The parallel between waltzing and language use lies in ______.

Language is used for doing things. People use it in everyday conversation for transacting business, planning meals and vacations, debating politics and gossiping. Teachers use it for instructing students, and comedians use it for amusing audiences. All these are instances of language use, that is, activities in which people do things with language.
    As we can see, language use is really a form of joint actions. What is a joint action? I think it is an action that is carried out by a group of people doing things in coordination with each other. A simple example: think of two people waltzing, or playing a piano duet. When two dancers waltz, they each move around the ballroom in a special way. But waltzing is different from the sum of their individual actions. Can you imagine these two dancers doing the same steps but in separate rooms or at separate times. So Waltzing is, in fact, the joint action that merges as the two dancers do their individual steps in coordination as a couple. Similarly, doing things with language is also different form the sum of a speaker’s speaking and a listener’s listening. It is the joint action that merges when speakers and listeners, or writers and readers, perform their individual actions in coordination, as ensembles.
    Therefore, we can say that language use incorporates both individual and social processes. Speakers and listeners, writers and readers, must carry out actions as individuals if they are to succeed in their use of language.  But they must also work together as participants in a social unit I have called ensembles. In the example I mentioned just now, the two dancers perform both individual actions, moving their bodies, arms and legs and joint actions coordinating these movements as they create the Waltz. In the past, language use has been studied as if it were entirely an individual process, and it has also been studied as if it were entirely a social process. For me, I suggest that it belongs to both. We cannot hope to understand language use without viewing it as a joint action built on individual actions.
    In order to explain how all these actions work, I’d like to review briefly settings of language use. By settings, I mean scene in which the language use takes place, plus the medium which refers to whether language used is spoken or written. And in this talk, I’ll focus on spoken settings. The spoken setting mentioned most often is conversation, either face to face, or on the telephone.  Conversations may be devoted to gossip, business transactions or scientific matters, but they are all characterized by the free exchange of turns among the two or more participants. I’ll call these personal settings. Then we have what I would call non-personal settings. A typical example is the monologue. In monologues, one person speaks with little or no opportunity for interruption or turns by the members of the audience. Monologues come in many varieties too, as when a professor lectures to a class or a student gives a presentation in a seminar.  These people speak for themselves, uttering words they formulate themselves for the audience before them and the audience isn’t expected to interrupt. In another kind of setting which is called institutional settings, the participants engage in speech exchanges that look like ordinary conversation, but they are limited by institutional rules.  As examples, we can think of a government official holding a news conference, a lawyer cross-questioning a witness in court, or a professor directing a seminar discussion. In these settings, what is said is more or less spontaneous, even no turns of speaking are allocated by a leader, or are restricted in other ways. The person speaking isn’t always the one whose intentions are being expressed. We have the clearest examples in fictional settings. Vivien Leigh plays Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Frank Loesser sings a love song in front of a live audience. The speakers are each vocalizing words prepared by someone else, for instance, a playwright or a composer, and are openly pretending to be speakers expressing intentions that are not necessarily their own. Finally, there are private settings, in which people speak for themselves without actually addressing anyone else. For example, I like to explain silently to myself, or talk to myself about solving a research problem, or rehearsing what I’m about to say in a seminar tomorrow.  What I say isn’t intended to be recognized by other people; it is only of use to myself. These are the features of private settings.