LING/ANTH 6320 Feedback Paper Number 2

Due Friday, October 10, 5 pm, via email or hard copy

The last few weeks of this course has been spent looking closely at what could be called generally "the ethnography of communication" -- the ways in which different groups of people speak differently, use language and linguistic features in different ways to accomplish the same goals, and also do radically different, culturally-specific things with language (i.e. different goals entirely). But ethnography is always the ethnography of some group, and defining what that group is can be very difficult. Furthermore, even if one is satisfied that a group has been defined, isolating specific components of social work within the flow of speech interaction can be difficult. A number of readings have sought to respond to the first question, by developing the category of "speech community" as well as terms such as language "variety(ies)" and "verbal repertoires" which could be used to describe such a community. Many other readings have used various mechanisms to further delimit the field of social interaction by appealing to ideas of specific types of artistic performance, specific cognitive models that are in play in specific contexts, specific speech genres such as greetings, service encounters, use of wise words, signifying and rapping, or specific speech frames, or even specific technological modes of speech transmission that define audiences. In both the large-scale (community) and smaller-scale (genre, frame, etc.) questions, the issue of prototypes has appeared on several occasions (not always explicitly). In your three-page feedback paper, referring specifically - and only - to the readings and examples in class, discuss one key strength and one key weakness of the idea of prototypes for resolving the problem of the boundaries of speech communities and speech events/genres. Aim to use at least two examples for the strength argument, and two examples for the weakness argument. You don't need to resolve the argument and claim that prototypes are 'good' or 'bad' - that's too simplistic. Just point out a key strength and a key weakness.