Monday, October 7, 2013

Five Registers

Chapter Seven of Gary D. Chapman's Covenant Marriage is entitled "Five Levels of Communication".  In it, he identifies five different kinds of interaction, each one involving more intimacy than the last.

1.  Hallway Talk.  As Westerners, we often struggle in English for a way to ask, "how are you?" that is not simply a hollow greeting.  This level of interaction is the lowest, and occurs naturally when you pass a stranger in the hallway.

2. Reporter Talk.  People who know each other well can often fall into a pattern of communication no different than that between people who need to accomplish a simple task together, like a bank teller and a customer.  Chapman calls this "just give me the facts".

3. Intellectual Talk.  Next, we come to sharing our opinions, judgments, and interpretations.  This involves more intimacy and trust, and chance to be hurt.  There is an inherent test here: this level is almost never maintained; they either go up or down.  Every response to a level 3 statement is a test.

4. Emotional Talk.  Here we say "I am" statements, statements of feelings.  Most responses that aren't deliberate here are injurious.  

5. Genuine Truth Talk.   Honest, but not condemning.  Open, but not demanding.  

Now, from a conlang perspective, its impossible to force communication up the levels by any amount of engineering.  However, it is important to plan ahead and not let such important phrases like, "how are you?" be relegated to the dung heap of level 1.    Perhaps, as in English, only certain stock phrases could be associated with level one.  In our time, most interaction is level two, and that's ok.  Perhaps that could be programmed in.  Discourse particles could mark three and four.  Five is not marked by morphology but by the heart.  It's hard to program culture as well!

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