| Multiple Goals in Discourse: An Overview of Issues |
Karen Tracy
Communication Department, University of Colorado,
Boulder, CO 80309, USA |
Nikolas Coupland
Centre for Applied English Language Studies,
University of Wales College of Cardiff,
CardiffCF1 3XE, Wales |
 | | | Abstract Understanding communicative action requires bridging two worlds: the world of social actors with the purposes, concerns, and 'goals' that motivate their actions, and the world of discourse in which everyday actors' goals are expressed and inferred. This paper overviews two distinct approaches to building that bridge, discourse studies and communicative goal studies, highlighting the strengths and limitations of each approach. In addition, we overview each of the papers in the volume showing how each contributes to and extends one approach while raising challenges to the other. |
| In the spring of 1988 Temple University held its annual Discourse Analysis Conference, on the issue of 'Multiple Goals in Face-to-Face Interaction'. In response to a call for papers outlining a set of motivating questions, scholars from an array of disciplinary backgrounds submitted and subsequently presented topically relevant work. The conference theme had apparently tapped ongoing concerns of a diversity of researchers. The questions and assumptions central to the conferencehow discourse and goals were, and should be linked; that communicators often, if not always, had more than one purposeimplicitly undergird many specific issues in the study of face-to-face communication. All participants recognised the centrality of these concerns but what became apparent during conference dialogue were the differences in the way these concerns were being addressed. Conference attenders problematised or took-for-granted different issues, asked fundamentally different questions, and disagreed about the desired end-goals of research. As a consequence of these differences, there were many heated exchanges, some of which were notable only for their heat, but many of which produced light as well: illuminating issues, generating new definitions, suggesting better starting assumptions. |
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