Lecture 8. Language and Social Interaction
General characteristics
In its simple definition interaction iscommunication or collaborationbetween two or more people when they cause a speech effect upon each other. The idea of a two-way effect is essential in the concept of interaction, as opposed to a one-way causal effect.
In communications interaction occurs when speakers take turns transmitting messages between one another. This should be distinguished from transactive communication, in which some sources transmit messages. This category includes all new modes of communication, such as cable video, teletext, videotext, telescoping, computers, Internet, TV-conferences, etc. Tele communication also falls under this category: cell phones, pagers, mobile phones, electronic mail are all interactive communications.
In sociology, social interaction is a dynamic, changing sequence of social actions between individuals (or groups) who modify their reactions due to the actions of their partner(s). Social interaction can be differentiated into accidental, repeated, regular, and regulated.
Language switchingis not solely determined by a situation (See the previous lecture). As psycholinguists have pointed out, speakers are not sociolinguistic automata. Speakers can use switching for their own purposes: to influence or define the situation as they wish, and to convey nuances of meaning and personal intention. This can be done in one of the two possible ways:
a) by using two languages. For example, in many areas of the south-western USA there are bilingual Mexican-American communities. Their verbal repertoires comprise Spanish and English. The following passage, demonstrating this kind of instant switching, was recorded by John Gumperz and Eduardo Hernandez from a speaker who lives in such a community, and is shown in the discussion on giving up smoking:
‘I didn't quit, I just stopped. I mean it wasn't an effort I made que voy a dejar de fumar porque me hace daño o this or that. I used to pull butts out of the wastepaper basket. I'd get desperate, y ahi voy al basurero a buscar, a sacar, you know?
The Spanish part can be translated as: 'that I'm going to stop smoking because it's harmful to me' and 'and there I go to the waste-basket to look for some, to get some'.
This switch on, in a culture, where English is a dominant language, is presumably subconscious, and has the effect of making the conversation more intimate and confidential. Language mixing, as we can call this rapid switching, has an effect of enabling the speaker to signal two identities at once.
b) a speaker can switch from one language to another completely. David Parkin has described an interesting example of this from Uganda. In Kampala, the capital of Uganda, the sociolinguistic situation is very complex. Many different ethnic groups live in the town; most of them have different vernacular languages. They include Nilotic, Bantu, Arabic, and a small number of speakers of Hamitic languages. In addition the people know and use English and Swahili.
This means that many people in Kampala and elsewhere in Uganda are often presented with the problems of language choice. Many people must speak English, Swahili, the official languages of Uganda, as well as their own vernaculars. Meetings and other social gatherings are conducted in English and Swahili; but in everyday communication the people use different vernaculars; thus creating ethnic tension and hostility.
The study of the way in which language is used in conversations of this and many other types is an important part of sociolinguistics. Sociolinguists have looked at the way in which language can be used for manipulating relationships and achieving particular goals. They have also looked at the rules for conducting conversation and its interpretation, and at the way these may differ from society to society.
Interaction structure
An English vernacular speaker knows that it can often be embarrassing in the English society to be together with someone and not talk to them. This is because language, besides being means of communicating information, is also an important factor of establishing and maintaining relationships with other people. Young children have to learn not only the pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary of their language; they also have to learn how to use the language in conversational interaction in order to be able to establish social relationships and participate in two-way communication.
Different verbal and nonverbal signals used in conversation have been studied, and the functions of such factors as gaze, gesture, tone of voice are analyzed in social interaction studies. Therefore social interaction may consist of closely related sequences of nonverbal signals and verbal utterances.
Among the theoretical models developed to describe the nature of social behaviour, stimulus–response reaction has been generally found helpful but incomplete. Other scholars see social behaviour as a kind of motor skill that is goal-directed and modified by response, while other models have been based on the theory of games, which emphasizes the pursuit and exchange of rewards and has led to experiments based on laboratory games.
An obvious aspect of the structure of conversations is that they are based on the principle of turn-taking, and are organized in such a way as to ensure that only one speaker speaks at a time. In a conversation between two people, each speaker, obviously enough, takes a turn alternatively; but note that a speaker's 'turn' bestows (даровать) not only the right but also the obligation to speak. If someone were reporting a conversation between certain John and Mary, he might say of ‘one point offered by John and then stop… because Mary didn't answer anything'. However, it was Mary's turn to speak, but she kept silent. That is why she is the one who seemed to have broken the rules of conversation.
