The Aspects of Coordination: a Clarkian Perspective

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Language & discourse analysis | Language In Action | The Aspects of Coordination: A Clarkian Perspective | | | | Contents Introduction 1 Analysis 2 Coordination 2 Coordination strategies 3 Joint activity 4 Common ground 5 Conclusion 6 Bibliography 8 Appendix 9 Transcript Key 9 Transcript 10 Introduction The title of this essay I took influence from ‘Language In Use: a Clarkian Perspective’ (Griffiths, et al., 2009) because I shall be explaining and analysing the aspects of coordination from the viewpoint of H. Clark, with reference to several of his and Levinson’s theories, and the experiment two participants performed using a map. I shall focus on Clark's notions of coordination, coordination strategies and common ground, as well as Levinson’s joint activity structure. Coordination is what people have to do to make their individual actions fit together with those of others in a joint action. For instance, communication enables people to perform joint actions such as travelling to a destination, one person directing the driver where to go, and the other driving using the directions given. In the same way, the Map Task is performed by two participants, the Information Giver (IG) and the Information Follower (IF). The IG draws a route onto a map, then describes that route to the IF who must then replicate that route onto an identical map. In the case of my experiment, the map I used had several points of interest located sparsely on it so that a route could not be easily predicted by the IF. In other words, the IF would be drawing a route completely dependent on the directions given, and not what he or she believes to be the logical route. I transcribed this conversation between the two participants co-ordinating in the Map Task, which can be found in the appendix under ‘Transcript’. Analysis Coordination Preceding the

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