“You’re putting words in my mouth!”: Interaction as mutual ventriloquation

ABSTRACT

The accusation that someone is putting words in someone else’s mouth can be heard in everyday conversations, but what does this phenomenon reveal about the ways human beings communicate? This paper aims to show that it is useful to view putting words in someone’s mouth as a form of ventriloquation. By theorising this phenomenon, this paper explicates how people discover a version of what they said in their interlocutors’ mouths, and in turn react to these ventriloquations. Since this phenomenon is especially visible in conflict situations, this paper demonstrates the value of using a ventriloquial lens to study human interactions through a detailed analysis of a public dispute and a conflict mediation session. Thus, this paper shows how this lens can be used to gain insight into the communicative constitution of conflict as well as its resolution. More broadly, it proposes to conceive of interaction as a process of mutual ventriloquation and highlights the methodological, ethical, and political implications of this analytical move.

KEYWORDS:

• conflict
• conflict mediation
• language and social interaction
• reformulation
• ventriloquism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Similarly, it could be said that first-, second-, third-, or fourth-position repairs are terms whose analytical value has been demonstrated, even if interactants would rarely use these terms to describe what is happening – unless they are conversation analysts themselves (see Schegloff, 1988). In other words, the fact that interactants do not recognise the ventriloquial nature of communication does not mean that this phenomenon does not exist. On the contrary, our MSF example illustrates how ventriloquism can produce specific effects that are highly consequential to the way an interaction unfolds.

2. The excerpt we analyse here starts at 3:05 (see Kobin, 2019).

3. For a compelling example, see CNN (2020).

4. In his 1999 book, Speaking into the Air, Peters contrasts two traditions in communication studies, which he calls dialogue vs. dissemination. Given the normative connotation of the concept of ‘dialogue’ (a connotation acknowledged by Peters), we prefer to use the term ‘interaction’, so Peters’s distinction ‘speaks to’ research approaches such as conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and pragmatics.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2017-0681].