The Call

"Let me tell you the story
'Bout the call that changed my destiny
Me and my boys went out
Just to end up in misery
Was about to go home when
There she was standing in-front of me
And said "Hi, I got a little place nearby
Wanna go?"

the backstreet boys may be straight-forward with their message of hooking-up with some sweet chic at a party, but i feel that its a bit too shallow for me. regardless, i chose the title because i wanted to write about the phone calls that i've been having with my friend, maiko. though our conversations do not resemble the one described by the backstreet boys, the song was the first thing i thought of when i thought about phone calls.


it was 3 am on a saturday morning and i called maiko, my friend, who i've been talking to almost every night for the past 2 months now. i'm tired, she's tired, but we usually end up talking late at night and for almost an hour every time too. each conversation usually consists of a discussion about what happened throughout the day and how we felt about it or any new news that we haven't conveyed yet. pretty regular...

hymes describes a speech event as having a sender, a receiver, a message form, a channel, a code, a topic, and a setting. i've already briefly outlined most of the speech event criteria described by hymes, i'll also add that most of the conversation is spoken in japanese where i speak with a japanese level equivalent to a college education, and she speaks japanese fluently. i'll do my best in japanese until my words fail me and i'll have to switch to english to clarify. she'll say some sentences in grammatically incorrect english, but i still understand the essential meaning.

as for functions, hymes lists 7 forms: expressive, directive, poetic, contact, metalinguistic, referential, and contextual. the conversations i have with maiko normally utilize all 7. we show different emotions through speech by use of intonation and exclamatory phrases. i ask her for advice about what i should do next, and she offers suggestions and sometimes directs me to do certain things. sometimes the phone signals become weak and i wonder if she is still on the other line so i have to ask her if she can hear me. often we switch languages between english and japanese and sometimes i correct her pronunciation or i ask her to how say certain phrases in japanese. as for our regular conversations, we talk about events during the day and sometimes we discuss certain speeches that we have read.

hymes' factors and functions present a classification and checklist for how to analyze speech acts. conversation can be analyzed in an almost infinite number of ways, and hymes notes this but presents a nice structure also.