[(Forms of Talk)] [Author: Erving Goffman] published on

by Erving Goffman

What makes Goffman's work so perceptive and incisive is his insistence that talk be placed in an interactional framework and studied as part of the total physical, social, cultural, and verbal environments in which it occurs. Forms of Talk extends Erving Goffman's interactional analyses of face-to-face communication to ordinary conversations and vebal exchanges. In this, his most sociolinguistic work, Goffman relates to certain forms of talk some of the issues that concerned him in his work on frame analysis. This book brings together five of Goffman's "Replies and Responses," "Response Cries," "Footing," "The Lecture," and "Radio Talk."Of lasting value in Goffman's work is his insistence that behavior--verbal or nonverbal--be examined along with the context of that behavior. In all of these classic essays, there is a "topic" at hand for discussion and analysis. In addition, as those familiar with Goffman's work have come to expect, there is the wider context in which the topic can be viewed and related to other topics--a characteristic move of Goffman's that has made his work so necessary for students of interaction in many disciplines.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Linguistics, Language, Anthropology, Psychology, Social Science

Paperback

First published March 1, 1981

About the author

Erving Goffman was a Canadian-born American sociologist, social psychologist, and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century".
In 2007, The Times Higher Education Guide listed him as the sixth most-cited author of books in the humanities and social sciences.
Goffman was the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association. His best-known contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction. This took the form of dramaturgical analysis, beginning with his 1956 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman's other major works include Asylums (1961), Stigma (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981). His major areas of study included the sociology of everyday life, social interaction, the social construction of self, social organization (framing) of experience, and particular elements of social life such as total institutions and stigmas.

Reviews

[Mike Mena · Rating 4 out of 5]

His essay of Footing is perhaps worth buying the entire book for. Very important essay that is often quoted in linguistic anthropology

[Gary Bruff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a bad book per se, just a disappointing one. I expected to learn much more about the structure and function of everyday conversation, but I found the work (and it does feel like work getting through it at times) to be less informative in that regard than standard works on hermeneutics or pragmatics. I am reminded of the quip about Wittgenstein's Tractatus: the journey is long and the distance covered is comparatively short.

But there is much to learn here nevertheless. Goffman in Forms of Talk showed an astute eye, or ear, for a textuality of language which falls off the radar of mainstream linguistics. Hence, another criticism I have is that the domain of language he covers is too marginal or peripheral to be of much use to a grammatically minded linguist. This is no book on grammar. He looks at phenomena ranging from the nearly pre-cultural act of saying 'oops' to oneself to the over-wrought asides of media professionals. But he manages to bring it all home by using these seemingly inconsequential examples as his laboratory on natural speech. He does this by returning time and again to his theories, based largely on the arch-metaphors of footing and frame. Using these concepts, he minutely examines the places where our common sense about how language works breaks down. Language use is more than a tit for tat of turntaking and information sharing. Language performance can be this back and forth, but it also entails shifts in the social dynamic (say, in a lecture or a radio announcement where the audience is bracketed off and not in a dialog in any strict sense). Or language use can be directed at no one, as in the case of semi-involuntary but socially witnessed response cries.

This book can also lead the reader to grasp the framing of discourse in novel ways. For example, the book made me think about media discourse as being the model for interpersonal discourse and vice versa. Political Correctness can then be seen as the model for not offending an unseen diversity on the receiving end of media discourse, and this in turn can serve as a sociolinguistic model for speakers to follow outside of the mediated context.

I did not like the lecture in the middle of the book that was about 'the lecture'. It seemed more tedious than reflexive. The best parts of the book were at the beginning, where responses and replies were given a micro-pragmatic analysis, and at the end where radio talk is shown to be highly relevant to the understanding of discourse mishaps and listener charity when the possibility of back-channel cues is present.

The book says a lot about a little, which makes it boring at times. I just wish it had said more.

[Pearlyn Lim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The chapter and Footing was the most illuminating. Radio Talk is pretty long for an example. Responses and Replies dwells into linguistic analysis and can be tedious.