Dell Hymes and the ethnography of speaking Flashcards
What is Ethnography?
Studying daily life in a given speech community and interpreting the relationship(s) between language and social behaviour(s)
Emic
insider
Etic
Outsider
What is communicative competence?
Its ability to participate in its society as not only a speaking, but also a communicating member
John Gumperz (1968) definition of a speech community?
Any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language usage.
What does an ethnographer study?
Rules of speaking in a speech community or culture
What are speech events?
The largest units for which one can discover linguistic structure” (Coulthard 1985: 42
activities which could not occur except in and through language, such as ‘argument’, ‘gossip’, ‘storytelling’.
What is the SPEAKING grid
S = setting and scene P = participants E = ends A = act sequence K = key I = instrumentalities N = norms G = genre
Setting
The time and place of a speech act
The physical circumstances
Scene
The psychological setting or cultural definition of a setting
Participants
Refers to the relationships between speakers and their audiences
Ends
Are the outcomes/purposes/goals of a speech event
An act sequence
An act sequence refers to the form and content of a speech event
Key
The key of a speech act refers its tone, manner, or spirit in which it is conveyed
Instrumentalities
Instrumentalities refers to the form or style of a speech act
Norms
Norms specify when speech occurs, how it occurs, how often it occurs, who has the right to speak and when.
Genre
Genre refers to the type of speech event or speech act
a unique combination of stylistic structure and mode
What questions are the ethnography of communication concerned with?
the questions of what a person knows about appropriate patterns of language use in his or her community and how he or she learns about it. (Farah, 1998: 125)
Means of speech
The features that enter into styles, as well as the styles themselves
Speech economy
Speech economy is a set of relationships within a speech community, the marketplace in which participants in speech use their means of speech, and those means of speech are in turn a constituent element of the speech economy.
What does Hymes mean by speech community?
common linguistic norms: ‘a community sharing rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech, and rules for the interpretation of at least one linguistic variety’ (Hymes, 1972b: 54).
Speech situations
Hymes means socially-contextual situations like ‘ceremonies, fights, hunts, meals, lovemaking, and the like’ (Hymes, 1972b: 56).
Why do performances have the potential to characterize cultural competence vis-à-vis behaviours:
Because the are able to able to interpret behaviour, being report on behaviour, and repeat behaviour.
What is the most important distinguishing feature of ethnographic approaches?
The aim is not just to collect ‘objective’ factual data about the group’s way of life, but to understand that way of life as group members understand it themselves.
How does Stephen Levison define the ethnography of speaking?
As ‘the cross-cultural study of language usage’
What are the relevant units for an investigation of rules of speaking?
- Speech situation
- Speech event
- Speech act
What are one of the potential problems of observing your own culture.
The observer may take things for granted instead of seeing them clearly and describing them explicitly.
What is latching?
Changes of speaker occur with no overlap or perceptible gap
Systematic Potential Competence
whether and to what extent something is not yet realized
Appropriate Competence
whether and to what extent something is in some context suitable, effective or the like
Feasible Competence
whether and to what extent something is possible
What contentions Coulthard ha towards speech acts?
Hymes doesn’t offer a list of speech acts, even for English, although ‘request’, ‘command’, ‘statement’ and ‘joke’ are used informally as examples.
A second linked problem is that Hymes, although warning that acts are not ‘identifiable with any single portion of other levels of grammar’, does not discuss how acts are related to the lexis and grammar which realize them; thus, when Saville-Troike reports another study in which an event opens with the sequence ‘greeting’-‘acceptance of greeting’ (p. 156) the reader does not know whether this is equivalent to ‘greeting’ -‘acknowledgement’ or significantly different.
A third difficulty arises from the fact that whereas other descriptions have at least three units of analysis, Hymes proposes only two and this places great strain on act. Hymes gives ‘greeting’ as an example of a speech act he has no way of showing that greetings typically consist of two paired utterances - indeed it is not at all clear whether he would regard the two utterances as a composite realization of the act ‘greeting’ or whether each utterance itself is an act.
Hymes argues that there at least four participant roles in speech
addressor, speaker, addressee and hearer or audience,
Real indirect utterances depend on two factors
a trigger, the breaking of a Gricean maxim
an inference.
relevance: the soup’s a bit bland (pass the salt)
