Coupland E.A. - Accommodating The Elderly PDF

Accommodating the Elderly: Invoking and Extending a Theory
Author(s): Nikolas Coupland, Justine Coupland, Howard Giles, Karen Henwood

Source: Language in Society, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), pp. 1-41
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4167896
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Lang. Soc. 17, [-41. Printed in the United States of America
Accommodating the elderly: Invoking and extending a
theory'
NIKOLAS COUPLAND AND JUSTINE COUPLAND
Centre for Applied English Language Studies
University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology
HOWARD GILES AND KAREN HENWOOD2
Department of Psvchology
University of Bristol
ABSTRACT
The article begins by exploring briefly the role of the elderly in so-
ciolinguistic theory and research. After an outline of the parameters of
speech accommodation theory together with a new schematic model, it is
argued that speech accommodation theory is a profitable framework for
elucidating the sociolinguistic mechanics of, and the social psychological
processes underlying, intergenerational encounters. A recent conceptual
foray in this direction, which highlights voung-to-elderly language strat-
egies, is then overviewed with some illustrations. Contrastive data from a
case study are then introduced, a discourse analysis of which allows us to
conceptualize various elderly-to-young language strategies. This in-
terpretive analysis suggests important avenues for extending speech accom-
modation theory itself. A revised, more sociolinguistically elaborated ver-
sion of this framework is then presented which highlights strategies beyond
those of convergence, maintenance, and divergence and leads to the con-
ceptualization of over- and underaccommodation. Finally, and on the basis
of the foregoing, a new model of intergenerational communication is pro-
posed and Ryan et al.'s (1986) "'communicative predicament" framework
duly revised. (Accommodation theory, elderly, overaccommodation, case
studies, discourse management, stereotypes, underaccommodation, inter-
disciplinary)
To date, ageing has not been treated as a centrally sociolinguistic issue. The
absence of sustained research into elderly communication and intergenerational
talk contrasts dramatically with the breadth and variety of sociolinguistic investi-
gations of other social groups, for example, regional and ethnic groups, so-
cioeconomic classes, and sex groups (cf. Gudykunst 1986). That ageing is cen-
C 1988 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045/88 $s.oo + .00
N. COUPLAND, J. COUPLAND, H. GILES, AND K. HENWOOD
trally a sociolinguistic issue should be clear from the uniqueness and urgency of
social, political, and economic questions relating to the elderly in Western soci-
ety and from lay accounts of communication difficulties of and for the elderly,
and for those who interact with them. Although we recognize the simplicities
inherent in designating this heterogenous social collectivity (Brewer, Dull, & Lui
I981; Rubin I986) a "minority group" (see Barron I96I; Palmore 1978; Sreib
I965; Ward 1984), we also recognize that they do have unique problems and
needs, many of which are socially based and are both experienced through and
consolidated in communication. This position is exacerbated by the elderly's
rather low "vitality" profile in many Western societies, given their poor societal
status and institutional support (Giles, Bourhis, & Taylor 1977).
Even across the range of communication sciences, there has been little concern
with elderly populations or with issues relating to the elderly. This is particularly
surprising given the very large increase in the size of this proportion of the
community in recent and projected decades as well as the concomitant increase in
attention afforded gerontological matters in general. Although social geron-
tologists have argued that psychological health in the aged is at least in part a
function of central nervous system activity and higher level cognitive function-
ing, which are themselves mediated by frequent social contacts and communica-
tional activity (e.g., Keidel I980), the actual study of this communication has
received very scant attention outside the social psychological literature on social
support (e.g., Heller & Mansbach I984; Rook I984). Interest in the field of
communication processes and the elderly has increased recently (Cohen & Wu
I980; Giles & Ryan I986; Kreps I986; Kreps & Thornton I984; Obler & Albert
I980; Oyer & Oyer 1976), though principally in asocial spheres. Most of this
work relates to (i) the linguistic (and particularly paralinguistic) correlates of
ageing (cf. Helfrich 1979; Kynette & Kemper I986; Ramig 1986); (2) how the
elderly are depicted and generally disvalued in the mass media, in literature, and
in everyday usage, and the psychological implications of this for them (cf.
Berman & Sobkowska-Ashcroft I986; Davis & Kubey 1982; Korzenny & Neu-
endorf i980); and (3) productive/receptive communicational disabilities among
the elderly (cf., e.g., Portnoy I98I; Weinstein & Ventry I982). There is surpris-
ingly little inquiry into how the elderly are talked to or how they themselves talk
to others - the interactional dimension in communication that is of most direct
relevance to the elderly themselves and to those involved with their well-being.
This article begins by exploring the role of the elderly in sociolinguistic theory
and research. After a very brief outline of the parameters of speech accommoda-
tion theory (SAT) together with a new schematic model of these parameters, it is
argued that SAT is a profitable framework for elucidating the sociolinguistic
mechanics of, and the social psychological processes underlying, intergenera-
tional encounters. A recent conceptual foray in this direction, which highlights
young-to-elderly language strategies, is then overviewed with some illustrations
of our own. Contrastive data from a case study are then introduced, a discoursal
2
INTERGENERATIONAL ACCOMMODATION
analysis of which allows us to conceptualize the other side of the coin, namely,
various elderly-to-young language strategies. This interpretive analysis suggests
important avenues for extending the parameters of SAT itself. A revised, more
sociolinguistically elaborated version of this framework is then presented, high-
lighting strategies beyond those of convergence, maintenance, and divergence
and leading to the conceptualization of over- and underaccommodation as SAT
processes. Finally, on the basis of the foregoing, a new model of intergenera-
tional communication is proposed updating Ryan et al.'s (I986) "commu-
nicative predicament" model.
A terminological note: in this article, we operationalize "the elderly" as those
over sixty-five years of age, while recognizing the tremendous diversity inherent
in the category, especially in terms of psychological age. What we mean by "the
young" can cover a very wide age range and for our present purposes include
adolescents up to even the so-called ageing (that is, those of around fifty-five
years). It is not that we do not appreciate interesting and important consequences
dependent on the actual and perceived precise ages of those involved in in-
tergenerational encounters, but rather that the empirical state-of-the-art is too
meagre to justify other than
quite
gross conceptual distinctions at this stage.
SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND THE ELDERLY
In mainstream sociolinguistic studies, age has figured as a variable only to the
extent that it may show patterns of dialectal variation within speech commu-
nities, reflecting dialect change over "apparent time" (Labov 1972a: 163). La-
bov, for instance, uses this technique to identify a sudden change in the status of
postvocalic Ir/ in New York City coinciding with World War I1 (1972a: ii 6).
Being able to demonstrate age differentiation in dialect behaviour, such that "the
regular process of sound change can be isolated and recorded by observations
across two generations" (ibid.), is a valuable complement to scarce real time
comparative data. However, there is a risk that the apparent time methodology
may be taken to endorse a stereotypical view of the elderly as being inflexible in
their linguistic behaviour, at least in respect to their being supposedly unrespon-
sive to changing societal speech norms. In fact, Labov (1972b:258) states that
"how much the basic vernacular system changes in the course of a life-time" is
still "an open question." Hence, the success of the apparent time approach in a
restricted (diachronic) research area must not obscure two (more synchronic)
possibilities across the full range of age-related speech behaviours: first, that
many elders may, in dialectal and other communicative respects, not only be
responsive to changing norms but actually contribute to their establishment (see
Dowd's
[I9841
analysis of the Gray Panthers movement; also Dunkle, Haug, &
Rosenberg I984); and second, that elderly speech may have its own "intrinsic"
(i.e., not historically derived) stylistic qualities which reflect elderly speakers'
particular communicative needs and their social, psychological, and other cir-
3
cumstances (e.g., features or tactics that we consider below which may bolster
their particular identity needs).
In fact, an integral part of our work is to research the existence of potentially
important generational differences relating to beliefs about talk (N. Coupland
i986; Wiemann, Coupland, Giles, et al., forthcoming), situational perceptions,
interactional goals, and various language devices between the young and the
elderly as empirical questions in their own right. Indeed, such unrecognized
possibilities could be theoretically emancipating for understanding intergenera-
tional communication effectiveness which can often be marred, and on both sides
as we shall see, by ageist misattributions. Our point is that incipient research in
the sociolinguistics of ageing should not be blinkered by an expectation that
elderly speech is an historical relic, any more than by the assumption that the
elderly themselves are necessarily disengaged cultural fossils (however vig-
orously some societies continue to relegate some elders to that position; see
Branco & Williamson 1982).
Likewise, it is simplistic to predict "sociolinguistic inflexibility" in elderly
communication from experimental findings that some older individuals have
lower rates of infornation processing (e.g., Kausler 1982), more problems of
recent verbal memory (Poon et al. 1980), or more difficulty with comprehending
and recalling prose texts (Meyer & Rice 1983). Inflexibility implies a cognitive
deficit which may either be unrelated to observable sociolinguistic behaviours or
be relevant to only a small number of individuals. As Ryan et al. (1986:6) say,
",professionals and non-professionals alike fall into this trap of drawing easy
inferences and indulging in damaging generalizations," and we must be wary of
perpetuating the naiveties
- methodologically, empirically, and theoretically -
of the early language and social class research domain. At the same time, we
must be wary (given that many social, cognitive, and physiological dimensions
cut across age in complex ways) of unthinkingly embracing the appealing libera-
tionist "'difference" tradition of expecting and interpreting communicative ef-
fectiveness amongst certain elderly where nonesuch exists.
Clyne (I977)
has highlighted the difficulty of interpreting sociolinguistic be-
haviours in his study of elderly bilingualism. He finds, for example, that elderly
German-English and Dutch-English bilinguals in Australia transfer lexical items
from their first languages into English more frequently than younger speakers,
regardless of the hearer. In addition, the elderly migrants' English becomes less
fluent, and their switches into their first language increase. This pattern of "'LI
[first
language]
reversion" is acknowledged in the community and catered for by
the establishment of ethnic Dutch and German old people's homes and villages.
Such a sociolinguistic pattern is, of course, prone to deficit interpretations by
community and analysts alike, even though stereotypically based orientations
cannot capture the complexity of the phenomena and processes involved. Clyne
considers some of these possibilities, including neurophysiological causes (e.g.,
weakening of a hypothesized code-switching distributor in the
gyrus
su-
4
pramarginalis) and sociobiological causes (e.g., "disengagement theory,"3
which posits an inevitable mutual withdrawal of the elderly from others in the
social system). However, a social explanation is also considered by Clyne
(1977:48) whereby retirement and the absence of children lead the elderly mi-
grant to settle into a milieu where the use of English is no longer as necessary as
before. Moreover, these elders have more time to concentrate upon and read their
first languages and in any case are relatively removed from the pressures of
assimilation and economic advancement. In terms of the language attitudes liter-
ature, we could say that the "solidarity" dimension of evaluation assumes
primacy over its "status" counterpart (see Brown & Gilman 1960; Ryan, Giles,
& Sebastian I982). To our minds, sociolinguistics is obligated to explore the
social underpinnings of elderly communication, at least to counterbalance the
predominantly cognitive and physiological theories of "normal decrement" ad-
duced by many gerontologists and the more commonplace folk theorists.
