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CHAPTER 10
Language and Social Interaction
DOUGLAS W. MAYNARD
ANSII PERÄKYLÄ
At least since Aristotle, language has been seen as distinctively human in its complexity.
Ethologists have increased our appreciation of how other mammals—dolphins, chimpanzees,
gorillas, and so on—employ sounds to signal one another in sophisticated ways, but humans,
in conducting their everyday affairs, rely on spoken and gestural forms of intercourse to an
unparalleled degree (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). Despite the centrality of language use in human
society, social psychology textbooks often ignore the topic (Clark, 1985, p. 179), and when
they do pay attention it is to regard language as a mode of communication or a vehicle whereby
humans transmit information, including ideas, thoughts, and feelings, from one to another.
A variety of philosophers and social scientists regard the view of language as primarily
communicative in function as the “conduit metaphor” (Reddy, 1979). This metaphor is rooted
in the commonsensical notion that, through speech, one person conveys information by insert-
ing it into words and sending them along a communicative channel. People receive the words
at the other end and extract the encoded thoughts and feelings from them. The conduit
metaphor reinforces an idea that problems of meaning in human society are essentially refer-
ential or concerned with how concepts correspond to or represent reality, and that language
operates to make propositions about the world (Pitkin, 1972, p. 3). Instead of using the con-
duit metaphor and referential approach to meaning, scholars recently have approached lan-
guage as a medium of organized social activity, in which words are “performatives” (Austin,
1962) or “deeds” (Wittgenstein, 1958, para. 546). It is partly through language that humans
“do” the social world, even as the world is confronted as the unquestioned background or con-
dition for activity. The conduit metaphor and “picture book” view of language, rather than the
233
DOUGLAS W. M AYNARD • Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706
ANSII PERÄKYLÄ • Department of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by John Delamater. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York, 2003.
Delam-10.qxd 03/01/2003 11:30 AM Page 233
more dynamic or activist approach, still heavily influence social psychological theory and
research, however. This chapter begins with a review of general statements in social psychol-
ogy about language, then examines language as action and the philosophical and social
scientific background to this perspective. We review the so-called mapping problem or the
question of how utterances become linked to social actions. Rule-based answers to this ques-
tion include sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. In other perspectives—the frame analy-
sis of Goffman, and discursive psychology—rules play a less dominant role. Finally, we
discuss ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, in which rules are altogether abandoned
as explanatory resources and investigators connect language to action through other means,
such as the sequential organization of talk.
LANGUAGE IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
There are two main disciplinary “branches” to the field of social psychology—the psycho-
logical and the sociological (House, 1977). Along the psychological branch, it has been tra-
ditional to employ the conduit model of language. For example, a frequent topic along this
branch is that of persuasion, and the well-known Yale communication model (Hovland,
Harvey, & Sherif, 1953) poses a basic question about it: “Who says what to whom by what
means?” This model, which has been modified by more recent, cognitively oriented models
such as the elaboration likelihood and heuristic and systematic models (Chaiken, 1987;
Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), includes four factors that are important to achieving persuasion—
a communicator or source, a message, an audience, and a channel through which the message
is conveyed. When, for example, audience members perceive a source as credible and trust-
worthy, they are more likely to be persuaded by what the source says. Over the years, such
public figures as (in the United States) Eleanor Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton
have been seen as examples of persuasive source figures. Other “source” features including
likeability, attractiveness, and expertise also affect how audiences evaluate messages. Besides
features of a source, researchers have studied characteristics of messages (capacity to arouse
emotion or fear, quantity and timing of messages, discrepancy between message and target’s
own position, etc.), targets (mood, motivation, etc.) and situations for their influence on
persuasiveness.
In the sociological branch of social psychology, symbolic interactionists have been most
concerned with language. This is no doubt due to the influence of Mead (1934), who origi-
nated the suggestion that humans employ significant symbols that, when emitted by one party,
elicit the same response in that party as in the party to whom the symbol is directed. This sug-
gestion assumes significance in a larger context than social psychology, however. Sociologists
regard communication as achieving a solution to “the problem of meaning,” which Weber
(1947) long ago identified as being at the core of social action, for the defining criterion of
such action is that it is a product of the interactive interpretations of society’s members. When
Mead (1934) proposed the existence of significant symbols and the capacity for “taking the
role of the other,” it seemed to represent a clear statement of how humans could form com-
mon understandings, produce mutual and complementary stances within what he called the
“social act,” and also thereby provide for larger patterns of social life.
From ideas like Mead’s and a more general concern with the problem of meaning, it is
easy to see how social psychologists moved to the conduit metaphor when discussing human
language, seeing it as a repository of significant symbols in which people package their ideas
and feelings. Significant symbols include not only words but gestures as well, although there
234 Douglas W. Maynard and Ansii Peräkylä
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are two views of gestural communication. In one view, gestures are substituted for words.
Thus, a hand wave stands for “hello,” a green light suggests “go,” a beckoning arm signifies
“come on,” and so on (Hertzler, 1965, pp. 29–30). In the other view, gestures occupy a dif-
ferent “channel of communication” than words—a nonverbal one. In either view, because of
the presumption that gestures encode referential meaning, the conduit metaphor is preserved.
Although it is recognized that gestures and words are arbitrary and conventional and that they
take on different senses according to the context in which they appear, individuals’ ability to
encode their own experiences with words and gestures inexorably leads actors to share the
same mental attitudes or states and to agree upon reference (Hewitt, 1997, pp. 30–38), which
makes collaborative activity possible.
An influential variant of the communicational view of language is the famous
Sapir–Whorf, or linguistic relativity, hypothesis. Benjamin Whorf, a student of the anthro-
pologist Edward Sapir, studied the languages of American Indians and other groups, and
argued that these languages conditioned the members’ life experiences. As a straightforward
example (Whorf, 1956, p. 216) observes that the Hopi language has one word for everything
that flies (except birds, which form another category), whereas English has separate nouns for
insect, airplane, aviator, and so on. Thus, according to Whorf (1956, p. 218), actors “dissect”
the world “along lines laid down by our native languages.” Despite the relativity it implies,
the Whorfian hypothesis is compatible with the conduit metaphor and communicational view
of language in that it proposes the very source of an individual’s experience.* Once individ-
uals have learned the group’s language, they have acquired the symbolic means for having
emotions, beliefs, perceptions, and so on and transmitting them to one another.
Of course, most social psychologists argue that language and experience reciprocally
influence one another. Nevertheless, in studies where language is a prominent variable, it
remains as a relatively static repository of meanings†that either conditions or is conditioned
by those social factors of interest to the investigator. Later, we show that in traditional studies,
social structure is often conveyed by the conduit of communication. Overall, then, language
has been important to social psychology because it represents a vital medium whereby actors
can communicate with one another and thereby set up joint projects according to preexisting
social arrangements. In this view, the manipulation of significant symbols is a precursor to
action and behavior is the product of linguistically achieved common understandings. A dif-
ferent view of language sees it as co-constitutive of social activity. That is, language and action
are facets of a single process that participants collaboratively organize through their practices
of speech and gesture.
LANGUAGE AND ACTION
The conduit metaphor implies that language is largely a vehicle whereby interactants make
propositions about the world. From this perspective, which is explicit or implicit in traditional
social psychological research on language, problems of meaning involve how well linguistic
concepts refer to, correspond with, or represent reality, including internal thoughts and feelings.
Language and Social Interaction 235
*The Whorfian hypothesis suggests an iconic relation between language and thought—that is, that language
determines thought. Early on, Lenneberg (1953) and Brown (1958) pointed out the logical flaws in this proposition.
For a more recent critique, see Pinker (1994, chapter 3).
