Jaspers, J. (2012). Interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. In Gee, J. P., & Handford, M. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, pp. 135-146. New York: Routledge.
People write emails—and generally, other forms of distant communication—thinking the message will be received exactly as it was intended.
The reality, however, is that speakers assume that all the subtle, mild, hidden factors that aid in getting a message across during a face to face interaction will be attached to the words they write, even in the absence of contextual paralinguistic data, i.e. pragmatic, proxemic, haptic, or kinesic information. These elements play a decisive role in different day-to-day situations, such as job application interviews, and even how to seduce strangers in a nightclub.
Now, if we were to understand language simply as “…a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length, and constructed out of a finite set of elements.” (Chomsky, 1957: 13), we would be discarding these important nuances of communication altogether. Language is, therefore, more than the verbal syntax-semantics of a message, and that is where Interactional sociolinguistics (IS) walks in…
As an additional branch of linguistics, together with discourse and conversation analysis, IS relies on theoretical insights from formal, applied and anthropological linguistics, as well as pragmatics, dialectology, and sociology. IS assumes that verbal speech is not the only element in communication, but it is complemented by background knowledge, speakers’ prior understandings and assumptions.
During face to face interaction, there is a tacit agreement about the shared information that shapes the conversation, which permits speakers to fill in the missing portions of a message, resulting in a suitable interpretation of the intended meaning. A well-known example is that of the word fire, whose meaning and intention varies according to the situation or the person that utters it (i.e. a sergeant in a fire squad, a firefighter, a boy scout camping outdoors, etc.)
Among some of the topics of interest, IS focuses on miscommunication, native-nonnative interactions, and negotiation of meaning. These are addressed through a social approach that treats discourse as a set of habitual practices. Language is thus perceived as a rapidly evolving resource of social agents in a constant flux of information, determined by the structures of society. This perspective has got an unavoidable tendency to gravitate towards the critical analysis of power structures within society, as seen in the roles played by the speakers.
In order to undertake an IS analysis, the requirements go well beyond the traditional data collection strategies employed in more formal approaches of linguistics. Unlike the laboratory work of psycholinguistics, or the isolated phoneme recordings of phonetics, the IS researcher should usually be immersed in the local situations where spoken interaction occurs (or have an abundant quantity of written texts, for text-linguistics). This is due to the need to take an ethnographic approach in IS. The subtle nuances that allow speakers to fill in the gaps, should also be available to the researcher in order to assess the complexities of real word communication, beyond the level of the sentence.
As a conclusion, IS has a relevance in several fields, other than linguistics alone. Language policy and planning, educational initiatives, marketing, customer service, “soft-skills” training, to name but a few, are some of its areas of application. IS exhibits established discursive practices that are culturally and socially determined and it allows to expand the scope of communication studies and linguistics, for scientists, as well as to achieve small but important feats for the rest of us, whether it is sending an effective email, landing a dream job or getting that phone number in a nightclub.
