Conversation style

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CONVERSATION STYLE

PRESENTED BY: GROUP 1 PRESENTED TO: MA'AM MARIA SUBJECT: STYLISTIC

GROUP MEMBERS

GROUP MEMBERS

BUSHRA IFTIKHAR

UMM-E-KALSOOM

BUSHRA IFTIKHAR

UMM-E-KALSOOM

IQRA AKBAR

IQRA AKBAR

AYESHA JABEEN

NAGEEN SHAHID

AYESHA JABEEN

NAGEEN SHAHID

MISHAL RUBAB

SAIMA SHAHZAD

ALIYA BATOOL

MISHAL RUBAB

SAIMA SHAHZAD

ALIYA BATOOL

DANIA KHAN

RAAZIA FAROOQ

ASMA MUZAFFAR

DANIA KHAN

RAAZIA FAROOQ

ASMA MUZAFFAR

INTRODUCTION

CONVERSATION

A verbal exchange in which ideas, thoughts, and information are communicated takes place between two or more individuals is referred to as a conversation. It entails a back-and-forth conversation that is often casual and engaging in style.

Conversations have a crucial role in establishing and maintaining connections, transferring information, and expressing ourselves. They are a fundamental component of human communication.

In the context of stylistics, the use of language that replicates the organic flow and tone of common conversation is referred to as conversational style. The use of casual language, contractions, colloquial idioms, and unconventional grammar and syntax are characteristics of this writing style. In the study of stylistics, conversational style is crucial as a tool for producing interesting and efficient communication in a variety of settings.

Pragmatics and interpretation of conversation:

Some parts of conversations can be understood entirely from our knowledge of syntax and lexis. According to Fowles (1965), in a conversation between Nicholas Urfe and Mr. Conchis, Nicholas asks, `I shall see you next spring then?’ `Perhaps.’ `I have a two-year contract at the school.’ `Ah.’ ...`Will she be here next year?’ `You will not see her.’ `But will she be here?’ (First edn, Chapter 55)

EXAMPLE EXPLAINATION

• Nicholas asks questions, and the mysterious Mr. Conchis provides the answers.
• But this time there is an obvious undercurrent to the conversation, perceived by both reader and characters.
• Mr. Conchis never gives a straight answer.
• The declarative form of Nicholas’s first query expects confirmation, but Conchos’s reply is totally neutral.
• The value for Conchis remarks cannot be arrived at merely through an understanding of syntactic and lexical structure of the exchange.
• We also have to use pragmatic interpretative strategies.
• In order to understand the interaction of character and character in dialogue, then, it will be useful to see how we can profitably apply the work of those who have developed the pragmatic analysis of ordinary conversation.

SPEECH ACT

The pragmatic analysis of language can be understood into an aspect of meaning which is derived from the way in which utterances are used and how they relate to the context in which they are uttered.

The concept relates utterance meaning to context is Speech Act, developed by J.L Austin and J.R Searle.

When people utter sentences, they also perform acts of various kinds, such as declaring, asking, requesting, commanding, promising and so on. Speech acts are independent of syntactic and semantic categories

SPEECH ACT EXAMPLE

Here we examine a passage from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:

`O Mr Bennet, you are wanted immediately; we are all in an uproar.........................‘Speak to Lizzie about it yourself. Tell her that you insist upon marrying him.’(5) (Chapter 20).

Suppose we asked to report this dialogue to another person, without directly quoting each speech. We could do so by turning it into a stylised indirect speech, using speech act verbs to convey roughly the interpersonal force of what is said.

From the example of Pride and Prejudice, it is not at all obvious that a wife can normally order her husband, nor that a father can force a daughter to marry against her will. However, felicity conditions for speech acts may change from one society or time to another. Speech acts also have conditions of success; a command or a question is successful if it elicits an appropriate response. Thus the first part of Mrs Bennett’s demand ‘speak to Lizzie... yourself’ is acceded to, but the second part ‘Tell her that you insist...’ is not. Mr Bennett merely asks his wife to confirm, in Elizabeth’s presence, that she insists on the marriage. Throughout the passage, the conditions of success for Mrs Bennett’s speech acts are unfulfilled: her demand is ignored, her assertions are doubted, and her threat is finally thwarted.

CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE

• The ‘extra meanings’ that we infer, and which account for the gap between overt sense and pragmatic force, may be called implicatures.

• The term ‘implicature’ was proposed by the philosopher H.P Grice. When people converse with one another they acknowledge a kind of tacit agreement to cooperate conversationally towards mutual ends. This agreement he calls cooperative principle.

• In pragmatics, much of what we learn comes from inferences from the language, rather than from what is openly said. When Mr Bennett says ‘Of what are you talking?’ We can conclude either that he has not heard or understood what his wife has said, or we can conclude that he is pretending not to understand.

