Dr. Leon James
(c) 1974
Table of Contents
Empirical Study
Conversations with Rex
Discovering Reality
Consensual Validation
Discovering Nature
Underlying Structure
A comprehensive study of human language must include a serious attempt to specify the
relationship between what a speaker knows and what he can say. At a sufficiently abstract
level of generality, the notion "what a speaker knows" includes that which a
speaker says and can say as well as various other things, but it will be useful, for our
present purposes, to consider the concept of "knowledge" at a less general
level, even though we may not succeed in giving it a sufficiently precise definition so as
to clearly exclude "what a person can say" from "what a person knows."
This, however, is not crucial to our present intent, which is to show how a person's
conception of reality is built upon and develops from the everyday conversational
interactions in which he participates.l
It is not our intention to minimize the importance of physical manipulation of the
environment and nondiscourse thinking2 as factors that contribute to a person's
acquisition of knowledge and discovery of reality. In fact, we have no idea what the
relative contribution is between these various factors, or even that they can be separated
observationally, but it appears evident to us that a significant proportion of that which
is ordinarily ascribed to what a person knows is acquired via the intermediary of verbal
interaction with others. 3 Formal education, as practiced in technological societies, is
almost exclusively transmitted through the medium of verbal interaction, and the social
and physical reality of the preschool child is similarly based on the category systems and
methods of inferencing that govern linguistic and discourse structure as used in the home.
It is possible to adopt a strictly behavioristic approach to this problem by defining a
person's conception of reality as the sum total of all the verbal interactions in the life
history of a speaker. But we cannot reconcile ourselves to such a narrow approach inasmuch
as we can find no theoretical justification for distinguishing between "what a person
says" (or "understands") and "what a person can say" (or
"can understand "). A nontrivial account of speaking and understanding will
include processes of semantic analysis that will permit application to an indefinitely
large number of verbal interactions, only some of which will have actually occurred in the
history of any one speaker. We are convinced that a significant part of what a person
evidences that he knows cannot be traced to actual verbal interactions that are
observationally identifiable, partly on account of the fact that deep structure semantic
relations and discourse rules are never verbalized overtly, and partly because some
knowledge is self-generated in discourse thinking.
We are, furthermore, not concerned here with the "truth value" of what a person
knows. Thus, a speaker can evidence that he knows x by uttering y and it matters not
whether y is a true or false statement, a belief, a hypothesis, an illusion based on
fantasy, or whatever. What a person can say is some function of what he knows, and this in
turn will define a significant portion of that person's reality. Since what a person knows
evidently varies from moment to moment, it is proper to say that a person's reality also
varies accordingly. An individual may read a few pages of a book or listen to a speech and
have thereby his reality changed. Similarly, he may have a dream, a "vision" or
some nonparticipatory transcendental experience, and his reality may change in significant
ways.
Our specific purpose in what follows is to show how the reality of a
two-and-a-half-year-old boy, Rex, changes as a function of the nature of the verbal
interactions he is exposed to. In its broad terms of reference, this is a study of the
socialization process. The reality to which Rex is exposed in his home is the reality of
his mother and father who are the principal participants in his verbal interactions. In
important ways, the reality of Rex's parents is related to a standard, which is definable
in reference to an ethnography of the subculture they belong to. Thus, whether Rex's
reality will include a God that manipulates his environment, whether he assigns some of
the events he sees on T.V. to "real things" versus "fantasy things,"
or whether his self-concept is diminished as a result of defecating in his pants, or
whatever, will be traceable to what he is told about these things by his parents, and what
he is told will depend on what his parents' reality is, which in turn will depend on their
subcultural standards and their own previous socialization process.
