Discourse and Pragmatics

The Ethnography of Speaking

Mediated Action

• Action determines discourse

• Discourse determines action

• Cultural Tools

• Social Practices

• Communities of Practice

• Agency

A Workplace Interaction

• Actions• Cultural Tools• Agency• What’s the point? • Understanding how actions determine discourse• Understanding how discourse determines action• The Pressure of Practice• The Funnel of Committment

What are the ‘rules’ for social practices

• Different in different communities• Rules about• Who says what to whom, when, and how• The expected outcomes of our

communication• Whose in charge and who is not• Who is allowed into the conversation• What it means to be a competent member of

the community

Ethnographic Based Discourse Analysis

• ‘Rules’ not RULES

• Participant observation• Insider vs. Outsider

The Ethnography of Speaking

Noam ChomskyCompetence vs. Performance(grammatical competence)

Dell Hymes

Communicative Competence

Speech Situation

Hymes

Speech Event

Speech Act

Situations, Events and Acts

• Speech Situation• All the actions going on and cultural tools available to

take them• NEXUS OF PRACTICE

• Speech Event• Instance of a social practice in which discourse plays

a primary role• Argument, debate, lecture, chat, mahjonng game

• Speech Acts• Lower order actions• Greeting, Thanking, etc.

Speech Acts and Speech Events

Speech Event

Act Act Act Act

Question

• What does a member of a community of practice need to know to participate successfully in a speech event?

• What sort of communicative competence does s/he need to have?

Task

• Ethnographic data• Observation• Interviews with ‘informants’

• ‘Krumping’• Watch the video and discuss

• What members need to know to participate in this speech event

• How they learn it• What kinds of behavior might mark one as a non-

member

‘Speaking’

• Setting and Scene

• Participants

• Ends

• Act Sequence

• Key

• Instrumentalities

• Norms

• Genre

Setting and Scene

• Where the speech event is located in time and space

• "Setting refers to the time and place of a speech act and, in general, to the physical circumstances”

• Scene is the "psychological setting" or "cultural definition" of a scene, including characteristics such as range of formality and sense of play or seriousness

Participants

• Who takes part and what role they play

• Discourse roles and social roles

• ‘Ratified’ and ‘Unratified’ participants

• Speaker and audience (addressees, hearers, ‘over-hearers’, eavesdroppers

Ends

• Purpose or expected outcome

• Might be different for different participants

• Asking your boss for a promotion

• Going to the cinema

Act Sequence

• What acts (actions) are included and how they are arranged sequentially

Key

• Tone, manner, mood, spirit and how it is signalled or established

• Linguistic, paralinguistic and non-verbal cues

Instrumentalities

• Channel, media, languages and language varieties

• ‘Cultural tools’

Norms of Interaction

• Rules governing how acts (‘actions’) are produced and interpreted

• How participants are supposed to act and react

Genre

• What type (social category) does the speech event belong to

• What conventional forms are drawn upon

• Mixed genres, ‘blurry; genres

Speech Situation vs. Speech Event?

• Do the same rules of speaking apply throughout the entire segment?

Ethnography of Speaking vs. Mediated Discourse Analysis

MDA E of S

Practices and Actions Speech Events and

Speech Acts

Cultural Tools Instrumentalities, Genre, Setting, Key

Focus on Agency Focus on Competence

Focus on all human action Focus on ‘communicative action’

Analysis vs. Description

• What are the speech events that occur in this community and what are their features?

• Why do these speech events occur in this way?

• What is the social and cultural significance of speaking in a certain way?

• Making connections between speech events and community organizations, practices, values

• ‘cookbook’ vs. ‘heuristic’

Examples• ‘Having a Kros’

• Setting• Participants• Ends

• A Pentecostal Church Meeting (Cameron)• Sequencing: When to say ‘hallelujah’• Members’ generalization vs. observation• Implicit vs. explicit knowledge• Participants?• Setting?• All components are to some extent discursively constructed

Task

• Watch the clip from an Evangelical Church Camp for children and apply the SPEAKING model to it

• Discuss any difference between how you perceive the event and how you think participants perceive it

The Ethnography of Writing

• Internet Forums/Blogs

• Graffiti

• ‘Sky Writing’

The Ethnography of Reading

• Reading as a public ‘event’

• Choral reading• Notice reading• Newspaper reading• Book reading• Technologically

mediated reading