Discourse and Pragmatics

1. Discourse and Pragmatics The Ethnography of Speaking

2. Mediated Action • Action determines discourse • Discourse determines action • Cultural Tools • Social Practices • Communities of Practice • Agency

3. 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

4. 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

5. Ethnographic Based Discourse Analysis • ‘Rules’ not RULES • Participant observation • Insider vs. Outsider

6. The Ethnography of Speaking Noam Chomsky Competence vs. Performance (grammatical competence) Dell Hymes Communicative Competence

7. Hymes Speech Situation Speech Event Speech Act

8. 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.

9. Speech Acts and Speech Events Speech Event Act Act Act Act

10. 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?

11. 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

12. ‘Speaking’ • Setting and Scene • Participants • Ends • Act Sequence • Key • Instrumentalities • Norms • Genre

13. 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

14. 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

15. Ends • Purpose or expected outcome • Might be different for different participants • Asking your boss for a promotion • Going to the cinema

16. Act Sequence • What acts (actions) are included and how they are arranged sequentially

17. Key • Tone, manner, mood, spirit and how it is signalled or established • Linguistic, paralinguistic and non-verbal cues

18. Instrumentalities • Channel, media, languages and language varieties • ‘Cultural tools’

19. Norms of Interaction • Rules governing how acts (‘actions’) are produced and interpreted • How participants are supposed to act and react

20. Genre • What type (social category) does the speech event belong to • What conventional forms are drawn upon • Mixed genres, ‘blurry; genres

21. Speech Situation vs. Speech Event? • Do the same rules of speaking apply throughout the entire segment?

22. Ethnography of Speaking vs. Mediated Discourse Analysis

23. 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’

24. 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

25. 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

26. The Ethnography of Writing • Internet Forums/Blogs • Graffiti • ‘Sky Writing’

27. The Ethnography of Reading • Reading as a public ‘event’ • Choral reading • Notice reading • Newspaper reading • Book reading • Technologically mediated reading