What is Interactional Linguistics?

Abstract

Throughout much of the twentieth century, modern linguistics suffered from a written language bias (Linell 2005): the general thinking about language, as well as the descriptive concepts and categories developed for linguistic research, were tailored to language as it appears in writing. Interactional Linguistics, by contrast, grew out of an interest in spoken language and a desire to see it studied in its natural habitat: in social interaction. Interactional linguists took seriously the observation that “some of the most fundamental features of natural language are shaped in accordance with their home environment in co-present interaction, as adaptations to it, or as part of its very warp and weft” (Schegloff 1996b:54). They pursued this observation to its logical conclusion: namely, that as a consequence language must be analyzed in the home environment of co-present interaction. The idea was to apply the same empirical methods that had been so successful in revealing the structure and organization of everyday conversation, the methods of ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis, to explore the structure and organization of language as used in social interaction. From the cumulative results of such exploration, it was hoped, a new theory of language would emerge. Naturally, in order to explore language in its home environment, Interactional Linguistics needed and continues to need an appreciation of the structure and organization of interaction. For this, it is heavily indebted to Conversation Analysis, whose practitioners over the years have laid bare the structural underpinnings of coordinated interaction in social contexts. However, as the “founder” of Conversation Analysis, Harvey Sacks, explained early on, he was not interested in ordinary conversation because he had any “large interest in language,” but rather simply because it was easy to record and because these recordings could be listened to again and again (Sacks 1984:26). Conversation analysts are primarily interested in understanding how interaction works, in uncovering the mechanisms of, for example, how turns at talk are coordinated, how actions are constructed and recognized, and how they are made to cohere in sequences of interaction. Interactional linguists, by contrast, do have a “large interest” in language, because they believe that turns, actions, and sequences are accomplished and made interpretable by the systematic use of linguistic resources; consequently, they make the linguistic forms deployed by ordinary speakers in everyday and institutional encounters the focus of their attention.