Professional Documents
Culture Documents
____________________________________________
1. INTRODUCTION
I. DEFINING PRAGMATICS
The question that we ask ourselves is ‘What do all these branches have
in common?’ According to Verschueren (1999:2), they share a focus on
language resources (the ingredients that make up a language as a tool
that people use for expressive and communicative purposes). Units of
analysis are identified, thus leading to a manageable division of labour.
As implied in the above definition, pragmatics cannot be identified with
a specific unit of analysis. Then what is pragmatics? The linguistic
phenomena to be studied from the point of view of their usage can be
situated at any level of structure. The question pragmatics asks is: How
are the language resources used? Thus, in Verschueren’s view
(1999), pragmatics is not an additional component of a theory of
language, but it offers a different perspective.
EXAMPLES:
a. The level of speech sounds: Most speakers of languages who
have grown up with a local dialect, for example people born in
villages in Banat region, but who were socialised into the use of
Introduction 3
____________________________________________
TASK: paraphrase the various meanings of the noun ‘meaning’ and the
verb ‘to mean’ in the examples below:
a. I did not mean to do it.
b. Life without love has no meaning.
c. A red light means stop.
d. A flower behind the right ear means that the person is not
engaged.
e. What is the meaning of ‘axiology’?
f. The sentence James murdered Max means that ‘someone called
James deliberately killed someone called Max’.
g. By ‘my best friend’ I meant Sue Carter not Sally Brown.
c. Sam is a male.
d. Sam is an adult male person.
Notice that semantics is interested in the conditions that make the
sentence ‘true’.
In pragmatics, the utterance ‘I promise to be back early’ means a
promise on condition a future action is involved: ‘I’ll come back
early’ (SEE the Speech act theory). In this case we are interested in
those conditions which make the promise ‘felicitous’, i.e, be a
promise and not a threat for instance.
(Two linguists, call them Jacob and Mark, are coming out of a
lecture hall at a university which is neither’s home territory, but
8 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
(Marks gets into the car; after the first turn, he starts giving
directions, which greatly amazes Jacob, and irritates him a little –
he was under the impression that ‘he’ needed to guide the other,
not the other way round. After several more turns – which Jacob is
taking at greater and greater speeds, so the other doesn’t get a
chance to interfere – Marks says:)
Mark: Oh, I thought you didn’t know the way to the campus.
Jacob: I thought you didn’t know!
(whereupon they both start laughing)
III. SUMMARY
Pragmatics is:
• ‘the science of language in relation to its users’ (Mey, 1993)
• ‘meaning in interaction’ (Thomas, 1995)
• ‘the study of language in use’ (Verschueren, 1999)
Meaning, as a defining feature of what pragmatics is concerned with,
is not seen as a stable counterpart to linguistic form. Rather, it is
dynamically generated in the process of using language (Thomas, 1995,
Verschueren, 1999).
IV. TASKS
‘I wake with my alarm. I say to myself, but not out loud, a word or two
that should perhaps not be printed here. I stagger to the bathroom,
shave and generally prepare myself for the first phase of the day. […]
Having prepared myself for the day, I go down to the kitchen
and there, in the process of preparing my breakfast, encounter yet
more written messages as they silently scream at me from food
manufacturers packets, bottles and cartoons. I turn on the portable
television set, strategically placed on a worktop so as not to miss any
vital bit of breakfast television whilst standing guard over slowly
simmering porridge. I now encounter not my language, but the
language of other people specifically produced by them as a means of
communicating something to me along with several million others.
The language these people produce is mostly spoken language
and whilst sometimes it is directed at me as if I were a partner in a
conversation they are holding, at other times the language is directed
at actual conversational partners, either present in the studio or linked
by microphones, TV monitors and other electronic wizardry. But the
odd thing is that whilst the talk is produced, for example, as part of a
conversation involving just those who are indeed in the studio, I
12 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
Alright Peter
Here!
C’mmon Peter.
Beautiful tip!
Introduction 13
____________________________________________
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mey, L. J., 1993, Pragmatics. An Introduction,
Blackwell
Thomas, J., 1995, Meaning in Interaction, Longman
Verschueren, J., 1999, Understanding Pragmatics, Arnold,
London
Yule, G., 1996, Pragmatics, Oxford University Press
Introduction 15
____________________________________________
2. MICROPRAGMATICS
DEIXIS AND IMPLICIT MEANING
For the beginning, let’s suppose (with Mey, 1993:89) that you are in a
foreign country, sitting in your hotel room at night. There is a knock at
the door. You don’t open the door, but ask: ‘Who’s there?’. The visitor
answers: ‘It’s me’. What do you do then?
There are two possibilities. Either you recognise the visitor’s voice, and
then decide whether or not to open the door. If you don’t, then what do
you do with a voice that refers to a ‘me’, when you don’t know who
that ‘me’ is. Since the ‘me’ always refers to ‘I’, and every ‘I’ is a
‘speaking me’, the utterance ‘It’s me’ is always necessarily true, but
totally uninformative to establish a speaker’s identity.
16 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
I. DEIXIS
“Deixis” is a technical term (from Greek) for one of the most basic
things we do with language. It means “pointing” via language, and any
linguistic form used to accomplish this pointing is called deictic
expression or indexicals. They are among the first forms to be spoken
by young children and can be used to indicate
• people via person deixis (‘me’, ‘you’), or social deixis
• location via spatial deixis (‘here’, ‘there’)
• time via temporal deixis (‘now’, ‘then’)
• and discourse via discourse deixis (referring expressions in texts)
Person deixis
The distinction described above involves person deixis, with the
speaker ‘I’ and the addressee ‘you’. To learn these deictic expressions,
we have to discover that each person in a conversation shifts from
Micropragmatics: Deixis and implicit meaning 17
____________________________________________
Person deixis operates on a basic three part division, the speaker (I), the
addressee (you) and other(s) (he, she, it). As Yule (1996) observes, in
many languages these deictic expressions are elaborated with markers
of social status. Expressions which indicate higher status are described
as honorifics (social deixis).
For example, in French and Romanian there are two different forms
that encode a social contrast within person deixis, ‘tu’ (tu) and
‘vous’(dumneavoastra). This is known as T/V distinction.
In deictic terms, third person is not a direct participant in basic
interaction, and being an outsider, is more distant. Using a third person
form, where a second person would be possible, is one way of
communicating distance. This can also be done for humorous or ironic
purposes, as in the following examples given by Yule (1996:11):
Temporal deixis
Deixis is a form of referring tied to the speaker’s context, with some
basic distinctions being ‘near speaker’ versus ‘away form speaker’. In
English, the ‘near speaker’, or proximal terms are ‘this, ‘here’, ‘now’.
