Agenda: Language and aging: work,
play and movement ch 6-7, 10
I *Alert to changes on syllabus
II *Small groups: Conversational analysis of previous conv/narrative
– share and continue with
(a) Turn Structure
Adjacency pair: greeting-greeting,
question-answer [Excamples
from Norrick, http://www.uni-saarland.de/fak4/norrick/lecture.htm
]
Pre-sequence:
"Are you busy Saturday night?"
Sue: Hi. greeting
Jill: Hi. greeting
Sue: So, how have you been.
question
Jill: Not so well
really. answer
Sue: Oh I'm sorry to hear
that. response
Jill: How about you? question
Sue: Not too bad, I
guess. answer
Jill: Yes, one muddles
through. response
Sue: By the way, I’m
looking for Al. statement ?request?
Jill: I just saw him at
Lou’s. response
Sue: Really? Who else was
there? response/question
Jill: Fred. answer
Sue: Wow. Are you busy
right now? response/question
(pre-sequence)
Jill: Not really. answer
Sue: Would you do me a
favor? question
(pre-request)
Jill: Sure. answer
(commitment)
Sue: Would you call Al for
me? request
(b) repair
Self-repair: A: I saw Judy last Tuesday- sorry, Monday.
Other-initiated repair:
A: I saw Judy last
Tuesday.
B: Uh:, Tuesday?
A: Oh, yeah, I saw her
Monday at the party.
Other-repair:
A: I saw Judy last
Monday.
B: You mean
Tuesday.
A: Yeah, I saw her
at
(c) implicature
Pragmatics
studies how context influences communication.
It examines a speaker's intention in
producing an utterance. if a speaker asks How's
that salad doing? Is it ready yet?" as a way of ("politely")
enquiring about the salad, his/her intent may be in fact to make the
waiter bring the salad.
The illocutionary force of the utterance is
not an inquiry about the progress of salad construction, but a demand that
the salad be brought. The illocutionary force is comprised of the illocutionary
point of an utterance, plus the particular
presuppositions and attitudes that must accompany that point.
The
linguist and philosopher, Grice, examines the difference between what is said
and what is meant. He claims that to understand an utterance one needs
These
principles can be described as common expectations in a given communicative
situation between rational human beings. The sum of these principles make up
The Cooperative Principle (CP) which consists of 4 maxims (quantity,
quality, relation, manner) The goal of the CP is to account for implicatures.
Maxim of Quantity:
1. Make your contribution to the conversation
as informative as necessary.
2. Do not make your contribution to the conversation more informative than
necessary.
Maxim of Quality:
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Maxim of Relevance:
Be relevant (i.e., say things related to the
current topic of the conversation).
Maxim of Manner:
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness).
4. Be orderly.
Implicatures are those meanings implied by an
utterance in a variety of contexts and situations.
STANDARD IMPLICATURE
Conversational implicature that arises from the addressee's assumption
that the speaker is being cooperative by directly observing the conversational
maxims. The activity
in which we are engaged suggests how we could expect the utterance may or
should be interpreted
A background belief relating to an utterance, that
must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the
utterance to be considered appropriate in context….
"John regrets that
he stopped singing light opera before he left
- `There is someone uniquely identifiable to
speaker and addressee as "John"',
- `John stopped singing light opera before he
left
- `John was singing light opera before he left
- `John left
- `John had been at
Playing with presuppositions and implicature
The Answering machine game
·
Write down the
message you have for callers on your machine(s)
·
Write down a
funny or unusual ‘greeting’ message you have heard on a machine
1. Are there message(s)
in answering machine solicitations that flout any of the maxims?
2. Which maxims seem to
be the most crucial in terms of an ‘understood’ schema for answering machines?
3. Do you have
messages/solicitations that illustrate standard implicature?
4. What kinds of
presuppositions can you illustrate from your data?
III. *Aging and work, play and
movement ch 6-7, 10
Leisure and retirement– powerpoint from Project MORE
Marriage
and friendship
How
do we talk about these issues? Back to CA
Work and movement
with language: *Clark LangCogFig02
28
February 2002,
Language
and coordination
Herbert
H. Clark, Department of
Psychology,
People use language
to coordinate on many of their joint actions—what they do together. But they
cannot use language itself without coordinating with each other—on attending
to, identifying, understanding, and taking up each other’s utterances. The
central issue is coordination of action—what it requires and how it is
accomplished. I will consider evidence on two issues: the role of language in
coordinating action, and the role of coordination in using language.
