ON ERVING GOFFMANN.

Erving Goffman had a fullness of perspective on the social world, an inveterate taste for the texture of social reality. These qualities drew him into the orbit of the linguistic turn, and the companionship of linguists; yet he remained always his own man, as much a critics as anything else. From first to last his own vision of an intact sphere of reality governed his participation. It can be seen in his first paper to signal his involvement in a loose confederation at Berkeley in the early 1960s, one that became the basis of a continuing network of sociolinguistic activity. The paper, The Neglected Situation, was his contribution to a symposium at the 1963 meetings of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, California, and was published the next year in a special number of the American Anthropologist. In this paper, as in his conversation at the time, Erving welcomed the emerging attention to the social dimension of language, but issued a warning. Research that correlated this or that aspect of speech with this or that aspect of participant and setting would entail an infinite ingress. One would always be entering upon the social reality of speech without ever encompassing it. States of talk have their own constraints and configurations that are not reducible to partial correlation.