Dell Hymes and the ethnography of speaking

Question 1

What is Ethnography?

Answer 1

Studying daily life in a given speech community and interpreting the relationship(s) between language and social behaviour(s)

Question 2

Emic

Answer 2

insider

Question 3

Etic

Answer 3

Outsider

Question 4

What is communicative competence?

Answer 4

Its ability to participate in its society as not only a speaking, but also a communicating member

Question 5

John Gumperz (1968) definition of a speech community?

Answer 5

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.

Question 6

What does an ethnographer study?

Answer 6

Rules of speaking in a speech community or culture

Question 7

What are speech events?

Answer 7

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’.

Question 8

What is the SPEAKING grid

Answer 8

S = setting and scene
P = participants
E = ends
A = act sequence
K = key
I = instrumentalities 
N = norms
G = genre

Question 9

Setting

Answer 9

The time and place of a speech act

The physical circumstances

Question 10

Scene

Answer 10

The psychological setting or cultural definition of a setting

Question 11

Participants

Answer 11

Refers to the relationships between speakers and their audiences

Question 12

Ends

Answer 12

Are the outcomes/purposes/goals of a speech event

Question 13

An act sequence

Answer 13

An act sequence refers to the form and content of a speech event

Question 14

Key

Answer 14

The key of a speech act refers its tone, manner, or spirit in which it is conveyed

Question 15

Instrumentalities

Answer 15

Instrumentalities refers to the form or style of a speech act

Question 16

Norms

Answer 16

Norms specify when speech occurs, how it occurs, how often it occurs, who has the right to speak and when.

Question 17

Genre

Answer 17

Genre refers to the type of speech event or speech act

a unique combination of stylistic structure and mode

Question 18

What questions are the ethnography of communication concerned with?

Answer 18

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)

Question 19

Means of speech

Answer 19

The features that enter into styles, as well as the styles themselves

Question 20

Speech economy

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

What does Hymes mean by speech community?

Answer 21

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).

Question 22

Speech situations

Answer 22

Hymes means socially-contextual situations like ‘ceremonies, fights, hunts, meals, lovemaking, and the like’ (Hymes, 1972b: 56).

Question 23

Why do performances have the potential to characterize cultural competence vis-à-vis behaviours:

Answer 23

Because the are able to able to interpret behaviour, being report on behaviour, and repeat behaviour.

Question 24

What is the most important distinguishing feature of ethnographic approaches?

Answer 24

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.

Question 25

How does Stephen Levison define the ethnography of speaking?

Answer 25

As ‘the cross-cultural study of language usage’

Question 26

What are the relevant units for an investigation of rules of speaking?

Answer 26

1. Speech situation
2. Speech event
3. Speech act

Question 27

What are one of the potential problems of observing your own culture.

Answer 27

The observer may take things for granted instead of seeing them clearly and describing them explicitly.

Question 28

What is latching?

Answer 28

Changes of speaker occur with no overlap or perceptible gap

Question 29

Systematic Potential Competence

Answer 29

whether and to what extent something is not yet realized

Question 30

Appropriate Competence

Answer 30

whether and to what extent something is in some context suitable, effective or the like

Question 31

Feasible Competence

Answer 31

whether and to what extent something is possible

Question 32

What contentions Coulthard ha towards speech acts?

Answer 32

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.

Question 33

Hymes argues that there at least four participant roles in speech

Answer 33

addressor, speaker, addressee and hearer or audience,

Question 34

Real indirect utterances depend on two factors

Answer 34

a trigger, the breaking of a Gricean maxim

an inference.

relevance: the soup’s a bit bland (pass the salt)