CFP: Formulating Times and Places in Interaction
| CFP:Time&Place | |
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| Type | Special issue |
| Categories (tags) | Uncategorized |
| Dates | 2026/10/25 - 2026/10/31 |
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| Address | |
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| Abstract due | 2026/10/31 |
| Submission deadline | 2026/10/31 |
| Final version due | |
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| Tweet | A Special Issue on “Formulating Times and Places in Interaction.”
We are calling for papers examining time and place references as interactional practices across languages and settings. Deadline for abstracts: 31 October, 2026. Please visit EMCA Wiki for details |
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CFP: Formulating Times and Places in Interaction:
Details:
Theme: Since Sacks’s lectures and Schegloff’s subsequent publications on the subject, references to persons, times and places have become a topic of abiding interest in conversation analysis (Sacks 1992; Sacks & Schegloff 1979; Schegloff 1972, 1996). For Sacks, far from being merely alternative ways of describing “the same thing”, formulations of persons, times, places and events are inextricably tied to ongoing actions and the interactional goals that participants happen to be pursuing in the moment. In one of Sacks’s memorable data clips, where the speaker tells a story about her witnessing a “gosh-awful” car accident, a particular spot on the highway where the accident occurred was described as “on the way home”. Sacks’s laconic but sharp observation on this place formulation was: “Which is to say, [the accident] occurred in the course of [the speaker’s] actions” (Sacks 1992: 770). Subsequent work by Schegloff and others has investigated person references in different languages and settings. However, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Raymond and White 2022; Buscariolli 2023), much less attention has been paid to place and time formulations. The aim of this Special Issue is to fill this gap by focusing on time and place formulations and the diverse ways in which these are used in conversational interaction to advance projects and activities. References to times and places constitute a fundamental resource for organizing social action in interaction. In conversational interactions, speakers routinely draw on time and place expressions to coordinate activities, manage participation, and establish shared contextual understanding. Rather than serving merely referential functions, time and place formulations are deeply embedded in the design of turns and the organization of sequences and are closely tied to the formation and ascription of social actions. With this Call for Papers we invite contributions that examine time and place formulations as interactional practices in different settings, with particular attention to their role in action formation, sequence organization, and turn design. The Special Issue will showcase in-depth investigations of how time and place references are introduced, oriented to, negotiated, or repaired, and how their design is shaped by the occasion and its local contingencies. References Buscariolli, André (2023) Place formulations and the incongruity procedure: On police officers’ practices for assembling appearances of wrongdoing. Discourse Studies 25.5: 598–617. Raymond, Chase W. and Anne E.C. White (2022) On the recognitionality of references to time in social interaction. Language & Communication 83: 1-15. Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation. Volumes I & II. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Sacks, H. & E. A. Schegloff (1979) Two preferences in the organization of reference to persons in conversation and their interaction. In Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, George Psathas (ed.), 15-21. New York: Irvington Publishers. Schegloff, E.A. (1972) Notes on a conversational practice: formulating place. In Studies in Social Interaction, David N. Sudnow (ed.), 75-119. New York: Free Press. Schegloff, E.A. (1996) Some practices for referring to persons in talk-in-interaction: A partial sketch of a systematics. In Studies in Anaphora, Barbara Fox (ed.), Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Possible topics We welcome contributions based on naturally occurring data from different languages, cultures, and interactional settings. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• temporal reference as an interactional resource; • spatial reference, deixis, and perspective-taking; • indexicality and the occasionedness of time and place expressions; • time and palce formulations and recipient design; • temporal and spatial formulations in institutional interactions; • embodied practices and multimodal resources in spatial and temporal reference; • the grammar of time and place formulations and its grounding in interaction; • cross-linguistic and inter-cultural observations in temporal and spatial formulations. Information on Submission This proposed special issue is intended for submission to a leading international journal in language and social interaction. The special issue will follow the journal’s standard open call and peer-review procedures. All submissions will be subject to editorial assessment and peer review.
Authors interested in contributing are invited to submit an extended abstract of approximately 1000 words outlining: • the research question(s) and theoretical motivation; • the linguistic and interactional data; • the analytical approach and major findings; • the paper’s contribution to broader research on the uses of time and place formulations in interaction.
The abstract should show a sample or two of the data that form the backbone of the study.
Please include: • author name(s); • affiliation(s); • email address(es); • tentative title of the paper.
Submission deadline: 31 October, 2026 Contact Prof. K. K. Luke Nanyang Technological University Email: kkluke@ntu.edu.sg
Dr. Shuangshuang Chen Fudan University Email: chen_ss@fudan.edu.cn
