The Interpenetration of Communicative Contexts: Examples from Medical Encounters

Verbal interaction is related to the task at hand. Language and other social practices are interdependent. Not all students of language use and social interaction, however, will concede that ethnographic material, participant attributes, and patterns of social organization that are constitutive of talk need to be included in studies of conversation or discourse. The researcher can exercise considerable discretion in what the reader will be shown or told about "context. " In the present paper, I discuss two senses of "context" as it involves conversational interaction in a bureaucratic environment. This use of the term "context" includes an institutionalized framing of activities or ways that group-derived prescriptive norms pressure and/or channel people with designated titles, presumed competencies, duties or responsibilities into certain physical spaces at certain times in order to engage in a finite number of specifiable activities. Within this institutionalized context or framing of activities, emergent processes of talk appear that creates a more narrow view of "context" in the sense of locally organized and negotiated interaction. I have chosen a conversation between three physicians in a university medical center to underscore the importance of context at different levels of analysis. The analyst's decision to focus on particular sociolinguistic notions rather than the interrelationship between discourse and broader and narrow senses of social structure will frame different expectations for the reader and different substantive conclusions on the part of the researcher.