Strategic Interaction

Discourse Analysis
Strategic Interaction
Understand what somebody means is understanding what he or she is “doing”and “what‟s going on”; who somebody is “trying to be”in a conversation is an important part of understanding what they mean by what they say. Conversational strategies is a method we use to negotiate “what we are doing”and “who we are being” with the people with whom we are interacting. There are two basic kinds of conversational strategies. First one called face strategies (showing who we are, what kind of relationship we have with people who has conversation). Another one is framing strategies (showing what we are doing in a conversation, whether we are).
These two concepts for analyzing how we manage conversations come from an approach called interactional sociolinguistics. It is concerned with the sometimes very subtle ways person signal and interpret what they think they are doing and who they think they are being in social interaction. There are two scholars in interactional sociolinguistics; first one is John Gumperz (1982). He pointed out people belonging to different ways if signaling and interpreting cues about conversational identity and conversational activities, and this can sometimes result in misunderstandings and even conflict; another scholar is Erving Goffman, he compared social interaction to a dramatic performance. He argued that social actors in everyday life like stage actor use certain “expressive equipment”to perform certain “roles”and “routines”. The goal in these performances is to promote particular “line” or version of who we are and what is going on. Goffman contributed to discourse analysis the concept of face and frames.
Face is tied up with who successful he or she is at …pulling off‟his or her performance and getting other to accept his or her “line”. Frames is “definitions of a situation are built up in a accordance with principles of organization which govern events‟. Face strategies: when we talk, alone with conveying information about the topic about how close or distant from the people with whom we are talking we think we are, alone with information about weather we are social equals or whether one has more power than the other, this kind of things we called face strategies. Face here means …the negotiated public image mutually granted to each other by participants in a communicative event‟.
There are basically two broad kinds of strategies we use to negotiate our identities and relationships in interaction. The first one is involvement strategies; we use it to establish or maintain closeness with the people with whom we are interacting –to show then that we consider them our friends, in short it‟s the strategies people use to communicate friendlness or solidarity Another one is independence strategies; I t‟s
the strategies people use to communicate respect or deference. We use this to establish or maintain distance from the people with whom we are interacting either because we are not their friends or because we wish to show them respect by not imposing on them. These two kinds face strategy correspond to two fundamentally, contradictory social needs that all humans experience: we all have the need to be liked (positive face), need to be respected (in the sense of not being imposed on or interfered with –negative face).
Framing strategies: for different activities we have different sets of exportations about what kinds of things will be side and how those things ought to be interpreted, these sets of exportations called frames. Bringing to most interactions a set of expectations about the overall activity in which we will be engaged called primary framework (Goffman). And the smaller, more local frames are called interactive frames, such like when we are interacting with people, we often change what we are doing within the broader primary framework, we need ways to signal these frame changes and ways to negotiate them with the people whom we are interacting.
Negotiating relationships and activities
Participants in interaction need to negotiate their relationship. Such negotiations are common for example, as people move from more distant to closer relationship. There are expectations called face systems, it is about how independence and involvement strategies will be used to communicate information about power and intimacy. Most people enter interaction with three basic ideas: Deference face system: Interaction where the parties are socially distant but relatively equal, both parties are likely to use independence strategies. Solidarity face system: Interaction where people are close and relatively equal, they are likely to use involvement strategies. Hierarchical face system: Interaction in which one person has more power than other, the more powerful one is more likely to use involvement strategies and the less powerful one is more likely to use independence strategies.
Those systems should not be treated as “rules” but rather as broad sets of expectations people draw on to decide how to act towards other people and how to interpret others‟ behaviour towar ds them. People usually employ both independence and involvement strategies, mixing them tactically depending on the situation and what they are trying to accomplish. One further factor that determines which strategy a person will use to communicate his or her relationship with another person is the topic of the conversation he or she is engadged in. If the topic of the conversation is serious, independence strategies will be more common, whereas if the topis is less serious, involvement strategies are more common. Face strategies can be regarded as resources that people use to negotiate social distance. A person might use involvement strategies with another not because they are close, but because he or she wants to create or strengthen the impression that there is a power difference. Similarly, a person might use independence strategies not to create a sense of dictance from the
person they are interacting with, but rather to endow the topic under discussion with a certain …weightiness’.
Other ways of signalling to people what we think we are doing in an interaction. For example, arguing, joking, small talk. We call the signals we use to communicate this information contextualisation cues. Contextualisation cues also include non-verbal signals delivered through things such as gestures, facial expressions, gaze, our use of space and paralinguistic signals delivered through alterations in the pitch, speed, rhythm or intonation. There are two kinds of frames: broader primary frameworks which consist of the relatively stable sets of expectations we bring to particular situations. Interactive frames, consist of our negotiated ideas about what we are doing moment by moment in a conversation. One of the most obvious ways we signal shifts in frames verbally is through what are known as discourse markers. These are words or phrases that often rather explicitly mark the end of one activity and the beginning of another. DM typically consist of words such as okay, so, well, and anyway, as well as more formal connectors such as first, next and however.。