talk1.htmlTEXTMSWDŘŘŘŘ8 ř{íř{šŞŞ) Instructions for Studying Discourse in Talk

Instructions for Studying Discourse in Talk
Topic, Argument, Setting and Relationship

Dr. Leon James
University of Hawaii
c. 1977
(Psychology 322(2), Spring, 1977, UHM)

Table of Contents
Introduction Traditional Treatments of Talk Functional Analysis of Talk The Analysis of Topic The Analysis of Argument To the bottom

[1.]

Introductory Remarks:

The focus in this assignment is on talk, your kind of talk, the kind that can be heard on your daily round. Talk is a key factor in understanding the setting, any setting. Your awareness of what's going on is given by either or both of these factors: (a) your interior dialogues with yourself, and (b) your public dialogues with others. In either case, talk is involved. Either you talk to someone, or you talk to yourself: most of people's waking and sleeping time is marked by a complete involvement with talk. In talk, we find the following five elements: (a) topic, i.e., what's being talked about; (b) argument, i.e., what's being asserted or predicated; (c) sequence, i.e., talkers take turns talking and listening (speaker vs. audience role); as well, topical references and predications are time bound, viz. they mark and order events sequentially with reference to a time line (past, present, future); (d) relationship, i.e., all acts of talking occur only in (are occasioned by) a context (or frame) of a dyad or multiples there; (a dyad is a pair of persons, i.e., two people who form a relationship; = relate to each other = act and react to each other; implies dependency or functional relationship; etc.); (3) setting, i.e., the location of the talking activity; location may imply "physical" (as in "He said it in the car") or "historical" (as in "She said it at the wedding", or "They talked about their parents before broaching the subject of where to go for the weekend"), or "ambient" (as in "They talked in an ambiance of tension", or "He said it with feeling, not coldly" or "My words fell on deaf ears").

To recapitulate our observations on talk, we can say that talking or discourse occurs during much of a person's life, and that it has five basic elements; there are: topic, argument, sequence, relationship, and setting (physical, historical, ambient).

[2.] Traditional Treatments of Talk:

In "philology" talk is treated as usage (e.g., dictionaries document definitions by quoting notable writers employing the word in the sense defined there); in "linguistics" talk is treated as sentences (e.g., the difference between patterns like "I put it on the table" vs. "She's putting it on the chair"); in "psycholinguistics" talk is treated as a communication act, as well as a symbolic language for problem solving; in "social psychology'' talk is treated as a variable to be manipulated or observed in an experiment (e.g., attitudes people express verbally or instructions to affect a subject's set or goal); in "anthropology" and the "ethno-sciences" talk is treated as one of the things people do when they get together; hence, in their field work. ethnoscientists record talk, transcribe it, and tabulate its components in various ways; in "literary criticism" talk is treated as a dramatic medium of presentation; hence, literary critics are always evaluative in terms of how well the writer or composer of talk achieves some discernible goal with an audience or in a subject matter; in "rhetoric" talk is treated as a dialectical process; hence, the "art" and "science" of talk among professional talkers (e.g., poets, comedians, minstrels, prophets, con men, etc.); in "oral history" talk is treated as a documentation interview; hence, oral history projects store and analyze taped interviews with participants to events the investigator is studying; in "drama" talk is treated as a staged performance; hence, people who are into drama and theater can be noticed to talk with carefully developed and practiced styles and evolved thematic elaborations thereof; all people, however, treat talk as a staged performance, in the sense that habits and styles of nonmorphemic contour features of standard display acts characterize individual identity---which in simpler language means that the way you talk characterizes your style, and that means, that you see talk as a staged performance; in "jurisprudence" talk is treated as the primary mode of documentation, investigation, and interpretation; hence, all legal evidence is in the form of a deposition by a witness that something x or y is the case---a situation necessitated by the fact that courts of law or judicial committees "sit" in a room and everything about the matter being judged must be deposited in the room in the form of reports by witnesses, oral or written; these reports are always signed, i.e., they are made of talk uttered by a particular person; in "folk psychology" talk is treated as an achievement; hence, to good or "fast" talkers are attributed all sorts of power, magic and charm; in actual practice, we can easily imagine that talk can be anything or everything: in talk, we can work off steam or bend someone's resistance; we can wound or caress with a look, a touch, or a remark; when two people talk to each other, they are animated and their emotions are triggered by comments: through talk, we can trigger physiological reactions in the body and biochemical discharges in the brain; through talk we can manage people and programs; talk is thus the hub of civilization as well as the content of a person's consciousness.

[3.] The Functional Analysis of Talk:

In the contemporary scientific literature, talk is only now becoming a subject of study. In the past, linguists, psychologists, and sociolinguists have studied "language" rather than talk. An easy method of distinguishing between language and talk is to remember the rule that talk is an act while language is a system. For example, if you write a note to your friend which says "Let's have coffee after" (or if you whisper or say the same thing), you have committed an act of talk and it actually occurred at a given time, in a given place; but now if you write the sentence "Let's have coffee after" in a book on the English language, or if you analyze it as a response a subject gave in an experiment, then you are treating it as part of a system known as language.

