Tannen, D. (1989) : Ch2 - Involvement in discourse. From Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge University Press

 

______________________________________________

 

1. Repetition, dialogue, and imagery create involvement in discourse... strategies, shaped and elaborated in literary discourse are spontaneous and pervasive in conversation, because they reflect and create interpersonal involvement.

 

2. Gumpertz (1982, p.1) in Discourse Strategies:

 

AOnce involved in conversation, both speaker and hearer must actively respond to what transpires by signaling involvement, either directly through words or indirectly through gestures or similar nonverbal signals.@

 

3. Cross-cultural (people reared in the >same culture=, however, exhibit regional, ethnic, age, gender, class, and other social and individual differences):

 

AThere is a tendency to take for granted that conversational involvement exists, that interlocutors are cooperating, and that interpretative conventions are shared@ (p.4).

 

4. Tannen: five Americans and one native of London - conversational styles differ, and these differences led to subtle misunderstandings and misjudgments.

 

5. Prototypical spoken genre is characterized by fragmentation and involvement, while prototypical written genre is characterized by integration and detachment... Chafe (1985, p.116) notes three types of involvement in a conversation: self-involvement by the speaker; interpersonal involvement between speaker and hearer; and involvement of the speaker with what is being talked about.

 

6. Tannen=s sense of involvement: an internal, even emotional connection individuals feel which binds them to other people as well as to places, things, activities, ideas, memories, and words... not a given but something achieved.

 

7. Conversation is not a matter of two (or more) people alternately taking the role of speaker and listener, but rather that both speaking and listening include elements and traces of the other. Listening, in this view, is an active not a passive enterprise, requiring interpretation comparable to that required in speaking, and speaking entails simultaneously projecting the act of listening: In Bakhtin=s sense, all language is dialogic.

 

8. Conversation is Aa joint production.@ ... Not only is the audience a co-author, but the speaker is also a co-listener... no utterance, no word, can be spoken without echoing how others understand and have used it... Atalking with another person... is like climbing a tree that climbs back@.

 

9. Involvement - an aesthetic response... coherence, a sense of connectedness... being able to follow someone wherever they may go (and to see what they see on the way).

 

10. The elaboration of meaning through the play of familiar patterns: the eternal tension between fixity and novelty that constitutes creativity.

 

11. Poets (why banned by Plato): AYou were not asked to grasp their principles through rational analysis. Instead you submitted to the paedeutic spell@ - the effect of >total engagement= and >emotional identification= - involvement.

 

12. Tannen=s interest: comparison of written and spoken narratives: a written narrative that had been >cooked up=, rather >boiled down=.


13. Ordinary conversation and literary discourse have much in common.

 

15. Two levels: sound and rhythm, and mutual participation in sense making: i) strategies not features; ii) form levels to language working in many ways at once; iii) from merely sound and rhythm to musicality; iv) mutual participation to do with a response to scenes, and the power of scenes coming from images made up of details - music and scenes as triggering emotions (feelings, an inner re-living, re-feeling).

 

16. Friedrich (1986) AThe language parallax: linguistic relativism and poetic indeterminacy@

 

ALanguage is the symbolic process that mediates between, on the one hand, ideas/feelings and, on the other, the sounds produced by the tongue, larynx, and so forth. Poetry, analogously, is the symbolic process by which the individual mediates between the music of a natural language and the (nuances of) mythic meaning. To create felt consubstantiality between language music and myth is the master trope of poetry - >master= because it is superordinate to and in control over such lesser figures as image, metaphor, and paradox. And this master trope is unique, that is, it is diagnostic of poetry@ (p.39).

 

17. Language works in many ways at once. Sound and sense, music and meaning. Meaning is in a word=s >movement= (intonation - positions a speaker, and a listener).

 

18. Involvement: one becomes involved by being >moved= by another=s words over a >scenic landscape= of human places to go.... being >move3d= together.

 

Involvement strategies

 

Rhythmic synchrony

 

Scollon (1982)

 

AAs musicians use the term, ensemble refers to the coming together of the performers in a way that either makes or breaks the performance. It is not just being together, but the doing together. And so a performance of a string quartet can be faulted, no matter how impeccably the score has been followed, if a mutual agreement on tempos, tuning, fortes, and pianos has not been achieved. Ensemble in music refers to the extent to which performers have achieved one mind, or - to favor Sudnow (1979), one body - in the performance of their work. Of the elements which contribute to the achievement, tempo is the guiding element@ (p.342-3).

 

Repetition and variation

 

Phonemes

 

Morphemes

 

Phrases

 

Longer discourse sequences

 

Style figures of speech

 

Participation in sense-making

 

Indirectness/ellipsis/silence


Tropes

 

Constructed dialogue

 

Imagery and detail

 

Narrative

 

Involvement through linguistic strategies

 

Scenes and music in creating involvement

 

 

Neurological evidence

 

Involvement and emotion

 

Particularity

 

 

  To Return to Management Workshops