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2 - Temporal Organization and Procedure in Ascribing Action

from Part I - Constituents of Action Ascription

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2022

By
Robert B. Arundale
Edited by
Arnulf Deppermann  and
Michael Haugh
Arnulf Deppermann
Affiliation:
Universität Mannheim, Germany
Michael Haugh
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
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Summary

Human interaction is organized in time, but that organization is neither automatic nor externally imposed. It is an effortful creation within everyday interaction as participants produce next utterances and place them adjacent to their own or other’s prior utterances. Participants produce utterances in sequence using their knowledge of the normative sequential organizations of a wide range of elements of interaction, key among those elements being turns, actions, and repair initiations. These sequential organizations are distinct, although inseparable from, the triadic temporal organization of adjacency, nextness, and progressivity of elements in sequence: an organization that has been widely acknowledged, but less closely examined than sequential organizations. Examining the temporal organization of interaction reveals the procedure by which participants assess the nextness of another participant’s next adjacent utterance as they interpret prior utterances, which has direct implications for understanding how participants ascribe actions to those prior utterances. The triadic temporal organization of everyday interacting points to third position utterances as essential for the recipient in ascribing action to any given first position utterance, and as a consequence, essential for the speaker and for the recipient in together establishing the state of the talk and conduct between them.

Keywords

action ascription adjacencynextnesssequential organizationtemporal organizationthird position
Type
Chapter
Information
Action Ascription in Interaction , pp. 31 - 56
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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