Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics series

Cynthia Gordon

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781647121112
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this groundbreaking collection, scholars within the field of linguistics and beyond offer discourse analyses in multiple languages, contexts, and modes, demonstrating the importance of the diverse perspectives that various approaches to discourse bring to bear on human communication.

1

How Linguistic Anthropologists Conceptualize Relations among Different Forms of Discourse

SUSAN U. PHILIPS

ALTHOUGH THE VARIOUS ACADEMIC disciplines that contribute to discourse analysis have a great deal in common, we also each have some typical features that distinguish us. In sociology and linguistics it is more common to focus analytically on one single form of discourse at a time. Conversation, interview, and narrative are the three forms of talk that have received the greatest methodological attention. In anthropology it is common for scholars to examine more than one kind of discourse from the same research context and to analyze the nature of relations among those forms of discourse. Anthropological contributions to discourse analysis have often focused on such relationships. In this chapter I describe how this focus on relations among forms of discourse came about theoretically and methodologically and show how some of those relations work in language use. Ultimately it is a human characteristic of language that we deliberately vary the way we organize discourse to accomplish different social ends.

I first discuss some of the commonalities in approaches to discourse that were part of sociolinguistics as it emerged as a cross-disciplinary endeavor in the late 1960s. We still share these commonalities across linguistics, anthropology, and sociology. Then I describe some features characteristic of approaches to discourse in linguistic anthropology, focusing on the rationale for examination of multiple forms of discourse.

The following three sections focus on how the anthropological concern with multiple forms of talk includes ideas about how forms of discourse are related to one another. I draw on my own past research projects as well as those of others to consider three key developments in anthropological discussions of how forms of discourse are related to each other:

First, there is an enduring tradition of thinking of forms of discourse as socially organized, as operating within a discourse system that is also a sociocultural system. Second, linguistic anthropologists have put forth a set of interpretive concepts concerned with how people make sense of discourse by relating units of discourse to one another. Here I discuss metapragmatic concepts of discourse relatedness that show us how very much control people have over the way they think about and organize discourse. Finally, I consider how forms of discourse are embedded in power relations, another common anthropological theme.

Intellectual History

Discourse analysis as we know it today emerged within the context of the development of sociolinguistics in the 1960s. Sociolinguistics was a cross-disciplinary endeavor primarily involving linguistics, sociology, and anthropology, but also psychology and philosophy. It brought together kinds of discourse for analysis not really considered together before, such as written and spoken language, and casual and formal language. New kinds of empirical analysis depended on the development of easily portable recording equipment. The disciplines involved all gave attention in one way or another to the identification of units of interaction. For any comparison of multiple instances of an activity, or comparison of different activities, such identification was methodologically necessary.

Erving Goffman’s (1963) conceptualization of the “encounter” as a bounded interactional entity characterized by a shared focus of talk was probably the most important stimulus to the identification of units, followed by conversation analysts’ description of the sequential organization of openings and closings that bounded conversations (Sacks and Schegloff 1973; Schegloff 1972). Different disciplines used different terms to talk about basic units of interaction. Philosophers and their followers spoke of “speech acts.” Goffman himself later proposed the phrase “forms of talk” (Goffman 1981).

Ethnographers of communication in anthropology were influenced by Dell Hymes and John Gumperz (Gumperz and Hymes 1964) to think in terms of larger units of interaction that encompassed smaller units of interaction through their introduction of the concepts of speech situation (following Goffman 1964), speech event, and speech act. And while this three-way distinction was given attention by linguists writing about discourse analysis in anthropology, including Muriel Saville-Troike (1982) and Deborah Schiffrin (1994), the concept of genre was in many ways more central for anthropologists studying talk.

Genre was and is an inherently comparative and relative concept. It tends to evoke or bring to mind relatively planned and clearly bounded forms of talk that are individually performed in public, such as the common examples of prayer, lecture, song, and story. This anthropological focus on genre was in part due to how, in Hymes’s teaching (1966–1968), he focused a great deal on his own analysis of Native American myths as units of interaction. He used Chinookan myths to illustrate how a given genre would be characterized by and even constrained to have particular linguistic features. For example, both Hymes in his teaching and Moore (2015, 25) argue that these myths were identifiable as myths, rather than as history or legend, by tense marking that conveyed the events as occurring in a mythic past. Hymes also used characteristic myth beginnings and endings to illustrate the boundedness of genres that justified sometimes pulling them out of context for examination. He similarly analyzed the predictable internal sequential structure of myths to illustrate sequentiality in discourse (e.g., Hymes 1981). In these ways he encouraged his students to think in terms of clearly bounded units of interaction. Hymes himself focused primarily on myth in his own research, and, as Kroskrity and Webster (2015) have argued, he influenced generations of students in the ethnopoetic analysis of narratives to focus on text-internal properties of discourse. Both Blommaert (2009) and Moore (2015) describe how a more situated and interactive concept of narrative discourse in some ethnopoetic analysis was in turn influenced by Hymes’s beautifully elaborated concept of ethnographic studies of language as the key to understanding situated meaning, itself a necessary component of a theory of meaning.

