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Lecture 8

The document discusses the relationship between context, culture, and communication in discourse analysis, focusing on various models of context, including those by Firth and Halliday, and emphasizing the importance of communicative competence as proposed by Hymes. It highlights the need for ethnographic methods to analyze speech events and the subjective nature of context in understanding communication within different speech communities. The SPEAKING model by Hymes is presented as a framework for analyzing the components of speech events, emphasizing the interaction of various contextual elements.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
17 views22 pages

Lecture 8

The document discusses the relationship between context, culture, and communication in discourse analysis, focusing on various models of context, including those by Firth and Halliday, and emphasizing the importance of communicative competence as proposed by Hymes. It highlights the need for ethnographic methods to analyze speech events and the subjective nature of context in understanding communication within different speech communities. The SPEAKING model by Hymes is presented as a framework for analyzing the components of speech events, emphasizing the interaction of various contextual elements.

Uploaded by

Asma Elaheimr
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 22

05/12/2022

Discourse Analysis

Lecture Eight
Context, culture and communication

Lecturer
Prof Albashir Ahmed

Autumn 2022/2023

CONTEXT, CULTURE & COMMUNICATION


• What is context?
• The different approaches to spoken discourse focus
on different aspects of the circumstances under
which utterances are produced.
• Pragmatics focuses on the intentions of speakers
and the immediate conditions under which
utterances are produced (including the knowledge,
goals and status of those who produce them).
• Conversation analysis focuses on how talk
occurring before and after utterances creates the
circumstances for certain meanings to be produced.

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• Interactional sociolinguistics examines how


utterances are interpreted based on participant’s
relationship and what they are doing, which are
negotiated using face strategies & contextualization
cues.
• Malinowski (1923) argued that to understand the
words spoken, we must understand the situation in
which they were spoken and the significance of
relationships and activities involved to speakers.
• Meaning is transmitted not just through words, but
through the ways words are embedded into social
relationships, goals and activities, histories, and
beliefs, values and ideologies of a cultural group.

• The problem with this idea is determining exactly


which aspects of the situation or of ‘cultural
knowledge’ need to be taken into account in the
production and interpretation of utterances.
• ‘Context’ refers to the place and time of an
utterance, the color of the speakers’ clothing, their
political views or religious beliefs, etc.
• How does the discourse analyst figure out which
aspects of context are relevant to the production
and interpretation of discourse and which are not?
• More to the point, how do people immersed in
conversation figure this out?

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• The linguist John Firth (1957) proposed that context


can be divided into three components:
1. The relevant features of participants, persons,
personalities;
2. The relevant objects in the situation;
3. The effect of the verbal action.
• Firth’s formulation highlights central aspects of
context, but other elements are excluded like the
setting or time.
• Furthermore, although this model highlights
‘relevance of features and objects’ to the
communication being analyzed, it does not fully
explain how such relevance is to be established.

• The most famous model of context is developed by


the linguist Michael Halliday, who drew heavily on
the work of both Malinowski and Firth.
• For him,context consists of:
1. Field: the social action that is taking place;
2. Tenor: the participants, their roles and
relationships;
3. Mode: the symbolic or rhetorical channel and the
role which language plays in the situation.
• Halliday goes a bit further than Firth in explaining
the relationship between context and actual
language use with his concept of register.

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• By register, Halliday means the different ways


language is used in different situations in terms of
things like the content and degree of formality.
• The basic distinction of register is between spoken
language and written language.
• Halliday’s model of context, however, suffers some
of the same problems as Firth’s:
The three categories are not clearly defined (for
example, do social identities & membership in
social groups are subsumed under role or field).
Why should the physical mode (channel), the
rhetorical form (genre) and the role language
plays be subsumed under the same category?

• Context and competence


• Halliday explains context from a linguistic point of
view, seeing it as part of a language’s system of
‘meaning potential’. He argues…
• ‘There is no need to bring in the question of what
the speaker knows,’ … ‘the background to what he
does is what he could do – a potential, which is
objective, not a competence, which is subjective.
• In sharp contrast to this position is that of Hymes,
for whom the notion of ‘competence’ is central to a
model of context he called ‘the ethnography of
speaking’, or, as it is sometimes called, ‘the
ethnography of communication’.

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• Hymes focused on the interaction between


language and social life ‐ ways of understanding
language are related to social & cultural knowledge.
• Knowledge or mastery of the linguistic system alone
is not sufficient for successful communication.
• People also need to know and master various rules,
norms and conventions regarding what to say to
whom, when, where, and how — which he called
communicative competence. He asked….
• ‘What kinds of things do participants in particular
activities or speech events need to know in order to
demonstrate that they are competent members of a
particular speech community?’

• What Hymes meant by speech community was not


just a group who speak the same language, but who
share the rules and norms for using and interpreting
at least one language variety in particular contexts.
• Like Halliday & Firth, Hymes developed a model of
what, he thinks, the essential elements of context.
• Rather than just three components, Hymes’ consists
of eight, each components beginning with one of the
letters of the word ‘SPEAKING’.
• S = setting K = key
P = participants I = instrumentalities
E = ends N = norms of interaction
A = act sequence G = genre

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• The crucial difference between this model and the


others is that, for Hymes, these elements do not
represent objective features of context,
• Rather, they represent more subjective features of
competence, things about which speakers need to
know to be considered competent communicators .
• For Hymes, then, the ‘subjective’ nature of context
is not the weakness of his model, but, in a way, the
whole point of it.
• Even when the ‘objective’ aspects of context remain
the same, expectations about who should say what
to whom, when, where and how will still vary across
different communities of speakers.

• Objective aspects of context include the status of


the participants, the nature of the activity and the
semiotic modes being used.
• Understanding of the communicative competence
cannot be acquired with reference to the linguistic
system alone, or through the analysis of texts.
• What is of importance is not just the meaning
communicated and how it is communicated, but the
meaning communication itself has in different
situations with different people.
• Understanding this requires a different approach to
the analysis of discourse, an approach which is
summed up in the word ethnography.

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• Ethnography is a method developed in the field of


anthropology which is concerned with describing
the lived experiences of people in social groups.
• It involves not just analyzing the texts and talk that
they produce from a distance,
• Rather, it involves spending time with them,
observing them as they use language, and talking to
them about the meanings they ascribe to different
kinds of utterances and different kinds of behavior.
• Many of the approaches to discourse discussed
earlier have begun to incorporate ethnographic
fieldwork:

Genre analysts, for example, typically interview


members of discourse communities about the kinds
of texts they use and how they use them;
Critical discourse analysts are focusing not just on
how producers of texts express ideology and
reproduce power relations, but also on how readers
respond to these ideological formations;
Issues of cross‐cultural pragmatics are increasingly
being explored through ethnographic methods.

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THE SPEAKING MODEL


• Speech acts, speech events and speech situations
• The main unit of analysis for the ethnography of
speaking is the speech event.
• Speech event is a communicative activity that has a
clear beginning & a clear ending & in which people’s
shared understandings of the relevance of various
contextual features remain constant throughout the
event.
• Examples of speech events are religious
ceremonies, lessons, debates, and conversations.

• Speech events occur within broader speech


situations, and are made up of smaller speech acts
(e.g., greeting, questioning, promising and insulting)
• For example, a university lecture can be considered
a speech event which occurs within the speech
situation of a school day.
• It is made up of smaller speech acts like asking and
answering questions, giving explanations of certain
concepts, and even joking or threatening.
• Similarly, the speech event of a conversation may
occur within the larger speech situation of a party
and may include smaller speech acts like joking.

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Example: Speech act, speech event


and speech situation
.
Speech situation
Speech event

Speech act
Asking &
Answering

Lecture
School day

• The same speech act,(joking), can take place in


different speech events, & different speech events,
(conversation), can occur in different situations.
• What distinguishes a speech event from a speech
situation is not just its size and having clearer
boundaries but coherence:
• Participants approach speech events with
consistent sets of expectations, while expectations
about the relevant features of context may undergo
dramatic changes throughout a speech situation:
• Students eating lunch at the canteen, for example,
are likely to pay attention to different sorts of things
than they do in a lecture during the same day.

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• The way to distinguish between a speech situation


and a speech event, then, is to ask if the same rules
of SPEAKING apply throughout the phenomenon.
• If so it can be regarded as a speech event.
• SPEAKING
• The components of the SPEAKING model devised by
Hymes are not meant to provide an objective list of
those elements of context which need to be taken
into account by the analyst.
• Rather, they are guidelines which can be used to
find out what aspects of context are/are not
important and relevant from the participants’ view
point. These components are:

1. Setting, which refers to the time and place of the


speech event and any other physical circumstances
• Hymes also included the ‘psychological setting’ or
the ‘cultural definition’ of a scene.
• For example, a church has particular physical
characteristics, but it also has certain associations in
that when people enter a church they are
predisposed to speak or behave in certain ways.
• Thus, the component of setting can have an effect
on other components like key and instrumentalities.
2. Participants: according to approaches to spoken
discourse like conversation analysis & pragmatics,
participants are the speaker and the hearer.

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• Ethnographic work, however, indicates that besides


speakers and hearers most speech events also
involve audiences and bystanders.
• Besides identifying the relevant participants, the
different kinds of identities, roles and rights
different participants have are also important.
• These aspects will depend on things like the genre
of the speech event, and may change over the
course of the speech event.
3. Ends: refers to the purpose, goals and outcomes of
the event, which may be different for different
participants (the goals of a teacher are not always
the same as the goals of his/her students),

4. Sequence: the form the event takes as it unfolds,


including order of speech acts & other behaviors.
5. Key: the overall ‘tone’ or mood of speech event.
• Key is important because it provides an attitudinal
context for speech acts, sometimes dramatically
altering their meaning (e.g., sarcasm).
6. Instrumentalities: meaning the ‘message form’ –
means or media through which meaning is made.
• Speech, for example, might be spoken, sung,
chanted or shouted, and it may be amplified
through microphones, broadcast through electronic
media, or written down.

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• Speech events include complex combinations of


instrumentalities that interact with one another and
with the other components in the model.
7. Norms, which can be divided into norms of
interaction and norms of interpretation.
• These are the common sets of understandings that
participants bring to events about what is
appropriate behavior and how different actions and
utterances ought to be understood.
• They may be different for different participants (a
waiter vs. a customer) and the ‘setting of norms’ is
often a matter of power and ideology.
8. Genre, or the ‘type’ of speech event.

• Speech events are recognizable by members of a


speech community as being of a certain type.
• It should be clear that none of these components of
the speaking model can really be considered alone:
• Each component interacts with other components
in multiple ways.
• The job of an analyst using this model is not just to
determine the kinds of knowledge about these
different components but also to determine how
they are linked together in particular ways for
different speech events.

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• For example, different participants are associated


with different genres, or different settings are seen
as suitable for different purposes, or different forms
of discourse are associated with different keys,
• Through these linkages, the analyst can get an
understanding of deeper cultural assumptions
about people, places, values, power and
communication itself that exist in a particular
speech community.

ANALYZING CONTEXTS
• Analyzing the communicative competence requires
more than the analysis of texts/transcripts (though
one can often tell a lot from such an analysis).
• It requires observing people interacting, and talking
to them about what they need to know in order to
participate successfully.
• Often one must talk with multiple participants in
order to find out what it is like for people playing
different roles in the event.
• Bateson and Ruesch (1968) say that there are four
kinds of information an ethnographer should gather

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1. members’ generalizations (what participants think


other people need to know and do to participate
in the speech event);
2. individual experiences (the specific, concrete
knowledge and experiences of individuals who
have participated in the speech event in the past);
3. ‘objective’ observation (the observation of people
participating in the speech event); and
4. the analyst’s comparison of what s/he observed
and heard from participants with his/her own
knowledge and behavior in similar speech events
In his/her own speech community.

• The important thing for the analyst is not to


privilege any of these four kinds of information,
• S/he should take them together in order to get a full
picture of what is going on from the participants’
viewpoint.
• It is important to remember that the ethnographer
of speaking is less interested in what is ‘objectively’
occurring in a speech event
• He is more interested in what participants think is
occurring and what they need to know to
participate as legitimate members of their group.

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• The danger in using a model like Hymes’s SPEAKING


model is that the analyst describes the expectations
participants have regarding the components in a
rather mechanical way, like filling out a check list.
• While this can provide a general idea of how the
speech event happens, it does not tell us very much
about why it happens the way it does.
• The analyst cannot stop at just describing the
various components, but also needs to ask….
1. why different components have particular
expectations associated with them,
2. how the expectations associated with different
components interact and affect one another, and

3. why certain components seem more important


and others less important to participants.
• Below are some useful tips to help you avoid falling
into the trap of mechanical description:
1. Compare and contrast: A way to understand
whether the communicative competencies you
analyzed are significant is to compare and contrast
speech events or experiences and perspectives of
different participants engaged in the speech event.
2. Be specific
• This sometimes involves asking probing questions
or observing what people say or do carefully, paying
close attention to detail.

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3. Remember that all components are not equal


• Participants may regard the expectations governing
some components to be stricter than those
governing others,
• Also, some behavior might be regarded as more or
less ‘compulsory’, while other behavior might be
regarded as ‘optional’.
• Expectations regarding one component can affect
the expectations participants have about another.
• Kinds of behavior tend to co‐occur in speech events
(for example, the genre of a joke may tend to
co‐occur with a humorous or light‐hearted key).

4. Explore transgressions
• A good way to understand what people are
expected to do in a particular situation is to find out
what happens when they fail to do what they are
expected to do.
• Noticing or talking with participants about mistakes,
transgressions, inappropriate behavior or
‘incompetence’ can be a good way to clarify what
they regard as appropriate and why.

