Why do recordings of speakers engaging in reported speech at British Prime Minister's Questions from the 1970s-80s sound so distant to us? This cutting-edge study explores how the practices of quoting have changed at parliamentary question time in light of changing conventions and an evolving media landscape. Comparing data from authentic audio and video recordings from 1978 to 1988 and from 2003 to 2013, it provides evidence for qualitative and quantitative changes at the micro level (e.g., grammaticalisation processes in the reporting clause) and in more global structures (e.g., rhetorical patterns, and activities). These analytic findings contribute to the theoretical modelling of evidentiality in English, our understanding of constructions, interaction, and change, and of PMQs as an evolving community of practice. One of the first large-scale studies of recent change in an interactional genre of English, this ground-breaking monograph offers a framework for a diachronic interactional (socio-) linguistic research programme.

This edited book revisits the concept of social 'activities' from an interactional perspective, examining how verbal, vocal, visual-spatial and material resources are deployed by participants for meaning-making in social encounters. The eleven original chapters within this volume analyse activities based on video recordings of naturalistic and naturally occurring social encounters from face-to-face and mediated settings in Chinese, Dutch, English, French, and German. Informed primarily by the methodological approaches of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, the authors study embodiment in space and time in three distinct types of situations: objects in space, complex participation frameworks, and affiliation and alignment. Moreover, the book includes a theoretical and methodological discussion of how activities are constituted and visibly embodied in interaction. It will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology and linguistics in general, and face-to-face and mediated interaction in particular.