Speech Act

I apologize for having been rather tardy in the completion of today's assignment. Pursuant to today's class discussion, I have chosen a speech act to describe...

Two girls find out that an unspecified guy has a crush on one of their friends, and a little pact of secrecy develops around it. They discuss the circumstance with endless delight, feeling the power of possessing a secret. When they next see the friend, they make oblique references to the crush. They want to let the girl know that they have a secret involving her, but they won't let her in on it. They refer to the guy as "Mmmm." So the entire conversation progresses so:

A- "I wonder if Katie would like Mmmm back if she knew."
Katie-"What are you talking about? Who's Mmmm?"
B- "Yeah, I know, they would make such a cute couple."
A-"But at the same time there would be such a height discrepancy."
B-"Did you see Mmmm at lunch today? He was really trying to get your attention, Katie."
Katie- "Is Mmmm Joe? Stop it, guys! This is so mean!"

There's a lot going on in this conversation...
I would say the primary goal is phatic... the two girls A and B are using their secret to create a closer relationship, but they are doing it at the expense of Katie, who is frustrated and feeling left out. They are trying to provoke a response in Katie... is this sufficient to make the speech act conative? They are not directing Katie to do something, as they would if they said "Go talk to him, Katie." But at the same time, the taunt would not be near so much fun-- it would cease to have a point-- if Katie were to say, "Jig's up. Steven told me he liked me 2 weeks ago, and I totally am not interested."

If we analyze it in Hymes' terms (and as one big speech act), then senders are A and B and receiver is both the other, non-talking A or B (because they are in on the inside joke together) and Katie... the object of the taunt. The main factor in keeping Katie excluded is the "code," by which the guy is referred to as Mmmm. Channel is informal conversation; setting is American high school, the class after lunch; topic is gossip about boys. Message form is just... well, in this case not that important, since it's not poetic.

Those are factors -- the primary function, as mentioned above, is phatic/contact and possibly conative. There is little poetic or expressive. The referential function is present, but it is subordinate to the primary functions. A does not want to give B information so much as it wants to conceal information from Katie. Do the statements about lunch and attention-seeking behavior perform contextual and referential functions? I'd say they might provide a little bit of contextual information... Katie will start to pin down who this guy is-- he goes to their school, she saw him at lunch, he was doing something to attract her attention. The contextual element is more implied as opposed to explicit. And then, of course, I made Katie's responses metalingual... she's trying to crack the code. "What does 'Mmmm' signify? Is it X?"

(Completely unrelated to previous example)
I am reading a lot of Heine right now (in translation-- though I'm trying hard to get my German up to par-- for reading, that is, don't ask me to speak), and that gives me a few things to say about functions of communication in his writings. First off, expressive function: yes, Heine expresses a lot of feelings and thoughts, but they're not necessarily true... even in personal letters he often takes on a persona who is designed to make the reader think (about their prejudices, about society, about what Heine is getting at). So he is consciously, purposely insincere every moment. And poetic function is important for Heine whether the piece of writing is poetry or prose. The referential content is often thickly veiled-- you can't take any sentence at face value without considering why he chose each individual word. Taken together, the cadences and choices of words make for incredibly fun reading, but you really have to slow down and take in the details to "understand" him. Conative seems to be always the most important function -- Heine is always wanting the reader to do something (read critically for one! also exhorting them to behave rationally, think his way about things, emancipate ppl, etc.).

I understand why Jakobson would be pretty influential in his view of poetics "as an integral part of linguistics (350)." As complicated as extemporaneous utterances can be to analyze, "noncasual" prose and poetry-- assiduously planned and loaded with layers of meaning--are absolute nightmares (yet attractive and totally fascinating). I like that Jakobson starts from the vantage point of literature as communication, which offers a different starting point than a more formal, grammatical approach. At the same time, I feel like the questions we are asking about speech acts are often the same questions we started off with for a work of literature in my high school English classes. So, I have tools both to analyze literature as communication and to analyze verbal communication as a work of literature (verbal art!).

Actually, I have no clue what I'm doing, but it sure is fun. To me, it's like a Rubik's cube or a really hard knot... except that it seems ultimately impossible to come to a completely clear, consistent understanding of meaning in poetry or in a speech act. But hey! That's why criticism/analysis never dies!