(Handbooks of Applied Linguistics, V. 2) Gerd Antos - Eija Ventola - Tilo Weber-Handbook of Interpersonal Communication-Mouton de Gruyter (2008)

Handbook of Interpersonal Communication
HAL 2

Handbooks of Applied Linguistics
Communication Competence
Language and Communication Problems
Practical Solutions
Editors
Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
Volume 2
Mouton de Gruyter Berlin New York

Handbook of
Interpersonal
Communication
Edited by
Gerd Antos and Eija Ventola
In cooperation with
Tilo Weber
Mouton de Gruyter Berlin New York

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.
Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines

of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Handbook of interpersonal communication / edited by Gerd Antos,

Eija Ventola in cooperation with Tilo Weber.
p. cm. (Handbooks of applied linguistics ; 2)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-11-018830-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Interpersonal communication. I. Antos, Gerd. II. Ventola,
Eija. III. Weber, Tilo, 1964
P94.7.H36 2008
302.2dc22
2008037812
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Introduction to the handbook series v
Introduction to the handbook series

Linguistics for problem solving
Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
1. Science and application at the turn of the millennium
The distinction between pure and applied sciences is an old one. Accord-
ing to Meinel (2000), it was introduced by the Swedish chemist Wallerius
in 1751, as part of the dispute of that time between the scholastic disciplines
and the then emerging epistemic sciences. However, although the concept of
Applied Science gained currency rapidly since that time, it has remained
problematic.
Until recently, the distinction between pure and applied mirrored the
distinction between theory and practice. The latter ran all the way through
Western history of science since its beginnings in antique times. At first, it was
only philosophy that was regarded as a scholarly and, hence, theoretical disci-
pline. Later it was followed by other leading disciplines, as e.g., the sciences.
However, as academic disciplines, all of them remained theoretical. In fact, the
process of achieving independence of theory was essential for the academic dis-
ciplines to become independent from political, religious or other contingencies
and to establish themselves at universities and academies. This also implied a
process of emancipation from practical concerns an at times painful develop-
ment which manifested (and occasionally still manifests) itself in the discredit-
ing of and disdain for practice and practitioners. To some, already the very
meaning of the notion applied carries a negative connotation, as is suggested
by the contrast between the widely used synonym for theoretical, i.e. pure
(as used, e.g. in the distinction between Pure and Applied Mathematics)
and its natural antonym impure. On a different level, a lower academic status
sometimes is attributed to applied disciplines because of their alleged lack of
originality they are perceived as simply and one-directionally applying in-
sights gained in basic research and watering them down by neglecting the limit-
ing conditions under which these insights were achieved.
Today, however, the academic system is confronted with a new understand-
ing of science. In politics, in society and, above all, in economy a new concept
of science has gained acceptance which questions traditional views. In recent
philosophy of science, this is labelled as science under the pressure to suc-
ceed i.e. as science whose theoretical structure and criteria of evaluation are
increasingly conditioned by the pressure of application (Carrier, Stltzner, and
Wette 2004):
vi Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
Whenever the public is interested in a particular subject, e.g. when a new disease de-
velops that cannot be cured by conventional medication, the public requests science
to provide new insights in this area as quickly as possible. In doing so, the public is
less interested in whether these new insights fit seamlessly into an existing theoretical
framework, but rather whether they make new methods of treatment and curing poss-
ible. (Institut fr Wirtschafts- und Technikforschung 2004, our translation).
With most of the practical problems like these, sciences cannot rely on know-
ledge that is already available, simply because such knowledge does not yet
exist. Very often, the problems at hand do not fit neatly into the theoretical
framework of one particular pure science, and there is competition among dis-
ciplines with respect to which one provides the best theoretical and methodo-
logical resources for potential solutions. And more often than not the problems
can be tackled only by adopting an interdisciplinary approach.
As a result, the traditional Cascade Model, where insights were applied
top-down from basic research to practice, no longer works in many cases. In-
stead, a kind of application oriented basic research is needed, where disci-
plines conditioned by the pressure of application take up a certain still dif-
fuse practical issue, define it as a problem against the background of their
respective theoretical and methodological paradigms, study this problem and
finally develop various application oriented suggestions for solutions. In this
sense, applied science, on the one hand, has to be conceived of as a scientific
strategy for problem solving a strategy that starts from mundane practical
problems and ultimately aims at solving them. On the other hand, despite the
dominance of application that applied sciences are subjected to, as sciences they
can do nothing but develop such solutions in a theoretically reflected and me-
thodologically well founded manner. The latter, of course, may lead to the well-
known fact that even applied sciences often tend to concentrate on application
oriented basic research only and thus appear to lose sight of the original prac-
tical problem. But despite such shifts in focus: Both the boundaries between
disciplines and between pure and applied research are getting more and more
blurred.
Today, after the turn of the millennium, it is obvious that sciences are re-
quested to provide more and something different than just theory, basic research
or pure knowledge. Rather, sciences are increasingly being regarded as partners
in a more comprehensive social and economic context of problem solving and
are evaluated against expectations to be practically relevant. This also implies
that sciences are expected to be critical, reflecting their impact on society. This
new applied type of science is confronted with the question: Which role can
the sciences play in solving individual, interpersonal, social, intercultural,
political or technical problems? This question is typical of a conception of
science that was especially developed and propagated by the influential philos-
opher Sir Karl Popper a conception that also this handbook series is based on.
Introduction to the handbook series vii
2. Applied Linguistics: Concepts and controversies
The concept of Applied Linguistics is not as old as the notion of Applied

Science, but it has also been problematical in its relation to theoretical lin-
guistics since its beginning. There seems to be a widespread consensus that the
notion Applied Linguistics emerged in 1948 with the first issue of the journal
Language Learning which used this compound in its subtitle A Quarterly Jour-
nal of Applied Linguistics. This history of its origin certainly explains why even
today Applied Linguistics still tends to be predominantly associated with
foreign language teaching and learning in the Anglophone literature in particu-
lar, as can bee seen e.g. from Johnson and Johnson (1998), whose Encyclopedic
Dictionary of Applied Linguistics is explicitly subtitled A Handbook for Lan-
guage Teaching. However, this theory of origin is historically wrong. As is
pointed out by Back (1970), the concept of applying linguistics can be traced
back to the early 19th century in Europe, and the very notion Applied Lin-
guistics was used in the early 20th already.
2.1. Theoretically Applied vs. Practically Applied Linguistics

As with the relation between Pure and Applied sciences pointed out above,
also with Applied Linguistics the first question to be asked is what makes it
different from Pure or Theoretical Linguistics. It is not surprising, then, that
the terminologist Back takes this difference as the point of departure for his dis-
cussion of what constitutes Applied Linguistics. In the light of recent contro-
versies about this concept it is no doubt useful to remind us of his terminological
distinctions.
Back (1970) distinguishes between Theoretical Linguistics which aims
at achieving knowledge for its own sake, without considering any other value ,
Practice i.e. any kind of activity that serves to achieve any purpose in life in
the widest sense, apart from the striving for knowledge for its own sake and
Applied Linguistics, as a being based on Theoretical Linguistics on the one
hand and as aiming at usability in Practice on the other. In addition, he makes
a difference between Theoretical Applied Linguistics and Practical Applied
Linguistics, which is of particular interest here. The former is defined as the use
of insights and methods of Theoretical Linguistics for gaining knowledge in
another, non-linguistic discipline, such as ethnology, sociology, law or literary
studies, the latter as the application of insights from linguistics in a practical
field related to language, such as language teaching, translation, and the like.
For Back, the contribution of applied linguistics is to be seen in the planning
of practical action. Language teaching, for example, is practical action done
by practitioners, and what applied linguistics can contribute to this is, e.g., to
provide contrastive descriptions of the languages involved as a foundation for
viii Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
teaching methods. These contrastive descriptions in turn have to be based on the

descriptive methods developed in theoretical linguistics.
However, in the light of the recent epistemological developments outlined
above, it may be useful to reinterpret Backs notion of Theoretically Applied
Linguistics. As he himself points out, dealing with practical problems can have
repercussions on the development of the theoretical field. Often new ap-
proaches, new theoretical concepts and new methods are a prerequisite for deal-
ing with a particular type of practical problems, which may lead to an at least
in the beginning application oriented basic research in applied linguistics
itself, which with some justification could also be labelled theoretically ap-
plied, as many such problems require the transgression of disciplinary bound-
aries. It is not rare that a domain of Theoretically Applied Linguistics or ap-
plication oriented basic research takes on a life of its own, and that also
something which is labelled as Applied Linguistics might in fact be rather re-
mote from the mundane practical problems that originally initiated the respect-
ive subject area. But as long as a relation to the original practical problem can be
established, it may be justified to count a particular field or discussion as be-
longing to applied linguistics, even if only theoretically applied.
2.2. Applied linguistics as a response to structuralism and generativism

As mentioned before, in the Anglophone world in particular the view still
appears to be widespread that the primary concerns of the subject area of ap-
plied linguistics should be restricted to second language acquisition and lan-
guage instruction in the first place (see, e.g., Davies 1999 or Schmitt and Celce-
Murcia 2002). However, in other parts of the world, and above all in Europe,
there has been a development away from aspects of language learning to a wider
focus on more general issues of language and communication.
This broadening of scope was in part a reaction to the narrowing down the
focus in linguistics that resulted from self-imposed methodological constraints
which, as Ehlich (1999) points out, began with Saussurean structuralism and
culminated in generative linguistics. For almost three decades since the late
1950s, these developments made language in a comprehensive sense, as
related to the everyday experience of its users, vanish in favour of an idealised
and basically artificial entity. This led in Core or theoretical linguistics to a
neglect of almost all everyday problems with language and communication en-
countered by individuals and societies and made it necessary for those inter-
ested in socially accountable research into language and communication to draw
on a wider range of disciplines, thus giving rise to a flourishing of interdiscipli-
nary areas that have come to be referred to as hyphenated variants of linguistics,
such as sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, psycholinguistics, conversation
analysis, pragmatics, and so on (Davies and Elder 2004).
Introduction to the handbook series ix
That these hyphenated variants of linguistics can be said to have originated

from dealing with problems may lead to the impression that they fall completely
into the scope of applied linguistics. This the more so as their original thematic
focus is in line with a frequently quoted definition of applied linguistics as the
theoretical and empirical investigation of real world problems in which lan-
guage is a central issue (Brumfit 1997: 93). However, in the recent past much
of the work done in these fields has itself been rather theoretically applied in
the sense introduced above and ultimately even become mainstream in lin-
guistics. Also, in view of the current epistemological developments that see all
sciences under the pressure of application, one might even wonder if there is
anything distinctive about applied linguistics at all.
Indeed it would be difficult if not impossible to delimit applied linguistics
with respect to the practical problems studied and the disciplinary approaches
used: Real-world problems with language (to which, for greater clarity, should
be added: with communication) are unlimited in principle. Also, many prob-
lems of this kind are unique and require quite different approaches. Some
might be tackled successfully by applying already available linguistic theo-
ries and methods. Others might require for their solution the development of
new methods and even new theories. Following a frequently used distinction
first proposed by Widdowson (1980), one might label these approaches
as Linguistics Applied or Applied Linguistics. In addition, language is
a trans-disciplinary subject par excellence, with the result that problems do not
come labelled and may require for their solution the cooperation of various dis-
ciplines.
2.3. Conceptualisations and communities

The questions of what should be its reference discipline and which themes,
areas of research and sub-disciplines it should deal with, have been discussed
constantly and were also the subject of an intensive debate (e.g. Seidlhofer
2003). In the recent past, a number of edited volumes on applied linguistics have
appeared which in their respective introductory chapters attempt at giving a
definition of Applied Linguistics. As can be seen from the existence of the
Association Internationale de Linguistique Applique (AILA) and its numerous
national affiliates, from the number of congresses held or books and journals
published with the label Applied Linguistics, applied linguistics appears to be
a well-established and flourishing enterprise. Therefore, the collective need felt
by authors and editors to introduce their publication with a definition of the sub-
ject area it is supposed to be about is astonishing at first sight. Quite obviously,
what Ehlich (2006) has termed the struggle for the object of inquiry appears to
be characteristic of linguistics both of linguistics at large and applied lin-
guistics. Its seems then, that the meaning and scope of Applied Linguistics
x Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
cannot be taken for granted, and this is why a wide variety of controversial con-
ceptualisations exist.
For example, in addition to the dichotomy mentioned above with respect to
whether approaches to applied linguistics should in their theoretical foundations
and methods be autonomous from theoretical linguistics or not, and apart from
other controversies, there are diverging views on whether applied linguistics is
an independent academic discipline (e.g. Kaplan and Grabe 2000) or not (e.g.
Davies and Elder 2004), whether its scope should be mainly restricted to lan-
guage teaching related topics (e.g. Schmitt and Celce-Murcia 2002) or not (e.g.
Knapp 2006), or whether applied linguistics is a field of interdisciplinary syn-
thesis where theories with their own integrity develop in close interaction with
language users and professionals (e.g. Rampton 1997/2003) or whether this
view should be rejected, as a true interdisciplinary approach is ultimately im-
possible (e.g. Widdowson 2005).
In contrast to such controversies Candlin and Sarangi (2004) point out that
applied linguistics should be defined in the first place by the actions of those
who practically do applied linguistics:
[] we see no especial purpose in reopening what has become a somewhat sterile

debate on what applied linguistics is, or whether it is a distinctive and coherent
discipline. [] we see applied linguistics as a many centered and interdisciplinary
endeavour whose coherence is achieved in purposeful, mediated action by its prac-
titioners. []
What we want to ask of applied linguistics is less what it is and more what it does, or
rather what its practitioners do. (Candlin/Sarangi 2004:12)
Against this background, they see applied linguistics as less characterised

by its thematic scope which indeed is hard to delimit but rather by the
two aspects of relevance and reflexivity. Relevance refers to the purpose
applied linguistic activities have for the targeted audience and to the degree that
these activities in their collaborative practices meet the background and needs
of those addressed which, as matter of comprehensibility, also includes taking
their conceptual and language level into account. Reflexivity means the contex-
tualisation of the intellectual principles and practices, which is at the core of
what characterises a professional community, and which is achieved by asking
leading questions like What kinds of purposes underlie what is done?, Who
is involved in their determination?, By whom, and in what ways, is their
achievement appraised?, Who owns the outcomes?.
We agree with these authors that applied linguistics in dealing with real
world problems is determined by disciplinary givens such as e.g. theories,
methods or standards of linguistics or any other discipline but that it is deter-
mined at least as much by the social and situational givens of the practices of
life. These do not only include the concrete practical problems themselves but
Introduction to the handbook series xi
also the theoretical and methodological standards of cooperating experts from

other disciplines, as well as the conceptual and practical standards of the prac-
titioners who are confronted with the practical problems in the first place. Thus,
as Sarangi and van Leeuwen (2003) point out, applied linguists have to become
part of the respective community of practice.
If, however, applied linguists have to regard themselves as part of a commu-
nity of practice, it is obvious that it is the entire community which determines
what the respective subject matter is that the applied linguist deals with and
how. In particular, it is the respective community of practice which determines
which problems of the practitioners have to be considered. The consequence of
this is that applied linguistics can be understood from very comprehensive to
very specific, depending on what kind of problems are considered relevant by
the respective community. Of course, following this participative understanding
of applied linguistics also has consequences for the Handbooks of Applied Lin-
guistics both with respect to the subjects covered and the way they are theoreti-
cally and practically treated.
3. Applied linguistics for problem solving
Against this background, it seems reasonable not to define applied linguistics as

an autonomous discipline or even only to delimit it by specifying a set of sub-
jects it is supposed to study and typical disciplinary approaches it should use.
Rather, in line with the collaborative and participatory perspective of the com-
munities of practice applied linguists are involved in, this handbook series is
based on the assumption that applied linguistics is a specific, problem-oriented
way of doing linguistics related to the real-life world. In other words: applied
linguistics is conceived of here as linguistics for problem solving.
To outline what we think is distinctive about this area of inquiry: Entirely
in line with Poppers conception of science, we take it that applied linguistics
starts from the assumption of an imperfect world in the areas of language and
communication. This means, firstly, that linguistic and communicative compet-
ence in individuals, like other forms of human knowledge, is fragmentary and
defective if it exists at all. To express it more pointedly: Human linguistic and
communicative behaviour is not perfect. And on a different level, this imper-
fection also applies to the use and status of language and communication in and
among groups or societies.
Secondly, we take it that applied linguists are convinced that the imperfec-
tion both of individual linguistic and communicative behaviour and language
based relations between groups and societies can be clarified, understood and to
some extent resolved by their intervention, e.g. by means of education, training
or consultancy.
xii Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
Thirdly, we take it that applied linguistics proceeds by a specific mode of

inquiry in that it mediates between the way language and communication is ex-
pertly studied in the linguistic disciplines and the way it is directly experienced
in different domains of use. This implies that applied linguists are able to dem-
onstrate that their findings be they of a Linguistics Applied or Applied
Linguistics nature are not just application oriented basic research but can
be made relevant to the real-life world.
Fourthly, we take it that applied linguistics is socially accountable. To the
extent that the imperfections initiating applied linguistic activity involve both
social actors and social structures, we take it that applied linguistics has to
be critical and reflexive with respect to the results of its suggestions and solu-
tions.
These assumptions yield the following questions which at the same time de-
fine objectives for applied linguistics:
1. Which linguistic problems are typical of which areas of language compet-
ence and language use?
2. How can linguistics define and describe these problems?
3. How can linguistics suggest, develop, or achieve solutions of these prob-
lems?
4. Which solutions result in which improvements in speakers linguistic and
communicative abilities or in the use and status of languages in and between
groups?
5. What are additional effects of the linguistic intervention?
4. Objectives of this handbook series
These questions also determine the objectives of this book series. However, in
view of the present boom in handbooks of linguistics and applied linguistics,
one should ask what is specific about this series of nine thematically different
volumes.
To begin with, it is important to emphasise what it is not aiming at:
The handbook series does not want to take a snapshot view or even a hit
list of fashionable topics, theories, debates or fields of study.
Nor does it aim at a comprehensive coverage of linguistics because some
selectivity with regard to the subject areas is both inevitable in a book series
of this kind and part of its specific profile.
Instead, the book series will try
to show that applied linguistics can offer a comprehensive, trustworthy and
scientifically well-founded understanding of a wide range of problems,
to show that applied linguistics can provide or develop instruments for solv-
ing new, still unpredictable problems,
Introduction to the handbook series xiii
to show that applied linguistics is not confined to a restricted number of

topics such as, e.g. foreign language learning, but that it successfully deals
with a wide range of both everyday problems and areas of linguistics,
to provide a state-of-the-art description of applied linguistics against the
background of the ability of this area of academic inquiry to provide de-
scriptions, analyses, explanations and, if possible, solutions of everyday
problems. On the one hand, this criterion is the link to trans-disciplinary co-
operation. On the other, it is crucial in assessing to what extent linguistics
can in fact be made relevant.
In short, it is by no means the intention of this series to duplicate the present
state of knowledge about linguistics as represented in other publications with
the supposed aim of providing a comprehensive survey. Rather, the intention is
to present the knowledge available in applied linguistics today firstly from an
explicitly problem solving perspective and secondly, in a non-technical, easily
comprehensible way. Also it is intended with this publication to build bridges to
neighbouring disciplines and to critically discuss which impact the solutions
discussed do in fact have on practice. This is particularly necessary in areas like
language teaching and learning where for years there has been a tendency to
fashionable solutions without sufficient consideration of their actual impact on
the reality in schools.
5. Criteria for the selection of topics
Based on the arguments outlined above, the handbook series has the following
structure: Findings and applications of linguistics will be presented in concen-
tric circles, as it were, starting out from the communication competence of the
individual, proceeding via aspects of interpersonal and inter-group communi-
cation to technical communication and, ultimately, to the more general level of
society. Thus, the topics of the nine volumes are as follows:
1. Handbook of Individual Communication Competence
2. Handbook of Interpersonal Communication
3. Handbook of Communication in Organisations and Professions
4. Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere
5. Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication
6. Handbook of Foreign Language Communication and Learning
7. Handbook of Intercultural Communication
8. Handbook of Technical Communication
9. Handbook of Language and Communication: Diversity and Change
This thematic structure can be said to follow the sequence of experience with
problems related to language and communication a human passes through in the
xiv Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
course of his or her personal biographical development. This is why the topic
areas of applied linguistics are structured here in ever-increasing concentric
circles: in line with biographical development, the first circle starts with
the communicative competence of the individual and also includes interper-
sonal communication as belonging to a persons private sphere. The second
circle proceeds to the everyday environment and includes the professional and
public sphere. The third circle extends to the experience of foreign languages
and cultures, which at least in officially monolingual societies, is not made by
everybody and if so, only later in life. Technical communication as the fourth
circle is even more exclusive and restricted to a more special professional clien-
tele. The final volume extends this process to focus on more general, supra-in-
dividual national and international issues.
For almost all of these topics, there already exist introductions, handbooks
or other types of survey literature. However, what makes the present volumes
unique is their explicit claim to focus on topics in language and communication
as areas of everyday problems and their emphasis on pointing out the relevance
of applied linguistics in dealing with them.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Robert Straube who did an amazing job in copy-editing
and proof-reading the typescripts and who taught us what it means to edit 21 ref-
erence sections.
Gerd Antos, Halle

Eja Ventola, Helsinki
Tilo Weber, Halle
Contents
Introduction to the handbook series
Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii
1. Introduction: Interpersonal Communication linguistic points of view
Gerd Antos, Eija Ventola, and Tilo Weber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
I. Theories, methods, and tools of Interpersonal Communication

research
2. Social Psychology and personal relationships: Accommodation

and relational influence across time and contexts
Margaret J. Pitts and Howard Giles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3. Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
Dennis Day and Johannes Wagner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4. Interactional Sociolinguistics
Susanne Gnthner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
5. Interactional Linguistics
Dagmar Barth-Weingarten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
6. Systemic Functional Linguistics: An interpersonal perspective
Geoff Thompson and Peter Muntigl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
7. Functional Pragmatics
Angelika Redder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
8. Data and transcription
Arnulf Deppermann and Wilfried Schtte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
II. Linguistic and multisemiotic resources and their interplay

in managing Interpersonal Communication
9. Linguistic resources for the management of interaction

Margret Selting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
10. Dynamics of discourse
Barbara A. Fox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
xx Contents
11. Face-to-face communication and body language

Paul J. Thibault . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
12. Technically-mediated interpersonal communication
Caja Thimm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
13. Feeling space: Interpersonal communication and spatial semiotics
Louise J. Ravelli and Maree Stenglin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
III. Interpersonal Communication on-track and off-track
14. Everyday communication and socializing

Tilo Weber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397
15. Counseling, diagnostics, and therapy
Peter Muntigl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431
16. Youth, discourse, and interpersonal management
Jannis Androutsopoulos and Alexandra Georgakopoulou . . . . . . 457
17. Language and discourse skills of elderly people
Anna-Maija Korpijaakko-Huuhka and Anu Klippi . . . . . . . . . . 481
IV. Working on conversational strategies
18. Relational work, politeness, and identity construction

Miriam A. Locher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509
19. Humor, jokes, and irony versus mocking, gossip, and black humor
Alexander Brock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541
20. Praising and blaming, applauding, and disparaging solidarity,
audience positioning, and the linguistics of evaluative disposition
Peter R. R. White . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 567
21. Silence and taboo
Sabine Krajewski and Hartmut Schrder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 595
Biographical notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 623

Subject index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 629
1. Introduction: Interpersonal Communication
linguistic points of view
Gerd Antos, Eija Ventola, and Tilo Weber
This first volume in the series of nine Handbooks of Applied Linguistics deals
with issues concerning individual communication competence, or, in other
words, it is concerned with how the individual acquires language and what
s/he can do with it, what happens when there are problems in acquisition, and
how s/he learns to shift the modes from speaking to writing. These perspec-
tives on individual competences need, however, a closer definition. The rea-
son for this is that as humans we communicate with one another, and so, we
speak to each other. This is a fundamental characteristic of the human species.
Our linguistic system has often been described as an intrapersonal compet-
ence system, but as we use this system for interpersonal communication, the
linguistic design must also comprise the means which have been specifically
adapted for these purposes. This is the reason why it is necessary to reassess
the intra-perspective by capturing the ways interpersonal communication
operates.
Against this background, this second volume of the handbook series con-
centrates on examining how interactants manage to exchange facts, ideas,
views, opinions, beliefs, etc. by using the linguistic system together with the re-
sources it offers. Interpersonal communication is a continuous game between
the interactants it is a give-and-take situation a constant, dynamic flow that
is linguistically realized as discourse. We can say that interpersonal communi-
cation is produced, interpreted, and developed as an ongoing sequence of inter-
actants acting linguistically. In interpersonal communication, the fine-tuning of
individuals use of the linguistic system and its resources is continuously being
probed. In this process, the language used enhances social relations between the
interactants and keeps the interaction on the normal track. When interaction
goes off the track, linguistic miscommunication may create complications in
the flow, which may sometimes even lead to the destruction of social relation-
ships.
Thus, the essential theoretical approach and strategy of this volume is that
this fine-tuning, for better or worse, is primarily carried out using linguistic
methods. This focus is in contrast, for instance, with purely psychological or so-
ciological views. The chapters in the volume represent various theoretical and
methodological approaches in linguistics that have developed an interest in in-
terpersonal communication.
The volume starts out from some of the fundamental questions:
2 Gerd Antos, Eija Ventola, and Tilo Weber
How do interpersonal relations manifest themselves in language?

What is the role of language in developing and maintaining relationships in
interpersonal communication?
What types of problems occur in interpersonal communication and what
kind of linguistic strategies and means are used to solve them?
How does interpersonal communication that is realized in a linguistic mode
interact with other semiotic modes?
The questions presented above override the usual interpersonal perspectives
that are commonly presented in many typical interpersonal communication
studies of other fields. But linguists also share some common interests with
these alternative approaches, as exemplified by the following questions:
What are the effects produced by the dyadic structure and the simultaneity,
typical, e.g., of face-to-face communication, on social behaviors of inter-
actants? How do behavioral patterns change when the communication is, for
example, mediated by modern technological media instead of face-to-face,
or how is interpersonal communication manifested when various social
groups are communicating with each other?
How do the ever-changing cultural and intercultural contexts influence the
behavior of interactants?
What are the effects on interpersonal communication when interactants en-
force their strategic goals and purposes (e.g., power, subtle influence, etc.)
in interpersonal communication?
Questions like these are typical for specialists working in fields such as social
psychology, communication, and media. It is by no means the case that this vol-
ume is not interested in these types of questions as well. The contrary is the case,
but what the above-mentioned approaches often seem to ignore is that language,
as linguistic structures, comprises largely the structures that realize interper-
sonal communication in the circumstances as described above, and linguists
have developed tools for researching these structures. Interpersonal communi-
cation is here, to a large extent, seen and researched from the perspective of
what is being said or written and how this is manifested in various generic
forms, but at the same time attention is also given to other semiotic modes
which interact with the linguistic modes. It is not concerned solely with the so-
cial roles of interactants in groups nor with the types of media available nor with
non-verbal behavior nor varying contextual frames for communication, but our
main focus is on the actual linguistic manifestations (if we really want to have a
comprehensive picture of what is actually going on in human interpersonal
communication). For productive research purposes, we need an interdiscipli-
nary approach with a strong linguistic focus. It is this linguistic perspective that
the volume aims to offer to any researcher who may be interested in interper-
Introduction: Interpersonal Communication linguistic points of view 3
sonal communication, so that we can together successfully both analyze and in-
terpret the complexities of this field. Thus, what linguistics has to offer to the
other disciplines are aspects such as:
orientation to interaction seen primarily as processes that are realized lin-
guistically
expertise on theorizing and analyzing cultural and situational contexts
where linguistic processes are realized
expertise on handling language corpora
expertise on theorizing and analyzing interaction types as genres
orientation to an integrated view of linguistic and non-linguistic participant
activities and of how interactants generate meanings
expertise on researching the successful management of the linguistic flow in
interaction.
In short, interpersonal communication is social action dyadic or multiparty in
various social domains, and it is this unfolding inter-aspect of the communi-
cative process that has interested social psychologists and sociologists. However,
it is hard to make this unfolding of social action into a thing or an object to be
studied without actually investigating and researching the various modes that are
at the root of this process, and the linguistic mode is often the main one that we
need to look at when studying social interaction in interpersonal communication.
The volume thus offers an overview of the theories, methods, tools, and re-
sources of linguistically oriented approaches for the purpose of integration and
further development with various other paradigms concerned with interpersonal
communication. But we also need a specific applied linguistic perspective when
researching this prototypical problem-continuum (on-track versus off-track). It
is by means of empirical linguistic research and analysis of interpersonal com-
munication that applied linguists try to offer solutions to interactants linguistic
problems. They want to help the interactants to understand why communication
can go off the track to such an extent that it complicates interpersonal communi-
cation, and also to help them to become aware of strategies as to how they can
bring it back on-track.
The volume is divided into four major parts:

I. Theories, methods, and tools
III. Interpersonal communication on-track and off-track
Each of the parts and their chapters will be introduced and summarized briefly
below. All the contributions have the following three methodological features in
common: 1) they introduce the reader to a particular topic in interpersonal com-
munication research, 2) they present the most important contributions to the re-
spective research fields, and 3) they outline research perspectives that may be
realized in the future.
I. Theories, methods, and tools of interpersonal communication

research
This part introduces a variety of different theories that have either been greatly
influenced by the linguistic approaches or that have a sound linguistic base for
developing the theory and the methodologies involved in the study of interper-
sonal communication.
In chapter 2, Social Psychology and personal relationships: Accommo-
dation and relational influence across time and contexts, Margaret J. Pitts and
Howard Giles take a social psychological approach to the field. They place the
dynamically realized interplay of language and social cognition at the nexus of
social interaction and interactional competence. They argue that, by extending
our analysis to contextual and temporal influences on social relationships,
we will be able to improve our understanding not only of relations across inter-
personal contexts but also of how we daily relate to others, whether it be at a
great social distance or whether it be at a very intimate interpersonal level. This
chapter argues for the need to encompass the intersections of language and cog-
nition in relationships and the need to account for more specialized communi-
cation contexts and relationships in everyday settings across the whole human
lifespan. At the same time when the common social psychological approaches
for investigating and analyzing interpersonal encounters are highlighted, it chal-
lenges the current theories, tools, and methods, and suggests that the social
psychological study of accommodation and interdependence should be ex-
tended to cover the human lifespan.
In chapter 3, Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, Dennis Day and
Johannes Wagner show how these originally sociologically oriented approaches
have produced interesting strategies to deal with the issues of linguistic mani-
festation, conversation development, and maintenance of relationships in inter-
personal communication. The central concepts and tools offered for analysis
are: turn-taking, indexicality, reflexivity, recipient design, and membership cat-
egorization device. In addition, the authors demonstrate how these concepts can
be applied by presenting an analysis of an authentic interaction. They show how
interpersonal relationships are manifested semiotically via the interlocutors co-
orientations taking place within an emergent, (reflexively and collaboratively)
constructed space of social activity. Once the relevance of the interpersonal
relationship has been manifested, it is also sustained and extended within the
framework of the linguistically realized interaction.
In the next chapter 4, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Susanne Gnthner, in-

troduces us to an alternative sociological approach to social interaction, based
on anthropological linguistics. Its perspective in analyzing language use is de-
fined by central operative research concepts and tools including indexicality,
inferencing, contextualization, communicative activities, and genres. This em-
pirically based, interpretative approach offers insights into linguistic and cul-
tural diversity that is characteristic to todays communicative environments.
Gnthner presents examples of interactional sociolinguistic analyses that focus
on relatively simple communicative genres, such as the use of proverbial say-
ings, and she shows how their combined effect leads to differentiated construc-
tion and assessment of various cultural and social identities.
The theory presented by Dagmar Barth-Weingarten in chapter 5, Inter-
actional Linguistics, has been inuenced by the approaches introduced in the earl-
ier chapters 3 and 4, but it argues for a stronger linguistic orientation. The focus
is on the relationship between linguistic resources and interactional activities.
By investigating linguistic patterns from a holistic perspective, it studies all
cues and the role of linguistic resources available to the interlocutors in the pro-
cess of sense-making, taking into account recent analyses of the non-linguistic
aspects. Language is considered to be a dynamic system, which is adapted to the
task of enabling humans to accomplish certain actions. As in the other ap-
proaches introduced above, the analyses are empirical and the data consists of
collections taken from examples of natural, spontaneous talk. The aim is to
inductively uncover the participants categories, and the results are supported
by the participants behavior.
In chapter 6, Systemic Functional Linguistics: An interpersonal perspective,
Geoff Thompson and Peter Muntigl outline how the lexicogrammatical resources
of language are employed in a principled way to convey interpersonal meanings
which are motivated both by the immediate situation and by the wider socio-cul-
tural context in which the communication takes place and from which it derives
its sense. The main interpersonal systems at the level of grammar and discourse
are: mood and speech function, modality, appraisal, and exchange structure. By
taking data examples from the contrasting genres of a doctor-patient consultation
and a family argument, the authors are able to show how different lexicogram-
matical resources are accessed and drawn upon in these two contexts one where
only one of the interactants has a socially validated authoritative role and the
other where interactants have to negotiate and contest the knowledge negotiated.
The advantages of the systemic, meaning-driven grammatical approach are to be
found in the flexibility of the description and the solidness or systematicity of the
approach, which has concrete and well-defined categories that make the analysis
of the recurrent patterns of language choices both replicable and explicable.
In chapter 7, Angelika Redder introduces Functional Pragmatics as an in-
tegrated theory of linguistic action that, while acknowledging the interpersonal
function of language, at the same time, aims at accounting for linguistic struc-
tures at all levels, including both discourse and text as well as morphology and
syntax. Redder offers a summary as to how functional pragmatics has developed
in the last 35 years how it emerged from sources such as Bhlers semiotic
conception and speech act theory. The main emphasis of this approach is firstly,
on language as a means to cope with societal needs and secondly, on language
use as a form of activity that is sociohistorically motivated. Redder, then, expli-
cates some of the central notions of functional pragmatics, including action pat-
tern and the so called theory of linguistic fields. She ends the chapter with a dis-
cussion of various areas of application such as language use in institutions,
plurilingualism, and language policy.
Part I closes with chapter 8, Data and transcription, where Arnulf Depper-
mann and Wilfried Schtte give an overview on what it means to do empirical
work, what kind of instruments are needed (and are available) for data-collec-
tion in a natural setting and, finally, on how to deal with the technical problems
that may occur during audio- and video-recordings. They further discuss is-
sues of corpus design and different systems for transcribing discourse data
(CA, HIAT, GAT). In addition, they present recently developed transcription
editors (EXMARaLDA, ELAN) and analyzing tools (PRAAT). They show
examples of transcripts and evaluate the differences of transcription systems
and software, used for transcription on the computer. Further, they highlight ep-
istemological problems of the written representation of oral communication via
transcripts and address the additional difficulties which arise in the transcription
of video data using multimodal interaction.

in managing Interpersonal Communication
This part has as its common theme the question of how the linguistic and
multisemiotic resources work together in interpersonal communication man-
agement.
In chapter 9, Linguistic resources for the management of interaction, Mar-
gret Selting outlines the resources that each individual has at his/her disposal via
the linguistic system and how they can be used for meaning-making in inter-
personal communication. The theoretical background and methodology is taken
from conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. Telephone conversa-
tional data are used to illustrate how the analyses function. The general focus in-
cludes the following fields: the use of syntax and prosody for unit construction,
lexical items for creating information, semantic focusing, various functions of
final prosody, the use and functions of voice quality and pauses for signaling in-
teractional mood and modality in interpersonal communication.
In chapter 10, Dynamics of discourse, Barbara Fox explores how speakers

accommodate their informational and interactional needs to their interactional
partner(s). The framework used is discourse-functional syntax, an approach that
applies conversation analysis to various levels of grammar. The chapter ex-
plores four facets of utterance design through which speakers display sensitivity
to their recipient(s) in terms of pragmatic organization, syntactic organization,
lexical organization, and prosodic organization. Two case studies present new
work relevant to the topic of recipient design. Further foci of the chapter include
both the prospective and retrospective aspects of discourse; in other words, our
abilities to project the development of discourses and to account for how the
discourse was carried out retrospectively.
In chapter 11, Face-to-face communication and body language, Paul Thibault
discusses the forms of intra-species (between humans) and inter-species (e.g.,
languaged bonobos and humans) face-to-face communication. Thibault argues
that with the notion of face-to-face communication we can link three kinds of ac-
tivity, the neuroanatomical capacities of the individual participant organisms, the
individual qua social-agent-in-interaction, and the networks of communicative
practices and conventions in which individual agents participate. The chapter ex-
plores the need to reframe face-to-face communication beyond purely proximate
and local processes in the here-and-now, and it suggests the need to abandon the
distinction of language and paralanguage in favor of one model based on dy-
namic processes that are spread across diverse time scales and which involves
brain, body, and cultural dynamics. It is further suggested that speech and gesture
should not be seen as two separate modalities that are combined in interaction
but rather as a foundation to all meaning-making and as a central unified system
whereby the whole body acts as the sense-making and signifying body.
In chapter 12 which shifts the focus of body-mediated communication to
Technically-mediated interpersonal communication, Caja Thimm discusses the
challenges introduced by technological developments in the media for interper-
sonal communication. Interactants today have various media available for inter-
acting technologically, with or without face-to-face interaction (letters, fax,
phone, SMS, PC-chatting, Skyping, and videoconferencing). Thimm points
out that interpersonal communication through technological mediation is char-
acterized by almost limitless mobility and availability of potential interactants
(SMS, mobile phone); spatial distance has become almost irrelevant. Social
networking sites and virtual worlds on the internet have (re-)introduced multi-
modality into technically mediated communication. These technological inno-
vations accompany the phenomenon of profound social change. Since individ-
uals are now in the position of designing their own web-identities (and thus are
responsible and accountable for them), new communities are emerging, some
of which are economically and socially connected to the real reality whereas
others constitute independent parallel worlds.
In chapter 13, the final contribution of Part II of the volume, Feeling space:
Interpersonal communication and spatial semiotics, Louise Ravelli and Maree
Stenglin discuss a resource that so far is less explored within research on inter-
personal communication: space. The focus is on issues in interpersonal com-
munication in relation to questions of spatial semiotics: how a (built) space
makes us feel, and how issues of spatial design contribute to the construction of
specific interpersonal relations between the interactants within and around the
space. The chapter introduces new systems for describing interpersonal mean-
ings in built spaces, in terms of how affective meanings are construed. By taking
as their example, the Scientia building, a relatively new landmark building for
the University of New South Wales, Sydney, the authors examine how such
issues as power, social distance, and affect are evoked through the exterior and
interior of the building, and what these mean for relations between the univer-
sity as an institution and its key stakeholder communities: its students and the
general public. In turn, this expanded understanding of interpersonal communi-
cation returns to questions of language, considering its relevance to a broader
understanding of communication.
III. Interpersonal Communication on-track and off-track
The chapters subsumed under this heading investigate how various factors, such
as genre and participants age, influence social interaction. In the contributions
presented here, the sequences of talk that are used as examples are placed some-
where along the discourse continuum of being on-track and off-track, a
continuum that is typical of everyday discourses.
In chapter 14, Everyday communication and socializing, Tilo Weber de-
scribes everyday communication as a concept that is based on an ethnocategory,
vague and difficult to define and, at the same time, indispensable in the fields of
linguistics and the social sciences. Weber suggests a prototype view of everyday
communication as a radial category with socializing or small talk as its central
member. He reconstructs the history of research in everyday communication
from its beginnings in the first half of the 20th century and identifies four differ-
ent sources that have contributed to the theoretical and methodological foun-
dations of the study of everyday communication. Against this background, it
seems that both conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistics have
in their different ways explicitly focused on everyday conversation and have
thus contributed to its study. Finally, it is suggested that what is regarded as
everyday communication may at the moment be undergoing a change which has
been stimulated by the emergence of new, internet-based media.
In chapter 15, Counseling, diagnostics, and therapy, Peter Muntigl explores
how detailed linguistic analysis can shed light on interactants in discourse
trouble and on the accomplishments of linguistic focus in therapy and counsel-

ing. Analyses of the linguistic details of the talk in sessions can help us to under-
stand how clients and therapists eventually share or diverge in their views of the
unfolding of conversational actions. The chapter focuses on the central discur-
sive practice of therapy and counseling, on the diagnosis of problems, a compo-
nent in most therapeutic activities. The chapter illustrates how problem diag-
nosis can become derailed or go off-track. An understanding of how language
changes over the course of counseling provides clients and therapists with new
resources that help them to improve diagnostic practices.
In chapter 16, Youth, discourse, and interpersonal management, Jannis
Androutsopoulos and Alexandra Georgakopoulou look at interpersonal man-
agement in youth communication in specific locations and activities most
commonly associated with young people. The discussion centers on the social
practices of aligning and converging on the one hand, setting boundaries and
misaligning on the other hand, together with the specific linguistic choices
these practices evoke. The peer-groups in leisure activities and in institutional
settings are focal sites where relations of intimacy and solidarity as well as con-
flict and hierarchy are discursively affirmed. But identities are formed,
shaped, and negotiated also in new communicational genres in the new elec-
tronic media.
In chapter 17, Language and discourse skills of elderly people, Anna-Maija
Korpijaakko-Huuhka and Anu Klippi focus on age-related factors that cause
changes in the ways elderly citizens do and can participate in different kinds of
everyday discourses. Normal aging may bring sensory problems (hearing and
sight impairments) that can make it difficult for the old people to maintain their
linguistic normality. Aging can have linguistic reflections which may hinder
their participation in everyday life activities. When aging is accompanied by
processes affecting the brain, interpersonal communication with and by the
elderly is at risk. With the help of their conversation partners, the normally
aging conversationalists can maintain their active role in interaction, but in de-
mentia the cognitive impairment changes their interpersonal communication
skills remarkably as the process of dementia advances.
It is commonly known that participants in interpersonal communication are

very sensitive with regard to the borders of their own sphere and that of their
partners. The chapters in this last part deal with different aspects of communi-
cative behavior by which interactants manage to keep the delicate balance
between what can and what cannot be talked about and in what way and in what
form communication may take place.
Miriam Locher, in chapter 18, Relational work, politeness, and identity con-
struction, explores the role of language in enhancing, maintaining, and challen-
ging relationships in interpersonal communication. In this, her point of view is
that of a postmodernist, and it considers social identity to be the unstable and
dynamic outcome of an active social positioning of participants in interaction.
This view is exemplified by applying it to the category of gender. Locher shows
that language use, even in cases that mainly serve informative purposes, always
involves and modifies the identity of those communicating. She then suggests
that the language aspect is but one factor in the process of identity work in gen-
eral and that it is closely intertwined with other semiotic means. The chapter
ends with a discussion on the interrelation between social identity and polite-
ness.
The foci of chapter 19, Humor, jokes, and irony versus mocking, gossip, and
black humor, by Alexander Brock, are linguistic phenomena that frequently
occur in various kinds of discourses, yet lack precise theorization and treatment.
Brock outlines some aspects such as the sequential management of conver-
sation, power exertion, information management, maintenance of group norms
and the resolution of interpersonal problems and calls for the creation of devel-
opment of adequate descriptions of these linguistic phenomena. What is needed
is a multi-functional treatment, as most of the phenomena have various discour-
sal functions as communicative devices and may equally cause as well as solve
communicative problems.
Chapter 20, Praising and blaming, applauding, and disparaging solidar-
ity, audience positioning, and the linguistics of evaluative disposition, by Peter
White, explores the nature and the interpersonal functionality, in written texts,
of language which conveys positive/negative viewpoints, and the role of this
language in the negotiation of writer/reader solidarity. It outlines an approach to
the analysis of such attitudinal language provided by the so called appraisal
framework, which is well suited also for analyzing spoken discourse. A method-
ology is described and applied to two authentic texts for the purpose of identify-
ing different types of attitude, different methods of conveying attitudinal mean-
ing (i.e., explicitly versus implicitly), and different orientations by the writer
to other voices and evaluative viewpoints. A discussion is offered on the com-
municative effects which follow when authors give preference to certain evalu-
ative options over others, and how, by these preferences, they establish different
terms by which solidarity may obtain between writer and reader.
In chapter 21, Silence and taboo, the final chapter of the whole volume,
Sabine Krajewski and Hartmut Schrder characterize silence or, rather, differ-
ent kinds of silence as a differentiated family of communicative tools and taboo
as an equally manifold set of conventions that in all cultures, if in very differ-
ent ways influences interpersonal communication. In addition, the authors
elucidate the interrelationship between the two phenomena, e.g., how interac-
tants deploy silence to deal with taboos. Obviously, taboos imply limits on what
can be talked about and in what form the discourse may take place. The focus of
this chapter, however, is on the positive functions of taboos, the regulation of
behavior, the establishment of boundaries, and the recognition of authority. The
chapter closes with views on silence and taboo from an intercultural perspective.
It is the editors sincere hope that this volume will build bridges between
various approaches not only within linguistics but also across all research fields
interested in interpersonal communication. The more we know about the ways
how language, together with other modes, works, in communication, the better
we can keep it on-track when needed and remedy the course of interaction,
when it is heading off-track. This enhances our interpersonal communication as
social agents and as members of interactive communities across cultures.
I. Theories, methods, and tools
of Interpersonal Communication
research
2. Social Psychology and personal relationships:
Accommodation and relational influence across
time and contexts
Margaret J. Pitts and Howard Giles
1. Introduction
Everyday communication can be problematic, but we are relatively good at man-

aging it. How is this accomplished through interaction? As scholars across dis-
ciplines move forward in the pursuit of understanding, explaining, and even pre-
dicting outcomes and processes related to human interactions, we also become
increasingly aware of the intricacies involved in such interpersonal encounters.
Relational processing is at the root of most of our daily encounters whether with
a long-term relational partner, a stranger with whom we share a brief encounter,
or the cashier you greet everyday purchasing your morning coffee. The com-
plexities of interpersonal connections are situated in an array of dynamic human
features and personal attributes such as experience, developmental process, and
social and personal identity orientations.
The question is: What tools can scholars of human interaction use to make
sense of these seemingly kaleidoscopic encounters? Scholars tend to investigate
encounters grounded in the scholarship and epistemological and ontological
positionings of their primary field. Perhaps this is rightfully so. However with
this chapter, we urge scholars to move beyond disciplinary borders and into
specific sites of human interaction and meaning-making. Along with Knapp
and Antos (2008 = this volume), this necessitates that we start by looking at
some of the challenges we have with current theories, tools, and methods for
understanding interpersonal relationships across contexts and across interac-
tions. Such an approach highlights the imperfection of language and communi-
cation behaviors among individuals and between groups (see Coupland, Giles,
and Wiemann 1991; Giles, Gallois, and Petronio 1998). And, when applied to the
social psychology of interpersonal relationships, it helps to identify locations of
disconnect between cognition, language, and communication in everyday en-
counters and work toward applied manners for mending problems therein.
Berger (2005) argues that research that does not seek to problematize the
fundamental processes underlying social interaction and goal achievement might
be interesting, but does little to promote theories of interpersonal interactions.
Our goal with this chapter is to highlight social psychological approaches to-
ward theory, method, and tools for investigating and problematizing interper-
16 Margaret J. Pitts and Howard Giles
sonal encounters. We do so first by problematizing traditional approaches to the

study of interpersonal relationships.
Without careful attention to tools and methods of conducting relationship
research, theory development can become constrained. Theories of interper-
sonal interactions can move forward to help us make sense out of everyday in-
teractions theories that are relevant to real world, real time encounters. How-
ever, they need to account for more specialized communication contexts (e.g.,
service, health, and family) and relationships (e.g., strangers, acquaintances,
lovers, family members, intergroup relationships) in everyday settings across
the lifespan (Nussbaum and Coupland 2004; Pecchioni, Wright, and Nussbaum
2005). From this perspective, we echo Knapp and Antos (this volume) call
for investigators to actively engage in the problematics of blurring applied and
basic research and the problematics of engaging in everyday interpersonal
encounters an approach they refer to as linguistics for problem-solving. In
doing so, we argue that it is time to put interpersonal theories into action and
into context. Moreover, we agree with Fiedler (2006) that language is not with-
out social cognition and social cognition is not without language. Understand-
ing language as a problem-solving and problem-evoking instrument heightens
the necessity of applied theories of interactional competence. We emphasize the
importance of investigating these everyday encounters from a longitudinal,
developmental perspective. This can be accomplished by entering and investi-
gating real life encounters where dynamic communication is happening and
where we can see talk in action.
2. Interdependent theorizing about personal relationships
The shift of focus, at least in the area of interpersonal communication, from

theories of persuasion and social influence to theories of disclosure, develop-
ment, and dissolution marks the trend over the last four decades toward a more
relational focus on interpersonal interactions (Berger 2005). Unfortunately, and
perhaps ironically, despite the social and interdependent nature of interpersonal
relationships, scholars have systematically explored them from a single-par-
ticipant, rather than dyadic, research paradigm with a primary focus on self-
reported data that situates the participant in a space devoid of any social, envi-
ronmental, political, and emotional context (Acitelli, Duck, and West 2000;
Ickes and Duck 2000). Instead, it is the dynamic interplay between people in
relationships that should be explored, as this is where the primary relational
functions are being managed and negotiated (e.g., Friesen, Fletcher, and Overall
2005).
Surprisingly little attention has been oriented toward how relational partners
creatively and communicatively develop couple or family identities. These
Social Psychology and personal relationships 17
identities are often distinctive and positive images of themselves as a unit that
relational partners can chose to act out in the presence of particular others (Giles
and Fitzpatrick 1984). Couple-focused social comparisons necessarily become
active and salient for all relational units involved in such conversations. Re-
latedly, it is fairly uncommon to explore personal and relational contradictions
as witnessed in multi-leveled discourse, or discourse with multiple goals, such
as marital conflict co-occurring with supportive relational talk (Verhofstadt et
al. 2005) or selfishly initiating rapport-building while maintaining an other-
orientation (Pitts and Miller-Day 2007). Investigations that take such a perspec-
tive emphasize the inherent dialectics and dualities in relationships and relat-
ing such as developing a public and private couple identity while maintaining
public and private individuality. Relational contradictions are emergent in the
communicative choices of the moment, but those choices reflect, in part, the
constraints of socialization and what transpired in the prior history of the rela-
tionship (Baxter and Montgomery 1996: 59). Thus, relationships should be
viewed as part of a dialectic system, not just as individuals and dyads, but also
as couples and individuals within a larger societal context (Brown, Altman, and
Werner 1992). Couples experience dialectical tensions within their relationship
as well as between their socio-cultural relationships, including kinship, friend-
ship, and other social relationships (see Rawlins 2004). What we should strive
to find are answers to the questions about the dynamic interplay of human inter-
actions across time and context that provide us with a better understanding of
the ways in which such subjective and intersubjective interactions influence
everyday living (Ickes and Duck 2000). Although theorists are no longer woeful
about the lack of theories relating to interpersonal interactions (Ickes and Duck
2000), there is still a need for current and new theories to draw from a more in-
teractional, dynamic theoretic paradigm.
3. Accommodating to relational partners
Interaction has been described as a multi-event process that involves the con-
nections between each partners observable behaviors and the others subjective
responses (i.e., thoughts and feelings) (Surra and Bohman 1991: 282). New
and developing theories can gain much from this approach while being pushed
to examine the dynamic interaction between communication and cognition
shifting, thus providing a link between cognition, communication processes,
and intersubjective interpretations across time and across interactions. Here
we argue for a shift of attention from intrapersonal processes to interpersonal
processes with a focus on language and cognition. Such an approach fosters an
understanding that language and behaviors have a cognitive counterpart, and
that cognition is structured through language and context. Historically, Kelley
and Thibauts (1978; Kelley 1979) interdependence theory, and later Rusbults
investment models (Rusbult, Drigotas, and Verette 1994), have maintained a
focus on interpersonal processes (Rusbult and Arriaga 2000) from a primarily
social psychological perspective, while Giles and colleagues (Giles 2008;
Giles, Coupland, and Coupland 1991) communication accommodation theory
takes a language-focused approach toward understanding interpersonal en-
counters and mutual influence.
Both theories take into account fundamental influences that shape inter-
actions by addressing the self, the cognition/goal, and the actual interaction.
However, the triangle of influence is not equilateral in that these two theories do
not put the same attention on each of the three influences (i.e., interdependence
theory focuses more on the cognitive processes while communication accom-
modation theory focuses more on the communication and resulting outcome).
Moreover, accommodation is at the nexus of each theory determining relational
satisfaction, relational closeness, interactional competence, and so forth. How-
ever, the core meaning of accommodation in each theory differs. An interdepend-
ence perspective on accommodation regards it as a pattern of interaction involv-
ing the suppressed desire to match a partners destructive interaction in order to
respond in a more constructive manner (Rusbult and Arriaga 2000; Rusbult,
Yovetich, and Verette 1996). In this way, accommodating to a partner who is
behaving negatively by responding in a constructive rather than destructive
manner will serve to preserve the relationship, but might come at a significant
cost to the accommodating party (Rusbult, Yovetich, and Verette 1996). In a
way, by accommodating to the partner (in this sense by responding construc-
tively) a person actively demonstrates her/his affiliation with her/his partner.
Communication accommodation theory is primarily concerned with the
motivation and social consequences underlying a persons change in communi-
cation styles (verbal and nonverbal features such as accent, volume, tone, lan-
guage choice) to either accommodate or not accommodate their interactional
partners (Giles et al. 2007). In both theories, motivation plays the driving role
for accommodating (or nonaccommodating) behaviors. Interactants may take
into account such variables as long-term goals, social norms, and/or a desire to
preserve the others well-being. Kelley (1979) and Rusbult, Yovitch, and Ve-
rette (1996) describe this as a transformation of motivation wherein interactants
strive to maximize the partners outcomes, a joint outcome, to achieve equity, or
to defeat the partner. Motivation to accommodate (or not) in communication ac-
commodation theory is derived from similar relational features, but contextual
features as well; social power and status are a prerogative of it (Gallois, Ogay,
and Giles 2005).
Communication accommodation serves both cognitive and affective purposes
in interpersonal settings. Cognitive purposes are met when accommodation
facilitates comprehension, prevents misattributions, or stimulates a shift in
communication that is more suitable to a particular context or mode of relational

development. Affective needs can be met through convergence so as to appear
more likeable, or diverging to reinforce distinctiveness and a sense of positive
personal identity. Convergence is typically associated with seeking affiliation,
social approval, compliance, and communication effectiveness. Divergence is
typically associated with seeking distinctiveness and/or expressing social dis-
approval (Harwood, Soliz, and Lin 2006). There are exceptions, however, such
as when too much convergence, or overaccommodation, results in negative out-
comes. For example, when patronizing speech (e.g., simplified grammar and
slow enunciations) directed at older people is seen by cognitively-active members
of this social group as utterly demeaning and condescending (Williams and
Nussbaum 2001).
A final feature of communication accommodation theory, for our purposes
here, is its capacity to account for compelling intergroup processes not usually
accountable under the rubric of interpersonal communication, yet are funda-
mental to it (see Gallois and Giles 1998). Some years ago, Tajfel and Turner
(1979) proffered the distinction between encounters even dyadic ones
that were either interindividual or intergroup. The former were interac-
tions that are based solely on the personal characteristics of the parties
involved (e.g., their personalities and moods) and not at all dependent on their
respective social category memberships. Hence, accommodation-nonaccom-
modation in these cases would be toward or away from the idiosyncratic com-
munication attributes of the other. Intergroup encounters were the converse,
and so accommodation-nonaccommodation was pitched vis--vis the others
and ones own social category memberships (sexual orientation, gang, sorority,
religious, political, etc.). This class of interactions was regarded by these auth-
ors as constituting and actually defining a very large proportion of all the inter-
personal situations we encounter. Even the most intimate communication
such as between spouses who have been married for decades can, at times,
be usefully understood and analyzed in intergroup terms (e.g., talk about who
does the cleaning, caring for the children, and shopping und cooking).
Rather than construing these dual entities as polar opposites of a single
interactional continuum, scholars (e.g., Giles and Hewstone 1982) have felt it
prudent to represent conversational possibilities as being located along two or-
thogonal continua, namely interindividual (high-low) and intergroup (high-
low). This lends the possibility of encounters being construed as high on both
dimensions, either in sequences within any conversation or between them, as in
the case whereby a son first discloses to his mother that he is gay. The history of
their relationship dictates that interpersonal salience would be high, with the
mother dealing with her son as the unique person she has known since birth.
Simultaneously, her sons homosexuality should be pertinent, potentially shap-
ing the encounter in so many ways.
4. Message production in relationships
Other psychological perspectives on interactions, albeit from communication

science, such as message production, skill, and design (Greene 1997; Greene
and Lindsey 1989; Greene et al. 1997; OKeefe 1997), interaction goals, and
message organization (OKeefe and Shepherd 1987; Ryan et al. 1996), and
conversation planning (Waldron 1997), help us understand the development,
output, and adaptation of messages in interaction, but rarely do they take a
dyadic perspective. Action assembly theory, for example, attempts to specify
the mechanisms by which output, so conceived, is produced, moment-by-
moment, during ongoing interactions (Greene 1997: 152), but focuses on the
behavior of an individual at any moment of time. Moreover, a message-pro-
duction focus inherently misses perhaps the most important factor when deter-
mining message effectiveness (i.e., how it is received and interpreted). Be-
cause of the dynamic nature of conversation and cognitive processing, social
psychological theories of relationships must move toward a better understand-
ing of the cognitive and language shifts in an interaction. Although message
design models, for example, state a focus on message adaptation (OKeefe
1997), adaptation in this sense refers to developing a message that meets situ-
ational and goal needs, but not necessarily message adaptation across an inter-
action1. A second criticism of planning approaches to message production is
that the focus rests too much on the cognitive processing and not enough on the
larger social forces (context, relationship, conversational direction) that in-
fluence the interaction (Waldron 1997). Conversational and relational goals
change in interaction (Greene 1997; Ryan et al. 1996), plans get thwarted
(Berger 1995, 1997; Berger and diBattista 1993), and people may simply
become distracted or too cognitively overloaded to communicate effectively.
Any of which could occur to one person, one time, in one action. Or, more
likely, all of which might occur several times, across several interactions, for
several interactants.
5. Methods for investigating interpersonal relationships
The study of the social psychology of interpersonal relationships has been

stifled by a persistence to look only narrowly at the act of relating. Methods
have myopically focused on single-participant relationship reflections, staged
laboratory investigations, and/or solitary case studies in a singular point of time.
Yet, relationships develop in context, many in the workplace and others outside
of it. In order to appreciate the unique ways in which relationships are socially
constructed and maintained, they must be studied from within their larger con-
texts including the broader socio-cultural history, developmental and relational
status, emotional, health, family, and social network, as well as economic in-
fluences in which they are embedded (Acitelli, Duck, and West 2000).
Taking relational and developmental status into account can lend significant
insight into the influences interpersonal communication can have on future in-
terpersonal encounters and relationships across the lifespan (Alberts et al. 2005;
Nussbaum 2006). We know, for example, that an interaction between long-term
partners is influenced by their relational history, the present context, and can
have implications for their future interactions as well as a significant influence
over each others lives (Rusbult and Arriaga 2000). Much of this can be studied
through the process of encoding and storing messages across time. For example,
partners encode and store past experiences as knowledge structures (Fletcher
and Thomas 1996) that later help serve to interpret or guide future interactions.
Overtime, interpersonal interactions can work in a self-fulfilling or expectancy-
confirming manner, thereby shaping not only the individual, but the relationship
as well (e.g., Murray and Holmes 1996). Moreover, interpersonal relationships,
even between the same partners, change across the lifespan as partners and
individuals shift their life-task focus from, say, becoming good parents to man-
aging a retirement lifestyle (Cantor and Malley 1991). Similarly, Carstensens
(e.g., 1995) socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that people are searching
for different meanings in their relationships with others as they move into
the second half of their lives. Socioemotional selectivity theory predicts that
when time boundaries (i.e., end of life) are perceived, people prioritize present-
oriented and emotionally meaningful goals over future and knowledge-oriented
ones. Such shifts in priority influence social preferences, social network
composition, emotion regulation, and cognitive processing (Lckenhoff and
Carstensen 2004). Accordingly, as people age, they are motivated to reach emo-
tionally meaningful goals and seek out interpersonal relationships and social
messages that fulfill that need (Cantor and Malley 1991; Fung and Carstensen
2003). Interpersonal relationships among elder adults or between people in inter-
generational relationships are necessarily different than those among younger
adults or children, especially in terms of relational maintenance, motivation,
and communicative work. Thus, a look at messages across time with a focus on
lifespan development gives us insight into quality and expectations of relation-
ships in later life (Pecchioni, Wright, and Nussbaum 2005).
In addition to actual interactions, people frequently generate and manage
relationships cognitively through series of imagined interactions. Such interac-
tions are often the source of relational expectations, but are also practice realms
in which individuals are able to rehearse or replay various relational encounters
(Honeycutt and Cantrill 2001). The knowledge structures developed over the
course of (real and imagined) relating help interactants to predict, explain, and
control interpersonal interactions, while at the same time can serve as relation-
ship-enhancing tools (Fletcher and Thomas 1996). As such, pro-relational modes
for relating and partner accommodation may become routine after time (Rusbult
et al. 1996). This is especially salient among close interpersonal relationships
marked by positive illusions and idealization of a romantic partner early in a
relationship that not only positively influences relational satisfaction (Murray,
Holmes, and Griffin 1996a), but through interaction over time also aids in the
social construction of the ideal romantic partner (Murray, Holmes, and Griffin
1996b). Therefore, methods that focus on relating across time and encounters
rather than on individuals or relationships are paramount.
A lifespan perspective takes into account the consequences and benefits of
communicating across time. Moreover, longitudinal studies such as the Marital
Instability over the Life Course (Booth, Amato, and Johnson 1998; Kamp Dush,
and Amato 2005) help to charter relational change and relational satisfaction
across time in close romantic relationships. Using paradigms of interdepend-
ence and accommodation might allow scholars the ability to map personal and
relational transformations across time. For example, partners or interactants
who behave, communicate, and interpret in a relationship-enhancing manner
and in ways that maximize individual and relational outcomes positively affect
present and future interactions. This type of communication promotes long-
term well-being, establishes a sense of trustworthiness, and lays the ground-
work for future reciprocal interactions (Rusbult and Arriaga 2000).
Methods for developing a more comprehensive view of relationships must
center on looking within and outside of personal relationships. A social psycho-
logical perspective implies a focus on the relation between structures and pro-
cesses at the individual level, with those operative at the dyadic level, but in
doing so, does not deny the importance of investigating interpersonal interac-
tions in their wider social contexts (Fletcher and Fitness 1996: xii). Longitudi-
nal and lifespan approaches toward the study of interpersonal relationships
are not the only directions that will advance knowledge. Interpersonal scholars
could spend more time developing knowledge surrounding the mundane side
of relating and everyday conversations (Alberts et al. 2005). Duck (1992: 69)
suggests:
In everyday life, we make many snap judgements about people and form instant likes
and dislikes. We all know that we can create irrational first impressions, sudden
lusts and likings, and intense hatreds for strangers. We can like the manner of a per-
son who has not even uttered a word to us. So, paradoxically, the study of initial
responses to strangers makes sense as a starting point for understanding long-term
human relationships; it is at this point when relationships most often start or fail to
start.
A problem-solving approach also necessitates a focus on interpersonal rela-
tionships as they naturally occur in a variety of everyday contexts (i.e., relation-
ships in action). While there has been a strong focus on investigating romantic
and other close interpersonal relationships, less attention has been paid to other
types of interpersonal encounters such as those between strangers, acquaint-

ances, service personnel, and others with whom we interact on a frequent basis
but have not developed a particularly close relationship (for an exception see
Ventola 1979).
Even within the domain of close interpersonal relationships, romantic rela-
tionships among primarily young adults have received the majority of attention
while relationships among older adults, some family relationships, and friend-
ships have received less attention (Pecchioni, Wright, and Nussbaum 2005). Re-
search that neglects to account for changes across the lifespan is missing most
of the relating that is happening. To remedy this requires a focus on stability
and change in personal relationships and a look at life transitions beyond just
ageing, adolescence, or college transitions, and into other life course changes
such as parenting, relocating, changes in career or health status, or personal
milestones.
6. Research tools for investigating relationships in action
Relationships are dynamic entities, on-going processes that are influenced by

everything that is around them (Planalp and Rivers 1996). Acitelli, Duck, and
West (2000) argue that when investigating the social there are three quintessen-
tial relational elements that must be attended to: the psychological congruence
and empathic understanding between two people, the interdependence of
their behaviors, and the larger social contexts in which the interactions are em-
bedded. Because social relationships are experienced subjectively and change
across time, the tools we use to explore those relationships must be sensitive to
capture relational nuances as they occur. In addition to investigating communi-
cation across relational or lifespan transitions Nussbaum (2006), Acitelli, Duck,
and West (2000) and others (e.g., Alberts et al. 2005) suggest researchers should
attend to even those relational enactments that appear to be trivial or routine
in nature, paying more attention to the subjective and intersubjective nature
of relationships and relating. Routine ways of relating has received very little
attention from scholars across disciplines (Berger 2005), but are rich areas to
explore in an effort to uncover how relationships are accomplished. Indeed, how
often have we heard responses like same old, same old to the question, how
are things going? a response that is often verbalized by other parties as being
a healthy state of affairs given the presumed and valued stability together with a
lack of stress and uncertainty.
7. Relating in real time: Charting interpersonal goals and emotions
Contributions from the eld of cognitive psychology have provided evidence that
peoples on-line processing is inextricably related to knowledge structures
developed through relating in interpersonal encounters (Fletcher and Thomas
1996). The availability and accessibility of knowledge structures and relational
elements, such as commitment and accommodation, can have an incredible
influence on present and future thoughts and communicative behaviors (Etch-
everry and Le 2005). Language in action develops, modifies, enhances, and
perhaps even dissolves the knowledge structures we can access. For example,
rewriting negative scripts for self- or other-talk into positive ones can serve to
generate new knowledge structures of self and other and over time if negative
scripts are not accessed they can weaken. Knowledge structures that develop
over the course of relating and relationships help us to create scripts and schema
that guide both verbal and nonverbal interactions. These relationally con-
structed scripts also provide information about the nature and course of various
emotions in their relationships (Fitness 1996). Unfortunately, ascertaining some
of the cognitive influences on the message output in an interaction poses the
most difficult challenge.
This challenge has been met in present times through convenient digital
media methods such as digital recording and replay (e.g., Verhofstadt et al.
2005), unobtrusive audio recordings of daily conversations (e.g., Alberts et al.
2005), and through more traditional methods such as maintaining a diary across
interactions (Duck et al. 1991; Goldsmith and Baxter 1996), or at the very least
comparing self-report data with observations (e.g., Qualter and Munn 2005).
These research tools provide the researcher with the important ability to cap-
ture talk in action, and in the case of diary studies offer longitudinal insight.
Researchers (and participants) can take a discursive psychological approach
to charting shifts in cognition and language outcomes by looking closely and re-
flecting on interactional goals in a moment-by-moment manner (see Wetherell,
Taylor, and Yates 2001). Warner (2002) suggests a microanalytic approach (e.g.,
detailed information about the behavior, affect, and/or physiology of social
interaction among participants) to capture the moment-to-moment exchange of
behaviors that occur as partners are relating in everyday contexts. The wide-
spread availability of the internet and computer-mediated interfacing offers yet
another tool for the examination of on-line processing. Lurking in a chat room
or instant-messaging forum where the researcher provides participants with
changing goals in an interaction could be a useful way of charting language
shifts as they relate to new interpersonal goals.
In addition to investigating dynamic interaction goals, Berger (2005) sug-
gests social interaction researchers should take more interest in the role of emo-
tions in both close relationships and more impersonal relationships to glean a
better understanding of how emotions shape our communication and how con-
text and rules for communicating shape our display of emotions. A recent special
issue on emotions in personal relationships (Fitness and Planalp 2005) points
to the inextricable, yet complicated ways that emotions influence relationships
and vice-versa. Moreover, a lifespan focus on emotions and relationships pro-
vides evidence that older and younger adults experience and process emotions
differently (Carstensen et al. 2000). Fitness (1996) argues that an emotion-script
analysis provides insight into the on-line processing of relational interactions
and would be useful in providing an additional link between relational cognition
and communication. This could be particularly insightful across age cohorts and
across relationship types. Research that does take an interaction-focus moves a
step closer to understanding the dynamic as well as dialectical nature of lan-
guage and behavior, but often does so in ways that are limited in terms of time
and task (Rusbult, Yovetich, and Verette 1996).
8. Conclusion
With this chapter, ways in which we can better investigate, better understand
and, as a result, better relate across interpersonal contexts are highlighted. By
taking a linguistics for problem-solving approach, we first argued that inter-
personal relationships and the contexts in which they flourish (or falter) are
dynamic and complicated. Linguistics for problem-solving involves socially ac-
countable applied research (Knapp and Antos this volume) designed to bring the
research focus out of laboratory and to the actual sites of linguistic and cogni-
tive behavior. People relate through various forms of talk (self-talk, relational
talk, computer-mediated talk, public discourse, etc.) simultaneously forging and
auditioning different personal, relational, and social identities. Thus, we must
strive to capture relating where the vast majority of relating is occurring. That
is, we should focus our attentions toward everyday contexts across a variety of
relationships from impersonal encounters to our most intimate ones. Moreover,
the changing social psychology of individuals, relational partners, and even so-
cial groups over time warrants a life-span approach. For example, investigating
the long-term influence of communication and accommodation across time and
across relational context is an important next step in understanding the social
psychology of personal and intergroup relationships as they develop over time.
More and more, scholars are investigating the interdependence between
communication and cognition. However, as we argue earlier, researchers tend to
approach social interaction primarily from either a communication or a cogni-
tion perspective, rather than emphasizing their powerful mutual influence. We
hope to have successfully argued for a shift in focus that includes the dynamic
interplay of communication and cognition. We further hope that the perspec-
tives, methods, and tools for investigating the social psychology of interper-
sonal relationships offered herein provide a fertile ground for future research
and theory development.
Notes
1. This is in comparison with communication accommodation theory which does take

into account shifts in accommodative strategies within a single interaction (Gallois,
Ogay, and Giles 2005).
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3. Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
Dennis Day and Johannes Wagner
1. Introduction
The fundamental questions addressed in this volume the manifestation, devel-

opment, and maintenance of interpersonal relationships as a function of lan-
guage and other semiotic resources in interpersonal communication will in
this chapter be explored using methods from ethnomethodology and conver-
sation analysis. Complying with the data driven method of research in ethno-
methodology and conversation analysis, we will use a fragment of a naturally
occurring interaction to illustrate the unique perspectives these two approaches
have to offer. Specifically, we will address how the interlocutors in the fragment,
through the positioning of particular linguistic and non-linguistic signs, mani-
fest to each other the relevance of a variety of interpersonal relationships and
how they thereafter develop and maintain those relationships within their inter-
action. In doing this, we will introduce the following conceptual tools: turn-tak-
ing, indexicality and reflexivity, and recipient design and membership categoriza-
tion device. These notions will enable us to view interpersonal relationships in
light of how they are manifested semiotically through interlocutors co-orien-
tations within an emergent, reflexively and collaboratively constructed spate of
social activity. Interpersonal relations are ordinary peoples concerns, therefore
the focus for the analysis is their own methods for manifesting, developing, and
maintaining these relations. This is to say that rather than trying to correct
these methods by reformulating them as issues of, for example, cognitive dis-
sonance or face considerations, the perspective of ethnomethodology and con-
versation analysis is to stay within the language, actions, and common sense of
interlocutors.
2. History of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis
Historically, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology emerged in the Cali-

fornia of the 1960s, when Harold Garfinkel (1967, 2002; Heritage 1984) ques-
tioned the credo in sociology that social order is created by the institutions of
human society. By studying social order as a practical (empirical) achievement,
Garfinkel could demonstrate that social order is created in interactions by the
participants as are social institutions (see Section 3.2. below about indexical-
ity and reflexivity). Garfinkels work in Los Angeles was akin to the work of
34 Dennis Day and Johannes Wagner
others close by at Berkeley, especially Erving Goffman (1967) and John Gum-
perz (Gumperz and Hymes 1964), who rethought the relationship between ac-
tivity, social order and language. This is the environment in which conversation
analysis took form as the most advanced study of the details of social order and
human interaction.
In the early studies (e.g., Sacks 1972; Schegloff 1968; Sacks, Schegloff, and
Jefferson 1974), conversation analysis described social order as a recognizable
social practice where turn taking and repair secure intersubjective understand-
ing. In these early years, data were mainly but not always collected in
mundane everyday interactions which were and still are seen as the richest
environment for human interaction. In the later years, conversation analysis has
expanded considerably out of sociology into other fields as communication
(e.g., Nofsinger 1991), psychology (e.g., Antaki 2004; Potter and Edwards
2001) anthropology (e.g., Moreman 1988), and applied linguistics (e.g.,
Gardner and Wagner 2004). More than analyzing recordings of telephone talks,
new studies try to understand the fine-grained work of participants in multi-
modal interactions where gesture, gaze, talk, and the bodys placement in space
demonstrably are one contingent phenomenon (Goodwin 1981, 2003). More
than analyzing everyday interaction, institutional communication has taken a
central position in conversation analysis (Drew and Heritage 1992) and results
from conversation analysis are used in professional environments, such as
medical care (Maynard 2003; Heritage and Maynard 2006), media and journal-
ism (Clayman and Heritage 2002), the law (Atkinson and Drew 1979), business
(Boden 1994), helplines (Baker, Emmison, and Firth 2005), and others.
Ethnomethodology has, through the years, not been so concerned with con-
versation as such, but has rather incorporated it into an interest in human social
activity generally, from giving directions (Psathas 1986) to the discovery of
astronomical phenomena (Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston 1981). Of late,
researchers from a variety of disciplines have been keen to follow ethnometho-
dological pursuits into the study of work, particular work as it is carried out
in technologically complex environments (e.g., Button 1992; Heath and Luff
2000).
In the remainder of this chapter we will demonstrate the procedural ap-
proach of conversation analysis by an analysis of a fragment of talk (Section 3.).
Before highlighting differences between conversation analysis and ethnometho-
dology (Section 5.) we will, in Section 4., briefly discuss the interactional con-
text of the extracts used in Section 3.
Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis 35
3. Analysis of a fragment of talk
Throughout this chapter we will illustrate our arguments with fragments of a

telephone call.1 The first 50 lines of the transcription are printed as Appendix 1
to this chapter. Transcriptions are intended to document features of spoken in-
teractions to which written language normally does not attend. Therefore, tran-
scriptions differ significantly from ordinary written texts. The main features of a
transcript are often a modified orthography (ello instead of Hello), indication of
pauses, prosodic features, and overlapping talk. Further, a workable transcrip-
tion will note sublexical elements such as breathing noise and laughter. A list of
transcription conventions is included as Appendix 2.
Gail Jefferson (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) developed these fea-
tures of transcriptions in the founding years of conversation analysis.2 Detailed
transcriptions allow the analyst to describe interactions as developing in real
time and as interplay between different speakers. For example, when Jefferson,
instead of just indicating laughter in the margin of the transcript as everybody
had done before her, started to capture the hearable features of laughter as hh
hh hhh or hhe hhe hha, she made the sequential architecture of laughing
available for analysis and showed how laughter is created in cooperation be-
tween the speakers over a spate of time.
Transcription symbols may make reading more difficult, but at the same
time as a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarization effect)
remind the readers that they are not just reading a written text and that the inter-
actions, represented by the raw audio or visual signals, are the real object of the
analysis. During the later years, digital technology has made access to sound
and video easy at any point of the transcription; and conversation analysis is in-
creasingly using these digital tools for corpus construction and for making data
used in the analysis available for the reader.
3.1. Turntaking
A major focus of conversation analysis has been the study of talk as it emerges
in its sequential environment. Telephone openings, as in the following fragment,
illustrate nicely the mechanics of turn-taking and its role in the overall activity.
Fragment 1 Gailport, Golf

1 MsA: Ello:?
2 Guy: Ello is Curly there?
3 (.)
4 MsA: Oo jis (.) Who:?
5 Guy: Johnny?h An[ville?]
6 MsA: [Oo j]ista minnih,
When reading the first lines of the fragment, we can easily recognize what ap-
pears to be the beginning of a phone call (Ello:? Ello), in which a caller
requests to talk to someone other than the call-taker. Further, the caller refers
to a person using a term (Curly) which is not immediately recognized by the
call-taker (Who:?) and which is repaired to a fuller reference (Johnny?h An-
ville?). We may note as well that the recognition of the person asked for by
the call taker in line 6 might have taken place even a bit earlier than it does.
Johnny?h, as indicated by the transcription, is delivered as one possibly free-
standing unit with rising final intonation and might have triggered recognition
by the call taker on its own before the family name is offered. In other words, we
can see the caller offering the family name since the call taker does not indicate
recognition after the first name.
As a member of a society in which such phone calls are regularly conducted,
we are immediately able to produce the sensible context for the talk and under-
stand the impact of what somebody is doing when offering a nickname (Curly).
With its use, the caller, Guy, is indicating a particular social relationship he
holds with Johnny Anville which we will gloss for the time as being friends. We
will discuss below how one might pursue an analysis of such phenomena and
what they portend for an understanding of interpersonal relationships as they are
coordinated cumulatively throughout the call. Some 15 seconds after MsAs last
turn in line 6, Johnny picks up the phone.

19 Joh: Hello:?
20 Guy: Johnny?
21 Joh: Ye:h.
22 Guy: Guy Hoffmeyer.
23 Joh: Hi Guy how you doin.=
24 Guy: =Fine.
As MsA in the first segment, Johnny offers an Hello?. Schegloff (1968, 1979,
1986) has shown that this first utterance is actually a response, an answer to the
summons represented by the ringing of the phone. Its main purpose is to indicate
that there is a call taker available to talk to. At the same time, the Hello? gives
a voice sample which allows the caller the opportunity to identify the call-taker.
Hearing the Ello in Fragment 1, the caller can decide that the call-taker is not
the person he wants to talk to while Hello in Fragment 2 is enough for him to
launch an other-identification, Johnny. This gives Johnny the information that
the caller knows him well enough to identify him and makes at the same time
the voice of the caller available. If Johnny had recognized the caller, he could
simply have mirrored other-identification with a Hi Guy. But Johnny is appar-
ently not able to identify Guy and replies with a confirmation of the other-identi-
fication, leaving the floor to Guy who self-identifies with first and family name.
We will discuss later in detail how this cline of moving from a reference by nick-
name to self-identification by full name can be analyzed, but at the moment we
want here to indicate three different aspects of turntaking which this sketchy
analysis of the first few lines in phone interaction reveals.
Firstly, the fragments illustrate the fundamental sequential nature of talk-
in-interaction. All talk occurs in time and occupies a spate of time. This affords
certain possibilities to the participants in an interaction. Any contribution to an
interaction, as for example the initial Hellos in fragment 1 and 2, occur on the
basis of a preceding event, here the phone ringing. Taking the phone and saying
hello sets the stage for a certain next activity by the caller. Taking the phone
and producing just a minute sets the stage for another activity. As we have
seen, depending on who the call-taker is, the hello opens up for several pos-
sible next actions by the caller, but all of them are bound to be heard as a next
to the hello. Conversation analysts have studied the sequentiality of talk in great
detail and shown that a contribution to the talk will always be heard as following
and in some way responding to the immediately preceding contribution.3 And it
will open up for the next contribution. In general, a next contribution to the talk
will be heard as indicating the way in which the immediately preceding con-
tribution has been taken to mean (the principle of contiguity in talk) and creates
itself a possible space for the next contribution.
As we do not have the space to discuss both fragments in detail, we ask the
reader to give it a go on his/her own. The reader will discover that some utter-
ances project a range of immediately possible nexts of a certain type. A ques-
tion, for example is a first pair part and projects an answer (second pair
part). Very often, the answer will be followed by an acknowledgment of the
answer by the questioner (sequence closing). Other utterances do not project
action on behalf of the next speaker, but pave the way for later actions by the
same speaker as, for example My son-in-law is down here and I thought we
may play a little golf opens for an invitation to join the game (cf. Fragment 3,
lines 3033, below).
Secondly, the form of a turn at talk is produced in relation to its sequential
environment. When Guy uses the term Curly he builds his reference to be
understood by somebody who knows that Johnny may be referred to by this
nickname. Not having been successful, he produces in a second attempt,
Johnny? h Anville?, hearable as a possibly free-standing unit, including the
family name after there is no immediate uptake by the call-taker. Note that Guy
does not repair his first try as Is Johnny Anville there or I would like to speak
with Mr. Anville since the repair initiation Who:? in line 4 specifies exactly
what MsA needs to get repaired. In other words, a turn at talk does a certain
job in the talk; and its form is sensitive to the local environment in and for
which it is being built.
Thirdly, Fragments 1 and 2 demonstrate how technology influences interac-

tion. The traditional land line phone creates the possibility to meet other people
through voice only. The first tasks which participants in a phone call face is to
secure that the line is established (summons answer) and who caller and call-
taker are to each other (self- and other identification). In a face-to-face meeting,
these activities are either not done or done very differently because the partici-
pants share time and space. They can see each other and they share the condi-
tions for hearing each other. Interestingly, Guy and Johnny make exactly these
technological constraints an issue in the talk which follows Fragment 2.
3.2. Indexicality and reflexivity

In Fragment 2, Johnny and Guy get through the opening phase of the call very
straightforwardly. They identify themselves and Johnny initiates a short how
are you. So far, the call could go anywhere but then, Johnny comments on
Guys appearance, a comment which may strike one as very odd.

25 (.)
26 Joh: Yer lookin goo:d,
27 Guy: Grea:t.hhh Sor you:.hh-hh Grea:t. Gotta nice
28 smile on yer face[n erry]thng.
29 Joh: smile on yer face[( )] Yeah.hh
30 Guy: hh hh hhh Hey uh,hhwhhkhh My sonlaws downn:d
31 uh:::,hh thought wmight play a lil golf:: eether
32 this afernoon er duhmorruh wouldju like tuh (0.3)
33 hhhh (0.3) git out? uhh
34 (.)
35 Joh: Well this afnoond be alright but I dont think ahd
36 better to morrow,
37 (0.6)
38 Guy: We:ll?
39 (0.6)
40 Joh: Cuz (.) we dont My sisters gonna come do:wn tmorrow
In a face-to-face meeting, line 26 may follow up on the (normatively expected)

positive response to a how are you sequence. We do not know why Johnny is
using this phrase in a phone call but we can see what he achieves by it. Its ab-
surdity moves the call from the slightly stiff way the opening phase has been
produced into a jokey mood and opens up for a non-serious topic.
Note that the micro-pause at line 25 is sequentially a place where Guy
might reciprocate Johnnys how are you, for example with an and how are you.
Another possibility for Guy as the caller would be to introduce his reason for
the call and to get down to business. But what we witness is rather something we
can hear as an inside joke. We cannot know the history of the joke, nor are
there any other details concerning it provided. Given the affordances of this
land line telephone, however, we can understand it as describing an impossible
physical state which is not problematic in the least for Guy and Johnny, i.e., as
something people with a particular sort of relationship might share. Returning
briefly to the inside jokes sequential placement and the work these turns at talk
accomplish, we can note that Johnny has taken a turn allowed to him by a pause
which we can hear as owned by Guy, i.e., it was Guys turn to talk. Johnny
uses this opportunity to initiate what can be heard as the mutual telling of an
inside joke. And, when this is completed, the business of the call is embarked
upon (line 30).
We see at play quite poignantly here a central pair of features of interactions,
namely, indexicality and reflexivity. Together, these terms account for how any
utterance in its sequential environment is built on earlier context (indexicality)
and itself creates a new context for what is possibly coming up (reflexivity).
Johnny builds on the preceding how are you sequence which is standard in a
phone opening. But doing this with an absurd formulation, he invokes a specific
relationship, which we discuss below in Section 6., he and Guy have built in ear-
lier encounters. In this way, the joke creates the context for what turns out to be
the business of the call, a suggestion for Johnny to join Guy and his son-in-law
for golf.
As in line 25, it is Guys turn to speak in line 3. According to the principle of
contiguity, whatever he says should be heard as having to do with the preceding
turn, Guy might take Johnnys ?Ye?ah.hh. as an enthusiastic response to
Guys reciprocal joke and might go on joking or Guy might deem the time
right to move forward, and treat line 29 as a sequence closing. In line 30, Guy
produces hearable breathing sounds. This can be heard as him taking the turn
without speaking and creating a distance between the last turn (line 29) and the
upcoming turn. In other words, he moves the upcoming turn away from the last
turn, weakening the contiguity between the turns. This delay and the turns first
word Hey prepares the grounds for a change of topic. We will just encourage
the reader to register the way the suggestion for playing golf is produced: Guy
might have done this in all kind of ways Wanna play a little golf today?,
I thought about playing golf, what about you?, the possibilities of making
this suggestion are countless. How does he do it in lines 3033 and what is he
achieving by the way he is doing it? And at what point might Johnny respond to
the suggestion? He does it rather late although Guys words in line 32 wouldju
like are already recognizable as a suggestion for joining them. What does
Johnny achieve hereby?
3.3. Recipient design and membership categorization

Turns are built to be heard by specific recipients. Recipient design is the achieve-
ment by the speaker to fit the ongoing talk not only to the sequential environ-
ment, but to the expected knowledge and here-and-nows of the addressee. In this
way, the design of a turn-at-talk indicates who the speakers take the addressee to
be. We have of course seen this in action throughout our analysis thus far. MsAs
Ello at line 1 is designed for someone who has summoned the household on
the telephone, Guys response at line 2 is likewise designed for a call-taker,
and so forth. It is obvious that this aspect of recipient design is very closely tied
to the particular turns at talk within this particular activity. Within these turns,
however, there are mentionings of other people. These mentionings are simi-
larly constrained by recipient design such that their adequacy as referring de-
vices is determined by the extent to which the speaker has fitted his/her talk to
the expected knowledge of the addressee. The failure in reference in line 2 by
Guy with his referring expression Curly indicates a failure in recipient design.
Harvey Sacks (1974) introduced the notion of membership categorization
device referring to the way in which categorizations rely on social categories,
e.g., policeman, mother, deviant, and how these and associated social categories
might be organized into collections, known as membership categorization
devices, sharing family resemblance to each other. Furthermore, such categories
may provide for particular sorts of predicates, for example typical actions
or other characteristics, to be made of candidate members of a category. Such
actions or other characteristics are referred to as being category-bound (Sacks
1992; Jayusi 1984).
Of special interest to Sacks, and those who have followed him, has been the
following problem: Given that a person may be described correctly in an in-
finite number of ways on a given occasion, what are the principles of a proper
description? One such principle by which a description becomes proper
is through it being heard as relevant in lieu of it falling under a membership cat-
egorization device which is relevant to the talk at hand.
Sacks describes a certain type of device which may be of use here, namely
devices which are duplicatively organized:
If some population has been categorized by use of categories from the same device
whose collection has the duplicative organization property (e.g. family, base-
ball team, etc.) and a member is presented with a categorized population which can
be heard as coincumbents of a case of that devices unit, then hear it that way
(Sacks 1974: 221).
The classic example from Sacks, derived somewhat atypically from a book of
stories by children, is how we understand the expression The baby cried, the
mommy picked it up. Sacks contends, and the reader is encouraged to try this
on their own, and we hear the mommy as the babys mommy. While the full
analysis would be too lengthy here, the basic idea is that if we can hear the ren-
dering of the categories, mommy and baby, as belonging to the device, members
of a family, we hear them that way. We may say that picking up their babies is
a category bound predicate of mommies, something mommies are expected
to do. Thus, when offered a description of some mommy picking up some baby,
we infer they are members of the same family unless of course we know of some
reason not to do so.
Membership categorization analysis, along with the analysis of turn se-
quencing and recipient design, provide a powerful analytic toolkit with which
relationships between interactants can be understood (Sacks 1992; Antaki and
Widdicombe 1998; Hester and Eglin 1997a). Fundamental, and perhaps most
distinctive, in this regard is the injunction in ethnomethodology and conver-
sation analysis to stay within the talk. For our case here, this implies that
whatever Guy and Johnnys relationships may be outside of the talk, they are
only relevant if demonstrably consequential for the particulars of this talk. Re-
call from above how context is created through indexicality and reflexivity.
Something previous in the talk, or even outside the talk, altogether may be
pointed to indexically and create a context reflexively for some next action. In
this way, a description of Guy and Johnny as friends may become a proper
description. This is to say that their friendship must be something which they
point out, for example by the use of particular categorizations, here and now.
Guy and Johnny may be correctly described in a vast number of ways but their
proper description as friends demands orientation to this on their part.
If we are to maintain that Curly signifies Guys contention of friendship
with Johnny, then we may say the relevant device in use is the duplicatively or-
ganized friends device. Friends must come in, at least, pairs or, in semantic
terms, friend is a converse term. Using a nickname, Curly can be heard as a
category-bound predicate of the friends device, that is using nicknames to refer
to each other is hearable as something friends do. Others may recognize a
nickname, in the sense that it may adequately refer, but not themselves be in-
cumbent to the category, i.e., a member of the friends group. Johnnys wife,
MsA, could be an example of such a person, however, here Curly does not ac-
complish reference with her. For the time being, one might envisage that the sort
of friends that Guy and Johnny are effectively excludes members of other, simi-
lar relations, here husband wife.
We would now like to draw your attention to Fragment 2. As discussed
above, we have a similar identification sequence as initially in the call. Worth
noting is that identification is not accomplished by voice recognition, both
Johnny and Guy use their names to identify themselves. Furthermore, Guy does
not use the term Curly. One could then hear the earlier attempt to refer to Johnny
by using Curly as an unsuccessful attempt to demonstrate closeness to Johnny
which is not repeated here.
In lines 3136, we witness the reason for Guys call he wants Johnny to
join him in a game of golf. Guy begins in line 31 by offering a reason for his
wanting to play, his son-in-law has come for a visit, and in asking Johnny if hed
like to git out, offers two possible times, this afternoon or tomorrow. Johnny,
at line 34, responds affirmatively to the afternoon, but negatively to tomorrow.
In the same way as Johnnys ( )?Ye?ah.hh at line 29 allowed Guy to con-
tinue, the ensuing pause at line 36 and Guys subsequent well following it can
be heard as calling for the following account by Johnny as to why he is not avail-
able for golf tomorrow.
Concerning what sorts of friends Johnny and Guy are, or alternatively
what comprises our friends device, we can, at this point in the conversation,
conclude that they are the sorts of friends who have a history of some note, in-
dicated by the inside joke. They play golf together. Visiting male family
members is a viable reason to play golf, as in Guys case, and visiting female
family members is a viable reason not to play golf, as in Johnnys case.
The relationship between Guy and Johnny is an ongoing affair demanding
interactive work between the two of them. Our own common-sense allows us
easily to see they are some sort of friends. Just what sort of friends they are,
what sorts of incumbencies their particular friendship entails, is a negotiated
matter. Further, this category negotiation is not an end in itself, but embedded
within and contingent upon turns at talk, with their own practical tasks and
sequential contingencies. Describing the work Guy and Johnny do in order to
do being friends allows us to go beyond our own common-sense and into the
intricate architecture of a common social structure, namely friendship relations.
While people may be friends for life, in interaction with each other their friend-
ship is, nonetheless, contingent upon bringing that friendship into the inter-
action. The same is of course true for any other social relation of which one may
be a part.
4. Practical activities
Although Guy and Johnnys friendship is, for us, a thoroughly endogenous af-
fair, i.e., it is a collaboratively manifested within the boundaries of this interac-
tion, this does not entail that our interest in Guy and Johnny need stop there.
Guy and Johnnys telephone call is, for them, not an isolated island of activity in
their daily lives, rather an activity which is undoubtedly motivated by previous
activities and one which, in its turn, is prerequisite to future activities. Further-
more, the call itself has most likely interrupted ongoing activities in Johnnys
home.
Later in the call not shown here, Guy momentarily leaves the call to search a
phone number to a golf course. That the search was unsuccessful prompts a later
call to directory assistance for the number. Guy then calls the course to book a
tee-time for their upcoming match and calls back to Johnny to give him driving
directions. With regard to these post-call activities, we can see the call under in-
vestigation here as task-setter whereby a host of future activities are launched as
a response to a problem in the call, i.e., the unavailability of the golf courses
phone number, or a consequence of work done in the call, i.e., Johnnys accept-
ance of Guys invitation. These activities involve the establishment or mainten-
ance of relationships between people, not least what is implied by the assign-
ment of task responsibility between Guy and Johnny. These activities also
involve the competent use of communication technologies with their concomi-
tant affordances which, in their turn, may involve changes in modality and
media (see, for example, Hutchby 2001; Heath and Luff 2000).
While a consideration of, in this case, a telephone call and how it is part of
what we may call an assemblage of activities is relatively rare in conversation
analytic and ethnomethodological studies, we feel it is a fruitful line of inquiry.
Concerning interpersonal relationships, it would be quite interesting to see how
relationships established in one activity, for example between Johnny and Guy,
impinge upon quite different relationships in another activity, for example be-
tween Guy and the golf-course personnel. Recall how an analysis of a similar
sort was offered above concerning Guy and Johnny vis a vis Johnnys wife,
MsA. Also of interest would be how relationships develop over various com-
municative technologies as well as over various modalities and media. For this
call, it would be interesting to explore how friends actually go about their golf
game, particularly the relationship work between Johnny and Guy vis--vis
their guest, i.e., Guys son-in-law.
Finally, pursuing such a study within the framework offered by ethnometh-
odology and conversation analysis generally, and membership categorization
analysis specifically, would, in contrast to more abstract procedures such as sem-
antic field analysis or social network analysis, firstly allow the analyst to stay
close to the lived world of the people in whom s/he is interested, secondly, allow
accounts for these phenomena in relation to other systematicities of social
interaction, and thirdly allow, through careful documentation of observations
by way of audio/video files and transcriptions, the possibility of replicability of
findings.
5. On some differences between conversation analysis

and ethnomethodology
Throughout our demonstration above, we have expended little effort in discern-

ing whether a particular analytic resource derives from conversation analysis or
ethnomethodology. We have not done so for the simple reason that such a task,
whatever its merits, would be exceedingly difficult and often speculative. His-
torically, ethnomethodology came first and its treatment of indexicality and
reflexivity are still today cornerstones of ethnomethodological as well as conver-
sation analytical research. An interest in the everyday lives of ordinary socie-
tal members, consistent with Garfinkels (1967) critique of Parsonian sociology
as a sociology of deviance and Goffmans (1983) interest in the interaction
order, soon led, however, to an interest by many followers in how members
interact through talk. Not only is such interaction postulated as the primordial
site of sociality, convenience also played a role by way of the availability of
cheap sound recording equipment.
While conversation analysis obviously grew out of ethnomethodology, there
were and are differences between the two. Already in 1988, Atkinson noted:
In the current state of its development, ethnomethodology in general is not easily
distinguished from the more specific development of conversation analysis. The
latter pays special attention to the fine-grained analysis of naturally occurring spoken
interaction (and, more rarely, to the coordination of spoken and nonverbal activities);
this is the most consistent and productive area in the tradition. Not totally distinct
from other domains of ethnomethodological work (much of which draws on its find-
ings), conversation analysis has its own characteristic set of concerns and pro-
cedures. [] However, in certain respects conversation analysis has diverged from
ethnomethodologys original inspiration. In particular a tension exists between the
specific treatment of conversations sequential order and more general interests in
mundane reasoning (Atkinson 1988: 442).
Have (2002) sees the distinction between a general interest in mundane reason-
ing and conversations sequential order from a methodological perspective. The
latter is seen as relying on mediated observation through recordings and the
former as relying on direct observation by the researcher. Thus findings from
conversation analysis and ethnomethodological studies are reported quite differ-
ently: conversation analytical studies generally include a collection of instances
of a phenomenon found in a data set of transcripted recordings. Ethnomethodo-
logical studies, on the other hand, look very much like ethnographies, relying
to great extent on the description of a setting and its events as witnessed by the
researcher.
More fundamental discrepancies between conversation analysis and eth-
nomethodology have, however, been forwarded. Returning to Atkinsons point
above, Crabtree (2001) discusses the ethnomethodological critique of conver-
sation analysis reliance on rendering practices, here the coding of conversa-
tional phenomena through the application of rigorous procedures quite foreign
to the lived work of interactants. Thus, what is lost is insight into interactants
everyday, mundane reasoning and competencies. Membership categorization
analysis is another case in point in its somewhat equivocal status between
conversation analysis and ethnomethodology (see, for example, Wowk and Car-
lin 2004). How interactants categorize themselves and the world around them,
provides rich insights into everyday reasoning. Moreover, membership catego-
rization analysis is often grounded in the analysis of everyday talk. Many prac-
titioners of conversation analysis, however, have been critical of membership
categorization analysis for not dealing sufficiently with the sequential environ-
ment of members categorization (see, for example, Schegloff 2007).
Interestingly, despite these significant and reciprocal critiques, there appears
to be an ensuing opportunity for closer cooperation between ethnomethodology
and conversation analysis in their more applied strands of research. Applied
Conversation Analysis (see, for example, Gardner and Wagner 2004, Richards
and Seedhouse 2004 and works therein), and its counterpart in ethnomethodol-
ogy known as hybrid studies (see, for example, Crabtree 2004) seem dedicated
to the assistance of practitioners in real world settings. Such work may very well
demand more empiricism from ethnomethodologists as well as a re-engage-
ment with the ordinary from conversation analysts.
6. Further reading
There are several introductions to conversation analysis, for example Hutchby

and Wooffit (1998) and Have (1999). Harvey Sacks lectures, published in
Sacks (1992), are an invaluable resource for conversation analysis as well as
ethnomethodology. Atkinson and Heritage (1984) and Boden and Zimmerman
(1991) are examples of classic anthologies within conversation analysis. For
membership categorization analysis, there are introductions, for example by
Lepper (2000) and Hester and Eglin (1997b) as well as anthologies, for example
Hester and Eglin (1997a) and Antaki and Widdicombe (1998). For Ethnometh-
odology, there are introductions, for example Have 2004 and Heritage 1984.
Foundational works by Garfinkel are Garfinkel (1967) and (2002).
Appendix 1
Fragment 1 (Gailport: 16Golf) (transcription Gail Jefferson) (simplified)

1 MsA: Ello:?
2 Guy: Ello is Curly there?
3 (.)
4 MsA: Oo jis (.) Who:?
5 Guy: Johnny?h An[ville?]
6 MsA: [Oo j]ista minnih,
(several lines omitted during which Johnny is called to the phone)
19 Joh: Hello:?s
20 Guy: Johnny?
21 Joh: Ye:h.
22 Guy: Guy Hoffmeyer.
23 Joh: Hi Guy how you doin.=
24 Guy: =Fine.
25 (.)
26 Joh: Yer lookin goo:d,
27 Guy: Grea:t.hhh Sor you:.hh-hh Grea:t. Gotta nice
28 smile on yer face [n erry]thng.
29 Joh: [( )]Yeah.hh
30 Guy: hh hh hhh Hey uh,hhwhhkhh My sonlaws downn:d
31 uh:::,hh thought wmight play a lil golf:: eether
32 this afernoon er duhmorruh wouldju like tuh (0.3)
33 hhhh (0.3) git out? uhh
34 (.)
35 Joh: Well this afnoond be alright but I dont think ahd
36 better tomorrow,
37 (0.6)
38 Guy: We:ll?
39 (0.6)
40 Joh: Cuz (.) we dont My sisters gonna come do:wn tmorrow
41 Guy: (Yih weh?)
42 Joh: Ah ha:h?
43 Guy: Oh.
44 Joh: t hhh Where dyuh wanna go:.
45 Guy: Oh I dknow,hhh hhhhh Wut about dat SAN JUAN HILLS
46 down ere.
47 Guy: Yuh think we cget on ere?
48 (.)
49 Joh: Ye:s I think so:,
50 Guy: Do yuh?
51 Joh: h Ya:h?
52 Guy: hhhhhh (0.3) d-Dihyou have a phone number form,h
Appendix 2
Transcript conventions (cf. Jefferson, Gail (2004). Glossary of transcript sym-

bols with an introduction. In: Gene H. Lerner (Hg.). Conversation Analysis:
Studies from the first generation, 1331. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Ben-
jamins.)
[] Left and right brackets indicate beginning and end of overlap.
(0.0) Numbers in parentheses indicate silence by tenths of seconds.
(.) Micropause.
:: Colons indicate prolongation of the immediately prior sound. The
longer the colon row, the longer the prolongation.
Arrows indicate shifts into especially high or low pitch.
. , ? Punctuation markers are used to indicate intonation:
, level intonation
; slightly falling intonation
. falling intonation to low
slightly rising intonation
? rising intonation to high
WORD Upper case indicates especially loud sounds relative to the surround-
ing talk.
word Degree signs bracketing a sound, word, phrase, and so on, indicate es-
pecially soft sounds relative to the surrounding talk.
hhh A raised dot-prefixed row of hs indicates an inbreath. Without the
dot, the hs indicate an outbreath.
word Underlining indicates stressed syllables
= Latching between turns or parts of turns
Notes
1. The data are part of the GAILPORT corpus. The full transcript and access to the sound
is available at TALKBANK.ORG
2. For an alternative transcription system GAT cf. Selting et al 1998
3. Instead of providing a long list of references we refer to Paul ten Haves CA bibli-
ography at http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/emca/resource.htm (last access: November 16,
2007).
References
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chology 14: 667683.
Antaki, Charles and Sue Widdicombe (eds.)
1998 Identities in Talk. London: Sage.
Atkinson, Paul
1988 Ethnomethodology: A critical review. Annual Review of Sociology 14:
441465.
Atkinson, John M. and Paul Drew
1979 Order in Court: The Organisation of Verbal Interaction in Judicial Settings.
London: Macmillan.
Atkinson, John M. and John Heritage (eds.)
1984 Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Baker, Carolyn, Michael Emmison and Alan Firth (eds.)
2005 Calling for Help: Language and Social Interaction in Telephone Helplines.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Boden, Deirdre and Don H. Zimmerman (eds.)
1991 Talk and Social Structure: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation
Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Boden, Deirdre
1994 The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Button, Graham
1992 Answers as interactional products: Two sequential practices used in job in-
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Clayman, Steven and John Heritage
2002 The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air. Cambridge:
Crabtree, Andy
2001 On the practical availability of work-practice. Ethnographic Studies 6:
716.
Crabtree, Andy
2004 Taking technomethodology seriously: Hybrid change in the ethnomethod-
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1992 Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge
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1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Garfinkel, Harold
2002 Ethnomethodologys Program: Working Out Durkheims Aphorism. Edited
and introduced by Anne Rawls. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Garfinkel, Harold, Michael Lynch and Eric Livingston

1981 The work of a discovering science construed with materials from the
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2004 Second Language Conversations. London: Continuum.
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1983 The interaction order. American Sociological Review 48 (February):
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1981 Conversational Organization: Interaction between Speakers and Hearers.
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baum.
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cess: November 2, 2007).
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bridge: Cambridge University Press.
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2001 Conversation and Technology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Polity Press.
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1984 Categorization and the Moral Order. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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4. Interactional Sociolinguistics1
Susanne Gnthner
1. Introduction
Imagine the following scene: You are working as a visiting lecturer/professor at

a Chinese university. One late afternoon you are taking a walk around campus,
when a Chinese colleague approaches you: Good afternoon Ms. X (Mr. Y).
Have you eaten yet? You might interpret this utterance as a pre-sequence to a
following invitation for dinner. Full of expectation you answer: No, not yet.
You are, however, quite puzzled when your colleague responds with: Well,
then I do not want to disturb you any longer. I am sure, you must be hungry.
Bye-bye.
What happened in this interaction? The Chinese colleague translated the Chi-
nese greeting formula Chi guo le ma? (Have you eaten yet?), intending to con-
vey something like English How are you?. You, however, interpreted the utter-
ance as a possible pre-sequence of a following invitation for dinner. In China the
expression Chi guo le ma? addressed to someone in the street simply functions
as a form of greeting. If the co-participant reacts by answering No, not yet,
s/he indicates that s/he is in a hurry and not up for a chat. In case s/he answers
with something like Dont worry; I just had my meal. I am not hungry, s/he
conveys her/his interest in having a chat.2
Instead of analyzing the propositional content of constituent utterances and
reducing language to an abstract structure, Interactional Sociolinguistics aims at
studying the interpretation and function of linguistic forms in socially and cul-
turally situated discourse. In the case of the introductory episode, this perspec-
tive implies questions like: What greeting routines do speakers use with whom
in which cultural and social contexts? What do reactions to someones remarks
reveal about their willingness to talk? Do differences in greeting (who greets
whom with what formula in which situation?) reveal anything about the relevant
community of speakers?3
As part of Anthropological Linguistics, Interactional Sociolinguistics is
concerned with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context,
its role in constructing and sustaining cultural practices and social structures
(Foley 1997: 3). Focusing on communicative practices as the real world site
where societal and interactive forces merge (Gumperz 1999: 454), Interac-
tional Sociolinguistics a term proposed by the anthropologist and linguist
John J. Gumperz seeks to forge links between Linguistics and the Social
Sciences.4
54 Susanne Gnthner
In the following, I will present an outline of the most important theoretical

issues underlying current work in Interactional Sociolinguistics. Central con-
cepts of Interactional Sociolinguistics (i.e., indexicality, inferencing, contextuali-
zation, communicative activities, or genres as well as social, ethnic and cultural
identities) will be introduced. In order to show how these concepts can be applied
in actual analyses, I shall discuss various examples from my own research.
2. Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS): Its background and goals
Interactional Sociolinguistics is grounded in earlier studies in the Ethnography of

Communication. It can be described as an approach to discourse analysis that
has its origin in the search for replicable methods of qualitative analysis that ac-
count for our ability to interpret what participants intend to convey in everyday
communicative practice (Gumperz 2001: 215). A basic underlying assumption
in Interactional Sociolinguistics, one that is widely shared by students of any lan-
guage use, is that grammar and lexicon, while necessary, are not sufficient for
participation in discursive interaction. Interpretation of what is intended at any
one point always depends on additional inferences based on background knowl-
edge, including among other things, beliefs and values of the surrounding com-
munity, applicable principles of speech etiquette and shared understandings of
what communicative ends the interaction is designed to achieve.
Whereas Ethnography of Communication initially relied on ethnographic
observations to find out how language is used in social/cultural events, Interac-
tional Sociolinguistics has focused directly on turn by turn interpretative pro-
cesses in interactions and on analyzing how interactants communicate meaning
in social situations, concentrating on interactants own context-bound, situated,
on-line processing of information.
Similar to interpretative approaches within social theory (e.g., Ethnometh-
odology, Goffmans studies on the interaction order, the Sociology of Knowl-
edge), Interactional Sociolinguistics assumes that social processes are ultimately
constructed in everyday interactions, that social activities are interactively
organized, and that social and cultural knowledge (including communicative
knowledge) is reproduced, confirmed, and modified in interactions. Interac-
tional Sociolinguistics, thus, aims at studying the interrelationship between
language, language use, and sociocultural processes by focusing on situated,
context-bound processes of interpretation.
During the last 20 years, research in Interactional Sociolinguistics and An-
thropological Linguistics in general has refined its insights into the interplay of
language use and social/cultural processes and developed aspects of a theory of
communicative practice dedicated to analyze the complex relationship between
language structure, language use, contexts/situations, and cultural knowledge
Interactional Sociolinguistics 55
(Gumperz 1982; Hanks 1996; Gnthner 2000, 2003). The focus on communi-
cative practices provides a perspective that attempts to integrate cultural knowl-
edge of communicative situations and actions into a wider approach to analyz-
ing cultural presuppositions involved in human interactions (Gumperz and
Cook-Gumperz 2007). This raises questions such as the following: How do in-
teractants infer what others intend to convey? How are linguistic (i.e., phono-
logical/prosodic, morphosyntactical, semantic, pragmatic) elements used to
construct communicative meaning and activities? How can we account for in-
teractants ability to negotiate meaning and construct communicative activities?
How do communicative practices relate to interactants social, cultural and
communicative background? How is the interplay between linguistic, social,
and cultural aspects constrained by universal as well as locally-specific organi-
zational principles?
3. Central concepts of Interactional Linguistics
As Interactional Sociolinguistics has drawn on concepts such as indexicality, in-

ferencing, contextualization, communicative activities, or genres as well as so-
cial, ethnic, and cultural identities to provide analytical tools for understanding
how communicative processes are interactively constituted, I shall introduce
those concepts and provide examples from my own research in order to illus-
trate how to work with them.
3.1. Inferencing, contextualizing, and indexicality

In order to account for participants ongoing process of communicating mean-
ing in interactions and, thus, for methods participants use to perform and inter-
pret social activities, John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz have devel-
oped the theory of contextualization.5 Its theoretical and methodological
implications combined with its insistence on empirical analysis makes it a
powerful approach for the in-depth-analysis of inference processes in intercul-
tural as well as intracultural communication.
The concept of contextualization implies that interactants relying in part on
their background knowledge construct the contextual presuppositions they
orient to in carrying out their interactive activities: by producing verbal or non-
verbal activities, speakers enact the particular context for the interpretation of
these particular activities.6 Contrary to structuralist notions of context as a
given entity, the theory of contextualization suggests a flexible, dynamic,
partly interactionally negotiated concept of context. The relationship between
context and discourse (or text) is a reflexive one; i.e., one in which talk in inter-
action is in part determined by context as it is commonly understood, but at the
56 Susanne Gnthner
same time talk also contributes to the construction of context. Thus, speakers
do not just produce utterances in order to transmit referential meaning and
information, they also contextualize them and make them interpretable by the
use of certain empirically detectable features the so-called contextualization
cues.7 As metapragmatic signs, contextualization cues represent speakers
ways of signaling and providing information to interlocutors and audiences
about how language is being used at any one point in the ongoing stream of
talk (Gumperz 1996: 366). As indexical signs, contextualization cues (based
on prosodic, morphosyntactic, lexical, stylistic, code-bound options as well as
on mimic and gesture) do not always have referential meaning. Their communi-
cative function is mostly relational; i.e., they cannot be assigned context-free
interpretations (such as high pitch register signals indignation or code-
switching into Standard German means social distancing); but they play a
major role in constructing social action. Due to their inherent vagueness, speak-
ers often use several co-occurring cues situated on various linguistic levels.
The ways we contextualize meaning and interpret contextualization cues are
shaped by socioculturally specific conventions: in order to interpret the utter-
ances of their counterpart adequately, interactants have to recognize the present
communicative situation and the embedded contextualization cues as an in-
stance of typified schemata and relate them to my stored sociocultural knowl-
edge. A shared repertoire of contextualization conventions is an essential
prerequisite for communicative cooperation. Interactants in intercultural com-
munication often do not share the same contextualization cues. As various
studies in intercultural communication have shown (Gumperz 1982; Tannen
1984; Hinnenkamp 1989; Erickson and Shultz 1982; Gnthner 1993; Scollon
and Scollon 1995; di Luzio, Gnthner and Orletti 2001; Kotthoff 2002), system-
atic cultural differences in the conventions and principles evolve that guide the
way a conversational intention is signaled. For example, what may sound like
a reproachful voice for Southern German ears (such as falling terminal pitch,
rising-falling pitch movements, narrow or verum-focus, global increase of
loudness, lengthening and glide on the verb, etc.) may not necessarily sound re-
proachful to Northern German or even Shanghai ears (Gnthner 1996).
Let us now look at a specific example to illustrate how contextualization
works in interaction and how inferencing processes i.e., interpretative pro-
cedures by which participants assess what is communicatively intended at any
one point in an interaction and on which they rely to plan and produce their re-
sponses (Gumperz 1999: 458) are taking place within ongoing interaction.
The transcript segment is taken from a German dinner conversation among
friends (Hanna, Urs, Fritz, Klara, and Gerd). After Hanna (line 1) mentions
Mustafa, a Turkish friend of hers and Urs, Urs reports news about Mustafa,
who has just received the MUS ter(.)BR ger PREIS (the prize for a model
citizen):
(1) MUSTAFA8
01 Hanna: des hat doch hi MUS(h)tafa(h) au schon hi fest-

ge(h)stellt.
Actually hee Mus(h)tafa(h) already hee no(h)ticed that.
02 Urs: MUStafa hat den (.) MUS ter(.)BR ger PREIS be-
kommen.
Mustafa got the (.) model (.) citizen prize.
03 Hanna: <<behaucht> WA:(h)S.> haha[haha NEI::N.]
<<aspirated> Wha(h)t!> [hahahaha No.]
04 Fritz: [hahahahaha NEI::N]
[hahahahaha NO::.]
05 ()
06 Urs: also da es sOwas berHAUPT gibt,
Actually, its astonishing that they would do something like this.
07 also es gibt irgendwie jeder LANDkreis darf also
vorbildliche br[ger,]
Every county is allowed to choose model cit[izens,]
08 Hanna: [hhm]
[hhm]
09 Urs: so ein, zwei pro LANDkr[eis aussuchen.]
about one or two per [county.]
10 Hanna: [oh:::::oh::]
[oh:::::oh::]
11 Urs: und die kriegen dann die <<f> MUS ter BR ger ur KUN
de.>
And these people receive a <<f> model citizen certificate.>
12 <<f> baden WRTTem[berg,>]
<<f> Baden Wuerttem[berg,>]
13 Gerd: [hm.]
[hm.]
14 Urs: [natrlich sEIn dorf]schultes hihi in BER(h)gen(h)-
dorf hat gedAcht,
[Of course, his mayor] heehee in Ber(h)gen(h)dorf thought:
15 Gerd: [( )]
[( )]
16 Urs: << f> U- TRke.>
<< f> Uh, a Turk>
17 << len> der sich gegen AUSlnderfeindlichkeit en-
gagiert,>
<< len> who is committed to fighting the discrimination of
foreigners>
58 Susanne Gnthner
18 << len> und gleichzeitig en HUSle ba[ut,>]

<< len> and at the same time builds a little [house,>]
19 Gerd: [haha]
[haha]
20 Urs: [der sich ANpasst ] und gleichzeitig gegen dIs-
kriminierung;
[who conforms] to German life and at the same time is against
discrimination.
21 Gerd: [hahahahahahahahahahha]
[hahahahahahahahahahha]
22 Urs: [< des isch doch Ideal.>]
[< This is just ideal.>]
23 Klara: [AU::::: nei::::n.]
[oh no]
24 Urs: <<, flsternd> und der SCHAFFT (.) wie en brun-
nebUtzer,>
<<, whispery voice> And he works like a dog,>
25 <<, flsternd> hot no a GSCHFT und goht no in d
schIcht zum->=
<<, whispery voice> has his own business and does
shift work->=
26 Hanna: =<<len> und [d=frau] trgt au koin SCHLEIer.>
=<< len> and [his wife] doesnt wear a veil
either.>
27 Urs: [zur (.)]
[to (.)]
28 Urs: << len> und d=frau trgt koin SCHLEIer.> (-) <<f>
GENAU.>
<< len> And his wife doesnt wear a veil (-) <<f>
Exactly.>
29 Klara: und fnf KINder ham se.
And they have five children.
30 Urs: genau. und no hat ihn VORgschlage,
Exactly! And then he suggested to him,
31 und no dann wurd wurde er jetzt MUSterbrger.
and then- then that now he would become a model citizen.
32 U/K/F: hahahahahahahaha[hahahahahahaha]hahahaha
hahahahahahahaha[hahahahahahaha]hahahaha
33 Hanna: [NEI:::::::::N]
[NO:::::::::::!]
34 K/G/U: hahahahahahaha[hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha]
hahahahahahaha[hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha]
35 Hanna: [<<> woher weisch DU [des.>]

[<<> How do you know?>]
36 Klara: [(ach) GOTT ach gott)]
[oh God oh God]
37 Urs: und ich denk da er des so:::-
And I think that he like-
38 ich kann mir des gUt vorstellen wie er erZHLT hat;
I can imagine how he said that;
39 so halb irOnisch, halb mit [STOLZ.]
half ironically half [proudly.]
40 Hanna: [jaja.]
[yeah yeah.]
41 Urs: eh: em KLAUSpeter hat ers erzhlt.
eh: em He told it to Klauspeter.
42 U/G: hihihihihihihihihi
heeheeheeheeheehee
43 Klara: sind nicht die KINder leider (-) ehm nur MDchen ge-
worden.
Isnt it unfortunate that the children (-) ehm they all turned out to
be only girls?
After providing the news about Mustafas prize for being a model citizen,
the interactants initiate a mocking sequence. In line 14, Urs starts to reconstruct
the mayors inner monologue by announcing it metapragmatically as [natrlich
sEIn dorf]schultes hihi in BER(h)gen(h)dorf hat gedAcht, ([of course his
mayor] heehee in ber(h)gen(h)dorf thought,). The use of the antiquated term
dorfschultes for the village-mayor as well as the giggling interspersed through-
out this announcement index a playful modality. Using direct reported speech,
Urs confronts his recipients with the imagined world of thought of the village-
mayor (lines 1626). Here, he switches to a dialect variety (Swabian); he speaks
in a low pitch register and decreases his tempo. Thus, Urs uses various co-oc-
curring contextualization cues as a communicative resource to achieve specific
interpretative effects. These indexical cues contribute to animate the quoted
dorfschultes and stylize him as rather naive and provincial. This stylization
is supported by the clich-like thoughts attributed to the mayor: he highly values
a Turkish citizen who is not only engaged in the fight against discrimination but
who also meets the Swabian ideals of Husle bauen (build your own home)
and schaffen wie en Brunnebutzer (to work like a dog). The whispery voice is
intended iconically to reflect his inner world of thoughts. The animation of the
mayors world of thought can be regarded as an implicit way of social catego-
rization. Instead of producing explicitly lexicalized evaluations of the village-
mayor (as simple-minded, provincial, etc.), code-switching into a marked com-
60 Susanne Gnthner
municative style in order to animate a particular character can be seen as an im-

portant resource to contextualize ones opinion or attitude (Gnthner 2002).
Thus, contextualization cues function as important cues in the inferential
process: first of all, these indexical signs (the switch into dialect combined with
the low pitch register and decrease of tempo indicate a new voice speaking)
contrast with the preceding utterances; second, due to their inherent meaning
potential they give direction for the inferential process. In the transcript
example (1) MUSTAFA, code-switching into dialect in combination with pro-
sodic cues (lines 1618, 20, 22, 2425) work to portray the mayor as rather un-
educated, slow, and provincial (as opposed to cosmopolitan, well-educated, and
distinguished). Thus, contextualization cues do not only establish a contrast and
thereby indicate a change of activities, but they also restrict the amount of plaus-
ible inferences (Auer 1992; Gnthner 1993).
Furthermore, in (1) MUSTAFA, recipients reactions in lines 19, 21, and
23 motivate Urs to go on with his mise-en-scne of the mayors inner mono-
logue. Finally the co-participant Hanna chimes in and co-constructs the follow-
ing social character: <<len> und [d=frau] trgt au koin SCHLEIer.> (<<?,
len> and [his wife] doesnt wear a veil either.>; line 26). In her collaborative
completion of Urs turn, Hanna not only continues the mayors argumentative
line by providing a further argument for Mustafas political correctness, she
also takes over Urs prosodic design (the low register and the broader Swabian
dialect) to animate the mayors thoughts, and thus confirms Urs construction of
a social type. This kind of chiming in (by taking over the already established
prosodic marking and linguistic variety of the animated character) functions as
a means of indexing co-alignment with the reporters chosen social categori-
zation.
The transcript segment (1) MUSTAFA illustrates how contextualization
cues located on various levels influence the interactive process of negotiating
meaning.
3.2. Genres9
In communicative situations, meaning is negotiated on the basis of the com-
municative intent, inferences, and sociocultural knowledge of the participants.
A good part of this knowledge is knowledge about the use of genres.
During the last 20 years, studies within Sociology of Knowledge10 as well as
within Anthropological Linguistics11 have repeatedly addressed the issue of
communicative or discourse genres. They provide a theoretical conceptuali-
zation which links the notion of genre to the theoretical model of social construc-
tivism (Berger and Luckmann 1966). As communicative genres represent a cen-
tral communicative means in the construction of social reality, they turn out to
play a major role within an approach to communicative practice (Hanks 1987).
Communicative genres represent historically and culturally specific, prepat-

terned, and complex solutions to recurrent communicative problems (Luck-
mann 1986). Members of a culture usually have the knowledge of communi-
cative genres which are necessary to use in their life-world; e.g., they know how
to tell a joke, they recognize when someone else is telling a joke, and they also
know in which situations it is adequate to tell what kind of jokes (Gnthner and
Knoblauch 1995). Thus, genres can be seen as frames, embodying presupposi-
tions associated with ideological values and principles of communicative con-
duct that in a way bracket the talk and thereby affect the way in which we assess
or interpret what transpires in the course of the encounter (Gumperz 1999:
456). In choosing a particular genre, a speaker makes use of culturally seg-
mented solutions to communicative problems, and at the same time due to
their prepatterning genres do not only relieve the speaker, but also assist the
recipients in limiting the interpretative possibilities of utterances by relating
them to the specific frame (Luckmann 1986, 1992). The interactants knowl-
edge that communicative processes take on recurrent forms does not only guide
the communicative actions themselves but also their interpretations. Thus, the
orientation towards generic forms is an important component of inference pro-
cesses in interaction.
The analysis of genres does not only allow for the description and expla-
nation of communicative practices in detail, but provides access to interpre-
tative processes by establishing an essential analytic link between speaking
activities in the ongoing interaction, the social context, and cultural ideologies
(including communicative norms, expectations, etc.) of a particular group.
Thus, genre analysis goes far beyond the task of classifying discursive activ-
ities: it mediates between situatively produced texts and larger sociocultural
contexts.12
If we take communicative genres as socially constructed solutions which or-
ganize, routinize, and standardize the dealing with particular communicative
problems, it seems quite obvious that different cultural groups may construct
different solutions for specific communicative problems. Thus, the repertoire of
communicative genres varies from culture to culture (Gnthner 1993, 2007;
Gnthner and Luckmann 2001): besides having culturally different repertoires
of communicative genres, often seemingly similar genres (e.g., scholarly dis-
cussions, gossip, sermons, jocular stories, etc.) or minor forms (greetings, com-
pliments, reproaches, etc.) are used differently by members of different com-
municative cultures (Knoblauch 2001).
The use of the little genre13 of proverbial sayings provides an example for
differing stylistic conventions and different cultural assessments of seemingly
similar genres. In German, proverbs are treated as the wisdom of the little
man, and books on style advise against using them (Gnthner 1993). In Chi-
nese, however, to ornament ones argumentation, academic thesis, or speech
62 Susanne Gnthner
with quotes from proverbial sayings is highly valued and appreciated as a sign
of good education (Gnthner 1993, 2007). Studies on Chinese rhetorics report
that proverbial sayings are traditionally used to support ones argument, as the
power to convince traditionally relies on analogies and on citations of recog-
nized authorities, anecdotes, and proverbial sayings (Gnthner 1991). In argu-
mentative sequences, Chinese speakers frequently refer to proverbial sayings
(especially to chengyu14) in order to back up their arguments. In using these
communicative forms, they not only present their own assertions as being part
of traditional and still valid collective wisdom but also demonstrate their good
education and show their strong links with traditional norms and forms of wis-
dom. Even in intercultural contexts, Chinese speakers frequently make use of
proverbial sayings to back their arguments.
The following transcript (2) TIANANMEN 1989 is part of an interaction be-
tween the German student Eva and the Chinese student Bu. They are talking
about the situation in China after the Tiananmen incident in June 1989. (The in-
teraction took place in summer 1989 in Germany). Eva asks Bu why there are no
more protests in China against the Tiananmen massacre:
(2) TIANANMEN 1989
15 Eva: und jetzt im moment gibt es ja keine weiteren

proteste in kina?
And now at the moment, are there any more protests in China?
16 (-) oder?
(-) right?
17 Bu: im moment hat die bevlkerung in schina ja
sehr grOe ANgst. [ja]
At the moment, the people in China are very much afraid. [Yeah.]
18 Eva: [mhm]
[mhm]
19 Bu: wird sehr ein- ge eh schchtert ja.
(They) are very inti- mi eh dated, yeah.
20 in schina gibts ja so ein sprichwort,
In China there is such a proverb
21 das heit eh? (--)
that says eh (--):
22 <<f> sa yi jing bai.> (-)
<<f> sa yi jing bai.> (-)
23 eh (.) ja, das bedeutet so,
Eh (.) yeah, this means:
24 wenn man einen ja umbringt,
If you kill one,
25 dann ja gleichzeitig eh (-)

then, at the same time, eh (-)
26 schchtert man eh hundert weitere leut ein.[ja]
(-) you intimidate eh another hundred people. [Yeah.]
27 Eva: [ahja]
[I see.]
28 (1.0)
29 Bu: deshalb gibts ja momentan keine groe proTESTaktio-
nen oder so was.
Therefore, there is at present no real big protesting or things like
that.
Bu supports his position concerning the political situation in China after Tian-
anmen and thus provides an explanation by quoting the proverbial saying
<<f> sa yi jing bai.> (Kill one, warn hundred; i.e., if you kill one person, a
hundred more will be warned; line 22). He introduces the proverb by explicitly
announcing it and referring to the cultural community it comes from (in schina
gibts ja so ein sprichwort, in china there is yeah such a proverb,; line 20). Fur-
thermore, the proverb is set into the running discourse text as a montage: short
pauses before and after the saying (lines 21 and 22), code-switching into Chi-
nese combined with particular prosodic features; i.e., a particular rhythm and an
increase of volume set this little genre apart from the surrounding text. By quot-
ing this traditional saying, Bu provides ancient knowledge about strategies of
Chinese politics and thereby backs his statement that at the moment people in
China are afraid and intimidated (lines 1719).
In Chinese-German interaction, Chinese speakers in contrast to Germans
make frequent use of proverbs. This little genre fulfills an important function in
the backing of arguments: it allows speakers to demonstrate their classical
knowledge and to present their own assertions as being part of traditional and
still valid collective wisdom. However, the frequent use of proverbs by Chinese
interactants is not restricted to oral genres. Even in academic texts, Chinese
writers often support their arguments by referring to traditional wisdom in the
form of a proverbial saying (Gnthner 1991, 1993). Furthermore, Chinese stu-
dents of German (English, French, etc.) often use German (English, French,
etc.) proverbs in similar ways. In many Chinese universities, the teaching of
foreign languages includes teaching of proverbs in the respective languages:
German theses or other academic papers written by Chinese students often start
with German proverbs such as Aller Anfang ist schwer (the first step is always
the most difficult) or Was Hnschen nicht lernt, lernt Hans nimmermehr (you
cant teach an old dog new tricks). Chinese teachers of German, thus, transfer
onto German language use their culturally shaped attitudes towards the genre of
proverbs which enjoys such a high status in China.
64 Susanne Gnthner
As one of the main concerns for Interactional Sociolinguistics is to provide

insights into linguistic and cultural diversity characteristic of todays communi-
cative environment, a systematic analysis of the use of culturally differing reper-
toires of communicative genres serves as an important analytic tool with which
to achieve this goal.15
3.3. The construction of social and cultural identities in interactions

A further aspect closely connected to interactional sociolinguistic focus on lin-
guistic and cultural diversity is the study of identity constructions in interac-
tions: How do interactants construct particular cultural and social identities
through communicative practices? How do they use linguistic heterogeneities to
position themselves in everyday encounters?16 Focusing on the development of
communicative practices can provide new insights into the workings of social
and cultural identities as well as diversity in modern societies.
In the following, I shall demonstrate in some detail how communicative
practices such as ritual insults are used by adolescents to do identity work
and form in-group connections. Narrative interviews and conversations col-
lected among male adolescents with migration background in German youth
centres in Mnster and Hamm show that these young men (17 to 23 years old)
frequently make use of insulting remarks when addressing one another.17 ON
and PA are 19- and 17-year-old male adolescents of Turkish and Iranian origin
respectively. They meet almost daily at a youth centre, play games, listen to
music, or play at the computer. In general, they communicate in German; some-
times they switch into Turkish.18 ON is sitting at a computer trying out different
names for his e-mail-address, when PA joins him:
(3) WUDDIE I (MNSTER)
01 ON: <<ff> ey PLAYBOY,>