There are numerous ways in which the socialization process can be seen to direct the
etiology of a person's conception of reality. The pattern of interaction with others
affects an infant's conception of the role of people in the world: who they are, what
their rights and privileges are, what they do, what they consider proper and for which
they are rewarded positively and what they consider improper and for which they are
rewarded negatively, and so on. The home environment serves as a selective mechanism of
exposure to specific things: what foods are eaten, what objects are present, which ones
are "playable with," and which ones must be seen without being touched, their
functional use, their break down and replacement histories, and for obscuring, ignoring,
forgetting, dismissing, distorting purposefully, and so on. In all of this, verbal
interaction plays a crucial role: what aspects of the physical and social world are
selected for focus of attention, for topicality in conversational interaction, for
interpretation, evaluation, analysis, elaboration, explanation, justification. The quality
of the social adjustment of a child is reflected in the nature of the verbal interactions
in which he participates. Does he whine and cry a lot? Does he know how to ask for what he
wants? Do the parents have to scream, lecture, warn, threaten? Do they typically explain,
justify, elaborate, evaluate, scold, express feelings, and do they place similar
requirements upon the child? Who is Santa Claus? Why do we celebrate birthdays? Why is it
bad to lie? Why must we brush our teeth every day? What's going to happen if I stick my
fingers in the wall plug? Can Baby Joy die, and do cars eat? And on and on to a limitless
number of verbal interactions that reflect the underlying structure of our everyday
reality. As the child grows and matures„becomes socialized, the structure of his reality
changes, and this is reflected by a change in the nature of his verbal interactions: the
things he says, the questions he asks, the explanations he gives, the feelings he
expresses, the reasons he accepts, change in direct measure to the changing picture of his
reality. At first his world is populated with people, monsters, fairies, fantasy
characters. Gradually, he begins to show-in his verbal interactions-the effects of the
verbal socialization process: he comes to make distinctions between Yes and No, a lot and
a little, real things and pretend things, what's alive and what isn't, I want to and you
want to, and learns to use appropriately such expressions as I need, have to, must,
because, which one, why, if. . . then, which reflect the particular processes of logical
implication and inference making that are proper to the reality of the parental
subculture. By the time the child reaches his third birthday he has acquired a significant
proportion of the adult reality and evidences the rules of ordinary consensus in his
conversational interactions.
Conversations with a two-and-a-half-year old
In what follows, I shall present samples of conversational interactions with my son
Rex at a time just prior to his third birthday, specifically during his 34th month
of life. In general, Rex's motor and language development appear to have followed the
typical pattern described by Lenneberg (1957, Table 4.1), although his motor development
was somewhat slower and his language development somewhat faster than those norms would
indicate. All conversational interactions presented here are based on verbatim records
written down as they occurred or a few seconds after they occurred. We made no effort to
be either comprehensive or representative, but simply wrote down interactions whenever it
was convenient to do so, or whenever a particular interaction appeared at the time to be
noteworthy for a number of reasons that are not particularly relevant for our present
purposes. Although we have no documented evidence to support this claim, it is our strong
impression, corroborated by his mother's judgment, that these recorded interactions were
"typical" of Rex's utterances at this stage of development.
A cursory inspection of these verbal interactions (see Appendix)
reveals the general character of Rex's conversational rules at this stage of his
development. one of the most striking aspects of these records is that, with virtually no
exceptions, Rex's verbal interactions are one-topic conversations. This is not an artifact
of the method of record keeping. At this stage, Rex shows no evidence of engaging in
multiple-topic conversations typical of adults. If the verbal interaction is initiated by
the adult, the child might participate in the ordinary fashion, but without making any
attempt to pursue the interaction beyond the specific topic raised by the initiator, and
will typically allow the interaction to lapse into silence unless the adult once again
chooses to initiate a topic switch. The same holds true for interactions initiated by the
child himself. One possibility occurs to us to account for this pattern. It may be that,
at this stage, the child has not acquired any adult rules relating to topic switches in
conversational interaction and thus allows the verbal interaction to lapse into silence.
