The structural analysis of verbal interaction

This thesis is a study of the structural similarities between language and social behaviour. It is intended to show two things: firstly that a number of social psychological problems can be approached by analysing behaviour sequences in certain ways; and secondly that the study of conversation as an example of this approach reveals a number of interesting features of discourse structure. In particular it suggests that the arrangement of speech acts in sequences to form conversations is like the arrangement of morphemes in sequences to form sentences, so the temporal structure of a conversation (and possibly other forms of social interaction) may be viewed as the manifestation of an underlying language or code.
Chapter 1 outlines the objectives of the study and the models and methods available. It starts with an overview of the traditional perspective of social psychology and the criticisms which have been levelled at it in recent years. It has been suggested for instance, that social psychologists tend to treat stimuli and responses as physical events, without regard for the meaning they convey to the actor; that they use artificial and unrealistic situations for their laboratory experiments; and that the theories they test are too simplistic, and framed at the same level of description as the empirical observations which support them. In contrast the natural sciences have tended to postulate enduring qualities of the systems studied which could not be observed directly, but which gave a economical account of a diversity of observed phenomena. These remarks about the techniques of natural science and social psychology suggest that we should look for some pattern of behaviour during social interactions which may be observed, and from which the more abstract properties of the actor may be inferred. Such a pattern may be found in the sequences of events which make up a conversation.
The study of sequences and structures is more common in other disciplines than in social psychology, so there is a great deal we can learn from analogies with other structural sciences. The resemblance between behaviour sequences and sentences is introduced in chapter 1, and explored in greater detail in later parts of the thesis. Analogies with the study of games, chemical structures and 'systems' are also introduced at this point.
In the final section of chapter 1, a number of methodological issues are discussed;the relative merits of emic and etic techniques; ethical problems which may arise if subjects are deceived or recorded surreptitiously; the limitations of atomistic psychology; the attractions of mechanistic explanations; the need to take account of the creativity which is evident in the actor's behaviour; and the representation of behavioural meaning.
Chapter 2 contains a brief review of work on the structure of conversations under five headings: naturalistic.observation and recording; linguistic analysis; interaction process analysis; simulation; and experimentation (including some laboratory observation and recording). Most of the authors agree that this subject is in its infancy, and while they have contributed substantially to the understanding of social interaction they do not provide a unified model of the structure of discourse. Their work is open to several criticisms. It is often based on an arbitrary classification of the events which are thought to make up an orderly sequence. Structures are often described as Markov chains when in reality they seem to be more complex, and there is little attention to behavioural semantics.
In Chapter 3 the experimental work on conversation begins with four feasibility studies. These are intended to demonstrate that successive utterances are tailored to suit their context, thus generating a non-random sequence of events. This influence of verbal context on utterance choice may be seen when all verbal aspects of the utterances are present, when syntactic 'variations have been controlled, and even when syntactic and semantic features have been removed leaving a string of speech act classes. To show this, subjects were asked to reassemble unfamiliar natural dialogues, given their component utterances in random order. This is possible even when syntactic cues as to the original sequence have been reduced. To show that sequences of conversation consists of non-randon/ sequences of speech act classes(and that subjects can give an accurate account of the nature of this non-randomness) a group o fsubjects was asked to supply intuitive values for a matrix of transitional frequencies in the format used by Bales (e.g. 1953). The subjects' judgements were found to correlate significantly with Bales' data.
Chapter 4 is an examination of particular aspects of the sequential structure of conversation. There are two experiments in which different orders of statistical approximation to conversation are judged for their realism. They show agreement between subjects,an increase in perceived realism as the order of approximation is increased, and an unchanging quality of simulation after the fourth or fifth order of approximation. This suggests that most of the influences on utterance selection are to be found in the immediately preceding three or four utterances. That is not to say that the sequence of events cannot be broken off and resumed, and in another experiment found, in that subjects felt actors more likely to respond to attacks with counter-attacks and concessions with concessions in a dispute, than to respond to attacks with concessions, and concessions with attacks. In the third such experiment subjects judged confession to be a likely sequitur to accusation, and denial to a neutral enquiry about possible guilt, rather than denial as a sequitur to accusation and confession as a sequitur to enquiry. These results are not to be seen as reliable findings, but as methodological examples.
