Field Investigations

Discourse and Pragmatics

Investigation #1 (Week One) Selecting a Site of Investigation

Select a site for the investigations that you will carry out in the coming weeks. The site should involve a consistent group of people who come together on a regular basis to engage in consistent social practices. Suitable sites might be a workplace, an educational setting, a club, organization, or church, your family, or some kind of on-line community that you participate in. Reflect on why you have chosen this particular site for investigation. What kinds of issues around discourse and social interaction do people face in this site, and what kinds of problems do you think applying the ideas that you learn in this course will help the people in this site to solve?

Investigation #2 (Week Two) Site Survey: Actions and Practices

List this main social actors involved in your site of investigation, the important social actions and social practices that they engage in, and the role discourse plays in performing these actions or engaging in these social practices. Reflect on the different kinds of discursive tools that are available to different participants and how these tools make some actions easier and other actions more difficult.

Investigation #3 (Week Three) Analyzing a Speech Event

Choose an important speech event in your site of investigation and analyze it using Hymes's SPEAKING model. What are the consequences of 'marked' behavior in any of the categories that you have analyzed? What does your analysis tell you about the kinds of cultural competencies that are necessary to engage in this speech event, and how do participants go about mastering and displaying these competencies?

Investigation #4 (Week Four) Genres and Generic Conventions

Choose a written or spoken text from your site of investigation and analyze it using the principles and methods of genre analysis. Pay attention to the 'move structure' of the text. Reflect on the extent to which the features you have discovered in this text can be generalized to other texts of a similar type in this site, and on the role these generic conventions that you have observed in the 'discourse community' constituted in your site of investigation.

Investigation #5 (Week 5) Analyzing a Text

Choose a written text from your site of investigation and analyze it using the principles and methods of textual analysis discussed in the lecture. You can focus on such features as word choice, cohesion, grammar, thematic organization or any other textual features that you think are important. Reflect on what your analysis can tell us about how the text is produced, the uses the text can be put to, and the effect the text might have on users.

Investigation #6 (Week 6) Analyzing Speech Exchanges

Collect a number of common speech exchanges from your site of investigation and analyze them based on speech act theory and/or the cooperative principle. Discuss how meaning and or implicature is created in these exchanges and reflect on how they are linked them to the social actors and social practices associated with them.

Investigation #7 (Week 8) Analyzing Politeness

Loosely transcribe an interaction in your site of investigation, preferably one containing a 'face threatening act'. Use the principles and methods of politeness theory to examine the politeness strategies participants use. Reflect on the implication of theses strategies on the social actors and the actions/practices they are performing.

Investigation #8 (Week 9) Analyzing a Conversation

Closely transcribe a short conversation in your site of investigation and analyze it using the principles and methods of conversation analysis. Identify the 'procedural rules' that participants follow in the conversation and reflect on role of such rules in the larger context and social practice in which they occur.

Investigation #9 (Week 10) Analyzing Interaction and Social Identity

Closely transcribe and interaction and analyze it using the principles and methods of interactional sociolinguistics, focusing on such aspects as the discourse strategies people use and the different conversational styles they have, and reflect on the relationship between these aspects and the construction of social identities and social relationships.

Investigation #10 (Week 11) Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Videotape and interaction in your site of investigation or collect a multimodal text from the site. Analyze the text or interaction using the principles and methods of multimodal discourse analysis. Pay particular attention to the affordances and constraints associated with different modes and how the modes are used together to produce particular meanings and project particular kinds of social identities.

Investigation #11 (Week 12) Discourse and Power

Choose any of the texts (written, spoken or multimodal) which you have collected for the previous investigations and analyze it using the principles and methods of critical discourse analysis. Pay particular attention to the way the text reveals power relationships among participants and how power is either enforced and resisted through discourse. Reflect on the ways the larger social order are reflected in and constituted by the text or interaction.

Investigation #12 (Week 13) Reflection and Retrospective

Reflect on all of the investigations that you have conducted in your site of investigation and what you have learned about the way people communicate and construct reality in this particular setting. Look back at the questions and problems that you generated in your first investigation and discuss how the work you have done might help you devise solutions to these problems or recommendations for the people involved. If possible, share your ideas with the other people in this setting and get their reactions.

Length
The maximum word limit for each investigation is 500 wd. (excluding data transcripts). Work exceeding the limit will be penalized.

Ethical issues
No surreptitious recording Never record surreptitiously. Always tell people that you would like to record them well in advance so that they can think about the idea and let you know if they are agreeable. It is sometimes possible to collect data from close friends by obtaining a general agreement to tape them surreptitiously at some time in the future and then checking after the recording that they are agreeable to your using the material collected from them. You must then tell them immediately after the recording so that they can then veto the use of the tape if they wish to do so. Note that this strategy which is aimed at collecting more "natural" speech does not always yield usable data: the quality of surreptitious recordings is often dubious since the microphone is rarely in the best position for collecting the data.

Confidentiality
When transcribing material, names should be changed to protect the identity of people referred to.

Transcription
The transcription method you use should fit the kind of analysis that you are doing. For example, if you are simply doing a move analysis, then just transcribing the words is enough. But if you are doing a conversation analysis, more information about turn structure, pauses, etc. will be useful, and an interactional sociolingusitic analysis might require more detail about intonation, stress, and other paralinguistic features.

Chinese Data
Given the sociolinguistic context of Hong Kong, is is quite likely that some (or even most) of your data will be in Chinese. This should not be a problem since the concepts you are learning should be applicable to data in any language. However, since most of these concepts were developed with reference to English, using Chinese data might provide a good opportunity for you to reflect on any modifications to the principles and methods you think might be necessary for the examination of Chinese data. When you include transcripts of Chinese data be sure to provide the original Chinese transcript and an English translation. In some cases (as with conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics, you will need to find a way to represent paralinguistic information in your Chinese transcription.