Discourse and Pragmatics

Week 8

Context and Culture

Text and Context

• People don’t say what they mean

• People don’t mean what they say

• How do we understand one another?

• Expectations about communication (Maxims)

• Expectations about sequencing (Adjacency Pairs)

• ‘Co-text’

Text and Context

• CONTEXT

• Expectations about the social situation• What kinds of things people are supposed to say to

whom in different situations• Relationship to scripts• ‘Coherence’

• Cultural Models• What is a dim sum? • What is a good boyfriend

The Ethnography of Speaking

Noam ChomskyCompetence vs. Performance(grammatical competence)

Dell Hymes

Communicative Competence

Speech Situation

Hymes

Speech Event

Speech Act

Speech Acts and Speech Events

Speech Event

Act Act Act Act

Question

• What does a member of a community of practice need to know to participate successfully in a speech event?

• What sort of communicative competence does s/he need to have?

Task

• Ethnographic data• Observation• Interviews with ‘informants’

• ‘Krumping’• Watch the video and discuss

• What members need to know to participate in this speech event

• How they learn it• What kinds of behavior might mark one as a non-

member

There’s a time for krumping and this isn’t it.

‘Speaking’

• Setting and Scene

• Participants

• Ends

• Act Sequence

• Key

• Instrumentalities

• Norms

• Genre

Setting and Scene

• Where the speech event is located in time and space

• "Setting refers to the time and place of a speech act and, in general, to the physical circumstances”

• Scene is the "psychological setting" or "cultural definition" of a scene, including characteristics such as range of formality and sense of play or seriousness

Participants

• Who takes part and what role they play

• Discourse roles and social roles

• ‘Ratified’ and ‘Unratified’ participants

• Speaker and audience (addressees, hearers, ‘over-hearers’, eavesdroppers

Ends

• Purpose or expected outcome

• Might be different for different participants

• Asking your boss for a promotion

• Going to the cinema

Act Sequence

• What acts (actions) are included and how they are arranged sequentially

Key

• Tone, manner, mood, spirit and how it is signalled or established

• Linguistic, paralinguistic and non-verbal cues

Instrumentalities

• Channel, media, languages and language varieties

• ‘Cultural tools’

Norms of Interaction

• Rules governing how acts (‘actions’) are produced and interpreted

• How participants are supposed to act and react

Genre

• What type (social category) does the speech event belong to

• What conventional forms are drawn upon

• Mixed genres, ‘blurry; genres

Speech Situation vs. Speech Event?

• Do the same rules of speaking apply throughout the entire segment?

Analysis vs. Description

• What are the speech events that occur in this community and what are their features?

• Why do these speech events occur in this way?

• What is the social and cultural significance of speaking in a certain way?

• Making connections between speech events and community organizations, practices, values

• ‘cookbook’ vs. ‘heuristic’

Examples• ‘Having a Kros’

• Setting• Participants• Ends

• A Pentecostal Church Meeting (Cameron)• Sequencing: When to say ‘hallelujah’• Members’ generalization vs. observation• Implicit vs. explicit knowledge• Participants?• Setting?• All components are to some extent discursively constructed

Task

• Watch the clip from an Evangelical Church Camp for children and apply the SPEAKING model to it

• Discuss any difference between how you perceive the event and how you think participants perceive it

• Children speaking in tongues

• Faith Healing

The Ethnography of Writing

• Internet Forums/Blogs

• Graffiti

• ‘Sky Writing’

The Ethnography of Reading

• Reading as a public ‘event’

• Choral reading• Notice reading• Newspaper reading• Book reading• Technologically

mediated reading