TRODUCTION LANGUAGE, IN CULTURE AND SOCIETY CONTEXT

INTRODUCTION

LANGUAGE, IN CULTURE AND SOCIETY CONTEXT

According to Hymes, (1964), state that the older and younger generations were always respectful of each other in their writing. This mutual respect, however, has historically occluded a very strong divide between their approaches to language

Imaging the referential function of language as the primary one to seeing it as one of many. He saw the organizing principles of language as derived from language functions, and social appropriateness as essential criterion for the ‘rightness’ of utterances. He was fundamentally concerned with linguistic diversity, and so, perhaps most importantly, he demanded that language study be grounded in ethnographic observation rather than introspective theorizing. In 1965, Hymes moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he joined the faculty of the

The generational shift from descriptive linguistics into sociolinguistics was contemporaneous with the Chomskyan shift to Transformational-Generative grammar. The sociolinguistics movement expressed continuity with prior generations of scholars, in contrast to the acrimony surrounding transformational grammarians’ split with structural linguistics. But both represente fundamental changes in linguists ‘understanding of language. Hymeswas particularly critical of Chomsky’s idea of linguistic competence and his failure to account for linguistic variation. Locating language within an a prior mental grammar does not account for or even acknowledge the enormous role of the socially-contextualized ways we uselanguage in determining the shape of utterances. We do more than construct grammaticallypossible linguistic utterances, and, as Hymes frequently noted, ungrammatical utterances may be sociallyappropriate, just as grammatical utterances can be socially inappropriate (Hymes, 1972b, 1989).

The object of study Hymes proposes for linguistics is ‘ways of speaking’ (Hymes 1989). The idea of language as a set of ways of speaking is an alternative to the idea

of language as grammar, an abstracted set of rules or norms. Under the rubric of ways of speaking, Hymes offers a bipartite conception of speech that encompasses both the ‘means of speech’ available to speakers, and the ‘speech economy’ these speakers participate in. Thus Hymes offers a theoretical basis for language study that accounts for both linguistic variation f

