Disagreeing in english and vietnamese
CHAPTER ONE DISAGREEING – A COMMUNICATIVE ILLOCUTIONARY AND SOCIAL ACT
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- 1.1.1.2. Three-dimension speech acts
- 1.1.1.3. Classification of speech acts
- 1.1.1.4. Disagreeing – a communicative illocutionary act
- 1.1.2.1. Historical background
- 1.1.2.2. Co-text and context
- 1.1.2.3. Turn – turn taking and adjacency pairs
- 1.1.2.4. Disagreeing – a social act
CHAPTER ONEDISAGREEING – A COMMUNICATIVE ILLOCUTIONARY AND SOCIAL ACT
1.1.1.1. Speech acts and speech eventsSince its initiation by Austin a few decades ago, the notion of speech acts has become one of the most compelling notions in the study of language use. Speech acts have been central to the works by many other philosophers and linguists like Grice (1957, 1975), Hymes (1964), Searle (1969, 1975, 1979), Levinson (1983), Brown & Yule (1983), Mey (1993, 2001), Thomas (1995) and Yule ([1996] 1997). Their common assumption is that when conversing people use grammatical and lexical units not only to produce utterances, but also to perform actions. In saying something the speaker (S) does something (Austin 1962). The utterance given below is more than a statement; it is a pleasant and ear-pleasing compliment:
Generally, the actions that are produced via utterances to communicate are called speech acts (Yule 1996: 47). These SAs, considered ‘the basic or minimal units of linguistic communication.' (Searle 1969: 16), are performed in authentic situations of language use. In English, SAs are specifically labeled as compliment, apology, request, disagreeing or promise. These terms for SAs are used to name the S's communicative intentions and the hearer (H) is expected to correctly interpret the S's intentions via the process of inferences. The circumstances surrounding the utterances are of great help to both the S and the H in successful communication. These circumstances are known as the speech events. A speech event can be considered as an activity in which conversational participants interact via language in a conventional way to achieve some outcome (Yule, 1996: 57). SAs and speech events are said to be hierarchical components of speech situations (Hymes 1972), and for an utterance to have been made and to be successful as an act of communication, it is necessary that the process of intention-and-inference be done on the basis of due consideration of the speech event. 1.1.1.2. Three-dimension speech actsThe classic distinction between the different aspects (or 'forces') of a SA is due to Austin (in his How to Do Things with Words 1962). There are three related acts in the action of performing an utterance. Let us consider the following example:
B: Isn’t that good? (Pomerantz 1978: 94) In uttering (2) the S performs a number of SAs (Austin 1962, Searle 1969): a phonetic act, a linguistic act, a referring act etc. all of which together constitute a locutionary act, an act of producing a meaningful linguistic expression. On the other hand, the act of performing an utterance like (2) with a purpose is considered an illocutionary act. It is clear that each utterance in (2) contains a 'force'. This force of the SA is known as its illocutionary force. The force of the SA is what it 'counts as' (Yule 1996: 49). In the above fragment, G’s token can count as an evaluative assessment or a compliment, while B’s response is a scaled-down/weak disagreement with the prior evaluation. In addition, the S normally intends to have an effect when producing an utterance with a function. This third dimension of the SA is called perlocutionary act. Further effects obtained by the S are termed perlocutionary effects of an utterance. These ultimate effects, according to Mey (1993: 112), are dependent on the context of the utterance and unpredictable. The H may correctly understand the S's intention and does what his/her interlocutor wants, or he/she may deliberately ignore the S's want or desire. Of the three acts the illocutionary act appears to be the most crucial and discussed. The term 'speech act' is used to mean the same illocutionary act (Thomas 1995: 51), and illocutionary act is 'the basic unit of human linguistic communication' (Searle 1976: 1). In conclusion, an action created via an utterance is made of three acts or dimensions: locution, illocution, and perlocution. The speech act theory, in fact, has focused on illocutionary acts to such an extent that the term speech act has predominantly come to mean illocutionary act, or communicative illocutionary act (Bach & Harnish 1979).
Table 1 1: The five general functions of speech acts (Yule 1996: 55) Searle (1976), Hatch (1992), Mey (1993) and Yule (1996) point out that representative SAs carry the true or false values, i.e. they can be judged for truth or falsity. In using them the S makes words fit the world of belief, as Hatch (1992: 127) suggests: Representatives may vary in terms of how hedged or aggravated the assertion might be. 'Darwin was partly correct' is, obviously, not as strong as 'Darwin was right' or 'Darwin was wrong.' It is the lexical hedges like a little, a little bit, maybe, kind of/kinda, just, approximately, very, almost, extremely, seem, appear, etc. that help strengthen or weaken, qualify or soften the assertions, claims or statements. Hatch (1992: 127) believes: Hedges ... also serve as a ritual function. They may act like disfluencies in smoothing over a disagreement with a conversational partner. (My emphasis) We can see this very clearly in his example (Ibid.) given below:
An act of disagreeing seems to be an almost exact opposite of an act of agreeing. The person who disagrees responds to somebody else's expressed opinion or assessment. Most of the time, an overtly expressed opinion or assessment can be considered as an implicit expectation/invitation to get the same opinion or assessment from the conversational partners. The person who performs an act of disagreeing does not take care of the earlier S's expectation, saying that his/her opinion is different or opposite. He/she may also say that he/she thinks the first S is wrong or that his/her opinion or assessment is neither good nor right. In everyday interactions, the same utterance, the same linguistic act can express different illocutionary forces. Let us consider the following example by Pomerantz (1978: 97):
K: Is’n it pretty? Judging from the structure, K’s reply is an interrogative, but is interpreted as a disagreement token that is usually expressed in declarative form. In English there is a recognizable relationship between the three structural forms (declarative, interrogative and imperative) and the three communication functions (statement, question and command/request). Actually, in K’s performing an act of disagreeing the relationship between the structure and the function is indirect. A declarative is normally utilized to make a disagreeing statement, but here, an interrogative is deployed to produce a weak disagreement. In this case we have an indirect speech act. Whenever there is a direct relationship between a structure and a function, we have a direct speech act. In B’s disagreement in the example given below (Pomerantz 1978: 99), the structure and function converge as a typical expression of a disagreement:
B: Not very solid though. In indirect SAs the S means more than or other than what is said. Indirect SAs are said to be more polite in SAs like requesting, commanding, refusing, disagreeing etc. (Brown & Levinson [1978]1987, Leech 1983 and Yule 1996 among others). The relationship between structures and functions serves as another approach to dealing with typology of SAs. 1.1.1.4. Disagreeing – a communicative illocutionary actAccording to Wierzbicka (1987: 128) disagreeing can be defined as a dual act, an act of saying 'what one thinks' and indicating 'that one doesn't think the same as the earlier speaker'. In the case of disagreeing, the act of showing that the second S does not think the same or he/she has a different view or opinion seems to be much more important than the prior. This can be seen in the utterance by Pomerantz (1978: 87) given below:
→ W: Do you really think so? It’s just a rag my sister gave me. It is observable that the act of disagreeing, like any other SA, possesses both illocutionary force and propositional content. These two properties of SAs are realized syntactically, and the correct understanding of the intended illocutionary force is inevitably dependent upon the context. In terms of syntax, there is no necessary correlation between structural forms and illocutionary forces. Practically, disagreements can be performed in declarative, interrogative and imperative forms respectively as in:
It is normally easier to agree with the prior S than to disagree with him/her. Wierzbicka (1987: 128) assumes, 'Disagreeing is a fairly forceful and self-confident act, more than agreeing'. Let us consider the utterances below:
→ L: Yeh it’s just gorgeous … (Pomerantz 1978: 93)
→ R: Yee- Uhghh it’s not worth fra(hh)mi(h)ng, (Ibid. 98) The recipient in (10) exhibits a strong display of agreeing with the proffered evaluation, whereas the recipient in (11) seems to delay his/her disagreeing response by starting it out with ‘Yee’. The use of agreement marker in (11) helps to frame the disagreement token as a ‘weak disagreement’ or partial disagreement (Pomerantz 1978, 1984a; Mori 1999), and mitigate its disaffiliative force. As a matter of fact, Ss need more stamina and more self-confidence to express their disagreement than to express their agreement. Especially in the case of Anglo-American culture, Ss are expected to express their disagreement implicitly or tacitly, rather than to perform it explicitly or frankly, as they would in the case of agreement. It is advisable that one should hedge one's disagreement or avoid outright disagreement to maintain relationships with others. Fraser (1990: 229) proposes that disagreeing is among those SAs (such as complaining, criticizing, etc.) named FTAs (face threatening acts), as they are inherently threatening to the H’s desire to be appreciated and approved of (Brown & Levinson 1987). When faced with FTAs, Ss may choose between various strategies to reduce or eliminate the seriousness of the threat by either softening their communicative tokens or implicitly expressing them. The choice of politeness strategies is said to be affected by three variables relative power (P), social distance (D) and ranking of imposition (R) (Ibid.). By and large, from the view of SA theories, disagreeing which belongs to representatives that make the words fit the world of fallacy or truth, and which is an FTA that needs to be hedged to weaken the potential threat, is a communicative illocutionary act.
