Tala om att tänka. Om processer och projekt vid användning av orden 'tänka' och 'tanke' i tre samtal

Sammanfattning: This thesis is a qualitative investigation of how the Swedish verb tänka and the noun tanke are used in three radio phone-in counseling conversations (the words are comparable with, but not equivalent to, the English verb think and the noun thought). The aim of the study is to explore in detail what the participants talk about when they use these two words. The investigation focuses on two roles, referred to as the thinker and the thought, representing someone who is thinking and something that is thought. A systemic-functional analysis of the processes containing the words tänka and tanke shows that the thinker and the thought are engaged in an emergent interplay which can be described as a pattern of material, verbal and relational processes, rather than the expected mental processes. Furthermore, an activity analysis of these processes in terms of communicative projects shows that talking about the thinker and the thought contributes in a critical way to a successful outcome of the ongoing counseling activity. Following Harvey Sacks’ seminal article On doing “being ordinary” (1984), the study proposes that the uses of the words tänka and tanke support, grammatically and interactionally, an interpretation in which the speakers cooperatively are doing “being thinking”. The combined description of process types and communicative projects in languaging turns out to be a fruitful method for exploring the dialogical and dynamic aspects of human sense-making.