ABSTRACT
Robert Hopper’s intellectual history illustrates the interplay of scholarly and secular life. With his ear tuned to the poetic frequencies of language, coming of age during the 1960s and 1970s, with an interest in language development that may have been born with his children, Hopper was ideally positioned to find rigorous ways to bring social science’s Linguistic Turn (Rorty, 1967/1992) to the (Speech) Communication field. In his scholarly career he worked in, or made important scholarly contributions to, many of the major currents of work to be found in Language and Social Interaction. His early work focused on speech effects. He then became interested in speech act theory and discourse analysis, focusing particularly on alignment talk. Next he became intrigued with conversation analysis (CA). In the process of becoming a conversation analyst, he worked through many issues regarding the possible intersections between conversation analysis and such bordering territories as ethnography of communication, social psychology, and performance studies. In his later work, he used conversation analysis to address some of the communication field’s traditional questions and issues, and also explored what conversation analysis can offer to the medical field. He did all of this with his special brand of creativity and originality, inspiring his colleagues, undergraduates, and graduate students.
