1. Constructing Social Action in Conversation
IPrA Manchester 2011

2. Language, action & interaction
Language delivers action, not meaning (as Levinson reminds us)
The question is, How does language deliver action?

3. Initial actions & responses
Much of CA has focused on responses
Responses & preference organization
Non-equivalence of preferred & dispreferred actions
Not exclusively response-focused; eg. question design (Heritage), requests (Wootton 1981)

4. CA has tended to take for granted…
Conversation Analysis (CA) has not much explored how turns at talk are constructed or designed to conduct a particular social action. We’ve tended to take for granted that some turn or utterance ‘is’ an invitation, or a proposal or request or whatever, or that some next turn is a response to the prior (a rejection, for instance), without considering systematically how these turns/utterances are designed to ‘conduct’ those actions

5. Accountability of turn design
Design talk to be understood in a particular way - as ‘doing’ some particular action
Encompasses duplicity
Design (to be an action) & attribution related, but analytically distinct (symmetry of production & recognition; Heritage 1984)

6. So what is a social action?
Some of us have focused on ‘speech acty’ actions - requests, offers, proposals etc
Shouldn’t restrict to these - panel will go beyond this
Schegloff (1996) on ‘confirming allusions’
Anything in talk-in-interaction is, potentially, an action

7. Aims of panel Contribute to developing programme of research into
how we construct turns as actions…
…& especially linguistic resources in action construction
how participants recognise what’s being ‘done’ (action attribution)
what do we mean by ‘social action

8. Panel contribution will cover…
…responses as well as initial actions
Linguistic properties/resources in action construction include lexis, syntax, prosody/phonetics, & morphology
Embodied actions

9. Panel programme 8.30-10.00 Rossi; Walker/Ogden; Sorjonen & Hakulinen
Fox, Thompson & Couper-Kuhlen; Selting; Wells
Drake & Ford; Keating & Egbert; Heritage
Steensig & Heinemann; Levinson; Drew

10. Thank you…
…we know you have a choice!