Quoting others

…and she said ‘hey, come and see this’

…and she was like ‘hey, come and see this’

Which of the above do you think is more formal, said or was like? Why? If you’re telling a story and start reporting what someone else has said, how do you think that you would introduce the quote?  What would influence your choice?

These are the sort of questions Natalia Blackwell and Jean Fox Tree investigated by looking at the speech and opinions of students at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  The focus of their study was the verbs that people use to introduce direct speech (such as said/say, was like/ is like, went/ goes etc.) and it’s these verbs which are known as ‘quotatives’. They explain that there are two main approaches to how previous research has viewed the choice of quotatives.  The first is known as ‘quotation-centred’.  This approach says that it is the content of the quote that determines what quotatives are used.  For example, say is thought to introduce quotes which are more accurate and true to the original, while be like (i.e. she’s like/ I was like), although more emotional and dramatic, indicates that what is reported is more vague in relation to the original event.  In contrast, the ‘social-context-centred’ proposal claims that it is the social relationships between, for example, the speaker and the person being quoted or the speaker and the listener that influences which quotatives are chosen. 

Blackwell and Fox Tree designed 7 experiments to test what factors may influence quotative choice.  The motivation for designing a range of experiments was that, unlike using a corpus of spontaneous speech, conditions could be controlled and, therefore, comparisons would be more valid.  The design of the experiments varied in form and included tests where participants were asked to guess which quotatives (either say or be like) had been bleeped out of recordings (to judge whether it was the content of the quote which guided selection), and the telling of stories to different audiences relating to video clips they watched (to judge whether social factors influenced choice).

The results of the various experiments showed that participants thought there was a distinct difference between say and be like, with be like particularly described negatively as irritating and annoying.  As a result, a comparison of their actual use and their opinions showed that most participants over-estimated their use of say.  They also found little evidence supporting the ‘quotation-centred’ approach to quotative use, as, for example, participants couldn’t select the correct quotation when it was missing from sound clips they were played.  However, they did find evidence supporting the ‘social-context-centred’ approach as participants adjusted their choice of quotative according to who they were quoting and the status of the addressee – the higher the status, the more say was used. They suggested that use of say, in contrast to be like, enabled speakers to signal the relationship status among the person being quoted, the speaker and the addressee. In addition to these observations, Blackwell and Fox Tree suggested that, even though there was little evidence to suggest that say was used instead of be like to reflect the accuracy of the quote, say was used extensively when quoting writing or set phrases.  This, they suggested, indicates that say may be adopting specific functions in the language.

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Blackwell, N. and Fox Tree, J. E. (2012) Social Factors Affect Quotative Choice. Journal of Pragmatics 44: 1150-1162.

doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2012.05.001

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

It's actually quite interesting

Previous research has claimed that the adverbs actually and really are interchangeable.  In other words, we should be able to use one or the other with no significant change to the meaning of the utterance.

                                                 

                          It’s actually not as simple as that

                          It’s really not as simple as that

Mark Gray investigated the meaning of these words in medial position (i.e. when they are not at the beginning or end of an utterance) to see how interchangeable they were.  He used two sources of data for the analysis – the spoken part of the British National Corpus and a series of BBC 4 radio broadcasts of the ‘Any Questions’ programme.  In order to carry out his study, he looked at what other words actually and really occur with throughout the data.  By looking at these collocations, he could judge how interchangeable they were.  For example, if actually and really were found to occur in the same structures (such as with the same following verbs), they could be considered as interchangeable.  However, if there wasn’t much overlap in how they were used, that would indicate they had different core meanings and were not able to be substituted for each other without changing the meaning.

Looking at actually and really before adjectives, Gray found that actually tended to occur with adjectives whose meaning had an easy opposite (such as true, which has the opposite false: we say that’s actually true and that’s actually false). Actually also occurred with adjectives that imply only a two-way comparison (such as he’s actually better than Sam).  In contrast, really was found to pattern mostly with gradable adjectives (such as it’s really good to see you or she’s really nice, where it’s also possible to say she’s exceptionally nice or she’s slightly nice).  This seems to imply that speakers will select which adverb to use in accordance with the properties of the following adjective.  Further to this, Gray observed that actually is much more restricted in what type of verb can follow it, and there are many verbs which were found to follow one but not the other.  For example, saw and put were found to follow actually but not really, while hate and like were found to collocate with really but not with actually.

