Interactional sociolinguistics

Interactional sociolinguistics is concerned with how speakers signal and interpret meaning in social interaction. The term and the perspective are grounded in the work of John Gumperz (1982a, 1982b) who blended insights and tools from anthropology, linguistics, pragmatics, and conversation analysis into an interpretive framework for analyzing such meanings. Interactional sociolinguistics attempts to bridge the gulf between empirical communicative forms—e.g., words, prosody, register shifts—and what speakers and listeners take themselves to be doing with these forms. Methodologically, it relies on close discourse analysis of audio- or video-recorded interaction. Such methodology is central to uncovering meaning-making processes because many conventions for signaling and interpreting meaning in talk are fleeting, unconscious, and culturally variable.

Background

Interactional sociolinguistics was developed in an anthropological context of cross-cultural comparison, and the seminal work that defined interactional sociolinguistics focused largely on contexts of intercultural miscommunication. It is in such contexts—where unconscious cultural expectations and practices are not shared—that the perspective has the most salient explanatory value. The perspective has been extended to cross-gender communication, most notably by Deborah Tannen (1990), and it has also been applied to the performance of social identity through talk. The framework can be applied to any interaction, however, and much of the empirical work that falls under the rubric “discourse analysis” in communication, linguistic anthropology, sociology, discursive psychology, and socially-oriented linguistics owes a debt to this perspective.

Theoretical Significance

The key theoretical contribution of interactional sociolinguistics is to illustrate a way in which social background knowledge is implicated in the signaling and interpreting of meaning. While ethnographers of communication have long emphasized that talk is contextually and culturally embedded, they have not specified how sociocultural and linguistic knowledge are systematically linked in the communication of meaning. Gumperz’s interactional sociolinguistics operationalizes a dimension of this relationship. His program shows that sociocultural knowledge is not just beliefs and judgments external to interaction, but rather that sociocultural knowledge is embedded within the talk and behavior of interaction itself. At a theoretical level, this undermines a “conduit metaphor” or “information theory” notion of communication, in which context is presumed to be discrete and separate from communicative content. Gumperz argued that we communicate rapidly shifting interpretive frames through conventionalized surface forms, which he calls contextualization cues. These contextualization cues--“constellations of surface features of message form”—are “the means by which speakers signal and listeners interpret what the activity is, how semantic content is to be understood and how each sentence relates to what precedes or follows” (1982a: 131). These surface forms range across semiotic modes, including such varied phenomena as prosody, code and lexical choice, formulaic expressions, sequencing choices, and visual and gestural phenomena. They are united in a common, functional category by their use, commonly in constellations of multiple features. They cue interpretive frameworks in which to interpret the propositional content of utterances, which can otherwise be ambiguous.

Related Work

Scollon and Scollon (1995) address this in terms of conversational coherence, and break that down into three areas: the basic message, or what a speaker is saying; the metamessage, or how the speaker intends the message to be taken; and discourse contextualization, which confirms the metamessage (Scollon and Scollon, 1995, p. 68). Scollon and Scollon give several mechanisms by which speakers can establish conversational coherence. Reference is a way of indicating connection among conversational elements, such as using a pronoun to refer back to its antecedent. Adjacency sequences are predictable patterns in conversation, which can be used as transitional points to begin, end, or change the topic of a discourse. Prosodic patterning includes intonation, stress, volume, and pitch; these combine to form tone contour, which can indicate the end of a turn, or that "something other than the expected situation is being alluded to" (Scollon and Scollon, 1995, p. 61). Lexical and grammatical devices, such as verb tenses and conjunctions, also help establish coherence, and finally, and perhaps most importantly, contextualization cues as defined by John J. Gumperz (1992).

Gumperz' citation of inference is related to Paul Grice's theory of conversational implicature. Grice argued (as referenced in Grundy, 2000, Chapter 4) that the most rational way for speakers to carry on a conversation is to cooperate. Therefore, they will adhere to four conversational principles: quantity (giving as much information as is required), quality (truthfulness of the information), relation (relevance of information to the conversation), and manner (clarity, brevity, and order). Because interlocutors operate under the assumption that they are all adhering to these four maxims, they can safely assume that every utterance in a conversation, no matter how unlikely-sounding, has some bearing on it. If the literal meaning, or entailment, of an utterance seems nonsensical, speakers will use this assumption to create an implicature; in other words, they will find a way to slot the utterance logically into the conversation.

This is especially important given that not all speech follows the maxims perfectly; speakers may choose to deliberately flout the maxims to create indirect utterances with humorous or metaphorical intent. They may use prosodic cues or facial expressions to convey this intent, or may depend on the addressees' ability to infer the intent of the flouted maxim from context (Attardo, class 2007). Of course, this type of deliberate flout is not the only way in which maxims may be violated; accidental violation of maxims will result in disintegration of the dialog, and may require one or more repair strategies, such as repetition, apologies, or rephrasing, to get it back on track. Therefore, it is important for language learners to be aware of the principles behind the maxims—not only for own understanding, but also so that they can produce comprehensible utterances that will clearly be considered logical contributions to the discourse at hand.

Pedagogical Concerns for Language Teachers

Minegishi-Cook (2001) points out that foreign language students will have a hard time learning to watch for inferences and contextual cues in their L2, since they are likely to rely on their L1 strategies, and these will not necessarily be transferable. For example, English uses a number of prosodic contextual cues, but Japanese creates those same cues morphologically, by encoding them in verb forms and inflectional endings (Minegishi-Cook, 2001, p. 82). She further notes that this is more difficult for foreign-language learners than for second language learners, since the latter are using their L2 as a "resource for dealing with social life... language is a means of communication but not an object of introspection" (Minegishi-Cook, 2001, p. 84). By contrast, language use in foreign-language classrooms is highly restricted, teacher-fronted, and often artificial; therefore, there is less opportunity for pragmatic awareness.

Useful pedagogical strategies might include presenting sample dialogs where one or more maxims is flouted, either accidentally or deliberately, and asking students to 1) identify the maxim and the flout, 2) determine whether the flout is deliberate or accidental, 3) decide whether it needs correction to be relevant to the rest of the dialog, and if so, 4) correct it. It might also be useful to leave the deliberate violations in, and have students brainstorm repair strategies to pull the conversation back on track. Students might also be asked to consider prosodic patterning in their L1 and compare it to the L2; most people are not aware of this aspect of even their native language, and would likely find it an interesting examination.

References

• Attardo, S. (2007, July). Conversational Implicature. In "Pragmatics and Language Teaching". Class conducted at GA State University, Atlanta, GA.
• Grundy, Peter. (2000). "Doing Pragmatics" (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Gumperz, J. (1992). Contextualization & understanding. In Duranti (Ed.). "Rethinking context". CUP.
• Gumperz, J. J. (1982a). "Discourse strategies". Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press.
• Gumperz, J. J. (1982b). "Language and social identity". Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York, Cambridge University Press.
• Minegishi-Cook, H. (2001). Why can ‘t learners of JFL distinguish polite from impolite speech styles? In Rose & Kasper (Eds.). "Pragmatics in language teaching". CUP.
• Scollon, R. & S. Scollon. (1995). Conversational inference: Interpretation in spoken discourse. In Socllon & Scollon (Eds.). "Intercultural communication". Blackwell.
• Tannen, D. (1990). "You just don't understand : women and men in conversation". New York, Morrow.