43. John Gumperz and interactional sociolinguistics ( IS).

John Joseph Gumperz is an American linguist and academic. Gumperz was, for most of his career, a professor at the University of California in Berkeley. He is currently affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara.

John Gumperz developed a new way of looking at sociolinguistics with Dell Hymes, also a scholar of sociolinguistics. Their contribution was a new method called the " ethnography of communication. " Gumperz' own approach has been called Interactional sociolinguistics.

Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via interaction. Topics of interest include cross-cultural miscommunication, politeness, and framing.

In terms of research methods, interactional sociolinguists analyze audio or video recordings of conversations or other interactions (it’s the bedrock of IS methodology). The primary goal of IS is to understand how language works to create meaning in interaction. Analysis focuses not only on linguistic forms such as words and sentences but also on subtle cues such as prosody and register that signal contextual presupposition. These contextualization cues are culturally specific and usually unconscious. When participants in a conversation come from different cultural backgrounds they may not recognize these subtle cues in one another's speech, leading to misunderstanding.

An example of IS: Gumperz was called upon to adress a thorny employment situation. The staff cafeteria at a British airport had for the 1 time hired food servers from Pakistan and India, and both supervisors and customers were complaining that these new emploees were “ surly and uncooperative”. For their part, the Indian and Pakistan emploees were complaining that they were discriminated against. In order to figure out what was going on, Gumperz tape-recorded interactions that took place as customers were served in the cafeteria. While listening audio-tapes, he identifyed a small contrast in the use of pitch and intonation. Customers who came through the line were asked whether or not they wanred gravy. Both British and South Asian servers posed this question by uttering a single word “gravy”. But the British servers said it with raising intonation while the south Asian servers said it with falling intonation. This tiny difference in paralinguistic features – whether the pitch went up or down at the end of a single word – resulred in very different impressions. For speakers of South Asian languages, the falling intonation was simply the normal way of asking a question in that context. This example illustrates a number of points that are key to IS: 1) it shows that tiny linguistic features can play a large part in conveying meaning and hence in negotiating relationships. 2) shows that speakers of different cultural backgrounds develop systematically different conventions for using and interpreting linguistic features.

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