Participants’ roles and the co-construction of culture

Sociologist Erving Goffman: In addition to the institutional roles that speakers assume by virtue of their occupation or their status, there are also local participant roles, or participation frameworks. Through the register (informal, formal), the key or tone of voice (serious, jesting, sarcastic), the frequency of the interruptions, the way the speakers take the floor, the feedback signals they give, the choice of lexical and grammatical structures, the distribution of their silences, participants in verbal exchanges play the various social roles that reveal a great deal about the social persona they wish to represent, and about the social personae they are assigning to their interlocutors. They may come across as confident or shy, interested or indifferent, close or distant, helpful or pushy; they may take on a friendly, competitive, bossy, motherly role.

Husband: Y’want a piece of candy?

Wife: No

C: She is on a diet.

C is animating words that are not hers. Is she chipping in in a helpful manner, or butting in and not minding her own business? If she is a long-time friend she helps to minimize the negative impact of the rejection. In other contexts, speaking for another person might be viewed as signaling not solidarity, but, rather, an asymmetrical relationship of power and authority, such as when a mother speaks for her child, a husband for his wife, a teacher for a student. Listeners can be acknowledged or non-acknowledged participants – addressees, hearers, eavesdroppers, bystanders.

Gender roles are not the natural result of biological makeup, they are socially constructed by males and females enacting different participant roles in conversation. They show self-assertiveness or uncertainty, dominance or submissiveness. Women’s rising intonation is often interpreted as a sign of uncertainty. The male’s interruptions may be viewed as dominance.

Language use is a cultural act because its users co-construct the very social roles that define them as members of a discourse community.

Summary

· The system of signs that constitute culture is actively constructed through the verbal actions taken by sign-makers in interaction with one another. In the construction of meaning, the interpretation of events is grounded in each person’s experience and field of perception.

· The context of situation and the context of culture in which verbal actions take place are constitutive of these actions; they imbue them with necessary pragmatic coherence.

· The participants maintain this verbal coherence by observing a principle of co-operation, that prompts them to align their expectations onto those of others by playing various participant roles. All these actions by the participants are finely attuned to the cultural norms and conventions of the group they belong to.

· The meaning of words are different if they are conveyed face-to-face in the close proximity of another fellow human being, or over a distance, through writing and print.

Spoken language, oral culture

Participants in verbal interaction take up various social roles. Social structure is constructed through the two different media of speech and writing.

The spoken medium is directly linked to the time of its enunciation and to the perception by those present of the transient dimensions of the verbal event. By contrast, the technology of writing has been able to overcome the auditory nature of spoken language by translating it into more permanent, visible signs on a page.

 

Speech and writing

The very term orality is defined against written word and was coined by literate people within a context of literacy.

Characteristics of conversational speech:

1. Speech is transient, rather than permanent. Because of physical constraints, interlocutors may not speak at the same time, or else they cannot hear what the others say. Written language, by contrast, can be stored, retrieved, and recollected, and responses can be delayed. Moreover, the permanence of writing as a medium can easily lead people to suppose that what it expresses is permanent too, hence the important link between written documents and the law.

2. Speech is addictive or “rhapsodic”. Because of the dialogic nature of oral interaction, speakers “rhapsodize”, i.e. stitch together elements from previous turns-at-talk, they add language as they go along (and…and; then…), thus showing conversational cooperation in the building of their own turn. By contrast, the information conveyed in writing is hierarchically ordered within the clause structure, and is linearly arranged on the page, from left to right, or top to bottom, according to the cultural convention. Since it is likely to be read by distant, unknown, or yet-to-be-born audience, it has developed an information structure characterized by a high level of cohesion.

3. Speech is aggregative, i.e. it makes use of verbal aggregates or formulaic expressions, ready-made chunks of speech that maintain the contact between interlocutors, also called phatic communion. The term coined by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowsky to characterize the ready-made chunks of speech like “Hi, how are you?” that people use more to maintain social contact than to convey information. By contrast, in the absence of such direct contact and for the sake of economy of information over long distances or long periods of time, and because it can be read and re-read at will, writing has come to be viewed as the medium that fosters analysis, logical reasoning and abstract categorization.

