Goffman, Erving. Forms of Talk.
With my own thumbs, in this volume I want to hold up three matters for consideration. First, the process of “ritualization” - if I may slightly recast the ethological version of that term. The movements, looks, and vocal sounds we make as an unintended by-product of speaking and listening never seem to remain innocent. Within the lifetime of each of us these acts in varying degrees acquire a specialized communicative role in the stream of our behavior, looked to and provided for in connection with the displaying of our alignment to current events. We look simply to see, see others looking, see we are seen looking, and soon become knowing and skilled in regard to the evidential uses made of the appearance of looking. We clear our throat, we pause to think, we turn attention to a next doing, and soon we specialize these acts, performing them with no felt contrivance right where others in our gestural community would also like, and like them, we do so apart from the original instrumental reason for the act. Indeed, gestural conventions once established in a community can be acquired directly, the initial noncommunicative character of the practice (when there is such) serving merely as a guide in our acquiring gestural competency, ensuring that our learning how to be unthinkingly expressive won’t be entirely rote. The purpose and functions of these displays cannot of course be caught by the term “expression,” but only by closely examining the consequence each several gesture commonly has in samples of actual occurrences - with due consideration to the sorts of things that might be conveyed in the context had no such gesture been offered. (2-3)
Second, “participation framework.” When a word is spoken, all those who happen to be in perceptual range of the event will have some sort of participation status relative to it. The codification of these various positions and the normative specification of appropriate conduct within each provide an essential background for interaction analysis - whether (I presume) in our own society or any other. (3)
Third, there is the obvious but insufficiently appreciated fact that words we speak are often not our own, at least our current “own.” Who it is who can speak is restricted to the parties present (and often more restricted than that), and which one is now doing so is almost always perfectly clear. But although who speaks is situationally circumscribed, in whose name words are spoken is certainly not. Uttered words have utterers; utterances, however, have subjects (implied or explicit), and although these may designate the utterer, there is nothing in the syntax of utterances to require this coincidence. We can as handily quote another (directly or indirectly) as we can say something in our own name. (This embedding capacity is part of something more general: our linguistic ability to speak of events at any remove in time and space from the situated present.) (3)
So three themes: ritualization, participation framework, and embedding. It is their interplay that will be at issue. Every utterance and its hearing have gestural accompaniments, these under some control of the actors. Every utterance and its hearing bear the marks of the framework of participation in which the uttering and hearing occur. All these markings we can openly mimic, mime, and reenact, allowing us dramatic liberties. Thus, when we speak we can set into the current framework of participation what is structurally marked as integral to another, enacting a dozen voices to do so. (For example, in describing a conversation, we, as speaker, can enact what had been our unstated response as listener.) (4)
In what follows, then, I make no large literary claim that social life is but a stage, only a small technical one: that deeply incorporated into the nature of talk are the fundamental requirements of theatricality. (4)
1. Replies and Responses
This paper examines conversational dialogue. It is divided into four parts. The first presents arguments for dialogic analysis, the second lists some failings, the third applies this critical view to the notion of a “reply”; the final part is an overview. (5)
Whenever persons talk there are very likely to be questions and answers. These utterances are realized at different points in “sequences time.” Notwithstanding the content of their questions, questioners are oriented to what lies just ahead, and depend on what is to come; answerers are oriented to what has just been said, and look backward, not forward. Observe that although a question anticipates an answer, is designed to receive it, seems dependent on doing so, an answer seems even more dependent, making less sense alone than does the utterance that called it forth. Whatever answers do, they must do this with something already begun. (5)
A sketch of some of these system requirements is possible:
1. A two-way capability for transceiving acoustically adequate and readily interpretable messages. (14)
2. Back-channel feedback capabilities for informing on reception while it is occurring. (14)
3. Contact signals: means of announcing the seeking of a channeled connection, means of ratifying that the sought-for channel is now open, means of closing off a theretofore open channel. Included here, identification-authentication signs. (14)
4. Turnover signals: means to indicate ending of a message and the taking over of the sending role by next speaker. (In the case of talk with more than two persons, next-speaker selection signals, whether “speaker selects” or “self-select” types.) (14)
5. Preemption signals: means of inducing a rerun, holding off channel requests, interrupting a talker in progress. (14)
6. Framing capabilities: cues distinguishing special readings to apply across strips of bracketed communication, recasting otherwise conventional sense, as in making ironic asides, quoting another, joking, and so forth; and hearer signals that the resulting transformation has been followed. (15)
7. Norms obliging respondents to reply honestly with whatever they know that is relevant and no more. (15)
8. Nonparticipant constraints regarding eavesdropping, competing noise, and the blocking of pathways for eye-to-eye signals. (15)
We can, then, draw our basic framework for face-to-face talk from what would appear to be the sheer physical requirements and constraints of any communication system, and progress from there to a sort of microfunctional analysis of various interaction signals and practices. Observe that wide scope is found here for formalization; the various events in this process can be managed through quite truncated symbols, and not only can these symbols be given discrete, condensed physical forms, but also the role of live persons in the communication system can be very considerably reduced. Observe, too, that although each of the various signals can be expressed through a continuum of forms - say as “commands,” “requests,” “intimations” - none of this is to the point; these traditional discriminations can be neglected provided only that it is assumed that the participants have jointly agreed to operate (in effect) solely as communication nodes, as receivers, and to make themselves fully available for that purpose. (15)
System constraints reinforced by ritual constraints provide us with an effective means of interpreting some of the details of conversational organization. This is no longer news. The point of having reviewed the arguments is to question the adequacy of the analysis that results. For although a focus on system and ritual constraints has considerable value, it also has substantial limitations. It turns out that the statement-reply format generating dialoguelike structures covers some possibilities better than others. Consider then, some problems introduced by this perspective. (22)
First, the embarrassing question of units.
