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(2011) Human Studies 34 (2).
This article is a comment on papers being published in this special issue concerned with interactional semantics. As these papers are concerned with abstractions, formulations, generalizations, and other uses of categorizations whereby participants' everyday understandings and interpretations come to the foreground of analysis, I explore the wider issue with which the papers wrestle. That issue is whether problems of meaning—related to subjectivity, intersubjectivity, mutual comprehension, and the like—are pervasive in interaction, or are limited and situational. I examine problems of meaning through the lenses of social theory and ethnomethodology, and take the position that analytic preoccupation with interpretation should be one that follows participants' own orientations to problems of meaning. This is different from but related to what each author argues in his own paper.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/s10746-011-9188-7
Full citation:
Maynard, D. W. (2011). On "interactional semantics" and problems of meaning. Human Studies 34 (2), pp. 199-207.
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