The hockey collective identity: cognitive and psychological approachEs to the discourse analysis (Verbal and Multimodal Aspects)

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

The hockey collective identity: cognitive and psychological approachEs to the discourse analysis (Verbal and Multimodal Aspects)

Tetiana Suvorova

PhD in Philology, Associate Professor,

European and Oriental Languages and Translation Department,

Alfred Nobel University

Research Laboratory LT2D EA7518, EUTOPIA Alliance,

CY Cergy Paris Universite (France)



Асоціативний та інтерпретаційний аналіз одиниць мовлення є традиційною практикою аналізу дискурсу, яка використовується в дослідженнях, щоб продемонструвати, як учасники комунікації взаємно погоджуються щодо значення, яке вони структурують під час дискурсу. Контрольовані експерименти проводяться в умовах, відносно незвичних для практики природного дискурсу, оскільки в дискурсі в реальному часі процес структурування та реконструкції смислу відбувається завдяки глибокому залученню в ситуативний контекст. Тому метою нашого дослідження було доповнити результати експерименту ментальними моделями чи моделями ситуацій, що відображають категорії мислення під час структурування хокейного дискурсу, щоб розвинути ідею колективної хокейної ідентичності, яка виникає з дискурсу через типове залучення мовленнєвих структур і типової мовленнєвої поведінки в процесі дискурсу. Мета дослідження дозволила вирішити декілька завдань. Перше -- визначити, чи є якісь особливості хокейного дискурсу. По-друге, реконструювати колективну хокейну ідентичність відповідно до дискурсу, який вони будують під час спілкування. Ці завдання допомогли нам охарактеризувати учасників хокейного дискурсу як тих, хто має статус «внутрішніх» членів і мають особливий рівень довіри з боку інших членів соціальної групи. Основу дослідження складають методи аналізу дискурсу разом із когнітивним моделюванням. В експериментах 1 і 2 ми виявили, що статуси «in-member» і «off-member» формуються та приписуються учасниками відповідно до здатності правильно структуру- вати значення в хокейному дискурсі. Когнітивний аналіз дав нам змогу побудувати когнітивну модель колективної хокейної ідентичності, яка ґрунтується на репрезентаціях хокейного світу, взятих із дискурсу в соціальних медіа (сторінки команд НХЛ в Instagram). Результати експериментів і когнітивного моделювання домінуючих концепцій хокейної колективної ідентичності підтверджують кілька гіпотез. Ми виявили соціальні ефекти демонстрації статусу через конструювання смислу в процесі дискурсу та важливість бути «in-member» для ефективної комунікації та задоволення учасників.

Ключові слова: хокейний дискурс, колективна хокейна ідентичність, ментальні моделі, дискурсивні репрезентації, комунікаційний експеримент.



THE HOCKEY COLLECTIVE IDENTITY: COGNITIVE AND PsYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHEs TO THE Discourse ANALYsis (Verbal and Multimodal Aspects) hockey discourse communication experiment

Tetiana M. Suvorova, CY Cergy Paris University (France)

Key words: hockey discourse, collective hockey identity, mental models, discourse representations, communication experiment.

The associative and interpretative analysis of speech units is a traditional practice in discourse analysis that is involved in discourse studies to demonstrate how participants of communication mutually agree on the meaning they structure during the discourse. The controlled experiments are held under conditions that are relatively unusual for the natural discourse practice as in the real-time discourse the process of meaning structuring and reconstruction is due to deep involvement in the situational context. That is why the purpose of our study was to complete the experiment's results with the mental models or situation models reflecting the categories of thinking during structuring hockey discourse in order to develop the idea of collective hockey identity that arises from the discourse because of some typical discourse structures and typical language behaviour in the process of discourse. The purpose of the research enabled several tasks to be solved. The first one was to define whether there are any peculiarities of the hockey discourse. Secondly, to reconstruct a collective hockey identity according to the discourse they construct during communication. These tasks helped us to characterize the participants of hockey discourse as the ones with the status of "in-group" members and gives them a special level of trust from other members of the social group. The methods of the discourse analysis together with the cognitive modeling compose the basis of the research. In experiments 1 and 2, we found that the "in-member" and "off-member" statuses are drawn and ascribed by the participants according to the ability to correctly structure the meaning in hockey discourse. The cognitive analysis enabled us to build a cognitive model of collective hockey identity that is based on the representations of the hockey world drawn from the discourse in social media (Instagram pages of the NHL teams). Results of the experiments and cognitive modeling of the dominant concepts of the hockey collective identity prove several hypotheses. We found social effects of status demonstration via the construction of meaning in the process of discourse and the importance of being "in-member" for effective communication and satisfaction of the participants. Differences in hockey-oriented conversation between in-group members and off-group members are proved as we assumed in the hypothesis. We provide some evidence that in-group members' and off-group members' reconstruction of the meaning in communication can differ in conversations that are focused on a specific collaborative goal, though their verbal behavior is moderated by the employment of clear general vocabulary.Though the methods of the study introduce literal and statistical noise, putting people into more naturalistic contexts and examining discourse between interlocutors who have various levels of the English language competence can reveal differences that are hidden or discouraged in the laboratory.



