Metacommunicative awareness

At the beginning, we noted the importance of the “environment of mutual monitoring possibilities” that underlies all social situations (Goffman [1964] 1972: 63). Critical to these “mutual monitoring possibilities” is our awareness of self and other as socially constituted persons. This means that not only do we interpret and evaluate what we ourselves say and do and what others say and do, but we also reflexively interpret and evaluate these pragmatic meanings, acts and the like through the eyes of others. In other words, we include the perspective of others in our interpretations and evaluations of pragmatic phenomena. This kind of perspective-taking is what underpins the two forms of metacommunicative awareness that are critical to social interaction: interactional awareness and interpersonal awareness

A key manifestation of metacommunicative interactional awareness is what is commonly termed recipient design, that is, where meanings and actions are reflexively designed with particular recipients in mind. The fi ne-tuned specificity of recipient design becomes evident in the incremental production of utterances, that is, in cases where speakers add further segments to utterances in order to adapt to changes in the participation footing of recipients. Goodwin (1979), for instance, examines in very close detail an excerpt from a conversation where the speaker, John transforms his utterance in line 3 from a discovery or noticing of an anniversary (i.e. having given up smoking for one week), about which the direct addressee, Beth (whose recipiency is signaled through John’s gaze), already knows, into a report about having given up smoking which is deemed to be newsworthy for another direct addressee, Ann (whose recipiency is signaled through a subsequent shift in gaze by John).

Notably, the utterance-final actually here marks this news as perhaps contrary to Ann’s expectations, and thus as reporting something that is likely previously unknown to her. In this way, he transforms the utterance from its previous design, when it was being constructed as a “noticing” directed at Beth of it already having been one week since he had given up smoking, into an utterance designed to function as reporting news to Ann. In interpreting talk or discourse, then, participants are inevitably aware of this finely-grained recipient design.

Metacommunicative interpersonal awareness involves reflexive evaluations of relations with and attitudes towards others, an area which was largely covered. Here we focus on how manifestations of reflexive awareness of interpersonal relations (such as face, status and so on), attitudes (such as like/dislike, disgust and so on), and evaluations (such as politeness, impoliteness and so on) are critically dependent on a reflexive awareness of self vis-à-vis other. In the following example from the TV series, Everybody Hates Chris, we can see how Chris manipulates his mother’s (over-)concern about how others evaluate their family. Prior to the excerpt below, Chris has been complaining to his mother about having to wear his younger brother’s old clothes for picture day at school, but to no avail. He concludes (in the voice of the narrator) that the only way he can get his mother to buy him new clothes is through invoking the idea of what others might think of their family if he wears old clothes:

What Rochelle, Chris’s mother, is most concerned about here is that other people might think they are on welfare, or in other words, poor. This motivates her to go out and buy new clothes for Chris, even though they can’t really afford them. Once again irony arises here, as Rochelle seems much less concerned about people thinking they have a drug problem (they already think I’m a crack baby) than their being seen as poor. There is also epistemic slippage in this excerpt from others potentially “thinking” something (Chris’s claim), to people actually “saying” these things (Rochelle’s assumption).