National open university of nigeria school of arts and social sciences
The organization of practical actions and practical reasoning
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- Talk-in-interaction within institutional or organizational settings
| The organization of practical actions and practical reasoning: This was the concern of earliest ethnomethodologists • The organization of talk-in-interaction: This is known in modern times as Converstional Analysis. We shall be looking at this late in this unit. • Talk-in-interaction within institutional or organizational settings this is basically concerned with interactional structures that are specific to particular settings. • The study of work The study bof any social activity within the setting in which it is performed 3.2 Language and the Social World Language is an essential part of the human social structure. Everyday, we use it actively to create and shape the world through social interaction. Every language operates in asocial world. Speakers, as part of a society, rely on a corpus of practical knowledge, 29 which they assumed is shared, at least partly with others. This is why a group of linguists, generally referred to as Functionalists, see language as asocial activity being performed in asocial world. The primary concern of such linguists, who belong to the schools of Sociolinguistics, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Text Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, and so forth is that language is context- dependent and the general context is the world we live in, while the specific contexts are the contexts of a particular usage. Context here includes the knowledge of the speaker of his/her world, the culture, values, expectations and norms. One way in which language is believed to influence our understanding of social reality goes back to the ideas of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis stresses that we view and perceive our world in terms of our language. It also stresses that the social reality we experience is unique to our language, since no two languages/cultures shares exactly the same social reality. This is why oftentimes terms for specific phenomena in languages do not have precise counterparts in other languages. What we have discussed in this section is really an important guiding principle for our approach to the analysis of discourse. We can only analyze any particular discourse effectively if we situate it within the social context or domain of its use. And this will take into consideration a lot of factors such as, the interlocutors, their role relationships in discourse, the mode of discourse. All these are used to create the text that will fit appropriately into the social world of the language users. Download 0.49 Mb. Share with your friends:
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