We don’t always say exactly what we mean, and yet we’re still pretty good at understanding each other. That’s because we don’t just use meaning to figure out what’s going on, we also use context. This episode of Crash Course Linguistics is all about pragmatics, the area of linguistics that deals with context. We’ll cover the four main assumptions we make about context in language, also known as Grice’s Maxims, as well as the ways that languages can use grammar to convey politeness, and the different types of conversational styles within and between languages.
For more on pragmatics, including exercises on Gricean Maxims with answer key, check out this week’s issue of Mutual Intelligibility.
Lingthusiasm Episode 39: How to rebalance a lopsided conversation
Why do some conversations seem to flow really easily, while other times, it feels like you can’t get a word in edgewise, or that the other person isn’t holding up their end of the conversation?
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne have a conversation about the structure of conversations! Conversation analysts talk about a spectrum of how we take turns in conversation: some people are more high-involvement, while other people are more high-considerateness, depending on how much time you prefer to elapse between someone else’s turn and your own. These differences explain a lot about when conversations feel like they’re going off the rails and how to bring them back on track.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
This month’s bonus episode is about onomatopoeia! We talk about words that take their inspiration from the sounds and experiences of the world around us, and how these words vary across languages. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the onomatopoeia episode and 33 previous bonus episodes.
Lingthusiasm merch makes a great gift for yourself or other lingthusiasts! Check out IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at lingthusiasm.redbubble.com
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
Twin Babies Conversation (YouTube)
Kingston's conversation with Me (YouTube)
Conversation Analysis (Wikipedia)
Discourse Analysis—What Speakers Do in Conversation (LSA)
Deborah Tannen (Wikipedia) has several pop linguistics books about conversation, which are very accessible and fun to read!
Who's got the floor? (Carole Edelsky, Language in Society)
High-involvement and high-considerateness (Wikipedia)
Lingthusiasm Episode 13: What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday
Lingthusiasm Episode 23: When Nothing Means Something
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
Transcript Episode 39: How to rebalance a lopsided conversation
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 39: How to rebalance a lopsided conversation. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 39 show notes page.
[Music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about analysing conversation. But first, thank you for spending another year with us travelling around the sun.
Gretchen: It’s been so much fun doing this again for a third year. Thank you for sending in all of your examples and quotes and fun facts for our anniversary. We’ve also been enjoying, so much, seeing your photos of the socks, and the glottal bottles, and the liquids for your liquids, and the other Lingthusiasm merch in your lives.
Lauren: We’re looking forward to bringing you another year of Lingthusiasm, both our main episodes and our bonus episodes, in 2020. Our current bonus episode is about onomatopoeia.
Gretchen: You can get access to the onomatopoeia bonus and 33 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website.
[Music]
Gretchen: When we talk about kids learning language, we often get really excited about a baby’s first word. But before kids can even get to that first word, let alone first sentence stage, they’re already doing something that’s really cool linguistically. That’s having conversations.
Lauren: I’m already having great conversations with a kid who doesn’t have any words yet and that’s because she can participate in that back and forth, and taking turns, and I make a noise and then she responds. And then I – as a good, supportive parent structuring her through her language acquisition – will respond as though she’s given some kind of opinion, “Ah, oh, really?” I love it when grownups are like, “Ah, that’s interesting,” at kids because they’re kind of motivating them through learning this skill of having conversations.
Gretchen: I love it. I mean, suddenly, all my friends are having babies now. So, I’m beginning to practice this kind of pseudo-conversational skill with a lot of different small kids. You also see fun videos of this on the internet. There’s these two twins in a kitchen. They seem to be having this nonsense conversation back and forth with each other. There’s one with a dad who’s having this conversation with his kid and he’s responding to the kid as if it’s a real conversation. The kids are learning something from that.
Lauren: Those videos get me every time. I love it so much. One thing they’re doing is using intonation, which is that way of changing the tone and the melody of your voice. Nicole Holliday talked about that in our Episode 13 on intonation. We do other things to show people that we want to speak or that it’s their turn to speak – and how we build conversations like this. There’s a whole field dedicated to studying this from the perspective of linguistics.