The environing or contextual unit of considerable linguistic concern is the sentence - “...an independent linguistic form, not included by virtue of any grammatical construction in any larger linguistic form” [Bloomfield, 1946, p. 170] - in which the contained or dependent units are morphemes, words, and more extended elements such as phrases and clauses. (22)
> footnotes 12: His definition seems to have been a little optimistic. Grammatical elements of well-formed sentences can be dependent on neighboring sentences. (22)
In natural talk, sentences, do not always have the surface grammatical form grammarians attribute to the well-formed members of the class, but presumably these defectives can be expanded by regular editing rules to display their innermost normalcy. (22)
The term “sentence” is currently used to refer to something that is spoken, but the early analysis of sentences seemed much caught up in examination of the written form. The term “utterance” has therefore come into use to underscore reference to a spoken unit. In this paper I shall use the term “utterance” residually to refer to spoken words as such, without concern about the naturally bounded units of talk contained within them or containing them. (22)
In order to attack this definition I cannot and want not to fix very closely - the notion of a “move.” I refer to any full stretch of talk of or of its substitutes which has a distinctive unitary bearing on some set or other of the circumstances in which participants find themselves (some “game” or other in the peculiar sense employed by Wittgenstein), such as a communication system, ritual constraints, economic negotiating, character contests...or whatever. It follows that an utterance which is a move in one game may also be a move in another, or be a part of such other, or contain two or more such others. And a move may sometimes coincide with a sentence and sometimes with a turn’s talk but need do neither. Correspondingly, I redefine the notion of a “statement” to refer to a move characterized by an orientation to some sort of answering to follow, and the notion of “reply” to refer to a move characterized by its being seen as an answering of some kind to a preceding matter that has been raised. Statement and reply, then, refer to moves, not to sentences or to speaking. (24)
The notion of move gives some immediate help with matters such as types of silence. For example, there will be two kinds of silence after a conversational move has been completed: the silence that occurs between the back-pair moves a single speaker can provide during one turn at talk, and the one that occurs between his holding of the floor and the next person’s holding. (25)
Although it is clear that ritual constraints reinforce system ones, deepening a pattern that has already been cut, qualifications must be noted. A response will on occasion leave matters in a ritually unsatisfactory state, and a turn by the initial speaker will be required, encouraged, or at least allowed, resulting in a three-part interchange; or chains of adjacency pairs will occur (albeit typically with one, two, or three such couplets), the chain itself having a unitary, bounded character. (25)
Moreover, standard conflicts can occur between the two sets of conditions. Ritual constraints on the initiation of talk, for example, are likely to function one way for the superordinate and another for the subordinate, so that what is orderliness from the superior’s position may be excommunication from the inferior’s. (25)
Consider now the properties of responses in general, not merely replies in particular. (35)
1. Recall that in the couplets so far considered, the second pair part incidentally can be seen as a reply to something of its own generic kind, namely, a brief spurt of words whose semantic (or propositional) meaning is to be addressed, a restriction to same generic type to be seen when one move in a game of chess calls forth another move or one strike at a ping-pong ball calls forth another. A case simply of tit for tat. (Indeed, not only will a reply here answer a statement, but also it will be drawn from the same discourse-type, as in question-answer, summons-acknowledgment, etc.). (35-36)
Talk is ritually relevant largely insofar as it qualifies as but another arena for good and bad conduct. (37)
> Footnote 21. Grice (1975) argues for a distinction between conventional maxims and conversational ones, the latter presumably special to talk. However, although the maxims that seem special to an effective communication system allow us to account for certain presuppositions, implications, and laconicities in speech - a reason for formulating the maxims in the first place - other maxims of conduct allow for this accounting, too. (37)
2. Another feature of responses in general, as opposed to replies in particular, must be addressed: their “reach.” A contrast between answering a query regarding the time by words and demonstration has just been argued. But the matter needs further consideration. If we take the case of verbal answers (or their emblematic substitutes), even here we find that matters may not be merely verbal. Again look at answering a question about the time. What the respondent does is to look at his watch and then answer. His response, properly speaking, involves a strip of behavior which includes both these phases. Where he not to precede the verbal part of his answer in the same way. (40-41)
3. Another characteristic of responses. An individual can, and not infrequently does, respond to himself. Sometimes this will take the form of an actual verbal reply to the semantic content of his own utterances...More commonly a “reflexive frame break” to some aspect of his own just-past utterance. (45)
4. All of which should prepare us for the fact that what appears to be an anomalous statement-reply form may not be anomalous at all simply because replying of any kind is not much involved. Thus the basic pair known as a greeting exchange. It turns out that the two parts of such a round can occur simultaneously or, if sequenced in time, the same lexical item may be employed. (47)
5. And so we can turn to the final point. If a respondent does indeed have considerable latitude in selecting the elements of prior speaker’s speaking he will refer to, then surely we should see that the respondent may choose something nonlinguistic to respond to. Respondent can coerce a variety of objects and events in the current scene into a statement to which he can now respond, especially, it seems, when the something derives from someone who could be a speaker. (47)
