Journal of Pragmatics 5 ( ! 981 ) 2187- 308 Nortla-Hoiland Publishing Comparty

287

BOOK kEVIEWS

William Labov and David l:anshel, Therapeut';c di:~course: l 'syehotherap.v as con- versation. New York: Academic Press, 1977. ix + 392pp.

In the book under review, Labor and Fanshel (hereafter: L .~: F) show that thera- peuu(: discourse can be accounted for by the same theorelica! devices that also cover ordinary discourse. The authors emphas, ze th0t both t~e study of the thera- peutic process and the stu(ty of conversation require an in:erdisciplinary effort. Their study is the result of such an effort and of "a long peri )d of evolution m the understanding of this particular conversation and conversati 3v in general" (F~x). Even readers who are not interested in therapeutic discours~ as such should pay attention to rids stimulating study.

The book consists of 11 chapters plus an apper.dix, containing; the transcript of a 15 minute therapeutic session; there is a list of references, a~d no less than 7 valu- able indexes to subjects, authors, discourse rules, paralinguist c cues, propositions, interacdonal terms, and utterances.

L & F start out by introduct~lg some of the backgxound features of their study, and presenting the therapist and the patient in a clinical sessio~. The patient is a 19 year old girl called Rhoda, suffering from maore×ia ~ervosa, a classical psychoso- matk: illness most often seen i~ girls and young w,_~men. The main result of the illness is an extreme droo in the patient's weight, caused by a tefus~ to eat (Rhoda dropped from 140 to 70 pounds in a short period).

TLerapeutic interv~ew~ have been the object of rather intensive research, but, as L& F point out, this research has seldom focused on the sp:e(>h behavior itself.

They vv rite:

we do not ~ i~ to set aside or take issue with tile theoretical t'ramewor| s use t by psychiatxists and other tht~raplsts in evalua-ting their ~wn interviews, bu~ in focusing ul on the actual language used by therapist and patient we hope to uncover principles that may b~ valuable for any theo- retical orientation (p. 3).

According to the auth(,rs, the most promising studies of t~erapeutic conversa- tion are those ~,nich incorporate close examination c.~ recorded verbal material. Among oth~)rs they mendort Pittenger et al. 's The f irst J:~e min~ tes (1960) which is devoted mo:~fly to an analysis of prosodic cues, but also present, some general prin- ciples for the study of conversation. "Hie authors place t~reat ~alue on the~e prin-

ciples.

0 378-2 ] 66/.~ 1/0000-0000/$02.50 © North-Holland

288 Book reviews

As another source of inspiration ':or theil own frame%ork, L & F point to the developing interc~,t among linguists it: the study of speech acts and the connected- ness of sentences. Goffman's work is also mentioned in this connection, and L & F at tempt to take Goffman's advice see'tot, sly that the social definition of the situa- tion must be the point of departure fc,r further analysis.

L & F emphasize that they have not wc rked like "intuit ive" linguists, construct- i,lg their examples rather freely and then using their intuit ion to decide on accepta- bfli'/y and interpretation. They state dmt it is questionable to limit the amount of contextual in fommtion , and go on:

Whe~c we dc not have specific knowledge Jf the context, we necessarily maagit~e it. The con- strucfion of such imagined conte:.ts ".. an uncontroUed w~riable in the study, so rules that appear to be quite general are, in fact, limited by those conditions that we n, eessarily con- struct uncovsciously as we imaghle how we would interpret the ulterances in general (p. 73).

What L & F are saying here is that we cannot ever understand or interpret an ~,tter- ance in isfAation from its real or imagined context. However, they do not pursue this line of thought to its very end. They continue:

Eventually xse must construct discourse rules flint are quite general and stand free of context: but with ouJ present state of knowledge, the only way we can be sure that these rules are devel- oping in a useful direction is to show that they apply over and over again in many di:'fere~t con. texts (p. 73)

Clearly we can also have in interest in the construclion of "quite general" dis- course rules: but why mast we conceive of these rules as standing "fi'ee of con- text"? Why no~: conceive of them as general, simply because they apply "over and over again in mea~y different contexts" .

