Notes from Ch2 - Involvement in discourse: In Tannen, D. (1989) Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
______________________________________________
The radio was on and that was the first time I heard that song, the one I hate. Johnny Mathis singing “It’s Not For Me To Say.” When I hear it all I can think of is that very day riding in the front seat with Lucy leaning against me and the smell of the Juicy Fruit gum making me feel like I was going to throw up. How can a song do that? Be like a net that catches a whole entire day, even a day whose guts you hate? You hear it and all of a sudden everything comes hanging back in front of you, all tangled up in that music.
Lynda Barry, The good times are killing me, pp.42-3
1. Repetition, dialogue, and imagery create involvement in discourse... the same (involvement) strategies that are shaped and elaborated in literary discourse, are to be found in spontaneous and pervasive use in conversation. This is so because they reflect and create interpersonal involvement.
2. Gumpertz (1982, p.1) in Discourse Strategies:
“Once involved in conversation, both speaker and hearer must actively respond to what transpires by signaling involvement [to each other], either directly through words or indirectly through gestures or similar nonverbal signals.”
3. In Gumpertz’s view, conversational involvement is achieved in intracultural communication, but compromised (made difficult) in cross-cultural communication. Hence the advantage in taking cross-cultural communication as a research site:
“[For in intracultural communication] there is a tendency to take for granted that conversational involvement exists, that interlocutors are cooperating, and that interpretative conventions are shared” (p.4).
Tannen points out, however, that people reared in the ‘same culture’, however, also exhibit regional, ethnic, age, gender, class, and other social and individual differences!
4. Tannen discusses a dinner conversation involving five Americans and one native of London - conversational styles differ, and these differences continually led to subtle misunderstandings and misjudgments.
5. Spoken versus written (Chafe): Prototypical spoken genre is characterized by fragmentation and involvement, while prototypical written genres are characterized by integration and detachment... Chafe (1985, p.116) notes three types of involvement in a conversation: self-involvement by the speaker; interpersonal involvement between speaker and hearer; and involvement of the speaker with what is being talked about.
6. Conversational involvement:
‒ For Gumpertz: 1) an observable state of being in coordinated interaction as distinct from mere co-presence – “conversational engagement” (Goodwin, 1981);
‒ for Chafe: 2) an internal state that shows itself in various linguistic phenomena;
‒ 3) Tannen’s sense of involvement: an internal, even emotional connection individuals feel which binds them to other people as well as to places, things, activities, ideas, memories, and words... not a given but something achieved. [All feelings though have characteristic expressions.]
7. Conversation is not a matter of two (or more) people alternately taking the role of speaker and listener, but rather that both speaking and listening include elements and traces of each other, i.e., it is not a first-you-then-me turn-taking activity, but a process in which both occur in varying degrees simulataneously:
‒ Listening, in this view, is an active not a passive enterprise, requiring an expressive-responsiveness comparable to that required in speaking,
‒ and speaking entails simultaneously projecting the act of listening:
‒ In Bakhtin’s sense, all language is dialogic, [i.e., there is an active intertwining of all influences at work].
8. Conversation is “a joint production.” ... Not only is the audience a co-author, but the speaker is also a co-listener... no utterance, no word, can be spoken without echoing how others understand and have used it... use of “strategic ambiguity” (Kochman, 1986) by a speaker to leave it up to listener to determine meaning... “talking with another person... is like climbing a tree that climbs back”.
9. Involvement - an aesthetic response... an emergent [i.e., growing] “sense of coherence,” a sense of connectedness [of an wholly internally interconnected unity]... being able to follow someone wherever they may go (and to see what they see on the way)... an inability to see coherence is what “drives people mad”...
10. The elaboration of meaning through the play of familiar patterns: the eternal tension between fixity [the already given] and novelty [the surprising extension of what seemed finished] that constitutes creativity.
11. The metamessage (Bateson, 1972) of rapport: the sense that we are “on the same wavelength,” or in “the same ballpark.”
12. Poets (why banned by Plato): “You were not asked to grasp their principles through rational analysis. Instead you submitted to the paideutic spell” - the effect of ‘total engagement’ and ‘emotional identification’ - involvement.
Sound and sense in discourse:
12. Tannen’s interest: comparison of written and spoken narratives: mostly, written ‘stories’ illustrated Chafe’s features (integration and detachment)... but one written narrative didn’t; it had been ‘cooked up’, rather ‘boiled down’... a ‘short story’ rather than ’expository prose’.
13. Literary writing elaborates strategies that are spontaneous in conversation... (see Vygotsky notes on Speech and Writing)
14. Ordinary conversation and literary discourse have much in common.
15. Two levels: 1) sound and rhythm, and 2) mutual participation in sense making:
‒ i) “strategies,” not “features”... used simply to convey a systematic way of using language;
‒ ii) from “levels,” to language working in many ways at once [intertwined... dialogical];
‒ iii) from merely “sound and rhythm,” to “musicality” [orchestration];
‒ iv) “mutual participation” to do with a response to scenes, and the power of scenes coming from images made up of details - music and scenes as triggering emotions (feelings, an inner re-living, re-feeling).
16. Friedrich (1986) “The language parallax: linguistic relativism and poetic indeterminacy”
“Let us put the problem in the more comprehensive context of poetic language as a kind of language. Language is the symbolic process that mediates between, on the one hand, ideas/feelings and, on the other, the sounds produced by the tongue, larynx, and so forth. Poetry, analogously, is the symbolic process by which the individual mediates between the music of a natural language and the (nuances of) mythic meaning. To create felt consubstantiality between language, music, and myth is the master trope of poetry - ‘master’ because it is superordinate to and in control over such lesser figures as image, metaphor, and paradox. And this master trope is unique, that is, it is diagnostic of poetry” (p.39).
Mythic thought: invisible presences (spirits, ghosts, etc), music... all rhythmically moving together... language... shared attention...
17. Language works in many ways at once. Sound and sense, music and meaning. Meaning is in a word’s ‘movement’ (intonation - ‘positions’ a speaker, and a listener in/on a scenic ‘landscape’).
“Language can be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without dividing the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound...” (Becker, 1959, 113).
18. Involvement: one becomes involved by being ‘moved’ by another’s words over a ‘scenic landscape’ of human places to go.... being ‘moved’ together.... “Rhythmic Ensemble:”... Sense patterns create audience participation in sense-making...
19. Meaning making and mattering: we care for what we have taken care of.
INVOLVEMENT STRATEGIES [Three major strategies: Repetition; Dialogue; Scenes]
20. Strategies researchers have identified in conversation, are ones that Tannen has found to be of importance literary discourse.
21. SOUND: The strategies that work primarily on sound include:
‒ 1 rhythm; synchrony; self-synchrony – like breathing..share the dance, timing, tempo
‒ 2 patterns based on repetition and variation of (a) phonemes, (b) morphemes, (c) words, (d) phrases, (e) longer discourse sequences
‒ 3 style figures of speech
Rhythmic synchronicity: temp (pattern of beats) and density (syllables, or silence, per beat)
“As musicians use the term, ensemble refers to the coming together of the performers in a way that either makes or breaks the performance. It is not just being together, but the doing together. And so a performance of a string quartet can be faulted, no matter how impeccably the score has been followed, if a mutual agreement on tempos, tuning, fortes, and pianos has not been achieved. Ensemble in music refers to the extent to which performers have achieved one mind, or - to favor Sudnow (1979), one body - in the performance of their work. Of the elements which contribute to the achievement, tempo is the guiding element” (Scollon, 1982, p.342-3).
... knowing not only where one has been but also where headed... “it is ensemble which holds participants together in a mutual attention to the ongoing situation” (p.345)... knowing how to ‘go on’ (LW)
Repetition and variation
Phonemes
Morphemes
Longer discourse sequences
Style figures of speech
22. MEANING: The strategies that work primary on meaning include:
The more work done by listeners and readers in supplying meaning, not only the greater their sense of involvement, but also the greater their sense of deep understanding.
Indirectness/ellipsis/silence... Tyler (1978) the intersection of the said and the unsaid
Tropes..metaphors, etc.
Constructed dialogue...voices, scenes
Imagery and detail
Narrative...see Bruner (1986) quote
Involvement through linguistic strategies... a shaped and vectored sense of ‘where’ on is in a conversation
Scenes and music in creating involvement...
Neurological evidence...
Involvement and emotion...
Particularity