Introduction

Support for the original statement of speech accommodation theory (SAT) (Giles 1973) has been amply provided by experimental studies on intercultural convergence of general speech phenomena, such as language choice, accent, and speech rate (Bourhis and Giles 1977; Bourhis et al. 1979). However, recent challenges to the theory to (1) achieve more precision in detailing specific linguistic features involved in convergence or divergence (Coupland 1984; Thakerar, Giles, and Cheshire 1982; Trudgill, 1981, 1986), (2) apply to style shifting evidenced in intracultural as well as intercultural accommodation of speech between speakers of unequal status (Putnam and Street 1984), and (3) account for cooperative encounters in natural settings (Coupland 1984) have resulted in further refinement of the theory about language adaptation in response to interlocutors. Increasingly, accommodation theory is becoming concerned with the socially constituted nature of language behavior.

In light of these advances, the central aims of this chapter are to expand the range of naturally occurring settings for which information is available and to offer a close linguistic analysis of accommodated speech in the natural setting of psychotherapy. At the same time, the chapter offers methodological criticism and suggestions for innovations that may result in a clearer understanding of accommodative processes.

The setting to be examined, psychotherapy, is a highly focused dyadic experience between a client and a trained psychotherapist. Paradoxically, in psychotherapy, language serves both as the method of diagnosis and as the medium of treatment. Relatively little is known about the processes involved in the interaction because the speech event has emerged only in the twentieth century.

Introduction

This chapter is concerned with discourse in criminal court trials. Hence we will deal with highly asymmetrical social situations, encounters between professionals/experts (judges and lawyers) and laymen/clients (defendants and witnesses), that is, interactants who are widely different in terms of power, status, competence, perspectives, and, presumably, interests and intentions. Specifically, this chapter deals with various accommodative processes (adjustments, attunings) occurring between participants and across trial phases. In my analysis, I use the theoretical framework of speech or communication accommodation theory (SAT or CAT), which has been developed and successively refined over the last fifteen years, chiefly by Howard Giles and his collaborators. As is well known, this theory is designed to elucidate the sociolinguistic mechanisms of, and the social psychological processes underlying, discourse and interaction in various types of social encounters. I assume that the reader is familiar with the basic concepts and major versions of the theory (see recent overviews in Giles et al. 1987; N. Coupland et al. 1988; and the introduction by Giles, Coupland, and Coupland, to this volume). In accordance with recent proposals (e.g., Coupland and Giles 1988), I favor the term “communication accommodation theory (CAT).”

Work in CAT has recognized that accommodative orientations and strategies (and their evaluations by actors and observers) may be quite different under different contextual conditions. Although a major part of this research has used communication in experimental contexts, often but not always (see Thakerar, Giles, and Cheshire 1982) involving subjects of more or less equal status, we are concerned with discourse in an authentic and strongly asymmetrical situation.

Introduction

Since its articulation in the early 1970s, speech accommodation theory (SAT) has evolved into a complex and rich conceptual framework that helps account for a broad range of communicative behaviors in both laboratory and field settings (Giles et al. 1987). During the 1980s, the accommodation framework was successfully adapted as a conceptual tool to better understand communicative processes in an ever-increasing range of applied settings, as indeed this volume attests. One aim of this chapter is to extend the accommodation framework to yet another applied setting: the rapidly developing field of organizational communication (Goldhaber and Barnett 1988; Jablin et al. 1987). Given the expanding scope of both the accommodation and organizational communication literatures, this first attempt to link these two fields of research is necessarily quite focused and selective. It is hoped that linking the accommodaton with the organizational communication field will provide the needed impetus for researchers in both these fields to join forces in addressing ever more pressing communication problems within organizations throughout the world.

The first section of this chapter provides a brief overview of the accommodation framework especially in relation to language switching in bilingual environments such as those found in Canada. The reason for this focus on accommodation research conducted in the Canadian setting is twofold. First, the earliest empirical studies supporting key features of the accommodation framework were conducted in the bilingual setting of Montreal, where instances of linguistic convergence and maintenance could be unequivocably monitored through clear-cut French- English language switches (e.g., Giles, Taylor, and Bourhis 1973).

