General section
The importance of borrowing across disciplines
The anthropological notion of speech events
Over the years, linguists have borrowed from other allied fields, including speech events from cultural
anthropology, schema theory from psychology, speech acts from philosophy, and conversational strategies from rhetoric. In
analyzing large and continuous chunks of conversational data, the first and most important of these borrowings is the speech
event, for it sets the stage in which the other language elements are embedded and provides a useful sequence for analyzing
everything else, including the conventional linguistic tools of the grammar and lexicon.
The present paper represents the optimal sequence of analysis as an Inverted Pyramid, starting with the speech
event and then moving down the order to schemas, agendas, speech acts, conversational strategies, and finally to the grammar and
lexicon that are embedded within each other. Two prominent criminal law investigations are used to demonstrate the effectiveness
of the Inverted Pyramid approach for understanding this evidence.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The evolving development of linguistics
- 3.Speech events
- 4.Analytical procedures: The DeLorean case and the ‘Inverted Pyramid’
- 5.The case of Texas v. Clayton
- 5.1The business transaction speech event
- 5.2The campaign contribution speech event
- 5.3The bribery speech event
- 5.4The ambiguous “do”
- 5.5The last ditch approach
- 6.Summary
- Note
-
References