Expression of surprise in modern English

 

     CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….3 

PART ONE. SURPRISE AS A FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN EMOTION……………………………………………………………......…………...5 

PART TWO. SURPRISE TOKENS…………………………....……………….……7 

     2.1. Surprise as a display of (sub)cultural and category memberships…...…..10

     2.2. Surprise as a vehicle for other actions………………………………...….12

     2.3. Surprise as an alternative to other actions……………………………......13 

CONCLUSIONS..…………………………………………………………………...15 

REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………...17 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

INTRODUCTION 

     The interpretation of human’s emotional states and feelings, as a special form of the reflection of reality, is generally adopted. There is a great number of the shades of these states. Unfortunately, language doesn’t have enough number of words to transmit all possible shades of these feelings. Exploration of emotional speech is an actual and insufficiently studied problem in contemporary linguistics. The great number of different opinions about including emotionality into the sphere of linguistic analysis, the absence of systemic description of its characteristics explain such situation. That is why the description of the linguistic means of expressing emotions is extremely actual in modern English.

     Some studies, which throw light upon the problem of the means of expressing surprise in English appeared during last few years. Such scientists  as E. Goffman, V. Shakhovskyi, V. Demyankov, S. Murzambekova, M. Mykhaylivs’ka and others have made their contribution into the researching of this problem.

     The expression of surprise — at something unexpected — is a key form of emotional display. Focusing on displays of surprise performed by means of reaction tokens (akin to Goffman’s “response cries”), such as wow, gosh, oh my god, ooh!, phew, we use an ethnomethodological, conversation-analytic approach to analyze surprise in talk-in-interaction.

     The key contribution of the work is to detach the psychology of surprise from its social expression by showing how co-conversationalists collaborate to bring off an interactionally achieved performance of surprise. Far from being a visceral eruption of emotion, the production of a surprise token is often prepared for several turns in advance. We also show how surprise can be recycled on an occasion subsequent to its initial production, and how surprise displays may be delayed by silence, ritualized disbelief, and other repair initiations. Finally, we consider some of the uses of surprise as an interactional resource, including its role in the reflection and reproduction of culture

     Urgency of the research is determined by the lack of studying about the peculiarities of the representation of surprise in English on the levels of vocabulary, phraseology and syntax.

      Current research is devoted to the establishment of functional peculiarities of expressing surprise in English on three levels: lexical, phraseological and syntactical. The functional aspect of studying linguistic means assumes the researching of their real functioning, causing the uniting of the linguistic units, with a glance to their functions in the text, into one functional-semantic system.

     The research reported here contributes to the interactional tradition, building specifically upon the work of Goffman (1978). 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

     PART ONE. SURPRISE AS A FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN EMOTION 

     Surprise — the emotion experienced when encountering “unexpectedness” or “expectancy violations” — is commonly regarded as a fundamental human emotion. Like other “basic” or “primary” emotions — happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust — it is typically inferred from characteristic facial expressions, bodily postures, and vocalizations (Tomkins, 1962). Raised eyebrows, open mouth, upflung hands, and gasps and exclamations are common expressions or displays of surprise.

     Social psychologists typically have theorized such displays with reference to one or the other of two distinctive frameworks, sometimes called “organismic” and “interactional” (Hochschild, 1979). In organismic approaches, rooted in Darwin’s classic evolutionary theory (1892), emotion is understood as fundamentally biological, and displays of emotion are seen as inadvertent manifestations of individual bodily processes. For Darwin, emotions are innate and instinctual physiological responses with functional significance; emotion displays are designed in the first instance not to communicate emotions but to serve adaptive purposes. According to Darwin, expressions of surprise, graduating into “astonishment” and thence to “stupefied amazement”, originate in the biology of the “startle” response (although some subsequent researchers have argued that the startle response is more reflex than emotion). In Darwin’s classic account, in the face of an unexpected event or a violated expectation, raised eyebrows enable “the eyes to be opened quickly and widely” and the “open mouth of a man stupefied with amazement” is “so as to draw a deep and rapid inspiration”. The vocalizations characteristic of surprise (“a deep oh” or “a blowing, hissing, or whistling noise” such as “whew” are a consequence of position of the mouth in interaction with the timing of expiration. Organismic approaches, then, conceptualize emotion as “unbidden and uncontrollable” (Hochschild, 1979); emotion displays are viewed as “visceral” eruptions, the involuntary overflowing of internal states. Emotional expression is not considered to be intentional or primarily communicative (although a “signaling” function is clearly adaptive in evolutionary terms). Rather, it is a by-product of physiological responses within the individual.

     Goffman theorized the interactional uses of the visceral understanding of emotion in his important paper on “response cries”: “exclamatory imprecations” (p. 798), which function as “exuded expressions, not intentionally sent messages” (p. 800). Akin to (some kinds of) emotional display, response cries are “a form of behavior whose very meaning is that it is something blurted out, something that has escaped control” (p. 799): they include pain cries (ow, ouch), “spill cries” (oops, whoops), revulsion sounds (eeuw), surprise sounds (eek, yipe), and lexicalized items drawn from religion (hell, heavens) and taboo domains of bodily function (shit, fuck).