However, even though this evidence suggests that, at least in British English, actually and really are not interchangeable, there are some syntactic contexts where both can be found.  In particular, both were found to occur after the pronoun I and before the verb think.  For example, people said I actually enjoyed it and also I really enjoyed it. So, how does a speaker choose between the two?

Gray proposes that actually is used when a speaker is presenting a new opinion - that is, one which is not implied by the discourse so far. Using the example I actually enjoyed it, a previous utterance could have been:

            A:  I can’t believe you went scuba diving….. you’ve always                        hated being in the water

            B:  I actually enjoyed it

B’s response shows how the actually refutes the assumption that A had about B’s feelings toward scuba diving.  In contrast, really is used when the speaker wants to intensify their own feelings towards what follows it.  So, if we substitute really in the example above (I really enjoyed it), the speaker is instead emphasising the ‘enjoyment’ of the experience.  In contrast to previous claims, then, Gray concludes that, even when really and actually are found in the same syntactic frame, they do not have the same meaning in discourse.

__________________________________________________________ 

Gray, M. (2012) On the interchangeability of actually and really in spoken English: quantitative and qualitative evidence from corpora. English Language and Linguistics 26:151-170

Doi:10.1017/S1360674311000323

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

Text or call? How one thing leads to another…..

The use of mobile phones allows us to exploit communication through both written (text messages) and spoken (phone calls) language. Whether we choose one mode over another depends on many factors. For example, research has shown that teenagers often choose text messages over phone calls because they are cheaper and faster than making a call and because they are more convenient in that they can take place anywhere and at any time. On the other hand, teenagers seem to prefer a phone call if the call is to their parents and usually only call their friends if they need to explain something or if they have a lot to say.

Researcher Ditte Laursen has been at the forefront of research on adolescents’ mobile phone communication and in this recent article she reports not on the choice of mode but rather on the change of mode, specifically how participants manage the change of mode from a text message to a phone call and how both modes interrelate as parts of the same communication sequence.

The data come from the recordings of mobile communication (text messages and mobile phone calls) of six 14-year-old friends who were recorded over a period of six weeks, one week for each person. Laursen focused on a subsample of mobile communication, which involved 31 young people and consisted of 481 text messages and 173 calls. She found that the messages and calls were often linked to other messages and calls. For example, she found that 100 of the 173 calls were parts of series of calls and that 24 of the calls were preceded by a text message.

The 24 calls preceded by a text message were analysed further and Laursen found that after a text message in a continuing communication sequence, four different types of conversation may follow:

1)             the answer (after a text message demanding a reply)

For example, a girl sends a text message to her best friend to say that her boyfriend has let her down. Rather than reply with a text message, the best friend calls the girl. Laursen suggests that in this context the call demonstrates a greater commitment than the text message and is used to ‘upgrade the importance or the seriousness of the text message’. These calls, which can be seen as a second pair-part in a paired sequence, also allow for a longer and more complex response than a text message. The opening sequence in this type of call is said to be minimal since the participants do not need to introduce themselves or make any initial enquiries (such as how are you? where are you?).

2)             the reminder (when there is a missing text message)

When a text message is sent and requires a reply which does not subsequently arrive, a reminder for a response may be made in the form of a call. Laursen provides an example of a young person who sends a text message asking another person to meet her the following day to repay some borrowed money. The person does not respond to the message nor arrives the next day with the money so the sender makes a phone call which then requires an immediate response. In these conversations the opening sequence is likely to be maximal (self-identification, greetings, initial enquiries). In this way, the caller puts off the reason for the call and provides the callee with the opportunity to respond to the unanswered text message (thus avoiding possible conflict).

3)             the resumption of conversation (picking up a conversation again after a closed text sequence)

In these cases, there has been a closed text exchange but it is then followed up by a call which addresses the text message exchange. An example might be when an arrangement to meet has been agreed via text messaging but then one person calls the other close to the time of the appointment perhaps to confirm the meeting. Laursen suggests that the phone call provides an opportunity to confirm the meeting place and time in an interactive way and that it gives the conversation ‘an air of urgency’ as the call is made at the time of, or shortly before, the meeting time.