Proximal terms are typically interpreted in terms of the speaker’s
location, or the deictic centre, so that ‘now’ is generally understood as
referring to some point or period of time that has the time of the
speaker’s utterance at its centre. The psychological basis of temporal
deixis is that we treat events and objects that move towards us (into
view) or away from us (out of view).
Spatial deixis
The concept of distance is relevant to spatial deixis, where the relative
location of people and things is being indicated. Contemporary English
makes use of two adverbs, ‘here’ and ‘there’, for the basic distinction.
Some verbs of motion, as Yule (1996:12) observes, such as ‘come’ and
‘go’, retain deictic sense when they are used to mark movement toward
the speaker (‘Come to bed’) or away the speaker (‘Go to bed’).
E.g.: I was looking at this little puppy in a cage with such a sad look on
its face. It was like, ‘Oh, I’m so unhappy here, will you set me free?’
(from Yule, 1996:13)
Further, I guess that you, like me, do not want us to sit here silently but
that we both want to interact socially and sociably by means of a
conversation. Since we also share the knowledge that it is now dinner
time, that the main part of the day is over, and that during a day like
there are many things one can do, a basic option being either to remain
here or to leave, it seems reasonable for me to start a conversation by
asking you whether you went somewhere today. So I am asking you:
‘Did you go anywhere today?’ And I would very much appreciate it if
you could say something in response to the question’ (from
Verschueren, 1999:26)
Presuppositions
A presupposition is something the speaker assumes to be the case prior
to making an utterance. Speakers, not sentences, have presuppositions.
Thus, we can identify some of the potentially assumed information that
would be associated with the following utterance (Yule, 1996:25):
Mary’s brother bought three horses.
2. Factive presuppositions
A number of verbs, such as know, realise regret, or phrases involving
be aware, be glad, have factive presuppositions. The following
examples have been taken from Yule (1996:28-29):
E.g.:
She didn’t realise he was ill. (He was ill)
We regret telling him (We told hem)
I wasn’t aware that she was married. (She was married)
I am glad that it’s over (It’s over).
3. Non-factive presuppositions
There are examples of non-factive (presuppositions assumed not to be
true) presuppositions associated with a number of verbs: dream,
imagine, pretend.
Eg:
I dreamed that I had a lot of money (I didn’t have a lot of money)
We pretended that we knew what it was all about (We didn’t know)
4. Lexical presuppositions
The use of one form with its asserted meaning is conventionally
interpreted with the presupposition that another (non-asserted) meaning
is understood. For example verbs like manage (presupposing tried),
stop, start.
E.g
He managed to repair the car (He tried hard)
She started smoking (She wasn’t smoking before)
Micropragmatics: Deixis and implicit meaning 25
____________________________________________
5. Structural presuppositions
Some sentence structures have been analysed as conventionally
presupposing that part of the structure is already assumed to be true.
For example, the wh-question constructions in English are interpreted
with the presupposition that the information after the wh-form is
already known.
E.g. (Yule, 1996:29):
When did you leave? (You left)
Where did you buy the bike? (You bought the bike).
III. SUMMARY
The term ‘micropragmatics’ is used by some pragmaticians (e.g. Mey,
1993) to refer to the pragmatics of lesser units of human language use
such as deixis.
Deixis means “pointing” via language, and any linguistic form used to
accomplish this pointing is called deictic expression or indexical.
Indexicals are among the first forms to be spoken by young children
and can be used to indicate:
• people via person deixis (‘me’, ‘you’), or social deixis
26 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
Presuppositions
A presupposition is something the speaker assumes to be the case prior
to making an utterance. Speakers, not sentences, have presuppositions.
Micropragmatics: Deixis and implicit meaning 27
____________________________________________
IV. TASKS
Three days later, at 7.45 a.m., his friend Dr. Vaclav Orlik was
standing outside the Church of St. Sigismund, awaiting the arrival of
the hearse and clutching seven of the ten pink carnations he had hoped
to afford at the florist’s. He noted with approval the first sings of
spring. In a garden across the street, jackdaws with twigs in their beaks
were wheeling above the lindens, and now and then a minor avalanche
would slide from the pantiled roof of a tenement.
Ehile Orlik waited, he was approached by a man with a curtain
of grey hair that fell below the collar of his raincoat.
‘Do you play the organ?’ the man asked in a catarrhal voice.
‘I fear not’, said Orlik
‘Nor do I ‘, the man said, and shuffled off down a side-street.
Bruce Chatwin, Utz, 1988)
QUESTIONS
a. What types of deixis are found in the excerpt?
b. Make an inventory, and try to establish a preliminary classification
(you can proceed either by looking at the ‘type’ of deixis, or at what
deictic elements refer to in the text).
QUESTIONS:
a. What does this sign tell you explicitly? And implicitly?
b. Who do you think is the sender of the message?
The owner of the parking lot?
The owner of the phone number?
The police?
(Argue your point of view)
c. Judging from the text of the message, would you say that illegal
parking is a criminal act in Chicago?
(Justify your answer).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Keenan, E., O., 1976, The universality of conversational
implicature, in Language in Society, 5, 67-80
Verschueren, J., 1999, Whose discipline? Some critical
reflections on linguistic pragmatics, in Journal of Pragmatics,
31, 869-879
30 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
E.g.
What’s the time, because I’ve got to go out at eight?
Speech act theory 31
____________________________________________
We can safely say that (cf. Levinson, 1980:8), in the example above,
the structure of the sentence is not that normally associated with
because as a logical connector. In other words, our understanding of the
example is based, not on an interpretation of the sentence on the page,
but on our assumption that a reason is being expressed for an action
performed in speaking
We will next look at the speech act theory, which is basic to any
pragmatic approach to language.
I. LANGUAGE AS ACTION
For example, the utterance This tea is really cold (Yule, 1996:48),
functions as a complaint if it is uttered on a winter day, when the
speaker reaches for a cup of tea, believing that it has been freshly made.
It may also function as a praise if it is uttered on a really hot summer’s
day, with the speaker being given a glass of iced tea by the hearer.
Speech Act theory begins with the observation that there is a class of
highly ritualistic utterances which carry no information about the world
outside language at all because they refer to themselves.
E.g.:
a. I swear to… .
b. I sentence you to death.
c. I hereby open the Theater House.
d. I hereby name this ship ‘Aurora’.
In the utterances above, saying the words and doing the action are the
same thing. By uttering them, we perform the acts of swearing an oath,
sentencing a criminal to death, opening a building, and naming a ship.
In other words, the function of the utterance is created by the form.
They are called declarations.
E.g.
I order you to clean your boots.
(Source: Cook, 1989:36)
But you can also use the imperative instead, and this is called implicit
performative:
E.g.
• the subject must be first person sg., + the adverb ‘hereby’, indicating
that the utterance counts as an action by being uttered + a
performative verb in the present tense + indirect object in the 2-nd
per.sg. This underlying clause will always make explicit what may
be implicitly expressed.
FELICITY CONDITIONS
The private, for his part, may try to challenge the felicity conditions
invoked, and, if he succeeds, he will take away the status of ‘order’
from the utterance:
E.g.:
Don’t you think having a well-oiled rifle is more important?
I’ve been scrubbing all morning and they won’t come any cleaner.
Speech act theory 37
____________________________________________
In armies the power relations are so clear, and the rights and obligations
of the participants so firmly established that these comments are likely
to be punished. It rarely happens that explicit ordering and challenging
take place.
Austin suggests in fact that the words are determined by the intention
of the speaker. He also gets into extremely fine detail as to certain
38 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
verbs that can be used to perform a specific act. So, for a speech act to
succeed, all three levels have to be taken into consideration: it must be
minimally understood by hearer, the words uttered do something, and
the words are determined by the intention of the speaker.
Declarations: speech acts that change the world via their utterance.
E.g.:
Priest: I now pronounce you husband and wife.
Referee: You’re out.
Jury Foreman: We find the defendant guilty.
40 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
E.g.
a. Gimme a cup of tea. Make it strong.
b. Could you lend me a pencil, please.
c. Watch the step.
Speech act theory 41
____________________________________________
In using a directive, the speaker attempts to make the world fit the
words (via the hearer).
One of the most common types of indirect speech acts in English has
the form of interrogative, which is not typically used to ask a question
(we don’t expect only an answer, we expect an action).
E.g.:
Could you pass the salt?
Would you open this?
Indirect speech acts are generally associated with greater politeness in
English than direct speech acts.
hearer the opportunity to choose between one force and another). Thus,
the utterance If I were you I’d leave town straight away, can be
interpreted according to the context as a piece of advice, a warning, or a
threat.
Also, speech acts are often played out over a number of turns, so we
need to look at more extended interaction to understand how these
actions are carried out and interpreted within speech events.
In this chapter we have seen how utterances perform actions, how
speakers can mean considerably more than their words say. In the next
chapter we shall address the question of how hearers get from what is
said to what is meant.
VII. SUMMARY
Speech acts are actions performed via utterances (apology, complaint,
compliment, etc.) They apply to the speaker’s communicative intention
in producing an utterance. The speaker normally expects that his/her
communicative intention will be recognized by the hearer. Both
speaker and hearer are usually helped in this process by the
circumstances surrounding utterances. These circumstances, including
other utterances, are called speech events.
VIII. TASKS
Exchange 1.
A: Are you planning to do it this afternoon?
B: (angrily) Well WHEN this afternoon?
A: (with injured innocence) I’m just asking whether you’ll be able to
do it this afternoon.
Exchange 2.
B: Oh no, we haven’t got the TV programme.
A: Go and get one then.
B: Go and get one! I’ve just come in.
A: Well if you don’t go I’ll go.
B: That’s blackmail.
A: It’s not blackmail, it’s just a FACT.
6. Suppose you come across a street sign whose text says: (Source:
Mey, 1993:127)
Speech act theory 47
____________________________________________
7. What is the problem with the following speech acts. Do they all
suffer from the same irregularity, or are they irregular different
ways? Can you think of any conditions that make any of these
speech acts acceptable? (Source: Mey, 1993:127)
CR 338-343
M: somebody tells me that er Mihai means who’s the king. Ok, and
er somebody tells me sometimes I have to know what to say
because I might hurt someone. OK, thank you.
T: wow, that wasn’t very nice. What about (.) are there some
complimentary ones?
Ser: no, they’re actually nice
T: oh really? […]
Speech act theory 49
____________________________________________
10. In groups, take a textbook for teaching English and look for
ways in which language functions are dealt with.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
4. CONVERSATIONAL PRINCIPLE:
COOPERATION
1. If people can mean different things with the same words, how do
human beings interpret what is meant from what is said?
2. Why is there a divergence of function and form, or why do not
people speak directly and say what they mean?
For an answer we have to look at the work of Paul Grice, who
attempted to explain how, by means of shared rules of conversations,
competent language-users manage to understand one another.
Like Austin before him, Grice was invited to give lectures at Harvard
University, and it was there in 1967 that he first outlined his theory of
implicture. A shorter version of these lectures was published in 1975
in a paper Logic and conversation. Later, Grice expanded upon his
earlier work and it proved to be one of the most influential theories in
the development of pragmatics. Grice’s theory is an attempt at
explaining how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant, from
the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning.
Tears filled his eyes; he cried easily in these days, nor having full
control of himself, and Theo’s fate caused him great grief. The Duchess
had told him that she had been able to discover nothing, and therefore
it was assumed that he head been released as entirely innocent.
Maurice was convinced that nothing of the kind had happened, and
assumed that the Duchess had found out that Theo was dead and had
invented the agreeable solution in order not to distress him. He could
not do anything about it and had accepted the statement in silence, but
he fretted a great deal over Theo’s death.
(source: Thomas, 1995:58-59)
Here, the Duchess implied that Theo was all right. Maurice understood
what she had implied, but nevertheless inferred the opposite (that Theo
was dead).
Some years ago, Jenny Thomas went to stay with her brother
and his family, including his son, aged 5. She had had with her an
electric toothbrush, into which she had recently put new batteries. Her
brother asked to see the toothbrush, but when he tried to operate it, it
would not work:
Step 2: The hearer works out the speaker’s intention in uttering those
words; they understood him to have implied that he was not
responsible for the fact that the batteries were flat. The
pragmatic force of his utterance was to deny guilt.
Using this assumption, combined with the knowledge of the world, the
receiver can reason from the literal, semantic meaning of what is said to
the pragmatic meaning and infer what the sender is intending to do with
his/her words.
E.g.: A neighbour to you:
Sorry, dear. I saw you were home. My cat got stuck in the tree over
there.
(Adapted from Cool, 1989)
58 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
The hearer (you) starts from the knowledge and experience of the
world, that a cat is likely to be very unhappy stuck in a tree, that a
human is able to free such a cat, etc.
Quantity:
a. As you probably know, I am afraid of dogs.
b. So, to cut a long story short, we grabbed our stuff and ran.
c. I won’t bore you with all the details, but it was an exciting trip.
Relation:
a. I don’t know if this is important, but some of the files are missing.
b. This may sound like a dumb question, but whose handwriting is
this?
c. Not to change the subject, but is this related to the budget?
Manner:
a. This may be a bit confused, but I remember being in a car.
b. I’m not sure if this makes sense, but the car had no lights.
c. I don’t know if this is clear at all, but I think the other car was
reversing.
There are cases in which not all four maxims can be observed. Brevity
and truth often pull in opposite directions (a short answer is often
simplified to the point of distortion). Legal discourse and scientific
discourse often sacrifice the maxim of quantity to the maxim of quality.
Maxims of quantity and manner are often at odds. To be clear one
sometimes needs to be long-winded.
60 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
E.g.
The official could simply have replied Yes. The actual response is
extremely long-winded.
Conversational principle: Cooperation 63
____________________________________________
Infringing:
A speaker who, with no intention of generating an implicature and with
no intention of deceiving, fails to observe a maxim is said to ‘infringe’
the maxim. For example, a speaker may fail to observe a maxim
because of imperfect linguistic performance (foreigners, young child
speaking, nervous speakers, etc.)
64 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
IV. SUMMARY
In 1967, Grice outlined his theory of implicture. Grice’s theory is an
attempt at explaining how a hearer gets from what is said to what is
meant, from the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied
meaning.
V. TASKS
c. This meal is delicious (said by a guest who finds the food disgusting)
3. [A is a 14 year boy and has just come back from school; B is his
mother]
B: How was school today?
A: Oh, I scored two goals during the football match.
Conversational principle: Cooperation 67
____________________________________________
[Victor has been buried up to his neck in the back garden by an irate
builder. His wife, Margaret, comes out]
M: What are you doing?
V: I’m wallpapering the spare bedroom, what the hell do you think
I’m doing?
(One Foot in the Grave, BBC 12/11/96)
[This is part of the queen’s speech at the anniversary of her 40th year
on the throne. It had been a bad year for the queen - marital difficulties
of her children, the Windsor Palace had gone up in flames]
1. ( Thomas, 1995:65):
The speaker is Rupert Allason (author, M.P. and expert on the British
intelligence services). He is discussing the identity of the so-called
‘Fifth Man’:
It was either Graham Mitchell or Roger Hollis and I don’t think it was
Roger Hollis.
2. (Thomas, 1995:68)
Conversational principle: Cooperation 69
____________________________________________
B was on a long journey and wanted to read her book. A was a fellow
passenger who wanted to talk to her:
A: What do you do?
B: I’m a teacher.
A: Where do you teach?
B: Outer Mongolia
A: Sorry I asked.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cameron, R. & Williams, J., 1997, Sentences to Ten Cents;
A Case Study of Relevance and Communicative Success in
Non-native/Native Speaker Interaction in a Medical Setting, in
Applied Linguistics, 18: 415-445
Clark, H., H., & Gerrig, R., J., 1984, On the Pretense
Theory of Irony, in Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol.
113, nr.1: 121-126
Sarangi, S., and Slembrouck, S., 1992, Non-cooperation in
Communication: a reassessment of Gricean pragmatics, in
Journal of Pragmatics, 17: 117-154
Sperber, D., 1984, Verbal Irony: Pretense or Echoic
Mention?, in Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 113,
nr.1: 130-136
Issues of co-text and context 71
_____________________________________________________________________
I. CONTEXT
The following example and analysis have been taken from Mey,
1993:186: on the face of it the following conversation is quite strange:
It makes no sense at all unless we know what the context is: A is trying
to lease a flat, and mentions the fact that he has a child. The landlord
doesn’t mind children, but when he hears about the dog, he indicates
that A’s prospects as a future lease-holder are rather dim. Now, the
question can be asked, what exactly the landlord is sorry about. It is
clearly not the fact that A has a dog. Rather it has something to do with
the fact that regulations for the block of flats do not allow tenants to
have pets. So, the landlord is either sorry for A if A has to give up the
dog, or for himself (if A looks like a good future tenant) in case A
renouncing getting a lease.
The term ‘discourse’ is used in this section to indicate not only the
social occasion in which the linguistic interaction takes place (e.g. job
interview, medical consultation, conversation, etc.), but also how
people use the language in their respective social contexts.
Discourse is different from ‘text’, in that it embodies more than just the
text understood as a collection of sentences. It is also different from
conversation. Conversation is one particular type of text, governed by
special rules (SEE CA). Thus, while it is natural to use the term
‘discourse’ specifically in connection with conversation, discourse and
conversation are not the same.
Issues of co-text and context 75
_____________________________________________________________________
In this conversation some speech act linguists will claim that A has
performed a speech act of betting, just by uttering the words ‘I bet’.
Yet, in another, equally valid, pragmatic and discourse-oriented sense,
he has not: B has not ‘risen to the bet’, by uttering for example ‘you’re
on’. Instead, B utters a non-committal ‘Oh’. Consequently, there has
been no ‘uptake’, because one of the felicity conditions has not been
fulfilled, and so there has been no bet.
S= the Setting and Scene of the exchange; the setting refers to the
concrete physical circumstance in which speech takes place, e.g.
courtrooms, classrooms, telephone conversations, passing
acquaintances in the street, etc. The scene refers to the
psychological and cultural circumstances of the speech
situation, e.g. consulting, pleading, conferring. The settings and
scenes do not necessarily remain constant throughout a
particular language exchange, although it appears to be easier to
shift scenes than to shift settings, e.g. a speaker’s attempt to tell
a joke to dispel a tense atmosphere.
P= the Participants may be of various kinds and may be referred to
as Speaker, Hearer and audience, or Addressor, Addressee.
E= Ends, i.e. the conventionally recognised and expected outcomes
of an exchange as well as the personal goals that each of the P
seeks to accomplish. Some speech events have conventional
outcomes, e.g. ‘diagnosis’, ‘verdict’.
A= Act sequence, i.e the actual language forms that are used, how
these are used. It refers to message for, i.e. topics of
conversation and particular ‘ways of speaking’. In a given
culture, certain linguistic forms are conventional for certain
types of talk.
K= Keys refers to the tone, manner in which a particular message is
conveyed, e.g. light-hearted, serious, precise, etc.
I= Instrumentalities, i.e, the choice of channel: oral/written,
general/specialised language, formal/informal
N= Norms of interpretation, i.e.interpretation which would normally
be expected for the speech event in question; norms of
Issues of co-text and context 77
_____________________________________________________________________
‘The goals of the participants: notice that we are talking about the
goals of the individuals rather than the goals of the whole speech event.
The goals of one participant may be different from those of another.
For example, the goal of a trial is to come up with a fair verdict, but the
goals of the prosecution lawyer (to get a verdict ‘guilty’) are
diametrically opposed to those of the defense lawyer and the defendant.
An individual’s goals may also change during the course of an
interaction.
III. SUMMARY
The term ‘context’ apparently has a limitless range of potentially
relevant objects. However, we can understand the concept looking at it
in an extensional way. According to Mey (1993:182), this can be
understood in two ways:
• either as extending the individual utterances making up the text =
co-text;
• or, alternatively considering those utterances in their natural
‘habitat’. In this case we are dealing with the larger context in
which people use language.
S= the Setting and Scene of the exchange; the setting refers to the
concrete physical circumstance in which speech takes place, e.g.
courtrooms, classrooms, telephone conversations, passing
acquaintances in the street, etc. The scene refers to the
Issues of co-text and context 81
_____________________________________________________________________
IV. TASKS
3. Analyse the following two excerpts, both taken from the same
speech event – a PhD supervision to observe the choices made by
Issues of co-text and context 83
_____________________________________________________________________
Example 2
A: Oh, e’s back is’e? From Columbia?
