34.519, Review: Anthropological Linguistics, Discourse Analysis: Lindström, Laury, Peräkylä, Sorjonen (2021)
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Subject: 34.519, Review: Anthropological Linguistics, Discourse Analysis: Lindström, Laury, Peräkylä, Sorjonen (2021)
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Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2023 02:40:52
From: Vladan Sutanovac [vladan.sh at gmail.com]
Subject: Intersubjectivity in Action
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-2038.html
EDITOR: Jan Lindström
EDITOR: Ritva Laury
EDITOR: Anssi Peräkylä
EDITOR: Marja-Leena Sorjonen
TITLE: Intersubjectivity in Action
SUBTITLE: Studies in language and social interaction
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 326
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2021
REVIEWER: Vladan Sutanovac, Universität Wien
SUMMARY
What could human bodies, human language, movement, silence, wildlife, and dogs
possibly have in common? No sooner do we let our imagination run wild, than it
starts raining cats and dogs in ideas. And the silent pause for pondering the
question only a second ago gives way to our sensorial practices convening for,
well, the fastest route to an umbrella. Aware of such potential for a breadth
of ideational interactions, the editors of this book have given us one such
sought-after umbrella term in the form of intersubjectivity. In treating
intersubjectivity as a “precondition for all human life” (p. 1), the
contributing authors give the notion a life of its own. This is especially
mirrored in and made possible by its presentation through a band of diverse
authorial voices. Each of these voices testifies to the key role of
intersubjectivity in the realization of the quotidian acts of social
organization as well as individual development and well-being. And it is
through this interactive recurrence that intersubjectivity achieves its
cyclicity and longevity. Taking this as a starting point, the editors identify
the conversation analysis (CA) framework (Schegloff, 2007) as the most
productive frame of reference in their exploratory pursuit. The aim of this
pursuit is to bridge the gap between the concept (intersubjectivity) and
quotidian practices, which reify the concept itself by making it the very
fabric of our social being. The linguistic-cultural diversity (Schiffman,
1996) of this being is, additionally, given a nod by the joining in of the
more specific methodological voices such as quantitative movement synchrony
and psychophysiology. Commonly regarded as distal, within the exploratory
landscape of this book, these voices are however taken as combinatorially
complementary. They are, moreover, also taken as advantageous to a more
informed tackling of the specific nuanced socio-interactive phenomena of
concern to the book’s topical knowledge space.
As an overarching phenomenon, intersubjectivity and its nuanced nature, its
creation and maintenance in particular, are explored here across a range of
different perspectives and linguistic cultures (Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese,
English, Finnish, French, German, and Swedish). More specifically, the book’s
very own intersubjective conversation is spread across four centripetal
thematic units. The first thematic unit focuses on the interaction between
language and intersubjectivity, particularly with respect to the former’s
coding-mediated constitutive role in the societal life of the latter. This
overarching topic is explored through a series of six micro-dialogues, each
zooming in on what the editors have identified as the key dimensions of the
interrelation in question. The pervading character of intersubjectivity in
(inter)action is reviewed here: 1) when all odds are stacked against it as in
the construal/maintenance of “we-ness” in the face of complete absence of
understanding, 2) through intersubjective common ground negotiation and
construction in the face of internally contradictory linguistic expressions,
3) from the point of view of directive turn design as the locus of
intersubjectivity, 4) by proxy of agency and affiliation focused second
assessments mediated by opinion-verb constructions, 5) via address inversion
and its intersubjectivity management potential, and 6) through the prism of
requests and offers grounded in language brokering and individual (i.e.
beneficiary) volition. The second thematic unit brings together
micro-dialogues whose contextual variety affords a knowledge space for the
exploration of the dimensional embeddedness of intersubjectivity, primarily,
as shared understanding (Linell, 2017). In this sense, intersubjectivity is
recast as the shared understanding “in service” of: 1) business sales (as an
adhesive to interactional commitment and decision-making), 2) therapy (as a
facilitator of patient understanding), socialization (as a motivator of
environmental awareness), 4) other-initiated conversation repairs (as a
targeted-trouble resolution strategy), and 5) silence (as a window into the
nature of momentary mutual conversational disengagements). The third thematic
unit marks a move to the corporeality of intersubjectivity as its embodied, or
more concrete reality (Bakhtin, 1993[1986]). The micro-dialogues that give the
body and the voice to this particular knowledge space put emphasis on how,
specifically, intercorporeality comes to reify intersubjectivity. Or, how by
entering into an embodied conversation with one another, intersubjectivity and
intercorporeality jointly form the “nuclear axis of our identity”
(Sáenz-Herrero et al., 2019, p. 265). The body of intersubjectivity is
explored here across a three-dimensional landscape that rests on: 1)
multisensorial experiences (by proxy of tasting-based interactions), 2)
physiological arousal (by proxy of affiliation expression), and 3)
body-movement synchrony (by proxy of conditional relevance, dialogic resonance
and affordance). The book’s fourth, and ultimate, thematic unit concerns
itself with temporality of intersubjectivity, i.e. with its character that is
continuously “under construction” and “on the move” (p. 18). Each of the
micro-dialogues invested in the formation of this knowledge space approaches
intersubjectivity from a particular developmental perspective. These distinct
developmental frames put intersubjectivity to the test in 1) infants and
children requesting interaction, 2) young adults’ theatrical improvisation,
and 3) interspecies (human-dog) interactional reciprocity building.
