Interactional linguistics

Last updated August 21, 2023

Interactional linguistics (IL) is an interdisciplinary approach to grammar and interaction in the field of linguistics, that applies the methods of Conversation Analysis to the study of linguistic structures, including syntax, phonetics, morphology, and so on. Interactional linguistics is based on the principle that linguistic structures and uses are formed through interaction and it aims at understanding how languages are shaped through interaction. The approach focuses on temporality, activity implication and embodiment in interaction.^[1] Interactional linguistics asks research questions such as "How are linguistic patterns shaped by interaction?" and "How do linguistic patterns themselves shape interaction?".^[2]^: 78

History

Interactional linguistics is partly a development within conversation analysis focusing on linguistic research questions, partly a development of Emergent grammar or West Coast functional grammar. The two approaches can be seen as effectively merged into interactional linguistics,^[3] but also with interactional sociolinguistics.^[2]

Conversation analysis

While conversation analysis did indeed study language since its beginning, it grew out of sociology and often dealt with sociological research questions and topics. However, over time the use of ideas and methods from conversation analysis for linguistic research questions grew. Some early uses of the term Interactional Linguistics are found in the title of a 1995 conference with the title^[4]^: 211 and 2000 conference Interactional Linguistics: Euro-conference on the Linguistic Organisation of Conversational Activities^[5] and in the 2001 book Studies in Interactional Linguistics^[6] by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and Margret Selting. They mark a development that most clearly took place in the 90s through the publication of various edited volumes - most importantly the book Interaction and Grammar edited by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel Schegloff and Sandra Thompson.^[1]

While there is no agreed-upon delineation between the two, interactional linguistics is characterized by looking at linguistic structures and employing linguistic terminology for its description of what interactants orient to (and not only looking at e.g. gesture). It goes against earlier approaches where research was focused on investigating written language. With the improvement of technology, linguists have started to focus on spoken language as well due to its functions in intonation and transcription system. Though the functional linguistic study was not all about conversational interaction, it was really helpful for the language study which saw linguistic form as being useful on the situated occasion of use. The next step which made interactional linguistics develop was the important work on conversation analysis. Some sociologists were saying the study of everyday language was the essence of social order; some other kinds of discourse were said to be understood as habituations of the fundamental conversational order. The term talk-in-interaction was created as an inclusive term for all of naturally speech exchange.

Emergent grammar and West Coast functional grammar

Emergent grammar was proposed by Paul Hopper and postulates that rules of grammar come about as language is spoken and used. This is contrary to the a priori grammar postulate, the idea that grammar rules exist in the mind before the production of utterances.^[7] Compared to the principles of generative grammar and the concept of Universal Grammar, interactional linguistics asserts that grammar emerges from social interaction.^[8] Whereas Universal Grammar claims that features of grammar are innate,^[9] emergent grammar and other interactional theories claim that the human language faculty has no innate grammar and that features of grammar are learned through experience and social interaction.^[8]

Relations to linguistic theories

Interactional linguistics has connections to various linguistic approaches, such as discourse analysis and conversation analysis, and is used to investigate the relationship between grammatical structure and real-time interaction and language use.^[10] Further, the topic of normativity in a discourse or a social norm both contribute to how a conversation functions.^[11] Interactional linguists contrast their perspectives with that of "traditional structuralist descriptions".^[3]^: 547^[12]

Scholars in interactional linguistics draw from functional linguistics, conversation analysis, and linguistic anthropology in order to describe "the way in which language figures in everyday interaction and cognition"^[13] and Interactional Linguistics may be considered an usage-based approach to language. Studies in interactional linguistics view linguistic forms, including syntactic and prosodic structures, as greatly affected by interactions among participants in speech, signing, or other language use. The field contrasts with dominant approaches to linguistics during the twentieth century, which tended to focus either on the form of language per se, or on theories of individual language user's linguistic competence.^[6] Various scholars have or are attempting to write grammar books from an interactional linguistic perspective, for languages such as Alto Perené ^[14] and Danish (See Samtalegrammatik.dk).^[15]

Interactional linguistics can also be considered compatible with construction grammar and cognitive grammar.^[16] Wolfgang Imo has coined the term Interactional Construction Grammar on the recognition of similarities between construction grammar and interactional linguistics.^[17] Interactional linguistics does not subscribe to the strict separation of competence and performance of generative grammar. Methodically, it takes what would be considered "performance" as the empirical starting point.^[16]

Related Research Articles

Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).

Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of spoken language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system.

Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction that empirically investigates the mechanisms by which humans achieve mutual understanding. It focuses on both verbal and non-verbal conduct, especially in situations of everyday life. CA originated as a sociological method, but has since spread to other fields. CA began with a focus on casual conversation, but its methods were subsequently adapted to embrace more task- and institution-centered interactions, such as those occurring in doctors' offices, courts, law enforcement, helplines, educational settings, and the mass media, and focus on multimodal and nonverbal activity in interaction, including gaze, body movement and gesture. As a consequence, the term conversation analysis has become something of a misnomer, but it has continued as a term for a distinctive and successful approach to the analysis of interactions. CA and ethnomethodology are sometimes considered one field and referred to as EMCA.

Harvey Sacks was an American sociologist influenced by the ethnomethodology tradition. He pioneered extremely detailed studies of the way people use language in everyday life. Despite his early death in a car crash and the fact that he did not publish widely, he founded the discipline of conversation analysis. His work has had significant influence on fields such as linguistics, discourse analysis, and discursive psychology.

Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is an approach to the analysis of written, vocal, or sign language use, or any significant semiotic event.

Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles and specific parameters that for particular languages are either turned on or off. For example, the position of heads in phrases is determined by a parameter. Whether a language is head-initial or head-final is regarded as a parameter which is either on or off for particular languages. Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik. Many linguists have worked within this framework, and for a period of time it was considered the dominant form of mainstream generative linguistics.

Kiezdeutsch is a variety of German spoken primarily by youth in urban spaces in which a high percentage of the population is multilingual and has an immigration background. Since the 1990s, Kiezdeutsch has come into the public eye as a multiethnic language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics</span>

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is a research institute situated on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen located in Nijmegen, Gelderland, the Netherlands. The institute was founded in 1980 by Pim Levelt, and is particular for being entirely dedicated to psycholinguistics, and is also one of the few institutes of the Max Planck Society to be located outside Germany. The Nijmegen-based institute currently occupies 5th position in the Ranking Web of World Research Centers among all Max Planck institutes. It currently employs about 235 people.

Sandra Annear Thompson is an American linguist specializing in discourse analysis, typology, and interactional linguistics. She is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She has published numerous books, her research has appeared in many linguistics journals, and she serves on the editorial board of several prominent linguistics journals.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The modern-day scientific study of linguistics takes all aspects of language into account — i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.

Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via social interaction. It is one of the ways in which linguists look at the intersections of human language and human society; other subfields that take this perspective are language planning, minority language studies, quantitative sociolinguistics, and sociohistorical linguistics, among others. Interactional sociolinguistics is a theoretical and methodological framework within the discipline of linguistic anthropology, which combines the methodology of linguistics with the cultural consideration of anthropology in order to understand how the use of language informs social and cultural interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz. Topics that might benefit from an Interactional sociolinguistic analysis include: cross-cultural miscommunication, politeness, and framing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neal R. Norrick</span>

Neal R. Norrick held the chair of English Linguistics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he established a linguistics curriculum firmly based in pragmatics and discourse analysis. In the last two decades, he has become an important personality in linguistic pragmatics for his pioneering works on humor and narrative in conversational interaction.

In linguistics, stance is the way in which speakers position themselves in relation to the ongoing interaction, in terms of evaluation, intentionality, epistemology or social relations. When a speaker describes an object in a way that expresses their attitude or relation to the object, the speaker is taking a stance. Stancetaking is viewed as a social action that shares the speaker's view of an object with their audience, sometimes inviting listeners to take their own stance as well.

Peter Auer is professor of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Freiburg in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Auer graduated from the University of Constance in 1983. He worked at the University of Hamburg before going to Freiburg.

Laurel J. Brinton is an American-born Canadian linguist.

Deborah Sue Schiffrin was an American linguist who researched areas of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, producing seminal work on the topic of English discourse markers.

In linguistics, a co-construction is a single syntactic entity in conversation and discourse that is uttered by more than two or more speakers. Other names for this concept include collaboratively built sentences, sentences-in-progress, and joint utterance constructions. Used in this specific linguistic context, co-construction is not to be confused with the broader social interactional sense of the same name. Co-construction is studied across several linguistic sub-disciplines, including applied linguistics, conversation analysis, linguistic anthropology, and language acquisition.

Charles Goodwin was a UCLA distinguished research professor of communication and key member of UCLA’s Center for Language, Interaction and Culture. Goodwin contributed ground-breaking theory and research on social interaction and opened new pathways for research on eye gaze, storytelling, turn-taking and action.

