5 - John Gumperz and Interactional Sociolinguistics—Intentionality, Interpretation and Social Meaning

Abstract

This chapter presents the work of John Gumperz on interactional sociolinguistics. Gumperz's early work was ethnographic in nature, and his sociolinguistic theory is in many ways grounded within the ethnographic tradition. Nevertheless, Gumperz disagrees with what he perceives to be the seemingly non-interactive nature of sociolinguistics within the ethnography of communication. Gumperz's sociological theory is grounded in human interaction whereby meaning, order, structures, etc., are not predetermined but evolve within interaction based on a complex range of material, experiential and psychological factors. Gumperz's linguistic theory is aimed at the level of the individual; it is not individualistic or asocial.It is instead based on a social theory of language that rejects the separation of language from social context. The method for doing interactional sociolinguistics that Gumperz advocates is a form of microanalysis. He starts with the basic socially significant unit of interaction in terms of which the meaning is assessed. In his own work, Gumperz has looked at code switching, prosody, formulaicity, and contextualization conventions as signaling mechanisms. In terms of conversational coordination, Gumperz suggests that examination of participant's success in establishing common themes, maintaining thematic continuity or negotiating topic change at the level of content yields empirical evidence about what is achieved.