Guest Editorial : Language as action

Abstract

The theme of this Special Issue, ‘language as action’, reflects the contributors’ interest in what, and how, people do things with language, and particularly spoken language. The papers here have in common a concern for investigating language-in-use in ordinary social life, and how language can both shape, and be shaped by, its use in particular social settings. More specifically, the papers share the interest of conversation analysis (CA) in the language of real-time naturally occurring interaction, for uncovering the practices and processes of reasoning by which participants create and make sense of what it is they are doing, of what is going on.