Adult conversational interaction - under ordinary conditions contains a prohibition rule
against silence, and various devices are typically used to move from one topic of
discourse to the next (e.g., Incidentally . . .; By the way . . .; This reminds me of . .
.; So, what else have you been doing?...; And how is.. ., or And how are you . . .; I hear
that . . .; Did you read about . . .; etc., etc.). There isn't a single occurrence of
these topic switch devices in Rex's speech at this stage of his development.
The lack of topic switch rules either contributes to or is merely correlative with a
number of other features of Rex's conversations that contrast with adult conversations.
The sample interactions being considered here are dramatically single-minded and
purposeful. There is no "beating around the bush," small talk, innuendo, or
indirect expression of intent. These interactions are in a direct representa- tional
style, and Rex pursues his conversational intent with a striking bluntness that can appear
to the adult embarrassing, if not sanguine, in its directness and unpretentious
simplicity.
This directness also expresses itself in a total literalness in meaning that Rex attaches
to utterances. One way in which this manifests itself is his extreme susceptibility to
teasing. He will instantaneously switch from a happy, playful mood to crying when told he
must do something he does not wish to do or when contradicted in a statement, even though
the adult's intent was one of playful teasing. Conversely, he will switch from crying to
demonstrative jubilation at the mere intervention of a verbal assent. His reality at this
stage is determined as much by verbal fiats as it is by nonverbal contingencies in the
environment. The promise of a cookie to be had later seems to be as effective a reinforcer
for Rex as the actual receiving of it, and a verbal prohibition or threat has comparable
effects to a physical intervention. He shows similar effects of fright when his father
verbally play-acts a "monster," and when he puts on facial and bodily
contortions in imitation of one. If it is true for the older child or adult that words
have a magical power, for the two-and-a-half-year-old they assume truly awesome power.
Singlemindedness, directness, and literalness are further notable in an absolute
egocentricity of participant interaction. Rex will interject himself in a conversation
without any preliminaries whether or not he is a prior participant and whether or not he
retains the ongoing topic of conversation. He has no rules against interruptions and acts
as if he expects a response merely as a result of his making an utterance. He does not
use, at this stage, any verbal attention-getting device but simply proceeds with his
utterance.4 If no response is forthcoming, he will merely repeat his utterance and proceed
to do so a number of times until he gets a response or is otherwise distracted.
Conversely, when an adult addresses an utterance to him, and he is not inclined to respond
(for whatever reason), he will simply ignore it without showing any inclination to explain
his silence. He also exhibits strong resistance to talking in the dark insisting that he
must see the interlocutor, and he will similarly insist on face-to-face visual contact
whenever possible. We noticed that when the latter is not possible (as in telephone
conversations or talking loudly from another room), his comprehension shows considerable
attenuation in a way that cannot be attributed to a mere hearing problem.
The absence of metalinguistic attention-getting devices and the lack of topic switch
rules, coupled with an absolute egocentricity and literalness are thus some primary
factors that contribute to the striking character of Rex's conversational interactions
shortly before his third birthday of life. Yet despite these structural differences
between his and an adult's pattern of interaction, it is evident that even this
intermediary form of competence has sufficient power to enable Rex to discover the reality
of his subculture: the intricacies of the social order around him, the nature of
consensual validation, the appropriateness of justification, the semantic order and the
culturally sanctioned conceptual syntax. It appears clear to us, and we hope we can make a
convincing case for it in what follows, that the syntax of Rex's conversational competence
at this early stage already approaches the awesome power of the full-fledged adult model
despite the fact that his capacity for logical inferencing and the intricacies of his
taxonomic semantic system are woefully inadequate when compared to the adult model.
Sapir's analogy (quoted in Bruner, 1967) again comes to mind: "It is somewhat as
though a dynamo capable of generating enough power to run an elevator were operated almost
exclusively to feed an electric doorbell." But the waste implied by this analogy does
not seem appropriate, for is it not the very power of this structural generator that
affords the occasion for the acquisition in socialization of a conceptual structure as
intricate as ordinary knowledge? A more efficient coupling between discourse syntax and
conceptual thinking may not be able to achieve the same results. The acquisition of
language does not seem to be a feat at all, not for the individual, even though it may be
for the race, no more so than seeing, or hearing, or walking: the presently evolved
structure of the brain makes it as inevitable and unproblematic as imprinting is for the
greylag goose. If there is a feat at all, it is surely the use of this human capacity to
discover the fortuitous peculiarities of the socially validated reality of the particular
group of humans the child happens to be raised in.
There are many examples we can present to evidence the specific deficiencies in Rex's
conversational interaction. He will repeat an utterance over and over again until
acknowledged by the adult, rather than make a prior attempt to obtain the adult's
attention. He apparently does not consider it criterial what the addressee is doing before
addressing him (viz., whether he is available for conversation) and will proceed in a
uniform manner whether the other person is engaged in play with him, is engaged in a
separate conversation with a third party, or even is talking on the telephone. He will
interject himself in a conversation in total disregard of his prior nonparticipation. He
will merely disregard any utterance he does not understand rather than demand
clarification. He might even start an utterance in the absence of the addressee as in the
following recorded instance.
Father:
Go tell Mommy to bring me an ashtray.
Rex:
O.K. Mommy, bring an ashtray for Daddy.
Walking out of the kitchen. He kept repeating his
utterance while on his way to find his mother and repeated it in her presence.
Discovering Reality Through Questions
An analysis of the range of questions he typically asks at this stage gives an indication
of the strategies he uses in discovering the consensual validation process of his parents'
ordinary reality. Here is a near complete list of types as they occur in our records.
| List | Continued |
Undoubtedly, a detailed linguistic analysis of Rex's questions would present a more
coherent syntactic picture, but our purpose here is merely to illustrate the power of the
conversational devices he controls for obtaining information about the socially given
order in his environment. To do this systematically, it would be necessary to develop
analytical techniques pertaining to discourse rules, which are not, at the moment,
available to us. Inspection of the verbal interactions presented in the appendices do,
nevertheless, reveal a number of elementary strategies Rex uses for obtaining information
about certain aspects of the socially conceived order. In examples (8), (12), and (17) in see Appendix.
Rex poses questions that are satisfied by a neutral Yes/No answer, while in (10)
and (30) it is clear that he has a hypothesis about the answer but wants confirmation for
it. If he has sufficient information about a topic or understanding of the issue, he will
ask a highly specific clarification, as in (16b), otherwise he will use a shotgun inquiry
technique that is too general, intrinsically, but still succeeds because of the adult's
willingness to guess what his specific problem is, as in (16a), (23) and ~J;). Note,
however, that the latter technique is nonfunctional when the adult is uncooperative, as in
(32), and presumably, when he makes a wrong guess about the child's particular interest,
as appears to be the case in examples (20a) and (40a). Further evidence of the nature of
Rex's discovery techniques will be found in the other interactions recorded in the Appendix.
More specifically, example ( 14) in which he sets up a two-step problem for the listener
in order to inquire about the latter's motivation for helping him in a task, example (15)
in which he tests out the adult's reaction to a potentially improper action, example (13)
in which he ingeniously sets up the frame for the adult's answer by analogic thinking, and
example (18) in which he invents a counting game whose rationale resembles an
instructional program. Example (11) shows that he can frame a request using an utterance
that appears to be a neutral question, which is a stylistic variant of a direct request
(cf., 22a).
