bs_bs_banner

Susan Gal
Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago
susangal@uchicago.edu

John J. Gumperzs Discourse Strategies

John J. Gumperz was a founding figure of sociolinguistics and an important contributor to
the development of linguistic anthropology in the 20th century. This article traces not his past
but his present and future, exploring four themes that he inaugurated and that have had a
shaping influence on the dual fields in which he was active. The themes are: approaches to
ethnographic evidence; social and linguistic differentiation; speech practices in history;
culture and contextualization. [John Gumperz, discourse strategies, ethnographic evidence, social and linguistic differentiation, contextualization]

ver the course of a long and productive life, John J. Gumperz (19222013)
found many opportunities to explicate his views about language and society.
He narrated his own theoretical contributions, and mapped what he saw as
his early inspirations and the influences exerted on his thought by his contemporaries. These writings are indispensable for anyone aiming to understand todays
sociolinguistics. And they are crucial sources for histories of sociolinguistics, linguistics and the anthropology of the 20th century because Gumperz was a founding figure
of the continuing interdisciplinary effort to understand linguistic interaction through
its modes of embeddedness in social and cultural processes and, conversely, to study
social relations and culture as they are constituted by communicative practices.
Especially revealing are the interviews and retrospectives he provided in his last
decades. His biography and intellectual itinerary are well known; they need no
rehearsing here.1
But his own writings are only part of the record. By the first decade of the 21st
century, Gumperz had been widely recognized and celebrated on at least three
continents. Many of these appreciations, encyclopedia entries, and occasional critiques, however, have focused on a single aspect of his work. They see Gumperz as
the founder of interactional sociolinguistics, a phrase thatpartly through his own
effortshas become an identifying tag. Unfortunately, it is too easily mistaken for the
kind of objectified brand that can be placed alongside others in a marketplace of
linguistic and sociolinguistic wares. Such a treatment seems ill-suited to a scholar
who mixed, matched and invented analytic concepts, but not systems; who was an
interpretivist, not a formalist; and who called some of his own best analyses merely
suggestive. Rather than neatening up his work, I take a cue from his practice to ask:
What were some of the notably diverse discourse strategies of the scholar who was so
interested in the Discourse Strategies (1982) of others? Rather than turning to his past,
I look to his present and future: what Gumperzian directions or themes have been
taken up by subsequent scholars on the basis of his far more than suggestive
indeed, his exemplaryresearch? What are the puzzles he identified for himself that
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 23, Issue 3, pp. 115126, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. 2014
by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12023.

115

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

116

have since inspired and guided the field? For it is the setting of problems that is the
most lasting influence of any scholar.
Encounters
As Gumperz would be the first to note, these questions are necessarily about
interactivity, in several ways. First, they deal with generational shifts, defined as
relationships, not as sequential demography. Many decades ago, jazz fans thought
that Dizzy Gillespies bebop trumpeting had replaced or superseded the music of the
earlier master Louis Armstrong. Yet, when asked about this, Mr. Gillespie famously
quipped: No him, no me. We in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics must
similarly say: No John Gumperz, no us. Those who have criticized Gumperz are
firmly included. When it comes to relationships with predecessors in scholarly life,
disputes and disagreements are forms of continuity. But continuing what? In reading
others writings about Gumperz, I see that my own perspective on his work was
significantly shaped by the moment at which I encountered it. Students never learn
just what teachers think they are teaching. Like all authors, John Gumperz failed to
control the interpretive uptakes of his own writings. Readers points of departure,
their wider intellectual commitments, their anxieties of influence,2 and historical
trends in scholarship are all crucial. But here I would like to focus on timing as a key
factor: At what point in the mentors own intellectual life does the student enter?
What has the teacher cleared away as not worth worrying about or contrariwise,
identified as indispensable to know/read? What is on the local agenda of the whole
range of scholars who are the mentors interlocutors? It is no wonder that
studentsin Gumperzs case this includes many scholars who encountered his work
when they were already fully trained professionals on other continents and in other
disciplinescome away with different impressions of the same scholar and different
lessons about what is worthy of study.
Inevitably, this observation about timing evokes a second and more personal,
face-to-face aspect of the questions I have set. It takes me to the early 1970s at the
Language Behavior Research Laboratory at Berkeley, where a group of faculty had
won an National Institute of Mental Health training grant that funded several of us
graduate students in the Anthropology Department. In addition to Gumperz, the
faculty group consisted of anthropologists Paul Kay (the real formalist of the group),
Brent Berlin, and William Geoghegan who were exploring the possibilities of a
cognitive turn and universals, as inspired variously by Chomsky, some aspects of
structuralism, and by a lively anti-behaviorism. E. A. Hammel was a fellow traveler.
Gillian Sankoff was an occasional visitorbringing Labovian quantification and the
lessons of Tok Pisinas were the psychologists Susan Ervin-Tripp and Dan Slobin.
The psychologists who had been more active in earlier years, with the Field Manual
for the Cross-Cultural Study of Communicative Competence, and reconnected in a
faculty-student seminar on creolization. Many of us also took courses with the philosophers John Searle and H. P. Grice, and with the linguists Charles Fillmore, Lily
Wong-Fillmore, George and Robin Lakoff. These scholars were all, in different ways,
extending the purview of linguistics, away from syntax and a stripped-down semantics toward what we anthropology students saw as our bailiwick, cultural meanings
and socially situated interactions. Yet, their assumptions about culture and society did
not seem rich enough. We asked: what were they getting wrong?
Only gradually did I see the role of scholars further away in time and space, but
very present for Gumperz: There was Gumperzs former coeditor, the linguist
Charles Ferguson across the Bay, as well as anthropologist Charles Frake, whose
language-based ethnographic method was much admired, as was the work of past
graduate students in the department, like Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Michael Agar.
The sociologists Goffman, Garfinkel, Cicourel and Sacks cast long shadows. They
were key characters in Gerald Berremans graduate course on Symbolic Interaction,
which stressed the centrality and complexity of interpretation; the constructedness of