Introduction

The process of transmitting thoughts and ideas has always been the focus of attention of linguists since the language is the means that is considered to be developed for the purpose of communication. The theories of discourse [Grice, 1975; Goldinger, 1996] are determined to reveal the verbalized communicative interaction of the addressee and the addresser under specific communicative conditions, social and pragmatic situations for realizing some definite scope of pragmatic impact on the addresser [Donders, 1969]. While some societies are developing, there is a requirement for the language to serve the communicative needs of the society in general and definite social groups in particular. Thus, the scholars figure out special social needs to create a special secret language of communication on the basis of the general language of the society [Goldinger, 1996; Guydish et al., 2020; Hepburn & Bolden, 2013; Hoey, 2015] [Horton & Spieler, 2007; Kuperberg & Jaeder, 2016]. The division of the discourse into official and non-official aims at giving more accurate characteristics of pragmatic and communicative functions that are served.

Each of the discourses, official and non-official, presupposes different linguistic behaviour which has been studied and described from different angles: the structure of the discourse within informal linguistic behaviour with friends [Planalp & Benson, 1992]; discourse markers [Guydish et al., 2020], overlapping structures [Donders, 1969], laughing [Smoski & Bachoroski, 2003]; unspoken structures in opening and closing parts of the conversation.

Yet, the researchers also paid attention to the non-fluent nature of communication [Liu et al., 2016]; prosodic convergence [Truong & Heylen, 2012]; amount of laughter [Smoski & Bachoroski, 2003]. The fact that being acquainted has an impact on linguistic behaviour, can be traced in the Map Task Corpus. These documentations of friend and stranger pairs of communicative patterns prove the differences in the behaviour of one person depending on the communicative situation, though the acquaintanceship is not supposed to influence entertainment behaviours with Artwalk Task [Liu et al., 2016]. Thus, the results of the discourse studies prove the fact of some particular typical linguistic behaviour that can generally describe a personality in a particular situation. Based on the results, a conclusion can be drawn that if the linguistic behaviour is typical under some situation, we can speak not of some kind of individual identity but of the collective identity of people under some communicative circumstances. Discourse analysis is about structuring the notion / meaning of a conversation and identity. In different types of discourses the identity of an interlocutor is composed and distinguished by other communicative participants on the basis of reference and inference.

The main task is to prove the specificity of the meaning of structuring and reconstruction in a non-official discourse such as the hockey one. The next point is to describe the hockey identity as a representative of a specific linguistic behaviour that could give us the basis to mention the collective hockey identity.

The first goal of our research is to assess the communicative situation in which a collective identity reveals itself as an interlocutor with a specific linguistic behaviour. Secondly, characterize the collective identity acting in a specific discourse, in our case it is non-official hockey discourse. Thirdly, prove the existence of specific linguistic behaviour that figures out the users of the specific linguistic behaviour for the purpose of being distinguished and accepted by others as in-group social members due to the ability to co-construct the meaning of the utterance in the flow of communication.

Communication in Psychological Perspective

Communication between people is in its broad meaning an ability to generate numerous constructions via the language means in order to present an idea in its closest enveloping. Psychologically, it is a high and specific type of mental interaction that differentiates people from other biological species as the mind enables a person to reconstruct the model of reality according to available general mechanisms of cognition [Vygotsky, 1962, p. 16]. With regard to Vygotsky's ideas, the speech is, first of all, the means of communication, and it is mostly social communication that is the reason why people struggle to express thoughts, ideas, feelings, and states, and also it is a means of cognition and categorization [Ibid.]. That means the ability of a human being to reconstruct both the model of reality according to Vygotsky's understanding and somebody's individual model of the world according to contemporary cognitive theories [Peeters et al., 2006; Mertens & Ruiter, 2021].

Cognitive Approach

In terms of cognitive linguistics, the external information perceived by organs of the body is the embodied knowledge (that is from the limits and abilities of the human body), and psychologists add that the word is ready when the understanding is ready. It means a definite path the perceived information is going to undergo before crystallizing into a unit of information that is ready to be worded. This process is very individual that is why the model of the world is personalized.

