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Interactional linguistics is an interdisciplinary approach to grammar and interaction in the fields of linguistics, the sociology of language, and anthropology. Originally proposed by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, the interactive approach to language applies to the domains including, but not limited to, phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, semantics and pragmatics as well as language acquisition, loss, and disorder. The influence of interaction could be conversational or institutional, adult or adult-like, with language-impairment or without. In this perspective, language forms and structures are thought of as actively reproducing pre-adapted features based on anticipated needs of the interaction. In that way, past and present interactions influence the base on which language transforms to speech. This relationship is bidirectional, meaning that languages influence interactions just as much as interactions influence language. Studies have shown that practices like self-initiated repair or other-initiated repair lead to new but non-conflicting underlying conversation rules, which manifest themselves in the speakers' followed language choices (Uhmann 1997, Fox and Jasperson 1995).

Paul Hopper originally proposed emergent grammar as a functional approach to the study of syntax in 1987. Later work expanded to include approaches to phonology and other aspects of grammar.

Emergent grammar postulates that rules of grammar emerge as language is used. This is contrary to the a priori grammar postulate, the idea that grammar rules exist in the mind before the production of utterances. Contrary to the principles of generative grammar and the concept of Universal Grammar, interactional linguistics asserts that grammar emerges from interactions among language users. Whereas Universal Grammar claims that features of grammar are innate, emergent grammar and other interactional theories claim that the human language faculty has no innate grammar and that features of grammar are learned through experience and social interaction.

Interactional linguistics has developed in linguistic discourse analysis and conversation analysis, and is used to investigate the relationship between grammatical structure and real-time interaction and language use.

Scholars in interactional linguistics draw from functional linguistics, conversation analysis, and linguistic anthropology in order to describe "the way in which language figures in everyday interaction and cognition." Studies in interactional linguistics view linguistic forms, including syntactic and prosodic structures, as greatly affected by interactions among participants in speech, signing, or other language use. The field contrasts with dominant approaches to linguistics during the twentieth century, which tended to focus either on the form of language per se, or on theories of individual language user's linguistic competence.