The Pragmatics of Sensitive Activities in Institutional Discourse

This volume examines the way participants orient to aspects of their interactions with others as interpersonally sensitive across an array of languages and contemporary institutional settings. The individual chapters address interactional episodes where the participants signal that elements of the exchanges they are engaged in are problematic in terms of the vulnerability of their own and/or each other’s face and the role-identities assumed throughout the interactions. The volume contributors examine a range of activities. In some of these, an orientation to interpersonal sensitivity is expected, such as citizens’ encounters with traffic police officers, negotiations with a line manager, political news interviews, or public inquiries. Other types of activity, such as service calls or guided tours, involve no such expectations in and of themselves. In some cases, the situated vulnerabilities studied here, whether expected or not, lead to deviation from the expected trajectory of the communicative event, with implications for goal achievement. The collection of papers draws on diverse analytic perspectives. These include interactional discourse analysis, interactional linguistics, and conversation analysis. The diversity of languages and institutional environments examined will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in face-to-face interaction and serve to stimulate debate in the field of pragmatics and beyond.