ETHNOGAPHY OF
COMMUNICATION: SECOND PART
…a society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to
operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and do so in any role that they accept for
any one of themselves (Goodenough , 1957: 36).
Anthropological Approaches to
Language as Action
• Bronislaw Malinowski (1884—1942)
• the native’s point of view
• the native’s relations to life
• the native’s vision of his world
Malinowski’s Ethnographic
Theory
• 1. context of the situation
• 2. language as a mode of action
• Inadequacies of translation
• limitations of traditional grammatical
analysis
Ethnographic Theory of
Language
• Living among the natives
• Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935) in
Trobriand Islands
• Function of language: Pragmatic, active
• Pragmatism typical of all languages
• Pragmatics: Verbal acts, Speech acts
Speech Acts as Units of Action
• J.L Austin (1940’s) Speech Acts
• Limitations of declarative sentences or
assertions
• All men are mortal.
• The snow is white.
• The king of France is Bald.
Types of Speech Acts
• Locutionary acts
• Illocutionary acts
• Perlocutionary acts
A locutionary act
• the act of saying something:
You are fired, I will pay you back next
week, What time is it?
An illocutionary Act
• the act the speaker can accomplish in saying
something by means of the conventional
force of the locutionary act.
• You are fired: may be used to change
someone’s status from employee to
unemployed
A perlocutionary act
• the actual act produced by the uttering of
the particular locution
• May or may not coincide with illocutionary
acts
Speech acts:
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Ways of expressing intentions
Ways of expressing goals
Directly or indirectly
Routines: greetings, apologies,
complements, etc
The Characteristics of Routines
• 1. similarity of function in social
interaction: solidarity, cohesion
• 2. occur as sequences of exchanges between
participants: responses
• 3. they are formulaic: instances of patterned
form used by speakers
Speech Acts: Routines
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Greetings
Apologies
Formal or informal
Culture specific
Sense of equality or inequality
Summary
• Speech acts: refer to the ways speakers express
themselves based on their intentions
• Types: locutionary, illocutionary and
perlocutionary
• Also routines: greetings, apologies, thanks,
complements, etc
• Importance of studying language within the
context of culture