Language in Action

Psychological Models of Conversation

William Turnbull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134639489
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Face-to-face conversation between two or more people is a universal form, and perhaps the basic form, of social interaction. It is the primary site of social interaction in all cultures and the place where social and cultural meaning takes shape. Face-to-face conversation between children and parents can also be an important context for social and cognitive development. Given the universality, frequency and importance of conversation in social life, a psychological model of conversation is required for an understanding of the central issues in social and developmental psychology. This book provides such a model.
Language in Action presents a critical examination of four models of conversation: the Code model based on Chomsky's linguistic views; the Speech Act model of Austin and Searle; the Inferential model of Grice, and the Conversation Analytic model of Sacks and Schegloff. It also considers the Brown and Levinson model of politeness in conversation. Using many examples from natural talk and drawing on the positive aspects of the reviewed models, Turnbull proposes a new Social Pragmatic model of conversation as social interaction. He also describes the research paradigm of Social Pragmatics that experimental psychologists can use to study conversation. This book will be invaluable for advanced students in psychology, sociology, language and linguistics and communication. It will also make fascinating and lively reading for anyone wanting a greater understanding of this fundamental form of social interaction.

1

Introduction

The Conversing Organism

Who is the Audience for this Book?

When preparing to write anything, it is important to know who is the intended audience. The title of this book may lead readers to assume the book is about language. Perhaps, then, the intended audience consists of psycholinguists and perhaps also linguists and sociolinguists. It may come as a surprise to learn, then, that in an important sense the book is not about language as one normally thinks of that term. In the course of the book the argument is made that conversation is social interaction. Thus, the book focuses on social interaction, not language.

To see how conversation could be considered social interaction, consider an example of a conversation in which the wife of a colleague asked him how he liked her new reading glasses. My colleague reported, and this was the point of him telling me the story, that he had paused too long before answering. What he meant by this is that his wife had taken his silence as indicating that he did not like her new glasses, an interpretation that was confirmed when his wife next expressed displeasure over her husband’s negative evaluation of her glasses. In this situation, silence or failing to speak was a crucial part of the conversation: the husband used it to carry out a particular action, and the action was recognized as such by his wife. Silence is not part of the structure of English, nor of any natural language, but silence is relevant to an understanding of this conversation. Further, it was in and through conversation that the husband and wife carried out an episode of social interaction; and it was in and through conversation that interpersonal effects were produced. In other words, their conversation constituted a form of social interaction.

In this book, through the careful consideration of the positive and negative attributes of various models of talk, a model of talk-as-social-interaction is developed. In addition, a methodology for analysing talk-as-social-interaction, including a set of analytic categories, is also presented. The usefulness for psychological research of the model of talk-as-social-interaction is illustrated through research on important psychological phenomena, including mother–child interaction and couples counselling. Finally because conversation is centrally about meaning-making, implications of a model of talk-as-social-interaction for theories of action, meaning and representation are briefly discussed.

The psychological study of interaction, which includes the study of personal relationships, and of interpersonal, group and cultural processes, is the domain of social psychology. But it is also the case that developmental psychologists study the impact of social interaction, in particular of parent–child and peer interactions, on social and cognitive development. Accordingly, the book is directed primarily to social and developmental psychologists who should find the model of talk-associal-interaction interesting because it provides them with a way of examining the structures of episodes of interaction and of characterizing the nature of interactions in various ways. Those analyses can be related, in turn, to such phenomena as the relation between the structure of arguing and the quality of long-term intimate relations, or the impact of styles of parent–child interaction on the child’s social/cognitive development.

To demonstrate the relevance to social and developmental psychology of the material discussed in this book will take some time. The dominant, taken-for-granted models treat talk as relatively unimportant and, at most, merely a conduit by which one person conveys information to another. Further, those models are so entrenched that they have attained the status of fact rather than theory. But they are theories and I will try to convince you that they are seriously flawed theories. However, because of their taken-for-grantedness, to dispel the dominant view of talk requires a long and difficult argument. Until that argument is complete, the reader needs to be patient in waiting to see how the study of talk is centrally relevant to the study of social interaction.

In order to set the stage for the issues discussed in this book, it is necessary to first define some terms and set down some signposts.

What is Conversation?

Conversation can be defined as the situation in which two socialized and co-present persons talk to one another as they go about their everyday informal lives. There are other types of ‘conversation’ that do not include one or more aspects of this definition. In particular, there is conversation involving more than two participants and conversation between people from different cultures. Also, there is conversation without visual interaction (e.g., conversation on the telephone), and there is conversation with varying degrees of formality (e.g., in formal situations such as the classroom, the courtroom and the therapy session). Although examples from various types of conversation are given in this book, the focus of the book is two person, everyday, informal, face-to-face conversation.

Examination of conversation reveals that it is composed of much more than spoken language as traditionally defined (this will become evident as you proceed through the examples presented in the book). Thus, it is preferable to use a term for this type of human social activity that does not have the connotation of conversation being equated with spoken language or speaking. Further, ‘conversation’ may refer to a form of social activity involving two or more participants (‘having a conversation’) and to the activities of each of the participants in creating this social activity (‘speaking’ or ‘conversing’). Accordingly, the term ‘talk’ is used to refer both to the activities or ways in which people together construct this universal form of social interaction and to social interaction so constructed. Specific forms of talk are referred to as, for example, telephone talk, lecture talk, therapy talk and mother–child talk.

Aims of the Book: Why Study Conversation/Talk?

I have already suggested that the study of talk is relevant for psychologists interested in social interaction. The following are five additional reasons why talk should interest psychologists, practitioners of other social science disciplines (e.g., sociologists, anthropologists), cultural theorists, linguists, educators and educated citizens.

Everyday talk occurs in all cultures and involves all social categories of persons: ruler and ruled, rich and poor, literate and illiterate, male and female. Even people who are unable to talk or whose language is seriously impoverished, such as the very young and those with severe physical or mental impairments, engage in talk with others. It is because universal human activities may reveal something essential about the human experience that talk is of interest. Further, because talk is the most frequent form of social interaction, what is learned about talk will be useful in understanding other forms of interaction.

Second, talk is reflexively tied to personal identity, to human relationships, and to culture; that is, in talk participants co-construct their personal, social and cultural worlds, and participants’ orientations to those co-constructed worlds influence the structure of talk (Ochs, 1988, 1992).

Third, the ability of persons to coordinate their actions bestows an adaptive advantage. It seems likely that talk evolved from the attempts of human beings to coordinate their own actions with the actions of others (Goody, 1995). Language, in turn, evolved from talk, and it is likely that the structure of language is greatly influenced by its origins as a solution to problems of coordination. It can be expected that grammar is adapted to the structures of talk (Ochs, Schegloff, & Thompson, 1996). A model of talk is, thus, relevant to an understanding of language.

Fourth, language is considered by many theorists to be a uniquely human achievement and, thus, central to a theory of mind. The influence of this belief is evident in claims about the relation of language and intelligence, both natural and artificial, and in the vast amount of philosophical debate about the relation of language and mind. By focusing on talk rather than language, a fresh perspective is brought to these concerns. For example, the philosopher Wittgenstein proposed a tight interconnection between talk and thought, one in which thoughts are not preexisting entities to which words are then applied: ‘Does a child learn only to talk, or also to think? Does it learn the sense of multiplication before or after it learns multiplication?’ (Wittgenstein, 1970, p. 324, italics in original). Wittgenstein is expressing the belief that talk and thought develop together in a ‘chicken and egg’ sort of way. Focusing on talk rather than language also brings new perspectives to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language determines or influences thought, that ‘culture, through language, affects the way in which we think, especially perhaps our classification of the experienced world’ (Gumperz & Levinson, 1996, p. 1).

Fifth, on a practical note, a model of how humans talk has implications for the possibility of developing artificially intelligent machines that can ‘talk’.

How People Accomplish Talk is not Obvious

The above reasons for studying talk may be convincing, and it might be wondered why psychologists have not devoted a great deal of research to the study of talk. One reason is there is a widely accepted model of talk (language use) and in that model, language is important but talk is not. That model is described in detail later in this chapter. A second reason is that talk may be overlooked as a central activity of human social life precisely because talk is a universal and ubiquitous form of human interaction. Just as fish might be the last organisms to discover water, so too might human beings be the last to discover what is all around them – talk. Another fate of extremely common, mundane activities is that even if they are recognized, they may arouse no interest and, instead, be dismissed as obvious. But one should be very cautious about the nature of phenomena deemed obvious. As long as ‘obvious’ is meant to signify only that there is considerable agreement about the existence, and perhaps also the prevalence, of some phenomenon, there is no problem. Unfortunately, ‘obvious’ is often used to signify that something is simple and explanations of it are readily available. It is not uncommon in the social sciences, however, to discover on careful examination that many mundane, everyday, ‘obvious’ activities are extremely complex and difficult to explain. Talk is just such an activity. The central goals of this book are to reveal some of the complexities of talk and to examine critically some of the models/theories of how humans accomplish talk in their everyday lives.

Psychological Study of Talk

As noted previously, because people speak when they converse, one might be led to the conclusion that the study of talk is the study of language and, therefore, part of the discipline of linguistics. Research in linguistics has contributed to the study of talk, but so too has research in anthropology, communication studies, psychology and sociology. Whereas research from all these disciplines is considered in the present book, the primary focus is the psychological analysis of everyday talk. From a psychological perspective, I examine various models of how it is that people carry out talk, of how they are able to understand one another when they talk, of how understanding sometimes goes wrong and how such misunderstandings are corrected, of what people do when they talk, and of how it is that they can do all these things. In other words, the focus of this book is on the nature of everyday talk and the psychological models and theories, the psychological explanations, of such behaviour.

Appropriate Data for Research on Talk

Research psychologists agree that if a theorist makes a claim about any aspect of human behaviour, that claim must be backed up with empirical data. The requirement that researchers back up their claims empirically means that they must observe, measure and describe the phenomena t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: The Conversing Organism
• 2. The Code Model
• 3. The Speech Act Model
• 4. The Inferential Model
• 5. The Interpersonal Dimension
• 6. Conversation Analysis
• 7. Social Pragmatics
• 8. Summary and Conclusions
• References
• Name index
• Subject index