Creation And Destruction Of Understanding

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

The aim of this endeavour is to discover whether the variable of gender may alone dictate different conversational styles in male and female participants. Through the analysis of seven transcripts made on the basis of recordings of naturally-occurring cross-gender, all-male or all-female conversations I want to demonstrate that the variable of gender is indeed important, but it cannot act alone in the determination of fundamental differences in conversational styles.

The scope of this study ranges from the concept of language as a mobile entity under continuous change, to the power of language within dialogue in point of how personalities are rendered in talk.

The topic of gender and language research "crosses the boundaries of Linguistics into, inter alia, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, Cultural and Media Studies, Politics, History, Religious Studies and Education" (Sunderland, 2006: 56). So cross-gender talk-in-interaction is a very wide research area that has been dealt with by a great number of disciplines that seldom find mutual theoretical grounds.

Linguistic and sociological theory has often found models of male and female interaction. Some models of female interaction, based on White middle-class English speaking models, have proposed that "male speakers are socialized into a competitive style of discourse, while women are socialized into a more cooperative style of speech" (Coates, 1994: 72). Traditional models neglect one, several, or all of the following variables: men in general, women other than normative white middle class heterosexual females, homosexual speech, research contexts other than Anglo-American ones. These omissions lead to an insufficient contextualization of gender (Litosseliti, 2006: 40). Bucholtz warns to the danger that the use of the normative white, straight, middle-class female as provider of research data excludes many groups and practices. Research on the "good" example does not lead to a natural attribute, but to one constructed through the interplay of language and social expectation (1999). Consequently, I have chosen the Romanian research context in order to investigate a model of male/female interaction that was different from the Anglo-American one.

Susan Philips states that "it has always been easier to put forth the general idea of a difference in perspective, without falling into unsatisfactory statements that are easily criticized as overgeneralizations, or as essentializations, as, for example, in the views that women are more nurturing and more concerned about interpersonal relationships than men" (Philips, 2005: 261-262). Recent studies that no longer accept sweeping generalizations (Sunderland, 1994) call into question the notion that women are fundamentally interested in cooperative, face-saving interaction. Marjorie Harness Goodwin recommends that researchers look beyond White middle-class English speaking groups to diverse social and ethnic communities. She also advises researchers to provide the transcripts of the naturally occurring behaviour they study so that comparison may be performed between "types of turn shapes" or "principles of sequential organization" (Goodwin, 2005: 243-244).

Models of male/female verbal interaction might prove useful, but only to a certain point. Tannen states that getting the perception of the world in patterns helps us make sense of it, that predictions about people and things, about actions and also about verbal communication are necessary. However, the researcher further warns the reader that "this natural and useful ability to see patterns of similarity has unfortunate consequences. It is offensive to reduce an individual to a category, and it is also misleading. Dividing women and men into categories risks reinforcing this reductionism. Generalizations, while capturing similarities, obscure differences. Everyone is shaped by innumerable influences such as ethnicity, religion, class, race, age, profession, the geographical regions they and their relatives have lived in, and many other group identities – all mingles with individual personality and predilection" (Tannen, 2001: 16).

The title of this paper, "A theoretical and practical approach to gendered talk-in-interaction" encompasses the idea that the variable of gender is indeed important in the analysis of conversations. The title highlights the fact that the variable of gender is one of the variables that belong to the outside cultural context that needs to be taken into consideration when analysing talk-in-interaction.

An issue of utmost importance to my research is that the context (namely the outside socio-cultural variables) matters irrespective of the participants’ orientations to it during the conversation. After extensive literature reading, I decided to adopt the interactional sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis approach [1] where cultural characteristics are supposed to be relevant to the analysis whether or not the participants orient to them in the course of the dialogue.

Researchers have approached the topic of gendered verbal interaction using a number of research paths. Throughout this paper, I tend to favour the cultural differences explanation [2] . The radical feminism perspective can hardly be accepted since it analyzes "marriage as a patriarchal institution in which women have little agency or autonomy, a perspective that has the unfortunate effect of representing heterosexual women as colluding in their own oppression by entering willingly into a relationship of unequal power. Interactional sociolinguists complicate the radical-feminist position by pointing out that male communicative strategies in intimate relationships may not always be intended to dominate or silence women" (Bucholtz, 2005: 50).

