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*The Ethnography of
Speaking and the
Structure of Conversation * 2.1. The Ethnography of Speaking 2.2. Speech Events as the Focus of Ethnography of Communication 2.3. Speech Acts 2.4. The Speech Act Set 2.5. Speech Acts in the Classroom 2.6. The Structure of Conversation 2.7. Politeness and Politeness Formulas. Terms of Address Questions for Discussion *2.1. The Ethnography of Speaking * There are many areas of public life where language has an impact, such as the medical and legal professions, but particularly in the school. Sociolinguists have been actively engaged in studying the problems which arise from language use in these contexts, and especially what happens when there is a mismatch or difference in language involved between the participants, such as doctor and patient, lawyer and client, judge and jury, etc. In sociolinguists’ view, the study of language goes beyond the sentences, which are the subject of linguistics. The sociolinguistic study brings in social context, that is real texts that make up human communication and social situations in which they are used. The act of communication (the speech event) is the focus of attention. * The ethnography of speaking studies language use as displayed in the daily life of particular speech communities. As a blend of scientific and humanistic approaches, the ethnography of communication has two foci: particularistic and generalising. On the one hand, it is directed at the description and understanding of communicative behaviour in specific cultural settings, but it is also directed towards the formulation of concepts and theories upon which to build a general theory of language development and use. * The subject matter of ethnography of communication can be illustrated by the following question: what does a speaker need to know in order to communicate appropriately and to make sense of communicative situations within a particular speech community, and how does he/ she learn this? The ethnography of communication thus accounts not merely for what can be said but for when, where, by whom, in what manner, and in what particular circumstances - it accounts for the processes of acquiring such knowledge. The task of the ethnography of communication is seen as the discovery and explication of the shared knowledge base for contextually appropriate behaviour in a community or group, that is what the individuals need to know about language use to be functional members of the community. * Much of linguistic behaviour is rule-governed; it follows regular patterns and constraints. One of the most important contributions of sociolinguistics is the demonstration that what earlier linguists considered irregularity or ‘free variation’ in linguistic performance follows regular and predictable patterns. Thus, sounds must be arranged in regular sequences if they are to be interpreted as a speaker intends; the possible order and form of words in a sentence is governed by the rules of grammar; and a well-formed discourse is determined by culture- specific rules of rhetoric. * The social unit proper to sociolinguistics is the ‘speech community’. By speech community, Dell Hymes does not mean a community defined by common language, but rather by common linguistic norms – it is a community which shares rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech, and rules for the interpretation of at least one linguistic variety. Dell Hymes is not only concerned about whether speakers have a common understanding of syntax and semantics, but also whether or not they share ideas about the use of silence, ideas about the meaning of irony or emphasis, speech taboos, ways of formulating requests or statements, and so on. * Within speech communities, ethnographers must look for ‘speech situations’, ‘speech events’, and ‘speech acts’. Speech situations are represented by socially- contextual situations like weddings, anniversaries, homecoming parties, fights, hunts, meals etc., speech events occur within speech situations, so for example the exchange of vows is a speech event occurring within a wedding (a speech situation). Speech acts are the individual utterances that form the minimal unit of analysis for ethnographies of communication. As an example, Dell Hymes describes a party, which is a speech situation, a conversation taking place during the party as a speech event, and a joke within the conversation represents a speech act. * Dell Hymes’s concern for pattern was to show that there was patterned regularity where it had been considered absent, in the activity of speaking itself. Dell Hymes proposed the term ‘ethnography of speaking’, later changed into ‘ethnography of communication’, to describe a new approach to understanding language in use. In doing this, Dell Hymes aimed to move away from considering speech as an abstract model towards investigating the diversity of speech as displayed in society. Essentially, Dell Hymes claims that the study of language must concern itself with describing and analysing the ability of the native speakers to use language for communication in real situations (communicative competence) rather than limiting itself to describing the potential ability of the ideal speaker/listener to produce grammatically correct sentences (linguistic competence). * Speakers of a language in particular communities communicate with each other not only correctly but also appropriately to the sociocultural context. This ability is the result of a shared knowledge of the linguistic code as well as of the socio-cultural rules, norms and values which guide the conduct and interpretation of speech and other channels of communication in a community. The ethnography of communication is concerned with the questions of what a person knows about appropriate patterns of language use in his or her community and how he or she learns about it. * Different languages and language varieties often serve a social identification function within a society by providing linguistic indicators which can be used to reinforce social stratification. Negative decisions on hiring based on applicants’ use of non-standard pronunciation would be an example. Among non-native varieties of a language, there are often