Sean's E-Reflections

Lecture 2 – Speech Acts
For this week’s lesson, I went to class not knowing what to expect, besides that the topic was on speech acts.

Slowly, I started to get a grip on what it was all about, especially since the focus was on giving and receiving compliments. It was quite relevant to our daily lives and it’s just something that you don’t take notice of until you really pay attention (I’ll narrate some instances later on!).

The activity that really caught my imagination was the one where we filled up the questionnaire. I managed to fill up both the English and Chinese sections. The results were quite astounding – I accepted all the compliments for the English part, and I rejected all compliments for the Chinese part. It really exemplifies the statement that speech acts are reflective of a culture ie. the Chinese culture with its focus on humility and the English culture with its core on being polite and agreeable.

Being more aware of compliments! – TeamNUS Squash Training Sessions

Being challenged by Dr Deng to be more attentive to speech acts, I started to be more active in “eavesdropping”. It was all quite apparent during my varsity squash training later in the evening. We are privileged to have two exchange students, Cyrus from the USA and Vania from Hong Kong. After a tough training routine, we emerged from the courts and my coach praised our new teammates.

Coach: Great job Cyrus, you can only get better.
Cyrus: Wow thank you, it was really tiring but I enjoyed it!

It was a typical response by an American, where he accepted the compliment.

Coach: Vania, 不错。你要继续努力！(Good job Vania, you must continue to work hard)
Vania: (smiling) 不会啦! (no, no)

Vania rejected the compliment. Interestingly, later on she commented to me that she thought the coach was being critical of her performance by telling her that she had to work harder because she wasn’t playing well enough. In fact, he was genuinely complimenting her on a good performance and was merely encouraging her to train harder so that she could be an even better player.

“See Ya Later!”

Following that, when a fellow teammate gave us a lift to the MRT station so that we could take the transport home, Cyrus said to our friends who were alighting, “Ciao fellas, see ya later.” The few of us left in the car asked him, “You’re still meeting them later on? It’s already near midnight!” Cyrus embarrassingly mentioned, “Oh no! Yeah it’s like so weird every time I say ‘later’ people here think I’m going to meet them again afterwards. In actual fact I mean I’ll see them another day or at the next training session.”

“Silence” as a Speech Act?
On to some thoughts. I was thinking if “silence” could be considered a speech act. Somehow, I feel that discourse can be both silence and sound. The former includes the pauses and hesitations that occur within and between turns of talk – the rhythmic patterns of silence. For example, I have read in articles that certain American Indian groups are accustomed to waiting several minutes in silence before responding to a question or taking a turn in conversation, while the native English speakers they may be talking to have very short time frames for responses or conversational turn-taking, and find long silences distressful. For members of these particular American Indian groups, a shorter duration may be interpreted as impoliteness, and as not giving adequate consideration to the topic under discussion. For native English speakers, a longer duration may be interpreted as unfriendliness or shyness, lack of knowledge, or not wanting to be involved. In the context of legal proceedings, native English speakers are likely to (mis)interpret long pauses by defendants and witnesses as signs of lack of cooperation and of evasiveness, perhaps even of guilt.

“Yeah right”
In other instances, the statement “Yeah right” can be used in many circumstances, as an acknowledgement, agreement/disagreement, indirect interpretation, or as part of an internal phrase of a sentence. More can be read from the article “Yeah Right”: Sarcasm Recognition For Spoken Dialogue Systems.
(http://sail.usc.edu/publications/teppermann_sarcasm_ICSLP06.pdf)

Conclusion
Wow, that was quite a lot of things I wrote. Not sure if I will be able to write as much since my workload is sure to pile up as the weeks go by. If you managed to last till this part, I hope you enjoyed reading it! To end off, I’ll leave you with an interesting youtube video on speech acts.

Do check it out!