Clark, Herbert H., and Susan E. Brennan. “Grounding in communication.” Perspectives on socially shared cognition 13.1991 (1991): 127-149.
Summary:
In order for two people to be in the same common ground in communication, they need to go through a process, which this paper dubs as “Grounding”. Grounding can be defined by two main factors. One of them is called purpose, the other is medium. “The contributor and his or her partners mutually believe that the partners have understood what the contributor meant to a criterion sufficient for current purposes.” This is called the grounding criterion. the collective process by which the participants try to achieve this criterion is called grounding. Contributing to a conversation takes place in two different phases. Presentation phase, where the contributor presents their utterance. Acceptance phase, Where the partner accepts the utterance and gives some sort of feedback. During the acceptance phase, if the partner doesn’t give a negative feedback, the contributor usually assumes that they have been understood, otherwise they’d go on ahead to repair their utterance. Speakers, in principle, usually put least collaborative effort in a conversation. But it may not always lead to grounding, because of reasons such as, time pressure, errors and ignorance, in which case, the speaker has to repair their utterance for grounding to take place.
Grounding may change based on the purpose of the utterance. It may differ from each other in case of referencing, verbatim content. Grounding may also change based on the medium. Conversation isn’t always face-to-face. It may take place on phone, email, telegraph, videotape etc. In these cases the grounding criterion changes. One of the factors that are important in terms of grounding based on different media, is cost. Cost decides whether the grounding will take place or not. The purpose of the conversation and the medium also interacts with each other. Either of them may change based on the other.
Grounding is essential in a conversation because it determines whether the message was conveyed from the speaker to the listener. Whatever the speaker intended to convey with their utterance must have been understood by the listener, and they have given some sort of feedback to it. This process is what is called grounding.
Reflection:
The paper talks about the process of grounding. The grounding is basically the process of sender’s intended message to be understood by the receiver. Now, even though the paper mostly focused on face to face conversation, they did mention that the criteria of grounding may change based on the purpose of the conversation and even the media.
The fact that grounding changes with medium has been the point I was able to relate to the most. These days, the media of conversation has changed so much. So many people prefer instant chat messages or email over face-to-face conversation. So, the grounding process has changed drastically. There was a time, when whether grounding took place on chat messages was vague. We didn’t know if the person we are talking to got our message, understood it. The whole grounding process depended on the fact whether they gave any sorts of feedback or not. These days on chat apps such as Messenger, Whatsapp we see that the message was delivered AND seen by the user. At that point we realize that they message was received or not. But whether they understood what we said or not still rests on their feedback. These days, reducing the cost of grounding on such medium has also been worked on. Everyday we are trying to make grounding even easier in the electronic media.
For someone who is always engaging in electronic media for conversation, the contrast between different media and purpose in grounding has been quite insightful for me. It shows me how different they are and how much people may or may not understand each other. It also helps me to understand what sort of communication I’m expecting from people on the reddit on /r/speedrun, which is essential for our class project. Based on whether grounding took place or not will make us understand whether the speedrunners managed to convey their process of speedrunning to others.