1~ seems to me that 1.. & F are tlying to ride several horses at the same time. On the oae hand. daey oppose an intuitive and "decontextualizing" linguistics; on the othei they do i;ot reaUy tra,ascend the fimdamental attitudes of this kind of lin. guistics, even though their choice of words does.

L & F's framework for comprehe,lsive discourse analysis is based on an anlR- elementaristic point e f view. In conversations, ,he parties appear to tmderstand and react to speech acts at man} levels of abstractioa. L & F make it clear that:

. ° ° ' * e conversation is not a ch~dn of utterances, but ra,h r a matri of uttera~:ce~ and actions bou,v,l together by a web of understandings and reactions tP. 30L

Tile analysis of this matrix must set oul from the socia definition of the situa- ti,,m. For L & F, this implies an at tempt to define file therapeutic interview as a social occasion before applying the general rules of discoarse. The rights, duties, aad obligations must , according to them, be understood if lhe rules a',-e :o have any f ~rmal application.

Book revie ws 2 8 9

L & F's definition of the therapeutic interview siluation is ver3 instructive. They manage to :~ow its telatively weU-defined boundaries, as wd~ a; sets of expected behaviors within those boundaries. As an immediate effect of th; defining charac- tersitics of the therapeutic interview situation, they ,-o,,~ pc~:,: ou. styilStlC patterns ha the conversations. Three distinct "fields of discourse" are found: "the style of everyday ]ifi~", "the inter'dew style", and "the family style". The fields of discourse from part of concentric "frames" (" therapy", "interview", "narrative", "family"), in which the patient's behavior is embedded and between which the conversation

can shift. In this definition of the therapeutic interview situation, ve~-y tittle attention is

paid to the negotiations about the definition of the situation in fat e-to-face interac- tion on the one hand. and to the societal determinants of the ~ituation on the other. Both these aspects arc mentioned by Goffinan (L & F's .,outce of inspira- tmn). who writes (1~74: 2}

Presumably, a 'definition of the situation' is almost 'always tk~und, but tl ose two are in the situation ordinarily do not create this definition, even though their society ~,ften can be said to do so; ordmazily, all they do is ~.~ assess correctly what the sitt~ation ought to be for them and then act accordingly. True, we personally negotiate aspect, of all the arrange nents under which we live, but often once these are negotiated, we continue on mechanically as though the matter and Mways been settled.

L & F's r~eglect of those levels of analysis that are either abov,' their own (i e. society) or below it (,'.e. the level of negotiatk, ns) ~.~, well be due to a reascnab!e desire to put certain limits o~ thei~ study; but i~ ~ ':':~inly make, their discourse

analysis less comprehensive and more abstract. Convel'sation is seen as a complex matrix with two kinds of relat: ons: "Ihe "hori-

zontal relations" of seqaencing between utterances and actions.. ~fild the "vertical relations" between surface utterances and deepel level actions whic a are related by rules of interpretation and production. Analyzing the conversatio~ls into ",.'onsti- tuent units" itl what is termed "cross-sectional analysis" allows L ~ F to identify these entities and uncover their relations. The components of the cross-sectional aJ/alysis on the level of "what is said .... re (1) the " text" consistirg of the words that are spoLen, together with false starts, hesitations, and selfinterr~ptions, (2) the "cues" which here denote the pa~;t-linguisiic cues as transcribed and verbally inter- preted, and (3) tire "expansion '' which is described not as an an'alyt c step, but as a "synthesis °' where all hdpful informatioJ~ in understanding the pr(,ductioa, inter- pretation, and sequencing of the utlerances is brought together.

According to L & F, this "expansion" has four steps: (a) the meaning conveyed by the "cues" is expanded into its nearest verbal equivalent; (b) pr~ ,nominal refer- ents are made explicit; (c) factual material that is presented bef,.m, and after the utteran:e is introduced in the expansion; and (d) shar.~d knowkd~e between the parties is made explicit. Also very important in the %xpansion" is the localization

290 Book reviews

of what are called "proposi t ions". These are def'med as recutTent communicat ions ,

and are described as predications o f :~ome degree o f generality. They are referred to

by the participant:; more than once. L e t s take an e):ample. In the following " tex t " Rhoda is tl;e speaker:

I d o n ' t , . , know, whe the r . . . I - THINK I did - the right thing, jis ~:alittle... situation came up . . . an' I tried to uhm . . . well, try to . . . use what i - what I've learned here, see if it worked (p. 119).