social distinctions depending on which foreign accent is involved. In the United States, for example, English spoken with a French or German accent may be viewed as prestigious, whereas a Spanish accent may be considered a handicap to economic and educational success. The functions which language differences in a society are assigned are various means of effecting social control. The use of language to create and maintain power is part of the concern of the ethnography of communication with linguistic and social inequalities. * Dell Hymes claims that patterning occurs at all levels of communication: societal, group, and individual. At the societal level, communication usually patterns in terms of its functions, categories of talk, and attitudes and conceptions about language and speakers. Communication also patterns according to particular roles and groups within a society, such as sex, age, social status, and occupation: e.g., a teacher has different ways of speaking from a lawyer, a doctor, or an insurance sales representative. Ways of speaking also pattern according to educational level, rural or urban residence, geographic region, and other features of social organization. * The relationship of form and function is an example of communicative patterning along a different dimension. Asking someone in English if he or she has a pen is readily recognized as a request rather than a truth-value question, for instance, because it is part of the regular structural pattern for requesting things in English; the person who answers “Yes, I do,” without offering one is joking, rude, or a member of a different speech community. * Thus, a main goal of ethnography of speaking is discovering and formulating rules for appropriate language use in specific contexts. These rules are directly related to the shared values of the speech community and typically reflect an ideal cultural perception. They can frequently be discovered in reactions to the violation of the ideal by others. The description of means of speaking and their availability to speakers is important to the ethnography of speaking as a way of beginning to specify how speaking is patterned in particular communities. * 2.2. Speech Events as the Focus of Ethnography of Communication * Dell Hymes considered that in order to speak a language correctly, one needs not only to learn its vocabulary and grammar, but also the context in which words are used. He paid considerable attention to the notion of the speech event, and suggested that any speech event can be seen as comprising several components, and the analysis of these is a major aspect of ethnography of speaking. Every speech event involves 1. a Sender (Addresser) ; 2. a Receiver (Addressee) ; 3. a Message Form; 4. a Channel; 5. a Code; 6. a Topic; and 7. a Setting (Scene, Situation). In particular cases, one or more of these factors can be emphasised. * As an example of interaction of all the factors mentioned by Dell Hymes according to rules we might consider a religious service. The typical speaker is a priest, the listeners are a group of people attending the church, the setting - a church, the channel - a direct voice or a voice amplified by loudspeakers, the message form - a register of language understood by the church goers, and the topic - some appropriate religious content. * Later, Dell Hymes developed another model based in part on a mnemonic (something intended to assist the memory, as a verse or formula) making the components easier to remember. This model is based on the notion of discourse seen as a series of speech acts (themselves components of speech events) within a situational and cultural context. This model can be used to examine and analyse all kinds of discourse. * Setting and Scene. Setting includes the time and place, physical aspects of the situation such as arrangement of furniture in the classroom, the living room in the grandparents' home etc. Scene is the "psychological setting" or "cultural definition" of a scene, including characteristics such as range of formality and sense of play or seriousness. The family story may be told at a reunion celebrating the grandparents' anniversary. At times, the family would be festive and playful, at other times, serious and commemorative. * Participants (speaker and audience). A distinction within these categories should be made; for example, the audience can be distinguished as addressees and other hearers. Participants’ identity will include such characteristics as age and sex, social status, relationship with each other. At the family reunion, an aunt might tell a story to the young female relatives, but males, although not addressed, might also hear the narrative. * Ends include the purpose of the event itself as well as the individual goals of the participants and outcomes. The aunt may tell a story about the grandmother to entertain the audience, teach the young women, and honour the grandmother * Act Sequence (or how speech acts are organized within a speech event and what topics are addressed). This will describe the form and order of the event. The aunt's story might begin as a response to a toast to the grandmother. The story's plot and development would have a sequence structured by the aunt. Possibly, there would be a collaborative interruption during the telling. Finally, the group might applaud the tale and move onto another subject or activity. * Key establishes the tone and manner in which something is said or written. The aunt might imitate the grandmother's voice and gestures in a playful way, or she might address the group in a serious voice emphasizing the sincerity and respect of the praise the story expresses * Instrumentalities (or the linguistic code) establish the language, dialect, variety and channel. These will describe the forms and styles of speech. The aunt might speak in a casual register with many dialect features or might use a more formal register and careful grammatical "standard" forms. * Norms (or the standard socio-cultural rules of interaction and interpretation). These will describe the social rules governing the event and the participants' actions and reaction. In a playful story by the aunt, the norms might allow many audience interruptions and collaboration, or possibly