World of English
Florafoza
U214BFirstTutorialCommunicatinginEnglish--Chapter1TalkinginEnglish.pptxU214B Talking in English
Chapter 1
What is talk? Introduction
What is talk/ conversation?
What does the meaning of a spoken utterance depend on? What role does what is said has as opposed on how things are said/paralanguage?
What are language practices and what is the language practice approach to studying language focus on?
What is discourse analysis?
What are some variables of context that make a difference in our linguistic and cultural interpretation of talk?
Introduction – Language practices & discourse analysis
Communication in this course is going to be viewed in terms of language practices: routines or activities in which people take part for particular purposes (e.g. finding something out, persuading somebody to do something or simply building relationships with other people). A language practices approach focuses on how language is part of our daily routines and
how it functions to help us get things done
Establish and maintain relationships
Express creativity and playfulness
Sometimes focus will be on the surface form of what people have said or written, looking carefully at the way people use language. This approach is called discourse analysis (p.6) and it has its conventions in transcription (p.15) of speech.
Introduction: Context
This chapter will focus on ways in which people use spoken English to communicate and interact. Context (p.6) is a major concept/ factor in dealing with spoken (and any other form) of communication. Context refers to the physical location and social circumstances in which a particular example of language use occurs. Context includes the following (overlapping) elements, all of which will influence the use and interpretation of particular words or phrases:
the physical surroundings
The relationship between the speakers
Their past shared experience, and current goals
The social events of which the interaction is a part
If applicable, the institutional setting (e.g. if the interaction takes place in somebody’s place of work, or if one or more of the participants is speaking in an official or professional capacity)
Broader cultural values and expectations.
** In order to understand the function and meaning of any spoken exchange, we need to know the values held by the speakers and their expectations about language use in that particular cultural context. (cf Aboriginal society- Diane Eades, Reading B/ Study by Tannen / contrast between Arabs and British people at dinner table)
Introduction
Emanuel Schegloff (1999) defines conversation as the specific kind of talk that people engage in when their spoke interaction is not organized by institutional rules. An example of conversation is how people talk in the playground or schoolyard (where there are no rules, enabling conversation to occur). People talk, without engaging in conversation, in the classroom (where there are rules about who speaks , when and in what way), as well as in job interviews, legal hearings and service encounters (Mayor and Allington 7).
The structure and function of talk
The structure of talk is characterized by:
inexplicit references
Unfinished and overlapping utterances which are different from what is expected in written grammar
What is considered ungrammatical in writing may be exactly grammatical and appropriate in conversation.
Linguists Roland Carter and Michael McCarthy, as well as Douglas Biber and colleagues have recognized through examination of computerized data that spoken English has its own distinctive grammar.
Michael Bakhtin emphasizes that ‘everyday talk’ is dialogic: “people constantly (although often implicitly) refer to what previous speakers have said, anticipate what they might say next and assume a large amount of shared experience.’
The anthropologist Malinowski refers to how small talk or “phatic communion” is an expected part of conversation openings, used to bind people together and to establish an interactional framework for the encounter.
The structure and function of talk
Roman Jakobson argued that a speech event fulfills both a referential function and a phatic function (dealing with social relationships) .
Michael Halliday calls these functions the ideational and interpersonal functions of language.
the ideational function includes giving information and getting things done, whereas the interpersonal functions are infused in talk and maintain or establish new relations, especially at the beginning and the end of talk between the two or more interlocutors.
J.L.Austin realized that in ‘saying something (e.g. ‘hello’), a speaker is usually also doing something (… perhaps greeting somebody). Austin referred to actions that are carried out through speaking as speech acts.
The structure and function of talk
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, however, argues that more attention should be paid to the social conditions that make particular speech acts possible. The most powerful speech acts require particular institutional contexts and are not authorized for every speaker to perform.
Another criticism of speech act theory is that it relies on invented or remembered examples instead of working with recordings of real talk. In an attempt to understand how people actually use spoken language to communicate, sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson developed the discipline of conversation analysis, which examines naturally occurring talk in an extremely detailed and methodical way.
Harvey Sacks began his work in conversation analysis, by noticing the ways in which spoken interaction could go wrong when people rang into the helpline at a psychiatric hospital. This set him thinking about the implicit cultural rules that underlie the conduct of talk. (See example in Reading A: Rules of conversational sequence)
More on: structure and function
Opening and closing of a conversation:
Harvey Sacks talks about ‘procedural rules’ (‘rules of etiquette’) which people tend to follow when one person addresses another. The first speaker has the social right to choose the form of address, and that there are then predictable ‘returns’ that the second speaker may routinely choose from to fill the next speaker ‘slot’.
Sacks refers to adjacency pairs. In response to the first part of the adjacency pair by the first speaker, such as a greeting to be followed by a reciprocal greeting or a question to be followed by an answer, the second party realize that they ‘properly ought’ to respond with the second part.
Conversation analysis refer to this ‘proper’ way of responding as the preferred response. Sacks illustrates that a speaker does not always get the preferred response – for example, a question may be followed by a change of topic or a greeting by silence. This is referred to as a dispreferred response – a response that the first speaker would not be assumed to expect.
Structure and Function Opening & Closing
Openings usually include some of the following typical pairs of utterances: an offer or invitation, followed by either acceptance or refusal; an apology or a compliment followed by either acceptance or rejection; a directive, followed by either compliance or refusal; a reprimand, followed by either apology or retaliation, and so on.
Openings always include ‘phatic communion’.
There are also important rituals for closings and withdrawing from the roles involved in a conversation.
Conversation endings, such as saying goodbye properly, are usually repetitive to achieve Emphasis on solidarity at the closing point of an encounter:
Speakers often express evaluations of their time together (‘It was a great evening’ / ‘Thank you again’/
The person initiating the closing often cites an external reason for needing to go or effaces her-or himself in some way (e.g. taking up your time; …)
Turn taking
Conversation analysts show that everyday conversations have an organized (and often orderly) structure, despite the fact that they are unrehearsed and spontaneous.
Speakers usually turn take turns and overlap (speak simultaneously) to a minimum degree; regardless of context, speakers need to and usually try to cooperate with one another if the conversation is not to break down. Turn taking can be done through many means including:
Adjacency pairs
Grammatical knowledge and knowledge of paralinguistic cues, such as intonation and eye contact.
Interlocutors (two people speaking to each other) respond at the end of a unit of speech rather than in the middle. A the end of each unit comes what Sacks calls a transition relevance place (usually abbreviated as TRP). The speaker may pause very briefly for a response, but it is equally likely that other speakers (having anticipated the opportunity) will come in with their next turn, perhaps resulting in a slight overlap.
An overlap before a transition relevance place may be considered an interruption.
Cross-reference: Bourdieu’s concept of authority in speech acts/ Activity 1.3
Politeness and interpersonal meaning
Erving Goffman, an American sociologist introduced the term face to refer to how people manage their own and other people’s self-image. Loss of face for any speaker is disruptive and my need to be ‘repaired’; for instance by rephrasing of a comment or by an explicit apology.
Others refer to what is called face work, which may involve strategic talk to boost or maintain status: an aspect of interpersonal function of language use. Thus speech acts are referred to as face threatening (possibly causing someone to lose face) or face saving (enabling a speaker to escape from potential loss of face.)
Politeness and interpersonal meaning
Clear examples of face work can be noticed in openings and especially closings;
Politeness involves turn taking, and it also includes terms of address and degrees of directness and formality. These vary according to people’s relative status, the degree of social distance between them and the extent of their solidarity with one another.
Terms of address:
In some languages the relationship between speakers is encoded grammatically; for example the distinction between formal and informal ‘you’ in many European languages, or in Japanese the use of distinctive verb endings. Arabic is another example.
In English there used to be a distinction between informal ‘thou/ thee’ and formal ‘you’.
Terms of Address
English now uses terms of address preceding nouns;
Terms of address may indicate
relation to the speaker (aunty, mum, dad, etc.)
Profession
Nicknames
Gender
The sociolinguistic rules that tell us who has the right to use which term and to whom depend on :
Difference in status between speakers [age, social position..]
How well they know each other
The formality of the situation [somebody’s sister/ brother at one’s workplace]
The cultural and linguistic context [e.g. significance of using full name vs. full name, first name ...]/ [frequency of using ‘uncle, aunty in new Englishes as opposed to use by British or American English speakers. ]pp.18-20
Terms of address can also be used to insult someone, such as the example by Ervin-Tripp, the policeman addressing the African-American doctor as ‘boy’ although he had made it clear that he is ‘Dr. Poussaint.’ (p.19)
Communicative Strategies & Conversational Styles
A conversational style refers to a combination of features relating to the meaning and management of conversation, including:
prosody (rhythm and intonation),
overlapping (how turn taking is managed and whether pauses are considered welcome or to be avoided/ whether interruptions are meant to encourage the other speaker or to stop him,
repetition,
use of laughter,
tolerance of noise and silence,
and ways of using anecdotes,
asking questions, linking topics and expressing particular emotions
( See Deborah Tannen’s analysis of the conversation of five friends and herself) (p.21)
as well as paralinguistic features such as gesture, stance and gaze.
Individuals have their particular personal conversational style – the way we use stories, or how private we are/ how much we share of our personal information
But cultural groups and gender groups can also have characteristic styles in terms of: questioning strategies, ways of seeking and expressing personal information, the role of pauses and silence.
Communicative Strategies & Conversational Styles
Characteristic features may have reaching effects if not used in the same way by people trying to talk to each other.
One area of variation is cultural differences: Diane Eades in Reading B, studies the Communicative strategies in Aborginal English
Eades suggests that the lack of personal privacy in the Aboriginal lifestyle may have led to an indirect verbal style. Aboriginal people, she argues are reluctant (not eager) to express personal opinions, supply information or account for actions directly. This indirectness is not unique to Aboriginal, but among them it is often achieved by:
the ‘multifunctional’ nature of utterances; for example, whether a question is also interpreted as a request for a favor –Are you going to use your English book this evening?
Aboriginal’s responses to white people’s directness in interactions often include ‘gratuitous concurrence’ a apparent agreement , while all that may be intended is that the conversation should move on.
-- this may create great misunderstanding, especially in cases of aboriginal integration in higher education.
Communicative Strategies & Conversational Styles
Another area of variation is gender differences:
Do you think there is a difference between the conversational styles of men and women?
It is argued that women are less competitive and more cooperative than men, and work harder to make the interaction run smoothly – for instance, by encouraging others to talk and using more face-saving politeness strategies.
Robin Lakoff: she argued that the difference is because women are brought up to occupy less powerful positions in society, and to display deference towards men, which they do through being more hesitant and indirect. Lakoff suggested that women use more tag questions (isn’t it? don’t you?) and more indirect polite forms (e.g. could you possibly?), intensifiers (e.g. this is very kind..), euphemisms and what she saw as general weaker vocab.
Goodwin: argued that men and women speak differently, not because of an asymmetrical power relationship between them, but because they are socialized into different gender subcultures as children through play. While boys played competitive, hierarchal games, that involved direct competition and verbal confrontation, girls played more cooperative groups and made more indirect suggestions.
More on : Gender Differences
Deborah Cameron: Men?? Women??
She argued earlier that male students in their conversation showed solidarity and were cooperative when talking about or to each other in private; gender is not expressed through the speaking style as much as topics. Both males and females showed more cooperative and less competitive styles in family contexts, including solidarity signaling features .
Recently (p.25 paragraph 2) Cameron has taken this further to argue that popular conceptions of variation across the gender divide are not supported by evidence; men and women are not alien to each other – she wrote a book called The Myth of Mars and Venus. She argues that there are more similarities than differences in the way both genders talk; she gives examples of cultures such as Madagascar and Papua New Guinea where men are recognized for their cooperative talk and women for their confrontational talk.
The style that men and women use to speak need not be explained by either ‘dominance’ or ‘difference’ in upbringing between the genders.
Cameron recommended to focus on social roles (instead of gender) to explain the predisposition to cooperative or competitive talk. Both men and women could express display more sympathetic, convivial style of language in the private sphere of family and close relationships.
Style, Identity and performativity
In analyzing someone’s conversational style, focus on individual linguistic features is less revealing or useful than focus on a combination of features. These language features serve to index (literally ‘point to’) a particular social identity on the part of the speaker.
Eckert and McConnel-Ginex argue that style and performance are part both of the formation and the expression of identity: each has a ‘toolbox’ of communicative resources both linguistic and paralinguistic that ‘produce a communicative style … to constitute the presentation of a persona of the self.’
In a multilingual context, speakers are able to draw on linguistic resources from more than one language, performing complex identities. Multilingual speakers in their everyday talk often use codeswitching between languages, whether to symbolically signal shared ethnicity or group allegiance with the person they are addressing or pragmatically to achieve certain effects or goals.
Style, Identity and performativity
In some communities a mixed code may be used routinely ; this practice has been termed plurilanguaging and calls the very idea of separate languages into question. In a purely English-medium conversation, the process of style variation is called style-shifting, whereby speakers adopt different accents or dialects or use a more or less formal register, in order to serve particular purposes or to achieve particular effects.
----- See example of code-switching in Extract 4, p.27; Activity 1.7
In the example of Anne and the two butchers we notice that a language change is sometimes deployed (used) to:
address a particular person
exclude other participants
reinforce a particular point
The purpose of code-switching is not only to communicate more effectively with the addressee, but also simultaneously to signal a symbolic allegiance to different parts of one’s identity. Conversationalists are adept/ apt at interpreting implicit references or implications in a conversation. .. Conversations are essentially collaborative communicative affairs between speakers and listeners.
Stories, accounts and identity
When people talk together, they often share experiences in the form of spoken narrative and each conversational storytelling has attracted a great deal of research interest.
William Labov and Waletzky argued that informal spoken narratives are composed of up to six kinds of ‘narrative clause,’ five of which occur in a predictable order:
Abstract: a brief preview of what the narrative is about.
Orientation: where and when the story took place and who was involved.
Complicating action: an unusual or unexpected action. Events are told in the order in which they happened
Resolution: the way in which the complicating action came to an end.
Coda: the end of the telling, which brings the focus back to present time;
Evaluation: the point of the story; why the story is important. While the other elements typically occur in the order above, evaluation can appear at any point within the story.
See Activity 1.8, p.30-31.
It has been argued that the order of these elements is not necessarily as such in a regular conversation, but only in an interviewer/interviewee scenario, as the interviewee creates all the missing frames and fills the gaps to the ‘attentive ears’ of the interviewer.
In regular conversation, this might not be the case, as speaker assumes knowledge of the events and instead of focusing on the actions themselves, and most of the talk is occupied with evaluating the events in moral and ethical terms (Bamberg 31).
Collaborative story telling
Speakers tell stories collaboratively. They use other people’s words, or present their judgments of situations they are describing. Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian literary critic, says taking on of other people’s voices is a common feature of language use. He suggests that whenever we take on a voice, we also take on an evaluative stance towards the voice, that is either aligning ourselves with that stance or distancing ourselves from it and disagreeing with it.
Recap the main concepts together
What is conversation/ talk?
How is talk different from written communication? What is the structure of talk?
What are the functions of talk? Why do people talk?
What characterizes openings and closings?
How can politeness be achieved? What is turn taking and how do people know when?
Do people have the same style in conversation? How & why do styles vary?
What is code-switching? Why do we resort to it and when?
Why & how do we tell stories? What matters in a story?
