American Talk Research Articles

Telling the Truth? A Cultural Comparison of "Facilitating Discussion" in American Talk

This study examined a form of American talk that may be termed facilitating discussion. In doing this type of talk, Americans propose a new idea, which they do not necessarily hold personally, to facilitate discussion. Compared to another form of talk "expressing opinion," in which people try to get their personal opinions across, the facilitating-discussion talk is marked by 3 characteristics: (a) an invitation to consideration and discussion, (b) openness to disagreement, and (c) a lack of resistance. Furthermore, this form of American talk sounds suspicious to German informants. For them, the American person engaging in the facilitating-discussion talk is not telling the wahrheit (truth). Different cultural rules for speaking can account for the different interpretations of the American talk. For Germans, telling the wahrheit is the critical rule for speaking, whereas for Americans, the rule of reciprocity is desirable. The German notion of "public sphere" and the American value of "personhood" function as assumptions of appropriateness of a type of talk that help people to make sense of the facilitating-discussion talk.

Citizen Views of Democracy in Latin America

When Americans and Americans talk about democracy, are they imagining same thing? For years, researchers have suspected that fundamental differences exist between how North Americans view and appraise concept of and how Americans view same term. These differences directly affect evolution of democratization and political liberalization in countries of region, and understanding them has tremendous consequences for U.S.-Latin relations. But until now there has been no hard data to make the definition of democracy visible, and thus able to be interpreted. This book, culmination of a monumental survey project, is first attempt to do so. Camp headed a research team that in 1998 surveyed 1,200 citizens in three countries - three distinct cases of democratic transition. Costa Rica is alleged to be most democratic in America; Mexico is a country in transition toward democracy; Chile is returning to after decades of severe repression. The survey was carefully designed to show how average citizen in each of these nations understands democracy. In Citizen Views of Democracy in America, ten leading scholars of region analyze and interpret results. Written with scholar and undergraduate in mind, essays explore countries individually, showing how meaning of varies among them. A key theme emerges: there is no uniform Latin American understanding of democracy, though nations share important patterns. Other essays trace issues across boundaries, such as role of ethnicity on perceptions of democracy. Several of contributors also compare democratic norms in America with those outside region, including United States. Concluding essays analyze institutional and policy consequences of data, including how attitudes toward private versus public ownership are linked to democratization. Every essay in collection is based on same data set, included on a CD-ROM packaged within each book, resulting in an organically cohesive work ideally suited for use in courses introducing and Third World politics, comparative politics, democratic transition, and research methods. Scholars and students may use software and data set on CD-ROM for comparative research projects linked to essays in volume.

Talking Circles: Listen, or Your Tongue Will Make You Deaf

The purpose of this article is to provide a description of the Native American talking circle in terms of (a) its group structure and process, (b) selected examples and descriptions of group incidents to illustrate the process, and (c) qualitative findings based on group member comments that support the group's development of sense of community and members' listening and empathy skills. Although the talking circle process presented here is based on a peer education program with college-level students, we nevertheless believe its adaptation and generalization to other populations and contexts are possible and worthwhile.

Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom

Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom

Review Essay:Analyzing Slavery and the Slave Narrative

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, by Ira Berlin.Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation, edited by Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller.

Semi-institutional discourse: The case of talk shows

This paper explores the nature of the talk show as a particular instance of broadcast discourse, which is envisaged both as a media product and as an ongoing talk-oriented process. The analysis focuses on the discursive features of the talk show, regarded as a host-controlled, participant-shaped and audience-evaluated speech event. The approach taken here draws on recent research in conversation- and discourse-analysis, pragmatics, critical linguistics, philosophy of language, and media and cultural studies. By focusing on excerpts taken from two American talk shows (the Oprah Winfrey show and the Geraldo Rivera show), this study is intended to capture the distinguishing features of the talk show by comparing it with casual conversation, on the one hand, and with institutional interaction, on the other. It is proposed that one of the major distinguishing features of talk shows is their semi-institutional nature, i.e. they exhibit a mixture of characteristics pertaining to both casual conversation and institutional discourse in terms of discursive configuration and goal, participant role assignment and role switching, talk and topic control.

