Week 7 The Ethnography of Speaking Schemas, Frames & Scripts

Question 1

Communicative competence

Answer 1

rules of speaking

Question 2

what is Ethnography of Communication

Answer 2

the analysis of communication within the wider context of the social and cultural practices and beliefs of the members of a particular culture or speech community

Question 3

what did Chomsky and Hymes say about competence?

Answer 3

linguistic competence (Chomsky)- he believed that everyone had innate knowledge of language and that we build rules off of that - difference between competence and performance

Communicative competence (Hymes)- in addition, people need communicative competence. People need rules for speaking and behaviour

Question 4

how may ethnographers investigate the rules of speaking?

Answer 4

Interactional frames and everyday scripts
• conventional ways of organizing talk (i.e. frames)
• e.g. lecture, debate, interview, conversation
• ritualistic (or scripted) ways of speaking
• e.g. greetings, service encounters
• ‘Have a nice day!’ ‘Did you find everything you were looking for today?’

Question 5

what are the levels of talk that we might focus on?

Answer 5

Units of speech
• Speech situations
e.g. family meals, church services, university lectures, seminars, workshops
• Speech events (aka ‘genres’)
e.g. arguments, storytelling, gossip, jokes
• Speech acts
e.g. greetings, apologies, requests, compliments

Question 6

what did Hymes create based on pinpointing the ‘rules of speaking’

Answer 6

S Situation: Time & space setting • physical circumstances, location, time of day, week, year

P Participants: Who, in what roles  speaker, addressee, audience, eavesdropper  age, ethnicity, social status, relationships to each other

E Ends: Goals, purposes • What is the intended function or outcome of the speech event? • What are the goals of the participants?.

A Act sequence: Form, content, order. What speech acts make up the speech event and in what order are they performed? (message form and content) 
Including features such as turn taking and overlapping

K Key: Tone or manner • Serious or joking, sincere or ironic, formal or informal etc.

I Instrumentalities: Channel/medium • Message form: verbal/non-verbal; spoken/written; notes, email, text; singing, gesture, signing etc.
• Nature of code; which language and which variety

N Norms: Interaction ‘rules’ • What the norms are for producing and interpreting speech within the cultural belief system
• Including common knowledge or relevant cultural presuppositions which allow inferences to be drawn

G Genre: ‘Type’ of communicative event Joke; story; lecture; gossip; seminar; sermon; news text; editorial; advertisement; problem-page; comic strip; novel

SPEAKING

Question 7

give a case study for Ethnography of communication

Answer 7

Community pharmacy

• customer looking for flu tablets
• receptionist has mild pharmaceutical training
• asks general questions about illness
• gives opinion on what customer should take
• tells them how to take it
• customer just agrees

Question 8

what did Goodwin and Duranti find about the dynamics of context

Answer 8

Neither physical nor social setting is fixed/immutable. These phenomena and their constraints are dynamically and socially constituted by activities (talk included) of the participants, which stand in a reflexive relationship to the context thus constituted

Question 9

difference between schemas, scripts and frames

Answer 9

Schemas – essentially individual, cognitive phenomena.
Scripts = more dynamic types of schemas or schemata through narrative representations of knowledge.
Frames – as interactional phenomena are necessarily social and can be linked to speech events.

Question 10

what is a schema

eg

Answer 10

data structures that we have in our minds.
A schema shared by everyone within a social group would be something like a prototypical version e.g. of ‘the university lecture’

Question 11

what is a frame

eg

Answer 11

based around actions and utterances of the participants

‘Erving Goffman (1963) distinguished as ‘focused interaction’ those occasions when two or more people openly join together to sustain a single common focus of concern.
… a single focus of concern must likewise be openly entered into when people play games together, dance together…

Question 12

what is a script

Answer 12

A script is a frame specialised to deal with event sequences; a script incorporates a standard sequence of events that describes a situation: our understanding as language hearers/readers is very much expectation-based

eg. A visit to the dentist has a script of specific events in sequence (which might start with giving one’s name to the receptionist and being asked to wait; finish with paying /or making a further appointment).