Gretchen: Yeah. Conversation analysis is such an interesting subfield of linguistics because a lot of us think about the sounds or the words or the sentences, but there’s also this broader conversational level where there are also interesting patterns going on. A thing that I found most satisfying about encountering conversation analysis was how understanding how there are different cultural conversational norms, which helped me navigate different kinds of conversations that I was having in different kinds of norms that other people were having, even if you’re all speakers, ostensibly, of English. Even if you’re speaking the same language, you can have slightly different conversational norms depending on your personality type, or what region you’re from, or various other factors. Understanding those more explicitly can help make those conversations more rewarding.
Lauren: Conversation analysis has definitely helped me through holiday season, family conversations, interacting with small kids, job interviews, all of these places where back and forth conversations happen. Understanding them from what’s happening on the linguistic level is a really useful way to think about conversation.
Gretchen: Yeah. Travel, when you’re interacting with people from different backgrounds and stuff like that, also really helps with that. There’s this great metaphor that gets used with conversation, which is already present in English in general, that conversation analysts have really seized on, which is the idea that conversations have a floor. When you have the floor, you’re the one who’s talking. So, I have the floor right now –
Lauren: I could interject, and I could take the floor. The metaphor is from places like parliaments where there is a literal speaking area on the floor where a person comes to and does the speaking. In formal contexts there are formal ways to officially take the floor, so to speak. If you’ve been in high school debating, you’ll know that the person has to walk to the middle of the room or stand up. If you have been to Parliament, you’ll see where they physically walk to on the floor to speak.
Gretchen: Even in less formal contexts, like when you start going to school and you get taught you need to raise your hand before you talk, that’s a way of saying, “We’ve got 30 people in here and the only way to manage the floor is to do some sort of more formalised things.” Because, by default, the teacher has the floor. Or in some contexts you have something like a talking stick that you can pass around and that also helps signal who has the floor.
Lauren: Those formal ways of showing who has the floor are great in formal situations or in large groups of people where lots of people might be competing to be the one to speak or negotiating who’s going to be the one to speak. Where there’s smaller groups of people, we can also signal our interest in taking the floor. We can do that with our voice by kind of going, “Uh, yeah” or kind of saying, “That’s a great point,” and then waiting for them to speak and then stepping in. We can use the way we look at someone. We can lean forward or use a gesture that we kind of hold in space to show that we are ready to take the floor if someone will give it over to us.
Gretchen: I’ve been talking at a lot of conferences on panels recently. The interesting thing about being on a panel of four or five people is that you’re figuring out how to navigate who has the floor because you’re trying to present a good experience for the audience and let each of the panellists talk about their area of expertise. You wanna negotiate that “Who has something to say next?” sort of thing. I’ve become very attuned to what I call the “I have something to say about that” body language/gesture combination, which is like you have one hand that’s kind of raised a little bit, just below the level of your face with maybe your index figure extended and the other fingers kind of curled. And then your eyebrow’s a little bit lifted and your mouth kind of half open. You might say something like, “Uh...” Of course, I’m doing it, but you can’t see it. But you can just picture that, “Hello, I would like to interject politely, please” gesture set, and facial expressions. That’s one way of signalling “I’d like to talk” in a semi-formal context.
Lauren: In those contexts, a really good panel moderator or a really good chair of a meeting will read that and go, “Okay, we’ll hear from this person and then that person,” as a way of managing that. In more informal situations, it really is a matter of everyone in the conversation trying to be as receptive as possible to the needs of each of the speakers.
Gretchen: Sometimes, deliberately not doing that and saying, “I know you have a thing to say, but let me finish this.” You can not let people have the floor as well.
Lauren: I think the really interesting thing about conversation analysis is it shows just how much negotiating we do. We might be talking about a topic over here, but so much of our energy about talking around that topic happens around the edge of who has the right to speak, who’s gonna finish their turn, who’s gonna talk next. There are lots of ways to not give the floor over to someone. We talked a bit about the “I’m willing to speak now” body language and things you can say. But there are also strategies to stop people from taking their turn: continuing to speak. You can use intonation to stop people talking over the conversation by making your voice go up a little bit at the end so that it makes it clear that you still have something more to say. Then, people will be less likely to interject.
