[341/365] December Days - useful linguistics things

[cosmolinguist]

Like I said yesterday, silveradept asked me for "A useful thing you have learned by studying linguistics."

They asked separately about the IPA, which is always my immediate thought when I think about useful linguistics things. I wish everybody was taught it in high school. And I've written about that before too, so I won't go into that again.

So let's see...what else have I learned that's useful? I'm going to talk about two things from pragmatics: phatic communication, and Grice's maxims.

I know a lot of neurodiverse people, and a lot of them struggle with phatic communication (link is to a Tom Scott video on the subject), finding "small talk" difficult and confusing. I think if people explicitly knew more about it, why it exists and what function it serves, it might seem less annoying and pointless, and hopefully might even be easier to navigate once people recognize its uses.

Things like greeting someone with a question that you don't expect a complex and unique answer to (like "you alright?" or "what's up?") aren't pointless. They acknowledge the other person, indicate that you're interested in starting a conversation with them, We can, even in languages like English that lack other grammatical ways of doing this, establish a hierarchy: we might not have "tu" and "vous" to do this like French, or the many ways of addressing someone in a language like Japanese, but we can indicate how we relate to somebody by whether we greet them with "hey" or "hello" or "excuse me" or whatever.

Phatic expressions also help with turn-taking in conversation: a lot of the "mmm"s and "yeah"s and so on that we say to show we're listening to someone and also, often, that they've paused or come to the end of a sentence, where we could start talking, but we've chosen to encourage them to go on. When we want to speak, there might be other "yeah"s or "oh"s we use, but they don't usually sound the same. These kinds of verbal clues are especially important to me, since I can't see facial expression or body langauge clues that somoene wants to speak or not (I do tend to talk over people because of this, which I hate and have anxiety about, so if I do it to you I'm

This reminds me of Grice's maxims. Paul Grice was a philosopher who came up with the cooperative principle, which says that we expect, and try to offer, certain kinds of cooperation from people we're in a conversation with. Grice came up with four kinds: quality, manner, relevance and quantity.

1. The maxim of quality says we don't say things we believe to be false or that we can't back up with evidence. We want to believe that people know what tbey're talking about, that they're not lying or misinformed. Otherwise we're wasting our time talking with them, and probably frustrating ourselves.
2. The maxim of manner says we talk in a way appropriate for the people we're talking to. This means
   • using words we think they'll understand (I explain, for example, my white cane much differently to toddlers than to bus drivers)
   • using only as many words as we need
   • avoiding ambiguity
   • talking about things in a sensible order -- whether that's chronological, or here where I'm talking about the four maxims one at a time, and here talking about the four things Grice says we need in order to be "appropriate."
3. The maxim of relevance has a clue in the name: be relevant. We don't expect non-sequiturs in conversation (being rare is one of the things that allows them to be funny; they're tiresome if they happen too often). Often if something seems like a non-sequitur, we'll give the person the benefit of the doubt a bit because we expect relevance and are generally willing to politely hang in there a little to see if "Twelve years ago, I got really drunk one day..." ends up being an answer to our question about someone's job. But it does put some strain on the conversation, we like nice straightforward relevance better.
4. The maxim of quantity is the last one. This says you should be as informative as you need to be, and no more so. So if someone asks me if I like where I live and I say "I like some things about it," I'm giving them the information that there are also things I don't like. But if I don't want to go into that, because it's more polite to be positive, I can offer that information without detaling my dislikes.

You certainly don't have to remember all of Grice's maxims -- when I was telling Andrew the other day that autistic people could benefit from them, not only could I only remember three of them, I was convinced that there only were three -- the point is that these aren't rules Grice is telling us to follow, but patterns he'd noticed in how people already behave.

But we're mostly not conscious of it, and that can lead us to being annoyed not just when this assumption of cooperation breaks down. Even if we can't fix the people around us, it sometimes helps to put our finger on why talking to them bugs us, and it definitely helps if we know what cooperation looks like.

Feel free to suggest more December topics for me if you like!

Comments

[silveradept]

Those are quite interesting maxims to learn about, and I can imagine them being extremely helpful to have if someone's brand of neurodiversity makes conversations more difficult to perform. Thank you!

[(Anonymous)]

This was helpful, thank you!

[syntaxofthings]

frack that was syntaxofthings (me if this logs me in).

[cosmolinguist]

Thanks for letting me know, and thanks for saying it was helpful! That's what I was aiming for. :)