Cameron, McAlinden, and O'Leary: "Lakoff in Context" (1988)

In Language and Woman's Place, Robin Lakoff hypothesized that a number of linguistic forms – in particular, hyper-politeness – are markers of "women's language." She speculated that women were encouraged to talk this way from an early age, and that the engine underlying this recommendation was the power difference between men and women.

The short paper "Lakoff in context," first published in Women in Their Speech Communities (1988) and available at this university website, argues that the issue is a little more complicated than that.

First of all, it is not generally true without qualification that women use tag questions like

• It's a nice day, isn't it?

more often than men. In fact, Cameron et al.'s material suggest that men use tag questions more than women (cf. their table — it's on page 53 of Cameron's anthology On Language and Sexuals Politics).

Secondly, the straightforward relationship between form and function that Lakoff took for granted (tag question = politeness) does not hold up: Tag questions can be used for a number of purposes, including fairly direct attacks.

To get the full range of the uses that are suggested in the paper, I've scanned it for all the corpus examples that it cites. Here's the list:

• You were missing last week, weren't you?
• Thorpe's away, is she?
• But you've been in Reading longer than that, haven't you?
• His portraits are quite static by comparison, aren't they. (no question intonation)
• Quite a nice room to sit in actually, isn't it. (no question intonation)
• One wouldn't have the nerve to take that one, would one? (about a nude picture)
• It's compulsive, isn't it? (tv host to guest)
• That's a lot of weight to put on in a year, isn't it (radio show doctor to caller)
• It's become notorious, has it (doctor to caller, about the caller's crush on a teacher)
• It is this one, isn't it (teacher to pupil)
• You are going to cheat really, aren't you (teacher to pupil)

About the last two sentences, I'm not quite sure whether they come from Cameron et al.'s material or whether they're constructed.

In addition to these examples, there is one more which is explicitly attributed to Sandra Harris:

• You're not making much effort to pay off these arrears, are you (judge to defendant)

It should be pretty clear from this example that tag questions like aren't you? by no means universally signal insecurity or absensce of imposition.

Norris: What's Wrong With Postmodernism? (1990)

This book is like a time machine, effectively taking you back into the middle of the vitriolic debate about "postmodernism" that raged the decade before and after its publication.

Its author, Christopher Norris, is a no-nonsense, British literary critic with a somewhat odd set of allegiances: He admires Jacques Derrida, but hates Richard Rorty; respects Paul de Man but has no patience with Jean Baudrillard; and, more broadly, he is all for deconstruction, but completely antagonistic to most of its American practitioners.

I've read two and a half chapter, and I think I'll move on to some other books in the pile now. But let me just give a couple of quotes from chapter 4, the one about the Searle/Derrida exchange.

First, Norris notes that Derrida is methodologically more in line with Austin's spirit than are his contemporaries in analytical philosophy. Taking distinctions like performative/declaritive or illocutionary/perlocutionary to the extremes to see how much weight they can take is exactly what he was all about:

For if there is one thing that Austin should have taught them – so Derrida implies – is is the need to press these cardinal distinctions as far as they will go, but also to keep and open mind when dealing with instances, anecdotes, off-beat usages, anomalous cases, and so forth which might seem to 'play Old Harry' (Austin's own phrase) with all such tidy categorical schemes. (p. 146)

OK, a second comment which is kind of nicely put: Derrida's point, he says, is to draw attention to

problematic factors in language (catchphrases, slippages between 'literal' and 'figural' sense, sublimated metaphors mistaken for determinate concepts) whose effect […] is to complicate the passage from what the text manifestly means to say to what it actually says when read with an eye to its latent of covert signifying structures. (p. 151)

I think a different way of looking at the same phenomenon is this: When you're trying make your text produce something that it can't really produce (e.g., eternal truths), your rhetoric is going to be leaky somewhere. This does mean that we can't see what you "mean to say," but it does mean that you will always in the process have said something which, strictly speaking, is complete bogus.

Cameron: "Is there any ketchup, Vera?" (1998)

In reaction to Beborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand (1990), Deborah Cameron wrote a short and insightful paper that, for various reasons, only got published much later.

In the paper, she argues that the observable differences in women's and men's conversational styles are the visible sign of strategies for handling gender roles rather han direct consequences of either gender differences or gender inequality.

