Day2008
| Day2008 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Day2008 |
| Author(s) | Dennis Day |
| Title | In a bigger, messo, context |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Context, Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, Ethnography, Basic Resources, Methodology |
| Publisher | |
| Year | 2008 |
| Language | |
| City | |
| Month | |
| Journal | Journal of Pragmatics |
| Volume | 40 |
| Number | 5 |
| Pages | 979–996 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.pragma.2007.10.011 |
| ISBN | |
| Organization | |
| Institution | |
| School | |
| Type | |
| Edition | |
| Series | |
| Howpublished | |
| Book title | |
| Chapter | |
Abstract
The concept of context continues to generate discussion amongst students of communicative interaction. Its treatment in Duranti and Goodwin (1992) evidences its enormous complexity and interdisciplinary concern. I take as a point of departure Schegloff's (1992:215) call for context's ‘demonstrable relevance to participants’ as well as his notion of procedural consequentiality. Briefly, these notions stipulate that elements of a distal context, e.g., one's profession, can be brought to bear in an analysis of a proximate context, i.e., the interaction under study, if it can be shown that participants orient to them and that this orientation can be shown to be relevantly tied to particular actions. While supporting these notions in principle, I wish to put forward cases where what is relevant for participants is not always demonstrable within the observation under study, but in some previous observations. These cases problematize viewing context in terms of distal and proximate and the analytic tasks as one of subsuming the former within the latter. The remedy I propose is the notion of a messo context whereby the analyst is no longer restricted by the, often arbitrarily set, confines of one observation, but nonetheless is bound to demonstrate relevance to participants.
Notes
