Temporality in Interaction

“A book that creates an important agenda for future research by bringing together original research by major scholars demonstrating how both language structure, and the phenomenal organization of human understanding, are shaped in fine detail by the practices required to use language as something that emerges through time. The way in which any current unit of talk both projects a relevant future while incorporating within its organization a consequential past, has deep implications for the analysis of both language, and human action within interaction. Phenomena investigated include projection, intersubjectivity as something that can only be accomplished through sequences of action that unfold through time, implications for syntax and word order in a number of different languages, the temporal, rather than static organization of grammatical processes such as sluicing, and the ways in which the understanding of language, including where units begin and end, requires moving beyond the stream of speech to take into account bodies changing their orientations toward each other as they move through both space and time. We learn to appreciate the important and varied ways in which the emergence of phenomena through time organizes both language and human understanding.”

“The concept of time has fascinated scholars from a large range of fields. This book presents thorough and detailed empirical studies of its role for language beyond tense and aspect. It convincingly demonstrates that language, and human interaction in general, can only be described on the basis of “instances”, as communicative phenomena are tailored to the precise moment of their online emergence in their specific context and co-text.
Such reconceptualization of language production and perception is to be truly welcomed. It challenges a number of linguistic pet assumptions from a participants’ perspective and points towards answers for some of the fundamental questions on language as a tool for human action, while allowing us a glimpse of the huge area yet to be covered. At the same time, the book underlines that an amazing wealth of CA concepts are related to temporality. Its topics thus make this book valuable to readers working on interaction and on linguistic issues alike.”

“Ever since the alphabet enabled the abstraction of sound into text, we have been fixated on spoken utterances as if they were timeless, motionless structures, visible at a glance. This only changed with the advent of conversation analysis. How profoundly and pervasively our understanding of language has changed, and is continuing to change, as a consequence is made poignantly clear by the precise and penetrating studies of Temporality in Interaction.”

“The volume as a whole aims to show how linguistic structure is shaped by local contingencies of unfolding interaction, and sensitive to the affordances and constraints of a given sequential moment. To this end, it is successful and consistent. Overall, it demonstrates the strength and vitality of the research program(s) on language and social interaction, and points the way forward for future work on the topic. Perhaps most importantly, it serves as a call to linguists and students of interaction to not neglect the ways in which language and grammar are responsive to and structured by the inescapably temporal nature of language use.”