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Forum:
Methods and Analysis in Linguistic
Anthropology

Following the very well-attended Presidential Panel Frontiers in Methodology in

Linguistic Anthropology, organized by Diane Riskedahl and chaired by Barbra
Meek at the November 2012 American Anthropological Association meeting, we are
inaugurating a new forum for essays and commentary on linguistic anthropological
methods and analysis in this issue.
We are very pleased to have Susan Philipss essay as our first piece, and are
confident that it will be a valuable resource and will prompt lively discussion.
Authors who would like to contribute an essay or brief commentary to this forum
should contact either one of us to discuss the specific proposal.

Alexandra Jaffe and Paul Garrett

Susan Philips
Department of Anthropology
University of Arizona
sphilips@email.arizona.edu

Method in Anthropological Discourse

Analysis: The Comparison of Units
of Interaction
1. Introduction

M
y purpose here is to describe and instantiate the comparison of units of
interaction in anthropological discourse analysis. This comparative method
is fundamental to empirical claims anthropologists make about properties
of language in use, because our analyses depend upon the comparison of recordings
of similar and different units of interaction. From an anthropological point of view a
central aspect of the nature of language is that it is used to communicate. Language
constitutes sociocultural processes through face to face interaction. Language shapes
and is shaped by the social interactional process. Crucial properties of language
derive from its use in interaction and these properties can only be fully recognized
and understood by studying speech as it occurs in its social context.
Speech in interaction is organized into interactional units by co-interactants who
also conceptualize and categorize their speech as organized into units. Anthropolo-
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 23, Issue 1, pp. 8295, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. 2013
by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12011.

82
Method in Anthropological Discourse Analysis 83

gists treat interactional units as units of analysis. Linguistic anthropologists address a

range of kinds of interactional units in their work. The speech genre is the theoretical
unit of discourse that has been most central to linguistic anthropology (as well as to
folklore and literary studies) and it has a robust history in Western thought. In
addition we also draw upon concepts from interactional sociological traditions,
including the encounter from Goffmans work and the conversation analysts concept
of a conversation. We also treat the turn at talk and the utterance as units of interaction.
Whether our analysis focuses on the functions of ergative case markers in Samoan
fonos (Duranti 1994) or the representations of gender in stories about La Llorona
(Mathews 1992), we compare and contrast units of interaction: e.g., fonos (a type of
meeting) with each other or stories with each other, or fonos with classroom encoun-
ters. We do this in order to make claims both about what all instances of a unit have
in common, and about how they differ and vary. Thus comparison of units of inter-
action is methodologically at the heart of anthropological discourse analysis. When
we recognize such units as researchers, it is because we have been taught to do so by
the people whose communication we are studying, and because we draw upon our
human cognitive ability to create and recognize units of discourse that are also units
of interaction and units of culture.
I am motivated to pursue the methodological use of units of interaction in order to
stimulate discussions among linguistic anthropologists about methods of analysis.
With some shining exceptions (e.g., Ochs 1979; Briggs 1986), there are few accounts of
how we analyze our data. Comparison of units of discourse is one of the least
explicitly discussed aspects of data analysis in linguistic anthropology in spite of
being pervasive to our sub-discipline. Scholars from other disciplines who do dis-
course analysis, especially linguists, have written more about our ethnographic
methods of discourse analysis than we have (e.g., Saville-Troike 1982; Schiffrin 1994;
Blommaert and Jie 2010). Cultural anthropologists as well as linguistic anthropolo-
gists, are increasingly interested in recording and analyzing speech as a way to
document the innovation, replication, and transformation of ideas in cultural pro-
cesses, but they do not necessarily know how to make decisions or justify them in the
various stages of data collection, processing and analysis: what to record, what to
transcribe, how to transcribe, what to translate, and then what to do with the tran-
scriptions generated. Finished analyses in our written ethnographies often provide
only indirect clues to these processes. There is, then, a need within linguistic anthro-
pology for us to make our methods more accessible, both to each other and to
scholars who are interested in our work, and in possibly replicating our methods.
The comparative analysis of units of discourse is characteristically done by linguis-
tic anthropologists within a broader ethnographic project. In such projects the anthro-
pologist lives for an extended period of time in the locale where recording of
interaction takes place, absorbs local knowledge, and gathers other kinds of data.
Even so, we sometime write as if or create the impression that our recordings or
transcripts of recordings are our only form of data. And yet a great strength of
anthropological discourse analysis lies in the ways that transcripts are related to what
goes on outside them. In the discussion to follow I will show how I compare units of
interaction in recordings of Polynesian Tongan interactions. I will also discuss how I
related such discourse analysis to my broader experience living in Tonga and to other
systematic forms of data collection. In my first and most developed example of
analysis below, the focus is on culture in discourse. I show how I established the
claims I have made in Philips (2004) about Tongan moralizing on bad behavior in
Tongan Magistrates Courts through my comparison of court cases. Attention is also
given to how this analysis of units of interaction in the courtroom was related to other
systematic methods of data collection and to my broader ethnographic experience. In
the second example I discuss what can be learned about honorific speech registers
from looking at Tongan honorifics in actual use that cannot be known or documented
from other kinds of data (Philips 2010). In this material I draw upon comparisons
within and between a range of kinds of interactional units from the lexical item
84 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

through the utterance to the genre of prayer and the social activity of a church service
to discuss how honorification is part of an elaboration of forms of address in rhetori-
cal Tongan.
Following a description of these two examples of comparative analysis from my
Tongan data from the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga, I will highlight the way the
recording of speech and its analysis is embedded within a broader ethnographic
project. Methodologically it is important to distinguish between the kinds of mean-
ings that can be inferred from discourse data alone versus those which can only be
interpreted by looking at additional discourse data and attending to local understand-
ings and meaning making. Part of our method is that we do this, but this relating of
discourse data to other kinds of knowledge has not been well explicated.

Illustration 1: Tongan Morality in Court Cases

Here I focus on the analysis of moralizing from a paper on ideology in discourse
(Philips 2004). In that paper I showed how in Tongan Magistrates Courts, speech is
organized into cases, or hia, both interactionally and conceptually. Internal to these
cases is another level of organization in which there is an outer British (colonially
derived) legal framing of each case, but an inner Tonga-specific moral core. The
sequential structure of the criminal procedure thus organizes ideological diversity, a
duality of framings of bad acts.
I deliberately chose to look at two different kinds of legal jurisdictions, one in the
capital town of Nukualofa and one in a village on the same main island of Tongatapu.
I recorded in the courts or had research assistants record in the courts of two mag-
istrates in each jurisdiction. I did this partly to be more able to preserve the anonymity
of the magistrates, but also to achieve a kind of representativeness of what was taking
place in courts across at least the main island. I found that the moralizing was specific
to the type of criminal charge, rather than, say, very general or very diverse. In other
words, all of the four magistrates in two distinct rural and urban jurisdictions, asked
the same kinds of questions and gave the same kinds of scoldings to criminal defen-
dants in a criminal charge-specific way.
Excerpt #1 from my transcripts and translations, which is a case of drunk on the
public road, shows the internal sequential structure of criminal cases that were
completed (rather than dismissed or partial and postponed). This sequential structure
consists of 1) The call of the case; 2) The charge; 3) The plea; 4) The factual basis; 5)
testimony; 6) counseling; and 7) sentencing. The identification of these units in each
case is based on repetition of the same material or kind of material over and over in
the same sequential order. It is also based on who produces the same kinds of
sequences of words and meanings over and over. For example, each case begins with
the call of the case which is a number. It is always called out by the court clerk who
sits at a table below and in front of the magistrate. And it is always repeated a second
time, yelled really to outside of the building, by a different man in a police uniform
to summon defendants into the courtroom and up to the defendant box or witness
box in the front of the courtroom facing the magistrate. Each case always ends with the
police prosecutor thanking the magistrate after he gives the sentencing. These same
words and kinds of words and those who speak them happen in every completed
case. The call of the case is preceded by the previous defendant leaving his box in
front of the magistrate and followed by the new defendant physically moving to
stand in the same box to face the magistrate. Physical interactional shifts of these
kinds in who is engaged in focused interaction with who mark boundaries between
units of interaction.
The complete case presented below is as simple and basic as such procedures can
be. Some cases are more elaborated, especially in their factual bases, testimonies, and
counselings, as we will see below, but they still have the same recognizable sequence
of interactional units.
Method in Anthropological Discourse Analysis 85

1) Excerpt 1: Tape 18A Nukunuku 1987page 27, Case #21

Call of the Case
Clerk: S. L., Houma.
eng: Mr. S. L., Houma.
Police: S. L., Houma.
eng: Mr. S. L. of Houma.
Magistrate: Fika fiha?
eng: What number?
Clerk: 698.
eng: 698.
Charge
Magistrate: S.L. Fanongo mai, S. Mea naa ke fai he aho 3 pouli e mahina ko Novema
1987. I Houma naa ke ko ia he feituu fakapuleanga aia ko hoo kona i
he hala puleanga, loto kolo o Houma, maumaui ai e kupu 30 vahe ua o e
lao o Tonga, 1967 Vol. I
eng: Mr. S. L. Pay attention S. The thing you did the night of the 3rd of Nov. 1987.
In Houma you did it in a public place, which is to say you were drunk on
the government road, in the middle of Houma, breaking section 30 part 2, of
the Law of Tonga of 1967, Volume 1.
Plea
Oku ke tali tonuhia pe oku ke tali halaia?
eng: Do you plead innocent or do you plead guilty?
Defendant: Halaia atu, sea.
eng: Guilty, sir.
Factual/Moral Basis
Police
Prosecutor: Tapu moe sea umaa e fakailoa. Sea ikai ke mau ha lekooti heni, sea, o e
fakailoa, sea ko ene. Kona pe he pouli aho 3 o Nov. 1987, sea, he hala
puleanga, loto kolo o Houma. Ha ha mea maolunga a e feituuna1 e
anga ki he fakailoa, sea, fiemalie talatalaaki. Malo, sea.
eng: Respect to (the magistrate), sir, and also the accused. Sir, the accused did not
have any [criminal] record sir, before now, sir. Drunk on the night of
November third, 1987, sir on the public road in the center of Houma. Any
high advice from you to the defendant, sir, will be a comfort to/satisfy the
prosecutor. Thank you, sir.
Testimony
Magistrate: Oku toe ko ha mea oku ke fie lea ki ( )?
eng: Is there anything you want to say to ( )?
Defendant: Fie lea atu pe sea. Kole atu he fakailoa ( )
eng: I want to speak to you, sir. The defendant begs ( )
Counseling
Magistrate: Oua te ke toe alu o kona pehe he hala naa faifai pea lele atu ha mealele o
malaki koe. ( )
eng: Do not go and get drunk like that on the road again, otherwise you could be
run over by a vehicle. ( )
Sentencing
Te ke moua paanga hongofulu. Totongi mai leva he taimini, e? Ikai, ko e
ngaue popula he uike e ua.
eng: You will be fined ten dollars, Pay at once now, hey? If not, then two weeks in
prison.
Police
Prosecutor: Malo,sea.
eng: Thank you, sir.