Gretchen: See, look! I didn’t interject at any point there because I was like, “Lauren clearly has something to say because she’s going up at the end and she doesn’t want me to interrupt her.”
Lauren: Thank you very much for taking the floor-maintaining cue that I was using.
Gretchen: Even things like a filled pause – when you say something like “um” or “uh” or “well, uh, I think, maybe,” that can be a way of saying, “I’m still searching for the words that I wanna try to get out, but I have words to get out.” It’s not just a silent pause where the other person might take it as their turn to talk.
Lauren: Also holding your gesture up in the gesture space – if you go up and make a gesture and you don’t put it down, even if you don’t say anything. I like to use this when I teach language and gesture. I kind of see how long the students can cope with me having my hands up without saying something before they start looking a bit uncomfortable. You can stretch it out really far. If you have a conversational situation where you don’t wanna give someone else the chance to speak for a particular reason, there are lots of strategies that you can use to maintain being the person who’s doing the talking.
Gretchen: One that I found really interesting is the use of eye gaze in this because if you think about the simple notion of eye gaze, you might assume like, “Oh, people are talking to each other. They must be looking at each other.” But in actual fact, what often happens is that the person who’s listening is more likely to gaze at the person who’s talking, but the person who’s talking is more likely to gaze away. Then, the talker can use that return of the eye gaze to the listener or to the groups of listeners to signal that they’re finished with their turn.
Lauren: Listeners can also do things to support the person who is talking. You can nod your head. You can go, “Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah.” You can kind of give them some vocal feedback. But that gaze is also really important. It’s why people find it really stressful if they’re the one talking if people are looking at their phones because it indicates that they’re not respecting that this person’s talking at this point.
Gretchen: Right. We should say that there are different sorts of gaze norms. Not everybody is comfortable maintaining eye contact and that can sometimes result in conflict if people have different sets of – whether they’re expecting somebody to be holding their gaze as if they’re listening or whether you can say, “Actually, I’m doodling and that makes it easier for me to listen,” but it’s not necessarily part of the same set of norms.
Lauren: I’m also a very vocal supporter of people who have the floor. I will do lots of smiling and nodding and hm-ing. That’s not the case for everyone. It’s also a matter of different audiences, whether that be because of cultural differences or just personal preference differences, respond differently.
Gretchen: I try to be that person when I’m a larger audience of that person who’s just gonna nod at the speaker, especially if they seem, maybe, they’re a little bit nervous or I know it’s the first time giving a talk or something. I’m just going, “I’m just gonna sit here nodding,” because it’s always really reassuring to look out at the audience and see someone there nodding every time you make a point.
Lauren: Because that’s how we’ve learnt to structure a conversation. Then, suddenly you have a different genre, which is a formal talk, and you’re not getting those cues that you’re used to from conversation. It can be really confronting. It’s really confronting when you have someone who sits there and doesn’t really smile or nod. Then, at the end, they’re like, “That talk was...” – they were clearly engaged. And you’re like “Oi, I have a very conflicting set of cues from you right now.”
Gretchen: I was giving a talk a number of years ago. I had a person sitting in the back row at some point just put their head on their palm, like face down, like kind of facepalm, during the talk. I was like, “Oh, no! What have I just said?” It turned out it was fine. But it definitely freaked me out.
Lauren: Just a long day of talks from this poor person.
Gretchen: Yeah. One of the things that I think is really interesting when it comes to conversation is how people structure the amount of silence and the amount of overlap that happens in between conversational turns – how you structure that passing back and forth of the floor to one another.
Lauren: We’ve talked about different strategies people can use to keep the floor, to hand it to someone, to be the supportive listener who’s letting them keep the floor or to take it, but they happen at different paces and in different ways in different conversations.
Gretchen: Have you ever been in a conversation where you felt like you either had a hard time getting the floor because the other person was just talking so much you couldn’t get a word in edgewise, or you’re stuck with the floor because the other person just wouldn’t talk at all and you’re carrying both ends of the conversation?
