Markku Haakana

Minna Laakso

Jan Lindström

During the recent decades Conversation Analysis has developed into a distinctive method for analyzing talk in interaction. The method is utilized in several disciplines sharing an interest in social interaction, like anthropology, linguistics, social psychology, and sociology, and it has been applied to a great variety of languages and types of interaction. Conversation Analysis then is coming of age as a truly comparative enterprise. This volume presents and discusses comparative approaches to analyzing interactional practices and structures. The contributors to the volume have their background in sociology, linguistics, and logopedics. They offer comparative analyses of activity types, participant roles and identities, displays of emotion, and design of actions such as questions and corrections. The languages covered by the chapters include English, Finnish, German, and Swedish. This volume is of interest to all those interested in the research of language and social interaction. Because of its methodological nature, the book can also be utilized in teaching and in learning the discovery procedures typical of Conversation Analysis.

Comparative dimensions

Talk in interaction

In the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of porters carried ivory every year from the African interior to Bagamoyo, a port town at the Indian Ocean. In the opposite direction, they carried millions of meters of cloth, manufactured in the USA, Europe, and India. This book examines the centrality of the caravan trade, both culturally and economically, to Bagamoyo’s development and cosmopolitan character, while also exploring how this history was silenced when Bagamoyo was instead branded as a slave route town in 2006 in an attempt to qualify it for the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Heritage-Making, Bagamoyo, and the East African Caravan Trade

Muted Memories

Sven Cederroth

Claes Corlin

Essays on Mortuary Rituals and Eschatological Beliefs

On the Meaning of Death

Yael Maschler

Simona Pekarek Doehler

Leelo Keevallik

This volume explores how emergent patterns of complex syntax – that is, syntactic structures beyond a simple clause – relate to the local contingencies of action formation in social interaction. It examines both the on-line emergence of clause-combining patterns as they are ‘patched together’ on the fly, as well as their routinization and sedimentation into new grammatical patterns across a range of languages – English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Mandarin, and Swedish. The chapters investigate how the real-time organization of complex syntax relates to the unfolding of turns and actions, focusing on: (i) how complex syntactic patterns, or routinized fragments of ‘canonical’ patterns, serve as resources for projection, (ii) how complex syntactic patterns emerge incrementally, moment-by-moment, out of the real-time trajectories of action, (iii) how formal variants of such patterns relate to social action, and (iv) how all of these play out within the multimodal ecologies of action formation. The empirical findings presented in this volume lend support to a conception of syntax as fundamentally temporal, emergent, dialogic, sensitive to local interactional contingencies, and interwoven with other semiotic resources.

Clausal patterns and the organization of action

Emergent Syntax for Conversation

Anssi Peräkylä

Ritva Laury

Marja-Leena Sorjonen

Intersubjectivity is a precondition for human life – for social organization as well as for individual development and well-being. Through empirical examination of social interactions in everyday and institutional settings, the authors in this volume explore the achievement and maintenance of intersubjectivity. The contributions show how language codes and creates intersubjectivity, how interactants move towards shared understanding in interaction, how intersubjectivity is central to phenomena and experiences often considered merely individual, and how intersubjectivity evolves through learning. While the core methodology of the studies is Conversation Analysis, the volume highlights the advantages of using several methods to tackle intersubjectivity.

Studies in language and social interaction

Intersubjectivity in Action

Talk in interaction - Comparative dimensions is a collection of current conversation analytical work on interactional practices. How do speakers correct the errors made by other speakers? How is disappointment expressed in interaction? How are disputes constructed in different kinds of interaction? Do girls and boys construct play interaction in the same way? These are among the topics addressed in the volume. The central theme of the volume is comparative analysis of interactional practices. The authors analyse the specific phenomena through different kinds of comparative perspectives. Some of the studies analyse the different ways of construction a certain conversational action, some compare the realization of certain activities in different kinds of interactions (e.g. everyday vs. institutional interaction), and some explore the culture- and language-specific aspects of interaction. In addition, the articles address the issues of gender and the change in interactional practices over the time. Furthermore, the volume explores the possibilities and challenges of comparative analysis within conversation analysis in general.

Comparative Dimensions

Talk in Interaction

Jan Lindström

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