sociolinguistic areas of asi

Interrelationship of sociolinguistics areas | Mike McDonald | April 6th, 2003

I'm very confused about the interrelationship of the various areas, traditions, and methodologies discussed in the IIC module. There are so many of them that it's difficult to see how they fit together. What I'm looking for is some kind of hierarchical and/or evolutionary relationship between ethnology, the ethnology of communication, ethnomethodology, microethnology, ethnographic microanalysis, interactional sociolinguistics, context analysis, conversation analysis, speech acts, continental discourse analysis, and so on. Of course there is probably no one-to-one relationship in many cases, but I wonder if there is any way to clarify the picture.

For example, could we use some kind of network mapping pattern to show the connections? To me, speech acts seem to be closely related to the ethnology of communication, but a Japanese professor told me the other day that their study was actually a branch of pragmatics.

Mike McDonald

Re: Interrelationship of sociolinguistics areas | Colin Graham | April 6th, 2003

To me, speech acts seem to be closely related to the ethnology of communication, but a Japanese professor told me the other day that their study was actually a branch of pragmatics.

I'd agree with you and disagree with your Japanese professor. From readings in TDA, I get the impression that a general theory of speech acts is one of the central aims of an ethnography of speaking (rather than the wider "communication"). Pragmatics grew out of a study of speech acts - Austin (How to do things with words: OUP 1962) or Searle (Speech Acts: CUP 1969) are the main writers here. It can be a very convoluted area when you get beyond the analysis of the sentence, and I think most of the techniques or methodologies you mention were developed from the 1960s onwards. If you haven't read it already, I would suggest the first four chapters of Coultard (An introduction to Discourse Analysis: Longman 1977, 1985 [2 nd Ed]) which sets the scene for how conversational analysis grew from the earlier ideas of speech acts, ethnography of speaking and Grice's maxims. I've got copies of the Coultard and the Searle if you can't get hold of them in the library or at the bookshop.

Colin

\(^_^)/
Banzai!

Interrelationship of sociolinguistics areas | Mike McDonald | May 4th, 2003

Sorry to harp on this, but I'm still confused by all the methods and fields involved in IIC. I've attempted to draw a network of connections using the information given in McKay and Hornberger and elsewhere, but it doesn't really suggest any coherent trends, except that everything seems to converge on microethnography and ethnographic microanalysis. I suppose this may be because of a tendency to move from macrocosmic to microcosmic.

Does anyone have any more thoughts on how to make sense of all the movements in IIC?

Mike McDonald

IIC areas | Keith Richards | May 7th, 2003

Hi

Many thanks to Mike for his diagram, which I think is very helpful. The only change I'd suggest is removing the arrow that goes from Speech Acts to Conversation Analysis. The reason for this is that CA explicitly rejects the use of pre-determined categories (at a deeper level there are also empirical and theoretical issues between CA and Speech Act Theory, many of which relate to the what constitute data). You could shift the arrow to "ethnography of communication", where the term "speech act" is actually used, though if you're familiar with Speech Act Theory from the TDA module you'll know that this uses it in a slightly different way.

I agree that this is a difficult territory to pin down because it's developing and shifting all the time, and there is considerable overlap. Hence the use of "IIC" for a module title. It would have been possible to plump for CA or EC or IS or some such thing, but this would have narrowed things down too much and in one way or another excluded some of the excellent work that participants have done.

Mike's diagram captures the three main sources in the module and the traditions flowing from them:

Ethnography > ethnography of communication > microethnography

Ethnomethodology > conversation analysis

Goffman & Gumperz > interactional sociolinguistics

Many researchers work in one or other of these, though "Pragmatics" (broadly interpreted) seems to find space for them all (and others). I concentrate on the first two in the module, but allow some space for the third. I've ignored continental discourse analysis not because it doesn't feature in research in spoken interaction but because you have to stop somewhere.

What we have is effectively a whole range of analytical tools we can draw on, and that's what quite a few researchers do. If you want examples, though, of researchers within distinct traditions put side by side, a recent issue of Applied Linguistics is spot on. A discussion of general issues by the editors is:

Rampton, B. Roberts, C., Leung, C. and Harris, R. 2002. Methodology in the analysis of classroom discourse. Applied Linguistics, 23(3): 373-392.

In the end, it's probably best not to worry too much about the relationships among traditions but to work with the one(s) that you are happiest with and find most appealing in the module.

Hope that helps.

Cheers
Keith

Re: IIC areas | Mike McDonald | May 7th, 2003

Many thanks to Keith for his illuminating reply.

Great!! This is exactly the kind of clarification I was looking for. I have revised the diagram a bit (attached) to reflect Keith's comments.

Rampton, B. Roberts, C., Leung, C. and Harris, R. 2002. Methodology in the analysis of classroom discourse. Applied Linguistics, 23(3): 373-392.

I read this carefully when it came out (though obviously not carefully enough) and thought about posting a message about it here. I hadn't started IIC at the time so most of it was new to me. There is also a very interesting (to me, anyway) article by Junko Mori in the same issue (pp. 323-343) about the use of conversation analysis in a Japanese-as-a-foreign-language classroom. It gives a good practical example of the application of CA in the language classroom.

Cheers,

Mike McDonald

 

Archive Categories