Linguistic structures in social interaction : Moving temporality to the forefront of a science of language*

Abstract

In this introductory paper to the inaugural volume of the journal Interactional Linguistics, we raise the question of what a theory of language might look like once we factor time into explanations of regularities in linguistic phenomena. We first present a historical overview that contextualises interactional approaches within the broader field of linguistics, and then focus on temporality as a key dimension of language use in interaction. By doing so, we discuss issues of emergence and its consequences for constituency and dependency, and of projection and its relation to action formation within and across languages. Based on video-recorded conversational data from French and Garrwa (Australian), we seek to illustrate how the discipline of linguistics can be enriched by attending to the temporal deployment of patterns of language use, and how this may in turn modify what we understand to be language structure.