Viaggio.pdf

78 Meta, L, 1, 2005

The Importance of the Metacommunicative

Purposes of Communication,

or Teaching Students to Listen and Speak

Like Normal Human Beings

SERGIO VIAGGIO

United Nations, Vienna, Austria

Sergio.Viaggio@unvienna.org

RÉSUMÉ

Les énoncés s’inscrivent toujours dans un environnement social spécifique ; ils sont pro-

duits et compris en fonction de certains objectifs métacommunicatifs. La communication

dépasse le simple échange d’énoncés : la vraie compréhension va au-delà des signes

linguistiques, recherche la pertinence pour atteindre le sens cognitif et pragmatique latent.

Si les étudiants ne sont pas sensibilisés à privilégier le sens dans la compréhension et la

réexpression, ils courent le risque de comprendre, de mémoriser et de restructurer de

manière parcellaire.

ABSTRACT

This article submits that utterances are always uttered in a specific social context and are

produced and understood out of specific metacommunicative purposes. There is more

to communication than the exchange of propositions. Real comprehension is always top-

down and relevance-governed, and succeeds at the level of metarepresented cognitive

and pragmatic meaning. If students are not taught to understand and speak meaning-

fully, they fall into the trap of modular comprehension, memorization and verbalization.

MOTS-CLÉS/KEYWORDS

top-down processing, metarepresentation, critical listening and speaking, relevance,

cognitive and qualitative effects

I think that one of the great mistakes that an interpretation (or, for that matter,

translation) teacher can make is to forget completely about the social embedding of

communication. To my mind, students should never be asked to interpret as if in a

social vacuum. The first thing to be taught, I am convinced, is a realistic and compre-

hensive model of communication. In my experience, my development of García

Landa’s proves extremely useful. Let me explain it succinctly.

According to García Landa (2000), speech production and comprehension con-

sist in the mutual production of speech percepts ( LP s) 1 that, for simplicity’s sake, can

be described as a composite of noetic meaning (expressible in propositional terms)

and linguistic signs. A speech act is initiated as an intended speech percept ( LPI )

comes to the speaker’s mind as a result of the simultaneous activation of the linguis-

tic systems that he has internalized and of specific chunks of his knowledge of the

world as stored in his memory. In order to have an interlocutor perceive it in turn, the

speaker generates a sensorially perceptible stimulus consisting of an utterance (that,

add I, is paralinguistically and kinetically configured). As the interlocutor applies to

Meta, L, 1, 2005

the importance of the metacommunicative purposes of communication 79

this semiotic stimulus his own interpretation rules activating a representation of the

speaker’s linguistic systems and specific chunks of his knowledge of the world, a

comprehended percept ( LPC ) is produced in his mind. The speech act is produced in

a specific social situation upon which gravitate the participants’ personal experience,

social practices and, generally speaking, culture, plus a situation-specific microworld

(the relevant collection of schemata, frames, scenes and scenarios). If the speaker’s

intended percept and that produced by the interlocutor are identical – or, in simpler

terms, if they share the same noetic content, i.e. if meaning as intended by the

speaker is the same as meaning as comprehended by his interlocutor, communica-

tion has succeeded.

To my mind, however, this is the short, but not the long of the story. A speaker

must have a motivation to speak. This motivation will govern his specific main and

constellation of secondary pragmatic intentions, which, in turn, will govern his

meaning meant and what he actually ends up saying. And an interlocutor too must

have a motivation to understand. This motivation will govern his specific main and

constellation of secondary expectations, which, in turn, will govern what he actually

ends up understanding. Understanding will, moreover, produce specific contextual

effects upon him, both cognitive and emotive or qualitative – which will now deter-

mine his attitude both to what has been said and to what comes next.

The motivation to speak or to understand, moreover, does not simply boil down

to producing a string of intended or comprehended “mini” LP s (equivalent to units

of sense), processed bottom-up, or, even, a complex perceptual space that is the result

of their further, immediate top-down processing, but, rather, to produce, on that

basis, a series of relevant metarepresentations. In that sense, there is, at the

postperceptual macro level, a difference in degrees of comprehension both in quan-

titative and qualitative terms, i.e. in how much you understand bottom-up at the

micro level, and how relevant is that which you have or have not understood. This

difference in quantitative and qualitative degrees of bottom-up comprehension in

the end is decisive when it comes to metarepresenting top-down the speaker’s global

communicative and metacommunicative intentions. If at the micro level, due to the

linearity of speech, comprehension is also linear (though more discretely segmented),

at the postperceptual level, comprehension entails a thorough reorganization and

systematization of those linearly produced LPC s: Understanding this paper, for

instance, does not amount to having produced a sequence of LPC s as a result of having

linearly processed every clause. At the macro level – and this is crucial – relevant

identity of meaning meant and understood is a matter of degree. Our comprehen-

sion of what we are told is not, therefore, simply the sum total of a longitudinal series

of LPC s produced in a longitudinal series of speech acts: We constantly enrich and

revise our global representation of what that linear series of LPC s – presumably, but

not always necessarily identical to the respective LPI s – amount to as meaning meant

on the part of our interlocutor. At the neurophysiological level, it seems quite clear:

