ANT115 Language in Action

Derived from chapter 6 of Ottenheimer/Pine textbook!

indirection

the act of attempting to make a request without directly asking

• can also apply to accepting or declining offers

• not every group of speakers uses it or understands how it works

context

the larger cultural and social situation in which speech acts take place

linguistic competence

a speaker’s underlying ability to produce (and recognize) grammatically correct expressions in a language

communicative competence

a speaker’s ability to speak a language well in a variety of social situations

• designed to go beyond the restrictive definition of linguistic competence

symbolic capital

a form of linguistic “wealth” that provides access to linguistic and social power

• related to communicative competence

linguistic community

a group of people who share a single language variety and focus their identity around that language

community of practice

a group of individuals who interact regularly, developing unique ways of doing things together (e.g. clubs, families, organizations)

• timespan and topic of interaction can vary wildly; the idea is that members of these communities have shared established ways of speaking with each other

ethnography of speaking

an ethnography that focuses on describing and analyzing the ways that people use language in real situations

• same as ethnography of communication

ethnography of communication

an ethnography that focuses on describing and analyzing the ways that people use language in real situations

• same as ethnography of speaking

S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G

in the ethnography of communication: a set of basic areas that students and fieldworkers should attend to in order to understand how language is used in specific speech communities

• Setting/Situation, Participants, Ends, Act Sequence, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms, Genres

setting/situation

the location in which a conversation or speech event is taking place, as well as the overall psychological feeling of that place

participants

individuals who can or should be involved in various speech events or conversations and what is expected of various individuals in a speech event

ends

the reasons for which the speech event is taking place, or the goals that people may have in speaking in a particular situation

act sequence

the actual sequence of events in a speech act

speech act

the specific utterances that people make during a speech event (e.g. “Do your homework!”, “I’m sorry I didn’t do my homework.”, “Can you do my homework?” etc)

speech event

one or more speech acts involving one or more participants (e.g. exchanging greetings, making apologies, ordering food, etc)

speech situation

the entire setting or situation in which people speak (e.g. a class, a conference, a birthday party, a vacation, etc)

key

the mood or spirit in which communication takes place

instrumentalities

the channels that are used in a speech act (speaking, signing, writing, signalling) as well as the varieties of language that speakers use (language, dialect, register)

mutual intelligibility

the ability of speakers of different speech varieties to understand one another

• often used as a test for classifying speech varieties into dialects (mutually intelligible) versus languages (mutually unintelligible)

dialect

a specific variety or subdivision of a language, mutually intelligible to other speakers of that language (e.g. California English, Southern English, New York English, etc.)

• a way of speaking that is characteristic of a particular group of people

register

a variety of a language that is considered appropriate in specific situations (e.g. formal register, informal/casual register, scientific register, etc.)

norms

the expectations and ideologies that speakers have about appropriateness of language use

genres

different kinds of speech acts or events (e.g. lectures, conversations, jokes, lies, etc.)

conversation analysis

the close study of actual conversational exchanges

• conversation analysts often record and transcribe conversations to study act sequences and how people use them

discourse analysis

the study of how authority and power are distributed and negotiated in verbal exchanges

• general goal of discovering rules that legitimate particular conversational practices, as well as the linguistic ideologies that help to reinforce those practices

rich point

the moment when things “go wrong” or get complicated in speech analysis

M-A-R

an acronym used to describe the process of analyzing rich points

• Mistake —> Awareness —> Repair

mistake

recognizing that a rich point has occurred (M-A-R)

awareness

recognizing that different expectations or linguistic ideologies have caused the rich point to occur (M-A-R)

repair

in response to a rich point, developing new sets of expectations or new linguistic ideologies to use in communicating (M-A-R)