John Gumperzs Discourse Strategies

117

meaning in social life, through situated talk. The course, with its huge enrollment of
some 25 students, operated as an informal introduction to social science for a department that, at the time, had no requirements or official program of study whatsoever.
Other social theories appeared in student-organized, off-campus seminars where
some of us looked to Marxist writings for more frankly political analyses of meaning.
But it was the sociologists featured in Berremans course, along with George Herbert
Mead from another era, who became the social theorists of sociolinguistics, despite
their many feuds with each other.
Slowly, other campuses came into view: Dell Hymes and Erving Goffman at the
University of Pennsylvania had been at Berkeley in the 1960s and were close colleagues of Gumperz. Their students at Penn were perceived as our intellectual kin,
though with a touch of familial tension. We knew that Gumperz and Hymes, while
productively allied as coeditors and co-organizers, were not entirely agreed on theoretical emphases. Concerning a broader intellectual world, students and faculty at
Berkeley were united by some fashionable opinions: Durkheim was out as
he supposedly rejected individual cognition in favor of group mind; Gregory
Batesons writings on metacommunication in Steps to an Ecology of Mind were essential, as was whatever Austin did with words. We were encouraged to forage in other
philosophical traditions. For some, Heidegger deserved to be read, no matter how
difficult to digest; for others even Wittgensteins clear but aphoristic writing was
considered heavy fare. By contrast, power was a question on many students
mindshence those homemade seminarsbut hardly addressed by faculty, most of
whom seemed more interested in thought processes and social order. There were
also ambient agonistic views, only rarely expressed, about anthropologists who
were transforming the discipline on other campuses, in other directions. One day, in
the seminar room (the former kitchen) of the brick mansion that the LBRL then
occupied, we found an anonymous message. The usually scribble-covered blackboard was wiped entirely clean, save for the clearly printed caption at the top of the
empty board: The Thought of Clifford Geertz.
John Gumperz, as I remember, was often quiet in seminars. He was nevertheless a
strong presence and a perplexing one, for students. His influence could be gauged, in
that pre-Internet era of expensive xeroxing, through an unobtrusive measure: the rate
of disappearance of his works from the library. The famous special issue of the
American Anthropologist (Vol. 66, Issue 6, Part II, 1964) that he edited with Hymes did
not officially circulate, but was missing from the shelves. Its sequel, with verdant
cover, was fondly called the Green Book (i.e., Gumperz and Hymes, 1972). It was
declared lost by the library as quickly as it was acquired. John Gumperz himself
could not locate his own copy of the Green Book that he had left in his office sometime
in 1972. In all these cases, as I happen to know from the perps themselves, eager
students took wherever and whatever they could find.
To describe the perplexing part of his presence, I like to tell of my earliest encounter with him, at the start of my first year in graduate school at Berkeley. To meet the
famous Professor Gumperz, I made my way nervously to what was then his crowded
basement office off Piedmont Avenue. Of course he had to ask the standard question:
What are you interested in? and I produced my little prepared speech, probably
something about power in society. His response? Oh, those super-aspirated alveolar
stops! Youre from New York? Indeed he had gotten it right; he was after all a
student of dialects. But the net effect was disconcerting: had he not heard what I was
saying? It was an open secret among students that Professor Gumperz, interested in
interaction, was sometimes abstracted, searched for words, and seemed to be struggling to interact. Yet he was also known as the most interactive of mentors, involving
students in his research, coauthoring publications with them, always generous with
advice. This apparent contradiction is what makes the little incident a revealing one.
His form of listening was no ordinary attention; he practiced what he preached. He
was interpreting and making propositional what were then taken to be the merely
marginal features of pronunciation, rhythm, intonation (Gumperz 1982:32), and

