Le indicazioni tra [parentesi quadre] nel passo che segue – e in altri – non
non fanno parte della citazioni, sono le note aggiuntive di Emanuela per uso personale.

Pag. 1

Firth (1951) ...(...). For Firth language was only meaningful in its context of situation

[Firth, J.R. Modes of meaning 1957 :190-215, dalla bibliografia]

Pag. 33

Hymes (1971) argues that Chomsky’s definition of competence is too narrow – linguistics ought to concern itself with communicative competence, the speaker’s ability to produce appropriate utterances not grammatical sentences. (...). Appropriateness includes ‘whether and to what extent something is in some context suitable, effective or the like’. (...) A speaker’s competence also includes knowledge about occurrence, ‘whether and to what extent something is done’.

Pag. 35

Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) suggest that for American English there is a conversational rule that only one speaker speaks at a time. (...) Any group which shares both linguistic resources and rules for interaction and interpretation is defined as a speech community and it is on such groups that ethnographers of speaking concentrate.

Pag. 47

All speech events and speech acts have a purpose, even if occasionally it is only phatic. [cioè per mantenere il contatto. Hymes usa questo termine che ha preso poi da Malinowski]

Pag. 48

Within key Hymes handles the ‘tone, manner or spirit’ in which an act or event is performed. He suggests that acts otherwise identical in setting, participants, message, form, etc., may differ in key as between mock and serious, perfunctory and painstaking. (...) The ‘how marvellous’ uttered with a ‘sarcastic’ tone is taken to mean the exact opposite.

The signalling of key may be non-verbal, by wink, smile, gesture or posture, but may equally well be achieved by conventional units of speech like the aspiration and vowel length used to signal emphasis in English.

Pag. 49

Under channel the description concerns itself with the ‘choice of oral, written, telegraphic, semaphore, or other mediums of transmission of speech’. (...) The development of radio and television has created a situation in which some speech events have enormous unseen and unheard audiences, which subtly affect the character of the event. What is superficially a round-table discussion or a cosy fireside chat can in fact be an opportunity to attempt, indirectly, to sway a nation’s opinions.

Pag. 50

Hymes’ observation that ‘how something is said is part of what is said’. (...) ...concept of face, (...) as something that is emotionally invested and that can be lost, maintained or enhanced’. They [Brown and Levinsonn, 1978] suggest that many interactive acts constitute a threat to face and that many aspects of utterance form can be explained in terms of speakers attempting to defuse or mitigate a Face Threatening Acts (FTA). Face, they argue, can usefully be seen as consisting of two aspects: positive face, ‘the positive, consistent self-image...crucially including the desire that this self-image be appreciated’, and negative face, ‘the...claim to...freedom of action and freedom from imposition’.

Pag. 52

...negative politeness is an attempt to mitigate the inconvenience caused by the FTA. One major strategy is to minimize the content by ‘diminutives’ (...): Could you have a little look at this? (...)

A second strategy is to minimize the strength of the threat or imposition: I think you may be wrong. (...)

And a third is to minimize the speaker’s apparent involvement with and therefore responsibility for the FTA by attributing it to others, to a general rule or to no agent at all: (...) All passengers must...

Pag. 53

One complicating problem for foreigners is that speech communities differ in the relative weight they give to positive and negative politeness and the amount of politeness they require in informal situations. To the amusement of foreigners, English emphasizes negative face using ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ extravagantly, even between intimates, and the culture enshrines the practice in stories for children like The Bad Baby whose crime was that ‘he never once said please’.

Pag. 56

Hymes (1972b) suggests that for white middle class Americans the normal hesitation behaviour is to pause, and often fill the pause with ‘um’, ‘er’, and then to continue, while for many blacks, the normal patter is to recycle to the beginning of the utterance.

Pag. 59

Sacks (MS) suggests that there is an underlying rule in American English conversation – ‘at least and not more than one party talks at a time’.

Pag. 60

Sacks suggests that a current speaker can exercise three degrees of control over the next turn. Firstly, he can select which participant will speak next, either by naming him or by alluding to him with a descriptive phrase (...). If the current speaker selects the next speaker, he usually also selects the type of next utterance by producing the first part of an adjacency pair (...) for example a question or a greeting which constrains the selected speaker to produce an appropriate answer or return greeting.

DOCTOR: Hello Mrs Jones

PATIENT: Hello Doctor

Pag. 60-61

Sacks notes that when an unselected speaker takes a turn already assigned to a selected one, the right of the selected speaker to speak next is usually preserved:

A (to C): Tell us about yourself so we can find something bad about you

B: Yeah hurry up

Pag. 62

If the current speaker has not selected a next speaker, beginning at a possible completion, may well overlap with the current speaker who has decided to continue, or with a second self-selecting speaker.

Pag. 64

There are several techniques open to the speaker who wishes to continue speaking past a particular ‘possible completion’. The simplest technique is to employ what Sacks calls an utterance incompletor – these are items such as ‘but’, ‘and’, ‘however’, and other clause connectors, whose importance in conversation is that they turn a potentially complete sentence into an incomplete one. (...) One technique is to begin with an incompletion marker, ‘if’, ‘since’, or any other subordinator, which informs the other participants that there will be at least two clauses before the first possible completion.

Pag. 65

A non-speaker who wishes to speak, but is unable to find a suitable entry spot has the option of simply breaking in, though this is frequently heard as a rudeness.

Pag. 69

...adjacency pairs (...) they are two utterances long; the utterances are produced successively by different speakers; the utterances are ordered – the first must belong to the class of first pair parts, the second to the class of second pair parts; the utterances are related, not any second pair can follow any first pair part, but only an appropriate one; the first part often selects next speaker and always selects next action – it thus sets up a transition relevance and expectation which the next speaker fulfils, in other words the first part of a pair predicts the occurrence of the second: ‘Given a question, regularly enough an answer will follows’ (Sacks 1967).

Pag. 71

Levinson observes that dispreferred seconds are distinguished by incorporating a ‘substantial number of the following features’:

1. delays (...)

2. prefaces: (i) the use of markers or announcers of dispreferreds like Uh and Well (...)

3. accounts: carefully formulated explanations for why the dispreferred act is being done.

4. declinational component