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Discourse analysis is a broad and complex interdisciplinary field. It includes diverse theoretical and methodological approaches from linguistics, anthropology, and sociology. All approaches to discourse share a commitment to studying language in context. But "context" is notoriously indeterminate, and different approaches to discourse analysis emphasize different aspects of context as potentially relevant to understanding language use. My approach to discourse analysis draws primarily on work in linguistic anthropology, although the central insights were originally developed in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and in fields beyond the human sciences ranging from literary criticism to philosophy. The best overview of my approach is in chapters 2 and 4 of my book Narratives in Action.

The basic question for contemporary discourse analysts is: how do participants and analysts know which of an indefinite number of potentially relevant aspects of the context are relevant to understanding a given utterance? Drawing particularly on work in linguistic anthropology, I argue that an adequate answer to this question must rely on the central concepts of mediation and emergence. Instead of following rules to make their utterances both grammatical and appropriate to particular cultural contexts, speakers deploy indexical cues that could have multiple meanings and hearers must infer which of several possible aspects of the context are in fact relevant to interpret the utterance. In other words, the relationship between an utterance and its meaning is mediated by participants' construal of the context. This process of mediation or "contextualization" is crucial to explaining how utterances come to have meaning in context. But, without knowing what responses followed an utterance, participants and analysts often cannot know what an utterance meant. An utterance has particular meanings, ultimately, because of the effect it comes to have in the interaction. Indexical cues in an utterance establish its functions only as subsequent utterances indicate that those cues have been taken in a certain way, not necessarily because of what hearers think the speaker intended. On this account, in order to interpret or react to an utterance participants and analysts must attend not only to the moment of utterance but also to some later moment when subsequent context has helped the meaning of the utterance solidify. At the moment of utterance the relevant context has often not yet emerged. This concept of emergence is also critical to explaining how utterances come to have meaning in context. See the links under "publications" for detailed descriptions of the methodological procedures an analyst can use to do discourse analysis from this point of view.