Lauren: I’ve definitely been involved in conversations with you where I’m pretty sure other people would have a hard time getting a word in if they weren’t particularly assertive about it. We’re both very good at talking. As soon as you give over the floor, I’m happy to take it. We often overlap. We owe a great debt of gratitude to our producer, Claire, who makes this sound like a conversation people can listen to sometimes. I definitely know that I have a habit of being very in a conversation, and as soon as someone hands me the floor, I’ll take it. And I’ll hand it back just as quickly. If they’re not in there, I’ll probably have something else to say.
Gretchen: For me, if I’m excited about what someone’s saying, I wanna be anticipating what they’re going to say and – not finishing their sentences in a, like, trying to cut them off sort of way, but in a like, “I’m showing that I’m following you so closely that I can anticipate what you wanna say because of how much I’m paying attention right now.”
Lauren: There’s a part of me that always wants to be the wise, wait for someone to talk, and take a moment’s breath, and come back with an incredibly pithy reply that is very efficient. But actually, no, I actually find the cut and thrust of a face-paced, enthusiastic conversation much more satisfying.
Gretchen: I think of the Owl character from Winnie-the-Pooh of like, “Ah, yes. That’s very interesting. Let me retreat to my cave and ponder it for a week. And then I’ll come back to you with a reply.” I’ve been in the situation where, even though normally I’m really keen on the cut and thrust of the conversation – I’m definitely more on that side – sometimes I have been in conversations, especially if I’m a little bit tired, where someone else will just be talking and I’ll be like, “Yeah, I guess I could say something, but I’m just silent right now. You’re just doing all the talking, and I’m sorry about that, but that’s what you’re doing.”
Lauren: When I’m in Nepal, that is definitely more the pace of conversation. I think it’s partly just that it takes having a conversation in a second language to slow me down a little bit. I think also conversation styles in general with the people I talk to tend to be a bit more, “I’ll say my thing. Then, you’ll say your thing. And then I’ll say my thing.” It’s a different pace of conversation.
Gretchen: I will say that I grew up in eastern Canada, in Nova Scotia, and I have been very used to having these high-overlap conversations. Then, I moved to Ontario for undergrad and this was the first time that I ever heard people saying the phrase, “No, you go ahead,” in conversation. I was like, “What? Why would anyone ever say this?” because, clearly, the thing that people do is just you both just keep trying and then eventually either you give up because you didn’t actually think your thing was that important or you eventually get it out. Nobody takes any offence about this because that’s just how conversations happen. Why would you ever tell someone, “No, you go ahead?” You could just be talking at that point. Why would you be spending this time on conversation management phrases? But now I go back to Nova Scotia and I’m like, “Wow! People talk really fast.”
Lauren: In different contexts you have people who are very involved in the conversation and get right in there. Then, as a spectrum of individual preferences or larger cultural preferences at the other end, you have people that are very considerate of the other person’s right to be the person who has the floor and is taking their turn.
Gretchen: Yeah. This was why it was really satisfying for me to read Deborah Tannen because she has several books which have been very popular pop linguistics books about conversation. One of the distinctions that Deborah Tannen makes is between high-involvement conversational styles and high-considerateness conversational styles. When I read this it was like, “Oh! Here’s this thing that I’ve been doing, that I’ve noticed in different types of conversation where you have some kinds of conversation where you have this cut and thrust, and this back and forth, and this high level of overlap.” I think it’s probably not a coincidence, Lauren, that we became friends because we both have this type of conversational style, so we don’t feel like we’re interrupting each other. I’ve noticed that I tend to be friends with more people that have high-involvement. I’m sorry, high-considerateness people, I’m sure you’re all lovely, but it just doesn’t always click as much.
Lauren: I think there’s something about someone who you click with is in some way a factor of how you interact.
Gretchen: I noticed that I tend to be friends with other people who also talk quickly or other people who also have this high level of involvement in conversation. The thing that I like about the distinction that Tannen makes here is that “involvement” and “considerateness” both sound really positive. They both sound like really nice things to be. It’s not like the “fast talkers” and the “slow talkers,” which sounds sound of pejorative for both groups to be honest. Both traits that are really positive as long as you understand that’s what’s going on.
Lauren: I think it’s worth remembering not only are these traits a scale and that, as an individual, you can move up and down them depending on who you’re talking to and the context that you’re in, but also – and we talked about this a little bit in our Episode 23 about nothing and how silence can be meaningful in conversation – the differences that we’re talking about here are millisecond differences. But we’re so sensitively attuned to when we can take the floor, or when someone else wants to interject, that these differences are really small and there’s not a lot of difference between individuals. But overall, we’re very sensitive to it.
Gretchen: They’re so tiny. The example that Deborah Tannen has is she recorded some of her friends at a Thanksgiving dinner. Some of them were New Yorkers and some of them were Californians. She found that the New Yorkers were move high-involvement. The Californians were more high-considerateness. That’s within even the same country. You have two different coasts with two different sets of norms. You can build out that continuum even more. I said I’ve noticed it in Canada. If you think of it in terms of particular countries or particular nationalities, something like maybe Italians or Spanish speakers are gonna be more high-involvement. Whereas, something like, I think, Finns was Deborah Tannen’s example. In Finland, they’re very high-considerateness. They have a lot of silences between statements. But even that, it’s still milliseconds.
Lauren: We learn these things really early. I am raising what is probably gonna be a relatively high-involvement child because I’m teaching her the type of turn taking that I find acceptable.
Gretchen: The thing that I also found really interesting about Tannen’s research is that she also gives you a set of tips for what to do if you find yourself in a conversation with someone who is at a different point than you from the scale.
Lauren: This is a delightful applied use of conversation analysis.
Gretchen: It’s so useful! I tell this to people at parties because a) I’m that kind of person and b) it is really one of the most “Here’s how linguistics can make your life better” examples that I have ever encountered. I think this is why people like her books so much.
Lauren: So, as a high-involvement person, if I’m gonna have a conversation with someone who has a really high-considerateness threshold, what should I do?
Gretchen: Right. As a high-involvement person, something we may encounter more often is that you’re in a conversation with somebody and the other person is just not talking. And you’re like, “Oh, my god. I did not sign up to give a monologue, here. Why is this person not keeping up their end of the conversation? Are they bored? Are they unengaged with me? I have to do all the work myself.” The temptation when that happens is to kind of go into monologue mode of, like, “I guess I’m just doing all this work myself. I didn’t sign up for this, but I guess I’m just giving a monologue now because this person just won’t talk.” Tannen points out the temptation is to dig in deeper into the thing you’re already doing. What’s actually probably happening is that this person is waiting for a pause that’s long enough that they can interject, and they don’t feel like they’ve gotten one yet.
Lauren: This is why I find, sometimes, having coffee as an actual activity is quite useful because even the most high-involvement person has to stop for a few milliseconds to have a drink.
Gretchen: Sometimes, I do this very explicitly if I’m having lunch or something with someone. I notice that I’ve been doing a lot of talking and so their food is almost all eaten and my food is not eaten, and I’ll be like, “I’m gonna eat my food now. You should talk to me.”
Lauren: That should be a quantitative analysis – counting how much food is left for each person at different points in the conversation.
Gretchen: It’s like, “I still have three quarters of a sandwich here and you have barely any sandwich left, so it’s your turn to do the talking, and I’m gonna eat my sandwich now.” It’s great because a) I get a sandwich and b) I also don’t have to do the whole side of the conversation, and the other person doesn’t feel like I’m monopolizing the conversation as much.
Lauren: So, what if I’m a high-considerateness person, or I’m in a conversation where I feel like that’s my interactional style, and I’m being bombarded by a high-involvement person?
Gretchen: Yeah. Even though I would consider myself fairly high-involvement, sometimes I’ve been in the flip side of that where you have somebody who’s doing all the talking and not letting you get a word in edgewise. The temptation, if you’re more on the considerateness end in a given conversation, is to say, “Okay, well, I guess I’m just not gonna get a word in edgewise. I’m gonna just sit back here because this person seems totally content to just do all the talking. I’m just gonna give up.” Like how just doing all the talking yourself, if you’re on that end, is also a kind of digging yourself in deeper rather than trying a different strategy, the person who seems to be giving a monologue actually really wants to be interrupted – or what, for you, will feel like interrupting. I had a friend that I knew a number of years ago who was part of a larger friend group. This person was kind of known in our friend group for being a person that was prone to monologue or would get into conversational monologue. Because I’m pretty high-involvement, I was often able to interrupt this person and then other people could get in after me. We had this meta conversation among our friends that was like, “Do you guys mind that I keep trying to interrupt this person’s monologue?” And the other people were like, “No, no, no! This is great. Because once you’ve interrupted her, then I can get in.”