"Thanks, mom"

According to Cameron's summary, Tannen's central thesis is that women and men have different conversational styles, and this leads to systematic misunderstandings. She gives an example, repeated by Cameron on page 79, of a female and a male co-worker walking between two buildings on a cold day. The following exchange takes place:

• Female speaker: Where's your coat?
• Male Speaker: Thanks, mom.

According to Tannen's analysis, this is an example of a frustrated communication situation that arises because a typical female move (showing consideration for others) is interpreted by a male hearer as a typical male move (status-grabbing through pecking).

Cameron is uncomfortable with this analysis, among other things because we have no overt evidence that the man actually misunderstood the woman's question. Instead, this "momming" might instead be a case of

'strategic' misunderstanding, where the relativity of linguistic strategies is exploited as a weapon in conflicts between men and women. (p. 86)

Here, the relevant "relativity" would be the two different functions of a question, as an expression of interest, or as a covered command.

"Would you like to finish that report today?"

To illustrate this point further, Cameron cites two more examples. One comes from a magazine advising women in managing positions to use "on record" strategies when giving orders to male employees. Forms like

• Would you like to finish that report today?

are, in other words, not recommended, since the employee receiving this request could worm his way out of the obligation under the excuse that "if it was really urgent you should have made that clear" (p. 86).

The other example is an anecdote she heard from a friend about a recurring dinner table exchange between the friend's parents (p. 87). Every night, the mother would serve dinner, and the father would ask,

• Is there any ketchup, Vera?

This was, of course, intended as a request or order and always understood as such.

The Use of Forms

Cameron's point is that the inderect form of request – a "feminine" form according to the stereotype – is not invariably produced in all women and all circumstances. Rather, using one or other form is a matter of choosing the right strategic move in a particular situation.

A key aspect of the situation is indeed the power distribution, and this power distribution is not independent of gender. In the classical dinner table setting, it is thus almost unthinkable that Vera should respond "Yes, it's in the kitchen cupboard," while this might be appropriate if the young daughter had asked (p. 88). On the other hand, as the magazine said, it is absolutely conceivable that a man would exploit this ambiguity strategically; hence the recommendation.

This is not necessarily due to any differences in cognition, nor even global differences in power between the sexes. It is rather the visible trace of a strategy/counterstrategy dialictic that follows in the slipstream of social change and challenges to traditional privileges.

In Camoron's words:

One might paraphrase Marx: 'men and women make their own interactions, but not under conditions of their own choosing'. (p. 91)

Spivak: "Bonding in Difference" (1993)

This is an interview with Gayatri Spivak conducted by Alfred Arteaga, recorded in 1993 and reprinted in The Spivak Reader (1995).

There's an interesting comment in there:

I have trouble with the questions of identity or voice. I'm much more interested in questions of space, because identity and voice are such powerful concept-metaphors that after a while you begin to believe that you are what you are fighting for. In the long run, especially if your fight is succeeding and there is a leading power-group, it can become oppresive, especially for women, whose identity is always up for grabs. Whereas, if you are clearing space, from where to create a perspective, it is a self-separating project, which has the same politics, is against territorial occupation, but need not bring in questions of identity, voice, what I am, all of which can become very individualistic also. (p. 21)

As a negative point, this is very close to what Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, and – later and less well-known – Miranda Joseph have said. But I like that it proposes the positive metaphor of "clearing space" as well.

Then a completely different thing, quite independent of the content of the interview: During her discussion of the Rushdie affair, Spivak makes a comment that I find quite interesting from a psycholinguistic perspective:

And the unease [in Britain] was on grounds of possible racism, which didn't give anybody any pause in the United States. They saw it right from the beginning as those bloody Arabs. Of course the Ayatollah isn't an Arab; what's the difference? Bloody Arabs against freedom of Expression. (p. 22)

Notice how the comment falls gradually more into a quotation or impersonation: First by using the phrase "bloody Arabs," obviously supposed to be taken as a covert quote of the American media, and then the whole unmarked quotation "Bloody Arabs against freedom of expression." I wonder what kind of body language accompanied these sentences.

Innis: Empire and Communications (1950)

I've always thought it sounded quite odd when Derrida said that Western philosophy has a preoccupation with the spoken word. How could a genre almost be more rigidly text-oriented than European philosophy?

Now that I've been reading some of Harold Innis' Empire and Communications, I'm beginning to see the contours of a different historical hypothesis that I hadn't originally read into Derrida's arguments. This concerns the extremely high value that European 19th-century philology put on phonetic alphabets as opposed to syllabic or idiographic scripts.