The "expans ion" o f ~his " t ex t " runs as follows (propositions are indicated with

numbers and letters in orackets):

I am not sure, but 1 clahn that (1) I did what you say is right, or (?1) what may actually be righL when (4) I asked my mother to help me by coming home after she had been away from home longer than she ust~ally is, creating some sm~l problems for me, and I tried to use the principle that tve learned from you here, (S) that I should express my needs and emotions to relevant others, and see (?S) if this principle worked (:ft. 126).

The proposit ion (1) is given this formulation: "1 think I did the right thing". The symbol (?1) means that proposition (1) is questioned. Tl-e proposition (4) is "Pdmda requests her mother to come home immedia te ly" , ai~d (S) is "One should

express one's need an~ emotions to relevant others", which is a proposition closely tied up with the thera,)eutic session, since it points to one of tl~e things the thera-

pist is ~ryin~ to t-=:,.:il Rhoda to do (she is questioning (?S) this very proposition in her last remark).

L & F make it clear that the expansion of ~he text is, ot course, open-ended.

There is no limit to the number of facts which could be brou~]lt in. The expansion

plays a crucial role in the a t tempt to relate "what is said" to "what is done" . '1"he

implicit propositions.

• . . serve more than anything else to build the fabric of conversational it~teraction (p. 51).

The authors :dso recognize the dangers of the expansion procedure. They write:

But t~e e:~pan,~ion can also be somewhat decei~tive, since there is an it, ter:tctive component of over-e~plicitness, which throws many of the actions into a wrong light. This is a general prop- erty of microanalysis: ordinary behavk~r takes on a Machiavellian intricacy, and hostilities that are la~ent :~nd unobtrusive become overpt)wering and oppressive. E~p~ns~ons magnify the strains and tetlsiot~s irt the soci~d fabric ~rtd will produce distorted interpretation unless we remember that tht expar~s.ion loses the important dimension of backgrounding, ~Jhich subordinates one form of social intcractioJa to another (p. 51).

L & F adrr.it that they

. . . have not tully solved the problem of ho~ to restore the subjective effect of mitigating devices after aralysis (p. 51).

Bool¢ reviews 291

! doubt that they ever will be able to solve the problem as long as their "expan- sions" are presumed to uncover what is really being conveyed in conversations. Within the L & F framewcrk, such must be the case, as their implicit tt~eory of human behags presupposes precisdy ~.~s kind of undetstartding.

The most critical step ha L & F's analysis is to determine what actions arf per- formed by speakers through their utterances. That is, to uncover rules of discourse which relate what is sam to what is done in production and interpretation. They find the internal structure of speech actions to be very complex, and they ampha- size its hierarchical organJzatio~rl. Fu:thermore, they find that in establishing coher- ence of sequencing the important act.ions are not "requests" ,'rod "assertations", but "challenges", "defences", and "retrez~ts".

Normally, a "chat!enge" is probabty not recognized as a speech act. L & F Z~efine a speech act shnply as "an acnon carried out by means of sp~ect~ (p. 56). ~h~,y do not want to confine theresa:Ires to ~he traditional linguistic speech act analy~i~

In L & F's ~ramework what is done belongs to the level of "interaction". ~ le expansion of RJ~oda's tex~ referred to above is turned into the tbklowing description of what is done at the level of interaction [for technical reasons some symbols are lef~ out or changed by me. SEOI:

R. initiates the session in Interview Style (IVS) by referring to the previous suggestion of the therapist and an incident from everyday life and asserting that she did fight in carrying out (S), thereby asserting (S). She simultaneously expresses uncertain;y about her assertion, ambigu- ously questioning that she carried out (S) correctly and questioning that (S) is appropriate, thereby challenging the competence of the therapist (p. 126).

