"Thanks, no problem, pleasure, don't mention it, thanks"

I once heard that how someone treats a waiter can say a lot about their character. What about the way a waiter responds? Researcher Larssyn Rüegg thinks that there may be differences in how waiters respond to their customers’ thanks, based on the kind of restaurant they are in.

While previous research has looked into how various languages may differ in this pragmatic function of the thanks response, none so far has looked into how thanks response might vary within a single language. Rüegg's research is based in part on a previous work by Klaus Schneider who typified different forms of thanks responses. An example is the welcome type which include a spoken phrase such as 'you're welcome', or even just 'welcome'. Other types include okay, anytime, no problem, pleasure, don't mention it, thanks, yeah, sure, and don't worry about it. Rüegg extends this study by asking what influences these types of response. She identifies two potential factors: socio-economic setting and the type of favor.

It is strongly supported by research that service staff tend to select a style of speech deemed appropriate to their clientele, so their speech would therefore reflect social stratification. Based on this, Rüegg decided to use a corpus of naturally occurring talk in restaurants of different price ranges to exemplify different socio-economic settings. This corpus, the Los Angeles Restaurant Corpus (LARC) contains three categories, LARC-up, LARC-mid, and LARC-low, each reflecting their price range.

The first finding from this study is as we would expect: thanks responses in LARC-up and LARC-mid were 50% more frequent than that of LARC-low. Yet, even the frequency of thanks responses in LARC-up and LARC-mid are quite low, with expressions of thanks being responded to less than 25% of the time.

The form of thanks responses also differs across the socio-economic categories. For example, the most common response types in LARC-up and LARC-mid, such as welcome and thank you, are not found in LARC-low. Furthermore, customers in the LARC-low restaurants use thanks responses that are not present in both LARC-up and LARC-mid, such as yeah, and absolutely. Interestingly, LARC-mid display the most variation in types of thanks responses.

The type of act which waiters are thanked for shows distinctive patterns as well. A non-verbal service act elicits the most thanks responses in LARC-up and LARC-mid. Such acts include clearing or setting the table, or perhaps bringing the bill. Interestingly, such acts never elicit a thanks response in LARC-low. Enquiries by the service staff about the guests' well-being do not elicit a thanks response in LARC-low either. Serving food or drinks is correlated with socio-economic setting, with customers in LARC-up giving the most thanks responses, and those in LARC-low the least. On the other hand, verbal offers of service such as Do you need more wine? Anything else? more consistently generate thanks responses across all categories.

Through this research, we can see that thanks responses in English are not very frequent on the whole. This is in contrast to some other languages. In addition, the sensitivity of thanks responses to socio-economic setting suggest that they are a subtle form of cultural encoding, with common responses in LARC-up and LARC-mid restaurants possibly signalling formality. Furthermore, thanks responses do not appear to be very standardized, with a wide range of forms being used, especially in LARC-mid and LARC-low. The fact that the type of service performed elicits differing thanks responses across the different socio-economic settings reinforces the sense that these small linguistic acts are actually a rich form of interactional management and cultural signalling.

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Rüegg, Larssyn. 2014. Thanks responses in three socio-economiuc settings: A variational pragmatics approach. Journal of Pragmatics 71: 17-30

doi. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.07.005

This summary was written by Darren Hum Chong Kai 

The Queen’s Speech

Picture this: it’s Christmas day, you’re overloaded with turkey, surrounded by the remnants of wrapping paper and you’ve just settled down to watch the Queen’s annual speech. It’s a tradition for many at Christmas. But, what if I told you that the Queen’s speech isn’t the same as it was in more recent decades than, say, in the 1950’s. Of course, here I’m not talking about the content of her speech (of course that changes year by year!), but rather her pronunciation of what is sometimes referred to as ‘the Queen’s English’. 

Jonathan Harrington along with colleagues set out to find out how changes in society have influenced the ‘Queen’s English’ by examining the Queen’s speech in her Annual Christmas broadcast over three time periods. This synopsis focusses on just one of these papers, Harrington, Palethorpe & Watson (2000).

