Speaking and writing and their inte

Speaking and writing and their interrelationships are located within this wider conceptualization of
discourse but are also experienced and acted out in specific local contexts. Recent work on
contextualization (Gumperz, 1982a, b; Duranti and Goodwin, 1991; Auer and di Luzio, 1992) focuses
on the connection between what is “brought about” and what is “brought along” in an event (Giddens,
1976; Hinnenkamp, 1989). In other words there is the contextual work done by participants in an
event which actively creates context (McDermott, 1974; Erickson, 1975), the “brought about.” There
are contextual parameters which cannot be changed but which can be brought into focus or not (the
brought along) and there are contextual schema which are brought along but subject to negotiation
(Auer, 1992). More specifically, Gumperz's notion of “contextualization cues” channels semantic
information into a message which in turn indexes sets of discourses and interactional experiences,
which in Silverstein's (1992) term become part of “contextual reality.” How this contextualization
works and is differentially used and evaluated in settings where power relations are in focus is the
subject of much of Gumperz's work and allies his approach to Bourdieu's concept of the linguistic
marketplace, where linguistic and so symbolic resources are differentially distributed. What seems to
be lacking still is sufficient ethnographic research which draws on this approach to context, sets the
situated processes of writers and speakers within a wider critical perspective, and asks how these
practices come to be produced and given value (or not).