Participants’ Choice of Reference Terms in “Natural” and “Elicited” Soap Opera Talk

 

Pamela Downing

Dept. of English

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

 

 

Participants’ Choice of Reference Terms in “Natural” and “Elicited” Soap Opera Talk

 

Although linguists since at least the time of de Saussure have concentrated on describing and accounting for the internal structural organization of grammatical systems, recent work by functionalist linguists has begun to reveal the motivations and sources for these grammatical patterns in the everyday social contexts in which language is used. This new work has highlighted the way in which frozen grammatical patterns develop in the social and linguistic contexts that necessitate their repeated use, yielding “grammars” that are not tidy, logical, and stable, but messy, inconsistent, and constantly evolving. Today, new studies are also beginning to reveal how deeply the use, and patterning, of language is tied in with other semiotic resources, such as gesture and gaze, that are used in conjunction with it.

            Much of the most interesting recent work in this vein has been done within the framework of “Conversation Analysis” (CA). CA practitioners, though they have long since moved beyond “conversation” to other forms of “talk-in-interaction,” have repeatedly insisted on the necessity of basing analyses on “natural” data that have not been produced as a result of the researcher’s efforts. While much of this work has been done within the disciplinary confines of sociology, this methodological caution seems equally relevant for linguists interested in probing the origins of “grammar” in “discourse.” If the “discourse” on which we base our studies is “unnatural” in some way, it is unlikely that we will discover the sources for the grammaticized resources of language.

            With an eye toward these issues, the current paper investigates the use of reference forms for characters used in “natural” vs. “elicited” soap opera talk. The data are taken from three sources:

1. Elicited conversations: audiotapes of a set of four conversations elicited from pairs of experimental subjects who were asked to watch soap opera episodes and then discuss them

2. Interviews: audiotapes of a set of (four) interviews in which the researcher

asked subjects to recount “what happened” in the soap opera episodes they had watched

            3. “Natural” conversations: the audiotape of a single naturally occurring conversation in which the subjects happened to discuss a soap opera they both watched regularly

While one might not expect that the differences among these three social settings would manifest themselves in all the “micro-“ linguistic elements of the talk, the principal finding of this paper is that the settings did “filter down” into the reference forms used. In this regard, the linguistic patterns visible in the “natural” conversation differed substantially from those found in the elicited forms of talk.

       * In the natural conversations, most characters (83%) were introduced by “recognitionals,” i.e., reference forms that indicate to the recipient that the referent being denoted is someone the recipient knows (about). Of those recognitionals, two thirds were proper names; the rest were common noun phrases such as those two women.. By contrast, in the interviews, even though the subjects knew the interviewer was familiar with the soap’s characters, only about 40% of the introductions were recognitionals.

            * In both the elicited conversations and interviews, speakers tended to use lots of relative clauses; these appeared in19% of the character introductions in the elicited conversation introductions, and 26% of the interview introductions, compared to only 3% in the natural conversation. In the elicited talk, relatives were often coupled with proper names to produce complex, multi-functional nominals (e.g., Neil, who from what I could gather, thinks Alexander is his son); these served to provide background information or advance the plot in addition to identifying the character in question.           

* In both the elicited conversations and interviews, speakers tended to introduce new characters with indefinite articles (a, some, this) that assumed no recipient knowledge of the referent. This was quite striking in the interviews, where the speakers knew that the interviewer had already seen the videotape whose plot they were recounting. By contrast, participants in the natural conversation often exploited their recipient’s presumed familiarity with the show, using evaluative and presupposition-ridden terms which their recipients showed no difficulty in de-coding,

e.g., A: What ever happened with … ugly Justin. And Fatty.

B: Oh: they got back together.

* In the natural conversation, the participants often switched among proper names to demonstrate their own familiarity with a particular character, while speakers in the elicited forms of talk tended to use the same name for a character throughout. These speakers also chose noun phrases that overtly eschewed any involvement with or knowledge of the characters (e.g., someone named Jack. Who I have no idea the relationship).

These and a number of other observed differences in the use of reference terms can readily be tracked to features of the different social contexts. In the natural conversation, the participants used their shared familiarity with the soap opera as a means of affirming their ongoing personal relationship – the soap opera segment was by far the longest and most successful segment of an awkward, topically choppy conversation. By contrast, the participants in the elicited conversations and interviews were temporary occupants of an unfamiliar social role (“experimental subject”), pre-occupied with recounting as much as they could of the plot of the soap opera episodes they had seen. These circumstances resulted in not only the patterns noted above, but also the use of some unusual constructions that were absent from the natural conversation (e.g., use of proper names with articles - There’s a Diana and a Roman.)

            These findings suggest that data from experimentally elicited talk, even when it sounds very “natural”, should be used with caution in attempting to ascertain the contours of the linguistic patterns that underlie the grammaticization of discourse-prominent structures. While such talk may not be “unnatural” for the academic social setting in which it is produced, neither is it identical to the “primordial” and ubiquitous forms of talk that have arguably motivated the structural contours of the “grammar” of English and other languages.