New Adventures in Language and Interaction

Book excerpt: 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.