L & F's discourse analysis of the therapeutic session with Rhoda takes up more than 200 pages of the book, and it is very informative indeed. What 1 ~ea~.ly find problematic in L & F's presental'~ion is the status of the expanded texts and of the uncovered speech actions.

In other words, the question is: what kind of e:-~tential status can be ascribed to the expansions, the rules of discourse, and the speech actions?

Often, thespeaking person does not recognize the postulated expansions and speech acts as what he or she actually had in mind wihiie spea.~:ing; thus the postu- lated entities often do not belong to the speaker's field of consciousness. This fact does not bother L & F~ because they work within ~. mentalistic paradigm and allow themselves to impute all kin, Is of unconscious mental entities to the language "aser.

Of course, it is important for use to uncover the, rules of conversation, ever:~ if we must admit that th~ speaker, at the moment of spealcing, may not be conscious of these rules. L & F :~;tate th,at the rules of conversation may be more abstra~:t and more difficult to grasp than the rules of sentence graramar. I doubt that this is the case -- none of the rules sugge.,~ted by I, & F are such that the intelligent native spe~t,;t,r will not "be able to recognize tSe rules as rules he ha:; been following all along" - to use Searle's formulation ha his critique (1976) of Chomsky.

292 Book reviews

From my point of view, we are allowed to speak about "unconscious rules" only if we imply that even though the speaker was not conscious of the rules while he or she spoke, he or she will, given the right circumstances, be able to recognize the rules as covering what he or she was doing. If this were not the case, we would have to operate wiith unconscious rules existing at a mysterious level of unconscious mental processes or events, placed somewhere below the level of conscieusness, but above that of ~:he physical brain processes [ 1 ].

The expansions can be st en as mere methodological devices; however, if they are thought of as descriptions of something wlfich can be lo,:ated at the back of the speaker's head, they are just as problematic as the unconscious rules. There is still another interl:,retation of the expansions, wluch neither takes them to be descrip- tions of fictitious entities no~ just helpful devices: expansions may be interpreted as "explications" (I will return to this interpretation later).

The postulated unconscious speecl ~, acts are even more problematic, because they carry the untenable implication that g.hat you re',dly mean, really intend., and really do, are things that are outside the reach of your consciousness (or, at least, are ciearez ~nd more fixed that you will ever a,::cept). Here, too, a mysterious process- ing-level is presupposed - unless another interpretation of the result of the dis- course analysis can be provided.

The reason why L & F's comprehensive discourse analysis makes everything in conversation more conspicuous, more rigid, and t oo well-defined, without giving us the impression of misrepresenting what is a,~:tually going on, is to be found in their underlying, widely accepted image of the human being. The same image :is also pre- supposed by ~:he majority of newer li::~;~tic (and psychological) research and theorizing, especially in the mentalistic tradi:ion.

Within this image, human beings are pictured as information processing devices, and aescribed in terms and manners bora'owed from computer technology. Since the middle of the fifties, the computer ~m:dogy has been used extensively in the human and social sciences. For linguistic:s, Newell and Simon t1972) date this break-through of the new perspective to the publication of Cttomsky's 'Three models for the description of language' (1956). One can name this perspective the "mentalistic", or better: the "informati, on-processing" paradigm; but, of course, theorizing and research do not have to use: 't:he terms "infornmtion" and "process- ing" in order to be located inside the paradigal. One might just as well, for example, speak about " ~ ' " repres,ntatlons and their "computations" as it is done by Chomsky when he states that linguists, on reaching an explanation of certain phenomena, can

. . . impute exislence to certain mental representations and to the mental computations that apply in a specific way to these mental representations (1976: 9).

[ 1] ! have e|aborated this point of view in ar~other paper (Olsen 1979b). in an earlier paper (1979a), 1 have ~ried to use Labor's ideas in connection with the study of schizophrenic speech. Of course, what I suggested then also has to be adapted in view of the criticism put forward here.

Book reviews 293

Looking at human beings, their language, and their social interaction through the fdter provided by the computer teclmology results in the illusion that every phe- nomenon has to be accounted for in terms of (digit~d) computation. As digital com- puters must operate; on finite strings of determinate elements related to each other by! clearly describable rules, so must hurt:an beings and human minds [2].

