Glossary:
Week 1
Chapter 1
Everyday talk The ordinary kinds of communicating people do everyday.
identity Who people are, is what communication theorist call identity. Most personal
aspects, character, personality, attitudes, roles, background (ethnic)
Tactic knowledge Knowledge you routinely use to make sense of actions and inform your own
communicative choices this knowledge is not easy to articulate. (hidden) shoe
laces.
Explicit Knowledge that can be articulated to help analyze who you are.
knowledge
Cooperation Guides how people talk and interpret. Participants should make their
principle conversational contribution such as is required: quantity maxim: say the right
amount, quality maxim; say what is true, relevance maxim; say only what is
relevant, manner maxim; avoid ambiguous obscure phrases.
Conversational Meanings that differ from what a person said explicitly (ignoring a maxim)
implicatures
Identity work The process through which talk makes available to participants who people
doing the talk must be. Identity shapes talk people live in different communities
which results in some sort of talk. Talk does identity work: the choices of how to
talk shapes an identity.
utterance The smallest meaningful unit are always situated. Occurring at particular times
and places, directed toward particular someone. Could be as short as a single
word and is different from a sentence.
content First level of meaning in the unit of social life: the conventional meaning of the
words or phrases: the literal or dictionary meaning exists apart from content.
The interactional The meaning of the utterance in the situation it was said. It depends on context
meaning and can be given or given off.
Given and given Meanings that are intentionally given is given. Meanings that are unintentionally
off given are called given off.
context The interactional meaning arises from the content in combination with the
context. It refers to all backgrounds kinds of information that shape how
interactional meaning gets assigned to what is said.
Contextualization Context is not restricted to features of the people & situation. Is also cued
cues through the design of utterances (how they are said, their particular vocalic
quality, tone of voice, facial expressions, order of parts of speech.
Interactional Two versions of interactional meaning: meaning intended by the first person
meaning speaking and the meaning assigned by the conversational partner.
Speech acts: Name utterances in terms of their purpose: 1 information giving, 2 make an
offer, 3 complementing, 4 criticizing, 5 requesting a favor, 6 ordering another to
do something, 7 apologizing, 8 something else, this is the first of the 3 questions
about interactional meaning: what act is being performed by uttering the words.
Situation frame: Second question/layer: understood label for occasion, the everyday names we
give to speech occasions. Frames are inferred rom the physical situation and
change through the ways people talk with each other.
Identity work: The third set of questions we could pose about the meaning of an interaction
focusses on the people doing the talking. What kind of person is the
communicator? How does each one regard the other? What kind of relationship
do the two have? Identify work does refer to this kind of interactional meaning.
It is the way a segment of talk implicates who the person talking must be.
,Face Is the view of self each person seeks to uphold in an interaction.
Face threat: Is the challenge a person experiences to a facet of identity he or she cares about
in a particular situation.
Identity: A term with meany meanings. It includes most personal aspects of who people
are, as well as group-level identifications.
Category In research about communication and identity, some researchers adopt a
approach: category approach: equating identity with group-level categories such as
ethnicity, nationality and social class. Category approaches treat identities as
stable aspects of persons that shape how they communicate.
Social In contrast, other scholars adopt a social constructionist approach: they assume
constructionist that who people are is created through the actions they choose, particularly
approach their expressive choices. Identity is regarded as fluid, better referred to in the
plural (identities). People change their identities to suit the needs of the
moment.
Master identities: The first kind of identity: it refers to those aspects of a personhood that are
presumed to be relatively stable and unchanging: gender, ethnicity, age, national
and regional origins.
Contrastive sets: Meanings can change over time and across situations. Of note is the fact that
master identities frequently are conceived as contrastive sets. The meaning of
male is deeply bound up with the meaning of being female: each gender
category informs and contrastively defines the other.
Interactional The second kind of identity: it refers to specific roles that people take on in a
identity: communicative context with regard to specific other people.
Personal identity: The third kind of identity: it is what in ordinary life we think of as individuals’
personality and character, their relationships with others. Their attitudes about
events, issues and other people. It includes features of self that are treated as
relatively stable, even though they may vary from situation to situation.
