In Chapter 1, we provide an introduction for the present book. First we present our take on language and politics, by outlining how and why our bottom-up, strictly language-anchored and replicable analysis contributes to previous inquiries in the field. Here we also outline the elements of our framework and the ways they are interconnected, as well as the analytic pitfalls that our approach helps to avoid. Following this, we present the contents of the book.

Chapter 3 showed that as linguistics became increasingly interested in the wider co-textual structures and meanings in which clauses and sentences were situated, stylistics drew on these developments and combined them with frameworks from narratology to produce a more sophisticated approach to style in both literary and non-literary texts. At the same time as these developments were taking place, linguists and stylisticians were also taking more and more interest in the context in which texts (written and spoken, prepared and spontaneous, ephemeral and preserved, etc.) were produced and consumed. This led stylistics to consider the extent to which the then relatively new subdiscipline of pragmatics may provide yet more insight into the style of texts. Consequently, this chapter outlines the influence of pragmatic concepts and frameworks on stylistic analysis.

This chapter provides an overview of foundational principles that guide CA research, offered both on the basis of our own experiences as researchers, and from our discussions with other conversation analysts as they authored contributions for the present volume. We begin by briefly sketching of some of the fundamentals of human social interaction, in order to underscore CA’s central focus, the study of social action, and describe some of the basic features of how interaction is procedurally organized. These basic features of interaction, which CA research has rigorously evidenced and which guide our examination of new data, are then shown directly to inform CA as a research methodology. Put another way, it is precisely due to the procedural infrastructure of action in interaction that conversation analysts use and work with interactional data in particular ways. We conclude with advice for readers as they continue to explore the volume’s contents.

This chapter discusses a language component that has not received sufficient research attention, that is, pragmatics. The chapter answers socially oriented questions such as How can I make this request politely? and What’s the best way to address this person? The chapter explains how pragmatics knowledge helps learners be aware of the requirements of the larger social context surrounding the language, and understand which grammatical and lexical forms are appropriate and helpful in different social contexts. Different pragmatic knowledge is discussed, that is, sociopragmatics (i.e., knowledge about the context) and pragmalinguistics (i.e., knowledge about specific linguistic forms). In addition, the chapter discusses speech acts, such as requests and compliments, which are used to achieve goals in our daily life by using language appropriately and effectively. The chapter then explains how pragmatics is embedded in our society by discussing illocutionary force and intercultural communicative competence. Finally, the chapter explores different ways of teaching pragmatics.

This chapter overviews broad issues related to language acquisition research and answers fundamental questions related to first language acquisition, such as What is language? and How do children learn their first language? It begins by introducing some components of language, such as grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, pragmatics, and discourse. It also discusses language varieties (e.g., American English vs. Indian English) and explains their legitimacy. Then, the chapter addresses language learning during the first years of a child’s life. It also discusses bilingualism, especially of those who start learning multiple languages in their early years (simultaneous bilingualism). In order to understand second language acquisition for the rest of the textbook, the chapter focuses on a question: How are children able to learn a language without formal instruction? In order to answer this question, multiple language acquisition theories will be discussed.

Linguistic pragmatics is one of the fastest growing fields in contemporary theoretical linguistics. It grew from the influential work of philosophers such as Grice, Austin, Stalnaker, Lewis, and others on context and communicative inferences. It engages directly with general rationality, theory of mind, and systems of intention. One of the major debates in pragmatics has been where to precisely draw the line between semantic phenomena and pragmatic phenomena. In this chapter, three classical and influential ideas on the nature of pragmatics, courtesy of Grice (1975), Stalnaker (1978), and Lewis (1979), are discussed. This discussion leads to three further general philosophical frameworks for separating semantic from pragmatic processes and analyses that have roots in the aforementioned triumvirate: (P1) the indexical conception, (P2) the cognitivist conception, and (P3) social-inferential conception. Each option offers a different demarcation. Finally, three linguistic theories of pragmatics are selected as candidate representations of the contemporary state of the art: (L1) optimality-theoretic pragmatics, (L2) game-theoretic pragmatics, and (L3) Bayesian pragmatics. It’s shown that each of these prominent frameworks exploit the philosophical demarcations (P1–P3) presented to different degrees.

This chapter offers a toolbox of Methods for Gesture Analysis (MGA). Developed in the context of research on emerging protolinguistic structures in cospeech gestures, the present version of MGA differs from earlier publications (Bressem, Ladewig, Müller 2013; Bressem 2013) in offering sets of tools for gesture analysis that adapt flexibly to different research questions. Essential starting points for MGA are an understanding of hand gestures as temporal forms embedded in a dynamically unfolding context and an understanding of context that itself varies with the adopted framework. The baseline for any chosen tool is a microanalysis that entails some account of the form of the gesture (as temporal form), i.e. ‘form analysis’,and some analysis of how a gesture, a sequence of gestures, a multimodal sequence is placed in a given temporally unfolding context-of-use, i.e. context-analysis. Macroanalyses of gesture dynamics are briefly introduced. MGA offers a toolbox with a flexible set of tools that encourages critical reflection on the insight that can be gained from analyzing gestures in multimodal communication and interaction.

The chapter considers gesture studies in relation to corpus linguistic work. The focus is on the Multimedia Russian Corpus (MURCO), part of the Russian National Corpus. The chapter includes a brief biography of the creator of this corpus, Elena Grishina. The compilation of the corpus out of a set of Russian classic feature films and recorded lectures is described as well as the methods of annotating it in detail. The gesture coding is not limited to manual/hand gestures, but also includes head gestures and use of eye gaze. The chapter considers the findings from the corpus, and reported in Grishina’s posthumously published volume on Russian gestures from a linguistic point of view. The categories include pointing gestures, representational gestures, auxiliary (discourse-structuring) gestures, and several cross-cutting categories, including gestures in relation to pragmatics and to grammatical categories, like verbal aspect. Additional consideration is given to other video corpora in English (and other languages) which are being used for gesture research, namely the UCLA NewsScape library being managed by the Red Hen Lab and the Television Archive.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the present book, by outlining its objectives, providing a working definition for ritual, and introducting the concept of the ritual perspective. The chappter also introduces the conventions used in this book and overviews its contents.

In this chapter the focus moves beyond Pāṇini’s grammar to address a topic of major concern within the broader Indian tradition: semantics. While some observations regarding semantics can be drawn from Pāṇini, for the most part semantics was treated as a separate field of inquiry within the Indian tradition until the early modern period. This chapter provides introductions to the traditions of semantic analysis in ancient India and the modern West, and a comparison of their approaches to one issue of central concern in semantic theory: compositionality.