Abstract
Interactional linguistics (IL, henceforth) is a relatively new perspective to the study of language in use that researches ‘linguistic structure as a resource for social interaction’ (p. 4). It has adopted the methodological underpinnings of Conversation Analysis (CA), and in its view of the interplay between language and social interaction, it was also influenced by functionalism, contextualisation theory, and linguistic anthropology.
It is only natural that two of the forefront and founding figures of this approach to the study of language in interaction, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (University of Helsinki, Finland) and Margret Selting (Universität Potsdam, Germany), would put together such a comprehensive introductory textbook that collects over twenty years of research in interactional linguistics, most of which had so far been published as journal articles and in edited volumes, such as the essential Prosody in Conversation (1996) and Studies in Interactional Linguistics (2001).
Because of space constraints, only a few selective remarks about the textbook content and organisation will be made in this review, which will hardly do any justice to the wealth and breadth of material that the manual offers.
The paperback version of this 617-page textbook is divided into 9 chapters, and is supplemented by 6 online chapters (adding an extra 291 pages), the latter freely accessible at: http://cambridge.org/interactional. Chapters are organised into two large sections, the first focusing on the fundamentals of conversation analysis and the use of linguistic resources to conduct it, and the second describing studies on how, specifically, these resources are deployed in interaction.
Each chapter is divided into subsections introducing key concepts – defined and later summarised in clearly signposted end-of-section boxes – and a review of relevant foundational and more recent research. Topics are illustrated through a number of examples of conversational data – both classic and new – in a variety of languages beyond English, and transcribed using mostly Jeffersonian or GAT2 conventions. A comparison of these transcription systems is provided as an appendix, but given the prominent role of both authors in the development of systems such as GAT, it might have been useful to highlight its benefits for the record of phonetic detail more explicitly. In spite of reference to some interactional linguistic work on language and gesture, no discussion is made of transcription systems for embodied action. It is, perhaps, a sore omission that so little is said about gesture and its interplay with verbal aspects, particularly for the perpetuity of a manual that promises to be a reference set of materials for decades to come. To be fair, though, the shift from the study of verbal-only material into the engagement of the full reality of multimodality in interaction is not yet as widespread in (interactional) linguistics as it could have been, but a whole chapter on this integration would have been welcome.
In terms of how the textbook develops, there is an introduction that defines interactional linguistics with a focus on its antecedents and development, and provides a set of principles that gives a clear picture of not only where the empirical nature of IL lies, but also how analyses are warranted and validated. This is a welcome manifesto, especially for readers who may be well versed in the methodologies and tenets of other linguistic approaches. The second introductory chapter, available online, discusses more closely the inextricable link between language and the implementation of social action.
The first part, ‘How is interaction conducted with Linguistic resources?’, provides readers with a good review of the basic orderly mechanisms of talk as described by CA and the interactional linguistic studies that contribute to the description of this organisation. This section contains specific chapters on turn-construction and turn-taking that include, for example, how syntactic and prosodic projectability are seen to work across different languages, showing that the description of TCUs and projectability may have so far overlooked how much of this might be language-specific, as the section on delayed projection in Japanese reveals. There is also a description of turn-holding and turn-yielding, as well as turn expansion practices, and of overlap as a form of ‘deviant’ turn-taking.
The chapter on Repair is probably one of the most detailed ones, which is not surprising for a volume on linguistics, nor given the amount of research done on the area. There is also an extense action-formation and action-ascription chapter that establishes links and differences with speech act theory, and describes the most important findings around not only the vast literature on information question-response patterns and function, but also the studies on requests, offers, assessments, compliments, and self-deprecation, among other social actions. The discussion of epistemics and deontics is interspersed within the description of social action in this chapter, and these forms of stance and status then receive detailed treatment on the online chapter on Stance and Footing.
The following (online) chapter reviews the well-known studies of Preference, and this is followed by a specific chapter on Sequence that includes topicality, an issue that many may consider understudied from a CA perspective. The following online chapters in this section are about Stance and Footing, and ‘Big Packages’. Regarding the latter, beyond the detailed discussion of storytelling and complaint sequences, it might have been useful to provide the reader with further information on interactional studies of other overall sequence organisation blocks in interaction, an area which will hopefully see an advancement in CA in the next few years.
The second section, ‘How are linguistic resources deployed in interaction?’, is perhaps the most useful contribution to linguists and interactionalists alike, as it clearly shows how much of established knowledge in linguistics is not really the result of the study of everyday interaction. This section approaches the interactional study of basic grammatical units (sentences, clauses, and phrases) and how they are co-constructed in interaction. This is, arguably, the greatest contribution of IL so far: its re-definition of the boundaries of linguistic units as permeable and flexible, and as a result of the constant co-construction and the emergence that characterise speech.
The section also includes a chapter on clause combinations, and on particles. The vast body of interactional work mentioned in this chapter, such as research on the grammatical constitution of TCUs, forms of dislocation, and clause combinations, not only helps to address the bias towards speaker-dominated units that may be common in other approaches, but also invites further conversation with other areas of linguistics, given the similarity of phenomena and the borrowing of terminology. In a way that perhaps other CA studies do not and should, the authors duly acknowledge the influence of, for example, Hallidayan approaches to grammar, with which they establish a ‘conversation’ with clear footnotes and citing of studies.
Two online chapters complete this section, the first one being on prosody and phonetics, which reviews foundational interactional phonetic studies and summarises the areas and views that make this approach to the study of phonetics different from other ways of describing the role of prosody in communication. Because of this, the chapter is a must for non-interactional phoneticians and non-phonetician interactionalists alike. As a small criticism, the chapter could have benefited with further information on the relation between prosody and gesture, apart from a footnote on ‘pikes’ as described in Ogden (2014).
The final online chapter includes further practices with language, and approaches in some detail the numerous and ever-growing cross-language studies of reference, recipiency, and especially, repetition.
The book finishes with a conclusion that highlights the implications for language theory, and it foresees the contribution that interactional linguistics can also make to sociolinguistics and studies of language universals. This section clearly shows that the study of how language constructs, and is deployed in, interaction, is something that needs to stem from the observation of its use in the real world, and this makes this form of scientific enquiry empirical, whereas other linguistic approaches which also provide valuable information for our understanding of language mostly work on imaginary contexts and then analyse the plausibility of these phenomena happening in real speech.
This introductory textbook is valuable support material for interactional linguists and IL lecturers, it is a clear and necessary reference for conversationalists who are not familiar with the basics of linguistic descriptions and jargon, and an essential book for any linguist who may be interested in the study of interaction, or in need of reassurance of the empirical value of the study of something seemingly so slippery yet so orderly as everyday talk. There is no doubt, then, that Couper-Kuhlen and Selting’s comprehensive and didactic description of the state-of-the-art in Interactional Linguistics will not only become a must-have reference book for anyone embarking on CA or IL, but also a source of inspiration for the next generation of interactional linguists.
