Liberman1999b
| Liberman1999b | |
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| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Liberman1999b |
| Author(s) | Kenneth Liberman |
| Title | The social praxis of communicating meanings |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA, Phenomenology, Ethnomethodology, Meaning |
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| Year | 1999 |
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| Journal | Text |
| Volume | 19 |
| Number | 1 |
| Pages | 57–72 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1515/text.1.1999.19.1.57 |
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Abstract
A microsociological reflection upon linguistic communication is offered, in reliance upon a synthesis of the theoretical contributions of ethnomethodology, phenomenology, and semiotics. Ethnomethodology has rejected the 'conduit' model of communicating, whereby speakers encode meaning in words which hearers then decode straightforwardly. Harold Garfinkel has located the phenomenon of communicating meanings face-to-face in the work of interlocutors who concert themselves to produce local displays of the emerging praxis for making meanings to which interlocutors are reflexively oriented. Ethnomethodology avoids a subjectivist hermeneutics by recognizing that it is the objective character of the practices that are emerging that provides interlocutors with their communicative possibilities. Saussure can provide this ethnomethodological project with an appropriate technology for explaining the detail of the labile and interconnectedly dependent work of signs. Saussurian semiotics need not lead to a structural determinism but may be combined with phenomenological and ethnomethodological interests in ways that preserve human agency in the proper context of the emerging details of the public sphere. Merleau-Ponty, who derived his insights from both phenomenology and semiotics, emphasizes that speakers are simultaneously hearers, and he guides this microsociological inquiry by his repudiation of any rationalist reductionism and by his resolve to describe with remarkable accuracy the precise yet 'more than rational' ways in which interactants proceed to an understanding of their world, an insight that lies at the very origins of ethnomethodological research.
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