CMN457: Introduction to Interpersonal Communication

Spring 2003, Professor John Shotter

REVISION HINTS FOR SECOND EXAM

[The exam will cover material from: #8 (Schegloff); #9 (Notes - Shotter); Tannen ch.1, ch.2, ch.3, ch.4, ch.5, ch.6, ch.7, ch.8, ch.10; #11 (Krippendorff); #13 (Scheff)

‒            What, classically, have been the four central concerns in the study of communication?

‒            Schegloff focuses both on what is done in our utterances, and what is done by an utterance being absent.

‒            He has three premises for his own approach: what are they?

‒            What is the difference between conversation and discourse?

‒            To whom do we give “news”? Why do we first check out whether the person already has the news or not?

‒            What is the ‘preferred’ response to an offer, or pre-offer, of information?

‒            Whose ‘units of action’ matter in Conversational Analysis (CA)?

‒            Silences are not ‘nothings’.

‒            What is an “adjacency pair” (give examples)?

‒            “Conditional relevance”?

‒            “Preference structure”?

‒            “Pre-sequence,” “insertion sequence,” and “occasioning”?

‒            Why does the giving of a dis-preferred response often give rise to a more complicated exchange than the giving of a preferred response?

‒            What are the reasons for people often communicating indirectly?

‒            What are the main dimensions of difference that define people’s different conversational styles?

‒            What conflicting needs are we continually trying to balance in our communicating?

‒            Why can we often not communicate directly even if we want to?

‒            Look up framing and re-framing.

‒            Study the special nature of intimate relationships.

‒            What features of our utterance most often convey metamessages?

‒            Grice’s Cooperative Principle

‒            Lakoff’s Logic of Politeness.

‒            Feelings versus Content

‒            Saying versus Showing... what is said versus the saying of it.

‒            Complimentary schisogenesis.

‒            Bateson and metamessages

‒            Tannen’s claimed differences between mean and women

‒            Look into the properties of communication as a continuous stream of actions.

‒            Krippendorff and the power of words in shaping our perceptions.

‒            What are the taken-for-granted assumptions that prevent us from noticing the power of language in our seeing.

‒            What are K’s four conclusions?

‒            Does Scheff see power as lying in offers or responses?

‒            What does Scheff mean by the ‘format’ of a negotiation?

‒            Why is consciousness of the process of negotiation?

All the course notes are on my web-site: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jds