10 - Postscript

Summary

In attempting to develop interpretive, sociolinguistic approaches to the analysis of verbal strategies, this book has touched on a number of recurrent themes. The objects of study are automatic, context and time bound inferential processes, not readily subject to conscious recall, embedded in oral exchanges which until the advent of modern electronic technology were not accessible to detailed investigation. In order to clarify precisely what it is that is being investigated concrete examples of situated talk have been transcribed and analyzed in such a way as to reveal the working of phonetic, prosodic, formulaic and other contextualization cues in generating the perceptions of discourse coherence on which interpretation must rest. In this Postscript I will review some of the theoretical issues raised by these examples and attempt to show how, when seen in interactional perspective, they can be integrated to lay the foundations for a unified program of research on human understanding.

The study began with a brief historical outline of developments in linguistics that led to the recognition that linguistic processes are basically cognitive in nature. The notion of cognitive processing, which argues that human understanding rests on meaning assessments in which physical reality is selectively perceived, transformed and reintegrated with reference to pre-existing background knowledge, is by now generally accepted. First illustrated in Saussure's concepts of opposition and relationship and in Sapir's phonemic principle, it has been generalized to apply to grammatical, interpretive and cultural phenomena of all kinds.