Hør dog hvad de siger - Note-to-Self: Trials & Errors

e, and should perhaps be regarded a fundamental in human communication and a prerequisite
for successful social interaction.
However, accommodation also has a negative side to it. Divergence as a symbolic mar-
ker of opposition was mentioned, but also convergence can have negative outcomes. Recent
work on ‘accommodating the elderly’ (Coupland et al. 1988, Coupland et al. 1991, Ryan et al.
1986) highlights such negative outcomes, pointing out problems which I believe are also ap-
propriate for interaction in attitude interviews. The paradigm analyses the styles of speech that
some younger speakers adopt when speaking to elderly people whom they assume will have
trouble hearing, understanding or relating to their usual style. Ryan et al. (1986) list a number
of strategies used by younger speakers to elders that will result in unsuccessful, often demea-
ning, communication. The most blatant of them is when the younger may diverge his speech,
in order to mark intergroup opposition with the elderly – e.g. by using colloquialisms. This is
the more rare strategy. More often, the strategies that result in unsuccessful communication
are over-accommodating. That is, a younger speaker may, when speaking to an elderly, apply
generally negative expectancies about elder peoples’ linguistic and mental capacities. This
will lead him to accommodate, not to the actual needs of his interlocutor, but far exceeding
these needs; e.g. speaking with raised vocal volume and reduced syntactical complexities to
an interlocutor with excellent hearing on the assumption that all old people have hearing im-
pairments. Or it can lead to tragic-comical situations in which a person with a poor eyesight
but excellent hearing are addressed in raised volume on the implicit assumption that handi-
capped people have special needs. In sum, “elderly recipients might regularly be addressed by
speakers who are accommodating not to individuals’ communicative characteristics per se,
but rather to those they stereotype the elderly as possessing” (Coupland et al. 1988: 9).
Interesting for the discussion of subjective processes in the interview is Coupland et
al.’s (ibid.) presentation of two examples of ‘elderspeak’. What they clearly show is that ‘el-
derly in need of special linguistic attention’ is not a label that can be simply induced from a
person’s (apparent) age. Rather, the label should maybe be regarded an interactional construc-
tion of the specific elderly and the younger interlocutor. The article presents the same interlo-
cutor/interviewer, JC, in conversation with two elderly women, cousins, and of roughly the
same age. The striking differences between the conversations with the two women, and the
honest, introspective analysis, highlight several interesting points. Firstly, the woman who is
regarded harder to communicate with, Doris, is so, not because of her age, but because of her
‘life position’ e.g. her health and the fact that she rarely leaves the house. That is, JC finds it
hard to communicate with Doris because any question asked conceals a possibly painful re-
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