In the Monk piece, we are told that conferring expressions (pronouns such as it, that, and they) are often a good indicator of common ground development. When avoiding an explicit topic opening the speaker is making the assumption that given the conversation topics and trends, the listener will be able to interpret what these pronouns refer to. The piece I examined is an excerpt of an interview with Blake Ross, the founder of Firefox. The topic of the interview is the interplay between Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Interviews such as this one have two very unique elements. The first is that the person being interviewed generally has a very long response. The goal of the interviewer is to essentially elicit as much information as possible from the interviewee, while keeping his end of the conversation relatively short. The second unique element is that the subject of the conversation is very explicitly stated and therefore very much a part of the common ground. My assumption was that because Ross would be speaking for a long period of time about an “understood” topic that his usage of conferring expressions would be substantial.
Q: I know you're asked frequently about Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's next browser. How much have you used the test version, and what do you think of it?
Ross: I've used it a little bit. The truth is that it actually looks pretty good. People don't expect me to say that, they expect me to say that it's terrible. They did exactly what we were expecting them to do, which was take a bunch of time and get IE7 up to feature parity with Firefox. I haven't seen any real innovation above and beyond what we delivered in Firefox. I think that it's a solid product, but I think that by the time it comes out, we're going to be another world ahead of them again, so I think it's kind of a step or two behind us.
We really are trying to make it less of a religious thing. The whole browser space in general has traditionally been very religious.
Q: Kind of like operating systems.
Ross: Kind of like operating systems, exactly. We're trying to just say, we've all got good ideas in this space. Everyone's talking, for example, about how IE7 is ripping off Firefox. I'm very careful to say that they're matching feature parity. They are ripping off Firefox in a sense, but the truth is that when we started Firefox, we ripped off Internet Explorer because we wanted to make sure that people who migrated from IE felt comfortable in the Firefox world.
If that means copying the interface to some degree, if that means copying some keyboard shortcuts to make sure that people can migrate and feel comfortable, that's what we'll do, and then we can innovate on top of that. I think in general, the community understands that this is kind of a collaborative process. There are always going to be people on the fringes who are just kind of zealots in either direction.
4 uses of “it”
11 uses of “that”
4 uses of “they”
Based off of the counts, I would say that the assumption is pretty accurate. Ross uses the identifiers in reference to Microsoft, Mozilla, Firefox, and Internet Explorer far more than he uses the titles themselves. I would be interested to compare these conference counts to a conference count of a standard conversation as a control in to the assumption.
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While reading this post I decided to go through and substitute the actual word everytime the words that and it were used. If you actually say each sentence out loud when doing this, you realize that it is not simply convenient or shorter to use words such as it, but that it actually sounds extremely strange to say the entire word. We've become so used to talking in this way that it sounds wrong to say a sentence like "Do you know much about Internet Explorer because I want to learn how to use Internet Explorer."
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