The interactive achievement of space – and its possible meanings.
| Panel: | P54 - Space as resource and achievement |
| Author: | Hausendorf, Heiko |
| Abstract: | |
| The approach I shall take is typical for CA. Instead of accounting for space in terms of the spatial parameters of a speech situation existing somehow a priori to interaction, space, is, along with the speech situation itself, to be considered as something necessarily interactively achieved. As such the idea of a given speech situation disappears, and along with it the idea of hard-core parameters such as space. Otherwise, space remains a subject beyond the reach of conversation analysis. The interactive achievement of space has, accordingly, become a sort of slogan implicitly and explicitly stated in a number of concrete empirical analyses to emerge over the last years (connected with catch words such as ‘multimodality’, ‘situated discourse’ or ‘discourse in places’). In my paper, I will raise some of the questions lying behind this attractive master key for CA: • First of all: What do we mean by ‘space’ in the motto of interactive achievement of space? • Secondly: What do we mean by ‘interactive achievement’ itself? Whatever it may be in the end (question 1), might we not be well advised to accept that space is already in a meaning of speaking, present at the beginning of interaction? Perhaps. But what could ‘interactive achievement’ then mean? • Last but not least: How, in detail, does the interactive achievement of space occur? Although there is a language of space (grammar and lexis) there is, obviously, no need to talk about space in every case. What, then, are the interactive means and forms we are looking for? Far from suggesting an overall solution to these questions, I will try out the idea of a broad concept of space that is bound to the co-participants’ location. For I believe it is the concrete ‘here’ rather than the abstract ‘space’ that matters. The kind of problem that we are faced with when we talk about the interactive achievement of space is then a problem of situation. I will argue that it can be split up into the problems of co-orientation, co-ordination and co-operation the empirical solution of which will, then, guide us to relevant verbal and nonverbal means and forms. Several bits of data (from different social settings) will be discussed in order to illustrate the kind of findings such a framework allows for. |
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