ABSTRACT
There is something ironic about verbal interaction. It is both wonderous in its diversity and exceptional in its sameness; both frustrating in its ease of failure and mundane in its everyday successfulness. That is so, at least in part, because discourse is individually goal-driven yet socially structured. As scholars of discourse, then, we are confronted by a tension that we must theorize. This chapter addresses various aspects of this tension and offers some thoughts about reconciling it in our theories of discourse.