* * *
I want to take
up a particular issue here that starts with some observations made by a woman
named Gail Jefferson. The
question is about “ok,” which we see done in some conversations, but never in
others. What is its use? Gail Jefferson said “mhmm” when seen in conversations is an exhibit of what she
called passive recipiency, which means “I am not
taking the floor.” Where as
“yeah” says, “I am ready to take the floor.” She gives
evidence that is consistent with this. But what is “ok”? (p 55)
[Professor Clark
shows a video of subjects performing and conversing about the task.]
If you break
this down it consists of a set of cycles. The director says how the builder
should put the blocks together, the builder says “mhmm.” The director says what to do next; the builder says
“mhmm.” The director states the final action for putting one section
of blocks together and the builder replies “ok.” This is a cycle, in the first sense in identifying the
object, now we go onto the next block. This is a nice task because it is so
well defined. I want to point out that the
builder says, “mhmm,” and
“ok.” If we look in great detail and hierarchically at what is going on – we
see that when one level is complete you say “ok.” If we look at the data, 80% of “mhmm”s are done in the middle of a
cycle. Sixty percent of the “ok”s are
at the end as a signal to go on. “Ok” is completely a vertical marker, “mhmm”s are horizontal. They are telling you how to move
through the hierarchy of the task that you are engaged in. When there is a
clear well-defined task, we
often see these “ok”s. In
ordinary conversation we see them almost never.
NOTE: We call
these “go-ahead”s when we are working to communicate
with confused older people—The powerpoints we use for service-learning training in GRNT 2100 are at
Project MORE’s intergenerational gallery, http://education.uncc.edu/more/StartResources/Intergenerational_Gallery.htm
*Gender-cued issues in CA -- ICLASP powerpoint
IV *for next time: in your conversational
narrative, locate and assign a function to
1. one or more instances of conversational repair
2. one or more presuppositions
3. one or more items of figurative language -- assuming any or all are present
Similes overtly
state that something is like
something else, and therefore, call attention to the act of comparing in a way
that metaphors do not. Arguably, a simile is less dangerous than a metaphor
because it acknowledges the comparison and invites rebuttal.
Metaphor is an implied rather than explicit comparison
..."Her hand is a slender ivory sculpture" is a metaphor." Prof.
Andrea Tyler says “Traditional
views of language and the mind hold that language and thought are inherently
literal and that metaphor is a special kind of language, belonging to the area
of literature and requiring different cognitive and linguistic skills than
those employed in ordinary language. … we will examine
an alternative view--conceptual metaphor theory. Conceptual metaphor theory
argues that metaphor is a fundamental aspect of how humans understand and think
about the world. This understanding of the world is in turn reflected in
everyday language… taken from sources such as newspapers, sports commentary,
and political speeches.
2 May
2002
Understanding
figurative language
Sam Glucksberg, Department of Psychology,
Figurative language has been
considered derivative from and more complex than literal language. In my dual-reference
theory of metaphor I argue that people use the same strategies to create and to
understand ordinary metaphors as they use to understand literal language.
Metaphors create novel categories that are used to characterize topics of
interest. Metaphorical categories are special in that (a) the novel categories
are based on outstanding examples of the things that they represent, and (b)
these categories get their names from the those best examples. Thus, “shark”
can be taken as a metaphor for any vicious and predatory being, from an
unscrupulous salesperson to a murderous character in the Three Penny Opera.
“Shark” thus has dual reference: a literal referent and a metaphorical
category, as in “My lawyer was a shark.”
Analogy draws
extended metaphorical comparisons by suggesting that two things are alike in
the same way that two other things are alike. Analogies when extended in
science are known as models.
V.
*Finally, via CENTRA, in two labs
– practice with techniques while we look at adults working/playing/expanding
friendship-marriage commitments
Powerpoint on OKeeffe with survey
Web
safari http://www.intermonet.com/oeuvre/grddeco.htm Monet
Powerpoint on Cocoon with real-time markup
Web safari http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088933/
trailer