Cultural Standing in Expression of Opinion

This article explores an underappreciated pragmatic constraint on the expression of opinions: When expressing an opinion on a topic that has been previously discussed, a speaker should correctly indicate the cultural standing of that view in the relevant opinion community. This Bakhtinian approach to discourse analysis is contrasted with conversation analysis, politeness theory (Brown & Levinson 1987), and analysis of epistemic modality. Finally, indicators of four points on the cultural standing continuum (highly controversial, debatable, common opinion, and taken for granted) are illustrated with examples from American English usage. (Opinion display, discourse analysis, argumentation, hedges, modality, welfare discourse)* “. . . Prose discourse—in any of its forms, quotidian, rhetorical, scholarly—cannot fail to be oriented toward the ‘already uttered,’ the ‘already known,’ the ‘common opinion’and so forth.” Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel” (1981:279) I N T R O D U C T I O N When speakers voice an opinion on a topic about which there has been prior discourse or tacit agreement in their opinion community, they are expected to mark the cultural standing of that opinion. “Cultural standing” is my label for the location of a view on a continuum that ranges from highly controversial to completely taken for granted in the relevant opinion community. Cultural standing has been insufficiently discussed in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis as a constraint on opinion display. Expression of opinion has been analyzed primarily from three perspectives: how conversations are structured (conversation analysis; e.g., Pomerantz 1984, Sacks 1987); how social relations of power and solidarity affect the expression of potentially offensive views (politeness theory; e.g., Brown & Levinson 1987); and what evidence speakers have for their views (Chafe & Nichols 1986). In this article I propose a Bakhtinian Language in Society 33, 161–194. Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.10170S004740450433201X © 2004 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045004 $12.00 161 perspective (Bakhtin 1981) that looks at how speakers respond not only to evidence and to the immediate addressee, but also to previous social commentary on a given topic. The following thought experiment may provide an intuitive grasp of the pragmatic principle that we should indicate correctly the perceived cultural standing of our opinions. Imagine someone who expresses a controversial or discredited view as if it were the common opinion or taken for granted – for example, Since the earth is flat, it follows that . . . Or imagine the opposite, someone who expresses what is taken for granted as if it were controversial: You may think this is crazy, but you could almost say that it is important to be kind to others. There are probably misanthropic flat-earth adherents among whom the first proposition is the common opinion and the second one is not, but that is not the point here. Imagine hearers who do not think the earth is flat and just take for granted, rhetorically at least, the value of being kind to others. Such hearers would judge these speakers to be culturally or mentally incompetent, or – if the speaker appears to be a properly enculturated adult in possession of his or her faculties – the hearers would draw the implicature that they must be speaking ironically, metaphorically, wishfully, or playfully, because they could not possibly be serious. This shows the power of the expectation that speakers should correctly mark the perceived cultural standing of their opinions. More attention to cultural standing would benefit research in both language and culture. For years, anthropologists tended to focus on highly sedimented world views – those that are taken for granted or are the consensual common opinion. Recently, the tendency has been to focus instead on contested views. Clearly it is necessary to recognize both: In a given society at a given time, some ideas are up for grabs and others are more settled. (See Bourdieu 1977:168; Williams 1977:121–7; Comaroff & Comaroff 1991:19–32; Strauss & Quinn 1997: 36– 41.) When a view is thought to have high cultural standing, so that it is generally considered to be the opinion that most people hold, it can be more powerful than the views that most people truly do hold, and the views that everyone thinks are controversial will be uttered only furtively if at all, reinforcing the view that no one holds them (Noelle-Neumann 1993). Paying attention to markers of cultural standing would be a way to explore this dynamic in a society at a given time, or to trace how the standing of a given idea has changed over time. For sociolinguists and discourse analysts, attention to cultural standing would bring together many unconnected bodies of research. It would also shed light on aspects of discourse that have not been adequately explained by other approaches. In addition to conversation analysis and politeness theory, important contributions to the study of how opinions are expressed have been made by analysts looking at particular genres (e.g., argumentation and focus group conversation), particular discourse features (e.g., discourse markers like you know, evidentials, hedging, presuppositions, formulaic speech), particular topics (e.g., race and immigration), and related functions (e.g., epistemic modality). In this article, I show C L A U D I A S T R A U S S 162 Language in Society 33:2 (2004) that some of these observations can be integrated in a model of markers of cultural standing, and others can be enriched by the model. The article has four main sections. First, I review previous research to show that while cultural standing analysis owes a great deal to previous work, it is a different pragmatic constraint than the interpersonal considerations of politeness analysis or the epistemic factors marked by evidentials. After the literature review, I outline the cultural standing model and discuss the kinds of data I draw upon for evidence. There follows, in the longest section, a detailed description of cultural standing markers in American English. In the Conclusion, I discuss the cross-cultural applicability of the model as well as other ways in which context may affect its application. R E L A T E D A P P R O A C H E S A review of conversation analysis, politeness theory, and critical linguists’ discussions of epistemic modality will clarify both what the proposed model owes to previous discussions and what it can add to them. Other pertinent analyses (e.g., of argumentation or hedges) will be discussed as they become relevant to particular aspects of the cultural standing model. Conversation analysis Conversation analysts have discovered a preference for agreement in conversation, at least among English speakers. If Speaker A offers an assessment and Speaker B disagrees, B will try to avoid blatant disagreement. These analysts have perceptively noticed some of the strategies used, such as replying with a weak affirmation before disagreeing (Yes but), or otherwise delaying the potentially offending demurral with pauses or prefatory comments (Well . . .) (Pomerantz 1984, Sacks 1987). Another way in which hearers respond to controversial opinions, they note, is through silence or “next-turn repair initiators,” which invite the speaker to back down or correct a questionable statement (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks 1977, Pomerantz 1984). However, conversation analysis is restricted in its ability to describe and explain markers of cultural standing because of its singleminded focus on the here-and-now of conversational interchange (as many critics have noted, e.g. Hymes 1974:81). In the simplified world of conversation analysis, speakers do not anticipate whether a hearer will agree or disagree on the basis of previous knowledge about the hearer or people like him or her. Instead, they react to the hearer’s subtle indications of agreement or disagreement. This misses the preventive work that speakers do based on the cultural models they bring to the conversation. Cultural models are learned, shared mental representations or schemas: both factual and value-laden assumptions about the world (Holland & Quinn 1987, D’Andrade & Strauss 1992, Strauss & Quinn 1997). As cultural models theorists and other theorists of pragmatics have observed, for speakers these include assumptions about the hearer’s beliefs (Sperber & Wilson 1986; D’Andrade C U LT U R A L S TA N D I N G I N E X P R E S S I O N O F O P I N I O N Language in Society 33:2 (2004) 163 1987:113). Assumptions about hearers’ views could be based on things they have said before. Frequently, however, assumptions about hearers’ opinions are based on cultural models or schemas of what a person like that would think; as stereotypes based, for example, on clothing, age, sex, ethnicity, educational level, or lifestyle. These beliefs undergird the anticipatory work speakers do in conversation, modifying both how speakers phrase their assessments and whether they venture an assessment at all. As described further below, speakers may not offer an opinion in the first place if they suspect the hearer will view the statement either as obviously true or as outrageously false (see also Bourdieu 1977:18).