This book has as its aim not to propose a new paradigm in discourse analysis but to make the most of, or in the author's own terms “faire fructifier,” the established traditions of discourse analysis. The book, however, constructs this tradition in a particular way, as an eclectic discursive practice drawing from a number of distinct approaches to discourse analysis, such as conversation analysis, Birmingham school, Geneva school, contrastive pragmatics, Gricean maxims, interactional sociolinguistics, and others.. The author aims to use the analytic approaches of various schools of discourse analysis as a way of capturing a rich or in-depth interpretation of instances of interaction. The motivation for the selection of approaches is the utility of their analytic apparatuses for describing the interaction as it takes place. This utilitarian approach to discourse analytic frameworks as methodological tools inevitably (and intentionally) removes the investigative techniques from their theoretical positioning and context of development. At the same time, eclecticism or synchronisme méthodologique becomes in itself a theoretical position, which argues that the “machinery” of various approaches to discourse analysis can be disconnected from and used independently of their original contexts and purposes, as tools rather than as theoretical constructs. In fact, Kerbrat-Orecchioni (K-O) argues that a multidimensional approach in which tools are separated from their theoretical contexts is required by the very nature of discourse-in-interaction itself: “Le discours-en-interaction est un objet complexe, comportant différents ‘niveaux’, ‘plans’ ou ‘modules’…. On doit donc se ‘bricoler’ une boîte à outils diversifiée” (p. 22) [“Discourse in interaction is a complex object made up of different ‘levels’, ‘plans’ or ‘modules’…. One must therefore cobble together for oneself a diversified toolbox.”]

This diverse toolbox rests on the base of conversation analysis, although the analytic approach is not directed at the same objectives as conversation analysis is, focusing more on the creation and interpretation of meanings than on the organization of conversational action. In this, K-O's approach of appropriating tools independently of theory can be seen clearly, as the distinctiveness of conversation analysis from other discourse analytic traditions and the difficulty of reconciling the micro-analytic perspective with other discourse approaches has been a commonplace of the position of conversation analysts (e.g., Schegloff Reference Schegloff1999).

After the discussion of the analytic approach in chap. 1, the book is divided into two main parts – conversational negotiation (chap. 2) and politeness (chap. 3) – with a final chapter on issues relating to comparing differences in interactions across cultures and the relationship between authentic discourse and created literary discourse.

In the discussion of negotiation, K-O emphasizes the role of collaboration, not inherent to negotiation but rather achieved by participants. She notes that the starting points of negotiation, the interests that the parties bring to the interaction, have the potential to diverge, and in fact it is the divergence of views that makes negotiation relevant. She then investigates the procedures used to resolve the disagreement at the heart of the negotiation, which she sees as fundamentally located in real time, synchronous action “dans l'interstice entre la proposition et la contre-proposition” [in the interstice between the argument and counter-argument] (183).

K-O identifies negotiation as applying to two quite different levels, organization and content. The organization of the interaction, which comprises language, genre, participation frames, turns-at-talk, openings, and closings, operates at macro, meso and micro levels. The macro level is the script or schema of negotiation. It appears from K-O's discussion that the operation of such a schema is in some way determined by internalized procedures rather than being achieved by the participants themselves. Here then is a key departure in K-O's approach from the original theoretical framework of conversation analysis (Schegloff Reference Schegloff1986). The content of the interaction is conceived as topic, choice of words, interpretation, opinions, and actions. Each of these is discussed with reference to examples drawn from a variety of sources, including service encounters, interviews, conversations, and literary works.

The chapter then moves to an analysis of misunderstanding as a special case of negotiation – that is, a case in which interpreted meanings are the basis of the different starting points for interaction. The examples discussed in this section can all be grouped as cases of repair (Liddicoat Reference Liddicoat2007). However, it is less clear how they work as negotiation. For example, K-O's first example of the interactional treatment of misunderstanding goes as follows:

In this example, there is evidence of disagreement between understandings of the first turn-at-talk; however, this third-positioned repair shows little evidence of negotiation in the sense of collaborative working together to reach a common point, which has been constructed as the essential core of negotiation. What this example shows is not an instance of negotiation, but rather an instance of the uncertainties that come into being when theoretical underpinnings are subordinated to a pragmatic approach to terminology. A similar problem exists in the next section on negotiation of identities and relationships, where again the issue is more one of clarifying, expressing, and creating subject positions rather than any necessary disagreement about positioning that underlies the interaction. For example, in service encounters, the scope for negotiating identities and relationships is quite minimal, and it is often uncertain exactly what is being “negotiated” in the strict sense of the term. For example on p. 167 K-O cites a case of an interaction between a customer and a baker in which the customer uses first tu and then vous, while the interaction is concluded with the baker using tu instead of vous. There is clearly something happening here in relation to the relative positioning of the two, but that this involves working toward agreement is not obvious.

K-O argues that because of its real-time enactment, conversational negotiation is distinguished from other forms of negotiation of ideas in which an interactant is an absent imagined participant. That is, negotiation is dialogic only in the sense of dialogue between individuals, and not in the sense of dialogue between ideas. While enacted conversational negotiations of agreement are likely to be different in some ways from other delayed or distanced forms of reaching compromise, this does not seem to be a necessary distinction to draw on the level of the procedures discussed in this work. Modifications of starting positions may be undertaken in real time, in reference to actual disagreement, or in reaction to imagined objections from some non-present audience. In neither case does the proponent of an idea have complete freedom in the formulation of the argument, because the presence of an expressed, projected, or imagined counter-argument affects the ways in which an argument will be formulated. Although K-O asserts that conversational negotiation is different, it is not clear what is distinctly conversational about the procedures she identifies, as it is not only with a co-present interlocutor that arguments and counter-arguments affect each other. The problem in the definition of conversational interaction is further underlined by the use of examples from Sartre's Huis clos [No exit], which cannot be really considered to be a face-to-face interaction between the characters but would be better considered as an imagined negotiation constructed by Sartre himself.

Chap. 3 investigates politeness, which K-O argues is fundamental to discourse-in-interaction. She starts from the perspective of Brown & Levinson's theory of politeness, which she adopts not only because it is the best-known and most-used framework, but also because it is best suited to explaining the empirical data she uses. That is, the adoption of Brown & Levinson's work is motivated not by theoretical concerns by rather by pragmatism. Brown & Levinson's work is associated in various places with other constructs, notably preference organization, although the discussions are more adpositions of concepts rather than the development on an integrated whole. The chapter is largely an exposition of Brown & Levinson's model, with examples drawn from casual conversation, service encounters, and literary texts.

The final chapter on “comparative approaches” deals with two quite different topics: politeness across cultures, and the reflection of everyday conversation in literary dialogue. The section on intercultural comparison is quite brief and seeks to determine the universal and the variable in politeness across cultures. The theme of literary dialogue is actually an unexpressed theme that is implicit in the whole work, as literary texts are often used to exemplify conversational negotiation. There is therefore an a priori assumption that conversation and literature are equally capable of exemplifying discourse-in-interaction, which is not addressed until the end of the book in an explicit way. In spite of the use K-O makes of literary texts, she nonetheless notes that literary dialogue is “lacunaire et hypertrophié, contracté, et dilaté, dans des proportions parfois considérables” [“incomplete and overdeveloped, contracted and dilated, in sometimes considerable amounts”]. Rather than seeing this as a difficulty, K-O argues that literary dialogue, because of these distortions, provides an analytic resource.

This book is an interesting contribution to the study of discourse, more because of its eclectic program rather than because of the themes it treats. It explores the possibility of an eclectic, theory-neutral approach to the study of discourse, which is a logical response to the claims of some discourse analytic approaches, such as conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, to be data-driven rather than theory-driven. In a sense K-O's work is a radical statement of data-driven approaches to discourse. However, the work also raises a question as to how far the analytic techniques of the various schools of discourse analysis do in fact furnish a theory-neutral toolbox, and to what extent they can be disembedded from their theoretical context. In K-O's work it is difficult to see just how far technique and theory are in fact divorced, as the argument is very much grounded in the work of the original authors. Thus, the discussion of politeness is framed entirely according to Brown & Levinson. It is hard to see elements such as “face,” “face threatening act,” or “positive and negative politeness” simply as analytic tools rather than theoretical constructs, and it is not clear that K-O uses them in any way that differs from a theory-driven account of politeness. Often the eclectic method appears to be a juxtaposition of discourse analytic approaches that varies according to the phenomenon analyzed. This means that rather than being a cohesive whole, the result is a collection of theoretically embedded accounts framed under an overarching topic. The approach is therefore characterized better as multi-theoretic than theory-neutral. Nonetheless, read critically, this work is a thought-provoking treatment of the relationship between theory and practice in discourse analysis and is well worth reading for this reason.