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Entry Title Hymes, Dell Hathaway
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1 Name M. Eleanor Nevins
Affiliation, country Middlebury College, USA
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All author bio(s) M. Eleanor Nevins is Associate Professor of
Anthropology at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA. She is
author of Lessons From Fort Apache: Beyond Language
Endangerment and Maintenance and contributing editor for
Worldmaking Stories: Maidu Language, Landscape and
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Community Renewal. She conducted three years of
ethnographic fieldwork with members of the White
Mountain Apache Tribe on the Fort Apache reservation. She
has also worked as linguistic consultant to language
revitalization projects in two different Native American
communities: the Ndee Biyáti / Apache Language Project
and the Weje-ebis Majdym / Keep Speaking Maidu
Language Revitalization Project. A specialist in linguistic
anthropology, her work addresses the interplay of language,
research ethics, education, religion, globalization and
environment. Nevins teaches courses in linguistic
anthropology, indigenous studies and environmental studies.
Her work has appeared in edited volumes as well as in the
journals Language in Society, Language and
Communication, Heritage Management, Journal of Folklore
Research and Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.
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please choose up to five Disciplines.]
Anthropology [D5]
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Sociology [D1]
Communication and Media Studies [D13]
Education [D2]
Public Policy and Social Policy [D6]
Method Group Qualitative
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Key Figures mentioned ]Dell H. Hymes, Franz Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman
Jakobson, Noam Chomsky,
Key Organizations
mentioned
American Anthropological Association, American Folklore
Society, Linguistic Society of America, Language in Society
(Journal), Society for Linguistic Anthropology
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Copyright statement © SAGE Publications Ltd 2020
DOI 10.4135/
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Dell Hathaway Hymes (1927-2009) was a discipline builder at the intersection of linguistics and the
social sciences. He was the founder and longstanding editor of the journal Language and Society, and
played a leading role in establishing linguistic anthropology as well as qualitative sociolinguistics. He
served as president of the American Anthropological Association, the Linguistic Society of America,
and the American Folklore Society. This entry explores Hymes’s contributions to anthropology,
linguistics and other related fields. In particular, the entry examines how he engaged with the work of
other influential linguists and social scientists such as Franz Boas, Noam Chomsky, Roman Jakobson,
and Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as his foundational role establishing topics such as ethnography of
communication, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, ethnopoetics, communicative relativity
communicative competence and speech communities.
Hymes is responsible for a major methodological toolkit known as the “ethnography of
communication,” which brings the comparative study of vernacular communication patterns into the
purview of the social sciences. In his later career, Hymes developed an offshoot of this program
identified as “ethnopoetics,” which addressed the comparative structuring of oral genres, especially
narrative. This later work trended more to the concerns of humanities than social science. He initially
applied ethnopoetics retrospectively to the 120+ year history of ethnolinguistic text collections in
Americanist anthropology and linguistics. His stated aim was to recover aspects of speakers’ voices
and the rhetorical shape of spoken performance, which were features otherwise obscured by the format
of text collections. He and others later expanded application of ethnography of communication and
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ethnopoetics to speech captured in the documentary record more broadly (Blommaert, 2010; Nevins,
2013).
Of Hymes’s many contributions, it is the ethnography of communication that has made the
largest and most durable impact on social science methods. It combines the analytic precision and
formalism of structural linguistics with the comparative and contextual concerns of ethnography within
cultural anthropology (Bauman & Sherzer, 1974). Hymes established ethnography of communication
as the foundational method of linguistic anthropology and qualitative sociolinguistics. First introduced
as “ethnography of speaking,” Hymes would later rename the approach to specify inclusion of
language outside the oral-aural channel. This method has become so fundamental to linguistic
anthropology, sociolinguistics, and sociology of language that it has become taken for granted in these
fields today. Practical applications of the ethnography of communication can also be found in critical
reform movements within education (e.g., Villanueva & Smitherman, 2003), workplaces (Drew &
Heritage, 1992), and at other interfaces between bureaucratic institutions or professions and the
communities they are designed to serve. When applied to historically marginalized groups,
ethnographies of communication have replaced “deficit” models with empirically supported models of
“difference.” Other applications include communicative language teaching for second language
learning, with an emphasis on language use in context (Canale & Swain, 1980).