<<ff> Hey PLAYBOY!>
02 <<f> komma=HER;
<<f> Come=ERE!;
03 (0.5)
04 <<all> stell=dich=ma eben=hin und hilf mir ma=mit=n
<<all> Stand=here for=a=sec and help me=find
05 NAmen suchen>
find a NAme.>
06 PA: (0.5) < hey GAMMler;>
(0.5) < Hey LAZYass!>
07 ON: sag mal was GEHT=N heut bei (dir)!
Tell me whats the matter with (you),
08 (1.0)
09 ON: HA?
HU?
10 PA: was?=
What?=
11 ON: =wo kommst du=n HER?
=Where do you come from?
12 PA: < zu hause;>
< At home.>
13 ON: <<unglubig> WAS?>
<<sceptical> WHAT?>
14 PA: zu HAUse;
At HOme.
15 ON: <<scherzhaft> warste am SCHten oder was,>
<<jokingly> Were you high or what?>
16 PA: ( )
( )
17 ON: <<flsternd> EY, mach ma=n bisschen niKITA
<<whispering> EY, do get down on niKITA
18 un=so fertig ALTER,>
and=others ALTER.>
When PA enters the room, ON addresses him with the first pair part of a greeting
sequence <<ff> ey PLAYBOY,> and asks to help him find a name. PA replies
with the conditionally relevant second part: < hey GAMMler;> (< hey
LAZYass;>) responding to ONs ritual insult. After this initial greeting routine
and PAs statement that he came from home (lines 12 and 14), ON enforces the
jocular modality by asking PA whether he was consuming drugs at home:
<<scherzhaft> warste am SCHten oder was,> (<<jokingly> were you high
or what,>) (line 15).
Sometimes speakers supply their insulting remarks with laughing tokens in-
dicating a playful tone of voice as shown in example (4) WUDDIE II
(MNSTER):
(4) WUDDIE II (MNSTER)
77 PA: < trotzdem (.) das klingt doch gut.>

< Still, (.) this sounds good.>
78 ((ON tippt etwas am Computer))
((ON is typing something with the computer))
79 ON: YES:
YES.
66 Susanne Gnthner
80 (1.5)
81 ON: VERPISS dich geh ma woanders hin <<lachend> du
GAMMler;>
PISS off! Go somewhere else <<laughing> you LAZYass;>
82 PA: <<lachend>( ) ALTER>
<<smiling>( ) MAN.>
83 (4.5)
84 ON: VERPISS dich du SCHWUCHtel;
PISS off you POOF!
85 (4.0)
86 ON: BOA mein LIEBlingsfilm;
BOA my FAvourite film!
ONs utterance VERPISS dich geh ma woanders hin <<lachend> du

GAMMler;> PISS off go somewhere else <<laughing> you LAZYass;> (line
81) is partly accompanied by laughter thus marking the modality as joking. PA
joins the playful modality and replies with a further remark (which is not intelli-
gible). ON (in line 84) returns the apparent insult by intensifying his attack with a
hint of homosexuality VERPISS dich du SCHWUCHtel; (PISS off you POOF;).
Most insulting remarks in the data consist of brief exchanges usually includ-
ing two turns. Rarely, as in this example (4) WUDDIE II (MNSTER), we find
a more extended form (with three and more turns). Such extended sequences
come close to what Dundes, Leach, and zkok (1972) describe in their study
on Turkish boys verbal duelling activities: male adolescents demonstrate their
communicative skills in selecting appropriate retorts to provocative insults.
Also in our case, ON is demonstrating his insulting skills by topping the preced-
ing offences. In besting PAs reply, ON constructs his status in this group. When
PA does not react (and thus gives in), ON switches topic and starts talking about
his favourite film. Thus, insults among these young men turn out to be con-
nected to the negotiation of social status; i.e., dominance and hierarchy within
the group is constructed by means of producing and reacting to verbal insults.
In his work on the Turkish Power Boys, Tertilt (1996: 198202) discusses
playful insults and verbal duelling as important means to construct masculinity
among those male adolescents. Ritual insults are according to Tertilt (1997:
164) a cultural technique, which instructs these young males (with mi-
gration backgrounds) how to display a macho disposition by showing aggres-
siveness, dominance, and coolness (Tertilt 1996: 206209). Dundes, Leach and
zkok (1972: 158) argue that ritual insults and verbal duelings as conven-
tionalized genres among Turkish (and Arabic) male adolescents are to be con-
sidered in connection with Turkish (and Near Eastern) concepts of masculinity;
therefore these genres focus on topics such as manliness and sexuality, sexual
subordination, and homosexuality.19 The insults in the data also mainly revolve
around a specic range of topics; i.e. stupidity, being a layabout, manliness, sexu-
ality, and homosexuality.
As the following sequence (5) WUDDIE 3 III (MNSTER) also taken
from the interaction between ON and PA shows, not all kinds of insulting
terms are accepted within the group; i.e., inadequate insulting terms get re-
jected. In line 32, PA addresses another guy who is entering the room calling
him a N:IGGER in an aggressive tone of voice:
(5) WUDDIE 3 III (MNSTER)
30 ON: =die meinten der ist voll der DO un=so;>

=They said he was totally NERVe racking and=so=on.>
31 (2.0)
32 PA: <<zu einem anderen; aggressiver Ton> (ey du)
N:IGGER,>
<<to another guy; aggressive tone> (Hey you) N:IGGER!>
33 ON: .hh
34 (2.0)
35 ON: ach NICH mit NIGGER MANN;
Oh no, NOT with NIGGER MAN.
36 hr auf mit so=m SCHEI:SS;
Quit that kinda SHIT!
ON explicitly opposes PAs use of the address form N:IGGER and asks him to
quit that kinda SHIT (lines 3536). Again, the negotiation of social status is at
stake: ON is the one who tells PA what insulting terms to use or what not to use.
These short sequences demonstrate that insulting remarks have a variety of
functions in this group of interactants: they are used as a conventionalized, in-
group way of addressing co-participants. Furthermore they function as means to
construct hierarchies and social status within the group (by means of striking
back, giving up, determining what terms are inappropriate, etc.). At the same
time, we can observe that not everything goes; i.e., not all kinds of insulting
forms are accepted.
As part of their socio-cultural style, ritual insults, furthermore, turn out to be
closely connected to the construction of common identities among those adoles-
cents. By adapting this conventionalized Turkish (or Near Eastern) practice
to their situation as migrants, elements of different cultures are blended: the
Turkish genre and the German language. Thus, a new hybrid communicative
genre seems to be developing which conveys transitional social and cultural
identity.20 In an interview sequence with ON and PA, they state that German
youths have problems understanding their way of talking. As an example for
such misunderstandings they refer to beleidigungen (insulting remarks):
68 Susanne Gnthner
(6) WUDDIE (HEURL; MNSTER)
232 ON: wenn einer (.) der nich zu uns gehrt,

if someone (.) who doesnt belong to us,
233 und einmal mit uns is;
and hes with us once;
234 der wrds uns vielleicht nich so gut verstehen;
hes not really gonna understand;
235 PA: (--) was wir (.) meinen;
(--) what we (.) mean;
236 ON: oder er wrd irgendwas ernst nehmen
or he might take something serious
237 was gar nich ernst gemeint is;
that wasnt meant like that;
()
281 ON: alles was was es an beleidigung gibt;
All those insults we have;
282 ON: [(.) is bei uns dabei so],
[(.) for us its like],
283 ? [((lachen))]
[((laughter))]
284 ON: aber das is dann halt keine beleidigung (.)[fr UNS
so ](.)
But its not really an insult (.) [for US ].(.)
285 PA: [(())]
[(())]
286 ON: weil das is nich ernst gemeint-
Because its not serious-
287 das is immer mit=nem lcheln;
its always with a smile.
ON and PA are talking about communicative problems they have with people
who are not part of their group (i.e., someone, (.) who doesnt belong to us,
line 232): they dont understand their ways of talking and take things serious
which arent intended to be serious (lines 236237). A few seconds later, ON
refers to beleidigungen (insults) to exemplify what they mean by communi-
cative problems; he states what insulting remarks for them are: its not seri-
ous its always with a smile (lines 286287). Thus, he refers to the playful
modality these insults have for them (as a group); outsiders, however, might
misunderstand the intended playfulness and take them seriously. What is at
issue, thus, are shared vs. non-shared interpretations of communicative prac-
tices. Within the boys community of practices (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet
1998), insulting remarks turn out to be a sort of we-code which distances these
adolescents from those who do not know how to use this genre. One might argue
that the use of ritual insults serves as acts of identity (Le Page 1978); their use
contextualizes co-membership in a sub- or even a street-culture. Ritual insults,
thus, function as sub-cultural capital (Bourdieu 1990) used to position oneself
as insider and others as outsiders.
4. Conclusion: Contributions to (Applied) Linguistics and research

perspectives
Since talking and interpreting language do not take place in a vacuum but are
closely connected to social processes and cultural assumptions, Interactional
Sociolinguistics aims at the interplay of linguistic, social, and cultural forces
governing and constraining interactions. An analytic basis for studying these in-
terconnections are communicative practices in real everyday interactions.
Empirical studies of different areas show that Interactional Sociolinguistics
can be applied as a method of studying communicative situations of various
kinds; private as well as institutional, intercultural as well as intracultural. It
helps us sharpen our understanding of the different constraints that underlie in-
terpretative processes in ongoing interactions.
Various sociolinguistics topics which were marginalized during the last
2030 years are turning up again, and due to todays culturally and linguistically
diversified institutional and private settings new topics are arising. Thus,
todays diversified societies are a big challenge to Applied Linguistics. Here, In-
teractional Sociolinguistics offers theoretical as well as methodological per-
spectives by integrating the analysis of communicative practices with cultural
knowledge and social phenomena. Thus, topics like linguistic heterogeneities,
linguistic hegemony, language and ideology, linguistic performances in various
social and ethnic communities, language and identity, language(s) and globali-
zation, intercultural communication are challenges for research in Interactional
Sociolinguistics as well as in Applied Linguistics.
Notes
1. I am very grateful to John Gumperz for his comments on a previous version of this
article. Thanks to Gerd Antos, Eija Ventola, and Tilo Weber for their comments on an
earlier version of this paper.
2. Cf. Gnthner (1993).
3. Cf. Duranti (2001) for greeting rituals in different cultural contexts.
4. Cf. Eerdmans, Prevignano, and Thibault (2002).
70 Susanne Gnthner
5. For an introduction to the theory of contextualization cf. Gumperz (1982), Auer and
di Luzio (1992), and Gnthner (1993).
6. Cf. Gumperz (1982); Gnthner (1993).
7. Cf. Gumperz (1982); Auer (1986); Gnthner (1993).
8. The transcription conventions are based on GAT (cf. Selting et al. 1998).
9. The term communicative genre is often used interchangeably with terms such as
speech activity, activity type, or speech event. In the following, I will use the concept
of genre, as social theories (i.e., the sociology of knowledge; Luckmann 1986, 1992;
Knoblauch 2001) as well as anthropological linguistics (Hanks 1987, 1996; Gnth-
ner 2000) use this concept as an analytical tool situated between detailed analyses of
communicative practices and larger social contexts.
10. Cf. Luckmann (1986, 1992); Gnthner and Knoblauch (1995); Bergmann and Luck-
mann (1995).
11. Cf. Hanks (1987); Briggs and Bauman (1992); Gnthner (1993, 2000); Kotthoff
(1994, 1998).
12. Cf. Gnthner (1993, 2000); Gnthner and Knoblauch (1995); Hanks (1987); Knob-
lauch (2001).
13. The terms little genres or minor forms are used in accordance with Bakhtin (1976/86)
and Hymes (1974). Little genres or minor forms such as stereotypes, idioms, prov-
erbs, formulas, riddles, inscriptions, etc. are sequentially less complex; often they
are integrated in more comprehensive genres.
14. Chengyu are a special kind of Chinese proverbs. For a discussion of the folk-taxono-
mic categorizations of Chinese proverbs, see Gnthner (1993).
15. Cf. Gnthner and Luckmann (2001); Gnthner (2007).
16. The research group of Werner Kallmeyer and Inken Keim at the IDS (Institute for
German Language, Mannheim, Germany) has conducted various studies on com-
municative practices among different communities of migrants in Mannheim (Keim
2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2005; Kallmeyer and Keim 2003; Androutsopoulos 2001,
2003) focusing on social and linguistic development, linguistic repertoires, and com-
municative practices of migrant children and youth groups. Cf. also the studies by
Hinnenkamp (2000, 2001, 2005); Hinnenkamp and Meng (2005); Auer (2002);
Dirim and Auer (2004) on linguistic and cultural diversities in migrant contexts in
Germany.
17. Cf. also Bcker (2006).
18. Thanks to Tanja Bcker, Kristin Heurl, Albina Begischewa, and Maren Kienass for
collecting these data.
19. Within migrantion contexts in Germany, ritual insults, however, do not seem to be re-
stricted to male adolescents. As Kallmeyer and Keims (2003) studies demonstrate,
Turkish girls in Mannheim are not only familiar with ritual insults, but also practice
them.
20. Cf. also Hinnenkamp (2000, 2005) and Keim (2002a, 2002b, 2005) on hybrid forms
of communicating among Turkish adolescents in Germany.
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76 Susanne Gnthner

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5. Interactional Linguistics1
Dagmar Barth-Weingarten
1. Introduction
As a systematic field of investigation with distinct research goals Interactional

Linguistics is comparatively young. It emerged only in the middle of the 1990s,
mainly on the basis of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (cf.
Wagner and Day this volume), Interactional Sociolinguistics and Anthropologi-
cal Linguistics (cf. Gnthner this volume). From these, it adopted a range of
basic assumptions about language as well as essential methods and tools for its
analyses. At the same time, it employs the latter to arrive at its own goals, namely
to uncover the orderly details of natural interaction in terms of linguistic patterns.
As a case in point, observe the use of the connective and in the following ex-
cerpt (1) from a visit of a health nurse to a first-time mother.
(1) forceps (quoted from Heritage and Sorjonen 1994: 15)

1 HV: -> An di- did you have to have forceps or anything.
2 M: No:. Well I had an epidu:ral.
3 HV: Ri:[ght.
4 M: [No forceps.=
5 HV: -> =No forceps.=You (.) pushed her ou:t yourself.
6 M: Yeah ([ )
7 HV: [Lovely.
8 (2.1)
9 HV: -> And did she sta:y with you all the ti:me,
And prefaces the questions in lines 1 and 9, but not that in line 5. Heritage and
Sorjonen (1994), from whose study this example is taken, observed that the and-
preface in these sorts of exchanges related to the filling in of the nurses form is
often used in two functions: 1) it creates coherence in that it moves the activity
forward and constitutes the next question as part of the agenda, and 2) it ac-
knowledges the previous answer as a no-problem answer. Contingent questions,
in contrast, i.e. those without an and-preface, return to aspects of prior talk
which are somehow problematic, they bring the activity to a halt and sustain the
focus of the preceding question. Thus, by using the and, or not, in the example
the questions in lines 1 and 9 are marked as belonging to the nurses agenda of
enquiring about the course of the actual birth, while that in line 5 reworks one
procedural detail and thus brings the activity of stating and answering questions
78 Dagmar Barth-Weingarten
in order to fill in a form to a halt. Next to this regular usage of the and-preface,
Heritage and Sorjonen found it being employed strategically by the health visi-
tors, namely when, on the basis of its regular tasks, and is used to suggest dis-
continuing lengthy narrations by the parents visited and moving on in the
agenda as well as when it is used to de-toxify questions which are potentially
problematic in that they, for instance, question the mothers expertise (cf. Heri-
tage and Sorjonen 1994). The example thus illustrates the orderly use of a spe-
cific linguistic element to achieve particular interactional goals, and in that
sense addresses the two basic research questions at the heart of Interactional
Linguistics:
1) How are linguistic patterns shaped by interaction?
2) How do linguistic patterns themselves shape interaction?.
Interactional Linguistics is a perspective on language structure and use in-
formed by languages natural habitat in the interaction order (Couper-Kuhlen
and Selting 2001: 1), i.e., in contrast to an autonomist view, which sees lan-
guage as independent of its use, it claims that linguistic forms cannot be inves-
tigated without close attention to their co(n)text of occurrence, i.e., talk in inter-
action. As such, Interactional Linguistics offers a new approach to linguistics.
It deals with all aspects of language structure and use. This includes both the
core fields of linguistics, i.e., phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis,
semantics, and pragmatics, as well as those of a cross-disciplinary and more ap-
plied nature, such as language variation, language acquisition, loss, and disorder
(cf. Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2001; Selting and Couper-Kuhlen 2001). It is
this breadth of the field of investigation which turns Interactional Linguistics
into a starting point for many linguistic research questions and issues including
those relevant to applied linguistics.
In the following, I will provide an outline of Interactional Linguistics and
its relevance to applied linguistics. This includes a survey of the emergence of
Interactional Linguistics (2.), its basic concepts and methodological tools (3.),
research questions and future challenges to Interactional Linguistics (4.) as well
as its contribution to applied linguistics (5.). The chapter ends with a biblio-
graphy of cited works and further relevant references (6.).
Before setting out on this agenda, two caveats are in order. One concerns the
use of terminology in this chapter: similar to Conversation Analysis, Interac-
tional Linguistics is characterized by the frequent use of apparently common
words as terminology specific to this field. While it is neither feasible nor desir-
able to avoid all technical terms, I will try to keep this article as accessible as
possible by circumscribing relevant notions where possible and indicating tech-
nical terminology with italics. Secondly, it needs pointing out that this contribu-
tion aims at providing interested readers with starting points for further explo-
rations. Thus, it is restricted in its choice of foci as well as references.
Interactional Linguistics 79
2. Emergence of Interactional Linguistics
The emergence of Interactional Linguistics can be attributed to technological

advances as well as to progress in a number of scientific approaches to language
and its use in the second half of the twentieth century. The basic technological
pre-condition, which also laid the foundations for the predecessors of Interac-
tional Linguistics, was the invention of means to record interaction auditorily
(and later visually). In this way, speech became accessible as an object of scien-
tific investigation in its natural environment. Since the advent of the tape re-
corder, naturally occurring speech has become widely accepted as a research
object in its own right and is under investigation in a number of academic dis-
ciplines (cf. Brinker et al. 2001; also Thompson and Muntigel this volume;
Redder this volume). Among them are also the following, all direct prede-
cessors of Interactional Linguistics:
Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis have provided a considerable

number of concepts, methods and tools employed by Interactional Lin-
guistics. While Ethnomethodology attempts to uncover the participants
common-sense methodology for ordinary social interaction, Conversation
Analysis, coming from a sociological background, stresses the orderliness
of everyday conversation as an instantiation of social order (Sacks, Scheg-
loff, and Jefferson 1974; Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998; Schegloff 2007). Vari-
ous orders of conversational organization have been investigated, including
turn-taking, repair, sequence organization, person reference, etc. using
micro-analysis and methodological tools such as, for instance, the next-turn
proof procedure (cf. Section 3.2; also Wagner and Day this volume; Depper-
mann and Schtte this volume).
Interactional Sociolinguistics, Anthropological Linguistics, and the Eth-
nography of Speaking introduce a cross-cultural perspective. They focus
on the cultural diversity of social orders. This is investigated by a compari-
son of the speech exchange systems and the discourse strategies observable
in culturally different contexts (cf., e.g., Foley 1997). Interactional Sociol-
inguistics, in particular, is interested in the social situation of language
use. It assumes that we create context and identity in interaction. One of
its branches is the theory of contextualization. Contextualization Theory
focuses on the role of linguistic and other forms as meta-cues to meaning and
interpretation in specific contexts. It claims that participants construct con-
texts on the basis of contextualization cues, i.e., indexical signs which are
empirically detectable in discourse. Among these, we do not only find body
position, gesture, and gaze but, also prosodic features and code-switching
(cf., e.g., Gumperz 1982; Auer and di Luzio 1992; Eerdmans, Prevignano,
and Thibault 2003; Auer and Dirim 2004; Gnthner this volume).
The discourse-functional tradition subsumes a broad variety of scholars. All

of them are united in their focus on the motivated relations between lin-
guistic form and discourse function (cf. Cummings and Ono 1997; Ford,
Fox, and Thompson 2002). Here, overall pragmatic and cognitive considera-
tions have figured prominently, while the local contingencies and re-
levancies in conversational interaction have only more recently come to
play a role (e.g., Thompson 2002; Fox and Thompson 2007).
Within these, as well as other, research traditions investigating spoken language,
such as Systemic Functional Linguistics, scholars have frequently observed a sys-
tematic use of linguistic forms and patterns. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson
(1974), e.g., mentioned the role of syntactic constituency in determining when
a turn is ready for transition. Goodwin (1979) described the joint achievement of
a sentence. Heritage (1984) observed systematic regularities in the use of the par-
ticle oh. Lerner (1991) described the linguistic resources which enable partici-
pants to jointly produce turns. And, as early as 1979 Schegloff envisaged a Syntax
for conversation. Yet, especially within the frameworks of Phonology for
conversation in Britain (Local, Kelly, and Wells 1986; Local and Kelly 1989),
Discourse-Functional Linguistics in the United States (Ford and Wagner 1996;
Ochs, Schegloff, and Thompson 1996; Cumming and Ono 1997; Ford, Fox, and
Thompson 2002) and, in particular, of Interactional Linguistics, these orderly lin-
guistic aspects of language in talk-in-interaction have been focused on more com-
prehensively and systematically. While research in Interactional Linguistics is
mainly located in Europe (especially Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great
Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, and The Netherlands) and also in Korea and Japan,
there are multiple contacts and joint ventures between these research traditions.
3. State-of-the-art: Central concepts and methodological tools
3.1. Central concepts and theoretical assumptions

Interactional Linguistics is a descriptive, functional, linguistically informed ap-
proach to language and language use. Thus, it works with a wide range of terms
and concepts originating in descriptive linguistics. However, at the same time In-
teractional Linguists must constantly bridge the gap between linguistic notions
based on an autonomist, generativist approach to language and their own, often
opposed findings based on observed use (cf. also Section 4.). The main difference
between the two approaches is that Interactional Linguistics views language as a
fundamentally situated social phenomenon. This includes two aspects:
Language accomplishes actions, and
Language is language in use.
Interactional Linguistics assumes that language is not produced for its own sake
but serves the purposes of participants in interaction: the participants aim is to
accomplish actions, such as agreeing, assessing, or inquiring, and thereby to
carry out activities, such as accusing or complaining, asking for help or gather-
ing information on a form (Schegloff 1997) more generally, to manage every-
day tasks arising from having to organize their social lives via interaction. Lan-
guage, in turn, provides them with resources of all sorts, such as lexical items,
clausal and bi-clausal structures, connectives, questions, statements and im-
peratives, etc., for dealing with these communicative situations. Participants
systematic deployment of these resources becomes practices, i.e., recurrent
ways of accomplishing particular tasks in interaction. Often linguistic forms
have a specific function only in a particular environment. Hence, interactional
linguists claim that in order to obtain a realistic description of language it is not
sufficient to study linguistic structure out of context. Rather, the analysis of lin-
guistic patterns must be combined with an analysis of the actions and activities
carried out by them, because in contrast to corpus linguistics, for instance, lan-
guage patterns are assumed to be not only dialect- and situation-specific, but
also dependent on what actions/activities are carried out with and around them
(sequence-specific) and on how these actions are implemented (turn format-
specific).
At the same time, interactional linguists not only investigate what partici-
pants do and in what sequential order they do it but also how they do it. This
issue is approached from two basic research directions:
1) which linguistic resources are used to constitute particular conversational
sequences and to carry out interactional activities, and
2) which interactional actions and conversational sequences are accomplished
by particular linguistic resources.
Lindstrm (2005), for instance, investigates the syntactic formats used to make
requests in visits from the Swedish home help service to elderly citizens. In
these contexts she observes questions, statements and imperatives being em-
ployed. However, Lindstrm shows that there is a division of labor between the
respective clause types: while imperatives are used when the requestor is en-
titled to the help requested, questions occur with tasks that are not necessarily
part of the institutional context of the encounter. Statements, in turn, leave space
for negotiation whether they are to be understood as requests at all.
Language is at home in social interaction (Schegloff 1996). This is the case
both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, as well as in terms of where lin-
guistic practices become imbued with meaning. Therefore, in contrast to for-
mal linguistics, Interactional Linguistics assumes that the study of language
must account not for language as a highly abstract system, but for language in
use, the patterns of sound, syntax, semantics, lexis, and morphology as observ-
able (embodied) in social interaction. This has major implications for the inter-
actional-linguistic perspective on linguistic patterns with regard to their emer-
gence, their status as entities and the methods employed in their investigation:
Linguistic patterns are flexible and adaptable entities, which are collabo-
ratively achieved. The Interactional Linguistics approach to linguistic patterns
stands in stark contrast to many more traditional ways of thinking about lan-
guage. Linguistic forms are not conceptualized as fixed entities stored in a
speakers memory and retrieved from there in order to package content in what
may be pictured as message parcels to be sent off to recipients (cf. the conduit
metaphor; Reddy 1979). Rather, Interactional Linguistics conceptualizes lan-
guage as sets of resources, permitting linguistic practices, i.e., recurrent (rou-
tine) and recognizable ways of carrying out actions and activities, shared by the
members of a speech community. Linguistic patterns are thought of as dynamic,
constantly evolving and emergent (cf. Hopper 1998) in specific communicative
situations. This then also differentiates Interactional Linguistics from earlier
research on spoken language as well as from some functionally oriented gram-
mar models.
Deppermann (2005), for instance, describes the negotiation of the semantics
of a lexical item in a mediator session. By analyzing the example of throwing a
stone (einen Stein werfen), Deppermann shows how the initial meaning of the
verb is revaluated from an accomplishment interpretation, according to which
the stone is thrown at something and reaches its goal, to a mere activity inter-
pretation, i.e., throwing a stone without hitting a goal (cf. example (2)). The se-
mantics of the verb, of course, is of immediate consequence in terms of justify-
ing the accusation in the kind of communicative event at hand:
(2) throwing a stone

(quoted from Deppermann 2005: 296297; simplified and abbreviated tran-
script; the speakers use a German dialect)
1 Med: da ham se awwer AUCH- (.)

there have you but also
But there you have also
2 angegebe wie die TOCHter der Antragsgegnerin auf
declare how the daughter of the opponent on
declared how the daughter of the opponent on
3 dem <<len, berdeutlich pronunciert> geMEINsamen
the <<lento, hyperarticulated> common
the common
4 wschetrockenplatz einen stein auf die wsche
laundry drying ground a stone at the clothes
laundry drying ground
5 -> die dort hI:ng wAr:f.> (--)

which there hang cast
cast a stone at the clothes hanging there.
6 Pro:

10 -> also steht se im garde drin un !SCHMEIT!-
(--)
so stand she in the garden inside and throw
So she stands in the garden and throws- (--)
11 n halwe meder weit- (-)
a half meter far
half a meter- (-)
12 -> awwer sie hot nEt getroffe.
but she have not hit
But she did not hit the clothes.
Linguistic patterns are collaborative achievements in that the form of talk or

language-in-use is assumed to be the result of a joint effort of both current
speakers and their interlocutors to address recurrent tasks in interaction. Good-
win (1981, 1995), for instance, showed that the emerging form of the turn is
highly sensitive to the kind of recipiency which the speakers are getting from
their partner(s)-in-conversation. A new body position or change of gaze direc-
tion may induce a change of plan in terms of syntactic structure (cf. also Ford
1993 on subordinate clauses).
Participants in conversation can also co-produce linguistic structures in a
quite literal sense. For instance, recipients can use linguistic cues in the emer-
ging turn, such as conjunctions projecting bi-clausal structures (e.g., if/when-
then) or list patterns (e.g., first-second-third) to infer what kind of structure is
being produced as well as the presumable end of their initial (preliminary) and
final parts. They can use this information to identify a spot for turn-transition in
order to maintain smooth turn-taking or to complete the structures themselves
(collaborative completions; e.g., Lerner 1991, 2002).
While language patterns are recurrent and thus can to a certain degree be ex-
pected to be realized in a specific form and in particular co(n)texts, they are at
the same time influenced by the particulars of the individual interactional event
(local contingency). Consequently, in contrast to corpus linguistics, for in-
stance, the single event counts. As Goodwin (1981, 1995) has shown, the plan
of a turn once started is not set in stone but can be adapted to the local contin-
gencies and relevancies of the ongoing interaction. Thus, break-offs and re-
phrasings are not necessarily speakers errors but can be closely connected to
the interactional contingencies at hand (cf. also Schegloff 1979). Similarly, the
projected end of a clause need not be its actual end. If need be, e.g., in cases of
problematic uptake by a recipient, speakers can add a range of further (optional)

constituents to the clause in the form of syntactic and prosodic increments (e.g.,
Ford, Fox, and Thompson 2002; Walker 2004; Auer 2006).
In addition, interactional linguists also acknowledge that linguistic patterns
are shaped by the more general characteristics of on-line language production.
Thus, Auer (2000, 2006) points out that speakers need to cope with three aspects
of the temporality (Zeitlichkeit) of spoken language (cf. also Fiehler et al. 2004):
1) the non-permanency of sounds and structures: sounds vanish and structures
are hard to store for any length of time so that speakers may lose track of in-
tricate structures. As a result, they prefer shorter and cognitively less demand-
ing patterns, such as right-branching relative-clause constructions and hang-
ing topics instead of left-branching structures with extensive attribution.
2) the irreversibility of utterances: speakers cannot take back what they have
said. Hence, problems in speaking remain visible (hesitation phenomena,
cut-offs, restarts), and specific practices for repairing mistakes have
emerged (Fox, Hayashi, and Jasperson 1996; Schegloff 1979).
3) the simultaneity of speaking and hearing: patterns produced by speakers are
processed by recipients almost simultaneously. Recipients thus closely
monitor the emerging patterns for interaction-relevant features such as turn-
ending signals. This feature of spoken language is a basic pre-condition for
the collaborative production of linguistic structures.
The relationship between linguistic forms and their sequential interactional
context is reflexive. While on the one hand linguistic forms are influenced
(shaped) by their (specific) interactional co(n)text, on the other hand, they
themselves shape interaction. For instance, it is widely known that co-referen-
tial pronouns are used subsequent to the introduction of a referent by means of a
full noun phrase, i.e., the co(n)text shapes the linguistic form. However, Fox
(1987) has shown that in talk-in-interaction using a full noun phrase next will
contextualize the beginning of a new sequence. In addition, a pronoun can be
co-referential with a referent before the one in an immediately preceding noun
phrase. In this case, the use of the pronoun will signal that the preceding se-
quence is still open. Hence, the use of linguistic items not only depends on se-
quential structure, but also shapes it. From this observation, Interactional Lin-
guistics draws its basic research questions (cf. Section 1. above).
Linguistic forms are tailored to the needs of organizing interaction and
interaction is organized by them. In the interactional-linguistic approach the
global and local interactional needs of the participants are assumed to be the
basic motivation for linguistic structures. This implies that linguistic units are
epiphenomena in interaction in that their shape and extension is a result of the
need to organize interaction. Thus, for instance, the co-extensiveness of lexico-
syntactic and prosodic structures such as clauses, phrases, and words with the
basic organizational unit in interaction, the turn constructional unit (cf. Sacks,
Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974), is not a coincidence, but the result of a need to
signal floor-holding and -yielding by projecting what it will take to end a unit
via the internal structure of the unit constituents (cf., e.g., Ford and Thompson
1996; Schegloff 1996; Auer 2000). Likewise, the signaling of turn-construc-
tional-unit endings as potential points of turn-transition (transition relevance
place, cf. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) by means of specific phonologi-
cal practices, such as intonation falling to low or rising to high in the speakers
voice range, are claimed to be similarly motivated (Selting 1996, 2000). Here,
the projection of the turn-ending is crucial for maintaining the smoothness
of speaker transition. At the same time, particular conversational activities are
highly dependent on these cues to the organization of interaction. Thus, one
regular location for repair, for instance, is the end of the turn containing the
repairable (cf. Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977).
The employment of specific linguistic practices in particular sequential
environments provides for the interpretation and, thus, the accomplishment
of particular actions and activities. Interactional linguists assume a systematic
relationship between the use of certain linguistic structures in specific
co(n)texts and their interpretation by the interlocutors, i.e., that there are clear
form-function relationships in specific co(n)texts. Thus, at the end of a possible
syntactic and pragmatic unit (syntactic and pragmatic completion points; cf.
Ford and Thompson 1996), but not necessarily elsewhere, a specific kind of
intonation will signal whether the speaker has come to the end of his turn. Simi-
larly, French and Local (1983) describe the employment of regular sets of pho-
nological features with competitive and non-competitive incomings by other
speakers in everyday conversation (increased pitch and greater intensity vs.
lower pitch and reduced intensity). These activities are, however, only contex-
tualized by these cues in the middle of turn constructional units. At transition
relevance places, in contrast, they may also be understood as cues to topic
change (cf. Couper-Kuhlen 2004).
Language-specific linguistic forms shape interaction differentially. Interac-
tional Linguistics assumes that the characteristics of a particular language shape
interactional patterns. Accordingly, the opportunities for and the restrictions on
particular interactional practices in a language are dependent on the resources
available in that language. In the Germanic languages, for instance, turn-taking
depends heavily on the notion of early projection, i.e., due to a relatively tight
syntactic organization of clauses, the beginning of a unit makes it possible for
the interlocutors to infer what it will take for that unit to be complete. In German
and English, with the finite verb coming relatively early in the (main) clausal
unit, cues for turn-transition are provided by means of its valency: as the finite
verb usually occurs with its core arguments in a clausal unit, the kind of the verb
indicates how many phrases will follow till the end of the unit. This, in turn, can
be used to roughly predict when the end will come. In Japanese, by contrast, the
verb is produced unit-finally and, in addition, subjects and object complements
need not be realized if they are inferable from the context, so that the only cue to
the ending of the unit is a final particle or other turn-final object (Fox, Hayashi,
and Jasperson 1996; Tanaka 2000). These linguistic features of Japanese are
thus responsible for the fact that its speakers cannot project until relatively late
in the turn what it will take for that turn to be complete and when the end of the
turn is expectable.
In addition, even among the Germanic languages there are differences in the
linguistic resources signaling the end of a unit: while German interlocutors
often can fall back on the second part of the so-called verbal bracket (Auer
1996), English speakers have to rely on other means. Differences such as these
inspire a second direction of research in Interactional Linguistics: the investi-
gation of diverse languages in terms of differences of practices for particular in-
teractional tasks and the language characteristics which motivate them.
Linguistic patterns need to be investigated from a holistic perspective.
Interactional Linguistics understands a communicative event to be a semiotic
event. Consequently, it chooses a Gestalt approach to the analysis by taking into
account potentially all cues available to the interlocutors in the process of sense-
making. Recently this has come to include a more systematic consideration
of non-linguistic means of communication, in recognition of findings by, for
instance, Goodwin and others on the coordination of verbal and non-verbal
means, including gesture and gaze, in organizing interaction. This topic is of im-
mediate relevance to all studies of face-to-face encounters as it raises awareness
of the fundamentally multimodal nature of human communication. At the same
time, it underlines Interactional Linguistics inherent transdisciplinarity in reach-
ing beyond core linguistics.
3.2. Methods
Interactional Linguistics combines methods from three main fields of research:
(1) Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
(2) Linguistics
(3) Interactional Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics.
For reasons of space, in the following, these methods are merely listed. Details
can be obtained from the relevant chapters in this volume (cf. 3. Wagner and
Day; 4. Gnthner; 8. Deppermann and Schtte).
From Ethnomethodology, interactional linguists adopt micro-analysis, the
close examination of the fine details of actual communicative situations. Its
off-spring, Conversation Analysis, in turn, provides a range of methods deriving
from the assumption of orderliness in natural conversation:
Natural data. Interactional linguists analyze talk that was natural, un-pre-
pared, and consequential for the participants at the time it was produced. For
this, analysts may rely on (their own) private recordings as well as commer-
cially available corpora of spontaneous talk-in-interaction, i.e., unprepared
spoken language in public and private communicative situations.
Co(n)text-sensitive analyses. The phenomena are analyzed as units occur-
ring in specific turns and turn constructional units. The latter constitute ac-
tions and activities, which, in turn, contribute to organizing interaction as
such. Thus, the analyst needs to take into account various co(n)textual lev-
els, all of which may be relevant for the local interpretation.
Inductive empiricism. The interactional-linguistic methodology is strictly
empirical in that, rather than working with preconceived analytic categories,
it seeks to inductively uncover the participants categories and resources
(members devices) and to warrant its claims via the participants behavior
(cf. Wootton 1989; Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 1996).
Order at all points. With Conversation Analysis, Interactional Linguistics
assumes that the details of interaction are not chance products but the regu-
lar outcome of the participants routine attempts at solving recurrent every-
day problems. In contrast to Chomskyan linguistics, which dismisses spon-
taneous talk as too flawed to be studied, interactional linguists assume
language-in-use to be intricately structured and organized on all levels. It is
the task of the analyst to identify this structure: no order of detail can be
dismissed, a priori, as disorderly, accidental or irrelevant (Heritage 1984:
241). This does not imply that speakers are robots whose behavior is deter-
mined by algorithms. Rather, Interactional Linguistics assumes that lin-
guistic resources are employed regularly and flexibly within more or less ex-
pectable, and expected, limits (Deppermann 2007).
Next-turn proof procedure. Interactional Linguistics uses participant beha-
vior in sequentially next turns as evidence for what action(s) the prior turn
was taken to have accomplished. Participants reactions are assumed to
show that and how they are dealing with (orienting towards) a prior utter-
ance and thus what they understand it to be doing.
Sequential analysis. Turns-at-talk are assumed to be grouped into clumps
by, among other features, the actions they accomplish or the activity being
pursued, and the reactions to these (sequences). Interactional linguists assume
that the form of linguistic patterning is sensitive to its position in these se-
quences. Thus, the analyst needs to discover where actions are initiated,
worked through, and brought to closure (cf. Schegloff 2007) and whether the
utterance under discussion is an initiating or reacting move, i.e., the rst or the
second pair part of the basic unit of sequence organization, the adjacency pair.
Collections of instances. In order to describe the use of particular linguistic
patterns, interactional linguists employ collections of relevant instances of a
phenomenon. To compile these, they adopt the Schegloffian (1997) triad no-
ticing something, collecting generously, singling out boundary cases, which
necessarily leads to a prototype or family-resemblance understanding of the
phenomena studied (cf. Weber 2003; Barth-Weingarten 2006a).
Valuation of the single case and the deviant case. While Interactional
Linguistics argues on the basis of larger collections, it also values the single
case. Interactional Linguistics sees these instantiations of a linguistic pattern
in a particular context as an instantiation of a larger set of practices, since
each single case can be assumed to reflect the routine expectations of the
participants and thus the general pattern. At the same time, interactional lin-
guists use single, deviant cases to substantiate their findings by showing
the deviation to be explainable by the particular co(n)texts of use and the
contingencies associated with them. Thus, the remainder of a collection is
not neglected, as in corpus linguistics, for instance, but is given an essential
role in the analysis.
Linguistics offers concepts and tools for the technical description of the lin-
guistic patterns as resources in talk-in-interaction. Interactional Linguistics en-
deavors to show that and how linguistic forms are adapted (tailored) to the
needs of on-line, situationally embedded production and interpretation of social
interaction (Selting and Couper-Kuhlen 2000: 79). Among other tools the fol-
lowing deserve mention:
Form-function pairings. Interactional linguists seek to identify pairs of lan-
guage form and function. They arrive at these in two ways, which may be
roughly compared with the onomasiological-semasiological distinction in
semantics: Which linguistic resources are used to constitute particular con-
versational sequences and to carry out interactional actions and activities?
Which interactional actions or conversational sequences are accomplished
by particular linguistic resources?
Syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. In prosodic, phonetic-phonological,
syntactic, lexico-semantic, and pragmatic analyses, the distribution and
combination of linguistic signs (syntagmatic axis) is a basic technique of
linguistic inquiry and description. Interactional Linguistics adopts this by
asking where in a sequence (co-text) and in combination with what other
items (collocations) certain linguistic forms co-occur. The paradigmatic axis
introduces issues of the substitutability of items. Based on collections of in-
stances, it can be shown which linguistic forms occur in similar contexts and
are thus in a paradigmatic relation with one another.
Frequency. The question of how frequent a particular linguistic form is (in
comparison to other, alternative linguistic forms) is essential to any empiri-
cal linguistic study. It touches upon issues such as routine and expectations
and is relevant in any context which argues for (or against) the emergence
and sedimentation of forms (cf. Bybee 2006; Barth-Weingarten 2003; also

Section 4., below).
In addition, Interactional Linguistics employs concepts, methods and tools from
specific linguistic theories and models with which it is readily compatible such
as, for instance, Rhetorical Structure Theory, Empirical Construction Grammar
and Genre Theory (for examples, cf. Mann and Thompson 1992; Deppermann
2006; Gnthner and Imo 2006; Gnthner and Knoblauch 1995). Moreover, due
to its focus on actual language use in natural environments Interactional Lin-
guistics has a great potential for a wide range of applied-linguistic objectives
(cf. Section 5., below).
Interactional Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics offer a com-
parison of diverging cultural practices and, in addition, with the theory of con-
textualization a tool for the in-depth analysis of interactional processes (cf.
Gnthner this volume).
Finally, a method should be mentioned which appears to be unique to Inter-
actional Linguistics: the reflexive investigation of linguistic patterns and their
interactional co(n)text, i.e., the constant back and forth between looking at the
detailed linguistic properties of items [] and inspecting the evolvement of the
interaction (Hakulinen and Selting 2005: 10). This method is based on the
close connection between the actions and activities carried out by the partici-
pants and the linguistic resources they use in order to do so.
4. Research questions and future challenges
Ultimately, interactional linguists aim at a general theory as to how language

is organized and used, structurally and functionally, in social interaction.
This includes a new conceptualization of linguistic categories, which is based
on the theoretical premises and empirical methods of Interactional Linguistics
(cf. Section 3., above), and the jigsaw-like extension of its findings. Basic re-
search questions in Interactional Linguistics include the following:
How do the basic units of interaction, turn constructional units (cf. Sacks,
Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974), come into being? How are prosodic, syntac-
tic, lexico-semantic, and pragmatic resources, in particular, involved in this?
How is turn-taking organized? What role do linguistic means play in signal-
ing transition relevance places (cf. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974)?
Which non-verbal means need to be taken into account?
What role do linguistic structures, i.e., sentences, clauses, phrases, and
words, play?
By which linguistic means do speakers signal specific conversational activ-
ities as well as particular genres and conversational styles?
What kind of influence do specific interactional situations and types of in-

teraction, such as institutional communication, language acquisition, and
language disorders, exert on these phenomena?
Next to these, there are a number of more general challenges to Interactional
Linguistics, which often arise from its transdisciplinary nature. Interactional
linguists will have to find ways to come to terms with
Integrating existing linguistic categories and notions. The inductive em-
piricism adopted by Interactional Linguistics precludes the adoption of
preconceived categories. Instead, categories are to be uncovered in and
warranted by reference to the participants own behavior (Schegloff
1997). This holds for all sorts of categories employed in Interactional Lin-
guistics, be they from linguistics, action analysis, participant-framework
analysis, or others. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that
research does not start from a tabula rasa. Analysts employ very often
without taking this into account as a basis of their own investigation their
knowledge of co(n)textual features (Deppermann 1999, 2000) as well as
of linguistic resources and their functions (Weber 2003). The interactional
linguist, in particular, needs to come to terms with existing notions und
definitions as developed in autonomist linguistics. To explicate these and
to integrate them into its own approach in a constructive way is one of the
major challenges for Interactional Linguistics (cf., e.g., Barth-Weingarten
2006a).
(Re)Conceptualizing linguistic categories and establishing a terminology.
Linguistics has developed a broad variety of terminology, which, as in any
field, reflects its assumptions and theoretical models of language (cf. Linell
1998; Fiehler et al. 2004). Yet, a number of discourse-functional and inter-
actional-linguistic findings have shown that the autonomist understanding
and modeling of language is often not compatible with the findings of a per-
spective focusing on language in use. Thus, to mention a few examples from
syntax, the analysis of language in use provided sufficient evidence for
Hopper (2001) to re-analyze the pseudo-cleft construction, for Couper-
Kuhlen and Thompson (2006) to subdivide it-extraposition constructions,
and for Fox and Thompson (2007) to postulate an independent zero-relativ-
izer relative-clause construction (cf. also Deppermann 2007; Gnthner and
Imo 2006). As a result either the old connotations must be kept in check,
for instance, by specific markings such as quotation marks, or new terminol-
ogy must be established.
Incorporating frequency. In particular the discourse-functional approach
has introduced the notion that text frequency is vital to understanding the
discourse motivations for particular grammatical constructions (Cumming
and Ono 1997: 114). While single-case analyses are essential in the attempt
to uncover the order in interaction, frequency can serve as a major key in de-
ciding whether a linguistic pattern is sedimented. In addition, it is highly rel-
evant to notions such as routine and expectation (cf. Barth-Weingarten
2003) as well as language norms.
Cognitive aspects. Assuming the joint accomplishment of talk and its struc-
turing, Interactional Linguistics precludes the analysis of utterances []
in terms of a single speakers intentions and action plans (Hakulinen and
Selting 2005: 1). Yet, speaker actions and activities presuppose speaker
intentions, recipient inferences, and choices between alternative actions
(cf. Deppermann 2007). Conversation Analysis has recently taken up the
issue of how the details of the talk reveal the operation of cognitive pro-
cesses, for instance in terms of epistemicity (cf. Heritage and Raymond
2005; also Heritage 1990/91; te Molder and Potter 2005).
Integrating non-verbal communication. The advent of easy-to-use video re-
cordings, presents us with the opportunity of studying the role of non-verbal
means of communication in the organization of interaction. The question of
whether and if so how to systematically include this issue into research is
one of the biggest challenges to Interactional Linguistics at the moment. It
also raises questions of how to transcribe non-verbal behavior in a way that
maintains readability of the transcripts and deciding on the extent to which
gestures as well as changes in gaze and body positions need to be taken into
consideration.
Incorporating a diachronic perspective. The focus on recordings of natural
spoken talk-in-interaction seems to quite naturally restrict interactional-lin-
guistic studies to taking a synchronic perspective on language and its struc-
ture. However, some recordings of natural conversation date from the
1960s. This allows us to start taking issues of language change into account.
Bearing in mind corpus-linguistic findings which point to short-term change
in written language in a time span of 30 years (brachychronic change), tak-
ing this perspective appears to be a feasible and promising undertaking for
future research in Interactional Linguistics. This type of research could
reveal to what extent aspects of the spoken language have changed since the
time when the earliest recordings were made. In addition, it may lend sup-
port to descriptions of on-going language change in Discourse-Functional
Linguistics and Interactional Linguistics (cf., e.g., Mulder and Thompson
2008; Fox and Thompson 2007).
Studying variation across dialects and varieties. While many topics in lin-
guistics still await first-time treatment in Interactional Linguistics, we
should also in the long run envisage a systematic comparison of its findings
across dialects and varieties of a single language. This level of investigation
has already been reached in prosodic research (cf. Auer et al. 2000; Gilles
2005), and it needs to be extended to other fields as well.
Spreading the interactional-linguistic perspective. While Interactional Lin-

guistics has demonstrated the nature and insightfulness of its findings in
a number of linguistic fields such as prosody/phonetics, syntax and lexis
(cf. Section 6., below), there are still core fields of linguistics which have
so far received less or no attention, among these semantics (but cf. Depper-
mann and Spranz-Fogasy 2002; Deppermann 2005; Barth-Weingarten
2006b) and in particular morphology. Also, Interactional Linguistics now
needs to go beyond the initial stage of individual studies and systematize its
findings both in terms of modeling human language and communication as
well as making itself accessible to newcomers. For this purpose introductory
textbooks to core fields of linguistics as well as to areas of application in the
spirit of Interactional Linguistics will be needed.
Applying Interactional Linguistics. Finally, while strengthening its stance as
a field of research, Interactional Linguistics must also continue to system-
atically investigate the relationship between linguistic form and function in
institutional settings in order to develop tools for the training, amelioration,
and enhancement of communicative strategies.
5. The contribution of Interactional Linguistics to applied linguistics
Applied linguistics is not restricted here to foreign language teaching and learn-
ing, but it is understood as a eld which deals with the description, explanation,
and solution of practical problems in verbal interaction in all spheres of social life,
including those elds where ethical issues are involved (cf. Knapp 2004: xviii).
Especially in Applied Conversation Analysis (ten Have 1999: 8; Richards
and Seedhouse 2005; also Wagner and Day this volume), conversation analytic
findings and methods have for some time already been used as background and
tools for the diagnosis of problematic language use and its treatment in a variety
of social interactional situations, for instance, in business enterprises, in court,
in medical encounters and in the media (for references cf. below).2
Into this enterprise, interactional-linguistic findings have so far often been
integrated, presumably because increasingly applied conversation analysts have
a linguistic, rather than a sociological, background, and linguistic analyses are
as relevant to them as sequential analyses. Yet, the contribution of Interactional
Linguistics has not been specifically acknowledged. There is as yet no clearly
distinguishable field of applied Interactional Linguistics. As a comparatively
young field of research, it has so far been mainly research-oriented in develop-
ing its stance as an academic discipline. However, using conversation analytic
methods, Interactional Linguistics, too, offers the same advantages Conver-
sation Analysis has over psychologists and management experts treatments of
problems in communication: rather than suggesting crudely generalized rule-of-
thumb solutions, Interactional Linguistics offers detailed single-case analyses,

which are able to take into account all relevant factors in the particular com-
municative event. It allows the participants to step back from the immediate
conditional relevancies and contingencies of the actual communicative event.
And it can draw attention to subconscious verbal and non-verbal practices and
their effects (cf. Hartung 2004; Habscheid 2004). In addition, Interactional Lin-
guistics focuses on natural, genuine talk-in-interaction and it is thus immedi-
ately applicable to the kind of data in which interactional problems occur.
Also, as case studies by applied conversation analysts in institutional dis-
course show (cf. below), the basic research questions of Interactional Lin-
guistics (see Section 3.1, above) are immediately relevant to the diagnosis of
communication problems in institutional situations: on the one hand, communi-
cative problems concern the ways of accomplishing specific communicative
actions as well as basic interactional activities, such as opening and closing an
exchange, organizing speaker transition, signaling recipiency, participants rela-
tionships and topic progression. Here, Interactional Linguistics can point out al-
ternative linguistic forms to achieve similar effects. On the other hand, Inter-
actional Linguistics offers an empirically grounded way to connect syntactic,
prosodic, and lexico-semantic means as well as their interplay in participants
exchanges with particular pragmatic effects, and thus specific actions. These can
then be compared with and evaluated against the communicative goals origi-
nally aimed at. These goals can be manifold and they depend on the specific set-
ting of the interaction. Thus, in particular, Interactional Linguistics can provide:
empirically tested methods of collecting natural data and analyzing specific
cases
an approach to language and its structure in real-life situations
research questions relevant to the diagnosis of communicative problems
with a focus on linguistic resources
immediately applicable descriptive concepts inductively derived from the
data themselves
an understanding of the meaning and pragmatic effects of linguistic items as
being a joint accomplishment by both speaker and hearer, plus
a number of specific, empirical findings for particular institutional settings.
The latter have not yet been converted into concrete recommendations for
improved communicative practice. In this regard, the Birmingham Schools
applied focus might serve as a source of inspiration, for instance. Yet, by focus-
ing on specific language forms, instead of vaguely referring to conventionalized
patterns of expression (konventionelle Formulierungsmuster, Habscheid
2004: 322), Interactional Linguistics can help trainers and participants recog-
nize concrete instances of the misuse of specific linguistic forms and thus fa-
cilitate attempts to improve ones communicative behavior.
Interactional Linguistics can contribute to the description of rules for the use
of spoken language in all sorts of professional fields. Here only some examples
of relevant literature with regard to a selected range of areas of application of In-
teractional Linguistics are provided. These will direct the reader to other relevant
pieces of work.
business encounters/enterprises:
Drew and Heritage 1992; Brnner, Fiehler, and Kindt 1999; Baker, Em-
mison, and Firth 2005; Becker-Mrotzek and Fiehler 2002; Habscheid 2004;
Hartung 2004; Vinkhuyzen and Szymanski 2005
medical settings:
1. general medical encounters: Frankel 1984, 1990; Heath 1989, 1992;
Maynard 1991, 2003; ten Have 1993; Brnner and Glich 2002; Glich,
Schndienst, and Surmann 2002; Birkner 2006; Heritage and Maynard
2006
2. psychotherapy: Czyzewski 1995; Antaki, Barnes, and Leudar 2005
3. language disorders: Gill and Maynard 1995; Goodwin 1995; Booth and
Perkins 1999; Rnfeldt and Auer 2001; Helasvuo, Laakso, and Sorjonen
2003
4. care-giving: Heritage and Sorjonen 1994; Lindstrm 2005, Wilkinson
1999, 2004
language acquisition: Corrin, Tarplee, and Wells 2001; Wootton 2005
teenage talk: Deppermann 2001, 2005
foreign language teaching and learning: Cromdal 2001; Koshik 2002
academia: Guthrie 1997; Jacoby and Gonzales 2002
court and mediation: Atkinson and Drew 1979; Spranz-Fogasy 1986; Drew
1990; Deppermann 2005
politics and the media: Greatbatch 1986a, 1986b, 1992; Heritage 1985,
2003; Heritage and Greatbatch 1991; Heritage and Roth 1995; Hutchby
1992, 1996; Clayman 1993; Clayman and Heritage 2002; Liddicoat
et al. 1994; Antaki and Leudar 2001; Bilmes 2001; Barth-Weingarten
2003 3
In terms of the future of applied Interactional Linguistics one can envisage two
possible developments:
1) a greater emphasis on and systematic integration of Interactional Linguistics
findings in Applied Conversation Analysis, or
2) the establishment of a separate applied Interactional Linguistics, similar and
in parallel to the establishment of Applied Conversation Analysis.
Whichever of these two developments comes to pass, Interactional Linguistics
findings will serve as a basis for rhetorical training, e.g., which need not end at
intuition-based inferences on the relationship between the form of utterances
and the actions accomplished by them, but which can point to specific linguistic
practices and details as concrete starting points for enhanced communicative
practices.
Notes
1. I am grateful to Margret Selting and especially to Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen for their

insightful comments on an earlier version of this article. Thanks is also due to the edi-
tors of this volume for their suggestions.
2. For the German variant of Applied Conversation Analysis, Angewandte Gesprchs-
forschung, cf. Becker-Mrotzek and Brnner 1992; Becker-Mrotzek and Fiehler 2002;
Brnner, Fiehler, and Kindt 2002; Knapp et al. 2004). Also, Arbeitskreis Angewandte
Gesprchsforschung (AAG, http://www.linse.uni-essen.de/linse/aag/index.html),
Gesprchsforschung Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion (ISSN 16171837;
www.gespraechsforschung-ozs.de), InLiSt (Interaction and Linguistic Structures)
(http://www.uni-potsdam.de/u/inlist/), Informationsportal Gesprchsforschung
(http://www.gespraechsforschung.de/), and Gesprchsanalytisches Informationssys-
tem [conversation-analytic information system] GAIS (http://gais.ids-mannheim.de/).
3. For further references on the application of Conversation Analysis and Interactional
Linguistics, see also Paul ten Haves bibliography on Ethnomethodology and Conver-
sation Analysis (available at http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/emca/bib90s.htm) and Sandra
A. Thompsons bibliography on Interactional Linguistics (available at http://www.lin
guistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/sathomps/bibliographies/bibliog-interactional-linguistics.
htm).
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6. Systemic Functional Linguistics:
An interpersonal perspective
Geoff Thompson and Peter Muntigl
1. Introduction
In exploring interpersonal communication, it is very easy to focus on what is

said and why. This is natural, since for the interactants themselves it is the
meanings that are of paramount importance and, except in special circum-
stances, they are unlikely to take conscious note of, or remember, the way in
which those meanings are expressed. However, the analyst cannot afford to
overlook the fact that language is not simply a transparent medium for convey-
ing information: how speakers choose to express meanings has a fundamental
effect on the interaction. To take a very simple example, the choice of how to
word a command e.g., let your feet hang vs. could you let your feet hang re-
flects the speakers assessment of the social relations in the particular interac-
tion and simultaneously contributes to constructing the social relations as being
business-like (allowing bare commands) or polite (requiring the command
to be mitigated). Any full analysis of how an instance of communication works
requires a principled examination of the choices made by the speaker from
the lexicogrammatical resources of the language, in a way which allows these
choices to be related to the immediate situation and the wider socio-cultural
context in which the communication takes place and makes sense. Many
approaches to linguistic description are not intended to lend themselves to this
kind of application; but Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which is the
focus of the present chapter, is designed precisely for the purpose of mak[ing]
it possible to say sensible and useful things about any text, spoken or written
(Halliday 1994: xv).1
As a preliminary example of the interpersonal issues that can be explored
with this kind of analysis, we can take the following short extract. This is part of
a consultation in a doctors surgery at the point where the doctor is carrying out
a physical examination of the patient, who has complained of back pain. During
this examination the doctor taps on the patients spine in order to discover the
locus of pain.
(1)
D: tell me where the tender spot is
P: there oh
D: er further down
108 Geoff Thompson and Peter Muntigl
P: no just there
D: no . .
sides
P: yeh
D: so thats the worst spreading out to both sides
P: yeh
D: let your feet hang over the edge
If we focus on just one aspect of the doctors contributions to the interaction

(a fuller analysis will follow in Section 4.1.), we can see that there is a kind of
tension between the functional meaning of his utterances and the structures that
he uses to express the meaning. From a functional point of view, the doctor asks
four questions, none of which is expressed by a simple interrogative form: the
first question (where is the tender spot?) is expressed in the form of an impera-
tive, as if it were a command (tell me); the next two are elliptical with the inter-
rogative element understood (the patients responses show that she successfully
interprets them as meaning something like [is it tender] further down? and [is it
tender on the] sides?); and the final one is expressed as a declarative (so thats
the worst compare so is that the worst?). It might appear at first that this ten-
dency to ask questions indirectly is purely accidental; but in fact, as we shall
show in Section 4.1. below, it is possible to link these and the other language
choices made by the interactants to the context in a systematic way in order to
understand more fully how and why these choices have been made. The connec-
tions can be made with aspects of the context from the specific co-text (for
example, the elliptical no sides would be unlikely to occur as the initial ques-
tion in this kind of exchange) and the non-verbal aspects of the situation (for
example, the fact that the doctor is tapping parts of the patients back as he asks
the questions) to the wider socio-cultural context including especially the in-
stitutional roles being performed by the doctor and patient. Making the connec-
tions, however, depends on adopting a functionally-oriented approach to the
analysis of interaction which starts from, and gives appropriate weight to, the
linguistic choices made by the speakers.
In Sections 2. and 3., we will sketch an overview of the SFL model of the
linguistic resources that play a major part in constructing interaction.2 In Sec-
tion 4, we will then apply the model to two types of spoken interaction, in order
to illustrate the kinds of insights that can be gained. In each case, we will not at-
tempt to provide an exhaustive analysis, but will concentrate on features that
seem more revealing. This will allow us to highlight how choices from particu-
lar systems within the lexicogrammatical model offered by Systemic Functional
Linguistics operate in discourse, and how the choices reflect and construct in-
terpersonal aspects of the socio-cultural context of the interactions.
Systemic Functional Linguistics: An interpersonal perspective 109
2. Lexicogrammatical and semantic resources for interaction
The major set of choices in interpersonal grammar that are open to the speaker is
in the system of MOOD :3 Every independent clause chooses between imperative
and indicative; within indicative, between declarative and interrogative; and
within interrogative between polar (yes/no) and wh-interrogative.4 In contrast to
the imperative, which has neither Subject nor Finite,5 the indicative is realized
by the presence of Subject and Finite (in the order S^F for declarative, F^S for
polar interrogative and wh-element^F(^S) for wh-interrogative). Corresponding
to these structural choices, the speaker chooses between four options in the sys-
tem of SPEECH FUNCTION : s/he may take on the role of giver or demander, and
what s/he gives or demands may be information or goods-&-services. Thus
every independent clause functions as statement (giving information), question
(demanding information), command (demanding goods-&-services), or offer
(giving goods-&-services). See Table 1.:
Table 1. The basic speech functions
role in exchange commodity exchanged

information goods-&-services
giving statement offer
demanding question command
Other speech functions, many of which have everyday labels and which have
been the subject of much discussion in, for example, speech act theory, can be
seen as more delicate sub-categories of these four basic functions: e.g., contra-
diction is a kind of statement, request is a kind of command, promise is a kind of
offer.
While offers are not realized by a specific mood form in English, there is an
unmarked match between the three other speech functions and the mood
choices: declaratives predominantly realize (function as) statements, inter-
rogatives realize questions, and imperatives realize commands. The match is
not, however, absolute: for example, commands may be instantiated by impera-
tives (let your feet hang), but are often instantiated by declaratives (you must let
your feet hang) or interrogatives (could you let your feet hang); and questions
may be instantiated by interrogatives (what is it) but also by declaratives (so
thats the worst) or imperatives (tell me where). Form-function mismatches of
this kind (which are described as indirect speech acts in some other approaches
see, e.g., Austin 1962; Searle 1969) combine two kinds of meaning in a way
which serves specific interactional purposes. For instance, a command may be
expressed as a polar interrogative in order to show politeness: the interrogative
form (e.g., could you) in principle offers the addressee the possibility of giving
either a positive or negative response. On the other hand, a question expressed
as an imperative (e.g., tell me where) in principle does not offer this possibility
and thus tends to construe the questioner as having (or assuming) greater author-
ity than the addressee. It is, however, important to stress two points: first, as we
will explore in Section 4.1., the effect of, and reason for, particular choices in
the systems of MOOD and SPEECH FUNCTION will depend on contextual factors
such as the institutional roles of the interactants, the degree of personal close-
ness, and so on; and second, apart from in exceptional contexts such as a court
of law, the speech function may not succeed, in that the addressee always in
principle retains the option of giving what Halliday (1994: 69) calls the discre-
tionary alternative response (equivalent to the dispreferred response in Conver-
sational Analysis, cf. Pomerantz 1984). For example, they may refuse to comply
with a command.
A further system of interpersonal choices which play a crucial role in inter-
action is that of MODALITY . Modal resources involve modal operators (e.g., may)
but also many other kinds of expression including lexical verbs (e.g., suggest),
adjectives (e.g., probable), adjuncts (e.g., certainly), nominalizations (e.g.,
possibility), clauses (e.g., it is probable that), and other less direct wordings
(e.g., the plain truth is that). M ODALITY covers two main semantic areas,
depending on whether it relates to what Halliday (1994: 89) calls propositions
(utterances which centre on the exchange of information i.e., statements and
questions) or proposals (utterances which centre on the exchange of goods-
&-services i.e., commands and offers). The former type is MODALIZATION ,
which adjusts the validity of the proposition in terms of probability or usuality,
and the latter type is MODULATION , which adjusts the strength of the proposal
in terms of obligation on the addressee or inclination of the speaker. (There is
also a further modal category, ABILITY, expressed by can/be able to; but this
is largely marginal in terms of the negotiation of the validity or strength of an
utterance, which is our main focus here.)
Within the two main areas, the most important variables that can be manipu-
lated are the value and the orientation. Key points on these two clines are illus-
trated in Table 2.
Value here refers to where the modal expression falls on the cline in terms of
degrees of probability, usuality, obligation, or inclination. For example, high
value probability indicates near-certainty (e.g., Im sure its a torn muscle),6
whereas low value obligation expresses permission (e.g., you can relax now).
Orientation refers to how overtly the speaker takes responsibility for the modal
meaning: with explicit subjective modality, the speaker is directly implicated in
the assessment (I think X), whereas with explicit objective modality, the moda-
lity is represented as if it were an attribute of the proposition/proposal itself (X is
possible) and thus the speakers responsibility for the assessment is masked.
Table 2. Main variables in the domain of MODALITY
modalization modulation
probability usuality obligation inclination
commitment:
high she must be shes always you must Im keen to
median she will be shes usually you should Im determined to
low she may be shes sometimes you can Im willing to
responsibility:
objective its likely that its usual for its essential to
maybe usually supposed to willing to
may will must will
subjective I think that I expect you to I volunteer to
Together, these resources (with more delicate options not discussed here) allow
speakers to make an enormously wide range of fine gradations in the extent to
which they accept interpersonal responsibility for the validity or strength of
their utterances.
The final main area of interpersonal resources that we will touch on is the
APPRAISAL system (Martin and White 2005; Macken-Horarick and Martin
2003). This covers the expression of the speakers evaluation of entities, propo-
sitions, and proposals. In order to capture what goes on when a speaker evalu-
ates, we need to take three related perspectives, each of which can be repre-
sented as a system of choices within the overall APPRAISAL system: the
assessment itself, which draws on the system of ATTITUDE ; how the speaker ne-
gotiates the intersubjective status of the assessment in his/her discourse, termed
ENGAGEMENT ; and how the speaker amplifies or tones down the expression of
the assessment, termed GRADUATION .
Attitudinal evaluation can be divided into three major types, each with sub-
categories (some will be introduced as necessary in the analyses in Section 4.2.
below). The basic type is AFFECT , which is prototypically expressed as a mental
process directed at the appraised entity: this can be schematically exemplified as
I like/dislike X. This form of assessment is then institutionalized (Martin
2000a: 147) into two other types, where the assessment is essentially repre-
sented as an attribute of the appraised entity: JUDGEMENT involves assessments
of behavior in terms of moral, ethical values (e.g., you are being inconsiderate),
while APPRECIATION involves assessments of things in terms of aesthetic values
(e.g., the tablets are effective). One complicating factor is that attitude may be
expressed directly, or inscribed; but it may also be expressed indirectly, or in-
voked. For example, in the consultation the patient says all last night I couldnt
turn on my side: in itself, this is not an overtly evaluative statement, but it is
clearly intended to make the doctor see her situation as undesirable.7 The im-
portance of the concept of invocation of attitude is that it highlights the fact that
appraisal is intersubjective: invocation works by inviting the other interactant to
share, even if only provisionally, the values of the speaker in order to understand
why this information is being given. In fact, contrary to the conventional view
that evaluation is simply the expression of personal feelings, all appraisal can be
seen as intersubjective in that it represents an appeal for solidarity (or, alter-
natively, enacts antagonism).
This intersubjectivity emerges even more strongly through the options in the
system of ENGAGEMENT . The primary choice here is between monogloss and
heterogloss utterances. All discourse can be seen as inherently dialogic, in
Bakhtins terms; and heterogloss utterances are those which in some way rec-
ognize this, acknowledging and responding to the possibility of alternative
views, either already expressed in previous discourse or potentially held by
other people, including the addressee. Signals of heteroglossia include modal-
ization, hedging, negation, and reporting. For example, as the doctor prescribes
pills, he tells the patient they dont make you drowsy. The negative signals his
awareness that the patient knows that this is an undesirable side-effect of some
drugs. Monogloss utterances, on the other hand, do not take account of other
possible voices. This may be an unexceptionable option, as when the patient de-
scribes her own feelings Ive been in agony all night; but with more contentious
evaluations it may represent an attempt to close down any possibility of negotia-
tion over the evaluation being expressed.
The third perspective, GRADUATION , is in some ways the simplest: it involves
boosting or minimizing the evaluation. This may be done either through modi-
fying elements (a little bit, so much) or through intensified lexis (agony, hope-
less). Appraisal in discourse is typically cumulative, with an evaluatively coher-
ent stance being constructed across a discourse; and speakers may deploy the
resources of GRADUATION to foreground or background particular claims. In ad-
dition, they may use these resources to negotiate greater interactional solidarity
by matching the strength of their evaluations to what they predict will be accept-
able/appropriate to their addressee; or they may strengthen confrontation by de-
liberately aiming at a mismatch.
It is worth mentioning that intonation also plays an important role in support-
ing and extending the ways in which the lexicogrammatical resources outlined
above operate in constructing interaction. For example, one of the linguistic fea-
tures which signals to the patient that, when the doctor says sides, this is to be
interpreted as a question is the rising intonation. However, space prevents us
from including intonation in the present account. For full accounts see Halliday
and Greaves (forthcoming) and Brazil (1997).
3. Exchange Structure
When communicating with others, we tend to draw from the range of lexico-
grammatical and semantic resources listed above to co-produce patterned se-
quences of conversational structure. What is meant here goes beyond the con-
cept of the adjacency pair in which an answer tends to follow a question or
acceptance tends to follow a request. This broader view suggests that social ac-
tions seem to be organized alongside interactional slots that can extend across
any number of conversational moves extending beyond the pair. For instance,
it is quite common in the negotiation of meaning and action during a medical
examination for the patient to comply with the doctors commands (e.g., press
down with your feet against my hands). But this exchange of meanings, which
comprises a command followed by compliance, often contains a third move in
which the doctor indicates that the patient has successfully carried out the com-
mand (e.g., okay, thats good). So, in order to provide a comprehensive account
of how interpersonal meaning is produced and negotiated in conversation, we
need to not only identify the lexicogrammatical resources that function inter-
personally, but also we need to show how these resources pattern within an ex-
change of moves in sequence.
Research in exchange structure from an SFL perspective has largely bene-
fited from the pioneering work of Berry (1981a,b) and has seen various devel-
opments from a number of researchers (see especially Martin 1992, 2000b;
Muntigl 2007; ODonnell 1990, 1999; Ventola 1987). Taking as a point of de-
parture some of the earlier studies from the Birmingham school (for overviews,
see Coulthard and Montgomery 1981; Sinclair and Coulthard 1975), Berry went
on to propose that exchanges be distinguished in terms of whether they involve
propositions or proposals. As discussed earlier, propositions involve the giving
or demanding of information (i.e., statements and questions), whereas proposals
involve the giving or demanding of goods-&-services (i.e., commands and
offers). Information-based exchanges are referred to as knowledge exchanges
(or K-exchange for short) and goods-&-services exchanges are referred to as
action exchanges (or A-exchange for short). The moves comprising an ex-
change tend to sequentially unfold in a specified order, which is represented in
the following structure potential (X = A or K; ^ = is followed by; ( ) =
optionality):8
(X2) ^ X1 ^ (X2f ^ (X1f))
The only obligatory move is X1. It is realized as a statement if a K-exchange and
an offer if an A-exchange.9 Making a statement or performing an action on its
own may therefore be construed as a complete or felicitous exchange. X2s, on
the other hand, are eliciting moves and tend to be considered infelicitous if oc-
curring in isolation. In other words, there exists an expectation that an addressee
will respond to the X2 by taking up the X1 option. Elicitations of knowledge in-

volve questions, whereas elicitations of action involve commands. The last two
moves (X2f and X1f) are follow-up moves and tend to signal the speakers atti-
tude towards the prior move in the exchange.
The function of a move is also in part determined by its position in sequence.
For example, X2s, which can be realized as questions or commands, are elicit-
ing moves that occur at the beginning of exchanges. X2fs, by contrast, are fol-
low-up moves and are realized subsequent to the core moves of the exchange.
Another important feature of exchange structure is that the four moves are each
interpreted as functional slots within which speakers take up certain knowledge
or action positions. Moves designated as 1 are associated with primary
knowers/actors and those designated with 2 are secondary knowers/actors.
What this means is that our choice of initiating move sets up certain knowledge
or action roles for each of the participants (as will be shown in example (5) and
in Section 4.2., these roles are anything but immutable; they can be upgraded,
downgraded, resisted, or appropriated). If a speaker A begins with a K2 by ask-
ing a wh-question, A positions herself as having secondary access and rights to
knowledge and positions her interlocutor as having primary access. This local
assignment of knowledge (or action) roles is especially relevant in situations
where access to knowledge and/or the performance of an action is being resisted
or challenged, as in examples (5) and (7) below.
An example of an A-exchange involving a doctor-patient interaction is
shown in (2), taken from the same consultation as (1) above; the complete tran-
script is shown in (6). In the first move, represented as A2, D elicits an action by
way of a command (press down hard). Here, D is performing a physical exam-
ination in response to Ps complaint of having severe back pain. P then realizes
the role of primary actor, represented as A1, by pushing against the doctors
hand. The follow-up move by D, expressed as ok, works not only to complete the
exchange, but also to signal to P that she has correctly complied with Ds request
(the horizontal line between moves 04 and 05 signals an exchange boundary).
(2)10
01 A2 D: what I want you to do first then is to press down with your feet
against my hands
02 A2 D: press down hard
03 A1 P: ((presses down))
04 A2f D: ok
05 A2 D: now pull up against my fingers
Turning to a K-exchange in (3) that involves a therapist (T) and a client (F), we
see a similar type of sequential unfolding. In this example, T is exploring the
causal effects of Fs problem, which had previously been identified as indeci-
siveness. The initiating move is a K2, as shown by Ts question in line 06 (what

does it have you thinking about yourself (.) Fred). By selecting a K2 move,
T positions himself as a secondary knower. In other words, what indecisiveness
makes F think about himself is primarily knowable to F and not to T. F takes up
a K1 slot in line 08 by providing the what to Ts question (that I cant make
a decision), and T closes down the exchange by producing the third position
response token kay. T then initiates a new exchange in line 11 that ultimately
unfolds in the same K2^K1^K2f sequence.
(3) (from Muntigl 2004: 285)

01 T: kay (2.0) now this is great (1.0)
02 I think
03 were really getting at indecisiveness
04 is the influence over you .hh
05 so what does have you um (.)
06 K2 what does it have you thinking about yourself (.) Fred
07 (2.0)
08 K1 F: that I cant make a decision
09 K2f T: kay
10 (4.0)
11 K2 T: is that true Fred
12 (1.5)
13 K1 F: oh I can when I have [to ]
14 K2f T: [yes] okay so you can
Exchanges, of course, do not necessarily begin with an X2 move. An example of a

K1 initiated exchange is shown in (4). In this example, again involving therapy
but this time with a different client (W), T makes a statement that refers back to a
positive experience that W had in the previous therapy session (so it wasnt a bull-
shit day). By way of this action, T positions himself as a primary knower who can,
in certain situations, make claims about Ws personal experience. W then raties
Ts primary knowledge status by producing a K2f in which she offers an agree-
ment (I didnt think so). This exchange structure gets recycled in lines 0406, with
the addition of a K1f through which T acknowledges Ws prior agreement.
(4) (from Muntigl 2004: 153)

01 K1 T: so it wasnt a bullshit day
02 [that wuz it wuz ] positive
03 K2f W: [I didnt think so ]
04 K1 T: an it wuz real.
05 K2f W: i cou- uh uh it wuz tuh me?=
06 K1f T: =mm hm
So far, our discussion of exchange structure has involved affiliate actions in

which the speakers agree with each other or comply with one anothers demands.
Bearing in mind that speakers are not always compliant or interested in achieving
consensus, Berry suggested that speakers have some manoeuvrability in re-
sponding to an initiating action. If we briefly return to (3), we note that F has
demonstrated that he has access to the knowledge that was being elicited by Ts
questions. According to Berry, F has selected the option of [+k], which simply
means that F is able to fulfill the K-role set up by the K1 move. Sometimes, how-
ever, speakers do not know the answer. In such cases, speakers claim no access to
knowledge, and this can be represented by the speaker having selected for [-k].
An important issue in the modeling of conversational exchanges, therefore,
is to illustrate how K- and A-roles are negotiated over the course of the ex-
change. Muntigl (forthcoming) has suggested that one way of doing this is to in-
dicate the K- or A-roles of each of the conversationalists for each move of the
exchange. For example, if a speaker selects a K2 by asking a wh-question, the
speaker not only claims lesser access to the information (i.e., [-k]), but also
positions next speaker as having greater access and rights to the information.
The answerer, in turn, may ratify the K-roles set up in the initiating move, or
s/he may challenge the K-roles by denying knowledge of the answer, thereby se-
lecting for the [-k] rather than the expected [+k] option. An example of this
type of modeling is shown in (5), which is an example of couples therapy
(T=Therapist; D=Dave; L=Lisa). For convenience, this excerpt has been
divided into exchanges with the third and fourth columns indicating the
[+/-]K-role assigned to T, D, or L.
(5)
T D
784 T: s:o:. (6.0) so youve done the (.) big screw up,
785 and you realize its hopeless,
786 and you cant really rectify: it.
787 ((Ts gaze returns to D))
788 (2.0)
Exchange 1
789 K2 -k +k T: what h(h)appens.
790 (1.5)
Exchange 2
791 K2 -k +k T: d-does- do you:. (2.5) ((T turns to gaze at L))
792 is that a time when: (.) when you sort of (2.5)
793 ((T gazes back at D))
794 withdra:w a little bit from the relationship?
795 ((T and D gaze at L))
796 er shut dow:n a little bit from the relationship? er.

797 (2.5) ((T returns gaze at D))
Exchange 3
798 K2 -k +k T: what h(h)a:ppens for you.
799 (0.5) ((D glances quickly at T, then returns gaze at L))
800 K1 -k -k D: I dont know if I do:. I might- (0.5) but not realize it.
801 (2.0) ((D maintains gaze with L))
L D Exchange 4
802 K2 +k -k D: dyou know what- (.) do I?
803 (1.0)
804 K1 -k -k L: I dunno.
In this example, T attempts to elicit a response from D that explains what D does
in situations where he acts in contrast to his wifes (L) expectations (so youve
done the (.) big screw up). The first K2 initiated exchange begins in line 789.
Here, T positions herself as having lesser rights to knowledge [-k] and D as hav-
ing greater rights to knowledge [+k]. Since a K1 move is not forthcoming im-
mediately following Ts K2 note the 1.5 second silence in line 790 T refor-
mulates her question, this time providing D with some possible answers (is that
a time when: (.) when you sort of (2.5) withdra:w a little bit from the rela-
tionship? er shut dow:n a little bit from the relationship? er.). Ts subsequent
version of the question, which also contains candidate answers that D may use
to respond, can be seen as a way to more specifically pursue a response from
next speaker (see Davidson 1984 for a discussion of this strategy). Again no
answer from D is forthcoming, which leads T to begin another K2 exchange in
line 798 (what h(h)a:ppens for you.). Although a response finally occurs in 800,
notice that D selects a [-k] option by claiming no knowledge of what could
happen (I dont know if I do:. I might- (0.5) but not realize it.). In effect, Ds so-
cial actions ultimately result in the absence of a primary knower for two rea-
sons: first, by denying access to knowledge through I dont know, D resists
claiming greater access and epistemic rights of his own personal experience;
and second, in exchanges one and two, D fails to take up a K1 slot in which his
being cast as primary knower becomes relevant. To confound matters even
more, D begins a new exchange (exchange 4) in which he casts himself as the
secondary knower of his own experience and L, his spouse, as the primary
knower.
What we hope to have illustrated, however briefly, is that exchanges involve
more than simply providing opening or closing moves, and certainly more
than merely sending and receiving information. Exchanges cast the conversa-
tionalists in certain epistemic or deontic roles, and these roles may be negotiated
(resisted, challenged, or usurped) in a variety of ways. In the next section, we
show in more detail how lexicogrammatical and semantic resources and ex-
change structure work in tandem to account for the interpersonal negotiation of
meaning.
4. The model in operation
Having outlined the main areas of the SFL model that relate to interpersonal as-
pects of communication, we will now expand on our account by showing how
this approach can be used to illuminate discourse choices in context. In the fol-
lowing illustrative analyses, we will focus especially on mood choices in Sec-
tion 4.1 and exchange structure and appraisal in Section 4.2, with reference to
other parts of the model as relevant.
4.1. Questioning and mood

The following is a longer stretch of the doctor-patient interaction from which
example (1) at the start of the chapter was taken.11 The extract can be divided
into three stages: the opening in which the patient explains the problem (moves
0111); a brief verbal diagnosis stage (1216); and then the physical examina-
tion (1762).
(6)
Phase 1: the patients account
01 P: what it is er I work with elderly people
02 D: yeh
03 P: and yesterday I got home from work and [inaudible] the trouble is
I cant bend forward and I cant like turn sideways its like the bottom
of my spine it just feels like Im sitting on a pin
04 D: so its pain in the lower back
05 P: lower back just about there
06 D: ok
07 how long did you say again
08 P: I mean all last night I couldnt turn on my side I couldnt stand up
I couldnt go to the toilet
09 D: so it got worse overnight
10 P: yeh when I walk it hurts me to walk
11 I dont know what it I dont know if probably its lifting the residents in
the nursing home or what
Phase 2: verbal diagnosis
12 D: no remembered injury [1 sec]
13 you dont remember doing anything in particular
14 P: Ive Ive worked with elderly people for ten years moving them
around
15 D: waterworks OK
16 P: yeh fine
Phase 3: physical examination
17 D: can you climb on the couch while I have a look at your back
18 P: ((action))
19 D: just lie flat on your back
20 P: lie back oh ooh [inaudible]
21 D: Ill give you a hand
22 just relax back as best as you can / sorry / as you are comfortable ok
23 P: yeh
24 D: its when you move
25 P: its when I move and when I lie on my bed back in the house I cant lie
straight I have to lift my bottom up otherwise I can feel something like
ripping the back of my spine
26 D: what I want you to do first then is to press down with your feet against
my hands
27 press down hard
28 P: ((action))
29 D: ok now pull up against my fingers
30 P: ((action))
31 D: can you press your feet together
32 P: ((action))
33 D: press your knees apart
34 P: ((action))
35 D: just relax while I do your reflexes which are fine
36 can you bend your knees
37 P: oh
38 D: yes ok take your time
39 now keep them as they are while I just try and straighten your legs
40 P: ((action))
41 D: right
42 now let your feet come down
43 P: ((action))
44 D: thats it
45 Im going to do the work if you can try and relax and tell me when it
gets too uncomfortable
46 P: now
47 D: thats it ok so about forty degrees
48 now [inaudible] now this one
49 P: there
50 D: about the same

51 can I sit you forward now while I while I hit you
52 P: (laughs) [inaudible] thats as far as I cant go any further
53 D: tell me where the tender spot is
54 P: there oh
55 D: er further down
56 P: no just there
57 D: no . .
58 sides
59 P: yeh
60 D: so thats the worst spreading out to both sides
61 P: yeh
62 D: let your feet hang over the edge
If we start with mood choices, as noted above the doctors questions are almost
all expressed in forms other than direct interrogatives (the only exception in the
extract is utterance 07): in utterances 04, 09, 13, 24 and 60, he uses declaratives
functioning as yes/no questions (Geluykens (1987) introduced the term quecla-
ratives for this particular form-function pairing); in 12, 15, 55, and 58 he uses
elliptical forms in which the Mood element (consisting of the Finite operator +
Subject) is missing; and in 53 he uses an imperative. He also uses a range of
forms to express commands. Some of these are mitigated in various ways: mo-
dalized interrogatives (can you in 17, 31, 36; can I in 51); and some declaratives
(what I want you to do first then is to in 26; if you can try and in 45).12 However,
the majority of his commands are expressed as imperatives with no mitigation,
or only minimal mitigation (just): this happens in utterances 19, 22, 27, 29, 33,
35, 38, 39, 42, and 62. There is also one elliptical command in 48 now this one.
These lexicogrammatical features of the doctors contributions can be seen
as reflecting and construing his role in the interaction. In terms of commands,
his expertise-based authority allows him to use bare imperatives in the physical
examination stage of the interaction: there is a conventional agreement that the
doctor has the right, by virtue of his institutional role, to command the patient to
carry out certain actions which will aid diagnosis, without needing to negotiate
this imposition.
Less obviously, it can be argued that his choice of question forms which do
not explicitly signal their interrogative nature is also related to the construal of
his authority. It has been noted that in certain contexts questioners have a more
authoritative position than answerers, since they in principle control the next ut-
terance (see, e.g., Thornborrow 2001). However, questions are a double-edged
sword, in that they inherently indicate lack of knowledge, which is associated,
locally or more globally in an interaction, with a less authoritative position. One
significant feature of the doctors questions is that their function is not formally
signaled: either they are expressed by non-interrogative forms (imperative or

declarative), or the Mood, which explicitly signals interrogation through the Fi-
nite^Subject order, is ellipted. People whose professional role is to be consulted
on specialist matters, such as doctors or lawyers, are constructed, by both inter-
actants in a consultation, as being institutionally knowledgeable (cf. Berrys
1987 term Primary Knower): even though they are asking about events of which
the patient/client has first-hand knowledge, they are in a position to predict the
kind of information that is likely to be given, and to control the kind of in-
formation that is relevant: it is worth noting that the questions are designed to
elicit confirmation rather than information, acknowledging the doctors greater
epistemic right to identify and diagnose. Thus the grammar supports and reflects
the expert knower role conventionally assigned to the doctor by offering ways
of expressing his meanings which do not explicitly construe lack of knowledge.
At a more delicate level of analysis, the question forms that the doctor uses
are conventionally associated with certain specific functions, especially in the
diagnostic stages of such interactions. The queclaratives are typically used to
confirm the essentials of the information that the patient has given and simulta-
neously to reformulate it in a way that fits in with the medical process of diag-
nosis. On the other hand, the elliptical questions typically construe progress
which is business-like (and therefore potentially reassuring for the patient)
through a pre-established checklist of points that need to be covered in order to
reach a diagnosis. Utterances 12 and 13 are interesting in this respect: the doctor
begins by using a specialist formulation from his mental checklist in an ellipti-
cal question no remembered injury; but after a pause he rephrases this as a que-
clarative in terms which will be more comprehensible to the patient you dont
remember doing anything in particular.
Turning more briefly to the patient, she mostly uses statements giving in-
formation about her condition. It is unsurprising that, given her role, she utters
no commands; and on the one occasion in the extract when she asks what might
be interpreted as a question (utterance 11), she explicitly expresses it as a state-
ment about her own lack of knowledge. We can further note a significant differ-
ence in where ellipsis occurs in her utterances. Whereas the doctors elliptical
utterances are typically initiating moves in an exchange (e.g., 15 waterworks
OK), when the patient uses ellipsis, it is normally in responding moves (e.g., 16
yeh fine). Unlike the doctor, the patient does not have an institutionally ratified
agenda to work through, which means that any initiations by her have no pre-
established grounding to work from; they therefore need to be negotiated fully
through non-elliptical Mood elements.
If we move from grammatical choices at clause level to discourse choices at
the level of the exchange, the doctors authority is construed by the fact that
he initiates all the exchanges, and the patient consistently supplies the expected
response: she answers the questions (though in places her idea of a relevant
answer does not necessarily match the doctors; e.g. 14) and obeys the com-
mands. If we view the mood choices in terms of exchange structure roles, we see
that, even though the doctor selects K2 moves, these are moves that position
himself as [+k]. In the physical examination, for example, the patient must re-
spond to the doctors taps. So it is actually the taps which discover the pain
areas. In a way, the patient is construed as not expert enough (not having equal
epistemic rights) to know exactly where the painful areas are on her own body,
at least in terms which are appropriate to medical diagnosis. Only the doctor is
capable of ascertaining this. At times, the patient does initiate an exchange as in
utterance 11; but on several of these occasions, including 11, the doctor does not
provide a response: the responsibility for the successful completion of ex-
changes is not reciprocal. In one case, the doctor provides a feedback move, re-
peating and validating the patients utterance: no just there / no (56 / 57). The
right to validate rather than just acknowledge a preceding move in an exchange
belongs to the more authoritative interactant: it is, for example, typically associ-
ated with teachers.
This illustrative analysis has of necessity focused only on a small extract. It
is worth stressing that this would be only part of a typical analysis within the
SFL approach: the aim is not only to illuminate what happens in a particular in-
teraction, but to show how the choices made in that interaction make sense
against the background of repeated patterns of choices across other instances of
interactions of the same genre or similar genres. In order to be sure that the lin-
guistic choices are not simply idiosyncratic, and that the language-context con-
nections that we have argued for above are representative, we need to project the
choices onto those found in a larger corpus of similar interactions. When we do
this (see Thompson forthcoming), we can see that they are each playing a con-
ventionalized part: the patterns of choices indeed recur not only across doctor-
patient consultations but also across other kinds of institutional discourse such
as solicitor-client. The choices in a specific consultation make sense against
these wider patterns, because both interactants recognize, usually without being
consciously aware of it, that they are behaving as normal in a consultation. As
is typical in institutional interactions, the doctor, as the expert, has a discourse
role for which he has been specially trained and his patterns of linguistic choices
are thus more easily identified both in individual cases and across a corpus. The
patient, on the other hand, has not been trained to be a patient: she mainly fol-
lows the doctors lead, filling the role that is constructed for her at each stage
(answering questions, obeying commands, etc.), and otherwise making do with
patterns based on ordinary conversation in which she is of course an expert.
4.2. Knowledge roles and appraisal

In the discussion of example (5) above, it was shown how a speaker in a K1 slot
resists the [+k] epistemic status that was assigned to him in the previous move
by denying that he has access to this knowledge. In addition to resisting a certain
epistemic status, we may also choose to take over or usurp the epistemic role
claimed by the previous speaker. The conversation shown in (7), which is a
family argument involving a teenage daughter (D), the father (F) and the mother
(M), is a vivid illustration of how epistemic rights are negotiated or fought for
during a social encounter. (More examples of family arguing can be found in
Muntigl and Turnbull 1998.) In this example, D, F, and M are arguing over a re-
curring problem that involves Ds abundant use of the telephone. The conver-
sation can be roughly divided into three phases: Phase 1 involves Ds (some-
what humorous) identification of the problem (lines 0107), Phase 2 involves a
lengthy exchange of disagreements (lines 0824), and Phase 3 involves the pur-
suance of agreement (lines 2545).
(7)
D F&M Phase 1: identifying the problem
01 K1 D: Okay, theres a problem with the phone use
02 because I occupy it ninety percent of the time, as
03 mom says,
04 a::nd when shes on the phone I bug her too much.
05 Thats the problem.
06 (.8)
07 ((laughter))
Phase 2: disagreement
08 K1 -k +k F: The problem more than that ah
09 obviously you are being inconsiderate and ru::de.
10 (.7)
11 [To your parents.
12 K2f +k -k D: [NO, I JUST-
13 K2f +k -k D: NO IM NOT.
14 She:s the one who is always inconsiderate and
15 rude to me.
16 (.7)
17 K1f -k +k F: When you have the phone ninety percent of the
18 time?
19 (1.0)
20 K2ff +k -k D: NO::, whenever- whenever friends phone
21 she says oh those zit faced punks phoned again.
22 (.6)
23 K1ff -k +k M: No I didnt.
24 (2.7)
Phase 3: pursuing agreement
25 K2 +k -k F: Why should you have the phone 90 % of the time
26 (.5)
27 K1 +k -k D: Because thats who I call. (2.2)
28 They ca::lled. (1.1)
29 [NOT LIKE-
30 K2 -k +k F: [Sh- sh should you not be considerate of your
31 parents?
32 K1 +k -k D: .hh I do:: [I-
33 K1 -k +k F: [Your mother and I have phoned
34 have friends and telephone calls too.
35 K2f -k +k D: .hhh y::eah.
36 (2.4)
37 K2 -k +k F: Shouldnt we get a portion of the time?
38 K1 -k +k D: .hhh yeah, I try to make em short
39 because mom always threatens me when Im on
40 the phone.
41 (3.5)
42 K2 -k +k F: Should you come out when were on the phone
43 and wave your ha::nds and make gestures for us
44 to get o::ff because you are in a panic?
45 K1 +k -k D: .hh that only happened once with the call alert.
To begin the analysis, we focus first on the lexicogrammatical resources used in

Phase 2 (the sequence of extended disagreements). As is typical for disagree-
ment, we find many shifts in polarity from one move to the next that are realized
in negative polarity elements (e.g., NO IM NOT in line 13, No I didnt in
line 23) and discourse markers of opposition (e.g., NO, NO::). Disagreement
is also achieved by manipulating the element that is represented as modally
responsible for the proposition (i.e., the Subject). Compare the following:
F: you are being inconsiderate and ru::de. (.7) to your parents
D: She:s the one who is always inconsiderate and rude to me.
Here, D switches the roles of the participants as construed in Fs utterance: your
parents is shifted from the target of inconsideration and rudeness to the Sub-
ject role as She, while you takes over the target role (i.e., to me). This kind of
switching is strongly associated with nave contradiction. The final way in
which disagreement is realized involves the attributes of being inconsiderate

and rude. Whereas F claims it has to do with Ds occupying the phone ninety
percent of the time (see line 17), D claims it is because M calls her friends zit
faced punks (lines 2021).
Although Phase 2 can be identified as a knowledge exchange, it should be
clear that information is not what is at stake for these participants; that is, they
are not arguing about the right answer or who has access to the true facts.
Instead, the disagreement has more to do with epistemic rights in the sense that
not every participant has equal rights in interpreting a given state of affairs. For
instance, who is being inconsiderate to whom centrally involves differing points
of view and has little to do with factual information. In this sense, the issue of
epistemic rights has to do with who is able to get their point of view across and
accepted and this seems to be what the main battle between D, F, and M is about.
In fact, the commodity under negotiation seems to centrally involve appraisal:
by calling D inconsiderate and rude, F made a negative judgement about Ds
character. D then tries to turn the tables on F by naming an instance in which M
negatively judges (i.e., insults) her friends. This functions as a token of invoked
negative judgement of M, providing evidence for Ds explicit appraisal of her as
inconsiderate and rude.
Turning now to the level of exchange structure, we can see that the assign-
ment of [+/-]K rights gets reversed from move to move. F begins by positioning
himself as [+k] and D as [-k]. D, in turn, attempts to seize primary epistemic
rights and to resist Fs positioning of D as [-k] by disagreeing with F. This back
and forth assignment of opposing epistemic rights continues until the end of the
exchange. Note that we did not differentiate between F and Ms epistemic role,
because, for all practical purposes, they are constructing themselves as a single
unit (e.g., your parents, your mother and I).
In Phase 3, there is a shift from arguing by way of contradiction to F trying
to get D to take on (and ultimately accept) the parents point of view. One of the
most notable differences is the shift from a K1^K2 exchange structure to a
K2^K1 structure; that is, the initiating move now specifically tries to elicit
something from the addressee. In the first exchange, F selects a K2 in line 25
that is realized by a wh-question (Why should you have the phone 90 % of the
time). Subsequently, D answers by providing the why (Because thats who I call.
(2.2) ), thereby satisfying the K1 requirement in which she ratifies her pri-
mary knower role. If Fs local interactional goal is to convince D that she should
make fewer and shorter phone calls, then it is clear that this strategy is not work-
ing in Fs favor. The reason is that by accounting for her exorbitant phone use, D
is able to strengthen her position. It is perhaps for this reason that, at this point, F
uses a very different type of question to realize a K2 initiated exchange. Fur-
thermore, he initiates two subsequent exchanges in the same manner. Let us take
a closer look at how F formulates his questions:
Sh- sh should you not be considerate of your parents? (line 30)

Shouldnt we get a portion of the time? (line 37)
Should you come out when were on the phone and wave your ha::nds and
make gestures for us to get o::ff because you are in a panic? (lines 4244)
Although these questions realize eliciting moves, they seem to be very different
from Fs wh-question in line 25. Whereas the wh-eliciting move positioned D
as a primary knower (D is arguably in the best position to answer why), the sub-
sequent eliciting moves do not position D as someone who can decide over the
matter. This is because they merely seek confirmation from D: the first two K2s
invite a yes and the last K2 invites a no. For example, the question Sh- sh should
you not be considerate of your parents? implies that D should be considerate;13
there is no equal yes/no option implied in this formulation. For this reason, Fs
K2s position himself as having greater epistemic rights (i.e., F is stating that D
should be considerate or more considerate by not using the phone to the degree
that she does), and by confirming, D would simply ratify Fs greater epistemic
rights, thereby ratifying her own lesser epistemic rights. Notice also that F par-
tially succeeds in maintaining the distribution of [+k] for F&M and [-k] for D. It
seems that F has been somewhat successful in moving away from outright dis-
agreement and into a line of persuasion that attempts to get D to view the di-
lemma from the parents perspective.
In this phase, as in Phase 2, the exchange revolves mainly around appraisal
meanings. F utters many judgements of propriety, some of which are explicit (D
does not show consideration of her parents) and others are more implicit (D
should give her parents a greater portion of the phone time; D should not make
arm waving gestures when she is in a panic). D also draws from appraisal by de-
picting M as a cruel person and by arguing that it is because of Ms cruelty that
she is forced to make shorter phone calls (I try to make em short because mom
always threatens me when Im on the phone.).
By focusing mainly on exchange structure, we tried to demonstrate in this
analysis that K-exchanges can involve commodities other than information. An
exchange, therefore, should be seen in terms of rights to knowledge, which in-
cludes negotiation of points of view and not so much what is true and what is
false or can someone provide me with the information that I need. The right
to knowledge also includes making competing judgements about self, other and
relationship. It is about improprieties, poor vs. good taste, and the expression of
emotion. It is about who can make claims and who can resist them. We feel that
an analysis of lexicogrammatical resources within the context of conversational
exchanges can help us to shed some light on how this is accomplished.
5. Conclusion
What we have aimed to do in this overview is to illustrate some of the main

ways in which interpersonal communication can be investigated using Systemic
Functional Linguistics. We have shown not only how lexicogrammatical and
semantic resources are deployed by conversationalists to construe interpersonal
meanings on a moment-by-moment basis, but also how these resources play a
role in constructing larger activities or genres (for some important overviews
on genre in Systemic Functional Linguistics, see Bateman 2006; Christie and
Martin 1997; Muntigl and Gruber 2005; Ventola 1987). We have not had space
to show how the insights may be applied in practice, but we hope that the im-
plications are largely self-evident. The most obvious application is in achieving
a better understanding of how language functions in establishing and maintain-
ing social and personal relationships and, beyond that, the broader cultural
norms of behavior. It is important to stress that Systemic Functional Linguistics
does not see language use as simply reflecting those norms: language has a cen-
tral role in constructing them. By speaking as they do, the doctor, the patient, the
therapist, the client, the parents, and the child all construe their view of the
world that they inhabit and their position in it. This means that an examination
of their language is essentially an examination of their social beliefs, which has
a number of ramifications. In institutional contexts, the insights may be used to
inform training, making those who take on the expert role more aware of their
own behavior and perhaps better able to guide, interpret, and respond appropri-
ately to, the contributions of those whom they are advising. In less formalized
settings, the description of how people go about the routines of living through
their language is of direct relevance to many fields, including, for example,
foreign language teaching (see, e.g., Thompson 2007) where it helps to avoid
the kind of unrealistic and unhelpful distortions that bedevilled many teaching
materials in the past.
The chief advantage that we would claim for the approach set out in this
chapter is that it rests on a set of concrete categories: the recurrent patterns of
language choices that occur in particular (types of) contexts. The model offered
by Systemic Functional Linguistics is extravagant in Hallidays (1994: xix)
term (and we have only outlined one part of it here); but this extravagance is bal-
anced by systems of choices that are clearly defined, thus ensuring that analyses
are in principle replicable. Of course, as noted above, specific contexts will in-
volve factors which influence the reason for choosing, and the effect of, particu-
lar linguistic choices; but the consistency in the analytical categories allows a
greater degree of comparability in the analysis of different interactions.
Appendix: Transcription notation
Notation Gloss
(.) untimed short pause (less than .5 seconds)
(1.0) timed pause
[] overlapping speech, e.g., A: how was the [movie]
B: [great]
= contiguous utterance, e.g., A: how was the movie=
B: =great
indicates cut-off speech, e.g., I gu- guess
: extended sound, e.g., we:::ll
. clause final falling intonation
? clause final rising intonation
underline emphasis
CAPS greater emphasis
.hh inbreath
hh outbreath, e.g., t(hhh)ake
() transcribers guess at speaker utterance
(?) unidentifiable speaker
((cough)) non-speech vocalizations are placed in double parentheses
((laughter))
whispered utterance, e.g., he is nuts
sharply rising intonation
sharply falling intonation
Notes
1. The focus in this chapter is on speech, but it should be borne in mind that it is now
widely accepted that written text can also be considered from the interpersonal per-
spective, in terms of the interaction that takes place between writer and reader. The
ways in which this interaction unfolds is clearly different in kind, but the same lin-
guistic tools can be used to explore it (see, e.g., Thompson 2001; Hyland 2005).
2. Within Systemic Functional Linguistics, the interpersonal resources that we focus on
are seen as only one of four complementary sets of resources, which serve four meta-
functions: in addition to the interpersonal, these are the experiential, logical, and tex-
tual metafunctions. For the purposes of analysis, the metafunctions can be explored
separately as we do with interpersonal meanings in this paper; but it is important to
bear in mind that all language use realizes all four kinds of meaning simultaneously,
and the account given here is inevitably only part of the picture. For fuller treatments
of the whole model, see Halliday and Matthiessen (2004); Eggins (2004); Martin,
Matthiessen, and Painter (1997); Thompson (2004).
3. In Systemic Functional Linguistics, specific typographical conventions are used to

distinguish different kinds of linguistic concepts. The names of systems of choices in
the grammar are given in small capitals; individual choices from systems are in
lower case; and names of functional categories have an initial capital letter. Thus,
MOOD refers to the system of choices which includes indicative and imperative, etc.
The mood of an individual clause may be indicative or imperative, etc.; and the
Mood is the functional element of a clause which consists of Subject and Finite.
4. There are some less frequent mood choices in addition to those listed here, including
exclamative (a sub-type of declarative, with a wh-element) and imperative: sugges-
tive (with lets). Note that dependent clauses in English, with very few exceptions,
have declarative word order i.e., there is no choice, as there is with independent
clauses.
5. Some imperatives (e.g., dont touch that) have a dummy Finite form of do. This is not
a true Finite, as is shown by the fact that it is invariable (e.g., no past form) and the
fact that the tag uses a different Finite: dont touch that, will you.
6. As has often been pointed out, even the highest value of modality is less certain
than a categorical, unmodalized proposition. Later in the consultation, the doctor ac-
tually says its a torn muscle, which indicates that he is now representing the validity
of that diagnosis as non-negotiable.
7. In fact the negative couldnt indicates a problem, so in Martin and Whites terms, the
attitude here is flagged: that is, there is a signal that something is being evaluated,
thus prompting the intended interpretation of the information.
8. Berry proposed an additional move, the Dk1 or Da1, which may precede an X2
move. In the case of K-exchanges, these moves are commonly referred to as exam
questions in which the teacher delays the making of a knowledge claim until the
third move of the exchange. The X1f move was not, in fact, proposed by Berry. This
move was first introduced in Martin (1985) and in Ventola (1987).
9. Recall that statement and command refer to general speech functions. These cat-
egories may subsume more specific speech functions such as requesting or inviting
when uttering a command.
10. See the Appendix for a summary of the transcription conventions used for the
examples.
11. We are grateful for Sultan Al-Shariefs permission to use this data.
12. It is worth noting that the cases of can you in utterance 20, which we have classified
as commands, could perhaps have been intended at least partly as questions, para-
phrasable as given the pain are you able to bend your knees.
13. These questions have multiple meanings, which puts D in a bit of dilemma with re-
spect to how she should respond. Note that Ds response of I do:: does not directly
respond to the question, but to the presupposition that she is not considerate of her
parents. So, although D has managed to counter the presupposition that she is not
considerate, she still indirectly confirms she should show consideration.
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forthcoming Knowledge moves in conversational exchanges: Revisiting the concept
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7. Functional Pragmatics1
Angelika Redder
In this article I shall give a brief overview of the origins (Section 1.), the the-
oretical background and the essential concepts, and methodological approaches
of Functional Pragmatics (Section 2.). In Section 3., I shall present applications
of the theory regarding non-institutional communication (3.1.), institutional
communication (3.2.) and plurilingualism and language policy (3.3.).
1. Origins
Functional Pragmatics (FP) is a linguistic theory that has been developed dur-
ing the past 35 years. Its origins date back to the beginning of the 1970s when
pragmatics gained a high profile in Europe. In the context of these developments
(e.g., Maas and Wunderlich 1972; Wunderlich 1972a; Ehlich 1972; Ehlich and
Rehbein 1976a, 1979a) and based on the works of John L. Austin and Karl
Bhler, Konrad Ehlich and Jochen Rehbein set out to develop a theory of lin-
guistic action. This theory conceives of language as a complex of form-func-
tion-nexus anchored in reality as societal practice. In a way similar to Leontev
and Vygotskij, Functional Pragmatics views language as something specific to
and constitutive of the human species, i.e., as something that arose from a quali-
tative leap of communicative devices during the formation of human societies,
thus allowing for a knowledge-based appropriation of reality (Hoffmann 2007).
Hence, Functional Pragmatics does not focus on evolutionary (pre-)forms of
language or neurobiological mediations, but on the emergence of linguistic
structures within the formation of societies and on the adaptation of these struc-
tures to societal needs. Functional-pragmatic analyses are thus deeply em-
bedded in societal practice2 (Ehlich 1999a), but not in an applied linguistics
sense, for Functional Pragmatics is about the reconstruction of the systematicity
of language as a form of historically-societal action (Ehlich and Rehbein 1979b;
Rehbein 1977) in a way that increases the language consciousness of societal
actants (Ehlich and Rehbein 1977a, 1977b).
Methodologically, this reconstruction is to be achieved through reflected
empiricism, i.e., hermeneutic analysis. Categories are to be derived from an
analysis of authentic language data, and theoretical insights are then to be
checked against new data. This dialectic theory formation (Rehbein 1994a) is
one of the central differences between Functional Pragmatics and, for instance,
early Systemic (Functional) Linguistics, in which Halliday (1973), in his pio-
134 Angelika Redder
neering work, matches functional categories with linguistic structures and their
hierarchy in an a priori manner. In a way similar to Critical Discourse Analysis
(Wodak and Meyer 2001; Fairclough 2003), Functional Pragmatics views so-
ciety as central to understanding language, but tries to avoid the danger of short
circuiting linguistic forms and ideological functions, by reconstructing in great
detail linguistic and mental processes. The linguistic sign is thus not a basic cat-
egory, as linguistic devices are seen as historically and societally proven means
for the pursuit of repetitive purposes in repetitive constellations. Signs are there-
fore seen as the medial concretizations of action paths, i.e., of societally elabo-
rated ways of pursuing purposes.
2. Theoretical characteristics and methodological approaches
2.1. Functional Pragmatics as an integral language theory

Functional Pragmatics is an integral language theory, i.e., it attempts to recog-
nize all systematic dimensions of language. Since Functional Pragmatics views
language as a societal action form, it is an action theory of language (Rehbein
1977). The conception that Functional Pragmatics holds of pragmatics is thus
fundamentally action-bound. Pragmatics is not conceived of as pragmalin-
guistics, i.e., as a language-in-use-module to be added to language as a semiotic
system (Ehlich 1996). On the contrary, Functional Pragmatics attempts to re-
construct language as an abstract societal action form through an analysis
of authentic linguistic interaction. To do so, Functional Pragmatics expands
Bhlers organon-concept and employs purpose as a central category in a two-
fold manner: extralinguistic purposes, as they are pursued by societal actants,
and linguistic purposes, according to which language itself is shaped (Ehlich
1981). Representation, for instance, is a central linguistic purpose that, however,
is pursued with different means in different languages. The recognition of such
purposes has led to a theory of linguistic fields (cf. Section 2.2.) that underlie
language specific word classes and thus allows for a different perspective on ty-
pological differences between languages (Redder 2005, 2007).
Due to the integral character of Functional Pragmatics, research is not only
undertaken in the core disciplines of speech action analysis, discourse analysis,
and text analysis, but there are also studies in functional pragmatic grammar
(Redder 1990a; Redder and Rehbein 1999; Rehbein, Hohenstein, and Pietsch
2007), as well as in syntax (Matras 1994; Hoffmann 2003), semantics (Ehlich
and Rehbein 1972a; Thielmann 1999a, 2004; Ehlich 2001; Eggs 2006; Forsch-
ner 2006), phonology (Ehlich 1986; Ehlich and Schnieders 1998; Liedke
2007), and written language (Ehlich 1983a, 1994a; Berkemeier 1997). Within
Functional Pragmatics, these classic distinctions are not conceived of as vir-
Functional Pragmatics 135
tually autonomous levels of language, but as form-function-nexus inherent

in the phenomena, i.e., possible interfaces, so to speak, for linguistic research.
The same applies to the reality of linguistic action. Functional Pragmatics
investigates, in an applied manner, language as part of societal practice. But
it also investigates the historical dimension of language (e.g., the genesis of tex-
tual forms, Ehlich 1989a; the linguistic consequences of reformation, Ehlich
1993a, 1998a; language adaptation, Ehlich 1989b); it undertakes research
in language sociology (Ehlich and Rehbein 1994), and has produced a wide
range of studies on communication in institutions (published since 1980 as the
Kommunikation und Institution series by Gunther Narr, Tbingen). Similar
to Faircloughs Critical Discourse Analysis, these studies have been based on a
historical-materialistic and dialectic social theory. Language as practical
consciousness (Redder 1998; Rehbein 1979) and as a communication form that
directs the mental processes of the speaker as well as of the hearer, thus serving
to work their knowledge and understanding (cf. Section 2.2.) requires philo-
sophical, sociological, and psychological approaches. Functional Pragmatics
attempts to do justice to these requirements within its category formation and
language analysis, and, so far, has made major contributions in the areas of lan-
guage psychology and sociology.
2.2. Categories and units of linguistic interaction

Overviews of central categories of Functional Pragmatics can be found in
Ehlich (2000b), Rehbein (2001a), and Rehbein and Kameyama (2004). Fur-
thermore, a German-English-Dutch glossary of functional pragmatic terms
(Ehlich et al. 2006) and handbook entries on pragmatics (Ehlich 1993b) are
available.
Functional Pragmatics employs society and individual as central categories:
Society is the sociohistorical base category from which the category of the indi-
vidual is derived (not vice versa). Individuals, as societal actants, pursue pur-
poses, i.e., repetitive societal needs to be satisfied through actions. (In contrast
to acts, actions transform deficiency into sufficiency.) Actants personal goals
are thus always structurally related to purposes. As reality is societal reality, ac-
tants needs for action arise in repetitive constellations. Such a constellation, for
instance a knowledge deficit, may be dealt with through linguistic action. The
paths for such actions are societally elaborated as linguistic action patterns
(Ehlich and Rehbein 1979a). The basic illocutionary device of the question-
answer-pattern, for instance, starts with a knowledge deficit of the speaker. The
speaker asks a question. The hearer commences a mental searching process and,
if he3 possesses the knowledge requested, answers the question. The speaker, if
he can propositionally integrate the knowledge transferred by the answer, then
closes the pattern. Speaker and hearer are thus systematic categories of action
136 Angelika Redder
patterns, not turn-related categories of the linguistic surface. Linguistic action

involves three dimensions of reality: extralinguistic reality (capital letter P), for
instance, the constellation that gives rise to the speakers knowledge deficit;
mental reality (P-area) within which the speaker determines his precise non-
knowledge so that he can ask a question; and linguistic reality (small letter p),
i.e., the speakers linguistic action, the question. For a model specifying the re-
lations of the three components, see figure 1:
Figure 1. The basic linguistic model (Ehlich and Rehbein 1986: 96)
In short, the fundamental aim of Functional Pragmatics is to analyze language

as a sociohistorically developed action form that mediates between a speaker
(S) and a hearer (H), and achieves with respect to constellations in the actants
action space (Rehbein 1977) a transformation of deficiency into sufficiency
with respect to a system of societally elaborated needs.
Language, as a special kind of action, i.e., as an action form, relies on coop-
eration (Ehlich 1987). This can be gauged from the fact that S and H do not con-
stantly re-invent their action paths in communication4, but avail themselves of
societally elaborated linguistic action patterns (see above). The inner structure
of these patterns is determined through the purposes they serve and is an ab-
stract deep-structure of language. To visualize these structures, Functional
Pragmatics uses flow chart diagrams, see figure 2:
Figure 2. The question-answer-pattern (cf. Redder and von Bremen 2007)

138 Angelika Redder
The starting point of an action pattern is a deficiency on the part of the speaker,
its completion the realization of the speakers purpose, i.e., the speakers suffi-
ciency. This sufficiency is achieved by a sequence of linguistic and mental ac-
tions by the speaker and the hearer5 (Ehlich 2000c). The terms used to refer to
these complex action patterns are usually derived from the illocutionary quality
of the speakers initial, and sometimes also the hearers responding, linguistic
action (e.g., assertion, request, substantiation, question answer).
During their socialization, actants acquire linguistic action patterns interac-
tively through trial and error (Redder and Martens 1983). They do so gradually,
but sometimes also in leaps (Garlin 2000; Rehbein and Meng 2007). The im-
plicit knowledge of linguistic action patterns is a distinct type of knowledge
structure: pattern knowledge (Ehlich and Rehbein 1977a). Pattern knowledge
forms an important basis of actants expectations and presuppositions (Wunder-
lich 1972b) and thus keeps discourse on track.
The inner structure of speech actions consists of three acts: the utterance
act, the propositional act, and the illocutionary act (Searle 1969). Because of
this, the hearers understanding processes are threefold (Maas and Wunderlich
1972); perception of a speech action has occurred when the hearer has pro-
cessed the three acts. The action the hearer performs after he has processed the
speech action is part of the speech actions reception (Redder 1990a: 36). The
hearers subsequent action depends very much on the illocution and is system-
atically part of the speech actions post-history (Ehlich 1972). Since Functional
Pragmatics makes the hearer, his mental processes, and his subsequent actions a
systematic part of the analysis, there are no perlocutive acts or calculations of
efficacy as in speech act theory (Hagemann and Rolf 2001).
The success of speech actions requires a synchronization of the speakers
and hearers P-areas with respect to topics, focus of attention, previous
(speech-)actions, etc. To achieve this synchronization, there are language-spe-
cific devices, but also devices that can be found across several languages (Ka-
meyama 2004). Such devices can consist of speech actions that repair a defi-
ciency of a previous action constellation such as apology, justification (Rehbein
1972), or substantiation (Ehlich and Rehbein 1986) and elucidation (Bhrig
1996). As for German, also a rich inventory of smaller synchronization devices
has been investigated, such as the interjections HM, HE, and NA (Ehlich 1986),
secondary interjections (Reisigl 1999), the particles aber (roughly but;
Ehlich 1984a), also (hence, so, at least; Redder 1989), denn (for) and da
(since, as; Redder 1990a; Melin 1997), doch (but, though; Graefen 1999)
and determiners (Ehlich 2003a; Kovtun 2003). Deictic expressions achieve a
synchronization of the speakers and hearers attention focuses (Bhler 1934;
Ehlich 1982a).
Since language is an organon (Bhler 1934), not only speech actions them-
selves, but also the linguistic devices that constitute them possess instrumental
character, i.e., they are instruments through which the speaker makes the hearer
do something (i.e., makes him focus his attention, call upon a certain knowl-
edge, modify his expectations, etc.). Functional Pragmatics calls these small
units procedures. Systematically, these procedures can be differentiated as be-
longing to five different linguistic fields, i.e., belonging to functional areas de-
termined by an abstract, overarching purpose. While these fields are not lan-
guage-specific, their devices are. In the following, these five fields and their
devices are illustrated for German (cf. Redder 2005).
There is the incitement field (Ehlich 1986) that harbors devices by which the
speaker, in an immediate way, makes the hearer do something. Its devices are
called incitive procedures and they consist in tonal interjections, the strong
falling intonation contour on verb stems or other symbolic radicals, and the
morphemes of the imperative. Languages differ significantly with respect to the
procedures required for the fine-tuning of linguistic interaction (Liedke 1994;
Rasolosson 1994).
The deictic field (Ehlich 1979, 1982b) contains deictic words (ich, du
(I, you), hier (here), jetzt (now), dieser (this (one)), jener (that (one)),
so (so; (alike) as) and personal and temporal deictic morphemes (frag-st (ask-
hearer-directed deictic morpheme), mach-t-e (make-temporal-deictic mor-
pheme of the German preterite). These devices are called deictic procedures.
Using a deictic procedure, the speaker makes the hearer re-focus his attention on
an entity that is categorized by the procedure, for instance himself, a point in
space, an object, etc.
The symbol field consists in symbolic procedures such as nouns, adjectives,
verbs, and basic prepositions in their spatial sense. Employing symbolic pro-
cedures, the speaker makes the hearer call upon societally constituted knowl-
edge complexes. Because of division of labor, individual participation in this
knowledge ranges from general to expert knowledge (Rehbein 1998a,1998b;
Thielmann 1999a, 2004).
The operative field consists in devices that assist the hearer in processing
the structure of an utterance with regard to the syntactic function of its consti-
tuents, its propositional content, and its status in terms of discursive expec-
tations (Ehlich 2000b; Redder 1990a, 2002a). Hence, determiners, (subordi-
nating and coordinating) conjunctions, connectives such as dabei (in some
instances: thereby), deshalb (in some instances: therefore), particles
such as schon (in some instances: already), doch (sometimes: but), inter-
rogatives, case and gender morphemes, and sentence intonation are operative
procedures.
The tinge field harbors expressive procedures such as picturesque into-
nation contours or expressions such as toll (great) or wunderbar (wonderful)
or by god! (Ehlich 1998a; Redder 1994a; Zifonun et al. 1997). Its purpose is the
emotional alignment of the speaker and the hearer.
140 Angelika Redder
Speech actions consist in complex procedural combinations or procedural

integrations the precise description of which is a task of functional pragmatic
grammar. Apart from these, there are also self sufficient, i.e., syntactically au-
tonomous procedures such as N (sometimes: well), Hej (sometimes: come
on), Ach (so) (I see) (Bredel 2000) or self sufficient (bi-)procedural combi-
nations such as Lauf! (Run!), Feuer! (Fire!), Mann (oh Mann)! (Oh man!)
(Redder 1999a), and Da! (Look (there)!) that are not expanded into speech ac-
tions. It is possible that entire text and discourse phases consist of partial action
units such as Sie hin, er weg, alles umsonst (lit.: She hither, he yon, all for
nothing) (Redder 2006). The concepts of speech action and procedure thus
allow for a new interpretation of the notion of ellipsis (Hoffman 2006) and make
it possible to expand traditional sentence grammar into a grammar of discourse
and text (Redder 2003a).
Discourse and text are the largest units of linguistic action. They consist in
ensembles of speech actions that are organized, in a complex manner, with re-
spect to an overarching purpose. Their inner structure can thus be fully explored
by speech action analysis. Approaches which focus on illocutionary hierarchies
(Brandt and Rosengren 1991), on turn structure or the local sequencing of dis-
course, or which, when concerned with texts, remain at the propositional level
(Brinker 1997; Heinemann and Viehweger 1991), may not fully do justice to
the phenomena as they do not acknowledge purpose as a central category. To
describe certain discourse structures, Functional Pragmatics has developed pra-
xeograms (restaurant discourse, Ehlich and Rehbein 1972b; doctor-patient-
communication, Rehbein 1986a; job interview, Griehaber 1987; international
sales talk, Rehbein 1995a; genetic counseling, Hartog 1996). Discourse types
the genres of systemic theory are hence differentiated according to their pur-
poses (Ehlich 1990). Discourse is characterized by the co-presence of speaker
and hearer, text by the lack thereof, i.e., by a diachronically and diatopically
dilated speech situation (Ehlich 1983b). Texts are therefore ensembles of speech
actions whose actional potential has been suspended to bridge a spatial and/or
temporal gap and structurally overcome short-time memory. Hence, the actional
potential of texts is only realized during reception a fact that has substantial
consequences that are also of interest to literary studies (Krusche 2007; Riedner
1996). Technological advances have created certain in-between forms: a phone
conversation is discourse under a diatopic constraint; chat communication ap-
pears to be a para-discourse (Hoffmann 2004a). Dramas, on the other hand,
are texts designed for discursive performance (Redder 2003b).
Texts do not become texts through writing alone the oral message sent
through a messenger reaches the recipient through a temporal and spatial gap
and is therefore as much a text as written instructions left behind for someone
else. Hence, the categories of spoken and written language do not capture the
differences between discourse and text (transcriptions, for instance, are dis-
Figure 3. Units of linguistic action (Redder 2005: 47)
courses made available through writing to overcome their effervescence). Be-

cause of the diatopic and diachronic constraint, texts demand a specific use of
procedures of certain fields (Ehlich 1994a). Koch and Oesterreichers (1994)
conception of spoken and written language, however, would translate into Func-
tional Pragmatics categorical framework as specific choices in the realization
of linguistic action and thus as style (Rehbein 1983).
Figure 3 visualizes micro and macro units of linguistic action and their po-
tential interrelations, and is therefore not to be interpreted as a strict hierarchy or
an algorithm. Discourse and text, as the largest linguistic forms, consist in very
different ensembles of speech actions or procedural integrations. Vice versa,
procedures can be used as self-sufficient units or as procedural combinations
142 Angelika Redder
and integrations to constitute speech actions or parts of the ensembles of text

and discourse (Ehlich 1998a; Redder 2003a). During its beginnings, Functional
Pragmatics placed major emphasis on a general reconstruction of linguistic in-
teraction (Rehbein 1977) and thus on linguistic action patterns and their specific
realizations in text and discourse. This top-down approach is meanwhile com-
plemented by procedural analysis as established in Ehlich and Rehbein (1972a)
on modal verbs and Ehlichs analyses of deictics and interjections (1979, 1986).
Pattern and procedural analysis, in combination, allow for a holistic explanation
of linguistic interaction with (societal) purpose as the overarching objective
base category. Because of this, norm and convention are not intrinsic, explana-
tory categories of Functional Pragmatics. Thus, they are free to be used to de-
scribe factual, institutional conventions such as the terminological norms or
agreements on linguistic standardization (spelling etc.). Linguistic action pat-
terns or procedural combinations and integrations are no algorithms, but soci-
etal problem solutions. The knowledge of how to use them and how to make the
most of them is acquired during socialization. It is this knowledge on the basis
of which conformity and creativity become genuine individual options.
2.3. Analytical steps

Functional Pragmatics central empirical method is corpus-based fieldwork.
The aim is to record language within authentic interaction. Now and then, infor-
mal interviews, triangulation or experimental settings (such as thinking aloud;
Rehbein and Mazeland 1991) are also used. The sound and video recordings of
spoken language are then transcribed. Functional Pragmatics uses HIAT (Ehlich
and Rehbein 1976b), a system that, in a way similar to a musical score, allows
for a notation of several simultaneous speech events, intonation (HIAT 2; Ehlich
and Rehbein 1979c), emphasis, nonverbal communication, etc. (HIAT 3; Ehlich
and Rehbein 1981a, 1981b; for a short introduction into HIAT in English, cf.
Ehlich 1993d). The process of transcription transforms recorded language into
data available for linguistic analysis (Redder 2001a). The transcription software
EXMARaLDA6 is linked to a database that supports certain search options. In
Functional Pragmatics, the main steps of empirical data analysis are the follow-
ing (cf. Ehlich and Rehbein 1977a, 1986; Redder 1984; Rehbein 1995a; Graefen
1997; Ehlich 2000c, 2007c; Hoffmann 2001):
i. sound or video recording of spoken language or selection of written data

ii. computer based transcription according to HIAT of written data
iii. filling in the transcription cover sheet (information on the actants, the con-
stellation of interaction, pre-history and post-history of the interaction)
iv. phasing of the discourse or text, i.e., determining macrostructural units
according to discourse or text type
v. segmentation of the utterances7 according to initial illocutionary or pro-

cedural assessments
vi. paraphrase of the discourse
vii. interpretative analysis of details, for instance:
reconstruction of linguistic action patterns; initially, according to the
surface progression of discourse and text, then, according to the deep
structure (pattern positions)
reconstruction of the pre-history and the post history of speech actions
and their discursive or textual functionality
differentiation of basic, derived, supportive, and second-order speech
actions (i.e., speech actions such as substantiation that operate upon
other illocutions)
analysis of certain speech actions according to their three dimensions:
utterance act (phonological, lexicogrammatical), propositional act
(semantic) and illocutionary act (pragmatic)
reconstruction of modifications of action patterns (for instance because
of institutional action conditions); identification of tactics; separation
of systematic and contingent phenomena
differentiation of knowledge types (professional versus semiprofes-
sional or common knowledge) and identification of the knowledge
types interactants draw on
investigation of the nexus of verbal, para-verbal, and nonverbal com-
munication
investigation of the communicative apparatuses (turn-taking, repairs,
speaker and hearer orientation, style).
3. Applications
Reality is an action space constituted through societal formation. Modern so-

cieties are characterized through a far-reaching institutionalization of their prac-
tice. Even ordinary practice, everyday life, cannot do without institutions.
Hence the attributes ordinary or everyday can be used to describe common prac-
tice devoid of any anomalies, but they do not apply to the distinction between
non-institutional and institutional action, since non-institutional action space is
very narrow. As a suitable word for non-institutional interaction, Ehlich and
Rehbein (1979a) coined the term homileic discourse (from Ancient Greek homi-
lein: to talk while walking), a term that can also be used for textual action.
The following is an overview of functional-pragmatic analyses on homileic
(Section 3.1.) and institutional (Section 3.2.) linguistic interaction. Section 3.3.
is an overview of works within the area of plurilingualism and language policy.
144 Angelika Redder
3.1. Homileic discourse and text
Homileic discourse as well as homileic text are particularly characterized by an

archaic form of linguistic action: story-telling (narration). The purpose of dis-
cursive and textual narration is the transfer of experience that overcomes indi-
vidual isolation and creates a shared knowledge base with regard to forms of so-
cietal practice and their potential for change (Ehlich 1980: 20). Narration allows
hearers to sympathetically participate in a bygone experience, while speakers,
through a transformation of experiential knowledge into a story, stabilize their
experience and thus make it available for reflection in the form of a moral, a
doctrine (Rehbein 1982a), or any other qualitative knowledge-shift. Narration
counteracts the fragmentation and particularization of experience and fosters
social generalization and identity. Hence, functional-pragmatic analyses of nar-
rations frequently focus on aspects of knowledge management. There are studies
on the mental aspects of exemplary versus explorative narrations during times
of societal change (Bredel 1999), on biographical narrations across inconsisten-
cies of societal practice resulting from migration (Roll 2003; Meng 2001), from
a lack of language skills (Rehbein 1986b), or from a psychological blockage of
action patterns (Flader 1995; Redder 2002b). Reconstructing institutional
knowledge from biographical narrations (Ehlich and Rehbein 1977a; Becker-
Mrotzek 1989; Rehbein 1989a, for tertiary institutions) is another area, which
also allows for methodological reflections on the narrative interview.
Narrating or story telling are frequently used as general terms for various
types of linguistic action, such as giving an account of something, communicat-
ing, reporting, portraying, etc. (Ehlich 1983c) which constitute special recon-
structive discourse and text types (Rehbein 1989a). Their differences can be re-
vealed through form-function analysis: narration is a rendering of events for the
purpose of hearer participation. In contrast to narration, a report focuses on the
result of a chain of events, and its purpose is to assist the decision-making process
in the results post-history (Rehbein 1984a, 1989a; Hoffmann 1984a). Descrip-
tion (rendering of events according to their structure; Rehbein 1984a), portrait,
illustration, confession, biographical justification, apologia, and chronicle each
reveal a characteristic use of procedural elements (Rehbein 1989a).
Frequently the actants use ensembles of speech actions belonging to one of
these forms or another so that amalgamations arise. Nevertheless, homileic nar-
ration covers a wide range of different forms, from a trivial concatenation of
events to renderings of experience of some linguistic virtuosity, such as expres-
sive renarration (Redder 1994a). The immediacy of experience may be rec-
reated by non-sentential forms of expression in homileic and literary narration
(Redder 2003a, 2006). Other devices used by experienced narrators, namely by
professional authors, to increase hearer participation are a special use of deictics
(Ehlich 1982a, 1985, 1992b; Riedner 1996; Krusche 2001; Schiedermair 2004);
special devices can be identified as description of events vs. description of per-

ception vs. communication of perception (Redder 2000a) or ambivalent knowl-
edge management at epistemic interfaces (Redder 2000b). The discursive and
textual forms of narration are language and culture specific. The same applies to
style and to the devices used to govern reception (cf. the comparative analyses
of Rehbein 1982b and Fienemann 2006).
Narrative competence is procedurally complex (Rehbein 1987; Ehlich
2005a). The speaker needs to anticipate the hearers knowledge and understand-
ing; the hearer has to perform the necessary linguistic actions to keep the
speaker going, to ask for clarification etc. (Meng 1988; Hoffmann 1989a).
School seems to counteract the acquisition of these linguistic devices through
expectations derived from literature (Ehlich 1984b). At the same time, this ac-
quisition process is further undermined by the institutional conditions of inter-
action at school (Flader and Hurrelmann 1984). Hence, the didactics of nar-
ration require some reflection (Ehlich 1984b). Narrations in institutions, for
instance in a medical practice or before a court of law, are therefore a special
area for functional-pragmatic investigation where the functionalization of nar-
ration becomes apparent (Rehbein 1980, 1986a; Flader and Giesecke 1980;
Hoffmann 1980, 1991; Koerfer and Khle 2007).
3.2. Institutions
Institutions are in a way different from action patterns and discourse/text
types a complex and purpose-driven structural type of repetitive societal ac-
tions (Ehlich and Rehbein 1994: 317). In accordance with Poulantzas (1975),
Functional Pragmatics views an institution as societal apparatus and recon-
structs institutions as mediatory instances of societal reality a theoretical chal-
lenge (Koerfer 1994). From its very beginnings, Functional Pragmatics has
dedicated itself to revealing the nexus of language and institutions in order to
make actants conscious of the institutional conditions of their actions and to
make these actions accessible to practical criticism. Functional Pragmatics con-
ceives of linguistic knowledge as actional consciousness (Redder 1998). Crea-
tivity, when societally relevant, aims at a change of repetitive practice and does
so in acknowledgement of the affirmative momentum that lies in the reproduc-
tion of society through institutional apparatuses.
The papers collected in Redder (1983, 1994b), Ehlich (1994b), Brnner,
Fiehler, and Kindt (2002) and the annotated bibliography by Becker-Mrotzek
(1999) give a good overview of functional pragmatic research into language use
in institutions.
In institutions, the action spaces of actants are frequently separated in a
characteristic manner (Ehlich and Rehbein 1977a): agents (i.e., actants who act
on behalf of an institution) realize institutional purposes and usually act on the
146 Angelika Redder
basis of second degree institutional knowledge, i.e., an institutional theory such

as educational sciences provide for the institution school. Clients, on the other
hand, are actants who avail themselves of institutional purposes for their indi-
vidual goals. They possess first degree institutional knowledge that is, more or
less, based on their experience. In their paper on knowledge structure types
available to actants of the institution school, Ehlich and Rehbein (1977a) recon-
structed six types that have meanwhile been found to apply to other institutions
also: incidental experiential knowledge, assessment, image, sentential knowl-
edge, maxim, pattern knowledge, and routine knowledge. The concept of stereo-
type appears to lump together the knowledge structure types of assessment,
image (picture, Bild) (a compound of several assessments made by one actant),
image (an image shared by several actants), and sentential knowledge which
might have contributed to the interesting career and ideological functions of that
notion in the social sciences (Redder 1995a). Ehlich (1998b) addresses the im-
plications of this concept in terms of knowledge sociology. In an empirically
based study across several institutions, Schubarth (2001) shows that irony is a
very functional device of institutional cooperation: the speaker presents the
hearer with a knowledge element to test its validity and to achieve a common
ground via shared evaluation. The knowledge types involved in this are mainly
sentential knowledge and maxim, but also general institutional knowledge.
The following sections give an overview of the results of functional prag-
matic research on language use in institutions and its implications for applied
linguistics (Sections 3.2.1. through 3.2.6). Verbal and nonverbal communication,
spoken and written language, are especially dealt with in Sections 3.2.1. and
3.2.2. on institutions of knowledge transfer. Interactional aspects such as polite-
ness and interculturality are addressed in 3.3.
3.2.1. Schools
Irrespective of all pedagogical reforms, the purpose of school consists in pas-
sing on selected societal knowledge to the next generation a fact also con-
ceded by studies focusing on aspects concerning individuals (Becker-Mrotzek
and Vogt 2001). Ehlich and Rehbein (1986) therefore differentiate between dis-
course of teaching and learning (which can occur outside school) and instruc-
tional discourse. Based on the transcriptions of several school lessons three
of which have been published in Redder (1982) and another in Ehlich and Reh-
bein (1986), they reconstruct several action patterns pertinent to linguistic inter-
action at school: problem solving, task-completion pattern, puzzle solving,
question answer, and didactic question with directing question as its deriva-
tive. Empirical analysis reveals a particular institutional adaptation of linguistic
action patterns: a didactic question is a question, but it is asked to elicit insti-
tutionally relevant knowledge a tactical use of a linguistic action pattern
(Ehlich 1982c). For the purpose of e-learning, Redder and von Bremen (2007)
suggest a digital model of representation for several types of questions (ordi-
nary question, teachers question, questionnaires, doctors questions and their
mental presuppositions as well as outcomes).
However, instructional discourse also has its own linguistic action patterns
such as teacher-specific repair patterns (Rehbein 1984b) and rephrasings
(Keller 1978). Rephrasings, as Bhrig (1996) demonstrates, belong to the class
of reformulations that especially in institutional contexts reorganize the
knowledge of speaker and hearer. Bhrig shows that reformulations are an am-
bivalent device that can be counterproductive when used without linguistic
awareness. Such ambivalence and inconsistency is also characteristic of instruc-
tional discourse in mathematics (task-completion pattern), as von Kgelgen
(1994) reveals in his empirical comparison of classroom discourse and authen-
tic societal problem solving a study that could also be interpreted as an antici-
patory explanation of some of the observations made in the current PISA evalu-
ation. Teamwork a collective task-solution pattern does not appear to offer a
fundamental solution to these problems, but offer insights into the various men-
tal processing spelled off by bilinguals in different languages (Rehbein and
Griehaber 1996). In contrast to instructional discourse, vocational teaching
and learning discourse shows some modifications of the task-completion pattern
and more emphasis on physical action, as Brnner (1987) points out. According
to Brnner, this is the case because this discourse is closely tied to industrial
practice and students are very focused on their objectives.
In instructional discourse, teachers use modal verbs as a very functional de-
vice to organize the turn apparatus, phasing, the realization of patterns, and the
restoration of discipline (Redder 1984). Since modals categorize perspectives
on action (alternative action paths or actional objectives), they can be used to
steer students through a pattern. Actants know, on the basis of their first de-
gree institutional knowledge, which action paths are available to them it is this
kind of knowledge students acquire quickly when starting school and that also
forms an integral part of text books (Redder 1990b; Brnner and Becker-Mrot-
zek 2006).
Classroom discourse can be differentiated into main discourse and parallel
discourse. The latter consists of accompanying discourse, which is related
to the main discourse, and side discourse, which is homileic (chatting etc.).
The systematics of these discourses offer a basis for the analysis of several pat-
terns: students abduction with a punch line (Ehlich 1981a), admonition with
its characteristic options of increasing or decreasing the illocutionary force
(Fssenich 1981), and admonitions in incultural comparison (for German
Egypt, cf. Nagi 2007). Students criticism is dealt with according to plan,
i.e., according to how teachers have planned phases of the main discourse
(Redder 1987).
148 Angelika Redder
Nonverbal actions during instructional discourse can accompany this dis-

course or constitute actions in their own right. In their empirical investigation of
eye communication, Ehlich and Rehbein (1982) demonstrate that when stu-
dents avert their gaze in deliberation or teachers evaluate students contribu-
tions in a way where verbal and nonverbal communication patterns do not
agree, this is due to institutional conflicts of maxims (Ehlich and Rehbein
1977a).
3.2.2. Universities and research