Introduction

In recent years, an increasing amount of research on second-language acquisition (SLA) has shifted away from studying aspects of the learner's second language (L2) behavior in isolation. The emphasis in the 1970s was on analyses of errors in the learner's language, in support of linguistic theory stating that there are certain universals that govern all SLA. By implication, it was assumed that all learners make the same, or similar, errors (see e.g., Burt and Dulay 1975; Oiler and Richards 1973; Richards 1974; Schumann and Stenson 1975). Although there is still some theoretical support for such a research orientation, a growing number of SLA researchers have begun to study L2 learners as they interact with others, whether it be native speakers (NSs) of the language they are learning or other nonnative speakers (NNSs). The shift toward interactionally situated research can be credited, in large part, to theoretical assertions by Krashen (1981, 1982) that comprehensible input from the L2 learner's interlocutor is crucial for language acquisition to take place. Also influential are claims by Long (1981, 1983, 1985), Hatch (1983), and others that in interactions, it is the negotiations toward meaning that are necessary for L2 development.

The growth in research on NS-NNS interactions clearly represents an important step toward the study of language as communication. However, much of the research is atheoretical, confined to linguistic descriptions of the NNS's or NS's speech. Since NNSs and NSs communicate within a social context that they both influence and are influenced by, it is essential to tie the research to sociolinguistic theory. In so doing, we can go beyond linguistic description to an explanation of how NSs and NNSs communicate.

Introduction

Coupland et al. (1988) introduce a “sociolinguistically elaborated model” of speech accommodation theory (SAT) in which the speaker attends to the interlocutor's productive performance (the focus of more traditional SAT) and projected ability to comprehend, as well as conversational needs, and to the role relations between the conversational partners. Of its four components, the discourse management component that responds to the addressee's conversational needs is understood to play the central role in what has been recast as “communicative accommodation theory (CAT)” (see, e.g., Coupland et al. 1990). The purpose of this expanded accommodation framework is “to model and explain degrees and types of communicative ‘attuning’ in discourse, and contextualise these with considerations of social norms, beliefs and expectations, self- and other categorizations, and interactional goals, as they influence both encoding and decoding choices.“ (Coupland et al. 1990: 3).

In this chapter, I apply this interactionally grounded sociolinguistic framework of accommodation theory to a situation of potential and actual miscommunication – conversations between normal and mentally disabled interlocutors, including Alzheimer's disease patients, schizophrenics and the mentally retarded. First, I discuss the disability-linked decreased ability to accommodate the conversational partner along dimensions of interpretive ability and discourse management, viewing this as a contributing factor to communicative breakdown. Second, in the face of this type of breakdown, I examine the normal other's use of accommodation both to the mentally disabled partner's perceived interpretive competence and to his or her conversational needs, seen as a way to maintain a balance between accomplishing what one wants to propositionally while maintaining both the speaker's and the hearer's face (see Brown and Levinson 1987; Goffman 1967; Lakoff 1973, 1979) in the interaction.

Introduction: the classic view of measurement

Measurement in science traditionally is defined as an assignment of numbers (or, in some definitions, numerals) to fundamental attributes of an object or event studied (Kyburg 1984). Once such a correspondence between numbers and objective properties is established, the numbers can be manipulated via mathematical operations and the results assigned back to the measured phenomena. The classic conception of measurement can be elaborated to include the entire range of techniques through which geometric models mediate the interpretive relationship between theory and data: ‘Using a geometry, the abstract objects and events of physical theory are composed into models which give a picture of reality and which are used to connect theory by experimental and nonexperimental investigation to sense impressions’ (Willer, 1984: 243).

This broadened definition of measurement comprehends a more complex array of practices than simply attaching numbers to objective attributes. The construction of an ‘interpreted diagram’ or model articulates the relevancies under which theoretical expressions are brought into correspondence with empirical properties. A model's constituent symbols and imagery can enable progressive generalisation of a family of models for mapping and measuring diverse phenomena. Despite its emphasis on the dependence of models on theory, this definition retains the classic concept of measurement as a bringing together of symbolic imagery and ‘small bits of information which we receive from the world’ (Willer, 1984: 247).

