Tuesday, March 04, 2025 - 12:40 p.m. to 2 p.m.
Horton Hall, Room 115
Please join us for the Department of Communication Spring Colloquium. The speaker is Andrew Chalfoun ( PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles). The talk title is “How Many Things Can We Do with Language? Thinking with (and against) John Searle’s Taxonomy of Speech Acts.”
Abstract
Scholars interested in social interaction, including conversation analysts, frequently rely on action categories to describe the shared properties of discrete turns-at-talk. However, we have been reluctant to define how the labels we use (questions, proposals, announcements, repair initiations, and so on) fit together, resulting in persistent confusion and disagreement over definitions. To move forward, I argue, interaction research should adopt an overarching typology that can catergorize everything that happens in language into one or more discrete kinds of action. John Searle’s taxonomy, which divides speech acts into five macro-categories, provides a useful (but flawed) starting point. Using examples from everyday interaction, I suggest that a modified version of Searle’s taxonomy provides a valuable organizing principle for the analysis of spoken interaction while capturing variation in participant orientations. After outlining the basic typology, the paper discusses cases where multiple action categories may be simultaneously applied to a single turn-at-talk. It concludes with a discussion of how action categories relate to sequence organization and to multimodality.
March 4, 2025, 12:40 - 2:00 p.m.
Horton 115
