A common thread across the human sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth century has been the conceptualization of human behavior as a series of interacting and yet autonomous systems, each of which can be further divided into smaller and smaller components. As we saw in chapters 5 and 6, in linguistics this trend has meant the decomposition of human discourse into sentences, phrases, words, morphemes, phonemes, and distinctive features. This work has given us a more sophisticated understanding of the complexity of human speech, its different layers, and some of the ways in which the different layers feed into each other, but it has not answered the question of how speakers manage to connect the smaller units of language to the larger entities such units participate in. The approaches discussed in the last two chapters are attempts to come to grips with this problem by connecting linguistic forms with either individual acts or sequences of acts. In this chapter, I will expand the discussion presented in those chapters by exploring other units of analysis. The running theme this time will be “participation.”

Participation – to be discussed here as both a dimension of human interaction and a perspective of analysis – is a concept that draws from a variety of schools within linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Sociolinguists have tended to focus on participation as an issue between the individual and larger reference groups or aggregates such as networks (Milroy 1980; Milroy and Milroy 1985) and speech communities (Hudson 1980; Labov 1966; Romaine 1982; Walters 1988).