Page 227 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

SPEECH COMMUNITY

‘Sod off’ (or words to that effect).
‘I nowdeclare the Garden Festival open.’

These utterances exemplify a whole range of speech acts, including
those of betting, commanding, greeting, requesting an action, acknowledging,
insulting, and so on. None of them is limited to asserting some kind of
propositional truth. This kind of observation led Austin to the
conclusion that stating or asserting (in ways that can be judged true or
false) is only one of many kinds of action (or speech act) that language
makes possible – actions as diverse as warning, promising, naming,
exemplifying, commenting and challenging. Significantly, for many of
these actions it is difficult to envisage howelse they might be
performed except in words. Since Austin’s pioneering work, most
attention has been devoted to trying to identify a determinate range of
speech acts, and also to specifying precisely the recognition criteria for
the most common speech acts, such as questions or commands.
The concept is an important one for communication and cultural
studies, partly as a way of countering simplistic linear flow models of
communication that see it simply in terms of ‘information transfer’ or
‘exchanging ideas’. It has also been influential in studies of social
interaction by providing an analytic tool for a variety of research
traditions ranging from discourse analysis to the ethnography of
communication.
See also: Discourse, Language, functions of, Pragmatics

Further reading: Austin (1962); Montgomery (1986); Searle (1969)

SPEECH COMMUNITY

A group of people who share a common language or linguistic variety.
A speech community in the strongest sense will also display common
ways of using the shared language and common attitudes towards it
within a given society. The term is important for highlighting the way
in which language exists not just as an abstract system, codified in
grammar books and dictionaries; it is integral to everyday social life
and belongs ultimately to its community of users. It is they who make
and remake it in their everyday encounters.
At the same time it is a term beset with difficulties. First, the
reference to ‘speech’ recalls earlier societies based on face-to-face
contact, and this seems inappropriate for societies in which print and

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