those interruptions might be limited to participation by older females. A serious, formal story by the aunt might call for attention to her and no interruptions as norms. * Genre (or type of event such as lecture, poem, letter) refers to the kind of speech act or event, the kind of narrative, comment, exclamation, etc. The aunt might tell an anecdote about the grandmother for entertainment, but have the purpose to point a moral or sustain an argument as moral instruction. Different disciplines develop terms for kinds of speech acts, and speech communities have their own terms for types. * An expectation is a standard shared by members of a speech community. In communicative interactions, some expectations are so strong (some patterns so regular, so predictable) that a very low information load is carried even by a relatively long utterance or interchange, even though the social meaning involved can be significant. * Let us consider the greeting ‘How are you?’ followed by the expected response ‘Fine, and you?’ It has little if any reference to factual conditions. However, a response of silence, or a long tale of unhappy events would be strongly marked communicative behaviour and would carry a very high potential load of social meaning. Many non-native English speakers conclude from the fact that when we ask ‘How are you?’ we do not really want to know, that native English speakers are cold, uncaring and hypocritical. * For ethnographers it is essential to differentiate the referential and social components of language use, the social component being most important. Both those who learn a language and those who teach it have to be aware of the role of predictability and expectation (i.e., social and linguistic convention) in communication, as well as to be able to distinguish conventional meaning from referential meaning (i.e., meaning that refers to things or actions) in specific contexts. * 2.3. Speech Acts * John Searle claims that speaking a language is performing speech acts, acts such as making statements, giving commands, asking questions, making promises, and so on. To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the type of speech act being performed corresponds to the type of attitude being expressed. For example, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a desire, and an apology expresses regret. * A speech act is an utterance that serves a function in communication. A speech act might contain just one word, as in "Sorry!" to perform an apology, or several words or sentences: "I’m sorry I forgot your birthday. I just let it slip my mind." Speech acts include real-life interactions and require not only knowledge of the language but also appropriate use of that language within a given culture. * Here are some examples of speech acts we use or hear every day: Greeting: "Hello, how are you?" Request: "Could I use you dictionary, please?" Complaint: "You have overcharged us – we had two glasses of wine, not a bottle." Invitation: "We’re having a homecoming party for our children and want you to join us." Compliment: "You look gorgeous with your new haircut!" Refusal: "Oh, I’d really like to have a game of tennis with you, but I’m having dinner with my parents." Congratulation: “Many happy returns of the day!” * Speech act behaviour is an area of continual concern for language learners since they are repeatedly faced with the need to utilise speech acts such as complaints, apologies, requests and refusals, each of which can be realised by means of several potential strategies. Sorry about that! may serve as an adequate apology in some situations; in others it may be perceived as a rude, even arrogant, non-apology. In yet other situations, it may not even be intended as an apology. Hence, it has become increasingly clear that the teaching of second language words and phrases isolated from their sociocultural context may lead to the production of linguistic curiosities which do not achieve their communicative purpose. * The theory of speech acts aims to do justice to the fact that even though words (phrases, sentences) encode information, people do more things with words than convey information, and that when people do convey information, they often convey more than their words encode. * According to J.L.Austin’s theory of speech acts (1962) in How to Do Things with Words, three distinct levels of action beyond the act of utterance itself are identified. John Austin distinguishes the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, and what one does by saying it, and calls these the 'locutionary', the 'illocutionary' and the 'perlocutionary' act, respectively. * The propositional or locutionary meaning, is the literal meaning of the utterance or "the act of 'saying' something". If a child says to his mother I am hungry, the locutionary meaning would concern the fact that the child needs to be given some food. * The illocutionary one renders the social function that the utterance or written text has. The illocutionary meaning of I am hungry may be a request from the child to be offered some food. If the utterance is expressed emphatically or if it is repeated, perhaps it would function as a complaint. * John Austin adds the notion of prelocutionary force, which is the result or effect produced by the utterance in that given context "saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, of the speaker, or of other persons." Thus, if the utterance leads to the action of setting the table for the child, its prelocutionary force would be greater than if the request were ignored. * The illocutionary speech acts can be classified as follows: - representatives – the speaker asserts a proposition to be true using such verbs as affirm, believe, conclude, deny, report. E.g. It is warm. - directives - the speaker tries to make the hearer do something using verbs as suggest, ask, beg, require, invite, insist. E.g. Don’t touch that! - commissives – the speaker commits himself to a future course of actions using verbs as guarantee, promise, swear, vow. E.g. I’ll be back! - expressives – the speaker expresses an attitude with the verbs apologise, complain, thank, appreciate, congratulate, detest, regret. E.g. I’m really sorry. - declaratives – the speaker alters the