Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T23:30:58.148Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Interviewer's linguistic production and its effect on speaker's descriptive style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Sylvie Dubois  and
Barbara Horvath
Sylvie Dubois
Affiliation:
Université Laval
Barbara Horvath
Affiliation:
Sydney University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A re-examination of primary school descriptions by Anglo, Greek, and Italian speakers in the Sydney sociolinguistic survey focuses on the interactional patterns that characterize the elicitation of a particular text type. Two aspects of the interaction are analyzed—the type or mixture of types of questions asked by the fieldworker within the same or different turns at talk, and the response behavior of the speaker—in order to determine what part of the variability in the text data is the result of the interaction process itself rather than of the characteristics and intentions of the respondents. We hypothesize that a constant feature of every interaction is the negotiation of tension between interviewer and speaker. The results confirm that varying the details of the interviewer's questioning strategy, even when the referential content of the questions seem uniform, can have strong and predictable effects on the nature of the speaker's response. We also demonstrate links among stylistic variation, interactional patterning, and ethnicity differentiation. Where differences in behavior in the same setting have often been attributed to learned patterns of different ethnic or social groups, much of this may instead be due to different degrees of interactional tension. We show that less negotiation of interactional tension is required when the interviewer and the speaker share a set of sociolinguistic assumptions through common ethnic identity, and more negotiation is required when this is not the case.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , July 1992 , pp. 125 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13:145–204.Google Scholar
Coupland, N. & Giles, H. (eds.). (1988). Communicative accommodation: Recent developments. Language and Communication 8(3/4):175–327.Google Scholar
Hindle, D. M. (1979). The social and situational conditioning of phonetic variation. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Horvath, B. (1985). Variation in Australian English: The sociolects of Sydney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, W., & Waletsky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis. In Helm, J. (ed.), Essays on verbal and visual arts: Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 12–44.Google Scholar
Linde, C., & Labov, W. (1975). Spatial networks as a site for the study of language and thought. Language 51:924–939.Google Scholar
Rickford, J. R., & McNair-Knox, F. (1992). Addressee and topic influenced style shift: A quantitative sociolinguistic study. In Biber, D. & Finegan, E. (eds.), Perspectives on register: Situating register variation within sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tannen, D. (1980). A comparative analysis of oral narrative strategies: Athenian Greek and American English. In Chafe, W. (ed.), The pear stories. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 51–87.Google Scholar