Archive for June, 2013

QOTD: communicative competence, ethnography of speaking

June 5th, 2013

An ethnography of speaking is centrally concerned with `communicative competence’ (Hymes 1972c), what speakers need to know to communicate appropriately in a particular speech community, and how this competence is acquired. Competence includes rules pertaining to language structure and language use as well as cultural knowledge — for example which participants may or may not speak in certain settings, which contexts are appropriate for speech and which for silence, what types of talk are appropriate to persons of different status and roles, norms for requesting and giving information (of particular concern to ethnographers), for making other requests, offers, declinations, commands, the use of non-verbal behaviours in various contexts, practices for alternating between speakers, for constructing authority, etc. This focus on the skills members of a community display when communicating with each other entails a broader notion of competence than linguists advocated. Hymes included communicative as well as grammatical competence in conditions of appropriate speech use, embracing aspects of communication such as gestures and eye-gaze, whereas Chromsky caustioned that to incorporate aspects such as beliefs and attitudes into a study of language would mean that `language is chaos that is not worth studying’ (Chomsky, 1977:153).

We have … to account for the fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a repetoire of speech acts, to take part in speech events, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others. This competence, moreover, is integral with attitudes, values, and motivations concerning language, its features and uses, and integral with competence for, and attitudes toward, the interrelation of language, with the other codes of communicative conduct. (Hymes, 1972c:277-8).

-page 287 from “The Ethnography of Communication”, Elizabeth Keating (pages 285-301) in SAGE Handbook of Ethnography

Resolving above References
Chomsky, Noam (1977) Language and Responsibility, Based on Conversation with Mitsou Ronat (tras. J. Viertel). New York: Pantheon.

Hymes, Dell (1972 c) “On communicative competence”, in J.B. Pride and J. Holmes (eds), Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 269-85.

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QOTD: System

June 3rd, 2013

On what a system is, to Christopher Alexander:

When the elements of a set belong together because they co-operate or work together somehow, we call the set of elements a system.

For example, in Berkeley at the corner of Hearst and Euclid, there is a drugstore, and outside the drugstore a traffic light. In the entrance to the drugstore there is a newsrack where the day’s papers are displayed. When the light is red, people who are waiting to cross the street stand idly by the light; and since they have nothing to do, they look at the papers displayed on the newsrack which they can see from where they stand. Some of them just read the headlines, others actually buy a paper while they wait.

This effect makes the newsrack and the traffic light interactive; the newsrack, the newspapers on it, the money going from people’s pockets to the dime slot, the people who stop at the light and read papers, the traffic light, the electric impulses which make the lights change, and the sidewalk which the people stand on form a system – they all work together.
– Christopher Alexander, A city is not a tree, 1965.

(See also the article’s conclusion and publishing history)

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