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Learning how to ask: Native metacommunicative competence and the incompetence of fieldworkers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Charles L. Briggs
Charles L. Briggs
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Vassar College and the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology, Harvard University
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Abstract

Every speech community boasts an array of devices for characterizing communicative events. These native metacommunicative repertoires are culturally patterned in terms of both use and acquisition. Interviews meet with varying degrees of success by virtue of their relative (in-)compatibility with the norms underlying such events. An analysis of the way in which Spanish speakers in rural New Mexico gain metacommunicative competence suggests that native metacommunicative routines provide a rich source of sociolinguistic and social/cultural data and that awareness of these repertoires can assist fieldworkers in using interviews more appropriately and effectively. (Interview techniques, metacommunication, acquisition of sociolinguistic competence, ethnopoetics, New Mexican Spanish)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , March 1984 , pp. 1 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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