Speech Communication -- qu'est-ce que c'est?

[Don Kulick]

Can anyone who knows do me the tremendous favor of explaining to me very
quickly what "speech communication" is as a discipline? I know there are
journals and departments of speech communication in both the US and Europe,
and I have checked various websites, but I am still not really sure.

The reason I want to know is because I am finishing a review article in
which a good deal of the literature I am reviewing is written by people in
speech communication. Without wishing to sound insulting or too ignorant, my
impression is that a lot of it is  thin, and it seems to be a bit of a
hodgepodge -- not really linguistics, not really anthropology, not really
psychology. It seems that the main object of analysis is rhetoric and
discourse, not how people actually talk to one another. And when speech
communication scholars do analyze how people talk, they don't seem to use
linguistic tools like CA. So although I understand that  speech
communication sees itself as different from sociolinguistics or applied
linguistics,  I don't quite see how, or why. Any enlightenment on this would
be greatly appreciated.

Don Kulick
--

Don Kulick
Chair
Department of Social Anthropology
Stockholm University
106 91 Stockholm
Sweden

Tel. +46-8-16 22 40
Fax  +46-8-15 88 94