In Roadville

A piece of truth

Roadville residents worry about many things. Yet no Roadville home is a somber place where folks spend all their time worrying about money, their children's futures, and their fate at the hands of the mill. They create numerous occasions for celebration, most often with family members and church friends. On these occasions, they regale each other with “stories.” To an outsider, these stories seem as though they should be embarrassing, even insultingto people present. It is difficult for the outsider to learn when to laugh, for Roadville people seem to laugh at the story's central character, usually the story-teller or someone else who is present.

A “story” in Roadville is “something you tell on yourself, or on your buddy, you know, it's all in good fun, and a li'l something to laugh about.” Though this definition was given by a male, women define their stories in similar ways, stressing they are “good fun,” and “don't mean no harm.” Stories recount an actual event either witnessed by others or previously told in the presence of others and declared by them “a good story.” Roadville residents recognize the purpose of the stories is to make people laugh by making fun of either the story-teller or a close friend in sharing an event and the particular actions of individuals within that event. However, stories “told on” someone other than the story-teller are never told unless the central character or someone who is clearly designated his representative is present. The Dee children sometimes tell stories on their father who died shortly after the family moved to Roadville, but they do so only in Mrs. Dee's presence with numerous positive adjectives describing their father's gruff nature. Rob Macken, on occasion, is the dominant character in stories which make fun of his ever-present willingness to point out where other folks are wrong.

In Trackton

Concepts of print

Newspapers, car brochures, advertisements, church materials, and homework and official information from school come into Trackton every day. In addition, there are numerous other rather more permanent reading materials in the community: boxes and cans of food products, house numbers, car names and license numbers, calendars and telephone dials, written messages on television, and name brands which are part of refrigerators, stoves, bicycles, and tools. There are few magazines, except those borrowed from the church, no books except school books, the Bible, and Sunday School lesson books, and a photograph album. Just as Trackton parents do not buy special toys for their young children, they do not buy books for them either; adults do not create reading and writing tasks for the young, nor do they consciously model or demonstrate reading and writing behaviors for them. In the home, on the plaza, and in the neighborhood, children are left to find their own reading and writing tasks: distinguishing one television channel from another, knowing the name brands of cars, motorcycles and bicycles, choosing one or another can of soup or cereal, reading price tags at Mr. Dogan's store to be sure they do not pay more than they would at the supermarket. The receipt of mail in Trackton is a big event, and since several houses are residences for transients the postman does not know, the children sometimes take the mail and give it to the appropriate person. Reading names and addresses and return addresses becomes a game-like challenge among all the children, as the school-age try to show the preschoolers how they know “what dat says.”

Preschool and school-age children alike frequently ask what something “says,” or how it “goes,” and adults respond to their queries, making their instructions fit the requirements of the tasks. Sometimes they help with especially hard or unexpected items, and they always correct errors of fact if they hear them. When Lem, Teegie, and other children in Trackton were about two years of age, I initiated the game of reading traffic signs when we were out in the car. Lillie Mae seemed to pay little attention to this game, until one of the children made an error. If Lem termed a “Yield” sign “Stop,” she corrected him, saying, “Dat ain't no stop, dat say yield; you have to give the other fellow the right of way.”

The way to be

When Annie Mae says, “They've come up with some new rules to make 'em feel important,” she is referring to the townspeople – teachers, preachers, politicians, and “all the ‘big heads.’” The townspeople are blacks and whites whose names and influence waft in and out of Trackton and Roadville through newspaper articles about the city council's debate on city buses, permission forms for school field trips, and invitations to a “community” meeting to talk about new urban housing. Townspeople not known by name can be identified immediately by Roadville and Trackton residents: clothes, bearing, speech, and habits of talking from or with pieces of paper mark them. Even preachers, black and white, who have churches in town and have become identified with Gateway's city projects such as daycare programs, neighbourhood centres, the human relations council, and housing projects are “town folks.” Only those preachers who remain “in the country” are not automatically counted as “big heads” – “folks that have forgotten where they come from or what it's like to have to keep up with all those rules.”

The townspeople, black and white, are mainstrearners, people who see themselves as being in “the main stream of things.” They look beyond the Piedmont for rules and guidance in ways of dressing, entertaining themselves, decorating their homes, and decision-making in their jobs. Though for some of the oldtime families, their core values may be regional, many of their norms of conduct and bases for forming judgments about their own and others' behaviors have much in common with the national main-stream middle class generally presented in the public media as the American client or customer. Townspeople are strongly school oriented, believing success in school, academically and socially, is a prerequisite for being successful as an adult. For them, school is an institution which helps instill values such as respectability, responsibility, and an acceptance of hard work. Early achievement within an institution that rewards adherence to norms of conduct reflecting these values is necessary for success in the workplace, whether as a businessperson, lawyer, politician, doctor, or teacher. Beyond these easily expressed ideals of mainstream behavior in school and workplaces, townspeople exhibit but can rarely articulate other mainstream norms of conduct.