Lauren: Not because she didn’t want to be interrupted, just that you were the person who could do that.
Gretchen: No, I just had enough tolerance for overlap that I was willing to do something that, to the rest of this group – and this was early on when I had moved to Ontario. So, this was when I was in undergrad and I was still used to this really high-involvement style. Most of the people around me also had this high-considerateness style, except for someone else who also wasn’t from the same area who also had this really high-involvement style. So, I was able to get in this person’s very high-involvement style, and then all of these considerateness people were like, “Oh, yeah. Okay. Now, I can talk because there’s been a long enough gap that I feel like I can get a word in edgewise.” It’s really tempting to keep doing the strategy that you’re most comfortable with, but, in fact, it can be useful to do the thing that seems rude to you – whether that's it seems really rude to leave silences or it seems really rude to interrupt. That can sometimes help break a conversation out of its fail state where one person is doing all the talking and the other person isn’t talking at all.
Lauren: Thinking about cues to give over the floor or to take the floor and then using those to do the thing that probably feels like the thing you don’t want to be doing can make it a bit easier.
Gretchen: Yeah. Reading this on paper – and this is why I tell people, “Hey, there’s research about this because it feels really rude to do the thing that doesn’t come naturally." It feels rude to me to leave too many silences because then it’s like I’m not interested. But if I know that the other person is waiting for silences or if I know the other person is waiting for interruptions, even though an interruption might feel rude, it can be cooperative in the right set of circumstances. It gives you permission to help make the conversation better.
Lauren: Of course, remember you have other linguistic tools in your conversational toolkit for doing this. So, taking a moment to ask someone questions if you feel like you need to give them a chance to take the floor can be one way of very actively handing the floor over to someone. A question is a big “Here is the floor and I am handing it to you” strategy.
Gretchen: This was something that I also found really interesting about Tannen’s research because she talks about how some conversation styles – and I’m not sure if it completely correlates with the high-involvement versus high-considerateness thing – but she talks about how some conversational styles use questions and other conversational styles use one person’s anecdote as a springboard for me to give my version of that anecdote. And the other person uses that as a springboard for their anecdote. Then, I use it as a springboard for my anecdote. And you go back and forth with “You’ve shared something, so that’s my cue to share something,” even without questions. Whereas, for me in a conversational style, I actually find questions fairly rude.
Lauren: Because it’s assuming that I have the right to ask you about a part of your life that you may not feel like you wanna share with me.
Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. Like, not the “How are you” question. That’s fine. But if someone’s like, “What do you think about this?” or –
Lauren: I may or may not be willing to disclose that information.
Gretchen: That’s confidential. My name? You’re not allowed to have it.
Lauren: I guess I’m the same. I won’t ask people directly if they have kids, but I might say a story about my little kid and then that’s an invitation to them to talk about if they have kids or not if they want.
Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. I’m not gonna ask someone point blank, “Do you have kids?” Or if they mention a dog, I might be like, “Oh, your dog! How old is your dog?” or something like that. But I’m not gonna say, “Do you have any pets?” That just feels weird to me. But, in the inverse, it can also feel weird if you’re used to a conversational style that doesn’t have direct questions, if someone’s just doing what Tannen calls this “mutual paired disclosure” – so you tell a story, I tell a related story, you tell a story, I tell a related story. If someone’s just doing that style and you’re waiting to be asked a direct question, you could be like, “Wow, this person’s only talking about their life. Don’t they care about mine?” I’ve had to get used to saying, “Well, if someone asks me a direct question, at least I can assume that they won’t consider it rude for me to ask them the same question back,” which is about where I’m at. I’m still not really starting with questions, but at least I’ll reciprocate questions and hopefully people don’t find that rude.
Lauren: You’re doing some in-conversation real-time conversation analysis to figure out how best to proceed with the conversation.
Gretchen: Absolutely. That is exactly what I’m doing. Because linguists gotta ling. You can’t take the linguist out of the conversation. Have you done any official conversation analysis, Lauren, speaking of direct questions?