In recommending the notion of talk as a sequence of reference-response moves on the part of participants, such that each choice of reference must be awaited before participants can know what that choice will be (and each next speaker must be awaited before it can be known who he is), I do not mean to argue against formalistic analysis. However tortured the connection can become between last person’s talk and current speaker’s utterance, that connection must be explored under the auspices of determinism, as though all the degrees of freedom available to whosoever is about to talk can somehow be mapped out, conceptualized, and ordered, somehow neatly grasped and held, somehow made to submit to the patterning-out effected by analysis. If contexts can be grouped into categories according to the way in which they render the standard force of an utterance inapplicable and principles thus developed for determining when this meaning will be set aside, then such must be attempted. Similarly, sequencing must be anticipated and described. We must see, for example, that current speaker’s shift from the ordinarily meant meaning of last speaker’s statement to an ordinarily excluded one, with humorous intent, can lead to a groan intoned jointly and simultaneously by all other participants and then return to seriousness; or the maneuver can lead to the temporary establishment of a punning rule, thus encouraging an answering pun from the next speaker. Standard sequences are thus involved, but these are not sequences of statement and reply but rather sequences at a higher level, ones regarding choice with respect to reach and to the construing of what is reached for. (A compliment seems totally different from an insult, but a likeness is involved if each has been elicited by its kind.) It is thus that uniformities might be uncovered in regard to reference selection, including how standard utterances will be construed as a reference basis for response. In this way we could recognize that talk is full of twists and turns and yet go on to examine routinized sequences of these shiftings. Conversational moves could then be seen to induce or allow affirming moves or countermoves, but this gamelike back-and-forth process might better be called interplay than dialogue. (72-73)
2: Response Cries (78)
Utterances are not housed in paragraphs but in turns at talk, occasions implying a temporary taking of the floor as well as an alternation of takers. Turns themselves are naturally coupled into two-party interchanges. Interchanges are linked in runs marked off by some sort of topicality. One or more of these topical runs make up the body of a conversation. The interactionist view assumes that every utterance is either a statement establishing the next speaker’s words as a reply, or a reply to what the prior speaker has just established, or a mixture of both. Utterances, then, do not stand by themselves, indeed, often make no sense when so heard, but are constructed and timed to support the close social collaboration of speech turn-taking. In nature, the spoken word is only to be found in verbal interplay, being integrally designed for such collective habits. This paper considers some roguish utterances that appear to violate this interdependence, entering the stream of behavior at peculiar and unnatural places, producing communicative effects but no dialogue. The paper begins with a special class of spoken sentences, and ends with a special class of vocalizations, the first failing to qualify as communication, the second failing not to. (78-79)
To be all alone, to be a “solitary” in the sense of being out of sight and sound of everyone, is not to be alone in another way, namely, as a “single,” a party of one, a person not in a with, a person unaccompanied “socially” by others in some public undertaking (itself often crowded), such as sidewalk traffic, shopping in stores, and restaurant dining. (79)
Here, I believe, is a crucial feature of human communication. Behavior and appearance are ritualized - in something like the ethological sense - through such ethologically defined processes as exaggeration, stereotyping, standardization of intensity, loosening of contextual requirements, and so forth. In the case under question, however, these transformations occur to a form of interaction, a communication arrangement, a standard set of participant alignments. I believe that any analysis of self-talk (or for that matter, any other form of communication) that does not attend to this nonlinguistic sense of embedding and transformation is unlikely to be satisfactory. (84)
These parables about self-talk provide entrance to a mundane text. First, definitions: by a social situation I mean any physical area anywhere within which two or more persons find themselves in visual and aural range of one another. The term “gathering” can be used to refer to the bodies that are thus present. No restriction is implied about the relationship of those in the situation: they may all be involved in the same conversational encounter, in the sense of being ratified participants of the same state of talk; some may be in an encounter while others are not, or are, but in a different one; or no talk may be occurring. Some, all, or none of those present may be definable as together in terms of social participation, that is, in a “with.” (84)
Consider now some standard cries.
1. The transition display. Entering or leaving from what can be taken as a state of marked natural discomfort - wind, rain, heat, or cold - we seem to have the license (in our society) to externalize an expression of our inner state. Brr! Is a standard term for wind and cold upon leaving such an atmosphere. (101)
2. The spill cry. This time the central examples, Oops! And Whoops!, are well-formed sounds, although not in every sense words, and again something as much (perhaps even more) the practice of females as males. Spill cries are a sound we emit to follow along with our having for us a moment lost guiding control of some feature of the world around us, including ourselves. (101)
3. The threat-startle, notably Eek! And Yipe! Perhaps here is a response cry sex-typed (or at least so believed) for feminine use. (103)
4. Revulsion sounds, such as Eeuw!, are heard from a person who has by necessity or inadvertence come in contact with something that is contaminating. (104)
So far response crying has been largely considered as something that could be available to someone who is present to others but not “with” any of them. If one picks accompanied individuals, not singles, the behavior is still to be found; indeed, response crying is, if anything, encouraged in the circumstances. So, also, response cries are commonly found among persons in an “open state of talk,” persons having the right but not the obligation to address remarks to the other participants, this being a condition that commonly prevails among individuals jointly engaged in a common task (or even similarly engaged in like ones) when this work situates them in immediate reach of one another. (104)
1. The strain grunt. Lifting or pushing something heavy, or wielding a sledgehammer with all our might, we emit a grunt at the presumed peak and consummation of our fully extended exertion, the grunt so attesting. (Pp. 104-105)
