Conversational interaction (original) (raw)

2012, Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics

The study of conversational interaction is now approached in a multitude of different ways in pragmatics, reflecting in part the ever increasing diversity of the field. Approaches range from the study of the structure and management of talk as a form of social order itself in conversation analysis, through to the study of a wide variety of pragmatic phenomena that occur in conversational interaction, including formulaic language, discourse/pragmatic markers, reference and deixis, presupposition, implicature, speech and pragmatic acts, humour, im/politeness and beyond to issues of identity and power, to name just a few. The latter study of pragmatic phenomena in conversational interaction draws from a wide range of approaches, including conversations re-constructed through the introspective methods of philosophical pragmatics, the study of naturally occurring conversations through ethnography of speaking, interactional sociolinguistics, philology, (critical) discourse analysis, interactional pragmatics and more recently corpora, and the study of conversation elicited through devices such as discourse completion tests or role plays. 1 Within this complex analytical landscape two key trends can be discerned in relation to the place of conversational interaction in pragmatics. First, the work of the ordinary language philosophers, Austin, Grice and Searle, who were all focused on analysing meaning (and to a lesser extent action) in language from ordinary conversation, has been enormously influential in regards to the ways in which conversation itself, and language data from conversation, is approached by many in pragmatics, particularly those practising cognitive and philosophical forms of pragmatics (so-called Anglo-American pragmatics). In such approaches, the analyst largely abstracts away from the details of conversation itself in order to formalise the rules and principles by which speakers mean (and to a lesser extent do) 1 See Schiffrin (1994) for a good overview of these various approaches to analysing spoken interaction, and Jucker (2009) for an excellent discussion of the various types of methodologies and their respective value for the study of speech acts in particular.