Recontextualizing Context: Grammaticality Meets Appropriateness (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

Recontextualizing Context Pragmatics & Beyond New Series Editor Andreas H. Jucker University of Zurich, English Dep...

Author: Anita Fetzer

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Recontextualizing Context

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series Editor Andreas H. Jucker University of Zurich, English Department Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]

Associate Editors Jacob L. Mey University of Southern Denmark

Herman Parret Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp

Jef Verschueren Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp

Editorial Board Shoshana Blum-Kulka Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni University of Lyon 2

Jean Caron Université de Poitiers

Claudia de Lemos University of Campinas, Brazil

Robyn Carston University College London

Marina Sbisà University of Trieste

Bruce Fraser Boston University

Emanuel Schegloff University of California at Los Angeles

Thorstein Fretheim University of Trondheim

Deborah Schiffrin Georgetown University

John Heritage University of California at Los Angeles

Paul O. Takahara Kanzai Gaidai University

Susan Herring University of Texas at Arlington

Sandra Thompson University of California at Santa Barbara

Masako K. Hiraga St.Paul’s (Rikkyo) University

Teun A. Van Dijk University of Amsterdam

David Holdcroft University of Leeds

Richard J. Watts University of Berne

Sachiko Ide Japan Women’s University

Volume 121 Recontextualizing Context: Grammaticality meets appropriateness by Anita Fetzer

Recontextualizing Context Grammaticality meets appropriateness

Anita Fetzer University of Lüneburg

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fetzer, Anita, 1958Recontextualizing context : grammaticality meets appropriateness / Anita Fetzer. p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond, New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 121) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Context (Linguistics) 2. Grammaticality (Linguistics) 3. Acceptability (Linguistics) I. Title. II. Series. P128. C67F48 2004 401’.41-dc22 isbn 90 272 5363 3 (Eur.) / 1 58811 510 0 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)

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© 2004 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Context and contexts2 1.1.1 Linguistic context4 1.1.2 Social context7 1.1.3 Sociocultural context9 1.2 Grammaticality and well-formedness12 1.3 Acceptability and appropriateness19 1.4 Dialogue: Well-formed and appropriate23 1.5 Goals and objectives29 Chapter 2 Grammaticality and context 2.1 Introduction34 2.1.1 Language, grammar and grammaticality35 2.1.2 Grammaticality judgements: The competence–performance interface44 2.1.3 Conclusion48 2.2 Context in syntax50 2.2.1 Sentences in context52 2.2.2 Syntactic ability and syntactic structure55 2.2.3 Conclusion57 2.3 Context in morphology58 2.3.1 Words in context59 2.3.2 Word-internal contexts62 2.3.3 Word-external contexts63 2.3.4 Conclusion65

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Table of contents

2.4 Context in phonology65 2.4.1 Phonemes in context67 2.4.2 Prosody in context69 2.4.3 Conclusion72 2.5 Context in semantics/pragmatics73 2.5.1 Context-independent meanings in context76 2.5.2 Context-dependent meanings in context79 2.5.3 Conclusion83 2.6 Conclusions84 Chapter 3 Context and appropriateness 3.1 Introduction91 3.2 Speech acts in context102 3.2.1 How to do things with words or a set of necessary and sufficient conditions107 3.2.2 Intentions in communication112 3.2.3 Attempt and achievement, and process and product119 3.2.4 Speech acts and language121 3.2.5 Conclusion128 3.3 Utterances in context131 3.3.1 Utterances and sentences134 3.3.1.1 Language production and language use138 3.3.1.2 Presumptive meanings141 3.3.2 Utterances and speech acts145 3.3.2.1 Sociolinguistic variation146 3.3.2.2 Actions and interactions151 3.3.3 Utterances, turns and turn-constructional units153 3.3.3.1 Turn-taking154 3.3.3.2 Joint construction158 3.3.4 Utterances: Social and cognitive160 3.3.4.1 Signals, language and language use160 3.3.4.2 Joint projects and common ground164 3.3.5 Conclusion167 3.4 Dialogues in context168 3.4.1 The dialogue principle of cooperation174 3.4.1.1 Logic and conversation177 3.4.1.2 Conversational maxims184

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3.4.1.3 Communicative intentions189 3.4.1.4 Cooperation, linguistic acts and pragmatic wellformedness197 3.4.2 Validity claims in context202 3.4.2.1 The dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim: objective, social and subjective worlds203 3.4.2.2 Communicative intention: A subjective-world concept or a social-world construct?209 3.4.3 Micro and macro communicative intentions211 3.4.3.1 We-intentionality and I-thou-sociality212 3.4.3.2 Co-suppositions, dialogue-common ground and communicative genre215 3.4.4 Conclusion222 3.5 Conclusions223 Chapter 4 Conclusion: Sentence grammar and dialogue grammar revisited

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References Other sources252

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Name index

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Subject index

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Acknowledgements

This work owes a debt of gratitude to a large number of people, with whom I have discussed context in different contexts. Amongst those, I am very grateful to the organizers of the international and interdisciplinary conferences on context, CONTEXT’99, CONTEXT’01 and CONTEXT’03. My special thanks go to Varol Akman for his kind support, and helpful and encouraging comments. I am also grateful to Isja Conen of John Benjamins, and I am immensely grateful to Andreas Jucker for editorial advice and support, to Teun van Dijk and Achim Stein for their supportive comments and criticisms, and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and criticisms. And last but not least my thanks go to david and dieter, to say more would be impossible. Anita Fetzer

Chapter 1

Introduction

Context is one of those linguistic terms which is constantly used in all kinds of context but never explained (Asher 1994: 731)

In mundane everyday talk and in academic discourse, context and meaning are used rather frequently, and in almost all of these scenarios the two terms cooccur. In both domains, coparticipants refer to context and meaning when the validity of their argument or of its propositions require some modification. In academic discourse, a reference to context has two goals: on the one hand, it restricts the validity of a theory and its propositions, and on the other hand, it specifies one or more premises of a theory and its propositions with regard to its application (cf. Edmonds and Akman 2002). This is not only reflected in the development of context-sensitive parsers, context-sensitive translation machines and context-sensitive information systems, for example, but also in the growing number of discursive investigations focussing on the context-sensitive employment of the linguistic code and its social practice in particular settings, such as courtroom interactions, medical talk, bureaucratic discourse and political discourse. In mundane everyday talk, context is referred to in similar settings, namely in negotiation-of-meaning sequences, where the validity of an argument and its propositions is at stake because it is considered to be either too broad or too narrow. This may be due to a communicative problem, such as a deliberate misunderstanding or a non-deliberate misunderstanding, some kind of mishearing or to the non-acceptance of a prior contribution, which is seen as untrue, insincere or inappropriate. Since one of the goals of naturallanguage communication is mutual intelligibility, coparticipants tend to repair these communicative problems by making explicit their speaker-intended meaning. In the case of a mishearing, they repeat their contribution, in the case of a misunderstanding, they paraphrase their contribution, and in the case of a non-acceptance, they spell out the controversial presupposed contextual information in order to make the argument more acceptable to their coparticipants while in the meantime strengthening its validity.

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References to context and references to meaning have the communicative function of modifying the force of an argument and its propositions by deliminating their domains of validity. In conversation, coparticipants either deliminate the context themselves by saying, for instance, I was referring to a business context when they have reason to assume that their coparticipants might have inferred an educational context and not the business context they had intended. Or, they recontextualize a prior contribution by saying, for example, I did not mean to offend you, I was only joking. In the meantime, they evaluate a prior interpretation as not having been in accordance with their communicative intention. Coparticipants do not only deliminate the context themselves or recontextualize a contribution themselves, they also request their coparticipant to deliminate the context in order to make her/his argument more acceptable by saying, for instance, what contexts would you have in mind or well, it really depends on the context, you know. In the case of a recontextualization, they request their coparticipant to spell out a particular scenario, in which a prior contribution was supposed to have been valid by asking, for example, what do you mean or how do you mean. In all of these settings, a reference to context and a reference to meaning signify that there is some controversy about the communicative status of a contribution while at the same time providing a frame of reference for its recontextualization and reevaluation. As regards the commonsense notions of context and meaning, they are conceived of as interrelated concepts which are seen as meaningful, well-formed and delimited. But does this also hold for the theoretical constructs of context and meaning in the heterogeneous field of linguistics?

1.1

Context and contexts

Context is at the heart of pragmatics, and meaning is at the heart of both semantics and pragmatics. While semantics has traditionally been described as focussing on an investigation of context-independent meaning, viz. on literal meaning or on what is said, pragmatics goes beyond this conception of meaning and concentrates on the analyses of what is meant, of utterance meaning and of speaker-intended meaning, for instance. These types of context-dependent meaning are conceived of as being communicated through the coparticipants’ employment of generalized and particularized conversational implicatures, through their employment of indirect speech acts and conventionalized indirect speech acts, through their employment of more and less implicit modes of

Introduction

realizing communicative intentions, and through their employment of other types of implicit use of language. Sociopragmatics, discourse analysis and ethnomethodological conversation analysis examine longer stretches of talk by extending the cognition- and action-based frameworks anchored to individual speakers and to individual communicative acts. They explicitly accommodate the connectedness between discourse as a whole and its constitutive parts, and they accommodate the connectedness between society, culture, language and language use. This is reflected in their differentiation between context-dependent meaning, that is utterance meaning, and particular types of contextdependent meaning, such as nonce meaning, conversationally implicated meaning, functional meaning, discursive meaning, sociocultural meaning or intersubjective meaning, which are conceived of as being co-constructed in discourse through the coparticipants’ employment of social and discursive practices. Hence, context is the anchor of any pragmatic theory and the accommodation of context is a necessary condition for both a pragmatic and a sociopragmatic perspective on language and language use. In spite of its omnipresence in the domains of pragmatics, sociopragmatics, discourse analysis and ethnomethodology, the concept of context has remained fuzzy and seems almost impossible to come to terms with. There is, however, a core meaning which is found in all of its usages, namely the gestalt-psychological distinction between a figure or a focal event, viz. the phenomenon being investigated or being contextualized, and its ground or background, viz. the phenomenon’s surroundings. As regards its delimination, the surroundings may refer to a domain anchored to the phenomenon’s immediately adjacent surroundings, or they may refer to a domain which is more remote to the phenomenon’s immediate surroundings. In investigations focussing on the coparticipants’ behaviour, the figure-ground distinction is also called main attentional track and disattend track (Goodwin and Duranti 1992). The former refers to the phenomenon of language as context, and the latter refers to the setting, that is the social and spatial frameworks, the coparticipants’ body language and the extrasituational context. To take the argument further, in its disattend-track conception, context can refer to the whole universe. In order to be felicitously integrated into pragmatic theory, however, that extremely general definition of context requires some delimination. Depending on the frame of investigation, context is deliminated to the global surroundings of the phenomenon to be investigated, for instance to an institution or to a sociocultural setting, in which the discourse is taking place, or it is deliminated to a communicative genre, of which the phenomenon to be

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investigated is a constitutive part. Here, context is not restricted to linguistic material, which is referred to as linguistic context or as co-text. It also includes social and cultural phenomena, and is referred to as social context and as sociocultural context. Prototypical social-context constituents are coparticipants, their psychological dispositions, their social and discursive roles, the physical location of the discourse, time and preceding discourse. From a sociocultural-context perspective, these universal constituents are given a culture-specific interpretation and are reframed, such as a more individualistically or a more collectively oriented conception of a coparticipant, and a more polychronically or a more monochronically oriented conception of time. In its narrow definition, context is deliminated to the local (or immediately adjacent) surroundings of the phenomenon to be investigated and refers to the immediately adjacent surroundings of a phoneme, to the immediately adjacent surroundings of a morpheme, to the immediately adjacent surroundings of a phrase, to the immediately adjacent surroundings of a grammatical construction, to the immediately adjacent surroundings of a lexical item, to the immediately adjacent surroundings of a sentence, or to the immediately adjacent surroundings of an utterance; and it can also refer to the coparticipants and their immediately adjacent surroundings, and to the setting and its immediately surroundings. If the surroundings are cognitive material, for instance a proposition, a mental representation or an assumption, they are called cognitive context. If the surroundings are of an extra-linguistic nature, that is noncognitive and non-linguistic material, they are called social context, and if the surrounding are language material, they are called linguistic context, which is examined in more detail below. 1.1.1

Linguistic context

In traditional linguistic accounts of context, context is conceived of as comprising the immediate features of a speech situation in which an expression is uttered, such as time, location, speaker, hearer and preceding discourse. However, context is a much wider and a far more transcendental notion than what these accounts imply. In philosophical approaches to intentionality and action, language is no longer examined as consisting of decontextualized sentences. Instead, the focus of investigation has shifted towards the examination of language use which is seen as embedded in larger activities, through which they become meaningful. This is reflected in the research paradigms of speech act theory, where felicity conditions are seen as social and linguistic

Introduction

context categories (Austin 1980; Searle 1969), and in language games, where language is conceived of as a form of action and as a form of life (Wittgenstein 1958). But there is not a simple one-to-one mapping between speech act and language use, as is pointed out by Vanderveken and Kubo (2002: 12): “Illocutionary acts are successfully performed by uttering words in contexts of utterance. In each context of utterance, there is a token of an utterance act made by the speaker. There is also a token of the illocutionary act type attempted by the speaker in that context of utterance whenever the conditions of success are fulfilled.” As a consequence of the connectedness between particular tokens of language use and the performance of particular speech acts as illocutionary act types, intentionality can no longer be anchored to the individual mind only, but rather must be conceived of as distributed within interactive contexts. Thus, language use is necessarily anchored to a speech situation, it is necessarily anchored to coparticipants and it is necessarily anchored to language. It is embedded in the immediate physical surroundings which are available in local linguistic context(s) and in more remote linguistic context(s), and it is embedded in immediate extra-linguistic context(s) and in more remote extra-linguistic context(s). Depending on the theoretical frameworks, the linguistic context of social action comprises a contribution’s adjacent contributions, a speech act’s adjacent speech acts, an utterance’s adjacent utterances or a turn’s adjacent turns. Yet, is it only the prior contribution that constitutes linguistic context or is it the prior and the upcoming contributions which constitute the linguistic context of a current contribution? In discourse analysis, it is generally assumed that a current contribution requires a prior contribution in order to account for anaphora resolution, and for the retrieval of indexical expressions and of other types of contextual information. In a dynamic outlook on communication, however, a current contribution is not only anchored to a prior contribution, but also constrains the form and function of upcoming talk. For instance, an information question, such as where is the butter, requires a dovetailed answer, for example in the fridge, which provides the requested information. An information question only allows a question as an upcoming contribution if it functions as a request for a specific type of information referred to in the prior question, such as the salted or the unsalted one, or I beg your pardon. This is also reflected in the conversationanalytic framework, where utterances are assigned the status of linguistic context. Following Akman and Alpaslan (1999), the language produced (formulated) and interpreted (decoded) by the co-participants is assigned a dual function. On the one hand, it invokes linguistic context by constructing it itself; on the

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other hand, its sole production and interpretation provide the context for subsequent talk and recovery of intended meaning. Accordingly, the acts of speaking and interpreting build contexts and at the same time constrain the building of contexts. To employ Heritage’s terminology, “the production of talk is doubly contextual” (Heritage 1984: 242). An utterance relies upon the existing context for its production and interpretation, and it is, in its own right, an event that shapes a new context for the action that will follow. Against this background, the delimitation of linguistic context to a contribution’s directly or immediately adjacent contributions seems too narrow. Rather, linguistic context must be conceived of as delimited by the contextual constraints and requirements of a communicative genre (Luckmann 1995), which entails the notions of text type (De Beaugrande and Dressler 1981), macro speech act (van Dijk 1977), macro validity claim (Fetzer 2000a, 2002a), communicative project (Linell 1998) and activity type (Levinson 1979). These macro categories are hierarchically structured and sequentially organized, and they subcategorize into pre-sequences, core- or main-sequences, side-sequences and closing sequences. In a dynamic outlook on communication, linguistic context can be decontextualized at a local level, and it can be recontextualized at a global level. Regarding the former, linguistic context is decontextualized in a negotiation-ofmeaning sequence in order to repair a mishearing or a misunderstanding. Regarding the latter, the reproduction of local meaning, as is the case with the phenomenon of reported speech, for example, is recontextualized at a global level, where it is supplemented with further contextual information. In other words, there is intra-discursive recontextualization anchored to local decontextualization, and there is interdiscursive recontextualization anchored to global recontextualization. A necessary condition for the differentiation of context into linguistic context and social context is a conception of language as a vehicle for communication and conversational interaction. Against this background, linguistic context is intrinsically linked to social context which is also clearly shown in the definitions of the macro category of a communicative genre, which is based on the social-context concept of convention. The micro-macro link, on which the above mentioned macro categories are based, is also reflected in the distinction between local social and global social contexts. But what is a social context; or more precisely, what are its constituents?

