Fleming1995
| Fleming1995 | |
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| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Fleming1995 |
| Author(s) | David Fleming |
| Title | The Search for an Integrational Account of Language: Roy Harris and Conversation Analysis |
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| Tag(s) | Roy Harris, conversation analysis, integrational linguistics |
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| Year | 1995 |
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| Journal | Language Sciences |
| Volume | 17 |
| Number | 1 |
| Pages | 73–98 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1016/0388-0001(95)00004-F |
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Abstract
The linguist Roy Harris has criticized theories of communication in which language is treated independently of the occasions of its use. Such accounts err, Harris argues, by segregating the linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena of social interaction. In his alternative, however, which he calls ‘integrational’ linguistics, Harris does not specify just how the study of language would be methodologically reconstituted. One model for that reconstitution might be conversation analysis (CA), a program of social research based on the ethnomethodological investigation of ‘language-in-action’. Conversation analysts share with Harris the belief that language is situated, time-bound activity, the study of which should begin with naturally-occurring social behavior, viewed from the perspective of the interactants themselves. In several respects, however, CA departs from ‘integrational’ assumptions, most notably in its exclusive concern for informal conversation, its recurring appeal to formal mechanisms underlying communication, and its reduction of the temporal aspects of social life to the sequential unfolding of events. What may be needed, then, is an approach to the study of language which is more firmly committed to the empirical analysis of naturally-occurring discourse than Harris' linguistics but which avoids the formal and structural abstractions of CA. We might call such an approach an integrational rhetoric.
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