1. Interactional Sociolinguistics
Varieties,
Week 11, Term 2
Goldsmiths, University of London

2. Interactional sociolinguistics
Small differences, big differences (Cameron 2001)
Contextualisation cues
Discourse markers
Intercultual (mis)communication; cross-talk
Methods: distributional analysis; controlled elicitation of judgements
Form and function problem

3. The analysis of spoken discourse: small differences, big difference
Doborah Cameron suggests that small and subtle variations in the way people speak can make a big difference in how people interpret spoken language
Why analyse spoken language?
Previous examples of the study of spoken discourse?

4. Interactional sociolinguistics
So far: correlation between linguistic features and social categories (social class, ethnicity, gender and age)
ways of organizing spoken interaction such as turn taking rules, who speaks first, second, acknowledging that you are listening to someone, agreement
‘the way people talk to one another – how they hold conversations, tell stories, make jokes, argue or tease one another’

5. Interactional sociolinguistics vs. variationist sociolinguistics
Naturally occurring speech
Context
Meanings/ functions of language- (not just distribution of forms)
Interest in the role of language in managing relationships between speakers
Qualitative rather than quantitative methods (a mix of methods is possible)

6. Interactional sociolinguistics
Interactional sociolinguistics (IS) is an approach to discourse analysis that has its origin in the search for replicable methods of qualitative analysis that account for our ability to interpret what participants intend to convey in everyday communicative practice. It is well known that conversationalists always rely on knowledge that goes beyond grammar and lexicon to make themselves heard. But how such knowledge affects understanding is still not sufficiently understood.

7. Doing ethnography
‘Doing ethnography’ in another culture involves first and foremost field work, including observing, asking questions, participating in group activities, and testing the validity of one’s perceptions against the intuitions of natives. Research design must allow an openness to categories and modes of thought and behavior which may not have been anticipated by the investigator. The ethnographer of communication cannot even presuppose what a speech community other than his own may consider to be ‘language’, or who or what may ‘speak’ it
(Muriel-Saville-Troike 1982), The Ethnography of Communication)

8. Conversation management
Beginning of research on Conversational turn-taking- Seminal paper Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson in 1974.
In ordinary spontaneous conversation how do speakers know when to start talking and when to stop
How do speakers coordinate their talk in order to achieve a smooth flow?

9. Conversation management
‘transition relevance places’- this is where an utterance is completed
Turn taking: Signalled by syntactic cues, intonation
Speaker selection / self selection
Assumptions: one person speaks at a time
What is the role of variation?

10. Conversation management: variation
Minimal responses/ backchannelling
(Mmh, yeah, right)
Form-function
Cooperation, involvement but – cross cultural variation
(e.g. Finland- silence is preferred)

11. Conversation management: variation
1. Maltz and Borker (1982) suggested that women use more minimal responses- cooperation
Form and function
Cross-cultural misunderstanding

12. Conversation management: variation
2. Japanese engineer tried to buy secrets from someone believed to be an American company representative – who was an undercover FBI agent:
Agent: You see these plans are very hard to get
Engineer: uh-huh
Agent:I’d need to get them at night
Agent:It’s not done easily
Agent:Understand
Roger Shuy (1993) Language Crimes

13. Multiracial Britain: Cross Talk
This old BBC-recording (one of originally ten) aims to capture the differences and difficulties involved in cross-cultural communication in 1970s Britain with particular emphasis on South Asians. Watch some of the sequences (e.g. post office encounter, benefits interview, job interview) and consider the following questions:
1) Which types of misunderstandings result from the different ways people from different ethnic groups use the English language in this video?
2) Are these examples still relevant today? Why (not)?
3) How can interactional sociolinguistics contribute to the analysis of intercultural (miscommunication) or cross talk?

14. Contextualisation cues (Gumperz 1982)
Ways of conveying complex information about what we mean
Paralinguistic cues, intonation, code-switching
(speaking in an ironic tone, softly and quickly to indicate that the message is confidential)

15. Indirectness
Deborah Tannen (1982) investigated cultural preferences for indirectness among Greek, Greek-American and Anglo- American speakers.
Wife and husband want to decide if they will go to a party. The wife asks and the husband responds: OK
What does OK mean in this context?
2 axes of variation (ethnicity and gender)
Greeks (indirect option), Anglo-American (direct), Greek- Americans (in the middle); Anglo-Americans – significant gender differences

16. More terminology – towards analysis
discourse markers – features such as ‘oh’, ‘well’, ‘like’, ‘sort of’, ‘y’know’, ‘I mean’ which are inserted within and in between utterances and function in different ways; e.g. as ‘hedges’ (reducing force of utterance’, as ‘pause fillers’ (filling silence to give time to think); their function needs to be determined in context, e.g. ‘well’ can function as a initiator (to mark the beginning of a turn: well, I don’t know) or as a hedge/marker of a dispreferred response ‘well, I’d love to join you but’
false starts – an utterance is started one way, unfinished and then abandoned for another structure: ‘I wanted to (.) I wish I could have…

17. More terminology – towards analysis
repetitions – self evident: ‘I wanted to (.) I wanted to talk to you….’
recycling – similar to repetition but involves a hitch in production; the initial sounds are repeated before the speaker manages to get the word out. This is not the same as stammering/stuttering. ‘I w. wanted to talk’
self-corrections – speaker realises that s/he has made some sort of (grammatical) mistake and corrects it: ‘I wants (I mean) I wanted to…’

18. Questions What are the aims of interactional sociolinguistics (IS)?
What type of language features/variables does IS investigate?
What is the form-function problem?
What are the contributions of IS to exploring inter- ethnic/cultural communication?
Give some examples of discourse markers and discuss their possible functions
Define and give examples of ‘contextualisation cues’ (Gumperz 1982) and discuss the role they play for discourse analysts taking an interactional sociolinguistic approach.

19. Questions
Explain the IS methods of distributional analysis and controlled elicitations of speakers’ judgements. Give examples from Cameron
List some differences between written and spoken language and discuss language users’ (including your own) attitudes towards these differences.
What are the overlaps and differences between IS and the Ethnography of Speaking/Communication?
What are some of the problems with the methodology adopted by Interactional Sociolinguists?