2. The pain cry, Oww! (or Ouch!). Here the functioning of this exclamation is rather clear.
4. [sic 3.] The sexual moan. This subvocal tracking of the course of sexually climatic experience is a display available to both sexes, but aid to be increasingly fashionable for females - amongst whom, of course, the sound tracing can be strategically employed to delineate an ideal development in the marked absence of anything like the real thing. (106)
5. Floor cues. A worker in a typing pool makes a mistake on a clean copy and emits an imprecation, this leading to, and apparently designed to lead to, a colleague’s query as to what went wrong. A fully communicated statement of disgust and displeasure can then be introduced, but now ostensibly as a reply to request for information. (106)
6. Audible glee. A lower-middle-class adolescent girl is sitting with four friends at a table in a crowded crêperie is brought her order, a large crêpe covered with ice cream and nuts. As the dish is set before her, she is transfixed for a moment, and wonder and pleasure escape with an Ooooo! (106-107)
DISCUSSION (113)
1. Written versions of response cries seem to have a speech contaminating effect, consolidating and codifying actual response cries, so that, in many cases, reality begins to mimic artifice, as in Ugh!, Pant pant, Gulp Tsk tsk, this being a route to ritualization presumably unavailable to animal animals. (113)
2. A point might be made about the utterances used in response cries. As suggested, they seem to be drawn from two sources: taboo but full-fledged words (involving blasphemy and - in English - Anglo-Saxon terms for bodily functions) and from the broad class of nonword vocalizations (“vocal segregates,” to employ Trager’s term (1958), of which response cries are one, but only one, variety. (114)
3. Earlier it was suggested that a response cry can draw on the cooperation of listeners, requiring that they hear and understand the cry but act as though it had not been uttered in their hearing. It is in this way that a form of behavior ostensibly not designed for directed linguistic communication can be injected into public life, in certain cases even into conversations and broadcasts. In brief, a form of response perceived as native to one set of circumstances is set into another. In the case of blasphemous cries, what is inserted is already something that has been borrowed from another realm - semantic communication - so the behavior can be said to have been returned to its natural place, but now so much transformed as to be little like a native. (117)
It is recommended, then, that linguists have reason to broaden their net, reason to bring in uttering that is not talking, reason to deal with social situations, not merely with jointly sustained talk. Incidentally, linguists might be better able to countenance inroads that others can be expected to make into their conventional domain. For it seems that talk itself is intimately regulated and very closely geared to its context through nonvocal gestures which are very differently distributed from the particular language and subcodes employed by any set of participants - although just where these boundaries of gesture-use are to be drawn remains an almost unstudied question. (122)
3 Footing (124)
I have illustrated through its changes what will be called “footings.” In rough summary:
1. Participant’s alignment, or set, or stance, or posture, or projected self is somehow at issue. (128)
2. The projection can be held across a strip of behavior that is less long than a grammatical sentence, or longer, so sentence grammar won’t help us all that much, although it seems clear that a cognitive unit of some kind is involved, minimally, perhaps, a “phonemic clause.” Prosodic, not syntactic, segments are implied. (128)
3. A continuum must be considered, from gross changes in stance to the most subtle shifts in tone that can be perceived. (128)
4. For speakers, code switching is usually involved, and if not this then at least the sound markers that linguists study: pitch, volume, rhythm, stress, tonal quality. (128)
5. The bracketing of a “higher level” phase or episode of interaction is commonly involved, the new footing having a liminal role, serving as a buffer between two more substantially sustained episodes. (128)
A change in footing implies a change in the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance. A change in our footing is another way of talking about a change in our frame for events. This paper is largely concerned with pointing out that participants over the course of their speaking constantly change their footing, these changes being a persistent feature of natural talk. (128)
As suggested, change in footing is very commonly language-linked; if not that, then at least one can claim that the paralinguistic markers of language will figure. Sociolinguists therefore, can be looked to for help in the study of footing, including the most subtle examples. And if they are to compete in this heretofore literary and psychological area, then presumably they must find a structural means of doing so. In this paper I want to make a pass at analyzing the structural underpinnings of changes in footing. The task will be approached by reexamining the primitive notions of speaker and hearer, and some of our unstated presusuppositions about spoken interaction. (128)
It is my belief that the language that students have drawn on for talking about speaking and hearing is not well adapted to its purpose. And I believe this is so both generally and for a consideration of something like footing. It is too gross to provide us with much of a beginning. It takes global folk categories (like speaker and hearer) for granted instead of decomposing them into smaller, analytically coherent elements. (129)
The easiest improvement on the traditional paradigm for talk is to recognize that any given moment of it might always be part of a talk, namely, a substantive, naturally bounded stretch of interaction comprising all that relevantly goes on from the moment two (or more) individuals open such dealings between themselves and continuing until they finally close this activity out. The opening will typically be marked by the participants turning from their several disjointed orientations, moving together and bodily addressing one another; the closing by their departing in some physical way from the prior immediacy of copresence. Typically, ritual brackets will also be found, such as greetings and farewells, these establishing and terminating open, official, joint engagement, that is, ratified participation. In summary, a “social encounter.” Throughout the course of the encounter the participants will be obliged to sustain involvement in what is being said and ensure that no long stretch occurs when no one (and not more than anyone) is taking the floor. Thus, at a given moment no talk may be occurring, and yet the participants will still be in a “state of talk.” Observe, once one assumes that an encounter will have features of its own - if only an initiation, a termination, and a period marked by neither - then it becomes plain that any cross-sectional perspective, any instantaneous slice focusing on talking, not a talk, necessarily misses important features. Certain issues, such as the work done in summonings, the factor of topicality, the building up of an information state known to be common to the participants (with consequent “filling in” of new participants), the role of “preclosings,” seem especially dependent on the question of the unit as a whole. (130-131)
