Análisis Funcional de la Conducta y Cambio Conductual

As is clear from the literature discussed, several different aspects of communication and language use are of importance to understanding how individuals communicate in legal advice meetings. The communicative resources used in advice meetings, including aspects such as vocabulary; register and communicative style; discursive structure of interactions; and modes of communication drawn upon, merit close examination in this study. I also approach language use as offering perspectives on the cultural orientations of individuals, because (as stated in Chapter One, and explored in relation to the law in section 2.1) I see culture as to a large degree expressed, embodied and symbolized through ways of using language (Gee, 2012; Kramsch, 1998; Scollon et al., 2012). I draw on Risager’s (2006) model of the ‘language-culture nexus’ (p. 196) to conceptualize and describe language and its relationship to culture, because this model provides a useful set of concepts to more precisely express the complex relationship between language and culture.

Risager (2006) draws on sociolinguistic approaches to language and a (general) view of culture situated in cultural anthropology concerned with globalization and complexity (Hannerz, 1992). For Risager, language and linguistically-expressed culture are bound together in a complex multidimensional relationship comprising three layers: the linguistic, the languacultural, and the

discursive; and two dimensions, (internal, cognitive) resources and (external, behavioural) practices. Starting at the linguistic level, Risager distinguishes between the following dimensions:

• ‘linguistic resources’ (Risager, 2006, p. 79) – a cognitive construct; the internal or psychological language-related resources that people have available to them for communication. These include knowledge of linguistic systems, paralanguage and kinesics; they also incorporate ‘metalinguistic attitudes and beliefs’ (p. 81), or language ideologies, which individuals draw on when communicating or interpreting others’ communication.

• ‘linguistic practices’ (p. 74) – a behavioural construct; the visible or audible parts of communication, including behaviours such as speech, writing, signing, and/or production of ‘paralanguage and (language-accompanying and -complementing) kinesics’ (p. 77). They are externalized linguistic resources.

Risager (2006) also points out that a third, ‘artificial’ (p. 74) conceptual locus of language exists in the ‘language system’ (p.81), the system-oriented discursive and metalinguistic construction of ‘language’ in the sense of the ‘English language’ or ‘legal language’. The language system is a secondary social construct used by individuals to make sense of how linguistic resources and

practices (which are primary constructs) work in a simplified way. The construct is also used within society ‘to control and regulate linguistic practice’ (p. 84) through ‘linguistic prescription and standardisation, language policy, suppression or favorisation respectively of particular languages and language varieties, etc.’ (p. 84).

Risager (2006) argues that the nexus between language and culture is located in the two intermediate levels of resources and practices, the languacultural and the discursive, both of which build on linguistic resources and practices. Risager (2006, drawing on Agar, 1994; Friedrich, 1989) defines languacultural resources and practices (p. 110-134) as those elements of linguistic resources and practices in particular linguistic systems which incorporate aspects of cultural (i.e., social group) identity. For example, the expression (o tsukare sama desu) in Japanese has a literal (recreating the source language) English translation of ‘you [honorific form] are a tired person’, but is pragmatically (approximating the target language) translated as ‘well done and thank you for your hard work’. It is a frequently used idiomatic term tied to cultural conceptions of the respect to be accorded to hard work commonly held in Japanese society, and demonstrates the close connection between cultural beliefs and attitudes, and linguistic expressions. The extent of a person’s languacultural resources and practices vary depending on whether they are using their L1 or an L2. In legal communication, specialized terms ('legalese', Gibbons, 2003, p. 198) can be characterised as languaculture, associated with and expressing a legal culture learned as a second culture and language (C2 and L2) through professional training. Discursive resources and practices (Risager, 2006, p. 144) are linguistic resources and practices used to express or understand discourses circulating in a particular group or society, and across societies in cases where the relevant discourses circulate more widely. Risager uses the Foucauldian conception of discourse, ‘a particular way of constructing a subject-matter’ (Fairclough, 1992, p. 128), or a way of talking about something which implies a specific perspective on that subject-matter. This level of meaning – the expression of ideas and viewpoints – sits above any particular linguistic system, although linguistic and sometimes also languacultural resources are used to express them. An individual’s discursive resources include: knowledge of a ... world of verbalised themes, points of view and positions; insight into which subjects are taboo; knowledge of who can be expected to be of the [sic] opinion, and express what in which situations; ... ability ... to express, formulate and develop discourses ... ; reflexive capacity to understand own and other people’s positions in relation to social and political reality; [and] strategic abilities to shape and administer one’s own subjectivity in collaboration or conflict with others. (Risager, 2006, p. 144)

