A daily conversational ‘violence’
The subject of the article are conversations held daily, in which interlocutors, generally speaking, have some kind of ‘business’ to handle. This makes them use varied persuasive techniques. The introductory definition of a communicative situation, performed by the interlocutors, allows to extract this ‘business’ and correlate it with the goals of its adversary and the rest of the participants. The said ‘violence’ is the means of a conversational game based on the inequality of the roles and it belongs to that of the interlocutors who controls it and uses it. The justification of the communicative activity are the social norms encompassed by the “common knowledge.” The activity itself, thus, is conventionalized in the speech genres inside which various tactics and scenarios are applied.
This article presents Goffman’s contextualized analysis of a few types of communicative situations, which are illustrated by quoting standard conversations.
The conclusion of the article contains a detailed list of ways of managing a conversation and marking tactics of refusals.