I think Innis sort of reiterates the valorization. Take a look at the kind of words that he uses to describe the "progress" of the Babylonian writing system:

Conventionalization of pictographs began with signs most frequently used and advanced rapidly with the replacement of strokes by wedges. Pictographic expression became inadequate for the writing of connected religious or historical texts and many signs were taken to represent syllables. By 2900 BC the form of the script and the use of signs had been fully developed, and by 2825 BC the direction of writing and the arrangement of words according to their logical position in the sentence had been established. (p. 27)

It's not that it must necessarily be a progress history—he might just mean "fully developed" in the sense of "to its known final form," or perhaps in some pragmatic sense (as the word "inadequate" suggests). But surely, there is quite a lot of directionality built into the metaphors he is using.

He continues as follows:

By 2900 BC the introduction of syllabic signs in a vocabulary which was largely monosyllabic had reduced the number of signs to about 600. Of these signs about 100 represented vowels, but no system was devised for representing single consonantal sounds or creating an alphabet. Cuneiform writing was partly syllabic and partly ideographic or representative of single words. Many of the signs were polyphonic or had more than one meaning. Sumerian had no distinctions of gender, and often omitted those of number, persons, and tenses. An idea had not fully been developed to the symbol of word or syllable. Pictographs and ideograms took on abstract phonetic values, and the study of script became linked to the study of language. (p. 28)

Weird, isn't it? It's almost as if he takes gender/number/person/tense marking as the mark of a civilized and modern language.

Here's what he writes on alphabets in the beginning of the chapter on ancient Greece:

The alphabet escaped from the implications of sacred writing. It lent itself to an efficient representation of sounds and enabled the Greeks to preserve intact a rich oral tradition. The ancient world troubled about sounds. (p. 53)

Maybe there's something to this. It is strange that Plato, the number one critic of the poetic tradition, should also be the main proponent for the use of structured conversation as a learning tool. Don't we have any ancients that thought that books could do something that the spoken word couldn't?

Barbara Dancygier: "Mental space embeddings, counterfactuality, and the use of unless" (2002)

According to many native English speakers, the word unless has a tendency to work less well in hypothetical contexts:

• You're not clinically depressed unless you're tired.
• ?You wouldn't be clinically depressed unless you were tired.

In Barbara Dancygier's paper on the use of unless, she tries to explain this fact by means of some rather extravagant cognitive assumptions about people's use of hypothetical mental spaces. This explanation mainly amounts to describing the different distributions of unless and except if.

Unacceptability: Counterexamples

Although unless is indeed not appropriate in many hypothetical constructions, there are couterexamples. Dancygier gives a number of quite nice corpus examples, including

• 'Unless I was naked, you'd still worry I was wearing a gun or a wire.' (p. 365)
• 'I have pulled my tail off,' replied the younger Mouse, 'but as I should still be on the sorcerer's table unless I had, I do not regret it.' (p. 368)
• [I]f Miss Catherine had the misfortune to marry him, he would not be beyond her control, unless she were extremely and foolishly indulgent (p. 369)

So apparently, some hypothetical uses are OK, whatever the reason is.

Some Acceptability Judgments

Zooming a bit out from this observation, we have, according to Dancygier's intuitions, the following pattern (p. 369; I've abbreviated the sentences a bit):

• If she married him, he would be under control unless she were extremely indulgent.
• If she married him, he would be under control except if she were extremely indulgent.

Further, we have the following distribution in the mouse example, again according to Dancygier's intuitions (p. 372):

• As I should be on the table unless I had pulled my tail off, I do not regret it.
• *As I should be on the table *except if I had pulled my tail off, I do not regret it.

I suppose it's fair to assume the following acceptability judgments as well, even though Dancygier does not explicitly say so:

• *I wouldn't have finished unless you had helped me.
• *I wouldn't have finished except if you had helped me.

If these three cases are representative, then unless is more lax than except if: Whenever except if fits in a frame, unless does, too. Whatever story we tell about these distributions, it thus better be one in which except if requires some kind of higher standard of well-formedness.

Acceptability Patterns: A Possible Explanation

Dancygier's theory has something to do with contrast.

She proposes that except if needs to introduce a condition that stands in contrast with the whole hypothetical context (I think?) all the way up to the actual situation. Unless, on the other hand, only needs to introduce a condition that stands in a contrastive relationship with the immediate intensional context.

