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Social actions
(2021)
Social actions are recipient-designed actions that occur in the context of interaction sequences. This chapter focuses on sources and practices for the formation and ascription of social actions. While linguists stress the relevance of linguistic social action formats, conversation analysts highlight the relevance of the sequential position of an action, and sociolinguists point to the influence of social identities for action-formation and -ascription. The combination of these three approaches helps us to solve the analytic problem of indirectness, which, however, only rarely becomes a problem for the participants in an interaction themselves. Social properties which recurrently apply when using verbal and bodily resources of action-formation, i.e. the social actions themselves, inferred meanings, projected next actions, the participation framework, the activity type, speaker’s stance, participants’ identities, etc. lead to stable pragmatic connotations of those forms, i.e. action-meanings, which become idiomatic and part of our common-sense competence. Still, social actions are multi-layered and can be ambiguous at times. Therefore, their meaning can be open for negotiation. Intersubjectivity of action ascription is ultimately secured neither by conventions nor by speaker’s intentions, but is accomplished by their treatment in subsequent discourse.
This paper studies how the turn-design of a highly recurrent type of action changes over time. Based on a corpus of video-recordings of German driving lessons, we consider one type of instructions and analyze how the same instructional action is produced by the same speaker (the instructor) for the same addressee (the student) in consecutive trials of a learning task. We found that instructions become increasingly shorter, indexical and syntactically less complex; interactional sequences become more condensed and activities designed to secure mutual understanding become rarer. This study shows how larger temporal frameworks of interpersonal interactional histories which range beyond the interactional sequence impinge on the recipient-design of turns and the deployment of multimodal resources in situ.
Recipient design is a key constituent of intersubjectivity in interaction. Recipient design of turns is informed by prior knowledge about and shared experience with recipients. Designing turns in order to be maximally effective for the particular recipient(s) is crucial for accomplishing intersubjectively coordinated action. This paper reports on a specific pragmatic structure of recipient design, i.e. counter-factual recipient design, and how it impinges on intersubjectivity in interaction. Based on an analysis of video-recordings data from driving school lessons in German, two kinds of counterfactual recipient design of instructors' requests are distinguished: pedagogic and egocentric turn-design. Counterfactual, pedagogic turn-design is used strategically to diagnose student skills and to create opportunities for corrective instructions. Egocentric turn-design rests on private, non-shared knowledge of the instructor. Egocentrically designed turns imply expectations of how to comply with requests which cannot be recovered by the student and which lead to a breakdown of intersubjective cooperation. This paper identifies practices, sources and interactional consequences of these two kinds of counterfactual recipient design. In addition, the study enhances our understanding of recipient design in at least three ways. It shows that recipient design does not only concern referential and descriptive practices, but also the indexing intelligible projections of next actions; it highlights the productive, other-positioning effects of recipient design; it argues that recipient design should be analyzed in terms of temporally extended interactional trajectories, linking turn-constructional practices to interactional histories and consecutive trajectories of joint action.
Dieser Artikel gibt einen Überblick darüber, wie grundlegend Wissen als Vorausssetzung, Gegenstand und Produkt von Verständigungsprozessen für die Organisation von Gesprächen ist. Zunächst wird ein kognitivistischer Zugang zu Wissen mit einem sozialkonstruktivistischen kontrastiert. Es werden zum einen kommunikative Gattungen, die auf die Kommunikation von Wissen spezialisiert sind, dargestellt; zum anderen wird gezeigt, wie Wissen auch dann die Gestaltung der Interaktion bestimmt, wenn der primäre Gesprächszweck nicht in Wissensvermittlung besteht. Vier Dimensionen werden angesprochen: a) Das mit dem Adressaten geteilte Wissen (common ground) ist Grundlage des Adressatenzuschnitts von Äußerungen (recipient design); b)geteiltes Wissen wird in Verständigungsprozessen konstituiert; c) der relative epistemische Status der Gesprächspartner zueinander wird durch Praktiken des epistemic stance-taking verdeutlicht und bestimmt selbst die Interpretation von Äußerungsformaten; d) epistemischer Status, soziale Identität und Beziehungskonstitution sind durch moralische Anspruchs- und Erwartungsstrukturen eng miteinander verknüpft.