Historiography and Innovation: Renewing the Boasian Legacy
Part of being a “change-maker” is in establishing new understandings of the past and of possible
futures. Hymes’s historiographic writings cast his own innovations in the social sciences within a long
arc of historical development. He defined a unique “Americanist tradition” (Hymes, 1983), which was
associated with Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Gladys Reichard, Charles Voegelin, and others. Boas had
shaped a unique Americanist tradition by encouraging anthropological fieldworkers to transcribe
spoken or sung texts (e.g., stories, songs, autobiographical accounts) in indigenous languages and to
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publish these as ethnolinguistic text collections. Hymes showed how the comparative study of language
in culture has always been a defining strength of the Americanist tradition, sharply distinguishing it
from French and British anthropology.
The other key leitmotif of the Americanist tradition that Hymes elaborated upon was a concern
with relativism as a methodological principle. Boas (1911) had defined “linguistic relativity” against
prior philological linguists working on Native American languages. These scholars had organized the
elements of Native American languages according to conventions established for Greek, Latin, and
Hebrew. The resulting distortions sometimes consisted in the projection of some features of Greek or
Latin or Hebrew where they did not fit, or, alternately, in failing to make adequate provision for
distinctions and categories present in some Native American languages that did not have counterparts
in the literature on Greek, Latin, or Hebrew. Boas had argued instead that each element of a language
should be understood in terms of its relationship to other elements (lexical and grammatical) of the
particular language of which it is a part. Boas’s relativism pertained to explanatory adequacy. He
argued that valid generalizations or typologies could only rest upon fieldwork with methods tuned and
refined to capture patterns specific to the research object, guarding against naïve projection of familiar
analogues on the part of researchers and analysts.
Hymes brought the Boasian emphasis upon native language spoken texts, and Boas’s
commitment to relativity as a principle of explanatory and comparative adequacy, to the ethnography
of communication. Hymes argued that differences in conventional norms of communication are often
missed by academic and institutional fieldworkers for the same reason that classically trained
philologists missed the distinctive patterns of Native American languages. He proposed that just as
there are relativities of language structure, there are also relativities in conventional norms of language
use (Hymes, 1966). The ethnography of communication is designed to uncover conventional
distinctions in language use, or “ways of speaking” operative in the field-site community. Hymes
influenced several generations of linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists to document vernacular
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ways of speaking in speech communities in the United States and around the world (e.g., Bauman &
Sherzer, 1974; Gumperz & Hymes, 1972). By formalizing the study of vernacular speech styles with
respect to social relations, Hymes came to play a leading role in the American Folklore Society, and
brought the traditional domain of folklore studies into the social sciences.
Between Structural Linguistics and the Social Sciences: Hymes, Jakobson,
and Lévi-Strauss
Another way to understand Hymes’s contribution to social science methods is to compare him with
contemporaries who played parallel leadership roles with respect to the social and linguistic sciences.
One such contemporary is Claude Lévi-Strauss, who, more than any other scholar, established
structuralism in anthropology. Both Lèvi-Strauss and Hymes were inspired by the Prague School of
linguistics, most notably Roman Jakobson. Both Levi-Strauss (1963) and Hymes (1972a) described
themselves as bringing advances from linguistics to the social sciences. However, their respective ways
of doing this differed. Levi-Strauss emphasized the analytic power of linguistic models to redefine and
illuminate classic anthropological objects. He identified elementary structures of kinship, myth, and
classificatory thought. He utilized structuralist ideas, including a distinction between syntagmatic and
paradigmatic relations, binary oppositions, contradictions, and transformations, to explain the operation
of kinship systems, classificatory systems, and the distribution of elements of mythic narratives among
contiguous peoples. Levi-Strauss utilized linguistic models to transform anthropological theory and to
recast some of the objects of anthropology, but left data-gathering methods largely unaffected.
By contrast, Hymes, whose doctoral work was in linguistics, brought linguistic methods to the
study of society. In response to the status accorded to Ferdinand de Saussure in modern linguistic
history, Hymes identified a prior parallel development of structuralism in American anthropology and
linguistics (Hymes, 1983). He adapted models of language structure (paradigmatic and syntagmatic
relations) and Jakobson’s model of language functions (which are described in a later section) to the
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contextual and comparative concerns of socio-cultural anthropology (Jakobson and Halle 1956).
Hymes developed methods and theory to document a new kind of social science object, comprising
integral linguistic-social relations. He showed that language and society were observable in situated
“speech events” (Hymes, 1972a). Working with a scholarly network that included cultural
anthropologists, linguists, sociologists (especially ethnomethodologists), ordinary language
philosophers, and folklorists (Hymes, 1964), Hymes provided leadership and a collaborative platform
for establishing and refining new methods and new forms of systemic relation. Hymes called upon
linguistic anthropological fieldworkers to document “speech events,” and to explain them with respect
to local phenomenal organization, (i.e., within ways of speaking particular to the community or group).