Since there is currently no clear-cut agenda for a sociolinguistics of ageing,
there is much to be gained from particularistic analyses of elderly talk in context.
This article will make some small contribution in this direction, though discourse
analytic studies are beginning to accumulate. Boden and Bielby (1983, 1986)
explore elderly conversationalists' employment of the past as a topic resource
and sequential aspects of conversational life histories. In our own work, we have
taxonomized strategic options in sequences of self-disclosure in intergenerational
contexts (Coupland, Coupland, Giles, & Wiemann I988) and accounted for the
variable frequencies and structures that participating generation-groups show
(Coupland, Coupland, Giles, Henwood, & Wiemann, in press; Coupland, Hen-
wood, Coupland, & Giles, in press). In a large corpus of first encounters be-
tween over seventy-five-year-old and thirty- to forty-year-old women, the older
group regularly reveals highly personal and "painful" information to their peers
and to their younger interlocutors. Elderly painful self-disclosure appears to be,
in various ways, problematical for recipients, and a systematic investigation of
the generality and constitution of such "problems" reveals complex evaluative
processes that we have modeled again using SAT. At the same time, the group of
thirty-year-olds is frequently found to predispose and even elicit this self-dis-
closure, perhaps through stereotypically driven assumptions that old speakers
want or need to fill this self-disclosive role.
Overall, then, the literature to date on elderly communication can be charac-
terized as reasonably strong in its accounts of the narrow linguistic correlates of
ageing on the one hand, and in its broad sociological, psychological, and demo-
graphic coverage and explanations on the other. We have a clear case of the lack
of integrated interdisciplinary work which would attempt to follow through anal-
yses of the social and psychological circumstances of ageing into everyday
communication behaviours and their consequences. Sociolinguistically, we have
the position Hymes (1977:76) describes as unacceptable wherein "a mechanical
amalgamation of standard linguistics and standard sociology is not likely to
5
suffice," leading to a limited account "from which the heart of the relevant data
will be missing." A solution, and a controversial one possessing important
teleological implications for some researchers (see Condor & Henwood, mim-
eo), is a more "socially constituted" linguistic approach (Hymes 1977:196) that
"must begin by identifying social functions, and discover the ways in which
linguistic features are selected and grouped together to serve them."
ACCOMMODATION THEORY AS A BASIS FOR EXPLORING
INTERGENERATIONAL COMMUNICATION
There are few theoretical systems available in sociolinguistics or beyond which
are readily applicable to processes of communication to and from the elderly. A
candidate initially considered was work in the Gumperz (i 982a, I 982b) tradition
on miscommunication between ethnic groups. This provides a general frame-
work for understanding intergenerational miscommunication, on the assumption
(still to be empirically verified) that "young" and "old" may constitute differ-
ent subcultures with distinct self- and other-identities, aspirations, beliefs, and
life circumstances, and, consequently, distinct strategies for producing and in-
terpreting talk. Unfortunately, this does not offer us a coherent model because it
attends principally to decoding and seems to assume that the link between social
category membership and encoding is a simple, even automatic, one. rhat as-
sumption may be more reasonable in the context of Li interference, but not in
mixed-sex or intergenerational encounters. Generally, Gumperz's paradigm is
not a sufficiently interactional one since it does not seek to explain sociolinguis-
tic behaviours as the interweaving of social actors' meanings and strategies, and
takes (existing) spoken texts as the analytical starting point. For our purposes, a
theoretical prerequisite is that a framework should analyze interpersonal encod-
ing strategies and interpretive procedures, as well as explore the links between
them. Despite claims that SAT, in earlier formulations, is at an embryonic stage
of sociolinguistic development (cf. Bell 1984), we feel that SAT provides a firm
basis for examining such processes in an intergenerational domain.
Speech accommodation theory
In barest outline, SAT is a social psychological model that explains
and
predicts
interindividual sociolinguistic behaviours and their effects (see, e.g., Giles 1973,
I984; Giles & Powesland 1975; Giles, Taylor, & Bourhis 1973; Street & Giles
I982; also, for an early, informal but suggestive review, Grimshaw 1967). It
specifies that when speakers (based on their psychological makeups, past experi-
ences, contextual demands, etc.) come to adopt various sociopsychological
ori-
entations vis-a-vis their interlocutors (e.g., "convergent" or "'divergent" orien-
tations) and have particular motivations for talk and interactional
goals (e.g.,
wanting to gain the other's social approval, wanting talk to be efficient, or
wanting to establish themselves or their own social group as distinct from the
interlocutors' and/or their social groups), they
will select from a
range
of so-
6
ciolinguistic (and nonverbal) strategies, having attended to or anticipated their
recipient's productive performance (Giles, Mulac, Bradac, & Johnson, 1986;
Street & Giles I982).
The strategies that have been widely investigated and exemplified to date are
speech convergence, whereby individuals adapt to each other's speech as they
perceive (or envisage) it over a potentially very wide range of communicative
features and levels (e.g., segmental phonology and other dialect features, speech
rates, pause and utterance lengths, choice of language system), and speech
divergence, the process by which speakers may accentuate believed linguistic
differences between themselves and others. A third general possibility is speech
maintenance, an attempted strategy of nonconvergence/nondivergence, which
can itself signal significant (often psychologically dissociative) interpersonal
meanings (Bourhis 1979). Given that individuals can converge their speech to
varying extents (Street I982) from, say, moving minimally in the direction of
others to actually matching their speech patterns or to even transcending them
(and the converse process of linguistic calibration, of course, applies to diver-
gence, too), we hereby refer to these speech accommodation strategies as those
of approximation. A final major approximation strategy is that of speech comple-
mentarity (Giles I980). This is a (or a set of) modification(s) which accentuates
valued sociolinguistic differences between interlocutors occupying different
roles, as, for example, in the case where a young male might deepen his pitch in
a heterosexual encounter (see Thakerar, Giles, & Cheshire I982).
As for communicative effects, SAT predicts that convergence strategies will
be positively evaluated by receivers, provided they are perceived to be imple-
menting psychological convergence, to be at an optimal sociolinguistic distance
from the receiver's own speech patterns, and to adhere to prevailing so-
ciolinguistic norms for the situation. Speech maintenance and divergence will
trigger generally negative evaluations and responses, again given various con-
textual provisos, and principally when receivers attribute the sender's motives as
due to dissociative intent (e.g., lack of effort, dislike). For a selective review of
studies of speech accommodation in the context of dialect variation, see Coup-
land (I988). It should also be pointed out that SAT has not only theoretical value
for our understanding of sociolinguistic behaviours within and between social
categories (e.g., cross-cultural encounters), but also for exploring the dynamics
of international (e.g., superpower) communications, where diplomats could
construe a certain face-to-face negotiation as both an interindividual and an
intergroup encounter at one and the same time (see Gudykunst I986).
Figure i is a new schematic representation of the above processes, not all of
which come to individual A's and B's conscious awareness on every occasion
(e.g., actually coding the other's language behaviours as convergence or what-
ever). This conceptualization has a number of important features. First, it recog-
nizes the fact that communicators are speaker-hearers (McGregor I986) and that
encoders can monitor their own productive performances and use such feedback
cognitively (e.g., anticipating the recipient's attributions and evaluations) so as
7
EALUATINO BELELOTHEN ATIB UING LABE.MLNBTRATEBIEN RIXECE1NWPEFOINVIG OWN/
AND
PERFORMANCEACOMMooovAS
AE
OTEERREONMANCE
POSITIV AIITY OVER-ACCOMMO lE (X
ENCE
NEGaTiVE EFFORT UNDER-OCOMMOTIVE PINT,
fl t ~~~~NEOXV
MAINTENANCE,
SITUATiON CONTRA-A~COOMMODAIVE DIVERGENCE)
INDIYDUAL A's
(cOGNITIVE,AFFECTIVE; IE GTIONAL A?EIIEE
SEHN1OURAL.ROMATIC)
EG MCN
PffY-CHOLD ICAL
PROMOTE SOCIAL
aTEND TO OTHER'S
APPRCKIMATION
b
QRIExw1H
* sAPPROW PRODUCTIVE STRATEGIES.
ORIENTOION
~~~POMOTE PERFOR11MANCE CONVERGOENCE,
CONVERGENT COMMUNIWqON (ACTUAL.
COMPLEMENTITY.
DIVERGENT EFFICENCY
MANTENANCE
PROMOTE
STEREOTYPIC) DIVERGENCE
20 DIETINCTvENESS
A
BITER-ACTONAL
ADDRESSE
SOCILINGUISR C
GONE
SOCIO~FSTCH0OGIICAL ED=
EO S2
E
ORIEKDI.I]ON
OOTESOCAL
ATTEND TO OTHER'S APPREILIMATION
10 ~~~~~~APPROW&
PRODUCTIVE
TAEI.
CONVERGENT PRAMaTE
PERFORMANCE CONVERGENCE.
DIVERGENT
OOMMUNYOR (ACTUAL. COMPLEMENDITY
EFFICIERCY OMLMNAIY
i NDIYIDUA.Lr B=PRMOTE
PERCEIVED.
MA|NTENACE.
DISTINCTIVENES
STEREOTYPIC) DIVERGENCE
SWES
(COONITIVE,AFFECTI YE.
BEHNIOURAL,SOMATIC)
A
ffi/ =LASELLUNG|ATBAMIES
Al ISDEEfR MAl INTENTS ACCOMMODATIVE l lOTHEf ERFORMANZE
ABILUTY OVER-ACCOMMODATIVE (AS CONVERGENCE.
POSITIvE
EFFORT
UNDER-ACCOMMODATIVE
COMPLEMENIRITY,
NEGATVE
S
ITUA|ION NTRA-ACCOMMODA IVE DIVERGENCE)
FIGURE i: A generalized model of SAT processes.
to adjust their approximation strategies if necessary from moment to moment.