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05/12/2022

• ‘Don't Bite My Shit’


• It is not possible to conduct a full ethnographic
analysis of a speech event in this section.
• Instead, the meaning and significance of a
particular utterance in the social and cultural
context in which it occurs will be discussed.
• The utterance, was heard frequently during the
author’s ethnographic study of urban skateboarders
in Hong Kong.
• It was sometimes uttered in a playful manner and
sometimes with deadly seriousness.
• To understand its meaning, it is necessary to
understand the cultural context in which it occurs.

• Skateboarding in Hong Kong takes place within the


context of a speech situation (skate session’).
• These sessions usually occur at skate parks, but
sometimes occur in other places such as on
sidewalks, in parking lots and in city squares.
• Skaters regard the skating that goes on in these tow
different places to be two different ‘genres’ of
skating: ‘park skating’ and ‘street skating’.
• ‘Park skating’ occurs during the day when the parks
are open, and ‘street skating’ occurs at night when
fewer people are around.
• Skate sessions can last many hours and sometimes
involve skaters moving from setting to setting.

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• They may begin a session in the skate park in the


afternoon, and then move to the street after the
skate park closes.
• Skaters participate in skate sessions in groups of
people who skate together and who share a certain
style of dressing or acting and are of a similar level.
• People hardly ever skate alone since one aim of a
skating session is to let others witness one
performing daring or difficult tricks.
• This is reinforced by the fact that they bring video
cameras during skate sessions to film one another.

• one core competency for members of this


community is understanding how to manage the
use of space in order to avoid conflicts among crews
• These conflicts can sometimes become intense if
one crew claims the exclusive right to skate at a
certain spot and tries to deny access to other crews.
• Therefore, different crews must cooperate and
carefully negotiate the use of space.
• Skate sessions normally consist of multiple ‘speech
events’ including conversations, horseplay, games of
‘SKATE’ in which skaters compete in performing
tricks) and ‘doing lines’.

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• ‘Doing lines’ involves skaters taking turns executing


‘lines’ upon various obstacles (such as rails, stairs
and ramps).
• A ‘line’ is one or more ‘tricks’ (most of which have
names ‘ollie’ and ‘kickflip’) done in succession.
• Skaters work to compose lines which show their
skill and imagination.
• Often members of different crews will occupy
different parts of the park and content themselves
with different obstacles.
• Sometimes, however, people from different crews
make use of the same obstacle, having to take turns
with one another.

• It is in the mechanism of turn taking among


members of different crews that the notion of
‘biting someone’s shit’ becomes relevant.
• ‘Biting someone’s shit’ in the context of the ‘speech
event’ of ‘doing lines’ refers to the action of
imitating or repeating the line executed by the
previous person in the queue.
• The meaning of this action depends crucially on the
relationship between the person who does it and
the person whose line has been imitated.
• When it is done by a member of a different crew, it
can be taken as a sign of disrespect – transgression
of rules of etiquette associated with ‘doing lines’.

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• In this case, the utterance ‘Hey man, don’t bite my


shit,’ can be interpreted as a warning or a threat.
• When the person who ‘bites one’s shit’ is a member
of one’s own crew, it can be seen as a matter of
friendly competition or even a way of showing
respect for one’s crew member by emulating him.
• In this case, the utterance ‘Hey man, don’t bite my
shit,’ might be interpreted as teasing.
• In the context of a different speech event, such as a
game of ‘SKATE’, repeating the trick that the
previous person has done is expected and so does
not constitute ‘biting someone’s shit’.

• This example illustrates that the meaning of an


utterance like ‘don’t bite my shit’ cannot be
interpreted with reference to only one component
of the SPEAKING model,
• It can only be understood as a matter of the
interaction among multiple components:
– place, participants, goals,
– the expected sequence of acts,
– the tone in which the utterance is said,
– the various media involved in the
communication,
– norms about what constitutes ‘showing respect’
to others, and the genre—‘park or street skating’.

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• More importantly, successful use of and


interpretation of this speech act incorporates a
complex range of cultural knowledge regarding…
the values,
identities and
norms of conduct of this particular community of
young (mostly male) skateboarders in Hong Kong.

Activity
• Choose a speech event in which people that you
know normally participate but with which you are
not entirely familiar.
• Interview the people involved with the aim of
finding out what their expectations are about who
should say what to whom, when, how and why.
• Ask people both about the kind of communicative
competence most members of their speech
community have and about their own personal
competence and their own personal experiences
with this particular speech event.

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• After that, see if you can find occasion to observe


people taking part in this speech event.
• Notice not just what is said, by who says it, when
and how.
• Use the components of the SPEAKING model as a
guideline for your analysis.
• Choose a number of phrases or an exchange that
you think could not be fully understood outside of
the context of this speech event, and list the kind of
knowledge people need to have to interpret these
utterances correctly.

22

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