The same analytical process (looking for repeated, common elements and
sequences) can be applied to the individual components of the case genre. If we look
86 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

at the charge, for example, we find that every charge has the same elements found
in the example above: The name of the defendant; where the defendant is from; the
name of the crime; where the crime took place; the number of the law broken, and the
date the crime was committed.2
Once I understood the basic sequential structure of these criminal cases, my
attention focused on what I came to think of as their moral centers. Recall that a
central claim of the earlier paper (Philips 2004) for which this analysis was done was
that there was a Tongan moral center to these cases with an outer legal framing of
British law. Through this discourse structure, a dual ideological framing of the cases
in both legal and Tongan moral claims was constituted. The outer legal framings of
the call of the case, the charge, and the plea at the beginning of the case and the
sentencing at the end of the case were pretty obvious to me (and could be compared
with similar American procedures of the kind documented in Philips 1998). But the
internal moral framing concentrated in the testimony and counseling units of inter-
action seemed less obvious to a non-Tongan researcher such as myself.
I could see a rough patterning in the moralizing emerging gradually from the time
I began to sit in on court proceedings on through the processing of recordings. And
as I have already noted, I found that the moralizing was specific to the type of criminal
charge regardless of which of the four magistrates was handling the specific type of
case. So each kind of criminal charge, whether it be theft or assault or bad language,
had a kind of cultural moral script that spelled out why what the defendant had done
was a bad thing.
It was not immediately clear, however, what these case-specific moralizings had in
common. By looking at the similarities and differences between the cases for a given
charge, I was able to see more clearly what was common across cases for a given
charge in the way of moralizing. I was aware of the diversity across the cases, but
focusing analytically on how they were similar. This is how I came up with the claim
in Philips (2000) that bad language cases are treated as a violation of the brother-sister
tapu on bad language, even when no sister was sworn at in any of the cases.
Here I would like to illustrate comparative analysis with crop theft cases. I found
theft cases were typically about the theft of pigs and crops, especially yams, manioc
and sweet potatoes. It also turned out that property cases other than theft cases
were sometimes about crop theft too. In transcript excerpts from two cases where
theft of crops was at issue I point out below both what was distinctive about the
moralizing in each case and what the moralizing in each case had in common with
other crop theft cases. I do this explicitly to demonstrate the process through which
I arrived at my claims about common moral scenarios for each kind of criminal
charge. As we will see the moralizing took place across multiple interactional units
in the sequential structure of a completed criminal case. The police prosecutor,
witnesses, defendants, and the magistrate all weighed in on why certain acts were
bad though not all did so in any given case. Ultimately it was the magistrates
moralizing that mattered, however, in that it provided the basis for his sentencing
of the defendant. As I discussed in Philips (2004), theft was treated as a relatively
serious crime. Magistrate moralizing typically focused on the harm the criminal
defendant did to the entire country and to the land with crop theft, both cap-
tured in the term fonua.
In the first case considered here, in Excerpt #2 the Charge is theft:

2) Tape 8B, NN Magistrates Court, Case 15

Magistrate: S.S., Houma. Ko e mea i he fakailo kiate au, a e mea koia naa ke fai i he
aho 25 Okatopa 1987 i he uta Houma, naake kaihaa, maumau ai e kupu
133 Lao Tonga ki he ngaahi hia. A ia ko hoo fusi kaihaasi e mukaia talo
Futuna.
eng: S. S. of Houma. The thing that has been made known to me, the thing you did
on the twenty-fifth day of October, 1987, in the Houma bush, you stole,
breaking part 133 of the criminal Law of Tonga. That is your plucking theft
of the sprouting leaves of the Futuna taro.
Method in Anthropological Discourse Analysis 87

