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Journal of Pragmatics 9 (1985) 765-783 765

North-Holland

THE LANGUAGE OF POWER

Towards a Dynamic Pragmatics

Jenny A. THOMAS*

The goal of this paper is two-fold. My first aim is simply to describe the systematic way in which a
range of pragmatic features were employed by the dominant’ participant in a series of ‘unequal
encounters’ in order to restrict severely the discoursal options of the subordinate participant. The
features in question are: (i) IFID’s (illocutionary force indicating devices); (ii) metapragmatic
comments, ‘upshots’ and ‘reformulations’, and (iii) appeal to felicity conditions.
My second aim is to argue that we can only satisfactorily explain the effectiveness of these tactics
by bringing together insights from both conversational analysis and recent work in interpersonal
pragmatics. In so doing, we go some way towards overcoming the limitations of conversational
analysis, single-utterance based pragmatic analyses and the problems inherent in ‘speech-act’
descriptions of discourse, and move towards a model of discourse-organisation with greater
predictive and explanatory power.

1. Introduction

Levinson (1983) suggests, rightly in my view, that in recent years the most
substantial insights into the way in which discourse is organised have come, not
from linguists, but from the work of conversation analysts such as Sacks,
Schegloff and Jefferson and others working in the ethnomethodological tra-
dition. However, impressive as the conversation analysts’ work is in terms of
rigorous empirical observation and absence of premature formalisation, its
predictive power is limited and explanatory power totally lacking. Much of
what conversational analysis presents as purely structural configurations (adja-

* I am indebted to Professor Jacob Mey and to colleagues at Lancaster - Norman Fairclough,


Christopher Candlin and, above all, Geoffrey Leech - for commenting on earlier versions of this
paper.
Auther’s address: J. Thomas, Dept. of Linguistics and Modern English Language, University of
Lancaster, Lancaster LA1 4YT, England.
’ Defining the concepts of ‘power’, ‘dominance’ and ‘subordination’ is extremely problematical
within social theory and is beyond the scope of this paper. I have avoided grasping this particular
nettle by drawing my data from interactions within social institutions with a clearly-defined
hierarchical structure (schools, the police, the law courts, etc.), in which the power to discipline or
punish those of lower rank is invested in holders of high rank (head teachers, inspectors, judges,
etc.).

0378&2166/85/% 3.30 0 1985, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)


766 J. Thomas 1 Towards a dynamic pragmatics

cency pairs, insertion sequences, etc.) could be explained more powerfully in


terms of goal-orientation and the observance of Gricean maxims and principles
of ‘interpersonal pragmatics’ (as described by Leech (1983)). In passing, I
would add that it does strike me as quite extraordinary that Levinson fails to
make this point himself in what is, after all, the final chapter of a book on
pragmatics!
My aim in this paper is to build on the work of the conversational analysts,
taking it beyond the level of a very detailed description of the organisation of
discourse, in order to show how and why the participants in the interactions I
describe are able to exploit the features which the system makes available in
order to achieve a particular goal. In this article, I shall argue that incor-
porating insights from recent work in interpersonal pragmatics (particularly
that of Leech (1977,1983) and Brown and Levinson (1978)) goes some way
towards providing a more powerful and predictive model of discourse planning
and utterance-interpretation.
My main argument will be that the power relationship obtaining between the
participants in an interaction and the institutional norms within which that
interaction takes place are central to the way in which the discourse is
developed and individual utterances interpreted. The data I shall use to
develop my argument are taken from a variety of dyadic interactions .where
the pragmatic parameters of power, social distance2 and degree of imposition
are held relatively constant. All the interactions take place within social
institutions where the role-relationships between members of that institution
are clearly defined and where the power differential and social distance
between the interactants are great. Furthermore, in each case the subordinate
participant has a great deal invested in the outcome of the interaction (the
avoidance of minimisation of punishment) and each interaction can be said to
take place on the ‘home territory’ of the dominant participant (the head-
master’s study, the chief inspector’s office, the magistrate’s court, etc.).
My principal source of data is an interview between a chief inspector of
police and a detective constable who is being severely censured. 3 In the course
of the interview, the detective constable is told that he is to be returned to
uniformed duties and by the end of the proceedings he is in tears. To
demonstrate the degree to which my findings are generalisable across other
‘unequal encounters’, I shall also refer to transcripts from hearings in ma-
gistrates’ courts4 to two separate interactions between a headmaster and

