This chapter extends on the previous one by investigating the validity of preexisting theories of intersubjectivity within psychology. Operationalizations of children’s intersubjectivity are applied to narrative vignettes used to exemplify alternative theories. This analysis demonstrates how each theorization illuminates some dimensions of interaction while excluding others. The vignettes are contrasted to show how the measurement of interactions determines the form of intersubjectivity observed. The conclusion argued for in this chapter is that although all theories depict some component of intersubjective behavior, a theory in line with the principles elaborated in the previous chapter is necessary.

This chapter offers a toolbox of Methods for Gesture Analysis (MGA). Developed in the context of research on emerging protolinguistic structures in cospeech gestures, the present version of MGA differs from earlier publications (Bressem, Ladewig, Müller 2013; Bressem 2013) in offering sets of tools for gesture analysis that adapt flexibly to different research questions. Essential starting points for MGA are an understanding of hand gestures as temporal forms embedded in a dynamically unfolding context and an understanding of context that itself varies with the adopted framework. The baseline for any chosen tool is a microanalysis that entails some account of the form of the gesture (as temporal form), i.e. ‘form analysis’,and some analysis of how a gesture, a sequence of gestures, a multimodal sequence is placed in a given temporally unfolding context-of-use, i.e. context-analysis. Macroanalyses of gesture dynamics are briefly introduced. MGA offers a toolbox with a flexible set of tools that encourages critical reflection on the insight that can be gained from analyzing gestures in multimodal communication and interaction.

Conversation Analysis (CA) is a major contributing discipline to the study of language use and social action in context. Originating in the discipline of sociology, it forms the basis for the burgeoning field of interactional linguistics. This chapter offers an overview of major themes in the field. Beginning with a brief discussion of the intellectual background of the field, the chapter sketches three distinctive levels of analysis: sequential organization, practices of turn construction, and the organization of these practices as sets of resources for dealing with recurrent problems in the social organization of interaction. Sections of the chapter deal with sequence organization, preference, turn design, the fitting of talk to specific contexts and recipients (recipient design), progressivity, multimodality, and interaction in the context of specific social institutions such as medicine, legal discourse, and news conferences.

This opening chapter first discusses the important position politeness research holds in pragmatics. Four areas of research are selected for the purpose: speech acts, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and interaction on the Internet, with the overarching aim to show that politeness offers insights for how meaning is made and transmitted in each of these areas. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the discussion on the important role Chinese politeness plays in politeness research in general. Since the notion of Chinese face is a pillar of Brown and Levinson’s notion of face, an in-depth understanding of Chinese face and, subsequently, Chinese politeness, stands to benefit the understanding of Brown and Levinson’s thinking in their theory. In addition, research on Chinese face has been drawing an increasing amount of attention from scholars of politeness in recent decades, accumulating a literature the size of which few other languages can parallel and offering insights to the understanding of politeness that are unique and significant, a thorough exploration of Chinese politeness can inform the field about politeness theorizing.

The introduction provides a brief overview of the topic, outlining the status of English as a global language and pointing at the lack of research when it comes to patterns of conversational interaction in Englishes of the Outer and Expanding Circle. Language and culture are closely interrelated, yet existing research on English interactions has so far focused on only one small part of the English language complex – that of Inner Circle varieties such as British or American English. The chapter ends with an overview of the research questions that will be addressed in this study as well as a detailed outline of the book.

Classroom language ecologies are increasingly diverse as a result of mobility, migration, and information technology. In these spaces, interlocutors may draw upon shared linguistic and cultural resources but also bring in others. Prime examples are additional-language (AL) classrooms, where there is a shared target language, but where students may have different first languages from their classmates and teacher. In this chapter, we review empirical research on interaction in multilingual classrooms in approaches such as ethnography, translanguaging, and conversation analysis (CA), and discuss methods and findings in relation to the growing field of intercultural pragmatics (IP). Additionally, we offer an empirical illustration from video ethnography research in multilingual English AL classrooms in Sweden. With a CA approach, we demonstrate how a group of students participating in a vocabulary game manage an instance of diverging understandings of an English word. We show how, in resolving this interactional trouble, participants draw on the target language English and the societal/school language Swedish, and we discuss the observations in light of the IP concepts of salience and common ground. Finally, we argue that classroom studies detailing social actors’ language repertoires by using audiovisual data are essential in advancing our understanding of multilingual AL classrooms.

