POLITICAL TALK: THEMATIC ANALYSIS OF A POLICY ARGUMENT *

Policy and the processes that go into i t s formulation and implementation are constituted by language. In this article, a linguistic and ethnographic approach to the study of "themes" is applied to the transcripts of some oral arguments by independent truckers at the Interstate Commerce Commission. The results show a portion of the underlying logic of the argument, a logic whose structure was minimally affected by the eventual policy decision. Copyright 1983 by The Policy Studies Organization.