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Nov. 18th, 2006 06:12 pm"Exploring the language of Poems, plays and prose" by Mick Short
is currently my favourite book ever.
Yes, I know it sounds a bit dry to hold such a status.
But it has the rules! It has what normal conversation is like! And it has rules about turn taking, and a little table of how it relates to power, which makes me go "er, oops" because most of my stuff like accidentally interrupting or apparently changing the topic (because it connects somewhere in my head) actually comes out as *power* moves, which I can understand pissing people off, because it's like I'm sitting there saying I'm the boss of them, and clearly I am not.
And now it has a section on politeness, including the what and why of it.
With rules! And definitions!
Politeness has two faces, which it calls positive and negative, though I don't quite see why... ah,
Positive is for what we do want and Negative is for what we don't want.
We do want people to like what we do, and we don't want people to stop us doing what we do.
( Read more... )
Some of this stuff I'm immensely better at now than at some points I can remember.
But written down this way it makes sense as a coherent set of rules, rather than just a list of do and don't. Can see the why of it.
So I do the happy dance of knowledge acquisition.
I never know how much I'm exaggerating my confusion though. It is possible I do things quite well most of the time and only notice when I do oops. It is in fact probable the times I do oops eat most of my attention.
I should go apply theories to texts soon, but I want to read more of this book. It is full of interesting.
The only thing that do bug me is it lists his 'intuitions' about power relationships and how it shows up in turn taking. And then it goes on talking about them as if they are facts. To become facts they would have to be backed up by empirical data, yesno? And I'm sure there's people researching this stuff. I was looking stuff up when I was looking up the 'women speak more than men' theory (they probably don't, is probably men who speak more, which would fit the power thing sometimes). So where are the numbers? Why are his intuitions in a textbook?
Also like the other book was saying, how there's a gap between noticing all these things in the language and interpreting what they do, what effect they create. There's sometimes a small hop and other times a bigger one. So you have to look out for the jump.
Aside from that, I like this book.
is currently my favourite book ever.
Yes, I know it sounds a bit dry to hold such a status.
But it has the rules! It has what normal conversation is like! And it has rules about turn taking, and a little table of how it relates to power, which makes me go "er, oops" because most of my stuff like accidentally interrupting or apparently changing the topic (because it connects somewhere in my head) actually comes out as *power* moves, which I can understand pissing people off, because it's like I'm sitting there saying I'm the boss of them, and clearly I am not.
And now it has a section on politeness, including the what and why of it.
With rules! And definitions!
Politeness has two faces, which it calls positive and negative, though I don't quite see why... ah,
Positive is for what we do want and Negative is for what we don't want.
We do want people to like what we do, and we don't want people to stop us doing what we do.
( Read more... )
Some of this stuff I'm immensely better at now than at some points I can remember.
But written down this way it makes sense as a coherent set of rules, rather than just a list of do and don't. Can see the why of it.
So I do the happy dance of knowledge acquisition.
I never know how much I'm exaggerating my confusion though. It is possible I do things quite well most of the time and only notice when I do oops. It is in fact probable the times I do oops eat most of my attention.
I should go apply theories to texts soon, but I want to read more of this book. It is full of interesting.
The only thing that do bug me is it lists his 'intuitions' about power relationships and how it shows up in turn taking. And then it goes on talking about them as if they are facts. To become facts they would have to be backed up by empirical data, yesno? And I'm sure there's people researching this stuff. I was looking stuff up when I was looking up the 'women speak more than men' theory (they probably don't, is probably men who speak more, which would fit the power thing sometimes). So where are the numbers? Why are his intuitions in a textbook?
Also like the other book was saying, how there's a gap between noticing all these things in the language and interpreting what they do, what effect they create. There's sometimes a small hop and other times a bigger one. So you have to look out for the jump.
Aside from that, I like this book.
