Assignment #4: Grounding at 1AM

Anson: so ive decided to put an o/u on how long before you and chud get kicked off the air

To most people this means absolutely nothing. In fact, a week ago this would've meant nothing to me. However, this is how my friend and I started our conversation and were able to communicate complicated ideas with very few words.

There's a lot of common ground hidden in this sentence. First off most people would ask, what is o/u? Who is chud? Why are they getting kicked off something they can't really stand/sit on? I'd imagine this would be a difficult sentence to explain to an alien who has full knowledge of the English language, but has never actually used it in an every day setting (something tells me my high school Latin curriculum wouldn't have served me well in Rome). Because we both bet on sports (www.centsports.com completely legal sports betting) we understand that o/u means "over under" in which you bet on whether or not a certain event will occur over or under a time limit. We both also know that "Chud" refers to a mutual friend who goes by that nickname. Finally, getting "kicked off the air" is a phrase most English speaking people are familiar with, and Anson was listening to my radio show earlier so he knows we sort of pushed our boundaries. It's amazing how  all these ideas were transmitted through one short sentence, and one that defies most conventions of grammar, spelling and punctuation! We both must spend way too much time online. Clearly Clark and Brennan are correct in saying that we "cannot even begin to coordinate on content without assuming a vast amount of shared information or comon ground - that is, mutual knowledge..."

Despite being good friends, we of course don't have an endless amount of common knowledge and often we have to establish our grounding in the conversation. According to Clark and Brennan we look for negative and positive evidence in a conversation. If we find negative evidence we "repair the problem" as in we repeat ourselves. Positive evidence appears as an acknowledgment, something very common in AIM conversations. For example:

Eric: i was supposed to study tonight

Eric: but i ended up playing bball hahaha

Anson: yeah

Clark and Brennan call this a "continuer". Anson doesn't know that I played basketball tonight so I inform him, establishing common ground for the rest of this segment of our conversation. Similar to before where I knew Anson listened to our radio show I was able to proceed quicker into the conversation, however this time I am sure he didn't know my nights plans. I then proceed to explain to him how XYZ fraternity smoked us in intramural basketball (perhaps I should stick to blogging).

This example shows how in everyday conversations we demonstrate the outrageous power of the human mind to process complex information. Clearly more than just language is at work here, our brains are taking the words, processing the information, recalling past knowledge and trying to tie it all together. If it all works we say "yeah" or "uh-huh" and if it doesn't - "excuse me, what?"