Introduction

In this discussion, I seek to consider various aspects of the historical divorce of Logic from a concern for the details of praxis, and the contemporary reassertion of that concern in various quarters. My purpose-built history will be designed to specify the important place of ethnomethodological studies within the current respecification of the proper object of logical inquiry broadly conceived.

Logic and practical activities: historical connections

In their splendid overview of the development of Logic, the Kneales address themselves explicitly to a range of relationships which obtained between everyday practices and the emergence of logical formalisms:

Everyday discourse, and not only everyday factual arguments, generated various puzzles which prompted logical dissection prior to Aristotle (Kneales, 1962). The contemplation of such conceptual puzzles was developed by the Megarian school founded by a disciple of Socrates called Euclides. That this school enjoyed some success is attested to in the chronicles of Diogenes Laertius.

Introduction

This chapter is concerned with the exploration of the problem of analysing human cognition. Focussing upon the theoretical dimensions of this complex issue, I shall deal with some of the contemporary perspectives within which it has been conceptualised and studied. My chief aim will be to show to what extent a commitment to the exploitation of computational concepts in the field has precluded a properly sociological understanding of those properties, attributes, and capacities of people typically construed as ‘mental’ phenomena. It thus elaborates upon one of the specifications of ‘the actor’ in the human sciences that was introduced in the previous chapter. Subsequent to this demonstration, I shall seek to illustrate in what ways a specifically ethnomethodological respecification of this field is defensible, intellectually productive, and constitutes a coherent and genuinely alternative approach to a range of problems traditionally subsumed under the cognitivist rubric.

I will begin by sketching some salient aspects of the historical background to the current ‘cognitive revolution’ in the human sciences. In particular, I shall try to show on this basis how, although many proponents of cognitivism claim that it has transcended its Cartesian roots by invoking essentially ‘materialist’ understandings of the mind–brain–behaviour relationship, there still remains an undissolved Cartesian core to their ways of thinking. The alternative to this is not, contrary to some critics of cognitivism, to embrace more fully a ‘materialist’ metaphysics of the mental, but will be argued to consist in a richer appreciation of the praxiological character of cognition.

In Chapter 1, I showed how, from the early 1970s, Australia had adopted positive attitudes and policies towards immigrant languages and cultures. Drawing on information in earlier chapters, I shall outline the development of co-ordinated language policies at the federal and state levels. It is not my intention to discuss in detail the events leading to the National Policy on Languages. These are dealt with comprehensively in Ozolins (1988). An attempt will be made, however, to compare the present state of implementation with the formulated policies. The question will be addressed if other countries have anything to learn from Australia's language policy experience.

THE PUSH FOR LANGUAGE-RELATED POLICIES

The push for a National Language Policy came in two phases — the first in favour of policies on language-related issues and the second explicitly for a National Language Policy. There was, of course, considerable overlap between them. They are part of the change from assimilation to multiculturalism policy.

The language-related policy suggestions came through demands to end discrimination against ethnic minorities in access to facilities and information and also for the education system(s) and the media to take into account the multicultural composition of the population. The first concerns only non-English speakers. Examples of demands relating to language are:

• the employment of interpreters in offices, hospitals, law courts, prisons and schools and interpreter facilities at driving tests;

• improved facilities for ESL teaching;

• the introduction of maintenance-oriented community language programs in primary, secondary and tertiary education;

• the introduction of bilingual education, where appropriate;

• the establishment of an ethnic radio station.

Introduction

There is a traditional puzzle about the relationship between the linguistic and the socio-cultural. In this chapter I want to suggest that it involves a question about the relationship between linguistics and sociology. Specifically, the question concerns the relationship between their methodological and theoretical frameworks. There is a certain amount of comfortable correspondence between linguistics and sociology which is not surprising given that there are parallels and even direct connections between Durkheim and Saussure, for example. This chapter examines some basic aspects of this complex relationship. A main theme will be the identification of inadequacies in the models constructed by linguists in order to account for the relationship between language and culture. Notable are those inadequacies which accrue from the excessively ‘cognitive’ emphasis of linguistic models. Such cognitive models give, at most, residual status to the social character of language – its social organisation. Indeed, it will be suggested that this cognitive emphasis is a conceptual outgrowth of linguistic treatments which have an in-built philosophical prejudice against the contemplation of action and the social dimension.