The concept of context has undergone some fundamental rethinking in the scientific community. Rather than being considered an external constraint on linguistic performance, context is analyzed as a product of language use and thus as an interactional achievement, which is negotiated and co-constructed, imported and invoked. Context and contexts are analyzed from the perspectives of interlocutors, considering contextualization, recontextualization and decontextualization, and entextualization. The complexity, multilayeredness and dynamics of context have far-reaching implications on its role in intercultural pragmatics with interlocutors from different linguistic backgrounds having diverging meaning-making processes, diverging contextualization conventions, and thus diverging constructions of context. Intercultural pragmatics thus calls for context-sensitive particularizations of the fundamental premises of cooperation, contextualization, meaning-making process, and negotiation of discourse common ground.

Im/Politeness Research is already a well stablished research field which offers interesting insights for the analysis of Ancient Greek and Latin texts, and the interpersonal dynamics of the societies that spoke those languages throughout time. This chapter gives a broad and accesible overview of the history of Im/Politeness Research, including its origins, the main stages of its development, its key concepts and methods and the current research trends. It also discusses the tools of Conversation Analysis and their possible contribution to our understanding of im/politeness, includuing the ways this methodology can help to extend the scope of study. Special emphasis is also given to the particular problems faced by classicists when examining im/politeness phenomena in ancient languages, and the ways to overcome those issues with the help of suitable methodologies. Finally, the chapter presents the structure and contents of the rest of the volume.

The chapter uses the dialogues of Roman comedy (Plautus, Terence) to examine the correlation between the characters’ perception of im/politeness and the practice of interrupting. By adopting the methods of Conversation Analysis, the study sets out criteria to distinguish interruptions from other non-hostile or non-salient types of interventions in a dramatic text without explicit stage directions. According to the main argument, proper interruptions – just like impolite behaviour – are constructed interactionally and their identification depends on how the affected party reacts to someone invading their speaking turn. The analysis of face work in various types of turn-taking incidents, either collaborative or disruptive and antagonistic, helps to justify why given talk is not handled as an interruption. After comparing some qualitative and quantitative data, the chapter shows that there are many examples of face-threatening and hostile interventions in the comedy corpus that cannot be analysed as interruptions but rather should be associated with the type of interaction (e.g. conflictual talk) or the speaker’s dominant position within.

The opening sequence is a delicate phase of any conversation. Through ritualized acts, interlocutors come into contact, reveal their respective stances toward each other and prepare themselves to broach the first topic of the discussion. Their positioning in the opening sequence influences the subsequent phases of the interaction. An integrated pragmatic approach that combines Conversation Analysis, Speech Act Theory and Im/Politeness Research is well-suited to studying this communicative stage in its complexity.

This chapter examines the opening phase in the dialogues of Menander’s comedy from such a perspective. After showing that, in Menander’s Athens, conversational openings follow rules analogous to those in our society, it then demonstrates how Menander exploits the social delicateness of the phase. Clear patterns in the development of Menandrean conversational openings are identified, which are linked to the communicative situation as well as to the speakers’ state of mind and relationship. Finally, the chapter discusses how in Dyskolos the poet plays with im/politeness in conversational openings to characterize the protagonist, structure the plot and generate humour.

