Language and causation: A discursive action model of description and attribution.

Abstract

Everyday explanations of human actions have been studied as event perception, with language part of method, used by experimenters for describing events and obtaining causal judgments from Ss. Recently, language has acquired theoretical importance as the medium of causal thinking. Two developments are the linguistic category model of Au (1986), Brown and Fish (1983), and Fiedler and Semin (1988) and the conversational model of Turnbull and Slugoski (1988) and Hilton (1990). Three areas of weaknesses are identified: the relation between linguistic and psychological analysis, the nature of ordinary discourse, and the action orientation of event descriptions. A Discursive Action Model is proposed for investigating everyday causal attribution. Although a cognitive psychology of discursive attribution is considered feasible, this must follow a reconceptualization of language as social action

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3. Two to Tango: Script Formulations, Dispositions, and Rhetorical Symmetry in Relationship Troubles Talk
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5. Conceptual structure and social functions of behavior explanations: Beyond person‐situation attributions
   Malle, Bertram F., Knobe, Joshua, O'Laughlin, Matthew J., Pearce, Gale E., Nelson, Sarah E. · 2000 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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