Participants in Discourse: Relationships, Roles,

Identities

Mary Anne ColicoCollege of Liberal Arts and CommunicationsDela Salle University – Dasmariñas

Topics for Discussion:

Power and CommunityIndexicalityStance and StyleSocial Roles and Participant StructureAudience, Politeness and AccomodationSocial Identity and IdentificationPersonal Identity: Discourse and the SelfThe Linguistic Individual in DiscourseReference: Johnstone, B. (2008) Discourse Analysis, Second Edition. USA:Blackwell Publishing.

Participants in Discourse

Author/Speaker (active) - Decoder/Hearer (passive)

Incorrect interpretative strategies of the hearer

Correct interpretative strategies of the hearer

Power and Community

Two important aspects of social relatedness that are expressed and created in discourse are power and solidarity.

Power vs. SolidarityPower – has to do with the respects in which relationships are asymmetrical, with some participants more able than others to shape what occurs or how it is interpreted.Solidarity – has to do with relatively symmetrical aspects of human relationships.

Example: Asymmetric use of names and address terms is often a clear indicator of a power differential

o Teacher and studento In the past, white people addressing black

peopleo People addressing the Queen or the

President

Power and solidarity are both always at play in any relationship (Tannen, 1994)

PowerPower comes with social status

Example: US President has the power to declare warChairperson of a committee has the

power to adjourn a meetingSome religious leader has a power to

decide a marriage

*The examples are power which is institutionally defined.

But power is also negotiable, as people compete for the ability to make things happen.

Example: In US politics, the legislature can and does try to

limit the President’s power to declare war

Other committee members can suggest that the chair adjourn a meeting, or they can cause a de facto adjournment by simply getting up and leaving.

*The examples are situationally negotiated power

Power as an agencyPower is not necessarily dominance, but rather more

like agency: an individual’s ebbing and flowing ability to shape the activity at hand.

Institutionally conferred power and situationally negotiated power are often both in play.

Power not ‘held’ by one person or group forever, but exists as a circuit, or something to be ‘exercised’ by each of us in different situations.

Thus, where there is power, there is always resistance

We might not say certain things in certain situations, but there is always the potential for us to do so

So, by ‘breaking the rules’ we have the potential to re-define the limits of discourse

By playing by the rules, we re-affirm the ‘truth’ in discourse

This re-definition of the limits of discourse is what is productive about power: it enables us to redefine ‘truth’ and what is valid (and valuable)

Speech community

Communities seen through the lens of discourse have been called “speech communities,” “discourse communities,” or “communities of practice.”

“Discourse community” might be constituted by a group of people who regularly talk to one another about a particular topic or in a particular situation

Example: researchers in an academic discipline Staff of a company

Indexicality

Indexicality – refer to “indexical forms” or “indexicals” or “indexes” or “indices”

- these are strategies that people use to set social alignment which is relevant at the moment

Indexical form is a linguistic form or action points to and helps establish “social” meaning

Example: engaging in joint discourse activity can index - that is create/ affirm – shared membership in a “community of practice”

Common ways of doing things with language, such as telling stories (Johnstone, 1990), having arguments (Schiffrin, 1984), or following the necessary events in an airplane cockpit (Neville, 2006) can index common affiliation.

All of these modes of indexicality can function both signals of group solidarity and claims to group membership.

Stance and Style

Stance (or stancetaking) - the methods, linguistic and other, by which interactants create and signal relationships with the propositions they utter and with the people they interact with.

Evidentiality and Affect

Early work focused on “evidentiality” and “affect” (Biber and Finnegan, 1989)

Evidentiality – textual feature that signal the speaker’s knowledge and their degree of certainty

Affect – speaker’s attitude about the propositions they utter

Evaluation

Hunston and Thompson (2000) have explored the linguistics of “evaluation”

Evaluation – the expression of the speaker or writer’s attitude or stance, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about.

