Topic 8 - Discourse structure and point of view > Discourse structure and point of view > Task A

Discourse structure and point of view

Task A - Point of view in conversation

Consider the sentence below, said by one male student to another in a coffee bar. Whose viewpoint do the highlighted parts of the sentence express/take into account, and how do you know? When you have worked out your answer, compare it with ours by choosing the relevant part of the sentence.

The discourse of coffee bar talk and poems

In the example we looked at in Task A, there is one level of discourse, which we could represent as follows (we use 'addresser' and 'addressee' rather than 'speaker' and 'listener' so that we can to take written communication (e.g. letters) into account, as well as speech):

Addresser 1 (Student A)

Message

Addressee 1 (Student B)

The same discourse structure would appear to account for prototypical poems, like Wordsworth's 'Daffodils', which we played with in Topic 1. The poet, Wordsworth, appears to write directly to the reader, and so he is the addresser. There is no specific person that the poem is addressed to, and so by default the reader appears to be the addressee. There is a difference compared with our coffee bar example, however, in that the notion of an addressee has to be complex here. Many people read the poem, each of whom will take up the addressee position as they read it:

Addresser 1

Message

Addressees 1, 2, 3

In this respect prototypical poems are more like lectures than one-to-one coffee bar conversations. In personal coffee bar chat the addresser has only to take the viewpoint of one other person into account (though even this kind of chat can be a bit more complex if others (so-called 'licensed overhearers') are present in the conversation, as their viewpoint may need to be taken into account too). But lectures and poems (and websites!) have to be designed to take many unknown (or not well-known) addressees into account. This is why good lecturers are careful to define terms and repeat information in different ways - to help students with different amounts of background knowledge all to understand what is being said.

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