Understanding Face-to-face Interaction

Challenging current work in communication and social psychology that assumes face-to-face interaction can be adequately understood without attending to discourse expression, this volume examines how people's goals, concerns, and intentions can be related to discourse expression. The text discusses discourse-goal linkages in specific face-to-face encounters such as courtroom exchanges, marital counseling, and intellectual discussions, as well as in more general theoretical dilemmas. Because it poses a new set of questions about social actors' motivations and pre-interactional goals, this volume offers a new direction for discourse study -- one that seriously considers the thinking and strategy involved in human communication.

Tracy, Karen

Contents: K. Tracy, Introduction: Linking Communicator Goals With Discourse. Part I: Discourse-Goal Linkages in Specific Face-To-Face Encounters.R. Penman, Goals, Games, and Moral Orders: A Paradoxical Case in Court? S. Jacobs, S. Jackson, S. Stearns, B. Hall, Digressions in Argumentative Discourse: Multiple Goals, Standing Concerns, and Implicatures. R. Buttny, J.R. Cohen, The Uses of Goals in Therapy. N. Coupland, J. Coupland, H. Giles, K. Henwood, Intergenerational Talk: Goal Consonance and Intergroup Dissonance. W.K. Rawlins, On Enacting Friendship and Interrogating Discourse. Part II: Theoretical Dilemmas Linking Goals and Discourse.J.B. Bavelas, Some Problems With Linking Goals to Discourse. B.J. O'Keefe, Message Design Logic and the Management of Multiple Goals. J. Mandelbaum, A. Pomerantz, What Drives Social Action? R.E. Sanders, The Two-Way Relationship Between Talk in Social Interactions and Actors' Goals and Plans. G.J. Shepherd, E.W. Rothenbuhler, A Synthetic Perspective on Goals and Discourse. Appendix: Transcript Notation.