Language and Social Interaction

This course introduces an ethnographic approach to language and interpersonal communication. Such an approach tries to understand the bases for social relations and social interaction based on the observation of, and the participation in, actual instances of interpersonal communication. Concerns of face, speech acts, person-referring forms, terms for talk, relational dialectics, narrative, and rules and norms are introduced as theoretical frameworks for the analysis of interpersonal communication. We will turn our attention to moments of intercultural communication since different cultural communicative patterns for interpersonal communication are active there. These often result in miscommunication, negative stereotyping, injustices, discrimination, and the like.