Download here: Rules of conversation and Speech Acts
Consider the following things that parents often say to young children
- Don’t interrupt me when I’m speaking.
- Speak when you’re spoken to.
- Did you hear what I said?
- What’s the magic word?
- Say thank you.
- Don’t talk like that in front of your grandmother.
- Don’t say, ‘what’, say, ‘pardon’.
These things are intended to teach children about how to have conversations. They teach some ‘rules’ of conversation.
Turn-taking, structure
Adjacency pairs – question-answer, greeting-greeting, information-acknowledgement
Politeness, negotiation
Conversation is not just for exchanging information, but for getting things done. We use politeness to do this, as a way of negotiating with other people, of relating to them.
Content for different situations – register
We change our choice of words, and how we put them together, depending on who we are talking to, and where.
We use these ‘rules’ to achieve our purposes in conversations.
All conversations (all communications of any kind) have a purpose.
We can divide these purposes into three kinds: exchanging information, getting people to do things, building and maintaining relationships.
A speech act refers to the ‘thing we are trying to do’ when we use words to achieve some purpose. For instance,
apologies, invitations, congratulations, warnings, promises, requests and responses are all speech acts. Sometimes the ‘meaning’ of a speech act (the intention behind the act) may be not obvious from the words alone.
Consider this: when a student arrives to a 9:20 am class at 9:45, I might say, ‘good afternoon’. What’s my intention? Or, if someone stops me in the street and says, ‘excuse me, I’m looking for Yodobashi Camera’, is the person simply giving me information, or is there a different purpose?
Task:
Think of a conversation you had today, or recently. What was the purpose? What kind of speech act was it?
This outline is mostly taken from Francesca Pridham (2001). The Language of Conversation
A recent article on turn-taking, interrupting and the gender balance: