Fictive interaction and the conversation frame: An overview

We deal with the notion of fictive interaction, namely the use of the conversation frame in order to structure cognition, discourse, and grammar (Pascual 2002, 2006b, 2014). We discuss how thought and the conceptualization of experience are partly modeled by the pattern of conversation, and present kinds of fictive interaction on different levels: the discourse, the inter-sentential, the sentential, and intra-sentential level, down to the morpheme. We also provide a list of its defining characteristics (conversational features, non-actual and non-token interpretation, metonymy), and discuss what makes this ubiquitous phenomenon, widespread across languages, discourse genres, and sociolinguistic groups, worth studying, and what its theoretical implications are. The chapter closes with an overview of the structure and content of this volume.