THEORY 5: Communication Accommodation

Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) is focusing on the role of conversation between people in their everyday lives.  People might change their way of speaking automatically in order to make adjustments or accommodate with the language being use under some situation. Howard Giles (1973) introduced two strategic forms of communication that diverse people use when they interact- convergence and divergence. (Griffin, 2012).

Speakers were said to converge sociolinguistically when they reduce the actual or apparent phonological differences between their respective speech styles. (Coupland, 1991).

From the video above, it shows how Inspector Clouseau is trying to change his American English to English with French accent. The reason he change his accent is because he want to adjust his speech style so that he can reduce the social differences between him and the French while he is doing an investigation in France. This is known as covergence strategies.

Giles (1973) stated that ‘when two people from different ethnic or cultural groups interact, they tend to accommodate each other in the way they speak in order to gain the other’s approval. (Griffin, 2012)

On the other hand, divergence is a strategy of identification with linguistic communicative norms of some reference group external to the immediate situation. ( Giles, H., Coupland, N., & Coupland, J., 1991). To the extent that divergent strategies are probably adopted more often in dyayds where the participants derive from different social backgrounds, the incorporations of idea from Tajfel’s theory of intergroup relations and social change (Tajfel,1978; Tajfel & Turner, 1979) provides an appropriate context in which to consider divergent shifts more generally (Giles, Bourhis & Taylor, 1977).

This is an example of divergence strategies where Lee-Young Jae, a popular actor try to avoid a conversation with a girl that he just met on the plane during his flight to China. Thus he diverge from the girl because he knows that they have different backgrounds. Therefore he decided not to answer every single questions from the girl and he rather sleep.

REFERENCES      

Couplan, N. (2010). Society and Language Use.  (p. 21) John Benjamins Publishing Companies

Learning English pronunciation retrievd from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq8IqZXy1s8

Full House Drama Episode 1. Retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6H64UXe_yc

Griffin, Em. (2012). A First Look at Communication Theory. (8th ed.) New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Giles, H., Coupland, N., & Coupland, J.(1991). Accommodation Theory: Communication, Context and Consequence. Journal of Context of Accommodation: Development in Applied Sociolinguistics, p.27