Excerpts from Goffman's Forms of Talk

Forms of Talk

Erving Goffman

University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1992 (first edition 1981)

ISBN 0-8122-1112-X

Note: Citations are marked in blue (all highlighted text inside citations due to the authors themselves); my own comments are preceded by 'EFR' (Torribio Blups); the rest is a digest of the text, either my own words or paraphrasing the author's.

What the book is about

[...] in this volume I want to hold up three matters for consideration. First, the process of ritualization —if I may slightly recast the ethological version of that term. The movements, looks, and vocal sounds we make as an unintended by-product of speaking and listening never seem to remain innocent. Within the lifetime of each of us these acts in varying degrees acquire a specialized communicative role in the stream of our behavior, looked to and provided for in connection with the displaying of our alignment to current events. We look simply to see, see others looking, see we are seen looking, and soon become knowing and skilled in regard to the evidential uses made of the appearance of looking. We clear our throat, we pause to think, we turn attention to a next doing, and soon we specialize these acts, performing them with no felt contrivance right were others in our gestural community would also, and like them, we do so apart from the original instrumental reason for the act. [...]

Goffman: the purpose and function of these displays can only be caught by closely examining the consequences each several gesture commonly has in samples of actual occurrences —with due consideration to the sorts of things that might be conveyed in the context had no such gesture been offered.

Second, participation framework. When a word is spoken, all those who happen to be in perceptual range of the event will have some sort of participation status relative to it. The codification of these various positions and the normative specification of appropriate conduct within each provide an essential background for interaction analysis —whether (I presume) in our own society or any other.

And embedding:

Third, there is the obvious but insufficiently appreciated fact that words we speak are often not our own, at least our current 'own'. Who it is who can speak is restricted to the parties present (and often more restricted than that), and which one is now doing so is almost always perfectly clear. But although who speaks is situationally circumscribed, in whose name words are spoken is certainly not. Uttered words have utterer; utterances, however, have subjects (implied or explicit), and although these may designate the utterer, there is nothing in the syntax of utterances to require this coincidence. [...]

So three themes: ritualization, participation framework, and embedding. It is their interplay that will be at issue. Every utterance and its hearing have gestural accompaniments, these under some control of the actors. Every utterance and its hearing bear the marks of the framework of participation in which the uttering and hearing occur. All these markings we can openly mimic, mime, and reenact, allowing us dramatic liberties. Thus, when we speak we can set into the current framework of participation what is structurally marked as integral to another, enacting a dozen voices to do so. (For example, in describing a conversation, we, as speaker, can enact what had been our unstated response as listener.)

In what follows, then, I make no large literary claim that social life is but a stage, only a small technical one: that deeply incorporated into the nature of talk are the fundamental requirements of theatricality.

Replies and responses

I. Questioners are oriented to what lies just ahead, and depend on what is to come; answerers are oriented to what has just been said, and look backward, not forward.

II. These little pairings of questions and answers form dialogic units, and are liable of a linguistic mode of analysis of a formalistic sort, in different ways:

• 1. Focusing in the recovery of elided elements of answers by referring to their first pair parts. Goffman: 'note that answers can take not only a truncated verbal form but also a wholly nonverbal form', a gesture for example.

  2. Extending the dialogic units through embedding and side-sequence features, 'whereby a question is not followed directly by an answer to it, but by another question [...]'

  3. What leads to a central issue: 'the question of how adjacency pairs are linked together to form chains'.

  4. Combining the notion of ellipsis with the notion of chaining, we have the possibility of eliding at a higher level:

     1. A: "Are you coming?"

     2. B. "I gotta work"

     3. that can be viewed as a contraction of:

     4. A1: "Are you coming?"

     5. B1: "No"

     6. A2: "Why aren't you?"

     7. B2: "I gotta work"

     8. this being an example of the practice of replacing and answer by a reason for that answer.

iii.

Observe now that, broadly speaking, there are three kinds of listeners to talk: those who overhear, whether or not it has been encouraged; those (in the case of more than two-person talk) who are ratified participants but are not specifically addressed by the speaker; and those ratified participants who are addressed [...](p. 9)

iv

[...] a basic normative assumption about talk is that, whatever else, it should be correctly interpretable in the special sense of conveying to the intended recipients what the sender more or less wanted to get across. The issue is not that the recipients should agree with what they have heard, but only agree with the speaker as to what they have heard; in Austinian terms, illocutionary force is at stake, not perlocutionary effect. (p. 10)

But note that:

• 1. What one obtain is not a complete understanding but a working agreement, an agreement for all practical purposes (p. 10-11).

  2. It does not have to do with the three kinds of speech efficiency, namely: indexicality, ellipsis, literality (p. 11).

  3. Functional ambiguities, on the contrary, has to do with difficulties such:

     1. • Genuine uncertainty

        • Genuine misunderstanding

        • The simulation of these difficulties

        • The suspicion that real difficulty has occurred

        • The suspicion that difficulty has been pretended, and so forth.

  4. Conditions or arrangements that would facilitate an effective transmission (p. 12):

     1. • Norms constraining interruption or simultaneous talk

        • Norms against withholding of answers

        • Back-channel cues (facial gestures and nonverbal vocalizations) from hearers

        • A hold signal and a resume signal

  5. Given a speaker's need to know whether his message has been received, and if so, whether or not it has been passably understood, and given a recipient's need to show that he has received the message and correctly —given these very fundamental requirements of talk as a communication system— we have the essential rationale for the very existence of adjacency pairs, that is, for the organization of talk into two-part exchanges. We have an understanding of why any next utterance after a question is examined for how it might be an answer. (p. 12)

  6. Once we have begun to think about the transmission requirements for utterances and the role of adjacency pairing in accomplishing this, we can go on to apply the same sort of thinking to sequences or chains of statement-reply pairs, raising the question concerning what arrangements would facilitate the extended flow of talk. We could attend the issue of how next speaker is selected (or self-selects) in more-than-two-person talk, and [...] how utterances might be built up to provide sequences of points where transition to next speaker is facilitated and even promoted but not made mandatory, the speaker leaving open the possibility of himself continuing on as if he had not encouraged his own retirement from the speaker role. We could also examine how a speaker's restarts and pauses (filled and otherwise) might function both to allow for his momentary failure to obtain listener attention and to remind intended recipients of their inattention. And after that, of course, we could pose the same question regarding the initiating and terminating of a conversation considered as a total unit of communication. We would be dealing with talk as a communications engineer might, someone optimistic about the possibility of culture-free formulations. I shall speak here of system requirements and system constraints. (p. 13)

  7. What Goffman intends to do is a microfunctional analysis of various interaction signals and practices. (p. 15)

  8. Nor are these ritual contingencies restricted to commands and requests. In making an assertion about facts, the maker must count on not being considered hopelessly wrongheaded; if a greeting, that contact is wanted; if an excuse, that it will be acceptable; if an avowal of feeling and attitude, that these will be credited; if a summons, that it will be deferred to; if a serious offer, that it won't be considered presumptuous or mean; if an overgenerous one, that it will be declined; if an inquiry, that it won't be thought intrusive; if a self-deprecating comment, that it will be denied. [...] I have called such units ritual interchanges. Ordinarily each incorporates at least one two-part exchange but may contain additional turns and/or additional exchanges. Observe that although system constraints might be conceived of as pancultural, ritual concerns are patently dependent on cultural definition, so can be expected to vary quite markedly from society to society. Nonetheless, the ritual frame provides a question that can be asked of anything occurring during talk and a way of accounting for what does occur. For example, back-channel expression not only let the speaker know whether or not he is getting across while he is trying to, but also can let him know whether or not what he is conveying is socially acceptable, that is, compatible with his hearers' view of him and of themselves.

  9. Participants, it turns out, are obliged to look not so much for ways of expressing themselves, as for ways of making sure that the vast expressive resources of face-to-face interaction are not inadvertently employed to convey something unintended and untoward. Motivated to preserve everyone's face, they then end up acting so as to preserve orderly communication. (p. 19)

  10. Just as system constraints will always condition how talk is managed, so, too, will ritual ones. Observe that unlike grammatical constraints, system and ritual ones open up the possibility of corrective action as part of these very constraints. Grammars do not have rules for managing what happens when rules are broken. (p. 21)

Radio Talk

[...] [A]ny occasion of an individual's effort has a double consequence: substantive, in terms of the contribution a competent performance would make to some extraneous system of ongoing activity, especially when this activity directly involves the interests of other actors; and expressive, in terms of the consequent judgment that failure or success produces concerning the individual's competency and his moral character as a claimant to competency.

Failure at competent execution of an act can initiate the workings of social control, the prospect of which is itself, of course, a means of social control. The failing person ordinarily initiates remedial action of some kind, and if not, others may well remind him to do so.

