Encounters At The Counter

Bringing together a diverse collection of studies from a team of international scholars, this pioneering volume focuses on interactions in shops, exploring the dynamics of conversation between sellers and customers. Beginning with the emergence of a 'need' for a product before the request to a seller is actually made, all the way through to the payment phase, it explores the rich and deeply methodical practices employed by customers and sellers as they go about the apparently mundane work of buying and selling small items. It looks at how seller and customer interact both verbally, and by means of manipulating the material objects involved, across a range of different kinds of purchase. Providing new insights into multimodal human interaction and the organisation of the commercial activity, it aims to bring about a new understanding of the fundamental ways in which economic value, possession and ownership is achieved.

Barbara Fox is Emerita Professor of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She works at the intersection of grammar, the body, and social interaction. Her book Grammar in Everyday Talk (with Thompson and Couper-Kuhlen, Cambridge, 2015), won the Best Book Award from the International Society for Conversation Analysis in 2018.

Lorenza Mondada is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Basel. Her research focuses on social interaction in ordinary, professional and institutional settings, within an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective. She has co-edited several collective books, and published Sensing in Social Interaction (Cambridge, 2021).

Marja-Leena Sorjonen is Professor of Finnish language at the University of Helsinki. Her studies cover interactional practices in mundane interactions and in a range of institutional settings, conducted from conversation analytic and interactional linguistic perspectives. She has co-edited several volumes, and published Responding in Conversation (John Benjamins, 2001).