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Linguistic Theories for the Analysis of Bureaucratic Language Chad Nilep Nagoya University Introduction Linguistics is the study of how languages work. Linguists study many things, including the sounds of language, the grammar of different languages, how people learn languages, and the relationships between languages and the people and societies that use them. Linguists also study how people use language. That is, they study things such as how people decide what to say, how listeners understand what speakers mean, and how spoken or written communication works, or when people cannot understand one another, how it fails to work. In this course, we will study how texts produced by companies, government agencies, or other organizations communicate their messages to readers. We will be particularly interested in understanding texts that fail to communicate effectively. Organizations and the people who work for them want to communicate messages – sometimes complicated messages – to large audiences. Sometimes in the process of creating these texts, problems occur that make the texts difficult to understand. By analyzing these texts, we hope that we will learn how to communicate more effectively and to help other people and organizations communicate. In order to analyze bureaucratic texts it will be useful to know some of the theories developed by linguists, philosophers, and social scientists about how language works. It will also be useful to know some of the techniques they use for analyzing language. This paper introduces two theories about how people use language to communicate. These theories are called speech act theory and the cooperative principle. The paper also introduces one technique for analyzing how people or texts communicate their messages, a technique called topic analysis.1 Speech act theory Speech act theory was originated in 1955 by J.L. Austin, a British philosopher. The theory was then developed in the 1960's by John Searle, a professor from the University of California. Speech act theory describes, as Austin put it, how people “do things with words”. When a person speaks or writes, she (or he) is doing three things at the same time. First, she is creating an utterance – the actual words and the grammar that organizes them. In most cases though, the utterance itself is not the most important thing the speaker is doing. Usually we do not speak just to show how many words we know, or that we can put those words together to make sentences. Occasionally someone might do this, for example on a foreign language test, but not most of the time. Usually, when a speaker talks or a writer writes, it is to accomplish something else. At the same time that the speaker is creating an utterance, she is also communicating some message. Words are put into sentences so that other people can hear those sentences and understand what they mean. It may seem obvious that language is used to communicate 1 Roger Shuy describes how he used speech act theory, the cooperative principle, and topic analysis to help people at the Social Security Administration, an American government agency, improve their communication in chapter two of the book Bureaucratic Language in Government and Business.
messages, but too often when we think about language we only think about words and sentences. Speech act theory reminds us that people are actually doing complicated things. They must choose the words that are most appropriate to communicate the message they have in mind. And that is still not the only thing that a speaker or writer is doing. In addition to the utterance and the message, the speaker is creating some effect in the world.2 Sometimes this effect is relatively simple: just making other people understand the message. But sometimes language is used to do very complicated things. Language can actually cause other people to do things. Under the right circumstances, language use can even change societies, as happens when governments write new laws. Let's look at some examples. In the following examples, we can separate the utterance (the actual words) from the message (what hearers understand) and the effect (what happens if the hearers understand and accept the speaker's message).
UTTERANCE 鈴木と申します。
MESSAGE The speaker's name is Suzuki. EFFECT The listener knows his name. UTTERANCE お勘定をお願いします。
MESSAGE The speaker wants to pay the bill. EFFECT The listener will bring the bill to the speaker. UTTERANCE I now pronounce you Husband and Wife. MESSAGE The speaker has completed the wedding ceremony. EFFECT The couple is now married. Imagine that you are meeting someone for the first time. You don't know this person's name, so he says 「鈴木と申します。」Now you know his name: it's Suzuki. By uttering that sentence, Suzuki has changed something about you. He has caused you to know his name. Communicating messages – causing people to know things – is a very simple example of how utterances have both messages and effects. We can think of statements or reports as a kind of speech act, one that has the effect of making people know things. There are also other speech acts which do more complicated things. Here is a slightly more complicated example. Imagine that you go to a restaurant and eat a meal. After you finish eating, you want to pay. In order to do that, you need the server to bring you the bill. If you say 「お勘定をお願いします。」the server can understand what you want and know that he should bring you the bill. By making that utterance you have caused 2 J.L. Austin used different labels for these ideas. He called the actual words the locutionary effect, the message communicated the illocutionary effect, and the effect on the world the perlocutionary effect. We will use the simpler labels utterance, message, and effect.