MAXIMS

When one abides by the cooperative principle one conforms to various rules, or maxims, as Grice calls them. One must tell the truth, and make remarks which are relevant to the conversation, for example. Grice suggested four conversational maxims:

step 1

The maxim of quality:

The maxim of quantity:

The maxim of manner:

The maxim of relation:

Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in

+info

Maxim of quantity:

Maxim of quality: Do not say that for which you lack evidence or which you believe to be false.

Give the required amount of information- not too much or too little.

Maxim of relation: Make your contributions relevant to the purpose in hand.

Maxim of manner: Avoid obscurity, ambiguity and unnecessary prolixity, and orderly.

Conversational maxims are unlike rules. They are often violated. In this sense they are rhetorical principles. When this happens the listener perceives the difference between what the speaker says and what he means by what he says, the particular meaning deduced for the latter being the Implicature.

The breaking of maxims of quantity and quality can be seen in the following extract from Wuthering Heights where Nelly Dean and Isabella are talking about Heathcliff:

‘Hush, hush! He’s a human being,'.............pinched it to death, and flung it back to me.’ (Chapter 17).

When Nelly Dean calls Heathcliff a ‘human being’ she breaks the maxims of quantity by stating what is self-evidently true and therefore redundant. Isabella breaks the maxim of quality a number of times by uttering what is literally untrue, namely that Heathcliff is not a human being, and that he has torn her heart and killed it.

• Gricean Implicature can be seen in ordinary conversation, or traditional rhetorical figures such as metaphor, hyperbole and irony. Such figures are, negatively speaking, ways of ‘failing to say what one means’, and the motivation for such obliquity lies in interpersonal factors which are at odds with the principle of cooperation: factors of attitude, tension and conflict.
• A second point is that pragmatic force is not so much a function of the situation.
• Besides a ‘model of reality’, participants in a discourse also construct a ‘model of context’ which includes their conceptions of relations with the interlocutor. Implicatures are contributions which are made to this ‘model’ as conversations proceed.
• When characters are at cross-purposes, their models are at variance. Such variance is the basis of the dramatic interest in conversational dialogue.

1.3. Pragmatics and thoughts:

Pragmatic analysis would not be able to aid significantly our understanding of the flow of character thought. But although there can be, by definition, no interlocutor when minds are depicted, writers often represent them as if there were.In Virginia Woolf's novels this often results in a stark contrast between inner and outer reality. In this way thought becomes a form of suspended action; or even a form of suspended interaction between characters:

That girl, thought Mrs Dempster, doesn't know a thing yet. (1) She had had a hard time with it, and couldn't help smiling at a girl like that. (2) You'll get married, for you're pretty enough, thought Mrs Dempster. (3) Get married, she thought, and then you'll know. (4) For really, what with eating, drinking, and mating, the bad days and good, life had been no mere matter of roses. (5) But, she implored, pity. Pity, for the loss of roses. Pity she asked of Maisie Johnson, standing by the hyacinth beds (6). [Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, Hogarth Press, 1976 edn, p. 31]

Conversation between author and reader:

4) In other words, Jane Austen breaks the maxim of quality. So how do we make sense of what she says? We assume that the author is speaking ironically, and understand her roughly as follows: 'Although this is not a universal truth, the social conventions of money and marriage are such that a lot of people go about behaving as if it were true. 5) Phatic communion would seem to be a counter-example to Grice's theory; the maxim of quantity is broken in such talk not to convey implicatures; rather, phatic communion is a way of expressing social cohesion, starting off conversations, and the like. But at the level of the interchange between author and reader an implicature does pass. 6) If philosophers such as Grice and Searle have contributed new dimensions to the understanding of human behavior in conversation, further illumination has been provided by work in sociology and sociolinguistics.

1) Pragmatic model of understanding can apply not only to character—character discourse, but also to the way in which authors convey messages to their readers. 2) Sometimes an author conveys what he wants to say directly, and sometimes via interchange between characters. In both kinds of case we can expect conversational implicatures and other inferential strategies to be used. 3) The author breaks away from the narrative past, and adopts the aphoristic present tense, we must assume some relevance to the narrative: e.g., that the narrative illustrates the general truth in question. It is with such a sentence that Jane Austen begins Pride and Prejudice.

EXTENDED PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS

“An extended pragmatic analysis refers to a detailed examination of the way people use language in different social contexts to convey meaning beyond the literal interpretation of the words themselves” This approach takes into account various contextual factors, such as the ● Speaker’s intentions ● The audience’s expectations ● The cultural and social norms that govern communication. Examples of extended pragmatic analysis could include:

1) Studying the language used in political speeches: This would involve analyzing how politicians use language to appeal to different audiences and convey their political positions. Factors such as the speaker’s tone, choice of words, and use of rhetorical devices could all be examined to gain insights into their communication strategies. 2) Investigating the language used in customer service interactions: This would involve analyzing how customer service representatives use language to address customer complaints and inquiries. Factors such as the tone of voice, use of empathy, and the degree of formality would all be relevant to understanding how these interactions play out. Overall, an extended pragmatic analysis involves a detailed examination of language use in a particular context to understand how meaning is conveyed beyond the literal meaning of the words themselves.

