CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Francesca Merlan and Alan Rumsey (Australian National University): " Some aspects of the use of speech-event models in social theory " February 23, 2005, 5pm. Haines 332.

Much of social theory over the past thirty years has been concerned with the processes through which more-or-less shared and perduring socio-cultural forms are reproduced or transformed in everyday events, and with the relationship between these processes and individual agency or subjectivity. Drawing upon language-based models such as those of Benveniste and Austin, theorists working on these issues have often taken the uses of 'I' and 'you' by interacting individuals in particular speech events as a prototypical instance of the interface between structure and event, agency or subjectivity. Using ethnographic examples from Aboriginal Australia, Highland New Guinea, and California, we will attempt to identify some problems with this use of speech-event models, and some ways in which we think they can be addressed. In particular, we will argue that: 1) what appear to be dyadic interactions between perspective-exchanging individuals are always more-or-less covertly triadic, involving a third term or terms in relation to which the exchange is grounded; 2) the triadic interactional schema which this entails is actually more basic than the notion of 'speech situation' per se, in that it is found in 'inner' or self-addressed speech, and, as Bakhtin showed, within the 'word' itself insofar as it is heteroglossic; 3) the class of relevant 'third terms' is very heterogeneous, including concrete referents, typifications, roles, and institutional norms; 4) by attending to the triadic interplay involving such terms, we can gain a better understanding both of the social micro-macro interface and of subjectivity and agency than we can by treating the speech event per se as the relevant micro-level unit.