IS across Different Disciplines

It is important to note that one of the distinctive features of IS can be found in the fact that it offers an integrated approach to discourse analysis (Pan, 2013) as it is underpinned and influenced by several different academic disciplines. This section outlines the main theories that IS has drawn upon and that have contributed to its development as an approach to analysing discourse. This section also serves to illustrate the different fields of linguistic research from which some of the key analytical items used in this research originated.

3.3.1 Structural linguistics

Despite the major differences between structural linguistics and IS, Gumperz takes the credit for reviving the notion of speech communities that was originally proposed by the structuralist linguist Bloomfield ([1933]1984, p.42) whose influence had declined as a result of the influence of Chomskyan linguistics (Baquedano-López and Kattan, 2009). Bloomfield’s original definition of a speech community as “a group of people who interact by means of speech” was refined by Gumperz, who suggested that the term should be used to refer to “the socially defined universe” (1968, p.381) through which linguistic phenomena should be analysed. According to Baquedano-López and Kattan (2009), this helped to remedy the shortcomings of Bloomfield’s earlier postulation of the concept of the speech community, by acknowledging that speakers who share the same language are not necessarily members of the same speech community (Baquedano- López and Kattan, 2009, p.72).

Prevignano and di Luzio (2003, p.20) highlight the fact that Gumperz still believed in the usefulness of some of the fundamental notions espoused by structuralist linguists (namely, phonological and syntactic competence) together with their approach to speaking that viewed this as a partly subconscious process; however, at the same time he recognised their limitations. As a result, Gumperz was able to extend these structuralist notions for use in the analysis of social and cultural phenomena (Gordon, 2010).

3.3.2 Anthropology: the contributions of Hymes and Gumperz

Anthropology in general, and the ethnography of communication in particular, represents another academic field that had a major influence on the development of IS. According to Gordon (2010), it was Gumperz’s collaboration with Hymes, who was working on the ethnography of communication at the time, which was partly responsible for prompting the former to direct his attention towards the use of anthropological techniques in his research. As Gumperz (2001, p.215) himself noted:

Hymes’s key insight was that instead of seeking to explain talk as directly reflecting the beliefs and values of communities, structuralist abstractions that are notoriously difficult to operationalize, it should be more fruitful to concentrate on situations of speaking or, to use Roman Jakobson’s term, speech events.

The techniques adopted by Gumperz from the field of ethnography of communication require researchers to immerse themselves in the community they have chosen to study. This means that the study population must usually be observed over long periods of time in order to reach a better understanding of the ways in which its members make use of language (Gordon, 2010). According to Tannen (1992:9):

The backbone of IS is the detailed transcription of audio- or video-taped interaction. Transcription systems vary, depending on conventions established in particular disciplines and the requirements of particular theoretical assumptions and methodological practices. However, most interactional sociolinguists attempt to represent intonational and prosodic contours in the transcription, since these are often crucial for analysis.

It can be argued that in this way, IS researchers are able to go beyond the analysis of the formal units in language found in structuralist research (such as phonological elements or sentence structures), looking instead at communication patterns in the light of cultural knowledge and behaviour (Schiffrin, 2006).

3.3.3 Sociology: the contributions of Goffman and Garfinkel

As an approach, IS has also benefitted greatly from the research of the sociologist Erving Goffman, including his concept of ‘interaction order’ which is “the order that exists in socially situated interactions among copresent parties” (Jacobsen & Kristiansen, 2015, p. 83) and is “predicated on a large base of shared cognitive presuppositions, if not normative ones, and self-sustained restraints” (Goffman, 1983, p. 5). According to Gumperz (2001), as a unit of analysis for investigating interaction structures, this concept serves as a means of bringing together the linguistic and the social. Moreover, a range of phenomena that occur in daily interactions can be analysed using Goffman’s notion of the self as an interactive construct which is, in turn, linked to his notion of face (Schiffrin, 2006).

According to Goffman (1967, p.5), face can be defined as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact”. Moreover, he adds, face is “something that is diffusely located in the flow of events in the encounter and becomes manifest only when these events are read and interpreted for the appraisals expressed in them” (Goffman, 1967, p.5).

Schiffrin (2006) observes that the maintenance of face is dependent on what Goffman referred to as interpersonal rituals which he further categorises as being either avoidance or presentational rituals. Goffman coined the term ‘avoidance rituals’ to describe forms of deference whereby no closeness is established between the agent and the receiver in an interaction. Presentational rituals was the phase he used to refer to the actions whereby particular attestations are conveyed by the agent to the receiver regarding how the former perceives the latter.

The concept of inferencing, which is widely applied in IS research to signal the process by which individuals interpret various utterances, is also partly reliant on another concept of framing originally identified by Goffman (1974 (see section 2.2.2.2). He also introduced the notion of footing, which refers to the alignments that are adopted by individuals for themselves and for others, and Goffman argued that this is reflected in how the manner in which an utterance is generated or received is dealt with. The concept of footing is dealt in greater detail below (see section 3.4.4).

Gordon (2010) notes that the work of the sociologist Garfinkel (1967) also contributed to the development of IS. In a series of experiments, he attempted to flout social norms using

techniques known as ‘breaching’ (Garfinkel, 1967) or ‘Garfinkeling’, in order to try and identify social rules that were frequently unspecified and to examine what individuals knew about a particular situation and expected from it.

3.3.4 Pragmatics

Another field that has made a valuable contribution to the development of IS is that of pragmatics, as Gumperz (2001, p. 216) himself acknowledges:

It is the philosopher Paul Grice (1989) who lays the foundations for a truly social perspective on speaking, with his emphasis on conversational cooperation as a precondition for understanding. Arguing that communicating is by its very nature an intentional process, Grice goes on to develop a theory of meaning that brackets the traditional semanticists’ concern with word-to-world relationships or denotation, to focus not on utterance interpretation as such, but on implicature — roughly, what a speaker intends to convey by means of a message. Grice coined the verb implicate to suggest that our interpretations, although often not closely related to context-free lexical meaning, are ultimately grounded in surface form. They are derived from what is perceptibly said through inference via processes of implicatures, processes that in turn rest on a finite set of general, essentially social principles of conversational cooperation. Grice cites a number of conversational examples, which show that situated implicatures often bear little denotational likeness to propositional or, loosely speaking, literal meaning. Exactly how Gricean principles of conversational implicature can be formulated more precisely is still a matter of dispute (emphases in original).

The above quotation highlights the link between the conversational inference theory proposed by Gumperz, which deals with how individuals evaluate utterances made by others to generate meaning in conversation, and Grice’s notion of implicature and his principles of conversational cooperation. However, while IS and pragmatics can both be said to emphasise the study of language in context, researchers adopting IS rely on transcribed data of naturally occurring talk in their work whereas researchers working in the field of pragmatics conventionally use pre-constructed samples of language use (Pan, 2013).

3.3.5 Conversation analysis

Another field with which IS research intersects is that of Conversation Analysis. Gumperz (2015) notes that Conversation Analysis, similar to the work by Goffman and Garfinkel, has emerged as an attempt to study everyday talk by investigating the methods by which individuals manage the verbal exchanges that constitute order in talk, such as turns.

Gordon (2010) argues that IS and Conversation Analysis share a further similarity in that they are both concerned with the investigation of real-life social encounters by employing tools such as recording, meticulous linguistic transcription, and turn-by-turn sequential analysis. However, according to Gumperz, one important difference between them is that IS, unlike Conversation Analysis, employs turn-by-turn sequential analysis as merely a single element within a much bigger process of inferencing. As Gumperz explains (2015, p.312):

Assessments of communicative intent at any one point in an exchange take the form of hypotheses that are either confirmed or rejected in the course of the exchange. That is, I adopt the conversational analysts’ focus on members’ procedures but apply it to inferencing. The analytical problem then becomes not just to determine what is meant, but to discover how interpretive assessments relate to the linguistic signalling processes through which they are negotiated. This means that while interaction is perceived from a structural perspective by conversation analysts (Schiffrin, 2006), IS takes this a step further and also considers the social and cultural perspective, thus adding a macro-dimensional level to the study of interaction.

3.3.6 Broader influences of IS work

According to Gordon (2010), work in the field of IS has been extended to influence other approaches in discourse analysis. Since IS and CDA, for instance, both share the view that studying language can offer a means of addressing social phenomena, IS is one of the approaches employed by CDA researchers to provide insights into dominance and inequality. Moreover, both IS and CDA aim to establish meaningful correlations between micro and macro levels by making it possible to provide micro-analysis of interactions while simultaneously taking into account macro-societal perspectives, using IS tools found in CDA studies.

After reviewing the interdisciplinary nature of the theoretical bases underpinning IS as an approach to discourse, it is useful to point out that a number of areas of linguistic research which have chosen to incorporate the research of Goffman and Gumperz have emerged. Pan (2013) argues that the influence of work by Goffman and Gumperz respectively can be seen in three distinct areas of linguistics research, namely, linguistic politeness theory, coherence in discourse and conversational style. Thus, for example, the notion of face was used by Brown and Levinson (1987) when they devised their now famous model of

politeness which was responsible for sparking a great deal of interest in studying politeness in numerous cultures. Another area which can be seen to have incorporated IS ideas is Schiffrin’s (1987) work on discourse markers in which the researcher demonstrated how coherence in context is achieved by participants not only through their use of language but also through other aspects of their interaction. By demonstrating how discourse markers function on referential, social, and expressive levels of discourse, Schiffrin suggests that there is an interplay between these three levels that achieves cohesion in discourse. The use of IS techniques can also be found in the work of Tannen (2005[1984]) who demonstrated the ways in which conversational style can be influenced by the use of different linguistic strategies and contextualization cues. However, it is important to note that work within the IS paradigm is not limited solely to linguistic areas but has also extended to investigations of sociolinguistic concepts such as power and inequality and even the process of socialization as discussed in the previous chapter.