Interactional linguistics

Interactional linguistics is an interdisciplinary approach to grammar and interaction in the fields of linguistics, the sociology of language, and anthropology. Not only is Interactional Linguistics about language grammar and use, but it encompasses a wide range of language as well – syntax, phonetics, phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, and so on. Interactional linguistics is a project in which linguistic structures and uses are formed through interaction and it aims at helping understanding how languages are formed through interaction.

Interactional linguistics was not much developed until recently. A few centuries ago, students and researchers were only investigating written language. With the improvement of technology, linguists have started to focus on spoken language as well due to its functions in intonation and transcription system. Starting to investigate spoken language on its own is the start of Interactional linguistics’ development. Afterward, function-directed linguists were working on relations between discourse function and linguistic form. Though the functional linguistic study wasn’t all about conversational interaction, it was really helpful for the language study which saw linguistic form as being useful on the situated occasion of use. The next step which made interactional linguistics develop was the important work on conversation analysis. Some sociologists were saying the study of everyday language was the essence of social order; some other kinds of discourse were said to be understood as habituations of the fundamental conversational order. The term talk-in-interaction was created as an inclusive term for all of naturally speech exchange.

One theory of interactional linguistics, emergent grammar, proposed by Paul Hopper, postulates that rules of grammar come about as language is spoken and used. This is contrary to the a priori grammar postulate, the idea that grammar rules exist in the mind before the production of utterances. Compared to the principles of generative grammar and the concept of Universal Grammar, interactional linguistics asserts that grammar emerges from social interaction. Whereas Universal Grammar claims that features of grammar are innate, emergent grammar and other interactional theories claim that the human language faculty has no innate grammar and that features of grammar are learned through experience and social interaction.

Interactional linguistics has developed in linguistic discourse analysis and conversation analysis, and is used to investigate the relationship between grammatical structure and real-time interaction and language use. Further, the topic of normativity in a discourse or a social norm both contribute to how a conversation functions. There is a common ground that both parties in a conversation use in order to determine how to both continue a conversation and what sort of social syntax to use. For example, if two workers were speaking together, the interaction between them would be different, more informal, compared to how a worker and their boss might interact in a more formal manner.

Scholars in interactional linguistics draw from functional linguistics, conversation analysis, and linguistic anthropology in order to describe "the way in which language figures in everyday interaction and cognition." Studies in interactional linguistics view linguistic forms, including syntactic and prosodic structures, as greatly affected by interactions among participants in speech, signing, or other language use. The field contrasts with dominant approaches to linguistics during the twentieth century, which tended to focus either on the form of language per se, or on theories of individual language user's linguistic competence.

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Further reading

Category:Discourse analysis
Category:Grammar frameworks
Category:Grammar
Category:Syntax
Category:Phonology
Category:Emergence