Project Overview The proposed book will be designed as a supplementary classroom text for use in primarily undergraduate courses in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, communication, and culture & communication. The book will be organized around a set of "hands-on" exercises or small projects for students to do in the course of a semester (or quarter) class. The exercises will be selected and developed to engage students with fundamental concepts in the study of communicative practice cross-culturally. The exercises have a "research" focus designed to teach students essential skills in investigating human behavior, particularly as it pertains to communication. Some of the projects or exercises will be designed for use in small groups, others to be done individually. In addition, each exercise will have detailed links to key concepts in anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and culture and communication. The benefit to instructors will be that the projects are planned, including equipment needed and supplemental readings.
Project Rationale:
The idea for this book emerges from my experience teaching large undergraduate classes in linguistic anthropology/language & culture. I felt that there was a real need for a book specifically designed to engage students in active learning about the role of everyday language in shaping societies and individual experience.
Related courses taught:
Culture and Communication
Language in Culture and Society
Seminar: Introduction to Graduate Linguistic Anthropology
Seminar: Discourse Analysis
Seminar: Language and Gender in Interaction
Seminar: Language and Power
Uses of Video in Linguistic Anthropology
Language and Politics in the Pacific
Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (undergraduate)
Tentative Table of Contents/Outline:
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2: Analysis of an Advertisement or Web Page
CHAPTER 3: Diary of a Speech Event
CHAPTER 4: Mapping Communicative Spaces
CHAPTER 5: Audiotaping Conversation
CHAPTER 6: Transcription Exercise
CHAPTER 7: Videotaping Greetings
CHAPTER 8:
Sample Exercise/Project for "Problem Sets in Culture and Communication":
A Student Diary of Speech Events
What:
Diary of the types of speech events you have participated in any one day (the unit of analysis we are looking at is the "speech event" or "communicative event")
Length:
1-2 pages single spaced, typed
Requirements (3):
- List all of the types of speech events in any one day that you have participated in
2. Choose two of the speech events and describe the components of them as shown below: (see also Duranti, Linguistic Anthropology, p. 288 and lecture). In other words, include in the description all of the following that are applicable (see below for more explanation of each component): setting, participants, ends, act sequences, key, instrumentalities, norms, and genres.
Theoretical Background to Assignment #1: In order to organize the collection of data about speech events and speech acts in many diverse societies around the world, with an eye towards cross cultural comparison, the anthropologist Dell Hymes formulated a list of features or components of speech events for each researcher to describe. (Developing a universal set of features that could easily be compared could help us learn about cultural differences such as relationships between rules of speaking and settings, participants, and topics, and we could begin to understand the relationships between language and sociocultural contexts.)
Hymes made his list as a useful guide toward discovering which components of speech can be considered universal. He chose eight particular components of events based on his own study of a lot of ethnographic material (the model is also based on Jakobson's paradigm of six factors or components in any speech event: addresser, addressee, message, contact, context, and code). Hymes' model includes the following dimensions, which he formulated as the "mnemonically convenient" title "SPEAKING", where each letter in the word ‘speaking' represents one or more important components of a good ethnography of speaking. The components of the SPEAKING model are explained below: setting, participants, ends, act sequences, key, instrumentalities, norms, and genres.
List the features of your two speech events according to the following categories:
- Setting:
Temporal and spatial aspects of the speech event: time of day, season, location, spatial features. In some cultures it is common to find different settings for many kinds of speech events-rooms for classes, structures for religious observances, buildings for litigation, entertainment, etc. Also include the social valuing of these aspects of setting, if applicable.
Important Concepts: An ethnographer asks: how do individuals organize themselves temporally and spatially in an event? In Charles Frake's discussion of the Yakan house in the Philippines, for example, he shows the complexities of spatial and temporal arrangements. He shows that a house, even a one-roomed Yakan house, can be the site of social events are which are differentiated not only by the spatial position in which they occur but also by the positions the participants move through and the manner in which they make those moves.
- Participants:
Describe age, ethnicity, gender, relationships of persons to each other.
Important Concepts:
It's important to expand the traditional speaker-hearer dyad to more categories of participants: speaker, hearer, addressee, bystander.
- Ends:
Describe the purposes of the speech event, such as outcomes and goals. Ends are differentiated from personal motivations of social actors in a speech event, which can be quite varied and hard to know.
Important Concept:
There are "conventionally expected or ascribed" outcomes. These are important because rules for participants and settings can vary according to these aspects.
- Act sequences:
Sequential organization of a speech event.
Important Concepts:
According to Dell Hymes' scheme this term refers to the way message form and content interdependently contribute to meaning, or "how something is said is part of what is said". Act sequences can include silence, co-participants' collaborative or supportive talk, laughter, gesture, as well as restrictions on which speech elements can occur at the same time.
- Key:
Describe the tone, manner, or spirit in which the speech event is performed, or the emotional tone of the speech event
Important Concepts:
Participants can indicate key through choice of language or language variety, gesture or paralinguistic cues such as intonation, laughter, crying. Acts that are similar in terms of setting, participants, and message form can differ in terms of key, for example mock vs. serious. Key signals can be simple or complex; complex types tend to occur at the boundaries of events.
- Instrumentalities:
Describe the language varieties (e.g., Texas variety English, Standard English), different languages or gestural modes, or registers (e.g., formal talk, informal talk, baby talk) in your speech event. Instrumentalities include media of transmission, such as oral, written, or gestural.
Important Concepts:
Participants can indicate meanings through choice of language or language variety, or gesture. Acts that are similar in terms of setting and participants can differ in terms of instrumentalities.
- Norms:
Describe briefly some of what you know about the norms for this speech event and norms of interpretation.
Important Concepts:
Examples of community norms are whether it is appropriate to interrupt or not, how speaking turns are allocated, etc. The question of "norms" has proven to be problematic in sociolinguistic studies (particularly studies of "gendered" language behavior) where one group is posited as the norm and others are evaluated against this framework.
- Genres:
Describe the speech event in terms of categories such as poem, tale, riddle, letter.
Important Concepts:
Participants have attitudes about genres. Although genres often coincide with speech events, Hymes conceived them as analytically independent.
3. Third: Briefly discuss one problem that you found with using the SPEAKING schema.
In class we will talk about how you might improve this model.
