BAGHDAD: Discarded drinks cans and plastic bags litter the halls of al-Mamuniyeh state school in Baghdad where, despite over a billion dollars of US spending on Iraqi education, children squeeze into dim, crowded classrooms, often without books or electricity.
In the same neighbourhood, the spotlessly clean al-Mawwada girls school that is privately-run and housed in a large modern villa seems a world away: teenagers with books sit behind neat desks in air-conditioned surroundings as a maths teacher chalks a quadratic equation on the blackboard.
With security on the mend and violence ebbing as Iraq staggers to its feet following the 2003 US-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein, more schoolchildren have returned to classrooms, teachers and educators say.
But that has overwhelmed the poorly-funded and long-neglected state schools, driving parents to one of the few dozen private schools like al-Mawwada that did not exist under Saddam but are now springing up in Baghdad and other parts of the war-torn country.
“Private schools are better because they employ better teachers,” said Adnan Hashim, headmaster of the state-run Omar Bin Abdulaziz secondary school in Baghdad.
“I would prefer to send my own son to a private school than to educate him here,” said Hashim, remarking that the annual fees of about two million dinars (1,600 dollars) for a final-year student were too expensive.
Iraq once boasted an envious state education system, producing some of the most qualified doctors, engineers and scientists in the Middle East.
All schools were state-owned and literacy was compulsory from an early age, as it is now, but one in five Iraqis under 15 still cannot read, according to the UN.
“Overall, Iraqis’ perceptions of education have deteriorated during the past few years,” said a UN report in April.
Education has been a prime target of insurgents fighting against American forces and the Iraqi government.
Between 2003 and 2008, 31,598 violent attacks were reported against educational institutions, said a February 2010 UNESCO report quoting the Ministry of Education.
“I have no problem paying the fees for a private education,” said Fatima, a mother of three seeking admission for her 14-year-old at the Osool al-Deen school for boys.
“I am paying for after-school private lessons anyway because the teaching is so bad at his public school. I am hoping that he won’t need those lessons once he starts here,” she said.
“In the public schools you’re on your own. There is no one to help if you don’t understand something,” said Riham Rashan, a tall and lanky ninth-grader at al-Mawwada. “The teaching is much better here.”Private schools sometimes have facilities like swimming pools, or French-language or music lessons, not available in public schools.
They also often have better teachers because they pay around double what their state-employed colleagues receive and because thousands of experienced teachers were forced out of their jobs at public schools after the US-led invasion for links to Saddam’s Baath party.
“Public schools in Baghdad are overcrowded because less than 30 have been built here since the invasion. We need 952 more,” said Falah al-Qaisi, a senior education official in Baghdad’s provincial council.
He said that some schools had about 70 students per class, while private ones had no more than 25.
Since 2003, the US government has spent more than one billion dollars on education in Iraq. The funding built over 500 schools and refurbished more than 2,500 others nationwide, according to USAID.
There are about 3,000 public schools in Baghdad, while just 30 private ones have opened since they were authorised by the government in 2008.
The popularity of private schools has meant that their numbers are growing.
The UN says that the Iraqi government has “identified education as one of its main priorities” and increased budget allocation from 7.2 percent in 2008 to 9.9 percent in 2009.
But Qaisi believes much more is needed — between 18 and 20 percent of the budget — and that the outdated curriculum should be modernised.
He noted that the results from the private schools favoured by Iraqi parents were not actually much better.
“Of the 61,000 students from public schools who took the exam last year for a high school diploma only 27 percent passed. But the percentage of students from private schools was only 31 percent — not much different,” Qaisi said, adding that the situation in Baghdad was worse than other parts of Iraq because of the capital’s larger population.
He said many who had stayed out of school for a year or two during the worst violence were having a hard time picking up their studies where they left off. – AFP
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Said on Culture & Imperialism
Said believes that literary fiction reflects the history and attitudes of imperialism. His studies in colonial and post-colonial literature prove that "cultural forms as the novel... were immensely important in the formation of imperial attitudes..." In his Introduction to Culture & Imperialism he says that culture is a source of identity which was used by the imperialists to further their aims and later the anti-imperialists used the same literary forms to fight imperialism. The first attempt resulted in a culture-biased literature which, Said believes, was "a part of the general European effort to rule distant lands." The later resulted in narrow nationalisms, which have caused much of the modern political discord.
Said defines culture as those practices that have "relative autonomy from the economic, social and political realms". He includes in culture the arts of description, communication and representation that often exist in aesthetic forms and whose principal aim is pleasure. Among these cultural forms he takes the novel to be the most important and believes that "stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world". He sees European writings on these as "part of the general European effort to rule distant lands and peoples". Therefore "when it comes to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it...these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative". He is of the view that "the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the colonial world to rise up and throw off imperial subjection". So he points out that the sway of European imperialism was never peaceful as was presented in the colonial fiction, "there was always some form of active resistance and in the overwhelming majority of cases the resistance finally won out".
In contrast with Arnold's belief that culture has a civilizing effect on "modem, aggressive, mercantile and brutalizing urban existence", Said believes that "In time, culture comes to be associated, often aggressively, with the nation or state". This breeds the nation of culture as identity and tends to separate "us" from "them" and produces religious and nationalist fundamentalism. People come to believe in the superiority of their culture and expect others to "belong loyally even uncritically, to their nations and traditions while denigrating or fighting against others. Culture thus becomes a theatre, a battleground on which people claim superiority.
Related to this is Said's thesis that these notions of superiority closely follow the notions of subject of inferior races which prevailed among the imperialist officials in India or Algeria. He believes that while artists and writers seldom took issue with them, "these notions were widely accepted and they helped fuel the imperial acquisition of territories in Africa throughout the nineteenth century". Thus culture and politics become entangled with culture being the handmaiden of politics Carlyle, Dickens and Thackeray with their ideas about colonial expansion and inferior races therefore need to be seen in this light.
Referring to Dickens' "Great Expectations", Said points out that the reason Abel Magwitch is not acceptable to Pip is that he is "from Australia, a penal colony designed for the rehabilitation but not the repatriation of transported English criminals". The novel therefore should be seen not one about a big city but rather one set in the history of colonialism. The real context of the novel is the social apartheid, pursuit of profit, and the building of empire. Dickens had not written the novel with intentions to reveal this but the new generation of critics, `the children of decolonization' have seen in such texts of western literature "a standing interest in what was considered a lesser world, populated with lesser people of colour, portrayed as open to the intervention of so many Robinson Crusoes".
Said finds imperialist rhetoric of the 19th century echoing in the laws that US has landed to impose the New World Order as the saviour of the world peace. He finds in it the same self congratulation,... triumphalism,... proclamations of responsibility" as could be heard from the 19th century imperialists denounced by writers like Conrad. When Holroyd in Nostromo says, "Of course some day we shall step in... We shall run the world's business whether the world like it or not. The world can't help it — and neither can we, I guess" he presents the same illusion of benevolence the US is force upon the world today.
Yet even in Conrad, Said sees a complete blindness to "other histories, other cultures, other aspirations". He was unable to see that he wrote as a Westerner about Westerners for Westerners with little or no regard for the people of another culture as individuals. He therefore suffered from the same malady as is common to novelists and theoreticians of imperialism who deliver the non European world either for analysis and judgment or for satisfying the exotic tastes of the audiences
Said defines culture as those practices that have "relative autonomy from the economic, social and political realms". He includes in culture the arts of description, communication and representation that often exist in aesthetic forms and whose principal aim is pleasure. Among these cultural forms he takes the novel to be the most important and believes that "stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world". He sees European writings on these as "part of the general European effort to rule distant lands and peoples". Therefore "when it comes to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it...these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative". He is of the view that "the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the colonial world to rise up and throw off imperial subjection". So he points out that the sway of European imperialism was never peaceful as was presented in the colonial fiction, "there was always some form of active resistance and in the overwhelming majority of cases the resistance finally won out".
In contrast with Arnold's belief that culture has a civilizing effect on "modem, aggressive, mercantile and brutalizing urban existence", Said believes that "In time, culture comes to be associated, often aggressively, with the nation or state". This breeds the nation of culture as identity and tends to separate "us" from "them" and produces religious and nationalist fundamentalism. People come to believe in the superiority of their culture and expect others to "belong loyally even uncritically, to their nations and traditions while denigrating or fighting against others. Culture thus becomes a theatre, a battleground on which people claim superiority.
Related to this is Said's thesis that these notions of superiority closely follow the notions of subject of inferior races which prevailed among the imperialist officials in India or Algeria. He believes that while artists and writers seldom took issue with them, "these notions were widely accepted and they helped fuel the imperial acquisition of territories in Africa throughout the nineteenth century". Thus culture and politics become entangled with culture being the handmaiden of politics Carlyle, Dickens and Thackeray with their ideas about colonial expansion and inferior races therefore need to be seen in this light.
Referring to Dickens' "Great Expectations", Said points out that the reason Abel Magwitch is not acceptable to Pip is that he is "from Australia, a penal colony designed for the rehabilitation but not the repatriation of transported English criminals". The novel therefore should be seen not one about a big city but rather one set in the history of colonialism. The real context of the novel is the social apartheid, pursuit of profit, and the building of empire. Dickens had not written the novel with intentions to reveal this but the new generation of critics, `the children of decolonization' have seen in such texts of western literature "a standing interest in what was considered a lesser world, populated with lesser people of colour, portrayed as open to the intervention of so many Robinson Crusoes".
Said finds imperialist rhetoric of the 19th century echoing in the laws that US has landed to impose the New World Order as the saviour of the world peace. He finds in it the same self congratulation,... triumphalism,... proclamations of responsibility" as could be heard from the 19th century imperialists denounced by writers like Conrad. When Holroyd in Nostromo says, "Of course some day we shall step in... We shall run the world's business whether the world like it or not. The world can't help it — and neither can we, I guess" he presents the same illusion of benevolence the US is force upon the world today.
Yet even in Conrad, Said sees a complete blindness to "other histories, other cultures, other aspirations". He was unable to see that he wrote as a Westerner about Westerners for Westerners with little or no regard for the people of another culture as individuals. He therefore suffered from the same malady as is common to novelists and theoreticians of imperialism who deliver the non European world either for analysis and judgment or for satisfying the exotic tastes of the audiences
OF STUDIES
Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornaments, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment and disposition of business; for expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies, is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humour of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience; for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them. For they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. That is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books: else distilled books are, like common distilled waters, flashy things.
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.
Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathe¬matics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend; Abeunt studia in mores; nay, there is no stand or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies, like as diseases of the body may have appropriate exercises: bowling is good for the stones and reins, shooting for the lungs and breast, gentle walking for the stomach, riding for the heat., and the like; so, if a man's wits be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again; if his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen, for they are cymini sectores. If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call upon one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyers' cases. So every defect of the mind may have a special receipt.
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. That is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books: else distilled books are, like common distilled waters, flashy things.
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.
Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathe¬matics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend; Abeunt studia in mores; nay, there is no stand or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies, like as diseases of the body may have appropriate exercises: bowling is good for the stones and reins, shooting for the lungs and breast, gentle walking for the stomach, riding for the heat., and the like; so, if a man's wits be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again; if his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen, for they are cymini sectores. If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call upon one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyers' cases. So every defect of the mind may have a special receipt.
SYMBOLISM IN MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA
Edwin Engel, in his brilliant analysis of the play, pointed to the dominant symbols and philosophy of Mourning Becomes Electra:
Symbolism is the practice of representing objects or ideas by symbols or of giving things a symbolic character and meaning. For example scales symbolize justice; a dove stands for peace; a lion stands for .strength and bravery. In all literary works, symbolism uses a concrete image to express an emotion or abstract idea. A symbol shows more than what is actually seen. Symbolism as ' a literary movement started in France in the nineteenth century.
O'Neill's use of symbolism is highly artistic. His use of symbolism is, artistically intended to extend the scope and meaning of the play. In "Mourning Becomes Electra", O'Neill uses Freudian psychological symbols.
He has used in his play a number of symbols - the mother image, the Blessed Isles (Desert Island), the Mannon portraits, etc. The very house of the Mannons stands as a symbol of hatred and callousness (cruelty, coldness). As Edwin Engel says, In Electra the Mother is a primordial (ancient) image, an archetypal (classic, conventional) experience shared by all the Mannons. Thus, Lavinia is identified with her mother, Christine, and both are the image of Marie Brantome.' Adam Brant falls in love with Christine because he associates her with his mother Marie. To him Lavinia looks like her mother. Only his mother (Marie Brantome) had hair like hers. O'Neill uses the Mother-image in details in the case of Orin. His love for his mother has sexual overtones (hint). He is his mother's crybaby. He used to wait as a child to get an extra goodnight kiss from his mother. When he comes back from the war he finds his mother beautiful, she is his 'only girl'. And Christine replies, 'You're a big man now, aren't you?' Lavinia and Orin are drawn to the parent who belongs to the opposite sex. With Orin, his mother means everything that is sweet, pure, lovely and comforting and peaceful.
He feels his mother around him in the Blessed Islands; the breaking of the waves was her voice. The sky had the colour of her eyes;" the whole island was Christine. So the mother symbol means much more than mother - peace, security, love, freedom from fear. After the suicide of Christine, Lavinia occupies the mother image for Orin and he loves her with all the guilt in him, the guilt they shared. Orin's subconscious motive, in taking Lavinia is to possess his mother completely and Lavinia would be able to share the burden of his guilt.
The Blessed Isles are a symbol of joy, purity and innocence of Orin, 'Lavinia and Christine and Adam. O'Neill is voicing (expressing) a yearning in the heart of the puritan man for an ideal paradise full of beauty and sinlessness. The islands are a place of beauty for Adam; a refuge and paradise for Orin and a lode (level) star for Christine and Lavinia. Thus the Blessed Islands have been invested with psychological dimensions of peace and new trouble-free life. The islands are thus an image of fresh new life. The islands motif (image) runs through the whole play tantalizing (tempting) and attracting Orin, Lavinia and Christine to a life of peace and nature and unalloyed happiness -their dream of an earthly paradise. As Lavinia says, 'I love those islands. They finished setting me free. There was something there, mysterious and beautiful- a good spirit - of love - coming out of the land and sea. It made me forget death. The islands stand for freedom from all puritan tabs (, bounds, check) freedom from pain and misery. O'Neill shows an average American's yearning to escape and return to paradise. But it remains a paradise lost a vision unachieved for grief is the lot of the Mannons and mourning becomes Electra.
The song of Shenandoah serves the purpose of a choral song. In the first part - Home Coining - Seth sings that melancholy song which has the brooding (gloomy, threatening) rhythm, of the sea. The song foreshadows (predict) unattainability and frustration for the characters. The song is there again after Christine's suicide; 'Oh, Shenandoah. I can't get near you,' casting a veil of finality (conclusiveness, determination) and mystery on Christine's death.
The symbol of the Mannon House shows us much more than a large house. It is a house built in hatred (of Marie Brantome's marriage with David). It is a house of death and the dead Mannons' portraits always intervene in the path of' happiness of their younger generation. It is a house, haunted by ghosts and sin and evil.
The use of symbolism adds a poetic quality to O'Neill's prose and universalizes the theme. It adds a new, dimension of emotion and depth of meaning to the dark events of the play. Thus as Travis Bogard puts it,
"Mourning Becomes Electra, perhaps O'Neill's most secular (worldly) play is also his least symbolic work to date. Such symbols as exist in the play, the house, for example, or the portraits, or the flowers, are all ' related to the human-beings at the central focus. Now, none of the conflict between character and symbol that beset (plagued, under pressure) many of the minor works and such major plays as Strange Interlude enters to plague this study of crime and retribution (revenge). There are no ambiguities; nothing is vague or suggested. The characters are drawn precisely, their story fully told, and they move toward a comprehensible (clear, understandable) and convincing destiny."
Symbolism is the practice of representing objects or ideas by symbols or of giving things a symbolic character and meaning. For example scales symbolize justice; a dove stands for peace; a lion stands for .strength and bravery. In all literary works, symbolism uses a concrete image to express an emotion or abstract idea. A symbol shows more than what is actually seen. Symbolism as ' a literary movement started in France in the nineteenth century.
O'Neill's use of symbolism is highly artistic. His use of symbolism is, artistically intended to extend the scope and meaning of the play. In "Mourning Becomes Electra", O'Neill uses Freudian psychological symbols.
He has used in his play a number of symbols - the mother image, the Blessed Isles (Desert Island), the Mannon portraits, etc. The very house of the Mannons stands as a symbol of hatred and callousness (cruelty, coldness). As Edwin Engel says, In Electra the Mother is a primordial (ancient) image, an archetypal (classic, conventional) experience shared by all the Mannons. Thus, Lavinia is identified with her mother, Christine, and both are the image of Marie Brantome.' Adam Brant falls in love with Christine because he associates her with his mother Marie. To him Lavinia looks like her mother. Only his mother (Marie Brantome) had hair like hers. O'Neill uses the Mother-image in details in the case of Orin. His love for his mother has sexual overtones (hint). He is his mother's crybaby. He used to wait as a child to get an extra goodnight kiss from his mother. When he comes back from the war he finds his mother beautiful, she is his 'only girl'. And Christine replies, 'You're a big man now, aren't you?' Lavinia and Orin are drawn to the parent who belongs to the opposite sex. With Orin, his mother means everything that is sweet, pure, lovely and comforting and peaceful.
He feels his mother around him in the Blessed Islands; the breaking of the waves was her voice. The sky had the colour of her eyes;" the whole island was Christine. So the mother symbol means much more than mother - peace, security, love, freedom from fear. After the suicide of Christine, Lavinia occupies the mother image for Orin and he loves her with all the guilt in him, the guilt they shared. Orin's subconscious motive, in taking Lavinia is to possess his mother completely and Lavinia would be able to share the burden of his guilt.
The Blessed Isles are a symbol of joy, purity and innocence of Orin, 'Lavinia and Christine and Adam. O'Neill is voicing (expressing) a yearning in the heart of the puritan man for an ideal paradise full of beauty and sinlessness. The islands are a place of beauty for Adam; a refuge and paradise for Orin and a lode (level) star for Christine and Lavinia. Thus the Blessed Islands have been invested with psychological dimensions of peace and new trouble-free life. The islands are thus an image of fresh new life. The islands motif (image) runs through the whole play tantalizing (tempting) and attracting Orin, Lavinia and Christine to a life of peace and nature and unalloyed happiness -their dream of an earthly paradise. As Lavinia says, 'I love those islands. They finished setting me free. There was something there, mysterious and beautiful- a good spirit - of love - coming out of the land and sea. It made me forget death. The islands stand for freedom from all puritan tabs (, bounds, check) freedom from pain and misery. O'Neill shows an average American's yearning to escape and return to paradise. But it remains a paradise lost a vision unachieved for grief is the lot of the Mannons and mourning becomes Electra.
The song of Shenandoah serves the purpose of a choral song. In the first part - Home Coining - Seth sings that melancholy song which has the brooding (gloomy, threatening) rhythm, of the sea. The song foreshadows (predict) unattainability and frustration for the characters. The song is there again after Christine's suicide; 'Oh, Shenandoah. I can't get near you,' casting a veil of finality (conclusiveness, determination) and mystery on Christine's death.
The symbol of the Mannon House shows us much more than a large house. It is a house built in hatred (of Marie Brantome's marriage with David). It is a house of death and the dead Mannons' portraits always intervene in the path of' happiness of their younger generation. It is a house, haunted by ghosts and sin and evil.
The use of symbolism adds a poetic quality to O'Neill's prose and universalizes the theme. It adds a new, dimension of emotion and depth of meaning to the dark events of the play. Thus as Travis Bogard puts it,
"Mourning Becomes Electra, perhaps O'Neill's most secular (worldly) play is also his least symbolic work to date. Such symbols as exist in the play, the house, for example, or the portraits, or the flowers, are all ' related to the human-beings at the central focus. Now, none of the conflict between character and symbol that beset (plagued, under pressure) many of the minor works and such major plays as Strange Interlude enters to plague this study of crime and retribution (revenge). There are no ambiguities; nothing is vague or suggested. The characters are drawn precisely, their story fully told, and they move toward a comprehensible (clear, understandable) and convincing destiny."
SYMBOLISM IN A TALE OF TWO CITIES
The word `symboli' is derived from the Greek Verb Symbollein, which means to `put together' and the Greek noun `Symbolon', which means a `sign'. "The term in literary usage refers most specifically to a manner of representation in which what is shown (normally referring to something material) means by virtue of association, something more, or something else (normally referring to something immaterial)."
Anything that signifies something is a symbol. Even a word may be symbol. Symbols are of two types—Public or conventional, and private or personal symbols. The word `Rose' for example, means a lovely flower. In poetry, a Rose becomes a symbol, meaning a lovely lady or the beloved. William Blake uses `Rose' as a private symbol, meaning `joy', `love' and `bed'
Symbolism has become a literary cult (religious group these days. This French poets like Baudelaire, Mallarme, Paul Valery, Rimbaud, and English poets like Blake, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot have employed private or personal symbols that have made their verse relatively abstruse (complex, mysterious) Novelist have also made use of symbols. Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities is replete with symbols. What a simple word or even a long sentence or a paragraph or even a whole poem cannot do what a symbol can. A symbol, thus, connotes (indicate) a huge corpus (quantity) of thought.
Writers down the age all over the world have used symbols. Readers faced no difficulty in appreciating their works. The names of characters of Ben Jonson, playwrights of the Resoration Comedy, and of the anti-sentimental comedies are symbolical.
Let us review some of the major symbols of A Tale of Two Cities. Some of the names of characters in this novel have a symbolical significance. Manette, for example, is the diminutive (miniature) of `man'. A full-blooded `man' is crushed into a Manette. Lucie may mean the luminous one. Evremonde may mean `everyman'.
Sydney Carton is the symbol of self-sacrifice and service. Charles Darnay symbolises composure (calm, mixture). Lucie stands for sweetness and grace. Jarvis Lorry stands for disinterested service. Stryver symbolizes pomposity (arrogance) and selfishness. Madame Defarge stands for cruelty, revenge and hatred. `Monseigneur' represents decayed aristocracy. Marquis d'Evremonde is the symbol of inhumanity and barbarism.
Blood is a major symbol. Gaspard of Saint Antoine Street dips his fingers in the red-blood wine that has spilt on the street, and scrawls (drawss) the word `Blood' on the wall. Blood becomes the symbol of the French Revolution, the leaders of which forget the ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity (union) and plunge Paris into a blood-bath. Tumbrels on the street carrying the heads of the victims to be thrown into the river. Marquis d'Evremonde watches the blood-red glow of the setting sound. He drives rashly on Saint Antoine street and Gaspard's son is run over, lying in a pool of blood. When the magnificent Chateau of the Evremondes is set ablaze,-the entire atmosphere looks as red as blood. The indiscriminate (unsystematic) slaughter and the non-stop use of the guillotine have shed so much human blood.
Water is Dickens' favourite symbol. The water of the river, of the sea, of the fountain, of the reservoir is the elixir of life. At times the water is contaminated and ends the life. Water flows as time flows. In chapter seven of Book Two Dickens comments: "The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much life in the city only ran into death according to rule". Running its own course is the law of nature. The water ran not in the city alone it flows in the village as well.
`Footsteps' is also a recurrent (repeated) image that becomes a symbol. Even in the tranquil atmosphere in Soho Square, London Lucie hears the sound of footsteps, the stampede (charge) of the frenzied (hyperactive) and furious revolutionaries that would not give a moment's rest to the poor Manette, who is destined to suffer.
Right at the beginning of Book one, the Mail Cash bound for Dover is symbolical. The journey is arduous, and has ominous associations. Horses are fighting shy as if they have seen something uncanny. All the passengers wear looks of suspicion and distrust. Even the guard grows suspicious. All things, living and dead, feel that dark days are ahead. And what can be darker than the French Revolution, the activists of which are on the spree (extravaganza) to shed blood.