Areas of Consensual Validation
The other examples in Appendix I are presented to illustrate the manner in which
conversational interactions with an adult can serve to transmit consensual validation
about the social and physical order of the environment. The following conceptual areas are
evidenced: (a) the nature of logical implication in conversational interaction dealing, in
these examples, with functional use (1), counting (18), private events not directly
accessible to the other (21), (37a, b), and availability for participatory interaction
(39b, c; (b) the definitional range of concepts (2), (5), (18), (22b), (25), (27), (29),
(35b), conversational situations (7), verbal (3), (4), (6) and nonverbal rituals (35a);
(c) accessibility of the other to verbal control (34a), (35a);(d) psychological
implication about interpersonal intention (9), (24); (e) verbal interaction as an
expression of phatic communion (19), (34b), (37); and (f) reporting events (28). In
addition note the child's behavior in practicing reporting (26) and description, the
latter via a verbal monologue in the presence of an adult (38).
Discovering the Nature of Social justification
Through Conversational Interaction
In Appendix II, we present 59 verbal interactions all of which contain a Why-question
followed by a because statement. At the time these records were collected (viz., during
the 34th month of Rex's life) a substantial proportion (possibly up to 50%) of the
father's verbal interactions with Rex consisted of short, one-topic conversations
revolving around the socially acceptable justification for verbal and nonverbal events. It
is clear that this was an active period for the development of consensual validation for
justifying socially relevant phenomena. Inspection of these conversational interactions
reveals the wide range of events that are salient to a three-year-old child and the manner
in which the socially sanctioned order can be transmitted through conversational
interactions. In Table 1, we have attempted to summarize the
topics of these interactions about ordinary justification by classifying them into ten
types or conceptual areas about the socially relevant order as viewed from the adult's
perspective. The numbers in the Table refer to the sequenced order of conversations as
presented in Appendix II. The sequence approximates the order of their recording or
occurrence in time. It can be seen that, by this stage of development, the child is
capable of initiating because statements in every category used by the adult.
The general character of conversational interactions with an almost-three-year-old, as
typified by the examples presented in Appendix II, differs in some crucial respects from
adult conversational interactions. Perhaps the most salient differentiating feature about
the data under consideration relates to the explicitness of social justification. Adult
conversational interaction is highly elliptical in the sense that inferential processes
that must form part of the interaction for it to be meaningful are never concretized in
the observable data that form the phonetic shape of the utterances. An example, cited by
Garfinkel (1967, pp. 25-26) will serve to illustrate our point. The following is an
interaction that took place between a couple:
Husband: Dana succeeded in putting a penny in a parking meter today without being picked
up.
Wife: Did you take him to the record store?
Husband: No, to the shoe repair shop.
Wife: What for?
Husband: I got some new shoe laces for my shoes.
Wife: Your loafers need new heels badly.
The elliptical nature of this interaction, typical of everyday ordinary conversations,
renders it partly meaningful and partly meaningless to the uninvolved observer. It is
obvious that the participants do not find it necessary to refer, in their overt
verbalizations, to much information that they share in common as well as to the logical
inferential steps that we must posit if we assume, as would be normal, that what each says
is meaningful to the other. If we were to attempt to restore the full conversation by
verbalizing overtly that which typically remains unexpressed, we might come up with the
kind of awkward and atypical conversation suggested by one of Garfinkel's students. To
wit:
Husband: This afternoon as I was bringing Dana, our four-year-old son, home from the
nursery school, he succeeded in reaching high enough to put a penny in a parking meter
when we parked in a meter zone, whereas before he had always had to be picked up to reach
that high.
Wife: Since he put a penny in a meter that means that you stopped while he was with you. I
know that you stopped at the record store either on the way to get him or on the way back.
Was it on the way back, so that he was with you, or did you stop there on the way to get
him and somewhere else on the way back?
Husband: No, I stopped at the record store on the way to get him and stopped at the shoe
repair shop on the way home when he was with me.
Wife: I know of one reason why you might have stopped at the shoe repair shop. Why did you
in fact?
Husband: As you will remember I broke a shoe lace on one of my brown oxfords the other day
so I stopped to get some new laces.
Wife: Something else you could have gotten that I was thinking of. You could have taken in
your black loafers which need heels badly. You'd better get them taken care of pretty
soon.