118

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

showing their interactional significance. His metacommentary, based on inference

about pronunciation, revealed and accomplished a discursive routine: getting to
know you. I was experiencing, firsthand, a Gumperzian discourse strategy for locating discourse strategies.
Both the question of student-mentor timing and the face-to-face incident suggest
the specificity of a space/time. It is part of my point that John Gumperz must have had
a different view of that era than any of the students, who themselves took many
different paths. Yet, the moment surely framed some puzzles for him. And his
responses inspired and were incorporated into subsequent research. So let me recast
my task: What nonobvious matters did John Gumperz enable us to see? What questions
did he posein concert with colleagues and collaboratorsthat turned out to be
intriguing for those who now count as his students because we have benefited from his
teachings? Since this is not a review article, I have dispensed with extensive citations.
You know who you are. Four theme-clusters are highlighted here: approaches to
ethnography, social and linguistic differentiation, speech practices in history, and
contextualization. These choices reflect a personal view. Yet, in the 1970s these helped
to setand today, I argue, continue to shapewidespread research agendas.
Approaches to Ethnographic Evidence
Not many anthropologists or linguists can boast of fieldwork on three continents,
literally a half-dozen countries and as many languages. Without fanfare Gumperz
acted on the principled conviction that conceptual advance comes out of detailed
analysis of empirical materialsrecording-based and transcript-based interpretive
understanding of comparative examples within an interactive surround that he
described with varying degrees of richness and scalar extent. His methods are a major
source and example for the kind of linguistic ethnography that most of us practice
today. He pioneered it, not as a programmatic ideal but as a professional habitus.
Gumperz was acutely aware of the constructedness of evidence, the way the choice
of methods has deep theoretical consequences for what scholars can detect about
communicative practices on the one hand, and on the other hand what is inadvertently but systematically elided. He returned many times to describe the various
conventional modes of abstraction that created evidence in European dialectology, in
descriptive linguistics, American structuralism, and generative grammar. Later he
included conversation analysis and variationist sociolinguistics, noting what they
each left out. Never suggesting that one could access communicative practices
without abstraction, his point was rather that to do justice to the complexity of
communication one needs multiple methods for any single research question. For
example, he emphasized that the distribution of linguistic variants across events and
roles as defined and perceived by the sociolinguist is one crucial piece of evidence.
Set beside this, however, is the equally indispensable and often quite different perception via folk categories that participants bring to an interaction. Gumperz was
most concerned with accessing speakers perceptions. He proposed several ways:
through formal elicitation; through observation of speakers reactions in what was
then called natural interaction; through interviews with speakers about their communicative attitudes and life experiences in schools, markets and with government
agencies; and especially through close collaboration with participants who listen to
the recordings of their own interactions to explicate, elaborate, and guess about their
own and others interpretations. Such collaboration became a key feature of his work
and continues to be a characteristic feature of third wave sociolinguistics and current
linguistic anthropology.
Eventually, capturing that interpretive process in theoretical terms became his
goal. It was also the goalbut with different resultsof his contemporaries doing
conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and speech act theory, among others. But
for Gumperz, the contrasts between analysts and speakers perspectives was central.
It was an abiding puzzle to explore and one that has contributed to our current

John Gumperzs Discourse Strategies

119

attention to language ideologies. This required not only novel field techniques but
also new modes of analysis. Gumperz rethought tools then familiar in linguistics,
(e.g., structural paradigms and contrastive frames), extending them to sociolinguistic
materials. What would that utterance have suggested, if it had been said with different phonetics? If the tune or lexical formulation had been different?
He also extended conventional ethnographic analysis, through bold comparisons.
Comparative work in ethnography (as in linguistics) tended to be typological, as in
the comparison of kinship systems. Even the early ethnography of speakingthough
importantly highlighting a previously neglected aspect of social life and recognized
by Gumperz as one point of departurefocused on inventories of speech event types.
By contrast, Gumperz juxtaposed sociolinguistic processes as they occurred in widely
disparate communities, showing them to be surprisingly similar. He then sought the
sociological circumstances that would produce, say, different degrees of compartmentalization vs. fluidity of codes in Norwegian and north Indian villages, or different
forms of standardization and linguistic convergence in an Austrian bilingual village
vs. a trilingual one in central India. Perhaps most importantly, he insisted that as a
matter of method, social and linguistic information had to be gathered simultaneously, and had to be analyzed within the same theoretical framework. Although
Gumperz never used the terminology of performativity, he often remarked that
linguistic forms did not simply reflect but also constituted social boundaries. The
insight, of course, is a taken-for-granted aspect of todays sociolinguistic work.
Juxtaposition of cases was an analytical method but also a powerful writing strategy: argument through comparative ethnographic example. Despite what may seem
a potpourri of conceptssocial networks and allophones, communicative intention
and ethnicityhe succeeded in convincing readers by tying his conceptual integrations and innovations to exemplary empirical materials: discussion of two or more
cases that were made to contrast and reflect on each other. As much as the concepts
of convergence, compartmentalization, conversational inference or codeswitching,
one recalls the lessons of Kupwar, Khalapur, Hemnes, the south Austrian Gailtal or
Indian-English speakers in Britain and Latinos in California. The concepts persuade
via memorable, multifaceted exemplification.

