ENCOUNTERS, FRAMES AND FOOTING

Question 1

MODELS OF INTERACTION

Answer 1

Erving Goffman: language as one part of interaction or encounter. Messages are given intentionally and given off unintentionally. People take on a self only in relation to other people, as a set of performances.
Theatre metaphor:
    - activity type = performance
    - Speakers = actors, audience
    - projected self-image = mask

Question 2

ENCOUNTERS

Answer 2

Co-presence: people are co-present in a space where they are mutually aware of each other and constantly take account of each other.
Focused encounter: participants are engaged in a ‘special kind of mutualactivity that can exclude others’. Participants are involved with each other through posture, gaze and talk. Beginning and ending of the engagement are clearly marked.
Unfocused encounter: participants communicate ‘merely by being in the same social situation’.

Question 3

ATTENTIONAL TRACKS

Answer 3

Encounters contain a main-line/story-line track and several other tracks:
Civil inattention: displaying signs that show one is not part of an interaction.
Directional track: signs we give that we are engaged in interaction, including looking at others, addressing them, asking and answering questions.
Disattend track: signs we give off that are not officially part of the interaction but don’t get noticed - those signs can be used intentionally.

Question 4

REGIONS

Answer 4

any place that is bounded to some degree by barriers to perception.
Front region: ‘the place where the performance is given’, the “stage”
Back region: where a team rehearses and prepares its performance – ‘a place…where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted’

Question 5

FRAMES

Answer 5

cognitive: the mental representation or structured knowledge that speakers have of an encounter
interactional: context for which utterance is constructed as meaningful
Goffman (1974): interactional frames have an impact on how encounters are understood and organised => contextualisation cues: participants need to signal to others which frame they are in through non-verbal + linguistics signals

Question 6

TERMS OF ADDRESS

Answer 6

these cue the degree of formality, respect, closeness or solidarity between speakers: these are highly culture specific and they depend on the speaker’s intention

Question 7

FOOTING AND ROLES

Answer 7

who addresses who and in what capacity

Question 8

LINGUISTIC IMPLICATIONS

Answer 8

• Importance of address terms, greetings, partings
• Relevance of gaze and body posture to talk
• Contextualisation cues that signal changed frames
• Shifts of language or register for different audiences or purposes
• Constant facework in these moves