Download spoken-genres

SPOKEN GENRES IN THE
WORKPLACE
What do you remember about the key
differences between the written and
spoken modes?
What features of conversations can you
remember?
Issues we have already covered which you might want
to discuss in relation to spoken genres in occupation
contexts:
• Grice’s Conversational Maxims and the Cooperative Principle
• The concept of ‘face’; face threatening acts
• Positive and negative politeness strategies
• Phatic tokens
• Forms of address
Starting point: using this transcript, what do you
notice about spoken genres in the workplace?
Here, Kerry has been given a
position with another
organisation and wishes to
attend a conference before
she leaves her current job
without having her pay
docked. Ruth is the manager.
Drew and Heritage (1992)
• Institutional talk is goal-oriented: Talk is oriented to particular tasks and
functions
• There are constraints on contribution (who can say what to whom), dependent
on role and hierarchy.
• There are accepted conventions and ‘unwritten rules’ such as constraints on
affective (about emotions) talk, which is seen as inappropriate.
– Formal settings such as courtroom, classroom, news interviews are all powerfully
structured by turn-taking conventions. Participants are constrained by this and this
insures relevance. There is asymmetry.
– There are sanctions if conventions are contravened! (e.g. pupil interrupts teacher) These
settings also have audiences who overhear. The turn-taking conventions curtail and
control audience participation. ( e.g. Especially classroom and courtroom)
– These contexts are public.
ISSUES OF ASYMMETRY AND STATUS
• This can be maintained through turn design and sequence organisation –
who is controlling the agenda and discourse?
• There is a direct relationship between status and role in discourse.
• Depending on status, participants will have different access to knowledge
as well as participation in interaction (this is not the case in ordinary
conversation). Those with greater status gain control over topic and
therefore agenda.
• Patients may lack access to ‘hidden’ agenda of a doctor’s questioning.
• Tension can be caused by an organisation’s treatment of individuals as
‘routine case’ and the client sees his/her case as unique and personal not fitting into a perceived pattern.
OCCUPATIONAL TALK IN NON-FORMAL
SETTINGS
• There is less uniformity of interaction in non-formal settings
such as – medical consultations, social service and business
interactions.
• The discourse is still asymmetrical (particularly Q and A turntaking)
• Sanctions cannot be used if participants contravene turntaking (e.g. patient interrupts doctor).
• These contexts are private not public. There may be elements
of ordinary conversation.
Looking back at the transcript before,
what do you notice about the setting?
• In what ways is the discourse asymmetrical?
• Are there sanctions for breaking ‘unwritten
codes’?
• Who holds the floor? Who controls turntaking?
TURN DESIGN
• A turn will be designed to perform an action (e.g. an
answer to a question can be defensive or in agreement).
• A turn can be used to achieve an end in a variety of ways
– different speakers can employ different ways to achieve
the same end (e.g. agreement can be offered in a variety
of ways and demands can be made in different ways and
thus chosen)
• Consider the difference between ‘Get out your
homework’ and ‘Please have your homework ready’.
In the interaction between Kerry and Ruth, in what ways are turns designed? In what ways
are direct requests mitigated (or not!)?
Speech act theory (J. L. Austin, 1962)
• Many utterances are equivalent to actions. When someone says: “I
name this ship” or “I now pronounce you man and wife”, the
utterance creates a new social or psychological reality. That is, people
believe that the ship has this name and these two people are
married. (In the case of marriage, some of us would add that the
marriage is somehow fixed or favoured by God.)
– Locutionary acts are simply the speech acts that have taken place.
– Illocutionary acts are the real actions which are performed by the utterance,
where saying equals doing, as in betting, plighting one's troth, welcoming
and warning.
– Perlocutionary acts are the effects of the utterance on the listener, who
accepts the bet or pledge of marriage, is welcomed or warned.
Looking deeper: illocutionary acts
•
David Crystal, quoting J.R. Searle, gives five categories of illocutionary acts:
– Representatives: here the speaker asserts a proposition to be true, using such verbs
as: affirm, believe, conclude, deny, report.
– Directives: here the speaker tries to make the hearer do something, with such words
as: ask, beg, challenge, command, dare, invite, insist, request.
– Commissives: here the speaker commits himself (or herself) to a (future) course of
action, with verbs such as: guarantee, pledge, promise, swear, vow, undertake, warrant.
– Expressives: the speaker expresses an attitude to or about a state of affairs, using such
verbs as: apologize, appreciate, congratulate, deplore, detest, regret, thank, welcome.
– Declarations the speaker alters the external status or condition of an object or situation,
solely by making the utterance: I now pronounce you man and wife, I name this ship, I
sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you be dead. (In this case, the alteration is
not the execution of the sentence - which is in the future - but the convict's passing
under sentence and becoming a condemned man or woman.)
Putting this into practice
• Now look at this
transcript: can you
identify ways in which
speech acts are used?
• Extension: how does
‘Len’ mitigate the
directness of his
requests?
SEQUENCE ORGANISATION
•
•
•
•
•
Some institutional discourse inhibits the contributions of those of unequal status (e.g.
in clinical or classroom contexts) This means that misunderstandings can arise when the
discourse is highly controlled by a powerful participant e.g. teacher, doctor etc.
There are institutional patterns of talk e.g. question and answer (adjacency pairs)
sequences are often the dominant form of talk.
(Frankel 1990) in medical consultations fewer than 1% of patient utterances were
initiatory (asking questions or beginning a sequence of talk. This was the same in court
proceedings with witnesses.
Classroom discourse is characterised by particular three-part sequence –
QUESTION – ANSWER – EVALUATION
teacher - pupil
teacher
(or IRF Initiation – Response – Feedback)
(Mehan 1985) Teachers ask questions to which they already know the answers and evaluations reaffirm
their superior knowledge and thus power.
In some contexts e.g. court proceedings, questioners remain neutral by withholding
responses or evaluations of answers.
Putting this into practice
• Looking at either the Kerry/Ruth dialogue, or
the government organisation discussion,
consider how turns are organised in terms of
who speaks and when.
An alternative context
• Most of the occupational contexts we have
been exploring are ‘white-collar’ institutions,
i.e. administrative or work which requires high
levels of formal education.
• How do you expect that a ‘blue-collar’ or
manual labour environment to be different in
terms of occupational lexis?
Look at this: does it confirm or challenge your
expectations?
Discussing the style model
• What is this text’s purpose(s)? Context? Genre? Audience?
• What is its primary argument about the language of
emails?
• What might you want to include in an text of this genre
about the language of emails in business communication?
Which theoretical ideas would you want to discuss? Would
prescriptivism/descriptivism have a place here? What
would your primary argument be?
– Plan how you would give reasons for your primary argument.
• How would you select an appropriate register or sociolect
for the genre?
Write an opinion article in which you
discuss the issues surrounding the use of
emails in occupational contexts. Before
you write your article you should state
your intended audience.
Homework
• To write up your article and post it on your
wordpress portfolio.
• Write an opinion article in which you discuss the
issues surrounding the use of emails in
occupational contexts. Before you write your
article you should state your intended audience.