Linguistic and Social Differentiation

From his first published articles in the 1950s to his work on linguistic relativity in the
late 1990s, Gumperz was a tirelessif always gentlecritic of linguistic and social
theories that assumed language to be a homogeneous system. This was a commitment
he shared with all the authors who participated in the Green Book (see also Hymes
1968, and Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968). Gumperzs particular critique was
justified not in abstract terms or by historical argument, but through what he presented as a series of conundrums. He argued that there were incommensurabilities
between the social and the linguistic units of analysis that were in routine use by
scholars. This made the empirical study of communication impossible: Grammatical
analyses did not line up with the linguistic behavior of actual human groups; people
living in what counted socially as a community were rarely speakers of what by
linguistic and institutional criteria counted as a single language; the degree of linguistic difference among linguistic forms used by groups and subgroups was not
directly related to the social distance between those groups; boundaries of the most
salient social categoriescaste, class, nationdid not line up with the most salient
language boundaries; genetic and typological relationships were rarely the most
socially important relations among linguistic forms. In such matters, he averred, the
new ideas of generative grammar offered no enlightenment, although they did
inspire an interest in cognitive processes and universals. These would be found,
however, not only in grammar but in what Gumperz (1971:343) famously proposed as
. . . a new level of sociolinguistic analysisthe level of social communication.

120

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Gumperz introduced concepts for understanding the mediations between social

and linguistic materials, an indispensable step toward todays dominant mode of
studying the two as aspects of a single phenomenon. Recent writings about the
history of language ideologies enable us to see that Gumperz was undermining the
taken-for-granted hegemony of standard languages as objects of analysis within
the discipline of linguistics. Drawing in part on the Prague Schools work on standardization and on the functional analyses in Firthian linguistics, Gumperz rewrote
Bloomfields definition of speech community so that it would encompass systematic
variation and social complexity. A speech community is a human aggregate connected by ties of regular and frequent interaction, and sharing at least one grammatical system. But more importantly, the aggregate shares norms defining the
appropriateness of linguistically acceptable alternates for particular types of speakers;
these norms vary among subgroups and among social settings. . . (1968:381). The
speech community, he argued, is a field of action in which the intelligibility of social
informationspeakers identities, social relationships, background experiences,
communicative intentpresupposes the existence of regular relationships between
language usage and social structure. This opened the way to the fruitful distinction
between speakers orientation to norms for denotation versus their attention to social
norms of indexicality. Both are simultaneously present in social groups; attention to
their intersection guides research on linguistic differentiation today.
Although the article on speech community is a classic that remains highly instructive, it has been faulted for implicitly conceiving of communities as bounded, closed
units, albeit recognizing internal heterogeneity. Certainly, the piece is marked by its
origins in a period dominated by social theories of consensus and modernization,
with which Gumperz was fully engaged through his work in India. Nevertheless,
many of its assertions pointed in other directions. His own research looked beyond
internal heterogeneity to the way speakers defined selves in contrast and opposition
to others, regardless of presumed community boundaries. His study of friendship
networks in Khalapur (1958) was perhaps the first to demonstrate that frequency of
interaction among speakers need not result in similarity of their linguistic forms. It
could lead to opposition and exclusion across social boundaries, promoting contrast
and divergent change of linguistic varieties, as Labov (1963) also showed. Conversely,
in another of his classic early studies, Gumperz suggested that particular kinds of
close social relationships over many centuries created dramatic parallels in the local
forms of genetically unrelated languages in Kupwar, village India. Yet the languages
remained lexically distinct. Significantly, differentiation through salient, lexical contrast was of great social importance and occurred simultaneously with relatively
unremarked grammatical convergence.
Another direction suggested by the article on speech communities is only now
being taken up and concerns questions of scale. Always attuned to methodological
issues, Gumperz wrote that most groups of any permanence, and of whatever size,
can be treated as a speech community, if the linguistic activities warrant study:
groups bounded by face-to-face contact like gangs, committees, and work groups, but
also occupational associations, whole geographical regions and entire nation-states. If
it is participants who define such a group through their reflexive actions, then
Gumperz was attending to what has since been called communities of practice. But if
we consider, in addition, the sociolinguists role in defining what to study, in directing the investigative gaze on one sociocultural phenomenon rather than another, then
speech community is not a fixed object in the social world, but rather a way of
analyzing sociolinguistic practice, or an organizational formeven an ideological
modelthat is not limited to any particular (commonsense) scale of social activity.
Even more productive in the long run than the reconceptualization of speech
community was Gumperzs proposal of linguistic repertoire as the analytic category
that encompasses the totality of linguistic variants employed within a community. It
is repertoires that are characteristic of particular speech communities; speaker types
can be identified with particular repertoires as well. Among the advantages of the

