9.

3 ‘Conversation’ between authors and readers

The pragmatic model of understanding can apply not only to character–character discourse, but also to
the way in which authors convey messages to their readers. The cooperative principle must be adopted
more strongly in interpretation of novels than for everyday talk exchanges. The writer has the time to
choose exactly what he wants to say, there should be no glaring errors, and it is assumed that
everything in the novel ‘counts’. An author conveys what he wants to say either 1- Directly, or 2- Via
interchange between characters.
In both we can expect conversational implicatures and other inferential strategies to be used.
The employment of sentences in the present is a clear example of author–reader implicature. When the
author breaks away from the narrative past, and adopts the present tense, we must assume some
relevance to the narrative: e.g., that the narrative illustrates the general truth in question. It is with such
a sentence that Jane Austen begins Pride and Prejudice:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in
want of a wife."
Jane Austen breaks the maxim of quality, no one can accept such a ‘truth’ as ‘universally acknowledged’.
So we assume that the author is speaking ironically, and understand her roughly as follows: ‘Although
this is not a universal truth, the social conventions of money and marriage are such that a lot of people
go about behaving as if it were true.’ This sets the tone for the rest of the novel, so that when we see
Mrs Bennet trying to marry off her daughter to any man who has money within sight, we recognize the
norm of behavior that is being satirized.
The reader is invited in a novel to draw implicatures both from character speech and authorial
commentary. But this two-level response also leads to a third kind of implicature: dramatic irony, where
the reader understands from the characters’ speech what the characters on the stage don’t
One example occurs at the beginning of Dorothy Parker’s story Here We Are:
‘Well!’ the young man said.
‘Well!’ she said.
‘Well, here we are,’ he said.
‘Here we are,’ she said. ‘Aren’t we?’
‘I should say we were,’ he said. ‘Eeyop. Here we are.’
‘Well!’ she said.
‘Well!’ he said. ‘Well. How does it feel to be an old married lady?’
Here the two newlyweds are so embarrassed by their situation that they can produce nothing but
informationless sentences. It is not obvious that either of them is aware of the other’s hesitancy; they
are expressing, rather than implicating, embarrassment. The maxim of quantity is broken in such talk
not to convey Implicatures, rather to convey phatic communion which is a way of expressing social
cohesion, starting off conversations and the like. It is the reader who notes the breach of the quantity
maxim and interprets this as embarrassment.

Philosophers have contributed further illumination by work in sociology and sociolinguistics in the
dynamics of turn-taking in conversation. It is this aspect of conversational behavior that governs the
exchange of roles in conversation. It can be clarified by analyzing a part from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over
the Cuckoo’s Nest. It is the part where nurse Duckett controls the conversation with her patients in the
mental hospital. In this part the reader is obviously intended to perceive the rigid control that Nurse
Duckett exercises over her patients in the mental hospital, and to disapprove of the authoritarian world
which she has created. In everyday conversations the participants are on roughly equal terms when
negotiating whose turn it is to speak next. But in other, more controlled situations, the turn-taking is
more carefully regulated. In a doctor’s surgery, for example, the doctor speaks first, asking questions,
and the patient takes up the secondary, answering role. The nurse adopts a controlling role, she
nominates who is to speak, and has also determined the general nature of the responses. The patients
must announce some past act of which they are ashamed. She is thus completely in control, treating a
group of fully grown men as if they were guilty children, and hence demeaning them both by what she
forces them to say and by how she does it.

The normal rules of cooperative interchange are abandoned, and through this Kesey implicates to the
reader, more powerfully than he could communicate by direct statement, that Nurse Duckett is a tyrant,
and that the Acutes are in her power.

9.4 An extended pragmatic analysis:

Such analysis is used to explain and justify how the readers react to the fictional dialogue intuitively. This
point is clear in another passage from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest:
The dialogue between Mr.Taber and the little Nurse and how it is escalated at the end and the big nurse
treated him in a brutal way.
The starting point of the dialogue is just an inquiry from Mr. Taber about the medication he is ordered
to take:

"Wait just a shake, honey; what are these two little red capsules in here with my vitamin?"

The way in which he asks, using imperative "wait" and colloquial lexis "honey", indicates that he is
familiar with the nurse.
On the other hand, the vague answer of the nurse is on opposite level of formality using titles of address
"Mr.Taber", the answer breaks two maxims; the maxim of quantity as she doesn't add new information
to Mr.Taber and the maxim of manner as the answer was very vague:

"It's just medication, Mr.Taber, good for you."

The way in which she answers makes the reader conclude that she doesn't want to answer for some
certain reasons and also she wants to keep the distance between them, she is just trying to convince
him to take it in a suitable and good manner. She uses coaxing language that is often used by parents in
situations where ultimately the child has no choice.

Mr.Taber starts to change his tone to be more polite by using titles of address and to show that he is not
trying to make troubles " Miss, I don't like to create troubles"

Once again she doesn't answer trying to re-establish her control, but her speech act is not successful as
he doesn't obey her order whatever she says and deny her control using declarative form supported by
an oath "all I want to know, for the love Jesus".
The whole matter changes by the interference of the big nurse who started to disregard him at all
addressing Miss Flinn only". Physically and verbally, she showed him that he has no choice in taking his
medication when she holds him paralyzing his movement and in a sarcastic way "you can go" while she
is in control of his movement and he won't be able to go until she frees him.
This end is a part of kersey's strategy of pushing the reader away from the nursing staff of the mental
house and the big nurse in particular.