There are also moments in the structure of conversation where it is possible, and moments where it is not possible, to interrupt a speaker. And there are 'rules', too, about how and when one is allowed to introduce a new topic into conversation. There are even 'rules' about silence! It has been said that, in a conversation between two English speakers who are not close friends, a silence of longer than about four seconds is considered not civilized. It means that people become embarrassed if nothing is said during that time. They feel obliged to say something, even if this something is only a remark about the weather. Many of these 'rules' can in fact be broken. We say 'I'm sorry to interrupt', 'On a completely different topic', 'To go back to what we were talking about before', 'Just let me think about that for a minute', and so on, and so forth.
Another big problem is listening in relation to speaking. Context analysis and the study of numerous tape-recordings led the researchers to look at the verbal and nonverbal behavior together. Such analyses make it seem as if in an ordinary conversation it is each individual's successive turn at speaking catches the action. But that tells only part of the story. When we engage ourselves in a conversation, we do not just utter little speeches one after another, as in a debate; much more is going on interactionally in the situation considered as a whole. A very important component in what is going on is listening, considered not just as a passive reception of information but as a communicative interaction that is itself informative to the participants in the event.
When the researcher views an audio-visual record carefully, especially in a slow motion, he is impressed by the mutuality of all the partners engaged in interaction. In the process of speech listeners are not just doing nothing, they do not "switch off" when they are not speaking. Rather, listeners are very active in the scene — they may be gazing at the speaker or at some object in the scene to which the speaker is referring, they may be nodding or changing facial expression while listening. Listeners may be speaking while the primary speaker is talking. They utter brief "back channel" comments that show attention (e.g., in American English, "h-m*, "yeah"), or even speak out full clauses that overlap the talk of the primary speaker.
The cultural organization of social participation structure in conversation is an issue of pedagogical significance, since some classroom participation frameworks may be more or less familiar to students, depending upon the frameworks they are accustomed to in their daily life outside school.
Schegloff, and Jefferson argue that speaker change is a basic conversational process and that turn-taking mechanisms are organized about transition relevance places, which determine when a next speaker can take the floor. But they give no data on how such transition relevance places are signalled. Conversations, unlike sentences, do not come ready-made. Speaker and listener must be ready with verbal signs to determine when to take turns without interfering with oth ers' rights.
Another process of key importance for conversational inference is the signalling of utterance prominence to indicate which of several bits of information is to be highlighted or placed in focus. In the English rhetorical tradition this is done partly through syntax and lexical choice and partly through placement of prosodie accent. Given a particular choice of words, we have certain expectations about normal accent placement. These, however, can then be systematically violated to convey additional information not clearly given in the message.
A final signalling cue of relevance (намек уместности) here is the choice of discourse strategy. The following example of a brief recorded exchange between two secretaries in a small university office serves to organize a discussion of relevant interpretive processes given by Humperz.
1. A: Are you going to be here for ten minutes?
2. B: Go ahead and take your break. Take longer if you want.
3. A: I'll just be outside on the porch. Call if you need me.
4. B: OK. Don't worry.
Note that A could have achieved her end by simply asking Can I take my break?, in which case a simple one-word or one-phrase answer like Yes or OK would have been sufficient to complete the exchange. But given her choice of words, and the experience with similar situations tells us that more talk is preferable and naturally expected.
This discussion suggests that conversational inference is best seen not as a simple evaluation of intent but as involving a complex series of judgments, including relational or contextual assessments on how items of information are to be integrated into what we know and into the event at hand, as well as the assessments of content and interaction.
Regardless of the participation structure, however, the listening activity of the auditors is always available to the speaker in the form of a certain feedback about how and what is being said. Thus, the audience feedback and the production of coherent discourse by the speakers are both: taking place in real time, and influencing one another continually as speaking and listening are being produced in interaction jointly.
Listening activity by the audience is one of the main ways in which the people in interaction form environments for one another. This mutual influence is both simultaneous and successive. At the immediate moment of speaking, the speaker can see and hear what the auditors are doing — looking away, nodding, uttering a back-channel fragment and so on.
We can also observe that conversations consist of structured sequences of different types of utterances. In most cases, for instance, conversations are organised in such a way that questions are followed by answers, as in:
Q: Have you written to John yet
A: No, not yet.
Q: Are you going to write7
A: Yes, eventually.
However, it is perfectly possible for question and answer sequences to be embedded in one another:
Q: Have you seen John yet?
QA: Is he back?
Q: Didn't you know that?
A: No, I didn't.
A: He's back all right.
A: Well, I haven't seen him.
Like questions, summonses (обращения) are normally followed by answers:
Bill: John!
John: Coming!
The fact that a summons is normally followed by an answer may explain a rather odd fact, that in telephone conversations, it is usually the person who answers the telephone speaks first. From a purely common-sense point of view, it could be said that the caller has a far better idea of who is going to answer the phone than the answerer has of who is calling. Nevertheless, the answerer speaks first because the ringing of the telephone functions as a summons, which requires an answer, even if it is only 'hello'.