John Gumperzs Discourse Strategies

121

concept is its ability to include within a single category the many traditionally quite
differently classified forms of variation: regional dialect, social dialect, language, or
style; classical language, national language, professional jargon. Whereas these
diverse categories distinguish linguistic forms according to criteria such as provenance, authorizing institution, social function, or according to the kinds of linguistic
features involved, the concept of variety in Gumperzs usage was a more abstract unit,
indicating only that some cluster of linguistic and paralinguistic features constituted
one among several alternates recognized as different in a socially significant way by
a group of speakers. Repertoire would then be, in a similarly abstract way, the totality
of varieties. What were otherwise understood (by speakers and/or linguists) as
different languages could be varieties; but so could what an analysis of its features
would designate as lexical or phonological styles of the same language or alternating
forms in systems of address. The term register is currently doing exactly this important theoretical work, labeling the same analytical distinction, and so owes a considerable debt to Gumperzs example.
What is now called enregisterment also has roots in Gumperzs work, as he
explored the social processes that create registers (i.e., what he called varieties). In
assessing the possible differences between bilingual situations, bidialectal ones, and
those where variation was a matter of linguistically minor phonological variables or
lexical sets, he wrote: The degree of grammatical diversity is not in itself the most
important sociolinguistic characteristic of linguistic repertoire. . . . What seems more
important socially is the way in which grammatical options. . .co-occur in communicative situations (1971:341). Co-occurrence constraints are social norms, default
expectations that make one set of forms seem to belong together in contrast to
another set and to be appropriate towe would now say indexical ofsome
types of activities, speaker stereotypes, and scenes, not to others. Social change, in
Gumperzs view, was reflected not in changes of specific linguistic forms used, but
in changing co-occurrence constraints, for instance the decreasing (or increasing)
degrees of compartmentalization between varieties in a repertoire. He was impatient
with the usual suspects of sociological analysis like class, caste, and ethnicity as
explanation for these norms. Instead he proposed that interaction in social networks
maintained and enforced the experiential knowledge on which the norms of
co-occurrence relied.
Gumperz did not at first label these norms metacommunicative, as his early
work focused more on social than on cultural processes. And he did not ask how the
sense of going together among linguistic details of different kinds and among these
and social stereotypes was itself produced and institutionalized in culturally specific
narratives, ritual events and folk explanations. He pointed to shared experience as a
prerequisite for shared interpretation of co-occurrence patterns. But he did not investigate the semiotic processes by which the raising of a vowel, and/or a certain
intonation contour come to seem related and form an iconic image of a person-type,
a value, a group, an event type, or an activity and hence distinctly different, even
opposed, to the images and values suggested by other such sets of variants. Nevertheless, current questions about how registers and axes of differentiation are reflexively and semiotically constructed arose, in part, from the work he did to identify
varieties and repertoires as objects of investigation.
With these concepts, Gumperz placed at the center of his research program a
phenomenon that at the time was marginal and even stigmatized: multilingualism.
His interest in this probably derived in part from his experience as an immigrant to
the United States, followed by his dissertation on German-English bilinguals in
Michigan, and his work in language pedagogy. But it was first worked out in writings
about speakers in India. At the time, the practices of bi- or multilinguals were
demeaned by linguists (recall Bloomfields contempt for White Thunders atrocious
Menominee), identified as cognitively inadequate and politically dangerous by
European language ideologies, and trivialized even by ethnographers of speaking,
who presumed they simply followed rules of choice.

