The speaking model
The main unit of analysis for the ethnography of speaking is the speech event, which can be defined as a
communicative activity that has a clear beginning and a clear ending and in which people’s shared understandings of
the relevance of various contextual features remain fairly constant throughout the event. Examples of speech events
are such things as religious ceremonies, lessons, debates, and conversations. Speech events occur within broader
speech situations and are made up of smaller speech acts.
For example, a university lecture can be considered a speech event which occurs within the speech situation of a
school day and is made up of smaller speech acts like asking and answering questions, giving explanations and
illustrations of certain concepts, and even joking or threatening.
What distinguishes a speech event from a speech situation is not just its size and the fact that speech events tend to
have clearer boundaries. The main distinction is coherence: participants tend to approach speech events with
consistent sets of expectations that remain the same throughout the speech event, whereas participants’ expectations
about the relevant features of context may undergo dramatic changes throughout a speech situation.
The way to distinguish between a speech situation and a speech event, then, is to ask if the same rules of SPEAKING
apply throughout the phenomenon. If so, it can be regarded as a speech event.
The idea of 'unmarked’ (the usual or normal way of saying or doing something) vs. 'marked' (an unusual or deviant
way of saying or doing something) was introduced into structural linguistics by the Prague School of linguists. When
people deviate from the default or expected way of using language, the result is often the expression of some special,
more precise or additional meaning. When it is applied to ‘context’, it reminds us that communicative competence
does not refer to a set of ‘rules’ that must be followed, but rather to a set of expectations that experienced speakers can
sometimes manipulate in order to strategically manage the meanings of speech acts, the relationships among
participants, or the outcomes of the speech event.
The components of the SPEAKING model devised by Hymes are not meant to provide an objective list of those
elements of context which need to be taken into account by the analyst, but rather a set of guidelines an analyst can
use in attempting to find out what aspects of context are important and relevant from the point of view of participants.
In other words, in any given speech event, different elements will be afforded different weight by participants, and
some might be regarded as totally unimportant.
The first component in the model is setting, which refers to the time and place of the speech event as well as any other
physical circumstances. Along with the physical aspects of setting, Hymes included what he called the ‘psychological
setting’ or the ‘cultural definition’ of a scene. The unmarked setting for a particular speech event, for example, might
be in a church. A church has particular physical characteristics, but it is also likely to have certain associations for
people in a particular culture so that when they enter a church they are predisposed to speak or behave in certain ways.
Thus, the component of setting can have an effect on other components like key and instrumentalities.
The second component in the SPEAKING model is participants. Most of the approaches to spoken discourse we have
looked at so far, including conversation analysis and pragmatics, begin with the assumption of an essentially didactic
model of communication in which the participants are the speaker and the hearer. Ethnographic work, however,
indicates that many if not most speech events involve many kinds of participants, not just speakers and hearers, but
also participants like audiences and bystanders.
The third component of the model is ends, which refers to the purpose, goals and outcomes of the event, which, of
course, may be different for different participants (the goals of a teacher, for example, are not always the same as the
goals of his or her students), and the fourth component is act sequence, the form the event takes as it unfolds,
including the order of different speech acts and other behaviours.
The fifth component in the model is key, by which is meant the overall ‘tone’ or mood of the speech event. Key is
important because it provides an attitudinal context for speech acts, sometimes dramatically altering their meaning (as
with sarcasm).
The sixth component is instrumentalities, meaning the ‘message form’, the means or media through which meaning is
made. Speech, for example, might be spoken, sung, chanted or shouted, and it may be amplified through microphones,
broadcast through electronic media, or written down and somehow passed back and forth between participants.