What this means is not quite clear, and it requires some further (and quite strong) assumptions about the introduction of new layers of intensional context. Such layers are introduced quite often in Dancygier's theory; not only modal verbs like would and should trigger them, but also future tenses and conditional items like if.

Beyond Control

So, and example: Let's look at the marriage example and show how this example allegedly builds up layers of context according to Dancygier's analysis. The relevant embeddings are:

This should be read as follows: In the base layer, Miss Christine and the male character are not married. However, in the first conditional scenario (if…), they are imagined to be, and from this hypothetical situation (would…), it is judged that "he would not be beyond her control."

This imaginary situation is then equipped with an exceptional condition (unless…), namely that "she were extremely and foolishly indulgent." This condition is taken to imply to lack of control in a future scenario (not lexically expressed). (Cf. pp. 369–70.)

Pancake Upon Pancake

Another way to visualize the same thing is by keeping track of when different assumptions are introduced, inherited, and negated in the embedded structure:

Not marriage (assumed)
(No assumption about control)
(No assumption about indulgence)
Hypothetical scenario:
        Marriage (overridden)
        (No assumption about control)
        (No assumption about indulgence)
        Future scenario:
                Marriage (inherited)
                Control (assumed)
                (No assumption about indulgence)
                Exceptional scenario:
                        Marriage (inherited)
                        Control (inherited)
                        Indulgence (assumed)
                        Future scenario:
                                Indulgent (inherited)
                                No control (overridden)
                                Marriage (inherited)

The important grammatical fact is here which of its ancestor layers the exceptional condition (indulgence) is inconsistent with. The ancestor layers are here the base layer, the hypothetical scenario, and the future scenario.

Since the indulgence is neither assumed nor denied in any of these layers, the exceptional assumption stands in a relationship of contrasts with all of them. Both unless and except if are thus grammatical in this context.

Note that this conclusion crucially depends on the fact that the base layer assumed to be undecided about control. If we suppose that Miss Christine has no control over the male character in the base layer, except if should be ungrammatical

Tailless Escapes Captivity

This analysis should be compared to the example I should be on the table unless I had pulled my tail off (cf. p. 371):

Pulled tail (assumed)
Not on table (assumed)
Hypothetical scenario:
        (Assumptions about the tail deleted)
        On table (overridden)
        Exceptional scenario:
                Pulled tail (assumed)
                On table (inherited)
                Future consequence:
                        Pulled tail (inherited)
                        Not on table (overridden)

In this case, the exceptional condition (I pulled my tail off) is in contrast with the immediately preceding scenario, which has no assumptions about the tail. The exception is, however, not in contrast with the base layer. Consequently, except if is ungrammatical, and unless is grammatical.

But note again the assumptions going into this conclusion: Without the assumption of "forgetfulness" in the hypothetical scenario, the conclusion would not follow. It is thus crucial that the hypothetical If I were still on the table… "deletes" a particular one of our assumptions in a seemingly rather arbitrarily fashion.

And All the Other Cases…?

Let's look at the case I wouldn't have finished, which I assumed above was ungrammatical with both unless and except if. This sentence should presumably be analyzed as follows:

I have finished (assumed)
You helped me (assumed)
Hypothetical scenario:
        I have not finished (overridden)
        You helped me (inherited)
        Exceptional scenario:
                I have not finished (inherited)
                You did not help me (overridden)
                Future consequence:
                        I have not finished (inherited)
                        You did not help me (inherited?)

In this case, the conditional exception (you did not help me) contrasts with both of the two layers above. So why not a grammatical use of unless and except if?

I think questions like these point to the fact that the cognitive assumptions behind Dancygier's theory are pretty vague and very, very speculative. It is by no means clear when assumptions are "forgotten," or exactly which or how many assumption that have to contrast with the intensional context.

In fact, it is not even quite clear to me whether except if requires contrast to all ancestor levels, and whether it requires contrast on a particular, high-focus parameter, or just any single parameter. Without an answer to these questions, it will be very difficult to assess the theory to any interesting degree.

Foucault: "Writing the Self" (1984?)

This brief and very well-written text, reprinted in Foucault and His Interlocutors, is a case-study in the culture of writing and reading which, according to Foucault, emerged in the Roman Empire in the first centuries A.D.

