As Beng Fong held the hands of the lady he had loved for the past 7 years of his life, he was sweating in all the areas - forehead, back, underarms. He was a nervous wreck, shifting in his seat as he tried to recall the words he had practised to himself in the mirror every single night for the past week. With a furrowed brow, Mei Ling asked him, "What's wrong with you? Why are you sweating??" Immediately, the words left him, and all he could babble was "Please marry me." Caught unaware, Mei Ling's eyes widened. She looked to the ground and did what a man would want at any time but now - she remained silent.
Now everybody say it with me, "UH OHHHHHH." Hahhahaha.
"Uh ohhhh" was my first response when I read that silence was the Japanese lady's response towards her lover's proposal.
Turns out that silence really means consent!! I was totally blown away! If it was a Singaporean man proposing, and all he received from his girlfriend was silence, how he'd feel like he had never been born at all!
It's really amazing how the same response can mean 2 different things in different cultures. And it's interesting and somewhat exciting that studies are actually being conducted on such things.
I still find speech events somewhat.. hard to understand though. Is it that.. simple? Practically every conversation we have is a speech event. It's difficult because we don't notice these simple everyday conversations. And it's even more difficult to recall them (I have really really terrible memory), much less break them down into its different components.
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Casual conversations are not a prototypical example of a speech event, though they can also be subjected to the analysis though. Many rules governing casual conversatgions have been proposed, e.g., the turn-taking mechanism. They are in fact more complicated than we think they are.
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