4. Speech is redundant or “copious”. Because speakers are never quite sure whether their listener is listening, paying attention, comprehending and remembering what they are saying or not, they tend to make frequent use of repetition, paraphrase, and restatement. By contrast, since written language doesn’t have to make such demands on short-term memory, it tends to avoid redundancy.

5. Speech is loosely structured grammatically and is lexically sparse, writing, by contrast, is grammatically compact and lexically dense. Speakers have to attend to many aspects of the situation while they concentrate on what they are saying, and while they monitor the way they are saying it. Thus, their speech is characterized by false starts, filled and unfilled pauses, hesitations, parenthetic remarks, unfinished sentences. They create their utterances as they are speaking them. One way of keeping this balancing act is to use grammatical resources as best serves one’s immediate needs, and to leave the vocabulary as sparse as possible. Writers, by contrast, have time to pack as much information in the clause as they can, using all the complex syntactic resources the language can give them; they can condense large quantities of information in a tighter space by using, for example, dense nominalized phrases. WRITTEN Every previous visit had left me with a sense of the futility of further action on my part. / Improvements in technology have reduced the risks and high costs associated with simultaneous installation. SPOKEN Whenever I’d visited there before, I’d ended up feeling that it would be futile if I tried to do anything more. / Because the technology has improved, it’s less risky than it used to be when you install them at the same time, and it doesn’t cost so much either.

6. Speech tends to be people-centered, writing tends to be topic-centered. Because of the presence of an audience and the need to keep the conversation going, speakers not only focus on their topic, but try to engage their listeners as well, and appeal to their senses and emotions. In expository writing, by contrast, the topic or message and its transferability from one context to the other is the main concern. Writers of expository prose try to make their message as clear, unambiguous, coherent, and trustworthy as possible since they will not always be there to explain and defend it. Of course, other written texts, in particular of the literary or promotional kind, appeal to the reader’s emotions, and display many features characteristic of speech.

7. Speech, being close to the situation at hand, is context depended; writing, being received far from its original context of production, is context - reduced. Because of the dialogic character of oral exchanges, truth in the oral mode is jointly constructed and based on commonsense experience. Truth in the literate mode is based on the logic and the coherence of the argument being made.

The features listed above are not inherent in the spoken or in the written medium. Orality and literacy have to be seen on a continuum of more or less literate users of both spoken and written language. A scribbled memo, an e-mail, an information letter, like a conversation or a homily, are written in the orate mode; an academic lecture, a scientific presentation, like a scholarly article, are spoken in the literary mode.

The cognitive skills associated with literacy are not intrinsic to the technology of writing. Although the written medium does have its own physical parameters, there is nothing in alphabet and script that would make them more suited, say, for logical and analytic thinking than the spoken medium. To understand why literacy has become associated with logic and analysis, one needs to understand the historical association of the invention of the Greek alphabet with Plato’s philosophy, and the influence of Plato’s dichotomy between ideas and language on the whole of Western thought. It is cultural and historical contingency, not technology that determines the way we think, but technology serves to enhance and give power to one way of thinking over another. Technology is always linked to power, as power is linked to dominant cultures.

Indicating status

Deictic is an element of speech that points in a certain direction as viewed from the perspective of the speaker. (you, me, here, tomorrow..) Deixis is a process by which language indexes the physical, temporal, and social location of the speaker at the moment of utterance. Markers of social deixis give an indication not only of where the speaker stands in time and place but also of their status within the social structure, and of the status of speaker gives the addressee. For example, the use of vous or tu in French, Sie or du in German can index either power or solidarity, distance or closeness. English used to have you for distance, thou for closeness; now English has only retained the “you”, but social deixis in English expresses social position by other forms of address like Bill, Mister X, Professor X and the like. The forms can index a generational culture, or a culture that wants itself to be egalitarian and democratic as in informal forms of address used in the USA (dear friend, call me Bill). The police’s use of a non-reciprocal tu to address North African youth in France expresses an explicit display of power; being addressed as tu indexes the subordinate or marginal place occupied by these youths in French society today.