Second, the model proposes that decoders can label speakers' performances as
accommodative, overaccommodative, underaccommodative, or contraaccom-
modative (categories which we attempt to delimit below). Moreover, and in line
with the previous point, speakers can also appreciate in anticipation and in
progress (perhaps in part due to initial reactions from the other) that their own
performances may be labelled as, for instance, underaccommodative or even
contraaccommodative by the recipient irrespective of the speaker's original in-
tent. Third, the model recognizes that participants' attributions and evaluations
of their interlocutors' approximation strategies can create and alter situational
and relational definitions (cf. Bradac I982; Giles & Hewstone I982). Fourth,
while much of the foregoing has been couched in sociopsychological terms,
accommodative processes do not, of course, operate in a sociological vacuum
(an issue we have discussed at length elsewhere, see Giles, Bourhis, & Taylor
1977). Because sociological forces provide an historical backdrop informing the
power and other relations operating between groups in contact, we have ac-
knowledged the important roles of macro contextual factors mediating accom-
modative phenomena in Figure i. Finally, the possibility is mooted (and dis-
8
cussed below) that speech accommodation strategies can not only affect
psychological states and communicative actions in the immediacy of the situation
(e.g., triggering certain identities, changing emotional states), and can even in
the long-term affect one's physical well-being and health (cf. for example,
Kaplan, Cassel, & Gore I979; Dunkel-Shetter & Wartman I982).
SAT in intergenerational contexts
Giles and Coupland (1984) explored ways in which SAT could be brought to
bear on reported difficulties in intergenerational talk. A set of empirical studies
(Thakerar, Giles, & Cheshire I982) established the need for SAT to consider the
role of stereotypical perceptions of interlocutors and their speech characteristics
and showed how such stereotypes can mediate the strategies speakers adopt and
their effects on listeners (see also Street & Hopper I982). In the case of the
elderly, there is ample research evidence demonstrating that older commu-
nicators are regularly prey to negative stereotypical assessments, being perceived
by younger individuals as relatively incompetent, slow, old-fashioned, and in-
flexible (Crockett, Press, & Osterkamp I979; Stewart & Ryan I982). Moreover,
data suggest that when another's elderliness is made explicit, interactants may
well, under certain circumstances, seek to confirm age-related stereotypes by the
nature of the questions which they pose the older person (Carver & de la Garza
I985; Franklyn-Stokes, Harriman, Giles, & Coupland, in press). This opens up
the possibility that elderly recipients might regularly be addressed by speakers
who are accommodating not to individuals' communicative characteristics per
se, but rather to those they stereotype the elderly as possessing.
In reality then, we might expect to find frequent, inappropriate, misconceived
talk to those elderly for whom the stereotypes do not coincide with actual so-
ciolinguistic, cognitive, and other behaviours and abilities (cf. Platt & Weber
I984). The predictable consequences might be irritation and dissatisfaction -
ultimately for both parties involved
-
leading in the longer term to the accentua-
tion of perceived intergenerational differences and perhaps to a mutual wish to
avoid future contact (see Brewer & Miller 1984; Hewstone & Brown I986). It is
not farfetched to see the consequences of repeated miscarried convergences of
this sort for some older individuals as being a decline in life-satisfaction and in
psychological, even physical, health (see discussion below on linguistic self-
stereotyping; Giles & St. Clair I985).
In SAT terms, then, we can derive the general hypothesis that younger speak-
ers may regularly overaccommodate (see Giles & Smith 1979) their speech to the
elderly, producing linguistic behaviours targeted at the often inappropriate, but
previously stereotyped, social persona of "the elderly communicator" (cf.
Rubin & Brown 1975). In lay terminology, elders are likely to suffer from being
patronized, talked down to, or baby-talked
-
evaluative dimensions of miscom-
munication that SAT should be able to clarify, model, and relate to specific
sociolinguistic selections and their effects.
Reported and observed instances of this sort of overaccommodative speech to
9
the elderly are accumulating. Henwood and Giles (reported in Ryan et al. I986)
observed thirty-three elderly women aged sixty-five to ninety-four years living
alone in conversation with homecare assistants. They found that baby talk oc-
curred quite frequently and that about 40 percent of the sample claimed to have
been the recipients of demeaning talk. Caporael and associates (Caporael i981;
Caporael, Lukaszewski, & Culbertson I983; Culbertson & Caporael I983) have
investigated speech to the institutionalized elderly and found frequent use of
prosodic features (notably high and variable pitch) that they associate with baby
talk. Moreover, they point out that, in this context, such speech is taken to be
either demeaning or nurturing, depending on the physical, cognitive, and at-
titudinal states of the recipient. Interestingly, the nurses who employed this
linguistic strategy did so without appraising the actual functional autonomy of
the elderly person to whom they were speaking. Ashburn and Gordon (i 98 I) also
showed how adult speakers modified their speech to elderly residents of a rest
home in ways reminiscent of speech to young children.
The Ryan et al. young-to-elderly language strategies
Ryan et al. (I986), informed by the observational experience of Henwood and
Giles and by means of SAT constructs and processes, devised a typology of four,
young-to-elderly language strategies.
The first of these they characterized as overaccommodation due to phys-
ical/sensory handicaps, which arises when speakers rightly or wrongly perceive
their addressees to be specifically handicapped (e.g., with hearing impairment)
and adapt their speech beyond the optimal level. Even if the recipient does suffer
some hearing loss, the younger person who overcompensates with much in-
creased amplitude or lowered pitch will be heard to be shouting. The perception
of specific handicap can trigger a wide range of sociolinguistic characteristics,
many of those associated with speech to children or baby talk (Ferguson 1977;
Snow & Ferguson I977), such as lexical or syntactic simplification, decreased
speech rate, and the prosodic features taken as primary by Caporael and associ-
ates.
The second strategy identified was labelled dependency-related overaccom-
modation and refers to overbearing, excessively directive and disciplinary speech
to the elderly as in the exclamation oh you naughty girl! used by a carer to one
elderly person who made quite a minor mistake. It was conjectured that this
strategy is encoded as one of the means by which a younger person can control
the relationship and induce the elderly individual to become dependent on the
former. In these circumstances, the latter is classified as needy and loses some of
her rights to make autonomous decisions, unless, that is, these rights are vig-
orously protected and overtly asserted. It is precisely these rights that are being
asserted in the account (in Extract X below, transcribed from Henwood and
Giles's [19851 tape-recorded data) that an older person (OP) gives to a researcher
(K) of a problematic interaction she (admittedly reports to having) had with relief
10
homecare assistants standing in for her regular carer (P). OP volunteers the
information that she was shouted at, told what to do in her own home, and
generally, she felt, spoken to "like a baby."
Extract I
I OP: ... and and and she told me off (.) she she said to me (.) go in
2 she said (.) sit down (.) I don't want you to watch me washing (.)
3 1 said I'm not watching you washing (.) I'm only having a conversation
4 like P_ _ used to when she did the washing (.) and she said gel in
5 then she said I don't want you (.) ((watching)) me
6 K: so did she think you were angry at her [and] then she got angry?
7 OP:
I
I
8 OP: yes she (.) she came in you see (.) to me (.) and she but she was angry
9 at me first
10 K: right
I1 OP: she told me off first you see because I sat down (.) she didn't ((want))
12 she thought I suppose in her mind I don't know (.) that I was watching
13 to see if she was doing the washing properly ((it was)) far from my mind
14 (.) because I always was used to P setting down ((into it)) I've
15 never complained to you have I P _ ? (.)
[ever
16 P: not ((2 sylls.)) no
17 OP: and all I wanted was a kind of conversation as I sat down you see (.)
18 and yet she told me off(.) get in out of it she said get in she said (.)
19 1 don't want vou ((watching)) me (.) and course that put my back up see
20 and I come in and I sat down and I thought myself I'll never have you
21 again I'll rather sit on my knees and do the washing again and she come
22 in again she said shall I ring mister R . ? I said you can do what
23 you like (.) but I said tell him your attitude to me (.) whatever else
24 you do (.) tell him your attitude to me I don't want the likes of you
25 coming and doing washing for me and telling me off and treating me like
26 a baby I won't have it (.) I said I'm a sensible decent person (.) and
27 I'm not going to be told off because I happen to sit in my kitchen if I
28 want to (1.0) would You have it?
The third strategy, age-related divergence, draws on a central prediction from
SAT that speakers may seek to promote the distinctiveness of their own social
group by differentiating their speech in various ways from that of their in-
terlocutors. In the intergenerational domain, it is plausible that young individuals
who wish to dissociate themselves culturally and in terms of perceived value
systems and life-styles from the old may achieve or confirm this psychological
divergence sociolinguistically. Though we have no firm behavioural evidence of
this strategy in action, we have collected ample exemplification of its attitudinal
underpinnings as recognized in the literature (Kogan 1979; Lutsky 1980;
Tuckman & Lorge I953). In audiotape-recorded group sessions, a total of more
than ioo young people of widely varying socioeconomic and educational back-
grounds (trainees on the Youth Training Scheme, participants at a residential
outdoor pursuits awards course, university undergraduates) shared their views on
the strengths and weaknesses of the young and the old and on the similarities and
differences they perceived between the two categories. Vivid stereotypical im-
ages (by no means homogeneous) of the elderly as an outgroup emerged. The old
11
emerged. The old were frequently seen as physically decrepit and inactive (in-
cluding sexually), cognitively declining, and socially isolated. In speech, they
were characterized as repetitious, grumpy, slow, and dull, though knowledge-
able and correct.
The group sessions were conducted as a pilot to more systematic investigations
of intra- and intergroup attitudes and categorizations, but are interesting in them-
selves in showing very little overlap of perceived ingroup and outgroup at-
tributes. When the old were assigned positive traits (e.g., experience, wisdom,
gentleness), these were quite uniformly different traits from those assigned to the
young (namely, sense of humour, cheerfulness, strength and potency, good
looks, concern for contemporary social issues such as world peace). Given this
virtually complementary distribution of in- and outgroup stereotypical traits, it
would be surprising if some young communicators did not seek to symbolize
their distinctiveness linguistically in particular encounters with elders. We might
hypothesize that such divergence might be sociolinguistically manifest by means
of a dynamic communicative style including a fast speech rate, expressed non-
conservative ideologies and "progressive" ideas and attitudes, youthcult slang
and colloquialism, and so forth.
Finally, Ryan et al. (1986) identified intergroup overaccommodation as the
fourth and one of the most pervasive of young-to-elderly language strategies.
Here, the simple perception of an addressee's social category membership
being old
- and, independently of a particular handicap (if any), considerations
of dependency and ingroup symbolization are sufficient to invoke negative phys-
ical, social, and psychological inferences for many younger people. In this
category, Ryan et al. find a failure to accommodate to elderly addressees as
individuals, only accommodation to perceived group norms, and we would ex-
pect to find a habitual contextually delimited mode of speech, a register of
"'oldspeak" (see Cohen & Faulkner I986). Following from Smith (in press), we
would now anticipate that such linguistic depersonalization would come about
especially with those young people who had few ideas about the social structure
of the elderly community; that is, for those who regard the elderly as more or less
a homogeneous mass. Giles and Coupland (i984) hypothesized that the related
but nonparallel linguistic processes of simplification and clarification (cf. Brown
1977; Coupland, J.
