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Welcome back to the Deep Dive.
For a while now, we've been focused pretty inwardly, haven't we, looking at the nuts and bolts of language.
Yeah, the linguistic architecture, phonemes, morphemes, the whole Lang system, as a social word called it.
Exactly.
But today, we're flipping that completely.
We're looking outward.
That's right.
Because knowing the rules isn't much use if you don't know how to, well, play the game in the real world.
We're shifting to parole.
So the social side, how language actually works when people, you know, talk to each other.
Precisely.
We're looking at language as this incredibly adaptive tool, really sensitive to context.
It's shaped by everything happening outside the grammar book.
Okay.
So our mission today is exploring how social situations dictate the language we choose, focusing on conversation, discourse, that kind of thing.
We've got a great way into this.
Just think about saying goodbye.
Seems simple, right?
But imagine a high school student knows English grammar perfectly well.
Okay.
How do they say goodbye?
Well, it depends entirely who he's talking to.
Right.
If it's his teacher.
It's probably something formal.
Goodbye, sir.
Maybe even a bit stiff.
Yeah.
And his mom.
Maybe.
See you later, ma.
Casual.
Familiar.
Okay.
But then his best friend calls.
Totally different language.
I got a split, man.
Quick, slangy.
And he would never say, I got a split, man, to his teacher.
Absolutely not.
And that knowledge, knowing which form fits which social situation, that's not just grammar.
That's what we call communicative competence.
Ah, okay.
So it's the practical social know -how guiding your words.
Exactly.
It often overrides just pure grammatical correctness.
It's knowing how to use the tool appropriately.
It's like knowing the rules of chess versus knowing how to act during a tournament.
You need both.
You really do.
And this practical social angle brings us straight into pragmatics.
And when we apply pragmatics to real time talk.
We get conversational analysis, or CA.
Right.
CA really took off in the 1980s.
Researchers started looking closely at actual everyday conversation.
And what did they find?
That we're not just making it up as we go along.
Well, yeah, basically.
What seems spontaneous, like taking turns in conversation, is actually highly systematic.
We follow these sort of unspoken rules, these tacit reasoning procedures.
So knowing when it's okay to jump in or when to stay quiet,
that's all part of this hidden system.
It is.
It's just as rule bound as syntax in its own way, even if we're not consciously aware of it most of the time.
Okay.
And a big part of making conversation work smoothly is, well, not being repetitive and clunky.
Oh, definitely.
Repetition kills the flow.
Imagine trying to tell a story like this.
Mary went to the store.
Mary saw a friend at the store.
Mary and the friend talked.
Yeah, sounds like a first grade reader.
Really unnatural.
But in normal speech, you'd instantly say,
Mary went to the store.
She saw a friend there.
They talked.
See?
Smooth, efficient.
And that smoothness comes from using specific words like she, there, they.
Exactly.
Those are anaphoric devices.
They refer back to things already mentioned, Mary, the store.
They keep the conversation flowing without constant repetition.
Okay.
Anaphora points back.
Is there one that points forward?
That's cataphora.
Less common, maybe, but it builds suspense.
Like, even though he will deny it, I tell you that Mark did it.
The he comes before you know it's Mark.
Hmm.
Okay.
But defining these terms, anaphora, cataphora, isn't that, back to Lang, the internal structure?
I thought we were focused on the social, the parole.
That's a really good point.
The pronoun itself is a grammatical element, sure, part of the Lang.
But the reason we use it, the choice to use she instead of repeating Mary, that's driven by social pressure.
Ah, the pressure to be clear, efficient, not boring.
Exactly.
That's pragmatics.
That's parole.
The social need shapes how we deploy the grammatical tools.
Same with cataphora.
Using it to create a dramatic effect is a social communicative choice.
Got it.
So the social context demands we use these structures.
Now, beyond reference, what other little tricks or gambits do we use to keep conversations on track?
Well, hedges are everywhere.
Those little noises we make.
Uh -huh.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Especially on the phone, right?
You need those to show you're still listening.
Definitely.
Or even things like pausing with an mmm.
It's like putting a placeholder down, saying, I'm still thinking.
Don't interrupt me yet.