This distinction is fundamental to an understanding of talk as a standardized social activity. The study of talk as a system of language can be called structuralism (as in linguistics, language teaching, sociolinguistics, philosophy, cognitive psychology); functionalism refers to the study of talk as a situated act (as in ethnosemantics, law, psychiatry, public speaking, behaviorism).

The functional analysis of talk demands two criteria: (1) that there be pre-defined units of talk which can be observed to occur, and (2) that the setting be known wherein the talking occurs. These are the necessary and sufficient criteria for any behavioral act, talk or non-talk, in a functional analysis.

Pre-defined units of talk are always available to individuals whose cultural backgrounds overlap to some sufficient pragmatic degree (left undefined, for now): for instance, when you talk to members of our family in the course of eating dinner at home, you have available the following:

(1) An indefinitely large number of topics, either old or new;

(2) An inexhaustible string of possible arguments which you may shortcut, elaborate, or interrupt;

(3) A repeatable cycle of exchanges in a sequence that depends on an agreed upon operational procedure among the talkers, e.g., comment> reaction> comment> etc.

(4) A prior history of episodes in relationship which involves mutual expectations and provides a dynamics of accounting through claims, moves, and strategic counter moves in a context of a developing or evolving interactional case history or biography.

(5) Shared versions of reality, which may be called standardized imaginings---a process which allows each listener to reconstruct the setting for every act of talk, and thereby to give it "meaning".

Armed with these five conditions, your dinner table conversation proceeds automatically, spontaneously, effortlessly (and no doubt, noisily'). Why do we talk? That is the question which the assignment will ultimately have to come to grips with. In order to answer it in a scientific manner you need to follow the following general steps:

(1) Prepare a written record of some exchange of talk, with annotated stage directions (i.e., details that allow the reader of the record to reconstruct the physical, historical, and ambient features of the setting).

(2) Use the written record of talk to document the functional relationship between a particular move or exchange of moves and the setting (e.g., "John said 'No' to Steve after Steve laughed at John" or "Mary's reference to her accident did not occur until Jane told her about her operation").

(3) Tabulate the relationships you are documenting so as to indicate general properties of talk (e.g., how the talkers behave and how those behaviors at the dinner table fit in the larger context of the day, the family, the neighborhood, the culture.

(4) Write up a report presenting your findings, interpretations, and discussion; the report is to be in an objective register and a scientific format. Throughout this process of writing up the assignment, the student should keep in mind why he is doing what he is doing all along the way. This is why it is essential that you read these instructions, study them until everything about this project is completely clear, then proceed with the necessary and logical steps. You don't know what you'll find. You'll be surprised. You've never done this before. There will be plenty of opportunity for you to discuss all your problems with the instructional team. This needs your unfailing, persistent and de-dramatized attention. It is possible for you to do a scientific piece of work. It is. Do it. We present some guidelines for you to follow:

(A) The analysis of topic:

(i) List breakdown of topics exchanged; use ordinary way of titling exchanges (e.g., "talking about the food", "saying something about his feelings during the war", etc.).

(ii) Sake a chart or figure showing how and when one topic leads into another; localize people's utterances by numbering the lines in the written record of the talk.

(iii) develop rationales to account for the structure of the topic over time; contextualize the topical exchanges in terms of your understanding, i.e., give information that places the topical exchanges into their real life context: e.g., why does John bring up the topic of going bowling rather than golfing? Why does Mary ask who Robert is? Why does Ted ask Jane about the broom handle and not Doris?

(iv) state some general laws about topic in talk that are derivable from your findings: e.g., that when a person switches the conversation to another topic, there is a longer pause than usual just before he starts his turn (this is documented by timing pauses on the tape with a stopwatch and contrasting the length of silent periods before different remarks or topics); or, a second example: that when John switches topics he says "Yeah, but..." 90% of the time when he is talking to brother Robert but only 10% of the time when he is talking to Father; or, a third example: that Jane's answers to questions are occasions for telling a story along with the answer; etc. These general laws you'll be expressing about your talk at the dinner table are in fact a listing of the cataloguing-practices of your community in the area of topic. They represent objective, scientific data about you and your community.

(B) The analysis of argument:

(i) give a breakdown, in schematic form, of the argument as it unfolds dramatically on the written record of the talk: e.g.,

Move 1: (John bumps Mary's arm) 126

Move 2: (John does not apologize) 126

Move 3: (Mary scolds him) 126

Move 4: (John denies having done it) 127

Move 5: (John bumps Mary's shoulders deliberately) 128

Move 6: (John apologizes profusely) 128

Move 7: (Mother scolds Mary and John) 129

Move 8: (Mary talks to Father--switches subject to birthday party) 130

(Numbers 126-130 refer to numbered lines in transcript.)

(ii) correlate the argument Moves as per your breakdown with the appropriate lines on your written record: are the utterances spoken visibly related to the argument Moves? They ought to be. Those correspondences, as they appear in your tabulation, are valuable as scientific data. They are objective descriptions of the operational talking procedures of you and your community. They show the exact characteristics of the standardized argument practices of your ethnicity: they define you and your group within the context of others and their groups on your daily round.

(iii) derive abstract patterns for the arguments in your sample record: are there recurrent types? e.g.,

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