Garfinkel quite correctly points out that the elliptical nature of ordinary conversations
cannot be restored by attempting to fill in the missing details, no matter how elaborate
the restoration process is. Although it might be possible to render a conversation more
meaningful to a third party by elaborating on certain missing information, as was done in
this example, this gain is possible only because the third party is himself a
conversationalist and can interpret the elaborated version on the basis of his prior
knowledge of how to participate in conversations. Were this not the case, as for instance
if he were a stranger to the community or a not yet socialized child, it would be
impossible for him to understand the elaborated version of the conversation, so long as he
does not know the rules of ordinary talk: that people talk in order to say something, that
certain types of information (what kind?) can be assumed to be known by the listener
whereas other types (what kind?) must be supplied in the conversation, that the listener
shares with the speaker certain methods of inferencing and that he can be trusted to
follow those rules in the absence of their elaboration, that one can speak directly,
indirectly, metaphorically, seriously, jokingly, by double talk, etc., and that the
listener can be trusted to know which is the case in each instance, that the ongoing
conversation is but a member of a sequence of conversations that extends from the past to
the foreseeable future, and so on, and so on.
To render conversations comprehensible, therefore, it is necessary to deal with three
sorts of things: (a) shared information relevant to the topic of the conversation, (b)
common processes of inferencing in terms of what leads to what, and (c) knowledge about
the rules of ordinary talk. The data presented here are not particularly enlightening with
respect to the development of the competencies involved in each of these three areas. By
the time Rex engages in conversational interactions with adults, his competence already
includes the basic skills involved in talking ordinarily, even though there is evidence
that his actual competence is deficient in various specific ways relative to the adult. An
examination of these deficiencies may be instructive as to the developing nature of the
child's conversational competence, while at the same time, it may be suggestive of the
nature of the underlying structure of adult conversational ability.
The data in Appendix II are particularly useful for the present purposes because all the
verbal interactions therein contain a Why-question followed by a because statement
(sometimes not verbalized) supplied by the addressee. One of the most pervasive rules of
ordinary talk is that everything one says must have a point. Another way of saying this is
that a participant who produces an utterance thereby makes a claim that he is saying
something, rather than just making noises or talking for the sake of talking. The question
Why, therefore, does not ordinarily mean "Why are you saying that," but rather,
"Please justify what you are saying since your logic for saying that isn't clear to
me." Thus, the occurrence of Why in an ordinary conversation is evidence that there
has been a breakdown in the shared inferential processes between participants that are
ordinarily necessary for conversations to be successful. The verbal interactions in
Appendix II show the specific deficiencies in Rex's inferential processes in conversations
inasmuch as many of the occurrences of Why to be found there would not occur in ordinary
adult conversations. The data are additionally illuminating in that Rex will accept
particular justifications (because statements) as adequate explanations in places where an
adult would not„where an adult would ask for further clarification, and the reverse, such
that Rex would continue to ask for further justification after a place where an adult
would desist, both of these anomalies serving as evidence for a deficiency in the
structure of his conversational competence.
Let us start with verbal interchange number ( I) (Appendix II). In the first place, Rex's
opening question is anomalous, on the surface, if it is assumed, as we do on the basis of
the context (Pam is a live-in babysitter), that he does not mean "Is Pam going to eat
with us?" The father's straightforward answer in the affirmative demonstrates his
willingness to engage in a conversation with Rex under less than ordinary conditions, by
adult standards, for had his wife asked the same question, his answer no doubt would have
been something like "What do you mean?" Similarly, the justification he gives,
which Rex accepts as adequate, would be taken as facetious in an adult conversation with
the probable merited retort of "Aren't you funny!," at the very least.
