Integrational Linguistics - Epistemological Overlaps

Epistemological Overlaps

Integrational linguistics overlaps with recent and not so recent epistemologies concerning communication and interaction. It retains an interest in understanding the system of language-making as an emergent, context-bound, and fundamentally human activity. This view is philosophically consistent with sociocultural theories such as activity theory where the historicity of human experience is recognized to have implications on our activities in ways that shape how they unfold (Cole & Hatano, 2007).

Integrationist linguistics overlaps with pragmatic and phenomenological approaches such as ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The latter being rightly susceptible to a written and spoken word bias yet this is not without current attempts to broaden and include a wider range of semiotic contingencies into analyses. The more fundamental overlap is epistemological. Harold Garfinkel's (1994) ethnomethodological policies prioritize the context of interaction with strict objection to analytic presupposed systems of any kind other than that which is made so by the sequentially ordered interactions of participants. Conversation analysts have developed an empirical approach stemming from those policies where spoken and written words are centralized. A recent decentralizing move to the analysis and theorization of multimodal sequential analysis is very much consistent with an integrationist point of view (Goodwin, 2000; Streeck, 1996).