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Occasioned Semantics: A Systematic Approach to Meaning in Talk

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Abstract

This paper puts forward an argument for a systematic, technical approach to formulation in verbal interaction. I see this as a kind of expansion of Sacks’ membership categorization analysis, and as something that is not offered (at least not in a fully developed form) by sequential analysis, the currently dominant form of conversation analysis. In particular, I suggest a technique for the study of “occasioned semantics,” that is, the study of structures of meaningful expressions in actual occasions of conversation. I propose that meaning and rhetoric be approached through consideration of various dimensions or operations or properties, including, but not limited to, contrast and co-categorization, generalization and specification, scaling, and marking. As illustration, I consider a variety of cases, focused on generalization and specification. The paper can be seen as a return to some classical concerns with meaning, as illuminated by more recent insights into indexicality, social action, and interaction in recorded talk.

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Notes

  1. CA does look for normative generalizations, but, again, the fact that a norm is sometimes violated, and that sometimes such violations are not sanctioned, is not taken as falsification. Rather, the occasional occurrence of sanctions in response to violations is taken as proof that participants are, or may be, oriented to such norms and, therefore, that the norms exist. It is true that conversation analysts sometimes make quasi-statistical empirical generalizations (Schegloff 1993), but the lack of adequate sampling procedures makes these claims less than scientific.

  2. See the appendix to this article for a critique of Sacks’ paper.

  3. It is to be noted that an expression may signify by virtue of its placement. So, “yes” or “he did” has a particular signification when preceded by “Did he do his homework?”

  4. I am not really sure that there is such a thing as “pure reference”. Even the use of a proper name is a choice from among other referential possibilities and may therefore have descriptive implications or overtones.

  5. I have run across definitions that seem to include written language, but this, I think, does not represent the common understanding.

  6. Some gestures are significant, in the sense that they have referents and may substitute for words. They are, like signifying words, to be considered, in themselves, formulations. Thus, the notion of a formulation as “putting into words” is too narrow.

  7. I am indebted to Arnulf Deppermann for reminding me that this is not necessarily true in the case of language acquisition. Perhaps in the case of formulaic performatives, to understand what act they perform is to understand them as language.

  8. Categorizing, in this quotation from Frake, involves withholding of information. Typically, within the conversation analytic tradition, the emphasis is on meaning or relevancies that are added in the process of categorization. That is, the choice of this category rather than that is informative. By categorizing, we reveal the nature of the thing as we would have it known on this occasion.

  9. This is a common way to do certain kinds of tactical contrast—get the other to provide or accede to the first term. It is also a way to introduce an item into a conversation. In this case, show a proper (and, at least in this case, sequentially motivated) interest in the other’s upbringing, then reciprocate with information about one’s own upbringing.

  10. I have argued in another publication (Bilmes 2009b) that at least some metaphors may also be considered generalizations of a sort, but I have chosen not to consider metaphor in this article, since it raises issues that are not especially relevant to the current discussion.

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Correspondence to Jack Bilmes.

Appendix

Appendix

Three of Sacks’ major points on “The baby cried. The mommy picked it up”. are:

  1. (a)

    Sacks asks how we know that the mommy is the mommy of the baby. “Baby,” he claims, belongs to two “devices”—a device being a collection (i.e., a set of categories that go together, that is, a set of categories which are themselves members of a more general category, as “male” and “female” are members of the category “sex”) and its rules of application—a stage-of-life device and a family device. “Baby” is a member of the category “age group” and also a member of the category “family member”. The ambiguity is resolved by the use of “mommy”. Sacks proposes three rules to explain this. According to the “economy rule,” “a single category from a membership categorization device can be referentially adequate”. So, for instance, the category “baby” is sufficient reference for the purposes of this story. The consistency rule states “If some population of persons is being categorized, and if a category from some device’s collection has been used to categorize a first member of the population, then that category or other categories of the same collection may be used to categorize further members of the population”. So, if “oak” is mentioned, there is a distinct possibility that “pine” will be mentioned also. There is also a “corollary” of the consistency rule which holds that “if two or more categories are used to categorize two or more members of some population, and these categories can be heard as categories from the same collection, then: Hear them that way”. So, given that both “mommy” and “baby” can be heard as members of the family category, that is how we will hear them. Moreover, since families, like teams, are “duplicatively organized,” we will hear them as belonging to the same family.

    I think that Sacks’ argument on this point is flawed. To begin with, “baby,” unlike “child,” is not ambiguous as between age and family membership. “Baby,” in its literal usage, refers to an age-group. For this very reason, one cannot literally refer to an adult as a baby, although an adult can, literally, be someone’s child. (The online Miriam-Webster dictionary supports me on this.) Many languages have two words that would be translated as “child,” one for child as offspring and one that refers to an individual as a member of an age group. Furthermore, Sacks ignores a crucial aspect of the word’s context—its situation within a nominal phrase. Since, I have argued, “baby” is not ambiguous to begin with, let’s use the semantically ambiguous “child” as our example. The phrase “the child” signals, in most contexts, that we are referring to age, whereas “my child” refers to family membership. So, even if “baby” were ambiguous, the phrase “the baby” would make it clear that the reference is to age. (Of course, the phrase “my baby” does invoke family membership, but so does “my teen-ager” or “my little fireman”. It is the possessive pronoun that recruits teen-agers and firemen—and babies—into the family.) Why, then, do we hear “the mommy” as the parent of “the baby” in this story? Given that the adult in question could be formulated as, e.g., woman or lady, we are led to ask why this more marked formulation. “Mommy” is unambiguously a family member. We assume, therefore, that she is formulated in this way because she is the mother of the baby who cried. (Consider: “The teen-ager was rude. The mother scolded him.”) But, again, the nominal phrase is crucial. As Arnulf Deppermann has pointed out to me, if it were “a mommy” who picked the baby up, we would probably understand that it was not the baby’s mother. We require a linguistic, as well as categorial, analysis.

    One further thought: If the story was “The baby cried. The nanny (or the babysitter) picked it up,” would we not be likely to hear “the nanny” as the nanny of the baby? How does Sacks’ analysis apply to this case? I think, as in the case of “mommy,” that the interpretation is guided by the categorization of the adult. Why formulate the woman as a nanny, unless she is the nanny of the baby?

    Despite these flaws in Sacks’ analysis, his economy and consistency rules are powerful. I am interested in particular in the corollary to the consistency rule. Take, for instance, the statement “He hates rats and squirrels.” These animals can be heard as belonging to the same collection—rodent or small mammal or some such—but I don’t think that we necessarily hear them in that way. It may be that he doesn’t like rats and he doesn’t like squirrels, period. In contrast, “He hates rats and squirrels and so forth” calls for the inference of a superordinate category, with “rodents” as one possibility. Compare “He hates rats and cockroaches and so forth,” which might lead us to infer “vermin” as the collection.

  2. (b)

    The second major point of Sacks’ analysis is that membership categories are associated with particular activities. He calls these “category-bound” activities. [Watson (1978) has proposed the phrase “category-bound predicate,” to accommodate the fact that categories may have associated attributes other than activities.] Thus, the category “baby” is associated with crying. (Note that this lends further weight to my contention that “baby” in this story refers unambiguously to the age-group category.) When a category is invoked, it brings with it a set of possibly relevant predicates. And mention of an activity or attribute, in turn, may invoke the associated category. The concept of category-bound activity is not exactly original—one thinks, for example, of role theory—but Sacks’ use of it to analyze conversation was an innovation, and subsequent studies in MCA rely heavily on this concept.

  3. (c)

    Sacks points out that the baby’s crying and the mommy’s picking it up are ordered acts. First the baby cried and then the mother picked it up. He proposes that this perception of sequence is produced not so much by the ordering of the sentences (cf., Labov and Waletzky 1967) as by our notion that a mother picking up a baby is commonly occasioned by the baby crying. (See, especially, Sacks 1992: 244–245.) That is, we see not merely a sequence of behaviors, but events linked by causation. We suppose that the mother’s action was consequent on the baby’s. I think Sacks is not entirely correct on this point. How would we hear “The mommy picked the baby up. It cried.”? It would seem to me that the ordering of the sentences is, in this case, determinative. I think this story would normally be heard as suggesting that the mother, by picking the baby up, caused it to cry. Perhaps the more crucial point that Sacks is making, though, is that, when we hear of some sequentially ordered sequence of events, we infer, when necessary, some mechanism—causation, purpose, etc.—that connects the events and accounts for their ordering.

One can go to other sources (e.g., Lepper 2000; Schegloff 2007a; Silverman 1998) for more complete (and less critical) expositions of MCA. Some, most notably Jayusi (1984), have tried to elaborate Sacks’ notions regarding categories. Others (e.g., Watson 1997) have argued for a more complete integration of MCA with SA.

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Bilmes, J. Occasioned Semantics: A Systematic Approach to Meaning in Talk. Hum Stud 34, 129–153 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9183-z

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