I have suggested that orators and actors provide a ready contrast to a conversation’s speaker, the former having audiences, the latter fellow conversationalists. But it must be borne in mind that what goes on upon the platform is only incidentally - not analytically - talk. Singing can occur there (this being another way words can be uttered), and doings which don’t centrally involve words at all, such as instrument playing, hat tricks, juggling, and all the other guileful acts that have done a turn in vaudeville. The various kinds of audiences are not, analytically speaking, a feature of speech events (to use Hymes’s term), but of stage events. (139)
Beginning with the conversational paradigm, I have tried to decompose the global notion of hearer or recipient, and I have incidentally argued that the notion of a conversational encounter does not suffice in dealing with the context in which words are spoken; a social occasion involving a podium may be involved, or no speech event at all, and, in any case, the whole social situation, the whole surround, must always be considered. Provided, thus, has been a lengthy gloss on Hymes’s admonition (1974, p. 54): “The common dyadic model of speaker-hearer specifies sometimes too many, sometimes too few, sometimes the wrong participants. (144)
It is necessary now to look at the remaining element of the conversational paradigm, the notion of speaker. (144)
The notions of animator, author, and principal, taken together, can be said to tell us about the “production format” of an utterance. (145)
Given an utterance as a starting point of inquiry, I have recommended that our common sense notions of hearer and speaker are crude, the first potentially concealing a complex differentiation of participation statuses, and the second, complex questions of production format. (146)
The delineation of participation framework and production format provides a structural basis for analyzing change in footing. At least it does for the change in footing described at the beginning of this paper. But the view that results systematically simplifies the bearing of participation frameworks and production formats on the structure of utterances. Sturdy, sober, sociological matters are engaged, but the freewheeling, self-referential character of speech receives no place. The essential fancifulness of talk is missed. And for these fluidities linguistics, not sociology, provides the lead. It is these matters that open up the possibility of finding some structural basis for even the subtlest shifts in footing. (146-147)
A beginning can be made by examining the way statements are constructed, especially in regard to “embedding,” a tricky matter made more so by how easy it is to confuse it with an analytically quite different idea, the notion of multiple social roles already considered in connection with “principal.” (147)
It was recommended that one can get at the structural basis of footing by breaking into more differentiated parts, namely, of participation framework and production format. Then it was suggested that this picture must itself be complicated by the concept of embedding and an understanding of the layering effect that seems to be an essential outcome of the production process in speaking. But this complication itself cannot be clearly seen unless one appreciates another aspect of embedding, one that linguistic analysis hasn’t much prepared us for, namely, the sense in which participation frameworks are subject to transformation. For it turns out that, in something like the ethological sense, we quite routinely ritualize participation frameworks; that is, we self-consciously transplant the participation arrangement that is natural in one social situation into an interactional environment in which it isn’t. In linguistic terms, we not only embed utterances, we embed interaction arrangements. (153)
I have dealt till now with changes in footing as though the individual were involved merely in switching from one stance or alignment to another. But this image is itself too mechanical and too easy. It is insufficiently responsive to the way embedding and ritualization work. For often it seems that when we change voice - whether to speak for another aspect of ourselves or for someone else, or to lighten our discourse with a darted enactment of some alien interaction arrangement - we are not so much terminating the prior alignment as holding it in abeyance with the understanding that it will almost immediately be reengaged. So, too, when we give up the floor in a conversation, thereby taking up the footing of a recipient (addressed or otherwise), we can be warranted in expecting to reenter the speaker role on the same footing from which we left it. As suggested, this is clearly the case when a narrator allows hearers to “chip in,” but such perceivedly temporary foregoing of one’s position is also to be found when storytelling isn’t featured. So it must be allowed that we can hold the same footing across several of our turns at talk. And within one alignment, another can be fully enclosed. In truth, in talk it seems routine that, while firmly standing on two feet, we jump up and down on another. (155)
The Lecture (162)
However, it is apparent that lecturing on lectures is nonetheless a little special. To hold forth in an extended fashion on lecturing to persons while they have to sit through one, is to force them to serve double time - a cruel and unusual punishment. (163)
A lecture is an institutionalized extended holding of the floor in which one speaker imparts his views on a subject, these thoughts comprising what can be called his “text.” The style is typically serious and slightly impersonal, the controlling intent being to generate calmly considered understanding, not mere entertainment, emotional impact, or immediate action. Constituent statements presumably take their warrant from their role in attesting to the truth appearing as something to be cultivated and developed from a distance, coolly, as an end in itself. (165)
A platform arrangement is often involved, underlining the fact that listeners are an “immediate audience.” I mean a gathered set of individuals, typically seated, whose numbers can vary greatly without requiring the speaker (typically standing) to change his style, who have the right to hold the whole of the speaker’s body in the focus of staring-at-attention (as they would an entertainer), and who (initially, at least) have only the back channel through which to convey their response. (165)