2 The term ‘social distance’ (Leech (1983: 126)) is the opposite of Brown and Gilman’s (1960)
‘solidarity factor’. It is best seen as a composite of psychologically real factors (status, age, sex,
degree of intimacy, etc.) which together determine the ‘overall degree of respectfulness’ within a
given speech situation.
3 Taken from a BBC TV documentary series Police. filmed over several months with the Thames
Valley Police force.
4 Some of the magistrates’ courts examples are taken from Harris (1980). the rest I collected from
Lancaster magistrates’ court.
J. Thomas / Towards a dynamic pragmatics 161

teenage girls who had been caught playing truant and who subsequently lied
about their actions, and to two Ph.D. supervisions. The names of all the
participants have been changed.
There are, of course, many markers of asymmetrical discourse, from the
‘power semantic’ of Brown and Gilman (1960) and Ervin-Tripp (1972) to more
recent work dealing with interruptions, turn-taking, turn length, etc. Many
such features (linguistic, discoursal, paralinguistic, kinesic, etc.), have been
identified by others at Lancaster engaged in research on the use of language in
‘unequal encounters’ (cf. Candlin (1982) Fairclough, Makosh and Spencer
(1982) and Fairclough (this issue: 739-763)) but I intend to concentrate here
on those concepts which I myself developed in order to describe particular
strategies employed by the ‘powerful’ participant in an interaction and which
seem to enable him/her to keep the upper hand. I shall begin my brief outline
of the features in question with the clearest examples I have of the way they
operate, taken from a variety of unequal encounters, before going on to show
why they are effective.
The pragmatic features I shall describe were striking in the speech of all the
dominant participants and entirely absent from the speech of the subordinate
participants. I have called them collectively ‘metapragmatic acts’,s because in
each case the dominant participants make explicit reference to the intended
pragmatic force of their own or their subordinate’s utterances. The categories I
have established should not be seen as theoretical constructs, designed to
impose order on data, like those set up by British discourse analysts, such as
Sinclair and Coulthard. Rather they should be seen as an attempt to describe
features systematically employed and responded to by participants in con-
versations (cf. Schegloff and Sacks (1974: 237)). The first two sets of strategies
are closely related, and should be seen as differing from one another in degree,
rather than in nature. They are: (a) IFID’s (Illocutionary Force Indicating
Devices); (b) Metapragmatic comments, ‘Upshots’ and ‘Reformulations’, and
(c) Appeal to felicity conditions.
What each of these features has in common is that, by its use, the dominant
participant effectively denies his/her interlocutor the possibility of escaping into
indirectness and ‘pragmatic ambivalence’ - of leaving the precise illocutionary
intent of an utterance diplomatically unclear.
Accounting for indirectness, discoursal indeterminacy (see Thomas (forth-
coming)) and pragmatic ambivalence is, of course, a central concern of
pragmaticists, whereas discourse analysts, particularly Sinclair, Coulthard and
others of the ‘Birmingham School’, appear to regard these phenomena
as inconvenient and untidy and have largely ignored them. Conversational
analysts (e.g. Atkinson, Heritage, Jefferson), on the other hand, whilst re-
cognising them as problems for participants in interactions, are unable either to

5 I use the term ‘metapragmatic’ in the same sense as Giv6n (1984), meaning ‘pragmatic reflection
on pragmatics’.
768 .I. Thomas / Towards a dynamic pragmatics

account for them or to explain how participants cope with these uncertainties,
since they refuse to seek explanations beyond the exchange system itself.
Linguists who have discussed indirectness and ambivalence in relation to
politeness phenomena (notably Brown and Levinson (1978) Lakoff (1974) and
Leech (1977, 1980 and 1983)) have noted that for reasons of politeness or
expediency, it is often in the interests of both speaker and hearer to allow the
force of an utterance to remain imprecise:

“The indeterminacy of conversational utterances... shows itself in the NEGOTIABILITY of


pragmatic factors; that is, by leaving force unclear, S may leave H the opportunity to choose
between one force and another, and thus leaves part of the responsibility of the meaning to H. For
instance, ‘If I were you, I’d leave town straight away’ can be interpreted according to context as a
piece of advice, a warning, or a threat. Here H, knowing something about S’s likely intentions, may
interpret it as a threat, and act on it as such; but S will always be able to claim that it was a piece of
advice, given from the friendliest of motives. In this way, the ‘rhetoric of conversation’ may show
itself in S’s ability to have his cake and eat it.” (Leech (1983: 23-24))

An illustration of such deliberate exploitation of pragmatic ambivalence in


order to be polite may be found in the following exchange, which took place
one Sunday afternoon, over the telephone:

E.xample 1
A: I was wondering if you could come over here this evening between live
and six, because I’m rather tied up in the early days of next week?
B: I havent’t got the car any more.

