Witnessing an Assault on Vagueness
Simon Marshall
Simon is a Teacher Trainer and Language Teacher at Pilgrims, Canterbury with almost 30 years experience in ELT. He is a keen etymologist and is especially interested in teaching Advanced Learners. E-mail:simon.marshall@pilgrims.co.uk
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Introduction
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Bibliography
Recommended Reading
This is an honest attempt at recounting a linguistic contretemps I was involved in recently. The setting was a public house I frequent regularly in my home town in the south east of England. For the purposes of this article the constructors of the discourse under analysis will be referred to as G (male), T (male) me (male), who are all regard this pub as their "local," and A (female), who works behind the bar. All four of us have developed a cordial relationship and discuss a whole range of subjects from the disasters of the Iraq campaign to the sublime joys of various musical genres.
"Vagueness" is a key word in the title of this article and for this reason I would like to define what is meant by this term with some exactness!!
(From "Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide to Spoken and Written English Grammar and Usage" by Professors R. Carter & M. McCarthy (OUP 2006)
"Vague language softens expressions so that they do not appear too direct or unduly authoritative and assertive. It is also a strong indication of an assumed shared knowledge and can mark in-group membership: the referents of vague expressions can be assumed to be known to the listener."
Examples of vague language cited by Carter and McCarthy include, thing, stuff, or so, or something, or anything, and so on, or whatever, kind of, sort of.
I will now return to the scene I describe in my introduction. Conversation was developing with customary flow until G said to T (a political leader who for purposes of anonymity will be referred to as "Blair") "is sort of trying to fool the lot of us, do you know what I mean? " T snapped back, "of course I know what you mean. If I didn't I'd tell you. Stop wasting your words."
A and I looked at each other with the haunted expressions of two witnesses to a public execution.
G, a man of the very kindest nature, tried to resuscitate the exchange by saying, "sorry, I was only " sort of……Before he had the chance to continue T pressed the dagger home with renewed fervour, "what do you mean by " sort of?" Why can't you speak clearly and get to the point. You're always wasting your words with your constant "likes"," "sort ofs""and "do you know what I means? "" They simply don't mean anything. People don't speak clearly these days." There was a genuine hard boiled ire in T's heartfelt condemnations.
By this time, I felt that the opportunities for the renewal of a convivial interchange had reached an excruciating impasse. I felt compelled to intervene. I was also acutely aware that if I gave a high minded, linguistic sermon (after all, I have admitted in my biopsy, I'm sorry, bio-data, that I am a teacher trainer!), that I would come across as pompous, schoolmasterish agent provocateur. Therefore I simply said something along the lines of "every English person I have spoken to uses phrases like "sort of," "kind of," "do you know what I mean?" so that they don't sound too overbearing." "I never do" T retorted with a savage immediacy and surety. "Come on, T," said A. Everyone uses those expressions. If not, you just sound like you're giving orders" "No it doesn't" asserted T, "I say what I mean and get to the point."
This "yes you do/no I don't" thrust and counter thrust continued for the next couple of minutes, resulting in an unproductive pantomime of circularity. I then made a forlorn attempt to explain the essential role of softeners, approximations, hedges and discourse markers in emergent discourse (back on my high horse again!) only to be rebuffed out of hand by T. By this time, G said he felt he couldn't continue talking to T in fear of not receiving his conversational "papal dispensations!"
An occasionally fractured silence ensued until we all wended our way home.
I was amazed how T had suddenly begun to "proof listen" to the form of G's language while apparently ignoring the content. I was equally astounded by G's patience and forbearance in the face of what I considered to be aggressive rudeness. Yet T was not fabricating his irritation in the slightest, I felt, although he had literally fulfilled the English collocation of "killing the conversation."
The whole series of events reinforced Carter and McCarthy's contention that "there are occasions where vague language is necessary and where its absence would make the message too blunt" and also that "vagueness is motivated and purposeful and is often a mark of sensitivity and skill of the speaker." (My italics)
It was also fascinatingly informative for me to read in Pierre Bourdieu's "Language and Symbolic Power" how vagueness becomes more ubiquitous in bourgeois speech. He writes:
"bourgeois usage is characterized, according to Lakoff, by the use of what he call hedges, e.g. sort of, pretty much ,rather, strictly speaking, loosely speaking, technically, regular, par excellence etc., and according to Labov, by intensive use of what he calls filler phrases, e.g. such a thing as some things like that, particularly. It is not enough to say, as Labov does, that these expressions are responsible for the verbosity and verbal inflation of bourgeois speech. Though superfluous in terms of a strict economy of communication, they fulfill an important function in determining the value (my italics) of a way of communicating. Not only does their very redundancy bear witness to the extent of the available resources and the disinterested relation to those resources which is therefore possible, but they are also elements of a practical metalanguage and, as such they function as marks of neutralizing distance which is one of the characteristics of the bourgeois relation to language and to the social world. Having the effect, as Lakoff puts it, of "heightening intermediate values and toning down extreme values," or as Labov says, of "avoiding all error and exaggeration," these expressions are an affirmation of the speaker's capacity to keep his distance from his own utterances, and therefore his own interests."
So perhaps I bore witness to a clash of values between G and T. The former maintaining an authentic desire for non assertive inclusiveness while T was craving a more first person ownership of discourse, where a spade is very much called a spade, unfettered by the niceties of, what he perceives to be, the extraneously insincere niceties of softeners and hedges?
Finally, I ask the reader to reflect on redundancies and discourse markers in their own language, The equivalents to the English "sort/kind ofs," "by the way," "anyway," "well," "stuff like that" etc and ask yourself what your own spoken language would be like without them? Also experiment in a section of a conversation you have and listen to how many such devices you and your interlocutor employ?
I kind of intend to do the last recommended, by the way!
"Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide to Spoken and English Written Grammar and Usage." R. Carter & M. McCarthy (OUP)
"Language and Symbolic Power" P. Bourdieu (Polity Press) Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson.
"Vague Language" J. Channell (OUP)
"Pragmatics" S. Levinson (CUP)
"Doing Pragmatics" P. Grundy (London, Arnold)
"Meaning in Interaction" J. Thomas (Longman)
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