As might be expected from this formulation, remedial action itself takes two directions. First, there are substantive, restitutive acts of an instrumental sort, sometimes codified in civil law, involving repair, replacement, or monetary compensation —all calculated to restore material matters as much as possible to the way they were before the failure. Here the sentiments of the inept actor are not at issue, merely his reparations. Second, there are ritualistic acts, these being commentarylike and self-referring, designed by the doer to redefine the expressive implications of his own maladroit performance. Through gestural and verbal displays, sentimental relief is attempted; the offender typically tries to establish through disclaimers, excuses, apologies, and accounts that the failing performance is not characteristic, or if it was, that it is no longer, or if it is, that the offender is at least alive to his deficiencies and supports social standards in spirit, if not in deed. In brief, misperformance 'expresses' a definition of the actor, one he presumably finds inimical, and the remedial ritual pleads a more favorable way of reading the event.

Ritualistic remedies, more so than substantive ones, have a variable temporal relation to what they comment on. Very crudely speaking, they may be retrospective, occurring immediately after what they are designed to modify the meaning of; or prospective and disclamatory, aimed at controlling the possible implications of something that has not yet occurred; or finally, concurrent, appearing as an overlay on the ongoing dubious activity.

Observe also that remedial rituals tend to be dialogic in character. Once such a remedy is provided, the provider typically requires some response from recipients so that he can be sure his message has been correctly received and is deemed adequate, effectively redefining the breach. Substantive remedy can also have something of a dialogic flavor, for the individual who provides restitution may need to know that what he has offered is deemed sufficient. (p. 200-201)

Linguistic faults.

It appears that a working classification of faults can be made —if indeed, one is not implied in the literature. I divide them into two broad classes, 'knows better' and 'doesn't know better', according to whether or not the speaker's own hearing (on this or other like occasions) would be likely to inform him of his error, causing him to consider a remedy, which, in turn, he would be competent to provide.

Among 'knows better' faults, the following:

(1) Influencies, namely, hitches in the smooth flow of syntactically connected words, as with restarts, filled pauses, stuttering.

(2) Slips, by which I mean words or their parts that have gotten mixed up, or miss-uttered, as in word transposition, phonological disturbance, and the like.[...] Thus, slips are to be seen as a consequence of confused production, accident, carelessness, and one-time muffings —not as ignorance of official standards or underlying incompetence.

[...]

Among 'doesn't know better' faults, I include the following:

(3) Boners, namely, evidence of some failing in the intellectual grasp and achievement required within official or otherwise cultivated circles, this evidence implied in words spoken or others' words not comprehended. [...] The extreme case here is the 'incorrect' use of a word (especially a 'long' one carrying tacit claims to the user's learnedness) or the formulation of a conversational reply that patently indicates a failure to understand prior speaker's use of a 'difficult' word. Nationwide schooling and media-inspired sophistication have given such faults a coercive force in wide populations, in the sense that almost anyone breaching the standards in question can be made to feel ashamed for having done so.

[...]

(4) Gaffes, that is, unintended and unknowing breaches in 'manners' or some norm of 'good' conduct —breaches of the kind that are here realized in speech, but can also be perpetrated through other modes of activity. Thus: indiscretions, tactlessness, indelicacy, irreverence, immodesty, intrusiveness, etc. A very special ignorance is inadvertently displayed, namely, ignorance of what one would have to know about the rights and biography of one's coparticipants in order to conduct oneself with moral sensibility in regard to them'. (p. 208-11)

Response cries

Note (EFR): I'm reproducing here the second chapter, Response cries, almost in full. I've omitted the footnotes and the "Discussion" part at the end of it.

Part I and Part II state the rule (No talking to oneself in public) to which Part III shows the exceptions. I don't recommend it, but you can skip them and go directly to Part III

Part I [12402 bytes]

Utterances are not housed in paragraphs but in turns at talk, occasions implying a temporary taking of the floor as well as an alternation of takers.' Turns themselves are naturally coupled into two-party interchanges. Interchanges are linked in runs marked off by some sort of topicality. One or more of these topical runs make up the body of a conversation. This interactionist view assumes that every utterance is either a statement establishing the next speaker's words as a reply, or a reply to what the prior speaker has just established, or a mixture of both. Utterances, then, do not stand by themselves, indeed, often make no sense when so heard, but are constructed and timed to support the close social collaboration of speech turn-taking. In nature, the spoken word is only to be found in verbal interplay, being integrally designed for such collective habitats. This paper considers some roguish utterances that appear to violate this interdependence, entering the stream of behavior at peculiar and unnatural places, producing communicative effects but no dialogue. The paper begins with a special class of spoken sentences, and ends with a special class of vocalizations, the first failing to qualify as communication, the second failing not to.

To be all alone, to be a “solitary” in the sense of being out of sight and sound of everyone, is not to be alone in another way, namely, as a “single,” a party of one, a person not in a with a person unaccompanied “socially” by others in some public undertaking (itself often crowded), such as sidewalk traffic, shopping in stores, and restaurant dining.

Allowing the locution “in our society,” and, incidentally, the use of we as a means of referring to the individual without specifying gender, it can be said that when we members of society are solitary, or at least assume we are, we can have occasion to make passing comments aloud. We kibitz our own undertakings, rehearse or relive a run-in with someone, speak to ourselves judgmentally about our own doings (offering words of encouragement or blame in an editorial voice that seems to be that of an overseer more than ourselves), and verbally mark junctures in our physical doings. Speaking audibly, we address ourselves, constituting ourselves the sole intended recipient of our own remarks. Or, speaking in our own name, we address a remark to someone who isn't present to receive it. This is self -communication, specifically, “self-talk.” Although a conversationlike exchange of speaker-hearer roles may sometimes occur, this seems unusual. Either we address an absent other or address ourselves in the name of some standard-bearing voice. Self-talk of one type seems rarely replied to by self-talk of the other. I might add that the voice or name in which we address a remark to ourselves can be just what we might properly use in addressing a remark to someone else (especially someone familiar enough with our world to understand cryptic references), or what another might properly use in talking to us. It is not the perspective and standards that are peculiar or the words and phrases through which they are realized, but only that there are more roles than persons. To talk to oneself is to generate a full complement of two communication roles—speaker and hearer—without a full complement of role-performers, and which of the two roles—speaker or hearer—is the one without its own real performer is not the first issue.

Self-talk could, of course, be characterized as a form of egocentricity, developmentally appropriate in childhood years and only reappearing later "in certain men and women of a puerile disposition" (Piaget 1974:40). Common sense, after all, recommends that the purpose of speech is to convey thoughts to others, and a self-talker necessarily conveys them to someone who al ready knows them. To interrogate, inform, beseech, persuade, threaten, or command oneself is to push against oneself or at best to get to where one already is, in either case with small chance of achieving movement. To say something to someone who isn't there to hear it seems equally footless.

Or worse, self-talk might appear to be a kind of perversion, a form of linguistic self-abuse. Solitary individuals who can be happily immersed in talking to themselves need not in that degree seek out the company of their fellows; they need not go abroad to find conversational company, a convenience that works to the general detriment of social life. Such home consumption in regard to the other kind of intercourse qualifies either as incest or masturbation.

A more serious argument would be that self-talk is merely an out-loud version of reverie, the latter being the original form. Such a view, however, misses the sense in which daydreaming is different from silent, fuguelike, well-reasoned discussion with oneself, let alone the point (on which Piaget [1962:7] and Vygotsky [1962:19—20] seem to agree) that the out-loud version of reverie and of constructive thought may precede the silent versions developmentally. And misses, too, the idea that both the autistic and constructive forms of "inner speech" are considerably removed from facially animated talk in which the speaker overtly gives the appearance of being actively engrossed in a spirited exchange with invisible others, his eyes and lips alive with the proceedings.

In any case, in our society at least, self-talk is not dignified as constituting an official claim upon its sender-recipient—true, incidentally, also of fantasy, "wool gathering," and the like. There are no circumstances in which we can say, "I'm sorry, I can't come right now, I'm busy talking to myself." And anyway, hearers ordinarily would not reply to our self-talk any more than they would to the words spoken by an actor on the stage, although they might otherwise react to both. Were a hearer to say, "What?", that would stand as a rebuke to conduct, not a request for a rerun, much as is the case when a teacher uses that response to squelch chatter occurring at the back of the room; or, with a different intonation, that the self-talk had been misheard as the ordinary kind, a possibility which could induce a reply such as, "Sorry, I was only talking to myself."

Indeed, in our society a taboo is placed on self-talk. Thus, it is mainly through self-observation and hearsay that one can find out that a considerable amount goes on. Admittedly, the matter has a Lewis Carroll touch. For the offense seems to be created by the very person who catches the offender out, it being the witnessing of the deed which transforms it into an improper one. (Solitary self-talkers may occasionally find themselves terminating a spate of self-talk with a self-directed reproach, but in doing so would seem to be catching themselves out—sometimes employing self-talk to do so.) In point of fact, the misdoing is not so much tied up with doing it in public as continuing to do it in public. We are all, it seems, allowed to be caught stopping talking to ourselves on one occasion or another.

It is to be expected that questions of frames and their limits will arise. Strictly speaking, dictating a letter to a machine, rehearsing a play to a mirror, and praying aloud at our bedside are not examples of self-talk, but should others unexpectedly enter the scene of this sort of solitary labor, we might still feel a little uneasy and look for another type of work. Similarly, there are comedy routines in which the butt is made vulnerable by having to sustain a full-blown discussion with someone who is hidden from general view. And there are well-known comic gestures by which someone caught talking to himself attempts to transform the delict into a yawn or into the just-acceptable vocalizations of whistling, humming, or singing.But behind these risible issues of frame is the serious fact that an adult who fails to attempt to conceal his self-talk, or at least to stop smartly on the appearance of another person, is in trouble. Under the term verbal hallucination we attribute failure in decorum here to "mental illness."

Given the solitary's recourse to self-addressed remarks well into adult life, and that such talk is not merely a transitional feature of primary socialization (if, indeed, a natural phase of childhood development), one is encouraged to shift from a developmental to an interactional approach. Self-talk, when performed in its apparently permissible habitat—the self-talker all alone—is by way of being a mimicry of something that has its initial and natural provenance in speech between persons, this in turn implying a social encounter and the arrangement of participants through which encounters are sustained. (Such transplantation, note, is certainly not restricted to deviant activity; for example, a writer does it when he quotes in the body of his own single sentence an entire paragraph from a cited text, thereby pseudomorphically depositing in one form something that in nature belongs to another.)

With self-talk, then, one might want to say that a sort of impersonation is occurring; after all, we can best compliment or upbraid ourselves in the name of someone other than the self to whom the comments are directed. But what is intended in self-talk is not so much the mere citation or recording of what a monitoring voice might say, or what we would say to another if given a chance, but the stage-acting of a version of the delivery, albeit only vaguely a version of its reception. What is set into the ongoing text is not merely words, but their animator also—indeed, the whole interactional arrangement in which such words might get spoken. To this end we briefly split ourselves in two, projecting the character who talks and the character to whom such words could be appropriately directed. Or we summon up the presence of others in order to say something to them. Self-talk, then, involves the lifting of a form of interaction from its natural place and its employment in a special way.

Self-talk described in this way recommends consideration of the soliloquy, long a feature of western drama, although not currently fashionable. An actor comes stage center and harangues himself, sometimes at enormous length, divulging his inner thoughts on a pertinent matter with well-projected audibility. This behavior, of course, is not really an exception to the application of the rule against public self-talk. Your soliloquizer is really talking to self when no one is around; we members of the audience are supernatural, out-of-frame eavesdroppers. Were a character from the dramatized world to approach, our speaker would audibly (to us) self-direct a warning:

But soft, I see that Jeffrey even now doth come. To the appearance of innocent business then.

and would stop soliloquizing. Were he to continue to self-talk, it would be because the script has instructed him to fail to notice the figure all the rest of us have seen approach.

Now, if talking to oneself in private involves a mocking-up of conversation and a recasting of its complementarity, then the production of this recasting on the stage in the bloated format of a soliloquy obviously involves a further insetting, and a transformation of what has already been transformed. The same could be said incidentally about a printed advertisement which features reallistically posed live models whose sentiments are cast into well-articulated inner speech in broken-line balloons above their heads, providing a text that the other figures in the pictured world can't perceive but we real people can, to be distinguished from the continuous-line balloon for containing words that one figure openly states to another.

Here, I believe, is a crucial feature of human communication. Behavior and appearance are ritualized—in something like the ethological sense—through such ethologically defined processes as exaggeration, stereotyping, standardization of intensity, loosening of contextual requirements, and so forth. In the case under question, however, these transformations occur to a form of interaction, a communication arrangement, a standard set of participant alignments. I believe that any analysis of self-talk (or for that matter, any other form of communication) that does not attend to this nonlinguistic sense of embedding and transformation is unlikely to be satisfactory.

Part II [10553 bytes]

These parables about self-talk provide entrance to a mundane text. First, definitions: by a social situation I mean any physical area anywhere within which two or more persons find themselves in visual and aural range of one another. The term "gathering" can be used to refer to the bodies that are thus present. No restriction is implied about the relationship of those in the situation: they may all be involved in the same conversational encounter, in the sense of being ratified participants of the same state of talk; some may be in an encounter while others are not, or are, but in a different one; or no talk may be occurring. Some, all, or none of those present may be definable as together in terms of social participation, that is, in a "with."

Although almost every kind of mayhem can be committed in social situations, one class of breaches bears specifically on social situations as such, that is, on the social organization common to face-to-face gatherings of all kinds. In a word, although many delicts are situated, only some are situational. As for social situations as such, we owe any one in which we might find ourselves evidence that we are reasonably alive to what is already in it, and furthermore to what might arise, whether on schedule or unexpectedly. Should need for immediate action be required of us, we will be ready; if not mobilized, then able to mobilize. A sort of communication tonus is implied. If addressed by anyone in the situation we should not have far to go to respond, if not to reply. All in all, a certain respect and regard is to be shown to the situation-at-large. And these demonstrations confirm that we are able and willing to enter into the perspective of the others present, even if no more than is required to collaborate in the intricacies of talk and pedestrian traffic. In our society, then, it is generally taboo in public to be drunken, to belch or pass wind perceptibly, to daydream or doze, or to be disarrayed with respect to clothing and cosmetics—and all these for the same reason. These acts comprise our conventional repertoire, our prescribed stock of "symptoms," for demonstrating a lack of respectful alertness in and to the situation, their inhibition our way of "doing" presence, and thereby self-respect. And the demonstration can be made with sound; audible indicators are involved as well as visual ones.

It is plain, then, that self-talk, in a central sense, is situational in character, not merely situated. Its occurrence strikes directly at our sense of the orientation of the speaker to the situation as a whole. Self-talk is taken to involve the talker in a situationally inappropriate way. Differently put, our self-talk—like other "mental symptoms"—is a threat to intersubjectivity; it warns others that they might be wrong in assuming a jointly maintained base of ready mutual intelligibility among all persons present. Understandably, self-talk is less an offense in private than in public; after all, the sort of self-mobilization and readiness it is taken to disprove is not much required when one is all alone.

This general argument makes sense of a considerable number of minor details. In a waiting room or public means of transportation, where it is evident that little personal attention to pedestrian traffic is required, and therefore less than a usual amount of aliveness to the surround, reading is allowed in our society, along with such self-withdrawal to a printed world as this makes possible. (Observe that reading itself is institutionalized as something that can be set aside in a moment should a reason present itself, something that can be picked up and put down without ceremony, a definition that does not hold for all of our pleasures.) However, chuckling aloud to ourselves in response to what we are reading is suspect, for this can imply that we are too freely immersed in the scene we are reading about to retain dissociated concern for the scene in which our reading occurs. Interestingly, should we mouth the read words to ourselves and in the process make the mouthings audible, we will be taken to be unschooled, not unhinged —unless, of course, our general appearance implies a high educational status and therefore no "natural" reason for uncontained reading. (This is not to deny that some mumbled reading gives the impression of too much effort invested in the sheer task of reading to allow a seemly reserve for the situation-at-large.)

In public, we are allowed to become fairly deeply involved in talk with others we are with, providing this does not lead us to block traffic or intrude on the sound preserve of others; presumably our capacity to share talk with one other implies we are able to share it with those who see us talking. So, too, we can conduct a conversation aloud over an unboothed street phone while either turning our back to the flow of pedestrian traffic or watching it in an abstracted way, without the words being thought improper; for even though our coparticipant is not visually present, a natural one can be taken to exist, and an accounting is available as to where, cognitively speaking, we have gone, and, moreover, that this "where" is a familiar place to which the others could see themselves traveling, and one from which we could be duly recalled should events warrant.

Observe also that we can with some impunity address words in public to a pet, presumably on the grounds that the animal can appreciate the affective element of the talk, if nothing else. We extend the same sort of regard to infants. Although on both these occasions a full-fledged recipient is not present to reply to our words, it is clear that no imagined person or alien agency has captured our attention. Moreover, special forms of talk are involved: for example, the praising/admonishing sort of evaluative utterance that routinely leads to no verbal reply when employed in talk between competents, or mimicked babytalk projected as the talk the incompetent would employ were it able to speak ("say-foring"). Should a pet or infant be addressed in quite ordinary speech, then, of course, something would be heard as very odd indeed. Incidentally, to be seen walking down the street alone while silently gesticulating a conversation with an absent other is as much a breach as talking aloud to ourselves—for it is equally taken as evidence of alienation.

Finally, there are the words we emit (sometimes very loudly) to summon another into talk. Although such a speaking begins by being outside of talk with actual others, its intended recipient is likely quickly to confirm—by ritualized orientation, if not by a verbal reply—the existence of the required environment, doing so before our utterance is completed. A summons that is openly snubbed or apparently undetected, however, can leave us feeling that we have been caught engaging in something like talking to ourselves, and moreover very noticeably.

Note (EFR): I insert here, exceptionally, the footnote called by the last word.

Such an occurrence is but one instance of the deplorable class of occasions when we throw ourselves full face into an encounter where none can be developed, as when, for example, we respond to a summons that was meant for someone behind us, or warmly greet a total stranger mistakenly taken to be someone we know well, or (as already mentioned) mistakenly reply to some one's self-talk. The standard statement by which the individual whom we have improperly entangled sets us right, for example, "Sorry, I'm afraid you've ..." itself has a very uneasy existence. Such a remark is fully housed within a conversational exchange that was never properly established, and its purpose is to deny a relationship that is itself required for the remark to be made.