Evaluation - Functions

According to Hunston and Thompson, evaluation has three functions:

Expressing the opinion of the speaker/writer vis-à-vis the propositions being expressed

Manipulating the hearer/ reader’s attitude vis-à-vis these propositions

Organizing the discourse

Examples of language of evaluation:Use of modals including might or could/

must or must notSentence adverbs such as “apparently” or

“in my opinion”Conjunctions and structures

Ochs (1992) models how particular linguistic forms can index evidential stances such as certainty, interpersonal stances such as friendliness or intensity, or social identities such as gender.

Example: the phrase “I believe…”

Stancetaking

Stancetaking can index social identities.Example: the use of tag question may index uncertainty or powerless interactional identity.

So, a witness in court might use more tag questions than the attorney questioning her (O’Barr and Atkins, 1980; Conley and O’Barr, 1998) or a student might use more tag questions than the teacher.

StylesStyles- repeated sets of stancetaking moves that became

stabilized repertoire associated with situations or social identities. Style associated with participant roles are sometimes referred to under the rubric of “footing.”

Style associated with socio-demographic identity is sometimes referred to as a “dialect” or a “variety” or “accents”

Example: a person’s style in talk among peers is different from person’s style when reading aloud in front of the strangers

Styles associated with a particular set of contextual factors that confront a speaker with a particular set of rhetorical requirements are sometimes called “registers” (Biber and Finnegan, 1994, Finnegan and Biber, 2001).

Register – is usually defined as a set of lexical (vocabulary) and grammatical features that help to identify discourse that occurs in a particular recurrent situation

Example: legal language or “legalese” or a set of words, structural choices and interactional patterns that tend to occur in discourse in legal situations (Melinkoff, 1963; Bowers, 1989; Bhatia, 1993)

Social Roles and Participant Structure

Common pair of discourse roles: Server and client

Example: service crew and customerteacher and studentparent and child

One of the ways in which social identities and discourse roles can be indexed is via forms of address.

Choices include first name or nickname; last name only; title plus last name; title only; terms for family members like Dad, Mom, Sis or quasi-family members; or numerous forms like luv, honey, bro, sweetie, old man, mate and so on.

Every time a form of address is used, it helps create, change or reaffirm a social relationship, in addition to indexing a set of conventional expectations.

Example: a student is expected to call his/her teacher by “Ma’am” or “Sir” in a conventional way

Choices among forms of address are complex and often difficult.

Example:“We’re all on a first-name basis around here” is never simply a statement of fact, but an attempt to shape the beliefs and behaviors of others.

Discourse roles are indexed via choices of words to use and what words to say

Note the difference of the two utterances:a) (a teacher in school) Well, today I thought we’d do

three quizzes b) (in casual conversation) Well, today I thought we’d

talk about my Holiday in France

The first utterance is fairly usual because the teacher is expected to decide interactions while the second one might be rude.

People create roles for one another and reinforce the difference between roles as they speak in ways their roles require.

Example: teacher and studentsTeachers only exist because there are students, and vice versa.

Teacher: What does the food give you?Student 1: StrengthTeacher: Not only strength, we have another

word for it.Student 2: Energy.Teacher: Good girl, energy, yes.

Footing

One useful way of thinking about how people orient to their own and others’ roles is in terms of “footing” (Goffman, 1981 [1979]).

For Erving Goffman:“ a change in footing implies a change in the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance.”

A footing may be associated with a conventional , named role such as “teacher” or “journalist” or it may signal an alignment to gender.

Shifts in linguistic style can index shifts in footing.

Example: a bilingual interpreter in a beauty pageant who acts as an interpreter between the contestant and the interviewer

*Subtle shifts in footing can cause trouble in interaction.

A person who utters a sentence may have one or more roles: 1) Principal – the person/group who has decided what to

say and responsible for its having been said; or2) Author- the person who planned the actual words; or3) Animator – the person who wrote down or spoke the

words

Example: a speech writer for a politicianPrincipal: politicianAuthor: speech writerAnimator: Politician/ spokesperson

Audience, Politeness and Accomodation

An audience may be imagined as a collection of actual people or as an image in the mind of a speaker or a writer.

