ABSTRACT
Recent work in linguistic anthropology and related disciplines has shown that we must move beyond the speech event in order to analyze the role language plays in constituting social life. We now have a solid theoretical account of this new approach to language and society and a robust collection of empirical work illustrating its productivity. But researchers who study discourse need methodological guidance about how to implement the approach in their empirical work. In this book we provide such guidance, and in this final chapter we summarize our four primary contributions. First, we build on existing linguistic anthropological approaches to develop a systematic method for doing discourse analysis of discrete speech events. Second, we show how many central human processes require analysts to move beyond a focus on discrete and recurring types of events to study emergent cross-event patterns. Third, we present a method for doing discourse analysis on the pathways of linked events across which many central human processes occur. Fourth, we illustrate the heterogeneous ways in which events are linked into pathways and accomplish various social actions. In addition to being methodologically useful, our approach also has implications for how discourse analysts conceptualize social life.
