Actions That Aren't: features of speech events in textual conversation
By Julia Orth for Prof. Vesperi,
Language, Culture, and Society 18 April 2000
Historically, written language was thought to represent spoken
language, to in fact be close enough to a frozen form of a language as to
provide most of the information used for the study of language. More
recent thought has contested this idea heartily, and with good reason. As
can easily be determined with an audio recorder, written language does not
directly represent spoken language, and indeed, the two forms are
structured quite differently due to their different natures and purposes.
Speech is something common to all human societies, whereas writing is
possessed by only some. Speech is learnt first and used most often and in
everyday interactions, and it almost always occurs in a context rich with
paralinguistic/kinesic information--information that is provided through
such means as stress, intonation, physical movement, cultural gestures,
and emotional expressions (Salzmann, 1998, pp 234 - 236). The instant
feedback in speech situations, the fact that the addresser hears the
speech as it's produced and sees the reactions of the addressee at the
same time, makes dialogue possible. Because of its immediate, transient
nature and frequent, necessary use, speech changes across space and time
more quickly than does writing. Since one of the purposes of writing is
in fact to overcome the transient quality of speech and cross distances of
space and time, it tends to be standardized and conservative, and to
represent only one dialect of a language. Since written language is
presented without the wealth of contextual information present in speech,
it also tends to be carefully structured so as not to be ambiguous (Milroy
& Milroy, 1991; Duranti, 1997, pp 125.)
This paper proposes that there is a new form of writing, which
might be characterized as written conversation that possesses some social
features confined in other cases to speech. A particular focus of this
paper is on the direct reference to and use of some paralinguistic
features such as actions and expressions in this written conversation.
English, particularly Standard American English, is the language I am
considering in this discussion, and great caution must be exercised in
generalizing these thoughts to other languages.
"Written conversation" may seem to be oxymoronic, but I contend
that it is an accurate description of on-line written communication in
real time, which I will refer to here as "chatting." Chatting takes place
on computer networks when two people can send text or chunks of text to
the other's screen, at which it arrives almost immediately, and the other
participant is present to reply. Chatting is a special subset of
writing. I say that it is a "subset" of writing because most of the
salient features of written language, as opposed to spoken language,
apply. Like other writing, chatting makes use of a standardized form of
the language in question (though there is more variation in spelling,
grammar, and punctuation than in formal writing, this is largely not
systematic or regular in the sense that dialects and accents are),
permanent, and lacking natural paralinguistic/kinesic features. At the
same time, chatting also has important features that set it apart from
formal writing. The primary difference is that while most other writing
(as poetry, books, letters, speeches, papers, presentations, &c.) is
necessarily a solitary activity, with the writer seperated from the
audience by time and space alike, on-line chatting is necessarily a
shared activity. It is by definition communication that takes place in
"real time" (meaning that when a message is sent, it arrives almost
instantly) and it is not an activity that one can engage in without
partners. It is, therefore, a social language act, in a way that most
speech events are and most written works are not. Jakobson represents
speech events as consisting of six factors, the addresser, addressee,
context, message, contact, and code. He continues to describe six
corresponding functions of language, emotive, conative, referential,
poetic, phatic, and metalingual. The referential function, which
describes something, the poetic function, which focuses on the form of the
message, and the metalingual function, which allows language to be used in
reference to itself, are all possible in normal writing. What is of
interest here are the emotive function, which expresses information about
the addresser's feelings and attitude, the conative function, which
signals a message specifically directed at the addressee (as vocatives,
imperatives), and the phatic function, which is meant to establish,
prolong, or discontinue communication, as greetings, farewells, and "idle
talk." (Duranti 1997, pp 284 - 286) These three functions are not
usually appropriate in written language, but it seems that all three have
their places in chatting. This is exemplified very clearly by the use, in
chatting, of lexical items that serve these particular functions.