It's interesting that just being silent isn't really an option in English conversation as a hedge.
You have to fill the gap somehow.
That's pure communicative competence.
It really is.
Another huge structural piece in CA is the adjacency pair.
Conversations are built on these expected sequences.
Like, if I ask a question, you're expected to answer.
Right.
Question, answer.
Greeting, greeting.
Invitation, acceptance or rejection.
Offer, acceptance or rejection.
They form these little two -part scripts that structure our interactions.
Can I help you?
Yes, please.
That's an adjacency pair.
And what if we mess up, say the wrong thing?
Then we use repair gambits, quick fixes.
If I say, see you Tuesday, but I meant Wednesday, I'd quickly add, sorry, I meant Wednesday.
We repair the conversation on the fly.
Okay.
So we manage flow, we manage turns, we fix mistakes.
But what about the actual purpose of what we say?
That's the perfect transition to speech acts.
This idea shifts focus from just the flow to the social function or the force of an utterance.
So saying something is doing something.
Pretty much.
Some utterances have the weight of a physical action.
Think of a judge saying, I sentence you to life imprisonment.
Those words don't just describe something.
They do something.
They change the person's reality.
Exactly.
Or yelling, be careful.
It's not just information.
It's an action intended to make someone stop or change course.
The words function as an intervention.
Okay.
Let's break down these acts.
There are three layers, right?
Can get a bit technical.
Let's simplify.
First, the locutionary act.
That's just the literal act of saying the words, the surface meaning, what was actually uttered.
Okay.
Simple enough what I said.
Second, the illocutionary act.
This is the crucial one.
It's a speaker's intention or purpose in saying those words.
Am I making a request, a promise, an apology, a threat?
So what I meant by saying it.
Precisely.
And third, the perlocutionary act.
This is the effect the utterance has on the listener.
Did my warning make them stop?
Did my apology make them feel better?
Did my argument convince them?
How they reacted.
Okay.
Locutionary.
What I said.
Illocutionary.
What I meant.
Perlocutionary.
How they reacted.
Got it.
And that middle one, the illocutionary act, the speaker's intent is so central that the philosopher John Searle classified his main types back in 69.
Let's run through those quickly.
They seem important for understanding social interactions.
Definitely.
First, representatives.
These commit the speaker to the truth of what they're saying.
Like stating a fact or making a claim.
The sky is blue.
Okay.
Makes sense.
Then directives.
These are attempts to get the listener to do something.
Commands, requests, invitations, questions.
Close the door.
Could you pass the salt?
Got it.
Trying to direct their actions.
Third, commissives.
Here, the speaker commits themselves to some future action.
Promises, threats, offers.
I'll be there tomorrow.
I promise to pay you back.
So committing yourself.
Fourth,
expressives.
These reveal the speaker's psychological state or attitude about something.
Thanking, apologizing, welcoming, congratulating.
Thanks so much.
I'm really sorry.
Expressing feelings.
Right.
And finally, the big ones, declarations.
These are speech acts that actually change the state of the world by virtue of being uttered in the right context by the right person.
Think.
I now pronounce you husband and wife.
Or you're fired.
Wow.
Those words literally create a new reality.
They do.
And understanding these different illicutionary forces helps us see if a conversation is, say, cooperative or competitive.
How do we spot cooperative talk?
You see people building on each other's comments, using lots of those hedges like uh -huh to show agreement.
Maybe using tag questions to soften opinions.
That film was great, wasn't it?
Inviting agreement.
It's all about maintaining social harmony, then.
A lot of it is, which brings up fad of communication.
This is Maluski's term even earlier.
It's language used just to maintain social contact where the literal meaning is almost irrelevant.
Ah, like passing someone in the hall.
Hi, how are you?
Fine.
Thanks.
You.
Exactly.
Neither person expects a real detailed answer about their health or finances.
It's just oiling the social wheels.
Acknowledging the connection.
If the second person actually started listing their medical problems?
Yeah, the whole frame would shift.
It would stop being fadic and become a very different, maybe awkward conversation.
Knowing the difference is key social knowledge.
Okay, so we've looked at the micro level of conversation flow and speech acts.
What about the bigger picture, the larger social forces?
