review by michael stubbs - forms of talk by erving goffman

Forms of Talk by Erving GoffmanReview by: Michael StubbsLanguage in Society, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Mar., 1983), pp. 77-82Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4167357 .

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Lang. Soc. 12, 77-131. Printed in the United States of America

REVIEWS

DIMENSIONS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS

ERVING GOFFMAN, Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press and Oxford: Blackwell, I98I. PP. 335.

All students of social interaction owe a great debt to Goffman's distinguished writings. The indebtedness may range from amazement at the revelations con- tained in books such as The presentation of self in everyday life (Goffman 1959), to the more scholarly realization that his insights have opened up the principled study of everyday life where no such possibility was seen before. These two reactions will equally affect readers of his latest book. On the one hand it is impossible to listen to radio announcers in the same way after seeing their problems exposed in the paper on "Radio talk." Similarly, it is impossible to organize, chair, deliver, or listen to a lecture in the same way after reading "The lecture." As always, Goffman's writings have the ability to change our percep- tions of the world. On the other hand, Goffman meticulously picks apart concepts which are central to the study of language but need much more careful analysis, including: speaker-hearer; conversational fluency; a conversation as a basic context for utterances; and the possibility of a deterministic model of interaction. And he develops at length several aspects of his approach to everyday behaviour, presented in Frame analysis (Goffman 1974). Goffman might point out that these prefatory remarks comprise a ritual text bracket to the main substance of my review, which contains various criticisms of the work. They are genuinely intended for all that.

The book is a collection of five papers, three previously published and re- printed with minor revisions; the last two published for the first time.

"Replies and responses" (from Language in Society 1976) discusses the possibility of a formalistic and deterministic analysis of conversational exchanges including adjacency pairs such as question-answer, or more generally, initiation-reply. Goffman admits that elegantly structured exchanges are found, and provides many examples of interchanges which show tight constraints between utterances. However, utterances may not comprise units in a dialogue or conversation at all, but sustain an open state of talk during some coordinated task, such as mending a car or playing a game. In such cases, the whole framework of conversational constraints may be disregarded. In criticising a purely interactionist framework (which assumes that utterances are predominantly ini-

?) 1983 Cambridge University Press

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tiations or responses), Goffman is also questioning the possibility of always applying linguistic structural analysis to conversation. "Response Cries" (from Language 1978) questions more directly the centrality of the concept "a conversation." It discusses many types of utterances which fail to fit into the usually assumed dialogic model of speaker-recipient. There is a general prescriptive, moral, lay rule (often taken over by discourse analysts): no talking to oneself in public. But the descriptive rule is more complex: talking to oneself may be allowed (if one trips in the street) or expected (on hearing bad news). Such utterances often occur outside conversations, as part of some physical task. Further, such utterances as exclamations comprise marginal words at best, which break phonotactic constraints, have no standard spellings, and occur only in the spoken language. "Footing" (from Semiotica 1979) is a very general analytic statement, although illustrated again with very specific examples. The general concept of change of footing is familiar to linguists in the concept of code- switching, and Goffman uses Gumperz's work on code-switching in Norwegian dialects to introduce his argument. However, Goffman intends footing to be a much more general concept, referring to the alignment of an individual to an utterance.

"The lecture" is a lecture about lectures, delivered in 1976. This version is modified in unspecified ways (of which there is more discussion below) from the spoken version. It is essentially a description of a social event, and provides many acute observations on the linguistic, social, and ceremonial organization of lectures; the relationship between lecturer and audience, between lecturer and text, between spoken and written versions of the 'same' lecture; and on the ways in which lecturers sustain the illusion of spontaneously composed talk. "Radio talk" is a long discussion of radio announcing. Its central descriptive topics are the ways in which announcers maintain the impression of fluent talk, and correct errors they make (worth reading just for the hilarious howlers, by the way). However, the paper contains also important theoretical points. Goffman draws on the well-known linguistic work on speech errors, but he argues that the collection of such errors by linguists is often ad hoc. An analysis requires reference to the ethnographic setting of announcers' work, including the trans- mission technology and editing practices which lead to some of the errors and their importance.

The whole book is in Goffman's characteristic style: long, inevitably repetitive discussions, sometimes highly abstract, and sometimes strangely unanalytic as example after example is quoted without much explicit comment. As there is very considerable overlap between the papers, I will select some of the concepts most important for linguistic study. As always, Goffman's work is packed with insights, but my main criticism will be that it is often less explicit and systematic than it might be. Goffman himself appears on occasion uneasy about the inex- plicitness of his discussion. For example, he admits in an added preface to "The lecture" that he has revised the paper only slightly for print, and in unspecified

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ways: so that the presentation of a spoken lecture in written form itself provides examples of framing issues. However, he "ventures this plea without confi- dence" (i6o) and admits to "abusing the reader" (i6i).

