Investigating Interaction

Investigating Interaction

Rakovac, Selma

Verbal interaction has been a research object of several approaches and theories, including discourse analysis, conversation analysis, ethnography of speaking, critical discourse analysis, functional pragmatics, interactional linguistics. Those approaches (some of them deserve to be called theories) have one and the same object of observation: talk. However, as a result of different perspectives, the name of their object varies. Both discourse linguistics and functional pragmatics are focused on the way in which languages in use function. Ethnography of speaking is concerned with cultural aspects of human production, and the language itself is observed as a part of a culture. Conversation analysis investigates regularities in social activities, whereby language is one of the products of human society. Different names, different backgrounds and traditions, different scope of interest, different categories, methods and goals, and different naming of one and the same object, are resulting in a general confusion considering study of language interaction. This paper researches both possibilities and limits of the approaches being observed, by analyzing several transcribed talks from outlined perspectives

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012

988