4)             the confirmation (after a text message with a request for/promise of a call).

These are calls which result from text messages that contain a request or a promise of a later call, for example calls which follow a text message which contains the request call me or a text message which contains the promise I’ll ring you later. These calls are usually made because the exchange is likely to be complex and will require multiple turns back and forth. Text messaging in such cases might be deemed as inappropriate.

The study is innovative in that it is the first study of text messages and mobile calls in interconnected communication sequences. Laursen argues that text messages and mobile calls are often intertwined to such an extent that they are not meaningful if considered separately or taken out of sequence. Her analysis indicates that phone calls following text messages are often used for complex or lengthy matters and that they might be considered ‘more valuable than a text message’ when the call is used to deal with important topics or when used to express emotional aspects of an interaction such as compassion and sympathy.

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Laursen, Ditte (2012). Sequential organization of text messages and mobile phone calls in interconnected communication sequences. Discourse and Communication 6(1): 83-99.

doi: 10.1177/1750481311432517

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Taken Prisoner?

Two prisoners in a cell – so why do we say taken prisoner? Why haven’t they been taken prisoners? We may not often stop to think about the way we use the little phrase take prisoner, but Eva Berlage’s research shows that it is a good example of the processes of change that affect the way we use language.

Using a wide range of historical and modern texts dating from the early 1500s to the early 2000s, representing both American English and British English, Berlage explored how the phrase take prisoner(s) has evolved over the centuries. She showed how it has stabilised and created a new meaning which is distinct from the original meaning of the two separate words take and prisoner.  For example, the literal meaning of (to) take prisoners means something like ‘to condemn persons to a state of confinement’.  But when we use the phrase in writing or speech, it can either keep its literal meaning or adopt more metaphoric meanings (e.g. he took my heart prisoner).

Berlage was able to identify two separate but relevant processes of language change.The first is known as grammaticalisation.  During this process, a word takes on a more abstract meaning (rather than a literal meaning) and, as a result, can generate many new structures which it couldn’t before.  In the case of take, Berlage suggests that it has undergone partial grammaticalisation over the centuries so that it is now used to produce a wide range of phrases such as take care, take advantage or take notice. 

However, while the number of phrases with take has increased, the distribution of prisoner was found to have decreased.  Therefore, while historical texts had cases where both take prisoner and make prisoner were used, over time prisoner was no longer found to occur with other verbs.  This restriction of prisoner to occur only with take (and its derivatives such as took or taking) suggests that the phrase take prisoner has become increasingly lexicalised over time.  This is the second type of language change, with the phrase now used as if it was a single word with its own unit of meaning rather than having the separate meanings of each of the words.  However, the lexicalisation process is only partial as both the words take and prisoner can have individual meanings outside the phrase take prisoner (as in, for take, I only take sugar in my tea sometimes).

Berlage suggests that further evidence for the lexicalisation of take prisoner is the increasing loss of the plural form take prisoners (e.g. many soldiers were taken prisoners), which, according to the historical evidence, declined the most during the 1920-1939 period in British English.  She produces evidence to show how it was word order which influenced the speed of change towards the loss of the plural form prisoners in this phrase.  Looking at American newspapers between 1895 and 1945, the plural was more than twice as likely to be kept in phrases where a noun phrase came before prisoners compared to when it came after – examples from the LA Times in 1917 include The Teutons took prisoner 556 men and […] bayoneting a number of them and taking others prisoners. After the 1940s, the plural form prisoners fell out of use. In the texts that Berlage analysed it survived only in the phrase take prisoners of war.

The results from this analysis show that there are a number of inter-relating factors that influence language change and that historical texts can provide valuable insight into how these changes are accepted by those who use the language.

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Berlage, Eva. (2012) At the interface of grammaticalisation and lexicalisation: the case of take prisoner. English Language and Linguistics, 16:35-55

doi: 10.1017/S136067431100027X

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

Life chang(ing)

Do you say life changin’ or life changing? The chances are that you say both, perhaps without realising it. English speakers all around the world vary their pronunciation of (ing) in words like changing, and as far as we know they always have done. Researchers have found, though, that younger speakers generally pronounce (ing) more often as –in than adults do. Then, as they grow older, they begin to use more –ing. In old age people seem to go back to saying –in more often.

