Re: RT list: Degrees of inference?

Hi again,
I've been away from home over the weekend, including Friday-Monday, and
only this morning starting to look at emails again.

Ernst-August's response is helpful.
I understand Ian Mac's original communication to frame the question
within a single culture/society, especially when he says "...
Yoshikawa(1978) ... saying "the basic principle of communication in
Japan, the fact that what is verbally expressed and what is actually
intended are two different things, is something that Japanese people are
supposed to be aware of."
My response also was intended to be read within the same framework --
insiders making claims about communication in their own society.

As soon as we speak about this, from outside such societies, we risk
either making judgements as outsiders, or being read to be making these.
So, I can see how our emails on this topic could make the boundary
fuzzy. But I think we were both, Ian and I, trying to consider
remarks/claims made by insiders about their own society, and begin
thinking about how they might be handled within an RT framework. At this
point, we were also, I think, talking informally. I was certainly hoping
to attract comment from those working closely with the academic inside
of RT.

So, I think neither of us [Ian or I] was making cross-cultural
judgements of other societies; both were seeking to operate within the
framework clarified above. I hope that rules out the risk Ernst-August
deals with in his first point.

Ernst-August's second point is the interesting one. The reminder that
optimal relevance includes the qualification "the communicator's
preferences" (Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. 1995:270), is indeed key. If I
interpret Ian's initial interest again, then I think he is asking for
discussion about cultures/societies/sub-societal groups in which this
factor of */communicator preferences/* varies.

E.-A.'s comment is a good one, that "information is a very valuable, and
potentially also risky, commodity" and that this may form an underlying
cultural assumption in some society. It is certainly a familiar
interpretation of [some of those few] societies in Africa that I am
familiar with, viz., that /*information is a commodity*/. Having
information gives its possessor some degree of power and influence;
lacking it leaves one without the 'power' the information grants. In
Africa, it is familiar to hear this interpreted as affecting
communication; speaker's preferences constrain the flow of information
they provide. Many westerners have understood this to be frustrating
[but that is also subject to a mis-match in cross-cultural
expectations]. So, yes, I'm with E.-A. on this example. This preference
at work in communication would likely affect the sharing of information.
Here, I think Ian's starting comments were about whether anyone had
looked into this in a piece of research. HAS anyone? Agnieszka
Psiskorska mentioned Helga Schroeder's article as a potential example,
which I haven't read yet.

To the cultural assumption that /information has commodity value/, can
we postulate others? I am going to try to offer a couple ... whether
they end up providing explanation will come out sometime!

a. The assumption that communication will be conducted with
/*politeness*/ may be a normal, one might hope, universal assumption
unless grievance is being addressed in an irritated way. But, it does
appear that the role that an assumption of politeness plays differs in
different societies. One does hear those of other societies commenting
on the more or less politness expected of communication, and how any
instance may partly fail, or eminently meet expectations of politeness.
Across cultures, it does appear that British and American
communication--perhaps some European communities also-- places a higher
value on directness than on politeness. Both within a society and across
societies, assumptions of appropriate politeness vary, and affect
speaker preferences in the form of an utterance. E.-A. can sharpen this
up perhaps.

b. In many societies it seems to be generally accepted that /*preserving
Face*/ is of high importance, and that in communication, speaker's take
great care to express themselves in ways that do not create a Face
challenge. I'd like to suggest that this is not simply subsumed by an
assumption of politeness by by some other/stronger assumption about the
responsibility to maintain inter-personal relationships in
communication. This might also result in speaking being much more
oblique by speaker preference ... it could be simpler, more overt, but
the Face assumption places responsibilities on speakers to be indirect,
and hearers to handle the indirect with enhanced inferencing.

c. For the sake of exploring this, I would probably also wonder whether
the speaker's assumption of the /*truthfulness*/ of her / his utterance
is subject to speaker preferences that are societally variable. Loose
talk approximations are one area where I suggest it might be seen. I'll
fall into the western trap here ... "How long will it take to get to X?"
might generate a response "Not too long". And it might be doing so out
of a compromise between different assumptions -- that a response should
be as relevant as possible, that a response should affirm the
questioner's hopes, and that the variables make it difficult to give a
time.

All of these apparently vary contextually within "our own society",
whichever society that is, and perhaps start to provide some response to
Ian Mac's original question. It does seem that communicator preferences,
and that these preferences driven by different underlying cultural
assumptions, do affect the cost-benefit balance in some ways.

