Читать книгу Living Language - Laura M. Ahearn - Страница 35

Some linguistic anthropologists who analyze conversations draw on the theories of Erving Goffman, a sociologist who rejected many of the most common preconceived notions – or language ideologies – regarding the ways in which conversations allegedly take place between speakers and hearers. Like Dell Hymes before him, Goffman rejected approaches that focused on isolated speakers or even isolated speaker-hearer dyads. Instead, Goffman emphasized the importance of foregrounding participation in general as an analytical concept (Goodwin 2001). Goffman recognized that there were many potential interactional roles people can inhabit, so he suggested applying a sophisticated participation framework and production format even to the simplest of conversations. He argued, for example, that we should distinguish between ratified and unratified hearers. Some hearers are addressees (those to whom the speaker addresses an utterance), but others are bystanders, overhearers, or even eavesdroppers.

Similarly, Goffman realized that the seemingly unified role of speaker in any interaction can also be separated into different roles (Goffman 1981:144):

 Animator. The person who serves as the voice box; the person who animates the words being spoken, whether they are the speaker’s own words or not.

 Author. The person who composed the words, whether or not this person is the one who voices them.

 Principal. The person who stands behind what is said; the person whose opinions are expressed, whether or not this person composed or voiced these opinions.

In an earlier version of this well-known typology, Goffman (1986[1974]) presented a slightly different set of roles that included “emitter,” for the voice box, and “animator” to represent the “expressive actions” accompanying talk, which is interesting to note with reference to our focus on multimodality in this chapter. Other scholars have also suggested multiple alternative roles. The most important insight to glean, however, is Goffman’s initial one that the dominant language ideology concerning conversations – that they involve one unified speaker and one unified hearer – is a model that is, at best, too simple and, at worst, simply incorrect.

Sometimes, all three speaker roles are inhabited by one person, but sometimes they can be distributed across several people or be relatively indeterminate (cf. Irvine 1996). So, to give a hypothetical example, let’s assume that President Obama once delivered a speech that was written by a speech writer who totally disagreed with the President’s policies. Let’s also assume that the speech writer wrote eloquently and convincingly enough to keep his or her job. As President Obama delivered the speech, he would be considered the animator (the voice box) and, presumably, the principal (the person whose opinions are being expressed), but the speech writer would be the author – and not the animator or the principal. Even in ordinary conversations, these roles frequently shift, especially when reported speech is used. Goffman called these instances shifts in footing:

A change in footing implies a change in the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance. A change in our footing is another way of talking about a change in our frame for events. … [P]articipants over the course of their speaking constantly change their footing, these changes being a persistent feature of natural talk.

(1981:128)

Such shifts in footing are important to study closely, as they offer scholars clues about the multifunctionality of even the most mundane of utterances. Changes in footing also often index various social identities, cultural values, attitudes, stances, or relationships. They can be triggered by subtle verbal or nonverbal moves and are tracked by all of us as a normal part of the complex multimodality that constitutes linguistic interactions.