Co-construction

This special issue brings together a set of papers that address the import of co-construction in the constitution and interpretation of culturally and historically situated social interactions. In this volume, co-construction is referred to as the joint creation of a form, interpretation, stance, action, activity, identity, institution, skill, ideology, emotion, or other culturally meaningful reality. The "co-" prefix is intended to cover a range of interactional processes including collaboration, cooperation, and coordination.

The articles raise three important methodological and intellectual issues for the study of language, discourse, and social interaction:
* The obvious importance of capturing the linguistic, paralinguistic, and nonlinguistic events of interaction and of having a principled way of incorporating them into a sequential analysis of what appears to be going on from the participants' point of view in a particular sociocultural setting.
* The challenge of treating spontaneously produced discourse not as free-standing "text," however it may look when transcribed or isolated from larger stretches of talk and interaction, but as something contingently dynamic and unfolding in interactional time.
* To study language behavior, discourse, and social interaction is to study communicative competence, not as an abstract construct or a model, but as it plays out in all its incredible complexity as people go about managing their identities, their relationships, and their lives.

The editors are pleased that this cross-disciplinary group of researchers has come together to consider co-construction in naturally occurring discourse in a variety of settings and cultural contexts.