the server to do something. Speech acts such as requests, demands, or commands, cause people to do things for the speaker. On the other hand, speech acts such as promises or offers require the speaker to do things for the listener. These are effects that go beyond communication. Speech acts can have even bigger effects on the world. Imagine that you go to a wedding. At the beginning of the ceremony, the bride and the groom are not married. During the ceremony, a priest says several things, and tells the bride and the groom to say specific things. At the end of the ceremony the priest says, “I now pronounce you Husband and Wife.” By saying these things in the right way at the right time, the priest has caused the two people to be married to each other. His speech act has changed their social status. Pronouncements or declarations like this one (Austin called them performative speech acts) actually change the status of things in the world. As is suggested in these examples, there are different kinds of speech acts that have different kinds of effects. Statements or reports cause people to know things. Requests or commands cause people to do things. Questions are like requests, since they cause people to say things, to give an answer. Promises or offers cause the speaker to do things (or to be required to do things). Other speech acts such as warnings, advice, apologies, congratulations, and greetings also affect the relationship between the speaker and the hearer, and cause them to share certain information. And performative speech acts such as declarations or pronouncements change the status of people or things in the world. Indirect speech acts Many speech acts are associated with specific words or phrases. For example, if someone says, “I promise...” then whatever they say next will probably be a promise, which is a kind of speech act. If a sentence ends with「ですか。」then it is probably a question, a different kind of speech act. Sometimes, though, an utterance might look like one kind of speech act but actually be a different kind of speech act. We call these indirect speech acts. For example, imagine that a bully says to you, “I promise that if you come here next week I will beat you up.” That utterance begins with the words “I promise”, which usually introduces a promise. But beating you up is not something that the bully is doing for you – it is something you don't want him to do! The bully has actually made a different kind of speech act, a threat, using the form of a promise. There are many indirect ways of communicating a speech act. Remember, a speech act consists of an utterance, a message, and an effect. The message communicated and the effect created may be different from the usual utterance associated with the speech act. If the message and the effect are successful, this is still a speech act, but it is indirect. Sometimes it is considered more polite to use an indirect speech act than a direct speech act. Consider the following example.
A: Would you like to go on a date with me this weekend? B: I have a big test on Monday, so I can't go out this weekend. MESSAGE B cannot go on a date this weekend. EFFECT B will not go on a date with A.
In this conversation, B could communicate this message more directly by saying, “No, I don't want to go on a date this weekend.” That might be considered impolite, though. B can communicate the same message and have the same effect with a different utterance. This is an example of an indirect speech act. (There is more discussion about politeness and about how A understands B's message in the next section, The cooperative principle.) Consider another example that uses an indirect speech act. A: Can you close the window? (B closes the window.) MESSAGE A requests B to close the window. EFFECT B closes the window. In this example, A appears to be asking a question, but B understands that it is actually a request. This is not done only for politeness – it might be just as polite to say, “Please close the window.” This is simply a conventional way of making an indirect request. In this case, the speech act is successful because both A and B know that B can close the window, and both understand that this kind of question is a common indirect speech act. Sometimes, though, indirect speech acts fail to communicate because the audience for a message does not share the same knowledge as the person or group that created the message. In this section we have examined speech act theory, a theory that explains how speakers create messages and how those messages have effects in the world. In the next section we will learn about the cooperative principle, which explains how listeners understand the messages that speakers communicate. The cooperative principle The cooperative principle was first described by Paul Grice, a philosopher at Harvard University. It is sometimes called Grice's maxims. The cooperative principle describes how people normally behave when they are having a conversation. According to Grice, speakers usually follow four principles, or maxims when speaking. 1. The maxim of quality. Speakers say true things; they do not say false things. 2. The maxim of quantity. Speakers say enough to be understood. They do not say too much or too little. 3. The maxim of relevance. Everything the speaker says is relevant to the conversation. 4. The maxim of manner. Speakers try to be clear, to be brief, and to make sense. Since there are normal expectations for how people will behave, listeners can assume that speakers are following these expectations. If a speaker says something during a conversation, the hearer will assume that it is true and will think about how it is relevant to the conversation. These four maxims describe how speakers usually behave in a conversation. However, it is possible to violate any of these maxims. A speaker can say things that are not true, in other words, tell a lie. A speaker can say too little (in other words, keep secrets) or say too
much (be noisy). A speaker can say things that are not relevant or say things in a way that does not make sense. If a speaker does any of these things, though, that speaker is not being cooperative and not trying to communicate effectively. This does happen, but it is not the usual way that people behave. Therefore, listeners usually assume that speakers are trying to cooperate and are following these maxims. It is also possible to communicate while not following these maxims, an activity called flouting. A speaker can flout one of the maxims, and in that way communicate something indirectly. For example, imagine that it is a cold, rainy day. Your friend says to you, ｢いいお天気ですね。｣ Your friend is saying something that is not true, but you understand that she is not lying. She is making a joke by flouting the maxim of quantity – deliberately saying something that is not true.3 Hearers use the cooperative principle to understand what speakers mean, especially when speakers communicate indirectly. Consider again this example of an indirect speech act.
