Discourse and Pragmatics

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Discourse and Pragmatics

• Week 8
• Context and Culture

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Text and Context

• People dont say what they mean
• People dont mean what they say
• How do we understand one another?
• Expectations about communication (Maxims)
• Expectations about sequencing (Adjacency Pairs)
• Co-text

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Text and Context

• CONTEXT
• Expectations about the social situation
• What kinds of things people are supposed to say
  to whom in different situations
• Relationship to scripts
• Coherence
• Cultural Models
• What is a dim sum?
• What is a good boyfriend

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The Ethnography of Speaking

• Noam Chomsky
• Competence vs. Performance
• (grammatical competence)
• Dell Hymes
• Communicative Competence

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Hymes
Speech Situation
Speech Event
Speech Act
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Speech Acts and Speech Events
Speech Event
Act
Act
Act
Act
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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?

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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

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• Theres a time for krumping and this isnt it.

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Speaking

• Setting and Scene
• Participants
• Ends
• Act Sequence
• Key
• Instrumentalities
• Norms
• Genre

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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

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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

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Ends

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

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Act Sequence

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

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Key

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

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Instrumentalities

• Channel, media, languages and language varieties
• Cultural tools

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Norms of Interaction

• Rules governing how acts (actions) are produced
  and interpreted
• How participants are supposed to act and react

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Genre

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

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Speech Situation vs. Speech Event?

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

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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

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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

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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

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• Children speaking in tongues
• Faith Healing

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The Ethnography of Writing

• Internet Forums/Blogs
• Graffiti
• Sky Writing

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The Ethnography of Reading

• Reading as a public event
• Choral reading
• Notice reading
• Newspaper reading
• Book reading
• Technologically mediated reading