My publications are about the intricacies of the communicative work that people engage in when they interact. This includes attention to what people must know (at least tacitly) and what children must learn about language and social interaction—their competence—to communicatively engage others in the joint pursuit of their interests and undertakings. It includes attention to the linguistic, interactional, relational, and cultural basis of the situated meaning of communicators’ utterances and nonverbals, and their interconnections. As such this work has ties to language pragmatics and intercultural communication. In addition, much of this work shares some common ground with conversation analysis in its attention to micro-details of interaction, but it differs in a critical way. Rather than focus on what knowledge people share about the workings of interaction, as conversation analysts do, my interest is on ways such knowledge is built on and exploited in situ to influence others—what I referred to at one point as neo-rhetorical participation in interactions.
Because my work ranges across these diverse topics, I have grouped publications in my bibliography under different topical headings, with some publications included under more than one heading.
These various topics are all outgrowths of a central interest that emerged early in my career. I was struck by George Campbell’s definition of rhetoric as the art of adapting discourse to its ends. I’ve generalized that to communication in general—what someone communicates, to whom, how, when, does not start with what they are thinking or feeling in the moment, but is adapted to what result they intend to bring about. At about the same time I saw an analogy between interactions as strings of utterances and sentences as strings of words. Just as each next word in a sentence cannot be freely chosen but is constrained grammatically and semantically by the intended meaning of the sentence and the words that preceded it, each next utterance in an interaction is constrained by the intended end result of the interaction and what utterances preceded it.
Of course, there is no grammar of interaction, but it seemed to me there has to be a principled basis for these utterance-by-utterance constraints in interaction, and I wanted to work out what they are. My thinking initially is that these involve meaning relations among successive utterances that cohere them together, guides their interpretation, and progressively delimit what the end result can be. I called these meaning relations principles of relevance (principles of discursive relevance, not the cognitive relevance that relevance theory is about).
My original approach centered on communicators’ competence to incrementally contribute to interactions strategically, in such a way as sustained their coherence, guided and constrained the other(s)’s contributions, and made it increasingly likely that the targeted end result would come about. My thinking about this came together in my 1987 book, Cognitive Foundations of Calculated Speech. But I have increasingly recognized since then that in addition to the constraints within an interaction, there are constraints that come from outside it. These are the standardized practices and goals that are built into tasks and activities that people engage in together, and also culturally based practices, rights and obligations, and role-identities.
Accordingly, I have developed an additional interest in constraints on utterances in interactions that arise externally, from what I have recently conceptualized as their material and interpreted human-made environment. This has surfaced in my new book, The Work and Workings of Human Communication. In that book, in addition to my interest in the doing of communication as it serves the interests and undertakings of persons interacting, I have added an interest in communication as it serves the creation, maintenance, and participation of people in the infrastructures of the human-made environment, where interactions between people are guided and constrained by the coordination of effort needed within each infrastructure.
The many infrastructures of the human-made environment require a variety of ostensibly independent interactions to be delimited and linked in such a way that they collectively bring about some end result, linkages that have to be engineered by some central macro-agent. An example elaborated in The Work and Workings is all the communication involved in air travel where the airline industry is the macro-agent. For a plane to depart on schedule with its complement of passengers and crew, many ostensibly independent interactions have to take place whose substance and possible end result are delimited in advance and linked. In addition to all the communication of each passenger making their travel arrangements, there is the communication that each of the flight crew and ground crew have to engage in beforehand and during preparations for boarding and departure, and all the communication within the airline that has to take place—not just in regard to ticketing, ground transportation, crew assignments, the provision of food, fuel, and the like by vendors, airplane readiness, and air traffic control, but in regard to the engineering, manufacture, and purchase of the airplane, also the siting, architecture, construction, and operation of the airport, and much more.