Albeit somewhat challenged by the Bologna process, one purpose of univer-
sities still is to guide students towards thinking independently and thus towards
innovating academic knowledge. Hence, universities are not just institutions of
knowledge transfer, but they attempt to introduce academic novices to aca-
demic knowledge as work in progress (Redder 2002c; Ehlich 2003b). The
different epistemic status of academic knowledge, when compared to school
knowledge, becomes apparent in students assessments of this knowledge,
which go through several quantitative and qualitative steps (Redder 2002c).
Sometimes, different epistemic qualities are even revealed at a grammatical
level, as Chen (1995) shows in her study on the use of the two German passives
in university laboratory discourse. The choice between sein/werden (to be/to
become) + past participle determines whether a state of affairs is anticipated
or is communicated as a constellation that offers potential for further action
(Redder 1995b, 1999b).
It is widely known that the characteristics of seminar discourse are disci-
pline and culture dependent. In German-speaking countries, discursive forms of
academic knowledge mediation still play a major role, even though this may
change in the near future because of university reforms. Wiesmanns (1999)
analyses of academic discourse in several disciplines show a central set of fre-
quent and operational illocutions. Patterns such as substantiation, explanation,
elucidation, assessment, exemplification, and objection have to be profession-
ally handled by speakers and hearers a rewarding challenge for foreign and
German students alike (Wiesmann 2001; Hanna 2001, 2003).
Lectures and seminars, as discursive forms of knowledge mediation that are
aimed at changing and networking students knowledge, create receptive diffi-
culties. This becomes apparent in text types such as seminar minutes (Wissen-
schaftliches Protokoll) (Moll 2001) or lecture notes (Mitschriften) (Breit-
sprecher 2007) the purpose of which is a type of reduction that preserves the
integrity of the academic argument. Moll and Breitsprecher thoroughly compare
original discourses and their textual reconstructions and thus reflect the transfer
from spoken into written language. They show that students tend to abstract
from nexus of argument, critical considerations, and digressions in favor of
information gathering based on the propositional content of the utterances

regardless of their illocutionary dimension. These findings may point to a recep-
tion practice of the so called knowledge society, a practice that may be
encouraged when, as a result of modularization, universities focus more on
canonic knowledge transfer than independent, hermeneutic thinking. Programs
such as Effektiv studieren (Studying effectively) (Redder 2002d) have made
practical use of such findings to counteract these tendencies.
The attitude towards and the mediation of academic knowledge is very cul-
ture dependent a general problem with regard to the internationalization of
German universities and a specific challenge for the mediation of German as a
foreign academic language. The degree to which a certain society regards aca-
demic knowledge as authority based has an impact on the forms of discursive
argumentation and the knowledge structure types involved (Trautmann 2004;
Shoaib 2007 on Germany vs. Egypt). Such differences also reveal themselves in
students oral presentations (Guckelsberger 2005) and term papers (Stezano
2006, in press). Furthermore, they become apparent in the reception of aca-
demic writing (cf. Ehlich 1981b; Ehlich and Steets 2003, on excerpts; Schramm
2001, on reading processes in a foreign academic language). These insights pro-
vide a sound basis for the linguistic assistance of foreign students (Ehlich 1995;
Ehlich and Graefen 2001; Steets 2003; Graefen and Moll 2007) and for com-
parative projects involving several European universities.
In contrast to terminology-oriented Language for Specific Purposes
research, functional pragmatic studies of academic communication focus on
ordinary linguistic devices. It is these ordinary linguistic devices (i.e., formu-
lations like meanwhile it is widely held, it seems/appears) resulting from
historical processes of language adaptation that form a metalanguage of science
and research and constitute the crucial differences between academic lan-
guages (Ehlich 1997), i.e., the academic varieties of, say, French, German,
English, Russian, or Japanese. These differences are to be investigated within
comparative linguistics of academic languages (Ehlich 1993c), i.e., a critical
analysis of different conceptions of academic knowledge (Ehlich 1998c) and
of discipline specific academic styles (Ehlich 2000a). The research under-
taken within this comparative framework has meanwhile produced results on
different discourse and text structures (genres) and ensembles of illocutions
(Thielmann 1999b, 2003, 2006 and Fandrych and Graefen 2002, on German and
English; Hohenstein 2006, on German Japanese). Symbolic procedures char-
acteristic for academic language are investigated in Fandrych (2001, 2002,
2005), on German and English speech action verbs; Wiesmann (2001, 2003), on
German and Spanish verba sentiendi; Hohenstein (2004), on German and Japa-
nese matrix constructions; and Fandrych and Graefen (2002) and Redder
(2001b), on German and English modal verbs. The use of deictics in academic
language is investigated in Ehlich (1992b) and Graefen (1997), an exemplary
150 Angelika Redder
study of the use of deictics in German research papers. The differences de-
scribed in these empirical studies point to a significant challenge for interactants
and educational and language policies alike (see Section 3.3., below).
3.2.3. Medicine
The pivot of doctor-patient communication is the knowledge difference be-
tween agents and clients a difference that cannot be sufficiently subsumed
under the notions of professionalism and laymanship (Brnner and Glich
2002). This is because educational German TV programs on medical issues
such as Sprechstunde (consultation hour), which are conducted as an inter-
active teacher monologue (Partheymller 1994), have an impact on patients
knowledge: patients do not just have incidental experiental knowledge of their
illness, they also, because of such programs, draw on pseudo-professional and
semi-professional knowledge when communicating their afflictions (Lning
1994). Doctors, when hearing a professional term, tend to misinterpret such
terminology use as an indication of professional knowledge.
Doctor-patient communication shows yet another institutional adaptation
of the question-answer pattern, as questions are asked to elicit information
to be subsumed under a narrowing categorical grid (Rehbein 1993a, 1994b).
A special discursive form, the elicited portrait, is also typical for such com-
munication. As Lning (1993) demonstrates, the internal structure of this
form questions, responses, and their evaluations leads to characteristic
knowledge differences between the interactants that result in discursive loops.
The illocutionary and discursive structure of anamneses reveals frequent
confusion about the interactants current pattern position (Rehbein 1986a).
With migrants as patients, such asynchrony can lead to discursive ruptures,
especially when doctors are not aware of intercultural differences in the con-
ception of illnesses and therapies, or offer well meant linguistic assistance
(patronizing) (Rehbein 1985a, 1994c). A detailed analysis of the illocution-
ary structure of clinical anamnesis reveals interactive modifications as phe-
nomena of internal division of labor between the medical agents a situation
which leaves diagnostic evaluations of the patients utterances pending for the
medical team (Redder 1994c); at the same time, patients attempt to communi-
cate a certain knowledge structure type, an image (see Section 3.2., above)
of themselves. Hartog (1996) investigates, on a rich empirical basis, the
fairly recent discourse type of genetic counseling. She is able to show that
the expert knowledge clients seek does not at all possess the expected struc-
ture and certainty a deficiency resulting in significant discursive dissonances
or even complete failure of the consultation. According to Rehbein (1997),
such failures may result from the importance that statistics has gained as
a new epistemic framework. It is therefore important to instigate and keep
alive an interdisciplinary discussion of such framework shifts and of inter-

cultural framework differences to ensure continuing client-focused practice.
3.2.4. Law
Hoffmanns (1983) empirical studies of communication in the courtroom are the
first functional pragmatic analyses of the entire discourse type, its phases, its
illocutions and propositional contents. He also investigated institutional adap-
tation of patterns (Hoffmann 1980), misunderstandings during the establishing
of facts (Hoffmann 1989b) and pattern knowledge and strategies (Hoffmann
1991). Institutional purposes are also dominant in the text type legislation
(Hoffmann 1998), which is why these texts do not cater for ordinary reader ex-
pectations (Hoffmann 1992). In a similar manner, instruction leaflets do not cor-
respond to such expectations, as they have to simultaneously fulfill medical and
legal purposes (Hoffmann 1984b).
Appeals, where the accused is heard after the decision of the lower court has
been read out, display a peculiar amalgamation of spoken and written language
(Rehbein 1989b). Seibert (1981), an attorney, arrives at similar results in his em-
pirical study of files: files result from an institutional interpretation of inter-
rogation discourse; and this interpretation has an impact on the courts decision
making. The principle that decisions can only be based on what has been
said aloud during proceedings (Mndlichkeitsprinzip; principle of orality) is
always threatened by the primacy of the written word (Seibert 1989) as its de-
fault status in bureaucratic organizations.
3.2.5. Business
Despite the difficulties of empirically based research into business communi-
cation, functional pragmatics has been quite active in this field (Brnner 2000).
Brnners (1987) investigation of vocational teaching and learning discourse was
followed by numerous studies and transcript-based trainings on ordinary business
communication and conflict management (Brnner 1994, 1998, 2007; Becker-
Mrotzek and Brnner 1999, 2002).
Rehbeins (1995a) empirically based praxeogram of buying and selling
among large businesses in Europe shows a cooperative discourse structure char-
acterized by negotiation as a specific phase. The structure of negotiation is
language and culture dependent and, at the same time, subject to institutional
conditions (Rehbein 2001c).
Dannerer (1999) analyses business communication amongst institutional
agents; Schnieders (2005), a study of telephone reclamation discourse, reveals
a professionalization of German clients. The structure of the reclamation pattern
is cultural dependent (cf. Ohama 1987, on Japan, and Schnieders 2007, on
152 Angelika Redder
Indonesia); cultural dependent aspects of external business communication are

investigated in Schlickau (in press).
The works of Griehaber and Schilling on job interviews are based on quite
explosive material. Griehabers study (1987) on job interviews in retail busi-
nesses shows the characteristics of decision-making discourse and demonstrates
the limitations of role-play based trainings for migrants. Schillings (2001) in-
vestigation of interviews with academically qualified applicants cast some light
on a different economic sector. Her study centers on the decisive phases of the
discourse, where personnel managers insist on justifications and substantiations
of the applicants career decisions. On this empirical basis, Schilling can draw
some important consequences for the teaching of key qualifications to German
and foreign students.
3.2.6. Administration and politics

Functional Pragmatics has so far focused on agent-client discourse in adminis-
trative institutions, narrations in administrative contexts, and mass communi-
cation and political discourse.
Ehlich, Becker-Mrotzek, and Fickermanns (1989) early transcription based
project on the communication between local government and citizens in Dort-
mund (Germany) resulted in a brochure communication guide for institutional
agents and made transparent the general structure of this discourse type. Mi-
grants narrations during social counseling are frequently subjected to institu-
tional re-categorizations (Rehbein 1980). A praxeogram of such discourse and
the cognitive structures of the terminology involved have been presented in two
handbook entries (Rehbein 1998a, 1998b) where the institution-specific use of
ordinary linguistic devices and the epistemic drifts resulting from such use are
analyzed.
Functional pragmatic contributions to mass communication and political
discourse include illocutionary characteristics of the language of fascism
(Ehlich 1989c; Hoffmann 2001), the knowledge structures involved in anti-
Semitism (Hoffmann 2004b; Ehlich 1998d, 2002a), and migration discourse
(Rehbein 1993b).
3.3. Plurilingualism and language policy

Plurilingualism and language policy is also a central interest of functional prag-
matic research as documented by the papers collected in House and Rehbein
(2004), Kameyama and Meyer (2006), Ehlich and Hornung (2006), and Ehlich
and Heller (2006). These papers are concerned with plurilingualism in aca-
demia, in the workplace, in schools, families, and hospitals, and thus contribute
to functional pragmatic language typology and language sociology. The con-
trastive analyses mentioned in Section 3.2.2. are complemented by studies in

language contact and plurilingualism in practice: Ehlich (2005b) investigates
language contact in Europe and the impact of language contact on communi-
cative ruptures (Ehlich 1994b), and re-analyzes sociolinguistic categories such
as integration and identity (Ehlich 1991). Rehbeins broad empirical studies in
German Turkish language contact focus on contact-induced modifications of
linguistic structures such as verbal planning and hearers constructions-in-ad-
vance based on finite verb positioning (Rehbein 1995b), verbalized or assumed
connectivity (Rehbein 2001a), and the increase in structural potential of the
variety of Turkish spoken by migrants in Germany (Rehbein, Herkenrath, and
Karaco 2003). Matras (2007) touches the interrelation of contact, connectivity,
and language evolution. Pragmatic modifications under plurilingual conditions
are investigated in Afshar (1998), on bilingual communication in families; and
Rehbein and Griehaber (1996), on bilingual language learning; Kameyama
(2004, 2006), on German-Japanese planning discourse in architectural prac-
tices; Rehbein (2007a), on the reflection of plurilingualism in workplace nar-
ratives and Rehbein (2007b) on biographical experience of bilingual children.
Further aspects of plurilingualism addressed by Functional Pragmatics are
translating and interpreting, politeness, and intercultural communication and
plurilingualism in academia:
The mental aspects of translating and interpreting, i.e., reproducing ac-
tions, are very complex (Bhrig and Rehbein 2000). Durlanik (2001) investi-
gates note taking and verbal planning in consecutive translation. The use of ad-
hoc interpreting when informing patients about the consequences of an invasive
medical procedure (Meyer 2004) may result in various verbal and crossmodal
(verbal and pictorial) strategies to achieve consent (Bhrig and Meyer 2003;
Bhrig 2005).
Politeness is investigated by Ehlich (1992d) as a hearer evaluation process
resulting from problem solving regarding historical changes in societal
formation. Rehbein and Fienemann (2004) complement this analysis by recon-
structing the overall linguistic apparatus of politeness on the basis of broad em-
pirical investigations in plurilingual settings.
Intercultural communication requires a re-analysis of the notion of culture
to make available the concepts critical potential, as is attempted in Redder and
Rehbein (1987), based on the analytical methods of historical materialism. On
the basis of such reflections, the pragmatics of interculture (Koole and ten
Thije 1994) and intercultural communication become analytically accessible
(Rehbein 1980, 1985b, 2001b, 2001c, 2006; Schlickau 2005).
Ehlich (1997) discusses potentials, perspectives, and limitations of pluri-
lingualism in international academic communication from an epistemic perspec-
tive and in terms of science history, i.e., the abandonment of Latin as Europes
universal scholarly language in favor of European vernacular languages
154 Angelika Redder
(Ehlich 2002b). Against this background, the adaptation of European vernacular

languages for the purposes of science and research can be seen as an engine of
innovation, since language specific adaptation paths (Ricken 1995; Rabin 1989;
Prksen 1989; Ehlich 1989b; Weinrich 1995; Menzel 1996; House 2002; Fabri-
cius-Hansen 2007; Thielmann 2004, 2006) have lead to language specific epis-
temic resources within and beyond European languages (cf. Section 3.2.2.,
above). Despite these comparative studies of academic languages which ex-
plore terminology and syntax as well as speech actions and their sequentiality in
text and discourse the innovative potential lying in these epistemic resources
is only barely described and understood; at the same time, the linguistic future
of science and research is seen in English as the institutionally promoted
new universal language. As Clyne (1987, 2004) and Ehlich (2004, 2007c)
point out from the Australian and German perspectives, these developments
may endanger Europes innovative potential for several reasons: the epistemic
potential of academic plurilingualism is abandoned in favor of a single language
that, to non-native speakers, is only available as a lingua franca, i.e., as a func-
tionally restricted idiom unsuitable for academic purposes. At the same time,
such developments create major obstacles for academic knowledge transfer
within non-anglophone societies. Finally, academic varieties being an ongoing
source of linguistic expansion for the languages that support them (for instance
French, Italian, German, Russian), their loss would result in a fundamental re-
duction of the functional range of these languages.
4. Conclusion
Rather than a conclusion, I shall supply one final remark: this brief and there-
fore somewhat technical summary might have left the reader with the impres-
sion that Functional Pragmatics views people as something like robots, devoid
of creativity and freedom, whose linguistic exchanges are encased in linguistic
action patterns readily provided by society. Functional Pragmatics does not. But
the linguists working within this framework have recognized that the trodden
paths also extend to the things people do with language. These trodden paths,
linguistic action patterns, are deep structures that underlie our linguistic pur-
suits. Like the grammar of a language, they are societal problem solutions.
We are free to avail ourselves of these patterns, even to deviate from them to
some extent. But if individuals would constantly attempt to reinvent them, they
would be as successful as they would trying to communicate in a private lan-
guage. And thus, they would abandon their potential for partaking in creativity
and change.
Notes
1. I would like to express my warm thanks and acknowledgements to Winfried Thiel-

mann (Mnchen/Dresden) who prepared the translation of a draft of this article.
I would also like to take this opportunity to express my wish that, at some time in the
near future, publishers may realize the difference in terms of the time required
between the translation of a dense academic paper and a work of crime fiction. I take
responsibility for any remaining inaccuracies.
2. It is not by accident that the first and to date most widespread transcription system in
Europe, HIAT, was developed within Functional Pragmatics (Ehlich and Rehbein
1976a). Two volumes of transcripts created with this system have been published
(Redder 1982; Redder and Ehlich 1994).
3. For the sole purpose of economy of expression, the generic masculine is used through-
out this paper.
4. Otherwise, strictly surface-based analyses would not have found any regularities.
5. A sequence of linguistic actions involves a systematic change of turns; several lin-
guistic actions by one speaker are called a concatenation of speech actions.
6. A site with further information on EXMARaLDA from which the free software can
be downloaded is available at http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/exmaralda/ (last access:
October 16, 2007).
7. Utterance is the pre-analytical category for each self-sufficient unit of linguistic inter-
action (speech action, procedural combination, procedure) whether this unit is spoken
or written.
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8. Data and transcription
Arnulf Deppermann and Wilfried Schtte
1. Introduction
In order to be an empirical approach to solving everyday problems with lan-

guage and communication, the study of interpersonal communication must be
based on recordings of authentic verbal interactions as they naturally occur in
everyday life. To this end, the researcher has to construct a corpus of audio- or
video-taped data which document exactly the kind of communicative events he/
she is interested in (see Section 2). In contrast to field notes, sociolinguistic in-
terviews and coded data (from rating scales, etc.), audio- and video-recordings
have some decisive advantages:
They are not affected by researchers or subjects limitations of imagination,
attention, memory and expressive power.
They are not selective, but contain every detail of the whole communicative
process.
They preserve the transitory, temporal quality of interpersonal interaction
and document it in a naturalistic fashion.
They do not involve an interpretation which is inextricably intertwined with
the data, but they provide for a passive, physical registration of acoustic and
visual events (Bergmann 1985). Consequently, the processes of establishing
data and analyzing them, which have to be kept apart, can be dealt with in
separate stages of the research process.
Still, audio- and video-recordings alone will not be sufficient preparation for
analysis. A data-base must also comprise transcripts of the recordings. A tran-
script is a written representation of an audio- or video-recording, which can be
edited using a specialized editor (see Section 3). It is set up according to special-
ized transcription conventions which define how acoustic or visual phenomena
have to be rendered in the written mode. It has to capture at least all vocal
activities of all participants to the talk, as they are documented on the audio- or
video-recording. There are epistemological and practical problems concerning
the edition and the use of transcripts which have to be solved with respect to the
nature of the recordings and to the aims of the research (see Section 4).
180 Arnulf Deppermann and Wilfried Schtte
2. Data-collection and corpus-construction
Depending on your research questions, you have to gain access to a specific

field of interpersonal communication which hopefully will provide you with the
data you need. Many research questions require ethnographic field research.
Field research comprises at least the following activities: gaining access to the
field, securing ethical concerns of the study, finding a role in the field, using dif-
ferent ethnographic methods of data collection.
2.1. Access to the field

A study of interpersonal communication starts with some more or less clearly
defined research questions. Some questions relate to phenomena which are tied
to a specific context, e.g., how do people interact in a specific social environ-
ment, such as an institution or a social network? Others concern phenomena
which might be distributed in a more context-independent manner, i.e., how is
turn-transition managed by the use of gaze and prosody? In any case, you need
to get recordings of authentic talk-in-interaction.
2.1.1. Accessing the field

First of all, you need to establish contact with people from the field and explain
them the aims and procedures of your study in order to gain their trust and their
willingness to be recorded. If you record data from institutional settings, this
often involves asking superiors for permission (such as the director and teachers
in a school). Provide members of the field with a hand-out which informs about
your study in a non-technical style.
2.1.2. Ethical concerns

All subjects have to give their informed written consent to being recorded. You
need to assure them that data are only used for scientific purposes and that they
will be masked to secure the privacy of the people being recorded. Be prepared
to explain why you need recordings and consider also which benefits your study
could pay off for the field itself. This might imply that you think about ways to
communicate your findings to members of the field when you have completed
your study.
2.1.3. Finding a role in the field

Often it is necessary for the researcher to adopt a social role that fits in the prac-
tical structures of the field. This is often the prerequisite to be allowed to par-
Data and transcription 181
ticipate in the communicative events you want to record. In research on adoles-

cents peer communication, for instance, it will be useful or even necessary to
engage in youth work, or in order to record international business communi-
cation you might be required to participate as an interpreter. Doing so, the re-
searcher becomes a temporary member of the field with a status that is useful for
the members of the field, and this provides him/her with a motive for partici-
pation beyond merely being an external observer.
2.1.4. Ethnographic methods

A researcher who is well established in his/her field of research can engage in
participant observation. Extended participation observation can give access to a
variety of occasions and sites of communication. It provides the researcher with
an intimate knowledge of the members of the field, their routine practices, and
the material, spatial, and social structures which they orient to. In this way, the
researcher at least gradually acquires members competences in acting and
understanding, and (s)he gains an overview of the communicative practices and
events in the field and of the values, norms, and participation frameworks which
are associated with them. Participant observation can be supplemented by other
ethnographic methods. Biographic or sociolinguistic interviews can be con-
ducted in order to ask subjects about the history of the field, its social structure,
the linguistic intuitions and ideologies of the members of the field, or in order to
elucidate unclear references and allusions in the records. Especially, if you re-
search institutional talk, it is strongly advisable to conduct expert interviews,
which provide background information on institutional goals and on organi-
zational, juridical, and technical aspects which might affect the interactions. You
also might need some disciplinary knowledge which relates to the topic of the
talk (business, medicine, technology, law, etc.). Further ethnographic data com-
prise documents, such as texts (letters, e-mails, newspaper articles, manuals,
etc.), pictures, or videos which are produced or used in the field. They are es-
pecially important when they are directly involved or referred to in the com-
municative processes under study.
Ethnography is not only important for gaining access to conversational data.
It provides the researcher with background knowledge which enables him/her
to adopt an emic perspective. That is, ethnographic knowledge is often indispens-
able for understanding categorizations, their references, and norms of conduct.
It helps to notice communicative phenomena or problems which are relevant to
the members of the field themselves and which deserve primary analytic atten-
tion. Profound ethnographic knowledge is also very useful in order to decide
which recordings you want to make. It gives you guidance about the relevance,
the typicality, and the validity of your data. It gives you an idea which types
of communicative events and practices are frequent and which are marginal or
extraordinary. It guides your search for additional recordings since ethno-

graphic information can point to dimensions of variation (as far as participants,
settings, topics of the talk, etc. are concerned), which may be decisive for the
shape of communicative events. Finally, ethnographic knowledge is most im-
portant for data analysis: it can make you aware of aspects of the data which
would go unnoticed otherwise, it can fill interpretive gaps, provide you with
further levels of meaning, rule out alternative analyses which might be possible
from recorded data alone, protect you from wrong conclusions, direct your at-
tention to possible lines of interpretation, and to specific factors affecting the
details of the talk, or provide you with a sense for the right categorizations to
phrase your findings (see Deppermann 2000).
2.2. Data recording

Audio- and video-recordings of interpersonal communication have to comply
with two major criteria: they have to be of good technical quality (sound, pic-
ture), and they have to document naturally occurring talk-in-interaction. The
second criterion means: data must be a valid token of just that type of practice
which the researcher claims to study. This means that data do not have to be elic-
ited by the researcher (such as group discussions, interviews, etc.). The problem
is captured by Labovs formulation of the observers paradox:
The aim of linguistic research in the community must be to find out how people talk
when they are not being systematically observed; yet we can only obtain these data
by systematic observation (Labov 1972: 209).
Ethnography may again help you in deciding if your records are marked by the
observation, and you can ask the participants, if the observation did influence
their behavior. But data analysis in a conversation analytic mode will also give
you hints as to aspects and segments of data in which the subjects orient to being
recorded. The observers paradox often will influence your data in an unfavor-
able way. But there is no need to discard such data. Just as with interviews or
focus groups, you can still use them for analytical concerns, if you are prepared
to take into account the way in which the researchers activities play a role in the
making of the interaction at hand, and if you consider how they are reacted to by
the other participants. Sometimes, such reactions can be very revealing, since
they display fears, preconceptions, or goals of the researched subjects which
relate to your research questions. Apparent orientations to the fact of being ob-
served and to researchers interventions in the interaction might also imply that
you have to revise your research questions. It would, however, be a methodo-
logical mistake to treat such data as mere reflections of ordinary communicative
events of the field which would have happened in the same way without the
researchers participation.
Making a good record: technical aspects. With the rise of digital technol-
ogies, collecting data in field settings has become much easier. Field equipment
must be portable, robust, and small. It should have sufficient storage for several
hours of recording. Digital audio recorders have a hard-disk or (removable SD
or CF card) flash storage devices. You must check if a built-in-microphone will
do or if your recorder needs to be wired to an external microphone. Easy file
transfer from the recorder to your computer via an USB-interface is desirable.
When planning audio recordings, you must decide whether you will use a com-
pressed (MP3) or an uncompressed file format (WAVE). Compression allows
you to record larger amounts of data but it causes reductions of the recorded
sound signal. This may turn out to be problematic if you want to use the data for
computer-assisted prosodic analysis, e.g., to obtain spectrograms and pitch con-
tours. Then, you should use an uncompressed file format with parameters close
to the Redbook CD digital audio standard (i.e., 44,1 kHz sampling rate, 16 bit,
2 channels1).
Unfortunately, the quality of field recordings and their naturalness rival with
one another. Technically perfect recordings often require measures which limit
the range of activities of the subjects of research in an unnatural way, and they
require much more clumsy and visible recording equipment which disturbs the
communicative situation. In many cases, a video-recording would be essential
for a comprehensive representation of the interaction. Video, however, is more
invasive than audio, because participants are embarrassed by the camera and
because the recording might require conditions of light or camera placement
which affect the ongoing interaction. If subjects are in motion you have to de-
cide which one of them will be provided with a microphone. As far as camera
perspectives are concerned, you may have to choose between an overall view,
which captures the whole scene on the cost of details, such as facial expression,
and a more focused recording, which supplies fine-grained pictures, but misses
some participants, typically those who do not produce turns at talk at the mo-
ment. In addition, subjects often decline video recordings, while they may agree
with being audio-taped. Thus, the researcher has to decide on the best compro-
mise between naturalness, technical quality, and the completeness of phenom-
ena to be recorded: What minimal technical quality does your recording require
in order to be still analyzable? Is the visual dimension essential to your research
interests? When does a situation lose too much of its naturalness so that your re-
search questions possibly cannot be answered by the data?
Completeness and quantity are two further aspects which determine the
quality of recordings. Completeness refers to the fact that conversations should
be recorded in their full temporal extension. That is, you do not have to start
your tape only when participants get to the first topic. Rather, it is advisable to
start as early as possible, e.g., already when participants enter a room, at the first
exchange of greetings, or while you are informing them that you are making a
recording. In the same way, recordings do not have to be cut off prematurely, be-
fore participants close the conversation and leave the room. Such fringes of
the talk often include important framing activities, which already project trajec-
tories of interaction or participants stances towards one another, and they might
include reinterpretations which can elucidate actions that have been taken be-
fore.
Quantity refers to the question of how many recordings the researcher has to
make. The answer depends very much on the research question you want to
answer. Conversation analytic research starts with the detailed sequential analy-
sis of single cases. Accordingly, you do not need a large corpus to get your
analysis started. Rather, it is advisable to begin immediately with transcription
and subsequent data analysis as soon as the first recordings were made. The
cumulative collection of a corpus can proceed according to the principle of
theoretical sampling (Glaser and Strauss 1967). This means that you look for
additional data on the basis of the analyses that have been carried out yet, be-
cause they provide you with hypotheses, questions, and dimensions of data-
variation which guide the choice of the next data to be recorded. In other cases,
it is best to record series of interactions which the participants themselves con-
sider to belong together, e.g., all meetings during a business visit or all doctor-
patient interactions pertaining to the treatment of a patients disease. Although
close single case analysis is at the core of conversation analytic research, it is
the analysis of collections, which makes up for the possibility of typological
findings and maybe additional quantitative measures. To reconstruct the general
structures of an interactional practice, you need to consider variants produced in
different contexts. Schegloff (1997) recommends to collect instances gener-
ously but then to single out boundary cases in order to delineate the margins,
that is, the specifics of the interactional practice in question. Most importantly,
you have to scrutinize (seemingly) deviant cases in order to see if they urge you
to revise your hypothesis. However, the deviant structure may also be produced
and reacted to in a way which attests to its being not normal. Then it can pro-
vide for a very strong point in favor of your hypothesis.
2.3. Metadata documentation

A corpus of data does not only consist of audio- or video-recordings and tran-
scripts. You also need to document data which describe your recordings. First,
you have to note data which pertain to the making of the recording: name of the
observer, equipment used, (digital) data format of the recording, local setting,
date and time of the recorded events, duration of the record. Metadata should
also contain remarks on the overall quality of the record: interruptions or miss-
ing parts of the record, problems with the audio- or video-signal, specific
restrictions on the usability of the data. Secondly, you have to collect data on the
participants: age, sex, ethnicity, occupation, family role, kinship, preferred lan-
guage variety, language proficiency, and other features which might be relevant
to the talk (such as membership in an organization, disablements, academic
titles, distinctive clothing, etc.). This might also include features of the com-
municative behavior which are peculiar to individual speakers, such as speech
rate, comprehensibility, volume, etc. Thirdly, ethnographic observations and
other information which is needed for data analysis must be written down and
stored in a way that its relation to the recording is obvious. This concerns
events which took place before and after the recording, such as participants dis-
playing their unwillingness to be recorded, giving comments, or confidential in-
formation, and previous events which were alluded to in the recorded interac-
tion. Table (1) shows how a basic metadata documentation of an audio recording
might look like.
(1) Example of a metadata documentation of an audio recording
Name of the recording: Trip to Gstaad 1

Corpus Number: youth communication 24
Recording date: 20001010
Recording time: 2 a.m.
Duration: 90 minutes
Medium: Audio recording (MD)
Recording Equipment: Sony MZ-R710, Sony ECM MS-907
Data format: Wave 44100 Hz, stereo
Setting: Van of the participant observers; Trip from Bern to Gstaad
Participants (gender, age): Alex (Participant Observer, male, 30), Anna
(Participant Observer, female, 27) Frank (male, 16), Wuddi (male, 15), Denis
(male 17), Knut (16).
Comments on Participants: Wuddi speaks a dialect from Southern Hessia;
Frank suffers from a slight speech impairment (stuttering)
Comments on the recording: Partially poor sound quality because of sounds of
the vans engine; about 15 minutes are missing because of a break; Knuts turns
are mostly incomprehensible
Transcription: 0:45:10 to 1:02:20; 1:13:25 to 1:15:55
Transcriber: Peter Reich
Transcription checked by: Arnulf Deppermann and Wilfried Schuette
Metadata capture information which is basic for storage, retrieval and analysis
of recorded data. Moreover, it is needed in order to make your corpus com-
parable to other corpora, e.g., if you want to consider the possibilities and limi-
tations of the typicality and generalizability of your findings. Moreover, it can
engender hypotheses about variables which might be responsible for certain
communicative phenomena in your data. Especially, if your data are deemed to

be included in larger digital data-bases, metadata are needed to define queries by
which you can collect and compare linguistic phenomena which might depend
on the values of specific metadata variables. In this case, it is strongly advisable
to use a standardized, fixed set of categories and a controlled language for meta-
data description (cf. IMDI 2003).
Your own metadata collection should also contain a key for anonymizing
your data. Privacy policies require that names of persons, organizations, places,
and all other descriptions which could be used to identify the persons who were
recorded be replaced by invented items which allow no such inference. You
should keep a list which matches the original names and the invented names you
use in your transcripts and publications.
2.4. Corpus inventory

You can start transcribing right after the first recording was made. But in most
cases, you will record much more data than can be transcribed. Moreover, it is a
deplorable fact that in many research projects, too much time is spent on tran-
scribing data, leaving too little time for a detailed and extensive data analysis
and a theoretical interpretation of the findings. Consequently, a lot of tran-
scripts, which took a lot of time to be produced, do not get analyzed. In order to
avoid these problems and to decide on a principled basis which stretches of data
should be transcribed, it is best to make inventories of your recordings. While
metadata describe circumstances and participants of your recordings, the inven-
tory summarizes the recordings themselves. An inventory of a corpus can be set
up as a table which documents the following information for every recording in
separate columns:
A timeline on which the time that has elapsed since the beginning of the rec-
ord is noted.
Speakers: who is speaking during a defined spate of talk.
Action/content: a short description of the participants activities, the topics
talked about and perhaps some most important statements or citations.
Remarks: here, you can note phenomena of the interaction which strike you
as being peculiar, interesting or presumably most relevant, such as emo-
tional outbursts, recurrent activities and formulations, keywords, seemingly
inadequate behavior, participants joining the conversation or taking their
leave, etc.
Research question: this section contains references to phenomena in the data
which pertain to your research questions.
Transcript: here, you can indicate which segments of the talk have already
been transcribed.
Filling out such a form must not pre-decide on analytic questions. It should not
consume too much time, and it does not have to be a transcription, but a rough
and dirty summary of what is going on in the recording. The uses of an inven-
tory are
to get a fast overview of your data
to recognize larger developments in the conversation, which often do not be-
come apparent in the microscopic mode of close sequential analysis
to select segments of data for transcription. The inventory can also be used
to search for comparative segments, especially, if you have exhaustively cat-
egorized all instances of the phenomena which relate to your research ques-
tion. It is thus an excellent means for setting up a collection.
to get an idea of what happened in those segments of the conversation which
are not transcribed.
2.5. Selection of data segments for transcription

The inventory provides a basis for the choice of data to be transcribed for analy-
sis. Quite often, the first overview of the data already points to the need to adjust
your research questions. On the one hand, it may turn out that the initial ques-
tions may not be answerable by the data or that they rest on preconceptions of
the field which were flawed. On the other hand, phenomena impose themselves
as being relevant to the participants, which were not expected by the researcher.
First recordings thus often cause a revision of the aims of the research. They
provide for an empirical basis on which to ground more precise formulations of
the research questions to be addressed.
As you might guess from our short reference to the principle of theoretical
sampling, selecting segments for analysis does not need to be carried out once
for all. Rather, it is advisable to select a few segments which seem to be pri-
marily relevant and then re-iterate the procedure after the first results of sequen-
tial data analysis. Here are some considerations which can guide the selection of
data segments for transcription:
Choose segments which relate to your research questions. Most important
are passages in which participants directly refer to phenomena of interest or
in which they use ethno-categorizations by which they refer to them.
Choose segments which seem to be clear or prototypical cases of the prac-
tice you are interested in. Here, ethnographic knowledge can help to direct
your attention to tokens which are most typical.
Do respect the boundaries of activities and/or topics which the participants
themselves indicate. It is very important to define segments according to the
segmentations which speakers themselves mark. Otherwise, you will very
probably risk misinterpretations because of your neglect of sequential pre-
suppositions and framings which had been established before. Answers, for
instance, should not be inspected without regarding the questions which
gave rise to them, concluding activities should not be analyzed without tak-
ing account of the previous stretch of talk which is reformulated in the con-
clusion, rejections and disaffiliative reactions should be related to the first
pair parts which they address, etc.
Start with the opening of a talk (or an activity) whenever it seems reasonable
with respect to your research interests. Openings (or more generally: initial
passages which open up some line of action) always have the advantage that
you will not miss framings, preconditions, and projections which strongly
prefigure what will happen later and how it is to be interpreted. But there is
one caveat to this principle: check if the opening stage of an interaction is
strongly influenced by the participants orientation to the observation. This
being the case, it might prove to be better to turn to later phases of the inter-
action, when the participants have lost their awareness of being recorded.
3. Transcription: Conventions and editors
A transcript must contain those parts and features of the recorded audio or video
data which are relevant for further analysis. In order to be good transcript, it
must render the details of the talk which might be relevant to how the partici-
pants perform their activities. It includes phenomena which usually do not ap-
pear in written texts and which do not conform to grammatical or orthographic
rules of written standard language. Which phenomena, then, can be represented
in a transcript?
A precise rendering of the verbal phrasing of the utterances including mor-

pho-phonological and morpho-syntactic details, such as contractions, abor-
tions, or dialectal variants of words.
Non-lexicalized, vocal utterances like laughing, whistling or humming; most
importantly, so called backchannel behaviors (uhuh), interjections (oh,
hey), and hesitation markers (uh) have to be noted.
The sequential, temporal parameters of social interaction: speakers and their
turns at talk in their sequential order, the exact extension of overlaps of turns
of different speakers, pauses, and latching.
Prosody: changes in speed (including stretched syllables), volume, and
pitch, especially in those (stressed) syllables which immediately precede a
transition relevance place (TRP). Complex prosodic parameters, such as
stress and rhythm, are combinations of those three parameters.
Syntactic, semantic, pragmatic annotation: some transcribers annotate such
features depending on their specific research interests. Corpora for studies in
grammar, e.g., often contain part-of-speech-tags, the CHILDES-corpus of

parent-child-interactions includes annotations of speech acts.
Multimodal activities: if you have a video recording, you can annotate par-
ticipants gestures, facial expression, body posture and movements, gaze,
proxemics (i.e., bodily distance between participants) and actions involving
objects (such as repairing a car).
Translations: if code-switching occurs in your data, it may be good to trans-
late segments of the talk which were produced in a foreign language. The
same applies for all publications in a different language than the one spoken
in the data. There are two common ways of translating: a free translation
delivers an idiomatically correct rendering; an interlinear translation keeps
to the original sequence of words and makes their morpho-syntactic features
explicit by the use of a defined inventory of morpho-syntactic annotations.
Occasionally, transcripts include interpretive comments regarding individ-
ual utterances or parts of them (surprised, ironic). They can be useful in
order to catch features of the talk which are very difficult to capture in a for-
mal, non-interpretive way.
Properties of the talk may neither be left out nor be corrected by the tran-
scriber according to written standards or to what the speaker presumably has
meant. Conversation analytic research has shown that all these phenomena are
not mistakes. They are systematically produced for interactional concerns,
such as holding a turn by a hesitation marker, expressing emotional stance by in-
terjections, or negotiating the acceptance of a position by self-correction (see
Day and Wagner this volume on conversation analysis). The precise shape of
these phenomena and their interactional uses could only be detected by studying
transcripts which capture them precisely. The art of transcription rests on the as-
sumption that there is order at all points (Sacks 1984): for analytical concerns,
it must be presupposed as long as possible that every detail of the talk is system-
atically produced, i.e., that it contributes in some way to the organization of the
conversation and to the process of intersubjective sense-making. This also
means that no element of the talk has to be discarded as irrelevant or random. On
the contrary, only the transcription of unexpected, seemingly irregular or even
contra-intuitive features gives you the opportunity to correct your intuitions on
an empirical basis, and it allows you to make discoveries you did not anticipate.
Transcripts still have other advantages which make them an indispensable
complement to audio- and video-recordings for analysis. Transcripts freeze the
time, i.e., they give you the opportunity to stop the permanently ongoing, tran-
sitory process of verbal interaction at any point in order to focus on specific phe-
nomena and on different levels of analysis. They open up the possibility for
extensive, repeated analysis, for the close study of specific features of the talk,
and for the step-by-step reconstruction of the minute details of the production of
turns and their co-ordination. Transcripts allow you to gain a structural synoptic
overview over longer stretches of talk, and they enable you to gather collections
of segments of the talk which can be compared with one another. All these pay-
offs are essential for a rigid methodology of the analysis of talk-in-interaction,
and they can only be gained by transcriptions which often can be very demand-
ing and time-consuming.
3.1. Coding conventions

Transcription has to be carried out according to a transcription system. This
consists of coding conventions which define how features of the talk (and other
activities) have to be coded in the transcript. Transcription systems differ with
respect to which phenomena they allow to represent, which level of granularity
can or must be achieved in representing features of the data, and which signs are
used to convey a specific conventional meaning within the system. Differences
between transcription systems are motivated by theoretical assumptions on talk-
in-interaction and by the specific research interests of their authors. Coding con-
ventions for transcripts should comply with several criteria which are hard to
reconcile with one another: they should be easy to learn, to read, and to under-
stand; however, they ought to represent the complexity and the details of the
communicative reality most reliably and as precisely as necessary for analytical
concerns. They should be ready to use in common text processing programs, but
still be apt for post-processing in computerized data-bases. Bearing these crite-
ria in mind, the following properties are most important for the selection of tran-
scription symbols:
the clarity of the signs used (principle of iconicity)
a coherent and explicitly defined one-to-one mapping between transcription
signs and the linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena which are to be rep-
resented
a comprehensive design of how to deal with all features of the data which
are possibly relevant for transcription.
Coding with conventional signs (i.e., no use of special characters) will increase
the robustness of transcripts (i.e., their exchangeability) and is the basis for the
integration of the transcripts into corpus data-bases. Transcription systems
differ in how they deal with two key issues in representing talk:
1. How should the temporal sequentiality of talk-in-interaction be transformed
into the spatial linearity of transcription?
2. How should features of speech be transformed into a written mode?
3.1.1. The transformation of the temporal sequentiality of talk-in-interaction

into the spatial linearity of transcription
As for the layout of turns, three different types of representation have been
established: the vertical or sequential writing mode (see figure 2), the partiture
mode (see figure 3), and the column mode.
a) In the vertical or sequential mode, each turn is represented in a new tran-
script line. This mode of writing inherently marks the boundaries of turns.
The transcription system GAT (see below) demands a segmentation of lines
according to functional and prosodic units (turn constructional units). This
kind of representation thus gives a very clear idea of the individual units,
talk-in-interaction and its individual turns are made of.
b) In the partiture mode, similar to a musical score, every participant in a com-
municative event is assigned his/her own individual line, which, in prin-
ciple, is a potentially endless horizontal axis. Specific transcript editors
(e.g., EXMARaLDA, see below) allow you to represent talk in such a way
that it is conceived of as being located on a continuous (time-)line. This
mode of representation is most suitable for interactions with many partici-
pants and overlapping segments of talk. It easily makes visible who con-
tributes when and also gives a rough idea of the proportions of talk produced
by individual speakers. In the partiture mode, the segmentation of structural
units of the ongoing natural course of interaction is minimized.
c) In the column mode, the course of turns is represented vertically, i.e., from
top to bottom, not horizontally, as in the partiture mode. Each participant is
assigned his/her own column. This mode of transcription has advantages for
the presentation of asymmetries in talk and for focusing on single speakers.
It has been used for the analysis of parent-child-interaction and for language
acquisition research (see the CLAN editor in the CHILDES project).
3.1.2. The transformation of speech into a written mode

The sounds uttered by speakers may be represented according to the following
types of transcription conventions:
a) The orthographic transliteration follows the rules of orthography which are
obligatory for the written standard of the object language (such as German,
American English, Russian, etc.). This mode fulfils all expectations of prac-
ticability, as the conventions are commonly known and may be realized in
popular text processing programs. Additionally, the orthographic mode en-
sures a consistency of transliteration which is most important for the post-
processing of transcripts in corpus linguistics and for their inclusion in
researchable data-bases. Its main disadvantage, however, lies in its neglect
of sound fidelity. Consequently, there is no predictable relation between

characters and sounds. An orthographic layer of transliteration thus is most
recommendable for retrieval purposes in a spoken language data-base, but it
is insufficient as the only mode of representation for the analysis of speech
and talk-in-interaction.
b) The phonetic transcription represents sound sequences most faithfully by
using an extensive and precisely defined sign inventory which captures all
physiological features of articulation and phonation. Most common is the
IPA system of the International Phonetic Association. This minute translitera-
tion allows you to represent most precisely variants of pronunciation. It
makes available those features of speech which are important for the study of
dialectal and ethnolectal variation and for second-language learning, speech
impairments, and other issues which crucially involve phonological variants.
Phonetic transcription, however, is very hard to write and read. It requires a
lot of training from transcribers and readers, and it is very time-consuming.
Often an IPA transcription is not feasible because the special characters of the
phonetic alphabet are not applicable in a technical sense. A thorough pho-
netic transliteration is only needed for phonetic research interests. It is not
needed for conversation analytic purposes and should be used only locally in
order to represent phonetic variants which are interactionally relevant.
c) The literary transcription uses the standard alphabet, but it departs from or-
thography in using the alphabet to represent the sounds as faithfully as pos-
sible. That is, the transcriber tries to capture properties of the articulation of
spoken language (like elision of vowels or contraction) and dialectal (and
other) variants of pronunciation by representing them in the standard alpha-
bet in a most evident manner. However, as there are no explicitly defined
matches between sounds and signs, precision and reliability of literary tran-
scriptions are poor. They depend very much on the individual transcriber and
his/her conventions, which are mostly implicit and often inconsistent. Lit-
erary transcription thus is an attempt at producing transcripts which are still
easily accessible and not so demanding as a phonetic transcription, while
still representing the particulars of spoken language. Although the practice
of literary transcription is used by nearly all conversation and discourse ana-
lytic transcription systems, there are no (comprehensive) phono-graphic
rules and no uniform sign inventory for the annotation of all non-standard
features of spoken language.
3.2. Transcription systems

If you transcribe talk-in-interaction, you have to decide which transcription sys-
tem you will use. Different systems have been developed. Most prominent and
widespread are:
CA (Jefferson 1984); many other systems are based on it

HIAT (Ehlich/Rehbein 1976)
GAT (Selting et al. 1998).
Besides these three, there are other well-known transcription systems: the sys-
tem of interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz), DT Discourse Transcription
(du Bois 1991; du Bois et al. 1993), the system DIDA (discourse data-base of
the Institut fr Deutsche Sprache/Mannheim (Germany)). CA, HIAT, and GAT
are described below. Since there are no elaborated standards for multimodal
transcription which are commonly used, we restrict ourselves to the presenta-
tion of auditory transcripts. GAT and HIAT include some basic ideas for how to
transcribe multimodal activities; for more elaborated approaches see Baldry and
Thibault (2005).
3.2.1. Conversation analysis

The transcription system of conversation analysis (CA) was mainly developed by
Gail Jefferson (1984). It was rst presented in the famous article on turn-taking by
Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974). The CA conventions represented the rst
discourse analytic transcription system. Their introduction was motivated by con-
versation analysts aim to capture authentic everyday talk in its very detail and its
sequential process for doing natural sociology (Sacks 1984). CA pioneered the
use and representation of transcripts as the core methodology of discourse analy-
sis and as the basis for constructing and testing claims about conversational phe-
nomena. Rooted in sociology, CA became soon very inuential also in linguistics,
media research and anthropology, and its conventions are still widely used. Since
conversation analysts in the 1970s focused on the systematics of turn-taking and
mainly dealt with recordings of telephone conversations, the transcription was
made to give a precise representation of the sequential organisation of turns.
(2) Transcript according to CA
Frank: <den is ULTRAGEIL, (.)
<this is ULTRA FUCKING, (.)
This is ultra fucking,
Frank: aldr, (.)
oldster, (.)
man!
Frank: den hab isch schon ges:hn letzte [ja::hr, (.) hey aldr. (.)]
this have I already seen last [year, (.) ay oldster. (.)]
Ive seen this already last year. Ay, man!
Denis: [ta::m ey::, ]
[ri::ght ay::, ]
Right, ay.
Denis: total ta::m. (.)

totally ri::ght. (.)
Totally right.
Denis: [ta::m (ha:h.)]
[ri::ght (hu:h.) ]
Right.
Frank: [ta:m tschu]cki aldr. (.) tschU:cki.>
[ri:ght fine] oldster. (.) fi:ne.
Right. Fine, man. Fine.
Wuddi: mayer (0.3) mein bein mal (0.3) an deinem (.)
mayer (0.3) my leg just (0.3) along your (.)
Mayer, let me move my leg along yours
Emanuel Schegloff shows, how this set of notational conventions continues to
evolve and is adapted to different types of analysis, to the developing skills of
the transcriber, and to changes in technology.2 Characteristic features of CA
transcripts are:
Sequential organization of the transcript format, each turn has a line of its own.
Literary transcription: conversation analysis was first laughed at for using
funny paper English, because it tries to capture articulatory variants by the
standard alphabet. It includes some additional characters for a more precise
rendering of sound representation, such as underlining for increased volume,
degree markers for lower voice, equation sign for latching and contractions
of words; punctuation marks are used to represent turn-final intonation.
Interpretive comments, socio-linguistic annotations, and ethnographic back-
ground information within the transcript are avoided, because the analysis
should be gleaned from the data themselves (Schegloff and Sacks 1973:
290).
Conversation analysis is a unitary standard; it does not provide options for
different levels of detail in transcription, nor does it include conventions for
the representation of nonverbal events.
3.2.2. HIAT
HIAT (halbinterpretative Arbeitstranskription, semi-interpretative working
transcription) was developed by the German linguists Konrad Ehlich and
Jochen Rehbein for studying classroom-interaction (Ehlich and Rehbein 1976;
Ehlich 1993; HIAT 2002). It is used by many German speaking researchers in
studies of institutional interaction. The label HIAT stresses that transcription in-
evitably is constructive and may be refined depending on evolving research in-
terests (see below). At the same time, it claims that transcripts should be as free
from interpretation as possible (Ehlich and Redder 1994: 910). HIAT (1) is a
system for setting up raw transcripts. HIAT (2) contains additional annotation
conventions for nonverbal communication and prosody.
(3) Transcript according to HIAT; intonation contours are depicted by little
circles on 4 lines above FKs utterance
FK Frank
FE Frank English(word by word)
FE Frank English(idiomatic)
DS Denis
DE Denis English(word by word)
DE Denis English(idiomatic)
------------------------------------------------
o
(high) o o o o o o o o
o o o
o o
FK[ den is ultrageil, . aldr, den hab isch schon geshn let
FE[ this is ultrafucking, . oldster, this have i already see
FE[ This is ultra fucking, man! Ive seen this already
1 ----------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------
o
o o o
o
FK[ ztes jahr . hey aldr.
FE[ n last year . ay oldster.
FE[ last year . Ay man!
DS[ tam hah total tam .
DE[ right huh totally right .
DE[ Thats right. Totally right.
2 ----------------------------------------------------
HIAT is characterized by:

Partiture mode; partiture areas, which delineate stretches of time during
which one or more speakers take turns at talk, are bracketed.
Literary transcription; some punctuation marks (such as question and excla-
mation marks) are used interpretively in order to convey which speech act is
performed; a refined prosodic notation for interjections is proposed.
Raw transcripts do not represent turns.
It needs a specialized editor (formerly HIAT-DOS or SyncWriter for Mac,
nowadays EXMARaLDA).
3.2.3. GAT
GAT (gesprchsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem, discourse/conversation
analytic transcription system) was developed by German researchers with a CA
background (Selting et al. 1998). It is based on CA. However, GAT is deemed to
refine and enlarge the CA conventions, taking into account suggestions from lin-
guists of different theoretical origins. Most prominently, GAT proposes a refined
treatment of prosodic features and a more systematic and purely formally moti-
vated use of diacritic signs. Each line corresponds to a turn constructional unit
(TCU). GAT defines a minimal standard (base transcript) with compulsory
transcription symbols. They can be elaborated and supplemented by further con-
ventions (notably concerning prosodic properties) in order to get a refined tran-
script, which also may include some representation of nonverbal communi-
cation.
(4) Transcript according to GAT
15 Frank: <<len, h> den is <<f> ultragEIl,> (.)
<<len, h> this is <<f> ultra fucking A,> (.)
This is ultra fucking,
16 aldr, (.)
oldster, (.)
man!
17 den hab isch schon ges:hn LETZte
this have I already seen LAST
Ive seen this already last
18 Frank: [ja::hr, (.) hey aldr.> (.)]
[year, (.) ay oldster.> (.)]
year. Ay, man!
19 Denis: [TA::M ey::, ] total TA::M. (.)
[ri::ght ay::, ] totally RI::GHT. (.)
Right, ey. Totally right.
20 Denis: [ta::m (ha:h.)]
[ri::ght (hu:h.)]
Right.
21 Frank: [ta:m TSCHU]cki aldr. (.) < tschU: cki;>
[ri:ght FINE] oldster. (.) < fi:ne;>
Right, fine, man. Fine.
22 Wuddi: mayer- (-) mein bein mal- (-) an deinem- (.)
mayer- (-) my leg just- (-)along your- (.)
Mayer, let me move my leg along yours
Characteristic features of GAT are:
No special characters: GAT is meant to be used with any text processing pro-
gram; consequently, no specific transcription editor for GAT has been devel-
oped yet.
Vertical and sequential mode of writing: every turn (sometimes, even every
turn-constructional unit) is represented in a line of its own.
Literary transcription is used.
Elaborated instructions for the segmentation and its notation, especially in
terms of prosodic units and their turn-final intonation contours.
3.3. The process of transcribing

Transcribing a recording should be done in several runs. There are so many dif-
ferent features of the talk which occur within a few seconds and which cannot be
attended to simultaneously. Therefore, the transcriber has to focus on a specific
set of features in each run. It is advisable to begin with the verbal phrasing, then
turn to the segmentation of the talk (pauses); later on you should focus on dif-
ferent levels of prosodic organisation (pitch movement, stress, speed changes,
etc.) in turn; segments which are difficult to discriminate and the precise organi-
sation of overlaps should only be treated at the end. For a more comfortable
handling of the digital audio or video source, you can use a player with a loop
mode (endless repetition of a data segment) or a foot pedal. They allow you to
replay a freely selected stretch of data as often as you need, until you have man-
aged to transcribe it correctly. How can you improve the quality of your tran-
scripts (cf. Selting 2001)? Let others check or correct your transcripts; use dif-
ferent players and audio settings, because they may make available different
sound characteristics. Furthermore, you can rely on computer-aided prosodic
analysis (using, e.g., Praat; see below) to verify intonation patterns such as base
frequency and intonation contours at transitions relevance places.
3.4. Transcription editors

Transcription systems (like CA and GAT) can be used with any common text-
processing software (like Microsoft Word), because they neither require special
characters nor a sophisticated layout. Transcription, however, can be done by
means of a specialized editor, and some conventions (such as HIAT) require the
use of it. Using a specialized editor has some advantages. It facilitates the edit-
ing process and the correction and standardization of transcripts, because it
provides transcribers with specialized character sets, devices for the represen-
tation of the sequential structure, and for the allocation of turns to speakers. It
is especially useful, if the transcript shall be produced in a division of labor by
several transcribers who correct first drafts and add additional annotations.
Transcription editors are needed, if the transcript has to contain several anno-
tation tiers per speech text line (prosodic, morpho-syntactic, multimodal anno-
tations, interlinear translation, etc.). Separate tiers enable the systematic anno-
tation of transcripts in focused working cycles and they guarantee that the
reference of each annotation can be assigned unambiguously, e.g., which inter-
val, which point of the time line, which character string in the speech text does
the annotation refer to. Furthermore, editors allow for a standardization of the
use of transcription conventions and of digital data formats which can in part be
checked by automatic means. This is an important feature, if transcripts are to be
included in a larger data-base which is to be used by several researchers and
which can be researched by automatic queries.
Using a specialized editor, however, takes some extra time for becoming ac-
quainted with the software; often, the handling is also clumsier than using a
simple text editor. If you work on your own and if you only wish to produce a
simple verbal transcript without much refined annotation, if you can do without
a precise representation of the temporal structure of different speakers turns
and different modalities of verbal and nonverbal behavior, then you might
prefer to stick to your ordinary text-processing software. This, however, is
likely to cause problems, if you intend to exchange and to collaboratively work
on your transcripts. In Sections 3.4.1.3.4.3. we briefly present three current
transcription editors.
3.4.1. EXMARaLDA
EXMARaLDA was devised by Thomas Schmidt (EXMARaLDA 2007;
Schmidt 2001, 2005). It includes a system of data formats and tools for the com-
puter-assisted transcription and annotation of spoken language. All components
are freely available from the internet. Its most important characteristics are:
EXMARaLDA transcripts are stored as XML files. This W3C standard
guarantees that data can be used on different platforms and for long-term
storage in archives.
All software tools for the production and processing of EXMARaLDA data
(score editor and corpus manager) are JAVA applications. They are execu-
table on all common operating systems (Windows, Macintosh, Linux,
Unix).
Interoperability: the EXMARaLDA concept is based on the annotation
graph framework (Bird and Liberman 2001), which is designed to guarantee
maximum exchangeability and reusability of transcripts. This makes it pos-
sible to use wide-spread editing tools, such as Praat, ELAN, TASX Anno-
tator, for the production and treatment of EXMARaLDA data.
EXMARaLDA data for printed or web-publications can be transferred into sev-

eral common presentation formats (RTF, HTML, PDF). EXMARaLDA sup-
ports the use of different wide-spread transcription systems (HIAT, DIDA, GAT,
CHAT) by a number of parameterized functions.
(5) Transcript in an EXMARaLDA partiture (score) format including time-
marks for synchronization with the sound file
[6]
14 [15.2] 15 [16.7] 16 [17.3]
Frank: <<len, h> den is <<f> ultragEIl,> (.) aldr, (.) den hab isch schon ges:hn
B <<len, h> this is <<f> ultra fucking A,> (.) oldster, (.) this have I already seen LAST
B This is ultra fucking, man! Ive seen this already last
[7]
.. 17 [18.3] 18 [19.3] 19 [20.4] 20 [21.0]
Frank: LETZte ja::hr, (.) hey aldr.> (.) ta:m TSCHU cki aldr. (.)
B year, (.) ay oldster.> (.) ri:ght FINE oldster. (.) <
B year, ey man! Right. Fine, man.
Denis: TA::M ey:: total TA::M. (.) ta::m (ha:h.)
B ri::ght ay::, totally RI::GHT. (.) ri::ght (hu:h.)
B Right, ay. Totally right. Right.
[8]
.. 21 [21.8] 22 [23.5]
Frank: < tschU: cki;>
B fi:ne;>
B Fine.
Wuddi: mayer- (-) mein bein mal- (-) an deinem- (.) fu da vorbei
B mayer- (-) my leg just- (-) past your- (.) foot that I could
B Mayer let me move my leg along yours
In the following screenshots (6)(8) from three different editors, the corre-
sponding segments are marked. They contain an overlap between turns from
Frank and Denis (cf. figure 5, EXMARaLDA event No.17 in partiture area
No. 7).
(6) Screenshot from the EXMARaLDA Partiture Editor

The screenshot shows optional windows in EXMARaLDA: the keyboard

panel allows for the inclusion of characters which are peculiar to GAT, the
Praat panel synchronizes the EXMARaLDA partiture with Praat, the Praat
LongSoundEditor shows the part of the sound file which corresponds to the
transcribed event No. 17.
3.4.2. ELAN
ELAN (ELAN 2007, Brugman and Russel 2004) is developed by the Max-
Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen/Netherlands). It is an anno-
tation tool for audio and video files with the following functions:
Annotation tiers can be defined by the user by means of predefined linguistic
types (such as word, phrases, prosody) including their dependencies.
It provides for hierarchical annotations, which are necessary for, e.g., mor-
phology and phrase structure.
It supplies different character sets, such as Chinese, Arab, Hebrew, IPA, and
includes support for their writing systems (ligatures with the Arab one).
ELAN allows for easy marking of a segment of the media file for its auditive
and/or visual control and its annotation.
You can change the presentation speed of audio and video signals (slow mo-
tion).
ELAN provides different viewers for each annotation. All viewers are
linked so that navigation in one viewer entails highlighting the correspond-
ing elements in the other tiers.
It supports fast reading and time allocation of annotations which already
exist and shall be elaborated.
(7) Transcript ultrakrass: Screenshot from the ELAN editor

The screenshot shows how the waveform (sound signal) is synchronized with
annotations. Annotations are shown in subtitle form (above) and in partiture
format (below the waveform).
3.4.3. Praat
Praat (Praat 2007) was written and is supported by Paul Boersma, University of
Amsterdam. It is a powerful program for the phonetic and prosodic analysis of
language data. Praat, however, can also be used for transliterating audio files;
for a tutorial with a short instruction on how to transcribe, i.e., label with Praat
cf. Lieshout (2005). For conversation and discourse analysts, Praat will be par-
ticularly useful for exact phonetic analyses (spectograms, formant analyses), for
the detection of pitch movement and F0-contours, for the representation of in-
tensities and for the precise measurement of the temporal properties of articu-
lation, prosody, and overlap. In this way, Praat can be used to support and verify
auditory recognition by instrumental means. If Praat is used for transliterating
audio files, the transliterated parts of an utterance are synchronized immediately
with the audio file. Praat supports WAV and MP3-compressed audio, but no
video files.
(8) Screenshot from the Praat TextGrid editor

The screenshot shows the waveform and the transcript as a TCU oriented label.
There are additional areas for prosodic analysis. The spectrogram is useful for
the delimitation of labels and the measurement of pitch and intensity. It clearly
shows the lengthening of TA:M in the label following the marked one.3
Here are some technical considerations you might take into account, if you want
to choose the right editor for your concerns.
Does the editor support the partiture format, does it restrict the choice of
transcribing conventions or coerce some change in adapting them to the edi-
tor? GAT conventions, for instance, demand that the beginning of an overlap
must be marked, but not necessarily the end. A transcription editor might
force you to note the end of a simultaneous passage as well.
Is it possible to set up the required number of annotation tiers to each par-
ticipant, and may they be semantically specified according to the type of an-
notation?
Is the file format which the editor produces compatible with a standard
format such as XML, which enables free exchange and post-processing of
transcripts?
Is the editor platform-independent, i.e., are there equally efficient versions
for all current computer platforms and operating systems? This feature also
eases the exchange of transcripts.
Does the editor have a timeline as a horizontal axis which runs parallel to the
transcription and annotation tiers? With a true timeline, time periods and
spatial representations of stretches of the transcript are proportional.4 This
makes it possible to integrate a waveform representation (of volume, pitch,
etc.) into the score (which is the case with Praat and EXMARaLDA).
Does the editor include style-sheets, and does it produce transcripts which
can be printed out and included into texts written with a common text editor
(such as MS Word)?
Are there import and export devices so that the transcript may be exchanged
between different editors, e.g., for further annotation or for refined analyses
(e.g., with Praat)?
4. Controversial issues
A good transcript should be a naturalistic representation of a data-recording.

A transcript makes data better available for analysis, but it should not predeter-
mine analytical results. But can transcripts really be neutral representations of
the original audio or video? Our discussion of transcription conventions has
shown that the choice of the convention decides which properties of the original
recording will be represented and to what degree of precision they will be ren-
dered. Every transcription is
selective: it represents some features of the talk while others are missing.
For instance, most prosodic features are not represented in conversation
analytic transcripts. Only final intonation contours of turn-constructional
units are present. However, pitch movement is a feature which changes with
every voiced syllable.
abstractive: transcripts represent segments and features of speech in a typi-
fied way. For instance, a final intonation contour can be represented by three
or five distinct categories (high rise rise level fall deep fall); inton-
ation, however, is located on a continuous scale. Phonetic variation, e.g., is
only approximately captured by a literary transcript. In general, transcripts
assimilate the empirical acoustic tokens as they are recorded to graphic or
verbal types (of conventional signs and words).
imbued with theory: every transcription rests on an implicit or explicit theo-
ry of speech and interaction. Transcripts, for instance, parse speech into
words. Words, however, are not brute empirical facts. Gaps of phonation are
often rather within and not between words. Psycholinguistically, it may well
be an issue, if a string like its really is a clitic contraction of two words or
rather an unanalyzed unit of speech production.
Taking these issues seriously, transcription must be viewed as a kind of data-
construction and not as a mere process of transparent data-representation in the
written mode. This does not mean that a transcriber should not care to make his/
her transcript as precise and faithful to the original recording as possible. These
epistemological considerations, however, point to the fact that transcription is
a process which involves representational decisions which are not determined
by the data alone. Rather, they have to be made by taking account of some other
pragmatic factors as well:
Relevance of the phenomenon for analysis: transcripts have to capture those
phenomena most precisely which matter to the research question and to the
ways in which participants themselves deal with the interactional issues re-
lated to it. This means also that the transcript should include all phenomena
and features which previous research has proved to be relevant. The tran-
script must contain all details which are needed in order to verify and to
test the analysis, and in particular, it must faithfully include all phenomena
which could serve as counter-evidence. Arguably, it is not always easy to
fulfill this demand. Often, close analysis of data is needed to know which
features do matter for an interactional practice, task, problem, etc. Hence,
there is a risk of circularity, because the analysis heavily rests on the tran-
script itself. Although there is no absolutely safe way to solve this problem,
two measures should be taken: first, transcripts should be refined and cor-
rected in the analytical process (see below); sometimes, the transcription
conventions you use have to be adapted to your findings.
Second, there is a general rule concerning the granularity of transcription: a
transcript must be at least one level more detailed and more basic than the
phenomenon to be studied. This rule is needed for the following reason: in
order to analyze how a phenomenon is produced in talk-in-interaction, the
transcript needs to provide for the detailed processes which bring the phe-
nomenon into being. Such an analysis, however, would be impossible, if the
transcript just stated the existence of the phenomenon. Then the transcript
would already include the analysis as part of the data, but it could neither be
used to test claims about the existence of the phenomenon nor would it help
in elucidating its constitution. If you are, e.g., interested in irony in conver-
sation, it would be a mistake to bracket passages of talk with the remark
ironic. Rather, you might have to represent pitch movement, because it can
contextualize that a quote is used mockingly. If you are interested in accen-
tuation in tone groups, you need a refined representation of accents in order
to discover the distribution of different kinds and intensities of accents and
their specific uses.
Audience: transcripts need to be adapted to the audience you are writing for.
It is strongly advisable to use conventions which are widely used and well-
known. Especially, if transcripts are very elaborate while the audience is not
acquainted with this kind of representation, readers will be likely to skip
them in the reading process. Remember also that with a very sophisticated
transcription, the reader easily gets lost in details and does not obtain a vivid
impression of the interactional sequence.
Interactional relevance: phenomena which are strikingly important for the
interactional process should be represented in the transcript, even if you
choose not to attend to that feature throughout your data. So, e.g., if a
speaker dramatically alters his/her speech rate or ostensibly switches to an-
other code, this has to be represented, even if tempo or the representation of
code-variation generally is not part of the transcription.
Uses of the transcript: how you transcribe can vary according to the uses of
the transcript. Working transcripts may be only preliminary, rough rendi-
tions which are used to get an idea of a conversations overall course and
content and which are needed to decide which segments have to be tran-
scribed in more detail. In a research project, selected transcripts can include
features which are particularly relevant for specific local analytical con-
cerns, but which are not pursued in other segments. Most transcription sys-
tems therefore distinguish between a primary, raw, or base transcript
and a more fine-grained transcription, which is optional and which can be
designed according to particular research interests.
The granularity of transcription also depends on economical considerations:

each additional level of annotation costs a lot of time which only should be in-
vested, if the transcripts are really put to close analytical scrutiny. This practice,
however, might prove very problematic, if transcripts are produced for a ma-
chine-readable corpus. This requires a common standard of transcription for all
data, which has to be used consistently.5 Otherwise, results of queries will be
fragmentary, because relevant features are not represented in each case they
were present in the original data. On the other hand, over-inclusive results can
turn out, if a feature is rendered inconsistently in the corpus. For example, if a
data-base includes orthographic and literary transcripts, a search for the stan-
dard realization of a phonological variable is likely to produce wrong results,
because they will include cases in which in fact dialectal pronunciation was
used, but the data are represented orthographically. Especially, literary tran-
scriptions create massive problems for researchable data-bases, because there
are no canonical conventions for the literary rendition of dialectal, sociolectal,
etc. variants of pronunciation. Machine-readable corpora also require that the
verbal text of the transcript is kept apart from annotations (of prosody, pho-
netics, nonverbal behavior, etc.) in separate tiers. If such features and descrip-
tions are mixed with the verbal representation, it will become almost impossible
to filter out all instances of identical wordings in the corpus and it will be diffi-
cult to search systematically for combinations of features.
Transcripts often contain interpretive remarks, like ironic, smile voice, etc.
Such comments have to be used very cautiously and should be avoided, because
they anticipate analytical results and make them seem to be a property of the data.
All these issues of data-construction become even more problematic when
video-data are involved. To date, there is no commonly accepted convention for
transcribing visual information (see Baldry and Thibault 2005). Moreover, the
problem of categorization is aggravated. Many acoustic events (such as spoken
words) can be represented in an analogical mode which rests on conventions
of alphabetical rendition and on similarity (i.e., sound-grapheme correspon-
dences). Visual events, however, have to be described. The same event could be
phrased as 90 rightward axial rotation of the head, looks to participant B,
turns his head away from participant C, or monitors skeptically Bs move-
ments. But which categorization is right? Highly interpretive categorizations
should be avoided, but very technical, positivistic descriptions are also prob-
lematic, because they do not give an evident idea of what is going on.
The issue of selectivity is also aggravated with video-data. While audio-data
are intrinsically selective, because the visual aspect of the interactional event is
missing, video-data are selective because of the handling of the camera (its posi-
tion, focus, and zoom). As to transcription, the transcriber of a video is faced
with a much more difficult task of choice than when transcribing audio-data.
Since it is impossible to describe all visual information, it is not advisable to
look for an all-purpose standardized annotation schema. The transcriber must

decide which features are worth transcribing and how fine-grained their catego-
rization needs to be for the research question and the recorded activity at hand.
The issue is relatively simple, if the transcriber wants to code some a priori de-
fined selected multimodal channel (e.g. gaze, gestures) using a restricted set of
descriptors. If, however, the transcriber wants to analyze data in an inductive
mode, the transcription of a video reaches by far deeper into the analytical pro-
cess than an audio-transcription. It is only by close data analysis that you be-
come aware of which aspects of multimodal behavior prove to be relevant to the
organization of action. Especially extended and recurrent events (like people
walking around) and actions of participants who do not take turns at talk are
often easily overlooked and hard to describe. While a very selective video-tran-
script may cause severe problems as to its usability for understanding and testing
an analysis, a more comprehensive representation is very likely to be unread-
able and it often cannot be visualized and integrated into common text-editors.
For a systematic multimodal transcription, a specialized editor, such as EX-
MARaLDA or ELAN, is required (see Rohlfing et al. 2006 for a comparison of
tools). In any case, visual data need to be shown as far as possible by presenting
the video itself, screen-shots, or graphics which are derived from the video. In
doing so, transcription and description may often be reduced to pointing out
those features which matter most for analysis, without depriving the reader of
the possibility to visualize the whole scene and to check the analysis.
In working with video-data, the transcript thus can only be an additional
source for data-analysis. It should never be used as the only data. The same,
however, applies to audio-data. Many discourse analysts work only with tran-
scripts, once they have been produced, and do not listen to the audio anymore.
This is a methodological mistake. Because of their frozen quality, transcripts
are very useful for specific analytical concerns, such as focusing on linguistic
details, analyzing syntactic structures, comparing the structure of different turn-
constructional units, or getting an overview of longer stretches of talk-in-inter-
action. Transcripts, however, can never fully represent the phonetic and proso-
dic details of the talk. Consequently, the analyst underestimates their relevance
or reaches wrong conclusions based on neglect and on wrong imagination of
these features. Transcripts can also be quite misleading because of their level of
detail. It makes you often think that a sequence is much more anomalous or
problematic than it really is for the participants, because the written mode tends
to dramatize problems, which are quickly and routinely managed by the par-
ticipants. In sum, transcriptions are an indispensable tool for analysis and for
the presentation of findings in conversation analysis. But transcripts may never
be the only data upon which an analysis can rest in order to be valid.
Notes
1. The Redbook audio CD standard is shortly described under http://en.wikipedia.org/

wiki/Red_Book_(audio_CD_standard) (access date: May 3, 2007); the standard
is fully described in IEC 60908, which is available as a PDF download for $210
(http://webstore.iec.ch/webstore/webstore.nsf/artnum/023623).
2. See reference in the additional sources and recommended readings section.
3. The pitch contour in the marked simultaneous labels is an artefact, for Praat cannot de-
tect a pitch in such an overlapping episode properly.
4. This contrasts with a linear representation, where the extension of the data represen-
tation depends on the number of characters which are needed for the transcription or
annotation of a segment of data.
5. Consistency here means: each token of a type of feature must be represented in the
same way, that is, by only one conventional symbol vice versa, each conventional
symbol must have the same interpretation each time it is used in the corpus, and the in-
terpretations of different conventional symbols have to be distinct.
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II. Linguistic and multisemiotic
resources and their interplay
in managing Interpersonal
Communication
9. Linguistic resources
for the management of interaction1
Margret Selting
1. Introduction
This chapter will focus on verbal interaction, or on what has come to be called
talk-in-interaction (Schegloff 1996a). This includes both face-to-face and
telephone conversations, the defining criterion being that participants in the in-
teraction or conversation respond to each other immediately.
When dealing with linguistic resources for the management of interaction, the
basis and theoretical background of this exposition is work carried out in Conver-
sation Analysis (CA; Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974; Schegloff 2007, etc.)
and Interactional Linguistics (IL; Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2001; Selting and
Couper-Kuhlen 2001; cf. also Day and Wagner and Barth-Weingarten this vol-
ume). Linguistic structures will be conceived of as resources used for (practices
in) the organization of actions/activities2 in talk-in-interaction. When I consider
linguistic items or structures as resources, I mean to imply that the use of these
items or structures is not determined by some extra- or intralinguistic factors;
speakers are not compelled to use them for the expression of the intended mean-
ing, but actively choose to deploy them as means or cues that they tacitly know to
fulll a particular function or to suggest a particular interactional meaning.
In this chapter, I will show how linguistic structures are used as resources of
interaction in ordinary conversation. One such example comes from a telephone
conversation between Gitta and Jule, two students in their early twenties, which
is presented and analyzed in Section 3 of this chapter. Further, I will deal with
the following issues, among others:
the use of syntax and prosody for unit construction, i.e., turn constructional
units (TCUs)
the use of lexical items for creating information in TCUs
the use of accentuation for semantic focusing of TCUs
the use of final prosody for turn holding versus yielding
the use of final prosody for the signaling of action/activity types in se-
quences
the use of marked prosody or prosodic marking for the display and signaling
of emotive stance and involvement
the use of voice quality and, in this case, pauses for the signaling of interac-
tional modality and mood.
218 Margret Selting
Before dealing with these issues in detail, I will outline the history of the
field.
2. History of the field
After almost-all-embracing structuralism and then generative (transforma-

tional) grammar had taken over the hegemony in thinking within linguistics, be-
side approaches to functional grammar (Bhler, Firth), speech act theory was an
important approach to open up a perspective systematically re-introducing the
investigation of the meaning and function of language use. Around the 1960s
and 1970s, recording equipment had become small and cheap enough to be
widely available and usable for the collection of data; this suggested a wealth of
potential for empirical investigations in social sciences. Linguists interested in
the analysis of discourse soon developed their own approaches to deal with em-
pirical data, drawing on speech act theory and functional linguistic approaches
as their ancestor in linguistics (for instance Labov and Fanshel 1977; Coulthard
1977, etc.).
Some linguists, however, felt disappointed in the restricted potential that es-
pecially speech act theory offered for the empirical investigation of discourse
(cf. Searle 1992; Levinson 1983). They were not satisfied with the individual-
ist-intentionalist premises of speech act theory and turned to Conversation
Analysis (CA) which had in the 1960s developed as an offspring of ethnometh-
odology in sociology (Garfinkel 1967). Some of their early, groundbreaking
papers (Schegloff 1968; Schegloff and Sacks 1973; Sacks, Schegloff, and Jef-
ferson 1974; Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977 etc.) showed a rigorous em-
piricism in the description of, e.g., telephone opening and closing, turn-taking,
repair, etc. that seemed promising. Conversation analysts set out to investigate
the organization of verbal (and in part also non-verbal) interaction, showing
how interaction is in every detail a negotiated accomplishment and achieved by
collaborative actions by the participants. The heart of their methodology was
and is sequential analysis. The meanings of utterances in turns are accounted for
by describing them as occurring at a certain position in the sequence and occa-
sioning reactions of the recipients in the next turn(s). So, a speakers question
initiates a sequence and makes an answer by the recipient conditionally rel-
evant. The answer in the next turn provides evidence for the participants that the
prior utterance has indeed been understood as a question (and allows us to study
the phenomenon as researchers). An object like uhum or hm can function as an
answer, when it is delivered in the position of an answer; that is: after a prior
question. In other positions, namely after prior actions other than questions, it
will function as and thus interactionally mean something else. Analyses of con-
versational objects are predominantly sequential analyses. The role of linguistic
Linguistic resources for the management of interaction 219
detail did get into the focus of descriptions for instance in the transcription
system that Jefferson devised for conversation analytic research (cf. Sacks,
Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) or in Jeffersons work on the relevance of the
form of the definite article as th[] versus th[i] in projecting the noun to come
(Jefferson 1974), in Heritages (2002) description of the use of negative inter-
rogatives in news interviews, or in Lerners (2004) description of the deploy-
ment of stand-alone conjunctions, prepositions and other items as increment
elicitors to prompt a prior speaker to add a type-specific element found miss-
ing from an otherwise completed turn (Lerner 2004: 151). But Conversation
Analysis of course did not aim at the investigation of language structure and use
as such.
Important papers which had a large impact on the development of CA-re-
lated work in linguistics were, apart from the ones already mentioned and
among others, especially Goodwins (1979) demonstration of the production of
a sentence as a collaborative accomplishment, Schegloffs (1979) suggestion
of a syntax-for-conversation and, later, Schegloffs (1996a) inquiry into the
relationship of grammar and conversation. Apart from these papers, there are
numerous other publications by the first generation of conversation analysts, es-
pecially Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, Drew, Heritage, Lerner, which cannot all
be listed here a recent collection of work by first-generation CA practitioners
has been edited by Lerner (2004); overviews have been given, for example,
by Levinson (1983), ten Have (1999), Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998), Bergmann
(2001), Glich and Mondada (2001), Mazeland (2003) (cf. also Day and
Wagner this volume).
2.1. Conversation Analysis and phonetics

The first scholars to show the relevance of linguistic detail as a resource for the
conduct of interaction systematically were French and Local (1983), who
showed that the actions performed by incoming overlaping speech could not be
sufficiently accounted for by sequential analysis. They demonstrated that it is
the prosody of the incoming speech that is consequential for the way the overlap
is treated by the participants. For instance, if overlaping incoming utterances
are delivered with high pitch and forte loudness, they are treated as inter-
ruptions, and the recipient either competes for the floor or gives it up. If the ut-
terances are realized with low pitch and piano loudness, they are treated as
background comments, and the recipient does not show any signs of having
been disturbed in the production of her/his own turn. In other words, they are
treated as non-competitive. French and Local (1983) carried out a phonetic and
prosodic analysis of sequences that Conversation analysts had described as
regularly occurring in the organization of turn-taking before (Sacks, Schegloff,
and Jefferson 1974). They isolated the prosodic exponents of actions and they
220 Margret Selting
warranted this description as relevant for the participants by giving evidence

that recipients oriented to these prosodic exponents of actions in their recipient
responses in the next turn or in the ensuing interaction.
On their way to develop a phonology-for-conversation, Local et al. analyzed
the role of prosodic and phonetic parameters relevant for the organization of
turn-taking (Local, Kelly, and Wells 1986; cf. also Local, Wells, and Sebba
1985), the phonetics of holding and yielding pauses (Local and Kelly 1986;
Local 1992), etc. With more analyses being carried out, Local and his col-
leagues made it clear that conversational practices and actions are being sig-
naled through clusters of phonetic features that cut across the traditional clas-
sification of phonetic parameters into prosodic and segmental (see, e.g., Local
2004). Thus, in the introduction to a recent collection of papers on Sound Pat-
terns in Interaction, Ford and Couper-Kuhlen (2004: 34) use phonetics as a
cover term to avoid the separation of what has traditionally been regarded as
segmental, prosodic/suprasegmental, and paralinguistic aspects of speech.
Local et al.s work was taken up and continued by students of conversation
analysis and linguistics, and combined with Gumperz contextualization theory
(see below). Work at first concentrated on the role of prosody, both intonation
and rhythm, for the management of conversation. Prosodic signals were de-
scribed as contextualization cues for the suggestion of inferences of conversa-
tional meaning. Monographs that resulted from this approach are Couper-
Kuhlen (1993), Selting (1995a), and Auer, Couper-Kuhlen and Mller (1999);
an early edited volume in the later b(l)ooming field of prosody in conversation,
with many important articles, is Couper-Kuhlen and Selting (1996).
Recently, work has been done on the regionalized variation of prosody in
conversation (e.g., Auer 2001; Selting 2000b, 2001b, 2004a,b; Gilles 2005) and
the prosodic and syntactic organization of talk in what is called Turkish Ger-
man or Kanak sprak, an ethnolect of German used by young adolescents of
Turkish background (cf. Kern and Selting 2006 a,b).
2.2. Conversation Analyis and grammar

Work on grammar in conversation from the perspective of Conversation Analy-
sis soon began in Germany and other European countries. It continued earlier
work on the grammar of spoken language, but now linked up grammatical
analysis of the form of grammatical constructions with conversation analysis
for the description of its use and function in interaction (cf., for example, Selting
1993; Auer 1996; Gnthner 1993, 1996; Scheutz 1992, 1997; Uhmann 1993,
1997; Auer 2000, 2005 for German, Couper-Kuhlen 1996 for English).
At the same time, in the USA, Ford, Fox, and Thompson (e.g., 1996) set out
to investigate the role of grammar for the organization of interaction, in an ap-
proach commonly referred to as discourse-functional linguistics (Ford, Fox,
and Thompson 2002: 4). For their methodology and interactional categories,
they, too, rely on Conversation Analysis. They try to show, among other things,
that the
[] very basic nuts and bolts of grammar, such as clauses, pronouns, verb forms,
and parts of speech like adjectives, can be seen to fit into the picture of grammar as
an adaptive resource in which the most useful routines are selected and strengthened
by daily use (Ford, Fox, and Thompson 2003: 139).
Important early monographs testifying this approach are Fox (1987) and Ford
(1993); edited volumes are Ochs, Schegloff, and Thompson (1996) and Ford,
Fox, and Thompson (2002).
2.3. Conversation Analysis and lexico-semantic resources

Some work has also been done on the use of other linguistic resources in talk-
in-interaction. Studies on lexical and semantic resources have included the
analysis of referring expressions (Sacks and Schegloff 1979; Schegloff 1996b;
Fox 1987), response particles (Heritage 1998; Sorjonen 2001; Gardner 2001),
conjunctions (Mazeland and Huiskes 2001), and subjunctions (Gnthner 1993,
1996; Couper-Kuhlen 1996)3, discourse markers (Schiffrin 1987; Glich 2006)
as well as the description of discourse-semantic relations such as cause, conces-
sion, condition, and contrast (see, for instance, the papers in Couper-Kuhlen and
Kortmann 2000, and Hakulinen and Selting 2005), etc.
2.4. Conversation analysis and contextualization theory

As already mentioned, in a lot of the work referred to, conversation analysis was
brought together with contextualization theory (Gumperz 1982, 1990) in order
to give more weight to the relevance of linguistic cues in the signaling and in-
terpretation of meaning in interaction (cf. Auer 1986, 1992). An edited volume
by Auer and di Luzio (1992) shows, however, that the work relying on the no-
tion of contextualization and the work on phonology-for-conversation, gram-
mar and lexico-semantics in conversation did not differ considerably in their ef-
forts to pay attention to linguistic resources in the analysis of social interaction.
Furthermore, after the beginning of research on prosody in conversation, it very
soon became clear that the role of prosody for the management of conversation
cannot be examined without taking into account syntax and its interplay with
prosody. This is attested in, among others, the work of Selting (1992, 1995a,
1996a) and Auer (1991, 1996).
In addition, there were descriptions of the use of complex linguistic struc-
tures as resources in social interaction: of code-switching as well as of speech
style variation as an interactional resource (see, for example, Auer 1982, for an
222 Margret Selting
early monograph on code-switching, and Selting 1999 and in press, for the
analysis of speech styles in conversation). These linguistic structures are de-
scribed as contextualization cues, that is: as resources that are used to suggest
but not determine the interpretation of meanings and inferences in their se-
quences in conversational interaction.
2.5. Interactional Linguistics

All the previous work led up to and constituted the approach that is now often
called Interactional Linguistics (Selting and Couper-Kuhlen 2001; Couper-
Kuhlen and Selting 2001). It is a linguistic approach that seeks to describe
language structure and language use in talk-in-interaction. Interactional Lin-
guistics shares most of its approach with Conversation Analysis: for its prem-
ises and methodology, it is greatly indepted to Conversation Analysis, and also
for the categories deployed to describe the functions that language is used for. It
is only slightly different interests that make these two approaches investigate
partly different objects of study. Interactional Linguistics wants to go beyond
sequential analysis by systematically examining the role that linguistic cues and
structures play as methodically used resources in the construction and interpre-
tation of interaction, to unpick the linguistic constitution of practices, actions,
and sequences in interaction. Investigations in an interactional linguistic spirit
can start from linguistic forms or functions, and they can examine individual
languages or compare resources cross-linguistically. Linguistic parameters/
structures/constructions are conceived of as resources for the construction of
practices and actions in their sequential contexts (cf. Schegloff 1997). Work in
this line of research has been published, apart from many articles in journals and
other books, in several edited volumes: Selting and Couper-Kuhlen (2001),
Couper-Kuhlen and Ford (2004) specifically on Sound Patterns in Interaction
and Hakulinen and Selting (2005) specifically on Syntax and Lexis in Conver-
sation. Most recently published monographs are Golato (2005) on grammatical
structure and sequential organization in compliments and compliment responses
and Taleghani-Nikazm (2006) on the intersection of grammar, interaction, and
social context in request sequences.
The result and outcome of this development from Conversation Analysis to
Interactional Linguistics has been a body of publications with some more pro-
grammatic and theoretical work and many descriptions of single phenomena
that attest to the productivity of the field of inquiry and to the added value of an
interactional-linguistic approach in contrast to more traditional linguistic ap-
proaches.
There is no room here to detail on any of the prosodic, syntactic or lexical
structures or constructions that have been examined in interactional-linguistic
research (cf. Barth-Weingarten this volume). Therefore, I will only mention
some of the linguistic structures dealt with and the functions/tasks in conver-
sation that they have been related to.
Work has been done on the following linguistic parameters/structures/con-
structions as resources of interaction:
Phonetic: vowel qualities, consonant articulations, articulatory/assimilatory
projection versus disjunction, pitch/intonation (pitch peaks, register shifts, high
onsets), loudness/volume (amplitude/loudness shifts), pitch and loudness
matching, duration/length, speech rate/pace (rush through/abrupt poins), articu-
latory and phonatory settings, voice quality (glottalization/creaky voice, aspira-
tion, whisper), rhythm, pauses and their phonetic embedding, the form and syl-
labic structure of laughter tokens/laughing, cut-offs, the poetics of everyday
talk (Jefferson 1996), phrasal breaks with glottal stops and stretched hesi-
tation signals such as uh:, recipiency tokens such as hm/uhum, etc.
Grammatical: sentences, clauses, noun phrases, ellipsis/short phrases,
possible sentences/clauses with pre- and post-positionings (left dislocations,
right dislocations; increments), parentheses, pivot or apokoinou constructions,
causal constructions with weil (because) followed by the verb in second or
final position, concessive constructions with obwohl (although) followed by
the verb in second or final position, constructions with wobei (whereby) fol-
lowed by the verb in second or final position, other subordinate clause formats,
asyndetic constructions, constructions with what Sacks called first verbs such
as wanted to, interrogative constructions, sequential conjunctions, etc.
Lexico-semantic: forms of reference, the employment of response and other
discourse particles, lexical means such as repeats or reformulations, the con-
struction of semantic relations such as negation, cause, concession, contrast,
etc.
Other, more complex resources: code switching and shifting; style shifting
and switching; choice and alter(n)ation of language variation between the stan-
dard variety, colloquial varieties, and dialect varieties; the use of ethnic styles
such as Trkendeutsch (Turkish German, Kanak sprak, or the like).
In the course of examining these resources, the following tasks and func-
tions in interaction have been investigated: the construction of turn construc-
tional units (TCUs) and turns, projection, delimitation, turn holding and turn
yielding, competition for the floor, turn-continuation after suspension, repair,
the organization of sequences, the construction/contextualization of actions,
such as understanding checks, acknowledgements, news receipts, conversa-
tional questions, assessments, requests, storytelling, listing; the organization of
talk about topics, signaling resumption of a prior topic after intervening talk;
alignment/disalignment; the signaling of affiliation/disaffiliation, the construc-
tion of institutional contexts and the construction of genres (kommunikative
Gattungen) through talk, the construction of social categories such as gender,
social class, professional, cultural and ethnic membership, etc.
224 Margret Selting
The data that have been analyzed have come from different contexts, mostly
everyday conversation, both telephone and face-to-face, between adults, but
also talk in institutional contexts as well as talk between adults and children, be-
tween linguistically unimpaired and impaired speakers. So far, the languages
that have been subject to such investigations have been as far as I know Eng-
lish, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, French, Italian,
Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
Previous work has shown that linguistic devices are deployed in ways that
are language specific, dialect specific, specific to their location, in particular un-
folding sequences and specific to the format of the action they are producing (cf.
also Ford and Couper-Kuhlen 2004: 15). That means: participants in interaction
design their talk in very specific ways to both adapt at and fit it to the particulars
of the linguistic systems they use, the position in the sequence that they are co-
constructing and the format of their actions as preferred or dispreferred. The
language produced in social interaction is thus a truely contextually and situa-
tionally sensitive product, a product emergent from the interactionally particu-
lar situation in which it is produced.
These results of studies in Interactional Linguistics are well compatible with
recent developments in empirical approaches to construction grammar (cf. the
volume edited by Gnthner and Imo 2006). Here, the notion of construction is
being brought together with an interactional linguistic perspective. Using the
term construction is a way of talking about items that have a partly fixed and
partly free format. Such items have been discussed in terms of formats within
Conversation Analysis. Construction grammar makes it clear that there are im-
portant items, frequently occurring in talk-in-interaction, which cut across the
traditional boundaries between syntax and lexis (cf. Fillmore, Kay, and OCon-
nor 1988; cf. also Hakulinen and Selting 2005: 5). Important publications in this
field are Hopper (1988, 1998), the papers collected in Gnthner and Imo (2006),
and Deppermann (2006).
Most recently, students of interaction have shown an increasing interest in
the investigation of stance, affect, and emotion in talk-in-interaction (for early
work on this, see Selting (1996b), for some recent papers, see Wilkinson and
Kitzinger (2006) and Couper-Kuhlen (2006)).
Also most recently, work on what is called the multimodality of interaction
seems to challenge the methodology of Conversation Analysis and Interactional
Linguistics. The analysis of the interrelation between verbal and non-verbal ac-
tions in interaction as well as their integration in the carrying out of work tasks
shows the complexity of interaction that needs to be considered in the sequential
analysis of complex face-to-face interaction in various contexts (cf. work, for
instance, by Mondada (2007) and Mller and Bohle (2007)).
3. State-of-the-art: Central concepts and sample analysis
Discourse participants use linguistic resources of various kinds in order to con-

stitute talk-in-interaction as a collaborative achievement. This means that par-
ticipants actions (or activities) are designed for each other and responded to by
their recipients in such a way that makes it clear that both speakers and recipi-
ents contributions to the interaction are necessary constitutents for the actions
being accomplished. In order to achieve interaction, participants make system-
atic use of linguistic material. That means, speakers make systematic use of lin-
guistic material in order to signal and suggest interpretations of meanings, and
recipients make systematic use of linguistic material in order to interpret the sig-
naled and suggested meanings in terms of actions. In talk-in-interaction partici-
pants orient to holistically interpreted actions, or rather: actions in sequences of
actions. This is what Conversation Analysis has described, providing back-
ground theory, methodology, descriptive results in the form of a rich terminol-
ogy, and descriptions of sequential interaction. Interactional linguists have
adopted all this in their studies of the linguistic details of interaction.
For the analysis of linguistic resources being used to constitute and manage
interaction, the goals are twofold:
(1) the deconstruction of holistically interpreted actions and interpretations of
meaning in order to isolate the constitutive cues and practices that partici-
pants make use of, and
(2) the reconstruction of the methods and systematic principles in the deploy-
ment of the cues and practices that are used by participants in the interaction
in order to bring about these actions and interpretations of meaning.
In the following, the methodology of interactional linguistic studies of linguistic
resources for the conduct of interaction will be sketched. This chapter outlines
the collection and transcription of data, and presents a sample analysis.
When setting about to analyze the linguistic details of turn constructional
units, turns, actions, and sequences, it should be clear that the deconstruction and
separation of these entities into their linguistic details is an analytic separation
only. Nevertheless, participants in interaction do have a tacit, intuitive knowl-
edge about the usability of linguistic details for the construction and interpre-
tation of meanings that the interactional linguistic analysis needs to reconstruct.
(a) Data collection

In order to study linguistic resources for the management of natural interaction,
the data need to be audio or video recordings of natural interactions. Telephone
conversations, in which the participants themselves have to rely on the audio
channel, are good research objects if the researcher wants to concentrate on the
226 Margret Selting
study of audio material only; face-to-face conversations should, if possible, be

audio- and video-recorded. For data from face-to-face interactions, the choice
of audio-recordings has the disadvantage of reducing the data to the audio chan-
nel only, thus precluding the analysis of the contribution of non-verbal devices.
Nevertheless, in some delicate contexts audio recordings might have the advan-
tage of being perceived as less intrusive by the participants and thus enabling
data recording (cf. also Deppermann and Schtte this volume).
(b) Transcription
In order to analyze the role of phonetic, in particular prosodic, structures in de-
tail, the data need to be transcribed following a transcription system that is suit-
able for that purpose. German conversation analysts and interactional linguists
have devised such a transcription system, called GAT (Gesprchsanalytisches
Transkriptionssystem; Selting et al. 1998; for a discussion and comparison of
this system with others, see also Selting 2001c). The data presented below have
been transcribed according to this system; a synopsis of the symbols needed
here is provided in the Appendix.
The analysis of the linguistic resources deployed for the management of in-
teraction will be illustrated with an extended extract of conversation rather
than a collection of examples of one specific device.
The following data are an extract of a telephone conversation between Gitta
and Jule, two students in their early twenties. Gitta has called Jule to inquire
whether she called a friend to make sure that he is still coming on a trip with
them. After closing this topic and a brief pause, Jule starts a new topic as follows:
(1) Telephone conversation Gitta & Jule (Tel7-2: 02:35ff.):

1 Jule: .h <!WARST! du gestern abend noch DA als wir
<whispery, breathy voice
were you yesterday evening still there when we
2 gegangen sind?>
whispery, breathy voice>
left had
Were you still there last night when we left?
3 (-)
4 Gitta: NEE:,
No.
5 ich bin gegangn: da lagst du grad auf m <FUSSboden>;
<smily voice>
i have left when you were lying on the floor
I left when you were lying on the floor.
6 (-)
7 Jule: AH:;
Oh.
8 (-)
9 <ich kann mich da nmlich nIx mehr so erINnern;>
<smily voice >
I cannot that much of that remember
I cannot remember much of that.
10 Gitta: <JA das glaub ich;>
<smily voice >
yes that believe I
Yes, I believe that.
11 (---)
12 Jule: war ich SEHR peinlich?
was I very embarrassing
Did I behave very embarrassingly?
13 (--)
14 Gitta: <n;>=
<with lip rounding>
No.
15 =du LAGST nur da und hAs:t versucht zu <schlafen>;
<smily, nasalized>
you were lying just there and were trying to sleep
You were just lying there trying to sleep.
16 (1.0)
17 Jule: .h A:ha.
oh
I see.
18 (-)
19 .h ja[:;
Yes.
20 Gitta: [<wann seid ihr (den)n WEG,>
<all>
when did you then leave
When did you leave then?
21 (-)
22 Jule: .h <das kAnn ich dir ALles nich sAgen; >
<len >
that can I you all not tell
I cant tell you any of that.
228 Margret Selting
23 ((pustet in den hrer))

((blows into the phone))
24 Gitta: <ECHT? >=
<all >
Really?
25 Jule: =ich wei blO dass <isch heut frh
<creaky voice
i know only that i this morning
26 mit SEHR starken KOPFschmerzen Aufgewacht bin.>
creaky voice>
with a very bad headache woke up
I only know that I woke up with a very bad headache this morn-
ing.
27 Gitta: <ohah:;>
<creaky voice>
Oh dear!
28 Jule: =und heute zu !NICHTS! zu gebrauchen war;=
and today for nothing to use was
and was good for nothing today.
29 =un dann hab ich verSUCHT- ((clears her throat)) .h
and then have i tried
30 die ARbeit: zu berARbeiten-
the paper to rework
And then I tried to revise the paper.
31 det hat alles ni HINgehauen;=
that has all not worked
All that didnt work.
32 Gitta: =[(glottalisiertes Rezeptionssignal)]
(perhaps a creaky recipiency token)
33 Jule: =[du hast] da ne ganz viehische kriTIK
there you have a very devastating review
geschrieben;=
written
You have written a very devastating review there.
The content is as follows: Jule asks Gitta whether she was still there at the
party last night at the time when she herself went home. She then discloses that
she was so drunk that she cannot remember what happened and that she is wor-
ried about her embarrassing behavior. After Gitta has comforted her, Jule re-
veals that she is suffering from a severe hangover and finally complains about
Gittas criticism of a draft of her seminar paper that she found in her mailbox
that day.
(c) Analysis
In the following, it will be shown how linguistic structures are used as resources
of interaction in this extract of an ordinary telephone conversation between two
friends. For reasons of space, I cannot deal with the entire extract and with every
detail here and I will not be able to systematically separate the structural and
functional analyses. I will select sequences appropriate for illustrative analyses.
Wherever possible, the analysis will be warranted by, for example, referring to
co-occurring evidence or recipient responses in the following turns. (For an ac-
count of the methodological principles underlying these analyses see Selting
and Couper-Kuhlen 2001 and Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2001; cf. also Barth-
Weingarten; Deppermann and Schtte; Day and Wagner this volume).
I will look at the linguistic resources used for
(1) the construction of units,
(2) the signaling of semantic meaning,
(3) the organization of turn-taking,
(4) the construction of practices and actions,
(5) the construction of sequences,
(6) the signaling of emotive stance and involvement as well as the interactional
modality and mood in the extract at hand.
The linguistic resources that are deployed for these ends come from the follow-
ing levels of linguistic organization: syntax, prosody, phonetics and phonology,
lexis and semantics, pragmatics and sequential organization. Linguistic re-
sources (for instance: cues from different levels of linguistic organization such
as interrogative sentences, prosodic configurations like falling or rising final
pitch, lexical choices) are used as single cues or in combination to constitute
practices (for instance: questions, repeats, pauses) which in their sequential
contexts accomplish actions (for instance: initiate question-answer sequences in
order to find out if there is a problem, initiate repair, complain, etc.) (Schegloff
1997).4 However, there is no one-to-one relationship between resources, prac-
tices, and actions whatsoever, but need for situated analysis, as Schegloff (1997:
537) points out:
Once we see that virtually every lexical or grammatical construction or other prac-
tice of turn-design can get used for a variety of actions, it becomes clear that the ana-
lyst must examine each instance to see what that form of talk is being used to do on
that occasion.
230 Margret Selting
3.1. The construction of units through syntax and prosody

The construction and delimitation of turn constructional units (TCUs), i.e., the
smallest interactionally relevant complete linguistic units in talk-in-interaction,
is achieved through the interplay of syntactic and prosodic structures (for details
see Selting 1995a, 1996a, 2000a, 2001a). Sometimes it is also claimed that
pauses are used to delimit units from each other. Participants need to construct
both single unit turns as well as combine units in multi-unit turns.
If we look at lines 1217 of the transcript, we can make the following ob-
servations: in the utterances constructed in lines 12, 14, 15, and 17, syntactically
(possibly) complete constructions are deployed in co-occurrence with prosodi-
cally (possibly) complete units and thus delimit the respective turn construc-
tional units. Syntactically, we find an interrogative clause in line 12, a response
particle in line 14, a declarative sentence in line 15, and another response par-
ticle in line 17, all of which are syntactically possibly complete units in their
respective sequential contexts. The unit in line 12 ends with high rising pitch,
lines 14 and 15 end with mid falling pitch, and line 17 ends with low falling
pitch. All these pitch endings are usable for the signaling of unit completion (cf.
Selting 1995a, 1996a, 2000a). Unless the unit is retrospectively expanded (Selt-
ing 1995a; Auer 1996), the beginning of a new unit entails the ending of the
prior one. The new turn constructional unit is signaled by recognizably begin-
ning a new syntactic construction in co-occurrence with the start of a new pro-
sodic unit, often set off from the old one with a pitch jump to higher or lower
pitch or with latching or fast syllables at the beginning of the new unit. What we
can see here, then, is that possibly complete syntactic constructions are de-
ployed in co-occurrence with possibly complete final pitch configurations to
form and delimit turn constructional units.
Contrary to what is claimed in more traditional descriptions of prosody or
intonation, mostly on the basis of data from reading aloud or other more mono-
loguous speech styles, pauses in our data extract are not used in order to delimit
prosodic units or turn constructional units. We find a TCU-internal pause in line
29, which is filled with Jules clearing her throat and breathing in. All other
pauses are turn-initial delays that I will come back to later in this chapter.
3.2. The signaling of semantic meaning within units:

Lexical choice and accentuation
For the analysis of semantic meaning, we can look at the lexical choices as well
as the deployment of accentuation for signaling the semantic focus of turn con-
structional units.
3.2.1. Lexical choices
With respect to lexical choices, both Gitta and Jule mostly select colloquial lexi-
cal items that do not seem to be remarkable. The only unusual lexical choice
is the adjective viehisch (devastating, literally beastly or brutish) to qualify
Gittas criticism of her paper (line 33). Apart from this, we can note some ex-
treme case formulations (Pomerantz 1986) such as in telling Gitta that it is NIX
(nothing) that she can remember (line 9) or ALles (all) that she cannot tell her
(line 22), in asking whether she was SEHR peinlich (very embarrassing) (line
12), she woke up with SEHR starken KOPFschmerzen (with a very bad head-
ache) (line 26), she has been zu !NICHTS! zu gebrauchen (good for nothing)
(line 28) and all her effort to revise her paper hat alles ni HINgehauen (all that
didnt work at all). Jule thus exhibits a tendency to use extreme case formu-
lations in referring to her behavior at the party and the consequences of it. In re-
sponse to this, Gitta tends to play the implicit descriptions down: Gitta says that
Jule had been nur (just) lying there and trying to sleep (line 15), and she uses
the news marker ECHT? (really?) in response to Jules information that she
cant tell her when they left the party.
3.2.2. Accentuation
In general, the information structure of sentences, i.e., its structuring in terms
of semantic focus and background, is constituted through accentuation in co-oc-
currence with word order and focus particles. For current purposes, it suffices
to say that the accentuation of constituents constitutes them as focused, i.e., as
semantically foregrounded (cf. Ladd 1996).
In sentences with normal word order, there is in general one constituent that
can be focussed on to signal broad focus, that means: to signal the most neu-
tral meaning, with a foregrounding of the meaning of the entire sentence. This
one constituent is said to be the rhematically strongest constituent of the sen-
tence (Pheby 1980; Uhmann 1991). When, however, another constituent than
the rhematically strongest constituent is accented, this results in the signaling
and interpretation of narrow focus, that means: the foregrounding of only the
accented constituent or word.
As usual, most of the turn constructional units in our extract exhibit broad
focus. For example, in line 5, ich bin gegangn: da lagst du grad auf m FUSS-
boden; (I left when you were lying on the floor), the realized accentuation sig-
nals broad focus; any other accentuation in this unit would create a narrower
focus. I will not go into detail on the other lines with broad focus, for instance
lines 1, 9, 20, 2930, 31, 33.
The utterance in line 12 shows narrow focus: by accenting the intensifier
sehr (very), the speaker signals narrow focus on this item while the item it
232 Margret Selting
modifies, peinlich (embarrassing), is left unaccented and thus presented as

background. Jule thus seems to take for granted that her behavior was embar-
rassing indeed. Her question is phrased to ask just how much so she was. A more
neutral way of phrasing this question with a broad rather than a narrow focus
might have been, e.g.: war ich PEINlich? (was I embarrassing?). Likewise,
lines 15, 22, and 28 display narrow focus.
3.3. The organization of turn taking: Final pitch and loudness

According to Local, Kelly and Wells (1986), Schegloff (1987), and Selting
(1995a), turns yielding the floor to the co-participant exhibit particular prosodic
and phonetic features, such as particular pitch configurations, often a pitch peak,
reduced loudness, sometimes centralized vowel quality, and lengthenings in or
after the last accented syllable of the turn. The last accented syllable opens up
the transition relevance space (TRP; Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974;
Schegloff 1987, 1998). The prosody of turn yielding is remarkably different
from the prosody of turn holding.
In our example, accented syllables that open up the transition relevance
space can be witnessed in several lines. For instance, in lines 5 and 9, the ac-
cented syllables in FUSSboden and erINnern have high pitch peaks and falling
final pitch to the end of the units. In line 12, war ich SEHR peinlich? (was I very
embarrassing), however, there is a low pitch valley and rising pitch to the end
of the unit opening the transition relevance space.
In colloquial Standard German, there is no particular pitch at the end of turn
constructional units that is unequivocally associated with turn yielding: both
high or mid rising as well as mid or low falling pitch are used in TCUs that yield
the turn. Unless the semantics and pragmatics of the action that is being per-
formed has been or is being projected as a longer one, TCUs with these final pitch
movements can be deployed in turn-final TCUs (Selting 1995a, 1996a, 2000).
In contrast to the deployment of rising and falling pitch movements, which,
in the appropriate sequential context, may be used in turn-final TCUs and thus
for turn yielding, level final pitch as deployed in and after the accented syllable
in line 30 is usable for signaling turn holding. In the utterance in lines 29 and 30,
both the syntax and semantics of the utterance already project a continuation of
the turn: the usage of the (first) verb versuchen (try) in this unit projects an-
other unit to follow in which the projected negative outcome of the trying is
phrased (det hat alles ni HINgehauen all that didnt work) (cf. Schulze-Wenck
2005). At the same time, the level pitch at the end of line 30 holds the turn and
projects more-to-come, which is provided in line 31. In contrast to this, the final
mid-falling pitch after the pitch peak in the accented syllable near the end of line
31 might, in co-occurrence with the end of the syntactic and semantic unit and
with the imminent end of Jules complaining about not being able to work be-
cause of her hangover, potentially be interpreted as a turn-yielding pitch by the

recipient. This seems to be a reason why Jule adds her next complaint in line 33
with latching, i.e., with fast tempo and without any gap that might yield the re-
cipient room and time to come in for a turn of her own.
The interplay of syntax and prosody in turn constructional units in their sem-
antic, pragmatic, and sequential context is thus used to make TCUs recogni-
zable and to organize turn holding and turn yielding.
Furthermore, there are some more phonetic details of the talk that can only
be investigated more closely after the analysis of the actions and sequences con-
structed through the talk. There is, for instance, whispery, breathy voice in
Jules turn in lines 12, smily voice in Gittas and Jules turns in lines 5, 9, 10,
lip rounding in line 14, creaky voice etc. I will come back to this in Section 3.6.
of this chapter.
3.4. Practices and actions

The linguistic devices deployed are conceived of as being used or combined to
constitute practices that accomplish actions in their sequential contexts. The ac-
tions (and sequences) being constructed in lines 1217 have already been re-
ferred to above: Jule asks a question, Gitta answers to that question, and Jule
gives an acknowledgement of the answer. Gittas giving the answer provides
evidence that she understood the prior turn by Jule as a question.
On the level of analyzing practices and actions, in this case and in the entire
extract of talk given for illustration here, interrogative clauses are being deployed
in order to perform questions (cf. also lines 12, 20). This, however, is a mere co-
incidence. The action of questioning can also be performed by deploying other
syntactic structures, such as declarative sentences with a question tag, or even
declarative sentences without a question tag. If, for example, the speaker provides
a statement about something that the recipient has expert knowledge about or an
inference from the recipients prior talk that only the recipient can assess, these
practices are understood as questioning or, more precisely, as requests for con-
rmation, and they need to be conrmed or dealt with by the recipient. In the
appropriate context, many linguistic structures can be interpreted as performing
questioning; and interrogative sentences can be deployed to perform quite differ-
ent actions, for instance, inviting, complaining, accusing, etc.
There is another question-like turn in the extract: in line 24, Gitta uses the
word echt in an accented form, with fast tempo and with high rising pitch:
ECHT? (really?). The action that this practice performs can be labeled as a
kind of request for confirmation: Jule is being solicited to confirm that what she
said is really true. In its sequential position, it functions as a news marker that
Gitta deploys to acknowledge Jules information in lines 2223 as news, and at
the same time proffers the turn to Jule for an expansion (see below).
234 Margret Selting
3.5. Sequences
By the term sequence, conversation analysts refer to the orderly succession of
utterances and/or actions in interaction. The best known kind of sequence is the
adjacency pair; Schegloff (2007: 9) calls it a basic unit of sequence construc-
tion. In our extract at hand, we find quite a few adjacency pairs and their ex-
pansions (Schegloff 2007). In lines 119, the sequences are initiated by Jule, in
lines 2027 they are initiated by Gitta. After that, Jule takes the initiative again.
3.5.1. Adjacency pairs and their expansions

As has been well described in Conversation Analysis, in adjacency pairs such as
question-answer sequences, greeting sequences, etc., a first pair part pro-
duced by a first participant makes a second pair part by the recipient condi-
tionally relevant. The absence of a second pair part is noticeable. The relation of
conditional relevance between first and second pair parts is stronger and more
specific in adjacency pairs than in other kinds of sequences. The initiation of ad-
jacency pairs is therefore a good means of structuring and controlling inter-
action. As Schegloff (2007: 118) shows, adjacency pairs can be expanded, among
others, by minimal post-expansions of sequences, which are instantiated by
the kinds of acknowledgement tokens that are used as sequence closing thirds
in the data extract at hand.5
The adjacency pairs and their expansions in extract (1) can be listed as in
table (1) (=> = makes/provides conditionally relevant next):
Table 1. Adjacency pairs in extract (1) Telephone conversation Gitta & Jule
Line(s) speaker first pair part=> second pair part sequence closing third
13 J: question=>
46 G: answer
7 J: acknowledgement
9 J: informing
10 G: acceptance/
confirmation
12 J: question=>
1417 G: answer
20 G: question=>
2123 J: account for
inappropriate answer
24 G: news marker=>
2526 J: expansion of account
27 G: acknowledgement/
signal of sympathy
2831 J: further expansion of
prior account and
topic shift
32 G: response?
33 J: complaint
((not shown))
As indicated, the interrogative clauses are deployed as practices to initiate ques-

tion-answer sequences: they provide the first pair parts of adjacency pairs which
make answers by their recipients conditionally relevant.
Here, most of the question-answer sequences in lines 119 are followed
by an acknowledgement turn. While there is a relation of conditional relevance
between a question and an answer, an acknowledgement turn is not part of the
basic adjacency sequence, let alone a second acknowledgement. It is, rather, an
expansion that closes the sequence. As these expansions are not obligatory, they
may be used as indicative of the conversational style constituted here. The
acknowledgement tokens occur in turns in which, in other conversations, the
speakers might just continue with topical talk. Combined with the pauses be-
tween turn, the provision of these acknowledgement turns here, especially by
Jule, slows down the pace of the conversation and suggests the interpretation
that they are a display of Jules hangover.
In line 9, Jule offers some background to her prior question, informing Gitta
that she cannot remember much of what happened at the party at the given time.
Gittas response to this is a kind of explicit acceptance and confirmation (JA das
glaub ich; yes I believe that) which realizes a sympathetic uptake of Jules in-
formation and encourages her to continue.
In lines 2027, Jule provides an account for not answering Gittas question
by giving her the time that they left. This is evidence for the relation of con-
ditional relevance between the question and its answer: if an answer cannot be
given, there should be an account for this, in order to prevent the recipient
from drawing unwanted conclusions. Here, then, the conditionally relevant
answer is not given, but this is taken into consideration by the kind of response
given.
Gittas news marker in line 24, << all> ECHT?> (really?), proffers the
turn to Jule for an expansion, which Jule provides in lines 2526 and further in
lines 2831. This marker functions as the first part of an adjacency pair as well,
making a response and some kind of expansion on the prior news relevant.
236 Margret Selting
Gittas acknowledgement turn in line 27 is a signal of sympathy acknowledging

Jules expansion and at the same time responding to the specific content of it,
namely Jules telling her about her severe hangover. In contrast to Jules provid-
ing acknowledgement turns as a display of her hangover before, Gitta now pro-
vides an acknowledgement turn in fulfillment of her role as a sympathetic lis-
tener to her friends troubles telling (cf. Jefferson 1988).
3.5.2. A pre-expansion/pre-sequence
In view of the entire extract, we can surmise that the point of Jules initiating the
entire talk on the topic is to find out whether she behaved too embarrassingly the
night before, which is expressed in lines 912. This means that we can analyze
lines 18 as a pre-expansion or pre-sequence to the following sequence. In a
pre-expansion/pre-sequence, participants test whether the conditions and
requirements for the initiation of the following sequence are fulfilled (cf. Levin-
son 1983, Schegloff 2007: 28): here, Jule inquires whether Gitta was there at the
relevant time and thus can answer her intended question in line 12 at all. All
contributions after line 12 can be summarized as topical talk about the event and
its consequences for Jule. In line 29, Jule shifts the topic of her talk from being
drunk at the party and being overhung today to revising her paper, and at the end
of the extract she complains to Gitta about the viehische kriTIK (devastating
criticism) that the latter wrote about that paper (line 33).
After having analyzed the actions and sequences in extract (1), the meaning
of some phonetic parameters of the talk can now be investigated more closely.
3.6. The signaling of overlaying interactional meanings: Interactional

modality, mood, and emotive involvement
Interactional keys such as modality, mood and emotive involvement can modify
or overlay sequences or even passages of interaction. They can highlight, but
also change or even reverse the meaning of what has been said (cf. also Couper-
Kuhlen 2000).
3.6.1. The signaling of interactional modality by voice quality

The term interactional modality is intended to capture displays of stances to-
ward reality such as serious, earnest, amused, playful, joking, ironic, sarcastic,
etc. (cf. Kallmeyer 1979).
There is ample evidence of the deployment of phonetic parameters for the
signaling and negotiation of interactional modality by using voice quality in the
data at hand. There is whispery, breathy voice, smily voice, lip rounding, nasal-
ization, and creaky voice.
Jule asks her first question on the topic (lines 12) (!WARST! du gestern
abend noch DA als wir gegangen sind? were you still there last night when we
left) with whispery, breathy voice. After using normal voice when dealing with
the prior topic, she can thus be observed to change her voice to a less clear and
less loud quality for the initiation of a new topic that she presents as an embar-
rassing one later. At the end of her answer, when Gitta informs Jule that she left
when Jule was lying on the floor, Gitta uses smily voice for the potentially em-
barrassing item FUSSboden (floor). Smily voice seems to display Gittas
amusement about this; it suggests a playful, funny, take-it-easy modality for
talking about the potentially ambarrassing event.
When giving her information in line 9, ich kann mich da nmlich nIx mehr
so erINnern; (I cannot remember much of that), Jule also uses smily voice,
thus joining in in the playful modality suggested by Gitta. Incidentally, Jule in
this turn also deploys non-standard syntax: ich kann mich da nmlich nIx mehr
so erINnern; with two syntactically superfluous particles (da, so) and non-stan-
dard nix instead of standard nicht as a negator. In her response to this, JA das
glaub ich; (yes I believe that) Gitta still deploys smily voice.
After Jule has asked her question in line 12, war ich SEHR peinlich? (was
I very embarrassing), presupposing that she might have behaved very embar-
rassingly, Gitta answers with n; with lip-rounding, which suggests downplay-
ing of Jules fears of having behaved embarrassingly. In her expansion on this,
in line 15, du LAGST nur da und hAs:t versucht zu <schlafen>; (you were just
lying there and were trying to sleep) Gitta again ends her turn with smily voice
in the final word, again suggesting an interpretation of this as doing being
amused. The nasalization in the final word can be analyzed as reinforcing this
interpretation, as giving another cue that this turn is not meant to sound, for in-
stance, worried.
3.6.2. The signaling of interactional mood and emotive involvement by pause/

pace, prosodic marking, and voice quality
Speakers can deploy pauses/pace and voice quality to signal their interactional
mood. The term (interactional) mood is used here (in its colloquial meaning) to
refer to a speakers emotive display as feeling good/high, bad, low/down, quiet,
talkative, or the like. Through the use of prosodically marked cues, i.e., marked,
extra conspicuous prosody to attract extra attention to an item or a turn, speakers
can make turns recognizable as emotively involved, for instance, as emphatic
(Selting 1994) or surprised/astonished (Selting 1996b).
Gitta and Jule leave many pauses between turns. For instance, Jules ques-
tion in line 12, whether her behavior caused embarrassment at the party last
night, is followed by a pause of about half a second, before Gitta answers in line
14 with her delayed and lip-rounded n; and expands on this in line 15. Fur-
238 Margret Selting
thermore, after Gittas answer, there is another pause of about a second length
(line 16) as well as an inbreath (line 17), before Jule then provides her acknowl-
edgement token A:ha. (I see) (line 17). In these sequential positions, that
means: before conditionally relevant second pair parts of question-answer se-
quences or before an expected acknowledgement of, or other response to, an
answer, these pauses are noticeable delays that will be interpreted by the recipi-
ent.
(2) Fragment from extract (1) above:

12 Jule: war ich SEHR peinlich?
was I very embarrassing
Did I behave very embarrassingly?
13 (--)
14 Gitta: <n;>=
<with lip rounding>
No.
15 =du LAGST nur da und hAs:t versucht zu <schlafen>;
<smily, nasalized>
you were lying just there and were trying to sleep
You were just lying there trying to sleep.
16 (1.0)
17 Jule: .hA:ha.
oh
I see.
This interpretation of the meaning of these pauses can only be reconstructed

from the sequential context: the pause in line 13 might be a cue to signal the im-
minent answer, a rejection, as a dispreferred one, or it might be an expression
of Gittas surprise and needing time to plan her answer, or it might be a way of
adapting to Jules general slow tempo of responding in this conversation. Evi-
dence in favour of the most plausible interpretation can be gained from pho-
netic cues in the following turns: Gittas rejection of the presupposition of
Jules question that she might have been very embarrassing, her n; in line 14,
is produced with lip rounding. Her expansion of this in line 15, her downplay-
ing account that Jule had just (nur) been lying there and had been trying to
sleep, ends with smily and nasalized voice. This seems to suggest the follow-
ing: Gitta is trying to comfort Jule. First, she uses lip rounding as a display of
belittling, downplaying the relevance and seriousness of the issue at hand.
Then, in her expansion, she uses cues to make her response interpretable as a
display of being amused. Thus, even though a rejection following a question
is generally dispreferred, this kind of rejection in this context is the preferred
response. All this reinforces the interpretation of the short pause in line 13 as a
display of Gittas slight delay in responding to Jules question as a result of her

surprise at Jules question and as taking time in order to plan and decide on her
response.
In contrast, the pause in line 16, as it only occurs before an acknowledgment
token, does not seem to be a potential signal of dispreference, but rather a dis-
play of Jules doing being slow because of her hangover. Jules acknowledge-
ment token A:ha. in line 17 is, apart from the lengthening of the first vowel, not
produced with any phonetic cues to make it noticeable. The falling-to-low pitch
just seems to suggest this acknowledgement token as a more concluding one
than, for instance, the one in line 7. Yet, the lengthened A:ha. after the rather
long pause and after the inbreath seem to suggest its interpretation as a display
of Jules being slow because of her hangover again. The same argument could
be made for her next pause and breathing in lines 19 and 20 as well as for her
providing a repeated and again lengthened acknowledgement token in line 20.
This interpretation is reinforced by her slow tempo in line 22.
After Jules slow pace in acknowledging Gittas prior answers to her ques-
tions, Gittas question wann seid ihr (den)n WEG, (when did you leave then)
in line 20 is posed with fast tempo and in overlap with Jules prior second
acknowledgement. This is answered by Jule with das kAnn ich dir ALles nich
sAgen; (I cant tell you any of that) with slow tempo. The two tempos are con-
trasted here, suggesting perhaps the different moods of the speakers. Jules then
following nonverbal action of blowing into the receiver displays an outburst of
suppressed laughter, ostensibly humouring herself and thus aligning with the
playful modality negotiated before, after she informed Gitta that she cannot tell
when they left the party (see below).
Gittas ECHT? (really?) in line 24 is the only place in this extract in which
possibly one of the participants is deploying prosodic marking: it is produced in
an accented form, with a rise-to-high pitch and with fast tempo. Yet, its prosodic
marking is not really clear: the item is short and the marking, if at all, is not very
noticeable. If Gitta is indeed signaling emotive involvement here, it could be ar-
gued that Jule in her following lines adapts at this by beginning with ich wei
blO (I only know), thus emphasizing the degree of her being drunk the night
before. But this, too, is only weak evidence for the interpretation of this se-
quence as emotively involved.
After Gittas news marker ECHT? (really?), Jule provides information
about how she felt upon waking up the next day, that is: this morning. In her turn
in lines 2526, the relevant information to that point, isch heut frh mit SEHR
starken KOPFschmerzen Aufgewacht bin. (I woke up with a very bad headache
this morning), is given in creaky voice. Iconically, the use of very low, creaky
voice could be interpreted to suggest and match the content of what she says
here: she woke up with a very bad headache, thus suggesting that she feels very
low/down. Here, too, Jule uses a non-standard pronunciation of the first
240 Margret Selting
person pronoun, namely isch instead of ich (I). Gitta adapts to this in her re-
sponse ohah:; (oh boy).
In this extract, thus, voice quality is used in order to suggest and negotiate
the interactional modality and mood of talking about a topic, and to suggest and
match the interactional mood that a speaker expresses. Pausing/pace is realized
as a resource to suggest the speakers mood. Prosodic marking, usually de-
ployed to signal the speakers emotive involvement, could not be identified with
certainty in the data at hand.
3.7. The construction of everyday talk between friends

