Page 46 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

24 John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz

for conversational cooperation. Where conventions are not shared, participants
are unable to agree on what activity or communicative task is being enacted.
They might, but need not necessarily, find themselves unable to predict where
the conversation is going or how to integrate what is said into a coherent whole,
so that the interaction becomes unpredictable. If attempts at turn allocation or
topic shift negotiation fail, conversationalists are in the position of strangers lost
in a foreign city who must try to find their way without being able to rely on road
signs (Gumperz 1992).
In interactional analysis, speaking is treated as a reflexive process such that
everything said can be seen as either directly reacting to preceding talk, reflect-
ing a set of immediate circumstances or responding to past events, whether
directly experienced or indirectly transmitted. To engage in verbal commu-
nication, therefore, is not just to express one’s thoughts; speaking ties into a
communicative ecology that significantly affects the course of an interaction.
We use the term ‘contextualization’ cue to refer to any linguistic sign which, when
processed in co-occurrence with symbolic grammatical and lexical signs, serves
as an indexical sign to construct the contextual presuppositions that underlie
situated interpretation and thereby affects how constituent messages are under-
stood. Code switching is one type of contextualization cue; others include pho-
netic enunciation, along with prosody (i.e. intonation and stress), rhythm, tempo
and other such supra-segmental signs (Gumperz 1991: 229–252). Contextuali-
zation cues, when interpreted along with other grammatical and lexical signs,
construct the contextual ground for situated interpretation and thereby affect
how particular messages are understood (Gumperz 1982). As metapragmatic
signs, contextualization cues represent speakers’ ways of signaling and provid-
ing information to interlocutors and audiences about how language is being
used at any point in the ongoing exchange. What sets them apart from communi-
catively similar indexical signs like “here” and “there” is that they are for the
most part intrinsically oral forms. Since no utterance can be made without such
signs, contextualization cues are ever present in talk, and to the extent that they
can be shown to affect interpretation, they provide direct evidence for the
necessary role that indexicality plays in talk. In conversation we could not pos-
sibly express all the information that interlocutors must have to plan their own
contributions and adapt their talk to that of their interlocutors, so that it is easy
to see the reason for this indexical signaling.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, indirect (not overtly lexicalized) sig-
naling mechanisms are for the most part culturally specific. That is, they reflect
conventions that speakers and listeners have learned over time by cooperating
and living with others, and in that sense they are cultural conventions (see Coder
and Meyerhoff in this volume).
How interactional sociolinguistics views the identification of contextualiz-
ation cues as a process of understanding can be illustrated in the following way: