Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

However, recently specialists in a variety of areas of linguistics, including phonetics, pragmatics and language disorders, have been looking in detail at the way talk is managed (or mismanaged).

The prototypical, and in some sense simplest, kinds of interchange are paired utterances, such as pairs consisting of question–answer or offer–acceptance, but including more or less formulaic pairs such as greeting–greeting. Such pairs are called adjacency pairs. The key fact about such pairs is that the first utterance virtually demands a response. In other kinds of talk, however, it may not always be so obvious who should talk and for how long. To manage the progress of talk we need to manage who takes a turn at talking at various stages; in other words, we need to understand the mechanics of turn-taking. Talkers don’t take up their turn at random places. Rather, there are transition relevance places (TRPs), that is, places where a second person can take up the talk. One obvious TRP is when there is a noticeable silence, but this is not the only type. Whenever such a place occurs in the talk, the current speaker has the option of selecting the next talker. If the speaker doesn’t make a specific selection, then anyone can take over. If no one takes over, the speaker has the option of continuing.

One of the implications of this is that silence can be very informative. In the sequence shown in (543), speaker A offers an invitation to B, who doesn’t reply at once (the numbers in parentheses designate the length of pauses in seconds): (543)

speaker a: Would you like to meet now, (0.3)

speaker a: [or late-

speaker b: [Well, not just now. (0.1) Maybe in about ten minutes?

A’s question invites an immediate response, which isn’t forthcoming. In other words, B fails to take his or her turn. Therefore, A tries again with a modified version of the original invitation. The square brackets in A’s second contribution and that of B indicate that A and B start talking simultaneously. This means that before B has had the chance to hear A’s alternative offer, he or she makes explicit the implication of the silence after A’s first turn.

A second feature of the interaction in (543) is B’s use of the conversational particle wel . Words such as this have been studied in some detail by pragmaticians

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and conversation analysts. In some cases, their function is to indicate to the hearer how to process the utterance (we saw this above in our discussion of after all). In other cases, however, a particle may be used to indicate the speaker’s attitude to some aspect of the conversation. A particle that has been studied in some detail is oh. This particle has a number of uses, and its precise function depends on a variety of factors, especially intonation. However, when pronounced with a high falling intonation, it generally indicates that the speaker acknowledges receipt of a piece of news. In (544), for instance, speaker B is effectively acknowledging that she didn’t know before about Mary’s new job:

(544)

speaker a: Mary’s got a new job.

speaker b: Oh!

On the other hand, in (545), speaker B uses a different conversational particle, that’s right, and thereby is signalling that Mary’s having got a new job is already known. In CA, this implication is known as a claim to epistemic priority (roughly,

‘I got there first, actually’):

(545)

speaker a: Mary’s got a new job.

speaker b: That’s right!

By using conversational particles such as that’s right (rather than oh), speakers can try to manipulate their position in the conversation and make it less easy for others to disagree with them (as we saw in the case of after all) (exercise 9).

Pragmatic theories such as that of Grice or Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance

Theory don’t have anything to say about such conversational practices as turn-taking or establishing prior rights to knowledge. On the other hand, CA doesn’t deal with the matters of inference and conversational implicatures in the same degree of detail as, say, Relevance Theory. While pragmaticians and conversational analysts would not all share this optimism, taken together the pragmatic approach and the CA approach can be thought of as complementing each other

and providing a rich model of the way that talkers interact with each other, a fundamental aspect of language use.

Exercises

1.

Taking (503) as a model, write out explicit truth conditions for the following sentences

(a) You own a cat

(b) He owns a cat

(c) She owns a cat

(d) They own a cat

(e) We own a cat

(f) That girl (over there) owns a cat

(g) These girls own a cat

Using sentences

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2.

The following words are further instances of deictics. Explain exactly

how they are used. What is the crucial dimension of deixis for each of

the words?

(a) here/there

(b) come/go

(c) now/then

(d) today/yesterday/tomorrow

Can you think of any other words in these classes which behave in a

similar fashion?

3.

The following sentences illustrate grammatical devices which manip-

ulate information structure in various ways. Provide an informal

description of the effects of each of these devices.

(a) It’s Bill who Sally was meeting up with last night

(b) The one who Sally was meeting up with last night was Bill

(c) Bill, Sally would never go out with

(d) What with the accident, Sally’s been getting very behind with her

work

(e) As for Sally, she’d never go out with Bill

(f) As for dinner tonight, is Sally still going to the cinema with Bill?

(g) Max and me, we just can’t see what Sally sees in Bill

(h) They’re nice, these pears

4.

For the examples in (535), explain in detail how Grice’s Co-operative Principle and Maxims account for the way the utterances are interpreted.

Set out the shared background knowledge and background assump-

tions, and identify the inferences the hearer is able to make (note that the hearer is simply the recipient and reader of the postcard for 535a, b).

Model answer for (a) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Background knowledge

K1 The weather was bad on the speaker’s vacation

Background assumptions

A1 People prefer the weather to be good when they are on vacation.

A2 The speaker knows that the hearer knows K1.

A3 The speaker knows that the hearer knows A2.

Hearer’s inferences

I1 The literal content of the speaker’s utterance is incompatible

with K1.

I2 Given A2 and A3, the speaker will know that the hearer can infer I1.

I3 Given I1, the speaker has violated the Maxim of Quality.

I4 Given I2, the speaker will assume that the hearer can infer I3.

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I5 Therefore, the speaker’s violation of the maxim is a flouting.

I6 Given I5 and A1, the speaker is intending to convey a non-literal

meaning.

I7 Given I6 and K1, the speaker is intending to convey the content of

K1 (but emphatically).

5.

We have cited Grice’s four maxims in (529) as they are presented in Steven Levinson’s influential textbook on pragmatics. However, in

Grice’s original text, point (iii) of the Maxim of Manner reads ‘(iii) be

brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity)’. Why the difference?

6.

In a well-known play by Shakespeare with a Scottish theme, three

weird sisters tell a politically ambitious warlord that he won’t suffer

military defeat until Burnham Wood comes to his fortress, Dunsinane,

and that he himself cannot be killed by any man of woman borne. Are