What in the World: Conversation and Things in Context

Conversation is clearly a form of social interaction and depends on the same kinds of dynamical processes found in interaction more generally. In conversation meaning emerges at the intersection of a set of semiotic resources that include social, cultural, material structures and their dynamical changes in the environment where action and interaction occur. Meaning, including what we can understand of the other’s actions, is accomplished, not just in a linear set of speech acts but, by drawing on the various resources available in the environment and in whole body pragmatics. Alignment is an important concept in this context and I define it in wide terms to include the broad range of embodied, ecological and material processes integrated into such events