Friday, March 16, 2007
A4: I, We, You
From reading the Monk et al piece and our discussion in class I found myself very weary of some of the claims that were made. In particular, the claim that the use of first and second person pronouns renders queries from direct to indirect. Further, the claim that their use makes a statement more polite. I decided to take a look at a number of email conversations I've had with different people: my mom, my boss, and a potential landlord. The email conversations with my mom contained very few first person pronouns but a decent amount of second person pronouns. This makes sense because my mother and I are quite straightforward with one another and politeness is not necessary. The email conversation with my boss was quite different. I found that I used a lot of first and second person pronouns but he barely used first person and a few second person pronouns. The relationship between a boss and employee also supports Monk et al in this case. Finally, an email conversation with a potential landlord as I have been trying to find a summer sublet in New York City was examined. In this, I found a great amount of both first and second person pronouns. I, as a potential tenant was trying to manage my impression in order to have a good chance at landing the apartment. He, on the other hand, wanted to make sure to attract as many people to his listing to be able to be more choosey. My findings actually ended up supporting Monk et al's claims but I do not believe there is a strict causality here. There is great possibility for context to completely undermine this claim, as well as tone. To conclude, I found that this exercise helped me think a bit more about correlation and research claims that may or may not be hiding behind a lurking variable.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I'd be curious to see how these discussions would have been different were they over different communications media. I'd imagine that with a phone call, for instance, the pronoun use change might be less pronounced because you'd have less time to contemplate which words to pick as you form the speech. The use of pronouns seems to have more of a calculated effect on the other party when he/she has a chance to read and re-read it.
After reading this post, I went back and looked at various emails I've exchanged with friends vs. professors vs. clients (old job) vs. support requests (old job). When communicating with my friends, politeness pronouns weren't too common. However, when communicating with the other three, I too noticed an almost over-usage of "polite" words an phrases. Even though this isn't necessarily a ground-breaking discovery... the over-usage was interesting to note.
I think in general, the theory proposed by the monk et al. piece is correct. However, i don't think this is the case with every instance. First person pronouns can also be used in a less polite way and more of in an enforcing way. When making a statement such as "I don't want you to go", the first person pronoun is used in a less polite way and more of in an authoritative way. This is an exception to the rule. I think the monk et al. piece makes too much of a generalization about pronoun usage.
I agree that your data may support the Monketal's theory, however I believe that that is not enough evidence to prove the theory. A famous phrase that should be remembered when trying to prove a theory is that "correlation does not mean causation." In other words just because two thinks happened to be correlated, does not mean they have a direct relationship, as there could be a third and fourth variable that are unrecognized.
Post a Comment