The argument will develop two strands. The first will consider the way in which attempts are made to accommodate the social aspects of language within the largely unmodified principles and suppositions of conventional linguistic theorising. Language is conceived in terms of linguistic theory, and the social is accommodated by showing how social variables determine, or are otherwise related to, linguistic ones.

This book has its origins in discussions I had with Jeff Coulter and Lena Jayyusi whilst I was on fellowship leave at Boston University. Aspects of the turbulent relationship between ethnomethodology and sociology (and as we came to argue, the human sciences) perplexed us. The first was that despite the fact that ethnomethodology has, during thirty or more years of ethnomethodological studies, provided a respecification of foundational matters for sociology, in the main, the discipline blithely carries on as usual. For example, the indifference that is shown to the radicalising respecification of sociological method is astounding for a subject that, above others in the human sciences, attempts to ensure that its students are methodologically trained.

The second aspect concerns the fact that although ethnomethodology is, in part, the product of Garfinkel's problem of operationalising Parson's theory of social action in situated circumstances of action, and is thus firmly rooted and located within sociology, his problem leaks into the other human sciences. This is because, although the disciplines propose separate and sometimes exclusive topics of enquiry, they have conceptual, methodological, epistemological, theoretical, and other foundations in common. In many respects, however, the human sciences at large are unaware of the foundational respecification that is proposed by ethnomethodology and the significance, or at least the implication, this respecification has for them.

The third feature was that within sociology, yet also within other departments of the human sciences that have engaged some ethnomethodological studies (often those in conversation analysis), there persists an obstinate, at times almost wilfully malicious misunderstanding of an ethnomethodological study policy.

Introduction

The question of ‘values’ and moral judgement has pervaded the human sciences and philosophy since their inception. This chapter will deal with the way this question has been formulated and pursued in sociology and moral philosophy, the problems that arose with the different formulations, and the ethnomethodological respecification of the base problematic. It was within sociology (as distinct from economics, political science, or psychology) that the issue of ‘values’ in social science was most significantly topicalised, and it was from within sociology that the ethnomethodological respecification of the domain of human scientific inquiry originated. At the same time, it was moral philosophy that made the sustained and systematic exploration of moral and ethical matters an object for attention, developing on, and addressing, some of the same philosophical antecedents that informed modern social science.

The question of ‘values’ has classically had two prongs to it. On the one hand there is the conceptualisation and study of the relationship of ‘values’ to human conduct; on the other hand there is the conceptualisation and study of the relationship of ‘value’ to human inquiry. For sociology (until the ethnomethodological turn) the latter problematic has been paramount; for moral philosophy, the former problematic has been the central one, leaving the latter to other sub-branches of philosophy. Throughout both these domains of inquiry, however, the problematics have been articulated around a central set of axes (distinct but interdependent) which shall provide the pivot for this discussion: (1) the distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘value’; (2) the is/ought dichotomy; (3) the problem of ‘relativism’ versus ‘objectivity’, and (4) the related issue of ‘moral diversity’.

Introduction

In our view, the epistemological arguments over ‘objectivity and relativism’, the relationship between ‘commonsense and pure reason’, the issue of ‘a paramount and multiple realities’, the relationship between ‘objects and appearances’ and other related epistemological issues in sociology and the human sciences seldom get beyond first base, not least because it is hard to get the lines of division identified well enough for there to be agreement on what are indeed the points of difference. Here we attempt a first base treatment of these issues by reverting to consideration of them in terms of Schutz's argument, and other basic phenomenological considerations. We do this because reasoned presentation of the issues in simple terms may help with the uphill struggle that, as Margolis (1986) observes, confronts anything that looks like a ‘relativist’ position – and we add, any which might be construed as ‘subjective’ in approach – because it will be typically presented by the opposition as blatantly stupid. Our objective is to display how Schutz, then Garfinkel and ethnomethodology, transforms the formulation of epistemological criteria into the topic of describing the properties of social organisation.

Examining social reality

It is a serious mistake to set philosophical scepticism on all fours and head to head with common sense understandings as though one straightforwardly and directly challenged the other. It is a usual characteristic of that scepticism that it seeks to operate at another level than the one on which our ordinary claims to knowledge get made.