status or condition of something with the verbs declare, decree, name, pronounce. E.g. We find the defendant guilty. * 2.4. The Speech Act Set * Speech acts are difficult to perform in a second language because learners may not know the idiomatic expressions or cultural norms in the second language or they may transfer their first language rules and conventions into the second language, assuming that such rules are universal. Something that works in English might not transfer in meaning when translated into the second language. * Given a speech act such as apologising, requesting, complimenting or complaining, the first concern of second language acquisition (SLA) researchers has been to arrive at the set of realisation patterns typically used by native speakers of the target language, any one of which would be recognised as the speech act in question, when uttered in the appropriate context. According to Andrew Cohen, this set of strategies is referred to as the speech act set of the specific speech act. It has become increasingly clear to researchers that learners of a language may lack even partial mastery of such speech act sets and that this lack of mastery may hinder or even cause embarrassment in communication. * Let us consider the act of apologising. An apology is produced when there is some behaviour that violates social norms. The person who apologises would do that only if he regretted having done something wrong. Thus, the apology act takes place only if the speaker believes that some act has been performed prior to the time of speaking and that this precondition has resulted in an infraction which affected another person who now deserves an apology. Furthermore, the apologiser believes that he or she was responsible for the offence and has, as an interactional goal, to make amends. * In the case of apology, Andrew Cohen established the following main strategies: 1. An expression of an apology - the speaker uses a word, expression, or sentence which contains a relevant performative verb (a verb which names the speech act) such as apologise, forgive, excuse, be sorry. 2. An explanation or account of the situation which indirectly caused the apologiser to commit the offence and which is used by the speaker as an indirect speech act of apologising. * 3. Acknowledgement of responsibility - the offender recognises his or her fault in causing the infraction. 4. An offer of repair - the apologiser carries out an action or provides payment for some kind of damage which resulted from the infraction. 5. A promise of non-recurrence - the apologiser commits himself or herself not to have the offence happen again. * Successful production of speech acts depends on certain sociocultural and sociolinguistic abilities. Sociocultural ability refers to the respondents’ skill at selecting speech act strategies which are appropriate given the culture involved, the age and sex of the speakers, their social class and occupations, their roles and status in the interaction. For example, in some cultures (the USA) it may be appropriate for speakers who have missed a meeting with their boss through their own negligence to use a repair strategy by suggesting to the boss when to reschedule the meeting. In other cultures (Israel) such a repair strategy might be considered inappropriate as it would most likely be the boss who determines what happens next. Thus, sociocultural knowledge determines whether a speech act set is appropriate to use and, if so, which members of the set are selected. * Sociolinguistic ability refers to the respondents’ skill at selecting appropriate linguistic forms in order to express the particular strategy used to realize the speech act. Sociolinguistic ability constitutes the speakers’ control over the actual language forms used to realise the speech act (e.g., sorry vs. excuse me) as well as their control over register or formality of the utterance, from most intimate to most formal language. For example, if a student is asked to dinner by his or her professor and cannot accept the invitation, although it may be socioculturally appropriate to decline the invitation, the reply No way! would be an inappropriate choice of form for realising the speech act of refusal. * 2.5. Speech Acts in the Classroom * In order to achieve a communicative purpose or the intended illocutionary meaning in the majority of cases it is necessary that the speaker should employ more utterances than just one statement containing vocabulary typical of the speech act. For example, an apology might consist of three utterances that can be regarded as separate speech acts: 1. I feel terribly sorry, which expresses regret, 2. I missed your graduation, which is the explanation, 3. I was stuck in the airport because of the stormy weather, which is the excuse. * In a second language it is difficult for students to produce a speech act in the same way as native speakers do because those learners may not know the idiomatic expressions or cultural norms in the second language or they may transfer their first language rules and conventions into the second language, assuming that such rules can be applied in all the languages. The first impulse for language learners is to translate the speech act from their native language into the foreign language. Something that may be appropriate in English might be inappropriate when translated into the second language. * Speech acts reflect the cultural norms and values that are possessed by the speakers of different social and linguistic backgrounds. Different cultures and languages have different techniques to realize speech acts. Such differences can lead to a breakdown in communication when people from different cultures interact. If the sociocultural and sociolinguistic abilities are not paid sufficient attention in second language teaching the learners may encounter misunderstanding and conflicts in real-life communication. In order to avoid these problems, it is essential for the foreign language teachers to increase the learners’ competence and awareness of appropriate use of speech acts in the target language. * The role of the teachers in the process of their students’ acquisition of speech acts is to collect information on the way native speakers perform