Laura M. Ahearn - Living Language

In an earlier version of this well-known typology, Goffman (1986[1974]) presented a slightly different set of roles that included “emitter,” for the voice box, and “animator” to represent the “expressive actions” accompanying talk, which is interesting to note with reference to our focus on multimodality in this chapter. Other scholars have also suggested multiple alternative roles. The most important insight to glean, however, is Goffman’s initial one that the dominant language ideology concerning conversations – that they involve one unified speaker and one unified hearer – is a model that is, at best, too simple and, at worst, simply incorrect.

Sometimes, all three speaker roles are inhabited by one person, but sometimes they can be distributed across several people or be relatively indeterminate (cf. Irvine 1996). So, to give a hypothetical example, let’s assume that President Obama once delivered a speech that was written by a speech writer who totally disagreed with the President’s policies. Let’s also assume that the speech writer wrote eloquently and convincingly enough to keep his or her job. As President Obama delivered the speech, he would be considered the animator (the voice box) and, presumably, the principal (the person whose opinions are being expressed), but the speech writer would be the author – and not the animator or the principal. Even in ordinary conversations, these roles frequently shift, especially when reported speech is used. Goffman called these instances shifts in footing :

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 change in our footing is another way of talking about a change in our frame for events. … [P]articipants over the course of their speaking constantly change their footing, these changes being a persistent feature of natural talk.

(1981:128)

Such shifts in footing are important to study closely, as they offer scholars clues about the multifunctionality of even the most mundane of utterances. Changes in footing also often index various social identities, cultural values, attitudes, stances, or relationships. They can be triggered by subtle verbal or nonverbal moves and are tracked by all of us as a normal part of the complex multimodality that constitutes linguistic interactions.

The approach advocated here is an integrative one that considers multiple modes of communication together because that is how we experience meaning-making on an everyday basis. Nevertheless, it is useful to separate out a few key modes for analytical purposes. Speech, as the primary mode of communication in many instances, deserves special attention. Linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, and other scholars who study speech often refer to “talk-in-interaction” so as to emphasize the socially situated and jointly constructed nature of the speech they are analyzing.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Emanuel Schegloff, Harvey Sacks, and Gail Jefferson developed the approach known as Conversation Analysis (CA for short), and it has evolved since then into a vibrant field of study. CA practitioners focus on the sequential organization of talk as it unfolds moment by moment. They consider each utterance to be the context for the next utterance, and most CA scholars therefore believe that bringing in data from other methods such as interviews or experiments would constitute making unwarranted inferences (Mondada 2013:33–34; Sidnell and Stivers 2013).

Because the sequential nature of conversation is a key insight of CA scholars, turn-taking is one of their central concepts. The precise coordination needed for participants in a conversation to switch from speaking to listening and back again is accomplished largely unconsciously. We pick up on subtle pauses, intonation, or other prosodic features in speech such as pitch, volume, or rhythm, and most of the time use that information to switch turns in a conversation right on cue with what came to be called “no gaps, no overlaps” turn-taking (Duranti 1997:245ff; Walker 2013).

In addition to such cues, part of what enables this sort of coordination to occur are components of conversation that CA scholars have identified called adjacency pairs . These are sequences of two utterances spoken by two different speakers. An extremely common adjacency pair in English is, “How are you?” – with the preferred response, “Fine.” A typical greeting exchange in Nepal is a bit different, however. When one meets another person, one frequently asks, “Where are you going?” The response is often a less-than-informative one: “In that direction.” (Both of these adjacency pairs are perfect examples of cases in which Jakobson’s phatic function predominates.)

There are many types of adjacency pairs, and they vary across languages and speech communities. Some examples include all sorts of question/answer exchanges, including offer/acceptance and offer/rejection (“Would you like to come with me?” “Sure!” or, “Do you want me to help you?” “No, thanks.”). Compliment/rejection is a fairly common (and gendered) adjacency pair in this society (“That’s a lovely dress you’re wearing.” “Oh, it’s just a rag I pulled out of the closet.”).

Many other adjacency pairs can be identified, along with their culturally preferred types of responses. Dispreferred responses can be illuminating as well, such as when someone is asked an everyday “How are you?” and answers with a 30-minute litany of complaints. “Conversational trouble,” as well as dysfluencies and repairs, can also be extremely interesting to investigate. By focusing so closely on everyday talk – something that many researchers have either overlooked or looked right through in order to get at the “real” data – CA practitioners have drawn attention to the complex accomplishments involved in even the most mundane conversations.

As valuable as the insights of CA are, however, the assumptions and research questions of most CA practitioners differ from those of most linguistic anthropologists. 3CA scholars have traditionally insisted upon the autonomy of talk, therefore limiting themselves to analysis of transcripts. Moreover, their research questions have primarily pertained to the organization of talk itself. Linguistic anthropologists, in contrast, have generally utilized CA as one method among many (as described in the next chapter), and their research questions have usually focused on the intersections of linguistic interactions with broader social dynamics and cultural meanings. Alessandro Duranti (1997:266) identifies three main criticisms leveled at researchers who use only CA: (1) they are uninterested in the “larger contexts” of the conversations they analyze, even such basic aspects as the relationship between the people who are talking, or where or when the conversation took place; (2) their transcripts tend to indicate a very narrow view of “speech,” omitting nonverbal interactions, changes in intonation, and other aspects of multimodal discourse to be discussed in this chapter; and (3) they are completely uninterested in what the speakers themselves might say to explain or interpret their own utterances. For these reasons, when linguistic anthropologists use CA (and many do consider it an extremely valuable approach), they combine it with other methods and contextualize the conversations they analyze far more comprehensively than strict CA practitioners do. In fact, conversation analysis, in conjunction with ethnographic methods, can provide valuable insights into many different kinds of linguistic and social practices.

There have actually been some interesting indications of a rapprochement between the two groups of scholars in recent years. Ignasi Clemente (2013) identifies three phases in the relationship between CA and anthropology: