The Expression of the Self and Conversational Context: a Pragmatic Theory of Discourse About the Self
Year: 1993
Type: article
Abstract: The first half of this dissertation provides a broad review and analysis of the concept of the self, the phenomenon of self-reference, and the use of metaphors in theorectical accounts of the self. The second half of the dissertation explores the role of the conversational context upon people's self-presentations of themselves, particularly the proportion of self-evaluative statements as elicited by open-ended probes for selfdisquisition. Although the resurgence of interest in the study of the self has made for a greater awareness of the interpretative importance of context on a person's selfdescription, the implicit contextual effects of the experimenters' own choice of openended questions and enquiry into people's notions of themselves has not rece!.-ed due attention as part of a collaborative interaction. The articulation of a person's selfconcept a s elicited by self-report instruments like the Who are you?YWAY) or tell us about yourself' open-ended questionnaires was here found to be highly variable with respect to minor re-wording of those questions or to the imagined situation in which those same questions are asked. A key finding of this study is that one can practically reverse previous research claims that a t most only 10% of the spontaneous self' is explicitly self-evaluative. From the perspective of a Gricean or pragmatic model of discourse interpretation, it is proposed that a person's self-related constructs are always interactive and guided by prototypic scenarios of discourse relevancy. Results were supportive of the prediction that in order to determine how the experimental question should be relevantly answered, participants in a psychology experiment must resort to the inference-making strategy of drawing upon situational prototypes of comparable questions found in everyday conversations.
Source: Summit (Simon Fraser University)
Author: Ted Wayne Altar
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2109434187