I983)
might define significant aspects of intergroup overac-
commodation at many linguistic levels: phonological (e.g., careful, little assimi-
lated articulation), syntactic (low complexity in terms of number of constituents
and coding rules), lexical (familiar vocabulary), and discoursal (e.g., a high
level of explicitness and redundancy in encoding linguistic functions and struc-
turing interactions [cf. N. Coupland I983]).
Empirical work is in progress to test these hypotheses in controlled and natu-
ralistic settings. However, an illustrative fragment (Extract 2) shows apparently
overaccommodative speech by a twenty-two-year-old female student clinician
12
(C)
to a sixty-two-year-old, functionally competent, female patient (P) at an
audiotaped University Optometry clinic.
Extract 2
1 C: right (1.0) let's have a look and see what you can read (switches on)
2 OK (.) if you just look there and [er
(.)]don't
read down the whole chart
3 P: yeahJ
4 C: but tell
meI
one of the lowest ones yeah
5 P: Lno I tell you one of the (( 3 sylls.)) yeah (.) well I can
6 see (.) something Z U Y
7 C: mhm (.) rthat's right at the bottom is it?
8 P: L(( 3 sylls.)) that's right at the bottom yeah
9 C: mm
10 P: now then the one above that
11 C: [ how about the 1-line above?
12 P: yeah (.) now that's (.) R P B Z E P D N (( )) R O N
13 C: that's good (.) that's good (.) let's try this one
14 P: FUREPH
15 C: mhm
16 P: can't see any more
17 C: you can't
18 P: no (.)
noIthat'sI
blurred that is but I can make it out (.) it's F U R
19 C: [ight]
The patient is being put through a routine visual acuity test with which she is
familiar. At line 6, the patient reads letters from the bottom line of the test chart,
which the clinician follows with the highly redundant that's right at the bottom is
it? That the letters Z, U, and Y are right at the bottom of the chart is uncontrover-
sial, evident to P and C alike; clearly to P who has just identified the letters! At
line i i, C interrupts P's verbal lead-in to the identification of further letters with
the apparently redundant how about the I-line above? Again, P's fluent reading
of the R, P, B, and so on, sequence (line 12) is met by the overly commending
that's good (.) that's good with very high start-points to the falling intonation on
each occurrence of good conveying enthusiastic praise.
As we have seen, the developing overaccommodation paradigm is well suited
to explaining some central problems of potential miscommunication for the
elderly in young-old dyadic talk (cf. Coupland, Giles, & Wiemann, forthcom-
ing). And, arguably, it is addressing a problem for the elderly that has a high
priority given the social and psychological circumstances of isolation, neglect,
and negative stereotyping in which elderly people find themselves. Ultimately, it
is naive to see problematic intergenerational talk as a one-sided affair (cf.
Grimshaw [I980], who appeals for a bilateral focus on miscommunication in
general). Neither participant in such a context can experience whatever satisfac-
tion we assume to derive from "balanced" accommodative interaction, certainly
in the longer term. Relatedly, we find the notion of relational competence an
13
appealing one, embracing as it does the perspective that often mutually satisfy-
ing, effective, and nonproblematic interactions are jointly constructed and nego-
tiated (as indeed are the opposing cases) in ways that are not simply interpretable
in terms of the individual skills and sensitivities of the participants involved (see
Wiemann & Bradac, in press).
Still, our preliminary research is convincing us that there are regular problems
of intergenerational communication which manifest themselves initially in the
speech of the elderly to the young, such that the young report the elderly to be
"difficult" in conversation or "not on our wavelength." Such a bilateral per-
spective is largely missing in Ryan et al.'s (I986) communicative predicament
model of intergenerational communication, where the blame for problematic talk
and its negative sociopsychological consequences is laid, perhaps in a biased
fashion, at the door of the young alone. We feel it important to adtd the old-to-
young perspective because (i) these seemingly dissimilar miscommunications
may well have their origins in the same complex of sociopsychological factors
that give rise to young overaccommodative speech; (2) young-to-elderly speech
is influenced by the speech strategies adopted by the elderly themselves; and
(3)
we wish to argue later that intergenerational communication problems arising
from both sides can be modelled through an extension of the existing SAT
paradigm. But before introducing these extensions and attempting to recast the
communicative predicament model, the following section will present a con-
trastive study of two young-to-elderly interactions, one of which exemplifies
elderly-to-young discoursal behaviours problematical for the younger partici-
pant.
A CONTRASTIVE CASE STUDY
There is no inevitability of intergenerational miscommunication. In fact, two
naturally occurring instances of intergenerational talk involving one of us (JC)
and, on separate occasions, two elderly females (each living alone) provide
striking evidence of both the problems and the possibilities of cross-generation
conversational interchange. We wish to demonstrate, despite the possible inter-
vention of numerous interindividual considerations of personality, history, and
so on, that the contemporary and recent life circumstances of different elders
(often mediated if not sometimes shaped by their early experiences, see Caspi &
Elder [I986]) can systematically influence their conversational strategies and
styles in ways that prove sometimes facilitative and sometimes obstructive for a
younger interlocutor. The accumulation of social and psychological, objective
and subjective factors in the life circumstances of the elderly have been recog-
nized to correlate with specific pattems of communicative behaviour (namely,
television viewing) (Rubin I984; A. Rubin & R. Rubin I982; R. Rubin & A.
Rubin I982). Yet, what the Rubins refer to as the "contextual age"
of
elderly
people, measured by an index of life circumstantial factors distinguishing sharply
14
between individuals of the same chronological age, has not so far been seen as a
potential determinant of conversational behaviour.
The methodology of participant observation of researchers' own interactions
with family or friends is, of course, a restricted one. It does not allow any degree
of generalizability and risks skewing so-called natural behaviours through the
intrusion of research interests. As regards the latter, however, it should be
clarified that at the time of recording, no explicit research objectives had been
formulated other than providing a case study corpus of intergenerational talk. We
would argue that as a source of preliminary data in the area of intergenerational
miscommunication, it is a powerful procedure allowing depths of insight and
sensitivity not easily available to more traditional objective sociolinguistic ap-
proaches. In any event, we are persuaded by Robinson's (1979:2I7) account of
the "layers of reality" surrounding "the truth" in social scientific research as
well as by Cicourel's (1973:124) recognition of the process of "indefinite tri-
angulation," whereby apparently objective methods which seem to "lock in"
evidence and claim a level of adequacy can themselves be subjected to research
inquiry. In this way, there are no ultimately authoritative or final accounts of
communication data. Participant observation, then, is not seen as the best or the
only method here, merely that it is at least able to respond to and give some
reflection of the particular satisfactions and some forms of difficulties to which
intergenerational talk can give rise.
We should preface our introduction of these case study data with a few further
cautionary, interpretive remarks. Admittedly, the fragments of overaccommoda-
tion we highlight below (as well as in the previous Extract 2) could well be
manifestations of a caring/talk-to-the-infirm register (cf. Tate I983) which is
impervious to recipient-age. The extent to which the particular overaccommoda-
tions reported here are unique to young-elderly interactions is a contentious one;
many others could be at risk, in various categories of disadvantage including the
visually handicapped (Coupland, Giles, & Benn 1986). Recent research by De
Paulo and Coleman (I986) objectively discriminating at subtle levels of analysis
between talk to children, foreigners, and retarded adults suggests the possibility
that ultimately
-
by means of multifaceted, detailed codings
-
we might indeed
be able to isolate styles which are unique to the various addressee-contexts.
However, we are not claiming that the extracts or the subsequent theoretical
framework that arises from them are peculiar only to intergenerational encoun-
ters. The line we wish to pursue is that overaccommodation (and other strategies
invoked) is nonetheless a significant feature of communication between the
young and the old, and our intergenerational model is of value if it is able to
capture and explain sociolinguistic processes operative in this context and, by
implication, probably in others too.
The two elderly females -
fictitiously Doris and Emily
-
are cousins, both
distantly related to JC, who live in separate flats in the same house. Doris is
eighty-five years old, a retired high school teacher who never married. Until ten
15
years ago, she led an active life, attending coffee mornings, visiting friends, and
so forth. At that time, she was hospitalized for a serious abdominal operation and
is now frail, partially sighted, quite immobile, and rarely leaves the house. Apart
from her daycare assistant, she has only three regular visitors, two elderly female
friends and a priest.
Emily is eighty-three years old and worked as a clerk in a garage until she
married young. She has three children, six grandchildren, and seven great-
grandchildren. She is relatively healthy, though partially deaf, and very mobile;
she often travels long distances alone to visit friends and relatives and leaves the
house every day to go shopping, visiting, and so forth. In turn, she has many
visitors, young and old, male and female.
Neither Doris nor Emily shows any serious cognitive nor linguistic decrement,
though Emily has an apparent tendency to be forgetful and her partial deafness
sometimes obtrudes. Despite this, it is the conversation with Doris that is regu-
larly problematical for JC. Below, taking data from two audiotaped complete
encounters, we isolate categories of conversational behaviour in which JC finds
the shared construction of meanings routine, easy, and comfortable in the one
case, but effortful awkward, and unsatisfying in the other. Both individuals were
informed of the recording of the conversations after they had been made and gave
full permission for their use in this context.
Phaticity and topic constraint
"Phatic communion" (Laver 1974) is a convenient term to subsume the range of
ritualistic conversational functions social actors employ in the establishment and
maintenance of social encounters. Even among acquaintances, it is com-
monplace to find the introduction of pseudo-topics subject to quite clear conver-
sational constraints. How are you?lhow's things?lhow've you been? are thus
usually to be taken as requiring some minimal, nonspecific response, though
predictably more contentful and genuine among friends (as in the case with our
present data) than among just acquaintances (e.g., an exchange ol how do you
do?s). Consider JC's would-be phatic question of this sort, asked against the
background knowledge of Doris's continuing frailty, and Doris's response to it
(in Extract 3 below). The very asking of the question is the cause of some small
unease for JC in this context, though the avoidance ol it might make the issue of
Doris's age and health more rather than less, salient at that point.
Extract 3
1 JC: how are you anyway?
2 D: not too bad JI
3 JC: not too bad
4 D: not too good either
5 JC: you're not feeling very well'?
6 D: I don't know what it is (.) I suppose (.) I suppose
it's old
age
7 1 (.) it's such an effort to do anything
8 JC: mm (3.0)
16
9 D: still (.) (cheerfully) could be a lot worse
10 JC: mm (.) that's right (.) yes (.) you can get about a bit anyway
I I D: oh (.) I can (.) ooh yes I can (.) you see (.) E does
12 the cleaning and that kind of thing (.) shopping r(( 3 sylls.))
