Addressivity in Context
Bahktin's "addressivity," and a Disney+ joke...
I’ll start today’s blog with a bit of an anecdote. With two little ones running around the house (twin girls who are a little over three years of age), sometimes the only opportunities my wife and I have to convene are during.. a showing of Paw Patrol, or after the girls have gone down for the night. Several weeks back, we were loading up some show prior to the girls’ nighttime routine and my spouse hit me with a joke: I couldn’t get the app to load on the device, so I told her: “It’s frozen.” And she responded with… “Let it go…”
There’s something to be said here about humor, context, situation, and what Bakhtin called “addressivity.” Needless to say, I felt some type of way about my wife’s joke there, but it reveals something about the nature of context and the understandability of language. It’s not news to educators—or communicators more broadly—that context fundamentally matters, and that the meaning of words is in large measure dependent upon the context in which they are uttered. I’m nearly a discipline of the Wittgenstein aphorism: “Meaning is use,” and without the socio-cultural situation of the “It’s frozen” mentioned above, much of the sense is lost.
Wiktionary defines “addressivity” as:
(linguistics, philosophy) The quality of being addressive, of engaging in communication for the sake of one's interlocutor.
A more robust definition of “addressivity” comes from G. S. Morson here:
Addressivity indicates that an essential feature of language is that it is always oriented to a listener. Addressivity is what turns a sentence, a mere potential utterance, into an actual utterance. Listeners do not just respond to an utterance after it is made; they also shape it while it is being made. Addressivity also includes an utterance's implicit dialogue with earlier utterances on the same topic. Words 'remember' their contexts. Addressivity also includes the utterance's orientation to a 'superaddressee,' an imagined perfect listener who would understand perfectly.
Note: emphasis added.
Bakhtin and linguists rightfully call out the responsive nature of language and dialogue here, and my wife’s joke is a case in point. Building upon a utterance-context wherein we’re shuffling streaming apps, watching kids’ movies, struggling with connectivity issues, and managing a variety of emotions (on the parent- and child-side), the remark “Let it go” is jam-packed with information and rich in what it communicates. She’s communicating an awareness of the moment—when we’re trying to load content to help manage the kiddos; she’s communicating advice—how I ought manage my own emotions or a recommendation of how to do so; and she’s communicating some humor through the double entendre—serving to lighten the load, ease some potential conflict, and even get a jab at me through the simultaneity of the joke.
This is to say, responsivity is absolutely integral and inseparable from dialogue, from language, from conversation itself. As the blurb above recognizes, interlocutors “do not just respond to an utterance after it is made; they also shape it while it is being made.” This case in point—the “It’s frozen” story—may serve to illustrate how context-dependent our interactions are across our days, interactions which are necessarily bound up with language—the language of orality, literacy, or gesture and behavior. Awareness of the specific situation, the context, and attending to our ‘addressivity’ in context assists educators and educational leaders in leveraging the moment, their expertise, and their values for refining teaching and learning.