Abstract
Action ascription has been paid much attention over the past decade in Conversation Analysis (CA) and Pragmatics. As the first volume focusing on this field, this book addresses the way in which participants conceive of actions and ascribe actions to another party’s behavior in social interaction, so as to further our understanding of action ascription and clarify its relation to the theory of action. Written by a group of internationally known scholars, this volume consists of 13 chapters, divided into three parts, and with the first chapter as the introduction.
The editors begin the introductory chapter by highlighting our lack of a comprehensive theory of action, and foregrounding the essential role of action ascription in this theory. Then, they frame action ascription as a members’ concern and introduce its approaches, constituents, and resources. Before ending the chapter by an overview of the volume, the editors emphasize that action ascription is also a social action, a viewpoint being repeatedly mentioned in the following chapters.
Part I, from Chapter 2 to Chapter 5, touches upon the constituents of action ascription. In Chapter 2, Robert B. Arundale emphasizes the critical role of the third position utterances in action ascription, based on the examination on the temporal organization of adjacency, nextness, and progressivity of element in sequence, from the perspective of both speaker and recipient. In Chapter 3, Paul Drew, based on the claim that ‘action ascription is itself a social action’ (p. 58), discusses what he calls ‘micro-politics’ of action, and holds that the value attached on to action is not intrinsic but a situated property, which may be maneuvered to promote or inhibit the actions.
Chapter 4, by Michael Haugh, can be seen as an extension of the central idea of Chapter 3. The author explores two implications of treating action ascription as a social action. First, action ascription is not only a matter of intersubjectivity, but also a matter of accountability. Second, in action ascription, participants’ inferences might make the process of ascribing suppressed, avoided, or undercut. In Chapter 5, Lorenza Mondada uncovers how embodied resources, namely multimodal behaviors, and the local sequential environment together with the entire project serve as the resources for ascription of the decision of buying.
Part II, from Chapter 6 to Chapter 11, addresses practices of action ascription. Chapter 6 and 7 focus on two different practices of overt action ascription. In Chapter 6, Arnulf Deppermann and Julia Kaiser reveal how intention ascriptions are used to clarify the ambiguous meaning in the prior turn, coordinate the ascriber’s future actions, and index a problem with the preceding utterance. Chapter 7, by Henrike Helmer, delineates how strategy ascription plays a role in a public mediation setting. Three main types of strategy ascriptions are identified, and they all comprise actions themselves which serve to strengthen the speakers’ own party and discredit the opponents.
Then, attention is paid to implicit action ascription practices. Chapter 8, by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and Sandra A. Thompson, elucidates how the prior turn is ascribed as advice-giving, and how it is responded in terms of its varied deontic stance displayed by different grammatical forms. Chapter 9, by Takeshi Hiramoto and Makoto Hayashi, unveils how the incongruence between one’s deontic stance and status, combined with the roles of participants, plays a part in recipients’ action ascription in the family decision-making process.
Chapter 10, by Yaxin Wu and Guodong Yu, centers on the secondary action parasitic on action ascription, namely, action assessment. It is demonstrated that particular linguistic forms, like the particle ya in Chinese, may be major resources for action assessment and affect formation. Chapter 11, by Tom Koole and Lotte van Burgsteden, investigates the relation between action ascription and participant identities in emergency calls. The analysis shows that the callers’ identities and corresponding actions are not determined by their institutional roles, but ascribed through the interactional contingencies in the call.
Part III reexplores the action ascription on the theoretical dimension. Chapter 12, by N.J. Enfield and Jack Sidnell, challenges the macro categorization of action. They argue that action categorization is neither necessary nor sufficient, since participants are not labeling actions in interaction but dealing with the details of turns under the assumption that the interactors’ behavior is goal-directed.
In the last chapter, John Heritage reviews the contributions of previous chapters, and at the same time, provides an overview of researches in action ascription in CA. He also sorts out the resources for action ascription from the bottom-up (turn-internal) and top-down (turn-external) perspectives, while highlighting the goals to be achieved in CA.
This volume can be praised for its systematicity, multi-perspective analysis, and innovative case studies. First, this book presents a systematic introduction to action ascription, from its theoretical development to the latest studies. All the chapters interlock with one another even if they are written by different experts. For instance, the key principle ‘action ascription is a social action’ claimed in Chapter 1 is integrated into every chapter, and what Chapter 4 discusses about accountability is also underpinned in Chapter 2, 3, and 5.
Second, the analysis in this book is multi-dimensional. It investigates various types of sequence in different environmental contexts like ‘everyday advice-giving’ (Chapter 8) and ‘decision-making while shopping’ (Chapter 9), and covers diverse research subjects, such as ‘intension’ (Chapter 6) and ‘strategy’ (Chapter 7). The data, including audio and video recordings, come from nine different languages and are analyzed in detail in terms of their linguistic forms or non-linguistic forms (multimodality). Third, this book delves into many topics neglected by previous researchers. For example, Chapter 9 sheds light on the ‘roles’ relevant to family decision-making, and Chapter 10 conducts research on how affectivity is expressed through the implementation of the secondary actions. Both of them are topics less discussed in CA.
However, since all the chapters in this book are based on qualitative research, its contribution could be even stronger if it includes a quantitative study. Despite this minor flaw, this book, in general, provides invaluable sources for this burgeoning area and offers refreshing views on CA and pragmatics. It could be regarded as a must-read for conversation and pragmatics analysts who are interested in action formation and ascription.