Action Ascription
| Number: | P42 |
| Organizer: | Stivers, Tanya |
| Co-Organizer: | Federico Rossano, Mardi Kidwell |
| Abstract: | |
| A main goal of Conversation Analysis is to understand underlying structures of social interaction and specify which structures are universal and which are culture or language specific. CA has, as a central tenet, the view that interaction is about doing things with and through visible and vocal behavior. These social actions include requests for information, requests for action, offers, invitations and repair initiations, to name a few. Despite significant research on practices used in social interaction to perform particular social actions, we do not yet understand how people formulate social actions so they are consistently recognizable to co-interactants in the course of ordinary conversation. We do not understand the role played by grammar, prosody, epistemic domain, gaze, semantics, body behavior and sequential position. We do not know whether there is a set of core social actions that occur across all languages or cultures nor the extent to which there are culture-specific practices for accomplishing particular actions. We do not know the mechanisms through which the same turn or even the same TCU can accomplish multiple social actions simultaneously. This panel will explore some of these issues across several languages to provide us with substantial leverage on the problem of how it is that speakers design and recognize social actions. |
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