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

[Kristine L. Fitch]

Dear Don Kulick,

Although the discipline of "speech communication", like the field of
psychology, is sufficiently broad and diverse to make quick overviews
difficult, I'll do my best.  For starters, the primary national
organization changed its name in 1997 from the Speech Communication
Association to the National Communication Association, in large part as a
response to members' feeling that the title "speech" no longer encompassed
a great deal of what gets studied in our discipline.

The roots of the field are, as you perhaps surmised, in rhetoric, but since
1914 when "speech teachers" began to separate themselves from departments
of English it has multiplied in a number of directions.  One formulation
(always disputable) of what all of our branches have in common is that we
study adaptation of messages to people and people to messages.  And yes, in
a great many ways and instances that includes studying "ways that people
actually talk to each other."  Two of our journals that would provide
exemplars of such work are the _Quarterly Journal of Speech_ and _Research
on Language and Social Interaction_, specific works listed below.
Sometimes that study is CA, though we would tend not to view that or use it
as a "linguistic tool"; other times it is ethnography based on extended
fieldwork in a community.  (Ethnography in our field is largely, though not
exclusively, ethnography of speaking, i.e. with a focus on communicative
activity though not limited to verbal behavior but including nonverbal,
mediated, and so forth).  The slice of the field of "speech communication"
which is, judging from your description, the part most relevant to your
question is generally referred to as language and social interaction.
Beyond that, the discipline encompasses a wide range of research into human
interaction and messaging processes, including rhetorical, electronic, and
other media; specific to particular kinds of contexts - families,
organizations, health care, mediation; and studied with the full range of
methodologies observable in the social sciences/humanities:  statistical,
textual, qualitative. And so forth.

Web sites that might be helpful:

http://www.natcom.org/   - National Communication Association
http://cscwww.cats.ohiou.edu/%7Escalsi/ Language and Social Interaction
Division, NCA
http://www.icahdq.org/index.html   International Communication Association


References:

	Morris, G., White, C., & Iltis, R. (1994). "Well, ordinarily I would,
but:"  Reexamining the 	nature of accounts for problematic events. Research
on Language and Social Interaction, 27, 123-144.
	Sequeira, D. (1993). Personal address as negotiated meaning in an American
church community. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 26, 259-285.

	Huspek, M., & Kendall, K. (1991). Withholding voice:  An analysis of the
political vocabulary of a "non-political" speech community. Quarterly
Journal of Speech, 77, 1-19.
	Philipsen, G. (1975).  Speaking "like a man" in Teamsterville:  Culture
patterns of role enactment in an urban neighborhood.  Quarterly Journal of
Speech, 61, 13-22.
	Schely-Newman, E. (1997). Finding one's place:  Locale narratives in an
Israeli Moshav. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 83, 401-415.

Regards,

Kristine L. Fitch, Ph.D
Associate Professor
Department of Communication
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA  52242  USA


At 12:26 PM 01/13/2000 +0500, you wrote:
>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
>
>