Introduction

This chapter provides a theoretical framework for analyzing conversational data derived from job interviews and reports a case study using such a framework. Our data derive from simulated interviews given to 12 Afro-American students of a CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) job training program in Oakland, California in the summer of 1978. Our goal is to highlight those communicative conditions that can lead to negative evaluation in stressful speech encounters like job interviews.

We describe (1) the structural and communicative characteristics of the job interview, (2) the nature and inferential implications of interview questions, and (3) the nature of communicative tasks, showing how interview conversation differs from ordinary conversation. We then go on to compare the responses of two candidates to a similar set of interview questions, using three major parameters of communicative effectiveness in interview conversation: stylistic expectations, content, and underlying patterns. The comparison shows how the accretion of ethnic discourse features that diverge from established conventions of interview talks leads to a negative evaluation of one of the candidates.

The job interview

The interview as a kind of conversation is probably as old as language itself. In its simplest form, it is prototypically manifested as an interrogative encounter between someone who has the right or privilege to know and another in a less powerful position who is obliged to respond, rather defensively, to justify his/her action, to explain his/her problems, to give up him/herself for evaluation. (God's interview of Adam after the latter had eaten the forbidden fruit provides an archetype.

Committee meetings with their delays, procrastinations, and inconsistencies have long been a favorite source of humor, but, like it or not, committees form an essential and in many ways crucial aspect of the process by which policy is made in industry and public affairs. In modern post-industrial urban societies, institutions of all kinds have become increasingly open to public scrutiny. Regardless of how policies originate, or who proposes them and carries them out, actions of all kinds may ultimately be subject to some public inspection and control of decision making processes. This means that the mechanisms by which policies are adopted must have the visibility of group processes where the evidence for and against is openly debated in ways that are comprehensible to most, regardless of interest and background.

Sociologists of organizational behavior point out that committees are designed to “overcome difficulties in bureaucratic hierarchies caused by jobs needing unfamiliar responsibilities by creating a super person, a committee” (Burns 1969). As such superpersons, committees also make decisions that are suprapersonal above and beyond the decision making powers of any member.

Committees act as courts of appeal for what can be acceptable arguments as well as means of sifting information. It is ‘in committee’ that decision making appears to take place.

Previous chapters of this book have argued that linguistic diversity is more than a fact of behavior. Linguistic diversity serves as a communicative resource in everyday life in that conversationalists rely on their knowledge and their stereotypes about variant ways of speaking to categorize events, infer intent and derive expectations about what is likely to ensue. All this information is crucial to the maintenance of conversational involvement and to the success of persuasive strategies. By posing the issue in this way, one can avoid the dilemma inherent in traditional approaches to sociolinguistics, where social phenomena are seen as generalizations about groups previously isolated by nonlinguistic criteria such as residence, class, occupation, ethnicity and the like, and are then used to explain individual behavior. We hope to be able to find a way of dealing with what are ordinarily called sociolinguistic phenomena which builds on empirical evidence of conversational cooperation and does not rely on a priori identification of social categories, by extending the traditional linguistic methods of in-depth and recursive hypothesis testing with key informants to the analysis of the interactive processes by which participants negotiate interpretations.

Initially we approach the problem of the symbolic significance of linguistic variables by discovering how they contribute to the interpretation of what is being done in the communicative exchange. The hypothesis is that any utterance can be understood in numerous ways, and that people make decisions about how to interpret a given utterance based on their definition of what is happening at the time of interaction. In other words, they define the interaction in terms of a frame or schema which is identifiable and familiar (Goffman 1974).

Chapters 6 and 7 outline a perspective to conversation that focuses on conversational inference and on participants' use of prosodic and phonetic perceptions as well as on interpretive preferences learned through previous communicative experience to negotiate frames of interpretation. Using this perspective we can account for both shared grammatical knowledge and for differences in communicative style that characterize our modern culturally diverse societies.

This approach to speaking has both theoretical and practical significance. On the theoretical level it suggests a way of carrying out Garfinkel's program for studying naturally organized activities through language without relying on a priori and generally untestable assumptions about what is or is not culturally appropriate. Although it might seem at first glance that contextualization cues are surface phenomena, their systematic analysis can lay the foundation for research strategies to gain insights into otherwise inaccessible symbolic processes of interpretation.

On the practical level, the study of conversational inference may lead to an explanation for the endemic and increasingly serious communication problems that affect private and public affairs in our society. We can begin to see why individuals who speak English well and have no difficulty in producing grammatical English sentences may nevertheless differ significantly in what they perceive as meaningful discourse cues. Accordingly, their assumptions about what information is to be conveyed, how it is to be ordered and put into words and their ability to fill in the unverbalized information they need to make sense of what transpires may also vary. This may lead to misunderstandings that go unnoticed in the course of an interaction, but can be revealed and studied empirically through conversational analysis.

The background of modern sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is commonly regarded as a new field of inquiry which investigates the language usage of particular human groups and relies on data sources and analytical paradigms quite distinct from those employed by linguists. Yet the two subfields have common intellectual roots. Throughout the nineteenth and for much of the present century, language study was an integral part of the wider search into the cultural origins of human populations. This inquiry was in part motivated by abstract scientific concerns, but in part also by the desire to legitimize the national ideologies of the newly emerging nation states of Central and Eastern Europe. Because of the lack of direct documentary sources reflecting earlier forms of culture and the great gap in the published literature on local speech varieties, scholars began to seek new ways of recovering what the German Romantics had called Versunkenes Volksgut, the ‘sunken folk cultures’ of past eras. Along with the quest for new unpublished manuscripts, the search for historical materials on which to base studies of cultural evolution also stimulated direct investigation of unwritten folk speech throughout the world.

Although the development of linguistic tools for comparative reconstruction was the overt goal of nineteenth-century language scholarship, its most important achievement from the social scientist's point of view is the discovery of grammatical structure as the underlying dynamic of all verbal communication. Pioneers of linguistic sciences like Erasmus Rask and Jakob Grimm had already demonstrated that, to capture the regularities of language evolution, one cannot rely on comparison of words as meaningful wholes. One must analyze patterning both at the level of form and at the level of content.

Conversational code switching can be defined as the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems. Most frequently the alternation takes the form of two subsequent sentences, as when a speaker uses a second language either to reiterate his message or to reply to someone else's statement. The following examples are taken from natural talk recorded in bilingual communities. The language pairs in question are Spanish and English (Sp–E), Hindi and English (H–E) and Slovenian and German (Sl–G); where appropriate, English translations are given in parentheses. Speakers are fluent in both languages and regularly use both in the course of their daily routines.

1. (1) Chicano professionals in California, exchanging goodbyes (Sp–E).

2. A. Well, I'm glad I met you.

3. B. Andale pues (O.K. swell).

4. (2) A college student in India, telling an anecdote (H–E):

5. Mai g∂ya jodhpur me (I went to Jodhpur). There is one professor of Hindi there, he is a phonetician. To us-ne pronauns kiya ∂pne vais-se (so he pronounced it in his own voice).

6. (3) Family conversation in a Slovenian village in Austria talking about a visiting peddler (Sl–G):

7. A. Tot∂ kuarbc∂ y∂ mewa (she had such baskets).

8. B. No na jinyan (no I don't believe it).

9. C. Ya di mit di kerbalan (the one with the baskets).

10. […]

It is a commonplace of modern Linguistics that language boundaries are sharpest and older forms most likely to survive in areas which, for one reason or another, have been communicatively isolated and where populations have remained stable over time. When barriers to communication break down, it is said, rapid language change takes place and dialect boundaries become muted. Development of transportation routes, large scale population movements, increasing social mobility, centralization of education and government facilities, universal exposure to the language of mass media and the need to master expository styles of science and bureaucracy, along with many other factors characteristic of ongoing urbanization, all generate powerful pressures for linguistic uniformity. Yet, while it is true that indices of regional and social speech diversity have undergone far-reaching change, especially in the metropolitan centers of modern industrial states most directly exposed to these pressures, many important dialect differences remain and show no signs of disappearing.

Frequency or intensity of communication is perhaps a necessary precondition for the disappearance of dialect boundaries, but it is by no means sufficient. We know of many areas in Europe where people in adjoining villages speak mutually intelligible dialects which are nonetheless set off by clear speech distinctions. In these localities members of one community regularly communicate with members of the other, but speakers use their own locally specific forms. To adopt the other's way of speaking would count as discourteous and constitute a breach of local etiquette. Similar language usage conventions were also observed in a long term ethnographic study of dialect distribution, social organization and interaction patterns in a North Indian village where many different caste groups have lived side by side for several centuries.

Conversational inference, as I use the term, is the situated or context-bound process of interpretation, by means of which participants in an exchange assess others' intentions, and on which they base their responses.

Recent studies of conversation from a variety of linguistic, psychological, anthropological and sociological perspectives, have shed light upon a number of issues important to the study of conversational inference. It is generally agreed that grammatical and lexical knowledge are only two of several factors in the interpretation process. Aside from physical setting, participants' personal background knowledge and their attitudes toward each other, sociocultural assumptions concerning role and status relationships as well as social values associated with various message components also play an important role. So far, however, treatment of such contextual factors has been primarily descriptive. The procedure has been to identify or list what can potentially affect interpretation. With rare exceptions, no systematic attempts are made to show how social knowledge is used in situated interpretation. Yet we know that social presuppositions and attitudes shift in the course of interaction, often without a corresponding change in extralinguistic context. As we have argued in previous chapters, the social input to conversation is itself communicated through a system of verbal and nonverbal signs that both channel the progress of an encounter and affect the interpretation of intent. It follows that analysis of such ongoing processes requires different and perhaps more indirect methods of study which examine not the lexical meanings of words or the semantic structure of sentences but interpretation as a function of the dynamic pattern of moves and countermoves as they follow one another in ongoing conversation.

Introduction

This chapter deals with the question of how conversationalists use prosody to initiate and sustain verbal encounters. ‘Prosody’ here includes: (a) intonation, i.e. pitch levels on individual syllables and their combination into contours; (b) changes in loudness; (c) stress, a perceptual feature generally comprising variations in pitch, loudness and duration; (d) other variations in vowel length; (e) phrasing, including utterance chunking by pausing, accelerations and decelerations within and across utterance chunks; and (f) overall shifts in speech register. These are conceptual conflations of variations in the three basic phonological dimensions of frequency, amplitude and duration.

Prosodic phenomena have been studied from a variety of perspectives. They have been examined as elements of syntactic and lexical (Bresnan 1971, Berman & Szamosi 1972) as well as pragmatic competence (Bolinger 1972; Brazil & Coulthard 1980). In spite of many basic disagreements, linguists and phoneticians have discovered a great deal about the conventions of English prosodic usage, and about the nature of the semantic information conveyed by prosody. This work, which forms the basis of this analysis of prosody in conversation, will be discussed below. However, my approach to the semantics of prosody will be quite different. The question raised here is one which has hitherto received little direct attention: What sorts of information do speakers in fact rely on prosody to provide in verbal exchanges?

In conversations, we must continually make judgements at simultaneous levels of meaning, through an inferential process which both interprets what has been said and generates expectations about what is to come. The process is always situated or context bound.

Communication is a social activity requiring the coordinated efforts of two or more individuals. Mere talk to produce sentences, no matter how well formed or elegant the outcome, does not by itself constitute communication. Only when a move has elicited a response can we say communication is taking place. To participate in such verbal exchanges, that is, to create and sustain conversational involvement, we require knowledge and abilities which go considerably beyond the grammatical competence we need to decode short isolated messages. We do not and cannot automatically respond to everything we hear. In the course of our daily activities we are exposed to a multitude of signals, many more than we could possibly have time to react to. Before even deciding to take part in an interaction, we need to be able to infer, if only in the most general terms, what the interaction is about and what is expected of us. For example, we must be able to agree on whether we are just chatting to pass the time, exchanging anecdotes or experiences, or whether the intent is to explore the details of particular issues. Once involved in a conversation, both speaker and hearer must actively respond to what transpires by signalling involvement, either directly through words or indirectly through gestures or similar nonverbal signals. The response, moreover, should relate to what we think the speaker intends, rather than to the literal meanings of the words used.

Events of the last decade have served to accentuate the importance of verbal communication in modern urban society. The way we talk, along with what we say, determine how effective we are in dealing with the public agencies, the judiciary and other bodies that increasingly affect the quality of our daily lives. A glance at recent history will show that in public situations, it is easier to get things done when everyone concerned has the same background than when backgrounds differ. This creates a serious dilemma for speakers of minority dialects who rely on their in-group strategy to enlist cooperation and mobilize support, but who find that the largely automatic persuasive strategies that they rely on at home and in their own neighborhoods, may cause serious miscommunication in public settings.

This chapter illustrates this dilemma through in depth analysis of two speech events: a black protestant religious sermon and a speech made during a public rally by a black political leader. The sermon was recorded from a radio broadcast of a service held in a San Francisco Bay Area church and is typical of a type of sermon that can be heard on public radio stations on Sundays. The main speaker is the assistant pastor of the church, and the congregation whose responses are also recorded is black. The political address was made during the late 1960s at a San Francisco public meeting, called to protest against United States policies during the Vietnam war. The speaker was a well-known, but highly controversial black community leader.

This book seeks to develop interpretive sociolinguistic approaches to the analysis of real time processes in face to face encounters. It grew out of approximately ten years of field studies of verbal communication in India, Europe and the United States, originally intended to answer questions and test hypotheses arising from earlier ethnographic work on the realization of social categories in language (Blom & Gumperz 1972, Gumperz 1972). Detailed observation of verbal strategies revealed that an individual's choice of speech style has symbolic value and interpretive consequences that cannot be explained simply by correlating the incidence of linguistic variants with independently determined social and contextual categories. Sociolinguistic variables are themselves constitutive of social reality and can be treated as part of a more general class of indexical signs which guide and channel the interpretation of intent. The discussion of these indexical signs, of their relation to traditionally studied aspects of grammar and of what they tell us about the nature of misunderstanding in human society is the main subject of the book.

Much of the material presented here has appeared in a preliminary form elsewhere, but it has been extensively revised and rearranged to fit into a more general argument. Portions of chapter 2 first appeared as Working Paper No. 33, Centro Internazionale di Semiotica e di Linguistica, Universitá di Urbino, Urbino, Italy. A preliminary version of chapter 3 appeared in C. Molony, H. Zobl & W. Stolting (eds.) German in Contact with Other Languages (Kronberg: Scriptor Verlag, 1977), and of chapter 4 in Papers in Language and Context, Working Paper No. 46, Language Behavior Research Laboratory, University of California.