On What We Owe in Attention

Journal of Philosophical Research, 2022

Attention is a finite, morally significant good. Attention is a precondition for healthy human relationships, and its absence can wrong others by cutting them off from vital human goods. At the same time, human persons have limited powers of attention. And so the question arises, when does someone legitimately command my attention? In Conversational Pressure (2020), Sanford Goldberg argues that the competent speaker has a default entitlement to normatively expect the addressee to attend, even if only for a short while. If the addressee fails to attend, the speaker is wronged. I argue that the conditions under which attention is owed to another are more restricted than Goldberg allows, and are sensitive to context and standing.

2008

The Philosophy of (Im)politeness

This chapter attempts to outline a philosophical view of (im)politeness that connects (im)politeness phenomena to either acknowledging or disregarding the other’s subjectivity. After briefly illustrating the speech-act theoretical framework in which my approach is contextualized, I consider why and how the illocutionary force of utterances contributes to eliciting (im)politeness evaluations and I discuss the relationship between implicitness and (im)politeness. I then focus on the three rules of politeness put forward by Robin Lakoff (1973). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.) and, showing how they connect to different layers in the recognition of the other’s subjectivity, I outline a view of (im)politeness phenomena, suggesting that they have an ethical basis that finds expression in different ways, depending on the layer of subjectivity that is in focus. After discussing some counterexamples to this view, I conclude by considering the widespread complaints about the rise of impoliteness in contemporary society and suggest that, while certain cases can be explained away by invoking shifts in evaluation criteria, some concerns regarding the ethical basis of (im)politeness have some reason to exist.

Journal of Pragmatics, 1997

This article explores the realization, distribution and function of what I shall call 'attention-getting devices' in English and Spanish conversations. While it is probable that both languages use some linguistic mechanisms to draw the attention of the interactant to the message that is being transmitted, it may be the case that the elements used to realize this function, as well as their distribution and use, are specific to each language. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to make a comparative analysis of this phenomenon in order to obtain a clearer picture of the behavior of the attention-getting elements in English and Spanish conversation.

2010

Native-English speakers generally appreciate a certain amount of supportive feedback from their listeners. However, occasionally, a positive listener response actually causes the speaker to become threatened and revert to floor-saving measures. Speakers whose first language is not English may be at a disadvantage when involved in interactions with native-English speakers because they may not be equipped with the tools to exercise conversational power, if they wish to do so. Consequently, with the goal of creating educational materials that can be easily used in English Language Teaching (ELT), this thesis examines instances of listener support which are not appreciated by the speaker. For my corpus, I pulled 69 conversations from a popular American reality TV show, The Real World. These conversations were selected because of the presence of floor-saving strategies in the wake of seemingly benign listener commentary. I adopt a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach with multimodal elements aimed at exploring issues of power in the struggle for conversational dominance inherent in the act of listener talk and speaker rejection of this support. These issues were exposed when I I want to express my gratitude to those who have supported and helped me as I worked on this thesis. First, thanks to my parents for instilling in me a thirst for education. In addition, I need to acknowledge the important contribution many of my students have made to the materials I have created as a result of this research. They were my inspiration, as well as my enthusiastic guinea pigs. I would also like to thank my supervisor, Dr. David Hyatt, for his support and valuable feedback. Finally, thanks to my wonderful husband. Without his encouragement and innovative distractions, I would not have been able to finish this project.

2012

Journal of Pragmatics, 2024

This paper is concerned with the organization of responses to informings. Using Conversation Analysis, it will show that different receipting practices, including both embodied and vocal ones, display differences in scope in response to informings. With these differences in scope, recipients of informings can signal to the informing party that they receipted either the just preceding part of the informing or the entire informing. The positions of these practices follow a typology of four dimensions: embodied vs. vocal, token vs. phrasal, semantically empty vs. semantically filled and rising vs. falling intonation. When an informing is receipted by different practices of these pairs, the first type will be used for small-scope recipiency while the second type will be used for large scope. This organization of receipting practices illustrates how participants in informing sequences can negotiate the completeness of the informing and the state of informedness of the recipient.