Discursive resources and practices therefore concern knowledge of values and beliefs, which may circulate within or across social groups, and linguistic and languacultural ways of expressing and constructing these. They are used in the construction, shaping and signalling of cultures. In a legal context, the expected format and content of a witness statement would be an example of a discursive resource (a form of cultural/linguistic knowledge) acquired during legal training and shared amongst lawyers.

Risager (2006) also recognizes a non-linguistic dimension of other cultural resources and

practices, incorporating means of cultural expression such as the use of artefacts and music in

signalling group identity and affiliation. Since her focus is on explicating the relationship between language (which she defines as verbal communication with accompanying paralanguage and kinesics) and culture, Risager does not consider these forms of communication in much detail, but a wider conceptualization of communication extending beyond the linguistic would take this dimension into account. Drawing on Risager (2006), culture is for me, therefore, both constructed and signalled through linguistic, languacultural, discursive and other cultural resources and practices, which indicate and shape affiliation with social group identity positions. Importantly for this study, Risager views the use of communicative practices within ‘communicative events’ (p. 185) as taking place in a larger network of ‘flows’ (p. 16) of resources and practices around ‘the global ecumene’ (p. 67) as a consequence of human migration patterns, technological interconnectedness, and global trade in goods and services. A communicative event in a monolingual, monocultural situation may well exhibit a ‘convergent language-culture nexus’ (p. 188), but intercultural and multilingual interactions such as those taking place in asylum and refugee legal advice meetings, exhibit a more ‘divergent language-culture nexus’ (p. 187) which actually or potentially engages a complex range of first and second linguistic, languacultural, discursive, and other cultural resources and practices. The exact mix depends on the resources available to the participants, the affinities that exist between them and the possibilities for communication that are entailed.

I follow Risager (2006) in considering that in a close study of communicative events across languages and cultures, the overly-broad terms ‘language’ and ‘culture’ should be eschewed in favour of the vocabulary of linguistic, languacultural, and discursive resources and practices that more precisely describes the language-culture nexus. This approach resonates with Gee (2012) and Scollon et al. (2012), who in analysing how culture is constructed and operates through language, both choose to use ‘discourse’ instead of the term ‘culture’. Adopting this more nuanced approach also assists in research: practices are constructs that are observable in interaction, and which can be taken as evidence of people’s resources; they can provide evidence

of at least some of an individual’s cultural identifications and how these are brought into or made relevant in interaction. 2.5.2 Contexts of communication As observed in Chapter One, communication is a social phenomenon – it takes place within a social context, which is drawn upon in communication (Hymes, 1974). “Context” is a metaphor for an aspect or aspects of the social world, a construct used to address ‘the way in which linguistic forms – ‘text’ – become part of, get integrated in, or become constitutive of larger activities in the social world’ (Blommaert, 2005, p. 39). Language (text) is always associated with context, because ‘the social nature of the utterance’ (Voloshinov, 1973, p. 93) is that language is a product of the social world: The organizing center of any utterance, of any experience, is not within but outside – in the social milieu surrounding the individual being ... Utterance as such is wholly a product of social interaction, both of the immediate sort as determined by the circumstances of the discourse, and of the more general kind, as determined by the whole aggregate of conditions under which any given community of speakers operates. (Voloshinov, 1973, p. 93) Thus, knowledge of context is necessary for a complete understanding of linguistic, languacultural or discursive practices: ‘context is what we need to know about in order to properly understand the event, action or discourse’ (Tracy, 1998, p. 3 citing van Dijk, 1997, p. 11). The challenges this presents for interpreted legal advice interaction, which encompass questions of knowledge about the cultural context(s) that a speaker draws on in communication, have been discussed in section 2.4.3 above.

