ABSTRACT
Discourse analysis is a research method that provides systematic evidence about social processes through the detailed examination of speech, writing and other signs. This book describes an approach to discourse analysis drawn primarily from the field of linguistic anthropology (Agha, 2007; Duranti, 1997; Silverstein, 1976, 2003)—a discipline that studies language use in social and cultural contextsalthough we also borrow concepts from related fields. Our approach makes two significant contributions. First, we clearly delineate a linguistic anthropological method for doing discourse analysis, offering transparent procedures and illustra tions. Second, we extend discourse analysis beyond the speech event, showing how to study the pathways that linguistic forms, utterances, cultural models, individuals and groups travel across events. Recent theoretical and empirical work has made clear that many important
social processes can only be understood if we move beyond single speech events to analyze pathways across linked events (Agha, 2007; Agha and Wortham, 2005; Wortham, 2012). Learning, for example, involves systematic changes in behavior from one event to the next. A learner has experiences in one or more events and then behaves differently in subsequent events. In socialization, to take another example, a novice experiences events characteristic of a group and then parti cipates more competently in subsequent events. No matter how sophisticated our analyses of discrete events, we cannot offer empirically adequate analyses of processes like learning and socialization unless we study pathways across linked events, because such processes inherently take place across events. In order for discourse analysis to be a useful method for studying processes like learning and socialization, it must uncover how people, signs, knowledge, dispositions and tools travel from one event to another and facilitate behavior in subsequent events. This book presents the first systematic methodological approach to doing discourse analysis of linked events.
