Communicating & Relating

Communicating & Relating offers an account of how human relating emerges in everyday communicating: an account of how, as participants engage one another in everyday talk and conduct, they mutually constitute actions and meanings, and in so doing constitute both their relationships with one another and what is known across cultures as face.

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Communicating & Relating offers an account of how relating with one another emerges in communicating in everyday interacting. Prior work has indicated that human relationships arise in human communicating, and some studies have made arguments for why that is the case. Communicating & Relating moves beyond this work to offer an account of how both relating and face emerge in everyday talk and conduct: what comprises human communicating, what defines human social systems, how the social and the individual are linked in human life, and what comprises human relating and face. Part 1 develops the Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communicating to address the question "How do participants constitute turns, actions, and meanings in everyday interacting?" Part 2 argues that the processes of constituting what is known cross-culturally as "face" are the processes of constituting relating, and develops Face Constituting Theory to address the question "How do participants constitute relating in everyday interacting?" The answers to both questions are grounded in evidence from everyday talk and conduct. Like other volumes in the Foundations of Human Interaction series, Communicating & Relating offers new perspectives and new research on communicative interaction and on human relationships as key elements of human sociality.