rarely completely neutral. Think of the people you talked to today. Each
time you begin an exchange, a complex series of calculations begins: Do I
need to be formal with this person? Do I owe her respect? Does she owe
me deference? Will she take me seriously, or reject me out of hand? What
do I want from her, or she from me? Those calculations are more
conscious in unusual encounters; for example, if you suddenly were
introduced to the Queen of England, without preparation, would you be
comfortable talking to her? For those you interact with every day, the
calculations are fast and sure and well below the level of consciousness.
In any situation, a person can simply refuse to communicate. In an
adversarial position, we may understand perfectly what our partners,
parents, friends say to us, but still respond with “I cannot understand you.”
We can also reject how what we say has been understood: We say “You
just don’t understand” when in fact the issue is not comprehension, but
difference of opinion.
When a person rejects the message in this way, he or she is refusing to
accept responsibility in the communicative act, and the full burden is put
directly on the other. “I can’t understand you” may mean, in reality: “You
can’t make me understand you.”
Clark’s cognitive model of the communicative act is based on a
principle of mutual responsibility, in which participants in a conversation
collaborate in the establishment of new information. This involves
complicated processes of repair, expansion, and replace-ment in iterative
fashion until both parties are satisfied:
Many purposes in conversation, however, change moment by moment
as the two people tolerate more or less uncertainty about the listener’s
understanding of the speaker’s references. The heavier burden usually
falls on the listener, since she is in the best position to assess her own
comprehension.
(Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs 1986: 34)When native speakers of U.S. English are confronted with an accent which
is foreign to them – either unfamiliar varieties of English, or foreign (L2)
accented English – the first decision they make is whether or not they are
going to participate. What we will see again and again in the examples that
follow, is that members of the dominant language group (in the cases we