Verbal Communication

Andrea Rocci, Louis de Saussure, Andrea Rocci, Louis de Saussure

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783110394696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Common sense tells us that verbal communication should be a central concern both for the study of communication and for the study of language. Language is the most pervasive means of communication in human societies, especially if we consider the huge gamut of communication phenomena where spoken and written language combines with other modalities, such as gestures or pictures. Most communication researchers have to deal with issues of language use in their work. Classic methods in communication research - from content analysis to interviews and questionnaires, not to mention the obvious cases of rhetorical analysis and discourse analysis - presuppose the understanding of the meaning of spontaneous or elicited verbal productions. Despite its pervasiveness, verbal communication does not currently define one cohesive and distinct subfield within the communication discipline.
The Handbook of Verbal Communication seeks to address this gap. In doing so, it draws not only on the communication discipline, but also on the rich interdisciplinary research on language and communication that developed over the last fifty years as linguistics interacted with the social sciences and the cognitive sciences. The interaction of linguistic research with the social sciences has produced a plethora of approaches to the study of meanings in social context - from conversation analysis to critical discourse analysis, while cognitive research on verbal communication, carried out in cognitive pragmatics as well as in cognitive linguistics, has offered insights into the interaction between language, inference and persuasion and into cognitive processes such as framing or metaphorical mapping.
The Handbook of Verbal Communication volume takes into account these two traditions selecting those issues and themes that are most relevant for communication scholars. It addresses background matters such as the evolution of human verbal communication and the relationship between verbal and non-verbal means of communication and offers a an extensive discussion of the explicit and implicit meanings of verbal messages, with a focus on emotive and figurative meanings. Conversation and fundamental types of discourse, such as argument and narrative, are presented in-depth, as is the key notion of discourse genre. The nature of writing systems as well as the interaction of spoken or written language with non-verbal modalities are devoted ample attention.
Different contexts of language use are considered, from the mass media and the new media to the organizational contexts. Cultural and linguistic diversity is addressed, with a focus on phenomena such as multilingual communication and translation.
A key feature of the volume is the coverage of verbal communication quality. Quality is examined both from a cognitive and from a social perspective. It covers topics that range from to the cognitive processes underlying deceptive communication to the methods that can be used to assess the quality of texts in an organizational context.

IV.Types of discursive activities

Jean-Louis Dessalles

11Narration and reasoning, from structure to biological function

Abstract: Human conversation has a particular structure that bears no resemblance with any other known communication system. People’s talking comes in two forms: narratives and collective argumentative reasoning. This characteristic conversational structure cannot be fortuitous. Conversation is a costly behaviour, if only by the time and energy it demands. Surprisingly, there have been few attempts to relate conversational structure to any function it may have. This chapter illustrates conversational structure with examples and explores the issue of its purpose.

Keywords: conversation, narratives, argumentation, evolution, biological function

1Introduction

Verbal communication is what makes the most obvious difference between homo sapiens and other animals. The time we devote to it is disproportionate. Spending about six hours a day (Mehl & Pennebaker 2003) in verbal activities, speaking some 16,000 words on average per individual (Mehl et al. 2007) seems ridiculous. What is so essential about talking that we devote so much time and energy to it? Strangely enough, this issue about the function of verbal communication has rarely been addressed. What is even more surprising is that there have been very few attempts to relate the structure of verbal communication to any supposed biological function it may have. This chapter proposes precisely to do this. I will consider the two main conversational modes, narration and argumentative reasoning, and illustrate them with examples. I will then observe that these two components of verbal behavior can be linked to proximal functions, which include the maximization of unexpectedness. Lastly, I will consider the issue of determining the possible ultimate (i.e. biological) function of narration and of argumentative reasoning.