The ‘Queen’s English’ or Received Pronunciation (RP) as linguists refer to it, is a variety of English spoken by some upper-class individuals and is often associated with power, money and privilege. It also happens to be the variety of English spoken by Queen Elizabeth II (hence the name!). Typically, RP is characterised by pronunciations such as ‘gep’ for ‘gap’ and ‘bottle’ where both of the t’s are still pronounced as t’s, as opposed to ‘bo’le’.

But, as sociolinguists know, language changes over time. This is particularly the case for RP, which has been influenced by the changing social class boundaries between upper-, middle- and working-class communities. These changes are likely to influence language use. As Harrington and colleagues observe, these changes have already influenced RP, such that the tendency to pronounce an ‘l’ in a word like milk as something like a ‘w’ – a feature that was once typical of working-class varieties, such as Cockney – is now regularly heard in the speech of many RP speakers. So, then, how do these changes relate to the ‘Queen’s English’?

By examining the Queen’s Christmas address across three different time periods (1950’s, late 1960/ early 70’s, 1980’s), Harrington and his colleagues examined how the changing social landscape related to the Queen’s English. They did this by looking at what linguists refer to as ‘acoustic properties’ of the Queen’s vowels. Vowels, like other sound forms (e.g., music) can be measured in Hz. These measurements are then plotted onto a graph and linguists are able to track changes in the way a particular vowel was pronounced over time or by speaker.

In Harrington and colleagues’ analysis, they measured the acoustic properties of 11 vowels, including those in the words: heed, hid, and hoard. They also compared the Queen’s pronunciation of these vowels with data from Standard Southern British English speaking females to see how the Queen’s speech related to more general patterns of speech.

What they find is that, over time, the Queen’s English appears to have moved towards the pronunciation typical of the Standard British English speaking females. Although she doesn’t mirror their speech, the English spoken by the Queen in the 1980’s appears to be dramatically different than the variety she spoke in the 50’s, sounding more like younger speakers who are lower on the social class hierarchy - in other words, the Queen has become less posh!

For instance, in the next two videos, compare how the Queen says ‘Happy Christmas’ in 1950 (0.31, in the first video), where happy is pronounced more like ‘heppy’ and in 1980, where it pronounced more like ‘happy’ (8.55, in the video below).

So, it seems that, whilst the Queen may have become less ‘posh’, it’s quite clear that she’s not part of the Royle family just yet.

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Harrington, J., Palethorpe, S., and Watson, C. (2000). Monophthongal vowel changes in Received Pronunciation: an acoustic analysis of the Queen’s Christmas Broadcasts. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 63-78.

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100300006666

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See also: 

Harrington, J., Palethorpe, S., and Watson, C. (2000). Does the Queen speak the Queen's English? Nature, 408, 927-928

Harrington, J. (2006). An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing’ in the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts, Journal of Phonetics, 34 439–457. 


This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

Does Gaga ‘live for the applause’? Or, is it more of a ‘Poker Face’?

As one of the best-selling pop artists of our time, Lady Gaga is a name few would fail to recognise. From ‘Poker Face’ to ‘Telephone’, her artistry has earned her a level of notoriety comparable only to a few other music legends. Along with her success, she’s built a loyal fanbase that she affectionately refers to as the ‘Little Monsters’. At shows, she often invites her ‘Little Monsters’ on stage, whilst at other times, she’s surprised her fans by appearing at a movie premier. Here, Lady Gaga appears to navigate between her identity as an international superstar whilst simultaneously appealing to her fans to recognise her as an ‘ordinary person’. But, how does Gaga manage these apparently conflicting identities and what linguistic devices does she use to achieve this? In her 2018 paper, Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson decided to find out:

To examine the ways in which Gaga navigates the ‘ordinary person’ and ‘celebrity superstar’ identities, Valentinsson examines tweets sent by Gaga aimed at her fans and transcripts taken from media interviews with Gaga.

A group of Lady Gaga's superfans - her 'Little Monsters'

Central to Valentinsson’s analysis are the concepts of stance and stance-taking. These two terms describe two aspects of communication. The term ‘stance’ refers to the way that people align or position themselves in relation to some object, person or idea. So when a speaker expresses their attitude towards something, that speaker is taking a stance. The notion of stance-taking refers to the actual process of making that alignment, which is usually achieved through communication. For instance, if you said, ‘I don’t like cheese’, you'd be taking a stance that you ‘don’t like the dairy goodness of cheese’. The Stance-taking bit would be you actually saying those words.

To examine Lady Gaga’s stances in relation to her fans and journalists, Valentinsson first turns to Gaga’s Twitter account where she observes that Gaga often creates a stance of alignment with the ‘ordinary people’. She does this through a number of linguistic strategies. For instance, in one tweet aimed at her fans, Gaga uses terms usually associated with the family (‘mommy’, ‘kids’, ‘mother’) to take a stance of intimacy that allows her to align with her fans. In another tweet, which references the two awards that Gaga won at the People’s Choice Awards, she uses the third-person pronoun ‘we’ in the sentence: ‘we won two people’s choice awards’ to include her fans as recipients of the awards. In other contexts, Gaga uses the @ function of Twitter to ‘speak’ to her fans directly, referencing an awareness of issues effecting her fans in real life. Together, these ‘strategies’ allow Lady Gaga to create a stance of alignment with her fans, rejecting her celebrity status, therefore presenting herself as an ‘ordinary person’. 

             

In interviews with journalists, however, Valentinsson observes an altogether different set of strategies used by Gaga. In these contexts, Gaga adopts a relatively confrontational stance. She does this by refusing to answer questions she deems inappropriate or correcting journalists’ comments about her stage performance. For instance, in one interview, asked whether the sexual references in her songs would negatively influence her record sales, Gaga responds by confronting the interviewer with her achievement of selling 4 million records. Valentinsson argues that, by taking these stances, Gaga explicitly creates a stance of disalignment with the ‘media enterprise’ and reinforces her earlier identity as an ‘ordinary person’.

Concluding, Valentinsson argues that Gaga maintains an ‘ordinary persona’ by engaging in stance taking moves that emphasise her alignment with her fans above all other audiences. So, it seems, at least Gaga is not a ‘Judas’ afterall and she’s certainly not as ‘Shallow’ as the media would like you to believe…

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Valentinsson, Mary-Caitlyn (2018). Stance and the construction of authentic celebrity persona. Language in Society 47, 715–740.

doi:10.1017/S0047404518001100

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

Do birds of a feather tweet together?

Do you think you would be able to guess the gender of the author of an anonymous tweet? David Bamman, Jacob Eisenstein and Tyler Schnoebelen found some distinct but complex differences in the way men and women use language on the Twitter microblogging site.

The researchers amassed a corpus of over 9 million tweets from more than 14,000 American users. They then assigned gender to each account using historical census information on given names. Using computational methods and statistical tests, they found that:

·       pronouns are used more frequently by women. These include alternative spellings such as u and yr;

·      emotion terms (sad, love, etc.) and emoticons are also associated with female authors.;

·      although previous research has found that kinship terms are used more often by women, in this study  it really is a mixed bag. Most kinship words including mom, sister, daughter, child, dad and husband are used more by women. However, a few words, including wife, bro, and brotha, are associated with male authors;

·      some abbreviations such as lol and omg are used more by women, as are ellipses, expressive lengthening (e.g. coooooool), emoticons, exclamation marks, question marks, representations of sounds like ah, hmmm, and grr as well as hesitation words such as um;

·      assent terms such as okay and yess, are all used more by women, but yessir is used more by men. Similarly, negation terms nooo, and cannot are associated with women, while nah, nobody, and ain’t suggest the author is likely to be a man.

·      swearwords and taboo words are mostly used by male writers whereas women choose milder terms such as darn.

The researchers suggest that the male/female distinction used in much previous research is too simplistic. For example, some linguists claim that women use language in a more expressive way than men by lengthening words like yess and noo. However, using swearwords may also be seen as expressive, and this is done more frequently by men. Similarly, the fact that women use more abbreviations such as omg and lol goes against the common view that women prefer to use more standard language. And although men mention named 'entities' such as Apple or Steve about 30% more often than women, this does not support previous claims that men use language mainly to convey information while women tend to engage with others. When one looks more closely at the data it becomes clear that many of the named entities are sports figures and teams, and are  used by men to engage with others with similar sports interests.

The researchers then identified groups of tweeters who used similar sets of words, regardless of their gender. Many groups turned out to have a substantial majority of either men or women. While some of these clusters matched the linguistic expectations  for their gender, others didn’t. For example, although swearwords are generally preferred by men, some of the male-associated clusters used taboo terms far less often than women. On a closer look, many of these messages turned out to be work-related, where taboo language would be discouraged.

Finally, the researchers wanted to find out whether individuals with a greater proportion of same-gender people in their social networks use more linguistic items associated with their gender. In other words, do birds of a feather tweet together?

Well, sort of. There was a strong correlation between the use of gendered language and the composition of people’s social networks. The women in the dataset had networks which were on average 58% female. However, women whose tweets contained the most strongly marked female characteristics had social networks which were 77% female. Conversely, women who displayed the least gender-marked language had social networks that were on average only 40% female. The results for the men followed a similar pattern.

This fits with previous work showing that people change the way they communicate to match their addressees. People can use language to position themselves in relation to others, and they can do this by either conforming to or defying gendered expectations. So, it seems that it is not so straightforward to match language use with gender after all.

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Bamman, David, Jacob Eisenstein & Tyler Schnoebelen (2014) Gender identity and lexical variation in social media. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(2): 135–160.

doi. 10.1111/josl.12080

This summary was written by Danniella Samos

Please excuse me while I use the Bathroom Formula.....

Everyday language is usually the most interesting to study.  A perfect example of this is how we excuse ourselves when we need to use the bathroom/go to the toilet/powder our nose/visit the little boys’ room etc….As you can see the possibilities are endless!  In a fascinating study Magnus Levin investigated how and why speakers use this ‘Bathroom Formula’.

The ‘Bathroom Formula’ refers to the phrases speakers use to express their need to leave an ongoing activity in order to go to the bathroom.  It is a highly complex formula as in most situations it would be inappropriate to just disappear without giving an explanation and yet the explanation itself in this instance could cause embarrassment or be deemed impolite.  Therefore the speaker needs to be resourceful and draw on predictable expressions to negotiate this potential difficulty.

In his data, taken from British (BE) and American (AE) English, Levin identified six different ways of using the Bathroom Formula:

1)     Going to a place: ‘I’ll have to go to the loo.’ (BE)

2)     Specifying the activity: ‘I’m gonna go pee.’ (AE)

3)     Asking for directions: ‘Where’s the little boys’ room at?’ (AE)

4)     Asking permission: ‘Please may I go to the toilet?’ (BE)

5)     Promising to be back: ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ (AE)

6)     Using a metaphor: ‘I’ve got to wash my face.’ (AE)

In both British and American English (1) was the preferred way of using the Bathroom Formula, regardless of gender or age of the speaker.  We would expect children to use (2) the most; however, interestingly, Levin found that adults also quite often specify the activity they intend to perform with words like pee and tinkle.  Also surprising is that 86% of these speakers are women, who describe what they are going to do just as often in conversations with men as with other women.  It seems that verbs like tinkle are seen as polite and inoffensive enough to use in any company. 

Many other uses of the Bathroom Formula were found to be intermixed; for example, (5) was used with at least one of the other categories and served to make the interruption in the conversation seem less impolite.  The metaphors used in (6) were nearly always quite conventional (wash my hands/face, powder my nose or spend a penny, for example) and the following, rather bizarre, conversation between two American men helps to illustrate why this may be:

A:              Thanks for getting bags and stuff

B:              Oh, no problem.  They were two for one so

A:              Alright.  I’ll be right back….I’ve got to go deliver something
       around the corner OK. I just smelled gun powder

B:              Really

A:              It’s somebody…still lighting off fireworks

B:              (laughs) I wouldn’t doubt that

The only way that the speaker manages to convey his real need to go to the bathroom through his peculiar metaphor is by using the highly conventionalised phrase I’ll be right back to introduce it, which gives his friend a clue about what’s really going on.  So, using a tried and tested formula that everyone recognises, like wash my hands, is more accessible for the listener.  This is why new metaphors for going to the bathroom tend to fall out of use so quickly – they’re just too much work to use! In fact, Levin found that people rarely use metaphors at all when excusing themselves; it’s just that, when they do, they ‘stick out’ in the conversation and so are more memorable.

