[Editorial] Towards interspecies pragmatics: Language use and embodied interaction in human-animal activities, encounters, and narratives

Overview & Synopsis

This special issue explores interaction and language use in situations involving human and non-human participants. Bringing together methodologies and theoretical approaches in linguistics and interactional studies, namely Conversation Analysis, the volume focuses on the social actions accomplished in interspecies interaction and the linguistic construction of non-human perception and meaning-making. The studies of the volume deal with cat's bodily and vocal cues used for coordinating human participant's attention to a shared object, animal actions as conditionally relevant to human utterances within sequence organization, dogs' embodied responses to playing partners' verbal turns within a ball game, and expressions of non-human sensory perception through reported animal thoughts. The special issue introduces Interspecies Pragmatics as an approach used for studying human-animal interactions and relationships, with a particular focus on building multimodal understanding in these specific environments. Interspecies Pragmatics aligns with various interdisciplinary approaches in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Human-Animal Studies, Posthumanism, Ecocriticism, Ecolinguistics, Biosemiotics). By undoing conceptual hierarchies and boundaries between humans and other living beings, we can gain insights into shared interests and meanings across species boundaries.