Perspective-Taking and Perspective-Shifting Associally Situated and Collaborative Actions

• Published in: Journal of pragmatics 2004-10, Vol.36 (10), p.1851-1884
• Main Authors: Filipi, Anna, Wales, Roger
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0378-2166
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2003.11.003

In this paper, we investigate how speakers jointly construct talk around route directions using a map task. A corpus of eight task-based interactions from the Map Task section of the Australian National Database of Spoken Language - ANDOSL [Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech & Signal Processing 94, Adelaide 1 (1994) 97] form the corpus for this study. Basing our analysis on Taylor & Tversky's [J. Mem. Lang. 31 (1992a) 261; Mem. Cogn. 20 (1992b) 483; J. Mem. Lang. 35 (1996) 371] route & survey perspective-taking strategies in route descriptions & Levelt's [Speech, Place & Action: Studies of Language in Context, John Wiley, Chichester, pp. 251-268] study of speakers' linearisation strategies two issues form the nucleus of the study. The first is to describe the interactions as the collaborative constructions of both the instruction-giver & the instruction-follower. Here we use Conversation Analysis to examine the sequential distribution of route & survey strategies. We find that the route perspective, which is associated with the activity of route-giving, is distributed overwhelmingly in base & post-expansion sequences, while the survey perspective, which is associated with suspension of the activity, is distributed in insertion & pre-sequences. The second & related issue is to try & account for the shifts in perspective, which like Taylor & Tversky [J. Mem. Lang. 35 (1996) 371], we find is a common strategy used by the speakers in our corpus. Here an attempt is made to account for these shifts at pragmatic levels. 2 Tables, 50 References. [Copyright 2004 Elsevier B.V.]