In other words

In other words: Variation in reference and narrative. By Deborah Schiffrin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. 373. ISBN 9780521484749. $48.

Reviewed by David Herman, The Ohio State University

Defining variation analysis as the study of different ways of saying (more or less) the same thing, this book focuses on variation as it plays out in two aspects of language use: reference (i.e. the evocation of a person, place, or thing through a referring expression) and narratives (i.e. sequences of temporally ordered clauses that report sequences of events). Ch. 1, ‘Variation’ (1–32), distinguishes between two approaches in which variation analysis, originally concerned with lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic features, has been extended to the discourse level. One approach examines discourse variation, or patterns of language use associated with specific groups in specific settings; the other approach, pursued by the author, examines variation in discourse, or how linguistic structures (e.g. verb tenses, clause order) are variably realized in different discourse contexts. The following chapters consider referrals and stories that appear in the second position (i.e. after another, prior referral or storytelling act); hence Deborah Schiffrin is concerned with such phenomena as repairs, repetitions, paraphrases, and replays.

Ch. 2, ‘Problematic referrals’ (33–68), investigates repairs made to referring expressions. Four possibilities are analyzed: (i) continuing referring expressions and continuing referents, (ii) changing referring expressions and changing referents, (iii) changing referring expressions but continuing referents, and (iv) continuing referring expressions but changing referents. Ch. 3, ‘Anticipating referrals’ (69–109), discusses repairs to the definite and indefinite articles prefacing nouns. These repairs encompass shifting and repeating articles and are targeted at external (i.e. word-to-world) as well as internal (i.e. word-to-word) problems that affect interlocutors’ management of referrals. Ch. 4, ‘Reactive and proactive prototypes’ (110–53), deals with referral problems that occur when a speaker assumes that the hearer has a level of familiarity with the referred-to item that proves to be unwarranted. A reactive strategy to such problems involves redistributing information initially presented by a noun across several utterances and tying the problematic information to a prior text. This same basic strategy can also proactively ward off potential referral problems, as demonstrated by utterances in which there is and they have are used to establish familiarity with discourse referents and separate out potential foci of attention. Ch. 5, ‘Referring sequences’ (154–98), explores how interlocutors manage referrals to people, places, and things in an evolving textual world in which those discourse entities acquire, as talk proceeds, new properties and relations.

The next three chapters of the book shift the focus from referrals to stories. Ch. 6, ‘Reframing experience’ (199–240) and Ch. 7, ‘Retelling a story’ (241–76) both explore issues bound up with the retelling of a story by one speaker—namely, Holocaust survivor Susan Beer—across four different oral history interviews. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s concepts of framing and footing as well as recent work in positioning theory, Ch. 6 examines how the teller reframes her past experiences in different contexts of telling, whereas Ch. 7 discusses structural and evaluative changes across the different versions of Beer’s story. Ch. 8, ‘Who did what (again)?’ (277–313), offers yet another take on the idea of stories in the second position. Here S revisits narratives analyzed in previous work, developing new perspectives on those stories by exploring how they involve rereferring and retelling. Finally, Ch. 9, ‘Redoing and replaying’ (314–40), draws together the various strands of the analysis as a whole, in the process showing how S’s account of redoing referrals and replaying narratives relates to approaches and constructs developed by other theorists of discourse.

This rich study will help set the agenda for research on variation in discourse for years to come. For specialists in the field of narrative inquiry, the book’s insights into the structures and functions of acts of renarration will be particularly valuable. S’s account of referrals is no less illuminating and will be of broad interest to researchers in fields such as pragmatics, discourse analysis, and the philosophy of language.