My best friend, and former roommate, Megan, is abroad in Paris. Unfortunately, the internet in her apartment has a very bad connection so we often resort to AIM instead of Skype. We have known each other for around 2.5 years now and in our conversations we draw on a tremendous amount of existing common ground. This existing common ground allows us to have successful conversations with low bandwidth. Due to how often we talk and how well we know each other, in this particular conversation we had very little grounding to do because we have many “mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs, and mutual assumptions” (Clark 127).
Whenever I refer to one of our roommates or close friends by first name, even if we know other people by that name, she knew exactly who I was talking about. I told her that my high school friend, Liz, was going to visit, and she knew that we had no mutual friends at school named Liz so I must be talking about the one from home. When I mention people that I have met while she was gone, or that we didn’t know very well while she was here, it does requires some grounding. We look for negative evidence (such as “I went to lunch with Katie”, “Katie (last name)?”, “No, she’s in one of my classes”), and then fix the misunderstanding.
Our conversation also drew from what we have told each other since she went abroad. When I asked what she had done today, and she responded:
Megan: “Well I actually had to go to classes”
I knew that she had said it in this way because the teachers in Paris are on strike. However, our conversation generally requires more grounding when she is talking about Paris because we both know that she has a lot more knowledge of Ithaca and Cornell, than I do of Paris. Therefore, I cannot draw on existing knowledge. She recognizes this, and often explains what she is talking about to ensure that I understand. For example,
Megan: “Mary, this girl from my program, and I went to this restaurant (name) that I want to take you to, near Notre Dame, which is about a 10 minute walk…”
Megan anticipates me not knowing who she is talking about or where things are, so she provides me with more detailed information. By doing this, she is reducing the cost of producing utterances/changing speakers. However, she also draws on the common knowledge that I know what Notre Dame is and that I will be there in March. The highest cost in our interactions, though, is start-up costs because we need to be online at the same time and the time-difference makes that difficult.
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I wonder, although you are able to draw on common ground when explaining certain aspects of Paris (like restaurants, locations), what kind of models would she have to employ to explain something more subtle, like culture? In this case, she is able to ground on name and place, but what if she had to try to describe to you the "atmosphere" of a French cafe that is completely unlike anything in Ithaca? Is it possible to create a mutual understanding about all of her experiences in Paris, or are some things only explicable through experience (hence, why you are visiting in March).
ReplyDeleteBuilding on what Kayla said, I think it's possible that your friends grounding with respect to you may deteriorate over the course of the next few months. Being across the ocean, and only being able to correspond over AIM, will prevent you from sharing a lot of mutual information. Like you said, when you visit France she will have to explain a lot to you. It will be interesting to see how quickly you can establish a high level of grounding in France.
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