2022

where she is a member of PEriTiA (Horizon 2020). She is co-editor of The Murdochian Mind (Routledge 2022) and has co-edited and co-translated Simone Weil's Venice Saved (Bloomsbury 2019). This book draws on Iris Murdoch's philosophy to explore questions related to the importance of attention in ethics. In doing so, it also engages with Murdoch's ideas about the existence of a moral reality, the importance of love, and the necessity but also the difficulty, for most of us, of fighting against our natural self-centred tendencies. Why is attention important to morality? This book argues that many moral failures and moral achievements can be explained by attention. Not only our actions and choices, but the possibilities we choose among, and even the meaning of what we perceive, are to a large extent determined by whether we pay attention, and what we attend do. In this way, the book argues that attention is fundamental, though often overlooked, in morality. While the book's discussion of attention revolves primarily around Murdoch's thought, it also engages significantly with Simone Weil, who introduced the concept of attention in a spiritual context. The book also engages with contemporary debates concerning moral perception and motivation, empirical psychology, animal ethics, and Buddhist philosophy. Introduction This book In this book I propose an 'ethics of attention': a meta ethical and normative view that takes attention to be central. My claim in this book is that attention is fundamental to morality. It returns the experience of a reality from which distraction, defenses, or projection separate us. That, in itself, makes us better, more open and less self-concerned. Every time, often imperceptibly, attention shapes us and our world. It constitutes the

“For communication to succeed, speakers must be cooperative, in that they must cater features of their utterances to the needs of their addressees”(Ferreira et al 2005); whereas addressees must be attentive, in that they must tolerate features of their utterance to the needs of their speakers. By definition, speakers are supposed to produce well-designed utterances by expressively considering the alleged common knowledge they assume to be shared with addressees. In actuality, however, speakers often take into account of their own knowledge, in that their behavior is egocentric on the first stage of interaction to the extent that it is anchored to their own knowledge rather than to mutual knowledge (Keysar 2007; Colston 2008; Kescskes 2007). Usually, despite the threat of speakers’ egocentricity, addressees are able to return well-designed utterances to the egocentric speakers via such strategies as question-answer, confirmation, and organization of repair inter alia (cf. Schegloff 1987). On the next phase of interaction, the addressees’ behavior is conducted, based on ‘epistemic vigilance’ – “the capacity to defend oneself against being accidentally or intentionally misinformed by communicators” (Sperber et al. 2010). In the face of the threat, speakers and addressees are at a loss to understand each other on the one hand, and achieve mutual understanding on the other, by making joint utterances. In the first part of this paper, I will briefly address the question of how interactants are misinformed by overconfidence (i.e., illusion of transparency)—“a tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by others” (Colston ; Okamoto 2010) on the first stage of interaction, are corrected by such fillers as eh- /huh-initiated-repairs, and are led to corrections of the content of the tagetetd sentences on the final stage. I maintain that the flow of misinformed utterance is initiated by speakers’ undergeneration of what they have to convey, in which case it is required that there should be “a balance between two forces: a speaker's desire for economy and an auditor's need for sufficient information” (Levinson 2000); hence speakers’ overgenerated egocentricity and addressees’ overreacted epistemic vigilance. In the main part of the paper, I will be focused on how people jointly make utterances, using such co-constructed forms as split utterances, reformation or confirmation of the first speaker’s words, that means/you mean-initiated utterances by the second speaker, etc. The main claim of the paper is that similar strategies to the misinformed utterances are developed for jointly made utterances, but such strategies are accounted for in terms of speakers’ egocentricity and addressees’ epistemic vigilance, even in the most cooperative co-constructed forms of utterances. On the face of it, there is no need to take into account of the two opposed notions of speakers’ and addressees’ mental states, but the need for the two is evidenced by a rather long speaker’s intentional pause to encourage addressees to join her utterance when they split them (egocentricity) and an abrupt interruption or overlapping by addressees when they reform or rephrase the other’s words (epistemic vigilance). Selected References Colston, H.L. (2008) “A new look at common ground: Memory, egocentricism, and joint meaning.” I. Kecskes and J. Mey (eds.) Intention, common ground and the egocentric speaker-hearer. pp. 151-188. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Victor S. Ferreira, V.S., et al (2005) “How do speakers avoid ambiguous linguistic expressions?” Cognition 96, 263–284. Kecskes, I. and F. Zhang (2009) “Activating, seeking, and creating common ground: A socio-cognitive approach.” Pragmatics & Cognition 17:2, 331-255. Keysar, B. 2007. “Communication and miscommunication: The role of egocentric processes”. Intercultural Pragmatics 4, 71–84. Haugh, M. (2008) “The place of intention in the interactional achievement of implicature”. I. Kecskes and J. Mey (eds.) Intention, common ground and the egocentric speaker-hearer. pp. 45-85. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Horton, S. W. (2008) “A memory-based approach to common ground and audience design.” I. Kecskes and J. Mey (eds.) Intention, common ground and the egocentric speaker-hearer. pp. 189-222. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Levinson, S.C. (2000) Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalied conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press. Okamoto, Sin-ichiro (2010) Socio-psychology of Language(Kotoba no Shakai Shinrigaku). Tokyo: Nakanishiya. Sperber, D. et al. (2010) “Epistemic vigilance.” Mind and Language, 25, 359–393