As the work of Gumperz (1982b, 1982a, 1992, 1999) in interactional sociolinguistics demonstrates, the impact of context(s) within communication can be analysed linguistically by identifying the use and effect of ‘contextualization cues’ (Gumperz, 1999, p. 461) in talk. Gumperz aimed ‘to find empirical ways of showing through discourse analysis whether or not interpretive procedures are shared’ (p. 458) between interactants. By combining Hymes’ (1974) ethnography of communication, pragmatic discourse analysis, and conversation analytic techniques, Gumperz developed tools for analysing how contextualization cues are drawn upon and interpreted by individuals ‘through their own culturally shaped background knowledge’ in deriving meaning from speech, a process he called ‘conversational inference’ (Gumperz, 1999, p. 458).

Contextualization cues are defined as ‘any verbal sign which when processed in co-occurrence with symbolic grammatical and lexical signs serves to construct the contextual ground for situated interpretation, and thereby affects how constituent messages are understood’ (p. 461). Although this definition focuses on the verbal, elsewhere Gumperz acknowledges the importance of non- verbal cues; others have studied how contextualization also takes place through non-verbal cues such as gaze, gesture, and posture, used to signal aspects of context (Auer & Di Luzio, 1992). Gumperz’s research on interactions in workplace settings in Britain uncovered hidden misunderstandings arising in ‘interethnic communication’ (Gumperz, 1982a, p. 172) between individuals who both spoke English well, but whose underlying schemas for interpretation of verbal contextualization cues differed because of their different sociocultural backgrounds. His work shows that communication challenges deriving from a lack of shared understandings of context affects not only multilingual interactions, but same-language intercultural communication, and has contributed to understanding the issues around institutional literacy discussed earlier in this chapter.

Roberts argues that ‘contextual considerations are particularly significant in intercultural communication because of the reliance on contextual knowledge by the minority speakers...there is more weight given to the contextual’ (Roberts, 1996a, p. 24). Roberts highlights that shared understandings of context (e.g., the usual content of a routine interaction) are a resource for achieving understanding in (dyadic) intercultural communication, for example by minority speakers using an L2 to interact with institutional representatives using their L1. Roberts draws on Goffman’s concept of ‘frames’, or ‘principles of organization which govern events – at least social ones – and our subjective involvement in them’ (Goffman, 1974, p. 11), to explain this, commenting that ‘shared frames are central to creating the conditions for shared interpretation’ (Roberts, 1996a, p. 24), yet that shared frames are often lacking in intercultural communication. Investigating and identifying the contexts of interactions, and what impact they have, is therefore an important aspect of studying intercultural communication. However, the ‘heterogeneous nature’ (Fetzer, 2010, p. 13) of context makes it hard to specify exactly what researchers should be looking for. In the excerpt cited above, Voloshinov highlights two dimensions which underpin the academic approach to context: the micro-context of the immediate conversation, and the broader macro-context of the social conditions surrounding an interaction. Different fields within the study of language and social interaction have focused attention on different parts of this micro-macro spectrum, with for example critical discourse analysts (Fairclough, 1992; Wodak, 2001) focusing on the macro-context, and conversation analysts (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; ten Have, 2007) focusing on the micro-context (see also Chapter Three, section 3.2.3).