It is supposed that in the memory a person has a limited number of models, prototypes acquired during life via associative reasoning and due to practical experience. Accordingly, new pieces of information are adjusted to the categorized units in the memory, and then, further, together with a situational information the units are involved into concepts, situational units of knowledge organization in the memory created ad hoc.

The concepts are the contrails used to reconstruct the world. They are the basic structures of situational knowledge influencing the choice of language means to present some ideas and emotions in speech. They dictate linguistic behavior to some degree as they are the content of the linguistic form.



Psychological Motives

Psychologists insist on the predominant role of at least three motives that rule the behavior of a person and also influence language functioning in speech. The principle of the dominant gives the explanation to the behaviour of living beings [Vygotsky, 1962]. Every definite moment some behaviour act is performed, that is preconditioned by unity and agreement of all the systems of an organism participating. The terminate centre for ruling and agreeing on all the processes is considered to be dominant, which uses the energy of any incoming signal and suppresses any other possible unrequired activities. Further, the role of the dominant goes to other centres to perform functional tasks. The theory was developed and elaborated by A. Ukhtomsky. According to A. Ukhtomsky's physiological theory, there are the dominants which cover the inner state of a person and the influence of the outer surroundings. They are neuropsychological entities that presuppose the behavior of a person. They are viewed as generalities compared to the general gravity principles by universality. The theory gives the possibility to describe many psychological phenomena: memory, attention, cognition, object thinking, and motivation [Cited in: Vygotsky, 1962]. The author Ukhtomsky himself supposed that the same approach can be applicable to other practical spheres to explain the motives of behaviour, speech behaviour in particular. The spheres mentioned are sport psychology, labour psychology, and pedagogical psychology.

Current Study

Modern psychology and psychoanalysis develop the ideas about the three most influential dominants ruling the behaviour of a person as a social unit. These are the dominants formed on the basis of self-defense, hierarchical and breeding instincts.

These are hierarchical principles, which indicate the place of each member of a social community in hierarchical relations. It is the instinct of gender development, which divides members of a social circle into strong and weak representatives, who also demonstrate passive and active roles. It can be reflected in speech via definite types of grammar constructions or synonyms to emotionally neutral types of expressing and organizing speech.

And the instinct of self-defense, which prevents a person from undesired danger and can be expressed in speech in a specific style of communication, is more or less attractive to the members indicating the openness to relations or danger of approaching the person.

It goes without question that all the dominants are included in the process of cognition and elaborating knowledge as a precondition, but in the stage of concept organization some definite dominant/-s can influence speech creation and organization. For this reason, we agree with the definition of speech proposed by Vygotsky: a thought is a cloud that is given by the wind of motivation and is poured down by words [Vygotsky, 1962, p. 332]. The thought itself is not born from another one, but a motivating sphere of consciousness that captures impressions, emotions, interests, determinations, artifacts, and needs. Behind a thought, there is an affective-voluntary tendency, which can answer the question “why". A thought is not equal to a language expression, they rather overlap and coincide as presenting thoughts in speech flow is a complicated process of thought discretion and partially presenting in language means. That is why the units of thinking and speech do not coincide. Polan concluded [Vygotsky, 1962, p. 334] in his research that there is a more independent link between content and a word than between meaning and a word. A word has a dynamic content which is formed of contextual affective and intellectual meanings which narrow the word content in respect of the abstractness which is narrow by itself and limits the meaning due to the context; and widens in the light of enrichment by other words accompanying it in the text. Due to the ability to associatively reason a person in mind enlarges the scope of the content expressed in language means. Moreover, language expressions can trigger a definite scope of information that is associatively fixed behind them. Specifically, it is vivid in literary texts where the word used in the title to the end of the literary work acquires additional meaning and is considered to be the concentration of all textual meaning and the content in general.

Psychological closeness of the interlocutors is realized through common apperception among the speakers and this fact helps to understand the meanings of communication from a hint, for shortening speech. In this case, syntax and its phonetics are reduced to a minimum, simplified and condensed as much as possible, when the subject of judgment is known to the interlocutors in advance and when there is a greater or lesser degree of commonality of apperception among the speakers. The meaning of the word comes to the fore.

The Collective Identity

It is believed that the focus of social studies is on communication and in particular the language functioning in text samples as the products of speech production. It is vastly discussed in scientific papers in the field of sociolinguistics, stylistics, and communication how the choice of language units can signify about the status, age, gender, and profession of the speaker. Thus, by evaluating the language behaviour we identify ourselves and other members of some social circle. Identity is presently the issue and the problem of interdisciplinary studies: discourse analysis, pragmatic stylistics, and other disciplines of social and psychological sciences.

