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A Seminar in the Monday Series

 

Monday 20 July , 4:00-5:30pm, Room W3.03, Baldessin Precinct Building

 

Penty Haddington, University of Oulu and Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

 

Situated semantics: Constructing meaning in social interaction

 

My talk discusses on certain ways in which meaning in is constructed in situated social interaction. In linguistics, ‘meaning' has been studied from very different perspectives. For example, cognitive linguistic research argues that linguistic structures are direct reflections of cognition in that they can be associated with the way given situations are conceptualized. Corpus linguistics, on the other hand, uses large corpora for investigating the frequencies and collocations of linguistic items and thereby investigates the meanings that, for example, words and phrases receive in discourse through frequent use. Interactional linguistics has shown that particular linguistic structures are routinely used for accomplishing meaningful social actions. All these views are necessary for understanding LANGUAGE (or langage in Saussure's terms). Nevertheless, there is relatively little research on ‘meaning' is constructed in social interaction. In my talk I will discuss how people build and understand ‘meaning' in collaboration with each other, as a joint accomplishment. I will show how ‘meanings' are constructed and understood moment-to-moment, in the sequential context of the interactional moment. I will also show that in situated moments of interaction, language is not the only source of meaning, but that ‘meaning' can be understood as a conglomerate of language, gestures, gaze directions and the place / space (the contextual or semiotic environment) where interaction takes place. Theoretically my talk also builds upon the idea of ‘situated cognition' and the ‘extended mind hypothesis'. The basic idea of these is that ‘cognition' can be extended beyond the boundary of the body, as ‘cognition or mind in a social environment.' The data come from audio-video recordings of everyday social interaction and some ethnographic notes.