LCS: 1 October 2008

LCS: 1 October 2008 ‘attitudes’: taboo sites, lab 1 Ethnography ConvAnal (Antaki) Perceptions/attitudes: dude, pbs Quiz 2 planning process

What’s discourse analysis? …discourse analysis foregrounds • language use as social action, • language use as situated performance, • language use as tied to social relations and identities, power, inequality and social struggle, • language use as essentially a matter of "practices" rather than just "structures" • http://bank.rug.ac.be/da/da.htm Slembrouck

Focus of discourse analysis discourse analysis is defined as • concerned with language use beyond the boundaries of sentence/utterance, • concerned with the interrelationships between language and society and • as concerned with the interactive or dialogic properties of everyday communication. (Stubbs 1983:1: cf Slembrouck 2005)

The neuropsychology of narrative “Narrative, then, is the depiction of events driven by the intentional behaviour of one or more autonomous agents in a manner that manifests an imagined world which parallels the world of real experience. Expository texts, on the other hand, outline an argument or explanation in order to communicate propositional information directly, for rhetorical or informational purposes. Empirical studies have demonstrated that the difference between stories and essays has measurable implications, with regard to comprehension and recall” Mar, R. Neuropsychologia 42 (2004) 1414–1434

narrativization • Hurston and Smitherman both call attention to ‘narrativization’ as a discourse convention in African American discourse. • How does context change the discourse interaction?

cockpit discourse: black box transcripts (Kripka et al) “Problems of sentence parsing:[back [on the power]][[back on] [the power]] Problems of phonological identification:climb to five zeroclimb two five zero” Must modify speech act theory to account for interactions. They find “Slightly more questions in well-performing crews. More questions are answered in well-performing crews (0.54 in poorly performing crews, 0.77 in well performing crews)”

Approaches to Discourse Analysis (Barton, LSA, 2005) • Theoretical Frameworks for DA • discourse of medicine • discourse of law • discourse of academy • Methodological Approaches for DA • ethnography of speaking • interactional sociolinguistics • conversation analysis

Ethnography of speaking • theoretical framework – cultural anthropology • embedding of language and language use in wider sociocultural contexts • ethnography of communication – language use as cultural practices

In ethnography: methodological approaches • ethnographic participant-observation • account from ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the culture – aimed at understanding • (contested terms, especially in interdisciplinary contexts)

In ethnography: approaches • ethnography of speaking • speech situation – cultural occasions (e.g., family dinner) • speech event – language use (e.g., argument, storytelling, talking) • speech act – linguistic acts (e.g., questions, answers)

Intercultural comm/miscommun. contextualization cues – conventions for communicating information about how utterance is intended to be interpreted e.g., features of intonation, pitch, stress, hesitations, pauses, codeswitching, e.g., intonation and offers crosstalk – conflicting assumptions about norms and conventions of particular speech events: e.g., intercultural interviewing

How to use conversation analysis to understand what’s going on • turn-taking • management of conversational floor • interruptions, repairs, co-construction • adjacency pairs • e.g., question-answer

Preference system in conversational analysis • unmarked preferred response (e.g., invitation-acceptance) • marked dispreferred response (e.g., invitation-refusal/deferral) • discourse marker signal (well), pauses, hesitations, elaborate accounts

Institutional vs ordinary talk • what makes talk in an institutional context different from ordinary talk? • e.g., asymmetrical restrictions on asking/answering questions • Anything else? See Bailey art, etc

More on institutional x ordinary • goal orientation is associated w/ the institution in question • There are constraints on what can and cannot be said, and how to say it • inferential frameworks particular to specific institutional contexts e.g., questions as accusations in setting of court

Activities • Antaki CA: http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssca1/sitemenu.htm • Standard/Nonstandard & attitudes CD • Preston http://www.pbs.org/speak/ • http://www.pitt.edu/~kiesling/dude/dude.html • http://english.cmu.edu/PittsburghSpeech/ • CEP/MH: Davis&Maclagan08 • Quiz-plan using Bailey etc; special process

LCS: 1 October 2008