certain speech acts. This information is available in some textbooks. If such information lacks, a valid means for obtaining it is through observing speech acts as they occur naturally. This can be accomplished by collecting samples of speech acts from fiction, films, or by asking a native speaker to record what he/ she would say in some situations. Once the samples have been collected, the teacher’s next task is to determine the degree of control that learners have over the speech acts through role play, gap completion tasks, interviews etc. Next, the learners will notice similarities and differences between the way native speakers perform such speech acts and the way they do, which is often influenced by the way they would perform such communicative functions in their native language. * The teacher’s first step in teaching speech acts is identifying the students’ level of awareness of a particular speech act. This can be done orally or in writing through gap completing tasks or role-plays. Concomitantly, the teacher reveals the students’ perception of speech acts. When evaluating the student, the teacher can suggest a task describing a situation followed by multiple choices. Suppose that you accidentally run into a person and step on his foot. The multiple choices of forms of apology suggested by the teacher in this situation will include (1) “Excuse me, please.” (2) “I’m really sorry, are you all right?”, (3) “Forgive me, please.”, (4) “Why don’t you watch where you are going?”. * The evaluation of the situation is a useful procedure to further increase the learners’ awareness of the factors that influence the choice of linguistic formulas. The students are introduced several situations of apology and for each they have to decide whether the violation requiring apology is mild or severe, whether the person who apologises needs to intensify the apology, whether the person who has been offended will accept the apology and whether a typical strategy is required. * Discussions are efficient for teaching speech acts. During the discussions, the teacher will reveal the students’ perceptions, expectations and awareness of similarities and differences between speech act behaviour in their native language and in English. The teacher’s task will also be to provide the necessary explanation and help students recognise areas of negative transfer where communication failure may occur. * 2.6. The Structure of Conversation * Conversations are the product of people engaged in joint activities in which they have to coordinate with each other in order to succeed. When two people gossip, plan a holiday, negotiate a contract, they coordinate through dialogue. Conversations, therefore, reflect the joint activities they coordinate. Each participant has a role, such as clerk or customer, teacher or student, friend calling or friend called. These roles determine what the participants do or say. Most conversations have mutually recognised goals (exchanging gossip, planning a holiday, negotiating a contract). The participants also have private goals, such as being polite, short etc. These private goals also constrain what they do and say. Often, people are involved in two or more joint activities (gossiping and eating) and the structure of their conversation reflects this. * People carry out joint activities against their common ground – their mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs and mutual assumptions. They infer their common ground from past conversations, joint perceptual experiences and joint membership in cultural communities. When Ann asks Bob ‘Where is your office?’ she presupposes certain common ground – that Bob has a job and works in an office, but that she does not know where. And with this question, she adds to their common ground that she wants to know. Conversations proceed by orderly increments to common ground – especially to the common ground relevant to the current joint activities. * If conversations are to succeed, the participants must ground what they say. To ground what is said is to establish the mutual belief that the addressees have understood the speakers well enough for current purposes. Conversations follow rules and patterns. However, many English learners are unfamiliar with them and thus encounter difficulty having or maintaining conversations. Even learners who have a good knowledge of vocabulary and grammar may still struggle to communicate effectively without having specific conversation skills. * Conversation strategies, structure, and micro-skills need to be explicitly taught. We expect an utterance to be followed by a particular type of utterance. These ‘pairs' are the main building blocks of conversations and are called adjacency pairs or two-part exchanges. They can be interrupted through insertion sequences. Adjacency pairs involve two utterances - one utterance leads on to another in quick succession. Straight-forward examples of adjacency pairs are two utterances which contain a rational link such as a question followed by an answer or a statement followed by an agreement. The ‘chains' of adjacency pairs can be broken up or interrupted. This might happen if, for example, someone comes into a room and joins in the conversation. These temporary interruptions are known as insertion sequences when someone from ‘outside' joins, and side sequences when, for example, there is a need to clarify something before the original thread of the conversation is resumed. * Speech acts succeed or fail depending on conversational context. Conversations additionally involve turn taking, conversation structure manifested in each party’s contributions to the conversation, establishing common ground, identifying conversational implicatures * The structure of conversations emerges step by step as people coordinate on each new move in their joint activities. People need to coordinate on the content, participants and roles of each joint action, and they do that in a sequence of local, opportunistic agreements. It is these techniques that give conversations their structure. Who Utterance Comment
The person who calls (dials; phone rings) This is the summons
The person who is Hello? Answer
called The person who calls Hello, this is Pete. Is Identification that Kate?
