The Parameters of Conversational Style 
Deborah Tannen 
Georgetown University 
There are several dimensions along which verbalization 
responds to context, resulting in individual and social 
differences in conversational style. Style, as I use 
the term, is not something extra added on, like decora- 
tion. Anything that is said must be said in some way; 
co-occurrence expectations of that "way" constitute 
style. The dimensions of style I will discuss are: 
I. Fixity vs. novelty 
2. Cohesiveness vs. expressiveness 
3. Focus on content vs. interpersonal involvement. 
Fixity vs. novelty 
Any utterance or sequence must be identified (rightly or 
wrongly, in terms of interlocuter's intentions) with a 
recognizable frame, as it conforms more or less to a 
familiar pattern. Every utterance and interaction is 
formulaic, or conventionalized, to some degree. There 
is a continuum of formulaicness from utterly fixed 
strings of words (situational formulas: "Happy birth- 
day," "Welcome home," "Gezundheit") and strings of 
events (rituals), to new ideas and acts put together in 
a new way. Of course, the latter does not exist except 
as an idealization. Even the most novel utterance is to 
some extent formulaic, as it must use familiar words 
(witness the absurdity of Humpty Dumpty's assertion that 
when he uses a word it means whatever he wants it to 
mean, and notice that he chooses to exercise this li- 
cense with only one word); syntax (again Lewis Carroll 
is instructive: the "comprehensibility" of Jabberwocky); 
intonation; coherence principles (cf Alton Becker); and 
content (Mills' "vocabularies of motives," e.g.). All 
these are limited by social convention. Familiarity 
with the patterns is necessary for the signalling of 
meaning both as prescribed and agreed upon, and as cued 
by departure from the pattern (cf Hymes). 
For example, a situational formula is a handy way to 
signal familiar meaning, but if the formula is not known 
the meaning may be lost entirely, as when a Greek says 
to an American cook, "Health to your hands." If mean- 
ing is not entirely lost, at least a level of resonance 
is lost, when reference is implicit to a fixed pattern 
which is unfamiliar to the interlocutor. For example, 
when living in Greece and discussing the merits of buy- 
ing an icebox with a Greek Friend, I asked, "Doesn't the 
iceman cometh?" After giggling alone in the face of his 
puzzled look, I ended up feeling I hadn't communicated 
at all. Indeed I hadn't. 
Cohesiveness vs. expressiveness 
This is the basic linguistic concept of markedness and 
is in a sense another facet of the above distinction. 
What is prescribed by the pattern for a given context, 
and what is furnished by the speaker for this instance? 
To what extent is language being used to signal "busi- 
ness as usual," as opposed to signalling, "Hey, look at 
this!" This distinction shows up on every level of 
verbalization too: lexical choice, pitch and amplitude, 
prosody, content, genre, and so on. For example, if 
someone uses an expletive, is this a sign of intense 
anger or is it her/his usual way of talking? If they 
reveal a personal experience or feeling, is that evi- 
dence that you are a special friend, or do they talk 
that way to everybody? Is overlap a way of trying to 
take the floor away from you or is it their way of 
showing interest in what you're saying? Of course, ways 
of signalling special meaning -- expressiveness -- are 
also prescribed by cultural convention, as the work of 
John Gumperz shows. The need to distinguish between 
individual and social differences is thus intertwined 
with the need to distinguish between cohesive and ex- 
pressive intentions. One more example will be presented, 
based on spontaneous conversation taped during Thanks- • 
giving dinner, among native speakers of English from 
different ethnic and geographic backgrounds. 
In responding to stories and comments told by speakers 
from Los Angeles of Anglican/Irish background, speakers 
of New York Jewish background often uttered paralinguis- 
tically gross sounds and phrases ("WHAT!? .... How INTer- 
esting! .... You're KIDding! .... Ewwwwww!"). In this con- 
text, these "exaggerated" responses had the effect of 
stopping conversational flow. In contrast, when similar 
responses were uttered while listening to stories and 
comments by speakers of similar background, they had the 
effect of greasing the conversational wheels, encourag- 
ing conversation. Based on the rhythm and content of 
the speakers' talk, as well as their discussion during 
playback (i.e. listening to the tape afterwards), I 
could hypothesize that for the New Yorkers such "ex- 
pressive" responses are considered business as usual; an 
enthusiasm constraint is operating, whereby a certain 
amount of expressiveness is expected to show interest. 
It is a cohesive device, a conventionally accepted way 
of having conversation. In contrast, such responses 
were unexpected to the Californians and therefore were 
taken by them to signal, "Hold it! There's something 
wrong here." Consequently, they stopped and waited to 
find out what was wrong. Of course such differences 
have interesting implications for the ongoing interac- 
tion, but what is at issue here is the contrast between 
the cohesive and expressive use of the feature. 
Focus on content vs. interpersonal involvement 
Any utterance is at the same time a statementof content 
(Bateson's 'message') and a statement about the rela- 
tionship between interlocutors ('metamessage'). In 
other words, there is what I am saying, but also what it 
means that I am saying this in this way to this person 
at this time. In interaction, talk can recognize, more 
or less explicitly and more or less emphatically (these 
are different), the involvement between interlocutors. 
It has been suggested that the notion that meaning can 
stand alone, that only content is going on, is associa- 
ted with literacy, with printed text. But certainly 
relative focus on content or on interpersonal involve- 
ment can be found in either written or spoken Form. I 
suspect, for example, that one of the reasons many people 
find interaction at scholarly conferences difficult and 
stressful is the conventional recognition of only the 
content level, whereas in fact there is a lot of involve- 
merit among people and between the people and the content. 
Whereas the asking of a question following a paper is 
conventionally a matter of exchange of information, in 
fact it is also a matter of presentation of self, as 
Goffman has demonstrated for all forms of behavior. 
A reverse, phenomenon has been articulated by Gall Drey- 
fuss. The reason many people feel uncomfortable, if not 
scornful, about encounter group talk and "psychobabble" 
is that it makes explicit information about relation- 
ships which people are used to signalling on the meta 
level. 
Relative focus on content gives rise to what Kay (1977) 
calls "autonomous" language, wherein maximal meaning is 
encoded lexically, as opposed to signalling it through 
use of paralinguistic and nonlinguistic channels, and 
wherein maximal background information is furnished, as 
opposed to assuming it is already known as a consequence 
of sharedexperience. Of course this is an idealization 
as well, as no meaning at all could be communicated if 
39 
there were no common experience, as Fillmore (197g) 
amply demonstrates. It ~s crucial, then, to know the 
operative conventions. As much of my own early work 
shows, a hint {i.e. indirect communication) can be miss- 
ed if a listener is unaware that the speaker defines the 
context as one in which hints are appropriate. What is 
intended as relatively direct communication can be ta- 
ken to mean f r more, or simply other, than what is 
meanS if the listener is unaware that the speaker de- 
fines the context as one'in which hints are inappropri- 
ate. A common example seems to be communication between 
intimates in which one partner, typically the female, 
assumes, "We know each other so well that you will know 
what I mean without my saying it outright; all I need do 
is hint"; while the other partner, typically the male, 
assumes, "We know each other so well that you will tell 
me what you want." 
Furthermore, there are various ways of honoring inter- 
~ersonal involvement, as service of two overriding hu- 
man goals. These have been called, by Brown and Levin- 
son (1978}, positive and negative politeness, building 
on R. Lakoff's stylistic continuum from camaraderie to 
distance (1973) and Goffman's presentational and avoid- 
ance rituals (1967). These and other schemata recog- 
nize the universal human needs to l) be connected to 
other people and 2) be left alone. Put another way, 
there are universal, simultaneous, and conflicting hu- 
man needs for community and independence. 
Linguistic choices reflect service of one or the other 
of these needs in various ways. The paralinguistically 
gross listener responses mentioned above are features in 
an array of devices which I have hypothesized place the 
signalling load (Gumperz' term) on the need for commu- 
nity. Other features co-occurring in the speech of many 
speakers of this style include fast rate of speech; fast 
turn-taking; preference for simultaneous speech; ten- 
dency to introduce new topics without testing the con- 
versational waters through hesitation and other signals; 
persistence in introducing topics not picked up by oth- 
ers; storytelling; preference for stories told about 
personal experience and revealing emotional reaction of 
teller;'talk about personal matters; overstatement for 
effect. (All of these features surfaced in the setting 
of a casual conversation at dinner; it would be pre- 
mature to generalize for other settings). These and 
other features of the speech of the New Yorkers some- 
times struck the Californians present as imposing, hence 
failing to honor their need for independence. The use 
of contrasting devices by the Californians led to the 
impression on some of the New Yorkers that they were 
deficient in honoring the need for community. Of course 
the underlying goals were not conceptualized by partici- 
pants at the time. What was perceived was sensed as 
personality characteristics: "They're dominating," and 
"They're cold." Conversely, when style was shared, the 
conclusion was, "They're nice." 
Perhaps many of these stylistic differences come down to 
differing attitudes toward silence. I suggest that the 
fast-talking style I have characterized above grows out 
of a desire to avoid silence, which has a negative value. 
Put another way, the unmarked meaning of silence, in 
this system, is evidence of lack of rapport. To other 
speakers -- for example, Athabaskan Indians, according 
to Basso (1972) and Scollon (1980) -- the unmarked mean- 
ing of silence is positive. 
Individual and social differences 
All of these parameters are intended to suggest pro- 
cesses that operate in signalling meaning in conversa- 
tion. Analys'is of cross-cultural differences is useful 
to make apparent processes that go unnoticed when sig- 
nalling systems are shared. 
An obvious question, one that has been indirectly 
addressed throughout the present discussion, confronts 
the distinction between individual and cultural differ- 
ences. We need to know, for the understanding of our 
own lives as much as for our theoretical understanding 
of discourse, how much of any speaker's style -- the 
linguistic and paralinguistic devices signal)ing meaning 
-- are prescribed by the culture, and which are chosen 
freely. The answer to this seems to resemble, one level 
further removed, the distinction between cohesive vs. 
expressive features. The answer, furthermore, must lie 
somewhere between fixity and novelty -- a matter of 
choices among alternatives offered by cultural convention. 
References 
Basso, K. 1972. To give up on words: Silence in Western 
Apache culture, in P.P. Giglioli, ed., Language in 
social context. Penguin. 
Brown, P. & S. Levinson. 1978. Universals in language 
usage: Politeness phenomena, in E. Goody, ed., Ques- 
tions and politeness. Cambridge. 
Fillmore, C. 1979. Innocence: A second idealization for 
linguistics, Proceedings of the fifth annual meeting 
of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 
Goffmen, E. 1967. Interaction rttual. Doubleday. 
Kay, P. 1977. Language evolution and speech style, in B. 
Blount & M. Sanches, eds., Sociocultural dimensions of 
language change. NY: Academic. 
Lakoff, R. 1973. The logic of politeness, or minding 
your p's and q's. Papers from the ninth regional 
meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. 
Scollon, R. 1980. The machine stops: Silence in the 
metaphor of malfunction. Paper prepared for the A~er- 
ican Anthropological Association annual meeting. 
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