Anna Filipi and Roger Wales:
An interactional account of what might
determine shifts in speakers’ use of ‘come’ and ‘go’ in a map task
Abstract
The investigation to be reported in this paper builds on earlier work in
which we examined the distribution of perspective strategies within the discourse
structure of a map task (Filipi & Wales 2004). Here we extend the analysis
in two ways: firstly by extending the data-base to include children and secondly
by more closely examining the shifts in the deictic verbs ‘come’ and ‘go’.
Using the tools of Conversation Analysis our aim is to try and account for
the shifts by focusing on the interaction and by isolating the sequential
position in which the shifts occur. We find that the children only use the
verb ‘go’. A key finding in the adult data is that the shifts are aligned
with shifts in perspective strategy. We attempt to account for these findings
within a framework that views deixis as socially situated (Hanks 1990; Hindmarsh
and Heath 2000). The speakers’ shifts in verbs are thus the product of the
interaction of both speakers who themselves shift from speaker to hearer
and whose actions constitute a set of resources for getting the task done.
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