Dickens uses personal symbols while referring to the woodcutter and the farmer. They are not babblers. They work continuously. They are represented here as not the bringer (spreader) of fuels and the producer of daily food that sustains us. The woodcutter is the symbol of inexorable (unchangeable) destiny, at whose wish a man may live or die. He represents the inevitability of the Revolution that would overcome mankind. The farmer is the sower of the seeds of death—death that would come in the wake of the Revolution.
The Bastille sprawls (spread out) before us as Dante's Inferno (firestorm), at the gate of which it is inscribed (decorated): "Abandon hope, ye all who enter here". Hundreds of innocent men, who have caused the least irritation either to the monarchy or the aristocracy, have been committed to the vast prison with its dark cells to languish (decay) away The human beings are reduced to mere numbers. Dr. Manette has forgotten his name and become Prisoner No. 105, North Tower. Tyranny, cruelty, injustice, exploitation—these are the vices the Bastille stands for. The Fall of the Bastille on 14 July, 1789 heralds (indication) the end of tyranny.
The Grindstone is apparently innocuous (harmless). In reality it is not Dickens looks upon the grindstone not as a machine for grinding wheat into flour that keeps us alive. Most of the inhabitants of Saint Antoine Street area had to work round the clock at the Mill for their bare subsistence. As the wheat was being crushed by the grindstone, they were also crushed and bled white. Hence the grindstone had a dual role to crush the wheat and also the poor labourers. Child labour was there. Children worked at the Mill and lost their childhood--the period of primal joy, bubbling (sparkling) with life. Dickens must be thinking of his factory days. The Mill and the grindstone have more or less similar functions. Both crush wheat and the laboures, children included.
The grindstone during the frenzied (hyperactive) days of the Revolution had another role to play. Men, women and children had to use the grindstone for sharpening not only swords and daggers (blade), but all metallic instruments to be used as improvised (unplanned) weapons to kill the enemies of the people.
La Guillotine becomes the symbol of quick extermination (killing) after summary trial. In the common parlance (idiom, manner of speaking), the guillotine was `the national Razor to behead the aristocrats with. The King and the aristocrats- had their conventional, but lethal weapons for the liquidation (collapse) of the poor and the oppressed. Since the table was turned, the revolutionaries devised a new weapon, namely, the guillotine.
Resurrection is a major symbol. A devout (pious) Christian, Dickens believes in Resurrection. What Sydney Carton heard from the priest, while quite a child, at the funeral of his father—"I am the Resurrection. I am the life," had little meaning for him then. But with the passage of time, particularly when he chooses to be Charles Darnay, he is inspired by the words of Christ, "I am the Resurrection, I am the Life". From the temporary earthly life he is stepping into life eternal. It is Sydney Carton who resurrected Charles at Old Bailey. Dr. Manette is resurrected on his release from the Bastille, and gets a new lease' of life in the company of Lucie. Sydney Carton, who was suffering death-in-life, is resurrected by the profound sympathy and compassion of Lucie. He finds a new meaning in life, a purpose, a mission, to live for, and also to die for. And towards the end Sydney Carton's death and resurrection inspire all even amidst blood and vengeance.
Carmagnole, the frenzied dance of a section of the revolutionaries strikes terror in the delicate heart of the delicate Lucie. Flaunting (showy) their red caps, they gnash (grind) their teeth and sing in prrison to give vent (expel) to their excessive joy over their well-organized and yet chaotic victory. What was a symbol of joy to the masses was a symbol of horror to Lucie.
So many symbols are there only to heighten the horrors of the Revolution and the supremacy of Resurrection in the long run.
There is another symbol, not public or conventional, but a personal one. It is the symbol of the lion and the jackal. Stryver is a symbol of pomposity and conceit. A barrister-at-law, he has an extensive practice. He, therefore, calls himself a lion, and patronizingly (arrogantly) ls Sydney Carton a `jackal'. A lion is the king of animals. Stryver, therefore, prides himself upon describing himself as the king of the beasts. The lion always takes the lion's share and the leavings are shared by the lioness, the cubs, and when practically nothing is left in the carcass (skeleton)he timid jackal steps in. Carton is far more talented and intelligent than Stryver. It is he who, with his quick perception and critical acumen (intelligence) easily solves the intriguing problems of the clients. Stryver owes his success to Carton. Stryver, in the fitness of things, takes more than the lion's share, and Carton, who has absolutely no material ambition, is thoroughly satisfied with wine that Stryver provides. Stryver does not understand that he is "stout fond bluff'. An egocentric person, he does not understand that his assistant, `the jackal' is the source of his professional success. He with his usual self-complacency claims to be the lion, the patron of Carton. And Carton, the protege, accepts the appellation `jackal'. He has no vanity, no inflated ego. That is why he dances attendance upon Stryver, as a jackal does upon the lion. We, however, feel that the position should have been reversed. But the jackal becomes the Christ-like figure and serves not one master, but the whole humanity with love and inspires them to avoid all cruelty and hatred, and make the world a better place to live in.
Anything that signifies something is a symbol. Even a word may be symbol. Symbols are of two types—Public or conventional, and private or personal symbols. The word `Rose' for example, means a lovely flower. In poetry, a Rose becomes a symbol, meaning a lovely lady or the beloved. William Blake uses `Rose' as a private symbol, meaning `joy', `love' and `bed'
Symbolism has become a literary cult (religious group these days. This French poets like Baudelaire, Mallarme, Paul Valery, Rimbaud, and English poets like Blake, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot have employed private or personal symbols that have made their verse relatively abstruse (complex, mysterious) Novelist have also made use of symbols. Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities is replete with symbols. What a simple word or even a long sentence or a paragraph or even a whole poem cannot do what a symbol can. A symbol, thus, connotes (indicate) a huge corpus (quantity) of thought.
Writers down the age all over the world have used symbols. Readers faced no difficulty in appreciating their works. The names of characters of Ben Jonson, playwrights of the Resoration Comedy, and of the anti-sentimental comedies are symbolical.
Let us review some of the major symbols of A Tale of Two Cities. Some of the names of characters in this novel have a symbolical significance. Manette, for example, is the diminutive (miniature) of `man'. A full-blooded `man' is crushed into a Manette. Lucie may mean the luminous one. Evremonde may mean `everyman'.
Sydney Carton is the symbol of self-sacrifice and service. Charles Darnay symbolises composure (calm, mixture). Lucie stands for sweetness and grace. Jarvis Lorry stands for disinterested service. Stryver symbolizes pomposity (arrogance) and selfishness. Madame Defarge stands for cruelty, revenge and hatred. `Monseigneur' represents decayed aristocracy. Marquis d'Evremonde is the symbol of inhumanity and barbarism.
Blood is a major symbol. Gaspard of Saint Antoine Street dips his fingers in the red-blood wine that has spilt on the street, and scrawls (drawss) the word `Blood' on the wall. Blood becomes the symbol of the French Revolution, the leaders of which forget the ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity (union) and plunge Paris into a blood-bath. Tumbrels on the street carrying the heads of the victims to be thrown into the river. Marquis d'Evremonde watches the blood-red glow of the setting sound. He drives rashly on Saint Antoine street and Gaspard's son is run over, lying in a pool of blood. When the magnificent Chateau of the Evremondes is set ablaze,-the entire atmosphere looks as red as blood. The indiscriminate (unsystematic) slaughter and the non-stop use of the guillotine have shed so much human blood.
Water is Dickens' favourite symbol. The water of the river, of the sea, of the fountain, of the reservoir is the elixir of life. At times the water is contaminated and ends the life. Water flows as time flows. In chapter seven of Book Two Dickens comments: "The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much life in the city only ran into death according to rule". Running its own course is the law of nature. The water ran not in the city alone it flows in the village as well.
`Footsteps' is also a recurrent (repeated) image that becomes a symbol. Even in the tranquil atmosphere in Soho Square, London Lucie hears the sound of footsteps, the stampede (charge) of the frenzied (hyperactive) and furious revolutionaries that would not give a moment's rest to the poor Manette, who is destined to suffer.
Right at the beginning of Book one, the Mail Cash bound for Dover is symbolical. The journey is arduous, and has ominous associations. Horses are fighting shy as if they have seen something uncanny. All the passengers wear looks of suspicion and distrust. Even the guard grows suspicious. All things, living and dead, feel that dark days are ahead. And what can be darker than the French Revolution, the activists of which are on the spree (extravaganza) to shed blood.
Dickens uses personal symbols while referring to the woodcutter and the farmer. They are not babblers. They work continuously. They are represented here as not the bringer (spreader) of fuels and the producer of daily food that sustains us. The woodcutter is the symbol of inexorable (unchangeable) destiny, at whose wish a man may live or die. He represents the inevitability of the Revolution that would overcome mankind. The farmer is the sower of the seeds of death—death that would come in the wake of the Revolution.
The Bastille sprawls (spread out) before us as Dante's Inferno (firestorm), at the gate of which it is inscribed (decorated): "Abandon hope, ye all who enter here". Hundreds of innocent men, who have caused the least irritation either to the monarchy or the aristocracy, have been committed to the vast prison with its dark cells to languish (decay) away The human beings are reduced to mere numbers. Dr. Manette has forgotten his name and become Prisoner No. 105, North Tower. Tyranny, cruelty, injustice, exploitation—these are the vices the Bastille stands for. The Fall of the Bastille on 14 July, 1789 heralds (indication) the end of tyranny.
The Grindstone is apparently innocuous (harmless). In reality it is not Dickens looks upon the grindstone not as a machine for grinding wheat into flour that keeps us alive. Most of the inhabitants of Saint Antoine Street area had to work round the clock at the Mill for their bare subsistence. As the wheat was being crushed by the grindstone, they were also crushed and bled white. Hence the grindstone had a dual role to crush the wheat and also the poor labourers. Child labour was there. Children worked at the Mill and lost their childhood--the period of primal joy, bubbling (sparkling) with life. Dickens must be thinking of his factory days. The Mill and the grindstone have more or less similar functions. Both crush wheat and the laboures, children included.
The grindstone during the frenzied (hyperactive) days of the Revolution had another role to play. Men, women and children had to use the grindstone for sharpening not only swords and daggers (blade), but all metallic instruments to be used as improvised (unplanned) weapons to kill the enemies of the people.
La Guillotine becomes the symbol of quick extermination (killing) after summary trial. In the common parlance (idiom, manner of speaking), the guillotine was `the national Razor to behead the aristocrats with. The King and the aristocrats- had their conventional, but lethal weapons for the liquidation (collapse) of the poor and the oppressed. Since the table was turned, the revolutionaries devised a new weapon, namely, the guillotine.
Resurrection is a major symbol. A devout (pious) Christian, Dickens believes in Resurrection. What Sydney Carton heard from the priest, while quite a child, at the funeral of his father—"I am the Resurrection. I am the life," had little meaning for him then. But with the passage of time, particularly when he chooses to be Charles Darnay, he is inspired by the words of Christ, "I am the Resurrection, I am the Life". From the temporary earthly life he is stepping into life eternal. It is Sydney Carton who resurrected Charles at Old Bailey. Dr. Manette is resurrected on his release from the Bastille, and gets a new lease' of life in the company of Lucie. Sydney Carton, who was suffering death-in-life, is resurrected by the profound sympathy and compassion of Lucie. He finds a new meaning in life, a purpose, a mission, to live for, and also to die for. And towards the end Sydney Carton's death and resurrection inspire all even amidst blood and vengeance.
Carmagnole, the frenzied dance of a section of the revolutionaries strikes terror in the delicate heart of the delicate Lucie. Flaunting (showy) their red caps, they gnash (grind) their teeth and sing in prrison to give vent (expel) to their excessive joy over their well-organized and yet chaotic victory. What was a symbol of joy to the masses was a symbol of horror to Lucie.
So many symbols are there only to heighten the horrors of the Revolution and the supremacy of Resurrection in the long run.
There is another symbol, not public or conventional, but a personal one. It is the symbol of the lion and the jackal. Stryver is a symbol of pomposity and conceit. A barrister-at-law, he has an extensive practice. He, therefore, calls himself a lion, and patronizingly (arrogantly) ls Sydney Carton a `jackal'. A lion is the king of animals. Stryver, therefore, prides himself upon describing himself as the king of the beasts. The lion always takes the lion's share and the leavings are shared by the lioness, the cubs, and when practically nothing is left in the carcass (skeleton)he timid jackal steps in. Carton is far more talented and intelligent than Stryver. It is he who, with his quick perception and critical acumen (intelligence) easily solves the intriguing problems of the clients. Stryver owes his success to Carton. Stryver, in the fitness of things, takes more than the lion's share, and Carton, who has absolutely no material ambition, is thoroughly satisfied with wine that Stryver provides. Stryver does not understand that he is "stout fond bluff'. An egocentric person, he does not understand that his assistant, `the jackal' is the source of his professional success. He with his usual self-complacency claims to be the lion, the patron of Carton. And Carton, the protege, accepts the appellation `jackal'. He has no vanity, no inflated ego. That is why he dances attendance upon Stryver, as a jackal does upon the lion. We, however, feel that the position should have been reversed. But the jackal becomes the Christ-like figure and serves not one master, but the whole humanity with love and inspires them to avoid all cruelty and hatred, and make the world a better place to live in.
Critical Discourse Analysis
A structuralist approach to media studies has the advantage of opening up many new areas for analysis and criticism. However, questions about structuralist assumptions and methods still remain, and we are seriously lacking in satisfactory answers, many of which remain beyond the scope of this investigation.
But if we persist in the conviction that audiences should be granted the role of subject, that is, a role of "active agent" in television production, one capable of constructing meanings from the language of the media, then it is also necessary to continue under the assumption that language and meaning are in some way social constructs. Although much of the methodology and research goals used in the study of language have resisted this trend, today "society" and "criticism" have become key words in various new approaches to language study and its application to the analysis of media as discourse. Ruth Wodak, writing in Language, Power and Ideology, defines her field, which she calls "critical linguistics," as "an interdisciplinary approach to language study with a critical point of view" for the purpose of studying "language behavior in natural speech situations of social relevance." Wodak also stresses the importance of "diverse theoretical and methodological concepts" and suggests that these can also be used for "analyzing issues of social relevance," while attempting to expose "inequality and injustice." Wodak underscores and encourages "the use of multiple methods" in language research while emphasizing the importance of recognizing the "historical and social aspects."
Emphasis on both the structure and the social context of media texts can provide a solution which enables the media critic to "denaturalize," or expose the "taken-for-grantedness" of ideological messages as they appear in isolated speech and, when combined with newer ethnographic studies and newer methods of discourse analysis, create a broader common ground between structuralists and and those who see the media as manipulators. The critical use of discourse analysis (CDA) in applied linguistics is leading to the development of a different approach to understanding media messages. Robert Kaplan expressed some of these new concepts when he wrote: "The text, whether written or oral, is a multidimensional structure," and "any text is layered, like a sheet of thick plywood consisting of many thin sheets lying at different angles to each other." The basics of a text consist of syntax and lexicon; its grammar, morphology, phonology, and semantics. However, "The understanding... of grammar and lexicon does not constitute the understanding...of text." "Rhetoric intent...," says Kaplan, "coherence and the world view that author and receptor bring to the text are essential." The comprehension of meaning
...lies not in the text itself, but in the complex interaction between the author's intent and his/her performative ability to encode that intent, and the receptor's intent and his/her performative ability not only to decode the author's intent but to mesh his/her own intent with the author's.
Critical discourse analysis has made the study of language into an interdisciplinary tool and can be used by scholars with various backgrounds, including media criticism. Most significantly, it offers the opportunity to adopt a social perspective in the cross-cultural study of media texts. As Gunter Kress points out, CDA has an "overtly political agenda," which "serves to set CDA off...from other kinds of discourse analysis" and text linguistics, "as well as pragmatics and sociolinguistics." While most forms of discourse analysis "aim to provide a better understanding of socio-cultural aspects of texts," CDA "aims to provide accounts of the production, internal structure, and overall organization of texts." One crucial difference is that CDA "aims to provide a critical dimension in its theoretical and descriptive accounts of texts."
More specifically, according to Kress's definition, CDA treats language as a type of social practice among many used for representation and signification (including visual images, music, gestures, etc.). Texts are produced by "socially situated speakers and writers." The relations of participants in producing texts are not always equal: there will be a range from complete solidarity to complete inequality. Meanings come about through interaction between readers and receivers and linguistic features come about as a result of social processes, which are never arbitrary. In most interactions, users of language bring with them different dispositions toward language, which are closely related to social positionings. History must also be taken into account, as ideologically and politically "inflected time." Finally, precise analysis and "descriptions of the materiality of language" are factors which are always characteristic of CDA.
In addition to language structure, ideology also has a role to play in CDA. Kress stresses that "any linguistic form considered in isolation has no specifically determinate meaning as such, nor does it possess any ideological significance or function." Consequently, "the defined and delimited set of statements that constitute a discourse are themselves expressive of and organized by a specific ideology." Language, "can never appear by itself-it always appears as the representative of a system of linguistic terms, which themselves realize discursive and ideological systems." For example,
...in The chairman has advised me that ..., The Chairman occupies first position and has the emphasis conveyed by that, in the equivalent passive clause I have been advised by the Chairman that... that emphasis now attaches to I. Hence a syntactic form signals not simply the prior presence of a specific ideological selection, it also signals or expresses the meaning or content of that ideological choice.
The speaker (or writer) expresses ideological content in texts and so does the linguistic form of the text: "...selection or choice of a linguistic form may not be a live process for the individual speaker...," but "the discourse will be a reproduction of that previously learned," discourse. Texts are selected and organized syntactic forms whose "content-structure" reflect the ideological organization of a particular area of social life.
To illustrate his point, Kress offers as an example the transcript of a news report in which "transactive clauses" are used (in the active voice) to portray causally the role of demonstrators against apartheid at a football match. The demonstration, therefore, which was against a particular injustice, was in fact portrayed by the media as having been somehow caused through the actions of the demonstrators. The report portrayed the demonstrators in a violent way, as "protesters" who "chanted slogans, ...blew whistles," and even tried to " ...disrupt the match, ...invade the pitch." In another incident, "the demonstrators stormed the fence," and even began "tearing the fence down." As Kress points out, "Clearly," in this particular incident, "the mode in which an action is presented, either as transactive or as nontransactive, is not a matter of truth or of reality but rather a matter of the way in which that particular action is integrated into the ideological system of the speaker, and the manner in which such an action is therefore articulated in a specific discourse." [Italics mine]
The actual decision on the part of the journalist or editor to use either a transactive or a nontransactive clause, Kress insists, was definitely a matter of choice and not chance. Kress offers another example to illustrate a common way in which nontransactive clauses are used:
Things began peacefully enough, police hurried to the back fence, violent clashes followed; More clashes...erupted, the confrontation was to last several hours; emotion subsided...
In the example (above) one can see that the adoption of a particular ideological-discursive structure on the part of the journalist expresses the values of an ideological system and of a specific "discourse authority."
The choice of lexical items, as well, is mentioned by Kress. With only minimal inspection, one is able to see that some reports, as Kress puts it, are "guided by the metaphor of a military clash." One side is cast by the journalist as "enemy" and the other as "friend or protector." "So the police guard the ground," (the policing representing the defenders of "good") "which the protesters attempt to invade, storm" (the aggressors, in this case). "In this way," says Kress, "the newscast audience's perceptions or readings [Italics mine] of the text are structured so that they will not only regard the report as 'simply reporting the facts as they were' but will also structure their interpretation [Italics mine] of the relevance of the text overall.
The visual portion of a television text, says Kress, is also important for interpretation. This includes the portrayal of the anti-racist demonstrators as being aggressive through the use of certain camera shots. Kress mentions other examples, taken from newspaper reports, in which government authorities, such as the Prime Minister, are consistently presented in thematic [Italics mine] positions, and the main events, such as talks or backlash, union unrest, etc., are presented as if they are acting on the Prime Minister.
Consequently, according to Kress, "From an ideological point of view this presents the Prime Minister (through a syntactic-textual metaphor, so to speak) as the most significant individual, but nevertheless, as acted on, nonactive himself, responding rather than initiating, with a network of interactive relations." The result is, that "The main actions of people in government are," according to the existence of a syntactic-textual metaphor, "not real actions, but the mediation, facilitation, interrelation between individuals, groups, and abstract categories."
Ideology, society, cognition and discourse analysis
Although Teun Van Dijk places emphasis on ethnic affairs, his study of racism and the press provides a detailed discourse analytical approach to media studies. Van Dijk's focus is also on content from an interdisciplinary point of view. Discourse analysis, when used together with a "multidisciplinary approach to the study of language," provides the critic with a tool for studying communication within "socio-cultural contexts." Specifically, Van Dijk states that the focus on "textual or conversational structures" derives its "framework" from the "cognitive, social, historical, cultural, or political contexts." Van Dijk's approach, however, differs from linguistics in that it is not "limited to the study of ...the surface structures and meanings of (isolated, abstract) sentences.... Once such a structural analysis has been made," according to Van Dijk's method, it is possible to "proceed to establishing relationships with the context... We are ...interested in the actual processes of decoding, interpretation, storage, and representation in memory, and in the role of previous knowledge and beliefs of the readers in this process of understanding."
Ideology also plays a "crucial role" in Van Dijk's analytical method. To Van Dijk, "ideologies" are viewed as "interpretation frameworks" which "organize sets of attitudes" about other elements of modern society. Ideologies, therefore, provide the "cognitive foundation" for the attitudes of various groups in societies, as well as the futherance of their own goals and interests.
Van Djik offers a "schema" of relations between ideology, society, cognition and discourse: Within social structures, social interaction takes place. This social interaction is presented in the form of text/discourse, which is then cognizized according to a cognitive system/memory. This "system/memory" consists of short-term memory, in which "strategic process," or decoding and interpretation takes place. Long-term memory, however, serves as a holder of "socio-cultural knowledge," which consists of knowledge of language, discourse, communication, persons, groups and events-existing in the form of "scripts." "Social (group) attitudes" also reside within long-term memory and provide further decoding guides. Each of these "group attitudes" can represent an array of ideologies which combine to create one's own personal ideology which conforms to one's identity, goals, social position, values and resources.
One can therefore say that Van Dijk's theory is, in some imporatant ways, a development of Fiske's own concept of cognition, which he expressed follows:
... to take an example, a Catholic trade unionist working in a Detroit car plant will inflect working-class social experience quite differently from, say, a Protestant, "nonpolitical," agricultural worker in Wisconsin.
This "process" of framing "beliefs and opinions," say Van Djik, that benefit one particular group, is not final. "Some people may be forced or persuaded, socially or economically" to go against their "best interests...." Therefore, in contrast with many Marxist or other critics who interpret the role of the media in modern societies deterministically, Van Dijk does not suggest that ideologies are "essentially 'false' forms of consciousness, as in the case of many traditional theories of ideology." Still, the possible discrepancy between group ideology and group interests implies that power relations in society can also be reproduced and legitimated at the ideological level, meaning that, to control other people, it is most effective to try to control their group attitudes and especially their even more fundamental, attitude-producing, ideologies. In such circumstances, audiences will behave out of their own "free" will in accordance with the interests of the powerful. Van Dijk's thesis, like Wodak and Kress, implies that the exercise of power in modern, democratic societies is no longer primarily coercive, but persuasive, that is, ideological.
The other essential element of Van Dijk's thesis, especially as it applies to an intercultural approach to media analysis, is "the systematic analysis of implicitness." Journalists and media users are in possession of "mental models...about the world." Consequently, the text is really like "an iceberg of information," and it is really only the "tip" which is "actually expressed in words and sentences. The rest is assumed to be supplied by the knowledge scripts and models of the media users, and therefore usually left unsaid." [Italics mine.] Van Dijk concludes, therefore, that "the analysis of the implicit...is very useful in the study of underlying ideologies."
