Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL

Coordinators and editors:

• Alexandra Gubina (Leibniz-Institute for the German Language, Mannheim, Germany) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0053-6257)
• Elliott M. Hoey (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3220-8119)
• Chase Wesley Raymond (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA) (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4353-7345)

Overview

The Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics is an online resource for students and scholars of CA/IL, publicly available on the EMCA Wiki page. Encyclopedias and glossaries are widespread across various fields and methods, and serve as immensely valuable resources. Given the extent to which the EMCA/IL community has expanded over the years—both terminologically as well as geographically—we hope that this encyclopedia of terminology will be well received by students and practitioners of CA and IL across the globe.

While prototypical ‘glossaries’ usually contain a simple alphabetical list of terms from a particular research area, and provide readers with short definitions of these terms (e.g., The SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms), ‘encyclopedias’ contain a summary, or a theoretical overview of specific concepts, or topics from a particular research field, or discipline (see, e.g., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Our Encyclopedia is in fact a bit of a hybrid between these two formats. On the one hand, there are entries on terms/phenomena/notions that are clearly and simply defined in the literature (e.g., [[[Show concession]]], Antaki & Wetherell 1999); such entries typically contain a short definition, description, and often a short extract to illustrate the phenomenon. On the other hand, however, there are several other terms/phenomena/concepts that are much more complicated to explicate. This may be due to the intrinsic complexity or multidimensionality of the specific term in question, and/or due to there being a wide range of relevant lines of research to highlight, in which case more of a presentation of the ‘state of the art’ is incorporated into the entry (e.g., request). On this point, authors have aimed for ‘neutrality’ in their overviews: If some scholars use a term in one sense, and others use it in a slightly different sense, both of these (and their citations) are included in the entry (e.g., assessment).

An important feature of the online nature of the Encyclopedia is the interlinking between entries for different terms. So the entry for Turn-taking will have embedded links to other relevant terms (e.g., Turn allocation, [Turn-constructional unit (TCU), Transition-relevance place (TRP), etc.). Relevant bibliographic information is found at the end of each entry as well, including an automatically generated list of references available in the EMCA Wiki that use the term; this list will continue to update automatically as new publications are added to the EMCA Wiki.

It is crucial to clarify that, with this project, we do not mean to present CA/IL as an overly terminological enterprise. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: We don’t want CA/IL’s terminology to be a barrier to students’ and researchers’ participation in the field. The aim here is to be more open and transparent about the terminology we use, and why we use it, and to provide a place where such information can be easily located. Moreover, the entries are indeed summaries, and as such they should serve as a starting-off point for further exploration, navigation of relevant literature, developing of research questions, etc. We hope this resource will be useful for both novices (especially for those who do not have systematic CA/IL training) and advanced practitioners alike.

'. Here is a full alphabetical listing of the current items in the encyclopedia.