SOME NOTES
FOR WEEK 1
The course will be concerned
with
1) communication between different cultures, and with
differences in cultures that may
affect communication.
We will also concern
ourselves with
2) changes in our own
culture (some brought about by technology, some not),
that have changed the ways
that we communicate (the forms, styles, and amounts).
And also we will be concerned
with the:
3) nature of systems by
which people communicate with one another,
and with the kinds of
meanings that are communicated.
Thus we will be concerned
with both semiotics, the study of signs, and with meaning;
(i.e. with languages as
systems that can convey meaning,
with speech (discourse) as
the manifestation(s) of language.
Some useful Jargon for this
Course (mostly anthropological and linguistic jargon)
Jargon - specialized
vocabulary or technical terminology of a specialized group or activity
CULTURE - 1) learned,
shared, traditional behavior.
"Culture is learned, acted out,
transmitted, and preserved
through communication." (behavior)
2) a construction of
reality that is created, shared, and transmitted by members of a
group (and used to guide
and evaluate behavior, whether or not this is explicitly
acknowledged by
participants). (n. bonvillain p. 2) (mental model)
Ethnocentric – Thinking one's own culture is superior to other
cultures.
COMMUNICATION
1) communication takes place
whenever people attach meaning to behavior, and
often takes place out
of awareness.
2) "communication is a dynamic,
systematic process in which meanings are created
and reflected in human
interaction with symbols."
3) transmission of
(meaningful) messages from a sender to a receiver.
LANGUAGE
1) a set of symbols and the rules for combining those symbols
that are used and
understood by a community of
people.
2) a system of meaningful signs by which humans communicate
explicit messages.
Uses of language and the
meanings transmitted, can be seen as situational, social, and cultural.
situational meanings are conveyed through forms of
language that occur or are excluded in various
contexts - (e.g.
in formal encounters speakers pronounce sounds clearly, avoid slang or
profanity, etc)
social meanings are signaled by linguistic
alternatives chosen by different groups within a community
(e.g. men and women may pronounce sounds differently,
roofers employ special roofing terminology)
cultural meanings are expressed both in the
symbolic senses of words and by the ways
that interlocutors evaluate communicative behavior.
FORM - the sensory
or physical properties possessed by something that embodies meaning
(e.g. a sound, word, sentence, narrative or other element
of discourse)
MEANING - That which
is conveyed by a message. (sense,
significance,
import,
anything admitting of interpretation).
More narrowly, meaning is -- the entity, quality, action, or relationship inferred from or
implied by a sign, and by extension the emotional or intellectual
impact of experience
on an individual.
Words do not really possess
meaning—they just convey it. It is
more accurate to say that
people possess meanings and
that words elicit these meanings. What
the word 'dog' means
to you may be slightly
different, or even very different from
what it means to me, for example.
MESSAGE - a
communication by means of signs;
an idea transmitted from one place to another.
SEMIOTICS - the study
of signs
Sign - sends a
message
1) (relation holding between [form] and signified
[meaning]); a form that has
meaning
signs are understandable and describable but the meaning
attached
to them is dynamic
2) (a communicative
some) thing that stands for something else.
an entity is a sign of a given referent if it elicits
at least
some of the responses elicited by the referent)
3) a message vehicle
ICON - expresses relation of formal
similarity between
meaning and meaning carrier (form)
INDEX - expresses relation of contiguity
(between meaning and
meaning carrier (form)
SYMBOL - expresses relation based on a learned
convention,
ascribed contiguity, or binding between
meaning and
meaning carrier (form).
ETHNOGRAPHY OF
COMMUNICATION -
includes description and
analysis of speech habits, situational contexts, and
cultural norms used in producing
and evaluating speech. It identifies the possible components,
functions,
and contexts of speech acts
in a given speech community or society,
as well as similarly
delineating named speech events and speech
situations in that community.
DISCOURSE events of
communication - discourse units
(utterances,
communicative events, messages with social and
linguistic meaning).
THE SPEECH ACT minimal
communicative acts employing verbal means (e.g.
'[telling a] joke'
involves participants, a message, a code, a topic, a context
minimally a speech act has 7 components:
sender, receiver, message form, message channel,
code, topic,context.
9
possible functions of a speech act can be
associated with
these 7 components
SPEECH EVENT composed of
one or more speech acts, and characterized by
having specifiable rules governing the use of speech
.
e.g. a 'joke'
(speech act) can occur in a 'lecture' (speech event), a formal
introduction (speech event), or a sermon (speech event).
SPEECH SITUATION a 'joke'
(speech act) could also occur within a
'conversation'
(speech event) at a 'party' (speech situation)
Below are some concepts and
their labels (jargon) relevant to this course.
SPEECH COMMUNITY
a. A group of people who interact by means of speech.
(Bloomfield)
b. A community sharing knowledge of rules for the conduct and
interpretation of speech. (Hymes)
c. Not a group of speakers who all use the same forms, but rather a
group who...share a set of social attitudes
toward their
own and others' language and speech. (Labov)
SPEECH NETWORK -
"speech community" is an abstraction and individuals don't
interact with all other
members, the concept of speech network was developed. People
in a speech network have
contact with each other on a regular basis.
People in "weak
networks" have less
regular contact and do not know all of each others' associates.
People in "dense
networks" have more frequent contact and are likely linked by more
than one type of bond (e.g.
same neighborhood, same work, relatives).
ETHNOLINGUISTIC APPROACH - employs anthropological techniques of gathering
data from observations of people's daily lives and of attempting to
understand behavior from the participants'
point(s) of view.
Ethnolinguists try to extract communicative rules by observing
the
behaviors occurring (or not) in various contexts and observers
reactions to them.
They want to understand what one needs to know in
order to function appropriately in a given culture.
SOCIOLINGUISTIC APPROACH - concern w/
1. discovering
patterns of linguistic
variation (from differences in speech situations and social
distinctions
within a community that are reflected in
communicative performance);
2. with the dynamic
connection between
language (style, pronunciation, code, register) and social
factors (gender,
age, class, region, race, ethnicity,
occupation)