When the baby comes

The coming of a baby is a big social event for the women of Roadville. When the expectant mother is in her sixth or seventh month of pregnancy, the neighborhood and church women, plus those who work on her shift in her section of the mill, plan “stork showers.” These are parties to which only women are invited and to which they are expected to bring a gift for the new baby. These showers are usually held in the evening in the home of one of the women sponsoring the shower or in the church recreation hall. First babies always receive several showers, but subsequent babies, at least through the second and third child, generally receive only one small shower.

In contrast to their grandparents and parents, Roadville women now prefer small families. They recognize that, for their grandparents especially, a large family was an economic necessity. Some children worked on the farm, and others in the mills to help their parents make ends meet; few got an education. But now Roadville children have to be educated, and because education “takes time and money,” parents see a large family as an economic liability. Families pride themselves on “doing well by” just two or three children. Having only one child is, however, frowned on, for an “only child” is pitied, sure to be “spoiled rotten,” and to suffer from being deprived of the fun of brothers and sisters.

Stork showers are planned to provide the expectant mother with the necessary clothing, supplies, and equipment. If several showers are given, the sponsors plan carefully, so that the baby receives clothes at one shower, and supplies and items of equipment at others. For the more expensive items, such as a plastic infant seat, several women join together and buy cooperatively.

The notion of a “speech community” has long been recognized as problematic since competent language users who are geographical neighbors may be linguistic distant cousins at best. They assume they share a common code, but their ability to enter into fruitful exchanges may at times be limited. Our data derive from an ethnographic group interview recorded in 1969 involving a university professor and a group of inner-city teenagers enrolled in an urban alternative high school. The meeting took place in the home of a young black social worker less than a mile away from the professor's residence located in a medium-sized California city. The researcher had asked the social worker to arrange the group discussion to give him an opportunity to tape informal Black English conversation. Communication problems at the meeting provide striking evidence of the interpretive difficulties that can arise even among long-term residents of the same urban environment.

Although linguists concerned with Black English have concentrated on phonological and grammatical differences, the problem here is rather one of conversational conventions embodied in prosody and formulaic speech which draw upon knowledge specific to the Afro-American cultural traditions in the United States.

In attempting to isolate the relevant conversational conventions, we begin by focusing on empirical evidence of conversational breakdown occurring in the course of the discussion. Our purpose is to identify culturally specific contextualization cues that have signalling values for individuals familiar with the Afro-American tradition but that are not noticed or interpreted by the middle-class white interviewers.

Conversational conventions are those organizational filters that the listener uses when making the connection between speaker's intent and meaning.

In order to show how prosody (including rhythm and register shifts) and paralinguistic cues signal interpretive meaning, and how this affects evaluation of an individual's performance, I have analyzed part of a counselling interview between Das, a schoolteacher, born in South Asia and Beth, a British born staff member in an adult education center specializing in industrial language and communication problems. Das is typical of numerous Asian professionals working in the urban West, whose written English is good, and who have no difficulty on their day-to-day affairs in English, but who experience what to them seem unexplainable difficulties in oral exchanges. After completing his professional training he had received several probationary appointments. Probationary teachers are regularly evaluated, but normally such evaluations are routine. The vast majority of probationary appointments are eventually regularized. Das, however, had been released from three positions and seemed unable to obtain regular employment. He reports that in his last post the principal had at first assured him that he was doing well, but when he was then once more released, he was informed that this was because he lacked communication skills and that he needed more training to improve his language before he could be appointed to another post.

He thus turned to the center for advice on how to proceed. In the following extract from a 90-minute interview, Das attempts to explain the circumstances that led to his dismissal. The interviewer, Beth, is a center staff member in charge of curriculum planning, not a regular member of the teaching staff.

It has been customary to deal with cross-cultural differences in language behavior either in terms of correlations between interference (i.e., the mapping of grammatical and phonological patterns from one system to the other) and independently determined cultural presuppositions or in terms of social norms. The aim of this chapter is to show how these phenomena interact at the level of discourse so that, in spite of surface similarities, some styles of English used by many South Asians are even more pervasively divergent from Western styles of English, and are systematically different not only in the social knowledge their speakers use as bases for conversational strategies, but also in the conventions and principles that guide how a given conversational intention will be signalled in speech.