Audience may be passive listeners or active co-participants in the meaning making process of discourse

Example: jointly constructed, highly interactive discourse is highly valued and audience is considered as co-authors

PolitenessAs discourse is shaped by audience and speakers and

interlocutors have their social needs, both participants behave according to the “rules” to proceed with smooth interaction. These rules are Lakoff’s three “rules of politeness” (1973, 1974b):

1) Formality (Distance): Do not impose on others; be sufficiently aloof.

2) Hesitancy (Deference): Allow the addressee options about whether or not to respond and about how to respond

3) Equality (Camaraderie): Act as if you and the addressee are equal; make the addressee feel good

Lakoff claimed that:

Three rules must be balanced since they cannot all be maximized at once

Example: More formality = less equality/ camaraderieMore equality = less hesitancy

Speech act or behavior may be perceived as rude, odd inappropriate when the balance is off. Hence, a misunderstanding may result in an interaction.

“Positive-face” and “negative-face”

Politeness works in terms of “positive face” and “negative face” (Brown and Levinson, 1987).

Face is defined as “the negotiated public image mutually granted to each other by participants in a communicative event” (Scollon et al, 2012).

In social interactions, humans have social needs: the need to be liked (positive face) and the need to be respected (not being imposed on - referred to as negative face)

Whenever a “Face-Threatening Act” or FTA must be performed – a speech action which poses a threat to addressee’s positive or negative face – speakers must employ strategies that mitigate or redress the threat

Involvement strategies – those that we use to establish or maintain closeness with the people with whom we are interacting – to show them that we consider them as friends.

Independence strategies - those that we use to establish or maintain distance from the people with whom we are interacting either because we are not friends or we want to show them respect by not imposing on them

Face strategiesInvolvement strategies Independence strategies

Using first names or nicknames (Hey, Rodders!)

Using title (Good afternoon, Professor Jones.)

Expressing interest (What have you been up to lately?)

Apologising (I’m terribly sorry to bother you.)

Claiming a common point of view (I know exactly what you mean.)

Admitting differences (Of course, you know much more about it than I do)

Making assumptions (I know you have lots of sugar in your coffee.)

Not making assumptions (How would you like your coffee today?)

Using informal language (Gotta minute?) Using formal language (Pardon me, can you spare a few moments?)

Being direct (Will you come?) Being indirect and hedging (I wonder if you might possibly drop by.)

Being optimistic (I’m sure you’ll have a great time.)

Being pessimistic (I’m afraid you’ll find it a bit boring.)

Being voluble (talking a lot) Being taciturn (not talking much)Talking about ‘us’ Talking about things other than ‘us’

Social Identity and Identification

Everyday interaction requires “performances” Goffman (1959) of selves strategically geared to interactional demands at hand. The term “identity” has been used to describe these performances.

Identity refers to the outcome of processes by which people index their similarity to and difference from others (the process might be called “identification)

Social identities are associated with race, gender, ethnicity and nationality.

Identities can be also associated with participant role in discourse like author or overhearer, or social cliques in some school.

Social identities can be indexed by styles of discourse.

Example: a person want to identify with a certain category of women, she (or he) can adopt ways of talking that are conventionally associated with this group

Personal Identity: Discourse and the Self

This can involve adopting a consistent personal style, or conversely, it can involve calling attention to the fact that one is always flexible, across modes of behavior and situations (Johnstone, 1996).

Three characteristics of personal identity (Linde, 1993):1) Represent the experience of continuity of the self

over time2) Represent the relationship of the self to others3) Represent the experience of one’s own life as a

meaningful whole.

The Linguistic Individual in Discourse

Participants in discourse are individual human beings therefore, discourse is fundamentally creative.

Creative, because no two people speak the same language and humans are individual agents. Different people experience the world through different eyes, different bodies; they have different stories. Concepts of the self vary widely across cultures and others have free will to make their moral choices.

References

Johnstone, B. (2008) Discourse Analysis, Second Edition. USA:Blackwell Publishing.

Machin, D. & Mayr, A. (2012) How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis A Multimodal Introduction. London: Sage.

Jones, R. (2012) Discourse analysis: a resource book for students. London and New York: Routledge