We all need ways of figuring out what other people (or, increasingly, bots) are doing in an interaction and how to respond. This insightful volume's core project is to use conversation analysis (CA) to examine how participants in an interaction recognize, attribute, and interpret actions; how they design and respond to perceived actions; and how the sequential position of an action, its composition, and ‘contextual features for the situated understanding of actions’ (6) work together. Following Stephen Levinson and others, editors Deppermann and Haugh develop the concept of ‘action ascription’, by which they mean both how participants in an interaction categorize other participants’ prior actions and how they respond in ways that would seem to fit that interpretation. Insofar as ascription is a matter of interpretation and response, this is the flipside of what has been called ‘action formation’, shifting the focus from what a speaker might be doing to the doing's intersubjective reception.
The book consists of an introduction and twelve chapters. Deppermann & Haugh assume some familiarity with interactional sociolinguistics and CA, but their introductory essay (chapter 1) helpfully sketches the contours of action ascription as a theoretical problem to be tackled, enough to get a handle on what is at stake in the data-rich chapters that follow. Authors include prominent scholars in CA and interaction analysis, working in a welcome variety of languages beyond English.
A strength of this volume is the breadth of types of talk the authors document and analyse. There are, for example, German political debates and mediation (chapter 7, by Henrike Helmer); everyday advice-giving sequences in American English (chapter 8, by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen & Sandra A. Thompson); thanking in Dutch emergency calls (chapter 11, by Tom Koole & Lotte van Burgsteden); and shopping encounters between European customers and sellers (chapter 5, by Lorenza Mondada) and between Japanese family members deciding on purchases (chapter 9, by Takeshi Hiramoto & Makoto Hayashi). The cross-generic and cross-linguistic possibilities of the volume as a whole are left somewhat underdeveloped by the editors, John Heritage's excellent commentary (chapter 13) notwithstanding. There are, however, some notable exceptions within the chapters; Mondada's chapter in particular showcases the payoff of examining cheese-tasting encounters across twelve languages to reveal their systematic organization.
Action ascription is, the editors argue, its own form of consequential social action. This observation is not new; it follows Paul Drew from about a decade earlier, who also contributed a chapter (3, on how interactants avoid or disguise actions to leave values open). But the book is useful in rigorously and systematically detailing how action ascription constitutes social action. In particular, the authors show not just how interactants categorize actions, or what N. J. Enfield & Jack Sidnell call in chapter 12 ‘binning’, but the strategic ways interactants manipulate multiple possible interpretations of prior talk and their social consequences. Koole & van Burgsteden, for instance, show how thanking an emergency caller recasts their preceding report as a public service rather than a request for help. Likewise Helmer shows how politicians ‘expose’ opponents’ supposed rhetorical strategies of telling half-truths and other discursive misdeeds.