It focuses mainly on a number of texts by the two philosopher-politicians Marcus Aurelius and Foucault's favourite, Seneca. Both of these writes also play a central role in Care of the Self, the third volume of his History of Sexuality.

The hypothesis that Foucault proposes in the text is that writing and reading in this period began to be considered as a kind of spiritual or ethical exercise that could help a (male, Roman) person constitute himself as a good, ethical subject. This meant using writing and reading as tool for reflecting on one's own life and training oneself in the discipline of independence from wealth and health. The main inspiration for this approach was Pierre Hadot.

Exercise or Confession?

Apparently, a part of the function of all this ceaseless writing was a kind of benevolent self-surveillance. Foucault quotes Seneca as saying

we must regulate our lives as though the whole world were looking at them (p. 243; originally in Letter 40)

However, Foucault insists that this practice should not (yet) be taken as a kind of confession;

it is not a matter of pursuing the unsayable, nor of revealing the hidden, nor of saying the unsaid, but on the contrary of capturing the already-said, of reassembling what one could hear or read, and this for an end that is nothing less than the constitution of the self. (p. 237)

It is not completely clear that this claim is true, though. The introductory quote from the Christian writer Athanasius clearly shows that a couple of hundred years down the line, the purpose of writing had certainly become "to ensure that one does not sin" (p. 234).

The rest of Foucault's text can perhaps be read as a prolonged attempt to justify that this is not the philosophy that we find in Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.

Why We Write

One strand of evidence in support of Foucault's claim comes from the ancient sources themselves. At least sometimes, they seem to consider the practice of writing diaries or letters explicitly as a kind of mental exercise:

Seneca recalls that when one writes, one reads what one writes just as in saying something one hears what one says (p. 241; reference to Seneca's Letter 84)

Consequently,

Whoever teaches, educates himself. (p. 237; quoted from Letter 7)

The point of writing a letter is thus not to air your flaws, but to give a friend advice about how to live a good, philosophical life, and thus indirectly benefit yourself.

Reflections On the Day Gone By

Another argument comes from the fact that some of the exercises simply seem to be ill-suited as acts of confession. For instance, the practice of silently and privately meditating on the day gone by can hardly be construed as a kind of confession (pp. 245-47).

This is further supported by the fact that when such reflections are actually written down, they often look more like attentive descriptions of daily details than like catalogues of sins and errors. Thus, Seneca describes a day in which "nothing happened" (Foucault's words) by meticulously recording its events in a letter. Foucault lists the contents:

A bit of physical training, racing with a young slave, a bath in barely tepid water, a simple meal of bread, a very brief nap. But the essential part of the letter---and it is that which occupies the longest part of the letter---had been devoted to meditation on a theme suggested by a sophisticated syllogism of Zeno apropos drunkenness. (p. 245; he is talking about Letter 83)

Marcus Aurelius tells a similar story, equally filled with tiny details, and with reasons for happiness rather than shame. Quoting him:

Then we went to eat. On what do you think I dined? On a bit of bread, while I watched many others devouring oysters, onions, and very fat sardines. Afterwards, we set ourselves harvesting the grapes; we sweated a lot, shouted a lot. [...] Having returned home, before turning on my side to sleep, I go through my task; I make an account of my day to my sweetest of masters, whom, were I to be consumed by it [i.e., were I to die on this day?], I would love still more. (p. 247; quoted after Marcus Aurelius' Letter 6 to Fronto)

Indeed, this looks more like an account of small successes and failures than an account of good and bad deeds. If recounting such events is beneficial for the soul, it cannot be as a disinfectant.

Reading As an Spiritual Exercise

Of course, the least confession-like of all literary practices is that of reading. However, this is also considered a valuable tool for moulding and training the self (pp. 238-40). Seneca thus recommends daily reading as well as slow and careful digestion of what one reads:

From all that you have skimmed, extract one thought to digest well that day. This is also what I do. (p. 239; quoted after his Letter 2)

The fact that such study and meditation is a tool for improving the soul on a general level is suggested by a statement by Epictetus that Foucault quotes:

It is of little importance that one has or has not read all of Zeno or Chrysippus; it is of little importance that one has seized exactly what they meant, and that one is capable of reconstructing the unity of their reasoning. (p. 239; quoted from Epictetus: Entritiens (the Discourses?), 2:65)

What is of importance, presumably, is that one goes through the trouble of meditating one some edifying prose, perhaps like the many religious cultures have emphasized ritually reading and re-reading sacred texts, both in private and in public.