Ethnography of Speaking

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UNIVERSITY OF BAGHDAD COLLEGE OF ARTS ENGLISH DEPARTMENT SOCIOLINGUISTICS The Ethnography of Speaking BY: Hiba Dhafer 25th December, 2013 Introduction According to Hudson (1980: 106), speech is "shorter or longer strings of linguistic items uttered on particular occasions for particular purposes". It is used in different ways among different groups of people and each group has its own norms of linguistic behaviour (Wardhaugh, 2010: 253). Contrastingly, Ferdinand de Saussure claims that speech is totally individual, in that it depends only on the "will of the speaker" (Hudson, 1980: 106). So, does society affect speech? And if it does, in what way? And how can such effect be investigated? The answer to all these questions lies within the notion of the ethnography of speaking. So, what is meant by the ethnography of speaking? And how did it come to existence? The following section will answer these questions. The Ethnography of Speaking Coulthard (1985: 33) states that Chomsky set the goal of linguistic theory as the description of the ideal speaker-hearer’s competence, his knowledge of grammaticality rather than appropriateness. Chomsky only focused on the grammatical relations holding between sentences like "He hit me", "It was me who he hit" and "It was him who hit me" without attempting to explain why one and not another might be appropriate to a particular situation. But Wardhaugh (2010: 264) refers to the fact that there is more to understanding how language is used than only describing the syntactic composition of sentences. When you learn to use a language, you learn how to use it in order to do certain things that people do with that language. Thus, Coulthard (1985: 32) states that Hymes (1971) argues that Chomsky's definition is too narrow as linguistics must concern itself with communicative competence ( which is defined by Gumperz as the

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