Alice Freed, in a 2005 article entitled "Reflections on Language and Gender Research" points to the fact that although recent research in the field of language and gender points to denial of differences and promotion of similarities, to gender as no longer a priori category, public perceptions of the way women and men talk do not match the patterns that researchers have identified (2005: 700). "Researchers have substantiated again and again that speakers use language in creative and divergent ways depending on a wide range of factors including (but not limited to) setting and context, type of activity engaged in, group, social, and personal identity, topic of conversation, channel of communication, community of practice, audience, language repertoires of various sorts, economic and symbolic resources, political purpose, symbolic and actual resistance to various forms of oppression, relative rank, and nature of relationship to addressee" (Freed, 2005: 705). Despite the whole lot of scientific research conducted, the folklinguistic beliefs, the stereotypes remain awfully strong. Students that participate in scientific surveys, Freed remarks, report year after year the existence of the same gender stereotypes. On-line databases of popular, educational, and academic print media do not reflect the findings of the studies and research in language and gender studies made since the 1990s. Within the context of this huge discrepancy between the empirical sociolinguistic observations and the public views of language and gender, multiple questions on the future of research arise.

So, between the two extremes, the stereotyping dominance theory and radical feminism, the different cultures thesis of differences in conversational styles based on the category of gender, as one of several other socio-cultural variables, seemed the most appropriate to follow.

Motivation of the study

The first reason why I chose gendered talk-in-interaction in the Romanian language was that it represented an area that had not been investigated yet. Looking at studies in the Romanian language I noticed there was a gap regarding the analysis of gendered dialogue. The issue of construction of meaning in casual conversation had been tackled in a number of studies (Coposescu, 2002), but there was none that would address the variable of gender within the context of talk-in-interaction. So this paper aims at filling an important gap in the analysis of Romanian language data.

A second reason why I decided to explore this part of conversation analysis was that I found the eternal male/female struggle for communication intriguing. A topic of incessant human interest, dealt with by thousands of authors, and major source of both public and private disagreement, the male/female verbal fight demanded detailed research.

Aims of the study and research methodology

Dialogue is important in understanding and the spoken word has huge powers in society. Various authors have exploited both the negative and the positive values of language. This research focuses on the importance of dialogue for the discovery and creation of new meanings related to the interpretation of personality.

When I started reviewing the literature for the purpose of this paper, my initial aim was to focus on the way participants build meaning in casual conversation. Later on, when I formulated my research questions in order to start collecting, transcribing and analysing my data, I needed to narrow down the scope of my dissertation to gendered talk-in-interaction.

My purpose in this study on cross-gender interaction was to discover whether the conclusions that linguists came to while investigating cross-gender informal communication in the English language would also hold true for the Romanian language. What I wanted to find was whether the variable of gender was of paramount importance when exploring the construction of meaning in dialogue between male and female participants.

I also wanted to know whether the verbal fight or at least the disagreement that often arises in male/female conversations had its roots in different conversational styles or if there were other variables at stake.

The study of gendered casual conversation among Romanians aims at discovering whether the researcher can generalize upon the conclusions that he/she has drawn following various types of analyses, and whether they may label gendered verbal interactions according to one or the other cultural attitudes described in the literature.

The conclusion that I have reached is that any generalization about gender differences is limited to a specific group or community situated in a social context. Gender is indeed a very important variable that determines differences in conversational styles, but it is not the only one. The differences that arise are not the sole result of gender variation, but the outcome of multiple variables such as age, ethnic background, social status, political, cultural and religious environment.

For deeper insight into cross-gender verbal interaction I studied naturally occurring samples of talk-in-interaction among male and female friends of about 30 to 35 years of age, belonging to the University educated middle-class.

To analyse the transcribed samples, I used alternatively two research paths, Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis.

The research done within the framework of this paper could be labelled as exploratory since it deals with issues that have not yet been tackled in the Romanian language literature. To my knowledge, this is the only study focusing on the construction of meaning in gendered talk-in-interaction among Romanian language speaking participants.

One of the very few studies of naturally occurring face-to-face verbal interaction, my research has used both data that I have collected, transcribed and analysed myself, and conversations transcribed and assembled in a corpus of spoken Romanian language by L. Dascălu-Jinga (2002).

The Romanian participants in my case-study research behaved in a way that closely resembled the behaviour of English-speaking subjects described in the literature that I reviewed for the purpose of this investigation. Although the analysis of talk-in-interaction does no longer represent a novelty in the field of Romanian language research, the study of cross-gender conversations has not yet been performed for the Romanian language.

The theoretical background of my investigation includes ample inquiry into language and gender, linguistic sexism and stereotyping, an extensive survey of traditional and most recent views of feminism, all in the English language. The ample research done for the English language is paralleled by a scarcity of studies on private and public verbal interaction in the Romanian language (Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu, 2007, Dascălu-Jinga, 2002).

Relevance of the study

The findings of my research might be of help for both Romanian and other languages scholars belonging to a multiplicity of domains such as linguistics, sociology, psychology, who are interested in the male/female interactional construction of meaning.

This paper may also address larger general audiences that may benefit from a new perspective on a much discussed topic: the source of cross-gender conversational misunderstandings.

The structure of the study

This paper is organised in two parts, a theoretical and a practical one, and ten chapters.

Chapter one (this chapter) attempts at providing the scope of the research, the motivation of the study, the aims, the research methodology and the relevance of the study. The final section of chapter one represents an overview of the study, shortly summarizing each chapter.

Chapter two focuses on the idea that language is a living unit continuously changing. Thus the study of speech leads the researcher to the discovery of the hidden processes according to which speakers interact in a certain context.

The relationship between language, the thought processes and reality has been taken up by numerous scholars and, as a result, various theories have emerged. Philosophers of language such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Eugeniu CoÅŸeriu, Austin, Searle promote the idea that language and reality are interconnected; linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf claim that language determines thought; linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky affirms that language is innate and universal. The most recent question in the world of research is no longer whether language influences thought, but how it influences thought.

Since language and reality are complementary, it is obvious that the context in which participants utter their words matters for the purpose of the analysis of talk-in-interaction. This means that outside socio-cultural variables are of utmost importance in the analysis of conversation.

Having briefly outlined the concept of conversation in Chapter two, in Chapter three I describe in detail what casual conversation means and I explain how an apparently unsystematic piece of talk-in-interaction is actually highly organized and patterned.

In Chapter three I delineate the main methodological approaches to the study of casual conversation/talk-in-interaction: ethnomethodological, sociolinguistic, logico-philosophic and structural-functional.

Chapter four demonstrates that there are differences at the level of communicative expectations in both intercultural and cross-gender verbal communication. The emergence of Ethnopragmatics proves that theories on communication need to take into consideration cultural norms and ways of thinking, namely cultural scripts, otherwise risking to lose their validity. Gender ideologies follow the same pattern as they were found to be contained in cultural scripts (Philips, 2005).

Chapter five provides a definition of the term "gender" as it is used in the present paper. It further gives an overview of the research so far, starting with the early study belonging to Jespersen, on the inferiority of women, going through Trudgill’s research on sociolinguistic variation and finishing with the most recent research belonging to authors such as Jane Sunderland, Lia Littoseliti and Ruth Wodak who regard gender as a category that is performed, among others, in speech. Chapter five reviews main perspectives on gendered talk-in-interaction, starting from the traditional, dominance and difference theories, going to third-wave feminism, including relevant examples and explanations.

This chapter underlines the fact that, whereas past approaches were characterized by a static conception of distinct male and females identities, recent studies have rejected the gender dichotomy and have defined it as a process. In the study of gender and language we witness a shift in perception starting from generalization and oversimplification based on stereotypical perception of the dichotomous category of gender to the acceptance of variation and diversity, to a new perception of gender as dependant on context.

Chapter six deals with variation studies according to which different social groups tend to use different linguistic forms. Men and women are said to belong to different groups, consequently they would use different forms.

Meaning is constructed differently along the imaginary lines that divide groups by gender, social status, ethnic or regional background and so on. This is why, when members belonging to different groups interact conversationally, meaning is often distorted or lost.

Another reason why understanding may be lost is the ambiguity and polysemy of linguistic strategies, phenomenon which I also describe in chapter six.

Finally, I discuss the use of politeness and face-saving strategies. Participants may either want to exert power or show solidarity in conversation, they must always obey the tact maxim and be careful about preserving their interlocutors’ face since this is the method by means of which they can preserve theirs.

In Chapter seven I first review the two overarching research questions together with their respective subordinate research questions (three for each main RQ) that guide the analytical part of my dissertation. Then I describe the process of data collection, transcription and analysis, followed by the methodology that I use for the purpose of this investigation.

Chapter eight is based on the analysis of an excerpt where two male and three female participants interact conversationally. I am trying to demonstrate that the variable of gender is important in talk-in-interaction and that it can be considered even when the participants never overtly orient to it during the dialogue. The same piece of dialogue is approached from two different analytical perspectives: the CA and the CDA perspectives.

Chapter nine illustrates patterns of gendered conversational styles with the help of carefully chosen excerpts of naturally occurring conversations between male and female participants (section 9.2.), all-male (section 9.3.) and all-female speakers (section 9.4.).

Chapter ten starts by summarising the findings of my research in cross-gendered talk-in-interaction, shows the limitations that the study has been subjected to and finally stresses on the implications that the present study may have for further research.

PART I: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

LANGUAGE. DIALOGUE. COMMUNICATION. POWER OF LANGUAGE

Introduction

This chapter aims at demonstrating that language is a living entity, that it has tremendous power in the world. This power comes to life in dialogue, the creative process that invents and re-invents matter. Participants build their social selves and social networks when uttering words in conversation. This is why Conversation Analysis needs to study the words when they come to life, in naturally-occurring talk-in-interaction. The researcher needs to capture the life of words so as to come closer to understanding social human nature.

Various linguists and thinkers have been preoccupied with the relationship between language, thought and reality. Some claimed that language anchors thought (Boas). Sapir went even further and affirmed that language and thought mutually influence each other. Determinists maintained that the words we possess would determine the things we know (Whorf). The most recent question in the world of research is no longer whether language influences thought, but how it influences thought.

Since language and reality are complementary, it is obvious that the context in which participants utter their words matters for the purpose of the analysis of talk-in-interaction. This means that outside socio-cultural variables are of utmost importance in the analysis of conversation.

The spoken word: creation and destruction of understanding

Language is created in the process of interaction. Eugeniu CoÅŸeriu who introduces the notion of integral linguistics (1996), gives tremendous importance to dialogue in understanding. Human interaction is at the basis of language evolution and change; nevertheless, communication has been found to adopt innumerable faces and to produce various outcomes.

Talk is at the same time creative and destructive: the spoken word is given, by the simple fact of being uttered, an exceptional value, it becomes so powerful that it can forge relationships, it can bring about peace and war, love or hatred, it can build, give life or murder.

Amélie Nothomb in "Métaphysique des tubes" thus muses upon the importance of the spoken word, upon the tremendous power of language; she uses the metaphor of a child who realizes how things come into being or get greater or lesser importance by simply uttering their names. A god-like, fantastic child who, during the stage prior to speaking has knowledge of the whole world, starts building reality through her first words.

So, beginning in early childhood we do things with words as Austin said, we build and destroy things and ideas. Human interaction through conversation can be a way of building the world, but also, as the authors of the theatre of the absurd so well demonstrate, a way of destroying understanding and language.

Eugen Ionescu together with Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov signal a crisis of civilization, of language, of literature, trying to find a way of expression for what they think to be hell itself. Ionescu tries to explain that the falling apart of language, the stereotype of consciences and the dehumanisation are forms of death. Ionescu does not consider the word an instrument of action and he unveils the powerlessness of art, of speech, of language, while human existence altogether seems to fall into nothingness. As the theatre cannot do without the word, Ionescu exploits it in order to make the shortcomings of language explicit (1958). An example in point is the play "The Chairs", a visual play, where the pointless chat of the two characters tells us infinitely less than their anxiety expressed through body language, through their impossibility to compose themselves. The death of language into stereotype is in fact the death of meaning and of humanity altogether eventually. Another example is "The Bald Soprano", where human life is deeply artificial and false; the lives of the two couples, lost in banality and cliché have lost meaning; boredom comes out of repeating over and over again the same speech stereotypes that have no meaning any longer. What they utter is the negation of the word, an attack against ideatic content, a murder of meaning, a simulacrum of life, what they do is a parody of action, their agreements are misunderstandings, their relationships are faces of acknowledged alienation and indifference. Words, instead of placing personalities together, pull them apart. There is no idea to be communicated, characters are enclosed inside the frontiers of their experiences as they would be inside failure and any human action is performed out of ridiculous self-importance, ending in uselessness, within the disconcerting mixture of tragedy and comedy. A proof in point is the orator’s suffering moan at the end of "The Chairs", with no words to reveal the cause of his affliction.

Whereas the authors of the theatre of the absurd consider that language cannot render meanings, that the word is crushed under the debris of misunderstanding and uselessness, believers in the power of the spoken word formulate other opinions. Eugeniu CoÅŸeriu, Mikhail Bakhtin or H.P. Grice are some of the advocates of the value of language, of the importance of dialogue and interaction in the construction of new meanings in human life. Starting from this point of view, dialogue has been considered revelatory for the discovery and creation of new meanings connected to the interpretation of personality.

Grice asserts, in the Cooperative Principle, that in dialogue, participants tacitly cooperate with a view to creating meanings. From Bakhtin we find that it is not only the voices of the actual participants that make meanings in conversations, but that one single line hides two different voices (1978: 158).

These views on language and interaction are fascinating and throw a different and somehow positive light upon the concept of conversation. They come as fresh and healthy ideas as opposed to the gloomy hue that the authors of the theatre of the absurd cast upon dialogue and life.

CoÅŸeriu pleads for a start from the authentic product, namely speech, since there is nothing in language that did not exist in speech before (1999: 28); so, although the object of linguistics is "langue" (the linguistic system), the researcher cannot ignore "parole", the activity of uttering words. CoÅŸeriu uses the two Saussurian terms to show that the linguistic act does not exclusively belong to one individual, but it is both an individual and a social act. It is an individual act since the individual renders in spoken form a novel intuition that is exclusively his, and it is a social act since the speaker recreates the way of expressing himself according to previously existing models.

Then, the analysis of verbal communication is not supposed to study rigid text samples that linguists can create, but instances of naturally occurring conversation. Discussing the data that the linguist should study, Stubbs asserts that "beyond the tidy and well pruned bonsai trees of syntax lies the jungle: menus, road signs, advertisements, propaganda, guarantees, recipes, instructions, lectures, speeches, jokes, news bulletins, arguments and the like, not to mention discussions, conversations and novels" (Stubbs, 1983: 5).

Concepts: conversation, Conversation Analysis

Language is changing incessantly, language means freedom and creative act (CoÅŸeriu, 1996: 68). A Chomskyan ideal model, of an ideal speaker and listener, that leaves aside the issue of language variety would be inappropriate here (CoÅŸeriu, 1996: 143). Language is extremely complex, with physical and physiological, psychic and logical, individual and social issues that cannot be ignored (CoÅŸeriu, 1999).

In "Sincronie, diacronie şi istorie", Coşeriu states that language changes only to continue functioning as such (1997: 27); he sees it both as "energéia", creative process that invents and re-invents matter and as "ergon", product, or finite act (1996, 1997, 1999). Languages are phenomena under a permanent process of creation by individuals, each speaker being a part of this dynamic process of language creation, like a grain of sand which is so small but so important for the pile. Within the dialogue, speaker and listener interact, language is an asset, and the result of speech is language again, but this time it is a concrete manifestation of this asset in speech (1997: 70). While analysing dialogue, we are to witness linguistic change, since this happens through the passage of linguistic modes belonging to one speaker to the interlocutor’s knowledge (1997: 70).

Thus, the basis for analysis should not be some ready made texts, but real excerpts coming from speakers of a particular language. One should not start from the rule to attain speech, but from speech, from usage to acquire the rule. It is only this way we can keep in our research language as living unit, as "energéia", not as a frozen unit or product, only "ergon". Eugeniu CoÅŸeriu, in a footnote of "Sincronie, diacronie ÅŸi istorie", remarks: "Dacă semnificaÅ£iile s-ar afla toate în limbă, obiectul vorbirii ar înceta să mai fie infinit ÅŸi vorbirea însăşi ar înceta să mai fie o activitate cu adevărat liberă, adică creaÅ£ie de noi semnificaÅ£ii. De aceea, eroarea celor care aspiră să construiască limbi perfecte ÅŸi complete, cu semnificate definite o dată pentru totdeauna, este totală: ei îşi asumă o sarcină absurdă ÅŸi inutilă, caci pretind să transforme vorbirea în altceva decât ceea ce este" (1997: 43) [3] .

