Clark and Brennan (1991) explain that participants must mutually believe they have understood what they meant well enough to carry a conversation. The conversation I had with my friend through MSN Messenger involved presentation and acceptance phases. Most of the time, existing common ground helped us to understand each other so that we did not have to explain in more detail or show that we were confused.
Continuers such as “hehe” or “lol” (laughing out loud) were mutually understood as a signal that meant acknowledgment of the turn so far. For example, I commented on my friend’s use of emoticon “that’s very cute,” and she responded by typing “hehe.” Since my comment was not funny, I understood her as acknowledging or accepting my comment, and we talked about something else.
During the conversation, we had to do grounding because my friend was confused about what I said.
[JY] happy says:
brb
[JY] happy says:
Christine says something about a packet from VS
[deb] says:
Hm?
[JY] happy says:
she got 2 tops
[JY] happy says:
but she doesn't like the yellow one
[deb] says:
?
[JY] happy says:
it's like a tube top
[deb] says:
She got a bikini?!
[JY] happy says:
well she got that too but that didn't come yet
[JY] happy says:
she got 2 tops
Until she typed “She got a bikini?!,” I did not understand why she continued to type “Hm” or “?” because I had no contextual information. By her mentioning of the bikini, I knew that she took tops as a bikini. I also knew that she was confused because she heard previously that Christine has ordered a bikini online. I explained to her that she also ordered two tops and they arrived before the bikini. With immediate responses to each other, we were able to coordinate the conversation and understand each other.
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Nice post. It seems there was a lot of negative evidence in this conversation. Several times your friend typed to question marks to show she didn't understand. But I also find it really interesting that you also did not understand what exactly your friend was confused about until she said "bikini". I guess in this case you and your friend had different interpretations of "mutual assumptions". Since your friend assumed top meant a bikini, and you assumed top meant a tube top. Luckily the conversation was fixed with grounding.
ReplyDeleteAgreeing with Ashley, I agree that there's a lot of grounding work done within the context of this specific conversation. As such, it's a good example of what happens in a conversation when you don't have initial grounding to work off of, though if you had a conversation with the same friend again about the same girl with the same bikini, you would be able to draw upon the common ground set in this exchange so that you wouldn't have to expound as much.
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