| Language and Social Interaction is an interdisciplinary approach to studying the everyday practices and details that make up the complexities and multifunctionality of human communication. This area has reached a level of maturity that calls for a handbook specific to its concerns. That maturity is noticeable in a distinctive body of research and theory and a well-developed cadre of influential and productive scholars, a journal dedicated to its pursuits, and active divisions in both the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association. This collection features 18 chapters that describe five areas of research and theory in Language and Social Interaction (LSI)— pragmatics, conversation analysis, language and social psychology, discourse analysis, and ethnography—and a sixth section on extensions of technology in traditional LSI work.
We expect that this book will serve as a resource to graduate students and faculty in various areas within the field of communication. A distinctively LSI approach, described in detail in the introduction, has become increasingly visible and incorporated into traditional perspectives within a number of the contexts and central issues of the field. The subfields of ethnography, discourse analysis, and conversation analysis, for example, have made important contributions to health, organizational, interpersonal, and intercultural communication research and theory and have informed work in instructional communication. The subfield of language and social psychology has been for some time an influential part of research into intercultural communication, race and ethnicity, and intergroup communication, as well as in the interpersonal domain. Work in pragmatics on politeness and speech act theory has been similarly important to communication theory and studies of argument. The discipline of communication as a whole has found many productive avenues to explore in the direction of technology and how technological advances have shaped human social life. The electronic extensions of LSI work contribute to those endeavors, as well as to studies of broadcast media. |