Introduction

1.1.2 Social context Social context is often considered to comprise the context of a speech event and is defined by the deduction of linguistic context and cognitive context from a holistic conception of context as comprising all of the constitutive parts of a speech event. Constituents of social context are, for instance, coparticipants, the immediate concrete, physical surroundings including time and location, and the macro contextual institutional and non-institutional domains. Frequently, language use in social contexts has been allocated to the domains of communicative performance or parole which have been assigned the status of an individual and momentary product. That has been denied by Recanati (1998) and by ethnographic studies. The non-individualistic use of language is also manifest in the prototypical micro contextual phenomenon of deixis and its realization as deictic expressions, that is temporal deixis, local deixis, participant deixis, discourse deixis and social deixis. Unlike anaphora resolution, which requires linguistic contexts, discourse deixis is informed both by linguistic and social contexts. As regards the status of a coparticipant, the categories of speaker, hearer and audience denote interactional categories and have been refined by Goffman (1981) with respect to their footing, that is their ratified and unratified status in the participation framework and their interactional roles of animator, author and principal. In an actual speech situation, however, the interactional roles do more than simply produce and interpret contributions. In a social context, they subcategorize into social roles and their gendered and ethnic identities. In institutional communication, the coparticipants’ institutional roles embody institutional power which manifests itself in their corresponding rights and obligations. True, the concepts of speaker, hearer and audience as well as their participation roles are, from a language-production and languageinterpretation viewpoint, fairly straightforward. However, if those interactional roles are instantiated in social contexts, they become more complex. For this reason, speakers, hearers and audience are represented by multiple social roles. As for their status in discourse, one would like to represent multiple discourse identities. Social context has further been differentiated by Teun van Dijk (1981) with regard to a general social context anchored to functional pragmatic coherence, and particular social context types anchored to contextual frames, assumed purposes and intentions. These context types contain information about particular institutions, frame structures, settings, functions, properties, relations, positions and frame conventions. Furthermore, van Dijk specifies the

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coparticipants’ contextual course of action with respect to utterance and illocutionary force. To account for the micro-macro interface, van Dijk distinguishes between macro actions and micro actions. In the field of corpus linguistics, Biber (1988) adapts basic social-context constituents to his examination of variation in spoken language and in written language. According to him, the components of a speech situation do not only contain information about the present situation, they also include information about previous encounters. This is reflected in his categories of participant roles and characteristics, which are further refined by the communicative roles of speaker, addressee and audience, their personal characteristics, the group characteristics, the relations among participants, the social role relations, the personal relations, the extent of shared knowledge, the setting, topic and purpose. Biber explicitly points out that purpose comprises both conventional and personal goals thus connecting the individual domain with the social domain. He further points out that the production and interpretation of utterances is interdependent on the channel: coparticipants can produce and interpret a written text in an individualized manner, while they must produce and process a spoken text online and in the meantime accommodate the communicative function of its prosodic features and other non-verbal features. The impact of social context on language, language use and communicative performance is also of importance in the field of sociolinguistics and its analyses of the social varieties of language (Fasold 1990; Holmes 1992; Wardhaugh 1993). For example, code-switching is given both a value-free and a valueloaded interpretation. Regarding the former, it is conceived of as bi- or multilingualism and as different social styles and registers. Regarding the latter, it is conceived of as diglossia with its high- and low-variety counterparts. While sociolinguistics examines the nature of the connectedness between language and society, the research paradigm of ethnomethodology investigates the interactional organization of society. It represents a micro sociological perspective par excellence, which is based on the premise that indexicality of social action is key. Ethnomethodology focuses on the domain of intersubjectivity and it examines the questions of how separate individuals are able to know or act within a common world and of how members (or coparticipants) negotiate or achieve a common context. The common context is synonymous with social context, which, like linguistic context, classifies into a local (or micro) social context and a global (or macro) social context (Schegloff 1987). Social contexts are further distinguished with regard to a number of intermediate layers, such as meso social contexts which can denote the delimiting frame of a particular speech

Introduction

event or the delimiting frame of a more global institutional context (Boden and Zimmerman 1993; Drew and Heritage 1992; Sarangi and Slembrouck 1996). Unlike the conception of language as an autonomous system, the ethnomethodological and discourse-analytic frameworks assign language the status of a sociocultural and context-dependent means of communication. In these dynamic frames of reference, social contexts are jointly constructed and negotiated. Analogously to the ethnomethodological conception of social context, more recent approaches to context are also based on a dynamic conception of context and explicitly account for the accommodation of communicative meaning which is constructed and negotiated in communication (Clark 1996; Duranti and Goodwin 1991; Thomason 1992). Thus, a dynamic approach to communication in context is based on the premises that social action and language use are embedded in a context of situation, that they constitute practical action and that they are a socially situated cultural form. The social context of a speech situation is multifaceted and hence extremely complex, and it is, in practice, refined by sociocultural constraints and requirements. But what exactly is sociocultural context? 1.1.3

Sociocultural context

As has already surfaced above, social context is frequently used synonymously with extra-linguistic context which comprises the coparticipants, their physical and psychological dispositions and the specific knowledge or assumptions about the persons involved, the knowledge of the language, the knowledge of routines and activity-types, their communicative intentions and communicative goals, and general background knowledge. Of course, the immediate extralinguistic context is embedded in more remote extra-linguistic contexts, such as particular organizational contexts and other socio-historically constituted contexts of institutions and (sub)cultures. The synonymous use of extralinguistic context and social context is, however, an oversimplification as research in sociolinguistics, anthropology and cultural studies has informed us. Rather, social context subcategorizes into different types of sociocultural context which are defined by a particular perspective on social context in general. Thus, social context and all of its constituents can be conceived of as an unmarked type of context or as a default context, and sociocultural context can be conceived of as a marked type of context in which particular variables, such as time or location, are interpreted in a particular mode. For instance, the distinction between monochronic time and polychronic time is based on the

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differentiation between a linear, tangible and divisible conception of time, where events are scheduled one at a time and where this schedule takes precedence over interpersonal relationships. Polychronic time, by contrast, is characterized by things occurring simultaneously. Here, interpersonal relationships take precedence over a task-oriented outlook on communication (Hall and Hall 1989). In other words, culture provides us with a filter mechanism which allows us to interpret social context in accordance with particular sociocultural-context constraints and requirements. The aforementioned view is also reflected in Hymes’s notion of a speaking grid (Hymes 1974) anchored to the components of situation (the physical setting and the psychological scene), participants (speaker, hearer and audience, and their statuses in the participation framework), ends (the goal and the purpose of the speech event from a sociocultural viewpoint), act sequence (how something is said with regard to message form and what is said with regard to message content), key (mock or serious), instrumentalities (channels, i.e. spoken, written, e-mail), and forms of speech (vernacular, dialect, standard), norms (of interaction and interpretation) and genres. Hymes’s speaking grid and his notion of communicative competence has been refined by Gumperz (1977, 1992) who explicitly connects the cognitive operation of inference with the sociocultural activity of conversation. His conception of conversational inference represents a context-bound process of interpretation in which other’s intentions are assessed, and in which self illustrates her/his understanding and comprehension through her/his response. If the response is seen as being in accordance with other’s intentions, it is evaluated as appropriate. If the response is seen as not being in accordance with other’s intentions, it is evaluated as inappropriate. Gumperz assigns language usage the status of actual language practice, and he interprets evaluation as a social activity. Saville-Troike summarizes his contribution to the field of ethnography of communication as follows: “Gumperz builds on this in proposing the outline of a theory of how social knowledge is stored in the mind, retrieved from memory, and integrated with grammatical knowledge in the act of conversing” (Saville-Troike 1989: 131). Because of its cultural base, the meaning that emerges in a conversation is different for participants if they are not members of the same speech community. Gumperz’s original contribution to the field of ethnography of communication shows us a way of bridging the gap between linguistic context and sociocultural and social contexts on the one hand, and between linguistic, social and sociocultural contexts and cognitive context on the other hand. This is due to the fact that language is seen as a socially situated cultural form and, therefore,

Introduction

as a specification of the more general social and linguistic contexts. However, there are also numerous investigations which focus on the cognitive processes of speakers and hearers that are required for the performance of communicative acts in a sociocultural setting. Cognitive context denotes a set of premises and cognitive environment denotes a set of facts, namely, true or possibly true mental representations. Constitutive elements of cognitive context in a relevance theoretic frame of reference (Sperber and Wilson 1996) are mental representations, propositions, contextual assumptions which may vary in strength, and factual assumptions. Assumptions are read, written and deleted. In the meantime, contextual implications are raised in strength, lowered in strength or erased from memory. Since cognitive contexts are anchored to an individual but are also required for a cognitively based outlook on communication, they must contain assumptions about mutual cognitive environments. Intention is also anchored to cognitive context. Following Sperber and Wilson, intention is a mental representation capable of being realized in the form of actions. It differentiates into an informative intention, namely, the intention to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions, and the second-order informative intention, the communicative intention, viz. the intention to have the informative intention recognized and to make it mutually manifest to the audience and the communicator that the communicator has this informative intention (Sperber and Wilson 1996: 54–64). Yet, intention is not only seen from a cognitive perspective. Intention is also considered to be a constitutive element of social action and action theory. And it is at the locus of intentionality where linguistic, social, sociocultural and cognitive contexts meet. Against this background, social actors select and construct the appropriate contexts for their social actions. In an integrated approach to natural-language communication, cognitive, linguistic, social and sociocultural contexts are not conceived of as discrete categories, but rather as prototypes. Metaphorically speaking, context is represented by an onion with an infinite number of layers (Sperber and Wilson 1996), or it is represented by interdependent frames (Goffman 1974). In natural-language communication, the contextual information stored in a particular layer or in a particular frame interacts with information stored in adjacent layers or frames. Here, the order of inclusion corresponds to the order of accessibility. Due to its relational and interactive nature, context represents a dynamic construct, which may be put in another context and thus be recontextualized in accordance with the corresponding contextual constraints and requirements. The integration of context into linguistic theory entails the

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evaluation of the nature of the connectedness between the phenomenon to be investigated, namely the part, and its surrounding, the whole. Regarding the nature of the connectedness between a cognitive unit and its cognitive context, the products of the cognitive processes of inferencing and the products of the respective reasoning mechanisms are evaluated as true or false. Regarding the nature of the connectedness between a linguistic unit and its linguistic context, the product of the grammaticality judgement is evaluated as grammatical or ungrammatical, or as well-formed or ill-formed, and regarding the nature of the connectedness between a contribution and its sociocultural context, the product of the construction of intersubjective meaning is evaluated as acceptable or unacceptable, or as appropriate or inappropriate. While cognitive meaning is inferred, linguistic meaning is evaluated as being produced in accordance with the rules of a particular grammar or as being produced in disaccordance with the rules of that grammar. Sociocultural meaning, by contrast, is calculated by mapping the cognitive-context and linguistic-context results onto (1) the coparticipants’ communicative intentions, (2) other possible linguistic realizations of the communicative intentions, and (3) the contextual constraints and requirements of a particular sociocultural context. In the following, the concepts of grammaticality and its underlying grammaticality conditions, of well-formedness and its underlying well-formedness conditions, and of acceptability and of appropriateness and their underlying appropriateness conditions (or felicity conditions) are compared and contrasted, and explicitly related to the different types of context.

1.2 Grammaticality and well-formedness Grammaticality as a theoretical construct denotes something different from its mundane everyday usage, where it often conflates with a prescriptive outlook on grammar and the tacit assumption that there exist good sentences and good constructions which do not contain any mistakes, and that there exist bad sentences and bad constructions which contain minimally one mistake. In that context, native speakers are not assigned linguistic competence per se, but they are only seen as native speakers if they ‘speak properly’ by producing grammatically correct sentences. Contrary to its common-sense notion, the theoretical construct of grammaticality presupposes a native speaker with a linguistic competence, which provides her/him with the linguistic knowledge of being able to (1) differentiate between grammatical sentences and ungrammatical

Introduction

sentences, and (2) to produce and interpret grammatical sentences. In spite of the clear-cut definition, the theoretical construct of grammaticality is not always referred to by the evaluations of grammatical and ungrammatical in the field of linguistics. Sometimes, the evaluations of well- or ill-formed and of acceptable or unacceptable are used as functional synonyms when the question of grammaticality is at stake. In this investigation, the term of a grammatical sentence denotes a sentence which is produced in accordance with the rules of a grammar. A grammatical sentence is different from a well-formed sentence and from an acceptable sentence. The difference between a grammatical sentence and a well-formed sentence lies in the fact that a well-formed sentence does not only have to be grammatical, it also must be easy to process, from a psycholinguistic viewpoint. And an acceptable sentence does not have to be grammatical, it should be comprehensible and easy to process. But is the theoretical construct of grammaticality really such a clear-cut matter? The theoretical construct of grammaticality is the foundation of the grammar of both artificial languages and natural languages. It is based on the premises (1) that language is a rule-governed system which is defined by rules and constraints, and (2) that sentences or constructions which are produced in accordance with the rules and constraints are grammatical, whereas sentences or constructions which are not produced in accordance with the rules and constraints are ungrammatical. Hence, it is not an intrinsic feature of a sentence to be grammatical or to be ungrammatical, but it is the native speaker or the artificial native speaker who assign a sentence or a construction the status of a grammatical sentence or of a grammatical construction, or they assign a sentence or a construction the status of an ungrammatical sentence or of an ungrammatical construction. But on what basis do native speakers and artificial native speakers evaluate sentences and constructions, and does the product of their evaluation depend on the frame of reference employed? A generative-grammar based investigation of the English language has been carried out by Liliane Haegeman and Jacqueline Guéron (1999), who explicate the particularities of their frame of reference regarding its underlying conceptions of grammar and grammaticality as follows: The question arises on what basis the native speakers can evaluate language of their language. Clearly, it is not the case that native speakers have access to a sort of exhaustive list of all possible sentences of the language, and that they then match the example sentence with the list. Sentences are no pre-existing static objects. Human language is creative: new sentences are formed and interpreted every day, at all kinds of opportunities, and there is no predeter-

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mined total number of sentences. Rather, there seems to be a potentially infinite number of sentences for any given language. The native speaker is able to form acceptable sentences at every moment and to evaluate and interpret any new sentence of the language when confronted with it. (…) we postulate that native speakers have at their disposal an internal system of rules and principles which enables them to produce well-formed sentences, and also to evaluate the sentences they are confronted with, and to replace an unacceptable sentence by an acceptable variant. Such a system of rules and principles which is at the basis of all sentences of a language is called a grammar of the language. Knowing a language means knowing its grammar. (Haegeman and Guéron 1999: 16)

The generative framework differentiates between an internal language or an I-language and an external language or an E-language, which is also called performance. The E-language is the realization of the internal language’s interfacing modules of syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics and pragmatics in an external linguistic context and in an external social context, which is a rather complex endeavour. While the E-language is of no immediate relevance to generative grammar, it is the internal language which is at the heart of their investigations, as is stated by Michael B. Kac (1992: 1): “When the research program of generative grammar was first proposed, its stated purpose was to explicate an intuitive concept — that of grammaticality, both in particular languages and in general (Chomsky 1957: 13).” The internal language and its premise of grammaticality are not affected by performance-related inadequacies, that is by potential problems resulting from interfacing logical form (LF) and phonetic form (PF) modules. But how is internal language examined and how is it accessed in natural-language research? As regards the grammar of natural-languages, their rules and constraints can only be inferred from an examination of external-language data. On the basis of that output, rules and regularities can be identified and refined with regard to particular constraints. The results obtained are then evaluated in the framework of grammaticality judgements. In the grammaticality judgements, native speakers are confronted with a list of sentences and constructions which they evaluate and categorize as grammatical or as ungrammatical. Unlike the presuppositional and binary conceptions of grammaticality in generative grammar, the functional-grammar framework does not assign the theoretical construct of grammaticality the status of a premise, but rather adopts a relational outlook on it. Here, grammaticality is considered to be the product of a process of evaluating a sentence or a construction with regard to being constructed in accordance

Introduction

with the rules and constraints of a particular language or as being constructed in disaccordance with the rules and constraints of a particular language. This is due to the fact that the goal of functional grammar does not primarily lie in the formalization and implementation of rules. Instead, it is based on the premise of grammaticalization. The grammaticalization of language is anchored to a dynamic conception of language, which entails a dynamic conception of rules and a dynamic conception of constraints. They are seen as interdependent on language users, as interdependent on linguistic and social contexts, as is succinctly spelled out by Tom Givón (1993: 1): Perhaps the best way of saying what grammar is from a functional perspective is to say first what grammar is not. Grammar is not a rigid set of rules that must be followed in order to produce grammatical sentences. Rather, grammar is a set of strategies that one employs in order to produce coherent communication. Nothing in this formulation should be taken as a denial of the existence of rules of grammar. Rather, it simply suggests that rules of grammar — taken as a whole — are not arbitrary; they are not just for the heck of it. The production of rule-governed grammatical sentences is the means by which one produces coherent communication.

In the generative frame of reference, grammaticality denotes the fundamental premise of I-language and is firmly anchored to linguistic form: it is both premise and product. In the functional paradigm, grammar is not conceived of as a set of rules but rather as a set of strategies, with the help of which speakers communicate. For this reason, grammar is not only connected with language and with the production of grammatical sentences, but also with speakers, hearers, context and discourse coherence. The functional-grammar concept of grammaticality is thus firmly anchored to linguistic context, to cognitive context and to social context: it is not premise and product, but rather product and goal. As has already surfaced in the analysis of grammaticality, the functional-grammar conception is intrinsically connected with the notions of wellformedness and acceptability, which are two of the prerequisites for discourse coherence. But where do grammaticality and well-formedness meet, and where do they depart? Grammaticality and well-formedness are both anchored to the domain of linguistic form. While the grammaticality of a construction or of a sentence manifests itself in the non-violation of the rules of a grammar and therefore is a purely linguistic concept, well-formedness is more refined: it is anchored to the domain of linguistic form and to the domain of comprehensibility thus supplementing the rules of grammar with psycholinguistic sentence processing.