Through deploying all the resources, practices, actions, and sequences de-
scribed above, Gitta and Jule construct their talk as everyday talk between close
friends. By disclosing her embarrassment and by asking Gitta for an assessment
of her behavior at the party, Jule presents herself as Gittas friend. By dealing
with her behavior in an amused way, by comforting Jule, and by consoling her
for her headache, Gitta, in turn, presents herself as Jules friend. The two young
women both conduct this interaction in a way that routinely (re-)enacts and en-
sures the other one of their relationship as close friends.
The sample analysis of an extract of ordinary telephone conversation has
demonstrated the following:
The turn constructional units and turns of the extract have been decon-
structed into their constitutive cues, thus isolating the linguistic resources
that are deployed in an interactionally meaningful manner.
These resources have been reconstructed as methodically used to fulfill their
function and signal their interactional meaning in their sequential context.
No detail of the talk is used accidentally. Rather, it has been shown that lin-
guistic resources are systematically and methodically deployed in order to make
recognizable and construct actions and sequences that, in the material at hand,
altogether re-enact the relationship between the young women as close friends
to each other.
For the analysis and description of the linguistic resources that the participants
use to manage interaction, we of course need to refer to linguistic categories. The
study of linguistics and its subdisciplines, such as phonetics, phonology, syntax,
and semantics, is much older than Conversation Analysis or Interactional Lin-
guistics. When we set out to analyze linguistic resources from a conversation
analytic and/or interactional linguistic perspective, how are we going to deal
with the traditional and received categories that linguistics has developed? There
are two opposing tendencies with respect to this question, with many researchers
working somewhere on the continuum between the two end positions:
At the one end, researchers are quite optimistic with respect to adopting
traditional categories and adapting them to the material of talk-in-interaction.
On the syntactic level, we thus find terms such as sentence, or its adaptation
possible sentence, clause, expansion of a sentence such as left dislocation or
right dislocation, parenthesis, ellipsis, etc. On the phonetic-phonological level,
we find terms such as accentuation/accent, intonation unit, prosodic unit, etc.
Researchers adopting these notions argue that traditional and modern linguistics
has developed notions and categories that often are appropriate for the data they
were intended to describe, which most often was and is written language or an
unaccounted for mixture of written and intuitively judged spoken language.
Spoken language and talk-in-interaction are not altogether different from
written language; they share the basic language system. We can thus refer to the
traditional and/or modern linguistic categories, but we have to be careful: prove,
warrant, and demonstrate that and how they are relevant for the analysis of talk-
in-interaction. Thus, the notion of possible sentence is not relevant because the
sentence is a traditional grammatical unit, but because it has been shown and
demonstrated that the possible sentence is a category that participants in inter-
action make use of and show to be relevant through their subsequent behavior
(Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974; Selting 1995b).
At the other end, researchers hold that we cannot adopt and adapt categories
from traditional or modern linguistics. In their view, descriptive categories have
to be developed anew from the material of talk-in-interaction since talk-in-in-
teraction is an altogether different use of language from written prose. Even if in
the end the traditional categories might turn out to be (partly) appropriate for the
description of talk-in-interaction, we cannot start with them, because they will
obscure our analytic sensitivity to the data. These researchers will consequently
avoid notions such as sentences or clauses or units and rather refer to stretches
of talk and utterances; they will avoid notions such as accentuation/accent and
rather refer to phonetic parameters such as pitch, loudness, length, speech rate,
vowel quality, etc. Researchers adopting this view would argue that, for in-
stance, accents or sentences are the outcome of interpretations already, and that
our task is to analyze, not presuppose, the ways in which linguistic resources are
deployed to bring about and warrant such interpretations (cf., e.g., Local, Kelly
and Wells 1986, Kelly and Local 1989).
Many researchers in the eld work somewhere in-between these positions or
adopt a position that is most adequate for their research question at hand. In effect,
then, the issue of talking about accents and/or the phonetic parameters constitut-
ing them becomes one of the delicacy of the analysis. The level of delicacy aimed
at and needed for the analysis, however, is relative to the research question.
242 Margret Selting
5. Research perspectives
Further research should give us more descriptions of linguistic phenomena on

all levels of linguistic analysis, in an interactional linguistic perspective, i.e., as
resources deployed in the management of interaction. The goal should be the
further development and detailing of a comprehensive grammar of talk and/in
social interaction, for both the description of talk-in-interaction in single lan-
guages as well as the cross-linguistic description of talk-in-interaction in mono-
lingual and bi- or multilingual situations/participant frameworks. We need to in-
vestigate the deployment of linguistic resources in everyday private contexts as
well as in more special contexts, in such institutional contexts as adult-child
talk, talk with language-impaired speakers, prosody in first and second language
acquisition and in (inter)cultural or ethnic styles of speaking, etc. In the long
run, research in an interactional linguistic framework should lead to a general
theory of language in interaction that tries to define the goals and categories of
linguistic inquiry with respect to the use of language in talk-in-interaction.
This endeavour will have to seek points of convergence and integration with
what Schegloff (2005) calls the investigation of talk-and-other-conduct-in-in-
teraction as well as with recent approaches to the multimodality of interac-
tion (cf. Schmitt 2007).
A description of the ways in which linguistic resources are deployed in the
production and interpretation of talk in natural social interaction will benefit the
better understanding of both unproblematic as well as problematic sequences in
conversation, and it will help in the diagnosis of problems, e.g., of understand-
ing and interacting, and in the repair of them. The methodology and accumu-
lated knowledge can be made use of in the development of an empirically based
new rhetoric of talk in interaction (cf. also Kallmeyer 1996), which can benefit
both the monolingual and multilingual classroom and in rhetorical and com-
municative training of sensitivity outside the classroom as well as for the prac-
tical goals that applied discourse analysis is engendering in.
Appendix
Transcription symbols used in extract (1) (according to GAT, Selting et al. 1998)
Sequential structure
[ ] overlap and simultaneous talk
[ ]
= latching
Pauses
(.) micropause
(-), (--), (---) brief, mid, longer pauses of ca. 0.250.75
secs.; until ca. 1 sec.
(2.0) estimated pause, more than ca. 1 sec. du-
ration
Other segmental conventions
:, ::, ::: segmental lenghtening, according to duration
h, h, etc. hesitation signals, so-called filled
pauses
Accentuation
akZENT strong, primary accent
ak!ZENT! extra strong accent
akzEnt weaker, secondary accents
Pitch at the end of units

? rising to high
, rising to mid
- level
; falling to mid
. falling to low
Changes in loudness and speech rate
<<all> > allegro, fast
<<len> > lento, slow
Breathing
.h, .hh, .hhh inbreath, according to duration
Other conventions
((coughs)) para- und extralinguistic activities
and events
<<breathy voice> > concomitant para- und extralinguistic
activity/property or event with no-
tation of scope
244 Margret Selting
<<erstaunt> > interpretative commentaries with scope

(solche) uncertain transcription
al(s)o uncertain sounds or syllables
Notes
1. For most useful comments which helped me to improve the first draft of this chapter I
am grateful to Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and Friederike Kern. Furthermore, I am
grateful to the participants in the data sessions at the University of Potsdam in which
we were dealing with the extract used in this paper, most notably Elizabeth Couper-
Kuhlen, Friederike Kern, Bernhard Bielick, Yazgl Simsek, Elisabeth Reber and
Stephanie Kser.
2. In the German research context, the choice of the term Aktivitt (activity) by re-
searchers adhering to the CA paradigm, rather than Handlung (action), was intended
to prevent confusion with the intentionalist term Handlung (action) in the discourse
analysis paradigm. As by now, however, the paradigms have become quite distinct,
and the distinction does not seem to be important in the English-speaking world, I will
mostly use the term action here to refer to the objects that participants in talk-in-inter-
action set out to do and collaboratively achieve.
3. This field can be looked at both from a syntactic as well as from a lexico-semantic per-
spective; in the latter perspective, the use and function (discourse meaning) of a single
subjunction such as weil (because), obwohl (although), aber (but), etc. is exam-
ined in different syntactic and sequential contexts.
4. In my understanding, when speaking of linguistic resources, even when attempting
to reconstruct them from an interactional perspective, we still take a linguistic per-
spective, for instance in referring to levels of linguistic organization. When relating
linguistic resources/forms to their functions, practice is suggested by Schegloff
(1997) as the term to refer to interactionally relevant components below the level of
actions. That means: practices are observable means that are deployed in order to
get actions accomplished. The term practice is preferred over processes, as the
latter is often used in, e.g., psycholinguistics to refer to unobservable cognitive pro-
cesses that conversation analysts would not want to speculate about.
5. On the relevance of rhythmic integration and intonational fitting in sequences see
Couper-Kuhlen (2000).
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10. Dynamics of discourse
Barbara A. Fox
1. Introduction
This chapter explores a fundamental process in discourse, particularly in con-

versation: namely, the process by which speakers accommodate the informa-
tional and interactional needs of their recipients. The chapter provides an over-
view of some of what is known on this topic within the discourse-functional
syntax community and the conversation analysis/interactional linguistics com-
munity. The chapter explores four facets of utterance design through which
speakers display a sensitivity to their recipient(s): pragmatic organization, syn-
tactic organization, lexical organization, and prosodic organization.
Findings over the last several decades in both scholarly communities sug-
gest that much of the lexical, syntactic, prosodic, and semantic-pragmatic or-
ganization of speakers utterances are selected as part of a process of recipient
accommodation (within conversation analysis this is known as recipient de-
sign). While most of this process is no doubt unconscious on the part of speak-
ers, it can nonetheless be characterized as design and selection by virtue of
the fact that speakers have, at any given moment in an interaction, a range of lin-
guistic options available to them, and yet repeatedly use linguistic forms which
can be argued to respond to the recipient needs of that particular moment.
While, at a particular moment in an interaction, the pressures of crafting an
utterance for a particular recipient, doing particular work, may seem daunting
when looked at from the outside by an analyst, it is clear from research in this
area that for participants this work can be accomplished, and in the speed of
real-time interaction, and made to appear natural, normal, and even effort-
less. How such remarkable work can be done at such high speeds is a fascinat-
ing question that is beyond the scope of this overview (see Levinson 2000).
It is also worth noting here that while much of the design of an utterance can
be attributed to the recipient accommodation process, some of the shape of an
utterance may reflect the speakers own needs. For example, a speakers attempt
to find a word, while managed to accommodate the needs of the interaction, a
rather complex issue for the clause may arise from an internal need (an inability
to find a sought-for word); speakers may choose particular noun phrases as
grammatical subject, based on their own associations or alignments with the ref-
erents of those nouns, or cognitive priming, or other speaker-internal processes.
Since the topic of the current chapter is recipient accommodation, I will have
nothing more to say about speaker-internal processes. Interested readers will
256 Barbara A. Fox
find the literature on priming especially relevant (e.g., McKoon and Ratcliff
1998).
I will also not address or focus on the extensive literature on speech/com-
munication accommodation, which attends to issues relevant to, but slightly dif-
ferent from, the concerns taken up in this chapter. There are several excellent
surveys of that literature, including the chapter by Giles in this volume (see also
Giles, Coupland, and Coupland 1991).
One last note is in order: the literature on information packaging and recipi-
ent design is vast, and it would not be possible to cover all of it here. What fol-
lows is a survey of just some of the highlights of that literature.
2. Discourse-functional syntax: Information packaging
In the 1970s, a group of American linguists began exploring the possibility that
at least some syntactic structures could be understood historically as solutions
to recurrent communicative problems faced by speakers (cf. Li 1975, 1976,
1977; Givon 1979; Hooper and Thompson 1973; Chafe 1976). As the scholars
in this area began to make greater use of naturally-occurring discourse data, the
extent of the functional basis for syntactic structures became more apparent.
In discourse, speakers have a wide range of choices for coding referents.
The same individual can be referred to, for example, as Mary Lapolla, Mary, my
friend Mary, your wife, my friend, that woman, the woman who donated the
screens, she, you, or even I, just to list a few of the coding options. The coding
choice made by a speaker at any given moment reflects what the speaker as-
sumes the recipient knows about that referent at that moment; a referent that is
new information for the recipient is very likely to be coded with a full noun
phrase, while a referent that is known to the recipient and has been talked about
recently is likely to be coded with a pronoun or zero (Givon 1983; Chafe 1976;
Du Bois 1987; Tao 1994; Lambrecht 1994; Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski
1994; there are actually complexities to the choices which are not expressed in
this formulation, see Fox 1987 and Duranti 1984 for discussion). The phenom-
enon of coding according to the informational value of a referent has come to
be known as information packaging. Information packaging is a fundamental
mechanism through which speakers accommodate the informational needs of
their recipients. For example, cross-linguistically there is an association be-
tween heavier coding devices (such as lexical noun phrases) and new in-
formation, on the one hand, and lighter coding devices (such as pronouns) and
known (or old or given) information on the other (Givon 1983; Chafe 1976,
1996; Lambrecht 1994), a fact which suggests that speakers provide more in-
formation about a referent when it is new to the recipient than when it is already
known to the recipient.1
Dynamics of discourse 257
3. Conversation analysis: Recipient design
Recipient design, the process by which speakers create utterances specically for
the current recipient, in the particular interactional moment, is a central concept
in conversation analysis. As Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1978: 43) say:
With recipient design we intend to collect a multitude of respects in which the talk
by a party in a conversation is constructed or designed in ways which display an
orientation and sensitivity to the particular other(s) who are the coparticipants. In our
work, we have found recipient design to operate with regard to word selection, topic
selection, the admissibility and ordering of sequences, the options and obligations
for starting and terminating conversations, and so on. [] It is a major basis for that
variability of actual conversations that is glossed by the notion context-sensitive.
It is clear from this statement that recipient design is a fundamental principle or-
ganizing talk-in-interaction; in fact, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson refer to it as
perhaps the most general principle particularizing conversational interaction
(1978: 4243). The process of accommodating particular others is thus central
to conversation.
The following sections explore some of the facets of utterance organization
that are shaped through recipient design.
4. Utterance form and recipient design
This section explores four facets of the linguistic form of an utterance that dis-
play a sensitivity to recipients: pragmatic organization, syntactic organization,
lexical organization, and prosodic organization.
A note on the nature of recipiency is, however, in order here, before we pro-
ceed to the detailed discussions of the linguistic means by which speakers shape
their utterances for their recipients. Although we often speak about recipients as
if it is a straightforward and static notion, in fact the achievement of recipiency
requires work on the part of both speakers and co-present (or even non-copre-
sent) others, and the organization of participation to come to particular align-
ments of participants is indeed a delicate dance. For example, someone selected
to speak next after a question may not, in fact, answer, and a third party may
answer, either on behalf of the selected recipient or in another kind of align-
ment, such as ratting on the selected recipient. A speaker may also start an
utterance with one participant selected as the recipient, and then may select an-
other recipient at the first place of possible completion of the utterance if the
first selected recipient fails to display signs of recipiency (such as appropriate
gaze alignment). Recipiency may also shift if new participants join the partici-
pation framework, or if participants disengage from the participation frame-
work. In addition, speakers may attend to overhearing audience members, who
258 Barbara A. Fox
are not their direct recipients, in designing their utterances, for example when
calling a radio talk show. Thus, part of the work of recipient design is the co-
construction of who, in fact, the recipient(s) of a particular utterance might be
(Goodwin and Goodwin 1999).
4.1. Pragmatic organization

By semantic-pragmatic organization, we mean to highlight the facet of an utter-
ance that relates to what that utterance means in a very broad sense; that is,
what it is doing in the interaction what action or activity it accomplishes, as
well as what the utterance is about (as construed by the participants). This
facet of an utterance is perhaps the area in which speakers are most sensitive
to recipients, in that the action accomplished by an utterance is almost always
responsive in some way to what has come before it. This subsection examines
three dimensions in which the meaning of an utterance is sensitive to the
recipient: responding in and through the sequential environment; situating the
utterance in the unfolding turn exchange in the interaction; and topic selection.
4.1.1. Sequential environment

At the moment that a participant begins to take an opportunity to speak, s/he will
already find her/himself in a sequential location, with relevancies mobilized by
the prior talk, most especially by the immediately prior utterances.2 S/he may
find her/himself to be the recipient of a first pair part, which enfolds the moment
of utterance in a network of interpretations and relevancies (for example, hear
the next utterance, if possible, as a second pair part). As Schegloff has pointed
out (1988), participants thus begin not with their own internal intention for what
to say, but with an interactionally-permeated sense of how the next utterance
will be heard and what will constitute a relevant next action. Consider the fol-
lowing instance3.
(1) Farmhouse
1 Michelle: Well scoot in though so they can see you.
2 (0.6)
3 Mom: I think they can [see us fine. hehehehehehe
4 Michelle: [Come on Donna
5 (0.3)
6 Michelle: Oh [come on
7 Donna: [Dont you think Im in?
8 (0.5)
9 Laura: Youre probably fine.
This fragment occurs towards the beginning of a videotaped interaction. There

are four participants present; Donna arrived after the researcher had already set
up the camera. Michelle, who was the researchers contact to the group, initiates
this sequence at line 1 with her request to Donna to scoot in, so that Donna is
in the view of the camera. Donna thus finds herself to be a recipient of a request
to physically move, and the silence that grows after Michelles turn comes to
completion (line 2) is heard as Donnas silence, and serves as a harbinger of the
dispreferred (Schegloff 1998), that is, it indicates that a possible refusal of the
request may be coming. Whatever Donnas intentions here, the silence that she
allows to grow at line 2 is heard as delaying a response to a request, and thus
as potentially indicating a refusal of that request. In this way we can say that the
sequential action location of an utterance is the first principle in shaping the
understanding of a next utterance.
From its inception, then, a next utterance is already shaped by the force of
recipient design. How the particular next utterance will be heard and understood
has already been at least partially formed by the prior talk. Whatever the next
speaker says will be heard through that filter. Recipient design also includes
a sensitivity to this network of interpretations within which the utterance
emerges. For example, in the following fragment Donna designs her utterance
with a sensitivity to the action-environment in which it is produced (Donnas
utterance is arrowed):
(2) Farmhouse
1 Mom: Would you like some m:ore water, or some hot tea,
2 [or coffee,
3 Donna: [hhhh
4 Mom: o[r
5 Donna: [Ill have some water and coffee.=
6 Mom: =Okay.=
7 Donna: =hnnnnhnn
8 Michelle: mm hmm?=
9 Donna: =Is tha [t
10 Michelle: [mh mh mh=
11 Donna: =being greedy?=
12 Mom: =No: [:.
13 Michelle: [ha [haha
14 Donna: [khe [haha
15 Laura: [haha
In example (2), Mom produces an offer of something to drink (lines 12). From
the body and gaze organization, it is clear that this offer finds Donna as its
recipient.4 An offer is a first pair part which makes an acceptance or declination
260 Barbara A. Fox
relevant as its second pair part (Sacks and Schegloff 1973; Schegloff 2007);
Donna displays her sensitivity to this relevancy by withholding acceptance at
the first place of possible completion5 (water), producing only an outbreath at
the second place of possible completion (tea), and then an acceptance of two of
the offered items at the third place of possible completion (just after coffee).
There are several striking features about the design of the utterance itself; for
our purposes at this moment it is enough to notice that Donna has designed her
utterance at line 5 with a sensitivity to the action-environment created by
Moms prior talk (and body movements).
4.1.2. Turn-taking
Fragment (2) also nicely illustrates the strong sensitivity to turn-taking that is
another facet of recipient design. At line 1, Mom begins an offer (would you
like) and then proffers a beverage (water); the intonation is compatible with
a hearing of a list. At this point, there is no uptake from Donna, and Mom
produces an extension to her turn which is another member of the beverage
list (hot tea); this second offer receives only an outbreath from Donna, and
Mom adds another extension to her turn (coffee). Just as she prepares to ex-
tend the turn with another option, Donna produces an acceptance of two of the
items. Mom abandons the extension as Donna produces the acceptance. Mom
thus designs her turn with a sensitivity to particular displays of recipiency
from Donna.
4.1.3. Topic selection

As mentioned in the quote from Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1978) above,
topic selection is also sensitive to the recipient. Although relatively little re-
search has been done on topic selection within conversation analysis, one of the
classic conversation analysis papers takes up a related issue. Jefferson (1980)
describes a practice through which speakers can indicate that they may or may
not have a trouble to tell, and that the trouble, if there is one, may or may not be
told. The practice is a downgraded conventional response to a how are you
question; pretty good would be an example of a downgraded conversational re-
sponse. Jefferson goes on to say:
Further, the downgraded conventional response can provide that, should there be a
trouble, the actual telling of it will be negotiable. For example, whether the trouble
will be mentioned at all [] or whether it will be mentioned now or later [] can
turn on what the recipient does following the downgraded conventional response
(Jefferson 1980: 166).
One way in which this negotiation can take place is for the recipient of the
downgraded conventional response to ask about relevant others in the speakers
life; if the query regarding a relevant other finds the possible trouble, the
speaker can then tell the trouble.
Topics can also be touched off (Jefferson 1984) by a current topic, or re-
lated by slight shifts to a current topic. Consider the following fragment in (3).
Donnas new sequence follows a discussion of a mouse that Laura and Michelle
saw in Michelles house (the relevant utterances are arrowed):
(3) Farmhouse
1 Laura: =.hhhh ((sniff))You know what- we saw today, and I
2 thought of you?
3 (0.7)
4 Michelle: Uh-oh, (.) This better be good,
5 (1.2)
6 Laura: We saw a mous:e climbing up our sh:creen.=
7 Michelle: =khaa ( [haha)
8 Laura: [in the basement.
9 Mom: [Why did that make you think of
10 (0.4)
11 Laura: BECAUSE hehh=
12 Mom: =Mich [elle hehehe
13 Laura: [hha .ihh haha=
14 Laura: =[Friday ni:ght [there was a mou:se=
15 Donna: =[heha [You did better than I did
16 Laura: .ihh there was a mouse in her:- basement, (0.5)
17 and just s: [curried all over the plac:e
18 Mom: [cough))
{40 lines omitted}

19 Mom: Hed have a riot [in there hmhmhmhm
20 Laura: [( )
21 (.)
22 Michelle: Yea::h,
23 (.)
24 Donna: There was a sna:ke on the way here.=Its first
25 Ive seen a li:ve one.
26 (0.2)
27 Mom: Eo::h.=
28 Michelle: =What ki:nd.
262 Barbara A. Fox
Laura and Michelle have been talking about a mouse that they saw in Mi-
chelles basement. Perhaps through a topic selector of encountering un-
wanted creatures, Donna begins a new sequence with the slightly shifted
topic There was a snake on the way here. It is interesting that Donna chooses
the same syntactic construction to introduce her encounter with the snake that
Laura used to introduce their encounter with the mouse (there was a mouse
there was a snake). To my knowledge, the role of parallel syntax in touched-
off topics has not been addressed (but see Du Bois to appear on dialogic syn-
tax); it may be a practice for showing that the new topic is more of the same
general topic than a shift in topic. In any event, it is clear that Donna intro-
duces her topic at this moment in the conversation approximately 15 minutes
into the interaction as a display of sensitivity to her recipients and their
recent topic.
It is interesting to consider the possibility that, had Donnas encounter with
the snake been treated as important news or a major event, it could have been
placed earlier in the interaction rather than Donna waiting for a relevant topic to
emerge with which to situate it. In other words, one way of treating an event as
highly newsworthy is to misplace it earlier in the conversation than the topical
organization of the talk otherwise might allow for, and to mark it as out of
place. Emergency news is perhaps the extreme form of this, and can be treated
as such by very early placement, including placement outside of a normal mo-
ment of interaction (such as a phone call in the middle of the night). Placement
and marking of topics, in addition to topic selection, are thus also sensitive to re-
cipients.
4.2. Syntactic organization

The second facet of linguistic form that displays a sensitivity to recipients is
syntactic organization. Research within conversation analysis and interactional
linguistics6 has identified a variety of ways in which the syntactic resources of a
language are deployed to fit an utterance to its recipient. This subsection exam-
ines the use of syntax in turn-taking and in contextualizing the action of an
utterance.
4.2.1. Syntax for turn-taking

In his now-classic paper The interactional construction of a sentence, Charles
Goodwin (1979) provided a cogent argument for considering a single sentence,
produced by a single speaker, to be the outcome of interactional work on the part
of all of the participants in an interaction. The sentence he analyzed, I gave,
I gave up smoking cigarettes. l- uh one week ago today.actually, though con-
structed as a single syntactic unit, was produced in three segments, each seg-
ment for a different recipient. As each newly added segment failed to receive
appropriate uptake from the current recipient, the speaker extended the turn
grammatically to provide a new place of possible completion at which the new
recipient could provide appropriate uptake. The syntactic coherence of the three
segments was a design-feature of the utterance, in that although the speaker lo-
cated three different people as potential recipients in the course of the utterance,
with three different places of possible completion, constructing the utterance
as a single syntactic unit interactionally deleted the prior places of possible
completion and treated the final place of completion as the only intended one
(Goodwin 1979). In this utterance, then, the syntactic structure of the utterance
displays a sensitivity to the multiple recipients, each segment specifically de-
signed for the current recipient, and each new syntactic increment deletes
the prior place of possible completion (see also Ford, Fox, and Thompson 2002;
Walker 2004).
In English and German, syntax is used from the very beginning of an utter-
ance to project how and when that utterance might come to possible completion
(cf. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974; Ford and Thompson 1996; Ford,
Fox, and Thompson 1996; Auer 1996; Selting 1996). In English, because of the
highly syntacticized and recurrent practices for the design of the beginnings of
turn constructional units (TCUs), this projection is quite strong and accounts for
the findings in English that turn-beginnings are a critical site in turn projection
(Schegloff 1987). German shows a great many more options in its initial syn-
tactic slots (referred to as fields in various traditions of German linguistics)
and thus exhibits much less tightly constrained projection than does English.
Consider Auer (1996) on elements that turn out to be in the pre-front field in
German:
I have suggested that the pre-front field should be treated as the very beginning
of a syntactic gestalt, emerging in-time as the speaker begins to construe his or her
turn or turn-component. Note that during the production of the constituent in ques-
tion, its syntactic status is completely open; it may turn out to occupy the front
field, or rather the pre-front field, for instance. Only after the left sentence brace
has been produced do recipients know what the constituents syntactic status is.
So the emergent gestalt is underdetermined during its production (Auer 1996:
307308).
In Japanese, by contrast, the syntactic organization of the beginnings of turn

constructional units is such that little information regarding how the utterance
will unfold is produced at the beginning; rather, Japanese recipients make use
of a wait and see strategy (Fox, Hayashi, and Jasperson 1996, a phenomenon
also referred to as delayed projectability; Tanaka 1999) to see how the utterance
unfolds, often waiting until the predicate, or turn-ending devices such as turn-
final particles, are produced to start the next turn.
264 Barbara A. Fox
As the research in this area makes clear, the syntactic resources of a lan-
guage both shape the turn-taking practices of the speakers of that language, and
are used to fit an utterance to the recipient.
4.2.2. Syntax and action/activity-type

There is extensive evidence that the syntactic structure of a given utterance is
constructed for the particular action under production, for this particular re-
cipient at this particular moment in the interaction. Ochs and Schieffelin
(1976) explore left-dislocations in English and find that left-dislocations show
the speakers understanding that the referent named by the left-dislocated
noun is a new topic that is being introduced, but connected semantically to the
prior topic. Fox (1987) finds that the choice between a pronoun and a full noun
phrase displays a sensitivity to the sequential location of the utterance, as well
as to certain actions that can be accomplished with a marked reference form.
Pronouns are used when a sequence containing a mention of that same referent
has not yet been brought to a close; a full noun phrase will be used generally to
introduce a referent for the first time in an interaction and also to return to a
referent after the sequence in which that referent was last mentioned was al-
ready closed and a new sequence started. Examples (4), (5), and (6) illustrate
these patterns:
(4) Farmhouse
1 Michelle: Well, I thought yknow the
s[:mell of the ca: [t,
2 Laura: [.hhh [ehheh
3 Michelle: the mouse would like go awa:[:y.
4 Laura: [.eh [.eh .ehhh ((sniff))
5 Michelle: [But no:. He just
6 kept like (.) teasing me or something,
(5) TG
Bee: Hey do you see v- fat old Vivian anymore?
Ava: No, hardly,
(6) Farmhouse
1 Laura: ACtually (we) pulled off Dads very well.
2 (0.7)
3 Laura: Considering:, (0.2) people .pt met over here
4 while he was here.
5 (.)
6 Laura: Tch and he had no [clue.
7 Donna: [Is that right?

8 (0.5)
9 Donna: Why didnt he have a clue.
10 (.)
11 Mom: He was out in the fie:ld,
12 Laura: M [hm,
13 Mom: [One of uh Willys: (.) uh ca:lves was (0.7)
14 Laura: No it was a cow. She was: (0.2) it was a prolapsed
15 cow.=
16 Mom: =Yea:h, (0.2) she was si:ck n they- he and Willy
17 were out(0.2) in- (0.3) the back field that way,
{10 pages omitted}
18 Donna: (Probly) some parts that really get- (0.9) a lot of

19 snow:, but
20 (.)
21 Laura: hnhnhn=
22 Donna: =I ne [ver lived in tho [se parts
23 Laura: [hhaha
24 Laura: [Like Lenora(s) in
ta(h) ha?
25 .ihhh Up by Lenora(h)?
26 (.)
27 Mom: ha hehe
28 (.)
29 Laura: .ihhh .ih[h hha hehe he
30 Mom: [( ) (This) is mo- u: [h,=
31 Laura: [u
32 Laura: =hhh s:[ister.
33 Mom: [mo:m, and sister >and family< live up:
in:
34 Upper Peninsula of Michiga[n.
35 Donna: [O::h.
36 (0.5)
37 Mom: Willys in love with her siste(h)r
In example (4), Michelle refers to the mouse at line 6 with a pronoun, having
just mentioned him in the same sequence at line 4. In example (5), Bee intro-
duces a new referent (fat old Vivian) with a full noun phrase. In example (6),
Mom reintroduces with a full noun phrase (Willy) a referent from a prior se-
quence that was treated as completed.
266 Barbara A. Fox
Ford (1993) notes that adverbial clauses in English can either precede or fol-
low their main clauses. Adverbial clauses that precede their main clauses can be
used to project that a further clause is coming (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson
1974; Lerner 1991) and can be used to frame the longer turn within which they
are situated. Example (7) below, taken from Ford (1993), illustrates this func-
tion:
(7) Knee surgery

Valerie: So the doctors said, that they would- (0.3) If he:
(0.5)didnt wanna keep being active, an do sports n
things, right now, at his age, an with the bad
condition of his knee, they normally put in a plastic
knee.
In this example, Valerie begins a clause, cuts it off, and begins an adverbial
(conditional) clause. This adverbial clause projects that at least a main clause is
still to come; Valerie makes use of this projection space to add additional el-
ements before the main clause.
Adverbial clauses that follow their main clauses, on the other hand, often re-
spond to a lack of uptake of the main clause on the part of the recipient. For
example, because-clauses often come after their main clause in fact, they
often come after a silence after their main clause because the speaker has pro-
duced a main clause which has gotten no uptake, and then adds the because-
clause to provide an account for the main clause. In the following example, from
Ford (1993), Andys question receives no immediate uptake from Burt; he then
produces a because-clause that provides an account for this question:
(8)
1 Andy: .hhh Well do you think its: umm (0.2) ahm (0.2)
2 stress?
3 (.)
4 Andy: Cause a lot of back- I know back pain, (0.2)
5 comes with stress.
6 Burt: .hhh we:ll Im thinking it might be uh (0.2) I um:
7 (0.5) I havent ever had ahh directly related
8 physical symptoms of stress before, and it could
9 easily be that.
Complex clauses are thus a resource for accommodating the recipient, es-
pecially with regard to turn-taking (see also Auer 2000).
In a recent study illuminating the interactional power of grammar, Raymond
(2000) demonstrates that responses to yes/no interrogatives in English display a
sensitivity to the grammatical relevancies mobilized by the yes/no interrogative.

He provides evidence that recipients of yes/no interrogatives can respond either
with yes/no in their answer or without a response token; the former choice ac-
cepts the grammatical relevancies of the question, while the latter resists them.
In choosing to respond without yes/no in their answer, participants treat the
question as problematic in some way. The following fragment illustrates what
Raymond calls a nonconforming response (the participants are discussing what
a Dairy Queen blizzard is):
(9) Three gals

Lisa: Is it like a:- (0.2) a sundae?
(0.3)
Molly: A thick thick thick sha:ke. I would say
Mollys response to Lisas question does not employ either yes or no; rather it
seems to treat the terms of the question as problematic the item under dis-
cussion is not in the category of edibles (like sundaes) but is rather in the realm
of drinkables (like shakes). The format of responses to yes/no interrogatives is
thus sensitive to the terms constraining it in the question.
Oh (2005, 2006) explores the functions of subject zero anaphora in English
conversation and finds that subject zero anaphora (as in utterances like wouldnt
know what thell hed want) is recurrently found in a small set of sequential en-
vironments. One of these environments is in a second saying of an utterance, es-
pecially in negatively valenced (Oh 2005; Schegloff 1997) actions, such as
complaints, negative self-assessments, and so on. Consider example (10), taken
from Oh (2005):
(10) Reeves
1 M: So yeh gonna ahow long yeh think youll be in Tacoma
2 W: I really dont know
3 (1.2)
4 W: ohh really dont know
5 (1.1)
6 M: Do you have some place youre going to be there,
7 most of the time?
8 W: um:: (1.2) tch well probably be at (0.3) a friend::
9 of Jerrys house.
At line 1, M asks a question to W. W responds with a no access claim (Ray-

mond 2000), that is, I really dont know. As Oh (2005) points out, such utter-
ances are dispreferred in that they do not align with the question they do not,
268 Barbara A. Fox
in fact, answer the question. At line 4 W re-does the utterance, this time with
a zero subject (really dont know). Example (8) thus illustrates the use of
zero subjects in English in second sayings that are engaged in dispreferred
actions.
Looking outside of English, Mazeland and Huiskes (2001) discovered that
maar (but) in Dutch is used to resume a topic that had been abandoned.
Hayashi (2001) presents the finding that postpositions in Japanese can be used
to initiate an utterance and thereby link the current utterance with a noun in
a prior utterance. Monzoni (2005) provides evidence that marked construc-
tions in Italian are used to introduce disconnected interjections, which are
carefully placed within a conversation, suggesting sensitivity on the part of
the speaker to their recipients and the unfolding topical organization of
the talk.
4.3. Lexical choice

The precise words chosen by a speaker clearly display a sensitivity to the recipi-
ent. Jefferson (1974) described a practice whereby a speaker can replace one
word with another word, and in doing so can display to the recipient that they
are not the kind of person who would normally use the second word but they
will use it now in deference to the recipient (cf. Jefferson 1974). Example (11)
provides one of her now-famous illustrations:
(11)
Jean: Well she said thet there was some woman thet- the- thet
they were whh- had held up in the front there, that they
were poining the gun at, n everything, (0.4) a k-
Negro woman.
Jefferson says of this example:

This can be proposing I am not a liberal but am talking by reference to the fact that
you are [] starting to say colored and specifically, recognizably, substituting
Negro, and substituting it after a very slight degree of error has been made (Jefferson
1974: 193).
Self-repair in which one word is replaced with another is thus a clear resource
that speakers can draw on to accommodate their recipients.
Depperman (2005) provides evidence that words can come to be used in a
contrastive relationship in a conversation through the speakers sensitivity to
the interactional context. Consider the lexical items frech (insolent) and krank
(sick) in German. These two words do not stand in a contrastive relationship in
general, but in the following example they acquire a contrastive interpretation,

through the work of the sequential context (the fragment comes from a formal
mediation session)7:
(12)
A: sie hawwe e freschs mdl des wisse sie ge!NAU!
you have an insolent girl that know you very well
You have an insolent girl, you know that very well.
B: ! ALLE! kinner sin fresch. (.)
all children are insolent
All children are insolent.
B: liewer hab isch e fresches kind wie e krankes kind.
rather have I an insolent child than a sick child
Id rather have an insolent child than a sick child.
Regarding this fragment, Depperman says:

[ T]he opponent [] resumes the proponents categorization of her child as
frech and establishes a preferential contrast between frech and krank (sick) with
respect to her child. In traditional semantic terms, both predicates would not be re-
garded as mutually exclusive, but as causally, logically, and semantically unre-
lated. Consequently, the attribution of one of them to a referent would neither pre-
clude nor project the applicability of the other to the same referent. The
preferential contrast, however, does not only express a preference for frech (inso-
lent) over krank (sick). It suggests an alternative or even the need for a choice
between the two states having an insolent child and having a sick child: both
words are constructed as a locally relevant set of complementaries. Now, con-
trasted with krank (sick), frech (insolent) obtains a positive semantics, because
the contrast highlights possibly relevant interpretations, such as vivid, healthy,
self-reliant. These interpretations were not available in the proponents original
context in line 1 (Deppermann 2005: 299).
The contrast thus emerges in the context of the argument between the two
speakers; speaker Bs contrast displays a sensitivity to speaker As use of the
word frech and simultaneously shifts its meaning to her own benefit.
Example (12) raises the important issue that recipient accommodation is not
always one of aligning with the recipient; speakers can accommodate recipients
and design their utterances for particular recipients even if those utterances con-
stitute disagreement or argument with the recipient. Even in disagreements and
arguments, speakers display a sensitivity to the recipient, although perhaps not a
positive or aligning one.
Schulze-Wenck (2005) explores the notion of first verb, a term introduc-
ed by Sacks (1992), which includes verbs that project further talk and
evok[e] a counterfactual world (Schulze-Wenck 2005: 319). First verbs, such
270 Barbara A. Fox
as wanted to, was going to, tried to, display a sensitivity to the recipient in
that they indicate to the recipient that a further turn constructional unit is
projected, a turn constructional unit in which a failure of the desired event is
presented (e.g., I tried to get her but the line was busy). According to Schulze-
Wenck, first verb utterances have three properties: first verbs express con-
cepts such as intention, plan, expectation, attempt [] (2005: 325), they ex-
press past time reference, they take complement clauses, and they carry a
counterfactual interpretation (2005: 325). Example (13) illustrates this phe-
nomenon:
(13) NBII:1
1 Emma: Buds gonplay go:lf now up Riverside hes js
2 leavin
3 (0.2)
4 Lott: Oh:.
5 (0.5)
6 Emma: So: Kathern Harry were spoze tuh come down las
7 night but there wz a deathn the famly so they
8 couldncome
In line 6 supposed to is a first verb: it carries the meaning of a plan or obligation,

it shows past time reference and takes an embedded clause, and in this example
it clearly has a counterfactual meaning. The use of a lexical item like supposed
to displays a sensitivity to the recipient in providing a statement of what was
going to happen (or what was wanted to happen) and an account for why it did
not happen (but see Schulze-Wenck 2005 for cases in which the account is not
given).
There is an extensive literature on recipient design and lexical choice in
languages other than English (e.g., Hakulinen and Selting 2005). For Finnish,
there have been studies on pronoun choice (Laury 1997) as well as on the choice
among various response particles (Sorjonen 2001, 2002; Hakulinen 1998,
2001). For Danish, one finds studies on response particles (Heinemann 2005;
Steensig and Asmuss 2005).
It should be clear from the literature discussed here that lexical choice
provides a powerful resource for accommodating the recipient in a number of
ways. We now turn to a discussion of the role of prosody in accommodating the
recipient.
4.4. Prosodic organization

The third facet of utterance organization examined in this section is prosodic or-
ganization.
Prosody plays an important role in recipient design of utterances. Speakers
use prosody to make clear to the recipient what the informational organization
of the utterance is, what kind of action is underway, and how the current utter-
ance fits with the unfolding sequential environment.
In work on prosody from a laboratory phonology perspective, it has been
found that speakers can deaccent words which represent information already
known to the recipient (Ladd 1996). For example, in the following fragment Mi-
chelle requests that Donna scoot in, and she provides an account for her request:
so they can see you. See in this utterance is strongly accented. Moms response
(Mom and Donna are sitting on the same side of the table) deaccents see and in-
stead accents fine. Mom deaccents see because this word has just been used in
Michelles utterance and thus is known information to Michelle:
(14) Farmhouse
1 Michelle: Well scoot in though so they can see you.
2 (0.6)
3 Mom: I think they can [see us fi:ne. hehehehehehe
4 Michelle: [Come on Donna
The following sections explore the findings in interactional studies regarding

the role that prosody plays in accommodating recipients.
4.4.1. Prosody to contextualize the action/activity of an utterance

One function that prosody has in conversation is to contextualize for the recipi-
ent what action or activity is underway. For example, prosody is used to contex-
tualize a repetition of the prior turn as the speech of another (Couper-Kuhlen
1999a, 1999b), as playful appreciation, as next turn repair initiator, or as mimi-
cry (e.g., Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977; Glenn 2003; Couper-Kuhlen
1996). The following fragment in (15) illustrates the use of repetition to ap-
preciate the humor of a prior turn:
(15) Gamenight
Terry: >Those are,< (.) Irish [sheep, they are: actually,
Maureen: [heh heh heh heh heh heh
heh heh
Terry: taken, (.) in Ireland,
Maureen: [Really?]
272 Barbara A. Fox
Abbie: [ Yes. ] [(Millie Thompson got the photo),]

Terry: [That photo was taken in Ireland.]
(.)
Maureen: (shed say?) (.) Theyre [GO:NE.]
Terry: [ The ] sheep were not
taken. eh heh
Abbie: A huh huh huh huh huh huh,
Maureen: The sh(h)eep the sh(h)eep w(h)ere n(h)ot t(h)a:ken,
Terry: Just the pictures.
Prior to this fragment, Maureen commented on all the photos of sheep that are
on the walls of the home of her hosts, Pam and Terry. Attention has been brought
to a particular photo, regarding which Terry says >Those are< Irish sheep, they
are: actually, taken in Ireland. She later repairs this utterance with That photo
was taken in Ireland, and then The sheep were not taken. Maureen repeats this
last utterance, in a recurrent format: a repetition of the just-prior turn with laugh
tokens in the repeated words. This format is used in English for appreciating the
humor of the just prior turn (Glenn 2003).
With different prosodic properties, a repetition of a prior utterance can
come off not as appreciating the humor of an utterance but as mimicry of
that utterance (Couper-Kuhlen 1996). Consider example (16) below from
Couper-Kuhlen:
(16)
M1: h you can find reference in any Latin dictionary to a
briga:de
C4: o.h- .h troops
(0.5)
M1: troops (.) erm troops is wrong
C4: oh:
Couper-Kuhlen describes this fragment as follows:

[ T]he moderator repeats the callers proffered answer troops twice. The first
repetition is not only a good approximation in terms of tone; it is also a perfect
match of the upper level of the callers register in absolute terms []. Both the
callers utterance and the moderators first rendition of it begin at 379 Hz [] and
fall steeply downwards []. Note that this absolute matching is not theresult of ac-
cidental similarity between the callers and the moderators voice ranges. In fact,
the normal voice range of this moderator is much lower than that of the caller [].
In this sense his absolute register matching can be seen as an achieved effect; we
might say that it is part of the recipient design of his turn (Couper-Kuhlen 1996:
381382).
Couper-Kuhlen describes this function of absolute pitch matching, especially

by someone with a very different normal pitch base, as a kind of mimicry, a way
of criticizing the original version (Couper-Kuhlen 1996).
Prosody can also be used to construct an utterance as the reason for the
call in phone calls (Couper-Kuhlen 2001), or as a new topic or sequence
(Couper-Kuhlen 2004). It can mark an utterance as connected to something
prior to the immediately-prior talk (Local 2004).
Outside of English, a great deal of research has been done on prosodic con-
textualization of action/activity in German. According to Gnthner (1996),
prosodic practices are used to distinguish information-seeking why-questions
(using wieso or warum) from reproaches. She finds that why-questions doing
reproaching are characterized by terminal falling pitch and narrow focus on the
finite verb or auxiliary. And prosodic means are used to mark normal next turn
repair initiators versus astonished repair initiators (Selting 1996). Next turn
repair initiators doing astonished repair initiation in German tend to be
marked prosodically with a very high peak and extra loudness (Selting 1996:
237).
4.4.2. Prosody used to achieve turn-taking

Prosody is also used to contextualize for a recipient how an utterance may come
to completion. It is used to indicate whether the current utterance is approaching
possible completion (Wells and MacFarlane 1998; Schegloff 1987), projects
more to come, or has reached possible completion (Wells and Peppe 1996;
Local, Kelly, and Wells 1986; Local, Wells, and Sebba 1985; Ogden 2004;
Szczepek-Reed 2004; Ford, Fox, and Hellerman 2004). For example, Wells and
Peppe (1996) report that turn-final prosody in Ulster English typically shows
slowing of tempo in the last two syllables, a sudden increase and decrease in
volume on the last foot of the turn, and a final rise in pitch; they note that these
features distinguish Ulster English from two other dialects of English that have
been studied, namely Tyneside English (Local, Kelly, and Wells 1986) and Lon-
don Jamaican English (Local, Wells, and Sebba 1985).
Prosody is used to mark the English word so as a trail-off device or as pro-
jecting more to come (Local and Walker 2005). According to Local and Walker
(2005), trail-off so is quieter than the speakers earlier talk, lower in pitch than
the speakers earlier talk, and has no glottal stop at the end. Holding so, on the
other hand, is louder than the speakers earlier talk, higher in pitch than the
speakers earlier talk, and ends in glottal closure. Fragment (17) below illus-
trates the trail-off use of so: Donna produces so with low volume, low pitch, and
no glottal closure at the end. This prosody contextualizes her so as a trail-off
device (prior to this fragment, Donna was talking about walking on a track at a
local high school):
274 Barbara A. Fox
(17) Farmhouse:
1 Mom: Is that a nice track?
2 (.)
3 Donna: Mhm,
4 (0.3)
5 Donna: r [eally nice.
6 Mom: [Is it one of those soft sorta
7 (.)
8 Donna: Mhm
9 (0.4)
10 Laura: I think they almost all are anymo [re

11 Donna: [What is that
12 shredded tire or something (maybe) (0.3) that
13 ([ )?
14 Laura: [Is that what it is?=
15 Donna: =Thats what Ive heard.
16 (0.4)
17 Michelle: Hmmm=
18 Donna: =So,
19 (0.5)
20 Mom: (um)
21 (0.7)
22 Donna: .hhh (0.2) Anyway:,=
23 Mom: =Yeh Laur- (0.2) we were training for the Bolder
24 Boulder
Figure 1 below shows that Donnas so is noticeably quieter than the final accented
syllable of her prior utterance (heard). The spectrogram in Figure 2, with overlaid
pitch track (in semitones), shows that the pitch maximum on so is lower than the
pitch maximum found on the last accented syllable of her prior utterance (heard):
Figure 1. Waveform of Donnas utterance

Figure 2. Spectrogram (with pitch track) of Donnas utterance
Interactionally, we can notice that after Donnas so there is a fairly long

silence Donna does not pursue talk on the topic of the running track, and
none of the other participants self-selects. Donna then produces another turn-
exit device (anyway), after which Mom produces a shift in topic (though a
related one).
Local (2004) reports that prosody is used to contextualize a collabo-
rative completion as an incursion into the turn space of another. He finds
that collaborative completions in English are regularly done with low vol-
ume, narrow pitch range, and relatively fast tempo (compared to the talk
around it).
Outside of English, Selting (1996) describes syntactic and prosodic prac-
tices of turn-taking in German. She finds that while syntactic units in German
can be relatively long, and syntactic projection can reach fairly far, prosodic
units tend to be small, and prosodic projection tends to be quite local. She de-
scribes in some detail a particular prosodic practice for holding a turn, namely a
(non-low) level pitch accent. She says:
At the end of a possible syntactic unit, level pitch accents can be deployed in order to
project intended turn-holding for a continuation of the turn, until later a unit ending
in falling or rising pitch is produced, then signaling possible turn ending (Selting
1996: 376).
One upshot of her findings is that at least for Standard German, turn comple-
tions are prosodically unmarked. What is marked prosodically are moments of
syntactic completion which are not turn completions these are marked with
level pitch accents. She states further:
[ I]n Standard German turn-endings are not projected by a specific ending
intonation, but projected turn ending can only be defined negatively: Projected
turn endings are points at which (a) a possible syntactic construction and, if rele-
vant, a possible activity-type specific semantic or discourse-pragmatic unit and
276 Barbara A. Fox
(b) a prosodic unit, i.e. an intonation contour, are potentially complete, and
(c) there are no holding devices being used [] (Selting 1996: 379; emphasis in
the original).
Ogden (2004) notes that non-modal voice quality is used to mark turn transition
in Finnish. He says:
Towards the end of a turn at talk, the current speaker regularly changes the phonatory
setting to non-modal without resetting it to modal (Ogden 2004: 29).
For Japanese, Tanaka (1999) has found that turn-endings marked with final
particles, copulas and other turn-completion morphemes are prosodically
somewhat unremarkable (Tanaka 2004: 67). In turns not marked with such
morphemes, however, several prosodic practices for indicating that a turn con-
structional unit has come to possible completion are used (Tanaka 2004). For
example, Japanese speakers make use of lengthening, increase in loudness and
dynamic pitch movement on the final syllable (Tanaka 2004: 70) as one
cluster of prosodic marking of these so-called truncated turns.
4.5. Summary
It should be clear from the preceding discussion that speakers make use of every
kind of linguistic device to accommodate the recipient as they construct their
utterances. Recipient design is truly a fundamental concept in the study of lan-
guage-in-interaction.
5. Summary and conclusion
The studies surveyed above create a picture of immense sensitivity on the part
of speakers to their recipients. Every facet of linguistic organization is put to use
in the production of utterances in conversation.
They also create a picture of recipient accommodation which suggests that
recipient design is in fact not done just by the speaker for the recipient but is
actually interactionally-coordinated and achieved by both parties at talk. The
alignment/disalignment of selected recipients as recipients shapes the unfolding
trajectory of the speakers utterance, just as the speakers utterance shapes
the recipiency of particular participants. Any given utterance in conversation is
thus an achieved outcome of the accommodation work of all parties concerned
(cf. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974; Goodwin 1979). Studies of recipient
accommodation thus find themselves within this sense of interactionally-coor-
dinated action.
While this has clearly proven to be a fruitful area of study, many issues
remain to be explored. For example, are there general principles by which
linguistic forms are used to accommodate recipients? If linguistic forms are

sensitive to sequential location, how might that affect our theories of lin-
guistic practices (or structure)? How do gesture, body movements, gaze or-
ganization and so on coordinate with grammatical and prosodic organiza-
tion in particular sequential locations? How do children learn the practices
of recipient design? Are there speakers for whom designing utterances for
particular recipients, in particular sequential locations, is challenging?
What can be learned from cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies of re-
cipient design?
These and related questions will undoubtedly shape the future direction of
research on the dynamics of discourse.
Notes
1. A fascinating demonstration of this phenomenon in real time is provided in Clark and

Wilkes-Gibbs (1986).
2. Even an utterance that begins an interaction such as with a stranger at a bus stop
exists in a sequential location: in such an instance it would find itself to be interaction-
initial, which is a very particular sort of sequential locus.
3. The transcription notations used in this chapter are taken from Jeffersons work. See
for example the convention set in Ochs, Schegloff and Thompson (1996).
4. For a discussion of gaze organization, see Goodwin (1981).
5. For an introduction to basic conversation analytic terminology, see Levinson
(1983).
6. The term interactional linguistics was coined by Selting and Couper-Kuhlen (see Selt-
ing and Couper-Kuhlen 2001) to describe the emerging field of linguistics that takes
the methods and data of conversation analysis as a starting point.
7. This example is given in Depperman (2005). I have added glosses for each word.
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11. Face-to-face communication and body language
Paul J. Thibault
1. Introduction
Face-to-face communication is a form of action system which is specialized for

interaction with others of the same species, as well as between species (e.g., lan-
guaged bonobos such as Kanzi and humans). Many other animals also engage in
forms of intra-species face-to-face communication. In both the human and non-
human cases, other members of ones species constitute fundamental resources
in the animals environment. The notion of face-to-face communication brings
together in the one term three different through related organizations of doing.
These are: (1) the neuroanatomical capacities of the individual participant or-
ganisms; (2) the individual qua social-agent-in-interaction; and (3) the net-
works of communicative practices and conventions in which individual agents
participate and in which specific occasions of face-to-face communication are
embedded. This chapter will explore the need to re-frame face-to-face com-
munication beyond purely proximate and local processes in the here-and-now
(Sections 12, 1014.). The concept of face-to-face communication will then
(Sections 35.) be examined in terms of a number of evolutionary and develop-
mental layers which exert mutual influences on each other. The separation of
language and paralanguage will also be re-examined (Sections 79). With the
aid of a brief analysis, I shall propose a re-exploration and further development
of Scheflens concept of the face formation (Sections 1011.). I shall conclude
with some reflections based in part on the work of Latour which suggest that
a point-to-point network ontology is a more useful theoretical perspective for
exploring the intersection of local and nonlocal factors in occasions of face-to-
face interaction (Section 12).
2. Process and structure in face-to-face communication
Since the early work of pioneering figures such as Birdwhistell (1952, 1961,
1970), McQuown (1957), Trager (1958), Pittenger, Hockett, and Danehy (1960),
and Scheflen (1973, 1976), the study of face-to-face communication has always
been concerned with understanding both communicative processes and struc-
tures. Process refers to the various behaviors in real time that enact and con-
tribute to the embodied performance of face-to-face interactive or communi-
cative encounters between individuals. Structure refers to the underlying
286 Paul J. Thibault
mechanisms which make face-to-face communication possible. Face-to-face

communication is a very complex and intricate phenomenon, involving (1) neu-
ral connections between motor and sensory systems; (2) a range of somatic re-
sources such as vocalizations, head movements, eye gaze, posture, body move-
ment, gestures, facial expressions, and the integration of these with external
affordances in the environment; and (3) social coordination between individ-
uals, and cultural forms of learning and conventions of interaction.
The very term face-to-face communication puts the focus on the most proxi-
mate effects of the here-now communicative event on the participating individ-
uals. This is the time scale which we inhabit and relate to in our everyday inter-
actions with others. In actual fact, a particular communicative event always
involves a complex and simultaneous folding together of many different time
scales, ranging from very fast short scales of neural activity to the very long and
slow time scales of cultural and biological evolution (Lemke 2000a; Reed 1996:
3031; Thibault 2000).
We can use the idea of the three-level scalar hierarchy developed by Salthe
(1993: 3652) to aid us in keeping straight the levels of relations involved. The
term face-to-face communication puts the emphasis on the proximate and local
processes on the time scale of human action that we associate with real-time and
with processes in the here-and-now. However, face-to-face communicative in-
teraction is an emergent level of organization which does not come from just
anywhere and cannot be explained only in terms of real-time processes. Instead,
it emerges between and is a result of the interactions among previously existing
levels in a more complex system of relations. Communicative behavior or inter-
action is distributed in a number of different, yet closely related, ways across a
hierarchy of interconnected levels on different time scales. For our present en-
tirely heuristic purposes, these can be roughly approximated in terms of three-
level hierarchy analysis as follows:
(1) semiotic-informational constraints distributed over the higher-scalar level
of the ecosocial semiotic system in historical-cultural time (level L+1)
(2) the real-time of co-constructed inter-individual activity of social agents-in-
interaction on some occasion (level L)
(3) the neuroanatomical processes, capacities, and affordances of the human
brain and body as biological initiating conditions in the micro-time scale of
bodily dynamics and the pico-scale of neural dynamics (level L-1).
Three-level hierarchy analysis always requires a focal level that is inserted be-
tween the highest and the lowest levels. In the present case, the focal level, L, is
that of face-to-face communicative activities, which are (1) initiated and made
possible by the neuroanatomical capacities of individual organisms (L-1) and
(2) regulated and entrained by a social-cultural system (L+1). The hierarchy of
three levels proposed above is not an exhaustive picture of all the (very many
Face-to-face communication and body language 287
more) levels of relations involved. Instead, it is a heuristics for showing the

necessity of thinking minimally in terms of three levels in order to construct a
conceptual framework that can help us to better grasp the real complexity of the
relations involved and to avoid the temptation to resort to simplicity and reduc-
tionism. Human interaction cannot be explanatorily or causally reduced to pro-
cesses at the level of the individual organism (L-1) just as it cannot be wholly
explained in terms of cultural dynamics (L+1). The communicative capacities
of humans depend on the biological initiating conditions and cognitive abilities
of individuals (L-1) without which the individual would be unable to participate
in interaction with others. These capacities include the neuro-social capacity for
intersubjective attunement that is manifested in the earliest stage of caretaker-
infant dyads, intrinsic motivations and value-settings that induce individuals to
seek and explore the interactive potentialities of others. Level L specifies the
emergent inter-individual patterns and properties that results from the coordi-
nated activities of two or more individuals in interaction. Face-to-face com-
munication has emergent properties that cannot be reduced to the actions of the
individual participants. Instead, it has properties which depend on the real-time
synchronization of the behavior of each individual participant. Finally, there are
the higher-scalar boundary conditions of the given social-cultural system (L+1).
These regulate and constrain the lower level behaviors and body-brain dy-
namics of individual organisms on the basis of cultural conventions and norms
of patterns of learning. Norms and conventions enable individuals to come to a
mutual understanding of the nature of the given social situation and hence to
provide solutions to the problem of coordinating their behavior on the basis of
such understandings. Norms and conventions of this kind enable agents to ac-
count for institutional and social realities and to participate in social and cultural
life on the basis of stabilized norms of interaction which have evolved in his-
torical time.
3. The developmental significance of the face as an affordance for

interpersonal attunement with others
That infants are strongly attracted to faces is evident from the very earliest
stages after birth. Johnson and Morton (1991) argue that newborns orient to
faces as a preferred source of interpersonal contact with mothers and other care-
givers on the basis of an initial intrinsic bias or value-setting that sets the par-
ameters for further development to occur. The prone posture of newborns also
works to facilitate this emphasis on the face as a source of interpersonal contact.
On the basis of this initial value-bias, infants become progressively more
attuned to stimuli visual, auditory, kinetic that originate from faces on the
basis of their close up encounters with others in ways that set off a developmen-
tal cascade (Thelen and Smith 1994: 315). Initially, the newborn orients to an
overall topology based on the low dimensional differentiation of the face into
regions corresponding to the eyes and mouth. Gradually, as the process of at-
tunement increases in the first few months, infants become more attuned to the
face as a source of multimodal sensory information which affords interaction
with others. Furthermore, the behavioral evidence suggests that infants are
adaptively biased to attend to the array of stimulus information provided by
faces as an affordance for interpersonal contact and social interaction in ways
that is reinforced by the association of the face with values such as affect, nur-
turing, and care. From the outset, the infant actively orients to and explores the
array of multimodal stimulus information afforded by others faces. The visual,
auditory, kinetic, and haptic information that originates from the others face
is correlated in real-time with the infants own exploratory movements of his
or her head, neck, eyes, mouth, and so on, as he or she actively explores and
samples the stimulus array. In this way, infants quickly learn, for example, that
facial movements and voices are correlated as sources of information about the
interactive possibilities of another person.
Experimental evidence shows that infants are able to correctly match, for
example, seeing a moving mouth with hearing a spoken voice. Moreover, they
are aware when the two modalities do not match (Kuhl and Meltzoff 1982,
1984). This research suggests that infants relate what they see, hear, feel, and so
on, in the faces of others to their experience of their own living, moving, and
feeling bodies. The infants capacity for inter-body attunement to and resonance
with the articulatory gestures of a caregivers face shows that our innate capac-
ity for attuning to others is the very ground on which all forms of interpersonally
coordinated face-to-face communication are established. Infants are able from
the outset to match their experiences of movement perceived in others to their
own experiences of their own kinetic bodies in ways that promote further explo-
ration of and interaction with others. Trevarthen (1978: 130) has pointed out
the kinetic basis of the infants experience of the world and how, in particular,
sensitivity to animate movements hones the infants capacity to accurately dis-
tinguish self-made change in sensory signals from effects caused from outside
(Trevarthen 1978: 130; see Thibault 2004a: 5759 for discussion).
The strong attraction of newborns to the faces of caregivers is grounded in a
mirror neuron system which provides the neurosocial basis for the development
of intersubjective awareness and dialogic engagement between persons (Rizzo-
lati and Arbib 1998). Infants are active participants in a dialogic matrix of ani-
mated inter-individual activity in the infant-caregiver dyad from the time of
birth. The mirror neuron system provides the neurobiological basis for the de-
velopmental emergence of all forms of face-to-face interactive encounters and
will be discussed in the following section.
4. The mirror neuron system and the dialogical matrix of

communicative behavior: The development of intersubjectivity in
early infant semiosis
The dialogic matrix of face-to-face communication is grounded in a mirror

neuron system which supports intersubjectivity and other-centered participation
(Brten 1992, 2007a, 2007b; Halliday 1975). The mirror neuron system fires
when the participant perceives anothers other-centered action or experience,
leading to the pre-enacting or the co-enacting of what the observed participant is
about to do such that the observer co-authors or co-participates in the observed
action of the other. The mirror neuron system is therefore foundational for the
emergence of dialogical capacities in humans. The human capacity for interper-
sonally coordinated dialogic exchange is naturalistically grounded. In their
seminal paper Language within our grasp, Rizzolati and Arbib (1998) provided
indirect evidence of a mirror neuron system in the human brain. The mirror
neuron system provides the neurosocial support for intersubjective attunement,
including alter-centric participant perception, and interpersonally coordinated
interaction. The mirror neuron system is a direct and unreflective means of mo-
deling others actions from ones own perspective and of co-participating in a
virtual way in the construction of the others action. This provides new perspec-
tives on infants capacities for interpersonal communion and altercentricity
(Brten 2007a: 3). The existence of mirror neurons shows that the capacity for
intersubjective awareness and communion e.g., self-with-other resonance and
altercentric mirroring of the observed others actions are founded on intrinsic
biological capacities which are further shaped and specified in the course of de-
velopment. Brten provides a range of examples of how both infants and adults
show overt manifestations, entailing pre-enacting or co-enacting movements,
anticipant or concurrent mirroring or simulation of what the perceived patient
or performer or partner is about to do or say, as if being a co-author of the new-
borns attempt to imitate, or of the others intake of the afforded food, or of the
crossing of the obstacle, or of the conversation partners statement (Brten
2007b: 112).
Stein Brten (2007a: 3) has linked the discovery of mirror neurons to the three
layers of intersubjectivity that Brten and Trevarthen have argued as emerging
in the development of infants. Table 1 presents the three layers of intersubjec-
tivity that are evidenced as a developmental emergence in the first two years or
so of the infants interactions with caregivers.
Table 1. Brtens three layers of intersubjectivity (2007a: 3)
Layers of Age of Characteristic Semiotic,

Intersubjectivity Infant Developmental Achievements
Primary First nine Movement based affective
Intersubjectivity months attunement with others, es-
pecially caregivers; negotiation
of affect and feelings in recipro-
cal proto-dialogical contact
based on inter-individual body
dynamics, including smiles,
touching, body movements,
gaze, voice prosodics
Secondary From around Members of dyad (caregiver
Intersubjectivity nine months infant) jointly focus on objects
to about two of attention and emotion refer-
years encing; relationship building
based on trust and companion-
ship; object-oriented learning
through other-centered partici-
pation
Tertiary Around two Symbolic conversations with
Intersubjectivity to six years actual and virtual others, con-
comitant development of skills
for naming objects and events,
and leading to 2nd order mental
simulation of the minds of
others in dialogue; tracking of
selves through narrative and
autobiographical skills
Much of the neurobiological research on mirror neurons nevertheless continues

to emphasize the brain at the expense of the living, moving, feeling body as the
ground for all forms of communicative behavior. This emphasis therefore often
fails to fully appreciate the body-centered basis of our moving as the means for
moving others and being moved by others.
5. Communication as a bridge between solipsistic brains and dynamic

bodies: Sex, lies, and semantics in the layers of face-to-face
communicative behavior
Freeman (1995: 89) defines communication as the priming and enaction of co-
operation between solipsistic brains. This gets at the essential point though it
can be refined to include both cooperation and competition as forms of coevol-
ution between organisms and their environments, including most significantly
others of the same species. Thus, cognition evolves from the management of the
organisms engagements with the physical world to the management of the or-
ganisms interactions cooperative and competitive with other organisms.
The development of a central nervous system is a specialized internal subsystem
that (1) links effector and sensory surfaces in rapid, energy efficient ways; and
(2) the stimulus information from the external environment gets linked to inter-
nal patterns of nervous system activity in a circular self-modifying loop. The
emergence of such capacities permits the animal to go beyond the self-regu-
lation of the metabolic processes essential to life such that adaptation to the
world, including others of the same species, takes place through cognitive and
semiotic meta-control of the bodys exploratory and performatory capacities
(cf. Section 10.). In complex organisms, the nervous system on this basis devel-
ops capacities for the off-line exploration and simulation of virtual mental
worlds based on digital semantic categories that are decoupled from immediate
environmental stimuli and cues so as to facilitate anticipatory thinking and
silent mental rehearsal of future actions that are contemplated, yet may not
necessarily be undertaken.
Brains are solipsistic, as Freeman (1995: 34) puts it, in the sense that their
self-organizing dynamics create networks of relations based on unique individ-
ual experiences. However, brains also need to communicate with other brains in
order to calibrate their own dynamics with those of other brains in the interests
of interpersonal coordination of behavior. In doing so, communicative behavior
arises. Communicative behavior can involve stimulus information from all the
sensory systems audio, visual, olfactory, gustatory, haptic, kinesic. It also re-
cruits intentionality in the form of the distance receptor systems for sights,
sounds, and odors, the hippocampal system for localizing targets in space and
sequencing events in time, the limbic system for generating actions and expect-
ances by reafference, and the intentional structure of cortical neurophil that pro-
vide attractor basins for generalization and classification during multimodal
convergence into the limbic system (Freeman 1995: 89).
Face-to-face communicative behavior can be seen as a complex layering of dif-

ferent kinds of interaction systems that have evolved to bring about different
kinds of cooperation and calibration between solipsistic brains and dynamic
bodies. A number of different interaction systems will be referred to below as

being characteristic of the diverse ways to engage in various forms of face-to-
face communicative behavior (see also Freeman 1995: 8992; Reed 1996: 92
for further discussion). The following interaction systems can therefore be dif-
ferentiated:
(1) The sexual reproduction system: this is the most basic form of interactive co-
operation and, in vertebrates, including humans, often involves complex and
intricate interactive-communicative displays and skills associated with
courtship and copulation.
(2) The inter-individual coordination of behavior system: animals that live in
herds and packs (e.g., wolves) have developed elaborate systems of signals
to indicate the intentions of individual members of the herd or pack in the in-
terests of coordinating the behavior of the group. This means that the group
can respond collectively and in a coordinated fashion to a specific situation,
e.g., when seeking sexual partners involving competition between males,
when responding to threats, or when coordinating an attack on prey.
(3) The nurture, caring, and grooming system: many animals care for their
young and behavioral suites have evolved to bring others into cooperative
relations based on forms of mutually caring and nurturing activity (e.g.,
feeding, grooming, preening).
(4) The empathy and inter-individual affect-based attunement system: the be-
havior and associated emotion states of one animal are capable of inducing
a corresponding emotional state in another animal in ways that lead to di-
rect interaction between them (De Waal 2007: 52). Such behavior is typi-
cally intentionally directed or addressed to a potential interactional partner.
This layer of face-to-face communicative behavior perhaps most closely
corresponds to the expressive systems identified by Darwin that have
evolved for the expression of affect and inner emotional states (see below
Section 9.).
(5) The Machiavellian interaction and social intelligence system: primate social
lives require that individuals keep track of the thinking and behavior of the
individuals with whom the primate engages in social transactions. This ex-
plains why primate social life is characterized by the formation of political
alliances, kinship relations, hierarchical relations of dominance, friendship,
and so on. These transactions tend to be spread over diverse individuals,
times, and places and call for the use of strategic thinking and intelligence
that may involve calculation, deception, lies, guile, cunning, and the ability
to imagine possible future outcomes of strategic behaviors. Thus, the drive
for social power and the competition for mates fostered the development
of so-called Machiavellian social intelligence and forms of interaction in
social primates (Whiten and Byrne 1997; Gavrilets and Vose 2006).
(6) The intersubjective awareness system: this is a further layer of cognitive-

affective development that is probably confined to humans and some other
primate species. This layer involves the emergence of selfhood and a corre-
sponding capacity of selves to differentiate the perspectives, feelings, and
intentions of others from their own. Unlike system (4) above, this inter-
action is not symmetrical, but is based on the selfs capacity for other-cen-
tered altruistic sympathy with and understanding of the distress of another.
In the human case, this system undergoes a number of developmental stages
that have been the focus of pioneering work by Trevarthen and Brten (cf.
Section 4., table 1).
(7) The semantic-representational system: the semantic system of human lan-
guage functions to digitally compress semantic classes of representations that
are decoupled from specific perceptual, actional, and environmental cues
(Ross 2007: 714). These representations allow the individual organism to
express meanings about its environment, rather than its own internal states
(Reed 1996: 92). The categories of the semantic system are then (relatively)
decoupled from environmental stimulus information of the kind that is
picked up by the organisms perceptual systems though it can also be used to
represent specific perceptual and environmental cues. Such digital forms of
representation are virtual systems of second order cultural constructs which
afford inter-generational cultural accumulation and learning (Ross 2007:
715). They enable the robust tracking over space, time, and individuals of
features that do not pertain to the domain of first-order experience, but to
a virtual second-order cultural one affording off-line reasoning, planning,
and mental simulation. As distinct from Darwins expressive system, which
serves to signal the animals emotion states and intentions to others, the
semantic system sometimes called the content of symbolic communi-
cation is buffered from changes in the organisms internal states and is
therefore robust to such changes due to the fact that the patterns of neural ac-
tivity associated with semantic classes of representations are not directly
coupled to stimulus information. It is this fact of the robustness of the sem-
antic class of representation which incorrectly leads to the idea of a fixed
and transmissible information content that is attached to a signal form with
an invariant structure. This in turn leads to the notion that something called
language is constitutively separable from paralanguage and kinesics
qua non-verbal behavior (cf. Section 6. below).
In all of the cases mentioned above, communication qua inter-organism cogni-

tion and interaction is based on the fact that the perception-action cycles of or-
ganisms that interact in the ways described above as various forms of face-
to-face interaction are mediated by semiotic-informational processes that lift
the organism above the requirements of metabolic regulation and adaptation.
Information in this sense is intentionally directed to the world (referentiality),

but it is also closely tied to self-referentiality. The informational coupling
between central nervous system activity and the world is interpreted in the
self-referential perspective of the organism, based in the first instance on the felt
(not cognized) self-coherence of the proto-self and the separation of the internal
milieu of the proto-self from the external world beyond the skin (Damasio 1999:
133167).
6. What is communicated in face-to-face communication?

Information transfer vs. management of behavior
The idea of face-to-face communication also implies that something is com-

municated between the participating individuals. According to the dominant
paradigm over the past few decades, communication involves the transfer of in-
formation from one participant to another. Moreover, the concept of information
is itself fraught with difficulties which have nontrivial implications for the ways
in which we theorize communicative processes. One problem with the idea of
information is that it is seen as a stable commodity which is transferred from
one participant to another in sequences of purely local dyads, e.g., AB, CD,
EF, etc. In their important study of animal communication, Owings and Mor-
ton (1998: 228) point out that this view fails to explain the effects of communi-
cation processes on larger time scales beyond the proximate here-now one, with
its concomitant focus on the immediate effects on the participating individuals.
Owings and Morton propose the alternative concept of accomplishment as a
way of focusing on the effects of communicative processes on different time
scales. They point out that whereas it is difficult to establish what is conveyed
over time scales longer than the proximate one, it is on the other hand more fea-
sible to ask what is accomplished over different time scales. As Owings and
Morton (1998: 228) point out, some interval of time must pass before something
is accomplished.
Owings and Morton show in their studies of animal communication that
physical signal form itself is enormously variable at the same time that there are
clearly identifiable types of signals that can be modulated in a wide variety of
ways depending on the kinds of management effects that the signaling agent
seeks to accomplish. Rather than communication involving a sender transfer-
ring information to a receiver, Owings and Morton show that communicative
acts seek to change or manage the behavior of others in ways that are in the
interests of the manager. These researchers therefore postulate the concept of
management to refer to this function of communicative acts. Management refers
to the ways in which the forms of signals are adjusted or modulated. Owings and
Morton (1998: 83) report that adjustments or modulations of a particular signal
or display are a means of varying managerial effort independently of switching

among categories of vocalizations. Adjustments to signal form vary indepen-
dently of which signal form-types are used and can be deployed across multiple
performances of the same signal form. The capacity to adjust signal forms in
this way is a managerial strategy for adjusting behavior to bring current cir-
cumstances into line with the managers interests (Owings and Morton 1998:
49). Management is therefore focused on what is accomplished. It is interactive
and transformative of the situation.
The concept of management puts the explanatory focus on behavior rather
than information transfer and accordingly helps to explain the remarkable varia-
bility of signal forms in both animal and human communication on this basis,
viz., natural selection favors those signal-forms which are most effective in
changing the behavior of others in ways that benefit the manager (the signaler)
(Owings and Morton 1998: 40). If they were not successful or effective in bring-
ing about the effects desired by the signaler, then they would be de-selected and
fall out of use. Importantly, motivational and emotional factors, rather than
information-processing, lie at the core of this shift in emphasis. It is often
assumed that information is contained ready-made in the signal form without
taking into account that the signal form must be converted by processes in the
central nervous system into meanings which are cognitively and semiotically
salient for organisms (Freeman 1995: 105106; Thibault 2004b: 109118).
Assessment does not refer to the speakers assessment of the informational
content of a proposition (cf. Halliday [1985] 1994: 6871 on clause as exchange),
but to the adaptive behavioral adjustments that animals, including humans,
make by selecting and directing their attention to those cues, including those
provided by signal forms, for appraising individuals and situations (Owings and
Morton 1998: 49). In the human case, assessment requires and is based upon a
high degree of inherent reflexivity: the coordination of agents in face-to-face
communicative activities is inherently reflexive, depending on the resolution
of my understanding of your understanding of my understanding etc. of the situ-
ation.
It is widely assumed by many theorists (e.g., Trager 1958; Hauser,
Chomsky, and Fitch 2002) who distinguish between language and paralan-
guage or body language and assign them to separate channels or codes that lan-
guage in particular is a stable encoder of information which is transferred from
sender to receiver. In this view, the sender encodes information in the linguistic
signal and sends or transmits this information to the receiver. It is assumed that
the information so transferred impacts on and affects the behavior of the re-
ceiver. However, this view fails to account for the active and enactive character
of assessment (Owings and Morton 1998: 55). Assessment is an active process
of adjusting behavior to fit present circumstances. The assessor is actively en-
gaged in a self-interested process of hunting for and extracting information that
will aid in this process of assessment. Managers accordingly seek to influence

the behavior of assessors by affecting the conclusions they reach in assess-
ment (Owing and Morton 1998: 55). Changes or adjustments in the form of the
signal can therefore be used by managers to regulate or change the assessors
behavior in order to bring it into line with the managers interests. Pragmati-
cally, modulations of the signal form can be used to achieve the interactive goals
or purposes that serve the interests of the manager. Assessors are rewarded for
responding as expected just as managers are rewarded for getting what they
were seeking. The rewards for attending to signaling behavior are therefore mu-
tual and serve to bring about value oriented courses of action (e.g., protection,
finding food, fleeing a predator, finding a mate).
Now, in the literature on the separation of language and paralanguage (e.g.,
Trager 1958; Austin 1965; Poyatos 1993) it is often assumed that language forms
are logically invariant and segmental whereas paralanguage is variable and
suprasegmental. Paralanguage may indicate the speakers internal emotional or
physiological states. Paralanguage and kinesic elements may also color seg-
mental linguistic units such as phonemes and combinations of phonemes (Poya-
tos 1993: 129). In this view, language is established as a synchronic system of
stable or (relatively) invariant forms that realize or express their meanings. The
term paralanguage refers to a range of phenomena which are seen to combine
with or accompany language. These include the many ways in which something
is said (how it is said) as distinct from the linguistic content (what is said) and
how people move their bodies in conjunction with the linguistic messages they
utter. Paralanguage thus serves to qualify and modify the linguistic message in
ways that may support or contrast with the overt linguistic message. Paralan-
guage is variable and unstable and is extrinsic to the definition of language, ac-
cording to this definition. Thus, paralinguistic behaviors such as drawl, sing
song, and so on, are variables that may accompany and contextualize an invari-
ant and stable core linguistic form in various ways. This view rests on the fatally
flawed assumption that paralanguage accompanies or combines with lan-
guage to qualify it (cf. Section 7. below). Moreover, the language component
serves to convey or transmit a stable quantum of information from a sender to a
receiver. At this point, the alternative view that languaging behavior qua pro-
cess not language qua determinate thing is inseparable from body dynamics
comes into clear view. In the alternative view, it is an intrinsic feature of lan-
guage behavior that signal forms are adjusted or modulated in ways that serve
managerial ends in the way defined by Owings and Morton. Moreover, there is
an entire repertoire of ways in which signal forms may be modulated. Owings
and Morton (1998: 83) propose the following examples of adjustments to vocal
signals: adjustments in sound frequency, in sound clarity or other tonal qualities,
inflection patterns, amplitude, duration, and in complexly patterned combi-
nations of these.
Owings and Morton cite many instances of animal signaling, e.g., the prairie
dog switching from barking to yipping and the zit calls of eastern kingbirds to
show that signaling can vary according to the type of signal and that different
signal types can also be modified by the phenomena referred to above. Thus,
eastern king birds modulate the frequency of their quavering across different
kinds of vocal calls e.g., zits and t-zee calls in ways that suggest this perva-
sive variation is due to managerial activity across diverse time frames and
serve to regulate accomplishments such as feeding and reproduction (Owings
and Morton 1998: 8485). The observations of these authors are also supported
by the research of Slagsvold (1977) on the song activity of twenty species of
birds in forested areas of southern Norway. Slagsvold showed that bird calls are
varied and modulated in relation to accomplishments and factors on various
time frames, including breeding and egg-laying and environmental conditions
such as temperature, snow-melt, and environmental phenophases.
Analogously, Halliday ([1998] 2003: 21) shows how infants learn after the
first year to separate the articulatory and prosodic aspects of phonation such that
different articulations typically rapid postures and movements of tongue, lips,
soft palate, larynx can be combined with different prosodies (e.g., timbre,
voice quality, melody, rhythm) so that the same articulatory segment can take
on different tones or voice qualities. In Hallidays theory, interpersonal mean-
ings tend to be enacted by prosodies which operate on the segment as a whole,
e.g., a particular pitch contour or voice quality spreads across and modifies an
entire segment rather than being confined to its individual constituents. Inter-
personal meaning in this account is enacted when one unit modifies or deforms
the shape of a particular unit for interactive-evaluative purposes (McGregor
1997: 210).
Darwin has described exactly the same phenomenon in his classic study,
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). For example, he
describes in great detail two antithetical body postures deployed by dogs to dis-
play anger and affection, respectively (Darwin [1872] 1998: 5556). Darwins
description of these two antithetical modes whereby the dog modulates the
shape of its whole body is clearly interactional, rather than serving in a purely
individual-centered way as the outward expression of an inner emotional state
of the organism. There is a clear perception of the other dog or master as an
addressee to whom the display is directed. The principle of antithesis refers to
the ways in which contrasting deformations or modulations of the animals body
display opposite feelings such as anger and affection qua interactive stances that
are adopted with respect to the dogs addressee. The meaning of the two poles
suggests a vague analogue to the distinction between negative and positive
polarity in the mood component of the clause (Halliday 1994: 8889). The
negative pole (anger) proscribes amicable contact and readies the animal for
fight and/or flight from possible threat or danger. The positive pole (affection)
prescribes close contact and the active seeking of a relationship of care and nur-
ture with the addressee.
Pfaff (2006: 7778) reformulates the traditional division of the arousal sys-
tems into the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. Alternatively, he argues
that arousal states, as in emotionally laden behaviors such as those described by
Darwin, are based on two key factors: (1) teamwork or coordination between
autonomic, cortical, and behavioral systems (e.g., cardiovascular and respir-
atory systems); and (2) a high degree of sensitivity on the part of the organism
and hence a high information content on account of the enhanced sensitivity to
environmental states (e.g., the appearance of threat) that the arousal of the sys-
tems mentioned in (1) entails in the face of uncertainty and unpredictability. Un-
certainty and unpredictability cause autonomic arousal and place the animal in
a state of readiness to deal with the new situation. Dogs, as Darwins description
illustrates, have a high degree of informational sensitivity to others and to the
possible responses they require from them.
Canine display of anger and affection, as described by Darwin, is the enact-
ment of an interactive stance. It depends at least implicitly on the ways in which
the dog perceives others, rather than on the basis of explicit representations.
Specifically, it depends on an inter-individual principle of affective linkage
which is based on the addressers implicit understanding of the addressees ca-
pacity to respond to the dynamical movements of the addresser in ways which
activate in the addressee corresponding dynamical body states and feelings that
are connected to the subjective experience of the feeling body by the proto-self
(Damasio 1999: 133167; cf. Section 9. below). It is a capacity which is much
more basic than the abstract and cerebral notion that the addressee must map the
addressers behavioral state onto the addressees own representations. This ca-
pacity for affective linkage as described here lays the foundation for more de-
veloped layers of empathy to develop in social animals such as primates. The
other is thus recognized as the source of body feelings and related emotion dis-
plays that support and give rise to empathy-based co-affiliation and co-action.
At still higher levels approximating the human capacity for dialogue, these prior
capacities of empathy pave the way for the capacity to view things from the per-
spective of the other.
At any rate, dogs, in interaction with both other dogs and humans, demon-
strate a capacity for mimicry and emotion transfer which in some respects re-
sembles the earliest form of intersubjective communion between mother and
human infant (see de Waal 2007: 5254, on the notion of animal empathy). As
de Waal shows, interactive displays of the kind discussed by Darwin are based
on the need to coordinate action and movement in inter-individual ways which
require that the animal has the capacity to be attuned to and responsive to the be-
havioral and affective states of others of the same species. De Waal uses the
term emotional contagion (2007: 52) to refer to the ways in which one animals
emotional state can affect that of another. However, de Waal also recognizes that
more is involved than one animal causally influencing another through such dis-
plays. Modulations of body shape and movement are directly interactive and
show features of addressivity the behavior is actively directed at another, it
seeks and anticipates a response, and very often it gets it.
In the accounts cited above, the modulation or reshaping of a given unit by
another unit (e.g., prosodic units modifying articulatory ones) shows the prin-
ciple of management/assessment at work. Halliday (2003: 219) observes that in-
terpersonal prosodies occur on a more extended time frame with respect to the
constituents that express the separate parts of a referential structure. They
extend over and modify entire units of variable duration. Essentially, the time
frame of prosodies, which are spread over an entire unit e.g., the interrogative
mood of the clause whats the time? to signal its interactive status as a question ,
serves to maintain, over that time frame, a behavioral state of the individual with
respect to some aspect of the environment with which the individual is interac-
ting. Prosodies are dynamic responses to and adjustments to the environment of
the speaker. They are a mode of regulation which is based on a controlled or
modulated transformation from one bodily state to another over a given time
frame. Articulation, on the other hand, is a mode of regulation based on the
dynamical control of the vocal tract postures required to produce different
sounds. Reed (1996: 85) observes that movements are nested within postures
in the sense that a movement involves not only a change of state from one pos-
ture to another but always the maintenance of some postural orientation as well
(1996: 85).
Language behavior is the result of the global order produced by many diverse
local interacting components that are spread across brain, body, and environ-
ment. The observable bodily dynamics of articulation and prosodies in vocal
tract gestures, along with the neural processes that coordinate vocal tract activ-
ity, and relevant environmental factors (e.g., addressing someone in an angry
tone to show disapproval of his/her behavior) constitute a coupled system in the
sense that some parameters of each system involved are functions of state vari-
ables of the other systems involved. The observed vocal tract behavior is not,
then, under the control of a central processor in the central nervous system
which sends commands or issues instructions to the body to behave in a certain
way. Instead, vocal tract behavior is the result of the mutual influence and
modulation of neural, bodily, and environmental/situational factors that interact
on and are distributed over diverse time scales.
The separation of language and paralanguage takes it as axiomatic that lan-
guage is a system that realizes well-defined input-output functions by processes
of encoding and decoding meanings. Such a view is especially suited to a focus
on the referential-representational function of language as being encoded in
well-defined constituents. Absent in such an account is a richly temporal and

dynamical focus on the many non-representational dimensions of language
which are not readily describable in terms of code-like input-output devices.
Moreover, once we shift the focus to the ways in which languaging activity is
distributed in complex ways between brain, body, and world, then the temporal
aspects of the languaging activity will be seen to be more central. In the perspec-
tive of dynamic systems theory (Thelen and Smith 1994), brain, body, and
world are coupled systems. Coupled systems mutually perturb each others
dynamics on many different time scales of the processes involved. Systems
so coupled mutually constrain and influence each other and give rise to the
semiotic developmental trajectories of agents. An individuals developmental
trajectory is a form of historical emergence because it entails the accumulation
of meanings along the entire trajectory, rather than in the agent per se at any
given moment in time.
Rather than the transference of coded information, which amounts to an
externalist perspective on the relevant system of relations (minimally, the inter-
actants, their viewpoints, the thing they interact about, the system of interpre-
tance that mediates and makes possible the interaction), management reflects
the agents efforts to acquire information about the assessor (the addressee)
by evoking a behavioral response on the part of the assessor. The amount of un-
certainty that the manager has to deal with tends to increase as the manager
attempts to get more information about the environment, including most import-
antly information about the assessor. This is so because the search for information
is an active and exploratory one (Gibson 1966; Gibson and Pick 2000). In seek-
ing information through their own exploratory and performatory activity, agents
impact on their worlds in novel ways that generate more uncertainty. Permu-
tations, modulations, or variations of signal form over sequences of behavior
mean that the degrees of freedom available to the signaling agent are not fixed,
but revisable over time. How will the assessor react? There can be no total
certainty about this. The modulation and variation of signal form therefore
amounts to a kind of irregularity which gives rise to uncertainty for any agent
needing to relate to the signal form as meaningful or environmentally salient.
Modulation and variation of signal form are a kind of behavioral plasticity. If
language really did consist of sequences of regular, invariant forms, there would
be no uncertainty, no change, no dynamism, and no unpredictability. Communi-
cation would not surprise us, and we would quickly fail to be aroused. Indeed,
communication would be decidedly dull and ineffective.
According to one of the central tenets of Shannons (1948) theory of infor-
mation, a high level of information is associated with these factors of uncer-
tainty, change, dynamism, and unpredictability. The dynamic modulation of sig-
nal form is high on information and therefore has more potential of arousing
stimulating behavioral responses. Thus, affect charged modulation of signal
form and interpersonal prosodies, as described by Owings and Morton, Halliday,

and Darwin, produces irregular, unpredictable, and surprising patterns, rather
than code-like regularities. The modulation of signal form can arouse enthusi-
asm, fear, joy, surprise, anxiety, and so on, depending on the combinations of
stimuli involved in concert with situational and other factors. They are still pat-
terns, but they are not totally predictable or regular ones. Modulations of signal
form are deformations of an array of stimulus information that serve to respond
to salient environmental changes and to move others assessors, addressees to
act. For this reason alone, it is important to stress that modulation of signal
forms is intrinsic to the dynamics of languaging behavior and cannot be separ-
ated from language as a separate, yet combinable paralanguage (see Section 7.).
7. Some contrasting ways of talking about language

and body language
The term body language perhaps paradoxically is associated with the separation
of language from what has been called paralanguage (Hill 1955: 257258,
1958: 408409; Trager 1958; Poyatos 1993) and kinesics (Birdwhistell 1952,
1961). Hill is credited by Trager as the one who first coined the term paralan-
guage. Hill has summarized this position as follows:
A part of communicative activity which is outside the area of microlinguistics, but is
not on the straight line which leads from sentence to style, is what can be called para-
linguistics. The chief investigator here has been Henry Lee Smith and, for a second
part of the field, Ray Birdwhistell. Neither has carried his work as far as might be
wished, but each has at least demonstrated that there is an intimate relationship be-
tween the expressive features, which accompany speech, and speech itself, and that
these expressive features pattern in a way similar to linguistic patterns and are
learned, rather than innate (Hill 1958: 408; see also Hill 1955: 257).
Expressive features and linguistic patterns are opposed to each other along the
same lines that Hill, in the paragraphs preceding the passage cited above, op-
poses stylistics and linguistics. Stylistics, Hill writes, seeks to explain as much
as possible of linguistic variation (1958: 408) above or beyond the levels
covered by microlinguistics (phoneme to sentence). In this view, variation is ex-
trinsic to the definition of microlinguistic patterns and is the province of styl-
istics, rather than linguistics proper. Expressive paralinguistic features are like-
wise opposed to core speech patterns in the above quotation. In both cases, the
opposition illustrates a divide between stable invariant or core properties of lan-
guage, defined as a three-level system based on sound, form, and sense (Trager
1958), and extending from phoneme to sentence. Stylistics and paralinguistics,
on this definition, pertain to language-as-interaction and the different forms of
organization that are not captured by microlinguistic categories.
This separation is based on the notion that language is separable from para-
language and kinesics and that it is therefore definable on the basis of intrinsic
criteria which distinguish it from the latter. One consequence of this separation
is that language itself was seen in terms of abstracta which were detached from
bodies, brains, and the world. This separation often went hand-in-hand with the
idea that language was a symbolic system for the encoding/decoding and trans-
mission of mental contents from one mind to another whereas body language
was primarily seen as expressive and emotional. The dominant traditions in 20th
century linguistics, under the influence of Saussures methodological separation
of langue and parole, have focused their attention on form-based abstractions
and their regularities. Language was cognitive and referential; body language
was expressive and interpersonal in this view. This contrast is summarized in
table 2:
Table 2. Some contrasting ways of thinking about body language and language
Body language Language

body mind
expressive communicative
behavior cognition
feeling, affect concepts, cognition
natural conventional, normative
ephemeral stable
analogue digital
style code
freedom constraint
The contrasting ways of thinking about body language and language proposed
in table 2 suggest, in actual fact, the inherent vagueness of the many degrees of
freedom of the bodys interactive possibilities. Terms such as body language
and language seek to isolate specific phenomena and to treat them as sharply de-
fined classes even though they may be said to interact with and overlap each
other. Developmentally, biological systems move from a relatively vague
embodiment to an increasingly more specified and definite one (Salthe 1993;
Thibault 2004a, b). The problem faced by analysts of embodied face-to-face in-
teraction is that bodies and their interactive potential are always to some degree
inherently vague. The problem arises when analysts, guided by the notion that
language is a well-defined code, seek to specify well-defined linguistic units
such as phonemes in contrast, for example, to the vague or ill-defined paralin-
guistic vocal qualifiers first described by Trager (1958); see also Austin (1965).
Here is Austin on this distinction:
A dilemma arises when features paralinguistic in origin result in permissible pho-
. f
f ./
netic and phonemic strings. Yes said with drawl is yeah /y e h/ and with clipping yep
. /f
f .
/y e p/. There is also nope /n w p/. These forms may as often end in [?] as in [p+] but
the final stop is never aspirated. The whole problem of free variation must thus be
considered in the light of paralinguistic communication. Help! with [p] is clipped or
shortened (The situation is desperate!).
Vocal qualifiers are employed either to reinforce the linguistic message or to contra-
f
. f
.
dict it. For the affect of drawl Smith has the example of Yeah, hes a real nice guy
where the paralinguistic signal contradicts the linguistic one. Good-bye, now ,
with sing-song, obviously tries to mitigate the farewell, a signal to have it cancelled
< <
or one for future meetings. I really should be getting on with over-slow tempo asks
> >
for an invitation to stay. And now that thats settled, lets get on to with over-fast-
tempo says lets forget it (Austin 1965: 33).
Austin sees paralinguistic vocal qualifiers as either reinforcing or contradicting

a coded linguistic message. Meaning is thus created by combining two distinct
systems, e.g., the paralinguistic affect of drawl combines with the linguistic
message Yeah, hes a real nice guy to contradict it. There is, then, equivocation
or ambiguity of meaning depending on the way in which paralinguistic and lin-
guistic elements are combined. The presumed fact of their separation into two
distinct paralinguistic and linguistic systems and their combination and recom-
bination is based on the notion that the analyst can definitely describe real en-
tities such as phonemes that are separable from paralinguistic features such as
drawl, sing-song, and jerky. What is correspondingly lost sight of is that the
physical form of the signal is not invariant, but can be varied and modulated in
very many ways which enable signalers to achieve particular behavioral effects.
Moreover, these variations and modulations are not extrinsic to the form of the
signal as some external force that impinges on it, but are constitutive of its
micro-temporal dynamics.
The separation of linguistic and paralinguistic items is based on the view
that language consists of strings of formal properties which we equate with ver-
bal patterns that can be described and annotated on the basis of script-like no-
tations (e.g., phonetic or alphabetic script) (see Linell 2005; Harris 2001). Para-
linguistic elements are aspects of body dynamics from which verbal patterns are
abstracted and which elude their reduction to script-like regularities. In this
view, language is taken to be strings of physical invariants e.g., phonemes to
which meanings are attached in a process of encoding. Paralanguage, in this
view refers, to more primitive body dynamics which are not the same as the
words actually spoken. In the process, our definition of language itself is re-
duced and impoverished. First, an ungrounded linguistic utterance such as Aus-

tins example Yeah, hes a real nice guy (see above) is combined with a paralin-
guistic item so that the meaning of the utterance can be interpreted by agents.
This view fails to see that language is always already grounded by the ways in
which it is integrated to cognitive, affective, and bodily dynamics of real-time
interaction. Language is not reducible to formal strings and text-like entities that
are separable from bodies. Instead, language is fully integrated with body activ-
ity and cannot be separated from it except by an artificial process of abstraction.
This, then, poses the problem as to how formal strings are linked to meanings
or are made meaningful for an agent, i.e., the symbol grounding problem
(Harnad 1990) posited by computationalists in trying to discover how formal
strings of symbols connect to the world. Usually, this is solved by postulating
a central processing unit in the brain-mind of the individual which treats
sequences of forms as inputs to which meanings are assigned by an encoding/
decoding process.
It is therefore problematic, to say the least, to postulate an a priori distinction
between the verbal and non-verbal aspects of face-to-face communicative beha-
vior. Linguistics has tried to isolate the verbal part of human behavior from the
rest of communicative behavior and then attempt to construct a science of lan-
guage viz., linguistics on the basis of this artificial separation. One of the ear-
liest theorists of paralanguage, George L. Trager (1958: 2), argued that language
was accompanied by other communication systems, one of motion kinesics,
and one of extra-linguistic noises vocalizations (1958: 2). On this basis,
Trager argued that communication was divided into language, vocalization,
and kinesics.
However, there is compelling neurobiological and developmental evi-
dence which suggests that a more integrative approach is required. Take, for
instance, the relationship between speech and gesture. Semiotic systems such
as gesture, which is integrated with speaking and therefore not dissociated
from it, is controlled by meanings in Brocas area that also control the activity
of speaking (McNeill 2005: chapter 8). Iverson and Thelen (1999) also pro-
duce developmental evidence for a coupled speech-gesture system. They de-
scribe the ontogeny of coupled oral and limb movements in terms of four
stages:
(1) initial linkages: hand and mouth movements are loosely coupled from birth; (2)
emerging control: increasing adaptive use of hands and mouth, especially marked by
rhythmical, sometimes coordinated, activities in both manual and vocal modalities;
(3) flexible couplings: emergence of coupled, but not synchronous gesture and
speech; (4) synchronous coupling: more adult-like, precisely-timed coupling of ges-
ture and speech (Iverson and Thelen 1999: 29).
This developmental trajectory typically unfolds as follows. Initial linkages are
seen in newborns in the form of mutual spontaneous hand-mouth coordination.
Emerging control is characterized by rhythmical vocal and manual babbling in

which babbling and rhythmical hand-arm movements are mutually entrained.
Flexible coupling is seen in the use of gestures prior to words to indicate or an-
ticipate phenomena. The use of gesture at this stage is predictive of but only
weakly entrained by words. An 11 month old infant observed by the author since
birth manifested the first appearance of this stage when the father was pointing
out ducks to her during a walk by a lake in their neighborhood. The infant then
began systematically using pointing to indicate a wide variety of phenomena
(ducks, aeroplanes, and so on) which would sometimes co-occur with vocaliz-
ations but were not tightly synchronized with them. Synchronous coupling starts
to occur from 14 to 18 months and is characterized by meaningful synchronous
couplings of word and gesture in ways that indicate that gesture and language
are under the control of the same brain area (see above).
In the same infant mentioned above, I have observed during the develop-
mental period in question 14 to 18 months the spontaneous emergence of
synchronized speech-gesture complexes such as the following:
Infant looks at father + says hat + lightly taps her head with right hand to
indicate where her hat should go. This gesture + speech complex typically
occurs when the infant wants to put her hat on prior to going outdoors.
Infant approaches father, saying hand and raising and extending her hand
to take fathers hand in hers. This gesture + speech complex typically occurs
when she wants to hold hands with her father and go for a walk together out-
side.
In both these cases, which are regular occurrences in the interactions between
father and child in the period in question, along with others, hand-arm gesture
and speech are tightly synchronized components of a single whole-body sense-
making activity. The higher control level in this case is probably at this stage
semantic in a rudimentary way: synchronized hand-arm gestures and vocal tract
gestures are both under the control of the same higher-order constraint in the
brain. It therefore makes little sense to say they are two separate modalities that
are combined. Rather, as MacNeill (2005) has shown, they are functioning
components of the same overall phenomenon, which also provides compelling
evidence for the sensorimotor basis of thought (Iverson and Thelen 1999: 36).
Iverson and Thelen use dynamics to explain that gestures and speech are con-
trolled by a common semantics, are tightly synchronized by temporal coupling,
and have a common integrative basis in cognition and perception. It makes little
or no sense to talk of combining gesture and speech, because this kind of ex-
planation is externalist and based on linear causality. Thus, one kind of action is
combined with another, as seen from the point of view of an external observer
who is independent of the perspectives of those for whom the synchronized
body movements in question are signs of something.
The internalist view, in contrast, requires that we take into account the view-
points of the agents involved (i.e., infant, father) for whom the body movement
is meaningful. Something can only be a sign from the internalist viewpoint of
someone. The concept of circular causality, on the other hand, is a better pros-
pect for developing an integrated explanation which involves hierarchical inter-
actions of very large numbers of semi-autonomous components, including neur-
ons, intentions, body parts, and environmental features, which give rise to the
emergence of macroscopic populations of dynamical patterns on many scalar
levels (e.g., neural, bodily, environmental) that shape and modulate the whole-
body sense-making of individuals-in-interaction.
To separate gesture from speech as two distinct modalities or channels
of communication fails to show that the self-organizing dynamics of the whole
system of components in interaction cannot be causally/explanatorily broken
down into isolated constituents. A new kind of explanation based on complex
nonlinear interactions across different levels and timescales is required (cf. Sec-
tion 2. above). In the examples above from my own observations of an infant,
we could say that her actions are shaped by the circular relationships on many
levels and timescales of the self, current awareness, past states, the body, inten-
tions, the cultural world, and the physical environment. The brain, as Freeman
(1995) points out, anticipates future possibilities, which the infants whole-body
sense-making (see examples above) seeks to bring into actuality in ways that
support the efforts of the self to shape its own future. Self-organizing brain and
behavioral dynamics are globally orchestrated as a globally internal state vari-
able of neuronal dynamics that modulates an action trajectory of the entire
whole body towards the achievement of a particular value. The resulting action
trajectory is in the perspective of the self, which Freeman describes as emerging
in the dynamics of the limbic system. The global organization of brain and body
dynamics occurs on the basis of the infants knowledge of her current environ-
ment organized in terms of how a desired value (e.g., put her hat on or go for a
walk outside with daddy) can be achieved by harnessing the interactive potential
of her body qua dialogically intermediary interaction with her father.
Bonobos such as Kanzi at the Great Ape Trust, Iowa also show the co-ar-
ticulation of vocalization and gesture (Segerdahl, Fields, and Savage-Rum-
baugh 2005: 131, 186187; see Tomasello 2006 for a contrasting view). In the
example shown in figure 1 below, Kanzi holds a point gesture to show that he
wants to go to the room on the other side of the window that he points to. During
the act of pointing, he also vocalizes at one stage. The pointing gesture + vocal-
ization, along with gaze vector, seem to have a clear function of inducing the
human researcher/interactional partner to open the door. They are interrelated
and synthesized as components of a single overall meaning complex which sig-
nals something like open the door; I want to go there. It is Kanzis whole body
which is making meaning here, not his finger per se.
J Think we can do some more work? Do you Jared tracks Ks arm movement and begins Go where?
want to do some more work on your key- to lean towards lexigram indicated by K. Looks at lexigram
board? Where do you want to go, Kanzi?
K Facing Jared, begins to avert gaze on work Points to lexigram
J Maintains same posture You want to go in there? I cant let you in there right now. We can ask
Liz when she comes back
K Points to window Retracts point and begins to turn towards J Shifts to new posture on back; vocalizes:
Face-to-face communication and body language
V
307
Figure 1. Kanzis point gesture + vocalization

Seen from the perspective of Kanzis use of vocalization + gesture, we see evi-
dence for the synthesis of vocal and manual gestures under the control of mean-
ing in hominid evolution. The meaning effect which is obtained is not the result
of simply adding one resource to the other. The relationship between the two
resources is not an additive one. Rather, they are functional components in a
single overall meaning system. The meaning potential resulting from the inte-
gration of gesture, gaze, body orientation, and vocalization in the interaction
between Kanzi and the human researcher cannot be explained in terms of the
meaning of the separate components qua semiotic modalities. Each of these
resources multiplies the meaning potential of the others so as to create a very
large multi-dimensional space of semiotic possibilities (Lemke 1998: 9196).
A given episode, such as the one shown in figure 1, is a narrowing down, a hon-
ing of the possibilities of that space in ways that fit the purposes and understand-
ings of the participants in the particular situation from their respective points
of view. The basic principle at work is the co-contextualization of somatic and
extra-somatic resources so that the meaning of any given resource (e.g., point-
ing) is made more definite or specified by the contextual redundancies it shares
with other resources (e.g., vocalization + gaze vector + point + window on other
side of room, etc.) in this particular dialogical array see Hodges (2007) for
this term consisting of a fluctuating behavioral flow that is fundamentally
based on degrees of irregularity and unpredictability instead of the regularity
and predictability of the code model of communication. The coupling of point,
vocalization, gaze, and so on, is based on timing. Timing in living systems
means irregularity and uncertainty in ways which increase the level of in-
formation in the system.
In this way, a local consistency obtains relative to the viewpoints of the
agents enmeshed in this world of potential signs such that the meanings made
with one resource from one sign system are seen to support or be consistent with
other resources from other sign systems. By the same token, different semiotic
resource systems do not necessarily make the same meaning in different ways.
For example, the lexicogrammar and semantics of natural languages are es-
pecially good at organizing the phenomena of our experience into discrete
classes or categories. The semantics of natural languages typologizes the world
into digital categories. It has evolved above all to perform this function. Ges-
ture, on the other hand, is a topological-continuous (analogic) mode that oper-
ates in a visual-spatial dimension, unlike spoken language, which depends on
the pick up of acoustic information about the speakers vocal tract activity.
The emphasis on first-order languaging as micro-temporal behavioral dy-
namics allows us to re-focus attention on language activity (languaging) as
being an integrated, co-orchestrated, and co-constructed whole bodily move-
ment of individuals-in-interaction, rather than the products of single individuals
or their minds. The micro-temporal bodily dynamics of first-order languaging is
the missing link in accounts of language which focus on second-order language

patterns (e.g., regularities and rules of grammar, semantics, and discourse). This
level is itself informational and cognitive (Bottineau 2003). Typically, it is seen
as the coding of the second-order units referred to above (e.g., Halliday 1994;
Langacker 1987). Micro-temporal bodily dynamics is information on smaller,
faster timescales that may escape normal levels of awareness. First-order lan-
guaging is less amenable to being analytically segmented into text-like units
(verbal patterns) and their relations in text-like entities. Rather, it is integrated
behavior of the organism that is selected for by the affordances of the other em-
bodied agents with whom one interacts.
First-order languaging is both contextually constrained by grammar and con-
textually integrated to it. It is not the encoding of grammar by bodily expression.
Individuals lock into and interact in micro-time with the embodied resources
of others as cognitive resources for getting things done in concert with other as-
pects of their shared cultural environments. Moreover, this is not achievable by
a single mode (e.g., vocal tract gestural activity) in isolation, but is constituted
by the co-orchestration in micro-time of constellations of bodily and neural
resources that are distributed across all of the individuals-in-interaction. This is
always achieved in concert with other features of their jointly constituted en-
vironment (e.g., relevant tools, artifacts, technologies, physical settings, and so
on). The individual does not therefore acquire language as something pre-pack-
aged which is already out there and which is extracted from the environment
(e.g., others). Individuals interact with other individuals in ways that harness and
synchronize the micro-temporal dynamics of their jointly enacted neural-bodily
activity in ways that change perception, cognition, affect, and action.
8. Reinstating the behavioral dimension
An earlier generation of students of body language squarely put the emphasis on

behavior in contrast to the processing of text-like symbolic forms that has char-
acterized most of the work in both language processing and the cognitive
sciences until the more recent rise since the early 1990s of theories of embodied-
embedded cognition, which have developed alternatives to the computational
model of symbolic processing (Wheeler 2005). The pioneering work of
Birdwhistell, Scheflen, and others in the 1950s and 1960s developed sophisti-
cated analyses of the minutiae of real-time face-to-face interaction. For example,
Scheflen claimed that
[] changes in the position, orientation and relations of persons are called beha-
viors. These behaviors define and are defined by territories. The study of human ter-
ritoriality is the study of human behavior (Scheflen and Ashcraft 1976: 4; authors
emphasis).
Scheflen located the study of behavior in an ecological context in which living

persons move around, take up positions, and orient to each other in the forms of
bounded space which he defined as a territory. Persons establish, define, move
in, and use territories by virtue of the kinds of bodily interactions that they
engage in. Furthermore, for Scheflen, a territory is not a pre-given entity, but a
dynamic and time-bound field of relations that is embedded in and defined
by larger-scale territorial fields. A territorial field, Scheflen argues, is a more
extensive and often more lasting field of relations of movement and other beha-
vior (1976: 5).
Scheflen was interested in what people actually do in small-group inter-
actions such as psychotherapy transactions (Scheflen 1973). To analyze psycho-
therapy transactions, Scheflen, who was trained as a medical doctor, was in-
fluenced by the first attempts in the mid 1950s to produce film recordings of
such transactions. He gradually came to see, under the influence of general sys-
tems theory, the necessity of dispensing with encoding-decoding and stimulus-
response models that focused on individual aspects of behavior. This led to an
approach that took the interpersonal and inter-individual dimensions of beha-
vior to be fundamental. Scheflen (1973: 6) referred to this approach as the be-
havioral systems approach. According to this approach, behavior is not defined
on the basis of individual organisms but instead on the basis of the patterned re-
lations of inter-individual behavior that takes place between people and which
constitutes communication. With remarkable foresight, Scheflen argued:
If we were to study communication, then, we had to retrace our steps from the high-
level inferences of the psychological and social sciences and get back to the study of
behavior itself. We had to examine action, describe it, analyze its form, and try to de-
fine meaning behaviourally (Scheflen 1973: 7).
Moreover, this attention to behavior and its fine-grained analysis on the basis of
filmed episodes of real-time interaction was not a return to the behaviorist and
neobehaviorist tenets which sought to reveal neurophysiological and cognitive
processes. Scheflen was interested in the study of behavior and its structure in
its own right as a technique for revealing how communicative behavior be-
comes meaningful (Scheflen 1973: 7).
To this end, Scheflen, Birdwhistell, Bateson, and others also drew on the
methods developed by Sapir, Bloomfield, Pike, and Harris in structural lin-
guistics. They pioneered techniques of behavioral analysis that sought to syn-
thesize behavioral episodes in order to reveal behavioral integrations at levels
larger than the sentence. In this way, they attempted to understand how different
behaviors were integrated in the overall stream of communicative activity.
Scheflen also highlighted the significance of technology for the recording and
transcribing of the complex, time-bound communicative events in the behavio-
ral systems view:
To study such complexity, we needed a technology. We cannot examine multiple mo-

dalities of behavior in detail at a single observation. Armed with eyes, ears, and a
notebook, the observer has his hands full merely to hear the speech and to note the
gross actions of one participant. The sound motion picture and, more recently, the
video tape provided the needed technological means for thorough observations.
Given a film record we can go over again and again the events of a transaction, sys-
tematically observing one, then another, behavioral modality and testing their vari-
ous relations until we have described the synthesis of elements in the over-all picture
(Scheflen 1973: 8).
In many respects, the study of body language and language have gone their sep-
arate ways since the pioneering work of Birdwhistell, Scheflen, and others in the
1950s and 1960s. Body language early came to be seen as the domain of inquiry
of a separate and parallel study of paralanguage (e.g., Birdwhistell). Conse-
quently, the study of language was linked more and more to the study of mind
and cognition at the same time that the bodily dimensions of interaction were
not seen as intrinsic to the definition of human intelligence. Language was mo-
deled in terms of disembodied symbol strings that could be defined and ex-
plained independently of human agents, their perspectives and their bodily ac-
tivity. Moreover, the symbolic aspect of language in this perspective was seen
and analyzed largely in terms of a hierarchy of constituents, seen by many as the
defining characteristic of the grammar of natural languages. The interpersonal
and prosodic aspects of language qua bodily activity were ignored or down-
played in favor of a partial view of language as essentially consisting of abstract
lexicogrammatical forms.
9. Inter-personal communicative behavior, norms, and affect
Norms are everywhere in human interaction. People must signal that they
understand and orient to norms concerning how to create and maintain relation-
ships with each other and how to create and maintain a self. Co-constructed
micro-temporal body dynamics (first order languaging) is more fundamental
than words in signaling and organizing the moral order of a social group. These
body-based events are emergent patterns of bottom-up activity that nevertheless
enable individuals to engage with recurrent patterns and to connect their activity
to higher-scalar forms of social organization beyond the body. It is in this sense
that people execute skillful performance in order to display how they fit in with
the moral order (Goffman 1963).
Norms are tied up with values and the social judgments and accounts agents
make about themselves and others. Heterarchies of fluctuating and sometimes
competing value-systems come to the fore even in the same situation and regu-
late the actions of individuals. Co-constructed body dynamics of first-order lan-
guaging, as we saw above, is not reducible to body movements qua events, but
is constrained and interpretable in many different ways under different nor-
mative and contextual descriptions of intentional actions. It is on this basis that
affect-charged interactional routines arise. For instance, the examples of vocal-
izations coupled to gestures in the episodes of infant-father interaction men-
tioned above are based on timing and agent-environmental couplings in time
that give rise to responses that feel right in the given situation and which ap-
pear to interactants as natural and transparent. Father and infant draw on their
experiences of their interactional history to anticipate each others responses
and in so doing they respond in ways that seem motivated and intelligible. They
therefore construe each others actions as purposeful and intentional according
to the norm-based standards of some moral order.
Cowley (in press) has pointed out that we feel words just as we hear them.
We feel and hear an auditory pattern with which we actively engage and explore
as a patterned auditory event. A vocalization or other form of body movement
can function as an inducer of emotion (Damasio 1999: 68). The micro-tem-
poral dynamics of a loud or aggressive voice, for instance, is such an inducer
of emotion and concomitant body feeling. The feeling of the others voice not
just the hearing provides a basis for affective linkage between interactants.
This capacity reaches right back to the earliest forms of intersubjectivity that
characterize the infant-caregiver dyad (cf. Section 4 above). Vocalizations, ges-
tures, and other forms of body movement are emotion inducers in the sense that
they provide a means of directly mapping the others feeling state onto the self
in ways that alter ones own body state and consequent ways of responding in
value-weighted ways at the same time that they enable the addressee to feel the
bodily feeling-state of another. This, in turn, provides a basis for the later devel-
opment of higher levels of empathic identification in ways which increase the
capacity for caring, sympathy, and support.
At a still higher level of intersubjective perspective taking, one is able to
take the others perspective, to anticipate their intentions and to understand their
feelings. Typically, language is associated with higher cognitive and conceptual
abilities and body language with feeling and expression where it is assumed that
the ascent to language is a progression from the one to the other. This view
misses the far more fundamental point that whole-body-face-to-face interaction
systems have evolved precisely as a means of coordinating feeling and affect
between persons no less than higher-order thinking or reasoning of the kind we
associate with conceptual and representational semantics (Sarles 1977; Bouis-
sac 1999). The connection between the two perspectives is bodily movement.
For instance, Abercrombie (1967: 97) has written of the phonetic empathy
that is reciprocally felt by participants in spoken dialogue on the basis of their
entrainment to and mutual attunement to the rhythms of their speech and the
ways this enables speakers to tune into the body dynamics of the other.
Moreover, organisms respond to very many levels of constraints neural,

bodily, social, cultural in developing ways of acting and meaning that benefit
themselves and the social groups they belong to. The view of language as code-
like input/output machine for processing symbolic forms has been massively
biased towards the idea that language is an instrument of cognition and rational
thought. Damasios neurobiological theory of the centrality of body feelings and
emotions to consciousness, cognition, and higher-order rational thinking offers
a new perspective for demonstrating the centrality of affect and body feelings to
languaging activities and hence to signal form and function.
The invariant character of linguistic forms that is presupposed by the lin-
guistic approach described above is based on the idea that recurrent regularities
that are collected over time provide the basis for postulating an abstract system
of types. However, face-to-face communications such as conversations make
use of meaningful patterns that depend on very small-scale micro-temporal dy-
namics of the kind that cannot be captured on the basis of a pre-existing system
of regular form-meaning correlations. Paralinguistic and kinesic features of
speech are ill suited to their description in terms of recurrent types. Rather, their
patterning occurs on very small, fast micro-temporal scales of fine-grained
bodily dynamics. Cowley (1994) shows, for example, how rhythmic means are
used by interactants in conversation to achieve specific, usually interpersonal
ends, such as sharing enthusiasm, which are interactional achievements
whereby the behavior of others is managed and regulated. Moreover, rhythmical
patterning qua form of body movement, is patterned, but not regular so that its
analysis can never be captured in terms of a priori regularities of linguistic form
(Cowley 1994: 354; cf. Section 6. above). Cowley shows that it is intrinsically
irregular rhythmic patterning that gives rise to an experience of rhythm by the
individual participants in the conversational event. Rhythm is therefore grounded
in the first-person experiences of individuals engaged in conversation in ways
that enable them to assess, manage, and resonate with each other in real time. It
is a primordial form of inter-body attunement that takes as its deictic centre
the tactile-kinaesthetic body as the very basis for organizing self-experience,
but also for experiencing others. Bhlers ([1934] 1990: 117131) notion of the
here-now-I system of subjective orientation precisely renders the way in which
the material, not just conceptual, basis of these deictic words qua gesture-like
clues (Bhler 1990: 121) serves to orient intersubjective perception and cogni-
tion of the situations in which they are uttered.
Accounts of language which are founded on form-based regularities and
their invariant character either miss the point of or marginalize such phenomena
as mere paralinguistic accompaniments to language (Trager 1958: 2; cf. Sec-
tion 7. above). In doing so, these approaches fail to see that micro-temporal
forms of movement patterning such as rhythm are fundamental to verbal beha-
vior on time scales that simply do not register on the radar screen of those lin-
guistic theories based on form-based regularities of recurrent types. We experi-

ence vocalizations, gestures, facial expressions, and other body movements as
sad, frightening, joyful, and so on. Whole body movement dynamics are
directly geared to and communicative of affect in ways that cut across all the ex-
pressive modalities and show that the common denominator is their shared basis
in movement. This fact alone should induce researchers to rethink the division
of language and body language. The division is misleading for two reasons.
First, it is underpinned by the assumption that language is a stable code-like
system of invariants that is separable from body dynamics. Secondly, the term
body language directs attention away from movement as the common factor in
all modes of sense-making by virtue of the way in which the topological-quanti-
tative variation that is characteristic of movement under some normative con-
strual, including gesture, facial expressions, eye gaze, and so on, cannot be
assimilated to a view of these as language-like or code-like channels of com-
munication.
The central lesson to be drawn from this discussion for our present purposes
is that the presumed invariance of linguistic forms qua types is an artifact of a
metalinguistic approach which focuses on and equates language with virtual
second-order cultural constructs of the kind we typically associate with verbal
patterns such as lexicogrammatical and semantic regularities (Section 7.). Lexi-
cogrammatical forms are naturalistically grounded as patterns of neural acti-
vation that are sensitive to and interact with other neuronal patterns rather than
interacting directly with environmental stimulus perception that is picked up by
perceptual activity. Such systems of neural patterns implement networks of de-
coupled representations that increasingly cue further associations of such repre-
sentations in a symbolic system that is more and more buffered from environ-
mental perturbations (Deacon 1998: 7992). They are therefore able to track
virtual cultural constructs over diverse persons, places, and times beyond the
here-and-now in ways that are decoupled from and not directly under the control
of perceptual stimulus information. Instead, they are under the control of other
symbolic items in networks of symbolic associations between thematically
linked items forming networks of representations that can be modified, updated,
changed, and so on, through the modification, addition, or subtraction of spe-
cific items (Thibault 2005a).
10. Scheflens concept of face formation
Face-to-face interaction takes place in and constitutes what Scheflen and Ash-
craft (1976: 5) refer to as a more extensive and often a more lasting field of re-
lations of movement and other behavior. Minimally, face-to-face interactions
consist of dyads of two persons who tend to co-orient and use parallel or con-
gruent postures (Scheflen and Ashcroft 1976: 97). A number of people may
physically cluster together, but do not co-orient interactively speaking. In the
latter case, people are not engaged in face-to-face communication even if the
fact of their clustering may be communicative to an outside observer (e.g., a
number of non-affiliated individuals standing in a queue or a crowd of unrelated
individuals all attending to the same phenomenon (Scheflen and Ashcraft 1976:
102). The members of a dyad co-act, are mutually involved and in some kind of
relationship of affiliation or involvement (Scheflen and Ashcraft 1976: 103).
Whenever people come together and face each other in this sense, they form
what Scheflen and Ashcraft call a face formation (1976: 107). A face formation
is constituted when people come together and take up locations in the space that
is so constituted.
A face formation is, then, the higher-scalar organization within which face-
to-face communication is embedded. A face formation is constituted when two
or more persons: (1) co-orient; (2) take up congruent postures; (3) take up lo-
cations or positions in the space of the formation; (4) use the space so consti-
tuted to form relations of co-action and co-affiliation of various kinds and to
varying degrees; and (5) they and the elements of the face formation are coupled
to interactionally significant environmental affordances such as relevant ob-
jects, artifacts, physical settings, designed spaces, and so on. Face-to-face com-
munication is embedded in this higher-scalar arrangement as a dialogic matrix
in which the whole body posture-movement system of each individual partici-
pant is deployed to accomplish the co-enacted exploratory and performatory ac-
tivities the terms are Gibsons (1966: 4546) whereby the dialogical matrix
is established and maintained. In turn, the dialogic matrix is grounded in the
capacities of each individual for self-initiated movement and other forms of
exploratory and performatory activity so that they can couple with each other in
interactively and cognitively salient ways. The whole body posture-movement
system makes use of postures and movements of the body and can itself be
divided into a number of different regions. These are: (1) the head-face sys-
tem; (2) the torso and upper limbs system; and (3) the lower limbs-torso-head
system.
We can once again put scalar hierarchy thinking to good use to show that
face-to-face communication can be seen in terms of the three interrelated scalar
levels of hierarchical organization discussed in Section 2., as follows:
L+1: the face formation
L: the dialogic matrix
L-1: the individual whole-body-posture-movement system of nested levels of per-
formatory activity.
11. A brief analysis of a face formation
The following example is transcribed from a television reality show concerning

the life of a family in Sydney (Australia). The two interactants, Laurie and Noe-
leen (hereafter, L. and N.), who are husband and wife, argue about Lauries
inability to make any of the pens that he is trying to write with work. The ex-
change takes place around a bar in the kitchen-dining room area of their Sydney
home.
The analysis will focus on the performatory activities of N.s movements
and postures as a nested system of a number of action systems in relation to L.
For the purposes of the present discussion, I shall refer to the following body
units: (1) the head, including gaze and vocal tract activity; (2) the torso; and (3)
the upper limbs. The analysis below is divided into three postural units with
associated movement transformations, identified as Bodily States 1, 2, and 3,
respectively, in the transcription and discussion below.
The Transcription: From Sylvania Waters, Episode 1 of a six part series about a
Sydney family, ABC Television, Sydney, July 1992
Bodily State 1
N: no language
L: no language
Figure 2a. Bodily State 1
Observations on Bodily State 1:

N.s head and upper body posture is oriented to the pen rack on the table as she
moves towards and takes a pen from the rack with her right arm-hand. Head,
gaze, upper body, upper limbs, and lower limbs (locomotion) are all oriented to
and adjusted in relation to the pen L. is seeking to take from the rack.
Bodily State 2
N: yeah look
L: one of those I picked up first
Figure 2b. Bodily State 2

N.s head and upper body posture reorient to face her husband, L. She holds the
pen in her right hand (yeah) to show him as she leans across the table to write
with the pen (look) she has taken on a sheet of paper located between N. and
L. on the table. Vocal activity: L. says yeah as she holds the head-upper body
posture indicated here and holds the pen in front of L. to show him. She then
lowers her right upper arm-hand to begin writing. She utters look as she be-
gins writing. The controlled transformation of the right upper arm-hand from
the raised position to the lowered position in order to write is synchronous with
the uttering of yeah (arm-hand-pen raised) and look (arm-hand-pen lowered
to writing position). The linguistic units are synchronized with the body move-
ments in ways that are directed to constraining and directing L.s perception and
understanding of the pens.
Bodily State 3
N: this is the one you had

L:
Figure 2c. Bodily State 3


N. reorients by engaging L.s gaze and raising her right fore arm-hand which is
holding the pen in front of L. to show him. On performing this upper limb ac-
tion, she says this is the one you had.
As Reed (1996: 85) points out, there are various levels of postures and nest-
ings of these as well as controlled transformations from one posture to another
(movement). A movement is both a change of state from one posture to another
at the same time that it is the maintenance of some postural orientation. For
example, in Bodily State 2, the overall postural orientation of the head and torso
is maintained whereas the right upper arm-hand-pen undergoes a controlled
transformation as it is lowered from the showing position to the writing posi-
tion. Furthermore, the movement from one state to another is synchronized with
the two vocalizations. The first of these (yeah) serves to call L.s attention to
the overall shift in attention which she is asking L. to undertake (i.e., attend to
what I am showing you). The second (look) directs L.s attention to N.s
writing with the pen on the paper.
However, all of the action systems referred to here (head, gaze, torso, upper
arm-hand(-pen), and vocalizations) are fully interactive. Thus, they are other-
directed, other-sensitive, and other-calibrated. They therefore play their role in
creating or sustaining a relationship between N. and L. that is based on many
levels of reflexivity in addition to the observables of the situation. At the same
time, all of these action systems act on and transform the situation, its represen-
tations, and its conventions through the cognitive and semiotic work done by the
mutual management and assessment of each others behavior in order to bring
about perception-action transformations in the other. In this last sense, each ac-
tion system is oriented to the seeking of values. Thus, the action of moving the
arm-hand(-pen) from the raised to the lowered position, as described above,
seeks to move L. to a new perception and understanding of the status of the pens.
12. The face formation is embedded in and coupled to a local

micro-ecology
Face-to-face interaction does not only occur between the human agents who
participate in the face formation. Interaction also takes place between agents
and aspects of their physical-material environments, including artifacts, texts,
tools, objects, physical settings, the built environment, etc. When an agent par-
ticipates in face-to-face interaction with others, the physical world beyond the
body is coordinated with the actions of interacting agents. This coordination
gives rise to ways of thinking and reasoning that extend beyond the body. Such
distributed forms of cognition emerge as a result of the interactions in real-time
of the neural and non-neural bodily resources of agents, on the one hand, and se-
lected features of the physical-material environment in which the interaction is

embedded, on the other hand. In this view, features of the physical environment
are cognitive artifacts that serve to transform thinking processes in a larger,
more distributed system in which cognitive resources are not confined to bio-
logical individuals, but are distributed over an extended system involving
brains, bodies, and aspects of the external world (Hutchins 1995; Clark 2001).
In the interaction between L. and N. that is analyzed in Section 11. above, this
involves aspects of the physical world that function as cognitive-semiotic re-
sources and which play their own role in the process of finding a solution to the
problem of the recalcitrant pens. The most salient of these material resources are
summarized below.
Physical Setting:
Face-to-face interaction is always embedded in, coupled to, and co-constructs a
local micro-ecology comprising socially meaningful configurations of objects,
surfaces, media, architectural spaces, and what these afford the inhabitants or
participants. In the present example, the bar table is one item that plays a medi-
ating role in the cognitive ecology that is mediated by the interaction between L.
and N. The bar table participates in activities of the following kinds:
activities concerned with the preparation, serving, and consuming of food
and drink
supporting objects, both functional and aesthetic (pen racks, bar tables, etc.)
other activities such as writing a letter, scribbling with pens, as here
a focal point for interaction or conversation in that bar brings participants
together and enhances face-to-face orientation and mutual gaze
divides and defines boundary between kitchen and living space as two parts
of a larger whole; a kind of permeable buffer between these two areas
bar is spatially contiguous with the kitchen to which it is attached and which
it extends.
The Physical Setting:

The physical setting is itself a mediator and enabler of interaction rather than a
neutral and inert setting per se. In the present example, the following observa-
tions are relevant:
The relations between embodied participants-in-activity and physical set-
ting are mutually constitutive.
The situational specificity of the argument about the pens is generated by the
relations between the acts of trying out different pens and the physical set-
ting of the kitchen-bar.
Interactionally familiar activities tend to take place in settings that are cul-
turally fashioned to be an integral part of the activity (e.g., the surfaces, ob-
jects, furnishings, division of space, etc. in relation to the intentional acts of

participants); cf. L.s writing at the bar; Ns moving back and forth in the
kitchen.
Particular arrangements of these physical settings are inscribed with meta-
functionally describable semantic values: (1) what experiential meaning is
stored in objects and configurations of these; (2) what interactive procedures
are entailed between participants and objects; (3) how are objects arranged
in particular coherent spatio-temporal configurations, relations of depend-
ency, and so on.
Objects (e.g., pens) are not simply tools that participants manipulate to pro-
duce a cognitive result; rather, participants place themselves in specific em-
bodied and interactive (hence semiotic) relations with selected aspects of
the physical setting; it is this which produces meaning, knowledge, cogni-
tion.
Person-acting-in setting: knowledge and cognition are organized not as de-
contextualized, abstract ways of thinking and knowing, but in interactively
structured relations between participants and physical-material environ-
ments.
Language is not a universal calculus for abstract rational thinking and rea-
soning but a semiotic resource co-deployed with other semiotic resources
whereby solutions to problems co-emerge with selected aspects of the situ-
ation in the course of participants interaction with these; in interacting with
the physical environment, participants use this to organize and reorganize it
until a coherent and meaningful result semiotically and materially emerges
from it.
Semiotic interaction with the material environment imposes value on it; the
fact that L. and N. are in the kitchen-bar area paradigmatically defines where
they are in relation to where they are not, and hence the value of the activity
they participate in along some of its dimensions.
Semiotic values are embodied in room- and other-sized configurations of
participants, objects, surfaces, etc.
13. Re-framing face-to-face communication: Towards a network

ontology of distributed actors and mediators on diverse scales of
time and place
The lesson to be drawn from the above analysis is that there is more to face-to-
face interaction than the complexities of the many modes of embodied signaling
that interactants must attend to and interpret. This is something that we have
shared for a very long time with our primate ancestors and extant sibling
species, such as bonobos and chimpanzees. It is the oft made point of many
popular accounts of how to both deploy and decipher the subtle cues of body
language that we constantly attend to in order to enhance our chances of social
success, to bypass cognition to make snap judgments without knowing why, and
so on (see, for example, Malcolm Gladwells (2005) bestselling Blink). The col-
lective patterns that emerge from myriad interactions that make use of subtle
cues of voices, facial movements, eye movements, body posture, and so on, are
things we share with our primate cousins and siblings. Face-to-face interaction
thus brings to the fore the ways in which the humanization of our bodily affor-
dances for interaction has been shaped by a long natural and cultural history. As
Latour (1996: 230) points out, we have been immersed in a primate social life
that long preceded humanity.
Theories of interaction are confronted with the question: what is the starting
point of the explanation, the social structure or the specific occasion of interac-
tion? It is an analogous problem to that faced by sociologists who must contem-
plate two possible points of departure social structure or action for the study
of society. Latour (1996) points out that the two points of departure entail, re-
spectively, the globalization of structure and the localization of interaction.
The very term face-to-face interaction presupposes a reduction or a partitioning
so that, as Latour (1994: 230) puts it, the whole of social life is not mobilized by
a particular local interaction. The notion of social structure, on the other hand,
presupposes that any given interaction is an instantiation or a manifestation of
an all pervasive global social structure. Latour comments on this predicament as
follows:
[ O]ne must have seen a troop of some 100 baboons living in the midst of the sa-
vannah, looking incessantly at each other so as to know where the troop is going,
who is with whom, who is grooming whom, who is attacking or defending whom.
Then you must carry yourself away in your imagination to those scenes beloved of
interactionists where a few people, most often just two, are interacting in cloistered
spots hidden from the view of others. If hell is other people, as Sartre said, then ba-
boon hell differs from human hell, since the continuous presence of all creates a
pressure quite other than that of closed-doors of interactionism to such a degree
that a distinction must be drawn between two entirely different meanings of the word
interaction. The first, as given above (pp. 229, paragraph 2) applies to all primates,
including humans, whereas the second applies to humans alone. In order to retain the
usual term, it is necessary to talk of framed interactions. The only difference be-
tween the two derives from the existence of a wall, a partition, an operator of reduc-
tion, a je ne sais quoi whose origin remains, for the time being, obscure (Latour
1996: 231).
Face-to-face communicative behavior has been studied for the most part with a
focus on real time the here-and-now of the fractions of seconds, seconds, and
minutes of the behavioral acts produced by individuals as these unfold in time.
Individuals mobilize somatic and extra-somatic resources to achieve their goals
and realize their intentions. Each act is a behavioral form that displays some fea-
tures which are stable and predictable whereas others are flexible, variable and
adaptive to the moment. Transcriptions freeze the time-locked character of real-
time behavior and consequently encourage the coding of the resultant static
data on the basis of stable and predictable regularities. These stabilities have
in turn been attributed to global social structures or language or language-like
systems. However, these approaches fail to capture the dynamically emergent
character of behavior as it is soft-assembled in real-time in response to particu-
lar tasks and emerging values.
Face-to-face interaction cannot be explained by program-like regularities
deriving from global systems. Instead, it strategically mobilizes and harnesses
the available bodily and environmental resources which themselves have their
histories and individual characteristics on their respective time scales. Com-
municative behavior is directed towards the obtaining of certain results; it is an-
ticipatory, rather than being a backwards looking response to prior stimuli
(Bickhard 2005: 207208; Thibault 2005a, 2005b). Participants in interaction
do not sit around waiting to respond to particular stimuli; rather, their actions
lock into and make use of available somatic and extra-somatic affordances to
achieve future-oriented results meaning. Gibsons concept of affordance puts
the emphasis on the specicity of the relations between organism and environment
(Bril 2002: 122). The morphology of the human body is a primary affordance in
face-to-face interaction and the properties of the human body are accordingly
central to the control of dialogically coordinated inter-individual interaction.
When L. and N. interact in the episode discussed above, their co-produced com-
municative behavior is a dynamic result of their neuromuscular status, their
intentions, the physical setting, the bar around which they are aligned, the pen
rack, the pens they hold and write with, and the way their bodies move. Their
actions make use of all of these factors in real time at the same time that each of
these components has its own history on its own time scale. For instance, the
room, the bar table, and so on were designed by architects and built by crafts-
men in other times and places, yet the agency of their work makes itself felt in
the here-and-now of the particular occasion of interaction. They organize and
frame, as Latour puts it, the face-to-face interaction that takes place in the
here-and-now. The two participants each have a life history a biography as
well as a history of a shared relationship as husband and wife extending over
years in ways that also contribute to the shaping of this particular interaction.
The same can be said of the semiotic resources that are deployed. These
have a history of individual patterns of use in the two individuals and also a cul-
tural history that goes well beyond the time scale of the here-and-now interac-
tion that is briefly analyzed in Section 11. Thus, we see that diverse dynamical
histories ranging across fractions of seconds, minutes, weeks, months, years,
and centuries are all seamlessly interwoven into the real-time localized occasion
of interaction. The agents and agencies the actants in Latours Greimasian turn
of phrase that frame and hold the interaction together are in actual fact not
necessarily human at all. They include the objects, the physical settings, the
tools and implements, the furnishings of the room. Their effects are not all
proximate and local, not all in the here-and-now, but are distributed across di-
verse times and places. Nevertheless, they continue to participate in and to
shape the interaction that takes place in the here-and-now (see also Lemke
2000a; Thibault 2000). Scheflen and Ashcraft similarly point out how objects,
furnishings, and what they call set ups comprising preexisting arrangements
of furnishings and so on in, for example, a room, structure the possibilities of
interaction: A set-up provides a prearranged site and defines what is to occur
there (Scheflen and Ashcraft: 1976: 135). A set up thus anticipates types of
interaction and types of interactional roles that are embodied on specific occa-
sions by particular persons.
By the same token, the set up is itself the result of the activities of other
actors and agencies in other times and places. The actions of L. and N. in the
example are shared with the actions of other agents and agencies which are dis-
persed in other spatio-temporal frameworks and who exhibit other kinds of on-
tology (Latour 1996: 239). They too are embedded in and participate in the in-
teraction in real-time such that all of the diverse times and places are interwoven
in the real-time interaction. This has nothing to do with the instantiation of a
global social structure in a local instance of interaction. We do not go from the
hub of macro-level social structure to some point of localized micro-level inter-
action. Instead, we go from point to point in a network of many potentially in-
terconnected points. There is no hub; just many point-to-point connections.
In the proximate and localized view of face-to-face interaction, individuals
are said to use words, gestures, pens, and bar tables. Aside from the spin of
the externalist discourse, the idea of use here, in turn, entails the existence of
a meaning-making subject with certain skills and capacities and an object (e.g.,
signs, pens) which the subject acts upon, uses. The point of origin of the result-
ing action is therefore located in the subject (Latour 1996: 237). Latour suggests
an alternative view in which words, body movements, pens, and bar tables are
events which provide opportunities for and prompt other actors to act. Import-
antly, Latour also extends our understanding of the term actor to include the
non-human world of objects and their potential for agency and transformation.
They too act in their own way. In this view, signs are not vehicles or carriers
of meanings that are attached to them by an encoding process. In Latours terms,
signs are not intermediaries which represent or express untransformed
meanings, but mediators (Latour 2005: 3940) which provide opportunities for
meanings to be transformed. Mediators provide and mediate possibilities for
action which other actors can take up and transform in the service of their
own projects. Mediators are distributed between different actors and agencies
(human and nonhuman) as networks of interconnected actors that are spread
across a diversity of time-scales, rather than being confined to a particular local

moment of sign-use or interaction.
Interaction on a particular occasion is then the result of the cross-linkages
over many scales of space and time of interconnected networks of actors and
mediators, both human and nonhuman, semiotic practices, material processes,
human artifacts and technologies. None of these constitutes a higher-order or
more global level of social structure or a social semiotic that is encoded in signs.
Instead, the network connects distant times, places, and persons to locally pres-
ent and proximate ones on a point-to-point basis. Face-to-face interactions are
emergent and distributed outcomes of the ways in which material processes are
contextualized by cognitive and cultural dynamics in and through contextualiz-
ation processes that are created in human activity. Furthermore, individuals and
their first-person experiences both constitute this system through their activities
at the same time that individuals are constituted by their participation in the net-
works of interconnected actors that stretch out in many different directions
across space and time. Moreover, the interpersonal coordination of individuals is
itself not something which is confined to the localized scale of the here-and-now
interaction, but is spread across diverse times and places beyond the here-now.
How, then, can the actor hold together in this diversity and spread of factors
over space and time? Latours answer, which is a familiar one, is through the
narrative creation of an I for which we construct an autobiographical continu-
ity over time (1996: 239). This process is itself made possible by the skillful use
of our body as the ground of this I. The singularity of this I is grounded in
our unique embodiment (Harr 2001: 6061). The self is at the centre of a per-
ceptual field and the points of view that are attributable to the self by virtue of its
bodily positioning at the centre of the perceptual field. The self has a unique em-
bodiment which situates it in and connects it to its external milieu (esterocep-
tion) as well as to its internal one (proprioception) through the dynamical capac-
ities of the living, feeling animate body to attune to and resonate with other
similar bodies. That is the ground and the starting point of all forms of face-to-
face interaction.
14. Conclusion
The concept of face-to-face interaction puts the emphasis on an inter-individual

unit of analysis, rather than individuals per se. Many properties of interaction are
emergent results of the interactions between affordances of the biological individ-
ual, the social and cognitive skills and knowledges of individuals, and the social
and cultural worlds in which the interaction is embedded. The ne-grained analy-
sis of face-to-face interaction reveals the ways in which multi-agent, multimo-
dal interaction co-deploys somatic and extra-somatic resources and affordances
in the co-construction and mutual development of the meanings and activities

that serve to create and enhance their perception and understanding of their
worlds. It is therefore possible to reconceptualize cognition and thinking as
distributed processes that are spread across persons, times, and places, rather
than being confined within the brains of individuals. This has important future
implications for the ways in which we theorize language and other semiotic
resources and their role in human cognition and development. A related task
for future research is to understand on the basis of sustained empirically
grounded research how different timescales of semiosis are implicated in and
play a determining role in the shaping of any given occasion of face-to-face
interaction.
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12. Technically-mediated interpersonal
communication
Caja Thimm
1. Introduction
Online media have influenced global communication like no other media tech-
nology in the last decades. But it is not the degree of media exposition of indi-
viduals all over the world or the possibility of presenting oneself on a website or
ordering a book online, rather, it is the interpersonal contact function of com-
putermediated communication that has shaped and still is shaping human com-
munication. As early as 1993, Howard Rheingold commented on the communi-
cative force of computer-mediated interaction:
The idea of a community accessible only via my computer screen sounded cold to me
at first, but I learned quickly that people can feel passionately about e-mail and com-
puter conferences. Ive become one of them. I care about these people I met through
my computer (Rheingold 1993: 1).
Technically-mediated communication is now a part of daily interaction. It helps

us maintain existing relationships and fosters the creation of new contacts
(Thurlow, Lengel, and Tomic 2004).
In the early 1990s, the idea of having a look-alike avatar in a virtual meta-
verse like Second Life wearing digital copies of ones own clothes or sporting a
copy of ones real haircut was probably far-fetched. Today, however, computer-
mediated communication has taken over many communicative functions, and is
everywhere to be found. Whether in organizational communication (Thimm
2002) or in interpersonal exchange in learning contexts (Mazer, Murphy, and
Simonds 2007; Thimm 2005); whether in dyadic or group interaction technol-
ogy has already influenced many settings of interpersonal contact. And there will
be even more ways to meet in cyberspace as another technological trend brings
additional change: the social web, or as Tim OReilly named it in 2001 the
web2.0, has started to turn the internet into one big meeting place for people all
over the world (Haas et al. 2007). Social websites on which millions of mostly
young users have created a gigantic universe of interpersonal networks may be
regarded as the start of a new age of technically-mediated relations.
Language occupies a privileged position in the co-production of inter-subjec-
tive experiences, whether online or ofine. When people speak, their proximity to
one another in physical terms also translates into relational terms (cf. chapter 11
this volume). This is because speech serves not only as a means of expression;
332 Caja Thimm
rather, it is used to construct reality and shape relationships. It is by means of lin-

guistic exchange that people reproduce the normative basis of society. There are
many implications to technically-mediated communication, some of which are
pertinent to a communication-oriented view of society. For one, in technically-
mediated communication there is a lack of physical co-presence, which means
that visual and physical cues are eliminated. Mediation also eliminates the physi-
cality of interaction and thus the countless paralinguistic cues provided through
facework, such as body language or intonation. The integration of space and time
also changes. Consequently, mediated communication involves phenomena on
several different levels simultaneously: the facework of interaction, the speech
contexts, and the intrinsic relationship of action to time and place.
Many technical applications reflect these changes, some of which will be in-
troduced briefly in this chapter. Tools such as e-mail (4.1.), chats (4.2.), instant
messaging (4.3.), blogs (4.4.), multi-user dungeons (4.5.) and social websites
(4.6.) such as Facebook, Youtube, StudiVZ, or Flickr, have influenced interper-
sonal communication on a large scale. With the introduction of Second Life
(4.7.)1, interpersonal communication once again takes a new dimension.
Another important factor which has changed interpersonal communication
is mobile communications (4.8.). With more than 30 billion e-mail messages
and 5 billion text messages exchanged over mobile phones every day, techni-
cally-mediated interpersonal communication is available to everyone in most
parts of the world.
Due to these developments, we have to analyze technology and human com-
munication not only on the level of text or talk: today, it is the users inuence, in
terms of user-generated content, participation, and online sociability, which forces
us to look at interpersonal communication from a very different perspective.
2. A framework for the analysis of technically-mediated

interpersonal communication
Digitalization and liberalization as well as economic growth and modernization

of information and infrastructure have encouraged the innovation and diffusion
of a wide range of technical (phone- or web-based) media dedicated to interac-
tion and communication among smaller, more targeted groups. A number of sig-
nificant changes in interface and transmission, such as the development of user-
friendly software, and decreased production costs have made these media avail-
able for millions of people in both private and professional situations. Subse-
quently, these media forms have given rise to a wide range of new types of text,
such as personal web pages, blogs, networking sites, and online journalism.
These phenomena have been dealt with traditionally within the fields of
corpus linguistics and conversation analysis (Runkehl, Schlobinski, and Siever
Technically-mediated interpersonal communication 333
1998; Thimm 2000; Baron 1998; Beiwenger 2001). But technology has been
developing at such a fast pace in the last 20 years, that the resulting media usage
was not hitherto foreseeable. For example, SMS was initially designed for in-
ternal use but it is now used by millions of people, with billions of text messages
being sent around the globe daily. Since around 1998, a new generation of the
websites began to flourish which not only integrate user-produced content, but
are based upon it. These innovative sites or media are called social software,
network media, or simply, web 2.0. To keep pace with such technical inno-
vations, applied linguistics needs to modify its treatment of these developments
in the personalization of media usage.
When looking at personal media usage, two forms or modes of communi-
cation are distinguishable: presentational and interactive. The presentational
mode is used to attract and direct attention to ones own ideas, thoughts,
opinions, and information of other sorts, as for example on personal homepages
on the web. The interactive mode refers to such media as tools and channels for
ongoing contacts with specific others, and as a means for coordinating activities
in professional and family life, the mobile phone being the typical case. Up until
the 1990s, these modes could be linked to distinct technological platforms. One
could distinguish between presentational web-based media (personal web-sites
and web-diaries, blogs), and interactive phone-based media. The two modes be-
longed to two different media and technical platforms the computer and the
mobile phone. However, this technical distinction has become obsolete as a con-
sequence of digital convergence. Now, the two platforms are used interchange-
ably for both presentational and interactive purposes. Firstly, mobile phones
are increasingly used for web services, bridging on-line television and on-line
newspapers and combining interpersonal communication (telephone, text mess-
ages) with public media (TV, radio, newspapers). Secondly, a number of web-
sites, such as blogs with RSS and track-back functions, or podcasts, employ
both the presentational and interactive modes. Lastly, social networking sites
such as Facebook or StudiVZ and many blogs have emerged which also apply
both the presentational and interactive functions in the construction and repro-
duction of relevant social networks for various purposes. Consequently, within
the field of applied linguistics, there is a need for a broader theoretical and me-
thodological framework when studying these increasingly complex types of in-
teraction in changing technical environments.
3. Theoretical approaches to technology, media, and communication
Looking at ways to categorize and describe technically-mediated interpersonal

communication requires a variety of approaches (Hflich 2003). As categories
like anonymity, privacy, space, time, and distance have gained importance in the
334 Caja Thimm
overall description of interpersonal interaction, so the levels of analysis have

changed (Dring 2003). The internet provides asynchronous communication
via e-mail, bulletin boards, and computer conferencing, and it provides syn-
chronous communication via chatting or real-time conferencing, instant mess-
aging, or chats in multi-user dungeons. In addition, virtual simulation activities,
such as online seminars, virtual field trips, and virtual experiments are also
possible on the web.
In general, the focus of studies on communication and the use of new media
has shifted over the past 20 years from a more technologically-oriented ap-
proach to one that puts emphasis on social context. The media richness model as
put forth by Daft and Lengel (1984) proposed that the use of a certain medium in
a communicative activity is influenced by the way medium capacity (richness
presented as objective characteristics of the medium) and the nature of the task
(uncertainty/equivocality) fit together. The authors claim that media vary in
their capability of reducing equivocality and ambiguity. A medium is regarded
as rich if it facilitates feedback, communicates multiple cues, presents indi-
vidually-tailored messages, and uses natural language. Trevino, Daft, and Len-
gel (1990) concluded that media can be ranked according to their richness,
with face-to-face (FTF) communication ranked highest, formal numeric text lo-
west, and e-mail somewhere in between.
With computer-mediated communication (CMC) media becoming widely
available and more people using e-mail, voice mail, and the internet, the focus
shifted to researching the social influences, network contexts, and processes
of media uses and perceptions (Walther 1992). Others (Turkle 1984, 1996;
Thimm 2000; Thurlow 2004; Dring 2003) proposed that the characteristics of
a medium are defined and appropriated through the social activities for which
the medium is used.
How does technically-mediated communication differ from more traditional
face-to-face relationships, and which kinds of participant contexts might
influence these differences? New media may complement current interpersonal
and telephone communication or may lead to additional and specialized uses
(Hflich and Gebhardt 2005; Kim et al. 2007). Furthermore, mediated communi-
cation can foster connected presence or communicative readiness, whereby
people manage multiple encounters at the same time and across time, signal on-
going awareness of relationships with specific others, indicate their availability,
and maintain a social context (Herring 1996).
All experience is situated in time and space, but communication technol-
ogies decontextualize communication and interaction from the here and now,
and change the grounds on which face-to-face interaction is based. This dis-
location of temporality from contextualized experience in the world is one
of the fundamental operations of mediation. Communication technologies are
as much about time and temporality as they are about distance and space. Syn-
chronous media permit direct communication in real time. Asynchronous media

permit communication only through use of a recording medium (e.g., text) and
not in real-time. Both intervene in the temporality of interactions. Online media
construct virtual immediacy with respect to our access and presence to each
other, we become virtually equidistant to one another. We are also increasingly
available to others for communicative purposes due to the new technologies that
permit this. Technology becomes a means of production for interpersonal inter-
action because it makes communication possible regardless of spatial (and tem-
poral) distances. Connective technologies radically transform our presence and
availability to others in relational and temporal terms.
People bring their real-life problems and personalities with them into their
virtual lives. Computer-mediated communication must therefore include,
inherently, all kinds of interactive content. Theoretical frameworks that are
capable of accounting for this major shift in mediated communication are there-
fore multidisciplinary, and often only focus on one specific perspective of com-
munication in cyberspace (Thiedecke 2003). It is necessary, for linguistic ap-
proaches as well as for others, to integrate theories from various related fields
such as media research, social sociology, or psychology.
3.1. The neurophysiological approach to technically-mediated

communication
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan based his theories of media-human relations
on assumptions about the physiological makings of humankind and the impact
of technology thereon (McLuhan 1964). He construed media to be an exten-
sion of man and thus laid the foundations for the neurophysiological paradigm
of media theory (McLuhan 1962: 72).
In The Medium is the Massage (1967), McLuhan insisted that we cannot
understand the technological experience from the outside. We can only compre-
hend how the electronic age works us over if we recreate the experience.
For McLuhan, the new media [] are nature since technology refers to the
social and psychic extensions or outerings of the human body or senses
(McLuhan 1967: 62). McLuhan considered his description of communication
media to be universal because he viewed all technology as a force pushing
archetypal forms of the unconscious out into social consciousness. In this
understanding, technology is an extension of biology: the expansion of the elec-
tronic media as a metaphor for or the environment of twentieth century experi-
ence implies that, for the first time, the central nervous system itself has been
exteriorized. Humankind is becoming a part of the technological network by
participating intensively and integrally in a technostructure, which is nothing
but a vast simulation and amplification of the bodily senses. McLuhan pro-
posed that technologies are no mere add-ons to whom and what we are, but
336 Caja Thimm
rather, they alter us as though the technologies really were extensions of us. Liv-
ing in a world where humans turn into machines may sound like the work of
science fiction, but for McLuhan, it was the reality of our mediated, technolog-
ized world. Consequently, he described humans as modified by technology. This
very controversial approach (cf., e.g., Bolz 1993) to the relationship between
humankind and technology has influenced the debate on media, technology, and
human interaction to a large extent (Thimm 2003). McLuhans neurophysiologi-
cal paradigm offers a framework for understanding and conceptualizing the self
in an increasingly medialized environment.
3.2. Social capital and mediated communication

A second approach to media and communication which has received wide inter-
national attention is based on the works of Pierre Bourdieu (1991) and his con-
cept of social capital. This term broadly refers to the resources accumulated
through relationships between people. Bourdieu and Wacquant define social
capital as
[] the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group
by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relation-
ships of mutual acquaintance and recognition (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 14).
Resources from these relationships can differ in form and function based on
the relationships themselves. For individuals, social capital allows a person to
draw on resources from other members of the network(s) to which he or she
belongs. These resources can take the form of useful information, personal re-
lationships, or the capacity to organize groups. Access to individuals outside
ones intermediate social circle provides access to non-redundant information,
resulting in beneficial ties such as ones that would lead to getting a job or a
promotion.
The internet has been linked both to increases and decreases in social capital
(Adler and Kwon 2002; Huysman and Wolf 2004; Quan-Haase and Wellman
2004; Williams 2006). It can be argued that internet use detracts from face-to-
face time with others, which might consequently diminish an individuals social
capital. Other research suggests that online interactions may supplement or re-
place FTF-interactions, thus mitigating any loss of time spent online (Wellman
et al. 2001). Recently, researchers have emphasized the importance of internet-
based linkages for the formation of weak ties, which serve as the foundation of
building social capital. Because online relationships may be supported by tech-
nologies like distribution lists, photo directories, and search capabilities, it is
possible that new forms of social capital and relationship building will occur in
online social network sites (Lin 2001). Accumulation of social capital might be
augmented by sites that support loose social ties, allowing users to create and
maintain larger, diffuse networks of relationships from which they could poten-
tially draw resources (Wellman et al. 2001).
For the analysis of technically-mediated communication, this theoretical
framework can be regarded as one of the most promising approaches that are
able to account for the interrelationships of social values, communicational ex-
change, and technology.
3.3. Virtual sociability

The concept of virtual sociability is associated with the opportunity for individ-
uals to form aggregations across space and time via computer-mediated com-
munication systems, such as internet chat rooms, bulletin board systems, and
other multi-user contexts (Jones 1995; Hflich 2003; Bigge 2006). If it is as-
sumed that communication in virtual environments involves the participatory
engagement of various individuals, a virtual community can be understood by
examining the activities of its participants (Williams 2006). Both individually
and collectively, users maintain and change the prevailing notions of the online
community. These electronic gatherings require negotiations of rules, norms, and
technical procedures (Walther 1992, 1996). Thus, computer-mediated groups fit
the description of an interpretive community actively constructing meaning for
themselves.
Although it has been stated that technologically-mediated modes of com-
munication are necessarily impoverished and antisocial (Walther, Anderson,
and Park 1994), recent findings show that there is potential for online social
communications to sustain and even enhance human communication (Bell and
Kennedy 2007). But by the same token, it cannot be denied that generalizations
about computer-mediated communication are inherently problematic, conflat-
ing important differences in the specific affordances and communicative prac-
tices of different technologies. As Herring (2004) notes, computer-mediated
communication is clearly affected by technological variables such as synchro-
nicity, granularity, and multimodality. There is also a range of social variables,
for example the amount of time participants spend online, the nature of their re-
lationship, and their levels of motivation, which empirical research proved to be
an influential part of the nature of such communication (Dring 2003). In this
regard, mediated and unmediated communication is both equally situated and
context-dependent; and mediated practices are intricately embedded in the daily
lives of users.
Mediated proximity, however, is explained by its lack of physical reality and
context (e.g., Herring 2004). Communication and events are removed from ob-
jects, bodies, and faces. Messages are delivered without the context of speech
and gesture that might help to decipher their original intent. Interactions unfold
in an often disordered progression, lack coherence and clear reference (Storrer
338 Caja Thimm
2001), and are removed from the physical experience of being present with an-
other. The importance of knowing what is going on in an interaction shifts to
issues created by the introduction of technology; for example, who is on, who is
referring to whom, etc. Participants often unwittingly attend to matters of
production rather than to each other.
One of the major claims of the sociability approach is based on the observa-
tion that in online communication there is a general tendency for individuals
to engage in greater self-disclosure and more intimate exchanges. Online com-
munication tends to become more than just skin deep and to do so quite quickly
(Walther 1996). There are a number of unique qualities of the internet that
facilitate self-disclosure and intimacy online. Among the motivational forces of
this kind of interactive behavior is a greater sense of anonymity or non-identi-
fiability that leads to a reduced feeling of vulnerability and risk on the part of the
individuals. This is complemented by the absence of traditional gating features
such as physical appearance, mannerisms, apparent social stigmas such as stut-
tering, or visible shyness or anxiety which may prevent the establishment of any
close relationship. Online communications make it easier for users to find others
who share our specialized interests and values, particularly when there is a lack
of real world counterparts. Furthermore, users have more control over ones
side of the interaction and how one presents oneself.
Some authors claim that the internet has an enormous potential for provid-
ing tools to create effective inter-group contact (Floyd 1996; Thiedecke 2003).
Its unique characteristics provide a basis for such a contact, for example, by cre-
ating a secure environment, reducing anxiety, cutting geographical distances,
significantly lowering costs, and by creating equal status, intimate contact, and
cooperation (Walther, Anderson, and Park 1994; Bell and Kennedy 2007). In
addition, it offers the chance to receive approval from authorities. The internet
is also a major source of information, and its ability to answer questions and
provide knowledge in real time makes it a uniquely useful tool in promoting
inter-group information exchange, such as in online forums. The internet may
be said to provide opportunities for successful contacts which are superior to
those provided in a traditional face-to-face meeting. There clearly are, however,
potential obstacles to establishing a contact in cyberspace: uncertainty about the
gender and age of the contact, and the possibility of becoming a victim of cy-
bercrimes such as cybermobbing. Some means of making contacts on the inter-
net, however, prove to be exceptionally effective tools which improve interper-
sonal and inter-group relations.
Interactive learning systems are just such a platform where the technology
interacts with each user individually (Thimm 2005). In addition, social websites
show new ways of taking over social contact functions for millions of users.
4. Technically-mediated communication: Forms of text and talk
As recent research shows, people increasingly use all kinds of media in combi-
nation for interpersonal contact purposes. Boase et al.s (2006) nationally-rep-
resentative survey for the United States found that people who kept in contact
with those closest to them via e-mail also had more frequent and intense ex-
changes on the telephone with them, and more face-to-face contact with those
less important to them. Internet users had more of such less important relation-
ships. Further, e-mail users received more support from their contacts, and even
more so if they used multiple new media (such as instant messaging, mobile
phone, PDA, text messaging, or wireless internet connections). These findings
point to the complexity of combining various means of relaying messages and
organizing interpersonal relationships through media.
Of the many ways to make use of technical infrastructures for communi-
cative purposes, the following will be introduced briefly: e-mail (4.1.), chat
(4.2.), instant messaging (4.3.), blogs (4.4.), social network sites (4.5.), multi
user dungeons (4.6.), and Second Life (4.7.). Mobile phone communication
(4.8) will also be briefly discussed.
4.1. E-mail communication

The final years of the 20th century saw the introduction and widespread adoption
of e-mail as a means of interpersonal interaction. Whether in the private or the
professional sphere (Waldvogel 2007), e-mail is the most common of all methods
for developing and maintaining technically-mediated interpersonal contact
today. It may also be regarded as the most important single tool for communi-
cating and developing relationships since the telephone. As a means of com-
munication, it has received wide attention in applied linguistics (Baron 1998,
2000; Kleinberger Gnther and Thimm 2000; Ziegler and Drscheid 2002).
E-mail is not just electronic mail sent via the internet; e-mail communication
creates a psychological space in which pairs of people or groups of people
interact.
E-mail can be characterized as text talk; users type words to communicate
via e-mail. More technologically-sophisticated methods enable the incorpor-
ation of pictures and sounds into the message. The typing/writing barrier filters
some people out of the e-mail world. The benefits and drawbacks of e-mail com-
munication have been widely discussed and can be summarized as follows:
In the typed text of e-mail which goes by situated rule of conduct (Ziegler
and Drscheid 2002), other peoples faces or voices are lost. But creative means
were developed to make up for this limitation, such as secondary orality style of
writing (Koch and sterreicher 1985). One graphically-realized strategy is the
use of so called emoticons. As the term emoticon suggests, these keyboard faces
340 Caja Thimm
are used in texts to enhance emotional expression. E-mails show a wide variety
of style features and modes of communication. We find creative text and sign
combinations in different languages (donde trouve io the wrterbuch; wheres
the dictionary?) or various forms of conveying emotionality from the simple
smiley to complex graphematics (aber klAAr spendIEr ich dIr ein BIIIER; Of
course Ill buy you a glass of beer!; Kleinberger-Gnther and Thimm 2000).
Despite the lack of face-to-face cues, conversing via e-mail has evolved into a
sophisticated, expressive form of interpersonal exchange, whether in private or
in business communication.
E-mail exchanges do not occur in real time. Unlike face-to-face encounters
which are synchronous, e-mail interactions do not require participants to re-
spond on-the-spot. Because e-mail communication is asynchronous, the rate at
which interaction takes place is flexible. A dialog may occur over the course of
minutes, days, weeks, or months. Most e-mail programs allow for a carbon
copy (cc) to be sent to people or allow users to create a mailing list. These
features help expand a dyadic conversation into a group. Often enough, they are
the cause of e-mail based interpersonal conflicts. Forwarded mails or especially
including the previous mails as automatic attachments can be the source of in-
terpersonal conflicts.
Although e-mail certainly is a major part of modern interpersonal communi-
cation, it has shortcomings which have to be taken into account. For one, there is
the notion of social and information overload: people can be stressed by the fast
pace of incoming messages which are sent by different types of people with
many different agendas, and are filled with all sorts of information, some valu-
able, some useless. Also, missing face-to-face cues makes e-mails potentially
ambiguous. Even sophisticated e-mail users might experience miscommuni-
cation. Unwanted and uninvited mail, spam, has started to be a severe problem.
Some authors claim that due to the distance caused by mediated communi-
cation, individuals quickly open up and reveal a great deal about themselves in
e-mail (Siegetsleitener 2001). An excessively rapid and even false intimacy
may develop which might turn into undesirable reactions. One highly underesti-
mated risk is the public character of seemingly private communications. Privacy
in e-mail communication is tenuous, although people often perceive it as pri-
vate. An e-mail message is a record of an exchange that can be accessed by, for-
warded to, or unintentionally sent to a third party or an entire group of recipi-
ents. E-mails now count as legal documents and can be treated as evidence in a
court of law. This threat to privacy has become one of the central issues con-
cerning most technically-mediated types of communication.
4.2. Chat communication

One of the most frequent online activities of internet users is the use of chat
rooms. Chat rooms are forms of text-based communication that allow individ-
uals to interact with each other over the internet. This type of communication
has been likened to other forms of communication, such as casual face-to-face
interactions and telephone conversations, because it allows the exchange of
short synchronous messages in real time (Beiwenger 2001; Herring 2006).
In chat rooms, two or more people are allowed to post messages in real time
and see the messages on their screens as they are posted. When they enter chat
rooms, they are required to create a nickname which participants use to identify
who messages come from. However, since the nickname does not necessarily re-
veal the participants identity or their gender, they can remain anonymous if they
wish. When comparing chat rooms with face-to-face communication, the lack of
communicative directness becomes obvious; problems of cohesion and reference
determine the communication. Participants in chat rooms can only communicate
with others through typing their messages. Although chat room communi-
cation is often very personal, it is lacking certain types of information, including
physical appearances and nonverbal cues. Both visual anonymity and text-only
communication characterize chat communication and determine its content.
Chats can be used for various purposes. Beiwenger (2001) and Beiwenger
and Storrer (2005) show a variety of chat types, from tutoring in e-learning, to
chats as tools in intercultural exchanges and recruitment, to chat in therapeutic
discourse. Below, a short excerpt (with the psychologist John Suler) demon-
strates the confusing referentiality of the exchange. To avoid addressing the
wrong participants, these experienced users use the nicknames as points of ref-
erence:
1. Andrea: Is anyone here currently involved with someone they rst met online?
2. Butterfly:
I dont quite agree Andrea. I like the physical a whole lot too.
3. M-W: That collaborates my theory Kimberley.
4. Storm: People that are susceptible to projections get involved in online ro-
mance a lot
5. Peg: yes andrea
6. JohnSuler: thats an interesting collection of people, Kimberly.
7. Butterfly: bingo MW, its 95 % projection
8. Linux: I was involved for a year and a half with someone I met online
9. LullySing: What do you mean by currently involved R/t or C/t
10. Diane: I was married to the man I met online just last week.
11. Kevin: I separated from a women I met online after 3 months
12. Peg: congrats dianne!
In general, internet chat is classified as a hybrid medium between written text
and spoken language. This leads to some theoretical and structural conse-
quences for an account of the textual mode of this sort of dialog (Beiwenger
342 Caja Thimm
2003). The text-based character of internet chat has lead to the assumption that
chats are written conversations, applying verbal strategies which can be char-
acterized as secondary orality (Koch and sterreicher 1985). Looking at the
functional side of chatting, one can conclude that chats have taken over many
functions of interpersonal exchanges (Herring 2006). Internet chat has proven
to be a productive and creative form of technically-mediated interpersonal
exchange.
4.3. Instant messaging

Instant messaging (IM) offers two functions unique to computer-mediated com-
munication: the ability to identify who is connected to the shared space between
or among friends, and the ability to conduct a text-based conversation in real
time (Schneider et al. 2005). Not only in contexts of private interaction but also
for the work-place, instant messaging has proven to be a practical means of
interaction (Quan-Haase, Cothrel, and Wellman 2005). Increasingly, IM soft-
ware features audio and video components as well. Instant messaging has proven
to be one of the most popular online applications, resulting in dramatically in-
creased internet connection time. This phenomenon fosters a sense of (online)
community that perhaps no other application has achieved (Kim et al. 2007).
Some reasons for the popularity of instant messaging may be that this form of
communication is inexpensive compared to other forms of media such as the
telephone. Beyond economic factors, some other attributes also contribute to
its acceptance. Near-synchronous and text-based, instant messaging may be ad-
ministered in one-on-one or in group communication, virtually combining fea-
tures of the telephone, e-mail, and chat rooms into one (Lewis and Fabos 2005).
Instant messaging is particularly popular with teens who keep in touch with
their classmates and friends via instant messaging in selected groups.
History has shown that communication technologies are not replacing face-
to-face interactions (e.g., Walther 1992), but they are definitely influencing the
way in which people communicate. Instant messaging is an important tool for
local people to stay connected. The feeling of closeness enforced by simulta-
neous online presence and the limited amount of people participating in a given
IM interaction makes it a very effective mode of targeted interaction.
4.4. Blogs
Within the last few years, a new genre of computer-mediated communication
has emerged (Bruns and Jacobs 2006; Burg 2004; Schmidt 2006, 2007; Ingen-
hoff, Schneider, and Tanner 2008). Web logs, or blogs, are frequently updated
websites where content (text, pictures, sound files, etc.) is posted on a regular
basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. Readers often have the op-
tion to comment on any individual posting, which is identified by a unique URL.

With comments and references to other online sources in the postings as well as
with links to favorite blogs in the sidebar (the blogroll), blogs form a clustered
network of interconnected texts: the blogosphere. Schmidt (2007) states that
even though the majority of blogs are of the personal journal type which deals
with the bloggers personal experiences and reflections, there is a certain part of
interpersonal communication necessary.
There are two structural relationship types in blogs: hypertextual relation-
ships (hyperlinks) and social relationships (social ties). While hypertextual
relationships result from blogging episodes, social relationships can be main-
tained additionally by other means of communication and interaction outside of
blogging (e.g., face-to-face interaction or the exchange of personal e-mails).
Hypertextual relationships are established through different mechanisms built
into the blogging software, the most important being permalinks, which make it
possible to point directly to microcontent rather than linking whole blogs (see
Schmidt 2007). The basic relationship is between two blog postings, where one
posting refers to another by including a hyperlink to the permalink of the cited
posting. Trackbacks make these links reciprocal by adding a backlink from the
cited to the citing post, turning it into distributed conversations. Another way
to establish relationships between blogs is through the use of comments.
Hypertextual relationships can also convey different aspects of social rela-
tionships, such as in expressing consent or dissent with the cited source, signal-
ing a friendly or professional affiliation, or just adding to the context to the orig-
inal posting by providing links to additional information. The blogosphere can
therefore be regarded as a focused and specified network in which communi-
cation takes place via applying text and links.
Especially in journalism or corporate communication (Ingenhoff, Schnei-
der, and Tanner 2008), blogs have come to have significant influence upon pub-
lic opinion. Some researchers even see bloggers as the new whistleblowers in
cases where personal knowledge becomes an important factor in issues manage-
ment (Thimm and Berlinecke 2007).
4.5. Social networking sites

Social networking sites (SNSs) such as such as Facebook, Friendster, MySpace,
and the German StudiVZ, allow individuals to present themselves, articulate
their social networks, and establish or maintain contact to others (Lenhart and
Madden 2007). Social network sites enable individuals to articulate their social
connections visibly on the site, a practice that supports individuals interest in
pursuing self-presentational and social goals. Friends-links offer users a variety
of social contacts, allowing them to explore and interact with a larger network
via profiles and the communication tools they offer. Together, individual pro-
344 Caja Thimm
files, friends-links, and communication tools make up the backbone of social

network sites.
As Lenhard and Madden (2007) point out, these sites can be oriented towards
work-related matters (e.g., LinkedIn.com), initiating romantic relationships (the
original goal of Friendster.com), connecting those with shared interests in music
or politics (e.g., MySpace.com), or the college student population (the original
incarnation of Facebook.com and StudiVZ.com). Participants may use the sites
to interact with people they already know offline, or to meet new people. Face-
book, for example, enables users to present themselves in an online profile,
accumulate friends who can post comments on each others pages, and view each
others profiles. Facebook, StudiVZ, and SchlerVZ members can also join vir-
tual groups based on common interests, see what classes they are in together, and
find out about each others hobbies, interests, musical tastes, and romantic rela-
tionship status by reading through the information on members profile pages.
Previous research suggests that Facebook users engage more in searching for
people with whom they have an offline connection already than in browsing
for complete strangers to meet (Bigge 2006; boyd 2006). But Facebook has also
been used for coordinating purposes by teachers in classrooms as well as for self-
presentation and trust building (Mazer, Murphy, and Simonds 2007). Its appli-
cations for communicational purposes are therefore very broad indeed.
In brief, it can be summarized that online social network sites support both
the maintenance of existing social ties and the formation of new connections.
Online identities tend to raise individual consciousness insofar as they enforce
additional self-reflection. When putting up a profile, one has to consider who
should have access to their information, what their favorite music styles are, and
perhaps even describe personal hopes and dreams on a matching platform. The
various risks, however, which users often take unknowingly by uploading pri-
vate photos (boyd 2006), personal information and stories about intimate life
details, have been highly underestimated.
4.6. Multi-user dungeons

Multi user dungeons (MUDs) are text-based virtual realities, adventure role-
playing on the internet (Curtis 1997). In contrast to new commercial and graphi-
cal virtual worlds, they have existed in one form or another for over 20 years
(Keegan 1997). MUDs are more socially-oriented than newsgroups, yet more
centered around a common interest (role-playing) than chats, combining char-
acteristics of different forms of virtual communities. Although most MUDs are
simply text-based, they feature a highly-developed social system. While com-
puter-mediated communication can take place synchronously or asynchron-
ously, multi-user dungeons are synchronous. They often involve competitive
role-playing games. They are typically set in fantasy worlds in which players cre-
ate their own characters, choosing a name, a gender, and a race (e.g., demon,
elf, gnome). To join these virtual worlds with virtual rooms, shops, pubs, towns,
streets, forests, seas, ships, etc. each described by text only players log on to
a server hosting the MUD. In most cases, no graphical elements are provided.
These virtual worlds change continuously; they are dynamic worlds developed
by their inhabitants (players) and thus form universes of their own.
4.7. Communication in virtual worlds Second Life, a case study

Introduced in 2002 by Linden Lab, Second Life, often regarded as the first
metaverse, hosts a virtual world in which its users (also known as residents)
take on a so-called avatar persona with which one can interact with other avat-
ars and the virtual environment. Second Life provides a few rules and structures
as well as a simple interface for customizing ones avatar and for building ob-
jects within the world. The idea of being able to purchase digital goods with
Linden Dollars has started up a veritable economic metaverse along side the
fantasy environment. This has resulted in a massive burst of creativity leading to
the development of a complex and engaging multifaceted society with its own
economy, value systems, and socio-political structures.
The open-ended design of Second Life means that it lacks most elements
that would classify it as a game. It has neither a set of goals, nor rank values, nor
rules, nor contestants. All of these elements have to be quantified subjectively
by the individual him-/herself. Second Life allows its users to construct a com-
plete alternate reality with social groups, pastimes, and possessions.
Each member of Second Life adopts and adapts the form of an avatar that
can be customized to a very high degree, creating what he or she looks (or would
preferably look) like (Schroeder 2002). The avatar forms can be human or non-
human, but the vast majority of avatars appear to take on a humanoid form. The
avatar is the locus of identity in Second Life. When signing up for an account,
new residents must choose a first name and a last name with which they can be
identified. Second Life provides a number of mechanisms for communication
and coordination. Users may chat if they are physically in each others pro-
ximity in the game world, or instant message each other if they are not.
Participation in virtual metaverses like Second Life is particularly cumber-
some because the reach of fully-intentional communication has been expanded
from purely verbal to nonverbal levels (Geser 2007). Thus, users/avatars are
not only made responsible for the things they say, but also for the precise way
they look and behave. While physical bodies are shaped by exogenous biologi-
cal factors, the avatar is completely the product of ones own fantasy. Second
Lifes open-ended and social nature appeals to a broad range of users, from teen-
aged action gamers to middle-aged women. Such diversity leads to the creation
of an environment that is quite like a neighborhood. Second Life appeals to
346 Caja Thimm
people eager for experiences that are difficult for them to find in the physical
world. Some of the purchases or attires, like a special hair-do or outfit, lead to
differences in status between avatars. In their analysis of social differences in
Second Life, McKeon and Welch (2007) found four axes of social status along
which residents may occupy different positions: citizenship, wealth, reputation,
and level of education.
When looking at the role of interpersonal interaction in Second Life, some
new phenomena need to be considered. In telephone conferences as well as in
internet relay chats and e-mail exchanges, social interactions are completely re-
duced to a focused interaction centering on explicit formal issues; in Second
Life, such exchanges are embedded in a wider setting that encompasses preced-
ing stages in which members notice and greet each other, engage in small talk,
joking, and personal exchanges. Also there are subsequent phases where partici-
pants may continue talking in smaller groups and on more informal levels. Such
casual informal talk serves the purpose of social exchange and helps to establish
interpersonal bonds and multilateral networks.
There is a considerable amount of evidence suggesting that such virtual en-
counters are considered substantially rewarding to all participants. As they
take place in a situated social environment, they have much more similarity to
face-to-face contacts than simple chats or e-mail exchanges. Studies which as-
sessed the rate of user acceptance of virtual worlds and, specifically, Second
Life, show that about 70 % of online users agree that Second Life improves col-
laboration and communication; more than 60 % feel that it improves cooper-
ation between people (Gscheidle and Fisch 2007). Other results indicate that
people are using Second Life not to change their identity, but rather to explore
and visit new places and meet new people (Haas et al. 2007).
If users accept virtual worlds as a new way and channel to communicate,
collaborate, and co-operate, and if institutions emerge that offer a valuable ser-
vice for their users, virtual worlds might become the next generation of plat-
forms for internet users. However, in order to become mainstream, virtual
worlds like Second Life have many challenges to overcome, particularly in the
case of user.
4.8. Mobile phone communication

Mobile phone communication has introduced new parameters for interpersonal
interaction. For one, it offers ubiquity and accessibility (Thimm 2003) as well as
increased immediacy and intensity of interaction. In the third wave of mobile
communication (Steuerer and Bang-Jensen 2002), we are not only seeing text
message and mobile phone usage on the rise, but also specific services such as
geographic orientation with GPS devices, visual communication by digital
photos, and e-mail communication via internet mobile phones.
Of the various functions besides verbal telephone interactions, it is especially

the short message service (SMS) that has had the most profound impact on inter-
personal interaction. SMS is seen as a specific constellation of structural and
semiotic features which provides the basis for the emergence of particular speech
genres as determined by the communicative purposes of specific users (An-
droutsopoulos and Schmidt 2002). On a situational level, SMS is primarily used
for emotional, phatic, and action-oriented purposes (e.g., arranging meetings).
With regard to interactive structures, SMS is mainly used in dialogs which fol-
low highly-standardized sequence patterns. From a microlinguistic point of view,
the prevailing tendencies of SMS messages are: (a) reduction, which is attributed
to both the technical restrictions of the medium and the conceptually spoken
character of its use, and (b) creative language use, which draws on and playfully
combining a wide range of linguistic resources (Dring 2002).
5. Potentials, limits, and deficits of technically-mediated

communication
In many studies, two conflicting attitudes towards technically-mediated inter-

personal communication particularly online communication can be found.
Accordingly, technically-mediated communication is seen as either being char-
acterized primarily by major deficits, or as generally enhancing interpersonal
communication.
The fact remains, however, that the very nature of communication changes
when it is mediated by communication technologies. Critics see mediated com-
munication as impersonal, artificial, or even hostile. It has been said that com-
puter-mediated communication lacks many aspects of traditional communi-
cation such as physical presence, social, nonverbal, and contextual cues. From
this point of view, computer-mediated communication is utilitarian and not
relational; and as it lacks many face-to-face cues, it is more prone to misunder-
standings and interpersonal conflicts. Text-only computer-mediated communi-
cation has been claimed to be interactively incoherent due to limitations im-
posed by messaging systems on turn-taking and reference (e.g., Dring 2007).
New technologies and new modes of communication are constantly coming
into use. It can be argued that computer-mediated communication can, to a large
degree, liberate relationships from the confines of physical locality, thus creat-
ing opportunities for new and genuine interpersonal relationships and com-
munities (Rheingold 1993; Turkle 1996). Technically-mediated interaction is
generally assumed to fall short on many factors underlined in conventional the-
ories of relationship development. Traditional personal relationship theory sug-
gests that the relative lack of social cues and the potential for feedback delays
lead to uncertainty as to how users should and are expected to behave, and how
348 Caja Thimm
behavior can be explained. Media richness theorists (Daft and Lengel 1984)
suggest that computer-mediated communication has a narrower bandwidth and
less information richness than face-to-face communication. They argue that dif-
ferent communication channels have different ways of processing information:
rich media is more suitable than lean media for conveying socially-sensitive or
intellectually-difficult information, and for persuading, bargaining, or getting to
know someone.
Walthers (1992) social information-processing theory is representative of
many previous studies supporting the enhancement approach. Walther empha-
sizes that because people need to manage uncertainty and develop relationships,
they will adapt the textual cues to meet their needs when faced with a channel
that does not carry visual and auditory cues. Using e-mail as an example, Walther
illustrates that it provides no less opportunities for positive personal relation-
ships than face-to-face communication over time. In conclusion, he suggests
that computer-mediated communication is suitable to convey relational mess-
ages, but that that requires more time.
6. Where do we go from here? Future developments
The transformations resulting from our use of technology as a production

format ultimately become embedded in new social practices. Our dependence
on the possibility of communicating anytime anywhere is going to increase even
further. The impact of communication technology on our experience and pursuit
of interpersonal relations, as well as on the ability to contribute to reproducing
society, trust, and social commitments, is enormous. Even if on an interpersonal
level we find it difficult to achieve a sense of being in the same space, our pro-
ximity to one another is different when technically-mediated than when we
communicate face-to-face. Many people now feel closer to their communicative
partners when they interact via mediated channels. And as we spend greater
amounts of time in technically-mediated communication and experience, these
attributes of technical proximity will increasingly become a matter of day-to-
day life.
The popularity of technically-mediated communication will continue to
grow independently of developments in the social and communication sciences.
Just as the telephone has altered the notion of conversation by enabling a form
of live talk between people in different geographical locations, the web, simi-
larly, is now broadening the concepts of immediacy, presence, and intimacy.
And with the onset of social websites and user-generated content, we have
moved one step closer towards the digital self.
Notes
1. Facebook (http://facebook.com), YouTube (http://www.YouTube.com), Second Life

(http://secondlife.com), studiVZ (http://www.studivz.net), flickr (http://www.flickr.
com); all sites accessed December 10, 2007.
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13. Feeling space: Interpersonal communication
and spatial semiotics
Louise J. Ravelli and Maree Stenglin
1. Introduction
In language, a range of resources contribute to interpersonal meanings and re-

lations, and form a key part of our participation in and understanding of social
life. Similarly, semiotic systems other than language can be seen to construe
comparable meanings in relation to interpersonal communication. In the built
environment, for example, spatial semiotics actively construe interpersonal re-
lations between the interactants within and around the space. Buildings make us
feel: they may seem inviting or intimidating; they may make us feel comfortable
or uncomfortable; as if we belong or as if we are intruding. This chapter will ex-
plore issues of interpersonal communication in relation to questions of spatial
semiotics. Departing from the social semiotic work of Halliday (1978), inter-
preted in relation to multimodal texts by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), and
drawing on the semiotics of place by Scollon and Scollon (2003), the chapter
will demonstrate how it is that many familiar notions from linguistic studies of
interpersonal communication such as issues of power and social distance can
be applied to an understanding of spatial semiotics. This chapter will provide an
overview of key literature in the multimodal discourse analysis field and at the
same time introduce new systems for describing interpersonal meanings in built
spaces, in terms of how affective meanings are construed. These notions will be
demonstrated in relation to the Scientia building at the University of New South
Wales, Sydney, a relatively new landmark building which has been pivotal in
reconstruing the visual identity of the University. We will examine how issues
such as power, social distance, and affect are evoked through the exterior and in-
terior of the building, and what these mean for relations between the University
as an institution and its key stakeholder communities: its students and the gen-
eral public. In turn, this expanded understanding of interpersonal communi-
cation will be turned back to questions of language, considering its relevance to
a broader understanding of communication.
The Scientia building1 has been chosen as a case study for this chapter be-
cause of its pivotal role in contributing to the reconceptualization of the identity
(visual and discursive) of the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Located
in Sydney, Australia, the UNSW is a major national university, albeit one with
a relatively short history (it was established in 1949), and one founded in the
sciences and technology, which remain its research strengths. A significant pro-
356 Louise J. Ravelli and Maree Stenglin
gram of campus redevelopment in the 1980s and 1990s culminated in the open-
ing of the Scientia in 1999. Designed by MGT Architects, it is a ceremonial
building and was awarded a major public architecture award, the 2000 Sir Zel-
man Cowan Award for Public Buildings, by the Royal Australian Institute of
Architects. Described as a rare, highly refined work and a consummate work
of public architecture,2 the Scientia has somehow managed to encapsulate a
new identity for the University. It both expresses the power and confidence of
the University as an institution, and invites those who enter the campus stu-
dents, staff, visitors3 to identify with the institution. The purpose of using the
Scientia as a case study is to illustrate how a mere building can do all this to
explore how spatial semiotics can express meanings such as these, and to exam-
ine how we may respond to such meanings.
2. Outline of the approach: Social semiotics
To understand how a building such as the Scientia makes meaning, and specifi-
cally how it functions interpersonally, we need to clarify the overall approach of
this chapter. This chapter is informed by social semiotic theory. Social semiotics
focuses on the social dimensions involved in all meaning-making practices. It
has been strongly inspired by the research of a group of linguists working with
systemic functional theory, namely, Halliday (1978, 1985/1994), Halliday and
Hasan (1976), Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), Hodge and Kress (1988), Mar-
tin (1992), and Matthiessen (1995).
In addition to inspiring a rich theory of language (see Chapter 6 this vol-
ume), systemic functional theory has also been used to theorize a wide range of
communicative modes as well as multimodal texts:
visual images (Kress and van Leeuwen 1990, 2006; OToole 1994)
movement (Martinec 1997, 1998a, 1998b, 2000a, 2000b)
speech, music, and sound (van Leeuwen 1991, 1999)
architecture/three-dimensional space (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Martin
and Stenglin 2007; OToole 1994, 2004; Ravelli 2000, 2006; Scollon and
Scollon 2003; Stenglin 2002, 2004, 2007, in press a, in press b, in press c, in
press d; van Leeuwen 1998, 1999, 2005a; White 1994).
filmic texts (Pun 2005)
hypermedia texts (Djonov 2005; Lemke 2002).
The main resource social semioticians have used to theorize all of these com-
municative modes has been Hallidays metafunctional hypothesis (1978). This
hypothesis states that a semiotic system such as language simultaneously fulfils
three communicative functions: first, an ideational function, in which language
constructs representations of human experience; second, an interpersonal func-
Feeling space: Interpersonal communication and spatial semiotics 357
tion which is concerned with our participation in speech situations, and the ex-
pression of our attitudes; and third, the textual function, the organization of a
text into a meaningful whole. The ideational and textual metafunctions will be
briefly introduced here, and then the interpersonal metafunction will be intro-
duced in more detail, using examples drawn from both language and visual
images, and relating it to spatial semiotics. Following Kress and van Leeuwen
(2006), when these functions are extended to spatial semiotics, we will use the
terms representational, interpersonal, and compositional meanings, equating
with the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions respectively. These
should be seen to be largely equivalent, and see also Lemke (1998), OToole
(1994) and Ravelli (2006) for additional options.
2.1. The ideational metafunction

The ideational metafunction is concerned with how events are portrayed, in-
cluding the activities which are construed as taking place, represented in lan-
guage through particular Process types. Events also include what is represented
as being involved in those activities, Participants, and the Circumstances under
which these events take place. When looking at a spatial text such as a build-
ing, it can first be considered in terms of the event being portrayed. The event
may be static, represented by conceptual Processes, and characterized as being
without vectors, or the event may be active, represented by narrative Processes,
and characterized as having vectors (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006; see also Ra-
velli in press). Typically, when looking at a building, we generally expect it to
be without vectors buildings should be static, not dynamic! Exceptions to this
include the use of vectors pointing upwards, as with skyscrapers, to indicate dy-
namism and power, or architecturally innovative buildings which use unusual
vectors to suggest dynamism in the building. In addition, ideational meanings
can be construed in a spatial text through the denotation and connotation of
signs, in particular, the materials used in construction, and shapes in the exterior
or interior design. For example, in Sydney, Australia, the use of a material such
as sandstone connotes both nature, history, and status, as it is an expensive,
natural material used in most of Sydneys significant historical buildings.
2.2. The textual metafunction

The textual metafunction is concerned with bringing together the disparate el-
ements of a text into a coherent whole, and relating the parts to each other. In
language, relevant resources include the complementary patterns of Theme and
Information, enabling a text to construct a particular method of development,
and to come to a point of News (Halliday 1994; Martin and Rose 2003). In
images, it encompasses five key elements (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006).
Firstly, information values can be construed in a text depending on how items

are placed in relation to each other. In a building, for example, placement of an
important symbol up high gives it an Ideal information value, whereas the
door at entrance level has the value of the Real (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006:
260; see this also for further description of other information values). Secondly,
some of the componential elements may be made salient, through a range of re-
sources such as using large size, a contrasting color, and so on, to make an el-
ement stand out. The textual metafunction also encompasses framing, that is,
the extent to which elements are construed as being the same, through seam-
less framing devices, or different, through strong framing devices, such as a
change in design practice, use of a border or space to define elements, and so on.
The use of design features may also affect the reading path of the text, that is,
the likely way a user will take in a visually complex text, and rhythm relates to
the way in which design features are used to create cohesion. In buildings,
placement on the vertical axis is often used to attribute Ideal values to important
signifiers, such as religious, national or commercial emblems. The relation of
one building to another can be made seamless or distinct, through framing prac-
tices (for a full description of all of these aspects, see Kress and van Leeuwen
2006, and Ravelli in press; for a complementary and slightly different perspec-
tive on ideational and textual meanings in three-dimensional space, see Stenglin
2004: 447478, Martin and Stenglin 2007, and Stenglin in press a).
2.3. The interpersonal metafunction: Overview

The interpersonal metafunction in systemic functional theory is concerned with
participation and interaction, as well as the negotiation of feelings, attitudes,
and judgments. In language, for example, we facilitate interaction by taking
turns in dialogue, adopting different speech roles, initiating interaction with
others as well as responding to such interactions in supportive or confronting
ways. We can also use language to describe how we feel, or how we feel about
other people or things.
Like language, other semiotics such as visual images also have resources for
constituting social interaction. Kress and van Leeuwens seminal work on
images (1990, 2006) is the springboard for much social semiotic analysis of
other non-linguistic modes, and aspects of their interpersonal descriptions will
be briefly described here, before explaining the extension to spatial semiotics.
Kress and van Leeuwen have shown, for example, that the social relations
between viewer and the participants represented in an image are determined in
the first instance by contact: whether the image demands visual attention or
merely offers something for contemplation. Represented participants that
enter into direct eye-contact with viewers demand visual engagement while
those that direct their gaze elsewhere offer themselves up for observation. In
buildings, contact is realized by whether or not the user can engage with the in-
terior of the building, for example by seeing inside it through windows or glass
walls. Where walls are solid, and there are no windows, or they are obscured,
the building is an object of contemplation, and does not invite direct contact
with it (see Mills 2006).
A second important dimension of the social meaning of images is social dis-
tance. In language, social distance may be realized by a variety of resources,
such as the choice of vocative used in interaction: formal names and titles im-
plying distance, familiar names implying intimacy. The distances people keep
from one another depend closely on their social relationships and in images
this is reflected in different types of shots. Close shots (including head and
shoulders) and very close shots (the head, or part of the face) suggest we have an
intimate relationship with the visual subject. Medium close shots (which cut the
subject off at the waist) and medium shots (cut off at the knees) suggest social
familiarity, but not intimacy. Medium long shots (full figure), long shots (sub-
ject occupying approximately half the image), and very long shots (anything
wider) suggest we have a public acquaintance with what is being portrayed. In
buildings, social distance is also realized by the distance of the viewing posi-
tion: from what distance it is that we can see the building. As Kress and van
Leeuwen note (2006: 128):
We can see a building from the distance of someone about to enter it, in which case
we will not see the whole of the building [] We can also see it from the distance of
someone who just identified it as his or her destination, and is surveying it for a mo-
ment, before moving towards it. In that case the frame will include only the building
and leave out the surrounding environment. Or we can see it, so to speak, from be-
hind the gates that keep the public at a respectful distance from the palace, or the for-
tress, or the nuclear reactor, and in that case the representation will include also the
space around the building.
Thus, social distance in relation to buildings is likely to be transformed depend-
ing on the nature of the approach to the building.
A third important resource for interaction in images is power. Power relates
to the relative equality between interactants, and in language, is realized by such
features as the reciprocity in use of linguistic options: for example, whether
both interactants may initiate speech turns, or whether similar types of vocatives
may be used reciprocally (see, for example, Poynton 1989). For both images
and three-dimensional objects, power involves some kind of angle. When we
look at objects at our own level (the level angle) they tend to admit a degree of
social equality, as the viewing position is reciprocal. If we are positioned higher
than what is displayed (high angle), we tend to be in a position of superiority,
while standing lower (low angle) usually signals respect or inferiority to what or
who is observed. Buildings typically manifest power on the vertical axis, using
height to signal this. As Kress and van Leeuwen note (2006: 251): What towers
over us has, by design, power over us, and is, by design, socially distant []
Further, the variable of power in relation to space may be realized in other ways,
such as by particularly large size or solidity on the horizontal axis, giving it a
horizontal presence in the visual field. Or, power may be manifested on the hori-
zontal plane in terms of the internal organization of spaces, for example, placing
public spaces to the front and more private spaces to the rear. Stenglin (in press
b) uses the term horizontal hierarchy to refer to such horizontal power relations.
Interaction may also be affected by the nature of the involvement one has
with the text: in language, direct involvement can be realized by such features as
first and second person possessive pronouns, signaling an alignment with what
is represented in the text; whereas third person pronouns would realize a more
detached perspective, signaling distance (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 139). In
images and buildings, involvement is realized on the horizontal axis, with dif-
ferent angles signaling different kinds of involvement. The front-on angle real-
izes direct involvement; the oblique signals detachment. Thus, a door which
opens directly to the street invites stronger involvement than one which is
placed on an angle.
A further dimension of interaction is modality. In language, modality refers
to the modification of propositions and proposals, enabling the speaker to in-
trude on the message (Eggins 2004: 172), using such devices as modal adverbs
and modal adjuncts. Kress and van Leeuwen extend the notion of modality to in-
terpersonal meanings in images, relating it to how real or truthful an image
is presented as being. Such a measure, however, needs to be evaluated against a
specific coding orientation. For example, in a naturalistic coding orientation,
real images have a wide range of colors, realistic contextual backgrounds, and
a mid-level of color saturation. In a sensory coding orientation, in contrast,
color differentation and contextual backgrounds may be more restricted, and
very high color saturation is the norm. There is a complex relation between the
realization of modality in relation to coding orientation, and Kress and van
Leeuwen (2006) should be referred to for further details. When applied to spa-
tial semiotics, the overall coding orientation of the text becomes important.
Generally, we expect real buildings to be conventional built in a style which
is common for a particular time and place (emphasizing that, as with all these
meanings, this is a social-semiotic construction). Buildings which depart rad-
ically from convention (the famous Bilbao effect) draw attention to them-
selves, raising questions about how real they are, and drawing praise or ap-
probation for how amazing they are.
To summarize, contact, social distance, power, involvement and modality
are some of the important resources for constructing and maintaining interac-
tion in linguistic, visual, and spatial texts.4
With respect to interpersonal meaning and space, Scollon and Scollon
(2003) have applied several of the tools developed by Kress and van Leeuwen to
their theory of geosemiotics. Geosemiotics explores the social meanings of the

material placement of signs and draws strongly on notions of represented/inter-
active participants as well as modality. This is clearly an important starting
point for considering spatial semiotics. Extending these notions, this chapter
will expand Kress and van Leeuwens notions of contact, social distance, power,
involvement and modality, by applying them to space, in particular, the analysis
of the ways interpersonal meanings are organized in the Scientia building.
2.4. The interpersonal metafunction and Appraisal

An additional dimension of interpersonal meanings, related more to the ex-
pression of feelings, attitudes, and judgments, rather than the Mood-related cat-
egories that have inspired Kress and van Leeuwen, is that of APPRAISAL. To
analyze these, Martin (1997, 2000), Martin and White (2005) and White (1997,
1998, http://www.grammatics.com/appraisal) have developed the APPRAISAL
network. APPRAISAL offers systems that describe the semantics of evaluation,
that is, how participants are feeling (Affect), the judgments they make (Judg-
ment) and the value they place on the various phenomena of their experience
(Appreciation). In language, such meanings are typically realized by a variety of
linguistic resources, such as the choice of lexical item, whether it be a verb,
noun, adjective, or adverb.
The system of APPRAISAL has recently been extended to the analysis of
images (Martin 2001; Painter in press), and it is a particularly important part of
the exploration of spatial semiotics. This chapter will draw on APPRAISAL
theory, in particular, the system of ATTITUDE to explore how a space can make
its occupants or users feel. To do this it will use two recently developed theor-
etical tools for exploring interpersonal meaning in three-dimensional space.
They are Binding and Bonding (Stenglin 2002, 2004, 2007, in press a; in press b;
in press c; in press d; Martin and Stenglin, 2007).
Binding is a scale that organizes spaces along a continuum from extreme
openness to extreme closure. Extremes of Binding evoke claustrophobic and
agoraphobic responses, whereas median choices produce comfort zones of se-
curity and safety, or freedom and possibilities. Binding is realized by a combi-
nation of variable elements (such as color and light) and invariable elements
(such as walls, floors, and ceilings).
Bonding is concerned with the communing potential of spaces. It is realized
in part by bonding icons, social emblems of belonging that people rally around.
It is also realized by the hybridization of space one space designed to serve
many social functions and facilitate value transfer. Binding draws strongly on
Affect from Appraisal theory, the area concerned with emotions and feelings, in
particular, feelings of security and insecurity. Bonding, on the other hand, draws
on all three Appraisal systems: Affect, Judgment and Appreciation.
3. Concepts and theory: Applied to the Scientia
3.1. Introducing the Scientia

Let us first look at the Scientia. Visually, the Scientia dominates the campus,
from the point of view of one of its main pedestrian entrances (see Photo 1).5 It
stands at the top of the University Mall, a central pedestrian link from the
main road (Anzac Parade) to the Scientia. As the campus is on a sloping site, the
Scientia is literally up high, as the mall ascends to it. Externally, the Scientia
consists of two large rectangular shapes, set perpendicular to the mall, divided
by a central passage. This passage is constructed of branching arms which thrust
Photo 1. Long shot of the Scientia

up towards the sky, and which enclose a suspended glass structure which spans
the two rectangles, but which can be walked through (underneath), to the other
side. The rectangular blocks are made of sandstone; the thrusting arms of lami-
nated jarrah6 poles, tapering at the endpoints, and supporting the glass and steel
of the enclosure. It is this central tree-like structure which marks the unique vis-
ual identity of the Scientia, and which is now ubiquitous in all aspects of Uni-
versity marketing (see Photo 2).
Photo 2. Medium shot of the Scientia (front side)
Importantly, the Scientia changes in identity on approach: at the entrance to

the campus, it is visually prominent (because of its size, location, and unusual
architecture) but nevertheless distant. It therefore functions somewhat as a
lure.7 As one approaches it, the size of the Scientia begins to dominate, until,
arriving at the threshold, this is maximized to its full potential (see Photo 3).
Here, there is perhaps a moment of confusion. There is no entry point to the
building on this side, and the passageway is potentially intimidating. However,
there is nowhere else to go, with only two poorly indicated alternative paths to
the left, and no pathway to the right. On passing through the passage, one as-
cends steps to the other side, and finds a differently smaller scaled Scientia
Photo 3. Close shot of the Scientia (looking up)

Photo 4. Medium shot of the Scientia (rear view)
to the rear, with a clearly indicated entry, including an oblique panel which
channels users in through the entry (see Photo 4). Thus, as a text, the Scientia
unfolds as it is experienced (that is, logogenetically), and the meanings ex-
pressed shift according to the point at which one is viewing or experiencing the
building.
An additional important feature of the exterior is the inclusion of contrasts,
in terms of materials, finishes, and shapes. The heavy sandstone blocks, rec-
tangular and static in shape, contrast with the largely transparent central struc-
ture and the dynamic thrust of its upward vectors; natural stone contrasts with
manufactured glass and steel; opaque and slightly rough stone contrasts with
smooth and transparent glass, and so on. The significance of these contrasts will
be elaborated below in relation to Bonding icons.
Internally, the Scientia primarily consists of a main reception hall (on the
left, looking at the front of the building), used for receptions after graduations,
and for other functions (as well as for exams sometimes!), and a secondary hall
(on the right), used primarily for meetings, and which also houses a temporary
restaurant. These two spaces are connected by the entrance vestibule, entered
from the rear of the building, and the central atrium. There are a number of other
spaces in the building, such as smaller office rooms, and a University cinema fa-
cility.
3.2. General interpersonal meanings
As with any other semiotic system, spatial semiotic systems operate across the
three metafunctions proposed by Halliday for language, as described above.
That is, spatially, meaning is made through the ideational function about what is
being represented, representational meanings; about the nature and organization
of parts in relation to the whole through the textual function, compositional
meanings; as well as about the interactions between participants and their
stances and attitudes towards the text, interpersonal meanings. Whether in lan-
guage, image, or space, all of the three metafunctions are simultaneously present
in any text, and while operating largely independently, they nevertheless inter-
act in important ways. Our discussion of the Scientia will focus on interpersonal
meanings, but it is important to remember that representational and organiz-
ational meanings contribute in fundamental ways to the overall meaning of the
Scientia as a text. These will be mentioned where appropriate, but see Ravelli
(in press) for a discussion of each of the metafunctions in relation to this text;
and Martin and Stenglin (2007) and Stenglin (in press a) for an analysis of all
three metafunctions in two very different museums.
What we aim to achieve with this analysis is an account of how it is that a
building, a concrete, material object, can function to make interpersonal mean-
ings, in a similar way to a linguistic text. We want to consider the interactional
relations that are enabled between users, and the building, and hence by impli-
cation, with the University as represented by the building. What impressions
does it make on those who see it, walk towards it, and possibly enter it?
When the variables of power and social distance are considered, it soon
becomes evident that the building manifests a motif of contrast, a motif which
characterizes the building as a whole.8 On the one hand, the Scientia is first
glimpsed at the start of the pedestrian mall as being far away, and while dis-
tinctive and interesting, it appears relatively small (see again Photo 1). Thus, at
the point of greatest social distance, the Scientia is not necessarily overpower-
ing. As one approaches the building, however, and social distance decreases, the
Scientia becomes larger and larger, and its height, solidity, and quality, all be-
come more evident, until at the threshold, the point of least social distance, the
power variable is maximized (see again Photo 4). Here, the status and authority
of the institution is clearly evoked: users are supposed to be impressed.
At the threshold point (see again Photo 3), where power is maximized, the
angle of involvement is frontal. Kress and van Leeuwen (2006: 145) note that
this is the angle of maximum involvement; hence it can also be maximally
confronting for the user, and it is significant that there is no actual entry at this
point. Instead, the visitor is lured via the stairs to the rear of the building. From
this side, the scale of the building, while still impressive, is significantly re-
duced, and a polished granite wall is placed on an oblique angle to channel users
in to the building. Overall, then, while the power of the institution is clearly as-
serted on approach, the actual entry itself is made more inviting and welcoming.
As a text, the Scientia manifests complex interpersonal meanings, counter-bal-
ancing the need to both impress and include.
This counter-balancing of interactional effects is replicated in other interper-
sonal systems. In terms of contact, parts of the Scientia, such as the sandstone
anks, are solid, preventing any engagement with what is within. Other parts,
such as the central structure, are transparent, inviting an inside view. Louvres at
the rear may be open or closed, and when open, allow a view through the building
to the sky on the other side (see again Photo 4; rear). Thus, the Scientia functions
both as an Offer and a Demand, suggesting that it is both an object for contem-
plation and an object to be engaged with. At the same time, the solid sandstone
anks evoke a naturalistic coding orientation, within which these parts of the
building are very real and familiar in terms of the local architecture. The central
structure, however, with its dynamic and unconventional design, is both low mo-
dality (is that really a building?) and hyper-real (wow; look at that!).
In three-dimensional spaces, an additional system of interpersonal meaning
needs to be considered, that of the Control exerted over users, and the relative
freedom or restriction of their behavior. Control is realized by the freedom of
access to the building and its interior, and the pathways leading to it, and by the
absence or presence of restrictions (such as surveillance) on behavior (Ravelli
in press).9 In the Scientia, the strong directionality of the pedestrian mall, com-
bined with the lure of the Scientia at the end of it, implies a Command to users to
embark on this pathway. However, the absence of restrictions on this path
there are no fences or gates to negotiate, no security guards to pass means that
the Command functions more as an Invitation: it is the users choice to embark
on this path or not, and once on it, there are possibilities for diversions and al-
ternative destinations on the way (even if these are not made prominent).
Overall, then, in interpersonal terms, the Scientia both welcomes and im-
presses. It indicates clearly to the user that the University to which the Scientia
belongs is an important place, one which should be taken seriously. Simulta-
neously, it also indicates that the user is welcome to enter, and indeed is invited
to do so. Through resources such as those described here, the building and the
institution establish their own persona, and indicate appropriate roles and re-
lations for users to take up. In this way, the building functions to create inter-
personal meanings between the institution and the users who interact with it.
3.3. Binding and Bonding

In considering interpersonal meanings, it is important to remember that inter-
action also involves personal responses. One of the most interesting aspects of
interpersonal meanings in relation to spatial semiotics is in terms of how a
building makes us feel. Is it a space in which we feel comfortable and secure, or

at risk and uneasy? Is it a space with which we identify, or a space which alien-
ates?10 To address such issues in spatial semiotics, the systems of Binding and
Bonding, introduced briefly above, have been proposed (Stenglin 2004, 2007, in
press a, in press b, in press c, in press d). We will now explore these systems in
some detail, and relate them to the exterior and interior of the Scientia.
3.3.1. Binding
Binding is concerned with the interpersonal relationship between a user and a
space, and is determined by the way a space closes in or opens up around a
user. If a space closes in on a person too tightly, for example, that person is
likely to feel smothered. In contrast, if a space does not provide enough enclos-
ure, a person may feel dwarfed and overpowered. Thus, Binding is concerned
with the feelings of security or insecurity people may experience in a space.
As Binding deals with feelings, which are gradable, it is best represented as
a scale or topology. Insecurity lies at both ends of the scale, while security is
positioned at the heart of Binding, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Binding scale: security and insecurity
Importantly, the categories of security and insecurity are not absolutes, but are
subject to cultural, social, and individual variation based on personal experi-
ences of space. Culture, geography and climate influence spatial preferences
in a cold climate, for instance, strongly Bound spaces are likely to be experi-
enced as being more secure. Social factors, such as processes of change, can
also influence the experience of space. The first modernist homes of the late
1940s, with full-length glass sliding doors and open plan living areas, provoked
strong feelings of insecurity (Andersons 2002), but today would be considered
neither radical nor challenging, because such designs have become very fam-
iliar (Spigelman 2001: 180). Despite such potential variations in the responses
to space, it is nevertheless possible to establish patterns of similarity in the types
of spaces that make people feel secure and insecure. It is to these patterns for
spatial security that we turn to now.
3.3.1.1. Security
Security, the middle ground for Binding, has two choices, the Bound and the
Unbound. Each establishes a relationship of security with users. Spaces that fall
within the Bound dimension evoke feelings of comfort, safety, and protection
by enveloping around the occupant both horizontally and vertically to create a
womb-like enclosure. This is typically provided by vertical enclosures such as
walls, which envelop around an occupant in much the same way that a carers
arms may fold around a young child. Horizontal enclosures also provide spatial
security and include ceilings (which define the upper limits of a space) and
floors (which define its lower limits). The way people feel in a Bound space is
encapsulated in the following quote from an architectural reviewer.
The home has a warm, calm and inviting presence, and it is not just the smiling face
of owner Ann Godden greeting us that makes us feel welcome. It is the house itself
(Hayes 2005: 10).
In Unbound spaces, security is experienced as partial freedom from enclosure,
and can be created by receding walls and elevated ceilings which increase the
volume of space around the occupant. This makes the area feel more spacious
and open, and the user feels free and unencumbered. An abundance of natural
light from glass ceilings or glass window walls can achieve the same effect, be-
cause light increases the degree to which users are able to perceive both depth
and volume.
The following quote from a home-owner who has recently completed a
large-scale home renovation captures the essence of feeling Unbound.
The thing is not the size in terms of floor space, but the size in terms of how it makes
us feel. It gives us a sense of freedom, a sense of space [] you need spaces that are
free and comfortable (Burns, SMH Domain, July 14, 2005: 10).
3.3.1.2. Spatial insecurity

Insecurity may be created by choices which are Too Bound or Too Unbound.
Spaces that are Too Bound set up a smothering, suffocating relationship with
their occupants. They include caves, tunnels, prison cells, elevators, and mines.
Spaces that are Too Unbound do not provide enough enclosure for occupants.
They can be found at the edge of a cliff or the glass wall of a skyscraper where
the floor plane drops away suddenly, or in cavernous spaces that soar vertically
high above occupants. Such spaces are often found in public buildings such as
museums and cathedrals, and may make people feel diminished, vulnerable, and
overpowered especially if users are unaccustomed to such over-scaling.11
3.3.1.3. Binding in the Scientia

For reasons of space, our analysis of Binding in the Scientia will be selective
rather than comprehensive, focusing on the rear entry to the building, the vesti-
bule, and the central atrium (see Photo 4 again). Generally in the Scientia, we
see the same motif of contrast in terms of Binding that has already been ident-
ified in relation to other interpersonal factors. At the rear of the building, where
the actual entrance is located, there are two Bound spaces. The first is the entry
leading into the building (see Photo 5).
In the entry, two solid walls, a sandstone wall on the left and an angled gran-
ite wall on the right, evoke a solid sense of enclosure. As visitors to the building
move past these entrance walls, large glass sliding doors open automatically and
visitors are received into the second Bound space: a small vestibule consisting
of a low white ceiling and two permeable walls (see Photo 6). At the same time,
large glass window-walls lure them into the spaces to their left and directly
ahead (see Photo 7).
By clearly delineating the boundaries of both the entrance itself and the ves-
tibule inside, through choices for solid enclosure, a relationship of security is
constructed between the spaces and users. Thus, at the point where the power
variable is minimized, security is strongly evoked.
Photo 5. Rear entry to the Scientia

Photo 6. Vestibule of the Scientia
Photo 7. Transition between Vestibule and Atrium

In the interior, the Scientia building also contains spaces that are Unbound,
such as the central and iconic atrium. This atrium houses a huge triple volume of
space. Both the walls and the ceiling are constructed solely from glass. This is a
strong choice for Unbinding as it constructs an open, light-filled, diaphanous
space that contrasts markedly with the firmly enclosed opaque spaces, which
characterize the masonry of the entrance walls and vestibule.
In particular, large sheets of plate glass unbind the interior of the atrium by
metaphorically dissolving horizontal and vertical planes separating internal
from external spaces. The use of glass walls and ceilings thus project the atrium
onto the landscape and extend the feeling of spaciousness to include the out-
doors: the trees to the rear, the mall and University in front and the sky overhead
(see Photo 8). Unbinding in these ways brings interior and exterior spaces into a
Photo 8. View from the interior

strong interrelationship. The user therefore experiences security as freedom

from firm spatial enclosure.
3.3.1.4. Gradations of Binding

As noted, Binding is represented by a scale, and so finer distinctions may need
to be made between spaces which are strongly, weakly, or moderately Bound or
Unbound. The entrance vestibule in the Scientia building, for example, would
only be weakly Bound, as the space is not enclosed on all four sides, while the
atrium would be strongly Unbound as optimal choices for Unbinding are used
both vertically and horizontally.
It is interesting to note that a gradation of choices offers architects and those
involved in the design of space a tremendous resource for designing comfort-
able and secure environments. Environmental psychologist, Anita Rui Olds
(1994), argues that people need small shifts in the design of spaces to keep
them feeling alert and responsive. According to Rui Olds, moderate variations
prevent boredom and withdrawal and help people to stay comfortable. It thus
seems that slight variation is the key to maintaining feelings of security in three-
dimensional spaces as abrupt shifts can overwhelm people.
Having explored the various dimensions of spatial security and insecurity,
the Binding scale can now be summarized as seen in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Binding Scale: strongly (st), moderately (mo), weakly (w) Bound and
Unbound.
3.3.1.5. Materialization
The next necessary step is to identify how Bound and Unbound spaces are ma-
terialized, that is, to identify the resources that are used to create these different
feelings of enclosure. In analyzing Binding, it is firstly important to account for
the context particularly the surrounding climactic and geographical condi-
tions together with information about technological innovations and cultural
orientations to security (for further information about these contextual factors,
see Stenglin 2004: 116129).
Spaces then need to be analyzed for both variable and invariable elements.
The invariables refer to the fixed, structural elements constructing a space, and
consist of three intersecting planes: an overhead plane (roof and/or ceiling);
wall planes; and a base plane (floor). These define the limits of a space (Ching
1996: 99) and also determine its Permeability, that is, the extent to which a
space can be penetrated, either physically or visually, by the elements. Permea-
bility may also be materialized by implying enclosure, using false ceilings or
movable screens, for instance.
The variable elements which materialize Binding are referred to as Am-
bience, that is, the affordances that can easily be changed in a space, in par-
ticular, color, light, texture and pattern.12 Together with Permeability, choices
for Ambience co-articulate to determine the firmness of enclosure in a three-di-
mensional space (and see further descriptions in Stenglin 2004: 210394).
Materialization will now be considered in detail, using the two spaces from
the Scientia Building we have already mentioned: the atrium and the entrance
together with vestibule. When analyzing the Permeability and Ambience of a
space, it is vital to consider these two systems in tandem because they work
together to construct the feeling of enclosure in a given space.
3.3.1.6. Permeability: Overhead planes

On the overhead plane, Bound choices shut the environment out by sealing the
ceiling from the sky and the elements through choices for occlusion. Unbound
choices tend to physically seal the elements out but visually open the space to
the environment overhead through choices for diaphany.
Three main elements need to be considered when analyzing overhead
planes: the type of material, the height of the ceiling, and its shape. Opaque ma-
terials such as stone occlude a space and make it feel Bound, as we saw in the
entrance vestibule to the Scientia building, while diaphanous materials like
glass connect the atrium of the Scientia with the sky overhead, making the space
feel Unbound (see Photo 9).
In terms of height, low ceilings make a space feel Bound, while height
makes it feel more expansive. Again, the low height of both entrance spaces to
the Scientia (about 2.53 meters) is a strong choice for creating a firm enclosure,
while the large triple volume of space in the atrium makes the interior feel as
though it soars upwards.
Regarding roof shape, there are five common choices for materialization:
flat, curved (barrel), raked, pitched, and compound/combination. Of these, a flat
or cantilevered ceiling is the most Bound choice, while a raked ceiling unbinds a
space by opening it up and outward. The ceiling/roof of the atrium, for example,
consists of two raked roofs joined into a butterfly shape that creates a trough-
like space along the central spine overhead, while both outer perimeters rise
Photo 9. Overhead plane in the atrium
upward, and in this way optimize the feeling of being Unbound (see Photo 9
again). The ceiling in the entrance vestibule, in contrast, is flat and provides a
firm sense of enclosure over those entering the space.
Table 1. Summary of permeability and the overhead plane
Element Bound (occlusion) Unbound (diaphany)

material Solid/opaque eg concrete, thatch Transparent e.g. glass
height Human scale Institutional scale (>5 metres)
shape Flat (cantilever) Raked, curved, pitched
3.3.1.7. Permeability: Base planes

The base plane is the plane of gravity. It anchors the building to the earth and
can be divided into two different planes. First, there is a ground plane, which
touches the earth and physically supports the building. This can be heavy, gra-
vitizing the building (e.g., the pyramids) and is a Bound choice as it signals sta-
bility. OToole (1994) refers to this as cthonicity. Alternately, the ground plane
can rest on the earth lightly, like the Eiffel Tower, which only touches the earth
at four points, signaling light contact and transience.
As noted, much of the exterior of the Scientia is strongly Bound on the
ground plane, by the solid sandstone flanks at the front, and also by a large grey
granite platform at the rear on which the entrance to the building sits (see Photos
1 and 4). In contrast, the ground plane of the atrium is elevated approximately
two storeys above the ground, using the towering wooden posts as supports.
This makes extremely light contact with the earth.
The second half of a base plane is the floor, which may or may not also have
covering. The material and height of the floor plane materialize spatial security.
Soft, thick carpet that bodies can sink into, for example, creates a Bound feeling.
It is comfortable, secure and allows the user to rest their weary limbs. Polished
flooring, in contrast, has no resilience or give, but allows users to glide over it
freely, and thus is Unbound. The height of the floor may be varied: level, sub-
merged, or elevated. A level floor is Unbound, as it creates a level playing
field to glide over. Submerged or elevated floors are Bound choices as both
make users feel more enclosed.
Once again, there are contrasts in the flooring chosen for the entrance and at-
rium of the Scientia building. The entrance has dark grey polished tiles that
stretch directly to the window at the opposite end, while the flooring in the at-
rium consists of polished wooden floorboards. In terms of Binding, both choices
for flooring are Unbound as they create a glossy and level platform on which
users can glide into, and around, the building. Finally, the different choices for
flooring tiles and wooden floorboards also play another important role in vis-
ually delineating these two very different spaces.
Table 2. Summary of Permeability and the base plane
Plane & element Bound (occlusion) Unbound (diaphany)

Ground plane Heavy contact gravitises, Light contact elevates, e.g.,
e.g., stone stumps, piers
Floor plane: Elevated or submerged Level
height
Floor plane: ma- High resilience to sink into, Low resilience to glide over,
terial e.g. thick carpet e.g. polished tiles
3.3.1.8. Permeability: Wall planes
Walls dene the vertical boundaries of a space and have a great presence in our
eld of vision (Ching 1996), strongly dening the rmness of enclosure we feel in
a space. They can also make a space penetrable or impenetrable depending on the
choices for the following variables: visual weight, spatial envelope, and ltering.
Visual weight refers to how heavy or light the walls seem, determined by the
opacity or transparency of the materials. Visually heavy walls create a more
Bound space than walls that are visually light. In the Scientia, the choice of
sandstone and marble for the two walls framing the physical entrance, followed
by plaster walls in the entrance vestibule, are choices for occlusion (see Photos
5 and 6 again). In contrast, glass as walling for the atrium is a strong choice for
visual lightness and diaphany (see Photo 8).
The spatial envelope refers to the way the walls are constructed to envelop
a space, either enclosing a space firmly (Bound) or loosely (Unbound). The spa-
tial envelope is determined by the number of walls, their height, and their span.
A spatial envelope that completely wraps around the occupant creates a firm
enclosure, either by using a single wall plane which constructs an organically
shaped spatial envelope, such as Frank Lloyd Wrights spherical Guggenheim
Museum on Fifth Avenue, New York, or by using four walls that are joined to-
gether, creating an envelope that is angular. Open and Unbound envelopes, on the
other hand, can be created by combining two walls into an L-shape or using one
freestanding wall to create partial delineation in a space and optimal openness.
In terms of wall height, most walls stretch from floor to ceiling and create a
firm sense of enclosure (Bound), because they occlude visual continuity be-
tween adjoining spaces. However, Unbound spaces may be created by reducing
the height of the vertical plane, using waist-high walls, for example, to provide a
moderate physical sense of separation while maintaining visual continuity be-
tween adjoining spaces.
The horizontal span of the wall also contributes to the spatial envelope, with
complete wall spans constructing a closed spatial envelope, and freestanding
walls constructing more open spatial envelopes.
None of the spaces we have been analyzing in the Scientia in the preceding
sections constructs a tight spatial envelope, as the spaces do not have four opaque
and enclosing walls (see Photos 5 and 6 again). The entrance comprises a two-
sided opaque enclosure while the vestibule is a three-sided enclosure with two
opaque walls and one diaphanous one (the glass doors). The result is a vestibule
consisting of a three-sided rectilinear envelope with one open end. This openness
is important as it prevents the vestibule from feeling oppressive (Too Bound) and
allows it to be strongly connected to the adjoining spaces, facilitating the function
of the vestibule as a transitional space that welcomes visitors as they move from
the exterior to the interior of the building. In addition, the relatively low height of
the walls contributes to the feeling of Binding in the space, while their short hori-
zontal span prevents the vestibule from feeling too tightly enclosed.
The atrium, on the other hand, contains two different spatial envelopes. The
lower section, which is occupied by visitors, consists of two enclosing walls
while the upper section consists of four enclosing walls. The lower section is
thus designed as an open, fluid spatial envelope that visitors can move through,
while the upper section of the same space is much more strongly delineated and
contained. Such strong delineation in the upper regions of the space appears to
be important in preventing the space from feeling too open as they provide it
with clear upper boundaries.
A further element to consider is the degree to which the walls filter the pen-
etration of elements via openings such as windows and doors. Bound spaces are
created by strong filters which block out the elements using impermeable
materials, small windows, solid doors, and supplementary filters such as blinds
and curtains. Unbound spaces are created by weak filters that allow light, air,
heat, and the other elements to pass through them. Walls that only allow the pen-
etration of light construct visually Unbound spaces, while walls that allow light,
air and/or heat to enter construct visually and physically Unbound spaces,
through the use of large openings, louvres, sliding doors, and so forth.
Both of the Scientia spaces we have been analyzing so far have weak filters.
The large glass doors at the entrance allow light, air, and heat to enter the ves-
tibule as well as visually connecting it with the outdoors, while the atrium is
strongly visually connected to the sky and built environment surrounding it.
However, grey blinds have been installed inside the atrium to provide some de-
gree of filtering by reducing the amount of light and heat that enters the space
during the periods of intense heat that typify Australian summers.
Table 3. Summary of Permeability and the wall plane

Visual weight Heavy materials: Light materials:
opaque, semi/transparent
impermeable permeable,
permanent temporary/fluid
Spatial envelope: 1 continuous wall (circle or oval) 1 or 2 partial-span walls
number of walls or 3+ walls
Height of the walls Floor-to-ceiling; floor-to-eye level Waist-high walls; line on
the floor
Span Complete: wall-to-wall Partial
Filters Strong filters via minimal openings Weak filters via large
openings
3.3.1.9. Variables: Ambience

The four key elements to consider when analyzing a space for ambience are
color, light, pattern, and texture. In this section, we will briefly consider color
and lighting. Warm and dark colors create Bound spaces because they appear to
advance and close the space in. Cool and light colors, in contrast, are Un-
bound because they open a space up and can create the illusion of receding both
the walls and the ceiling.
Similarly, light directionality can alter the firmness of enclosure in a space.
Down lighting, for example, closes a space in by appearing to bring the ceil-
ing closer, while up lighting can create an illusion of elevating a ceiling, mak-
ing an area seem more open and spacious.
In applying the notion of Ambience to the Scientia entrance and atrium, we
can see that the choices for the variable elements are also significant and care-
fully balanced. In the entrance, for example, the walls on the right consist of
deep reddish brown granite and dark grey plaster (vestibule). To prevent these
dark colors from appearing too oppressive, both walls on the left open the
space somewhat through choices for cool and light colors: cream sandstone and
off-white paint. The choices for down-lighting, on the other hand, work to cre-
ate a firmer sense of enclosure in the entry while the polished texture of the tiles
underfoot counters this by increasing light levels. So, in relation to Ambience in
the entrance to the building, the design effectively counter-balances choices for
diaphany as well as occlusion, to prevent the space from feeling too oppressive,
too small, and too closed in.
As the atrium is primarily made of glass, there are fewer choices for color,
nevertheless warm timbers have been chosen for the flooring, contributing to
a Bound effect. It is obviously important to create some sense of occlusion
in the space; otherwise the occupant would likely feel too exposed. Lighting
in the atrium is mainly natural and plentiful, and enters the space from over-
head.
Table 4. Summary of Ambience

Color Warm and dark colors Cool and light colors
Light Down lighting Up lighting
directionality
Texture Rough textures (decrease illumi- Smooth, shiny textures (in-
nation by absorbing light) crease illumination)
Pattern Vertical and horizontal
stripes
In summary, Section 3.1.1 has shown how gradations of Binding, materialized

through choices for Permeability and Ambience, work to establish a relation-
ship of security with the occupants of the space. In particular, choices for
Permeability and Ambience co-articulate to evoke feelings of security and wel-
come occupants into the vestibule, a weakly Bound enclosure. Once a relation-
ship of security is established with the user in this way, it is maintained through
slight but incremental changes to Permeability and Ambience until the occu-
pants finds themselves in the open, light-filled heart of the building where they
feel strongly Unbound. Interaction with a space has the potential to move us in
other ways as well, especially with regard to affiliation, which is the focus of
Bonding.
3.3.2. Bonding
Bonding is concerned with how we can negotiate solidarity and affiliation in
three-dimensional space, through the use of Bonding icons and through the hy-
bridization of a space (Stenglin 2004). Bonding icons are emblems or evocative
symbols of social belonging, which have a strong potential for rallying, such as
Olympic rings, flags, buildings such as the Sydney Opera House, songs, and so
forth. They can also function to establish a visual identity for an institution such
as a university. This is clearly what the Scientia building has accomplished for
the University of New South Wales, especially the iconic tree-like structure of
the central atrium.
3.3.2.1. Bonding icon: The Scientia building

The Scientia is clearly a landmark building what it symbolizes and how it is
able to create a new identity for the institution is the concern of Bonding icons.
Bonding icons have enormous potential to facilitate empathy, affiliation, and
identification through the genesis of shared meanings that evolve amongst
members of a community. They do this by crystallizing strong interpersonal
attitudes to ideational meanings, as we will now see.
Ideationally, the central part of the Scientia is a tree-like structure with many
upward thrusting arms creating vectors pointing to the sky and the heavens
beyond. Interpersonally, this tree-like construction evokes many different layers
of meaning, including a positive appreciation of abstract values such as dyna-
mism, growth, dreams, and aspirations both institutional and personal. The
central tree also suggests the metaphorical tree of life, which in turn evokes
valuations of appreciation. Such valuations may be positive or negative but their
function is to evoke collective understandings or familiar ideas, and in doing
so, connect people around shared ideational meaning(s) and mutual attitudes
towards them.
Furthermore, in its role as Bonding icon the Scientia evokes many other
fused layers of ideational and interpersonal meanings. The materials used, for
example, create some very powerful and evocative contrasts. The two large
blocks flanking the central tree structure are made of sandstone and are particu-
larly heavy and solid, thereby evoking shared judgments of the permanence and
enduring capacity of the building to stand the test of time as well as evoking a
shared appreciation of its consummate status, reinforced by the use of rarefied
materials such as sandstone, jarrah, and entire walls of plate glass. Not only are
the materials rarefied, they also suggest that the values associated with the build-
ing belong to both the natural world (as signified by the sandstone and jarrah) and
the industrial, built environment (as signified by the stainless steel and glass).
Again, moreover, a motif of contrast can be seen in relation to the central
tree structure, which rests almost delicately on one finely tapered point (see
again Photo 3: close up shot). This lack of gravitas strongly contrasts with the
solid sandstone walls that flank it and by doing so evokes positive judgments of
the capacity and giftedness of the architects, engineers, and builders who were
able to design and create a structure that appears to defy gravity. Not only are
all of these meanings crystallized in the Scientia, they also have the potential
to multiply (Lemke 1998; Royce 1998, 2002). Consequently, the materials
and contrasts discussed so far function to suggest that the value of the build-
ing is simultaneously traditional and ground-breaking, historical and
contemporary, real and amazing, old and new, natural and con-
structed. The synergy that results from such fusion of meanings also has the
potential to evoke some very powerful emotions positive or negative. Positive
emotions may include pride and loyalty, while negative feelings could include
cynicism and hatred. These shared emotions in turn can evoke affiliation with at
least one of two communities: those who identify with the institution and the
values it represents, and those who do not.
3.3.2.2. Affiliation and Appraisal

Having explained what and how the building symbolizes, let us now turn our at-
tention to how the building creates communal alignment over time with key stake-
holders such as students. To explore how such afliation is negotiated, we will
need to apply Appraisal theory, especially the systems of Attitude: Affect, Judg-
ment, and Appreciation. Shared Affect aligns people around empathy, shared
Judgment aligns them around shared principles, while shared Appreciation aligns
them around joint tastes and mutual preferences. Although the following account
will be a compliant one, we do acknowledge, once again, that the attitudinal align-
ment evoked by a Bonding icon may be either negative or positive.
In terms of ideational meaning, students attending the University of New
South Wales are invited into the Scientia to participate in two main types of ac-
tivities: examinations and celebrations. During examinations, one can imagine

that many students are feeling nervous, apprehensive, and afraid. The building
thus no doubt evokes strong feelings of insecurity associated with the passing or
failing of examinations feelings that probably recur over the extended period
of time that constitutes student life and only ends after the successful comple-
tion of all subjects and the awarding of degrees at graduation ceremonies. At
that point, students and their families are invited into the Scientia for celebra-
tory drinks and photographs. On these occasions, the Scientia clearly symbol-
izes success in education, and this would often evoke very strong feelings of
happiness, security, and pride in ones achievements, heightened by the fact that
it takes many years of success before one can achieve public recognition.
The strength of such positive and negative emotions would clearly influence
the types of judgments students make about the building. This is reflected in the
following student comments: one comes to this building to be at the height of
education and you have to work hard to get here and graduate.13 It is not sur-
prising that for many students the building becomes a landmark that also evokes
strong judgments associated with social esteem, in particular, their own capac-
ity, tenacity, and normality.
In addition to aligning students around shared feelings and judgments, the
building also evokes strong evaluations of appreciation. Appreciation is con-
cerned with the value of objects in a culture. Typically students appraise the
composition of the building and its parts in the following ways: the unusual
glass structure, the unique design and the distinctive wooden pole. They
also make valuations of the building in terms of its messages or ideologies.
These include: [it] connotes the feeling of grandeur, excellence, prestige and
[it] is open to all, and embraces knowledge.
By evoking the full range of appraisal in these ways Affect, Judgment, and
Appreciation the Scientia building is a Bonding icon that over time aligns stu-
dents into communities of feeling and affinities of collegiality. In this way, it is
also able to accrue and crystallize the institutional values embodied by the Uni-
versity of New South Wales. Another powerful resource for negotiating Bond-
ing is hybridization.
3.3.2.3. Hybridization
The hybridization of spaces facilitates Bonding by transferring the values of one
activity to those of another, and vice-versa, thus expanding the potential range
for identification with the space (Stenglin 2004). In doing so, it functions in
much the same way as a lexical metaphor (Martin 2004b). For example, an art
gallery that screens a film from popular culture invites those interested in popu-
lar culture into the gallery. Via this, the values of accessibility are transferred to
the institution, and the high culture prestige of the gallery is transferred to the
film. Similarly, Ravellis (2000) analysis of a souvenir store for the Sydney
2000 Olympic Games identified that, through hybridization, it was much more
than just a retail experience. Via methods of museum-like display, values of the
Olympic Games (such as harmony, unity, loyalty) were transferred to the mer-
chandise.
For the Scientia, its functionality is not immediately apparent from the ex-
terior, although its size and design would suggest ceremony. A kind of hybridiz-
ation does occur on the exterior, however, as students typically sit on the stairs
and grass at the front, and at graduations, families take photos with the Scientia
as backdrop. Thus the values of everyday life are transferred to the institution,
as it forms the backdrop for student activities; similarly, the prestige of the
institution is transferred to these activities, giving them significance. Similarly,
for the interior, the largely ceremonial spaces could potentially lie empty,
a fate mitigated somewhat by using the main hall for receptions (University and
private), as well as for exams, and by using the secondary hall as a (temporary)
restaurant, with fittings that can be quickly removed, to restore the space for
functions or meetings. Again, the prestige of the institution is transferred to
these social activities, and the incorporation of a broad range of social activities
expands the image of inclusivity of the University.
Bonding therefore involves negotiating communal alignment either posi-
tive or negative around shared attitudes. In particular, these attitudes include
shared affect, appreciation and judgment, and evolve amongst community
members over time. As discussed in Section 3.3.2.1., one of the resources for
materializing Bonding are icons. Bonding icons crystallize strong interpersonal
attitudes to ideational meanings and as a result have the potential to facilitate
empathy, affiliation and identification. Another powerful resource for material-
izing Bonding is hybridization. By facilitating value transfer, hybridization in
the Scientia building transfers the prestige of the university to a broad range of
social activities while these activities enhance the image of inclusiveness that
the institution wishes to project. In these ways, the basic function of Bonding is
to align people around shared, communal ideals.
One of the challenges of a metafunctional approach to any semiotic is to account

for both the distinctiveness and the simultaneity of the metafunctions. Our focus
in this chapter has been on the interpersonal, but of course, any three-dimen-
sional text is more than just an interpersonal construct. It also functions through
the representational metafunction, to construct a sense of what is there, and is
made to cohere through the textual metafunction. This is also true for the Scien-
tia: what it stands for, and how it is organized, including in relation to the
campus as a whole, are critical to a more comprehensive understanding of the

building as a whole. As discussed in Ravelli (in press), the Scientia is made
to be, textually, the Centre of the campus. Not a literal centre, but a symbolic
one. What it symbolizes in representational terms is captured both by the motif
of contrast already identified in relation to interpersonal meanings, namely
the contrast of old and new, natural and manufactured, and so on, and
by the visual impact of the central structure, with its thrusting arms representing
something dynamic and growing, connoting perhaps the tree of knowledge.
Thus, the University is represented as a complex institution, grounded in his-
tory, dynamically engaging with the present and the future. These aspects are of
course semiotic constructs: the Scientia is not literally the Centre of the campus,
the University is not particularly old, and any relation to the future is merely
speculation. Nevertheless, a three-dimensional space does make meaning
across each of these metafunctions, and so a full analysis needs to account for
them all, and for their interaction.
At the same time, analysis needs to take account of the potential for different
readings of the same text. A text may be read compliantly, resistantly, or tacti-
cally (Cranny-Francis 1992), and this chapter has produced what we believe
to be a compliant reading of the text. Resistant readings recognize but reject the
semiotic thrust of the text (perhaps in the case of the Scientia, something like,
I hate that building!, or else using the stair rails as a slide), whereas tactical
readings are less predictable (perhaps for the Scientia, something like I think
Ill use Jarrah in my own home). Readings are also located socially, culturally,
and historically, and thus may vary along any of these dimensions. With the
progress of time, for example, something which was initially unconventional
and ground-breaking may come to be seen as quite mundane a process that is
also familiar in visual arts discourse (Hughes 1980/1991; Wilkinson 2000).
Perhaps the most fundamental controversy in dealing with three-dimen-
sional spaces is whether or not we want to see such spaces as being semiotic at
all: are they really texts? Perhaps, after all, a building is just a building? But to
such a question we would offer a resounding no. Three-dimensional spaces of
our built environment are indeed texts: they are neither necessary nor natural,
but are a construct of semiosis (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 154). They
make meaning socially and culturally, and are produced and read in social and
cultural contexts. Sometimes, built spaces within our own culture may be so
conventional and familiar that their meanings have become naturalized and are
no longer noticed. As Lumley notes (1992: v):
[] everyone lives and works in buildings of some sort. We all react instinctively to
the size and space relationships of architecture because buildings and their surround-
ings relate to the human figure as we walk in, around and through them.
[] When we study architecture, we need to analyse many of the things which we
otherwise take for granted, or perhaps like or dislike without knowing why.
Equally, however, anything slightly new or different attracts attention positive

and negative and highlights the meaning-making potential of these texts. Dra-
matic new buildings magnify this process, drawing extremes of praise or appro-
bation. Witness, for instance, some of the negative responses to I.M. Peis pyra-
mid for the Louvre:
[ E]veryday Parisians expressed their disapproval by wearing buttons that asked,
Pourquoi la Pyramide? Peis daughter, Liane, saw women spit at her fathers feet
as they passed on the street (Cannell 1995: 17).
Such approbation is not in response to bricks and mortar (or glass and steel,
in this case), but to the new and unconventional meanings of the pyramid in re-
lation to those of the traditional and familiar Louvre: to its social and cultural
contribution.
5. Relation to applied linguistics and research perspectives
It may still seem strange to be discussing the meaning potential of a building, in

a volume which is focused on applied linguistics. And yet, as we hope to have
shown in the chapter, the connection is not strange at all. Each endeavor shares
many of the same features: a concern with texts as communicative constructs,
an understanding of meaning as being metafunctional, an understanding of se-
miotics as being socially situated.
And yet the endeavors are not identical. Kress and van Leeuwen (2006:
122123 and 139140, for instance) discuss some of the close parallels between
linguistic and visual systems in the interpersonal domain, but also note their
divergences. For example, in relation to image acts, the visual equivalent of
linguistic speech acts, they note (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 123) that it is
more or less impossible for an image to directly offer goods and services: such
offers must take the form of an offer of information. It must be represented. It
cannot be enacted directly. Thus, while other communicative systems can be
understood in relation to linguistic communication, they must also be under-
stood in their own terms.
At the same time, however, accounting for the affordances of non-linguistic
semiotic systems has the potential, in turn, to feed back into our understanding
of language also. In the case of spatial semiotics, Stenglins newly proposed
systems of Binding and Bonding is inspired by work on Appraisal in language,
in particular, Martin (2004a). The systems enable a delicate analysis of the
resources which enable security, insecurity, affiliation, and exclusion to be ne-
gotiated in a three-dimensional space, and the delicacy of this analysis provides
the springboard for further reflection on language: what are the ways in which
Appraisal and other resources are used in language to align affiliations, create a
secure sense of belonging, or a distancing effect? We are not suggesting here

that such matters have not already been considered within linguistics. We
would, rather, like to propose that there is further potential here not only with re-
gard to language, but also the co-deployment of language and visual images, as
the research of Caple (2006) and Economou (2006) clearly indicates. Similarly,
Martin and Welch (in prep.) are exploring the co-articulation that occurs be-
tween language and another modality, facial expressions, and thus furthering
our understanding of the multi-dimensional potential of Bonding.
Yet, it is also sometimes the case that work in a new domain does reveal as-
pects which have otherwise been neglected in a familiar domain. For example,
work on visual resources has revealed the meaning potential of the visuality
of language (through typographic systems, for instance), an aspect which has
tended to be ignored in the study of linguistics (van Leeuwen 2005b). Overall
then, between applied linguistics and other research directions, there is a dia-
logic relationship: each research perspective is mutually informing of the other.
Just as with applied linguistics, work on spatial semiotics has the potential
for fruitful applications. The enormous descriptive scope of this work provides
the opportunity for reflection and critique on spaces that are private, public, and
commercial; on spaces that are conventional or ground-breaking. In relation
to the interpersonal metafunction, we can explore how spatial semiotics con-
tributes to the establishment, maintenance, and adjustment of social relations,
and how they contribute to an individuals sense of security and belonging. Our
examination of the Scientia begins to suggest how important spatial semiotics is
to the creation of identity for an institution, and there is scope to compare this
with other, similar, institutions. Within the University, the interpersonal systems
we have described here can be usefully applied to the analysis of the various
learning spaces which comprise the institution: the traditional, large lecture
halls, with their impersonal, hierarchisized layout; smaller tutorial rooms, with
their more equalizing potential; and newer break-out spaces, allowing for
more fluid and informal relationships. Similar issues can be explored in schools
(Jones in press), hospitals (Iedema in press), shopping centres (Stenglin 2000),
homes (Stenglin in press b) as well as museums and galleries (Martin and Steng-
lin 2007; Ravelli 2006; Stenglin 2004, 2007, in press a, in press b, in press d).
All create important interpersonal relations between institution and user, and
can be usefully critiqued.
To undertake such an enterprise requires more than we have outlined here,
however. As already noted, the approach needs to be integrated with a cross-
metafunctional analysis, to account for the full meaning potential of a three-di-
mensional text. All of the systems described can be further extended in delicacy,
and no doubt application to different instances of texts will reveal the need to
adjust these systems. For example, the system of Control proposed above, to ac-
count for relative freedoms and restrictions on behavior, needs to be further and
more specifically described. Also, there is the potential to apply such systems to
other kinds of semiotics, for example, to the relative freedom or restrictions of a
users navigation of the web. As with the relation between linguistic and spatial
semiotics, the relation between spatial and other semiotics will not be identical,
but can be seen to be analogous.
One particular challenge for further research is to develop models and
methods which can account for the logogenetic unfolding of space. Currently,
our descriptions of spatial texts can provide synoptic snapshots of different as-
pects of a complex text (for example, a view of the Scientia from a distance, or
up close), but our model cannot yet describe the dynamic unfolding of the text,
as it is experienced by users. Dynamically-oriented models exist for aspects of
language (see for example, Ventola 1987), but need to be re-thought for spatial
semiotics. This is likely to be most challenging for interpersonal meanings gen-
erally, as opposed to the other metafunctions, because of the inherently prosodic
nature of interpersonal structures (Martin and Rose 2003).
To account for spatial semiotics has much potential, both in understanding
the fundamental relations with other communicative systems, such as language,
and in extending the approach to account for the wide range of communicative
semiotics which characterizes the contemporary world. A focus here on inter-
personal meanings allows us to explore some of the ways in which identities,
relations, security, and belonging can be created through the resources which
comprise our built environment.
Notes
1. This is the original name of the building. It was renamed The John Niland Scientia in
2006, in honour of the Vice-Chancellor who oversaw its construction.
2. Jury Verdict; Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Buildings; Royal Australian Insti-
tute of Architects; Architecture Australia November/December 2000; accessed 22. 5.
07 at http://www.architectureaustralia.com/aa/aaissue.php?issueid=200011.
3. Together these shall be referred to as users.
4. There are also other resources for analyzing interaction in images such as the point-
of-view dimension (perspective), but it is beyond the scope of this chapter to con-
sider this in depth. See Kress and van Leewen (2006) for more information about
perspective (129140) and for further details on modality see (154174).
5. All photos taken by the authors.
6. Jarrah is an indigenous Australian wood, found primarily in Western Australia.
7. The notion of a spatial lure is termed prominence in Stenglin (2004) and Stenglin (in
press a).
8. Again, this is also across each of the metafunctions; see Ravelli (in press).
9. Stenglin (in press a) also explore and analyzes Mood choices in space and the ways
different spaces impact on behavior, using Bernsteins concepts of classification and
framing (1975). These are particularly relevant to understandings of surveillance.
10. Responses to spaces can also be provoked by the other metafunctions. For example,
textually, a lack of clarity in the layout of a complex spatial text might lead to con-
fusion and disorientation; or representationally, connotations of materials or objects
may be positive or negative for a particular user. However, the interpersonal focus here
is a more literal sense of feelings, related to emotions, attitudes, and judgments.
11. Again, the potential for variation in responses needs to be remembered. For examples,
some individuals may find strongly Bound spaces (like caves) or strongly Unbound
spaces (like cliff edges) exciting and stimulating, rather than suffocating or over-
powering.
12. Interior designers who are vocationally trained to work with Ambience work with
a very broad range of elements. They include accessories, scale, fittings, soft furnish-
ings, furniture, and style as well as the elements identified in this chapter: color,
light, pattern, and texture. However, only color, light, pattern, and texture were
chosen as variables for Ambience in this chapter because they can specifically be
used to modify perceptions of how firmly a space is enclosed. Their relevance to
Binding is thus most significant.
13. Quotes from students in ENGL2821/LING2530, Visual Communication, UNSW,
2005.
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III. International Communication
on-track and off-track
14. Everyday communication and socializing
Tilo Weber
1. Introduction
Since the 1960s, spoken discourse has been established as a (if not the) main re-
search focus of functionally and typologically oriented linguistics and related
disciplines including sociology and social psychology. The primary realm of the
study of spoken discourse is ordinary life outside professional and highly for-
malized circumstances, i.e., everyday communication.
But what is everyday communication? What are its dening properties? Is this
type of communication distinguishable from other kinds of discourse and, if so,
according to which criteria? To answer questions like these has become increas-
ingly important for linguists who have become aware of the fact that speakers are
not just members of a homogeneous speech community that unites competent
users of a single language. Rather, speakers master different registers, styles of
speech, degrees of formality, genres, etc. and are able to switch between them ac-
cording to contextual needs. This variability pertains to all linguistic levels, rang-
ing from phonetic and phonological structure up to activity types and genres.
At first sight, everyday communication appears to be the most natural, mun-
dane, and non-technical term that modern linguistics and social sciences have to
offer to refer to this type of social interaction. As members of Western cultural
communities, we have no problems listing typical instances of everyday com-
munication: phone conversations with friends, family dinner conversations, and
occasional exchanges with strangers asking their way through our neighbor-
hood. Also socializing, in the sense of non-goal oriented small talk, can be in-
cluded in this list of examples of everyday communication. If pressed to specify
what all of these discourses have in common and what makes them examples of
everyday conversation, we may consider, among others,1 the following features:
they are ordinary and usually informal, spoken rather than written, private
rather than public. What is also common to all of them is that what is talked
about is not fixed in advance. But, as with many other concepts relevant to the
study of language (e.g., word, a (particular) language, meaning), it is much
easier to enumerate prototypical examples of everyday communication, such as
chatting, and prototypical properties of these examples, such as informality,
than to define the concept in a way that would make it possible to draw a sharp
line between instances and non-instances of the category.
One aim to be pursued in the present chapter is to offer convincing argu-
ments to the effect that everyday communication is a prototype category which
398 Tilo Weber
originates in a folk- or ethnocategory and is never in need to be defined for the

practical purposes of the mundane interactional circumstances in which it is
usually employed. Even though the radial nature of this category does not allow
for an Aristotelean definition, it is argued here that the concept should not be
prematurely abandoned on account of its vagueness, but that it can indeed be
useful in linguistics and social studies. First, as ordinary discourse participants,
we use expressions of the form everyday + x (where x may be substituted by
words like language, communication, life, phenomenon, etc.) as elements of
our standard language. But for linguists, this raises the question as to what are
the intuitions that underlie the use of these terms, or, in other words, as to what
everydayness means from the perspective of ordinary speakers.
Scholars working within various research paradigms seem to agree that it is
necessary to look at an intermediate level of categorization between the super-
ordinate level and the different subordinate levels of genres of spoken dis-
course. If this assumption is considered plausible, the question then arises as to
which categories are to be distinguished at this intermediate level and as to
whether everyday communication (as opposed, e.g., to institutional discourse)
is a candidate for being included in the list of these categories.
These introductory remarks lead up to the conclusion that everyday com-
munication is a relevant and, at the same time, problematic category in interper-
sonal communication research. Proceeding from this starting point, the remainder
of this chapter will elucidate everyday communication in five stages.
Section 2 reconstructs the pre-history of research in everyday communi-
cation apropos of four different approaches to language and social interaction.
The aim here is to demonstrate that there are particular empirical findings and
theoretical problems that lead scholars to turn their primary attention away from
written sentences and texts, on the one hand, and ideal language, on the other
hand, in order to focus on ordinary discourse. Section 3 shows how, on this
basis, conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistics from the very
beginning on have made everyday conversation their main object of study. Fol-
lowing this, Section 4 suggests that everyday communication is a prototype cat-
egory and explores six dimensions as to which typical instances of everyday
communication are defined and how they can be distinguished from other types
of interaction. Section 5 highlights several potential research directions which
appear to be the most urgent and promising to pursue at present, and Section 6
provides a brief summary.
Everyday communication and socializing 399
2. The pre-history of studies in everyday communication

and socializing
Everyday communication today has become a legitimate empirical base not

only for the analysis of social processes but also for such classical areas of
linguistics as morphology and syntax. This is the result of a rather recent devel-
opment both in the social sciences and in linguistics. For millennia up to the
19th century and outside the tradition of rhetorics, linguistic data, in the sense
that we have used this term in the Western tradition of studying language, has
been mainly limited to two types:
isolated morphemes, words, and sentences constructed by philosophers,
philologists, or grammar teachers; these constructs reflected the (native)
speaker intuitions of their authors more than the actual language use
formal, often literary, sentences quoted from written texts.
In the work of grammarians, for example, this was reflected by a strong bias in
favor of written and highly valued varieties of languages and a neglect of oral
language use and varieties of languages other than the standard ones.
The reasons that changed this situation are of a primarily theoretical nature.
However, for those researchers who shifted their interest from the literary Euro-
pean languages to native cultures in the Americas or in Southern Asia, it was a
matter of practical necessity to take into account oral and everyday communi-
cation where written and formal or literary communication either was not pres-
ent at all or not easily accessible to ethnographers and linguists.
Regarding the theoretical and methodological groundwork that paved the
way for turning attention to everyday communication as an object of empirical
studies, four approaches have been particularly influential:
(1) Bronisaw Malinowkis (1923, 1927) field work investigations on what he
called primitive languages and his pragmatic view of meaning,
(2) Karl Bhlers organon model of the linguistic sign ([1934] 1999) together
with its adoption by Roman Jakobson (1961),
(3) ordinary language philosophy the proponents of which, in line with the later
work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, maintained that ordinary language not only is
a worthy object of study, but it is also the most fundamental means (or meta-
language) of philosophical and linguistic analysis,
(4) Harold Garfinkels ([1967] 1984a) ethnomethodology which is based on the
doctrine that social interaction is both indexical and reflexive.
400 Tilo Weber
2.1. Malinowskis functional approach to culture and language
This section presents Bronisaw Malinowski as a researcher who 1) defined an

empirical point of view from which everyday communication became the focus
of attention for anthropologists and linguists, 2) introduced the method of par-
ticipant observation, and 3) coined concepts that today are crucial for the eluci-
dation of language use, including phatic communion, context of situation, and
pragmatic character of language.
Malinowski was a pioneer of social anthropology. His field trips, the most
extensive of which lead him to the Trobriand islands of the South Pacific
(19141918), gave rise to a series of studies that were innovative both at the the-
oretical level as well as having new methodological implications: theoretically,
Malinowski ([1922] 1990) insisted that the anthropologist investigating a
foreign culture has to approach his/her objects from a certain point of view
using categories deeply rooted in the observed culture itself rather than criteria
being applied to the particular culture from the external perspective of Western
science. The approach that Malinowski developed for studying foreign, primi-
tive societies, was later on generalized and radicalized. This was the case, e.g.,
when ethnomethodologists, following Harold Garfinkel (1967), and without
being directly influenced by Malinowski, demanded the use of participant cat-
egories as the only legitimate type of research category for the analysis of social
structures and processes.
Malinowkis methodological principles are direct consequences of his the-
oretical approach. From the latter, it follows that social interaction among
members of foreign social communities cannot be done justice to on the mere
basis of apriori theoretical axioms nor by means of concepts readily available
from the standard scientific toolbox. Rather, research questions, concepts, and
analytic categories have to be developed that are demonstrably relevant from
the point of view of the target community (even though its members may not be
consciously aware of them); and as such these categories are outcomes of, rather
than prerequisites to, inductive processes based on minute and extensive obser-
vation. This research strategy can only be successful to the extent that the re-
searcher may gain intimate access to the daily lives of those individuals that s/he
is observing. This is achieved by becoming a temporary member of their social
communities a method of doing field work that has since been established in
the social sciences under the name of participant observation (cf., e.g., Kawu-
lich 2005).2
Malinowskis study that had the most significant impact on linguists was
published as a supplement chapter to Charles K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richards
(1923) famous monograph on The Meaning of Meaning. In his chapter On the
problem of meaning in primitive languages, Malinowski argued convincingly
that the meanings of sentences in primitive languages cannot be accounted for
adequately by translating them word by word or even morpheme by morpheme

into English, German, or any other idiom used by linguists as a metalanguage.
Quoting just one of his examples suffices to demonstrate that this claim is plaus-
ible:
(1) Tasakaulo kaymatana yakida;
We run front-wood ourselves;
tawaoulo ovanu; tasivila tagine
we paddle in place we turn we see
soda; isakaulo ka uuya
companion ours; he runs rear-wood
oluvieki similaveta Pilolu
behind their sea-arm Pilolu (Malinowski 1923: 300301)
Malinowski does not provide an idiomatic translation of the utterance in (1), the
verbatim gloss of which does indeed read like a riddle or a meaningless jumble
of words (Malinowski 1923: 301). According to Malinowski, the utterance is
not at all without meaning and communicational significance. However, in
order to be able to appreciate what the Trobriand speaker meant when uttering
the above quoted sentence, one has to take into account, among other things,
the situation in which these words were spoken as well as a set of customs
to which utterance (1) corresponds. In the particular case quoted above, the
context of situation seems to be defined by a speaker reporting on an overseas
trading expedition [], in which several canoes take part in a competitive
spirit. Obviously, this context information is too thin even to resolve the refer-
ences of expressions glossed as front wood or companions ours that as we
have to believe Malinowski are used metaphorically here. To be able to ap-
preciate the competitive spirit of the event and its significance for speakers
and hearers that make it worth reporting, etc., one would have to know many
other facts that we may subsume under the broad category of culture. Without
claiming exhaustiveness, Malinowski mentions the following items:
competitive activities for their own sake that are of high significance for
the Trobriand people
their tribal psychology in ceremonial life, commerce and enterprise
the geographical feeling of the natives
their use of imagery as a linguistic instrument (all quotes from Mal-
inowski 1923: 301).
This extensive example is taken from a language and a culture that, probably,
are as strange to the reader of this chapter as they were for Malinowski himself
when he first got in contact with the Trobriand islanders. The sense of strange-
ness that at first appears to be a disadvantage, turns out to be an advantage
because the experience of bewilderment illustrates one of the central ideas de-
fining Malinowkis theory of language: the description and analysis of exotic
402 Tilo Weber
(i.e., for us, other than Indoeuropean) languages is possible only if we explicitly
build on the presuppositions concerning the cultural background of the speak-
ers. Malinowski, then, extends this view to language in general and states:
Exactly as in the reality of spoken or written languages, a word without linguistic
context is a mere figment and stands for nothing by itself, so in the reality of a spoken
living tongue, the utterance has no meaning except in the context of situation (Mal-
inowski 1923: 306; authors emphasis).
[] What I have tried to make clear by analysis of a primitive linguistic text is that
language is essentially rooted in the reality of the culture, the tribal life and customs
of a people, and that it cannot be explained without constant reference to these
broader contexts of verbal utterance (Malinowski 1923: 305).
What makes Malinowkis doctrine so interesting and consequential for his
scientific successors is its radically pragmatic nature3 according to which lan-
guage is based on language use and language use is fundamentally indexical,
i.e., essentially rooted in situational and cultural contexts. From this, he con-
cludes that the idea of context-free, i.e., timeless conventional, meaning is fic-
titious and irrelevant (Malinowski 1923: 307).
Based on this approach to language, Malinowskis interest in everyday com-
munication is theoretically motivated, but, at the same time, it is also a matter of
practical necessity and this is directly implied by the research strategy of par-
ticipant observation. Because linguistic meaning can only be accounted for on
the basis of detailed cultural knowledge, the linguistic field worker has to be-
come acquainted with the culture in focus. A culture, however, is neither a
well-defined object, easily amenable to observation, nor is it accessible to direct
reflection by those who share it and who could be questioned about it. Rather, it
is realized in the totality of practical and interactive activities and products of
the community members. In order to move towards an account of this totality,
the researcher has to gain access to the culture from within, which is best ac-
complished by temporarily sharing the everyday lives of the members of that
culture and engaging in participant observation. Once the investigator has been
granted access and some trust in his/her intentions has been built up, s/he may
be permitted to audio- and videotape authentic interactions.
To summarize, it can be stated that everyday communication and, specifi-
cally, socializing taken here in the common-sense understanding of these
terms is the most relevant kind of data for the Malinowskian linguist because it
best reflects the cultural foundations in which language use is embedded in any
given speech community and because it is easily accessible to the researcher.
In addition to his enormous impact on anthropology and on many modern

practitioners of field work (Firth [1957] 1970), Malinowkis pragmatic ap-
proach has, in the field of linguistics, both directly and indirectly proved to be
a source of inspiration for a variety of scientific schools as well as for individ-
ual scholars. They all share a contextual theory of language and pursue an
interest in actual language use rather than in abstract linguistic systems and
structures of the Saussurean and, later, the generativist type. Amongst those
who have come under his influence, his student John Rupert Firth (e.g., 1937,
1957) has to be mentioned in the first place as a researcher who became a cen-
tral figure in British functionalism. Firths most influential followers include
Michael A.K. Halliday (2007), known above all for his development of sys-
temic functional linguistics (SFL; e.g., Halliday 1973; Halliday and Mat-
thiessen 2004) and his social semiotics (Halliday 1978). Malinowkis program
that originated from an interest for non-Indoeuropean languages and cultures,
has proven its universality, particularly in view of the fact that the proponents
of the functional paradigm redirected their focus on casual conversations
(Ventola 1979; Eggins and Slade 1997) in European languages. To study any
language, regardless of its typological kind or origin, means to study its use
by speakers within particular contexts of situation and under specific cultural
circumstances.
Malinowskis legacy for the study of everyday communication and socializ-
ing as a communicative activity lies in the fact that he had introduced these
as legitimate objects of research into the fields of cultural studies and social
sciences. Rather than seeing language serving merely as a means by which speak-
ers refer to objects and facts and exchange information Malinowskis insight
that language is used to establish, maintain, and negotiate social relations is
commonplace today. Accordingly, phatic communion a term actuated by the
demon of terminological invention (Malinowski 1923: 315) is defined as
[] a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words.
[] They fulfil a social function and that is their principal aim, but they are neither
the result of intellectual reflection, nor do they necessarily arouse reflection in the
listener. Once again we may say that language does not function here as a means of
transmission of thought (Malinowski 1923: 315).4
In this view, what today is called small talk or mere socializing appears an ac-
tivity type that realizes a linguistic function that, as such, is of no less value and
is no less worthy of investigation than the transmission of thought.
2.2. Phatic communication from the point of view of Bhlers and

Jakobsons semiotic conceptions
Unlike Malinowski, neither Karl Bhler ([1935] 1999) nor Roman Jakobson
(1960) were ever involved in the empirical study of language use in its natural
habitat of everyday communication. In spite of this, they may rightly be listed
among those who have paved the (theoretical) way for research in everyday talk
in general and socializing as a communicative activity in particular. This is true
404 Tilo Weber
mainly because Bhler puts forward a proclaimed functionalist view of lan-

guage, i.e., of the linguistic sign that is defined by three functions: expression,
representation, and appeal. It was Jakobson (1960) who, building up on and
elaborating this conception, used Malinowkis term phatic to distinguish the
particular function that is of particular interest in the context of the present
chapter.
Bhler and, later, Jakobson approach language from a perspective which is
quite different from that of Malinowski. The latter arrived at his pragmatic view
when he had to deal with the practical problems of being a radical foreigner to a
culture to which he found himself exposed and of a fieldworker who was con-
fronted with linguistic facts that forced him, in order to make any sense of them
at all, to rely on his own interpretation of both the communicational co-text and
the cultural context. The contextualist framework directly reflects this very ex-
perience. Bhlers approach, even though occasioned by concrete instances of
language use, is motivated theoretically. It arises within a general theory of
science and is characterized by its author as axiomatic reasoning (cf. Hilbert
1918, quoted after Bhler 1934: 20), i.e., a way of arguing that proceeds
from fundamental constitutive assumptions. The first and the most famous of
Bhlers four axioms is represented by his organon model that is intended as a
model of the concrete speech event in those circumstances in which it quite
regularly occurs (Bhler 1999: 24; translation mine, T.W.).
Following de Saussure ([1916] 1990), Bhler takes language to be a se-
miotic system, a system of linguistic signs (Bhler 1999: 9, 33). Quite interest-
ingly, however, and in contrast, to many structuralist and, later, generativist
views originating from Saussures doctrine, the linguistic sign, for Bhler, is a
dyad of form and function, rather than form and content/meaning/intension/etc.
This semiotic conception is consequential because it broadens the view of the
linguistic sign as a multifunctional phenomenon rather than a mere means of
reference (as understood by the logical empiricists of that time). Almost in pas-
sing and quoting Saussure, Bhler introduces his essentially functionalist view:
[] that linguistic phenomena always present two complementary facets, each

depending on the other (Saussure 1922:23 [1983:8; 1959:8; 1931:9]). Of course;
but a specialist certainly does not need to be told that sound and function belong to
the entirety of a concrete language phenomenon (Bhler [1934] 1990: 8).
It is worth emphasizing, however, that Bhlers functionalism represents a
theory of the sign rather than a communication theory. Auer (1999a: 22) points
out that the organon metaphor together with the invocation of Platos Kratylos
are rather infelicitous with regard to Bhlers own intention. This is because
Bhlers model does not suggest that the sign is a ready made tool used by a
speaker in the same way that a hammer is used by a craftsman for the realization
of a certain preset goal or purpose. According to the model, the association of
form and functions, which constitutes the sign, depends on the threefold relation
of the sign to a speaker, a hearer, and an object/state of affairs in a particular
context of situation. By the same token, the sign is the medium (Mittler) that
uniquely establishes the relations between speaker, hearer, and the world to each
other.5
It was Roman Jakobson who, in his paper on Linguistics and poetics (1960),
suggested a semiotic model that was inspired by the organon model and intro-
duced further differentiations. According to Jakobson, the linguistic sign was
defined by six functions, which his model arranged in the following manner:
REFERENTIAL
(cf. Bhlers representation)
EMOTIVE POETIC CONATIVE
(cf. Bhlers expression) PHATIC (cf. Bhlers appeal)
METALINGUAL (cf. Jakobson 1960: 356)
Jakobsons explication of the semiotic nature of language is in two regards rel-
evant to the study of everyday communication. First, he (re-)introduces the no-
tion phatic function of language into semiotics. Second, he like Bhler before
him points out that not all language use realizes all these functions equally, at
the same time to the same extent. Rather he suggests that different linguistic
genres are defined by which one(s) of the functions is (are) realized by speakers
or writers.
The relevance of this conceptual framework for identifying socializing as an
interactional genre most prototypical of everyday communication is revealed in
the following quote:
There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue com-
munication, to check whether the channel works (Hello, do you hear me?), to at-
tract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention (Are you
listening? or in Shakespearean diction, Lend me your ears! and on the other end
of the wire Um-hum!). This set for CONTACT, or in Malinowskis terms PHATIC
function [], may be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by
entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication. [] (Jakobson
1960: 355).
By focusing on the phatic semiotic function, Jakobson draws attention to the
fact that language use is mostly communicative language use and that communi-
cation is not possible unless there is contact established between the partici-
pants. Interactive language use necessarily serves this function to some degree
or other. Hence, small talk or socializing can be conceived as a genre of inter-
action in which the phatic function is the one that motivates the exchange in the
first place, but this function is also present in communications of other types.
406 Tilo Weber
2.3. Ordinary language philosophy and everyday communication

Rather than aiming at an account of what ordinary language is in terms of lin-
guistic means and structures, ordinary language philosophy originated from an
interest in what the appropriate role of this type of language is in the realm of
philosophical analysis; that is, ordinary language is looked at from the perspec-
tive of philosophical methodology (cf. Hanfling 2000: Chapter 2). This method
of philosophizing developed as an offspring and by way of a critique6 of the
most prevalent philosophical paradigm in the Anglosaxon world of the 1940s
and 1950s, i.e., analytic philosophy as represented by authors like Bertrand Rus-
sell and the Vienna circle lead by the logical positivists Rudolph Carnap and
Hans Reichenbach.
That ordinary language philosophy represents a method of philosophizing
is, ex negativo, expressed quite clearly in a quote from one of the most promi-
nent and determined opponents of this approach. Bertrand Russell rightly
attributes to philosophers including his former student Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1953), John L. Austin (1962, 1964), Gilbert Ryle (1949), and Peter Strawson
(1950) the conviction
[] that common speech is good enough, not only for daily life, but also for philoso-
phy. [] I, on the contrary am persuaded that common speech is full of vagueness
and inaccuracy []. Everybody admits that physics and chemistry and medicine
each require a language which is not that of everyday life. I fail to see why philoso-
phy, alone, should be forbidden to make a similar approach towards precision and
accuracy (Russell 1959; quoted after Hanfling 2000: 12).
Several aspects of ordinary language philosophy are alluded to in this quotation.

Ordinary language is equated with the language of everyday life, i.e., of every-
day communication. Furthermore, Wittgenstein and others suggest that the lan-
guage of everyday communication alone is sufficient for philosophical purposes.
In addition, they argue that ordinary language by necessity is the fundament and
ultimate means of philosophy. Even if one designed as conceived by, e.g., Rus-
sell, Carnap, and the early Wittgenstein ([1921] 2002] an ideal language of
science, there would be no other way to explicate the meaning of its concepts
than by means of ordinary language. Ordinary language, hence, proves to be the
most basic metalanguage. The observation that this metalanguage is full of
vagueness may (or may not) be considered problematic from the point of view
of science; it does not, however, support any counter-argument against the doc-
trine suggested by ordinary language philosophy. Austin himself formulates:
[ O]ur common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found
worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes
of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound []
than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon (Austin
1961; quoted after Hanfling 2000: 26).
The philosophical implications of this view are outside the scope of this chapter.
However, for attempts at elucidating the nature of the meaning of linguistic ex-
pressions, i.e., for semantic analysis in general, the consequences are concisely
expressed in the famous 43rd paragraph from Wittgensteins Philosophical In-
vestigations:
For a large class of cases though not for all in which we employ the word mean-
ing it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language (Wittgen-
stein 1953: 43).
From a linguistic point of view, the question immediately arises of how the use
of a word in the language can be determined. The adherents of speech act the-
ory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969), the most direct heirs of ordinary language
philosophy that have influenced linguistics, seem to have answered this with
reference to introspection. Accordingly, ordinary language is what speech act
theorists, provided they are native speakers of that language, consider to be
ordinary language. Typical linguistic data, then, include one-sentence utter-
ances (The cat is on the mat.; Would you pass me the salt, please.; etc.) selected
or even constructed by the linguist and analyzed by him/her on the basis of lin-
guistic intuitions presupposed to be shared by all competent members of the
speech community. The overall deductive nature of speech act theory is an in-
heritance from its analytic predecessor.
There are, however, approaches to pursuing a Wittgensteinean semantic pro-
gram in linguistics that are more empiristic in kind, i.e., data-driven or even cor-
pus-based. One example is provided by Franz Hundsnurscher (1995) who expli-
cates the meaning of the German adjective alt (old) by giving a usage profile
(Gebrauchsprofil) that is the result of a corpus analysis. More recently, the vol-
ume by Deppermann and Spranz-Fogazy (2002) presents data-based empirical
studies on the emergence of meaning in conversation.
In sum, it can be stated that ordinary language philosophy has provided
arguments that direct the attention of linguists and, more specifically, seman-
ticists to the actual use speakers make of language in everyday communi-
cation.
2.4. Ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology, an approach to sociology closely associated with the names
of Harold Garfinkel ([1967] 1984a) and his students, is the fourth important
source that lead to the study of everyday communication in linguistics. Garfin-
kel arrived at his major claims on the reflexive and indexical nature of social in-
teraction under the influence of Husserlean phenomenology and, especially, of
Alfred Schtz, on the one hand, and as the result of his critique of Talcott Par-
sons way of doing sociology on the other. The relevance of ethnomethodology
408 Tilo Weber
for the study of everyday communication is obvious from the fact that conver-
sation analysis (see below Section 3.1.) is its direct offspring. Like Malinowski,
but in contradistinction to speech act theory and Bhlers semiotics, ethnome-
thodology is emphatically empiricist in nature (Weber 2003). And similar to
Malinowskis, Garfinkels and his most influential students, Harvey Sacks, ap-
proaches, his interest in language use and communication was also of a second-
ary and rather indirect nature. This is illustrated by the following statement by
John Heritage:
The term ethnomethodology thus refers to the study of a particular subject matter:
the body of common-sense knowledge and the range of procedures and consider-
ations by means of which the ordinary members of society make sense of, find their
way about in, and act on the circumstances in which they find themselves (Heritage
1984: 4).
The (ethno-)methods by which the members of a community make sense of each

others activities and their environment, thus, are the ethnomethodologists pri-
mary objects of interest. Language use and communication are drawn into their
focus because linguistic social interaction is a major, though not the only, kind
of activity by which individuals collaboratively perform and display their sense
makings to each other and which is most important from a methodological
point of view to outside observers and analysts.
Garfinkels radical empiricism and anti-apriorism is based on two main the-
oretical assumptions:
(i) indexicality: the meaning of any given social behavior (whether linguistic
or otherwise), rather than being determined by the conventional type-mean-
ings of the tokens produced, is interactively and collaboratively constructed
by the participants in the ongoing interaction.
(ii) reflexivity: [ T]he activities whereby members produce and manage set-
tings of organized everyday affairs are identical with members procedures
for making those settings account-able (Garfinkel 1984b: 1).7
In other words, Garfinkel suggests that participants in interaction not only pro-
duce sense by their social activities, but they also display to their co-interactants
that they are doing so.
From these two basic assumptions, which are grounded in the traditions of phe-
nomenology, a radically empiricist approach to social interaction follows. If
sense is not an apriori property of semiotic types but emerges in the here-and-
now of social interaction, it cannot be adequately accounted for on the basis
of an analysts own native speaker competence which reflects the necessarily
de-contextualized outcome of his/her linguistic socialization within a speech
community. Hence, ethnomethodologists consider Husserls epoch, i.e., the
bracketing or suspension of ones own prejudices with regard to the objects

of study, the first step to any sound data analysis.
However, what criteria can be applied for the interpretation of utterances if
the interpreters intuitions are excluded? Garfinkels answer is closely related to
his concept of reflexivity and presupposes a priority of the participants perspec-
tive to the analysts with regard to the analysis of discourse. Accordingly, an
analyst is able to observe what a particular utterance means, because the partici-
pants display their understandings of each others contributions by reacting
to them as to activities of certain types. Paul, for instance, may utter Its
5 oclock in response to Cynthias Excuse me, what time is it? and, thus,
react to it as if to a question for the time. In turn, Cynthias behavior (e.g., her ut-
tering Thanks or her nodding) will indicate to Paul that he interpreted Cyn-
thias utterance correctly. Correctly, however, does not imply that Paul
really understood, what Cynthia thought and intended by what she said. For
the ethnomethodologist (as for everybody else), other minds are opaque; what
the observer and Paul alike may conclude from Cynthias interactive behavior,
however, is that Pauls understanding was sufficiently in line with Cynthias in-
tention to meet the practical purposes of the ongoing interaction (cf. Garfinkel
1984a: 7). This conclusion is justified by the assumption that speakers are ac-
countable for what they say8 and for how it is reacted to by their interlocutors. In
those cases where they notice a misunderstanding or another communicational
problem, they are expected to take measures to account for what they meant
and, thus, to fix the problem at least to an extent necessary for the ongoing ex-
change. From a methodological point of view, the argument reconstructed
above suggests a radically empiricist research strategy.
2.5. Summary
At the beginning of the 20th century, everyday communication and, especially,
an empirical account of authentic everyday communication were far outside the
scope of linguistics. The review of the theoretical and empirical findings, and
arguments has shown how scholars changed their perspectives and turned to
consider speaking and listening in ordinary circumstances of everyday life more
than just an epiphenomenon of speakers putting the language system into use.
The objective of this discussion was to show that, while having started from
very different premises, the proponents of the four approaches discussed arrived
at conclusions that are remarkably similar with regard to the aspects relevant to
the issues discussed here. All four accounts argue in favor of a functional view
which considers language to be inextricably related to language use and social
interaction. This theoretical reason makes everyday communication, by which
participants typically realize social interaction, the obvious focus of linguistic
interest. The empirical nature of this interest is a consequence of the insight
410 Tilo Weber
that meaning (Malinowski), semiosis (Bhler), or sense-making (Garfinkel) is

essentially indexical, i.e., it comes about only under the special conditions of
particular contexts of situation.
After this reconstruction of the pre-history, the next section introduces two
research paradigms, conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistics,
proponents of which explicitly turn their research attention to the empirical
analysis of discourse and, in particular, everyday communication.
3. Everyday conversation in the focus of empirical discourse analysis
This section presents two approaches, conversation analysis and systemic func-
tional linguistics, that have focused either directly or indirectly on the every-
dayness of everyday communication as distinct from other modes of interac-
tion. Furthermore, brief reference will be made to a few other works which have
contributed to research on everyday communication, but which are not closely
associated to either of the two paradigms mentioned above.
3.1. Conversation analysis (CA)

As we saw in the previous section, ethnomethodology provided the theoretical ar-
guments to convince scholars that social order, the principles of interaction, and
the coming about of sense should be studied empirically. As the initial step in a
valid research strategy, the focus should be on authentic given, rather than made
up, data that occurred uninuenced by the analyst. Introspection and the analysts
intuitions, which are based on his/her experiences as a member of the community
under observation, are to be excluded from the analytic process as far as possible.9
At the beginning of the 1960s, it was an ethnomethodological background
together with a number of technical innovations that were conducive to the rise
of a research program which explicitly concerned itself with the study of spoken
discourse: conversation analysis.10 As noted above, social interaction is mainly
realized by way of interactants engaging in talk. The telephone as a widespread
medium of communication and the availability of recording devices audio-re-
corders and, from the 1970s onwards, video-cameras enabled researchers to
realize the empiricist programs formulated earlier by ethnomethodologists but
also by other empirically minded linguists. It was Michael A.K. Halliday, the
initiator of systemic functional linguistics, who acknowledged this fact when he
stated:
Perhaps the greatest single event in the history of linguistics was the invention of
the tape recorder, which for the first time has captured natural conversation and
made it accessible to systematic study (Halliday 1994; quoted after Eggins and Slade
1997: 1).
Up to this point, scholars had to rely on field notes they took at the same time
they were observing their research objects, or in retrospect. Discourse analysts
were now able to preserve their data in a way that allowed for multiple replays.
They were able to do fine-grained analyses on a multiplicity of details that gen-
erally pass unnoticed when the observer has the chance to listen to and watch a
verbal exchange only once.
A look at the early work in conversation analysis (Sacks 199511; Schegloff
and Sacks 1973; Schegloff 1968, 1972; Sacks, Jefferson, and Schegloff 1974;
Schegloff, Sacks, and Jefferson 1977) reveals that conversation is, here,
understood in the sense of authentic oral social interaction which is set off
from made-up, written, and/or monological texts. The data available for re-
cording and, subsequently, for analysis include exchanges as different as ther-
apy sessions, telephone calls from a suicide prevention center, and private
phone conversations. Only the latter would, in the still intuitive sense in which
the term has been used so far, qualify as a typical kind of everyday communi-
cation.
The properties that characterize specific modes or genres of spoken discourse
and distinguish them from one another have not yet been explicitly focused
upon in this approach. Rather, conversation analysts identify and describe struc-
tures and mechanisms that seem to be constitutive of conversation in the broad
understanding. Most influential for subsequent research has been Sacks, Jeffer-
son, and Schegloffs (1974) paper on A simplest systematics for the organization
of turn-taking for conversation that explores the so called turn-taking ma-
chinery. Based on conversational data of various types and origins, the authors
argue that the constitutive process that underlies verbal interaction, i.e., the
abab-alternation of the participants turns-at-talk, is regulated by a relatively
simple mechanism that is applied recursively by the speakers. Other phenomena
identified as central to conversation are:
adjacency pairs and conditional relevancy (e.g., Sacks 1987; Schegloff
1968; Kallmeyer 1976)
preference structures (e.g., Schegloff, Sacks, and Jefferson 1977; Pomerantz
1986; Bilmes 1988)
repair activities (e.g., Schegloff, Sacks, and Jefferson 1977; Schegloff
1979b; Egbert 2002; Weber 1998)
Among other things, conversation analysts are credited for having demonstrated
that one of the most mundane and everyday activities mastered by virtually all
members of a social community, i.e. conversation, depends on activities the
successful performance of which is a true accomplishment. Hence, seemingly
trivial activities, like turn-taking or the closing of a conversation, are liable to
problems or even to complete failure which interactants have, but may fail to be
able, to avoid or to overcome by their communicative activities.
412 Tilo Weber
It was only later that conversation analysts started to focus more on different
sub-types of what until then had been studied under the general heading of con-
versation. Everyday communication, it seems, is now referred to as a kind of
default case providing the background against which discourse of other kinds is
profiled. Paul Drew and John Heritages (1992: 2122) section on Institutional
talk and ordinary conversation in the introduction to their volume on Talk at
Work is typical of this strategy. At its onset, they state:
In the following discussion, we will address some aspects of interaction which are
often cited when analysts seek to distinguish institutional talk from ordinary con-
versation (Drew and Heritage 1992: 21).
By subsequently stating what talk at work is, which the authors equate with
institutional talk, they ex negativo define also their concept of ordinary con-
versation. Accordingly, ordinary conversation typically
is not normally informed by goal orientations of a relatively restricted con-
ventional form
does not involve special and particular constraints on what one or both of
the participants will treat as allowable contributions to the business at hand
is not associated with inferential frameworks and procedures that are par-
ticular to specific institutional contexts (all quotes from Drew and Heritage
1992: 22; authors emphases).
The quotation of this definition would not be complete without the following
qualification by which the authors
[] stress that we do not accept that there is necessarily a hard and fast distinction to
be made between the two in all instances of interactional events, nor even at all
points in a single interaction event (Drew and Heritage 1992: 21).
From this, it can be concluded that everyday communication, at least from
the point of view of conversation analysts, does not tend to be goal-oriented,
specifically constrained with regard to allowable moves, and associated with
particular inferential frameworks. However, it is well conceivable that one or
several of these features may be displayed by (rather untypical) instances of
everyday communication. An example in point is provided by family dinner
table conversations among the members of traditional European families where
the contributions allowed to the various participants seem very much conven-
tionalized (Keppler 1995).
The success of conversation analysis in defining everyday communication
as opposed to institutional discourse remained somewhat vague. Another strat-
egy to explicate the notion of everyday communication is to look more specifi-
cally at what activity types or genres discourse analysts have analyzed under
two different headings. The list of institutional and, thus, non-everyday
genres explored as such by conversation analysts is very long and beyond the
space available here (cf. the contributions to Drew and Heritage 1992; Boden
and Zimmerman 1991; Arminen 2005); it includes medical discourse (Have
2006; Heritage and Maynard 2006; Lehtinen 2007), job interviews (Botton
1992; Birkner 2001), court proceedings (Atkinson and Drew 1978; Atkinson
1992; Drew 1992), educational discourse (Hester and Francis 2000), and many
more. As for clear examples of everyday genres explored within conversation
analysis, the list is much shorter, which is in line with the observation formu-
lated above that everyday discourse is to be defined sui generis rather from a
merely negative point of view. Everyday genres that have attracted the attention
of researchers influenced by conversation analysis include dinner table conver-
sations (Weber 1998) and small talk (Schneider 1988; Coupland 2000).
3.2. Casual conversation from the point of view of systemic functional

linguistics (SFL)
As expressed by Hallidays statement given earlier, practitioners of systemic
functional linguistics have been using authentic oral discourse as data right
from the moment at which this was technically feasible.While, from a CA per-
spective, everyday communication has to be reconstructed as a participant cat-
egory by means of an empiricist methodology, systemic functionalists pursue a
different approach. Their starting point within a broader theoretical frame-
work that includes the concepts of genre and register is a presupposed notion
of casual conversation. Eggins and Slade introduce their research object along
these lines:
Very often we talk to other people to accomplish quite specific, pragmatic tasks: we
talk to buy and to sell, to find out information, to pass on knowledge, to make ap-
pointments, to get jobs, and to jointly participate in practical activities.
At other times we talk simply for the sake of talking itself. An example of this is
when we get together with friends or workmates over coffee or dinner and just have
a chat. It is to these informal interactions that the label casual conversation is
usually applied (Eggins and Slade 1997: 6; authors emphasis).
[] We will define casual conversation functionally and, initially at least,
negatively, as talk which is NOT motivated by any clear pragmatic purpose (Eggins
and Slade 1997: 19; authors emphasis).
Much like conversation analysts, Eggins and Slade, first, set off casual conver-
sation against goal-oriented discourse. It seems, however, that their concept is
narrower and excludes more than just institutional talk in the CA sense. If all
interaction that pursues quite specific, pragmatic tasks is beyond the realm of
the casual, asking a passerby for the time or the shortest way to the railway
station does not qualify as casual conversation. Furthermore, if one considers
complex genres, e.g., dinner table interactions or job interviews, casual and
pragmatic activities occur alternately. Thus, it appears that what systemic
414 Tilo Weber
functionalists put into focus are those aspects of communication that, using
Malinowskis and Jakobsons term, can be qualified as phatic interaction. And if
this is a fair description, socializing may be regarded a more appropriate term
given that, e.g., the exchange of greeting formulas at the beginning of a job in-
terview serves phatic purposes, but is certainly not casual.
Eggins and Slades view is indeed compatible especially with Jakobsons
model according to which the linguistic sign is functionally motivated in six
regards. Different kinds of language use, then, differ from each other according
to which of the functions is the primary and not necessarily the only one
(cf. above Section 2.1.2.). In casual conversation, then, the phatic function is the
participants main motivation to interact. Ventola expresses the idea that casu-
alness is a matter of degree:
Casualness may be a part of any encounter, but there are particular face-to-face
encounters which are marked by this feature namely casual encounters (Ventola
1979: 267; authors emphasis).
Given this functional view, the description of casual conversation as talk
simply for the sake of talking itself appears somewhat misleading, which is
also clear when Eggins and Slade state:
[ C]asual conversation is a critical linguistic site for the negotiation of such im-
portant dimensions of our social identity as gender, generational location, sexuality,
social class membership, ethnicity, and subcultural and group affiliations. In fact, we
will be arguing in this book that casual conversation is concerned with the joint con-
struction of social reality (Eggins and Slade 1997: 6).
It follows from the discussion above, that casual conversation is much narrower
a concept than everyday communication. Furthermore, casual encounters are
found also beyond the realm of everyday interaction and do occur in the context
of talk at work, i.e., of institutional exchanges. Apparently, systemic func-
tional linguists like Ventola, Eggins, and Slade focus on a somewhat different
research object than conversation analysts. There is, however, a close relation-
ship between the two perspectives, an intersection that is represented by small
talk or socializing. Socializing can be conceived of as the prototypical everyday
speech activity or discourse genre because its participants primarily engage in
realizing the phatic semiotic function, that is, in casual conversation.
The systemic functional perspective, thus, does not provide us with an inten-
sional understanding of what constitutes the everydayness of everyday com-
munication. However, it directs our attention to the center of this fuzzy category
as one of its prototypes. An advantage of this approach is that it relies on a single
positive criterion only, which makes it feasible to identify stretches of casual
talk even when they are embedded in structurally and functionally more com-
plex interactions. Collections of plausible examples of socializing, which are
offered both by Ventola as well as by Eggins and Slade, serve as data on the
basis of which further questions may be answered. Within the limited realm of
this chapter, only an inexhaustive list of relevant issues can be given:
What is the structure of casual conversation (Ventola 1979)?
Are there types of casual conversation?
Is there a specific grammar of casual conversation (Eggins and Slade 1997:
Chapter 3)?
What is the semantics of casual conversation (Eggins and Slade 1997:
Chapter 4)?
etc.
3.3. Further contributions to research on everyday communication

In the preceding sections, conversation analysis and systemic functional lin-
guistics were presented as two research paradigms on the basis of which scholars
have contributed to our understanding of everyday communication. From this
systematic point of view, however, it is easy to overlook work that is not readily
associated with either of the two approaches.
In this regard, Robert E. Nofsingers introductory textbook on Everyday
Conversation (1991) should be mentioned. The aim of this author is not so much
to align himself with a particular paradigm and to develop, on this basis, an in-
novative theory of a particular genre, but rather, to present to his readers what
scholars from different, and not necessarily mutually compatible, theoretical
backgrounds have contributed to his topic. Accordingly, Nofsinger introduces
speech act theory and Gricean pragmatics as having laid the foundations that
made research in everyday communication possible. The larger portion of his
monograph is, then, concerned with those findings of conversation analysts that
pertain to the study of everyday communication. In sum, Nofsinger provides a
thorough and easily accessible introduction to the topic without discussing the
theoretical details and problems that go along with it.
Finally, I would like to refer to two studies on dinner talk, one by Angela
Keppler (1995) and one by Shoshana Blum-Kulka (1997; cf. also Tannen [1984]
2005). Even though they do not explicitly concern themselves with definitorial
problems, their analyses of participants activities from a sociological point of
view are relevant for linguists interested in ordinary social interaction because
dinner table conversations represent an interactive genre that seldom is missing
in lists of exemplary cases of everyday communication.
416 Tilo Weber
3.4. Summary
The purpose of Section 3 was to demonstrate that conversation analysts and sys-
temic functionalists both concern themselves with everyday communication,
but their perspectives are different. Conversation analysts approach everyday
communication as a special case of discourse that is to be distinguished from in-
stitutional interactions. In contrast, systemic functional linguists focus more
specifically on casual conversation as a prototypical type of everyday communi-
cation. Both accounts go along with specific strengths and weaknesses; and they
also share a common property. While conversation analysts propose a more glo-
bal account of everyday communication, their concept remains rather vague; on
this basis, it would be difficult to collect undisputable examples of everyday in-
teraction that go beyond the well known and often listed prototypes. On the
other hand, Ventola (1979) and Eggins and Slade (1997) define casual com-
munication, or socializing, as a class of everyday interactions elements of which
are characterized by a common primary function: phatic communion. While
casual conversation is without doubt a prototypical case of everyday communi-
cation, the latter concept is commonly used in a much broader sense. It includes,
e.g., dinner table conversations that are both structurally and functionally more
complex than casual conversations. Ventola, Eggins, and Slade, thus elucidate
a particular type of everyday communication; however, they do not say what
everyday communication in the broad sense is.12
Hence, conversation analysts as well as systemic functional linguists are not
alone in struggling to find a well defined account of everyday communication.
What, on first sight, seems unsatisfactory, appears less surprising when two fac-
tors are considered: first, everyday communication, above all, is an ethnocat-
egory used by speakers on an intuitive basis in well everyday communication.
What suits the practical purposes of ordinary interaction is not necessarily apt in
scientific contexts. Second, everyday communication refers to an intermediate
level of categorization that is rather abstract. Other than for both the superordi-
nate category (i.e., spoken discourse) and the subordinate categories (e.g., so-
cializing, dinner table conversations, etc.), in the case of everyday communi-
cation, it is impossible to identify specific properties that all members share and
all non-members do not show.
In conclusion, everyday conversation is a category that seems best defined
with reference to prototypical members and prototypical properties featured by
these members. This gives rise to more systematic considerations presented in
the following section.
4. Everyday communication as a prototype category with socializing as

its central member
Confronted with conceptual and methodological problems like the ones dis-
cussed above, Petra Lindemann (1990: 206, 219) suggests that the concept of
everyday conversation (Alltagsgesprch) should be completely dispensed
with. However, this radically therapeutic approach is not recommended here
for two reasons: first, everyday communication and its relatives, including every-
day language, everyday situation, and everyday life, are ethnocategories that are
frequently referred to by speakers outside of scientific discourse; empirically
minded social scientists and linguists cannot ignore this fact and have, there-
fore, to account for it by explicitly reconstructing the tacit intuitions which
underlie these common, if problematic, concepts. Second, the contrast between
everyday and institutional communication, which has been proven useful by
proponents of rather different research paradigms, suggests that there is a rel-
evant intermediate level of categorization between the superordinate level of
oral discourse and particular everyday genres or activity types, such as small
talk or job interviews.
Taking into account the problems discussed above whilst at the same time
retaining this concept is possible only if the prototypical nature of this particular
category is given its due weight. On the one hand, it is feasible, on this basis, to
account for the observation that the transition from ordinary to institutional
communication (Drew and Heritage 1992: 21) or from casual to non-casual dis-
course (Ventola 1979; Eggins and Slade 1997) is continuous rather than dis-
crete. On the other hand, it allows us to understand why socializing or small talk
is almost always mentioned when concrete examples of everyday communi-
cation are listed; and also, why it is plausible to state that not all small talk is
casual (e.g., in the context of job interviews) and institutional discourse is not
necessarily formal and goal-oriented (e.g., the exchange of greetings among
colleagues in the morning).
In the following, this proposal is spelled out by brief reviews of six proper-
ties that characterize typical cases of everyday communication: these are ordi-
nary, authentic, oral, private, informal, and lacking goal-orientation/phatically
motivated.
Ordinariness: Everyday communication is, in the first place, communi-

cation that happens every day or, at least, frequently. It represents a type of
ordinary, mundane social interaction. Several times a week, most but prob-
ably not all of us are involved in dinner table conversations or chats in the
street, in the office, in the supermarket, or in some other place. It is obvious
however, that ordinariness is also the mark of interactions that, even though
they occur daily, are not everyday communications in the sense discussed in
418 Tilo Weber
the present chapter. Primary or high school teachers, for instance, spend
many hours a day communicating with students during lessons; still, we do
not want to include teaching or class discourse into the category of everyday
communication. In contrast, telephone chats are considered ordinary lan-
guage use even though many people in Western societies do not phone regu-
larly with their friends or relatives.
Authenticity: Conversation analysts have insisted against traditional lin-
guists, but also against other pragmatically minded scholars, such as the pro-
ponents of speech act theory, that admissible data for linguistic analysis
ought to be authentic. Accordingly, the interactions included in an ideal
data base are independent of the analyst in all regards, e.g., in terms of their
selection, occasion, participants, structure, topics, etc. The discussion, initi-
ated by William Labov (1972: 206), on the so called observers paradox
has demonstrated, however, that data authenticity in the empirical social
sciences and in linguistics can at best be approximately realized and, thus, is
a matter of degree. The preference, for instance, in early CA studies for ex-
changes between family members, friends, and students was, in addition to
theoretically well justified reasons, in part due to the fact that these data
were readily available to the researchers.
Orality: Everyday communication overwhelmingly is spoken discourse.
This is trivially and exclusively true for oral societies and for early child-
hood. But also in Western cultures and in later periods of the life, the role of
writing outside professional contexts, for most, is of rather minor signifi-
cance. Or so it used to be. In recent years, the rise of new communicative
means and platforms, ranging from e-mail to social networking sites and vir-
tual worlds on the internet, have created a kind of social reality that is very
much based on writing rather than or in addition to speaking. To date, it is
still a minority of members even in developed societies that make extensive
use of these media and platforms. Their example illustrates, however, that
the possibility of leading an everyday life that is very much rooted in the
virtuality of electronic media and based primarily on writing has left the
realm of science fiction literature and entered the actual reality with many
concrete (e.g., cognitive, financial, and societal) consequences.
Privateness: Conversation analysts like Drew and Heritage (1992) have
equated institutional communication with talk at work. In contrast then,
everyday communication is talk at home or in private circumstance. This
is obviously true for our prototype of socializing and for dinner table talk
among friends and family members. Talk shows on TV, however, the suc-
cess of which to a large extent is dependent on an atmosphere of privateness,
mundaneness, and authenticity, are not at all private. However, they feature
several other properties considered characteristic of everyday communi-
cation, including informality, the range of intimate topics, etc.
Informality: Socializing among friends typically is informal and casual. At

first sight, phatic interaction appears hardly to be regulated by constraints on
admissible behavior. However, even small talk at a neighborhood barbecue
may not allow for all conceivable topics of conversation (e.g., sexual pref-
erences, severe financial problems), and may also require the use of formal
terms of address (e.g., of honorifics or in languages like German and
French the formal Sie/vous (3rd/2nd person plural pronoun) rather than the
familiar du/tu (2nd person singular pronoun)), etc. Politeness and face (Goff-
man [1955] 1967) are categories, interactants orient to in discourse of all
types. Independently of the discourse genre, the degree of informality de-
creases, the more formal the setting is, in the context of which the genre is
realized.
Lack of goal-orientation/phatic motivation: Talk simply for the sake of
talking itself (Eggins and Slade 1997: 6), i.e., chat or socializing interac-
tion, may be rightly characterized as lacking an orientation to intentionally
pursued pragmatic goals. Even in the context of dinner talk, however, par-
ticipants will ask each other to pass the salt or a dish of vegetables, which
clearly is a goal-oriented activity. A couple making plans for the weekend or
asking ones spouse whether he can take the kids to school both represent
everyday, mundane, and even casual communications, and still speakers
pursue quite specific goals by performing them.
This section has elaborated on the prototype character of everyday communi-

cation as a linguistic category. Accordingly, everyday communication may be
modeled as a radial or, rather, multi-dimensional category in the center of which
we find the prototype(s) that are characterized by the six features presented
above. This model allows us to account for the fact that socializing almost
unanimously is considered a prototype case of everyday communication and, at
the same time, to include as peripheral members cases that are lacking one or
several of the characteristic properties.
5. Research perspectives
After almost a whole century of research and since Malinowkis ethnographic

field-studies on primitive cultures, everyday communication has been estab-
lished as a research object and an indispensable kind of data base both in the so-
cial sciences and in empirically oriented linguistics. Progress in these fields has
always been stimulated by theoretical, empirical, and technological develop-
ments. At present, several directions can be identified in which research in
everyday communication will proceed in the near future. Four of those potential
developments are briefly characterized in the following.
420 Tilo Weber
It was Michael A.K. Halliday who rightly pointed out the impact made
by the audio recorder on empirical linguistics. For some time now, linguists
have used increasingly sophisticated technologies including (multiple) digital
cameras, eye trackers, etc. Along with these technological innovations goes an
understanding that natural communication is not limited to the verbal and, so
called, para-verbal levels, but is multimodal. Simultaneous video recordings
from various perspectives, the possibility to manipulate the video tapes (slow
motion, zoom), etc. allow discourse analysts to investigate different semiotic le-
vels of everyday communication and their interaction, including gestures and
mimics, eye gaze, body posture, proxemics, and others. The fact that research in
this direction is soaring is indicated by the large number of recent and upcoming
publications (e.g., Poggi 2007), conferences (cf., e.g., Allwood, Dorriots, and
Nicholson 2006), and new journals (e.g., GESTURE. John Benjamins).
While, for a long period of time, the analysis of everyday communication
was regarded relevant mainly for scholars of language usage (or parole), more
recently, functionally oriented linguists have insisted that natural and, by impli-
cation, everyday communication is the primary locus of structures and dy-
namics on all linguistic levels and, thus, has to be studied also by phonologists,
grammarians, and semanticists. On the basis of an empiricist view of language,
proponents of this approach have published work under various labels, includ-
ing discourse functional linguistics (e.g., Ford, Fox, and Thompson 2001) and
interactional linguistics (Selting and Couper-Kuhlen 2001; cf. Chapters 5 and 9
this volume).
From the perspective of applied linguistics, another stimulus for research in
everyday communication may originate from the popularity of this topic in the
areas of commercial and popular consulting, training, coaching, etc. The list of
practically oriented monographs, training manuals and videos, weekend sem-
inars, etc. is very long. These contributions to what Antos (1995) has called
lay-linguistics (Laien-Linguistik) hold out the prospect for their clients to im-
prove their small talking and other special communication skills that are con-
sidered indispensable for private and professional success. For a number of
reasons (cf. Weber 2005), these products are at best indirectly informed by lin-
guistic research (e.g., via Schultz von Thuns (2007) model of the four ears
(Vier-Ohren-Modell) that is based on Bhlers organon model). If the cultural
differences between social scientists on the one hand and practically (and com-
mercially) oriented trainers and consultants, on the other, could be bridged, the
potential profit would be mutual. From the point of view of linguists, this would,
e.g., include access to data that otherwise are not easily available.
As mentioned in Section 4 above, the implication that authentic communi-
cation, by default, is oral communication has to some degree lost its status as an
unquestionable truism with the rise of electronic media and the internet in recent
years. These technological innovations have brought with them rapid changes
and are at the moment causing dramatic consequences for the ways an increas-
ing number of people in developed and developing societies communicate.
While more recently introduced means of written communication, including
e-mail, short message system (SMS) services, instant messaging, internet chats
and forums, allow users to realize many of the functions formerly limited to oral
and mostly to face-to-face interactions, social networking sites, e.g., facebook
(www.facebook.com), and virtual worlds, e.g., Second Life (www.secondlife.
com), for some, have redefined and, very likely, will redefine in the future what
is to be considered ordinary or everyday (cf. Chapter 12 this volume). This
means that at the moment, for students of everyday communication, an entirely
novel research domain is emerging.
6. Concluding remarks
In this chapter, everyday communication was approached in four major steps.

First, the emergence of everyday communication as a linguistic research object in
the rst half of the 20th century was reconstructed (Section 2). It was demonstrated
that scholars as different as Bronisaw Malinowski (1923), Karl Bhler (1934),
John Austin (1962, 1964), and Harold Garnkel (1984) put forward arguments
and ndings that converge on a common conclusion: questions on the grammati-
cal structure and meaning of linguistic expressions and utterances cannot be
answered without reference to authentic data from everyday communication in
their situational and cultural contexts. Following this summary of the scientic
prehistory, Section 3 introduced conversation analysis and systemic functional
linguistics as two research paradigms that approach everyday communication in
specic manners respectively. Whereas conversation analysts, from a more global
perspective, look at everyday communication as at a type of discourse that is in
contrast with institutional talk, systemic functional linguists have concerned
themselves primarily with one of its prototypes, i.e., casual or phatic interaction.
Up to this point of the discussion, a picture of everyday communication as
an important concept in linguistics had emerged that displays the structure of a
prototype category. This radial category, it was argued further, is derived from
an ethnocategory or, rather, an entire family of ethnocategories. Section 4 pres-
ented a more systematic look at the prototype nature of everyday communi-
cation. One of its central members, socializing or small talk, was characterized
by six properties: ordinariness, authenticity, orality, privateness, informality,
and a lack of goal-orientation. It was further stated that the prototype concep-
tion of everyday communication also implies the notion of peripheral category
members which are marked by a lack of one or the other of the characteristic
properties. Finally, Section 5 highlighted perspectives on current and future re-
search in everyday communication.
422 Tilo Weber
Notes
1. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974: 700701) provide a more detailed, but not
meant to be exhaustive, list of grossly apparent facts about any conversation to
constrain their area of study (cf. also Nofsinger 1992: 1).
2. Besides Malinowski and the so called British functionalists, Franz Boas ([1938]
1965) and his students were pioneers of this method.
3. To restate the main position arrived at in this section we can say that language in its
primitive function and original form has an essentially pragmatic character; that
it is a mode of behaviour, an indispensable element of concerted human action
(Malinowski 1923: 316; emphasis mine, T.W.).
4. In order to emphasize the pioneering character of the ideas thus expressed, it may be
noted that this view is formulated at the same time at which philosophers of language
including Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the proponents of the Vienna
Circle are devoting their research to the concept of an ideal language and pursuing
the most influencial research program of logical semantics that is based on assump-
tions contrary to Malinowkis.
5. In spite of this contextualistic character of the organon model, which is the basis of
his entire linguistic theory, Bhler insists that there are uses of language that are re-
moved from any specific situation (situationsfern; Bhler 1934: 21). His prime
examples for this include written texts and phraseologisms. For the purposes of the
present chapter, it suffices to point out the functionalist nature of Bhlers view.
It is, therefore, neither necessary nor possible here to elucidate the non-trivial ques-
tion of how the organon model is to be interpreted in the light of Bhlers distinction
between subject [and context] related (subjektsbezogene) and subject [and con-
text)] free and intersubjectively fixed (subjektsentbundene und dafr intersubjektiv
fixierte) phenomena (Bhler 1999: 49; for a discussion, cf. Auer 1999a: 2529).
6. The emergence of ordinary language philosophy out of logical semantics is nicely
illustrated by the Russell-Strawson-debate on definite descriptions (Russell 1905,
1957; Strawson 1950; for a review, cf. Hanfling 2000: 170175).
7. Garfinkel (1984b) advances this central recommendation of reflexivity right at the
beginning of his programmatic paper on What is ethnomethodology?.
8. Within ethnomethodology, this doctrin plays a similar role as, in the Gricean para-
digm, the assumption that the presumption of rationality is taken for granted by all
rational interactants. According to this assumption, meaningful interaction is utterly
impossible unless the participants mutually attribute rationality to each other (cf.
Grice [1967] 1989: 2930).
9. The limits of this methodological doctrine have often been pointed out. Most conse-
quential is William Labovs (1972: 209) discussion of the so called observers para-
dox. For a review of the consequences following from this problem and related ones
for the methodology of conversation analysis, cf. Weber (2003).
10. Introductory monographs on conversation analysis are numerous and include Psa-
thas (1995), Hutchbe and Wooffit (1998), Silverman (1998), Have (1999), and Mar-
kee (2000). German readers may be referred to the canonical introductory articles by
Kallmeyer und Schtze (1976) and Bergmann (1981, 1994). Cf. also Chapter 3 this
volume.
11. It is one of the pecularities of conversation analysis as a scientific paradigm that

much of the work authored and co-authored by Harvey Sacks was edited and offi-
cially published after the death of this charismatic scholar in 1975. For the editing
history of Sacks early lectures, cf. Schegloff (1995).
12. In her study on The Structure of Social Intraction, Ventola (1987) shows how par-
ticipants switch between genres thus realizing everyday interactional activities also
in institutional settings.
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15. Counseling, diagnostics, and therapy
Peter Muntigl
1. Introduction
Over the years, linguistics seems to have been gaining a stronger foothold in
psychotherapy research. By this I mean to say that discourse structures are in-
creasingly being taken into account to help describe and explain how the pro-
duction and evolution of meanings is realized in psychotherapeutic interactions.
Whereas some researchers have suggested links between language and client
narratives (Angus and McLeod 2004; McLeod 1997; White and Epston 1990) or
language and levels of intended meanings (Stiles 1986), other researchers have
made the more general argument that therapeutic activities are primarily con-
structed in language (Anderson and Goolishian 1992; Meares 2004; McNamee
and Gergen 1992).
But for all this (recent) attention given to language and the social construc-
tion of meanings, a brief glimpse of any of the above-mentioned research would
quickly reveal that linguistic categories are rarely incorporated into the analysis.
In general, scant attention is paid to the phonology, grammar, and semantics of
utterances and the relationships between these linguistic levels. Client-therapist
conversations are often restricted to being the means by which the analyst may
discover more important psychotherapeutic processes. In some cases, the de-
tails of spoken interaction serve mainly as a stepping stone to creating psycho-
logical categories (e.g., Rennie 1992) and in other cases, to reveal a certain
psychotherapeutic process of client development (e.g., Leiman and Stiles 2001;
Stiles et al. 2006).
The aims of psychotherapy researchers are certainly different from those of
linguists and so it should not come as a big surprise to find that less emphasis is
given to linguistic than to psychological processes. Nonetheless, if language is
argued to be so important in constructions of experience and social relation-
ships, one might expect that more focus be placed on the linguistic and conver-
sational resources that play a part in constructing meanings relevant to the thera-
peutic process.1 In order to do that, psychotherapy researchers would need to
develop a comprehensive model of language or, since models of language al-
ready abound in linguistics, to incorporate a model of language that best serves
their aims.
Most linguists who adopt a functional as opposed to a formal approach to
language, or to use the more general term discourse analysts in order to include
researchers from anthropology, psychology and sociology with a strong interest
432 Peter Muntigl
in language use, proceed from the premise that language is a central resource
through which we construe experience and social relationships as meaningful.
Over the years discourse analysts have increasingly made therapy and counsel-
ing the target of their investigations. Research has not only focused on specific
institutionalized social groups such as couples (Buttny 1993, 1996, 1998; Ed-
wards 1994, 1995; Gale 1991; Kogan and Gale 1997; Muntigl 2004a, 2004b;
Muntigl and Hadic Zabala 2008; Muntigl and Horvath 2005), children (Hutchby
2002), families (Aronsson and Cederborg 1994; Grossen 1996), groups
(Wodak 1981, 1986, 1996), anorexic patients (Labov and Fanshel 1977), Aids
patients (Perkyl 1993, 1995; Perkyl and Silverman 1991; Silverman 1994,
1997), and persons with psychiatric disorders (Fine 2006), but also on a range of
psychotherapy schools, which include psychoanalysis (Billig 1999; Perkyl
2004; Vehvilinen 2003), narrative therapy (Kogan and Gale 1997; Muntigl
2004a, 2004b), cognitive behavioral therapy (Antaki, Barnes, and Leudar 2005),
family systems therapy (Perkyl 1995) Rogerian client-centered therapy
(Weingarten 1990), and experiential therapy (Muntigl 2005).
In general, the majority of discourse-based research on therapy and/or coun-
seling has been informed by either of two diverse approaches to discourse
analysis, namely, conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistics.2
Both approaches are highly sensitive to the interactional details that speakers
deploy in co-constructing an orderly, intersubjective world in common.3 One
major difference between these approaches is that conversation analysis consti-
tutes a sociological approach to the study of language and social interaction
(Heritage 2003: 2; italics mine), whereas systemic functional linguistic studies
are predicated on linguistic analyses of texts, spoken or written, in context. Sys-
temic functional linguistic analyses of spoken texts involve a description of the
speakers use of linguistic resources in construing experience and constructing
social relationships. Language, as a meaning making resource consisting of
phonology, lexicogrammar, and semantics, is functionally tied to social context
in a bi-directional manner; language constructs social context and social context
activates a meaning potential by which language choices tend to be realized (for
a useful discussion see Halliday 1999). Conversation analysis, on the other
hand, is not principally informed by linguistics, and so this type of analysis may,
but need not, include linguistic categories. Conversation analysts tend to focus
more on the sequential organization of social actions and on how the details of
talk can show how speakers are (or are not) producing shared understandings.4
The aim of this chapter, however, is not to argue for a specific approach to
analyzing therapy or counseling, but rather to show that discourse-based re-
search in this field can shed much light on how therapy and counseling, as social
activities, are accomplished. Looking at the details of social interaction,
whether grounded in linguistics or sociology, can tell us something about how
clients and therapists come to shared or divergent understandings of experience
Counseling, diagnostics, and therapy 433
and how therapeutic goals are realized in the moment-to-moment unfolding of

conversational actions. The bridge between a linguistic/sociological description
of interaction and the psychological processes involved in therapy may in all
probability still be under construction. The argument made here is that suc-
cessful bridge building may best be accomplished by taking the details of talk
into consideration, mainly because psychological processes are not independent
of language structures. In fact, we may go so far as to say that phenomena such
as consciousness, identity, emotions, psychopathology, and develop-
ment are realized in the so-called micro, mundane, or everyday meaning mak-
ing resources found in language and other semiotic systems. From this perspec-
tive, ignoring language means neglecting a significant area of how human
sociality gets accomplished.
In order to topicalize the role of linguistics or language use, I draw my at-
tention to a discursive practice that is centrally constitutive of therapy and coun-
seling. The discursive practice of diagnostics, whether it is explicitly or impli-
citly realized through the use of everyday or technical terms, seems to be a
component of most therapeutic activities. Although the term diagnostics, as in
making a diagnosis, is sometimes equated with illness or pathology, I would in-
terpret this term as referring more generally to how problems are socially con-
structed through language. In this way, diagnostics may involve the discursive
construction of problems as a pathology that is internal to the organism, or
equally, it may involve the discursive construction of a problem as socially
shared.
In the remaining sections of this chapter, I discuss how diagnostic practices
in therapy and counseling have been described in the discourse analytic litera-
ture. I begin by addressing the issue of how therapy has come to be seen as a
social activity that comprises a range of discursive practices or genres, one of
which involves diagnostics. Following that is a discussion of the various studies
addressing the issue of problem diagnosis, which is then complemented by an
illustration of how problem diagnosis can get derailed or off-track. Lastly, I con-
clude this article by suggesting some future directions that research on diag-
nostic practices in therapy may take.
2. Therapy as social activity: Some characteristics
How different are counseling and therapy from each other? The difference is
given a fairly straightforward interpretation by some researchers. Gaik (1992:
276), for instance, claims that therapeutic practices are non-directive and thus
seek to avoid any prescriptive or directive role in the interest of motivating the
patient into further introspection, self-analysis, and eventual autonomy. Coun-
seling, by contrast, is directive and primarily associated with the social actions
434 Peter Muntigl
of advice giving or providing guidance (Gaik 1992: 276). Silverman (1997: 6),
however, argues that many counselors disagree with the attempt to equate coun-
seling with advice giving, or even with the claim that counseling is vastly dif-
ferent from psychotherapy. What is advocated instead is that counseling be seen
as comprising different activities, which are not limited to giving advice,
but also include, for example, giving general information and client advocacy
(Silverman 1997: 1011).
Similar definitional problems to those of counseling may occur in the field
of therapy or, as it is commonly referred to, psychotherapy.5 Some of the diffi-
culty with providing therapy with a unitary functional definition may be due to
the diverse types of practitioners who claim to be doing therapy. As Garfield and
Bergin (1986: 5) have argued, counseling psychologists, school psychologists,
social workers, psychiatric nurses, pastoral counselors, and a number of other
professional groups participate in some type of psychotherapy or counseling.
Because of this, Garfield and Bergin (1986: 5) go on to conclude that it is evi-
dent that psychotherapy does not constitute a distinctive profession but rather
is an activity that is performed by members of many different professions. It is
perhaps mainly due to these reasons that Garfield and Bergin (1986: 8) have
noted a strong trend towards eclecticism or the lack of allegiance to any single
theoretical system.
Because there is currently no agreement on what constitutes the defining
features used to distinguish therapy from counseling or vice versa, I will use
therapy as a cover term for therapeutic and counseling activities. In the sec-
tions to follow, I discuss some important ways in which the therapeutic activity
has been conceptualized: the first is that therapy differs in certain respects from
everyday talk; the second is that therapy is realized in various interconnected
discursive practices or genres.
2.1. Institutional talk

It has been generally argued that therapy is realized through a range of discur-
sive practices that are institutional in quality. The term institutional is meant
to serve as a contrast to what may be interpreted as ordinary or everyday
(Drew and Heritage 1992: 21). Drawing from Levinsons (1979) paper on ac-
tivity types, Drew and Heritage proposed that institutional interactions differ
from ordinary conversation in three important ways. First, institutional talk
orients to specialized institutional goals and identities. Second, particular forms
of constraints, as for example restrictions on turn taking or topic selection, may
be placed on the interaction. Third, institutional talk contains specialized infer-
ential frameworks. For example, a clients expression of certain emotions such
as anger or sadness may be given a theory specific interpretation by the thera-
pist.
Ferrara (1994: 39) has proposed seven dimensions through which therapy
can be differentiated from conversation, many of which index a particular type
of modification or constraint that is placed on the interaction. These include
parity, reciprocality, routine recurrence, bounded time, restricted topic, remun-
eration, and regulatory responsibility. Parity is an important dimension to con-
sider in therapy because, unlike everyday conversation, conversationalists in
therapy agree to enter into an unequal relationship. Other differences include
non-reciprocal turn-taking patterns, the routine non-spontaneous recurrence of
a specific social activity, the temporally bounded nature of the speech event, the
restriction in what can be discussed, the exchange of money associated with
professional services, and the ability of one conversational participant to regu-
late how the conversation may unfold.
2.2. Speech event vs. genre

Previous linguistic research has also shown that different types of communi-
cative activities get accomplished during therapy (Ferrara 1994; Gaik 1992;
Labov and Fanshel 1977; Muntigl 2004, 2006). Depending on the researchers
discourse analytic approach, these so-called communicative activities are given
different labels such as genre (or macrogenre), activity, social practice, speech
event, and process. Taking genre as a general rubric for the different theoretical
views on communicative activities, Muntigl and Gruber (2005) have argued that
genres are associated with specific characteristics. For example, genres have a
stabilized yet flexible communicative structure that orients toward a social pur-
pose. In therapy, for example, the communicative structure may be reflected in
such activities as getting background information on clients, getting clients
to present the problem, or offering solutions to the problem. Further, such ac-
tivities are often prospective in orientation and therefore purposeful. In this
way, getting background information may lead into problem presentation,
which may lead into finding ways of getting rid of the problem. Communicative
structures in therapy also tend to be associated with specific situational contexts
(and are realized in those contexts) and interpersonal roles. For instance, thera-
pists do on average ask more questions than clients, which place the therapist in
the dominant role of information seeker (Ferrara 1994: 38).
Two major approaches to therapy as communicative activity will be re-
viewed below.6 In Section 2.2.1., therapy is described as a speech event, and in
Section 2.2.2. as a macrogenre. Speech event related work on therapy is based
on the theoretical framework found in Hymes (1972) ethnography of com-
munication. Within this model, a speech event is defined as a culturally recog-
nized occurrence that centers around language; the therapy hour is a naturally
bounded speech event containing many varieties of language use (Ferrara
1994: 12). Macrogenre related work, on the other hand, is primarily informed by
436 Peter Muntigl
systemic functional linguistics, which centrally includes Martins (1992) genre

theory. According to Martin (2002: 269), the term genre is used for configur-
ations of meaning that are recurrently phased together to enact social practices.
Some examples of everyday genres are narrative, recount, anecdote, service en-
counter, explanation, and discussion.
2.2.1. Therapy as speech event

As Hymes (1972: 56) previously stated, the term speech event will be restricted
to activities, or aspects of activities, that are directly governed by rules or norms
for the use of speech. An event may consist of a single speech act, but will often
comprise several. Speech event characterizations of therapy can be found in
the work of Ferrara (1994), Gaik (1992), and Labov and Fanshel (1977). Labov
and Fanshel claim that therapy should be characterized as an interview, in which
a therapist attempts to extract information from a client. Ferrara (1994: 37),
however, argues against this claim because seeking information is not the only,
and perhaps not even the primary, activity that constitutes the therapy process.
Instead, Ferrara proposes that therapy be subsumed under a larger class of
speech event termed consultation. According to Ferrara (1994: 37), consul-
tations occur when one person, A, approaches a specialist, B, to receive assist-
ance in planning future behavior or action, action that can be medical, legal,
financial, or other. Different again is Gaiks (1992: 276) conceptualization of
therapy as a speech event. Gaik turns his attention primarily to the communi-
cative structure of therapy and the way in which specific language selections
provide contextualization cues to the conversationalists that they are in a cer-
tain activity rather than another. He argues that therapy consists of two activities
or modes, which he labels as therapeutic and counseling. The therapeutic mode
is non-directive and is oriented to a discovery procedure of what the problem
might be, whereas the counseling mode is directive, focusing more on giving
advice or finding a solution to the problem.
Although speech event studies have largely focused on the situational con-
texts in which therapy is done, a significant part of this work, such as Labov and
Fanshels (1977) and Ferraras (1994) examination of speech act sequences and
story telling episodes, has also looked at the way in which language is used
to construct these speech events. I would argue, however, that a much more
detailed investigation of linguistic practices is needed, particularly if our aim is
to learn more about the important role that language serves in the making of a
diagnosis. In particular, more attention should be given to the lexicogrammar,
and especially to how the therapists use of grammar influences a clients under-
standing of the problem. The macrogenre analysis shown below, which is
based on systemic functional linguistic theory, offers an approach to investigat-
ing therapeutic practices (and, of course, other institutional or everyday forms
of social interaction) that can remedy some of these shortcomings. By using this
approach, it can be shown how the therapists unique choice of linguistic/ gram-
matical structures has important consequences for the diagnosis of problems
and for the subsequent unfolding of therapy.
2.2.2. Therapy as macrogenre

Macrogenre studies on therapy take communicative structure as a main point of
departure. One of the main goals in this type of analysis is to map the therapy
process as a system of interconnected genres or macrogenres (Muntigl 2004a,
2004b, 2006). Although many different types of activities are realized during
therapy, a macrogenre analysis places its main focus on those activities that cen-
trally involve the discursive negotiation of problems.7 In other words, the domi-
nant interest lies in identifying the textual unfolding or logogenesis of problems
and the discursive practices that form a component part of this activity.
Figure 1 illustrates how problem logogenesis in therapy can be modeled in
terms of genres. In his examination of the narrative counseling interview, Mun-
tigl (2004a) argued that the overall interview consisted of two main activities,
namely problem construction and problem effacement. Furthermore, these ac-
tivities or genres are composed of discrete sub-activities or stages, which in-
clude problem identification and problem agency for problem construction as
well as identification of alternative events and alternative event/ client agency
for problem effacement. Lastly, the stages involving problem or alternative
event identification can be further sub-divided into formulation-reformulation
sequences. The genres and stages are sequentially ordered and goal-directed:
problems, and subsequently alternative behaviors, are identified so that their
Figure 1. A constituency representation of the macrogenre and staging structure of the

Narrative Counseling Interview (cf. Muntigl 2004a: 119).
438 Peter Muntigl
causal influences may be explored. This macrogenre representation is modeled

in terms of constituency, but see also Muntigl (2006) for non-constituency
based representations of narrative counseling.
An example of problem logogenesis within problem construction, taken
from session 3 of couples therapy, is shown in Ex. (1).8 Wendy (W) recounts
her experience of feeling that she is letting down Fred, her spouse, when she
does not convey more enthusiasm in situations where they must make joint deci-
sions (see arrowed lines 1820). Some lines later, the therapist (T) makes a spe-
cific referential tie to Ws previous formulation by embedding it within a nom-
inal group (this letting him down; the history of this idea of letting him
down). Through this form of grammatical transformation, T not only draws
special attention to Ws behavior of letting him down, he also creates new
possibilities for interpreting this behavior. In lines 8286, Ws behavior is
placed in a causal relationship in which this idea of letting him down is con-
strued as an agent that brings about guilt and fear.
(1)
PROBLEM CONSTRUCTION this letting him down
Session 3: Problem Identification

01 W: I started
02 but then I I just Ive Ive lost my uh .hh uh
03 Im not sure exactly
04 what or how I cn how I cn put it dow::n with .hh (0.8)
05 and Fred is tentative in approaching me with anything
06 yknow hes hes got this
07 an hes .hh hes i looked at it fo:r twenty five minutes half hour .hh
08 an he thinks
09 okay this would be really goo:d
10 an then hell come to me:::
11 an sa:y
12 um uh .hh have yuh thought about
13 what zuh wanna do:: tomorrow or or the next da::y
14 an I will say
15 oh god (.) I cant think that far ahead
16 T: awright
17 (0.8)
f 18 W: a:nd uh then (0.8) I begin to fee:l
f 19 like Im letting him down (1.0)
f 20 cause Im not enthusiastic about it
21 an I: uh I dont wanna go out anyway (.)
22 I dont wanna (1.0) yeah=
23 T: =mhm
.
.
.
f 71 T: okay su so so you started talking
f 72 bout um (.) um this letting him down. (.)
73 yeah. now you dont know for sur:e
74 if youre letting him down? [u::m]
75 W: [no]
76 T: youre goin on in your head=
77 W: =yes
f 78 T: u::m whats the history of this idea of letting him down
79 (2.0) does this go back [a long way]
80 T: [it goes ] back quite a long way yeah
81 (7.5)
Session 3: Problem Agency

f 82 T: hh does w: this when you when you when you experience
f 83 this idea that Im letting him down=
84 W: =yeah=
f 85 T: =w::: what kinda feelings come with that
f 86 you mentioned guilt
87 (1.2)
88 W: yes. guilt and uh (1.5) and fear (1.2)
89 fear that (1.0) he will (1.5) he will do it anyway (1.0) without me
90 (.) and hell find some other lady that he likes better than me
This first genre of narrative therapy, problem construction, can also be inter-
preted as a diagnostic genre in which a problem diagnosis is made. Problem
diagnosis is a 2-step process consisting of 1) grammatically transforming a
clients utterance by embedding it within a nominal group, and 2) associating
the embedded behavior with agency. The evidence for claiming that a prob-
lem has been identified by the therapist and client comes from two sources. The
first is found in the repeated, consistent grammatical realizations of letting him
down over the course of therapy. The second relates to the range of additional
meanings that are bound up with the use of letting him down. In order to dis-
cursively construct a problem, one must do more than simply name it. Addition-
ally, a problem must be given a prospective reading, in the sense that the identi-
fication of a problem will implicate further discursive work on the part of the
client and therapist. Put differently, problems in narrative therapy have a unique
discursive trajectory, in which the naming of a problem leads to the exploration
of how the problem is influencing the clients life, especially in terms of what
440 Peter Muntigl
the client thinks and feels. A detailed examination of problem logogenesis in

narrative therapy is found in Muntigl (2004a: 179232).
A genre is identified though unique linguistic patterns, which are jointly
produced by the conversationalists. For example, therapist reformulations in
problem construction involve the embedding of (part of) the clients formu-
lation within a nominal group. One could say this letting him down originated
in the clients prior wording of experience, thereby making problem identifica-
tion a jointly managed activity. But the construction of a problem does not
usually signal the end of therapy. If it did, the overall relevance of therapy could
certainly be questioned. For the most part, problems are constructed so that they
may be gotten rid of and another part of therapy, termed problem effacement, is
devoted to this getting rid of activity. Although I will not discuss problem ef-
facement in this chapter, mainly because the focus here is exclusively on prob-
lem diagnosis, readers may consult Muntigl (2004a: 239240) for a description
of this shift in meaning in which Ws behavior moves from the problem-laden
description of I begin to feel like Im letting him down to the alternative de-
scription of no:: I am not going to do that.
In sum, a macrogenre analysis gives insight into how diagnostic genres are
produced during therapy and, more generally, how different genres work to-
gether to both construct and efface problems. What this brief analysis has shown
is that specific genres are associated with unique linguistic structures. By delving
more into a speakers use of grammar, more can be said about what the speaker is
doing and what activity the speaker is playing a part in co-constructing. This
grammatically-informed approach to discourse can also be directed to other,
more specific, therapeutic practices. In Section 3, special attention is given to the
issue of problem diagnosis, by 1) examining in more linguistic detail the range of
discursive practices used to identify problems and 2) suggesting that the how of
problem diagnosis is related to a specific therapeutic vision.
3. Problem diagnosis
White and Epston (1990: 6) provide a list of useful analogies that depict how the
construction of problems has been viewed in various (social) scientific theoreti-
cal frameworks. In the positivistic physical sciences, problems are equated with
damage or a breakdown that needs to be repaired or corrected. Biological
models of problems, on the other hand, are associated with pathology, the cor-
rect diagnosis of the pathology, and the removal of the pathology. These two
theories place problems squarely within the individual, with treatment aimed at
repairing that part of the organism that is malfunctioning.
Social scientific interpretations of problems differ in significant ways from
the physical and biological models outlined above. Here, problems tend to be
given an inter-organism perspective in which problems need to include but

move beyond the individual, to include the individuals social context. White
and Epston argue that these social scientific perspectives view problems
in terms of a game, a living room drama, a rite of passage, or a behavioral
text.
Basically, White and Epston (1990) are suggesting that our overall view of
problems will depend on our theoretical background. A therapist who believes
in the biological model will most likely attempt to diagnose problems as a cer-
tain type of illness. On the opposite side of the spectrum, a narrative therapist
will diagnose problems as the social construction of oppressive dominant
stories. In this way, the communicative structures and specialized institutional
frameworks realized in therapy relate to what Goodwin (1994) has termed a pro-
fessional vision. This means that the therapists specialized ways of using lan-
guage correspond to the therapists theory or special way of construing client
experience. The therapists unique ways of diagnosing problems will point to a
certain view that the therapist brings to bear on how the clients social world
is being understood and consequently shaped.
In order to discover how therapists are diagnosing problems, we need to
look at the detailed linguistic practices that are used in the making of a diag-
nosis. One way of pursuing this aim is to examine how problems are described.
Do therapists use a specialized technical terminology in describing problems or
are more everyday formulations used? Another way of shedding light on the
discursive practices of problem diagnosis is to examine the broader context in
which problems are identified. For instance, what is the activity within which
problem descriptions are realized and what other types of social actions and
conversational moves are associated with the actual diagnosis?
3.1. Everyday vs. technical descriptions

An examination of the precise way in which problems have been described can
divulge much information about the therapists theory. One useful yardstick that
can be used in classifying problem descriptions draws from the distinction made
between commonsense or everyday vs. technical taxonomies (Martin 1993;
Wignell, Martin, and Eggins 1993). What is a technical term and how can such a
term be differentiated from an everyday term? Wignell, Martin, and Eggins
(1993: 144145) suggest the following answer:
Technicality [] refers to the use of terms or expressions (but mostly nominal group
constituents) with a specialized field-specific meaning. For example, the term duck
has a different meaning for the cricketer (e.g., out for a duck) as opposed to the
bridge player (e.g., to duck a trick), or the haberdasher (e.g., a kind of cloth); and
none of these meanings will be equivalent to the commonsense vernacular meaning
(a bird with webbed feet and a flat beak).
442 Peter Muntigl
Technical terms can be expressed as things or nominals in a number of ways.

Some examples taken from the field of linguistics will serve to illustrate this
point (but see Wignell, Martin, and Eggins 1993: 145146 for the diverse ways
in which technicality is construed in Geography): a technical term may consist
of a single noun (e.g., phonology, morphology, syntax), a nominal group com-
pound appearing in a Classifier ^ Thing structure (e.g., Functional Linguistics,
Formal Linguistics, Applied Linguistics), or a nominalization (e.g., clefting, dis-
location, raising). Technical terms tend to be field-specific, which means that
the terms are meaningfully bound to specific institutions and are given a precise
interpretation within those institutions. The work of Ravotas and Berkenkotter
(1998) provides us with some interesting examples from therapy. The therapist
that they examined produced a variety of diagnoses involving technical terms
such as post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression, and mixed personality
disorder. These terms not only constitute the typical Classifier ^ Thing nominal
structure of technicality, they also draw from a psychiatric register contained
within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (Ravotas
and Berkenkotter 1998: 212). This means that the meaning of these terms is en-
trenched within a psychological taxonomy that cannot be confused with every-
day interpretations of these terms. For example, the compound major depress-
ion is associated with illness and not with a vernacular understanding of being
depressed. Furthermore, the term major does not simply describe depression
(you cannot, for instance, upgrade this term by saying very major), but clas-
sifies it as a distinct type of depression with specific implications regarding
treatment. Ravotas and Berkenkotter are also careful to point out that these tech-
nical terms are not directly derived from what clients have said. The client never
specifically mentioned that she had a traumatic stress disorder. Instead, client
utterances such as nauseated by turpentine are interpreted as a symptom of
intense physical and psychological stress to a memory cue relating directly to
post-traumatic stress disorder (Ravotas and Berkenkotter 1998: 226).
If technicality is associated with field-specific taxonomies, commonsense
terms must then be associated with the everyday organization of meaning or
knowledge. What this means is that commonsense terms relate to everyday ex-
perience rather than the specialized inferential frameworks and goal-directed
meanings associated with institutional experience. A nice illustration of the
difference between technical and commonsense taxonomies is given in Martin
(1993: 205206). Whereas a commonsense taxonomy of infectious diseases
would place chickenpox under the general category of childhood diseases, a
medical taxonomy would classify chickenpox as a viral disease of the type
herpes zoster.
An example of an everyday problem was shown in Ex. (1). The term let-
ting him down was not derived from an institutional source such as a manual of
psychological illnesses. The problem, instead, was derived from the clients ar-
ticulation of everyday experience in which she expressed a difficulty in refusing

to comply with her husbands requests. We also saw that in the process of mak-
ing a diagnosis, although the therapist grammatically transformed what the
client had said, a close connection was maintained with the clients own words.
This type of transformation initiated by the therapist is commonly referred to as
a discursive practice of abstraction, in which a grammatical unit becomes em-
bedded within another unit, or even becomes nominalized (for a discussion see
Martin 1993). What also differentiates these problem terms from technical
terms is that, unlike technical terms, problem formulations do not remain con-
sistent, but vary in their expression (see Martin 1991: 317 for a discussion of
non-technical terms used in history texts). This variability of expression for two
different problems, letting him down and being reserved, is recorded in Table 1
(expressions appear in actual order of occurrence, so that this letting him
down appears before the history of this idea of letting him down, etc.). For
example, letting him down is expressed as a non-finite or finite clause (the non-
finite variety is much more common) and also appears with a different comple-
ment (letting others do:w:n). Even more variability was found for being re-
served, since it began as an adjective, then became an embedded clause, and
finally ended up as (two different!) nominalizations (reserveness, reservation).
Table 1. A list of the different expressions for the problems letting him down and
being reserved
letting him down being reserved

this letting him down reserved
the history of this idea of letting him this idea about about being
down reserved
this idea that Im letting him down reserveness
under the influence of letting others reservation
do:w::n
An examination of the nominal group structure of these expressions reveals

further diversity (see Table 2). If the problem is embedded within a nominal
group, it is most commonly realized as the Qualifier of the Thing or head noun.
The verb of the embedded clause tends to be realized as a non-finite, present
participle construction (e.g., letting, being). In its non-finite form, the problem
lacks a subject. The therapeutic relevance of these non-finite constructions is
that the client (or the clients spouse) no longer becomes directly associated
with having that behavior (compare this letting him down with this youre
letting him down). This is in line with what White and Epston (1990) have
dubbed externalizing the problem. The aim of this externalization is to stop
444 Peter Muntigl
clients from producing what White (2001) terms negative identify conclusions,
in which the client believes that a behavior such as letting him down is an in-
herent part of the clients identity (Discussions of externalizing practices in nar-
rative therapy are found in Muntigl 2004a: 181, 194; 2004b). The present parti-
ciple realization of problems may also have additional therapeutic relevance.
The form letting him down is realized in the imperfective (or realis) which
signals ongoing, habitual behavior (see Halliday 1994: 278). Because the be-
havior is not a one-time occurrence, the therapist may make the inference that
the clients habitually (negatively-laden) construal of experience will be nour-
ishing grist for the therapeutic mill.
A further feature of everyday problems is also the variety of meanings, in
this case clause-internally, with which the problem is associated. For instance,
letting him down qualifies a variety of nouns such as history, idea, and
influence (see Table 2). There are many meanings packed within these nom-
inal groups and if we were to unpack them, we may come up with a series of ex-
panded meanings such as 1) the idea of letting him down has a history; 2) letting
him down is the product of a certain type of thinking or idea; and 3) thinking that
you are always letting others down may influence your life (negatively!).
Table 2. The nominal group structure of letting him down
Deictic Thing Qualifier

this letting him down
the history of this idea of letting him down
this idea that Im letting him down
the influence of letting others do:w::n
To sum up, I argued that a technical problem diagnosis construes the clients
talk as a symptom that relates to a type of illness/disorder. Everyday problem
diagnosis, on the other hand, construes the clients talk as everyday behavior.
Diagnosis, however, involves more than wording a problem in a technical or
commonsense manner. As Martin (1991) has pointed out, practices of technical-
ity and/or abstraction also involve a certain kind of reasoning or interpretation.
It is to these practices that we turn in the next section.
3.2. Relating and interpreting client experience

Another important aspect of problem diagnosis involves the therapists interpre-
tation of the clients talk. This activity of interpreting has most commonly been
examined with respect to therapist formulations or reformulations. The term
formulation draws primarily from conversation analytic work and refers to the
provision of candidate readings for the sense established in preceding stretches
of talk (Heritage and Watson 1979: 141). These candidate readings generally
do the work of providing the gist or an upshot of what a previous speaker had
said (for examinations of formulations in therapy see Antaki et al. 2005; Davis
1986; Hak and de Boer 1996). The term reformulating, by contrast, often draws
from linguistics to include a wider range of rhetorical conjunctive relations
such as clarifying, generalizing, particularizing, exemplifying and adjusting
(see Muntigl 2007).
The interest in (re)formulating, however, goes beyond its conjunctive mean-
ing. By reformulating, therapists tend also to create relevant links between the
clients different modes of experience. This specific focus on how therapists
go about interpreting the clients talk has recently been given due attention in re-
search on psychoanalysis (Perkyl 2004; Vehvilinen 2003). According to Per-
kyl (2004: 297), the analyst often builds up sequences that enable him or her
to re-explicate the patients experience in ways that create a match between its
different domains, thus making the potential linkages possible. This practice of
making links is, in all likelihood, a general practice of therapy and not a specific
psychoanalytic practice. For if we return to problem construction in narrative
therapy, we also find similar linking practices at work. The therapists reformu-
lation of Ws talk in Ex. (2) demonstrates how such linkages are linguistically
constructed. Following a series of negative appraisals directed at F, Ws hus-
band, T does two things that are highly relevant for diagnosing a problem. First,
as has already been shown to be typical for narrative therapy, he re-construes the
clients prior formulation (he likes to lecture? (1.2) on any: any subject ) as
a nominal group (this lecturing style). Second, he relates the lecturing behav-
iour to Ws experience through what in systemic functional linguistics is called
a relational clause. To put it a different way, Ws experience is linked to (is rep-
resented by) Fs lecturing style.
your experience Wendy is of uh living with a man

Sue who has a lecturing
style
x relational verb is rep- y
resented by
(2)
06 W: Fred is a: uh
07 he likes to lecture? (1.2) on any: any subject
08 that he feels even mildly uh uh yknow animated abou::t
09 he likes to lecture
446 Peter Muntigl
10 and and go on and on and on and on about it .hh

.
.
.
f 26 T: your experience Wendy Sue .hh is of uh living with a man
f 27 who has a lecturing style
28 W: yes
Additional causal links are made later on in the transcript, when T construes
lecturing style as an agent. In this way, the lecturing style is made to be causally
associated with Ws feeling like a child (line 04), Ws feeling ignorant (line 06)
and Ws feeling that she cannot grasp it quickly (line 07).
(3)
01 T: what are y- impact or effect .hh does this lecturing style that you
02 experience from Fred
03 what does what impact does that have on you .hh as a person
f 04 W: .hh oh well I it makes me feel like uh a child? .hh
f 05 to a certain degree .hh it makes me feel
f 06 like Im (1.0) I Im ignorant
f 07 that I cant grasp it quickly .hh umm
This section has shown that problem diagnosis may consist of a number of inter-
pretative activities. In narrative therapy, problem diagnosis includes naming an
everyday problem and making links between the problem and different domains
of the clients experience, with a special emphasis on how the problem may be
negatively influencing the client. These diagnostic practices do more than allow
clients and therapists to put a label to the problem. The therapists interpretations
especially, since they make links to the clients different domains of experience,
build up a complex network of problem-related meanings. This not only demon-
strates the far-reaching influence that the problem has on the clients life, it also
provides a forceful argument for continuing on with further therapeutic work.
3.3. Off-track diagnostic practices: Resisting the incitement to talk

The examples presented so far have illustrated successful goal-oriented diag-
nostic practices at work. By successful I mean that problems undergo a spe-
cific genesis in which a problem is identified (i.e., named), followed by a series
of interpretive practices that link problems to different domains of client experi-
ence. As can be expected, there are instances where, for some reason or other,
problems do not unfold in the manner that is typical for the specific therapeutic
vision being deployed. In these situations, we may speak of a diagnostic prac-
tice becoming off-track or slightly de-railed from the expectations constitut-

ive of the therapeutic approach.
In his work on child counseling, Hutchby (2002) identied one such off-track
practice. Hutchby noted that, especially during the discussion of delicate topics
involving the relationship between a 6 year-old child and his parents, the child
would resist the incitement to talk by denying knowledge of the counselors ques-
tion. In these situations, children would utter explicit dont knows, often pro-
duced with marked stress and with minimal or no pause following the counselors
prior turn. Furthermore, these denials of knowledge functioned as a relatively suc-
cessful attempt to actively close down the counselors line of questioning.
Denials of knowledge were observed to have a somewhat different conver-
sational organization in couples therapy (Muntigl and Hadic Zabala 2008).
Consider Ex. (4), which contains an instance of I dont know (D=Dave;
L=Lisa; T=Female therapist). First, the denial of knowledge is surrounded by
reluctance markers such as pauses, prefaces (usually I just-) and accounts (no-
thing really (0.5) I just feel that way), which make it quite clear that an
answer is not immediately forthcoming. Second, the lengthy pause following
Ds denial of knowledge implicates that Ds answer is oriented to as expan-
dable; that is, because T withholds from self-selecting a turn, T provides D with
an extra opportunity to say more. Third, the denial of knowledge is ultimately
followed by what Muntigl and Hadic Zabala term a general expansion elicitor
(you just feel that way and) in which T makes explicit to D that she wishes him
to continue talking. This example is a clear case in which problem diagnosis
gets side-lined; Ts attempt at constructing a link between Ds feeling like a bad
guy and subsequent behavior that is caused by this feeling does not receive an
uptake. But unlike the child counseling example, D is not attempting to ex-
plicitly stop T from pursuing a response. As a result, problem diagnosis gets
stuck in limbo, with T endeavoring to elicit a response and D resisting, however
subtly, the incitement to answer.
(4) 23-MR13 Session 4

787 T: and so when you: (1.0) when you start to feel like the ba:d guy:
788 (3.0)
789 what do you do?
790 (3.0) ((D directs gaze closer to L, tugs at hair with left hand))
791 D: usually I just- (1.5) ((slight shoulder shrug))
792 I dont know
793 nothing really (0.5) ((partially covers mouth with left hand))
794 I just feel that way
795 (4.5) ((T maintains gaze at D))
f 796 T: you just feel that way and (1.0) ((D shifts gaze closer to T))
448 Peter Muntigl
4. Conclusion
One of the main aims of this chapter has been to highlight the achievements of
linguistic-oriented approaches to therapy. It was shown that a detailed lin-
guistic investigation of therapeutic talk can help us to understand how thera-
peutic practices are accomplished. In a general sense, we could say that one of
the therapists main tasks is to provide a certain type of order and meaning to
the clients life. This order and meaning is, of course, related to the diagnostic
sense making practices of the therapeutic institution from which the therapist
is drawing. It was shown that one way of creating order is to re-construe client
behavior as a technical or abstract term. This practice does not only transform
meaning by placing the behavior within a different grammatical structure; it is
also transformative in the sense that the new term will now be interpreted with
respect to new institutional (or everyday) taxonomies and inferential frame-
works. Another way of creating specific forms of social order is to make in-
terpretative links between the clients different domains of experience. We
saw in narrative therapy that this consisted of making representational and
causal links between the problem and client behavior. Finally, diagnostic prac-
tices can become derailed, especially in situations where the client resists the
incitement to answer by expressing uncertainty or by denying knowledge. Re-
cent work by Muntigl and Hadic Zabala (2008) has explored how therapists
attempt to get the interaction back on track by prompting the client to say
more.
Our understanding of the discursive activity of problem diagnosis is most
likely still in its infancy. What we now need to do is examine the diagnostic
sense making practices from other therapeutic approaches and from practi-
tioners stemming from different professions. Research that I am currently con-
ducting with Adam Horvath from Simon Fraser University seeks to address
some of these issues. This research draws from a total of 246 audio- and video-
taped couples therapy sessions, involving 6 therapists and 41 couples.9 One of
the major aims of this study is to gain a better understanding of how therapy
sessions are realized by a series of linguistic genres, how different therapeutic
approaches may be differentiated in terms of these specific linguistic patterns
and how different linguistic developments generate the particular changes the
clients may experience in therapy. Such a focus should give us much more in-
sight into the manifold ways in which problems are discursively bound up with
human experience. It should also begin to shed more light on why certain diag-
nostic practices achieve their desired result within the interaction, while other
practices do not.
Another important next step for discourse analysts, especially if their aim is
to achieve a deeper understanding of therapeutic processes and the role that lan-
guage plays in realizing these processes, is to begin a dialogue with psycho-
therapists about the relevance of language in psychotherapy. Some pioneers in

this area are Charles Antaki from Loughborough University and Ivan Leudar
from Manchester University. Since 2004, they have played an integral part in
organizing an annual conference called conversation Analysis of psycho-
therapy, which brings together conversation analysts, ethnomethodologists,
and psychotherapy practitioners. The topics of this conference include all as-
pects of therapeutic interaction, and psychotherapists are encouraged to attend
and articulate their own views of therapists practices. I should think, however,
that a psychotherapy forum that casts the net even wider to include other dis-
course analysts, such as systemic functional linguists, would provoke even
more fruitful discussions. Perhaps we should be taking Hallidays advice, which
suggests that researchers adopt a problem-oriented approach to social inter-
action, rather than a discipline-oriented one. This would make it easier for
others to join in the dialogue. It would also help to make the enterprise of psy-
chotherapy research a truly transdisciplinary one.
Notes
1. There are interesting exceptions to this claim. For instance, Freuds (1999a, 1999b)
work on dreams and on jokes is illustrative of Freuds keen interest in words and their
meanings. In his analysis of jokes, Freud (1999b) identified a variety of techniques in
which the structure of words and clauses were modified or transformed with the aim of
conveying a novel and humorous meaning. Although one could argue that Freuds
analysis demonstrated a level of sensitivity to linguistic structure and analysis, his ul-
timate aim was not linguistic but psychological; analyzing jokes can reveal something
about the workings of unconscious processes.
2. Muntigls work, however, is informed by both approaches (see especially Muntigl
2004a; Muntigl and Ventola in press).
3. Since these two approaches are discussed in earlier chapters (cf. chapters 3 and 6) of
this volume, I will not provide an extensive overview here. A general overview of
conversation analysis can also be found in Atkinson and Heritage (1984) and Levin-
son (1983: chapter 6). Readers wishing to find out more about systemic functional lin-
guistics should consult Halliday (1978, 1994), Halliday and Matthiessen (1999), or
Martin (1992).
4. Comparisons of conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistics can be
found in Muntigl (2004a) and Muntigl and Ventola (in press).
5. Therapeutic practitioners most often refer to their profession as psychotherapy, but
I will continue using the term therapy to include other non-accredited professionals
who engage in an institutionalized activity that shares the basic features of psycho-
therapy.
6. It should be emphasized, however, that for most of these studies on therapy it is diffi-
cult to identify a single core approach to language. In many cases, these studies are
transdisciplinary in nature, drawing from a range of different discourse analytic
frameworks.
450 Peter Muntigl
7. This problem-focus is consistent with the practice of many psychotherapy re-

searchers, who have foregrounded the notion of problem in their description of the
therapy process. Some examples include problem formation and problem resolution
(Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch 1974), problem-organizing and problem-dis-solv-
ing systems (Anderson and Goolishian 1992: 27), and problem evolution and problem
dissolution (Eron and Lund 1993).
8. The transcript notation system used for the examples is taken from Atkinson and Heri-
tage (1984: ix-xiv). See also transcript notation in chapter 6, this volume.
9. This research is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada Standard Research Grant (No. 41020041816).
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16. Youth, discourse, and interpersonal
management
Jannis Androutsopoulos and Alexandra Georgakopoulou
1. Introduction
This chapter provides an overview of sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic

studies of interpersonal management in youth communication. Although we
will make use of the terms adolescents or teenagers in the research reviewed in
this chapter, our own preference is for youth. The use of the term adolescence
has come under recent criticism (cf. Bucholtz 2002; Wyn and White 1997) for
two main reasons. Based on biological criteria, this term misleadingly sug-
gests a homogeneous socio-cultural experience, which hardly corresponds to
the real-life diversity of young people. Moreover, its rigid chronological
boundaries ignore the increasingly fuzzy borders between life phases, as well
as how social actors experience these borders. Adolescence is defined from the
perspective of adults and adulthood as a transitional period marked by lack of
autonomy and competence, judged against the normative benchmark of adult-
hood, and often associated with deviance from adult norms (cf. Bucholtz
2002).
As an alternative, the concept of youth displays some conceptual difficulties
too, depending as it does on age borders and social institutions such as school-
ing and the job market, but it nonetheless offers a more flexible starting point for
discourse-based research. Static conceptualizations of youth as a fixed-bound-
ary period and as a transitional, developmental phase are being replaced by re-
lational approaches, which foreground the relation of youth to adult, and child,
categories. Youth is then determined in relation to that which is interpreted as
respectively childish or adult (Forns 1995: 3). Such a relational concept of
youth is well placed to integrate the fuzziness of youth, extended post-adoles-
cence, and emerging adulthood (Arnett 2006). Likewise, studies of youth cul-
ture have progressively shifted focus from class-based youth subcultures in
Western societies to the diversity of youth-cultural expressions worldwide, and
from deviation and resistance to life-style choices in a variety of ethnic groups
and local communities (Shelton and Valentine 1998). Moving a step further,
Bucholtz advances an approach that treats youth cultures not in relation to adult
and child categories, but as social practices in their own right. Seen this way, the
notion of youth emphasizes the here and now of experience, or put differently,
the fact that youth are cultural actors whose experiences are best understood
from their own point of view (Bucholtz 2002: 533).
458 Jannis Androutsopoulos and Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Such a culturally focused notion of youth forms the backdrop for our exam-
ination of linguistic forms and discursive practices which have been found to
typify the cultures of youth peer groups within sociolinguistics, ethnography,
and conversation analysis. We structure our discussion around the discursive
processes of aligning and converging on the one hand, setting boundaries and
misaligning on the other hand. We depart from recent, practice-based studies,
which locate language choices in specific sites and activities that the young
people are engaged in (Section 2.). We then specifically look into language
choices that are routinely mobilized in each case, that is, as part of interpersonal
relationships of alignment (Section 3.) and misalignment (Section 4.). In both
cases, we stress the importance of the peer-group either in leisurely or in insti-
tutional settings as a focal site for the discursive affirmation of relations of inti-
macy and solidarity, but also of conflict and hierarchy. We conclude by high-
lighting the importance of new types of interpersonal communication and
community formation via digital media amongst young people (Section 5.).
2. Discourse sites and activities in youth communication
Earlier sociolinguistic research on adolescence focused on tiny linguistic items

(mostly phonological variables), which were in turn mapped in a relatively
straightforward way onto the social identity aspect under study (be it age, gender,
or social class). From Labovs (1972) seminal study of sociolinguistic variation
onwards, it had been acknowledged that the level of formality would shape the
choice of language variants. There was also an attempt to collect data in situations
that seemed typical of the participants lives in addition or juxtaposition to those
obtained from standard sociolinguistic interviews. It is notable that Labov (1972)
himself also had data from the Inner City hood and Cheshire (1982) from the
playground. However, the site as the social space in which communication oc-
curred was seen more as an independent variable rather than as constitutive of and
mutually feeding with the actual communication. This has recently changed
within the variationist ethnographic paradigm of which Eckerts study (2000) is a
good example. Using ethnographic methods, which included extensive eldwork,
Eckert closely attended to the local understandings and cultures of the female
High School students she investigated and linked those with language choices.
However, the emphasis on variables at the micro-linguistic level (e.g., pho-
nological, lexical) has gone hand in hand with a relative neglect of the role of
suprasentential units, e.g., episodes, extended sequences, types of text, in the
shaping of communication. Attention to such units is normally to be found in
more discourse analytic or interactional paradigms. These recognize the import-
ance of the type of sequence and type of activity for actual language choices as
well as the fact that such choices are collaboratively produced between speaker
Youth, discourse, and interpersonal management 459
and audience. The approaches here are too divergent to be made sense of in a
homogenizing way. The concept of genre alone has been defined variously in
various paradigms, and our aim here is not to rehearse the debate over what con-
stitutes a genre, a discourse type, etc. (see papers in Gruber and Muntigl 2005).
Nonetheless, it is important to note that recently there has been a shift from pre-
dominantly text-based analyses to practice-based analyses, as illustrated, e.g.,
in Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou (2003a). In practice-based analyses of
youth communication, there is a focus on the socially and culturally recognized
events in relatively stable (or typified) settings dedicated to specific communi-
cative purposes and eliciting relatively routine ways of speaking; also, on the
participants roles and relations and their conventionalized expectations about
what is to be done in those settings. The analysis then looks at language choices
as being integrally connected with such genres (in a broad sense) or activity
types. Put differently, activity types are seen as providing sites of lived experi-
ence in which locally motivated linguistic choices can be creatively related to
extra-situational social categories and meanings (Androutsopoulos and Geor-
gakopoulou 2003b: 7).
3. Aligning converging colluding
There is widely held recognition within socially minded linguistics that lan-
guage varieties and repertoires play a vital role in the (re-)affirmation of a sense
of belonging and of interpersonal relationships of intimacy and solidarity. In the
case of research on youth, the exploration of this view has been closely linked
with the assumption that socialization within the peer-group and leisure activ-
ities associated with it are of paramount importance in the particular life stage.
As already suggested, within social sciences (particularly social psychology and
anthropology), underlying this specificity of social and cultural practices is an
emphasis on adolescence as a distinctive, biologically delimited, and transi-
tional phase that inevitably presents certain differences and all too often conflic-
tual relations with adulthood and adult authority (see Section 4. below). The as-
sumption then is that adolescents tend to fashion their distinctiveness through
formation and participation in close-knit groups of close friends.
Within earlier research on sociolinguistics, as we have suggested, this age-
linked distinctiveness was explored in terms of linguistic variation: that is,
through a focus on the frequency of certain variants in the speech of adolescents
that set them apart from adults. Phonological variants, particularly non-stan-
dard ones, were the ones that were mostly put under scrutiny in this respect.
Again, there is an underlying assumption here that the speech of adolescents will
somehow mirror their propensity for defying anything that is regulated, proper,
and standardized, on the one hand, and for (re-)creating peer-group bonds through
language convergence on the other hand. Cheshires (1982) classic study of teen-
agers in Reading, England, is a case in point. In contrast to previous studies of so-
ciolinguistic variation, Cheshire recognized the importance of social networks in
the use of linguistic variants and clearly distinguished the participants she studied
between core, secondary, and peripheral members in groups. In this sense, lan-
guage variation was not only linked with an age-specic feature of socialization
(i.e., the peer-group) but also with differentiated participation roles within the
peer-group. In her study, language convergence correlated with the degree of in-
tegration into the group. On another level, gender proved to shape language use,
which provided evidence for the by now widely held idea that it is impossible to
talk about adolescence as an undifferentiated whole. In particular, adolescent boys
were found to employ more non-standard forms, a nding which Cheshire linked
with the covert prestige involved in this use in terms of a specic model of mas-
culinity (based on machismo, sounding, and acting rough) and of local alle-
giances. More recent studies by Cheshire and colleagues (e.g. Cheshire, Kerswill,
and Williams 1999) have explored the role of adolescents in dialect leveling. The
focus has been again on the use of non-standard variants by adolescents but with a
comparative regional (three towns in England) and social class focus (working
class vs. middle class).
Since the 1980s, sociolinguistic variation studies have become increas-
ingly more contextualized and fine-tuned, and it is no accident that scholars
nowadays talk about the current phase of inquiry as the fourth wave of va-
riationist sociolinguistic research. It is also worth noting that many of these
studies have employed data from adolescents (in the biological sense)
whilst being interested in documenting how language variation shapes and is
shaped by other identity categories, e.g., gender, ethnicity, social class. In this
respect, adolescence has remained as a somewhat hidden or unspoken of
category that is taken for granted (see Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou
2003b: 6).
The methodological ways in which peer-groups are being researched have
also become more situated with an increasing emphasis on ethnographic studies
that allow the researcher to develop a good sense of their subjects emic under-
standings and local practices. In fact, language itself is increasingly seen as
interwoven with social practices and the relationships between the two were
documented. In Bucholtzs study (1999a) of high-school female students in
California, two communities of practice were identified: the nerds and the
popular girls. The participants were recorded in and out of school and a con-
textually sensitive analysis showed that each of the groups was not solely de-
fined in terms of language choice and repertoires but also in terms of attitudes to
and participation in academic life, dating practices, and a host of semiotic
choices, including dress code, etc. The language use emblematic of each group
was also located in different levels, not just the phonological one, but also lexis,
including creative and playful uses of language. Finally, the language ideologies
of each group were found to differ, that is, their local theories of how language
connects with social life and what is evaluated as good or bad language. This
study is a good example of the gradual move within studies of language vari-
ation towards an understanding of how we construct identities through language
that is based on dynamic and situated views of identities.
At the same time, it has to be noted that studies that may be called post-
variationist or variationist ethnographic still work with quantifying language use
in order to explore its relationships with social variables. There seems to be a ten-
sion then in the relevant literature between quantitative studies that involve a
rather large number of participants and data, and qualitative, contextually sensi-
tive studies that focus on how language is shaped within small peer-groups. The
former employ phonological variation as their main point of entry inasmuch as
they recognize that other language choices, e.g. discourse markers, are inherently
multi-functional and thus less amenable to neat categorizing and quantifying.
Micro-analytic studies of specific discourse phenomena on the other hand
have found it difficult to yield comparative findings and generalizations. That
said, it is notable that the semiotic phenomena that have been proposed by nu-
merous studies as markers or indicators of peer-group alignment and member-
ship belonging form a relatively closed list (e.g., Andersen 1997; Corsaro and
Eder 1990; Eble 1996; Eder 1993; Erman 2001; Ito and Tagliamonte 2003; Kall-
meyer and Keim 2003; Kataoka 2003; Norrby and Wirdens 2003; Stenstrm
2003). The list includes:
playful language, e.g., language puns, play with words, coinage of new
terms and more generally creative uses of language, jokes-telling
teasing
nicknames
more or less innovative and unexpected or incongruous (in the given
co-text) mixings of language registers (e.g. formal informal) and styles,
mainly to humorous effects
increased and innovative use of certain discourse markers (e.g. like), inter-
jections (e.g., sort of, you know, I mean), extenders (e.g. and stuff like that),
invariant tags (right?, innit?, yeah?), addressee-oriented tags (e.g. you know
what I mean?). It must be noted here that there is a lack of consensus as to
what is labeled as what in the literature, and some of the terms above are em-
ployed with overlapping reference.
increased use of intensiers (e.g., so, just, really followed by a qualier) and
more generally of expressive and affectionate elements, including manipu-
lations of the graphemic code in cases of written language (see Section 5.)
insulting or obscene terms (e.g., bitch, fuck, shit) that are frequently recast as
terms of endearment and in-group bonding.
Specific generic forms have also been flagged up as being closely associated with
intimate relationships. For instance, collaborative narration (e.g. Eder 1998) that
involves various signals of audience participation, ranging from verbal and non-
verbal back-channeling to ratification and enhancement of certain story parts
(e.g. the climax); moreover, overlaps in turn-taking and various ways of mirror-
ing or echoing the interlocutors previous turn in order to stress agreement
with the point made. In similar vein, it has been shown that linguistic choices that
highlight in-group bonding and membership belonging (e.g. positive politeness
strategies) are frequently mobilized in peer-group communication, and that
there is a tendency for implicitness and heavy reliance on shared assumptions
(e.g. Deppermann and Schmidt 2003; Schmidt 2004; Spreckels 2006). These are
frequently alluded to more or less cryptically in order to reaffirm intimacy and
sharedness through invoking the familiar, and to rejoice in the recognition of this
sharedness. Media references, i.e., references to shared media experiences (e.g.,
songs, TV series), but also to shared stories from the interactional history of
a group are hallmarks of an allusive style that can only be unpacked by the
members of a close-knit group (see Georgakopoulou 2003b, 2007; Spreckels
2006; Shankar 2004). Such reaffirmations and repetitive uses of an in-group style
of dense referencing may seem to the outsiders as communication about no-
thing inasmuch as it occurs in leisurely settings that involve young people
hanging out. The liminal aspects of such communication as suspensions of the
norms of everyday engagement have been duly noted (Rampton 1995).
Nonetheless, it is also important to add a word of caution about the fact that
what may be significant, serious, reportable, ordinary, or extra-ordinary is
relative to contexts and participants. Code-switching phenomena are a case in
point: studies of secondary school students in urban multi-ethnic environments
have shown that not only is switching to a variety that is perceived as ours as-
sociated with affiliative acts, but also that speakers can perform alignments by
crossing to a variety that is demonstrably not theirs (Rampton 1995). Such tak-
ings on of other voices have been found to complicate issues of membership
authenticity and to level ethnically inflected divisions in favor of local cultures
that base their participation on factors other than traditional lines of ethnic or so-
cial class belonging. These new ethnicities as sites of cultural crossing, thresh-
olds that young people move across as they carry on with their cultural busi-
ness (Bucholtz 2002: 538) have been closely associated with the context of late
modernity in urban multi-ethnic setting and have often formed part of a celebra-
tory discourse that recognizes the agency, creativity, and power of social actors
to transcend established boundaries. That said, it is also recognized that the val-
ency of such phenomena is contextually bound (cf. Dirim and Auer 2004). As
we will see in Section 4., several of the very language choices that in certain
contexts have been found to serve to highlight intimacy and convergence can
also serve to accentuate boundaries and act disaffiliatively in other contexts.
4. Boundary marking conflicting excluding
We now move on to studies of processes of demarcation and conflict in youth

conversational interaction. Young speakers may set themselves apart from a var-
iety or relevant others in discourse, and a broad distinction between intra- and in-
tergenerational boundary setting has been proposed (Deppermann and Schmidt
2003; Schmidt 2004). On the intra-generational side, boundaries are drawn to
peer-group members or to other youth groups; in the inter-generational dimen-
sion, to family and relatives, (unknown) adults or persons of institutional auth-
ority such as youth workers or schoolteachers. For instance, the teenage male
group studied by Deppermann and Schmidt (2001a, 2001b, 2003) delimited
itself from: other male youth groups perceived as having deviant lifestyles
(e.g., gays, students); girls (categorized by appearance and moral criteria); adult
figures of authority (such as teachers and youth workers); persons with some
kind of authority in the local society; family members; and public personalities
(e.g. celebrities).
In particular, rather than being characterized by an egalitarian ethos, youth
peer-groups have been found to be shaped by hierarchies built and maintained
through verbal interaction. Learning how to establish ones position in the
group hierarchy is a major aspect of peer-group socialization; conversely, pro-
cesses of status negotiation are important episodes in the social life of peer-
groups. In this context, what has mainly attracted the attention of researchers
is ritual conflict more than less unmitigated, on-the-record conflict talk. Ritual
conflict is defined as playful, non-serious verbal dispute that is not aimed at
conflict resolution (cf. Stenstrm, Andersen, and Hasund 2002; Grimshaw
1990). Ritual conflict has elements of performance, being carried out in front
of a knowing and judging audience; it is instantiated in different formats/
genres, such as ritual insults, verbal duelling, or dissing; it typically is a multi-
part activity, including sequential rules (such as initiation, audience reaction,
reply, reaction to reply, etc.) and conditions for acceptable propositional con-
tent; it is competitive, resulting in winners and losers, without however
ending in socially disruptive conflict.
A well known instance of ritual conflict is ritual insult, introduced in the
linguistics literature by Labovs classic study on the sounds and dozens of
African American male teenagers (Labov 1972), which are well-elaborated se-
quences of ritual insults with strict formal and semantic regulations. In similar
practices of verbal duelling among Turkish boys (Dundes, Leach, and zkok
1972; Tertilt 1996) the focus has been more on the symbolic sexual domination
and humiliation of the opponent, which has to be asserted and countered in
rhyming. Similar genres of ritualized verbal competition are common in other
non-Western European languages and cultures, including the Mediterranean,
Near East, Latin America, Africa, and Arabic countries. However, global popu-
lation flows and popular media prompt an even wider spread, thus leading to lo-
calized, hybrid practices of ritual conflict among migrant offspring (Tertilt 1996)
or even among youths from the majority group, as in the case of German youth
appropriating dissing from the African-American hip-hop culture (Depper-
mann and Schmidt 2001b). Although ritual insult and verbal duelling are wide-
ly regarded as a specifically male adolescent practice, Stenstrm et al. (2002:
chapter 8) identify a type of ritual conflict among working-class female speak-
ers in London. Their tough girls talk is not primarily competitive in nature,
but it nonetheless resembles ritual insults in that it contributes to the devel-
opment of self-defence strategies and verbal skills. Their playful disputes and
staged fights also serve as a means to negotiate appropriate behavior for girls.
That said, the line between playful and serious, non-mitigated conflict may be
thin, and the choice between the two will often depend on social and contextual
parameters such as age, social milieu, and the sort of territorial face-threat in-
volved (cf. Cindark and Keim 2002).
Processes of hierarchy building and competitiveness within the peer-group
have also been documented in Goodwins (1990, 2006) study of African-Ameri-
can working class pre-adolescent groups of girls. Goodwin has specifically fo-
cused on a range of interactional activities such as assessment sequences, verbal
duelling, stories as devices for sustaining and constructing the groups social
and political organisation, as well as managing processes of inclusion and ex-
clusion. Her study has been instrumental in debunking myths about boys
groups being competitive and girls groups exhibiting a cooperative ethos (see
also Branner 2003; Spreckels 2006).
An important type of resource for indexing and negotiating dissent in youth
discourse is linguistic divergence on different levels of linguistic description.
A first area is socially marked vocabulary, including jargon, argot, and anti-lan-
guage (Halliday 1978). Such lexis is often taken to indicate by itself, i.e.,
through its formation patterns (as Hallidays notion of anti-language suggests;
cf. also Kieling and Mous 2006), a delimitation of its speakers from normal
social values. However, concrete interactional analyses of how such forms are
deployed in interaction are rare. In two studies examining the use of slang in in-
teractions between adolescents and adults, namely mother/daughter interactions
(Augenstein 1998) and conversations between young people and adult field-
workers (Schwitalla and Streeck 1989) the youngsters use of slang leads to
misunderstandings which are subsequently repaired by the youngsters by offer-
ing equivalent non-slang lexis. In the case of fieldworker communication, how-
ever, the non-slang lexis offered by the young speakers shifted semantically
from soft drugs to alcohol, and in this way translated a concept from the world
of the local youth sub-culture into a concept seen as comparable for the world of
adults. Such translation, and its celebration by young participants, sets clear
boundaries between young insiders and adult outsiders and offers a nice illus-
tration of the double function of argot/slang lexis as both a sign of belonging and
a means of boundary-setting for the outsiders.
Code switching and style shifting are basic linguistic devices of signaling
divergence (Giles, Coupland, and Coupland 1991), and studies of their use
amongst youth people tend to concentrate on multiethnic or migrant peer groups,
involving contrasts between mainstream colloquial varieties of the dominant
language and minority (migrant) languages or ethnic styles of speech. For
example, research on Turkish/German code switching and code mixing among
young ghetto females (Keim 2007a, 2007b; Kallmeyer and Keim 2003; Keim
and Cindark 2003) reported that negotiating the language of interaction is
a fairly regular mechanism for indexing consent or dissent. In particular, when
a mixed code is established as the base language of interaction, code switching
at turn-taking points is a conventional device for emphasizing a clash of
opinions between interlocutors.
Another focal concern in the literature are interactions in which peer-group
members jointly produce boundaries to (absent) third parties, such as adult fig-
ures of authority or other young people with differing lifestyle orientations. Such
episodes are common in the unstructured situations of hanging out that are typi-
cal of youth groups (see also Section 2. above), and they draw on resources such
as social categorization devices, intertextuality, and stylization. Speakers work
on their group profile ex negativo, i.e., through stylized representations of others.
A key feature of such representations is that they tend to be heavily stereotyped,
presenting out-group behavior as inadequate or even grotesque. The orientation
of much youth group interaction to producing entertainment (Deppermann and
Schmidt 2001a, 2003) favors such stereotypical other-styling. In Schwitallas
study, a group of high school students differentiate themselves from working-
class youth from the same neighbourhood through the interactive staging of the
latter, drawing to that end on a variety of social-symbolic resources, such as non-
lexicalized sounds, stereotypical lexis, and pseudo quotations (double voicing).
Here, social difference is evoked and performatively reproduced rather than ex-
plicitly discussed (Schwitalla 1994). Such stylized representations of the (sup-
posed) voice of the other may be also achieved by style shifting to a (usually non-
standard) variety, or by intertextually exploiting mass-media voices (cf. Depper-
mann and Schmidt 2003; Deppermann 2007; Georgakopoulou 2005; Spreckels
2006; Bierbach and Birken-Silverman 2007). However, media allusions and quo-
tations can also be used to directly discriminate and exclude peer-group members
(cf. Schlobinski, Kohl, and Ludewigt 2003).
As the preceding discussion suggests, processes of linguistic divergence and
stylization may resort to language crossing, i.e., the use of linguistic resources
that are felt to belong to other social groups (Rampton 1995, 1999). As already
discussed (see Section 3.), language crossing may also be a resource in acts of
alignment; the type of crossing most relevant to boundary-setting activities is
varidirectional double-voicing (following Ramptons 1995 adaptation of

Bakhtins terms): here speakers use social voices (other languages, non-stan-
dard varieties of the same language, voices lifted from mass-media sources), but
clearly dissociate themselves from these voices, indicating that they are putting
them on rather than identifying with them. This enables speakers to do and say
things they would never say with their own voice, including showing-off, sexist,
and racist aggression. Putting on alien social voices is consonant with the ritual,
playful conflict we have already discussed as typical of youth interpersonal
communication. It frames on-going interaction, including the propositional con-
tent of the utterance conveyed through that voice, as entertaining and non-seri-
ous, thus enabling the speaker to withdraw and deny responsibility for their
statements in case they are interpreted by addressees as offensive (see also Dep-
permann 2007; Pujolar 2001).
While language crossing always evokes stereotypical associations of the
legitimate, authentic speakers of the code crossed into, the codes associative
potential may vary by referent, interlocutor, or other aspects of interactional con-
text. Thus Rampton (1995) found that London adolescents used Stylized Asian
English towards adult interlocutors to disrupt their attempts to impose inter-
actional order or to challenge them by evoking a relationship of dominance
between the adult figure of authority and the pupils. But among peers, Stylized
Asian English was used to mark certain behaviors as inappropriate, improper, or
marginal, alluding thereby to stereotypical lack of competence. In two strikingly
similar cases, Eksner (2001) found that stylized Turkish German among Tur-
kish youth in Berlin-Kreuzberg was used as a threatening device in conflict situ-
ations with German adults, but in in-group talk, where the default code for con-
flict talk was Turkish, it rather served to mock incompetence and to regulate
group activities. The Turkish-German female teen ghetto group studied by
Keim (2002) used stylized learners German (Gastarbeiterdeutsch) towards their
mothers, the authentic speakers of that code, to accentuate intergenerational dif-
ferences and underscore their criticism for their parents lack of integration.
Among peers, the use of stylized learners German accentuated their distancing
from the stereotype of uneducated migrant workers. Towards German adults,
however, it ironically affirmed such stereotypes, thereby putting interlocutors
stereotypes to the test. Keim reports how she, as an adult fieldworker, was con-
fronted with Gastarbeiterdeutsch in her first attempt to approach the ghetto girls
group; this use of a devalued code was seen as subversive, to the extent that it dis-
rupted the fieldworkers engagement by evoking a relation of inequality.
We move on to settings of institutional interaction, especially classroom dis-
course, which involve young actors in their specific situated identities (Zimmer-
mann 1998) as pupils. Here, the focus is not just on what those situated iden-
tities dictate, but how they are taken up, managed, resisted, or undermined
by the participants themselves. One strand here encompasses what might be
viewed as prototypical cases of classroom rebellion, i.e., verbal behavior that

aims at sabotaging the interactional order in (urban) classrooms, e.g. through
disruption of the initiation-response-evaluation pattern or other expected
patterns of institutional discourse
choice of a dispreferred language or language variety that is tacitly unwel-
come or even explicitly banned from classroom discourse, such as a regional
dialect, a minority or migrant language, instead of the expected standard
language delivery
engaging in backstage communication, developing own agendas in the
fringes of classroom instruction, thus subverting, more or less openly, the
focus of attention and directionality of interaction as defined by the official
agenda of the classroom.
Such practices are in sharp contrast to the requirements of task-oriented (peda-
gogical) communication. At the same time they do relationship work for the
pupils, as rebellion may enhance ones status among classmates i.e., as yet
another case where affiliation and conflict are two sides of the same coin. And
while these practices are probably as old as schooling institutions, the resources
for doing so change over time. In contemporary Western societies at least, extra-
curricular resources from techno-popular culture, such as singing, humming,
or engaging with digital technologies are being introduced into the school life
(cf. Rampton 2006), and employed in backstage communication or in disrupting
expected patterns of classroom discourse. However, negotiations of status and
teacher-pupil relationship are at work in orderly classroom discourse as well,
for example, with respect to the ascription of and resistance to stigmatizing so-
cial categories. In Hawaii secondary schools, for instance (Talmy 2004), speak-
ers of English as a Second Language (ESL) reject stigmatized categories such as
fob (fresh off the boat, a colloquial label for recent immigrants), which are
imposed on them by their teacher as part of the institutional routine (e.g. in the
form of assignments). By challenging such institutional labelling, students sub-
vert the conflation of language, culture, nationality, and identity (Talmy 2004).
At the same time however, these students tease and humiliate recently immi-
grated classmates with poor ESL competence, thus reproducing in classroom
discourse the stigmatized category they reject for themselves.
Overall, multi-ethnic settings emerge in much of the recent literature as sites
of styling processes. For ethnic minority youth, multilingual switching, double
voicing, and styling are resources for negotiating their relationship with their
ethnic community as well as for resisting discrimination by members of the ma-
jority society (cf. the papers in Lo and Reyes 2004). Also, what emerges as
youth-preferential practice across linguistic and cultural boundaries is a ten-
dency for vivid and performative (as opposed to argumentative) ways of negoti-
ating social boundaries.
5. Beyond face-to-face: Mediating interpersonal communication
The expanding social spread and domestication of digital information and com-
munication technologies (ICT) is transforming the ways in which identities and
relationships are constructed and negotiated. While this is of course not re-
stricted to the young, it is well documented that they have been innovative in
making connections (Abbott 1998) through information and communication
technologies (ICT), and still use these for social interaction more often than
other age groups on an international scale (see, e.g., Bryant, Sanders-Jackson,
and Smallwood 2006 for the USA; van Eimeren and Frees 2006 for Germany).
Depending on their affordances, ICT for interpersonal communication may be
divided into different types:
technologies for interpersonal interaction, termed as socially interactive
technologies (Bryant, Sanders-Jackson, and Smallwood 2006), including
mobile phones, internet telephone, texting, instant messaging
formats of public multi-party interaction such as chat, web discussion
boards, and three-dimensional environments; and
spaces of self-presentation in which edited content is complemented by in-
teraction formats, as is the case with personal homepages, weblogs, and so-
cial networking environments.
All of these, in turn, may host a multitude of genres (e.g., small talk, joking,
greeting) and communicative purposes (e.g., flirting, problem solving, recom-
mending, making arrangements).
The last few years have witnessed the emergence of a substantial volume of
language-focused research on computer-mediated communication (CMC) and
texting, initially framed in descriptive linguistics and genre analysis, and in-
creasingly positioned in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics as well. Even
though patterns and regularities of CMC are often analyzed comparatively to
face-to-face discourse, there is currently widespread consensus that CMC needs
to be addressed not as a deficient substitute for face-to-face discourse, but as a
social practice in its own right (cf. Georgakopoulou 2003a; Herring 2001). This
applies to the notion of interaction itself: CMC exchanges display some key fea-
tures of verbal interaction, such as sequentiality and contextual dependency,
while others e.g., multi-channel immediacy, turn-taking mechanisms, respon-
sibilities for opening and closing interaction may be much less rigid or alto-
gether missing. Rather than viewing the resulting interaction as less than genu-
ine conversation, the aim is to understand how new media alter the conditions
for interpersonal communication by affording complex constellation of familiar
and novel, medium-specific resources for interpersonal work. Having said that,
it must be noted that the fundamental mechanisms of interpersonal management
discussed above repeatedly emerge as valid for computer-mediated discourse as
well. We find for instance the copy of elements of the previous message or turn
to indicate alignment (cf. Section 3. above), the joint construction of virtual
worlds in e-chat, the emergence of common repertoires for interpersonal work
in the process of virtual community formation, or style-shifting to strategically
converge to chat interlocutors (see, e.g., papers in Beiwenger 2001). On the
other hand, there is evidence of code switching and style shifting in CMC in
order to foreground contextually relevant social identities, to negotiate con-
flicts, or to accentuate dissent (see, e.g., Androutsopoulos 2006, 2007).
Most linguistic studies of CMC among young people focus on processes of
identity construction or self-presentation, while the negotiation of interpersonal
relationships has been relatively less attended to. One relevant question has
been whether digital technologies are used by the young to sustain established
face-to-face social networks, or rather to create new ones. Several studies have
stressed the potential of going online to disrupt traditionally defined identities,
to enable play with anonymity, to subvert rigid social features and transgress
conventional boundaries (notably gender). Chat channels and newsgroups (and
more recently virtual environments such as Second Life) in particular have been
hailed as sites for the formation of virtual relationships and online communities,
which transcend traditional geographical boundaries. By contrast, research on
the use of mobile telephones, instant messaging, and texting attends to the ways
in which these digital media extend interpersonal communication within existing
social networks across space and time (Bryant, Sanders-Jackson, and Smallwood
2006; Kasesniemi and Rautiainen 2002; Schmidt and Androutsopoulos 2004;
Thurlow 2003). Studies of texting, in particular, report its significance for phatic
and expressive communication, the planning and coordination of joint activities,
and notably for conflict resolution as well, as texting is sometimes preferred to
face-to-face exchange for reconciliation. Note, however, that the prevailing
methods of data collection in this area, i.e., questionnaires and samples of text
messages detached from context, leave little space for the study of texting-as-in-
teraction (but see Schmidt and Androutsopoulos 2004; Spilioti 2006).
The repertoires for interpersonal communication are both constrained and
enriched in settings of digitally mediated discourse. Constraints arise, as re-
sources of face-to-face interaction have to be done without or compensated for,
while at the same time additional resources may be afforded by each medium.
The best well known instance of that process is smileys/emoticons, which
emerged and were rapidly conventionalized as collective response to the chan-
nel reduction in text-only interactive written discourse. Not by coincidence,
they do phatic and interpersonal, rather than information oriented, work
(cf., e.g., Huffaker and Calvert 2005). On the other hand, emoticons are just a
sub-case of a wider tendency to explore the shape of written discourse for iden-
tity- and relationship-related work. Creative, unconventional uses of spelling
and punctuation serve as a partial compensation of familiar channels (mimics,
kinesics, prosody) as much as a resource that is inherent to the written mode and
may now be explored in environments which are largely free from normative
control over the form of written discourse.
The heavy reliance on code-centered choices, a tendency that has been
found to be characteristic of CMC (see Georgakopoulou 2003a), ultimately
depends on the manipulation of graphemic form to evoke codes and voices.
These do contextualization work in defining, reproducing, or revising rela-
tionships between interlocutors. All these processes look back to pre-digital
traditions both at the level of expressivity and emotion (see, e.g., Kataoka
2003) and at the level of youth-culture affiliations and everyday micro-pol-
itics, i.e., acting as a means of spelling rebellion (Sebba 2003). Spelling and
punctuation present fuzzy borders with multimodality, the joint use of the
verbal and visual mode in meaning making. However, multimodality in CMC
has mostly been discussed in terms of self-presentation and identity construc-
tion (see as early as Chandler and Roberts-Young 1998), and its relevance
for interpersonal communication still remains unexplored. One avenue is to
examine how multimodal expression might prompt, or provide occasions, for
subsequent digital interaction; for example, self-presentation on graphic sur-
faces consisting of language, image, sound, and background color offers clues
to be taken up in direct exchanges via the technologies offered in each case.
The connection of multimodality to interpersonal communication is perhaps
more obvious in the case of the enormously popular graphic emoticons, and
even more so in still largely unexplored three-dimensional environments such
as Second Life, where the looks of co-players are massively decisive in initi-
ating interaction.
Information and communication technologies offer the option of editing in-
teractive discourse (as in, e.g., chat lines, forum entries, text messages, etc.),
and even though such editing must often be quite rapid in order to sustain
the flow of mediated interaction, it may be strategically used to manage inter-
personal communication. For instance, planning time affords the packaging
of more than one response into the same entry; also, the time of response may
be used as an index of interpersonal stance: a swift response is conventionally
understood as indexing interest or urgency, a delayed response as indexing lack
of interest (Jones 2005). Also, editing time may be used to make the message
more appealing, by investing in language play and linguistic experiment invol-
ving the visual dimension of written discourse (see preceding discussion). But
planning time can also be exploited, especially under conditions of anonymity,
for its conflict potential, as in the practice of flaming, which may be viewed as
a digital equivalent of unmitigated conflict talk. In an early study of flaming,
Karlsson (1998) examined a Swedish chat environment in which a newspaper
editor interfered in a youth e-chat, seeking to draw the chatters attention to edu-
cational policy matters, to which young chatters reacted with irony. This culmi-
nated in direct confrontation expressed as verbal aggression and flaming.