122

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

By contrast, Gumperzs great insight was that the nonpropositional switching

among codes by bilinguals is a particularly salient version of a pervasive communicative phenomenon observable everywhere: Normative assumptions about how to
interpret the use of a linguistic variety in interaction, paired with creative, jointly
produced violation of those presumptions result in interpretable communicative
effects. In other words, varieties conventionally indexing particular kinds of identities, relations, activities or values could be superimposedin social interactionon
other ongoing events, relations and activities, thereby producing novel, emergent
meanings (Gumperz 1971:274310). The intersection of superposed and dialectal
variation worked in this way. He called this metaphorical usage, likening it evocatively to T/V usage in pronominal systems. Its ramifying implications for language
change and the nature of human communication are still very much on our collective
agenda. This insight was part of the inspiration for the more formal concepts of
orders of indexicality and troping; it has been clarified through Bakhtinian
notions of voicing, and renamed as crossing or styling when it occurs in certain
interethnic circumstances.
Speech Practices in History: Process, Event, Consequentiality
The focus on multilingualism was distinctively Gumperzian, especially when paired
with the insistence that ethnic and racial categories are symbolic entities, evoked and
invoked in interaction often via nonpropositional linguistic cues. Minority speakers
do not live in culturally separate worlds or subcultures, as it was once fashionable to
imagine. Rather, they engage in a multiplicity of communicative modes and take
advantage of the expressive possibilities of juxtaposing them, or as we would now
say: of inhabiting and/or ventriloquating different personae. These Gumperzian
views contrasted, in the 1970s, with the Labovian method of abstracting linguistic
variables from the contexts of talk and correlating them with separately devised
speaker categories. They also contrasted with the conversation analysts reluctance to
include in their framework those aspects of the situation not overtly present, aspects
only presupposed, in the segments they analyzed. However, a more provocative and
challenging opposition, evident at Berkeley, was that between those social sciences
that analyzed linguistic matters and those that were concerned with what purported
to be the great forces of history: structures of political economy and inequality.
For many students, the question was not how to mediate between social and
linguistic units of analysis, but how to connect the attractive empirical focus of
sociolinguistics with the pressing social realities of injustice, exploitation, and domination. In the midst of protests against the Vietnam War, mobilization by the feminist
movement, and Black Panthers in Oakland, there was also nationwide stagflation, and
a dearth of jobs for new PhDs. It was hard to know which was worse: the disciplines
multifaceted complicity in war and colonialism, abetted by language study (see
Reinventing Anthropology in 1972), or the apparently contrary charge that the academy
had retreated into the minutiae of interaction, so as to avoid the political problems of
the day (see The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology in 1970). If linguistic interaction was
not to be dismissed as trivial, one would have to show its consequentiality for social
relations widely defined.
John Gumperz was among the faculty members who were sympathetic to this
dilemma. His political commitment to social justice has been noted by commentators.
Less remarked is the theoretical mode of his response to the pressure of such issues.
He faced the challenge through strategic choice of research site. He zeroed in on
the ways that institutionalized political and economic processes of wide scope
interethnic relations, educational stratification, legal processes, publicly enacted
political conflictsare produced and reproduced via key event types. These could be
gate-keeping interviews, teacher-student exchanges, courtroom testimony, political
speeches by movement leaders, interactions at workplaces among employees of
different statuses. Each scene was understood as an interpretive puzzle, but also as a

John Gumperzs Discourse Strategies

123

moment in the lives of the participants, with serious consequences for their personal
histories: getting or losing a job, learning to read with all the repercussions of that
accomplishment, avoiding charges of sedition.
One characteristic of such events, Gumperz found, was the recalcitrant fact of
miscommunication. But this did not mean lack of interpretability. On the contrary:
he argued that outcomes are affected by misfires because speakers assume that if
they can decode lexical and grammatical aspects of each others talk, they can also
infer each others communicative intent. Yet, even when speakers use what is, in folk
terms, the same language, speakers from different social backgrounds vary a great
deal in the interpretation of nonpropositional linguistic and paralinguistic cues that
provide meta-signals for the way their utterances and hence their communicative
intent are to be understood. These cues invoke taken-for-granted cultural assumptions that are rarely matters of conscious reflection. Differences in speakers reactions are interpreted as evidence about personal qualities, attitudes or social
background. Speakers are said to be unfriendly, impertinent or specifically ethnic,
for instance, never as simply linguistically mistaken. Being stereotyped as a member
of a stigmatized group is a context-bound, interactive process. Misfires become
consequential because, although speakers manage conversations collaboratively,
they do not do so from equal social positions. Institutional roles cast some categories
of speakers as powerful judges of the intents, attitudes, abilities and potential of
others.
Some have suggested that Gumperz was naive or overly optimistic because he
thought the analysis of miscommunication could end discrimination by straightening out interactional difficulties. My reading of his work suggests that he made no
such assumptions. On the contrary, he was interested in showing the failure of good
intentions if they were not accompanied by technically and theoretically sophisticated
analysis of the many levels and forms of inference by which sociolinguistic mutual
categorization operates. Although he showed that systematic misfires can sometimes
be remedied, they can also lead speakers on either side of some social divide to be
even more certain that their negative images of each other are accurate. Thus, he
opened the way for the current studies of the ideologically driven semiotic process of
essentialization. Speakers linguistic styles are interpreted as evidence not only of
communicative intent, but of their internal essences or true selves. These posited
essences then seem to explain the observed differences between speakers andin
a circular processseem to justify participants faith in the cultural images that
produced the explanations in the first place. As Gumperz knew, communicative
events are not, in themselves, a solution but rather one source for such supposed
evidence and thus for the process of stereotyping.
Another aspect of consequentiality goes beyond events and categories of events to
consideration of institutions from the perspective of communicative practice.
Gumperzs strategy focused on the relatively long run: the novel communicative
situations that were designed to serve new organizational needs, or were themselves
emerging institutions of communication in what were then called modern or
postindustrial societies. This interest was a continuation of Gumperzs attention to the
historical and social structural location of each community he investigated. In the
Indian research, descriptions of linguistic practices are set beside the transportation
and market connections of each village, the nature of its social stratification, mass
media access, and language politics. Starting in the 1970s, in the United States and
England, he focused on how educational and government bureaucracies in urban
settings used standardized language as a selection device, or created novel ways of
processing and evaluating individuals across lines of social difference. Current
research into literacy practices, science teaching, and asylum requests take these
issues further. When bureaucracies, for ideological reasons, aim to avoid the appearance of racial and ethnic discrimination they rely on the kinds of interactional
proceduresinterviews, negotiation, testingthat drew Gumperzs attention: routines that can disguise or hide that decisions are based on such forms of distinction.