†This is true, as Boden (1990, p. 245) remarks, even in symbolic interactionist studies, which, despite interest in
people’s defining activities, have accorded language very little direct attention.
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A different idea— that language is a site of social activity—stems from developments in what
is called ordinary language philosophy. A variety of scholars, including Austin, Ryle, Searle,
and Wittgenstein, take the position that problems of meaning and reference in traditional
philosophy—and, by extension, issues concerning how and under what conditions interac-
tants communicate effectively with one another—can be fruitfully recast through investiga-
tion of ordinary language. This means avoiding the abstracting and generalizing process
whereby words serve to reference or point to objects and situating words in orderly contexts
to appreciate how words achieve actions.
Speech Act Theory
The title of John Austin’s famous book, How to Do Things with Words, conveys the essence
of speech act theory. Austin (1962, p. 12) questions “an old assumption in philosophy” that
to say something is to state something in a propositional sense. Sentences that convey refer-
ential information, in Austin’s words, form locutionary acts, but many utterances do not
describe, state, or report anything. That is, they do not state anything and cannot be evaluated
for their truth, but rather are illocutionary performances.* Examples, paraphrased from
Austin (1962, p. 5), are:
“I do” (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife) (as uttered during a marriage
ceremony)
“I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth” (as uttered when smashing the bottle against the
stem)
“I give and bequeath my watch to my brother” (as occurring in a will)
“I bet you it will rain tomorrow”
Such utterances do not report or describe what a person is doing; they achieve a designated
activity, such as promising, naming, giving, or betting.
As Austin (1962, p. 100) reflected on the characteristics of performatives or illocution-
ary acts, he came to view locutionary acts in a new way. He proposed that the “occasion of
an utterance matters seriously” and that to understand how it functions, the “context” in which
it is spoken must be investigated together with the utterance itself (Austin, 1962, p. 98). That
is, when we examine the occasion of locutionary or statement-like acts, we see that speakers
are using them to ask or answer a question, give assurance or a warning, announce a verdict
or intent, and so on. Accordingly, so-called “statements” also occur as some specific action—
they are performative rather than referential. The lesson for the “communicational” view
of language is that the locutions through which persons provide information about their
thoughts, feelings, and ideas occur as part of some context of acting and are, like promising,
naming, giving, and so on, illocutionary:
What we need to do for the case of stating, and by the same token, describing and reporting, is
to take them a bit off their pedestal, to realize that they are speech-acts no less than all these
other speech-acts that we have been mentioning and talking about as performative. (Austin, 1961,
pp. 249–250)
236 Douglas W. Maynard and Ansii Peräkylä
*Austin (1962, p. 102) also discusses “perlocutionary acts,” or utterances that are consequential in particular ways
for the behavior of persons to whom they are directed, but this type need not concern us here. The distinction
between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts is hazy (Levinson, 1983, p. 287).
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Thus, Austin abandons the dichotomy between locutionary and illocutionary acts “in favor of
more general families of related and overlapping speech acts.”
One of Austin’s successors, Searle (1969, pp. 16–17), more forcefully states that the
“unit of linguistic communication is not, as has generally been supposed, the symbol, word,
or sentence … but rather the production of the symbol or word or sentence in the performance
of a speech act,” and that a theory of language, therefore, needs a theory of action. For Searle,
this theory is one in which a set of underlying, constitutive rules specifies how speech acts
can be accomplished.
Both Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) attempt to come to grips with the well-known
problem in the philosophy of language that a sentence with a given reference and predication
can have an assortment of meanings. In terms of speech act theory, the “same” utterance can
perform a variety of different speech acts. Searle’s (1969, pp. 70–71) classic example is a wife
reporting to her husband at a party, “It’s really quite late”:
That utterance may be at one level a statement of fact; to her interlocutor, who has just remarked
on how early it was, it may be (and be intended as) an objection; to her husband it may be (and
be intended as) a suggestion or even a request (“Let’s go home”) as well as a warning (“You’ll feel
rotten in the morning if we don’t”).
Among speech act theorists, linking a given or “same” utterance to specific actions may
involve what Austin (1962, pp. 15–24) called “felicity conditions,” or the set of circumstances
that allow for the successful completion of a performative. Thus, for an act of promising to be
effective, Austin (1962, pp. 21–22) suggests that the promisor must intend to promise, have
been heard by someone, and be understood as promising. Incorporating and correcting theories
of meaning (Grice, 1957; Strawson, 1964) that, somewhat like Austin, are based on speakers’
intentions, Searle (1969, 1975) provides a sophisticated system of rules whereby the “direct”
or “indirect” action a given sentence is intended to initiate can be consummated. For example,
rules or conventions, according to Searle (1969, pp. 57–61) specify how an uttered promise is
produced, what the preparatory conditions are (e.g., that the promise stipulates an act for some-
one that would not occur in the normal course of events), that the speaker intends to do the act
as an obligation, and that the hearer recognizes the utterance as it was meant. These rules can
be related to what Grice (1975) has called “conversational implicature,” a set of maxims that
underlie and provide for the cooperative use of language (Levinson, 1983, p. 241).
Language as a Form of Life
Another important figure, and perhaps the most influential, in the ordinary language tradition
is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in his own early work was deeply committed to logical posi-
tivism and the idea that the function of language is to represent objects in the world.
Subscribing to the referential approach to meaning, Wittgenstein thought that the fundamen-
tal question about language was the truth or falsity of its propositions. The philosopher’s main
task was to translate complex sentences into their elementary units in order to assess its truth
or falsity (Pitkin, 1972, pp. 27–28). Later, Wittgenstein disavowed this approach and any rule-
based approach to language, instead urging the examination of language practice—how actors
employ words and sentences in concrete situations. Thus, in Philosophical Investigations and
other posthumous publications, Wittgenstein (1958) argues that language, rather than being
a vehicle for naming things, conveying information, or even enacting intentions according to
rules, is an activity or form of life in its own right. For example, to analyze a single word in
the language, and propose that there is a single definable class of phenomena to which it refers
Language and Social Interaction 237
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is to neglect that descriptions can be a wide variety of things depending on the various roles
the word plays in a multiplicity of language games (Wittgenstein, 1958, para. 24). Consider
the word “hello,” which we might define as a greeting. However, its status as a greeting
depends on where, in a developing conversation, the item occurs (Schegloff, 1986). When
a party uses the word after picking up a ringing telephone, the activity it performs is answer-
ing a summons rather than greeting the caller. Subsequently, there may be a an exchange or
sequence of salutations, and in that context “hello” does perform greeting. To discover the
meaning of a word, then, it is not possible to rely on ostensive or demonstrative or any other
fixed definitions; one must examine the contexts of use. When contexts of use are similar, then
words may be said to share what Wittgenstein (1958, para. 67) called “family resemblances.”
It is in the actual practice of placing words in particular contexts that such resemblances can
be traced and the lexical and other components of language appreciated as a form of life.
This emphasis on actual practice differs significantly from speech act theory, especially
that of Searle. In Wittgenstein’s view, just as the word hello might appear in a variety of lan-
guage games, so might the word promise, but rather than deriving its meaning from some
underlying constitutive rules, the illocutionary force of the utterance in which it appears
derives from its pragmatics, including both vocal and nonvocal signaling as it occurs within
the patterning or “grammar” of diverse language games. From this perspective, an investiga-
tor would eschew attempts to derive the rules of illocutionary force or to obtain access to
speaker intentions and instead would maintain an interest in the overt expressions and acts
through which a word such as “promise” comes to life. Linguistic competence, in other
words, consists not in following rules to realize intent but in systematically relating given lex-
ical items to other pieces of vocal and bodily conduct that signal how such items are produced
and understood.