The same happens with potentially more offensive expressions like take a piss and have a dump.  Levin found that they are very rarely used and because of this are more noticeable when they occur, hence their force.  Generally people choose a ‘safe’ and inoffensive conversational path, sticking to tried and tested formulas that everyone knows.  As Levin writes, ‘things which are heard often tend to be noticed less.’

Levin found that, overall, women used the bathroom formula more than men but he is unsure as to why – It may because in general women use the toilet more often than men?  Or maybe because women are generally more polite than men?  More studies are needed to investigate this.  However, more interesting than the differences between speakers is the lack of variation when it comes to using the Bathroom Formula – we all generally stick to the same phrases.  Levin puts this down to our desire to be as unobtrusive and discreet as possible.

Now, if you’ll excuse me …

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Levin, Magnus (2013) The Bathroom Formula: A corpus-based study of a speech act in American and British English. Journal of Pragmatics 64: 1-16.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.01.001

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle 

‘I thought’ I knew you so well…

Language is such a crucial part of our lives that the way we use it can even reveal something about our relationships with other people. Michael Sean Smith* explains that people come to a conversation with both their own first-hand knowledge about themselves and also with the second hand knowledge they have of the other speaker.  Being able to show such knowledge in a conversation is crucial to demonstrate engagement, closeness and intimacy in the speakers’ relationship.

Life moves quickly and things can change in the time that elapses between two conversations.  This means that discrepancies may arise between the speakers’ first hand and second hand knowledge. The phrase I thought is one way that speakers indicate a mismatch between their knowledge and what is now being said. To find out exactly how I thought works, Smith studied 75 hours of data taken from online corpora (or ‘banks’) consisting of examples from face-to-face and telephone conversations.

As seen below, I thought is used to signal a misunderstanding between what has been said and what the speaker believed to be true.

Shirley:   you know Michael’s in the midst of moving this weekend
Geri:       I thought it was last weekend

Shirley:   no he had some complications but he’s gonna be all moved in
              on Monday

Geri:       uh huh

Here, Geri signals a problem in the conversation with the use of I thought, which Shirley is then able to correct. She provides an explanation, thus filling in the gaps in Geri’s knowledge.  So, I thought points to an unexpected discovery on the part of the person who says it, one that is not their fault but in fact indicates a gap in knowledge which it is their listener’s responsibility to provide.  This nearly always leads to the gap being filled and shared knowledge being happily resumed.

However, Smith found that sometimes I thought doesn’t signal a gap in knowledge.  Instead the speaker might use past shared knowledge to their advantage.  This can be seen in the following telephone conversation:

Zoe:   what you watching

Dad:   football home improvement and now you’ve got me watching that
         crazy fresh prince

Zoe:   I thought you didn’t like it ha ha

Dad:   well I didn’t until you got me watching it ha ha it’s kinda funny

It is clear here that, although Zoe is correct with her I thought, she is well aware that there is no gap in their mutual understanding.  Her I thought reinforces her relationship with her father and demonstrates their shared knowledge as she teases him about his new taste in TV viewing.  Therefore it shows recognition and appreciation on Zoe’s part of the fact that a change has occurred since they last spoke.

In both of the above examples, the listener accepts the discrepancy and explains or corrects it.  However, Smith found another less common function of I thought, witnessed in the following conversation between Julie and her housemate, Karen.

Julie:     did you see my patio I’m putting in look how much is done now

Karen:   oh it’s a patio?  I thought you were gonna grass it?

Julie:      nooo!

Karen:   you told me you were gonna grass it

Julie:     I told you I’m gonna do a flagstone patio that’s why I took all
             these rocks over here

Karen:   well, I never know what you’re gonna do from week to week

In this case, the recipient of the I thought comment, Julie, completely denies responsibility for Geri’s misunderstanding and feels no necessity to explain herself or correct the situation at all.  This leads to a much more assertive and argumentative conversation.

