Perspective-taking and perspective-shifting associally situated and collaborative actions

In this paper, we investigate how speakers jointly construct talk around route directions using a map task. A corpus of eight task-based interactions from the Map Task section of the Australian National Database of Spoken Language-ANDOSL [Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing 94, Adelaide 1 (1994) 971 form the corpus for this study. Basin- our analysis on Taylor and Tversky's [J. Mem. Lang. 31 (1992a) 261; Mem. Cogn. 20 (1992b) 483; J. Mem. Lang. 35 (1996) 371] route and survey perspective-taking strategies in route descriptions and Levelt's [Speech, Place and Action: Studies of Language in Context, John Wiley, Chichester, pp. 251-2681 study of speakers' linearisation strategies two issues form the nucleus of the study. The first is to describe the interactions as the collaborative constructions of both the instructiongiver and the instruction-follower. Here we use Conversation Analysis to examine the sequential distribution of route and survey strategies. We find that the route perspective, which is associated with the activity of route-giving, is distributed overwhelmingly in base and post-expansion sequences, while the survey perspective, which is associated with suspension of the activity, is distributed in insertion and pre-sequences. The second and related issue is to try and account for the shifts in perspective, which like Taylor and Tversky [J. Mem. Lang. 35 (1996) 371], we find is a common strategy used by the speakers in our corpus. Here an attempt is made to account for these shifts at pragmatic levels. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.