Possibly the most fundamental concept which is picked apart is that of speaker-hearer. Goffman argues that the commonsense notions of speaker and hearer are crude; he (politely?) refrains from mentioning that linguists often operate with the same undifferentiated concepts. He proposes three main aspects of a speaker: Animator (A) refers to the participant who moves his lips up and down and produces words; author (B) refers to the person who has selected and encoded the message; and principal (C) refers to the person who is committed to the beliefs expressed. Goffman's main point is that A, B, and C typically coin- cide in a single person in everyday face-to-face conversation, but this is not necessary. In fact, A, B, and C label rather different aspects of an individual. A is a functional role in a communication system, while C is a social role. It is left unclear what B labels. Goffman then provides many cases where A, B, and C diverge. A radio announcer is typically only A, not B or C. He may, however, break frame and interject personal comments (A, B, and C) into material which he is merely animating. A politician might deliver a speech (A and C) which has been authored by a speech writer (B). An academic delivering a paper would normally be A, B, and C simultaneously. However, in summarizing someone else's ideas, he would switch to A and B only. And if he is ill, a stand-in (A only) might read his paper on his behalf.

Goffman develops the concept further. He distinguishes three types of vocal production: fresh talk, reading aloud, and memorization; and points out that each type has typically a different production format, that is, a different configuration of A, B, and C. Thus in fresh talk, such as most spontaneous conversation, speakers are usually A, B, and C. In reading aloud, a speaker is A, but may or may not be B and C, depending on whether he is reading his own words. In memorization, the speaker, such as an actor on stage, is typically only A. Each of these production formats provides a different interpretive framework for hearers, relevant to understanding who is committed to what by the language used.

The basic idea is striking in its insight: Goffman clearly demonstrates that speaker is an unanalysed concept, and provides an analytically powerful step forward. However, many loose ends remain. For example, an actor (A) delivers a speech in a play written by a playwright (B). Is the playwright also C? Or do works of imaginative literature not have a C? Hemingway was committed to the texts he wrote about the Spanish Civil War when writing for newspapers, but not committed in the same way to the propositional content of For whom the bell tolls. Just what Goffman understands by commitment in this context remains unclear. I return to this below, but in this particular context a link to work such as Searle's (0975a) on the logical status of fictional discourse would have been helpful. Or again, what of a simultaneous translator? Certainly A, but also partly B? The concept of authorship becomes problematic in translation. Where, for

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example, does translation diverge from paraphrasing in terms of authorship? Or what of cases of multiple authorship? A spokesman, say for a trade union, is certainly A, and typically also C, though only one representative C. He may or may not be one of the Bs, since an official statement is likely to have multiple authors (Bs?) who are committed to the particular statement formulated by the spokesman (B).

Goffman similarly picks apart the concept of hearer. A hearer may be a ratified participant to a speech event, but may not be listening. A listener on the other hand may be overhearing or eavesdropping. Ratified participants may be ad- dressed or unaddressed. Audiences are a special case of ratified participants; but live audiences have different possibilities in lectures and in theatres, whereas TV audiences are different again. The different possibilities for speakers' production formats and for hearers' participation frameworks together provide a powerful tool for analysing changes in footing, or changes in speaker-hearer alignment. Given the different possible relations between speakers and hearers implied in different participation frameworks, it follows immediately also that 'a conversation' is not the only necessary context for utterances.

Another topic of central linguistic interest is what Goffman calls embedding. Embedding takes many forms, but refers to a change in footing; one value of Goffman's approach is that he points out that something that linguists discuss is only one aspect of a much more general phenomenon, only partly linguistic. On the other hand, his argument could be made more explicit and systematic by reference to mainstream work in semantics and pragmatics. A simple case of embedding is provided by a direct quote of someone else's words, involving a switch from A, B, and C, to just A. Goffman also discusses explicitly the ways that speakers have of hedging and qualifying their utterances, and distancing themselves from what they are saying. The concept of commitment to propositions and illocutionary acts is therefore central. He points out that multiple embedding is possible in examples such as To the best of my recollection, I think that I said that 1 once lived that sort of life (149). Such examples suggest the analysis of utterances into preface plus propositional content, and the more general analysis of distancing and indirectness provided by the very large literature by Searle (0975b) and others on indirect speech acts. However, Goffman makes only fleeting reference to this literature, and it must be said that his analysis of syntactic forms and semantic content is often unsystematic. As one small syntactic example, he refers (148) hazily to wish, think, could, and hope as "performative modal verbs."