The main emphasis in the discussions of the identity and its manifestation via the language is made in [Suvorova, 2021a, 2021b]. The author indicates three main vectors in studying the connection of identity and language. The self as an isolated, self-contained entity (different psychological and social theories) is one of the vectors. The second one is interpersonal communication and the production of negotiating identities within a personality (discourse practices). The third delimits the connection between language and identity to the relation between social categories and the linguistic phenomena (sociolinguistic studies).

Considering the purpose of the article we would accept the ideas of social constructivism about the attention being brought to the identity as “doing" rather than “being", when a person practices the language to interact with other individuals.

The theory of mental models (or situation models) can be applicable to the analysis of hockey discourse in social media. Information in the discourse is structured about eventualities, and it is encoded in a propositional format “smb is smb/smth; smb/smth acts so/ as if/ for; smb/smth affects smb/smth and so on". The eventualities have the relations Cause-Effect, Inclusion/Exclusion, Evidence-Assertion and others described in the scheme (Pic.1) which are signaled textually and suggested about the hockey world. These relations must be computed in order to make sense of the discourse. The eventualities can involve one or more entities that are psychologically important, or “salient", “psychologically focused". The eventualities mentioned in the process of discourse may involve the same entities via anaphoric or inferential processes. From a broader perspective, the repetitions of the referent entities in communication across larger stretches of discourse happen because the communication concerns the same event in the hockey world. The “in-group" members structure their representations around some common event known to the members of hockey social groups. As an example the situation with the Finals 2023 when in the discourse These are the representations of hockey discourse rather than people-centered representations. More considerations about the length in texts on narrative comprehension in Emmots [Mertens & Ruiter, 2021; Hepburn & Bolden, 2013].

The point is that there is a need to go beyond the situational model theory and consider global levels of discourse structure and discourse comprehension to have a proper understanding of discourse.

Methods of analysis

Participants

Two hundred and thirteen participants' recordings of the experiment 1 (the meaning unpacking test) and seventy one participants' recordings of the experiment 2 (analysis of multimedia texts) were analyzed in this study (78% students and 22% professional representatives (2% teachers, 40% translators, 37% philologists, 20% coaches and sportsmen, 5% sports events followers). The students of the Department of European and Oriental Languages and Translation from Alfred Nobel University participated in free experiments that were designed as a part of the task for their course in stylistics of the main language (English). The experiment was based on the competencies they were supposed to obtain during the course, particularly the skills of lexical, linguistic and textual analysis. The rest of the participants are professionals connected with sport or/and language. Table 1 shows the professional field of the participants. The age of the participants ranged from 20 to 45 years old. The levels of English of the participants are represented in graph 1: advanced - 25%, intermediate - 70,8%, elementary - 3,3%, basic - 1,7%. The samples from Chats 1 and 2 of the followers of the NHL teams in social media were analyzed by a linguist researcher.

Pic. 1. The process of structuring knowledge in discourse

Adherence to ethical standards

The research was conducted in accordance with the requirements of the Research Ethics Committee, which was discussed at the meeting of the Department of European and Oriental Languages and Translation, Alfred Nobel University. The experiment procedure was agreed upon the respondents, which is documented in the body of the questionnaire (“by proceeding to the tasks you agree to participate in the experiment on words and sentences interpretation", Protocol № 1 from 30.08.2021). The experiment was not funded. There is no conflict of interest.

This research was conducted in the frame of the scientific topic “Multicultural Aspects of the Roman and Germanic Philological Discourse and Problems of Translating Foreign Languages and Literature" (state registration number 0119U000132), Alfred Nobel University.

Chart 1. The professional field of the participants

Chart 2.The level of the language competence of the participants

We thank our many research assistants who aided in data collection and coding, with special thanks to D. Valuiska, K. Nebozhenko, D. Tretiakova, D. Topilina, N. Bairamov, N. Dunder, T. Vasiliev, V. Poltavets. We thank D.Gnitko and D.Yakushin for contributions to this project. We thank T. Freeman and four anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Materials

The material is selected from the social media official profiles of the professional teams of hockey players of the NHL. The discourse in social media (Instagram) clearly proves the nonofficial up-to-date discourse as the profiles are open to the public to follow the publications and express the opinion in any style and by being available for the media means. The second source is the book written in a non-official style “Hockey for Dummies" by John Davidson. It contains easy-to-read and interpret information about the essence of hockey for the general public. For the research, only cartoons were taken for the reason that they are supposed to be understandable for the participants of the experiment on sense interpretation.

