Frames, speech acts, and pragmatics

There’s a crucial difference

• Between ‘taking a history’ or giving testimony and ‘conversational interviews’ – they’re framed differently.

• People (re-)position each other as they

interact. Changes in position change the frame of the interaction

Frames

Kovecses: ‘a frame is a structured mental representation of a conceptual category’

Other names for frames:

script, scenario, scene, cultural model, cognitive model, domain, schema, gestalt

Characteristics of frames

• Evoked by particular meanings of words or by who is sanctioned to speak when

• Impose a perspective on the situation

• Provide a history

• Assume larger cultural frames

• Are idealizations – linked to prototypes

• They can activate or be activated by our stereotypes

Inside the frame: speech acts

• “We perform speech acts when we offer an apology,greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, orrefusal. A speech act is an utterance that serves a function incommunication. • A speech act might contain just one word, as in "Sorry!" toperform an apology, or several words or sentences: "I’m sorry Iforgot your birthday. I just let it slip my mind." • Speech acts include real-life interactions and require notonly knowledge of the language but also appropriate use of thatlanguage within a given culture”.

http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/definition.html

Introducing Pragmatics

We’ll go 2 clicks into this web tutorial

http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/sp_pragmatics/Introduction_to_pragmatics/introduction_to_pragmatics.html

Theoretical underpinnings

• Austin –

• Searle – Taxonomy of Speech Acts

• Grice – Maxims & the Cooperative Principle

• Goffman – Face (how others might see us)

• Brown and Levinson – Politeness theory

• Other approaches such as Positioning theory, relational work

Pragmatics studies language in context

• who the speaker is, when the utterance occurred, and where;

• the speaker's intentions. • what language the speaker intends to be using,

what meaning the speaker intends to be using, whom s/he intends to refer to with various shared names….

• what s/he intends to achieve by saying what s/he does.

Pragmatics is about

• beliefs of the speaker and those who are addressed;

• what beliefs do they share; what is the focus of the conversation, what are they talking about, etc.

• Facts about relevant social institutions, such as promising, marriage ceremonies, courtroom procedures, and the like, which affect what a person accomplishes in or by saying what he does.

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Austin’s classifications for words as ‘acts’

Locutionary Acts• Saying something about something

Illocutionary acts• culturally-defined speech act type, characterized by a

particular illocutionary force; for example, promising, advising, warning…

• Performatives.

Perlocutionary acts• perceived effect (inference by addressee)

Searle’s taxonomy of illocutionary (speech) acts, based on Austin

• Representative or assertive. The speaker becomes committed to the truth of the content; for example, asserting: "It's raining."

• Directive. The speaker tries to get the hearer to act in such a way as to fulfill what is represented by the propositional content; for example, commanding: "Close the door!"

• Commissive. The speaker becomes committed to act in the way represented by the propositional content; for example, promising: "I'll finish the paper by tomorrow."

• Expressive. The speaker simply expresses the sincerity condition of the illocutionary act: "I'm glad it's raining!"

• Declarative. The speaker performs an action just representing herself as performing that action: "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth."

Grice’s Maxims

• Specific Maxims• Quality: make contribution as informative and

not more informative than required.• Quality: don’t say what you believe to be false

and that for which you lack adequate evidence.• Relation: Be relevant• Manner: avoid obscurity; avoid ambiguity; be

brief; be orderly.

• Cultural Differences: What is relevant, polite, true will vary from culture to culture.

Grice’s Conversational Implicature

Based on the cooperative principle, that speakers really want to construct meaning

A: How is C getting on in his job [at the bank]?B: Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet.

What is the implicature?While A hasn’t been to prison, he is the sort of

person who could easily end up there.

Presuppositions

• A presupposition is what is assumed to be true. It must be true for the utterance to be true or be false. It’s the assumed background

• A sentence like “The king of France is bald” presupposes that France is governed by a king.

• “Mary regrets that she stopped eating chocolate before she left the dinner table” has multiple presuppositions. . . .

Presuppositions: example 1, 2007

Example 2, 2006

Example 3, 1977

Example 4, 2007 (same product)

Brown and Levinson’s notion of ‘politeness’

Based on Goffman’s concept of face

• Face: The public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself.

• A communication (speech act) may contain an imposition on the “face” of the Hearer.

• Goffman writes that everyone is concerned, to some extent, with how others perceive them. We act socially, striving to maintain the identity we create for others to see. This identity, or public self-image, is what we project when we interact socially. To lose face is to publicly suffer a diminished self-image.

Facework

• People try to protect their ‘face’• Show respect and politeness; Show

discretion about feelings on topics that might embarrass others; Employs circumlocutions and deceptions; Employs courtesies; joking manner; neutralize offending activities by explaining them in advance.

• People may deny the face threatening nature of an incident.

Restoring face

• Ritual: one’s face is a sacred thing. Its stages:

• Acknowledgement: Begins with acknowledge of threat to face.

• The challenge: participants call attention to the misconduct

• The offering: the offender is given a chance to correct for the offence and re-establish order.• explain as a meaningless act, a joke, unintentional,

a mistake, unavoidable, not acting himself, under the influence of something or somebody

• The acceptance (or not) by the offended • Gratitude by the offender (equilibrium re-

established)

When speakers find themselves in disgrace, there is often a ritual attempt to re-establish a satisfactory state

B&L’s Positive and Negative face

• Positive Face: Honor• The public self. • The positive

consistent self-image or ‘personality’ (crucially including the desire that this self-image be appreciated and approved of) by interactants.

• the want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others.

Negative Face: Privacy• Invented by Brown

and Levinson• The concept of the

right to privacy.• The basic claim to

territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction

• the want of every ‘competent adult member’ that his actions be unimpeded by others.Compare with Scollon & Scollon’s Independence X Involvement

Relational work

• Watts & Locher, 2005:

“We propose that relational work, the “work” individuals invest in negotiating relationships with others, which includes impolite as well as polite or merely appropriate behavior, is a useful concept to help investigate the … struggle over politeness”.

Power and politeness

• According to Lakoff, “different discourse types [are] associated with certain professional and institutional contexts, and that examining such contexts forces us to see politeness from a different perspective and to foreground `different dimensions, especially as most such contexts have a built-in asymmetry.”

That leads us to the Communication Predicament for older people (more about that in next chapter)

A problem many older adults face

Contextualization cues

These are any linguistic feature that signals contextual presupposition that can lead to shared knowledge. Examples: Rising intonation for upspeak or to ask for encouragement; switching codes, styles or honorifics. Can even be nonverbal: think about what a pat on the shoulder can suggest. And of course, these can be misunderstood.

Cues in email scam letters

The 419 perpetrators employ a "con within a con" strategy, as the Secret Service explains it, and getting your bank account number in order to plunder your checking or savings is not the goal of the West African grifters. It's just the beginning of the relationship. As for the plundering, if things work out the way they hope, you'll do that for them. "The goal," the Secret Service says, "is to delude the target into thinking that he is being drawn into a very lucrative, albeit questionable, arrangement. [The victim] will become the primary supporter of the scheme and willingly contribute a large amount of money when the deal is threatened.”

Douglas Cruikshank’s I crave your distinguished indulgence (and all your cash) http://www.salon.com 2001 In which the hapless author falls under the syntactically challenged spell of the legendary Nigerian e-mail scam.

The letter I got earlier this weekFund OfficerNadace OS Fund PrahaSeifertova 47Praha 3, CZ-130 00.Concern.To Celebrate The 30th Anniversary Program, The Nadace OS Fund In

Conjunction With The Economic Community For West African States, United Nations Organization And The European Union Is Giving Out A Yearly Donation Of (Three Million United States Dollars) To just 2 Lucky Recipients . . .

Based On The Random Selection Exercise Of Internet Websites And Millions Of Supermarket Cash Invoices Worldwide, You Were Selected

AmongThe Lucky Recipients To Receive The Award Sum Of (Three Million

Our next steps

• Scollon & Scollon’s model, keyed to how people’s positions relative to each other, their status, deference, and distance ,establish frames of independence and involvement

• Cleary’s example of their model, applied to an interview with Faith McConnell http://newsouthvoices.uncc.edu/html/OHMC0106.html

• Discussion of first lab