Pronouns and Action Formation / Ascription in Interaction: A Usage-Based Approach

As proposed by Conversation Analysis (CA), designing and interpreting one’s own and others’ turns as performing specific social actions is a central challenge for participants in social interaction. While this process of action formation /ascription is a genuine multimodal endeavour dependending on its local and situational ‘home environments’, the role of verbal resources is crucial, especially with regard to linguistic structure and the organisation of a 'grammar of turn-constructional units' in interaction. Despite the pervasive presence in talk-in-interaction, the use of pronouns as matter of action related turn-design has not been systematically examined yet. This workshop addresses this research gap by focusing on how pronouns (and their shifts) contribute to the profiling of emerging social actions in their local sequential and embodied ecologies, on the role of pronouns for shaping the participation framework, and for contextualising different degrees of action, epistemic and deontic stances.

Organiser / Contact: 

Prof. Karola Pitsch, University of Duisburg-Essen, Institute for Communication Studies

Felix Bergmann, University of Duisburg-Essen, Institute for Communication Studies