There is a lot of research on the pronunciation of –ing! For some summaries of recent studies, you could look at:

http://linguistics-research-digest.blogspot.fr/2012/07/staying-or-goin.html

http://linguistics-research-digest.blogspot.fr/2012/07/making-sense-of-ing-and-in.html

In a study of 13 American girls from Philadelphia, Suzanne Evans Wagner looked at how their speech altered over the course of what is a highly significant transitional period – the change from high school to university or college.  For young people this can be a time of social and developmental upheaval: at school they spend much of their day with the same groups of friends, but once they leave school the groups split up, as friends go off to different colleges or workplaces. Wagner argues that this could represent a point in time where young people start to take a turn towards using –ing pronunciations more often, as they have to establish their identity in relation to new acquaintances and become more aware of sociolinguistic variation.

The girls who took part in this study were interviewed in 2005, when they were at high school, and again in 2006 after they had started at university or college. Only verbs were analysed (not nouns, then, such as ceiling).  The social factors that Wagner identified as likely to influence variation were socio-economic status, ethnicity (the area was populated by people with Irish or Italian backgrounds), post-high school transition and style of speaking (e.g. casual or careful). 

The results from both sets of recordings showed that, in line with other (ing) studies, casual speech styles prompted more –in pronunciations (81% in total) compared to careful styles (58%).  However, even though the results from the earlier recordings showed all the social factors (with the exception of social class) to affect variation to roughly the same extent, this was not the case in the later recordings.  In the later recordings, post-high school transition was calculated as having the most significant influence on the variation.  Those girls who went to more nationally-orientated institutions after high school (research universities or highly selective liberal arts colleges) reduced their use of–in more than girls who went to more local institutions.  Indeed, where the girls went after high school was found to have a stronger influence on their pronunciation of (ing) than their social class, showing, Wagner suggests, that at this life stage where you are going can have more influence on your speech than where you come from (at least for features like (ing) that have always been variable and so are not involved in language change).

In addition to this, the girls’ ethnicity was found to correlate with the variants they used. Using –in was treated as a feature of Irish identity within the high school and the girls who had the strongest links to that identity (through where they lived, worked, and socialised) showed the highest levels of –in pronunciation.  In addition, those speakers who had the least change from –in to –ing the year after high school graduation were those girls with the strong Irish ties.

Taking the data as a whole, Evans Wagner concludes that young people did indeed begin to use more –ing pronunciations as they approached adulthood, but that even so a minority did not. To understand why, it was important to examine the social meanings of the variation in the local community.

One of the questions that future research might investigate, she suggests, is whether the individuals who make big changes to their linguistic behaviour between school and university do so over the rest of their adult life span. 

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Evans Wagner, S. (2012) Real-time evidence for age grad(ing) in late adolescence. Language Variation and Change 24:179-202

doi: 10.1017/S0954394512000099

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

‘Now’, a little word that matters…..

What does now mean? Often its meaning is ‘at this moment’, (as in we’re going now) but it can also be a discourse-pragmatic marker – words like okay, right, like, well, mm, oh, I mean, you know that do not add to the content of an utterance but instead perform very important functions in interaction in spoken language (click on Discourse Markers in the left-hand category bar for some summaries of recent research on discourse-pragmatic particles). Researcher Deborah Schiffrin suggests that now is often used at the start of an utterance to focus attention on the speaker and the upcoming talk, as in ‘Now, let’s begin’ or it can often be used to evaluate one’s own or someone else’s talk, such as ‘Now that’s a good idea.’

Another function, however, has been highlighted by researcher Hansun Zhang Waring whose study shows that now-prefaced utterances (NPU) can be used to mark disaffiliation in social interaction and that they can either be directed towards one’s self or towards others. Waring collected over 100 NPUs from a variety of audio or video-recorded sources in American English, which included ordinary conversations as well as institutional talk such as second language classroom interactions. She excluded the type of NPU that usually marks a boundary or a switch from one activity to another (All right uhm let’s see, now we’re going to do something fun) as she states that the function of this type is relatively obvious and was not the focus of the study. As well as transcribing the data, Waring also used software to analyse the pitch contours at which now occurred.