13 JC: Lmm]
14 D: if I oniyr can get my meals and that kind of thing well as long
15 JC: Lmm] mm]
16 D: as I can do that
17 JC: mm (.) what's your appetite like nowadays?
18 D: well I never feel hungry (.) I never want to eat (.) I just eat
19 things at a mealtime (.) when I have to
20 JC: you've never been a big eater though (.) have you?
21 D: no (.) never
22 JC: no
At line 3, JC's follow-up move (cf. Sinclair & Coulthard 1975) accepts this
response, but Doris reinitiates (1. 4) with not too good either, going on to
attribute this to old age. From JC's viewpoint, these (nonformulaic) comments
transcend phatic communion and appear to have reinterpreted how are you? as a
more specific request for an appraisal of physical and psychological well-being.
Conversation is shifted in the direction of consultation.
In general, there are many conventional topic areas of this sort which IC
perceives to be unavailable to, or at least inappropriate for, conversation with
Doris. Much of phatic communion is topically founded in response to change,
and it is lack of change above all that characterizes Doris's life circumstances.
Her recent past and predictable future are exceptional for not being punctuated
with different experiences of the sort that could (for others) comprise conven-
tional responses to what've you been up to? what's been happening? doing
anything nice at the weekend? going on holiday this year? and so on. Doris
would experience extreme difficulty in finding adequately significant responses
to these apparently insignificant (though in the event perhaps threatening) ques-
tions, and JC accordingly strives to protect her from the salience of lack of
change. Given the doubtful prognosis for Doris, issues of futurity in general tend
to be problematical, as in discussion of medium and long-term plans and pros-
pects. There is even the worry that a discussion of others' (including JC's) plans
for future activities may itself contrastively highlight Doris's circumstances,
particularly since Doris herself very seldom asks JC questions about these is-
sues.4 Not least problematical for JC here is the recognition that protectionist
conversation strategies of this sort carry their own risks and that one does not
relish acting as the arbiter of an elderly interlocutor's communicative needs and
potential. Moreover, if it were generalized into a pervasive strategy for speaking
to many elders, it would undoubtedly strike a good number of these as over-
protective talk, overaccommodative in the sense introduced in the previous sec-
tion, which unduly constrained their discoursal opportunities and reinforced the
pernicious elderly stereotype.
A clear suggestion of the dangers of overgeneralizing such strategies is seen in
17
N. COUPLAND, J. COUPLAN[), H. GILES, AND K. HENWOOD
JC's parallel conversation with Emily. JC feels free to indulge in phatic openings
which regularly elicit comments from Emily on happenings and future occur-
rences in which she will have some predictable or planned personal involvement;
she recounts happenings in family visits and discusses two future births in the
family and the gifts she has made (see Extracts 4 & 5). Her interest in forthcom-
ing births in the family is bolstered by the strong expectation of visits to and from
the family member concerned, in contrast to Doris, to whom the same informa-
tion is available but who rarely raises these matters in conversation.
Extract 4
l E: um (.) what else (.) and er er I (.) I rang NL.. last
2 night (.) 1 was in a panic-
3 JC: -why?
4 E: when I came home from (.) er from er (.) Gloucester i.) from
5 KXC s birthday
rIm]
took some snaps when I was there (.) and
6 JC: LmmJ
7 E: um (.) I couldn't find
my
camera
Land
1I
looked and looked
8 IC: Lah J
Extract S
1 E: how um (.) when is H . expecting her ((baby))?
2 IC: oh it's not long now
3 E: my god! (.) I hope it's not
rIshe'll
burst!
4 JC: L(laughs) it's er (.) her due date
5
is the
eighth
of
August
(.) so that's over a week (.)
isn't
it?
Lack of change seems to underlie a more general problem for JC with Doris's
conversational topics. JC often perceives Doris's topic repertoire as narrow and
repetitive, talk which could be taken as confirmation of the young's stereotypical
views (see above) and which it is all too easy to ascribe vaguely to cognitive
decrement. In Extract 6, Doris has initiated talk on "the price of things today"
and has particularized this with the example of biscuits, not for the first time in
conversation with JC. Though the transcript tends to exaggerate this perception,
the extract is itself internally repetitive, and JC is struck by the contrast between
the mundane (for her) content and assertive (evaluatively overassertive) style of
presentation.
Extract 6
1 D: but in all ways prices are crazy (.) now (.) er for example
2 at breakfast (.) I never could eat breakfast (.) a couple of biscuits
3 are all I like for my breakfast-
4 JC: -mm
5 D: I like a plain biscuit I like an Osbourne biscuit (.) well Edna got
6 them for me (.) um (.) oh until about oh about two or three months ago
7 (.) she said to me well she said (.) I had a real shock today (.) she
8 said she'd always got the biscuits at such and such a place but she went
9 into another supermarket that she doesn't often go into
(.) and the same
10 packet of biscuits (.) Osboume biscuits which she had been paying twenty-
18
II five pence for (.) in this shop were fifteen (1.0) now (.) a packet of
12 biscuits (.) and ten pence variation on them
13 JC: gosh (.) that's a lot risn't it?
14 D: L I think there should be some price control
15 JC: mm (.) mm (.) there isn't though (.) is there?
An exhaustive, unsolicited account of Donis's daily routine and a familiar
anecdote about a relative helping with some building repairs in the same conver-
sation are perceived to fall into the same category. It is entirely understandable
that Doris should take whatever limited opportunities she has to be conversa-
tionally assertive and that, through a combination of limited topic repertoire,
infrequent social contacts, and a largely nonchanging milieu, she should mis-
judge the newsworthiness of issues to her interlocutors. This sociological basis
for miscommunication is appreciated by JC, for whom her own periodically
negative responses to Dofis's talk are a matter of some concern and even guilt. In
the recorded conversation with Emily, difficulties of this sort do not arise,
though with her, JC feels she would have no compunction in interrupting a
repeated anecdote and openly signalling any negative response. The different
interlocutors clearly need to be accommodated to very different extents, just as
they, in turn, are differentially accommodative to JC.
Discourse structuring and topic change
The two conversations differ in the mechanics of their discourse, such that the
transcripts lend themselves, to different extents, to formal discourse analysis.
The conversation with Doris is relatively easy
to analyze into moves, exchanges,
and transactions, following the model of Sinclair and Coulthard (I975). In par-
ticular, the conversation is analyzable as a series of typically two- or three-part
exchanges, mainly initiated by JC. There is relatively little overlapping of turns
except for very frequent follow-up, back-channel responses from JC overlapping
Doris's speech. Indeed, it is the fact of JC's leading conversational role that
produces the relatively tightly structured discourse, just as Sinclair and Coulthard
argue that it is the teacher's powerful role that primarily accounts for the recur-
ring patterns of classroom discourse Sinclair and Coulthard isolate. A large
majority of new transactions are opened by JC here, consistent with comments
made above about Doris's restricted topic repertoire, and the use of a retro-
spective shadowing technique of the transcripts and tapes revives JC's feeling
that she is generally responsible for discourse management in that encounter.
Once again, it is against this background of relative conversational powerless-
ness that Doris's occasional strongly assertive contributions need to be seen. On
three or four occasions when Doris does shift topic, her contributions are per-
ceived by JC to break the coherence of conversational development (cf. Craig &
Tracy I983). For example, during a series of exchanges about the merits and
demerits of television, Doris begins a protracted account of her daily routine
19
(because in the morning by the time(.) 1 get up andr make my bed and wash and
dress and get my lunch (.) that's (.) that's the morning (.) that takes (.) occupies
the whole morning . . . ). It is not that this initiation is unrelated to the foregoing
text, which had focussed on the time at which Doris switched on her television in
the evenings. But Doris does not render this account overtly coherent with the
''value of television" theme, leaving JC to achieve such coherence as may be
possible.
The frequency of JC's follow-up moves in conversation with Doris is also an
indicator of the extent of her conversational responsibility. Impressionistically, a
large proportion of these moves are realized by acts wherein JC confirms Doris's
assessments and views and is generally seen to align herself with Doris's opin-
ions. In Extract 3, for instance, we see acceptance in the repetition of not too bad
(line 3) and in the verbal and nonverbal confirmation conveyed by mm, that's
right, yes, no, and so forth (lines io, 15, 21). There is nothing intrinsically
significant about the use of follow-ups like these which occur routinely in most
conversation and in JC's talk to Emily. But JC perceives herself as more obli-
gated to produce them with Doris than with Emily and is strongly aware (in talk
to Doris) of the risk of sounding vacuous. JC follows the anecdote of the helpful
relative with that's worth (.) something isn't it really?' - an empty aphorism; at
the end of Extract 6, JC's there isn't though (.) is there? is said in the absence of
a more pertinent available contribution.
In these instances, potential conversational lacunae appear where next utter-
ances are problematical for JC (cf. Tannen & Saville-Troike 11985] on the
various functions of silence). A lacuna is not allowed to develop under the
overriding constraint of maintaining at least a superficial conversational flow.
Again, in Extract 3, Doris's self-disclosure, in recognizing that she is not too
good (line 4) demands some sort of follow-up, but not the simple accept that
would be signalled by mm, yeah, or no. It is not appropriate to be seen to
challenge fundamentally the assessment (Doris knows that JC knows of her
fraility) or to convey even mild surprise (really?) In the event, JC opts for the
weak and potentially minimizing you're notfeeling very well? which might seem
to reinterpret Doris's appraisal of an ongoing state as a temporary minor ailment.
Doris's more global assessment I suppose it's old age . . . (lines 6 & 7) comes
close to eliciting an actual lacuna, where JC sees no alternative to a minimal mm
- an impasse from which she is rescued by Doris's still (.) could be a lot worse
(in line 9).
Paradoxically, actual lacunae are more frequent in JC's conversation with
Emily, where JC does not feel the need to accommodate her interlocutor so
comprehensively and so meticulously. With Emily, silence can play its more
usual part as a rhetorical device, for example, indicating disagreement or disap-
proval. On one occasion, Emily broaches the subject of a long-standing family
disagreement and seems to seek support for her side of it. That JC will not be
20
drawn is implicit in her refusal to provide an immediate next utterance of any
sort.
Ideological matching
We have acknowledged that comfortable, well-founded conversational in-
terchanges will typically reveal convergence of many aspects of participants'
communicative behaviours, as predicted by SAT, including content con-
vergences, where, for instance, the speaker takes into account the audience's
lack of knowledge on a particular issue by means of elaboration (Giles & Smith
1979; see also, "content differentiation," Bourhis & Giles I977). But we take it
that a further characteristic of such interchanges will be the recognized pos-
sibility of disagreement and nonmatching of fundamental social beliefs, values,
and ideological standpoints.
