Contextualizing ‘contextualization Cues’

I would like to focus my remarks on John Gumperz’s notion of a contextualization cue, which I think is central to his current programme. However, before I begin, I would like to make some more general remarks on that programme and its place both in Gumperz’s overall oeuvre and in discourse studies generally. As Di Luzio sketches in his contribution to this volume, Gumperz had a. previous incarnation before becoming the founding father of interactional sociolinguistics; the previous avatar was of course one of the foundational spirits in the broader field of sociolinguistics itself. As the title of his collected papers of that vintage suggests,’ that previous self was (amongst other things) interested in how social groups express and maintain their otherness in complex societies. Gumperz started as a dialectologist interested in tracking down the forces of standardization and particularly those of differentiation, and it was the search for where these forces are located that has led him inexorably from the macrosociological to the micro-conversational perspective; it was a long journey from the study of regional standards, to ethnic groups, to social networks, to the activation of social boundaries in verbal interaction, to discourse strategies. Readers will not understand his work if they view it just as the study of conversation, He has not abandoned his interests in the macro it is the largescale sociological effects of multitudes of small-scale interactions that still partially fuels his preoccupations with conversation,* most evident perhaps in his concern with the plight of the individual caught up in these large-scale forces. Those seeking to understand his attempt to link macro and micro aspects of language use may still usefully turn to his studies of code-switching, where many of his current ideas were adumbrated.3 It was clear to him, for example, that social situations partially determine the choice of code, and yet that code-choice can partially determine situation and this play between the presupposing and creative aspects of linguistic choice (to employ Silverstein’s terminology) still dominates his work. This background will also help to explain what may otherwise be taken as a demerit: Gumperz’s analyses of conversations have nothing of the theoretical cleanliness to be found e.g. in conversational analysis. His tools are eclectic, and the toolbox cluttered, on the one hand with pragmatic notions like implicature, speech acts, frames, activities, cues, indices, and the like, and on the other with