I'm thinking about looking at these posts:
Taxes! - adjacent pairs
Movie Reviews - performative verbs
Tautologies galore! - Place name tautologies
Trees - sense relations across languages
Just wondering about when everyone could get together so that we could work on our group project. I suppose it's about time that we get to working on it!
Without question, one of the cutest shows on TV these days. Also a very good example of many of the things we talk about in class:
There is a narrator that often comes in and explains the words of the characters, such as here:
Chuch: what's wrong?
Ned: nothing.
Narrator: He said nothing, meaning I accidentally killed your father and I want to tell you but I can't tell you.
This really sounds like the analyses we've been doing in class.
Also, there is maxim flauting for politeness:
Candy store owner: Do you like excitement?
Ned: I think excitement is better than a lot of things.
He avoids the truth in order to be polite here.
Just thought there were some really good examples here!
I saw a commercial the other day about taxes and it really fit with what we've been talking about with adjacent pairs this week!
A guy walks up to a girl and asks: do you know what time it is?
she replies (yelling): yes, of course I know what time it is!!!!
this is of course not the expected response, but she is upset because she has yet to get her taxes finished. It was pretty funny actually.
After reading the article about silence in Japanese conversation I found myself thinking about it. When you are face to face empty silence doesn't really exist because you can pick up on non-verbal cues such as smiling, nodding but what about the phone. My sister called me today to make sure I got "the message" about "the party". After replying "yes", the awkward silence ensued. For 3 minutes, yes I counted there were no words spoken, did she fall asleep? This is what I consider silence in converstion.
So yesterday I received a voicemail from my sister declaring, "The party is at 2 p.m. at the house". After listening to this I started thinking about the explicatures of this statement.
"the party", whose party? My niece's birthday was last month, is the party for her?
2 p.m., ok nice, today, yesterday, Saturday, with Cingular I have received messages a week after it was left so this needed some clarifying.
"the house", who's house? My sister's house, my mom's house, my house, yikes!!!
People really need to think about the messages they leave. LOL
The 2nd part of the principle of relevance says, as Dr. Meyers put on the board, "Every communicative act carries with it the utterer's belief in its optimal relevance." What about when someone is trying to be as ambigous and obscure as possible. I don't have a good example, but sometimes people try to be just as confusing as possible and bring in statements and ideas out of left field. Does that constitute optimal relevance, even by the speaker's beliefs? Or is it relevant because they are trying to be confusing? Thoughts?
Yesterday we talked a little about performative verbs again. One example we saw was "regret" and "I regretfully decline..." I think many times when we use this phrase regret is not necessarily a performative verb. For a performative verb to actually be that we have to mean it right. Often when we say/write "I regretfully decline..." we don't actually feel regret; it's just a polite way to excuse ourselves from doing something, which we may be thrilled not to have to do. Also, in this example "regret" is used as an adverb. Can an adverb be said to be a performative verb? Is there such a category of performative adverb?
A girl I work with is constantly dying her hair and asking "do you like my hair". Yesterday she attempted to bleach the blue dye out of her hair and now has multi-colored hair, gray in spots, blue and pink in others, and even a few streaks of blonde and green.
Some of the responses I have heard are,
Wow, it's different. CONSIDERSATION?? Quality, Quantity, Manner
Rainbows cheer me up! Relevance? manner, quantity
Like, is a strong word.
It looks "nice". Manner, quality
Someone handed her a card for their hairdresser.
Someone simply said, WELLLLLL manner
My hair turned purple one time. relevance?
Isn't it funny how one question can encourage so many different people to flout so many different maxims. I wonder if she was seeking agreement.
So, yesterday I received an email from someone I have been friends with for a long time. We were very close for years and just recently lost contact with each other. The email read as follows:
Hey,
Before I bother with a long, drawn out email, a question. Are you still out
there in internet land? If so, are you interested in communicating with me?
How are you?
I truly hope all is well with you. And for what it's worth, I miss you.
I highlighted the part that seems really strange to me considering the closeness of our previous friendship. I find it unusual that he would select Negative Politeness to reach out when it actually seems to put us at a distance. My question is this, why negative politeness and what perlocutions could this express?