In the case just quoted, JC found the communicative means to dissociate
herself from Emily's perpetuation of a family feud. (Yet, at the same time, the
fact that disagreement was not actually voiced in any way is at least accom-
modative to Emily's position and is implicitly calling for a truce.) It is a general
characteristic of JC's talk to Doris, and again problematical for JC, that she feels
obliged to accommodate her ideological stances (on more or less trivial issues) to
those of Doris and in a more full-blown discoursal fashion than by sequences of
back-channels previously mentioned. JC matches the biscuits anecdote (Extract
6) with one about a relative who shops around for low-priced tinned tuna (she
would know exactly which supermarket to go into to get a tin of tuna for fifteen
pence less than in all the others . . .). This complementary ancedote is not about
JC but it purports to espouse a similar life experience position vis-a-vis thriftiness
in the management of household affairs. Indeed, it could well be that much
young-to-elderly ideological matching is produced on occasions where negative
stereotypes of the young believed to be held by the elderly are triggered in the
minds of the young. Matching therefore accomplishes not only the young's
apparent personal dissociation from the elderly's envisaged outgroup image - the
young as spendthrifts
- but also validates the elderly's lifelong adherence to old-
time values as well as expresses the young's own identification with them.
When Doris gives her views on the low quality of most television output (in
Extract 7), JC is heard to agree, and, during shadowing, even hears herself as
converging towards the style of Doris's criticisms.
Extract 7
D: I (.) don't look at any programme that I can say really appeals to me (.) and you know those
Crossroads and Emmerdale Farm and Coronation Street (.) I think they're boring (.) and I
don't like Westerns and I don't like science fiction (.) and quiz shows (.) those silly quizzes (.)
The Price is Right (.) (despairingly) oh
JC: really (.) if you think back to how funny Morecambe and Wise and people like that used to be
(.) I mean (.) there's nobody now to compare (.) and Paul Daniels (.) how on earth they
manage to put him in on a Saturday evening (.) he must be very popular but for the life of me I
can't understand why
21
JC edits her own views of television to praise programmes that she predicts Doris
will also express approval for (Princess Anne on the Terry Wogan show). There
is a hierarchy of ideological accommodation, which begins with avoiding the
articulation of viewpoints that an interlocutor will predictably not share, through
selective editing of one's own views and modifications of those, to outright
falsification. JC's ideological adaptation to Doris does not stretch to this last
category but is sufficient to produce a tension between integrity and accommoda-
tion; aspects of her talk to Doris do not allow her to "be herself."
Taken together, the communicative characteristics listed under the three broad
and overlapping headings above lead to quite polarized perceptions of the two
conversations. By comparison with the conversation with Emily, the one with
Doris is in many respects an effortful and self-conscious event for JC. In SAT
terms, JC sees herself as forced into a variety of overaccommodative speech
behaviours and finds her interlocutor underaccommodating to her own conversa-
tional needs. While every conversation requires the shared negotiation of mean-
ings, and an element of selectivity in the presentation of self, that sharing, as well
as the expression of personal integrity, is far more apparent to JC with Emily.
Beyond the immediate problem of sustaining talk with Doris, JC confronts the
problem that she tends to view her own discoursal style as undesirable and some of
her behaviour as inadequate, even though she is frequently prepared to modify her
own perceived persona considerably in the interests of "getting on."
Ultimately, the most severe problem is that such discourse games are dan-
gerous ones, and the dissatisfactions of moving outside one's habitual styles and
ideologies may lead to mutually dissatisfying interaction. This is either because
JC's efforts may be recognized as such (Doris may then perceive her to overac-
commodate), or simply because JC will have low expectations of future contact.
We feel that we have shown here how it is possible for life circumstances directly
to constrain topic repertoires and indirectly to dictate the mechanics of interper-
sonal discourse in problematical ways for interactants. Life circumstances do not
themselves directly dictate the matching (or otherwise) of ideologies in dis-
course. But a young interlocutor who is sensitive to an elderly interlocutor's life
position may feel it necessary not to dissociate herself from that elderly in-
terlocutor in these respects.
A typology of elderly-to-young language strategies
How general these instances and categories of miscommunication are in in-
tergenerational encounters remains to be established by large-scale empirical
research. Indeed, it is quite possible that many features of Doris's discourse (and
JC's sociolinguistic behaviours relative to them) could be found in
young peer
interactions, particularly when there is an imbalance across interlocutors' life
events and experiences of change. Yet, we have some faith that the case study
has wide generality for a host of intergenerational encounters in many Western
societies at this time and allows us to generate hypotheses for testing in future
22
interactive studies. Specifically, we are suggesting that the life circumstances of
some elderly people induce them to manage their discourse in a way that may be
very generally construed as underaccommodative by many younger recipients -
an elderly-to-young strategy we shall term, intergroup underaccommodation.5
At the same time, however, we recognize limitations inherent in the above.
First, the elderly's life circumstances are exceedingly varied (and along many
more dimensions beyond those contrasting Doris and Emily), thereby lending
themselves to quite different language strategies under the same environmental
conditions. Second, the elderly's social psychological processes can be complex
and therefore lead to language strategies that are far more actively motivated and
creative than hitherto described as seemingly so passive. Third and relatedly, the
data explored above are open to a number of possible interpretations. What
follows is a taxonomy of four further (SAT-inclined) elderly-to-young language
strategies which offer alternative or modified sociopsychological perspectives on
aspects of the case study discourse. They are not to be seen as mutually ex-
clusive, rather as elements of a highly complex accommodative repertoire for
(even one instance of) intergenerational talk.
Self-protective underaccommodation
Beyond JC's status as a young interactant, many dimensions of identity could
have been at least as, if not more, salient and perhaps threatening to Doris (such
as being married, employed, active, etc.). These factors could have disposed this
elder towards a communicative stance which would avoid verbally invoking
interpersonal evaluations likely to be uncomfortable. For instance, she may have
been eating up time by means of a discoursal style which in selecting, maintain-
ing, and repeating certain topics also deflects others on issues salient to life
circumstances (e.g., TV viewing; see Rubin I986), so as to minimize any un-
comfortable social comparisons between herself and JC that could arise (inten-
tionally or unintentionally) during conversation. Moreover, the potential for
being attributed as conversationally insular and/or egocentric by JC and others
may be regarded by Doris as a small price to pay for creating a degree of control
over the encounter, keeping her own identity intact, and even perhaps al-
truistically seeking to relieve JC from the arguably recognized pressures and
responsibilities of managing discourse sensitivity. And following the same line
of an earlier argument, it could well be that the necessity for such discourse
strategies to be implemented by JC do not allow Doris to "be herself' either.
Such a post hoc interpretation of events was far from the mind of JC in
ongoing interaction, yet it does, in concert with potential generational dif-
ferences (e.g., in beliefs about talk, see the section on Sociolinguistics and the
Elderly above), open up hitherto unexplored strategic subtleties in elderly talk
that have attributional implications for intergenerational miscommunication.
Whether such sociolinguistic self-protective strategies are widely manifest (and
probably misattributed) is a matter for future empirical research. It is quite
23
feasible that speakers combine intergroup underaccommodative and self-protec-
tive (and other) strategies as multifunctional aspects of social discourse (see
Street & Cappella I985).
Age self-handicapping
This is a defensive, face-saving strategy widely acknowledged in the social
psychology of self-presentation (Arkin & Baumgardner, in press; Jones &
Berglas 1978; Kolditz & Arkin I982). It can be illustrated by the seemingly
commonplace occasions where people excuse themselves from performing ade-
quately at a forthcoming event or series of events due to illness, mishap, or
tragedy (e.g., I have rotten flu today; my lecture notes and slides were lost in
transit). Such verbal behaviour allows the speaker much attributional freedom
(cf. literature on "disclaimers": Hewitt & Stokes 1975; Schlenker & Leary
1982). Should he or she not come performatively or communicatively up to par
or expectations, there is a ready-made (extenuating situational) explanation for
its cause which does not detract from the speaker's abilities and inherent disposi-
tions at least on this occasion. On the other hand, should an adequate or even
superior performance unfold despite these aggravating problems, then more
power to the individual's resilience and capacities for overcoming them, with the
product itself being likely upgraded as a consequence. In sum, should self-
handicapping be accomplished in convincing ways for the audience present, then
the speaker has a reasonable chance of controlling his or her image in others'
perceptions.
Experience informs us that self-handicapping one's behaviour, thoughts, and
feelings to age is very common among the elderly, and several instances of this
can be found in Doris's discourse reported above. Invoking such disclaimers as I
can't do that anymore; these old bones won't . . .; over the last few years, I just
can't remember as well as . . .; and so on; may be attempts to engender patience
or sympathy and propose inevitable biological attributions for the person's condi-
tion. Another more proactive variety of age self-handicapping is the oft-heard set
of statements such as, this will probably be my last Christmas . . .; no point in
buying me that, I won't be aroundfor much longer. . .; and so on. Depending
on the occasion when they are generated, these can carry multiple benefits,
including excusing the speaker from present and future strenuous activity, effort,
and responsibilities, as well as derive denials of self-evaluation (no, you're
healthy, marvellous, goodfor many a year yet, etc.). I'here is also a potential for
self-handicapping to be consciously manipulative as a form of "emotional black-
mail"
-
a tactic for gaining compliance or services. Nor should we be too quick
to censure such tactics among the elderly who, from one perspective, may
justifiably marshal whatever resources for conversational influence are available
to them. These, at least, are processes by which the elderly themselves might
legitimize the tactic.
24
Self-stereotyping
This phenomenon was brought to our attention as a cognitive device by Turner
(i982, in press) and can be conceived as a process of depersonalization. Turner
argues that when we construe a situation as an intergroup one, we not only
homogenize the attitudes, cognitions, and acts of members of the outgroup
through stereotyping (e.g., they all sound and speak the same) and respond to all
of them in like fashion, but we also attenuate presumed differences between
ourselves and members of our own group (cf. Doise 1978; Tajfel & Wilkes
I963). In other words, we take on the characteristics of what we believe to be -
or stereotype as
-
truly representative of the ingroup.
In our gerontological sociolinguistic context, we would argue that when, in
intergenerational encounters, contextual features trigger an elderly (or even
"aged") identity in people, they will assume communicative strategies they
believe to be associated with older speakers. Obviously the same situational
conditions will not invoke elderly self-categorizations in all senior citizens, some
of whom will be extremely resistant to such generative mechanisms. Moreover,
even when these categorizations do emerge, their sociolinguistic manifestations
will be many and various for different elders, given the potentially differing self-
stereotyped contents of individuals who occupy different social roles and respon-
sibilities in the elderly community (cf. Smith, in press). Nevertheless, it is
possible that identities so triggered will archetypally be communicated through
slowing speech rate, increasing vocal perturbation, attenuated frequency of facial
expressions and reduced intensity of general animation, and in patterns of topic
selection, for example, talking of things past and about self in an apparently
egocentric fashion.
Once again, we have no means of evaluating the appropriateness of this
analysis to the case study data or comparing it to the original interpretation. We
nonetheless believe that both analyses are viable and potentially generalizable.
