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Description of a speech event
Default due date: Mar 15, 2024 at 11:59 p.m.
Word count: 1000
As anthropology students, you will not be surprised to learn that one of the main ways that anthropologists examine language and communication is by producing an “ethnography of speaking”1) (Hymes 1974, 455). In this view, it is less important to know what linguistic community a person belongs to, or even what their native language is, than to know what kind of speech community they participate in (Silverstein 1972, 623; 1996; 2015; see also Ahearn 2021, 102–5). Each person—each of us—is a member of one or more speech communities, and we learn to operate in the speech situations of those communities, especially its speech events.
According to Hymes, a speech event is a term for
activities, or aspects of activities, that are directly governed by the rules and norms for the use of speech [for a speech community in a specific speech situation]. (Hymes 1972, 56)
Irvine also offers a useful definition:
[A speech event is an] organized stretch of discourse with some internal structure, performance conventions, and an overarching structure of participation. (Irvine 1996, 141; cited in Noy 2023, 348)
Put otherwise, a speech event is a type of event in which people engage in speech acts, or use speech to take an action. A speech event will be typically be found in a specific speech situation. The classic example of a speech event is a greeting, for instance, between Alice and Bahadur:
A: Hey, how are you?
> B: I’m good, and you?
> A: I’m good.
> B: That’s good.