W5: language in use, punctuation and capital letters Flashcards
What do we use to make inferences in conversation on what people really mean?
What someone says
How they say it
What they do not say
Everytime we speak we perform a.. and why
Speech act, to reach a goal
What are Austin’s three forces (speech acts)?
Locutionary force: Literal meaning (‘would you mind not speaking up the back’)
Illocutionary force: Trying to achieve (trying to say ‘stop talking’)
Perlocutionary force: Effect utterance has on the listener (the listener stops talking)
What are Searle’s five types of speech acts?
Representatives: Asserting a fact, conveying full belief in its truth (‘this door is hard to open’)
Directives: trying to get the listener to do something (‘can you make it any easier’)
Commissives: committing to some future action (‘I will email them about the door’)
Expressives: revealing psychological state (‘it makes me nervous that its hard to get out’)
Declaratives: Bringing about a new state of affairs (‘I have found a new way to open the door’)
Explain direct and indirect speech acts
Direct speech acts: straightforward utterances (intentions revealed in words)
Indirect speech acts: require interpretation by the listener
Indirect speech acts become more indirect with increasing..
politeness
What is discourse analysis?
Linguists use this - tries to discover basic units of discourse and rules
Give an example of a discourse convention
‘Did joe like the shirt Lucy wore last night?’
- do not have to say ‘Yes joe liked the shirt lucy wore last night’. you can say ‘yes he liked it’
You can use these pronouns to stand for previous info in the conversation
Cohesion in discourse allows us to use various terms to refer to ideas we have already mentioned - give examples of this
Pronouns: I like Sally. She is great (do not have to name her again)
Substitution: He asked her to sing. She did so.
Ellipsis: Do you want to go out dancing tonight? I don’t…
Lexical: Brody went speeding in his car again last night. That crazy fool will get himself hurt.
Explain discourse and the use of ‘a’ and ‘the’
The: means the referent is agreed on by both the speaker and the listener (I saw the sign - both know what youre on about)
A: Listener does not know the referent (I saw a sign - other doesnt know which sign you mean)
Hard for children to learn, autistic children struggle
What behaviours are involved in turn taking?
Gaze Hand gestures (e.g. putting hand up to stop someone from talking) Filled pauses (mmm instead of silence) Intonational contour of utterance Semantic and syntactic structure
Explain how conversation/dialogue is collaborative
Audience design: Speakers collaborate with listeners to ensure that utterances are understood
Alignment: Trying to make conversation match for both listener and speaker (should make sense to both)
Ambiguity reduction: speakers monitor speech and nearly always avoid non-linguistic ambiguity (looking for signs of not understanding eg. puzzled look)
What are Grice’s conversational maxims?
They are unwritten rules for efficient speech
Maxim of:
Quality (do not lie, tell the truth and acknowledge uncertainty)
Manner (be brief and orderly. avoid ambiguity and obscurity)
Quantity (say no more and no less than the discourse requires)
Relevance (confine yourself to only what is relevant)
What is politeness?
Acting so as to take account of the feelings of others
What are the two types of politeness?
Positive face: when you want someone to approve of you
Negative face: you do not want to be stopped doing what you want
What else governs how polite you are to others?
- Power: more polite to those who are more powerful than you
- Social distance: more polite with people you don’t know well
- Degree of imposition involved (e.g. how big of an ask something is)
What are some examples of positive politeness?
Notice/attend to your hearer (saying something to show you’ve attended) - ‘oh you’ve had your ears pierced!’
Exaggerate interest/approval/sympathy (polite to look like you care)
Avoid disagreement (being polite instead of having a strong opinion and getting involved)
Joke (show friendliness)
What are some examples of negative politeness?
Be pessimistic (we do it to show respect in some cases) - ‘I dont suppose you remember me’
Minimise imposition (showing you don’t want to be annoying) - ‘can i ask you a quick question’
Impersonalise speaker and hearer
Apologise (being polite when others do the wrong thing)
- ‘i’m sorry but do you mind not talking up there?’
How does politeness cause violations of Grice’s maxims?
Politeness can be wordy, and thus violate Grice’s maxims
How do children learn to be polite?
Parents socialise children into politeness routines
What are two forms of ‘silent spelling’?
Punctuation and capitalisation
Why was the initial greek punctuation system created and what did it mean?
The main reason for writing was to use for oral presentations so the punctuation represented various pauses of different lengths
Comma = short pause
Colon = a longer pause
Periodus = longer pause again
Useful because in early writing there were no spaces
The addition of spaces has…
Made reading much more accessible and less confusing
What has happened to the full stop?
Was originally used to seperate words - now we use it to show the end of the sentence.
Has always been neutral but now in text messaging, zero punctuation is the new neutral - full stops make younger people assume people are annoyed or being abrupt
