760 Seminar In Second Language Use: Action Formation and Ascription

Participants in social interaction confront the fundamental problem of designing recognizable action and recognizing actions produced by others. The seminar will explore how action formation and ascription are approached in conversation analysis. Along the historical trajectory of CA as a discipline, we will first examine action formation with vocal resources (grammar, prosody, temporal structure), consistent with CA’s original focus on talk-in-interaction. To this end we will also draw on interactional linguistics, the discipline that studies how action in interaction is designed with language. Secondly we will expand the perspective to contemporary versions of multimodal CA to consider how action formation and ascription are accomplished through configurations of bodily practices and the use of objects, in coordination with talk or without it. Crosslinguistic variation and L2 interaction will be addressed. Participants are welcome to work on data collected for their ongoing projects or develop new studies.

The required texts will be available on Laulima or through Electronic Resources.