Through flaming, participants disrupted the orderly flow of mediated interaction
to defend their autonomy, in a manner somewhat equivalent to the disruption of
institutional face-to-face discourse. This nicely illustrates the hybrid nature of
interactive written discourse as a composite of both old and new resources for
aligning and boundary setting.
6. Conclusions
Findings such as the above have gone a long way to shed light on the forms that
convergence and alignment on the one hand, divergence and boundary marking
on the other take within close-knit groups of young people at different semiotic le-
vels. In fact, more recently, the focus has decidedly shifted away from the mon-
opoly of linguistic choices in the formation of peer-group cultures to their synergy
with other semiotic choices (e.g., dress-code, hair-style) as markers of group iden-
tity (see, e.g., Eckert 2000; Wilson 2003). However, as we have shown, what re-
mains unclear in studies such as the ones discussed above is exactly how specic
to adolescent peer-group micro-cultures is language use of that kind as opposed to
being closely associated with relationships of closeness and intimacy across the
age span (cf. Kotsinas 1994; Karlsson 1998; Norrby and Wirdenas 2003). At the
same time, it has to be noted that generalizing and forming one-to-one relation-
ships between language use and social identities (in this case, age) has not been
the stated aim of this line of inquiry. Instead, the aim has been to draw attention to
and document the varying ways in which language use is shaped by and invokes
social identities (in interaction with one another) in a multitude of sites.
The other factor that makes drawing generalizations hard is the multi-func-
tionality of linguistic signs, as already mentioned. This means that the same lan-
guage choice may perform certain social actions in one context and others in an-
other; more locally, the same choice may be used and taken up differently in the
same interaction or stretch of discourse, as we saw in the example of code-switch-
ing phenomena and more specically language crossing (Sections 3. and 4.). By
the same token, ndings about solidarity as a prevalent ethos in peer-group com-
munication should by no means be equated with a picture of social harmony or
equally with a suggestion that social class, ethnicity, and other potentially divid-
ing factors no longer work as structuring forces in young peoples interactions
(see Rampton 2006). Instead, existing studies should form the basis for further
nuanced explorations of young peoples communication in a multitude of sites.
Finally, a note of caveat is in order regarding the restrictions of available re-
search literature. The aspect of age has not been sufciently brought to the fore in
sociolinguistics and studies of young speakers have often emphasized other social
identities, in particular gender. Moreover, there is an unavoidable cultural and lin-
guistic bias since most of the literature in the eld deals with Western societies,
while comparative studies tend to be missing (cf. Bucholtz 2002). In the light of
this, there is an apparent need for further studies in as many cultural settings as
possible that will broaden the scope of the inquiry into youth communication.
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17. Language and discourse skills of elderly people
Anna-Maija Korpijaakko-Huuhka and Anu Klippi
1. Introduction
The number of elderly people will increase significantly in the near future
throughout the world. In the European Union, the proportion of people over 65
years is predicted to rise up to 25 % of the total population by 2030, and by 2050
the figure is estimated to be almost 30 % (Nieminen 2005). The most rapidly
growing age group is people of at least 80 years of age; in the United Kingdom
their proportion is expected to reach 5.7 % by 2020 (Butler, Oberlink, and
Schechter 1998). In the United States, the proportion of population over 85
years is expected to increase to 5 % by 2050 (Administration on Aging 1998).
Aging should be seen as a natural process, part of the developmental life-
span (Maxim and Bryan 1994: 2). Aging as such, however, is the main factor
predisposing to conditions, such as cerebral vascular accidents and dementing
diseases (Cutler and Mattson 2006), which affect linguistic ability and interper-
sonal communication. Thus, much research on language and aging clearly be-
longs to what Coupland, Coupland and Giles (1991: 813) call a deficit para-
digm, i.e., studies focusing on the decrement and decline of linguistic and
communicative abilities in elderly people. It is, however, important to under-
stand how language processing and communicative skills may change in old
age, especially when it concerns differentiating typical age-related features (see
Section 3) from deviant features, such as those found in aphasic disorders or de-
mentia (see Section 4). It is equally important to find ways for elderly people to
maintain and enhance their active communicator role and autonomy in various
life situations. Participation in relationships, self-expression, and autonomy are
core elements of quality of life. For older peoples quality of life, communi-
cation skills, and opportunities to interact with other people are fundamental
(Worral and Hickson 2003). In addition, it is necessary to remember that many
of the communication partners of old people are themselves aged, which
multiplies the challenges of maintaining active life and of compensating for
possible age-related changes in interpersonal communication.
As the authors of this chapter have close connections with health-care and
also long experience as speech-language therapists, the overall theoretical
orientation of this chapter is based on the new biopsychosocial model of the
World Heath Organization (2001), the International Classification of Function-
ing, Disability and Health (ICF) (see Section 2).
482 Anna-Maija Korpijaakko-Huuhka and Anu Klippi
2. The International Classification of Functioning,

Disability and Health (ICF)
The ICF model is used here to cover the many-faceted research on language,
discourse, and aging. Thus, different approaches within neurophysiology, psy-
cholinguistics, and sociolinguistics are subordinated to the general frame of the
ICF. According to the ICF, a persons health condition in this context, his or
her age (see Worral and Hickson 2003, 2025) can be described from various
perspectives that interact with each other. The two basic aspects of any health
condition are called the level of body structures and functions and the level of
activity and participation. A third and equally important angle included in the
ICF model is that of environmental and personal factors which may either en-
hance or inhibit body functions or activities and participation of the individual
in question. On the whole, the ICF model focuses on functioning instead of dis-
orders or deficits, and the same philosophy is adopted in this chapter, too.
To help the reader to follow the reasoning in the following sections, a short
presentation of relevant items in the ICF model is provided. In the context of
this chapter, the brain and other organs participating in speech and language
production and comprehension are of interest. Deviations and diseases in these
body structures affect various functions which are prerequisites for linguistic in-
teraction. Sensory and motor functions, such as auditive acuity and articulatory
accuracy, respectively, are necessary premises for oral-verbal communication.
Language processes, such as lexical access, linguistic memory functions, and
discourse processing, are included in the bodys psychological functions. All the
functions or processes can be described in terms of resources or losses. Re-
sources include preserved hearing ability or appropriate linguistic memory. Dis-
ability or disorder refer to the loss of functions when a person has problems in
sensory, motor, or linguistic-cognitive functions.
A persons ability to accomplish various communicative tasks and to partici-
pate in various discourses in life-situations belongs to the level of activity and
participation in the ICF model. Expressing ones thoughts and conversing with
other people, as well as participating in business and leisure activities, are essen-
tial contributors to psychosocial well-being and quality of life. When old people
for any reason lose their skill or opportunity to act communicatively or to take part
in life-situations, we talk about activation limitation or participation restriction.
The most important environmental factors which affect old peoples com-
municative activities and participation are their communication partners skills,
social attitudes towards their roles and competencies, and the availability of ser-
vices for elderly people. Thus, in each section of this chapter, we have accord-
ing to the ICF philosophy taken into account contextual factors that may affect
linguistic processes and discourse skills. At various points, after describing the
possible age-related changes in linguistic processes and discourse activities, we
Language and discourse skills of elderly people 483
have tried to suggest some ways to modify the environment in order to help
elderly people to maintain their communicative autonomy. Accordingly, we will
also discuss some new interventions that seem promising in enhancing the life-
participation of elderly people with communicative problems and their signifi-
cant others.
3. Language processing and discourse in healthy aging
Getting older means inevitable physiological changes that may affect ones lin-
guistic and bodily functioning. In the absence of clear neurological or other pa-
thologies, i.e., diseases or traumata, these changes are considered to be part of
healthy aging (successful aging, active aging, or aging well, cf. Worrall and
Hickson 2003: 30). The structural and biochemical changes in the aging nervous
system are many (for a review, cf. Nicholas et al. 1998), and these contribute to
age-related deteriorations in motor, sensory, and cognitive functions. As a re-
sult, language and discourse skills may be affected, for example, by impaired
hearing, limited working memory capacity, and lowered speed of information
processing typical in elderly populations (Wignfield 2000). It is thus suggested
that language changes in relation to healthy aging should be considered lin-
guistic manifestations of changes in sensory, motor and higher-level cognitive
abilities rather than linguistic deteriorations as such (also Nicholas et al. 1998).
In Section 3.1., these changes will be discussed in relation to processes of lan-
guage comprehension and production. Section 3.2. then concentrates on dis-
course and social interaction, while Section 3.3. focuses on individual paths of
linguistic-cognitive aging.
3.1. Language comprehension and production

Changes in language-related processes are minor before the 70th or even the 80th
birthday, and comprehension seems to be more susceptible to age-related de-
teriorations than production (Nicholas et al. 1998). Old people themselves have
also been shown to be aware of these changes as they complain, for example,
about hearing impairment, memory problems, and difficulties in finding words
(Worral and Hickson 2003). They also report having difficulty in speaking
clearly and understanding other peoples speech.
In healthy aging, sensory-motor and histological changes affecting the
speech system may result in a decline of articulatory accuracy and speech rate
(Benjamin 1997). These do not, however, affect the general intelligibility of
utterances, nor do the typical age-related changes in voice quality (e.g., raised or
lowered pitch, reduced loudness, hoarseness; cf. Worral and Hickson 2003: 9).
If there are problems in understanding the message of an older individual be-
cause of the quality of his or her motor speech performance and voice quality,
environmental variables should be adjusted to match the communicative de-
mands. These variables include evaluating and if necessary optimizing the
denture, lowering the volume of surrounding noise, and ensuring direct eye-
contact between the interlocutors to enhance the multimodal interpretation of
the linguistic content.
Healthy elderly people without major hearing impairment have been shown
to comprehend natural, redundant speech in good listening conditions as well as
younger people (Obler et al. 1985). However, the proportion of hearing impair-
ments affecting speech perception and comprehension clearly increases with
age. Wingfield (2000) summarizes large-scale studies conducted in the United
States estimating that the proportion of hearing impairments that are severe
enough to affect speech comprehension amongst the younger old (aged under 75
years) is 2430 %, while it may be as high as almost 50 % in the group of older
old (75 years or more).
Difficulty in hearing high-frequency sounds properly is probably one of the
best known signs of sensory decline in elderly people. This age-related hearing
impairment, presbyacusis, may be crucial for the comprehension of messages in
natural situations, as it affects auditory acuity and, thus, the discrimination and
recognition of certain high-frequency and low-energy phonemes, specifically
plosives and sibilants (Wingfield 2000). It is especially hard for people with
presbyacusis to follow other speakers in noisy circumstances. Thus, acoustic
disturbances should be reduced to ensure optimal communication environment
for the hearing-impaired old person (Gordon-Salant and Fitzgibbons 1997). The
most important means to improve the speech perception of a person with pres-
byacusis, however, is the use of personal hearing aids and also of induction
loops in public service surroundings, churches, etc. (for details, cf. Garstecki
and Erler 1998). In addition, the compensation of impaired hearing by visual
speech perception, that is lip-reading, often takes place unconsciously during
the deterioration of hearing. Some elderly people, however, and also their com-
municative partners, may need special instruction that facilitates speech percep-
tion and comprehension. In this connection, especially the age-related deterio-
ration of eyesight should be remembered, and eyesight should be corrected with
glasses when necessary.
Fortunately, old people with impaired hearing do not lose their ability to
make use of contextual cues and their accumulated linguistic knowledge when
interpreting each others expressions, at least, if other age-related cognitive de-
teriorations are not severe and affect the top-down processing (for details, cf.
Wingfield 2000). It is also worth noting that hearing impairments do not affect
writing and reading abilities, and these modes of expressing ones thoughts may
also serve as alternative or augmentative means of communication for people
with impaired hearing and their communication partners.
In addition to diminished auditory acuity, speech comprehension may be af-

fected by lowered working memory capacity, i.e., difficulty in retaining, moni-
toring and manipulating recently received (auditory) information within a li-
mited time-frame, and difficulties in processing rapidly proceeding, natural
speech (Wingfield 2000). Older individuals have been shown to have more dif-
ficulties in comprehending long and syntactically complex sentences than
younger people, especially when the complex sentences convey implausible in-
formation (Davis and Ball 1989). However, such findings may, as Maxim and
Bryan (1994: 40) point out, be related to the experimental tasks used. Thus,
comprehension problems may not be evident in familiar everyday contexts,
where old people typically perform complex tasks efficiently on the basis of
their accumulated experience and knowledge (Park and Hall Gutchess 2000).
Although impaired working memory capacity is a common explanation for
comprehension deficits in the elderly, it cannot fully explain the difficulties of
some elderly people in comprehending on-line speech. It is known that the
speed of processing linguistic information slows down with aging, and this also
contributes to speech comprehension problems (for a review, cf. Wingfield,
2000). This is especially evident in word-recall tasks: Both young and old
people perform worse the faster the speech input rate, but with increasing
speech rates older people show more decline in recall accuracy than younger
people. It is also evident that both young and old people become cognitively
overloaded when receiving too much information too rapidly. When input
speeds are increased, older individuals show a steeper decline than do younger
ones in recalling semantic information (propositions). Wingfield (2000: 192)
further states that the older adults comprehension of spoken messages can be
facilitated by offering them more processing time; the interlocutors are in-
structed to lower their speech rate, especially by increasing pausing time be-
tween clauses or sentences. However, this should not result in patronizing
elderly talk, for example with simplified grammar or vocabulary and exagger-
ated intonation patterns, i.e., an ageist form of communication [] based on
stereotypical views of older people (Worral and Hickson 2003: 35; see also
Coupland, Coupland, and Giles 1991).
In addition to possible deterioration of speech comprehension, old people
often complain about lexical retrieval failures, especially problems remembe-
ring proper names of persons and places, and words in response to definitions.
While some researchers (Nicholas et al. 1998) report changes in picture naming
based on both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, others (Cruice, Worral,
and Hickson 2000) claim that in longitudinal studies, no significant changes in
word retrieval are observed. However, the decline in accessing words seems to
start as early as before the 50th birthday, but it is only in their 70s to 80s that
people seem to have more serious problems with word-finding (Connor et al.
2004; Nicholas et al. 1998; Zec et al. 2005). In connected speech elicited in pic-
ture description tasks, age has no effect on the number of content units (i.e.,
lexicalizations), but compared to younger people the older old convey in-
formation with reduced efficiency; what they say takes longer (LeDorze and
Bdard 1998; MacKenzie 2000b). The reduced efficiency is assumed to result
from slower access to words and disfluencies in terms of repetitions of same
words, or commenting on ones word-finding difficulty (LeDorze and Bdard
1998). Lexical knowledge (vocabulary) does not show age-related decline (Park
2000) it may even expand as new concepts emerge in everyday discourse situ-
ations (Maxim and Bryan 1994: 34). Thus, the picture of older peoples lexical
ability is controversial, and no coherent model is available that explains why
elderly people experience word-finding problems (for a discussion, cf. Nicholas
et al. 1998).
3.2. Discourse and social interaction

The connection of linguistic and (other) cognitive processes especially mem-
ory functions is of special importance when the discourse skills of elderly
people are considered. In a study of discourse comprehension of middle-aged
and young elderly people, Guimaraes dos Santos and Nespoulous (1993) had
different texts with varying schematic structures descriptive, argumentative,
and narrative read to the subjects. On group level, the subjects recalled the
narrative text best, and the descriptive text poorest; the typical schematic struc-
ture of a narrative most obviously enhanced the subjects ability to recall the
content of the story. The older sub-group, however, performed worse than the
younger one in terms of the amount of content recalled. This and other studies
(e.g., Ulatowska et al. 1998) suggest that older people comprehend and re-
member the most salient and essential information in stories but leave out minor
details that do not affect the overall coherence of the story. The sparcity of con-
tent is evident in tasks where older subjects should remember the explicit con-
tent of a story, i.e., in tasks that place heavy demands on working memory
capacity, and especially if the information cannot be recovered from real world
knowledge (Ulatowska et al. 1998). Results from reading comprehension
studies (for a review, cf. Kahn and Cordon 1993) also point to the role of prior
knowledge in discourse processing; older people seem to differ from younger
ones only in tasks where the information processed is not familiar to them.
The ability of elderly people to produce coherent texts in spite of gaps in
propositional content has been claimed to depend on their maintained and even
highly developed macro-level integrative processes. That is, it rests on strat-
egies, such as information reduction, generalization, and interpretation, which
compensate for their memory problems with detailed information (Ulatowska et
al. 1998). In a longitudinal study, Ulatowska et al. (1998) followed 16 healthy
home-dwelling people aged 8095 years for approximately three years (range
1.55 years). They used various discourse tasks (retelling, constructing sum-
maries, extracting gists and morals, explaining the meaning of proverbs) to
evaluate macro-level processing, and on the group-level they found no signifi-
cant decrease in applying the three strategies in any of the tasks. On the
contrary, the interpretation of familiar proverbs seemed to improve during fol-
low-up.
Moreover, Ulatowska et al. (1998) found that the participants continued
using complex syntax and high-level vocabulary; these skills are actually
necessary for the processes of reduction and generalization. The result is in ac-
cordance with Labov and Augers (1993) findings from two longitudinal
studies, the Montreal corpus and the South Philadephia study, where 176
subjects were interviewed at 1317 year intervals. By the latter interview, the
subjects were in their 60s80s. The interviews covered various topics, such
as neighbors, television, and the mother tongue. In these studies, the overall
measures of complexity (complex T-units and left-branching T-units) were
influenced by the proportion of narratives in the interview. This was expected,
as narratives are known to produce lower syntactic complexity than expository
texts. No statistically significant age effect was detected, or if there was a trend,
it was in the direction of greater complexity in the latter interviews.
These findings are clearly contradictory to what Kemper, Thompson, and
Marquis (2001) report about the reduction of syntactic complexity in the old age
based on statistical models. They followed a group of 30 healthy individuals
over a span of 815 years. The participants were 6575 years of age at the be-
ginning of the follow-up, and showed the steepest decline in syntactic complex-
ity between ages 74 and 78. In an earlier study, Kemper et al. (1990) observed
that the oldest age group (80 years or more) produced the most complex stories
(personal experiences and fantasy tales) which included multiple episodes, em-
bedded episodes, and evaluative codas. The oldest group, however, produced
these stories with decreased syntactical complexity compared to the younger
adults (60 years of age). In spite of reduced syntactic complexity, a group of 10
listeners evaluated the stories of the oldest participants somewhat higher than
the stories of younger individuals. The authors discussed the possible effect
of decreased working memory capacity on the older adults story-telling skills,
i.e., whether it is too much for an old person to recount complex story content
and complex syntactic structures simultaneously. They concluded, however,
that the oldest people, during their long life, may have learned the style of pro-
ducing interesting, appealing, and hierarchically complex stories with simple
clauses (see also Kemper and Kemtes 2000).
In story generation tasks, the density of informational content has been
reported to diminish as people grow old (Juncos-Rabadn, Pereiro, and Soledad
Rodrigues 2005). Juncos-Rabadn, Pereiro, and Soledad Rodrigues (2005)
asked their subjects (aged 4091 years) to produce stories with the help of three
sets of six-framed cartoons. The reduction of relevant (faithful) content was

accompanied by reduced cohesive reference (see also Stover and Haynes 1989;
Ulatowska and Chapman 1991). In addition, compared to younger people the
older adults produced more details not explicit in the picture frames (irrelevant
information) and demonstrated greater verbosity. Verbosity, however, is not
unanimously considered typical of elderly persons behavior, but in many cases
a symptom of some degenerative process that disrupts the inhibitory function of
the frontal lobes (for a review, see Kemper and Kemtes 2000).
The style of conversational interaction has also been observed to alter with
advancing age (MacKenzie 2000b). When talking with the researcher about the
weather, employment, day-to-day activities, etc., the oldest participants (7588
years of age) in Mackenzies (2000b) study showed a tendency towards verbos-
ity, failure to adhere to the topic, poor turn-taking, and unclear reference. By
contrast, in conversations with their peers, elderly people (aged 7890 years)
have shown preserved topic maintenance skills (Stover and Haynes 1989). In
addition, it should be noted that group-level results disregard individual per-
formance, as many participants in Mackenzies (2000b) study had excellent
conversational skills: approximately 50 % of the participants over 75 years-of-
age achieved maximum scores for referencing and topic maintenance, and about
40 % had maximum scores for turn-taking and non-verbosity.
Thus, the picture drawn from group-level results seems to strengthen the
stereotypical conception of old people being excessively talkative and often get-
ting off-track in conversation. More data providing evidence against the concept
of elderly people just talking about the same old things over and over again
come from Stuart (2000). Stuart looked at 28 participants natural conversations
during noon lunch hours in a senior citizens center. In addition, he conducted
natural field observations of the participants and interviewed their significant
others as well as professionals meeting elderly people in their work (priests,
insurance officers, medical doctors, etc.). Stuart found out that most of the par-
ticipants did indeed repeat the same core stories over the following days. Most
interestingly, however, they typically expanded the core story with new or elab-
orated information. In many cases, they connected the stories not only to past
experiences but to the present time, as when comparing the way of life then and
now. In addition to individual monologues, group stories emerged when other
visitors participated in constructing the story: these stories were often based on
an acknowledgement of common knowledge, like the interlocutors having ex-
perienced something similar. Thus, in these conversations between elderly
people, narration seems to serve the transmission of various values and cultural
maintenance.
3.3. Individual paths of linguistic-cognitive aging

Although some rough age-related trends are found in linguistic-cognitive func-
tions, as described in Sections 3.1 and 3.2, elderly people do not represent a
homogeneous group. Different paths of aging can be found in neurologically
healthy individuals, and both intra-individual (Hertzog, Dixon, and Hultsch
1992) and inter-individual (Ylikoski et al. 1999) variation in test performance
has been shown to increase with normal cognitive aging. In a sample of 120
healthy, home-dwelling people aged 5585 years, Ylikoski et al. (1999) found
three main groups using neuropsychological tests: 1) a group of average aging,
2) those with above-average level of performance (successful aging), and 3)
individuals at risk of cognitive decline. Those at risk were clearly the oldest
(75 years and above) of the whole sample. However, in this oldest age group, in-
dividuals with high level education, high general intelligence, and active life
participation showed successful aging, and those with very good linguistic
skills belonged to the group of averagely aging persons.
The connection between age and level of education seems especially im-
portant when linguistic-cognitive skills are evaluated or predicted. In language
comprehension tasks, the combination of young age (below 60 years) and high
education (university level) results in best achievement, while neurologically
healthy older elderly people, aged 75 years or more, who have left school at the
age of 14 or 15, may even perform similarly to persons manifesting clear pathol-
ogies, such as aphasia (Mackenzie 2000a). In language production, those with
minimum education produce shorter and less complete picture descriptions than
those with longer education, but conversational interaction seems not to be af-
fected by level of education (Mackenzie 2000b). Gender does not have an effect
on discourse comprehension tasks (Mackenzie 2000a) or on production tasks,
although Mackenzie (2000b) found that in a group of 189 neurologically healthy
people women had a tendency to produce longer and more interpretive content
descriptions than men.
Thus, it can be concluded that a healthy, elderly individual can be expected
to perform well even in demanding discourse contexts if he or she has a high
level of education and has spent an active life that has enhanced the develop-
ment and maintenance of intellectual processes, language use included. In addi-
tion, the age-related changes, when apparent, can be compensated by learnt,
top-down strategies and by communication partners who adjust their speech
style or act as external cognitive aids (Dixon 2000: 37). Moreover, communi-
cation may be enhanced by making the environment suitable for the elderly per-
sons communication needs.
4. Language and communication disorders in the elderly
Aging does not, however, always proceed successfully. The main causes of dis-
orders in speech, language, and interaction in the elderly are brain illnesses,
such as cerebral vascular accidents (brain infarct or cerebral hemorrhage) lead-
ing to stroke and degenerative processes of the brain resulting in dementia.
Thus, old people may be facing communication problems suddenly and usually
unexpectedly or progressively over a longer period of time.
In Sections 4.1. and 4.2., two conditions mainly responsible for elderly
peoples problems in communication and interaction are discussed, namely
aphasia and dementia. Language deficits in aphasia and dementia are partly
similar, but the nature of communication problems is different. In aphasia, the
main problems are seen in the level of microprocessing, i.e., in lexical and syn-
tactic processes, whereas in dementia especially, Alzheimers type dementia
the problems are connected with disordered macroprocesses, such as problems
with the coherence of discourse, or pragmatic deviations (Glosser and Deser
1990). Different forms of aphasia and dementia affect a fairly large group of
older people, who thus need specific services to support their living in the most
appropriate surroundings.
4.1. Language and communication in aphasia

Aphasia is an acquired linguistic-cognitive disorder in adulthood, and is typi-
cally a result of a stroke. It has been estimated that each year in the United King-
dom, approximately 20,000 new cases of aphasia are diagnosed (Parr et al.
1997), and about 100,000 new cases in the United States (Damasio 1992). As the
risk to cerebrovascular diseases, such as stroke, increases significantly with age,
the number of people with aphasia is expected to increase as the population lives
to become older than before. Currently, aphasia is present in 2138 % of patients
suffering from acute stroke (Berthier 2005).
Aphasia is typically a multimodal disorder and affects both the comprehen-
sion and production of spoken and written messages. Chapey (1986: 67) de-
fines aphasia as an acquired impairment in language and the cognitive processes
underlying language caused by organic damage to the brain. It is characterized
by a reduction and dysfunction of language content or meaning, language form
or structure, and language use or function and the cognitive processes underly-
ing language, such as memory and thought.
Aphasia as such, however, does not affect general intelligence. In addition,
aphasia takes different forms, that is, it manifests as different syndromes, it
varies in severity, and the symptoms may change over time. Aphasic disturb-
ances are seen in phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, but the individ-
ual syndromes vary widely. The most common feature in all forms of aphasia is
difficulty in finding words. The main distinction is made between non-fluent and
fluent forms of aphasia (Damasio 1998). The non-fluent aphasia syndromes are
further classified into Brocas aphasia, transcortical motor aphasia, and global
aphasia. A typical form of non-fluent aphasia is Brocas aphasia with slow and
laborious speech production. Grammatical structures are simple, and a speaker
may mainly use single-word utterances in conversation (e.g., Klippi 1996). It
has been claimed that morpho-syntactical disorder (agrammatism) is a common
but not universal feature of Brocas aphasia (Goodglass 1993). Helasvuo,
Klippi, and Laakso (2001) point out that word searching and repetitive attempts
to repair errors of speech make the sentence structures distorted. Speech com-
prehension in people with non-fluent aphasia is regarded as relatively good
compared to speech production although the understanding of complex lin-
guistic structures is often impaired.
A common type of aphasia is anomic aphasia, one of the fluent aphasia syn-
dromes (Goodglass 1993). It is considered a relatively mild disorder character-
ized by word-finding difficulties. In discourse, a person with anomic aphasia
typically produces long pauses and false starts, uses pronouns for proper nouns,
and reiterates successfully accessed words. In more severe cases of anomia, the
person has serious difficulties in accessing the target words, and the production
of semantic substitutions and use of indefinite terms (thing, some, something,
anything) are frequent. A severe form of fluent aphasia is called Wernickes
aphasia. Language comprehension problems are a fundamental part of this
syndrome, but in general the speech flows fluently, and the prosody is preserved.
A speaker with Wernickes aphasia typically produces lexical and phonological
substitutions, and even neologistic word forms which make it very difficult for
the communication partner to understand the content of the utterances. In addi-
tion, specific nouns are often substituted with indefinite terms. However, the
grammatical structures are well preserved. One of the clinical symptoms of
Wernickes aphasia is the pressure of speech output as people with Wernickes
aphasia sometimes speak excessively rapidly and seemingly without awareness
of their speech errors (Goodglass 1993).
Several studies have reported that people with Brocas aphasia are signifi-
cantly younger than people with global aphasia and Wernickes aphasia (e.g.,
Kertesz and Sheppard 1981). Many explanations have been offered for this find-
ing, but no consensus has so far been reached in this issue (Nicholas et al. 1998).
Nevertheless, it seems that, as a group, people with Wernickes aphasia are
some 10 years older than people with Brocas aphasia. Thus, a severe language
comprehension problem combined with old age and low educational level may
hinder old people with aphasia from maintaining communicative initiative and
predispose them to social isolation.
The discourse problems of people with aphasia are traditionally thought to
result from disorders in microprocessing (lexical and syntactic problems) rather
than macroprocessing (problems in text production, pragmatic skills, or cogni-

tive processes in general; e.g., Glosser and Deser 1990). This paradigmatic no-
tion, however, has been challenged in recent years, and the role of aphasic dif-
ficulties in using the linguistic resources to construct coherent discourse has
been the focus of research more frequently than before (e.g., Armstrong 2005;
Ulatowska and Streit Ollnes 2000). The difficulty that people with aphasia have
in lexicalizing their ideas is manifest in increased number of hesitations, revi-
sions, circumlocutions, paraphasic errors (substitutions), and ambiguous pro-
nouns in comparison with non-aphasic control subjects. This formulation diffi-
culty can be considered the main reason for the disrupted coherence of the
various types of discourse (Chapman, Peterson Highley, and Thompson 1998).
The frequent word-finding problems in aphasia directly affect the syntactic
structures and cohesion of a text (Glosser and Deser 1990). When the speaker is
unable to access the targeted words, the clauses may remain incomplete (Bird
and Franklin 1996), and relevant information may be missing from the intended
message (Christiansen 1995). If the speaker also starts a complicated repair se-
quence or a new word search, the clause structures will break down (Helasvuo,
Klippi, and Laakso 2001), as will the thematic continuity of the text (Korpijaak-
ko-Huuhka 2008). Word-finding problems also result in lexical ambiguity and
loosen the lexical cohesion of the text (Glosser 1993; Glosser and Deser 1990).
In addition, the impreciseness of pronominal reference found in the discourse of
people with aphasia (Armstrong 1991; Gleason et al. 1980; Ulatowska et al.
1983) affects the grammatical cohesion of the text.
In spite of the obvious problems described above, Korpijaakko-Huuhka
(2008) claims that people with aphasia have not totally lost their text production
skills. In a story-generation task, a group of 15 people with aphasia seemed to be
well aware of the narrative genre and struggled to complete the story. Although
their texts did not always turn out well-formed stories, fragments of narrative
structures or individual coherent episodes could be found in what they pro-
duced. Typically, however, the listener needs all the contextual cues available to
understand the message of the aphasic speaker. It is also likely that people with
aphasia rely on their partners ability to interpret their utterances with the aid of
contextual information. For example, the use of exophoric pronominal refer-
ence as a compensatory strategy if the speaker is unable to access the targeted
nouns seems more frequent the more severe the aphasic disorder is. In the most
severe cases, the partners help and prompting serve as a resource for the speak-
ers with aphasia, and support them in completing the task and saving face in a
difficult situation. Finally, Korpijaakko-Huuhka (2008) concludes that the
role of aphasic language in text production is fundamental. If the listener is un-
able to understand what the speaker is talking about and how the events de-
scribed are related to each other and to the discourse context, no coherent text
emerges.
Moreover, studies in conversation analysis have produced a new, more de-

tailed understanding of the everyday talk-in-interaction with people with apha-
sia (cf., e.g., Damico, Oelschlaeger, and Simmons-Mackie 1999; Goodwin
2003). First, the study of word-finding problems and problems in producing
coherent conversational turns has revealed the nature of repair work in aphasic
conversation. Aphasic word searches have similar features to those found in
normal conversation (e.g., Laakso 1997; Laakso and Klippi 1999; Oelschlaeger
1999), and most often the person with aphasia tries first to self-repair the prob-
lem (Laakso 1997). If the word search is unsuccessful, collaboration is estab-
lished by shifting the orientation to a co-participant (e.g., a speech language
therapist, a spouse, or a family member), and these collaborative repair se-
quences are often long and complex (Klippi 1996; Laakso 1997; Laakso and
Klippi 1999). Second, the study of embodiment has shown that persons with
aphasia often use gestures, facial expressions, and head positions in spoken in-
teraction to convey meanings and to elaborate their expressions (e.g., Klippi
1996; Klippi and Ahopalo 2008). Finally, the analysis of pragmatic competence
and social life (e.g., Goodwin 2003) has focused on the study of resources in
talk-in-interaction, not only on the troubles and restrictions.
4.2. Communication in dementia

Another common clinical syndrome in the elderly is dementia, with severe de-
cline in several cognitive functions. Dementia is characterized by the breakdown
of intellectual and communicative functioning, as well as personality change
(American Psychiatric Association 1994). Kempler (1995) has estimated that in
dementing diseases, communication disorders are present in 8895 % of cases.
In the early stages of dementia, the communication impairment is mild, but as
the disease progresses, deficits in linguistic communication become more pro-
nounced. In addition, it is important to understand that, depending on the type of
dementia, communication disorders vary (Bayles 1986), and that not all aspects
of linguistic communication or intellectual functioning are affected to the same
degree.
The most common etiology of dementia is Alzheimers disease, which pro-
gressively affects multiple cognitive functions, such as memory, language skills,
praxis, visuospatial perception, and executive functions. It causes remarkable
restrictions of social and occupational competence among elderly people
(American Psychiatric Association 1994). The prominent feature throughout the
course of the disease is memory impairment. Memory processes can be divided
into explicit and implicit memory. Explicit memory is further subdivided into
episodic and semantic memory. The most typical early feature of Alzheimers
disease is the decrement of episodic memory, which leads to the loss of memory
of recent events and experiences (Salmon, Heindel, and Butters 1997).
The general picture of language and communication in people with Alz-

heimers type dementia shows impaired semantic and pragmatic skills, whereas
phonology and syntax are relatively well preserved. Difficulties in finding words
(Kempler 1995), impaired performance, and circumlocutory responses in verbal
fluency tasks (Pekkala 2004) are common. The problems are particularly obvious
in discourse tasks (Ulatowska and Chapman 1995) and in spontaneous conversa-
tional speech (Bucks et al. 2000). In addition, comprehension impairments are
already discernible in the early and middle stages of dementia (Kempler 1995).
To sum up, the communication problems of people with Alzheimers disease
are typically seen in two areas of language: lexicon (word knowledge) and prag-
matics.
The second most common type of dementia is vascular dementia, caused by
multiple cerebral infarctions in both cortical and subcortical parts of the brain. It
is estimated that 1520 % of all dementia cases are of the vascular type (Molloy
and Lubinski 1995). People with vascular dementia form a much less homo-
geneous group than those with Alzheimers disease, and the cognitive and lin-
guistic profile of each person depends on the volume and location of the brain
lesions. Unlike in Alzheimers disease, clear aphasic disorders may be found in
vascular dementia, and the language deficit of a person with vascular dementia
may even be restored (Molloy and Lubinski 1995). In addition to Alzheimers
disease and vascular dementia, there are several other types of dementia, and
the reader is recommended to seek a more detailed overview, for example, in
Lubinski (1995).
Although the linguistic impairments in Alzheimers disease are not regarded
as aphasia proper, persons with Alzheimers disease may display language defi-
cits similar to those of people with aphasia (see Section 4.1.). However, the com-
munication breakdown in dementia differs from aphasic problems: Language
and communication problems apparently result from a more general cognitive
deficit and they manifest in conversation, for example, as unexpected and sudden
topic changes not seen in conversations of people with aphasia.
While aphasia is of sudden onset and will slowly be restored (within a
certain upper limit), the symptoms of dementia get progressively worse. For
example, Hamiltons (1994) study interestingly shows how the language used
by a person with Alzheimers disease (Elsie) changed over time. In the earlier
stages of Elsies illness, the changes were minor; she was capable of making ex-
tensive use of her linguistic means as she could request, express wishes, elicit
information, express concern for others, provide excuses for her unexpected be-
havior, and refuse or accept offers. In the later stages, Elsie did no longer initiate
an exchange verbally, but only responded to the researchers utterances, for in-
stance by agreeing with them by using mhm, or requesting repetition by uttering
mhm?, and expressing pleasure with mmm.
4.3. Social consequences of brain damage
As the overviews in Sections 4.1. and 4.2. show, a fairly comprehensive picture
of speech and language disorders in people with aphasia and dementia has
emerged, based on large numbers of clinical studies. However, very few studies
deal with everyday communication and interaction in elderly people with apha-
sia or dementia. One of the few is a recent study by Davidson, Worral, and Hick-
son (2003) which identified the communication activities of older people with
aphasia. Based on naturalistic observations, everyday communication with
healthy older people and older people with chronic aphasia were compared.
From the coded communicative activities, conversation was the most frequently
occurring discourse in both groups. As expected, compared to healthy older
people, older people with aphasia had significantly fewer activities making tele-
phone calls, in reading, and in writing. These findings were interpreted as evi-
dence of the negative impact of aphasia on both leisure and business activities.
People with aphasia were observed to have fewer communication partners and
more restricted social contexts for interacting than non-aphasic people.
Further, according to Davidson, Worral, and Hickson (2003), topics com-
mon to all participants were related to food and beverages, friends, neighbors
and family, health issues, and regular weekly activities. Common topics for the
healthy older people but infrequent for the people with aphasia were books,
news and current affairs, local politics, travel, computers, expressing opinions
about social issues, and conversing about other cultures and languages. For the
people with aphasia, restricted opportunities for conversations involving reflec-
tion, storytelling, discussion of opinions and ideas were found, and the range
of conversation topics in general was found to be small. Thus, the results of
the study clearly demonstrate that communication for older people means not
merely the transfer of information, but also, and possibly more importantly,
a means of social affiliation, and that people with aphasia obviously are at risk
of social isolation.
A study by Linell and Korolija (1995) analyzed the division of interactive
labor in family conversations involving aphasic participants (multiparty conver-
sations). Their results reveal that people with aphasia experienced particular
difficulties in getting their voices heard in conversation. The discussions were
typically asymmetrical, and the people with aphasia were relegated to second-
ary roles. They could seldom develop the episodes and remain in the interactive
focus throughout the episodes. In many cases, the people with aphasia were not
active as speakers but provided listener support items when others spoke. An-
other interesting phenomenon was found in Lindsay and Wilkinsons (1999)
study where they compared conversations between a person with aphasia and a
speech-language therapist or the spouse. These dyadic conversations revealed
different interactive patterns. The speech-language therapists worked to mini-
mize the interactive consequences of aphasic problems in conversation, where-

as the spouses contributed by exposing and prolonging the repairs. The re-
searchers suggested that being a spouse allows certain behaviors that are not
so evident in other types of interactions.
The psychosocial effects of aphasia have been divided by Byng, Pound, and
Parr (2000) into three main categories: 1) effects on lifestyle (e.g., employment,
education, leisure), 2) effects on the person (e.g., psychological effects, identity,
self-esteem), and 3) effects on others in the immediate social context (e.g., iden-
tity, relationships, changes of roles). Thus, the maintenance of social relation-
ships is of the utmost importance for people with aphasia after stroke, as well as
for people suffering from degenerative diseases. Maintaining social relation-
ships and receiving informational support predict better health-related quality
of life for people with chronic aphasia (Hilary and Northcott 2006). However,
people with aphasia typically feel more or less isolated from their previous con-
texts, and this isolation from social networks takes place soon after the stroke
(Parr et al. 1997).
4.4. Enhancing activities and participation

As the knowledge and understanding of the linguistic-cognitive functions and
discourse skills of elderly persons has grown in recent years, new approaches to
the preservation, activation, and restoration of the speech and language func-
tions of old people have also been developed. The rehabilitation of aphasia has
long roots (for reviews, cf. Chapey 1986; Howard and Hatfield 1987), whereas
communicative interventions for people with dementia are only gradually
emerging (e.g., Lubinski and Orange 2000).
Speech-language therapy is considered the mainstay of the treatment of
aphasia, and, over the past decade, speech and language therapists have been in-
creasingly influenced by the biopsychosocial model of functioning and health
(World Health Organization 2001) and the social model of disability (e.g.,
Duchan and Byng 2005). Accordingly, the understanding of the social role of
language in various contexts has increased. This understanding has led to the
development of communication-focused therapy, sometimes referred to as func-
tional therapy or pragmatic therapy. The main purpose of such therapy is to
facilitate and enhance optimal interaction using all the verbal and non-verbal
resources available (Lesser and Perkins 1999: 14). As the focus in this section is
on elderly people with communication disorders, only approaches specifically
intended to enhance their communicative activities and participation in social
life will be mentioned.
The treatment of people with aphasia in group-settings is an established
therapeutic approach. Group treatment has several advantages over individual
treatment (Elman 1999). For example, it fosters pragmatic skills, including im-
proved turn-taking and communicative initiative, and increases the variety of

communicative functions. Group environments are seen to provide an opportun-
ity for a wider array of communicative partners and natural tasks, thereby
enhancing participation in various discourses at home and in community
environments. Group treatment may directly and indirectly improve a persons
psychosocial functioning by providing a supportive environment for communi-
cation. In addition, group treatments are regarded as a cost-effective way of pro-
viding treatment compared to individualized speech-language therapy.
Recently, new interventions have been developed to alleviate aphasic com-
munication problems. One of the approaches is called conversational partner
training programmes in aphasia (Turner and Whitworth 2006), and they directly
aim to capitalize on the potential of partners to facilitate maximally effective
communication through their own conversational behavior. These methods
(e.g., Hopper; Holland, and Rewega 2002; Kagan 1998; Lock, Wilkinson, and
Bryan 2001) are designed to increase communicative access for the person with
aphasia, the core idea being to provide a model for the communication partners
(family members, friends, and volunteers) of how to interact with people with
aphasia and to increase their life participation. These methods also have poten-
tial for application to dementias. Promising results have been achieved, for
instance, through a cognitive-linguistic intervention program for patients with
mild-to-moderate Alzheimers disease (Mahendra and Arkin 2003).
In this chapter, we applied the new biopsychosocial model of the WHO, the
International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), as a
general framework for discussing language and discourse skills in the elderly.
We introduced some possible causes of age-related changes in language and dis-
course, but according to the model we have focused on the functional im-
pacts of such changes rather than on the causes as such. In addition, we followed
the ICF model also in that the impact of the environment on a persons function-
ing has been taken into account in relation to both healthy aging and pathologi-
cal conditions.
Growing old causes inevitable physiological and cognitive changes for
everyone. These changes may affect ones linguistic and bodily functioning, and
thereby ones quality of life. The quality of elderly peoples lives seems to suffer
more from restricted opportunities to interact and communicate with other
people than from deteriorations found in experimental tasks. Moreover, in fam-
iliar, everyday contexts healthy old people typically perform complex tasks ef-
ficiently, relying on their accumulated experience and knowledge. In discourse,
age-related changes, such as difficulty in recalling details, may be compensated
by the intact cognitive strategies and environmental support. Moreover, some

linguistic skills have been shown to develop throughout the whole life span. For
example, the adoption of new concepts and corresponding words, as well as the
use of elaborate narrative style, are possible if not typical developmental trends
as people grow older.
Our positive conception is, thus, that changes in the course of aging are not
necessarily only declines, and old people should be considered competent com-
municators with active and satisfying lives. This conception, however, is rad-
ically changed when aging is accompanied by sudden or progressive diseases
affecting language and discourse skills. The linguistic-cognitive deficits in
aphasia or dementia restrict life-participation and constitute a major risk factor for
the social isolation of elderly people. To avoid the negative social consequences
of aphasia and dementia, specific rehabilitative interventions are needed. In
addition, more attention should be paid to the physical and social environments
of elderly people. Lubinski (1995: 258271) emphasizes that the environment
should provide opportunities for individual control, personalization, choice, and
interpersonal communication. The role of communication partners forming the
social environment in enhancing and maintaining the communicative compe-
tencies of old people with aphasia or dementia is fundamental, and their role is
also essential for those without any communication disorders.
Within the philosophical framework of the social model of disability (Du-
chan and Byng 2005), people with disabilities are considered experts on their
own conditions. This insight has raised the question about the possibilities for
people with communication disorders also to be involved in decisions about the
course of therapy and how it is implemented. One solution is that service pro-
viders present the available choices and opportunities, which are then discussed
with the client to create a solid basis for the intervention. The voices of people
with communication disorders should be heard more often in research, too. Their
expectations and experiences are valuable, but they will be reached only when
the traditional instruments of data collection are modified to meet the needs of
people with communication disorders. This reasoning shows that, in the future,
we clearly need to further extend the research of language, discourse and aging
to everyday contexts to gain ecologically valid results, which will help us to en-
hance our understanding of both group-level and individual changes in healthy
aging.
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18. Relational work, politeness, and identity
construction
Miriam A. Locher1
1. Introduction
As social beings we express, communicate, and, ultimately, negotiate our identity

through many different channels: one such channel may be the way we dress, an-
other the way we comport ourselves; yet another important channel is the use of
language. We can even claim that the way in which we use language plays a cru-
cial role when enhancing, maintaining, and challenging relationships in interper-
sonal communication. This use of language has variously been termed facework,
identity work, relational work or rapport management (cf. Sections 3 and 4 for
references). This chapter is intended to explain this use by utilizing some of the
literature on identity that follows a postmodernist understanding of the concept
of identity as the social positioning of self and other (Bucholtz and Hall 2005:
586). In addition, an attempt is made to combine research on the construction of
identity by means of language more generally with the linguistic literature that has
developed ideas under the keyword politeness. It is shown in this chapter that po-
liteness research can fruitfully be combined with research on identity construction.
This line of thought has already been pursued to some extent in the eld of gender
research (cf. Swann 2000),2 and also in studies on face and identity more gen-
erally (cf. Tracy 1990; Spencer-Oatey 2007a,b). The chapter thus focuses on the
interpersonal side of communication and further intends to explore the links be-
tween identity, face, and politeness. It is organized as follows: In Section 2, I will
discuss the interpersonal and the informational aspect of language. In Section 3,
I will move on to link these ideas to identity construction in general. In Section 4,
different approaches to politeness will be at the heart of the investigation and will
be discussed with identity construction in mind. In Section 5, concluding remarks
on the two approaches to interpersonal communication will round off the chapter.
2. The interpersonal and the informational aspect of language
When engaging in linguistic interaction, people never just exchange factual

information but also always reveal information about themselves and their per-
ception of roles in a particular context. The choice of language in different
speech situations, in other words, the register or style3 the interactants use
to accommodate to their addressees and the speech situation, thus always entails
510 Miriam A. Locher
interpersonal information, too. The mere fact that individuals have different
registers and styles at their disposal and make use of them can be seen as evi-
dence for this need to negotiate roles in interaction.
In the literature, the relationship between the informational and the interper-
sonal side of communication has been discussed in numerous studies. Watzla-
wick, Beavin, and Jackson (1967: 54), for example, maintain that [e]very com-
munication has a content and a relationship aspect such that the latter classifies
the former and is therefore a metacommunication. These two parts4 cannot be
disconnected from each other. There are, however, discourses that focus more
on the content aspect, such as news broadcasts, or on the relationship aspects,
such as rounds of gossip. Kasper (1990: 205) names the former type of interac-
tion transactional discourse, in the sense that these exchanges focus on optim-
ally efficient transmission of information, and the latter interactional dis-
course, in that it has as its primary goal the establishment and maintenance of
social relationships. However, the two types of discourse can never be entirely
separated from one another (Fill 1990).
3. Relational work: Language and identity construction
Having generally postulated that there is a content and a relational aspect to acts
of communication, we can easily link these ideas to identity construction. In
Locher (2004) and Locher and Watts (2005), we have called the process of de-
fining relationships in interaction relational work. This term is meant to high-
light the fact that interlocutors invest work into their ways of communicating
by adapting their language to different speech events and to the different goals
that they might be pursuing. In addition, the term points to the relational aspect
of communication in that it highlights the relations the interlocutors have with
each other. It is important to stress that the term relational work does not only
refer to polite linguistic behavior, but is meant to cover the entire spectrum of
interpersonal linguistic behavior.5 Polite, refined, and polished language might
do a great deal for a persons identity construction, but so does rude, impolite,
and aggressive language (cf. also Locher and Bousfield (2008) and Locher and
Watts (2008) on linguistic impoliteness).
The construction of identity through linguistic means has been the subject of
study in numerous fields. For an excellent and detailed overview of different ap-
proaches, I refer the reader to a critical appraisal by Mendoza-Denton (2002).
Her general definition of the term is as follows:
[Identity is] the active negotiation of an individuals relationship with larger social
constructs, in so far as this negotiation is signaled through language and other se-
miotic means. Identity, then, is neither attribute nor possession, but an individual and
collective-level process of semiosis. (Mendoza-Denton 2002: 475)
Relational work, politeness, and identity construction 511
This denition can nicely be tied up with the notion of relational work: relational
work refers to the ways in which the construction of identity is achieved in inter-
action, while identity refers to the product of these linguistic and non-linguistic
processes. The denition of identity adopted in this chapter is thus one that could
be called postmodernist (Swann 2000: 43) in that it sees identity as in ux and not
as xed (cf., e.g., Davies and Harr 1990; Schiffrin 1996; Adelswrd and Nilholm
2000; De Fina 2003; Joseph 2004; Locher 2006a; Locher and Hoffmann 2006).
To exemplify this line of reasoning, I will briefly focus on the issue of lan-
guage and gender. Gender is one aspect of a persons identity that has been
studied extensively. Work in this research field also shows how our understand-
ing of identity construction has developed over time. Quite dramatic shifts in
focus have taken place from the 1970s until today (Swann 2000, 2002; Bucholtz
2004). According to Bucholtz (2004), we can identify several movements within
gender studies. In the 1970s and 1980s, the early feminists were concerned with
sexism, misogyny, and the social inequality between men and women, as well as
the exercise of power more generally. As an example, Bucholtz discusses the
use of generic he and feminist attempts to introduce new, non-gendered pro-
nouns to avoid sexism in language.
The next phase in gender research can be labeled the difference and domi-
nance approaches. The dominance approach suggested that men and woman use
language differently and that these different styles allow men to exercise power
over women. The difference approach was characterized by a recognition and
even celebration of womens own practices (Bucholtz 2004: 415) and by the
claim that women form a different cultural group from men. The studies follow-
ing this line of thought, however, often remained on a very general level and
could be reproached for excluding those men and women who did not fit the
general middle-class, heterosexual profile from which most data were derived
(Bucholtz 2004: 417). This resulted in more efforts to research gay and lesbian
linguistic behavior as well as in studies on non-white and non-middle class
speech communities.
Bucholtz ends her review of the literature on gender with a discussion of ap-
proaches that focus on identity in practice and performance. She claims that
[ s]tudies of women of color and of lesbians and gay men have shown the import-
ance of moving away from broad, even universal, categories like gender as the sole
explanation for speech patterns and toward other dimensions of identity that enrich
and complicate language and gender analyses (Bucholtz 2004: 422).
Bucholtz raises an important issue in this quotation: we have to be aware of the

danger of deriving from the variable we are studying (for example gender, but
also any of the other sociological variables such as age or class) a monocausal
explanation for observed linguistic patterns (cf. Swann 2000, 2002).6 Bucholtz
ultimately puts the emphasis on agency, which results in a definition of gender
and identity more generally as achieved and fluid (Bucholtz 2004: 422, auth-
ors emphasis), rather than being predetermined by social categories.
In Bucholtz and Hall (2005: 586), the authors address the study of identity,
the social positioning of self and other, more generally by reviewing the exist-
ing literature in the various fields of study. This framework provides the best
current guideline for the study of identity construction. They synthesize the
ideas on identity and propose a framework in which this concept should be
studied by taking the following five principles into account: the emergence prin-
ciple, the positionality principle, the indexicality principle, the relationality
principle, and the partialness principle. I will introduce each of these in turn.
The emergence principle is defined as follows:
1. Identity is best viewed as the emergent product rather than the pre-existing source
of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore as fundamentally a social and
cultural phenomenon (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 588).
This principle highlights the emergent and the relational aspect of identity con-
struction. By pointing out that identity is a product of interaction, the authors
avoid the previously mentioned danger of imposing preexisting categories (such
as, e.g., gender, age, class) on the text as the only explanatory factors and high-
light the social and cultural bases of identity.
The second principle is the positionality principle:
2. Identities encompass (a) macro-level demographic categories; (b) local, ethno-
graphically specific cultural positions; and (c) temporary and interactionally specific
stances and participant roles (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 592).
Essentially, this highlights that (a) identity, while being constructed relationally,
is also the product of a combination of different dimensions, among them the
previously mentioned influence of age, class, and sex. In addition, there are (b)
factors that can only be discerned when ethnographic work uncovers the mean-
ing of linguistic strategies for the members of a particular social practice, and
finally, (c) the authors point out that the emergent participant roles (e.g., evalu-
ator, joke teller, or engaged listener) in an ongoing interaction contribute to
identity construction.
The third principle is called the indexicality principle. It posits that the in-
teractants identities are the product of several processes of indexing through
language, and thus refers to the actual linguistic mechanisms the interactants
use. Bucholtz and Hall (2005: 594) claim that these processes occur at all le-
vels of linguistic structure and use. Examples are
(a) overt mention of identity categories and labels; (b) implicatures and presupposi-
tions regarding ones own or others identity position; (c) displayed evaluative and
epistemic orientations to ongoing talk, as well as interactional footings and partici-
pant roles; and (d) the use of linguistic structures and systems that are ideologically
associated with specific personas and groups (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 594).
The relationality principle entails the crucial point that

[] identities are never autonomous or independent but always acquire social mean-
ing in relation to other available identity positions and other social actors (Bucholtz
and Hall 2005: 598).
This principle works on many different levels. One of these relations refers to
processes in which similarities with or differences from other perceived groups
are constructed by social actors. A further relation is found between genuine-
ness and artifice. This relation refers to the social process that negotiates what
sorts of language and language users count as genuine for a given purpose
(Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 601) and what is constructed as crafted, fragmented,
problematic or false (602). The third relation discussed in Bucholtz and Hall
(2005: 603) refers to structural and institutional aspects of identity formation.
The notions of authority, hegemony, and power relations more generally are at
play here, in that identities are authorized or dismissed by these structures.
The final aspect of the identity framework proposed by Bucholtz and Hall
(2005) is the partialness principle. It states that
[a]ny given construction of identity may be in part deliberate and intentional, in part
habitual and hence often less than fully conscious, in part an outcome of interactional
negotiation and contestation, in part an outcome of others perceptions and represen-
tations, and in part an effect of larger ideological processes and material structures
that may become relevant to interaction. It is therefore constantly shifting both as in-
teraction unfolds and across discourse contexts (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 606).
The authors stress that agency in identity construction should not be understood
as a fully rational and always conscious process since there are undoubtedly as-
pects that are habitual. In addition, identity construction is a composite of pro-
cesses. Notice the use of in part in the quotation above, which points both to
the compositionality of identity as well as to the fact that, [b]ecause identity is
inherently relational, it will always be partial, produced through contextually
situated and ideologically informed configurations of self and other (Bucholtz
and Hall 2005: 605).
From this brief introduction to the study of identity as proposed by Bucholtz
and Hall, we can glimpse how intricate and dynamic such processes of identity
construction are. In the next section, the links between research on politeness
and identity will be discussed.
4. Relational work and politeness issues
Politeness research is one of the productive research strands that aims at a better
understanding of how interactants negotiate the interpersonal side of communi-
cation. It is for this reason that different approaches are reviewed here with re-
spect to relational work in general. It is, of course, impossible to give a compre-

hensive overview of this field here. For such introductions, I refer the reader to
the works of Eelen (2001), Watts (2003), and Locher (2004). Two influential
works that have appeared during the past few decades will be introduced in this
chapter. They are Brown and Levinsons (1978, 1987) concept of face-saving
and Leechs (1983) politeness principle. This is followed by a summary of ap-
proaches that highlight social norms and the evaluative character of judgments
on linguistic behavior (Watts 2003; Locher 2004; Locher and Watts 2005).
Since the notion of face is discussed in all of these approaches, the next section
is dedicated to explaining this important concept.
4.1. The notion of face

Goffmans (1967) notion of face,7 which he derived from Durkheim (1915), is
an important concept for the discussion of identity construction and relational
work in general. Goffman (1967) defines face as follows:
The term face may be defined as the positive social value a person effectively claims
for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is
an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes albeit an image
that others may share, as when a person makes a good showing for his profession or
religion by making a good showing for himself (Goffman 1967: 5).
In Locher (2004: 52), I suggested that face can be equated with a mask,8 an
image a person gives him- or herself during a particular interaction, and that this
face is not fixed but negotiated in emergent networks. The notion of emergent
network is taken from Watts (1991). He makes a distinction between latent net-
works and emergent networks. Latent networks comprise the links between so-
cial interactants that have been previously established. The emergent network
refers to the actual moment in time when interactants engage in a social practice
and activate and renegotiate these links (for a discussion, see Locher 2004:
2730). The recurring negotiation of face in emergent networks implies that a
person can have several different faces or masks, depending on the situation. In
addition, it is crucial that face depends on the acceptance of others. Goffman
(1967: 10) describes this by saying that it is only on loan to [an individual]
from society. Finally, Goffman (1967: 13) maintains that considerations of
face will influence interactions between people.
Since this understanding of face implies that interactants always have face,
even though the face put on might differ from situation to situation, this means
that there is no face-less communication (cf. Tracy 1990: 221; Scollon and Scol-
lon 2001: 48), just as there cannot be any communication without an interper-
sonal aspect to it. The notions of face and mask can be linked to an interactants
understanding of a particular identity that he or she wishes to propose in a par-
ticular situation. It is this link that allows us to connect politeness research with
research on identity construction within a framework of the study of relational
work, as long as we do not perceive face to be a fixed construct.9 On the contrary,
we should conceptualize it as a product, emerging in interaction. This is in line
with Bucholtz and Halls (2005: 587) claim that identity is intersubjectively
rather than individually produced and interactionally emergent rather than as-
signed in an a priori fashion. It also supports Tracys (1990) position that
Face is a social phenomenon; it comes into being when one person comes into the
presence of another; it is created through the communicative moves of interactants.
Whereas face references the socially situated identities people claim or attribute to
others, facework[10] references the communicative strategies that are the enactment,
support, or challenge of those situated identities (Tracy 1990: 210).
It has to be stressed that the notion of face proposed here is not the same in all the
politeness frameworks discussed below. Brown and Levinson (1987) have a more
static, bipartite view of face, as explained in Section 4.2, while Spencer-Oatey
(2005) uses a more flexible, but also bipartite definition of face in her frame-
work of rapport management, as discussed in Section 4.5.11 However, it is sug-
gested that the notion of face can stand for identity construction in more general
terms and can be useful for both politeness and identity research in this sense.
4.2. Brown and Levinsons approach to politeness

Without any doubt, Brown and Levinson (1978/1987) have written the most in-
fluential work on politeness in the last few decades. Their work has been en-
thusiastically received, reproduced, and developed further by many scholars,
but has also been extensively criticized by others.12 In what follows, I will high-
light how their study has furthered our understanding of relational work, polite-
ness, and identity construction in general. To do this, I will briefly introduce
their main ideas.
Two key terms in Brown and Levinsons framework are face and the face-
threatening act. Face in a Goffmanian sense has already been introduced above.
Brown and Levinson (1987: 61) define face as the public self-image that every
member wants to claim for himself. They also maintain that it is made up of
two dualistic wants. They introduce the terms positive face and negative face:
negative face: the want of every competent adult member that his actions be un-
impeded by others.
positive face: the want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some
others (Brown and Levinson 1987: 62).
These two sides have also been called the independence and involvement
aspects of face by other researchers (Scollon and Scollon 2001: 48). Brown and
Levinson (1987: 62) argue that face respect is not an unequivocal right, which
means that an interactants face is vulnerable. The authors believe, however,

that it is in both the speakers and the addressees interest to maintain each
others face (1987: 60). This is complicated by the fact that there are acts which
intrinsically threaten one or both aspects of an individuals face. These acts are
called face-threatening acts (FTAs). Brown and Levinson make the following
proposition:
Unless Ss want to do an FTA with maximum efficiency [] is greater than Ss want
to preserve Hs (or Ss) face to any degree, then S will want to minimize the face
threat of the FTA (Brown and Levinson 1987: 62).
The key here is the minimization of the face threat. The authors claim that
politeness plays a role as soon as speakers consider each others face and wish
to minimize FTAs. To achieve this minimization, the speakers have several
strategies at their disposal, which are mutually known to both speaker and
addressee. These strategies range from not committing the FTA at all (strategy 5
in Figure 1) to committing the FTA without mitigation (strategy 1), with inter-
mediate stages that are characterized by making use of different types of re-
dressive means (strategies 2 to 4).
Figure 1. Possible strategies for realizing FTAs (Brown and Levinson 1987: 60)
The speakers choice of a strategy depends on several factors that together es-
tablish the estimated risk of loss of face, or the weightiness of the FTA x
(Wx). These factors are the value of the distance (D) between the speaker (S)
and the hearer (H), the measure of the power that the hearer has over the speaker
(P), and the relative ranking of the imposition in its cultural and situational con-
text (Rx). This equation is summarized as follows: Wx = D (S,H) + P (H,S) + R x
(1987: 76). It is best understood as an abstract way of representing the intricate
social factors that play a role in interaction.
What does this type of politeness research have to do with relational work
and identity construction? An important aspect of identity construction is
whether or not we want to project an image of ourselves as someone who is
aware of the social norms of behavior that are relevant in a particular social
practice. One way of displaying such knowledge is by selecting the type of re-
lational work that is suitable for redressing face-threatening acts in a specific
context. Consider, for example, the question of address terms (cf. Brown and
Gilman 1960). Anybody who has a language such as French or German as his or
her mother tongue knows that there is a difference between the uses of the per-
sonal pronouns tu and vous or Du and Sie. It is important to pick the right pro-
nouns when addressing an interlocutor since these pronouns index intimacy and
distance, as well as hierarchical relationships. It is, in other words, face-
threatening to pick a pronoun that is too close (tu/Du) or one that is too distant
(vous/Sie) since this could imply that the relationship between the interlocutors
is not as expected.
While one could say that English does not have this problem (since you
refers to both forms), the English situation is nevertheless far from straightfor-
ward. There is an intricate negotiation between calling each other by a nickname
(Bill), first name (William), using a combination of address form and last name
(Mr. Clinton), or even professional titles combined with last names (President
Clinton). What combination is used depends on many different factors such as
whether the two interactants are related, whether they are friends, whether they
are close or distant, whether their relationship is work-related or not, whether
they are on the same hierarchical level, etc. Knowledge about which of the ad-
dress types is appropriate in which context is acquired by socialization into the
different social practices.
The fact that we are dealing with face issues can be exemplified by a brief
anecdote. Two exchange students from the United States,13 who participated in
our program in the English Department in Berne, Switzerland, addressed the
teaching staff with their title (Dr.) and seemed not to mind when the teaching
staff addressed them by first name. It is, however, customary among the lin-
guists in this department to use only first names to address each other and the
students, and to expect the same from the students when addressing staff
members. The American students felt uncomfortable adjusting to this custom
(even after having been told that it is okay to call their teachers by their first
names), and it took them some time to adopt it. What is interesting is that a pub-
lic usage of Dr. Locher in class, such as in a question, always causes raised
eyebrows from their fellow Swiss students. To address somebody in a formal
way, in a situation where the custom calls for informal usage, thus, reflects on
the speaker as well as on the addressee. While the American students wanted to
use a respectful term of address, they may have come across as too deferential in
the eyes of their peers. It is, of course, also possible to display that one knows
the norms and conventions of a particular social interaction and to subvert them.
A student might use the term Dr. Locher in the context above to question my
expertise rather than to confirm it and to show respect.
Recognizing that politeness issues play a role in identity construction, we
must acknowledge that some aspects of Brown and Levinsons work are prob-
lematic from the perspective that sees identity as being in flux rather than fixed.
On the one hand, the notion of face, described as consisting of two wants, is too
static to equal face with identity. I suggest that it is preferable to return to the
original Goffmanian sense of the term which makes a link between the two con-
cepts possible. The variables P, D, and Rx can be seen as too simple an expla-
nation for the intricate social processes that take place when interactants engage
in social practice and position self and other. There is also a problem with as-
signing linguistic form to function, as indicated in the linguistic strategies
which link linguistic indirectness with the level of politeness, a position that is
no longer pursued in many of the more recent works on politeness. Finally, the
term politeness may actually be a misnomer since Brown and Levinson describe
mitigating relational work more generally, without being concerned about
whether or not the social agents themselves consider the interaction polite or
not. The last two points will be taken up again in Section 4.4. Having said this,
Brown and Levinsons work offers us the description of an abundance of lin-
guistic strategies (cf. the indexicality principle introduced in Section 3) that can
be identified in social interaction and that can be exploited to discuss the con-
struction of identity in emergent networks.
4.3. Leechs politeness principle

Leech (1983) deals with politeness in connection with his work on principles of
pragmatics in general. His starting point is Grices (1975) cooperative principle,
which is expressed in the following four maxims:
1. Quantity i) Make your contribution as informative as is required

(for the current purposes of the exchange).
ii) Do not make your contribution more informative than is
required.
2. Quality i) Do not say what you believe to be false.
ii) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
3. Relation i) Be relevant.
4. Manner i) Avoid obscurity of expression.
ii) Avoid ambiguity.
iii) Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
iv) Be orderly. (Grice 1975: 4546)
When interactants do not follow one or more of these maxims, they create so-
called implicatures, i.e., they create additional meaning.14 Leech argues that
what he calls the politeness principle explains the motivation for many of these
implicatures. He proposes that the aim of the politeness principle is to maintain
the social equilibrium and the friendly relations which enable us to assume that
our interlocutors are being cooperative in the first place (Leech 1983: 82). For
example, an interlocutor might interpret a roundabout way of formulating a re-
quest, which constitutes a deviation from the maxim of quantity and the maxim
of manner, as being motivated by the speakers wish not to impose on the ad-
dressee. In Leechs understanding, the indirect linguistic realization of the re-
quest, which constitutes a departure from the cooperative principle, is motivated
by the speakers wish to appear polite. More generally, we are once more deal-
ing with the positioning of self and other in social practices.
Leech (1983) formulates his politeness principle in the form of the follow-
ing maxims:
(I) TACT MAXIM (in impositives and commissives)
(a) Minimize cost to other
[(b) Maximize benefit to other]
(II) GENEROSITY MAXIM (in impositives and commissives)
(a) Minimize benefit to self
[(b) Maximize cost to self]
(III) APPROBATION MAXIM (in expressives and assertives)
(a) Minimize dispraise of other
[(b) Maximize praise of other]
(IV) MODESTY MAXIM (in expressives and assertives)
(a) Minimize praise of self
[(b) Maximize dispraise of self]
(V) AGREEMENT MAXIM (in assertives)
(a) Minimize disagreement between self and other
[(b) Maximize agreement between self and other]
(VI) SYMPATHY MAXIM (in assertives)
(a) Minimize antipathy between self and other
[(b) Maximize sympathy between self and other] (Leech 1983: 132)
In general, Leech (1983: 133) claims that interactants give avoidance of dis-
cord more importance than seeking concord. He also points out that not all
the maxims are equally important. The Tact Maxim and the Approbation Maxim
are considered to be stronger than the Generosity and Modesty Maxims. As an
explanation, Leech maintains that politeness is generally more oriented towards
the other than the self.
While Brown and Levinson (1987) remain at a very abstract level when they
give us their politeness equation (Wx = D (S,H) + P (H,S) + R x), Leech focuses
more explicitly on the formulation of the norms that influence the calculation
of the relative ranking of the imposition of the face-threatening act (Rx). It is,
however, doubtful whether maxims formulated in this manner are also suitable
to capture politeness universally (ODriscoll 1996: 29). Leechs maxims be-
come more convincing once we argue that they describe culture-specific notions
of politeness rather than universal ones. In other words, it may well be that
people taking part in a social practice in Britain orient towards these norms both
when they are in the role of speakers and of addressees. In analogy, it may well
be that other cultures will give more or less importance to some of Leechs pro-
posed maxims, or it may be that they have entirely different ones that constitute
polite behavior (cf. Spencer-Oatey 2000: 40; Locher 2004: 66).
With respect to identity construction and relational work, we can say that
norms of behavior are clearly at the heart of the issue. The anecdote of the ad-
equate use of address terms in the previous section has given evidence for this.
Leech has to be given credit for highlighting this fact even more explicitly than
Brown and Levinson did before him.
4.4. The discursive approach to politeness

Building on and sometimes departing from what Brown and Levinson (1978/
1987) and Leech (1983) have proposed, many other researchers have devel-
oped other ideas on politeness (cf., among others, Fraser 1990; Kasper 1990;
Holmes 1995; Held 1995). In what follows, however, I will focus on a more
recent approach that highlights the discursive notion of the concept of polite-
ness as such (Watts 2003; Locher 2004; Locher and Watts 2005, 2008) and
claims that politeness is a comment on relational work in particular social
practices or communities of practice15 (cf., e.g., Watts 2003; Mills 2003, 2004,
2005; Mullany 2004, 2008; Schnurr, Marra, and Holmes 2007, 2008; Graham
2007, 2008).
In Locher (2004, 2006b) and in Locher and Watts (2005, 2008), the claim is
made that what Brown and Levinson have studied should not be seen as polite-
ness per se, but as the description of linguistic strategies to mitigate face-
threatening acts within the more general framework of relational work or identity
construction. This means that we make a distinction between the term politeness,
as used in a theory such as Brown and Levinsons, and the understanding of
what politeness may mean for a lay person. This difference has been called the
distinction between first order (lay) and second order (theoretical) conceptions
(cf. Watts, Ehlich, and Ide 1992; Eelen 2001; Watts 2005).
This distinction makes it possible to describe the face-threatening character
of a linguistic act and to point to the linguistic strategy of mitigation used with
the help of Brown and Levinsons framework without a priori saying anything
about the level of politeness witnessed. Consider, for example, the following
well-known constructed sentences that might be uttered during a lunch conver-

sation:
(1) (a) Pass me the salt.

(b) Could you please pass me the salt?
(c) Would you be so kind as to pass me the salt?
Depending on the context and the way in which these sentences are uttered, any
of them might be appropriate and any might be inappropriate. If you are very
close to each other and you generally talk on a very informal basis, an example
such as (1a) might be called for, while (1c) might be over the top or even down-
right insulting. If you are on different hierarchical levels and if you usually talk
to each other in a very formal way, you might go for (1c) and find (1a) out of
place. The point here is that we cannot easily equate linguistic indirectness with
linguistic politeness, or, more generally, linguistic form with linguistic function.
On the contrary, we have to be very careful in taking into account the context of
the linguistic utterance and any evidence from the interactants themselves that
they may have wanted to use relational work in a particular way. For this reason,
it is crucial to study the norms of the particular social practice in question. This
is in line with Bucholtz and Halls (2005) positionality principle, as explained in
Section 3.
It is clear that a concept such as politeness has an evaluative character and is
thus linked to social norms which are negotiated by social beings in interaction
over time. This is what is meant by the discursive nature of politeness. This
approach highlights the importance of social norms even more than Leechs
(1983). The difference is that we do not claim to be able to generally state the
norms in question in the form of maxims, but we rather wish to stress that the
norms as such are constantly in flux and are created, maintained, challenged,
and ultimately changed by participants in social practices over time.
By using the term politeness again in its lay meaning, we can free it from the
overgeneralization that came with its use as a theoretical concept. We claim that
polite linguistic behavior is actually only one very small aspect of relational
work, namely relational work that is judged by participants in situ as appropriate
and positively evaluated or marked according to the norms of a social practice
(cf. Watts 1989, 1992; Locher 2004, 2006b; Locher and Watts 2005, 2008).
The notion of frame, i.e., structures of expectation based on past experience
(Tannen 1993: 53), explains the basis on which these judgments are made.
A frame is acquired over time in social practice when interactants categorize the
experiences of similar past situations, or draw conclusions from other peoples
experiences. A frame can contain expectations about action sequences (such
as money transactions in a sales situation), but also about role and identity is-
sues (such as the roles of sales assistant and customer). In Locher and Watts
(2008: 78), we point out that [t]he theoretical basis of frames are cognitive
conceptualisations of forms of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour that in-
dividuals have constructed through their own histories of social practice. Once
again, it is important to stress that these norms and expectations are acquired
over time and are constantly subject to change. When discussing the emergence
principle in relation to identity construction, Bucholtz and Hall (2005) state that
the property of emergence does not exclude the possibility that resources for identity
work in any given interaction may derive from resources developed in earlier inter-
actions (that is, they may draw on structure such as ideology, the linguistic sys-
tem, or the relation between the two) (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 588).
Hence people do not start inventing norms and expectations from scratch every
time they meet. On the contrary, the discursive understanding of impoliteness
and politeness issues stresses the importance of communities of practice and
frames, which means that people draw on their experience and that these con-
cepts entail historicity.
As a consequence of this historicity, as well as the discursive nature of the
evaluative notion of politeness, we can say that it is possible that members of
different social practices may perceive not only different linguistic behavior as
polite, but may also construct the lexeme politeness as having slightly differ-
ent connotations. The meaning of politeness has clearly shifted over time. The
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) reports intellectual refinement; polish, el-
egance, good taste as obsolete meanings for politeness with quotations from
the 17th century. Stein (1994: 8) claims that before the 18th century, politeness
referred to a social ideal, the polite urban, metropolitan gentleman, well-versed
in the art of polite conversation, a man about town. By the second half of the
18th century, a new notion of politeness had developed, one that is closely linked
to prescriptivism, in that two poles between correct (polite) and incorrect
(impolite) language usage were established and described, for example, in the
prescriptive grammars of the time.16 The modern definition of politeness given
in the OED is [c]ourtesy, good manners, behaviour that is respectful or con-
siderate of others. The entries for the meaning of the adjective polite in the
OED read as follows:
1. a. Smoothed, polished, burnished. Obs.

b. Clean; neat, orderly. Obs.
2. a. Of language, the arts, or other intellectual pursuits: refined, elegant,
scholarly; exhibiting good or restrained taste.
b. Of a person, social group, etc.: refined; cultured, cultivated; (also) well-
regulated. Now chiefly in polite society, circles, etc.
c. Courteous, behaving in a manner that is respectful or considerate of
others; well-mannered.
It would be premature, however, to claim that there is general agreement about

the exact connotations of the terms polite and politeness in all the different so-
cial practices (cf. Mills 2002, 2004). It is even possible to argue that the term
politeness carries negative connotations for some groups of people. This is the
case when they consider what others might perceive as socially appropriate be-
havior as being inappropriate to a certain extent according to their own norms.
In Locher and Watts (2008) we suggest that
this might lead to latently negative evaluative lexemes such as standoffish, stuck-up,
hoity-toity, etc., thus indicating that an individual who expresses such an evaluation
is aware that others would consider the behavior as appropriate, but personally inter-
prets it negatively (Locher and Watts 2008: 98).
Clearly further research is needed to establish the connotations that the lexemes
mentioned carry today for different groups of people.
Another advantage of investigating politeness as a first order concept is that
we do not perceive its opposite to be impoliteness in general, but allow for the
possibility that relational work which is negatively evaluated as breaching so-
cial norms may be judged in many different ways by participants in a social
practice. The literature on impoliteness is still scarce in comparison to the vol-
uminous literature on politeness. Early approaches took impoliteness as a mirror
phenomenon to politeness, often based on an approach similar to Brown and Le-
vinsons (cf., e.g., Lachenicht 1980; Culpeper 1996; Kienpointner 1997). The
more recent literature is more diverse both in its methodological approaches as
well as in its understanding of impoliteness (cf., e.g., Culpeper, Bousfield, and
Wichmann 2003; Culpeper 2005; Bousfield and Locher 2008). The need to steer
away from a simple dichotomy between polite and impolite behavior, however,
is clearly recognized, and more research is encouraged to study behavior that is
face-aggravating in particular social practices.
Let us look at an example in which a metacomment on relational work is
being made that was perceived as negative. In (2), taken from Baumann et al.
(2006), who studied impoliteness in a small number of family interactions in
Switzerland, the metacomment unhflech (impolite) is mentioned by one of
the participants. The conversation took place during a family dinner and was
documented immediately after the interaction. The participants are a father and
mother, their son, and their daughter, who are in their early twenties. The lan-
guage is Bernese, the Swiss German dialect spoken by the participants, and is
glossed with an idiomatic English translation.17 The mother asks her son why
his girlfriend Rahel, who had left the house only five minutes before the meal,
does not have dinner with the family.
(2) 1 Mother: Wiiso isst de ize d Rahel nid mit s?

So how come Rahel doesnt eat with us?
2 Son: Si het doch gseit si wott nid --
But she said that she didnt want to --
3 Mother: Nei, das hesch du gseit. D Rahel ht nmlech wue, i has ire
agseh.
No, it was you who said that. Rahel in fact wanted to, I saw
it.
4 Son: Das hesch du u sicher nid.
No you surely didnt.
5 Mother: (gets louder) Weisch, si mchte s vilich ou kennelehre. Sie
wrd nie eso bld tue, du tuesch eso bld.
You know, she might want to get to know us, too. She
would never act this stupidly, you are the one who acts stu-
pidly.
6 Son: (gets louder as well) Tue doch nid eso, hey, ig ma ize nid mit
dir ber das rede.
Stop acting like this. Hey, I dont want to talk about this
with you now.
7 Mother: (even louder) Ig finge eifach we si jedes Wuchennd hie ver-
bringt und sich die ganzi Zit vor s versteckt isch das e chli
unhflech --
All Im saying is that, if she stays with us every weekend
and hides from us the whole time, then this is somewhat im-
polite--
8 Father: (very loud) Chit dir ize ber ppis angers rede bitte, es cha
doch nid si, dass dir bi jedem znacht schtrmet.
Could you now talk about something else, please. How can
you always be fighting during dinner.
9 Mother: (aggressive) Ach ize wosch du s scho vorschribe ber was
mir sue rede.
Ahh now you even want to tell us what were supposed to
talk about.
10 Son: (to father) Misch di nid i!
Mind your own business.
11 Mother: (to father) Fr wn hautisch di eigentlech?
Who do you think you are anyway?
12 Daughter: Er isch der Herrgott.
Hes God.
13 Father: (in a rather joking way) I bi schliesslech z Familieober-
houpt.
After all I am the head of this family.
14 Daughter: (changing the topic) auso Ma, wohere gt dir ize id Land-
schueuwuche?
So Mom, where will you now be going for the school camp?
In this extract, the mother and the son quarrel about the fact that the sons girl-
friend does not join the family for meals a behavior which the mother describes
as impolite (7). She also argues that it is really the son who tells his girlfriend to
stay away and that it is not Rahels own wish (3, 5). The son clearly does not
wish to discuss this issue (6). When the quarrel between mother and son gets
louder and louder, the father interrupts them in an even louder voice by asking
his wife and son to change the topic (8). In addition, he complains that the two of
them are always quarrelling during dinner. This intervention does not go down
well with mother and son, as can be seen from the fact that they immediately
turn against the father now as a joint team. It is the daughter who answers the
aggressive question posed by the mother in line 11 in an ironic way.18 This tone
is taken up by the father, and after that the daughter takes the opportunity to suc-
cessfully change the topic entirely.
There are several comments to be made here on relational work and percep-
tions of relational work. With respect to frames, i.e., structures of expectations,
the mother states that she considers Rahels staying away from the dinner table
to be a breach of norms. She clearly expects her sons girlfriend to spend more
time with the family and not to hide. The metacomment impolite thus refers
to behavior that was already witnessed earlier as well as at the time of the inter-
action, and is now made in the absence of Rahel. Another set of expectations
that we see evidence of in this extract is the fathers comment on the repeated
quarrels between his wife and his son (8). He voices his wish that there should
be less schtrme, a Bernese expression describing quarrelling and fighting, de-
rived from storm, during dinner time. Finally, there seems to be a clear idea on
the part of the mother and her son that their quarrel is theirs rather than one that
includes all the members of the family. This can be seen in the content of their
immediate reaction to the fathers intervention.
Interestingly, there are also several roles and identities explicitly indexed
in this brief extract. In lines 5 and 7 the mother creates a sense of the family
by using the pronoun s/us (You know, she might want to get to know us,
too./hides from us). This implies that Rahel is not part of this us (yet). While
the mother creates a sense of family including her son, she also creates another
group consisting of her son and his girlfriend Rahel. In line 3, the mother puts
the blame for Rahels behaviour on her sons rather than on Rahels shoulders
(No, it was you who said that. Rahel in fact wanted to, I saw it.). She confirms
this criticism in line 5 (She would never act this stupidly, you are the one who
acts stupidly.) This is clearly face-aggravating for the son, but saves the girl-
friends face in that direct criticism of her is avoided.
From lines 8 to 13, repeated below from extract (2), the role of the father is
under attack:
(3) 8 Father: (very loud) Could you now please talk about something
else. How can you always be fighting during dinner.
9 Mother: (aggressive) Ahh now you even want to tell us what were
supposed to talk about.
10 Son: (to Father) Mind your own business.
11 Mother: (to Father) Who do you think you are anyway?
12 Daughter: Hes God.
13 Father: (in a rather joking way) After all I am the head of this
family.
14 Daughter: (changing the topic) So Mom, where are you now going to
go for the school camp?
Once the father has interrupted his wife and his sons quarrel, he is immediately
challenged by them for not having the right to do so (9, 10). In line 11, the
mother explicitly and aggressively asks the father about his role (Who do you
think you are anyway?). According to the daughter, who recorded the conver-
sation and commented on it at a later stage when discussing the analysis with
me, she wanted to help her father by saying Hes God. Her father takes up this
ironic mood and evokes the image of patriarch or head of the family.
The face issues in this brief extract are delicate. The attack on the sons face
has already been mentioned (lines 3 and 5). The fathers face is clearly chal-
lenged once his role in the interaction is so bluntly questioned by his wife and
son, who were antagonists only seconds before and are now teaming up against
him. The daughter finally manages to steer the conversation into calmer waters
by means of irony and thus prevents further rounds of aggravating behavior that
might have followed if any of the other interactants had tried to answer the ag-
gressive question in line 11. By referring to her mothers occupation in line 14,
the daughter highlights her mothers professional face and shifts the attention
away from face sensitivities in the family context.
Baumann et al. (2006) stress that the face-threatening acts witnessed in
example (2) are in fact not perceived by the participants to be as severe as they
might look to analysts not familiar with this particular family and their discur-
sive practice. The conversation indeed proceeded on a neutral tone after the
short episode described and did not have any long-term repercussions.
In contrast, extract (4), also taken from Baumann et al. (2006), might look
quite unspectacular with respect to the linguistic strategies used, but was ex-
perienced as problematic by the daughter with respect to face issues. The epi-
sode took place between a father and daughter while preparing the salad for
dinner:
(4) 1 Daughter: Sui die Zibele mit dm Hcksler da schnide?

Shall I cut the onions with that chopper
2 Father: Ja, das chasch scho.
Yes, you can do that.
(Father observes Daughter who is obviously struggling with
assembling the cutting utensil.)
3 Father: Nimm doch eifach es Msser, das geit o!
Why dont you simply take a knife. That would do the trick,
too!
4 Daugther: (rather peevishly and aggressively) Aber weni mit dm wot
schnide?!
But what if I want to cut with this one?!
5 Father: Ja, de isch scho guet!
Yes, all right, go ahead.
The daughter reports that her fathers comment to exchange the fancy chopper
for a simple knife (3) was taken as a face-threatening criticism of and a chal-
lenge to her expertise and competence. This resulted in her snapping at her
father in an aggressive way. Her fathers reaction, however, points to the possi-
bility that he merely wanted to give advice since he does not react negatively to
the challenge in his daughters response. Instead he takes her comment literally
and supports her in her choice of a chopper. Baumann et al. (2006) point out that
the extent of the face-threatening character in this brief extract can only be fully
explained once it is known that there had been tensions building up between the
father and daughter over quite some time (cf. Bucholtz and Halls positionality
principle (b), explained in Section 3).
With respect to the terms politeness or impoliteness, it seems clear that they
refer to the way in which interactants deal with each other, either linguistically
or more generally. Judgments on politeness and impoliteness are, in other
words, metacomments made by social interactants on each others relational be-
havior. It may be desirable to be perceived as having the qualities attributed
above to ones identity (polite, elegant, cultured, well-mannered, etc.).
(Mis)management of relational work that leads to negative perceptions of re-
lational work and intentionally face-aggravating behavior will equally reflect on
the product of an interactants construction of identity in an ongoing emergent
network. This is, finally, the link that we can draw between face, face-threaten-
ing acts, and identity construction: since there is no faceless communication, in-
teractants are constantly negotiating face needs and are trying to deal with face-
threatening acts in ways that serve their current interactional goals;19 since face
can be understood as a particular mask or role that an interactant wants to have
confirmed in social practice, we are automatically dealing with identity con-
struction. To be perceived as polite may then just be one of the many possible at-
tributes that an interactant wishes to display and hopes to have accepted as part
of his or her identity.
4.5. Relational work and rapport management

The final theoretical approach to be discussed here in the light of the construc-
tion of identity and politeness is Spencer-Oateys (2000, 2005) theory of rap-
port management, which was developed in research in the field of cross-cultural
sociolinguistics. Her framework is discussed here because it shows some useful
overlap with the discursive approach to politeness, but also adds further import-
ant insights. Spencer-Oateys (2005) definition of rapport management is simi-
lar to the definition of relational work:
Rapport refers to the relative harmony and smoothness of relations between people,
and rapport management refers to the management (or mismanagement) of relations
between people (Spencer-Oatey 2005: 96; authors emphasis).
Spencer-Oatey (2007b: 647) argues that rapport management should be seen as

a more general concept than relational work. I hope to demonstrate in this
chapter that dealing with relational issues is not reductionist. In fact, I would
like to suggest that what Spencer-Oatey defines as rapport management is equal
to our understanding of relational work (Locher and Watts 2005). It is important
to stress that rapport management, just like relational work, includes not only
the negotiation of harmonious relations. Spencer-Oatey (2005) mentions four
general types of rapport orientations:
a rapport-enhancement orientation (a desire to strengthen or enhance harmonious re-
lations between the interlocutors), a rapport-maintenance orientation (a desire to
maintain or protect harmonious relations), a rapport-neglect orientation (a lack of
concern or interest in the quality of relations, perhaps because of a focus on self), a
rapport-challenge orientation (a desire to challenge or impair harmonious relations)
(Spencer-Oatey 2005: 96; emphasis mine).
Spencer-Oateys (2005: 97) definition of (im)politeness is in line with Watts
(2003), Locher (2004), and Locher and Watts (2005) in that she takes (im)po-
liteness to be the subjective judgments that people make about the social appro-
priateness of verbal and non-verbal behaviour. However, she does use the term
(im)politeness as an umbrella term for all kinds of lexemes that index evaluative
meanings with positive, negative or neutral connotations, rather than treat it as
one of the metacomments.
What is of particular interest to us is that Spencer-Oatey is especially con-
cerned with the perceptions and judgments of rapport management. She pro-
poses that there are three key elements at the basis of such judgments: behav-
ioural expectations, face sensitivities and interactional wants (Spencer-Oatey
2005: 96). The behavioral expectations can be linked to the notion of frame pre-
viously discussed and stem from the interactants beliefs about what is pre-
scribed, what is permitted and what is proscribed in a particular social practice
(2005: 97).20 Spencer-Oatey uses two different concepts of face to describe
face sensitivities. The first type is called respectability face and is claimed to be
pan-situational in that it reflects the interactants prestige, honor, or good
name (based on Ho 1976). Identity face, in contrast, is defined as situation-spe-
cific and highly vulnerable (based on Goffman 1967). I suggest that we can
link these two types of face to the notion of latent and emergent networks pre-
viously mentioned: respectability face can be argued to be related to the prestige
that a person has established in previous encounters or that are given to him or
her in relation to the norms and values of the particular social practice in a first
encounter. Respectability face thus refers to the latent links in a social network
which are closely related to the frame of that particular social practice. These
links, however, will be negotiated in an emergent network, in which a persons
identity is constructed and his or her face is most vulnerable. The notion of iden-
tity face is thus best linked to the emergent network. In her discussion of
examples, Spencer-Oatey (2005) concentrates mainly on identity face, by link-
ing the linguistic analysis with work on self-aspects and positive social values
carried out in the field of social psychology (Schwartz 1992; Schwartz et al.
2001). Such self-aspects can be linked to physical features, roles, abilities,
tastes, attitudes, etc. (Simon 2004). Spencer-Oatey (2005: 104) maintains that
peoples claims to identity face are based on the positive social values that they
associate with their various self-aspects and that people develop sensitivities
around them. The third element that Spencer-Oatey identifies as contributing to
judgments on rapport management is interactional goals or wants. She makes
a distinction between transactional and interactional goals, similar to the argu-
ment presented in Section 2.
While Spencer-Oatey stresses that all three elements influence judgments on
rapport management, she claims that interactants make judgments on (im)po-
liteness mainly in relation to behavioral expectations. The other two notions
(face sensitivities and interactional wants) interact with these expectations, but
are seen to be at the base of judgments on rapport management more generally.
Her overall argument is that
[a]s people interact with each other, they make dynamic judgments as to whether
their rapport has been enhanced, maintained or damaged []. These judgments
(conscious or otherwise) are based to a large extent on assessments of the three key
bases of perceptions of rapport: interactional wants, face sensitivities, and behaviou-
ral expectations (Spencer-Oatey 2005: 116).
These bases of the dynamic perceptions of rapport are visualized in Figure 2, re-
produced from Spencer-Oatey (2005: 116). What is particularly useful for the
present discussion is the mention of emotional reactions in the right hand bot-
tom corner. The discursive approach to the study of politeness and impoliteness
claims that interactants make judgments about the appropriateness of behavior
in relation to the social norms and expectations of a particular social practice,
and that negatively and positively marked evaluations will lead to metacom-
ments such as, for example, polite or impolite. Spencer-Oateys figure not only
visualizes some of the emotions that are evoked by using the term negatively
marked or positively marked, but she also convincingly points out that these
reactions are dynamic, based on the perception of self and other and are trig-
gered by different interrelated processes.
How can we link these observations to the ideas on identity construction
presented in the previous sections? In Spencer-Oateys (2005) framework, the
notion of identity appears most prominently in her discussion of the concept
identity face.21 The process of constructing identity in interaction, however, is
clearly entailed in all three elements of behavioral expectations, face sensitiv-
ities, and interactional wants. The notion of role, for example, can be argued
to be of importance in all three realms. This claim is discussed with the help of
a constructed example, which is based on the authors own cultural ex-
pectations:
(5) Imagine that you are a boss who has to bring the bad news to an employee
that he has to be laid off because of financial cuts. You know that the employee
in question will be upset and unhappy about that decision and will probably con-
test it. You are also not happy about having to make this person redundant,
whose work you have always valued. Nevertheless, you see no other solution
but to go ahead with the dismissal. With respect to your role as boss, the follow-
ing issues may appear important for the conversation in which you tell your em-
ployee the bad news:
Behavioral expectations: As the boss, it is one of your duties to hire em-

ployees and make them redundant. You have gone through similar situations
before and you can draw on this particular frame here. For example, you
plan to invite the employee to your office, you will give him the bad news in
a factual way; you will give reasons for the dismissal, and you will offer
understanding for the difficult situation that you put your employee in. You
will make sure that you fulfil all the legal requirements that may be attached
to this activity. From the employee you expect that he recognizes the par-
ticular type of interaction and that he orients to it by reacting in a factual
rather than an emotional way.
Interactional wants: Your interactional goal is to conduct a factual and effi-
cient conversation. Your interpersonal goal is to be able to conclude the con-
versation on such a note that your role as boss is not challenged, while you
are willing to enhance the employees face, circumstances allowing, by ac-
Figure 2. The base of dynamic perceptions of rapport (Spencer-Oatey 2005: 116, copyright by Mouton de Gruyter)
Relational work, politeness, and identity construction
531
knowledging the employees difficult situation as a result of terminating the

work relations.
Face sensitivities: You are sensitive to any challenge of your role as boss
(appearing in control, being legitimized to take decisions, etc.) that might
come from the upset employee, while you are aware of the face-threatening
character of the act of making somebody redundant.
This constructed scenario is admittedly far from accounting for the complexities
of real interaction. It has shown, however, that the three elements that Spencer-
Oatey identifies are indeed closely related and together will contribute to the
identity construction that will be the product of the orientations to these three el-
ements once the interaction takes place.
It has to be stressed that Spencer-Oatey deals with the question of judgments
on rapport management in her (2005) paper and explicitly mentions that she is
not concerned with how (im)politeness, face and/or rapport are dynamically
managed in interaction (96). I take this to mean that such a focus is still pos-
sible, but not the subject of the paper. The scenario described above was formu-
lated in such a way that it outlined relational concerns at the outset of the inter-
action. It was meant to illustrate that the three elements that Spencer-Oatey
describes as being at the basis of judgments of rapport management will also be
crucial in identity construction in general.
The aim of this chapter was to link work on the construction of identity in in-
teraction with work on linguistic politeness in order to point out synergies in
the two research fields. The recent literature on identity construction has been
reviewed with a brief excursion into the issue of language and gender. The lit-
erature on politeness was represented by two seminal research traditions, one
inspired by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), and the other by Leech (1983).
In addition, the more recent discursive approach to politeness issues was in-
troduced to indicate new developments in this field of research (Locher and
Watts 2005). These approaches were discussed in connection with the con-
struction of identity.
I hope to have demonstrated that the view which considers identity as
emerging in interaction and the discursive approach to politeness with its
focus on relational work can more generally be fruitfully combined in lin-
guistic research which explores interpersonal communication. The overlap in
the approaches can be located in the position that there is no communication
without a relational aspect, and that identity is inherently relational (Bu-
choltz and Hall 2005: 605). In addition, the understanding of politeness as one
of many evaluative concepts, the contents of which are discursively negoti-

ated in social practices over time, highlights the importance of practice or
agency that is also crucial to the current postmodernist understanding of iden-
tity. The Goffmanian conceptualization of the metaphor face, being central to
politeness research, can also be of use for identity research if it is taken to
mean a role or mask that is being negotiated in an emergent network
rather than a predefined set of wants.
Finally, the terms relational work, facework, identity work, and rapport
management have been shown to refer to the same phenomenon the negoti-
ation of relations and identities in interaction, while a particular face or identity
is the product of this work. It remains to be emphasized quite clearly that much
more empirical research is needed to understand the intricacies of relational
work in all its facets. This chapter is meant to encourage such research.
Notes
1. The author wishes to thank Anne-Franoise Baer-Boesch, Lea Baumann, Derek

Bousfield, Nicole Nyffenegger, Lukas Rosenberger, Philipp Schweighauser, and
Ariane Studer for their perceptive and critical feedback on early drafts of this
chapter, and Gerd Antos, Eija Ventola, Tilo Weber and Richard J. Watts for their
comments on the final version of this text. A particular thank you goes to my students
Lea Baumann, Manuela Burgermeister, Sonaljeet Kundan and Ariane Studer for
sharing their data with me.
2. Swann (2000) reviews several authors who combine gender with politeness issues,
among them Brown (1980), Lakoff (1975), and Holmes (1995). However, these
studies are not oriented to the same degree to the construction of identity and the role
that politeness plays in this process as the present chapter is. More recent work (e.g.,
Mullany 2004) combines a constructivist approach to gender with politeness research.
3. For a detailed discussion of different approaches to style and register in language,
see Eckert and Rickford (2001).
4. Other researchers speak of a tri-partite distinction: the ideational (expressing con-
tent), the textual (organizing information into texts), and the interpersonal (Kresta
1993: 32, who bases his approach on Halliday 1976, 1981). The first two are in-
cluded in the focus on content (transactional) while the latter corresponds to the re-
lational aspect of an utterance (interactional).
5. The term facework is often used by researchers who follow Brown and Levinsons
(1987) politeness theory. It has been largely reserved to describe only appropriate
and polite behavior with a focus on face-threat mitigation. To avoid confusion and in
favor of clarity, the term relational work is adopted to highlight that the negotiation
of the relational aspect of language does not only involve mitigating strategies.
6. In her paper Yes, but is it gender?, Swann (2002) points out the importance of me-
thodological and theoretical considerations when studying gender. One of her many
critical comments is that it cannot be enough to study only women in interaction to
claim that we are witnessing womens talk, since we first have to find out how much
of this womens talk overlaps with mens talk to make such a claim.
7. The notion of face has been reproached for being culturally bound and based too
much on the individual (Gu 1990: 241242; Matsumoto 1988: 405). While I agree
that the metaphor of face is clearly culturally bound, I claim that the theoretical no-
tion of face as described in this section is not.
8. The metaphor of the stage is evoked here where people can put on different masks
or faces. However, I do not wish to imply that a person can take off such a mask to
reveal an underlying true identity, since there is no face-less communication
(cf. Tracy 1990: 221; Scollon and Scollon 2001: 48).
9. See the discussion of face as used by Brown and Levinson (1987) in Section 4.2.
10. Cf. note 5.
11. See also Ruhi (2007) for a recent discussion and development of the concept face.
12. I refer the reader to Werkhofer (1992), Eelen (2001), Watts (2003), and Locher
(2004) for critical reviews of Brown and Levinsons (1978/1987) work.
13. I do not mean to claim that all American students share the same expectations with
respect to the use of address terms. The point is that the social practice in question
had different norms with respect to the use of address terms than that of the two
individuals in question.
14. This comment refers in fact to a complex set of transgressions that are further dis-
cussed in Grice (1975).
15. For the concept of community of practice, consult Eckert and McConnell-Ginet
(1992a/b), Wenger (1998), and Meyerhoff (2002).
16. Other studies on the historical concept of politeness in the field of sociohistorical
linguistics are Fitzmaurice (1998) and Watts (1999, 2002).
17. The transcript in Swiss German was produced by the daughter and mother in the
example; the English translation is mine.
18. Here the Father knows best ideology, studied by Ochs and Taylor (2001), is evoked
in an ironic fashion.
19. I do not wish to imply that this interaction always has to be conscious. See Locher
and Watts (2008) for further comments on intentionality.
20. Spencer-Oatey (2005: 98100) describes different aspects that are part of behavioral
expectations: contract/legal agreements and requirements, explicit/implicit role
specifications, the interactional principles of equity and association, and behavioral
conventions, norms and protocols.
21. In Spencer-Oatey (2007b: 642644), the author discusses the link between the con-
cept of face and identity explicitly by claiming that the two concepts should be kept
apart. However, I argue that we can gain much by equating face with identity, as out-
lined in this chapter.
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19. Humor, jokes, and irony versus mocking,
gossip, and black humor
Alexander Brock
1. Introduction
Humor, jokes, irony, mocking, gossip and black humor are labels for a group of
communicative activities which are related and yet sufficiently different to earn
themselves specific terms. Many other similar ones could be added, including
sarcasm, teasing, banter and rumor. People often make funny remarks, they are
ironic or sarcastic, but most of us find it hard to tell exactly what, for instance,
the difference between humor and irony is and what specific contribution they
make to the ongoing conversation. The term versus in the title, moreover, sug-
gests a kind of opposition between some of the categories. Maybe this has to
do with the way society commonly evaluates them, crudely speaking: Humor
and irony are good, whereas gossip and mocking are bad. At a closer look,
however, things are far less straightforward. The difficulty of defining these cat-
egories and analyzing them in context becomes palpable as soon as one looks at
a seemingly simple example, like the following. Example (1) shows an extract
from a conversation among two 17-year-old school-boys who are strolling
around town. Both are relaxed and a little bored:
(1) Holiday Job1

Utz:2 Ich arbeite vielleicht im Sommer in den ersten paar Wochen in der
I work maybe in summer in the first few weeks at the
Taverne.
Tavern.
I might work at the Tavern in the first few weeks of the summer.
Fred: Wow, hier in Seblitz? Als was?
Wow, here in Seblitz? As what?
Utz: Als h Besitzer. (Beide lachen)
As erm proprietor. (both laugh)
Town 2, 1 May, 2004
It is tempting to describe this exchange as harmless joking, because the jocular

remark about a school-boy working as a proprietor serves a simple entertain-
ment function, like so many other cases of conversational joking. If, however,
Fred were a notorious show-off, then Utzs remark might be interpreted as
an echoic comment on Freds usual conversational behavior, to be classified as
542 Alexander Brock
ironic teasing. If, on the other hand, the show-off were not Fred, but a common
acquaintance of both youths, then Fred might construe Utzs remark as an im-
personation of that other person and as a possible introduction to a phase of gos-
sip.
This example shows that even in the simplest of cases, the interpretation of
what is going on depends on the context and communicative function as well as
the form and content of what is said. It also suggests that, in authentic communi-
cation, categories like joking, teasing, irony and gossip are not always clear-cut
and may well overlap in places. Example (2) seems to make an even stronger
point. It is taken from a local British radio phone-in program. The DJ, Brian
Hayes, discusses peoples choice of funeral music with some callers. Then the
next caller, Muriel, gives her opinion on the same topic. The extract in Example
(2) starts about one minute into Muriels call:
(2) Funeral Music

Brian: What are you going to have played at your funeral?
Muriel: I dont propose to have one.
Brian: Oh I see. Does that mean that youre not going to die?
Muriel: No no no. I Ive donated my body to science.
Brian Hayes Show, 27 March, 1986
Brians question to Muriel may be classified as aggressive humor, as mocking,

even as black humor, because it makes fun of somebody elses most intimate
arrangements concerning life and death. Non-involved listeners, on the other
hand, may just take it as light-hearted fun. So again, several categories suggest
themselves, which begs the question of which criteria we use to decide on any of
these labels. Other questions arise, too: Why does a DJ use this form of humor in
reaction to a callers statement? And why does the caller react the way she does?
In keeping with this volumes orientation, the DJs remark may be regarded as a
kind of problem-solving, which causes a new problem for the caller.
This chapter focuses on the problem-solving aspects of humor, jokes, irony,
mocking, gossip, and black humor from an applied-linguistic perspective.
Before we can develop this view further, it will be useful to look at the history of
research (Section 2) as well as the current research dealing with these everyday
categories (Sections 3 and 4). Section (5) provides a summary and an outlook
on issues of applied linguistics. The following section gives an overview of re-
search into humor, irony and laughter, as well as into the methods and concerns
of text linguistics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, after which the functional
approach will be discussed in more detail.
Humor, jokes, and irony versus mocking, gossip, and black humor 543
2. History of the research topic and current research
The categories named in the title of this chapter show vast differences in their
research histories. Some, such as humor and irony, were recognized two millennia
ago by the ancient Greek philosophers as worthy of investigation. This started a
research process that continues to this day. Some other categories, such as
mocking and gossip, were long considered too trivial for serious investigation.
Hence their research history is considerably shorter. In the following, I sketch
out the main traditions in the research history relevant to the categories men-
tioned in the title of this chapter.
2.1. Humor research

Humor research goes back to Greek philosophy and rhetoric, where humor
was partly seen as an interesting phenomenon in its own right, and partly as
a rhetorical device. Suggestions on how to ridicule ones opponent and how
to cash in on other peoples weaknesses are the forerunners of the modern
superiority/disparagement/aggression theories, according to which humor
arises from a feeling of superiority over others (cf. Hobbes [1651] 1990; Zill-
man 1983). Another main theory is incongruity theory, which states that
humor is the reaction to an unexpected, ill-fitting element entering into a
frame of expectation. Traces of it can be dated back to Aristotle, and by now it
is the most generally accepted theory of humor. Ever since, philosophers (e.g.,
Hobbes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) have formulated their own humor
theory, mostly based on incongruity or superiority. All these attempts were
strictly deductive and essentialist, in that the scholars tried to find one central
criterion as the explanation for humor. For our Example (1), the scholars
would either identify the incongruity of making proprietor a holiday job or the
mild aggression which comes with the teasing mentioned before, but not both.
In the late 19th century, the two main groups of theories were complemented
by psychological theories, which concentrated on relief/release of tension
caused by suppressed urges. The most famous proponent of these theories is
Sigmund Freud ([1905] 1985; cf. Keith-Spiegel 1972: 1013 for an overview
of theories).
The criteria used for defining humor according to the theories mentioned
were rarely specified. They range from semantic structure (mostly for incon-
gruity theories) to world-knowledge, flexibility of observation, social status (su-
periority) and subconscious mental processes (relief/release theories). System-
atic verification of the rather intuitive notions only started after 1950. Linguistic
humor research first concentrated on phonetic, morphological, and above all
semantic issues, looking at puns, ambiguity, semantic scripts and related phe-
nomena (cf. Attardo 1994 for a detailed overview).
544 Alexander Brock
By now, humor research has branched out into various traditions connected
with linguistics (Attardo 1994), literary studies (Hutchinson 2006), sociology
(Kuipers 2006), psychology (Ruch 1998), and some other disciplines. The es-
sentialist approach still exists, but more and more authors now use a combi-
nation of theories (cf. Brock 2004), some of which seem also applicable to the
category of irony, which would account for the fact that some authors tacitly
treat irony as a sub-category of humor (cf. Eggins and Slade 2001: 116).
2.2. Irony
In Greek rhetoric, irony received attention as a type of joking. From the various
approaches to irony at the time, subsequent researchers almost exclusively
concentrated on the alleged opposition between what is said and what is meant
(cf. the criticism in Hartung 1996: 114). Even modern theories are influenced by
this approach: Grices (1975) treatment of irony as based on flouting the quality
maxim, Groebens (1986) speech-act based approach, Clark and Gerrigs (1984)
pretense theory of irony where a speaker is pretending to be an injudicious per-
son speaking to an uninitiated audience (1984: 121) as well as Sperber and
Wilsons echoic-mention theory of irony, in which they formulate:
[] all standard cases of irony [] involve (generally implicit) mention of a prop-
osition. These cases of mention are interpreted as echoing a remark or opinion that
the speaker wants to characterize as ludicrously inappropriate or irrelevant
(Sperber and Wilson 1981: 310).
Apart from the difference between saying and meaning, Sperber and Wilsons
definition refers to another feature of irony which is usually regarded as consti-
tutive. This feature is a negative evaluation of the target of irony (similar to the
superiority/aggression theories of humor), although some authors (Groeben
1986; Long and Graesser 1988) also see positive evaluation as an option.
Both humor and irony can provoke laughter, but as the following section
shows, laughter should not be seen as an automatic reaction to humor, and to
humor only.
2.3. Laughter
Laughter was long seen as an immediate consequence of humor (cf. Eggins and
Slade 2001: 157), so that humor research and laughter research were regarded as
much the same thing. This view is exemplified vividly by the fact that Bergson
published his influential 1900 essay on humor under the title Le Rire (Laughter).
Gradually, the awareness of the differences between humor and laughter grew,
however, and authors like Plessner identified a number of non-humorous occa-
sions for laughter (Plessner 1993). By now, there is a large body of research fo-
cusing on laughter, partly in connection with the growing number of empirical

studies on both conversational humor and laughter (cf. Jefferson 1984; Jeffer-
son, Sacks and Schegloff 1987; Schwitalla 2001; Thimm and Augenstein 1996).
These studies often identify (non-humor-related) functions of laughter in spe-
cific contexts, which makes them particularly useful in establishing laughter as
a research object in its own right rather than a mere by-product of humor. Some
of the independent functions identified for laughter are:
establishing transfer from serious to non-serious mode (Jefferson, Sacks,
and Schegloff 1987: 160), e.g., to defuse a tense situation
establishing transfer to non-serious mode before introducing funny material
(Schwitalla 2001: 328)
indicating e.g. while reporting a personal problem that the speaker can
master his problems, demonstration of emotional self-distance (Jefferson
1984: 351; Schwitalla 2001: 338)
protection of the recipients face (Schwitalla 2001: 333)
threat to the recipients face (Schwitalla 2001: 335)
protection of the speakers own face (Schwitalla 2001: 336)
introduction of embarrassing topic (Schwitalla 2001: 338)
reaction to impropriety (Jefferson 1985)
expression of surprise (Schwitalla 2001: 341)
laughter as an element of the turn taking system (Jefferson, Sacks, and
Schegloff 1987)
The function of defusing a tense situation, like some others, is often directly
attributed to humor. It is here at least partly associated with laughter, because
this function can be fulfilled without either speaker or recipient being amused or
assuming amusement in the other party.
To settle the relationship between humor and laughter, we may want to im-
agine a scale between two poles. One of the poles represents laughter as a blind,
involuntary symptom of humor, the other fully deliberate, symbolic laughter
without mirth, which fulfills a number of interpersonal and social functions.
This deliberate laughter borrows from humor its expression and puts it to
multiple use in social interaction. Other surface manifestations of humor may be
borrowed at the same time, e.g., certain formulations, exaggeration, incon-
gruity, aggression, etc. This calculated production of the structural character-
istics of humor is a phenomenon that I call humor presented. The individual
phenomenon of mirth will henceforth be referred to as humor felt or amusement.
Quite clearly, humor presented may instigate amusement, but this cannot be
taken for granted.
It seems reasonable to assume that most laughter would be situated some-
where between the two poles of laughter as a symptom of amusement and purely
social/strategic laughter. This fact should be reflected in scholars research
546 Alexander Brock
methods, which is, however, not always the case. Strictly empirical investi-
gations in the tradition of conversation analysis should really only be concerned
with laughter and humor presented, as these are the only observable phenom-
ena. While there may or may not be amusement behind laughter, its presence
or absence is not something the researcher can prove, nor does it have much
bearing on its social functionality. The awareness of this fact and its critical
methodical reflection would make the study of laughter in the context of humor,
joking, gossip, mocking, etc. a far more precise affair. This chapter with its
focus on the functional nature of humor in problem-solving deals mainly with
humor presented and social/strategic laughter, with the possible exception of
some psychological functions (cf. Section 3 below).
2.4. Text linguistics

Among the research interests of text linguistics are the classification of text
types and their precise structural description. These interests are highly relevant
to the study of categories like humor, gossip, mocking, etc., because the differ-
ence between them should somehow be reflected in a good text typology and in
structural descriptions of the categories.
Text linguistics has chosen different ways of addressing these problems.
Early text typologies (cf. Isenberg 1984) were often deductive, aiming at a strict
theoretical demarcation of text types. This kind of approach would not be very
successful at describing the situation outlined above for Examples (1) and (2),
where several categories seem applicable. The same must be said about strictly
structuralist research which often concentrated on the semantic structure of
texts (cf. Ulrich 1977: 315 for jokes). Other classifications (cf. Heinemann and
Viehweger 1991: 144) aimed less at descriptive homogeneity and more at a lin-
guistic substantiation of why lay people use certain labels for communicative
phenomena. In the light of the Examples (1) and (2), this labeling obviously
involves some overlap between neighboring categories, as well a certain degree
of polysemy of the terms representing categories. One meaning of mocking,
for instance, seems to be largely synonymous with hostile teasing, whereas
friendly teasing is a near-synonym to one meaning of banter. Approaches
addressing these challenges include multi-level models, which apply several
criteria to identify the relevant properties of text types (cf. Heinemann 2000:
513) as well as prototype models (Sandig 2000), which allow for fuzzy edges
between neighboring types and overlaps between them. Morreall (1994: 57),
for instance, uses the terms humorous gossip and gossipy humor (cf. Sec-
tion 4.5. below).
In the process of modeling laypersons intuition about text types, text lin-
guistics also opened up to pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and other related disci-
plines which make the inclusion of contextual features a central concern. With
this, text linguistics should be able to handle cases like Examples (1) and (2),
where different contexts (perhaps due to differences in background knowledge)
produce different interpretations of the material.
2.5. Pragmatics, modern sociolinguistics, and gender studies

The fields mentioned here look at humor, gossip, etc. in a larger context, includ-
ing the communicative situation, institutional framing, background assump-
tions, communicative intentions, status of participants and their relationship
to each other, gender, etc. Kotthoff (2006: 4) characterizes humor as a situated
discursive practice. Among other things, scholars from this tradition try to ex-
plain why examples like (1) and (2) can be interpreted quite differently, even
though the actual wording of the utterance in question remains constant. Study-
ing contextual aspects of phenomena like humor and gossip encompasses
an enormous range of valid research problems, so that it is not surprising that
currently a great deal of original research comes out of these research fields,
with much more yet to be expected (cf. volume 38, 2006, of the Journal of Prag-
matics on gender and humor). As pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and gender
studies not only investigate the circumstances of producing humor, irony, etc.
but also their effects and functions, this research tradition is most relevant to
the perspective of this book, i.e., the problem-solving perspective on language
adopted here. If, for instance, gossip is not only described in terms of its topic
matter, but also as a norm-defining and group-maintaining activity, then this
research focuses on gossip as contributing to solving the social problems con-
nected with group stability and norms.
Studies to be mentioned in this connection focus on structures, communi-
cative circumstances and social functions of ironic speech acts (Groeben 1986;
Hartung 1996), communicative maxims specific to humor (Attardo 1993;
Brock 2004), participants social background and status, communicative phases
(Christmann 1996: 52; Gnthner 1996: 8384; Eggins and Slade 2001: 285),
and the technical organization of humorous events (Sacks 1978; Jefferson,
Sacks, and Schegloff 1987) as well as gender-specific differences in joking and
humor (Coates 1998; Pilkington 1998; Lampert and Ervin-Tripp 2006: 52).
2.6. Summary of research history: Criteria used for the definition of humor,
jokes, irony, mocking, gossip, and black humor
The following summarizes the main criteria so far mentioned to define the
above categories. Excluded are their communicative functions, which will be
treated in more detail in Section 3 below, as they are of particular concern to this
article. I follow a rough chronology of research. The most commonly applied
criteria are:
548 Alexander Brock
semantic structure, often text-internal, occasionally in comparison with

recipients knowledge or real world, used for all categories (Ulrich 1977;
Raskin 1985)
morphology and phonetics, used mainly for jokes and puns (Attardo 1994)
recipients expectation, used for mainly humor, partly for gossip (Bergmann
1987; Long and Graesser 1988)
social norms and negative evaluation, used for humor, gossip, and irony
(Bergson [1900] 1948; Bergmann 1987; Hartung 1996)
participation structure (e.g., aggressor, victim, witness), used for humor,
gossip, joking, and mocking (Bergmann 1987; Gnthner 1996; Brock 2004)
imitation of somebodys behavior, used for mocking and parody
degree of privacy, familiarity of participants, shared knowledge, used for
humor, gossip, and irony (Bergmann 1987: 69; Hartung 1996: 110112;
Gnthner 1996)
degree of context-dependence, used for the differentiation of jokes and jok-
ing (Sacks 1978: 262; Norrick 2001: 1440)
institutional or social setting (e.g., work and leisure for gossip; Bergmann
1987; Christmann 1996; Coates 1998: 228)
authorship, used for gossip (Bergmann 1987) and irony (the use-mention
distinction in Sperber and Wilson 1981 and the pretense model in Clark and
Gerrig 1984; cf. also Hartung 1996)
breaking of communicative rules, used for humor (Brock 2004)
communicative phases, used for all categories (Bergmann 1987: 113;
Christmann 1996: 52; Gnthner 1996: 8384; Eggins and Slade 2001: 285)
the contrast between serious vs. non-serious and threatening vs. non-threaten-
ing communication (Attardo 1993; Gnthner 1996: 81; Brock 2004)
various surface forms (e.g., simultaneous talk and modality for gossip; Coates
1998), partly as contextualization cues (silly voices; Christmann 1996: 57),
gestures, facial expression, laughter used for humor, joking, and irony
conventionalized opening phrases, such as: Have you heard this one?
(Attardo 1994).
3. The functional approach
Research into the communicative functions of phenomena like humor and gos-
sip directly refers to their problem-solving nature. A communicative problem
occurs such as the need for distraction and in response, the participants find
interactive forms whose function is to deal with the problem in question. The
more these forms are conventionalized, the more easily they seem to fulfill
their functions, and the more easily participants will recognize them as fam-
iliar. This finally leads to labeled categories like mocking, parody, irony, etc.,
which can be identified not only by their functions, but also by certain recog-
nizable forms.
The functional approach is not new. As mentioned in 2.1. and 2.2., humor
and irony were treated in ancient Greece and Rome as rhetorical devices, i.e.,
categories which had to fulfill a communicative function. Some later philo-
sophers also made the communicative function a central defining criterion for
categories, notably Bergson ([1900] 1948), who saw laughter as functional in
the punishment of human inflexibility. Even though his view was essentialist in
that he only saw one function as the essence of the humorous experience, his
definition was ground-breaking in that it showed that even humor had to per-
form a function which went beyond self-sufficiency.
In the last 20 years, numerous articles have been published which look at
humor, irony, mocking, etc. from a functional perspective. In the following,
I give the most important functions identified in the literature:
Entertainment:
This function should be self-evident for humor, but over the discussion of the
more serious functions, some authors lose sight of it. It is, however, stressed
by some authors in the context of irony (Hartung 1996: 120), gossip (Bergmann
1987: 154; Pilkington 1998: 255; Ben-Zeev 1994: 16), joking (Thimm and
Augenstein 1996: 224; Norrick 2001: 1438) and humor (Morreall 1994: 58).
Norm maintenance and social control:

Social group norms are stressed directly or implicitly. This was notoriously
claimed by Bergson ([1900] 1948) for humor. See also Long and Graesser
(1988: 54), Hay (2000: 719), Norrick (2001: 1448), Kotthoff (2006: 5, 14). For
gossip, see Bergmann (1987: 180), Eggins and Slade (2001: 276, 283), and Pilk-
ington (1998: 254).
Group maintenance and solidarity:

By joking, gossiping, and making ironic remarks, an in-group with common
values and experiences is created or confirmed. Group membership can be sig-
naled or claimed. See, for gossip, Bergmann (1987: 198), Ben-Zeev (1994: 15),
Coates (1998: 229), Eggins and Slade (2001: 273, 283), and Morreall (1994:
58); for irony, Hartung (1996: 118), and for humor Long and Graesser (1988:
5354), Attardo (1993: 555), Eggins and Slade (2001: 155, 159), Norrick (2001:
1439), Hay (2000: 716), and Kotthoff (2006: 10, 15).
Out-group exclusion:
A strong in-group automatically creates an out-group, which is excluded. See
Long and Graesser (1988: 5354) as well as Morreall (1994: 63) for humor.
550 Alexander Brock
Reaffirming and strengthening friendship:

Next to influencing group dynamics, humor, gossip, etc. can also be used to
build up and maintain individual relationships. See Coates (1998: 229) for gos-
sip. Thimm and Augenstein (1996: 221), Norrick (2001: 1438), as well as Lam-
pert and Ervin-Tripp (2006: 53) stress that humor can be instrumental in estab-
lishing common ground and intimacy. Kotthoff (2006: 17) points out the role of
teasing in relationship management.
Positive politeness:
Some authors, such as Kotthoff (1998: 303) and Norrick (2001: 1440), point to
the fact that joking is an activity which requires, produces, and highlights com-
mon values and desires. This makes it a positive politeness strategy. Long and
Graesser (1988: 54) mention an ingratiation function of humor with a similar
definition.
Presenting a personality, enhancing ones self-image:

Norrick (2001: 1438, 14401441) points out that humorous activities are part of
the personality which an individual builds up and presents to the public.
Information management:
This function is mentioned by many authors and has numerous facets. Berg-
mann (1987: 202), de Sousa (1994: 33), and Morreall (1994: 56) discuss the in-
formative function of gossip. Attardo (1993: 552) and Morreall (1994) point out
that humor, too, may have an information value. Norrick (2001: 1438) claims
that humor can be used to demonstrate knowledge. More precisely it may func-
tion to exhibit shared knowledge (Norrick 2001: 1439). The probing function of
humor postulated by Long and Graesser (1988: 53) serves to gather information
about other participants views (cf. also Kotthoff 1998: 254). The transfer of
new information is also emphasized by Norrick (2001: 1438) and Sacks (1978:
268), who formulates: The joke can [] serve to package information which
persons interested in such information can pull out of it. Ben-Zeev (1994: 15)
mentions that gossip can produce new insight. The self-disclosure function
of humor described by Long and Graesser (1988: 53) as well as Lampert and
Ervin-Tripp (2006: 57) means revealing information about ones views and
values to other recipients, while the decommitment function of humor (Attardo
1993: 554555; Long and Graesser 1988: 53) is to free the speakers from the
responsibility for an opinion which they do not want to be known to have.
Influencing opinions and emotions:

In addition to the management of information, humor, gossip, and irony may be
exploited to influence other peoples opinions and feelings, which goes beyond
the mere transfer of information.
Exertion of power:
Thimm and Augenstein (1996: 224226) see two ways in which humor helps to
exert power. 1. The unilateral establishment of the humorous mode of com-
munication is an act of controlling the conversation. 2. The recipient may be-
come the object of humorous aggression, which amounts to a face-threatening
act. They also state (1996: 233) that speakers may humorously trivialize other
participants position, which is another way of exerting power. Some authors,
however, (e.g., Kotthoff 2006: 11) point out that humor may help to level power.
This is not necessarily a contradiction to Thimm and Augenstein, as Kotthoff
clearly describes a different aspect of communication, a temporary suspension
of macro-social circumstances via humorous communication, whereas Thimm
and Augenstein focus on power relations developing within the micro-setting of
the ongoing communication itself (cf. also Eggins and Slade 2001: 167).
Taylor (1994: 46) sees gossip as powerful talk, and Hay (2000: 724) de-
scribes teasing as serving to maintain power. With respect to gossip, Pilkington
(1998: 255) refers to speakers who overdo the exertion of power, with the result
that the power-play backfires against themselves: Anyone gaining too much
power or overstepping their role leaves themselves open to be gossiped about.
Aggression:
According to superiority and aggression theories, humor should inherently have
at least a mildly aggressive component (Norrick 2001: 1438). Aggressive humor
may be deliberately and maliciously turned against a victim: either against the
immediate recipient or a third person present or absent. This is something not
only found in humor in a narrow sense, but also in gossip, mocking, and black
humor. It may even be claimed that a considerable degree of aggression is con-
stitutive for mocking (cf. Norrick 2001: 1440; Kotthoff 2006: 13) and some
black humor. Norrick (2001: 1443) mentions the production of animosity as a
function of sarcasm, while Hay (2000: 721) identifies a conflict-fostering func-
tion of humor. Aggression and its target are such an important aspect of the cat-
egories mentioned, that the presence or absence of the target of aggression seems
to be a vital aspect for defining some of the categories: Teasing, which aims at a
reaction, obviously requires the targets presence, whereas mocking does not
necessarily, and gossip even requires the targets absence. This is why, for
example, mocking can be used in gossip, but teasing and gossip do not go to-
gether simultaneously and with the same target.
In contrast to the research that stresses the aggressive nature of humor, gos-
sip, etc., Attardo (1993: 553) claims that humor may be used to defuse a difficult
situation (cf. also Eggins and Slade 2001: 166). Clearly, there are different types
of humor, some less aggressive than others. Similarly, Pilkington (1998: 255)
mentions that gossip can be used to negotiate differences of opinion, which Har-
tung (1996: 119) shows to be one of the functions of irony, too.
552 Alexander Brock
Resistance and subversion:

Gossip (Goodman 1994: 5) and humor (Kotthoff 2006) are often associated with
a subversive function, which is also one of the main aspects in the discussion of
carnival traditions. Kotthoff (2006: 10) formulates: Displaying humor means
to temporarily take control of the situation away from those higher up in the
hierarchy.
Poetic/aesthetic function:
Morreall (1994: 57) points out that both humor and gossip primarily please the
imagination, making humor and gossip candidates for aesthetic experience.
Hartung (1996: 116) claims the same for conversational irony.
Discourse management:
Long and Graesser (1988: 55) as well as Norrick (2001) state that humor and wit
can be used to negotiate openings, closings, topic changes and realignments
(Norrick 2001: 1443). With that, they play an important role not only in the con-
tent dimension, but also in the technical organization and the turn-taking system
of the conversation.
Psychological function:
Some authors refer to psychological functions of gossip (Goodman 1994) and
humor (Hay 2000). The latter may not be surprising in view of the psychological
humor theories mentioned in Section 2.1. The therapeutic potential of humor has
long been recognized, and there is a large body of research on this issue as well
as many therapeutic programs involving humor. The psychological functions of
gossip are less well documented. Goodman (1994: 3) mentions coping with
ones individual experiences and enhancement of self-esteem, whereas Ben-
Zeev (1994: 23) and Thomas (1994: 50) see gossip as an outlet for frustration
and anger. This establishes another parallel to humor, the release theories of
which describe the same function.
Multi-functionality:
In the foregoing explanations, it has become apparent that each of the categories
treated in this chapter can perform a number of functions, and it makes sense to
assume that they can perform more than one of them at the same time. Berg-
mann (1987: 205) emphasizes this fact for gossip, Long and Graesser (1988:
5556) as well as Hay (2000: 737) do the same for humor.
Institutional functions:
In addition to the multi-functionality mentioned above, yet another factor raises
the complexity of a functional analysis. This is the fact that each of the illus-
trated functions, which we may roughly call basic functions, may be used by
institutions to fulfill derived functions. A politician in a TV-debate, for instance,

may use laughter to ridicule his opponent and ingratiate himself with the audi-
ence (basic) to realize the derived function of winning votes; TV stations pro-
duce professional comedies to exploit the basic entertaining function of humor
for derived financial gains, etc. To take this further, it seems feasible to think of
a differentiation of primary and secondary within what I have called the basic
functions. All this leads to a fairly complex architecture of functions that humor,
irony, gossip, etc. may serve.
The multi-functionality of humor as well as the possibility of serving de-
rived functions can be illustrated with Examples (1) and (2). Utzs remark in
(1) about wanting to work as a proprietor certainly fulfills an entertainment
function. Considering the fact that neither of the youths has done a holiday job
before and that they are both quite inexperienced in this field, we may also as-
sume a solidarity function for the two young men, as well as the psychological
function of self-assurance. Brians question Does that mean that youre not
going to die? in (2) fulfills the entertaining function, performs information man-
agement by asking for elaboration, potentially fosters conflict between himself
and the caller, and exerts power by putting the caller under pressure to explain
herself and controlling the direction which the conversation is taking. Norm
management may also be behind his question, in that it can be interpreted to
imply that every person should have a decent funeral. This functional complex-
ity is still enhanced by the fact that the DJ represents a money-making institu-
tion. His question therefore serves the derived functions of maintaining the
institutions functionality and earning money. For this, the DJ has to stay in con-
trol of the commercial product phone-in program and to ensure its entertainment
value for the audience in order to get lucrative advertising contracts (cf. Brock
1996).
A third example, though seemingly simple, also shows a complex picture.
The situation is a card-game among friends. Fred, Utz, and Kristina are into
their second round of Knack, a simple card-game. The card constellation that
ensures the player an instant victory is also called Knack.
(3) Card game

Kristina: Ach so, was war jetzt hier mit meiner ersten Runde?
Oh right what was now here with my first round?
Ich habn Knack gehabt.
I had a Knack.
Oh right! So what about my first round, then? I won that!
Fred: Ich hatte 20 genau.
I had 20 exactly.
Thats right, I had 20 points.
554 Alexander Brock
Utz: Ich hatte 27, aber die zhlt nicht, war ne Einfhrungsrunde.
I had 27, but it counts not, was an introductory round
I had 27 points, but it doesnt count anyway, it was just a warm-up.
(conversation continues in jocular tone with mutual mock accu-
sations)
Cards, 2 May, 2004
Utzs attempt at turning the first round into a warm-up which does not count to-
wards the overall score provokes mild amusement. But why are the others
amused and not annoyed? What happens is this: nobody would expect Utz to be
serious in his transparent attempt to bend the rules of the game. Instead, he pro-
duces a fictitious persona who tries to cheat so pathetically. As the fictitious
Utzs behavior is an almost automatic reaction to a constellation like this, tried
many times over, it may well be interpreted as humor of the mechanical and in-
flexible kind, after Bergson ([1900] 1948). To this impersonation and the enter-
tainment value it holds, the other players react with amusement. At the same
time, the real Utz might be probing for a little lenience or lack of interest on the
other players part to get away with his suggestion after all. This probing would
serve the information function as well as the opinion-influencing function. Soli-
darity among the card-players might also be strengthened, as harmless banter
is often one of the main ingredients of card-games, reassuring each other of the
friendly relations between the participants.
In my comments on the individual functions, it has become apparent that not
only can one category perform a multitude of functions, but also that each func-
tion can be carried by more than one category. It is therefore useful to have a
closer look at the relationship between the categories treated in this chapter, to
look out for similarities and differences that are reflected in different labels for
the individual categories.
4. Problem-solving and the relationship between humor, jokes, irony,

mocking, gossip, and black humor
In the light of what has been said so far, simple categories and relationships can-
not be expected. If each category can perform several functions and each func-
tion can be performed by several categories, then this descriptive dimension is
highly complex in itself. Other dimensions such as semantic structure or partici-
pation structure are necessary for an adequate description, but they cannot pro-
duce clear-cut demarcations of categories either. The participation structure of
aggressor, victim, and witness, for instance, has been established for humor,
gossip, joking, and mocking (cf. Section 2.6) and therefore cannot serve for suf-
ficient differentiation. In addition to that, researchers do not agree on the defi-
nition of each category, which further complicates matters. De Sousa (1994: 27)
describes gossip as democratic, free speech extended to the private sphere,
and defines it like this: Gossip could be defined simply as conversation about
other peoples private lives (1994: 26). Coates (1998) and Pilkington (1998)
seem to share this positive view of gossip (where the term is used synonymously
with womens talk), whereas other authors see gossip as generally malicious
(Thomas 1994: 54) and moralisch kontaminiert (morally contaminated;
Bergmann 1987: 79).3 The following comments will therefore assume a proto-
typical organization of categories, and proceed from the general traits of each
category. Occasionally, some details will be discussed, too.
4.1. Humor as a problem-solving activity

Humor is the general term for non-serious, playful, non-threatening communi-
cative activities which involve cognitive incongruities, some aggression, psy-
chological relief and some degree of Witzarbeit (literally: joke work), to use
a term which Freud ([1905] 1985) coined for the technique of a joke. Some auth-
ors would also include surprise as a necessary condition. Thus defined, it can
serve a very wide range of functions, as illustrated in Section 3, including en-
tertainment, social control, and solidarity building. This potential multi-func-
tionality makes it an extremely efficient communicative device. It can, for in-
stance, be turned to their advantage by speakers who may want to use it to hide
their real intentions behind being humorous. If the politician mentioned above is
being funny, he may give the impression of simply wanting to entertain people,
while his real intention may be to ingratiate himself with the recipients in order
to win votes. Thus, humor not only serves the ingratiation function, but it sim-
ultaneously covers the tracks of this very strategy. With that, it is a problem-
solving activity for the politician in more than one respect. Utzs remark in (1)
about working as a proprietor neatly fits into the category of humor and general
conversational joking, too, but other interpretations are possible (cf. Section 1).
The wide functional applicability and flexibility of humor as problem-solv-
ing is also due to the many kinds and patterns of humor, from light conversa-
tional joking to stand-up-comedy and political satire. Each of the comical
genres is a different mixture of formal characteristics and cognitive/interper-
sonal patterns such as incongruities and aggression. Humor with a strong ag-
gressive component may, for instance, be particularly effective in creating in-
groups and out-groups as well as exerting power. In the following, I will com-
ment on specific patterns of humor, such as jokes and black humor, as well as the
cases of mocking and irony and the related phenomenon of gossip.
As opposed to the relatively free communicative activity of joking, whose only

defining requirement seems to be to create a humorous incongruity, the joke is a
556 Alexander Brock
stable communicative genre, studied among other disciplines in text linguistics.

