Conversational strategy and metastrategy in a pragmatic theory

The example of Scenes from a Marriage

Bibliographic Data

ID4474907
AuthorsRobin Tolmach Lakoff (0000-0002-0781-2429), Deborah Tannen (0000-0003-0132-5440)
Year1984
Volume49
Issue3-4
Publication date1984-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSemiotica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0037-1998 • E-ISSN: 1613-3692
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/semi.1984.49.3-4.323
OpenAlexW2120478049
LanguageEN
Citations received21
References cited1

The question of artistic verisimilitude - the relationship between the representation and the reality - is one of the more intriguing issues in a theory of aesthetics. Until now, linguists have largely been isolated from this area of philosophical speculation because it seemed irrelevant to our interests and impervious to our methodology. But as we get more involved in the formal analysis of naturalistic conversations - through tape recordings or transcripts - we are struck, often, in a perverse way by their apparent unnaturalness, their difficulty in being understood. Com­ pared, say, with the dialog in a play or a novel, naturalistic conversation strikes us as not what we expected, not working by preconceived pattern. We would not claim that constructed dialog represents a reality lacking in transcripts, but rather that artificial dialog may represent an internal­ ized model or schema for the production of conversation - a competence model that speakers have access to. If, then, we are interested in discovering the ideal model ofconversational strategy, there is much to be gained by looking at artificial conversation first, to see what these general, unconsciously-adhered-to assumptions are; and later returning to natural conversation to see how they may actually be exemplified in literal use. Thus, we are not claiming that the artificially-constructed dialog we are going to discuss literally represents natural conversation, but rather that one can inspect a different level of psychological reality and validity through the use of literary data, and in this paper we will illustrate how such work might responsibly be done. In this sense, our work here is in support of a theory of communicative competence - the knowledge a speaker has at his/her disposal to determine what s/he can expect to hear in a discourse, and what s/he is reasonably expected to contribute, in terms of the implicitly internalized assumptions made in her/his speech community about such matters. We need, then, some notion of what parameters the speaker can use as reference points in determining how a contribution can appropriately be made in a particular context. The speaker must know first what sort of Semiotica 49-3/4 (1984), 323-346

Aesthetics · Cognitive science · Conversation · Dialog box · Epistemology · Gestalt psychology · Linguistics · Natural (archaeology) · Naturalism · Perception · Representation (politics) · Schema (genetic algorithms) · Sociology · Verisimilitude · Communication · Computer Science · History · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Semiotics and Representation Studies

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