Communication Analysis: Q1004

Autumn 2007
Tim Wharton
Week Three Handout: The Ethnography of Communication

1. Introduction

Modern research into the Ethnography of Communication stems largely from the
work of Dell Hymes. However, it’s an approach with roots reaching much further
back.

It is a method grounded in anthropology (the branch of anthropology called

‘ethnology’ – literally, ‘picture of the people’). Many trace the origins of ethnography
to the research of Edward Sapir.

Also, we should not underestimate the importance of earlier research by Bronislaw

Malinowski

‘[An] utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to

speaker by a tie of some social sentiment or other…[L]anguage appears to
us in this function not as an instrument of reflection but as a mode of
action…A mere phrase of politeness… fulfils a function to which the
meaning of its words is almost completely irrelevant’.
(‘On Phatic Communion’)

2. Theory and method

2.1 Theory

Recall from Lecture One that Hymes didn’t think linguistics should focus only on the
Chomskyan notion of linguistic competence. He was interested instead in
communicative competence. He proposed…

‘… that scholarship focus on communicative competence: the tacit social,

psychological, cultural, and linguistic knowledge governing appropriate
use of language (including, but not limited to, grammar). Communicative
competence includes knowledge of how to engage in everyday
conversation as well as other culturally constructed speech events’.

It’s not enough to explore the difference between: ‘he hit me’, ‘it was him that hit
me’, ‘it was me that was hit by him’ and ‘it was me that he hit. Instead, we should
also explore why a speaker would choose to utter one of these in preference over the
others: i.e. what makes us utter the particular utterances we utter?
He proposed four aspects of communicative competence:

• Systematic potential (linguistic competence)

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 • Appropriateness.
A: What is your name?
B: Well, let’s say you might have thought you had something from
before, but you haven’t got it anymore.
A: I’m going to call you Dean.

This example is grammatical but inappropriate.

Albert (1972) reports that among the Burundi, differences in social status
require a peasant-farmer to make ‘a rhetorical fool of himself’, if in
conversation with a herder, or a prince: i.e. be ungrammatical, but
appropriate.

• Occurrence

‘[speakers] are aware of the commonness, rarity, previous occurrence or

novelty of many features of speech, and that this knowledge enters into their
definitions and evaluations of ways of speaking’.

• Feasibility

Some utterances are simply not possible, given cultural constraints. An

anthropologist working among the Cochiti of New Mexico was unable to elicit
the first-person possessive of ‘wings’. While the word existed, no-one would
say it, since people don’t have wings.

Any utterance, or extended piece of discourse, can be described in detail in terms of

these four (and more) dimensions.

2.2. Method

In many way, ethnography is less a theory, than a method.

Those who take an ethnographic approach to language and communication focus on

the cultural values and social roles that operate in particular communities. They are
particularly concerned not to impose their own cultural presuppositions on other
societies but rather to undertake detailed study which reflects the patterns of custom
and communication of the culture being studied.

In order to achieve their aims, ethnographers employ methods of Participant

Observation to study the language habits and customs of different communities.
Researchers spend many months, sometimes even years, living in a community and
taking part in community activities. Such methods are seen to be vital to the accurate
representation of culturally defined meanings.

The study of speakers in their speech community:

‘A community sharing rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech,

and rules for the interpretation of at least one linguistic variety’
(Hymes 1972: 54).

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The study of speech situations, speech events and speech acts: these are ‘to the
analysis of verbal interaction, what the sentence is to grammar... It represents an
extension in the size of the basic analytical unit from the single utterance to stretches
of utterances, as well as a shift in focus from... text to... interaction’. (1972: 17).
Speech situations = a party, speech event = conversation, speech act = joke.

Any act of speaking comprises several components and it is the analysis of these
components that is central to the work of the ethnographer. Before analyzing the
components, however, it is necessary to discover them.

Hymes introduced (almost as a footnote, and primarily as a mnemonic) the famous

S.P.E.A.K.I.N.G. Grid. An etic grid to discover emic patternings.

Scene-setting physical setting/psychological scene

Participants speaker/hearer, addressor/addressee or audience
Ends purposes, goals
Act sequence message form, structure and content
Key tone, manner, spirit of encounter
Instrumentalities channel (e.g. verbal/nonverbal, spoken/written)
Norms of interaction rules governing when, how and how often speech occurs
Genre recognisable stylistic structure and mode: ‘conversation’, ‘lecture’

S: All speech events occur in time and space, but sometimes the
time or space is the defining criteria: Christmas Lunch,
Wedding, Maori Encounter Ritual...
Psychological scene is the cultural definition of the setting (the
mindset associated with it).
P: Often, more than two people; note – among the ‘participants’
there may be objects: dolls, ‘stick babies’ in voodoo rituals
E: Greeting, communal work, trade, invitation
A: Code-switching between dialects, choosing different words to
say the same thing
K: Serious, mocking, light, heavy; often conveyed by non-verbal
means.
I: Verbal/non-verbal, drumming, semaphore
N: Culture-specific rules or rituals associated with encounters:
speak a lot, speak a little, physical contact (Philipsen’s work
on speaking ‘like a man’…)
G: A ‘lecture’, a ‘conversation’: Genres often coincide with speech events, but
are treated as analytically independent of them. They may occur in (or as)
different events. The sermon as a genre is typically identified with a certain
place in a church service, but its properties may be invoked, for serious or
humorous effect, in other situations

3. Case Studies

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The appropriacy of silence in different cultures and contexts.

…to a natural man, another man’s silence is not a reassuring factor, but,
on the contrary, something alarming and dangerous…. The breaking of
silence, the communion or words is the first act to establish links of
fellowship (Malinowski).

But see Basso’s (1972) paper about silence in Western Apache Culture; also, the role
of silence in Inuit cultures.

‘…[F]or a stranger to communicate appropriately with the members of an

unfamiliar society it is not enough that he learn to formulate message
intelligibly. Something else is needed: a knowledge of what kind of codes,
channels and expressions to use, in what kinds of situations, to what kinds
of people – as Hymes has termed it, an “ethnography” of communication.’

‘Meeting Strangers’, ‘Courting’, ‘Children, coming home’, ‘Getting cussed out’

The appropriacy of speech in an urban neighbourhood: (Philipsen’s

(1975) “Speaking ‘like a man’ in Teamsterville”.)

There’s a nice section in Chapter 5 of Schiffrin 1994 which shows how the
S.P.E.A.K.I.N.G. Grid can be used to discover what we know about a particular
speech-event.

4. Critical perspective

(1) Much work labelled as ‘ethnography of communication’ is

(according to many ‘true’ ethnographers) not really
ethnography. True ethnographic fieldwork takes at least a
year of living with the culture being studied, not the weeks
or months many modern researchers devote to it.
(2) Despite the stated aims and methods, there is a tendency
to study ritualised speech encounters rather than more
informal patterns of communication
(3) Relatedly, much work in ethnography focusses on
particularities and peculiarities, rather than generalisations.
(4) Equally, there is a failure to describe the production and
interpretation of cultural meanings, customs and
conventions.