ETHNOGRAPHY

ETHNOGRAPHY

Ethnography (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω grapho "I write") is the systematic study of people and cultures. It is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study. An ethnography is a means to represent graphically and in writing the culture of a group. The resulting field study or a case report reflects the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group.

Features of ethnographic research

•      Involves investigation of very few cases, maybe just one case, in detail.

•      Often involves working with primarily unconstructed data. This data had not been coded at the point of data collection in terms of a closed set of analytic categories.

•      Emphasizes on exploring social phenomena rather than testing hypotheses.

•      Data analysis involves interpretation of the functions and meanings of human actions. The product of this is mainly verbal explanations, where statistical analysis and quantification play a subordinate role.

•      Methodological discussions focus more on questions about how to report findings in the field than on methods of data collection and interpretation.

•      Ethnographies focus on describing the culture of a group in very detailed and complex manner. The ethnography can be of the entire group or a sub part of it.

•      It involves engaging in extensive field work where data collection is mainly by interviews, symbols, artifacts, observations, and many other sources of data.

•      The researcher in ethnography type of research looks for patterns of the group's mental activities, that is their ideas and beliefs expressed through language or other activities, and how they behave in their groups as expressed through their actions that the researcher observed.

•      In ethnography, the researcher gathers what is available, what is normal, what it is that people do, what they say, and how they work.

Procedures for conducting ethnography

•      Determine if ethnography is the most appropriate design to use to study the research problem. Ethnography is suitable if the needs are to describe how a cultural group works and to explore their beliefs, language, behaviours and also issues faced by the group, such as power, resistance, and dominance.

•      Then identify and locate a culture-sharing group to study. This group is one whose members have been together for an extended period of time, so that their shared language, patterns of behaviour and attitudes have merged into discernible patterns. This group can also be a group that has been marginalized by society.

•      Select cultural themes, issues or theories to study about the group. These themes, issues, and theories provide an orienting framework for the study of the culture-sharing group. As discussed by Hammersley and Atkinson (2007), Wolcott, and Fetterman (2009). The ethnographer begins the study by examining people in interaction in ordinary settings and discerns pervasive patterns such as life cycles, events, and cultural themes.

•      For studying cultural concepts, determine which type of ethnography to use. Perhaps how the group works need to be described, or a critical ethnography can expose issues such as power, hegemony, and advocacy for certain groups.

•      Should collect information in the context or setting where the group works or lives. This is called fieldwork. Types of information typically needed in ethnography are collected by going to the research site, respecting the daily lives of individuals at the site and collecting a wide variety of materials. Field issues of respect, reciprocity, deciding who owns the data and others are central to Ethnography.

Ethnography of Communication: A Person-Centered Approach

•      Setting: The resident’s room in the nursing home

•      Participants: A person with dementia and a graduate student in speech-language pathology

•      Ends (goals): These are difficult to ascertain in the case of the person with dementia. However, the graduate student has both overt goals (e.g., to learn about the resident’s life, and to spend time visiting with him/her) and covert goals (e.g., to collect data in order to study and treat dementia)

•      Acts sequence: The types of communication used (e.g., a question-answer format)

•      Key: Whether the interaction is informal or formal

•      Instrumentality: The mode of communication (e.g., conversation or sign language)

•      Norms: Polite conversation

•      Genre: Possibly a friendly chat or “small talk”

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SOLIDARITY AND POLITENESS

SOLIDARITY AND POLITENESS

The purpose of the present research from a sociolinguistic stance is to consider the aspects of solidarity and politeness including face-threatening acts from the point of view of their linguistic components, relevance for social interaction and their usage in male/female discourse.     In essence, this research will show that certain linguistic choices a speaker makes indicate the social relationship that the speaker perceives to exist between his or her interlocutor.

Generalizations concerning address systems

Aspects of social relationships, such as distance, solidarity or intimacy are given linguistic expression by address systems consisting of a T/V distinction and address terms. This way, speakers are given the chance to either be more formal or less formal with their interlocutor on certain occasions (Hickey 2007: 3).

Basic concepts and origin of T/V distinction and address terms

v  The term address denotes a speaker’s linguistic reference to his/her interlocutor.

v   Address means  only the main linguistic interaction without opening forms of address.

v   Speaking of forms of address includes words and phrases that are used for addressing.

v  These words and phrases refer to the interlocutor and thus contain deictic expressions designating the interlocutors, but not necessarily so, since their lexical meaning can differ from or even contradict the addressee’s characteristics.