Procedure

The methods involved in the research of the collective identity in sports and, in particular, in hockey sports include a complex of different techniques in order to ensure that the data gathered are reliable and to assist in developing the discourse analysis field. In the paper, the general methods, the qualitative and quantitative ones, are combined with the descriptive one to meet the purpose of the investigation.

The algorithm of the discourse analysis presupposes several stages.

The first one is the collection of the material for the research. It includes quantitative analysis which is focused on numeric examples of word combinations repeated in hockey discourse. The primary analysis of the gathered data gives the possibility to predict typical wording of some ideas in hockey discourse and choose the patterns of speech being typical ones for conducting surveys.

The second stage is preparing the material for the experiments which intend to prove the idea about the specificity of thinking of the one who is involved in the sports field. To obtain a wider understanding of the specificity of thinking of a person connected with the hockey activity, the experiment is conducted in two stages and with the help of two surveys.

One of the surveys is composed as a questionnaire containing an interrogation and the options of the answers to it. The testing system is to check understanding of the specific phrases popular in the speech of hockey players, coaches and supporters. The purpose of the survey is to check the hypothesis about specific dynamic content of common for the type of discourse phrases. The content of the phrases is clear only to the devoted representatives of the social circle of hockey lovers, professionals, and amateurs.

The second survey is based on the associative reasoning of the respondents. They are supposed to choose the appropriate interpretation of a cartoon devoted to hockey events and situations about hockey activity. The offered variants of interpretation differ in the degree of closeness to the sport and reflect how far the respondents are familiar with it. As far as the cartoons are based on the knowledge of hockey sport presented via some other practical experience it is possible to interpret the plot of the cartoons in some other meaning, direct or indirect.

The method of statistics is employed in the research to support the qualitative interpretation of data and complete the interpretative analysis of the chosen material.

The tools of cognitive modeling are involved to draw all the data about specific sports discourse into the system of connected concepts, the most abstract representations of the hockey world.

The basic method which is applied in the investigation of enclosed self is the method of semantic componential analysis and associative analysis, interpretational analysis. The material taken for the analysis and the experiment is shown in Pic.2.

Pic. 2. The chat from Instagram page of the NHL (2021, June)

The analysis proves that the participants of the communicative situation structure the hockey discourse so that it is clear to the involved members of the social circle of the followers and supporters of the NHL teams. They use the concepts of approval or disapproval by employing symbolic icons/emoticons (“fire" and “goat" ) offered by the software of Instagram or express their emotion directly through the language. Constructing a specific secretly coded discourse is a characteristic of an “in-group" social behaviour to prove the status of a “true member" of the social network. That is how a collective identity can be expressed.

Coding

We start with the description of the data chosen for the analysis, and further with the explanations of how the data was coded to measure communicative efficiency in hockey discourse. The purpose of the planned analysis required that the data for the answers of the participants with the level of English higher than basic would be analyzed for this study in two experiments. Inability to clearly understand the meaning of the material for the interpretation of the test tasks often had a cascading negative effect on performance. The participants either lost attention when the experiment moved on after 10 minutes spent on solving the tasks, or they ignored the time limitation and kept looking for the answers to the tasks, which then threw off the timing of the rest of the trials.

In the second experiment, the participants who had problems with the cartoon pictures were excluded. The problem with the pictures was that the software of Google Forms did not work properly on the side of the participants and they could not see the material.

Results

We tested whether the meaning constructed in hockey discourse is clear enough for the people who are doing hockey or are the followers and supporters of the sports activity (in-members) and those who are far from it (off-members). Experiment 1 examined how the efficiency of meaning unpacking differed in the experiments 1 and 2. The difference in meaning reconstruction from the context between the in-member participants and off-member participants is fixed in the results obtained from the experiment. The fact that some participants had a low level of English was taken into consideration and the results were excluded from statistics.

Overall, there was a negative skew (8% ) in the results (Table 1), with the participants rating themselves as being with low language competence. The scores were non-normally distributed (Shapiro-Wilk= 0.75, p= .06) in Chart 3.

Table 1

Basic descriptive statistics on variables of meaning reconstruction on the basis of inclusiveness into a hockey social group

Variables	in-group participants	off-group participants
Test 1	124 (77,8%)	47 (22,2%)
Success in reconstructing meaning	93,8%	24,6%
Test 2	21(28,6%)	50 (71,4%)
Success in multimedia interpretation	98%	54%

Analysis 1

With analysis 1 we tested whether there is a difference in discourse meaning reconstruction between in-group participants and off-group participants, as well as whether in-groupness had differential effects in experiments 1 and 2. Preliminary analysis indicated a great difference between the answers of the two groups, as it is shown in Table 1. This suggests that in-group members who participated in the experiment reconstructed some other additional information from the context because of the specific meaning conventionally attributed to the language and other means of communication by the hockey social group members.

