Ordinary Talk Research Articles

Beyond school-related learning: Parent-child homework talk as a morality building activity

Family interactions constitute an arena for children's moral development: it is indeed through ordinary talk, and shared, task-oriented activities that children are socialized into moral orders and culturally informed ways of thinking and acting. Drawing on a video-based study on the everyday life of 19 middle-class families and adopting a discourse analytic approach, the paper sheds light on the socializing function of a domestic activity: homework. We illustrate that, when it unfolds as a family activity, the issues at stake go far beyond its school-oriented goals: homework provides ‘ethical affordances’ that make relevant moral talk whereby parents introduce children to some unquestioned principles such as homework must be done neatly and it is part of the child's duties. We contend that, by participating in morally loaded homework interactions, children are socialized not only into a school-aligned cultural list concerning what is right and what is wrong about homework, but moreover into a constitutive, taken-for-granted pillar of human sociality: the moral assessability of human conduct, i.e., its being subject to evaluations informed by the ‘right vs. wrong’ category. Implications for teacher training and parent education programs are discussed in the conclusion.

The Perils of Polysemy: Racial Realism in the Real World

This paper critiques the biological race realism of Quayshawn Spencer. Spencer's recent embrace of “radical race pluralism” (RRP) is welcome but incomplete, because it needs methods that distinguish different communicative contexts for how American English speakers use “race” and related terms. I offer a pragmatic approach to identifying such contexts that combines pragmatic argumentation theory, rhetorical polysemy, and a pragmatic approach to definition. One consequence of embracing RRP is that Spencer's theory of “OMB race talk” is unsupportable because it collapses three distinct communicative contexts: genomic research, legal and regulatory governance, and ordinary talk. By so doing, OMB race talk blocks attempts to fight racism and violates ethical standards that should allow people the agency to define their own identities.

Offering an Interpretation of Prior Talk in Everyday Interaction: A Semantic Map Approach

ABSTRACT Sometimes in interaction, a speaker articulates an overt interpretation of prior talk. Such moments have been studied as involving the repair of a problem with the other’s talk or as formulating an understanding of the matter at hand. Stepping back from the established notions of formulations and repair, we examine the variety of actions speakers do with the practice of offering an interpretation, and the order within this domain. Results show half a dozen usage types of interpretations in mundane interaction. These form a largely continuous territory of action, with recognizably distinct usage types as well as cases falling between these (proto)typical uses. We locate order in the domain of interpretations using the method of semantic maps and show that, contrary to earlier assumptions in the literature, interpretations that formulate an understanding of the matter at hand are actually quite pervasive in ordinary talk. These findings contribute to research on action formation and advance our understanding of understanding in interaction. Data are video- and audio-recordings of mundane social interaction in the German language from a variety of settings.

The first and the last word

In his book Coercion and the Nature of Law Himma proposes a conceptual analysis of law defending what he calls the Coercion Thesis. Himma’s approach to conceptual analysis is articulated in two steps. The first step is what Himma calls an “empirical observation” of “ordinary intuitions” as they are manifest in the “contingent linguistic conventions for using the relevant concept-term” in “ordinary talk.” The second step consists in identifying “the philosophical assumptions about the metaphysical nature of a thing to which the corresponding concept-term refers.” Our remarks are not intended to question the Coercion Thesis (which, on the contrary, they can possibly corroborate); rather, they intend to show that grounding conceptual analysis exclusively on the canons of ordinary usage of words and on the philosophical assumptions of an undefined and contingent linguistic and cultural community to which the last word is given is not free from risks.

The orderliness and sociability of “talking together”

Conversations among Italians often entail many-at-a-time rather than one-at-a-time speaking. This “talking together” is a deliberate aim of parties and a relevant aspect of their social life. It is a variant system for organizing ordinary talk. We describe how simultaneity is organized, how participants collaborate to maintain the orderliness of their interaction, and how, to do so, they listen to each other and continuously monitor talk for its content and its form. Following Simmel, we see this as a classic example of sociability, a play-form of sociation.

Forms of address in interaction: Evidence from Chilean Spanish

This study reexamines the nature of forms of address in Chilean Spanish. Traditionally, survey-, ethnography- and interview-based methods have suggested that the address system of Chilean Spanish is rather static—in other words, that the choice between second person singular pronouns and their corresponding verbal inflections is uniquely determined by the relationship between speaker, interlocutor, and setting. Additionally, when variable usage has been documented, it has been observed in semi-staged and scripted settings, and interpreted as a random phenomenon in which shifts occur freely and unmarkedly. Using evidence from both unstaged everyday, ordinary talk settings and institutional contexts, this study demonstrates that address forms in Chilean Spanish are dynamic, and that speakers of this variety deploy them strategically to achieve their interactional goals. This locates my study within previous sociolinguistic research of the interactional strand, in which forms of address are interpreted as tools that speakers use to discursively construct relevant, time-specific aspects of their identities. Ultimately, it demonstrates that, far from being unequivocally constrained by socially conventionalized pragmatic norms, speakers are in control of their linguistic, discursive resources, and deploy different and varied address forms in ways that allow them to accomplish their immediate interactional goals.

How Americans Talk about Separation of Church and State: Moral Frameworks of Justice and Care

ABSTRACT This paper draws on data from 12 focus group discussions of a faith-based prison ministry program to examine how ordinary Americans talk about the separation of church and state. The focus groups – conducted in Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Boston – revealed that program supporters and opponents draw on different moral frameworks, with supporters focusing on a framework of care and opponents focusing on a framework of justice. The findings affirm the centrality of moral concerns in shaping citizen stances on church-state separation and suggest that meaningful political compromise is possible on the issue of government support of faith-based social services.

Tempo, Auftakt, levels of actions, and practice

This article builds on Scollon’s work on rhythm in ordinary talk (1981, 1982) and mediated discourse analysis (primarily 1998 and 2001) extending his work by utilizing multimodal interaction analysis (MIA) (Norris 2004) as the methodological framework. With multimodal transcripts of everyday interactions from grooming a horse to a workplace interaction and two boys painting Easter eggs, the article first illustrates Scollon’s notion of tempo, then discusses the new findings of Auftakt (offbeat or prelude taken from musicology) and that rhythm in chains of lower-level action may cross modal boundaries, before investigating a micro-medium-macro link. This micro-medium-macro link in everyday interaction is then explored through the analysis of the complexity of rhythm in everyday interaction by analysing an example of a father playing ball with his two-year old son. Here, it is demonstrated how multimodal rhythms are superimposed from chains of lower-level actions to chains of higher-level actions and to practices. Further, these superimposed rhythms are shown to take on a different tempo at each level. The article ends with the claim that rhythm, as Scollon thought, to a large extent structures ordinary interaction; but, as discussed throughout, and Scollon would have agreed, it is MIA that allows us to analyse the multimodal complexity.

LANGUAGE AND STYLE IN THE PROSE OF PETRO MARKOS

Styles is a writer's own way, the style is the writer himself. Styles regulates the organization of ideas, mountains of work, but, in general, the narrowest concept of style is the use of language. From this point of view, one can say that every writer has his own style. With the help of petro marko, the studios are ready to be used for the classifier and they are energy-intensive. Being the language itself is a creature of the author, it expresses in itself its cultural heritage. Petro marko mimics ordinary talk, introducing and making his own, perfectly perfect, spells, characteristics of spoken language phrases. The language used in the confession is mainly the language of the people. The novel "a four-way name" authored using the spoken language of the village of dhërmi, but also the expression of the literary language, creating words and expressions with ingenuity and subtlety. It is not a novel, "hasta la vista" and "the last city" he also extensively uses spanish, italian or other languages, giving the story a great force of expression and originality, and at the same time approaching the reader even more with the character or story to which it relates.

The radical account of bare plural generics

Bare plural generic sentences pervade ordinary talk. And yet it is extremely controversial what semantics to assign to such sentences. In this paper, I achieve two tasks. First, I develop a novel classification of the various standard uses to which bare plurals may be put. This “variety data” is important—it gives rise to much of the difficulty in systematically theorizing about bare plurals. Second, I develop a novel account of bare plurals, the radical account. On this account, all bare plurals fail to express propositions. The content of a bare plural has to be pragmatically “completed” by a speaker in order for her to make an assertion. At least the content of a quantifier expression has to be supplied. But sometimes, the content of a sentential operator or modal verb is also supplied. The radical account straightforwardly explains the variety data: Speakers’ communicative intentions vary wildly across different contexts. The radical account should be taken seriously in the literature on generics.

When words are not enough

Communication through ordinary talk is very common. Often, the receiver of information has the option to investigate a sender’s type. We extend a standard cheap-talk model by giving the receiver this option. We show that when the receiver bears most of the investigation cost, the option to investigate drives away most cheap-talk communication. When the sender pays a substantial part of the investigation cost, the option to investigate disciplines the sender. Introducing an investigation device to a cheap-talk model demonstrates the vulnerability of cheap talk on the one hand, and shows how communication can be improved on the other.

Do corporations have minds of their own?

Corporations have often been taken to be the paradigm of an organization whose agency is autonomous from that of the successive waves of people who occupy the pattern of roles that define its structure, which licenses saying that the corporation has attitudes, interests, goals, and beliefs which are not those of the role occupants. In this essay, I sketch a deflationary account of agency-discourse about corporations. I identify institutional roles with a special type of status function, a status role, in which the collectively accepted function is expressed in part through its occupier’s intentional expression of her agency in that role (where the occupier is part of the group whose collective acceptance underwrites her having the relevant function in social transactions). I identify institutions as systems of status roles and show how this is compatible with seeing the agency of institutions generally, even over time periods in which there is complete change in role occupiers, as a matter of the contributions only of individual agents. I explain how the reduction of the institution to its members is compatible with its potentially having had a completely different membership. I show in the case of the corporation in particular that, once we see its origins and function, the surface features of legal discourse about corporate agency are misleading and are compatible with a deflationary account of corporate agency. I show in connection with this that the corporation is to be identified with its shareholders, and that where a corporation separates ownership and control, its managers and employees are proxy agents of the shareholders doing business under the corporate form. Finally, I canvass the legitimate ways of construing ordinary talk about corporate intention, belief, and so on, in light of this, none of which support the attribution of genuine agency or intentionality to any group per se associated with the corporation.

The story of ‘Oh’, Part 1: Indexing structure, animating transcript

The expression ‘Oh’ in natural conversation is a signal topic in the development of the Epistemic Program (EP). This article attempts to bring into view a sense of place for this simple expression in the early literature, beginning with ‘Oh’ as a ‘change-of-state token’ and through its subsequent treatments in the production of assessments. It reviews them with an interest in two allied developments. One is the rendering of ‘Oh’ as an expression that ‘indexes’ epistemic structure. The other, pursued in the detail of transcript in Part 2, is how, as of this rendering, the literature manages its tasks of ‘animating transcript’, or how we portray ordinary talk as social action. We think these two moves are closely connected within the EP. And we think they yield a very different ‘vocabulary of motives’, different from the natural language studies of conversation analysis (CA). Our discussions address in turn the central phrases of our title.

Fictionalism and the Folk

1. INTRODUCTIONHow should we make sense of ordinary talk about the mind? When we say that someone has a particular belief or desire, are we claiming that they have a certain sort of causal state inside their heads? If we are, might future cognitive science show that we are wrong? Might it turn out that mental states, like beliefs and desires, do not exist? In this paper, I explore one way to approach these longstanding questions concerning the status of folk psychology: mental fictionalism. Put simply, mental fictionalism is the view that, even if mental states do not exist, it is useful to talk as if they do. Mental states are useful fictions.Recent philosophy of mind has seen a growing interest in mental fictionalism (e.g., Wallace 2007; Demeter 2013a). To date, much of the discussion has concerned the general features of this approach and the difficulties it faces.1 In this paper, I develop a specific form of mental fictionalism by drawing on Kendall Walton's work on make-believe (Walton 1990, 1993). According to the account I will put forward, when we say someone has a particular belief or desire, we are not making a claim about their inner machinery. Instead, talk about mental states is a useful pretence for describing people and their behaviour. As a result, the legitimacy of ordinary talk about the mind does not depend upon whether future cognitive science will discover beliefs or desires inside our heads.The structure of the paper is as follows. First, in Section 2,1 give a brief outline of Walton's theory, focusing on his discussion of metaphor and prop-oriented make-/ -believe. In Section 3,1 show how we may draw on Walton's analysis to develop a fictionalist analysis of folk psychology. In Section 4, I further clarify and motivate this account by comparing it to a number of well-known alternative positions, including behaviourism, instrumentalism, and eliminativism, as well as alternative forms of fictionalism. Finally, in Section 5, I consider some important challenges facing mental fictionalism.2. PROP ORIENTED MAKE BELIEVEImagine some children playing with a doll. They pick the doll up and hold it in their arms, push it down the hallway in a pushchair, cover it with a blanket, and so on. As they do so, the children imagine themselves picking up a baby and cradling it, taking it to the shops and lying it down in its cot to go to sleep. In Walton's theory, dolls and other objects used in make-believe are called props and the rules that govern their use in the game are called principles of generation (Walton 1990). Within a game of make-believe, the properties of the props, together with the relevant principles of generation, make propositions fictional. To say that a proposition is fictional, in Walton's sense, is simply to say that participants in the game are prescribed to imagine it. For example, if the doll's are closed, the children are to imagine that the baby is asleep. It is fictional that the baby is asleep. Notice that, since the content of a game of make-believe depends only on the props and principles of generation, it possesses a certain kind of objectivity: if the doll's eyes are closed then it is fictional that the baby is asleep, even if none of the children happen to notice this.One important feature of games of make-believe is participation. Children playing with a doll do not simply sit and look at it. Instead, they carry out various actions with the doll (e.g., putting a bottle to its mouth) and these actions generate imaginings within the game (e.g., that the children are feeding the baby). Like the doll, the children themselves become props in the game. The children also participate verbally. For example, David might sing a lullaby as he rocks the doll in his arms, thereby making it fictional that he is singing a lullaby to get the baby to sleep. Importantly, acts of pretence can be used to make genuine assertions. Suppose that Anna looks at the doll and says She's sleeping now! …

