Sandra Thompson will give an interactive talk based on questions by the audience on the topic of interactional linguistics, as well as her own pre-formulated questions (see abstract below).

Abstract

"Interactional Linguistics" by Sandra Thompson (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Interactional Linguistics specifically seeks to explain how everyday social interactions motivate the phonological, prosodic, semantic, and morphosyntactic patterns we call ‘grammar’. Interactional Linguistics intersects directly with the study of conversation, particularly Conversation Analysis, and considers such questions as:

• how does looking at language in everyday use affect what we understand grammar to be?
• how can we understand grammar as being both cognitive and social?
• how does the sequential, temporal nature of everyday interactions influence the way speakers store, access, and retrieve their experience with language?
• what are the categories and units of grammar? Which of the ones we’ve grown up on, and been trained to observe, would we see if we looked at just interactional data? Do everyday social interactions provide empirical support for traditional grammatical categories like ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’, ‘adjectives’, ‘sentences’, ‘clauses’, ‘question intonation’, ‘passive’, etc.? Or do we need new grammatical ‘units’?
• how do the categories and units of grammar arise from recognized patterns in the way social interaction is organized?
• what does grammar have to do with ‘taking turns’?