Appunti di Inglese 5

Lingua e traduzione inglese 5 – Prof Rossilezione 2

Difference between context, text, function

Context: is the part of the meaning that can be explained by knowledge of the physical and social world and the socio-psychological factors influencing communication, plus knowledge of time and place.

Text: the use of language, that is to say how languages become meaningful and unified for their use (with the help of coherence or relevance).

Function: the speaker’s purpose in speaking.

Lezione 4

We can distinguish between 3 kinds of context:

• Situational context: is the physical compresence of all the interlocutors (speakers and hearers) in the communication they are taking part; is what speakers know of the environment around them.
• Background knowledge context: it’s the cultural knowledge, it’s what people know about the world.
  • Cultural general knowledge: it’s everything we know about the way of the world, how the world functions.
  • Interpersonal knowledge: it’s speaker’s knowledge about their personal life (it relies on the degree of familiarity among the participant of the utterance), e.g., complicity.
• Then we have also the discourse communities (theorized by Swales): are formed by small groups of people (inside a large community) who share (a stronger interest in) a specific piece of language, leading to special vocabulary, e.g., football.
• Co-text: (is everything that surrounds a specific word, in order to better collocate that specific piece of language we are referring to), is the context of the text we are dealing with, formed by the words that surround a word we’re referring to. E.g., “the streets were crowded when I arrived.” I = subject. The streets were crowded when arrived = co-text.

How can we explain the reference?

Reference: is an act in which the speaker uses linguistic forms to make the hearer understand the entity referred. It can be reached through referring expressions (used to identify an entity) => the referent. E.g., I met the Simpsons: 2 referring expressions => the referents.

Referring expressions can be:

• Exophora: the referent is mentioned for the first time. It depends on the context outside the text => I / The Simpsons.
• Deixis: places the referent in place and time, it helps to understand what, when, where.
  • Person deixis: uses personal pronouns to refer to a person: “I live in Rome.”
  • Place deixis: refers to a location, it uses demonstrative adj/adv: “I like that.”
  • Time deixis: uses adverbs of time: “next year /now / tomorrow.”
• Intertextuality: a referring expression points to entities mentioned in a previous conversation: “That was amazing!”

Lezione 5

Exophora can be divided into:

• Exophoric reference: we refer to entity mentioned for the first time.
• Endophoric reference: we refer to entity already mentioned.

Endophora can be divided into:

• Anaphora: it refers to an entity already mentioned (so before).
• Cataphora: it refers to an entity mentioned forward (e.g., when he arrived home, John left for 3 hours).

How do we reach grammatical cohesion?

Grammatical cohesion is achieved when a referring expression is linked to another, e.g., “My parents live in Rome. They…” => it refers to my parents and avoids repetitions.

It’s achieved through 4 forms:

• Anaphora
• Cataphora
• Substitution: avoids repetitions, that is avoid the use of the same word “me and my wife” = “we.” It’s usually achieved with the use of personal pronouns.
• Ellipsis: so avoiding repetitions by omitting “I will study languages.” “I will too.”

How do we reach lexical cohesion?

Lexical cohesion can be achieved through:

• Repetition: repeat a word several times.
• Synonyms: a different word that means the same.
• Superordinates: general terms (birds – not a specific one).
• General words: higher level superordinate (stuff).

Lezione 6

Speech act (Austin): A speech act for Austin is everything we say whenever we are performing. We can analyze an act through 3 main levels:

1. Locutionary act: (the speech itself) what is said.
2. Illocutionary act: it’s the typology of speech: for example a request, an order…?
3. Perlocutionary act: the result, the effect we want to convey to the speaker.

For example in the sentence: “Is there any salt?”

1. Locutionary act: the speech itself, so the question we are performing.
2. Illocutionary act: it’s the typology of speech, a request.
3. Perlocutionary act: the result, we want that the hearer will pass us the salt.

Austin theorized also performative hypothesis: for him behind every utterance there’s a performative verb (to order, ask, promise). Later he abandoned this theory because we don’t always use a performative verb to get a perlocutionary effect.

It’s better to talk about implicit performatives: they are more common and natural in spoken language. The only problem is that they can lead to ambiguity in understanding the meaning of the intentions that are not always clear.

Ex.: “I’ll study English”: what is the function? Promise? Threat? The meaning of the intention is not clear!

To avoid misunderstandings:

Searle theorized the 5 macro-classes:

• Declarations: (whenever we can have the power to change a situation: “I declare.”
• Representatives: state what the speaker believes to be that case, “to claim, to insist.”
• Commissives: commit the speaker to future actions: “to promise,” “to offer.”
• Directives: make the hearer do something “ordering, repeating.”
• Expressives: used to express the speaker’s feelings: “apologizing.”

Felicity condition

In order to be successful in speaking, we need to follow some specific rules called felicity condition. Austin and Searle have two different opinions:

• Austin: For Austin, felicity conditions are satisfied if the context and roles are recognized by all the participants; they are also based on good intentions.
• Searle: For Searle instead, felicity conditions are satisfied if the hearer understands the language and the speaker doesn’t play or pretend. In that case, there would be 2 typologies of ACTS:
  • Direct speech acts: communicate the literal meaning of what we are saying.
  • Indirect speech acts: communicate a double meaning: for example “come and see me!” (double function – not only a request, but also maybe I like you and want to ask you out).

