The fourteen contributions in this collection come from different approaches in pragmatics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and dialogue analysis; the name given to what is studied ranges from spoken language and conversation to interaction, dialogue, discourse and communication. What the articles have in common is a similar starting point: they are informed by a form of linguistic understanding which has emerged within what could be called the interactional turn

Stancetaking in Discourse - Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction

This volume contributes to the burgeoning field of research on stance by offering a variety of studies based in natural discourse. These collected papers explore the situated, pragmatic, and interactional character of stancetaking, and present new models and conceptions of stance to spark future research. Central to the volume is the claim that stancetaking encompasses five general principles: it involves physical, attitudinal and/or moral positioning; it is a public action; it is inherently dialogic, interactional, and sequential; it indexes broader sociocultural contexts; and it is consequential to the interactants.

The essays in this volume are all analyses of prosody--primarily intonation and rhythm--and the role it plays in everyday conversation. Prosody emerges as a strategy deployed by interactants in the management of turn-taking and floor-holding; in the negotiation of conversational activities such as repair, assessments, announcements, reproaches and news receipts; and in the keying of the tone or modality of interactional sequences. The material studied is taken not from constructed laboratory data but from genuine English, German and Italian conversations.

The Interactional Instinct: The Evolution and Acquisition of Language

The Interactional Instinct explores the evolution of language from the theoretical view that language could have emerged without a biologically instantiated Universal Grammar. In the first part of the book, the authors speculate that a hominid group with a lexicon of about 600 words could combine these items to make larger meanings. 

This book brings together twelve studies, all written by scholars who identify themselves primarily as rhetoricians, that employ theory and/or method fromlinguistic discourse analysis. The studies make use of a variety of discourse analytic resources, including those of critical discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, narrative analysis, and computer-aided corpus analysis.