Abstract
Like all disciplines within the human sciences, the field of linguistics has a familiar paradigm story. Once entrenched in the absolutes of positivism, structuralism and psychologism, it tells the story of a discipline that became methodologically and epistemologically diverse and critical. It is sometimes assumed, I think, that paradigm change occurs because of some deep inconsistency between theory and reality, eventually collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The healthy paradigm is not a ‘body of theory’ that subsumes (or ‘sublates’ as Hegel would put it) all contradictions into a narrative of progress. This is the zombie version of paradigm – a veritable monolith of dead ideas. A paradigm is the living ensemble of research programmes, embodied by practitioners, researchers, methods, devices, instruments and, above all, practices, which are very much alive and which seek to tell, for the most part, a coherent story about the world. The health of a paradigm is measured not by the quality and consistency of its theory but by the vitality and productivity of its methods. Whatever we want to call this ‘new paradigm’, it is clear that method itself has become the motor of human inquiry. ‘The result is’, according to Patti Lather (1986), ‘a constructive turmoil that allows a search for different possibilities of making sense of human life, for other ways of knowing which do justice to the complexity, tenuity, and indeterminacy of most of human experience’ (p. 259). I believe that Research Methods in Linguistics is a symptom of how the field of linguistics is faring with this ‘constructive turmoil’.
All this paradigm-talk is central to understanding the diversity and innovation of contemporary linguistic research as well as the implicit tensions within it. The editor describes the purpose of this collection ‘as an essential up-to-date one-stop resource for researchers and graduates students’ (p. 1). In a superficial sense, each chapter provides a gloss of different research approaches involving statistical and corpus linguistics, discourse and narrative analysis, interviews and focus groups, social semiotics and multi-modal research. In a much deeper sense, most of the chapters offer adequate contextualisation by rehearsing the key debates that have shaped these approaches. The resulting balance between a ‘shopping menu’ and a ‘potted review’ of research methods is useful and effective. The collection is organised in three logical parts, which is particularly beneficial for graduate students. Part I deals with research questions and the issue of mixing qualitative and quantitative approaches, Part II comprises three chapters offering an overview of quantitative methods and Part III provides an overview of qualitative research approaches in five chapters. As this is a book that seeks to represent and illustrate linguistic research, it is not surprising that a large proportion of chapters are qualitative.
The ascendency of qualitative research is consistent with the aftermath of the ‘paradigm wars’ of the 1970s and 1980s, which foregrounded the incompatibility of quantitative and qualitative research. This we are told in Chapter 2, which addresses the lively issue of whether combining methods amounts to ‘mixing’ or ‘integrating’ different paradigms, and whether such a fusion is better than ‘mono-dimensional approaches to the study of complex phenomena and research sites’ (p. 41). The popularity of Bryman’s (2007) article on how much ‘integration’ actually occurs (not very much according to his analysis), indicates the degree of interest in this area. We are repeatedly told, especially by the quantitative practitioners, that mixed methods is on the rise and that the present climate of interdisciplinarity demands more flexible and pragmatic solutions to ‘complex’ problems. The author gives a good account of these issues while endorsing the ‘pragmatist’s stance’ of methodological bricolage as opposed to the ‘purist stance’ of inherent incompatibility. So it is worth asking, then, what does this collection say about methodological integration in the field of linguistics?
Research Methods in Linguistics is a book of two halves. The chapters on quantitative research are markedly different in terms of their style and their mode of explanation. They are explicitly didactic, rule-governed and more or less universal in the ‘operationalisation’ of linguistic variables, such as phonetics, phonology and morphosyntax. Linguistic variables are markers of changing patterns of ethnicity, class and social inclusion, the study of which forms the basis of questionnaires, recordings and longitudinal studies. Issues of reliability and validity, hypothetico-deduction and empirical induction are outlined clearly. The application of inferential statistics, that is, how and when to use a t-test or chi-square, is explained effortlessly as if one was following the logical steps of a recipe. Perhaps the most interesting of the quantitative chapters is the discussion on corpus linguistics, which seeks to understand ‘how people really use language’. Comparison between corpora tells us a great deal about how language use has changed historically, how statistically significant co-occurrence of words (collocation) and their contextualisation (concordance) reveal interesting patterns about authority, morality and sexuality. A common feature of these chapters, however, is the way in which quantitative research is presented as complementary or supplementary to qualitative research. This appeal to versatility is strikingly absent among the qualitative chapters.
The qualitative chapters on text and talk, narrative networks, linguistic ethnography, interviews and focus-groups and multi-modal analysis will be familiar to the readers of this journal. These chapters are different in that they are almost entirely self-referential, appealing to theoretical debates that have shaped cognate traditions such as conversation analysis, discourse analysis, post-structuralism and critical discourse analysis. Debates about micro- and macro-analytic approaches, the inherent performativity of interviews and focus-groups and the politics of linguistic research are well rehearsed in compact and useful discussions. However, the deeply theoretical nature of qualitative research reveals an extraordinary opacity in terms of how to operationalise concepts such as ‘discourse’, ‘semiotics’, ‘narrative’ and ‘meaning’. In contrast to the quantitative chapters, these concepts are quite resistant to logical, rule-governed explanations. While the authors are commended for their use of lists, bullet points and textual illustrations, the application of these methods are, after all, tacit and embodied skills, and relate as much to the ineffable qualities of style and imagination. This is not a criticism of the book but a general observation about different kinds of imagination that guide research. But the really curious feature of this book is that while linguistic research is framed as increasingly plural and interdisciplinary, this enthusiasm is not reciprocated by the authors writing on qualitative methods.
In my view, this book offers a glimpse of the deep divisions within contemporary linguistic research. The calls for a ‘third paradigm’ based on multi- or interdisciplinary research is evidently more appealing to quantitative rather than qualitative practitioners. This is because the logic of paradigms is based on a lingering memory of negation. Despite attempts to dissolve the old stereotypes of qualitative and quantitative research, this collection provides no convincing reason to think that it has bridged the epistemic gulf that separates them. Nevertheless, this book succeeds in suspending disciplinary antagonisms to offer the reader a series of credible choices. It is a concise, well-structured, well-informed introduction to the field of linguistic research and, as the editor intended, will serve the graduate student and early career researcher well.