30.2888, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Staley (2018)

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Subject: 30.2888, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Staley (2018)

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Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 12:47:49
From: Susan Burt [smburt at ilstu.edu]
Subject: Socioeconomic Pragmatic Variation

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-3319.html

AUTHOR: Larssyn  Staley
TITLE: Socioeconomic Pragmatic Variation
SUBTITLE: Speech acts and address forms in context
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 291
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Susan Meredith Burt, Illinois State University

SUMMARY

Socioeconomic Pragmatic Variation is the publication of Staley’s 2016
University of Zurich dissertation. The author places the work squarely in
variational pragmatics, which she defines, following Schneider and Barron
(2008), as the intersection of pragmatics with modern dialectology. The goal
of the volume is to explore and come to grips with the methodological
challenges of that intersection. As Staley discusses in the first chapter,
pragmatic variables differ from phonological variables in that they are more
dependent on non-linguistic context, so a different methodology is needed to
study them. Choosing as objects of study the offers, thanks responses, and
address terms used by servers in Los Angeles restaurants, the author cautions
that an a priori delineating or enumerating of the actual variants is not
possible, nor is prediction possible of the occurrence or non-occurrence of a
token of the speech act type under study. Staley cites Barron and Schneider’s
(2009) principles to which variationist pragmatics should adhere, empiricity,
contrastivity, and comparability. Following Labov’s (1972) study of the
stratification of the (r) variable in New York City department stores, Staley
selects restaurants at three different price tiers (designated ‘low,’ ‘mid,’
and ‘up’) as sites for data collection for a corpus that will adhere to these
principles. The Los Angeles Restaurant Corpus (LARC) is designed with these
research questions in mind: 

1. How can the variable context be circumscribed in pragmatics for variables
such as speech acts and terms of address in naturally occurring data?

2. Is there sociopragmatic or pragmalinguistic variation in the use of speech
acts and terms of address in the three socioeconomic tiers investigated here?
(Staley 2018: 9)

The second chapter takes these issues further, in detailing the reasons that
variationist sociolinguistic methods cannot simply be transferred into
pragmatics research data collection practices. First, unlike phonological
variants, which should not affect the truth value of the utterance, pragmatic
variants “convey different social, propositional, procedural and interpersonal
meanings” (p. 12), and furthermore, context contributes to our understanding
of usage, and is itself variable. Pragmatic features are further described as
“inherently polysemic” (p. 13). In addition, the typical sociolinguistic
interview does not elicit pragmatic items of interest, such as the offers,
thanks responses, and address terms studied here. The recognition of the
function of any of these, additionally, emerges from context. Participant
observation within delimited contexts, therefore, will produce data in which
factors such as relative status of interlocutors, familiarity of
interlocutors, shared background information, topic and purpose (p. 31) will
all be comparable. 

With Discourse Completion Questionnaires lacking the desired authenticity, and
with corpora lacking control, Staley set out to gather her own corpus in order
to meet her stringent criteria for data. As she details in Chapter 3, service
encounters have attracted pragmatics research for some time; here, the
introduction of Labovian stratification further structures and constrains the
methods of data collection. Between November 2011 and October 2014, Staley
(and guests) conducted and audio-recorded 22 restaurant service encounters of
between 40 and 140 minutes each. None of the chosen restaurants were chain
restaurants, all served “American cuisine,” all the meals recorded were
evening dinners where guests were seated. The restaurants were sorted into
three price points or tiers. The “low” restaurants were “casual dining,”
without tablecloths, perhaps with television in the background, with serving
staff wearing t-shirt uniforms. The “mid” level restaurants eschewed
television, may or may not have had tablecloths, and the servers wore
long-sleeved shirts, for a slightly more formal atmosphere. The “up” level, or
“fine-dining” restaurants used tablecloths and elegant paper menus, and the
servers wore long-sleeved white shirts and dress pants. Servers were almost
all in their 20s and 30s, and more women worked as servers than men in the
“low” tier restaurants, while more men worked as servers in the “up” tier. 

Chapter 4 details the characteristics of service encounter discourse as its
own genre, with restaurant service encounters as a sub-genre. Like many
interaction types, service encounters feature both relational and
transactional talk, and are jointly negotiated. However, they also have clear
beginnings and ends, a standard sequence/script, constraints on what are
acceptable moves, and importantly, are asymmetrical. The context of restaurant
encounters is further described as “layered”: there are social, sociocultural,
linguistic and cognitive contexts to these encounters, each of which is
described briefly. Finally, service encounters are described in terms of the
activity types and communicative tasks that characterize them, so that
participants’ strategies for those tasks can be compared across the price
tiers.

