what frequently happens when people speak collaboratively today.
Someone says a clause,and other voices chime in with variations that
change or expand it at certain points.For example:A.I go out a lot. X.I wanna go home.
B. I don’t go out at all. Y.I need to go home.
C. I go out and eat. Z.I’d love to go home.What this shows is that even the process of embedding something that
is usually taken to be terribly abstract and presumably the product of
individual cognition can be seen as the direct product of many-voiced,
interactive performances.In these cases,embedding is not a mysterious
mental process taking place in some hidden mind,but rather a perfor-
mance acted out in real time.How Sung Formulas Were Shanghaied into Dyadic Speech-Act Talk
Random,emotionally and interactionally driven sequences of syllables,
rhythms,and melodies became fixed by constant,interactive repetition
and by rhythmic expectancies into stuck-together,memorable,significant
somethings.What was significant and meaningful about each formula
was its connection to a situation and to the social actions of that
situation.The meaning of a formula was,in the beginning,entirely
holistic,a complex of the particular group of people involved,their
actions,and the circumstances.Thus it was a complex social action.
We vocalize in this kind of situation to accomplish these social ends;we
(a group of young males,or older women,or children,or whatever)
always (“this is what we do”) chant this formula in situations of (grief,
reconciliation,journeying,food gathering,before a hunt,during an initi-
ation,in the morning,at night,etc.) in order to do such and such (over-
come emotional tension,get others moving,agree on fair distribution,
etc.).
Later,after much historical development,them or parts of them came
to be used in more dyadic,speech-act kinds of discourse.Pairs of people
used talk to question,request,affirm,demand,order,deny,or agree with
each other,and they shanghaied formulas or their parts to be used in
these dyadic speech acts.When formulas were imported from their orig-
inal collective repetition contexts to more dyadic speech-act contexts,the
entire holistic mix of original meanings became available as potential
meaning components for the speech acts.Which of these meaning com-
ponents was actually used varied depending on the speech act.
Thus,the raw materials for dyadic speech-act talk were already-fixed,
already-stuck-together,already-meaningful (in a holistic way) formulas.312 Bruce Richman