Scratch project: Spring is in the air!

Post 2 

Garfinkel’s linguistic vision

A time for some rumination and regurgitation.

The reading of Chapter 1 in Sidnell (2010) helps shed some great light on the previous dense reading of Heritage, interpreting Garfinkel’s view of language. For sociologists, the focus on language use in a society, the talk or conversation, does not stem from an interest in the nature of language itself, but from an interest in how language constitutes actions. As Sidnell argues: “For a given occasion, there are specific places within it at which point particular actions are relevantly done (can’t tell the page number from my Kindle version).” And this corresponds with what I had previous read from Bourdieu who also asserts that the meanings of social actions are embedded in what is an unbroken chain of contingent inferences. The ability to make these numerous inferences through contextualization is illustrated by the anatomy of a simple 3-line conversation between a couple. What is marvelous about this analysis of the structure or the “machinery” (organization) of this seemingly explicit conversation is that it brings to light our “seen but not noticed” subconscious norms that facilitate communications, or in sociologist’s terms, that structure actions. During a conversation, we usually depend on the other party’s understanding to design and initiate a turn, to predict and monitor a response, and to probably adjust our own talk by making sense of the other one’s explicit or more often than not, implicit response and so on. These great abilities have so long been internalized within us that they could have been reduced to oblivion if it were not for the efforts of the linguists and the sociologists who examine the relations between language and society.

Since these generally overlooked abilities are nevertheless so intriguing if closely examined, they have attracted both linguists and sociologists (and philosophers) alike, who have unequivocally been seeking the answers for what they are. The search for linguistic competency was first launched by Saussure who made a distinction between “langue” (the inner language that stands for our universal language ability) and “parole” (individual speech acts). For Saussure, it was “langue” that should be the linguistic proper worth studying by linguists. Chomsky followed the lead and created the phrase of “language competence”, which equals to human being’s natural ability to formulate grammatical structures accepted by a speech community even with very few exposure to the language when they are young. This narrow definition of competency was later challenged and expanded into larger realms by linguists from other schools of the discipline. Incidentally, the later expansions can be paralleled with what Garfinkel has envisioned:      

“It is these capacities—the capacity to ‘understand’ a description, to ‘make out’ from the description-in-its-context what the speaker is understanding with the description and, with these resources, to determine what the description presently ‘amounts to’—which constitute the defining characteristics of “mastery of natural language’ or ‘membership’ (Heritage, p.155).”

As a former linguist myself, one of the takeaways from Garfinkel is a better understanding of language itself. In the midst of voices that lamented the paucity of our descriptive sources and claimed the indexical character of natural language use as a defect, Garfinkel proposed that it was our contextualization ability that permits “the clarification and refinement of descriptors to the point that they can be supplied with a sense that is adequate to their inferred task.” Simply put, it is our ability to make inferences that enables the economy of our words or language at large so that speakers can make sense with reasonably small vocabulary. Given the fact that Garfinkel wrote before Chomsky, not to mention before all those following linguists, his is indeed a visionary of great insights.

With the circle of what comprises language competency ever expanding, it is more and more realized that we rely on structural, physical as well as logical, sociocultural knowledge about the language action established through a process of socialization to function in a society. It is also upon these common denominators (or the shared mundane knowledge) within a speech community that a CA analyst is able to do the analyses because he and his subjects see the world through the same lens of a language. Here comes my doubt: am I qualified to analyze a language of which I am not a native speaker?