There was a special form presented to the participants where they were asked to define the meaning of the pointed language structures in the context. The possible answers were given to each question as options to choose from. The percentage of the participants who used the tactics of choosing without proper understanding is 10,8% (23 participants).

Chart 3. Distribution of the results of the test 2

In analysis 1, we found that the language competence and in-groupness influenced the ability to properly reconstruct the discourse meaning in the communicative situation of a particular social circle. The in-group participants with at least intermediate level of the English language competence were far more successful in the discourse interpretation compared to the results of the off-member participants.

We also took into account the fact of choosing the answers without thinking about the meaning as the task was in the form of a questionnaire, that is why there was a temptation for the participants to skip the stage of meaning reconstruction and minimize the efforts. We discovered that the practice found its place during the experiment and it influenced the interpretation. This was expected because the way people generally solve the problematic tasks is characterized by the minimum effort taken by people [Hepburn & Bolden, 2013; Guydish et al., 2020; Goldinger, 1996; Donders, 1969; Clark & Schaefer, 1987].

Analysis 2

With analysis 2, we tested the ability to construct the meaning of hockey discourse when the participants have a wider context as the meaning is constructed via multimodal means (graphic and language). The highest result of the similar interpretations of one cartoon was 71,4% with the distribution of the percent 71,4/14,3/ 7,6/ 1,4/ 1,4/ 1,4/ 1,4, the rest of the results vary as in Charts 3 and 4 38,6/ 31,4/ 8,6/ 7,1/ 7,1/ 4,3/ 1,4/ 1,4.

Chart 3. The results of the test 2 (column 8)

Chart 3. The results of the test 2 (column 5)

We used Google Forms to present the tasks of the experiment and Google Tables to collect the data and reflect the statistical analysis of the results.There was an option in the experiment to give a personal interpretation of the materials. The average percentage of the participants who used the option was 1,4-3,7. There was also an option to agree/ disagree to all offered interpretations and from 1,4-2,5% of the participants made the choice.

In analysis 2, we found that there is no direct effect of being previously acquainted with the context of the discourse on performance. We found direct relationships between in-group members and reconstruction of the meaning in discourse. The awareness of the peculiarities of hockey activities moderated the influence of the graphic support of the linguistic means to reconstruct the meaning of the cartoons chosen for the analysis.

For example, one of the jokes given as the illustration of the world of hockey for those who know nothing about is quite obvious and clear in respect of meaning for the in-group members and is a rather ambiguous one for the off-members of the hockey discourse. It sounds “of course the drinks taste funny - the ice is from last year's Stanley Cup playoff and is supported by a sketch with two men sitting before the television where hockey is on and one of the men looking bewildered and holding a glass in his hand (pic.4) . For the in-group members the play-off series of matches have enormous value so that they are ready to take pieces of ice from an ice-rink of the matches and keep them as precious souvenirs.

The interpretation of the joke that demands enough knowledge of the hockey world in the high league NHL was absolutely a failure for the off-members of the hockey discourse. It sounds as follows: “Shoot! I thought that thing would finally keep the Red Wings out of the alfalfa!" and is provided with a sketch where a man is looking out of the window before which he can see a courtyard with grass in the middle of which there is a scarecrow dressed as a hockey goaltender and four men dressed as hockey players napping near it (pic.3). To interpret the joke a person needs to know that RedWings is a successful NHL team and that a goaltender is always highly protected and supported by field players, especially defenders.

The off-members of hockey discourse had low performance in the experiment. The experiment showed that the participants could not interpret the jokes deeply or precisely enough.

Though we found that an interaction between the in-members and off-members accounted for some involvement in the hockey discourse, those who had some interest in sports activity in general. Once the participants believed they had established a conceptual picture of the cartoons, they chose to give their straightforward interpretation of the situational meaning presented by graphic and linguistic means. We predicted that the experiment 2 performance would be related to the meanings previously found in the experiment 1% less confusing and more straightforward performance in the experiment 1, the fewer number of the off-group participants, the more ingroup members would need to be involved in the performance of the experiment 2.

Analysis 3

The theory of discourse analysis by Teun A. van Dijk emphasizes the importance of the three-stage analysis: social, cognitive and discourse analysis [Guydish et al., 2020].

