Fairclough's unequal encounters
Fairclough believes that in any conversation there is always a more dominant/powerful speaker.
Maureen: well (.) there's a problem (1) he couldn't ||get them ||
Juliane: ||you're joking||
Juliane interrupts Maureen which asserts her power and shows that she is the more dominant speaker because she is able to talk over Maureen and she straight away stops. The fact that Juliane uses the declarative and determiner "you're" makes it seem as though not getting the tickets is being blamed on Maureen and made out as though it's a big deal. It comes across in a harsh tone, although possibly may have been said differently, which suggests that she has the power to blame Maureen and knows that Maureen won't say anything back. This shows that Fairclough was correct when saying that there is always a more dominant speaker because even though they're friends one of them is still more powerful.
This is interesting to see that the more dominant speaker interrupts, and also what I would add is that even when Maureen has the opportunity to gain power at this point in the text. This could also suggest that Maureen recognises that Juliane is the more dominant participant and wouldn't want to impose upon that power. Good one Soph :-) x
ReplyDeleteWell done, you two. I agree. It is good to identify the word class but we have a homophone issue here which is an easy mistake to make: "your" is a possessive determiner, but "you're" is short for you are, so it is the second person pronoun being used for direct address that you are interested in here ("you"). To mine the quote further, look at the contraction - if it was very harsh in tone, she could have said 'you are joking' with equal stress on each word, but the contraction is a little friendlier and perhaps supports a more lighthearted, disappointed tone. You would need to look at evidence from elsewhere in the text to support the interpretation that J is quite sharp with M. For instance, you could look at M's indirect request later, where she seems to fear J's response "[quoting from my memory, sorry] could you(.) would you" so she repairs and trails off rather than ask her confidently and directly if she could take action to secure them some tickets. This could come from having been chastised earlier with a harsh tone accusation "you're joking" (rather than a sympathetic expression of disappointment) which would have reminded her who the more powerful participant is.
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