As children learn more about language, they use it more effectively to achieve their conversational goals. They choose appropriate speech acts, establish joint attention, contribute new information, take up information from others, and take turns. They learn how to enter an exchange among others from as young as age two. Their intrusions in ongoing exchanges typically contain new information. Planning an utterance takes time, and children learn to plan what to say so as to take turns on time. This can be tracked in their answers to yes/no and wh- questions, where they get faster with age. They plan pretend play, assigning roles, assigning actions, and also utterances for each character enacted. They track common ground and design referring expressions for their addressees, and they repeat new words to mark uptake. They distinguish requests from offers, and, on occasion, persist in making repeated requests themselves. They clarify what they mean when asked and offer spontaneous repairs as well. In all this, they track what the others in the exchange say and choose when to enter the exchange themselves.

The last chapter sums up the main findings of the study and gives an outlook on potential further research at the interface of CA and World Englishes.

While Chinese is widely considered a topic-prominent language and 'topic' may be a useful notion for describing some of the unique grammatical features of Chinese, natural text/speech data call for a re-examination of its nature and the ways in which it is manifested and deployed in discourse. My multiple genre-based investigation shows that at a ratio of 4 percent to all clauses, topic constructions are a very rare type of construction in Chinese discourse among all the possible types of syntactic constructions. As such, the status of topic constrictions in Chinese needs to be rethought. An examination of the use of topic constructions in spontaneous conversation shows a number of surprising patterns, including: (1) topic is best described as located at speaker turn transition places; (2) topical elements are subject to speaker negotiation, so they do not have to be definite, identifiable, or shared at the time of the utterance; and (3) topical elements function quite differently in interaction depending on whether they are self-initiated, self-repeated, or other-initiated.

The most natural environment for both speaking and learning to speak is face-to-face interaction. This chapter explores some of the ways in which the demands of this ecology shape the phonetic design of turns-at-talk, focusing on how social actions are accomplished through talk, the methods of Conversation Analysis, the structure of turns at talk, and their organisation into sequences of action, and how affective and epistemic displays are made audible.

Chapter 3 provides a review of current frameworks intended to understand interactional language. It serves as the basis to develop a grammar of interactional language Classic speech act theory, and current attempts to syntacticize it, do not take into consideration the interactional dimension, specifically the role of the addressee in constructing common ground. This chapter reviews several frameworks that take the interactional dimension into consideration. Specifically, I review dialogue-based models (conversation analysis and grounding theory), several functional grammar-based models, as well as recent formal semantic and syntactic approaches toward interactional language. The core lessons learned from these frameworks are that the unit of analysis of interactional language is a minimal conversation consisting of an initiating and a reaction move and that the construction of common ground is an interactive process. It further implies that we have to rethink the classic distinction between competence and performance. Itshows that what these frameworks are missing is a way to disentangle the various factors that contribute to the interpretation of discourse markers. Consequently, it becomes impossible to develop a typology. In contrast, formal syntactic approaches, while well equipped for cross-linguistic comparison, have not explored interactional language and consequently they lack the empirical base necessary to develop a typology. This chapter is the first attempt to survey these frameworks

Emancipatory pragmatics (EP) is an emerging approach to sociopragmatics that aims to develop research frameworks based on languages that have rarely been considered within mainstream Western academia. After first describing some of the events that led to the advancement of the EP approach, we present findings from Thai and ǀGui, an African language, that challenge existing theories of language usage in two areas of pragmatics, politeness and turn-taking. Discussion then focuses on the proposal that the concepts of ba and basho can serve as the basis of a more inclusive framework for understanding social interaction. Following presentation of the foundational basis of ba-theory, we offer examples of language data to demonstrate its application to Japanese, to Hawaiian and also to English, thereby suggesting the potential of ba-theory to understand interaction across a diverse set of languages. Finally, we discuss the need for work that will not only investigate how ba-theory may apply to a wider range of languages but also explore other inclusive frameworks that will push the field of pragmatics to attain a richer understanding of the linguistic and interactional potential of people throughout the world.

This chapter focuses on the proactive management of relations in terms of ‘rapport maintenance’; in other words, the use of language to minimise or prevent causing offence. The chapter takes a communication-style approach and argues that directness–indirectness is a particularly important facet to be managed. This is not only because it is a key feature of politeness theorising, but because research has revealed widespread intercultural differences in people’s preferences for a given level of directness in a given context, and because this in turn can give rise to a range of interactional challenges and misunderstandings. The chapter also argues that other aspects of language use are important; its pays particular attention to the participation domain – how far simultaneous talk is acceptable and patterns of turn-taking and backchannelling. Finally, the chapter argues that the various communication styles that have been identified in the literature should not be viewed as dichotomies, but rather as continua. The chapter draws on relational dialectic theory to underpin this perspective. For all facets of ‘rapport maintenance’, both mindfulness and (convergent/mutual) accommodation are important.

This chapter examines what Trump might gain from perpetually evaluating others in his verbal interactions. The analysis presented here explores Trump’s evaluations of his guests at the 2017 Black History Month Listening Session. The political stakes of the event were high, as the President who had been repeatedly accused of racist and xenophobic remarks led a meeting of Black Americans in celebration of Black historical figures. Yet during the event, Trump repeatedly placed himself in the role of “evaluator” and positioned his guests as “evaluatees.” With each guest likely noticing that their own turn to be evaluated was soon at hand, each worked to provide Trump ample evidence of their fealty in exchange for his positive evaluation. Their demonstrations of commitment and loyalty to Trump garnered his praise only when the guests provided evidence that mets Trump’s implicit criteria, which he repeatedly modeled in his evaluation of others around the table. As a result, Trump and guests worked together on the fly to achieve his position as “Evaluator in Chief” and further solidify his public image as the “Boss.”

This chapter investigates the House of Commons at Westminster in a pivotal period for women’s representation: the first Blair government of 1997–2001. Based on archival, historical and ethnographic data (observations and interviews), the House of Commons is identified as a gendered space, in which women are peripheral members. For example, the overall proportion of turns taken in a sample of debates shows that men break the rules by speaking out of turn more than women. Prime Minister’s Question Time events are ‘scored’ according to the degree of adversarial features that they possess. The findings show that women and men can be equally adversarial in the House of Commons (both women and men were responsible for the most adversarial exchanges), but that women contributed proportionally fewer adversarial turns than their male counterparts. Finally, it is found that women are less likely to manipulate the ‘key’ of a speech event by using humour or irony (particularly the practice of filibustering) than men in this context. Women MPs’ avoidance of rule-breaking (or meticulous adherence to the rules) is explained as one of ways in which women MPs make sure they are beyond reproach in a Community of Practice in which they are interlopers.

Conversation analysis (CA) is a paradigm for studying social interaction, investigating talk in its sequential context. The concept of adjacency (the relationship between two turns uttered by different speakers one after the other) is a powerful resource for participants to make sense of what each speaker is doing, both through talk and its absence. This concept enables us to pinpoint the relevant absence of talk of a specific kind. Drawing on three key conversation analytic tools – sequence organization, preference organization and turn taking – this chapter demonstrates how CA can be used to get a handle on the"unsaid." We present a case study from a neurology consultation in which an adult patient’s mother and neurologist work to process their contrasting diagnostic agendas. We demonstrate how CA can reveal (1) what is relevantly absent in a sequence of talk; (2) the unsaid in what is articulated, and (3) the (often subtle) silencing of another through particular interactional "moves." We show that the underlying conflict seldom rises to the surface of the interaction; each speaker attempts to maintain social bonds while s advancing their own objectives.