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As a consequence of this, it feeds on pragmatic relevance and therefore requires linguistic context and social context. Grammaticality and well-formedness examine linguistic form and meet there, but they depart as soon as sentence processing is taken into account: in order to be assigned the status of a grammatical construction or of a grammatical sentence, the construction or the sentence does not necessarily have to be well-formed. In order to be assigned the status of a well-formed construction or a well-formed sentence, however, the construction or sentence has to be grammatical and it must be processed with a reasonable amount of time and with a reasonable amount of cognitive effort. Put differently, grammaticality is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for a sentence to be well-formed. Grammaticality and effective processability are necessary and sufficient conditions for well-formedness, as is illustrated with the following multiple embedded sentence, which is grammatical: (1) The dog which Peter who lives in Amsterdam, which is the capital of the Netherlands, which is in Europe, which is located on the planet earth, which is a rather strange place, owns, chased the cat, which was born in Stockholm, which is the capital of Sweden, which is in Europe …

In spite of the fact that it does not violate any rules of the grammar of English, sentence (1) is not generally considered to be well-formed because it is difficult to parse and, with regard to short-term-memory constraints, almost incomprehensible. In a language-as-communication paradigm, sentence (1) is neither considered to be acceptable, nor is it considered to be appropriate because it violates a number of pragmatic constraints: firstly, it infringes on the Gricean category of quantity and the corresponding maxims: The category of QUANTITY relates the quantity of information to be provided, and under it fall the following maxims: 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purpose of the exchange). 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. (Grice 1975: 46)

And secondly, it infringes on the Gricean maxim of manner: Finally, under the category of MANNER, which I understand as relating not (like the previous categories) to what is said but, rather, to HOW what is said to be said, I include the supermaxim — “Be perspicuous” — and various maxims such as: 1. Avoid obscurity of expression. 2. Avoid ambiguity. 3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). 4. Be orderly. (Grice 1975: 46)

For these reasons, a coparticipant would consider the producer of (1) to have the intention of getting in a conversational implicature thus communicating

Introduction

something beyond the level of what has been said. In an ordinary dyadic faceto-face encounter the multiple embedded sentence (1) would be parsed and interpreted only partially, because its producer would be interrupted and requested to clarify and to reformulate their contribution. Unlike a face-to-face setting, which allows for that kind of negotiation of meaning, a written setting would demand an enormous amount of cognitive effort from the reader for the sentence to achieve optimal relevance. And generally, s/he would only invest the amount of cognitive energy if s/he considered the message to be relevant and the potential enlargement of the coparticipants’ mutual cognitive environments to be an absolute must. The pragmatic constraint of optimal relevance is adopted from relevance theory and its premise that communication and context are primarily cognitive concepts and therefore intrinsically linked to the mental representation of meaning and to the calculation of implicatures with regard to (1) the generation of implicated premises, and (2) the deduction of implicated conclusions, which may vary in strength each (Sperber and Wilson 1996). Because of this, implicatures do not exist in isolation. Instead, they are generated in a cognitive context and they have contextual effects, which result from the retrieval of explicatures and the mental operations of reference assignment, disambiguation and enrichment. As regards example (1), reference is assigned to dog, Peter, Amsterdam, capital, Netherlands, Europe, planet, earth, cat, Stockholm and Sweden, and the respective propositions are enriched with lexical knowledge and with encyclopaedic knowledge. Additionally, the predication is a rather strange place is disambiguated and enriched. It has to be pointed out, however, that the mental operations are only performed if an utterance is assigned the status of an ostensive-inferential communicative act, whose contextual effects are presumed to be optimally relevant. Should there not be sufficient optimally relevant effects, the cognitive effort required outweighs the potential effects and the processing of information is terminated. But are the concepts of grammaticality and well-formedness relevant to the processing of information; that is, are only grammatical and well-formed sentences produced and processed? As has been shown above, the concept of grammaticality is rather complex: on the one hand, it represents the basic foundation of a generative approach to grammar thus providing the rules for the production of grammatical sentences. Here, grammaticality or grammaticalness (Chomsky 1965) is assigned a presuppositional status. As regards sentence processing in generative grammar, the necessary operations required for sentence processing, such as parsing, have to be initiated. Only then can the linguistic string be processed. At this stage, the

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linguistic string can be grammatical or ungrammatical, in principle. If the linguistic string is processed completely, it is grammatical. However, as soon as the grammar comes across a violation of a particular rule, it will stop its processing operations. This kind of termination is equivalent to assigning the linguistic string the status of an ungrammatical sentence. So, grammatical sentences are processed and interpreted completely, and ungrammatical sentences are processed only partially and therefore cannot be interpreted successfully. Unlike its presuppositional status in generative grammar, the functional-grammar concept of grammaticality has been defined as the product and goal of a process of evaluating a particular construction or sentence. But what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the evaluation of a sentence as grammatical or as ungrammatical in the functional frame of reference? To be able to assign the status of a grammatical or an ungrammatical construction or a grammatical or an ungrammatical sentence to a linguistic string, the linguistic string must have been processed in the first place. For this reason, the existence of both grammatical and ungrammatical constructions or sentences, or of more and less grammatical sentences and constructions, is a necessary condition for the evaluation of a construction or of sentence as grammatical or ungrammatical. But is this also a sufficient condition? Assigning a construction or a sentence the status of a grammatical, respectively an ungrammatical, construction or sentence, is necessarily based on the knowledge of a language, which is intrinsically linked to a native speaker’s linguistic competence and her/his intuitions about the grammar of a language. There are, however, borderline cases, where some native speakers evaluate a sentence as grammatical and well-formed, while others evaluate it as ungrammatical and ill-formed, as is the case with sentences (2) and (3):1 (2) ?John seems to win the prize. (3) ?More doors are higher than windows are wide.

Regarding the grammaticality and well-formedness statuses of (2) and (3), native-speakers evaluate them as grammatical in specific contexts only: (2) is considered to be grammatical and well-formed in a setting where John is about to win the prize, and (3) is grammatical and well-formed if there is a specific set of doors which is compared to a specific set of windows. As a consequence of

1.A question mark ‘?’ indicates that there is some controversy about the status of a sentence as grammatical or as ungrammatical. An asterisk ‘*’ indicates an ungrammatical sentence.

Introduction

this process of evaluation, grammaticality judgements are intrinsically linked to sentence processing and to sentence comprehension, and thus to the interpretation of a sentence in context. Yet grammaticality and well-formedness are not synonymous with sentence comprehension. That is, sentence (4) is considered to be comprehensible, but is neither grammatical nor well-formed in English: (4) *Peter seems not happy.

The evaluation of (4) as comprehensible, but as not grammatical is due to the violation of raising, viz. the verb seem does not raise out of the VP. More precisely, seem is a one-argument verb, and the surface subject of seem, the NP Peter, originates in the specifier position of the adjective phrase (Haegeman and Guéron 1999: 290). The argument that a sentence can be ungrammatical, but comprehensible also holds for sentence (5): (5) *That’s the woman that we couldn’t find out whether anybody likes her

Here, restrictions on the selection of a relative pronoun are violated, which render the linguistic string ungrammatical. In spite of that violation, which does not hold for a number of regional and social varieties of English (Milroy and Milroy 1993), sentence (5) is undoubtedly comprehensible. Linguistic strings are not only evaluated with regard to their grammaticality, well-formedness and comprehensibility, they are also evaluated with regard to being acceptable or unacceptable, and with regard to being appropriate or inappropriate. But what do acceptability and appropriateness refer to in the context of utterance evaluation?

1.3 Acceptability and appropriateness Contrary to the primarily language-oriented evaluation of a sentence as grammatical or as well-formed, acceptability and appropriateness do not refer to the grammatical unit of a sentence. Instead, they refer to the production and interpretation of an utterance in its linguistic and social contexts. Following van Dijk (1981), acceptability is assigned the status of an empirical concept and appropriateness is assigned the status of a theoretical construct. The acceptability of an utterance is evaluated with regard to the nature of the connectedness between its linguistic form, sequential position and social context, and the appropriateness of an utterance is evaluated with regard to the nature of the

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connectedness between a communicative action, its linguistic realization and its embeddedness in linguistic and social contexts. For instance, the employment of them as a demonstrative in (6) is perfectly acceptable in British urban dialects (Milroy and Milroy 1993: 64): (6) I saw them big spiders.

Not only is sentence (6) acceptable, it is also grammatical and well-formed in British urban dialects — in spite of its status as an ungrammatical sentence in English-English and in General American English (Milroy and Milroy 1993; Trudgill and Hannah 1994). But is a communicative action performed through utterance (6) also appropriate? Unlike the sociolinguistic concept of acceptability, which, according to Asher, is anchored to external language (E-language), exists outside the mind and is independent of it (Asher 1994:1113), appropriateness is a pragmatic concept which is anchored to speaker, hearer, communicative intention, communicative act, linguistic representation and context. While acceptability is evaluated with regard to the nature of the connectedness between linguistic form, sequential position and social context, appropriateness is calculated with regard to the nature of the connectedness between the linguistic realization of a coparticipant’s communicative intention and its social and linguistic contexts. For this reason, appropriateness feeds on both external language and internal language: it draws from internal language for the formulation and interpretation of speaker-intended meaning, and it draws from external language with regard to the connectedness between a communicative action, its linguistic realization and its embeddedness in linguistic and social contexts. Unlike the mutually exclusive definitions of internal language and external language in the generative research paradigm, functional grammar assigns language a dynamic status and considers it to be a constitutive part of the cognitive system (Givón 1999). Sentences, utterances and constructions are not only conceived of as linguistic strings, they are also seen as messages through which coparticipants are connected with each other, through which they are connected with their discourse, and through which they are connected with the world. Against this background, grammaticality tests do not only measure the grammaticality of a linguistic string, they also measure its well-formedness, its acceptability and its appropriateness, albeit in an indirect manner. As has been indicated above, the knowledge of a language, or native-speaker intuitions, do not only account for the grammaticality and well-formedness of a sentence or of a construction, or for the acceptability and appropriateness of an utterance. Rather, native-speaker competence also holds for the evaluation of a sentence’s

Introduction

constituents and other expressions with regard to being grammatical or ungrammatical, and with regard to being well-formed or ill-formed. For example, neither gling nor gnimk are actual words in English, but gling is a possible word of English, which may — at some stage — be introduced into the English lexicon and denote a name for some new fabric, perfume or soft drink. In contrast, gnimp is not a word of English, and could never be a word of English unless the grammar of English were to change drastically. This is due to the fact that it violates at least two constraints on phonological well-formedness of English words, namely (1) no English syllable has a sequence of a consonant and a nasal (where the nasal is not syllabic), and (2) all tautosyllabic nasalconsonant clusters are homorganic, with the exception of clusters whose second element is alveolar, for example, the -s and -ed suffixes in sums or summed (Giegerich 1992: 151–173; Radford et al. 2000: 88–92). Hence, grammaticality does not only refer to constructions and sentences, it is also a property of a linguistic expression and thus is grounded in the structure of the expression. A grammatical expression is one that does not violate any of the rules governing the structure of expressions, while an ungrammatical expression is one that violates at least one constraint of grammaticality. The concept of grammaticality investigated so far has been based on the premise that a sentence is the maximal unit of linguistic form. In this setting, the grammaticality of all of the sentence’s constituents is a necessary condition for assigning the sentence the status of a grammatical sentence. But is that a sufficient condition? For a sentence to be grammatical, the constituents do not only have to be grammatical, but the grammatical constituents also have to be ordered in accordance with a linear order specified in the syntax of the grammar. For instance, the constituents NP1(you), NP2(him), VP(should meet) and PP(after breakfast) of sentence (7) are all grammatical: (7) *You should meet after breakfast him

Their linear order, however, does not correspond to the constraints of the English language regarding word order, as is pointed out by Haegeman and Guéron: “The unmarked word order in English is that in which object and verb are adjacent; in many cases the separation of object and verb leads to ungrammaticality. This is particularly clear when the object is an unstressed pronoun.” (Haegeman and Guéron1999: 222). But why should the concept of grammaticality in a natural language be restricted to the maximal unit of a sentence? If natural-language is seen as an information-processing device only, the premise that a sentence is the maximal unit of investigation seems reasonable,

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because information is generally encoded in one or more propositions, and the propositions are arranged in a linear order to construct one or more sentences. For instance, the information that Peter lives in a house, and that the house is in Slinn Street is encoded in the propositions p1 (Peter, live, house) and p2 (house, Slinn Street). From an information-processing perspective, the order of the sequence is not relevant as the information transmitted through p1 and p2 remains the same. However, if natural languages are not only seen from an information-processing viewpoint, but also from a language-as-a-means-ofcommunication viewpoint, a conception of grammaticality based on the maximal unit of a sentence seems too narrow. This is due to the fact that information in natural-language communication does not only consist of propositional information, it also consists of interpersonal information anchored to both the coparticipants’ attitudes towards the propositions exchanged and towards each other. Furthermore, information in naturallanguage communication consists of interactional information regarding the sequential status of the communicative acts exchanged, such as their status as an initiating act, as a responsive act or as an elicitation. Moreover, information in natural-language communication is not only exchanged. Rather, it is formulated and produced, and processed and interpreted in a unit larger than a proposition or sentence, namely in discourse or dialogue; and the meaning of a discourse is not the sum of its individual sentences, but rather is the meaning of the whole which is inferred and calculated with regard to the meaning of its individual parts and with regard to the meaning of the individual parts and their connectedness with the discourse topic (Gernsbacher and Givón 1995; Halliday 1994). And, last but not least, the production and comprehension of both discourse and a sentence in discourse requires contextual information which is not encoded overtly in a sentence, as has become apparent in the analysis of sentences (2) and (3). For these reasons, an investigation of grammaticality, well-formedness, acceptability and appropriateness requires the accommodation of both an information-processing perspective and a languageas-a-means-of-communication perspective. In this refined frame of reference, restricting the maximal unit of investigation to a sentence seems neither reasonable nor appropriate. Instead, the maximal unit of investigation must be extended to the domain of discourse or dialogue.2 But does the knowledge of a language, which has been examined above, also obtain for the domain of

2.In this work discourse and dialogue are used as functional synonyms. Both denote longer stretches of talk.

Introduction

discourse: are native-speakers also able to evaluate discourse as grammatical or ungrammatical, as well-formed or ill-formed, as acceptable or unacceptable, and as appropriate or inappropriate?

1.4 Dialogue: Well-formed and appropriate Research on dialogue, textlinguistics and anaphora resolution has shown that native-speakers are not only able to evaluate the grammaticality and wellformedness of a sentence, of an expression or of a construction, they are also able to evaluate discourse as good or as bad (Gernsbacher and Givón 1995; Gibbs 1999; Linell 1998; Searle 1991). So can the notions of good dialogue, grammatical dialogue and well-formed dialogue be used as synonyms? Grammaticality has been defined as the product of the evaluation of a particular sentence with regard to a particular theory of grammar: if a sentence is constructed in accordance with the rules of a grammar, it is assigned the status of a grammatical sentence; and if it is constructed in disaccordance with the rules of the grammar, it is assigned the status of an ungrammatical sentence. But does this kind of argumentation also hold for the evaluation of dialogue: is the grammaticality of all of the constituents of a dialogue a necessary and a sufficient condition for the grammaticality of the dialogue? Before these questions are examined in detail, the notions of a grammatical dialogue and of an ungrammatical dialogue are made explicit. Analogously to the analysis of a sentence, dialogue is investigated with regard to its form, its content and its function: the grammaticality of a sentence is examined with regard to the grammaticality of the constituents and with regard to the grammaticality of their position in the micro linguistic string, and the grammaticality of a dialogue is examined with regard to the grammaticality of its sentences on the micro level and with regard to the grammaticality of the sentences’ positions in the dialogue (or in the macro linguistic string). But is this unconstrained transfer of rules from parts to wholes a valid move: can the rules of a micro framework be simply adopted to a macro frame of reference without accommodating the corresponding macro-domain-specific constraints? The grammaticality of a sentence has been defined by the necessary and sufficient conditions of (1) the grammaticality of all of its constituents (or of its parts), and (2) the grammaticality of their linear order (or of the whole). This definition is based on the implicit assumption that grammaticality judgements are a clear-cut matter and that sentences are either grammatical or ungrammatical.

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But is the evaluation of conditions (1) and (2) really such a clear-cut matter? In functional grammar, natural language is assigned the status of a dynamic system, which manifests itself in grammaticalization and language change (Hopper and Traugott 2000; Traugott 1988), and it is also reflected in the principles of linguistic variation (Bloor and Bloor 1995) and in the principle of sociolinguistic variation (Brown 1995). That is to say, natural languages allow for linguistic variation in the domains of pragmatics, morphology, phonology, syntax and in the lexicon, and they allow for social and regional variation (Holmes 1992; Labov 1994; Trudgill and Hannah 1994; Wardhaugh 1993). So, natural languages allow for variation in the framework of individual constituents, such as the post-nominal genitive construction (8a) and the pre-nominal genitive construction (8b), which, in this case, are both grammatical (Givón 1993: 291): (8) a. The house of Peter b. Peter’s house

Additionally, natural languages allow for variation in the framework of the sentence. Due to the more complex structure of a sentence, that frame of reference allows a larger number of variants, which result from the pragmatic constraints on constituent order and on word order. They are reflected in the movement operations of clefting, topicalization and Y-movement construction in (9b) and (9c), which signify contrastive focus (Givón 1993: 181): (9) a. She can’t stand Tom b. Tom she can’t stand c. It’s her who can’t stand Tom

Adopting the premise of linguistic variation to the domain of dialogue provides us with an even larger number of variants because dialogue does not only allow for linguistic variation regarding the constituents of a sentence including variation on the subsentential level, but also for variation regarding the sequential organization of dialogue. But are these conclusions really valid: is there such a huge amount of variants? Naturally, the quantitatively larger domain of dialogue permits a larger number of variants, which are, however, constrained by discourse coherence. Thus, substituting a discourse constituent, e.g. a sentence or a clause, by an indexical expression, such as an anaphor or an elliptical construction, is constrained by semantic definiteness and by pragmatic common ground (Givón 1993; Halliday 1994; Gernsbacher and Givón 1995). The following discourse, for instance, violates definiteness constraints, unless a specific contextual configuration is assumed:

Introduction

(10) *Susan went to the theatre. She didn’t meet some man there.

Here, the employment of the indefinite article some results in an ungrammatical discourse because some is under the scope of negation (Givón 1993: 221). The context of metapragmatic negation (Horn 1989), however, transforms the ungrammatical construction (10) into the grammatical construction (10’): (10¢) Susan went to the theatre. She didn’t meet some man there — the man was her husband.

As regards grammatical anaphora constructions, the identity of the referent which is substituted by an anaphoric construction, such as the indexical expression so or the pronouns he or she in discourse (11), must have been established before. Only then is a grammatical anaphora construction possible. That is, if the indexical expression so and the proposition the lecture was illprepared are taken as coreferential, the status of (11) as a grammatical discourse is not clear-cut: (11) I don’t think so. The lecture was ill-prepared.

If, however, the indexical expression so is interpreted as referring to some prior stretch of discourse which contains a statement about a well-prepared lecture and so is substituted for that (presupposed) proposition, discourse (11) has the communicative function of disagreeing with the prior assessment and therefore is grammatical. For this reason, the evaluation of dialogue as grammatical or as ungrammatical is necessarily based on context. But what is grammatical dialogue: is it synonymous with well-formed dialogue, or is it synonymous with acceptable, appropriate and coherent dialogue? And is ungrammatical dialogue necessarily ill-formed, unacceptable, inappropriate and incoherent? The grammaticality of a sentence has been defined by the necessary and sufficient conditions of the grammaticality of all of its constituents, and by the grammaticality of their linear order. In the analysis of discourse (11), the individual constituents, i.e. the sentences (11a) and (11b) are both grammatical, while their sequential organization is not necessarily grammatical: (11) a. I don’t think so b. The lecture was ill-prepared

While the sequence (11a–b) is ungrammatical in a coreferential reading, it is grammatical in a non-coreferential reading. Moreover, the sequence (11b–a) requires an even more particularized contextual configuration in order to be assigned the status of a grammatical discourse. Here, (11b) must be assigned the

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communicative function of a direct and straightforward contradiction with a previous claim about a well-prepared lecture, and the contradiction is pragmatically boosted by the additional contradictory statement (11a). In this scenario, the discourse-deictic expression so is substituted for a presupposed proposition containing a claim about a well-prepared lecture. Thus, grammaticality judgements are context-sensitive operations, which depend on the context(s) selected in the process of reference assignment and disambiguation: by adding an additional constituent or by explicitating a reference (Brandom 1994) ungrammatical discourse is transformed into grammatical discourse. But is the evaluation of discourse as grammatical or ungrammatical really appropriate? As regards the maximal unit of a sentence, grammaticality judgements are generally based on the form or structure of the sentence. The form-based conception does not hold for a discursive frame of reference, where the evaluation of dialogue as grammatical or as ungrammatical is also anchored to pragmatic and semantic constraints, such as reference assignment and enrichment of propositional form. As a consequence of the context-sensitivity of dialogue, it seems more appropriate to evaluate dialogue as well-formed or illformed. The well-formedness of a sentence has been defined as being evaluated with regard to grammaticality, sentence processing and relevance-theoretic pragmatics: a sentence is assigned the status of a well-formed sentence if it is both grammatical and processed without excessive cognitive effort. So, is it possible to adopt the necessary and sufficient conditions regarding the wellformedness of a sentence to a discursive frame of reference? The grammaticality condition, as has been shown above, only holds for the grammaticality of the individual constituents of a discourse, that is the sentences and subsentential constituents; it does not hold for the discourse as a whole.3 Analogously to the well-formedness conditions of a sentence, well-formed discourse must be grammatical and comprehensible. So, are the grammaticality of the majority of its parts and the comprehensibility of the whole necessary and sufficient conditions for the well-formedness of discourse?

3.The notion of discourse covers a wide range of academic and non-academic, and literary and non-literary texts, such as a face-to-face interaction, an interview or poetry. Regarding the grammaticality of discourse, a strong interpretation of the grammaticality condition, which requires all of the sentences to be grammatical, does not obtain because there are numerous elliptical and truncated sentences. As a consequence of this, a weak interpretation of grammatical discourse is adopted, which requires a large portion of sentences and subsentential constituents to be grammatical.

Introduction

Discourse processing is a rather complex operation which goes beyond the constraints of sentence processing because it is not only parts, i.e. the constitutive sentences and subsentential constituents, which are processed. The connectedness of the partial meanings with the whole discourse is also processed. In principle, the cognitive operations can be executed in a linear and successive manner, i.e. the individual constituents are processed before the discourse as a whole is processed, or they can be processed in a simultaneous manner. While the former is based on a modular approach of the mind (Fodor 1995; Sperber and Wilson 1996), in which the sentences and their constituents are parsed, assigned a logical form and pragmatically enriched, the latter employs parallel distributed processing, where the sentences and their constituents are simultaneously processed in a network scenario (Dascal and Weizman 1987; Miikkulainen 1993; Searle 1995). Against the background of accommodating both context and language processing, the evaluation of discourse as well-formed or as ill-formed seems reasonable. The discursive definition of well-formedness conflates with the prerequisites of sentential well-formedness, which is based on the necessary and sufficient conditions of comprehensibility and efficient processability. So, in what respect do well-formed and appropriate dialogue meet, and where do they depart? The appropriateness of a contribution and its linguistic realization as one or more utterances has been defined as being calculated with regard to the nature of the connectedness between a coparticipant’s communicative intention, its linguistic realization and its embeddedness in linguistic and social contexts, as is illustrated with regard to the following examples (12) and (13): (12) I hereby declare this meeting closed and wish you a happy new year. (13) Let’s call it a day, and let’s hope 2003 is not gonna be as chaotic as 2002.

Contribution (12) is undoubtedly grammatical, well-formed and acceptable, and it can be assigned the status of an appropriate contribution if particular social-context constraints and requirements obtain. Because of the verbal form gonna, contribution (13) cannot necessarily be seen as grammatical and wellformed, but it can be assigned the status of an acceptable contribution and it can also be assigned the status of an appropriate contribution in a contextual configuration which must be similar to the one required for (12). So, what contextual constraints and requirements are necessary to assign (12) and (13) the statuses of appropriate contributions? Both contributions have to be produced by the chairperson of a meeting — a fairly formal meeting in (12) and a fairly informal meeting in (13) — and the chair has to address the ratified

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participants of the meeting. As regards time and location, both must be uttered right at the end or right at the beginning of a calendar year, and both must be uttered in an institutional setting, a more formal one in (12) and a more informal one in(13). In spite of their different linguistic realizations, (12) and (13) require identical interactional roles (Goffman 1974; Levinson 1988). Unlike (12), however, (13) requires less fixed social roles and a less determinate setting in which it is possible to close a meeting in a less routinized manner (Aijmer 1996). As a consequence of these contextual configurations, well-formed discourse and appropriate discourse meet in their interrelated categories of communicative intention, linguistic realization and linguistic context, and they depart with regard to their accommodation of social contexts. Hence, well-formed discourse is not necessarily appropriate, but appropriate discourse is necessarily well-formed. For instance, a well-formed lecture on second-language acquisition is not appropriate in the social context of a primary-school lesson, but it is appropriate in the social context of a seminar on language acquisition. It has been shown that a conception of well-formed discourse as the sole result of additive relations is too simplistic. Rather, discourse production and discourse processing are the product of cognitive operations in which a discourse’s constitutive sentences, subsentential constituents and subsentential expressions are attributed to one or more discourse topics and to one or more subtopics. Against the background of their connectedness with these constitutive parts, the meaning of discourse and the meaning of its constitutive contributions are interpreted. While sentence processing is bottom-up by definition, discourse processing requires both bottom-up and top-down operations: it is bottom-up with regard to the processing of its constituents and individual contributions, and it is top-down with regard to the attribution of the micro constituents to the corresponding discourse topics, to the subtopics and to the discourse as a whole. Analogously to a well-formed sentence, a well-formed discourse should not require excessive cognitive effort but rather should adhere to the relevance-theoretic constraint of optimal relevance. Despite the fact that neither the Gricean cooperative principle (CP) nor relevance theory have been explicitly anchored to a discursive frame of reference, their contextual orientations allow for the degree of flexibility required to accommodate the constraints and requirements of discourse or dialogue.4 A network perspective not only

4.Fetzer(2002a/b) adapts the Gricean CP to a discursive frame of reference, and Gibbs (1999) presents a relevance-theoretic interpretation of discourse. For a speech-act-theoretic investigation of discourse and conversation see Cohen, Morgan and Pollack (1992), Searle

Introduction

necessitates a discursive outlook on language and communication, it also necessitates a context-based conception of language and communication. Unlike the traditional notion of context as a diffuse or unstructured entity, which is only of relevance if some linguistic structure is seen as problematic or as ambiguous, context in a network frame of reference is conceived of as both dynamic and relational. Analogously to the prototype-based conception of a network and its micro and macro domains, the category of context must also be conceived of in a prototypical manner. Here, it can be differentiated with regard to a default (or unmarked) context and with regard to a particular (or marked) context.5

1.5 Goals and objectives This work adopts a network perspective to the investigation of language and communication (Givón 1999; Mac Whinney 1999; Miikkulainen 1993; Searle 1995). It is based on the premise that discourse is produced and processed both in a bottom-up manner and in a top-down manner. The constitutive constituents of dialogue, the contributions, are produced and processed in a bottom-up manner with respect to the generation of the constituents’ preliminary meanings. In the meantime, their preliminary meanings are further processed in a top-down manner and refined with regard to their connectedness to a discourse topic and with regard to their connectedness to its subtopics. Hence, discursive meaning is not an inherent feature of the discourse, but rather is inferred, constructed and calculated by the coparticipants. The network perspective adopted here is based on the theory of semantic prototypes (Givón 1999; Lakoff 1987) and on their connectedness with cognitive, linguistic and sociocultural contexts. The prototype’s inherent fuzziness allows for a dynamic, flexible and interactive frame of reference and thus for a dynamic conception of micro and macro domains, which are constantly updated, reorganized and restructured. Both the organization and the reorganization of

(1992) and Vanderveken who speaks of collective higher order illocutionary acts (2002: 27). 5.The concept of markedness is adopted from the research paradigm of functional grammar, where it connects the cognitive domain with the external linguistic-surface domain. It is defined with regard to structural complexity, discourse distribution and cognitive complexity: the marked category is more complex and less frequent, and it is harder to process (Givón 1993: 178). The notion of default context is thoroughly examined in Recanati (1986, 1989).

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the network are cognitive operations and manifest themselves in lowering and raising the strength of contextual implications, and in adding and erasing contextual implications (Sperber and Wilson 1996). Thus, a network perspective permits the accommodation of different contexts and conceives of communication and language as firmly anchored to context, and as embedded in context. The premises of embeddedness and context-dependency require sentences, utterances and contributions to be produced and interpreted in accordance with contextual constraints. For this reason, there is generally no drastic mismatch between the sentence, the utterance or the contribution and the meanings calculated with regard to the constraints of the micro and macro domains. Should the micro meaning be contradictory to the constraints of the macro domain, it has to be recalculated and recontextualized through further processes of inferencing, in which the conversational implicature or the speaker-intended meaning is retrieved (Dascal and Weizman 1987; Fetzer 2002a; Grice 1975; Searle 1995; Weizman and Dascal 1991). Recontextualizing context: Grammaticality meets appropriateness examines the connectedness between grammaticality and context, and between context and appropriateness. The following chapter, Grammaticality and context, examines the connectedness between context and grammaticality. The introduction compares and contrasts the notions of grammaticality, well-formedness and acceptability in the framework of the English language; and it critically discusses the relevant premises of grammaticality judgement, native speaker and linguistic competence by focussing on the particular constraints and requirements for both a natural language and a non-natural language. Section 2.2 looks at the connectedness between syntax and context. It examines the necessary and sufficient conditions for grammatical, well-formed and acceptable sentences of the English language. Section 2.3. examines the status of context in morphology and focuses on the grammaticality, well-formedness and acceptability of English word formation with regard to both word-internal and word-external contexts. Section 2.4 looks at the connectedness between phonology and context, and gives special consideration to combinatory and prosodic phenomena of the English language with regard to their grammaticality, well-formedness and acceptability. Section 2.5 looks at the status of context in semantics/pragmatics; it critically examines the question whether grammaticality, well-formedness and acceptability are reasonable notions for the analysis of the particularities of the English language. Special consideration is given to the differentiation between context-dependent and context-independent meanings. Section 2.6 summarizes

Introduction

the results obtained and paves the ground for the subsequent part on context and appropriateness. Chapter 3, Context and appropriateness examines the connectedness between context and appropriateness, which is defined as a discursive (or dialogical) concept anchored to a dialogue grammar. Section 3.2 analyses the connectedness between a speech act and context by focussing on the question of how the social construct of appropriateness is conceived of in speech act theory. It gives special attention to the questions of how things are done with words, of what acts are intentional, and of whether speech act theory is a product- or a process-oriented approach to communication. It closes with the fundamental question of how a speech act is formulated and linguistically represented in the framework of the English language. Section 3.3 looks at the interdependence of an utterance and context and differentiates between linguistic, social and sociocultural contexts. It compares and contrasts utterances and sentences in context, utterances and speech acts in context, and utterances, turns and turn-constructional units in contexts. Special attention is given to the questions of how (joint) meaning is constructed in the framework of the English language and of how linguistic and sociocultural contexts are accommodated. Section 3.4 investigates the connectedness between dialogue and context, and supplements the differentiation between cognitive, linguistic, social and sociocultural contexts with the categories of local and global contexts. It critically examines the question of whether utterances and speech acts are reasonable units of investigation. It introduces the dialogue act of a plus/minusvalidity claim which systematizes the micro-contextual references of an utterance in the tripartite system of objective, social and subjective worlds and their premises of truth, appropriateness and sincerity. The bottom-up construct of the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim is then adapted to the macrocontextual constraints and requirements of a communicative genre and differentiated with regard to micro and macro communicative intentions, Weintentionality and I-thou-sociality, co-suppositions and dialogue-common ground. Again, special attention is paid to the English language. Section 3.6 summarizes the results obtained. The final part, Conclusion: Sentence grammar and dialogue grammar revisited, refines the notions of grammaticality, well-formedness, acceptability and appropriateness and adapts them to the constraints and requirements of dialogue. It compares and contrasts a primarily monological setting with a primarily dialogical approach to English grammar, and highlights new findings and insights.

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Chapter 2

Grammaticality and context

At first sight, grammaticality and context seem to represent two mutually exclusive terms: the former entails the dichotomy between grammatical and ungrammatical, while the latter entails a scalar and relativistic perspective on the phenomenon to be investigated. In the more formal-oriented fields of linguistics, grammaticality has been anchored to the context-independent conception of a sentence and its constituents, while context has been anchored to the domain of language use and its units of investigation: utterance, turn and conversation. If sentences are produced and interpreted in accordance with the rules and constraints of a grammar, they are assigned the status of grammatical sentences, and if they are produced in disaccordance with the rules and constraints of a grammar, they are assigned the status of ungrammatical sentences. Regarding the status of rules and constraints, they are tested with the help of grammaticality judgements. Grammaticality judgements operate on the performance-competence interface, and they have the function of testing whether sentences or constituents are grammatical or whether they are ungrammatical. To achieve that goal, native speakers are confronted with a list of sentences which they evaluate as good or as bad; sometimes in-between judgements are also possible. Because of their allocation to the competenceperformance interface, grammaticality judgements are informed by two diverging, if not mutually exclusive domains. On the one hand, they are based on the premise of linguistic competence, that is native speakers have knowledge of a language and know how to identify grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, and they have knowledge of how to produce and interpret sentences in accordance with the rules of a grammar. On the other hand, native speakers are confronted with language material and thus with linguistic performance, albeit in an idealized manner. When judging sentences as good or as bad, the language material is mapped onto ‘real’ utterances and onto ‘ideal’ sentences, and then compared and contrasted with the data in question. Against this background, the domain of grammaticality can only be accessed through performance-based language use in context. In spite of their diverging domains

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of validity, grammaticality and context meet whenever speakers and hearers use their linguistic repertoire in order to perform communicative actions and to achieve one or more communicative goal(s) in context, and they depart when the domains of grammar and context are conceived of as being independent of the intentions of their users. So, are the bridging points between context and grammaticality rational and intentional language users? The following section attempts to answer the question by contextualizing the concepts of language, grammar and grammaticality and by connecting them with the phenomenon of grammaticality judgement.

2.1 Introduction The concept of grammaticality is intrinsically linked to Noam Chomsky and was intended to account for possible violations of the basic phrase structure. In Chomsky’s conception of grammar, phonological and semantic representations have been assigned the status of interpretative components. The goal of a grammar is in the first instance to draw a dividing line between those sentences which are clearly grammatical and those which are clearly ungrammatical. Implicit in this argument is a scalar conception of grammaticality (or grammaticalness) which is anchored to the domain of competence and seen as the conformity of a sentence to the rules defined by the grammar of a particular language. As a consequence of the autonomous conception of syntax, violations of sentence-grammar rules are not of an equal standing: violation of structure rules are seen to generate less grammatical sentences than those that violate other rules regarding lexicon or tense; they are considered to represent less drastic violations. Analogously to competence-based grammaticality, Chomsky postulates the existence of rules for performance-based acceptability, which is also conceived of as a scalar concept and anchored to the category of an utterance, and thus to language use in context: [L]et us use the term ‘acceptable’ to refer to utterances that are perfectly natural and immediately comprehensible without paper-and-pencil analysis, and in no way bizarre or outlandish. Obviously, acceptability will be a matter of degree along with various dimensions. (…) The notion ‘acceptable’ is not to be confused with ‘grammatical’. Acceptability is a concept that belongs to the study of performance, whereas grammaticalness belongs to the study of competence. (…) Like acceptability, grammaticalness is, no doubt, a matter of degree (…), but the scales of


grammaticalness and acceptability do not coincide. Grammaticalness is only one of many factors that interact to determine acceptability. (Chomsky 1965: 10–11)

While grammaticality is firmly anchored to the domain of linguistics and to the linguistic string of a sentence, the concept of acceptability feeds on both grammaticalness and utterance-based performance. But what does performance denote: does it denote the phonological representation of a sentence, viz. a syntactic configuration supplemented by a particular phonological output, or does it refer to the speaker’s production and the hearer’s interpretation of a sentence in a context? Chomsky’s observation that “grammaticality is only one of many factors that interact to determine acceptability” (1965: 11) indicates the latter reading, but he does not spell out the “many factors”, as that is not the goal of his investigations. Yet he assumes that an investigation of acceptability requires an interactive frame of reference which accounts for both the rules of grammar and the maxims of dialogue.1 In the following the question whether grammaticality and acceptability are necessary and sufficient conditions for the analysis of the connectedness between context and grammaticality is examined. First, the conceptions of language, grammar and grammaticality are contextualized in the frameworks of generative grammar, optimality theory and functional grammar. Second, the theory and practice of grammaticality judgements are investigated in detail. 2.1.1 Language, grammar and grammaticality An investigation of the connectedness between language, grammar and grammaticality has to take into account the multifarious nature of language and

1.Contrary to the rules of a grammar, which account for grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, maxims have a different status. They function as guidelines and specify what type of verbal or nonverbal performance is to be expected in a specific context. Communicative performance which is in accordance with a particular set of maxims is seen as acceptable, and communicative performance which is not in accordance with a particular set of maxims either is interpreted as unacceptable communicative performances or is seen as triggering a process of inferencing to retrieve the speaker’s communicative intention and her/his speaker-intended meaning (Grice 1975; Levinson 1983). While ungrammatical sentences do not generally have social consequences, unacceptable communicative performance, if not seen as an inference trigger and thereby recontextualized as acceptable communicative performance, has social consequences, such as embarrassment or even sanctions. For this reason, it tends to be repaired. For a detailed differentiation between the concepts of maxim and rule in the framework of pragmatics see Leech (1983); for a philosophical outlook on the status of maxims see Reucher (1987).

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account for one of its most basic distinctions, the differentiation between natural languages and non-natural languages. In both domains, language can be used as a vehicle for communication and social interaction, and it can be used as an information-processing device. Regarding the former, language is generally assigned the status of a sociosemiotic system, and regarding the latter, it is assigned the status of a semiotic system. In a cognitive outlook on language and communication, language and communication are further refined with regard to their representation in a code model, and with regard to their representation in an inference model. But language is not only distinguished with respect to its communicative, social and cognitive functions, it is also differentiated with respect to its connectedness with other systems. The formal frame of reference conceives of language as an autonomous system with autonomous subsystems, and the functional frame of reference conceives of language as being represented by interrelated and interacting cognitive systems. Despite these rather fundamental differences, there is no controversy about the status of language as a rule-governed system, and the goal of a theory of grammar is to identify and describe the rules in accordance with which grammatically correct sentences, constituents and constructions are produced and interpreted. The concept of grammar is generally restricted to the unit of a sentence and does not explicitly cover the domain of dialogue. The goal of a theory of dialogue is to identify and describe the rules and regularities in accordance with which coherent dialogue is produced and interpreted. But who (or what) decides about the correctness of a rule, and what conditions are required to assign a linguistic string the status of a grammatical sentence, and what conditions are required to assign a linguistic string the status of coherent dialogue? To answer these questions, we have to distinguish between two different settings, or between two different contexts, namely the grammaticality of natural languages and the grammaticality of non-natural languages. Regarding the former, the status of a sentence as grammatical or as ungrammatical is generally evaluated by native speakers with the help of grammaticality judgements, where sentences are classified as grammatical or ungrammatical with respect to one particular language system, such as English, German or French. Regarding the latter, grammaticality judgements are independent of native speakers. Instead, it is the artificially designed system (or grammar) which evaluates sentences as good or as bad: good sentences are parsed and interpreted completely, and bad sentences are only parsed partially and therefore are not assigned a logical form. In both scenarios, the process and product of the evaluation of sentences is based on the rules and constraints of a grammar. But


which status do we assign to these rules and regularities: do they represent regulative rules or do they represent constitutive rules (Searle 1969: 33–42)? In a generative-grammar paradigm, the internal grammar consists of principles and parameters, which are specified for the grammar of a particular language, such as English, German or French. That is, a generative grammar of the English language is characterized by parameter-specific configurations which provide the rules for the generation of grammatically correct sentences. Should mistakes occur, they are due to imperfect operations at the interfaces of the logical form component (LF) and the phonetic form component (PF), or they are due to imperfect operations at the interface of competence and performance. So, the rules of a generative grammar regulate what sentence is assigned the status of a grammatical sentence and what sentence is assigned the status of an ungrammatical sentence. Regarding the theoretical framework and the claim that the implemented rules generate grammatical sentences only, the argumentation is undoubtedly valid. For instance, the locality condition on NP-movement requires an NP to be moved to the nearest landing site, as is the case in (14a), where the moved NP John originates in the specifier of the VP of the lower clause. This is exemplified by Haegeman and Guéron (1999: 362): (14) a. John seems to like Mary b. *John seems that he likes Mary.

Sentence (14a) is generated in accordance with the locality condition for the English language whereas sentence (14b) is generated in disaccordance with the rules of English because the moved constituent John has crossed a potential landing site, viz. the subject position of the finite embedded clause. For this reason, sentence (14b) is assigned the status of an ungrammatical sentence.2 The locality condition also holds for the assignment of thematic roles, the selection of case and case-assignment. Thus, the foundation, on which this product-oriented outlook on grammar is based, viz. the generation of grammatical sentences and clauses in accordance with the rules of a generative grammar, seems unproblematic. But how does a grammarian specify the possible rules of a grammar? To specify a possible rule of a grammar, a rule must have been identified,

2.Unless indicated differently, the examination of grammaticality and appropriateness is restricted to Standard English, viz. English-English and General American English. Thus, neither regional, social and functional varieties, nor English-based Creoles and secondlanguage varieties are explicitly taken into consideration.

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compared and contrasted with a number of closely related rules in which one variable is assigned a slightly different position or a slightly different function from the original rule. Only then is it possible to evaluate its validity with the help of grammaticality judgements, where native speakers provide information about the grammaticality of the sentences in question. Put differently, grammaticality judgements test the validity of a specific variable in a number of different contexts, and only after the rather elaborate process of evaluation is it possible to assign the variable in question the status of a parameter and to implement it. Michael B. Kac (1992) calls the process of evaluation ‘etiological analysis’, which he defines it as follows: “Such analysis seeks to provide, for any ungrammatical string, a ‘diagnosis’ of the type of ungrammaticality involved — which in turn amounts to identifying the grammatical rules violated by the string in question” (Kac 1992: 2). Thus, a necessary condition for a rule to be assigned the status of a grammatical rule is that it is valid in different contexts, while a sufficient condition is its validity in all possible contexts. For instance, the locality condition discussed above must have been compared and contrasted with other possible locality-condition rules, which specify more remote landing sites or no constraints on landing sites. Only then is it possible to evaluate the particular rule as correct. The implicit circularity of the argument becomes apparent in the definition of a grammatical sentence or a grammatical construction: a sentence or a construction is grammatical if, and only if, it is constructed in accordance with the rules of a particular grammar. Here, constructing sentences, clauses or constituents in accordance with the rules of a grammar is a necessary condition for their grammaticality, such as the potential cliticization of have as an auxiliary and its allocation to the head INFL position, and the non-cliticization of have as a lexical verb and its allocation to the head V position in the VP in English. Its counterpart, an ungrammatical sentence or an ungrammatical construction is defined as a sentence or a construction which is constructed in disaccordance with one or more rules of a grammar, such as the cliticization of the auxiliary have in head V positions in English. While the generative-grammar paradigm examines rules and constraints in a binary setting, optimality theory is based on a more context-oriented conception of grammaticality. Optimality theory (OT) offers a rather different outlook on the concept of grammaticality: “Note that OT differs from more traditional grammar frameworks in that the grammaticality of a structure is not determined by its inherent properties, but by the set of structures it competes with” (Keller 1998: 96). Here, grammaticality is not the fundamental premise of the theory of grammar. Instead, the grammaticality of a candidate is calculated with regard to the


violation of soft and hard constraints, and defined by its optimal structure, as is explicated by Keller (1998: 99): [T]his approach makes use of a different sort of informative pair: we compare two candidates S and S’ (both may be suboptimal) which have the same violation profile, apart from the constraint C, which is violated only by S. Now we try to learn about the violation of C by determining how the grammaticality of S differs from the grammaticality of S’. This method allows us to investigate constraint ranking (by varying C) and constraint interaction (by determining the effect of multiple violations).

Against this background, Keller refines the OT notion of grammaticality and postulates a scalar conception, namely gradient grammaticality: “A straightforward model of gradient grammaticality can be obtained by dropping OT’s assumption that all suboptimal structures are (equally) ungrammatical (…). Instead, we can stipulate that the relative optimality of a structure corresponds to its relative grammaticality” (Keller 1998: 104). Gradient grammaticality is calculated in the framework of selective constraint re-ranking and grounded in OT learnability theory. Keller’s experimental results lead him to the conclusion that there is evidence that constraint violations are cumulative, i.e. that the degree of ungrammaticality increases with the number of constraints violated: “The experimental results, however, indicate that the scope of gradience in the grammar is much more limited: differences in acceptability were found between violations of soft and hard constraints only; different types of soft and hard constraint violations did not differ in relative acceptability” (Keller 1998: 104). The inherently scalar conception of grammaticality, or of acceptability, to use Keller’s word, accounts for those cases in which native speakers do not agree in their judgements: sometimes a sentence is evaluated as not violating any rule of a grammar and therefore assigned the status of a grammatical sentence, and sometimes the identical sentence is evaluated as violating one or more rules of a grammar. In spite of the fact that the optimality-theoretic conception of grammaticality accounts for the connectedness between sentences and contexts, it is still firmly anchored to the sentence as the maximal unit of investigation. From a purely formal or structural viewpoint, a language L is defined as a set of sentences, its grammar is an abstract formal object that generates the sentences of L, and the members of that set are precisely those sentences that are grammatical in L. But is the generation of a set of sentences of L synonymous with the generation of the language L? If language is defined as an infinite number of grammatical sentences, then the grammar generates L. If language is seen from a dialogue angle, the condition that L must consist of an infinite

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number of grammatical sentences is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for the generation of the language L. Undoubtedly, dialogue is construed of grammatical sentences, but a finite number of grammatical sentences does not necessarily construe ‘good’ dialogue. Rather, the finite number of grammatical sentences has to be produced in accordance with a particular sequential organization which is based on the principle of discourse coherence, as is succinctly argued for by Givón: Language in its narrower core function, as an instrument of coding and communicating information, involves three well-coded, concentrically arrayed functional realms: a. Word (meaning) b. Clauses (information) c. Discourse (coherence) Words in our lexicon code concepts of entities; word thus have meaning. The entities coded by words may ‘exist’ in several distinct senses. First, they may be part of our experience of the so-called external (‘real’) world, accessible in principle to all members of the human species. Second, they may be part of each person’s internal mental world, accessible to that person only. Third, they may be part of our socially-negotiated cultural universe, within which we construe both external and internal entities as well as customs, intuitions, interpretations, behavior patterns and so on. (Givón 1993: 21–22)

Discourse coherence expresses a specific thematic connectedness amongst grammatical sentences and clauses and therefore is intrinsically related to the specific position of a sentence in a discursive sequence. And it is that position in a particular sequence, which determines whether the sentence is assigned the status of a grammatical sentence or whether it is assigned the status of an ungrammatical sentence. Moreover, natural languages are characterized by the premises of linguistic variation (Labov 1999; Bloor and Bloor 1995) and of sociolinguistic variation (Brown 1995) which supplements the linguistic concept of grammaticality with the performance-related concept of acceptability. The principle of discourse coherence is going to be illustrated by the analysis of example (15a). Here, all of the constitutive sentences can be assigned the statuses of grammatical sentences, if they are evaluated in isolation: (15) a. ?He1 lives in Amsterdam. Peter is a professor of philosophy. He2 has been a vegetarian for years.

If investigated from a discursive perspective, however, the first sentence cannot be seen as grammatical in a coreferential reading of he1 and Peter. But if he1 and


Peter are not seen as coreferential, viz. if he1 refers to another male person whose identity has already been established in the discourse and therefore is retrieved from the discourse common ground, (15a) is well-formed and coherent. If he1, he2 and Peter are coreferential, (15a) cannot be seen as wellformed either. The degree of well-formedness increases if he1 and Peter are not coreferential, and if Peter and he2 are cofererential. If the sequential organization of the string is changed to (15b), there is generally no controversy about its status as an instance of well-formed and coherent discourse: (15) b. Peter is a professor of philosophy. He lives in Amsterdam. He has been a vegetarian for years.

Here, every sentence of the discourse is grammatical and the discourse as a whole is well-formed and coherent. The definition of language from a discursive viewpoint cannot be based on the condition of a finite number of grammatical sentences. This is only a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. Thus, grammaticality needs to be supplemented by discourse coherence. Against this background, the system of L or the grammar of L does not only require a parser which parses individual sentences or a sequence of sentences. Instead, it needs a parser which parses both the individual sentences as such, and the individual sentences with regard to their statuses as sentences and with regard to their statuses as constituents of discourse. In other words, the grammar must contain rules which specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for a string to be assigned the status of a discursive sequence regarding L’s minimal sequence of a sentence (including its constituents) and it must contain rules which specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for the string to be assigned the status of a discursive sequence regarding L’s maximal sequence of discourse (including its constituents: the sentences). Depending on the purpose the formal language is designed for, the parser must parse the spoken input or written input, which requires the accommodation of rules from the domains of syntax, morphology, phonology and semantics/pragmatics. Furthermore, the system must be able to recognize the meaning of the individual constituents, and it must be able to evaluate their individual meanings in connection with the meaning of the discourse as a whole.3 In this setting, we have a candidate string which goes

3.The linearity of the argument does not necessarily implicate temporal linearity. Thus, it is, in principle, possible to design a system which recognizes the meaning of the input as a whole before it parses the input syntactically; or it is possible to design a system which recognizes the syntactic structure and then assigns meaning to the individual constituents

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through the process of evaluation, such as the decision procedure based on the rules of a generative grammar. If the input is recognized, it is evaluated as grammatical, and if the input is not recognized, it is evaluated as ungrammatical and disregarded. Unlike the decision procedure of a formal system, which evaluates linguistic strings as grammatical or as ungrammatical, native speakers are often able to provide more precise information about what is wrong with a given string and what must be modified in order to assign it the status of a grammatical string. But what do grammaticality tests actually measure? The grammars of natural and non-natural languages are both based on the premise that language is a rule-governed system. As regards non-natural languages, the rules of the grammar are designed and implemented, and the system produces output in accordance with the implemented rules and interprets input accordingly. In the framework of a natural language, the rules of the grammar have to be deduced from language corpora and other types of naturally occurring data, or from native-speaker intuition and native-speaker introspection. As regards language corpora, there is generally some difficulty regarding size and selection of data, as it is not necessarily the case that a corpus contains all the constructions of the English language. Moreover, different samples of the English language may employ different modes of linguistic realization. For instance, the spoken and written modes of English prefer different rules and regularities regarding the complexity of syntactic structures or the selection and position of adverbials (Biber 1988; Chafe 1984). Furthermore, different genres and styles display different regularities, and what is considered to be a grammatical construction in one particular frame of reference may count as an ungrammatical construction in another frame of reference, as is exemplified with discourse (16a). Here, coreference is expressed by the he-construction, which is considered to be well-formed, at least by some native speakers of English: (16) a.

The candidate we have in mind should be a fluent speaker of standard English. He should also have all the social skills required for such an exposed position.

