Interactional linguistics is often considered a recent interdisciplinary approach to grammar and interaction drawing on such fields as linguistics, the sociology of language, and anthropology. Scholars in interactional linguistics usually refer to conversation analysis, functional linguistics, or linguistic anthropology in order to describe "the way in which language figures in everyday interaction and cognition." (Ochs / Schegloff / Thompson 1996). The field contrasts with dominant approaches to linguistics during the twentieth century, which tended to focus either on the form of language per se, or on theories of individual language user's linguistic competence.
The seminar will be divided in two main parts: Starting with a theoretical look at talk-in-interaction, a significant amount of time will be dedicated to a close reading of some seminal papers in the field. In order to adopt a more practical stance to this rather theoretical issue, a second part of the seminar will be devoted to dealing with authentic material from the English speaking community(data sessions), including a workshop on transcribing audio-/video data.
- Dozent*in: Götz Schwab