Speaker A, who is in a position of power relative to speaker B, does not wish


to place her in the invidious position of having to make an outright refusal,
and so politely makes the force of his utterance ambivalent, between are you
able to? and are you willing to? B, unwilling to make a flat refusal, and whilst
recognising the ambivalence of the utterance, chooses to respond only to are
you able to?
Conventional ambivalence of this sort is regularly encountered in situations
where social distance is felt to exist between speaker and addressee and when
socially distant participants are involved in interactions which are face-
threatening to one or both parties, a high degree of ambivalence and indirect-
ness can be expected. For a pragmaticist, then, it is particularly interesting to
find exceptionally face-threatening interactions, involving socially distant parti-
cipants (magistrate/defendant, headmaster/schoolchild, inspector/police cons-
table) characterised by one participant’s trying overtly to reduce ambivalence.
In my ‘unequal encounters’ data, at moments of crisis where the dominant
speaker wishes to assert his authority (all the dominant speakers in my data
were male!) he uses a metapragmatic act which effectively removes any
possibility of ‘negotiating communicative intent’. He does this either by going
J. Thomas / Towards a dynamic pragmatics 769

on record with the intended pragmatic force of his own utterance, or by forcing
his interlocutor to do so. The subordinate interlocutor is obliged not only to
produce a contingently relevant response (the adjacency pairs which conver-
sational analysts describe), but also, because of the power relationship
obtaining between the speaker and hearer, a polite response. In the examples I
shall give, the clash between the propositional and the interpersonal is such
that this compromise is not possible: the subordinate must either directly
contradict his/her superior (and risk aggravating the confrontation), or s/he
must back down and lose the argument (or at best remain silent).

2. IFID’s (illocutionary force indicating devices)

The term ‘IFID’ (illocutionary force indicating device), introduced by Searle


(1969: 62) has been widely used by him and others (e.g. Stampe (1975),
Bierwisch (I 980) Motsch (1980)) to include many different illocutionary force
indicating devices, both linguistic and non-linguistic. I am here using the
term in the same rather restricted sense as Vanderveken (1980: 247) to cover

. . . any expression whose sense determines that a literal utterance of a sentence
containing a certain occurrence of that expression has a given illocutionary
force”. Compare, for example:

(i) Be quiet!

and

(ii) I order you to be quiet!

As Leech (1980: 70-71) points out, (ii) differs from (i) only in making
explicit its own speech act force, thereby removing any polite ambivalence and
giving the utterance a ‘sledge-hammer’ effect:

“If, for example, the speaker (of ii) is an officer speaking to an N.C.O., he makes it clear, by
formally expressing the illocutionary force of his utterance, that he is speaking in his authority as
an officer whereas (i) could implicitly have this force, (ii) makes, the hearer understand that this
force. and no other is intended.”

In general, in ‘equal’ discourse, IFID’s appear only in ‘costly to S6 situations


(see Leech (1983: 107-108)) - that is, in situations in which it is the speaker
who stands to lose or whose face is threatened ~ speech acts such as

6 For the purposes of this paper I am using Leech’s (1983) cost-benefit scale, although it is not, in
my view, unproblematical. For example, it is often not possible to assign a speech act to the
category of ‘costly to speaker’ or ‘costly to hearer’ - a speech act such as criticising a colleague
might be embarrassing (and thereby ‘costly’ and ‘face-threatening’) to both participants, and might
benefit both parties or neither.
770 J. Thomas 1 Towards a dynamic pragmatics

apologising or promising. In the ‘unequal encounters’ data, in contrast, IFID’s


are often found in ‘costly to H’ situations, such as ordering or warning. For
example :

Example 2
(Police Inspector addressing detective constable)
. . . you have come very close to formal discipline and I’m warning you, Barry,
that this is not the way to go on at all and if it happens again or anything like
it . . .

Example 3
(Headmaster addressing child)
I advise you very very seriously to keep away from this Maggy, right?

3. Metapragmatic comment (MPC)

‘Metapragmatic comment’ is a term I have coined to describe two strategies.


The first, like an IFID, is speaker-oriented (an S-MPC), designed to remove all
ambivalence from the speaker’s own utterance. The second (the A-MPC) is
addressee-oriented, employed to preclude the possibility of the subordinate
participant’s escaping into ambivalence. I consider MPC’s to be particularly
interesting since, as Stubbs (1983: 16) remarks in connection with ‘metadis-
course’, such comments can offer privileged access to the way in which
speakers plan their discourse strategies.
The S-MPC is used by the dominant speaker to comment prospectively or
retrospectively on the pragmatic force of his/her own utterance, thereby
removing any possibility of equivocation and simultaneously pre-empting the
possibility of the subordinate interlocutor’s complaining.

3.1. Prospective comment

Example 4
(Inspector to police constable in Police Data)
. . . it probably sounds a bit cruel but I’m going to be honest with you . . .

Example 5
(Inspector to police constable in Police Data)
. . . let me make it very very clear to you because I shan’t hold my punches ...

.It is interesting to note that it now becomes discoursally infelicitous (in that
it would not be an informative addition to the discourse, thereby violating the
Maxim of Quantity) for the constable to say: ‘That’s really cruel’, even though
J. Thomas / Towards a dynamic pragmatics 771

the criticism which follows is particularly vicious ~ ‘Your younger colleagues


think you’re a bit of a bloody joke’. Baker (1975) discusses the way in which
such pre-emptive moves, which she calls ‘control prefaces’, are used quite
systematically to constrain the next contribution, although, as she notes, such
control prefaces are by no means limited to the speech of the dominant
participant.

3.2. Retrospective comment

Example 6
(Headmaster to schoolgirl who has been playing truant)
I warned you, I always find out.

Example 7
(Inspector to police constable)
. . .well there you are Barry I’ve spelt it out to you I’ve left you in no doubt at
all how you stand...

Example 8
(Headmaster to schoolgirl who has been playing truant)
That’s just a friendly word of advice, all right?

Example 9
(Magistrate to Defendant)’
It’s straight question, Mr H

The advantage for the speaker of leaving the force of an utterance unclear
has often been demonstrated. An ambivalent utterance allows a speaker to
carry out a face-threatening act and still have an escape route (in the form of a
plausible alternative interpretation of that utterance) if his/her right to perform
that act should be challenged:

“A communicative act is done off record if it is done in such a way that is not possible to attribute
only one clear communicative intention to the act. In other words, the actor leaves himself an ‘out’
by providing himself with a number of defensible interpretations; he cannot be held to have
committed himself to just one particular interpretation of his act.” (Brown and Levinson
(1978: 216))

As a rule, the ‘alternative interpretation’ is a politer, more interpersonally


acceptable one (e.g. ‘I was asking you, not telling you’), but not necessarily. As I
shall discuss at greater length in section 7.2, the speaker may instead invoke
norms of interaction demonstrating his/her right to have performed the speech-

’ Example taken from Harris (1980).


772 J. Thomas / Towards a dynamic pragmatics

act in the first place (e.g. in normal circumstances, one cannot felicitously give
orders to total strangers, but it is perfectly permissible to ask them questions).
This is well-illustrated by an incident at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre,
Stratford-on-Avon, during a performance of Richard III. One member of the
audience, incensed by the fact that her neighbour kept rustling chocolate
wrappers, turned to her and asked whether she could eat more quietly. At the
interval, the following exchange took place:

Example 10
A: How dare you tell me to eat more quietly!
B: I didn’t tell you to, I asked if you could. If you can’t, there’s nothing more
to be said.

It is interesting that speaker B, while in no way mitigating the rudeness of


the implicature, is careful not to claim authority she clearly does not have. In
general, it is strategically inexpedient for speakers to employ IFIDs or S-
MPCs, since, as Alston (1980: 130) points out, to do so:

“(. .) changes one’s normative status in a certain way; one sticks one’s neck out or goes out on a
limb.”

The interesting point for the pragmaticist, then, is a point which the
conversational analyst resolutely refuses to address: why a speaker should take
unnecessary risks. From the data I have examined, it is clear that it is only
when a speaker is certain of not being challenged or of being able to withstand
a challenge should it occur, that s/he ventures an IFID or this first (speaker-
oriented) form of MPC.
This is because the MPCs we have examined so far are risky for the speaker.
In making his/her utterance unambivalent, the speaker goes out onto a limb
and is exposed to a challenge to his/her authority. But speaker-oriented MPCs,
like IFIDs, are very effective if they work, and they usually do. Indeed, on the
basis of the data I have examined, I would claim that these uses of IFIDs and
S-MPCs can be taken as markers of unequal discourse, normally indicating
that the speaker is absolutely sure of his/her power (generally an institu-
tionally-sanctioned power) over the addressee.8 In this they differ somewhat
from the tactics which are described below (addressee-oriented MPCs, upshots
and reformulations) which, although they are highly effective strategies in
themselves, can only be judged as markers of unequal discourse in relation to
their perlocutionary effect as revealed in the subsequent discourse (cf. Ochs
(1979: 50): i‘The assessment of control may be carried out by examining first,