1.1.2.1. Historical backgroundThe study of social interaction, known as conversation analysis (CA) or study of talk-in-interaction has long been a phenomenon of great interest for researchers of a wide range of fields. It takes as one of its subjects the study of mundane social interaction in naturally occurring settings on the basis of rigorous and systematic methods. The assumption that social actions are meaningful, and are produced and interpreted as such, leads to the desire to discover, describe and analyze their natural organization or order, which constitutes and constructs this orderliness. Drawing upon and growing out of developments in such domains as phenomenology, ethnomethodology (the study of ‘ethnic’, i.e. participants’ own methods), and language philosophy, CA keeps on extending its fields of study, and has become interdisciplinary interests of social psychology, communication, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and so on. The early theoretical and methodological developments of this approach date back to 1950s and 1960s of the 20th century with Bale’s Interaction Process Analysis (1950), Barker and Wright’s Midwest and its Children (1955), Pittenger, Hockett, and Danehy’s The First Five Minutes (1960), Soskin and John’s The Study of Spontaneous Talk (1963), and Goffman’s Interactional Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behavior (1967). Audiotape technologies utilized to record naturally occurring actions in real-world settings were combined with direct observation and notes by researchers in the field to provide extensive analysis of the rules and orders of talk. At the same time, such features of spontaneous speech like pronunciation, intonation, pace, volumes, the location and duration of pauses, and tone could be captured and contribute to the analytic process. New approaches to the study of language and communication with respect to culture focusing on meanings-in-context, natural classification systems by members of a culture, their perceptions and conventions also brought about changes in CA. With the names of researchers like Gumperz and Hymes (1964), Goodenough (1957), Sturtevant (1964), Garfinkel (1967), Sudnow (1972), especially Sacks (1963, 1972a-b), Schegloff (1972, 1979a-b), and Jefferson (1974, 1978, 1979), CA has been shaped as a science of examining order as a social product constituted and achieved in and through various empirical occurrences of interaction between ordinary members of society. The descriptive nature of the field reflects its interests in studying of interaction itself, discovering and depicting its structures and allowing occasional conceptualizations and general theories. CA, at the onset, with the works by Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, Pomerantz and others, tends to avoid preformulated theory construction. It examines the details of the temporal organization and various contingencies of the unfolding development of interaction. Recurring patterns found by essentially inductive methods are the results of many records of naturally occurring interactional exchanges. Also, intuitive judgments, which are assumed unreliable guides, are unlikely to resort to, although it may be utilized in other fields of linguistics. The main strength of CA, as Levinson (1983: 287) states, is in its ability to provide ‘by far the most substantial insight that has yet been gained into the organization of conversation’. As aforementioned in the introductory part, CA pays very little attention to the contextual particulars commonly believed to have influence on interpersonal interactions. Such personal characteristics of the participants as age, gender, social status, their relationship, or the formality/ informality of the settings etc. are likely to be neglected (Levinson 1983: 295; Psathas 1995: 36, 49-50). Their primary concern, as mentioned, is the discovery, description, and analysis of how social conduct, including interactional practice, is accomplished and perceived. 1.1.2.2. Co-text and contextThe mundane human conduct, in the view of conversation analysts, is meaningful, as well as intelligibly produced and understood on shared rules and methods. The interpretation of meaning depends on the contemporary context of its production. This immediate context, or co-text as it is often called in CA, is continually shaped by individual contributions of the parties (Pomerantz 1997). In other words, the current context is resulted from what the prior S does, and the current S’s action creates a new context for the next action. Thus, co-text is constantly shaped and renewed by parties within interactional activities (Heritage 1989). Co-text is significant in that it provides Ss with a local resource upon which they draw to design their utterances, and correspondently, it gives Hs sufficient clues necessary to interpret what is said. However, the immediate local co-text in CA seems to be a restricted framework for such a wealth of data obtained from naturally occurring interactions. To understand people’s linguistic behaviors, it is necessary to look further, and go beyond the co-text of the talk by extending the limited border of the conversational co-text, and taking into account the whole societal environment, relevant and surrounded the language production. It is believed that the very desire to look at the SA of disagreeing from the pragmatics and CA perspective is found here. CA ‘purist’ stance (Cameron 2002: 88), based on the data and nothing but the data seems to be insufficient in providing adequate grounds for the proper and all-sided interpretation of interactions. The meaning of a social action could not adequately be understood without consulting the on-going context within which the action takes place: who talks with whom, in what setting, when, in what language(s), on what topic, as well as the wider socio-cultural context of which interactional talk is considered and analyzed as part and parcel. As Cameron (2002: 53) puts it: Any given instance of language use is analysed as part of a whole social situation; more generally, ways of using and understanding language are analysed in relation to the wider culture in which they occur. The wider cultural context in which mundane interactions occur involves a range of cultural beliefs, practices, and values. What is assumed to be good in one culture may not count as such in other cultures. As aforementioned, social parameters like social status, gender, age etc. of co-participants are generally of little interest in conversation analytic studies. Seldom do conversation analysts pay a close attention to them, providing they are made explicit issues by participants in the data (Ibid. 88). Some analysts, however, argue that cultural factors affect natural interaction. Zimmerman & West (1975) and Fishman (1983), for instance, suggest that men seem to dominate talk involving both genders. All in all, it is high time CA adopted an interdisciplinary approach, and went beyond its traditionally strict border by considering social actions in relation to the wider socio-cultural environment in which they take place. This is suggested as a way of refining conversation analytic processes to compensate their having no place for societal factors to go in the framework that primarily study co-text (Mey 2001: 135). 1.1.2.3. Turn – turn taking and adjacency pairsIn everyday life, people use language to converse with their interlocutors, and this is a typically social way of ‘doing things with words’. They talk, exchange information, or express their ideas. The kind of talk is various in terms of contents and contexts where it is produced. The structural organization, however, is always the same: ‘I speak – you speak – I speak – you speak’. As Crystal (2003: 477) puts it: … [C]onversation is seen as a sequence of conversational turns, in which the contribution of each participant is seen as part of a co-ordinated and RULE-governed behavioural interaction. (My emphasis) The finding of turn, considered the basic unit of conversation (Sacks 1995), is one of the important discoveries in the development of this analytic approach. Interactive talk is assumed ‘prototypically a joint enterprise’ that involves more than one S (Cameron 2002: 87). Studying recorded interchanges, Sacks (1995: II, 223) recognizes that in normal, civilized interactions, conversationalists follow a certain kind of rules: they take turns to speak rather than speak in overlap. ‘A central … feature [of conversation] is that exactly one person – at lease one and no more than one – talks at a time’ (Sacks 1995: II, 223). Simultaneous speaking (two or more speakers speak at the same time) is calculated as little as five per cent, and there is very little gap between one co-conversant talking and another starting (Ervin-Tripp 1979, Levinson 1983). Speaker changes occur normally at certain points called ‘transition relevant places’ (TRPs). The initiation and completion of a TPR can syntactically, semantically and intonationally be projected or predicted. Consequently, the conversant that currently has the right to speak, or the ‘floor’, may choose the next S, as well as self-select or any other party may self-select (Sacks, Schefloff, and Jefferson 1974, 1978; Levinson 1983). In some cases, a S may ignore an upcoming TRP and hurry past it, leaving no space for other parties to jump in. Herein, overlap and interruption may take place as in excerpts by Sacks et al. (1978: 16) given below:
B: Yeah.
rea:s’n//ble explanatio:n F: I: think it was a very rude le :tter Detailed study reveals it is a prevalent fact that turn taking is structurally organized (Sacks et al. 1974, 1978). And in most cases, one party speaks at a time, although the turn order and turn size vary, and speakership transfer as well as overlap occur. Also, the turn-taking organization is assumed to be both context-free and context-sensitive (Sacks et al. 1978: 10). It may remain unaffected by variations parties bring into talk on the one hand, and partly and locally changed under the influence of social facets on the other. The ‘one party talking’ rule, for example, may be invariant in almost all contexts, and the ‘speaker change’ rule could relatively be sensitive with some social aspects of contexts. The existence of turn-taking phenomenon is obvious, although there are still controversial arguments about the mechanism organizing it. Levinson (1983: 301), for instance, mentions the hierarchical pre-allocation of turn taking of the Burundi, the African people, in which high-status persons have preference over the others. He indicates that in such settings as classrooms and courtrooms in Anglo-American culture turns follow the pre-allocated principle too. In addition to this, some psychologists and conversation analysts (Duncan 1974; Duncan & Fiske 1977; Goodwin 1981, 1984) show that the turn taking works on the basis of signals like gazes. This view appears to be implausible when applied to telephone talks, which go quite smoothly with very little gap and overlap in spite of the absence of visual contact. The projectability and repair work, as proposed by Sacks et al. (1974, 1978) seem ‘to be wrong’ in Levinson’s critical analysis. Consequently, the present problem leads to more searches to discover an adequate mechanism for the organization of turn taking within and across languages and cultures. Interactional exchanges, often composed of two subsequent utterances, are called pairs or adjacency pairs. The production of the first-turn action provides the relevance for the appearance of the second-turn action. And the second cannot exist without the first. They recur in pairs. Everyday casual conversations are full of such pairs as invitation-acceptance, greeting-greeting, assessment-agreement and assessment-disagreement. Below is one example of assessment-disagreement by (Pomerantz 1984a: 74):