Those who present themselves before an audience are said to be “performers” and to provide a “performance” - in the peculiar, theatrical sense of the term. Thereby they tacitly claim those platform skills for lack of which an ordinary person thrust upon the stage would flounder hopelessly - an object to laugh at, be embarrassed for, and have massive impatience with. And they tacitly accept judgement in these terms by those who themselves need never be exposed to such appraisal. The clear contrast is to everyday talk, for there, it is felt, no elevated role is being sought, no special competency is required, and surely only morbid shyness or some other unusual impediment could prevent one from delivering the grunts and eyebrow flashes that will often suffice. (Which is not to say that in conversational settings individuals may not occasionally attempt a set piece that asks to be judged as entertainment, not talk, and unlike talk is relatively loosely coupled to the character and size of the listening circle.) In any case, in talk, all those who judge competency know themselves to be thus appraised. (165-166)
Face-to-face undertakings of the focused kind, be they games, joint tasks, theater performances, or conversations, succeed or fail as interactions in the degree to which participants get caught up by and carried away into the special realm of being that can be generated by these engagements. So, too, lectures. However, unlike games and staged plays, lectures must not be frankly presented as if engrossment were the controlling intent. Indeed, lectures draw on a precarious ideal: certainly the listeners are to be carried away so that time slips by, but because of the speaker’s subject matter, not his antics; the subject matter is meant to have its own enduring claims upon the listeners apart from the felicities or infelicities of the presentation. A lecture, then, purports to take the audience right past the auditorium, the occasion, and the speaker into the subject matter upon which the lecture comments. So your lecturer is meant to be a performer, but not merely a performer. Observe, I am not saying that audiences regularly do become involved in the speaker’s subject matter, only that they handle whatever they do become involved in so as not to openly embarrass the understanding that it’s the text they are involved in. In fact, there is truth in saying that audiences become involved in spite of the text, not because of it; they skip along, dipping in and out of following the lecturer’s argument, waiting for the special effects which actually capture them, and topple them momentarily into what is being said - which special effects I need not specify but had better produce. (166)
I am suggesting that it is characteristic of lectures (in the sense of common to them and important for them) that animator, author, and principal are the same person. Also, it is characteristic that this three-sided functionary is assumed to have “authority” - intellectual as opposed to institutional. By virtue of reputation or office, he is assumed to have knowledge and experience in textual matters, and of this considerably more than that possessed by the audience. And, as suggested, he does not have to fight to hold the floor - at least for a stipulated block of time - this monopoly being his, but, of course, attention may not be. As would also be true if instead of a lecturer at stage center we had a singer, a poet, a juggler, or some other trained seal. (167)
Following the linguist Kenneth Pike, it can be said that lectures belong to that broad class of situational enterprises wherein a difference clearly occurs between game and spectacle, that is, between the business at hand and the custard of interaction in which the business is embedded. (The custard shows up most clearly as “preplay” and “postplay,” that is, a squeeze of talk and bustle just before the occasional proceedings start and just after they have finished.) The term “lecture” itself firmly obscures the matter, something referring to a spoken text, sometimes to the embracing social event in which its delivery occurs - an ambiguity, also, of most terms for other stage activities. (167)
Finally it should be said that although a lecture can be the main business of the social occasion in which it is embedded - an arrangement that speakers presumably find ideal - other settings are common. In the United States, for example, there is the institution of the lunch speaker, and the understanding that a membership’s regular get-togethers for a meal cannot be complete without a guest speaker; who, or on what topic, need not be a first consideration - anyone in the neighborhood who does talks for a fee will often do. (In many cases, of course, we might find it more natural to speak of such luncheon performances as giving a talk, not a lecture, the critical difference somehow involving the matter of systematic topic development.) And just as an occasion can make a convenience of a speaker, so a speaker can make a convenience of an occasion, as when a political figure graces a local gathering but his main concern is the transmission of his talk to media audiences. (171)
I have suggested that when a speaker senses that equipment or encoding troubles have occurred, he may intrude a comment about the difficulty and about any effort to physically correct matters he may undertake. The minor change in footing that ensues as the speaker ceases to transmit his text and instead transmits open reference to his plight as an animator will often be quite acceptable, characteristically attended in a dissociated way. But there are format-specific limits. It is a structurally significant fact of friendly conversations that they are set up to allow for a vast amount of this reflexive frame breaking, and, contrariwise, a crucial condition of prime-time broadcasting to allow for extremely little. Lecturing falls somewhere between. Interestingly, speakers can be optimistic here. Sensing that time is running short, a speaker may change voice and let the hearers in on the fact that the pages he is now turning over are ones he has now decided to summarize in fresh talk or even skip, projecting the rather touching plea that he be given credit for what could have imparted. Finding a page out of order in the script, he may hunt for the right one while candidly describing that this is what he is doing. Reaching for the book he planned to quote from, he may assay a little quip, confiding that he hopes he brought the right one. I believe that once the show has seriously begun, these efforts to frankly project oneself exclusively in one’s capacity as an animator are not likely to come off - at least not as frequently as speakers believe. Nonetheless the liberty is often taken. (186)
The lecturer and the audience join in affirming a single proposition. They join in affirming that organized talking can reflect, express, delineate, portray - if not come to grips with - the real world out there to comprehend. (After all, that’s what distinguishes lectures from stints at the podium openly designed as entertainments.) And here, surely, we have the lecturer’s real contract. Whatever his substantive domain, whatever his school of thought, and whatever his inclination to piety or impiety, he signs the same agreement and he serves the same cause: to protect us from the wind, to stand up and seriously project the assumption that through lecturing, a meaningful picture of some part of the world can be conveyed, and the talker can have access to a picture worth conveying. (194-195)
