The functioning of such cues also depends on the broader socio-cultural context. The functioning of a given cue is made even more ambiguous by the fact that such cues typically occur in constellations of features, e.g., a smile and a marked intonation contour, in which the constellation of features channels inferential processes differently than any one feature, in isolation, might. A smile, for example, does not always indicate a joking insult frame for the talk that it accompanies. Contextualization cues do not directly index or refer to a specific interpretive frame, but rather serve as prods to inferential processes. A broad smile and marked intonation accompanying the words “Nice tie!” can serve as contextualization cues that channel inferential processes toward a particular interpretation. Contextualization cues within the performance of the utterance can suggest the frame in which the utterance is to be interpreted. In American English, the utterance “Nice tie!” can represent a sincere compliment, or it can represent a joking insult, i.e., that the speaker finds the tie somehow inappropriate. They cue interpretive frameworks in which to interpret the propositional content of utterances, which can otherwise be ambiguous.Īn example can illustrate the dual functioning of the communicative stream as both referential content and a context in which to interpret that very referential content. They are united in a common, functional category by their use, commonly in constellations of multiple features. These surface forms range across semiotic modes, including such varied phenomena as prosody, code and lexical choice, formulaic expressions, sequencing choices, and visual and gestural phenomena. These contextualization cues – “constellations of surface features of message form” – are “the means by which speakers signal and listeners interpret what the activity is, how semantic content is to be understood and how each sentence relates to what precedes or follows” (1982a, 131). Gumperz argued that we communicate rapidly shifting interpretive frames through conventionalized surface forms, which he calls contextualization cues. At a theoretical level, this undermines a “conduit metaphor” or “information theory” notion of communication, in which context is presumed to be discrete and separate from communicative content. His program shows that socio-cultural knowledge is not just beliefs and judgments external to interaction, but rather is embedded within the talk and behavior of interaction itself. Gumperz’s interactional sociolinguistics operationalizes a dimension of this relationship. While ethnographers of communication have long emphasized that talk is contextually and culturally embedded, they have not specified how sociocultural and linguistic knowledge are systematically linked in the communication of meaning. The key theoretical contribution of interactional sociolinguistics is to illustrate a way in which social background knowledge is implicated in the signaling and interpreting of meaning. The framework can be applied to any interaction, however, and much of the empirical work that falls under the rubric “discourse analysis” in communication, linguistic anthropology, sociology, discursive psychology, and socially oriented linguistics owes a debt to this perspective. The perspective has been extended to cross-gender communication, most notably by Deborah Tannen (1990), and it has also been applied to the performance of social identity through talk. It is in such contexts – where unconscious cultural expectations and practices are not shared – that the perspective has the most salient explanatory value. Interactional sociolinguistics was developed in an anthropological context of cross-cultural comparison, and the seminal work that defined interactional sociolinguistics focused largely on contexts of intercultural miscommunication. Such methodology is central to uncovering meaning-making processes because many conventions for signaling and interpreting meaning in talk are fleeting, unconscious, and culturally variable. Methodologically, it relies on close discourse analysis of audio or video-recorded interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics attempts to bridge the gulf between empirical communicative forms – e.g., words, prosody, register shifts – and what speakers and listeners take themselves to be doing with these forms. The term and the perspective are grounded in the work of John Gumperz (1982a, 1982b), who blended insights and tools from anthropology, linguistics, pragmatics, and conversation analysis into an interpretive framework for analyzing such meanings. Interactional sociolinguistics is concerned with how speakers signal and interpret meaning in social interaction.
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