In chapter 5 the 'linguistic analogy' is discussed. There are a number of similarities between language and social behaviour sequences which suggest that the latter could be investigated by the same sort of techniques as the former. Both involve regular sequences of events in which order rather than mere presence or absence of items is of the greatest impotance. Linguistic and behavioural structures may be described by the assignment of events to classes (paradigmatic structure) and the constraints upon the deployment of those classes (syntagmatic structure)). The syntagmatic structure of language or behaviour may be described by a stochastic model in which transitional probabilities between event strings are recorded, or by some kind of non-stochastic or syntactic model. The use of generative models of the sequence of events entails the use of generative rules in linguistics and social psychology. f The relation between the observed course of events, and its implications or meanings also need to be explored whether one is dealing with language or social interaction.
There are methodological implications of the linguistic model of social behaviour as well as conceptual ones. Parametric description of events according to their dimensional properties give way to discrete categorical and taxonomic descriptions. The actor's knowledge of the social world (his communicative competence), which enables him to produce observed behaviour patterns, and the generative rules which correspond to that knowledge, become a focus of attention.
The suitability of linguistic models for work in other disciplines has often been recognised, and a brief acknowledgement is given to workers using similar methods in anthropology and psychology. The linguistic analogy also suggests the form that a programme of structural research should take. First one must investigate surface structure. This raises three issues: the unitisation of the behaviour stream(marking boundaries between discrete behavioural events); the classification of events; and the syntagmatic relations between event classes. When some information about surface structure is available three more issues may be explored: the nature of the semantic relation or 'deep structure' of behaviour and its relation with the surface; the generative process by which the actor arrives at his performance; and the practical consequences of being able to predict the outcome of certain behavioural sequences.
The classification of verbal events as a necessary part of structural analysis is influenced by the work of Austin (1962) and Searle (1965 and 1969) on performative utterances or speech acts.
In chapter 6 the 'surface structure' of discourse is studied according to the programme of research set out in chapter 5. The unitisation of the behaviour stream is discussed and found to be relatively unproblematic when dealing with verbal behaviour, but more difficult when the actor's nonverbal repertoire is involved. A classification of speech acts is attempted using the technique of test-frame analysis.
The results do not show a clear paradigmatic structure, possibly because the constitutive rules of discourse are more sensitive to context than those for language. A theoretical classification is proposed and used in a subsequent sequence analysis. This takes the form of a simulation in which three sets of dialogues were produced: one by random selection of speech act classes; one in accordance with the sequencing rules under test; and one control set produced by a group of subjects. Ratings of well-formedness by a second group of subjects showed the control dialogues to be the most realistic. The rule-governed set were given somewhat lower ratings and the random strings very much lower ratings still. This concludes the analysis of surface structure for the time being, although further work will be required before a definitive model is found.
Chapter 7 is a brief discussion of the concept of deep structure as applied to the linguistic analysis of social behaviour sequences. It appears to be true of both language and social behaviour that systematic arrangements of events carry information to the observer although the string of events and the information inferred from it have no necessary one-to-one correspondence. In some cases any ambiguity may be resolved by relabelling the nature of the events and the relations between them. Such ambiguities are called surface structure ambiguities and depend only on the properties of surface structure. In other cases ambiguities arise wtoich cannot be resolved by redescription of the surface structure. This suggests that each of the semantic representations which may be derived from a single surface structure should be related to a separate (deep) structure.
Chapter 8 contains a brief discussion of two remaining issues arising from the linguistic analogy: the nature of the generative process in vivo by which the actor arrives at his performance, and the possible practical applications of a predictive model of social behaviour sequences in determining the outcome of a crucial course of events. A possible application of generative rules to the description of person and situation interactions in the determination of behaviour is also discussed.