ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses linguistic anthropological approaches to develop a systematic method for doing discourse analysis of discrete speech events. It shows how many central human processes require analysts to move beyond a focus on either discrete or recurring events to study emergent cross-event patterns. The book presents a method for doing discourse analysis of the pathways of linked events across which many central human processes occur. It illustrates the heterogeneous ways in which events are linked into pathways and accomplish various social actions. The discourse analyst engages iteratively in three component tasks, pursuing the dialectic of contextualization and entextualization. First, attending particularly to types of signs that often signal social actions accomplished through discourse, the analyst asks which indexical signs become salient and signal context that may be relevant to interpreting the social action occurring in the narrating event.
