Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T06:39:17.607Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Action in interaction is conduct under a description

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2017

Jack Sidnell
Jack Sidnell*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
*
Address for correspondence: Jack Sidnell, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, 19 Russell St. Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 2S2Jack.sidnell@utoronto.ca
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Requests, offers, invitations, complaints, and greetings are some of the many action types routinely invoked in the description and analysis of interaction. But what is the ontological status of, for instance, a request? In what follows I propose that action is conduct under a description. Thus, for the most part, interaction is organized independently of any action description or categorization of conduct into discrete action types. Instead, participants in interaction draw on the details of the situation in which they find themselves in order to produce conduct that others will recognize and to which they are able to respond in fitted ways. ‘Action’ still plays a key role in the organization of interaction, however, because accountability attaches not to raw conduct but only to conduct under some particular, action-formulating description. (Action, interaction, description, conversation analysis, Anscombe)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , June 2017 , pp. 313 - 337
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The analysis reported here was first presented at a workshop on action description at Ghent University (September 2016). I thank the participants in the workshop for many helpful comments and much lively discussion and Peter Muntigl for hosting me. For comments on an earlier written version I thank two anonymous reviewers for the journal as well as Nick Enfield and Giovanni Rossi.

References

REFERENCES

Anscombe, G. Elizabeth M. (1957). Intention. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Anscombe, G. Elizabeth M. (1958a). Modern moral philosophy. Philosophy 33:1–19.Google Scholar
Anscombe, G. Elizabeth M. (1958b). On brute facts. Analysis 18(3):69–72.Google Scholar
Anscombe, G. Elizabeth M. (1979). Under a description. Noûs 13(2):219–33.Google Scholar
Austin, John L. (1962). How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Barsalou, Lawrence W. (1983). Ad hoc categories. Memory and Cognition 11(3):211–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barsalou, Lawrence W. (2010). Ad hoc categories. In Colm Hogan, Patrick (ed.), The Cambridge encyclopedia of the language sciences, 87–88. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bolden, Galina, & Robinson, Jeffrey D. (2011). Soliciting accounts with why-interrogatives in conversation. Journal of Communication 61:94–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clayman, Steven, & Heritage, John (2014). Benefactors and beneficiaries: Benefactive status and stance in the management of offers and requests. In Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth & Drew, Paul (eds.), Requesting in social interaction, 55–86. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth (2014). What does grammar tell us about action? Pragmatics 24(3):623–47.Google Scholar
Drew, Paul (1998). Complaints about transgressions and misconduct. Research on Language and Social Interaction 31(3–4):295–325.Google Scholar
Enfield, N. J. (2013). Relationship thinking: Enchrony, agency and human sociality. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Enfield, N. J. (2014). Human agency and the infrastructure for requests. In Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth & Drew, Paul (eds.), Requesting in social interaction, 35–53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Enfield, N. J., & Sidnell, Jack (2017). The concept of action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, to appear.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jefferson, Gail (1985). On the interactional unpackaging of a ‘gloss’. Language in Society 14(4):435–66.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Gail (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In Lerner, Gene H. (ed.), Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation, 13–31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb (2016). Ethical life: Its natural and social histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kendrick, Kobin, & Drew, Paul (2016). Recruitment: Offers, requests, and the organization of assistance in interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction 49(1):1–19.Google Scholar
Kent, Alexandra, & Kendrick, Kobin (2016). Imperative directives: Orientations to accountability. Research on Language and Social Interaction 49(3):272–88.Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen (2012). Action formation and ascription. In Sidnell, Jack & Stivers, Tanya (eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis, 103–30. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Rossi, Giovanni, & Zinken, Jörg (2016). Grammar and social agency: The pragmatics of impersonal deontic statements. Language 92(4):e296–e325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey (1963). On sociological description. Berkeley Journal of Sociology 8:1–16.Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey (1995). Lectures on conversation, volumes I & II. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1988). Description in the social sciences I: Talk-in-interaction. IPRA Papers in Pragmatics 2(1):1–24.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1989). Reflections on language, development, and the interactional character of talk-in-interaction. In Borstein, M. & Bruner, J. S. (eds.), Interaction in human development, 139–53. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1992). Repair after next turn: The last structurally provided defense of intersubjectivity in conversation. American Journal of Sociology 97(5):1295–345.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (2000). On granularity. Annual Review of Sociology 26:715–20.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (2005). On complainability. Social Problems 52(3):449–76.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (2009). Prolegomena to the analysis of action(s) in talk-in-interaction. Paper presented at the LISO, University of California, Santa Barbara, ms.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A., & Lerner, Gene (2009). Beginning to respond: Well-prefaced responses to wh-questions. Research on Language and Social Interaction 42(2):91–115.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A.& Lerner, Gene, & Sacks, Harvey (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica 8:289–327.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sidnell, Jack (2010). Conversation analysis: An introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sidnell, Jack (2012). Basic conversation analytic methods. In Sidnell, Jack & Stivers, Tanya (eds.), The handbook of conversation analysis, 77–99. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sidnell, Jack (2016). Conversation analysis. Linguistics: Oxford research encyclopedias. Oxford University Press. Online: http://linguistics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-40?rskey=HYGurj&result=2; accessed August 28, 2016.Google Scholar
Sidnell, Jack (2017). Distributed agency and action under the radar of accountability. In Enfield, N. J. & Kockelman, Paul (eds.), Distributed agency, 87–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sidnell, Jack, & Barnes, Rebecca (2013). Alternative, subsequent descriptions. In Hayashi, Makoto, Raymond, Geoffrey, & Sidnell, Jack (eds), Conversational repair and human understanding, 322–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sidnell, Jack,& Barnes, Rebecca & Enfield, N. J. (2014). The ontology of action, in interaction. In Enfield, N. J., Kockelman, Paul, & Sidnell, Jack (eds.), Cambridge handbook of linguistic anthropology, 423–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar