Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2009-12-06 01:24 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2009-12-06 01:24 pm
Entry tags:
Eddie Izzard Does Not Appreciate Your Threat To His Negative Face.
Right! I have a rather nasty exam for Communication Analysis on Tuesday. It is one hundred per cent of the mark for the module, and I find myself forced to teach myself more or less everything, because the tutor, although I am sure she is lovely as a person, has generally failed to impart any actual knowledge. I have actually been staying in bed until ten for the past couple of days (it's late for me) because I can't face getting up and confronting all that revision.
So I don't like revising. On the other hand, I like updating my Livejournal, and typing out and rephrasing the things I've learnt will probably help me get them clear in my head.
Conversation Analysis
(not Communication Analysis, but one of several approaches to it)
- aims to describe the structure of conversation in everyday life.
- interested in how members of society produce a sense of social order.
- attempts to identify general principles of interaction from specific patterns.
- studies naturally-occurring talk.
- interested in what is actually said; context is not considered essential in the way in which it is by, for example, the Ethnography of Communication approach.
Heritage's principles of conversation analysis:
i) interaction is structurally organised
ii) contributions to interaction are contextually oriented
iii) no aspect of conversation may be dismissed without consideration as accidental or irrelevant.
An important part of Communication Analysis theory is Grice's Cooperative Principle, a series of maxims that speakers use to determine what they may say in a given situation and how to interpret the utterances of other speakers. They are based on Grice's observation that 'talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did'; they are 'cooperative efforts' at least to some degree, with a 'mutually accepted direction'. One cannot simply say anything at any time; some 'moves' will be unsuitable at any given point in a conversation. The Cooperative Principle is the principle by which participants in a conversation ensure that the exchange remains cooperative and rational: essentially, 'make your contribution what is required at the stage at which it occurs'.
Grice divides the Cooperative Principle into four categories: Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner.
Quantity:
relates, unsurprisingly, to the quantity of information to be provided. Consists of the following maxims:
1. Make your contribution as informative as is required.
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
(Grice comments that the second is disputable: is providing more information than necessary truly a transgression of the Cooperative Principle or simply a waste of time? Is it necessary to have this maxim of quantity given that it may be later covered by the category of relation?)
Quality:
Supermaxim: 'Try to make your contribution one that is true.'
More specific maxims:
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Relation:
Be relevant.
Manner:
Supermaxim: 'Be perspicuous' (express yourself clearly)
More specific maxims:
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief.
4. Be orderly.
(Grice comments that his construction of the Cooperative Principle is limited somewhat by its assumption that the primary purpose of conversation is an efficient exchange of information, which of course is frequently not the case.)
Most speakers generally operate under the assumption that those to whom they are speaking will adhere to these principles, perhaps in part because they reflect ways in which people can be expected to behave in non-conversational transactions. If Dean tells Sam he needs four silver bullets to get rid of all the shapeshifters, he does not expect Sam to hand him two silver bullets (quantity), four rubber bullets as a hilarious joke (quality) or a copy of A Midsummer Night's Dream (relevance), and he expects Sam to get the bullets to him in a timely fashion, before the shapeshifters kill them (manner). People follow the Cooperative Principle because abandoning it would make achieving conversational goals much more difficult for both parties.
Here are the ways in which one may fail to fulfil a maxim:
1. violation - quiet, unostentatious, may mislead
2. opting out - making it plain that one is not following the maxim (opting out of the maxim of quantity, for example: 'Where's Ruby?' 'Around, but I'm not telling you more than that.')
3. clash - fulfilling one maxim may entail failing to fulfil another. For example:
Dean: So where's this vampires' nest?
Sam: Uh, somewhere in Washington?
Dean: Real helpful, Sammy, thanks.
Sam violates the maxim of quantity by not being as specific as is required; Dean needs a more exact location of the nest. However, he does this because two maxims have clashed: as Sam does not know exactly where the nest is, he cannot fulfil the first maxim of quantity ('be as informative as required') without violating the second maxim of quality ('do not say that for which you have insufficient evidence'). His failure to fulfil the maxim of quantity is unhelpful, but a violation of the maxim of quality would be misleading, which is more harshly judged, so he chooses to violate the maxim of quantity as the lesser of two evils. (Another option to him would be 'opting out' of the maxim of quality by explaining that he has insufficient evidence for what he says: 'I'm not totally sure, but I have a feeling it might be Forks.')
4. flouting - blatantly failing to fulfil a maxim. As it is blatant, the speaker cannot be assumed to be trying to mislead; if there is no apparent clash, the speaker is not opting out and the hearer has no reason to believe that the speaker would not generally follow the Cooperative Principle, how does the hearer explain the failure to fulfil the maxim? This is where implicature often arises.
Here is an example of implicature arising from apparent (but not actual, note) flouting of the maxim of relevance.
Sam: Hey, Bobby. Where's Dean?
Bobby: You see the unicorn over there?
Bobby's answer appears on the surface not to relate to Sam's enquiry; he has apparently flouted the maxim 'Be relevant', but Sam has no reason to believe that Bobby would not observe the Cooperative Principle, and so he will interpret Bobby's utterance through the assumption that he is in fact following the maxim of Relation. Bobby's utterance can be taken as a relevant response to Sam's if he is assumed to believe that the unicorn is Dean ('where's Dean?' 'over there; he's the unicorn'), so Bobby implicates that the unicorn is Dean. There is an implicature because:
1. Bobby generally observes the Cooperative Principle and Sam has no reason to think he is not doing so on this occasion, and
2. if Bobby is to be observing the Cooperative Principle on this occasion, he must believe that Dean is the unicorn, and
3. Bobby believes that Sam is capable of working out that Bobby's response is in fact relevant because Bobby believes Dean to be the unicorn.
Essentially, there is an implicature because you know the following:
1. The speaker is probably observing the CP.
2. The speaker can only be observing the CP if he knows/believes [something].
3. The speaker knows you know he knows.
An example that may arise in the real world (and which Grice uses):
A: Smith doesn't seem to have a girlfriend these days.
B: He has been paying a lot of visits to New York lately.
Exploitation is the procedure by which a maxim is flouted for the purpose of creating implicature. For example, let us say that A has recently taken up photography:
A: What do you think of my picture?
B: Oh, uh, it's beautifully framed.
This is a flouting of the first maxim of quantity (EDIT: or is it? Possibly a poor example). By failing to comment on the picture itself, B implicates that he is unimpressed by it.
The first maxim of quality may be flouted to create the effect of irony; for example:
Dean: Yeah, Hell was awesome.
Sam knows that Hell was unlikely to be awesome, so it is clear that Dean has said something that he does not believe, and it is clear that Dean does not expect Sam to believe it, so in saying that Hell was awesome Dean must be attempting to convey some other proposition, an obviously related one. The contradictory is the most obviously related. In saying Yeah, Hell was awesome, Dean is implicating that in fact Hell was really really not awesome.
(Oh, my goodness, the Cooperative Principle is only one part of Conversation Analysis which is only one part of the course ahdjadhfjadgjfdgh. LET'S MOVE ON. (If there isn't an essay question on the Cooperative Principle, I may weep.))
ALSO SCHOLARS OF CONVERSATION ANALYSIS: Schegloff, Sacks and Jefferson. Their work includes analysis of turn-taking, which, according to conversation analysis, consists of the turn constructional component and the turn allocational component.
The turn constructional component is, astonishingly enough, concerned with the construction of turns. Turns are composed of 'turn-constructional units', which we have had defined for us as a 'minimal unit of conversation, including "huh?"', although I'm not clear on exactly how to define the boundaries of a turn-constructional unit (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sparklenight?). Each turn consists of at least one move, one speech act, so a turn has both content and function; 'mm hmm?' does not count.
The turn allocational component is concerned with the way in which turns are allocated in a conversation. A Transition Relevance Place or TRP is the recognisable end of a turn, where one of the following may occur:
- the current speaker selects the next speaker, in which case that person must speak next, or
- the next speaker self-selects, or
- if neither of the above occurs, the current speaker may continue.
Selection of the next speaker may be done using explicit markers (questions or requests, for example: 'kind of creepy, don't you think, Dean?') or implicit markers: the speaker may indicate who should speak next using body language (a glance, a gesture). Speaker change recurs, which is a quote we've had thrown at us many a time without clarification: I assume it means there may be many changes of speaker within a conversation (or must be? otherwise it would presumably be a monologue). Interruption, which I suppose could be defined as seizing a turn outside a Transition Relevance Place, is a violation of turn-taking rules, but interruptions need not necessarily be unsupportive (in Tannen's analysis of New York Jewish conversation, she shows that supportive interruption is a common feature of New York Jewish speech, but speakers from other backgrounds were made uncomfortable by the violation of the turn-taking rules with which they were familiar despite the fact that the interruptions were supportive).
'Latching' is when speaker change occurs and a new turn begins without any discernable pause between the turns.
Schegloff, Sacks and Jefferson also identified four different types of repair work (repair: correcting slips of the tongue, factual errors et cetera in the process of conversation):
self-repair, self-initiated: the speaker catches and repairs his own error. Taking the example from Supernatural that one must decapitate a vampire in order to kill it:
Sam: So we shoot the vampires - no, we cut their heads off, sorry...
self-repair, other-initiated: another participant draws the speaker's attention to his error and allows him to correct it:
Sam: So we shoot the vampires -
Dean: We shoot the vampires?
Sam: We cut their heads off, sorry.
other-repair, self-initiated: the speaker notes the error and invites another to correct it:
Sam: So we shoot the vampires - is that right?
Dean: We cut their heads off.
other-repair, other-initiated: another participant both notices the error and corrects it:
Sam: So we shoot the vampires -
Dean: We cut their heads off.
Sam: Right, we cut their heads off.
(Gaskill uses the following example:
S: Single beds are awfully thin to sleep on.
H: What? (other-initiation, giving S the opportunity to repair herself)
S: Single beds. They're -
H: You mean narrow? (other-repair)
S: They're awfully narrow, yeah.)
Other-initiated other-repair is fairly uncommon in conversations between equals, perhaps because it can be seen as rude: by drawing attention to the speaker's error and not allowing the speaker to correct it him- or herself, the corrector damages the speaker's positive face (note that you are mixing conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics with this speculation. face: Goffman, politeness theory (positive/negative face): Brown and Levinson).
Okay, so that's the Cooperative Principle (Grice), turn-taking (Schegloff, Sacks and Jefferson) and repair (also SSJ), although they're certainly not a complete overview.
Other Conversation Analysis topics to revise: closings (Schegloff and Sacks), preference (Pomerantz), adjacency pairs (?), topic (?), CA + pragmatics (???).
Other approaches to revise (if anyone's actually read this far, you can ask me about anything that looks interesting, thus forcing me to revise that topic):
- Variation Analysis: social variation v. textual variation.
- Ethnography of Communication: Sapir and Whorf (linguistic determinism/relativism), Firth (what did he do? oh, dear), Malinowski (phatic communion), Hymes (communicative competence (extension of Chomsky's linguistic competence and linguistic performance), emic SPEAKING grid)
- Is speech act theory (Austin and Searle) a part of the ethnography of communication? OH, I DON'T KNOW. (locutionary/illocutionary/perlocutionary force) (might actually fall under pragmatics)
- Interactional Sociolinguistics: Gumperz (code-switching), Goffman (face, footing, frame), Brown and Levinson (politeness theory)
- Critical Discourse Analysis: I don't know. Van Dijk? Auuuuuuuuugh.
I cannot express how little I am looking forward to this exam. It seems as if communication analysis deals with potentially interesting stuff, but it simply hasn't been made clear enough. I have attended every lecture and almost every seminar, but I feel I could have skipped them all and still found myself beginning my revision from the same point. Doubleplusungood!
So I don't like revising. On the other hand, I like updating my Livejournal, and typing out and rephrasing the things I've learnt will probably help me get them clear in my head.
(not Communication Analysis, but one of several approaches to it)
- aims to describe the structure of conversation in everyday life.
- interested in how members of society produce a sense of social order.
- attempts to identify general principles of interaction from specific patterns.
- studies naturally-occurring talk.
- interested in what is actually said; context is not considered essential in the way in which it is by, for example, the Ethnography of Communication approach.
Heritage's principles of conversation analysis:
i) interaction is structurally organised
ii) contributions to interaction are contextually oriented
iii) no aspect of conversation may be dismissed without consideration as accidental or irrelevant.
An important part of Communication Analysis theory is Grice's Cooperative Principle, a series of maxims that speakers use to determine what they may say in a given situation and how to interpret the utterances of other speakers. They are based on Grice's observation that 'talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did'; they are 'cooperative efforts' at least to some degree, with a 'mutually accepted direction'. One cannot simply say anything at any time; some 'moves' will be unsuitable at any given point in a conversation. The Cooperative Principle is the principle by which participants in a conversation ensure that the exchange remains cooperative and rational: essentially, 'make your contribution what is required at the stage at which it occurs'.
Grice divides the Cooperative Principle into four categories: Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner.
Quantity:
relates, unsurprisingly, to the quantity of information to be provided. Consists of the following maxims:
1. Make your contribution as informative as is required.
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
(Grice comments that the second is disputable: is providing more information than necessary truly a transgression of the Cooperative Principle or simply a waste of time? Is it necessary to have this maxim of quantity given that it may be later covered by the category of relation?)
Quality:
Supermaxim: 'Try to make your contribution one that is true.'
More specific maxims:
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Relation:
Be relevant.
Manner:
Supermaxim: 'Be perspicuous' (express yourself clearly)
More specific maxims:
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief.
4. Be orderly.
(Grice comments that his construction of the Cooperative Principle is limited somewhat by its assumption that the primary purpose of conversation is an efficient exchange of information, which of course is frequently not the case.)
Most speakers generally operate under the assumption that those to whom they are speaking will adhere to these principles, perhaps in part because they reflect ways in which people can be expected to behave in non-conversational transactions. If Dean tells Sam he needs four silver bullets to get rid of all the shapeshifters, he does not expect Sam to hand him two silver bullets (quantity), four rubber bullets as a hilarious joke (quality) or a copy of A Midsummer Night's Dream (relevance), and he expects Sam to get the bullets to him in a timely fashion, before the shapeshifters kill them (manner). People follow the Cooperative Principle because abandoning it would make achieving conversational goals much more difficult for both parties.
Here are the ways in which one may fail to fulfil a maxim:
1. violation - quiet, unostentatious, may mislead
2. opting out - making it plain that one is not following the maxim (opting out of the maxim of quantity, for example: 'Where's Ruby?' 'Around, but I'm not telling you more than that.')
3. clash - fulfilling one maxim may entail failing to fulfil another. For example:
Dean: So where's this vampires' nest?
Sam: Uh, somewhere in Washington?
Dean: Real helpful, Sammy, thanks.
Sam violates the maxim of quantity by not being as specific as is required; Dean needs a more exact location of the nest. However, he does this because two maxims have clashed: as Sam does not know exactly where the nest is, he cannot fulfil the first maxim of quantity ('be as informative as required') without violating the second maxim of quality ('do not say that for which you have insufficient evidence'). His failure to fulfil the maxim of quantity is unhelpful, but a violation of the maxim of quality would be misleading, which is more harshly judged, so he chooses to violate the maxim of quantity as the lesser of two evils. (Another option to him would be 'opting out' of the maxim of quality by explaining that he has insufficient evidence for what he says: 'I'm not totally sure, but I have a feeling it might be Forks.')
4. flouting - blatantly failing to fulfil a maxim. As it is blatant, the speaker cannot be assumed to be trying to mislead; if there is no apparent clash, the speaker is not opting out and the hearer has no reason to believe that the speaker would not generally follow the Cooperative Principle, how does the hearer explain the failure to fulfil the maxim? This is where implicature often arises.
Here is an example of implicature arising from apparent (but not actual, note) flouting of the maxim of relevance.
Sam: Hey, Bobby. Where's Dean?
Bobby: You see the unicorn over there?
Bobby's answer appears on the surface not to relate to Sam's enquiry; he has apparently flouted the maxim 'Be relevant', but Sam has no reason to believe that Bobby would not observe the Cooperative Principle, and so he will interpret Bobby's utterance through the assumption that he is in fact following the maxim of Relation. Bobby's utterance can be taken as a relevant response to Sam's if he is assumed to believe that the unicorn is Dean ('where's Dean?' 'over there; he's the unicorn'), so Bobby implicates that the unicorn is Dean. There is an implicature because:
1. Bobby generally observes the Cooperative Principle and Sam has no reason to think he is not doing so on this occasion, and
2. if Bobby is to be observing the Cooperative Principle on this occasion, he must believe that Dean is the unicorn, and
3. Bobby believes that Sam is capable of working out that Bobby's response is in fact relevant because Bobby believes Dean to be the unicorn.
Essentially, there is an implicature because you know the following:
1. The speaker is probably observing the CP.
2. The speaker can only be observing the CP if he knows/believes [something].
3. The speaker knows you know he knows.
An example that may arise in the real world (and which Grice uses):
A: Smith doesn't seem to have a girlfriend these days.
B: He has been paying a lot of visits to New York lately.
Exploitation is the procedure by which a maxim is flouted for the purpose of creating implicature. For example, let us say that A has recently taken up photography:
A: What do you think of my picture?
B: Oh, uh, it's beautifully framed.
This is a flouting of the first maxim of quantity (EDIT: or is it? Possibly a poor example). By failing to comment on the picture itself, B implicates that he is unimpressed by it.
The first maxim of quality may be flouted to create the effect of irony; for example:
Dean: Yeah, Hell was awesome.
Sam knows that Hell was unlikely to be awesome, so it is clear that Dean has said something that he does not believe, and it is clear that Dean does not expect Sam to believe it, so in saying that Hell was awesome Dean must be attempting to convey some other proposition, an obviously related one. The contradictory is the most obviously related. In saying Yeah, Hell was awesome, Dean is implicating that in fact Hell was really really not awesome.
(Oh, my goodness, the Cooperative Principle is only one part of Conversation Analysis which is only one part of the course ahdjadhfjadgjfdgh. LET'S MOVE ON. (If there isn't an essay question on the Cooperative Principle, I may weep.))
ALSO SCHOLARS OF CONVERSATION ANALYSIS: Schegloff, Sacks and Jefferson. Their work includes analysis of turn-taking, which, according to conversation analysis, consists of the turn constructional component and the turn allocational component.
The turn constructional component is, astonishingly enough, concerned with the construction of turns. Turns are composed of 'turn-constructional units', which we have had defined for us as a 'minimal unit of conversation, including "huh?"', although I'm not clear on exactly how to define the boundaries of a turn-constructional unit (
sparklenight?). Each turn consists of at least one move, one speech act, so a turn has both content and function; 'mm hmm?' does not count.The turn allocational component is concerned with the way in which turns are allocated in a conversation. A Transition Relevance Place or TRP is the recognisable end of a turn, where one of the following may occur:
- the current speaker selects the next speaker, in which case that person must speak next, or
- the next speaker self-selects, or
- if neither of the above occurs, the current speaker may continue.