The cognitive analysis could give the categorial basis for the structure of the discourse. It involves the interpretative method and allows a deeper understanding of the communicative roles, status and purposes of the participants. According to Teun A. van Dijk [Truong & Trou- vain, 2012], social cognition is the mediator between society and discourse. It is defined by the scholar as a system of mental representations and processes in the cognition of a certain group.

We had a hypothesis that the in-group individuals of hockey discourse have specific models of communicative behaviour while practicing hockey discourse. The models control social practices of the participants.

The material taken from the social media Instagram was to prove the suppositions mentioned in the research. The cognitive models were reconstructed to create a cognitive structure of the discourse at the macro-structural level (Pic. 4).

In analysis 3, we found evidence of social positioning of the actors of hockey discourse as “true" members of the social circle of the players, coaches, followers, and supporters of hockey activity. The specific communicative structures are involved in the construction of the meaning of hockey discourse. They have the purpose of demonstrating the status of specialness and uniqueness of the social group compared to other social groups. Thus we can speak about hockey collective identity that can include the characteristics of social, mental, and linguistic behaviour to prove belonging to hockey social group. That helps the individuals to be taken as “true" members and to be trusted.

Pic. 4. The cognitive model of hockey collective identity drawn from hockey discourse

Conclusions

With the flow of time and decades of research using laboratory-based referential communication tasks and questionnaire tasks, interpersonal communication, we show that the narrowing of the discourse meaning within the communication between the ingroup members of hockey social circle is conventional and serves specific purposes of communication.

Taking the level of English level competence, the fact of being involved in sports activities or being a supporter of a hockey team into account, there was a noticeable difference in the discourse interpretation between in-group members and off-group members. The level of language competence and the situation of being involved in hockey activity together did affect how quickly and deeply the participants could reconstruct the meaning of the communicative units from the discourse. Among the participants who were not into sports, there were two different strategies of the meaning reconstruction. The first one was just a random choice from the options offered, in other words, it was the simplest way, without effort. The second one was based on general knowledge of the lexical meaning of the words used in the communication, but it did not succeed in most of the situations.

The second experiment was conducted with the participant with an intermediate level of the English language and higher, with both in-members and off-members. The material of the cartoons chosen for the experiment was based on the situations from hockey sports life. In-member participants spent less time on the reconstruction of the meaning of the discourse and received satisfaction from the interpretations. They laughed at the jokes devoted to hockey life. Some of the participants offered their own interpretation of the communicative situations and also were satisfied with having the possibility to share their own observations and understanding of the jokes' meaning. The off-group participants felt indecisive with understanding the meaning of the communicative situation and preferred to choose one of the offered options of the situation's interpretations. The quantity of wrong- direction interpretations was high. This proved the specificity of the hockey discourse and the meanings involved.

The third analysis was conducted by a group of linguists in order to characterize the hockey collective identity. The attention here was drawn to the hockey discourse organized in the social media between the professional teams representatives and the supporters and followers of the teams' accounts on Instagram. As far as two previous stages of the study on the hockey discourse proved the specificity of the discourse meaning structured by the in-member participants of communication, the focus was specifically drawn to the characteristics and purposes of the collective hockey identity.

The hypothesis was that we can speak of the collective hockey identity as a typical representative of the hockey community with a specific linguistic behaviour. The last is based on a certain number of language and speech units which are involved into the hockey discourse to represent definite meaning, different from the lexical one fixed in the dictionaries and clear only to the “true" members of the community. One more point, discovered during the analysis of the discourse on Instagram is that the participants of the discourse use different means of communication, language, graphics or GIFs, to construct synonymic meanings but in various ways. These are all about personal style in the discourse in combination with collective trend in communicative behaviour to prove the status of a “true" member. It was noticed that women mostly use more wording during communication combined with graphic means of thought transmission, while men tend to use more graphic means and some wording.

Differences in hockey-oriented conversation between in-group members and off- group members are proved as we assumed in the hypothesis. We provide some evidence that in-group members' and off-group members' reconstruction of the meaning in communication can differ in conversations that are focused on a specific collaborative goal, though their verbal behavior is moderated by the employment of clear general vocabulary.

Though the methods of the study introduce literal and statistical noise, putting people into more naturalistic contexts and examining discourse between interlocutors who have various levels of the English language competence can reveal differences that are hidden or discouraged in the laboratory.



References

1. Albright, L., Cohen, A.I., Malloy, T.E., Christ, T., & Bromgard, G. (2004). Judgments of communicative intent in conversation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40 (3), 290-302. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/jjesp.2003.06.004

2. Arons, B. (1992). A review of the cocktail party effect. Journal of the American Voice I/O Society, 12 (7), 35-50.

3. Clark, H.H., Schaefer, E.F. (1987). Collaborating on contributions to conversations. Language and Cognitive Processes, 1 (2), 19-41.

