Page 40 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

18 John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz

sume that extralinguistic knowledge is introduced into the interpretive process
in a series of stages roughly equivalent to Goffman’s notion of frames (1983).
Erving Goffman’s notion of frame offers a useful point of departure. In his
highly suggestive treatment of interactive exchanges, Goffman argues that the
principles that guide action in any given encounter are hierarchically nested in
terms of levels of generality operating at various degrees of remove from the
situation at hand, with each level acting like a membrane to filter out certain
considerations while highlighting others (Goffman 1974). But Goffman did not
attempt to present an explicit theoretical framework for empirical work. How-
ever, the development of linguistic anthropology around the notion of com-
municative practice provides a way of integrating cultural knowledge of speech
situations and events into a wider approach to analyzing the cultural presupposi-
tions involved in human action.

3. Communicative practice and conversational inference

Understanding speech events rests on what Hanks (1996), following Silverstein
(1992), calls communicative practice. Communicative practice provides a unify-
ing concept for the analysis of context-bound everyday talk that enables us to
deal with grammar and semantics as they enter into situated interpretation, along
with cultural presuppositions that rely on two types of knowledge: a) grammar
and lexical signs that signal via well known grammatical rules and lexical se-
mantics and b) indexical signs, and among them contextualization conventions
that signal by direct association between sign and context. Such indexical
knowledge can only be acquired through interactive experience within a cultural
environment.
Analytical procedures, including those developed and described in previous
work at Berkeley in Interactional Sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1981, 1982), have
drawn on the concepts of speech event, activity type and conversational analysis
of sequential organization, as well as on notions of conversational inference and
contextualization to provide a range of analytical tools for understanding com-
municative practice. Conversational inference is defined as the situated, con-
text-bound process of interpretation by means of which participants in an ex-
change assess other participants’ communicative intentions and on which they
base their own responses (Gumperz 1982).
At a more local level of inference, interpretations are made about more im-
mediate communicative tasks, as for example, how to respond to a particular
move, how to initiate a topic, how to open or close an interaction, how to shift
topics or distinguish main information from subsidiary points, how to make
asides and, most importantly, how to allocate turns at talk and claim the floor. It
is this level of verbal interaction, which we can refer to as conversational man-