To say that self-talk is a situational impropriety is not to say that it is a conversational delict—no more, that is, than any other sounded breach of decorum, such as an uncovered, audible yawn. Desisting from self-talk is not something we owe our fellow conversationalists as such; that is, it is not owed to them in their capacity as coparticipants in a specific encounter and thus to them only. Clearly it is owed to all those in sight and sound of us, precisely as we owe them avoidance of the other kinds of improper sounds. The individual who begins to talk to himself while in a conversational encounter will cause the other participants in the encounter to think him odd; but for the same reason and in the same way those not in the encounter but within range of it will think him odd, too. Clearly, here the conversational circle is not the relevant unit; the social situation is. Like catching a snail outside its shell, words are here caught outside of conversations, outside of ratified states of talk; one is saved from the linguistic horror of this fact only because the words themselves ought not to have been spoken. In fact, here talk is no more conversational than is a belch; it merely lasts longer and reflects adversely on a different part of personality.

So a rule: No talking to oneself in public. But, of course, the lay formulation of a rule never gets to the bone, it merely tells us where to start digging. In linguistic phrasing, No talking to oneself in public is a prescriptive rule of communication; the descriptive rule —the practice—is likely to be less neat and is certain to be less ready to hand, allowing, if not encouraging, variously grounded exceptions. The framework of normative understandings that isinvolved is not recorded, or cited, or available in summary form from informants. It must be pieced out by the student, in part by uncovering, collecting, collating, and interpreting all possible exceptions to the stated rule.

Part III [4910 bytes]

An unaccompanied man—a single—is walking down the street past others. His general dress and manner have given anyone who views him evidence of his sobriety, innocent intent, suitable aliveness to the situation, and general social competency. His left foot strikes an obtruding piece of pavement and he stumbles. He instantly catches himself, rights himself more or less efficiently, and continues on.

Up to this point his competence at walking had been taken for granted by those who witnessed him, confirming their assessment of him in this connection. His tripping casts these imputations suddenly into doubt. Therefore, before he continues he may well engage in some actions that have nothing to do with the laws of mechanics. The remedial work he performs is likely to be aimed at correcting the threat to his reputation, as well as his posture. He can pause for a moment to examine the walk, as if intellectually concerned (as competent persons with their wits about them would be) to discover what in the world could possibly have caused him to falter, the implication being that anyone else would certainly have stumbled, too. Or he can appear to address a wry little smile to himself to show that he himself takes the whole incident as a joke, something quite uncharacteristic, something that can hardly touch the security he feels in his own manifest competency and therefore warranting no serious account. Or he can "overplay" his lurch, comically extending the disequilibrium, thereby concealing the actual deviation from normal ambulatory orientation with clowning movements, implying a persona obviously not his serious one.

In brief, our subject externalizes a presumed inward state and acts so as to make discernible the special circumstances which presumably produced it. He tells a little story to the situation. He renders himself easy to assess by all those in the gathering, even as he guides what is to be their assessment. He presents an act specialized in a conventional way for providing information—a display—a communication in the ethological, not the linguistic, sense. The behavior here is very animal-like, except that what the human animal seems to be responding to is not so much an obvious biological threat as a threat to the reputation it would ordinarily try to maintain in matters of social competence. Nor is it hard to catch the individual in a very standard look—the hasty, surreptitious survey sometimes made right after committing a fleeting discreditable deed. The purpose is to see whether witnessing has occurred and remedial action is therefore necessary, this assessment itself done quickly enough so that a remedy, if necessary, can be provided with the same dispatch as occurs when there is no doubt from the start that it will be necessary.

However, instead of (or as a supplement to) engaging in a choreographed accounting that is visually available, our subject may utter a cry of wonderment, such as What in the world! Again he renders readily accessible to witnesses what he chooses to assign to his inward state, along with directing attention to what produced it, but this time the display is largely auditory. More over, if nonvocal gestures in conjunction with the visible and audible scene can't conveniently provide the required information, then self-talk will be the indicated alternative. Suddenly stopping in his tracks, the individual need only grimace and clutch at his heart when the issue is an open manhole at his feet; the same stopping consequent on his remembering that he was supposed to be somewhere else is more likely to be accounted for by words. (Presumably the more obscure the matter, the more extended the self-remarks will have to be and perhaps the less likely is the individual to offer them.)

I am arguing here that what in some sense is part of the subject matter of linguistics can require the examination of our relation to social situations at large, not merely our relation to conversations. For apparently verbalizations quite in the absence of conversations can play much the same role as a choreographed bit of nonvocal behavior. Both together are like other situational acts of propriety and impropriety in that they are accessible to the entire surround and in a sense designed for it. They are like clothing more than like speech. However, unlike clothing or cosmetics, these displays—be they vocal or in pantomime—are to be interpreted as bearing on a passing event, an event with a limited course in time. (What we wear can certainly be taken as an indication of our attitude to the social occasion at hand but hardly to specific events occurring during the occasion.) Necessarily, if unanticipated passing events are to be addressed, a marker must be employed that can be introduced just at the moment the event occurs, and withdrawn when concern for the event has been.

Part IV [11692 bytes]

It has been argued that there is a prohibition against public self-talk, and that breachings of this rule have a display character; yet also that there are social situations in which one could expect self-talk. Indeed, I think that the very force which leads us to refrain from self-talk in almost all situations might itself cause us to indulge in self-talk during certain exceptional ones. In this light, consider now in greater detail a few environments in which exposed self-talk is frequently found.

On our being "informed" of the death of a loved one (only by accident are we "told," this latter verb implying that the news might be conveyed in passing), a brief flooding out into tears is certainly not amiss in our society. As might be expected, it is just then that public self-talk is also sanctioned. Thus Sudnow (1967:141) describes the giving of bad news in hospitals:

While no sympathy gestures are made, neither does the doctor withdraw from the scene altogether by leaving the room, as, for example, does the telegram delivery boy. The doctor is concerned that the scene be contained and that he have some control over its progress, that it not, for example, follow him out into the hall. In nearly all cases the first genuine interchange of remarks was initiated by the relative. During the period of crying, if there is any, relatives frequently "talk." Examples are: "I can't believe it," "It's just not fair," "Goddamn," "Not John . . . no " These remarks are not responded to as they are not addressed to anyone. Frequently, they are punctuated by crying. The physician remains silent.

The commonsense explanation here is that such informings strike at our self so violently that self-involvement immediately thereafter is reasonable, an excusable imposition of our own concerns upon everyone else in the gathering. Whatever the case, convention seems to establish a class of "all-too-human" crises that are to be treated as something anyone not directly involved ought yet to appreciate, giving us victims the passing right to be momentary centers of sympathetic attention and providing a legitimate place for "anything" we do during the occasion. Indeed, our utter self- containment during such moments might create uneasiness in others concerning our psychological habitat, causing them to wonder how responsive we might be to ordinary situated concerns directly involving them.

Not all environments which favor self-talk are conventionally understood to do so. For example, podium speakers who suddenly find themselves with a page or line missing from their texts or with faulty microphones will sometimes elect to switch from talking to the audience to talking to themselves, addressing a full sentence of bewilderment, chagrin, or anger for their own ears and (apparently) their own benefit, albeit half-audibly to the room. Even in broadcast talk, speakers who lose their places, misplace their scripts, or find themselves with incoherent texts or improperly functioning equipment, may radically break frame in this way, apparently suddenly turning their backs on their obligations to sustain the role of speaker-to-an-audience. It is highly unprofessional, of course, to engage in sotto voce, self-directed remarks under just those microphonic conditions which ensure their audibility; but broadcasters may be more concerned at this point to show that some part of them is shocked by the hitch and in some way not responsible for it than to maintain broadcasting decorum. Also, being the sole source of meaningful events for their listeners, they may feel that the full text of their subjective response is better than no text at all. Note, there are other social situations which provide a speaker with an audience that is captive and concerned, and which thereby encourage self-talk. Drivers of buses, taxis, and private cars can shout unflattering judgments of invasive motorists and pedestrians when these have passed out of range, and feel no compunction about thus talking aloud to themselves in the presence of their passengers. After all, there is a sense in which their contretemps in traffic visibly and identically impinge on everyone in the vehicle simultaneously.

That drivers may actually wait until the apparent target of their remarks cannot hear them points to another location for self-talk, which is also suggested by the lay term "muttering." Frustrated by someone's authority, we can mutter words of complaint under the breath as the target turns away out of apparent conversational earshot. (Here is a structural equivalent of what children do when they stick out their tongues or put their thumbs to their noses just as their admonisher turns away.) For these subvocalizations reside in the very interstice between a state of talk and mere copresence, more specifically, in the transition from the first to the second. And here function seems plain. In muttering we convey that although we are now going along with the line established by the speaker (and authority), our spirit has not been won over, and compliance is not to be counted on. The display is aimed either at third parties or at the authority itself, but in such a way that we can deny our intent and the authority can feign not hearing what we have said about him. Again a form of communication that hardly fits the linguistic model of speaker and addressed recipient; for here we provide a reply to the speaker that is displaced from him to third parties and/or to ourselves. Instead of being the recipient of our reply, the initial speaker becomes merely the object or target of our response. Observe, as with tongue-sticking, muttering is a time-limited communication, entering as a "last word," a post-terminal touch to a just-terminated encounter, and thus escapes for incidental reasons the injunction against persisting in public self-talk.

