Article published in:
Categorization in multilingual storytelling
Edited by Matthew T. Prior and Steven Talmy
[Pragmatics and Society 10:3] 2019
► pp. 452–469
General section

The importance of borrowing across disciplines

The anthropological notion of speech events

| Georgetown University (emer.)
Over the years, linguists have borrowed from other allied fields, including speech events from cultural anthropology, schema theory from psychology, speech acts from philosophy, and conversational strategies from rhetoric. In analyzing large and continuous chunks of conversational data, the first and most important of these borrowings is the speech event, for it sets the stage in which the other language elements are embedded and provides a useful sequence for analyzing everything else, including the conventional linguistic tools of the grammar and lexicon.The present paper represents the optimal sequence of analysis as an Inverted Pyramid, starting with the speech event and then moving down the order to schemas, agendas, speech acts, conversational strategies, and finally to the grammar and lexicon that are embedded within each other. Two prominent criminal law investigations are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Inverted Pyramid approach for understanding this evidence.
Keywords: borrowing across disciplines, speech events, schema, agenda, speech acts, conversational strategies, Inverted Pyramid
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The evolving development of linguistics
  • 3.Speech events
  • 4.Analytical procedures: The DeLorean case and the ‘Inverted Pyramid’
  • 5.The case of Texas v. Clayton
    • 5.1The business transaction speech event
    • 5.2The campaign contribution speech event
    • 5.3The bribery speech event
    • 5.4The ambiguous “do”
    • 5.5The last ditch approach
  • 6.Summary
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 22 October 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.18060.shu
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