Page 47 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Discourse, cultural diversity and communication 25

“Sometime ago, while driving to the office, my radio was tuned to a classical radio
station. At the end of the program, the announcer, a replacement for the regular host,
who was scheduled to return the next day, signed off with the following words: I’ve
enjoyed being with “*YOU these last two weeks.” I had not been listening very care-
fully, but the unusually strong focal accent on “*you” in a syntactic position where I
would have expected an unaccented pronoun caught my attention. It sounded as if
the announcer were talking to someone else. Yet there was no other person with him
on the program. This led me to search my memory of past communicative experience
to construct an alternative, more plausible scenario that might suggest an interpre-
tation. The speaker’s words reminded me of a leave taking exchange where a first
speaker might begin with “I’ve enjoyed being with you,” and the second might re-
spond with “It was fun being with you.” I therefore inferred that the announcer, by
accenting the personal pronoun as one would in the second part of the exchange, was
actually implicating the first” (p. 222: Gumperz 2001).

A second, somewhat more complex example comes from an analysis of the
cross-examination transcript of a victim in a rape trial (Gumperz 1992):

Example 5
Counsel: You knew at the time that the defendant was interested in you, didn’t
you?
Victim: He asked me how I’d BEEN … just stuff like that.

Our interpretation of the above exchange relies on what is known about cross-
examinations as adversarial proceedings where the defense attorney attempts
to expose weaknesses in the victim’s testimony to explain what happened
(see Eades in this volume). But while general knowledge of such courtroom
practices tells us something about participants’ motives in courtroom situations,
we need to turn to what they actually said to understand what they intended to
convey. By means of the words he used and by the way he contextualized his
talk, that is choosing to begin with an assertion and following it with a tag ques-
tion, the attorney was attempting to induce the audience to infer that the victim
had had a prior relationship with the defendant. The victim’s move, on the other
hand, positioned and pronounced as it is immediately after the attorney’s ques-
tion, argues for a different scenario. Her phrase “how I’d been” with the accent
on “been,” is a form of reported speech which in this context evokes the inter-
textually related formulaic expression “how’ve you BEEN,” commonly em-
ployed by people who have not met recently. We thus infer that she is suggesting
that she and the attacker were merely casual acquaintances. In this way she man-
aged indirectly to contest the attorney’s argument, without openly challenging
him and running the risk of appearing overly aggressive.
In each of the above cases the interpretations relied on the retrieval of the
background knowledge necessary to construct possible scenarios or envision-
ments, or in some instances to inter-textually recall specific expressions in terms