1.4 Fields of Research in Linguistics and Interaction Studies

From a linguistic perspective, a central question will be in what way media are situated in and with linguistic interaction and how linguistic interaction is being configured by media artifacts and their locative infrastructures. So far, studies done in Conversation Analysis and linguistically based studies on written discourse of a situated communicative creation of places and locales have been specified with regard to a series of subject areas: To what extent do written linguistic signs in public spaces (linguistic landscapes), connected to other situated signs (announcements, architecture, object design, etc., see for example Molotch/McClain 2003) contribute to establishing understandable and usable venues of social practice (see Scollon/Scollon, 2003; Backhaus, 2007; Auer, 2010; on hospitals: Sharrock/Anderson, 1979; on museums: Kesselheim/Hausendorf, 2007; on train stations: Domke 2010)? How are these orientational and navigational signs processed individually (Schmauks 2002); what role do they play as resources in creating social order and interaction (Goffman, 1963; de Stefani/Mondada, 2010; on museums: vom Lehn/Heath, 2007; on guided tours: Costa/Müller-Jacquier, 2010; de Stefani, 2010)? How are interactive possibilities of accessibility and participation regulated multimodally (see Goodwin/Goodwin 2004); how do artifacts and infrastructures as media (re-)configure spatial and social positioning and territories (Goffman, 1974; Molotch/Logan, 1987)? How do media affect the representation of matters depending on and/or related to space: phrasing of spatial categories (Schegloff, 1972), spatial reference as embodied activity (see Hanks, 1990; Goodwin, 2000; Haviland, 2000), spatial creation through gestures including the spatial representation of non-spatial matters (see Enfield, 2003; Fricke, 2007; Mondada, 2007), the articulation, storage and reception of spatial meaning supported by media (Habscheid et al., 2010; Habscheid/Gerwinski, 2011)? 

Connected to the technical possibilities for the recording of audiovisual data, non-verbal, multimodal aspects of social interaction have also increasingly become the focus of attention that now can be made into objects of research in a highly complex way in the sense of an "overall context of all simultaneously realized, sequentially structured and interactive, relational involvement of all participants" (Deppermann/Schmitt 2007: 17; see Goffman's concept of interactional ensembles; Kendon, 1990). In this context, apart from language, voice, body, and the contextualized multimodal expressions on a common ground, increasingly spatial and material resources—like everyday things (Brown/Laurier 2005; McIlvenny/Broth/Haddington 2009)—begin to play a role as resources of constituting interaction. Visibly, verbal and multimodal interaction and the individual capacities related to it are embedded into increasingly complex socio-material structures (see for example Ingold, 2000 on a related reconceptualization of so-called skills). On the one hand, environments and objects are here included into the dynamic creation of social meaning by the interacting members who recognize this (see Goodwin/Goodwin, 1996, 1997; Streeck, 1996); on the other hand, social interactions and socio-technical processes are also configured in their own way by these activities.

In the context of post-constructivist debates—as they are held for example in Actor-Network-Theory—and which are therefore also relevant for a linguistics of interaction, an empirical and theoretical challenge emerges that asks about the reciprocal and asymmetrical constitution of the human and 'material' participants in the linguistic, multimodal processes of communication as well as about the dynamic production of the borderlines between the two (Suchman, 2007: 260). Compared to basic spatial, physical and material aspects of locative and situational interaction, so far the problem in what way symbolic action and structures of interaction are shaped by different forms of organized and computer based technology has been rarely tackled systematically. Links can be found in studies of linguistic media communication (survey: Androutsopoulos, 2010) and in disciplines connected to studies of work (Bergmann, 2006; Drew/Heritage, 1992) and workplace studies (Heath/Luff, 2000) influenced by ethnomethodology and analysis of conversation located on the border between sociology of work and organization, interaction studies and technology design. Apart from linguistic, paralingual and physical interaction, the interest also lay in the interactively relevant media apparatuses and infrastructures from the beginning. In addition—for example when studying centers of coordination (Suchman, 1997)—apart from the spatially copresent interaction the communication with spatially distant participants organized by media is also included. A programmatic departure from one-sided technological determinism and paternalism— also accentuating everyday practices of localizing and appropriating—has become characteristic for the respective linguistic studies; see for example the DFG-research group "New Media in Everyday Life" Schütz et al., 2005; Habscheid et al., 2006). Thus, the multiplicity of devices and possibilities of linkage increases the necessity of understanding and configuring the technical infrastructures in situ depending on the current context of use (Habscheid et al., 2010).

If it is a matter of situatively embedding the medium and its localization in communicative processes in the everyday perspective of the actors integrated into a practical context in terms of the questions of the Research Training Group, a particular relevance has to be attributed to the specific methodological approach to linguistic interactional studies as well. Acting communicatively also means simultaneously staging actions, i.e., the actors have to include a multiplicity of clues in their statements allowing their communicative partner to interpret the meaning of their simultaneously and sequentially embedded actions (for example with “accounting practices” (Garfinkel, 1967, 9) and “contextualization cues“ (Gumperz, 1982, 131. - See also Auer/di Luzio, 1992; Duranti/Goodwin, 1992; Deppermann, 2008b; Buss et al., 2009). This also allows the later interpreters reconstructing (on an ethnographic basis and also starting from the linguistic media surfaces of the interaction) the "primary layer of meaning" of everyday life (Panofsky, 1932; Bergmann, 1993)—even though, like in all hermeneutical reconstructions, a controlled preconception of the analyst unavoidably comes into effect. Similarly, technically imparted verbal and written interaction of 'stretched out' communicative situations (Ehlich, 1984, 1994; criticism: Oesterreicher, 2008) can also be questioned with regard to how language, perceptivity and signals of an imputed contextual knowledge interact in the process of communication. The ethnomethodologically inspired empirical analysis of conversation on this basis reconstructs specific extracts of the media-based "methods and procedures used in a quite self-understood way by the members of a society during the execution of their everyday matters for the meaningful structuring of their worlds" (see Bergmann, 1981: 22f.).

Therefore, linguistic interaction analyses (see Deppermann, 2008a) in their practical studies insist on avoiding theoretically blocking their view of the organizing principles of the participants ahead of time. The question from beginning to end is rather how the interacting participants signalize their understanding of the unfolding situation. With the starting point of a "passively registering" documentation of authentic data (see Bergmann, 1985) processed by methods of transcription that are as little interpretive as possible, the organizing principles of the participants can be reconstructed on different levels of the interaction and in an interplay of the material and media resources. Thus, a scholar would follow "the actors' own ways and the traces" on the insecure basis of the data left by their praxis (Latour, 2005: 29). Only the later work allows reconstructing recurring and simultaneously highly flexible methods of the organizing principles on this basis, thereby creating a knowledge in which the practical can be found again on an abstract level. This would not only be the case microsociologically but also with view to the multiplicity of manifestations of the discourses and relations in society as a whole (Knoblauch 2001).