The theft of the sprouting leaves of the plant during the summer, rather than of
grown roots of the crops, is the most unusual feature of the case, and is oriented to
repeatedly in the sequence of interactional units that follows. The alternative term for
these leaves is lu. They are used to wrap meat or fish with coconut milk to cook in
underground ovens, usually cooked ahead of time for the Sunday meal, but also for
a wide range of special occasions.
The moralizing in the case actually begins when the prosecutor describes the factual
basis, where he points out that although the crime was committed on a Saturday, it
took place during a time when people are preparing their lu for Sunday, which is a
sacred day. The moralizing continues in the magistrates elicitation of testimony from
the defendant, so that testimony and counseling are merged here. In transcript excerpt
3, he asks the defendant how much lu he took, he answers not much, and the
magistrate responds:
3) Tape 8BNN Magistrate Court, Case 15
Magistrate: Sai pe, ka ko hoo alu o ala. Oku ikai ke i ai hao talo aau?
eng. Thats good, but you stole. Dont you have any taro (plantation) of your own?
Defendant: Kii talo pe, kei uiki.
eng. Just a little taro, still young.
Magistrate: Iloi ko e moui ia a e talo e lu pea ko e taimi ia eni?
eng: (Dont) you know that the leaves give life to the taro and this is the time for
that (i.e., summertime when they are growing)?
In my observations and recordings of multiple crop theft cases, it was usual and
typical for crop thieves to be asked whether they have their own plantation and if so
whether they have crops growing. Of the moralizing that occurs in this case, the
question the magistrate asks about this, i.e., Dont you have any taro plantation of
your own? occurs in most crop theft cases. In other crop theft cases where this
question is asked, magistrates articulate the idea that if a defendant does have his own
land and does raise his own crops, then it is worse that he is taking others crops than
if he didnt have land or his own crops. Note here that the defendant really minimizes
how much he is growing and minimizes the usefulness of what crop he has. In cases
where the defendants had no land, which happened with very young defendants and
with defendants who lived in the capital, the magistrates told them that they should
have a job to make money to buy the roots. If these possibilities for getting food were
not available, or sometimes even if they were, magistrates told the defendants that
they should ask the crop owner or manager for food and that they would not be
denied. In this particular case the magistrate told the defendant that he should have
called out to the caretaker, by which my research assistant understood him to mean
that he should have asked for the leaves. However, Tongans also say that it is
considered shameful to ask.
As I have argued, then, not all of the general moral scenario appears explicitly in
this case, but part of it is activated. And this scenario is made relevant by the magistrate
even though it is clear from other testimony that the defendant didnt want the leaves
for himself, but rather was planning to take them to market to sell them to people who
had jobs and could buy them. What is different here from my other crop theft cases
and NOT part of a general theft moral scenario is the reproach to the defendant for
threatening the life of the plant, elaborated beyond what I have presented. The
defendant is reproached for taking leaves off a plant that depended on the leaves for
the growth of the root crop that feeds the people, for threatening the life of the plant
and its food supply. Still, on a more abstract level the reproach to this defendant about
killing the plant is the same one made to other crop theft defendants: he is hurting the
people and the country rather than making a contribution that helps them.
In the second procedure from which I want to show speech, there are again
idiosyncratic features to the case. First of all the actual charge is trespass into a
plantation, yet it is clear that what is at issue is crop theft. Two teenage male defen-
dants are charged with the same crime. In Excerpt 4 the Magistrate addresses one of
the defendants with the Charge:
88 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

4) Tape 18ANN Magistrates Court, Case 19

Magistrate: Fanongo mai ko e mea fai. He aho 24 o e mahina ko Okatopa 1987 i he uta
o Utulau, naa ke hu hala loto api, maumau ai a e kupu 179, kupu sii taha
o e lao o Tonga ki he ngaahi hia. Aia ko hoo hu hala loto api pea tae ha
uhinga fakalao. ki he api tukuhau o S.T. tae te ne loto ki ai.
eng: Listen to what you did. On the 24th of October, 1987 in the bush of Utulau,
you trespassed, breaking section 179, subsection one, of the criminal law of
Tonga. That is you entered without permission the garden allotment of S. T.
which he did not want you to do.

In the factual basis, the police prosecutor explains that the owner of the farm
allotment is sick and tired, pahia, of losing things. The magistrate then asks the
owner if he wants to speak, after the defendant declines to do so. The owner explains
in his testimony in Excerpt 5 why he has brought the young men to court.
5) Tape 18A, NN Magistrate Court, Case # 19
Witness: Tapu mo e sea, tapu mo e Ofisa M., umaa e fakamaauanga. Sea nae fuu
hulu pe eku mamahi he hala loto api a e kainga Utulau hoku api.
eng: Respect to you sir, respect to Officer M. and also the court. Sir, I was exceed-
ingly very hurt by the trespassing of the Utulau relatives on my property.
...
. . . Kole atu pe ki he sea na ke akonakii mo fakahinohino kinaua pea ke ilo e
Utulau a oku ikai teu loto au ke aluanga kiai ha taha. . . .
eng: I beg you sir to counsel and instruct the two and let Utulau know I do not
want anyone to go around there . . .
. . . Ko ia pe eku fakahohaa au.
eng: . . . That is all I worry about/want.