It is also possible, for adults, as native speakers of the language and skilled conversationalists, to distinguish between coherent sequences and random sequences of utterances. No one should have much trouble distinguishing between the following:
A: Are you going on holiday this year?
B: I haven't got any money.
A: Are you going on holiday this year?
B: My favourite colour is yellow.
Conversation conduct
W. Labov has pointed out that there is a number of rules for the interpretation of conversational discourses that adults have mastered and that children do not always understand.. The rule is this: if speaker A makes a request for information and speaker B 's response is not related linguistically to the question ('No, I'm not), then that response must be interpreted as asserting that there exists a proposition, known to both A and B, which makes a connection, and from which an answer to A 's question can be inferred (holidays cost money). Proposition is defined as an expression in language that can be believed, doubted, or denied or is either true or false. This rule of interpretation is very strong. If we hear a sequence of utterances that seem, on the face of it, to be totally disconnected, such as:
A Are you going on holiday this year?
B My aunt has just bought a bicycle.
we, nevertheless, try to force an interpretation on the conversation by searching for a proposition that might make sense of it. It is also of course possible for B to be mistaken in assuming that A shares knowledge of the proposition, or for A to deny the le'gitimacy (законность) of the proposition:
A Are you going on holiday this year?
BI haven't got any money!
A So what?
The fact that the rules for interpretation of discourses exist can easily be demonstrated by showing what happens when they are broken. Wolfram, for instance, investigated people's reactions to questioning of the sort:
A How old are you?
B 33.
A How come?
There is a rule of discourse interpretation which says that a ‘ How come?’ question involves an assertion that there exists a non-obvious proposition which is known to B, but which is not known to A. Wolfram interfered with the operation of this rule through asserting that it was not obvious why B was 33. Reactions to his ‘ how come?’ question showed very clearly that something had gone wrong. Some people laughed, some were embarrassed, some made a joke of it - and others searched hard for a non-obvious proposition that would make sense, such as: I look older than 33 because... or I'm still a student because....
Young children, of course, may have trouble with interpreting conversations, either because they are not familiar with a particular rule of interpretation, or because they are not yet aware of a particular proposition that is being asserted. The following would be a perfectly normal adult-child conversation:
Child Are we going on holiday this year?
Adult We haven't got enough money.
Child But are we going on holiday?
All societies, everywhere in the world, have rules about the way in which language should be used in social interaction. It is interesting to observe, however, that these rules may vary widely between one society and another. The study of these rules, and of cross-cultural differences in communicative norms, is often known as the ethnography of speaking. For instance, it is normal among English speakers for the answerer to speak first in telephone conversations. There is nothing inevitable about this, though. Some people in Japan, for example, expect the caller to be the one to speak first. And there are other aspects of telephone behaviour too, that can differ from one culture to another.
The norm for French telephone conversations, which children are taught to conduct is very different, and goes more like this:
Answerer: Hello.
Caller: Is that 123-4567?
A: Yes.
C: This is Andre here. I'm sorry to disturb you. Is Jean there?
It is normal, that is, for callers to apologize for the intrusion, and to identify themselves first. In American telephone conversations, callers are only really obliged to identify themselves if their intended addressee is not available:
A: Hello!
C: Is John near?
A: No, I'm afraid John's out at the moment.
C: OK. Please tell him Andy called.
Directness/Indirectness in conversation
We also observed above that there are rules for the conduct of conversations, which ensure that only one speaker speaks at a time. Studies in the ethnography of speaking, however, show that there are some cultures where this is not necessarily the case at all. In some Caribbean communities, as amongst certain groups of Black American adolescents, it is perfectly normal, at least in some situations, for everyone to talk at once. There are also many societies where it is quite normal for conversational silences to continue for much longer than four seconds. Some American Indian groups, such as Navajo and Apache, have traditionally held to the norm that one does not speak unless one actually has something non-trivial to say.
One can imagine that differences of this type between cultures can often lead, in cross-cultural communication, to misunderstanding and even hostility. When the cultures concerned are not very different, still difficulties can arise. Northern Europeans, for instance, often feel that Americans are noisy and dominating simply because the norms for how loudly and how much they talk differs between the two areas. And where the cultural differences are greater, the misunderstandings can be greater, too.
In Western Canada, for example, communication difficulties arise in interactions between English-speaking people of European origin and people who are speakers of a group of North American Indian languages known as Athabaskan. One crucial difference between the two ethnic groups is that the Whites use language to establish social relations. They speak to people in order to get to know them, and in order to find out how they stand relative to each other. Among Athabaskan groups, on the other hand, speech is avoided if there is doubt about social relationships and about how one should behave. And quite lengthy silences are readily tolerated.
