On the Distortion of Sequential Consistency in Spoken Discourse (original) (raw)
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While disagreement may appear in any interaction, intercultural conversations remain submitted to the highest risk of discordant interaction. During conversations, speakers select some socially or culturally marked behaviours which might lead the conversation to an open conflict. It is therefore crucial to study the evolution of possible disagreements in order to understand their logic. A systemic model of conversation is able to help us understand this logic and the fluctuations happening during intercultural interactions. Moreover, the systemic model is representative of the dynamic and ever changing rapports created and maintained by any human interaction. We will define the mechanism of a systemic model of intercultural conversations and refer to them as conversational systems. These definitions will help us understand the way harmonious and dysharmonious conversations may emerge 1 , and how cultural differences are able to create severe fluctuations which may affect the stability of the conversational system. These cultural differences find a way of outing through different elements: • Speech acts; • Organization of turn taking in conversation; • Verbal communication per se, including all sort of utterances (onomatopeia and other vocal outings) as well as changes in the voice (However, these differences may be considered as mere variables for multiple social and individual universes, while their meetings are undergoing the same pragmatic principles (Lewis 1969, Kallmeyer 1987, Bange 1992), mainly negociability, reciprocity and mainly cooperation. Thus, Grice's cooperation principle is useful when trying to describe and understand the process of disagreement. As seen through intercultural studies, the cooperation principle helps to discover a possible logic underlying not only harmonious relations, but also discordant interactions. Cooperation is a fundamental principle which regulates any possible interaction, may it be in economics, physics, biology or politics. If human beings cooperate in every interaction, then it may be also true throughout intercultural disagreements. Even in the latter cases, speakers follow this principle. According to Grice (1975: 45), a simple sentence explains the application of this cooperation principle: " make your conversational contribution such as required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged ". In fact, if the purpose or direction of the talk exchange is to disagree, then we might be able to argue that speakers still cooperate in such conversational cases. If disagreement cases are often perceived are ununderstandable or complex, the application of cooperation to these interactions clearly throw light on how strings get pulled during conversational mismatches. To some extent, the cooperation principle might even help us explain why disagreement may emerge and evolve without any restraint or interactional work proposed by speakers themselves. We will try to analyze how speakers really may obey this cooperation principle, even though they do not seem to cooperate at all during discordant interactions. However, we will not focus on Grice's maxims, as the cooperation principle in itself might be sufficient enough to help us build a comprehensive model of discordant interactions. For Goodwin and Harness Goodwin (1990: 85), " despite the way in which argument is frequently treated as disruptive behavior, it is in fact accomplished through a process of very intricate coordination between the parties who are opposing each other ". Furthermore, speakers may not necessarily be aware of the use of this coordination as such, while their very implication in arguments doubtlessly shows that all parties involved are using/used by Grice's cooperation principle. Thus, the aim of this paper will be to propose a definition of disharmonious conversational systems as seen through the lense of Grice's cooperation principle. Moreover, we will try to apply this theoretical framework to an intercultural case study chosen for its seemingly trivial context. This example will feature interactions between korean and hispanic co-workers in the United States of America, as mentioned by a Washington Post article written by Cecilia Kang. We have chosen this example because it features both inter-individual and sociocultural signs of disagreement: in fact, this interaction is placed in a Cooperative Disagreement: Towards a Definition of Discordant Interactions 1 Harmonious conversations may be defined as such because of their ability to maintain a certain rapport without disturbing the general balance of the interaction. On the contrary, dysharmonious conversations seriously threaten the balance of the ongoing interaction, letting fluctuations emerge within the communicational system.
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With reference to Mead, Peirce, speech act theory, conversation analysis, and Luhmann's phenomenological grounded version of systems theory, the paper tries to reconstruct actions as products of communication. A triadic sequence is identified as the elementary unit for the intersubjective constitution of an act. This unit combines three achievements: (a) the constitution of meaning by sequential attribution, (b) the intersubjective coordination of attributed meanings, and (c) the reproduction of rules, guiding the process of constitution and coordination of attributed meanings. Then, using the tools of systems theory and applying them to empirical results of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, it is shown how the rule scheme is integrated in a triadic sequence, functioning on three different levels of communication. Finally, a specific form of repair after next turn is discussed, relating it to the function of preserving the structure of conversational types. The analysis of such conversational types opens a possible realm of cooperation between conversation analysis and Luhmann's version of systems theory.
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