Temporality in Interaction

Time is a constitutive element of everyday interaction: all verbal interaction is produced and interpreted in time. However, it is only recently that research in linguistics has started to take the temporality of linguistic production and reception in interaction into account by studying the real-time and on-line dimension of spoken language.
This volume is the first systematic collection of studies exploring temporality in interaction and its theoretical foundations. It brings together researchers focusing on how temporality impinges on the production and interpretation of linguistic structures in interaction and how linguistic resources are designed to deal with the exigencies and potentials of temporality in interaction. The volume provides new insights into the temporal design of a range of heretofore unexplored linguistic phenomena from various languages as well as into the temporal aspects of linguistic structures in embodied interaction.

Charles Goodwin, UCLA:
A book that creates an important agenda for future research by bringing together original research by major scholars demonstrating how both language structure, and the phenomenal organization of human understanding, are shaped in fine detail by the practices required to use language as something that emerges through time. The way in which any current unit of talk both projects a relevant future while incorporating within its organization a consequential past, has deep implications for the analysis of both language, and human action within interaction. Phenomena investigated include projection, intersubjectivity as something that can only be accomplished through sequences of action that unfold through time, implications for syntax and word order in a number of different languages, the temporal, rather than static organization of grammatical processes such as sluicing, and the ways in which the understanding of language, including where units begin and end, requires moving beyond the stream of speech to take into account bodies changing their orientations toward each other as they move through both space and time. We learn to appreciate the important and varied ways in which the emergence of phenomena through time organizes both language and human understanding.