Metapragmatic comments in institutional talk: a comparative analysis across settings

The paper presents a comprehensive analysis of metapragmatic comments (MPCs) in institutional talk. It is based on a comparison of their functions in a range of institutional settings and consists in a meta-analysis of results based on a series of corpora collected and analysed by the two authors (jointly or individually) over roughly a 10-year period, integrated by further data collected mainly in educational settings. The contexts examined can be broadly defined as either ‘educational’ or ‘media’ contexts. The former category includes interactions between parents and children; interactions in instructional settings, from elementary schools to universities (Ciliberti and Anderson 1999; Ciliberti, Pugliese Anderson 2003; Anderson 2004); therapeutic encounters with couples (Anderson 2000); the latter category includes not only contexts such as talk shows, political debates (Anderson 2004) and theatrical performances, in which the presence of an audience is presupposed, but also - given the well-known ‘observer’s paradox’ - ethnographic research contexts (Ciliberti, 2007). Both macro-contexts are found to contain a high concentration of MPCs. In explicating why this is so, we draw on both Levinson’s (1988) notion of reception roles and on pragmatic and interactional analyses of how knowledge is made accessible in ongoing talk (Clark/Carlson 1982; Clark 1993; Gumperz 1989). In section 2 and 3, variation within educational and media discourse is respectively explored. In ‘educational’ contexts, a comparison of interactions in primary schools and in university settings shows that in the latter setting MPCs are less common, a finding we claim is related to the reduced asymmetry typical of higher education, which makes the socializing function of MPCs much less relevant. In university seminars the scope of prospective (i.e. forward-oriented) MPCs by students and teachers is differs, with those of teachers used to ‘reserve’ an extended turn at talk. MPCs in family interaction tends to be prescriptive (when used prospectively) and evaluative (when used retrospectively); in therapeutic contexts they are rigorously retrospective and are phrased as reformulations upon which the patients/clients are invited to reflect. Thus both the quantity and sequential positioning of MPCs are found to reflect the situated purposes to which they are put. The analysis of MPGs in ‘media’ contexts shows that their primary function is to provide an explanatory or interpretative key to what is going on, in order to guide the listener(s) towards a certain reading of the talk-in-progress; as ‘media’ discourse is inherently multiparty, MPCs also carry out a function of ‘targeting’ specific recipients. In both talk shows and political debates, retrospective-oriented MPCs are used to categorise contributions by other participants, usually negatively; an analysis of a theatre text (from Shakespeare’s Tempest) illustrates how the explanatory/interpretative function of MPCs cuts across both spontaneous and scripted media discourse. In closing, we argue that, although the two types of contexts differ in many ways, they share a common characteristic: an asymmetry of knowledge - real or supposed - between participants. A constitutive feature of educational contexts is the difference in knowledge levels between educators and learners; a constitutive feature of ‘media’ contexts, which are articulated along a dual communicative axis, is the impossibility of verifying to what extent knowledge is shared or not. In both macro-contexts, where a shared understanding does not exist, is not presupposed or cannot be verified, speakers use MPCs to facilitate the work of other participants in the interaction. Note on authors: A. Ciliberti is emeritus professor at the ‘Università per Stranieri’, Perugia; L.Anderson is professor of English at the University of Siena. They authors share a long history of collaboration and co-authorship.