The target of conversation analysis would be, taking into consideration Coşeriu’s distinction between language and speech, the study of the way in which language turns into speech in order to become language again. "Language" is incessantly being recreated, remodelled through speech: the linguistic act is the realization of a previous language, but at the same time it is an element of a new system, slightly different, to whose coming into being it fully contributes (2004: 23).

How do speakers of a certain language communicate, what is the process of correctly exchanging lines in conversation? There is a certain norm inside a society, and speakers produce utterances according to this norm, identify utterances belonging to the norm or swerving from it. Coşeriu says that speakers are fully aware of the system and of the so-called language rules. They know not only what they want to say, but also how to express it since otherwise they couldn’t talk (1997: 54). Participants know how to express their own personalities within the dialogue (and here Coşeriu uses the terms "cognitio clara vel confusa") (1997: 52). We then draw the conclusion that through "cognitio clara vel confusa" participants succeed in using the language in such a way as to reach a subconscious purpose. Negociation of roles in the dialogue is done by turn-taking, and the latter is done with the help of language. What a complex process and still so naturally and easily used by any native speaker!

Conversation Analysis settles itself as a purpose to follow the lead of this process, starting from the result, namely the authentic text, to the deepest roots, the minimal discourse units so as to discover the way in which one may reach this result. It also provides a powerful methodology for documenting how people position themselves relative to each other in their daily conversations.

Speakers are aware of the "inner" language rules, of what is "right", of what is appropriate at the text level depending on the interlocutor, as it is not the same thing to talk to a child or to an adult, to a woman or to a man, or to an elderly person (CoÅŸeriu,1996: 19). In the same way, this "saber expresivo" helps participants recognize members of a certain community according to the way they speak and pass judgements (most often negative ones) on interlocutors (CoÅŸeriu,1996: 18-20).

Another important aspect, relevant to conversation analysis, is the notion of context with CoÅŸeriu. Words bear various meanings in language that could be used in different ways, whereas it is only inside discourse that they refer to something specific and are given real significance (1996: 56). Words become different in context, they serve totally different purposes depending on who uses them and on how, when and where they are uttered. CoÅŸeriu says that "în lingvistica textului [...] unităţile de sens [...] se combină unele cu altele ÅŸi [...] dau mereu sensuri de ordin superior" (1996: 58). [4] 

In conversation, smaller units combine into turns that combine into chunks to reveal the meaning of the dialogue. Interpretation starts from the smallest units, such as the clause and reaches larger units, so context is important for the overall meaning to come to light.

Dan Sperber, in an article entitled "How do we communicate?" states that our thoughts are revealed through the way we interact, either whether we do it through body language or spoken or written words; interaction shows who we are and what we want to achieve. Within the framework of a dialogue, it is only by linking the lines in a certain context that we can understand what the interlocutor wants to communicate; there is thus a difference between "sentence meaning" and "speaker’s meaning". The latter is always deeper than the former and richer in implicit significance or connotation. A sentence such as "It’s late." may be interpreted in a variety of meanings, depending on the external circumstances of its uttering. He gives the example of a conversation in an airport where a woman tells this simple sentence to her interlocutor. "It’s late" might be referring to a variety of subjects: the arrival or departure of the plane could be late, a letter she was expecting might be late, or spring might be late. It might be late in the afternoon, or in the day, or in her life. When overhearing this utterance, and only considering "sentence meaning", we are not going to understand what she intends to say. It is only participants who may infer the right meaning and thus understand what the interlocutor wants to communicate. It is thus clear that meanings of lines within conversation can only be grasped when there is a context, when we become aware of the overall image, of the circumstances of the dialogue.

With the help of conversation, people manage to communicate much more than they encode and decode through language, much more than they utter; thus conversation proves to be a tool of utmost importance in finding the depths of the human being.