As this description of Van Dijk's method should make clear, there are many messages communicated through the text and structure of a television news broadcast, and what we see on the surface is really only the "tip of the ice berg." The ritualization and formalization of broadcast styles impart another implicitly understood message-carrying dimension to media studies, a dimension which has only recently been opened to observation and study because of the accessibility of foreign broadcasts through satellite technology. In most modern cultures, the familiar television newscast follows a formalized format, one which may have been in use, with only minor modifications, for decades. After many years of familiarity with a particular style of news broadcasting, broadcasters and audiences tend to overlook the implicitly "hidden" messages which accompany news content. In other words, the coding and decoding of television news has a tendency to become formalized to the point that many of the messages contained within the broadcast style are taken for granted by one culture, but interpreted differently, misinterpreted or not even decoded by another.
Both, audiences and broadcasters, learn to recognize and expect the familiar style typical of "their" television news. Today, however, through the availability of international broadcasts on satellite and cable, it is possible to examine, in the company of a foreign audience (one which expects a different style in television news broadcasting) many of those ritualized and implicitly understood formulas and turn them into visible phenomena.
The implicitness of style in discourse
The concept of implicitness, explicitness and change in language was developed by Edward T. Hall in the 1950s. His thesis is that the "formal," that is, the style which is accepted implicitly by audiences, "is seldom recognized as such."
The formal provides a broad pattern within whose outlines the individual actor can fill in the details for himself. ...Since the formal is seldom recognized as such, the American abroad often has the impression that other people's formal systems are unnecessary, immoral, crazy, backward, or a remnant of some outworn value that America gave up some time ago.
What comes across to foreigners visiting a strange country as incomprehensible, says Hall, is in fact another "formal" system of communication which is accepted implicitly as "natural" within the other cultural system. In the case of the language of television news, it, too, changes and fluctuates within a culture through the process of the "implicit" and the "explicit."
Explicit culture, such things as law, was what people talk about and can be specific about. Implicit culture, such things as feelings..., was what they took for granted or what existed on the fringes of awareness.
Within American and Finnish societies, for example, certain implicit assumptions exist about how a news report should be written and presented. Audiences and broadcasters take certain templates for news reports for granted. Such news reports seem "natural," because they incorporate a ritualized code with a certain history and tradition, including detailed scripts which are understood by audiences to be the "only" way to present the news.
Changes, of course, do come about. When a change is introduced, as is now happening in Finland because of competition from European and American broadcasters and the need for advertisers to have more exposure for their products, the whole structure enters a state of flux, becomes transitional and ultimately changes, but only in conformity with the laws of the given social, economic and cultural circumstances prevalent. "While one (assumption) will dominate, all three are present in any given situation." Edward Hall presents the following scheme:
IMPLICIT
0
/ \_
/ \_
/ \_
EXPLICIT 0-------------> TRANSITIONAL
Finland, therefore, may in the future be obliged to adapt its public service broadcasting monopoly, YLE, to a different discourse style, and one derived in part from Finnish culture, but based on the advertising advantages of the American commercial style of discourse.
Exposing and analyzing implicitness
Each culture has its own way of classifying the contents of the world. This truth was discovered in the linguistic-anthropological studies of Sapir-Whorf. Stuart Hall offers a masterful summary of the consequence of signification, as it was first employed in the work of Sapir-Whorf. As Hall sees it, meaning in a text is constructed by society, and the world is created by human beings for the purpose of that meaning. The linguistic and semantic structures which make up different languages, as symbols are the means by which humans produce meaning.
"Reality," or the way we see reality through the prism of our own culture's means of assigning meaning to the various elements of our world, especially as this applies to television news reports, is a phenomenon which will inevitably be defined differently according to the dictates and needs of different cultures. Different formulas in different societies will be used to decode the different scripts, or codes used in television news production-a process which is dependent upon our culture's history, its evolution and development. The meaning of "reality," therefore, will depend very much on the way a particular society defines it. All elements of that society's history, the totality of its development, including its present economic, cultural, racial, class and political balance, will make it unlikely that any two societies, no matter how similar, will look at one issue in exactly the same way.
The language of television news, as a particular style of discourse, is a complex blend of national, social, economic, and linguistic traditions which work in tandem with audience expectations. These expectations may vary and create a situation in which misunderstandings and misinterpretations may occur. Eco has remarked that differences in the ideological makeup of any audience in terms of ethical, religious, and psychological points of view as well as tastes, values, etc., inevitably lead to some sort of misunderstanding, or gap, especially under those circumstances where one culture comes in contact with the other.
Intercultural sensitivity
Understanding and mis-understanding between cultures is a topic which has invited much attention, a result of a growing interest in translation theory, applied linguistics and language teaching. As Edward T. Hall has warned:
The more precisely our linguistic components are examined, the more abstract and imprecise the old observations become...one can only be precise on one analytic level at a time and then only for a moment.
There is much discussion of "intercultural sensitivity" in the field of foreign language teaching. Milton Bennet has asserted that sensitivity to other cultures is not even natural, and that "cross-cultural contact usually has been accompanied by bloodshed, oppression, or genocide." To remedy the problems of intercultural sensitivity in the foreign language classroom, Bennet has developed a comprehensive program of education and training for both students and teachers in the art of "intercultural communication." Whether Bennet's observations concerning the history and belligerent consequences of intercultural contacts is true or false remains to be investigated. However, his method operates from what he calls "an ethnocentric assumptive base," in which it is assumed that the learner attaches false meanings to observable cultural differences in other individuals. To include, within the field of foreign language teaching, extra-linguistic phenomena, such as cultural mis-understandings and mis-interpretations of others' intentions, is a significant development in language learning theory. This development also recognizes the fact that successful communication in a foreign language precludes a realization and understanding of cultural diversity. Bennet's theoretical outline traces "ethnocentrism" in the foreign-language learner from the level of "denial," in which cultural differences are ignored and denied by the culturally uninitiated, through "defense," in which the ethnocentric student believes his/her culture is superior (and acts accordingly), to "integration," in which cultural differences are understood by the student who is, supposedly, in a position to realistically evaluate the actions of individuals from another culture.
The lacuna model
Bennet's model is especially useful for achieving understanding between cultures within the classroom, which is not, however, within the scope of this study. A lacuna model, therefore, was chosen for the present study because it permits more freedom in developing a comprehensive, analytical description of cross-cultural phenomena which arise from one culture's confrontation with another culture's news media. Also, the lacuna allows a discussion of cross-cultural differences without approving or disapproving of the practices of one culture or the other. As outlined by Schroeder, the lacuna was developed as a means for classifying and examining the linguistic components of languages when used cross-culturally. The lacuna method of cross-cultural analysis begins with the assumption that "Texts are the flesh and blood of a culture." Access to another culture can "only be achieved through exemplary examinations of texts while integrating these texts into a more comprehensive cultural analysis." Lacuna theorists see the problems which develop from a lack of cross-cultural understanding as communications problems. In contrast to Bennet, lacuna theorists assume that the lacuna can be developed in cross-cultural communications, which would make communication between cultures as normal as communication within a culture, if only one could develop more precise codes and supply them to users. The main problem, therefore, is that "a text from a foreign culture is nearly always received through the prism of one's own culture." This "prism" pre-programs the receiver to mis-understand, mis-interpret or not receive the encoded message.
"Lacuna," therefore, refers to perceived or unperceived "gaps" in cross-cultural texts (in which there is a nonequivalent lexis) or other poorly understood cultural items. Lacunae are single specific objects or events and specific processes and situations which "run counter to the usual range of experience of a speaker of another language."
The "fundamental characteristics" of lacunae are as follows:
...lacunae are perceived by the recipient as something incomprehensible, unusual (exotic), strange (unknown), erroneous or inaccurate in a text. ...further characteristics of lacunae can be described as follows: lacunae are perceived by the recipient as superfluous, astonishing (peculiar), unexpected, i.e., unpredictable ...
Lacunae, however, can also be ascertained, systematized and classified. In addition a distinction can be made between cultural lacunae and linguistic lacunae. Linguistic lacunae are involved with the actual translation of texts, but cultural lacunae are classified according to four principle categories:
1) Subjective, or "national psychological" lacunae
2) Lacunae of communicative activity
3) Lacunae related to cultural space
4) Text lacunae
Under (1) subjective, or "national psychological" lacunae, subdivisions are created in which we get the following categories:
a) Character lacunae: Certain "invariable" qualities "in the character of particular cultural communities," including stereotypical conceptions of character ("pragmatic Americans, etc.); different ways of conceiving activities ("Americans are workaholics"); self-definition ("Finns have sisu"-an inner, unstoppable strength and determination).
b)Syllogistic lacunae: Includes "modes" of thinking ("American academics are devoted to facts" whereas "German academics are more interested in theory."
c)Cultural-emotive lacunae: Concerned with the expression of feelings in public. Very often rhythm, pace, pauses, interruptions, etc., are based on the "national temperament."
d)Lacunae of humor: Cultural differences in a sense of humor.
Under (2) lacunae of communicative activity, the following are listed:
a) Mental lacunae: All culturally-specific problem-solving strategies. For example, representatives of different cultures may exhibit differences in the amount of time deemed proper to be used in certain tasks.
b)Behavioral-specific lacunae: Differences in non-verbal behavior when used for conveying information. Includes kinesics (mime, gesture), movements involved in routine habits, and etiquette.
Lacunae relating to cultural space (3) include incongruities, between cultures, in "conceiving and assessing aspects of one's cultural milieu." This includes a particular culture's typical "inventory of knowledge" which forms the "cultural identity" of the average citizen. This includes:
a)Perceptive lacunae: assessments of distance.
b)Ethnographic lacunae: culturally specific tastes in drink, food, clothing, interior decorating, eating out, etc.
c)Lacunae of cultural stock: incompatibilities between cultures in the volume and size of the inventory of knowledge, including a knowledge of one's own history, cultural and social symbols, color symbolism (blue jeans), and other implicit symbols which are "substantially more numerous."
Finally, text lacunae (4) occur as a "specific property of the text as a means of communication in both form and content." In other words, an understanding of genre and technique are expressed within cultures through the text. "Breaches or gaps" in the text can be "intentional or unintentional." Texts can even contain "direct errors" or "inaccuracies," but still have meaning to the culturally initiated recipient.
Satellites and international broadcasting have made it technically much easier to study foreign audience decoding of television news broadcasts and their deeper cultural and political connotations. Language is the main barrier, but Finland presents us with a unique environment. Ten years of English-language instruction in school, combined with intensive exposure to English-language films and television-programming on Finnish television, makes Finns, especially those members of the younger generation, as non-native speakers of English, especially fluent. To paraphrase Gumperz, they can be described as "individuals who speak English well and have no difficulty in producing grammatical English sentences" but may nevertheless have significant difficulties "in what they perceive as meaningful discourse cues..." When working cross-culturally with audiences who live only on the periphery of the American commercial news environment, and with audiences who are also linguistically competent in English, it becomes possible to isolate certain contextualization cues by means of intensive interviews. By borrowing from the lacuna model for the systemization and classification of these audience-perceived defects or gaps in cultural understanding, one is able to reveal cross-cultural differences between implicitly understood discourse styles.
A lacuna study also enables the exploration of the concept of broadcast news as discourse by imposing a new perspective on implicit knowledge, that which is taken for granted about television by audiences. Conceptualization cues which lead to cross-cultural "misunderstandings" can be systematized and those unexplainable phenomena which occur in one culture but not invariably in the other can be recorded. Russian ethnopsycholinguistics pioneered the lacuna method and stressed the social significance of communication. Lacuna advocates emphatically dismiss the common notion that society is an entity made up of isolated individuals pursuing their own individual goals. Language and communication are carriers of society's cultural characteristics and the search for lacunae is a search for the "social composite" which regulates the encoding of intent and its correct decoding. A text is therefore "meaningless until it is read, or listened to, by someone." The lacuna is the act of labeling this composite meaning, because, the "performative abilities of author and receptor are constrained by their respective knowledge of syntax." Syntax, however, is not the only constraint on understanding. Decoding also depends on the recipient's "awareness of key conventions" which are "often historically defined."
Ertelt-Vieth's lacuna model develops the lacuna for use in the revealing of implicit understanding in oral communication. For her study, she used a group of German students in Moscow to present examples of culturally relevant contacts between German and Russian students in which intercultural differences (misinterpretations and other cultural gaps) arise. Interviews were carried out in Moscow with visiting German students who were asked to evaluate contacts with their Russian colleagues. Russian students were then asked to elaborate on the contacts in their own words, mentioning the problems that may have arisen. Her experiment is significant because it considers both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors in intercultural contacts. Above all, her interviews attempt to expose implicitness of understanding, as well as national prejudices, by evaluating such factors which arise to activate prejudices. Vieth's lacuna model, therefore, avoids cultural differences without trying to "solve" them or "appreciate" them.
Television news programs generate messages, and those who generate those messages may not, themselves, be completely conscious of their own rules and categories of message encoding. Awareness of historically defined key conventions is crucial. If television news is a system of encoding reality, then the intentions of those who encode must be understood before proper decoding can occur.
But if we persist in the conviction that audiences should be granted the role of subject, that is, a role of "active agent" in television production, one capable of constructing meanings from the language of the media, then it is also necessary to continue under the assumption that language and meaning are in some way social constructs. Although much of the methodology and research goals used in the study of language have resisted this trend, today "society" and "criticism" have become key words in various new approaches to language study and its application to the analysis of media as discourse. Ruth Wodak, writing in Language, Power and Ideology, defines her field, which she calls "critical linguistics," as "an interdisciplinary approach to language study with a critical point of view" for the purpose of studying "language behavior in natural speech situations of social relevance." Wodak also stresses the importance of "diverse theoretical and methodological concepts" and suggests that these can also be used for "analyzing issues of social relevance," while attempting to expose "inequality and injustice." Wodak underscores and encourages "the use of multiple methods" in language research while emphasizing the importance of recognizing the "historical and social aspects."
Emphasis on both the structure and the social context of media texts can provide a solution which enables the media critic to "denaturalize," or expose the "taken-for-grantedness" of ideological messages as they appear in isolated speech and, when combined with newer ethnographic studies and newer methods of discourse analysis, create a broader common ground between structuralists and and those who see the media as manipulators. The critical use of discourse analysis (CDA) in applied linguistics is leading to the development of a different approach to understanding media messages. Robert Kaplan expressed some of these new concepts when he wrote: "The text, whether written or oral, is a multidimensional structure," and "any text is layered, like a sheet of thick plywood consisting of many thin sheets lying at different angles to each other." The basics of a text consist of syntax and lexicon; its grammar, morphology, phonology, and semantics. However, "The understanding... of grammar and lexicon does not constitute the understanding...of text." "Rhetoric intent...," says Kaplan, "coherence and the world view that author and receptor bring to the text are essential." The comprehension of meaning
...lies not in the text itself, but in the complex interaction between the author's intent and his/her performative ability to encode that intent, and the receptor's intent and his/her performative ability not only to decode the author's intent but to mesh his/her own intent with the author's.
Critical discourse analysis has made the study of language into an interdisciplinary tool and can be used by scholars with various backgrounds, including media criticism. Most significantly, it offers the opportunity to adopt a social perspective in the cross-cultural study of media texts. As Gunter Kress points out, CDA has an "overtly political agenda," which "serves to set CDA off...from other kinds of discourse analysis" and text linguistics, "as well as pragmatics and sociolinguistics." While most forms of discourse analysis "aim to provide a better understanding of socio-cultural aspects of texts," CDA "aims to provide accounts of the production, internal structure, and overall organization of texts." One crucial difference is that CDA "aims to provide a critical dimension in its theoretical and descriptive accounts of texts."
More specifically, according to Kress's definition, CDA treats language as a type of social practice among many used for representation and signification (including visual images, music, gestures, etc.). Texts are produced by "socially situated speakers and writers." The relations of participants in producing texts are not always equal: there will be a range from complete solidarity to complete inequality. Meanings come about through interaction between readers and receivers and linguistic features come about as a result of social processes, which are never arbitrary. In most interactions, users of language bring with them different dispositions toward language, which are closely related to social positionings. History must also be taken into account, as ideologically and politically "inflected time." Finally, precise analysis and "descriptions of the materiality of language" are factors which are always characteristic of CDA.
In addition to language structure, ideology also has a role to play in CDA. Kress stresses that "any linguistic form considered in isolation has no specifically determinate meaning as such, nor does it possess any ideological significance or function." Consequently, "the defined and delimited set of statements that constitute a discourse are themselves expressive of and organized by a specific ideology." Language, "can never appear by itself-it always appears as the representative of a system of linguistic terms, which themselves realize discursive and ideological systems." For example,
...in The chairman has advised me that ..., The Chairman occupies first position and has the emphasis conveyed by that, in the equivalent passive clause I have been advised by the Chairman that... that emphasis now attaches to I. Hence a syntactic form signals not simply the prior presence of a specific ideological selection, it also signals or expresses the meaning or content of that ideological choice.
The speaker (or writer) expresses ideological content in texts and so does the linguistic form of the text: "...selection or choice of a linguistic form may not be a live process for the individual speaker...," but "the discourse will be a reproduction of that previously learned," discourse. Texts are selected and organized syntactic forms whose "content-structure" reflect the ideological organization of a particular area of social life.
To illustrate his point, Kress offers as an example the transcript of a news report in which "transactive clauses" are used (in the active voice) to portray causally the role of demonstrators against apartheid at a football match. The demonstration, therefore, which was against a particular injustice, was in fact portrayed by the media as having been somehow caused through the actions of the demonstrators. The report portrayed the demonstrators in a violent way, as "protesters" who "chanted slogans, ...blew whistles," and even tried to " ...disrupt the match, ...invade the pitch." In another incident, "the demonstrators stormed the fence," and even began "tearing the fence down." As Kress points out, "Clearly," in this particular incident, "the mode in which an action is presented, either as transactive or as nontransactive, is not a matter of truth or of reality but rather a matter of the way in which that particular action is integrated into the ideological system of the speaker, and the manner in which such an action is therefore articulated in a specific discourse." [Italics mine]
The actual decision on the part of the journalist or editor to use either a transactive or a nontransactive clause, Kress insists, was definitely a matter of choice and not chance. Kress offers another example to illustrate a common way in which nontransactive clauses are used:
Things began peacefully enough, police hurried to the back fence, violent clashes followed; More clashes...erupted, the confrontation was to last several hours; emotion subsided...
In the example (above) one can see that the adoption of a particular ideological-discursive structure on the part of the journalist expresses the values of an ideological system and of a specific "discourse authority."
The choice of lexical items, as well, is mentioned by Kress. With only minimal inspection, one is able to see that some reports, as Kress puts it, are "guided by the metaphor of a military clash." One side is cast by the journalist as "enemy" and the other as "friend or protector." "So the police guard the ground," (the policing representing the defenders of "good") "which the protesters attempt to invade, storm" (the aggressors, in this case). "In this way," says Kress, "the newscast audience's perceptions or readings [Italics mine] of the text are structured so that they will not only regard the report as 'simply reporting the facts as they were' but will also structure their interpretation [Italics mine] of the relevance of the text overall.
The visual portion of a television text, says Kress, is also important for interpretation. This includes the portrayal of the anti-racist demonstrators as being aggressive through the use of certain camera shots. Kress mentions other examples, taken from newspaper reports, in which government authorities, such as the Prime Minister, are consistently presented in thematic [Italics mine] positions, and the main events, such as talks or backlash, union unrest, etc., are presented as if they are acting on the Prime Minister.
Consequently, according to Kress, "From an ideological point of view this presents the Prime Minister (through a syntactic-textual metaphor, so to speak) as the most significant individual, but nevertheless, as acted on, nonactive himself, responding rather than initiating, with a network of interactive relations." The result is, that "The main actions of people in government are," according to the existence of a syntactic-textual metaphor, "not real actions, but the mediation, facilitation, interrelation between individuals, groups, and abstract categories."
Ideology, society, cognition and discourse analysis
Although Teun Van Dijk places emphasis on ethnic affairs, his study of racism and the press provides a detailed discourse analytical approach to media studies. Van Dijk's focus is also on content from an interdisciplinary point of view. Discourse analysis, when used together with a "multidisciplinary approach to the study of language," provides the critic with a tool for studying communication within "socio-cultural contexts." Specifically, Van Dijk states that the focus on "textual or conversational structures" derives its "framework" from the "cognitive, social, historical, cultural, or political contexts." Van Dijk's approach, however, differs from linguistics in that it is not "limited to the study of ...the surface structures and meanings of (isolated, abstract) sentences.... Once such a structural analysis has been made," according to Van Dijk's method, it is possible to "proceed to establishing relationships with the context... We are ...interested in the actual processes of decoding, interpretation, storage, and representation in memory, and in the role of previous knowledge and beliefs of the readers in this process of understanding."
Ideology also plays a "crucial role" in Van Dijk's analytical method. To Van Dijk, "ideologies" are viewed as "interpretation frameworks" which "organize sets of attitudes" about other elements of modern society. Ideologies, therefore, provide the "cognitive foundation" for the attitudes of various groups in societies, as well as the futherance of their own goals and interests.
Van Djik offers a "schema" of relations between ideology, society, cognition and discourse: Within social structures, social interaction takes place. This social interaction is presented in the form of text/discourse, which is then cognizized according to a cognitive system/memory. This "system/memory" consists of short-term memory, in which "strategic process," or decoding and interpretation takes place. Long-term memory, however, serves as a holder of "socio-cultural knowledge," which consists of knowledge of language, discourse, communication, persons, groups and events-existing in the form of "scripts." "Social (group) attitudes" also reside within long-term memory and provide further decoding guides. Each of these "group attitudes" can represent an array of ideologies which combine to create one's own personal ideology which conforms to one's identity, goals, social position, values and resources.
One can therefore say that Van Dijk's theory is, in some imporatant ways, a development of Fiske's own concept of cognition, which he expressed follows:
... to take an example, a Catholic trade unionist working in a Detroit car plant will inflect working-class social experience quite differently from, say, a Protestant, "nonpolitical," agricultural worker in Wisconsin.
This "process" of framing "beliefs and opinions," say Van Djik, that benefit one particular group, is not final. "Some people may be forced or persuaded, socially or economically" to go against their "best interests...." Therefore, in contrast with many Marxist or other critics who interpret the role of the media in modern societies deterministically, Van Dijk does not suggest that ideologies are "essentially 'false' forms of consciousness, as in the case of many traditional theories of ideology." Still, the possible discrepancy between group ideology and group interests implies that power relations in society can also be reproduced and legitimated at the ideological level, meaning that, to control other people, it is most effective to try to control their group attitudes and especially their even more fundamental, attitude-producing, ideologies. In such circumstances, audiences will behave out of their own "free" will in accordance with the interests of the powerful. Van Dijk's thesis, like Wodak and Kress, implies that the exercise of power in modern, democratic societies is no longer primarily coercive, but persuasive, that is, ideological.
The other essential element of Van Dijk's thesis, especially as it applies to an intercultural approach to media analysis, is "the systematic analysis of implicitness." Journalists and media users are in possession of "mental models...about the world." Consequently, the text is really like "an iceberg of information," and it is really only the "tip" which is "actually expressed in words and sentences. The rest is assumed to be supplied by the knowledge scripts and models of the media users, and therefore usually left unsaid." [Italics mine.] Van Dijk concludes, therefore, that "the analysis of the implicit...is very useful in the study of underlying ideologies."
As this description of Van Dijk's method should make clear, there are many messages communicated through the text and structure of a television news broadcast, and what we see on the surface is really only the "tip of the ice berg." The ritualization and formalization of broadcast styles impart another implicitly understood message-carrying dimension to media studies, a dimension which has only recently been opened to observation and study because of the accessibility of foreign broadcasts through satellite technology. In most modern cultures, the familiar television newscast follows a formalized format, one which may have been in use, with only minor modifications, for decades. After many years of familiarity with a particular style of news broadcasting, broadcasters and audiences tend to overlook the implicitly "hidden" messages which accompany news content. In other words, the coding and decoding of television news has a tendency to become formalized to the point that many of the messages contained within the broadcast style are taken for granted by one culture, but interpreted differently, misinterpreted or not even decoded by another.
