This semester I'm taking Discourse Analysis, Phonology/Morphology, and Spanish. Those, along with buying and renovating a house, introducing my son to full time care, and still trying to enjoy some semblance of a married life has been keeping me pretty busy.

Here's a little critical review I wrote up on Interactional Sociolinguistics. It is not comprehensive. Just some thoughts really.

Defining Characteristics of Interactional Sociolinguistics
Interactional Sociolinguistics cannot be easily defined in a single sentence. There are several key ideas that go in to making a complete definition. IS studies how people create meaning in a verbal interaction, how we use shared cultural knowledge and contextualization cues in addition to grammar and the referential properties of language to interpret one another and make inferences.

Context is vital to the communicative process; there is no meaning outside of context. The same utterance can be interpreted in many different ways given the context in which it was spoken. Throughout a given conversation, we put out little cues to aid in interpretation. Facial expression, body language, tone of voice, prosody, pauses, even code choice or the use of lexical expressions are all used by the speaker to place what is being spoken into the proper context. IS has demonstrated repeatedly that if some or all of these contextualization cues are misread, serious miscommunication can take place.

According to IS, this type of breakdown is most likely to happen in cases where the participants do not have shared background knowledge of social and cultural norms. Without this shared knowledge, it becomes very easy for one or more participants to misread contextualization cues and draw incorrect inferences. A simple matter of intonation may be perceived as an offer in one culture but as sarcasm by another. This can dramatically change the meaning of an utterance. Lacking shared knowledge of the meaning of this cue can cause communication to break down without anyone in the conversation understanding what went wrong.

IS seeks to specify the kinds of shared knowledge necessary for successful communication, and to fully understand the process of conversational implicature.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Interactional Sociolinguistics
IS works very well to explain cross-cultural miscommunication. Indeed, Gumperz applies his methodology to examining multiple cases of this type. The method works very well in these cases because one of the key elements for interpretation is missing: that of shared background knowledge of social and cultural norms. Gumperz proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that this shared knowledge between participants in a conversation is absolutely vital. He demonstrates in multiple examples how a lack of shared knowledge has directly contributed to the breakdown of a communicative event.

There are a couple of weaknesses to IS. Because it focuses on face to face interaction and holds that context is key to communication, it is very difficult to make big generalizations within the theory of IS. Every speech situation is different, every context, thus replicating data is virtually impossible. The methodology can be applied on a case by case basis, but it’s hard to find universals.

Another difficulty with IS is that it can only be used to study unsuccessful events to determine why they’re unsuccessful, successful events are more difficult to deal with. The dynamic nature of language and the virtually infinite variety of verbal interactions make it impossible to write a recipe card for a successful interaction. This poses a problem for the validation of data. You can’t study an interaction, discuss what went wrong, make corrections and then repeat the same interaction to see if you fixed it.

Given these weaknesses, it may be impossible in the end for IS to achieve its stated goal of specifying “the linguistic and socio-cultural knowledge that needs to be shared if conversational involvement is to be maintained” (Gumperz: 1982. page 3).

Nevertheless, IS has proven to be invaluable in understanding specific examples of cross-cultural miscommunication. The methods developed by John Gumperz have had a direct benefit for countless people, by helping them to understand why they are being misunderstood by interlocutors from other cultures, and how they can more effectively use extra-linguistic features and other contextualization cues to communicate better in their new cultural situation.