While there would be disputes over the proper scope of speech communities, speech events, relevant
context, and ways of speaking, Hymes gave the social sciences a new class of socio-linguistic object to
recognize and describe in the field (c.f. Sherzer & Darnell, 1986).
The contributions of Hymes and Lévi-Strauss were complementary rather than contradictory.
Hymes appreciated Levi-Strauss’s application of structural analysis to the century-old field
documentary record of collected texts in the Americanist tradition (Hymes, 1983). Lévi-Strauss
appreciated the contextualizing support of ethnography of communication in the structural explication
of particular myth texts (Lévi-Strauss, 1976).
Hymes and Chomsky: The Challenge of Transformational Grammar
Another contemporary who provoked consequential responses from Hymes was Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky defined the center of what became known as the generativist revolution in linguistics.
Chomsky (1957) argued for a new, cognitive-internal approach to language against Americanist
descriptive linguistics, which had concerned itself with field documentation and with Native American
languages. Chomsky argued that the goals of description limited the scope of linguistic claims to
observed behavior, to already-produced sentences, such as had been documented in the Americanist
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literature as a “text collections.” For Chomsky, the human language faculty is better understood as a
potentiality in each individual mind that is neither reducible to communicative function nor to linguistic
behavior. To isolate language as an object of study, Chomsky made a distinction between competence
and performance. He defined competence as intuitive knowledge of the rules that make production and
understanding of grammatical sentences possible. Performance, on the other hand, consists in actual
instances of observable speech, including the oral texts field linguists had been collecting. Chomsky
argued that defining linguistics as the understanding of competence shifts the scope of claims from
particular bodies of documented speech to larger questions of human possibility. He identified
syntax—sentence constituent grammar—with that potentiality. The signature quality of syntax is that it
can be shown to be conditioned by a finite set of rules (elementary structures) used productively by
speakers to produce an infinite array of possible sentences.
Chomsky’s discipline was linguistics, but his claim was anthropological. Chomsky shifted the
object of linguistic study from particular behaviors to productive capacity—from particular languages
to human language writ large. Chomsky’s revolution was successful for two primary reasons: it
precisely modelled an open, generative system (finite number of rules used to produce a potentially
infinite number of possible sentences) and it was directly translatable to the concerns of the growing
field of computer programming. However, the problem for anthropologists was Chomsky’s separation
of syntax from language functions (i.e., from communication and social relations). Chomsky’s method
sharply departed from empirical, documentary linguistics. Instead of transcribing actual speech and
describing its patterns, the method relied on sentence elicitation and native speaker introspection to
define a boundary between grammatical and ungrammatical combinations of sentence constituents.
Chomsky relied on a further abstraction: the rules of syntax describe the knowledge of a speaker who
employs that competence with respect to an idealized homogenous speech community, the likes of
which, he admits, does not exist in the empirical record. The generativist program, ascendant through
the 20th century and still going strong, defined a sharp boundary between linguistic and non-linguistic
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phenomena, and defined the former with robust formal models. However, they accomplished this at the
cost of jettisoning analysts’ accountability to observed instances of language use (performance) and
observable real-world speech communities.
Defining Communicative Competence
Hymes took up Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance, and Chomsky’s
methodological pursuit of native speaker intuition. Hymes argued that as Chomsky modeled linguistic
competence with grammaticality rules, so expectations on language use, or communicative
competence, can be modeled with appropriateness rules. And, just as linguistic competence is
expressed with respect to exposure to and mastery of particular languages in the speaker’s
environment, so communicative competence is expressed by virtue of the speaker’s socialization to
particular speech situations. And like linguistic competence, the greater portion of communicative
competence is picked up tacitly, without trying, and employed without having to think about it (Hymes,
1972b, 1974). Hymes specified Chomsky’s object as “grammatical competence,” which he defined as a
component of an encompassing “communicative competence.” Recent work on language evolution
appears to bear him out, establishing the cognitive basis of communicative competence as primary, as
the foundation upon which linguistic competence is derived
Methodologically, communicative competence located in native speaker intuitions can be
pursued in ethnographic fieldwork via interviews, participant-observation, and field recordings. The
goal would be to provide an empirical window on normative expectations upon language use held by
speakers in a given community. It should be noted that Hymes did not define rules of communicative
competence with the formalism and precision with which the generativist school approached syntax.