     According to Goffman, social members understand response cries as visceral eruption of spontaneous emotions: “a natural overflowing, a flooding up of previously contained feeling, a bursting of normal constraints, a case of being caught off-guard” (p. 800). Regardless of their lexical (or paralexical) identities, what these response cries have in common is that they “externalize a presumed inward state” and convey the sense of having been blurted out spontaneously, the involuntary exuding of a psychological state rather than an intentional piece of communication. Goffman claimed, but did not provide systematic data analysis to demonstrate, that these apparently “blurted out” imprecations are fundamentally interactional events, “creatures of social situations” (p. 814). He made various provocative suggestions as to how response cries might work socially, but without analyzing any actual instances of their use.

     Expressions of surprise conveyed through surprise tokens (o:::h!, wow, golly,

and so on) are not involuntary spontaneous emotional eruptions but interactionally organized performances. It means, that surprise is an interactional achievement. 
 
 
 
 

     PART TWO. SURPRISE TOKENS 

     People display surprise in many ways other than producing surprise tokens, including prosodic marking on questions and repeats of prior turns, facial expression, andgesture and body deployment (C. Goodwin 2000). Nonetheless, people can and do display surprise, and are understood by co-interactants to be doing so, even when they are not visible to one another (as in the telephone conversations that constitute the majority of our data), using only surprise tokens. Although we are not claiming, then, to be documenting the range and variety of ways in which human beings display surprise to one another, we provide detailed analysis of one such means of display.

     It so happens that a wide array of different reaction tokens was used in our data set to display surprise, including wow, gee, gosh, jesus christ, my goodness, oh my word, oo:h!, oh:!, good gracious, oh my god, oh shit, blimey, and nonlexical tokens such as whistles and gasps. The lexical (and paralexical) items used to perform surprise also can be, and are, used to perform very different reactions.

     In our data set, for example, (oh) (my) god is analyzably deployed to perform, in addition to surprise, disgust and sympathetic dismay. Another way of putting this is to say that reaction tokens are both context-free and context-dependent: a single reaction token can be used flexibly across many different contexts. The particular reaction it performs on any given occasion depends upon the deployment and calibration of prosodic features and upon its local sequential context. Specific reaction tokens are selected in part with reference to vernacular poetics and in part to display both the extent of the surprise (from mild puzzlement to deep shock) and its valence (from very positive to very negative), such that particular combinations of lexical and prosodic usage convey anything from awed amazement to horrified disbelief, from delighted astonishment to carefully neutral surprise (Bollinger, 1985).

     In English, intonation makes an independent contribution to the meaning of an utterance. Early work focusing on the prosody of surprise suggested that pitch register, pitch movement, and relative volume were characteristic of “surprised” utterances, especially a rise-fall (Roach, 1983) or rise-fall-rise (Bollinger, 1989) intonational contour. Evidence in support of these early (and many subsequent) claims, however, has relied on analysts’ intuitions, remembered overhearings, and inormants’ judgments about scripted dialogues in laboratory settings (for example, Levis, 2002). We know of only two phonetic analyses of surprise based on empirical analysis of actual talk-in-interaction (Local 1996; Selting 1996; also see Freese and Maynard 1998, whose analysis of the prosodic features of news delivery includes surprise).

     Prosody does not operate independently of its local interactional, lexical, and sequential environment. Their contribution to conversation analysis (CA) is to describe some of the features of prosodic marking without which some of the ways in which speakers perform surprise would not be hearable as such, even with their local environment otherwise fully accounted for. Nonlexical reaction tokens (such as oh), are constituted as surprise reaction tokens largely through being “punched up” prosodically (represented in conventional CA transcription notations as, for example, O↑:::h!).

     Our collection of surprise tokens, then, consists of that subset of items, from our larger collection of reaction tokens, which register the unexpectedness of information conveyed in a prior turn at talk (whether the unexpectedness is valenced positively, neutrally, or negatively). As such, surprise tokens are differentiated from:

     Reaction tokens performing emotions other than surprise (such as disgust, pleasure, or sympathy);

     “Oh” as a simple news receipt;

     Other vocalized ways of conveying surprise that are not “tokens”: for example,

newsmarks and news receipts initiating new sequences (“Did he really?!,” “You’re kidding,”); claims to be surprised (“I am surprised at that”); and assessments of events as surprising (“That’s amazing,” see fragment 3 below). As we will see, these other methods of conveying surprise often occur in the same environment as surprise tokens, and to some extent shade into them at the edges of our collection. Nonetheless, as we will show, these tokens constitute a distinctive set of practices that perform surprise (instead of merely claiming it) and do so in an as-if-visceral way.

