Units of Talk-in-Interaction
| Number: | P41 |
| Organizer: | Szczepek Reed, Beatrice |
| Co-Organizer: | |
| Abstract: | |
| In this panel, we would like to bring together papers that reflect on the question: ‘What are the units of talk-in-interaction?’ Conversation analytic work has shown that some units that have been taken for granted in theoretical linguistics and sociology have to be deconstructed, and/or re-defined. For example, the traditional linguistic unit of the sentence has been shown to be ‘semi-permeable’ (Lerner, 1991; 1996) from a participant’s perspective; that is, the sentence is a matter of interactional co-construction, and sentence structures are under continuous negotiation. Thus, a perspective on the sentence as a pre-structured unit is no longer appropriate in the light of interactional analysis. Similar questions have been asked of other traditionally accepted units, such as the word or the phoneme, and of more recently described interactional units, such as the TCU and the turn. From a conversation analytic perspective, the main questions are: 1 What spates of talk do participants orient to as holistic entities? 2 How are traditionally accepted units realized in talk-in-interaction? 3 Is it helpful to analyse talk-in-interaction in terms of single-mode units, such as syntactic/ phonological/ interactional? 4 Do participants orient to units within these modes, such as in the form of syntactic or prosodic categories? 5 Or do participants orient to actions, employing clusters of features? 6 Are there multimodal units in which clusters of features including gestures, actions, syntactic structures, phonetic events, etc. are employed together? 7 How does the analysis of multimodal aspects of interaction influence how units are perceived and constructed? 8 Are there new, or previously un-described units that are relevant for talk-in-interaction? 9 Are there previously un-described units relevant for certain genres of talk, such as impaired speech, learner speech etc.? 10 Is it helpful to analyse talk-in-interaction as a succession of units at all? |
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