The magistrate complies with the land owners request in his counseling, but
becomes more explicit than either the police prosecutor or the land owner in making
a link between trespass and the theft of crops in Excerpt 6:
6) Excerpt 6: Tape 18A NNCase #19
Magistrate: Malo aupito S. E ongo fakailoa, ko hala loto api ko e pusipusiaki ia a e
kaihahaa. Ka oku ke fie hu leva ki hala totonu.
eng: Thank you, S. You two accused, to trespass in neighbors garden allotment is
the first step to stealing. If you want to enter, (go) immediately on a correct
path.

So in this case there is no conviction for a crime and no punishment. For the
purposes of my analysis of shared features of moralizing about crop theft, the main
value of this material is that is shows how closely farm allotment trespass and theft of
crops are linked in the minds of Tongans. The case is different from other cases of crop
theft in a variety of ways. Most notably we see here how the farmer is using the legal
system to ward off theft and avoid the more aggressive and humiliating prosecution
and conviction of relatives. I said earlier in this paper that the logic of the moral
message about crop theft is that if you have a plantation, you should grow your own
crops. If you dont have access to farm land, you should have a job to pay for food. But
you will never go hungry because all you have to do is ask for roots and they will be
given to you. However, it is considered shaming or shameful to have to beg for food.
This basic message is articulated in the case of theft of taro leaves, but not the part
about its being shameful. Even though multiple defendants were urged that they
could ask for food, no magistrate mentioned that it was shameful to do so. This
understanding comes from my broader ethnographic experience.
My understanding that asking for food could be considered shameful came early
in my fieldwork experience in Tonga, well before the pervasiveness of agriculture had
seeped into me. I was invited to an event where some of the top songs in a song
competition for World Food Day were being performed by classes from schools
whose teachers had composed them. In one lively song a boy and a girl called out to
one another in a dialogue that elicited a great deal of laughter from the audience. I
Method in Anthropological Discourse Analysis 89

asked my host and fellow guests why people had laughed. It turned out the children
were enacting a dialogue between a husband and wife in which the wife yells to the
husband to go next door and ask for food. I was told it was funny because it would
be embarrassing to have no food and to have to ask a neighbor for food. I gradually
came to understand that people were typically involved in a system of exchange of
food with relatives and redistribution of food from feasts that should render begging
to neighbors unnecessary. If neighbors who were not relatives had to be asked, that
would suggest the relatives were not sharing, which good relatives should do, so this
could be embarrassing to an entire family. I was told the song was also funny because
it wasnt really considered appropriate for a wife to yell at her husband and tell him
what to do that way. Back at home later I was able to record the song from the radio
because it won the national prize for best song. I consider this an opportunistic
connection that I was able to make between a song I heard and got to talk to people
about and legal data I had not at that point recorded. My radar was out for anything
anyone had to say that had to do with conflict management and the role courts might
play in peoples lives, and I initially registered this song as a representation of conflict
between husband and wife.
Over time I learned that one job of the District Officer for a district was to keep an
eye on the crops in his area and determine whether they were being raised in
abundance so as to assure a food supply for the country. My host, the head of the
family I lived with, was the District Officer for our district, and on occasions when we
were driving through his district, he would comment on how common crop theft was
and on how difficult it was to do anything about it. My second case here shows a land
owner trying to prevent theft with poor odds of succeeding. The District Officer also
articulated the view that really no one should have to steal crops in order for his
family to have enough to eat. From this I learned that the District Officer and the
magistrate both held and articulated a common view that crop theft could not be
justified on the grounds that it met the need for food.
Finally, I engaged in several forms of what I would call debriefing, a common
practice for linguistic anthropologists who want to know what the people they
recorded, as well as others, thought was going on in the material they recorded. An
influential innovation in this tradition was Fred Ericksons sharing of videotapes
with people he had recorded to get their reactions to the material (Erickson and
Shultz 1982). I began this practice in my Tucson study of judges use of language in
1978 (Philips 1998). After every courtroom taping I would go into the judges cham-
bers and interview them about any thoughts they had about what we had just
experienced and ask questions about what I thought was unusual or unclear. In the
first phase of Magistrate Court data collection in Tonga, I always took my female
research assistant with me to court and she took notes case by case as I did while I
was recording. Then after the court procedures ended we would go over our notes
together, she would describe her understanding of the cases and answer any ques-
tions I had about them.
Tongan research assistants who transcribed, translated, and computer entered
such data also had many opinions about the cases. After one long and mystifying case
of crop theft, my research assistant was able to tell me that the defendant was
generally considered by Tongans to be mentally ill and was widely known through
the region as a man maddened by having been a soldier in a war.3 The case had been
mystifying because the defendant both claimed innocence and admitted guilt. He
challenged the witness who said she had seen him steal, a kind of challenge that was
very unusual. People in the audience were stifling nervous laughter throughout the
case and the defendant was sentenced to prison, both of which were also unusual. But
this defendant still had been asked if he had his own plantation and he seemed proud
to acknowledge he had plenty of crops for food rather than trying to minimize what
food he had access to in the way some other defendants did.
In general I drew on sources of information from outside the recorded speech in the
courtroom in order to determine whether crop theft was moralized about in similar
90 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

