SPEAKING

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In sociolinguistics, SPEAKING or the SPEAKING model, is a model socio-linguistic study (represented as a mnemonic) developed by Dell Hymes. Hymes developed this model as part of a new methodology referred to as the ethnography of speaking. This model is a tool to assist the identification and labeling of components of interactional linguistics that was driven by his view that, in order to speak a language correctly, one needs not only to learn its vocabulary and grammar, but also the context in which words are used. In essence, learning the components of the SPEAKING model is essential for linguistic competence.

Contents

To facilitate the application of his representation, Hymes constructed the mnemonic, S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G (for setting and scene, participants, ends, acts sequence, key, instrumentalities, norms, & genre) under which he grouped the sixteen components within eight divisions. [1]

The model has sixteen components that can be applied to many sorts of discourse: message form; message content; setting; scene; speaker/sender; addressor; hearer/receiver/audience; addressee; purposes (outcomes); purposes (goals); key; channels; forms of speech; norms of interaction; norms of interpretation; and genres. [2] The SPEAKING model is used by linguistic anthropologists to analyze speech events (one or more speech acts involving one or more participants) as part of an ethnographies. This approach can be used to understand relationships and power dynamics within a given speech community and provide insight on cultural values.

Divisions

Setting and Scene

"Setting refers to the time and place of a speech act and, in general, to the physical circumstances". [3] The living room in the grandparents' home might be a setting for a family story. Scene is the "psychological setting" or "cultural definition" of a scene, including characteristics such as range of formality and sense of play or seriousness. [4] The family story may be told at a reunion celebrating the grandparents' anniversary. At times, the family would be festive and playful; at other times, serious and commemorative.

Setting and scene also refer to the implicit rules and expectations surrounding the speech event. The setting of the speech event determines who should speak and who should not, what type of speech is appropriate (see also code-switching), and when interrupting is acceptable. For example, speech events in the classroom have particular implicit rules for the speaking teachers and listening students, certain words are not viewed as appropriate in the classroom, and interrupting is often met with consequences. Conversely, different implicit rules and expectations apply at social gatherings and work settings. [5]

The setting of the speech event also refers to the location of participants and any physical barriers that may be present. For instance, whether participants are facing one another, what body language they are exhibiting, and whether or not they are separated by a table, chairs, or space in the room. Documentation of the physical setting is especially useful for completing an ethnography of a given community.

Participants

Participants include the speaker and the audience. Linguistic anthropologists will make distinctions within these categories. The audience may include those to whom the speech act is directed, and those who are not addressed but overhear. [6] For example, at the family reunion, an aunt might tell a story to the young female relatives, but males, although not addressed, might also hear the narrative.

When considering the participants in a speech event, one should consider the implicit and explicit rules about who is, can, and should be involved; what expectations are established for the participants; who is speaking and who is being addressed. Certain ideologies are at play regarding participants in speech events. For example, cultural norms about how children should speak to adults, how ladies should speak around men, or how employees should speak to their boss. Each participant in a speech event is operating with specific rules and expectations, which are important for linguistic competence.[ clarification needed ]

Ends

The ends of a speech event are its purposes, goals, and outcomes. [7] The aunt may tell a story about the grandmother to entertain the audience, teach the young women, and honor the grandmother. Additionally, the ends of a speech event may differ for those participating. Harriet Joseph Ottenheimer provides an example of a tourist seeking directions and a New Yorker providing vague answers, "your goal may be to get information and get to your destination, but their goal is to appear knowledgeable." [5] Differences in the ends of speech events can happen often, especially in classrooms and workplaces. Similarities and differences in the ends of speech events are important for successful communication and acceptance of an individual into a culture or a speech community.[ clarification needed ]

Act Sequence

Act sequence refers to the sequence of speech acts that make up a speech event. The order of speech acts greatly influences the speech event. The initial speech acts set the tone for the conversation. Beginning a lecture by saying, "Ladies and gentlemen ...", sets a different tone than by saying, "Hello! How is everyone today?"

The act sequence of an event also orients the participants to social cues. Important aspects of an act sequence include turn-taking and interrupting. For example, an aunt's story might begin as a response to a toast to the grandmother; the story's plot and development would have a sequence structured by the aunt. Possibly, there might be a collaborative interruption during the telling. Finally, the group might applaud the tale and move onto another subject or activity.