Greetings are lexical items of this sort, serving, among other
things, a phatic function. In the interest of clarity, I will define my
own approximation of this usage of the English "hello" using Weirzbicka's
"natural semantic metalanguage," (Weirzbicka) a set of words representing
proposed universal basic elements used to describe the social/semantic
values of specific speech acts and language constructions:
Hello =
I know you are here
I want you to know that I am here
I want you to know that I know you are here.
Because we know these things, we can say things to one another (if we want)
It is good for people to know these things.
Clearly "hello" with this meaning, and other phatic signals, have
no place in most writing. Since writing is utilized for communicating
across time, in those circumstances "hello" cannot be an acknowledgement
of the fact that one shares environment with someone else that could
potentially permit further interaction. There is no interaction to begin
with, since the addresser and addressee are not sharing the communicative
event in the same temporal space. I posit that when "hello" is used to
open notes or letters, it has only a fraction of the meaning it has when
it is used as a speech event. It serves to express pleasantness or
politeness, to mark the beginning of a piece of writing, or out of the
habits of spoken language. In chatting language, however, "hello"
possesses something very much akin to its full speech meaning. When an
individual logs into a chat room s/he is given greetings such as "hello"
as a way of showing that others in the same "space" or channel of
communication are aware of his/her presense and their capacity to engage
in social interaction with one another. In some ways this phatic signal
serves an even more important function on-line, because unlike in real
life, when chatting one can never tell if a person is actually present
on-line unless one is receiving information from him or her. This fact
makes the 'active listening' components of chatting, which can serve both
emotive and phatic functions, particularly important as well. During
speech acts, signals like nodding, expressing attention or agreement
("Yes", "Right", "Oh!", "uh-huh", "Awww...", &c.) all serve to signify
that the addressee is attending to what the addresser has to say, and
often also to express the addressee's attitudes or feelings towards that
subject. The same holds true on-line, with the added importance of the
fact that it is the only way the addresser can be sure that an audience
exists at all. (This urgency is countered to a degree by the fact that
the written words of chatting continues to exist after they are produced,
unlike the spoken word.) This too is obviously dependent on the
more-or-less real-time nature of speech acts. Here is an example of
active-listening emotive/phatic signals such as "hrm," and "ack," given by
the addressee ("Platypus") during a short narrative. Note that while the
times between segments of text are longer than would be necessary in
speech, an interactive conversation is still taking place, and timing
still provides information concerning the conversational event.
[00:16] <Eclipse> Anyway, as you probably know Lucas and I were going to
meet our friends Stephen and Mary from Santa Rosa for dinner today..
[00:17] <Eclipse> Well, this afternoon I got a call from Mary..
[00:18] <Eclipse> Saying that they were still in California.
[00:18] <Platypus> hmm.. heh, I didn't know, but go on..
[00:18] <Eclipse> Apparently a truck carrying nuclear waste was in an
accident on the major road to the airport..
[00:18] <Eclipse> They had to shut the whole thing down, and Stephen and
Mary couldn't get to the airport for their flight..
[00:18] <Platypus> ack.. :/
[00:19] <Eclipse> They called in an explained, and were put on stand-by
for every flight this evening.. I haven't heard from them since..
[00:19] <Platypus> hrm..
[00:20] <Eclipse> Heh, if you're on the web and you're bored, see if you
can find anything about a truck carrying nuclear waste having an accident
somewhere vaguely near Santa Rosa, CA..
[00:23] <Platypus> k.. hmm.. I think Santa Rosa is somewhere near where
Tia is...
(personal archives, 1999. Used with permission.)
Chatting language, like all written language, lacks the
paralinguistic and kinesic features that characterize spoken
communication, and help to fulfill emotive and conative functions. These
include intonation, volume, and stress in speech itself, as well as
physical demeanor and actions, facial expressions (smiles, laughs,
grimaces), and cultural gestures (shrugging, waving, nodding). Much work
has done on the significance of these signals to communication. Signals
such as these are in fact so valuable to communication that they have been
"transposed" after a fashion for use in chatting.