Mey in "Pragmatics" gives another example highlighting the centrality of making the difference between "sentence meaning" and "speaker’s meaning". To assess line (1) we need to be aware of the special conversational circumstances:

It’s getting late, Mildred.

Are you really that bored?

Do you want to go home?

So?

All these answers (2 to 4) may be correct in various different circumstances (Mey,1993: 250).

Neglect of context may give rise to misunderstandings at the level of participants; for example, this might be the case if a highly elaborate answer were given in response to a question that may have no other purpose than phatic communication, such as "How are you?". This is even clearer if we consider the case of intercultural communication. Here too we can recall Grice’s Cooperative Principle that presupposes that participants adopt cooperative interactional behaviours in order to facilitate communication (1975: 45).

Mey draws attention to the fact that text, conversation and discourse are not synonymous terms. It is practice, in the sense of "active creation of meaning" that "makes discourse different from mere text, or even conversation". "Discourse is a function that transcends the individual user : by its creation and re-creation of society’s bonds, it enables the single individual to exist and to co-exist with other individuals" (Mey, 1993: 208-209).

CoÅŸeriu also refers to this situation: "vorbitorul poate chiar să renunÅ£e la o bună parte din "ÅŸtiinÅ£a" sa, aÅŸa cum se întâmplă în vorbirea cu străinii, ÅŸi totdeauna modifică, într-o anumită măsură, realizarea modelelor sale, ca să uÅŸureze înÅ£elegerea, pentru ca celălalt să înÅ£eleagă." (1997: 68). [5] 

Mikhail Bakhtin, in a study made as early as 1934, so a long time before the advent of pragmatics as a science, underlines the fact that participants cooperate in dialogue: "Discursul viu, aparÅ£inând limbajului vorbit, este orientat nemijlocit spre viitorul discurs - răspuns: el provoacă răspunsul, îl anticipează ÅŸi vine în întâmpinarea lui. Formându-se în atmosfera a ceea ce e dinainte spus, discursul este, în acelaÅŸi timp, determinat de ceea ce n-a fost încă exprimat, dar forÅ£at ÅŸi deja prevăzut de cuvântul de răspuns. AÅŸa se întâmplă în orice dialog viu" (1982: 135). [6] 

Bakhtin forwards the thesis that it is not language that lays the basis of conversation, but the other way round. Understanding language outside dialogue is only a part of linguistic perception, only an abstract portion outside the living language we find in interaction.

Language is in conclusion a living entity that constantly changes and helps us communicate and be a part of the interacting universe we live in. Authors like CoÅŸeriu, Bakhtin, Grice or Austin help us understand that the word is a powerful instrument that actually performs actions and forces new reality on us; the very message that writers like Ionescu or Beckett intended to reveal is that language is powerful, so powerful in fact that it can forge or ruin existence.

The living language and reality

As we cannot live without words since they are the only link between our minds and the exterior, the idea has been forwarded that they shape life to the wishes of our minds. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a one-way theory according to which it is only language that anchors thought, never the other way round. Franz Boas, considered the founder of anthropology in the United States, studied the Native American languages from many different linguistic families, and discovered that they were different from the standard Semitic and Indo-European languages studied by most European scholars. Boas realized how greatly ways of life and grammatical categories may vary from a place to another. As a result he came to hold that the culture and lifeways of a people are reflected in their language. Continuing Boas’ work, Edward Sapir reached the conclusion that language does not merely mirror culture and habitual action, but that language and thought mutually influence one another.

Almost verging upon determinism, the words we possess would determine the things that we can know. Linguistic determinists claim that the structures, hierarchies, and hidden associations of our individual human languages determine the conclusions that we reach in our logic, the aspirations of our lives, and all our emotional content. Literature gives us a hint about this topic too. A striking example of linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, notes that the true purpose of Oceania’s official language, Newspeak, is to reshape the English language so it is impossible to commit thoughtcrime. Many words are made obsolete to grant the Party a universally narrow way of thinking. In this case, Orwell says that if humans cannot form the words to express the ideas underlying a revolution, then they cannot revolt. All of the theory of Newspeak is aimed at eliminating such words. For example, bad has become ungood, and the concept of freedom has been removed altogether over time.

Whorf further refines the scientific findings and frames his conclusion thus: "We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language [...] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated" (1956: 212-214).

