Studies In The Symbolic Interaction Of Speech Discourse

Fascinated by the omnipresence of such discourses as speech, advertisement, news report and editorial, we wonder how both sides of the participants in these discourses, as communicative events, communicate with each other so as to achieve temporary agreement on a given issue or event. After careful examination, we notice that they are consistent with the traditional public address that is the object of rhetorical study and share with it the commonality that both sides of participants usually interact with each other in a multi-dimensional and poly-level way so as to identify with each other, come to a temporary agreement on the issue under consideration and finally fulfill their own aims. Accordingly, for the convenience's sake, we borrow the old nomenclature of speech to denote the above discourses but endow it with new connotation by redefining it as a special kind of discourse that consists of various symbolic interactions, through human beings in a given context, who address and interact with each other in order to achieve temporary agreement on the issue under consideration. In this case, this research attempts to detect the appropriate, effective, and efficient way to understand speech discourse from the perspective of symbolic interaction between speaker and audience.The survey of the literature of speech study indicates that there are two fields that have devoted themselves to speech criticism: one is rhetorical criticism; the other is discourse analysis. However, neither of them can satisfy the purpose of understanding speech effectively and efficiently from the perspective of multi-dimensional and poly-level symbolic interactions. From the existing twenty approaches of rhetorical criticism, according to their relations with symbolic interaction, this research generalizes five types of rhetorical speech criticism (RCS):"speaker-centered,""ideology-or-motive-fascinated,""effect-driven,""context-oriented,"and"critic-determined."In the field of discourse analysis, based on the relations between linguistic factors and non-linguistic variables, this study classifies it into three trends of discourse analysis of speech (DAS): intra-textual micro-linguistic analysis, extra-textual macro-linguistic analysis, and the investigation of the interaction between speech-text and social context as the hybrid of the previous two. Although the existing approaches of both RCS and DAS do provide us with extensive insights for and make their own specific contribution to speech understanding, their penchants and limitations prevent them, to some extent or other, from viewing speech as symbolic interaction between speaker and audience. It is to complement this inadequacy and explore the multi-dimensional and poly-level interactions in speech that the present study is designed.The anatomy of the constituents and functions of speech justifies the hypothesis of this research that speech discourse is composed of a series of symbolic interactions so that the appropriate way of its understanding is to consider both its production and consumption in terms of the bilateral interactions between speaker and audience. And with the examination of both theoretical and practical relationships between speech and rhetoric, speech and linguistics, this research reveals that speech and rhetoric are interdependent and language is indispensable for producing and understanding speech. And what's more, rhetoric and linguistics are complementary in speech criticism. In this case, based on the achievements made by the previous studies on speech, the present research attempts to integrate and develop relevant rhetorical and linguistic theories and approaches so as to understand speech from the perspective of symbolic interaction.From rhetoric, this study assimilates and develops the Sophists's dialectic and contradictory arguments and Aristotle's artistic proofs in ancient Greece, the stasis theory of Hermagoras'and Cicero's invention in Rome, and Lloyd Bitzer's rhetorical situation, Kenneth Burke's"identification,"Cha?m Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's"universal audience"and"universal value,"Wayne C. Booth's"rhetoric of assent"and"rhetorology,"and Stephen Toulmin's"model of argument"in modern and contemporary times. These rhetorical theories and principles contain abundant ideas, methods, and strategies of symbolic interaction, represent the"speaker-initiated"and"audience-empowered"interactions and also demonstrate the interactions within text. Besides, Burke, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Booth, and Toulmin are consistent in that their rhetorical thinking reveals that the nature of rhetoric, as a communicative art, is a two-process identifying. Therefore, their rhetorical theories can provide people with the appropriate methods to understand interactions in speech from various angles.From linguistics, this study absorbs Beaugrande and Dressler's four textualities and then develops them into discursivities according to the characteristics of speech discourse. They are intentionality, acceptability, intertextuality, and inter-contextuality. The first two help to detect the intra-textual interactions in the process of constructing speech-text, which record the symbolic negotiation and compromise between context and speaker's intention and audience's expectation. The last two offer people the clues to probe into the extra-textual interactions on the level of context, which demonstrate how speaker and audience interact in the selection and reconstruction of the text-type, text allusion, pre-text, and post-text and how these contextual factors and the construction of speech-text influence each other, and so on.By means of integrating rhetorical theories with linguistic principles, that is, uncovering the underlying rhetorical power relations and interactions through examining the surface linguistic phenomena, this research investigates speech discourse on different levels and establishes a systematic and feasible three-dimensional framework to offer people the necessary awareness and orientation for understanding speech from the perspective of symbolic interaction. The first dimension is recovering the context. This demonstrates how speaker and audience interact with the CONTEXT, in accordance with their own intention, so as to co-construct the specific context for speech, and involves three levels of interactions between context and speaker, context and audience, and context and speech-text. The second dimension is uncovering the symbolic power relations between speaker and audience. On the one hand, the audience, as the determiner of a speech, can"coerce"the speaker to adapt to them on the poly-level interactions, accommodate to their characteristics and constraining variables. On the other hand, the speaker possesses the symbolic power to grant the qualification of audience and define the identity of the audience as intended audience, pseudo-audience, or non-audience in speech interactions. The speaker derives this power from his or her capability to resort to the rhetorical strategies, of which re-establishing favorable ethos is one of the most effective means. The third dimension is deconstructing the speech-text, which examines the interactions within speech-text, in light of Toulmin's model of argument. In order to illustrate how the framework functions in speech understanding, this study analyzes such speech discourses as political propaganda and public address, report and editorial, announcement and advertisement, and so on. In the process of probing into the new way to understand speech discourse, this research finds a series of relations namely speech and rhetoric, speech and linguistics, and rhetoric and linguistics, reveals the nature of speech as symbolic interaction and that of rhetoric as two-process identifying, detects the symbolic power relations between speaker and audience, and accordingly establishes a systematic and feasible three-dimensional framework by integrating rhetoric and linguistics to understand speech from the perspective of symbolic interaction. All of these will provide people with some awareness and orientation for creative criticism of speech as well as effective production of speech, with salutary reference to other communication studies, and with pedagogical guidance to writing and discourse analysis.Of course, due to the limitations of our knowledge and competence, this study inevitably has some shortcomings and inadequacies, which need to be improved in both depth and breadth.