Key

"Key" refers to the clues that establish the "tone, manner, or spirit" of the speech act. The aunt might imitate the grandmother's voice and gestures in a playful way, or she might address the group in a serious voice, emphasizing the sincerity and respect of the praise the story expresses. Generally, different keys are used in different situations. For instance, different tones are used at birthday parties and funerals. Intonation in sentences can provide additional meaning; lighter tones communicate humor and friendship, while monotone speech acts communicate seriousness or a lack of emotion. Similarly, keys can be formal or informal, and can be influenced by word choice. Informal keys include the use of contractions (can't, as opposed to cannot), use of slang or profanity, condensed or loose pronunciations (gonna), missing infinitives ("the kids need bathed" versus "the kids need to be bathed"), and prepositional endings ("What did you do that for?"). [5] Overall, the key of the speech act adds a human element to communication and provides valuable information for informing social norms and expectations for the speech event. Proper application of the appropriate key in a speech event is vital for linguistic competence.

Instrumentalities

Instrumentalities are the channels used to complete the speech act. These include the method of communication (writing, speaking, signing or signaling), the language, dialect (a mutually intelligible subset of a language) and register (a variety of a language that is used in specific settings). [8] Hymes described these instrumentalities generally as the Forms and styles of speech. [9] For example, the instrumentality of the spoken word is different from the written word; the language spoken is unique to the speech act, as is the dialect.[ clarification needed ] Similarly, the register that is used influences the speech event. For example, an aunt might speak in a casual register with many dialect features, but if her niece continues the conversation in a more formal register with standard grammatical forms, the conversation may seem awkward.

Norms

Norms are the social rules governing the speech event and the participants' actions and reactions. In a playful story by the aunt, the norms may allow many audience interruptions and collaboration; and, possibly, those interruptions may be limited to participation by older females. A serious, formal story by the aunt might call for attention to her and no interruptions as norms.

Norms will vary for each speech community. Examples of questions regarding established norms include:

Genre

Genre is the kind of speech act or event; for the example used here, the kind of story. The aunt might tell a character anecdote about the grandmother for entertainment, or an exemplum as moral instruction. Different disciplines develop terms for kinds of speech acts, and speech communities sometimes have their own terms for types. [10] Other examples of speech genres include gossip, jokes, and conversations. [8]

Rich Points

Rich points are instances where there is a disconnect between two speakers in a speech event resulting from differences in perceived implicit rules and expectations. These instances represent a conflict in the SPEAKING model between two people. This difference and the negotiation to reestablish the conversation is referred to as MAR (Mistake, Awareness, Repair).

Mistake

Mistakes in conversation occur when participants in the conversation are operating with different implicit rules and expectations for the SPEAKING model. Mistakes often result from disagreements about inclusion of participants, mismatched ends, unexpected act sequences, keys or instrumentalities. In general mistakes and conflicts arise when there is a deviation in the conversation from the norm. [8] In some genres, such as gossip, rapid turn-taking and interrupting is not only accepted, but expected. If one participant is not active in this type of speech, they may come across as ambivalent to the conversation—this would be an example of a mistake.

Awareness

Awareness occurs when one or more of the participants recognizes the differences in expectations for the conversation. In some cases, this may mean that one speaker recognizes that the other is speaking faster or slower, using act sequences that rely heavily on fast turn-taking or accepted interrupting, speaking in a more formal or informal register, etc. In the instance of gossip, it would be important to recognize if one is not matching the speech pattern.

Repair

Repair of the conversation occurs when one or more participants in the speech event change one or more of the SPEAKING components in order to ameliorate the mistake. For example, this may mean that the speaker increases the speed of their speech or participates in rapid turn-taking and interrupting. When repair does not occur the speech event can seem awkward. However, when one learns to repair speech events, the individual can more readily connect with participants in the speech event and establish rapport. Speaking through by maintaining grammatical rules for correct understanding.[ clarification needed ]

Applications

Standard (Linguistic)

The SPEAKING model has been applied to understand a variety of communities and situations. Speech events are key to the foundation of culture and have been the subject of much analysis. Many people have applied the SPEAKING model to understand conversations in unique populations and settings, [11] to better understand the interplay between culture and language, [12] and to analyze status, power and inequality. [13]

Non-standard

In the rise of a variety of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other software (such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365BC)), the SPEAKING model has been relied upon to build a framework for the analysis of computer programs to help companies and individuals choose the best option that suits their needs. [14]

Related Research Articles

In the philosophy of language and linguistics, speech act is something expressed by an individual that not only presents information but performs an action as well. For example, the phrase "I would like the kimchi; could you please pass it to me?" is considered a speech act as it expresses the speaker's desire to acquire the kimchi, as well as presenting a request that someone pass the kimchi to them.

Dell Hathaway Hymes was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use. His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics". The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what, by that time, had already become an autonomous discipline (linguistics). In 1972 Hymes founded the journal Language in Society and served as its editor for 22 years.

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on language and the ways it is used. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.

Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Code-switching</span> Changing between languages during a single conversation

In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation. Code-switching is different from plurilingualism in that plurilingualism refers to the ability of an individual to use multiple languages, while code-switching is the act of using multiple languages together. Multilinguals sometimes use elements of multiple languages when conversing with each other. Thus, code-switching is the use of more than one linguistic variety in a manner consistent with the syntax and phonology of each variety. Code-switching may happen between sentences, sentence fragments, words, or individual morphemes. However, some linguists consider the borrowing of words or morphemes from another language to be different from other types of code-switching. Likewise, code-switching can occur when there is a change in the environment one is speaking. Code-switching can happen in the context of speaking a different language or switching the verbiage to match that of the audience. There are many ways in which code-switching is employed, such as when speakers are unable to express themselves adequately in a single language or to signal an attitude towards something. Several theories have been developed to explain the reasoning behind code-switching from sociological and linguistic perspectives.

In sociolinguistics, a variety, also known as a lect or an isolect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety. The use of the word variety to refer to the different forms avoids the use of the term language, which many people associate only with the standard language, and the term dialect, which is often associated with non-standard language forms thought of as less prestigious or "proper" than the standard. Linguists speak of both standard and non-standard (vernacular) varieties as equally complex, valid, and full-fledged forms of language. Lect avoids the problem in ambiguous cases of deciding whether two varieties are distinct languages or dialects of a single language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conversation analysis</span> Approach to the study of social interaction

Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction that empirically investigates the mechanisms by which humans achieve mutual understanding. It focuses on both verbal and non-verbal conduct, especially in situations of everyday life. CA originated as a sociological method, but has since spread to other fields. CA began with a focus on casual conversation, but its methods were subsequently adapted to embrace more task- and institution-centered interactions, such as those occurring in doctors' offices, courts, law enforcement, helplines, educational settings, and the mass media, and focus on multimodal and nonverbal activity in interaction, including gaze, body movement and gesture. As a consequence, the term conversation analysis has become something of a misnomer, but it has continued as a term for a distinctive and successful approach to the analysis of interactions. CA and ethnomethodology are sometimes considered one field and referred to as EMCA.

Universal pragmatics (UP), more recently placed under the heading of formal pragmatics, is the philosophical study of the necessary conditions for reaching an understanding through communication. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas coined the term in his essay "What is Universal Pragmatics?" where he suggests that human competition, conflict, and strategic action are attempts to achieve understanding that have failed because of modal confusions. The implication is that coming to terms with how people understand or misunderstand one another could lead to a reduction of social conflict.

In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal, choosing words that are considered more "formal", and refraining from using words considered nonstandard, such as ain't and y'all.

In linguistics, linguistic competence is the system of unconscious knowledge that one knows when they know a language. It is distinguished from linguistic performance, which includes all other factors that allow one to use one's language in practice.

The ethnography of communication (EOC), originally called the ethnography of speaking, is the analysis of communication within the wider context of the social and cultural practices and beliefs of the members of a particular culture or speech community. It comes from ethnographic research It is a method of discourse analysis in linguistics that draws on the anthropological field of ethnography. Unlike ethnography proper, though, EOC takes into account both the communicative form, which may include but is not limited to spoken language, and its function within the given culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rudeness</span> Display of disrespect

Rudeness is a display of actual or perceived disrespect by not complying with the social norms or etiquette expected within a relationship, social group, or culture. Social norms are established as the essential guidelines of normally accepted behavior within a given context, and individuals often establish personal boundaries to meet their own needs and desires within smaller settings, such as friendships. To be unwilling to align one's behavior with these norms known to the general population of what is socially acceptable is to be rude. These norms may resemble a sort of "unspoken law", with social repercussions or rewards for violators or advocates, respectively.

Communication accommodation theory (CAT) is a theory of communication developed by Howard Giles. This theory concerns "(1) the behavioral changes that people make to attune their communication to their partner, (2) the extent to which people perceive their partner as appropriately attuning to them." The basis of the theory lies in the idea that people adjust their style of speech to one another. Doing this helps the message sender gain approval from the receiver, increases efficiency in communication between both parties, and helps the sender maintain a positive social identity. This theory is concerned with the links between language, context, and identity. It focuses on both the intergroup and interpersonal factors that lead to accommodation, as well as the ways that power, macro- and micro-context concerns affect communication behaviors; emphasizing the important duplexity of both factors in predicting and understanding intergroup interactions. Accommodation is usually considered to be between the message sender and the message receiver, but the communicator also often accommodates to a larger audience – either a group of people that are watching the interaction or society in general. Communication accommodation theory (CAT) predicts and explains why communicants make adjustments to increase, decrease, or maintain social distance.

Speech codes theory refers to a framework for communication in a given speech community. As an academic discipline, it explores the manner in which groups communicate based on societal, cultural, gender, occupational or other factors.

Metaphorical code-switching refers to the tendency in a bilingual or multilingual community to switch codes in conversation in order to discuss a topic that would normally fall into another conversational domain. "An important distinction is made from situational switching, where alternation between varieties redefines a situation, being a change in governing norms, and metaphorical switching, where alternation enriches a situation, allowing for allusion to more than one social relationship within the situation." For example, at a family dinner, where you would expect to hear a more colloquial, less prestigious variety of language, family members might switch to a highly prestigious form in order to discuss school or work. At work interlocutors may switch to a low prestige variety when discussing family.

Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via social interaction. It is one of the ways in which linguists look at the intersections of human language and human society; other subfields that take this perspective are language planning, minority language studies, quantitative sociolinguistics, and sociohistorical linguistics, among others. Interactional sociolinguistics is a theoretical and methodological framework within the discipline of linguistic anthropology, which combines the methodology of linguistics with the cultural consideration of anthropology in order to understand how the use of language informs social and cultural interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz. Topics that might benefit from an Interactional sociolinguistic analysis include: cross-cultural miscommunication, politeness, and framing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Turn-taking</span> Type of organization in conversation and discourse

Turn-taking is a type of organization in conversation and discourse where participants speak one at a time in alternating turns. In practice, it involves processes for constructing contributions, responding to previous comments, and transitioning to a different speaker, using a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic cues.

Situational code-switching is the tendency in a speech community to use different languages or language varieties in different social situations, or to switch linguistic structures in order to change an established social setting. Some languages are viewed as more suited for a particular social group, setting, or topic more so than others. Social factors like class, religion, gender, and age influence the pattern of language that is used and switched between.

Sam Glucksberg was a Canadian professor in the Psychology Department at Princeton University in New Jersey, known for his works on figurative language: metaphors, irony, sarcasm, and idioms. He is particularly known for manipulating the Candle Problem experiment which had participants figure out the best way to erect a candle on a wall. Along with performing experiments, Glucksberg has also written Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors to Idioms, published by Oxford University Press in 2001.

A social domain refers to communicative contexts which influence and are influenced by the structure of such contexts, whether social, institutional, power-aligned. As defined by Fishman, Cooper and Ma (1971), social domains "are sociolinguistic contexts definable for any given society by three significant dimensions: the location, the participants and the topic". Similarly, Bernard Spolsky defines domains as "[a]ny defined or definable social or political or religious group or community, ranging from family through a sports team or neighborhood or village or workplace or organization or city or nation state or regional alliance".

References

  1. ↑ Note that the categories are simply listed in the order demanded by the mnemonic, not by importance
  2. ↑ Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 53–62.
  3. ↑ Hymes (1974), p.55.
  4. ↑ Hymes (1974), pp. 55–56.
  5. 1 2 3 Ottenheimer, Harriet (2009). The Anthropology of Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. pp. 129–145. ISBN   9781428848849.
  6. ↑ Hymes (1974), pp.54 and 56.
  7. ↑ Hymes (1974), pp. 56–57.
  8. 1 2 3 Ottenheimer, Harriet (2009). The Anthropology of Speaking: an Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. Belmont, CA: Wadswoth. p. 122. ISBN   9781111828752.
  9. ↑ Hymes (1974), pp. 58–60.
  10. ↑ Anticipating that he might be accused of creating an (English language) "ethnocentric" mnemonic — and, thus, by implication, an (English language) "ethnocentric" theory — Hymes comments that he could have, for instance, generated a French language mnemonic of P-A-R-L-A-N-T: namely, participants, actes, raison (resultat), locale, agents (instrumentalities), normes, ton (key), types (genres) (1974, p.62).
  11. ↑ Moerman, Michael (1988). Talking Culture: Ethnography and Conversational Analysis. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN   9780812212464. JSTOR   j.ctt3fhhh2.
  12. ↑ Condon, John (1985). Good Neighbors: Communicating with the Mexicans. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press.
  13. ↑ Irvine, Judith (1974). Strategies of Status Manipulation in the Wolof greeting. Cambridge.
  14. ↑ Edocation, Corp (11 December 2019). "SOFTWARE Model (Edocation)". Edocation Corp. Retrieved 26 May 2020.
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