Selection of the next speaker may be done using explicit markers (questions or requests, for example: 'kind of creepy, don't you think, Dean?') or implicit markers: the speaker may indicate who should speak next using body language (a glance, a gesture). Speaker change recurs, which is a quote we've had thrown at us many a time without clarification: I assume it means there may be many changes of speaker within a conversation (or must be? otherwise it would presumably be a monologue). Interruption, which I suppose could be defined as seizing a turn outside a Transition Relevance Place, is a violation of turn-taking rules, but interruptions need not necessarily be unsupportive (in Tannen's analysis of New York Jewish conversation, she shows that supportive interruption is a common feature of New York Jewish speech, but speakers from other backgrounds were made uncomfortable by the violation of the turn-taking rules with which they were familiar despite the fact that the interruptions were supportive).
'Latching' is when speaker change occurs and a new turn begins without any discernable pause between the turns.
Schegloff, Sacks and Jefferson also identified four different types of repair work (repair: correcting slips of the tongue, factual errors et cetera in the process of conversation):
self-repair, self-initiated: the speaker catches and repairs his own error. Taking the example from Supernatural that one must decapitate a vampire in order to kill it:
Sam: So we shoot the vampires - no, we cut their heads off, sorry...
self-repair, other-initiated: another participant draws the speaker's attention to his error and allows him to correct it:
Sam: So we shoot the vampires -
Dean: We shoot the vampires?
Sam: We cut their heads off, sorry.
other-repair, self-initiated: the speaker notes the error and invites another to correct it:
Sam: So we shoot the vampires - is that right?
Dean: We cut their heads off.
other-repair, other-initiated: another participant both notices the error and corrects it:
Sam: So we shoot the vampires -
Dean: We cut their heads off.
Sam: Right, we cut their heads off.
(Gaskill uses the following example:
S: Single beds are awfully thin to sleep on.
H: What? (other-initiation, giving S the opportunity to repair herself)
S: Single beds. They're -
H: You mean narrow? (other-repair)
S: They're awfully narrow, yeah.)
Other-initiated other-repair is fairly uncommon in conversations between equals, perhaps because it can be seen as rude: by drawing attention to the speaker's error and not allowing the speaker to correct it him- or herself, the corrector damages the speaker's positive face (note that you are mixing conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics with this speculation. face: Goffman, politeness theory (positive/negative face): Brown and Levinson).
Okay, so that's the Cooperative Principle (Grice), turn-taking (Schegloff, Sacks and Jefferson) and repair (also SSJ), although they're certainly not a complete overview.
Other Conversation Analysis topics to revise: closings (Schegloff and Sacks), preference (Pomerantz), adjacency pairs (?), topic (?), CA + pragmatics (???).
Other approaches to revise (if anyone's actually read this far, you can ask me about anything that looks interesting, thus forcing me to revise that topic):
- Variation Analysis: social variation v. textual variation.
- Ethnography of Communication: Sapir and Whorf (linguistic determinism/relativism), Firth (what did he do? oh, dear), Malinowski (phatic communion), Hymes (communicative competence (extension of Chomsky's linguistic competence and linguistic performance), emic SPEAKING grid)
- Is speech act theory (Austin and Searle) a part of the ethnography of communication? OH, I DON'T KNOW. (locutionary/illocutionary/perlocutionary force) (might actually fall under pragmatics)
- Interactional Sociolinguistics: Gumperz (code-switching), Goffman (face, footing, frame), Brown and Levinson (politeness theory)
- Critical Discourse Analysis: I don't know. Van Dijk? Auuuuuuuuugh.
I cannot express how little I am looking forward to this exam. It seems as if communication analysis deals with potentially interesting stuff, but it simply hasn't been made clear enough. I have attended every lecture and almost every seminar, but I feel I could have skipped them all and still found myself beginning my revision from the same point. Doubleplusungood!