ABSTRACT

When people talk, they recruit a wide range of expressive devices for interactional work, from sighs, sniffs, clicks, and whistles to other conduct that borders on the linguistic. These resources are used in the management of turn and sequence and the marking of stance and affect, and they represent an aspect of the interactional machinery that is as elusive as it is powerful. Phenomena long assumed to be beyond the purview of linguistic inquiry emerge as systematically deployed practices whose ambiguous degree of control and convention allows participants to carry out subtle interactional work without committing to specific words. While these resources have been characterized as nonlexical, nonverbal, or nonconventional, I propose that they are unified in their liminality: They work well precisely because they equivocate between sound and speech. The empirical study of liminal signs shows the promise of sequential analysis for building a science of language on interactional foundations.

摘要

当人们交谈时，他们会招募各种各样的表达工具来进行交互工作，包括叹气，嗅探，点击和吹口哨，以及与语言接壤的其他行为。这些资源用于转弯和顺序的管理以及姿势和情感的标记，它们代表了交互机制的一个方面，尽管功能强大，却难以捉摸。长期以来被认为超出语言探究范围的现象出现在系统地部署的实践中，这种实践的控制和惯例含糊不清，使参与者能够进行细微的交互工作而无需承诺特定的单词。虽然这些资源的特征是非词汇，非语言或非常规的，但我建议它们在限制方面是统一的：它们之所以有效地工作是因为它们在声音和语音之间含混不清。