* There are, of course, occasions (e.g. in a quarrel) where people use such stratagems without any
power back-up, although even here one could argue that they signal the S’s claim to such power
(moral or otherwise).
J. Thomas / Towards a dynamic pragmarics 773

the extent to which the first move imposes a relevant response . . . and second,
the extent to which the initiator actually succeeds in securing the expected
response”).
In the second (addressee-oriented) sort of MPC (A-MPC) the dominant
speaker forces the addressee to take risks, by refusing to allow the subordinate
participant to retreat into ambivalence. This occurs in its simplest form when
the dominant speaker presents the subordinate participant with possible
pragmatic interpretations of an utterance and makes him/her choose (e.g. Are
you asking me or telling me?).

Example 11
(Supervisor to Ph.D. student)
Student: It’s not that you’ve misunderstood but that I don’t think your
account is particularly clear.
Supervisor: Are you retracting?

To the extent that the metapragmatic comment is in the form of a question,


it may be seen as slightly less impositive than simply stating what the force of
the interlocutor’s utterance ‘must be’ (cf. ‘So you’re retracting’). An assertion is
more difficult to counter, since it involves a subordinate interactant in a direct
contradiction.

4. ‘Upshots’ and ‘reformulations’

A more subtle form of blocking these addressee’s bolt hole, one much favoured
by dominant speakers, is by the use of what I have called ‘upshots’ and
‘reformulations’ (Thomas (1984)). Heritage and Watson (1979) use the terms
‘gists’ and ‘formulations’ to describe tactics used by participants in a conver-
sation to disambiguate or to check that they have understood. What Heritage
and Watson are basically concerned with, however, is linguistic disam-
biguation, i.e. getting straight the facts of what was said rather than what was
meant (cf. Thomas (1983)). What I am interested in is pragmatic disambigua-
tion: the strategies used by participants to clarify communicative intent. In my
‘unequal encounters’ data, what frequently happens is that the dominant
speaker presents the hearer with an ‘upshot’ (a brief summary by the dominant
speaker of a long contribution by the subordinate) or a ‘reformulation’
(presentation of H’s utterance in unambivalent terms), in response to which H
is required to make clear (example 12) or simply to confirm (example 13) the
intended pragmatic force of his/her utterance:
774 J. Thomas / Towards a dynamic pragmatics

4.1. Examples of reformulations

Example 12
(Police Data)
Constable: I’ve never nad any comment other than that.
Inspector: Are you saying that nobody’s brought your shortcomings to your
notice?

For the constable to say ‘no’ at this juncture would mean abandoning his
strongest card (he had been arguing that his demotion was unfair because he
had been given no indication that his work was in any way unsatisfactory). To
say ‘yes’, on the other hand, would imply criticism of the way in which his
superiors have carried out their job ~ in Labov and Fanshel’s terms (1977) an
‘aggravated challenge’ to their competence. He takes one of the few options
open to him by hinting that no-one has told him recently that his work was not
up to standard and then expressing his emotions:

Constable: (..7 sets..) SIGHS I had all my shortcomings pointed out to me


when I came off the off the serious crimes squad and as far as I
know I have never had anybody urn (..ll sets..) its just unbelie-
vable quite honestly sir I mean I’ve just

Example 13
(Court Data, reconstructed from Solicitor’s notes, Lancaster Magistrates’
Court, December 1983)
The defendant, a young man, was unrepresented. He was accused of resisting
arrest and hitting a police officer. He admitted that he had hit the policeman,
but later claimed in mitigation that the policeman had hit him first.
Court Official: How do you plead - guilty or not guilty?
Defendant: (Silence)
Court Official: Did you do it or not?
Defendant: Well, I did hit him, yes.
Court Official: So that’s ‘guilty’ then.
Defendant: Yes, sir.

4.2. Examples of upshots

Example 14
(Police Data)
Constable: My D.S. (Detective Sergeant) was telling me just how well things
have gone and the jobs that I’ve had under my belt I’m so pleased
I really am sir I’ve never had such a good time for basic police
work as I’ve had in the last.. .
J. Thomas / Towards a dynamic pragmatics 775

Inspector: You say that you’re working to the er er er the proper standard, is
that right?
Constable: Well er I’ve never had any comment other than that (my
brackets, JT)

Once again, the Constable is unable to say ‘yes’ to the Inspector Y question
without violating the ‘Modesty Maxim’ (Leech (1983)) and implying that the
Inspector is. wrong.