ways by Tongans generally, or had been treated in a way specific to the legal system.
The consistencies between what I heard outside the courtroom and what I heard inside
the courtroom gave me confidence that I could characterize the moralizing in the
courtroom as Tongan, as characteristic of how Tongans viewed crop theft.
I applied this same approach to bad language cases, assault cases, and drunk in
public cases. For each case or hia, I focused first on the interactional unit of the
charge to determine what the defendant was accused of. I grouped the cases with
the same charge together Then I looked at the moral heart of the procedure in the
interactional units of the factual basis, testimony and counseling in each case with
the same charge. I looked for similarities and differences between the moralizings
in the different cases and focused on the similarities to come up with a character-
ization of the moral scenario or script for each kind of charge. In making these
comparisons I used the method described at the beginning of the paper of compar-
ing like units of interaction and looking for similarities and differences in their
content and form. At the same time I drew upon other ethnographic sources of
information to assess how widespread the moralizing I recorded in court was in the
wider Tongan society.

Illustration Two: Honorific Analysis

In this second example, I focus on the analysis of Tongan lexical honorifics, a phe-
nomenon more central to linguistic anthropological analysis than the preceding
example, which I think of as more a cultural analysis using linguistic anthropological
methods, but still focused on discourse structure.
As Agha (2007) has noted, students of languages with honorific speech registers
have relied heavily on how speakers of those languages tell us those systems are used,
i.e., on language ideologies, to establish the nature and delimitation of such systems.
We also rely heavily on informant elicitation of sentences that show how honorifica-
tion takes place at the sentence level. We learn different kinds of things about speech
registers when we study them in actual use, in socially occurring speech that regularly
takes place within a social system in the way that Charles Ferguson modeled for us in
his research on sports talk as a speech register (Ferguson 1983).
Tongan lexical honorifics are individual lexical items that are used to show respect
to people being addressed and talked about. Tongan language ideology about these
items hold that there is a lower level of honorifics used to chiefs and a higher level of
honorifics used to the king. This ideology is part of state ideology put forth by the
Tongan state through education and scholarship that defines the Tongan nation as
made up of the king, nobles, and commoners with different legal rights (Philips 2007).
Prior to my recording of a range of activities in which Tongans used honorifics, the
main way that information about them was available was in the form of lexical lists.
Everyday or commoner words were listed with their chiefly and kingly equivalents.
Since the lists were my point of departure, I had a number of questions about them.
Which among the honorifics listed were actually used? Who used them and in what
contexts were they used? The transcriber and translator of my 1985 pilot research
recording of a Free Wesleyan church service immediately revealed that higher level
honorifics were used by a preacher to address God and to talk about Jesus. My review
of transcripts and translations of initial tapings in Magistrates Courts two years later
showed that lower level honorifics were being used by the police prosecutor when he
addressed the magistrate. Eventually I put together a small data base from my larger
data base that consisted of about ten hours of transcripts from three situations involv-
ing the use of honorifics: a church service; five village level fonos (a type of meeting)
and two Magistrates Courts proceedings, one from each judge in the rural jurisdic-
tion. In recent and ongoing analysis I have been closely comparing the use of honor-
ifics in these situations. I am also comparing honorifics in genred units of interaction
as well as more generally in the larger situations: multiple instances of the genres of
prayers in church and the fonos and speeches in fonos and in court.
Method in Anthropological Discourse Analysis 91

In addition to that I have also less closely examined honorifics in transcripts and
translations of wedding debate among matapule, who are ritual specialists that rep-
resent chiefs and others, speeches at the investiture of a noble, songs composed for
special occasions in which I took part, speeches in fakaafe (a type of feast), and
speeches by legislators in the Legislative Assembly recorded off of the radio. I have
also participated in a wide range of public activities that I did not record where
honorifics were being used.
So what have I learned about honorification by examining honorifics in such genres
of discourse? With regard to the words in the lexical lists that were the main form of
data on Tongan honorifics before my study, I can say the following now about their
use: Honorific lexical items occur in low frequencies in all public activities for which
I have recordings and do not occur in everyday conversational speech in my data base.
In general a small number of lexical items in each level are used frequently, a small
number are used infrequently and the rest are not used, except perhaps rarely. The
church service, the fono, and the court proceeding each have their own distinctive
pattern of honorific use in terms of who uses which honorifics for what purposes in
what speech genre. Most interesting to me so far is the finding that the two levels of
honorification are kept completely separate in use. Lower level honorifics and higher
level honorifics are not mixed together in relation to a single target of honorification.
In other words, there is no mixing of level alternates to create a de facto intermediate
level or subtle shadings of respect in the way such processes occur in some honorifi-
cation systems. There are however other ways that subtle shadings in degrees of
respect appear to be being created through honorifics and other means in speech. It is
also striking that honorifics are extended or directed to everyone in a public gathering
in some locutions involving verbs of movement that therefore are also deictic. There
are also instances when an honorific reserved for the noble or for God (according to
language ideology) is rendered in a way that includes non-chiefly people.
Tongan honorifics can be understood as a lexical honorific register, but I tentatively
propose that this honorific register is also a register within a register.4 Tongans talk
about the higher and lower levels of honorification as an autonomous phenomenon
of chiefly language or lea faka-eiki. It is spoken about as if it was relevant for all
occasions in which one might encounter or speak about a chief or the king and need
to use alternates to everyday vocabulary items to show respect for the persons to
whom those social identities are attributed. However, Tongan honorifics are also part
of a broader rhetorical tradition that has its own general characteristics. This broader
register is marked visually semiotically through dress, particularly the wearing of
waist mats by those who are co-present, and through the use of flowers and greenery
to decorate the bodies of performers and the surrounding environs.
This oratorical register is present in all of the situations and genres I have already
mentioned as data sources for honorifics. Although this more complex encompassing
register has no clear name the way chiefly language does, Shumway (1981) has
suggested that the best term for it is heliaki, or turned over words, which emphasizes
the generally allusive nature of the most appreciated realizations of this oratorical
tradition. The highly respected Tongan scholar, Futa Helu (personal communication)
used the term literary Tongan to refer in English to the register used in a range of
genres, and for him Tongan poetry and song compositions were at the heart or center
of this tradition.
Tongans readily describe some of the features that talk in this register has: beautiful
words, metaphorical words that can stand for whole sets of legendary events, hon-
orific words, and proverbs. What is referred to as the tapu mo, an elaborated greeting
by speakers in which they identify the key individuals in the situation they are
addressing, is also a basic feature of this register. There are also particular situations
and genres that are thought to call for this elaborated form of speech. Speeches, which
occur in a wide range of contexts such as fonos, openings of new buildings, and
feasts, are probably the most common forms of talk using this register, but as I have
noted, it is also intensely characteristic of poetry and song compositions. Ministers
92 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