B: Mm and I snapped off his fl…you know how I fidget when I’m
nervous and there was this ‘orrible looking thing and I thought
it was a spider on the end of a cobweb and I snapped it off and
apparently he’d been nurturing it in his breast for about two
years.
A: What was it?
B: I don’t know. Some silly plant but he was obviously/
A: /our plants got nicked.
B: Really?
A: In the last week yeah we’ve had all our plants knocked off.
B: What where from?
A: Here.
B: Really?
A: Must’ve been stolen from here and the Institute and the
Literature Department.
B: How strange. Oh and a bird shat on my head and then/
A: /I thought that was good luck!
Issues of co-text and context 85
_____________________________________________________________________
Although both speakers clearly can pronounce /h/ and both do so all the
time in Example 1 (harmony, here, have), both drop their h’s
and used the forms: ‘e’s back is ‘he and ‘orrible looking thing
in Example 2
Syntax
- the grammatical structure of Example 1 is more
formal, e.g use of do not, compared with the
informal wouldn’t’ve in Example 2
- more complex syntax in Example 1 – in A’s first
contribution there is a large number of subordinate
86 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Levinson, St., 1992, Activity types and language. In
P.Drew and J. Heritage (eds), 66-100.
Pomerantz, 1998, Multiple interpretations of context: how
are they useful?, in Research on Language and Social
interaction,31(1): 123-132
Wieder, D., L., 1999, Ethnomethodology, Conversation
Analysis, and the Ethnography of Speaking: resonances and
basic issues, in Research on Language and Social Interaction,
32:163-171\
Activity types 87
_____________________________________________________________________
6. ACTIVITY TYPES
INTERCULTURAL GATEKEEPING ENCOUNTERS
I. GATEKEEPING ENCOUNTERS
Given that one of the goals of such interviews is to assess the suitability
of the candidates for the course applied for, it follows that the
interviewers’ questions and the interviewees’ answers should appear
‘acceptable’ both in terms of content and the manner in which they are
presented.
may lack knowledge about the potential agenda. For example, they may
encounter difficulties if unexpected questions are asked.
SN: well, we’ve to receive the visitors, show them around and then
we have to go out er to the factories you know, sometimes to
attend the classes, how to do er cataloguing classification
(Gumperz, 1984)
responsibility for the mismatch with the speaker who deviates and thus
encourages analysts to cast mismatches in terms of ‘ignorance’ of the
‘rules of the game’. Gumperz’s alternative framework seems to be
more culturally sensitive.
III. SUMMARY
Gatekeeping encounters is a term that has been first used by Erickson
and Shultz (1982) in their research on counseling interviews in
academic advising. Gatekeepers have been identified as individuals
who have been given the authority to make decisions on the behalf of
institutions that will affect the mobility of others.
Selection interviews as activity type
A selection interview can be analysed as an ‘activity type’ with specific
norms and role-relationships which are different from those of, say,
casual conversation. Here are some ‘typical’ characteristic features:
• The goal of selection interviews is to assess the candidates’
potential for the training course on the basis of educational
qualifications and previous work experience.
• The interviewee’s goal is to present him/herself in such a way as to
maximise chances of being selected. The interviewer’s goal is to
elicit the information needed to take the decision
• The social context is asymmetrical, with an amount of power on the
part of the interviewer.
• Different types of temporal references are involved depending on
the topical segment of the interview. There is usually some talk
about past events in the candidate’s educational background, and an
exploration of skills and attitudes.
98 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
IV. TASKS
Analyse the following transcripts from selection interviews taken by
two Native speakers of English (NS1 and NS2) two Romanian
interviewers (RI1, RI2), to Romanian candidates (RC) for a post
graduate course on social work. (source: Coposescu:2003)
You may want to look specifically for dispreferred answers and sources
of activity-type mismatches:
I.
→ NS1: had you expected, if you got a place on this course that you go
abroad, for practice? on placement? are you familiar…?
130 RC3: if I like to go?
NS3: mhm
Activity types 99
_____________________________________________________________________
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Coposescu, L., 2003, The construction of meaning in the
Interaction between native speakers of English and Romanians,
Editura Universitatii Transilvania din Brasov, Chapter 6:185-
237
Sarangi, S., 1994, Accounting for mismatches in
intercultural selection interviews, in Multilingua,
102 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
13(1/2):163-194
Conversation analysis: Preliminary issues 103
_____________________________________________________________________
7. CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
PRELIMINARY ISSUES
I. WHAT CA DOES
1. CA is the study of recorded, naturally occurring talk-in-
interaction.
That is, the most distinctive methodological trait of CA is that research
is based on transcribed tape-recordings of actual interactions. What is
recorded is ‘naturally occurring’ interaction, i.e. the activities that are
recorded are situated in the ordinary unfolding of people’s lives, as
opposed to being set up or pre-arranged.
That is, words used in talk are not studied as semantic, syntactic or
morphologic units, but as objects used in terms of the activities being
negotiated in the talk: as requests, proposals, accusations, complaints,
etc.
In the next turn, line 2, Russ responds with ‘Who?’, thereby displaying
that his interpretation of Mother’s first utterance is as a pre-
announcement. But Mother’s next turn, ‘I don’t know’, displays that
Russ’s inference was in fact incorrect.: she was actually asking an
information-seeking question. Notice that following this turn, Russ
responds with the information his mother was seeking, thereby
displaying even more powerfully that he interpreted line 1 as a pre-
announcement, because he in fact knows quite a lot about who’s going
to the meeting. (Example and interpretation from Hutcby and Wooffitt,
1998).
He observed that, in the majority of the cases, if the person taking the
call within the organization started off by giving their name, then the
‘suicidal’ person who was calling would be likely to give their name in
Conversation analysis: Preliminary issues 107
_____________________________________________________________________
reply. But in one particular call, Sack noticed that the caller (B) seemed
to have trouble with the name of the answerer:
A: This is Mr. Smith, may I help you?
B: I can’t hear you.
A: This is Mr. Smith.
B: Smith.
(Sacks, 1995, Lectures on conversation)
Sacks observed that, for the rest of the conversation, the agent taking
the call had great difficulty in getting the caller to give a name. His
question then was: ‘where in the course of the conversation could you
tell that somebody would not give their name’?
Sacks noted that, on the one hand, it appears that if the name is not
forthcoming at the start it may prove problematic to get. On the other
hand, overt requests for it may be resisted. Then he remarked that it is
possible that the caller'’ declared problem in hearing is a methodical
way of avoiding giving one’s name in response to the other’s having
done so. In his analysis, Sacks shows that by ‘not hearing’, the caller is
able to set up a sequential trajectory in which the agent finds less and
less opportunity to establish the caller’s name without explicitly asking
for it. Thereby, the caller is able to begin the conversation by avoiding
giving a name without actually refusing to do so.
1. Turn-taking mechanism:
The starting point is the observation that conversation involves turn-
taking and that the end of one speaker’s turn and the beginning of the
next latch on to each other with almost perfect precision. Overlap of
turns (when two or more participants talk at the same time) occurs in
about 5% of cases and this suggests that speakers know how, when and
where to enter. They signal that one turn has come to an end and
another should begin.
The turn-taking model has two components:
The rules operating for turn units (see Sacks, Schegloff, and
Jefferson, 1974/1978):
a) if C (current speaker) selects N (next speaker) in current turn, then C
must stop speaking, and N must speak next.
c) if C does not select N, then any other party self-selects, first speaker
gaining rights to the next turn
d) if C has not selected N, and no other party self-selects, then C may
(but need not) continue.
Where, despite the rules, overlapping talk occurs, studies revealed the
operation of a system:
1. one speaker drops out rapidly
2. as soon as one speaker thus ‘gets into the clear’, he typically
recycles precisely the part of the turn obscured by the overlap.
Conversation analysis: Preliminary issues 111
_____________________________________________________________________
Question/answer
Greeting/greeting
Invitation/acceptance(declination)
Offer/acceptance (refusal)
These sequences are called adjacency pairs because, ideally, the two
parts should be produced next to each other. The point is that some
classes of utterances are conventionally paired such that, on the
production of a first pair part, the second becomes relevant and
remains so, even if it is not produced in the next turn. The next turn in
an adjacency pair ‘sequence’ is a relevant second pair part. But that
need not be the next turn in the series of turns making up some
particular conversation.
Example of an insertion sequence: (Levinson 1983)
1. A: Can I have a bottle of Mich? Q1
B: Are you over twenty-one? Ins 1
A: No. Ins.2
B: No. A1
The child asks his mother to confirm her observation that they will
‘have to cut these’, then getting no response in the 1.5-secon pause in
line 3, makes an issue out of the absence of an answer by repeating the
question.
114 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
Preference
Another inferential aspect of adjacency pairs stems from the fact that
certain first pair parts make alternative actions relevant in second
position. In some adjacency pairs there is a choice of two likely
responses, of which one is termed preferred response (because it
occurs more frequently), and the other dispreferred (because it is less
common).
Examples:
1. Offer A: Like some coffee?
-acceptance (preferred) B: I’d love some.
-refusal (dispreferred) B: Thanks, but I’m
waiting for my friend
EXAMPLE:
1 Jo: T’s-it’s a beautiful day out isn’t it?
2 Lee: Yeh it’s gorgeous.
(Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998:44)
116 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
Speakers may design first parts in particular ways in order to get certain
social actions done.
IV. SUMMARY
• CA is the study of recorded, naturally occurring talk-in-
interaction.
• CA is only marginally interested in language as such, but first
and foremost in language as a practical social accomplishment.
• Its object of study is the interactional organization of social
activities.
In other words, CA aims at discovering how participants understand
and respond to one another in their turns at talk, with a central focus on
how sequences of actions are generated. Throughout the course of a
conversation or talk-in-interaction, speakers display in the ‘next’ turns
an understanding of what the ‘prior’ turn was about. That
understanding may turn out to be what the prior speaker intended, or
not. This is described as next-turn proof procedure and it is the most
basic tool used in CA to ensure that analyses explicate the way in
Conversation analysis: Preliminary issues 117
_____________________________________________________________________
Basic notions
1. Turn-taking mechanism:
The turn-taking model has two components:
a. turn construction units
Turns at talk can be seen as constructed out of units which broadly
correspond to linguistic categories such as sentences, clauses, single
words (e.g., ‘Hey!’, ‘What ?’) or phrases.
• Features of turn-construction units
• projectability – it is possible for participants to
project, in the course of a turn-construction unit,
what sort of unit it is and at what point it is likely to
end.
• transition relevance place – at the end of each
unit there is the possibility for legitimate transition
between speakers.
b. Turn distribution
• There is no strict limit to turn size, given the extendable
nature of syntactic turn-constructional units;
• There is no exclusion of parties;
• The number of parties can change.
remains so, even if it is not produced in the next turn. The next turn in
an adjacency pair ‘sequence’ is a relevant second pair part.
3. Preference organization
In some adjacency pairs there is a choice of two likely responses, of
which one is termed preferred response (because it occurs more
frequently), and the other dispreferred (because it is less common).
V. TASKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lazaraton, A., 1997, Peference organization in oral proficiency
interviews: the case of language ability assessments, in
Research on Language and Social Interaction, 30(1): 53-72
Schegloff, E., A., 1980, Preliminaries to preliminaries: ‘Can I ask you a
question?’ in Sociological Inquiry, 50 (3-4): 104-52.
____ 1988, Presequences and indirectness, in Journal of Pragmatics,
12: 55-62
Conversation analysis: Preliminary issues 121
_____________________________________________________________________
8. REPAIRS AND
OVERALL ORGANISATION OF
CONVERSATIONS
The area of repair has generated a large amount of work in CA, the aim
being that of showing how repair illustrates participants’ orientations to
the basic turn-taking rules. There are two main ways in which this is
done:
Repair types
(All the examples and interpretations below are taken from Hutchby
and Wooffitt, 1998:61-63)
speaker who produced the trouble source), and repair initiated by other.
Consequently, there are four varieties of repair:
In this case it transpires that the first speaker has made a ‘slip of the
tongue’. However, the co-participants do not simply proffer the correct
word. Nor do they explicitly announce that a mistake has been made.
They provide a partial repeat of the prior turn and thereby recycle the
trouble source. The first speaker, then, can infer that there was a
problem connected to his earlier utterance, and the partial repeat of the
earlier turn identifies for them the precise source of trouble.
Furthermore, as a trouble source has been identified but nor repaired,
the possibility is offered for the speaker who has produced the trouble
source to repair it.
• Self-initiated other-repair. The speaker of a trouble source may
try and get the recipient to repair the trouble – for example if a
name is proving troublesome to remember.
E.g.:
In the following example the first speaker’s reference to his trouble
remembering someone’s name initiates the second speaker’s repair.
2 A: / Dan Watts.
• Other-initiated other-repair. The recipient of a trouble-source
turn both initiates and carries out the repair. This is closest to what
is conventionally understood by ‘correction’.
E.g.:
In the following example there is an explicit correction which is then
acknowledged and accepted in the subsequent turn:
• Opening section:
1. Summons – the telephone rings and the person at the receiving end
almost invariable speaks first (‘Hello’)
2. Answer – the caller produces a greeting in response, usually with a
self identification
3. Reason for summons
• The main body of a call
It is usually structured by ‘topical constraints’: the content of the first
slot is likely to be understood as the main reason for the call, and after
that topics should by preference be ‘fitted’ to prior ones. Topics
therefore are often withheld until a ‘natural’ location for their mention
turns up. Evidence for this preference for linked transitions from one
Repairs; Overall organization of conversations 127
_____________________________________________________________________
• Closing section
Techniques for topic closing are intimately connected to the
introduction of the closing section, or the shutting down of a
conversation.
E.g. :
A: I’ll ring you on Sunday night then
B: all right ring me Sunday
128 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
A: I will
B: bye bye then
A: bye
This structure avoids abrupt closure (construed as rudeness), and give
option of re-opening after the pre-sequence, thus ensuring that neither
participant is deprived of the right to add something forgotten.
III. SUMMARY
Repair types
The repair system embodies a distinction between the initiation of
repair (marking something as a source of trouble), and the actual repair
itself. There is also a distinction between repair initiated by self (the
speaker who produced the trouble source), and repair initiated by other.
Consequently, there are four varieties of repair:
IV. TASKS:
2.
L: an’ but all of the door ‘n things were taped up=
=I mean y’ know they put up y’know that
kinda paper stuff, the brown paper.
3.
A: Lissana pigeons
(0.7)
B: Quail I think
4.
A: Have you ever tried a clinic?
B: What?
A: Have you ever tried a clinic?
132 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Schegloff, E. A. & Sacks, H., 1973, Opening up
Closings, in Semiotica, 7: 289-327.
Schegloff, E., A., Jefferson, G., Sacks, H., 1977, The
preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in
conversation, in Language, vol 53, No. 2, 361-382
Repairs; Overall organization of conversations 133
_____________________________________________________________________
9. ISSUES OF TRANSCRIPTION
CA, who place a great emphasis on the use of naturally occurring data,
view transcripts as ‘representation’ of the data, while the tape itself is
viewed as the ‘reproduction’ of a social event. The transcription of the
data is considered part of the analysis itself. There is much that we hear
in the stream of speech in addition to the sounds by which we recognise
the individual words. Punctuation marks such as capital letters, full
stops, question marks, commas, were introduced to go some way to
represent the pauses, rhythms and tunes that are such a feature of the
way people talk.
There are also many, subtle ways in which speakers can use their
voices in order to say things in different ways. We can refer to an
individual’s ability to use their voices in different ways as the
134 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
1. Turn-taking features
Turn: a turn is the utterance(s) by which a speaker holds the floor and
a new turn starts when there is a speaker change. An utterance may be
made of one or more words, including non-linguistic vocalisations,
such as laughter and back-channeling.
The turn at talk is the main unit of analysis of the interaction. However,
since the page lines are strictly limited in length, whereas turns are not,
whenever the turn takes longer than a line, you could simply continue
the transcription of the turn onto the next line.
However, you may come across cases in which there are long stretches
of uninterrupted talk (for example in story-telling). Then the issue of
marking line boundaries may occur. For reasons of readability and
relevance to the analysis, in the long streteches of uninterrupted talk,
you can use one line for:
138 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
Pause: these are defined as intervals between turns, which may show:
1) clause completion) or 2) signals the point where the next speaker can
pick up the floor. Pauses refer to the timing of the participants’ talk
relative to each other. The following speaker’s talk may be latched on
to the prior speaker’s with no gap at all. Sometimes the speakers talk at
the same time and produce overlapping talk. There are inferences that
can be made on the timing of the talk, such as being supportive, pushy,
downright interruptive, etc.
2. Prosodic features
Prosody refers to rhythm and intonation. You may include such
prosodic features as:
• Loudness – segments, syllables, words or sequences of words that
are particularly loud relative to the surrounding talk
• Stress – segments, syllables, words or sequences of words that have
particularly strong stress relative to surrounding talk
• Intonation contour – clause final intonation, clause final rising
intonation
Below are listed symbols and their significance that you could use
when transcribing a piece of conversation:
140 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
Symbol Significance
_______________________________________________
Arabic numerals line numbers
. clause final falling intonation
? clause final rising intonation
, slight rise
(.) short hesitation within a turn (less than 2
seconds)
(2) inter-turn pause longer than 1 second, the number indicating the
seconds
= = latched utterances, with no discernible gap between the prior
speaker’s and the next speaker’s talk
/ the onset of overlapping talk
CAPS Segments, syllables, words or sequences of words that are
particularly loud relative to the surrounding talk;
Underlined item segments, syllables, words or sequences of
words that have particularly strong stress relative
to surrounding talk
:: lengthened syllables or vowels
(words within transcriber’s guesses
parentheses)
[words in square non-verbal information and/or unclear passages
brackets]
(*) unidentified speaker
italics word in Romanian
35 (*) mhm
II. SUMMARY
Features of talk represented in transcriptions
1. Turn-taking features
• Turn: a turn is the utterance(s) by which a speaker holds
the floor and a new turn starts when there is a speaker
change. An utterance may be made of one or more
words, including non-linguistic vocalisations, such as
laughter and back-channeling.
• Back-channeling - Non-word vocalisations are
transcribed, as appropriate, with er, erm, mm. These are
important to transcribe because they can be interpreted
as acknowledgement tokens, or ‘continuers’,
Issues of transcription 143
_____________________________________________________________________
2. Prosodic features
Prosody refers to rhythm and intonation. You may include such
prosodic features as:
• Loudness – segments, syllables, words or sequences of words that
are particularly loud relative to the surrounding talk
• Stress – segments, syllables, words or sequences of words that have
particularly strong stress relative to surrounding talk
• Intonation contour – clause final intonation, clause final rising
intonation
III. TASKS
144 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
The author mostly uses the verb ‘say’ in reporting speech. Substitute
alternative verbs of saying or descriptions of ways of saying, to indicate
how you think the things might have been said (from
Langford,1994:39-40).
2. Record any piece of informal conversation (from any source you can
afford) and transcribe a short excerpt. Create your own system of
transcription conventions. Design the transcription system in such a
way as to produce transcripts that are accurate at the relevant level of
detail, but accessible to the reader too.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Issues of transcription 145
_____________________________________________________________________
Two basic types of institutions have been defined (cf. Hutchby and
Wooffitt, 1998). They are described as:
7 B: Yes.
8 A: With several men?
9 B: No.
10 A: Just one?
11 B: Two.
12 A: Two. And you are seventeen and a half?
13 B: Yes.
As we see the defence attorney (A) and the alleged rape victim (B)
restrict themselves to producing questions and answers, and by this
restriction of turn-taking beahviour, we gain a powerful sense of
context simply through the details of their talk.
ask by far the most, and often clients ask virtually no questions. But
unlike in formal settings, there is no norm that says one person ‘must’
ask questions and the other must answer. So, there are other aspects of
talk to be located in order to see where the orientations to context
emerge.