The kind of systematic semantic framework which is missing from Goffman's account is provided by Lyons (1977; more succinctly and more explicitly in some ways, x98 I). Lyons points out that a sentence such as He may not come is four- ways ambiguous. It may have an objective epistemic interpretation: relative to what is known, it is possible that he will not come; or an objective deontic interpretation: he is not allowed to come. In everyday uses of language, howev-

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er, subjective interpretations are much more likely. A subjective epistemic interpretation would be: I personally think it quite possible that he will not come; a subjective deontic interpretation would be: I forbid him to come. Similarly, sentences such as That willlmust be the postman are most likely to be used in a subjective epistemic sense referring to the moment of utterance, rather than as expressing a view about a future event (will), or a demand (must). Lyons' topic is therefore the ways in which speakers can express their own beliefs and attitudes, qualify their commitment to propositions by being tentative or provisional, and in fact express themselves.

Whereas work by Searle and Lyons lack almost entirely any real-life data, Goffman's lacks a systematic syntactic and semantic framework. Embedding is a custom-made topic for the rapprochement between linguistics and ethnography which Goffman recommends but does not push far enough. Having discussed these two examples in some detail, I will make similar points much more briefly about other arguments.

Another example of a concept which is attracting increasing interest in semantics and pragmatics, and into which Goffman provides much new insight, is the use-mention distinction. He refers to the distinction explicitly (252, 282), and discusses at some length (280ff) the concept of metacommunication: that is, making metalinguistic reference to linguistic forms and meanings. Again, the discussion could be made more systematic and explicit by relating it to the semantic and pragmatic literature, and also by relating more explicitly different insights at various places in the book. The distinction is clearly relevant to the embedding and distancing mechanisms discussed above. Goffman cites, for example, different kinds of authorship disclaimers and the possibility of editorial footnotes as comments on texts by others. But he does not set out in a systematic way the different linguistic units which it is possible to mention: for example, both linguistic forms and meanings, as well as illocutionary forces; and different semantic units such as a whole proposition, a presupposition of a statement, or a single word. Further, Goffman discusses (xO ) the possibility of using repetition in constructing sarcastic utterances, but does not make explicit that repetition is one kind of mention. (Sperber and Wilson [ I 98 1 1 develop a convincing theory of irony based on this observation.) However, Goffman shows again that what appears to be an abstruse topic of interest to philosophers (the object versus metalanguage distinction) is central to everyday uses of language.

It is a characteristic of Goffman's method of argument that he sometimes allows arguments to proliferate without attempting to adjudicate between them or relate them fully. To take just one example from several in the book, in his discussion of ways of distancing speakers from the propositional content of utterances, he refers to Ross's 1970 performative hypothesis that "any un- adorned utterance implies a higher performative verb and a pronoun" (149).

However, this is appended in a footnote as just another analysis, with no hint of the fact that linguists have for the most part lost interest in such attempts at purely

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grammatical explanations of pragmatic phenomena, and that Ross's arguments were attacked very early on the grounds, briefly, that there is no syntactic motivation for positing performative verbs on higher nodes in deep structure.

I may have seemed to complain in this review that Goffman has not made sufficiently explicit the relevance of his work to linguistics. To this one might reply that he is doing sociology not linguistics, and that he is actually attacking some of the very assumptions of formalism that I am recommending. However, he says in several places that his aim is to relate linguistic and ethnographic concerms, and I have tried to indicate some further points of contact. Perhaps the task of making the relevance clear to the readers of a particular journal is in any case mine as reviewer. And I hope that I have made clear that the relevance of this work for linguistics is profound and far-reaching, even if the insights are presented in a form that is unfamiliar in style, with sometimes incomplete arguments and an informal approach to syntactic and semantic analysis. Goffman argues convincingly that an ethnographic dimension is correspondingly missing from much linguistics. He has provided the insight and the revelations, and some very firm if incomplete analytic frameworks, which it will take armies of researchers to refine, clarify, and formalize.

REFERENCES

Goffman, E. (0959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor Books. (1974). Frame analysis. New York: Harper & Row.

Lyons, J. (977). Semantics. 2 vols. Cambridge University Press. (1981). Language, meaning, and context. London: Fontana.

Searle, J. (0975a). The logical status of fictional discourse. New Literary Historv 6(2): 3 19-32. (1975b) Indirect speech acts. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 3.

New York: Academic Press. 59-82. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1981). Irony and the use-mention distinction. In P. Cole (ed.), Radical

pragmatics. New York: Academic Press. 295-318.

Reviewed by MICHAEL STUBBS Department of Linguistics UniversitY of Nottingham

(Received 8 April 1982) Nottingham NG7 2RD England

WILLIAM LABOV (ed.), Locating language in time and space. (Quantitative Analyses of Linguistic Structure i, W. Labov & D. Sankoff series editors.) New York: Academic Press, I980, Pp. xx + 271.

This volume contains studies of linguistic change and variation, all of which adopt quantitative methods of analysis. Unlike Sankoff's recent collection (1978), these papers are predominantly substantive, rather than methodological, in emphasis. As the series editors point out in their preface, "'the field has matured to the point that the advantages and disadvantages of various methods of treating the data are recognised and related to each other. Researchers are free to

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