Srikant Sarangi

Rethinking recontextualization in Professional discourse studies: An epilogue

Dans un numero thematique consacre au discours produit au-dela des frontieres professionnelles, c-a-d au discours impliquant des professionnels qui communiquent avec des individus issus dautres professions ou des personnes non expertes, lA. propose ici un article de conclusion dans lequel il fait le point sur les principales notions liees a ce type de communication (recontextualisation, intertextualite, polyphonie) et examine les questions analytiques et methodologiques posees par ces notions

Interprofessional case construction in social work: The evidential status of information and its reportability

This article deals with the changing status of information to serve as direct and circumstantial evidence in the interprofessional construction of teenage parenting and child protection. My starting point is that professional groups construct accounts of their practice through the deployment of institutionally available procedures, while paying attention to the evidential status of information vis-a-vis its reportability. I go on to argue that there is a two-way link between evidentiality and reportability: unless information is attributed evidential status it is not reportable to clients and (inter)professional colleagues; and by a similar token, information assumes evidential status in and through its reportability. Against this backdrop, the interprofessional setting of social work occasions competing discourses of social phenomena, here a case of child abuse. Using transcribed data, taken from a BBC series titled Hypotheticals involving real professionals (doctors, social workers, lawyers, police inspector, journalists, etc.), the analysis focuses on the interplay of activity-specific roles the professionals occupy and the nature of information exchange. This amounts to a major tension both within and across professional groups, embodied in the continuous shifting of professional gaze between the deficit parents (parents as evidence) and the child at risk (child as evidence)

Editorial: On demarcating the space between ‘lay expertise’ and ‘expert laity’

Abstract Textual and discursive analyses of various institutional and professional sites have been a mainstay among this journals priorities. This special issue, with its focus on interaction in health care settings, quite clearly connects with this objective. Conversation analysis in particular has been a visible strand of inquiry in this field, and this is further borne out by the contributions to this special issue. As the title ‘Lay diagnosis’ suggests, we have here a wide range of perspectives on lay participation in medical discourse. The guest editorial (Beach) and the two retrospective commentaries (ten Have and Drew) capture in clear terms the scope and remit of the special issue. Many of the contributors are well known for their previous work in health care communication. Here they extend their ongoing work to focus on the patients perspective. This is the point of departure from mainstream discourse analytic and sociolinguistic studies—as well as previous conversation analytic studies—which have been predominantly doctor-focused. As Drew points out, the paradox is that ‘in censuring medical practice for silencing the voice of the patient, such research has itself largely ignored the role of patients in their interactions with doctors’.

Editorial: Advances in family interaction studies

This editorial introduces the double special issue of Text & Talk on the topic of Family Discourse, Framing Family. In their introduction, the guest editors, Deborah Tannen and Marjorie Harness Goodwin, outline the genesis of this special focus on the interactional trajectories of ‘middle-class, dual-income families with children’. The studies reported here originate from research supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The actual sites of interaction as well as the methodological and analytical preferences are rich and varied, encompassing conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, and ethnographic fieldwork. The two commentaries by Karin Aronsson and Shirley Brice Heath o¤er further contextualization of the studies in di¤erent depth, at the levels of the micropolitics of social interaction and the macropolitics of societal ideologies respectively. Aronsson draws our attention to what she calls the ‘micro dramas’ in the ‘here and now’ of family interaction, which are not necessarily without the display of moral characterizations at the relational level. Heath’s commentary is more historically grounded as she points to the changes in contemporary family communicative practices in temporal and spatial terms. The everyday activity of family life has remained a fertile research site across the social scientific and humanist disciplines—sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, education, and linguistics. Family is conceptualized as a social institution that mediates the individual and the social, with identifiable structures, functions, and hierarchies. In this sense, it is a kind of hinterland that connects the private and public spheres of any society. Heath uses the metaphor of ‘dip-stick oil checks on cars’ to signal how family lives can be a barometer of social well-being. In a given sociopolitical arena concerning educational under-achievements or street crimes or unhealthy lifestyles, the spotlight often falls on families and parenting. The so-called ‘social problems’ are invariably scrutinized through the family lens against a backdrop of normative and deviant practices. The boundaries of family life are being drawn and redrawn constantly as the

Editorial: Texting and talking anniversaries

Abstract Not a single day passes without it being an anniversary of something. At the time of writing this editorial, Cardiff—TEXT ’s current editorial home—celebrates its centenary anniversary and the (western) world celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of the Victory in Europe (VE) Day. While Cardiff’s centenary celebrations span a whole year (2005), although clustered around a few days/dates and rather muted otherwise, the VE Day celebration marks the exact day when the Second World War ended, i.e., 8 May 1945. The celebration format for TEXT ’s silver jubilee shares features of both these events: it is a year-long celebration, but this special issue marks a pivotal moment.