Example IS
Constable: (makes very long complaint about what the Inspector has said) . .
and I’m afraid sir I’m just absolutely staggered.
Inspector: yeah well yes well what you’re basically saying is that urn . . . all
these people are wrong but Barry you are right
Constable: no you know I can’t take them on sir.

There is an even more insidious form of ‘upshot’ and ‘reformulation’ by


means of which an addressee can be forced into a double bind. In such cases,
not only is the subordinate participant obliged to make overt a discourteous or
challenging implicature which s/he would probably prefer to make indirectly,
but the dominant speaker puts into the subordinate’s mouth ‘snarl’ words
(Hayakawa (1952: 4445)) or even obscene words.g Even if the subordinate
were prepared to acknowledge the force of the speech act, s/he would not dare
to employ the form. Such ‘aggravated’ upshots or reformulations are par-
ticularly difficult to counter.

4.3. The ‘aggravated’ upshot

Example 16
(Taken from a Ph.D. Supervision)
Student: . . . but it’s not like that that’s not that’s just not the way people
talk no-one talks like that really well maybe it’s the way middle-
class academics talk to people they’ve never seen before.
Supervisor: what you’re saying then is Lamb is a bourgeois, Lamb is a
hypocrite.
(10 seconds’ silence)
Student: I didn’t mean to be rude
Supervisor: Didn’t you?

9 As an example of an obscene reformulation: Senior lecturer to research student (not in


Linguistics Department!): Are you trying to say I fucked it up? (cf. also Example 21).
776 .I. Thomas / Towards a dynamic pragmatics

Example I7
(Police Data)
Inspector: Are you suggesting there’s a bit of a conspiracy to put the skids
under you?
Constable: . . . conspiracy, I can’t say that, Sir.

In the ‘unequal encounters’ data, the pragmatic tactics I have tried to


illustrate are generally employed by a dominant speaker at moments of crisis,
when his authority is being challenged. In these data, the three metapragmatic
acts (MPAs) are never successfully countered ~ the subordinate interactant
either backs down or is silenced completely.
There are two points I want to stress at this juncture. First of all, I am not
arguing that the MPAs are effective in and of themselves (see section 6 below).
Their effectiveness lies in a combination of the MPA + the power relationship
obtaining between speaker and addressee. Secondly, I only claim that they are
effective within a given institutional framework, where both interactants are,
whether consciously or not, perpetuating the status quo (I term this ‘compliant
discourse’). As Fairclough (this issue: 739-763) also observes, in interactions in
which one participant refuses to accept the dominant ideology (e.g. Irish
Republican Army activists in Northern Irish courts), tactics such as those I
have described will not work. I do claim that my findings can be generalised
across many (perhaps all) hierarchical institutions. Interactions within institu-
tions are premised upon a high degree of shared knowledge and beliefs, among
these beliefs about what are and what are not allowable contributions and
concerning the rights and duties associated with particular institutional roles.

5. The ‘naked’ discourse of power

As a rule, the norms governing institutional interaction remain cloaked.


However, at moments of crisis - when, for example, a subordinate participant
(schoolchild, junior police officer, student) challenges a superior - these tacitly
accepted (though rarely articulated) norms break through to the surface and
are made explicit. Typically, on these occasions, the more powerful speaker will
refer to his/her official position and implicitly or explicitly invoke the rights
and power attached to that position (cf. Mey (1985: 77-81)). In other words,
the dominant speaker counters the challenge by demonstrating that the neces-
sary felicity conditions obtained for the issuing of the MPA.
J. Thomas / Towards a dynamic pragmatics 777

5.1. Dominant successfully counters challenge by appeal to felicity conditions

Example 18
(Ph.D. supervision)
Supervisor: You see, I have stated my considered opinion.
Student: No, it was a bilious, ill-considered opinion.
Supervisor: My very carefully considered opinion and if you choose to disre-
gard your supervisor’s opinion that’s up to you.
(5 seconds silence)
Student: (sniffs) all right.