Consideration of self-talk in one kind of interstice recommends consideration of self-talk in others. For example, if we are stopped for a moment's friendly chat just before entering or leaving an establishment or turning down a street, we may provide a one-sentence description of the business we are about to turn to, this account serving as a rationale for our withdrawing and as evidence that there are other calls upon our time. Interestingly enough, this utterance is sometimes postponed until the moment when the encounter has just finished, in which case we may mumble the account half-aloud and somewhat to ourselves. Here again is self-talk that is located transitionally between a state of talk and mere copresence, and again self-communication that is self-terminating, although this time because the communicator, not the hearer, is moving away. Here it is inescapably clear that the self-talker is providing information verbally to others present, merely not using the standard arrangement—a ratified state of talk—for doing so.

Finally, it must be allowed that when circumstances conspire to thrust us into a course of action whose appearance might raise questions about our moral character or self-respect, we often elect to be seen as self-talkers in preference. If we stoop to pick up a coin on a busy street, we might well be inclined to identify its denomination to ourselves aloud, simultaneously expressing surprise, even though we ourselves are no longer in need of the information. For the street is to be framed as a place of passage not—as it might be to a child or a vagrant—a hunting ground for bits of refuse. If what we thought was a coin turns out to be a worthless slug, then we might feel urged to externalize through sound and pantomime that we can laugh at the fools we have made of ourselves. Trying to open the door of a car we have mistaken for our own and discovering our mistake, we are careful to blurt out a self-directed remark that properly frames our act for those who witness it, advertising inadequate attentiveness to deny we are a thief.

With these suggestions of where self-talk is to be found, one can return and take a second look at the conventional argument that children engage in it because they aren't yet socialized into the modesties of self-containment, the proprieties of persondom. Vygotsky, responding to what he took to be Piaget's position, long ago provided a lead ([1934], 1962:16):

In order to determine what causes egocentric talk, what circumstances provoke it, we organized the children's activities in much the same way Piaget did, but we added a series of frustrations and difficulties. For instance, when a child was getting ready to draw, he would suddenly find that there was no paper, or no pencil of the color he needed. In other words, by obstructing his free activity we made him face problems.

We found that in these difficult situations the coefficient of egocentric speech almost doubled, in comparison with Piaget's normal figure for the same age and also in comparison with our figure for children not facing these problems. The child would try to grasp and to remedy the situation in talking to himself: "Where's the pencil? I need a blue pencil. Never mind, I'll draw with the red one and wet it with water; it will become dark and look like blue."

The implication is that self-talk serves a self-guidance function, and will be most evident, presumably, when the child senses that task performance is problematic. Given that Vygotsky's early work required an adult observer to be within listening distance, one could go on to suggest an additional interpretation, namely that for children the contingencies are so great in undertaking any task, and the likelihood so strong that they will be entirely discounted as reasonably intentioned persons if they fail (or indeed that they will be seen as just idling or fooling around anyway), that some voicing of what they are about is something they are always prepared to offer. An adult attempting to learn to skate might be equally self -talkative.

Some loose generalizations might be drawn from these descriptions of places for self-talk. First, when we address a remark to ourselves in public, we are likely to be in sudden need of reestablishing ourselves in the eyes and ears of witnesses as honest, competent persons not to be trifled with, and an expression of chagrin, wonderment, anger, and so forth would seem to help in this—at least establishing what our expectations for ourselves are, even if in this case they can't be sustained. Second, one could argue that self-talk occurs right at the moment when the predicament of the speaker is evident to the whole gathering in a flash or can be made so, assuring that the utterance will come as an understandable reaction to an understood event; it will come from a mind that has not drifted from the situation, a mind readily tracked. The alien world reflected in hallucinatory talk is therefore specifically avoided, and so, too, therefore, some of the impropriety of talking outside the precincts of a ratified conversation. Nor is "understandable" here merely a matter of cognition. To appreciate quickly another's circumstances (it seems) is to be able to place ourselves in them empathetically. Correspondingly, the best assurance another can have that we will understand him is to offer himself to us in a version with which we can identify. Instead, then, of thinking of self-talk as something blurted out under pressure, it might better be thought of as a mode of response constantly readied for those circumstances in which it is excusable. Indeed, the time and place when our private reaction is what strangers present need to know about is the occasion when self-talk is more than excusable.

Part V [5074 bytes]

Earlier it was suggested that when an unaccompanied man stumbles, he may present his case by means of self-talk instead of silent gesture. However, there is another route to the advertisement of self-respect. He can emit one or two words of exclamatory imprecation, such as hell or shit. Observe, these ejaculatory expressions are nothing like the pointed shout of warning one individual might utter to and for another, nor even like an openly directed broadcast to all-in-hearing, such as a street vendor's cry or a shriek for help. Talk in the ordinary sense is apparently not at issue. In no immediate way do such utterances belong to a conversational encounter, a ritually ratified state of talk embracing ratified participants, nor to a summoning to one. First speaker's utterance does not officially establish a slot which second speaker is under some obligation to fill, for there is no ratified speaker and recipient—not even imaginary ones—merely actor and witness. To be sure, an interjection is involved, but one that interrupts a course of physical action, not an utterance.

When, unaccompanied, we trip and curse ourselves (or the walk, or the whole wide world), we curse to ourselves; we appear to address ourselves. Therefore, a kind of self-remarking seems to be involved. Like the publicly tolerated self-talk already considered, imprecations seem to be styled to be overheard in a gathering. Indeed, the styling is specific in this regard. With no one present in the individual's surround, I believe the expression is quite likely to be omitted. If women and children are present, your male self-communicator is quite likely to censor his cries accordingly—a man who utters fuck when he stumbles in a foundry is quite likely to avoid that particular expletive should he trip in a day-nursery. If we can see that persons very close by can see what we have just done (or failed to do), then whispered expletives are possible; if witnesses are far away, then shouted sounds will be required. "Recipient design" is involved (to use Harvey Sacks's term) and so quickly applied as to suggest that continuous monitoring of the situation is being sustained, enabling just this adjustment to take place when the moment requiring it comes. Of course, in any case we will have taken the time to encode our vocalization in the conventional lexicon of our language (which is, incidentally, likely to be the local one), a feat that is instantaneously accomplished even sometimes by bilinguals who in addition must generally select their imprecations from the language of their witnesses. (This is not to say that bilinguals won't use a harsh imprecation from one language in place of a less harsh one drawn from the language in use, foreignness apparently serving as a mitigation of strength.) Significantly, here is a form of behavior whose very meaning is that it is something blurted out, something that has escaped control, and so such behavior very often is and has; but this impulsive feature does not mark the limits to which the utterance is socially processed, rather the conventionalized styling to which it is obliged to adhere.

It is plain that singles use imprecations in a variety of circumstances. Racing unsuccessfully to enter a turnstile before it automatically closes, or a door before it is locked for the evening, may do it; coming up to what has just now become a brick wall, we may exhibit frustration and chagrin, often with a curse. (Others, having formulated a possible reading of the precipitous rush we have made, can find that our imprecations are a way of confirming their interpretation, putting a period to the behavioral sentence we have played out, bringing the little vignette to a close, and reverting us to someone easily disattendable.) Precariously carrying too many parcels, we may curse at the moment they fall. The horse we have bet on being nosed out at the finish line, we may damn our misfortune while tearing up our tickets; our cause for disappointment, anger, and chagrin amply evident, or at least easily surmisable, we have license to wail to the world. Walking along a wintry street that carries a record-breaking snow now turned to slush, we are in a position to cry God! in open private response, but as it happens we do so just at the point of passing another, the cause of our remark and the state of our mind perfectly plain and understandable. It might be added that the particular imprecations I have so far used as illustrations seem in our society to be the special domain of males—females, traditionally at least, employing softer expressions. Nor, as is now well known, is this gender convention impervious to rapid politically inspired change.

Finally, I want to recommend that although imprecations and extended self-remarks can be found in much the same slot, do much the same work, and indeed often appear together, raising the question as to why they should be described separately, judgment should be reserved concerning their equivalence. Other questions must be considered first.

Part VI [3640 bytes]

The functioning of imprecations raises the question of an allied set of acts that can be performed by singles: response cries, namely, exclamatory interjections which are not full-fledged words. Oops! is an example. These nonlexicalized, discrete interjections, like certain unsegmented, tonal, prosodic features of speech, comport neatly with our doctrine of human nature. We see such "expression" as a natural overflowing, a flooding up of previously contained feeling, a bursting of normal restraints, a case of being caught off guard. That is what would be learned by asking the man in the street if he uses these forms and, if so, what he means by them.

I am assuming, of course, that this commonsense view of response cries should give way to the co-occurrence analysis that sociolinguists have brought to their problems. But although this naturalistic method is encouraged by sociolinguists, here the subject matter moves one away from their traditional concern. For a response cry doesn't seem to be a statement in the linguistic sense (even a heavily elided one), purportedly doing its work through the concatenated semantic reference of words. A remark is not being addressed to another, not even, it seems, to oneself. So, on the face of it at least, even self-communication is not involved, only a simpler sign process whereby emissions from a source inform us about the state of the source—a case of exuded expressions, not intentionally sent messages. One might better refer to a "vocalizer" or sounder" than to a speaker. Which, of course, is not to deny the capacity of a well-formed, conventionally directed sentence to inform us about the state of the protagonist who serves as its subject, nor that the speaker and protagonist can be the "same"—for indeed through the use of first-person pronouns they routinely are. Only that this latter arrangement brings us information through a message, not an expression, a route fundamentally different from and less direct than the one apparently employed in response cries, even though admittedly such cries routinely come to be employed just in order to give a desired impression. Witnesses can seize the occasion of certain response cries to shake their heads in sympathy, cluck, and generally feel that the way has been made easy for them to initiate passing remarks attesting to fellow-feeling; but they aren't obliged to do so. A response cry may be uttered in the hope that this half- license it gives to hearers to strike up a conversation will be exercised; but, of course, this stratagem for getting talk going could not work were an innocent reading not the official one. As might be expected, the circumstances which allow us to utter a response cry are often just the ones that mitigate the impropriety of a different tack we could take, that of opening up an encounter by addressing a remark to an unacquainted other; but that fact, too, doesn't relieve one of the necessity to distinguish between this latter, fully social sort of comment and the kind that is apparently not even directed to the self.

A response cry is (if anything is) a ritualized act in something like the ethological sense of that term. Unable to shape the world the way we want to, we displace our manipulation of it to the verbal channel, displaying evidence of the alignment we take to events, the display taking the condensed, truncated form of a discretely articulated, nonlexicalized expression. Or, suddenly able to manage a tricky, threatening set of circumstances, we deflect into nonlexicalized sound a dramatization of our relief and self-congratulation in the achievement.

Part VII [8309 bytes]

Consider now some standard cries.

1. The transition display. Entering or leaving from what can be taken as a state of marked natural discomfort—wind, rain, heat, or cold—we seem to have the license (in our society) to externalize an expression of our inner state. Brr! is a standard term for wind and cold upon leaving such an atmosphere. (Other choices are less easily reproduced in print.) Ahh! and Phew! are also heard, this time when leaving a hot place for a cool one. Function is not clear. Perhaps the sounding gives us a moment to orient ourselves to the new climatic circumstances and to fall into cadence with the others in the room, these requirements not ordinarily a taxing matter and not ordinarily needful, therefore, of a pause for their accomplishment. Perhaps the concentration, the "holding ourselves in" sometimes employed in inclement places (as a sort of support for the body), gets released with a flourish on our escaping from such environments. In any case, we can be presumed to be in a state of mind that any and all those already safe might well appreciate—for, after all, weather envelops everyone in the vicinity—and so self-expression concerning our feelings does not take us to a place that is mysterious to our hearers. Incidentally, it appears that, unlike strong imprecations, transition displays in our society are not particularly sex-typed.

2. The spill cry. This time the central examples, Oops! and Whoops!, are well-formed sounds, although not in every sense words, and again something as much (perhaps even more) the practice of females as males. Spill cries are a sound we emit to follow along with our having for a moment lost guiding control of some feature of the world around us, including ourselves. Thus a woman, rapidly walking to a museum exit, passes the door, catches her mistake, utters Oops!, and backtracks to the right place. A man, dropping a piece of meat through the grill to coals below, utters Oops! and then spears the meat to safety with his grill fork.

On the face of it, the sound advertises our loss of control, raising the question of why we should want to defame ourselves through this publicity. An obvious possibility is that the Oops! defines the event as a mere accident, shows we know it has happened, and hopefully insulates it from the rest of our behavior, recommending that failure of control was not generated by some obscure intent unfamiliar to humanity or some general defect in competence. Behind this possibility is another: that the expression is presumably used for minor failings of environmental control, and so in the face of a more serious failure, the Oops!has the effect of downplaying import and hence implication as evidence of our incompetence. (It follows that to show we take a mishap very seriously we might feel constrained to omit the cry.) Another reason for (and function of) spill crying is that, a specific vocalization being involved, we necessarily demonstrate that at least our vocal channel is functioning and, behind this, at least some presence of mind. A part of us proves to be organized and standing watch over the part of us that apparently isn't watchful. Finally, and significantly, the sound can provide a warning to others present that a piece of the world has gotten loose and that they might best be advised to take care. Indeed, close observation shows that the oo in Oops! may be nicely prolonged to cover the period of time during which that which got out of control is out of control.

Note, when we utter Oops! as we slip on the ice, we can be making a plea to the closest other for a steadying hand and simultaneously warning others as to what they themselves should watch out for, these circumstances surely opening up our surround for vocalizations. When in fact there is no danger to the self, we may respond to another's momentary loss of control with an Oops! also, providing him a warning that he is in trouble, a readied framework within which he can define the mishap, and a collectively established cadence for his anticipated response. That some sort of help for others is thus intended seems to be borne out by the fact that apparently men are more likely to Oops! for another when that other is a child or a female, and thus definable as someone for whom responsibility can be taken. Indeed, when a parent plucks up a toddler and rapidly shifts it from one point to another or "playfully" swings or tosses it in the air, the prime mover may utter an Oopsadaisy!, stretched out to cover the child's period of groundlessness, counteracting its feeling of being out of control, and at the same time instructing the child in the terminology and role of spill cries. In any case, it is apparent that oopsing is an adaptive practice with some survival value. And the fact that individuals prove (when the occasion does arise) to have been ready all along to oops for themselves or an appropriate other suggests that when nothing eventful is occurring, persons in one another's presence are still nonetheless tracking one an other and acting so as to make themselves trackable.

3. The threat startle, notably Eek! and Yipe! Perhaps here is a response cry sex-typed (or at least so believed) for feminine use. Surprise and fear are stated—in lay terms, "expressed"—but surprise and fear that are very much under control, indeed nothing to be really concerned about. A very high open stairwell, or a walk that leads to a precipice, can routinely evoke yipes from us as we survey what might have been our doom, but from a position of support we have had ample time to secure. A notion of what a fear response would be is used as a pattern for mimicry. A sort of overplaying occurs that covers any actual concern by extending with obvious unseriousness the expressed form this concern would take. And we demonstrate that we are alive to the fearsome implications of the event, albeit not overthrown by them, that we have seen the trouble and by implication will assuredly control for it, and are, therefore, in need of no warning, all of this releasing others from closely tracking us. And the moment it takes to say the sound is a moment we can use actually to compose ourselves in the circumstances. In a very subtle way, then, a verbal "expression" of our state is a means of rising above it—and a release of concern now no longer necessary, coming after the emergency is really over.

Here an argument made earlier about multiple transformations can be taken up. Precipitous drops are the sorts of things that an individual can be very close to without the slightest danger of dropping over or intent to do so. In these circumstances it would seem that imagery of accident would come to the fore or at least be very readily available. It is this easily achieved mental set that the response cry in question would seem to participate in. Thus the uncompelling character of the actual circumstances can be nicely reflected in the light and almost relaxed character of the cry. One has, then, a warninglike signal in dangerouslikecircumstances. And ritualization begins to give way to a copy of itself, a playful version of what is already a formalized version, a display that has been retransformed and reset, a second order ritualization.

4. Revulsion sounds, such as Eeuw!, are heard from a person who has by necessity or inadvertence come in contact with something that is contaminating. Females in our society, being defined as more vulnerable in this way than males, might seem to have a special claim on the expression. Often once we make the sound, we can be excused for a moment while decontamination is attempted. At other times, our voice performs what our physical behavior can't, as when our hands must keep busy cleaning a fish, leaving only the auditory and other unrequired channels to correct the picture—to show that indelicate, dirty work need not define the person who is besmeared by it. Observe, again there is an unserious note, a hint of hyperritualization. For often the contamination that calls forth an Eeuw! is not really believed to contaminate. Perhaps only germ contamination retains that literal power in our secular world. So again a protectivelike cry is uttered in response to a contaminatinglike contact.

Part VIII [5348 characters]

So far response crying has been largely considered as something that could be available to someone who is present to others but not "with" any of them. If one picks accompanied individuals, not singles, the behavior is still to be found; indeed, response crying is, if anything, encouraged in the circumstances. So, also, response cries are commonly found among persons in an "open state of talk," persons having the right but not the obligation to address remarks to the other participants, this being a condition that commonly prevails among individuals jointly engaged in a common task (or even similarly engaged in like ones) when this work situates them in immediate reach of one another.

1. The strain grunt. Lifting or pushing something heavy, or wielding a sledgehammer with all our might, we emit a grunt at the presumed peak and consummation of our fully extended exertion, the grunt so attesting. The sound seems to serve as a warning that at the moment nothing else can claim our concern, and, sometimes, as a reminder that others should stand clear. No doubt the cry also serves as a means by which joint efforts can be temporally coordinated, as is said to be true of work songs. Observe that these sounds are felt to be entirely unintentional, even though the glottis must be partially closed off to produce them and presumably could be fully opened or closed to avoid doing so. In any case, it could be argued that the expression of ultimate exertion these sounds provide may be essentially overstated. I might add that strain grunts are routinely guyed, employed in what is to be taken as an unserious way, often as a cover for a task that is reckoned as undemanding but may indeed require some exertion, another case of retransformation. Note, too, that strain grunts are also employed during solitary doings that can be construed as involving a peaking of effort. The rise and falling away of effort contoured in sound dramatizes our acts, filling out the setting with their execution. I suppose the common example is the vocal accompaniment we sometimes provide ourselves when passing a hard stool.

2. The pain cry, Oww! (or Ouch!). Here the functioning of this exclamation is rather clear. Ensconced in a dentist's chair, we use a pain cry as a warning that the drill has begun to hurt. Or when a finger is firmly held by a nurse, we ouch when the needle probing for a sliver goes too deep. Plainly the cry in these cases can serve as a self-regulated indicator of what is happening, providing a reading for the instigator of the pain, who might not otherwise have access to the information needed. The meaning, then, may not be "I have been hurt," but rather, "You are just now coming to hurt me." This meaning, incidentally, may also be true of the response that a dog or cat gives us when we have begun to step accidentally on its tail, although that cry often seems to come too late. In any case, these are good examples of how closely a vocalizer can collaborate with another person in the situation.

Note, EFR: there is no point 3 in the original.

4. The sexual moan. This subvocal tracking of the course of sexually climactic experience is a display available to both sexes, but said to be increasingly fashionable for females—amongst whom, of course, the sound tracing can be strategically employed to delineate an ideal development in the marked absence of anything like the real thing.

5. Floor cues. A worker in a typing pool makes a mistake on a clean copy and emits an imprecation, this leading to, and apparently designed to lead to, a colleague's query as to what went wrong. A fully communicated statement of disgust and displeasure can then be introduced, but now ostensibly as a reply to a request for information. A husband reading the evening paper suddenly brays out a laugh or a Good God!, thereby causing his wife to orient her listening and even to ease the transition into talk by asking what is it. (A middle-class wife might be less successful in having her floor cues picked up.) Wanting to avoid being thought, for example, self-centered, intrusive, garrulous, or whatever, and in consequence feeling uneasy about making an open request for a hearing in the particular circumstances, we act so as to encourage our putative listeners to make the initial move, inviting us to let them in on what we are experiencing. Interestingly, although in our society married couples may come to breach many of the standard situational proprieties routinely when alone together—this marking the gradual extension of symmetrical ritual license between them—the rule against persisting in public self-talk may be retained, with the incidental consequence that the couple can continue to use response crying as a floor cue.

6. Audible glee. A lower-middle-class adolescent girl sitting with four friends at a table in a crowded creperie is brought her order, a large crepe covered with ice cream and nuts. As the dish is set before her, she is transfixed for a moment, and wonder and pleasure escape with an Oooooo! In a casino an elderly woman playing the slots alongside two friends hits a twenty-dollar payoff, and above the sound of silver dropping in her tray peeps out a Wheee! Tarzan, besting a lion, roars out a Hollywood version of the human version of a lay version of a mammalian triumph call.

Part IX [4052 characters]

It is important, I believe, to examine the functioning of response cries when the crier is a ratified participant of ongoing conversation, not merely someone copresent to others or in an open state of talk. Walking along saying something to a friend, we can, tripping, unceremoniously interrupt our words to utterOops!,even as the hand of our friend comes out to support us; and as soon as this little flurry is passed, we revert back to our speaking. All that this reveals, of course, is that when we are present to others as a fellow conversationalist we are also present to them —as well as to all others in the situation—as fellow members of the gathering. The conversational role (short of what the telephone allows) can never be the only accessible one in which we are active.

Now let us move on to a closer issue. If these responses are to be seen as ritualized expressions, and some as standardized vocal comments on circumstances that are not, or no longer, beyond our emotional and physical control, then there is reason to expect that such cries will be used at still further remove, this time in response to a verbally presented review of something settled long ago at a place quite removed. A broker tells a client over the phone that his stock has dropped, and the client, well socialized in this sort of thing, says Yipe! or Eek! (The comedian Jack Benny made a specialty of this response cry.) A plumber tells us what our bill will be and we say Ouch! Indeed, response cries are often employed thrice removed from the crisis to which they are supposed to be a blurted response: a friend tells us about something startling and costly that happened to him and at the point of disclosure we utter a response cry on his behalf, as it were, out of sympathetic identification and as a sign that we are fully following his exposition. In fact, we may offer a response cry when he recounts something that happened to someone else. In these latter cases, we are certainly far removed from the exigent event that is being replayed, and just as far removed from its consequences, including any question of having to take immediate rescuing action. Interestingly, there are some cries which seem to occur more commonly in our response to another's fate (good or bad) as it is recounted to us than they do in our response to our own. Oh wow! is an example.

And we can play all of these response games because our choice of vocalization allows the recipient, or rather hearer, to treat the sound as something to which a specific spoken reply is not required. To the plumber we are precisely not saying: "Does the bill have to be that high?"—that statement being something that would require a reply, to the possible embarrassment of all.

Having started with response cries in the street, the topic has been moved into the shelter of conversations. But it should not be assumed from this that the behaviors in question—response cries—have somehow been transmuted into full-fledged creatures of discourse. That is not the way they function. These cries are conventionalized utterances which are specialized for an informative role, but in the linguistic and propositional sense they are not statements. Obviously, information is provided when we utter response cries in the presence of others, whether or not we are in a state of talk at the time. That is about the only reason we utter them in the first place and the reason why they are worth studying. But to understand how these sounds function in social situations, particularly during talk, one must first understand where the prototype of which they are designed to be a recognizable version is seated. What comes to be made of a particular individual's show of "natural emotional expression" on any occasion is a considerably awesome thing not dependent on the existence anywhere of natural emotional expressions. But whatever is made of such an act by its maker and its witnesses is different from what is made of openly designed and openly directed communication.

Part X [4164 characters]

At the beginning of this paper it was argued that extended self talk, if discovered, reflects badly on the talker. Then it was recommended that elements in the situation can considerably mitigate the impropriety of talking to ourselves publicly, and that in any case we are prepared to breach the injunction against public self-talk when, in effect, to sustain this particular propriety would go even harder on our reputation. Much the same position could be taken with respect to interjected imprecations. In both cases, one can point to some hitch in the well-managed flow of controlled events and the quick application of an ostensibly self-directed pronouncement to establish evidence—a veneer of control, poise, and competency. And although response cries do not on the surface involve words uttered even to oneself, being in prototype merely a matter of nonsymbolic emotional expression, they apparently come to function as a means of striking a self defensible posture in the face of extraordinary events—much as does exposed self-talk. However, there is one source of trouble in the management of the world which is routine, and that, interestingly enough, is in the management of talk itself. So again response cries occur, but this time ones that are constantly uttered.

First, there is the well-known filled pause (usually written ah or uh or urn) employed by speakers when they have lost their places, can't find a word, are momentarily distracted, or otherwise find they are departing from fluently sustained speech. Response cries seems an awkward term for such unblurted subvocalizations, but nonetheless they do, I think, function like response cries, if only in that they facilitate tracking. In effect, speakers make it evident that although they do not now have the word or phrase they want, they are giving their attention to the matter and have not cut themselves adrift from the effort at hand. A word search, invisible and inaudible in itself, is thus voluntarily accompanied by a sound shadow—a sound, incidentally, that could easily be withheld merely by otherwise managing the larynx—all to the end of assuring that something worse than a temporary loss of words has not happened, and incidentally holding the speaker's claim on the floor. (Interestingly, in radio broadcasting, where visual facial signs of a word search can't be effective, the filling of pauses by a search sound or a prolongation of a vowel has much to recommend it, for speakers are under obligation to confirm that nothing has gone wrong with the studio's equipment, as well as their own, the floor in this case being a station. And if only inexperienced broadcasters employ filled pauses frequently, it is because professionals can manage speech flow, especially aloud reading, without the hitches in encoding which, were they to occur, would equally give professionals reasons to ritualize evidence of what was occurring.)

In addition to the filled-pause phenomenon, consider the very standard form of self-correction which involves the breaking off of a word or phrase that is apparently not the one we wanted, and our hammering home of a corrected version with increased loudness and tempo, as if to catch the error before it hit the ground and shattered the desired meaning. Here the effect is to show that we are very much alive to the way our words should have come out; we are somewhat shocked and surprised at our failure to encode properly an appropriate formulation the first time round, the rapidity and force of the correct version presumably suggesting how much on our toes we really are. We display our concern and the mobilization of our effort at the expense of smooth speech production, electing to save a little of our reputation for presence of mind over and against that for fluency. Again, as with filled pauses, one has what is ostensibly a bit of pure expression, that is, a transmission providing direct evidence (not relayed through semantic reference) of the state of the transmitter, but now an expression that has been cut and polished into a standard shape to serve the reputational contingencies of its emitter.