D: Well, it is important. Paired utterances, viz., adjacency pairs are pervasive in natural language use. On the basis of the adjacency pair assumption, a second pair part is relevant and necessary, once the first pair part is produced. The delay or absence (in case of silences) of a second part may lead to the repetition of the first part by the prior S (Schegloff 1972a). ‘The painful silence’, as it is in Mey’s wording (2001: 158), on the part of the sequential S may sometimes make the prior feel totally embarrassed. A question raised here is that the so-called ‘painful silence’ would differently be interpreted in intra-cultural and across-cultural interactions by different identities. As a result, first Ss would have a variety of subtle nuances of feelings when facing second Ss’ silences, not just embarrassment. 1.1.2.4. Disagreeing – a social actConversation that is considered ‘the prototypical kind of language usage’ (Levinson 1983: 284) is normally assumed the first language form that every human being engages in. Conversationalists actually ‘do things’ (Austin 1962) with their words by informing each other of news, telling stories, making requests, invitations, offers to do things, expressing evaluations or assessments, and their co-participants respond to them, either accept/agree or reject/disagree. These acts are not only linguistic acts, but they are social acts as well. Naturally, CA, which explicates how social conduct is produced, recognized as intelligible and sensible, pays close attention to all acts of this kind. All initial assessments or evaluative tokens of people, things or events are produced in first turns of adjacency pairs. The proffering of assessments by the first Ss makes relevant the recipients’ assessments in response. As a rule, second assessments by the responders should be subsequent to the prior and made in the second turns. The first assessments act as invitations for the second to come, especially if they are given in interrogatives or interrogative tags, as in the excerpt by Pomerantz (1984a: 68):
M: iYeh isn’t she pretty, The first Ss’ evaluative comments, which are considered their claims of certain knowledge about the referents, can trigger and engender second assessments by the recipients who may want to demonstrate their access to the same referents, as below:
(0.6) A: //Y’know I don’t think- B: .hh- It’s warm though, (Pomerantz 1978: 100)
A: I do too. (Pomerantz 1984a: 67) CA practitioners like Pomerantz (1978, 1984a) and Sacks (1987) point out that second assessments subsequent to the first in form of agreements tend to immediately be delivered, as in (17), and sometimes, in some overlap with the prior. On the contrary, disagreements seem to be withheld, delayed or mitigated by pauses, hedges, prefaces and other non-linguistic devices to downplay the seriousness of the opposing stance, as in (16). In this extract, B’s withholding an answer leads to A’s self-selecting to continue the turn. B’s in-breathing before speaking and her using ‘though’ downgrade the contrast between the two assessments, making hers sound like a weak disagreement. In most cases, the producers of the initial assessments probably want their evaluations or opinions to be approved of. Disagreements on the part of the recipients would upset them. In addition, it might not be easy for the second Ss to forthrightly disclose their opposition. Hence, the softening or hedging of disagreements becomes a matter of common experience. A quick and outright answer might make the disagreement token too explicit and unpleasant, causing undesired tensions. Thereby, the first Ss wish to be indirect by prefacing their disagreements with agreement tokens or/and downgrading them as in excerpt (15) given above, or they may choose to tacitly imply their different ideas, or be silent altogether. However, when it comes to responding to self-deprecations, disagreements are likely to be direct and explicit. Conversely, agreements seem to be variously softened or muted, as they may sound critical. Pomerantz clearly illustrates this point in her 1984a work. Below is one of her examples (Ibid. 74):
W: Y-no, y-you’re not du:mb, … In short, most disagreement turns tend to be structured so as to minimize occurrences of overtly stated disagreements, but the organization of turns seems to work in the opposite direction in self-denigrations so as to maximize immediate and explicit disagreements. 1.1.3. SummaryDisagreeing as a communicative illocutionary and social act is theoretically examined within the speech act theories and CA in this part. The key notions of each approach are re-examined, applied to and highlighted by disagreeing tokens. In socio-communicative interactions, disagreements are often seen to be softened by means of hedges to qualify the negative force of the act on the one hand, and tend to be strengthened to intensify overt disagreements with prior self-deprecation tokens on the other. The assessment of socio-cultural parameters and some social situations by the English and Vietnamese informants is investigated in the following part. Yüklə 1,43 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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