EVALUATION
“Intersubjectivity in Action” manages to bring much of the phenomenon’s
breadth to life within a single conversational horizon. In doing so, the book
reaches for intersubjectivity in a multitude of interactional sites. The
latter include, in particular, the turn-action design, action attribution,
shared understanding achievement, intercorporality of meaning-making, conduct
synchronization, and temporality/developmentallity. Such intertopicality,
further extended through the selected multi-method research, adds promise of
unique interdisciplinarity to the book’s profile. It is with respect to the
selection, though, that the promises of the volume first begin to show signs
of over-constraint. More specifically, a closer look at the editors’
introductory statement, as well as at the authored chapters already reveals
unequal footing. This is most clearly visible in that all the previously
signalled intertopicality/interdisciplinarity ends in service of CA alone.
Alongside the strictly CA focused chapters there are certainly those that
attempt methodological combination or extension. However, these attempts go as
far as providing modal (detached) rather than unified (associated) accounts of
intersubjectivity in action. This methodological-link gap further points to a
gap between the chapters’ intended and the achieved breadth of the character
of intersubjectivity in everyday action. Although they achieve exploratory
breadth, the previously mentioned multi-method disconnect results in the
chapters falling short of explanatory breadth. The disconnects in question
additionally reflect a conceptual disconnect, mirrored in the book’s
narratively off-the-mark organizational blueprint. Diversified character of an
edited volume of course always poses a major challenge to coherent content
organization. Here, both the choice of chapter titles and the ideational
organization of the chapter units, additionally, play key roles in
establishing narrative coherence. The editors have, in this sense, mapped out
their book’s intersubjective conversation into four clearly distinguished, but
centrifugal turns. The volume’s overall coherence in the face of micro-topical
diversity could, therefore, have been achieved through a more reader-friendly
section organization that follows the unfolding of intersubjectivity along a
more intuitively traceable trajectory. In this regard, more of a bottom-up
design where the situated interactional evolution of the phenomenon (Part IV)
marks the onset point, followed by a move to its locus (Part II) and, finally,
to its corporeal (Part III) and linguistic (Part IV) reifications.
An additional dimension that would have significantly contributed to the
alignment of what is an overall impressive, micro-topical reach with its
potential audience reach is the language register used. In spite of a
noticeable diversity with respect to the latter, the book’s highly
specialized domain—intersubjectivity in the context of conversation analytic
action—translates to a restriction in terms of audience accessibility. This is
a caveat that has, implicitly, been expressed by the book’s editors at the
very beginning. But, despite that, the one that will, nonetheless,
significantly limit the book’s reach beyond it being a valuable resource for
those already versed in CA, and looking to expand their horizons with respect
to CA’s empirical and interdisciplinary application potential. This means that
the particular breadth of knowledge and insights this book offers makes it an
invaluable go-to textbook for teachers and students at the postgraduate level,
more experienced researchers looking to expand their CA-intersubjective
toolkit included. With respect to the latter, in particular, and within the
book’s intended scope, the failure to reach wider more diversified communities
of researchers can be compensated for by its potential to become a go-to
resource for the wide population of experienced qualitative researchers. This
also includes the research-minded professionals looking to enrich their
quantitative toolkit with a productive and empirically attested qualitative
method.
Where the book’s highly contextualized theoretical-empirical breadth proves
additionally enriching is in terms of its contributive potential. This is
evident not only when it comes to the extension of the empirical purviews of
CA with respect to the insightful exploration of the driving forces of human
interaction and societal life. But it is also noticeable in its potential to
leave a unique mark on the contemporary study of intersubjectivity, as a
specific-focus complement to such seminal works on the topic as Weigand’s “The
Routledge Handbook of Language and Dialogue” (2017) and Gallagher’s “Action
and Interaction” (2020). Moreover, what further testifies to the book’s
longevity potential is that it provides an example of how an empirically
directed exploratory landscape can prove instrumental not only in testing a
theory, but also in taking the intersubjective dialectics as the informative
point of departure for identifying the alleys that require further explanatory
treatment.
REFERENCES
Bakhtin, Mikhail; Holquist, Michael; Liapunov, Vadim. 1993[1986]. Towards a
philosophy of the act. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2020. Action and interaction. Oxford University Press.
Linell, Per. 2017. Intersubjectivity in Dialogue. In The Routledge Handbook of
Language and Dialogue, ed. by Edda Weigand, 109–126. New York: Routledge.
Sáenz-Herrero, Margarita, Janire Cabezas-Garduño, and Cristina Díez-Alegría
Galvez. 2019. Gender, Corporality, and Body Image. In Psychopathology in
Women, pp. 265-293. Springer, Cham.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007. Sequence Organization. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Schiffman, Harold. 1996. Language Policy and Linguistic Culture. In Ricento,
Thomas (ed.). An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method, 1-22.
Weigand, Edda, ed. 2017. The Routledge handbook of language and dialogue.
Taylor & Francis.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Vladan Sutanovac is a cognitive scientist, cognitive/experimental
ethnopragmatist, cognitive semanticist and philosopher of language. He holds a
Ph.D in intercultural/cognitive pragmatics, semantics and philosophy of
language, a soon-in-hand MSc in cognitive science, Mag. phil. in applied
linguistics and MA in English language and literature. His research focuses on
the investigation of cognitive underpinnings of linguistic cultures, speech
act conceptualization and meaning-making practices across cultures as well as
the neurophysiological underpinnings of affective perception and affective
disorders (with clinical application).
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