Both, audiences and broadcasters, learn to recognize and expect the familiar style typical of "their" television news. Today, however, through the availability of international broadcasts on satellite and cable, it is possible to examine, in the company of a foreign audience (one which expects a different style in television news broadcasting) many of those ritualized and implicitly understood formulas and turn them into visible phenomena.
The implicitness of style in discourse
The concept of implicitness, explicitness and change in language was developed by Edward T. Hall in the 1950s. His thesis is that the "formal," that is, the style which is accepted implicitly by audiences, "is seldom recognized as such."
The formal provides a broad pattern within whose outlines the individual actor can fill in the details for himself. ...Since the formal is seldom recognized as such, the American abroad often has the impression that other people's formal systems are unnecessary, immoral, crazy, backward, or a remnant of some outworn value that America gave up some time ago.
What comes across to foreigners visiting a strange country as incomprehensible, says Hall, is in fact another "formal" system of communication which is accepted implicitly as "natural" within the other cultural system. In the case of the language of television news, it, too, changes and fluctuates within a culture through the process of the "implicit" and the "explicit."
Explicit culture, such things as law, was what people talk about and can be specific about. Implicit culture, such things as feelings..., was what they took for granted or what existed on the fringes of awareness.
Within American and Finnish societies, for example, certain implicit assumptions exist about how a news report should be written and presented. Audiences and broadcasters take certain templates for news reports for granted. Such news reports seem "natural," because they incorporate a ritualized code with a certain history and tradition, including detailed scripts which are understood by audiences to be the "only" way to present the news.
Changes, of course, do come about. When a change is introduced, as is now happening in Finland because of competition from European and American broadcasters and the need for advertisers to have more exposure for their products, the whole structure enters a state of flux, becomes transitional and ultimately changes, but only in conformity with the laws of the given social, economic and cultural circumstances prevalent. "While one (assumption) will dominate, all three are present in any given situation." Edward Hall presents the following scheme:
IMPLICIT
0
/ \_
/ \_
/ \_
EXPLICIT 0-------------> TRANSITIONAL
Finland, therefore, may in the future be obliged to adapt its public service broadcasting monopoly, YLE, to a different discourse style, and one derived in part from Finnish culture, but based on the advertising advantages of the American commercial style of discourse.
Exposing and analyzing implicitness
Each culture has its own way of classifying the contents of the world. This truth was discovered in the linguistic-anthropological studies of Sapir-Whorf. Stuart Hall offers a masterful summary of the consequence of signification, as it was first employed in the work of Sapir-Whorf. As Hall sees it, meaning in a text is constructed by society, and the world is created by human beings for the purpose of that meaning. The linguistic and semantic structures which make up different languages, as symbols are the means by which humans produce meaning.
"Reality," or the way we see reality through the prism of our own culture's means of assigning meaning to the various elements of our world, especially as this applies to television news reports, is a phenomenon which will inevitably be defined differently according to the dictates and needs of different cultures. Different formulas in different societies will be used to decode the different scripts, or codes used in television news production-a process which is dependent upon our culture's history, its evolution and development. The meaning of "reality," therefore, will depend very much on the way a particular society defines it. All elements of that society's history, the totality of its development, including its present economic, cultural, racial, class and political balance, will make it unlikely that any two societies, no matter how similar, will look at one issue in exactly the same way.
The language of television news, as a particular style of discourse, is a complex blend of national, social, economic, and linguistic traditions which work in tandem with audience expectations. These expectations may vary and create a situation in which misunderstandings and misinterpretations may occur. Eco has remarked that differences in the ideological makeup of any audience in terms of ethical, religious, and psychological points of view as well as tastes, values, etc., inevitably lead to some sort of misunderstanding, or gap, especially under those circumstances where one culture comes in contact with the other.
Intercultural sensitivity
Understanding and mis-understanding between cultures is a topic which has invited much attention, a result of a growing interest in translation theory, applied linguistics and language teaching. As Edward T. Hall has warned:
The more precisely our linguistic components are examined, the more abstract and imprecise the old observations become...one can only be precise on one analytic level at a time and then only for a moment.
There is much discussion of "intercultural sensitivity" in the field of foreign language teaching. Milton Bennet has asserted that sensitivity to other cultures is not even natural, and that "cross-cultural contact usually has been accompanied by bloodshed, oppression, or genocide." To remedy the problems of intercultural sensitivity in the foreign language classroom, Bennet has developed a comprehensive program of education and training for both students and teachers in the art of "intercultural communication." Whether Bennet's observations concerning the history and belligerent consequences of intercultural contacts is true or false remains to be investigated. However, his method operates from what he calls "an ethnocentric assumptive base," in which it is assumed that the learner attaches false meanings to observable cultural differences in other individuals. To include, within the field of foreign language teaching, extra-linguistic phenomena, such as cultural mis-understandings and mis-interpretations of others' intentions, is a significant development in language learning theory. This development also recognizes the fact that successful communication in a foreign language precludes a realization and understanding of cultural diversity. Bennet's theoretical outline traces "ethnocentrism" in the foreign-language learner from the level of "denial," in which cultural differences are ignored and denied by the culturally uninitiated, through "defense," in which the ethnocentric student believes his/her culture is superior (and acts accordingly), to "integration," in which cultural differences are understood by the student who is, supposedly, in a position to realistically evaluate the actions of individuals from another culture.
The lacuna model
Bennet's model is especially useful for achieving understanding between cultures within the classroom, which is not, however, within the scope of this study. A lacuna model, therefore, was chosen for the present study because it permits more freedom in developing a comprehensive, analytical description of cross-cultural phenomena which arise from one culture's confrontation with another culture's news media. Also, the lacuna allows a discussion of cross-cultural differences without approving or disapproving of the practices of one culture or the other. As outlined by Schroeder, the lacuna was developed as a means for classifying and examining the linguistic components of languages when used cross-culturally. The lacuna method of cross-cultural analysis begins with the assumption that "Texts are the flesh and blood of a culture." Access to another culture can "only be achieved through exemplary examinations of texts while integrating these texts into a more comprehensive cultural analysis." Lacuna theorists see the problems which develop from a lack of cross-cultural understanding as communications problems. In contrast to Bennet, lacuna theorists assume that the lacuna can be developed in cross-cultural communications, which would make communication between cultures as normal as communication within a culture, if only one could develop more precise codes and supply them to users. The main problem, therefore, is that "a text from a foreign culture is nearly always received through the prism of one's own culture." This "prism" pre-programs the receiver to mis-understand, mis-interpret or not receive the encoded message.
"Lacuna," therefore, refers to perceived or unperceived "gaps" in cross-cultural texts (in which there is a nonequivalent lexis) or other poorly understood cultural items. Lacunae are single specific objects or events and specific processes and situations which "run counter to the usual range of experience of a speaker of another language."
The "fundamental characteristics" of lacunae are as follows:
...lacunae are perceived by the recipient as something incomprehensible, unusual (exotic), strange (unknown), erroneous or inaccurate in a text. ...further characteristics of lacunae can be described as follows: lacunae are perceived by the recipient as superfluous, astonishing (peculiar), unexpected, i.e., unpredictable ...
Lacunae, however, can also be ascertained, systematized and classified. In addition a distinction can be made between cultural lacunae and linguistic lacunae. Linguistic lacunae are involved with the actual translation of texts, but cultural lacunae are classified according to four principle categories:
1) Subjective, or "national psychological" lacunae
2) Lacunae of communicative activity
3) Lacunae related to cultural space
4) Text lacunae
Under (1) subjective, or "national psychological" lacunae, subdivisions are created in which we get the following categories:
a) Character lacunae: Certain "invariable" qualities "in the character of particular cultural communities," including stereotypical conceptions of character ("pragmatic Americans, etc.); different ways of conceiving activities ("Americans are workaholics"); self-definition ("Finns have sisu"-an inner, unstoppable strength and determination).
b)Syllogistic lacunae: Includes "modes" of thinking ("American academics are devoted to facts" whereas "German academics are more interested in theory."
c)Cultural-emotive lacunae: Concerned with the expression of feelings in public. Very often rhythm, pace, pauses, interruptions, etc., are based on the "national temperament."
d)Lacunae of humor: Cultural differences in a sense of humor.
Under (2) lacunae of communicative activity, the following are listed:
a) Mental lacunae: All culturally-specific problem-solving strategies. For example, representatives of different cultures may exhibit differences in the amount of time deemed proper to be used in certain tasks.
b)Behavioral-specific lacunae: Differences in non-verbal behavior when used for conveying information. Includes kinesics (mime, gesture), movements involved in routine habits, and etiquette.
Lacunae relating to cultural space (3) include incongruities, between cultures, in "conceiving and assessing aspects of one's cultural milieu." This includes a particular culture's typical "inventory of knowledge" which forms the "cultural identity" of the average citizen. This includes:
a)Perceptive lacunae: assessments of distance.
b)Ethnographic lacunae: culturally specific tastes in drink, food, clothing, interior decorating, eating out, etc.
c)Lacunae of cultural stock: incompatibilities between cultures in the volume and size of the inventory of knowledge, including a knowledge of one's own history, cultural and social symbols, color symbolism (blue jeans), and other implicit symbols which are "substantially more numerous."
Finally, text lacunae (4) occur as a "specific property of the text as a means of communication in both form and content." In other words, an understanding of genre and technique are expressed within cultures through the text. "Breaches or gaps" in the text can be "intentional or unintentional." Texts can even contain "direct errors" or "inaccuracies," but still have meaning to the culturally initiated recipient.
Satellites and international broadcasting have made it technically much easier to study foreign audience decoding of television news broadcasts and their deeper cultural and political connotations. Language is the main barrier, but Finland presents us with a unique environment. Ten years of English-language instruction in school, combined with intensive exposure to English-language films and television-programming on Finnish television, makes Finns, especially those members of the younger generation, as non-native speakers of English, especially fluent. To paraphrase Gumperz, they can be described as "individuals who speak English well and have no difficulty in producing grammatical English sentences" but may nevertheless have significant difficulties "in what they perceive as meaningful discourse cues..." When working cross-culturally with audiences who live only on the periphery of the American commercial news environment, and with audiences who are also linguistically competent in English, it becomes possible to isolate certain contextualization cues by means of intensive interviews. By borrowing from the lacuna model for the systemization and classification of these audience-perceived defects or gaps in cultural understanding, one is able to reveal cross-cultural differences between implicitly understood discourse styles.
A lacuna study also enables the exploration of the concept of broadcast news as discourse by imposing a new perspective on implicit knowledge, that which is taken for granted about television by audiences. Conceptualization cues which lead to cross-cultural "misunderstandings" can be systematized and those unexplainable phenomena which occur in one culture but not invariably in the other can be recorded. Russian ethnopsycholinguistics pioneered the lacuna method and stressed the social significance of communication. Lacuna advocates emphatically dismiss the common notion that society is an entity made up of isolated individuals pursuing their own individual goals. Language and communication are carriers of society's cultural characteristics and the search for lacunae is a search for the "social composite" which regulates the encoding of intent and its correct decoding. A text is therefore "meaningless until it is read, or listened to, by someone." The lacuna is the act of labeling this composite meaning, because, the "performative abilities of author and receptor are constrained by their respective knowledge of syntax." Syntax, however, is not the only constraint on understanding. Decoding also depends on the recipient's "awareness of key conventions" which are "often historically defined."
Ertelt-Vieth's lacuna model develops the lacuna for use in the revealing of implicit understanding in oral communication. For her study, she used a group of German students in Moscow to present examples of culturally relevant contacts between German and Russian students in which intercultural differences (misinterpretations and other cultural gaps) arise. Interviews were carried out in Moscow with visiting German students who were asked to evaluate contacts with their Russian colleagues. Russian students were then asked to elaborate on the contacts in their own words, mentioning the problems that may have arisen. Her experiment is significant because it considers both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors in intercultural contacts. Above all, her interviews attempt to expose implicitness of understanding, as well as national prejudices, by evaluating such factors which arise to activate prejudices. Vieth's lacuna model, therefore, avoids cultural differences without trying to "solve" them or "appreciate" them.
Television news programs generate messages, and those who generate those messages may not, themselves, be completely conscious of their own rules and categories of message encoding. Awareness of historically defined key conventions is crucial. If television news is a system of encoding reality, then the intentions of those who encode must be understood before proper decoding can occur.
John Joseph Gumperz (1922 - ) is an American linguist and academic. Gumperz was, for most of his career, a professor at the University of California in Berkeley. He is currently affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research on the languages of India, on code-switching in Norway, and on conversational interaction, has benefitted the study of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and urban anthropology.
Works
John Gumperz developed a new way of looking at sociolinguistics with Dell Hymes, also a scholar of sociolinguistics. Their contribution was a new method called the "ethnography of communication." Gumperz' own approach has been called Interactional sociolinguistics.
Sociolinguistics analyzes variation in discourse, within a particular speech community, and studies how that variation affects the unfolding of meaning in interaction and correlates with the social order of the community.
Gumperz was interested in how the order of situations and the culture of the speaker affect the way in which they make conversational inferences and interpret verbal or non-verbal signs known as contextualization cues.
His publications and courses given include work in the emerging field of sociolinguistics research in India.[1]
Discourse Strategies
John J. Gumperz
To understand the role of language in public life and the social process in general, we need first a closer understanding of how linguistic knowledge and social factors interact in discourse interpretation. This volume is a major advance towards that understanding. Professor Gumperz here synthesizes fundamental research on communication from a wide variety of disciplines - linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and non-verbal communication - and develops an original and broadly based theory of conversational inference which shows how verbal communication can serve either between individuals of different social and ethnic backgrounds. The urgent need to overcome such barriers to effective communication is also a central concern of the book. Examples of conversational exchanges as well as of longer encounters, recorded in the urban United States, village Austria, South Asia and Britain, and analyzed to illustrate all aspects of the analytical approach, and to show how subconscious cultural presuppositions can damagingly affect interpretation of intent and judgement of interspeaker attitude. The volume will be of central interest to anyone concerned with communication, whether from a more academic viewpoint or as a professional working, for example, in the fields of interethnic or industrial relations.
Crosstalk and Culture in Sino-American Communication
Foreword by John Gumperz
Chinese and Americans often unwittingly communicate at cross purposes because they are misled by the cultural trappings of talk. This book aims to clarify their misunderstandings by examining their different ideals and strategies of talk. It draws on cultural, philosophical, and linguistic insights and traces the development of Chinese communicative strategies from Confucius through the ‘eight-legged essay’ to the boardrooms and streets of Hong Kong. Its formal analysis of taped interchanges and in-depth interviews reveals Chinese speakers’ distinctive ways of communicating and relating. Crosstalk and Culture in Sino-American Communication will alert people to the pitfalls of cultural misunderstandings and the hidden assumptions and expectations underlying talk.
• Unusual in linking historical background to Chinese culture, traditional views of rhetoric and current communication strategies • Has clear practical significance for interethnic communication • Latest in SIS series which is valued by sociologists as well as linguists for its attention to naturally occurring conversation
Language and Social Identity
Throughout Western society there are now strong pressures for social and racial integration but, in spite of these, recent experience has shown that greater intergroup contact can actually reinforce social distinctions and ethnic stereotypes. The studies collected here examine, from a broad sociological perspective, the sorts of face-to-face verbal exchange that are characteristic of industrial societies, and the volume as a whole pointedly demonstrates the role played by communicative phenomena in establishing and reinforcing social identity. The method of analysis that has been adopted enables the authors to reveal and examine a centrally important but hitherto little discussed conversational mechanism: the subconscious processes of inference that result from situational factors, social presuppositions and discourse conventions. The theory of conversation and the method of analysis that inform the author’s approach are discussed in the first two chapters, and the case studies themselves examine interviews, counselling sessions and similar formal exchanges involving contacts between a wide range of different speakers: South Asians, West Indians and native English speakers in Britain; English natives and Chinese in South-East Asia; Afro-Americans, Asians and native English speakers in the United States; and English and French speakers in Canada. The volume will be of importance to linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and others with a professional interest in communication, and its findings will have far-reaching applications in industrial and community relations and in educational practice.
Works
John Gumperz developed a new way of looking at sociolinguistics with Dell Hymes, also a scholar of sociolinguistics. Their contribution was a new method called the "ethnography of communication." Gumperz' own approach has been called Interactional sociolinguistics.
Sociolinguistics analyzes variation in discourse, within a particular speech community, and studies how that variation affects the unfolding of meaning in interaction and correlates with the social order of the community.
Gumperz was interested in how the order of situations and the culture of the speaker affect the way in which they make conversational inferences and interpret verbal or non-verbal signs known as contextualization cues.
His publications and courses given include work in the emerging field of sociolinguistics research in India.[1]
Discourse Strategies
John J. Gumperz
To understand the role of language in public life and the social process in general, we need first a closer understanding of how linguistic knowledge and social factors interact in discourse interpretation. This volume is a major advance towards that understanding. Professor Gumperz here synthesizes fundamental research on communication from a wide variety of disciplines - linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and non-verbal communication - and develops an original and broadly based theory of conversational inference which shows how verbal communication can serve either between individuals of different social and ethnic backgrounds. The urgent need to overcome such barriers to effective communication is also a central concern of the book. Examples of conversational exchanges as well as of longer encounters, recorded in the urban United States, village Austria, South Asia and Britain, and analyzed to illustrate all aspects of the analytical approach, and to show how subconscious cultural presuppositions can damagingly affect interpretation of intent and judgement of interspeaker attitude. The volume will be of central interest to anyone concerned with communication, whether from a more academic viewpoint or as a professional working, for example, in the fields of interethnic or industrial relations.
Crosstalk and Culture in Sino-American Communication
Foreword by John Gumperz
Chinese and Americans often unwittingly communicate at cross purposes because they are misled by the cultural trappings of talk. This book aims to clarify their misunderstandings by examining their different ideals and strategies of talk. It draws on cultural, philosophical, and linguistic insights and traces the development of Chinese communicative strategies from Confucius through the ‘eight-legged essay’ to the boardrooms and streets of Hong Kong. Its formal analysis of taped interchanges and in-depth interviews reveals Chinese speakers’ distinctive ways of communicating and relating. Crosstalk and Culture in Sino-American Communication will alert people to the pitfalls of cultural misunderstandings and the hidden assumptions and expectations underlying talk.
• Unusual in linking historical background to Chinese culture, traditional views of rhetoric and current communication strategies • Has clear practical significance for interethnic communication • Latest in SIS series which is valued by sociologists as well as linguists for its attention to naturally occurring conversation
Language and Social Identity
Throughout Western society there are now strong pressures for social and racial integration but, in spite of these, recent experience has shown that greater intergroup contact can actually reinforce social distinctions and ethnic stereotypes. The studies collected here examine, from a broad sociological perspective, the sorts of face-to-face verbal exchange that are characteristic of industrial societies, and the volume as a whole pointedly demonstrates the role played by communicative phenomena in establishing and reinforcing social identity. The method of analysis that has been adopted enables the authors to reveal and examine a centrally important but hitherto little discussed conversational mechanism: the subconscious processes of inference that result from situational factors, social presuppositions and discourse conventions. The theory of conversation and the method of analysis that inform the author’s approach are discussed in the first two chapters, and the case studies themselves examine interviews, counselling sessions and similar formal exchanges involving contacts between a wide range of different speakers: South Asians, West Indians and native English speakers in Britain; English natives and Chinese in South-East Asia; Afro-Americans, Asians and native English speakers in the United States; and English and French speakers in Canada. The volume will be of importance to linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and others with a professional interest in communication, and its findings will have far-reaching applications in industrial and community relations and in educational practice.
Gumperz and Interactional Sociolinguistics
1. Introduction and overview
Interactional sociolinguistics is a qualitative, interpretative approach to the analysis of social interaction that developed at the intersection of linguistics, anthropology and sociology. It emerged primarily out of the work of anthropological linguist John J. Gumperz, who, in his field research in the tradition of the ethnography of communication in the 1960s and 1970s, observed immense linguistic and cultural diversity in everyday talk, and sought to devise a method for analyzing and understanding this diversity, and for testing hypotheses gained from doing ethnography through the collection and analysis of actual texts. Its development was also motivated by Gumperz‟s interest in investigating intercultural encounters characteristic of many modern urban areas, as well as by his concern for social justice.
As an „approach to discourse‟ (Schiffrin 1994), interactional sociolinguistics (IS) offers theories and methods that enable researchers to explore not only how language works but also to gain insights into the social processes through which individuals build and maintain relationships, exercise power, project and negotiate identities, and create communities. IS methodology involves an ethnographic component (observations of speakers in naturally-occurring contexts and participant-observation), audio- and/or video-recording of interactions, detailed linguistic transcription of recorded conversations, careful micro-analysis of conversational features in the context of the 2 information gained through ethnography, and sometimes, post-recording interviews. The key theoretical contributions of IS are to explain how speakers use signalling mechanisms, or „contextualization cues‟ (Gumperz, 1978, 1982a, 1982b, 1992a, 1992b, 1999b, 2001), often prosodic (like intonation, stress, pitch register) or paralinguistic (like tempo, pausing, hesitation) in nature, to indicate how they mean what they say, and how listeners, through a nuanced, context-bound process Gumperz calls „conversational inference‟, recognize and interpret contextualization cues through their own culturally-shaped background knowledge. In a foundational book investigating linguistic diversity in interaction, Discourse Strategies, Gumperz (1982a) suggests that communicative experiences lead to expectations regarding how to use contextualization cues; this study also demonstrates how members of diverse cultural groups often understand and employ these cues differently. Importantly, when interactional participants have dissimilar „contextualization conventions‟ (Gumperz, 1982a)—that is, different ways of conventionally using and interpreting contextualization cues—misunderstandings and conversational breakdown can occur. Such breakdowns, Gumperz suggests, ultimately can contribute to larger social problems such as ethnic stereotyping and differential access to information and opportunities.
Conversational inference and the related notion of contextualization cues constitute an interactive theory of meaning-making that was designed to investigate intercultural communication and conflict based on cultural differences; in fact it has been suggested that the approach pioneered by Gumperz „provides the most systematic investigations of such conflict‟ (Maynard, 1988:315). It also offers a means of performing micro-analysis of interaction in light of macro-societal issues like institutional 3 discrimination, thus taking part in an ongoing quest in sociolinguistics to link the „micro‟ and the „macro‟ in meaningful ways (e.g., Erickson, 2004; Scollon and Scollon, 2004). Further, IS offers a linguistic approach to the contemporary, constructionist understanding of identity put forth by researchers from a range of disciplinary perspectives (Goffman, 1959; Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Ochs, 1993; Holstein and Gubrium, 2007; see also Chapter 11 this volume). It has also made important contributions to the social scientific study of language in general, complementing other approaches aimed at understanding language from both structural and functional perspectives, such as Conversation Analysis and linguistic pragmatics. Additionally, IS has reached beyond the „ivory tower‟ to offer non-academics a means of understanding the role of language in social relationships, ways of identifying causes of miscommunication, and strategies for improving communication. Gumperz, for instance, served as a consultant for an educational B.B.C. television programme called Crosstalk (Twitchin, 1979) which addressed the subtleties of intercultural communication in multicultural workplaces in London; in addition, his work inspired other scholars to share, with nonacademic audiences, sociolinguistic insights into everyday interactional dynamics.
This chapter presents an historical overview of IS, focusing on the research of Gumperz as well as of other scholars who have made significant contributions to the development of the approach. It outlines IS‟s primary inspirations, goals, topical foci, theoretical constructs, and methods. It also describes contemporary research in IS, identifying it as topically diverse, theoretically rich, and poised to address increasingly interdisciplinary research questions. The main section of this paper traces the development of IS in detail, focusing primarily on the work of its founder, John Gumperz, and highlighting how, in formulating the key concepts and methodological frameworks of IS, he incorporated insights from scholars who examine interaction and meaning from a range of disciplinary perspectives (Section 2). I focus in particular on the methodological insights Gumperz developed in collaboration with Dell Hymes and through exposure to Conversation Analysis, the theoretical insights he gleaned from scholars such as Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, and H. P. Grice, and IS theory developments contributed by Gumperz‟s student Deborah Tannen in the light of Robin Lakoff‟s work. I also situate Gumperz‟s work in larger research trajectories in the field of linguistics. Next, I give a brief overview of five major research trajectories to which Gumperz‟s research in IS has contributed substantially: code-switching and language contact; intercultural communication; language and gender; discursive identity construction; and language, power and institutions (Section 3). Finally, I discuss possible future directions of IS, in particular in the context of growing interests in interdisciplinary research (Section 4).
