WP117 “Agents” or “participation”?: Sociolinguistic frameworks for the study of media engagement

Focusing on a couple of studies published in Androutsopoulos (2014), this short paper considers two approaches to agency in sociolinguistics.? The first focuses on the agency of speakers, who are seen as individuals skilfully mobilising resources in accordance with the needs and options they perceive in the situation. The second focuses on participation and prioritises interactional activity itself, which it treats as a dialectic of moves in which embodied persons position and get positioned by one another, to the extent that it becomes hard to ?know the dancer from the dance?.? The paper offers three reasons for preferring the second perspective.