By self-directed NPUs, Waring refers to those cases which communicate disaffiliation through revising, retracting or rejecting one’s own prior talk when engaging in such activities as giving opinions, correcting errors and seeking compliance. She provides the following example:

Libby: but I think our tendency to- to- when it comes to our phonetic language reading my 13 year old who’s reading The Jungle. He said oh the introduction is so difficult there’re all these little names and I said to hm w- you don’t have to pronounce them. Just look at them as a unit and move on. Now – but the tendency is that we’re trained to read phonetically, and then he was being dragged down by distractors he felt he should attack them sometime.

In this example, the speaker is talking about her son’s difficulty of reading foreign names and Waring suggests that the NPU in this case is used to reject the speaker’s earlier solution to ‘just look at them as a unit and move on’, perhaps realizing that this explanation may be too simplistic.

Other-directed NPUs are perhaps more common and are used to disaffiliate by correcting, rejecting or disagreeing with another’s talk. Waring provides the following example:

Virginia: I know she’s your favorite child. You [always (     )]

Mom:                                                       [O::::h! Now l]ets not get on to that. Now that is ridiculou[s

Virginia:                                     [Wull it’s the truth

This example occurs at the dinner table during a family dispute in which Virginia accuses her mother of favoring her sister. The NPUs occur emphatically and immediately and serve to dis-align with Virginia’s accusation.

Interestingly, the analysis in this study shows that in cases of NPUs that are used for disaffiliation purposes, the pitch of now tends to be delivered in a relatively flat tone. This is in contrast to NPUs in the boundary-marking cases, where now tends to rise sharply in pitch. The researcher concludes by suggesting further research on the way that now functions differently from other disaffiliative markers such as well.
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Waring, Hansun Zhang (2012). Doing disaffiliation with now-prefaced utterances. Language and Communication 32: 265-275.

doi: 10.1016/j.langcom.2012.01.001

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Fitting in to a new home – with a Bri’ish accent?

Whose English accent will this little girl grow up to use? Her parents’, or her local friends'?

It’s often thought that as they grow up, the children of immigrants begin to sound like their locally-born friends rather than their parents. Devyani Sharma and Lavanya Sankaran, though, found that things are more complex than this – language change between different generations is more gradual than might be expected, and it’s also more complex.

Sharma and Sankaran worked in the Punjabi community in Southall, London, where, over the course of the last 60 years, South Asians have shifted from being a minority group to a majority one which now makes up more than 60 per cent of the local population. The researchers analysed the English of three groups of South Asians, totalling 42 individuals. One group consisted of first generation immigrants who had migrated from India as adults, and the two other groups were locally-born second generation South Asians, one older (aged between 35 and 60) and one younger (aged between 18 and 35). The older second generation group had grown up in Southall at a time when South Asians were still a minority group there and when race relations in the area were hostile. By the time the second, younger, group (aged 18-35) was growing up, South Asians were no longer such a minority in Southall and, perhaps as a result, race relations had shifted to a cooperative coexistence. 

The researchers focussed on the pronunciation of /t/, which has a distinctive local pronunciation as well as a South Asian pronunciation. The local London pronunciation of /t/ is glottalised (with the pronunciation of words like water or feet sometimes represented in popular writing as wa’er and fee’). As you might expect, the first generation South Asian speakers had almost no glottalised pronunciations of /t/. By contrast, both second generation groups used glottalised /t/; furthermore, they followed the same pattern, using this pronunciation more often at the end of a word than the middle of a word (so, more often in feet than water). In their use of glottalised /t/, then, the second generation were speaking more like locally-born people of their age than their parents – just as we might expect.

