Page 38 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

16 John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz

classroom lectures, medical encounters, and other informal encounters that we
typically participate in during the course of our lives, also constitute speech
events, as many of the chapters in this volume demonstrate. Yet, we also know
that many intercultural situations differ from what we know from reading exist-
ing ethnographic accounts in that they are less sharply delimited and that we
commonly employ event names only after the encounter, to convey something
of what was done at the time. Such labels are not sufficiently refined to capture
the details of what goes on. In a job interview, for example, a great deal of the
time may be spent in casual talk, or narratives may be used to illustrate a point,
anecdotes may be told, or elaborate instructions given, and so on.
At this stage it is useful to distinguish between different ways of analyzing
interpretations. Initially, linguistic anthropologists relied on ethnographic obser-
vations to reveal the cultural assumptions that underlie interpretations. Some-
what later a second approach emerged that focuses directly on the organization
of speech exchanges and takes a broader view of language as communicating
both content and metapragmatic or indexical information about content. This
later approach became known as interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982).
A new analytic concept that accounts for conversationalists’ ability to dis-
tinguish among phases of an event and to reach agreement on what is intended at
any one time has become established: the speech activity. In this we assume that
in the initial phase of interpretive processes listeners seek to relate the ongoing
talk to past experiences by categorizing what they see and hear as an instanti-
ation of one or another activity type (Levinson 1983). Whereas speech events
exist in time and space, the notion of activity type is used here to refer to mental
models or schemata of goal-oriented actions. Such models yield criteria for
judging what is expected and for inferring how what is said in the course of
an event fits into a coherent whole. Agreement on what activity type is being
enacted at any given time thus also implies agreement on culturally grounded
inferences such as what the likely communicative outcomes are, what range of
topics can be brought up, what information can be expressed in words, and what
interpretations should be alluded to indirectly by building on shared understand-
ing (Gumperz 1981, 1982).
The following example will illustrate some of these points.

Example 2
[New research assistant addressing the secretary of the research unit]
A: Good morning.
B: HI JOHN.
A: HOWDI.
B: HOW’RE YA DOIN?
A: Fine … ah … do you know – did you get anything back on those forms you
had me fill out?