introduction

[Barbara Johnstone]

I'm Barbara Johnstone, Professor of Linguistics and Rhetoric at Carnegie
Mellon University (Pittsburgh, US), former (and continuing) student of A. L.
Becker.  I've worked in a variety of areas, all somewhere near the
intersection of sociolinguistics, rhetoric, and critical theory: persuasive
styles and strategies across cultures, narrative, repetition, variation in
discourse.  For the past few years I've been interested in complementing
linguists' work on collective "shared" knowledge and social aggregates by
thinking about langage and linguistics from the perspective of the
individual.   Currently, with Judith Bean, I'm working with some case
studies of women from Texas to see how particular people orient to and draw
on the various sociolinguistic models that are available to them.  I'm also
working on an introductory textbook on discourse analysis, for Blackwell.
(Unfortunately, this isn't going to be very useful to the people who've been
asking about textbooks, since it's not going to be ready for a while.)   The
focus will be on discourse analysis as a methodology for research about
discourse and discourses across disciplines.  The discussion on this list is
giving me some good ideas.  Many thanks to all.