Language as Literature: Action, Character, and Plot in Conversation

Works of fiction have characters, who perform actions, which make up the plot of the story. In this chapter, following some recent work in cognitive linguistics, I develop a tentative qualitative analytical framework for using the categories of action, character, and plot to analyze the meaning of ordinary language utterances. I propose a preliminary list of action levels, character types, and plot functions, which can be used in analyzing discourse using this framework, and apply this apparatus to the analysis of two conversation transcripts. Examining ordinary talk in the terms proposed here helps substantiate a radically enactivist and dialogic conception of linguistic meaning by extending an action-based account of the meaning of full linguistic utterances to also cover utterances’ content.

Language and Interactional Discourse: Deconstrusting the Talk- Generating Machinery in Natural Convresation

The study entitled. “Language and Interactional Discourse: Deconstructing the Talk - Generating Machinery in Natural Conversation,” is an analysis of spontaneous and informal conversation. The study, carried out in the theoretical and methodological tradition of Ethnomethodology, was aimed at explicating how ordinary talk is organized and produced, how people coordinate their talk –in- interaction, how meanings are determined, and the role of talk in the wider social processes. The study followed the basic assumption of conversation analysis which is, that talk is not just a product of two ‘speakers - hearers’ who attempt to exchange information or convey messages to each other. Rather, participants in conversation are seen to be mutually orienting to, and collaborating in order to achieve orderly and meaningful communication. The analytic objective is therefore to make clear these procedures on which speakers rely to produce utterances and by which they make sense of other speakers’ talk. The datum used for this study was a recorded informal conversation between two (and later three) middle- class civil servants who are friends. The recording was done in such a way that the participants were not aware that they were being recorded. The recording was later transcribed in a way that we believe is faithful to the spontaneity and informality of the talk. Our finding showed that conversation has its own features and is an ordered and structured social day by- day event. Specifically, utterances are designed and informed by organized procedures, methods and resources which are tied to the contexts in which they are produced, and which participants are privy to by virtue of their membership of a culture or a natural language community. Keywords: Language, Discourse and Conversation

Narrow-scoping for wide-scopers

Many philosophers think that requirements of rationality are “wide-scope”. That is to say: they are requirements to make true some material conditional, such that one counts as satisfying the requirement iff one either makes the conditional’s antecedent false or makes its consequent true. These contrast with narrow-scope requirements, where the ‘requires’ operator takes scope only over the consequent of the conditional. Many of the philosophers who have preferred wide-scope requirements to narrow-scope requirements have also endorsed a corresponding semantic claim, namely that ordinary talk about rationality, despite appearances to the contrary, expresses wide-scope claims. In doing so, they seek to avoid attributing massive error to ordinary speakers. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the wide-scope semantics inadequately captures the meaning of ordinary talk about rationality. It seems, then, that we are left with a dilemma: either give up the view that requirements of rationality are wide-scope, or accept an implausible semantics for ordinary talk about rationality, or attribute massive error to speakers. In this paper, I argue that this dilemma is only apparent, since we can appeal to a standard kind of contextualist semantics for modals to explain why narrow-scope talk comes out true in virtue of the wide-scope requirements. My view, then, combines wide-scoping about the explanatorily fundamental requirements of rationality with a contextualist variant of a narrow-scope semantics. I argue that this view gives us the best of both worlds, as well as solving related puzzles and challenges for the extant views in the literature.

Positioning identities

The purpose of this article is to broaden and sharpen the use of positioning in social science inquiry. Historically, positioning has either been aligned with ethogenic and ontological constructionist views of discourse/identity or post-structural projects interested in positioning as means to uncovering how people’s minds work or how an ordered extant exterior world shapes and constitutes human action. Rather than looking through acts of positioning to minds or worlds, the present chapter offers an epistemic discursive psychological view of positioning as sets of local discursive processes whereby speakers elegantly exploit the features of ordinary talk so as to make relevant their own and/or other’s identities as part of some social business that has an interactional logic as well as here-and-now relational consequences. The discursive dexterity of positioning is illustrated through an analysis of the negotiation of gendered identity categories.

