Communicative competence, context and context of situation (Lecture 2)

The ethnography of communication refers to the indepth study of the ways of communicating within a particular speech community The ethnography of communication (or speaking, as it was first called) stems from the work of anthropological linguists Dell Hymes and John Gumperz (1964, 1972). _ Hymes, in particular, was concerned about the growing schism between studies of language structure and language use. Hymes set forth basic elements to be considered when examining a speech event in a given speech community. _ His model has been put into practice in numerous studies in widely disparate speech communities around the world. _ Other important figures in the development of the ethnography of communication are: Richard Bauman, Joel Sherzer, and Muriel Saville-Troike Hymes wanted linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists to pay attention to communicative competence. _ Communicative competence refers to the knowledge that every competent member of a speech community has that makes it possible for that individual to use linguistic forms in appropriate ways to accomplish particular goals. Key terms involved in the ethnography of communication include: _ Speech community _ Speech situation _ Speech event _ Speech act A speech community is a group of speakers who share at least one communicative variety and the norms for its appropriate use. It is usually (but not necessarily) circumscribed geographically. _ Examples would be: clans, tribes, sectors, neighborhoods, cliques, religious congregations, towns, clubs, school classes, etc. A speech situation is any social situation in which speech is an element. Most human interactions involve speech in some way, so this is a fairly broad category. _ Note: the absence of speech can be meaningful within a speech situation and should be included in the analysis. Examples of speech situations would be: student assemblies, football games, weddings, religious services, graduations, driving tests, trials, medical consultations, etc. A speech event is the basic unit for analysis of communicative interaction in speech communities. Speech events are social events which are carried out through communicative means, especially speech. Examples of speech events include: speeches, verbal duels, flirtations, wedding vows, prayers, classroom lessons, etc. speech act is the smallest element of communication. It may consist of sentences or phrases, usually grouped in pairs called adjacency pairs. _ Speech acts are highly formulaic in most societies, and the rules for cultural appropriateness may vary greatly. Examples of speech acts would include: _ Greetings/farewells _ Questions/answers

_ Orders/compliances or refusals _ Invitations/acceptances or rejections _ Threats /promises /warnings _ Compliments _ Performatives (speech acts that perform social acts just by being uttered, e.g. saying I do in a wedding ceremony). To better visualize the relationship among these terms, imagine an American football game. _ Speech communitysomewhere in US _ Speech situationfootball game _ Speech eventspre-game prayer, coachs pep talk, huddle, cheers, etc. _ Speech actsinvocations, exhortations, calling out plays, etc. Like text, context is a metaphor from weaving. Contexere is classical Latin for to weave, while the noun contextus was used in the sense of connection. It was in the fourth century a.d. that another noun, contextio, came into use to describe the text surrounding a given passage that one wishes to interpret. Augustine, for example, in the course of a discussion of biblical interpretation, used the term a number of times in phrases such as contextio sermonis or contextio scripturae. The terms just discussed virtually dropped out of use in the Middle Ages, apart from contextio, which came to mean literary composition This absence does not entitle us to conclude that no one at all in this long period was interested in the kind of problems we call contextual. The interest was sometimes expressed by means of other words, notably circumstantiae (the things that stand around), a term employed in biblical exegesis. In the ninth century, for example, Sedulius Scotus enunciated the rule of seven circumstances, person, fact, cause, time, place, mode, and topic. Aquinas regularly referred to what he called literary circumstance (circumstantia litterae). Augustine too had used the term circumstantial in this sense In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in vernacular languages such as Italian, French, English, or German, the words contesto, contexture, context, and Kontext began to be used, usually in discussions of the interpretation of texts, especially the Bible and Aristotles. the term also came to refer to the coherence of an entire text. A third and more extended sense of the term included the intention of the writer, often described as his scopus or in English as scope. in the early modern period, much of the discussion of what we would term context, whether in law, ethics, political thought, or theology, was phrased in terms of circumstances (as in the Middle Ages) or occasions or in terms of what Machiavelli called the quality of the times (la qualit detempi )to which political leaders needed to adapt themselves if they wished to succeed. Jurists discussed circumstantial evidence and also the place of circumstances in interpreting and applying laws. Counter-Enlightenment was associated with a major expansion in the meaning of the term context, a meaning that continued the emphasis on factors external to the text but increasingly concerned not only the immediate setting of writers and readers but also a more general historical context and the metaphor of historical context was no longer perceived as a metaphor To some degree, this expansion of meaning might be described as a kind of conceptual imperialism, with context taking over the territory that circumstances had previously occupied. However, a shift is also discernible from what might be called the microcontext of local circumstances to the

