Accomplishing Sociocultural Identity in Talk;

Like, umm… you know, yeah? Isn't it funny how Australians, or maybe just my friends, seem to call their friends insulting names and yet call complete strangers ‘mate’? Even when things get heated between complete strangers at clubs or anywhere, it’s “what the bloody hell is your problem mate?” I think Australians are clearly and proudly identifiable by the way they speak. We seem to have our own vernacular and rules of speech my favourite being ‘yeah nah’ which is just a prefix for a sentence, a form of hedging, rather than a completely ambivalent response to a question. Hedging are the unnecessary conjunctives in a sentence used to continue the flow of speech, for example umm, like or ‘you know’. It’s funny to think that I do this every day and only now have learnt there is an actual term for it.

More to the point (or any point at all) one of the most prominent examples of sociocultural identity in language I think is nicknaming. Donna and Kerry (2011) distinguishes between personal naming, over which the named has little control and their identity is not overly affected over the long term and nicknaming which is a long term name which helps themselves and others in identifying a certain aspect or aspects of an individual. Often nicknames in Australia are just extensions of the first or last name (‘Neavey’ or ‘Neaveo’ for Neave). However, for nicknames focussed on a sociocultural or indeed physical characteristic of an individual there can be significant implications for the identity of that person, in either defining or reshaping their self perception and the way they are perceived. The focussed study of Donna and Kerry (2011) provides a useful insight into this specific area of sociocultural identity in talk and was an interesting and relevant read to me.  

Reference:

Starks, D., Taylor-Leech, K. (2011) A research project on nicknames and adolescent identities. New Zealand Studies in Applied Linguistics, 17(2), 87-97.

xoxo Gossip Mitch

The Social and Moral Order in Talk;

The documentary method of interpretation was my assigned definition in the tutorial and it’s almost paradoxical nature is lending me to write about it for this week’s blog. I managed to grasp the analogy towards the end of the lesson, but seeing as I had difficulty I wanted to alter the analogy and explain it in my own words here for others that struggled with the concept!

Think of the people you know as draws in the (hopefully large) filing cabinet that is your brain. When you think about a person you know, you open that person’s draw and view the files or documents associated with that person. They may be memories, ideas or labels you have for this person. Each person’s files will be different and each person’s filing cabinet will be different. The documents in each person’s draw are constructed on the basis of your experience with them.

You have an idea about who a person is every time you make a draw for them. If you meet someone new and they’re particularly friendly to you, the documents in their draw will reflect that you feel they are a nice person. Once this hypothesis is made, each subsequent file/document (meeting/experience) you have for a person will alter their draw or your overall opinion about that person.

Your documenting system works in a cyclic fashion. You meet a person and develop an understanding within yourself of who they are. You put the file in their draw and future experiences dictate the future direction of the documents in the draw. If the next time you see the friendly person you just met they are helping an old lady cross the street you will attribute this to their friendliness and this is the interpretation aspect of the documenting system.

Having written this out, I don’t know it makes it any simpler than the documentary analogy, but in my head, the documenting system seems to make more sense.

xoxo Gossip Mitch

p.s. At some point in the future I might try and justify the completely irrelevant gossip girl reference/signature because right now I just don't know...

Ethnomethodology;

I’m looking forward to summer, when it rains for days in a row on the first sunny day I will be commanded to mow the lawn. Understanding the consequences of being kicked out of home if I don’t I will snidely reply ‘there is nothing I can think of that I would rather be doing’. I will take the clip over the ears with glee, almost as an entitlement. God bless sarcasm.

Almost as fulfilling as making sarcastic comments is watching them go straight over people’s heads. Most people are able to identify sarcasm at least most of the time. It is often used to create humour and in instances where people don’t understand (for instance the character of Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory) there is even greater comedy created. Sarcasm usually entails verbally communicating the exact opposite of what is meant by the use – so how then do we correctly interpret the meaning? Rather than attributing a verbal tool such as sarcasm as to a rule or social norm in interaction, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology takes a somewhat more humanistic approach. Ethnomethodology suggests that individuals possess a ‘common sense’ knowledge of everyday social interactions. This allows us to interpret the socially constructed meaning of an event or in this case what is being said. In the instance of sarcasm, ethnomethodological frameworks allow us to detect sarcasm in people we’ve never even met by ascribing meaning to their words through our own understanding of social interactions. With this in mind Garfinkel may see Sheldon as pretty smart, however he’s well below average in social smarts.

xoxo Gossip Mitch

EDIT: I really wanted to find a video for my blog and use it and this was just too good not to use. This video is an example of where we apply our own ethnomethodological frameworks to conceptualise humour in what could without these frameworks appear a bland interview -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMsLArefSOw