The Pragmatics of Interaction: (4 Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights)

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, social, cultural, variational, or discursive angles, this fourth volume is dedicated to the empirical investigation of the way human beings organize their interaction in natural environments and how they use talk for accomplishing actions and their contexts. Starting from Goffman’s observation that interaction exhibits a structure in its own right that cannot be reduced to the psychological properties of the individual nor to society, it contains a selection of articles documenting the various levels of interactional organization. In addition to treatments of basic concepts such as sequence, participation, prosody and style and some topical articles on phenomena like reported speech and listener response, it also includes overviews of specific traditions (conversation analysis, ethnomethodology) and articles on eminent authors (Goffman, Sacks) who had a formative influence on the field.

Table of Contents:
1. Preface to the series; 2. Acknowledgements; 3. The pragmatics of interaction: A survey (by D'hondt, Sigurd); 4. Communicative style (by Selting, Margret); 5. Conversation analysis (by Clift, Rebecca); 6. Conversation types (by Hakulinen, Auli); 7. Ethnomethodology (by Firth, Alan); 8. Erving Goffman (by O'Driscoll, Jim); 9. Interactional linguistics (by Lindstrom, Jan K.); 10. Listener response (by Xudong, Deng); 11. Participation (by Sidnell, Jack); 12. Politeness (by Kasper, Gabriele); 13. Prosody (by Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth); 14. Reported speech (by Holt, Elizabeth); 15. Harvey Sacks (by Watson, Rod); 16. Sequence (by Sidnell, Jack); 17. Transcription systems for spoken discourse (by O'Connell, Daniel C.); 18. Index

Review :
This volume offers a rich panoply of approaches to the vast and deep set of questions and issues in the study of interaction, with priority given to accounts of the interactional ‘machinery’ and CA in particular. The authors not only provide comprehensive surveys of previous studies, but also present possibilities, challenges and suggestions for future work. In this way, the handbook offers the readers with both updated information for a specific field of study and inspiration for further investigation. In addition, it can be used as ‘a method or resource for shedding light on a host of other phenomena in the social life of human beings and in the fabric of the various societal arrangements they live in’ (p. 12). The strength of this volume is its paradox: it provides detailed description of the breadth of approaches within one small area. The work achieves its ambition of adding cohesion to the discipline. The similarity in structure of the majority of the chapters, which begin with a description of (a) how the approach addresses talk-in-interaction and (b) how it differs from the other approaches, is extraordinarily useful for disambiguating the often closely related fields. [...] Overall, this volume is exemplary in its treatment of theory. It would be an excellent reference work for graduate students preparing to write a thesis in the area of talk-in-interaction, because it would be an invaluable resource in helping establish which theoretical perspective best fits the student's premise. In this regard, it would also be helpful for those advising graduate students and mentoring them through the often murky waters of pragmatic theory. The strength of this volume lies in the inclusion of varied discourse examples that illustrate theoretical influences, stages ans execution of analysis.