Semantic Drift in Conversations

Abstract

The lability of the meaning of words has been a longstanding topic in ethnomethodology, and this review provides many specific details while analyzing the drift of the sense of words over the course of naturally occurring conversations. Ethnomethodologists do not see equivocality in the meaning of words merely as a problem for members, but they recognize that it is a resource for parties in their organizing the local interaction. Through the use of many concrete illustrations, an account of this pervasive phenomenon makes clear just-how sense develops, evolves over the course of an interaction, and is used to organize the local orderliness. Some ethnomethods used by parties to tame the developing sense for practical purposes are described and analyzed. Especially, the reflexive properties of sense-establishment are identified and described, along with their material details, and the opportunism of parties in taking advantage of the semiotic play of their talk is summarized. Finally, the components of a model for analyzing communication intersubjectively are presented. Keywords Indexical expressions Á Reflexivity Á Semiotics Á Intersubjectivity Es cazador, el lobo, he said. Cazador. Me entiendes? The boy didn't know if he understood or not. Cormac McCarthy 1Semantic drift is a ubiquitous feature of ordinary conversation. By semantic drift I refer to the phenomenon that the meaning of a word is naturally unstable over the course of a conversation, and a word can continuously gain, or lose, sense based

Phonetic drift in Spanish-English bilinguals: Experiment and a self-organizing model

“…When language users speak with one another, whether they are native speakers of the same language (Pardo, 2006), of different varieties of a language (Babel, 2010; Kim, Horton, & Bradlow, 2011), different idiolects (Pardo, 2013) or of different languages altogether (Sancier & Fowler, 1997), adaptation takes place at every level of language (Bock, 1986; Dunstan, 2010; Hohenstein, Eisenberg, & Naigles, 2006; Liberman, 2012). For example, Pardo (2006), found that the speech of native speakers of American English became more similar during conversational interaction, as measured by listeners’ judgments.…”

Avoiding initiation of repair in L2 conversations-for-learning

“…8 Nevertheless, there are also cases in which some problem with intersubjectivity seems to be recognized by at least one participant, but that participant does not initiate repair. In addition to those found in the dataset for this paper, a subset of which are presented above, Schegloff (1992) presents an instance of this and they can also be found in Liberman (1980Liberman ( , 2012 and Long (1983). In these instances, whatever the motivation may be for not initiating repair, and even for avoiding initiation of repair, a separate means of maintaining intersubjectivity becomes visible.…”

“…(Drew 1997). Instead, though, the first speaker does what Liberman (1980Liberman ( , 2012 has termed "gratuitous concurrence" and treats the turn following the misunderstood turn as a sequentially appropriate next turn which does not display any misunderstanding. Both Long (1983) and Liberman (1980Liberman ( , 2012 have demonstrated this for interaction between L1 and L2 users of English.…”

“…Instead, though, the first speaker does what Liberman (1980Liberman ( , 2012 has termed "gratuitous concurrence" and treats the turn following the misunderstood turn as a sequentially appropriate next turn which does not display any misunderstanding. Both Long (1983) and Liberman (1980Liberman ( , 2012 have demonstrated this for interaction between L1 and L2 users of English. 1 However, while avoidance of repair initiation may be more likely in interaction involving L2 users, it is certainly not limited to such interaction and Schegloff (1992) provides one example from a conversation between two L1 users of English.…”

Place and City: merging our affective and social spatial dimension in the (smart) platial city

“…In a Wittgensteinian view, given the lack of necessary landmarks and contextual clues in conversations, Liberman (2012) affirms that "the meaning of a word is naturally unstable over the course of a conversation" [p. 263], and, for that reason, "meanings do not reside in people's heads but in the world" [p. 266]. Participants in both groups re-arranged their places to follow the conversation and the general meaning of the experiment.…”