He continues to stress the importance of the precarious relationship among language, action, and knowledge, and of the three to situation. This straightforward description of the book's topic provides a good starting point for the first sentence above. Consider this example:
[1.4] Italy is shaped like a boot and France is hexagonal.
This statement is true, of course, for students studying geography, but not very helpful for a topographer. Truth in this sense, therefore, relies upon the relationship between the sentence and the environment, but also its appropriateness for an intended audience.
Although there is no tangible structure we can point to, language and situation are interrelated. We can often predict what kind of language to expect in a given situation, and, on the other hand, given a bit of language, we can imagine the situation in which it was constructed. For example:
[3.45] W: You're not
saying much.
S: (Pause.) I'm just enjoying my Guinness.
Just given these two sentences, which by themselves have no meaning, we can reconstruct a scenario in which this conversation would most likely take place. Conversely, given a pub or bar environment, we would probably expect a certain kind of conversation.
This example raises the question of cohesion - what makes these two sentences cohere? There are a number of factors at work: their structure, truth value, and also a knowledge of the rhetorical functions that the utterance is serving in conversation. Stubbs refers to these relationships as ethnographic-, a field that studies the patterns of human behavior. He explains these relationships in a chapter called On the Same Wavelength, his conscious attempt "of preparing the reader for what I want to discuss and thereby putting us both on the same wavelength" (41).
Although Stubbs admits that the very nature
of discourse analysis is somewhat ambiguous, in the last chapter of the
book, he also provides his readers with certain lexical structures and
grammatical syntaxes that can signal discourse functioning and sequencing.
These similarities can mark connections among speakers and social relationships.
This book is a good resource for those starting
out in their study of discourse analysis, yet also provides interesting
examples for people with some experience in the field since each chapter
is self-contained and can be read independently of the others.