Suzanne Eggins is an Australian linguist who is an Honorary Fellow at Australian National University (ANU), associated with the ANU Institute for Communication in Health Care. Eggins is the author of a best selling introduction to systemic functional linguistics and she is known for her extensive work on critical linguistic analysis of spontaneous interactions in informal and institutional healthcare settings.

Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen is an American linguist and distinguished professor (emeritus) from the University of Helsinki.

References

1 2 Laury, Ritva; Etelämäki, Marja; Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth (2014). "Approaches to grammar for interactional linguistics". Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association. John Benjamins. 24 (3): 435–452. doi:10.1075/prag.24.3. ISSN 1018-2101.
1 2 Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar (2008). "Interactional Linguistics". Handbook of Interpersonal Communication. Handbook of Applied Linguistics. Vol. 2. Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 77–106. doi:10.1515/9783110211399.1.77. ISBN 9783110211399.
1 2 Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth; Selting, Margret (2018). Interactional Linguistics: Studying Language in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781139507318. ISBN 9781107032804.
↑ Femø, Mie Nielsen; Steensig, Jakob; Wagner, Johannes (2 April 2006). "Konversationsanalyse i Danmark". Studies in Modern Danish (in Danish) (34–35): 182–216. doi:10.7146/NYS.V34I34-35.13461. ISSN 2246-4522. Wikidata Q109745891.
↑ "Notices". Linguistics. Walter de Gruyter. 38 (1): 219. 2000. doi:10.1515/ling.38.1.219. ISSN 0024-3949.
1 2 Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth; Selting, Margaret (2001). Studies in Interactional Linguistics. John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/sidag.10. ISBN 9789027297310.
↑ Hopper, Paul (1988). "Emergent Grammar and the A Priori Grammar Postulate". In Deborah Tannen (ed.). Linguistics in Context.
1 2 Su, Danjie (2016). "Grammar emerges through reuse and modification of prior utterances". Discourse Studies. 18 (3): 330–353. doi:10.1177/1461445616634551. S2CID 57406296.
↑ Hornstein, Norbert; Nunes, Jairo; Grohmann, Kleanthes K. (2005). Understanding Minimalism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
↑ Fox, Barbara (2007). "Principles shaping grammatical practices: an exploration". Discourse Studies. 9 (3): 299–318. doi:10.1177/1461445607076201. S2CID 220785959.
↑ Etelämäki, Marja (2016). "Introduction: Discourse, grammar and intersubjectivity". Nordic Journal of Linguistics. 39 (2): 101–112. doi: 10.1017/S033258651600007X . S2CID 151640262.
↑ Jakob Steensig; Maria Jørgensen; Nicholas Mikkelsen; Karita Suomalainen; Søren Sandager Sørensen (3 April 2023). "Toward a Grammar of Danish Talk-in-Interaction: From Action Formation to Grammatical Description". Research on Language and Social Interaction. 56 (2): 116–140. doi:10.1080/08351813.2023.2205304. ISSN 0835-1813. Wikidata Q121071205.
↑ Ochs, Elinor; Schegloff, Emanuel; Thompson, Sandra (1996). Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge University Press.
↑ Mihas, Elena (2017). Conversational structures of Alto Perené (Arawak) of Peru (PDF). Studies in Language Companion Series. Vol. 181. John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/slcs.181. ISBN 978-90-272-5946-2.
↑ Steensig, Jakob; Brøcker, Karen Kiil; Grønkjær, Caroline; Hamann, Magnus; Puggaard, Rasmus; Jørgensen, Maria; Kragelund, Mathias Høyer; Mikkelsen, Nicholas Hedegaard; Mølgaard, Tina; Pedersen, Henriette Folkmann; Sørensen, Søren Sandager; Tholstrup, Emilie (2013), "The DanTIN project: Creating a platform for describing the grammar of Danish talk-in-interaction", in Petersen, Jan Heegård; Henrichsen, Peter Juel (eds.), New Perspectives on Speech in Action: Proceedings of the 2nd SJUSK Conference on Contemporary Speech Habits, Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur Press, pp. 195–227
1 2 Pia Bergmann; Jana Brenning; Martin Pfeiffer; Elisabeth Reber (2013), Towards an Interactional Grammar, De Gruyter, pp. 1–16, doi:10.1515/9783110295108.1, Wikidata Q117303510
↑ Wolfgang Imo (2015). "Interactional Construction Grammar". Linguistics Vanguard . 1 (1): 69–77. doi:10.1515/LINGVAN-2015-0008. ISSN 2199-174X. Wikidata Q117304006.