Reconstructing institutions through talk: A discourse study of academic counseling encounters

This dissertation aims to contribute to our understanding of the notion of context and to research on the relevance of context in analyzing talk in institutions by examining discourse in a particular setting--the academic counseling encounter in an American university. Using conversation analysis, functional systemic linguistics and ethnographic methods as analytical tools, it investigates how such encounters are organized and explicates the ways in which such organization is oriented toward its social-institutional context and the ways in which such organization contributes to the context.; Data are drawn from eleven video- and audio-taped naturally occurring counseling sessions ranging from 10 to 30 minutes in length. The relevance of context is explored from the following angles: (1) how participants establish their relative discourse and institutional identities in the opening of the counseling encounter; (2) how the participants create an interactional context for the delivery and reception of advice (with emphasis on sequential structures in talk); (3) how the participants negotiate and establish the ontological status of their messages and their interpersonal relations (the focal object of scrutiny being the linguistic construct of modality); (4) how the participants' institutional identities are made relevant through what is not said, with the practice of avoidance (the avoiding and delaying of information being the object of analysis); (5) how participants construct their facts and stances through others' voices; and (6) how the participants bring such encounters to an end.; Highlighted throughout the dissertation is the role of interaction and that of practice. Advocated and testified repeatedly is the thesis that our discourse as well as social institutional identities, our interpersonal relationships of power and solidarity, our perceived truth and reality, our attitudes and stances, and the institutionality of the setting within which we conduct ourselves are all constituted through what we do in interaction. In other words, context is seen as being embodied in, rather than outside of, what we do. Although this dissertation has few conclusive words to offer, it has suggested the feasibility of constructing a theory of context by extracting the notion of context from moment-by-moment interaction and accounting for such interaction through several analytical perspectives.