ACCOUNT SEQUENCES

As common features of everyday interaction, social accounts have been studied by scholars from a variety of disciplines. Despite an impressi ve quantity of research on this topic, however, relatively little of i t has focused on the interactional dynamics of the accounting process. This research analyzes account sequences from literary fiction in ord er to (a) reveal the basic dimensions of account sequences, (b) identi fy those linguistic moves that mark the beginning and ending of accoun t sequences, and (c) discover the types of linguistic moves that are c ommonly employed in account sequences. Analysis of these sequencer sho ws that, although traditional models of account sequences are often ad equate for the description of dyadic interaction, making sense of acco unt sequences generated by triads and larger units requires a more com plex model of the process.