As social identity is contextually triggered, we would expect that such linguistic
self-stereotyping would occur in specifiable interactional circumstances where
age is salient (Ward I984). Intergroup underaccommodation by the elderly
would, on the other hand, be predictably manifest transsituationally in virtually
all intergenerational encounters.
There are many social psychological climates which could trigger age self-
stereotyping. These include visual representations of the elderly in the environ-
ment, including ageist representations of the elderly as hunched-up individuals
requiring physical support (as on British road crossing signs), the perceived
association of the elderly with the handicapped (as labelled on certain seats in
public transport), and the representation of the elderly in the media (that is,
where they are represented at all, in a negatively stereotypic manner). No less
important, however, are the experiences of overaccommodative talk from the
young, which in essence
-
and if frequent and diverse enough
-
is telling the
25
oftentimes vulnerable recipients that they are now relatively less competent and
"past it." Speculatively speaking, one might predict an elderly sociolinguistic,
developmental sequence of self-handicapping, leading eventually (and via over-
accommodative recipiency) to self-protectionism to self-stereotyping, and then
on to intergroup nonaccommodation.
Intergroup divergence
It is possible, as Caporael et al. (I983) showed amongst certain of the institu-
tional elderly, that recipients of young overaccommodation will react unfavoura-
bly.
It is also
possible
that this
young-to-elderly strategy
-
often
positively
motivated - could be transformed into communicative retaliation from its receiv-
er. A hierarchy all the way from politely informing the youthful that their
discourse style is mismanaged and inappropriate up to sharp, verbal aggression is
possible. Of course, reactions at this latter pole are likely to be combatted by the
evocation of confirming negative stereotypes of the elderly as "'grumpy and
irritable." Indeed, having a history of overaccommodations from the young is
likely to breed amongst the elderly a suspicious frame of reference with a conse-
quential "closed" communicative style for dealing with intergenerational en-
counters (whether they have retaliated previously, or are doing so at present, or
not). This suggests a second, orthogonal dimension of considering intergroup
divergence as involving, warm, accommodating talk at one pole to detached,
icy, nonaccommodating talk at the other.
Yet, intergroup divergence by the elderly might not be triggered simply by the
felt need for reactive measures, whether immediate or anticipatory. There could
be those occasions where elderly identity is salient yet the meanings of its
membership are considered negative but illegitimate (e.g., Giles & Johnson
I987; Turner & Brown 1978); members of the (American) Gray Panthers might
well constitute a group par excellence who experience a low threshold in this
regard. Sociolinguistic manifestations of this might well be found in accentuating
intergenerational differences and in favour of the elderly's time-honoured values,
experience, and achievements as well as verbalized denigrations of certain con-
temporary trends and beliefs, including ageism. This discourse is likely to be
managed counterstereotypically and could include other accommodative strat-
egies which signal implicit disregard for the young's interpretive capacities
(e.g., clarifying, simplifying, etc., for even stated reasons of other's immatu-
rity).
TOWARDS A SOCIOLINGUISTICALLY ELABORATED MODEL OF SAT
In this final section, we shall attempt to draw out some implications of the
foregoing which point to important modifications of SAT. Moreover, we shall
show how such a more sociolinguistically elaborated model of SAT can incorpo-
rate significant aspects of young-to-elderly and elderly-to-young interactions.
We have argued that the term "'overaccommodation" is generally appropriate to
26
characterize the range of young-to-elderly categories of Ryan et al. (I986) and
we used the same term to describe the younger speaker's perception of her own
talk in the problematical encounter in the contrastive case
study. There, we
invoked (for the first time illustratively and interpretively) the notion of underac-
commodation in an attempt to overview JC's perception of the "difficult" in-
terlocutor's speech to her. As yet, under- and overaccommodation are not con-
cepts adequately theoretically integrated into SAT, and the
sociolinguistic
dimensions of the interlocutors' communication attributes, abilities, and needs
are still scantily analyzed.
As an effort towards clarification, let us return to the model provided in Figure
I. Note here that the strategic options available to a speaker within the SAT
paradigm are constrained by an "addressee focus," which considers
only as-
pects of the interlocutor's productive performance. In this way, the sociolinguis-
tic heartland of SAT is traditionally limited to what we have referred to as the
approximation strategies of convergence, maintenance, complementarity, and
divergence. To move beyond this and incorporate the Ryan et al. (I986) as well
as the above strategies, we have to recognize two important issues. First, we
need to distinguish between behaviour which is adaptive to another's productive
performance and his or her receptive competence. Over- and underaccommoda-
tions often relate to perceived receptive skills of the recipient, as, for instance,
archetypally in sensory overaccommodations. Second, and relatedly, approxima-
tion strategies are only one subtype of what we propose to call attuning strat-
egies. These are the general sociolinguistic behaviours wherein speech (and
nonverbal behaviour) is, consciously or subconsciously, adapted in relation to
the interlocutor's perceived general communicative characteristics and not mere-
ly his or her speech output. Hence, coexisting encoding options are to be found
in the interpretability component, which requires a speaker to attend to other's
interpretive (including receptive) competence
-
specifically to what it is per-
ceived, stereotypically, to be. Another major component is the set of options
under discourse management strategies, where speakers judge others' conversa-
tional needs and attune their own talk to these.
Figure 2 presents a more developed model of the "addressee focus" and
"sociolinguistic encoding" components of SAT. We see the discourse manage-
ment component not only as the broadest but as the most central sociolinguistic
category through which interpersonal accommodation is realized. It highlights
the fact that a psychologically convergent orientation to one's interlocutor is
most naturally, we claim, indexed by and implemented through talk designed to
intermesh positively at a variety of discoursal levels with a conversational part-
ner. Figure 2 suggests that, in line with well-established treatments of contextual
or dyatopic variation (cf. Gregory & Carroll 1978; Halliday 1978), a tripartite
classification may be appropriate under which to identify discoursal attuning
processes
-
"'field" relating to ideational content construction; "tenor" to the
management of interpersonal positions, roles, and faces; "mode" to the more
formal procedural/textual dimensions of interaction. From this "well-managed"
27
ADRESSEE FOCUS
SOCIOLINGUISTIC ENCODING;
ATTEND TO OTHER'S
PRODUCTIVE PERFORMANCE APPROXIMAT:ON convergence/ e.g.
of dlaect/
(actual)/ _ . * STRATEGIES
dlvergence/ speeh-rate
percelved/
coinpbmnty/
stereotyped
ATTEND TO OTHER'S
INTERPRETABILITY
modify complexity/ e.g. In
respect of
IN TERPRETIVE COMPETENCE
(actual)/
STRATEGIES clarity/
explicItnes
ampltude/
eyntax/
lexbl
perceived/
stereotyped
DISCOURSE FIELD e.g. topic-selectlon/
ATTEND TO OTHER'S
topIc-sharing
CONVERSATIONAL NEEDS
MANAGEMENT TENOR e.g. face-malntalning/
(actual)/ back-channelling
percelved/ STRATEGIES
--\U ODE e.g. turn-maneglng/
stereotyped
coheaIon
INTERPERSONAL modify e.g. lnterruptlon/
ATTEND TO CONTROL other's torms of
sddress
ROLE-RELATIONS
STRATEGIES role-dIocretIon
FIGURE 2: An extended model of sociolinguistic processes in SAT.
perspective, accommodative talk is not necessarily talk wherein participants
share any obvious speech characteristic - although we have recognized the
power of approximative talk in respect to specific scalable speech dimensions
such as speech rate and dialect. Rather, it is talk wherein actors achieve a high
degree of fit between their typically different, but potentially attunable, behav-
iours.
This standpoint allows SAT to embrace sociolinguistic work conducted under
the headings of discourse and conversation analysis as well as other role taking,
constructivist research (e.g., Kraut & Higgins I984; O'Keefe & Delia I985). In
turn, SAT should provide a valuable theoretical framework in which to investi-
gate variability in discourse particularly from the evaluative perspective of study-
ing miscommunication (Coupland, Giles & Wiemann, forthcoming). In the con-
trastive case study, we were able to focus on a variety of sociolinguistic dimen-
sions in which elderly speakers attuned their discourse in more or less accom-
modative and contra-accommodative ways for one interlocutor. Already here we
are beginning to see the potential of a perspective on conversational management
of a sort seemingly denied by Gricean idealizations of conversational practice
28
(Grice 1975). His cooperative principle and its more specific maxims of quantity
(provide just that information which is currently needed), quality (be truthful),
relation (be relevant), and manner (be clear) are precisely those areas where we
could locate variable "field" behaviour in the case study in relation to in-
tergenerational attuning strategies.
In Figure 2, it will be seen that we have added a fourth addressee focus and, by
implication, a fourth attuning dimension, namely, a set of interpersonal control
strategies. A category of this sort is needed to take in Ryan et al.'s (I986)
"dependency-related overaccommodation," not to mention the growing liter-
ature on the relationships between social power and language (Berger I985;
O'Barr I982; Wiemann I985). It should also be emphasized that the four ad-
dressee foci are not mutually exclusive on all occasions. For instance, conversa-
tional needs often overlap with the maintenance of role relations; attending to
another's productive performance might well be instigated so as to provide
stereotypic clues as to how best to attune one's interpretability strategies. To this
end, the "addressee focus" boxes are schematically linked as potentially
interdependent.
A SAT-inspired typology of intergenerational language strategies
Finally, we need to show how the revised model relates to Ryan et al.'s (I986)
four categories of intergenerational language strategies (plus the fifth introduced
in note
5)
together with our own five above. Table I summarizes the various
social and sociopsychological triggers which activate the different chains of
interindividual communication and relates these to generalized motivational pro-
cesses associated with the various subtypes of accommodative talk. Though it
seems very likely that a range of sociolinguistic strategies will be simultaneously
activated in fulfilling particular speaker motivations, we list those identified
earlier as central to each category. Detailed study of particular cases may well
show that, for example, a younger speaker wishing to exert his or her authority
over an elderly addressee (row 2 of Table X) will opt for simplified/clarified talk
(interpretability strategies), perhaps constrain the addressee's conversation op-
tions (discourse management), and diverge linguistically (approximation strat-
egy), as well as produce the regulative talk suggested by Ryan et al. (I986).
The two columns at the right in Table I
attempt to summarize the labelling
judgements recipients are likely to make of senders' strategies. Although con-
textually based attributions are likely to alter some of the implied evaluations in
the far right column, they are, given our focus on intergenerational problematical
talk, largely negative, although like Ryan et al. (I986), we do not have direct
access to these issues apart from those in strategy 6.6 If the attributed strategies
do in fact adequately capture authentic attributions made in the specific cases
referred to, it is interesting to note the various matches and mismatches of
speaker strategies and recipients' attributions. For example, in rows 1, 4, 5, and
6, we find generally positive communicator intents being attributed negatively;
rows 2 and 3 show recipients quite adequately reading their addressors' intended
29
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strategies. This broad distinction allows us to identify two quite different per-
spectives on miscommunication, relating either to encoding/decoding mis-
matches (cf. Milroy 1984), or to communications considered to be mismanaged
ab initio.
