Action categorization in Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics: Challenges and perspectives

This introduction to the special issue on action categorization revisits the state of the art, discusses challenges and competing views, and considers future developments in the study of action in social interaction. After reviewing shortly speech act theory, (neo-)Gricean pragmatics, and conversation analysis as approaches to action categorization, it discusses the relationship between action formation and action ascription in interaction vs. the scientific categorization of action by generic labels. It also addresses core issues of labeling actions, such as the relationship between vernacular and technical labels, the issue of granularity of action-types, language- and culture-specificity of actions and their labels, and methodological issues of the empirical categorization of actions based on naturally occurring talk-in-interaction. In a wider perspective, the relevance of action categorization—and, in particular, of generic action labels—is critically discussed and related to other sorts of pragmatic meanings, which equally matter to how participants treat interactional conduct.