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Our survey of how interaction is conducted with linguistic resources (Part I) and how linguistic resources are deployed in interaction (Part II) would be incomplete were we not to consider the implications of these findings for language theory. What characterizes language in this view? What new light can Interactional Linguistics cast on age-old questions concerning language structure, language variation, language diversity, and language universals? These are some of the issues we address in this chapter. Language in an Interactional Linguistic Perspective For interactional linguists language is above all a form of social behavior. It is an inherently interactional activity observable in social encounters between human beings. It not only exists in the minds of its users but is materialized in their communication with one another. As one means of communication, language in this understanding is deployed along with other resources (visible, haptic, olefactive) in a semiotic ecology for communicative purposes. As a form of social behavior, language is discoverable through “close looking at the world”. This was one of the earliest insights of Sacks (cited in Jefferson 1985:26–27): Many of the objects we work with would not be accepted as a base for theorizing if they were urged as imagined. We can then come to see that a warrant for using close looking at the world as a base for theorizing about it is that from close looking at the world we can find things that we couldn't, by imagination, assert were there. One wouldn't know they were “typical”. One might not know that they ever occurred. Sacks’ point is that observable fact is far richer than anything researchers could ever imagine. If we were to present imagined “observations” as findings, we would be constrained by what others consider plausible. But if our observations on language are based on what happens in the real world – and we can point to the conversational record to document them – they are empirical, and no longer constrained by plausibility. |
