Interactional Sociolinguistics
Interactional sociolinguistics analyzes how speakers make and interpret meaning in face-to-face interaction, drawing on linguistic, social, and cultural knowledge to signal and infer what is going on.
Definition
Interactional sociolinguistics is the area of sociolinguistics that studies how participants in face-to-face interaction use linguistic and contextual resources to produce and interpret situated meaning and to manage social relationships.
Scope
This area covers the close analysis of situated talk, the contextualization cues by which speakers signal how utterances are to be understood, the conversational inferences listeners draw, and the management of social relationships through face and politeness. It includes the analysis of discourse markers that structure interaction, and the way cross-cultural differences in cues can cause miscommunication. Macro-level variation is treated elsewhere; this area focuses on the micro-level of interaction.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How do speakers signal how their utterances should be interpreted?
- How do listeners infer situated meaning from contextual cues?
- How is social relationship, including face, managed through interaction?
- How do cultural differences in interactional cues lead to miscommunication?
Key concepts
- Contextualization cues
- Conversational inference
- Face and politeness
- Footing and framing
- Discourse markers
Key theories
- Contextualization cues
- Gumperz argued that prosodic and other surface features serve as contextualization cues, signaling how an utterance is to be interpreted, so that shared interpretation depends on culturally specific conventions.
- Face and the interaction order
- Goffman analyzed face-to-face behavior as a moral order in which participants work to maintain face, supplying the foundation for sociolinguistic treatments of politeness and rapport.
History
Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by Gumperz, who combined ethnographic and linguistic analysis with Goffman's account of the interaction order; Schiffrin's Approaches to Discourse synthesized it alongside other discourse traditions in 1994.
Debates
- Shared versus divergent interpretive conventions
- A central concern is whether contextualization cues are widely shared or culturally specific, since divergent conventions can systematically produce cross-cultural miscommunication even among fluent speakers.
Key figures
- John Gumperz
- Erving Goffman
- Deborah Schiffrin
Related topics
Seminal works
- gumperz1982
- goffman1967
- schiffrin1994
Frequently asked questions
- How does interactional sociolinguistics differ from conversation analysis?
- Both study talk in interaction, but interactional sociolinguistics emphasizes how social and cultural background knowledge, signaled through contextualization cues, shapes interpretation, whereas conversation analysis focuses primarily on the sequential organization of talk itself.