Bilgewater: Foregrounded features
Task F - Our answer
Sentences 23-9 are discoursally and pragmatically deviant. At first sight
they apparently break the rules for turn-taking and politeness in conversation,
and this leads us to interpret them specially when we read them. We will
consider turn-taking and pragmatic aspects of interpretation in more detail
in the drama part of the course.
The question by one of the interviewers in sentence 22 clearly demands
an answer as the next turn in the conversation, and, given that sentences
23-29 are in inverted commas, it may appear at first sight that these
sentences constitute the answer. But there are a number of reasons to
suggest that this is not right:
-
these sentences are in brackets, suggesting that they do not belong
to the main flow of the conversation after all;
-
sentence 30 appears to be the sort of answer one might typically
expect to the question asked (interviews often end with an opportunity
for the candidate to ask questions, an offer which may be politely
declined, as in 30;
-
the content of 23-9 is too personal and impolite to be uttered in
an interview - questions about someone's sex-life are not the province
of polite formal conversation.
Hence, sentences 23-9 appear to be some sort of 'extra turn' in between
sentences 22 and 30. The factors we have noted in (a)-(c) above can be
explained if we think of sentences 23-9 not as the candidate's speech,
but as her thought.
We will consider speech and thought presentation on another page in this
topic. But it should be clear that this extended presentation of the character's
thoughts (which apparently take place in the micro-seconds in between
the question and her actual answer in sentence 30) again helps to suggest
her hyper-awareness and her highly-wrought emotional state in the polite
but tense (for the interviewee) interview situation.
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