The “Mapping” Problem
According to the speech act theorists, the language that humans use can help constitute an
infinite variety of social actions (1969, p. 23). Austin (1962, p. 150) suggests that there are on
the order of a thousand or so actions, while Wittgenstein (1958, para. 23) proposes that there
are “innumerable” activities in which language plays a part, including but by no means lim-
ited to “ordering, describing, reporting, speculating, presenting results, telling a story, being
ironic, requesting, asking, criticizing, apologizing, censuring, approving, welcoming, object-
ing, guessing, joking, greeting.” This list can be indefinitely extended and shows that, as all
the speech act theorists would argue, the communicative function of language, wherein
people refer to objects and report their thoughts or feelings about them in a verifiable way, is
only one among many modes of linguistic usage.*
When social scientists regard language in this dynamic sense, as intimately bound with
action, a seemingly simple problem still looms large for the investigator: How are we to know
what the illocutionary force of an utterance is? It is not tenable that the performative aspect
of an utterance is somehow built into its form, for the reason stated above—the “same” utter-
ance can perform a variety of acts. Put differently, the “form” of a sentence or utterance is
often misleading about its status as an activity. For example, Levinson (1983, p. 275) men-
tions imperatives, which, despite their grammatical structure as commands or requests, rarely
238 Douglas W. Maynard and Ansii Peräkylä
*In Katriel and Philipsen’s (1990) study, informants use “communication” in contrast to “small talk” to depict speech
in relationships that are “close …supportive,” and “flexible.”
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appear as such in natural conversation. Rather, they occur “in recipes and instructions, offers
(Have another drink), welcomings (Come in), wishes (Have a good time), curses and swear-
ings (Shut up), and so on … .” That is, the linguistic form is subordinated to social action and
interaction (Ochs, Schegloff, & Thompson, 1996). As Levinson (1983, p. 274) nicely formu-
lates the problem of knowing the illocutionary force of an utterance, it is one of mapping
speech acts onto utterances as they occur in actual contexts. As we have seen, in ordinary lan-
guage philosophy, there are two main solutions to this mapping problem, one being the rule-
based approach of Austin, Searle, Grice and others, and the other being the practice-based
approach of Wittgenstein. In contemporary social science, we also find these two approaches.
SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Although a number of sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists have affiliated with the term
sociolinguistics, it is, as its name implies, a field linked to linguistics proper. Pioneers in socio-
linguistics, such as Gumperz (1972), Hymes (1974), and Labov (1972b), were wrestling with
a legacy of theorizing about language that posited its fundamental forms as being cognitive
or minded phenomena. This legacy started with Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1962) famous dis-
tinction between langue, which comprises an underlying systematics across variations in
social context, and parole, which consists of the actual speech that people produce. In de
Saussure’s (1962) view, the proper focus of study was langue, the idea being that human
cognition was the seat of linguistic structures and categories that guided people’s behavior. In
contemporary times, Noam Chomsky (1965) has continued the cognitive legacy with his very
influential notion of generative grammar, a set of psychologically based universal structures
whose systematic transformations result in an infinite variety of human speech productions.
With its emphasis on Cartesian mental properties, structural linguistics has always sought to
decontextualize linguistic phenomena in favor of finding certain ideal properties of abstracted
sentences. That is, the overwhelming tendency has been to view linguistic structure as extant
outside of time and place and hence not subject to social influence.
Sociolinguists, following scholars such as Firth (1935), Malinoswski (1923), and others,
were utterly dissatisfied with such a view. As Hymes (1974, pp. 2–3) has argued, the frame
of reference of the social scientific investigation of language could not be linguistic forms in
themselves, and must substitute the community context as a frame. Indeed, Labov (1972b,
p. xiii) resisted the term sociolinguistics because he could not conceive of linguistic theory or
method that did not incorporate a social component. The social component would include cul-
tural values, social institutions, community history and ecology, and so on (Hymes, 1974,
p. 3). While sociolinguists agree that social influence is crucial to understanding linguistic
structure, there are different perspectives on the relationship between society and language
(Grimshaw, 1974) and different strategies for investigating this relationship. The earliest
sociolinguistic studies used dialect surveys to study speech variation among social networks
and communities, finding that dialect variables were an excellent gauge of both social class
and ethnic identity (Gumperz & Hymes, 1972, p. 12).
Variation in linguistic patterns is a prominent theme in sociolinguistics. Besides dialect
usage, another example of variation is code switching (Ervin-Tripp, 1972), or the manner in
which members of a single community juxtapose, in the same situation, speech belonging
to different grammatical systems (Breitborde, 1983; Fishman, 1983; Gumperz, 1982). When
a group, such as African American, Spanish-speaking, or Hindi-speaking minorities in the
Language and Social Interaction 239
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Delam-10.qxd 03/01/2003 11:30 AM Page 239
United States, is basically bilingual, the usual categories of class, ethnicity, education, and
so on are not good predictors of code switching. Of course, survey studies can document
situational (e.g., home vs. work) determinants of code switching in communities but are hard-
pressed to explain within-situation exhibits of the phenomenon. Interpretive sociolinguists
argue that code switching reflects speakers’ ability to categorize situations, interlocutors, and
social relationships and thereby to make inferences and judgments about the appropriate and
relevant speech forms to produce. Whereas the presumption in sociolinguistic survey research
is that language usage is normatively guided, interpretive studies propose that ethnographic
investigation is necessary to define the competence with which interactants manipulate lin-
guistic markers and devices to obtain their ordinary goals in everyday life (Gumperz, 1982,
pp. 35–36):
The analyst’s task is to make an in depth study of selected instances of verbal interaction, observe
whether or not actors understand each other, elicit participants’ interpretations of what goes on,
and then (a) deduce the social assumptions that speakers must have made in order to act as they
do, and (b) determine empirically how linguistic signs communicate in the interpretation process.
These strategies are compatible with Hymes’s (1974) comprehensive outline of the “ethno-
graphy of communication,” a way of collecting, categorizing, and analyzing the action-
oriented linguistic events in a particular community to answer the basic questions of what
these events are and how they work.
Sociolinguistics has been occupied with numerous topics surrounding code switching,
including second language learning and the relation of diverse languages to self concept, per-
sonality, and status attitudes. Other classic topics in sociolinguistics are language conflict,
loyalty, and maintenance and the structure and organization of pidgin and creole languages.
Grimshaw (1974, p. 80) reviews the early literature comprehensively and suggests that
sociolinguistics is a “hybrid discipline” that is “largely atheoretical.”
Related to sociolinguistics, and representing an effort to become more theoretically
sophisticated about the relationship between language and society, is the general category of
linguistic discourse analysis.* “Discourse” broadly includes both textual and spoken forms of
language and refers to language production as it is organized external to the unitary sentence
or clause (Stubbs, 1983). That is, discourse analysis is concerned with the orderly connections
between clauses and sentences, rather than with the structuring of those units alone. Thus, as
Coulthard (1977, p. 3) notes, discourse analysis overlaps partially with pragmatics, a subfield
in linguistics that is distinguished from traditional concerns with syntax and semantics by the
interest in how language users take the social context into account when producing and under-
standing speech forms. Discourse analysis, however, is multitopical and multidisciplinary, with
scholars from anthropology, artificial intelligence, communications, philosophy, psychology,
and sociology contributing to the enterprise (Stubbs, 1983; van Dijk, 1985).
