Interactional Sociolinguistics

Reading

Week 10

Required Reading

This week we will focus on how people use various kinds of speech genres and social languages when they interact. Speech genres and social languages are terms invented by the Russian literary critic Bakhtin. A speech genre is a particular form of interaction (a chat, an argument, gossip, love making, etc.). A social language is a particular way of talking (like 'doctor talk', 'triad talk'). Social languages are very closely related to conversational style and what the British linguist Halliday calls register.

The speech genre we will be most concerned with today is gossip. The funny thing about gossip is that although most people think it is 'bad', almost everybody does it. In fact, if you think back to all the communication you have taken part in in the past twenty-four hours, probably most of it consisted of gossip. There is something fundamentally human about gossiping, something universal and important for social cohesion. The psychologist Robin Dunbar, in his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language asserts that the main function of language (and the reason why it developed) is to maintain social groups, and the speech genre that is most important in the maintenance of social groups is gossip. In other words, Dunbar believes that we learned to talk in order to talk about one another.

Gossip can be seen as a sub-genre of a larger speech genre that can be referred to as conversational narrative. Narrative (story-telling) plays an important role in our interaction. Goffman sees narratives as the replaying of 'strips of social activity' which are designed to show the teller as a normal and proper member of a group. Conversation analysts have studied how interlocutors cooperate with each other to construct stories. Sociolinguist William Labov came up with a model for analyzing stories which divides stories into the common parts and examines how speakers use these part to evaluate, explain or justify the actions they are narrating.

Like stories in general, gossip plays an important social role. It is important in creating and maintaining solidarity between friends, of regulating social groups and maintaining group standards (by punishing people who do n o abide by them). The difference between gossip and other kinds of stories is that, while usually stories are told in 'chunks' of uninterrupted speech, gossip tends to contain more cooperative interruption. In most gossip there is 'more chat than chunk'.

Most people associate gossip with women, but actually men gossip just as much. There is, however, a difference in the way men and women gossip, and the style of women's gossip might be closer to our stereotype of gossip. Woman tend to have a lot of cooperative overlaps in their gossip and to use a lot of backchannel. Men tend to be more competitive in their gossip and use less backchannel.

The social language that we will be discussing today is 'foul language' or what in Cantonese is known as chou hau. Like gossip, foul language is something that most people object to but few people refrain from. It also serves important social purposes in interaction, marking identity and maintaining solidarity among friends.

Looking at foul language can give us an idea as to what the taboo topics in conversation are in a particular culture. In most cultures, the lexicon of foul language comes from lexical fields of sex, death and bodily functions. But the semantic meaning of these lexical items is extremely flexible and often do not map onto the sexual acts and bodily functions that they refer to in a one to one way. Foul language is an important field of linguistic creativity in most cultures.

Whereas gossip is associated with women, foul language is usually associated with men, especially young men. Foul language plays an important role in men's' competitive conversational style and ritual insulting. It's use also related to the tendency of males to adopt more unconventional (or even subversive) speaking styles. In fact, in many cultures, foul language is seen as a measure of masculinity.

Women, however, also use foul language, although they may use it in different situations and for different purposes.

Supplementary Readings

Jane Pilkington, 'Don't Try to Make Out that I'm Nice! The Different Strategies Women and Men Use when Gossiping' (from Language and Gender: A Reader, 1998, Blackwell, pp. 254-269) (e-group)

Jennifer Coates, 'Gossip Revisited: Language in All-Female Groups' (from Language and Gender: A Reader, 1998, Blackwell, pp. 226-253) (e-group)

Patricia, E. O'Connor, 'You could feel it through the skin' Agency and Positioning in Prisoner's Stabbing Stories' (from Text 14/1, pp. 45-75) (e-group)

Kingsley Bolton and Christopher Hutton, 'Bad Boys and Bad Language: Chou Hau and the Sociolinguistics of Swearwords in Hong Kong Cantonese' (from Hong Kong: The Anthropology of a Chinese Metrepolis, 1997, Curzon, pp.299-331) (e-group)