The importance of borrowing across disciplines: The anthropological notion of speech events

Over the years, linguists have borrowed from other allied fields, including speech events from cultural anthropology, schema theory from psychology, speech acts from philosophy, and conversational strategies from rhetoric. In analyzing large and continuous chunks of conversational data, the first an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Pragmatics and society 2019-10, Vol.10 (3), p.452-469
Main Author: Shuy, Roger W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Conversational strategies
Cultural anthropology
Grammar lexicon relationship
Lexicon
Psychology
Rhetoric
Schemas
Speech acts
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Summary:Over the years, linguists have borrowed from other allied fields, including speech events from cultural anthropology, schema theory from psychology, speech acts from philosophy, and conversational strategies from rhetoric. In analyzing large and continuous chunks of conversational data, the first and most important of these borrowings is the speech event, for it sets the stage in which the other language elements are embedded and provides a useful sequence for analyzing everything else, including the conventional linguistic tools of the grammar and lexicon. The present paper represents the optimal sequence of analysis as an Inverted Pyramid, starting with the speech event and then moving down the order to schemas, agendas, speech acts, conversational strategies, and finally to the grammar and lexicon that are embedded within each other. Two prominent criminal law investigations are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Inverted Pyramid approach for understanding this evidence.
ISSN:1878-9714
1878-9722
DOI:10.1075/ps.18060.shu