Review: Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation, by Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller and Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation, by Smithsonian Productions

Review: <i>Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation</i>, by Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller and <i>Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation</i>, by Smithsonian Productions

“Where can Americans talk politics: Civil society, intimacy, and the case for deep citizenship”

Voluntary associations are often said to be the fount of democracy. They are said to foster all sorts of goods in citizens, simultaneously: solidarity and trust, wide‐ranging deliberation, political knowledge, broadened horizons, and political power. This essay explores the tensions between these different goods. First, using Michael Schudson's historical study, The Good Citizen, and my own fieldwork in a range of voluntary associations as springboards for questioning, the essay asks how people in everyday conversations create these different, possibly incompatible goods. The essay argues that contemporary speech genres for voluntary associations resonate deeply with the very discrepant, clashing forms of citizenship Schudson discovered in past eras of American history. Finally, using some tentative ethnographic evidence from intimate settings and bureaucratic settings, the essay asks how people might cultivate some of these goods in institutions that are not “voluntary associations,” that do not just meet after dinner.

Charles A. Ferguson, Sociolinguistic perspectives: Papers on language in society, 1959–1994. Ed. by Thom Huebner. (Oxford studies in sociolinguistics.) Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. vii, 348. Hb $75.00, pb $35.00.

This collection of Ferguson's articles brings together his research over four decades. When Ferguson started writing about topics related to language and society, the term “sociolinguistics” was barely used and had no recognized status as a field of inquiry. Today, the term seems too diffuse for all the strands of specialization that range from the examination of micro-socio-phonetic detail to the consideration of broad-based macro-sociological and linguistic institutions. Perhaps better than those of any other individual scholar, Ferguson's research interests reflect the breadth of the field. His topics of study have ranged “from Arabic linguistics to applied linguistics, from child language acquisition to language planning, from language and religion to language universals, from Bengali syntax to American sports announcer talk” (p. 3). His impact on the field is undeniable; but because of his expansive interests in an age of increasingly (and sometimes myopic) specialization, few readers are familiar with the full range of sociolinguistic topics that bear this scholar's mark. In Huebner's selection of articles, Ferguson's overall contribution to the field is put in perspective, although the collection is hardly exhaustive of his impact. (See now also Huebner's 1999 obituary of Ferguson.)

Review: "You Ain't Heard Nothin'Yet": The American Talking Film: History and Memory, 1927-1949 by Andrew Sarris

Review: "You Ain't Heard Nothin'Yet": The American Talking Film: History and Memory, 1927-1949 by Andrew Sarris

Chile: the great transformation

Chile is frequently cited as a remarkable of neoliberal economic restructuring. In fact, countries around world are encouraged to follow Chilean model so that they can reap extraordinary benefits of rapid growth and expanding export markets associated with drastic economic reform in Chile. But Chilean experience is extremely complicated and contradictory.The international discussion on economic restructuring in Latin America often runs on two tracks: one dominated by consultants and scholars from English-speaking world and another in which Latin Americans talk to each other. This book attempts to bridge gap.Two outstanding Chilean scholars and activists present an original interpretation of Chilean experience. They cut through rhetoric surrounding the Chilean miracle and provide an integrated analysis of process of socioeconomic and political change that transformed their country between 1970 and 1990. In so doing, they discover not only a neoliberal revolution, but a capitalist revolution with roots far deeper than Pinochet reforms.The book provides a valuable resource for people around world who hope to understand principal success story of Latin American adjustment. Copublished with United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.

All of Us: Americans Talk About the Meaning of Death.

