The research program of interactional linguistics aspires “to better understand how languages are shaped by interaction and how interactional practices are molded by specific languages” (Selting & Couper-Kuhlen 2001: 3; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1996). While the second of these issues has been amply studied, empirical research into how social interaction motivates the routinization (or: sedimentation) of grammatical usage patterns over time is only now starting to emerge.

In this workshop we ask: How can we study the routinization / grammaticalization / pragmaticalization of linguistic resources in and for social interaction? One obvious response is: by looking at diachronic interactional data. Yet, this is not the only way, and there are obvious limits to the availability of such data. In this workshop, we discuss three ways of tackling the focal issue: diachronic, synchronic (continua of synchronic usage), developmental (longitudinal research on language acquisition). Taking stock of the scarcity of existing findings, the workshop provides hands-on training on the data-collection designs, ways of establishing and comparing collections, as well as analytic methods needed to conduct research along these three lines. It addresses specific challenges, such as tracking the routinization of multimodal packages or warranting comparability over time. It concludes with a discussion of how the three lines of research complement each other.

Facilitated by: Simona Pekarek Doehler