It is in this sense that every lecturer, merely by presuming to lecture before an audience, is a functionary of the cognitive establishment, actively supporting the same position: I repeat, that there is structure to the world, that this structure can be perceived and reported, and therefore, that speaking before an audience and listening to a speaker are reasonable things to be doing, and incidentally, of course, that the auspices of the occasion had warrant for making the whole thing possible. Even when the speaker is tacitly claiming that only his academic discipline, his methodology, or his access to the data can produce a valid picture, the tacit claim behind this tacit claim is that valid pictures are possible. (195)
No doubt some public speakers have broken from the fold, but these, of course, cease to have the opportunity to lecture - although presumably other kinds of podium work might become available to them. Those who remain to speak must claim some kind of intellectual authority in speaking; and however valid or invalid their claim to a specialized authority, their speaking presupposes and supports the notion of intellectual authority in general: that through the statements of a lecturer we can be informed about the world. Give some thought to the possibility that this shared presupposition is only that, and that after a speech, the speaker and the audience rightfully return to the flickering, cross-purposed, messy irresolution of their unknowable circumstances. (195)
Radio Talk: A study of the ways of our errors (197)
In this paper I want to consider a form of talk that is central work of a trade - radio announcing - and to consider this talk (and this trade) mainly from the perspective of what audiences can glean by merely listening closely. This allows me to try to bring sociolinguistic concerns to ethnographic ones, all in the name of microsociology. (197)
For the student of talk, the broadcast kind has much to recommend it. It is everywhere available, particularly easy to record, and, because publicly transmitted words are involved, no prior permission for scholarly use seems necessary. Further, there is no question of the subjects modifying their behavior because they know or suspect they are under study; for after all, announcers in any case are normally very careful to put their best foot forward. Their routine conduct on the air is already wary and self-conscious. (198)
The key contingency in radio announcing (I take it) is to produce the effect of a spontaneous, fluent flow of words - if not a forceful, pleasing personality - under conditions that lay speakers would be unable to manage. What these circumstances are and how they are responded to provide the focus of this study. To properly site the arguments, however, I want to begin very far back in some traditional doctrines of sociology (as enumerated below), work by slow degree through linguistic concerns, and only then consider the problem at hand. (198)
1. Once students of social life begin to understand the numbers of constraints and ends governing each of an individual’s acts on every occasion and moment of execution, it becomes natural to shift from considering social practices to considering social competencies. In this way, presumably, appropriate respect can be paid for all the things an individual is managing to do, with or without awareness, in purpose or in effect, when he performs (in the sense of executes) an ordinary act. (198)
Ritualistic remedies, more so than substantive ones, have a variable temporal relation to what they comment on. Very crudely speaking, they may be retrospective, occurring immediately after what they are designed to modify the meaning of; or prospective and disclamatory, aimed at controlling the possible implications of something that has not yet occurred; or, finally, concurrent, appearing as an overlay on the ongoing dubious activity. (199)
2. Even at the outset, the application made here of the social control model of competencies must be questioned, at least in one particular. Competencies do indeed fall under the management of normative expectations, but in a special way. Favorable and unfavorable appraisals are certainly involved, but less so moral approval or disapproval. (200)
3. There is a special family of competencies seen to be common to the human estate by virtue of involving ongoing requisites for living in society: the ability, for example, to walk, see, hear, dress appropriately, manipulate small physical objects and, in literate societies, write, read, and compute with numbers. As a class these abilities exhibit the following properties: (201)
a. Except for the abilities associated with literacy, they are felt to be pancultural.
b. They are in continuous, if not unremittant, exercise throughout the day.
c. With reservations regarding sight and hearing, their acquisition is developmental in character, a product of early socialization.
d. After initial acquisition, they are exercised without apparent effort or focal attention.
e. Their possession is uncredited, lack alone is noteworthy - ie., “negatively eventful.”
f. They are subject to what are perceived as biologically based defects.
g. With reservations for sight, their execution is vulnerable to stress. “Loss of control,” “nervousness,” “getting rattled,” are fundamental possibilities.
h. They are subject to what is seen as incidental, accidental failure in the sense that the foot, hand, and tongue can be said to slip. (201)
4. As suggested, when an actor muffs a nonlinguistic doing in the immediate presence of others, he is likely to shift into words (typically accompanied by gestures) to account, apologize, assure, and (often) avow that restitution or repair will be forthcoming. So words, then, have a special role in the remedial process. Moreover, a well-designed accommodation is implied between the ongoing activity in which the fault occurred (and in which the substantive remedy, if any, will take place), and the activity through which the ritual elements of the remedy are realized; for the latter can be performed without interfering with the nonlinguistic activity at hand. (203)
1. We employ a set of fairly well-known folk terms to refer to problems in speech production: speech lapse, stutter, speech defect, speech impediment, gaffe, malapropism, spoonerism, slip of the tongue, and so forth. Students of language behavior have refined these identificatory practices somewhat with such terms as silent pause, filled pause, false start (sentence redirection), dangling sentence, prolongation, influency, sound intrusion, transposition, word change, word repetition, word-segment repetition (stuttering), and the like. (203)
i. Influencies, namely, hitches in the smooth flow of syntactically connected words, as with restarts, filled pauses, stuttering. (209)
ii. Slips, by which I mean words or their parts that have gotten mixed up, or mis-uttered, as in word transposition, phonological disturbance, and the like. (209)
iii. Boners, namely, evidence of some failing in the intellectual grasp and achievement required within official or otherwise cultural circles, this evidence implied in words spoken or others’ words not comprehended. (209)
iv. Gaffes, that is, unintended and unknowing breaches in “manners” or some norm of “good” conduct - breaches of the kind that are here realized in speech, but can also be perpetrated through other modes of activity. (210)
