Listener roles

Accounts of listener roles

The standard account of the communicative situation, as I remarked in 1.6, envisages a single speaker addressing a single listener, where the role of the listener is seen as understanding what the speaker says, and the listener's full attention is given to what is being said (see Goffman 1981:129 for a characterisation of such a traditional view). We have seen, in the Map task data, that listeners may have intentions and goals in listening which are, to a greater or lesser degree, independent of those of the speaker. We have observed the same phenomenon in the Stolen letter task data, but here we noted as well that different listeners in a group listen in different ways.

Goffman draws our attention to three different types of listener: ‘those who overheat, whether or not their unratified participation is inadvertent and whether or not it has been encouraged; those (in the case of more than two-person talk) who are ratified participants but are not specifically addressed by the speaker; and those ratified participants who are addressed’ (1981:9—10). Addressees are particularly oriented to by the speaker and will be the persons designated to respond in an appropriate manner to what the speaker says. Later in the same volume, Goffman writes ‘the relation(s) among speaker, addressed recipient and unaddressed recipients) are complicated, significant, and not much explored’ (1981:133).