Lauren: I’ve done a lot of recording conversations and looking at how people use language in them. But it’s worth saying that conversation analysis is a really specific approach. The detail in the transcription is meticulous compared to, say, the transcripts that we create for the show. When we create a transcript for the show, we’ve already had Claire do wonderful audio editing and we’ve already really structured the conversation to be as clear as possible. She takes out all of the ums and uhs and a lot of those pauses and a lot of those overlaps that make it hard for people to listen. And then when Sarah does our transcripts, she cleans it up even more. We do this because we’re not trying to do conversation analysis on the transcripts. We just want something that people can have a pleasant experience reading. That’s very different to a conversation analysis transcript where you’re recording every single pause. You’re really making clear where those overlaps are. All of the false starts, all of the laughter, this all indicates how people are building the flow of conversation.
Gretchen: It can be really weird to look at a transcript of a conversation because you’re used to hearing a conversation or directly experiencing a conversation in its natural environment. Then, seeing that written down, especially with all of the annotations, it doesn’t look like a play script. It doesn’t look like a conversation in a novel. Because we don’t actually talk the way people talk in novels or in plays. We do have these overlaps. And we do have these sort of starting to say one thing and then ending up somewhere else, and misspeaking a little bit and then repairing it, and we don’t even notice it when we’re having it in real time. Then, you see it on the page and you’re like, “What is this mess?”
Lauren: In some ways, we can only really do this level of conversation analysis – and it’s not surprising it only really started in the '70s, '80s, '90s as it’s built up with affordable audio recording and now video recording.
Gretchen: That’s true.
Lauren: Because conversation analysis requires this revisiting, and transcribing, and more detail, and more detail. Conversation is so fleeting. It’s so hard to bring people back to it and even accurately recall conversation. We do a lot of editing in our head. I don’t think it’s surprising that conversation analysis is really closely tied with the evolution of technology.
Gretchen: Which also makes it interesting to think about conversation in the computer context. Because, of course, you also have chat as a format. One of the things that I found really interesting when I was researching my book, which perhaps you’ve heard of – we’ve been talking about it a lot on other episodes of this podcast – one of the things that I was interested in looking at when I was researching Because Internet was how the chat format had evolved. Because some of the very earliest formats of chat actually transmitted people’s messages character by character – letter by letter, space by space, punctuation mark by punctuation mark. You could see it in excruciating detail as someone was typing. Then, it seems like it would be a technological regression to say, “Actually, we’re just gonna send it one message at a time rather than every single letter.” It turns out this seems to be better for controlling the floor and taking turns in between stages of the conversation because it’s not quite as real time but it is more like a dialogue that a conversation actually happens in.
Lauren: I hadn’t ever really thought of that before. It would be very distracting to me to compose a message if I saw your message being composed at the same time.
Gretchen: Do you remember those old school PowerPoint animations where they’d drop in one letter a time in the title? It would just be really painful to watch.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: I think that’s what real-time chat would be like if it was character by character. This technology has existed since the '70s. There are conversations in the '70s that are character by character. Now, we don’t do it anymore. You also get platforms – so, like Google Docs – where if you’re collaborating on the document itself, you see other people’s messages character by character. But if you wanna chat about what’s in the document, you go back to a turn-based thing where you either use the comments, or you use the chat side bar, or sometimes people will each go on a new line and they’ll talk that way. You have to do stuff to make the turns more evident which, again, seems like it should be a regression until you think about conversation as a thing that’s not just composed of individual sounds or individual signs, but actually of turns.
Lauren: Whether it’s a conversation with someone who still doesn’t even have words, or a conversation across a great distance using computer chat, I really love that, in many ways, conversation really is a central feature of language, an essential feature of something we should be analysing when it comes to language. Because we talk about language being a really human thing, but I think in many ways, conversation is what makes language a fun and delightful human thing.
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Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA and syntax tree scarves, ties, and socks, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.
Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include onomatopoeia, reading fiction as a linguist, and a behind- the-scenes look at the writing of Because Internet. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.
Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our editorial manager is Emily Gref, our music is “Ancient Cities” by The Triangles.
Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!
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