Coulter1994
| Coulter1994 | |
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| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Coulter1994 |
| Author(s) | Jeff Coulter |
| Title | Is contextualizing necessarily interpretive? |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA, Context, Ethnomethodology |
| Publisher | |
| Year | 1994 |
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| Journal | Journal of Pragmatics |
| Volume | 21 |
| Number | 6 |
| Pages | 689–698 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1016/0378-2166(94)90104-X |
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Abstract
Ethnomethodology's treatments of ‘context’ and ‘contextualisation’ are contrasted to those inspired by post-structuralist theorists such as Derrida, Fish and Culler. In particular, by noting the mundane absence of explicit contextualisation as a routine feature of sense-making, and by emphasising the occasionality and purposefulness of ‘contextualisation’ as a form of problem-solving, discursive practice in its own right, it becomes possible to allay several contemporary misconceptions of contextualisation as involving ‘boundless’ interpretive assumptions and ‘indeterminacies’ at every turn. Any minimally intelligible text is argued to possess certain self-explicating features due to the inter-articulation of its conceptual devices, a parallel to the gestalt-contexture character of situations, rules and conduct in everyday life. Moreover, when ‘understanding’ and ‘interpreting’ are no longer conflated as properties of reading/hearing human communication, the ‘deconstructionist’ argument about contextuality evaporates.
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