He also did not model communicative competence as an internally productive system. Openness and
generativity, to the extent that they are a characteristic of the Hymesian approach, can be attributable to
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exogenous relations—the organized diversity of real-world speech communities wherein speakers
make choices about the means of speech they deploy to accomplish their ends in context.
Hymes built differentials of linguistic and communicative competencies into his model of
speech communities and speech economies. Actual language use (i.e., performance) occurs between
people with overlapping but non-identical competencies who coordinate with one another by
engagement in shared communicative events. For Hymes, real-world speech communities should be the
test of the descriptive adequacy of models of language. Any given instance of observable language use
in a sociocultural context can exceed the competencies of any particular participant. Performance in
speech situations is a meeting ground for speakers with possible competence differentials and,
therefore, performance has a necessary place in the study of integral language-social relations.
Speech Communities
Hymes modeled speech communities as internally differentiated speech economies characterized by
“organized diversity” (Hymes 1972a). Any given real-world speech community includes several
language varieties (stylistic variants as well as different denotational codes), along with
conventionalized norms for their use. Language varieties may function as situational cues, as
occupational or social relationship registers, and there are often conventional distinctions connoted by
situational “switching” between them. Individual participants acquire linguistic repertoires, or
communicative competencies with respect to language varieties and rules for their use, through a
process of language socialization. Within speech economies, language varieties serve as resources,
“means of speech,” that participants have differential, unequal access to (according to age, profession,
identity group, class, caste; Hymes, 1973). Normative values concerning varieties and their use are
loosely shared to the degree to which participants have histories of coordinating with one another.
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Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Relations: Co-occurrence, Co-variation
Inspired by Jakobson (Jakobsom & Halle 1956), Hymes adapted two pillars of structural linguistics to
problems of ethnographic description. The first, also adopted by Levi-Strauss, is the distinction
between the paradigmatic “axis of selection” (amongst alternants within a larger category or type)
while the second is the syntagmatic “axis of combination,” rules for how selected items are logically
combined with one another in sequences of action or composition. Application to sentence constituent
grammar is illustrated in Figure 1.
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Figure 1
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Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Relations
Hymes took the formal paradigmatic-syntagmatic relation, retained language as his object of
study, but scaled up from the constituent elements of sentences to the constituent elements of
communicative events. In a given situation, speakers draw on their communicative competencies to
choose paradigmatically from a variety of available possibilities. Over the course of an extended
utterance, speakers select and combine elements of speech in sequence in ways that are partially shaped
by conventional norms. There may be paradigmatic associations that follow from, or go together with,
those already selected in a given situation. Alternately, new elements may be chosen to introduce a
hitherto unlinked association. In the course of ethnographic observation, if certain elements co-occur
with one another, and do not co-occur with another cluster of elements, then those two sets of features
are in a relation of complementarity and differentiation with respect to one another. The elements that
co-occur under these circumstances are in co-variation with one another. For example, church services
may repeatedly begin with an invocation and end with a benediction. This pattern contrasts with the
manner of beginning and ending a stand-up comedy routine. Both will contrast in some ways with the
co-occurring features of everyday conversation among family. Documented through ethnographic
fieldwork, co-occurring and co-varying distributions of features define an integral linguistic-social
phenomena Hymes termed “ways of speaking” (Hymes, 1972a).
Translating Jakobson’s Speech Functions to Ethnography of Communication
Hymes took up an elementary unit of language function defined by Jakobson as the “speech event” and
adapted it to the ethnographic study of language use in socio-cultural contexts. Jakobson defined the
speech event as an irreducible unit involving a speaker and a listener engaged in an act of making and
interpreting speech. He argued that understanding language through the necessary relations of speech
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entails consideration of six functions speech performs simultaneously. Jakobson (1960) expressed this
in a now-famous diagram (see Figure 2).
Figure 2 Speech Event and Speech Functions
CONTEXT
(referential)
MESSAGE
(poetic)
ADDRESSER----------------------------------------------------------------------ADDRESSEE
(emotive) (conative)
CONTACT
(phatic)
CODE
(metalingual)
Speech events are defined as elementary structures in that they irreducibly involve roles of
addresser and addressee, even in cases of a person talking to themselves in their own minds. Speech
plays an emotive expressive function with respect to the addresser, a conative function with respect to
anticipated reception, and uptake by the addressee. Contact in the diagram includes the material means,
or channel, of speech—whether oral-aural, written on paper, electronic, sign-language. Speech plays a
phatic function ratifying the nature of the connection between addresser and addressee, with respect to
contact. Code refers to the denotational code or codes employed, like English, Spanish, or pig-Latin.
