SYLLABUS: MEANING AND COMMUNICATION (COM 375)

SYLLABUS: MEANING AND COMMUNICATION (CMS 375)

LENNY SHEDLETSKY

lenny@maine.edu

780-5437 (office)

What the course is about:

The assignment of meaning to words and things is central to communication. In fact, many people define communication as the assignment of meaning or sharing of meaning. In recent years scholars have intensively investigated linguistic meaning (dictionary meaning) and other types of meaning (e.g., “social meaning”). Indeed, in the past decade, real advances in understanding meaning and communication are developing from work in philosophy, linguistics, sociology, communication and psychology. Researchers have paid special attention to the ways in which words and actions take on meaning in context. Hence, researchers have had more and more to say about the full communicative event—i.e., context, including physical and social parameters; pragmatics, the actual use of language to accomplish everyday goals; grammatical structures and communication; conversational structures (e.g., questions and answers); and types of meaning (e.g., literal and implied, digital and analogic).

Required Texts:

Karen Tracy, Everyday Talk. (2002). New York: The Guilford Press.

D. Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand. (2001). New York: Quill.

What We’ll Do:

We’ll study a small number of concepts which researchers have found to be useful in understanding language usage (e.g., inference, speech acts, indirect speech acts, a game model of conversation, implicature, context, action sequences, coherence, and more). We’ll study each concept in two ways: (1) by reading and discussing what researchers/theorists have had to say; (2) by collecting data on naturally occurring spoken or written discourse. At one meeting we’ll discuss a concept and at the next meeting you will present what you were able to find in “the real world.” The attitude of this course will be: “I don’t believe it until I see (hear) it.”

The course will run in a seminar-like format (within the limits of constraints imposed by the number of students in the course) in which the level of participation, hopefully, will be high, both in discussion of texts and presentation of exercises.

Evaluation:

Participation . . . . . . . 25%

1. Discussion

2. Written exercises

3. Presentation

Two Essays:

Essay #1 . . . 35%

Essay #2 . . . 40%

Participation:

Your active involvement in meetings constitutes participation, as well as the written exercises you hand in each week. Please ask questions (if you are puzzled by something, chances are, so are others). Question the texts—that’s what we are all about. Find examples that refute the text, the teacher (g-d forbid), and your colleagues. When you challenge ideas you think things through for yourself. The examples (data) you bring to class will be crucial to the quality of the experience we all have in the course. Also, I urge you to work hard on your data collection and analysis (i. e., the exercises for class discussion) – tape record and sometimes distribute transcriptions. You’ll present both essays during class meetings (about 5 minutes per presentation) and the presentation will make up part of the participation grade.

Exercises—A Form of Participation:

Each week there are exercises assigned. The exercises are intended to help you learn the concepts presented in the texts. The exercises are simply for the purpose of applying the concepts. At one meeting each week we will go around the group and have each student talk about what they found in doing the exercise. Exercises are to be handed in at the class when they are discussed. These written exercises will be graded loosely (checkü, check plusü+ , check minusü- ) and counted toward participation. The main reason to work hard on the exercises is to help you prepare to write the essays.

Essays:

The two essays each require that you make use of the information you gain from this course. But the quality of the essays will depend upon not only your ability to understand the information but to be able to apply it creatively. Each essay should be 4 to 6 typed, double spaced pages (not including data). These essays make up the bulk of your grade, so they deserve your full effort. Late essays will lose one letter grade for each day they are late. Again, please remember that these essays are intended to be carefully thought out, organized themes. You will need to integrate course materials with your observations and creativity.

Essay #1: (see exercises #2, 3, 4, & 7)

Collect and transcribe a small amount of naturally occurring conversational language (approximately 1 to 2 minutes—you can use the conversation you have been using for exercises). Based on your data, discuss the way in which one or more of the following concepts (I suggest keeping it to 1 or 2 concepts and analyzing deeply) operate in conversation (i.e., contribute to conversational structure and coherence):

Speech acts

Identity

Conversational implicature

Indirect speech acts

The context of action: Frames

Action sequences

Person-Referencing

Paralinguistic devices

Essay #2: (choose either A. or B.)

A. Based on ideas stimulated by Tracy and Tannen, and with reference to data you collected (your transcription), discuss the idea that “communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence” (Tannen, p. 27). Tannen writes: “To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone” (Tannen, pp. 27 – 28). What would be particularly interesting is to explain how an utterance is multi-functional, one that serves to both sustain connectedness and independence. Be careful to support your analysis. Try to make use of Tracy’s discussion of identity and discurive practices, and turn organization. (Please note: This is not phrased as a gender issue. So, you do not need to limit your answer to the gender issue, but you can address it if you wish).

B. For this last essay, let’s see how we can apply concepts from this course to help illuminate issues of social relationship. Your task is to analyze a brief transcription of your choice (data you have collected) to demonstrate how talk may both use background knowledge and be illuminated by the background knowledge that the participants hold.

Tracy opens her book with reference to the idea that every utterance carries literal meaning and its meaning in context—the interactional meaning, the social or interpersonal talk. Tracy writes: “The interactional meaning of an utterance is its meaning for the participants in the situation in which the utterance (or more usually, a sequence of utterances) occurred. Interactional meaning arises from and depends on the context, and may be given or given off” (p. 8).

Another scholar of discourse put it this way[1]:

In telling a story, expanding an argument, or producing some other conversational structure, a participant may design utterances to invoke knowledge assumed to be held in common with a specific other participant. This is some item of background knowledge or shared experience that each person ‘knows, presumes that the other knows, and presumes that the other presumes [that he or she knows]’ (Maynard & Zimmerman, 1984, p. 303, n. 5). The other participant may then respond in a way that displays a recognition of what that knowledge is. Such an interactive display that two participants share a certain item of knowledge and thus have a “history” together may make their relationship (or some aspect of it) momentarily relevant to the conversation. (Nofsinger, p. 163)

Similarly, in the closing chapters of her book, Tannen focuses up the relationship between talk and friendship. She makes the point that we cannot tell from the act just what the meaning is. She explains that this is the case, since the act is embedded within a system, e.g., of cultural ritual, or relationship history, or style (e.g., genderlect). Show the link between literal meaning and meaning in context (interactional meaning).

Again, you are asked to find a transcription that allows you to explore this point that background knowledge is needed to understand the act, that when we talk to one another, we make use of such background knowledge.

EXERCISES

#1.

Collect one minute of recorded conversation and transcribe it. Come to class prepared to respond to two points: (1) what did you discover about recording and transcribing naturally occurring speech; and (2) what major conclusions can you draw from the data you gathered? Refer to Tracy, “Most Commonly Used Transcription Symbols” (p. 88).

#2. Tracy, Chapter 1

Can you apply the ideas of talk and identity to your data? Try to find examples in the talk of different kinds of identity created by talk, e.g., master identities, interactional identity, personal identity, and relational identities.

#3. Tracy, Chapter 2;

Explain the cultural perspective and the rhetorical perspective. Try to find examples in your data of each kind. Explain how your data illustrate the concepts of cultural and rhetorical perspective.

#4. Tracy, Chapter 3

Discuss Person-Referencing

Do you find any instances of person-referencing in your transcription?

If you do, what are the interpersonal implications, e.g., closeness, formality, gender.

Do you find any instances of Membership Categorization Devices (p. 57- 60).

#5. Tannen, Chapter 2

Do you find any metamessages in your data? If you do, describe some and explain how they work. Do you find examples that help to make the distinction between the message and the metamessage?

In your data, do you find instances of women and/or men displaying asymmetries of status? Displaying connection?

What is the invisibility of framing, and do you find any instances in your data? (p. 63)

#6. Tannen, Chapters 3 & 4

Find instances of talk to preserve independence, to negotiate and maintain status; find talk as a means to rapport. Can you find instances of conversational style (p. 79); public and private talk.

Find instances of gossip.

#7. Tracy, Chapter 5

Having read chapter 5 in Tracy, revisit your transcript and find examples of how “The Sound of Talk” influences the meanings assigned to talk. For instance, do you find instances where the following features influenced meaning:

Loudness

Pronunciation

Stressed words

Laughing

Pauses

Overlaps

Indication of a Feeling State

Uptalk

Dialect or Accent

#8. Tracy, Chapter 7

Find instances of “transition relevance place.” (p. 118-119)

Point out several examples of Adjacency Pairs, e.g., Invitaton/Acceptance, Request for Information/Response.

Do you find instances of:

(1) current speaker selects next (p. 118)

(2) self-select (p. 118)

(3) speaker continuation (p. 118)

Do you find examples of silence that seem to bear meaning, that hold significance for the conversation?

#9. Tracy, Chapters 8, 9, & 10

Chapter 8:

Do you find instances of indirect speech acts? Mitigation Markers? Small Talk?

Chapter 9:

Do you have an example of Everyday Narrative? Analyze how it functioned in the talk.

Chapter 10:

Do you find instances of stance indicators? Involvement, lack of involvement, hostility?

Do you find Marked and Unmarked forms? E.g., the black judge, a male nurse, gay teacher, nontraditional college student.

#10. Tannen, Chapters 9 & 10

Tannen talks about the idea that symmetry and asymmetry are key features in understanding talk between friends (pp. 277-296).

Discuss what is meant by symmetry and asymmetry in talk. Can you find instances of symmetry and asymmetry in your transcription?

Can you find an example to support Tannen’s claim that the meaning of an act is not found in the act itself, but in the cultural backdrop, the other’s perspective (see pp. 295-296).