Each of the constituents of (16a) is grammatical, and the discourse as a whole is construed in accordance with the principle of discourse coherence. Thus, discourse (16a) is well-formed.

and to the whole sequence.


In discourse (16b) coreference is expressed by the she-construction. (16b) is also an instance of well-formed dialogue: each of its constituents is grammatical, and the discourse as a whole is well-formed: (16) b. The candidate we have in mind should be a fluent speaker of standard English. She should also have all the social skills required for such an exposed position.

This also holds for discourse (16c), where coreference is expressed by the he-orshe-construction. (16c) is well-formed as each of its constituents is grammatical and the discourse as a whole is well-formed and coherent: (16) c.

The candidate we have in mind should be a fluent speaker of standard English. He or she should also have all the social skills required for such an exposed position.

Discourse (16d) is a prototypical representative of politically correct language use (Dunant 1994), where coreference is expressed by the they-construction. In spite of the fact that (16d) violates the number- and gender agreement constraints of coreference, it is considered to be well-formed and coherent, and it is very frequent in present-day English: (16) d. The candidate we have in mind should be a fluent speaker of standard English. They should also have all the social skills required for such an exposed position.

As has surfaced in the discussion above, the investigation of grammaticality in the framework of language corpora has to take into consideration the naturallanguage specific principles of linguistic variation and of sociolinguistic variation. For this reason, a natural-language account for grammatical or ungrammatical constructions is necessarily interdependent on the linguistic and social contexts in which the constructions are used. As regards discourses (16a/ b/c/d), the pronominal constructions employed can be seen as functional equivalents and therefore are assigned the status of competing constructions for the expression of coreference. Regarding their forms, they are definitely not equivalent. And regarding their communicative meaning, they are not equivalent either. Here, (16a) is seen as an instance of a more traditional variety, if not of a sexist code. Thus, the investigation of English constructions does not necessarily achieve clear-cut results with respect to the relationship between language form and language function. In spite of the theoretical construct of a set of rules, an internalized set of

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rules (Searle 1969: 14) and norms, native speakers’ intuitions about the status of a construction, sentence or discourse as grammatical or as ungrammatical, and as well-formed or as ill-formed, do not always achieve clear-cut results. The following section seeks to provide answers for the controversy. 2.1.2 Grammaticality judgements: The competence–performance interface An investigation of grammaticality in the framework of a natural language is based on a native speaker’s linguistic competence which manifests itself in her or his intuitions about her/his native tongue. That is to say, a native speaker4 knows when a sentence or a grammatical construction is grammatical and when it is not grammatical. For this reason, s/he is a representative of linguistic competence par excellence. The evaluation of one or more sentences or of one or more grammatical constructions is carried out by grammaticality judgements (or grammaticality tests), which aim to measure the grammaticality of a sentence or a construction. Grammaticality refers to the premise of a grammar, in accordance with which grammatical sentences or grammatical constructions are produced, and it refers to the product of a process of evaluating sentences or constructions as grammatical or as ungrammatical. The former is firmly anchored to linguistic competence, and the latter is connected with communicative performance, with language form and with language function. Against this background, grammaticality judgements are anchored to the interface between linguistic competence and communicative performance, and are, for this reason, contextdependent operations. They presuppose default contexts, against which sentences and constructions are evaluated. Because of the connectedness between form, function and context, grammaticality judgements cannot be reduced to a simple one-to-one mapping operation. This is due to the fact that native speakers may interpret the nature of the connectedness between form, function and context in a different manner, and thus construct different default contexts. In the research paradigm of linguistics, the nature of the connectedness between linguistic competence and communicative performance is rather controversial, as is pointed out by Allen and Seidenberg: “The mapping between

4.Native-speaker competence has become a rather controversial issue in the fields of applied linguistics and critical discourse analysis. The status of English native speakers in the frameworks of English as a first language and English as an international language is critically examined in Graddol (1999).


competence grammar and performance is at best complex, as we have noted; it is also largely unknown. A problem arises because the primary data on which the standard approach [generative linguistics] relies — grammaticality judgements — are themselves performance properties” (Allen and Seidenberg 1999: 117). Against this kind of reductionism, they explicate their conception of grammar, grammaticality and grammaticality judgements as follows: We have suggested that knowledge of language is not a set of rules for generating sentences and that the child’s task is not grammar acquisition. We therefore owe an account of how it is that people can nonetheless make grammaticality judgments. The capacity to make these judgments emerges out of the ability to process language normally. The task requires informants to establish criteria for deciding whether to call a sentence grammatical or ungrammatical. One important property of the task is that different decision criteria may be used, depending on the properties of the sentences being judged. Thus, judging the utterance The the the the the as ungrammatical may not rely on the same information as judging The boy tried Bill to go or The boy fell the chair. The first sentence can be judged on the basis of whether it even potentially conforms to an interpretable object; superficial properties, such as the absence of nouns and verbs provide a reliable basis for deciding that it is not. These criteria will not be sufficient for the second and the third sentences, which require using other sorts of information. (Allen and Seidenberg 1999: 121)

The functional-grammar conception of grammaticality entails a holistic approach to meaning and form. As a consequence of this, grammar and grammaticality are anchored to default contexts which contain prototypicality conditions for (all of) the constructions of a language. Unlike the productoriented outlook on grammar, which focuses on the rules, in accordance with which grammatical sentences are produced, a process-oriented outlook conceives of grammar as a dynamic system anchored to grammaticalization (Allen 1995; Hopper and Traugott 2000; Traugott 1988). Against this background, Allen and Seidenberg connect grammaticality and grammaticality judgements with both meaning and frequency: It follows that the grammaticality of an utterance is defined with respect to a particular meaning. Unlike the Turning machine metaphor of string recognition, the grammaticality of an utterance cannot be defined with respect to the form of that sentence alone, but must make reference to the meaning that gave rise to it. It further follows that an (absolutely) ungrammatical utterance is one to which no meaning maps. Note that this is not equivalent to saying that an ungrammatical utterance is one that maps to no meaning, because presumably

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there is always some semantic representation that best satisfies the constraints given the ungrammatical utterance as input. (…) The hypothesis, then, is that a mismatch between the form that is the input to the comprehension system and the form produced on the basis of what was comprehended could be used as the basis for detecting ungrammaticality. (Allen and Seidenberg 1999: 125)

Grammaticality judgements do not generally base the evaluation of grammaticality on the dichotomy of grammatical versus ungrammatical, which is operationalized in simple yes-or-no-questions. Instead, native speakers are asked to evaluate sentences with regard to minimally three categories, such as (1) acceptable, (2) ?, (3) ??, (4) *?, and (5) * (Linguist Network 1999), or (1) ok, (2) not ok, or (3) not sure (Davies and Kaplan 1998). In an examination of grammaticality judgements with L2 learners, Davies and Kaplan test the same group of subjects for both the L1 task and the L2 task. This allows them to directly compare strategies used for the L1 task and for the L2 sentences by the same subjects, thereby ruling out the possibility that any differences between the two sets of strategies are due to population differences. The types of strategies used in grammaticality judgements differ in the two settings. While L1-judgements are based primarily on feel, viz. intuitive responses, meaning and repair, L2-judgements are not based only on feel, meaning, and repair, but also on learning, translation, analogy and guess. Davies and Kaplan conclude that “[o]ur results indicate that the same speakers approach the task of judging grammaticality quite differently in the two contexts” (Davies and Kaplan 1998: 196). This is reflected in both the number and the types of strategies employed. Moreover, if the subjects could not supply a default context, they tended to assign a sentence the status of an ungrammatical sentence: “That’s not OK, because you don’t know what they’re talking about. This lack of context appears to be what determines the grammaticality judgment: in a context, it is perfectly acceptable to say (either in French or in English) ‘He’s not going to take it’: However, this dyad generally rejected sentences which had pronouns with no context.” (Davies and Kaplan 1998: 195). The distinction between language form and language function, and between internal domains and external domains is also reflected in John R. Searle’s conception of linguistic competence and performance. In his theory of speech acts, Searle explicates native-speaker competence as follows: Speaking a language is engaging in a (highly complex) rule-governed form of behavior. To learn and master a language is (inter alia) to learn and to have mastered these rules. This is a familiar view in philosophy and linguistics, but its consequences are not always fully realized. Its consequence, for the present


discussion, is that when I, speaking as a native speaker, make linguistic characterizations of the kind exemplified above, I am not reporting the behavior of a group but describing aspects of my mastery of a rule-governed skill. And — this is also important — since the linguistic characterizations, if made in the same language as the elements characterized, are themselves utterances in accordance with the rules, such characterizations are manifestations of that mastery. By reflecting on linguistic elements I can offer linguistic characterizations which do not record particular utterances but have a general character, deriving from the fact that the elements are governed by rules. (Searle 1969: 12–13)

As is explicated by Searle, the knowledge of a language does not refer to declarative knowledge — or knowledge that — as a conscious or explicit knowledge of the language anchored to the rules of syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics and pragmatics. Rather, native-speaker competence is conceived of as procedural knowledge anchored to a native speaker’s knowledge of how to construct and interpret grammatical and well-formed sentences, of how to produce and decode acceptable utterances, and of how to perform and interpret appropriate communicative actions. This type of implicit knowledge entails the capacity to judge whether a sentence is grammatical and wellformed, or whether it is ungrammatical or ill-formed, even though the native speaker may not be able to state what particular rule of the grammar is violated. Moreover, it entails the knowledge whether an utterance is acceptable or unacceptable, and whether a communicative action performed by and through an utterance is appropriate or inappropriate. This stance is summarized by Robert Brandom in his succinct reference to Wittgenstein as follows: “Wittgenstein’s regress-of-rules argument shows further, that while rules can codify the pragmatic normative significance of claims, they do so only against a background of practices permitting the distinguishing of correct from incorrect applications of those rules” (Brandom 1994: 22). A grammaticality judgement is seen as a means to compare, contrast and evaluate particular linguistic strings. However, in order to be able to evaluate a linguistic string as grammatical, it must have been contrasted with other linguistic strings which are more grammatical and which are less ungrammatical. Only in that heterogenous setting is it possible to decide whether the linguistic string in question is produced in accordance with the rules of a grammar, or whether it is produced in disaccordance with the rules of a grammar; and only then does the concept of grammaticality achieve significance. As a necessary consequence of this, grammaticality must be conceived of

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as an inherently context-dependent notion where one particular configuration — amongst an infinite number of other possible configurations — is singled out and assigned the status of a reference point which is anchored to a default context. The reference point and the default context represent the first side of the coin of grammaticality. The second side of the coin of grammaticality refers to the foundation to which the rules of a generative grammar are anchored. It concerns an abstract well-formedness with regard to a particular linguistic analysis, such as a grammar of English or a grammar of German. In this respect, grammaticality is not proven by direct observation or by statistical frequency but rather by native-speaker intuition. For this reason, the majority of grammaticality judgements do no longer categorize sentences as grammatical or as ungrammatical but rather as expressing a higher, respectively a lower, degree of grammaticality. The higher-degree cases do not require any further operations or explications, while the lower-degree cases are differentiated with regard to context-sensitive sentences, which require a specific communicative setting so that the sentence can be assigned the status of a grammatical sentence, such as the assignment of focus or the assignment of metapragmatic negation. Contextsensitive sentences further differentiate with regard to sentences which express an even lower degree of grammaticality and require an even more specific contextual configuration so that they can be assigned the status of a grammatical sentence, such as the assignment of repair or the assignment of a gardenpath sentence. As a consequence of this, grammaticality judgements can no longer be assigned the status of context-independent operations. Instead, they measure the grammaticality of a sentence in context. They are not solely based on the violations or non-violations of the rules of a grammar, they also take into consideration the well- or ill-formedness of a sentence. Thus, they do not only entail context-sensitive sentence comprehension, they also entail the evaluation of a sentence as acceptable in its (implicit) linguistic context, and they entail the evaluation of a sentence as appropriate in its (implicit) social context. 2.1.3 Conclusion Grammaticality has been anchored to a framework where the sentence is the maximal unit of investigation. The evaluation of a linguistic string as grammatical or ungrammatical applies to both sentence and its subsentential constituents: if a sentence is grammatical, its constituents are necessarily grammatical, but not vice versa. It has been pointed out that a conception of grammaticality is always interdependent on a particular theory of grammar, where is can be


assigned the status of a premise, or where it can be the product of an evaluation of a particular sentence with regard to a particular theory of grammar. Grammaticality is, for this reason, anchored to a monolithic or monologue-oriented perspective on grammar5 which defines sentences in a context-independent manner. That is, the sentence is independent of its linguistic and/or social contexts. However, grammaticality judgements show that native speakers do not perceive grammaticality in a binary manner. Rather, the evaluation of a sentence or construction as grammatical is intrinsically linked to deviant, anomalous or ungrammatical sentences and to deviant, anomalous or ungrammatical constructions. Against this background, native speakers tend to evaluate sentences as expressing a higher, respectively a lower degree of grammaticality. Grammaticality is thus a scalar concept whose evaluation is not only based on the rules of the grammar but also on the connectedness between a sentence and context: a more grammatical sentence requires a default context, and a less grammatical sentence requires a particular context. And it is in these contexts, where the rules of grammar, grammaticality and grammaticality judgements meet. In the following the connectedness between the constitutive systems of grammar and context are examined in detail. Section 2.2 investigates the connectedness between syntax and context in the formal and functional paradigms. Special consideration is given to the questions of what the concepts of sentence, syntactic ability and syntactic structure denote. The examination is based on the principle of compositionality and on its strong and weak interpretation of autonomous syntax. Section 2.3 analyses the status of context in morphology with regard to word formation and its corresponding wordinternal and word-external contexts. Section 2.4 investigates the connectedness between phonology and context and gives special reference to the contextdependent phenomena of assimilation and reduced forms. It further distinguishes between a bounded and an unbounded conception of a phoneme and emphasizes the particular status of prosody. Section 2.5 examines the connectedness between context and semantics/pragmatics by differentiating between context-independent meanings and context-dependent meanings. It reanalyzes the results obtained in a dialogue frame of investigation. Section 2.6 summarizes the results obtained and concludes.

5.Linell (1998) provides a very precise and detailed differentiation between dialogism and monologism.

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2.2 Context in syntax One of the key principles in formal approaches to natural language is the principle of compositionality. It expresses the idea that the meaning of a whole is a function of the meaning of its parts. For example, if a sentence is constructed of a noun phrase and a verb phrase, then, according to the principle of compositionality, the meaning of the sentence is a function of the meaning of the noun phrase and the meaning of the verb phrase. Thus, the meaning of a complex expression can be derived from the meanings of its parts in combination with syntactic structure. In the framework of formal linguistics, the principle of compositionality has received a strong interpretation and it has received a weak interpretation. According to the strong interpretation, the syntactic structure determines the meaning of a complex expression, and according to the weak interpretation, the syntactic structure influences the meaning of a complex expression. Or, in more general terms, the principle of compositionality provides a solution as regards the nature of the connectedness between a whole and its parts. Against this background, the principle of compositionality represents a relational and an inherently context-dependent concept. Another parts-whole approach to syntactic structure is provided by the paradigm of topological fields in Germanic linguistics (Eisenberg 1989). Here, a sentence is analyzed with regard to its topological fields of pre-prefield (VorVorfeld), pre-field (Vorfeld), middle field (Mittelfeld) and extraposition (Nachfeld). Again, the topological fields are conceived of in a relational and therefore in a context-dependent manner because the domains of prefield or middle field can only be identified if compared and contrasted with the other parts (or fields) of the sentence. For this reason, the concept of a topological field is interdependent on the whole sentence. That is, only against the background of the sentence as a whole can a specific field be classified as prefield or as middle field, such as the middle-field adverbial on the train in (17) and its left-dislocated prefield counterpart in (18): (17) Peter loves to read linguistic textbooks on the train. (18) On the train Peter loves to read linguistic textbooks.

If the topical-field analysis is adapted to the constraints and requirements of the English language, the adverbials actually, really and frankly in (19), (20) and (21) are allocated to the pre-prefields. This is because of their syntactic positions, which are defined with regard to their adjacent lexical expressions, that is their parts, and their actual position in the sentence as a whole. Regarding the form,


function and distribution of English adverbials, Ungerer (1988) differentiates between propositional adverbials and scope adverbials. The communicative meaning of scope adverbials, such as really, actually or frankly, results from their position in the sentence, namely pre-prefield, pre-field, middle field and extraposition. If a scope adverbial is positioned in the pre-prefield, such as actually in (19), really in (20) and frankly in (21), it has scope over the whole sentence:6 (19) Actually, I’d rather have a cup of tea. (20) Really, she’s smart. (21) Frankly, you should have thrown him out.

In (19) actually indicates that the speaker’s preferences are different from the hearer’s preferences. Because of that it signifies some kind of controversy about the communicative status of the utterance. In (20) really indicates that the speaker’s evaluation of some female person differs from the hearer’s evaluation. Because of that it signifies some kind of disagreement, and frankly in (21) indicates that the speaker does not agree with the hearer’s action in a prior situation, and because of that it signifies some kind of negative evaluation. If the adverbials are transferred to a middle-field position, as is the case in (22), (23) and (24), the adverbials do no longer have scope over the whole sentence: (22) I’d rather have an actually pleasant cup of tea. (23) She is really smart. (24) You should frankly have thrown him out.

Instead, they have scope over different constituents, that is the NP pleasant cup of tea, the AP smart and the VP have thrown him out. In (22), actually indicates that the speaker would have preferred some pleasant cup of tea thus implicitly contrasting it with some unpleasant cup of tea. Really in (23) expresses an upgrading function thus implicitly disagreeing with the hearer’s scale of evaluation, and frankly in (24) indicates that the speaker should have thrown the other person out in a direct and explicit manner thus implicitly contrasting it with an implicit way of throwing somebody out.

6.Greenbaum (1990) calls this type of scope adverbial disjunct as that kind of adverbial is dis-junct from the sentence. For this reason, it is a prototypical representative of a metapragmatic comment.

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The principle of compositionality highlights the context- and constituentdependent nature of linguistic meaning. But what does the concept of a sentence actually refer to in syntactic theory? 2.2.1 Sentences in context In his investigation of grammars and grammaticality, Kac (1992) investigates the necessary and sufficient conditions for grammaticality and explicates the premises of syntactic theory as follows: The most basic assumption of syntactic theory is that there exist linguistic objects of the kind commonly called sentences and that, even in the absence of a rigorous definition of the concept of sentencehood, there is good enough intuitive agreement as to what is and isn’t a sentence to make it possible to undertake rational investigation of objects of this kind. (…) First, though every sentence of a language is a sequence of morphemes from the language, not every morpheme sequence is a sentence. That is, the conditions for sentencehood are nontrivial, and the problem thus arises of giving a precise account of them. Second, the meaning of a sentence cannot be defined simply as a function of the individual morphemes. One can restate this observation by saying that the manner of combination of the morphemes is semantically significant, thus bringing to the fore the task of making precise the notion ‘manner of combination’ and developing a general account of the semantic consequences of particular manners of combination of morphemes. (Kac 1992: 5)

The difficulties of defining the syntactic unit of a sentence have been encountered in both the formal and the functional frameworks. The formal paradigm (Borsley 1987; Chomsky 1965, 1975; de Hoop 1997) differentiates between a non-overt and an overt representation of a sentence: the former can be equated with the so-called ideal sentence, or technically speaking, some kind of a functional projection, and consists of a nominal phrase and a verbal phrase (and the corresponding functional projections, such as inflection, agreement, tense or negation), which encode functional information, and the latter can be equated with lexical expressions, which encode lexical information. Or, to employ Haegeman and Guéron’s own words: In keeping with a long-standing tradition in the study of grammar, the constituent structure of a sentence is taken to be the product of the interaction of two types of information: (i) lexical information encoded on lexical heads such as nouns or verbs, and (ii) functional information encoded on functional


categories such as inflectional morphemes or conjunctions, called complementizers. (Haegeman and Guéron 1999: 3)

The ideal construct of a non-overt sentence represents the foundation against which overt sentences are evaluated as grammatical or as ungrammatical. Yet the evaluation of a sentence or a clause does not only take the string of words into consideration but also looks at their hierarchical relations because “sentences, or clauses, are not simply strings of words; they are hierarchically organized in units of different levels. Clauses have a structure” (Haegeman and Guéron 1999: 45). More precisely, clauses are organized with regard to their constitutive constituents, and the sentence and its constituents are endocentric, viz. organized around a central unit, the head. Thus, the core relations of a formal grammar are represented by a complement and by a specifier. Analogously to the differentiation between lexical information and functional information, the formal paradigm distinguishes between lexical heads and functional heads. Another relevant concept is the notion of movement which represents a transformation operation. If a constituent, such as an NP, moves from its base-position to a higher position, such as an A-position or an A’position, the movement leaves a trace in the extraction site of the moved constituent and its immediate landing sites. Movement is subject to locality constraints: a moved constituent cannot cross a potential landing site. Constituents cannot only be moved, but they may also be deleted; the corresponding gapping operation is an operation which deletes a constituent in one sentence under identity with a constituent of the same type in a preceding sentence. Again, the relational nature of sentence, sentence position and constituent has become apparent. That is, the operations of gapping and movement are only possible in specific contextual configurations: regarding the former, the identity of two constituents in two adjacent sentences is required, regarding the latter, movement operations are only valid in some restricted contextual domain. Unlike these competence-based operations, an overt sentence is a performancerelated construct and thus of no immediate relevance to formal linguistics. The functional paradigm has a radically different conception of a sentence and its constitutive constituents. According to Givón (1993: 22): “[c]lauses, also called sentences, code propositions. A proposition combines concepts — i.e. words — into information. Information is about relations, qualities, states or events in which entities partake.” Here, grammar is seen as a communicative code, and the coding devices in syntax are (1) grammatical morphology, (2) word order, (3) intonation patterns, and (4) their corresponding constraints. Against this background, Givòn explicates the coding device as follows:

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Concepts are coded in language as words, a coding procedure that is achieved primarily via the use of sounds. Briefly, and with inevitable oversimplification, the sound code of English consists of strings of sounds — or letters in the written language — that code (‘signal’, ‘stand for’) particular words. The sound code is the most arbitrary part of the human linguistic code, a fact that is well attested by translation comparisons of how the same concept (‘meaning’) sounds in different languages. (…) The grammatical code is both more complex and more abstract than the sound code. This complexity is due in large measure to the fact that grammars code two communicative realms jointly, and each of the two involves considerable complexity on its own. And further, the coding requirements of the two sometimes clash. (Givòn 1993: 25)

Analogously to the formal paradigm, the functional paradigm is also based on two realms — albeit on different realms, namely the realm of grammar and the realm of information. Unlike the formal paradigm, which is anchored to serial processing, the functional-grammar realms function in a joint manner thus allowing for parallel-distributed processing. In functional grammar, language is no longer assigned an autonomous status. Instead, it is seen as a means of communication which interacts with other cognitive domains, such as reasoning and perception. Moreover, the unit of investigation is no longer restricted to the sentence but extended to cover the domain of discourse and dialogue. The implicit reasoning behind the formal and functional paradigms is explicated by Givón as follows: “The rules of grammar are not 100% flexible, therefore the rules of grammar must be 100% rigid, and the rules of grammar are not 100% rigid, therefore they must be 100% flexible” (Givón 1999: 83). In a context-based framework, those rigid positions do no longer obtain. For this reason, they have to be assigned a scalar interpretation and thus a moregrammatical and a less-grammatical reading. In Kac’s work on grammars and grammaticality, the fundamental phenomena of grammar are conceived of as the partition phenomenon and the composition phenomenon, which he contextualizes as follows: We begin by stating explicitly some assumptions that will guide us throughout this study. The first is that sentences are but one instance of a more general category, namely that of meaningful expressions (or just expressions). More precisely, we take a grammar of a language to consist in part of a specification of the set of morpheme sequences to which meanings can be assigned, designating these by the term expression. (It follows accordingly that a morpheme sequence is meaningful iff it is an expression). We further assume that in order to constitute an expression, a sequence Z of two or more morphemes must


itself be exhaustively divisible into parts which are themselves expressions and which are appropriately combined. Sentences, then, are simply the highestlevel expressions of a language, and an ungrammatical string is a morpheme sequence which fails to constitute a meaningful expression of any kind. (All nongrammatical strings are nonsentences, but not all nonsentences are ungrammatical since a nonsentence might form a subsentential expression of some kind. Ungrammaticality, on this view, consists in failure to belong to a grammatical category, be it S, NP, VP or whatever. …) (Kac 1992: 7, 8)

Again, the relational nature of grammar surfaces in the conception of a sentence as a sequence of morphemes which must fulfil particular conditions to be assigned the status of a grammatical string. Moreover, the sentence represents the highest-level expression of a language and must itself be constructed of smaller expressions which must be appropriately combined. So, on what premises is the appropriate combination of a sequence of expressions based? 2.2.2 Syntactic ability and syntactic structure In linguistics, native speakers are assigned linguistic competence and they are assigned sociocultural competence. This puts them in a position to differentiate between grammatical and well-formed sentences, and ungrammatical and illformed sentences on the one hand, and between acceptable and appropriate utterances, and unacceptable and inappropriate utterances on the other hand. Adopting Radford’s discussion of linguistic competence, the premise of the appropriate combination of expressions to construct a sequence is anchored to the cognitive construct of grammatical competence: Grammatical competence in turn subsumes three primary types of linguistic ability — syntactic, semantic and phonological. The principal syntactic ability which forms part of the native speakers’s grammatical competence is the ability to combine words together to form grammatical sentences in his native language, and to know which sequences of words form grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in his language. For example, any native speaker of English would intuitively recognise (leaving aside for the moment differences of style and dialect) that all of the examples (…) are grammatical (i.e. syntactically well-formed) sentences in English. (…) However, there is — for Chomsky — a second aspect of the native speaker’s syntactic competence which a grammar should characterise — namely the native speaker’s intuitions about the syntactic structure of sentences in his language. For example, in a sentence like:

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(3)

John likes very fast cars.

any native speaker would agree that very modifies fast (and not likes), and that very fast modifies cars and not John — and so forth. Thus, the native speaker has two types of syntactic intuition: intuitions about well-formedness, and intuitions about structure. (Radford 1981: 3, 4)

What is of relevance for the investigation of the connectedness between context and syntax is the fact that a native speaker must have knowledge about how expressions are combined in a grammatical manner in order to construct the sequence of a sentence, and they must have knowledge about how these expressions or parts are related to one another. Again, the relational conception of grammaticality and structure can be identified as one of the basic foundations of syntactic theory. This is also manifest in Haegeman and Guéron’s conception of grammaticality, which is anchored to a native speaker’s internal grammar and contrasts with the performance-related notion of acceptability: Whenever a sentence is formed according to the rules of the internal grammar of the speaker of the language, it is grammatical; a sentence which is not formed according to the rules of the grammar is ungrammatical. Grammaticality and acceptability are closely related notions. But grammaticality and acceptability are not identical. Acceptability refers to the native speaker’s intuition: a native speaker intuitively knows when a sentence is acceptable or not. The native speaker has unconscious knowledge of his language, which is reflected in his intuitions, but, as mentioned before, the native speaker may not be able to formulate his knowledge explicitly. Grammaticality refers to the linguistic explanation of a phenomenon: it relates the native speaker’s intuitive judgements to an explicit representation of the native speaker’s unconscious knowledge of his language. (Haegeman and Guéron 1999: 18)

Furthermore, Haegeman and Guéron stress the inherent context-dependency of the concepts of grammaticality and well-formedness: “We conclude that the well-formedness of a sentence depends to some extent at least on the properties of the specific language we are considering”. (Haegeman and Guéron 1999: 15). Kac’s analysis of grammaticality is radically different from Radford, and Haegeman and Guéron. Kac (1992) conceives of language as (poly)normative systems and proposes an etiological analysis of ungrammaticality. He defines the corresponding etiological properties with regard to proper dependency, diagnostic dependency, that is the etiological property is immediately dependent, and dependency chain. Thus, etiology is a rather complex phenomenon and the resulting etiological complexity is both conjunctive and disjunctive. Against this background, Kac differentiates between an expression and its manifestation, and


introduces the phenomenon of frequency as a necessary condition for constituenthood. According to him, the continuous manifestation of an expression is a necessary condition for assigning it the status of a constituent. In the research paradigm of functional grammar, linguistic and sociocultural competence are conceived of in a process-oriented manner and thus connected with a dynamic outlook on language. Here, language is conceived of as a sociocultural construct which undergoes changes through grammaticalization. In the process of grammaticalization, new meanings are created: a particular lexical item may become a fully grammatical item, such as the present-day English auxiliaries have and do, or a less grammatical item may become a more grammatical item, such as the discourse markers well and now. Grammaticalization is an interactive process anchored to the language system as a whole. The choice of forms in a particular construction narrows, such as the cliticized genitive construction versus the non-cliticized genitive construction, and in general one form becomes obligatory. The form undergoing grammaticalization loses syntactic variability and occupies a fixed syntactic slot, such as the pre-prefield slot or the extraposition slot for discourse markers or for metapragmatic comments (Fetzer 1994, 2003; Schiffrin 1987; Smith and Jucker 2002). Grammaticalization is the result of reanalysis, including fusion across morphological boundaries, syntactic reanalysis, and/or reassignment of morphemes to different semantic-syntactic categories. Phonetically, grammaticalization is accompanied by attrition and loss. Semantically, it is thought to involve bleaching, weakening or loss of meaning, with a movement from concrete to abstract; it may also involve an increase in subjective meaning and may entail an increase in scope along with the acquisition of textual and expressive meanings. 2.2.3 Conclusion An investigation of the connectedness between context in syntax is intrinsically linked to Frege’s principle of compositionality and to the connectedness between a whole and its constitutive parts (Malpas 2002). In this section on context in syntax, it has been shown that linguistic meaning cannot be based on an autonomous conception of syntactic structure. For this reason, a compositional interpretation based on syntactic criteria alone is not sufficient to retrieve the intended interpretation for natural-language sentences. De Hoop (1997) has shown this to be the case for quantificational sentences of natural languages, where the domain of quantification is always restricted by the context. To

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employ her own words “a principle of weak rather than strong compositionality may characterize the relation between syntax and semantics in natural language” (De Hoop 1997: 1). Syntactic ability and syntactic structure are connected with grammaticality and with linguistic competence, which does not only consist of the ability to differentiate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. It also contains knowledge about the structure of the sentence and thus knowledge about how the connectedness between the parts of a sentence is to be interpreted and it contains knowledge about what this connectedness count as. For this reason, syntactic structure must be conceived of as a relational and contextdependent notion. Kac has been even more radical in his conclusion about the connectedness between context, grammaticality and grammar: But notice that the notion of context-freeness cannot be defined except in terms of a larger scheme which also accommodates non-context-freeness. The general notion of grammar type, as embodied in the Chomsky hierarchy, presupposes a set of background assumptions which is completely neutral to what is and what is not a possible natural language (up to recursive enumerability), but which nonetheless suggests a potential means for finding out by investigating the properties of languages generated by grammars which make use of only some of the logically available possibilities given the total scheme. (Kac 1992: 101)

Thus, a context-free approach to syntactic structure and to grammar presupposes the notion of a default context, to which sentences and their constituents are anchored. In order to account for their connectedness in a relational framework, (yet) another context seems to be required.

2.3 Context in morphology In the previous section, the principle of compositionality has been introduced as one of the key concepts in formal linguistics. It has been discussed with regard to the connectedness between the constituents of a sentence and the sentence itself. Against the background of the syntax–semantics interface, morphology provides relevant information with regard to the nature of the connectedness between individual parts (or constituents) in a whole (or a sentence) and between an individual part and a whole. Additionally, morphology provides information about the nature of the connectedness between a constituent’s individual parts and the constituent itself. In sentence (25), the


inflectional morpheme ‘s’, which has traditionally been assigned the status of marking the third person singular present tense and which has been reanalyzed as the default form of the verb by Roberts (2001), gives information about the connectedness between the NP every linguist, whose noun is singular, with regard to number constraint, and the VP love, which is constructed in accordance with the agreement constraints or with the concord constraints for the standard English verb morphology and supplemented by the appropriate ending; or, in Roberts’ default-form setting, not supplemented by any ending: (25) Every linguist loves context. (26) Linguists just love context.

In (26) the inflectional morpheme ‘s’ is a constitutive part of the NP linguist, where it provides information about number, namely plural. As regards the connectedness between the NP and VP constituents, the morpheme ‘s’, which functions as a plurality marker, requires no additional inflectional morpheme for the English verb love; or, according to Roberts (2001), requires the non-default form. Thus, inflectional morphology plays a key role in providing information about the nature of the connectedness amongst the individual constituents in a sentence. Yet, morphology does not only investigate word formation from a grammatical or from an inflectional viewpoint but also from a lexical and a derivational perspective. In both paradigms, word formation is not seen as a purely additive process, but rather as expressing a parts-whole relation. In the following, the status of a word is examined in the functional and in the formal frames of reference. 2.3.1 Words in context In functional-grammar, word formation and words are not investigated in isolation but rather seen as relational phenomena. This is reflected in the network-based approach to the lexicon which is organized with regard to prototypes, semantic features and semantic fields. Givón defines the core concept of morphology as follows: “Words code concepts that have meaning. Grammar-clad clauses code propositions that convey information. But clauses may also be strung together into multi-propositional discourse, which then has coherence” (Givón 1993: 41). In functional grammar, words express lexical meanings, clauses express propositional information and discourse expresses textual coherence. Givón explicitly points out that meaning is not identical to truth thus distancing himself from truth-conditional semantics, which is based

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on a strong interpretation of the principle of compositionality. Instead, he postulates a prototype approach to meaning, where “the meaning of words are structured clusters of semantic features” (Givón 1993: 43). Regarding the connectedness between individual words and the lexicon, Givón states that “[a] concept ‘contains’ many semantic features” (Givón 1993: 44), and from a totallexicon perspective, “[t]he lexicon is a ‘network’ of many semantic fields” (ibid.). The lexicon categorizes into lexical vocabulary and grammatical vocabulary: the lexical vocabulary contains content words, and the non-lexical lexicon contains function words, viz. grammatical morphemes and derivational morphemes, which are the foundation of word formation, such as verbal inflections regarding tense, aspect, modality and negation, and affixation. The underlying rules for the combination of the function words are languagespecific. That is to say, there are particular rules for standard English, such as the realization of the third person singular s-morpheme indicating the simple present tense in standard English, as has been shown in the analysis of (25). In regional varieties of English, there are dialect-specific rules for inflectional morphology. The East Anglian dialect is characterized by the non-realization of the third person singular s-morpheme in present tense (Edwards 1993: 222), as is the case in (27): (27) He go to conferences quite regularly.