Social positionings

The use of social deictics like pronouns, forms of address, or names, is one way speakers align themselves to the cultural context as they understand it. Changes in intonation and pronunciation can also indicate changes in our perception of the role as a participant in an interaction, and in our alignment to others. Goffman calls such a positioning as footing, i.e. the stance we take up to ourselves and to the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of utterances. A change in footing is usually marked by a change in register, tone of voice or bodily orientation. For example, it is frequently the case in the USA that a Northerner talking to a Southerner instinctively aligns his/her way of talking on that of the Southerner, as a sign of conversational co-operation; similarly, a native speaker who starts adopting a style of speaking called “foreigner talk” when talking to a foreigner, shows a convergence that can be interpreted either as cultural solidarity or as the display of cultural power. We can see the same phenomenon occurring in classrooms. A teacher talks differently to her pupils when she addresses them as a class or as individual children. (1. Now listen everybody. 2. At ten o’clock we’ll have assembly. We’ll all go out together and go to the auditorium and sit in the first two rows. Mr. Dock, the principal, is going to speak to us. When he comes in, sit quietly and listen carefully. 3. Don’t wiggle your legs. Pay attention to what I’m saying). Mind the switch in tone and in the use of pronouns. Three different footings are involved here: the first statement is a claim on the children’s immediate behavior, the second is a review of experience to come, and the third a side remark to a particular child. The teacher, as a speaker, switches roles from being a principal (institutional voice) to being an animator of her students’ voices (we), to becoming an individual demanding to be listened to.

Defining one’s footing can be achieved through code-switching. It is a verbal strategy by which bilingual or bidialectal speakers change linguistic code within the same speech event as a sign of cultural solidarity or distance, and as an act of identity. (Tolstoy)

Changes in footing correspond to a change in the way we perceive events and are connected with a change in our frame for events. (Framing is an ability to apply a frame of interpretation to an utterance or speech event through a contextualization cue).

E.g. Discussions in the groups of American and Japanese students.

The American students perpetuate a discussion style typical of American academic culture, in which a problem posed at the outset gets tackled without further ado by whoever takes the initiative to start the discussion. The Japanese speakers negotiate not only the procedural aspects of the subsequent discussion, but also a hierarchical order within the group. The question of who speaks first is, in Japanese culture, of paramount importance. In all the Japanese group discussions, a female member started, followed by the other female member, than by the younger male member, and last by the oldest male member.

Protecting face

The ultimate aim of negotiating frames and footings in conversation is to protect one’s own and other participants’ face at all times. Face is a person’s social need to both belong to a group and be independent of that group.

Members of a cultural group need to feel respected and not impinged upon in their autonomy, pride, and self-sufficiency (negative face). They also need to be reinforced in their view of themselves as polite, considerate, respectful members of their culture (positive face). These two contradictory needs require delicate facework, since it is the interest of all participants in a verbal exchange that everyone maintain both their negative and positive face, so that the exchange can continue.

The negotiation of frames and footings and the facework accomplished in verbal encounters among members of a given social group gives rise to group-specific discourse styles. What distinguish people from different cultures are the different ways they use orate and literate discourse styles in various speech genres for various social purposes.

Conversational style

Conversational style is a person’s way of talking in the management of conversations. In face-to-face verbal exchanges, the choice of orate features of speech can give the participants a feeling of joint interpersonal involvement rather than the sense of detachment or objectivity that comes with the mere transmission of factual information. Different contexts of situation and different contexts of culture call for different conversational styles.

Compare, for example an interview, in which the purpose is to elicit information, and a conversation among friends, where the purpose is to share past experiences.

Interview between a journalist and a young apprentice in Germany:

A: and where do you work?

