The "boomerang" effect of the radicalism in discourse analysis

the social discourses, but with a diverse theoretical-methodological option. The RDA
starts from the assumption that human beings produce discourses and representations of
the reality that are ever changeable in relation to the situations, by using various
interpretative repertoires.
“Interpretative repertoires are used to perform different sort of accounting tasks. Because people go
through life faced with an ever-changing kaleidoscope of situations, they will need to draw upon very
different repertoires to suit the needs at hand.”
(Potter & Wetherell, 1987, p.156)
Consequently the RDA is mainly interested in the study of the contextual variability
of the discourses and of the bond between the discourses and the contingent goals
suggested by the impersonal context. The SRT is interested in the study both of the
shared elements and of those dynamically different that characterise the discourses, i.e.
of those elements that make the discourse produced by the various social groups
recognisable and reveal the taking of position between the multiple and pluralist
prospects of the various social discourses.
“(...) linguistically mediated social representations to some extent are negotiable and border on our
imperfect knowledge of the world. What is made known by what is said in particular context of human
discourse is thus a considerable degree contingent upon negotiated specification of linguistically mediated
general drafts of contract concerning categorisation. Negotiated specification, moreover, allows for
adjustment of categorisations in accordance with private and contextually determined perspectives. And
mutual understanding will always entail a residual of presupposed commonality with respect of
interpretation or faith in a common world.”
(Rommetveit, 1984, p. 357-8)
Therefore, for the SRT each participant, although negotiating the meanings of the
communication in terms of the situational and immediate interactive context, aims at
expressing a point of view that reflects also previous social influences on the hereand-now
interaction. The SRT does not deny that the viewpoints may be negotiated,
justified or masked inside particular discussions and in terms of immediate particular
goals. The TRS merely retains that these points of view are nourished from even
previous discourses and social influences, that orient the discursive production
developed in the course of a specific interaction. If it is true that the discourses vary in
terms of the micro-temporal contexts, it is also true that, in many ways, these same
discourses reflect the points of view nourished by previously spoken discourses, reelaborated
in connection to a personal, social and collective memory of wider range and
in terms of semantic contexts activated by the imaginative capacities.
Thus come into play both the articulation between relational micro-contexts and
socio-cultural macro-context, and the role of the social and collective memory as well
as that of imagination.
The structural role of the context is theorised both by the RDA and by the SRT and in
both paradigms the context is brought back with priority to the common places of daily
life, rather than artificially recreated in laboratories with little ecological validity of the
research (although some researches based on DA are performed in the laboratory on adhoc
created groups and some developments of the SRT do not rule out also the
experimental approach, when the SRs are isolated in the research designs and treated as
independent variables). However, the context is considered in a fairly different way. The
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