A final comment, and Ian will be a better position than I am to respond.
My understanding of English literature/literary criticism is that
literary authors do set about making varying demands on their readers.
C.S. Lewis made some comment about "how we should read" a work [can't
remember where, right now], and the shift in literary criticism toward
reader response understanding of a text, often with an openness of
interpretation, seems to underscore the need to look at responsibilities
of readers.

Ronnie

On 28/11/2013 16:40, ernst-august_gutt@sil.org wrote:
> Hi,
> This discussion is interesting but I think Ronnie Sims' observation
> that somehow "it doesn't hit the spot" is very pertinent here. It
> seems that too little attention is paid to a couple of important
> points of RT. .
> 1) Optimal relevance is not universally defined, but always context
> dependent - which means, in effect, dependent on the mutual cognitive
> environment of the communication partners. The point from which this
> discussion started, however, seem to be cross-cultural judgments: in
> this case, scholars from one culture comparing the processing effort,
> esp. that incurred by inference, in acts of communication in another
> culture. This means, however, comparing two most likely
> non-commensurate things if the cognitive environments of both acts of
> communication are not the same, which in these cases they hardly will
> be. So what seems to be happening in these evaluations is something
> like the following: one is trying to compare the processing cost [e.g.
> steps of inference] that would one would have to spend in one's own
> cognitive environment to obtain an utterance considered satisfactory
> in one's own cognitive environment with the effort it takes one
> to process, in one's own cognitive environment, the utterance actually
> offered in quite a different cognitive environment. For example, a
> Western person considers the processing cost he/she would need to
> invest in processing the utterance of an East-African person to obtain
> the information a Western person would expect to be told, and comes to
> the conclusion that this information is either only very weakly
> implied or requires a lot of inferencing, which could have been
> avoided by a more direct answer, of the kind expected in a Western
> cognitive environment. From an RT point of view, this does not make
> sense. Optimal relevance, with both processing cost and cognitive
> effects involved, have to evaluated relative to the cognitive
> environment in which they take place.
> 2) Also,
> the 1995 version of optimal relevance includes a very significant modificationin
> its second part, bringing in the preferences of the communicator: "b)
> The ostensive stimulus is the most relevantcompatible with the
> communicator's abilities and preferences" (Sperber, D., and D. Wilson.
> 1995:270). This means, among other things, that the communicative POR
> does not oblige the communicator to supply, without unnecessary
> processing effort, the information the addressees might like to
> get but a) only information that is in line with the abilities of the
> communicator - e.g. the communicator can't supply info she does not
> have or can only come up with as good a stimulus as her particular
> skills allow - and b) information that the communicator is prepared to
> supply (preferences).
> This has far-reaching implications for the topic under discussion
> here. Suppose the mutual cognitive environment of a group contains the
> belief that information is a very valuable, and potentially also
> risky, commodity: one never knows what others might do with that
> information. When a person with that cognitive environment is asked by
> a stranger how far it is to a certain place or where such and such a
> person lives, then that person would, if indeed he felt he had to
> answer, tend to keep the information quite vague: "Oh, it's over
> there, quite far" - even if he was in a position to give a much
> clearer answer. While the vagueness of the answer probably would not
> surprise a person sharing a similar cognitive environment - it's only
> what any stranger could expect to be told - an outsider to the culture
> might conclude that either these people don't know how to be precise -
> how to formulate an optimal stimulus - or that they expected the
> addressee to work hard to figure out from that answer where they'd
> have to go. In the latter case, in the spirit of the discussion going
> on here, one might conclude that this is a culture that generally
> demands higher processing efforts from the audience than some other
> cultures. Similarly with business negotations, perhaps in an Asian
> context: if it is customary to reveal only as little of one's own
> interests to the other party as possible in order to get the best deal
> for oneself and to keep open as many options as possible, then, again,
> one will naturally tend to be rather vague, saying only as much as one
> feels one has to say to remain polite and to keep things moving. The
> other party, if they share the same cognitive environment, will
> interpret the answers given along these lines - probably also trying
> to figure out what the first party is trying to hide. Such interaction
> obviously involves a lot of mental work. This would not be needed in
> another group with less sophisticated conventions where one is quite
> ready to reveal information.
> The important point is that, in all these cases, people are actually
> guided by the communicative POR (adequate cogn. effects with minimal
> processing effort) - keeping in mind the preferences of the
> communicator, and the mutual cognitive environment in which the
> communication takes place. To take the observable difference in
