Interactional Sociolinguistics

Interactional sociolinguistics emerged from quantitatively-minded variation sociolinguistics of the 1960s (and which still continues today) which sought to correlate features of speech (like a glottal stop or a truncated verb form) with demographic factors like geographic location or socioeconomic class, or situational variables like the formality or informality of the speech setting. As interest shifted into what those features of speech might actively be doing in interaction, researchers dropped the survey method in favour of a close qualitative look at what was going on in the scene – what the founders of interactional sociolinguistics, Dell Hymes and John Gumperz, called the ‘ethnography of communication’.

Like Critical Discourse Analysis, interactional sociolinguistics means to explore the way that social and cultural forces (including power differentials) cash out in the details of talk. Unlike CDA, its proponents do not normally require a specific prior theory of politics or society, beyond a generic belief that society is structured along class, gender and cultural or ethnic lines, and an expectation that this structure will reveal itself  in interaction.  A further difference is interactional sociolinguistics’ preference for a great deal of ethnographic knowledge of the local scene in which the discourse takes place, and a fairly particular set of codes with which to analyse it.

To the degree that working interactional sociolinguists draw on pioneering work by John Gumperz, they will see people achieving their local goals (or being thwarted from doing so) by offering each other (and taking up, or failing to take up) ‘contextualisation cues’. These are various sorts of hints, codes and signals as to what speakers mean. (The requirement to call such things ‘contextualisation cues’ has been progressively relaxed as interactional linguistics becomes more widespread, but remains important for core proponents of the method.) To get a sense of what these contextualisation cues are doing, the interactional sociolinguist is committed to knowing something about the local ethnography of the speakers’ situation: what jobs they do, what their goals are and so on.

Here is an illustrative analysis, taken from an account meant to show off interactional sociolinguistics against a number of other discourse approaches (Stubbe et al, 2005). Before turning to the transcribed recording, the authors give us some background: 

The authors then invite us to read over the following lines to see how Claire gets across to Tom a way of framing what she is about to say or do in the interaction:

The authors point to certain speech features (the intonation, the ums, the false starts) that suggest that Claire is nervous. The interactional sociolinguist means to ask why this might be so in this local scene, and what it might prefigure for the conduct of the interaction, We can infer, the authors tell us, that one cause of her nervousness is the fact that she is lower in the hierarchy than is her interlocutor (something they have established prior to this recording). Furthermore, she is nervous because she is doing what women do not do:

So the interaction starts off with the ‘contextualisation cues’ of a complaint involving gender bias, and the authors can then  proceed to see how these two interlocutors bring it off.

Interactional sociolinguistics’ version of the four core features of DA (data found naturally; interpreted in co-text; non-literally understood; actions achieved) gives generous place to the wider ethnographic context. It is willing to use information from prior scenes to guess at what participants are feeling and intending in this one. It admits into its analysis inferences from prior theories, or common assumptions, about interaction. In the extract above, for example, a speaker was judged to be ‘nervous’, and her nervousness was partly ascribed to a common-sensical fear that a woman risks being heard as making a gender-based complaint. Such theorising is less particular and explicit than is required by CDA, yet still contrasts starkly with Conversation Analysis’ distaste for what they consider to be ‘going native’.