Grammar in Everyday Talk

Sandra A. Thompson is Research Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Barbara A. Fox is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen is a senior researcher associated with the Center of Excellence for Research on Intersubjectivity in Interaction at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Responses in information-seeking sequences with 'question-word interrogatives'; 3. Responses in informing sequences; 4. Sequences with assessment responses; 5. Responses in request-for-action sequences; 6. Conclusions.

'[This book] challenges serious scholars of language and social interaction with a rich, new and exquisitely contextual account of the work people do through their responses in real-time social interaction. Findings presented in the book are fully data-driven and compel us to critically re-envision the traditionally taken-for-granted notions that some utterances are 'elliptical' or 'non-sentential'. [The authors] demonstrate that response formats are artfully and precisely fitted to their contexts, and that the attested composition of utterances results from the limited range of meaning-making potentials opened up in the course of developing sequences of action. The presentation of findings, representing a new standard of methodological and theoretical integrity, is tightly articulated with forty years of research on language form and interactional sequence. Future research on sequence organization and action formats must take this book as a fundamental reference point, including the cross-linguistic expansion of this project, which the authors enthusiastically invite.' Cecilia E. Ford, University of Wisconsin, Madison