The final column of Table I provides a basis for defining over-, under-, and
contra-accommodation - SAT's contribution, we contend, to the characteriza-
tion of evaluative miscommunication: concepts which relate to participants' (re-
cipients or speakers themselves) evaluations of speakers' sociolinguistic perfor-
mances. Data considered in this paper suggest that:
Overaccommodation is a category of miscommunication wherein a participant
perceives a speaker to transcend those sociolinguistic behaviours the partici-
pant judges necessary for attuned talk on a particular occasion.
Such overattuned talk is instantiated in rows X and 4, and arguably, although less
clearly, in row 8 of Table i . It is most likely to stem from positive speaker intents
but is generally negatively evaluated as "patronizing," "demeaning," and
"talking down."
Conversely:
Underaccommodation is a category of miscommunication wherein a partici-
pant perceives a speaker to insufficiently (or not at all) implement those
sociolinguistic behaviours the participant judges necessary for attuned talk on
a particular occasion.
This underattuned talk is exemplified in rows 5, 6, 7, and 9 of Table 1. It can
stem from negative or relatively positive speaker intents but is generally nega-
tively evaluated by recipients as "inconsiderate" and "unhelpful."
Finally:
Contra-accommodation is a category of miscommunication wherein a partici-
pant perceives a speaker to be implementing those sociolinguistic behaviours
the participant judges to be psychologically dissociative.
Talk attuned in this fashion is exemplitied in rows 3 and io and is often nega-
tively evaluated as ""rude," "arrogant," and "insulting." It often constitutes
forms of speech divergence (as in the cases considered) but can be encoded
(intentionally or otherwise) by a variety of communicative distance strategies
(Lukens 1979), sometimes even by means of speech convergence (see Thakerar
et al. I982).
Needless to say, the far right column of Table X is an arbitrary cutoff point at
the present stage of theorizing. For example, a recipient's labelling of a speaker's
performance (as overaccommodative, for example) is not the end of the eval-
uative process (see Figure I). So, a complex of attributional considerations may
cause elderly recipients of overaccommodative talk (e.g.,
row 4) to rationalize
their evaluations of it, though they themselves recognize it to be overaccom-
modative in relation to their wishes and needs, along the lines of "well, it's all I
32
INTERGENERATIONAL AC'COMMODATION
deserve at my age" or "I dislike being the recipient of such talk, but accept it in
the recognition of my own life-span position." Such processes are the explana-
tion for the probable underreporting of elderly experiences in this category of
intergenerational miscommunication. Obviously, thereafter, reactive commu-
nicative strategies mediated by perceived contextual demands and norms are
importantly and consequentially dependent on the ever-changing attributional
and evaluative labelling of the dynamic input received, the sequential continua-
tion of which is schematically looped for both interactants in Figure i.
The dependency strategy (row 2) poses problems for the model. We are
diffident about assigning the oh, you naughty girl instance, quoted by Ryan and
associates, uniquely to either under- or overaccommodation. In fact, the brief
situational sketch from the authors suggests that both evaluations may be being
made. The speaker may be being perceived to transcend some aspects of pre-
sumed well-attuned talk (e.g., if some measure of authoritarian talk from a
homecare assistant to an elder is judged appropriate) and clearly to be insuffi-
ciently attuned (e.g., in constraining the elder's discoursal and behavioural op-
tions). This category makes it clear that overaccommodation and underaccom-
modation are not to be seen as mutually exclusive characterizations of any one
communicative event or even any one communicative act. Rather, they are two
central evaluative categories of problematical talk that can arise to varying de-
grees and in different combinations in response to the multiple dimensions of
accommodative strategies as we have sketched them. Space prevents us from
invoking a plethora of related research questions and hypotheses regarding the
psychological, cultural, and situational determinants and consequences of the
strategies we have identified (but see Giles & Coupland I984; Ryan et al. 1986).
It is through extensive social psychological and sociolinguistic research into
the contexts, character, and consequences of these accommodative processes that
we hope to clarify issues in intergenerational miscommunication and contribute
to their resolution. In addition, we do not feel that we have a patent on all the
intergenerational strategies operating in Western (let alone other) societies.7 For
instance, and in full recognition that our conceptualization of elderly-to-young
strategies may be unnecessarily biased in an underaccommodative direction
fuelled in the main by supposed threats to identity (see Table i), it may well be
that some elderly folk will attempt to approximate and ideologically match the
speech styles and contents they believe to be typical of youth today. In any case,
it remains for future research to examine the degree of fit between the tax-
onomies of intergenerational strategies and established propositional accounts of
SAT (which have been developed exclusively for approximation strategies) on
the one hand, and intergroup communication in other caring contexts and with
respect to the handicapped (cf. Coupland, Giles, & Benn I986) on the other.
As we noted at the outset, our analysis requires some revisions to Ryan et al.'s
(I986) communicative predicament model of ageing. There, intergenerational
encounters are taken by and large from the perspective of how "modified speech
to the elderly" (in particular, overaccommodation mediated by stereotyped ex-
33
Recgnitlon of Age
E i9i} +~~~~~CL C/
Context triggers
E
EEncounter
older person Ce/CotxtrgrsEncounter younger pero
agel dentity
Change:
Physlologicl
Pgychologica
Sociocultural
. SEEOTYPED EXPECTAMN8
Loss of personal control
and self esteem
Lessened psychological
activity and social
Interaction
S;peech behaviour tDadS"h behavlour toward
the older porson _ the
youngr
person
Constrained opportunitie
for communication
Reinforcement for
age-stereotyped
bohavlours ._
FIGURE 3: Revised interactive model for the communicative predicament of
aging (after Ryan et al.).
pectations) can arouse certain sociopsychological processes such as lowering
self-esteem and personal control, which themselves over time will constrain the
potential for satisfying intergenerational encounters and inhibit, over the longer
term, optimal psychological and physical states.
Our revised model in Figure 3 is an attempt to take advantage of the bilateral,
strategic focus in the present article and affords weight to contextual factors
triggering an elderly identity and the consequential speech to the young that
might ensue. The present communicative predicament model recognizes and
does not gloss over the possibility that some of the elderly themselves may
contrive to facilitate their own ageing by means of intergroup underaccom-
modative, linguistic self-protective, self-handicapping, and self-stereotyping
strategies. Indeed, these strategies may well have been cues to the young's own
overaccommodations in the first place. The model also gives prominence to
communication consequences for the young as well as for the elderly, which
again feed back into influencing the sociopsychological climates for the young's
subsequent intergenerational speech behaviour.
As JC's attributions and experiences indicate, certain kinds of speech from the
34
elderly (as well as the young's own self-monitored speech in that same context)
do seem to have a range of cognitive and affective consequences, including
reinforcing ageist stereotypes, inducing feelings of a lack of interactional control
and guilt, and lessening the desire for contacts with the elderly in the future.
Such communicative experiences also socialize the young into negative gener-
alized beliefs about elderly and ageing, laying the predictive foundations of their
own ageing experiences. This perspective implies that psychosociolinguistic in-
tervention in the process of ageing should itself be a lifelong pursuit; an educa-
tional preparation and policy for ageing should ideally embrace the very young as
well. We do believe that our framework will eventually be able to offer some
important insights for socially productive intervention. Sociolinguistic models
such as SAT could usefully inform social work, administration courses and
behavioural science modules to medical, nursing, dental, and ophthalmic stu-
dents, to name but a few. But it is premature at the present stage of data
gathering, and beyond the scope of this article, to explore particular strategies for
change.
CONCLUSION
This article has a number of interlocking objectives: First, to air gerontological
matters in a sociolinguistic context, arguing that such issues are at present se-
riously underrepresented in current theory. Second, we seek to extend recent
theorizing in this area on young-to-elderly language strategies to take into ac-
count their elderly-to-young counterparts. Third, we argue that language and
communication issues can be the bedrock of intergenerational problems in gener-
al and a contributor to psychological decline and physical ill-health among the
elderly in particular. Fourth, we show how empirical attention (albeit very mod-
est in this instance) to such intergenerational concerns allows us to revise and
elaborate the sociolinguistic heart of speech accommodation theory in ways that
are challenging to our understanding of a whole range of processes in everyday
conversation. In sum, with this article we begin to move away from mere lip-
service to interdisciplinary principles and theory nearer to actual practice within a
life-span perspective, integrating social psychological and discourse variationist
approaches. Of course, many of the details of the schematic inserts displayed
herein will be tightened, replaced, and amplified
-
as doubtless will the figures
and table themselves - in the wake of large-scale empirical inquiry. Our meta-
aims have been to excite theoretical interest in the sociolinguistics of ageing and
ageism on the one hand, and in the development of psychosociolinguistics on the
other.
NOTES
i. This paper is based on research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC,
UK) reference number: Goo222002.
35
2. We are grateful to John Wiemann and Karen Atkinson for their comments on an earlier draft of
this paper, which was presented in abridged forn at the Minnesota Linguistics Conference on
"Linguistic Accommodation and Style-shifting," September i986.
3. Our own framework here is aligned with some very recent sociological and social psychological
thinking in moving away from notions such as "disengagement' and 'dependency' towards a more
transactional analysis which invokes constructs like "cultural estrangement" and "interdependen-
cy" (e.g., Dowd 1986; Peterson & Quadagno 1986).
4. An alternative perspective is to see such other-directed questioning by JC as nicely absolving
her from self-disclosing and giving information and views about herself that one or both participant(s)
might find disturbing (cf. Berger & Kellerman 1983; Kellerman & Berger [984).
5. The evocation of this strategy also suggests that it has an analogue at the young-to-elderly level
and therefore should be an additional (fifth) item to the Ryan et al. (1986) typology. While elderly-to-
young underaccommodation may be negatively evaluated by young recipients, it is possible that the
young-to-elderly equivalent might be tolerated far more by some elderly owing to the mediating
possibility of retrospective social attributions (e.g., llwe waslwere the same at that age).
6. The hows, whens, and whys of attuned intergenerational talk mutually attributed as highly
successful are beyond the scope of the present paper. Our emphasis here on common experiences of
miscommunication and on the sociolinguistic manifestations of ageism reflects our feeling that these
are matters of the highest priority. Interventionist measures, when these can be justified, are likely to
take the form of problem avoidance, rather than attempts to promote ideal intergroup behaviours.
7. Hymes (personal communication) makes the important observation that different communities
and cultures will, of course, have very different ways of being old, and of treating the old. A full
picture would need to include cases in which the old had power (perhaps religious power).
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Accommodating the Elderly: Invoking and Extending a Theory

Author(s): Nikolas Coupland, Justine Coupland, Howard Giles, Karen Henwood

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