Now we're moving into discourse.
Think of discourse as the broader social and ideological frameworks that influence how whole groups of people talk.
Class, gender, profession, politics.
These all create specific discourses.
So it's not just individual choices, but group patterns.
Yes.
The Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, way back in the 1920s, talked about this.
He saw discourse as the particular way language gets used by social groups, often carrying ideological weight.
Think about the specific jargon doctors use or lawyers or gamers.
That jargon instantly signals I'm part of this group, right?
It includes some people and excludes others.
Precisely.
Discourse analysis looks at why certain groups speak the way they do, revealing their social positioning and beliefs.
And this brings us right back to Del Himes.
The guy who coined communicative competence.
That's him.
Himes insisted that you can't separate the linguistic rules from how people actually use them.
Parole.
They're intertwined.
And he gave us a model for analyzing that connection.
He did.
A really useful one.
With the acronym speaking,
it outlines eight key variables you need to consider in any speech event.
Okay, let's hear them.
S -P -E -A -K -I -N -G.
S is for setting where and when.
P is for participants who is speaking to whom.
N is the goals or outcomes.
A is for act sequences, the order of speech acts.
Halfway there.
K is for key, the tone or manner.
Serious choking.
We.
I is for instrumentalities, the channel, spoken, written, signed, and the specific code or dialect.
N is for norms, the social rules of interaction and interpretation.
And G is for genres, the type of speech event, lecture, gossip, joke.
Wow.
That covers pretty much everything.
Let's apply it quickly to our high school kid again.
I gotta split, man.
To teacher.
Fails on almost every count.
The setting classroom is wrong.
The participants, student -teacher hierarchy is wrong.
The key casual is wrong.
The norms formality are violated.
It just doesn't fit the speaking variables for that context.
Whereas goodbye, sir fits perfectly.
That model really shows how context governs competence.
And Himes argued that this very competence, how people adapt and use language and practice, is a major drivel of language change over time.
Use shapes the system.
Which underlines that language isn't just one thing.
It serves lots of different functions.
Absolutely.
Roman Jacobson, building on Malinowski and others, identified six core constituents needed for any communication.
Okay.
What are those?
The addresser, speaker, the message itself, the addressee, listener, the context they're referring to, the contact, the channel or connection, and the code, the language system itself.
Six constituents.
And each has a corresponding function.
It's exactly six functions.
The unitive function focuses on the addresser expressing feelings.
Ouch.
The canative targets the addressee trying to influence them.
Go away.
The referential points to the context conveying information.
It's reading.
That's three.
What else?
The poetic function highlights the message form.
Think slogans, rhymes, literary style.
I like Ike.
The phatic function maintains contact, keeping the channel open.
Hello?
Can you hear me?
And the metalingual function focuses on the code itself, talking about language.
What does canative mean?
So language is doing all these different jobs simultaneously, pretty much.
All the time.
Incredibly versatile.
Which leads us to how we use this versatility to signal who we are.
Language as a badge of identity.
That's a great way to put it.
How you speak instantly places you, gives you access to certain groups, or marks you as an outsider.
You mentioned the 1960s teens picking up British sounds from the Beatles.
Yeah, a perfect example.
Their pronunciation wasn't just about understanding the music, it was about aligning themselves with that specific cool pop culture movement.
It signaled belonging.
And slang is huge for this, right?
Media constantly introduces new identity markers, like the word cool.
Oh, cool has had quite a journey.
Started in like 1920s jazz circles for a certain vibe, then adopted by teens in the 50s, and now it's just generally positive, stylish, sophisticated,
similar story.
Originally about temperature or anger, but shifted in the 1800s to mean passionate, sexually attractive, leading eventually to things like hottie.
Media locks these meanings into popular consciousness.
We definitely see words jumping straight from movies or TV into everyday talk.
Animal House gave us wimp and brew.
Yep.
And Clueless really popularized that sarcastic as if, and whatever.
And Mean Girls pushed plastic for fake or superficial people.
These stick because they capture a certain attitude or fill a niche, and the media gives them wide exposure.
What about existing words changing function?
You mentioned profanity.
Right.
Think about Lenny Bruce using the F word in his comedy routines decades ago.
It was shocking, subversive, it had real power to offend and critique.
But now...
You might hear it 100 times in one episode of a show like The Sopranos.
The shock value is largely gone for many people.
It's become almost punctuation or mild emphasis.
That's semantic bleaching, right?
Overuse washes out the original force.
Exactly.
And when a word is bleached like that, it can even get repurposed.
Terms that were deeply offensive, like slut or hoe, are sometimes used, especially within certain female groups, almost as compliments, signifying attractiveness or confidence.
Meaning is constantly being renegotiated.
And that renegotiation is happening at lightning speed online, especially with text messaging, TM, and TextSpeak.
Absolutely.
TextSpeak operates on a core linguistic principle, compression.
Meaning.
If you can shorten something, a word, a phrase, without losing the meaning for your audience, you probably will.
Efficiency rules.
Think TGIF for Thank God It's Friday, or Bob for Robert.
Or in texts, Illou for I Love You.
Perfect example.
It's faster, takes less effort.
TextSpeak just takes this to an extreme, often visually.
By dropping letters, mostly vowels, like W -R -C -M -N -G -T -I -T -A, Sonny.
Exactly.
We are coming tonight to the party.
You can still read it, because the consonant structure carries most of the information.
It looks different, but it's highly efficient for that medium.
Common ones like tomorrow, brobe, O -O -L,
they're just extreme compression.
Now, some people hate this stuff.
Think it's ruining language or making us lazy.
Yeah, there's that debate.
Critics like Mark Kalbrin worry it fosters intellectual inertia, kind of addiction to speed over depth.
But linguists like David Crystal argue it's just another form of linguistic creativity, an efficient tool for informal, rapid chat.
It doesn't mean people can't write formally when needed.
And the data shows texting is dominant, at least for younger people.
For sure.
That 2009 study by Lenhart was revealing.
For teens age 12, 17 back then, texting was the preferred mode.
54 % chose it over face -to -face at 33%.
The efficiency clearly meets a social need.
This drive for compression isn't new, though, is it?
Not at all.
Ancient Greeks had systems of fast writing, tickigraphy.
Noah Webster deliberately simplified American English spelling, getting rid of the U in color, for instance.
But what is new is the speed and scale of it today.
Definitely.
Digital media allows these compressions and innovations to spread incredibly quickly and widely, and it's become part of identity and branding, too.
Like toys are.
Us using the backward are.
Or companies using X to sound edgy or futuristic.
Exactly.
Or the lowercase i in in Apple products, iMac, iPhone.
It suggests internet, individual, maybe ingenuity.
These aren't random.
They're calculated linguistic choices designed to project a certain modern identity.
Compression and nonstandard forms become markers of being current, tech savvy, cool.
Wow.
Okay, we have covered a lot of ground.
From the nitty gritty of turn taking NCA.
Through the social power of speech acts.
To the big picture of discourse via Bakhtin, Himes' speaking framework analyzing context.
And Jacobson's functions, right up to how identity, media, and the principle of compression are reshaping language right now through things like tech speak.
So the main thread seems to be language isn't static.
It's constantly being molded by how we use it in society.
That's the core takeaway.
It's this living, breathing, adaptive instrument.
Our social needs, our communication technologies, they all drive linguistic change.
The external world shapes the internal system.
Which leads to a final thought.
Something for you, the listener, to consider.
We talked about language and identity.
Historically, things like nicknames, titles, they were often given to you by your community.
They reflected how others saw you.
Right.
Social status was partly conferred from the outside.
But now, think about cyberspace.
People choose their own handles, their online usernames, like at LESIAD or whatever.
They are, in a sense, christening themselves.
So instead of receiving an identity marker based on social perception, people are actively constructing and branding their own online identities from scratch.
Exactly.
So the question is, if language use is so tied to identity and social standing, how might this shift from a largely received identity to a self -constructed, personally branded one fundamentally change the way we think about social status, influence, and even literacy, both online and maybe offline too?
What skills become valuable when everyone is their own brand manager?
That feels like a very 21st century linguistic question.
Something to definitely mull over.
It certainly is.
We hope this deep dive into the social life of language was illuminating.
Thanks for joining us.
Until next time.