Many linguistic anthropologists influenced by Hymes have made a point of recording more than one kind of discourse, and of considering how the forms they record are positioned within the larger speech economy of a community. This methodological commitment did not grow directly out of Hymes’s own practices, which were focused on informant elicitation of myths. Instead, this commitment to multiple forms of discourse stemmed from his and John Gumperz’s programmatic vision of the nature of language. From their point of view, the linguistic structure of a language should be viewed as a set of resources to be drawn upon selectively in the accomplishment of activities conceived by local speakers and observers as obviously different cultural activities. This means that in some but not necessarily all ways, actual linguistic structure will not be the same in all situations. Crucially the discourse genre or form of talk organizes the diversity of language forms to create culturally meaningful social activity.

For example, consider how we understand the statistical frequency of statements relative to questions differently in different forms of talk. In some interactions one speaker produces mostly questions and the other speaker produces mostly statements, now to be understood as answers to the questions. That is what a lot of my data looks like, with teachers asking students questions and judges asking criminal defendants questions. In other interactions, both questions and statements are being produced by both parties to an interaction. A conversation could conceivably look like that. The ways that linguistic structures are ordered in different forms of discourse thus play a role in the accomplishment of different cultural activities. To think in terms of different cultural activities in turn requires conceptualizing forms of discourse as bounded in some way. The term “speech genre” is used to refer to such forms in anthropology, as in folklore and literature.

Following the influential collaborative work between Gumperz and Hymes at the University of California, Berkeley, Hymes moved to the University of Pennsylvania. The first generation of Hymes’s students at the University of Pennsylvania carried out ethnographic research projects that involved recording multiple forms of talk, and not just the highly redundant publicly performed genres studied by earlier generations, but also more open-ended and varied conversations. This recording of multiple forms of discourse took place within what were conceptualized as ethnographic research projects. In anthropology, ethnography canonically means working in another culture where people speak a language other than English and spending at least a year immersed in the culture, preferably living with the people one is working with. Participant observation is a key source of data. Participant observation refers to the dual goals of engaging in activities with the people one is learning about, while paying attention through focused observation of what is going on. Audio and visual recording are understood to be an extension of participant observation. The speech recorded is, if possible, socially occurring speech. This means one records activities that are part of the fabric of the society in which the research takes place, rather than activities staged by the researcher. The researcher is typically present, but not a very active participant, and intends not to alter how things would go if he or she were not present. That does not mean that more interventionist activities, such as interviews and experiments, do not take place. Interviews provide information that can’t be obtained otherwise and often the interviews take the form of debriefings in which knowledgeable people help the researcher understand the social occurring activities that are the focus of the research.

Joel Sherzer’s (1974) early ethnographic research with the Kuna Indians of Panama illustrates this approach as it was conceptualized within the ethnography of speaking. Sherzer described the range of speech events and speech genres in Kuna communities. He showed how a set of forms of talk, including chanting in political meetings, in curing rituals, and in female puberty ceremonies, shared certain linguistic properties that set them apart from everyday speech. These properties included the phonological quality of less vowel elision, nominal and verbal affixes, and kernel-like sentences with much repetition of information normally deleted after initial introduction in more everyday speech. There was, therefore, a public speaking style that was highly valued and performed only by men.

This illustrates the linguistic anthropological commitment to thinking in terms of multiple forms of talk and how they are systematically differentiated linguistically and yet related to one another at the same time. These features of anthropological work on discourse have persisted through time.

As I indicated at the beginning, I will now consider three different kinds of relationships among different forms of discourse to which anthropologists have given attention. First, attention has focused enduringly on the social organization of forms of discourse—on how different units of discourse are systematically organized in such a way as to constitute the social structure of a speech community. Second, several concepts in linguistic anthropology have focused on the interpretive process through which parties to an interaction make sense of ongoing speech in a particular genre by relating it to other speech, sometimes to speech in other forms of talk. These include the concepts of intertextuality, indexicality, interdiscursivity, and metapragmatics. I will be focusing on how forms of talk are related in metapragmatic activity. Third, I will consider how different forms of discourse can enter into relations of power.