The most interesting thing about this little phrase I thought is how it can convey so much information about the speakers’ relationship.  The gaps in knowledge that it signals only arise in long-term relationships where two people continuously learn about each other over time as well as in their current conversation.  This knowledge is carried from conversation to conversation.  Nevertheless, each speaker also has their own independent life and what was reported in previous conversations may change by a later conversation. 

So, in a way, I thought is like a verbal traffic light calling a stop to the talk so that a gap in knowledge can be fixed.  But I thought I’d told you that already………..

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Smith, Michael Sean (2013). “ I thought” initiated turns: Addressing discrepancies in first-hand and second-hand knowledge. Journal of Pragmatics 57: 318-330.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.09.006

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle.

*Michael Sean Smith is a researcher in the Department of Applied Linguistics, University of California, USA

C'mon, give us a smile

As we know from our everyday lives, a smile can indicate many things (amusement, irony and agreement, to name a few).  However, Timo Kaukomaa, Anssi Peräkylä and Johanna Ruusuvuori were interested in researching smile production at a specific point in conversation – the smiles we make in a silence or a break in an interaction.  They note that the silent moments between two spoken utterances are ‘transitional spaces’, and that a smile produced by a speaker in one of these spaces can be seen as a ‘turn-opening smile’.  These turn-opening smiles, Kaukomaa et al. explain, project the onset of talk and can be analysed (along with other facial expressions) from two different perspectives:

1) facial expressions as an indication of inner emotional states and processes (such as a smile to show happiness)

2) facial expressions as a means of serving particular functions in interpersonal communication (such as a smile to show affiliation or solidarity).

The approach they adopt is the second of these, as they believe that turn-opening smiles, which were consistently backed up by prosodic and lexical features, perform a particular function in conversation.  In order to analyse the role that turn-opening smiles play, they video recorded five conversations in Finland between two people as they ate lunch and chatted with each other.

Following the analysis of the thirty turn-opening smiles which were present in the data, two main observations were made:  a) each turn-opening smile seemed to initiate a shift in the conversation from a neutral/ serious tone to a more positive humorous tone and, b) all of the smiles were reciprocated by the recipient.

The first observation highlights how a speaker is able to ‘make light’ of the topic that is being discussed or has previously been discussed.  One example Kaukomaa et al. use to illustrate this is an interaction between two female speakers discussing the possibility that a boy that one of girls is interested in may have lied about his age.  The discussion in the initial stages of description is quite delicate.  However, there is then a silence in which the speaker, who has shown an interest in the boy, smiles. She follows this with a comment relating to how, after you reach a certain age, you are more likely to lie about your age. In this exchange, the smile represents the turning point between a serious or frank tone of discussion to a lighter, more humorous tone, where the girls make light of the boy’s potential dishonesty.

The other point of note in this exchange, as well as all the others identified by the researchers, is that the recipient of the smile always joins in and smiles back. However, Kaukomaa et al note that there is a continuum of response times between an immediate reciprocation (i.e. before the speaker has followed up the smile with an utterance) and reciprocation once the speaker has validated the new humorous tone through the content of what they go on to say.  These two extremes have implications for the relationship between the speakers as well as the speakers’ relationship to the content of the interaction.  For example, an immediately reciprocated smile may indicate that the recipient of the smile trusts that the speaker is going to establish a more humorous stance or say something with which they are likely to agree.  On the other hand, a delayed return of a smile may show that the recipient is unsure of the speaker’s intentions, or is waiting to be ‘let in on the joke’ if a story is being introduced with which they are not familiar.

In conclusion, Kaukomaa et al. suggest that turn-opening smiles are unlike those facial expressions which are labelled ‘emotional contagions’.  These are, for example, smiles which are copied or mimicked automatically.  Instead, they perform an important role in the organisation of conversation and emotional projection across subsequent discourse.

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Kaukomaa, T., Peräkylä, A. and Ruusuvuori, J. (2013) Turn-opening smiles: Facial expression constructing emotional transition in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 55:21 - 42 

DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2013.05.006

This summary was written by Jenny Amos