This volume explores a rich variety of linkages between grammar and social interaction.

Cecilia E. Ford explores the question: what work do adverbial clauses do in conversational interaction? Her analysis of this predominating conjunction strategy in English conversation is based on the assumption that grammars reflect recurrent patterns of situated language use, and that a primary site for language is in spontaneous talk. She considers the interactional as well as the informational work of talk and shows how conversationalists use grammar to coordinate their joint language production. The management of the complexities of the sequential development of a conversation, and the social roles of conversational participants, have been extensively examined within the sociological approach of Conversation Analysis. Dr Ford uses Conversation Analysis as a framework for the interpretation of interclausal relations in her database of American English conversations. Her book contributes to a growing body of research on grammar in discourse, which has until recently remained largely focused on monologic rather than dialogic functions of language.

This monograph provides a micro-analytic description of the structure and communicative use of syntactic pivot constructions in German. Using the methodology of Conversation Analysis, this work shows that pivots emerge in interaction in response to local communicative needs.Exclusively found in spoken German, pivots allow a speaker to extend an utterance beyond a possible completion point in a syntactically and prosodically unobtrusive way. Speakers utilize this basic property to promote context-specific actions: managing boundaries of speakership, bridging sequential and topical junctures, and dealing with different types of interactional trouble. Through a close examination of syntactic pivots as an interactional resource, this work shows that spoken linguistic structures can only be fully understood if we acknowledge the temporality of language and view grammar as usage-based and negotiable. This book thus contributes to a growing body of research at the intersection of grammar and interaction.

In this book sixteen international scholars of language and social interaction describe their distinct frameworks of analysis. Taking conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics as their points of departure and investigating ordinary conversation as well as institutions such as health care, therapy, and city council meetings, they often incorporate gesture, prosody, and the listener's behavior in the analysis of talk. While some approaches are grounded in a critique of the major schools of interaction analysis, others integrate the interactionist perspective with ideas from fields such as systemic-functional linguistics, distributed cognition, and the sociology of knowledge. Each chapter combines a statement of the terms and methods of analysis with an exemplary analysis of a moment of interaction. "New Adventures in Language and Interaction" gives an excellent overview of the novelty and diversity of interaction-focused perspectives on language and of the heterogeneity of approaches that have evolved from the pioneering work of Sacks and Schegloff, Gumperz, and their co-workers.

Functional Grammar (FG) as set out by Simon Dik is the ambitious combination of a functionalist approach to the study of language with a consistent formalization of the underlying structures which it recognizes as relevant. The present volume represents the attempts made within the FG framework to expand the theory so as to cover a wider empirical domain than is usual for highly formalized linguistic theories, namely that of written and spoken discourse, while retaining its methodological precision. The book covers an array of phenomena, both from monologue and from dialogue material, relating to discourse structure, speaker aims and goals, action theory, the flow of information, illocutionary force, modality, etc. The central question underlying most of the contributions concerns the relation between, and the division of labour between the existing grammatical module of FG on the one hand, and a discourse or pragmatic module capable of handling such discourse phenomena on the other. What emerges are new proposals for the formal treatment of for instance illocutionary force and the informational status of constituents. Many of the data discussed are from ‘real’ language rather than being invented, and samples from various languages other than English (Spanish, Polish, Latin, French) are examined and used as illustrations of the theoretical problem to be solved. Readership: theoretical linguists and discourse and conversation analysts

A cutting-edge work, this book analyses the grammar of interactional language with a focus on discourse markers and their typology.

Traditional grammar and current theoretical approaches towards modelling grammatical knowledge ignore language in interaction: that is, words such as huh, eh, yup or yessssss. This groundbreaking book addresses this gap by providing the first in-depth overview of approaches towards interactional language across different frameworks and linguistic sub-disciplines. Based on the insights that emerge, a formal framework is developed to discover and compare language in interaction across different languages: the interactional spine hypothesis. Two case-studies are presented: confirmationals (such as eh and huh) and response markers (such as yes and no), both of which show evidence for systematic grammatical knowledge. Assuming that language in interaction is regulated by grammatical knowledge sheds new light on old questions concerning the relation between language and thought and the relation between language and communication. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the relation between language, cognition and social interaction.