This chapter has two core aims: first, it argues that a ‘discursive’ approach to im/politeness, which foregrounds interactants’ own (emic) evaluations of the (in)appropriateness of language as they arise in discourse, is needed to properly capture the nuances of social interaction in Greek and Roman literature. Second, it seeks to demonstrate the utility of Conversation Analysis in approaching this emic perspective. The chapter sets out from various passages in Greek tragedy in which speakers explicitly comment on the inappropriateness of their interlocutors’ language (metapragmatic comments), and shows that such comments regularly coincide with disruptions of regular conversational sequencing. The chapter then offers an extensive analysis of the herald scene in Euripides’ Supplices, a passage rich in metapragmatic commentary. Theseus’ principal concern in that scene, it is argued, is the correct procedural conduct of inter-polis diplomacy, rather than any putative personal face wants. Accordingly, expressions traditionally interpreted as politeness formulae should in this scene be seen as procedural rather than face-oriented devices.

Chapter 28 draws on findings from conversation analysis, pragmatics, and interactional linguistics studies of Korean language, to offer an overview of L1 Korean speakers’ routinized procedures and practices for turn-taking and repair organization, both of which are tied to the grammatical structures and pragmatic features of Korean. The discussion of each practice touches on pedagogical implications for L2 contexts, drawing on a number of recent empirical studies that have documented L2 interactional development processes.

Chapter 18 surveys research over the last few decades on discourse analysis in Korean linguistics. Since the 1980s, a number of Korean linguists have explored the relationship between discourse and grammar, dealing with topics such as information flow, choice of NPs in discourse, word order variability, case markers, pragmatic functions of clausal connectives and sentence-enders, grammaticalization, cohesion and coherence, and text structures. In the 1990s and 2000s, discourse analysts have explored the relationship between conversation, social action, and grammar, introducing the assumptions and methodology of conversational analysis into discourse analysis. The chapter provides a brief overview of major findings and research topics in analyses of conversational data in Korean linguistics in terms of (i) turn-taking, turn-constructional units, and turn increments, (ii) interactional functions of some clausal connectives and sentence-ending suffixes, and (iii) other interaction-based studies of topics such as repair, demonstratives, and reported speech. It also discusses discourse studies carried out from the perspectives of sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

This chapter demonstrates how to more fully integrate an interactional perspective into the definition, categorization, and quantification of a variable firmly rooted in the organization of discourse: listener responses, often called backchannels (Yngve, 1970).Building on an interactional analysis of approximately 5,200 vocalized listener responses in 17 hours of dyadic conversations, the study proposes (1) an interaction–based definition of listener responses, (2) an interactionally accountable way of quantifying, and (3) a coding scheme for different actions listeners can do, taking into account the discourse as it unfolds (see also Schegloff 1993 on quantification and conversation analysis). Given that the listener responds to their interlocutor at any given point, the envelope of variation needs to be defined based on aspects of the interlocutor’s linguistic production (similar to Duncan & Niederehe 1974). This chapter considers listener responses to an ongoing (multi–unit) turn relative to the number of words in this turn. Zero–inflated Poisson regression models confirm that women listening to women produce the highest number of listener responses, and men listening to men the lowest. This finding is also reflected in the distribution of action types, with women in all–female dyads producing the highest rates of complex responses.

This chapter approaches the topic of how adults talk to children in early childhood education settings from the perspective of socialisation, conceptualized as a dual process of learning language and institutional/cultural norms. Focusing on episodes in which teachers mediate in children’s peer conflict, it identifies two discursive practices that have been widely observed in various societies: (1) directives on what to say to peers (e.g., “Can you say, I’m sorry?”) and (2) replaying the talk of a third-party peer (e.g., “She’s asking you to lend it to her”). It is argued that these practices are important for encouraging children to use and respond to talk as social action (e.g., to apologize, to comply with another’s request), and to use talk to display affective stance (i.e. feelings, emotions, and attitudes). In addition to an analysis of interaction at the micro level, the chapter discusses the institutional and cultural norms that are potentially being socialized through these two practices. Finally, suggestions are made for pedagogy.