Time is a constitutive element of everyday interaction: all verbal interaction is produced and interpreted in time. However, it is only recently that research in linguistics has started to take the temporality of linguistic production and reception in interaction into account by studying the real-time and on-line dimension of spoken language. This volume is the first systematic collection of studies exploring temporality in interaction and its theoretical foundations. It brings together researchers focusing on how temporality impinges on the production and interpretation of linguistic structures in interaction and how linguistic resources are designed to deal with the exigencies and potentials of temporality in interaction. The volume provides new insights into the temporal design of a range of heretofore unexplored linguistic phenomena from various languages as well as into the temporal aspects of linguistic structures in embodied interaction.

This book presents a novel account of the human temporal dimension called the “human temporality” and develops a special mathematical formalism for describing such an object as the human mind. One of the characteristic features of the human mind is its temporal extent. For objects of physical reality, only the present exists, which may be conceived as a point-like moment in time. In the human temporality, the past retained in the memory, the imaginary future, and the present coexist and are closely intertwined and impact one another. This book focuses on one of the fragments of the human temporality called the complex present. A detailed analysis of the classical and modern concepts has enabled the authors to put forward the idea of the multi-component structure of the present. For the concept of the complex present, the authors proposed a novel account that involves a qualitative description and a special mathematical formalism. This formalism takes into account human goal-oriented behavior and uncertainty in human perception. The present book can be interesting for theoreticians, physicists dealing with modeling systems where the human factor plays a crucial role, philosophers who are interested in applying philosophical concepts to constructing mathematical models, and psychologists whose research is related to modeling mental processes.

This book presents an overview of different approaches to and understandings of time and temporality in organization studies. It explores the development of time and temporality studies within organisation studies, and examines its interdisciplinarity and roots in philosophy. From there, it moves to discuss more recent concerns in the field, including the agency of time and temporal agency of human actors, the temporal orientation of activities, temporal trajectories, sustainability, and an events-based view of time. It will be useful reading for academics of organisational studies and the philosophy of business.

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. the science of language use. The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers, which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995. Also available as Online Resource: benjamins.com/online/hop/

Everyday social life is deeply tied to the ways in which people talk, interact, and engage in joint activities with each other. This book examines language use and social interaction through the lens of complexity, focusing on how participants establish and maintain shared understanding in multi-layered situations and settings. This book will find readership among students and scholars who use video-based methods and are interested in interaction, intersubjectivity and multimodality.

This book discusses the disruptive power of the concept of taste in the works of a number of important British writers, including poets such as Alexander Pope and Joseph Warton, philosophical historians such as David Hume and Anna Barbauld, and novelists such as Frances Burney and William Beckford.

Xenolinguistics brings together biologists, anthropologists, linguists, and other experts specializing in language and communication to explore what non-human, non-Earthbound language might look like. The 18 chapters examine what is known about human language and animal communication systems to provide reasonable hypotheses about what we may find if we encounter non-Earth intelligence. Showcasing an interdisciplinary dialogue between a set of highly established scholars, this volume: Clarifies what is and is not known about human language and animal communication systems Presents speculative arguments as a philosophical exercise to help define the boundaries of what our current science can tell us about non-speculative areas of investigation Provides readers with a clearer sense of how our knowledge about language is better informed through a cross-disciplinary investigation Offers a better understanding of future avenues of research on language This rich interdisciplinary collection, with chapter authors including Noam Chomsky, Derek Ball, Denise Herzing, and Irene Pepperberg, will be of interest to researchers and students studying non-human communication, astrobiology, and language invention.

Microsociologists seek to capture social life as it is experienced, and in recent decades no one has championed the microsociological approach more fiercely than Randall Collins. The pieces in this exciting volume offer fresh and original insights into key aspects of Collins’ thought, and of microsociology more generally. The introductory essay by Elliot B. Weininger and Omar Lizardo provides a lucid overview of the key premises this perspective. Ethnographic papers by Randol Contreras, using data from New York, and Philippe Bourgois and Laurie Kain Hart, using data from Philadelphia, examine the social logic of violence in street-level narcotics markets. Both draw on heavily on Collins’ microsociological account of the features of social situations that tend to engender violence. In the second section of the book, a study by Paul DiMaggio, Clark Bernier, Charles Heckscher, and David Mimno tackles the question of whether electronically mediated interaction exhibits the ritualization which, according to Collins, is a common feature of face-to-face encounters. Their results suggest that, at least under certain circumstances, digitally mediated interaction may foster social solidarity in a manner similar to face-to-face interaction. A chapter by Simone Polillo picks up from Collins’ work in the sociology of knowledge, examining multiple ways in which social network structures can engender intellectual creativity. The third section of the book contains papers that critically but sympathetically assess key tenets of microsociology. Jonathan H. Turner argues that the radically microsociological perspective developed by Collins will better serve the social scientific project if it is embedded in a more comprehensive paradigm, one that acknowledges the macro- and meso-levels of social and cultural life. A chapter by David Gibson presents empirical analyses of decisions by state leaders concerning whether or not to use force to deal with internal or external foes, suggesting that Collins’ model of interaction ritual can only partially illuminate the dynamics of these highly consequential political moments. Work by Erika Summers-Effler and Justin Van Ness seeks to systematize and broaden the scope of Collins’ theory of interaction, by including in it encounters that depart from the ritual model in important ways. In a final, reflective chapter, Randall Collins himself highlights the promise and future of microsociology. Clearly written, these pieces offer cutting-edge thinking on some of the crucial theoretical and empirical issues in sociology today.

Unorthodox Minds in Contemporary Fiction seeks to provide an overview of the ways in which broadly understood contemporary fiction envisions, explores and engenders minds going beyond the classical models. The opening essay discusses the complex relationships between such innovative concepts of the mind and experimental techniques for presenting mentality. The chapters which follow focus on (dis)embodied and/or extended mind, virtuality of avatar minds, intermental thought of reader communities, the capability of artificial intelligence (and humans) for genuine selfless love, the interplay between technology and affect in posthuman consciousness. The books under discussion include Murmur by Will Eaves, The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker and Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan. A piece of conceptual fiction by Steve Tomasula, one of the most innovative American novelists of our times, exploring the human mind’s alleged power to transcend its biological limits, complements these scholarly inquiries.

Divided into four parts, this title examines commodity racism: representation, racialization and resistance. It presents the interpretive works in the interactionist tradition. It features the essays which interrogate the intersections between biography, media, history, politics and culture.