In Another Context (1992)

Schegloff Media Archive clips for:

Emanuel A. Schegloff, (1992), “In another context”, In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (Alessandro Duranti, Charles Goodwin, eds.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 193–227.

In his chapter in the present volume, Schegloff begins by addressing a number of theoretical and methodological issues posed in the investigation of context. He argues strongly that an analyst is not free to invoke whatever variables he or she feels appropriate as dimensions of context, no matter how strongly grounded in traditional social theory – e.g. class, gender, etc. – but instead must demonstrate in the events being examined that the participants themselves are organizing their behavior in terms of the features being described by the analyst. He then uses a specific storytelling episode to demonstrate how sequential organization provides multiple levels of context for the organization of participants’ action. In a previous analysis of part of this same sequence, C. Goodwin (1987) investigated how an utterance specifically designed to be a single-party, context-free event was in fact contextually shaped through a process of collaborative interaction. Schegloff now reanalyzes this same event by placing it within a much larger sequence than Goodwin looked at, an entire storytelling episode. Schegloff finds that this larger. sequence is in fact consequential in detail for the organization of the event that Goodwin examined. However, Schegloff notes that his current analysis in no way undercuts Goodwin’s earlier analysis. Instead multiple levels of sequential context mutually reinforce each other as they provide alternative types of organization for the local production of action. In the course of his analysis, Schegloff also provides an extended demonstration of how one of the speech events recurrently examined in this volume – storytelling – is studied within conversation analysis.