1. Exploring the Relationship among Culture, Interaction and Language: Crosslinguistic Perspectives -- what motivates this panel + its general merits -- brief global summary -- a couple of questions -- a brief/small suggestion IPra 2005 Riva del Garda, Italy

2. summary Contributions that compare languages Japanese/American + Japanese/Korean Contributions that investigate form-function relationships in ONE language Japanese + Yucatec Different speech activities/types of interactions O-data; story-sharing; video-taped interaction; institutional debate; ‘ordinary’ conversation (broken down into sub-activituies) Different types of analysis Cross-linguistic; discourse analytic; conversation analytic

3. contributions: How were these contrasts elicited? –what interactive situations + practices do we tap? What do these contrasts consist of? –precise descriptions of forms under consideration - relating to the loacl tasks - in order to accomplish the GLOBAL task What do these contrasts mean? –what do they “reflect”? (in ‘folk-psychological’ terms) And for those contributions that analyzed form- function relationships in ONE language: How are particular linguistic forms integrated theoretically + methodologically into ‘culture’?

4. summary (cont.) three types of approaches to make sense of ‘differences’ Orientation A a cross-linguistic perspective (comp. typologically - usually no far-reaching interpretations of culture + interaction) Orientation B differences in form ‘reflect’ different cognitive activities // cultural practices Orientation C (differences in) forms ‘constitute’ cultural practices (+ cognitive activities) Is there a compromise or ANOTHER option? (e.g., is it possible to “frame” the ‘reflection’ orientation in tems of a ‘construction’?)

5. interpretations congenial talk vs. exchange talk In synch with cross-cultural psychology (but also gender comparative works) - moving toward ‘cultural psychology’ or ‘ethnogaphic gender research’ Is there an alternative? -- moving to more fine-grained observational, ethnographic work, in different settings, with different populations …

6. brief suggestion Without moving back to “universializings” –Processes of INTEGRATION & DIFFERENTIATION (occurring simultaneously in all interactive phenomena as the “underlying” ‘developmental principle’ of ‘differences’