The Pragmatics of Style

Leo Hickey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415723749
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317933557
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In the general area of style study or stylistics there is no shortage of ideas, definitions or published works. It is hoped, in the present volume, to contribute to the prosperity of the discipline mainly by clarifying and exemplifying how pragmatic considerations may be relevant to any study of style, in the conviction that pragmastylistics is more interesting and useful than stylistics on its own. The starting point must be a brief survey of the definitions and style and stylistics. The very form of the latter term suggests a scientific and orderly, rather than an intuitive or impressionistic, investigation of style. There are two separate levels of study: one, a general, methodical and scientific discipline; the other, an application of its methods or postulates to the analysis of the 'style' of a specific utterance, text, speaker, writer, movement or period. It is clear that, in order to approach either, we must first attempt to understand style.

Section II

Style in Speech and Situation

Essentially concerned with the study of all types of communication through language, pragmatists pay more attention in practice to spoken than to written forms. Indeed, conversational analysis has developed as a sub-discipline in its own right, with much cross-referencing between general pragmatic principles and models of interpersonal language-use in particular. As in all pragmatic studies, the objective is usually to provide an explanation of the devices or strategies used by interlocutors to organize, structure and develop their discoursal relationship so as to achieve the ends they have in mind. Whatever else they may be, styles in conversation are the result of choices made on the subject of such devices and they frequently manifest features not found in written texts. In a special way, therefore, speakers’ choices are directly determined by what they are trying to do, and their style, in turn, is their way of doing it.

The chapters which comprise this section select four aspects of spoken language for detailed scrutiny. These are certain devices which show that particular referents are of special importance to a speaker, ways in which speakers express their attitudes to the truth or falsehood of what they say, means by which speech style is negotiated or interactively achieved by interlocutors and strategies used to negotiate power relationships in the course of an oral exchange.

Whereas the last chapter in Section I dealt with topicalization based on a written corpus (including dialogue in fiction), the phenomenon examined by Flora Klein-Andreu is found exclusively in spoken Spanish and indeed it might be regarded as a specifically oral version of topicalization. Her study is very much concerned with oral communication in practice and the feature discussed, the X-form, is essentially an informal style marker. The author suggests, however, that it is a way of expressing that the referent is important to the speaker for any number of reasons and not merely because the discourse is ‘about’ it, as would be central to most definitions of topic.

Carmen Silva-Corvalán discusses certain features which express speakers’ attitudes to the possibility that the content of their propositions may or may not be true. Such features determine what she calls ‘hypothetical discourse’, and this may vary along a scale of assertiveness. The choice of language, resulting in style, is conditioned by pragmatic considerations, including the degree of the speakers’ assertiveness, the effect they intend to produce and the formality of the situation. To the extent to which speakers select from the options open to them prompted by such factors, ‘style necessarily becomes a question of pragmatics’, the author concludes.

Also studying conversational speech styles, Margret Selting shows how the shifting and switching of such styles is not determined by extralinguistic or contextual factors, but by ‘dynamic interactively-achieved ways of speaking by which participants signal and achieve the constitution of global and local dynamic conversational contexts interactively’. Using a German corpus, she shows how style in speech is the result of a developing partnership between the interlocutors as they go along, rather than something fixed a priori by their situation or anything else.

A very similar point is discussed by Jenny A. Thomas, who focuses in particular on devices used in conversation to affirm, negotiate or control power relations; she is interested in ‘interpersonal pragmatics’ with the objective of moving ‘towards a more predictive and explanatory model of discourse organization’. Her examples are taken from ‘unequal encounters’, in the sense of conversations between superiors and subordinates, and her findings are similar to Margret Selting’s, namely that style is not settled before the interaction commences but is established as the exchange proceeds.

Chapter four

Speech priorities

Flora Klein-Andreu

Introduction

I should like to take this occasion to continue examining structures that occur in conversational Spanish, but not, it seems, in the written language or in the more formal spoken registers, under the assumption that the characteristics of these oral forms are due to the speech situation itself. My discussion is based on speech recorded in Spain, and specifically on consideration of a particular kind of construction that I have studied in detail: the constructions I call ‘X-forms’ (Klein-Andreu, 1989)

1. The Spanish ‘X-forms’

Consider the following examples:

(1) Y yo me entró una tos que me ahogaba.

(2) Tú te gusto ‘Upstairs Downstairs’?

(3) El águila real, la pieza favorita es la liebre.

What these utterances have in common is that each begins by mentioning a referent that is closely related semantically to the reference of a neighbouring utterance, but without the expected morphosyntactic indication of the nature of the relationship. Thus, in (1) and (2) we find the free (or subject) pronouns yo ‘I’ and tú ‘you (subj.)’, where the actual role of the referents would call for the prepositional forms a mí and a tí, respectively, as in (lb) and (2b) below. Similarly, in (3) we find el águila real ‘the royal eagle’ preceding la pieza favorita ‘the favourite prey’, with no specification of the relationship between the two, where we would expect to find la pieza favorita in initial position, as ‘head’, modified by the prepositional del águila real ‘of the royal eagle’, as in (3b).

(1b)	Y a mí me entró una tos que me ahogaba.
(2b)	A tí te gusto ‘Upstairs Downstairs’?
(3b)	La pieza favorita del aguila real es la liebre.

Thus, examples (1), (2), and (3) are ‘ungrammatical’ in that they counter the expectations set up by grammatical prescription. Yet, though such constructions seem relatively common in ordinary speech, at all educational levels, prescriptive grammars do not actually mention them at all, even to condemn them. From this I conclude that they must not be common in writing or in the more formal or ‘planned’ registers of speech. For this reason, too, they have no traditional designation, so that I refer to them as ‘X-forms’.

2. The problem and present approach

The questions to be asked, then, are why do such forms occur, and why do they occur precisely where they do – in ordinary conversation rather than in writing or in more formal oral registers. A common reaction is, of course, that such forms are simply errors, due to the time-pressure under which speech is produced. It seems to me, however, that this begs the question of just what is meant by an ‘error’ in the first place. Put differently, it is hard to imagine how we can ever hope to understand the characteristics of spoken language (or of any phenomenon, for that matter) if we start out by discarding examples of it from the outset, as ‘erroneous’. I therefore take the position that one must instead start by investigating whether the phenomena in question exhibit any systematic characteristics at all, that might help to explain their occurrence and especially their occurrence in particular contexts rather than in others.

Of course, the kinds of systematic characteristics one looks for will depend on one’s view of language. Thus, if one regards language as essentially an instrument of communication – the point of view that seems reasonable to me, though obviously not the only one possible – systematicity will be sought in the relation between overt form(s) and the kinds of communications with which they are associated, both at the local (syntactic/semantic) and at the larger (discourse-pragmatic) levels.

Accordingly, the next section summarizes some of the characteristics of the X-form’s reference and discourse-function that I have found to be systematic, as discussed in earlier work (Klein-Andreu, 1989). We then go on to examine the relation between these findings and one of the concepts most often employed in work on discourse: the concept of topicalization. Based on examples of X-forms in their actual context, we consider whether and to what extent this concept is an analytically useful characterization of these forms. Finally, we attempt to determine just what functional characteristics seem to be shared by all X-forms, and how they relate to the kind of situation in which X-forms occur – namely, ordinary conversation.

3. X-forms’ reference

Examination of X-forms’ reference shows that their occurrence is not random, but rather seems to depend on the X-form’s referent and its relation to the discourse in which it occurs. First, various statistical measures indicate that referents of X-forms typically are ‘topic-worthy’. Thus, in comparison with an equal number of grammatical subjects of randomly chosen utterances without X-forms, produced by the same speakers, we find that the X-forms are more likely than the subjects to have definite and animate referents, and even to refer to the interlocutors themselves or members of their immediate family. Further, the most usual operational measure of a referent’s actual topicality...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section I Style in Communication and Comprehension
• Section II Style in Speech and Situation
• Section III Style in Literature and Learning