CONVERSATIONAL TONE

“It refers to the way in which language is used to create a sense of informality and familiarity in spoken or written communication. In a conversational tone, the language used is usually less formal and more relaxed, with a focus on creating a comfortable and friendly atmosphere between the speaker or writer and the listener or reader”

Particularly in its role of indicating the ❖ Social stance of speaker to hearer: where the dynamics of conversation are reflected variously in Fiction the politeness, familiarity or rudeness of tone adopted by one character towards another. ❖ Tone can be so important as to overrule the actual sense of what is said: ‘It wasn’t so much what she said, as her tone of voice that I objected to.’ The phrase ‘tone of voice’ here brings out the significance of phonetic factors such as intonation and voice quality; but even if these are unavailable (as they are in written dialogue) tone can be indicated by varied and subtle use of grammatical, lexical and graphological markers, as well as by authorial descriptions of a character’s manner of speech. ❖ Stylistic values of tone are essentially scalar: there are scales of politeness, of formality, of emotive key, etc., and these have their positive and negative poles; for example, politeness implies its antonym of familiarity; formality implies its antonym of informality or colloquialism. The term impoliteness should perhaps be considered not so much the opposite of politeness, as a reference to an inappropriate position on the scale: we can be impolite both by being too polite and by being too familiar for the occasion.

Stylistic values of tone are essentially scalar: there are scales of politeness, of formality, of emotive key, etc., and these have their positive and negative poles; for example, politeness implies its antonym of familiarity; formality implies its antonym of informality or colloquialism. The term impoliteness should perhaps be considered not so much the opposite of politeness, as a reference to an inappropriate position on the scale: we can be impolite both by being too polite and by being too familiar for the occasion.

. This leads to an important observation about conversational tone in literature: we judge a character’s tone by relating it to some contextual norm of appropriateness (for example, the cheery greeting ‘Hi!’ may be appropriate when one student addresses another, but not when a student addresses an archbishop) and the interest of tone often lies in the way a character’s verbal behavior deviates from some such norm implicit in the fiction or in the author’s presentation of it. This means that we have to be sensitive to norms of tone in reading a novel, and must also be aware of the way in which such norms change from one age to another, and from one situation to another.

The politeness scale is used to determine whether a person's speech is polite or not. Based on Leech's theory in Klegr (2016), there are five politeness scales: Cost- benefit scale, Optionality scale, Indirectness scale, Authority scale, and social distance scale. The way in which one character addresses or designates another is a revealing indicator of tone, particularly in novels of the nineteenth century, when distinctions of social status were more explicitly graded in speech,than they are today. EXAMPLE: (‘Knightley! – I could not have believed it, Knightley! – never seen him in her life before, and call him Knightley!’) This shows a consciousness of the social implications of address which is also reflected in Dombey and Son when Dickens’s heroine Florence corrects her maid Susan Nipper for an irreverent reference to the aristocratic Skettles family. (chapter 23).

POLITENESS AND FORMALITY: Politeness goes with formal rather than colloquial vocabulary (misconceive, expressive of a quality, distinguished, submission), and also with syntax which tends towards rhetorical formalism: notice the balancing pairs of ‘adorns and graces’, ‘beauty and accomplishments’, ‘naturally and justly’. Because these are signs of studied linguistic choice they suggest a lack of spontaneity, and hence, by extension, carry a suspicion of insincerity. Scale of formality: A formal style is associated with the distance of serious public communication (particularly written communication), of language ‘on its best behavior’. Nevertheless, we see in Mr Dombey’s speech at Paul’s christening how a formality that is inappropriate to the situation can produce an effect very similar to that of over-politeness.

SPEECH AND THOUGHT PRESENTATION

THE PRESENTATION OF SPEECH: Direct and Indirect Speech (DS and IS): Direct speech is used to report or rather repeat the words spoken by the speaker or writer in the way it is told by the speaker, whereas indirect speech is the way in which you convey what someone said to another person, not necessarily using the exact words of the speaker. The formal relationships between these modes of report are most easily shown by seeing how it is possible to convert one into the other Example: 1) He said, ‘I’ll come back here to see you again tomorrow. (Direct) 2) He said that he would return there to see her the following day. (Indirect). In this example the time and place in which the reported and reporting speech events occur are totally distinct. But there will be occasions in conversations.

