ABSTRACT
For the past 20 years or so, I have been reading manuscripts for Discourse Processes, amultidisciplinary journal with a tilt toward experimental social psychology. In retrospect, it seems that my most frequent and consistent complaints about submissions I read were that authors were careless in defining both independent and dependent variables, often indifferent to questions of representativeness and comparability, and often acted as if they had forgotten the critical importance of ceteris paribus considerations in behavioral research. When the editors asked me to write this chapter and gave me the suggested title, I did not initially realize that I was being asked to suggest remedies for some of my complaints-or at the very least specification ofmy view of some of the problems. The assignment has required that I look closely at (sometimes contradictory) definitions of discourse, genres, registers, and contexts of discourse. It has also constrained me to articulate some reasons why these matters are of great moment in research on language/discourse in use in social contexts.