The linear conceptualization of context as a spectrum, one end of which is ‘local’ to the text, or ‘micro’, and the other ‘distant’ from the text, or ‘macro’, brought with it rather fixed models of the text-context relationship (‘text’ here being a metaphor for language). These included the context-as-container metaphor used within critical discourse analysis of situational context surrounding, and shaping the meaning of, text (see e.g., Fairclough, 2001), and the figure-ground metaphor of text as the figure or focus of study, containing most of the meaning, and context as the background surrounding the text, contributing secondary meanings (Duranti & Goodwin, 1992). This linear conceptualisation has been critiqued in contemporary scholarship (Canagarajah, 2017), for not taking account of within-person aspects of social life, such as cognition, as context (Potter, 1998); failing to acknowledge the part that participants, through language, play in shaping context, by making a certain context relevant and framing its relationship to the interaction (Buttny, 1998; Mason, 2006); and failing to recognize that a multiplicity of contexts, distant from each other in time, space, form and character, may be or become relevant or irrelevant to an interaction in an unpredictable, chaotic manner (Blommaert, 2005; Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008; Whiteside, 2013). These critiques lead to a problematic theoretical void for applied linguistics, expressed thus by Canagarajah (2017, p. 10): ‘what is the scale, scope, or boundary of the interaction that should be analysed? In short, what is a relevant unit of analysis for communicative interactions?’ The view of context adopted in this study reflects the latter two critiques. Firstly, I see contexts as not solely brought-along (as is the traditional view), but also as brought-about (Auer, 1992). Contexts are both external and internal to the talk, seen ‘as existing both independently of the text and as (re)created in and through the text’ (Buttny, 1998, p. 46). In this view, many potential contexts are latent until activated in an interaction, as Roberts explains: Contextual information is frequently potential rather than explicit. In other words it does not appear as readily available to participants and/or is not necessarily relevant and therefore attended to at any one time ... such information will have more or less marked traces on the surface across large stretches of discourse and may emerge or not according to the participants’ orientation. (Roberts, 1996a, p. 24).

Moreover, Blommaert (2005) points out that contexts not only have to be brought into an interaction by one participant, but also somehow acknowledged as meaningful by the other, to contribute in the dialogic negotiation of meaning. The contexts applying to an interaction are thus continuously signalled and negotiated in talk, evolving as the talk progresses (Mason, 2006).

In multilingual and intercultural communication, the type and nature of the contexts that are brought in to the interaction may become the subject of negotiation. In the context of the refugee and asylum advice meetings in this study, power relationships may come into play in this arena (Blommaert, 2005), through questions arising such as who has rights to introduce which contexts into the interaction, and to what extent this may be resisted.

Secondly, I do not see the spatial or temporal distance of a context from the interaction as important for whether it is relevant to the interaction. Blommaert notes that ‘context comes in various shapes and operates at various levels from the infinitely small to the infinitely big’ (Blommaert, 2005, p. 40). One conceptualization of context which recognizes this, as well as the unpredictability of how contexts may enter into an interaction, is the ecological approach to analysing multilingual and intercultural interaction (Kramsch & Uryu, 2012; Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008; Whiteside, 2013). The ecological approach advances a complexified view of context. It recognizes that there is always a vast complex of interrelated contexts of different kinds surrounding us, situated at different levels of the social order, times, places, and spaces (Blommaert, 2005, 2010). Each one of these can be (but does not have to be) relevant to interactions as a brought-along context, or become relevant as a brought-about context. Contexts are signalled in contextualization work, which may be linguistic or may be through role-behaviour or setting (i.e. communicative norms). In this model, contexts are not conceptualized in terms of hierarchical linear inter-relationships, bur rather as more akin to a complex network of intricately connected and interrelated constructs which can be variously called upon in interactions to support the negotiation of meaning. I like to think about context in these terms, since as a conceptualization which recognizes mobility and complexity, it is particularly suited to today’s globally interconnected communicative landscape. It can potentially be fruitfully applied to interactions such as the refugee and asylum legal advice meetings the subject of this study, which in accordance with Risager’s (2006) model may exhibit a divergent language-culture nexus.