Linguistic Models of Communication

As most human conflict is verbal, whether oral or written, one would expect that the field of communications would contribute much to our understanding. Wilmot and Hocker (1997) tell us that from a communications perspective, “Conflict is an expressed struggle between at least two interdependent parties who perceive incompatible goals, scarce rewards, and interference from the other party in achieving their goals.” The only thing in this definition remotely connected to communication is the word “expressed.”

In much the same vein, Brenneis (1988) writes, “Theoretical considerations of the language of dispute involve a number of issues… Participants in conflict talk have the same resources available for that interaction as do all conversationalists, and analysts have the same interpretive apparatuses.” This suggests conflict talk is the same as all talk, which may interest anthropologists but does not seem particularly useful to the student of conflict.

Goffman (1974) tells us his method of Discourse Analysis is rooted in eth-nomethodology and is process oriented, dependent on participant and non-participant observation, verbatim recording of conversation, and interviews. It concentrates on microelements such as turn-taking, pauses, paralingual variation (whatever that is), direct and indirect speech, address forms, silence, pronoun choice, and verbal static such as “you know,” an expression used by people when they do not know what they mean and want you to figure it out for them. Grimshaw calls it “an extremely rich and varied conceptual apparatus.” In Conflict Talk, he admits “there is obviously no such thing as a unified theory of sociolinguistic description of conflict talk. There are a variety of axiomatic orientations, proto-theoretic perspectives, and conceptual notions which are available for use in organizing the phenomenon for systematic analysis.”

So, apparently there are many ways to study “conflict talk,” or talk in general, and many variables to study, but no way to distinguish what is important.

One can only hope that linguists will become increasingly aware of the significance of their subject…and will not stand aloof behind a tradition that threatens to become Scholastic when not vitalized by interests which lie beyond the formal interest in language itself.

As Sapir predicted, the result frequently is reminiscent of medieval Scholastic debates. St. Thomas defined motion as “the act of that which is in potentiality and seeks to actualize itself.” Rain, he explained, “watered man’s crops, which grew to feed man and man lived to serve and worship God.” Could a spider (a symbol of evil) escape from a circle made of powdered unicorn horn (a symbol of virginal innocence)? Their debates sound remarkably like the convoluted rhetoric of many contemporary social scientists. The social sciences probably could do with a lot fewer of the trivial experiments, dubious measurements, obtuse mathematics, and incomprehensible verbiage that dominate their journals, and a lot more speculation and debate on what should be studied and why.

The field of communications in particular and the social sciences in general need to figure out what is important. The failure, despite the enormous difficulties of doing so, is a major reason so much “theory” in the social sciences passes only technical requirements such as operational definitions, while failing important ones such as generalizability, parsimony, and usability.