11 Interactional Sociolinguistics : A Personal Perspective

Interactional sociolinguistics (IS) is an approach to discourse analysis that has its origin in the search for replicable methods of qualitative analysis that account for our ability to interpret what participants intend to convey in everyday communicative practice. It is well known that conversationalists always rely on knowledge that goes beyond grammar and lexicon to make themselves heard. But how such knowledge affects understanding is still not sufficiently understood. My perspective on verbal communication is grounded in earlier work on ethno-graphy of communit.a'ncm (Hymes 1961); Hymes's key insight was that instead of seeking to explain talk as directly reflecting the beliefs and values of communities, structuralist abstractions that are notoriously difficult to operationalize, it should be more fruitful to concentrate on situations of speaking or, to use Roman Jakobson's term, speech events. Events are arguably more concretely available for ethnographic investigation (Gumperz and Hymes 1964, 1972). They constitute units of interaction subject to direct analysis by established empirical means. At the same time, what happens in such events frequently enters into public discussion, so that replicable information on relevant beliefs and values can readily be obtained through focused ethnographic inquiry. The ethnography of communication debate stimulated a wide variety of empirical investigations. These early studies and particularly the findings, which tended to be presented in terms of grammar-like rules of speaking of the form "in situation A do or say X"{Bauman and Sherzer 1976), have been convincingly criticized on the grounds that they cannot capture everyday practice {Brown and Levinson 1979; Bourdieu 1977, 1994). Nevertheless it is clear that speech event analysis has played an important role in calling attention both to the importance of context in talk and to discourse as the principal site for language and culture studies. As a result, research on language and culture has increasingly come to concentrate on discourse as the basic research site. Ethnographic insight gained through long-term, first-hand immersion in strategically selected fieldwork situations is applied to the interpretation of what 216 John J. Gumperz transpires in longer sequences and yields hypotheses on how native speakers think in everyday interaction. IS is one of several traditions concerned with these issues. 1 To look at talk as it occurs in speech events is to look at communicative practices. Along with others I claim that such practices constitute an intermediate and in many ways analytically distinct level of organization. A sociological predecessor here is …