The Pragmatics of Interaction

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, social, cultural, variational, or discursive angles, this fourth volume is dedicated to the empirical investigation of the way human beings organize their interaction in natural environments and how they use talk for accomplishing actions and their contexts. Starting from Goffman’s observation that interaction exhibits a structure in its own right that cannot be reduced to the psychological properties of the individual nor to society, it contains a selection of articles documenting the various levels of interactional organization. In addition to treatments of basic concepts such as sequence, participation, prosody and style and some topical articles on phenomena like reported speech and listener response, it also includes overviews of specific traditions (conversation analysis, ethnomethodology) and articles on eminent authors (Goffman, Sacks) who had a formative influence on the field.

Chit Cheung Matthew Sung, Lancaster University, in Discourse and Communication, Volume 4(4), 2010:
This volume offers a rich panoply of approaches to the vast and deep set of questions and issues in the study of interaction, with priority given to accounts of the interactional ‘machinery’ and CA in particular. The authors not only provide comprehensive surveys of previous studies, but also present possibilities, challenges and suggestions for future work. In this way, the handbook offers the readers with both updated information for a specific field of study and inspiration for further investigation. In addition, it can be used as ‘a method or resource for shedding light on a host of other phenomena in the social life of human beings and in the fabric of the various societal arrangements they live in’ (p. 12).