However, the South Asian speakers sometimes pronounced /t/ as a retracted or retroflex consonant, as in Punjabi, the Indian language that they also spoke. Here the tip of the tongue is curled back to touch the ridge just behind the top teeth (or close to the ridge). You can hear this pronunciation in the stereotyped English of Apu, the Indian immigrant in The Simpsons. The first generation immigrant group used retroflex /t/ 35 per cent of the time. The second generation groups also used this pronunciation, albeit less often: 16 per cent of the /t/’s in the English of the older second generation were retroflex, and 8 per cent in the English of the younger speakers. The second generation, then, had not altogether abandoned the pronunciation of their parents: although language change was taking place across the generations in these immigrant families, it was a more gradual process than is often supposed.

The change was also more complex than expected. Unlike both their parents and the older second generation group, the younger speakers used retroflex /t/ more often at the beginning of a word, where it is more noticeable (for example, in tea or toffee). They also pronounced it with a “fortis” (more energetic) phonetic quality.

In interviews with the researchers younger second generation male speakers used retroflex /t/ more often than younger female speakers Even here, though, the picture is more complicated than this gender difference suggests. Female speakers used a surprisingly high number of pronunciation features influenced by Punjabi, including retroflex /t/, when they were speaking English at home. For female speakers, then, there seems to be a sharper compartmentalisation of styles across their repertoire.

Sharma and Sankaran point out that other pronunciation features pattern in a similar way in the English of these three groups of speakers. They explain that for the older second generation group, surviving at school and in public meant they had to downplay Indianness and pass as British, so they acquired local pronunciations and weakened their use of South Asian ones. Many individuals in this group then went into their fathers’ businesses and had continuing ties with India. Depending on where they were and who they were talking to, they needed to signal that they belonged either to a British or an Indian group. As a result, they were able to control two distinct pronunciations of English. The younger generation not only had less regular contact with India, but by the time they were growing up race relations in the area were less hostile, so they did not need to try to pass as British. Instead, using a focused, Punjabi-inflected speech style allows them to signal their allegiance to the now sizeable local British Asian community.

Sharma and Sankaran note that in immigrant communities elsewhere – in North America, for example – there may be more rapid assimilation to local patterns of pronunciation since, as they have shown, linguistic assimilation depends in part on social factors such as community relations and the size of the migrant community.  

______________________________________________

Devyani Sharma and Lavanya Sankaran (2011) Cognitive and social forces in dialect shift: Gradual change in London South Asian speech. Language Variation and Change 23: 399-428.

doi: 10.1017/S0954394511000159

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Displaying Rejection

No, we can't!

In a previous summary, we looked at how people make requests, but what happens when you reject a request?  How does the person on the receiving end of the rejection deal with your response?

This is what Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen wanted to investigate. For her analysis she looked at a range of interactions, mainly telephone conversations made by a British English family. She explains that rejections are generally made to speech acts such as a request, a proposal or an invitation, where the addressee has two options: they can respond in a positive way by accepting, granting or doing what was asked; or they can respond in a negative way by refusing, declining or rejecting. Focussing particularly on negative responses, Couper-Kuhlen explains that there are a number of ‘affective displays’ which are common to how someone reacts in these situations and which allow them to make a particular attitude or stance visible or audible to others. For example, a display of disappointment may include a sagging of the shoulders, a quiet response and a generally withdrawn air.  In contrast, a display of irritation may take the form of a lraising of the voice,  confrontational gestures and subsequent challenges to the reasons behind the rejection.

The characteristics of these displays can, initially, be channelled through what she terms ‘rejection finalisers’.  These are words and phrases such as okay then, alright, oh well and never mind.  Imagine the difference in interpretation between the following responses (the last line in (1) and (2):

            (1) Disappointment           

A)  Am I allowed to come to the party tonight?

                   B)  Well, not really, it’s actually more of a work thing

                   A)  <subdued> Oh, okay then

            (2) Irritation

C)  There are still some tickets available for that play                      tomorrow, can we go?

                   D)  I’m working late tomorrow

                   C)  <sharply> Oh  (pause) well I didn’t know that

The use of rejection finalisers show how A and C acknowledge the rejection, and it is how they are used with linguistic factors such as different voice qualities (e.g. a breathy voice like a sigh of disappointment) as well as pitch and volume changes, that carry the affective meaning.  However, while responses of disappointment and irritation are marked displays following rejection, Couper-Kuhlen highlighted a further type of reaction – that is, not to acknowledge the rejection and, therefore, not produce a rejection finaliser.  This can happen in contexts such as negotiations, for example:

(3)      A) I know I said I would drop those papers around to you     tomorrow morning, but, unfortunately, I’ve been asked     to work instead. Can I bring them round in the

             evening?