Even though L & F never state explicitly that relating "what is said" to "what is done" by means of rules has to be conceived of, within the information-processing paradigm, :ts an unconscious mental computational process, it makes little sense to interpret their framework trt any other way. The problem of ~elating what is said to what i,,; done is solved by L & F in the best information-processing manner: they think of what is done as a level beh#ld the level of what is said, and this level 0ehind has to be reached through processing or computing certain items according to rules of ,discourse. Only thus can they maintain the illusion of having to do with a clear and well-defined object, lying behind the messy and unordered surface.

If we want to abandon the information-processing paradigm and its postuiated unconsciou~ mental representation,~ and computations, however, we wfl~ have to find some cther ways of thinking about, and performing discourse a.~al:,sis

One possible way would be to admit that conventionalization is a matt:.r of degree. We migh't find speech acts wldch are requests, challenges, or whatever, to a degree; such a view is in accordance with common serse (and I tlfink it is in accor- dance with the original ideas behind the philosophical analysis of actions, too). It follows tha~ we can avoid postulatiIig that actions exist at a different level from utterances. This view is, furthermore, suppor~ted by at least ~wo of the principles for conversation analysis suggested by Pittenger, Hockett, and Danehy and approved by L & F - namely, the "principle of adiustment" according to which we must expect continous recalibration of the communicative conventions, and the "principle of the priority of interaction", wlfich states that we only know what we are doing or feeling by checking the feed-back we get from others.

Another possible way would be to start out by re~.!~zml~ that L & F's analysis does not produce descriptions or explanations, but ratlaer what might be called "explications". By this I mean: clarifying idealizations which function as normative guidelines for change and development [3]. These explications can be constructed on the basis of tendencies which can be recognized in the actual cttterances, and which can be supported by knowledge about the speaker and the situation. Explica- tions can be used both to point towards po:~sible achievements and towards what ought to be avoided.

L & F's results are in many cases best interpreted as explications. This could account for the speaker's fi~eling misrepresented and enligh*:ened by the analysis at

[2] For a thorough criticism of the computer perspective, see ]Dreyfus (1979). See al~to Fortescue (1979).

[3] See also Itkonen (19718) whose concept of explication I borr,)w here (~though not defined in quite the same way).

294 Book review:

the same titve. Misrepresented, because of L & F's allegation tl'at they uncover what the speakers really ;mean and do; enlightened, because some ot the speaker's tenden.cies are presented hi a form which can be used as guicelitle for future actions.

A comprehensive discourse analysis as ~rutlined by L & F can be very useful as a theoretical framework in lherapeutic conversations. What really requi~res further discussion is lhe more general theory of haman beings and their ,,ociety, which is only implicitly present in their framework.

Society, as such, is not a significart ~:at,~goty for L & F. Here they may be excused on account of the necessity to focus more narrowly on microphenomena. However, as stated by Mey (1978), any approach to the explatlati.3n of social phe- nomena (such as language) l:as to take ~ccount of the consL,.~ tire features of society.

Human beings, in L & F's framework, tead to be red aced !o co~puter.like infer rnation-process,ing devaces (programmed ir~ Machiavellian style), l'ile mentalisti~ computational perspective not only makes us conceive of the mind's workings in ~, reifying and rigid manner; another effect is ~hat the situational ~:ontext and thc: detined situation cannot be grasped as essentially o[,~,~n and flexitle, but must be pressed into a ,,;implistic matrix [4].

Therefore, though we can agree with Labor and Fanshel's closin~ statement:

The study of conversation is engrossing for us be:au:~e we ~ e MI partic|pant~ in the same prac- tice. For better or worse, conversation is the human way of deating with hun~an behags, and we find in it a fundamenta~l expression of our humanity (p. 361),

we must insist tha~ t tus fundamental expres~iort of our humanity should be grasped, rather than suppressed, by our theoretica! fr ml,:work.

Svend Erik Olsen Rasmus Rask Institute of Linguistics

U~tiw~rsity of Odense O, tense, Denmark

References

Chomsky, N. 19~:6. Three models for the des~:ription of language. ~RE Transactions on Infor- mation Theory, voL IT-2: 113- ! 24.