One approach to discourse analysis is in Grimshaw’s (1989) effort to transcend the
linguistically oriented work of Labov and Fanshel (1977) by formalizing sociological
variables as derived from a more inductive and ethnographic inquiry such as Cicourel’s
(1974) cognitive sociology. Grimshaw (1989) models the discourse process as involving
240 Douglas W. Maynard and Ansii Peräkylä
*The term “discourse analysis” can be used to refer to a number of quite different research traditions. Along with the
linguistic discourse analysis discussed here, there is historical discourse analysis that usually focuses on written
texts (Armstrong, 1983; Foucault, 1979), “critical discourse analysis” which combines social criticism with the
analysis of textual material (Fairclough, 1992), and the social psychological discourse analysis that has come to be
called “discursive psychology” and will be discussed later in this chapter.
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a “source,” or originator of some manipulative speech move, a “goal,” or target of the move,
an “instrumentality,” which is the speech act itself, and a “result” or outcome that the source
pursues. The particular speech act a source employs is constrained according to the three
variables of power, affect, and utility. Power has to do with the relative statuses of parties,
affect with the emotionality of their relationship, and utility with the value and costs to
both the source and target of a speech act in achieving some result. Thus, Grimshaw’s (1989,
pp. 532–533) approach complements Labov and Fanshel’s preoccupation with rules of dis-
course by emphasizing rules deriving from essentially social considerations of appropriateness
as based on participants’ cultural and social knowledge. A less formalistic approach to des-
cribing discourse and its social parameters—how discourse as action involves topic selection,
overall or schematic organization, local meanings, choice of words, style, and rhetorical
devices—can be found in van Dijk (1997). Viewing discourse as action, van Dijk (1997) also
stresses the importance of context and power in the analysis of text and talk.
GOFFMAN AND FRAME ANALYSIS
Sociolinguistics and discourse analysis emphasize the importance of micro-analysis of
minute particles of speech and single interactional events as a means for understanding the
social dimensions of language use.* Both areas invoke rule-like mechanisms for connecting
social environments and structures to these particles and events. In Goffman (1983)’s work, we
begin to see less emphasis on the connective or even causal approach to rules and more
concern with social actors’ agency and rule usage. Rather than a broader social context, the
corporeal “face to face” or “body to body” situation—whether in urban or in rural areas, in a
business or in a family, and independent of socioeconomic class, gender or ethnic categories—
should be the primary focus for understanding social interaction. That is, the same rules and
conventions, applying to turn-taking, physical distance between speakers, and other matters,
prevail in social interaction regardless its broader context. Or to take a more specific exam-
ple: Goffman (1983) refers to a “contact” ritual, such as any service encounter where cus-
tomers may form a queue as they await their turn at being helped. Although the queue could
be organized according to externally structured attributes of involved parties (e.g., age, race,
gender, or class), normal queuing “blocks” or filters out the effects of such variables in favor
of an egalitarian, first-come, first-serve ordering principle.
Such an ordering principle belongs to what Goffman (1983) calls the “interaction order,”
which consists of “systems of enabling conventions, in the sense of ground rules for a game,
the provisions of a traffic code, or the syntax of a language.” The interaction order is relatively
autonomous order of organization both in relation to the broader social organization and to
the psychological properties of the actors. Hence, Goffman wanted to promote it as a target of
social scientific study in its own right. Although the interaction order consists largely of rules
or conventions, violations do not threaten the game or the language as much as they serve as
resources for accomplishing the very projects that adherence itself involves, including the
definition of self and the creation or maintenance of social meaning (Goffman, 1971, p. 61):
Given that a rule exists against seeking out a stranger’s eyes, seeking can then be done as a means
of making a pickup or as a means of making oneself known to someone one expects to meet but
is unacquainted with. Similarly, given that staring is an invasion of information preserve, a stare
Language and Social Interaction 241
*For overviews see Drew (1988), Burns (1992), and Manning (1992).
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can then be used as a warranted negative sanction against someone who has misbehaved—the
misbehavior providing and ensuring a special significance to overlong examination.
Actors, in this view, do not range between naive conformity and blatant rule breaking. Rules,
says Goffman (1971, p. 61) make possible a set of “nonadherences,” which, according to how
we classify the interactional work they do, have a variety of meanings.* The interactional
rules do not tightly constrain actions; they are more like rough guidelines that permit actors
to accomplish a variety of social projects, depending on how they align themselves with
respect to those rules or guidelines.
This point about actors’ capacity for flexible alignment to rules is most fully developed
in Frame Analysis, Goffman’s (1974) major treatise on the “organizational premises” of ordi-
nary activity, or, the “reality” of everyday experience. Much of everyday experience goes
beyond literal activity and has numerous figurative aspects, which are especially visible in
talk (Goffman, 1974, p. 502). In particular, Goffman (1974, chapter 13) argues that rather than
using terms such as speaking and hearing to characterize the production and understanding
of utterances, analysts must see how participants align themselves to those utterances.
A speaker, for instance, may employ a variety of production formats when talking, so that
he/she says something as principal (one whose position is represented in the talk) or as
animator (who simply speaks the words representing another’s position).
As principal or animator, one can also project a particular identity or figure (ranging
from that of the speaker to identities of fictitious and actual others). Finally, a speaker can be
a strategist who acts to promote the interests of an individual on whose behalf he/she is act-
ing. In a way complementary to speakers, hearers also take up different alignments or partic-
ipation statuses—ratified recipient, overhearer, eavesdropper, and so on. Eventually, Goffman
(1979) referred to the frame analysis of talk as an investigation of the “footing” or stances that
participants constantly change over the course of an utterance’s production. Goffman’s work
on footing has been taken up in a variety of contemporary studies, including those on chil-
dren’s arguments (Goodwin, 1988; Goodwin, 1990), the news interview (Clayman, 1988),
and the survey interview (Houtkoop-Steenstra, 2000).
DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Discursive psychology is a European social psychological approach that focuses on language
use, taking an “action oriented” understanding of language as its point of departure. This
approach has been developed since late 1980s, by scholars such as Billig (1987), Edwards
(1997, 1992), Potter (1996, 1987) and Antaki (1994). In their writings, discursive psycholo-
gists strongly question the “cognitivist” presuppositions predominant in current psychology.
The cognitivism attacked by discursive psychologists actually coincides with the “conduit
metaphor.” In cognitivism, “we start with a given, external world, which is then perceived and
processed, and then put into words” (Edwards, 1997, p. 19). In this view, language is under-
stood as a transparent medium used for transfer of ideas concerning the external reality
and inner worlds of humans. To counter this, discursive psychologists study accounts and
accounting—how everyday descriptions of people, their behavior, and their mental states are
242 Douglas W. Maynard and Ansii Peräkylä
*Indeed, actors’ orientation to the interaction order remains moral, resting on commitments that in one way or
another (through adherence or violation) enable the self to emerge and be preserved. On this point, see Goffman
(1971, pp. 185–187); for secondary discussion, see Rawls (1987, pp. 42–44).
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in themselves actions (Antaki, 1994). Descriptions are produced in particular occasions to do
particular things, such as blaming, justifying, explaining, and so on (Buttny, 1993).
The work of discursive psychologists has drawn inspiration from the social studies of
scientific knowledge: for example, Bloor (1976), Mulkay (1979), Woolgar (1988), and oth-
ers, who sought to show that the “factuality” of scientific knowledge is embedded in a set of
discursive and rhetorical practices. The discursive social psychologist examines how our
mundane understanding of the world and people in it are similarly socially located in such
practices (Edwards, 1997, pp. 51–83; Potter & Wetherell, 1987, pp. 146–155). As the last sec-
tion of this chapter will make apparent, this research program is much in debt to Garfinkel’s
ethnomethodology. The themes of discursive psychology include descriptions of courses of
action,descriptions of mind, and descriptions of identities.