With respect to code (and the extent to which the addresser and addressee draw attention to it, such as,
for example, “what did you mean by ‘code’?”), speech events perform a metalingual function. Context
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for Jakobson refers to what the speech is directed to, what it is about, what is referenced and
represented via the code, outside the immediate, phatic relation between the addresser and addressee. In
this sense, language plays a referential function, establishing a context that the addresser and addressee
direct their attention to by means of speaking. And finally, with respect to persuasive messages, the
function of speech is poetic, involving the transposition of similarity and equivalence—otherwise
qualities of the paradigmatic axis, upon the syntagmatic axis, or unfolding of speech. Here, various
kinds of repetition and parallelism of sentences and words helps establish the spoken as a durable,
transposable memory. Jakobson argues that all six speech functions are necessarily entailed in speech
events, but different kinds of speech in social life emphasize different functions.
Hymes took up Jakobson’s speech event and adapted it to the comparative ethnographic study
of language use in social contexts. As noted previously , Hymes proposed that speech communities
could be described according to “ways of speaking,” treated as discoverable empirical objects, but not
in terms of an analytic elementary form. Given his interest in documenting variety and difference
across speech communities, Hymes did not propose a new elementary form of speaking in society.
Rather, Hymes established a number of heuristic principles for arriving at the social organization of
speech in ethnographic fieldwork, for attuning ethnographic fieldworkers to the possibility of
variability in the configuration of participants and speech events across speech communities.
For example, Hymes devised a well-known heuristic for attending to communicative events in
cultural context (adapted from Hymes, 1974), as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 “Hymes’s SPEAKING Heuristic
S Setting and Scene socially recognizable time and place of the event
P Participants those present, or implied, and their respective roles
E Ends purpose, goals, outcome
A Act Sequence form and order of consecutive acts
K Key tone, manner, metacommunicative frame
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I Instrumentalities code, channel, media, style
N Norms socio-cultural norms of composition and interpretation
G Genre kind of speech act or event, socio-culturally defined
Some elements of the SPEAKING acronym derive directly from Jakobson’s speech event and
speech functions model, but expanded to establish socio-cultural context as an intrinsic component.
The “Act Sequence” is the documentation of the speech event, expanded by transcription techniques
pioneered by Gail Jefferson (1984). “Participants” include the addressor and addressee, but also a finer
grained differentiation of participant roles proposed by sociologist Erving Goffman and refined by
linguistic anthropologists. “Instrumentalities” refers to medium, contact, and code. All of the other
categories: “Setting and Scene,” “Norms,” “Genre,” “Ends,” and “Key” pertain to the conventional
organization of speaking in particular communities of use. Though less elaborated than his theoretical
writing, Hymes’s SPEAKING heuristic is widely disseminated. Through it, he poetically (in
Jakobson’s sense) called upon a cohort of language researchers to discover social variation in ways of
speaking, and to establish this in the social science record. It is also a standard tool for orienting
students in the classroom to some of the concerns of ethnographic fieldwork.
New Objects of Socio-Cultural Anthropology
Documenting speech communities as groups or networks of interacting participants characterized by
organized diversity opened up a new perspective on the traditional objects of anthropology from the
colonial era. Many early anthropologists treated languages, cultures, and socio-political entities like
“tribe” as co-terminus entities. In a ground-breaking paper, “Some Linguistic Problems in the
Definition of a Tribe,” Hymes (1968) synthesized accounts of regional multilingualism to show that
tribes, and other ethnological objects defined with assumptions of homogeneous linguistic identity,
required rethinking. In a positive sense, he demonstrated that looking at language use in speech
communities reveals principles of organization previously unnoticed. Studies of linguistic exogamy and
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the sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert, 2010) have further developed and established this
argument. Investigating the diverse means of speech employed by participants in speech communities
brings everyday engagements with social relations to the forefront and has helped to redraw, via
empirical study, the boundaries and functions of identity, difference, groups, and communities.
New Objects for Folklore
Hymes’s ethnography of speaking shifted the study of folklore from the collection of texts to the study
of performances in social context. Attending to “ways of speaking,” as defined by the behavior and the
meta-communicative terms and reflections of participants, replaced ethnological categories “myth,”
“tale,” and “autobiography” with culturally specific distinctions. Norms of composition and norms of
interpretation applied by members of the target community (rather than those imposed by the
researcher) were brought in as required components of an adequate account. Audience and speaker
roles, the form of their interaction with one another, became central to ethnographic description
(Bauman & Sherzer, 1974).