> processing cost as evidence for cultural parameters that somehow -
> arbitrarily? - determine a sort of "default level" of processing
> effort or inference for that group that is e.g. higher than the
> "default level" of some other group would be missing the point
> entirely. It would be much more useful to study the "contents" of the
> cognitive environment concerned and find out what cultural assumptions
> there are in that cognitive environment that would make the
> information and the stimulus used to convey it optimally relevant.
> That would actually help outsiders to better understand those
> communications - and the culture in which they take place.
> Personally I believe there is no reason to assume that there are
> groups that set "minimal processing cost" as such at a higher level
> than perhaps some other groups, or put more "responsibility" on the
> audience than other groups do. I would expect that in all and every
> case it will turn out that such differences arise not from culturally
> set default values for these two parameters but are natural
> consequences of beliefs and values of the cognitive environments
> concerned - whether this concerns just two individuals or large
> cultural or ethnic groups. (So this should actually be a testable
> hypothesis.)
> Well, this is my two cents' worth.
> Ernst-August Gutt
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* owner-relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk
> [mailto:owner-relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk] *On Behalf Of *Ronnie Sim
> *Sent:* 28 November 2013 10:20
> *To:* ian mackenzie
> *Cc:* relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk
> *Subject:* Re: RT list: Degrees of inference?
>
> Now you speak of
> "the SIL linguists with knowledge of Africa, and the various Japanese
> linguists working in RT. Then again, they tend to analyse specific
> particles, connectors, discourse markers, etc., i.e. do /real/ work,
> rather than trade in airy generalisations like I do!"
>
> I'd add three points:
> 1. Procedural meaning came out of RT work, and a number of us are
> applying it in analysing those particles &c ... I think with useful
> results, particularly in turning up particles in Greek, Hebrew and
> African languages that mark a string as metarepresentational.
>
> 2. "Trading in airy generalisations" is in fact where the new insights
> come, that the detail work can pick up. don't deprecate the
> theoretical developments you guys uncover; I don't-- and a reason for
> speaking to the issue you raise is the hope for some new thinking.
>
> 3. "Ranking languages according to levels of inference, or the use of
> implicatures" doesn't hit the spot, though, does it? It would
> presumably not be IN the language, but in how it is used for
> communicating in different interpersonal contexts, some of which would
> rely more on shared assumptions, or if Yoshikawa goes further, some of
> which pay less attention to shared assumptions and require audiences
> to spend more processing effort than RT suggests. I assume that all
> communities have situations in which speaking is deliberately less
> plain, and, if you are correct, that some communities spread this
> across many contexts, and make the assumption that the audience will
> make effort to understand. If that roughly represents the kind of
> societal contexts you have in mind, I then want to ask two further
> questions.
>
> a. How would RT be affected if the "minimal processing effort" side is
> weakened? I guess the affect can be tolerated, since all societies do
> communicate in situations where more effort is required [by some in
> the audience]. It presumably links up with the three strategies in Dan
> Sperber's paper /Understanding Verbal Understanding/, which also
> accepts audiencescan jack up the effort side.
>
> b. What kind of evidence would be required to show that community A
> typically uses language in ways that lay more responsibility on
> hearers/readers? Not from less benevolence or to obfuscate
> communication, but for some other reason.
>
> Coming back to eastern Africa, yes, I "see" communities that
> apparently lay more responsibility on audiences, and do not utter to
> minimise processing costs. And, yes, I see literature that requires
> more processing. Isn't it the case that much modern English literature
> is more open-ended than RT has allowed for?
>
> I'd really like to hear discussion from those in RT who are in a good
> position to speak to these questions.
>
> Ronnie
>
>
>
>
>
> On 27/11/2013 18:08, ian mackenzie wrote:
>>
>> Thank you, Ronnie Sim.
>>
>>
>> It's not only the Horn of Africa. John Hinds (1987) quotes
>> Yoshikawa(1978) (I can give the refs. to anyone who wants them)
>> saying "the basic principle of communication in Japan, the fact that
>> what is verbally expressed and what is actually intended are two
>> different things, is something that Japanese people are supposed tobe
>> aware of."
>>
>>
>> S&W do of course argue that language use (in any natural language) is
>> almost never literal, and that inference is almost always involved,
>> but I'm still surprised that no-one seems to have tried to rank
>> languages according to levels of inference, or the use of
>> implicatures. Especially with all the SIL linguists with knowledge of
>> Africa, and the various Japanese linguists working in RT. Then again,
>> they tend to analyse specific particles, connectors, discourse
>> markers, etc., i.e. do /real/ work, rather than trade in airy
>> generalisations like I do!
>>
>>
>> Ian MacKenzie
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:48 PM, Ronnie Sim <ronnie_sim@sil.org
>> <mailto:ronnie_sim@sil.org>> wrote:
>>
>> 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 Tue Dec 3 12:36:36 2013