2. John J. Gumperz and the Development of Interactional Sociolinguistics
John J. Gumperz was born in 1922 in Germany; fleeing Germany pre-Holocaust, he came to the United States in 1939. He served in the U.S. Army; it has been suggested that his later academic interests in intercultural communication and social justice may have taken root in part as a result of his emigration and military experiences. Gumperz received his bachelor‟s degree in science from the University of Ohio, Cincinnati in 1947, but after attending Linguistic Institute lectures as a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Michigan, he redirected his studies to linguistics. Gumperz received his Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics in 1954 from the University of Michigan, where he studied with Kenneth Pike and Hans Kurath. His dissertation examined variables of a German dialect spoken by third generation immigrants in southeastern Michigan and linked these variables to social and religious groupings of individuals, setting the scene for his later research.
Gumperz went to Cornell University to teach as an instructor before finishing his degree. After receiving his Ph.D., Gumperz was invited to serve as the head of Cornell‟s Hindi language training programme; he subsequently went to India to do post-doctoral research in sociolinguistics as part of an interdisciplinary research team. In 1956, he began collaborating with linguist Charles Ferguson at Deccan College (in India) on language diversity issues when both were visiting faculty there. Ferguson and Gumperz (1960) co-edited Linguistic Diversity in South Asia, a special issue of the International Journal of American Linguistics, which, in William Labov‟s (2003: 5) words, provides „the most important general statement‟ of the principles of the then young field of sociolinguistics. Gumperz gained more fieldwork experience in Norway in the 1960s, further fuelling his interests in linguistic diversity. The Norway study also resulted in a publication on code-switching (Blom and Gumperz, 1972) in which forms and functions of code-switching are investigated in a novel way—as tied to situation (situational switching) and as tied to participants‟ relationships and their signaling of how the listener should interpret what the speaker says (metaphorical switching). As Kathryn Woolard (2004: 75), a student of Gumperz, remarks, his work „has had not only seminal but enduring influence on the accepted anthropological view on codeswitching‟. Importantly, the Norway study also proved foundational for Gumperz‟s development of the notion of contextualization cues in the IS framework: code-switching, such as use of pitch, intonation, pausing, gesture, and other contextualization cues, can be used to signal how verbal messages should be interpreted.
After his research in India, Gumperz was invited to design a Hindi-Urdu programme at the University of California, Berkeley. A number of his studies around that time focused specifically on conversational Hindi-Urdu (Gumperz, 1958, 1960, 1963; Gumperz and Naim, 1960; Gumperz and Rumery, 1963), but he increasingly grew interested in sociolinguistic aspects of language use across different cultural groups. At Berkeley, Gumperz served as chairperson for South and South-East Asian Studies (from 1968 to 1971); he also served as a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology, becoming a full professor in Anthropology in 1965. While affiliated with Berkley, Gumperz has taken opportunities to cultivate connections with scholars in Europe, especially in Austria, Germany, and the U. K., as well as with scholars in the United States. He is currently an emeritus professor at Berkeley, and is affiliated with the University of California Santa-Barbara as a faculty member of an interdisciplinary research group and a Ph.D. emphasis both called Language, Interaction and Social Organization (LISO).
In establishing IS as an approach, Gumperz has explored topics as varied as language diversity, language contact, bilingualism, language and educational issues, and interethnic communication. With Dell Hymes, Gumperz co-edited two volumes key to the ethnography of communication (Gumperz and Hymes, 1964, 1972). His book Discourse Strategies (Gumperz, 1982a) and its companion edited volume, Language and Social Identity (Gumperz, 1982b), are viewed as groundbreaking in the study of issues of language and culture and as foundational IS texts. Discourse Strategies marks the beginning of Gumperz‟s current, ongoing research looking at interethnic and intercultural communication, communication and social background, and the social significance of details of communication (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003). Language and Social Identity consists of essays by students and postdoctoral researchers working with Gumperz—among them Monica Heller, Daniel Maltz, Ruth Borker, Celia Roberts, T.C. Jupp and Deborah Tannen—and by his spouse, and frequent co-author, Jenny Cook-Gumperz.
In the 1990s, Gumperz continued to refine his approach, linking conversational inference to Michael Silverstein‟s (1992, 1993) work on indexicality and conceptualizing contextualization cues as a class of indexicals (Gumperz, 2003), while also applying it to new institutional contexts in collaborative work (Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz, 1996, 1997, 2002) and furthering investigation of contextualization processes (as seen in Gumperz‟s contributions to two key IS edited volumes: Auer and di Luzio‟s Contextualization in Language, and Duranti and Goodwin‟s Rethinking Context, both published in 1992). In conjunction with his former student Stephen Levinson, Gumperz co-edited a volume reexamining the influential „Whorf hypothesis‟ (Gumperz and Levinson, 1996). In recent years, Gumperz (1999b, 2001) has taken opportunities to write reflective essays about IS. Additionally, he discusses his approach in Language and Interaction: Discussions with John J. Gumperz (Eerdmans, Prevignano and Thibault, 2003). This book includes two interviews with Gumperz (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003; Prevignano and Thibault, 2003) in which he talks about the motivations of his work, explains in detail his conceptualization of contextualization cues, and outlines connections he sees between his approach and others, such as Conversation Analysis and Silverstein‟s semiotics. It also includes commentaries on Gumperz‟s work by researchers such as Levinson (2003). In a response essay, Gumperz (2003) addresses issues brought up by these commentaries.
In total, Gumperz has more than 100 published books, chapters and articles over the span of his career. He has also received many academic accolades, has served on the editorial boards of numerous academic journals, and is founding editor of the influential Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics book series (in which Discourse Strategies is the first volume). Through his classes at Berkeley and visits to other universities in both the United States and abroad, Gumperz has introduced IS and issues of language and communication to students of interaction around the world. His approach is viewed as a key part of sociolinguistic research programmes in various European countries, such as Greece (Tsitsipis, 2006) and the U. K. (Rampton, 2007). Gumperz has been identified not only as the founder of IS, but also as „one of the foundational spirits in the broader field of sociolinguistics itself‟ (Levinson, 2003:43).
2.2 Social and Moral Motivations in the Development of IS
IS emerged as Gumperz was developing „replicable methods of qualitative analysis that account for our ability to interpret what participants intend to convey in everyday communicative practice‟ (Gumperz, 2001: 215). However, although as an approach to discourse IS gives insight into conversation as an entity in general, and into meaning-making processes in particular, it did not develop out of an interest in „interaction in the abstract‟, but rather as a means of exploring linguistic and cultural diversity in everyday talk (Gumperz, 2003: 105). As Duranti and Goodwin (1992a: 229-230) note, „Gumperz‟[s] work is unique for his ability to merge intellectual, social, and moral considerations within his analytical apparatus‟; that is, Gumperz developed IS as a way of not only explicating the interpretive procedures underlying talk, but also to address the consequences of real-life, everyday conversational misunderstandings between members of different cultural groups.
The „social‟ considerations of IS emerge through Gumperz‟s interest in understanding and explaining instances of miscommunication he observed in various fieldwork studies he undertook in India, Europe and the United States, and in trying to contribute to improving intercultural communication in increasingly diverse areas, particularly urban areas. For instance, in a now classic case-study example, Gumperz was invited to observe interactions between members of two groups suffering strained interactions and feelings of ill-will at work: native British cargo handlers and the Indian and Pakistani staff cafeteria workers who served their meals at a major British airport (Gumperz, 1982a, chapter 8). Gumperz observed cultural differences in uses of—and expectations regarding—intonation, a key contextualization cue. When the Indian and Pakistani cafeteria workers offered a serving of gravy, for instance, they did not use rising intonation as most native British English speakers would. Instead, they uttered „gravy‟ with a flat intonation because, to them, this was a culturally polite way of offering something. To native British English speakers, who had different expectations regarding intonation, this sounded rude; they thus misinterpreted the cafeteria workers‟ intentions. Calling into attention this seemingly minor difference in intonation usage and discussing it with members of both groups actually improved communication and inter-group perceptions. In this way, IS research clearly has practical social implications; it „may lead to an explanation for the endemic and increasingly serious communication problems that affect private and public affairs in our society‟ (Gumperz, 1982a: 172). This is particularly important as workplaces—and nations—become increasingly diverse.
The „moral‟ considerations Duranti and Goodwin (1992a) mention relate to social injustices. Gumperz‟s work explores issues such as misattribution of intent, stereotyping, and discrimination in the context of interaction, in particular against ethnic minorities. Following the work of Frederick Erickson (1975), Gumperz investigates the role of language in enacting discrimination in „gatekeeping encounters‟; these are encounters in which „two persons meet, usually as strangers, with one of them having authority to make decisions that affect the other‟s future‟ (Erickson and Schultz, 1982: xi). In such encounters, the consequences of misunderstandings can be very serious, especially for the person not in the authority position. In many of Gumperz‟s case studies, the participants have different expectations about contextualization conventions and/or mismatches regarding the nature of the institutional encounter in which they are involved. Thus, miscommunication does occur, and the person seeking access, usually an individual from an ethnic minority group, risks being denied material goods, a job prospect, or some other resource. For example, in a tape-recorded interview-counselling session that Gumperz (1982a, Chapter 8) analyzes, a Pakistani teacher who has been unable to secure permanent employment in London has an unsuccessful exchange with the native British staff counsellor whose job it is to help him, largely due to different expectations about what needs to be said in the session and to different uses of prosodic and paralinguistic features like rhythm and intonation. Careful turn-by-turn analysis of the recording reveals that their interaction is rhythmically asynchronous and the speakers never achieve a joint understanding of where the interaction is going at any given time. In other words, they seem to be „on parallel tracks which don‟t meet‟ (Gumperz and Roberts, 1980; as cited in Gumperz, 1982a:185). Thus, the teacher does not receive the support he needs and the staff counsellor is not able to do her job effectively. One motivation of many IS studies, including many by Gumperz, is the belief that by uncovering cultural differences and by educating people about them, some such misunderstandings can be circumvented, thereby decreasing the likelihood of unintentional discrimination or denial of resources based on misinterpretation of culture-specific uses of contextualization cues.
In line with this belief, Gumperz has participated in public educational efforts. As mentioned, he served as a consultant on an educational programme called Crosstalk, which was broadcast on B.B.C. television in 1979. As part of a ten-part series called Multi-Racial Britain, Crosstalk aimed to help develop awareness of possible causes of intercultural miscommunication in workplaces, as well as to draw attention to the role of language in stereotyping and discrimination. Written materials were also prepared by Gumperz and his colleagues to accompany the programme (Gumperz et al., 1979, 1980). Crosstalk, while serving as a useful tool for educating the general public at the time it was aired, has applications for formal educational contexts too, such as for teaching English as a foreign language and for teacher training (Baxter and Levine, 1982), as well as for courses in intercultural communication (Kiesling and Paulston, 2005: 2). It also inspired later work aimed at general audiences, such as an educational video focused on communication between Native Alaskans and non-Natives called Interethnic Communication (Scollon and Jones, 1979), and, more famously, general audience books by Tannen (1986, 1990) that examine various kinds of cross-cultural and cross-sub-cultural communication.
2.3 The Development of IS: Gumperz and his Major Intellectual Influences
The research programme of Gumperz and his development of IS grew not only out of interest in the social issues facing diversifying societies, but also out of Gumperz‟s training in structural linguistics, his contact with scholars from various fields interested in interaction, qualitative methodologies, and meaning-making, and broader movements in linguistics in the 1960s through to the 1980s. Gumperz‟s linguistics background, contacts with anthropologists, sociologists, language philosophers, and other linguists, and participation in larger language debates contributed substantially to the development of IS.
2.3.1 A Starting Point: Bloomfield and Structural Linguistics
Gumperz‟s linguistic training was in the tradition of Saussure, Sapir and Bloomfield (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003: 8); Gumperz specifically recognizes Leonard Bloomfield‟s (1933) book Language, a pioneering work in American structural linguistics, as having influenced and motivated some of his early reflections. As linguistic anthropologist (and Gumperz‟s student) Michael Agar (1994: 16) notes, structural linguistics „puts a circle‟ around language, meaning that it separates grammar from its cultural context. However, Gumperz observes that structuralists‟ „basic insights into linguistic, that is, phonological and syntactic competence and their approach to speaking as a partially subconscious process, continue to be useful‟ despite shortcomings of the approach (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003: 20). As we will see, Gumperz utilizes the notion of „competence‟ in a similar sense to Hymes‟s „communicative competence‟. He also draws on a view of speaking as a partially „subconscious‟ or „automatic‟ phenomenon in examining how interpretations are actually made in interaction (see, e.g., Gumperz, 1982a). Thus he extends basic ideas from structural linguistics into social and cultural realms.
Structural linguistics also motivated Gumperz‟s research in a more specific way: Gumperz cites as a starting point for him Bloomfield‟s thinking on regional linguistic diversity as it is interconnected with patterning of interpersonal contacts. Bloomfield‟s work offered „an initial outline of a theory of diversity that rests on human interaction as an analytical prime, and does not rely on a priori assumptions about ethnic, class or group identity‟ (Gumperz, 2003: 106). Gumperz (2003: 107) reports that a common assumption in the 1950s and 1960s was that communication between members of different social groups was problematic, yet, frustratingly, there was a lack of empirical evidence supporting this assumption. Therefore, he „set out to explore the validity of the interactional approach to diversity‟ that he saw seeds of in Bloomfield‟s work (Gumperz, 2003:107). Building on this, in research over the course of his career, Gumperz would move to erase „the circle‟ that disconnects language from social life.
2.3.2 An Anthropological Perspective: Hymes and the Ethnography of Communication
In order to investigate diversity in interaction, in the 1960s Gumperz turned to anthropological methods while collaborating with Dell Hymes, who was then developing the ethnography of communication (see Gumperz and Hymes 1964, 1972; Chapter 3, this volume). In fact, Gumperz‟s use of ethnographic methods goes further back, at least to his time in India: Ferguson and Gumperz (1960), for example, undertook an exploration of language contact „through qualitative methods involving work with informants, informal observations, and (sometimes) questionnaires‟ (Duranti, 2001: 5). The ethnography of communication, however, provided a systematic set of qualitative methodologies offering a means of analyzing „patterns of communication as part of cultural knowledge and behavior‟ (Schiffrin, 1994: 137). Importantly, ethnographic methods differ greatly from those of structural linguistics. Rather than contrasting formal units, such as sounds or sentence structures, across languages, ethnographers undertake in-depth fieldwork, usually involving participant-observation and interviewing. From relatively long-term observation and engagement with the community under study, ethnographers learn things about people and the diverse ways in which they use language that can only be discovered and understood over time. To use Pike‟s (1967) terms, ethnographers of communication are interested in viewing data from both etic and emic perspectives (see Carbaugh and Hastings, 1992). In other words, analysis needs to go beyond a general perspective and occur „in terms of categories which account for native perceptions of significance‟ (Gumperz, 1982a: 15). This is important because it extends beyond describing grammatical structures to the more problematic—and, for Gumperz, more consequential—task of identifying culturally meaningful categories, the relationships between them, and how language plays into their creation and maintenance.
This kind of anthropological „thick description‟ (Geertz, 1973) can be said to characterize Gumperz‟s research, even during the early formation of IS. In Rampton‟s (2007: 597) words, „Gumperz‟s work stands out for its empirical reconciliation of linguistics and ethnography‟. For example, Gumperz‟s fieldwork in a caste-stratified North Indian village and a small, homogeneous town in northern Norway led to the development of means of exploring language diversity as firmly embedded in specific aspects of sociocultural life, giving an emic understanding of the data (see Gumperz, 1971). His findings indicated that social interaction—frequency and quality of interaction among individuals, specifically—explained the linguistic distinctions he observed. Category labels put on people like „touchable‟ and „untouchable‟ (terms of social categorization then used in many Indian communities) were not sufficient to explain what was going on. In addition, ideologies of interpersonal relations—who should interact with whom, and in what way—further explicated patterns of language use in these two locales. Gumperz thus discovered information about what Hymes (1972: 277) refers to as speakers‟ „communicative competence‟, which includes information such as „when to speak, when not‟ and „what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner‟, going far beyond the grammatical knowledge described by structuralists. 2.3.3 Studying Interaction and Conceptualizing Knowledge: Goffman and Garfinkel
The notion of „communicative competence‟ suggests that in interacting, speakers follow not only grammatical rules, but also social rules, such as regarding what kinds of conversational topics are appropriate for what kinds of situations. In order to get at social rules in a meaningful way, Gumperz reached beyond linguistics and anthropology to build into IS elements of sociologist Erving Goffman‟s work on the „interaction order‟ and ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel‟s interest in the interpretive processes and background knowledge needed to keep interaction going. In fact, Gumperz has commented, „In my approach to interaction, I take a position somewhat between that of Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel‟ (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003: 8).
Although Goffman „does not analyze language per se‟ (Schiffrin, 1994: 102), Gumperz views him as a „sociological predecessor‟ of his own work (Gumperz, 2001: 216). Goffman (1967, 1974, 1981) contemplates face-to-face interaction with a focus on how it is that social encounters are constructed. In other words, he recognizes the „interaction order‟—how people behave in one another‟s co-presence and co-construct their social worlds in everyday encounters—as a legitimate area of study. Like Goffman, Gumperz views everyday interaction as worthy of study; further, Goffman and Gumperz were both on the faculty at Berkeley—Gumperz in Anthropology, and Goffman in Sociology—for a number of overlapping years (1960-1968). Gumperz also finds inspiration in Goffman‟s work in that the notion of „interaction order‟ provides „a distinct level of discursive organization bridging the linguistic and the social‟ (Gumperz, 2001: 216). However, whereas Goffman does not focus on the details of language in his work, Gumperz, with his concept of contextualization cues, does.
Moreover, Goffman‟s observations and theorizing uncover many interesting—and often taken-for-granted—phenomena that occur in everyday encounters; IS is able to investigate these phenomena from a perspective that highlights the role of linguistic features and investigates conversation as a collaborative endeavour. For example, identity presentation, considered in Goffman‟s (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, is examined from an IS perspective in Language and Social Identity (Gumperz, 1982b). Additionally, identity presentation and construction continues to be a topic of interest for IS scholars. For example, Tannen (1999), Kotthoff (2000), Kendall (2007) and others have drawn on IS to examine the linguistic creation of gendered identities. Framing, or how people establish and negotiate „definitions of a situation‟ (Goffman, 1974: 11), relates to a central part of IS: invoking Silverstein‟s (1992, 1993) discussions of indexicality, Gumperz remarks that „Contextualization cues, along with other indexical signs, serve to retrieve the frames (in Goffman‟s sense of the term) that channel the interpretive process‟ (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003: 10). In other words, using a speaker‟s contextualization cues as guidelines, a listener imagines himself or herself to be in a particular kind of situation; this enables a listener to assess what the speaker intends. Thus, contextualization cues are a means of collaboratively accomplishing framing in discourse. Numerous IS scholars have demonstrated how this occurs and continue to develop a theory of framing in the context of sociolinguistics by integrating and extending Goffman‟s and Gumperz‟s theorizing (e.g., Tannen, 1993a). Frames theory has been used to investigate a host of contexts, ranging from everyday family interactions (e.g., Gordon, 2002, 2008; Kendall, 2006), to medical encounters (e.g., Pinto, Ribeiro and Dantas, 2005; Ribeiro 1994; Tannen and Wallat, 1993), to moments of conversational humour (e.g., Davies, 2003; Kotthoff, 2000, 2002). Additionally, research has incorporated Goffman‟s (1967) work on face-saving and Brown and Levinson‟s (1987) work on face and linguistic politeness into IS analyses, such as by Kendall (2004), Kotthoff (2000) and Tannen (1984/2005). Building on Goffman (1981), research in the IS tradition has also considered how alignments or „footings‟ are linguistically created and managed (e.g., Couper-Kuhlen, 1996; Davies, 2003; Gordon, 2003; Tannen, 2003).
Gumperz also cites the work of Garfinkel as instrumental in his thinking about the nature of social interaction, as well as the knowledge required to participate in it. Garfinkel (1967) developed an approach within sociology known as ethnomethodology, which focuses on the interactive processes by which people create social organization and the knowledge needed to do this. Research in the IS tradition is able to examine the linguistic means by which social organization is accomplished. In addition, Garfinkel‟s (1967) experiments—usually known as „breaching‟ or „Garfinkeling‟ experiments—caught Gumperz‟s attention; these involved breaking social norms as a means of uncovering often unnamed social rules as well as people‟s knowledge and expectations about situations. Further, Garfinkel made the insightful observation that interactants can never be detailed enough in talk to convey every aspect of meaning, thus some combination of „practical reasoning‟ and „unstated, taken-for-granted background knowledge‟ is needed to fill in what is left unsaid (Gumperz, 2001:216). For Gumperz, Garfinkel‟s observations brought to light the role of sociocultural background knowledge in interpretation, a critical component of his theory of conversational inference. In the IS framework, and in the spirit of Hymes (1972), researchers argue that speakers gain sociocultural knowledge from having been acculturated in a community. In other words, knowledge about how to use language in culturally apt ways—how to use pitch, intonation, and other contextualization cues, including those that are nonverbal—comes from a speaker‟s collection of cultural experiences. It is this knowledge base that participants rely on too as they interpret contextualization cues. The nature and functioning of this knowledge—what exactly it encompasses, and how people access and activate the appropriate knowledge at a given conversational moment—is still under investigation in IS and related areas of research.
2.3.4 Micro-Analysis of Talk: Conversation Analysis
Garfinkel and Goffman also influenced Gumperz in more indirect way: Conversation Analysis (CA) (see Chapter 27, this volume), which proved influential to Gumperz‟s research, grew out of the work of two of Goffman‟s students at Berkeley in the 1960s: Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff. In collaboration with Sacks‟s student Gail Jefferson, Sacks and Schegloff applied Garfinkel‟s ethnomethodology specifically to conversation (see Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974). CA is interested in how conversation represents and creates social organization among participants; its focus on conversational discourse—both face-to-face and over the phone—as a research site and on the details of language provided inspiration for Gumperz‟s focus on talk and on the micro-features of interaction (Gumperz, 1999b, 2001; Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003). Both IS and CA examine actual social encounters, and their methods both involve recording, a form of careful linguistic transcription, and analysis of interaction. Key CA notions and conceptualizations of interaction are also central to IS. For example, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974), in a seminal CA study, outline a „systematics‟ for conversation based on the basic organizational unit of the conversational turn. This study views conversation as a sequentially organized event; in Heritage‟s (1984: 242) words, each utterance is „context-shaped‟ (shaped by the previous utterance) and „context-renewing‟ (creating a context for the next utterance). IS researchers consider this sense of context (discourse context) in their analyses; however IS also takes a broader perspective on what constitutes context and its effect on conversation2. For example, whereas CA researchers tend to claimthat „the turn-taking system [is independent of] various aspects of the socio-cultural context of speech‟ such as the speakers‟ ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic class (Duranti 1989:222), IS scholars consider such aspects to be central to how interaction unfolds, and indeed are interested in exploring diversity of turn-taking patterns across cultural groups (e.g., Tannen, 1984/2005). In other words, whereas „the CA view of interaction is a structural view‟ (Schiffrin, 1994:236), IS shows a more social and cultural emphasis. Thus, for instance, CA research has examined assessments from the perspective of conversational structure (Pomerantz, 1984), and research growing out of IS builds on this to demonstrate how two parents use assessments as a means of presenting different kinds of identities in interaction (Gordon, 2007).
In part, based on these different conceptualizations of what constitutes an utterance‟s context, IS and CA differ in another regard: Gumperz adopted playback, used in early sociolinguistic work by William Labov (Labov and Fanshel, 1977; see also Fanshel and Moss, 1971), as a means of testing analyst interpretations. Playback involves playing recordings of the interaction for those who participated in it, or for other insiders to the language variety and/or community, and asking for impressions in an open-ended way. It therefore provides multiple perspectives on interaction, which can be particularly insightful in cases of cross-cultural (mis)communication, where analysts might have native speaker insights into one side of the conversation, but not the other, based on his or her own cultural and linguistic background, as in Gumperz (1982a) and Tannen (1984/2005).
CA and IS continue to exist, side-by-side, as approaches to discourse analysis. Although they both investigate conversational discourse as what Schegloff (1982) calls „an interactional achievement‟, that is, as something „incrementally accomplished‟ via collaboration, CA and IS examine different aspects of the achievement. Sharing an interest in the micro-features of conversation, they continue to influence and complement each other mutually, for example by offering different perspectives on similar kinds of social interaction, as in Tannen and Goodwin‟s (2006) co-edited Text & Talk special issue on family interaction. Further, some scholars, like Goodwin (1990), have integrated CA methods with ethnographic fieldwork, blurring the distinction between the approaches and demonstrating that integrated perspectives are often especially revealing.
2.3.5 Inference: Berkeley Scholars—Grice and Lakoff
A number of scholars who interacted with Gumperz at Berkeley during the formulation of IS also influenced its development in meaningful ways. Levinson (2003: 32), who was then Gumperz‟s graduate student, describes the intellectual environment in which the approach developed:
In Berkeley at that time there was a rare and wonderful confluence of ideas from different disciplines concerning the study of meaning—in philosophy, Grice and Searle were expounding the ideas about implicature and speech acts now associated with them, Fillmore was preoccupied with indexicality in language, Kay with its sociological import, Robin Lakoff with contextual meaning, and George Lakoff was attempting to wrap it all up in a unified theory of generative semantics.
This intellectual milieu seems to have shaped Gumperz‟s thinking in multiple ways.
First, Gumperz‟s theory of conversational inference, which explains how people assess what others say to create meaning in conversation and what is required for this to occur, is related to language philosopher H. P. Grice‟s (1975) discussion of conversational cooperation, intention and implicature (Gumperz, 2001: 216; see also Gumperz, 1982a:202). Grice‟s (1975: 47) influential Cooperative Principle (CP) states: „Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of the talk exchange in which you are engaged‟. This principle, essentially, explains why conversation works at all, in particular at the level of information exchange. The CP includes four maxims which indicate that a speaker should be as (but not more) informative than required, tell the truth, contribute relevant remarks, and be orderly and clear. Within this framework, Grice suggests that speakers send certain meanings intentionally through implicatures sent by following or breaking („flouting‟) maxims. An implicature is „an inference about speaker intention that arises from a recipient‟s use of both semantic (i.e. logical) meanings and conversational principles‟ (Schiffrin, 1994: 193); it refers to „something which is implied in conversation, that is, something which is left implicit in actual language use‟ (Mey, 1993: 99). Thus, if a man asks a woman where he can buy a cup of coffee, and she says, „there‟s a place around the corner called Joe‟s‟, based on the CP maxims of truth and relevance, the man infers that coffee is for sale by the cup at Joe‟s 3. These maxims play into an IS understanding of how meaning-making works as well.
Second, Grice‟s (1975) and Searle‟s (1975) discussions of „the semantic basis of indirect conversational inference‟ (Gumperz, 1982a: 202) link to Gumperz‟s exploration of the indirect means by which speakers signal how utterances are to be interpreted. One way of thinking about contextualization cues is as indirect signals for interpretation: rather than saying, for example, „I‟m mad that you didn‟t invite me for coffee‟, a speaker might furrow his brow and say, in a whiney tone of voice, „You didn‟t invite me for coffee‟, thus indirectly indicating how the listener should interpret his meaning. The impact of Robin Lakoff‟s (1973, 1975) work on indirectness and linguistic politeness fits into this area as well, and it is formally incorporated into IS by Tannen (1984/2005). Lakoff (1973) notes that people regularly do not explicitly say what they mean in conversation for social reasons—to be nice, to respect another person‟s space, to leave interpretation options open, and so on. Importantly, research in IS shows that conceptualizations of how to be conventionally polite differ across cultural and subcultural groups (e.g., Rogerson-Revell, 2007; Scollon and Scollon, 1995/2001; Tannen, 1984/2005).
2.3.6 Conversational Style and Conversational Involvement: Tannen
While at Berkeley, Gumperz also collaborated with Tannen, who had a significant impact on IS, although she is perhaps best known for her work on language and gender (see Section 3.3). When Tannen was Gumperz‟s student, they co-authored a foundational IS paper, „Individual and social differences in language use‟ (Gumperz and Tannen, 1979) which introduced the notion of contextualization cues and provides material that would later be incorporated into a central chapter of Discourse Strategies entitled „Contextualization Conventions‟. Tannen‟s first book, Conversational Style (1984/2005), provides an important case study of cross-sub-cultural communication, introduces the key IS notion of „conversational style‟ and a new understanding of what Gumperz (1982a) called „conversational involvement‟, while also serving as an excellent example and overview of IS methodology.
„Conversational style‟ refers to an individual‟s way of speaking, including decisions about rate of speaking, pitch and amplitude, and the „countless other choices‟ speakers make that affect an utterance‟s interpretation (Tannen, 1984/2005: 14). In broad terms, a person‟s conversational style encompasses how he or she uses various contextualization cues. Drawing on the IS idea that a person‟s contextualization conventions grow out of interactive experiences, Tannen suggests that conversational style can be influenced by a range of factors, including where a person grew up and his or her cultural background, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexual orientation. Tannen‟s case-study of six speakers—three New York Jewish speakers, two Californians, and one speaker from England—uncovers a style continuum. Her analysis, building on not only Gumperz‟s research but also Hymes‟s (1974) on style and Lakoff‟s on politeness (1973) and communicative style (1979), shows that features of the „high-involvement style‟ characteristic of New Yorkers—such as talking along with other people and asking questions in a „machine gun‟ fashion—have a positive affect when used among those who share the style; these features create „rapport‟. In contrast, as in Gumperz‟s examples of mismatches in contextualization conventions, aspects of high-involvement style have negative affects when used with speakers exhibiting a style characterized by „high-considerateness‟ (see also Tannen, 1981).
A concept from Gumperz that Tannen extended and made even more central to IS is „conversational involvement‟ (Tannen, 1984/2005, 1989/2007). Gumperz (1982a: 1) used this notion in a very basic way, equating sustaining conversational involvement to participating in verbal exchanges; Tannen (1989/2007:13) develops involvement further: it is the „internal, even emotional connection individuals feel which binds them to other people as well as to places, things, activities, ideas, memories and words‟. She suggests that when aspects of style are shared, interacting serves as a means of building coherence and of bringing people together, the inverse of how clashing styles can drive wedges between them. In Talking Voices, Tannen (1989/2007) uses IS to examine both conversational and literary texts and focuses on repetition, the creation of dialogue („constructed dialogue‟), and details as linguistic strategies that seem to be especially productive in creating involvement. Tannen (1984/2005, 1986) also argues in her work that, through contextualization cues, participants send what Bateson (1972) calls „metamessages‟, or messages about how to interpret messages (e.g., „this is play‟). In other words, Tannen develops the idea that participants use contextualization cues to negotiate both the nature of a given situation and aspects of interpersonal relationships. For example, through „mutual revelation‟, where participants reciprocally share personal experiences with one another, participants are able to signal indirectly something to the effect of: „We are intimate; we both tell about ourselves; we are both interested in hearing about the other‟s experience‟ (Tannen, 1984/2005: 101).
Another contribution of Tannen to IS is bringing IS notions and their roles in interpersonal communication to broader audiences. Through popular books like That’s Not What I Meant! (1986) and the best-selling You Just Don’t Understand (1990), academic ideas about language and communication are shown to have, in the spirit of Gumperz‟s interests in social issues, practical applicability to everyday life. 4
2.3.7 Chomsky and Labov
When Gumperz was formulating and developing IS, other theories of language were being cultivated by Noam Chomsky and William Labov, and these influenced IS through providing approaches with which it could be compared and contrasted. In the early years of IS, Gumperz was considering language and social networks (Gumperz, 1971, 1976), the sociolinguistics of bilingualism and code-switching (Gumperz 1964a, 1964b; Blom and Gumperz, 1972; Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz, 1974) and language use in a variety of institutional contexts, including educational environments (Gumperz and Hernandez-Chavez, 1972; Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz, 1974), job interviews and counselling sessions (Gumperz et al., 1979; Gumperz, 1982a), committee meetings (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz, 1982), and legal contexts (Gumperz, 1982c). In such studies, Gumperz‟s approach, in his own words, reworks „the established traditions that continue to follow structuralist practices of separating the linguistic from the social‟ (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003:10). It thus stands in contrast with descendents of Saussure‟s structuralist approach to linguistics, including alternatives to it, the most notable being generative grammar, pioneered by Chomsky beginning in the late 1950s. For Gumperz (1982a: 19), although generative grammar has „theoretical significance‟, it also „clearly has only limited relevance for the study of verbal interaction processes‟. Chomsky‟s work focuses on the knowledge an ideal speaker needs to produce grammatical sentences („linguistic competence‟); it does not „attempt to account for the problem of cultural diversity‟ (Gumperz, 1974: 789). In contrast, Gumperz focuses on utterances produced and interpreted in context, and the knowledge—linguistic, social, and cultural—that participants use in so doing. He thus moves to erase the metaphorical „circle‟ that Agar (1994) has written about that disconnects language from social life, whereas Chomsky maintains the circle. Indeed, a major division that exists in contemporary linguistics is the division between Chomskyan linguistics and sociolinguistics. Thus, IS continues to develop itself—at least implicitly—in contrast to generative grammar.
During the time of IS‟s development, „the circle‟ was also being erased by other scholars, such as Charles Ferguson (1959), who was examining diglossia; indeed Ferguson‟s work provided a foundation for Gumperz‟s (1977) work on conversational code-switching (see also Blom-Gumperz and Gumperz, 1972). In addition, Labov was developing a quantitative sociolinguistics that linked linguistic variables to social categories (see Labov, 1966, 1972; see also Chapter 1, this volume). In a spirit similar to Gumperz, Labov‟s research focuses on language as a social entity. However, as Gumperz notes, „important as quantitative sociolinguistics is‟ for the study of language variation and change, „its applicability to the analysis of actual processes of face to face communication … is limited‟ (Gumperz, 1982a:26). This is so because Labovian sociolinguistics traditionally focuses on the quantitative analysis of linguistic variables at the social group level, whereas IS focuses on individuals‟ language use. Further, the statistical analyses of variationist sociolinguistics do not give insight into meaning-making as it happens moment-by-moment; in contrast, IS offers a view of language as „activity in a particular context, co-evolving along with that context, in part constitutive of it‟ (Becker, 1984/1995: 73). Because IS gives a nuanced analysis of individuals communicating in unfolding interactive sequences, it provides what Becker (1984/1995) might call a „linguistics of particularity‟, which we need to achieve a more complete understanding of how language works generally.
Just as there are theoretical and methodological tensions between generative grammar and sociolinguistics, so there are tensions between quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistics. As Tannen (1984/2005: 11-12) points out, it might be easy to dismiss a qualitative approach like IS due to its interpretive analytical procedures—with „interpretive‟ „wielded as a damning epithet‟. Analyzing talk in the IS tradition is necessarily interpretive in that researchers must weigh multiple possibilities—in terms of speaker intentions, listener interpretations, and so on—as they grapple with different levels of linguistic structure, the delicate twists and turns of social encounters, and the fact that there is no one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning. However, as Johnstone (2000: 36) notes, „sociolinguistic work is always “interpretive,” whether the interpretation involves numbers or results of some other kind. … Only with interpretation does an analysis have a point‟. And, although there will always be difficulties in uncovering speaker intent, the theory developed by Gumperz addresses these difficulties by taking an interactive approach that captures the use of (para)linguistic features in contextualized utterances as well as the listener‟s reaction to these. In addition, examination of negotiations and repairs occurring in discourse can aid in analyst interpretations of speaker intent (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003).
Although Gumperz‟s IS is markedly different from variationist sociolinguistics, it can also be viewed as developing in complementary fashion and contributing complementary insights into language and social life. Indeed, a growing number of scholars now view quantitative and ethnographic perspectives on language as usefully applied in tandem to explore issues like identity construction (e.g., Eckert, 2000; Schilling-Estes, 2004).
3. Key Research Trajectories in IS****
We have seen that IS as an approach to the analysis of discourse grew primarily out of Gumperz‟s work and multifaceted interests, as well as his incorporation of insights from a range of fields. This formed a coherent framework of how meaning-making occurs in the interaction that has propelled numerous research trajectories both within and beyond IS. These include studies related to code-switching and language contact, intercultural communication, language and gender, identity construction, and language, power and institutions. Note that as more and more scholars are using integrated methods—combining ideas and methods from IS and CA and social psychology, for example—it has become more and more difficult (if not impossible) to identify a „purely‟ IS study.
3.1 Code-switching and language contact
Many studies in code-switching and language contact have built on Gumperz‟s early and groundbreaking work on linguistic diversity in speech communities, his scholarship on conversational code-switching, and his identification of code-switching as fundamentally similar to style-shifting and as a contextualization cue. In the 1980s and 1990s, Gumperz‟s students drew on his framework to study language choice and language rights (e.g., Heller, 1982, 1985; Woolard, 1985), and colleagues in Europe (e.g., Auer and di Luzio 1984, 1992) provided insights into code-switching, language socialization, and issues related to language and migration, while also contributing to the development of IS as an „interpretative‟ sociolinguistics (see also earlier work, published in German, by Kallmeyer and Schütze, 1977).
Code-switching continues to be a topic of interest in sociolinguistic research (see Chapter 37, this volume). Code-switching has recently been examined in a number of vital everyday contexts, among them families (e.g., Wei, 1994; Blum-Kulka, 1997), informal gatherings among friends (e.g., Hinnenkamp, 2003; Kallmeyer and Keim, 2003; Keim, 2003), courtrooms (e.g., Gumperz, 1999a; Jacquemet, 1996), workplaces (e.g., Holmes and Stubbe, 2004; Prego-Vazquez, 2007), educational contexts (e.g., Rampton, 1995; Bailey, 2000), and email discourse (e.g., Georgakopoulou, 1997). It has also been investigated as a resource in discursive identity construction (e.g., Rampton, 1995; Bailey, 2000; Holmes and Stubbe, 2004; Auer, 2007) and for enacting societal ills such as racism (e.g., Hill, 1995). Indeed, much of this body of research, in the spirit of Gumperz, investigates code-switching and language contact as related to issues of social inequality.
3.2 Intercultural communication
As mentioned previously, Tannen‟s (1984/2005) work on „conversational style‟ advanced IS by providing a discussion of, and developing, the theoretical underpinnings of IS as an approach to cross-(sub)cultural communication. Tannen‟s (1986) That’s Not What I Meant! covers similar ground for nonacademic audiences, while Agar‟s (1994) Culture Shock offers nonacademic audiences an anthropological perspective on issues of communication and culture.
Given our continually globalizing world, there is continued interest in intercultural communication, especially between „East‟ and „West‟, and IS is being used productively to explore it. For example, Haru Yamada (1997) investigates Japanese-American discourse, with a focus on workplace settings, while Linda W. L. Young (1994) considers Chinese-American interaction. Yuling Pan, Suzanne Wong Scollon, and Ron Scollon‟s more comprehensive Professional Communication in International Settings (2002) considers a range of cultural groups and discourse types and incorporates multiple approaches, and is also aimed at general audiences, while Scollon and Scollon‟s (1995/2001) Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach provides a thorough, more academic introduction to the topic. Donal Carbaugh (2005) integrates IS and ethnography in his book Cultures in Conversation to consider a variety of issues related to communication and culture. Such studies, building on Gumperz‟s work, provide insight into various kinds of intercultural miscommunication; they identify a range of causative factors, including uses of address terms, the structuring of information in discourse, and uses of pacing and pausing; some also give practical suggestions for improving communication. Many are important not only because they contribute to a more nuanced understanding of cultural differences and how these manifest interactionally, but also because they aim to educate the public about cultural aspects of communication.
3.3 Language and gender
IS serves as one of many theoretical orientations that have been drawn on to investigate gender and communication. The pioneering study of Maltz and Borker (1982) provided a starting point for Tannen‟s (1990, 1994, 1996, 1999) writing on language and gender in which she investigates interactions between women and men as a kind of cross-cultural communication and firmly establishes IS as a useful approach to gendered interaction. Her general audience book You Just Don’t Understand (Tannen, 1990) offers insights into everyday communication rituals of speakers of both genders. Much like Lakoff‟s (1975) Language and Woman’s Place, Tannen‟s work has fuelled both academic and popular interest in the topic. In fact, language and gender research „exploded‟ in the 1990s and continues to be a topic receiving a great deal of attention from researchers using various theoretical and methodological perspectives (Kendall and Tannen, 2001; see also Chapter 35, this volume). IS continues to be—implicitly or explicitly—important among these (see e.g., Bucholtz, Liang and Sutton, 1999; Hall and Bucholtz, 1995; Kotthoff and Wodak, 1997; Tannen, 1993a; Wodak, 1997b, 1997c).
3.4 Discursive identity construction
In the tradition established by Language and Social Identity (Gumperz, 1982b), IS has been used to examine how people create and negotiate identities in interaction. Contexts explored include workplaces (e.g., Kendall, 2003; Holmes and Stubbe, 2004), educational settings (e.g., Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz, 1996; Bailey, 2000; Wortham, 2006), families (e.g., Gordon, 2004; Tannen, Kendall and Gordon, 2007), and other social groups (e.g. Hamilton, 1998; Kiesling, 2001). Gendered identities are of particular interest, as are identities related to changing ethnic landscapes, especially in Europe (e.g., Auer, 2007). Such studies reveal the various linguistic means by which identities are constructed, make efforts at linking linguistic features with broader ideologies, and in general contribute to our understanding of how individuals use language to accomplish social goals. 3.5 Language, power, and institutions
A thread of research known as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) addresses social inequalities through academic research in a spirit akin to the goals of Gumperz‟s IS approach (see for instance Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999); CDA shares with IS „the interest in looking at language as a means of illuminating social problems‟ (Gumperz, personal communication). CDA studies draw on a number of approaches to discourse, among them IS, but focus more explicitly on issues of dominance and inequality. For example, Scollon and Scollon (1995/2001) integrate IS methodologies with a CDA focus on ideologies in Intercultural Communication, while Wodak (1997b, 1997c) does so to examine issues of language and gender.
Institutional encounters in which power is negotiated and exercised, like academic assessments (Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz, 1997), medical encounters (Tannen and Wallat, 1993; Wodak, 1997a), and courtroom interactions (Jacquemet, 1996; Eades, 2003, 2005) have also been examined by drawing on IS, although the focus of such analyses is not necessarily power. While some researchers have criticized IS for examining how members of different groups use language (the „difference‟ approach) to the exclusion of considering larger power structures, like institutional discrimination (the „dominance‟ approach) (Singh, Lele, and Martohardjono, 1988), linking macro (sociopolitical forces and cultural discourses) and micro (conversational features) has actually been identified as a strength of IS (Levinson, 2003: 37). Further, recent research by Eades (2005) explores difficulties in the difference/dominance dichotomy and explains strengths and weaknesses of each, suggesting we need a „discourse‟ approach to go beyond these two perspectives. In addition, Gumperz has answered some criticisms of IS by addressing larger cultural forces like gender discrimination in his research in more explicit ways; for example, Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz (1996) uncover a subtle subtext of gender discrimination in a Ph.D. defence by analyzing contextualization cues like prosody in the context of the unfolding interaction, the interpersonal relationships among participants, the content of the talk, and the socio-historical roots of the defence as an event. Whether such efforts convince critics or not, interests in learning more about ways to link micro and macro in analyses of social interaction persist (e.g., Al Zidjaly, 2006; Wortham, 2006), and much research in this area is inspired in some way by Gumperz‟s approach.
4. Summary and Future Directions
We have seen that, since its inception, interactional sociolinguistics has been interdisciplinary. Its founder, John Gumperz, is an anthropological linguist (or a linguistic anthropologist—see Gumperz 2003: 117); other scholars contributing concepts, theories, and methodological perspectives hail from sociology (Garfinkel and Goffman), anthropology (Hymes), philosophy (Searle and Grice), and linguistics (Lakoff and Tannen). Many of these scholars, like Gumperz himself, have stretched the boundaries of their respective disciplines; their scholarship connects what is „inside the circle‟ of their field with that which lies outside. Growing from these interdisciplinary roots are numerous examples of studies using IS that involve scholars from multiple, and quite disparate, backgrounds and perspectives. For instance, genetic counsellors and linguists have collaboratively examined how prenatal genetic counsellors interact with their clients (e.g., Benkendorf et al., 2001; Gordon et al., 2002); linguists and medical professionals have explored doctor-patient talk (e.g., Hamilton et al., 2008); and anthropologists, linguists, and communication studies scholars have addressed various facets of family discourse (e.g., Tannen and Goodwin, 2006). Given recent calls for moves toward interdisciplinarity in medical communication research (by Sarangi, 2004), in studies of the family (by Schneider and Waite, 2005), and in Critical Discourse Analysis (by Wodak and Chilton, 2005), and given the current academic climate in which interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research is valued and encouraged, IS will surely continue to play a leading role in investigations of social interaction across a range of contexts.
Interactional sociolinguistics is a qualitative, interpretative approach to the analysis of social interaction that developed at the intersection of linguistics, anthropology and sociology. It emerged primarily out of the work of anthropological linguist John J. Gumperz, who, in his field research in the tradition of the ethnography of communication in the 1960s and 1970s, observed immense linguistic and cultural diversity in everyday talk, and sought to devise a method for analyzing and understanding this diversity, and for testing hypotheses gained from doing ethnography through the collection and analysis of actual texts. Its development was also motivated by Gumperz‟s interest in investigating intercultural encounters characteristic of many modern urban areas, as well as by his concern for social justice.
As an „approach to discourse‟ (Schiffrin 1994), interactional sociolinguistics (IS) offers theories and methods that enable researchers to explore not only how language works but also to gain insights into the social processes through which individuals build and maintain relationships, exercise power, project and negotiate identities, and create communities. IS methodology involves an ethnographic component (observations of speakers in naturally-occurring contexts and participant-observation), audio- and/or video-recording of interactions, detailed linguistic transcription of recorded conversations, careful micro-analysis of conversational features in the context of the 2 information gained through ethnography, and sometimes, post-recording interviews. The key theoretical contributions of IS are to explain how speakers use signalling mechanisms, or „contextualization cues‟ (Gumperz, 1978, 1982a, 1982b, 1992a, 1992b, 1999b, 2001), often prosodic (like intonation, stress, pitch register) or paralinguistic (like tempo, pausing, hesitation) in nature, to indicate how they mean what they say, and how listeners, through a nuanced, context-bound process Gumperz calls „conversational inference‟, recognize and interpret contextualization cues through their own culturally-shaped background knowledge. In a foundational book investigating linguistic diversity in interaction, Discourse Strategies, Gumperz (1982a) suggests that communicative experiences lead to expectations regarding how to use contextualization cues; this study also demonstrates how members of diverse cultural groups often understand and employ these cues differently. Importantly, when interactional participants have dissimilar „contextualization conventions‟ (Gumperz, 1982a)—that is, different ways of conventionally using and interpreting contextualization cues—misunderstandings and conversational breakdown can occur. Such breakdowns, Gumperz suggests, ultimately can contribute to larger social problems such as ethnic stereotyping and differential access to information and opportunities.
