Discourse across speech-events: Intertextuality and interdiscursivity in social life (Asif Agha & Stanton Wortham, Guest Editors). A special issue of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 2005.

For Bakhtin, who coined the term, the phenomenon of intertextuality occurs at both the micro- and macro-levels of discursive process. The micro-order of interaction is intertextual because its messages invoke other messages as conditions on their construal and effectiveness. Utterances invoke "preceding utterances," when they respond to, build on, or re-deploy them in the current interaction. Thus "any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances" (Bakhtin, 1953/1986). The notion of a "chain of utterances" implies linkages between features of one utterance (utterer, message-content, hearer, etc.) and features of other utterances, whether presupposed or represented. This suggests ways of linking the micro-order of interaction to larger scale discursive-social processes. Although the formulation is suggestive, and has provoked a great deal of attention in a number of scholarly traditions, we do not yet have a clear analytic framework for thinking about these possibilities. To develop such a framework, we will have to move beyond our (sophisticated but limited) conceptualizations of individual or typical speech events to a conceptualization of chains or trajectories of speech events and their intertextual relations to each other. Contemporary linguistic anthropology has already begun to study such "chains of utterances" in several domains. Reported speech constructions, for instance, are explicitly intertextual in that they describe other utterances and position the current speaker with respect to them. Evidential constructions are also inherently intertextual, as they index events in which the current speaker was a perceiver, hearer, or other category of cognitive participant. Some genres, such as gossip, are conventionally understood by their users as involving intertextual links. Other genres, like political oratory, myth, and ceremonial song, though not officially understood in this way, nonetheless employ intertextual features to accomplish their interactional work. Socialization involves intertextual trajectories of participation over time -- children and novices come to recognize and enact sociocultural patterns as they participate in increasingly successful ways across events that presuppose each other in various ways. And, finally, public sphere media inherently involve messages that represent other discursive interactions. When a single phenomenon becomes relevant to such diverse areas of study it seems useful to consider its own organization as a semiotic process, and to see if its characteristics can be illuminated by more focal attention to it. The papers in this volume illustrate how intertextuality occurs in these various domains and also begin to provide a framework for understanding the process of intertextuality more generally.