Conversation as a type of discourse
Conversation can be written and spoken. Written conversation is more loaded. It has higher lexical density (* measure of lexical units vs functional (grammatical) units in total). Written is more decontextualized. Conversation in a novel represents oral speech.
General features of spontaneous oral speech:
1) the use of incomplete sentences (reasons for that:
· the character is overwhelmed;
· 2) started to say smth,
· but decided to change the wording;
· 3) someone interrupts them;
· 4) principal of economy;
· 5) elliptical sentences;
· 6) emotionally coloured words;
· 7) interjections; 8) pause fillers;
· 9) hesitation markers;
· 10) initiating signals (look here!);
· 11) false starts (repetition of the words of the previous speaker to gain time to think);
· 12) tag questions (to elicit agreement and support fron your interlocutor – typical of women);
· 13) phrasal verbs;
· 14) grammatical inaccuracies
Social features
· The use of vulgarisms (improper words)
· The use of slang
· Graphon (a distortion of spelling used to represent the wrong pronunciation (wanna)
· The use of dialectal words
· The use of individual features (particularly expressions of characters)
Speech acts
- an act that a speaker performs when making an utterance
1) Declarations - words, phrases which change the world(Priest: I pronounce you man and wife)
2) Representatives - state what the speaker believes to be the case– most often used, include: describing, claiming, hypothesing, insisting, predicting
3) Commissives – commit the speaker to some future actions, include: promising, offering, threatening, refusing, vowing, volunteering
4) Directives – make the hearer do smth– when we give: commands, requests, invitations, suggestions, forbidding
5) expressives – express emotions: apologizing, praising, congratulating, regretting
Speech acts can be on-hand (evident, as they are) and off-hand (the form does not coincide with the implication)
4) Adjacency pair ( the expected reaction from the interlocutors)
¾ Hello! (a cliché)
¾ Hello! (a cliché)
The reaction is always expected. The violation (aka dispreferred reaction) of it causes a very strong react. Why can we get a dispreferred reaction? – 1) you have not been heard, 2) your interlocutor was not paying attention, 3) they’re refuding to cooperate, 4) they do it on purpose and want to be rude
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¾ A question – answer; if no answer- smth went wrong
¾ Invitation – acceptance
¾ Assessment – agreement
¾ Proposal – agreement
¾ Complaint – apology
However, you may have some insertion
¾ Do you want to go to the cinema?
¾ What film is it? - insertion
¾ ….. - insertion
¾ Ok
Politeness strategies
Searl: (акты по Серлю)
¾ Locution – content of the utterance itself
¾ Illocution – the meaning the speaker intends
¾ Perlocution – interpretation of the message of the hearer
For politeness face management is the most important thing. To keep it, we use redressive, mitigating techniques
¾ Type this immediately! – face threatening
¾ I want this typed immediately – on-record representative, but! Also off-record command
¾ It’s necessary to type it asap ( the most вах высказывание, так и надо!)
Negative politeness (negative face) - demonstrates distance between interlocutors, it’s about avoiding intrusion on each other’s territory. The speakers avoid imposing or presuming and give the hearer options.
E.g.1) emphasizing the importance of the other person’s time; 2) use an apology; 3) hesitation; 4) verbalizing your command to the question; 5) using mitigating phrases ( sort of, in a way)=understatements
Positive politeness strategies:
¾ By demonstrating closeness and solidarity
¾ Appealing to friendship
¾ Making other people feel good
¾ Emphasising that both people have a common goal
¾ Claiming common ground
E.g. I know (admitting) you hate parties but come (direct order) anyway, we’ll all be there.
Context
The study of context has been gaining popularity in recent years, either in linguistics itself or in many other interdisciplinary subjects such as semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis as well. Different linguists seek to define context from different point of view in order to answer questions encountered in their own fields, and to support their own ideas and theories.
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When Guy Cook was studying the relationship between discourse and literature, he took “context” as a form of knowledge of the world and “the term „context‟ can be used in a broad and narrow sense. In the narrow sense, it refers to (knowledge of) factors outside the text under consideration. In the broad sense, it refers to (knowledge of) these factors and to (knowledge of) other parts of the text under consideration, sometimes referred to as „co-text‟.When studying reference and inference, George Yule also took “context” into account. He provided us with a somewhat general definition, “Context is the physical environment in which a word is used.” Thus, one main point of the context is the environment (circumstances or factors by some other scholars) in which a discourse occurs.
Classification of context
Opinions on how to classify context vary from one to another. According to different circumstances, we can point linguistic context, situational context and cultural context.
A) Linguistic Context. Linguistic context refers to the context within the discourse, that is, the relationship between the words, phrases, sentences and even paragraphs. Take the word “bachelor” as an example. We can‟t understand the exact meaning of the sentence “He is a bachelor.” without the linguistic context to make clear the exact meaning of this word. Linguistic context can be explored from three aspects: deictic, co-text, and collocation.
B) Situational context. Situational context, or context of situation, refers to the environment, time and place, etc. in which the discourse occurs, and also the relationship between the participants. This theory is traditionally approached through the concept of register, which helps to clarify the interrelationship of language with context by handling it under three basic headings: field, tenor, and mode. (filed=ongoing activity, tenor = social relationship enacted by the discourse, mode= linguistic reflection of the relationship )
C) Cultural context. Cultural context refers to the culture, customs and background of epoch in language communities in which the speakers participate. Therefore, language cannot avoid being influenced by all these factors like social role, social status, sex and age, etc.
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The role of the context
As we can see, context plays a very important role in discourse analysis. Let‟s try to generalize its role as follows.
· Eliminating Ambiguity
· Indicating Referents (also to avoid repetition)
· Detecting Conversational Implicature
A discourse and its context are in close relationship: the discourse elaborates its context and the context helps interpret the meaning of utterances in the discourse. The knowledge of context is a premise of the analysis of a discourse. When we study and analyze a discourse, we should bear in mind that no context, no discourse and we should not neglect the related context of a discourse.
19. Implicature And Explicature
Explicature is a technical term in pragmatics, the branch of linguistics that concerns the meaning given to an utterance by its context. The explicatures of a sentence are what is explicitly said, often supplemented with contextual information. They contrast with implicatures, the information that the speaker conveys without actually stating it.
Explicature was introduced by Sperber and Wilson as a concept in relevance theory (билет 24). Carston gives a formal definition in accord with their reasoning: [An explicature is an] ostensively communicated assumption that is inferentially developed from one of the incomplete conceptual representations (logical forms) encoded by the utterance.
ð Thus, only meanings of an utterance that are communicated can be explicatures. Information that can be inferred, but was not intended to be inferred by the communicator, is neither an explicature nor an implicature.
This definition also implies that the logical form (intuitively, the literal meaning) of an utterance is incomplete. In order to turn it into a complete proposition that is either true or false, enough context must be known to be able to infer additional information: to
1. disambiguate ambiguous expressions (like, “kiwi” might refer to a fruit or a bird)
2. assign referents to indexical expressions (such as pronouns) (like, “Susan likes her car”. “her” – Susan’s or “her” – some other girl’s?)
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3. "enrich" logical forms containing words and grammatical structures that are semantically or grammatically incomplete (ellipses, genitive constructions, the degree adverb "too" – all those constructions that require bigger context than just one sentence)
Kent Bach has coined the term impliciture to refer to completions of the logical form to a proposition, minus disambiguation and assignment of referents, and also to expansions in the above sense. This is to distinguish what is explicitly said in a narrow sense, i.e. the literal meaning, from enrichments and expansions that go beyond the linguistic material actually present in the sentence.
То есть, чтобы понять импликацию не нужно анализировать средства языка, нужны внеязыковые знания. И наоборот для экспликации.
20. MEANING CONSTRUCTION
Meaning construction is equated with conceptualisation, a dynamic process whereby linguistic units serve as prompts for an array of conceptual operations and the recruitment of background knowledge.
Meaning construction involves 3 most important components:
· the production of the piece of discourse
· text/ discourse
· the perception of the piece of discourse
Cognitive linguistics relates meaning to operation of mental spaces. The notion of meaning construction is also associated with mental spaces.
Meaning construction is a dynamic process of creating meaning which happens between 2 participants or the text and the reader. It is also an inferential process of arriving at the meaning which happens in every communicative act.
The process of meaning construction (or, the determination of both explicit and implicit meaning) is largely guided or facilitated by
· conceptual metaphor
· conceptual metonymy
· irony
· iconicity
Conceptual metaphor is cognitive mapping. Conceptual metaphors are stable, conventionalised and largely universal. There are two conceptual domains used in conceptual metaphors: Source domain and Target domain.
Metaphor is considered to be a basic mental capacity by which people understand the world and themselves. Conceptual metaphor serves as a very important passway to meaning construction.
Using a conceptual metonymy, we combine schemas engraved into our brains as concepts that are dependent on our physical perception and experience of the world. Metonymy works by calling up a domain of usage and an array of associations, and transfers them to a new domain of usage, indicating a close relationship between the two entities combined. Metonymy has only one domain (internal mapping).
TYPES: part for the whole, product for producer, object used for user, institution for people responsible, the place for the institution, the place for the event, container for contained, object used for user, cause for effect
Metonymy is less original than metaphor.
The term metaphtonymy stands for the way in which metaphor and metonymy interact: METAPHOR FROM METONYMY (A metaphor is grounded in a metonymic relation) [Close-lipped] (when having de lips closed). METONYMY WITHIN METAPHOR [She caught the Prime Ministers ear and persuaded him to accept her plan.
Irony may be subdivided into several types: verbal , situational.
1) One of them is a trope. In this case it communicates the opposite.
2) Irony could be a form of mention and pretence (allusional view of irony). Irony involves an allusion to some kind of expectations that were violated in some specific context. [A driver is confronted with a car ahead that makes a sudden turn without giving any signals. The reaction of the driver: " I just love people who signal when turning."]
Sarcasm = bitter irony.
Iconicity is similarity between the representation and the object represented.
Thus, in functional-cognitive linguistics, as well as in semiotics, iconicity is the conceived similarity or analogy between the form of a sign (linguistic or otherwise) and its meaning, as opposed to arbitrariness (произвольность).
Two types of iconicity are often recognized:
· imagic iconicity (oral/aural, tactile, visual signs)
· diagrammatic iconicity (structural and semantic)
The recent research differentiates two types of iconicity:
· exophoric (form miming meaning)
· endophoric (form miming form)
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