Lesley Milroy
Introduction
The major theoretical issue to which this paper addresses itself is the
manner in which hearers use a combination of linguistic knowledge, knowledge
of a heterogeneous range of factors which broadly might be called
"contextual", and various perceptual strategies when they interpret utterances
in context. This issue is approached using methods familiar in sociolinguistics;
that is, the data base is real utterances as they are spoken in their
social context rather than constructed data intuitively interpreted. It seems
likely that both intuitive and empirical approaches are necessary (and a
combination of the two) if we wish to advance our knowledge of how
speakers comprehend what they hear in everyday situations. The problem is
tackled initially by looking at a number of communications which have gone
wrong; as Gumperz and Tannen (1979) point out: "by studying what has
gone wrong when communication breaks down, we seek to understand a
process that goes unnoticed when it is successful" (p. 308). A similar
approach to speech production may be found in Fromkin (1973 and 1981).
Most of the miscommunications examined here are between people from
different dialect backgrounds: that is people whose internal grammars are
different in some specifiable way. This limitation is important methodologically as it helps us to assess the role of specifically linguistic knowledge in
comprehension. and it seems likely that conclusions on this wider matter can
be extended to communications between people with the same dialect
background.
Although it may be seen as a contribution to a major theoretical issue. this
chapter is primarily intended as an exercise in applied sociolinguistics: the
insights of sociolinguistics are used to analyse the manner in which communicative
breakdown occurs between speakers in everyday situations and
the consequences of this breakdown are considered. These nvo issues. the
theoretical and the applied. will be considered in parallel throughout the
discussion.