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Discourse analysis capitolo 6, Dispense di Lingua Inglese

Università degli Studi di Catania (UNICT)Lingua Inglese

Riassunto del sesto capitolo del libro Discourse analysis

Tipologia: Dispense

2022/2023

Caricato il 12/11/2023

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A6. STRATEGIC INTERACTION
Conversations happen when multiple actions are put together to form
activities:
When we have conversations with other, we are always engaged in some kind
of activity (e.g., arguing, flirting, gossiping…).
A big part of understand what somebody means is understanding what they
are doing and what is going on in the social situation that the conversation is
part of.
At the same time, we use conversations to show that we are certain kind of
people and to establish and maintain certain social relations with the people we
are talking with.
Understanding who somebody is trying to be in a conversation is also
important to understand what they mean by what they say.
When we engage in such activities and construct these identities, we must
always negotiate ‘what we are doing’ and ‘who we are being’ with the people
with whom we are interacting.
The methods we use to negotiate are called CONVERSATIONAL STRATEGIES,
divided into:
-FACE STRATEGIES (have to do with showing who we are and what kind of
relationship we have with the people with whom we are talking). Face
strategies contribute to the management of conversational activities
(especially those involving face threatening acts).
-FRAME STRATEGIES (showing what we are doing in the conversation /
activity we want to carry out with the language). Framing strategies are
often central to the discursive construction of identity.
INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS
FACE STRATEGIES have to do with showing who we are and what kind of
relationships we have with the people with whom we are interacting.
FRAMING STRATEGIES has to do with showing what we are doing in the
conversation (e.g. arguing, flirting…)
These two concepts come from an approach to discourse as INTERACTIONAL
SOCIOLINGUISTICS, which is concerned with the way people signal and
interpret what they think they are doing and who they think they are being in
social interactions.
John J. Gumperz (1922-2013)
The anthropologist John Gumperz focused on face-to-face verbal exchanges in
different cultures.
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A6. STRATEGIC INTERACTION

Conversations happen when multiple actions are put together to form activities: When we have conversations with other, we are always engaged in some kind of activity (e.g., arguing, flirting, gossiping…). A big part of understand what somebody means is understanding what they are doing and what is going on in the social situation that the conversation is part of. At the same time, we use conversations to show that we are certain kind of people and to establish and maintain certain social relations with the people we are talking with. Understanding who somebody is trying to be in a conversation is also important to understand what they mean by what they say. When we engage in such activities and construct these identities, we must always negotiate ‘what we are doing’ and ‘who we are being’ with the people with whom we are interacting. The methods we use to negotiate are called CONVERSATIONAL STRATEGIES, divided into:

  • FACE STRATEGIES (have to do with showing who we are and what kind of relationship we have with the people with whom we are talking). Face strategies contribute to the management of conversational activities (especially those involving face threatening acts).
  • FRAME STRATEGIES (showing what we are doing in the conversation / activity we want to carry out with the language). Framing strategies are often central to the discursive construction of identity. INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS FACE STRATEGIES have to do with showing who we are and what kind of relationships we have with the people with whom we are interacting. FRAMING STRATEGIES has to do with showing what we are doing in the conversation (e.g. arguing, flirting…) These two concepts come from an approach to discourse as INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS, which is concerned with the way people signal and interpret what they think they are doing and who they think they are being in social interactions. John J. Gumperz (1922-2013) The anthropologist John Gumperz focused on face-to-face verbal exchanges in different cultures.

According to Gumperz, people belonging to different groups have different ways of signalling and interpreting cues about what they are doing and who they are being. This may lead to misunderstandings and even conflict.

  • Another important influence on interactional sociolinguistics comes from the American sociologist Ervin Goffman (1922-1982) Goffman compared social interactions to a dramatic performance. Social actors in everyday life, like stage actors, use certain expressive equipment, such as costumes, props and settings, to perform certain roles and routines. Our goal is to promote our particular ‘line’ or versions of who we are and what is going on. Most of time, other people help us to maintain our line, especially if we are willing to help them to maintain theirs. Sometimes people’s lines are not entirely compatible, and they need to negotiate an acceptable common ‘definition of the situation’ or else risk spoiling the performance for one of more of the participants. Goffman’s definitions of face and frames: FACE: positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken. This means that to Goffman, a person’s face is tied up with how successful he or she is at pulling off his or her performance and getting others to accept his or her ‘line’. FRAMES: definitions of a situation that are built up in accordance with principles or organization which govern events. The concept of framing relates to how we negotiate these definitions of situations with other people and use them as a basis for communicating and interpreting meaning. SHOWING WHO WE ARE: FACE STRATEGIES Our identities are always constructed in relation to the people with whom we are interacting. When we talk, we convey information about the topic about which we are discussing and we convey information about how close to or distant from the people we are talking to we think we are and we convey information about whether we are social equals or one has more power than the other. The strategies we use to do this are called face strategies. DEFINITION OF FACE The term ‘face’ is often used to denote a person’s honour or reputation. In interactional sociolinguistics, face is defined as ‘the negotiated public image mutually granted to each other by participants in a communicative event. There are three important aspects to this definition:
  1. Face is one’s public imagine rather than one’s true self. (We wear different faces for different people)
  2. This image is negotiated. (It is always the result of a kind of ‘give and take’ with the person or people with whom we are interacting with).
  • We all have the need to be liked – sometimes referred to as our POSITIVE FACE
  • We all have the need to be respected – sometimes referred to as our NEGATIVE FACE In interactions we need to attend others’ needs to be liked and respected and at the same time we need to protect our need to be liked and respected (Browns and Levinson, 1987) How we balance and negotiate these needs in communication is fundamental to the way we show who we are in relation to the people around us. In any given interaction, we are likely to use a combination of both these strategies as we negotiate our relationships with the people we are interacting with. Showing what we are doing: Framing strategies. In order to understand one another, we have to interpret what other people say in the context of some kind of overall activity in which we are mutually involved. For different kinds of activities we have different sets of expectations about what kinds of things will be said and how those things ought to be interpreted. We call these sets of expectations frames. We bring to most interactions a set of expectations about the overall activity in which we will be engaged, which Goffman called the primary framework of the interaction. Interaction, however, hardly ever involves just one activity. We often engage in a variety of different activities within the primary framework. While lecturing, for example, a lecturer might give explanations, tell jokes, or even rebuke members of the audience if they are not paying attention. And so, when we are interacting with people, we change the activities we are involved in as we go along and we need ways to signal these ‘frame changes’ and ways to negotiate them with the people with whom we are interacting. B6. NEGOTIATING RELATIONSHIPS AND ACTIVITIES
  • Power and politeness Whenever we interact with someone, we always communicate something about our relationship with them. We do this by using various discursive strategies, divided into two categories: involvement strategies and independence strategies. Involvement strategies: are strategies people use to communicate friendliness or solidarity. Independence strategies: are strategies people use to communicate respect or deference. In many cases, parties in interactions have a clear idea about how close they are and whether one has more power of the other, but in other cases

participants in interactions need to negotiate their relationship (e.g. Moving from a more distant to a closer relationship, one person wishes to challenge the other person’s assertion of power or dominance). We always approach interactions with certain sets of expectations about how independence and involvement strategies will be used to communicate information about power and intimacy. Those expectations are called FACE SYSTEMS. Although expectations about when involvement/independence strategies are appropriate and what they mean vary across cultures and groups, most people enter interactions with three basic ideas:

  1. In interactions where the parties are socially distant but relatively equal, both parties are likely to use independence strategies – DEFERENCE FACE SYSTEM.
  2. In interactions where people are close and relatively equal, they are likely to use involvement strategies – SOLIDARITY FACE SYSTEM.
  3. In interactions in which one person has more power than the other (regardless of their social distance), the more powerful one is more likely to use involvement strategies and the less powerful one is more likely to use independence strategies – HIERARCHICAL FACE SYSTEM. Face strategies can be regarded as resources that people use to negotiate social distance, enact power relationships, and sometimes manipulate others into doing things that they may normally not inclined to do. So people often use these strategies strategically to their own advantage. Face strategies are not only a reflection of the expectations about relationships that people bring to interactions but resources they make use of to manage and sometimes change those relationships on a moment-by-moment basis. INTERACTIVE FRAMES The interactive notion of frames refers to a definition of what is going on in interaction, without which no utterance could be interpreted. Bateson’s classic example: a monkey needs to know whether a bite from another monkey is intended within the frame of play or the frame of fighting. People are continuously confronted with the interpretation task. To comprehend an utterance, a listener must know within which frame it is intended: Joking? Fighting? Interpretation is important to direct the conversation in the right way. It has to do with frames. FRAMING AND CONTEXTUALISATION CUES Whenever we speak, we communicate not just the message contained in our words, but also information about what we think we are doing in an interaction

WHY SHIFT FRAMES IN INTERACTIONS?

Simply to manage multiple tasks or multiple audiences. Reframing can be done strategically, changing the definition of the situation (Goffman 1974) as a way of getting the upper hand or delegitimising the interlocutor is trying to do. The way one person frames the conversation may be at odds with the other person’s wishes, expectations, or interpretation of the situation. In some cases, they accept the framing imposed by the other person, in other cases they can contest or resist it by either attempting to reframing the situation using their own contextualisation cues or by breaking the frame altogether and engaging in a ‘meta-conversation’ about ‘what is going on. Reframing could also be used as a way to manage face. ‘Talking to the Dog’ (Deborah Tannen 2004): people sometimes use the frame of talking to their dogs as a way to talking to other people who might be present without confronting them directly. FRAMING AND FACE THREATENING ACTS Face strategies also contribute to the management of conversational activities (especially those involving ‘face threatening acts’), and framing strategies are often central to the discursive construction of identity.