects on the main findings: the
importance of sequence, but also grammar and turn design for action formation
and ascription. He notes that participants in interactions can use both
declarative and interrogative formats to ask questions, which makes it
relevant to utilize a different approach to a designated format to understand
how speakers design social actions. Seuren concludes that CA is a suitable
method for researching interaction -
EVALUATION
Seuren concludes his dissertation by calling for “a radical rethinking of
linguistic theorizing” (p. 209) - while citing a plethora of prominent authors
who have at least begun to address the role of language and action in
interactions, which weakens the argument somewhat. Focusing on Dutch, Seuren’s
work constitutes a much needed contribution to often English dominated
research in CA. The author provides readers with a theoretical introduction to
action accomplishment and a collection of studies to illustrate various
aspects of the topic.
The voice and style of writing differs notably in the co-authored papers to
the remainder of the text. As noted earlier, the introduction and conclusion
especially are marked by Seuren’s reflexive writing style, which allows the
reader insights into the author’s thought process, making it a potentially
very useful text for researchers and students not yet familiar with the
methodological procedures distinctive to CA. Appropriately, the published
articles are presented much more concisely and targeted for the particular
audiences of the journals. This may make for a slightly unbalanced reading of
the overall piece of work: however, as a dissertation it is presented very
successfully and reflects both the development of the work and the individual
studies as examples of finished research products.
With this dissertation, Seuren presents a cohesive piece of work showing that
a prevailing assumption that lays claim to a relationship between linguistic
form and its pragmatic function assuming causal implications that often do not
exist as he demonstrates in the case of the category questions. Seuren
emphasizes that speakers rely on sequential context and environment to design
turns to formulate their actions. The combination of reflexive writing,
in-depth understanding and engagement with relevant literature and the
well-executed individual studies make this dissertation a comprehensive read
on contemporary issues around action-formation, promoting some potential
solutions and also providing researchers interested in the subject with, if
you will, a clear sequential position for action.
REFERENCES
Koster, J. (1975). Dutch as an SOV language. Linguistic Analysis, 1(2),
111-136.
De Vogelaer, G. (2007). Extending Hawkins’ comparative typology: Case, word
order, and verb agreement in the Germanic languages. Nordlyd, 34(1).
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Géraldine Bengsch is a postdoctoral research associate at the School of
Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London. She is
interested in how language is used to create engagement in interpersonal and
intercultural conversations. Her work currently focuses on asymmetric
interactions between an expert and a lay person.
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