rom individual to individual and relative linguistic coherence across the social realm, while also offering a methodological heuristic for investigating communication. Dell Hymes and the Ethnography of Communication Barbara Johnstone and William M. Marcellino Rhetoric Program, Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh PA 152123 USA Corresponding author: bj4@andrew.cmu.edu Dell Hymes’ formative role in the ethnography of communication, ethno poetics and educational ethnography alone merit him biographic attention. In addition, though, tracing out DellHymes’ career arc offers a window on the birth and development of sociolinguistics as a whole. The particular cluster of early influences on Hymes – Franz Boaz, Edward Sapir, Roman Jakobson and Kenneth Burke – as well as Hymes’ resulting resistance to Chomsky linguistics, are representative of the sources of impetus for sociolinguistics in general. Hymes had an abiding personal and scholarly interest in American Indians in all their linguistic and cultural diversity. He argued for a widened scope for linguistics which started with diversity rather than in a search for the universal. In particular, he wanted linguists to pay attention to the poetic, aesthetic, reflexive aspects of discourse through which cultural knowledge is circulated. His interest in diversity has always been linked with a concern for the sources and consequences of inequality, and much of his work has taken place in the context of educational research. In Hymes’ interests, we can see sociolinguistics’ recurring concerns. If we want to understand how sociolinguistics grew out of linguistics, understanding Dell Hymes’ life and career is a good place to start. Life and Intellectual Biography. Hymes was born in Portland, Oregon in 1927. He grew up there, attending Reed College as an undergraduate, and began graduate work in anthropology at Indiana University in 1950, eventually receiving a doctorate instead in linguistics in 1955, with minors in anthropology and folklore. This constellation of interests would stay with Hymes throughout his career. C.F.Voegelin, Hymes’ dissertation advisor at Indiana, described Hymes as ‘a literary critic and minor poet who surprised us at Indiana when shifting from very general cultural interests to linguistics’ (Murray, 1998: 100). For Hymes, though, these interests were naturally allied ,allowing him to explore ‘the use of language, oral narrative and poetry, the history of anthropology and linguistics, Native Americans, theology’ (Hymes, 2009). While at Indiana, Hymes began his association with Roman Jakobson, whose ‘crucial contribution was to introduce a 'functionalist' perspective and to do so in a way that suggested an empirical, manageable way of dealing with speech functions’ (Hymes, 1975: 364), quoted in (Murray, 1998: 100) . That functionalist concern with how humans actually use language would steer Hymes’ work and presages sociolinguistics’ concern for contextualized language use. 2 From Indiana, Hymes became an assistant professor of linguistics at Harvard University, but was denied tenure in 1960. Hymes was then offered a position at Berkeley, in both Anthropology and linguistics. This was a fortuitous appointment. While other American Linguistics departments were beginning to focus increasingly on Transformational-Generative Grammar and other abstract models of linguistic competence, Berkeley’s department remained Focused on descriptive work on non-English languages, and the ‘social and cultural determinants of language’ (Murray, 1998: 101). Murray characterizes Berkeley as being split between an old Guard of linguists interested in fieldwork, resulting in descriptions of languages, and a younger Generation interested in developing theoretical frameworks for studying language use. That Younger generation, which included founding sociolinguists like Hymes, Erving Goffman, John Gumperz and Susan Ervin-Tripp, grounded their work in the Sapirian tradition, but expanded their concerns with language beyond description . Although their concern for the functions of language in social life represented a break from structural linguistics, there was clearly collegial respect between the emerging sociolinguists at Berkeley and the previous generation. Murray (1998: 131-3) points out that Hymes produced a rhetoric of continuity with the Sapirian and structuralism traditions in American linguistic anthropology, in part by including work by scholars such as Ha as, Emeneau and Hockett in the anthology Language in Culture and  societ(Hymes,1964), and that the older and younger generations were always respectful of each other in their writing. This mutual respect, however, has historically occluded a very strong divide between their approaches to language. However much Hymes grounded his work in the past, he still demanded a break from prior linguistic study. Hymes advocated a shift in focus away from linguistic code ‘la langue ‘to actual speech, ‘la parole’. He argued for the primacy of language function, and for a shift from imagining the referential function of language as the primary one to seeing it as one of many. He saw the organizing principles of language as derived from language functions, and social appropriateness as essential criterion for the ‘rightness’ of utterances. He was fundamentally concerned with linguistic diversity, and so, perhaps most importantly, he demanded that language study be grounded in ethnographic observation rather than introspective theorizing. In 1965, Hymes moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he joined the faculty of the Department of Anthropology and trained what Murray (1998: 133) has called the ‘second generation’ of ethnographers of communication, whose work is represented in the influential anthology Explorations in the Ethnography of Communication co-edited by two of Hymes’ students (Bauman and Sherzer, 1974). During this period, Hymes worked with other sociolinguists to create a new journal devoted to ‘the means of speech in human communities, and their meanings to those who use them’ (Hymes, 1972a: 2). The first issue of Language in Society appeared in 1972, published by Cambridge University Press, with Hymes as editor.

EDUCATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY

We have focused so far on the theoretical side of the ethnography of communication and ethno poetics, and on Hymes’s theoretical contributions to sociolinguistics as a whole. His work has always had applied goals as well, however, having to do with making unheard voices and ways of speaking hearable. This is particularly explicit in his work in ethno poetics, and it is alluded to in the title of his collected essays in ethno poetics: In Vain I Tried to Tell You. In the introduction to the volume, Hymes characterizes it as ‘devoted to the first literature of North America’ (1981: 5). He explains its title by saying: If we refuse to consider and interpret the surprising facts of device, design, and performance inherent in the words of the texts, the Indians who made the texts, and those who preserved what they made, we will have worked in vain. We will be telling the texts not to speak. We will mistake, perhaps to our cost, the nature of the power of which they speak. (Hymes 1981: 5-6) Hymes’ work has always been linked with social activism, and the need for linguists to be able to integrate their ‘scientific and social goals’

Conclusively,(Hymes, 1996: 26) is the basis for one of his critiques of abstract, universalizing, asocial approaches to language. The major themes in Dell Hymes’ explicitly educational writings are the

same as those in his work as a whole: the need for a view of language and linguistics broad enough that it has something to say and do about inequality, the significance and ubiquity of narrative poetics in the societies

                                                             REFERENCE

Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. (1990),Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life', Annual review of anthropology, 19: 59-88.

Bauman, R. and Sherzer, J. (eds) (1974), Explorations in the ethnography of communication Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.