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SUMMARY:The granularity of social action ascription in conversational inte
 raction - Professor Michael Haugh (University of Queensland)
DTSTART:20160609T150000Z
DTEND:20160609T163000Z
UID:TALK65942@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Theodora Alexopoulou
DESCRIPTION:A point of common interest in the fields of linguistic pragmat
 ics and conversation analysis is the ways in which we use language to do t
 hings. The traditional approach to speech acts in pragmatics has favoured 
 a theoretically more formal approach that draws upon the putative intentio
 ns and beliefs of speakers. On Austin’s (1962/1975) account of speech ac
 ts at least\, the subsequent uptake of recipients is also considered to be
  important. In conversation analysis\, folk categories\, along with techni
 cal neologisms\, have been used in descriptive accounts of the sequential 
 accomplishment of social actions that generally eschew recourse to intenti
 onal mental states. In CA\, action ascription is generally held to involve
  the assignment of an action to a prior turn through what the subsequent r
 esponse of the next speaker reveals (Sacks 1992\; Schegloff 2007).\nIn thi
 s paper\, the way in which participants interactionally accomplish social 
 actions as particular kinds of social actions is discussed. The focus will
  be on instances where offers of assistance from recipients are prompted b
 y reports or inquiries about needs\, difficulties or troubles on the part 
 of the speaker (Drew 1984\; Haugh 2015\; Kendrick and Drew 2014). While in
  pragmatics these have traditionally been analysed as “off-record reques
 ts” or “requestive hints” (Brown and Levinson 1987\; Weizman 1985)\,
  close analysis indicates that construing instances of prompting offers of
  assistance as intended by that speaker is treated by the participants as 
 an interactionally delicate matter (Haugh forthcoming). That is\, particip
 ants work to avoid licensing inferences about the offer-recipient’s inte
 ntions through both the design of prompted offers and subsequent non-strai
 ghtforward responses to them.\nThe implications of this analysis for our u
 nderstanding of act(ion)s accomplished through conversational interaction 
 are argued to be two-fold. First\, we need to develop a formal account of 
 social act(ion)s that not only gives us the ability to assign gross catego
 ries of act(ion)s\, but can also accommodate the inherently granular natur
 e of locally situated instances of these act(ion)s in conversational inter
 action. Second\, rather than rejecting a role for cognitive processes in a
 nalysing social action ascription\, we need to develop a more nuanced unde
 rstanding of the role that reflexive representations of intentions\, and i
 ntentionality more broadly\, play in construing actions as particular kind
 s of social actions in conversational interaction.\n
LOCATION:GR04\, English Faculty Building\, 9 West Road\, Sidgwick Site
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