How to Talk

Mark Turner 2010

Well! the young man said.
Well! she said.
Well, here we are, he said.
Here we are, she said. Arent we?
I should say we were, he said. Eeyop. Here we are.
Well! she said.
Well! he said.
Here we are, Dorothy Parker
People utter phrases, but thats a long way from talking. Being expected to
talk in a coherent style weighs heavily on many people.
Talk is a challenge because it seems to get away from usthe subject, the
purpose, the audience, the language . . . . Concepts become abstract,
jumping from domain to domain, unpredictably vaulting up and down. Cast
and scene change. Relationships shift. Motives transform, bumping and
rolling over one another. It can be like trying to get through a confused sea.
It can be exhausting out there.
By contrast, consider the following scene, which is very much on home turf
for the human mind, like standing on the stable shore, happy in the sunshine.
Some people, all next to one another, are attending to something in their
local environment. They all know they are all attending to it, and know, too,
that they are engaged with one other by attending to it. They typically talk
and gesture about what they are attending to. They give signs to each other
about their mutual engagement. Cognitive scientists call this a scene of
joint attention.
The most basic kind of joint attention is classic joint attention. In classic
joint attention, there are just two peoplejust you and one other person,
paying attention to something that is directly perceptible. Its right there. In
classic joint attention, the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the
scene is informal, language is adequate to serve the purpose, speaker and
hearer are competent, and the hearer will recognize what the speaker is
drawing attention to once the speaker points it out.
Heres the relaxing, at-home part: you never feel that things are getting
away from you when you are pointing out something directly perceptible to
somebody next to you. You say, That blackbird in the hedge by the tree has
red markings on its wings. You are built for this. You feel at home doing it
because the scene of classic joint attention is intelligible by itself. You
expect your companion to be able to perceive what you are presenting once
it is pointed out.
To talk, the trick is to blend a distributed, complicated mental network, one
that often ranges far from home, with an at-home scenelike classic joint
attention. Then the away-from-home network has an at-home anchor. If you
make the blend, and speak from this blend, then the talk becomes
intelligible, consistent, coherent, and familiar, even though you are in fact
dealing with a diffuse, complex, away-from-home network of ideas and
relationships.
In the scene of classic joint attention, there is something directly perceptible.
This may conflict radically with the network of ideas you actually want to
talk about, but the human mindunique in the worldis masterful at
blending things that dont actually go together. In the actual network, the
subject may be completely imperceptible. But in the blend, we treat the
subject stylistically as if it is something directly perceptible. The result is
that we can talk about anything at all as if it is directly perceptible:
someones disappointment or sense of the absurd, a citys magnificence or a
countrys intransigence, a neighborhoods poverty or a wines superiority
all are treated from the blend stylistically as if they were directly
perceptible.
In your mental network of ideas and thought supporting your talk, the
audience may be large and psychologically disposed in a variety of ways.
By contrast, in classic joint attention, we are speaking to one other person
collusively. So in the blend, we treat the audience like a competent
individual who colludes with us to recognize what we are pointing out. In
the actual network, the purpose can be anything, or multiple, and
conflicting. But in classic joint attention, the purpose is clear and simple: the
purpose is presentation. So in the blend, purposes in the network are
compressed to presentation. This lets us talk from the blend as if the purpose
of the talk is presentation. In the actual network, the motive can be
anythingdesire, fear, greed, self-defense. But in classic joint attention, the
motive is truththe reason the speaker is speaking is to point out to
someone, collusively, something worth recognizing. In the blend, we can
speak as if the motive is truth.
Blending gives us a coherent, stable, intelligible, familiar platform for the
network.
The blend does not replace, and is not at all meant to replace, the network.
The scene of classic joint attention does not substitute for the network of
ideas one actually wants to talk about. No one is deluded about the existence
of the network, its complexity, or its variety. The speaker is not confused, or
pretending to be in a scene of classic joint attention. Rather, the blend of at-
home classic joint attention with an away-from-home, sprawling network
creates an anchoring, at-home platform for the network, something
comfortable, intelligible, consistent, coherent.
Where the network is diffuse, the blend has a stable and familiar cast, scene,
motive, and purpose. Whatever the realities and difficulties of language in
the network, in the blend language is treated stylistically as if it is adequate
to the purpose of presentation. In the blend, the speaker is competent,
knowledgeable, and confident; the hearer is competent; there is symmetry
between speaker and hearer; the speaker does not want anything from the
hearer but is simply presenting something worth presenting; the speaker
speaks for himself or herself rather than a group; the occasion is informal;
the speaker is not straining but is in full command of the language. The
speaker does not draw attention away from the subject by displacing it with
the speakers own concerns or the labor of thought and language. On the
contrary, all the labor is hidden. The speaker does not seek praise for having
been able to make such a presentation. On the contrary, the talk is a perfect,
undistorting window on the subject of the presentation, and the speaker
takes the stand that this is a natural way to talk, because in real classic joint
attention, it is.
In the actual diffuse network of the communication, the speaker and
audience may not be in a symmetric relationship; the speaker may be
speaking for a group; the audience may be hostile; the purpose may be to
persuade someoneto get them to vote a certain way or do something for
the speaker; the speaker may want something from the audiencea job, a
grade, a promotion, an approval; the motive might be greed, vanity,
remorse, love. By blending this difficult network with the scene of classic
joint attention, we can give the network a manageable anchor, and speak
from the blend.
There are only two steps to learning to talk this way: (1) think of a scene of
classic joint attention; (2) blend it with whatever mental network of thoughts
and relationships you confront and speak from the blend. These two steps
will get you through any difficulty.
The result is an ability to talk that is naturally suited to something like a
field guide: The waves are breaking farther south, forming an outside set."
In this case, the guide is actually presenting something that is directly
perceptible, in a scene of actual classic joint attention.
But now imagine that two people are interviewing you for a job. This is a
scene of talking so complex, unfamiliar, and difficult to navigate that many
people find it paralyzing. It is far from home. For some people, the scene
induces an alien and terrible anxiety with which they wrestle, and the
wrestling is obvious to the interviewers. But there is another way to do it,
using the power of blending. Mentally, you can blend this diffuse and
difficult real scene with a scene of classic joint attention, and then, in the
blend, you are actually just presenting something to someone, collusively.
You are pointing out what you expect them to recognize once you point out
where they ought to look. There is no anxiety in the blend. You are
presenting yourselfjust the way you would present the blackbird. When
asked, So, what did you do in college? you answer, I divided my time
between molecular genetics and surfing.