h.ii)Conceptual Problems Associated with Involvement

h.ii)Conceptual Problems Associated with Involvement

Besnier (1994:282) raises the question of what involvement should be contrasted with. To put it another way, if a part of discourse contains a high amount of involvement, how can one characterize a part of discourse where there are no or very few such phenomena?

Involvement can be contrasted with “detachment” which is a term that Chafe (1982) introduces when comparing spoken and written discourse. As has been mentioned above, he claims that involvement is typical of spoken discourse, whereas detachment is a characteristic feature of written discourse. Involvement strategies defined by Chafe (1982) have been mentioned above (see Chapter 2.9).

As for the features of detachment, Chafe (1982) points out that complex syntactic structures may be found in texts which do not focus on interaction. He speaks about these types of complex structures: relative clauses, complement clauses, sequences of prepositional clauses, and nominalizations; in addition, he includes attributtive adjectives, passive voice, subordinate conjunctions, and finally, complex morphosyntax into this category.

The same terms, involvement and detachment, have been used by Urbanová (2003) who states that “the distinction on which involvement vs. detachment operate is the dichotomy foreground versus background information. In cases of involvement, the interactional process comes to the fore, whereas via detachment it is substantially subdued” (Urbanová 2003:50).

Within the context of spoken and written discourse, she emphasizes that “detachment, reservation, and depersonalization are elements which appear also in face-to-face conversation” (2003:50), in spite of the fact that these features are more characteristic of written discourse. Urbanová explains her findings “by the need for mitigation when the speaker does not want to make “outright assertions” and show his/her commitment in public” (2003:50). This opinion is in agreement with that of Chafe who claims that “there are other styles of speaking which are more in the direction of writing, and other styles of writing which are more like speech” (Chafe 1982:48), which has been discussed above (see Section 2.7).

From the relevant literature on involvement and detachment (cf. Tannen 1985; Chafe 1984; Urbanová 2003) it follows that in regard to these notions in various conversational genres, particular types are high-involved, such as spontaneous face-to-face conversation, whose typical feature is sharing personal attitudes and feelings. However, another type of spoken discourse, an interview, is more detached than a face-to-face conversation because the interlocutors concentrate predominantly on gaining facts rather than on personal views and feelings. This is determined by the fact that the roles of the speakers are asymmetrical, i.e. there is an interviewer and an interviewee, and the typical scheme is question-answer. Thus, one can characterize an interview as information-seeking. But again, as with face-to-face conversation where reservation, depersonalization and other features of detachment can be found, emotionality and involvement can be found in interviews as well. Their occurrence usually depends on the topic of the particular interview. The present analysis shows that many features of involvement may be found in this genre. Politicians use hedging and boosting devices and modal expressions to modify the illocutionary force of their utterances, and in this way, they show subjectivity, assurance, agreement, and emotiveness, which contribute to a high-involved style of politicians.

Lakoff (1990) compares involvement with “considerateness”, stating that it “uses the opposite strategy” from involvement such as “long waits before taking a turn; relatively steady and unremarkable articulation, conventional expression; no touching or addressing by name; few back channels, little overlap or interruption” (Lakoff 1990:50).

However, Besnier (1994) correctly argues that it is not certain if the proposed term “considerateness” can be considered an improvement over the term “detachment” because “involved styles can easily be placed in contexts where they will be perceived as considerate, if one interprets the meaning of “considerateness” in its everyday sense of paying attention to the feelings and needs of co-conversationalists” (Besnier 1994:283).

Tannen (1985) prefers the designation “focus on content” to “detachment” and gives a concise explanation of her preference: if a discourse participant is not directly involved in the interactional context, then one’s attention is directed to the content of the interaction. Moreover, Tannen has examined that “some written genres - for example, literary prose - combined features of spoken with features of written discourse” (Tannen 1985:127) so, for example, lack of involvement is not significant to many genres of written discourse. Tannen describes such texts as “mixed genres” because they combine the conversational involvement with the conventions of writing.

Additionally, what is important to consider is the fact that many written genres require certain degree of detachment and the involvement strategies are not appropriate there. These are, for instance, scientific texts which are detached, impersonal and emotionally neutral. From that it follows that it is important to make a distinction between involvement and detachment understood as two general principles which are established as conventional in a particular scientific tradition, and, from a different point of view, involvement and detachment as analytic conceptions in the description and understanding of a particular linguistic behaviour (Besnier 1994:284).

Katriel and Dascal (1989) propose to distinguish between two types of involvement that both relate to the speaker’s attentional orientation. The first type is called “topical involvement” and the second type “interactional involvement”. Topical involvement relates to “the speaker’s cognitive orientation to a shared discourse topic” (Katriel and Dascal 1989:285). Interactional involvement refers to “the speaker’s orientation to the speech situation and the participants in it” (1989:285). Both these types of involvement are relevant to the present analysis of political interviews. When it comes to the topic of the Iraq War, politicians who discuss this issue (Blair, Bush and Rice) are more hesitant, uncertain and indirect. As for interactional involvement, politicians use content-oriented boosters to emphasise the content, or hearer-oriented boosters to show that they take into account their listeners. Katriel and Dascal emphasize that conversations are “social, not only cognitive events” and so they entail that the speaker adjusts both to the interactional partners and to the topic of the conversation in such a way that s/he shows a certain degree of involvement.

To sum up, what is evident is a difference in the degree of involvement between spoken and written discourse and, in addition, differences across certain genres within these domains. Thus, the language of news broadcasting on the radio or TV is characterized by a detached, “low-involvement” style, whereas a personal letter, though representing a variety of written language that is typically detached, is usually high-involved and emotional (Tannen 1985:130). Similarly, with a change to a higher degree of interpersonal involvement, speakers may decide not to use titles. As Tannen (1984), Silverstein (1979), and Kochman (1981) suggest, the degree of speaker’s involvement in interaction is culturally constrained and a particular level of involvement or detachment may vary depending on the situation.