A revolution in the science of emotion has emerged in recent decades, with the potential to create a paradigm shift in decision theories. The research reveals that emotions constitute potent, pervasive, predictable, sometimes harmful and sometimes ...Read More

In our own words: Academically successful and unsuccessful low‐income African American young men talk about academic life

abstract A research team of Black and White, male and female, student and faculty members applied rhetorical analysis to interviews conducted with low‐income African American young men. The team identified and examined major themes that emerged as young African American men attending an inner city parochial high school discuss school life. Several patterns emerged that distinguished more academically successful students from the less. Surprisingly, some tendencies that might have been expected as distinguishing characteristics do not emerge as defining qualities.

Local Talk in the Global Village: An Intercultural Comparison of American and German Talk Shows

Local Talk in the Global Village: An Intercultural Comparison of American and German Talk Shows

Reforming the UN: the view of the American people

It may come as a surprise that surveys of the US people on the subject of the UN and global issues show that the US government policy of ignoring major UN reform is at odds with strong preferences by the American people for many major UN reforms. Illustrating both ignorance and some surprising discretion, it is also true that the US public opposes few of the many reforms tested. The Americans Talk Issues Foundation (ATI) has conducted six opinion surveys of US people on the UN and global issues in the past three years, the highlights of the latest of which are reported here.

Domestic and foreign policy issues in the 1988 presidential election

Abstract. Data surveyed for the ‘Americans Talk Security’project prior to the 1988 U.S. election are used to evaluate the impact of domestic and foreign policy attitudes on the presidential vote. Both kinds of issues did have significant effects on voting behavior, contributing to Dukakis’defeat. It is demonstrated, however, that prior attempts to isolate and weigh the electoral influences of these two sets of opinions are flawed, because they ignore their interrelation and their dependence on partisan sympathies. If these factors are explicitly taken into account within a causal modelling approach, the 1988 presidential vote in the aggregate is found to have been much more strongly determined by domestic concerns. Moreover, the assumption of uniform reactions within the electorate to various issue areas is proven wrong. While domestic policies were more decisive for the vote of the majority, there also was a clearly identifiable substantial minority that can be described as a foreign and defence issue voting public.

Books are `Littler' Than TV: American and German Children Talk About Different Media

American and German children were asked to reflect and talk about picture books, television and radio. Three findings of this research are noteworthy. Firstly, media awareness, which is influenced by developmental mechanisms, could already be observed in three- and four-year-olds. Secondly, there were significant differences between American and German children in their judgement of, and knowledge about, media. These results can be explained by differences in the media presentations of the two countries. Thirdly, `heavy' viewers judged TV better than `light' viewers but knew less about it.

J. L. Dillard, American talk. New York: Random House, 1976. Pp. 187.

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DARE: The View from the Letter F

��� n 1978 when Richard W. Bailey began planning for the first issue of the journal Dictionaries (which appeared in 1979), he asked Frederic G. Cassidy to write an article about the progress of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). By that time DARE’s editorial practices had been established, the letters A and E had been substantially finished, and work had begun on the letters B, C, D, F, G, H, I, L, and M. Although Fred agreed that such an article would be appreciated by members of the Dictionary Society of North America, he also felt over-committed by other obligations. (A look at his bibliography suggests that at that time he would have been working on a review of J. L. Dillard’s American Talk for Language in Society, an article about Gullah and Jamaican Creole for the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, and a contribution to the four-volume festschrift for Archibald A. Hill.) Rather than simply plead overwork and decline Bailey’s request, Fred offered the assignment to me. And as a newcomer to the field of lexicography, I was glad for the opportunity to get my feet wet. Engrossed at that time in editing DARE’s letter F, I used an analysis of the first thousand entries in that letter to provide a preview of what the full Dictionary might look like. “DARE: The View from the Letter F” offered a detailed analysis of categories of entries, treatment of pronunciation and etymology, application of regional, social, and usage labels, and fine points of entry presentation. Now that Volume V (Sl–Z) is close to publication, it is possible to have a much more panoramic view of the whole and to assess the impact of DARE as a scholarly undertaking and as a utilitarian tool.

American Talk, Where our Words Came From. J. L. Dillard, pp. xxi, 187. New York: 1977

American Talk, Where our Words Came From. J. L. Dillard, pp. xxi, 187. New York: 1977