Conversational inference and the related notion of contextualization cues constitute an interactive theory of meaning-making that was designed to investigate intercultural communication and conflict based on cultural differences; in fact it has been suggested that the approach pioneered by Gumperz „provides the most systematic investigations of such conflict‟ (Maynard, 1988:315). It also offers a means of performing micro-analysis of interaction in light of macro-societal issues like institutional 3 discrimination, thus taking part in an ongoing quest in sociolinguistics to link the „micro‟ and the „macro‟ in meaningful ways (e.g., Erickson, 2004; Scollon and Scollon, 2004). Further, IS offers a linguistic approach to the contemporary, constructionist understanding of identity put forth by researchers from a range of disciplinary perspectives (Goffman, 1959; Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Ochs, 1993; Holstein and Gubrium, 2007; see also Chapter 11 this volume). It has also made important contributions to the social scientific study of language in general, complementing other approaches aimed at understanding language from both structural and functional perspectives, such as Conversation Analysis and linguistic pragmatics. Additionally, IS has reached beyond the „ivory tower‟ to offer non-academics a means of understanding the role of language in social relationships, ways of identifying causes of miscommunication, and strategies for improving communication. Gumperz, for instance, served as a consultant for an educational B.B.C. television programme called Crosstalk (Twitchin, 1979) which addressed the subtleties of intercultural communication in multicultural workplaces in London; in addition, his work inspired other scholars to share, with nonacademic audiences, sociolinguistic insights into everyday interactional dynamics.
This chapter presents an historical overview of IS, focusing on the research of Gumperz as well as of other scholars who have made significant contributions to the development of the approach. It outlines IS‟s primary inspirations, goals, topical foci, theoretical constructs, and methods. It also describes contemporary research in IS, identifying it as topically diverse, theoretically rich, and poised to address increasingly interdisciplinary research questions. The main section of this paper traces the development of IS in detail, focusing primarily on the work of its founder, John Gumperz, and highlighting how, in formulating the key concepts and methodological frameworks of IS, he incorporated insights from scholars who examine interaction and meaning from a range of disciplinary perspectives (Section 2). I focus in particular on the methodological insights Gumperz developed in collaboration with Dell Hymes and through exposure to Conversation Analysis, the theoretical insights he gleaned from scholars such as Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, and H. P. Grice, and IS theory developments contributed by Gumperz‟s student Deborah Tannen in the light of Robin Lakoff‟s work. I also situate Gumperz‟s work in larger research trajectories in the field of linguistics. Next, I give a brief overview of five major research trajectories to which Gumperz‟s research in IS has contributed substantially: code-switching and language contact; intercultural communication; language and gender; discursive identity construction; and language, power and institutions (Section 3). Finally, I discuss possible future directions of IS, in particular in the context of growing interests in interdisciplinary research (Section 4).
2. John J. Gumperz and the Development of Interactional Sociolinguistics
John J. Gumperz was born in 1922 in Germany; fleeing Germany pre-Holocaust, he came to the United States in 1939. He served in the U.S. Army; it has been suggested that his later academic interests in intercultural communication and social justice may have taken root in part as a result of his emigration and military experiences. Gumperz received his bachelor‟s degree in science from the University of Ohio, Cincinnati in 1947, but after attending Linguistic Institute lectures as a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Michigan, he redirected his studies to linguistics. Gumperz received his Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics in 1954 from the University of Michigan, where he studied with Kenneth Pike and Hans Kurath. His dissertation examined variables of a German dialect spoken by third generation immigrants in southeastern Michigan and linked these variables to social and religious groupings of individuals, setting the scene for his later research.
Gumperz went to Cornell University to teach as an instructor before finishing his degree. After receiving his Ph.D., Gumperz was invited to serve as the head of Cornell‟s Hindi language training programme; he subsequently went to India to do post-doctoral research in sociolinguistics as part of an interdisciplinary research team. In 1956, he began collaborating with linguist Charles Ferguson at Deccan College (in India) on language diversity issues when both were visiting faculty there. Ferguson and Gumperz (1960) co-edited Linguistic Diversity in South Asia, a special issue of the International Journal of American Linguistics, which, in William Labov‟s (2003: 5) words, provides „the most important general statement‟ of the principles of the then young field of sociolinguistics. Gumperz gained more fieldwork experience in Norway in the 1960s, further fuelling his interests in linguistic diversity. The Norway study also resulted in a publication on code-switching (Blom and Gumperz, 1972) in which forms and functions of code-switching are investigated in a novel way—as tied to situation (situational switching) and as tied to participants‟ relationships and their signaling of how the listener should interpret what the speaker says (metaphorical switching). As Kathryn Woolard (2004: 75), a student of Gumperz, remarks, his work „has had not only seminal but enduring influence on the accepted anthropological view on codeswitching‟. Importantly, the Norway study also proved foundational for Gumperz‟s development of the notion of contextualization cues in the IS framework: code-switching, such as use of pitch, intonation, pausing, gesture, and other contextualization cues, can be used to signal how verbal messages should be interpreted.
After his research in India, Gumperz was invited to design a Hindi-Urdu programme at the University of California, Berkeley. A number of his studies around that time focused specifically on conversational Hindi-Urdu (Gumperz, 1958, 1960, 1963; Gumperz and Naim, 1960; Gumperz and Rumery, 1963), but he increasingly grew interested in sociolinguistic aspects of language use across different cultural groups. At Berkeley, Gumperz served as chairperson for South and South-East Asian Studies (from 1968 to 1971); he also served as a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology, becoming a full professor in Anthropology in 1965. While affiliated with Berkley, Gumperz has taken opportunities to cultivate connections with scholars in Europe, especially in Austria, Germany, and the U. K., as well as with scholars in the United States. He is currently an emeritus professor at Berkeley, and is affiliated with the University of California Santa-Barbara as a faculty member of an interdisciplinary research group and a Ph.D. emphasis both called Language, Interaction and Social Organization (LISO).
In establishing IS as an approach, Gumperz has explored topics as varied as language diversity, language contact, bilingualism, language and educational issues, and interethnic communication. With Dell Hymes, Gumperz co-edited two volumes key to the ethnography of communication (Gumperz and Hymes, 1964, 1972). His book Discourse Strategies (Gumperz, 1982a) and its companion edited volume, Language and Social Identity (Gumperz, 1982b), are viewed as groundbreaking in the study of issues of language and culture and as foundational IS texts. Discourse Strategies marks the beginning of Gumperz‟s current, ongoing research looking at interethnic and intercultural communication, communication and social background, and the social significance of details of communication (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003). Language and Social Identity consists of essays by students and postdoctoral researchers working with Gumperz—among them Monica Heller, Daniel Maltz, Ruth Borker, Celia Roberts, T.C. Jupp and Deborah Tannen—and by his spouse, and frequent co-author, Jenny Cook-Gumperz.
In the 1990s, Gumperz continued to refine his approach, linking conversational inference to Michael Silverstein‟s (1992, 1993) work on indexicality and conceptualizing contextualization cues as a class of indexicals (Gumperz, 2003), while also applying it to new institutional contexts in collaborative work (Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz, 1996, 1997, 2002) and furthering investigation of contextualization processes (as seen in Gumperz‟s contributions to two key IS edited volumes: Auer and di Luzio‟s Contextualization in Language, and Duranti and Goodwin‟s Rethinking Context, both published in 1992). In conjunction with his former student Stephen Levinson, Gumperz co-edited a volume reexamining the influential „Whorf hypothesis‟ (Gumperz and Levinson, 1996). In recent years, Gumperz (1999b, 2001) has taken opportunities to write reflective essays about IS. Additionally, he discusses his approach in Language and Interaction: Discussions with John J. Gumperz (Eerdmans, Prevignano and Thibault, 2003). This book includes two interviews with Gumperz (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003; Prevignano and Thibault, 2003) in which he talks about the motivations of his work, explains in detail his conceptualization of contextualization cues, and outlines connections he sees between his approach and others, such as Conversation Analysis and Silverstein‟s semiotics. It also includes commentaries on Gumperz‟s work by researchers such as Levinson (2003). In a response essay, Gumperz (2003) addresses issues brought up by these commentaries.
In total, Gumperz has more than 100 published books, chapters and articles over the span of his career. He has also received many academic accolades, has served on the editorial boards of numerous academic journals, and is founding editor of the influential Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics book series (in which Discourse Strategies is the first volume). Through his classes at Berkeley and visits to other universities in both the United States and abroad, Gumperz has introduced IS and issues of language and communication to students of interaction around the world. His approach is viewed as a key part of sociolinguistic research programmes in various European countries, such as Greece (Tsitsipis, 2006) and the U. K. (Rampton, 2007). Gumperz has been identified not only as the founder of IS, but also as „one of the foundational spirits in the broader field of sociolinguistics itself‟ (Levinson, 2003:43).
2.2 Social and Moral Motivations in the Development of IS
IS emerged as Gumperz was developing „replicable methods of qualitative analysis that account for our ability to interpret what participants intend to convey in everyday communicative practice‟ (Gumperz, 2001: 215). However, although as an approach to discourse IS gives insight into conversation as an entity in general, and into meaning-making processes in particular, it did not develop out of an interest in „interaction in the abstract‟, but rather as a means of exploring linguistic and cultural diversity in everyday talk (Gumperz, 2003: 105). As Duranti and Goodwin (1992a: 229-230) note, „Gumperz‟[s] work is unique for his ability to merge intellectual, social, and moral considerations within his analytical apparatus‟; that is, Gumperz developed IS as a way of not only explicating the interpretive procedures underlying talk, but also to address the consequences of real-life, everyday conversational misunderstandings between members of different cultural groups.
The „social‟ considerations of IS emerge through Gumperz‟s interest in understanding and explaining instances of miscommunication he observed in various fieldwork studies he undertook in India, Europe and the United States, and in trying to contribute to improving intercultural communication in increasingly diverse areas, particularly urban areas. For instance, in a now classic case-study example, Gumperz was invited to observe interactions between members of two groups suffering strained interactions and feelings of ill-will at work: native British cargo handlers and the Indian and Pakistani staff cafeteria workers who served their meals at a major British airport (Gumperz, 1982a, chapter 8). Gumperz observed cultural differences in uses of—and expectations regarding—intonation, a key contextualization cue. When the Indian and Pakistani cafeteria workers offered a serving of gravy, for instance, they did not use rising intonation as most native British English speakers would. Instead, they uttered „gravy‟ with a flat intonation because, to them, this was a culturally polite way of offering something. To native British English speakers, who had different expectations regarding intonation, this sounded rude; they thus misinterpreted the cafeteria workers‟ intentions. Calling into attention this seemingly minor difference in intonation usage and discussing it with members of both groups actually improved communication and inter-group perceptions. In this way, IS research clearly has practical social implications; it „may lead to an explanation for the endemic and increasingly serious communication problems that affect private and public affairs in our society‟ (Gumperz, 1982a: 172). This is particularly important as workplaces—and nations—become increasingly diverse.
The „moral‟ considerations Duranti and Goodwin (1992a) mention relate to social injustices. Gumperz‟s work explores issues such as misattribution of intent, stereotyping, and discrimination in the context of interaction, in particular against ethnic minorities. Following the work of Frederick Erickson (1975), Gumperz investigates the role of language in enacting discrimination in „gatekeeping encounters‟; these are encounters in which „two persons meet, usually as strangers, with one of them having authority to make decisions that affect the other‟s future‟ (Erickson and Schultz, 1982: xi). In such encounters, the consequences of misunderstandings can be very serious, especially for the person not in the authority position. In many of Gumperz‟s case studies, the participants have different expectations about contextualization conventions and/or mismatches regarding the nature of the institutional encounter in which they are involved. Thus, miscommunication does occur, and the person seeking access, usually an individual from an ethnic minority group, risks being denied material goods, a job prospect, or some other resource. For example, in a tape-recorded interview-counselling session that Gumperz (1982a, Chapter 8) analyzes, a Pakistani teacher who has been unable to secure permanent employment in London has an unsuccessful exchange with the native British staff counsellor whose job it is to help him, largely due to different expectations about what needs to be said in the session and to different uses of prosodic and paralinguistic features like rhythm and intonation. Careful turn-by-turn analysis of the recording reveals that their interaction is rhythmically asynchronous and the speakers never achieve a joint understanding of where the interaction is going at any given time. In other words, they seem to be „on parallel tracks which don‟t meet‟ (Gumperz and Roberts, 1980; as cited in Gumperz, 1982a:185). Thus, the teacher does not receive the support he needs and the staff counsellor is not able to do her job effectively. One motivation of many IS studies, including many by Gumperz, is the belief that by uncovering cultural differences and by educating people about them, some such misunderstandings can be circumvented, thereby decreasing the likelihood of unintentional discrimination or denial of resources based on misinterpretation of culture-specific uses of contextualization cues.
In line with this belief, Gumperz has participated in public educational efforts. As mentioned, he served as a consultant on an educational programme called Crosstalk, which was broadcast on B.B.C. television in 1979. As part of a ten-part series called Multi-Racial Britain, Crosstalk aimed to help develop awareness of possible causes of intercultural miscommunication in workplaces, as well as to draw attention to the role of language in stereotyping and discrimination. Written materials were also prepared by Gumperz and his colleagues to accompany the programme (Gumperz et al., 1979, 1980). Crosstalk, while serving as a useful tool for educating the general public at the time it was aired, has applications for formal educational contexts too, such as for teaching English as a foreign language and for teacher training (Baxter and Levine, 1982), as well as for courses in intercultural communication (Kiesling and Paulston, 2005: 2). It also inspired later work aimed at general audiences, such as an educational video focused on communication between Native Alaskans and non-Natives called Interethnic Communication (Scollon and Jones, 1979), and, more famously, general audience books by Tannen (1986, 1990) that examine various kinds of cross-cultural and cross-sub-cultural communication.
2.3 The Development of IS: Gumperz and his Major Intellectual Influences
The research programme of Gumperz and his development of IS grew not only out of interest in the social issues facing diversifying societies, but also out of Gumperz‟s training in structural linguistics, his contact with scholars from various fields interested in interaction, qualitative methodologies, and meaning-making, and broader movements in linguistics in the 1960s through to the 1980s. Gumperz‟s linguistics background, contacts with anthropologists, sociologists, language philosophers, and other linguists, and participation in larger language debates contributed substantially to the development of IS.
2.3.1 A Starting Point: Bloomfield and Structural Linguistics
Gumperz‟s linguistic training was in the tradition of Saussure, Sapir and Bloomfield (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003: 8); Gumperz specifically recognizes Leonard Bloomfield‟s (1933) book Language, a pioneering work in American structural linguistics, as having influenced and motivated some of his early reflections. As linguistic anthropologist (and Gumperz‟s student) Michael Agar (1994: 16) notes, structural linguistics „puts a circle‟ around language, meaning that it separates grammar from its cultural context. However, Gumperz observes that structuralists‟ „basic insights into linguistic, that is, phonological and syntactic competence and their approach to speaking as a partially subconscious process, continue to be useful‟ despite shortcomings of the approach (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003: 20). As we will see, Gumperz utilizes the notion of „competence‟ in a similar sense to Hymes‟s „communicative competence‟. He also draws on a view of speaking as a partially „subconscious‟ or „automatic‟ phenomenon in examining how interpretations are actually made in interaction (see, e.g., Gumperz, 1982a). Thus he extends basic ideas from structural linguistics into social and cultural realms.
Structural linguistics also motivated Gumperz‟s research in a more specific way: Gumperz cites as a starting point for him Bloomfield‟s thinking on regional linguistic diversity as it is interconnected with patterning of interpersonal contacts. Bloomfield‟s work offered „an initial outline of a theory of diversity that rests on human interaction as an analytical prime, and does not rely on a priori assumptions about ethnic, class or group identity‟ (Gumperz, 2003: 106). Gumperz (2003: 107) reports that a common assumption in the 1950s and 1960s was that communication between members of different social groups was problematic, yet, frustratingly, there was a lack of empirical evidence supporting this assumption. Therefore, he „set out to explore the validity of the interactional approach to diversity‟ that he saw seeds of in Bloomfield‟s work (Gumperz, 2003:107). Building on this, in research over the course of his career, Gumperz would move to erase „the circle‟ that disconnects language from social life.
2.3.2 An Anthropological Perspective: Hymes and the Ethnography of Communication
In order to investigate diversity in interaction, in the 1960s Gumperz turned to anthropological methods while collaborating with Dell Hymes, who was then developing the ethnography of communication (see Gumperz and Hymes 1964, 1972; Chapter 3, this volume). In fact, Gumperz‟s use of ethnographic methods goes further back, at least to his time in India: Ferguson and Gumperz (1960), for example, undertook an exploration of language contact „through qualitative methods involving work with informants, informal observations, and (sometimes) questionnaires‟ (Duranti, 2001: 5). The ethnography of communication, however, provided a systematic set of qualitative methodologies offering a means of analyzing „patterns of communication as part of cultural knowledge and behavior‟ (Schiffrin, 1994: 137). Importantly, ethnographic methods differ greatly from those of structural linguistics. Rather than contrasting formal units, such as sounds or sentence structures, across languages, ethnographers undertake in-depth fieldwork, usually involving participant-observation and interviewing. From relatively long-term observation and engagement with the community under study, ethnographers learn things about people and the diverse ways in which they use language that can only be discovered and understood over time. To use Pike‟s (1967) terms, ethnographers of communication are interested in viewing data from both etic and emic perspectives (see Carbaugh and Hastings, 1992). In other words, analysis needs to go beyond a general perspective and occur „in terms of categories which account for native perceptions of significance‟ (Gumperz, 1982a: 15). This is important because it extends beyond describing grammatical structures to the more problematic—and, for Gumperz, more consequential—task of identifying culturally meaningful categories, the relationships between them, and how language plays into their creation and maintenance.
This kind of anthropological „thick description‟ (Geertz, 1973) can be said to characterize Gumperz‟s research, even during the early formation of IS. In Rampton‟s (2007: 597) words, „Gumperz‟s work stands out for its empirical reconciliation of linguistics and ethnography‟. For example, Gumperz‟s fieldwork in a caste-stratified North Indian village and a small, homogeneous town in northern Norway led to the development of means of exploring language diversity as firmly embedded in specific aspects of sociocultural life, giving an emic understanding of the data (see Gumperz, 1971). His findings indicated that social interaction—frequency and quality of interaction among individuals, specifically—explained the linguistic distinctions he observed. Category labels put on people like „touchable‟ and „untouchable‟ (terms of social categorization then used in many Indian communities) were not sufficient to explain what was going on. In addition, ideologies of interpersonal relations—who should interact with whom, and in what way—further explicated patterns of language use in these two locales. Gumperz thus discovered information about what Hymes (1972: 277) refers to as speakers‟ „communicative competence‟, which includes information such as „when to speak, when not‟ and „what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner‟, going far beyond the grammatical knowledge described by structuralists. 2.3.3 Studying Interaction and Conceptualizing Knowledge: Goffman and Garfinkel
The notion of „communicative competence‟ suggests that in interacting, speakers follow not only grammatical rules, but also social rules, such as regarding what kinds of conversational topics are appropriate for what kinds of situations. In order to get at social rules in a meaningful way, Gumperz reached beyond linguistics and anthropology to build into IS elements of sociologist Erving Goffman‟s work on the „interaction order‟ and ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel‟s interest in the interpretive processes and background knowledge needed to keep interaction going. In fact, Gumperz has commented, „In my approach to interaction, I take a position somewhat between that of Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel‟ (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003: 8).
Although Goffman „does not analyze language per se‟ (Schiffrin, 1994: 102), Gumperz views him as a „sociological predecessor‟ of his own work (Gumperz, 2001: 216). Goffman (1967, 1974, 1981) contemplates face-to-face interaction with a focus on how it is that social encounters are constructed. In other words, he recognizes the „interaction order‟—how people behave in one another‟s co-presence and co-construct their social worlds in everyday encounters—as a legitimate area of study. Like Goffman, Gumperz views everyday interaction as worthy of study; further, Goffman and Gumperz were both on the faculty at Berkeley—Gumperz in Anthropology, and Goffman in Sociology—for a number of overlapping years (1960-1968). Gumperz also finds inspiration in Goffman‟s work in that the notion of „interaction order‟ provides „a distinct level of discursive organization bridging the linguistic and the social‟ (Gumperz, 2001: 216). However, whereas Goffman does not focus on the details of language in his work, Gumperz, with his concept of contextualization cues, does.
Moreover, Goffman‟s observations and theorizing uncover many interesting—and often taken-for-granted—phenomena that occur in everyday encounters; IS is able to investigate these phenomena from a perspective that highlights the role of linguistic features and investigates conversation as a collaborative endeavour. For example, identity presentation, considered in Goffman‟s (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, is examined from an IS perspective in Language and Social Identity (Gumperz, 1982b). Additionally, identity presentation and construction continues to be a topic of interest for IS scholars. For example, Tannen (1999), Kotthoff (2000), Kendall (2007) and others have drawn on IS to examine the linguistic creation of gendered identities. Framing, or how people establish and negotiate „definitions of a situation‟ (Goffman, 1974: 11), relates to a central part of IS: invoking Silverstein‟s (1992, 1993) discussions of indexicality, Gumperz remarks that „Contextualization cues, along with other indexical signs, serve to retrieve the frames (in Goffman‟s sense of the term) that channel the interpretive process‟ (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003: 10). In other words, using a speaker‟s contextualization cues as guidelines, a listener imagines himself or herself to be in a particular kind of situation; this enables a listener to assess what the speaker intends. Thus, contextualization cues are a means of collaboratively accomplishing framing in discourse. Numerous IS scholars have demonstrated how this occurs and continue to develop a theory of framing in the context of sociolinguistics by integrating and extending Goffman‟s and Gumperz‟s theorizing (e.g., Tannen, 1993a). Frames theory has been used to investigate a host of contexts, ranging from everyday family interactions (e.g., Gordon, 2002, 2008; Kendall, 2006), to medical encounters (e.g., Pinto, Ribeiro and Dantas, 2005; Ribeiro 1994; Tannen and Wallat, 1993), to moments of conversational humour (e.g., Davies, 2003; Kotthoff, 2000, 2002). Additionally, research has incorporated Goffman‟s (1967) work on face-saving and Brown and Levinson‟s (1987) work on face and linguistic politeness into IS analyses, such as by Kendall (2004), Kotthoff (2000) and Tannen (1984/2005). Building on Goffman (1981), research in the IS tradition has also considered how alignments or „footings‟ are linguistically created and managed (e.g., Couper-Kuhlen, 1996; Davies, 2003; Gordon, 2003; Tannen, 2003).
Gumperz also cites the work of Garfinkel as instrumental in his thinking about the nature of social interaction, as well as the knowledge required to participate in it. Garfinkel (1967) developed an approach within sociology known as ethnomethodology, which focuses on the interactive processes by which people create social organization and the knowledge needed to do this. Research in the IS tradition is able to examine the linguistic means by which social organization is accomplished. In addition, Garfinkel‟s (1967) experiments—usually known as „breaching‟ or „Garfinkeling‟ experiments—caught Gumperz‟s attention; these involved breaking social norms as a means of uncovering often unnamed social rules as well as people‟s knowledge and expectations about situations. Further, Garfinkel made the insightful observation that interactants can never be detailed enough in talk to convey every aspect of meaning, thus some combination of „practical reasoning‟ and „unstated, taken-for-granted background knowledge‟ is needed to fill in what is left unsaid (Gumperz, 2001:216). For Gumperz, Garfinkel‟s observations brought to light the role of sociocultural background knowledge in interpretation, a critical component of his theory of conversational inference. In the IS framework, and in the spirit of Hymes (1972), researchers argue that speakers gain sociocultural knowledge from having been acculturated in a community. In other words, knowledge about how to use language in culturally apt ways—how to use pitch, intonation, and other contextualization cues, including those that are nonverbal—comes from a speaker‟s collection of cultural experiences. It is this knowledge base that participants rely on too as they interpret contextualization cues. The nature and functioning of this knowledge—what exactly it encompasses, and how people access and activate the appropriate knowledge at a given conversational moment—is still under investigation in IS and related areas of research.