The Social Organization of Forms of Discourse

In the early days of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropologists gave considerable attention to the social organization of speech by identifying whole domains of discourse that were shown to be linguistically distinct from one another yet bound up in a single social system. Written and spoken speech were linguistically different. Planned and unplanned speech were held to be different in ways related to the written-spoken dichotomy (Ochs and Bennett-Kastor 1977). Formal and informal speech had linguistic characteristics that differentiated them. The public-private dichotomy was another such domain distinction. Political economic research showed whole language codes to be socially organized into different economically determined social domains. Charles Ferguson’s (1964) concept of diglossia, in which two varieties of language were used in different social contexts, was an influential example of a linguistically constituted domain difference. Actual forms of discourse underlie such domain distinctions, and different forms of discourse are related to each other partly through similarities and differences in their ordering of linguistic forms.

Relations among forms of discourse can, for example, play a role in constituting different levels of institutional organization. In my own research in the Kingdom of Tonga, a small South Pacific nation, I observed that there are two levels of trial courts (Philips 2016). The lower-level Magistrate’s Court hears misdemeanor criminal cases and minor civil cases. The higher-level Supreme Court hears criminal felony cases and more expensive civil cases. Both courts process defendants through a sequence of bounded units of interaction. Both courts have the same legal role identities, such as lawyer, judge, defendant, and witness. In both courts, talk consists primarily of legal personnel asking questions that are answered by witnesses. The cases in the higher-level Tongan Supreme Court are, however, considered more “serious,” and those cases take much more time. This greater amount of time results from interactional expansions of the same kind of discourse units one encounters in the lower court. The higher-court cases involve more lawyers eliciting testimony from a given witness. More witnesses are questioned by each lawyer, and each witness is asked more questions. In other words, the same interactional units we find in the lower-level court are both expanded and multiplied. There are more testimonies and more question-answer pairs to each testimony in the higher-level court. This expansion of discourse units constitutes and displays the greater seriousness of the attention given to the cases. In these ways the two courts are related by all they have in common in their discourse units, but also differentiated in that relationship by, among other things, the expansions available in the higher-level court.

Other scholars similarly compare forms of talk located in different structural positions within a social system. For example, Briggs and Mantini-Briggs (2003), examining discourse about a cholera epidemic in Venezuela, compare interviews with individuals located in different positions within the public health system. They conceptualize the people involved in addressing the epidemic as located in a political economic system that ranges from residents of an indigenous village with no health care to global organizations like the World Health Organization. In between are health-care professionals located in communities of increasing size and political and economic complexity, such as a doctor in a small-town clinic, a regional epidemiologist, and the director of a hospital. The authors show how the explanations and characterizations of the cholera epidemic in those speakers’ discourse representations vary. Those in the intermediate positions within the Venezuelan political economic system blamed the Warao indigenous people, who first got the disease, for the epidemic. They were blamed for failing to be modern in their health practices, even as such practices were denied them by the state. The medical professionals shared their views with radio and newspaper media and these views spread throughout the country. The Warao view, which blamed contact with fishermen on their coastline, did not circulate in the same way. Only later did quite distinctive global epidemiological research discourse forms indicate that the epidemic began in Peru and spread from there through the region. Clearly multiple processes were at play in the spread of the epidemic, but what concerned the Brig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. How Linguistic Anthropologists Conceptualize Relations among Different Forms of Discourse
• 2. “Two Different Kinds of Life”: A Cultural Analysis of Blackfeet Discourse
• 3. Gesture, Mimesis, and the Linguistics of Time
• 4. The Ambiguity and Polysemy of Power and Solidarity in Professor-Student Emails and Conversations among Friends
• 5. What Do Discourse Markers Mark? Arabic yaʕni (It Means) and Hebrew ya'ani across Modalities and Sociolinguistic Systems
• 6. Reconsidering the Concept of “Total Institutions” in Light of Interactional Sociolinguistics: The Meaning of the Marker “Here”
• 7. The Expression of Authority in US Primary Care: Offering Diagnoses and Recommending Treatment
• 8. Semiotic Ideologies and Trial Discourse: Implications for Multimodal Discourse Analysis
• 9. Repair as Activism on Arabic Twitter
• 10. Online Political Trolling as Bakhtin’s Carnival: Putin’s “Discrowning” by Pro-Ukrainian Commenters
• 11. From Post-Truth to Post-Shame: Analyzing Far-Right Populist Rhetoric
• Contributors
• Index