Part XI [6212 characters]

Earlier it was suggested that imprecations were somewhat like truncated, self-addressed statements but not wholly so. Later these lexicalized exclamations were shown to function not unlike response cries. Now it is time to try to settle on where they belong.

Say, for example, someone brings you the news that they have failed in a task you have seriously set them. Your response to the news can be: "I knew it! Did you have to?" In the styling I have in mind, this turn at talk contains two moves and a change of "footing": the first move (uttered half under the breath with the eyes turned upward) is a bit of self-talk, or something presented in that guise—the sort of open aside that adults are especially prone to employ in exasperated response to children, servants, foreigners, and other grades who easily qualify for moments of nonperson treatment. The second move ("Did you have to?") is conventionally directed communication. Observe that such a turn at talk will oblige its recipient to offer an apology or a counteraccount, locking the participants into an interchange. But although the recipient of the initial two-move turn will be understood to have overheard the self-addressed segment, he will have neither the right nor the obligation to reply to it specifically, at least in the sense that he does in regard to the conventionally communicated second portion.

Now shift from extended self-talk to the truncated form— imprecation: "Shit! Did you have to?" Given the same histrionics, one again has a two-move turn with a first move that must be oriented to as something that can't be answered in a conventional way. If the recipient does address a remark to this blurted-out portion, it will be to the psychic state presumably indexed by it —much as when we comfort someone who has burst into tears or when we upbraid them for loss of self-control. Or the respondent may have to venture a frame ploy, attempting to counter a move by forcing its maker to change the interpretative conventions that apply to it—as in the snappy comeback, Not here, injected immediately after the expletive. In all of this, and in the fact that standard lexicalizations are employed, I knew it! and Shit! are similar. However, although I knew it! follows grammatical constraints for well-formed sentences, Shit! need not, even if one appeals to the context in order to see how it might be expanded into a statement. Shit! need no more elide a sentence than need a laugh, groan, sob, snicker, or giggle—all vocalizations that frequently occur except in the utterances ordinarily presented for analysis by linguists. Nor, I think, does it help understanding very much to define Shit! as a well-formed sentence with NP! as its structure. Here, of course, imprecations are exactly like response cries. For it is the essence of response cries that they be presented as if mere expression were involved, and not recipient —directed, propositional-like statements, at least on the face of it.

Imprecations, then, might best be considered not as a form of self-talk at all, but rather as a type of response cry. Whereas unlexicalized cries have come to be somewhat conventionalized, imprecations have merely extended the tendency, further ritualizing ritualizations. Religious life already setting aside a class of words to be treated with reserve and ranked with respect to severity, response crying has borrowed them. Or so it would seem.

Insofar as self-talk is structurally different from the normal kind, imprecatory utterances (like other response cries) are too, only more so. And because of this sharp underlying difference between conventionally directed statements and imprecatory interjections, the two can be given radically different roles in the functioning of particular interaction systems, serving close together in complementary distribution without confusion.

Consider tennis. During the open state of talk sustained in such a game, a player who misses an "easy" shot can response cry an imprecation loudly enough for opponents and partner to hear. On the other hand, a player making a "good" shot is not likely to be surprised if an opponent offers a complimentary statement about him to him. (As these two forms of social control help frame his own play, so he will participate in the two forms that frame his opponents'.) But, of course, good taste forbids a player addressing opponents in praise of his own efforts, just as they must allow him elbowroom and not reply directly to his cries of self-disgust. A player may, however, use directed, full-fledged statements to convey self-castigation and (when directed to his partner) apology. Response cries and directed statements here comprise a closely working pair of practices, part of the ritual resources of a single interaction system. And their workings can be intermingled because of their structural difference, not in spite of it. Given this arrangement, it is understandable that a player will feel rather free to make a pass at ironically praising himself in statements made to opponents or partner, correctly sensing that his words could hardly be misframed as literal ones. (That he might employ this device just to induce others to communicate a mitigated view of his failure merely attests again to the various conveniences that can be made of forms of interaction.)

And just as response cries can form a complementary resource with conventionally directed statements, so they can with self-directed ones. For example, in casino craps, a shooter has a right to preface a roll, especially a "come out," with self-encouraging statements of a traditional kind directed to the fates, the dice, or some other ethereal recipient. This grandstanding (as dignified gamblers call this self-talk) sometimes serves to bring the other players into a cadence and peaking of attention. When, shortly, the shooter "craps out," he is allowed a well-fleshed imprecation coincidental with the dissolution of the table's coordinated involvement. So again there is complementarity and a division of labor, with self-talk located where collective hope is to be built up, and imprecatory response cry where it is to be abandoned.

Part XII: Discussion

Note, EFR: This section [three pages in print] omitted.

Conclusion [6000 characters]

The public utterance of self-talk, imprecations, and response cries constitutes a special variety of impulsive, blurted actions, namely, vocalized ones. Our tacit theory of human nature recommends that these actions are "purely expressive," "primitive," "unsocialized," violating in some way or other the self-control and self-possession we are expected to maintain in the presence of others, providing witnesses with a momentary glimpse behind our mask.

However, the point about these blurtings is not that they are particularly "expressive." Obviously, in this sense of that word, ordinary talk is necessarily expressive, too. Naked feelings can agitate a paragraph of discourse almost as well as they can a solitary imprecation. Indeed, it is impossible to utter a sentence without coloring the utterance with some kind of perceivable affect, even (in special cases) if only with the emotionally distinctive aura of affectiessness. Nor is the point about segmented blurtings that they are particularly unsocialized, for obviously they come to us as our language does and not from our own invention. Their point lies elsewhere. One must look to the light these ventings provide, not to the heat they dispel.

In every society one can contrast occasions and moments for silence and occasions and moments for talk. In our own, one can go on to say that by and large (and especially among the unacquainted) silence is the norm and talk something for which warrant must be present. Silence, after all, is very often the deference we will owe in a social situation to any and all others present. In holding our tongue, we give evidence that such thought as we are giving to our own concerns is not presumed by us to be of any moment to the others present, and that the feelings these concerns invoke in ourselves are owed no sympathy. Without such enjoined modesty, there could be no public life, only a babble of childish adults pulling at one another's sleeves for attention. The mother to whom we would be saying, "Look, no hands," could not look or reply for she would be saying, "Look, no hands," to someone else.

Talk, however, presumes that our thoughts and concerns will have some relevance or interest or weight for others, and in this can hardly but presume a little. Talk, of course, in binding others to us, can also do so for protracted periods of time. The compensation is that we can sharply restrict this demand to a small portion of those who are present, indeed, often to only one.

The fugitive communications I have been considering constitute a third possibility, minor no doubt, but of some significance if only because of what they tell us about silence and talk. Our blurtings make a claim of sorts upon the attention of every one in the social situation, a claim that our inner concerns should be theirs, too, but unlike the claim made by talk, ours here is only for a limited period of attention. And, simply put, this invitation into our interiors tends to be made only when it will be easy for other persons present to see where the voyage takes them. What is precipitous about these expressions, then, is not the way they are emitted but rather the circumstances which render their occurrence acceptable. The invitation we are free to extend in these situations we would be insane to extend in others.

Just as most public arrangements oblige and induce us to be silent, and many other arrangements to talk, so a third set allows and obliges us momentarily to open up our thoughts and feelings and ourselves through sound to whosoever is present. Response cries, then, do not mark a flooding of emotion outward, but a flooding of relevance in.

There is linguistic point to the consideration of this genre of behavior. Response cries such as Eek might be seen as peripheral to the linguist's domain, but imprecations and self-talk are more germane, passing beyond semiword vocal segregates to the traditional materials of linguistic analysis. And the point is that all three forms of this blurted vocalization—semiword response cries, imprecations, and self-talk—are creatures of social situations, not states of talk. A closed circle of ratified participants oriented to engaging exclusively with one another in avowedly directed communications is not the base; a gathering, with its variously oriented, often silent and unacquainted members, is. Further, all three varieties of this ejaculatory expression are conventionalized as to form, occasion of occurrence, and social function. Finally, these utterances are too commonly met with in daily life, surely, to justify scholarly neglect.

Once it is recognized that there is a set of conventionalized expressions that must be referred to social situations, not conversations, once, that is, it is appreciated that there are communications specifically designed for use outside states of talk, then it is but a step to seeing that ritualized versions of these expressions may themselves be embedded in the conventionally directed talk to be found in standard conversational encounters. And appreciating this, then to go on to see that even though these interjections come to be employed in conversational environments, they cannot be adequately analyzed there without reference to their original functioning outside of states of talk.

It is recommended, then, that linguists have reason to broaden their net, reason to bring in uttering that is not talking, reason to deal with social situations, not merely with jointly sustained talk. Incidentally, linguists might then be better able to countenance inroads that others can be expected to make into their conventional domain. For it seems that talk itself is intimately regulated and closely geared to its context through non vocal gestures which are very differently distributed from the particular language and subcodes employed by any set of participants—although just where these boundaries of gesture-use are to be drawn remains an almost unstudied question.

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