Spoken Interaction

1. Spoken Interaction Spokendiscourse and face work

2. Interpreting speech acts • We often need to go beyond literal meaning to get at speaker meaning. We often have to make inferences based on context. • We cannot rely solely on the literal meaning and the syntactic ordering of words to understand the intended meaning

3. Identifying speech acts • Locutionary act: the communicative act of uttering a sentence (involving the acts of referring to certain objects in the world and saying stuff about them).e.g. It’s hot in here. • Illocutionary act: the act (defined by social convention) which is performed when making an utterance: e.g. accusing, apologizing, asserting, boasting, congratulating, praising

4. Knowledge and inferring • For interpretation to be successful various types of contextual knowledge as well as vital inferential processes and an assumption of cooperative linguistic behaviour are all required

5. Choice and context • Linguistic behaviour is linked to social context • We always have a choice in what we say or write and one of the linguist’s tasks is to uncover what Choice X does that Choice Y doesn’t do.

6. Politeness and Face • Politeness theory(Brown and Levinson 1987, 1999) • To lose face • To save face • Face threatening acts • (Goffman 1967)

7. B and L • People have certain needs and two of these are: • the need for freedom (autonomy) • and the need to be valued (self-worth) • and because these needs are fragile they require careful tending by all participants involved.

8. Assumption • All competent adult members of society have, and know each other to have: • Face: the public self image that every member wants to claim for himself, consisting in two related aspects • A) negative face • B) Positive face

9. Negative face • the basic claim to territories, • personal preserves, • rights to non-distraction • i.e. to freedom of action and freedom from imposition

10. Positive face • The positive consistent self image or ‘personality’ (crucially including the desire that this self image be accepted and approved of) claimed by interactants

11. cooperating • In general people cooperate in maintaining face in interaction, this cooperation is based on the mutual vulnerability of face • Certain acts intrinsically threaten face • We can distinguish the sorts of acts that threaten face

12. Cooperation • Normally everyone’s face depends on everyone else’s face being maintained • People can be expected to defend their face if threatened • Defending face can threaten the other person’s face • It is in every participant’s best interest to maintain each other’s face

13. Politeness • Politeness is a term we use to describe the extent to which actions, including the way things are said, match the addressee’s perceptions of how they should be performed • Politeness refers to behaviour which actively expresses positive concern for others, as well as non-imposing distancing behaviour

14. Politeness is linked to status and power, which are not absolute • Social relations and situational contexts can determine who can expect to get their own way • To achieve our aims we have to interact in a way that meets our addressee’s expectations of how we should interact in that particular context

15. Face threatening acts • Threats to hearer’s negative face: indicating that the speaker does not intend to avoid impeding hearer’s freedom of action • 1. Acts that suggest hearer will have to do some future act (orders, requests; suggestions, advice; remindings; threats, warnings,dares

16. Threats to H’s negative face • 2. acts that suggest some positive future act on the part of S towards H which consequntly puts pressure on H to accept or reject and might therefore lead to H incurring a debt (offers, promises)

17. Pressure to protect or surrender • 3. acts that suggest some desire on the part of S towards H or H’s goods which may put pressure on H either to protect the object or to give it to S. • A. compliments, expressions of envy or admiration • B. expressions of strong negative emotions toward H (hatred, anger, lust)

18. Compensatory linguistic strategies • Positive politeness is linguistic behaviour signalling that the speaker wants/needs/appreciates the same things as the hearer. • Negative politeness is linguistic behaviour which signals that the speaker recognizes the hearer’s fundamental right to unimpeded action and autonomy

19. politeness • Politeness = behaviour which actively expresses positive concern for others (positive politeness) as well as non imposing distancing behaviour (negative politeness)

20. strategies • Positive politeness strategies: • 1. claim common ground • 2. convey that S and H are cooperators • 3 Fulfill H’s wnat for some X • Negative politeness strategies: • 1. be direct • 2. don’t presume/assume • 3. don’t coerce H • 4. communicate want not to impinge on H • 5. Redress other wants of H

21. Claim common ground • Notice, attend to H’s wants • Exaggerate interest/approval/sympathy in of with H • Intensify interest for H (question tags, direct quotes, historic present) • Use in-group identity markers (solidarity address forms, dialect, slang , contractions)

22. Common ground • Seek agreement (safe topics, repetition) • Avoid disagreement (token agreement, pseudo agreement, white lies) • Presuppose/assert common ground (gossip, speak from H’s point of view (use H’s deictic centre) presuppose H’s knowledge • Joke

23. Convey that H and S are cooperators • Assert knowledge of H’s wants • Offer, Promise • Be optimistic (reduce degree of opposition) • Include S and H in the activity • Give or ask for reasons (why not…..?) • Assume or assert reciprocity (you scratch my back)

24. Fulfil H’s wants • Give gifts to H: • Goods • Sympathy • compliments

25. Negative politeness strategies • Be conventionally indirect • Don’t assume/presume: question or hedge • Don’t coerce H: minimise imposition, be pessimistic, give deference – treat H as superior • Communicate S’s wnat not to impinge on H • Apologise, impersonalise (avoid pronouns I and you) • Go on record as incurring a debt

26. NB • Being linguistically polite does not necessarily entail sincerity • The fact of making an effort to go through the motions is what makes the act a polite one • Cross cultural differences: this is an Anglo- centric view

27. Institutional discourse • When language is being used for institutional purposes there can be more than one mode dominant at any one time • And these can relate to different kinds of face

28. Transactional mode • Language used to convey content • Transmission of information • Task focussed • Need for clarity, efficiency and brevity • Linked with competence face (being good at your job)

29. Interactional mode • Language used to express and maintain social relationships • Primary goal is the establishment and maintenance of social relationships • Negociation of role relationships, peer solidarity, the exchange of turns, the saving of face of both speaker and hearer • Linked with affective face (being liked)

30. Interpersonal and transactional • You can conduct interpersonal work (enhancing affective face) while pretending to do transactional work (involving competence face) and vice versa. In some jobs where social skiils are important – where some kind of persuasion is needed - affective face is part of competence face

31. competence face • Competence face: professional, capable, in control, authoritative • Compromised by error, oversight, perceived inefficiency • Not compatible with the expression of in-group solidarity • Associated with formality

32. Affective face • Non-threatening, congenial, good to be around, teasing, joking, relaxed • Associated with informality

33. Balancing acts • Buid up of competence face means risk of appearing non-affiliative, of claiming supremacy and superiority • Too much indulgence in in-group reference, common ground,humour or self deprecation can undermine competence face

34. references • Grundy, P. Doing Pragmatics ch7 • Bloomer et al. Introducing Language in Use ch 3 and 4 • Watts, R. Politeness • Lakoff, R, what you can do with words: politeness, pragmatics and performatives

35. Overview of corpus linguistics and (im)politeness • (Im)politeness studies: generally concerned with trying to understand the role of face and facework in communication, and how different types of facework are expressed. • The term (im)politeness implies aggressive facework as well as mitigation of face threat, or face enhancement.

36. (Im)politeness and corpus studies • previous studies in this field: • the theoretical framework of (im)politeness has been used in combination with corpus linguistics for a range of purposes and at a variety of stages in the research process:

37. Over- and too polite? • Culpeper (2008) has used corpus linguistics to investigate the evaluative force of the expressions over-polite and too polite, and thus highlights the potential of a corpus semantic approach to metalinguistic labels of (im)politeness.

38. annotation • McEnery et al (2002), annotated their data for pragmatic information about the sense and force of utterances in order to investigate directness and indirectness. In this kind of analysis the annotation may be very time-consuming

39. trolling • Hardaker’s (2010) analysis of first order (im)politeness notions of “trolling” in computer-mediated communication. She examines over 2000 references to troll* in her chosen discourse type to see how this community perceives troll behaviour and to form a working, user-based definition of trolling for future research. • Trolling is generally understood as the deliberate creation of social discord in online communities, though see Hardaker’s article for a full definition

40. Searching for features • Most frequently, the corpus is used as a resource for examples of a given (im)politeness feature, and research using this combination ranges from Kohnen’s (2008) study of Anglo-Saxon address terms to Beeching’s (2006) study of quoi in contemporary French.

41. What to analyse • a corpus approach to (im)politeness can provide a new means of deciding what to analyse as (im)politeness;

42. Conventionalised formulae • it enables the researcher to provide information about how frequent a phenomenon is; and also permits research into the process of conventionalisation of im/politeness formulae and pragmatic meaning shift.

43. Cherry-picking • the use of a corpus does not in itself guarantee reliability or validity - a cherry-picked example from a corpus is still a cherry- picked example even if it comes from a corpus.

44. when “politeness” is not being polite • the use of conventional markers of respect such as with respect or sir and challenge the blunt assumption that a polite form will necessarily be doing politeness work.

45. Different functions • the use of such forms can perform a number of different functions in discourse other than respecting an interlocutor’s face. • they are sometimes used as a deliberate ploy to attack face.

46. Humphries: Minister, with the greatest possible respect--Hacker: Oh, are you going to insult me again?

47. Taylor forthcoming • This case study examines the variety of functions which negative politeness forms fulfil in institutional discourse.

48. negative politeness, does not refer to impoliteness • but to politeness which is directed at an individual’s negative face, that is to say the right of the recipient to maintain their distance (Goffman 1967: 72). • As opposed to positive politeness through which a speaker may show his/her appreciation for another participant

49. Invasion of space • as Goffman notes, the two are frequently in opposition: • To ask after an individual’s health, his family’s well-being or the state of his affairs, is to present him with a sign of sympathetic concern; but in a certain way to make this presentation is to invade the individual’s personal reserve. (1976: 73)

50. Mitigation and warnings • negative politeness features are not limited to mitigation of the effect of an unavoidable face-threatening act (FTA) on the addressee (e.g. Harris 2001, Blas-Arroyo 2003). • in certain contexts some “polite” phraseologies have become so conventionalised that most competent English speakers would be primed to treat them as discourse markers indicating that a face threat is about to follow.