The person who is Yes. Identity stage
called The person who calls Are you coming to the Message game tonight?
The person who is Yes. See you there. Acknowledgement
called The person who calls OK. Bye. Close
The person who calls Hangs up
* Telephone conversations are rule-governed behaviour. If someone does not follow the above rules (you hear the receiver being lifted but no one speaks or you start speaking as soon as the receiver is lifted, not waiting for the answer to say something) there might be a chance that the conversation does not take place. Hanging up without a formal close is considered abrupt and insulting behaviour. There are national differences in these rules. In some countries, it is considered impolite to ask to speak to someone else before initiating a series of polite social interchanges with the person answering. * Turn-taking, the question who speaks, is one of the most intriguing aspects of conversational interchanges. If two people are speaking at once, they and others find it difficult to understand everything said. In various formal situations, there are clear rules on the order of speaking. In a classroom, teachers claim the right to control turn-taking. In a parliament or other public meeting, a chairperson is given the authority to determine who can speak and for how long. In informal conversations, the issue of turn-taking is often quite complex, depending on power and status. Who has the floor varies according to rules of social group. * 2.7. Politeness and Politeness Formulas. Terms of Address * Politeness is essential in social interaction whether it is between people of the same culture, the same social status, the same age and level of education or not; and its significance comes more to the fore when we consider the fact that English has become an international language and therefore needs new concepts, new types of pragmatic research and perhaps new teaching strategies. Indeed, English has been acquiring more and more power and status as a native language and more importantly as a second and foreign language since it is the lingua franca used to communicate between people who do not share the same language. Because of this cross-cultural and international usage of English, it is important indeed to understand the overall phenomena of politeness to overcome the problems of its usage. Finally, to understand politeness is also basic to bilingualism, for nowadays bilingualism is promoted due to the usefulness of language in business and politics. * Many languages have specific means to show politeness, deference, respect, or a recognition of the social status of the speaker and the hearer. There are two main ways in which a given language shows politeness: in its lexicon (for example, employing certain words in formal occasions, and colloquial forms in informal contexts), and in its morphology (for example, using special verb forms for polite discourse). Requests and greetings are the speech acts involving politeness most frequently. * The most common kinds of politeness formulas are involved with greetings. Failing to greet someone who expects to be greeted signals either some unusual distraction or a desire to insult the person. Each social group has its own set of rules about who should be greeted, who should greet first, and what an appropriate form of greeting is. * Requests, which are an imposition on the listener, are mitigated by being made indirectly as questions (‘Could you possibly help me?’) or as statements (‘I think you can help me in this situation’), or by adding formulas such as ‘Please’ and ‘Would you be so kind and…’ Social relations are eased by complimenting (‘You look great today’, ‘Congratulations’). * Another area showing patterned variation in speech and also studied within the ethnography of communication has been the use of terms of address. A number of languages offer the same sort of choice as French of addressing a single person using either the singular pronoun or the plural one. With the growing egalitarianism of modern life, there has been a slow breakdown in the formality of address system (a switch from vous to tu even when speaking to parents or strangers). English once had the distinction thou/ you and still offers a range of address terms, ranging from Title Alone (Sir, Your Majesty, Madam) to Title + Surname (Mr Jones, Dr Smith, Lord Clark, Miss Jones). Increasingly, in North America and British academic circles, people who have just been introduced as Professor X meet Dr Y move immediately to first names. The conditions for choosing vary socially and it depends on the cultural and sociolinguistic abilities of the speaker to select the appropriate terms of address and on how well he or she has learned about speech act strategies.