Uhomsky, N. 19"r6. 'On the biological basis of la~gu~ge capacities'. In: R.W Rieber, ed., The neuropsyehology of ~anga~age. Ne ~v York: PI,.'r um Press. pp. 1 o-24.

[4] See also LineU (1980), who pohlts out the similarity between Skinne:"s and Chomsky's iroints cf view, n~mely, the me~.'h~a!s*Je or paramechanistie flavor.

Book reviews 295

Dzeyfus, H.L. 1~79. What computers can't do: the limits of az~tifi¢iaJ intelJigen e. New York: ttarpe~ and R.~w. [Rcv. ed.]

Fortescue, M3_ ~. [979. Why the qanguage of throught' is not a language: so~T~e inconsistencies of the computational analogy of thought. Journal of Ptagmatics 3: 67-80.

Goffman, E. 1974. Frame analys s. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ltkonen, E. 1978. Grammatical theory and metascience. Amsterdam: Bonjandns. lAnell, P. 1980. ':On the similari'y between Skinner and Chomsky'. In: "r.A Perry, ed., Evi

dence and argumentation in lin~istics. Berlin de Gruyter. pp. 190-199. Mey, J.L. 1978. Marxism and lingvistics: facts anti fancies. Journal of Pragmatics 2 : 81-93. NeweU, A. and H.A, S~mon. i[ 972. Human problem solving. Englewood Cliff,,;: Prer,tiee-Hall. Olsen, S,E. 1979a. 'Psychopathology, interaction, and pragn~atic linguistics". In: J.L. Mey, ed.,

Pragmalh~guisfics. rite Hague: Mouton. pp. 233-254. C,lsen, S.E. 1979b. 'On the information-processing paradigm in cognitive psychology and

psycholhlguisfics'. In: T. Pettersson, ed., Papers from th~ Fifth Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics. Part II: General sessions. S tockhohn: Almquist and WikseU. pp. 93- 108.

Pittenger, ROE., C.t:. Hockell and J.J. Danehy. 71960. The first five minutes. New York: Paul Martineua.

Searle, J. 1976. The rules of lt~e language game. Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 10.

Svend b.'rik Olsen (b. 1946) M.A. in Psychology and B.A. in Psycholingui:~tics, University of Copenhagen.

Principal biterests: Conccptual ana~b.¢:~is and the relations between language, consciousness, and concepts. At prescott working on aa analys~s of the concept "responsJibility", and on ~n experiential fr,'unework for the study o! l:mguage and language use at the Rasmus Rask Institute of Linguis tics.

Dwight Bolinger, i,anguage - the ,loaded weapon." the use and abuse o f language today. London: Lo,~gmaa, i980. ix + 214pp. £ 9.95 (hardcoverL £ 4.95 (paper-

back).

"Hie concern with an ecology of language is not n e w !iadier in this century Alfred Korzybski's Scieme and sanity (1933) created a p~,~vertul wave which, under the name of 'General Semantics', soon produced Stuart Chase's The rjranny o f words (1938), a forerumLer of ,.q.I. ttayakawa's Language in t/:ought and action (1949), and -~- ill 1943 ~- I?TC., the journal of the International Society for General Seman-

tics. In the p~eface of his new book, Bolinger explains that "as the professional linguists of Kor;~vbski's day m America were not much interested ir~ meaning, much less therapeutics, the General Semanticists had no sciem~tlc body of information about language to draw upon", and he adds: "Circumstance, s have changed, and we are in a better positio~ now ~o take up where they left off" (p. viii). It is not liter- ally tree that General Semantics 'left off'. After ill , there are mor~ recent products of the same movement, such as N. Postman and C. Weiagartner (1966). And not only is the journal ETC. alive and well and living in San Francisco, but ever since 1950 it has enjoyed the company of the General Semano:ics Bullet, in. Nevertheless, popular interest in this communicative anti-poUutJon mcverrtent has dwindled, and in spite of the changed circumstances that Bolinger refers tc, General Semanticists