John J. Gumperz

Language and social identity

Preface A note on conventions 1. Introduction: language and the communication of social identity John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz 2. Thematic structure and progression in discourse John J. Gumperz, Gurinder Aulakh and Hannah Kaltman 3. Discovering connections Arpita Mishra 4. Inscrutability revisited Linda Wai Ling Young 5. Negotiating interpretations in interethnic settings Mark Hansell and Cheryl Seabrook Ajirotutu 6. Strategies and counterstrategies in the use of yes-no questions in discourse Adrian Bennett 7. Negotiations of language choice in Montreal Monica S. Heller 8. Performance and ethnic style in job interviews F. Niyi Akinnaso and Cheryl Seabrook Ajirotutu 9. Interethnic communication in committee negotiations John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz 10. Fact and inference in courtroom testimony John J. Gumperz 11. A cultural approach to male-female miscommunication Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker 12. Ethnic style in male-female conversation Deborah Tannen 13. Language and disadvanage: the hidden process T. C. Jupp, Celia Roberts and Jenny Cook-Gumperz Bibliography Subject index Author index.

The Ethnography of Communication

optional) Orientation (description of setting, introduction of participants) Complicating episodes Climax Resolution or final action Coda (optional) This structure provides another etic set of units within which to compare proportions of attention, selective omissions, and verbal strategies (as in how transition to the climax is marked). Dimensions where we have found language/culture-specific patterns of contrast are openings and closings; personifications of the owl “family,” 160 Contrasts in Patterns of Communication including naming and kin terms, assignments of relationships and responsibilities, and attributions of personality and motivation; omission of events which are on the etic list and addition of events which are not; inferencing and interpretation based on background information or experiences; symbolic interpretation of animals, colors, and other physical elements; and formulating moral judgments or other evaluations of behavior. For example, contrasts in patterns of closing relate in large part to the societal function which the tellers believe such stories serve. Representative of American codas are: Naughty little owl has learned his lesson and everyone lives happily ever after. Back in the tree the three laugh about the adventures and run into the house to play. All the owls thought this was funny, so they had a big laugh and went home. Safe and sound up on the limb, her brothers explained to her about the bad fox and she apologized for not paying attention. They lived happily ever after and none of the three ever told their parents! In contrast, the following translations are typical of endings which were told in Chinese: Afterward it dared not fail to listen to lectures again. Afterward it knew it needed to concentrate, and couldn’t fool around or play video games or watch television. Then it felt ashamed, because usually it did not study well, and it only loved to watch television. Then it shed tears. Such moralizing was also integrated into the interpretation of events. For instance, the episode of the owlet’s not learning to fly was retold by one adult in this way (translation from Chinese): The next day, father and mother made them do exercise and practice flying. In this way, when they grow up, they can live independently. Father swung the first baby in the air, he flew bravely over. Mother swung the second baby in the air, he also bravely flew over. When it was the turn of Little Red, he was so timid. He was very lazy too, and even did not dare to give it a try. He was crying in his mother’s arm: “I don’t want to try, I don’t, I am so scared.” His mother said this child needs more exercise later. The same story-teller later provides this coda: From then, the small owlet realized that as a little child, he should study hard, exercise hard and not be lazy from a very young age. Contrasts in Patterns of Communication 161 Also of considerable interest in interpretation of events in these stories is the extent to which mention and amount of detail in recall is dependent on tellers’ prior knowledge and on the cultural salience of the events. For example, American adults and children who retold this story gave relatively less attention to the complicating event in which the owlet did not pay attention at school than did the Chinese speakers, and only Chinese story tellers reported that the teacher was angry. On the other hand, most of the Americans mentioned that the owlets were “playing cowboy” when one fell, while few of the Chinese did. There was some misinterpretation by Chinese children who did mention that scene but said that the owlets were playing gangsters or Kung Fu. This finding is in accord with schema theory (e.g. Steffensen, Joag-Dev, and Anderson 1979), which claims that what is already known provides “ideational scaffolding” for details in recall tasks. There were two scenes which almost no one mentioned: a sequence of alternating suns and moons to represent passage of time, and the owlet’s ear-tufts growing to represent embarrassment. These symbols were either not recognized or were not considered important. In addition to showing different patterns across languages and cultures, event retelling tasks may also be highly productive for analyzing developmental factors: e.g. contrasts between children and adults in the same language, and between native speakers of a language and second language learners at different levels of competence.

The Sociolinguistic Significance of Conversational Code-Switching

By conversational code-switching, I refer to the juxtaposition of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems, within the same exchange. Most frequently the alternation takes the form of two subsequent sentences, as when a speaker uses a second language either to reiterate his message or to reply to someone else’s statement. The following examples are taken from natural talk recorded in bilingual communities. The language pairs in question are Spanish and English (Sp-E), Hindi and English (H-E) and Slovenian and German (Sl-G). Speakers are fluent in both languages and regularly use both in the course of their daily routines.

Individual and Social Differences in Language Use

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the individual and social differences in language use. Social differences in language are those features of an individuals speech behavior that are shared by significant numbers of others and play a role in the signaling of common identity. The usual method of demonstrating this sharedness has been to focus on groups such as residence, class, or ethnic background and to isolate phonological, syntactic, or semantic indices that show a systematic relationship to the macro-sociological variables that partition such groups. Furthermore, the correlation of linguistic variables with social variables has begun from the assumption that social groups are identifiable and known. This, however, is an issue much in dispute in the social sciences. A key heuristic device in linguistic research has been the concept of starredness.

Language as culture in U.S. anthropology: Three paradigms. Commentaries. Author's reply

The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is a set of distinct and often not fully compatible practices that can be made sense of through the identification of three historically related paradigms. Whereas the first paradigm, initiated by Boas, was mostly devoted to documentation, grammatical description, and classification (especially of North American indigenous languages) and focused on linguistic relativity, the second paradigm, developed in the 1960s, took advantage of new recording technology and new theoretical insights to examine language use in context, introducing new units of analysis such as the speech event. Although it was meant to be part of anthropology at large, it marked an intellectual separation from the rest of anthropology. The third paradigm, with its focus on identity formation, narrativity, and ideology, constitutes a new attempt to connect with the rest of anthropology by extending linguistic methods to the study of issues previously identified in other (sub)fields. A...The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is a set of distinct and often not fully compatible practices that can be made sense of through the identification of three historically related paradigms. Whereas the first paradigm, initiated by Boas, was mostly devoted to documentation, grammatical description, and classification (especially of North American indigenous languages) and focused on linguistic relativity, the second paradigm, developed in the 1960s, took advantage of new recording technology and new theoretical insights to examine language use in context, introducing new units of analysis such as the speech event. Although it was meant to be part of anthropology at large, it marked an intellectual separation from the rest of anthropology. The third paradigm, with its focus on identity formation, narrativity, and ideology, constitutes a new attempt to connect with the rest of anthropology by extending linguistic methods to the study of issues previously identified in other (sub)fields. Although each new paradigm has reduced the influence and appeal of the preceding one, all three paradigms persist today, and confrontation of their differences is in the best interest of the discipline.

Making space for bilingual communicative practice

Abstract This paper argues that bilingual communication should not be conceived of as something distinct from everyday communicative interaction. Monolingual and bilingual children do not differ in what they do with language, but in how they do it. Whereas monolinguals rely on style switching and voicing, bilinguals employ these strategies in addition to their bilingual resources. Code-switching for bilinguals serves as an indexical strategy which functions much like other similar discourse level processes. We will demonstrate that classroom peer group talk creates an interactional space in which students are free to use all their bilingual resources. Such a safe space provides them an opportunity to talk about grammatical and comprehension issues. Code-switching becomes a resource which allows children to deal with their school tasks by applying their own peer group communicative knowledge (Gumperz, Cook-Gumperz and Szymanski 1999).

Thematic structure and progression in discourse

It has been customary to deal with cross-cultural differences in language behavior either in terms of correlations between interference (i.e., the mapping of grammatical and phonological patterns from one system to the other) and independently determined cultural presuppositions or in terms of social norms. The aim of this chapter is to show how these phenomena interact at the level of discourse so that, in spite of surface similarities, some styles of English used by many South Asians are even more pervasively divergent from Western styles of English, and are systematically different not only in the social knowledge their speakers use as bases for conversational strategies, but also in the conventions and principles that guide how a given conversational intention will be signalled in speech. The bulk of our data derives from recordings of natural conversations of Indian and Pakistani residents of Great Britain who know English well and use it regularly in the course of their daily affairs. We will refer to the style of speaking they employ in the examples we cite as Indian English and we will contrast it with Western English, i.e., the conversational style or styles used by educated residents of England and the United States. We begin with some illustrative examples. First of all, Indian English sounds odd to Western ears because it has systematically different conventions at the sentence level governing lexicalization, syntax, and, as we have shown in Gumperz (1982), prosody. The following single Indian English sentences are extracted from natural conversational data.

The Communicative Competence of Bilinguals: Some Hypotheses and Suggestions for Research.

A model for the description of bilingual speech is proposed which focuses on the linguistic and social constraints governing the speakers selection of variables within a single complex linguistic repertoire. The model will be tested with field data from bilingual communities in India and Austria and results will be compared with relevant data on American English. The traditional dichotomy between bilingual and monolingual behavior is discarded and differences between the communities will be described in terms of the level of linguistic structure at which variables appear, the rules governing their co-occurrence and the social meanings they communicate. The goal is to contribute to our knowledge of the linguistic and social nature of code alternation to provide new insights into communication processes in ethnically diverse societies, and to lay the basis for improved educational strategies.

Children's discourse and inferential practices in cooperative learning

Videotape recordings of classroom discourse in a cooperative learning program are analyzed using interactional sociolinguistic methods to go beyond the surface content of what is said and reveal the inferential processes by which participants assess what is intended at any one point in the interaction. The analysis shows that, contrary to what has sometimes been claimed, children when left to themselves are actively involved in the learning task set by the curriculum. But the children are defining the task in such a way as to reveal their own concerns which, while carrying out the curriculum, tailor the issues to the childrens own analysis of their needs.

Dialect and conversational inference in urban communication

Maintenance of dialect differences despite loss of communicative isolation points up the need to analyze the role of dialect-standard alternates in signalling social identity and in contributing to conversational inference. Such analysis should focus on conversational interaction and on the processes by which situated interpretations are arrived at and used as frames for interpreting what follows. An Afro-American sermon and a disputed speech by a Black political leader to a mixed audience are analyzed. Dialect alternants serve to signal switching between contrasting styles in both. In the sermon, the audience shares with the speaker a knowledge of the structure of the activity and of the rules for both styles. In the speech, the activity lacks a predictable structure, only the style can frame interpretation, and most of the audience do not share its rules. Conversational inference is shown to depend not only on grammar, lexical meanings and conversational principles, but also on constellations of speech variants, rhythm, and prosody. Such constellations may persist as symbols of shared cultural background. (Dialectology, conversational and discourse analysis; Afro-American speech styles; urban United States.)