Lezione 8

Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson): Sperber and Wilson theorized about the way to be cooperative and relevant during a conversation. What do we mean with the term relevance?

It’s not only a matter of decoding a structure, but there are further aspects to deal with, such as the intention, the attitude, the code, the context. The relevancy is primary in communication and is based on two main processes:

1. Contextual effects: in which we can add or weaken information to be relevant.
2. Processing effort: the less is the effort, the more is the relevance. We need to be clear and direct, we don’t have to ask for further effort to understand what we want to say.

Ok: “I can see a tiger in the garden.”

No: “When I look outside, I…”

What is an explicature?

Explicature: is whenever we speak explicitly and we send a direct message, without intending anything behind it. Due to the context that is shared, the interlocutors can provide new info by filling in the missing words into the communications. (So it is possible because the hearer knows the environment.)

Limitations!

• It depends on the indeterminacy of the language.
• It doesn’t take into account social and cultural dimensions such as culture, gender, age, etc.

Lezione 10

Backchannels and feedback: When we talk about backchannels and feedbacks like: “you know,” “oh, really?”: we are going to let the conversation open, we encourage the speaker to continue talking, so that they have a social function.

What are the Brown and Yule’s macro functions of talk?

Macro-functions of talk (Brown and Yule):

• Transactional: is the best of those two macro-functions; it is performed whenever the language expresses content and info (giving information – for example a policeman providing information in the street).
• Interactional: it’s not only linked to the language, but also to the aspects of the language that are not literally conveyed, it expresses social relationship and personal attitudes (solidarity among the interlocutors) => here is fulfilled the pathic form: when we are not adding info in a communication but we are leaving the communication open: “it’s so noisy” in a crowded place.

Analyzing a discourse (Sinclair and Coulthard)

We can analyze a discourse through 2 main approaches:

• Exchange structure: is based on the patterns when someone speaks.
• Conversational analysis: how the words influence the speakers.

Exchange structure

Sinclair and Coulthard theorized that some conversations follow a rigid scheme with pre-established steps that are also called ranks: Let's analyze for example “a lesson.”

We can subdivide it in 5 ranks:

1. First level: is that of the acts and tends to lead to the second step.
2. Second level: it’s called IRF, it’s an acronym that stands for:
   • Iniziation: of the lesson from the teacher.
   • Response: from the students.
   • Follow-up: teacher’s comments on the student’s answer.
3. Third level: exchange: combination of the moves in IRF.
4. Fourth level: transaction: exchange then combines into.
5. Fifth level: lesson: the combinations of transactions.

Conversational analysis

Second level: conversational analysis:

First, we have to focus on the term conversation: When is talk a conversation?

Cook theorized that a talk is considered a conversation when:

• There’s no need for practical tasks.
• No unequal power among parts.
• Small audience.
• Short turns.
• Not addressed to outside audience.

It needs a turn-taking. It’s the point when a change is possible, it’s the moment when a participant has the right to contribute and speak. The specific moment in which we can change the turn is called TRP (transition relevance place) whenever it’s not respected we have an interruption. That is for example the case of overlapping, whenever a question is predicted. (Are we going to have a pizza tonight? We know strongly that in the previous shared context we talked about pizza).

A conversation actually can be divided into 3 steps:

• Pre sequences: prepare the ground for the future sequence.
• Insertion sequences: it holds the primary info.
• Opening/closing structures: for example greetings/farewell.

Adjacency pairs

When for example we have a specific typology of conversation where there is a specific response by another speaker (for example question-answer). It is composed of two main parts, called pairs:

1. First is the creation of the expectation.
2. The answer itself (that could be):
   • If positive: preferred response.
   • If negative: dispreferred response.

Interactional sociolinguistics

Emphasizes not only the language but all the social aspects of the social life that interact with the language.

Gumperz: recognizes that there are some relations between context and language determined by:

Contextualization cues = They are linguistic features emphasizing the relevant aspects of the context (e.g., intonation, accent, body language) everything that we can perceive from the social life, the culture, the communication, but not the language itself.

Lezione 12

Cooperative principle and the 4 maxims (Grice)

Grice says that when we communicate we cooperate. So a conversation is successful when some social rules are respected (he calls them maxims and not rules because they are more often broken than grammatical or phonetic rules).

1. Quantity: provide enough info (not more, not less).
2. Quality: always say the truth, or what you believe to be true.
3. Relation: we need to be relevant.
4. Manner: brief, clear and ordered (not ambiguous, direct to the point).

All maxims can cooperate during a conversation. When we are talking into a conversation, we can flout or violate the maxims.

Flouting the maxims

When we flout the maxims we produce an implicature, so a second meaning, a message that the speaker addresses to the hearer, hoping that he will understand it.

We can flout maxims using:

• Rhetoric figures
• Sarcasm
• Irony
• Banter

Rhetoric figures: like hyperbole or metaphor, are used to modify the sense.