Recipient Design, Harvey Sacks' term, Alan Bell, Audience Design
Accommodation, Couplands
What is the difference between tailoring your talk to the conversational style, preferences, personality, schema, etc. of your hearers and plain old manipulation (Kim asks)? Most of us agreed that manipulation is used to describe a vice, not a virtue, where self-interest is the primary motivator, Regardless of the good of the other (hearer). Lyndsey sees the word as more neutral, to describe people with good negotiation skills, e.g., her father. ee wryly reminded her that meaning is collaboratively constructed-- even if it's arbitrary, you need at least two people to Agree on the meaning of a word/sign for it to have that meaning. So she's looking for another person to go live on a deserted island with. (: She thinks she'll recruit her dad. My pocket Oxford at home, however, defines manipulation as dexterous (esp. UNFAIR) use of influence. And I don't think that's what she means when she describes her father's superior language skills.
The fact is that we All Always have our interactional goals in mind every time we speak or engage in social interaction. We don't necessarily have our goals as paramount to anyone else's; we usually strive for equilibrium, where everybody wins as much as possible. I think it's an excellent question that comes up all the time. Being deliberate and careful about how you say something doesn't make you manipulative-we all spend time thinking about how to approach difficult subjects with others--that doesn't make us conniving and underhanded. We often spend that time worrying about violating the other's face and are trying to think of a way to achieve what we need to without offending or hurting the other person's feelings (negative and positive face, respectively). Maybe we’re trying to tell them why no one will go out with them, for example. Totally loving motivation, very dicey topic, mine field of potential hurt feelings.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding and axiom, The man may be the head, but the woman is the neck that turn's the head, was mentioned and appreciated. Segue about how many mothers give their daughters pre-marriage advice about making her husband "think it (whatever) was his idea." Frighteningly consistent advice. But having the other person's best interest in mind and not just one’s own seems to be the touchstone for non-manipulative talk. (And in the movie everybody had one another’s best interest in mind; it was very sweet).
To be fair, I think there probably are more manipulative women than men, but that’s probably also because men can use more overt forms of power to get what they want. Personally I respect women more who use language ‘dexterously’ but are also disclosing and transparent in their communication in general. I tease the men in class quite a bit, but let me correct that a bit. Far more men are left brain dominant and analytical in their thinking style, which is the basic foundation of science. Far more women are right brain dominant, dwelling more in the aesthetic and emotional aspects of language. And even though women have the advantage that both of their brains actually talk to each other, it’s also true that a dismazing number of women pretty much let their left brains die over the course of time. So even though their brains Could talk to each other, far too often they don’t. Moreover, most of the men in our class are exceptional as they have self selected to take a class about intercultural interactional communication, and most of the women are fairly exceptional because they’re taking a class that turns interaction into an analytical system to be investigated part by part.
Canale and Swaine, Communicative Competence:
1) Grammatical
2) Discourse
3) Sociolinguistic
4) Strategic (the competence of incompetence)
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