Linguistic Text Collections Reinterpreted via Ethnopoetics
In the latter part of his career, Hymes launched a second contribution to method in the social sciences,
which he termed “ethnopoetics” (Hymes, 1981). This was in fact a re-analysis of recorded or
transcribed oral accounts and performances already collected via linguistic and social science research.
His argument is that patterns of repetition and parallelism at different scales (e.g., lexeme, phrase,
sentence, line, passage, scene) should be examined as evidence of poetic structure (in Jakobson’s
sense) germane to the message of the oral text as a whole. He advocated a return to texts collected
across the more than 120-year history of Americanist anthropology and linguistics in order to discover
new features latent in old materials. For some, this has resulted in recasting and republishing collected
texts as works of oral literature, and as examples of previously unrecognized artistry and voice. For
others, it has yielded new translations of interview materials collected as part of social science research.
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In these cases, close adherence to the discourse structure (patterns of parallelism and repetition) of the
original reveal aspects of the speaker’s composition, persuasive language, and coherence present in the
data but not sought or recognized through the interview format. Hymes argued that when considered,
these compositional properties represent attempted extensions of voice on the part of research subjects
(see also Nevins, 2013).
Inequality, Differences in Ways of Speaking, and Voice
Applied to recent narratives collected in social science interviews or elicitations, especially from
speakers from marginalized communities, ethnopoetics is a technique for attending to ways that
collected narratives have been misrecognized in social science, ways narrative responses often exceed
the question, or elicitation purposes, because they are shaped by the compositional skills and persuasive
purposes of the narrator. While this suggests the conversion of social science data to humanistic literary
concerns, Hymes’s insistence on close analysis of the original language source is a call for empirical
and epistemological adequacy (Hymes, 1975). Almost entirely outside what has been termed the
“critical turn” in the qualitative social sciences, Hymes developed tools for assessing the nature of
spoken language data, for correcting prior misrecognitions and misunderstandings. Outside of the
Foucauldian critical turn, he has nonetheless been critical of the distorting effect of political inequality
on social science interpretations of spoken data collected from members of marginalized communities.
He did more than critique. He devised methods for attending more closely and accurately to spoken
language data to recognize the means employed by speakers to voice their purposes.
Researchers and Indigenous Speakers Within a Historical Trajectory
Through his career, Hymes argued for the perfectibility of the long arc of anthropological science,
especially with respect to Native Americans and other colonized and marginalized peoples who largely
formed the subject matter of anthropology until the late 20th century. With ethnopoetics, he was
concerned with voice—the relation between what a speaker intends to convey, the means at his or her
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disposal, and the audience and their means and intention in interpreting the speech. He conceived of
ethnopoetics as a way of repatriating collected texts in a form accessible to their communities of origin.
He was partly motivated by late 20th and early 21st century concerns with supporting threatened
indigenous languages. With historiography and ethnopoetics, Hymes placed disciplinary history
alongside the history and voices of Native American and other research subjects. This helped to shape
anthropology into the distinctively reflexive, historical, comparative social science it continues to be
today.
Final Remarks
Hymes engaged key structuralist thinkers of his era (most notably Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, and
Chomsky) and, like them, worked at the juncture between linguistics and other sciences. His discipline,
anthropology, committed him to the comparative and historical study of the full diversity of human
languages and communities. One consequence of this is that whereas his counterparts established
theoretical elaborations upon elementary structures in the mind or in the speech event, Hymes adapted
these as heuristic guides for comparative ethnographic field studies. He translated 20th century
developments in linguistics to longstanding anthropological concerns with ethnographic field study,
relativism, empiricism, and contextual validity.
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Boas, Franz, ed. 1911. Handbook of American Indian languages. Bureau of American Ethnology,
Bulletin 40. Washington: Government Print Office (Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of
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Canale, M. and Swain, M. 1980. “Theoretical Basis of Communicative Approaches to Second
Language Teaching and Testing.” Applied Linguistics 1 (1): 1-47. doi: 10.1093/applin/1.1.1
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. Mouton de Gruyter. The Hague.
Drew, Paul and Heritage, John (1992). Analyzing Talk at Work: An Introduction. In Paul Drew and
John Heritage (ed.) Talk at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3-65.
Gumperz, John J., and Dell H. Hymes, eds. 1972. Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of
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