If a 250-millisecond LPC (say, the clause you have just read) seldom makes it past

short-term memory, an immediate top-down speech perceptual space (say, what I have

been saying for the last few lines) seldom makes it past medium-term memory: Only

metarepresentations are stored in long-term memory (say, my argument so far). At the

macro level, I insist, the identity between meaning meant and understood is a matter

of degree. In other words, we have two different layers of noetic comprehension : the

80 Meta, L, 1, 2005

one that is the object of the speech perception proper, and a more complex one that

is the product of a (series of ) metarepresentation(s) based upon it. The corollary is

that, according to your particular purpose at a given time, your perception of my

meaning meant may not be the relevant one at the postperceptual level (i.e. you have

misunderstood relevant LPI s or wasted unnecessary time and effort understanding

less relevant or totally irrelevant ones – or, worse, your metarepresentation based on

a perfect spontaneous, on-line understanding of my utterance is completely off the

mark). This, as I hope to prove, is fraught with momentous theoretical and practical

consequences for mediation.

There is a qualitative leap, moreover, between understanding what people say

and understanding people – what they mean to say, indeed, but also what they mean

to hide, why, etc. This second-degree comprehension, of course, goes far beyond

spontaneous, immediate comprehension of officially intended noetic meaning. The

consequences for mediation are, again, decisive. What leaves the mnesic trace , in

Seleskovitch’s felicitous expression, is, precisely, metarepresented meaning, since it

alone can give rise to further, more complex metarepresentations through proposi-

tional enrichment. Our memories of past speech acts – and that should be, but often

is not, the case with consecutive interpreters – are indeed almost entirely reduced to

metarepresented noetic content – and so should the interpreter’s memory of the

speaker’s meaning meant. Indeed, the fact that noetic content can be reverbalized

without much ado is essential for translation and interpretation. The translation of

pragmatic texts, as a case in point is mostly a matter of reproducing noetic content.

This is what Reiss and Vermeer (1991) imply when they speak of a text as an infor-

mation offer (which, rigorously speaking it is not: a text is nothing but frozen speech;

nor does it offer anything at all – only people can offer information or, for that

matter, anything else).

In any event, the basic problem remains: i.e. that of the quantitative and qualita-

tive number of cases of mini- LPI/LPC identity that is ultimately necessary, sufficient

or optimum for the specific metacommunicative purposes and stakes in hand. What

counts, then, is that LPI/LPC identity (including the intended metarepresentations)

obtains relevantly in the end: This is the fact that allows for the mediator’s manipu-

lation of propositional content and semantic form while nevertheless ensuring rel-

evant identity of meaning meant and comprehended.

It is also a fact that, through an ulterior process on the basis of speech comprehen-

sion, a keener interlocutor may well metarepresent what a speaker means better than

another or than the speaker himself. It happens all the time; in some situations some

people are more adept at understanding their interlocutors than the latter themselves

– it is systematically the case between grownups and young children. Indeed, media-

tors should have such skills as a crucial part of their professional wherewithal. Again,

if what I want to say to you and your comprehension of it do not totally overlap,

what really counts is that they both coincide in whatever aspects or features are

mutually or even individually relevant – i.e. that they are identical enough : enough

for the metacommunicative purposes in hand, for the specific social stakes. What

matters, in the end, is not sheer noetic identity, but what the interlocutors have

achieved by means of such identity, however partial or imperfect. In this particular

case, it is not enough for me that you understand every bit of the noetic content I am

so labouriously verbalizing – what counts is that you understand it ( it , not something

the importance of the metacommunicative purposes of communication 81

similar or equivalent or analogous to it) in a certain way , that comprehension of

what I mean you to understand produces certain effects and, most especially, that it

does not produce certain others.

As I verbalize this series of LPI s as they come into my awareness more or less

every 250 milliseconds, I do so striving to convince you, and trying not be boring or

not to make you work more than you have to; and I do hope that, even if I cannot

convince you, at least you will cast a benign eye on my point, suspend disbelief and

be willing to entertain it as yours for a while before passing final judgement on it –

i.e. before you decide what to do with what you have understood. All this is drenched

in emotion. This fact is very much relevant to me as a speaker, and I am sure that

whether you are or not convinced, and entertained, irritated or bored in the process,

is equally relevant to you as an interlocutor. Is this or is this not a relevant feature of

our communication? (Isn’t this, i.e. what happens to us as a result of comprehension,

what the success of literary speech acts is all about?) This is, in the end , the para-

mount concern of any flesh-and-blood human being, whether translating or not:

what it feels like , not what it actually is or the way it is perceived – much as what it

feels like is ultimately determined by what actually is and the way it is perceived.

