Rethinking Sequentiality

This book addresses current approaches to sequentiality in pragmatics and discourse analysis. It reflects the current moves in ethnomethodological conversation analysis and speech act theory to cross methodological borders to arrive at a conception of a sequence, which extends the local notion of sequentiality by integrating further constitutive components, such as cognition, intentionality, activity type, culture and genre. The individual contributions were presented at the 7th IPrA Conference held in Budapest in the year 2000. They range from critical analyses of speech act theory and cognitive pragmatics to detailed micro analyses of genre- and activity-specific constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning. The first part “sequences in theory and practice: minimal and unbounded” discusses the theoretical premises and exemplifies these by detailed data analyses. The second part “sequences in discourse: the micro-macro interface” examines genre-specific constraints on individual sequences and shows the benefits of supplementing the microanalytic concept of sequentiality with macroanalytic categories.