Conversation (1), though not out of the ordinary for Rex, is an impossible interchange for
adults.5
The next few interchanges ((2)-(16), with the exception of (3) and (8)) do not seem to
depart unacceptably from adult standards, although some of these would have to be
interpreted, in adult terms, as game activity, a dimension which, however, would not
overlap totally with Rex's definition. For example, Rex's justification in (2), (I'm
making a hole cause I like a hole) was said in all seriousness as if he was providing his
father with relevant information he did not possess before asking the question. His
justifying statement in (7), (Let's put Baby Joy in there cause I like her), is
structurally more complex than (2), with which it has a surface similarity, since the
argument contains three steps:
I want her to be in there
1. because it's nice in there
2. and I want her to enjoy it
3. because l like her
The justification in (3) can be rendered meaningful if we're willing to make some
inferences such as "It's dangerous to go in the forest, but it's all right now
because there are no tigers or other dangerous animals in there at this time," but
such an inferential process falls outside the specified boundaries of the type of
inferences that are routinely called for in ordinary conversations by participants (unlike
the three-step argument in (7), which follows expected rules of conversational
inferencing). (8) is anomalous because, in the absence of a contextual indicator that
places an utterance in the "rhetorical" style, it is odd to ask a question about
the speaker's own motivation for doing something, and then proceed to specify that
intention.
In (13)-(15) Rex poses Why-questions that indicate abnormal departure from ordinary rules
of inference in conversations. In (13) it would be permissible to insist on immediate
attention despite the adult's present reluctance, that would be merely a case of a
conflict in wishes, but it is odd to ask a participant why his wishes should take
precedence over the speaker's in such matters of personal preference. The Why-question in
(15) is deviant in a different sense: it does not violate a conversational rule if it is
assumed that Rex does not know that to playfully "throw pipi on the floor" is to
be silly. This occurrence of Why can thus be interpreted as ignorance of certain
commonplace rules of social propriety. On the other hand, in (18), it is odd to question
the motivation of the other to be helpful in the absence of a prior existing reason for
doubting either the propriety or sincerity of the other in wanting to be helpful.
In all of the subsequent interactions recorded in Appendix II, there do not appear to be
any further major violations of the rules of ordinary conversational interactions. The
oddity of some of the exchanges can be accounted for in other terms: the child's
inadequate knowledge of interpersonal motivation and the socially sanctioned conception of
the physical world, or in a few cases, to his clearly playful activity.
The Underlying Structure of Conversations
These analyses of the oddity of some of Rex's verbal interactions are suggestive of the
kind of structural rules that must be posited to account for the successful accomplishment
of participants in conversational interactions, the underlying rules of ordinary talk. The
following exchange, which occurred three months after the time the earlier data were
recorded, will serve as a departing point for our discussion on an initial formulation of
some aspects of the underlying structure of ordinary conversations.
R: What's that? (holding up an animal cookie he took out from its container)
F: I can't see. Turn it around.
R: (turns it, the front facing me)
F: It's an ostrich.
R: No, it's a camel.
F: It's an ostrich.
R: No because look! (points to pictures of animals on box, one of which was that of a
camel; subsequently I determined that there was no ostrich cookie or picture.)
Rex's "proof," No because look!, is an involved argument that contains in its
underlying structure, at least the following four steps:
1. Cookie animals in box correspond to pictures on box, and only the animals shown on the
box can be found in the box.
2. When cookie shape is ambiguous, you must match it with one of the pictures on the box.
3. Since there are no pictures of an ostrich, the cookie in question cannot be an ostrich.
4. The closest possible match between the cookie in question and one of the pictures is
with the camel. Therefore, it must be a camel.
It is not our intention here to propose a hypothesis about the specific content of the
mental operations that underlie Rex's statement No because look!, and no serious
significance should be attached to the particular wording of the four-stage
"proof" we have proposed. At this stage, we can offer nothing of importance as
to the psychological reality of the underlying structure of conversational interactions.