Question 13

Schemas, Frames and Scripts

Going to a restaurant for an evening meal

Answer 13

Schema: eats, drinks, talk, a treat

Frame: ‘activity-type’ may be celebratory, duty/work related, friendship, intimate

Script: booking a table in advance, getting appropriately groomed and dressed, turning up on time, ordering food and drink, talking, eating and drinking, (working out how to share the bill) paying, leaving a tip, etc.

Question 14

what are goals for talk

Answer 14

Tracy and Coupland 1990

• Task/instrumental/transactional goals:
- The overt ‘purpose’ of the interaction

• Relational goals:
- Connected with the relationship between the
participants

• Identity goals:
- Self-presentation, ‘face’ concerns

Question 15

Task-oriented talk vs relational talk

Answer 15

Task orientated
• Interactions can be focused on communicating information. eg. going to bank or doctors
• Some communication may be entirely task- oriented
e.g. Where is the milk? > On the top shelf

Relational talk
• But they can also function to build or nurture relations between people
• Whilst other communication could be seen as more relational (or entirely relational)- eg. filling time up, small talk

Question 16

discuss phatic communion

Answer 16

coined by Malinalski in 1972
- he lived with remote islanders in the pacific ocean
- they would use talk in different ways, for fishing, for eating etc
- task/ relational talk
- phatic communion =
“inquiries about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things – all such are exchanged, not in order to inform, certainly not in order to express any thought.”
-“ to a natural man, another man’s silence is not a reassuring factor, but, on the contrary, something alarming and dangerous”

Question 17

what is Phatic communion

Answer 17

“a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words”

Interpersonal, Social Function

Question 18

what did Tracy and Naughton say about phatic communion

Answer 18

‘Phatic communion is the closest relative to the lay concept of small talk. To quote Malinowski (1923: 318), the originator of the term, phatic communion “serves to establish bonds of personal union between people brought together by the mere need of companionship and does not serve any purpose of communicating ideas”.
Tracy and Naughton, 2000

Question 19

how does small talk save lives?

Answer 19

Samaritans, national rail and British transport police

- ‘if you see someone that might need help, trust your instinct and start a conversation. you could help save a life’

Question 20

how to locate small talk on the continuum

Answer 20

Holmes, 2000

Core —————–Work—————-Social———–Phatic business talk related talk talk communion
←——Small talk——-→

Question 21

Routine vs Ritual

Answer 21

(Kuiper, 1996)
Routine = more general (any repeated activity is
routine)
Ritual = ‘routines which have assumed socio-cultural significance’

Question 22

discuss greetings and partings

Answer 22

Firth, 1972
• ‘greeting is the recognition of an encounter with another person as socially acceptable.
• Parting, in a social sense, is the recognition that the encounter has been acceptable’ (Firth, 1972: 1)
• Firth (1972: 3) believed that such rituals were “formal procedures of a communicative but arbitrary kind, having the effect of controlling or regularising a situation”

Question 23

Three types of Conversational English Greetings

Answer 23

Firth
(1) Questions
•Formal
•Not requiring a literal answer
•Used by members of an older generation
‘How do you do?’
But what about: Alright? /What’s up?

(2) Interjections
•Less formal,
•More common in younger generation
•A straight recognition signal with no implied informational context, but tone may contain more illocutionary sense
“Hey” “Dude”

(3) Affirmations
•Fairly formal
•Gives rather than seeks information and modulates over time.
“Good morning/afternoon”
•A form of assurance, not necessarily a “truthful” statement.

Question 24

Greetings and Partings as Social Action

Answer 24

“greeting and parting behaviour may be termed ritual since it follows prepatterned routines …it is a system of signs that convey other than overt messages… and it has adaptive value in facilitating social relations’…
I see three major social themes, each connected with the concept of personality:
> Attention Producing
> Identification
> Reduction of Uncertainty”
(Firth, 1972)

Question 25

examples of Non-verbal Rituals

of Greeting and Parting

Answer 25

kissing, hugging, shaking hands

Question 26

formulaic language

Answer 26

verbal expressions that are fixed in form, often non-literal in meaning

Question 27

Examples of Formulaic Language (in greetings and partings)

Answer 27

How do you do?
• Goodmorning
• Have a seat
• How are you?
• I must go
• See you later
• Lovelytotalktoyou
• Bye bye