Since at least the time of Descartes and Leibniz, there has been current in western thought a conception of language which holds that insofar as language is governed by laws, they are ‘the specifically linguistic laws of connection between linguistic signs, within a given, closed linguistic system … Individual acts of speaking are, from the viewpoint of language, merely fortuitous refractions and variations or plain and simple distortions of normatively identical forms' (Vološinov 1973:57; see also Hymes 1970a). The prominence, or predominance, of this view in our own century and our own time, makes it especially important to state at the outset of this book our commitment to a contrary view. This work is built on, and intended as a contribution to, a conception which holds that the patterning of language goes far beyond laws of grammar to comprehend the use of language in social life, that such organization inescapably involves the radical linking of the verbal and the sociocultural in the conduct of speaking. The field of inquiry devoted to the discovery of this organization is the ethnography of speaking.

Consistent with current views of the nature and purpose of ethnography, the ethnography of speaking may be conceived of as research directed toward the formulation of descriptive theories of speaking as a cultural system or as part of cultural systems.