use this style in prayers and sermons in church. Matapule, ritual leaders who stand
in for chiefs, speak on the behalf of chiefs, and on the behalf of families on occasions
such as weddings and funerals, are specialists in this way of speaking. Police pros-
ecutors and some witnesses in Magistrates Courts use a stripped down version of
this style, i.e., use fewer features of it than on more traditional occasions.
A comparative analysis of recordings of socially occurring speech from different
public occasions where speakers use this register is enabling me to identify with
greater specificity how Tongan honorifics fit into this broader rhetorical tradition.
Such an analysis can also serve as a first step in another level of comparative analysis
with other cultures and languages through which we can better try to understand
how different kinds of speech varieties interact with each other.
I illustrate this process and possibility below in a brief discussion comparing forms
of address in the Magistrate Court transcripts described earlier in this paper with
forms of address in prayers from a Free Wesleyan church service. Basically I will
argue that in both court and church there is a proliferation of forms of address,
especially in initial address by a given speaker who is elevating others through his
speech. I tentatively propose that this proliferation of address is characteristic of the
broader Tongan oratorical speech register. This is not done through honorifics alone.
Rather honorifics participate in or are a part of this elaboration of forms of address
that is in turn an aspect of the Tongan oratorical register.
In the court excerpts, it is primarily the magistrate who is addressed by both the
police prosecutor and the land-owning witness, using the tapu mo respectful greeting
mentioned as a feature of rhetorical Tongan and lower level honorifics. In the first
transcript excerpt on page 86, the police prosecutor initiates his address to the mag-
istrate in the factual basis using the tapu mo to two addressees He uses the term sea,
glossed as sir by Tongans (although they say it is a borrowing of the term chair
from English) seven times in this address. The police prosecutor also uses the lower
level honorifics mea, here a substitute for advice, and feituuna, glossed by Tongans
as the second person pronoun you. In the fifth transcript excerpt on page 88, the
landowner/witness whose land was trespassed on also uses the tapu mo respectful
address to three addressees. He uses the term sea twice.
In the church service prayers, it is God who is addressed by the minister. Tapu mo
has already been used by the minister in his initial address to the congregation and
he does not use this to address God in prayer. In transcript Excerpt 7 below, I show
three instances in which the higher level honorific Afiona, glossed by Tongans as
you, is used to address God in prayer. The honorifics are in bold. In addition I have
underlined the other forms of address used in these utterances in both Tongan and
English to show the multiplicity of forms of address that occur in these contexts. In
prayers, God is not just addressed initially, but repeatedly in these ways.

7)Addressing God in prayer in church

a.Oku mau hanga atu Eiki ki he Afiona. . . .
We are all looking to you Lord . . .
b.Ko e oseni ofa e Afiona.
Thou art an ocean of love.
c.Ofa Eiki, oua naa ke tuku ke mau tuenoa, ka ke tau kaunga mo e Afiona.
Love us Lord, do not (you) let us be destitute, but let us work with you.

