Week 14 - Analyzing discourse in sociolinguistics.pptx

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1. Analyzing Discourse in Sociolinguistics Week 14 - Sociolinguistics

2. Introduction

3. Pragmatics and Politeness Theory Context is clearly crucial in interpreting what is meant, and pragmatics extends the analysis of meaning beyond grammar and word meaning to the relationship between the participants and the background knowledge they bring to a situation. Pragmatics is concerned with the analysis of meaning in interaction. Regarding to conversation, Paul Grice proposed cooperative principle to analyse conversation. It consists of: Maxim of quantity: say as much as but not more than is necessary Maxim of quality: do not say what you believe to be false, or that for which you lack evidence Maxim of relation: be relevant Maxim of manner: be clear, unambiguous, brief, and orderly In fact, of course, for many different reasons, people do not always follow these rules. Very often the reasons why people do not follow the conversational maxims relate to considerations of politeness, and this is where pragmatics overlaps with sociolinguistics.

4. Pragmatics and Politeness Theory Politeness entails taking account of social factors, such as how well you know somebody, what their social role or relative status is in relation to yours, and the kind of social context in which you are interacting. Robin Lakoff, an American pragmatics researcher who has been called ‘the mother of modern politeness theory’ introduced three rules of politeness. 1. Don’t impose: e.g. use modals and hedges: I wonder if I might just open the window a little 2. Give options e.g. use interrogatives including tag questions: do you mind if I open the window? it would be nice to have the window open a little wouldn’t it? 3. Be friendly e.g. use informal expressions, endearments: e.g. Be a honey and open the window darling

5. Ethnography of Speaking

6. Ethnography of Speaking The framework that Hymes developed for the analysis of communicative events involved the following components: ■ Genre or type of event: e.g. phone call, conversation, business meeting, lesson, interview, blog ■ Topic or what people are talking about: e.g. holidays, sport, sociolinguistics, politics ■ Purpose or function : the reason(s) for the talk: e.g. to plan an event, to catch up socially, to teach something, to persuade someone to help you ■ Setting : where the talk takes place: e.g. at home, in classroom, in an office ■ Key or emotional tone: e.g. serious, jocular, sarcastic ■ Participants : characteristics of those present and their relationship: sex, age, social status, role and role relationship: e.g. mother–daughter, teacher–pupil, TV interviewer, interviewee and audience ■ Message form , code and/or channel: e.g. telephone, letter, email, language and language variety, non-verbal

7. Ethnography of Speaking

8. Interactional Sociolinguistics

9. Interactional Sociolinguistics

10. Conversational Analysis Conversation Analysis (CA) has its roots in sociology, and sociologists argue its value in demonstrating that talk is action. CA researchers approach communication as jointly organised activity like dancing, or a cooperative musical. CA is now used by researchers in many other disciplines, including sociolinguists who are interested in analysing the structure of talk, and explaining how we manage the rules of ordinary everyday conversation at the most-micro-level. At the simplest level, for instance, it is noticeable that many interactions involve adjacency pairs , related utterances produced by two successive speakers in such a way that the second utterance is identified as a follow up to the first. Greetings, farewells, questions and answers, invitations and acceptances/refusals are all examples of adjacency pairs .

11. Preferred and dispreferred second pair parts As mentioned in the answer, CA looks for internal linguistic clues and paralinguistic clues to assist. So OK often functions as an acknowledgement of a point made, while well may signal that a qualification is coming next.

12. Conversational Feedback in CA

13. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) CDA by contrast is explicitly concerned with investigating how language is used to construct and maintain power relationships in society; the aim is to show up connections between language and power, and between language and ideology. In example 38 , the police officer’s choice of the friendly, and perhaps patronising, term love turns out to be an inappropriate form of address for the senior police woman he is addressing. Her response makes it clear that she does not approve of this way of greeting women. The critical discourse analyst deliberately dons a pair of critical spectacles and looks for evidence of the covert exercise of power in supposedly ‘equal’ interactions, or for indications of hidden ideological assumptions about ‘normal’ ways of doing things that disadvantage minority groups. Sexist and racist language are obvious targets for the critical discourse analyst, but CDA research has a very wide agenda, and includes the analysis of political speeches, medical textbooks, advertising and marketing strategies, and many other forms of rhetoric.

14. Ideology and CDA

15. CDA Here are a set of dimensions for analysis somewhat simplified from those provided by Teun van Dijk, a well-known CDA researcher. Access : who has access to the place of interaction and under what conditions? Setting : location, place and time of interaction: who decides? who is favoured by the location and the time? Participant positions and roles : what are the relevant social role relationships and identities? Genre : is everyone equally familiar with the appropriate genre? Speech acts : what kinds of speech acts occur in the interaction? Topics : who selects topics? who controls topics?

16. CDA Local meaning and coherence : (a) Levels of specificity and degree of completeness : e.g. what kind of information is given in most detail? (b) Perspective : whose perspectives are presented in the discourse? (c) Implicitness: implications, presuppositions, vagueness : what implicit assumptions underlie the discourse? (d) Coherence : are there any gaps in the argument as presented? Style: variations of syntax, lexicon and sound : (a) Lexical style : do word choices betray assumptions? (b) Syntactic style : do structures conceal/stress agency? (c) Anaphora and deictics : do choices indicate relationships? Rhetoric : what are the effects of metaphor, repetition, imagery, rhetorical questions, alliteration, parallelism in the discourse? Summary : who sums up?