9.5 conversational tone:

Tone plays a role in indicating the social stance of speaker to hearer. It dramatizes personal
relationships, as the dynamics of conversation are reflected variously in the politeness, familiarity or
rudeness of tone adopted by one character towards another.
In real conversation, tone can be so important as to overrule the actual sense of what is said: ‘ it wasn’t
so much what she said, as her tone of voice that I objected to’. The phrase ‘tone of voice’ here brings
out the significance of phonetic factors such as intonation and voice quality and even if they aren’t
available, tone can be indicated by varied and subtle use of grammatical, lexical and graphological
markers.
There are scales of politeness, of formality, of emotive key, etc., and these have their positive and
negative roles; for example, politeness implies its antonym of familiarity; formality implies its antonym
of informality or colloquialism. The term impoliteness should perhaps be considered not so much the
opposite of politeness, as a reference to an inappropriate position on the scale: we can be impolite both
by being too polite and by being too familiar for the occasion. Thus, we judge a character’s tone by
relating it to some contextual norm of appropriateness (Hi as a greeting is appropriate between
coequals not between a student and an archbishop).

9.5.1 An example: references to people

Conversational tone is reflected in the way in which one character addresses another. This is very
apparent especially in the novels of the 19 th century, when distinctions of social status were graded in
speech. This fact is reflected in the scale of politeness which has a graded variety: titles of respect (My
lord, madam), titular prefixes (Mr, Miss), surnames (Smith, Brown), first names (Cecilia, Thomas), and
pet names and endearments (my dear, Tom). So all these terms of address show the various degrees of
social distance. Here are some examples:

1- Mrs Elton in Emma shows her lack of social discrimination in cosily designating her husband ‘Mr
E’ and by the ill-judged familiarity of referring to Mr Knightly without title; social sins which lead
to raging Emma: ‘Knightly! I could not have believed it, Knightly!-never seen him in her life
before, and call him Knightly’.
2- Dickens's Dombey and Son shows a consciousness of the social implications when the heroine
Florence corrects her maid Susan Nipper for the impolite reference to the aristocratic Skettles
family.

3- Again in Dombey and Son, Susan addresses her beloved mistress as "Dear Miss Floy". This stands
out as a welcome sign of human affection which also goes beyond the limits of social inequality.
 However, Mr. Dombey disapproves this intimacy with 'lower orders'. He scarcely utters an
endearment to his wife, even when she is giving birth to her baby.
These examples show that modes of address express the manifold gradience of superiority and
inferiority, of intimacy and distance.

9.5.2 Other indicators of politeness

Generally speaking, to be polite, one has to be prolix and indirect. In order to satisfy the hearer, it
requires ceremonies of respectful address, apology, circumlocution and hyperbole.
For example, in Dombey and Son, we see Mr. Carker, Mr. Dombey's manager, betraying his insincerity
and hypocritical intentions through an extreme of politeness (p.313). His most striking mark, for
instance, is apparent when he replaces 'you' by the indirect third person in addressing Miss. Dombey.
Out of fake politeness, he apologizes ' a thousand times' for opening a conversation with his boss's
daughter.
Carker on the one hand excuses his implied disrespect to Mr. Dombey in applying the term 'pride' to his
wife and on the other hand expresses the suggestion of punishment as one of Mr. Dombey's rights as a
husband. Thus, apart from the routine apology ‘pardon me’, the chief markers of politeness here are
parenthetical constructions, euphemisms and hedges. Mr Dombey’s egotism and self-esteem were
satisfied by the extreme politeness of Carker and so he failed to detect the villainy beneath Cacker’s
fawning manner.

9.5.3. Politeness and Formality

The scale of formality is often related to the scale of politeness, but the two are distinct. They both
convey a sense of distance, but the formal style is related to the distance of a serious public
communication of language, ‘on its best behavior’.

In Dombey and Son, Mr. Carker's politeness is related to formal vocabulary and also with a syntax of
formalism like using 'submission', 'distinguished', adorns and graces', 'beauty and accomplishments', etc.
because these are signs of studied linguistic choice, they suggest a lack of spontaneity and a suspicion of
insincerity. In addition, in Mr. Dombey's speech at Paul's christening, he uses a formality that is
inappropriate to the situation and which produces an effect of overpoliteness.

Formality does not always indicate negative associations. For example, Jane Austen's novels show the
influence of the 18th century view which appears in the formal style of the characters in Mansfield Pak.
In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's style shows dignity and normal seriousness. This can be seen in the
contrast between the speech of Mrs. Bennet and her husband. Mr. Bennet replies to his wife 'I have not
the pleasure of understanding you . . . Of what are you talking?' , using the more formal construction of
the question. In the mode of address, Mrs. Bennet uses the familiar Lizzy, but her husband prefers the
fuller form Elizabeth.