Etnography of Speech(Communication) “… is based on anthropology and linguisctics… “

Dell Hymes : systematic potential, appropriateness, occurance, feasibility (Coulthard, 1988:33)

          *”patterns of communication are part of cultural knowledge and behaviour, this entails a recognition   of both  the diversity of communicative possibilities and practises (cultural relativity) and the fact that             such practises are integrated part of what we know and do as members of a particular culture (holistic view of human beliefs and actions)” (Schiffrin,1994:137)

*“culture is a system of ideas that underlies and gives meaning to behaviour in society : a set of assumptions and beliefs that orient and organize the way people think, feel and act” (138-9)

* speech community, speech situations, events and acts, communicative competence.

         Speaking Grid :

       S  setting scene

       P   participants

       E  ends : purposes, aims and goals, outcomes

       A act sequence : message form and content
       K  key : manner and tone

       I   instrumentalities : channel(verbal-non-verbal, physical) forms of speech of the community 

       N  norms of interaction and interpretation

       G  genre : text categories: telling story

        “Suppose you were setting out to do an ethography of communication in your own culture. What speech situations and events would you try to tape-record? Why?”

C: “Subay traşı kes saçımı.”

B: “Astsubay traşı kessek?”

C: “Hayır subay.”

B: ”Orgeneral kessek?”

C: “Hayır subay.”

B: “Paşa traşı kessek?

C: “Hayır subay.”

B: “Bunların hepsi subay.”

C: “Hayır subay.”

        Conversational Analysis (sociology ,Garfinkel) “… It seeks to discover the methods by which             members of a society produce sense of social order. Conversation is a source of much of our sense of social order….” (Schiffrin,1994)

* “Ethnomethodology : cross-cultural analyses of ways of doing and knowing.

* Participants understandings of their circumstances provide the stable organization of their social activities.

* Social action, thus, not only displays knowledge, it is also critical to the creation of knowledge (one’s own actions produce and reproduce the knowledge through which individual conduct and social circumstance are intelligible.” (Schiffrin,1994 : 232-6)

“a) Interaction is structurally organized; b) contributions to interaction are contextually oriented; c) these two properties inhere in the details of interaction so that no order of detail can be dismissed, a priori, as disorderly, accidental, or irrelevant”( Heritage,1984:241)

“CA’ view of interaction is a structural view. One such structure is the –adjacency pair- a sequence of two utterances, which are adjanced, produced by different speakers, ordered as first part and second part, and typed, so that a first part requires a particular second part or range of second parts ( Schegloff and Sacks)

Turn Taking

Intonation, paralanguage, body motion, sociocentric sequences, syntax (Duncan,1973,1974)

Topic, topic change, topic conflict, stories, topical coherence (Sacks)

Analysis of Conversation : (opening) foreigners and callers don’t use greetings ; (closing) topic bounding sequence, pre-closing- closing sequence  

Variation Analysis

“The Variationist approach to discourse is the only approach whose origins are solely within linguistics. This approach stems largely from studies of variation and change in language : fundamental assumptions of such stidies are that linguistic variation ( heterogenety) is patterned both socially and linguistically, and that such patterns can be discovered only through systematic investigation of speech community. Thus, variationists try to discover patterns in the distribution of alternative ways of saying the same thing, i.e. the social and linguistic factors that are responsible for variation in ways of speaking.”   

“It is in the search for text structure, the analysis of text level variants and of how text constrains other forms…” (Schiffrin,1994:282)

“… this framework defines a narrative as a particular bounded unit in discourse, and it defines parts of narrative as smaller units whose identities are based on thier linguistic (syntactic, semantic) properties and on thier role in  the narrative.” (283)

“ … variationist view the structure of narrative as largely independent of sorrounding text: narratives are autonomous textual units whose internal parts stand systematic relationships with one another.”(285)

“ Narratives have a linear structure in which different sections present different kinds of information. Each section has a different function within the story. In addition, each section is comprised of different types of clauses whose syntactic and semantic properties contribute to their identity as units within the story, and do their function. Narratives are open by an abstract, a clause that summarizes the experience and presents a general proposition that the narrative will expand. Orientation clauses ( typically within stative predicates) follow the abstract: they describe background information such as time, place, and identity of characters. The main part of the narrative is comprised of complicating action clauses. Each complication action clause describes an event -a bounded occurance in time- that is understoodto shift reference time, i.e. it follows the event immediately preceding it, and precedes the event immediately following it. Evaluation pervades the narrative: speakers can comment on events from outside of the story world, suspend the action through embedded orientation clauses, and report events that themselves indicate the significance of the experience. Speakers can also modify clause syntax as a way of revealing the point ( general proposition ) of the story. Finally the story is closed by a coda –a clause that shifts out of the past time frame of the story to the time frame of current talk.” (Schiffrin,1994:284)