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connection of cognitive processes and linguistic structures with the material world around them (see below).

9.2Speech events: from functions of speech to social units

Grammarians’ first serious step toward studying speech as embedded in social units was the introduction of a model in which both speaker and hearer play a crucial role. At the Conference on Style organized at Indiana University in 1958, the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, by expanding earlier work by the Austrian psychologist Karl Bühler,4 proposed a speech event model composed of six “constitutive factors,” each of which “determines a different function of language” (Jakobson 1960: 353). Figure 9.1 reproduces the six factors and figure 9.2 the six functions, as schematically represented by Jakobson.

CONTEXT

MESSAGE

ADDRESSER ...............................

ADDRESSEE

C O N T A C T

CODE

Figure 9.1 Jakobson’s six constitutive factors of a speech event

	REFERENTIAL
EMOTIVE	POETIC
	CONATIVE
	PHATIC
	METALINGUAL

Figure 9.2 Jakobson’s six functions of language

As shown by the fact that Jakobson’s examples consist of single utterances, in this model, “speech event” must be interpreted as equivalent to Austin’s and Searle’s notion of speech act. The idea of looking at utterances as “events” allows us to examine how the different factors play a role in the shaping of the message and in its interpretation.

4Karl Bühler was an Austrian psychologist who became very interested in language and wrote a major treatise, Sprachtheorie, published in 1934, which was very influential in European linguistic circles, including the Prague School of Linguistics, of which Jakobson was a member. Bühler’s model of language (an earlier version of which can be found in a 1918 article of his) included three factors: (a) representation (Darstellung),

(b)expression (Ausdruck), and (c) appeal (Appel) (Bühler [1934]1990). To each of these three factors corresponds a function. Jakobson’s functions referential, emotive, and conative are based on Bühler’s model (Jakobson 1960: 355). For an insightful review of Bühler’s intellectual and social life, see Eschbach (1990).

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For Jakobson, to concentrate on one aspect of the speech event means to privilege the corresponding function of language. Thus, a verbal message in which context is primary for Jakobson means a message in which the speaker privileges the referential function of language.5 A message predominantly aimed at describing a situation, object, or mental state is an example of this function of language. This function includes descriptive statements with definite descriptions (e.g. the snow is white, kids like to believe in Santa Claus) as well as utterances with deictic terms such as I, you, here, there, now (e.g. Alice lives here, I was sleeping). This model recast the referential (which also includes what we earlier defined as “denotative”) function as the predominant one in most messages but not in all: “... even though ... an orientation toward the CONTEXT ... is the leading task of numerous messages, the accessory participation of the other functions in such messages must be taken into account by the observant linguist” (Jakobson 1960: 353). The model also allows for the relevance of more than one factor and hence for more than one function at the same time in the same speech event.

A focus on the addresser brings instead into prominence the emotive (also called “expressive” and, more recently “affective”) function. The classic example here is interjections (English oh, ah, ugh, phew)6 and certain modifications of linguistic sounds that do not change the denotative meaning of an expression but add information about a particular attitude or stance that the speaker is taking (see Gumperz 1992; Ochs 1996).

Orientation toward the addressee means an exploitation of the conative function, the classic example being the vocative, which in some languages is marked morphologically (like in the Latin Brute! “oh Brutus!” where the final vowel e tells us that this is not said about Brutus but to Brutus) and in others by intonation alone (English calling intonation in John! come here!). The difference between the referential function on the one side and the conative and emotive on the other is that only when the first is used can one assess the truth value of what is being said. In the other two cases, such a judgment is not appropriate. Thus, as pointed out by Jakobson, we cannot challenge someone who says drink!

(conative function expressed in the imperative form) by saying “is it true or not?” (see also Austin’s position on the same point in section 7.2). To these three

5“Context” here is used in the limited sense of a world outside of language and does not have the implications associated with the concept of context in contemporary discussions (see Goodwin and Duranti 1992).

6Interjections form an interesting and much understudied area of spoken language.

Among other features, they allow for the adoption of sounds that are not otherwise part of the linguistic systems. An example is the voiceless velar fricative or “achlaut” /x/ of the English ugh pronounced [ x] or [əx] (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik 1985: 74) and the glottal stop found in the negation uh-uh pronounced [ʔ əʔ ə] (see Ferguson 1982).

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functions, which he took from Bühler, Jakobson added three more functions: poetic, phatic, and metalingual.

The study of the sequential aspects of talk (see chapter 8) has taught us that both the emotive and conative functions are usually at play, although they might be more or less dominant. For instance, even when people express imprecations after an adverse happening (e.g. stumbling, slipping, missing a bus, dropping an icecream on the floor) and produce expletives such as the English fuck!, the French merde!, the Italian cazzo!, or the Samoan oka!, a certain level of recipient design is at work. This is made evident by speakers’ ability to monitor the quality and manner of articulations of such imprecations, which can range from whispers to loud cries (Goffman 1981: 97-8).

The poetic function is at work when there is a focus “on the message for its own sake” (Jakobson 1960: 356). This function, which is part of but not identical with the language of poetry, is what allows for verbal play, phonosymbolism (see section 6.8.1), and any other linguistic device that manipulates or concentrates on the shape or sound of the message. The poetic function may let the form of the message control the content. For example, when song writers or poets look for a word that rhymes with a word in a preceding line, they are favoring the poetic function over the referential function. In fact, in some cases, if they find a word or phrase that “sounds good,” they might even rephrase something written earlier to fit the acoustic frame established by the new expression. The poetic function is not prominent only in poems, but also in genres such as political slogans and commercials.

The predominance of contact over other factors gives us what Jakobson, following Malinowski’s (1923) notion of “phatic communion,” calls the phatic function, which characterizes what is said just (or mainly) for establishing, prolonging, or discontinuing communication, like when speakers check whether the channel works, as in Hello, can you hear me? For Jakobson, greetings are seen as serving the phatic function, given that they often do not have a “content” (they are not “about something”) or when they do, their content does not to seem their main purpose. The same is true of expressions about the weather said in elevators and other closed spaces where spatial proximity makes people feel (in many societies) that they should say “something.”

The metalingual (now usually called metalinguistic or reflexive) function is the use of language to talk about language (Lucy 1993). The term is taken from logic where a distinction is made between the “object language” (for instance mathematical symbols) and the “metalanguage,” that is, the language we use to talk about the object language (e.g. English) (Tarski 1956). Jakobson extended the metalingual function to all cases in which we talk about talk, including the discussion of the meaning of words in our own language (when people say “I hate

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you” it means they don’t know how to relate to you) and the explanation of a word in a foreign language (“hon” means “book” in Japanese) (see section 6.7 on metalinguistic awareness). In writing, we typically use quotes to separate the expression in the object language from what said in the metalanguage. In speaking, often the cues to quoted speech are in the form of subtle changes in voice quality and prosody or other suprasegmental features such as volume and tempo (Cruttenden 1986; Crystal and Davy 1969). In some cases, these and other linguistic features are used to signal that what is being said is a quotation not necessarily from a different speaker but from a different dialect or way of being. This use of the metalinguistic function is what Morgan (1996) calls reading dialect in the African American community, a practice whereby members, often in a humorous or ironic way, contrast or highlight (“read”) commonly known features of African American English and American English to make a point.

For example, to stress a point members might say “It’s not simply that I am cool. I be cool. In fact, I been cool (a very long time).” In the African American community, not only the two dialects of A[frican] A[merican] E[nglish] and A[merican] E[nglish] are consistently read but also varieties within those dialects are consistently read by interlocutors. (Morgan 1996: 410)

In these cases, then, certain grammatical features like the uninflected verb be in a main clause (in I be cool) or the absence of the auxiliary have (in I been) become indexes of the contexts of use of these forms, which become then, in turn, almost like quotations.

Jakobson’s model owes a great deal not only, as I mentioned earlier, to Bühler, but also to the linguistic theory of the Prague School of linguistics.7 The members of the Prague School established an approach to the study of language that paid equal attention to structure and to function. This meant that language was seen as embedded in and at the same time an instrument of human activity:8

Produit de l’activité humaine, la langue partage avec cette activité le caractère de finalité. Lorsqu’on analyse le langage comme expression ou comme communication, l’intention du sujet parlant est l’explication qui se présente le plus aisément et qui est la plus naturelle. (Thèses présentées au Premier Congrès des philologues slaves, 1929, in Vachek 1964: 33)

7On the relationship between Bühler and the members of the Prague School, see Vachek (1966).

8The similarity with activity theory is not too accidental given that Vygotsky knew Bühler’s work and frequently cited it in his writings.

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The emphasis on language as a goal-oriented activity was important because it forced researchers to connect the study of linguistic forms with the study of social functions. This premise, which had inspired Jakobson’s model, became even more central in Dell Hymes’s call for an ethnography of communication. In this case, the influence of anthropological concerns and methods was apparent in the three building blocks of Hymes’s (1964b) approach: (i) ethnographic methods, (ii) a study of the communicative events that constitute the social life of a community, (iii) a model of the different components of the events.

The starting point is the ethnographic analysis of the communicative habits of a community in their totality, determining what count as communicative events, and as their components, and conceiving no communicative behavior as independent of the set framed by some setting or implicit question. The communicative event thus is central. (In terms of language proper, the statement means that the linguistic code is displaced by the speech act as focus of attention.) (Hymes 1964b: 13)

As shown by this quote, the task that Hymes set up for himself and his students (many of whom became major figures in linguistic anthropology) was to connect the specifics of language use to the community within which such uses took place, were interpreted, and reproduced. The link with the community was established through the communicative event as a unit of analysis. He wrote: “In one sense, the focus of the present approach is on communities organized as systems of communicative events” (1964b: 18).

Hymes explicitly built on Jakobson’s speech event model by refining and expanding Jakobson’s six “factors” into a list that grew from seven (Hymes 1964b) to sixteen (Hymes 1972a).9 To make his long list easier to remember, Hymes regrouped the sixteen components under the letters of the term “S-P-E- A-K-I-N-G”: Situation, Participants, Ends, Act sequences, Key, Instrumentalities,

Norms, Genre.10

These factors were components of speech or components of speech acts

9Hymes (1972a: 51) recognized a number of other influences, including Kenneth Burke, who, in the 1940s, constructed a theory of motives that relied on such concepts as agency, act, purpose, and scene (Burke 1945).

10Each of these eight components, with the exception of “key” and “genre” was further divided into two or more components: Situation (1. Setting , 2. Scene); Participants (3. Speaker or sender, 4. Addressor, 5. Hearer, or receiver, or audience, 6. Addressee); Ends (7. Purposes – outcomes, 8. Purposes – goals); Act sequences (9. Message form, 10. Message content); Key (11. Key); Instrumentalities (12. Channel, 13. Forms of speech); Norms (14. Norms of interaction; 15. Norms of interpretation); Genre (16. Genres). See Hymes (1972a, 1974) and Duranti (1985).

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(Hymes 1972a: 58). The earlier term “communicative event” (Hymes 1964b) was later abandoned and “speech event” was introduced. Speech events were to be understood in the restricted sense of those “activities, or aspects of activities, that are directly governed by rules or norms for the use of speech” (Hymes 1972a: 56). Examples of speech events include a lecture, a phone conversation, a prayer, an interview, the telling of a joke. In such activities speech plays a crucial role in the definition of what is going on – that is, if we eliminate speech, the activity cannot take place. Speech situations, on the other hand, are activities in which speech plays a minor or subordinate role. Examples of speech situations are a game of soccer, a walk with a friend, a ride on a bus, a visit to an art gallery. This analytical distinction between speech events and speech situations is intuitively appealing but can be problematic, especially if, as analysts, we expect clearcut distinctions between speech events and speech situations. In the real world what we find are situations or parts of situations in which speech is used in a constitutive way, that is, as an instrument for sustaining or defining that particular type of situation. Such a use is what characterizes a conversation, but it can also characterize a game or a walk with a friend. The absence of speech in these cases might be just as important as its presence in those situations that we would define as speech events (see Duranti 1985).

Hymes emphasized the heuristic nature of his SPEAKING model, which was to serve as a guide (or etic grid) for fieldwork and crosscultural analysis (ethnographers of speaking were supposed to go to different communities around the world and study language use in terms of the components described by Hymes) (see Sherzer and Darnell 1972). The idea seemed not so much to invite a series of ethnographic descriptions of speech events or speech acts that illustrated each of the sixteen components with examples – these descriptions tend to be particularly dull to read –, but to offer a sense of the factors involved in the study of language as part of social life (hence the title of Hymes’s 1972 article “Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life”). The real innovation in Hymes’s expansion of Jakobson’s model was thus not so much in the number and types of components, but in the nature of the unit of analysis.

For Jakobson the notion of speech event was a way of unifying his six components and their corresponding functions of language. With the linguistic code as still the central concern of his model, Jakobson offered important suggestions on how to link different forms of participation with grammatical patterns. Jakobson, however, was not interested in the sociocultural organization of speech events or their role within a community. For Hymes, on the other hand, the community is the starting point. Speech events are where communities are formed and held together. With Hymes, the unit of analysis is no longer a linguistic unit as such, but a social unit which includes or is based on speech. Hymes is thus less

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