4. Davidson, J. (2014). Hockey For Dummies. Foster City: IDG Books Worldwide.

5. Donders, F.F. (1969). On the speed of mental processes. Acta Psychologica, 30, 412-431. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-6918(69)90065-1

6. Goldinger, S.D. (1996). Auditory Lexical Decision. Language and Cognitive Processes, 6 (11), 559-568. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/016909696386944

7. Grice, H.P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics. Volume 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41-58). New York: Academic Press.

8. Guydish, A., D'Arcey, J.T., Fox Tree, J.E. (2020). Reciprocity in conversation. Language and Speech, Advance online publication, 64 (4), 859-872. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1177/0023830920972742

9. Hepburn, A., Bolden, G.B. (2013). The conversation analytic approach to transcription. J. Sidnell, T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis (pp. 57-76). Hoboken (NJ): Wi- ley-Blackwell. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118325001.ch4

10. Hoey, E.M. (2015). Lapses: How people arrive at, and deal with, discontinuities in talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 4 (48), 430-453. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/083 51813.2015.1090116

11. Horton, W.S., Spieler, D.H. (2007). Age-related differences in communication and audience design. Psychology and Aging, 22 (2), 281-290. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/0882- 7974.22.2.281

12. Kuperberg, G.R., Jaeder, T.F. (2016). What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension? Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1(31), 32-59. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/23 273798.2015.1102299

13. Liu, K., D'Arcey, J.T., Walker, M., Fox Tree, J.E. (2021). Referential Communication Between Friends and Strangers in the Wild. Dialogue & Discourse, 12 (1), 45-72. DOI: https://doi. org/10.5210/dad.2021.103

14. Liu, K., Fox Tree, J.E., Walker, L. (2016). Coordinating communication in the wild: The Ar- twalk dialogue corpus of pedestrian navigation and mobile referential communication. N. Galzo- lari, Kh. Choukri, Th. Declerc, S. Goggi, M. Grobelnik (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 3159-3166). Portoroz: European Language Resources Association.

15. Mertens, J., Ruiter, J.P. (2021). Cognitive and Social delays in the initiation of conversational repair. Dialogue & Discourse, 12 (1), 21-44. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5210/dad.2021.102

16. NHL. (2021). NHL Instagram. Retrieved from https://instagram.com/nhPutm_ medium=copy_link

17. Peeters, M.A., Van Tuijl, H.F., Rutte, C.G., Reymen, I.M. (2006). Personality and team performance: a metaanalysis. European Journal of Personality, 20 (5), 377-396. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1002/per.588

18. Pennebaker, J.W., King, L.A. Linguistic styles: Language use as an individual difference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77 (6), 1296-1312. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022- 3514.77.6.1296

19. Planalp, S., Benson, A. (1992). Friends' and acquaintances' conversations I: Perceived differences. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 9 (4), 483-506. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1177/0265407592094002

20. Savitsky, K., Keysar, B., Eplay, N., Carter, T., Swanson, A. The closeness-communication bias: Increased egocentrism among friends versus strangers. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47 (1), 269-273. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jesp.2010.09.005

21. Schober, M.F., Clark, H.H. (1989). Understanding by addressees and overhearers. Cognitive Psychology, 21 (2), 211-232.

22. Smoski, M., Bachoroski, J.-A. (2003). Antiphonal laughter between friends and strangers. Cognition and Emotion,17(2),327-340. DOI:https://doi.

23. org/10.1080/02699930302296

24. Suvorova, T. (2021a). The Hockey Collective Identity. E. Pluzhnik (Ed.), Science, Theory and Practice. Abstracts of XXX International Scientific and Practical Conference (pp. 418-419). Tokyo: International Science Group. DOI: https://doi.org/10.46299/ ISG.2021.I.XXIX

25. Suvorova, T. (2021b). The Peculiarities of the Hockey Collective Identity. E. Pluzhnik (Ed.), Science, theory and practice. Abstracts of XXIX International Scientific and Practical Conference (pp. 457-460). DOI: https://doi.org/10.46299/ISG.2021.I.XXIX

26. Truong, K.P., Trouvain, J. (2012). Laughter annotations in conversational speech cor- pora-possibilities and limitations for phonetic analysis. L. Devillers, B. Schuller, A. Batliner, P. Rosso (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Corpora for Research on Emotion Sentiment and Social Signals (pp. 20-24). Paris: European Language Resources Association

27. Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and Language. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press.

Размещено на Allbest.ru

...