A: Would you like to go on a date with me this weekend? B: I have a big test on Monday. MESSAGE B cannot go on a date this weekend. EFFECT B will not go on a date with A. A assumes that B is being cooperative. In response to the invitation to go on a date, B talks about a test. This does not appear to be relevant, but A knows that usually everything speakers say is relevant to the conversation. Therefore, A has to think about how a test on Monday is relevant to a date on the weekend. A reasons that if B is very busy studying, B will not have time to go on a date. In this way, A understands the message that B communicated indirectly. People assume that others will communicate cooperatively. In a conversation, each person assumes that everything the other person says is true, sufficient, relevant and clear, or else that their conversation partner is making a point by flouting what is expected. If a person says something that is clearly not true, we try to understand it as a joke, a fable, or something else. If a person says something that is not clearly relevant, we look for connections that might make it relevant. In this section we learned about the cooperative principle, a theory of how hearers make sense of what speakers say. In the previous section we learned about speech act theory, a theory of how speakers do things in the world by exchanging messages through language. In the next section we will learn about topic analysis, a technique that linguists use to understand the messages that speakers and hearers (or writers and readers) are exchanging. Topic analysis The topic is generally what a piece of language is about. In an English sentence, for example, the topic may be the same as the subject. In some Japanese sentences the topic may be specifically marked by は after a noun.
3 What is communicated in this example is much more complicated than usual. Instead of a message that matches the utterance (the weather is good), the message is something like, “This is a joke. We are friends because we tell each other jokes.”
Mary went to the movies with Bill. (Mary is the topic.) Bill went to the movies with Mary. (Bill is the topic.) 冬は一番寒い季節です。 (冬 is the topic.) 一番寒い季節は冬です。 (一番寒い季節 is the topic.) There are many other ways of indicating the topic, such as saying or writing it at the beginning of a sentence, or mentioning it many times. For our purposes, we do not need to describe all the ways that a topic might be marked. Topics are important not just for single sentences, but for longer stretches of communication, too. For example, a written paragraph is a number of sentences that are all about the same general topic. Even though the sentences may not have the same subject or otherwise mark their topic as the same, all of the sentences in a paragraph will be related to the same general idea, the topic of the paragraph. In conversation, too, people will usually say many things about one topic before moving on to another topic. Consider the following example. 田中：いい天気ね。 小林：うん。暖かくて、気持ちいい。 田中：本当、ぽかぽか。 小林：でも、明日は雨らしいよ。 田中：そう？天気予報見た？ 小林：うん。 田中：ねぇ、昨日の野球、すごかったよね? 小林：うん、巨人勝った、ね。 …
In the first part of this conversation, Tanaka and Kobayashi talk about several things that are related: the good weather, the temperature, the possibility of rain, and the weather forecast. We may say that all of this talk is about the same topic, which we can call “tenki”. 4 After saying several things about the weather, Tanaka introduces a new topic, “yakyu”, and Kobayashi says something about baseball. In this way, the topic of the conversation changes. There are many ways that speakers mark a change in topic when they are involved in conversation. One way that speakers often mark the end of one topic and the start of a new one is to pause, to stop talking briefly before beginning the new topic. There can also be changes in pitch, timing, or other aspects of speech sounds that can be used to signal the end of a topic.5 In the example above, Tanaka gives a small clue that the topic will shift by saying “nee” before introducing the topic. Speakers can also use longer phrases to show that they are 4 We could choose other labels for this topic, but topic analysis generally uses a phrase from the conversation or text as a label for the topic. 5 Linguists call these aspects of speech sounds prosody.
