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księżycowy wrote:Speaking of social skills, it's a bit off putting to read "you people" in your posts. It would soften the feel of your messages to simply said "you". There are other solutions too.
księżycowy wrote:It's a tone thing. It implies a separation between the speaker and the listeners, and implies a superiority on the part of the speaker. I'm not saying this was your intention, but that's how it sounds to this native speaker.
księżycowy wrote:It's a tone thing. It implies a separation between the speaker and the listeners, and implies a superiority on the part of the speaker. I'm not saying this was your intention, but that's how it sounds to this native speaker.
linguoboy wrote:księżycowy wrote:It's a tone thing. It implies a separation between the speaker and the listeners, and implies a superiority on the part of the speaker. I'm not saying this was your intention, but that's how it sounds to this native speaker.
In the American South, this has racial overtones. My Maryland-born father cringed every time my Bronx-born stepmother said "you people" to the staff at their resort in Virginia. Like SGP's, her dialect lacks an explicit plural like y'all or you guys and she was just trying to express her gratitude to all the staff when speaking to a single representative. But what it sounded like to him (and quite likely some of the Black staff members as well) was "you Black people".
linguoboy wrote:SomewhatGeeky, are you familiar with Gricean maxims? These represent an attempt to capture as succinctly as possible some of the factors at play in these situations.
SomehowGeekyPolyglot wrote:Could you also tell me (and this is a fully On Topic Question here) what my exact dialect would be?
linguoboy wrote:SomehowGeekyPolyglot wrote:Could you also tell me (and this is a fully On Topic Question here) what my exact dialect would be?
Non-native English?
linguoboy wrote:From reading your posts I get the impression of a European aiming for colloquial General American. A couple of the interference errors (e.g. "after I would post something") are clues to the fact that your native variety is German, but only to someone familiar with the language.
SomehowGeekyPolyglot wrote:In case you would also like to mention the Germanism that snuck in, you could do so, if you wanted.
linguoboy wrote:SomehowGeekyPolyglot wrote:In case you would also like to mention the Germanism that snuck in, you could do so, if you wanted.
I just did!
I that context we would use the simple past, not the conditional.
linguoboy wrote:I would say that the single greatest cause of misunderstandings that I've observed is the sender assuming the recipient has access to the same context for their message that they do.
As Grice and others have observed, humans are masterful at drawing complex conclusions from very limited information.
This can easily go awry, however, sometimes catastrophically so. I've witnessed (and participated in) entire conversations where one participant had a different idea of the subject of discussion (whether it be a person, a situation, a political topic, etc.) than the other.
Because there's so much underspecification in each utterance, it's easy for the recipient to come up with an interpretation which fits their understood context even if it means rationalising away apparent inconsistencies.
My older brother, for instance, has a tendency to free associate during conversations. Sometimes it's very obvious that he's changing the subject and other times it's more ambiguous and the recipients struggle to find some way of connecting his latest contribution to the rest of the conversation when really the connexion is just a very personal association in his mind.
On the other hand, I have several friends who can be very literal-minded and struggle with indirectness. They don't necessarily make the inferences I anticipate they will, and this can be frustrating in its own way. One, for instance, never assumes he's being invited to attend an event unless you explicitly say so. So just saying, e.g. "It'd be nice to have some company" isn't enough for him to assume that it's his company you're speaking of.
SomehowGeekyPolyglot wrote:And... could you tell me why this thread from its very start created much more input than I expected?
SomehowGeekyPolyglot wrote:This can easily go awry, however, sometimes catastrophically so. I've witnessed (and participated in) entire conversations where one participant had a different idea of the subject of discussion (whether it be a person, a situation, a political topic, etc.) than the other.
Not entirely sure if I got that one right. Is is about thinking one person that the discussion is about, e.g., Donald Trump while the other one was thinking of Barack Obama?
SomehowGeekyPolyglot wrote:Now this is about the "modularity" of words, i.e. considering each word a module that first and foremost means nothing beyond its very own meaning on its own. (I don't disagree, because this is how languages work. The opposite would be something like the Humpty Dumpty Principle in case you ever heard about it. But it is of course of utmost importance to also look at the result of these word's combination).
linguoboy wrote:SomehowGeekyPolyglot wrote:And... could you tell me why this thread from its very start created much more input than I expected?
I doubt it.
linguoboy wrote:Last weekend there was a massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. It was all over the news here in Chicago and people were talking about it on social media, so when I messaged a friend living near Pittsburgh, I took for granted that he'd heard about it. He hadn't, though, since he'd only just gotten up. But he tried to find a referent for "that synagogue" and seized on the nearest thing to hand, which was a video I'd sent him previously. He figured the video (which he hadn't watched) must include footage of a synagogue. This made his responses seem a little odd to me, but then again, I had no reason to think that he hadn't heard about the shooting or to think that if he hadn't, he wouldn't just ask "What synagogue?" instead of assuming he knew.
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