Maroc - NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - Hier 07:34

Talk, talk, talk

The widely reported state events in the US, so far, this year have provided perfect examples of the variety of human-linguistic interactions. Phatic communion is a good place to start. Phatic communion is how we communicate and interact with one another in social situations or upon encountering strangers. The term was coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in his 1923 essay The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages and made popular by the well-known linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky. It simply describes language that conveys no real information or meaning – empty words, so to speak. We like this sort of communication in TT. Many people, on entering a room, say “Good morning," very loudly, and expect a response. If none comes back, they repeat the greeting, often in a louder voice. We are generally very sociable people and we have a good line in phatic non-talk. For example, when someone asks, “How yuh going?” we might answer, “I there” or “poke-a-poke” or even, “I good, man” or some saucy limer’s joke might ensue. The question is not really sincere; nor is the reply. You might have a terrible pain or have just lost your partner or mother, but you know the other person would not really care to know that. The answer to “How are you?” must always be positive. That is clear from all the stock phrases taught in all the different foreign-language courses. The last thing other people are interested in is your woes. And to say how terrible you really felt would be breaking social convention, unless, of course, the person is someone close to you who is enquiring about something particular. We practise this sort of communication so automatically that we are hardly aware of it. I have experimented on various occasions with giving a truthful answer to a phatic enquiry and the other person usually feels awkward and changes the subject. The weather is a much safer source of phatic communion, as a rule. At the recent funeral of President Jimmy Carter, the world’s media were intrigued by President Obama and then President-elect Trump sitting together and being quite amicable with each other as other mourners took their seats. President Obama nodded and grinned and seemed to genuinely engage with the man who had concocted outrageous stories of his being an alien and called him an ineffective president and his wife Michelle “nasty.” For his part, Obama has traded insults for years, often making Trump the butt of his jokes. The two men had moved beyond phatic communion to engage in another form of human interaction that involves language: dissembling, which is concealing or disguising our true thoughts or emotions. Voters often fret about the palliness between opposition politicians outside the Parliament. Truth be told, they are not real pals and may be wary of one another, but they understand the need to observe codes of conduct. Dissembling is not quite the same as telling a lie, which is to tell untruths with the intention also to deceive. It is more about pretending, as both Obama and Trump did so well at the funeral. While dissembling, a person might tell none or all of the truth, an art Shakespeare perfected in his plays. President Trump is not a dissembler. A dissembler might understate things, while Trump exaggerates everything, good and bad. Four former presidents had to sit at his inauguration last week and hear what terrible presidents they had been and that Trump was and will be the greatest ever. He also misrepresents the truth. It is hard to know, though, if he believes those misrepresentations to be true. They certainly are not white lies, which are intended to avoid hurting feelings and to oil the wheels of human interaction, but not to deceive. President Trump has been a very successful salesman and excels at using language as a powerful tool in cutting deals and putting people on the back foot – “You’re fired” being among the best known. It is not how most politicians use language, nor is it accepted political discourse, which is partly why the leader of our opposition party, Mrs Persad-Bissessar, was summarily castigated for imitating Trump and being unwisely forthright in her criticisms of ex-president Biden’s administration. Hostile criticism is rare in diplomacy, as it is in literary criticism. There are well-established ways of criticising that avoid offending and they always include some dissembling. I found online a sourced analysis of the linguistic devices most used by President Trump. They include: hyperbole, repetition and intensifiers; directness; sentence fragments; digressions and segues; grade level; and sales talk. It concludes that if you combine his salesman experience with his contempt for old rules of statesmanship in oratory and his popularity, you get a new hapless brand of presidential oratory that is unsophisticated linguistically – but wins elections. The post Talk, talk, talk appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.