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The primary means for psychotherapy interaction is language. Since talk-in-interaction is accomplished and rendered interpretable by the systematic use of linguistic resources, this study focuses on one of the central issues in psychotherapy, namely agency, and the ways in which linguistic resources, person references in particular, are used for constructing different types of agency in psychotherapy interaction. The study investigates therapists' responses to turns where the client complains about a third party. It focuses on the way therapists' responses distribute experience and agency between the therapist and the client by comparing responses formulated with the zero-person (a formulation that lacks a grammatical subject, that is, a reference to the agent) to responses formulated with a second person singular pronoun that refers to the client. The study thus approaches agency as situated, dynamic and interactional: an agent is a social unit whose elements (flexibility and accountability) are distributed in the therapist-client interaction. The data consist of 70 audio-recorded sessions of cognitive psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, and the method of analysis is conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. The main findings are that therapists use the zero-person for two types of responses: affiliating and empathetic responses that distribute the emotional experience between the client and the therapist, and responses that invite clients to interpret their own experiences, thereby distributing control and responsibility to the clients. In contrast, the second person references are used for re-constructing the client's past history. The conclusion is that therapists use the zero-person for both immediate emotional work and interpretative co-work on the client's experiences. The study suggests that therapists' use of the zero-person does not necessarily attribute “weak agency” to the client but instead might strengthen the clients' agency in the sense of control and responsibility in the long term.

This special issue includes a collection of papers on language and intersubjctivity. There are two paradigms in linguistic approaches to intersubjectivity; cognitive linguistics and interactional linguistics, but these two paradigms hardly ever meet. This is due to the fact that these paradigms have opposing views on cognition and mental events. However, both these paradigms draw from phenomenology: whereas cognitive linguistic approaches to intersubjectivity have their basis on Husserl's philosophy, interactional linguistics is influenced by ethnomethodological conversation analysis and the philosophy of Schutz. Despite the apparent differences between these approaches, there are convergences, too. Moreover, both approaches are needed for a full account of language and human intersubjectivity. Oslo, P.O. Box 1102, Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway. m.i.etelamaki@iln.uio.no Human mind, language, and action are nowadays understood and studied as thoroughly social and intersubjective phenomena in many fields of research; simultaneously, human sociality and intersubjectivity per se have become topics for multidisciplinary studies. At present, studies concerning human intersubjectivity have at least three foci. One approach focusses on intersubjectivity as a property of the human mind, drawing on research in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive and neuroscientific studies (e.g. Bråten 2006, Hari & Kujala 2009, Rochat, PassosFerreira & Salem 2009, Zahavi & Rochat 2015. Another focus is on language and intersubjectivity as cognitive phenomena (e.g. Verhagen 2005Verhagen , 2008. The third line of research has its roots in sociology, where intersubjectivity is understood as an achievement of organized social interaction (e.g. Heritage 1984, Schegloff 1992, Sidnell 2014. Within this approach, the focus is on intersubjectivity as situated in the social world rather than the human mind. Drawing on the methodology of conversation analysis, this approach is radically empirical, emphasizing the importance of recorded data from authentic interactions. Keywords cognitive linguistics, conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, intersubjectivity, phenomenology Marja Etelämäki, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University ofRegardless of a shared understanding of humans as thoroughly social beings, these three lines of research do not easily meet. While psychological studies have, M A R J A E T E LÄ MÄ K Ito a large extent, neglected the role of language in the constitution of human intersubjectivity, 1 cognitive linguistic studies of language and intersubjectivity are either purely theoretical or focus on language as a means for sharing experience at the cognitive level, neglecting the affective and action-oriented levels of human interaction. On the other hand, interactionally oriented empirical studies on language and intersubjectivity mainly neglect -some even reject -the cognitive dimension. The result is that there is only a handful of empirical studies that approach grammar as a socio-cognitive, prof...