B: I work in the metal industry

A: uhuh… why did you choose that particular job? In the metal industry?

B: well… it was… so to speak… the job of my dreams. I wanted to work, but not particularly an intellectual job, but a more physical one

A: so… you can say that you chose that job yourself?

B: I chose that job myself

From the controlled, non-overlapping sequence of turns, the interviewer’s attempt at professional, detached objectivity, the cautious responses of the young apprentice desirous to be forthcoming with the required information, we recognize the typical style of a speech event called “interview” This literate journalistic style is quite different from the orate style one may find in a conversation among friends:

A: What I’ve been doing is cutting on my sleep

B: Oy!

A: And I’ve bee.. and I…

B: I do that too but it’s painful.

A: Yeah, 5-6 hours a night, and

B: Oh God how can you do it. You survive?

Here we can see personal involvement (paralinguistic signals like sighs and interjections, use of personal pronouns), empathy, frequent interruptions, overlaps – high degree of conversational cooperation.

The orate-literate continuum gets realized differently in different cultural genres, but also in different cultural traditions within one genre, such as classroom talk. For example, Indian children from the Warm Springs reservation in Oregon, who are used to learning by silently listening to and watching adults in their family, and by participating in social events within the community as a whole, have a notably different interactional behavior in the classroom than their Anglo-American peers and the teacher, even though all speak English. They mostly remain silent, do not respond to direct solicitations to display their knowledge in public, do not vie for the attention of the teacher, and seem more interested in working together with their peers.

People are able to display a variety of conversational styles in various situations, and one should avoid equating one person or one culture with one discourse style. However, by temperament and upbringing, people tend to prefer one or the other style in a given situation. This styl, in turn, forms part of their cultural identity and sense of self.

The problem in education, in particular, is how to combine different sets of values, different discourse and learning styles so as not to suppress anyone’s sense of worth, yet give everyone access to a dominant conversational style imposed by forces outside the local communities’ control.

Narrative style

The influence of culture on discourse style also becomes apparent in the different distribution of orate and literate feature of speech in story telling. For example, using the short “peer narrative” film by William Chafe, Tannen asked native speakers from Anglo-American and Greek background to retell the film in their own words. (It showed a man picking pears from a tree, then descending and dumping them into one of three baskets on the ground. A boy comes by on a bicycle and steals a basket of pears. As he’s riding away, he passes a girls on a bike, his hat flies off his head, and the bike overturns. Three boys appear and help him gather his pears. They find his hat and return it to him and he gives them pears. The boys then pass the farmer who has just come down from the three and discovered that his basket of pears is missing. He watches them walk by eating pears).

In comparing the narratives told by American women in English and Greek women in Greek. Each group had a distinctive narrative style. The Greeks told better stories, by often interweaving judgments about the character’s behavior, or about the film’s message. In contrast, the Americans reportedly gave a better recollection of the original sequence of events, and gave all the details they could remember. They used their judgment to comment on the filmmaker’s technique. The Greeks seemed to draw upon an interactive experience which was focused more on interpersonal involvement: telling the story in ways that would interest the interviewer, interpreting the film’s human message. The Americans seemed to draw on their wiliness to approach a school task for its own demands. They were focusing on the content of the film, treating it as a cinematic object, with critical objectivity. Each group made differential use of orate and literate features according to the expectations their culture had prepared them to have of the task at hand. So, given the same situation and the same task, people from different cultures will interpret the situation and the demands of the task differently, and thus behave in different ways.

Summary

The ways in which language means, both as sign and as action, differ according to the medium used. The spoken medium bears the marks of more or less orality, more or less literacy, as measured against the characteristic features of conversational-spoken vs. essayist-written language.

Through the social organization of talk, culture is constructed across day-to-day dialogues, through the choice of frames and footing that speakers adopt vis-à-vis their own and others’ discourse, and through the way they collaborate in the necessary facework within a variety of discourse types.

Culture puts its imprint on the conversational and narrative styles of the members of a social group.