Suchergebnisse

1. Talk and social life -- 2. Methods in conversation analysis -- 3. Taking turns -- 4. Action and understanding -- 5. Preference -- 6. Sequence -- 7. Repair -- 8. Turn construction and design -- 9. Stories -- 10. Openings and closings -- 11. Topic -- 12. Context -- 13. Conclusion -- References

'Conversation analysis' is an approach to the study of social interaction that focuses on practices of speaking that recur across a range of contexts and settings. The early studies in this tradition were based on the analysis of English conversation. More recently, however, conversation analysts have begun to study talk in a broader range of communities around the world. Through detailed analyses of recorded conversations, this book examines differences and similarities across a wide range of languages including Finnish, Japanese, Tzeltal Mayan, Russian and Mandarin. Bringing together interrelated methodological and analytic contributions, it explores topics such as the role of gaze in question-and-answer sequences, the organization of repair, and the design of responses to assessments. The emerging comparative perspective demonstrates how the structure of talk is inflected by the local circumstances within which it operates.

In the early 1930s, the well-known man of letters Phan Khôi wrote a series of essays about the Vietnamese language in which he advanced a number of proposals for reform. I focus on those arguments that are specifically concerned with the practices for referring to persons and, in particular, the practices for referring to participants in communication (i.e., speaker-addressee, writer-reader). I suggest that these arguments articulate a vision for Vietnamese public life that was imagined as breaking from the legacy of a Confucian past and establishing the conditions for the free flow of discourse among self-abstracted individuals.

Conversation analysis initially drew its empirical materials from recordings of English conversation. However, over the past 20 years conversation analysts have begun to examine talk-in-interaction in an increasingly broad range of languages and communities. These studies allow for a new comparative perspective, which attends to the consequences of linguistic and social differences for the organization of social interaction. A framework for such a comparative analysis focusing on a series of generic interactional issues or "problems" (e.g., how turns are to be distributed among participants) and the way they are solved through the mobilization of local resources (grammar, social categories, etc.) is sketched. Comparative studies in conversation analysis encourage us to think of interaction in terms of generic organizations of interaction, which are inflected or torqued by the local circumstances within which they operate ( Schegloff 2006 ).

Rules are an essential feature of social life and anthropologists have long debated the role they play in human forms of organization and activity. But what does it mean to follow a rule? The article addresses this issue by examining particular, ethnographically specified, cases drawn from fieldwork in an Indo‐Guyanese village. In doing so, it argues that an anthropological account of rule‐following might profitably draw on the writings of Garfinkel and the later Wittgenstein.

In Vietnamese, address (second‐person reference) is typically accomplished by the use of a kin term regardless of whether the talk's recipient is a genealogical relative or not. All Vietnamese kin terms encode a specification of either relative age or relative generation of participants, and there are no reciprocal terms akin to English 'brother' or 'sister'; rather, a speaker must select between terms such as 'older brother' (anh) or 'younger sibling' (em). Since generation is normatively associated with a difference in age, the result is a ubiquitous indexing of age and status hierarchies in all acts of address. This results in a problem for peers. How, in such a system, should they address one another (and also self‐refer)? In this article, we describe the various practices that speakers use to subvert the system and thus avoid indexing differences of age or station. Specifically, we describe four practices: (1) the use of true pronouns in address and self‐reference; (2) the use of proper names in address and self‐reference; (3) the use of kin terms in address and pronouns in self‐reference; and (4) the ironic use of kin terms in address. We conclude that the Vietnamese system well illustrates what is likely a universal tension between hierarchy and equality in acts of address and self‐reference, by showing how speakers deconstruct the vector of age and indicate that they consider one another peers. We further suggest that although the literature in this area has focused on the ways in which languages convey differences of status and rank, social order is built as much upon relations of parity and sameness – on identification of the other as neither higher nor lower than me – as it is upon relations of hierarchy.

Overture -- 1. Intersubjectivity, Activity, Accountability -- I. Prerequisites for Language -- 2. Status and the Tyranny of Accountability -- 3. Participation and Reciprocal Involvement -- 4. Enchrony and the Semiotic Bottleneck -- II. Elements of Language -- 5. Reference for Shared Intentionality -- 6. Semantics for Accountable Description -- 7. Grammar for Intersubjectivity -- Postlude -- 8. Conditions and Consequences of Language

When people do things with words, how do we know what they are doing? Many scholars have assumed a category of things called actions: 'requests', 'proposals', 'complaints', 'excuses'. The idea is both convenient and intuitive, but as this book argues, it is a spurious concept of action. In interaction, a person's primary task is to decide how to respond, not to label what someone just did. The labeling of actions is a meta-level process, appropriate only when we wish to draw attention to others' behaviors in order to quiz, sanction, praise, blame, or otherwise hold them to account. This book develops a new account of action grounded in certain fundamental ideas about the nature of human sociality: that social conduct is naturally interpreted as purposeful; that human behavior is shaped under a tyranny of social accountability; and that language is our central resource for social action and reaction.