COMM 305 1nd Edition Lecture 10 Outline of Last Lecture 2A Convergence Divergence and Maintenance 2B Pattern Distinctions 2C Explanations of convergence and Divergence Outline of Current Lecture Speech Code Theory Current Lecture 1 There are cultures within cultures Middle class America culture is a subculture There is variation within a culture because cultures are nested within cultures 2 A given person may belong to more than one culture A racial minority culture within a dominant culture They belong to both People have overlapping shared understandings Don t mistake that we aren t talking about every person in a culture 2 Speech Code Theory Speech code theory incorporate or address in different ways how culture helps us know how things mean in an interaction A speech code is a historically enacted socially constructed system of terms meanings premises and rules pertaining to communication conduct Speech codes have history Studying a speech code we look at it in a moment in history How do the premises act as rules for communication behavior The code is focused on communities behavior There is a difference in speech code and speech community Thinking of a speech code is thinking how it relates to others It applies the community broadly National identity American Chinese etc have their own speech identity A community can be a neighborhood or group Teamsterville how do members talk to one another What are their premises When do people talk and when do they not talk B six propositions that speech code theory lays out 1 Wherever there is a distinctive culture that is a distinctive speech code A certain way of speaking stands out Aggieland is a speech community with its own special language 2 In any given speech community multiple speech codes are deployed code switching We can t forget that cultures are inside cultures Speech communities are fragmented not uniformed Diglossia two language or language varieties co exist in a community One language is used for every day Another is used for public occasions Haiti is a diglossia There is standard French learned in school and for formal or public languages and creol used every day Arabic different than other dialects and standard Arabic Bilingual means a particular person speaks to languages It is different from diglossia Diglossia refers to a community that two languages coexist Diglossia provides opportunities for code switching Code switching is a single speaker using difference languages in systematic ways I engage in code switching too Code switching is more generic It happens because there are multiple codes Driving home from a bar you speak differently to your friends When you get pulled over you speak differently to the officer than you do to your friends Talking to a dps officer formally and he find out you re an aggie you switch codes and say gig em and maybe talk more as friends 3 A speech code involved a culturally distinctive psychology sociology and rhetoric What is our community like Rhetoric What does it mean to be persuasive What counts as effective communication COMM 305 1nd Edition 4 The significance of speaking depends on the speech codes used by listeners to create and interpret their communication What should things mean The Joy Luck Club movie clip a Chinese lady brings her English boyfriend to her parents house He doesn t know how to best relate to his new chinese friends He is trying to be polite but he actually comes across as rude He does things an American speech community would find good Having a hardy appetite His hosts do not like that 5 Speech codes must be discovered through observation of talk Set up an experiment to see how an interviewer is talking to someone in an interview You have to observe a talk You have to go there In Aggieland we say from the outside looking in you don t understand it form the inside looking out you can t explain it Something like that We know the phrase even without knowing it exactly 6 Speech codes guide and constrain behavior but then do not have deterministic force There is a difference in speech codes causing and guiding behavior Wai Thai expression Going to a friends house should you wai or not Speech codes die but don t determine behavior Wai may be seen as respectful or if you do it wrong it may be seen as wrong Trying to get concepts to describe what is going on in a particular culture