Scary Words # 7: “Interpretive Repertoires”

(Book: Wood, L.A. & Kroger. R.O. (2000). Doing Discourse Analysis: Methods for Studying Action in Talk and Text. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.)


“Interpretive repertoires are general discursive resources that can be used by speakers and writers to construct versions of events, actions, persons, internal processes, and so on and to perform a variety of other actions (e.g., the justification of particular practices such as discrimination). Such repertoires have been defined in a variety of ways, for example, “systemically related sets of terms, often used with stylistic and grammatical coherence, and often organized around one or more central metaphors” (Potter, 1996, p. 116).” (pp. 43-44)