The bulk of our data derives from recordings of natural conversations of Indian and Pakistani residents of Great Britain who know English well and use it regularly in the course of their daily affairs. We will refer to the style of speaking they employ in the examples we cite as Indian English and we will contrast it with Western English, i.e., the conversational style or styles used by educated residents of England and the United States.

We begin with some illustrative examples. First of all, Indian English sounds odd to Western ears because it has systematically different conventions at the sentence level governing lexicalization, syntax, and, as we have shown in Gumperz (1982), prosody. The following single Indian English sentences are extracted from natural conversational data.

In this volume we present a series of case studies exploring situations of intergroup communication in modern industrial society. These studies are instances out of which we seek to develop interpretive sociolinguistic approaches to human interaction which account for the role that communicative phenomena play in the exercise of power and control and in the production and reproduction of social identity. Our basic premise is that social processes are symbolic processes but that symbols have meaning only in relation to the forces which control the utilization and allocation of environmental resources. We customarily take gender, ethnicity, and class as given parameters and boundaries within which we create our own social identities. The study of language as interactional discourse demonstrates that these parameters are not constants that can be taken for granted but are communicatively produced. Therefore to understand issues of identity and how they affect and are affected by social, political, and ethnic divisions we need to gain insights into the communicative processes by which they arise.

However, communication cannot be studied in isolation; it must be analyzed in terms of its effect on people's lives. We must focus on what communication does: how it constrains evaluation and decision making, not merely how it is structured. We therefore begin with materials or texts collected in strategic research sites which exemplify the problems we seek to deal with.

Something strange is going on in Montreal. Every encounter between strangers, however casually, especially in public places but by no means exclusively, has become a political act. Buying a pair of socks has become problematic, as witnessed by the following article from The Montreal Star of January 26, 1978, reporting one person's frustration:

General introduction

In the 1950s and 1960s, many major urban areas of Britain which had been relatively monolingual and monocultural became multiethnic for the first time. A similar process of transformation occurred in many large industrialized cities of the world and for a similar reason: the need to fill unskilled, unsocial or poorly paid jobs which could not be filled locally. Generally, therefore, the jobs of the newly settled immigrants have not been determined by their qualifications, skills, and experience, but by gaps in local labor markets. So the primary cause of immigration was the needs of workplaces, and now many workplaces are, in turn, a reflection of the new multiethnic pattern of urban life which has resulted from this labor market immigration. But the particular circumstances and pattern of this immigration have varied significantly between different countries as has the pattern of settlement of families and dependants during the 1970s. Britain is different in some respects from the rest of Western Europe, and both are quite different from the United States, Canada and Australia.

Multiethnic workplaces are among those strategic research sites referred to in Chapter 1 which exemplify the problems of intergroup communication in modern industrial society. This paper arises from observation, analysis, and training programs related to communication in such multiethnic workplaces, particularly where numbers of South Asian people are employed. The first part of this chapter provides empirical background to some of the case studies in this volume and places them in a socioeconomic perspective.

This volume is the product of several years of cooperative field research. The initial goal was to seek comparative data to document and test the claim that interpretive analysis of conversational exchanges in key, naturally organized situations can yield significant insights into the communicative processes that underlie categorization, intergroup stereotyping, evaluation of verbal performance and access to public resources in modern societies. Ethnographic information and tape recordings of individuals of differing social and ethnic backgrounds interacting in such settings as counselling encounters, business and committee meetings, courtroom interrogations, public debates and family situations in North America and Britain were collected and subjected to comparative analysis. Most of the contributors were members of the research group directed by the Editor, and drew on a common pool of data. Heller, Maltz and Borker, and Tannen report on studies of their own that follow a similar perspective.

As the book developed, it became apparent that additional discussion was necessary to show how detailed analyses of conversational exchanges can contribute to an understanding of broader social issues. The introduction was therefore expanded to include a general discussion of basic communicative characteristics of modern industrial societies and their relation to ethnic and social distinction, and to the evaluation of verbal performance. The final chapter by Jupp, Roberts, and Cook-Gumperz reverts to this broader theme in discussing industrial communication in Britain, with special reference to the socioeconomic position of workers and professionals of Asian background.

Acknowledgments

Several of the chapters in this book appeared in preliminary form elsewhere.

