How Speakers Negotiate Relations of Intimacy and Control Through Gossip

Mércia Santana Flannery

Georgetown University

This paper analyzes an event of gossip in a natural occurring conversation and illustrates how it can both propitiate intimacy between gossipers and, simultaneously, help to establish a relation of asymmetry, or competition, between gossipers and gossipee. In order to demonstrate these functions of gossip, this paper draws on previous work about this topic in Linguistics (i.e., Tannen, 1990, 1993; Guendouzi, 2001,) and on contributions from relevant work in related disciplines (i.e., Havilland, 1977, Spacks, 1985). Specifically, it uses a socio-interactional approach and takes contributions from discourse analysis and conversation analysis.

According to Tannen (1990:107) “talking about someone who is not there is a way of establishing rapport with someone who is there.” When people agree in their judgment about others, they “reinforce their shared values and world views.” Tannen (1990:113) also maintains that gossip provokes involvement in a similar way that providing details when telling a story does. According to Tannen (1989: 138), details refer to “common orientational material as names, dates, and names of places.” By telling gossip, and/or sharing details, people create a sense of being part of the discussed events. The author (1990:120) also discusses two views of gossip: as talk about someone and as talk against someone. As Tannen shows, “connection and status are operating at once” when a third party is brought to attention and discussed in a conversation. It may also happen that gossiping provides a channel through which people can pass their judgments and opinions about others and their actions. Thus, gossip works in two directions: creating a kind of ‘alliance’ between gossipers and enabling them to reflect about themselves in relation to others, “measuring who’s up who’s down” (Spacks, 1985:05).

Additionally, the person who tells the gossip can show sympathy towards the person talked about at the same time that she uses the event told to mark how different she would act, or how similar things would or not happen to her. Simultaneously, gossip also appears to be an event that demands that the participants involved share some degree of intimacy, which the event in itself may help to increase. These relations of intimacy and difference are discussed in this paper in terms of power and solidarity (Tannen, 1993; 2002).

The observations derived from this study are based in the analysis of an informal after-dinner conversation among four participants. This conversation was recorded in the researcher’s house and all the participants were aware of the audio recording. The participants were two American men (ages 34 and 41) and two women, an American and a Brazilian (ages 28 and 39). Through the analysis, this paper demonstrates how gossip can serve the double purpose of creating rapport, intimacy and involvement on one hand, at the same time as it reveals a judgment about the ones being talked about. The analysis presented in this paper focuses on the linguistic strategies used by the participants engaged in telling a story about a third non-present party. Specific linguistic devices and strategies such as the use of evaluation, questions, and constructed dialogue enable the speakers to negotiate their positions and transmit these two notions of intimacy and involvement on one side, and of judgment and control on the other.

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