Loose Talk from Langland to Chaucer

Loose Talk from Langland to Chaucer Anne Middleton Chaucer’s skill at representing demotic speech—especially that pungently indecorous kind that passes for the ordinary talk of people in a golden age before canons of politesse and decorum got hold of it—has long been central to his reputation, even (or perhaps especially) among those not otherwise committed to upholding this or any other kind of literary valuation. Each of us can probably call up from our middle childhood, well before we were conscious of participating in any literary culture, an anecdote something like the one Ralph Hanna adduces as testimony to that alleged mastery of “salty” talk by which Chaucer (here, as often, standing for The Medieval more generally) often comes to our first notice at an impressionable age.1 He recalls a scolding by his father for having used (unspecified) “bad language.” After fulfilling his paternal duty to enforce the (inferrably maternal) standards of propriety whose violation prompted the rebuke, his father added a concession that made the occasion memorable: “but what you said wouldn’t have bothered Chaucer.” To eleven-year-old Ralph, it suggested not only that parental discipline held a less united front than previously supposed, but that the daily language of the deep past was a treasury of unknown and hitherto untapped discursive possibility. A world in which one could say “piss” with impunity had once actually existed, and might be worth knowing more about. (Yes, the offending term on that occasion seems to have been “piss”—and we will return to it shortly.) The illusion that the living speech-world of dead poets’ societies [End Page 29] might be directly recoverable from literary texts—where it is imagined as preserved like flies in amber, largely unmodified by their surrounding/containing medium—is an extremely tenacious one, to which classicists as well as medievalists are strongly attracted, if only because any other kind of access to the ambient talk of the deep past is beyond our reach.2 The very tenacity of that illusion attests to the kind of work that such moments of “loose talk” do in vernacular literary texts of the later fourteenth century. Irruptions of pungently demotic speech, (usually) in direct discourse, were a device that presented a different handle and cutting “edge” for poetic use from simple reflection of spoken language. Their effects, and their distinctive formal utility to Langland and Chaucer, will be my immediate concern here, as I explore (in an insufficient number of sketchy, discontinuous, and often minute examples) the defining properties, perpetual freshness, and radically destabilizing potential of this device. I think I can demonstrate that it is a literary device, not an inadvertent leakage of “natural” speech into artful texts, and that both poets were thoroughly conversant with it as such—less by way of their acquired knowledge of formal rhetoric (where all authorities agree in regarding it as a device of fictive discourse chiefly) than as striking usages in some of their direct vernacular models. But “loose talk” also became in this period a site of cultural ambiguities and ameliorating inventions, both requiring repeatedly renewed adjustments in the very brief moment, possibly no more than a decade, of our two poets’ formal experiments with it. Among the many provocations in Chaucer’s and Langland’s use of this technique is its durable affinity for the rude and excremental, as well as the sudden—features that prove integral to its more profound and intellectually respectable functions. Definitional Forays “Loose talk” as a category is not essentially salacious, scandalous, or irresponsible—though each of these modifiers suggests some of the accidental qualities of the device that made it interesting to both poets. It is not limited to “naughty” lexicon and idiom, of the sort explored some time ago, to different purposes, by both Charles Muscatine and D. W. [End Page 30] Robertson, and memorably exemplified in Jean de Meun’s portion of the Roman de la rose in the Lover’s critique of the use of plain vernacular terms for bodily parts and processes (it is noteworthy that he frames his distaste in an obscene double entendre: such things are “unbecoming in a lady’s...

Parts as counterparts

Mereological nihilists are faced with a difficult challenge: explaining ordinary talk about material objects. Popular paraphrase strategies involve plurals, arrangements of particles, or fictions. In this paper, a new paraphrase strategy is put forward that has distinct advantages over its rivals: it is compatible with gunk and emergent properties of macro-objects. The only assumption is a commitment to a liberal view of the nature of simples; the nihilist must be willing to accept the possibility of heterogeneous extended simples. The author suggests reinterpreting the parthood and composition relations as modal. According to this paraphrase, composition is a kind of counterpart relation. The author shows that one can accept that mereological nihilism is metaphysically necessary, while endorsing all the claims of classical mereology. As a result, the nihilists are in exactly the same position as the classical mereologist when it comes to explaining talk about ordinary objects, but without the additional ontology.