2.3.4 Micro-Analysis of Talk: Conversation Analysis
Garfinkel and Goffman also influenced Gumperz in more indirect way: Conversation Analysis (CA) (see Chapter 27, this volume), which proved influential to Gumperz‟s research, grew out of the work of two of Goffman‟s students at Berkeley in the 1960s: Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff. In collaboration with Sacks‟s student Gail Jefferson, Sacks and Schegloff applied Garfinkel‟s ethnomethodology specifically to conversation (see Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974). CA is interested in how conversation represents and creates social organization among participants; its focus on conversational discourse—both face-to-face and over the phone—as a research site and on the details of language provided inspiration for Gumperz‟s focus on talk and on the micro-features of interaction (Gumperz, 1999b, 2001; Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003). Both IS and CA examine actual social encounters, and their methods both involve recording, a form of careful linguistic transcription, and analysis of interaction. Key CA notions and conceptualizations of interaction are also central to IS. For example, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974), in a seminal CA study, outline a „systematics‟ for conversation based on the basic organizational unit of the conversational turn. This study views conversation as a sequentially organized event; in Heritage‟s (1984: 242) words, each utterance is „context-shaped‟ (shaped by the previous utterance) and „context-renewing‟ (creating a context for the next utterance). IS researchers consider this sense of context (discourse context) in their analyses; however IS also takes a broader perspective on what constitutes context and its effect on conversation2. For example, whereas CA researchers tend to claimthat „the turn-taking system [is independent of] various aspects of the socio-cultural context of speech‟ such as the speakers‟ ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic class (Duranti 1989:222), IS scholars consider such aspects to be central to how interaction unfolds, and indeed are interested in exploring diversity of turn-taking patterns across cultural groups (e.g., Tannen, 1984/2005). In other words, whereas „the CA view of interaction is a structural view‟ (Schiffrin, 1994:236), IS shows a more social and cultural emphasis. Thus, for instance, CA research has examined assessments from the perspective of conversational structure (Pomerantz, 1984), and research growing out of IS builds on this to demonstrate how two parents use assessments as a means of presenting different kinds of identities in interaction (Gordon, 2007).
In part, based on these different conceptualizations of what constitutes an utterance‟s context, IS and CA differ in another regard: Gumperz adopted playback, used in early sociolinguistic work by William Labov (Labov and Fanshel, 1977; see also Fanshel and Moss, 1971), as a means of testing analyst interpretations. Playback involves playing recordings of the interaction for those who participated in it, or for other insiders to the language variety and/or community, and asking for impressions in an open-ended way. It therefore provides multiple perspectives on interaction, which can be particularly insightful in cases of cross-cultural (mis)communication, where analysts might have native speaker insights into one side of the conversation, but not the other, based on his or her own cultural and linguistic background, as in Gumperz (1982a) and Tannen (1984/2005).
CA and IS continue to exist, side-by-side, as approaches to discourse analysis. Although they both investigate conversational discourse as what Schegloff (1982) calls „an interactional achievement‟, that is, as something „incrementally accomplished‟ via collaboration, CA and IS examine different aspects of the achievement. Sharing an interest in the micro-features of conversation, they continue to influence and complement each other mutually, for example by offering different perspectives on similar kinds of social interaction, as in Tannen and Goodwin‟s (2006) co-edited Text & Talk special issue on family interaction. Further, some scholars, like Goodwin (1990), have integrated CA methods with ethnographic fieldwork, blurring the distinction between the approaches and demonstrating that integrated perspectives are often especially revealing.
2.3.5 Inference: Berkeley Scholars—Grice and Lakoff
A number of scholars who interacted with Gumperz at Berkeley during the formulation of IS also influenced its development in meaningful ways. Levinson (2003: 32), who was then Gumperz‟s graduate student, describes the intellectual environment in which the approach developed:
In Berkeley at that time there was a rare and wonderful confluence of ideas from different disciplines concerning the study of meaning—in philosophy, Grice and Searle were expounding the ideas about implicature and speech acts now associated with them, Fillmore was preoccupied with indexicality in language, Kay with its sociological import, Robin Lakoff with contextual meaning, and George Lakoff was attempting to wrap it all up in a unified theory of generative semantics.
This intellectual milieu seems to have shaped Gumperz‟s thinking in multiple ways.
First, Gumperz‟s theory of conversational inference, which explains how people assess what others say to create meaning in conversation and what is required for this to occur, is related to language philosopher H. P. Grice‟s (1975) discussion of conversational cooperation, intention and implicature (Gumperz, 2001: 216; see also Gumperz, 1982a:202). Grice‟s (1975: 47) influential Cooperative Principle (CP) states: „Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of the talk exchange in which you are engaged‟. This principle, essentially, explains why conversation works at all, in particular at the level of information exchange. The CP includes four maxims which indicate that a speaker should be as (but not more) informative than required, tell the truth, contribute relevant remarks, and be orderly and clear. Within this framework, Grice suggests that speakers send certain meanings intentionally through implicatures sent by following or breaking („flouting‟) maxims. An implicature is „an inference about speaker intention that arises from a recipient‟s use of both semantic (i.e. logical) meanings and conversational principles‟ (Schiffrin, 1994: 193); it refers to „something which is implied in conversation, that is, something which is left implicit in actual language use‟ (Mey, 1993: 99). Thus, if a man asks a woman where he can buy a cup of coffee, and she says, „there‟s a place around the corner called Joe‟s‟, based on the CP maxims of truth and relevance, the man infers that coffee is for sale by the cup at Joe‟s 3. These maxims play into an IS understanding of how meaning-making works as well.
Second, Grice‟s (1975) and Searle‟s (1975) discussions of „the semantic basis of indirect conversational inference‟ (Gumperz, 1982a: 202) link to Gumperz‟s exploration of the indirect means by which speakers signal how utterances are to be interpreted. One way of thinking about contextualization cues is as indirect signals for interpretation: rather than saying, for example, „I‟m mad that you didn‟t invite me for coffee‟, a speaker might furrow his brow and say, in a whiney tone of voice, „You didn‟t invite me for coffee‟, thus indirectly indicating how the listener should interpret his meaning. The impact of Robin Lakoff‟s (1973, 1975) work on indirectness and linguistic politeness fits into this area as well, and it is formally incorporated into IS by Tannen (1984/2005). Lakoff (1973) notes that people regularly do not explicitly say what they mean in conversation for social reasons—to be nice, to respect another person‟s space, to leave interpretation options open, and so on. Importantly, research in IS shows that conceptualizations of how to be conventionally polite differ across cultural and subcultural groups (e.g., Rogerson-Revell, 2007; Scollon and Scollon, 1995/2001; Tannen, 1984/2005).
2.3.6 Conversational Style and Conversational Involvement: Tannen
While at Berkeley, Gumperz also collaborated with Tannen, who had a significant impact on IS, although she is perhaps best known for her work on language and gender (see Section 3.3). When Tannen was Gumperz‟s student, they co-authored a foundational IS paper, „Individual and social differences in language use‟ (Gumperz and Tannen, 1979) which introduced the notion of contextualization cues and provides material that would later be incorporated into a central chapter of Discourse Strategies entitled „Contextualization Conventions‟. Tannen‟s first book, Conversational Style (1984/2005), provides an important case study of cross-sub-cultural communication, introduces the key IS notion of „conversational style‟ and a new understanding of what Gumperz (1982a) called „conversational involvement‟, while also serving as an excellent example and overview of IS methodology.
„Conversational style‟ refers to an individual‟s way of speaking, including decisions about rate of speaking, pitch and amplitude, and the „countless other choices‟ speakers make that affect an utterance‟s interpretation (Tannen, 1984/2005: 14). In broad terms, a person‟s conversational style encompasses how he or she uses various contextualization cues. Drawing on the IS idea that a person‟s contextualization conventions grow out of interactive experiences, Tannen suggests that conversational style can be influenced by a range of factors, including where a person grew up and his or her cultural background, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexual orientation. Tannen‟s case-study of six speakers—three New York Jewish speakers, two Californians, and one speaker from England—uncovers a style continuum. Her analysis, building on not only Gumperz‟s research but also Hymes‟s (1974) on style and Lakoff‟s on politeness (1973) and communicative style (1979), shows that features of the „high-involvement style‟ characteristic of New Yorkers—such as talking along with other people and asking questions in a „machine gun‟ fashion—have a positive affect when used among those who share the style; these features create „rapport‟. In contrast, as in Gumperz‟s examples of mismatches in contextualization conventions, aspects of high-involvement style have negative affects when used with speakers exhibiting a style characterized by „high-considerateness‟ (see also Tannen, 1981).
A concept from Gumperz that Tannen extended and made even more central to IS is „conversational involvement‟ (Tannen, 1984/2005, 1989/2007). Gumperz (1982a: 1) used this notion in a very basic way, equating sustaining conversational involvement to participating in verbal exchanges; Tannen (1989/2007:13) develops involvement further: it is the „internal, even emotional connection individuals feel which binds them to other people as well as to places, things, activities, ideas, memories and words‟. She suggests that when aspects of style are shared, interacting serves as a means of building coherence and of bringing people together, the inverse of how clashing styles can drive wedges between them. In Talking Voices, Tannen (1989/2007) uses IS to examine both conversational and literary texts and focuses on repetition, the creation of dialogue („constructed dialogue‟), and details as linguistic strategies that seem to be especially productive in creating involvement. Tannen (1984/2005, 1986) also argues in her work that, through contextualization cues, participants send what Bateson (1972) calls „metamessages‟, or messages about how to interpret messages (e.g., „this is play‟). In other words, Tannen develops the idea that participants use contextualization cues to negotiate both the nature of a given situation and aspects of interpersonal relationships. For example, through „mutual revelation‟, where participants reciprocally share personal experiences with one another, participants are able to signal indirectly something to the effect of: „We are intimate; we both tell about ourselves; we are both interested in hearing about the other‟s experience‟ (Tannen, 1984/2005: 101).
Another contribution of Tannen to IS is bringing IS notions and their roles in interpersonal communication to broader audiences. Through popular books like That’s Not What I Meant! (1986) and the best-selling You Just Don’t Understand (1990), academic ideas about language and communication are shown to have, in the spirit of Gumperz‟s interests in social issues, practical applicability to everyday life. 4
2.3.7 Chomsky and Labov
When Gumperz was formulating and developing IS, other theories of language were being cultivated by Noam Chomsky and William Labov, and these influenced IS through providing approaches with which it could be compared and contrasted. In the early years of IS, Gumperz was considering language and social networks (Gumperz, 1971, 1976), the sociolinguistics of bilingualism and code-switching (Gumperz 1964a, 1964b; Blom and Gumperz, 1972; Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz, 1974) and language use in a variety of institutional contexts, including educational environments (Gumperz and Hernandez-Chavez, 1972; Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz, 1974), job interviews and counselling sessions (Gumperz et al., 1979; Gumperz, 1982a), committee meetings (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz, 1982), and legal contexts (Gumperz, 1982c). In such studies, Gumperz‟s approach, in his own words, reworks „the established traditions that continue to follow structuralist practices of separating the linguistic from the social‟ (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003:10). It thus stands in contrast with descendents of Saussure‟s structuralist approach to linguistics, including alternatives to it, the most notable being generative grammar, pioneered by Chomsky beginning in the late 1950s. For Gumperz (1982a: 19), although generative grammar has „theoretical significance‟, it also „clearly has only limited relevance for the study of verbal interaction processes‟. Chomsky‟s work focuses on the knowledge an ideal speaker needs to produce grammatical sentences („linguistic competence‟); it does not „attempt to account for the problem of cultural diversity‟ (Gumperz, 1974: 789). In contrast, Gumperz focuses on utterances produced and interpreted in context, and the knowledge—linguistic, social, and cultural—that participants use in so doing. He thus moves to erase the metaphorical „circle‟ that Agar (1994) has written about that disconnects language from social life, whereas Chomsky maintains the circle. Indeed, a major division that exists in contemporary linguistics is the division between Chomskyan linguistics and sociolinguistics. Thus, IS continues to develop itself—at least implicitly—in contrast to generative grammar.
During the time of IS‟s development, „the circle‟ was also being erased by other scholars, such as Charles Ferguson (1959), who was examining diglossia; indeed Ferguson‟s work provided a foundation for Gumperz‟s (1977) work on conversational code-switching (see also Blom-Gumperz and Gumperz, 1972). In addition, Labov was developing a quantitative sociolinguistics that linked linguistic variables to social categories (see Labov, 1966, 1972; see also Chapter 1, this volume). In a spirit similar to Gumperz, Labov‟s research focuses on language as a social entity. However, as Gumperz notes, „important as quantitative sociolinguistics is‟ for the study of language variation and change, „its applicability to the analysis of actual processes of face to face communication … is limited‟ (Gumperz, 1982a:26). This is so because Labovian sociolinguistics traditionally focuses on the quantitative analysis of linguistic variables at the social group level, whereas IS focuses on individuals‟ language use. Further, the statistical analyses of variationist sociolinguistics do not give insight into meaning-making as it happens moment-by-moment; in contrast, IS offers a view of language as „activity in a particular context, co-evolving along with that context, in part constitutive of it‟ (Becker, 1984/1995: 73). Because IS gives a nuanced analysis of individuals communicating in unfolding interactive sequences, it provides what Becker (1984/1995) might call a „linguistics of particularity‟, which we need to achieve a more complete understanding of how language works generally.
Just as there are theoretical and methodological tensions between generative grammar and sociolinguistics, so there are tensions between quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistics. As Tannen (1984/2005: 11-12) points out, it might be easy to dismiss a qualitative approach like IS due to its interpretive analytical procedures—with „interpretive‟ „wielded as a damning epithet‟. Analyzing talk in the IS tradition is necessarily interpretive in that researchers must weigh multiple possibilities—in terms of speaker intentions, listener interpretations, and so on—as they grapple with different levels of linguistic structure, the delicate twists and turns of social encounters, and the fact that there is no one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning. However, as Johnstone (2000: 36) notes, „sociolinguistic work is always “interpretive,” whether the interpretation involves numbers or results of some other kind. … Only with interpretation does an analysis have a point‟. And, although there will always be difficulties in uncovering speaker intent, the theory developed by Gumperz addresses these difficulties by taking an interactive approach that captures the use of (para)linguistic features in contextualized utterances as well as the listener‟s reaction to these. In addition, examination of negotiations and repairs occurring in discourse can aid in analyst interpretations of speaker intent (Prevignano and di Luzio, 2003).
Although Gumperz‟s IS is markedly different from variationist sociolinguistics, it can also be viewed as developing in complementary fashion and contributing complementary insights into language and social life. Indeed, a growing number of scholars now view quantitative and ethnographic perspectives on language as usefully applied in tandem to explore issues like identity construction (e.g., Eckert, 2000; Schilling-Estes, 2004).
3. Key Research Trajectories in IS****
We have seen that IS as an approach to the analysis of discourse grew primarily out of Gumperz‟s work and multifaceted interests, as well as his incorporation of insights from a range of fields. This formed a coherent framework of how meaning-making occurs in the interaction that has propelled numerous research trajectories both within and beyond IS. These include studies related to code-switching and language contact, intercultural communication, language and gender, identity construction, and language, power and institutions. Note that as more and more scholars are using integrated methods—combining ideas and methods from IS and CA and social psychology, for example—it has become more and more difficult (if not impossible) to identify a „purely‟ IS study.
3.1 Code-switching and language contact
Many studies in code-switching and language contact have built on Gumperz‟s early and groundbreaking work on linguistic diversity in speech communities, his scholarship on conversational code-switching, and his identification of code-switching as fundamentally similar to style-shifting and as a contextualization cue. In the 1980s and 1990s, Gumperz‟s students drew on his framework to study language choice and language rights (e.g., Heller, 1982, 1985; Woolard, 1985), and colleagues in Europe (e.g., Auer and di Luzio 1984, 1992) provided insights into code-switching, language socialization, and issues related to language and migration, while also contributing to the development of IS as an „interpretative‟ sociolinguistics (see also earlier work, published in German, by Kallmeyer and Schütze, 1977).
Code-switching continues to be a topic of interest in sociolinguistic research (see Chapter 37, this volume). Code-switching has recently been examined in a number of vital everyday contexts, among them families (e.g., Wei, 1994; Blum-Kulka, 1997), informal gatherings among friends (e.g., Hinnenkamp, 2003; Kallmeyer and Keim, 2003; Keim, 2003), courtrooms (e.g., Gumperz, 1999a; Jacquemet, 1996), workplaces (e.g., Holmes and Stubbe, 2004; Prego-Vazquez, 2007), educational contexts (e.g., Rampton, 1995; Bailey, 2000), and email discourse (e.g., Georgakopoulou, 1997). It has also been investigated as a resource in discursive identity construction (e.g., Rampton, 1995; Bailey, 2000; Holmes and Stubbe, 2004; Auer, 2007) and for enacting societal ills such as racism (e.g., Hill, 1995). Indeed, much of this body of research, in the spirit of Gumperz, investigates code-switching and language contact as related to issues of social inequality.
3.2 Intercultural communication
As mentioned previously, Tannen‟s (1984/2005) work on „conversational style‟ advanced IS by providing a discussion of, and developing, the theoretical underpinnings of IS as an approach to cross-(sub)cultural communication. Tannen‟s (1986) That’s Not What I Meant! covers similar ground for nonacademic audiences, while Agar‟s (1994) Culture Shock offers nonacademic audiences an anthropological perspective on issues of communication and culture.
Given our continually globalizing world, there is continued interest in intercultural communication, especially between „East‟ and „West‟, and IS is being used productively to explore it. For example, Haru Yamada (1997) investigates Japanese-American discourse, with a focus on workplace settings, while Linda W. L. Young (1994) considers Chinese-American interaction. Yuling Pan, Suzanne Wong Scollon, and Ron Scollon‟s more comprehensive Professional Communication in International Settings (2002) considers a range of cultural groups and discourse types and incorporates multiple approaches, and is also aimed at general audiences, while Scollon and Scollon‟s (1995/2001) Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach provides a thorough, more academic introduction to the topic. Donal Carbaugh (2005) integrates IS and ethnography in his book Cultures in Conversation to consider a variety of issues related to communication and culture. Such studies, building on Gumperz‟s work, provide insight into various kinds of intercultural miscommunication; they identify a range of causative factors, including uses of address terms, the structuring of information in discourse, and uses of pacing and pausing; some also give practical suggestions for improving communication. Many are important not only because they contribute to a more nuanced understanding of cultural differences and how these manifest interactionally, but also because they aim to educate the public about cultural aspects of communication.
3.3 Language and gender
IS serves as one of many theoretical orientations that have been drawn on to investigate gender and communication. The pioneering study of Maltz and Borker (1982) provided a starting point for Tannen‟s (1990, 1994, 1996, 1999) writing on language and gender in which she investigates interactions between women and men as a kind of cross-cultural communication and firmly establishes IS as a useful approach to gendered interaction. Her general audience book You Just Don’t Understand (Tannen, 1990) offers insights into everyday communication rituals of speakers of both genders. Much like Lakoff‟s (1975) Language and Woman’s Place, Tannen‟s work has fuelled both academic and popular interest in the topic. In fact, language and gender research „exploded‟ in the 1990s and continues to be a topic receiving a great deal of attention from researchers using various theoretical and methodological perspectives (Kendall and Tannen, 2001; see also Chapter 35, this volume). IS continues to be—implicitly or explicitly—important among these (see e.g., Bucholtz, Liang and Sutton, 1999; Hall and Bucholtz, 1995; Kotthoff and Wodak, 1997; Tannen, 1993a; Wodak, 1997b, 1997c).
3.4 Discursive identity construction
In the tradition established by Language and Social Identity (Gumperz, 1982b), IS has been used to examine how people create and negotiate identities in interaction. Contexts explored include workplaces (e.g., Kendall, 2003; Holmes and Stubbe, 2004), educational settings (e.g., Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz, 1996; Bailey, 2000; Wortham, 2006), families (e.g., Gordon, 2004; Tannen, Kendall and Gordon, 2007), and other social groups (e.g. Hamilton, 1998; Kiesling, 2001). Gendered identities are of particular interest, as are identities related to changing ethnic landscapes, especially in Europe (e.g., Auer, 2007). Such studies reveal the various linguistic means by which identities are constructed, make efforts at linking linguistic features with broader ideologies, and in general contribute to our understanding of how individuals use language to accomplish social goals. 3.5 Language, power, and institutions
A thread of research known as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) addresses social inequalities through academic research in a spirit akin to the goals of Gumperz‟s IS approach (see for instance Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999); CDA shares with IS „the interest in looking at language as a means of illuminating social problems‟ (Gumperz, personal communication). CDA studies draw on a number of approaches to discourse, among them IS, but focus more explicitly on issues of dominance and inequality. For example, Scollon and Scollon (1995/2001) integrate IS methodologies with a CDA focus on ideologies in Intercultural Communication, while Wodak (1997b, 1997c) does so to examine issues of language and gender.
Institutional encounters in which power is negotiated and exercised, like academic assessments (Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz, 1997), medical encounters (Tannen and Wallat, 1993; Wodak, 1997a), and courtroom interactions (Jacquemet, 1996; Eades, 2003, 2005) have also been examined by drawing on IS, although the focus of such analyses is not necessarily power. While some researchers have criticized IS for examining how members of different groups use language (the „difference‟ approach) to the exclusion of considering larger power structures, like institutional discrimination (the „dominance‟ approach) (Singh, Lele, and Martohardjono, 1988), linking macro (sociopolitical forces and cultural discourses) and micro (conversational features) has actually been identified as a strength of IS (Levinson, 2003: 37). Further, recent research by Eades (2005) explores difficulties in the difference/dominance dichotomy and explains strengths and weaknesses of each, suggesting we need a „discourse‟ approach to go beyond these two perspectives. In addition, Gumperz has answered some criticisms of IS by addressing larger cultural forces like gender discrimination in his research in more explicit ways; for example, Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz (1996) uncover a subtle subtext of gender discrimination in a Ph.D. defence by analyzing contextualization cues like prosody in the context of the unfolding interaction, the interpersonal relationships among participants, the content of the talk, and the socio-historical roots of the defence as an event. Whether such efforts convince critics or not, interests in learning more about ways to link micro and macro in analyses of social interaction persist (e.g., Al Zidjaly, 2006; Wortham, 2006), and much research in this area is inspired in some way by Gumperz‟s approach.
4. Summary and Future Directions
We have seen that, since its inception, interactional sociolinguistics has been interdisciplinary. Its founder, John Gumperz, is an anthropological linguist (or a linguistic anthropologist—see Gumperz 2003: 117); other scholars contributing concepts, theories, and methodological perspectives hail from sociology (Garfinkel and Goffman), anthropology (Hymes), philosophy (Searle and Grice), and linguistics (Lakoff and Tannen). Many of these scholars, like Gumperz himself, have stretched the boundaries of their respective disciplines; their scholarship connects what is „inside the circle‟ of their field with that which lies outside. Growing from these interdisciplinary roots are numerous examples of studies using IS that involve scholars from multiple, and quite disparate, backgrounds and perspectives. For instance, genetic counsellors and linguists have collaboratively examined how prenatal genetic counsellors interact with their clients (e.g., Benkendorf et al., 2001; Gordon et al., 2002); linguists and medical professionals have explored doctor-patient talk (e.g., Hamilton et al., 2008); and anthropologists, linguists, and communication studies scholars have addressed various facets of family discourse (e.g., Tannen and Goodwin, 2006). Given recent calls for moves toward interdisciplinarity in medical communication research (by Sarangi, 2004), in studies of the family (by Schneider and Waite, 2005), and in Critical Discourse Analysis (by Wodak and Chilton, 2005), and given the current academic climate in which interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research is valued and encouraged, IS will surely continue to play a leading role in investigations of social interaction across a range of contexts.
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