Uzbekistan state world languages university translation faculty the english applied translation department

	Participant
Speaker/sender/addressor/hearer/receiver/audience/ addressee
E	Ends	Purposes and goals, outcomes
A	Act sequence	Message form and content
K	Key	Tone, manner
I	Instrumentalities	Channel (verbal, non-verbal, physical forms of speech drawn from community repertoire)
N	Norms of interaction and interpretation	Specific properties attached to speaking, interpretation of norms within cultural belief system
G	Genre	Textual categories

This grid can be used to analyze a local cultural taxonomy of what Hymes calls ‘units’ of communication.

The largest unit is the speech situation (the social setting in which the conversation takes place, say a meeting); the next size of unit is the speech event or activity (say, the conversation or debate that is taking place within the meeting); and the smallest unit is the speech act (say, a disagreement within the discussion within the meeting). Although Hymes does not explicitly equate the smallest units of his analysis of conversation to Searle’s illocutionary acts, some of the examples he gives merit the classification of speech act, although others, like ‘greeting’ (Searle counted these types of act as Expressives), do not, and in fact appear to belong to a larger unit than the speech act, which is unaccounted for by Hymes.
Hymes recognizes that, although all units of communication are important for the interpretation of an utterance, it is the smallest unit, the speech act, which handles the basic management of a conversation:
Discourse may be viewed in terms of acts both syntagmatically and paradigmatically: i.e., both as a sequence of speech acts and in terms of classes of speech acts among which choice has been made at given points.
Although Hymes’s approach seems a very vague and cluttered way of representing a speech situation, it is significant because it was one of the first to try to include some details of the context of the speech situation to bear on studies of language understanding. Hymes’s work is not of direct relevance, as it is predominantly concerned with cultural variations in language.
Tannen’s work on the characterization and identification of different ‘styles’ of conversation, follows on from that of Hymes and Gumperz. She is interested in how we establish and develop a rapport with each other in conversation. She concentrates on looking at the overall characteristics and stylistic devices we use in order to gain mutual understanding in spoken conversation, rather than placing importance on the sequential organization that we use in order to do this.
Tannen identifies her strategies for the creation of rapport between speakers, with Lakoff’s ‘Rules of Rapport’:
1. Don’t impose (Distance).
2. Give options (Deference).
3. Be friendly (Camaraderie). (Lakoff in Tannen 1984:11)
She analyses conversation according to a number of different features, and the rules that govern them, among which are: topic choice and management, pacing of conversation, tactics for co-operative completion and feedback, narrative strategies and use of pitch, intonation and quality of voice. She specifies various speaker strategies in terms of the preferences and conventions they use to convey certain impressions by the manipulation of the features listed above. For example, Tannen gives the preferences for ‘narrative strategies’ as follows:
1. Tell more stories.
2. Tell stories in rounds.
3. Prefer internal evaluation (i.e. point of a story is dramatized rather than exicalised).
Tannen’s analysis of conversation as a variety of interactive styles as determined by the social group activity in which we are currently participating highlights the extent to which language use is anchored to social and cultural context.
Tannen also sees these varying styles as indicating differing but equal modes of communication. Cameron and Eggins and Slade however reject this claim and argue that there are some conversational styles and strategies that can seriously disadvantage and subordinate a speaker within a conversation. While Tannen’s work is useful for showing how important variation is in conversational behavior, not all her observations can be applied generically to all types of conversation.