Integrated Language Skills 1
November 17, 2017
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Spoken Discourse • Just like written discourse, spoken discourse also has rules which speakers follow. • These rules have one major difference, however, from the rules which govern written texts, and that is that the speakers are largely unaware of them while they are speaking.
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• As conversation participants improvise their way to sharing an experience, explaining themselves, getting information, telling a joke or even spreading gossip, they are negotiating time with their co-speaker in which to speak, knowing when there is a signal to take a turn in speaking and also supporting the other speaker during her/his turn.
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Speech Event • Spoken discourse exists within a social context, and here we aim to use everyday speech events as a starting point from which to recognise that while we may not speak in words, sentences and paragraphs, we still do have rules to follow, though they can be broken just as the rules of syntax can be.
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Example: • Imagine how the conversation might go as you take your leave of someone after having had dinner at their house. – You might signal your intention of leaving by some line such as ‘I must be going’, – you might express gratitude for the meal, you might say thank you, – you might praise the excellence of the food, – you might suggest a return visit to your place, – the conversation might drift back to an earlier topic or even start a completely new one, – you might say thank you again, – and then you embark on the ‘goodbyes’ and ‘goodnights’ before finally going.
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• In such a situation, or speech event, the speakers will be unconsciously following rules whose purpose is to express thanks, reinforce relationships, leave on good terms and allow a suitable length of time between first suggesting one must go and actually going. • Saying you must go and then immediately fleeing the house would probably be considered inappropriate and rude. • Conversation, then, exists within a social context and this context determines the purpose and shapes the discourse.
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• Conversation, however, is not always clear-cut, and sometimes a breakdown in communication occurs because intention is misunderstood.
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Activity 1 • For example, consider the case of the woman who had just undergone surgery to have a lump removed from her breast. • She tells her female friends that she found it upsetting to have been cut into, and that the operation had left a scar and changed the shape of her breast. Her friends replied: ‘I know. It’s as if your body has been violated.’ But when she told her husband, he replied: ‘You can have plastic surgery to cover up the scar and restore the shape of your breast.’ 9
• She felt comforted by her friends’ comments, but upset by what her husband said. • Her friends gave her understanding but her husband reacted to her complaint by giving advice. • His intention was to offer help, but what his wife heard was him telling her to undergo even more surgery. 10
Speech Act • Intention lies behind a range of specific utterances called speech acts.
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For example: • Saying ‘I do’ at the appropriate moment in a wedding ceremony—assuming you meet all the other criteria, being the bride or groom, for example; • The minister also confers legal status when s/he announces ‘I name this child…’; the judge when s/he declares ‘I sentence you to two years’ imprisonment’, etc. 12
• Several attempts have been made to classify the thousands of possible speech acts in everyday occurrence. • Perhaps the most useful has been made by Searle (1969) who has suggested five groups:
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1. Representatives: the speaker is committed, in varying degrees, to the truth of a proposition, e.g. ‘affirm’, ‘believe’, ‘conclude’, ‘report’. 2. Directives: the speaker tries to get the hearer to do something, e.g. ‘ask’, ‘challenge’, ‘command’, ‘request’. 3. Commissives: the speaker is committed, in varying degrees, to a certain course of action, e.g. ‘bet’, ‘guarantee’, ‘pledge’, ‘promise’, ‘swear’. 4. Expressives: the speaker expresses an attitude about a state of affairs, e.g. ‘apologise’, ‘deplore’, ‘thank’, ‘welcome’. 5. Declarations: the speaker alters the status quo by making the utterance, e.g. ‘I resign’, ‘you’re offside’, ‘I name this child’, ‘you’re nicked’, ‘you’re busted punk’. 14
Examples: 1. ‘Waiter, I insist on seeing the manager’ is an example of a directive. 2. ‘I’d like to congratulate everyone involved in making the show such a success’ is an expressive. 3. ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ is a declarative. 4. ‘I vow to obey the rules of the Black Hand Gang’ is a commissive. 5. ‘I deny all knowledge of the facts’ is a representative. 15
Indirect Speech Acts • In reality, in everyday discourse, many speech acts do not directly address the listener. • For many reasons—because we might be obeying the politeness principle, for example, and don’t wish to impose— we may ask for something to be done indirectly. ‘Can you pass the salt?’ for instance, is not really a question but a directive; an answer of ‘Yes’ without any attempt to actually pass it would seem totally inappropriate. • Forms, then, such as ‘Can you pass the salt?’ in preference to the more direct ‘I command that you pass the salt’ are known as indirect speech acts. 16
• It’s possible, of course, to phrase speech acts in various ways —you can, for instance apologise without actually using the term ‘apologise’, as in ‘OK I was wrong’; have a bet with someone by saying ‘You’re on’. • Directives can be especially interesting in the gradient they take from direct order to humble question. • Imagine that you’ve got a fly in your soup in a restaurant; a gradient might go something like this:
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The Gradient Chain 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Waiter, get the manager immediately Waiter, I insist on seeing the manager. Waiter, I want to see the manager. Waiter, I’d like to see the manager, please. Waiter, if it’s not too much trouble I’d like to see the manager. 6. Waiter, I don’t suppose I could see the manager, could I?
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Activity 2 • Try a similar gradient from direct to indirect speech act: – 1 Asking someone out on a date – 2 Requesting someone to stop talking in the cinema.
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