124

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

This line of thought has contributed to a great deal of research into the role of
communication as medium and locus of institutional change: Studies of how courts,
states and interstate organizations produce the reevaluation, purification and stigmatization of linguistic varieties; the way national and subnational movements valorize minority and indigenous languages through control over forms of interaction; the
way ideologized gender differences are enacted and reproduced in talk. Taking these
issues further are studies of long-term historical changes such as the shifting role of
genres in colonial encounters, or the way capitalist social relations have changed the
function of linguistic practices through commercialization of codes and interactive
routines in service encounters, tourism, and mass media.
Culture and Contextualization
Gumperzs studies of interethnic miscommunication in the 1970s were never separate
from his study of all kinds of interaction. As Stephen Levinson (2002:33) has
remarked, Gumperz and his students in those years were taping everything in
earshot and found everywhere a yawning gulf between what the words in interaction seemed (referentially) to mean and what participants self-evidently seemed to
be doing with their words. Like the gulf between social and linguistic units, or that
between observable events and their institutional consequentiality, this gulf could not
be bridged satisfactorily with the various conceptual tools that were available at the
time: illocutionary force, implicatures, indirect speech acts, sequencing, frames,
among others. Gumperz discussed, critiqued, and incorporated insights from all
these, in developing his novel concepts. In subsequent decades, we can see him
sharpening and generalizing in theoretical terms the relationships between signals
that speakers detect and what they infer about each others communicative intents, as
these unfold in actual interaction.
This is the work for which Gumperz is best known today and which remains a
resource in the many research directions that rely on discourse analysis, whether of
new electronic media, epistemological issues in knowledge practices, or political
process. Here I wish only to underline a few distinguishing features of it that are not
always stressed. Gumperzs analyses were interpretive, based on exegesis and glossing. He was inspired more by phenomenologists than by formalist approaches to
pragmatics in linguistics and philosophy. The goal was not an abstract characterization of communication from an outside perspective, but rather a model that makes
explicit the procedures that any goal-oriented, intention-bearing speaker would go
through to reach a provisional conclusion about the interactional moves and communicative intents of others. His earlier interests in cognition and universals are present
in this ambition to model online and real-time mental processes. With this aim,
Gumperz turned from an earlier focus on social organization, to what we would now
call culture: How does social knowledgeincluding the indispensable context
enter into the interpretation of utterances from the viewpoints of participants? Conversational analysts discovered sequence; students of pragmatics were exploring the
role of deixis and shifters more generally. But there are many other sign types.
Gumperz showed the significance for interactional moves and discourse coherence of
signs that had been neglected: among these are prosody, voice quality, rhythm, gaze,
formulaic expressions, and contrasting lexical and syntactic formulations.
All these can serve as contextualization cues, that is, as features of linguistic form
that contribute to the signaling of contextual presuppositions. The process of using
them is conversational inferencing. These two integrative notions (his characteristic term) capture what Gumperz now recognized as a metacommunicative process:
In co-occurrence, cues are framing devices that enable participants to guess at presuppositions about what counts as context for an utterance and how that utterance
might be taken up. The cues will vary across populations, as will the strategies for
inferencing, and assumptions about what activity types, intents, and events could
possibly be signaled. But some version of conversational inferencing is indispensable

John Gumperzs Discourse Strategies

125

to all communication. Already in the late 1960s, Gumperz was insisting on what
remains central today in analyses of interaction: Context is not separate from talk.
Speaking itself creates and re-creates contexts, evoking frames for events and activities, often in ways that speakers find hard to access in a conscious way. Gumperzs
attention to the nonpropositional aspects of interaction, and to the different ways of
referentially formulating topics, contributed to Goffmans (1979) understanding of
footing; Gumperzs discussion of interaction frames returned the compliment.
Moving away from a focus on shared experience, Gumperz developed ways of
observing how frames are jointly established.
Finally, although he was not a pragmatist in philosophical inclination, Gumperz
had a strikingly G. H. Meadian understanding of the context-bound, emergent, and
defeasible nature of interactive interpretation:
The mechanisms by which relational information is signaled . . . are inherently ambiguous,
i.e. subject to multiple interpretations. In conversation, such ambiguities are negotiated in the
course of interaction. . . . (1982:208)
. . . Contextualization cues . . . are uninterpretable apart from concrete situations. [They] are
impossible to describe in abstract terms. . . . We are faced with a paradox. To decide on an
interpretation participants must first make a preliminary interpretation. . . That is, they listen
to speech, [and] form a hypothesis about what routine is being enacted. . . . What distinguishes successful from unsuccessful interpretations [is] what happens [later] in the interactive exchange itself. (1982:170171)