Introduction

This chapter presents what we believe to be a useful new framework for examining differences in the speaking patterns of American men and women. It is based not on new data, but on a reexamination of a wide variety of material already available in the scholarly literature. Our starting problem is the nature of the different roles of male and female speakers in informal cross-sex conversations in American English. Our attempts to think about this problem have taken us to preliminary examination of a wide variety of fields often on or beyond the margins of our present competencies: children's speech, children's play, styles and patterns of friendship, conversational turn-taking, discourse analysis, and interethnic communication. The research which most influenced the development of our present model includes John Gumperz's work on problems in interethnic communication (1982) and Marjorie Goodwin's study of the linguistic aspects of play among black children in Philadelphia (1978, 1980a, 1980b).

Our major argument is that the general approach recently developed for the study of difficulties in cross-ethnic communication can be applied to cross-sex communication as well. We prefer to think of the difficulties in both cross-sex and cross-ethnic communication as two examples of the same larger phenomenon: cultural difference and miscommunication.

The problem of cross-sex conversation

Study after study has shown that when men and women attempt to interact as equals in friendly cross-sex conversations they do not play the same role in interaction, even when there is no apparent element of flirting. We hope to explore some of these differences, examine the explanations that have been offered, and provide an alternative explanation for them.

Introduction

Considerable work has been done on the factors that promote or mitigate understanding of contact across different cultures, both within nations as well as between nations. The theoretical apparatus has been drawn from various disciplines. For example, recent writings by anthropologists of ethnic process explain the persistence of ethnicity as an aspect of socioeconomic considerations and power relations and as a major factor in generating misunderstanding in ethnically mixed industrial societies. Previous work by social psychologists on the problems in cross-cultural interaction attributes cultural differences to variation in values and attitudes.

Philosophers and historians, for more than three centuries, have grappled with characterizing Chinese ethos, values, and perceptual framework. Many of them seek to define the differences in logical processes between the Asian mind and the Western mind. Moreover, they attempt to delineate the differences in social processes between Asian cultures and Western cultures. Their emphases have been reliance on either historically or religiously based explanations, or the search for the nexus between language and culture. Unfortunately, their excursions into the role of language in specifying modes of thinking have been mired in the study of vocabulary and isolated grammatical paradigms. Conversely, their comments on the overarching framework of social values have not been linked to linguistic evidence.

This chapter focuses on indirectness in male–female discourse, seen as a feature of conversational style. The present analysis investigates social, rather than individual, differences in the context of conversation between married partners; however, the phenomena elucidated operate in individual style as well. Investigation of expectations of indirectness by Greeks, Americans, and Greek-Americans traces the process of adaptation of this conversational strategy as an element of ethnicity.

Misunderstandings due to different uses of indirectness are commonplace among members of what appear to (but may not necessarily) be the same culture. However, such mixups are particularly characteristic of cross-cultural communication. There are individual as well as social differences with respect to what is deemed appropriate to say and how it is deemed appropriate to say it.

It is sharing of conversational strategies that creates the feeling of satisfaction which accompanies and follows successful conversation: the sense of being understood, being “on the same wave length,” belonging, and therefore of sharing identity. Conversely, a lack of congruity in conversational strategies creates the opposite feeling: of dissonance, not being understood, not belonging and therefore of not sharing identity. This is the sense in which conversational style is a major component of what we have come to call ethnicity.

As has been shown in earlier chapters in this volume, conversational control processes operate on an automatic level. While it is commonly understood that different languages or different dialects have different words for the same object, in contrast, ways of signalling intentions and attitudes seem self-evident, natural, and real.

In August 1978, a sixteen-month-old child was brought to the emergency room of a large US Navy hospital in Southern California for treatment of burns. The personnel present were the emergency room nurse, a physiotherapist, a medical corpsman and Dr. A, the Navy physician in charge. Dr. A is one of many medical officers, natives of the Philippines, who are attached to various Navy units currently stationed at the base. Unofficial sources state that about 40% of the junior physicians who are the primary care providers in this and other US Government hospitals in the Western United States, and who come into most direct contact with patients, are speakers of Philippine and other Asian languages. To the extent that this is true, this case raises communicative issues that have considerable importance for health care delivery in this region.

Dr. A speaks Aklan as his native tongue and in addition is fluent in Tagalog, the national language, and in English. His career pattern is similar to that of many other American physicians of South-East Asian background. He had been admitted to the University of California after secondary school training at home, where he was educated in English and Tagalog. Upon completion of a BA course in science, he enlisted in the US Navy, serving three years as a clerk at various bases in the United States and abroad, including Vietnam. Having decided to seek medical training, he applied to schools in the United States and the Philippines, but for financial reasons he was forced to take his medical training at the University of the Philippines.