Participants’ roles and the co-construction of culture

Sociologist Erving Goffman: In addition to the institutional roles that speakers assume by virtue of their occupation or their status, there are also local participant roles, or participation frameworks. Through the register (informal, formal), the key or tone of voice (serious, jesting, sarcastic), the frequency of the interruptions, the way the speakers take the floor, the feedback signals they give, the choice of lexical and grammatical structures, the distribution of their silences, participants in verbal exchanges play the various social roles that reveal a great deal about the social persona they wish to represent, and about the social personae they are assigning to their interlocutors. They may come across as confident or shy, interested or indifferent, close or distant, helpful or pushy; they may take on a friendly, competitive, bossy, motherly role.

Husband: Y’want a piece of candy?

Wife: No

C: She is on a diet.

C is animating words that are not hers. Is she chipping in in a helpful manner, or butting in and not minding her own business? If she is a long-time friend she helps to minimize the negative impact of the rejection. In other contexts, speaking for another person might be viewed as signaling not solidarity, but, rather, an asymmetrical relationship of power and authority, such as when a mother speaks for her child, a husband for his wife, a teacher for a student. Listeners can be acknowledged or non-acknowledged participants – addressees, hearers, eavesdroppers, bystanders.

Gender roles are not the natural result of biological makeup, they are socially constructed by males and females enacting different participant roles in conversation. They show self-assertiveness or uncertainty, dominance or submissiveness. Women’s rising intonation is often interpreted as a sign of uncertainty. The male’s interruptions may be viewed as dominance.

Language use is a cultural act because its users co-construct the very social roles that define them as members of a discourse community.

Summary

· The system of signs that constitute culture is actively constructed through the verbal actions taken by sign-makers in interaction with one another. In the construction of meaning, the interpretation of events is grounded in each person’s experience and field of perception.

· The context of situation and the context of culture in which verbal actions take place are constitutive of these actions; they imbue them with necessary pragmatic coherence.

· The participants maintain this verbal coherence by observing a principle of co-operation, that prompts them to align their expectations onto those of others by playing various participant roles. All these actions by the participants are finely attuned to the cultural norms and conventions of the group they belong to.

· The meaning of words are different if they are conveyed face-to-face in the close proximity of another fellow human being, or over a distance, through writing and print.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 1665