Wilhoit, E. D. (2016). Ventriloquism’s methodological scope. Language Under Discussion, 2(1), 45–49. doi:10.31885/lud.2.1.243.
Read in full in NOTE-1487.
Key takeaways
- Cooren (2014) offered ventriloquism as a pragmatic metadiscourse to bring Craig’s (1999) seven traditions of communication theory into dialogue. Wilhoit, extending Craig (2015), argues that it yields “a more unified than dialogic metamodel” (p. 45).
- The reason is method. The Montréal School is “committed to interaction as the basis of organizing”, which results in “CA as CCO’s method of choice” (p. 46). Sociopsychological, rhetorical and critical scholars would not adopt those commitments (pp. 46–47).
- Dialogue is coming from the other direction: CCO studies that use interviews, observation and other non-CA methods (pp. 47–48). Wilhoit reports reviewers rejecting her own non-CA CCO work as not CCO.
Why this is here
Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) cite it three times:
- p. 1351: conversational analysis “creates the impression that already-constituted agents are interacting with one another (Wilhoit, 2016; see also Brummans & Vézy, 2022)”;
- p. 1359: CA “traditionally does not question the status of interlocutors as agents (see Wilhoit, 2016)”;
- pp. 1363–1364: “as Elizabeth Wilhoit (2016) noted, while Cooren (2010) theorizes agency from a processual perspective, his analyses still tend to entify agents. This is mainly attributable, Wilhoit suggested, to the interaction/conversation analytic approach he employs.”
On reading, only the last sentence’s second half is in Wilhoit: she does tie the Montréal School to CA (p. 46). The rest is not. Wilhoit never says Cooren’s analyses entify agents, never contrasts a processual theory of agency with entitative analyses, and does not discuss whether CA questions the status of interlocutors as agents. Her objection is that CA’s commitments make ventriloquism too narrow to host other traditions’ methods. She cites Cooren (2010) only as the earlier, organization-bound statement of ventriloquism (p. 46). The nearest thing to the parent’s point is a remark about the critical tradition: studying communication “is never a matter of simply looking at how certain agents are made present in language because the language itself has already been imbued with power” (p. 47). That is about power, which the parent attributes to Bencherki, Matte & Cooren (2019) instead. The parent’s critique of entification may well be right, but it is the parent’s, and “see also Brummans & Vézy, 2022” is the citation that would need to carry it.