Aspects of asymmetry:
In institutional discourse there is a direct relationship between status
and role, on the one hand, and discursive rights and obligations, on the
other. For instance, analysts of doctor-patient interactions have
observed that doctors typically ask far more questions than their
patients, and those questions tend to be more topic-directing than the
few that the patients ask.. However, it seems that patients are often
complicit in maintaining a situation in which the doctor is able not only
to determine the topics that will be talked about, but also to define the
upshots and outcomes of the discussions.
(Physical examination)
1 Dr: Yeah.
2 (0.3)
3 Dr: That’s shingles.
4 (1.2)
5 Dr: That’s what it is:
6 (0.6)
7 Pt: Shingles.
8 Dr: Yes.
152 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
1) One kind of example can be found in Drew’s (in Drew and Heritage,
1992) work on courtroom interrogation. He observes how the pre-
allocated question-answer format of courtroom interaction gives
attorneys a certain discursive power which is not available to witnesses:
the power of summary.
On talk radio this asymmetry is ‘built into’ the overall structure of calls.
Callers are expected, and may be constrained, to go first with their line,
while the host systematically gets to go second. The fact that hosts
systematically have the first opportunity for opposition within calls thus
opens to them argumentative resources which are not available in the
same way to callers. These resources are powerful, in the sense that
they enable the host to constrain callers to do a particular kind of
activity – to produce ‘defensive’ talk.
Examples of ‘resources for power’ are those which belong to a class of
utterances including So? or What’s that got to do with it?
154 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
The important thing to bear in mind is that one should not seek to treat
power as a monolithic, one-way process. The exercise of powerful
discursive resources can always be resisted by a recipient.
In Drew and Heritage (1992) you can find a collection of articles about
institutional conduct and its underlying orientations, which offer
insights into the ways the interaction is conducted within organizations.
The contributors to the volume show kinds of possibilities that can
emerge when CA techniques are applied to institutional settings.
IV. SUMMARY
V. TASKS:
II
P: but she really has been very unfair to me. Got /no
D: / hm
P: respect for me /at all and I think. That’s one of the reasons
D: /hm
P: why I drank so /much you /know and
D: / hm / hm are you
You back are you back on it have you started drinking /again
P: / no
D: oh you haven’t (unclear)
P: no but em one thing that the
lady on the Tuesday said said to me was that. if my mother did
turn me out of the /house which she thinks she
D: / yes hm
P: may do coz..she doesn’t like the way I’ve been she
has turned me o/ before and em she said that
D: / hm
P: I could she thought that it might be possible for m
me to go to a council / flat
D: /right yes / yeah
P: /but she
Said it’s a very she wasn’t /pushing it because my
D: /hm
P: mother’s got to sign a whole /lot of things and
D: / hm
Talk in institutional settings 159
_____________________________________________________________________
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Austin, J. 1962, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford,
Oxford University Press
Cook, G.,1989, Discourse, Oxford University Press
Coposescu, L., 2003, The construction of meaning in the
Interaction between native speakers of English and Romanians,
Editura Universitatii Transilvania din Brasov
Coulthard, M., 1989, An Introduction to Discourse
Analysis, Longman
Drew, P. and Heritage, J. (eds.), 1992 Talk at Work:
Interaction in Institutional Settings, Cambridge University Press
van Dijk,T.A., 1985, Handbook of Discourse analysis, 4
vols, London, Academic Press
Eggins,S.,& Slade,D., 1997, Analysing Casual
Conversation, Cassell
Erickson, F., and Schultz, J., 1982, The Counselor as
Gatekeeper. Social Interaction in Interviews, New York,
London, Academic Press.
Fairclough, N., 1992, Discourse and Social Change, Polity
Press
________ 1995, Critical Discourse analysis, London and
New York, Longman
Garfinkel, H., 1967, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Inc.
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall
Grice, H., P., 1975, Logic and Conversation, in Cole &
Morgan, 1975:41-58)
Gumperz, J., J., 1982, Discourse Strategies, Cambridge
University Press
Bibliography 161
_____________________________________________________________________
53:361-82
Searle, J., 1969, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy
of Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Sinclair, J., and Coulthard, M., 1975, Towards an Analysis
of Discourse: the English used by teachers and pupils,
Oxford, Oxford University Press
Thomas, J., 1995, Meaning in Interaction, Longman
Verschueren, J., 1999, Understanding Pragmatics, Arnold,
London
Yule, G., 1996, Pragmatics, Oxford University Press
Bibliography 163
_____________________________________________________________________
INDEX
A
action: 6, 10, 12, 21, 31-32, 35,
36, 37, 39, 41-44, 71, 94, 103, 104, 107, 113-115, 145, 146, 153
activity-type: 81, 90-93, 96, 98,
adjacency pairs: 119, 111-113,
115, 116-118
asymmetry: 148-151
Austin, J.: 31-32, 37, 52
B
back-channeling: 135, 136, 140
C
constraint: (pragmatic) 3, 77, 78
(legal): 78, 82, 88 (topical) 125, 129, 146-148, 153
context: 1, 3, 6, 7-9, 15, 18, 21,
23, 31, 35, 43, 51, 67, 71-75, 78, 80, 86, 89, 92, 94, 97, 106, 133, 144, 146,
148, 150, 151
contextualization cue: 95, 98
Cook, G.: 33, 34, 36, 38, 45, 46, 51, 56, 66, 102,
co-operative principle: 52, 56
58, 63, 65-67
Coposescu, L.: 48, 98, 101,
136,
Coulthard, M.: 79
D
deixis: 15-20, 25-28, 71
Drew, P.: 86, 150, 153, 154,
E
Eggins, S./Slade, D.: 115
Erickson F./Schultz, J.: 87, 97
ethnography of speaking: 75
77, 81, 86-87,
ethnomethodology: 86, 107
164 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________
L
Langford, D.: 9, 10, 117, 133,
142
latched (talk-utterances): 137,
138
Levinson, St.: 20, 30, 31, 52,
77, 81, 86, 96, 111, 145, 146
locution: 37-38, 44
M
maxims (Gricean): 57-66, 79,
82, 88
Mey, L.J.:1, 7, 8, 10, 15, 25,
27, 29, 46, 47, 71, 72, 73, 75, 80, 118, 119
mismatches: 90, 93-95, 97, 98,
101
N
N(ext)T(urn)R(repair)I(nitiator
122
O
overall organization (of
conversation): 120, 125
overlap(ping talk): 64, 83, 108-
110, 120, 127, 137, 138, 141
P
performatives: 32, 34, 39
preference: 110, 113-115, 117,
124, 125, 128, 129, 131
pre-alocation: 145, 153
presupposition: 21, 23-28
perlocution(nary effect): 37, 38, 44, 47
S
Sacks, H.: 105-107, 109, 120,
131, 151, 154
166 Issues of Pragmatics
____________________________________________