Grandma & Grandpa

Met grandma when I was going through flight school in Texas. Blind date. Bruce had met a girl, Bruce DeVries had met a girl in Corpus [Corpus Cristi, TX]. And so she found a date for me and that was Zoe. [Interviewer: How did you know she was the one?] Grandma, mmm, she was a girl that all I know. It was fun. Butter and Marie [my grandmother Zoe’s parents]. They were they had a household that was very welcoming you might go in there walk over people sleeping on the floor. Uh they had a friend who came from El Paso to Corpus he was in the Navy, a seamen down from Corpus. And he and his buddies were there a lot beause he worked for your um great grandpa had a service station in El Paso and he worked at the service station. And he was in the Navy and he was stationed down there when Butter and Marie moved down to Corpus. So he would come down and he’d have buddies with him and they would spend the night just sleeping on the floor. I didn’t know grandma too terribly long before we got married. I can’t remember when we first started dating. When I got out of the service I came home. I think before that though I took leave or something her mom came out here and we drove out [journey from Corpus Christi, TX to Meridian, CA, 1936 miles in the 1950s]. That’s when she met my parents, they lived where Eric’s house is now, but not in that house. Interviewer: How’d you know she was the one you were going to marry?] Couldn’t find anybody else. I was 21 she was 18. I was 4 years older so I guess I was just about 22. We got married in El Paso, not Corpus because that’s where they came from. Butter and Marie, all there family was in El Paso. It wasn’t very big because everyone had to come to it. From my family there was only my aunt and uncle Tom and Gene and mom and dad. Jim and Kerm came, I think that was about it from my side of the family. There wasn’t very many. They liked Mexican food. Zoe and Marie knew how to make that. Marie did a lot of the cookin because when mom started getting her Parkinson’s she wasn’t able to do a lot of that stuff. So as long as Marie was here we ate dinner with them almost everyday. We were living in Sacramento and I got a chance to buy this little place. The company I was working for down there was in an uproar. They laid me off then hired me back as a fee appraiser like your dad. You work for the individuals and not a company. You know they didn’t want to pay all the benefits and stuff so they would just pay you by the appraisal. So then we moved up here cause I can that anywhere. This place came up for sale

Language as literature: Characters in everyday spoken discourse

There are several linguistic phenomena that, when examined closely, give evidence that people speak through characters, much like authors of literary works do, in everyday discourse. However, most approaches in linguistics and in the philosophy of language leave little theoretical room for the appearance of characters in discourse. In particular, there is no linguistic criterion found to date, which can mark precisely what stretch of discourse within an utterance belongs to a character, and to which character. And yet, without at least tentatively marking the division of labor between the different characters in an utterance, it is absolutely impossible to arrive at an acceptable interpretation of it. As an alternative, I propose to take character use seriously, as an essential feature of discourse in general, a feature speakers and listeners actively seek out in utterances. I offer a simple typology of actions in discourse that draws on this understanding, and demonstrate its usefulness for the analysis of a conversation transcript

Spartan Daily April 8, 2010

Volume 134, Issue 34https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1249/thumbnail.jp

The representation of conflict in the discourse of Italian melodrama

This paper is part of an extensive study of cinematic dialogue in a variety of film genres in Italian, which aims to address the disregard for the verbal plane that characterises film theory and, particularly, genre theory. Assuming a pragmatic and functional semantic perspective, it analyses the scripted dialogues in films against the backdrop of the literature on real life discourse. The focus of the paper is confrontational talk in Italian melodramas from early 1960s to the present. Conflict in such films is, to an extent, comparable to the cooperative sequential rebuttal of speakers' turns that typically occurs in comedies. However, melodramas are also marked by more incisive and subtle patterns of confrontation that can be summarised as 'disaffiliative dysfluency'. The forms of such break in the conversational flow are discussed and illustrated with selected scenes from a number of films