Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-mzp66 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-10T22:45:34.738Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Agency as an interactive achievement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

NAJMA AL ZIDJALY
NAJMA AL ZIDJALY*
Affiliation:
English Department, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Sultan Qaboos University, P. O. Box. 42, Postal Code. 123, Al Khod, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study explores how agency emerges and is negotiated moment by moment in interaction by applying Erving Goffman’s notion of production format to an extended sequence of discourse that revolves around accomplishing a conjoint action: the rewriting of an official letter. Deconstructing the participants into the social roles they undertake in accomplishing this task illustrates what is involved in exercising agency: interactively negotiating production format roles and footing shifts through several linguistic strategies aimed at either claiming, ratifying, or rejecting the participants’ agency. These include providing options, negotiating production format roles, asking questions, speaking for another, questioning and asserting expertise, providing counter-arguments, and asserting past agentive selves. This study, thus, contributes to an understanding of agency as co-constructed, mediated, and continually negotiated, while also identifying specific linguistic strategies through which agency is negotiated in interaction. (Agency, disability, production format, social actor, conjoint action, linguistic strategies)*

Type
Research Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 177 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahearn, Laura M. (2001). Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30:109–37.Google Scholar
Al Zidjaly, Najma (2005). Communication across ability-status: A nexus analysis of the co-construction of agency and disability in Oman. Dissertation, Georgetown University.Google Scholar
Ainsworth-Vaughn, Nancy (1998). Claiming power in doctor-patient talk. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Becker, Alton L. (1995). Beyond translation: Essays toward a modern philology. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Berger, Peter L., & Luckmann, Thomas (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope, & Levinson, Stephen C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Kathy (1988). Power under the microscope. Dordrecht, Holland: Foris.Google Scholar
Erickson, Frederick (1986). Listening and speaking. In Tannen, Deborah & Alatis, James E. (eds.), Languages and linguistics: The interdependence of theory, data, and application; Georgetown University round table on languages and linguistics 1985, 294–319. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of a spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1981). Footing. Forms of talk. 124–159. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1983). The interaction ritual. American Sociological Review 48:1–19.Google Scholar
Gordon, Cynthia (2003). Aligning as a team: Forms of conjoined participation in (stepfamily) interactions. Research on Language and Social Interaction 36:395–431.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Heidi E. (1998). Reported speech and survivor identity in on-line bone marrow transplantation narratives. Journal of Sociolinguistics 2:53–67.Google Scholar
Harré, Rom (1984). Personal being: A theory for individual psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Harré, Rom (1998). The singular self: An introduction to the psychology of personhood. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Honneth, Axel (1991). Critique of power: Reflective stages in a critical social theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kangasharju, Helena (1996). Aligning as a team in multiparty conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 26:291–319.Google Scholar
Lerner, Gene H. (1993). Collectivities in action: Establishing the relevance of conjoined participation in conversation. Text 13:213–45.Google Scholar
Murphy, Robert F. (1990). The body silent: The different world of the disabled. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
O’Connor, Patricia E. (1994). Narratives of prisoners: A contribution to the grammar of agency. Dissertation, Georgetown University.Google Scholar
O’Connor, Patricia E (2000). Speaking of crime: Narratives of prisoners. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Robillard, Albert A. (1999). Meaning of a disability: The lived experience of paralysis. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Rymes, Betsy (1995). The construction of moral agency in the narratives of high-school drop-outs. Discourse & Society 6:495–516.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah (1993). Speaking for another in sociolinguistic interviews: Alignments, identities, frames. In Tannen, Deborah (ed.), Framing in discourse, 231–63. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah (1996). Narrative as self-portrait. Language and Society 25:167–203.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah (2000). Mother/daughter discourse in a Holocaust oral history: “Because then you admit that you’re guilty.” Narrative Inquiry 10:1–44.Google Scholar
Scollon, Ron (2002). Nexus analysis: Towards an ethnography of motives. Martin Spector Lecture in Applied Linguistics, Center for Language Acquisition, Pennsylvania State University, October 10.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah (1984). Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah (1987). Remarks on discourse and power. In Kedar, Leah (ed.), Power through discourse, 3–10. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah (1994). Gender and discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah (2003). Power maneuvers or connection maneuvers? Ventriloquizing in family interaction. In Tannen, Deborah & Alatis, James E. (eds.), Linguistics, language, and the real world: Discourse and beyond; Georgetown University round table on languages and linguistics 2001, 50–62. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles (1985). Human agency and language: Philosophical papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles (1989). Sources of the self: The making of modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Vygotsky, Lev S.; Cole, Michael; John-Steiner, Vera; & Scribner, Sylvia (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cole, Michael et al. . (eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Vygotsky, Lev S (1981). The instrumental method in psychology. In Wertsch, James V. (eds.), The concept of activity in Soviet psychology, 134–43. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.Google Scholar
Vygotsky, Lev S (1987). Thinking and speech. Minick, N. (ed. and trans.). New York: Plenum.Google Scholar
Wertsch, James V.; Tulviste, Peter; & Hagstrom, Fran (1993). A sociocultural approach to agency. In Forman, Ellice A. et al. . (eds.), Contexts for learning: Sociocultural dynamics in children’s development, 336–56. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar