1.6 Ethnography of Communication

Hymes in 1972 and in the broad sense meant “the object of linguistic inquiry” or “communicative competence” [11, p. 175]. Hymes’s definition of the term consisted of 4 elements:

whether and to what degree something is grammatical (linguistic competence);

whether and to what degree something is appropriate (social appropriateness);

whether and to what degree something is feasible (psycholinguistic limitations);

whether and to what degree something is done (observing actual language use).

This far broader conceptualization of language made the object of linguistic inquiry not only the structure of isolated sentences, but rules of speaking within a community [10, p. 35]. Consequently, the sentence was replaced as a basic unit of analysis with a three-fold classification of speech communication, according to which speech communication can be of the following types:

speech situations, such as ceremonies, evenings out, sports events, bus trips – they are not purely communicative (not only governed by the rules of speaking), but provide a wider context for speaking.

speech events are activities which are communicative and at the same type governed by the rules of speaking: conversations, lectures, political debates. These are activities in which 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 acts are the smallest units of speech communication: orders, jokes, greetings, compliments, etc.; a speech act may involve more than one move from only one person, e.g. greeting usually involve a sequence of two ‘moves’.

Hymes’s model was based on a set of components of speech events, which provided a descriptive framework for ethnography of communication [11, p. 180]. These components were arranged in the following way:

1) situation (physical, temporal psychological setting defining the speech event);

2) participants (speaker, addressee, audience);

3) ends (outcomes and goals);

4) act sequence (form and content);

5) key (manner or spirit of speaking: mock, serious, perfunctory, painstaking);

6) instrumentalities (channels (spoken /written) and forms of speech (dialects, codes, varieties and registers);

7) norms of interaction – organization of turn-taking and norm of interpretation;

8) genres – casual speech, commercial messages, poems, myths, proverbs [10, p. 36].

References

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