Marty Laforest

Scenes of family life: complaining in everyday conversation

The purpose of this study is to characterize the complaint/complaint-response sequence in everyday conversations between people who are on intimate terms. More specifically, the intent is to examine the form taken by the complaint and the form of the response elicited from the hearer, and to bring out the relation between the complaint as an act and the argument as a genre of conversation. The complaints analyzed, taken from a corpus of family conversations recorded in Montreal, have preferential realization patterns that can be linked in part to the intimacy of the relationship between the interactants: In many ways, they are uttered without the special precautions generally associated with face-threatening acts. The complainees most often reject the blame leveled at them. But well characterized arguments are virtually absent from the corpus. The entry into the argument is negotiated in the speech turns that follow the complaint/response sequence, and the argument only breaks out if the complainer questions the value of the complainees response. Both interactants use numerous strategies for avoiding an argument and, more often than not, they succeed. The strategies they use can be seen as indicators of the status of verbal confrontation in the Quebec community.

The circulation of discourse: The case of deprecating remarks on trash radio

Because it is provocative and is based on the denigration of absent third parties, shock jock discourse stimulates reactions that go well beyond the initial circle of listeners. Trash radio supporters and detractors alike take up the hosts’ deprecating remarks, reinterpret them and put them back into circulation. As the repetitions multiply, interweaving private speech and public speech, a complex web of circulation forms, attesting to the contagiousness of the discourse and the influence of the radio hosts. In order to capture and explain this mechanism of propagation, we propose a model of analysis that combines elements of linguistic, discursive and pragmatic description. The model is illustrated by a case study. We are led to observe that the extent and rate of propagation of deprecating remarks inevitably affect the image of the person targeted and, more fundamentally, tend to make an aggressive mode of expression part of the natural speechscape.

Prosodic correlates of smiled-speech

Smiling is a visible expression and an audible one too when it is synchronous with speech. Very few studies have documented the perceptual prosodic cues associated with perceived smiling speech. The first aim of this paper is to study the perception of smiled-speech according to the listeners’ gender. The reaction time and the intensity of the perceived smiled-speech were also investigated. The second aim is to identify a combination of prosodic parameters which would allow a phonetic description of smiled-speech. 140 utterances were extracted from spontaneous data (Montreal 1995 corpus) and used as stimuli for a perception test administered to 40 Quebec French listeners (20 men, 20 women). Results show that men and women do not perceived smiled-speech in the same way, and women are quicker than men to make their decisions. Moreover, reaction times are faster for utterances perceived as smiling with a high degree of intensity, for both men and women, than those with lower intensity. Perceived prosodic par...

LA SUBJECTIVITÉ ÉNONCIATIVE ET LA CONSTITUTION D'IDENTITÉS DANS LE DISCOURS DE LA REVUE FÉMINISTE LA VIE EN ROSE

La question de l’avortement au Quebec suscite encore aujourd’hui des discussions sur sa legalite ainsi que sur le droit des femmes de decider d’avorter. En ce sens, cet article a comme objectif de faire l’analyse d’un editorial de la revue feministe La vie en rose publie en 1982, en reponse a la lettre antiavortement des eveques, ecrite en 1981. A partir des considerations de Kerbrat-Orecchioni concernant l’enonciation et la subjectivite, nous faisons une analyse discursive afin de comprendre comment l’enonciation contribue a la constitution des identites et de saisir comment la subjectivite produit une argumentation dans ces discours. En outre, nous adoptons les notions d’identite de Stuart Hall et de pouvoir de Michel Foucault pour comprendre comment la constitution des sujets dans le langage et dans le contexte socio-historique de production des enonces rend possible la description des relations de pouvoir exercees entre les feministes, l’Eglise, l’Etat et les medecins. Cette analyse nous permet de conclure a la production d’identites multiples pour les femmes, dont l’objectif est de faire resistance face au pouvoir d’institutions hegemoniques.