Chapter 5 focuses on one of these activity types: offers are inherent in
restaurant service encounters, and in this chapter are discussed on three
levels, “function, propositional content, and sequence” (p.89). Variants of
offering are recognized by both function and context, and, as is well known,
may be negotiated over several turns, but may vary in directness and
conventionality. Staley finds a preference for non-conventional indirect forms
across all three price tiers. Furthermore, context and sequencing promote the
interpretation of very non-conventional utterances as offers, such as
“Questions? Comments? Concerns?”, which is interpreted as an offer to take
guests’ orders. Inclusion of a pre-offer in the sequence further pushes the
interpretation as offer of utterances that are non-conventional, indirect, and
hearer-focused, at all three price tiers. 

Chapter 6 focuses on responses to thanks, an act type that may minimize the
hearer’s debt to the speaker (who is also the doer of the act being thanked
for). Thanks responses can take a speaker-focus (“My pleasure”), a
hearer-focus (“You’re welcome”), or a focus on the act itself (“No problem”).
As the second part of an adjacency pair, the occurrence of a thanks response
is fairly predictable, and thanks responses tend to be formulaic. There is a
frequency difference between the price tiers, however, with servers at the
mid- and up-level restaurants almost twice as likely to use thanks responses
than those at the low.

Chapter 7 tackles address forms, both nominal and pronominal, specifically
those used by servers to guests. Staley sees address forms as having deictic,
alerting, addressee-identifying, and relational functions; they may be nominal
or pronominal, and may be “bound,” that is, functioning as an argument of a
verb (as in ‘How are you?’), or “free,” that is, not integrated into a
sentence (‘Hey, Susie!’). Staley reviews the literature on the relational
functions of address forms, noting that the social meanings address forms can
convey now go far beyond the power and solidarity of Brown and Gilman (1960).
The social stratification built into her corpus will have an effect on speaker
notions of appropriateness: “A preference for address terms which reflect and
construct deference or solidarity can provide information about different
speaker ideologies insofar as what the interlocutors consider to be
appropriate for the context and how this reflects their view of the
relationship” (p. 157). 

Staley found that free address forms were used much less frequently than
bound, and were used mostly as alerters. Not surprisingly, forms that conveyed
deference were more frequent in the LARC-up sites, and those that signal
solidarity were concentrated in the  mid and low sites. ‘Bro’, for example,
was found only at LARC-low restaurants. Free plural address forms that were
preposed often served as alerters. Bound address forms serving as subject or
object, were usually ‘you’, with ‘you, sir’ or  ‘you, madam’ as rare
occurrences. You-plural variants, such as the often-maligned ‘you guys’ were
more frequent in LARC-low than LARC-up restaurants, while ‘everybody’ appeared
in all three tiers. 

The final chapter recounts the motivation for this methodologically-innovative
project: early data-collection methods in pragmatics, such as
discourse-completion questionnaires (Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989)
elicited self-reported, speculative responses, usually from imagined rather
than real contexts. In contrast, with Staley’s research questions focused on
the variability of both context and responses, the data from restaurant
interactions allowed for both comparability and depth of context. All three of
the variables examined, the offers, thanks responses and address terms, were
defined both in terms of function and in terms of sequence, allowing for
meaningful comparability between the three different price points.  

EVALUATION

The goals for this project were ambitious indeed—to attain Barron and
Schneider’s (2009) criteria of empiricity, comparability and contrastivity, to
create a sociolinguistically responsible pragmatics, and to answer the
research questions. The book succeeds at all three of these. The data
collection methodology was thoughtful, socially sensitive, and theoretically
well-motivated. The three variables were well chosen. My one disappointment
was the lack of a section with a summary comparison of the server styles of
each of the three price tiers; this would give a clearer picture of how the
three chosen variables can combine to create the linguistic, behavioral
manifestations of “levels” of dining experience. Nevertheless, the analysis of
the material is multi-faceted, multi-lensed, and meticulous. 

Socioeconomic Pragmatic Variation should prove of interest to students of
interaction, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. 

REFERENCES

Barron, Anne and Klaus Schneider. 2009. “Variational pragmatics: Studying the
impact of social factors on language use in interaction.”  Intercultural
Pragmatics 6(4): 425-442.

Blum-Kulka, Shoshona, Juliane House, Gabriele Kasper. 1989. Cross-Cultural
Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman. 1960. “The Pronouns of power and solidarity.”
In Thomas Sebeok, ed., Style in Language, pp. 253-276. Cambridge: MIT Press. 

Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.

Schneider, Klaus P., and Anne Barron. 2008. Variational Pragmatics. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Susan Meredith Burt is Professor Emerita of Linguistics in the English
Department at Illinois State University. She remembers reading Brown and
Gilman (1960) as an undergrad, and has been interested in address terms
(though not only that) ever since.





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