Understanding Face-to-face Interaction

Issues Linking Goals and Discourse

Karen Tracy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136691119
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Challenging current work in communication and social psychology that assumes face-to-face interaction can be adequately understood without attending to discourse expression, this volume examines how people's goals, concerns, and intentions can be related to discourse expression. The text discusses discourse-goal linkages in specific face-to-face encounters such as courtroom exchanges, marital counseling, and intellectual discussions, as well as in more general theoretical dilemmas. Because it poses a new set of questions about social actors' motivations and pre-interactional goals, this volume offers a new direction for discourse study -- one that seriously considers the thinking and strategy involved in human communication.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Linking Communicator Goals with Discourse

Karen Tracy

University of Colorado-Boulder

The assumption that communicative action is strategic and goal-oriented is virtually a given starting point of communication research (e.g., see recent volumes by Cody & McLaughlin, 1990; Daly & Wiemann, in press; Tracy & Coupland, 1990) as well as its most influential disciplinary neighbor: psychology (Frese & Sabini, 1985; Giacalone & Rosenfeld, 1989; Jones & Pittman, 1982; Schank & Abelson, 1977). The purpose of this book is not to challenge the reasonableness of the assumption—it is unimaginable that accounts of communicative action could be adequate without recognizing that people are purposeful and use talk to accomplish “goals”—but rather to challenge the simplistic way in which that assumption has typically been understood.

For the purposes of this introduction, I use goal as a general concept that references a family of concepts: goal, purpose, concern, intention, and want. Whether we should make more distinctions within that family of concepts is but one of the issues that this volume addresses (see especially chapter 9). The typical practice, however, is for researchers to not specify very precisely which meaning is intended when the concept is used (Craig, 1986, 1990).

Not all study of face-to-face interaction starts with an “intentional actor” assumption. Most notably, “discourse” studies (Bilmes, 1986; Gumperz, 1982a, 1982b; Tannen, 1981, 1984), studies that begin with naturally occurring talk, have attempted to sidestep the assumption in some interesting, although not completely successful, ways (see Tracy & Coupland, 1990, for a review). In this chapter, I restrict my focus to “communicator goals” approaches to face-to-face interaction, the approach type dominant in communicative and social psychological research. I argue that assuming that communicator goals relate to discourse in simple transparent ways is neither empirically warrantable nor theoretically wise.

As initial evidence of the complexity of the relationship between discourse and goals, consider one example of a “simple” exchange. Two friends have been conversing, and the first friend (A) says, “There was flooding in Harrisburg.” It is now the second friend’s (B’s) turn to talk; how should he or she respond? What did A mean by the comment? B’s ability to respond appropriately depends on B understanding A’s intended goal, which is inferred from the discourse in light of background knowledge (Schank et al., 1982). As illustration of the potential difficulty, consider the following four responses and how each suggests B inferred markedly different goals motivating A’s comment:

R1:		Is your brother OK?
R2:		Yeah, I was lucky this time. We closed the sale on our property a little over a month ago.
R3:		Yeah, we’ve certainly had obnoxious weather this Fall.
R4:		What’s your point?

Response 1 is a sensible one if friend A has a brother in Harrisburg. It will demonstrate that B cares about what A cares about; it will also show that B recognizes that a general event (weather/flooding) has emotional significance for A and that B recognizes that A was not bringing it up just because weather is an acceptable topic for general talk. Put another way, R1 suggests that Friend B took A’s comment about Harrisburg as a bid for interest and sympathy.

In R2, B interprets the goal motivating the Harrisburg comment quite differently. In essence, B treats the comment as an expression of interest and concern from friend A to self. R2 would be a sensible next comment for B to make if he or she has property in Harrisburg and knows that A knows that fact. Stated with words, A’s point would be something like, “I’m telling you this piece of information because I know it affects you and I notice and keep track of things that affect you.”

The third response is the most general; Schank et al. (1982) labeled it a “general interest” point. General interest points presume that the speaker’s goal was to say something that is generally of interest for people to talk about—in this case, weather and disasters. That is, there was not a more specific goal that motivated the comment; it is merely a topic to talk about to pass time and avoid awkward silences.

Where the first three responses presume that the speaker had friendly intentions, R4 does not. R4 is the kind of response that makes sense if, for example, A had warned B not to buy property in Harrisburg but B had gone ahead and done it anyway. In this case, B might be inferring A’s goal in commenting about Harrisburg to be a way to say, “I told you so.” The goal of Speaker B in responding with R4, then, could be to challenge A to be openly critical and self-righteous, a move that B might expect A to not want to do. In this last case, then, the point of the Harrisburg comment is for A to criticize B, and R4 is B’s response to that criticism.

There are many more goals than the four exemplified here that a speaker could have in making a single simple comment. The four, however, are sufficiently diverse to illustrate why being able to link discourse to goals is essential in understanding face-to-face interaction. This need to have methods for linking goals and discourse becomes even clearer when we start from the opposite vantage point—that of the speaker who has a goal. Imagine a speaker who had one of the following four communicative goals: (a) to express interest in another; (b) to make a bid for another to show interest in self; (c) to keep talk going and avoid awkward silences; (d) to criticize another’s judgment. How would these different goals be expressed in talk? As I have shown already, these goals could be expressed in an identical discourse form. Obviously, however, each goal could be expressed in a myriad of ways. A speaker interested in expressing interest in another, for example, could (a) ask a question (“What’s going on in your life?”); (b) give a compliment (“That was a good movie you selected.”); (c) demonstrate his or her attentiveness to the other’s past talk (“I was thinking about what you said yesterday, and . . .”); or (d) make a comment about something that affects the other (“There was flooding in Harrisburg.”).

If the same discourse form can indicate different goals, and different forms can express virtually the same communicative goal, then we are going to need good conceptual frameworks (theoretical distinctions, guiding ideas) to discover and construct how goals and discourse are (or should be) linked in any particular case. This example points to the complexity of relations between discourse and goals. All of the chapters in this volume consider issues involved in understanding how goals and discourse expression can be linked. In the remainder of the chapter, I do three things: (a) evidence the degree to which the assumption of simple transparency is widespread; (b) show how untenable such an assumption is in one kind of face-to-face interaction—intellectual discussion among faculty and graduate students in an academic department; and (c) overview the contributions that each of the chapters makes to conceptualizing more adequately how goals and discourse are linked.

ASSUMPTION: GOALS AND DISCOURSE ARE TRANSPARENTLY LINKED

The assumption that goals and discourse are transparently linked rests on two interconnected premises. The first is that the goals that undergird communicative action are a small, easily defined set. The goals in this set, moreover, are assumed to be related to each other in a straightforward manner. The second premise is that, if the links between a goal (get compliance) and functional message strategies (make a request, be rational, be friendly) are identified, then the interesting part of the goal–discourse relationship has been explained. That is, it is presumed that the extension to discourse is unproblematic and easy to do.

Premise 1: There is a Small, Easily Defined Set of Goals

The assumption that the goals undergirding communication are a small, easily defined set is seen in much theorizing. For instance, Clark and Delia (1979), in their now much-cited article, suggested that interactants have three main types of goals: a task or instrumental one, a self-presentational, identity one, and a relational one. Each of these goals is present in every social situation, they argued, but specific situations differ in the salience of each. Others have made similar arguments about the general goals of face-to-face encounters (Forgas, 1983; Graham, Argyle, & Furnham, 1980; McCann & Higgins, 1984; O’Keefe & Delia, 1982). Theoretical formulations such as these suggest that (a) the goals that people possess for specific types of interaction could easily be placed in one of three categories; and (b) the goal priorities that people will have is given, or at least strongly suggested, by the nature of the social situation.

When we look at research that investigates how people pursue a particular kind of communicative goal, we find the implications of these theoretical typologies drawn out explicitly. This is especially well illustrated in research on face-to-face persuasion, a research tradition typically labeled compliance-gaining or social influence. Study of social influence is based on the assumption that there are a large set of situations in which getting compliance is the obvious goal (Bisanz & Rule, 1990; Dillard, 1990; Rule & Bisanz, 1987; Smith, Cody, LoVette, & Canary, 1990).

Take, for instance, a much-studied situation (Marwell & Schmitt, 1967; Miller, Boster, Roloff, & Seibold, 1977; Seibold, Cantrill, & Meyers, 1985): getting one’s son to do his homework. This situation could be primarily a compliance-gaining situation, but there are many other goals that could be central. A parent could be concerned with motivating a son to take responsibility for his behavior. In this case, getting one’s son to do homework would be only part of a broader goal. Thus, if a parent saw the conversation with a son turning into a situation where the son seemed to perceive the situation as a compliance-gaining one, that is, one where the parent was trying to impose his or her preferences on the child, a parent might abandon attempts to get the son to do homework. In this case, although the parent might prefer that his or her son study more, the parent’s concerns to recognize that the son is a mature decision maker (relational goal?) and that he or she is able to give his or her child independence (identity goal?) might lead a parent to avoid the subject entirely or broach it in an indirect manner (“We’re going to Aunt Sarah’s for dinner on Sunday. You’ll need to plan around that in doing your homework.”). In such a situation, where compliance-gaining is not the central goal, we would expect a parent to speak in different ways than when it was (treat the situation as an information-giving one, for example). My point is that face-to-face situations do not come with easily prespecified goal packages.

Many researchers do recognize that situations have more than a single goal influencing action (see Tracy & Coupland, 1990, for a review); but, nonetheless, how these multiple goals are to be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Linking Communicator Goals with Discourse – Karen Tracy
• PART I: DISCOURSE–GOAL LINKAGES IN SPECIFIC FACE-TO-FACE ENCOUNTERS
• 2 Goals, Games, and Moral Orders: A Paradoxical Case in Court? – Robyn Penman
• 3 Digressions in Argumentative Discourse: Multiple Goals, Standing Concerns, and Implicatures – Scott Jacobs, Sally Jackson, Susan Stearns, and Barbara Hall
• 4 The Uses of Goals in Therapy – Richard Buttny and Jodi R. Cohen
• 5 Intergenerational Talk: Goal Consonance and Intergroup Dissonance – Nikolas Coupland, Justine Coupland, Howard Giles, and Karen Henwood
• 6 On Enacting Friendship and Interrogating Discourse – William K. Rawlins
• PART II: THEORETICAL DILEMMAS LINKING GOALS AND DISCOURSE
• 7 Some Problems With Linking Goals to Discourse – Janet Beavin Bavelas
• 8 Message Design Logic and the Management of Multiple Goals – Barbara J. O’Keefe
• 9 What Drives Social Action? – Jenny Mandelbaum and Anita Pomerantz
• 10 The Two-Way Relationship Between Talk in Social Interactions and Actors’ Goals and Plans – Robert E. Sanders
• 11 A Synthetic Perspective on Goals and Discourse – Gregory J. Shepherd and Eric W. Rothenbuhler
• Appendix: Transcript Notation
• Author Index
• Subject Index