Accounts of Courses of Action
Everyday language use frequently involves descriptions of courses of action: accounts of the
speaker’s and others’ordinary conduct. Citing Schegloff (1989), and like Potter and Wetherell
(1987, pp. 74–94), Edwards (1997, p. 8) points out that “accounts of actions are invariably,
and at the same time, accounts for actions.” Two distinct aspects of these accounts involve
scripts and dispositions (Edwards, 1997, pp. 142–169). In describing events in terms of
scripts, the speakers often implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) propose that what happened
followed a routine pattern in the given circumstances. The course of action is then presented
as expected, as ordinary, as “natural” one that follows a script. On the other hand, events can
also be described as breaches from the script, as something unusual and not to be expected.
When events are describing as breaches from the script, dispositions often come into play.
Dispositions are “pictures” of the actor implied by the description of the course of action.
Two relevant dimensions of dispositions include the personality and the moral character of
the actor. Deviations from scripts are often linked to specific dispositions of the actor.
However, scripted courses of action can also be linked to dispositions, not least to dispositions
of “normality.”
Cognitive social psychologists (Heider, 1958; Mandler, 1984; Shaver, 1983) also discuss
scripts and dispositions, as principles that organize perception, inference, and memory. How-
ever, discursive psychologists take a unique approach to these phenomena. Unlike cogni-
tivists, they emphasize that course-of-action descriptions are designed to exhibit the routine
or breaching character of the events, and to build the corresponding disposition of the actor.
Thus, in discursive psychology, scripts and dispositions are seen as resources used by speak-
ers in pursuing their local interactional goals (Edwards & Potter, 1992, pp. 77–126).
Accounts of Mind
Description of mind is another facet of ordinary talk (Coulter, 1989). Discursive psycholo-
gists are interested specifically in the ways in which the participants’ states of knowledge
figure in talk (Edwards, 1997, pp. 114–141, 170–201). They examine how emotional and cog-
nitive states are practically accomplished, and how local interactional goals are pursued in
and through them. Cognitive states are achieved, for example, through the ways in which
statements, stories and descriptions are designed and received in conversation. As conversa-
tion analysts (see the section below) have shown, speakers design their talk carefully to show
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their understanding of the recipients’ prior knowledge, and correspondingly, the recipients
show through their own action whether the things that were told were new information or
already known by them (Sorjonen, 2001).
Discursive psychology also investigates descriptions of affect, or the ways in which
speakers avow their own emotions and ascribe them to others. In line with other social con-
structionist approaches (Harré, 1986), research centers on the use of emotion words (rather
than non-lexical expression of emotion), to show how they are used (Edwards, 1997, p. 170):
in assigning causes and motives of action, in blamings, excuses, and accounts…Emotional states
may figure as things to be accounted for (in terms of prior causal events or dispositional tenden-
cies, say), as accounts (of subsequent actions and events), and also as evidence of what kind of
events or actions precede or follow them.
Thus, emotion descriptions are seen as an essential resource in accounting of and accounting
for action. Moreover, as Edwards (1997, p. 171) points out, emotion descriptions are closely
tied with scripts and dispositions. Emotion descriptions can be embedded on routine scripts
(when a particular event, such as having a child, wakes a particular emotion, such as happi-
ness). They can also be part of dispositions, for example, when a specific emotion, such as
inclination towards jealousy, explains non-routine courses of action.
Accounts of Identity
Identity is the third central theme in discursive psychology. In and through their talk, speak-
ers present themselves, those that they talk to, and those that they talk about, as having par-
ticular identities, as being particular persons and particular sorts of persons. Just like mental
states discussed above, also the identity is, as Antaki and Widdicombie (1998, p. 1) put it,
both an achievement and a tool: identity is achieved in and through the talk, and it is used as
a tool in performing particular actions in talk. Or to put it in terms used by Edwards and Potter
(1992, p. 192), “… detailed language of describing persons is a resource for action.” For
example, in blaming the other or in defending one’s own (or the other’s) actions, speakers
ascribe and avow particular motives and personality features, and thereby construct identities
(Potter & Wetherell, 1987, pp. 110–115).
Drawing on Sacks’ work (see the section on conversation analysis below),* Antaki and
Widdicombie (1998, pp. 3–6) emphasize the centrality of categorization in the construction
of identity: “to have an identity” entails being “cast into a category with associated charac-
teristics or features.” Categories can, of course, be numerous, the most general ones includ-
ing age, ethnic, gender and professional categories. In investigating categorization, Antaki
and Widdicombie (1998) point out, a key challenge is to show how a particular categorization
is oriented to by the interactants, and how this orientation is consequential for their joint
courses of action.
“Description as action” is the primary topic of research in discursive psychology. Three
broad and interrelated areas of description are accounts of courses of action, accounts of
mind, and accounts of identities. In all these fields, discursive psychologists seek to show how
the design and reception of descriptions contributes to particular social actions. This research
programme, of course, raises once again the above mentioned “mapping problem”: on which
244 Douglas W. Maynard and Ansii Peräkylä
*For discussion of Sacks’ work on membership categorization devices, see Hester and Francis (2000) and Watson
(2000).
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basis can we say that a particular type of description contributes to a particular social action?
In recent years, the research methodology of discursive psychologists has come very close
to that in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Therefore, the ways in which discur-
sive psychology deals with the mapping problem are more or less the same as those in con-
versation analysis, and we can postpone the discussion on them until we have introduced
conversation analysis in more detail.
ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AND
CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
Ethnomethodology proposes that there is a self-generating order in everyday activities
(Garfinkel, 1967) and takes a unique approach to the problem of mapping utterances onto
actions in at least two ways. First, where Goffman’s frame analysis relaxed the theoretical
hold that rules could have in explaining linguistic conduct, ethnomethodology, arguing that
rules can be treated as topics and features of the activities they are said to organize, utterly
extricates rules from theory per se. That is, in ethnomethodology there is no attempt to explain
linguistic or other behavior by reference to rules. Instead, the analytic tactic is to treat rules
as resources for actors, who use them for various situated projects and ends of their own.
Whether abstract conformity or deviance occurs has to do with what works to accomplish
these projects and ends. It is not that behavior is unconstrained, disorderly, or arbitrary, but
that rules, if they are operative at all, figure as part of actors’own practices of reasoning and
ways of organizing a social setting. Members are artful users of rules, often invoking them in
an ex post facto, rhetorical manner to describe the morality of some way of life. For example,
jurors invoke legal standards to depict ex post facto how they arrived at a verdict, even when
the route involved substantial common-sense, non-standardized reasoning (Garfinkel, 1967),
residents at a halfway house use the “convict code” to account for disregard of the official
ways of doing things (Wieder, 1974), and staff members at a social welfare agency get their
“people processing” job done, in part, through departing from routine policies and still
providing a “sense” of having conformed (Zimmerman, 1970). In language-oriented research,
ethnomethodologists study how “normative assertions” (Maynard, 1985) operate in the context
of already organized group activities to further such local purposes as accusing, competing,
and according membership. Rules, to repeat, are features of actions rather than explanations
for them.
Another unique aspect of ethnomethodological research is its concern with “indexical
expressions” (Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970), or utterances whose meaning and
understandability depend on the context or circumstances in which they appear. That “deic-
tic” utterances, such as “this,” “that,” “here,” “there,” and so on, assume particular meaning
according to their speech environment is generally recognized, but Garfinkel (1967) argued
that all talk is, without remedy, indexical and context-dependent. One major, orderly aspect
of “context” is an utterance’s sequential placement. Conversation analysis theorizes that an
utterance’s force as an action of a particular type derives from such placement (Heritage,
1984, p. 242; Maynard & Clayman, 1991, pp. 397–400). Thus, rather than linguistic or social
rules, sequential organization has primary analytic utility in describing talk as action and its
relation to “interaction” as well (Schegloff, 1991). Overall, ethnomethodology and conversa-
tion analysis have affinities with the Wittgensteinian “form of life” approach to the mapping
problem, in which actual, orderly linguistic practice (rule usage and sequence organization)
is brought to the fore of analytic inquiry.