It is the jokes pre-formed nature which makes it particularly interesting in terms
of functionality and problem-solving. Sacks (1978: 262) points out that jokes
can make their place in a conversation. This means that they are relatively con-
text-independent and do not have to be artfully embedded into the flow of con-
versation. They can simply be announced. Also, in contrast to funny remarks, the
turn-taking rules are suspended for the duration of a jokes telling. This way, the
teller is free from having to fight for his/her turn. In addition to that, jokes can be
planned, and do not require a quick, intuitive sense of humor. This reduces the
risk of unintentionally hurting someones feelings, also because the aggression
of the joke is at least ostensibly contained in its fictitious world. Serial jokes can
create a very strong appreciation of recognition and a feeling of community and
solidarity. This is especially prominent in jokes of political resistance. To sum
up, the joke is efficient in controlling the flow of conversation and suspending
turn-taking. It can be planned and bears relatively low risk of misunderstanding.
On the down side, jokes are often predictable, and due to this and their low risk
factor they are often considered inferior to free conversational joking.
4.2. Irony and its relationship to humor

As stated in Section 2.2., irony has often been described as a form of humor.
Hartung (1996: 118) defines it as an indirect negative evaluation which, due to
its indirectness, may have a poetic and humorous potential. This definition
shows clearly why irony is so closely associated with humor: the indirectness
mentioned may produce a kind of incongruity, whereas the negative evaluation
may be a form of aggression. If the indirectness highlighted by Hartung in-
volves a certain technique in its production and if we add to the definition the
playfulness which Hartung mentions elsewhere (1996: 109), then irony indeed
appears as a type of humor. However, not all humor is indirect (some humor
draws its incongruous nature from being virtually without technique and bluntly
direct, as in the British TV-series The Young Ones), and not all humor carries
negative evaluation. Likewise, not all irony is playful and light-hearted, particu-
larly when the negative evaluation concerns the participants vital interests.
This results in only a partial overlap of the categories of humor and irony.
It is of little practical relevance for the overlapping cases whether irony uses
the forms of humor or humor uses the ironic form. From a problem-solving per-
spective, these cases of humor and irony fulfill the same social functions criti-
cism and social control with much the same means, i.e., indirectness in a cre-
ative and light-hearted atmosphere. It is the attraction of irony/humor of this
kind to offer a relatively stable, conventionalized, socially accepted, and some-
times entertaining form of social control. As soon as the ingredients or their
ratio change if, for instance, the element of negative evaluation becomes
stronger than its playfulness , humor and irony part ways and begin to solve
different communicative problems in different ways.
The relationship between humor and irony shows us not only the subtlety of
similarities between the categories, but also that a useful discussion of the cat-
egories and their problem-solving nature has to incorporate a discussion of how
these problems are solved, i.e., the linguistic form and content.
4.3. Black humor

Black humor is a case in point. It uses all the techniques of humor and all the-
ories of humor can be successfully applied to it. What makes it special is only
its subject matter and the functions it can serve in connection with it: black
humor makes fun of topics which are usually considered outside the range of
humor death, mutilation, disease, and other serious threats to the individual.
This makes it a potential tool for psychological functions. Framing ones worst
fears humorously may be a coping strategy, for both real and imagined threats.
This coping function may unite the black humor reportedly popular among
the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps with the nauseating details of a
slaughter scene in a Monty Python sketch, even though the circumstances are
vastly different. Making fear and brutality a topic of humor at the same time
turns them from taboo non-topics into topics which society cannot easily avoid.
Black humor may thus serve an information and topic management function.
Black humor in its many forms is, however, a risky phenomenon, because
for some recipients at least it can easily turn into an aggressive, harmful act
of communication. If, maybe due to personal experiences, the depiction of
threatening aspects outweighs the non-threatening frame within which they are
delivered, the humor fades away, and the person is left with the traumatic ex-
perience itself. And of course, people can deliberately use black humor to exert
power and hurt others. A potential example of black conversational humor can
be found in the DJs question Does that mean that youre not going to die? in
Example (2).
4.4. Mocking
Mocking is one of the communicative categories which are hard to define, and
where people differ considerably in their application of the term. This is not sur-
prising if we look at the constitutive features of mocking: dictionary definitions
often stress the imitating, mimicking nature of mocking to show ridicule. Imi-
tation and making fun of people are also humor-related techniques to produce
funny incongruities and aggression. This makes humor and mocking similar
communicative activities. The crucial difference between them seems to be that
in mocking, the ratio of hostility/aggression and light-heartedness favors hostil-
558 Alexander Brock
ity over the other ingredients. If this is the case, then individual differences in
deciding whether something is joking/teasing or cold mockery are a natural
result of a) the similarity of the two categories, and b) the individual differences
in experiencing degrees of hostility. In the light of this definition, it is easy to see
that mocking may function as a means of fostering conflict.
One should not forget, however, that this is not unmitigated hostility. Mock-
ing comes with a technique, which is often imitation, and skillful imitation may
have a clear entertainment function. After all, political satire uses very similar
techniques, and it may just be a question of ones political affiliation whether
something is regarded as healthy political satire or malicious mockery. Also,
Norrick (2001: 14471448) uses Sperber and Wilsons (1981) mention model to
show that mocking among good friends may really mean that the attack is only
play and the participants are mutually engaged in a customary joking relation-
ship which, if anything, strengthens the participants friendship. This is also
the gist of Leechs (1983: 144) banter principle. The question which arises with
these meta-communicative uses of mocking is whether we are still really deal-
ing with the phenomenon that deserves the label mocking. If hostility is consti-
tutive to mocking, then quoted hostility which is really friendly only borrows
the empty carcass of mocking. Leechs definition of banter seems to fit this de-
scription much better.
4.5. Gossip
Gossip, variously described as malicious talk behind a persons back, seems at
first glance to be considerably different from humor. But like humor, it clearly
fulfills an entertainment function (Bergmann 1987: 154), for which role-play,
exaggeration (Bergmann 1987: 161162; Morreall 1994: 62; Pilkington 1998:
266; Lampert and Ervin-Tripp 2006: 57), narrative form, and other aesthetic
means (Morreall 1994: 57) can be used. Morreall (1994: 56) claims that both
humor and gossip provide new and surprising information, and that even gossip
is characterized by incongruities (Morreall 1994: 61), as the things we gossip
about are often unexpected, ill-fitting and norm-violating. Humor and gossip
serve the function of information management (Bergmann 1987: 202). As stated
in Section 3 above, both humor and gossip may contain a negative evaluation of
somebodys behavior; both have an aggressive component (Hobbes [1651] 1990;
Zillman 1983; Bergmann 1987: 199; Eggins and Slade 2001: 278) and are used
to vent ones frustration and negative feelings about another person. This ag-
gressive or even malicious (Thomas 1994: 54) aspect seems to me in contrast
to Coates (1998) and Pilkington (1998) a necessary condition of gossip, be-
cause Coatess (1998: 250) definition of gossip as relaxed informal conver-
sation between equals, which disregards the aggressive and evaluative compo-
nent, produces an unnecessary synonym to small-talk. Humor and gossip both
foster group-solidarity, they may exert social control (Bergson [1900] 1948;
Bergmann 1987: 193; Ben-Zeev 1994: 23), both usually take place in social
situations without immediate pressure to perform urgent business (Bergmann
1987), and they can be institutionalized in the form of comedy programs, plays,
books, etc. and in gossip columns. The participation structure for both consists
of actor, victim, and witness, and both depend much on their novelty value.
Apart from the many similarities, there are still some aspects which account
for the differences in the perception of humor and gossip. First of all, the in-
formation management function of gossip is of a specific nature: as Bergmann
(1987: 73) points out, gossip derives much of its energy from the tension be-
tween what a person makes public and what he/she tries to conceal as private
(cf. Morreall 1994: 58), or, in the words of Ben-Zeev (1994: 18), the gap be-
tween reputation or conventional behavior and actual behavior is what makes
gossip interesting. This is a specification not necessarily shared by humor.
There is also a difference in the participation structure: for gossip, the victim
usually has to be absent or at least acoustically excluded from the conversation
(Bergmann 1987: 67), and all participants should know each other at least
reasonably well (Bergmann 1987: 68). However, gossip is less restricted than
humor with regard to technique it may use surprise, effective narrative, imper-
sonations, etc., but these are not defining criteria of gossip. And of course, as the
novelty value of humor mainly depends on its bringing forth new techniques
and forms, the techniques of gossip are extremely limited by comparison, which
satisfies its novelty requirement mainly through new information. Also, humor
may be about real people and their private lives, and it may refer to absent
people, but there is much humor targeting people present or fictitious characters.
But wherever the conditions for both humor and gossip meet, we encounter a
situation which Morreall (1994: 57) describes as humorous gossip or gos-
sipy humor. We may simply call it an overlap of the two categories in an area
where they both share the same structural and functional properties. The easy
applicability of the patterns of one category in the other testifies to the similarity
of functions they have to fulfill.
At this point, a methodological remark seems in place. Morreall (1994: 56)
points out that when gossip is dominated by the spirit of humor, it tends to trans-
cend the pettiness and viciousness that have given gossip such a bad name. In
this statement, the positive atmosphere of the gossip described is attributed to
humor. This may wrongly lead to the evaluation of light-heartedness as not
being a possible property of gossip, but rather of humor or similar phenomena
within gossip. Similarly, I have talked of one category borrowing properties of
another. This kind of approach is, strictly speaking, misleading and no more
than a handy metaphor, because it disallows for variety within the borrowing
categories and reduces them to small and insufficient sets of properties. It is also
unnecessary, if one accepts a prototypical organization of categories. They are
560 Alexander Brock
then defined via clusters of typical functions and conventional structures which
they have developed to fulfill these functions. The property of light-heartedness
in gossip need not be borrowed from humor, but may be a legitimate property of
some gossip, with the only consequence that not everybody would see this as
prototypical gossip.
5. Summary: The role of applied linguistics
We have seen in the last section that the similarities between categories are great
and the differences in their functional potential for problem-solving are subtle.
At the same time, some of the categories treated in this chapter have a better
reputation than others, which is signified by the word versus appearing in
the title, and properties like the malicious nature of some gossip have been dis-
cussed here. The similarity of positively and negatively connoted communi-
cative phenomena is not only an academic issue: the picture drawn in the
preceding sections is corroborated by observations from communicative reality,
where much friction arises from misunderstood banter, humor, or irony. People
may unwittingly win themselves a reputation for being arrogant or without a
sense of humor. Even in early adulthood, many still lack the communicative
mastership over humor, irony, mocking, etc.
This is the point where the problem-solving potential of applied linguistics
becomes relevant. Applied linguistics is able to treat communicative problems
arising from insufficient competence in the following ways (cf., e.g., Thimm
and Augenstein 1996 for an investigation of high practical relevance):
It can analyze authentic occurrences of problematic categories. With this, it

can show how subtle the differences are between harmless joking and insult,
or irony and sarcasm. If aggression is common to all these activities, then
maybe the degree of aggression is crucial. This, however is not only depend-
ent on the speakers formulation, but also on the recipients background of
expectation. The theoretical background of such an analysis would be prag-
matics, sociolinguistics, and the kind of text linguistics outlined in Section
2.4., which models laypersons intuitions about text types.
The knowledge thus gained can be used in counseling and communication
training to raise the language users awareness of the possible pitfalls of
humor, irony, mocking, etc.
One of the basic aspects to teach is the fact that due to the interactional na-
ture of communication, a communicative act is not the speakers exclusive
accomplishment, and it is not the speakers exclusive right to decide on a
valid interpretation. The recipients active role in determining an interpre-
tation becomes obvious in Example (2), where the caller does not react to
the humorous or mocking potential of the DJs question Does that mean that
youre not going to die? Instead, by responding directly to the propositional
content of the question, she turns it into a bona-fide question.
It is vital to point out that the multi-functionality of the categories described
is both a blessing and a danger: a blessing, because if properly applied, the
categories can do many jobs at the same time, and a danger because this
complexity is sometimes hard to control.
In advanced communication training it should be possible to show that the
described overlap of categories may be exploited to the speakers strategic
advantage.
Above all, it is necessary to raise peoples awareness of the fact that every
observable function of humor, jokes, irony, etc. is the communicative re-
sponse to the needs or problems that naturally arise in connection with all
human activities, and more specifically with human interaction. This aware-
ness-raising is necessary because of the conventional nature of problem-
solving via the communicative functions identified. Conventional problem-
solving sometimes hides the fact that there was a problem in the first place.
The fact that many people are relatively inept at handling humor, jokes, irony,
mocking, gossip, and black humor even at a fairly mature age would suggest
that an awareness of these issues should be developed systematically, preferably
with the help of educational institutions.
Notes
1. The examples used in this chapter have been taken from two corpora available to the
author: private, casual conversation among good friends (Examples 1 and 3) and a
phone-in program on a British radio station (Example 2). The data found in both cor-
pora indicate that the phenomena discussed here are common both to the private and
public domain.
2. In the examples from private conversation, all names have been changed in order to
protect the speakers identity.
3. Cf. also Eggins and Slade (2001: 278) for different conceptions of gossip.
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20. Praising and blaming, applauding, and
disparaging solidarity, audience positioning,
and the linguistics of evaluative disposition
Peter R. R. White
1. Introduction
Central to much theorizing about the interpersonal functionality of language is a

concern with what is often termed solidarity, contact, bonding, or affiliation.
This, in general terms, is the issue of the connection, communality, or rapport
which holds between communicative participants, or, more precisely, the degree
of connection, communality, or rapport indicated through the interlocutors lin-
guistic choices. Do they address each other in friendly or familiar terms, or as
strangers? Do they communicate in such a way as to suggest they share beliefs,
experiences, expectations, feelings, tastes, and values, or do they seem to be dis-
associated or at odds? Is their language combative, conciliatory, or amicable?
Do they assume agreement or compliance on the part of those they address, or,
alternatively, do they anticipate skepticism, resistance, animosity, or ridicule?
Work which has significantly advanced theorizing about the linguistics of
solidarity/affiliation includes Brown and Gilmans highly influential Pronouns
of Power and Solidarity (1960), the very extensive politeness theory literature
(for example, Brown and Levinson 1987) and, within Systemic Functional Lin-
guistics, Poyntons work on the notions of contact and affect as parameters
of Tenor variation (for example Poynton 1985). This chapter provides an outline
of a more recent contribution to theorizing about solidarity/affiliation/bonding
provided by work within what is known as the appraisal framework (see,
for example, Iedema, Feez, and White 1994; Martin 2000; White 2000, 2002;
Macken-Horarik and Martin 2003; Martin and White 2005).
Appraisal theory has been developed over the past 15 years or so by linguists
working within the Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) paradigm of Halliday
and his colleagues (see, for example, Halliday [1994] 2004; Martin 1992; Mat-
thiessen 1995). The key insight of Systemic Functional Linguistics for the pur-
poses of this chapter is that there are three broad modes of linguistic meaning-mak-
ing, what SFL terms ideational, textual, and interpersonal meaning. Ideational
meanings are those by which speakers/writers interpret and reflect on the experi-
ential world, textual meanings are those by which speakers/writers organize their
texts and relate them to the context in which the communication is taking place,
and interpersonal meanings are those by which speakers/writers adopt subjective
positions, take on social roles and identities, and negotiate social relationships.
568 Peter R. R. White
The focus of appraisal theory is on the last of these three modes of meaning,
that of the interpersonal, and the theory picks up on early work in this area by
other systemic functional linguists, perhaps most notably the work on Tenor by
Martin and by Poynton (see Martin 1992, 1995; Poynton 1985, 1990a,b). The
work on appraisal has been directed at extending the SFL-model of interper-
sonal meaning-making by providing more delicate descriptions of the choices
available to speakers/writers as they convey positive and negative assessments
and negotiate those assessments with actual or potential respondents. Thus, in
simple terms, it is concerned with the ways in which speakers/writers praise or
condemn, approve or disapprove, applaud or criticize, empathize or indicate
animosity. Under the influence of the Bakhtin-inspired view that all verbal com-
munication is dialogic (see, for example, Bakhtin 1982), the appraisal frame-
work perceives attitudinal language to do more than simply self-expressively
announce the speaker/writers viewpoint. Bakhtins notion, of course, was that
even the most monologic text involves the speaker/writer in responding in
some way to what has been said before on the subject by others and in antici-
pating in some way how those addressed will themselves react or respond to
what it being asserted. Thus in any praising or condemning, applauding or criti-
cizing, there is always more involved communicatively and interpersonally
than self-expression. By announcing their own positive or negative viewpoint,
speakers/writers indicate where they stand with respect to other members of
their discourse community, since these others can be expected to have their own
views on the matter, or at least to be in the process of forming a view as the dis-
cussion unfolds.
As a consequence of this dialogic perspective, the appraisal framework pro-
vides insights into that aspect of solidarity/affiliation which turns on the degree
to which communicative participants present themselves as sharing, or failing to
share, attitudes, and in the ways in which they manage any apparent differences
in these attitudes.
In order to demonstrate this application of appraisal theory, an account is
provided in the following sections of how the appraisal framework models the
various options available to speakers/writers as they communicate attitudinal
meanings, i.e., as they seek to advance or activate positive and negative view-
points. Three of the key axes of variability in the communication of attitude are:
(i) variation in the type of positive/negative attitude, (ii) variation in the degree
of explicitness by which attitudinal assessments are conveyed, and (iii) vari-
ation in the degree to which, and the way in which, potential alternative attitudi-
nal positions are entertained or allowed for. Section 2. below provides an over-
view and discussion of these three axes.
A fourth axis, labeled graduation in the appraisal framework, is not con-
sidered in this chapter. Graduation is that sub-system of evaluative meanings by
which attitudinal assessments are intensified or down-scaled, or by which atti-
Praising and blaming, applauding, and disparaging 569
tudinal categories can be made more or less precise. For a detailed account, see
Martin and White (2005: 135160) or Hood (2004).
The evaluative arrangements which result from different settings of these
parameters of variation can be thought of as constituting particular evaluative
stances or dispositions. Thus a speaker/writer who, for example, mostly evalu-
ates by indicating how he/she responds emotionally to phenomena will present a
different evaluative disposition from one who typically evaluates by assessing
phenomena in aesthetic or ethical terms. Similarly, a speaker/writer who ex-
plicitly passes judgement on phenomena will present a different evaluative dis-
position from one who chooses only to be implicitly or indirectly attitudinal.
In Section 3. below, a comparative analysis of the attitudinal workings of two
movie reviews is presented in order to demonstrate how the appraisal frame-
work is employed to identify and characterize such evaluative dispositions. The
analysis identifies similarities and differences between the two reviews in terms
of the types of attitude favored by the writers, the degree to which they favor ex-
plicit or implicit attitude, and the ways in which they engage with other voices
and alternative viewpoints.
Section 4. concludes the discussion by demonstrating how appraisal-based
analyses of evaluative disposition can contribute to our understanding of the
ways in which texts position audiences and negotiate solidarity. Towards this
end, the section examines the audience positioning effects associated with the
evaluative dispositions operating in the two analyzed movie review texts. It is
shown that, on account of differences in the modes of evaluation favored by the
two reviewers, the two texts construct different ideal or imagined readers,
and negotiate solidarity under different terms.
Before turning to the discussion proper, it needs to be observed that, with
some notable exceptions (see, for example, Eggins and Slade 1997: 116167,
Clark, Drew and Pinch 2003), the majority of the work on appraisal and evalu-
ative disposition has, to this point, focused largely on written, single-party texts
and not on immediately interactive, conversational, multi-party texts. The ma-
terial provided below, accordingly, relies largely on insights derived from
written texts, takes most of its examples from written texts, and usually refers to
the writer rather than to the speaker/writer.
It also needs to be noted that the primary focus of the chapter is upon what
can be termed mass communicative texts, i.e., texts where the addressee is some
mass grouping not specifically known to the author and not in immediate con-
tact with the author, in this case two movie reviews directed to some general
public. In such contexts, the relationship of solidarity/affiliation is essentially a
virtual one. That is to say, it is a projected relationship which holds between the
authorial voice or persona and the imagined or putative addressee which the text
constructs for itself.
2. Axes of attitudinal variation
2.1. Attitudinal subtypes: Feelings, tastes, and values

At the broadest level of analysis, the appraisal framework identifies three sub-
types or modes of positive/negative attitude: (i) emotional reactions (labeled
affect), (ii) assessments of human behavior and character by reference to ethics/
morality and other systems of conventionalized or institutionalized norms
(labeled judgement), and (iii) assessments of objects, artifacts, texts, states of
affairs, and processes in terms of how they are assigned value socially (labeled
appreciation), i.e., in terms of their aesthetic qualities, their potential for harm
or benefit, their social salience, and so on. Illustrative examples of the different
subtypes are provided in the following (relevant lexical items are in bold):
[Affect (feelings emotional reaction)]
(1) I was unsatisfied with the characterisation, underwhelmed by the
mythic pomposity and bored to tears by the fight sequences (Guardian,
January 16, 2001).
(2) It was, then, with fury, that I returned home on Saturday to find my
own country rumbling with the mumbles of the peaceniks (Daily Express,
October 10, 2001).
[Judgement (values ethical and other assessments of the social acceptabil-
ity or praiseworthiness of human behavior)]
(3) If the reviewer is too cinematically illiterate to appreciate a masterpiece
like Crouching Tiger, then its her loss. Using the film to belittle Chinese
culture is, at best, insensitive. Referring to inscrutable orientals is clichd
racism, straight from the nineteenth century (dimsum.co.uk January 19,
2001).
(4) To see police brutally manhandling demonstrators was not only
shocking but representative of more repressive regimes, such as China (Bir-
mingham Post, October 25, 1999).
[Appreciation (tastes aesthetic and other social valuations of objects, arti-
facts, processes and states of affair)]
(5) It is a good film, not fantastic, but worth watching (dimsum.co.uk
January 19, 2001).
(6) The new presidents speech was elegant and well-woven, sounding a
panoply of themes without seeming scattered (New York Post, January 21,
2001).
There are a number of motivations for this three-way division. There are lexi-
co-grammatical grounds for the division between affect on the one hand and ap-
preciation and judgement on the other for example, the fact that affect is most
directly realized by verbs (I loved this film.; Mary annoys me.), while
judgements and appreciations are qualities which attach to entities and actions,
and hence are most typically realized as adjectives (She is illiterate and insen-
sitive.; It is a sweetly romantic movie.) or adverbs (The sword is richly and
exquisitely carved and inlaid.). As indicated above, the primary grounds for
distinguishing between judgement and appreciation as subcategories of attitude
is one of evaluative targeting judgements are positive/negative assessments of
human behavior by reference to social norms while appreciations do not directly
have human behavior as their target, but rather are assessments of objects, arti-
facts, material states of affairs, and so on.
However, there are also lexical, specifically collocational grounds, for the
division between judgement and appreciation, namely the following collo-
cational patterns. Judgement adjectives can typically operate in the following
collocational frame:
It was X (judgement adjective) of Y (human target of judgemental assessment) to
do Z.
Examples (7) and (8) below illustrate this.
(7) It was cruel of him to dump you right around the holidays, especially
for things like videogaming (Yahoo! Canada Answers).
(8) It was foolish of Barberella to have gone out in the rain (elroy
online.com).
In contrast, appreciation adjectives are not available for this slot. Thus, It was
thoughtless of you to leave the cat out in the rain. (judgement) is idiomatic and fel-
icitous while It was elegant of her to wear that outfit. (appreciation) is not. This
point can perhaps be more clearly illustrated by reference to a term such as beauti-
ful. Words of this type are capable of variably acting as judgements or appreci-
ations, according to context. This is illustrated by the following two examples.
(9) [judgement] She has a beautiful spirit she seems very aware of the
things that matter in life. I pray to have women strong and wise like that
where I live (essence.com). [Her behavior assessed as morally good.]
(10) [appreciation] Helen was an extremely beautiful woman, considered
one of the fairest that walked the earth (essortment.com). [Helens appear-
ance i.e., Helen as an object assessed not by reference to norms of be-
havioral acceptability but by reference to aesthetic value.]
We note that when terms such as these convey a judgement (i.e., assess human
behavior by reference to social norms), the it was X of Y to frame is avail-
able.
(11) It is beautiful of Mary to help out those street kids the way she does
[invented felicitous/idiomatic example].
In contrast, when they convey an appreciation (aesthetic assessment) the frame

is not available.
(12) *It was beautiful of Mary to wear her hair like that [invented infelici-
tous/unidiomatic example].
The appraisal framework, therefore, provides a three-way taxonomy of attitudi-
nal subtypes. Under this taxonomy, affect is firstly distinguished from judge-
ment/appreciation on the grounds that it is only in the case of affect that the
writer directly reports an emotional reaction on the part of some human subject.
Secondly, judgement and appreciation are distinguished from each other by ref-
erence to the target of the assessment i.e., the social acceptability of human be-
havior (judgement) versus social valuations of objects, artifacts, texts, happen-
ings, and states-of-affairs (appreciation). Putting this another way, we can say
that feelings (i.e., affectual responses) are central to any attitudinal positioning,
but that language makes it possible for these feelings to be externalized and re-
construed in more communal, less immediately subjective terms as qualities
which attach to behaviors and entities. This perspective on attitude is illustrated
diagrammatically below in figure 1.
In proposing a taxonomy of this type, the appraisal framework represents a
significant departure from previous approaches to the semantics of positive/
negative viewpoint. Much of the previous work (see, for example, Ochs and
Schiefflen 1989; Biber and Finnegan 1989; Bybee and Fleischmann 1995; Con-
rad and Biber 2000; Hunston and Thompson 2000) has operated with one broad
category encompassing all positive/negative assessment under terms such as
affect, sentiment, emotion, evaluation, or attitudinal stance. In this, there is an
Figure 1. A three-way taxonomy of attitude sub-types (after Martin and White 2005: 45)
obvious contrast with the appraisal approach. Other work has proposed more
delicate taxonomies of evaluative modes or subtypes. For example, Swales and
Burke (2003: 5) identified seven types of evaluative adjectives in their work on
attitude in academic speech: acuity, aesthetic appeal, assessment, deviance, rel-
evance, size, and strength. By way of another example, Lemke (1998) has offered
the following taxonomy of evaluative dimensions in his work on attitudinal
meaning: desirability/inclination; warrantability/probability; normativity/ap-
propriateness; usuality/expectability; importance/significance; comprehensibil-
ity/obviousness; humorousness/seriousness.
The appraisal framework is a departure from this type of work in that it offers
a clearly stated lexico-grammatical and semantic rationale for the taxonomic sub-
divisions which it identies (see the earlier discussion). As will be demonstrated
in Sections 3. and 4. below, the rationale is such as to have enabled appraisal-the-
ory based analyses to discover that particular interpersonal and rhetorical out-
comes arise when writers favor particular sub-types of attitude or particular com-
binations of attitudinal subtypes. (For a full account of the attitudinal sub-types
identied by the appraisal framework, see Martin and White 2005: 4291.)
2.2. Attitudinal explicitness: Inscription versus invocation

The appraisal framework also departs from previous work on evaluation/attitude
in systematically recognizing the role of forms of expression which are impli-
citly or indirectly attitudinal, in opposition to forms of expression which overtly
or explicitly convey a positive or negative viewpoint. Explicitly attitudinal ex-
pressions are those where the attitudinal value (positive or negative assessment)
is largely fixed and stable across a wide range of contexts for example, via
lexical items such as corrupt, virtuously, skillfully, tyrant, coward, beautiful,
abused, brutalized. Under the appraisal framework, this type of attitudinal ex-
pression is termed inscription and is contrasted with formulations where there is
no single lexical item which, of itself and independently of its current co-text,
carries a specific positive or negative value. Rather, the positive/negative view-
point is activated via various mechanisms of association and implication. This is
illustrated by invented example (13) below:
(13) He only visits his mother once a year, even though she is more than 90
years old.
Under the appraisal framework, the term attitudinal invocation (and also atti-
tudinal token) is used of such forms of attitudinal expression.
Within formulations which indirectly invoke attitude in this way, appraisal
theory makes a further distinction between formulations which contain no evalu-
ative lexis of any type and those which contain evaluative material but not of an
explicitly positive/negative type. In the first instance, the positive or negative as-
sessment is evoked via purely experiential (i.e., factual) material which, as a

result of being selected and brought into focus within the text, has the potential
to trigger a positive or negative reaction in the reader via processes of attitudinal
inference. In the second instance, the positive or negative assessment is pro-
voked via material which, while evaluative, is not of itself positive or negative
for example, via intensification, comparison, metaphor, or counter-expectation.
These possibilities are illustrated by examples (14) and (15) below:
Attitudinal invocation exemplified (evocation and provocation)

(14) [evocation triggering positive/negative responses by means of a
focus on purely informational content:]
George W. Bush delivered his inaugural speech as the United States
President who collected 537,000 fewer votes than his opponent (Ob-
server newspaper, January 21, 2001).
(15) [provocation triggering positive/negative responses by means of
formulations which contain evaluative material but have no lexical
item which explicitly, and of themselves, convey negative or positive
assessments:]
Telstra has withdrawn sponsorship of a suicide prevention phone ser-
vice just days after announcing a $2.34 billion half-yearly profit
(Sunday Mail, July 23, 2005).
In (15) above, the expression just days after construes surprise on the part of
the journalist author the action by Telstra, Australias primary, government-
controlled telecommunications provider, is assessed as unexpected, or at least as
coming sooner than would be expected. Such expressions are not of themselves
positive or negative, but nonetheless have a clear potential to provoke in the
reader an attitudinal response, in this case a negative assessment of Telstras
actions.
It is a feature of attitudinal invocations that they are typically conditioned by
the co-text and will often be subject to the beliefs, attitudes, and expectations
readers bring to their interpretations of the text (i.e., their reading position).
Thus, for example, a US supporter of the Republican Party may not interpret the
above proposition that Mr Bush received 537,000 fewer votes than his oppo-
nent as signifying anything untoward or wrongful with regard to Mr Bushs
presidency. Similarly, it is highly likely that such a proposition would not be
presented in attitudinal isolation and that there will be other indicators else-
where in the text as to the attitude being taken towards Mr Bushs election.
These indicators will act to indicate how this particular piece of information is
meant to be interpreted evaluatively.
In attending to this explicit (inscription) versus implicit (invocation) distinc-
tion, appraisal theory is concerning itself with issues which have been taken
up by theorists interested in what is seen as the distinction between saying and

meaning, or between encoding and implicating, and even more broadly
the distinction between semantics and pragmatics (see, for example, Sper-
ber and Wilson 1995; Levinson 2000; Carston 2002). None of this prior work
has, however, been specifically concerned with the implication or indirect acti-
vation of attitudinally positive/negative meanings, and appraisal theory is novel
in identifying the distinction between attitudinal evocation (attitudinal position-
ing via purely informational or factual meanings) and attitudinal provocation
(attitudinal positioning through meanings which are evaluative but not ex-
plicitly positive or negative).
2.3. Dialogic engagement: Recognition of alternative voices and positions

The third key axis of evaluative variability turns on the degree to which, and the
ways in which, writers acknowledge and engage with other voices and alternative
positions as they advance their own evaluative viewpoint. Thus, for example,
writers may choose either to acknowledge or to ignore prior utterances on the
same topic by earlier speakers. If they do acknowledge prior utterances, they may
present themselves as aligned with, at odds with, or neutral with regards the ear-
lier utterance. Similarly, writers have a range of options when it comes to signal-
ing how they expect those addressed will react or respond to the current proposi-
tion. They can, for example, present themselves as anticipating agreement,
compliance, surprise, skepticism, or resistance on the part of the addressee.
The appraisal framework characterizes a broad range of meanings and ex-
pressions as having this dialogic function. Labeled engagement in the appraisal
framework, these resources include attribution, modals of probability and evi-
dentials, negation, adversatives and concessives, adverbials such of course, nat-
urally, and intensifications by which alternative positions are fended off or re-
jected (for example, the facts of the matter, I contend that). The key insight here
is that all these meanings are dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense and act to recog-
nize that the communicative context in which the utterance operates is one with
multiple voices and viewpoints. Utterances which employ any of these mean-
ings are thus classed as heteroglossic.
Set against these dialogically engaged formulations are utterances formulated
as bare, categorical assertions, i.e., ones from which any form of modalization,
qualification, authorial reinforcement, counter-expectation, or justification has been
omitted. Example (16) below, taken from one of the movie review texts which will
be discussed below in Section 3., illustrates this bare assertion category.
(16) [The movie] is a sublime piece of work; a marriage of old and new so
perfectly managed that it results in something altogether rich, strange and
unusual.
Under the influence of Bakhtins view of all language as dialogic, the bare as-
sertion is not regarded as a default or an interpersonally neutral option. Rather it
is seen as but one choice among a range of options by which the writer takes a
stance with regard to the proposition and with regard to potential respondents to
the current communication. Thus, it is just one option within a system of choices
as to stance which include the following (all invented examples):
(17) Of course The Matrix is the best movie of all time.
(18) The facts of the matter are that The Matrix is the best movie of all
time.
(19) The Matrix is undoubtedly the best movie of all time.
(20) In my view, The Matrix is the best movie of all time.
(21) The Matrix is probably the best movie of all time.
(22) The Matrix could be the best movie of all time.
(23) A number of critics have declared The Matrix to be the best movie
of all time.
(24) The Matrix is the best movie of all time. [bare assertion monoglossic]
The appraisal framework observes that, by choosing not to modalize, justify, re-
inforce, or otherwise qualify the bare assertion, the speaker/writer presents the
proposition as not needing any form of support or interpersonal management in
the current communicative context. The bare assertion is revealed as the means
by which the proposition is presented as dialogically unproblematic or uncon-
tentious, as not at odds or in tension with some alternative viewpoint. Such for-
mulations are classified as monoglossic, in recognition of the fact that they
involve only the single voice of the writer and ignore the multiplicity of alter-
native views and voices likely to be in play in the current communicative con-
text. (For a full account, see Martin and White 2005: Chapter 3).
This perspective leads appraisal analysts to take a particular view of modals
of probability, evidentials, and related formulations (e.g., may, might, could,
seems, appears, perhaps, probably, in my view, I think, personally, etc). Such
formulations have traditionally been seen to convey uncertainty, equivocation,
or lack of commitment on the part of the speaker/writer (see, for example, Lyons
1977: 452). While the appraisal framework allows that such meanings may, on
some occasions, be in play, it holds that these locutions more generally function
dialogically to acknowledge that the current proposition is in tension with alter-
native propositions and potentially puts the speaker/writer at odds with other,
dissenting voices.1 Under the appraisal framework, such formulations are said
to entertain or allow for other viewpoints and are understood to be dialogi-
cally expansive in this openness to alternative voices and positions.
3. Demonstration: The appraisal framework and the analysis of

evaluative disposition
In this section, a detailed appraisal analysis is provided of the two movie review
texts mentioned previously. As already indicated, the purpose is to provide
a demonstration of the kinds of insights which have been made available by the
appraisal framework, more specifically, a demonstration of how the framework
provides for the identification and characterization of particular evaluative dis-
positions. Both reviews are concerned with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,
an extremely successful 2001 film by Chinese director Ang Lee. It must be
stressed that the texts, of themselves, are not the primary point of interest. The
overriding point of the analysis is to demonstrate a methodology for the inves-
tigation of attitudinal disposition which is applicable to texts of all types. These
two particular texts have been chosen, because they are rich in attitudinal mean-
ings and because they provide for usefull contrasts between different evaluative
dispositions.
The first review, by Xan Brooks, is from the arts pages of the leading British
broadsheet newspaper, The Guardian. The second is by a contributor to
www.epinions.com, a website which enables members of the public to post re-
views and engage in online discussion about movies. Analyses of the two texts
are provided below in Sections 3.1. and 3.2. The following Sections 3.3.
through 3.5. provide discussions of different aspects of these analyses.
3.1. Analysis of review text 1 (the Guardian newspaper)

The first review (Guardian, January 5, 2001) is provided below in figure 2. The
following text decorations have been employed to indicate different sub-types
of attitude:
boxed for inscribed affect,
italics for inscribed judgement,
bold underlining for inscribed appreciation
Instances of invoked (implied) attitude are not identified in the analysis but are
discussed later in Section 3.4.
Figure 2. Analysis of Guardian newspaper review, Xan Brooks, January 5, 2001.

3.2. Analysis of review text 2 (www.epinions.com)

An analysis of the second review text is provided below in Figure 3. The same
text decorations have been used to indicate attitudinal sub-types.
boxed for inscribed affect,
italics for inscribed judgement,
bold underlining for inscribed appreciation
Figure 3. Analysis of www.epinions.com review, by user-name demon5974, Febru-

ary 19, 2001
3.3. Discussion: Authorial preferences as to attitudinal sub-type
3.3.1. Review text 1 (The Guardian)

In terms of the attitudinal subtypes employed in the texts, it is clear that the
author of review text 1 overwhelmingly favors appreciation (specifically aes-
thetic assessments of the film as artifact) over judgement and affect when adopt-
ing an attitudinal position towards the movie. Thus, most of the attitudinal work
is done by appreciating formulations such as (partial quotations from review
text 1),
(25) a seamless weave of special effects
(26) a sublime piece of work
(27) something altogether rich
(28) a gorgeous firework display of a picture
(29) a bracing new sub-genre
In terms of judgements directed at the film itself, these are confined to just the
two instances:
(30) a marriage of old and new so perfectly managed
(31) cruder hands.
Both of these assessments construe the directors behavior as highly skilled and
competent. The remaining judgements are directed at the fictional characters
i.e., upright warrior, a spoilt little rich girl and hence have a very differ-
ent rhetorical function from judgements of real-world human targets such as the
director or the actors. Most importantly in the current context, they do not of
themselves act to signal where the writer stands attitudinally with regards the
movie. Similarly, instances of affect are limited, again to just two instances.
(32) you find yourself relishing every moment
(33) it has you giggling in the aisles
One of the key insights of the appraisal framework is that there is something sig-
nificant in terms of interpersonal positioning and potential rhetorical effect
when a writer chooses one of the attitudinal modes rather than another (i.e., ap-
preciation versus judgement versus affect). Consider the following invented
examples as available choices for a writer wanting to indicate a positive disposi-
tion towards a movie.
(34) [affect] I loved the movie.
(35) [appreciation] Its a brilliant movie.
(36) [judgement] In this movie, Ang Lee shows himself to be at the
height of his powers as a director.
By taking up the affect option, the writer/speaker chooses to present the evalu-
ation as entirely personal, as a matter of his/her own individual response. In
contrast, both the appreciation and judgement options externalize the evaluation
in that it is presented as a quality inhering in the evaluated entity itself, rather
than in the evaluator. In the case of affect, the appeal is only to the individual
who has experienced the phenomenon in question, while, as discussed briefly
above in Section 2.1., in the case of appreciation and judgement the appeal is
to some communal or institutionalized norm of assessment. Of course, it can be
argued that an affectual response is involved in all these options, that a sense of
I loved is involved in all three. The point, however, is that through appreci-
ation and judgement the speaker/writer can choose to construe the attitude in
different terms, to present the attitudinal position not as an individual emotional
response, but as a property of the evaluated entity itself which has been ident-
ified by the application of communal standards of taste or value.
With respect to judgement versus appreciation, the choice is between assess-
ing the human agent (judgement) and assessing his/her work (appreciation).
This is interpersonally and rhetorically significant, because to assess the human
agent (judgement) puts most at stake interpersonally since the assessment goes
most directly to the human agent and their standing and character in the com-
munity. In contrast, appreciation of a text or other artifact puts the assessment at
one remove from its human creator. To criticize the movie, for example, is only
indirectly to criticize the director, hence putting less at stake interpersonally.
Thus, the judgement New Yorkers are unfriendly. puts more at stake interper-
sonally than the appreciation, New York is an unfriendly place..
The very strong preference shown above by this reviewer for appreciation
over affect and judgement can thus be seen to have clear interpersonal conse-
quences. The evaluative stance is not that of an individual reporting his/her own
emotional responses to the movie. Tellingly, on the two occasions when an af-
fectual response is offered, it is not the reaction of the writer himself (i.e., not
I) but rather the impersonal you (i.e., you find yourself relishing every mo-
ment). Similarly the writer presents himself as not much interested in direct
assessment of the directors or the actors behavior with just the two instances
where the film maker is directly praised for his competence. Rather, for this
writer, movie reviewing is very largely a matter of responding to the movie as
artifact and bringing to bear a system of sophisticated aesthetic norms against
which the movie can be measured.
3.3.2. Review text 2 (www.epinions.com)

These findings will probably come as no surprise to those familiar with how film
reviewing is typically conducted in more highbrow English-language news-
papers and magazines. It is usual for professional reviewers of this type to adopt
this particular aesthetics-oriented evaluative arrangement. However, the analy-

sis of review text 2 (Figure 3 above) indicates that this is an option as to evalu-
ative disposition which is not taken up by the epinions.com contributor. His re-
view is strikingly different from review text 1 in the much reduced use it makes
of appreciation, with the first instance not occurring until the second paragraph
(beautiful scenery) and subsequent instances occurring at a rate of only about
one per paragraph. Additionally, only two of the texts five appreciations (i.e.,
biggest problem, dont waste any more money on this movie) act to convey
the writers attitude towards the movie.
Equally important, in terms of the contrast with the previous text, is the much
enhanced role played by affect in review text 2 as the writer reports his own dis-
like and annoyance with the movie and indicates animosity towards those who
like foreign films of this kind. In broad terms, then, review text 2 operates with
an evaluative disposition under which film criticism is very personal, a matter of
individual likes and dislikes. It is an arrangement by which the writer makes vir-
tually no claim to having access to the institutionalized norms of aesthetic assess-
ment associated with professional film criticism of the type exemplified by re-
view text 1 (Figure 2). Reacting to movies is a matter of individual feelings, not of
appreciative norms and the only claim the writer makes to aesthetic expertise is in
his use of the term deep to positively appraise certain types of plot (though not
necessarily the type of plot which the writer himself favors).
3.4. Discussion: Authorial preferences as to inscribed versus invoked

attitude
A second important evaluative difference between the two texts is the much
greater use the author of review text 2 makes of invoked attitude. Review text 1
includes only one clear cut case of attitudinal invocation the observation that
the movies plotline could have sprung from the pen of some 12th century cal-
ligrapher. The potential implication here is that springing from the pen of 12th
century calligrapher is a positive for a plotline. However, so densely surrounded
is this observation by explicit positive evaluations of the movie that there is little
at stake rhetorically should a reader fail to provide this attitudinal inference.
In contrast, attitudinal invocation has a much more substantial role to play in
review text 2. Firstly, there is the headline with which the review begins (partial
quotation from review text 2).
(37) Look! I like a foreign film! Im intelligent!
This functions to position the reader to take a negative view of people who claim
to like foreign films, such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and therefore to
take a negative view of the movie itself. The implication being activated is that
such people are dissemblers who only make such claims because they think it
will impress others. Since this is invocation rather than inscription of attitude,
the headline does not include any overt assertion of negativity towards lovers of
subtitled movies. The writer does not, for example, explicitly declare those who
say they enjoyed the movie to be bogus, fake, or dissembling. Rather it is
left up to the readers to draw these evaluative conclusions from the material
presented. This is actually a rather complicated instance of attitudinal invocation
in that, for the implication to arise, the reader must read these, not as the words
of the reviewer himself, but as the reported words or thoughts of some other
speaker, specifically a foreign film lover.
The first sentence of the review functions attitudinally in a similarly indirect
way:
(38) People seem to like subtitled films. Perhaps it justifies their intelli-
gence if they can claim that they enjoyed a movie in another language.
Later, there are attitudinal invocations directed at positioning the reader to take
a negative view of subtitled movies generally. For example,
(39) [With subtitled films] you always end up looking at the bottom of the
screen, trying to decipher the plot, when something important happens.
Someone always ends up walking in front of you in the middle of an import-
ant conversation between the two key characters.
The obvious implication is that viewing subtitled, foreign movies is annoying
and unsatisfactory. It is noteworthy that the repeated use of the hyperbolic al-
ways here acts as a signal that the material is attitudinally loaded. This is fol-
lowed soon after, by example (40):
(40) The scenery seems to be very beautiful throughout the entire film.
I believe this is because the American audience has never seen it before.
The public has seen the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains before. We
have never seen central China, and we enjoy the change.
Out of context, the material suggests a positive view of the movie, since it is
presented as involving beautiful scenery and providing enjoyment for the
American viewing audience. In context, however, a negative viewpoint is in-
voked, specifically a negative assessment of the critical capabilities of those
who have been praising the movie, implying that they favor the movie, not on
account of its intrinsic cinematic properties, but only on account of their nave
enjoyment of the unfamiliar scenery.
Several further invocations with a similar attitudinal functionality follow.
For example,
(41) This movie had that exact same run up the walls effect as The Ma-
trix, only it happened in every scene.
(42) Also, the ability the main characters have is never explained. Why can
they fly, while everyone else is forced to walk?
From this discussion, it becomes clear that use of attitudinal invocation is an

important element in the attitudinal arrangement by which the second reviewer
disposes himself attitudinally towards the movie and positions his readers to
share his viewpoint. The contrast with review 1 is a marked one.
3.4.1. Invoking versus inscribing attitude: Potential communicative

consequences
To understand the potential communicative consequences of this difference (i.e.,
between invocation and inscription) it is necessary to consider again what is in-
volved interpersonally in the use of attitudinal invocation. There are two aspects
of the functionality of invocations of the type which occur in review text 2 which
are important here. In review text 2, these invocations do not, of course, operate
in isolation. The writers evaluative position has been made explicitly very clear
elsewhere in the text via his inscribed attitudinal assertions, i.e., his announce-
ment that he dislikes subtitled movies, that he found the effects used in the
movie unbearably annoying and that the reader should not waste any more
money on this movie. The attitudinal invocations, therefore, operate against this
backdrop. Accordingly, unless there are counter-indicators, readers will bring to
their interpretation of the invocations an expectation that, by implication, these
too will be conveying a negative view of the movie. They will expect to find as-
sumptions at work which lead to negative conclusions about the move. Thus in
example (41), it is possible to discover an assumption on the part of the writer that
repeated use of the run up the walls effect from The Matrix is cinematically ill
conceived and annoying. Similarly in example (42), it is possible to discover the
assumption that it is unsatisfactory and cinematically damaging for there to be
no explanation of why some characters can fly and others cannot. This is the first
important aspect of the functionality of invocations of this type, i.e., that they rely
on the reader discovering certain assumptions on the part of the writer.
The second important aspect is that the invocations rely on the reader shar-
ing these assumptions or regarding them as reasonable. Thus example (41)
above will only operate to activate a negative view of the movie should the
reader share with the writer the assumption that repeated use of the running up
the wall effect is cinematically flawed. A reader who thoroughly enjoys the
running up the wall effect will not be positioned by this to regard the movie
negatively and will find it incongruous or rhetorically dysfunctional that the
writer should offer this as evidence against the movie. Similarly, example (42)
above will only operate to activate a negative view should the reader share
the view that movies of this type must explain why some characters can fly and
others cannot. Without this agreement, such invocations become communi-

catively incongruous, since they provide information which is clearly intended
to support a particular value position but which, in the end, fails to achieve this
outcome. Invocations of the type found in this text, therefore, involve the writer
making assumptions about the attitudinal implications of the material presented
in the invocation, and then taking for granted that these are assumptions which
will unproblematically be shared by the reader.
The ultimate communicative effect of these twin aspects of functionality
is for the text to construct an imagined or ideal reader who shares and takes
for granted the writers own evaluative assumptions. Thus, the regular use of
such invocations results in an evaluative disposition in which the writer assumes
a substantial degree of attitudinal alignment with the reader, even before the
reader completes his/her reading of the text. The disposition is thus one of as-
sumed attitudinal like-mindedness.
3.5. Discussion: Authorial preferences as to modes of dialogic engagement

The final evaluative difference between the two texts to be considered is a
matter of dialogic engagement i.e., variation in the degree to which the authors
present themselves as responding to prior utterances and in the degree to which
they present their propositions as potentially in tension with alternative view-
points.
3.5.1. Review text 1

The author of review text 1 almost exclusively employs bare, unqualified cat-
egorical assertions as he advances his assessment of the movie. The following
examples of bald evaluative assertion are typical of the text (partial quotations
from review text 1).
(43) [] Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon points forward, with its state-of-
the-art stunt work and seamless weave of special effects.
(44) What we have here, then, is a sublime piece of work; a marriage of old
and new so perfectly managed that it results in something altogether rich,
strange and unusual.
(45) Lee contrives to rustle up a narrative that is at once grand scale and
intimate; disciplined and extravagant.
(46) Its a film of exquisite grace under fire; a work so lush, giddy and
beautiful it has you giggling in the aisles.
There is only the one rhetorically significant instance where a dialogically ex-
pansive formulation is employed to signal recognition that an alternative view-
point is possible in the final paragraph:
(47) In the end, perhaps, Lee has created a bracing new sub-genre with this
gorgeous firework display of a picture.
Otherwise, the reviewers observations and evaluations are presented as dia-
logically unproblematic and hence able to be announced without qualification,
reinforcement or justification. In terms of the categories of the appraisal frame-
work, review text 1 is almost exclusively monoglossic.
3.5.2. Review text 2

In contrast, review text 2 does include some rhetorically significant engagement
with alternative viewpoints, at least in its opening stage. Formulations which
serve this function have been indicated in bold in example (48) below.
(48) [i] People seem to like subtitled films. [ii] Perhaps it justifies their in-
telligence if they can claim that they enjoyed a movie in another language.
[iii] Personally, I dislike subtitled films because you always end up looking
at the bottom of the screen, trying to decipher the plot, when something
important happens. Someone always ends up walking in front of you in the
middle of an important conversation between the two key characters.
The effect is to signal an acknowledgement by the writer that his beliefs about
people who say they like foreign movies may be subject to contestation, i.e.,
he allows for the possibility that there are other reasons why people say they
like subtitled movies. In sentence [iii], the use of personally acts to explicitly
acknowledge that these are his own subjective views and accordingly just one
position among a range of possible viewpoints. This opening, then, can be char-
acterized as involving a degree of dialogic expansiveness, as the writer acknowl-
edges the contentiousness of his various viewpoints and thereby entertains the
possibility of dissenting views. His negative assessment of foreign movies is
thus located in a heteroglossic environment of multiple value positions.
The remainder of review text 2, however, is very largely monoglossic as the
writer uses bare assertion to explicitly evaluate this and other movies, or ad-
vances observations which are implicitly evaluative. Thus, for example, all the
following propositions are advanced via bare assertion (partial quotations from
review text 2).
(49) The rst and biggest problem is the annoying effect that has people y-
ing across rooftops and running up walls. [inscription explicitly attitudinal]
(50) This movie had that exact same run up the walls effect as The Ma-
trix, only it happened in every scene. [invocation implicitly attitudinal]
(51) By the end of this long movie, this has become unbearably annoying.
[inscription explicitly attitudinal]
(52) Take your generic Jackie Chan movie. The karate that happens is goofy
and very fast. [inscription explicitly attitudinal]
(53) There is only one difference: In Crouching Tiger, the karate happens so
fast that it is impossible to see. [invocation implicitly evaluative]
(54) Just dont waste any more money on this movie. [inscription ex-
plicitly attitudinal]
The two texts have thus been shown to be similar with respect to dialogic en-
gagement, to the extent that both authors frequently employ bare assertion in ad-
vancing their evaluative propositions. They thereby frequently choose to signal
either the assumption that their viewpoint is not in tension with any alternative
position or, alternatively, the assumption that any such alternative viewpoints do
not need to be recognized or engaged with in the current communicative con-
text. Against this, the two texts differ dialogically in that review text 2 is less
consistently monoglossic, and does, at least in its opening stages, make dialogic
space for alternative voices and viewpoints.
3.6. Mapping evaluative disposition

The findings as to evaluative disposition outlined above are summarized in the
following tabular presentation.
Table 1. Patterns of evaluative preference
Review text 1 (Guardian) Review text 2

(epinions.com)
[attitudinal Strong preference for Values of all three subtypes
subtype] appreciation over employed, although affect
judgement and affect afforded a central role
[attitudinal Strong preference for the Multiple targets of evalu-
targeting] movie to serve as the target ation the film itself, foreign
of evaluation films generally, people who
say they like foreign films
[explicitness/ Strong preference for Both inscriptions and
implicitness] inscription over invocation invocation. Judgement
(of people who like foreign
films) only via invocation
[dialogic en- Strong preference for Mixed evaluative utter-
gagement] monoglossic bare assertion ances formulated in both het-
over any of the heteroglos- eroglossic and monoglossic
sic options terms, although monoglossic
expression predominates
4. Evaluative disposition, audience positioning, and solidarity
With this analysis of evaluative disposition in place, it is possible to address the

other key concern of the chapter chapter: the application of such appraisal-based
analyses to the investigation of how such texts construct relationships with
those addressed and establish terms under which solidarity may obtain with this
ideal or putative readership. In order to advance such investigations, it is
necessary to consider the interpersonal and dialogic potential of the choices
which constitute a given evaluative disposition. Thus it is necessary to consider
the communicative consequences of, for example, an author favoring one of the
subtypes of attitude, or of the author employing attitudinal invocation rather
than inscription at a particular point in the text, or making extensive use of a par-
ticular engagement option, and so on. Even further, it is necessary to consider
the communicative consequences which may flow from particular patterns of
evaluative co-selection for example, the co-selection of particular types of at-
titude, particular options as to implicitness/explicitness, and a particular orien-
tation to dialogic engagement. In the following discussion, this type of investi-
gation will be demonstrated by reference to the evaluative arrangements
identified as operating in the two movie review texts.
4.1. Review text 1

As outlined above in Section 3., the author of review text 1 offers enthusiastic
praise for the movie, conveying his high regard for it largely via the categorical,
monoglossic assertion of explicit appreciation. The categorical, bare assertion
is, of course, the usual option for material which is treated as factual or estab-
lished knowledge in a given communicative setting, since in such cases it makes
pragmatic sense to treat such material as uncontentious and not at odds with
some alternative position for example, Ang Lee was the director of Crouch-
ing Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But the authors explicit appreciations of the movie
will not, of course, be seen as factual or as knowledge in this sense, and accord-
ingly the combination of explicit attitude and categoricality has a different func-
tion. The effect is to construct for the text a particular imagined audience or
putative addressee for whom the proposition will be not so much factual as un-
problematic, and who will agree with the evaluative proposition or at least find
it plausible, reasonable, or otherwise acceptable. In terms of the negotiation of
solidarity, the effect is to construct conditions under which a sense of rapport,
connection, or affiliation is only available to those readers who accept these
bald, unqualified, and unjustified expert adjudications without quibble or
questioning. The effect is to construct an unoppositional audience, ready to be
instructed in the aesthetic merits of a movie about which they have not yet
formed a view.
4.2. Review text 2

Review text 2 is substantially more complicated in terms of interpersonal posi-
tioning and the negotiation of solidarity. Firstly, as discussed above in Section
3.3., there is the writers preference for affect. By this, he presents his position
as primarily a matter of his own emotional responses, offering declarations such
as I dislike and I like to see . Thus, the assessments are very clearly
grounded in the contingent, individual subjectivity of the writer himself, thereby
opening up dialogic space for alternative viewpoints. It is possible for readers to
accept that these are valid emotional responses on the part of the writer while not
necessarily having the same response themselves. Further enhancing this sense
of dialogic openness, at least in the opening stage of the review, is the writers
use of the dialogically expansive, seem, perhaps, and personally to
further acknowledge the subjective, contingent nature of his value position.
At the same time, it is noteworthy that the reviewer does not simply an-
nounce his various attitudinal assessments. At several key points in the text, he
also offers the reader argumentation in support of these assessments. For
example, he does not simply declare a dislike of subtitled movies but rather
offers several sentences in which he sets out reasons why this dislike is justi-
fied i.e., the tendency to miss important developments due to having to look at
the bottom of the screen, and so on. Similar argumentative support is provided
for his contention that the films running up walls special effects are unbear-
ably annoying. By this, the writer presents himself as involved in persuasion
and thus constructs a reader who may need convincing otherwise there would
be no need to justify the evaluations in this way.
The effect is to construct a reader/writer communality which is less con-
strained than that which obtains in review text 1. In anticipating a reader who
may not agree and hence who may need to be persuaded, the writer makes
allowances for and, in a sense, legitimizes potentially divergent viewpoints, or
at least acknowledges that they have a place in the unfolding conversation
around the movie. The dialogic conditions under which solidarity is offered to
the reader are such as to allow for resistance and difference of viewpoint.
Against this more dialogically open orientation, however, is the authors
negative stance towards people who say they like subtitled foreign movies such
as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. As discussed in some detail above in Sec-
tion 3.4., here, through the exclusive use of attitudinal invocation rather than in-
scription, the writer takes the reader for granted attitudinally, assuming he/she
will share and find unproblematic the writers conviction that such people are
boastful dissemblers. This is especially the case with the texts headline where
the invoking material is baldly asserted.
(54) Look! I like a foreign film! Im intelligent! (repeated above as example
37)
Such taking-for-granted results in highly constrained opportunities for writer/

reader communality, since for the reader to resist such a viewpoint is to reject
what the writer presents as natural and commonsensical and hence not sub-
ject to any form of debate or negotiation. In terms of his negotiation of solidarity
and audience positioning, then, the author of review text 2 is not consistent, or at
least demonstrates variability in the stance he takes. In his critique of the movie
itself, he acknowledges the contentiousness of his own position and leaves dia-
logic space for a reader who may disagree. In his contempt for people who go
about declaring how much they like such movies, he makes no such allowances,
assuming a like-minded reader who is similarly contemptuous.
5. Conclusion
It is clear that an understanding of how positive and negative attitudes are con-
veyed and negotiated is crucial for those with an interest in the interpersonal
functionality of language. By the attitudes we express, we not only forge iden-
tities and personas for ourself but enter into relationships of affiliation or dis-
affiliation with the communities of shared feelings, tastes, and values which in-
variably operate in any society. Thus, it is via our expressions of attitude that we
announce who we are, in social, cultural terms and develop the various personal
and professional alliances upon which we are so fundamentally reliant.
As demonstrated by the analyses set out in the chapter, the appraisal frame-
work provides a theoretical basis and an analytical methodology for investi-
gations of the nature of the attitudinal meanings and the mechanisms by which
these are activated linguistically. Appraisal theory is, of course, concerned with
issues which have been taken up elsewhere in the linguistics, discourse analysis,
and pragmatics literature under such headings as attitude/evaluation, affect,
modality, evidentiality, hedging, stance and metadiscourse.2 The ap-
praisal-theory approach constitutes a significant development of this earlier
work in that it offers a delicate taxonomy of attitudinal meanings and the for-
mulations by which writers engage dialogically with prior speakers and poten-
tial respondents. Perhaps most significantly, as the chapter has demonstrated, it
provides an account which attends to patterns of co-occurrence and interaction
in texts between the different appraisal systems and thereby makes possible
conclusions as to the communicative outcomes likely to be associated with the
particular evaluative disposition in operation in a text. By this, it becomes pos-
sible to develop linguistically principled accounts of the mechanisms by which
written texts construe for themselves ideal or imagined addressees, and by
which virtual relationships of solidarity/communality are constructed with this
putative readership.
Notes
1. The notion that such formulations are dialogic in this sense has previously been ad-
vanced by writers such as Myers and Hyland. Myers, for example, has observed that
one purpose of such locutions is not to mark knowledge claims as uncertain, but rather
to mark the claim as unacknowledged by the discourse community (Myers 1989:
12). Similarly, Hyland has argued that that hedges (which include low intensity
modals) sometimes act to convey deference, modesty or respect rather than to con-
vey uncertainty (Hyland 2000: 88).
2. For attitude/evaluation and stance, see Ochs and Schiefflen (1989), Biber and Finne-
gan (1988), Conrad and Biber (2000), and Hunston and Thompson (2000); for mo-
dality, see Palmer (1986) or Bybee and Fleischmann (1995); for evidentiality, see
Chafe and Nichols (1986); for hedging, see Myers (1989), Markkanen and Schroder
(1997), and Hyland (1996); and for metadiscourse, see Crismore (1990) and Hyland
(2006).
Sources of citations
Birmingham Post, October 25, 1999, leading article.

Daily Express, October 10, 2001, Sarler, Carol, Damn the Peaceniks for their faint hearts
Feature Pages, Daily Express (UK).
dimsum.co.uk January 19, 2001, articles and online discussion of Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon, www.dimsum.co.uk. accessed February 25, 2001.
elroyonline.com, web blog, www.elroyonline.com/p43093500.htm, accessed August 12,
2007.
essence.com, web discussion list, www.essence.com/essence/lifestyle/voices/ 0,16109,
1227093,00.htm, accessed October 1, 2007.
essortment.com, general information website, www.ctct.essortment.com/ legendtrojanwa-
rhss.htm, accessed November 3, 2007.
Guardian, January 16, 2001, Raven, Charlotte Crashing bore, wooden drama/ Arts pages
film review.
New York Post, January 21, 2001, op-ed page editorial.
Observer newspaper (UK), January 21, 2001, leading article.
Sunday Mail (Australia), July 23, 2005, news item.
Yahoo! Canada Answers, discussion list website, http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/answers2/
frontend.php/question?qid=20071227143307AAc4Mpi, accessed August 12, 2007
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21. Silence and taboo
Sabine Krajewski and Hartmut Schrder
1. Introduction
One cannot not communicate. Every behavior is a kind of communication.

Because behavior does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behavior), it is
not possible not to communicate (Watzlawick, Bavelas, and Jackson 1980: 48).
Originally this axiom implies that everything we do (or dont do) is part of (ver-
bal and non-verbal) communication. With the development of new communi-
cation systems, Watzlawicks assertion takes on another dimension: it is, for
example, impossible not to react to an SMS or an e-mail, because silence also
communicates a message.
However, silence is a phenomenon which is difficult to categorize. No
matter how we define it, silence and its meaning have to be sensed and inter-
preted taking a particular situation into account. According to the Oxford Eng-
lish Dictionary (Soans and Hawker 2005), silence as a noun is 1) complete ab-
sence of sound, or 2) the fact or state of abstaining from speech. The result of
this would be muteness, reticence, taciturnity. German schweigen and Hebrew
shtika describe this state.1 The state or condition when nothing is audible, as in
complete stillness, can be expressed with different words Stille in German,
dmama or dumia in Hebrew. Their closest equivalent in English is stillness.
Though silence can be a sort of absence of something, it suggests potential: [It]
may be peculiarly difficult if ones purpose is to objectify the state, that is, to say
that it is something (Scott 1993: 11).
In this chapter, silence and its relative, taboo, are in the center. We give an
overview of the relevant theorizing and the relevant results achieved in the re-
search on taboos and silence. We include examples to show where this research
leads to in practical terms and what the future perspectives are.
In Section 2, we introduce the state of the art in linguistic research on silence
and taboo. In Section 3, we discuss the concepts and functions of silence and
taboo. The interpretation of silence and its function in communication is differ-
ent from one culture to another (3.1.). Cultural differences shape the meanings
of silence across different contexts and individuals. Culture-related silence
is connected with taboo (3.2.). In the following, we focus on the meaning and
functions of taboo (3.3.) and, finally, on the interdependence of taboo and taboo
violation (taboo complex, 3.4.).
Section 4 centers on linguistic means and taboo discourse (4.1.) and ana-
lyzes them with reference to their place in different cultures. An example of cal-
596 Sabine Krajewski and Hartmut Schrder
culated silence (4.2.) shows how the meaning of communicatively relevant

silence is context dependent. We exemplify (universal) taboo topics by using
representations from hospital drama (4.3.). Taboo-related silence in family ther-
apy (4.4.) characterizes the pact of silence which is explained in part 4.5.
Section 5 highlights silence and taboo in intercultural communications and
it leads to our conclusions about the significance of taboo and silence for com-
municative competence in general (6.).
2. State of the art in linguistic research on silence and taboo
Both silence and taboo are important and frequent topics of discussion and
analysis in recent linguistic research and are considered to be highly dependent
on the culture and society in which they occur. This results in a variety of inter-
pretations which can be attached to both phenomena.
Summaries of research on silence and an overview of relevant publications
can be found in Knapp (2000) and in Tannen and Saville-Troikje (1985). Ja-
worski (1997) gives an interdisciplinary perspective on silence and discusses
social and pragmatic perspectives of the power of silence (Jarowski 1998). The
most recent monograph about Silence in Intercultural Communication has been
written by Nakane (2007) and presents an analysis of silence in intercultural
contexts by referring to examples from Japan and Australia.
While linguistic research on silence has predominantly been published in
English, research on taboo, particularly studies on linguistic taboo and euphem-
ism, still seems to interest specifically German scholars. This is also reflected in
the usage of terminology. The notion of Sprachtabu (linguistic tabu) seems to
belong especially to scientific literature written in the German language while
equivalents in other languages (English: linguistic taboo, French: tabou linguis-
tique; Italian: tabu linguistico) have either been replaced by different formu-
lations (French: interdiction linguistique; Italian: interdizione linguistica) or, in
some instances, equivalents of Sprachtabu are used as a general term, but this
phenomenon occurs less frequently than in the German language (cf. Schorch
2000: 6, fn 10).
An analysis of taboo discourse in languages other than German reveals that
the usage of euphemisms is just as dominant when topics such as death or bodily
functions are concerned. We assume with Balle (1990: 177) that linguistic taboo
is inseparable from euphemism: Where there are euphemisms, there have to be
taboos and vice versa. Euphemisms are the other side of the coin.
A phase of research on linguistic taboo in the German language is repre-
sented by Luchtenberg (1985: 35), who develops a pragmatic-semantic view
and shows that euphemisms may realize covering as well as veiling functions,
regardless of the particular subject area. The first, covering, is used for com-
Silence and taboo 597
munication about terms made taboo for consideration of feelings and values; the
latter, veiling, has the task of introducing certain facts to the listener in a way
that is favorable for the speaker who chooses how (s)he is to present the facts
(Luchtenberg 1985: 24). Luchtenberg understands taboos as objects, processes,
or thoughts that are, for various reasons, forbidden to be thought, touched, or
named in a certain society (1985: 24). He also identifies zero-euphemism as a
linguistic tool, namely, when the veiling consists of omission (rather than re-
placement) of certain words or expressions, or where dots replace words.
The work of Allan und Burridge (2006) has been published under the main
title of Forbidden Words so only the subtitle refers to taboo: Taboo and
the Censoring of Language. Allan und Burrdige offer a thorough overview of
English language literature and focus on topics such as sweet talking, political
correctness, and verbal hygiene the readily available literature in German is
unfortunately not taken into account. The reception of the relevant literature
outside the Anglo-Saxon world is also missing in Holdens (2000) Encyclopedia
of Taboos. It does, however, include perspectives from various disciplines such
as anthropology, psychology, and literary studies and introduces the most im-
portant theories and authors including Sigmund Freud, Mary Douglas, Edmund
Leach, and Franz Steiner as well as various taboo areas such as incest, cannibal-
ism, sex, death, and nourishment taboos.
The earliest scientific writings which explicitly refer to linguistic taboos
within the context of magical words that indicate their relevance for the Indo-
Germanic languages were compiled at the beginning of the 20th century. This
research focuses on name taboos, the denotation of God, animal names, and
circumstances often associated with taboos such as death and dying, illness, and
others. Havers (1946) offers an excellent summary of the status quo of these
studies in his book Arbeiten zum Sprachtabu (Studies on Linguistic Taboo).
Havers starts from the assumption that the Indo-Europeans were also aware of
linguistic taboo and illustrates this with many examples. He introduces a typol-
ogy of replacements which is still being used in more recent studies on linguistic
taboos. Havers connects the beginning of the linguistic work on taboos with
Meillets essay entitled Interdictions (1906).
Apart from the French scholar Meillet, the Swede Sahlgren draws a connec-
tion between the concepts of linguistic taboo and euphemism, as, for instance, in
his study Blkulla och blkullafrderna (The witches dance on the Blocks-
berg; translation from Swedish ours, S.K./H.S.) (1915). Chapter VI concerning
Taboo och noa (Taboo and Noa; translation from Swedish ours, S.K./H.S.) is of
particular interest to the present study. He uses examples from Swedish histori-
cal-linguistic studies and cultural history to illustrate their meaning outside
of the so-called primitive peoples languages. Sahlgren introduces the term
noaword.2 In the Polynesian language, noa is the opposite to taboo; it describes
the ordinary and the everyday, in other words, everything that is not under the
influence of the power of a taboo, the mana. The mana of a taboo can be so great
that the offender will suffer punishment merely through fear of its powers.
Without the supernatural power of mana, taboo cannot be established. Mana is
created through interaction within groups (Kraft 2004: 15) and is necessary to
maintain a taboo. If mana loses strength, the taboo may fade and finally cease to
exist. Noa, on the other hand, describes the ordinary and is independent of the
powers of mana.
Sahlgren (1915: 132) assumes that there are numerous traces of name taboos
in todays modern languages. In Swedish, it was not allowed to use the word
wolf, but it is acceptable to say goldfoot or the grey. A noaword, therefore, is a
replacement word that enables us to describe the things that are taboo (Sahlgren
1915: 133). Sahlgren (1915: 136) was one of the first to describe examples of
the tabu-euphemism-cycle: noawords eventually become taboo words them-
selves and need to be replaced by new noawords.
A widely discussed German dissertation on Indo-Germanic word taboo was
submitted by Trost at the University of Prague in 1934. Trost concentrates on
coping strategies to deal with word taboos. The results of this study are sum-
marized by Trost in his essay on Bemerkungen zum Sprachtabu (Remarks on
linguistic taboo, 1936), published in the Travaux du cercle linguistique de
Prague series. Among other things, Trost (1936: 289) discusses the function of
so called cover words which he characterizes as words that use a different
meaning to denote the same object as a taboo word. Furthermore, he discusses
the phenomenon of the taboo-plural and the effects of metaphors and metonyms
as linguistic replacements in various areas of the word taboo.
The 1930s mark a fresh start in taboo research. Linguistic work on taboos
in language concentrated on the concrete usage of language and culminated
in Ullmanns contribution (1962) which is still widely read. In structurally
oriented linguistics, it was Bloomfield (1933: 155, 396401) who was one of the
first to become involved with the concept of linguistic taboo. In a chapter about
the meaning of words in his introduction to linguistics (Language), he describes
the usage of euphemisms in connection with name and word taboos. Bloomfield
shows examples of homonyms from English and French which are still being
avoided because of their phonetic similarity with taboo words. Furthermore, he
compares name taboos that often lead to the disappearance of the expressions
made taboo with taboo words that are against common decency, but which con-
tinue to exist. In this context Bloomfield also refers to the taboo-euphemism-
cycle.
Ullmann (1962: 204206) describes various causes for semantic change. He
expands the (linguistic, historical, and social) causes identified by Meillet by in-
cluding the category of psychological causes which he divides into emotive fac-
tors and taboos. Ullmann differentiates between the categories he refers to as the
taboo of fear, taboo of delicacy, and taboo of propriety. Within these categories,
he describes the origin of euphemisms and gives examples for the taboo-
euphemism-cycle. Ullmann pointedly views the linguistic taboo as a universal
phenomenon which does not only concern linguistic history but also the current
use of language: It is a general human tendency to avoid direct reference to un-
pleasant subjects (Ullmann 1962: 206).
In the 1980s and 1990s, linguistic taboo was discussed within the frame-
work of discourse- and conversation analysis. A study by Schank on conver-
sation around tabooized subjects triggered more research on the subject. Schank
(1981: 36) talks about the phenomenon of covered speech which is marked by
a more frequent use of metaphors, pro forma, euphemisms, archaisms, etc., and
which may be characterized by a certain degree of directness and explicitness.
Pelikan (1987: 77), who also focuses on the the linguistic coping with ta-
boos at the level of discourse, points out that taboo discourse in political debates
on television is marked by lack of confidence, fear, aggression, feelings of guilt,
and repression. This again manifests itself at various linguistic levels. Accord-
ing to Pelikan, the taboo breach becomes linguistically visible in the choice of
termini, in the modus being used, and in certain general speaker strategies at
textual level. The way a topic is made taboo is also visible in the text. If the topic
is mentioned directly, this part will be different from the rest of the text, and will
be indicated by emphasis on the word or an increase of volume, an increased un-
certainty, pauses, and stuttering. In mentioning the topic, the speaker may either
use clichs and euphemisms, or provocatively direct expressions. The attempt
to not address the topic directly also leads to an escape into abstract, generaliz-
ing terms with the reference often remaining unclear (cf. Pelikan 1987: 77).
The most recent and more extensive study on linguistic taboo and euphem-
ism is Zllners dissertation Der Euphemismus im alltglichen und politischen
Sprachgebrauch des Englischen (Euphemism in everyday and political use of
the English language, 1997). Zllner regards euphemisms as means of glossing
over and veiling. Euphemisms are used within conventions of politeness and
also in order to prevent loss of face. Zllner expands Ullmanns categorization
by adding the so-called taboos of social tact in connection with the US-
American political correctness movement. They are ideologically motivated
and, according to Zllner (1997: 52), appear in societies which claim to have a
high degree of civilization. Taboos of social tact are devoted to the idea of prog-
ress in societies which recognize the principle of equality of all people.
3. Silence and taboo the concepts
In this section, we examine the functions of silence and taboo in different con-
texts and in different cultures. To interpret silence, one needs to be aware of cul-
tural differences and of how culture-related silence is connected with taboo. An
advertisement for sanitary pads on the internet and other sites for taboo-related
products are used to show how taboos go beyond mere silence.
3.1. Silence as a part of communication

Depending on the specific situation, silence can be used to express, and be in-
terpreted as expressing, a wide range of meanings. Where in one context silence
will cause unease and be uncomfortable for those sharing it, in another context,
silence may be experienced as comfortable and intimate. Jensen (1973: 253)
outlines the different intentions and functions of silence. His categories are
often used in more recent research:
1. A linkage function: silence may bond two (or more) people or it may separ-
ate them.
2. An affecting function: silence may heal (over time) or wound.
3. A revelation function: silence may make something known to a person (self
exploration) or it may hide information from others.
4. A judgmental function: silence may signal assent and favor or it may signal
dissent and disfavor.
5. An activating function: silence may signal deep thoughtfulness (work) or it
may signal mental inactivity.
Jaworski (1997) pursues a similar approach to Jensens in categorizing silence
according to its nature and function. He lists an interesting and diverse list of
types of silence in the index of his book on Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspec-
tives: absolute, acoustic, antecedent, anterior, arbitrary, contemplative, displayed,
gustatory, inter- and intra-turn, olfactory, spiritual, static, surrogate, tactile, tem-
poral, and visual.
The way silence is intended and read as part of communication does not
only depend on the general situational context but also on the cultural context.
The values connected to silence may therefore be negative, positive, or neutral,
and may express disagreement and anger in one context, affection and respect in
another. In educational settings, silence can be a sign of active learning and
concentration, as well as of idleness and ignorance (Jaworski 1999). In Western
cultures, silence in organizational contexts may signal lack of motivation and
interest, while actually originating in stress and ambiguous communication
(Jenkins 2000). In Asian cultures, silence is often a sign of respect and affection;
but remaining silent is also very common as a means to avoid verbal negation
and to show disagreement.
The meaning of silence is strongly tied to cultural conventions. Knapp
(2000) distinguishes between conventional silence and significant silence. The
first type refers to silence which is in accordance with the prevailing conven-
tions while the latter is characterized by the non-realization of a verbal act that
conventionally is expected to occur. Knapp (2000: 8) categorizes different ways

of communication that can be summarized under the label of silence. By means
of differentiated analyses of silence, he points out how communicative mis-
understandings may arise because of different, culturally rooted functions of si-
lence in various situations. In addition to terminological differentiation of the
various forms and functions of silence, Knapp looks at stereotypes created by
cultural differences in this context. Investigating the value of eloquence in dif-
ferent cultures, he shows how
[] forms of behavior related to silence figure prominently as potential sources of
intercultural misunderstanding. In view of the metaphor of malfunction it does not
come as a surprise that members of cultures or ethnic groups who conventionally
communicate with more or longer phases of non-talk and less talk proper, are per-
ceived negatively, at least by interactants from Western cultures, and that repeated
contact with members from cultures that in this sense are more silent leads to gen-
eralizing individual person-related negative attributions to negative stereotypes of
different ethnic groups or cultures (Knapp 2000: 3).
The problem of using silence or being silent as descriptive categories from an
academic point of view, is that these vague concepts are usually used from ones
own cultural perspective but are treated as universal with regard to interactive
behaviors and the way they are perceived. In order to understand silence, it is
essential to be aware of the formal features of face-to-face interaction; the per-
ception of non-talk as pauses, silences or non-communication depends on the
cultural conventions that the individual who categorizes the respective com-
municative functions is familiar with. We can see that silence may be misunder-
stood if we generalize its meaning or when we attach the meaning a pause has in
our own cultural environment to a conversation held in another. In intercultural
situations, silence may also have serious implications for the communication act
altogether, namely, when it is an indication that a taboo has been touched.
3.2. Taboo meaning and functions

Like silence, taboo is a complex concept which has serious implications for
intercultural communication. Before we look at the connection between the two
concepts, we will analyze the origin of the term and the meanings taboos have in
todays modern societies.
It is apparent that the basic meanings of taboo/tabu in todays usage have
little to do with the original concept from Tonga3. The essential meaning the
word has in Tonga and that is attached to the word in European languages is
known to most users: The Encyclopedia Britannica (2002: DVD Edition) spec-
ifies a first meaning, according to which taboo is a prohibition against touch-
ing, saying, or doing something for fear of immediate harm from a supernatural
force. In the following discussion, a taboo concept should be developed which
follows the second basic meaning mentioned in the Encyclopedia Britannica

(2002: DVD Edition) according to which a taboo is a prohibition imposed by
social custom or as a protective measure. The newer colloquial use of taboo
with a pejorative meaning is not yet considered in dictionaries.4
The second meaning of the word taboo given in the Encyclopedia Britannica
is that taboos in modern societies are a part of the social code, which establishes
the actions and behaviors that should not take place (Zllner 1997: 2526), and
determines what one does not communicate about or what should only be com-
municated about in a certain way. Thus, we mean by the term taboo (negative)
conventions of actions (what one does not do), non-themes (what one does not
speak about), as well as themes which require a certain linguistic etiquette (what
one only speaks of in a certain way).
Communication, linguistic taboos, and action taboos have one feature in
common. They are normally not explicitly mentioned or codified like grammar
rules or laws. In the process of primary language acquisition, language prin-
ciples, rules, and the lexicon do not need to be codified because they are, like
taboos, internalized in the process of growing up. The difference here is that, in
the case of grammar rules, there is a right or wrong, but taboos are context-sen-
sitive, and there is no clear definition of what is right and what is wrong.5
Taboo has no (visible) features except for silence that may act as an indi-
cator. Only the violation of a taboo makes its existence visible. The quintes-
sence of the term taboo in various disciplines, such as sociology, psychology,
and linguistics, is that they are usually concerned with something that is for-
bidden to be done, said, thought, felt, known, and touched, though it is do-able,
say-able, feel-able, recognizable, and touchable: otherwise, it need not be pro-
tected by a taboo. Taboos mark boundaries of acting, speaking, and thinking
(Kraft 2004: 10) and can be understood as negative conventions: certain things,
spirits, institutions, subjects, and contexts are not supposed to be touched or
have actions performed on them, whereas the symbolic touch is also forbidden,
as for example in picture taboos.
Reimanns (1989: 421) concept of taboo is particularly appropriate for the
analysis of modern societies (with secularly rather than religiously motivated
taboos). According to Reimann, taboos are societal matters of course and thus
hold an important social function in the regulation of behavior, the establish-
ment of boundaries, and the recognition of authority, for example, in the protec-
tion of property, the position of leaders, and certain social rules (Reimann 1989:
421). Taboo can be seen as the recognition of persons and subjects who indicate
force and threat and thereby require careful behavior upon the encounter. In
general, the role of taboo is to enforce social order.
However, taboos should not be confused with prohibitions. Prohibitions
require codification, whereas taboos presuppose that everyone knows what
is considered taboo; there are no explicit norms. This also means that, if one
breaks a taboo, there will be no discussion of the violation; therefore there is no

way of defending oneself. Punishing a violation, in the case of taboos, relies
mainly upon feelings of guilt, detestation, and shame: the person committing
a taboo violation is isolated, avoided by the society, made taboo. The person
who violates a taboo is stigmatized without discussion (Reimann 1989: 421).
Taboos are impassioned; they strongly depend on emotional influence and
they are beyond all discussion; this phenomenon is known in nourishment
taboos and the socialization of the small child. He or she already knows at a very
young age that certain actions and contacts are forbidden through statements
like One does not do that, That is not appropriate, etc. Taboos get internal-
ized by means of these kinds of inarticulate imperatives in the process of raising
children. Thus, legal rules and formal sanctions often become superfluous
(Reimann 1989: 421).
Taboos are a particularly effective way of control (Reimann 1989: 421) and
can be understood as axioms of communication, i.e., as unquestionable basic
truths of a society which may not be broached. Certain persons, places, and ac-
tivities, e.g., nourishment as well as other areas, such as sexuality, desire, pov-
erty, inequality, corruption, violence, death, and certain diseases, are considered
taboo (Reimann 1989: 421). These topics are universally burdened with taboos,
though the degree to which a topic is taboo varies from one culture to another,
and there are differences within societies and across individuals. The younger
generation of a society may be more comfortable discussing sexuality than the
earlier generations of the same society. Taboos are always context-sensitive.
Apart from the social and political control discussed in this section, there are
other important social functions that taboos fulfill: they add to the stability of
societies and groups and have protective functions. Taboos secure the survival
and the future of a society by simply avoiding or covering things that might be a
threat for the positive identity and life perspective of an individual or a group:
dark sides of ones own history, death, illness, or the question about the meaning
of life. Therefore, taboo can be understood as a coping mechanism, as a strategy
to build individual and collective identity (Kraft 2004: 114). Taboos cover the
potentially dangerous and painful in a society.
3.3. Culture-related silence and taboo

Culture-related silence is connected with taboos and can lead to misunderstand-
ings and conflicts in intercultural contact situations. Taboo and silence are
related, but they are not the same. Taboos are negative conventions and refer to
actions and verbal communication. They mark that something should not be
touched, while the touching can also be symbolic. Knowledge about taboo
grows with the child. Taboos do not need to be explained or justified, and they
are a matter of course besides being part of a persons social identity, but they
are also culture-bound. If they are being broken, the shame falls on the taboo
breaker and disgust on the affected person. This is only the case, of course, if the
person touching a taboo is aware of it, which may not be the case in intercultural
situations.
Taboos are related, on the one hand, to strategies of omission, avoidance,
and concealment, so that certain actions and interactions remain completely
avoided. On the other hand, taboos also make possible and require the appli-
cation of strategies of disguising, covering, glossing over, and circumvention.
Taboos go beyond mere silence and make substitutes available for communi-
cation. Language always finds new forms of coping, when dealing with taboos.
Like other communication devices, silence can be used as a tool, and can func-
tion in contrary ways. It can be empowering or oppressive, indicate interper-
sonal closeness or anger and hatred. It can also be used (or read) as a means to
mislead by concealing something.
To exemplify the relationship between silence and taboo, we will take a look
at how the two strategies are purposefully connected in advertisements of cer-
tain products. In advertising, the relation between silence and taboo often has
to be a well calculated one. Many products that belong to areas of health and
hygiene are connected to such taboo areas as bodily functions, sexuality, and
therefore become taboo products. This holds true for products for feminine hy-
giene, for the protection from incontinence, for the treatment of hemorrhoids, or
the athletes foot. Advertisements for these products have to take into account
taboos and use appropriate taboo discourse.
Taking into account taboos involves strategies of hedging as well as verbal
and visual silence. Hedging in this context means to shield oneself against
something unpleasant by doing something which will protect you from it. Hedg-
ing a problem or question may involve avoidance of giving a definite answer to
a question or giving a non-committing answer and postponing a decision. Hedg-
ing can be understood as the verbal realization of vagueness which depends on
context and situation. The aim of hedging may be the avoidance of conflict, or
in any case the avoidance of break-off of communication (cf. Markkanen and
Schrder 1997).
Hedging may also be used in non-verbal communication. In online advertis-
ing (cf. Wrobel 2003), there are usually pictures involved that demonstrate how
a product is supposed to be used or how effective it is. Just as taboos are culture
specific, icons and symbols that communicate product information only work
within cultural boundaries. Depending on the degree to which a bodily function
is taboo, visual hedging may be used.
Online advertising for sanitary pads for example uses soft-focusing or, as on
the US-American Websites of Kotex, visual silence (www.kotex.com, last
access: January 10, 2008). Information involving the actual use of the product is
also packed away to a deeper level of the site (concealed) to lead consumers
gradually to more detailed information. This careful approach is used to avoid
total break-off of communication that may occur if consumers are confronted
with taboo topics too abruptly.
Complete silence about bodily functions or potential users of a product is
of course also part of verbal hedging. Wrobel (2003) transfers the concept of
exceptional situations, such as mourners, menstruating women, and women
in childbed, from indigenous cultures to people in Western societies. The
taboo areas have changed to certain illnesses and ageing processes. In her
study, Wrobel compares US and German websites to show that the taboo
is stronger and the discourse more vague if the advertisers have less experi-
ence with advertising taboo products (Wrobel 2003: 124). Wrobel proves that
the high degree of hedging around subjects such as incontinence or hemor-
rhoids indicates that though the advertisers claim that these topics are be-
coming less taboo, this is not the case. The verbal discourse around hemor-
rhoids is full of metalinguistic signs that indicate that they are not only
a sensitive topic but downright taboo, the actual name of the illness only
occurs in the third sentence, where it is described as a sensitive problem
(Wrobel 2003: 157).
Hedging and other strategies such as omission and silence are being used in
taboo discourse. Taboos are carefully addressed in a society when there is a need
for it (for example, in advertising) to avoid break-off of communication. Where
taboo and silence are combined and used as tools, culture specific meanings of
both concepts have to be taken into account. This is especially important in in-
tercultural communication where social conventions differ and an ignorance of
cultural differences may lead to unintended taboo violations.
3.4. Taboos and taboo violations

Within the area of taboo, it is necessary to make a distinction between object ta-
boos (taboos on things, institutions, and persons) and action taboos, which are
accompanied and substantiated by communication taboos (taboo themes), word
taboos (vocabulary taboos), and picture taboos, which are in turn supported by
thought taboos and emotion taboos. Specific functions of verbal taboos (com-
munication taboos), in comparison to non-verbal taboos (taboos of action), in-
clude the following:
Confirmation and support of taboos that fall under an absolute taboo of ac-
tion (One does not speak about that, nor does one do that.). An example of
this is incest as taboo. It is a taboo to a degree that it is not talked about at all;
this way, the verbal taboo confirms the action taboo, thus sanctioning the act
of incest. (Kraft underlines his socio-economic approach by indicating that
in case of the incest-taboo the aim is also the survival of the individual and
his social group (Kraft 2004: 92)).
Permission for certain tabooed actions through a thin veil according to
accepted rules of etiquette (One does not openly speak about that, but one
may do that according to the pre-established rules of etiquette.). Examples
here include sexuality and other bodily functions and activities that a culture
has silenced.
The veiling of tabooed actions, where general acceptance cannot be presup-
posed. The actions are made possible through the modification of facts.
(Actually, one does not do that, but if one does it, then one speaks about
it in a secretive manner or expresses it another way). Taboos in politics and
economy fit this category, as for example when politicians (and others)
speak of a gift instead of a bribe and of an operation instead of war.
Veiling also concerns other euphemisms that may indicate taboo topics.
If we have to talk about the fact that someone died, we may use the phrase
he passed away or, in recent times, he passed.
Taboos serve as an important relief for every society. Sensitive issues and the
way we deal with them need to be self-explicatory, do not have to be justified,
and must not be questioned. In this respect, taboos are often more efficient than
direct prohibitions, because they seem natural to the involved and have been in-
ternalized. Taboos express silent consensus which the concerned may not be
aware of at all.
The taboo complex, on the one hand, consists of the taboo and the accept-
ance of the taboo, i.e. the marking of boundaries, and, on the other hand, the
taboo violation or the crossing of the boundaries. The violation of taboos is un-
thinkable without their existence. Viewed from the opposite perspective, taboos
would not be necessary without the danger of a possible violation. Kraft (2004:
211) points out that taboos secure identity but at the same time enable develop-
ment. Usually, a taboo violation is an attack on personal and social identity:
Taboo violations are indicators for changes in identity (Kraft 2004: 177). This
means that taboo violations are very important for social development, and they
fulfill several functions at once: they mark what is taboo in a society, raise con-
sciousness with regard to boundaries, and indicate shortcomings.
One has to differentiate between individual and collective taboo violations,
and between permanent and temporary taboo crossings. It can be assumed that
ritualized or institutionalized taboo crossings are common in some areas, but
they work only temporarily. Such taboo violations are not arbitrary; they have
a function in the relevant society. Temporary taboo crossings do not entail the
abolition of the taboo, but they temporarily lift the sanctioning mechanism. It is
possible for the taboo mechanism on the whole to be strengthened by a tempor-
ary taboo lift; humor can be used as comic relief in this context. When we talk
about death and dying, there are many humorous expressions that cover how un-
comfortable we may feel around the topic (bite the dust, kick the bucket, buy the
farm, or cash in ones chips). The temporary taboo lift occurs in special situ-
ations: academic discourse, doctor-patient communication, communication in
court, general emergency situations and situations of social change, jokes and
satire, curses, religion, and media strategies, such as talk-shows and advertise-
ments. The function of ritualized and institutionalized taboo violations is, that,
as part of the order system, they not only actually mark the violation but also
serve as an outlet for the pressure and thereby strengthen the taboo itself.
4. Linguistic means and taboo discourse
A discussion about the different functions of linguistically realized taboos needs

to include a closer analysis of taboo discourse and a closer look at different de-
grees of directness. Meaningful silence as part of taboo discourse is closely
linked to avoiding directness in addressing a topic. Throughout this section,
examples are used to illustrate the scope and complexity of both, silence and
taboo, so that the relations between them will become visible.
4.1. Taboo discourse

In communication, we do not usually have only the choice between speaking
or being silent (and refraining completely from addressing a theme). Rather,
through the application of certain linguistic means, we can certainly treat deli-
cate topics, without putting our foot in our mouth. Our language gives us a
multitude of possibilities for these cases. We can hint at, circumvent, gloss over,
etc., and in these ways communicate about areas with taboos, but without viol-
ating conventions. In this context we use the term taboo discourse.
Taboo discourse enables communication about things, which one does not
actually wish to talk about or even should not talk about. It includes various
forms of covering up, which exist in our language and culture but which we are
not always aware of. We mean, by the term taboo discourse, that in certain situ-
ations one can communicate about actions, subjects, institutions, and persons
with taboos. However, this can only be done in a very specific way, which does
not constitute a (verbal) taboo violation itself.
At the same time, euphemisms are not the only possibility to speak of sub-
jects, actions, and facts with taboos. Apart from the possibility of withdrawing
completely from a discussion about taboos (breaking-off of a discussion, spatial
distance, etc.), there are also various levels of openness available to the speak-
ers. This can range from the explicit One does not speak about that to a thor-
ough discussion. In this range of possibilities, the speakers must develop mech-
anisms or strategies, which allow them to speak with a one-quarter, half, or

three-quarter openness (Gnther 1992: 4849).
Concerning linguistic substitutes for taboo discourse, Havers (1946) lists
the following basic types in his linguistic-historical work on Indo-Germanic
languages: pronunciation changes, loan words, antiphrasing (one says the oppo-
site of what is meant; wish names), representative pronouns, euphemistic con-
tamination (word-crossing), stretching meanings, sentence-like descriptions
(wish sentences and descriptive relative sentences), captatio benevolentiae, el-
lipsis, subject-instrumental, as well as escape to generalities (generalization,
taboo-plural). More recent works on linguistic taboo research go far beyond this
typology from Havers (i.e., Balle 1990). At the same time, they extend the for-
mulation and methods of discourse and conversation analysis to indirect or
hidden speech. In particular, Gnther (1992) handles linguistic means, which
make the veiling of an expression possible. She names metaphor as the best
known strategy. Other strategies named by Gnther (1992: 5254, 218220)
are: the use of euphemisms and specialized vocabulary, agent emphasis and
omission, rhetorical account and role specification, word avoidance and vague-
ness, additional information on the limitation of expressions, and the use of pro-
forms.
However, taboos can also be used as tools. The degree of directness plays an
important role: taboo topics may be openly discussed (explicit taboo), suggested
(implicit taboo), or they may be completely avoided (avoided taboo). In this
case, a topic would not be tackled at all but kept in verbal and visual silence
(Krajewski 2002: 137). Attention is assured by deliberately choosing taboo
topics and addressing them straightforwardly, rather than indirectly through
socially accepted taboo discourse.
The clothing company Benetton has followed this strategy for years. It
is part of their communication strategy to shock, to provoke strong reactions by
visually presenting taboo topics. The actual product, colorful clothing, is usually
absent from their posters. Oliviero Toscani, who is known for his provocative
advertising, views advertising as a legitimate tool for social criticism that can
do without products. An example is Benettons campaign We, on death row
which shows images of death row inmates to address the human side of death
row in several US-prisons. This campaign created considerable problems for the
company and its advertising director. In reaction to the campaign, the US cloth-
ing chain Sears cancelled the contract with Benetton and removed all products
from its stores, because the killers victims were not mentioned at all (Mller
2004: 80). Benetton defended the campaign but withdrew the ads. By the end
of this campaign, Benetton and Toscani separated after many years of close co-
operation.
Niskanen (1999) acknowledges that campaigns that use pictures dealing
with cultural taboos regularly create problems in society.
Taboos can vary from society and even from subgroup to subgroup and include, for
example, death, illness, birth, and the human body. Themes such as refugees, Mafia,
over-population, and pollution might be actual phenomena in our society, but they
are not always accepted when used in advertising commercial products (Niskanen
1999: 370).
The pluralism of values among different societies becomes apparent, especially

when cultural taboos are involved. Taboo themes may collide with legal, politi-
cal, or social prerequisites. A flag in an advertisement may be banned for legal
reasons; Jews or Blacks protesting against an advertisement presenting repre-
sentatives of their group is a political issue (Niskanen 1999: 373); and an adver-
tisement presenting people on death row is a cultural, ethical, and aesthetic
taboo. More recent examples of taboo acts that are widely discussed are the
cartoons in Danish papers picturing Mohammed: in the West this counts as a
harmless joke, but Muslims are outraged because depicting God or Mohammed
in a mocking way is seen as an attack (on identity) and strictly taboo.
Pop icon Madonna has always enjoyed provocative performances. On her
latest tour, she is suspended from a cross as she performs the song Live to Tell.
By deliberately mocking a symbol, she attracts attention and gains publicity, but
also provokes many negative reactions: Vatican Cardinal Ersilio Tonino, who
spoke with the approval of the Pope, called the concert a blasphemous chal-
lenge to the faith and a profanation of the cross (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/
entertainment/5251614.stm; last access: February 08, 2008). He also called for
Madonna, who was raised as a Catholic, to be excommunicated. Not only Cath-
olics feel offended; Mario Scialoja, the head of Italys Muslim League refers to
the act as in the worst taste and Riccardo Pacifici, vice president of the Roman
Jewish community, said she should have cut the routine because of the close
proximity of the Olympic Stadium to the Vatican.
4.2. Discourse relevant silence

Silence is always a relevant part of communication acts and may be a calculated
part of taboo discourse. In a personal conversation between two people, the ac-
tual topic may be avoided by remaining silent. The participants get rid of the un-
comfortable task of talking directly. There are numerous studies of silence that
indicate various meanings. Silence is used to fulfill the interpersonal meta-
function and may be used to avoid conflict. It may be a means of negotiating
power relations or a face-saving strategy in impaired communication (Jaworski
and Stephens 1998).
One person alone can speak, but to be silent one needs the co-operation of all
involved. This means that meaningful silence is only possible in the case of two
or more people sharing the situation in which silence takes place and their mu-
tual understanding of the code of silence. An exchange of silence can only take
place when all sides accept the rules and do not break them by directly address-
ing the subject. The relation between taboo and silence is apparent in everyday
life situations and sometimes results from small misunderstandings or incon-
veniences.
4.3. The representation of taboo topics

Subjects such as sexual abuse and incest are classical taboo topics that, by all
means, should remain action taboos but not communication taboos. The social
convention of avoiding communication about abuse and incest is enhancing the
possibilities for abuse to take place. This is why the silence about these taboo
areas must be broken.
Television mediated discourse about taboos may actually help facilitate
communication about taboo topics in real life. What is seen on television can be
discussed just like real-life events but since drama shown on television is mere
fiction based on real life, it seems safer to discuss taboo topics shown on
television. We will look at hospital drama to exemplify the effects television
discourse may have on the development of taboos in real life.
Playing with taboo is a key ingredient of this genre. It seems to be natural to
have a conglomerate of mental and physical health problems, social dysfunc-
tion, and human tragedy in hospital drama. Hospital drama presents a place
where body and soul are human and fallible, and taboo topics may be touched
with less fear: there are no longer unmentionable illnesses, and taboo topics may
be openly discussed. Hospital drama is a television genre that consists of stories
around life and death and therefore covers stories around bodily functions and
human problems that are often connected to taboo topics, and, last but not least,
death itself. The discourse around these taboo topics reflects interpersonal com-
munication about taboo topics in medical drama, but the mediated discussions
could and probably do take place in a similar way in real life. Hospital drama is
an entertainment product that works with stereotypes; storylines are kept simple
and are eventually brought to an end while new ones are developed. Despite
the simple structure and many shortcomings, most medical details are well
researched and real doctors give advice about procedures. They also inform
producers about recurring cases from their practical experience. The mediated
discourse about taboo topics, such as sexual abuse, includes hedging strategies
and silence and often could have been taken straight from medical practice. Sex-
ual abuse is a familiar theme within the genre of hospital drama.
In Life Goes on. And Sometimes it Doesnt, Krajewski (2002) shows how
television drama uses real-life taboo discourse. In a conversation between two
nurses (Die Stadtklinik 1995), the head nurse approaches a young colleage and
asks her why her behavior has recently changed:
(1)
head nurse: I can tell something is weighing on your mind, you dont talk any
more, you withdraw. Your father wants to leave the clinic as soon
as possible [music sets in] and your mother remains silent when
I ask what is wrong with you. Gabi, what has happened? (trans-
lation from German ours; S.K./H.S.).
Finally, Gabi breaks down and tells her that her father has repeatedly raped
her (Krajewski 2002: 147). The television show skillfully uses interruption of
speech and longer silences when presenting taboo topics, the silence of affected
people is verbally referred to and the use of music is an additional device to
show just how sensitive the topic is.
In another medical drama series (OP ruft Dr. Bruckner, Germany 1999), the
topic of infibulation (the removal of the female outer genital organs) is part of
the story line. Infibulation is a taboo in Western societies, though there are
recurring campaigns by womens liberation groups and human rights organiz-
ations trying to inform the public about this practice and to organize action
against it. The topic provokes heated discussions, but it is not threatening to
Western society. The problem is far away and will not touch our private
sphere. The taboo topic can be dramatized, but there is a picture taboo: we do
not see the mutilated body or the books the doctors lose their appetite over, but
instead we have to use our imagination. All the gory details in operating theatres
are visualized, so that we even see organs accidentally being dropped onto the
floor, but there is visual silence about infibulation. The taboo is verbally dis-
cussed, but there is no solution. One TV doctor sees infibulation as the utmost
degradation of the female, her male colleague claims that this practice is merely
a cultural, religious ritual. Another doctor claims that it is mens fear of female
sexuality. The topic is far too complex to fit into 50 something minutes, and be-
cause of this it becomes farcical and involuntarily creates a humorous effect.
The first example may open a discussion about sexual abuse and incest among
viewers. The context of a fictive drama series makes it easier to discuss and
voice opinions about a topic that is otherwise taboo (Krajewski 2002: 151). The
second example provides different views within the television episode, but in-
fibulation is an action taboo in Western societies, not a communication taboo. In
terms of the development of the taboo in real life, the breaking of the silence
around sexual abuse as represented in the first example may have an effect on
the strength of the communication taboo within a society. Topics such as the
ones in our examples were not included in early television drama. This is a de-
velopment of the 1990s and may be read as a sign that the strength of the com-
munication taboo is gradually fading.
4.4. Taboo-related silence in family therapy
Significant events, such as the experience of violence, may lead to impaired

speech or to complete silence. It is the task of psychologists and psychothera-
pists to work out the problems behind the symptoms. Psychotherapists who
work with refugee children and their families encounter taboo-related silence in
different dimensions. In their article about eloquent silence in children and
family therapy, Walter, Mller, and Adam (2000) concentrate on the importance
of language (and lack thereof) in psychotherapeutical work with refugee
children and their families. Loss of language, stuttering, and silence are symp-
toms of trauma. The ability to express oneself verbally is diminished by experi-
ences of violence. Because of this lack of immediately readable language, there
is a chance to avoid superficial understanding and instead develop and find a
common language. The aim is to lift the communication taboo, to create contact
with the inner self (feelings, imagination, needs) as well as to create contact
with the family and society. The authors describe alienated language, language
that has been muted, and language that has been mutilated in refugee children.
One of their patients is Jussuf who comes from Afghanistan.
He stutters, but only in his mother tongue, Dari (Afghan Persian). The language has
become the symbol of what happened in this language. One night, the family was
raided by the Talibani. The father took his son on his arm, tried to flee down a stair-
case, fell and the son broke off his front teeth. Ever since, he is ashamed and covers
his mouth with his hand when he opens it. Pictures of danger, flight, physical injury,
having to be silent, and not to be held onto by his father, mix in his memory (Walter,
Mller, and Adam 2000: 554; translation ours, S.K./H.S.).
To help Jussuf, his father now speaks only German with him, but this makes
a differentiated communication impossible. For both, the traumatic event
has had consequences, because they have lost a communication tool and
are constantly reminded of the fathers inability to protect Jussuf in a critical
situation.
Many of the children who go through traumatic experiences become silent.
Mutism is a sign of social fear.
In their discussion about post-traumatic stress disorder, Walter, Mller, and
Adam (2000) address another kind of taboo the picture taboo. The ability to
think in pictures and feel to pictures is often restricted through experiences of vi-
olence. Language cannot be used creatively any more, but reflects the numbing
caused by trauma. The loss of symbolic thinking, and therefore of creativity and
imagination, is especially deleterious to the development of children. While stut-
tering is a sign of disturbed communication to the outside world, mutism affects
the inner language and therefore the ability to build inner cognitive schemes that
help predict the outside world (Walter, Mller, and Adam 2000: 557).
4.5. The pact of silence

A central concept that has been proven to help traumatized families of the kind
described in the previous section is the pact of silence.
The pact of silence (Danieli 1980) is a central concept in the work with
traumatized families. The social pact of silence includes the climate of terror as
ruling instrument of dictatorial regimes as well as the societal negation of social
violence. The negation refers to the victims who do not want to acknowledge
their victimization because that would mean facing feelings of humiliation and
shame; but it also refers to the perpetrators who, in order to avoid feelings of
guilt, understand their doings as reactive violence or as violence against brutes.
The family pact of silence aims at making things undone and reflects the
wish to quickly get back to a familiar normality. This non-communication about
problems often becomes a model for the children, according to the motto One
does not talk about the most difficult. This makes it hard to get help and often
adds to feelings of loneliness. The pact of silence is connected with the hope that
the children or the partner may not realize how bad one feels (Walter, Mller,
and Adam 2000: 558).
The examples discussed so far have already indicated that taboo areas have
an additional dimension. The next section highlights the issues that arise as soon
as people from different cultural backgrounds are involved in the communi-
cation process.
5. Taboo topics and silence in intercultural communication
Societies differ in their beliefs and in their rules of propriety and decency. When
one enters a foreign culture, therefore, there are, certain matters that one should
not talk about. However, one might still have to mention them somehow. Speak-
ers tend to observe the societal decency code, and when the need arises to talk
about a tabooed referent, they create new lexical items. Some may be jocular at
first, but often they become generally accepted and thus conventionalized.
Foreigners who come to England, for instance, are always amazed at what they
regard as fanciful names for toilet. What they are looking for in public build-
ings, theatres, restaurants, or pubs may be called cloakroom, Gents, Ladies,
lavatory, powder room, public convenience, rest room, etc. (Quirk and Stein
1990: 131132).
Taboos almost universally cover the references to sexual and excretory
functions, incest, and matricide. As a result of the intimate connection between
language and culture, every group of humans assigns offensive or otherwise
negative associations with certain sounds, words, names, numbers, figures,
shapes, and colors (Aman 1982: 215216).
An exemplary study on taboos within the context of politeness in communi-

cation between Poles and English-speaking foreigners was conducted by Ja-
worski et al. (1990). They understand taboo topics as topics which speakers
feel to be unsuitable or inappropriate for them to mention in the presence of
others (1990: 1). The aim of the study was to find answers to the following
questions:
(1) What do the British and Americans feel is inappropriate to say in the pres-
ence of Poles?
(2) What do the British and Americans feel is an appropriate or safe topic in
their home countries but is usually avoided (i.e. tabooed) by Poles?
(3) What do the British and Americans feel is inappropriate to say in Britain and
in the United States, but Poles do not hesitate to say? (Jaworski et al. 1990:
16)
As an outcome of the study, on the basis of a written questionnaire, with 18
foreigners who are living in Poland, the following taboo areas were identified to
be the most important ones for foreigners staying in Poland: religion, sexuality,
bodily functions, politics and Polish history. Furthermore, it was disclosed that
the questioned foreigners felt it to be especially complicated to criticize cases of
obvious racism by Poles, negative attitudes towards minorities by Poles (homo-
sexuals, handicapped, non-Catholics), as well as criticizing authorities who are
particularly popular in Poland (Walesa, Reagan, Thatcher). To avoid topic-
based conflicts in intercultural contact situations, Jaworski et al. (1990: 1) de-
mand optimal convergence between a foreigner and host along the level of
topic based on increased sensitivity for the existing differences between people
from different cultures.
While questionnaires and interviews doubtlessly lead to revealing results
about the existence and development of taboos in a given culture and in inter-
cultural contact situations, one needs to be cautious. Is it per se possible to elicit
direct evidence of deeply rooted taboos by asking those involved? As discussed
before, taboos are by definition self-explicable, and they are acknowledged, but
not defined exactly in a way that makes it almost impossible to formulate them
(cf. Rammstedt 1964: 40). The function of taboos even pre-supposes their re-
pression in the conscience of the person concerned since already the identifica-
tion and naming of a taboo may mean a taboo breach. This implies the danger
that we only become aware of those taboos that are not controlling us. As soon
as the taboo can be reflected, it is no longer a taboo (Rammstedt 1964: 41).
Still, there is a vital difference between (only) talking about taboos and
breaching them through actions. This becomes apparent by the verbal taboo
violations in talk-shows which have become a mere gimmick. Taboo violations
in talk-shows always have to be entertaining for the audience, so they do not re-
flect discourse practice of the relevant culture at all.6
Because of the reasons mentioned, questionnaires and interviews about ta-

boos need to be enhanced by other methods. An important one is discourse
analysis, since indications of the existence of taboos may be derived from the
analysis of the way communication and speech take place. An intercultural di-
mension adds to the complexity of the concepts of taboo and silence and makes
it even more difficult to interpret their occurrence in communication.
6. Conclusion
The word and the concept tabu has come to us from a distant language and cul-
ture and the way it is used today has only little to do with its original meaning. It
is useful and meaningful to use the concept in the analysis of modern societies
in general and in intercultural communication in particular. Taboos in the sense
outlined in this article are characteristic for all forms of community, because
they are a prerequisite for organized coexistence, and prevent unnecessary dis-
pute and conflict from occurring, without having to explicitly and directly regu-
late social interaction as a whole. The taboo complex is inseparably connected
to taboo crossing and taboo violation, as well as breaking of taboos and de-ta-
booization.
We have provided an overview of the relevant theories and results achieved
in research on taboo and silence in (intercultural) communication. Concrete
examples have illustrated the benefits these results provide in practical terms
and that there is a need for more studies, especially in intercultural contexts.
Subjects of taboo research are:
negative conventions of actions (taboos of action Dont do it)
non-themes (zones of silence, i.e., communication taboos Dont speak
about it!)
etiquette themes (taboo discourse Dont speak about it that way!)
linguistic expressions to be avoided (linguistic taboos Dont say that!)
the possible relationships between verbal and non-verbal taboos.
A problem of modern societies and intercultural communication is that taboo
rules cannot be stated explicitly. Taboos dealing with death, dying, and funerals
are largely agreed upon; however, there are group-specific differences when it
comes to taboos concerning sexuality. This is particularly true for homosexual-
ity. The differences may vary with age, education, social background, as well as
ones own sexual orientation.
Taboos ensure the stability of a society and are the basis for the identity of
the individual and his/her group. Taboo breaches allow development and dy-
namics. No community can do without this taboo complex. Modern societies
are also marked by taboos, though one can see an advancing de-tabooization in
certain areas. This is balanced by the emergence of new taboos. Because of the
progressive secularization and growing value pluralism, as well as an overall
globalization of all areas of life, todays taboos are not always and in every case
the same for all groups and individuals.
Taboos are rather context-sensitive; they have to be related to certain groups
and situations. It is important to separate action and communication taboos.
Communication taboos may be ambivalent because they include the conceal-
ment and repression of delicate subjects within a community and they can
hinder development. Dealing with taboos and taboo violation in intercultural
communication is difficult as recently shown in the argument around the Mo-
hammed caricature. In intercultural contact situations it is important to recog-
nize and understand meaningful silence of the foreign and other. Taboo breach
needs to be calculated and learned and, last but not least, this depends on the lin-
guistic and communicative competence of the participants.
Notes
1. In his review of the term Shtika, Ulrich Struve (1998) points out that, in their book
Shtika, Bubis and Mehler (1996) illustrate the result of silence in families. Even
if the experiences of parents who survived the National Socialist ghettos in the
1940s are not discussed at all, they are always present under the surface. Shtika tries
to break the taboo, but the authors and most of the interviewees fail to do this on
account of depth of silence. Bubis and Mehler (cited in Struve, http://www.literatur-
cafe.de/bf.htm?/erinnern/teil5.htm; last access: February 10, 2008) arrive at the
conclusion that one has to respect the victims life elixir which is suppression: The
long, silent years between the generations cannot be caught up with through talks in
the future.
2. Noa refers to the opposite of taboo and means common or free from taboo.
3. The word Tabu originally tapu comes from the Polynesian language, Tonga. It is
one of the few words, from a language other than Indo-Germanic ones, to have found
its way into languages of Western civilizations. James Cook brought this word to Eng-
land in 1777 from his South Seas trip. From this point onwards, it spread rapidly to
other languages and found its way into educated speech.
4. This is playing an increasingly significant role, particularly in the media where taboos
in communication serve as reproachful linguistic acts. Expressions such as free of
taboos, breach and to free from taboos go along with positive connotations in this con-
text.
5. There are attempts to provide sets of cultural rules to travelers, for example by offer-
ing useful guidebooks such as KulturSchluessel (KulturSchluessel Malaysia and Sin-
gapur 2003) which include sections such as Do and Taboo. The taboo chapters include
what to bring (or what not to bring) to a festive event or the advice not to wash your
hair during Chinese New Year, because it is believed to mean bad luck. As useful as
this advice may be, it is related to customs and superstitious belief and does not cover
what we mean by taboo in the present chapter.
6. It could be very misleading and would result in disaster if subjects and discourse re-
flected in TV talk-shows were to be transferred to intercultural contact situations.
Talk-shows misrepresent everyday discourse and pretend that everything, especially
controversial topics, may be talked about without taboos.
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622
Biographical notes 623
Biographical notes
Jannis Androutsopoulos is reader in Sociolinguistics & Media Discourse,

Kings College London. His research areas are computer-mediated communi-
cation, youth language and youth cultures, language and popular culture, socio-
linguistic aspects of orthography. His publications include Discourse Construc-
tions of Youth Identities (co-edited with Alexandra Georgakopoulou, 2003, John
Benjamins) and Sociolinguistics and Computer-Mediated Communication
(guest editor, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10/4).
Gerd Antos is Professor in German Linguistics at the Martin Luther University

Halle-Wittenberg and at the Pannonian University of Veszprm (Hungary). He
is a former chairman of the German Society of Applied Linguistics (GAL). His
research interests include applied linguistics, communication in the knowledge
society, and text and discourse linguistics.
Dagmar Barth-Weingarten holds a Ph.D. in English linguistics with a thesis

on various aspects of the realization of concessive constructions in everyday in-
teraction. Presently she teaches at the English Department of Potsdam Univer-
sity (Germany). Her current research employs techniques developed within In-
teractional Linguistics to investigate the role of prosody and phonology in the
signalling of syntactic constructions and their emergence.
Alexander Brock is a lecturer of linguistics at the English department of Halle

University. His research interests include text linguistics, pragmatics, humor
studies, and media linguistics.
Dennis Day is Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Com-

munication, University of Southern Denmark. His research interests include
ethnomethodologically inspired ethnographies of workplaces, membership cat-
egorization, interaction and communication technology. He is currently leading
the project Global Communication in Danish Organizations funded by the
Danish Research Council for the Humanities.
Arnulf Deppermann is head of the pragmatics department at the Institut fr

Deutsche Sprache and professor for German Linguistics at Mannheim Univer-
sity (Germany). His areas of research cover conversation analysis and interac-
tional linguistics, understanding in interaction, multimodal interaction, nar-
rative and identity in biographical interviews and in conversation, construction
grammar, and semantics in talk-in-interaction.
624 Biographical notes
Barbara Fox teaches in the Linguistics department at the University of Colo-

rado. Her research interests include interaction and grammar, the relationships
between grammar and phonetics, and discourse and grammar.
Alexandra Georgakopoulou is reader in Modern Greek Language & Lin-

guistics, Kings College London. She has published widely in the area of con-
versational narrative, computer-mediated communication and identities-in-
interaction. Her books include Narrative Performances: A Study of Modern
Greek Storytelling (1997, John Benjamins), Small stories, Interaction and Iden-
tities (2007, John Benjamins), and Discourse Analysis (co-authored with
Dionysis Goutsos, 2nd ed. 2004, Edinburgh).
Howard Giles obtained his Ph.D. and D.Sc. from the University of Bristol,
England, and ultimately became Chair of Social Psychology and thereafter
Head of Psychology at that same institution. He emigrated to California over
18 years ago, and is Professor (and past-Chair) of Communication at the Uni-
versity of California, Santa Barbara (with affiliated positions in Linguistics
and Psychology).
Susanne Gnthner is professor of German Linguistics at the University of

Mnster, Germany. Her research interests include Interactional Linguistics,
syntax in conversation, genre analysis, intercultural communication and An-
thropological Linguistics. Her Ph.D. dissertation was on discourse strategies in
intercultural communication between Chinese and German speakers. In her ha-
bilitation she analyzed grammatical, prosodic and rhetoric-stylistic features of
communicative genres in everyday interactions.
Anu Klippi, speech and language therapist, is a professor of logopedics and

head of the Department of Speech Sciences at the University of Helsinki. She is
the author of Conversation as an Achievement in Aphasics (1996). She has pub-
lished a number of scholarly articles on the different fields of logopedics, on the
methodological questions of the research of logopedics, and on the training of
speech and language therapists. Her principal interests are communication and
interaction with people with communication disorders, and especially with
people with aphasia and with dementia.
Anna-Maija Korpijaakko-Huuhka is professor in logopedics (speech-lan-

guage pathology) at the University of Tampere, Finland, since August 2006. She
has also been working as a speech-language therapist and a senior lecturer at the
University of Helsinki. Her main interest area is neurogenic communication dis-
orders, and she has been applying the systemic-functional linguistic framework
in her studies on narrative language use of people with aphasia.
Sabine Krajewski is a lecturer in International Communications at Macquarie

University, Sydney, Australia. Her research interest focuses on (media) presen-
tations around the body. Her most recent publications include When Rapunzel
had a bad hair day: The cultural meanings of hair. In: Paul Gladston
(ed.)(2007): A collection of Essays on Culture. CCC Press.
Miriam Lochers work has been in the field of linguistic im/politeness, and the
exercise of power in oral communication (Power and Politeness in Action,
Mouton de Gruyter, 2004; Impoliteness in Language, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008,
co-edited with Derek Bousfield), advice-giving in an American Internet advice
column (Advice Online, John Benjamins, 2006) and Standards and Norms of the
English Language (2008, co-edited with Jrg Strssler). She holds a lizentiat
(MA) from the University of Zurich and a Ph.D. and Habilitation (post-docto-
ral thesis) from the University of Berne. She is working in the English Depart-
ment of the University of Basel, Switzerland.
Margret Pitts obtained her Ph.D. in 2005 from the Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity. She is currently Assistant Professor of Communication in the Department
of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University. She teaches
and conducts research on interpersonal and intercultural communication with an
emphasis on life course transitions and identity.
Peter Muntigl is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the Uni-

versity of Salzburg and an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Education at
Simon Fraser University (Canada). His research interests include talk-in-inter-
action, social semiotics, psychotherapy, conflict talk and narrative. His research
on psychotherapy is currently being funded by a Social Sciences and Hu-
manities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant. He has recently
published a book on psychotherapy called Narrative Counselling: Social and
Linguistic Processes of Change (John Benjamins, 2004).
Louise Ravelli is Senior Lecturer in Communication at the University of New

South Wales. She is interested in sociocultural aspects of communication, both
linguistic and visual, particularly in the areas of museum communication and
academic literacy. She is the author of Museum Texts: Communication Frame-
works (Routledge, 2006).
Angelika Redder holds the chair for the Linguistics of German and is director
of the interdisciplinary Center for Linguistics at the University of Hamburg
(UHH). She got her Ph.D. in General Linguistics (Dsseldorf) and her venia in
German Linguistics (Mnster); at the University of Munich (LMU) she held a
professorship in German as a Foreign Language.
626 Biographical notes
Hartmut Schrder obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Bielefeld, Ger-
many. He served as chair of the Applied Linguistics and as Head of Communi-
cation Studies departments at the University of Vaasa, Finland. Presently, he is
chair of the Linguistic Communication and Media Research department at the
European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. His research inter-
ests include intercultural communication, special languages, and taboos.
Wilfried Schtte has been working at the Institut fr Deutsche Sprache (Mann-
heim/Germany) since 1989. He is concerned with the standardization of tran-
scription conventions, formats, and editors for the Archive of Spoken Ger-
man. His areas of interest include speech corpora technology, media talk,
language and communication in the internet, communication via hypermedia,
and conversation analysis.
Margret Selting is a professor of linguistics and communication at the Univer-

sity of Potsdam. Her research interests include conversation analysis, prosody
in conversation, grammar in conversation, interactional linguistics. She has
published widely in these research areas.
Maree Stenglin is an Honorary Research Associate at The University of

Sydney. She was Manager of Education Services at both the Australian Museum
(19942000) and djamu Gallery (19992000) in Sydney. She completed her
Ph.D. in 2004 under the supervision of Professor James Robert Martin. The
topic of her Ph.D. thesis is Packaging curiosities: Towards a grammar of three-
dimensional space.
Paul Thibault teaches linguistics and media communication at the University

of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway. His research interests include functional gram-
mar and semantics, discourse analysis, semiotics, educational linguistics, lan-
guage development, social theory, situated cognition, multimodal/multimedia
text analysis, and information technology. He is the author of, among others,
Brain, Mind, and the Signifying Body: An ecosocial semiotic theory (Con-
tinuum, 2004) and Multimodal Transcription and Multimodal Text Analysis
(with Anthony Baldry) (Equinox, 2006).
Caja Thimm is professor for Media Science at the University of Bonn and di-
rector of the Institute of Communication/Bonn (www.caja-thimm.de). She has
taught as a visiting professor at the University of Cardiff and the University
of California/Santa Barbara (USA). Her research interests include political
communication, web2.0, communication in virtual worlds, and old age in the
media.
Geoff Thompson is a senior lecturer in Applied Linguistics in the School of

English at the University of Liverpool. He previously taught EFL and Applied
Linguistics in a number of countries. Recent publications include Introducing
Functional Grammar (Arnold, 2nd edition 2004), and papers on topics such as
conjunction, theme and grammatical metaphor. With Susan Hunston he co-
edited Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse
(OUP, 2000) and System and Corpus: Exploring Connections (Equinox, 2006).
Eija Ventola is Professor at the Department of English, University of Helsinki,

Finland. Her research interests and publications cover systemic-functional lin-
guistics, discourse analysis, dynamic modeling of discourse, casual conver-
sations, chats, service encounters, language of tourism and business, scientific
writing and language of conferencing, multimodality and -mediality, semiotic
studies, Australian literature and stylistics.
Johannes Wagner is Professor at the Department of Business Communication

and Information Science, University of Southern Denmark. His research inter-
ests are analysis of second language and multilingual conversation, communi-
cation technology, and corpus development.
Tilo Weber Since October 2008, Tilo Weber is lecturer in the department of
Languages and Linguistics at the University of Nairobi (Nairobi/Kenia). Before
that, he was lecturer in German Linguistics at the Martin Luther Universitt in
Halle-Wittenberg (Germany). His main areas of interest and publication include
indeterminacy in discourse and grammar, conversation analysis and its method-
ology, and knowledge transformation in discourse. His monograph on lexical
categorization (Niemeyer Verlag) is in print.
Peter R.R. White is a senior lecturer in linguistics at the University of Ade-

laide, South Australia. His most recent publications include the co-authored
(with James R. Martin) The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, Pal-
grave/Macmillan. He maintains an email and discussion list on appraisal theory
at www.grammatics.com/appraisal/. He is a former journalist and journalism
trainer.
628
Subject index 629
Subject index
Symbols
A
A affiliation 380, 381
abstraction 443 affordance 39, 309, 322, 324
academic discourse 148 agency 439, 511, 513
academic knowledge 148, 149 agent 145, 446
academic plurilingualism 154 aggression 551
academic styles 149 aging 481, 483, 605
academic varieties 154 alignment 459, 461
comparative linguistics of academic altercentric mirroring 289
languages 149 Alzheimers disease 493
accentuation 217, 230 ambience 374, 379
accomplishment 294 analytic philosophy 406
act of pointing 306 animal signaling 297298
actants 322 annotation 188, 198, 201, 208
action 81, 229, 233 Anthropological Linguistics 5354, 60,
action assembly theory 20 79, 89
action exchanges 113 aphasia 490493
action systems 318 anomic aphasia 491
action taboos 605 Brocas aphasia 491
action trajectory 306 global aphasia 491
actional consciousness 145 transcortical motor aphasia 491
units of linguistic action 141 Wernickes aphasia 491
activity 81, 482 fluent/non-fluent aphasia syndromes
activity types 434, 459 491
boundaries of activities 187 applied linguistics 92, 385, 420
communication activities 495 appraisal 381, 567
exploratory and performatory activity appraisal framework 12, 577
300, 315 Appraisal 111, 361
performatory activities 316 appreciation 111, 361, 382, 570, 577
practical activities 42 arousal systems 298
whole-body sense-making activity artifacts 318
305 assemblage of activities 43
actors 323 assessment 295, 318
networks of interconnected actors assessor 300301
324 attitude 111, 361
primary knowers/actors 114 Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation
secondary knowers/actors 114 381
adjacency pair 234, 235, 411 attitudinal invocation 574
administrative institutions 152 attitudinal language 568
adolescence 457 invoked attitude 582
A-exchange 113 attunement 288, 312
affect 111, 224, 361, 567, 570, 577 audio- and video-recordings 179, 182
affect-based attunement system 292 audio-data 208209
affective linkage 298 auditory pattern 312
630 Subject index
authenticity 418 client 146

authorial voice 569 clinical anamnesis 150
avatar 345 code-switching 462, 465
coding orientation 360
B collaborative achievements 83
banter 541, 558 collaborative repair 493
basic functions 552 collections 184
behavioral expectations 529 collocations 88
behavioral plasticity 300 color 379
behavioral systems approach 310 column mode 191
Binding 361, 367368, 370 commands 109
Binding scale 373 commonsense terms 442
gradations of Binding 373 communication
biological initiating conditions 287 communication accommodation theory
biopsychosocial model 481 18, 19
black humor 541, 557 communication activities 495
blogs 332, 342 communication breakdown 494
body communication competence 3
body dynamics 303, 314 communication environment 484
body feeling 312 communication in the courtroom 151
body language 9 communication partners 497
body postures 297 communication problems 93
body structures 482 communication technologies 43
body units 316 communication training 561
Bonding 361, 368, 380 communicative apparatuses 143
Bonding icon 380, 382 communicative phases 547
in-group bonding 461 backstage communication 467
bonobos 285, 306, 320 business communication 151, 340
borrowing 559 computer-mediated communication
boundary conditions 287 331, 468
British functionalism 403 alternative/augmentative means of
Brocas area 304 communication 484
business encounters 94 youth communication 11
communities of practice 460, 520, 522
C compensatory strategy 492
camera 208 complex clause 266
central nervous system 291, 299 compliantly 384
cerebral vascular accidents 490 compositional meaning 366
chats 332 comprehension 484
chat communication 341 conceptual Processes 357
chat rooms 341 conditional relevancy 411
CHILDES 189, 191 conflict resolution 469
Chomskyan linguistics 87 connected speech 485
circular causality 306 constructing identity 530
CLAN 191 construction grammar 224
classroom discourse 147, 466 construe 127
clause as exchange 295 contact 58, 367, 567
clichs 599 content units 486
Subject index 631
contextual theory of language 403 deep structure 143

contextualization 470 deficit paradigm 481
contextualization cues 56, 5960, 220 degenerative processes 490
Contextualization Theory 79, 221 degrees of freedom 300
Control 367, 386 deictic field 139
convention 142, 285, 287 demand 358, 367
conventional silence 600 dementia 493494
convergence 19 denials of knowledge 447
conversation 217 density of informational content 487
casual conversation 413 derived functions 553
dinner table conversation 415 deviant case 88, 184
conversational moves 113 developmental trajectory 304
conversational partner training pro- dialectics 17
grams 497 dialects 91
conversational skills 488 dialogic matrix 288, 315
conversational style 235 dialogic perspective 568
relationship of grammar and conver- diaphany 374
sation 219 difference approach 511
conversation analysis 182, 184, 189, 432, digitalization 332
493 digital categories 308
Conversation Analysis 6, 33, 79, 193, digital self 348
217218, 410 digital semantic categories 291
Applied Conversation Analysis 45, disagreement 124
92 discourse 140
cooperative principle 518 discourse analysis 134
core stories 488 discourse comprehension 486
corpus 122 discourse management 552
corpus design 8 discourse markers 124, 461
corpus inventory 186 discourse of teaching and learning
corpus-based fieldwork 142 146
machine-readable corpus 208 discourse tasks 487
co-text 88, 108 discourse trouble 11
counseling 11 discourse-functional syntax 255
couple identity 17 discourse-functional tradition 80
coupled system 299300 homileic discourse 144
coupled speech-gesture system 304 instructional discourse 146
court 94 reclamation discourse 151
cthonicity 376 transactional discourse 510
culture 401, 402 dissing 463
cultural dynamics 324 divergence 19, 465
cultural maintenance 488 doctor-patient interaction 107, 118,
cyberspace 331, 335 150
dominance approach 511
D dont knows 447
Damasios neurobiological theory 313 duplicative organization property 40
data collection 8, 225 dynamic systems theory 300
natural data 87 dynamically emergent character of
decoupled representations 314 behavior 322
632 Subject index
E F
echoic-mention 544 face 419, 514520, 545
echoing 462 face formation 314315
elderly talk 485 face sensitivities 529
elliptical questions 121 face-threatening act 515
e-mail 332, 339 facework 515, 533
embedding 443, 439 respectability face 529
embedded clause 443 face-to-face communication 4, 9
embodiment 309311, 324, 493 family arguing 123
embodied-embedded cognition 309 field research 179181
emergence principle 512 field notes 179
historical emergence 300 filter 378
emergent/latent network 514, 529 first verb 270
emic perspective 181 first-order languaging 309
emotion 24, 224, 312 flaming 470
emotional contagion 298 focus particles 231
emotive involvement 236, 237 foreign language teaching 94
empathy 292, 298 form-function relationship 85, 133
Empirical Construction Grammar 89 formulation 445
engagement 112, 575 formulation difficulty 492
entertainment 549 frame 521522, 529
environmental affordances 315 framing 358
environmental factors 482 frequency 88
epistemic or deontic roles 117 functional grammar 218
epistemic rights 117 Functional Pragmatics 133, 154
esteroception 324 functional pragmatic grammar 134
ethical concerns 180 functional therapy 496
ethnography 181, 182
ethnocategory 398, 416 G
ethnographic methods 180181 gender 12, 223, 460, 511
variationist ethnographic studies gender studies 547
461 general expansion elicitor 447
ethnography of Speaking 79 genetic counseling 150
ethnomethodology 3334, 79, genre 5, 5455, 60 64, 6667, 6970, 89,
399400, 407 127, 223, 435, 459
euphemism 596 genre theory 89
evaluative disposition 569, 577, 587 macrogenre 435
everyday communication 10 geosemiotics 361
everyday conversations 22 Gesprchsanalytisches Transkriptions-
everyday talk 223, 240 system (GAT) 226
everyday term 441 Gestalt 86
exceptional situations 605 gesture 9, 304, 305
exchange 121 goals 135
exchange structure 113 gossip 541, 558
exertion of power 551 graduation 112, 568
external cognitive aids 489 grammar in conversation 220
externalizing 443 relationship of grammar and conver-
extravagance 127 sation 219
Subject index 633
group maintenance 549 institutional knowledge 146

group identity 471 institutional roles 108, 120
group stories 488 institutional talk 181, 412, 434
group treatment 496 integrative processes 486
intelligibility of utterances 483
H intentionality 291
hearer 135 interaction
hearing impairment 484 verbal interaction 217
hearing aids 484 interaction goals 20, 529
presbyacusis 484 imagined interactions 21
hermeneutic analysis 133 interactional competence 16
heteroglossia 112, 575 interactional discourse 510
historically-societal action 133 Interactional Linguistics 7, 217, 222
historicity 522 interactional modality 217, 236
horizontal/vertical enclosures 369 interactional mood 237
hospital drama 610 Interactional Sociolinguistics 7, 79
humor 12, 541, 555 interactive labor 495
humor felt/presented 545 interactive patterns 495
hybrid studies 45 inter-body attunement 313
hybridization 382 intercultural communication 153, 601,
613
I interdependence theory 18
ideal language 406 intergroup processes 19
ideational meanings 380 internet 336
ideational metafunction 357 interpersonal meaning 297, 366, 381,
identity 346, 509, 510515 567
identity construction 12, 510, interpersonal metafunction 358
513 interpersonal processes 17
identity face 529, 530 interrogatives 120
implication 573 intersubjectivity 289
incitement field 139 intertextuality 465
incongruity theory 543 introspection 407
indexicality 38, 5455, 408 investment models 18
indexicality principle 512 invocation 573, 584
inference 5456, 6061 invoked attitude 582
information 125 involvement 360, 366
information gathering 149 irony 12, 541, 556
information management 550
information packaging 256 J
information structure 231 job interviews 152
information values 358 joke 541, 555
informational coupling 294 Judgement 111, 361, 570571, 577
inscription 573, 584 judgement of propriety 126
insecurity 368369
instant messaging 332, 342 K
institutions 145 K- and A-roles 116
institutional discourse 412 Kanzi 285, 306, 308
Institutional functions 552 kinesics 293, 301
634 Subject index
knowledge meaning potential 308

knowledge exchanges 113 media 94, 332
knowledge structures 21, 24 media reference 462
denials of knowledge 447 media richness model 334
professional knowledge 150 new media 334
mediated proximity 337
L mediator 323
language medical setting 94
academic languages 149 membership categorization device 40
language acquisition 90, 242 memory impairment 493
language as code-like input/output ma- mental reality 136
chine 313 message production 20
language change 91 metacomment 523, 525, 527530
language convergence 460 metacommunication 510
language corpora 5 metadata 184186
language crossing 465 metafunctional hypothesis 356
language disorders 90 metafunction 366
language policy 152 micro-ecology 318, 319
on-line language production 84 microlinguistics 301
phatic function of language 405 micro-analysis 86
symbolic aspect of language 311 microprocessing 491
playful language 461 micro-setting 551
written language 134 micro-temporal dynamics 303, 309, 311,
langue/parole 302 313
laughter 544 mirror neuron system 288
lecture notes 148 mobile communications 332
level of education 489 mobile phone 333, 346
lexical choice 230, 268270 mocking 541, 557
lexical retrieval failures 485 modality 110, 360, 367
lexicogrammar 109 modal orientation 110
lifespan 16, 2125 modal value 110
lingua franca 154 modalization 110
linguistic categories 90 modern sociolinguistics 547
linguistic divergence 464 modulation 110
linguistic fields 139 modulation of body shape 299
linguistic resources 217, 229 modulations of signal form 301
linguistic-cognitive skills 489490 modulations of the signal form 296
lip-reading 484 monoglossic 576
local contingency 83 mood 109, 118
logogenesis 387, 437 moral order 311
loudness 219, 223 morphology 548
morphology of the human body 322
M motivation 18
macroprocessing 492 movement transformation 316
magical words 597 moves 113
mana see also taboo 598 multi-functionality 552, 561
mask 514 multi-level models 546
materialization 373 multimodality 9, 224, 470
Subject index 635
multimodal activities 189 P

multimodal texts 356 paralanguage 285, 293, 295296, 299,
multimodality of interaction 242 301303
multi-user dungeons 332, 344 paralinguistic features 301
mutism 612 paralinguistic vocal qualifiers 303
partialness principle 513
participant observation 181, 400402
N
participation 482
narration 144
participation structure 548
narrative 486
partiture mode 191, 195
narrative competence 145
paths of aging 489
narrative counseling interview 437
pattern 379
narrative processes 357
pattern knowledge 138
narrative therapy 439
patterns of choices 122
negative identify conclusions 444
initiation-response-evaluation pattern
negotiation 151
467
neurophysiological paradigm 336
linguistic patterns 77
next-turn proof procedure 87
linguistic action patterns 135, 154
nickname 461
question-answer pattern 135, 137
noaword 597
task-completion pattern 146
nominalization 442
pauses 217
non-serious mode 545
peer-group 459
non-standard forms 460
permeability 374377
nonverbal communication 91
phatic communion 403, 416
nonverbal actions 148
phenomenology 407
norms 142, 311, 520521, 530
phonation 297
norm maintenance 549
phonetics 203, 219, 548
phonetic embedding 223
O phonetic transcription 192
observers paradox 182, 418, 422 phonological variants 459
occlusion 374 phonology-for-conversation 80, 220
offer 358, 367 physical setting 319
online communication 338 pitch 219, 223
online applications 342 pitch movement 203
online communities 469 plurilingualism 152
online media 331 podcast 333
ontogeny of coupled oral and limb move- poetic/aesthetic function 552
ments 304 politeness 12, 153
opening 188 politeness principle 519
operative field 139 positive politeness 462, 550
orality 418 political correctness 597599
secondary orality 339 positionality principle 512
ordinary language philosophy 399, 406 posture 318
organon model 399, 404 practices 81, 233, 229
orthographic transliteration 191 pragmatic organization 258
other-identification 37 pragmatic therapy 496
out-group exclusion 549 pragmatics 547
overlap 188, 203 preference structure 411
636 Subject index
pre-sequence 236 realis 444

pretense theory of irony 544 recipiency 257
primary epistemic rights 125 recipient design 40, 255257
primate social life 292, 321 recipient inferences 91
principle of antithesis 297 recording 183184, 205
privacy 340 reflexivity 38, 295, 408
problem construction 437 reformulation 445
problem effacement 437 rehabilitation 496
problem solving 3, 10, 16, 146, 154, 554 relational work 510, 528
procedural approach 34 relational contradictions 17
procedure 140 relational expectations 21
projection 85 relationality principle 513
pronoun 84 repair 411
proper description 40 repair sequence 492
proprioception 324 repair work 493
prosody 8, 188, 203206, 217, 219, 232, report 144
297 representational meanings 366
prosodic marking 217, 239 representational metafunction 383
prosodic organization 271 research tool 2324
prosodic units 197 resistance 384, 552
interplay of syntactic and prosodic Rhetorical Structure Theory 89
structures 230 rhythm 313, 358
interpersonal prosodies 299301 rhythmical patterning 313
proto-self 294 ritual conflict 463
prototype category 397, 417 ritual insult 463
prototype models 546 routine 82
psychiatric register 442 rumor 541
psychological function 482, 552
psychological theories 543 S
psychotherapy transactions 310 salient 358
purposes 135 sarcasm 541
pursuing agreement 124 satire 558
scalar hierarchy 286
Q scalar hierarchy thinking 315
queclarative 121 script 24
question 109, 118 security 368370
question-answer sequence 229 segmentation 143
self 324
R selfhood 293
rapport management 515, 528 self-identification 37
rapport challenge 528 self-organizing dynamics 306
rapport enhancement 528 self-referentiality 294
rapport maintenance 528 self-repair 268
rapport neglect 528 enhancing ones self-image 550
reading 384 semantic 543
reading path 358 semantic focus 230
Reaffirming and strengthening friendship semantic structure 548
550 seminar minutes 148
Subject index 637
semiosis 384 sociolinguistic variation 460

seniors 11 solidarity 380, 549, 567, 569, 588
sensory system 291 spatial semiotics 10, 357, 386
sensory and motor functions 482 spatial enclosure 373
sentence 89 spatial envelope 377
sequence 234 speaker 135
sequence closing 37 speaker intention 91
sequential analysis 87, 218 speech act theory 218, 407
sequential location 258 indirect speech acts 109
sequential mode 191, 197 speech action 140
sequential nature of talk-in-interaction speech action analysis 134
37 perception of a speech action 138
sequential organization 194 speech event 435
sequentiality 191 speech function 109
setting 459 speech-language therapy 496
shared assumption 462 speed of processing 485
sign 134 spelling 469470
silence 12, 595 stance 217
pact of silence 613 story-generation 492
significant silence 600 story-telling skills 487
visual silence 604 style 141
silent mental rehearsal 291 stylization 465
slang 464 in-group style 462
small talk 417, 558 subsequent version 117
SMS 333 subversion 552
social action 5 superiority/disparagement/aggression
social anthropology 400 theories 543
social categories 40 supportive environment 497
social cognition 16 symbol field 139
social information-processing theory 348 sympathetic and parasympathetic sys-
social intelligence 292 tems 298
social model of disability 496 synchronicity 337
social psychology 6 synchronization devices 138
social semiotics 324, 403 syntax 217
social structure 321 syntax-for-conversation 80, 219
social capital 336 syntactic complexity 487
social control 549 syntactic organization 262
social distance 359, 366 interplay of syntactic and prosodic
social identity 414 structures 230
social isolation 495 Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) 7,
social relations 3, 107, 496 107108, 413, 432, 567
social websites 332 systemic functional theory 356
social networking sites 343
socialization 138 T
socializing 10 taboo 12, 595
socio-cultural context 107 Sprachtabu 596
socioemotional selectivity theory 21 communication taboo 605
sociolinguistic interview 179, 181 object taboo 605
638 Subject index
name taboo 597 IPA 192

taboo breach 599 transfer of experience 144
taboo complex 606, 615 transfer of information 294
taboo discourse 607 transference of coded information 300
taboo violations 605 transition relevance place 85
taboo-euphemism-cycle 598599 transition relevance space 232
tactile-kinaesthetic body 313 translation 189
talk-in-interaction 222, 241, 493 translating and interpreting 153
principle of contiguity in talk 37 turns 188, 191
teenage talk 94 turn constructional unit 85, 191, 196,
taxonomies 442 230
teasing 461, 541 turn-taking 35, 193, 218, 232, 266,
technical terminology 441442 273, 411
technically-mediated interpersonal com- turn taking system 545
munication 9
telephone 217, 226, 240, 339 V
territory 310 vagueness 302
text 140 values 288, 306, 311
text analysis 134 varieties 91
text linguistics 546 topological-quantitative variation 314
text production skills 492 verbal duelling 463
texting 469 verbosity 488
textual metafunction 357, 383 video-data 183, 208, 209
texture 379 virtual world 345346
theoretical sampling 184, 187 virtual community 337
theory 206 virtual group 344
theory of linguistic action 133 virtual sociability 337
contextual theory of language 403 virtual second-order cultural constructs
dynamic systems theory 300 314
therapy 11 visual hedging 604
therapeutic vision 446 visual weight 377
timing 308 vocal tract postures 299
time scales 286, 299, 313, 324 vocal utterances 188
tinge field 139 voice quality 217, 223, 236
topic selection 260262
transcription 8, 35, 179, 186188,
205209, 225226, 322 W
literary transcription 192, 194, 195, web 2.0 331333
197 web logs 342
transcription conventions 191 whole bodily movement 308, 314
CA 193 whole body posture-movement system
transcription editors 197 315
ELAN 201 word search 492
EXMARaLDA 191, 195, 198 working memory 485
Praat 203
transcription systems 190, 192, 219 Y
GAT 193, 226 yes/no interrogatives 267
HIAT 193194 youth 457

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(Handbooks of Applied Linguistics, V. 2) Gerd Antos - Eija Ventola - Tilo Weber-Handbook of Interpersonal Communication-Mouton de Gruyter (2008)

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Handbook of Interpersonal Communication

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin New York

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin New York

Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Handbook of interpersonal communication / edited by Gerd Antos,

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

Introduction to the handbook series

Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos

1. Science and application at the turn of the millennium

2. Applied Linguistics: Concepts and controversies

The concept of Applied Linguistics is not as old as the notion of Applied

2.1. Theoretically Applied vs. Practically Applied Linguistics

teaching methods. These contrastive descriptions in turn have to be based on the

2.2. Applied linguistics as a response to structuralism and generativism

That these hyphenated variants of linguistics can be said to have originated

2.3. Conceptualisations and communities

[] we see no especial purpose in reopening what has become a somewhat sterile

Against this background, they see applied linguistics as less characterised

also the theoretical and methodological standards of cooperating experts from

3. Applied linguistics for problem solving

Against this background, it seems reasonable not to define applied linguistics as

Thirdly, we take it that applied linguistics proceeds by a specific mode of

4. Objectives of this handbook series

to show that applied linguistics is not confined to a restricted number of

5. Criteria for the selection of topics

Gerd Antos, Halle

I. Theories, methods, and tools of Interpersonal Communication

2. Social Psychology and personal relationships: Accommodation

II. Linguistic and multisemiotic resources and their interplay

9. Linguistic resources for the management of interaction

11. Face-to-face communication and body language

III. Interpersonal Communication on-track and off-track

14. Everyday communication and socializing

IV. Working on conversational strategies

18. Relational work, politeness, and identity construction

Biographical notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 623

How do interpersonal relations manifest themselves in language?

The volume is divided into four major parts:

I. Theories, methods, and tools of interpersonal communication

In the next chapter 4, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Susanne Gnthner, in-

II. Linguistic and multisemiotic resources and their interplay

In chapter 10, Dynamics of discourse, Barbara Fox explores how speakers

III. Interpersonal Communication on-track and off-track

trouble and on the accomplishments of linguistic focus in therapy and counsel-

IV. Working on conversational strategies

It is commonly known that participants in interpersonal communication are

Everyday communication can be problematic, but we are relatively good at man-

sonal encounters. We do so first by problematizing traditional approaches to the

2. Interdependent theorizing about personal relationships

The shift of focus, at least in the area of interpersonal communication, from

3. Accommodating to relational partners

communication that is more suitable to a particular context or mode of relational

4. Message production in relationships

Other psychological perspectives on interactions, albeit from communication

5. Methods for investigating interpersonal relationships

The study of the social psychology of interpersonal relationships has been

types of interpersonal encounters such as those between strangers, acquaint-

6. Research tools for investigating relationships in action

Relationships are dynamic entities, on-going processes that are influenced by

7. Relating in real time: Charting interpersonal goals and emotions

1. This is in comparison with communication accommodation theory which does take

Acitelli, Linda K., Steve W. Duck and Lee West