2The human conversational behaviour

Human conversation is characteristic. It has no equivalent in nature (Hauser et al. 2014). Animal communication is most often manipulative (Krebs & Dawkins 1984) or consists in specialized costly displays (Zahavi & Zahavi 1997). There are wellknown exceptions, such as communication among social insects such as bees and ants (von Frisch 1967; Ryabko & Reznikova 2009), but these exceptions are all specialized communicative devices designed to achieve material goals, such as locating food sources. In most cases, the repertoire of signs is limited to less than a few dozens. We cannot exclude the possibility that some cetacean species make use of extremely rich communication systems, but for now there is no evidence of any elaborate analogy in form and function with our own. Some primate species spontaneously combine two meaningful signs to produce new meanings (Arnold & Zuberbühler 2006; Ouattara et al. 2009). However, there is no strong evidence that this ability, which mainly concerns innate signals, may be considered as a precursor of human verbal communication, even in an embryonic form (Hauser et al. 2014).

Human conversation has no equivalent in the technical world either. Our machines do communicate large amounts of data. They use definite protocols designed to achieve efficiency, i.e. to maximize the rate of error-free data transmission. These protocols bear no similarity with human conversation. In comparison, our way of communicating appears incredibly inefficient. Not at the level of speech: we can recognize more than 15 phonemes per second in a noisy acoustic environment, a feat that machines have not yet achieved in a reliable way. But what people do with this complex machinery seems desperately disappointing. People use many words, often in a repetitive manner, to make a point that can be summarized in one or two sentences. It seems that the conversational bandwidth is used in a way that any engineer would consider absurd. Verbal communication would be indeed very different if it were designed to maximize information transfer.

We will not conclude that conversation is inefficient, nor that it is a pointless activity, that we talk just because it is pleasurable, just to fill up the time. On the contrary, each spontaneous conversation should be regarded as a marvel. As will be suggested here, none of the elements mentioned in a conversational move are there by chance. They all contribute to making the move locally optimal, even if what is optimized is definitely not the information transfer rate.

Since the aim of this chapter is to associate possible biological functions to verbal behaviour, we only consider spontaneous verbal interactions. In particular, the word ‘conversation’ will be used in a restricted way, meaning chatter. We will therefore exclude from our scope the various institutionalized language games, such as formal argumentative debating, task-oriented dialogues (e.g., hotel booking dialogue), formal negotiations or written texts, that have attracted much attention in several fields of study on language and discourse (Walton & Macagno 2007). Spontaneous chatter makes up by far the major part of our six hour daily interaction time (Mehl & Pennebaker 2003). It could be thought to have a more complex structure than formal dialogues, due to the absence of institutionalized rules that limit the participants’ freedom. From a cognitive perspective, things turn out however to be simpler.

A cognitive approach to spontaneous conversation considers the evolution of beliefs and desires throughout the interaction, whereas the participants’ intentions are pushed into the background. From this perspective, the way utterances are linked one to each other is almost independent from who uttered them. For instance, self-answers make soliloquies sometimes hard to distinguish from dialogues. The main concern is to know what makes the content of an utterance acceptable. It is to predict the conditions in which saying that the carpet is red is appropriate or, on the contrary, would lead to an expression of incomprehension like “So what?” (Labov 1997).

This cognitive perspective offers a simplified description of conversation. Spontaneous verbal interaction seem to come in two distinct modes: narration and argumentative reasoning (Bruner 1986; Dessalles 2000). This partition echoes a classical distinction observed in written texts, where narration is marked by specific features such as the preterit in French (Feuillet 1985). Even if the narrative and the argumentative modes are sometimes intertwined in actual conversations, they can often be observed in pure form during several minutes of spontaneous verbal interaction. But the main reason to distinguish these two modes is that they correspond to different cognitive mechanisms. Together, these two conversational modes fill up more than 90% of spontaneous verbal communication (Dessalles 2008a). We will consider them in turn.

3Conversational narratives

The importance of narration in spontaneous conversation, despite a few precursor studies (Labov 1997; Sacks 1992; Polanyi 1979; Tannen 1984), has not been properly acknowledged until recently (Norrick 2000). One possible reason is that people do not tell stories in unnatural conditions, when they are observed by scientists and asked to behave spontaneously. People almost systematically tell stories to friends or family, but less often to strangers. Narratives may occupy from 25% (Dessalles 2008a) up to 40% (Eggins & Slade 1997) of conversational time. Conversational narratives most often come in clusters, in what Tannen called story rounds (Tannen 1984).