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With its commitment to the study of naturally occurring talk, conversation analysis in
particular aims to rebuild sociology as a natural observational science (Sacks, 1984, 1992a).
Indeed, in pursuing this goal, conversation analysts have generated a sizable research literature
over the past 35 years (Clayman & Gill, Forthcoming; Goodwin & Heritage, 1990; Heritage,
1984, Chapter 8; ten Have, 1999). Furthermore, in maintaining a commitment to examining
naturally occurring social action, conversation analysis avoids treating language as a variable
to be manipulated, tested, or related to other variables. We explore the implications of this
stance in the next section. Here, the point is that conversation analysts’ major social scienti-
fic concern has been with endogenous (internally orderly) features of “talk-in-interaction”
(Schegloff, 1991). There are three principal domains in which the analysis of endogenously
structured conversation is grounded: the organization of sequences, turn taking, and repair.
Organization of Sequences
It is well established that conversational interaction occurs in a serial fashion, with parti-
cipants taking turns in an A–B–A–B–A–B…ordering. However, parties collaboratively
structure the ordering rather tightly. This structure is sequence organization, exemplified
in the adjacency pair, which includes such conversational objects as question–answer,
request–grant/refusal, and invitation–acceptance/declination sequences. Adjacency pairs have
the following characteristics (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973): (1) they are a sequence of two-
utterance length, which are (2) adjacent to one another, (3) produced by different speakers,
(4) ordered as a first part and a second part, and (5) typed, so that a first part requires
a particular second part or a range of second parts.
Moreover, adjacency pairs are characterized by “conditional relevance”—conditional on
the occurrence of an item in the first slot, or first pair-part (e.g., the question), the occurrence
of an item in the second slot, or second pair-part (e.g., the answer to the question), is expected
and required. Consider an example of requesting (Wootton, 1981, p. 62, simplified):
Child: Can I have a wee drink while I’m waiting?
Mother: Yes, you can.
The absence of a second pair-part may occasion a repeat of the first pair-part and perhaps
“warranted inferences” concerning coparticipants who seem nonresponsive (e.g., that they are
being “evasive”). In the next example a child reissues the request for sweets when the mother
does not respond to the first request. In other words, a response is expected, and when it does
not occur it is noticeably absent (colons denote stretching of the preceding sound) (Wootton,
1981, p. 66, simplified):
Child: Mom, I want some swee:::ties.
[11.4 seconds silence]
Child: I want so:me: swee::ties.
[Child moves rapidly towards sweets; 2.5 seconds silence]
Child: There’s not any:::: …
[Child finds no sweets in their normal location]
Mother: You’ll get some after.
The noticeable absence of the mother’s reply is evident in the way the child pursues talk and
moves toward the object of his request until the mother deals with it—that is, answers him.
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That second pair-parts are required, does not mean answers or replies always occur in
a sequential position adjacent to the specific questions or requests (or first pair-parts) they are
addressing. Often, participants produce insertion sequences between first and second pair-
parts, as in invitation sequences, for example, where a recipient may need pertinent details
before providing a reply (Schegloff, 1972, p. 78):
A: Are you coming tonight?
B: Can I bring a guest?
A: Sure.
B: I’ll be there.
Additionally, when second pair parts do not occur, it may reflect other actions of the recipi-
ent, such as “ignoring” insistent demands, “snubbing,” or otherwise resisting the initial action.
Importantly, inferences concerning these kinds of other actions are made by the participants
of interaction themselves, not, in the first place, by the analyst.
Turn-Taking Organization
The A–B–A–B serial ordering of sequences also involves a recurring transfer of speakership.
The ordering of speaker change, as well as the size and content of a speaker’s turn, is not pre-
determined in ordinary conversation but instead is free to vary (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson,
1974). Moreover, change of speakership is so tightly articulated that both gap and overlap are
minimized (see Lerner [1989] and Schegloff [2000] for elaboration on the social organi-
zation of overlap). Consider the following example, which exhibits extremely close turn
transitions—the equal signs denote immediate “latching” of one utterance to the other
(Jefferson, 1986, p. 154, simplified):
EMMA: G’morning Letitia
LOTTIE: uh How’re YOU
EMMA:FI:NE
This finely tuned coordination by participants is made possible through the projection of
possible completion points in any one turn. Hearers anticipate exactly when speakers may
complete a current utterance, which enables precision timing in the start of next turns.
The projection of a possible completion point is just one social organizational feature of
turn taking, however, which relates to the issue of “who will speak next” on some occasion.
To determine this, participants methodically allocate turns of talk through a set of ordered
options, including current speaker selecting the next speaker, the next speaker self-selecting,
or current speaker continuing to speak (Sacks et al., Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). Through
projecting the completion points of current turns and precisely timing the start of new turns,
participants achieve hearing and understanding as an ongoing feature of ordinary talk.
Organization of Repair
Given this elaborate and systematic organization of sequences and turns within sequences,
how are interactional troubles managed? That is, how do participants handle errors, mishear-
ings, glitches in turn transition, problems of meaning, and the like? The answer is that the
turn-taking system itself provides resources for understanding as well as “repair” (Levinson,
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1983, pp. 340–342; Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977). In coordinating exchange of
speakership and tightly articulating sequences, participants display for one another their sense
of a current vocal action in the very next turn at talk. Consider this as a “proof procedure”:
the second speaker’s turn serves as a resource by which the first speaker may check whether
a turn was heard correctly. In the next example, Marcia is, according to Schegloff (1992,
p. 1301), explaining to her exhusband why their son is flying home rather than driving:
(1) MARCIA: …Becuz the top was ripped off of his car which is to say somebody
helped themselves.
(2) TONY: Stolen.
(3) MARCIA: Stolen. Right out in front of my house.
In turn 2, Tony offers a candidate understanding (“stolen”) of Marcia’s ambiguous reference
in turn (1) to the top being “ripped off” their son’s car. Then, in turn (3), Marcia confirms
Tony’s candidate understanding. Had Tony not been correct in his understanding, this is
a point at which Marcia could have repaired the trouble. In general, the third turn such as this
is a slot that may be taken up with the business of repairing various interactional troubles
(Heritage, 1984, pp. 254–258; Levinson, 1983, p. 340; Schegloff, 1992, p. 1302). This is not
the first opportunity in the sequence for repair initiation, however, for participants might well
repair their own utterances in their own first turn at talk or in the transition between turns.
Indeed, as Schegloff (1992, pp. 1300–1301) notes about the above episode, Marcia appears
to have used “which is to say somebody helped themselves” to clarify “ripped off,” a phrase
that could be ambiguous as between a literal meaning and an idiomatic expression for rob-
bery. This is termed a “self-initiated self-repair.” Also, in the second turn in the sequence it is
possible for the second speaker to repair aspects of the first speaker’s turn (Schegloff et al.,
1977). Thus, turn taking and the organization of repair in the system of turn taking provide
a structural basis for the achievement of intersubjectivity or mutual understanding (Sacks
et al., 1974; Schegloff, 1992).
The explication of these three domains of the social organization of conversation
(sequences, turn taking, and repair) provides the basis for much of the vigorous research
agenda in conversation analysis and has generated an expansive literature on talk in institu-
tional and organizational settings. We now consider this literature, along with other research
on the relation between language, action, and social structure.
LANGUAGE, ACTION, AND
SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Thus far, we have concentrated on interaction, suggesting that social psychology benefits
from understanding how parties use language in an immediate sense to perform joint endeav-
ors of all sorts. Of course, as parties talk and gesture to one another, more than completely
local interests and social organization may be at stake, and this means that questions regard-
ing “social structure” come to the fore. Following Zimmerman and Boden’s (1991) reflections
on talk and social structure, there are three approaches to probing the interrelation of lan-
guage, action, and social structure: macrodirectional, dialectical, and reflexive.
Macrodirectional Approach: Social Categories and Language Use
Investigators often see social structure as consisting of such forms as age, gender, class, and
other sociodemographic categories, as well as culture, institutions, and complex organizations,
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which condition the use of language in specifiable ways. “In such a framework,” Zimmerman
and Boden (1991, p. 5) remark, “talk and, indeed, all interaction of actual actors in social
situations is seen as a product of those social forces.” This is the strategy in experimental and
survey-based social psychology that examines how social structural arrangements condition
language and social interaction, and emphasizes the relationship between social statuses or
categories (e.g., race, gender, class, and age) and language. Perhaps the best known work in
this area is that of Bernstein (1961, 1972), who proposed that middle and working-class
children learn two very different linguistic “codes”—an “elaborated” and “restricted” code,
respectively, with the features of each determined by the forms of social relations in different
communities. Middle-class subcultures assert the primacy of the individual “I” over collec-
tive “we,” which results in an elaborated code characterized by flexible organization and
a range of syntactic options. In contrast, in working-class communities the collective “we” is
used over the “I,” and the result is a restricted, more rigid code with low levels of syntactic
and vocabulary selection, and implicit rather than explicit meanings (Bernstein, 1972,
pp. 475–476). These two class-based codes, Bernstein argues, help account for middle-class
children’s success and working-class children’s lack of success in school.
Bernstein’s argument generated a vigorous response. Portraying Bernstein’s analysis of
elaborated and restricted codes as a “deficit model,” Labov (1972a) demonstrates that the
“nonstandard English” spoken in U.S. African American communities is not “restricted” in its
flexibility or range of options for syntax or vocabulary and, in certain ways, exhibits impres-
sive linguistic, social, and cultural complexity and competence on the part of the speakers.
More recently, Goodwin (1990) shows how skilled urban African American youth are in
various linguistic activities (especially disputing) whereby they display and generate “char-
acter” and achieve localized social organization. Thus, Labov (1972a) has argued that there is
no relationship between language use or the “codes” employed in poor and working-class
African American communities and failure in school. Instead, “failure” may lay within the
school as a social institution that does not adapt to the cultures of the diverse communities it
serves. Controversy about whether linguistic repertoires represent “differences” or “deficits”
continues (Baugh, 1999; Edwards, 1979; Giles & Robinson, 1990).
Studies of the relationship between language and social stratification are related to
numerous comparisons of speech practice—based on cross-cultural, gender, and ethnic dif-
ferences. Perhaps most prominent are investigations of linguistic divergences between
women and men. Early research suggested that women are more expressive in intonation; that
they use more adjectives and intensifiers, including so, such, quite, vastly, and more; that
they make more precise determinations of color (Key, 1972); that they employ more fillers,
such as umh and you know; and that they more often use affectionate address terms, such as
dear honey, and sweetie (West & Zimmerman, 1985, p. 106). As it turns out, when researchers
examine these items as simple markers or indicators of female speech, only two show any
consistent patterning: compared to men, women produce speech in phonetically more correct
forms (Thorne & Henley, 1975, p. 17) and vary their pitch and intonation more (West &
Zimmerman, 1985, p. 107). Even the tradition of research on interruptions that West
and Zimmerman (1983) initiated has shown few regular results (Aries, 1996), as other status
and power differences (Kollock, Blumstein, & Schwartz, 1985) as well as processes intrinsic
to the interaction (Okamoto & Smith-Lovin, 2001), including participation rates and manner
(topic-changing behavior) may overshadow a characteristic such as gender. Still, differences
between men’s and women’s speech appear to be enough for Tannen (1990) to propose that
males and females speak different “genderlects.” Consistent with this is evidence that females
are more likely to interpret remarks indirectly rather than directly (Holtgraves, 1991), and that
men may initiate more “unilateral” (as compared “collaborative”) topic changes in interaction
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(Ainsworth-Vaughn, 1992; West & Garcia, 1988). Research on linguistic differences based on
gender, ethnicity, age, and other social categories has proliferated (Giles & Robinson, 1990)
and no doubt will continue to do so.
Talk and Social Structure: Dialectics and Reciprocal Influence
A dialectical approach to talk and social structure involves social structure as cause and out-
come of spoken interaction; language is the site of the production and reproduction of
sociodemographic, cultural, institutional, and organizational forms characteristic of the over-
all society. It is therefore important to know both the local and broad context in which utter-
ances occur, making it incumbent on the investigator to engage in ethnographic inquiry to
complement the analysis of recorded speech. This premise is central to cognitive sociology
(Cicourel, 1981), and it informs the work of students of talk in such institutional settings as
preschools (Corsaro, 1979, 1996), schools (McDermott, Gospodinoff, & Aron, 1978; Mehan,
1979; Phillips, 1982), universities (Grimshaw, 1989), doctor’s offices or hospitals (Cicourel,
1981; Fisher, 1983; Silverman, 1987; Strong, 1979; Waitzkin, 1991), and courts (Danet, 1980;
Molotch & Boden, 1985). As an example of this approach, Mehan (1991) argues that the
“social facts” of school systems derive from the “practical work” of educators engaged in
interaction with students, parents, and other professionals in a series of “microevents” that
occur in the classroom, testing sessions, and meetings. The dialectical approach is also com-
patible with the work of European theorists such as Bourdieu (1991), Giddens (1984), and
Habermas (1979) and their concerns with language, ideology, and social reproduction.
Talk and Social Structure: Reflexivity between
Interactional and Institutional Orders
A reflexive analysis of language, action, and social structure sees the interaction order and the
institutional order having complex interrelationships not adequately described in causal or
even reciprocally causal terms. The interaction order is comprised of mechanisms of turn
taking and other sequential organizations, which provide the resources for producing and
understanding what is being said and done in concert (Zimmerman & Boden, 1991, p. 9).
As Goffman (1983) pointed out, the interaction order and its constituent devices are basic or
primordial in the sense of underlying, preceding, being organized independently of any social
structural context in which talk occurs, and being invariant although with sensitivity to
historical and cultural variation.*
If the interaction order is primordial in this sense, it behooves investigators to analyze its
workings as a prelude to explicating the use of language in institutional settings. When inves-
tigators do not do so, they risk attributing features of the talk to its institutional surround and
missing both the bedrock of orderliness that makes it possible for participants to understand
one another at all (no matter what the setting) and the ways in which they display the rele-
vance of social structure through procedural “work” that is visible in the details of their talk
(Schegloff, 1991). Conversation analysts, who take this position, have shown its implications
in various ways. One implication is that the fundamental organization of conversational turn
250 Douglas W. Maynard and Ansii Peräkylä
*See, for example, recent studies of Japanese talk-in-interaction and how basic turn design, turn-taking and other
mechanisms are adapted to this language (Mori, 1999; Tanaka, 1999).