The various production formats provide a speaker with different relationships to the words he utters, providing, thus, a set of interpretive frameworks in terms of which his words can be understood. (Recitation, aloud reading, and fresh talk are but broad divisions of this potential.) These different possibilities in conjunction with the participation statuses he could enjoy comprise what might be called his frame space. In brief, then the individual speaks, avails himself of certain options and foregoes others, operating within a frame space, but with any moment’s footing uses only some of this space. (230)
One starts, then, with the announcer’s commitment to maintaining what is heard as fresh talk no more than ordinarily unfaulted, but which is nearly unfaultable aloud reading. This work obligation distinguishes announcers’ delivery from that of laypersons in ordinary day-to-day talk. Announcers must not only face many of the contingencies of everyday speech production (and, as will be seen, at greater cost), but also many contingencies specific to broadcasting. Consider now the special features of broadcasting work insofar as they condition the realization of the broadcaster’s central task - the production of seemingly faultless fresh talk. (242)
It should be said first that it is true of radio broadcasting, as it is true of any communication system, that trouble enters form different points, these points located at different levels or layers in the organizational structure of the undertaking. For example, a power failure and a voice failure can equally lead to a breakdown in transmission, but obviously these two possibilities should be traced back to different layers in the structure of the communication system, here reflected in the kind of remedial work that is undertaken. Indeed, one of the values of examining troubles is as a reminder that communications systems are vulnerable from different layerings of their structure. (242)
The required reorientation is now evident. Although many faults stand out in a very obvious way - clearly a fault to nearly everyone in the speech community - other faults are very much a question of discretion, namely, what the announcer himself wants to disaffiliate himself from. Differently put, because it turns out that when an obvious fault is committed, one apparent consequence for, if not intent of, the announcer is to distance himself from the event - from the image of incompetence it might imply - one can take this disaffiliation as the key matter and go on to address anything the speaker attempts to dissociate himself from, including, but only incidentally, errors in the obvious sense. An utterance, like any other personal act, projects an image of the actor; and actors, act by act, endeavor to maintain a personally acceptable relation to what they may be taken to be exhibiting about themselves. And given the circumstances of the action, the personally acceptable can be extended upward to the personally desired, or downward to the personally least unacceptable. (278-279)
As suggested, instances of this remedial behavior usually will not come from fully professional, network announcers of news and commercials (especially not from those who are happy with their role), but rather from those who have frequent cause for remedial action: incompetent announcers, alienated announcers, and announcers on special interest stations. Along with these there is reason to include those who have (or are tying to acquire) an M. C. Role on an informal “personal” show. It is the conduct of these performers that will be our guide. (279)
Conclusions (320)
1. Take it that a standard in much broadcasting is that the speaker will render his prepared text with faultless articulation, pronunciation, tempo, and stress, and restrict himself entirely to the copy. He is to appear to us only in the guise that his prepared material has planned for him, almost as though he were to hold himself to the character allotted to him in a play. And whether aloud reading or fresh talk is required of him, he is obliged to compress or stretch his talk so that it lasts exactly as long as the time allotted. (320)
It was argued that announcers on small and on special interest stations, and announcers employing a comic format, do not merely make errors and employ remedies for them, betraying their own role obligations to do so, but also make unscripted comments about strips of their performed text that otherwise would have passed by with no special attention. So, too, they may choose to treat error correction itself as requiring remedial comments. It was suggested that here repair work might be seen as merely one example of maintaining a dual voice, of commenting on one’s own production even while producing it. And that at the heart of it is the characterizing, self-projective implication of any stream of activity and the capacity and license to introduce contrary images during its flow. (320-321)
2. Now finally I want to review the argument that an examination of radio talk, especially the differences between the formal and informal kind, can direct our attention to critical features of everyday face-to-face talk that might otherwise remain invisible to us. (321)
As suggested, there are obvious differences between ordinary talk and radio talk of any kind, all a consequence of the presence in radio talk of absent addressees. Correction in radio talk is almost all of the self-administered variety; correction in everyday talk is considerably other-noticed, if not other-administered (Schegloff et al., 1977). (A member of an audience can write or phone in a correction, but the remedy will ordinarily have to be transmitted considerably after the error has occurred, by which time the announcer’s subject matter and audience will have changed somewhat; if he is to make a public acknowledgment, he will have to replay the original context of the error to be sure his comments will be understood.) Radio listeners are free to laugh derisively and openly when a faultable occurs, not being bound by the tact that leads face-to-face listeners to pass over some of the faults to which a speaker seems oblivious. Also as suggested, nonbroadcast talk would seem to allow for subtler changes in footing than does radio talk, in part because a speaker in everyday talk can obtain ongoing, back-channel evidence that his intention - his frame and its keying - is understood. (321-322)
But there are deeper issues. The fresh talk to be found in informal conversation, and the simulated fresh talk to be found in network announcing, are similar on the surface but different underneath. Both tend to be heard as faultless and spontaneous, the first because the sort of technical faults that routinely occur are routinely disattended or flatly corrected (in any case, losses of warrant is available for them), the second because special skill has been applied to eliminate such faults in spite of very treacherous conditions. (322)
Learning about the little maneuvers that announcers employ to keep themselves in countenance, and learning about the participation framework and production format in which these moves are grounded, is what gives warrant for something so trivial as the close analysis of radio talk. Catching in this way at what broadcasters do, and do not do, before a microphone catches at what we do, and do not do, before our friends. These little momentary changes in footing bespeak a trivial game, but our conversational life is spent playing it (326-327)