Nevertheless, it seems to us that hypothetical accounts of this type, when they succeed in
being descriptively adequate, may ultimately throw some light on the nature of real mental
operations that must form the basis of the observable data as given by records of actual
conversations. At the moment, we shall limit ourselves to an examination of the character
of the form of the underlying structure, leaving questions about content for subsequent
inquiries. In this example, our task is to account for three discourse elements, namely,
No, because, and look! In the following notation, the statement in parentheses refers to
the hypothetical underlying structure, and the arrow points to the overt verbalized
element that it generates:
(ia) (You said it's an ostrich, but it isn't)
|
|
V
No
(iia) (I am denying your assertion, and I justify my denial by the following)
|
|
V
because
(iiia) (If you looked here, you could see that there is no picture of an ostrich, while
there is a picture of a camel)
|
|
look!
If one compares this account with the four-stage "proof" given earlier, it can
be seen to be incomplete. In fact, the three hypothetical underlying statements in (ia) to
(iiia) do not constitute a "proof" in the formal logical sense in which the
"proof" was presented earlier. But now, let us present the underlying structure
of the hearer's interpretation of Rex's statement using an equivalent notation in reverse
order:
(ib)
|
|
V
No
(He is denying my assertion) |
|
V
because
(iib)
(He claims to be able to justify his denial of my assertion) |
|
V
look!
(iiib)
(He is pointing to the picture of a camel. His denial would be properly justified if it
were the case that the cookies in the box represent animals shown on the pictures, and
only those animals. Since there is a picture of a camel and no picture of an ostrich, and
the cookie in question looks more like a camel than any of the other pictures, it must
therefore be a camel, and thus his denial of my assertion is justified.)
The underlying structures in (ia) to (iiia) taken jointly with the underlying structures
in (ib) to (iiib), together constitute the equivalent of the four-stage formal
"proof." This indicates that the logical structure of justification in
conversations is a joint product of the interactional work of participants and is not a
function of the statement of any single participant. By extention, we would argue that the
formal structure of all conversational activities is a joint product of the interactional
work of participants.6 This outcome suggests that the analysis of the meaning of an
utterance cannot be appropriately pursued by a semantic analysis of sentences, or by an
analysis of a speaker's intention, or by an analysis of a hearer's interpretive
inferences„all three of which have been attempted in isolation in previous studies, but
must instead be pursued by an investigation of the joint cooccurrent interactional work of
conversational participants .
NOTES
1 I hope that when Rex grows up, he will not
think unkindly of his father for revealing to the public eye those most intimate
conversations with a Daddy who loves him so.
2 We are using "discourse thinking" in the sense of thought processes whose
structure has affinity with the discourse rules of ordinary conversational interaction.
Further elaboration will be given in the text that follows.
3 Under the notion of "verbal interaction" we mean to include all forms of
language use: face-to-face conversations, being a listener in an audience or small group,
reading and writing.
4 Although he may, at infrequent times, preface an utterance by "Daddy . . ., "
it is clear from paralinguistic features that it is not used as an attention getting
device. Instead, it appears to be a stylistic variant of the adult pattern in which the
address form occurs in the middle or at the end of an utterance.
5 Even if, by cleverly supplying a special context in which this verbal exchange could
plausibly take place between adults, its meaning within the context it took place with
Rex, would be altered. (We're willing to wager on it!)
6 The general thesis is that all conversational events are joint cooccurrent activities, a
thesis ably defended by Sacks (cf. his discussion on when an utterance is complete or not
complete in Chapter 3).
REFERENCES
Bruner, J. S. "The Ontogenesis of Symbols." In To HonorRoman Jakobson: Essays on
the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. The Hague: Mouton, 1967.
Garfinkel, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
Prentice-Hall,1968.
Lenneberg, E. H. Biological Foundations of Language. New York: John Wiley, 1967.
Sacks, Harvey. Aspects of the Sequential Organization of Conversation. (Forthcoming:
Prentice-Hall).
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