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taking may be different in institutional as compared with ordinary settings. Thus, where in
conversation turn size, turn content, and turn order are free to vary and are subject to local
management, in settings such as courtrooms (Atkinson & Drew, 1979), the jury deliberation
(Manzo, 1996), classrooms (McHoul, 1978; Mehan, 1979) and testing (Marlaire & Maynard,
1990), news interviews (Clayman & Heritage, In press), clinical settings (Peräkylä, 1995),
and the survey interview (Maynard, Houtkoop-Steenstra, Schaeffer, & Zouwen, 2002), this is
not the case. Attorneys, teachers, newscasters, clinicians, or survey interviewers ask ques-
tions, and witnesses, students, interviewees, patients, or respondents must answer. From these
elemental observations, a wide range of consequences follow in regard to how professionals,
in collaboration with lay and other participants, organize such actions as accusing and deny-
ing in the courtroom, teaching, testing, and showing learning ability in the classroom, being
“neutral” and expertly informative in the news interview, eliciting talk about delicate and sen-
sitive personal matters in the clinic, or achieving the “standardization” of social measurement
in the survey interview.*
It is not just alterations in turn taking that characterize institutional talk. Another impli-
cation of regarding conversation as primordial is that some mundane conversational
sequences might be imported more or less wholesale as a resource for tasks that actors in
institutional settings face recurrently. Thus, in medical settings, physicians and others are
occupationally predisposed to having to deliver “bad news” in the form of diagnostic infor-
mation. Maynard (1991) identified a perspective display series that, in ordinary conversation,
involves one party asking another about some social object, whereupon the first party pres-
ents a report or assessment that is then regularly outfitted to agree with the second party’s.
This way of producing a report or assessment is an inherently cautious maneuver, in that
a speaker can elicit, in a preliminary manner, some display from a recipient of how well the
speaker’s own information or opinion meshes with the recipient’s. Overall, this means that the
perspective display series permits delivery of such information or opinion in a way that pro-
poses a mutuality of perspective between speaker and recipient. In medical settings, where
severe illness and death are customary topics, the perspective display series and its orderly
features can be adapted to handling these topics. Clinicians, rather than presenting a diagno-
sis or death announcement straightforwardly, often take the more circuitous route of eliciting
the view of their recipient before reporting the bad news, and then agreeably shape the news
to the recipient’s knowledge and beliefs. At the very least, this works to promote the recipi-
ent’s understanding of what may be technically difficult jargon or terminology. In addition,
it co-implicates the recipient’s perspective in the presentation of the news, so that clinicians
can give a diagnosis in a publicly affirmative and nonconflicting manner.
Still another implication of treating conversation as a primordial backdrop to institu-
tional language is that actors can change the ordering of intact sequences of talk in system-
atic ways. In a comprehensive analysis of openings to ordinary telephone calls, Schegloff
(1986) distinguished four core opening sequences—the summons/answer sequence (consist-
ing of a ringing phone and its answer), the identification/recognition sequence, the greeting,
and the “how are you.” After participants produce these four sequences, they enter into
the “first topic” of the call. As Whalen and Zimmerman (1987) compared a corpus of calls
to emergency (“9-1-1”) dispatch centers with Schegloff’s analysis, they noticed that the
organization consisting of these four sequences was modified so that (a) identification of the
Language and Social Interaction 251
*For recent book-length treatments in which the reflexive approach to interactional an institutional orders informs
the analysis, see Clayman (In press), Heritage and Maynard (Forthcoming). For a secondary and general summary
of the approach, see Arminen (Forthcoming).
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dispatch center occurs as part of answering the summoning phone ring, and (b) the “first topic”
(a request for assistance) occurs immediately after the summons answer sequence. Participants
dispense with other forms of recognition, with greetings, and with “how are you’s.” Following
Heritage (1984, pp. 238–240), Whalen and Zimmerman (1987) argue that (a) represents
a specialization of ordinary conversational procedure, and (b) indicates a reduction of the core
opening sequences.
Thus, the interaction order of talk, what Whalen and Zimmerman (1987) call an “inter-
actional machinery,” is intimately involved in the means whereby, in institutional settings,
participants “exhibit for one another (and for the analyst) their appreciation of who, situa-
tionally speaking, they are, and what, situationally speaking, they are up to.” That is, in and
through modifications to the interaction order, participants also produce the institutional
order. These orders are distinct and yet related in complex ways. A reflexive approach to lan-
guage, action, and social structure, then, means understanding how sequential organization
and other aspects of the interaction order can be deployed in ways that are sensitive to the
contingencies and relevances of a society’s organizational and institutional settings. This
might be through alterations to turn taking, particularized adoption of ordinary conversational
sequences and series, discrete changes to the ordering of sequences, and other procedural
means yet to be discovered and analyzed.”
CONCLUSION
Language is a primary medium of social behavior and, as such, deserves center stage in the
panoply of social psychological topics. Indeed, other topics in social psychology, including
exchange, bargaining, justice, socialization, deviance, health, ethnic relations, and collective
behavior, necessarily involve interactive speech processes, which makes language use per-
haps the most basic of social psychological phenomena. This is, we have argued, not so much
because language is a vehicle of communication; rather, it is a resource for activity. One activ-
ity humans sometimes perform is “communicating” information of various kinds, but this is
one among many other activities, such as arguing, promising, requesting, apologizing, joking,
and greeting.
Influenced by ordinary language philosophy, recognizing that words do not have stable
“meanings,” and that the “same” utterance has different interpretations according to its con-
text of use, language-oriented researchers therefore wrestle with the basic question of how
utterances perform specifiable actions. Sociolinguists and discourse analysts answer this
question in one way by suggesting that some combination of linguistic and social rules link
words and activities together. This answer comes close to the theoretical model provided by
the speech act theory of Austin and Searle. Frame analysts also presume some normative con-
nection between utterances and actions, while giving freer rein to actors’strategic calculations
and decision making in regard to rule adherence. Ethnomethodologists, conversation analysts,
and discursive psychologists argue that in their ongoing conduct, participants themselves are
users of rules who make normative assertions in the service of performing various activities.
Rules, therefore, are only one possible facet of the practices whereby actors order speech
productions to accomplish and understand the active force of these utterances. This way of
solving the “mapping problem” is closer to Wittgenstein’s idea of language games.
Moreover, in the conversation analytic view, importance is attached to how actors
combine their utterances in a sequenced fashion. That is, the sequential organization of talk-
in-interaction is a “primordial site of social action,” which implies that this organization needs
252 Douglas W. Maynard and Ansii Peräkylä
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investigation and explication before the orderliness of conduct and action in institutional and
other social structural arenas can be analyzed fully. This assertion implies a point of contact
between conversation analysts and Goffman’s concern with the interaction order. Among
sociolinguists, discourse analysts, and cognitive sociologists, however, the argument is that
participants’ actions are not completely local in terms of either genesis or effect. It behooves
the analyst to import the context or setting of talk enthnographically to analyze speech
patterning and interactive order properly.
In short, the understanding of spoken language has moved from the conduit metaphor
to an “action” orientation. Still, considerable controversy exists on how this orientation is
best represented in theory and research. As this controversy continues, ever more realms of
language use come under the social psychological microscope. To name just a few, these
include discourse “marking” (Schiffrin, 1987; Sorjonen, 2001)—uses of “well…and,” “so,”
“y’know,” and the like, idiomatic expressions (Drew & Holt, 1988; Kitzinger, 2000), gossip
(Bergmann, 1993; Eder & enke, 1991; Goodwin, 1990), narrative (Labov, 1972a; Sacks,
1992b), puns and jokes (Sacks, 1992b), rhetoric (Atkinson, 1984; Billig, 1987), laughter
(Glenn, 1995; Haakana, 2001; Jefferson, 1979; Lavin & Maynard, 2001), the intersection of
grammar and interaction (Ochs et al., 1996) and numerous other aspects of the extraordinary
human wealth represented in ordinary language, action, and social interaction.
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