written by Tomaž Potočnik (UCL), recipient of a travel and fieldwork bursary from the Philological Society

This year, I travelled to Chicago for the Annual Meeting of the Society of Classical Studies, where I read my paper as part of the Greek and Latin Linguistics panel. While reading a paper in front of academics is the main reason to travel to a conference abroad, it is also a chance to experience a new city. I was just as eager to get a feel of the Windy City, to see whether it really is that windy (it is!) and whether that deep-dish Chicago pizza lives up to the hype (it does!).

After spending four years on my PhD thesis, I was anxious to get some feedback on my brand-new project—the interactional aspects of vagueness in Latin. Contrary to what we have been told in elementary school, vagueness is a desirable feature of human communication. Vagueness is, in fact, a part of the speaker’s communicative competence and knowing how to interpret vague expressions is a central feature of everyday conversation (Jucker et al. 2003: 1738). Since this is to some extent true for every language (case studies are accumulating), then it must have been true in Latin as well. The aim of my project, in the wider sense, is to see to what communicative ends vagueness strategies have been used by Latin authors: by Cicero in his letters, by Petronius in his linguistic depiction of different classes of society, and, of course, Plautus and Terence, in their imitations of conversation in Latin.

For the paper I read in Chicago, I focussed on one specific type of vague expressions: placeholders or dummy phrases—the Latin counterparts of words like stuff, business, thingy, and, in the right context, shit! While it is hard to say what the Latin word for stuff was, I discussed examples such as the following one where Olympio is muttering something to himself. When he sees Chalinus, his rival, following him around, Olympio bursts out:

• non mihi licere meam rem me solum, ut uolo, loqui atque cogitare sine ted arbitro?
  ‘I am not going to be allowed to talk and think about my own thing alone, as I please, without you looking over my shoulder?’ (Plautus, Casina 89–90; my free translation)

The speaker’s motivation to use rem is that he does not know how else to describe it—when you are muttering to yourself, thinking you are alone, and someone catches you, it is very hard to find a succinct way to describe what you were doing—in part because it may be quite embarrassing.

The question I was interested in was: Why do placeholders in conversation not interrupt the flow of conversation, since the speaker, semantically, has so little to go on? Why did Chalinus, for instance, not ask: “What thing?”

Part of the answer is that in natural communication, the precise referent assignment—knowing what is meant by each single word—is not a priority; in accordance with the principle of minimising collaborative effort (Clark 1986), both co-interactants exercise a certain degree of tolerance and are willing to sacrifice precise understanding for a higher ideal: that the conversation proceed to the next move as soon as possible—to maintain the flow of the conversation. If it turns out that precise understanding is essential, a speaker always has the option to ask for clarification. This suggests that placeholders, rather than hindering the flow of conversation, actually help to maintain it. This is made possible by rules on conversation structure which all (or most) speakers are implicitly familiar with. It is, ultimately, a manifestation of the fact that conversation is the primordial building block of society (Schegloff 1996: 54)—it is a socially motivated act, whose aim is rarely, if ever, limited to exchange of information.

As I continue working on the project on vagueness, I am grateful to the Philological Society’s Travel and Fieldwork Bursaries program, which enabled me to travel to Chicago and share this work with colleagues from the States—and, after the conference, to enjoy the blues scene that Chicago has to offer and to recreate that iconic scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), where Ferris, Sloane, and Cameron head up to the Sears Tower and lean on the glass panes to get a bird’s view of the city…

References

Clark, Herbert H., Wilkes-Gibbs, Deanna, 1986. Referring as a collaborative process. In: Clark, Herbert H. (Ed.), Arenas of Language Use. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 107–143.

Jucker, A., S. Smith and T. Lüdge. 2003. ‘Interactive aspects of vagueness in conversation.’ Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1737–1769.

Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996. Turn organization: one intersection of grammar and interaction. In: Ochs et al., eds. Interaction and Grammar. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press. 52-133.