introducing a new topic. Examples include “By the way,” or “Another thing that I wanted to talk about”. In writing there are also various ways to indicate a change in topic. One of the most obvious signals of topic is paragraphs. A paragraph is a collection of sentences that all have the same topic. Therefore, when you see a new paragraph begin, it is a good indication that a new topic is being introduced. Titles, headings, and blank space on the page can also indicate that different topics are being discussed. In this paper, for example, the headings “Introduction”, “Speech act theory”, “The cooperative principle”, “Topic analysis”, and “Conclusion” each mark the start of a section that discusses a different topic. As in speech, there are also words and phrases that can be used to show a change in topic. Examples include “Alternately,” “As was discussed previously,” “On the contrary,” or “In the meantime”. There are many more phrases that function similarly to show that a new topic is being introduced and to tell how the new topic relates to the previous one. Topic analysis is useful for analyzing conversations involving many speakers. To do this, the analyst first identifies all of the major topics in the conversation. Then, she (or he) makes note of which speakers talk about which topics. This includes who introduces each new topic, and who comments on topics introduced by other speakers. In this way, the analyst can have a clearer understanding of who is interested in (or at least, who talks about) each topic. Topic analysis is also useful for analyzing written texts. It is especially useful for analyzing long texts that have many sub-topics. To do this, the analyst first looks for divisions within the text. For example, most long texts are written as a number of paragraphs, so each paragraph can be treated as a separate division of the text. Next, the analyst identifies the topic of each division: what is each part talking about? Once this analysis is done, the analyst and the writer can look for communication problems. For instance, are all of the important topics introduced? Sometimes a writer who has to communicate many ideas forgets to include one. Other times, the writer puts the most important idea in between two less important ideas, so that it is harder for readers to notice it. The topic analysis also helps the writer think about the coherence of the text. Coherence literally means “sticking together”, but when we talk about coherence in writing we mean whether the relationships among the topics are clear. A text can be made more coherent if its topics are introduced in a logical order. Transition words or phrases, like those discussed above to tell how new topics relate to other topics in the text, also make a text more coherent. Also, repeating important words related to the topic helps remind readers of the topic and makes the text more coherent and easier to understand. Conclusion This paper has introduced two linguistic theories and one linguistic technique that are useful for analyzing bureaucratic language. Speech act theory explains how people “do things with words”. Words give information, and sometimes require the hearer or the speaker to do things. Different types of speech acts include statements, questions, requests, promises, warnings, and pronouncements. Although many speech acts have typical forms (for example, “I promise” for promises), indirect speech acts accomplish their effects with different words than the typical form. By thinking about how different speech acts affect people and how indirect speech acts can be misunderstood, we can write texts that are clearer and easier to understand but that still accomplish the effects that they are designed for. The cooperative principle explains how speakers usually behave and how listeners can make sense of what speakers say. Usually, if a person is being cooperative and trying to communicate clearly, she or he will say things that are true, say just enough to communicate
an idea, say things that are relevant, and try to speak clearly. Listeners understand that speakers usually do this, and so they try to make sense of what they hear, assuming that it is true and relevant. The same things are true of written communication, too. By understanding the cooperative principle and by thinking about how readers try to make sense of texts, we can design texts in a way that meets expectations so that the texts are easier to understand. Topic analysis is a way of dividing up a text into topics, the general ideas that are talked about in different parts of the text. Paragraphs, headings, and transition phrases are all ways to mark the start of a new topic in a piece of writing. By identifying the topics discussed in different parts of a text we can check for possible communication problems. We can make sure that all important ideas are introduced, that the order in which they are introduced is logical, and that the relationships among the topics are clear and coherent. Now that you understand these theories, you can use them to analyze bureaucratic texts and to suggest ways to improve those texts. Speech act theory can help you understand what needs to be communicated. The cooperative principle can help you think about how readers make sense of the text. Topic analysis is useful to identify the topics introduced in a text. Using these three techniques, you can analyze how bureaucratic texts communicate their messages, explain places where they fail to communicate effectively, and suggest ways to make texts easier to understand while still communicating all of the necessary information.