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What are clauses for ? Understanding grammar in terms of social action| old_uid | 4618 |
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| title | What are clauses for ? Understanding grammar in terms of social action |
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| start_date | 2008/04/15 |
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| schedule | 15h45-17h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | This presentation proposes a promising direction for answering the question posed in the title, drawing on work at the interface of grammar and interaction. Drawing on research in usage-based linguistics and in conversational organization, I will argue that this favorite linguistic unit, the clause, emerges as a locus of interaction, in the sense that it is one of the most frequent grammatical formats that interactants orient to in projecting what actions are being done by others’ utterances and in acting on these projections.
Intriguingly for linguists, the way in which the clause affords grammatical projectability varies significantly from language to language. In fact the way speakers orient to this projectability can be shown to depend on the nature of the most frequent clausal grammatical formats which have been stored, sorted, and categorized from massive experience with language in interaction to become available as resources in a language: in some languages these formats allow early projection in the turn unit (as in English), in others they do not (as in Japanese). I will show how grammatical projectability has repercussions for the way in which various interactional phenomena are managed in the speech communities with quite different patterns of ‘constituent order’ and clause organization. In each case the interactional practices used are precisely the ones which the clausal grammatical formats in the given language promote. The evidence thus suggests that clauses are interactionally motivated formats for social action. |
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| responsibles | Zondervan |
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