I’m not talking to you right now
I don’t often shop at Sears - in fact, as far as I can remember I’ve walked into one less than five times in my life. But recently I was looking for an item that I thought might be sold at Sears (turned out, it’s not, at least not at the one I went to), and we now live not far from one, so I went over to do some shopping. While up in the tools and hardware section, I heard a really interesting message over the PA system. Paraphrasing:
Attention, Sears sales associates. Make sure your areas are well organized. Walk through the aisles and make sure your inventory is tidy and that everything is visible. Remember, we pride ourselves on good service, and always put the customer first!
I’d never heard anything like this before. For the first half of the announcement, I was thinking, “why am I hearing this?” Then it became clear - this public announcement, on the surface aimed at employees (I have no idea if what was in the message was actually supposed to be immediately relevant to sales associates), was designed to be overheard by customers.
It’s an interesting question how (or if) one can tell that a message that was not explicitly addressed to them is meant to be overheard by them. It seems as though the biggest cues are semantic and pragmatic, but it seems like there could be some more grammatically constructions that do the job. I’m thinking of utterances like Well, I would have gone to the show but _someone_ wanted to stay home and unpack all evening. It seems as though conversation analysts would have covered this topic in their work, but after a quick search the closest thing I could find was the idea that conversations in play-by-play sports commentary are dialogues meant to be heard by a non-participating audience. Then there’s the more recent idea that some instances of self-directed or soliloquial utterances are in fact meant to be overheard by nearby potential addressees. But I don’t know of any real generalizations that have been made about saying things with the intention that someone other than the addressee receives a message.
[...] wrote an interesting post today on Iâ
I have a great example of exactly this. I’m a a grad student in a typically international linguistics department. I’m a native speaker of English. I was sitting in a small computer lab one day with a new grad student from Germany, let’s call her Franke, when another German grad student whom I’ve known for years walked in , let’s call her Hanna. Hanna and I talked for a bit, then she turned to Franke and they began speaking in English about the German language courses they each will be teaching. After 3 or 4 minutes of speaking in English, Hanna said directly to Franke, “Well, I guess we could talk in German” and they began speaking in German.
This comment could only have been meant for me, but it was not directly addressed to me. I was meant to overhear it. Partly because Hanna had begun speaking with me in English, she may have felt a certain politeness constraint to let me know that, although they were about to speak in German, they weren’t talking about me, hehe. This actually happened about 4 years ago, but it remains one of my favorite anecdotes about politeness, code-switching, and Gricean implicatures.