Text and social context: why linguistic studies cannot do without ethnography

All linguistic researchers have a basic interest in context. However there is considerable variation in how researchers understand and investigate it. Some focus on the developing, sequential context of speech exchanges, aiming to discern how the realities in question are collaboratively assembled within the machinery of conversation. Context here tends to remain analytically “close” to talk and social interaction. Conversational researchers, for many years now, have been extending this into the institutional patterning of speech exchanges; this is where “institutional talk” researchers conduct their studies. More ethnographically-inclined, other qualitative researchers tend to look beyond situated talk to find institutional context; they draw upon empirical sources outside of transcripts to make sense of “what’s going on.” Some of these researchers look at historical and cultural material, treating them as further evidence of the external mediating conditions of talk and interaction. From this debates an analytic lesson may be learned by taking an inclusive orientation to the study of context in linguistic research.