Abstract
Discourses in Interaction is a contribution to the interactional turn in the humanities. Although all the chapters choose different approaches such as pragmatics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and dialogue analysis, they have a common starting point: they all represent a form of linguistic understanding, that is, the interactional turn. As stated in the volume, discourse in interaction is understood as all forms of meaningful semiotic human activity which are considered ‘in connection with social, cultural and historical patterns and development of use’ (Blommaert, 2005: 3), thus the focus of discourse analysis today has shifted towards various types of interaction, private or public, dyadic or polyadic, written or spoken, present-day or historical. These shifts have been well illustrated in the contributions in this volume.
The editors give a brief introduction to the collection which addresses two points. First, they explain the shift from the linguistic turn to the interaction turn by referring to different approaches, such as dialogism, discourse-functional linguistics, functional linguistics and interactional linguistics. Second, they summarize the individual contributions that make up the volume.
The book is divided into four sections. The first section includes three chapters. Fetzer discusses the nature and function of ‘context’. After examining the different types of context and dynamics of context, she argues that context is a product of language use and is interactionally constructed and negotiated. Linell’s focus is on ‘communicative activity types as organizations in discourses and discourses in organizations’ (p. 33). He outlines a ‘dialogical’ perspective on discourse and puts its focus on the relationship between interaction and context. Using the Salem witchcraft documents of 1692 as an example, Hiltunen stresses the importance of historical discourse linguistics in contextualizing texts and argues that reconstructing the interplay of context and discourse is elementary for understanding the strategic choices involved.
The second section concerns constructing identity across genres, in four articles in different cultural contexts. Waugh presents a fine-grained analysis of pronoun choice in a conversation in French between three monolingual French speakers and one bilingual speaker of French and English. Vanhala-Aniszewski investigates the relations between participants in interactions actualized in Russian media discourse through a critical discourse analysis of newspaper articles representing ordinary news reports. She shows that the news texts include quite a few markers indicating the explicit presence of interpersonal relations between the participants of the communicative act, such as modality markers, restrictions, attitude markers and comment adjuncts. Siilin shows how the authoritative voice of the Russian Orthodox Church is evident in new media established by the Church to gain a new audience of young readers. In a discussion of reporting in Fanny Burney’s personal correspondence, Nevala and Palander-Collin have shown that: 1) reporting often serves personal and interpersonal functions; 2) reporting is more typical in Burney’s letters to close recipients, and the sayings of those closest are much more reported than general sources like newspapers; and 3) evaluative remarks in her reporting highlight the interactive nature of letters and show personal stance.
Section 3 concerns managing interpersonal relations, and presents four articles. Kryk-Kastovsky discusses power in the Early Modern English courtroom by examining levels of linguistic analysis such as lexicon, syntactic and social-pragmatic devices. This chapter is quite different from the others in that it is an attempt to apply the notion of power to the analysis of diachronic data. Martinez-Insua explores the use of indirect speech acts of refutation and denial in Modern English trials by examining the data from trial proceedings from the period 1560–1760. The next two articles concern computer-mediated communication. Kleinke investigates the functions and use of ‘disagreement’ in public news group Internet interaction in English and German, including their distribution, strategies of mitigation, preference organization and communicative effects. Lindholm’s chapter focuses on the functions of narratives in advice-giving messages by drawing on the data from asynchronous peer-to-peer discussions. The study shows the argumentative functions of narratives, such as supporting assessments and advice or for relational work.
Section 4 is devoted to structures in interaction. Sivenkova investigates a variety of communicative moves in which interlocutors negotiate appropriateness of an utterance. Speyer discusses the filling of the sentence-initial position in German in terms of discourse-structural considerations. Smith’s focus is on ‘phatic expression’ within the theoretical framework of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and speech act theory by analysing the data from everyday telephone conversations in German and French.
The 14 chapters are revised versions of presentations given at the Organization in Discourse 3: The Interactional Perspective conference held in Turku in August 2006. The conference and the 14 chapters are unique in that they analyse a great variety of types of interaction. As the editors point out (p. 7), although the starting point, goals and aims of studies differ, the volume is significant in adopting a new understanding of discourse, which will help to challenge old beliefs and to motivate new understanding to emerge. Through the interactional approaches to discourse in the 14 chapters, readers can easily see ‘the interconnected, parallel, but also varying and even divergent discourses on interaction’ (p. 7).
The most salient feature of this volume, I think, is that it presents readers with divergent research approaches and various types of data, such as courtroom interaction, media discourse, trials and telephone conversations. In so doing, it will benefit readers with different academic backgrounds. There are multiple reasons why the book can be recommended to a range of readers. It can not only serve as a course and reference book for students and researchers interested in the subject of discourse analysis, but also set the scene for further studies on interactional discourse linguistics.