Session 2 - Speech Acts (28 August)

Hello, and welcome to my blog for GEK1036: Cross-cultural Communication and Discourse. Am not very fond of the whole concept of blogging, so I’ll just try to imagine this as a kind of weekly newsletter; you can do the same if you’re so inclined.

The topic for today’s session was the speech act, namely ‘an utterance conceived as an act by which the speaker does something’ (Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics), which I found interesting as (like most people, I suspect) I hadn’t previously thought that the boundaries of speaking and acting could cross. But of course it makes sense if you think about it long enough (i.e. about three seconds), since speech is usually the precursor to, and instigator of, many more ‘concrete’ actions – war, divorce (same thing?), making friends, etc. – and could thus be considered an ‘act’ on its own.

While there is of course a very wide range of speech acts, most of the class was spent discussing compliments and compliment responses, since deep down everyone just wants to be loved and accepted and made to feel all warm and fuzzy inside. The whole thing was very empirically done, with various strategies – e.g. accepting, returning, deflecting, rejecting, disagreeing, denigrating – clearly denoted and analysed across cultures; once again I hadn’t thought of analysing compliments so assiduously and systematically. Apparently, according to the research, Americans tend to accept compliments, while the vast majority of Chinese (over 95%) reject them, disagreeing and denigrating themselves, expressing embarrassment, or explaining. What a shocker.

Anyway (as you may have divined by this point), I’ve suddenly realised I have nothing very interesting or constructive to say about this topic, so I thought I’d discuss a ‘real world’ example of a compliment and compliment response that occurred in today’s class, which I’ve only just remembered (amazing how desperation can sharpen the memory). The fellow sitting next to me suddenly complimented me on my cursive handwriting – something like ‘I really like it’ or ‘it’s very nice’ (even desperate memories are limited). I was rather taken aback, firstly because at that moment I was lost in my own thoughts about the meaning of life, the meaning of death, our place in the universe, the cosmos, and what to have for lunch, and secondly because, although I had made a conscious attempt to improve my handwriting since entering slavery... I mean ‘N’S, I had always felt that my handwriting was still well below-par, being somewhat of a perfectionist (contradiction in terms?) on that score. So I felt conflicted, since on one hand it felt nice to have my effort (which, going by what I’ve seen in university, most people don’t seem to have made) recognised, but on the other I didn’t feel I deserved the compliment.

To use the terminology, I was caught between accepting the compliment and rejecting it via disagreeing and denigrating. Not wanting to do either, I responded with a vague ‘was that a compliment?’ – a lame attempt at humour by linking the natural speech act to the empirical discussion – and an expression that would have made a lobotomised orang-utan look like a paragon of intelligence. Not sure what the ‘moral’ of this little story is (besides the fact that schools should really teach penmanship and that I should probably make an appointment with a psychologist specialising in OCD), but perhaps it could be used to demonstrate that speech acts are sometimes not as clear-cut as their empirical classification in tables and research can make them seem. Well, think that’s enough for a first post.