Pronoun of Address

v  Concerning pronouns of address, it has to be mentioned that pronouns referring to the interlocutors are meant. These pronouns are second person pronouns such as English you, German du and Ihr, French tu and vous

v  For convenience sake in order to thus designate a pronoun that either refers to social distance (V) or intimacy (T) in any language (1960: 254).

semantic evolution of the usage of T and V pronouns of address

v  Considering the consequence and the semantic evolution of the usage of T and V pronouns of address, it was apparent that by medieval times the upper classes began to use V forms with each other to show “mutual respect and politeness” (Wardhaugh 1992: 259).

v  Nevertheless, T forms of social intimacy or rather solidarity persisted among the lower classes with the upper classes using T forms only when addressing the lower classes

v  Contrary to this, V forms were on the one hand used by the upper classes amongst themselves to show respect or rather politeness and on the other hand V forms were used by the lower classes when addressing the upper classes so that a social distance was established between these classes.

v  In referring to Brown and Gilman (1960), Wardhaugh points out at that this T/V usage of upper classes addressing lower ones with T but receiving V forms of respect resulted in a non-reciprocal usage of asymmetrical patterns of address that therefore came to semantically symbolize a ‘power’ relationship such as officer to soldier, priest to penitent or master/mistress to servants (1992: 259

v  This power semantic is based upon a strict rule in which the superior says T and the inferior addresses the superior with the V form.

v  In contrast to this power semantic of the non-reciprocal usage of T/V pronouns of address usage, the reciprocal V usage of symmetrical address terms, that is when both interlocutors independent of class address each other with the V pronoun of address, then this usage of V forms, as Wardhaugh puts it, becomes ‘polite’ usage.

v  On the basis of this statement, the V form can be used by both interlocutors to indicate politeness as well as social distance along with the T form now being used by both to show solidarity (Lambert/Tucker 1976: 2).

v   But the non-reciprocal T/V usage can still be used to express status differences,

v  At least in American English when for instance, one person addresses another with a first name and expects a title plus last name in return, for example:

v   ‘Is that you, Max?’ ‘Yes, Mr. Adams.’ (1976: 2).

T/V Usage in English  

v  In English, all kinds of T/V usage or rather address terms combinations, whether reciprocal or nonreciprocal, are possible: Dr Smith, John Smith, Smith, John, Johnnie, Doc, Sir, Mack and so on, with Dr Smith himself expecting to be addressed Doctor from a patient, Dad from his son, John from his brother, Dear from his wife and Sir from subordinants.

Politeness

v  In general sense: taking account of sense: feelings of others, making others feel comfortable.

v  Linguistically: speaking appropriately to the relationship between speaker and hearer. Linguistic politeness requires understanding how language works  in variety of social contexts

Positive and Negative politeness

v  Positive politeness: solidarity oriented,

    politeness: oriented, emphasizes shared attitudes and values

v  Negative politeness: power, status and politeness: distance oriented, pays people respect and avoids intruding on them (does not equal lack of  politeness or rudeness!!)

LINGUISTIC POLITENESS

v  Needs assessing relationship b/w  speaker and hearer along two social dimensions:

v   Social distance/solidarity,

v  Relative status/power.

POWER AND SOLIDARITY

POWER:

       a relation between two people, it determines the negative rights               they expect  of each other: A<B (A  subordinate),

 A>B  other: (A superior),

 A=B (A equal to B)

SOLIDARITY:

characteristic of relation b/w two people; determines the positive rights, \ has two types: low and high. Concerns   social distance b/w two people in terms of how much experience they share.       

CONCLUSION

Expressing the same speech act /speech function may differ markedly from culture to culture. They may seem random, but are not. They reflect social values and attitudes of societies. Being polite involves knowing expression of a range of speech functions in a culturally appropriate way. Learning another language means / involves more than just learning literal meaning of words, how to put them together, etc. Learners also need to know what they mean in the cultural context, so they need to understand cultural and social norms of their users. This makes sociolinguistic competence, important component of communicative competence.

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TALK AND ACTION

TALK AND ACTION

In speaking to one another, we make use of sentences, or, to be more precise, utterances. We can attempt to classify these utterances in any one of a variety of ways. We can try to classify them by grammatical structure, e.g., their clausal type and complexity: active–passive; statement–question– request–exclamatory; various combinations of these; and so on.

                We may even try to work out a semantic or logical structure for each utterance. But it is also possible to attempt a classification in terms of what sentences do, i.e., to take a ‘functional’ approach, but one that goes somewhat beyond consideration of such functions as stating, questioning, requesting, and exclaiming.

Through conversation we establish relationships with others, achieve a measure of cooperation, keep open for further relationships, and so on. The utterances we use in conversation enable us to do these kinds of things because conversation itself has certain properties which are well worth examining. Our concern in this chapter is therefore twofold: we will be concerned both with what utterances do and how they can be used, and, specifically, with how we use them in conversation.

