Spoken Discourse

First, HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR!!! hope recess week is going well for everyone!

and now...on to the reflection.

This (last?) week we focused on spoken discourse. I think the really interesting thing about this module is that it really makes explicit all the things I just take for granted.

For example, telephone openings/closings. It’s just something that’s been taught from young and I never ever thought it could be an area of research for some – quite fascinating.

I remember when I was young I wasn’t allowed to answer the phone/make phone calls because I hadn’t yet learnt how to do it properly, and I might come off as rude. I think this might be the case for most families, where the kids aren’t allowed to answer the phone until they’ve learnt how to respond politely. Anyway, I remember learning how to answer phones (it was such a ‘shiok’ feeling when I finally got to answer my 1st phone call :D) and my mother would tell me that I always had to say “hello” first, never ever start with a “yeah” or “what”. When I was making a call, I would always have to say “may I speak to [so and so] please?” and “thank you” once the person on the other line had transferred me over. All these ‘steps’ are so ingrained in me I guess I don’t realize I’m doing it.

Another thing I found interesting was the exercise done on English and Chinese narratives. If the culture that the CW’s grew up in affected how they wrote their narratives in English, what would this mean for bilinguals, or at the very least, Singaporeans? Because I grow up speaking English, but I am Chinese and adhere to Chinese culture, so if I were to write a narrative in Mandarin, would it be affected by elements of how I would write in English, and vice versa?

Recalling a Speech Event

After learning about speech events, I thought I’d share about my experience when I went to Texas:

Going to Texas to visit my relative was a huge culture shock for me, simply because I wasn’t used to the overt friendliness of everyone there. I think what contributed to this extreme friendliness was the fact that it was a small town that my aunt stayed in, only a population of about 3000 people. What surprised me and my cousins the most was the fact that when we went into shops, everyone (I’m not kidding—everyone) greeted us in an extremely friendly manner. They’d say things like “Hi! How’re you today?” or “Hi there! How’s things going” which really caught us off guard. You just don’t find people like this in Singapore! The first few times, we didn’t really know how to respond to them, because we just weren’t used to it, so we employed a strategy of smiling and giving generic answers of “Oh I’m fine, thanks”, but didn’t really reply or engage in a conversation with them. It took us awhile to get accustomed to such friendliness and thereafter, we loosened up and started to converse more with the salespeople. The salespeople there were genuinely interested in helping and getting to know us, especially since we were 4 Asians from a country they had never been to. Friendliness seems to be a part of their culture, particularly in that town where everyone sort of knew each other. The customers that I observed actually welcomed the help and advice/suggestions of the salespeople, while in Singapore I suspect a lot of us would be quite annoyed with a salesperson hovering over our shoulders.

That was in 2004, before I ever learnt anything about speech acts or gave much thought to how different cultures beget different rules and norms.

Now, looking back, I can see that the first few times I encountered these Texan salespeople, I must have violated some culturally implicit rule by not replying equally cheerfully and instead attempting to maintain the distance of customer-salesperson. To them, I must have seemed quite (in Singapore Colloquial English terms) ‘dao’. However, I soon got used to their way of interaction and, because I was a minority, I think I started to change the way I would behave to suit the majority. As such the rules for interaction in Texas would probably have been being friendly, keeping a smile on one's face, while doing the converse would have been considered rude or impolite.

Comparing my experience there with Singapore, I can see that the values of a society lead to different interactional norms and rules. However, I wouldn’t say this is a truism for all of the service industry in Singapore, because some of the smaller retail outlets/restaurants are actually very much inclined towards getting to know their customers rather than selling as much as they can. Still, a large majority of Singapore seem to behave in this manner.

Speech Acts

The topic of ‘Speech Acts’ was really interesting, because I don’t think I ever really gave much thought to it. For me, using language is something so natural and normal that when I say something I don’t always realize that I’m performing an act. I think the fact that we call it a ‘performance’ kind of reflects on how no utterance is ever so ‘neutral’ as we think it is. I think this video sums up a bit of how un-neutral language can be when we use it – even if we don’t really realize we’re using it:



Anyway I had 1 final thought, which I guess is also kind of a question:

Maybe joking can also be a way of deflecting a compliment?
If a really good friend of mine complimented me, I think I’d be more inclined to be thick-skinned and go “Of course I’m pretty!” as opposed to “Thank you”. But then I thought maybe this could be a form of deflecting, where we play up the humor so we don’t have to deal with the compliment, because maybe we aren’t fully comfortable/used to receiving compliments! I mean, I think in Asian societies, the virtue of humility gets played up quite a bit so we don’t really give nor receive compliments much. It’d be quite a good strategy to use humor to sort of downplay the compliment, while at the same time giving this impression that you’re a funny person.