Year: 2002
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This chapter deals with perspectivation in verbal interaction, that is verbal practices in which participants manifest perspectives and set their relevance for the interpretation of their own and others' activities.Some of these practices will be studied here in the framework of a rhetorical conversation analysis.The main empirical objects are instances of remarkably elaborated perspective presentations which function as explanations of the speaker's position and actions and thus allow "rich" interpretations of them, displaying their plausibility and their inner logic to the interlocutors.The basic practice in perspective explanations relates conditions and consequences and often forms chains of such relations -contextualizing single actions in the framework of an action perspective and grounding this perspective in a background perspective which is rooted itself in specific conditions.This type of chaining constitutes perspective grounding.Explicit perspective grounding generally serves to define the speaker's position as deeply rooted, essential for the speaker's actions, and stable (Kallmeyer & Keim 1996).The most important strategies of grounding perspectives are grounding in personal experience, in social categorization, and in principles of acting (such as persistence in goal orientation, flexibility in reaction to situational changes, or rationality in problem solving).The specific interest which motivates my analysis of these practices of perspective grounding is in the role which perspectivation plays in the participants' way of constructing themselves as actors in social contexts.In their perspectivizing activities participants structure the field of potential or established contextual or intertextual relations with respect to themselves as perspective sources.Perspective grounding is a particulary good analytical object to show the way how participants define themselves and project spaces of possible actions and expectable activities.The corpus which is used here is a collection of interactions of different types which all center on activities of dealing with problems and conflicts, such as counseling, mediation, or clarifying discussions.They are all guided by an ideology of
Source: Human cognitive processing
DOI: 10.1075/hcp.9.09kal
Author: Werner Kallmeyer
Institution: Leibniz Institute for the German Language
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2503336147