From speech as “situated” to speech as “situating”: insights from John Gumperz on the practical conduct of talk as social action

Abstract

The article begins by reviewing the early research interests of John Gumperz and their further development across the course of his career. His doctoral research documented spoken language in an immigrant community. He then focused on bilingual speech communities and “code switching.” Later he became concerned with various aspects of style shifting within a language. Whether he was considering language switching, or dialect switching, or shifts in register, Gumperz showed that speakers were creative in their language use — active agents rather than passive rule followers — alternating among disparate styles to communicate metaphoric and usually implicit social meaning. Through changes in speech style, interlocutors could be seen to be reframing their social relations, modifying the social situation they were in. ( NB This lability in situational framing is a major point of emphasis in Gumperz's notions of “contextualization” and “conversational inference.”) The article continues by presenting and discussing two of Gumperz's “telling cases” of contextualizing frame shifts by speakers. In concluding, a few examples from the author's own research are presented, with emphasis on the use of contextualization in establishing local alignments of solidarity-in-the-moment among interlocutors — indexical shifts to a footing for interaction that the author has termed “situational co-membership.”