So far we have only talked about direct and indirect speech, but novelists do not just have two forms of speech presentation at their disposal. There are at least three other immediate possibilities: a more direct form than ds, a more indirect form than is, and a mixed form somewhere between the two. And indeed all these forms occur in fiction. They are, respectively,

Free Indirect Speech

Free Direct Speech

Narrative report of speech

The form in between direct speech (DS) and indirect speech (IS) is called free indirect speech (FIS). As its name implies, FIS is normally thought of as a free version of an ostensibly indirect form. Its most typical manifestation is one where, unlike indirect speech, the reporting clause is omitted, but where the tense and pronoun selection are those associated with indirect speech.

In the Narrator’s Representation of a Speech Act (NRSA), we are told what act of speech was used. We may also get some indication of the subject matter talked about e.g. She told him about his bad breath. With NRSA, then, the report of the speech is minimal, and completely under the control of the narrator

Free direct speech (fds) lacks a reporting clause to show the shift from narration to reporting; it is often used in fiction to represent the mental reactions of characters to what they see or experience.

PRESENTATION OF THOUGHT: Definition: The presentation of thought in stylistics refers to the ways in which authors and speakers present their ideas, thoughts, and perspectives through language. In stylistics, the presentation of thought is often analyzed in terms of various linguistic features such as syntax, diction, figurative language, and rhetorical devices. These features are used by authors and speakers to create a particular effect on the reader or listener. For example, an author might use short, simple sentences to convey a sense of urgency or to emphasize a particular point. Alternatively, they might use complex, compound sentences to convey a sense of complexity or to create a more sophisticated tone. Diction, or the choice of words, can also play a significant role in the presentation of thought. For instance, an author might use vivid, descriptive language to create a sense of imagery or to evoke a particular emotion in the reader. Figurative language, such as metaphor and simile, can also be used to present thought in a unique and memorable way. Rhetorical devices such as repetition, parallelism, and rhetorical questions can be used to create a persuasive and powerful effect. Overall, the presentation of thought in stylistics is an essential aspect of analyzing and understanding how language is used to convey meaning and emotion in communication.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INNER SPEECH AND POINT OF VIEW:

The relationship between inner speech and point of view: 1) Author chooses to represent the thoughts of a character, in this way we come to know about the point of view of the character and the character becomes a reflection of that fiction. It is possible to view things from a particular character’s perspective without representing his thoughts. Example : Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett and You Touched Me by D. H Lawrence. 2) Character’s point of view can be described as : ● Their expressions and inner thoughts ● Their representation of thoughts excluding mind descriptions, ● Requires an omniscient narrator. Examples will be seen from the novel of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. We can see that here lies more the linguistic forms rather than indirect forms. Example : “they saw Tess“ with “ they saw her white shape”.

• Thought presentation :
• DS: direct speech: FDS : free direct speech : Providing the expression that characters are talking in our presence, less authorial intervention is involved. Example : James Joyce’s The Dead .

• DT : direct thought : FDT: Free direct thought : Uses the expression where there is a monologue and also contains authorial interventions, conscious quality of the character. Represent the sudden strength of realization.
• Example : Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The switches from FIT to FDT and back again to NRTA are made apparent by the sentence boundaries and the sequence of dots after darling.
• The FDT distances us from characters produced in speech while FIT puts us directly inside in the mind of characters.
• Thought = IT = Norm , speech = DS = Norm.
• In twentieth century novels at least, the IT is viewed as the semantic, providing verbatim reports. Whereas IS is the substance that the author gives to the character of fictions.
• DI ;more artificial than IF , FIT ;more explicit to revealing.
• Twentieth century novels used the techniques of FIT in their intervention of soliloquy., an attempt to make characters feel more actual and showcasing their natural development.
• DT ; showcases the artificiality of speaking to oneself, convention

INNER SPEECH: Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meaning. If you catch yourself talking to yourself or can hear your voice in your mind as you read, you have it too. Point of view: It refers to who is telling a story, or who is narrating it. Author chooses to represent the thoughts of a character. In the following extract from Tess of the D’Urbervilles we see Tess’s departure from the view point of her family: *First sentence is dominated by They saw her *Hardy restricts the perception themselves by using linguistics form which are appropriate to the character, instead of saying They saw Tess We find They saw her As if in great surprise Narrator knows Tess was surprised or not

In conclusion, we must emphasize the almost boundless versatility of speech and thought presentation as a means of varying point of view, tone and distance.

Conclusions

We concentrated on the one-way discourse between author and reader. These two levels of discourse, we can now see, are closely interconnected: (a) because the discoursal point of view of the author must be interpreted in the light of the embedded discourses of conversation; and (b) because the strategies of communication (e.g., through implicature) employed in two-way conversation are also used by the author in his ‘conversation’ with the reader. To a large extent, it is only the greater complexity, multiplicity and subtlety of the novel as discourse which separates it from the most common- place conversational transactions. A further factor in this relation between the two levels of discourse is explored

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