You're wet/bleeding

[Kate Hickerson]

Greg, 

This is somewhat along the lines of the Tannen discussion you've already
mentioned, but have you considered looking at Harvey Sacks' work on
"noticings"? I don't have the exact reference available right now, but I
remember that he discusses how every interactent brings a number of
candidate topics to a conversation, and through the conversational device
of a "noticing" (such as, "You have new shoes!") another interactent
realizes that topic.

Just a thought,
Kate


At 11:38 PM 7/25/00 +0800, you wrote:
>I teach English in Taiwan. I have collected here two utterances
>from Chinese speakers of English which seem inconsistent with
>Gricean ideas of language as communication and I wanted advice
>about what to do with them.
>
>One was when I walked through a typhoon to the airport and the
>woman at the check-in counter greeted me with the statement, "You're
>wet!" or "You're all wet!" I can't remember the exact words. I can
>remember this made me feel warm inside, but I also remember thinking
>about it later perhaps and wondering how you would explain it in
>terms of the Gricean maxim to be as informative as required, but no
> more informative than required.
>
>Being told I was wet did not tell me anything I didn't know at all, but
>I did not feel it was odd, or  that I could respond with something like,
>"Don't you know there's a typhoon outside?" or "Am I? I didn't notice."
>or "No. This is the new look." But I couldn't put my finger on why it
>wasn't odd.
>
>The other example was in a textbook where one of the characters comes
>home after a motorcycle accident to get some money before going to
>the hospital and the other character greets him with the words, "You're
>bleeding!" This also is not informative. Why does the other character say it?
>
>I don't have any examples from native speakers, but it seems to me this
>kind of thing is that it is something they say too. I searched some on-line
>corpuses but couldn't find any examples.
>
>Reading Chao-Chih Liao's Intercultural emailing. Taipei: Crane, 2000, I see
>she cites Tannen's You just don't understand, NY: Ballantine, 1990, as
>saying one's topics of conversation are limited to 1. the same as one's
>interlocutor's, 2. answering questions, or 3. asking questions based on
>what the interlocutor has said.
>
>This suggests greeting someone with a problem with something that
>shows you recognize they have a problem is a form of politeness. The
>person with the problem doesn't have to impose as much.
>
>Brown and Levinson in Politeness on page 38 talk about preference
>organization and say offers by A are preferred to requests by B to A.
>The reason why someone would say something obvious about a
>problem is that it offers to make the topic of the conversation the
>problem rather than forcing the person with the problem to have
>to broach the issue.
>
>So, what do I do with this. Is there ammunition here for an attack
>on Gricean theory of conversational implicature?
>
>--
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