Example 19
(Police Data)
Constable: (Makes very long complaint about what the Inspector has said) . . .
and I’m afraid sir I’m just absolutely staggered.
Inspector: Yeah well yes well what you’re basically saying is that urn
Detective Inspector Jessop is wrong, Detective Inspector er Fuller
is wrong er Acting Superintendant until recently Chief Inspector
Button is wrong Chief Inspector Pullen is wrong. All these people
are wrong but, Barry, you are right.
Constable: No. You know I can’t take them on, Sir.

That this tactic is usually invoked only in unequal discourse is to be


expected. Stating one’s superior rank violates the ‘Modesty Maxim’ (see Leech
(1983: 136-138)) and -the Politeness Principle (ibid.). It also highlights an
interesting difference between the interpersonal and propositional strands of
pragmatics. It has been observed (by Grice, inter alia) that conversational
implicature relies on the assumption that the Speaker will make the strongest
possible claim in the circumstances i.e. you do not say ‘I think he’s ill’ if you
know he’s ill. In interpersonal pragmatics, the opposite principle seems to
obtain: ‘Do not make a stronger claim on your own behalf than is necessary’.

6. Instances where MPAs fail

Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) have shown how speakers can, to a
greater or lesser degree, pre-determine their interlocutor’s contribution by the
use of ‘pre-sequencing’ and adjacency pairs. Thus a greeting will elicit a
responding greeting, an offer a rejection/acceptance, etc. What conversational
analysis alone cannot explain, is why one slot filler should be preferred above
another.
Pragmatics, by appealing to regularities and motivations which lie outside
the exchange system itself, but within a more general theory of human
778 J. Thomas / Towards Q dynamic pragmatics

interaction (cf. Leech (1983)), is able to offer an explanation. We can predict


that a subordinate, faced with an upshot or reformulation, will back down
rather than violate the norms (usually politeness norms) of an institution.
When upshots and reformulations are used on someone who does not perceive
her/himself as a subordinate, they may well be ‘thrown back’ at the speaker. In
these circumstances, the success or failure of an MPA depends principally on
the interlocutor’s verbal prowess.
The first three examples (20))(22) of MPAs which fail are all taken from
British radio or television interviews between a very skilful interviewer and
various politicians. Example 23 (taken from Blum-Kulka (1983)) is from Israeli
television and is included to show that the pragmatic tactics I am describing
may well be universal, even though one would expect to find cross-cultural
differences in the sociopragmatic norms (see Thomas (1983)) which will
determine whether or not they succeed.

Example 20
(BBC Radio 4, 2-3-1984)
Interviewer: Are you saying that Mr. Brittan, the Home Secretary, is in
some way flouting the conventions of the European
Commission!
R. McClaren, M.P. :I am indeed suggesting that.

Example 21
(BBC Radio News, shortly after the banning of trade unions at the General
Communications Headquarters - the British Government’s ‘monitoring centre’
in Cheltenham)
Conservative M.P.: I don’t deny that the Government is right to put security
at the top of their priorities... But on the other hand they
could have handled it better.
Interviewer: Are you saying they cocked it up?
Conservative M.P.: You said that. What Z said was . . .

Example 22
(BBC Television discussion on the part played by the chairman of British
Airways prior to its de-nationalisation) lo
Labour M.P.: Urn what I would say is that uh I think he’s trying to play the
ends up against the middle. What he wants is to get his hands
on as much of the good bits as he possibly can for his company
in order to make as much for uh a er presumably himself and
er the other people who’ve got shares in his company.

lo Example taken from Troy (1984).


J. Thomas 1 Towards a dynamic pragmatics 719

Presenter: Private private gr private greed he’s the embodiment of is he?


Labour M.P.: Pass.

Example 23
(Israeli television news interview with a Government minister)
Interviewer: Are you saying, Minister, that someone in television is trying to
prevent you from stating your case? Didn’t you succeed in
appearing on the news this week?
Minister: Let me explain. You recorded me. You conducted an interview.
On Friday I received a message that for some reason it was all
unsuitable for showing. Seems odd to me.
(Later)
Interviewer: Are you saying that television has it in for you?
Minister: God forbid, Elisha, don’t identify yourself with television.

