Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part 1 THE RHETORIC OF POLITENESS
- Part II ELOQUENT RELATIONS IN LETTERS
- Part III A PROSAICS OF CONVERSATION
- Chapter 6 The pragmatics of repair in King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing
- Chapter 7 “Voice potential”: language and symbolic capital in Othello
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 6 - The pragmatics of repair in King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part 1 THE RHETORIC OF POLITENESS
- Part II ELOQUENT RELATIONS IN LETTERS
- Part III A PROSAICS OF CONVERSATION
- Chapter 6 The pragmatics of repair in King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing
- Chapter 7 “Voice potential”: language and symbolic capital in Othello
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The sustained production of ordinary conversation is a remarkable social accomplishment. There are so many things that could go badly wrong, and yet they rarely do. The potential for trouble is always there and at virtually every level – the textual, the ideational, the experiential, and the interpersonal. At the textual level, speakers in conversation regularly produce well-coordinated speech exchanges, with speaker change recurring and one member talking at a time, despite the fact that turn order, turn type, and turn size are not prespecified or governed by any obvious set of rules. At the ideational level, speakers generally manage to make sense of one another's contributions, despite the fact that the interpretation of speakers' meanings draws upon complex processes of inference-making. The meanings communicated are not by any means transparent, even in what we think of as rudimentary exchanges: to make sense, hearers must draw not only upon what is communicated “in” words (words which are at best ambiguous and imprecise) but also upon what text and context co-construct as shared or tacit knowledge. At the experiential level, speakers are constantly managing to do things with their words – both in the sense that J. L. Austin expounded when he demonstrated that utterances themselves act upon the world and others and also in the sense that utterances can persuade or compel people to take actions that go beyond words.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare and Social DialogueDramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters, pp. 141 - 162Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999