     Production of surprise is a powerful interactional resource for social members. In particular, we show how the expression of surprise is a resource for displaying cultural and category memberships; how it acts as a vehicle for performing other actions (such as apologies and justifications); and how it may be used to defer, or even to displace, other actions. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

     2.1. Surprise as a display of (sub)cultural and category memberships 

     “In talk about the world, speakers show whether or not they share one” (Moerman, 1988). Surprise is one resource for doing just that: it provides a basis for displaying cultural, subcultural, and category memberships. Consensual surprise displays define a normative world, and thereby produce interactants as co-members (or not) of that world and cocategory members (or not) within it. Surprise is shaped with reference to social judgments about what is to be expected and what is not, and these judgments are reflected in, and reproduced by, the production of consensual surprise. These displays of surprise show what co-members treat as unexpected, exceptional, or unusual and thereby what they take to be expected, unexceptional, or business as usual. In designing some informing so as to elicit surprise and in reacting to that informing with a surprise token, co-conversationalists collaborate to reflect and reproduce a shared culture.

     Conversely, surprise that is not shared can work to partition co-interactants into different (sub)cultural memberships. When a recipient fails to produce surprise following a turn clearly designed to elicit it, or does produce surprise following a turn clearly not designed to elicit it, a discrepancy is revealedbetween the interactants’ taken-for-granted understandings of, or orientations to, some feature of their world. The discrepancy may arise from, and reproduce, individual differences in what is taken for granted, differences between professional and lay knowledge; or cultural differences. Recipients of such surprise source turns could elect to “let them pass by” unremarked, without thereby having created a “noticeable absence.” In electing to produce, after intervening talk that prepares for it, an as-if-visceral reaction, they choose instead to draw attention to this discrepancy of worldview, giving it particular interactional salience.

     Surprise does not simply display the acquisition of unexpected new information; it also claims or displays preexisting knowledge. Surprise displays give rise to the recipient’s inferences both about what was not known by the surprised person and about what was known (providing the basis for whatever it was they treated as unexpected). This (sometimes sophisticated) taken-forgranted knowledge, which makes surprise relevant on any given occasion, may be distributed differentially between co-interactants. When one interactant displays surprise that another does not or cannot, or can display only ineptly, their respective category memberships are displayed and reinscribed. Speaker’s prior knowledge can be inferred either from the absence (or mitigation of surprise or from its production, depending on the nature of the surprise source turn. The issue of whether to display surprise, and with what degree of intensity, is a recurrent concern for participants, in part because of what it makes inferrable about their preexisting knowledge and (therefore) about their category and cultural memberships. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

     2.2. Surprise as a vehicle for other actions 

     Surprise acts as a vehicle for other actions; it may be displayed or withheld (and its intensity calibrated) with reference to the other actions it can be understood to convey in its local sequential context. Many of the actions that surprise is used to perform are affiliative, especially when a surprise token follows a surprise source turn designed to elicit it.

     Across the interactions surprise performances embody the assessment that something is unexpected or unusual, and such assessments can act as vehicles for actions including praise, apology, and knowledgeable admiration. In withholding surprise, a speaker claims to have had prior expectations; such claims likewise act as vehicles for actions such as the claim to cultural knowledge and the attribution of a characteristic trait to a co-interactant. The interactional meaning carried by displays of being surprised (or not surprised) is both context-free, insofar as it hinges around the core notion of “expectability,” and context-dependent, insofar as the meaning of treating something as expected (or unexpected) in any given context depends on what else is being done, deferred, or supplanted by the expression of surprise. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

     2.3. Surprise as an alternative to other actions 

     Surprise tokens are alternative to other possible actions that could have been performed in the interactional context in which they occur, so that the action performed by the surprise token depends to some extent on how it stands in relation to such alternatives. For example, tellings, announcements, informings, and so on typically elicit assessments (as good or bad). The appropriate valence of the assessment, however, is not always immediately apparent, and the interactional costs of getting this wrong — of treating good news as bad news, or vice versa — can be high. In response to an announcement, a surprise token sometimes may be deployed precisely because it can be designed so as merely to mark some news as unexpected and nothing more. Thus surprise tokens can defer assessment until more information has been given (or can displace assessment altogether). As Sacks (1995) put it, “The surprise thing can be treated as reserving rights to future expression of emotion, saying, ‘I see that this is the thing that I will express emotion about. Let me give you some more room to tell me about it. Then you’ll hear me give a wail.’”

     The interactional advantage of giving the prior speaker “more room to tell” is that this may enable a recipient to determine whether wailing or celebration is the more appropriate response. When responding to a prior turn that is producing complaint, surprise tokens are characteristically disaffiliative. That is, affiliation with a complaint calls for more than simply an expression of surprise: for example, it

requires confirming the speaker’s assessment of the situation, joining in the complaint, or expressing dismay or sympathy.

     Analysis of any particular surprise token, in its sequential context, requires analyzing it for what it is an alternative to, as well as for what surprise itself does in that position. In this final section we have considered some of the interactional uses of surprise: the display of (sub)cultural and category memberships (through differential displays of surprise to some feature of the world, indexing differences in cultural, specialist, or individual knowledge); the use of surprise as a vehicle for other actions (such as pursuit of affiliative goals, attending to breaches in a local moral order, or trait attribution); and the production of surprise as an alternative to some other action (such as an assessment, a co-complaint, or an expression of sympathy), or as a means of deferring it. In all of these ways, then, surprise is an interactional

resource as well as an interactional achievement.