macrocontext of an entire culture, society, or age. Even when the word context is not employed, there are signs of an increasing interest in locating texts, artifacts, and actions in this way. Marxists and non-Marxists alike were increasingly concerned with Zusammenhang, a term that came into use in the late eighteenth century to refer to the way in which different beliefs, customs, and so on hang together. An English equivalent for Zusammenhang was context. In the seventeenth century, discussing the impossibility of laying down simple rules of law, Matthew Hale had given an old metaphor a new twist when he wrote of the texture of human affairs. the German anthropologist Franz Boas caused a sensation in museum circles in the United States by arguing that exhibits should not be arranged according to the type of artifact or the stage that the objects represented in an evolutionary sequence. They should be arranged by culture area. The point of the change in arrangement was that, according to Boas, an object could not be understood outside of its surroundings, physical and cultural. Karl Mannheim, one of the pioneers of the sociology of knowledge, treated ideas as socially situated (literally tied to the situation, Situationsgebunden). In other words, ideas were dependent on the social location. (Lagerung) or position of individuals in groups such as classes or generations In psychology, a concern with frame, context, situation, or environment marked a number of enterprises located on the frontier with sociology. Anthropology is sometimes perceived, not without reason, as the contextual discipline par excellence. Malinowski's primary scientific interest was in the study of culture as a universal phenomenon and in the development of a methodological framework that would permit the systematic study of specific cultures in all their peculiarities and open the way to systematic cross-cultural comparison". Central and recurrent themes in his research were the following topics: the family, kinship, culture change, anthropology and psychology, the integrity of culture; the complex interrelationship of the society, the culture and the individual, and the systematic nature of culture. In his 1931 article on "Culture" in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences Malinowski states that for him "culture comprises inherited artefacts, goods, technical processes, ideas, habits, and values". Moreover, besides social organization the concept of culture also includes "the set of forces impinging on the individual born into each society" Malinowski became very much interested in linguistics when he found that he could not realize his project of writing a grammar of Kilivila because he had no linguistic training and because he was rightly convinced that the grammatical categories offered by the linguistic theories of his time did not fit for the description of a language like Kilivila. Besides coining the term 'ethnolinguistics', Malinowski emphasizes in his first 'linguistic' paper that "grammar can be studied only in conjunction with meaning, and meaning only in the context of situation" Malinowski's linguistic interests "centered on language as a mode of behavior and on problems of culturally determined meaning". Malinowski developed his ethnographic theory of language mainly in connection with his attempts to translate the Trobriand Islanders' magical formulae. He realized that the Trobriand Islanders believed in the power of the words in the magical formulae: they used these magical formulae to reach certain aims with the firm conviction that they can thus influence and control nature and the course of, and events in, their lives. Thus, in the domain of magic language is doing something, it has certain effects, it has power and force.

Malinowski explicitly equates here meaning with pragmatic function and this is typical for his way of looking at language functionally and contextually with semantics as the starting point for linguistic analyses. For Malinowski (as well as for Wittgenstein) the meaning of a word lies in its use. Thus, to study meaning one cannot examine isolated words but sentences or utterances in their situative context: "the real understanding of words is always ultimately derived from active experience of those aspects of reality to which the words belong" Malinowski emphasizes that language at least in its primitive function has to be regarded as a mode of action and that to understand the use of a complex speech situation requires the understanding of the situation in which it occurred and the action it accomplished. This position can certainly be described as a "radical functionalism and contextualism" (Nerlich & Clarke 1996: 323). Malinowski (1923: 296, 309ff) illustrates how the meaning of utterances can be determined in what he calls "the essential primitive uses of speech: speech in action, ritual handling of words, the narrative, 'phatic communion (speech in social intercourse)"; he emphasizes his main position as follows: "language in its primitive function and original form has an essentially pragmatic character; ... it is a mode of behaviour, an indispensable element of concerted human action ... to regard it as a means for the embodiment or expression of thought is to take a one-sided view of one of its most derivate and specialized functions" (Malinowski 1923: 316; see also Firth 1957: 94; Langendoen 1968: 21ff). Moreover, Malinowski is convinced that language "serves for definite purposes, that it functions as an instrument used for and adapted to a definite aim". Therefore, for Malinowski "the categories of universal grammar are reflections of universal human attitudes toward life and are brought out by the universally found conditions under which children grow up in the world" (Langendoen 1968: 27). Thus, these "categories of universal grammar must underlie categorizations implicit in nonlinguistic human behavior" (Langendoen 1968:36). In the second volume of Coral gardens and their magic Malinowski developed the central idea of his theory, namely "that the meaning of utterances is provided by the context of concurrent human activity" (Langendoen 1968: 30). He once more points out that "the real linguistic fact is the full utterance within its context of situation" (Malinowski 1935: 11). And he emphasizes "that the context of situation may enable one to 'disambiguate' sentences that are semantically ambiguous" (Langendoen 1968: 32; see Malinowski 1935: 32). Malinowski was concerned with what he called the contextual specification of meaning and the problem of translating the untranslatable. Meaning, he argued, is dependent on the context of situation so that the concept of context has to be broadened to accommodate this point. Malinowski discussed material culture in terms similar to those used for discussing language: he took the example of a stick that might be used for digging, punting, walking, or fighting. In each of these specific uses. he claimed, the stick is embedded in a different cultural context; that is, put to different uses, surrounded with different ideas, given a different cultural value and as a rule designated by a different name. He understood that a text written by these people into this language could not be understood by any foreigners or by people living outside this society even if translated into their own languages because each message brought more meanings than those expressed through the words, meanings that could only be understood if accompanied by the situation. Thus, Malinowski introduced the notion of context of situation, meaning by this the "environment of the text" [Halliday;1989;6]