Before the turn of the century, few studies had attempted to describe spontaneous conversational narratives from a cognitive perspective. Most studies concentrated on learned or written narratives, which result from a long elaboration process. We are dealing here with spontaneous narratives, in which the speaker holds the ground for seconds or minutes, telling a past event with the hope that listeners will find it interesting. Quite often, the story is told for the first time and its structure is designed in an on-going process. How? Some studies in the Conversational Analysis domain offered detailed descriptions of spontaneous narratives. However, the ones cited above are among the few that attempted to address the issue of interest. Knowing what makes a narrative interesting to interlocutors cannot be properly solved by limiting oneself to studying their ‘surface’ (structural schemas, style, …). Interest is a cognitive phenomenon that requires a description in terms of knowledge, desires, expectations. Let’s illustrate this with a few examples.

3.1The nude model

A conversational narrative is about an event that, supposedly, has really happened. It is easy to recognize a narrative by the fact that the four W’s (When, Where, What, Who) get generally instantiated as the story develops. Moreover, as we will see, a narrative has a point, which becomes clear when the story reaches its climax (Tannen 1989). Consider the following conversation (adapted from Norrick 2000, p. 55–56; transcription details omitted; emphasis added).

Brianne:	It was just about two weeks ago. And then we did some figure drawing. Everyone was kind of like, “oh my God, we can’t believe it.” We – y’know, Midwest College, y’know,
[…]
Brianne:	like a … nude models and stuff. And it was really weird, because then, like, just last week, we went downtown one night to see a movie, and we were sitting in [a restaurant], like downtown, waiting for our movie, and we saw her in the [restaurant], and it was like, “that’s our model” (laughing) in clothes
Addie:	(laughs) Oh my God.
Brianne:	we were like “oh wow.” It was really weird. But it was her. (laughs)
Addie:	Oh no. Weird.
Brianne:	I mean, that’s weird when you run into somebody in Chicago.
Addie:	yeah.

This conversation is about a coincidence. The person that Brianne encountered by chance has certain unique characteristics: she is that very person that posed in the nude for a figure drawing lesson Brianne had attended a week before. Our intuition tells us many things about what makes this story interesting. Let us comment on the elements that Brianne included in her narrative.

–Just last week: This temporal mention is by no means fortuitous. Interest would drop down if the same story was told in the same conditions months after the fact. Conversely, the excitement due to such an event is maximal at the moment of its occurrence or when it is reported shortly after. This does not preclude the possibility of telling old stories, but to be mentioned, old facts require some strong thematic connection which is dispensable in the case of recent events.

–Just about two weeks ago: The time interval between the two encounters with the model is an important parameter. Interest would be weaker if the interval had been of one month or one year instead of only one week. The impact of the story would have been greater, conversely, if the second encounter had occurred just two hours after the class.

–Nude model: The model’s nudity is essential to the story. With a dressed model, the story would be much poorer indeed, as it would lose its exceptional character.

–In clothes: Brianne needs to underline the obvious contrast between the two encounters.

–Midwest College: Brianne makes it explicit that figure drawing with a nude model is a truly exceptional situation in such an institution. Interest would lessen if Brianne was attending an art school with regular life drawing.

–It was her: The actual presence of the model in the restaurant is crucial. The story would be much poorer if the person seen in the restaurant had just been looking like the nude one, but was not her.

–Chicago: The size of the city matters here, as the second encounter would have been more likely in a small town.

–We saw her: Brianne reports the event as a first-hand story. The same anecdote would appear much less interesting to Addie if it had happened to one of Brianne’s neighbors rather than to herself.

Among these story elements, two are obvious to the addressee: the fact that the model is dressed in the restaurant, and the fact that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface to Handbooks of Communication
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. Verbal communication: Fundamentals
• II. Explicit and implicit verbal communication
• III. Conversation, dialogue and mutual understanding
• IV. Types of discursive activities
• V. Verbal communication across media and contexts
• VI. Verbal communication quality
• Biographical sketches
• Index
• Footnotes