In the interethnic communication there, English speakers start the conversation by introducing the topic because they want to set about establishing social relations and because the Athabaskans have remained silent. When there is a pause, they feel uncomfortable before the Athabaskans start speaking again.
The result is that English speakers hold the floor and control the topics of conversation for most of the time. The Athabaskans go away from the conversation thinking that English speakers are dominating, superior, garrulous (болтливый, словоохотливый), smug (чопорный) and self-centred. The English speakers, on the other hand, find the Athabaskans rude, surly (угрюмый, сердитый), taciturn (молчаливый) and withdrawn (замкнутые). In fact, hostility arises simply as a result of a failure by both parties to recognize that different groups of people have different norms concerning when and how language is to be used.
In fact, this can even happen within the same society. The American sociolinguist Deborah Tannen has suggested that in many respects communication between men and women can be regarded as cross-cultural communication, at least in North America, in Europe and elsewhere. She has suggested that men and women often fail to understand one another properly in interaction, and that such misunderstandings can lead to friction and tension in relationships. In fact, some Americans who have read her books on this subject have written to her to say that sociolinguistics has saved their marriages.
One aspect of communication that may cause problems of this type is the relationship between directness and indirectness. None of us say exactly what we think at all times - the world would be an even more antagonistic place than it already is if we did - and directness is something what the speakers in all cultures tend to be very careful about. Direct questions, for example, can be particularly threatening, and in many English-speaking societies some direct questions of the type - How much money do you earn? - are hardly ever asked. While other questions will typically be accompanied by some overt recognition that this is a problematical linguistic activity: How old are you - if I may ask? How much did you pay for it - if you don't mind telling me? Do you mind if I ask if you're married?
Indirectness is used as a conversational strategy much more frequently in some cultures than others. In India, for example, people admiring a particular object belonging to someone else may find themselves being given it as a present. There may be many reasons for this - Indians are perhaps especially hospitable and generous - but one interpretation is that compliments may be perceived, by people who are sensitive to indirect hints being employed rather than direct requests, as if they were requests, whether this was actually intended or not.
Even within Europe, the use of indirectness may vary considerably from one culture to another. Northern Europeans living in rural Greece, for example, eventually learn to say not Who's that person standing over there? but I've never seen before that person who is standing over there. The point is that direct questions impose an obligation on interlocutors to provide an answer. Indirectness leaves them with a choice.
Tannen reports that when a young Greek woman who was still living with her parents was asked why she was not going to a party, after she had asked her father if she could go and he had replied 'yes,' she explained that her father had not really wanted her to go because, if he had, he would have replied 'Yes, of course, go, and have a really wonderful time.'
It is possible that indirectness is used more in societies which are heavily hierarchical in structure. If you want to avoid giving offence to the people in authority over you, or if you want to avoid intimidating people lower in social hierarchy than yourself, then indirectness may be an important strategy.
Men use indirectness significantly less often in stating their goals, beliefs and intentions than women do, and therefore run the risk of being perceived by women as being tactless, dominating and impolite. Because they use indirectness less, they are also not sufficiently sensitive to its use by women, and may not realize when women have indirectly made a request or given an opinion. Women may therefore interpret men as being insensitive and self-absorbed.
Women, on the other hand, because of their relative lack of directness, may be perceived by men as being evasive (уклончивые) and indecisive. Because they are not sufficiently direct in what they say, moreover, they may be perceived by men as being uncommunicative. If misunderstandings are discussed after the event, men may say 'if that's what you think, why didn't you say so?' while women may reply 'I did say so, but you wouldn't listen to me!'
The British sociolinguist Jennifer Coates has suggested that men and women may differ conversationally in at least some other way too. In certain sections of British society, and at least in certain situations, men seem more inclined to prefer a more competitive kind of discourse, whereas women seem to feel on the whole more comfortable with a more cooperative style. Men, for example, may interrupt each other more, and take pleasure in argumentation and point-scoring.
Women, on the other hand, especially amongst groups of friends, may also go against the norm that only one person speaks at once, but in a rather different way. They may, as it were, interrupt another speaker to agree with her, or to supply corroboration, or to finish off what she was going to say for her, in a kind of supportive discourse style in which everyone combines to produce a form of joint monologue. This kind of difference can sometimes cause friction and misunderstanding, as when women participants in mixed-sex conversations complain that men are always interrupting them. Interestingly, Coates's research shows not only that men interrupt more than women, but also that women allow themselves to be interrupted more than men.