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Date: 2015-10-07; view: 453.

deborah tannen: You Just Don't Understand. Wm. Morrow 1990, page 40

A woman was telling me why a long-term relationship had ended. She recounted a recurrent and pivotal conversation. She and the man she lived with had agreed that they would both be free, but they would not do anything to hurt each other. When the man began to sleep with other women, she protested, and he was incensed at her protest. Their conversation went like this:

SHE: How can you do this when you know it's hurting me?

HE: How can you try to limit my freedom?

SHE: But it makes me feel awful.

HE: You are trying to manipulate me.

On one level, this is simply an example of a clash of wills: What he wanted conflicted with what she wanted. But in a fundamental way, it reflects the difference in focus I have been describing. In arguing for his point of view, the key issue for this man was his independence, his freedom of action. The key issue for the woman was their interdependence—how what he did made her feel. He interpreted her insistence on their interdependence as 'manipula­tion': She was using her feelings to control his behavior.

p Do you agree with the analysis presented here? Are there other implicatures possible from what is said in the dialog?

t> We are used to thinking that the term 'cross-cultural' will apply to people from different countries. Is it appropriate to think of the interactions between males and females within one country (sharing a lot of one culture) as a site for the study of cross-cultural pragmatics? What kinds of differences might be worthy of investigation?

114 readings

READINGS 115

SECTION 3