B) That’s not so good as I have to take the kids to 

    swimming practice

A) Umm, I could just drop them through your letterbox

    then and we can chat about them once you’ve had a 

    look

B) Okay, let’s do that

A) Great

In this example, A doesn’t produce a rejection finaliser or a specific affective display to convey her attitude to B’s initial response. Instead, A thinks and comes up with an alternative suggestion which is taken up by B and the matter is settled.

Comparing these three possible responses (disappointment, irritation and lack of affective display), Couper-Kuhlen concluded that there is an order of preference between them.  Irritation was not as frequent as the other two.  Additionally, when irritation occurred in the same sequence as disappointment, disappointment would come first before any affective display of irritation.  Therefore, while every response to rejection is uniquely linked to the contexts in which they take place, further research into the ordering of affective displays and how they intertwine with linguistic structure can help us understand conversation structure and the relationships between the participants.

__________________________________________________________

Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2012) On affectivity and preference in response to rejection. Text and Talk 32:453-475.

doi: 10.1515/text-2012-0022

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

Can you pass the salt?

This study takes a look at how people respond to requests

We can use requests to achieve many different things.  For example, we may want to ask permission to do something (e.g May I get a glass of water?) or to ask for assistance (e.g. Can you help lift this for me?).  How do we respond to requests, though? We can either accept and take action to fulfil the request, or we can decline.

By analysing peoples’ responses, Mirka Rauniomaa and Tiina Keisanen looked at how people use both linguistic and physical actions to fulfil various requests. The data that they used consisted of 16 hours of face-to-face and in-car interactions, and a total of 69 requests were identified.  Of these, 56 received a favourable response (i.e. the request was accepted by the person being addressed).  The linguistic construction of these requests was mostly either interrogative (e.g. Can you pass the salt?) or imperative (e.g. Tell us a story), showing that these are the preferred linguistic structures for asking someone to do something.  In addition, favourable responses were shown to prompt differing levels of commitment. 

Consider the following:

            1)  Will you put the rubbish out later?

                        a)  Okay

                        b)  I will                         

     c)  Yes, I’ll put the rubbish out

The response okay in 1a is judged as showing less commitment to the request compared with the responses in 1b and 1c.  As a result, it’s suggested that responses are made on a scale of commitment and that the more elaborate the response structure, the more committed the responder is. 

The main focus of the data analysis highlighted how responses to requests can take two different formats: (1) fulfilment only or  (2) acceptance + fulfilment.  Fulfilment-only responses involved the physical completion of the request only.  An example would be if A asks B for the salt and B simply passes it to A without saying anything or using any body movement to acknowledge A’s request.  However, an example of acceptance plus fulfilment would be if B says something like sure and also passes the salt.  Rauniomaa and Keisanen observed that the acceptance aspect of the response doesn’t need to be a vocal acceptance like okay, sure or yeah. Instead, it can be a bodily gesture such as nodding or giving the thumbs up.  They also highlight how acceptance plus fulfilment responses may serve to buy the responder time so that they may complete the request once they have finished an ongoing action (for example, if you were asked to pass the salt but were holding a dinner plate at the time, you might respond Okay, just a sec before putting down the plate and picking up the salt). 

 Therefore, Rauniomaa and Keisanen noted that responses also work on different time scales – they may be immediate, delayed while another act is completed or even postponed to a time in the future (e.g. Okay, I’ll do it next time I’m in town).

In conclusion, Rauniomaa and Keisanen noted that embodiment (that is the physical act of doing what is requested) is closely linked to the structure of request sequences – how much effort or imposition will be involved in the request’s completion will affect how the request is framed.  Also, the capability of the responder to react immediately or sometime in the future will depend on what type of response is produced, both verbally and non-verbally.

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Rauniomaa, M. and Keisanen, T. (2012) Two multimodal formats for responding to requests. Journal of Pragmatics 44: 829-842.

doi: 10.1016/jpragma.2012.03.003

This summary was written by Jenny Amos