Studies in Language and Social Interaction

In Honor of Robert Hopper

Jennifer Mandelbaum, Phillip J. Glenn, Curtis D. LeBaron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135652838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection offers empirical studies and theoretical essays about human communication in everyday life. The writings come from many of the world's leading researchers and cut across academic boundaries, engaging scholars and teachers from such disciplines as communication, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and education. Chapters emphasize empirical, qualitative studies of people's everyday uses of talk-in-interaction, and they feature work in such areas as sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and ethnography. The volume is dedicated to and highlights themes in the work of the late Robert Hopper, an outstanding scholar in communication who pioneered research in Language and Social Interaction (LSI). The contributors examine various features of human interaction (such as laughter, vocal repetition, and hand gestures) occurring naturally within a variety of settings (at a dinner table, a doctor's office, an automotive repair shop, and so forth), whereby interlocutors accomplish aspects of their interpersonal or institutional lives (resolve a disagreement, report bad medical news, negotiate a raise, and more), all of which may relate to larger social issues (including police brutality, human spirituality, death, and optimism). The chapters in this anthology show that social life is largely a communicative accomplishment and that people constitute the social realities experienced every day through small and subtle ways of communicating, carefully orchestrated but commonly taken for granted. In showcasing the diversity of contemporary LSI research, this volume is appropriate for scholars and graduate students in language and social interaction, communication, sociology, research methods, qualitative research methods, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, linguistics, and related areas.

1
An Overview of Language and Social Interaction
Research

Curtis D.LeBaron
Brigham Young University

Jenny Mandelbaum
Rutgers University

Phillip J.Glenn
Emerson College

This book is an edited collection of empirical studies and theoretical essays about human communication in everyday life. The primary focus is on small or subtle forms of communication that are easily overlooked and too often dismissed as unimportant. Authors examine various features of human interaction (e.g., laughter, vocal repetition, hand gestures) occurring naturally within a variety of settings (e.g., at a dinner table, a doctor’s office, an automotive repair shop), whereby interlocutors accomplish aspects of their interpersonal or institutional lives (e.g., resolve a disagreement, report bad medical news, negotiate a raise), all of which may relate to larger social issues (e.g., police brutality, human spirituality, death and optimism). The present collection is bound together by a recognition that social life is largely a communicative accomplishment, that people constitute the social realities experienced everyday through small and subtle ways of communicating, carefully orchestrated but commonly taken for granted.

This volume represents Language and Social Interaction (LSI) perspectives on human communication. LSI is a popular umbrella term for scholarly work carried out within and across a number of academic disciplines. The label covers an array of assumptions, methods, and topics, which draw unity from certain family resemblances (discussed later). LSI research includes studies of speech, language, and gesture in human communication; studies of discourse processes, face-to-face interaction, communication competence, and cognitive processing; conversation analytic, ethnographic, microethnographic, ethnomethodological, and sociolinguistic work; dialect and attitude studies, speech act theory, and pragmatics. Within the field of communication, scholarship in LSI has flourished in recent years. There are large and active LSI divisions within the National Communication Association (NCA) and the International Communication Association (ICA); the journal Research on Language and Social Interaction (originally called Papers in Linguistics) is now a mainstay within the field; LSI research appears regularly in books (e.g., Ellis, 1999a) and a host of mainstream disciplinary journals (e.g., Leeds-Hurwitz, 1992); and a growing number of communication departments at major universities emphasize LSI in their curricula.

The present volume originated as a Festschrift celebrating the intellectual career of the late Robert Hopper, a leading LSI researcher and an extraordinary teacher. Hopper completed his doctoral studies in 1970 at the University of Wisconsin and joined the faculty in Speech Communication at the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained until the end of his career. As author of eight books and dozens of published essays, he was known for his innovative thinking, lucid writing, and ability to bring together diverse scholars and perspectives. He taught more than 60 graduate courses and supervised more than 30 doctoral dissertations¹. He received many awards² for his research and teaching. Over the course of three decades, Hopper (and his students) pursued a rigorous speech science that led him to the forefront of approaches to LSI, as they were new to communication. He worked first with techniques for measuring language attitudes, then with discourse analysis, then conversation analysis, and finally explored microethnographic techniques for analyzing videotaped data. Each of these research traditions helped to shape the field of LSI, and each continues to make robust contributions to a rigorous science of speech in the communication field. By soliciting papers from Hopper’s former students and close colleagues, therefore, we have collected a cross-section of cutting-edge LSI research. This volume, then, arises out of two interrelated rationales. One, it is designed to showcase the diversity of contemporary LSI research, altogether allowing for reflection on LSI as an established and expanding area of study. Two, it celebrates Robert Hopper and the trajectory of his intellectual career, which in many ways paralleled developments in the field of LSI, for which he provided impetus. To the extent that this volume forwards his ideas and interests, it will make important contributions to the study of human communication and social interaction.

The remainder of this chapter explicates these two interrelated themes. First, we describe the emergence and influence of LSI within the field of communication³. The work of Robert Hopper embodies both the diversity of LSI research and the eclecticism of the communication field. Second, we describe the current state of LSI and discuss seven points of commonality and contention within the area—that is, seven points around which LSI scholars tend to rally in one way or another. Third, we preview the main sections of this book and comment on its organization.

THE EMERGENCE AND INFLUENCE OF LSI WITHIN THE FIELD OF COMMUNICATION

LSI is a relatively recent area within the field of communication, which has been dominated by rhetorical and psychological approaches for almost a century. The field of communication traces its beginnings to 1914, when a group of speech scholars met in Chicago to officially break from their English (and theater) departments at various U.S. universities by organizing the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking (see O’Neill, 1915). Early publications show a division within the field: Many speech scholars advocated standards of positivistic science, with a psychological rather than a sociological bent (e.g., Winans, 1915; Woolbert, 1916, 1917); many others had a humanistic and rhetorical emphasis, mostly grounded in neo-Aristotelian philosophy (e.g., Hudson, 1923, 1924; Hunt, 1920). Within a few decades, a respectable research literature had been established (see Simon, 1951), but it was mostly concerned with individual performers of speech during situations of public address. After 1950, as the field matured, its domain extended to include a broad array of communicative phenomena within a wide variety of human activities. Several scholars have documented the unfolding history and nature of the communication field (see Arnold & Bowers, 1984; Benson, 1985; Bitzer & Black, 1971; Gouran, 1990; Kibler & Barker, 1969).

In the late 1970s, a series of groundbreaking publications set the stage for LSI’s emergence within the field of communication (at that time called “speech communication”). Bringing together interpersonal communication and the detailed study of natural language, Nofsinger (1975, 1976) and Hawes (1976) demonstrated and advocated scientific analyses of naturally occurring speech without the use of statistical methods—an innovative proposition for the field of communication at that time. For instance, by drawing on conversation analytic work on presequences, Nofsinger (1975) identified a commonplace speech device he called “the demand ticket” (e.g., “Yuh know what?”), whereby a person may initiate a topic and at the same time secure the conversational floor. Nofsinger went on to suggest that utterances be understood according to their location within conditionally relevant sequences of talk, “rather than in terms of gross numbers of occurrences per unit of time or whatever” (p.). Philipsen (1975) drew on ethnographic methods pioneered by linguistic anthropologists Dell Hymes and Ethel Albert in his ground-breaking study of gendered patterns of speech in a blue-collar urban neighborhood (this essay won the NCA/ LSI division’s Outstanding Publication award in 1998). Two years later, in a special issue of Communication Quarterly (Summer 1977), naturalistic approaches (Pearce, 1977) to communication research were more thoroughly described, including ethnomethodology (Litton-Hawes, 1977), conversation analysis (Nofsinger, 1977), discourse analysis (Jurick, 1977), hermeneutic phenomenology (Hawes, 1977), and ethnography (Philipsen, 1977). Naturalistic methods were soon featured in other mainstream communication journals (e.g., Beach, 1982). Jackson and Jacobs (1980) combined detailed study of natural language with interests in rhetoric: They analyzed the structure of naturally occurring arguments and compared these to theoretical models of argument and the problem of “enthymemes” (missing or taken-for-granteds premises of arguments), thereby illustrating the utility of discourse analysis to the field of communication generally and to rhetorical theory specifically. In an awardwinning essay, Hopper (1981b) expanded upon the issue of the “taken for granted” (TFG) in everyday communication and social life. He brought together a wide variety of linguistic approaches, showing how concern with TFGs is a communication issue. After reviewing the difficulties that TFGs have caused scholars across a variety of disciplines (enthymemes for rhetoricians, presuppositions for linguists, etc.), Hopper suggested that “there may exist a functional and principled incompleteness in language use” (p.) and he provided a schematic model for how people handle TFGs in everyday situations. In sum, these early publications pushed naturalistic methods into the mainstream of communication research, providing new ways of conceptualizing and analyzing communication, and bringing attention to phenomena previously overlooked.

