چکیده:
Language is part of the culture of a people and the chief means by which the
members of a language community communicate. Ethnography of communication is the
study of the place of language in culture and society. This discipline is often
considered as a branch of sociolinguistics and is closely related to
ethnomethodology. Ethnographic description refers to knowledge available to
members of speech community which is used, more or less consciously, to
categorize persons, places and activities. Formal analyses in the ethnography of
communication focus on supra-sentential elements: speech situations, the forms
of speech events, the interrelations of speaker, addressee, audience, topic,
channel and setting, and the ways in which the speakers draw upon the resources
of their language to perform certain functions. This functional study is
conceived as complementary with the study of linguistic structure. Functional
analyses focus on larger social and cultural settings. In language teaching the
concept of ethnography of communication has provided impetus to Communicative
Language Teaching, especially through the notion of communicative competence.
خلاصه ماشینی:
It is not concerned simply with language structure, but language use, with rules of speaking, the ways in which speakers associate particular language codes, topics, modes of speaking, message forms and registers with particular socio-cultural settings.
Newspapers and periodicals, law books, court records, literature, idealized patterns of language and attitudes and values about language may also provide valuable sources of information about the socio-cultural setting and organization of the community.
Where the linguist considers differences within speech community as ‘ free variation’, the sociolinguist considers some of them as systematically related to the social identities of the interlocutors, or the socio-cultural setting in which communication takes place.
Like Chomsky’s reference to the ideal speaker and listener, the ethnography of communication too rests on a theory- a theory of speech as a system of cultural behavior and of …if our concern is social relevance and social realism, we must recognize that there is more to the relationship between sound and meaning than is dreamt of in normal linguistic theory.
(Hymes 1975:3) Ethnography of communication, introduced in the 1950s and early l960s by Gumperz (1972:205) is primarily concerned with the analysis of language use in its cultural setting.
As a branch of sociolinguistics, the ethnography of communication aims at describing the forms and functions of verbal and non-verbal communicative behavior in particular cultural or social settings.