One thing that many utterances do is make propositions: they do this mainly in the form of either statements or questions but other grammatical forms are also possible. Each of the following is a proposition: ‘I had a busy day today,’ ‘Have you called your mother?,’ and ‘Your dinner’s ready!’ Such utterances are connected in some way with events or happenings in a possible world, i.e., one that can be experienced or imagined, a world in which such propositions can be said to be either true or false. They have been called constractive utterances.

Austin (1975), a philosopher, distinguished still another kind of utterance that is the performative utterance. In using a performative utterance, a person is not just saying something but is actually doing something if certain real-world conditions are met. To say ‘I name this ship “Liberty Bell”’ in certain circumstances is to name a ship.

In general, the spoken part of the total act, the actual speech act, will take the grammatical form of having a first person subject and a verb in the present tense; it may or may not also include the word hereby. Examples are ‘I (hereby) name,’ ‘We decree,’ and ‘I swear.’ This kind of utterance is explicitly performative when it is employed in a conventional framework, such as naming ships, making royal proclamations, and taking an oath in court.

There are also less explicit performatives. Declarations like ‘I promise,’ ‘I apologize,’ or ‘I warn you’.  for anyone can promise, apologize, and warn, and there is no way of specifying the circumstances quite so narrowly. What we can observe, then, is that, in contrast to constative utterances, that is, utterances which are often used to assert propositions and which may be true or false, they are used either appropriately or inappropriately and, if used appropriately, their very utterance is the doing of the whole or part of an action.

Speech act is an act that the speaker performs making an utterance. There are some acts conditions in speech; (1) Locutionary act is the statement having grammatical structure and linguistic meaning, (2) Illocutionary act is the speaker intension of the utterance, (3) Perlocutionary act is the effects of the utterance on the hearer, (4) Felicity conditions are necessary conditions to make successful of speech acts, (5) Prepositional contain is the utterance produced if the composer commits himself to be a future act, (6) Preparatory condition is the utterance produced if speaker believes that the listener will not perform the act without being asked, (7) Sincerity  condition is the utterance produced if the speaker wants the listener to do what the speaker has been asked, and (8) Essential condition is the utterance produced if the speaker show to listener that he really wants to persuade and does what he wants to listener.

Austin divides performatives into five categories:

 (1) verdictives

 (2) exercitives

(3) commissives

 (4) behabitives

  (5) expositives

According to Searle (1969), we perform different kinds of acts when we speak. There are utterance acts, propositional acts and illocutionary acts.

Cooperation

According to philosophers such as Grice, we are able to converse with one another because we recognize common goals in conversation and specific ways of achieving these goals. In any conversation, only certain kinds of ‘moves’ are possible at any particular time because of the constraints that operate to govern exchanges.

Grice lists four maxims that follow from the cooperative principle:

•       Quantity

•       Quality

•       Relation

•       manner

Conversation

Speech can be planned or unplanned (Ochs, 1979). We should note that a lot of speech has a certain amount of planning in it: : it may not be all thought out and carefully planned and even rehearsed, as, for example, is the welcoming speech of a visiting head of state. Unplanned speech is talk which is not thought out prior to its expression. Unplanned speech has certain characteristics: repetitions; simple active sentences. i.e., words and expressions such as well, like, maybe, but, sort of, you know, I guess, etc.

Conversation is a cooperative activity also in the sense that it involves two or more parties, each of whom must be allowed the opportunity to participate.

Boxer (2002) provides a very short conversation that illustrates many of the points just made. Two female students pass each other on campus on the way to class:

•       A: Hey, how are you doing?

•       B: Fine, how about you? Going to class?

•       A: Calculus, I hate it! (keeps moving)

•       B: Ugh! Well, catch you later.

•       A: Yeah, see you at the meeting.

However, there are conversational settings that are unusual in still other ways. Because of the way in which certain of the principles are used, particular types of conversation may be given quite specific names: for example, teaching, interviewing, or interrogating.

Classroom conversation is different from ordinary conversation in the sense that the teacher may be said to ‘own’ the conversation, whereas in ordinary conversations such ownership may be said to be shared.

Conversations must also be brought to a close, e.g., an exchange of ‘Goodbye’s. It is into such places that you fit pre-closing signals which serve to negotiate the actual closing. Such signals can involve an expression like ‘Well, I think that’s all,’

The following is an example of such a closing:

•       A: So, that’s agreed?

•       B: Yep, agreed.

•       A: Good, I knew you would.

•       B: Yes, no problem really.

•       A: Thanks for the help.

•       B: Don’t mention it.

•       A: Okay, I’ll be back soon.

•       B: Okay, then, Bye. Take care.

•       A: Bye.

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