Editorial: The eidos of reading and the socio-religious ethos

A year ago, a special issue of Text & Talk (27–4, Wirtz 2007) was dedicated to the theme of ritual unintelligibility. It was hailed as a neglected topic in language, discourse and communication studies, calling for special attention. The same holds for the topic of reading practices which is the focus of this special issue titled The Spirit of Reading: Practices of Reading Sacred Texts, guest-edited by Laura Sterponi and supplemented with an afterword by Antonio Perri. There are some connections between these two special issues of Text & Talk which readers might want to pursue. Through this editorial, I wish to highlight the distinctiveness of the current special issue which explores reading practices across di¤erent religious traditions (Christian, Islamic, Jewish) and across the historical spectrum from interdisciplinary, multi-method perspectives. This special issue is premised on the key assumption that practices of reading sacred texts are a barometer of the prevailing socio-religious ethos. In adopting such a position, many of the contributors go beyond mere text/talk production and comprehension to address matters of socialization, including aspects of religiosity. The textual/semiotic/interactional environment accompanying individual reading practices receive detailed analytic attention as a way of grasping this socio-religious ethos. It may be useful here to draw attention to the distinction between eidos and ethos of culture. Following Kroeber (1948 [1923]: 101–102):

Editorial: The ritual of (not) making sense of unintelligibility

This special issue draws specific attention to a hitherto neglected topic area—unintelligibility—from a linguistic anthropological perspective, marked by a distinctive engagement with a diverse range of ritual cultural practices. An emergent focus is the functional, pragmatic dimensions of unintelligibility, as manifest in linguistic features ranging from contextualization cues and discourse markers to indexing of power and access at a metadiscoursal and symbolic level. The theme of unintelligibility—to include notions such as vagueness, indirectness, ambiguity, nonsense, nonliteral language use, etc.—has been approached by scholars working across linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. For instance, in sociolinguistics, unintelligibility is routinely taken as a defining feature of dialect variation. Within pragmatics, indirectness is premised upon a subtle calibration of, among other things, sense and force, sentence meaning and speaker meaning, presupposition and inference. The guest editor, Kristina Wirtz, and the commentator, Joel Kuipers, call for unintelligibility to become a topic of investigation in its own right, as they go on to suggest an expansive agenda and pose questions for current and future research to underscore the (non)communicative dimension of unintelligibility in everyday ritual practice. To meet this challenge, the individual studies reported here share the analytical platform of linguistic anthropology as they combine ethnographic fieldwork, imbued with key informants’ insights, and discourse analysis in order to interpret seemingly ‘unintelligible’ local practices across a range of sociocultural settings. The notion of (un)intelligibility is intimately connected with (un)interpretability. Interpretation is at the heart of sense-making practices, and this applies as much to participants who are the subject of research as it does to the researcher-analyst, whether in observer or participantobserver role. Consider the following two illustrative examples (Sarangi 2004). The first one is a description of the Toka rain making ritual o¤ered by Holy and Stuchlick (1983: 35):

Editorial: Text & Talk

This editorial, in a special way, marks the start of TEXT’s silver jubilee celebrations. The celebration idea took root in the early part of 2004. Following an extensive consultation within the editorial board, several changes—both substantive and procedural—will be introduced in a phased manner. Before I go on to elaborate the immediate changes, let me first dwell a little on things to come. The title of this editorial— TEXT & TALK—will become the new title of the journal, beginning volume 26 in 2006. The very passionate viewpoints expressed by the board members regarding the change of title could fill an entire issue of the journal and no doubt would make interesting reading, but all I can do here is to o¤er a brief summary of the main reasons for the change of title. First of all, as everyone is aware, TEXT has always published research in the domains of text and talk in the broad field of discourse and communication. In this respect, the new title does no more than confirm this breadth of coverage in an inclusive way. While maintaining this existing constituency, TEXT & TALK will help to attract the attention of new, interdisciplinary scholars—contributors and readers alike—more readily. It became apparent during the consultation process that many scholars in the USA, especially those in the field of communication studies, did not necessarily associate TEXT with research in talk and interaction. Instead, TEXT may have become branded as dealing with language analysis from within a genre-centered, rhetorical tradition. Since its inception, TEXT has of course remained committed to the broadest possible definition of ‘text’ by embracing all traditions of theoretical and analytic frameworks. To begin with, transcripts of talk are easily considered to be textual artefacts. In its extended sense, text also has the meaning potential to accommodate social and cultural practices and activities: Societies and cultural entities can be seen as texts in their own right. The word ‘text’ is capable of transcending the boundaries of language to include multimodal signs and signifiers. A few of the board members quite rightly voiced their concerns about the pairing of ‘text and talk’ which could potentially lead to