These words, already 30 years old, could have been written yesterday. They advance
a view of social life that has process, contingency, and performativity at its center.
Early on, conversational inferencing was Gumperzs investigative method. He
urged scholars to work with informants to figure out the social meaning of speech
varieties for participants. In a strong reflexive move, conversational inferencing
became the subject of his research. Although analyst and member would have different categories and perspectives, the members inferential process came to look very
much like the analysts form of understanding. There are examples throughout his
later writings stressing the parallel burdens of analysts and participants. As I see it, his
focus on conversational emergence can also be interpreted as a principled philosophical stance about the form and meaning of sociohistorical process and our empirical
access to it. His writings highlight a universal human necessity for inference, paired
with differentiation in the creation of locally novel speech activities and cues. He
juxtaposes institutional constraints of power with an open-endedness that allows for
the redefinition by participants of their own linguistic practices and hence their social
lives. This is a genuine, if limited, optimism about historical process. With these
antinomies, Gumperz defined a reflexive puzzle that is a key point of departure for
understanding the sociolinguistic world.
Notes
1. The most informative, for my purposes here, are the collections of his works in 1971 and
1982. Gumperz often developed his theoretical tools over several articles, as he returned to
reexamine and compare ethnographic cases. Therefore, I have alluded to his contributions
mostly according to the ethnographic materials that are discussed (India, United States,
Austria, etc.). These are identified in the titles of chapters in the two collections. The introduction and introductory essays to others contributions in Gumperz and Hymes 1972, and the
article Gumperz and Tannen 1979, reveal most clearly Gumperzs critiques of alternative
theories and approaches. Also useful are Gumperzs explications of his own scholarly work
and the surrounding discussions in Auer and di Luzio 1992, Eerdmans et al. 2003, and Paulston
and Tucker 1997. These point to what he saw as the influences on his work and his early
sources, as do the retrospectives in Gumperz 2001, Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz 2008, and
Heller 2013.
2. The literary critic Harold Bloom coined this phrase to designate the fear of sounding too
much like ones predecessors that he detected in the tradition of English language poetry. It is

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

126

relevant to some recent anthropological writing, where one finds a tendency to deny the
influence of proximate teachers, seeking instead to present the writer as inspired by earlier and
supposedly grander models.

References
Auer, Peter, and Aldo di Luzio, eds.
1992 The Contextualization of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Eerdmans, Susan, Carlo L. Prevignano, and Paul J. Thibault, eds.
2003 Language and Interaction: Discussions with John J. Gumperz. Amsterdam: Johns
Benjamins.
Goffman, Erving
1979 Footing. Semiotica 25:129.
Gumperz, John J.
1958 Dialect Differences and Social Stratification in a North Indian Village. American
Anthropologist 60:668681.
1968 The Speech Community. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 9.
David L. Sills, ed. Pp. 381386. New York: Macmillan.
1971 Language in Social Groups. Essays Selected and Introduced by Anwar S. Dil. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
1982 Discourse Strategies. New York: Cambridge University Press.
2001 Interactional Sociolinguistics: A Personal Perspective. In The Handbook of Discourse
Analysis. Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi Hamilton, eds. Pp. 215228.
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Gumperz, John J., and Jenny Cook-Gumperz
2008 Studying Language, Culture and Society: Sociolinguistics or Linguistic Anthropology?
Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4):532545.
Gumperz, John J., and Dell Hymes, eds.
1972 Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt.
Gumperz, John J., and Deborah Tannen
1979 Individual and Social Differences in Language Use. In Individual Differences in Language Ability and Language Behavior. Charles J. Fillmore, Daniel Kempler, and William
S.-Y. Wang, eds. Pp. 305324. New York: Academic Press.
Heller, Monica
2013 In Memoriam: John J. Gumperz. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17(3):394399.
Hymes, Dell
1968 Linguistic Problems in Defining the Concept of Tribe. In Essays on the Problem of
Tribe. June Helm, ed. Pp. 2348. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Labov, William
1963 The Social Motivation of a Sound Change. Word 19:273309.
Levinson, Stephen
2002 Contextualizing Contextualization Cues. In Language and Interaction: Discussions with
John J. Gumperz. Susan L. Eerdmans, Carlo L. Prevignano, and Paul J. Thibault, eds.
Pp. 3140. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Paulston, Christina Bratt, and G. Richard Tucker, eds.
1997 The Early Days of Sociolinguistics: Memories and Reflections. Dallas, TX: Summer
Institute of Linguistics.
Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov, and Marvin Herzog
1968 Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change. In Directions for Historical
Linguistics. W. P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel, eds. Pp. 95189. Austin: University of Texas
Press.