When the man is asked to move his chair closer to the table, he
orients posturally and in gaze direction to the speaker, silently
moves forward, reorients to the speaker (to check if the move was
sufficient, according to the analysis). The mans utters no word,
completes no linguistic verbal exchange unit. But the relevant
unit, even in so-called 'Conversation Analysis', is not really a
unit of talk at all, but of action, of activity. The activity of
Request-Compliance-Check, and the underlying interactional
synchrony (infra-semiotic?), _can_ be realized by verbal acts,
but they can also be realized by other kinds of acts, and in some
cases (responses to Halliday's Requests-for-Goods&Services class
of speech acts) normally are.
Language evolved functionally in such contexts of activity. It
has never been an 'autonomous' semiotic system. Only the
political imperatives of linguistics as a discipline, and the
mystique of written language, misdirect our choice of units from
the dynamic contingencies of doing to the synoptic formalizations
of 'language'. The tool is not the task (nor does the tool make
useful sense analyzed outside the context of tasks in general).
JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU