Cross-event processes

For decades, linguistic anthropology and related fields focused on the speech event as the focal unit of analysis (Hymes, 1964). Some studied typical speech events, describing how certain events recur among and characterize a group of speakers or social locations (Heath, 1983; Philips, 1983; Wortham, 1994). Others focused on the emergence of social action over interactional time as interlocutors enact contingent patterns (Duranti & Goodwin, 1992; Erickson & Shultz, 1982; Ochs et ah, 1996). This work has been enormously productive conceptually, empirically, and methodologically. It has allowed us to conceptualize and observe the central role of language in constituting social life and the central role of sociocultural context in making linguistic communication possible. It has provided vivid empirical accounts of how language facilitates action in context. And it has yielded a powerful methodological approach to discourse analysis of discrete speech events.

More recently, linguistic anthropologists have begun to look beyond the speech event, studying the cross-event chains or pathways involved in social identification, cultural change, and ontogenesis (Agha, 2007; Agha & Wortham, 2005). Many discursively mediated social processes take shape across and not merely within events—as an individual comes to be identified ontogenetically, as a way of speaking becomes established and characterized sociohistorically, etc. These processes take place at a different scale than event-level processes, temporally and often spatially. It is crucial to distinguish this claim about crossevent pathways from the important but distinct fact that analysis of any speech event requires inferences from information that comes from beyond the speech event itself. Discourse analysis of any discrete speech event requires that participants and analysts know about signs, models, and regularities from the broader sociocultural context (Goffman, 1981). But this is different from our claim about moving beyond analyses of discrete events to pathways across events. It is true both that any event of speaking can only be understood by presupposing information, models, and evaluations from beyond that event and that many discursively mediated actions can only be understood by attending to cross-event pathways.

Building on prior work, we argue that discourse analysis across pathways of linked events is essential to studying language and social life—because many processes in the human world only occur through such pathways. If we study only discrete events or recurring types of events, we will not be able to analyze central processes like learning, socialization, the emergence of social groups and associated ways of speaking, etc. This book provides several illustrations of such cross-event processes. For example, Tyisha and Maurice traveled pathways of social identification that shifted in unpredictable ways across the year. If we had studied only discrete events or types of events, we would not have been able to trace their complex, shifting social identities across time. In another example, Inoue shows how Japanese women’s language came to have different meanings across a century as similar linguistic forms were taken to index different models of female personhood. If she had studied only discrete events, she would not have been able to document the historical emergence and transformation of the register. Some types of processes in the human world can be studied by focusing on discrete but pivotal events or on recurring types of events. But most cannot. In these cases, we need to do discourse analysis beyond the speech event.