KEYNOTES

Emma Betz

Emma Betz is Associate Professor of German Applied Linguistics at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She uses conversation analysis to uncover the orderly ways in which humans use language, and in particular grammar, in interaction. One focus of her work is the use of particles in building responses. In her most recent publications, for instance in the co-edited volume ‘OKAY across languages’ (2021), she explores the range of interactional uses of the particle ‘okay.’

Grammar and (Inter)action: Redirecting and repairing action trajectories with okay

Self-repair plays a crucial role in managing understanding in social interaction. In conversation analytic research across languages, the syntax of self-repairs has received much attention, but we know less about the systematicities of self-repair initiation. Recent work has investigated how interactants can construct the connection between repairable and repair solution in particular ways through their choice of repair marker (e.g., Lerner & Kitzinger 2015, 2019). After reviewing this literature, I look at one lexical element that can serve as a repair preface in English: okay. Taking as a point of departure my initial observation that such okays regularly introduce a redirection of the action in progress, I address the following questions:

What types of redirecting/repairing moves are regularly introduced with okay?
How far back do speakers ‘reach’ (i.e., what/where is the repairable) in the repair process? Which projections are thereby deleted and which are newly created?
How can the use of okay as repair preface be connected to what we know about other uses of okay in interaction?

I then compare okay with other repair prefaces available in English (e.g., no, well, or) and discuss the contribution that work on repair prefacing can make to our understanding of grammar and (inter)action.

Nick Enfield

Nick Enfield is Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Sydney Centre for Language Research at the University of Sydney. His research on language and social interaction has drawn on his long-term field work in mainland Southeast Asia, especially Laos. Among his books are ‘Roots of Human Sociality’ (2006, with Steve Levinson), ‘The Anatomy of Meaning’ (2009), ‘Relationship Thinking’ (2013), ‘How We Talk’ (2017), ‘The Concept of Action’ (2017, with Jack Sidnell), and ‘Language vs Reality’ (2022).

Consequences of Reflexivity in Language

A unique feature of language is its reflexivity (Hockett 1966, Taylor 2000, Duncker 2019). Language is the only animal communication system that can be used to communicate about itself. Here I argue that this property of language had at least three revolutionary consequences for our species. First, reflexivity provides the elements needed for reputation management, a foundational function in human society. A piece of gossip such as Kim lied to me is possible thanks to three elements that depend at some level on reflexivity: (1) personal names, (2) grammatical displacement (tense-marking), and (3) quoted speech. Arguably, all social accountability is grounded in these elements. Second, reflexivity provides the elements needed for the coherence of higher-level ‘texts’ including conversations and narratives, both of deep importance to human affairs, both for in-the-moment social coordination, cooperation, and persuasion, and for functions of speech oriented to cumulative cultural conventions and social norms across generations. These elements include (i) repair, turn-taking, and sequence organization in interaction, (ii) reference-tracking systems in texts, (iii) narrative structure. Third, quoted speech enables the separation of the ‘animator’ of a signal and its ‘author’ and ‘principal’—meaning that one person’s message can reach another person without the two people needing to be in each other’s presence; the seemingly simple possibility of quoting another’s speech is arguably the original information revolution in our species, having the effect of compressing space and time in social networks (by enabling a message to reach a recipient who is away from the sender); I speculate that every information revolution since (including writing, printing, mass media, and the Internet) has been an quantitative scaling of this basic qualitative advance. This supports some speculations about the origins of reflexivity in language, and its relation to the roots of human sociality and language. I explore the idea that other-initiated repair is the wedge that introduces ‘metalanguage’ into a not-yet-linguistic system. It is communication about communication. The account also raises implications for the shared infrastructure for language and its role in communication in language contact situations.