The papers in the four preceding sections represent detailed analyses of particular problems relevant to the ethnography of speaking. Although the papers are closely focused and deal with specific societies, they also raise general methodological and theoretical questions, with wider implications. By contrast, the papers in this final section address themselves primarily to broader issues of method and theory.

The first paper, by Allen Grimshaw, discusses a range of relationships between method and theory in the ethnography of speaking, with particular reference to some of the papers in this volume. Consistent with contemporary linguistics, sociology, and anthropology, Grimshaw stresses the importance of accounting for native intuitions in an ethnography of speaking. But he also warns that the notion of native intuitions cannot be used uncritically; in fact the ethnography of speaking, by its insistence on the interrelation of language and social life, provides new ways of investigating intuitions which avoid the circularity of arbitrarily dealing with linguistic, social, or cultural intuitions as separate systems. Grimshaw also notes the necessary progression from descriptions of particular aspects of speaking to coherent ethnographies of speaking to theory.

During the past decade and even at times in this volume, ‘the ethnography of speaking’ and ‘the ethnography of communication’ have been used almost interchangeably. One of the contributions of this field has been the understanding that various communicative modes (verbal, proxemic, kinesic) are not absolutely independent of one another but are rather interrelated in various ways in various societies.

A community's system of speech situations and events constitutes the structural matrix within which speaking occurs in that community. Giving shape to these scenes as they are enacted, and underlying the dynamics of communicative activity within them, are sets of general cultural themes and social-interactional organizing principles, which may be seen from the point of view of the ethnography of speaking as the implicit or explicit community ground rules for performance. Such ground rules are only analytically separable from the speech activities themselves, and most of the papers in this volume contain information about organizing principles of this kind. The papers in this section, however, are distinguished by their principal focus on this aspect of the speech economy of particular communities (for speech economy, see Hymes, section VI).

The analysis of community ground rules for performance may serve a particularly important function for the ethnography of speaking in that such ground rules, by the generalness of their scope, often represent the means for establishing the continuity between speaking and other forms of expressive behavior. Speech activity does not necessarily constitute a discrete domain within cultures, and the analysis of general social and cultural principles governing speaking may show these to cut across a range of activities and govern other kinds of behavior besides speaking, in a way that the study of specifically speech acts, situations, and events cannot.

A basic element of an ethnography of speaking is the description of the speech community and its linguistic resources. Investigators are continually struck by the diversity of linguistic means in use in communities and the concomitant ability of members of the communities to communicate with one another nevertheless.

Every society makes available to its members a repertoire of linguistic alternatives or resources which they draw on (in an ecological sense) for both referential and stylistic purposes (see paper by Hymes in section VI). The nature of the communicatively meaningful contrasts within the ‘sociolinguistic’ repertoire varies dramatically from society to society. It might involve slight differences in the pronunciation of single sounds that must be described in terms of statistical tendencies. Thus Labov (1966) studies the social implications of the variable pronunciations of the sounds /th/, /dh/, and /r/, among others, in New York City. Gillian Sankoff here discusses the pronunication of the variable /l/ in Montreal French; speakers have available to them the choice of pronouncing this variable as either [l] or ø. This choice depends on both linguistic and social contexts of usage.

A society's linguistic resources might, on the other hand, consist of a complex of related dialects. Thus, James Fox shows that on the island of Roti, individuals speak the particular dialect of their nusak ‘native domain’ in everyday, colloquial speech, but draw on other Rotinese dialects for the formation of formal, ritual speech.

One of the most central concerns of the ethnography of speaking is the description of speech acts, events, and situations. All of the papers in the book deal with it in some way, but for the papers in this section it is the primary focus of attention.

Most formal description within linguistics has been limited to units of sentence length. With this limitation, insights have been achieved in the techniques and theory of linguistic formalization. Yet there is much more to language use than abstract, isolated sentences; and such uses of language as greetings, leave-takings, conversations, speeches, stories, insults, jokes, and puns also have a formal structure. The papers in this section by Judith Irvine and Anne Salmond are examples of the kinds of formal descriptions that can be written for discourse. Irvine provides a grammar of Wolof greetings; Salmond, of an entire Maori speech situation, the ritual of encounter. Rules which formally describe speech acts, events, and situations must include aspects of language and speech which have usually been ignored in traditional grammatical descriptions. Most obvious is perhaps the participants in the event. The grammatical descriptions by Irvine and Salmond are written not from the perspective of a single, isolated, abstract individual, but rather from that of all of the participants in the event. The participants in the Wolof greeting, and especially their social ranking with respect to one another, are incorporated into the greeting rules.

That verbal art and artistic verbal performance should figure prominently among the concerns of the ethnography of speaking is not surprising, since to participant and analyst alike the verbal art forms of a culture and the situations in which they are employed represent the most conspicuous, attractive, or powerful sectors of the speech activity of any society. Yet a truly ethnographic approach to verbal art, in the sense of a focus upon the situated use of verbal art forms conceived of as communicative process, is, like the ethnography of speaking itself, a relatively recent development. Anthropologists, linguists, and folklorists alike have tended over whelmingly to view verbal art, like language, as abstracted from social use. In all three disciplines, the unit of analysis in the study of verbal art has been the textual item, the myth, legend, song, or ritual speech, treated as a self-contained entity. To be sure, anthropologists at least have recognized and acknowledged the association of these items with events, but the principal frame of reference against which they have been studied – when such factors have been studied at all – is the culture or society as a whole. That is, the item is conceptualized as collective representation, shaped primarily by the shared culture, history, language, or character (in the collective psychological sense) of the members of the society in which it is current, and secondarily perhaps – more among folklorists than anthropologists – by the cumulative effects of long-term transmission through time and space.

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.

When we published Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking back in 1974, we framed the work as ushering in a new phase of research in the ethnography of speaking. The first phase, beginning with the publication of Dell Hymes's foundational essay, ‘The Ethnography of Speaking,’ in 1962 and proceeding through the early 1970s, was preliminary and programmatic, marked by a series of articles and edited collections that sought to define this new subfield of linguistic anthropology and to suggest what kinds of research might be carried out under its aegis (see Preface; Bauman and Sherzer 1975). Much of this work was seen to be converging and contributing toward the ethnography of speaking, but not yet exemplifying it, insofar as little research published in that first period was expressly and primarily undertaken for a purpose that might appropriately be called the ethnography of speaking, that is, carrying out the program outlined by Hymes and Gumperz. By the early 1970s, however, the ethnography of speaking had finally developed to a point where a number of scholars had taken up the repeated calls for fieldwork issued in the first decade and carried out original research guided by its principles. Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking grew out of our mutual concern to present the first fruits of that research and to attempt to synthesize its results – however exploratory that synthesis might be – in a way that might help to shape the subsequent development of the field.