The most common social signals utilized in chatting are known as
"smiley faces", and look something like this: :-) ;-) The first is an
indication of friendliness, happiness, or pleasantness, and the second (a
"winking" smiley face) a sign that one is teasing or flirting. These
signals often seem to function, in a very limited degree, the way that
one's tone of voice functions in speech. B's response in an interactions
such as:
A: Oh no, I just spilled cola all over my desk!
B: That was dumb.
Could easily be interpreted as serious and mean spirited, depending on the
context, where as an interaction such as:
A: Oh no, I just spilled cola all over my desk!
B: That was dumb. ;-)
It is clear that B is only teasing, if perhaps not appropriately, and
means no harm. (That is, it nearly as clear as were the conversation to
be taking place in real life, and B using a tone of voice/facial
expression clearly associated with teasing; both cases potentially allow
for misinformation.)
Perhaps more interestingly, "actions" (also known as "poses" or
"emotes") are ubiquitous in chatting. This author has yet to participate
in a medium for chatting or a group of chatters that do not employ some
standard for conveying emotions and attitudes (emotive functions) by means
of reference to physical kinesic signals. Some examples of common actions
are emotional expressions, such as <smile>, <laugh>, and <blush>, and
socially defined signals such as <shrug>, <nod>, and <wave>.
These are always set off from other discussion in some way,
sometimes by enclosure in brokets, as <grin>, or asterisks, as *giggle.*
Longer descriptions of actions almost always employ the third person, as
*sits on the couch and fidgets,* and shorter ones are sometimes marked
this way as well: <grins>, <waves>. This is likely because a third-person
description is closest to how the addressee would think of real-world
kinesic information. The third person may also be another way of setting
actions off from discussion. Many chat clients (programs that allow
chatting to take place). have special commands which both set off actions
and put them in the appropriate third person context. (i.e. the command
"/me" in IRC; and ":" in TinyMUCK).
It would appear that speech events and chatting share some
significant features. Due to their different natures, however, there are
slight differences in how these features are employed and what they mean,
and this could provide worthwhile information regarding both events.
The use of emotive actions in particular is a unique feature of
chatting. Expressions and social actions in real life are not always
under conscious control, such as blushing, crying, and shivering, and even
to some extent laughing, smiling, and tone of voice. In chatting, all
such social signals are not only voluntary, but explicitly voluntary,
despite being set off from the body of the conversation. While a
participant in spoken conversation may find it believable that a burst of
laughter or deep blush was an unintended reflex, perhaps even an exposure
of the individual's raw emotions, s/he can harbor no such illusions about
the nature of those signals which his/her conversational partner chooses
to display in chatting. This is especially intriguing when the actions in
question are indeed ones that would not normally be under conscious
control. The speaker may be accurately reporting reflexive responses in
real life, though s/he could clearly choose not to, or s/he may simply be
trying to express a lesser degree of the emotions usually symbolized by
those reactions (embarassment/coyness, sadness, fear/excitement, surprise,
&c.). Either way, the producer knows what s/he is choosing to express,
the receiver knows that s/he knows this, and s/he knows that the receiver
knows.
This feature makes chatting a potentially useful venue for
examining attitudes towards particular expressions/actions, once some kind
of relationship between actions in chats and their counterparts in the
"real world" is experimentally determined. Questions such work might
address are: when do people choose to utilize actions in chats? Is this
related to when they express the related actions in face-to-face
interactions? How often are actions reported on-line being physically
expressed by the person at the keyboard? If reported actions and physical
actions contradict, could this be a way of seperating more voluntary
actions from less voluntary actions, or determining what is thought to be
socially desirable in given circumstances? In a broader sense, now that
it is clear that speech events and chatting are in some ways comparable,
their relationship deserves to be addressed in more detail. What does
chatting allow that speech events do not? What do speech events permit
that chatting does not? By considering both situations, it is hoped that
more can be learned about each.
References:
Duranti, Allessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Milroy, James and Lesley Milroy. 1991. Spoken and Written Norms. From
Authority in Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Salzmann, Zdenek. 1997. Language, Culture and Society. Boulder, CO:
Westview.
Weirzbicka, Anna. 1992. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
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