There is more to meaning than propositional content

There are many other layers of meaning that travel between speaker and interlocutor,

even though they are not part of the speech perception proper and ensue from noetic

comprehension. A model of communication through speech cannot leave out the

meaning of silence . True, silence is not a part of the utterance, but can be

nevertheless meaning-laden. Very often, what is not being said is also an important

part of what we understand, or, rather, of what we end up understanding after we

have understood what has actually been said “officially.” Silence is interpreted via a

metarepresentation of what is being left unsaid and a meta-metarepresentation of

why it is left unsaid. A model of communication through speech, moreover, can

neither ignore the metarepresentation of what might have been said instead of what

has been actually uttered: the fact that a wife says to her husband “ I’m fond of you ”

rather than “ I love you ” may be heavily loaded – and certainly no less the fact that she

does not say anything at all. And equally loaded may be the fact that at an internatio-

nal gathering a Spanish delegate of Catalan origin intervenes in French rather than

Spanish. Silence, as well as some – statistically very rare – lexical and other positive

choices, becomes relevant, in other words, insofar as an interlocutor can meta-

represent the alternatives and the significance of the fact that they have not been

chosen or, even, that they have been consciously discarded. Because that is very much

a part of meaning meant – if meant indirectly – or, if not meant at all, then of

meaning as comprehended by the interlocutor despite the speaker’s intentions.

Again, this is fraught with consequences for mediation, since the specific weight of

an utterance – especially its semantic form – may be more, or less, relevant as a

positive choice. As I was writing an earlier version of this piece, China and the US

were at diplomatic loggerheads over the fact that a Chinese Mig had crashed in mid

air with an American intelligence plane above the China Sea, as a result of which the

Chinese pilot was missing and presumed dead, whilst the American plane was forced

to perform an emergency landing on a Chinese island. All the fuss was over whether

82 Meta, L, 1, 2005

the American aircraft was a “ spy” plane (as characterized by the more independent

Euronews), or a “ surveillance” plane (as labelled by the more obsequious BBC) legally

ogling from afar. In this specific context the semantic difference between an “ apology, ”

which was what the Chinese demanded, and an “ expression of regret, ” which was as far

as the Americans were ready to go, are not interchangeable: they give rise to

relevantly different (even contradictory) politically charged metarepresentations. In

most other contexts, instead, they would be very much interchangeable: “ I’m sorry

that your father is so ill, Peter ” will not give Peter much food for metarepresentational

lucubrations about whether I said “ I’m sorry” rather than “ I regret” in order to convey

that I feel responsible. Pretending that every speaker chooses his words as an

embattled Minister about to lose a no-confidence vote, carefully weighing and then

rejecting each and every alternative (which, by the way, is impossible), and that,

therefore, every word present counts as much as every absent word, is as preposterous

in direct communication as it is damaging when it comes to the notion of fidelity in

interlingual mediation.

As we can see, the motivations and intentions that bring together the interlocu-

tors – i.e. that give rise to the speech act to begin with – are an important part of the

totality of human communication that transcends speech production and compre-

hension. Again, the ultimate, metacommunicative, purpose of communication is not

simply to produce speech perceptions in our interlocutors, but to achieve certain

goals thereby – nor is it purely to perceive what others have to say to us, but also to

achieve certain goals thereby. What I am trying to bring in explicitly is that we are

not simply after understanding the other person’s speech, we also want to under-

stand his motives and metarepresent all that he may be willing to convey to (and/or

hide from) us by producing a series of LPI s – and this we do on the basis of our own

emotively-laden motivations. If a mediator does not take stock of why and what for

the interlocutors who engage him have themselves engaged in producing speech per-

ceptions in each other, he may be able to “translate” most competently, but he cannot

possibly mediate effectively – or, at least, optimally. Because what he must see to is

not ensuring sheer LPIo/LPCi identity, whatever the ulterior social consequences, but

rather ensuring a situationally relevant identity, coincidence or overlapping of

metarepresented meaning that will be also as pragmatically adequate as circum-

stances demand, advise or allow.

Direct communication can indeed be modelled short of the motivations and

intentions that govern it on either side, and of the effects that comprehension pro-

duces. When dealing not with one but with two speech acts, however, it is impossible

to extricate the mediator’s overall subjectivity as both an interlocutor to the speaker

and speaker to the new interlocutors, because it is there in the very middle of both

acts. No matter how hard he may try, the mediator cannot possibly reverbalize the

speaker’s LPI exactly as he himself has understood it – he must of necessity modify at

least parts of its perspective (as García Landa points out, sense never travels along a

straight line, it is refracted by the social gravitational field). The question, then, is not

whether but how he is adequately to choose this new perspective. And he cannot

possibly unless he takes stock of the metacommunicative purpose both of the origi-

nal speech act and of his own, which may be a very different one indeed (hail, after

all, skopostheorie !). As a case in point, even though the BBC announcer has informed

that an American “ surveillance” plane has just “ collided” with a Chinese fighter and

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