In the early 1980s, Robert Hopper and several other communication scholars interested in everyday language use participated in a series of conferences whereby the new research area (LSI) took shape. The first communication conference focusing on “conversational interaction and discourse processes” occurred in 1981 at the University of Nebraska (cohosted by Wayne Beach, Sally Jackson, and Scott Jacobs). The following year, two conferences occurred: one on language and discourse processes at Michigan State University (hosted by Don Ellis and William Donohue); the other on discourse analysis and “conversational coherence” at Temple University (cohosted by Karen Tracy and Robert Craig). Participants in the Michigan State conference produced a published volume about contemporary issues in language and discourse processes (Ellis & Donohue, 1986), which represented the wide range of LSI approaches (including speech act theory, discourse analysis, and conversation analysis) that were emerging at that time within the field of communication. For example, Hopper, Koch, and Mandelbaum (1986) described methods of conversation analysis, as the authors were coming to understand them. Participants in the Temple conference produced a published volume of original research (Craig & Tracy, 1983) that evidenced “a scholarly movement [with] radically different methods, databases, and conceptual frameworks for studying human interaction” (Knapp, 1983, p. 7). Each of the authors, including Hopper, examined the same data set: a careful transcription of a lengthy conversation between “B and K,” two female undergraduate students who talked casually about their families, friends, food, holiday plans, horses, weather, and whatever else happened to emerge in the course of their interaction. Authors employed qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the structures and strategies of B and K’s talk, providing detailed descriptions and accounts of the orderly and meaningful ways that competent speakers may show their talk to be coherently connected. For example, Hopper (1983) showed that coherence is an interactive accomplishment (“we can no longer rely upon a model of communication that emphasizes the role of the speaker over that of the listener” p. 84), across turns at talk (“the fundamental unit of interpretation is the pair” p. 80), whereby shared meanings systematically emerge and evolve (“the ordering of events in sequential time frequently seems an important tie to the interpretive process” p. 92).

During the final decades of the 20th century, LSI scholars in communication brought together approaches and concerns from a number of related movements. Hopper’s research exemplifies the eclectic interests which contributed to the emergence of LSI as a distinct area of study. Resonating with the field’s origins in rhetorical theory, LSI research on speech evaluation sought to gauge audience responses to speakers and their messages (e.g., Gundersen & Hopper, 1984). Early message research employed sociolinguistic methods to examine the effects of speech on the listener by focusing on how listeners evaluated speakers on the basis of characteristics of the talk or the speaker (e.g., de la Zerda & Hopper, 1979; Giles & Powesland, 1975; Zahn & Hopper, 1985). The influence of ordinary language philosophy (e.g., Austin, 1962; Wittgenstein, 1953) prompted studies of “speech as action” (e.g., Hopper, 1981a). Concurrently, sociological studies reflecting the influence of symbolic interactionists directed attention to such topics as accounts and formulations under the umbrella term alignment talk (e.g., Morris & Hopper, 1987; Ragan & Hopper, 1981). An emphasis on issues of coherence and cohesion drawn from linguistics (Coulthard, 1977) combined with these other streams under a broader label of discourse analysis (e.g., Ellis, 1995; Hopper, 1983). At the same time, ethnographic approaches to communication were drawn from fields such as linguistic anthropology (e.g., Fitch & Hopper, 1983; Philipsen, 1975). Conversation analysis in the ethnomethodological tradition (e.g., Beach, 1982) provided alternative method...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• 1. AN OVERVIEW OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL INTERACTION RESEARCH
• I. ORIENTING TO THE FIELD OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL INTERACTION
• II. TALK IN EVERYDAY LIFE
• III. TALK IN INSTITUTIONAL SETTINGS
• IV. EMERGING TRAJECTORIES: BODY, MIND, AND SPIRIT
• V. ROBERT HOPPER: TEACHER AND SCHOLAR
• APPENDIX: TRANSCRIPTION SYMBOLS
• CONTRIBUTORS