Résultat de la recherche
(in press). Emergent syntax for conversation: Clausal patterns and the organization of actions
This volume explores how emergent patterns of complex syntax – that is, syntactic structures beyond a simple clause – relate to the local contingencies of action formation in social interaction. It examines both the on-line emergence of clause-combining patterns as they are ‘patched together’ on the fly, as well as their routinization and sedimentation into new grammatical patterns across a range of languages – English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Mandarin, and Swedish. The chapters investigate how the real-time organization of complex syntax relates to the unfolding of turns and actions, focusing on: (i) how complex syntactic patterns, or routinized fragments of ‘canonical’ patterns, serve as resources for projection, (ii) how complex syntactic patterns emerge incrementally, moment-by-moment, out of the real-time trajectories of action, (iii) how formal variants of such patterns relate to social action, and (iv) how all of these play out within the multimodal ecologies of action formation. The empirical findings presented in this volume lend support to a conception of complex syntax as fundamentally temporal, emergent, dialogic, sensitive to local interactional contingencies, and interwoven with other semiotic resources.
A cross-linguistic perspective on grammar and negative epistemics in talk-in-interaction
In this introduction to the special issue on ‘Grammar and negative epistemics in talk-in-interaction’ we discuss the current state of research on the use of negative mental verb constructions such as I don’t know, I don’t understand, I don’t remember in social interaction. We scrutinize, in a cross-linguistic perspective, the grammatical and interactional features that emerge from existing research in the field, and spell out the specific contribution of the studies collected in this issue. We discuss how the cumulative evidence provided by these studies across a set of different languages, several of which are typologically unrelated, contributes to studies of talk-in-interaction and to the newly emerging field of Pragmatic Typology. We argue that the findings point to universal interactional motivations for the grammatical properties and the grammaticization of the constructions studied, and suggest that these motivations arise out of the basic requirements for intersubjectivity in social interaction.