Empractical Speech: The Forgotten Sibling in Spoken Dialogue

Abstract

This chapter recapitulates the historical neglect of empractical speech in the language-related sciences, seeks out the reasons for this neglect, and asserts emphatically that empractical speech is an important genre of spoken dialogue in everyday life along with conversational speech. The mystery is how such an evident fact of everyday life could possibly be overlooked by the language-related research communities throughout much of the past century. One explanation has to do with the nature of empractical speech itself: It is ubiquitous in our everyday life, but at the same time, by its very definition, inauspicious; it occurs in settings where its occasional use is taken for granted precisely because of the simultaneous presence of prominent nonlinguistic activity. Another explanation has to do with various aspects of its research history: Psycholinguistics has consistently exercised a deliberate penchant for concentrating on artificial and laboratory settings, and on both written and artificial materials rather than field-observational settings and materials. Later on, the insistence of sociolinguists and in particular Conversation Analysts that conversation was the sole proper object of research, if not the sole member of the genre of spoken dialogue, also contributed to both the empirical and theoretical neglect of empractical speech. And finally, the inaccessibility of translations from classical German-language research sources has substantively contributed to the invisibility of empractical speech on the modern research landscape. Furthermore, this chapter summarizes essential characteristics of empractical settings, including the setting itself, participants, varieties of concurrent nonlinguistic activities, diacrisis, and empractical speech, as garnered from the results presented in Chap. 4, along with a discussion of the role of nonverbal behavior in such settings.

All kinds of talk are shaped by the context in which they occur. Insightful analysis of any kind of talk entails paying close attention to this contextual shaping (Cameron, 2001, p. 29).