Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

470 Part 6: Language and Interaction
interactional processes as accommodation (see the section on CAT) and
recipient design (see section on CA).
Interactional Sociolinguistics
We noted that in standard speech act pragmatics, context is treated as a
confi guration of static, discourse-external social variables. The relationship
of discourse-external context to discourse-internal choices of pragmatic
strategies is based on a causal or correlational model, where context
fi gures as the independent variable and language use as the dependent
variable. On this view, cross-cultural difference can be explained in terms
of diverging values of context variables and their impact on the selection
of speech act strategies and forms. In interactional sociolinguistics, context
is conceptualized in a radically different way.
Proposed by John Gumperz in the 1970s, and inspired by Alfred
Schütz’s phenomenology, Goffman’s microsociology, ethnomethodology
and CA, interactional sociolinguistics is an empirically grounded theory
of situated interpretation. From these perspectives, the separation of context
and behavior collapses as context is seen as emergent, constantly
reshaped and refl exively produced through the participants’ interactional
conduct itself (Auer, 1992; Goodwin & Duranti, 1992). Although all dimensions
of behavior bear a refl exive relationship to context (Kasper, 2009),
interactional sociolinguistics is particularly interested in non-referential
contextualization cues or contextualization conventions, ‘the verbal and nonverbal
metalinguistic signs that serve to retrieve the context-bound presuppositions
in terms of which component messages are interpreted’.
More specifi cally:
A contextualization cue is one of a cluster of indexical signs produced
in the act of speaking that jointly index, that is invoke, a frame of interpretation
for the rest of the linguistic content of the utterance. Such
frames are subject to change as the interaction progresses and have
different scopes, from individual speech acts to sets of turns and
responses, to entire social encounters. (Gumperz, 1996: 379)
Key resources for contextualization are prosody and the temporal organization
of speech and nonverbal action, codeswitching between different
languages and language varieties, including styles and register and lexical
choices such as routine formulae, modal particles and discourse markers
(Auer & Di Luzio, 1992; Gumperz, 1982a, 1982b, 1992). Contextualization
cues instantiate relevancies in talk and enable inferences to epistemic
and affective stance, to claimed, ascribed, and contested identities, actions
and activities. These semiotic resources form a critical reservoir of cultural
members’ interactional competence (Gumperz, 1982a). Although the