7. Towards a dynamic pragmatics

So far I have tried to show that the model of discourse I am proposing has a
degree of explanatory and predictive power which is absent from conventional
conversational analysis. I am also arguing that the devices which I have
described differ crucially from the categories established by, for example,
Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) in that they reflect the ability of the participants
in asymmetrical discourse to predict the effect of MPAs, and the way in which
they take advantage of the structures which the exchange system makes
available, in order to achieve their goals. It is because powerful speakers know
that MPAs will work that they employ them so systematically.
I want to continue this line of argument in urging the development of a
‘dynamic pragmatics’. Levinson (1981) rightly points to the post hoc assign-
ment of a unique illocutionary force as a major (perhaps insuperable) problem
for speech act theory. Pragmatic force (like discourse value - see Thomas
(1985)) is at best ambivalent and potentially n-ways multivalent (see Thomas
(ibid.)). What Levinson fails to point out is that this represents a problem
not just for the analyst but also for the participants in discourse, who
are themselves forced constantly to re-assess their interlocutor’s goals and
intentions as the discourse develops. Conversation, as Candlin (personal
communication) has pointed out, involves the interactants in the gradual
reduction of uncertainty.

7.1. The force of successive utterances in situated discourse

The dynamic pragmatics I am proposing involves taking into account not only
the various pragmatic parameters (power, size of imposition, etc.) and the role
780 J. Thomas / Towards a dynamic pragmatics

of a speech event in a given institution, but also the situation of the utterance
in the discourse. For example, one of the headmaster-truant interactions
begins :

Headmaster: You know that I now know where you went, don’t you?
Girl : We were in the woods.
Headmaster: You went to Simon Connolly’s house.

The headmaster’s first utterance could be interpreted as a request for


information, for confirmation, for an explanation and/or apology or as pro-
viding an opportunity to confess (or as a combination of all these things). By
the end of this interaction (and of the strikingly similar police demotion
interview), it becomes clear that the powerless participants are not being asked
to clarify anything, but merely to rehearse their guilt and verbalise their
submission (the human equivalent of the wolfs exposing its throat!). In both
these cases, interpretations of utterances later in the interaction are ‘biased’ ~ in
the psycholinguistic sense (cf. Kess and Hoppe (198 1)) - by the force the hearer
has assigned to earlier utterances. What I am arguing, then, is that pragmatic
force is cumulative, not just in the way that Labov and Fanshel (1977: 95)
have described (they point out, for example, that repeared requests are heard as
challenges), but in the sense that participants assign value to utterances in the
light of what has gone before.

7.2. Dynamic pragmatics and the negotiation of roles in interaction

Pragmaticists and sociolinguists have shown how linguistic choice is a function


of .the social relationship obtaining between speaker and hearer. Thus, in a
situation in which the social distance between speaker and hearer is great, there
is likely to be a corresponding increase in the degree of indirectness employed.
However, power relationships, social distance, role relationships, perceptions of
relative rights and obligations or of size of imposition, are not necessarily
given, but can be negotiated in interaction.
In the interactions I have described here, the subordinate participants are
basically compliant, offering no fundamental challenge to institutional values.
In ‘confrontational discourse’, such as that used by members of counter-
cultures (cf. the skinhead-police interaction described by Fairclough (this issue:
739ff.)), there is often a great deal of negotiation within the pragmatic
parameters.
It might prove instructive to investigate which of the parameters most
commonly seen by pragmaticists as governing indirectness (social distance,
power and size of imposition), is most likely to be manipulated within a given
culture, group or institution. From Scotton (1983) it seems that in casual
conversation in the United States, speakers favour reducing social distance,
J. Thomas / Towards a dynamic pragmatics 781

whereas my own (informal) observations suggest that the British favour


reducing ‘size of imposition’, as in the following (reconstructed) dialogue. Each
of A’s utterances 1-3 serves to prepare the ground for making the request for
the glasses, by belittling successively the attractiveness of the glasses (implying
that they are not a very nice colour), their value (a ‘free gift’ from the garage)
and their usefulness to B.

Example 24
(A is an eighteen-year old University student and B is her mother. She can be
seen as being in a subordinate position by virtue of being a dependent and the
non-owner.)

Al: You know those browny glasses?


Bl: Yeah
A2: The ones we got from the garage.
B2: Mm.
A3: Do you use them much?
B3: Not really, no.
A4: Can I have them then?

7.3. Dynamic pragmatics and critical linguistics

Language is a social phenomenon and, as Fairclough (1982) argued, there is a


crucial connection between any institution’s language and its ideology: lan-
guage is central to the learning, maintenance and reinforcement of group
norms. The descriptive model I am proposing, to the extent that it is both
explanatory and that it exposes the norms and values governing interaction,
contributes to a ‘critical linguistics’ which aims at ‘denaturalizing’ discourse
(see Fairclough (this issue: 739-763). It can therefore be seen as ‘dynamic’ in a
rather different sense of that word, in that it admits at least the possibility that
language can be used to challenge, and not merely to reproduce passively, the
dominant ideologies of a society.

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