Note that in example c. a regular pronoun, ke, is used as well as Afiona and Eiki.
Clearly not just honorifics are used to address God in the way Tongan language
ideology would indicate.
In a comparison of the lower and higher levels of honorification in these examples,
the key honorific terms are those glossed as you: feituuna for the magistrate and
Afiona for God. Feituuna is made up of the everyday word feituu, place and the
spatial deictic na, which is associated with a second person addressee and conveys
spatial distance from the speaker. Afiona is made up of afio plus na. Afio is used as
a substitute for a variety of everyday words in speech to or about God or the King and
Method in Anthropological Discourse Analysis 93

this word has no everyday meaning. Although both terms are glossed by Tongans as
you in English, grammatically they are treated as full nouns in Tongan. In each of the
three examples above, Afiona is part of a noun phrase and is preceded by a definite
article. Definite articles do not occur with true pronouns in Tongan. This means that
these honorifics have the characteristics of both second person and third person
forms, both of which are common cross-linguistically in honorific systems.
More generally these examples provide evidence that honorifics are part of a more
complex elaboration of address in rhetorical Tongan. This elaboration is done through
tapu mo, multiple terms of address in a single utterance including honorifics, and
multiple utterances with explicit forms of address that include honorifics.
In this second example illustrating the comparison of interactional units in dis-
course analysis, I have compared individual lexical items, the utterances in which
they appear, and the genres and situations in which the utterances appear. In my
examination of this chiefly honorific register I have also relied on my broader ethno-
graphic experience of a range of public occasions characterized by the use of rhetori-
cal Tongan, as well as close work on the identification of honorifics with my
transcribers and translators in Tonga and with three Tongan sisters in Tucson.

2. The Broader Ethnographic Context of Discourse Analysis

I have shown how units of interaction are compared with each other and related to
other forms of ethnographic knowledge to arrive at an understanding of how lan-
guage constitutes social realities through discourse structure. It is necessary to add to
this picture, however, by pointing out that this direct comparison of forms of talk took
place within a broader theoretical and substantive focus that drove decisions at many
points in the research process. These earlier decisions determined what situations and
forms of talk were represented in my database and available to me. My main purpose
at the time this project was designed was to explore the nature of the way the Tongan
language was used to create legal realities, and to compare how Tongans did this with
the way U.S. citizens created legal realities in English in the Tucson courts, which I
knew well from earlier research. My thinking was that I had to collect and compare
speech from a variety of legal and non-legal settings in order to be able to make claims
about the nature of legal speech. Over a two-year period three of us from the
University of Arizona recorded approximately one hundred hours of speech and
supervised the transcription, translation, and computer entry of approximately half of
that set of recordings in the field, working with bilingual Tongans. Ultimately then
what one can analyze and how it can be analyzed depends on how research was
conceptualized in the first place, what motivated decisions about what kind of data to
collect, and what motivated decisions about what data to further process.
One is, however, never confined to ones transcripts, to the smaller subset of texts
that are an analytical focus at a given point in time. No analysis of transcripts ever
rests on the transcripts alone. Here I have distinguished understandings that come
from a given transcript of a recording of a unit of analysis, understandings that come
from comparing interactional units with each other, understandings that come from
direct participation in the lives of the people one is living among, and understandings
that come from other systematic methods of data collection and analysis.

3. Discussion and Conclusion

Linguistic anthropology is an empirical discipline. Even though it may be appealing
to be heavy on theory and light on data, ultimately it is necessary to have evidence for
our claims, to give those claims authority and reliability. We are building a theory of
the relations among language, culture and communication. It is central to the nature
of language that it is used to constitute social life through processes of communication
in face to face interaction. If one is trying to understand the nature of the relationship
between language and culture, then methodologically it makes sense to give priority
94 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

to data that comes from communication in socially occurring face-to-face interaction

because that is the locus of the constitution of social processes. When we record
multiple instances of a given human activity, we are documenting the replicability of
that social and linguistic process. When we compare units of interaction with each
other we are making an inquiry into what is reproduced, what is reiterated, what is
new and what is the same in multiple instances of communication in face to face
interaction.
Ultimately a theory of the relation between language, communication, and culture
rests on the comparison of units of interaction to identify their similarities and
differences. This is a basic disciplinary strategy for determining how language con-
stitutes sociocultural processeshow we innovate, replicate, and transform human
social life through language.

Acknowledgments
An earlier version of material in this paper were presented at workshop on anthro-
pological methods of discourse analysis at the University of Michigan in May 2012,
funded by NSF Grant 1157160 to Barbra Meek and Susan Philips. The paper also
incorporates material from my introductory comments at the SLA Presidential Panel
on Frontiers in Methodology in Linguistic Anthropology, AAA Meetings in San
Francisco, November 2012. I am particularly grateful to Barbra Meek, Niko Besnier,
and Judy Irvine for our conversations about methodology in linguistic anthropology.

Notes
1. Lexical items in bold are honorifics.
2. All of these elements appear in Tucson Superior Court guilty pleas when a defendant is
told what the crime is that he is being charged with, and pleading guilty to (Philips 1998). My
own knowledge of American law from law school courses and my research in the Pima County
Superior Court also entered into my identification of these basic discourse units in the Tongan
data. This means that comparison between U.S. data and Tongan data was part of my analysis.
3. I have always been relatively restrained in the use of this method of debriefing. When you
make recordings that people then listen to, it alters the way information comes into a commu-
nity and can even motivate people to intervene somehow in events related to the events
recorded earlier.
4. Taumoefolau (2013) offers an alternative related vision of Tongan speech registers.

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