By means of an analysis of the differences between English and the Hopi language, Whorf prepared the ground for research in the area of the relationship between language, thought and reality. This would be done through close analysis of grammatical structure, rather than through an account of the differences between, say, vocabulary items in a language.

Later on, linguistic theories of the 1960s - such as those proposed by Noam Chomsky - focused on the innateness and universality of language. As a result, Whorf’s work fell out of favour. Nevertheless, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has greatly influenced most feminist language activists who, based on it, have become advocates of language change as a measure for achieving a more balanced representation of women and men in language. Taking linguistic action to improve the plight of women has been seen as an important part of women’s liberation. The interactionist view of language and reality is based on the belief that language shapes and reflects social reality. A most extreme strategy that derives from this view is causing linguistic disruption, achieved through various forms of linguistic creativity including "breaking morphological rules, as in herstory (based on history), or grammatical conventions, such as the generic use of the pronoun she; using alternative spellings, as in wimmin, LeserInnen (female readers); or inverting gender stereotypes, as in ‘MrX, whose thick auburn hair was immaculately coiffed, cut a stunning figure when he took his seat in Parliament for the first time since his election.’" (Pauwels, 2005: 555).

The most extreme opposing position - that language has absolutely no influence on thought - is widely considered to be false (Gumperz: introduction to Gumperz, 1996). But the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language determines thought, is also considered to be incorrect.

The most common view is that the truth lies somewhere in between the two. Current linguists, rather than studying whether language affects thought, are studying how it affects thought. There has been a shift in recent research on language and gender regarding assumptions about language: language does not simply reflect social reality, but it is also constitutive of it "through an ongoing process of negotiation, modification and restatement in which all speakers, writers, listeners and readers are involved" (Litosseliti, 2006: 3). Litosseliti, in the 2006 Gender and Language: Theory and Practice gives several examples for the reader to understand better this process of construction of reality. Since one person’s "terrorist" is another person’s "freedom fighter" depending on the religious, national or personal point of view, the conclusion may be drawn that language shapes how we see ourselves and the world. Likewise, a person can be strong-minded, obstinate, or pigheaded, the same reality being expressed, but on different undertones (Lakoff, 2004: 104). Depending on the situation, reality has been reconceptualised in countless ways: the "killing of people" has been alternatively called "action", "severe measures", "evacuating", "rendering harmless", "war" has been renamed "conflict", "killing fields" have been renamed "free fire zones" and the "killing of civilians" has been reconceptualised as "collateral damage". These reconceptualisations help constitute particular versions of events and demonstrate that neutral language does not exist and that people make continuous choices when they speak in order to render the version of reality they desire. We never make our linguistic choices randomly and what we say when we say it depends on factors such as: the particular social occasion, the medium (spoken or written), who argues, for what purpose, age, sex, education, race, class, religion and the participants’ expectation of the communication situation. The same happens in the case of sexist language where the use of phrasing such as "male nurse" or "female doctor" or "lady doctor" constitutes a specific discriminatory version of the social world. This perception of reality that is restricted by languages is also explicit in the case of gender issues. Whereas in English there is a choice between three ways to address a woman: Miss, Mrs and Ms, Romanian has only two: doamna and domnişoara.

R.T. Lakoff, in the introduction to Language and Woman’s Place asserts that "language uses us as much as we use language" (1975: 39), and she further explains that there is a direct and rule-governed connection between linguistic form, social circumstance and psychological attitude of speakers. She claims that language is a diagnostic and that the choice of vocabulary is the most important element that defines our personalities besides paralinguistic elements, such as motion, facial expression, intonation, pitch, and expressions of personal style, such as dress, makeup or hairstyle. "Language isn’t just words, it reveals our selves to the world: it is, as Chomsky famously put it, a window into the mind" (Lakoff, 2004: 104).

Conclusion

In this chapter I have drawn a larger picture of the area where my research is situated: the living language, language in talk-in-interaction. I have demonstrated that language acquires enormous power while it is being used in verbal exchanges.

I have also reviewed several approaches to the relationship between language, reality and thought. I have demonstrated that the living language creates social relationships, but at the same time, outside socio-cultural variables determine language in use and what I call in the following chapters conversational style.