Positive face: One kind of face that focusses on competence and likeability is what is labeled
as the positive face.
Negative face: The second kind of face is geared to seeking respect and avoiding imposition.
Facework: Refers to how everyday talk practices support or challenges one or the other
party’s face.
Discourse: Discourse means noting more than a multi utterance unit of talk.
Discursive Are talk activities that people do. The reason that this is not called talk is
practices: because it leads us to see talking not just as a single thing but as an activity that
has many different parts and kinds.
Altercasting: References the work of a persons talk does to maintain, support or challenge the
conversational partner’s identities. Altercasing highlights how the way we talk t
act toward others (alters) puts them in roles (casts them). Two kind of identity
relevant issues are likely to be at stake: what kind of student teacher relationship
to the two have (aspect of each party’s personal identity and the particular
speech acts that are being performed and what the acts signify about the
teacher and the student.
communication Communication is a transfer at a certain time in a certain place.
Chapter 2
Rhetoric The art of discovering the available means of persuasion in a given case.
Analyzing discourse rhetorically foregrounds three things.
Strategic: First: it highlights individual agency. People are not cultural dopes, merely
enacting scripts. They are strategic. Choice making, planning agents tailoring
their communication for particular settings
Normative: Rhetorical perspective is a normative and evaluative one. If an action is an
, expression of some natural order, then a suitable response is to try
understanding it. it is not something to be evaluated as good or bad. However, if
actions are choices, then moral and or practical evaluation is appropriate.
Phronesis: Finally rhetorical perspective involves phronesis. Communicative action is
sensitive to practical challenges. Because it emphasizes that people can cultivate
an ability to choose how they will respond to moral demands in everyday life the
rhetorical perspective brings together strategy and normativity.
Phronesis thus also highlights how a rhetorical perspective is a problem centered
or, attentive to the dilemma’s of social life.
Gatekeepers: Academic advisors are first and foremost gatekeepers for society and the
institutions they represent.
Metaphor: Uses different context and ideas as a way of talking that implies that two
compared items are similar or nearly the same. Metaphor can be thought of as a
way of framing something in a nonliteral way.
Culture: An invisible system of symbolic resources that shapes peoples daily interactional
practices. For everyday talk a cultural perspective is the fact that groups of
people will speak and interpret actions of those around them in a patterned
way.
Speech To understand why people talk as they do, it is important to look at the groups in
communities: which people have spent large amounts of time. Hymes calls speech
communities professional, school, work, and recreational groups other scholars
have labeled discourse communities or communities of practice.
Speech codes: Speech communities share ways of talking which are speech codes. And ways of
making sense. (Interpersonal ideologies. These two are deeply bound together
such that ideology furnishes the logic behind a code.
Interpersonal Communities beliefs about interpersonal ideologies: people, relationships, and
ideologies: communicative action. In particular, an interpersonal ideology includes beliefs
about (1) the values people should pursue in intimate, work, and public
relationships (e.g., establishing closeness between people, respecting individual
autonomy, validating people’s basic equality, respecting status and social rank
differences); (2) what communicative acts count as being reasonable, fair,
friendly, and so on, and why they count as such; and (3) what are appropriate
communicative practices for persons of different master and interactional
identities.
speaking Dell Hymes developed a mnemonic device for organizing the sort of contextual
observations to which analysts taking a cultural perspective should attend.
Speaking stands for elements of a cultural scene: setting: (time and place in
environment), participants (people in the situation), ends (the purposes, goals,
and outcomes), act sequence (the structure of what happens in what order in
the situation), key (the tone), instrumentalities (particular ways of speaking),
norms (the social rules governing the event), genre (kind of event or label for
what is going on).
Cultural Descriptions of cultural patterns, what can be called cultural generalizations, can
generalizations often be used inappropriately. They can become stereotypes that get used
interactively to blame and to keep people in undesirable places.
Lecture Week 1
A communication Communication – society
– perspective Communication: interaction, discourse, interaction order.
Society: social world, context, social order.
What should we do? Where do we want to go to (social cognition)
We all have our own cognition but we should also have a collective cognition,
