Re: RT list: Degrees of inference?

Ian, you asked
"Can anyone tell me whether any work has been done on RT and /degrees of
inference/ considered to be necessary in different languages/cultures?"
The short answer from me is a nagative ... but I hope others on the RT
list will have something more positive.

What I can do is agree on the basis of anecdotal evidence.
I'd say in Africa generally -- so, at least in the societies I am most
familiar with, in eastern Africa and the Horn, speaking directly is not
the norm. People tend to talk indirectly about issues, and rely on the
audience doing a lot of inferencing to keep track of what is intended.
The more serious the issue is, the more care there is in not speaking to
it directly. So the western "value" of being up front with what is on
our mind is not appreciated, not valued, and may be read as insensitive.
Put like that, I can also see indirectness, and consequent reliance on
inferencing, at work in western societies in at least some aspects of life.

Secondly, especially in the Horn of Africa, it seems to me that
explanation [whenever called for] is achieved via the presentation of
analogies -- 'parables' if you like. A asks a question about something
that is not clear, and B responds by offering an analogy. A has to
inference in what way the analogy fits. Again, the west does this, and
some tropes depend on analogy, but in the Horn, in some societies at
least, it is an art form--a genre, almost. Sometimes the analogy might
be fairly 'narrow' and be interpretable in terms of one [or two] quite
strong implicatures. At other times, it seems to depend on a range of
weak implicatures, no one of which is consciously 'intended'. Again
certain [traditional?] negotiations in the west may show similar signs.
I think of negotiations that used to involve two families arranging a
marriage between one of 'our sons' and one of 'their daughters'. And
analogy and indirectness is the means of carrying it out. some time ago
now, I heard this done in terms of a young man wishing to harbour his
boat, so it can be quite raucous and baudy.

Is indirectness something that surfaces in all societies, in some
communication, and then, along the lines of your question, do some
societies prefer indirectness, and a consequent greater dependence on
inferencing?

Anthropologist Mary Douglas set up two parameters for understanding
societal behaviour -- Group and Grid. The Group parameter involves the
bondedness among members of the group; the grid parameter involves
stratification of tasks/roles among group members. Low Group/Low Grid
would be individualist; High group/High grid is hierarchical societies;
High group/Low grid is egalitarian; Low group/High grid is fatalist. The
epitomising terms are extremes; most societies presumably show trends
not extremes.

Communication in different Group/Grid societies might reasonably be
predicted to show differences brought about by such cultural factors.

There is a correlation between the Group/Grid concept and the concept of
high/low Context. Plausibly, communication in high shared context
situations relies more heavily on inferencing.

I would like to hear from others who have explored more systematically
these cultural aspects in which communication takes place. Which is my
main reason for saying anything at all, no matter how little! I assume
that the work of Helen Spencer-Oatey, Stells Ting-Toomey and those who
are associated with the same interests could give us much more.

Ronnie [Sim]

On 26/11/2013 17:07, ian mackenzie wrote:
>
> In the 1980s, John Hinds distinguished between speaker/writer and
> listener/reader responsible languages. In the former (e.g. English and
> French), the speaker/writer is primarily responsible for effective
> communication; in the latter (e.g. Japanese and perhaps Korean) it is
> the listener/reader. It is often said that in Japanese what is
> expressed and what is intended tend to be two different things; there
> is no obligation to give full explanations and clarifications, to be
> linear and direct, or to use explicit coherence markers and
> transitional statements. Consequently listeners/readers need to rely
> heavily on inference.
>
> In the 1970s, Edward Hall distinguished between high- and low-context
> cultures, giving Japan as an example of a high-context culture in
> which people tend to have similar experiences and expectations,
> allowing many things to be left unsaid, and inferences to be drawn
> from implicit shared cultural knowledge.
>
> The authors of RT come from speaker/writer responsible cultures (the
> French even have the deluded saying /ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas
> français/!). Can anyone tell me whether any work has been done on RT
> and /degrees of inference/ considered to be necessary in different
> languages/cultures?
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Ian MacKenzie
>
> Faculté de traduction et d’interprétation, Université de Genève
>
> ian.mackenzie@unige.ch <mailto:ian.mackenzie@unige.ch>
>
>
> Recently published:/English as a Lingua Franca: Theorizing and
> Teaching English/, Routledge, 2013.
Received on Wed Nov 27 11:49:33 2013