macro 'n' micro

[David Samuels]

Hmmm.  Okay; if the distinction is one of context and focus within context,
I can sort of see how one could say that CA is more "micro" than DA.
Certainly what is at stake in the difference between them is an argument
about what one can get just from the interactions and when you need to lift
your nose out of the "data."

But to make what could be a really long answer really short, I don't think
that's the only difference.  I think part of the difference is one of what,
within interactions and utterances, is foregrounded in the analysis.  To
that end, I think CA is most interested in "relevancy," the means by which
speakers coordinate turns so that they can "act as if" they are
communicating with each other.  Discourse Analysis, on the other hand, at
least in its Urban/Sherzer manifestation, is more interested in poetics,
and highlights issues of parallelism, trope, and so forth, in an analysis
that kind of conflates rhetorical effectiveness and poetic affectingness.
(Sherzer & Woodbury have an introduction to their book that basically says
that discourse genres can be classified according to the ways in which
features -- breath phrases, pause phrases, phonological phrases, clauses --
are coordinated or discoordinated.)

I think those are different micro approaches.  For my money, the latter is
better suited for my issues, which lie in the interanimation of symbolic
modalities.  I agree with Holly that CA has contributed important ideas
about what to pay attention to in interactions and how to transcribe them.

Well, I'll stop now.



David W. Samuels, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
212 Machmer Hall
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003

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