What is it about humans that makes language possible, and what is it about language that makes us human?If you are reading this, you have done something that only our species has evolved to do. You have acquired a natural language. This book asks, How has this changed us?Where scholars have long wondered what it is about humans that makes language possible, N. J. Enfield and Jack Sidnell ask instead, What is it about humans that is made possible by...

When people do things with words, how do we know what they are doing? Many scholars have assumed a category of things called actions: 'requests', 'proposals', 'complaints', 'excuses'. The idea is both convenient and intuitive, but as this book argues, it is a spurious concept of action. In interaction, a person's primary task is to decide how to respond, not to label what someone just did. The labeling of actions is a meta-level process, appropriate only when we wish to draw attention to o...

The field of linguistic anthropology looks at human uniqueness and diversity through the lens of language, our species' special combination of art and instinct. Human language both shapes, and is shaped by, our minds, societies, and cultural worlds. This state-of-the-field survey covers a wide range of topics, approaches and theories, such as the nature and function of language systems, the relationship between language and social interaction, and the place of language in the social life o...

Combining the main findings, methods and analytic techniques of this central approach to language and social interaction, along with real-life examples and step-by-step explanations, Conversation Analysis is the ideal student guide to the field.Introduces the main findings, methods and analytic techniques of conversation analysis (CA) – a growing interdisciplinary field exploring language and social interactionProvides an engaging historical overview of the...

Humans are imperfect, and problems of speaking, hearing and understanding are pervasive in ordinary interaction. This book examines the way we 'repair' and correct such problems as they arise in conversation and other forms of human interaction. The first book-length study of this topic, it brings together a team of scholars from the fields of anthropology, communication, linguistics and sociology to explore how speakers address problems in their own talk and that of others, and how the pr...

Presenting a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and descriptive research in the field, The Handbook of Conversation Analysis brings together contributions by leading international experts to provide an invaluable information resource and reference for scholars of social interaction across the areas of conversation analysis, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, interpersonal communication, discursive psychology and sociolinguistics.Ideal a...

'Conversation analysis' is an approach to the study of social interaction that focuses on practices of speaking that recur across a range of contexts and settings. The early studies in this tradition were based on the analysis of English conversation. More recently, however, conversation analysts have begun to study talk in a broader range of communities around the world. Through detailed analyses of recorded conversations, this book examines differences and similarities across a wide rang...