By contrast, the s-morpheme is generalized in south-western dialects and in some subvarieties of southern British English and realized irrespective of person and number (Edwards 1993: 223), as is the case in (28): (28) We goes to conferences quite regularly.

As can be seen, an investigation of inflectional English verb morphology is a context-dependent endeavour, and the results obtained are interdependent on the frames of reference employed. While verbal inflection is considered to be a fairly clear-cut matter for standard English, it is definitely more complex in its regional and social varieties (Milroy and Milroy 1993). The relational stance adopted by functional grammar is summarized by Givón’s systematization of the similarities and differences between lexical words and non-lexical words as follows:


criterion

lexical word

non-lexical word

morphemic status word size stress meaning class size membership function

free large stressed complex, specific large open

bound small unstressed simple, general small closed

code shared knowledge

grammar, word-derivation (Givón 1993: 48)

As has been pointed out above, morphology is not conceived of as an autonomous module of the linguistic system. Rather, it is conceived of as an interactive system interacting with the phonological system, especially with word stress, with extralinguistic information and with culturally shared knowledge. In the functional paradigm, language is seen as a dynamic construct which is characterized by grammaticalization. Regarding the connectedness between morphology and grammaticalization, grammaticalization often involves decategorization, viz. the loss of the morphological and syntactic attributes which characterize a word as belonging to a particular word class, such as the adverb well which has been reanalyzed as a discourse marker, or the adverb actually which has developed from a manner adverb to a scalarity adverb and then to a discourse marker (Schwenter and Traugott 2000). Morphosyntactically, there is movement from independence to boundedness, from less bound to more bound, or from morphologically heavier to morphologically lighter (Hopper and Traugott 2000). So, where do the formal and functional paradigms meet, and where do they depart? The formal paradigm’s approach to morphology is based on the premise that linguistic knowledge is represented by an autonomous system which subcategorizes into further discrete categories, viz. syntax, semantics, phonology and morphology. In the morphological module, word classes subcategorize into lexical categories and into functional categories (Radford et al. 1999: 143–192). The latter accommodate derivation and inflection, for instance the morphological properties of English verbs. Morphemes, that is both free and bound morphemes, are seen as the minimal linguistic sign. Against the background of the connectedness between a whole and its parts, a morpheme may be conceived of as a part, and the word it co-constructs (with other morphemes) may be conceived of as a whole. This part-whole relation is reflected in the categorization of a word into head and modifier. Word-formation is not simply

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an additive process, but rather a hierarchically based configuration, what has also been claimed for the construction of a sentence. Morphology does not only investigate the word-formation processes of derivation and inflection, and the internal hierarchical structure of a word with regard to its head and modifier, but also the in-between category of a clitic, which is neither a bound, nor a free morpheme. Instead, it needs a host to which it is attached. An investigation of word-formation is not possible without the accommodation of word meaning. Again, the connectedness between parts and a whole surfaces in the meaning relations of entailment, where the proposition in question entails a proposition. It surfaces in hyponymy, where the meaning of a lexical word is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the meaning of the lexical word (or vice versa), and it surfaces in meronymy, where the meaning of a lexical word is a constitutive part of the meaning of the lexical word. But morphology has not only been examined in a context-independent manner. In the following, Anna-Maria Di Sciullo’s analysis is presented, which is based on a context-based approach. 2.3.2 Word-internal contexts As has surfaced in the discussion above, context is of immense importance to the field of morphology. This does not only hold for the inflectional and derivational processes of word-formation but also for morphology’s unit of investigation, the morpheme. From a parts-whole perspective, a morpheme represents the minimal unit of linguistic meaning. Because of this, morphological processes are also of relevance in computational approaches to linguistics, as is the case with the an investigation by Di Sciullo (1999), who differentiates between the knowledge of a word-internal context (or under-the-word-level context) and a world-theoretical context. Implicit in the distinction is the morphology-semantics/pragmatics interface, or to employ Di Sciullo’s own words: “We take the formal context to be defined in terms of a model of formal grammar and the world-theoretical context to be defined in terms of a model of the world (or possible worlds). The formal and world-theoretical contexts in conjunction provide the basis upon which the linguistic expressions are analyzed and interpreted, as well as they make learning and reasoning possible” (Di Sciullo 1999: 105). Because of the conjunction of the formal context and the world-theoretical context, Di Sciullo needs an interactive frame of reference, which accommodates both the process and product of word-formation:


We take a dynamic approach to morphological analysis according to which lexical items are constructed on the basis of the properties of the formal context the morphemes are part of, the latter having no full feature structure to begin with. More precisely, we assume that the categorical and conceptual feature structures of the morphemes is not fully specified in the lexicon but constructed in the derivation of the expressions they are part of. We are thus taking a constructivist view of the lexical items as opposed to a projectionist view, according to which the feature structure of lexical items is fully specified in the lexical entries and is projected in the derivation of linguistic expressions. (Di Sciullo 1999: 106)

Di Sciullo’s context-based approach to morphology does not only account for the phenomenon of morphology as such. It also accounts for the learningdynamism, which is a constitutive part of the creativity of natural languages, and thus for potential processes of grammaticalization. The accommodation of these dynamic processes is not possible in the formal paradigm and its premise of discrete categories, which are organized in an additive and serial manner. Words do not only have word-internal context in natural languages, they also have word-external contexts, which is examined in the following. 2.3.3 Word-external contexts While word-internal contexts can be equated with cognitive contexts and with models of cognitive contexts, word-external contexts refer to so-called linguistic contexts and to models of linguistic contexts on the one hand, and to social contexts and to sociocultural contexts, and to models of social and to sociocultural contexts, on the other hand. Against this background, the wordexternal linguistic contexts are interdependent on the nature of the connectedness between morphology and grammaticality: if a particular linguistic context is constructed in accordance with the rules of morphology, it is assigned the status of a well-formed linguistic context, as has been the case for the sentences (or word-external linguistic contexts) (25), (26), (27) and (28) examined above. If the word-external context is constructed in disaccordance with the rules of morphology, it is assigned the status of an ill-formed context, as is the case with examples (29) and (30) for standard English: (29) The children plays peaceful. (30) The boy sing more louder.

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Example (29) violates the agreement constraints for inflectional morphology in standard English, namely the agreement constraint regarding person and number, and it violates the constraint regarding the realization of the adverbial function of the adjective. Example (30) also violates the agreement constraint regarding person and number, and it violates the constraint regarding a single realization of the grammatical function of a comparative. Unlike the wordexternal linguistic context, which is anchored to the domain of grammaticality only, the nature of word-external social and sociocultural contexts is interdependent on the connectedness between morphology, acceptability and appropriateness. Here, we find the creation of new lexical words or neologisms, which have to be constructed in accordance with the rules of derivational morphology. For instance, a new nominal construction marked by the adverbial affix -ly will neither be grammatical, nor will it be acceptable or appropriate, whereas a nominal construction marked by the affixes -ment or -tion will be considered as grammatical and, if it is accepted by the members of a speech community, it will be considered as an acceptable newly created term; and should it be employed with the appropriate communicative intention in an appropriate social setting, it will be considered as appropriate. In other words, wordexternal linguist contexts are grammaticality-based constructs, and wordexternal social and sociocultural contexts are anchored to the foundations of grammaticality, acceptability and appropriateness. Due to the connectedness between grammaticality, acceptability and appropriateness and the wordformation mechanism provided by derivational morphology, the formation of new lexical words, their free morphemic status and thus their open-class categorization, to employ Givón’s terminology, makes the word size very large and, as a consequence of this, their meaning specific and complex. Moreover, their meaning is part of a speech community’s code and shared knowledge. Because of its context-dependency, it must be assigned a relational status. Analogously to the context-dependent nature of the rules of inflectional morphology, lexical word-formation is also influenced, if not determined, by social and sociocultural contexts. This is reflected in the variety-specific lexical words pavement and sidewalk, or lift and elevator in standard British English and in mainstream American English, in the variety-specific words sleep and koon in standard British English and in Singaporean English, or in the Northern Irish English variant bring the children to school and in the standard British English variant take the children to school (Trudgill and Hannah 1994). Word-external contexts differentiate into word-external linguistic contexts, which are anchored to the premise of grammaticality, and word-external social


and sociocultural contexts, which are anchored to the premises of grammaticality, acceptability and appropriateness. They are relevant to inflectional and derivational word-formation processes — and the results obtained depend on the frames of reference employed. 2.3.4 Conclusion Context in morphology is of immense importance to the investigation of wordinternal and word-external contexts. In Words in context, the functionalgrammar approach to morphology has been compared and contrasted with the formal-grammar approach. For a context-based investigation of word-formation, the functional paradigm is seen as more appropriate because it explicitly accounts for the connectedness between linguistic knowledge, knowledge of the external world and knowledge of culture. In Word-internal contexts a formal approach to context in morphology has been presented, and some of the most important aspects of a natural language, namely its creativity and its underlying learning mechanisms have been introduced, which manifest themselves in the application of morphological rules to the formation of new words. In Wordexternal contexts, the context-dependency of inflectional rules for English verb syntax has been examined, and the social- and sociocultural context-dependency with regard to lexical-word formation has been shown. Again, the multifarious mechanisms of morphology can only be examined in a relational conception of context. Depending on the linguistic context, inflectional and derivational word formation are evaluated as grammatical or as ungrammatical, depending on the social and sociocultural contexts, inflectional and derivational word formation are evaluated as grammatical, acceptable or appropriate, or as ungrammatical, unacceptable or inappropriate.

2.4 Context in phonology The phonological system, which is also called the phonological module, is a constitutive part of the psychological construct of linguistic competence. Radford has defined the phonological module as follows: “Among the phonological abilities subsumed under grammatical competence are the native speaker’s intuitions about the phonological well-formedness or ill-formedness of sentences in his language” (Radford 1981: 5). Analogously to the conception of the syntactic and morphological modules, the phonological module does not only

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contain knowledge about the well-formedness of a phonological string. It also contains knowledge about phonological structure. So what kind of information does the phonological system contain? Phonology is a quite complex field which examines speech sounds and their production, that is consonants, vowels and approximants, which are generally classified with regard to their statuses as phones, phonemes and allophones. As regards the sound system of English, the English language is described and analyzed accordingly (Giegerich 1992; Davenport and Hannahs 1998). In the examinations of the connectedness between context and syntax, and between context and morphology it has already become apparent that the English language is not a homogeneous phenomenon. The social- and regional-variation based differences are of an even more profound nature in the phonological system of English than they are in syntax and morphology (Giegerich 1992; Milroy and Milroy 1993; Trudgill 1999; Trudgill and Hannah 1994). Regarding the consonantal sound system, the degree of social and regional variation is of no immediate relevance and is restricted to (1) the domains of diverging degrees of aspiration manifest in the bilabial plosives /p/ and in the alveolar plosive /t/, and (2) the lack of the dental fricatives in some creole-based and second-language varieties. However, the degree of regional and social variation in the vowel system is of immediate relevance and is found in almost all of the regional and social varieties of standard British English. More precisely, almost all of the international and regional varieties of British English are characterized by a reduction in the number of triphthongs, diphthongs and monophthongs. The reductionist tendency is also found in mainstream general American. Against this background, the differentiation between rhotic and non-rhotic accents of English results from the connectedness between the liquid /r/, the schwa-sound and other monophthongs and diphthongs. Unlike the primarily descriptive approach presented so far, the formal paradigm further refines the categorization of sounds with regard to the vowel system’s underlying universal features of sonorant, continuant and consonantal, of back, high, low and round, and with regard to the consonant features of anterior, coronal and strident, of voice and tense, and of nasal and lateral. From a context-oriented perspective, the combination of single sounds and the resulting sound sequences are investigated with regard to their syllable status, word stress and intonation contours. The complex field of phonology investigates the phonological inventory of language with regard to the universals of nucleus, syllable and coda. It also examines the phonological inventories of particular languages and systematizes them with regard to their statuses as


vowels, which subcategorize into monophthongs, diphthongs and triphthongs, and with regard to their statuses as consonants. An investigation of the sound system in a language-specific framework does not only describe, analyze, classify and formalize individual sounds. It also identifies language-specific combinations and their distribution, such as the English-language specific voiced and unvoiced dental fricatives, which are not a constitutive part of the French or German sound systems. While individual sounds can be investigated in isolation and described, classified and formalized accordingly, an examination of the huge field of prosody and its constitutive elements of stress, pitch and loudness requires a context-based approach. Before the status of prosody in context is examined, the connectedness between phonemes and context is investigated. 2.4.1 Phonemes in context A phoneme is the minimal unit of investigation in phonology and can, for this reason, be seen as a context-independent notion. It can, however, also be conceived of in a parts-whole setting, where it can be seen as a necessary, but not as a sufficient part of a whole. From a purely structural viewpoint, the context of a phoneme is represented by its immediately adjacent phonemes, and it can be represented by a bound morpheme and by a free morpheme. As regards the actual realization of a phoneme in the process of speech production, viz. the actual production of a phoneme in context, the phoneme can no longer be seen as a discrete unit. Instead, it interacts with the immediately adjacent sounds and undergoes qualitative and quantitative changes, such as the combinatory phenomenon of assimilation. For instance, regressive assimilation changes the actual phonological realization of a phoneme, as is the case in (31), (32) and (33): (31) that pen — that boy — that man (32) that cup — that girl (33) ten players — ten boys — ten men

In (31) the word final /t/ is replaced by /p/ if realized in the immediate context of one of the following members of the set /p, b, m/, in (32) word final /t/ is replaced by /k/ if realized in the immediate context of one of the following members of the set /k, g/, and in (33) word final /n/ is replaced by /m/ if realized in the immediate context of one of the following members of the set /p, b, m/. The impact of the immediate context on the realization of a phoneme in

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context is also reflected in the combinatory phenomenon of reduced forms (or weak forms), which are unaccented, as is the case in (34), (35) and (36): (34) I’m hungry. (35) I go to school. (36) She’s at home.

The phonological realization of the inflected verb forms of be are not generally accented in English and occur, for this reason, in the cliticized forms “’m” and “’s” in (34) and (36). By contrast, the preposition to is neither inflected nor is it cliticized. It is also realized in the reduced form with a schwa in (35), which is due to the phenomenon of information structure. As a necessary consequence of this, the phonological realization of a phoneme in context does not only interact with its immediate phonological context, but also with the linguistic domains of morphology and syntax, and with the extra-linguistic domain of information structure. Against this background, an investigation of the connectedness between grammaticality and phonology, that is between grammatically correct and grammatically incorrect phonological units, does not seem plausible because ‘phonological correctness’ is only a valid concept in the domain of a discrete phoneme. This is due to the fact that as soon as a phoneme is realized in context, its quality and its quantity changes because it has to accommodate the immediate phonological context, the resulting allophonic variation and the prosodic constraints of intonation, accent and stress. For this reason, phonological correctness is necessarily connected with the lexicon of a language and with its morphological and syntactic modules. Moreover, it is connected with the extra-linguistic domain of information and communicative meaning, because a preposition can, should the communicative setting require it, be accentuated and thus be realized in the full form, as is the case in repairing misunderstandings, for instance. As regards methodological aspects, the complex domain of phonology requires both a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach. The former is needed to account for the holistic phenomenon of prosody, and the latter is needed for the description, classification and formalization of the discrete unit of a phoneme. From a social-context perspective, the question of how the phonological inventory of a particular language is realized in context is of great importance because it provides relevant information about the speaker’s social and regional backgrounds. This is also manifest in Dell Hymes’s speaking grid (1974), which categorizes the actual situation in which the coparticipants exchange verbal and


non-verbal messages. Hymes explicitly refers to the domain of phonology in the definition of the component key, in which a message is coded, be it ironical, mocking or serious. For instance, the felicitous communication of irony depends to a large extent on particular phonological cues, such as stress and intonation contours (Barbe 1995). In the component instrumentalities, that is spoken, written, smoke signals or gestures, phonology is of immense importance, and in the component norms of interpretation and production, phonological knowledge is also of relevance. Against this background, the speakerintended production and the hearer-intended reception and interpretation of speech, that is utterance formulation and utterance interpretation, are extremely important because utterances are not produced and interpreted at random. Rather, they make explicit the underlying norms with regard to the performance of a social action, and with regard to the phonological and linguistic realization of the social action. Because of strata-specific constraints on speech production and speech interpretation, phonological strings are produced and interpreted in accordance with the corresponding social- and regional-variety-specific rules. Context is of great importance to the investigation of phonology. If we frame a phoneme by its immediately adjacent phonemes, we can identify the unit of a syllable. However, if the immediate context is extended to the unit of a word, which is not an original phonological unit, the parts in that construction are represented by syllables. In this setting, possible combinations of syllables for particular languages are investigated. And, if the context is extended to the sentence level and to the information unit, we can identify specific intonation contours, accent, pitch and stress, which are examined in the following section. 2.4.2 Prosody in context In the previous section it has been shown that the connectedness between context and phonology is not an additive matter, but rather a quantitative one and a qualitative one. Depending on whether the context of a particular phoneme is extended or restricted, we obtain different results, as has been shown with regard to different phonological inventories of social and of regional varieties of English. Moreover, it has been pointed out that the domain of phonology requires both a top-down and a bottom-up approach. Levelt (1998) bases his investigation on a bottom-up approach and on a top-down approach: He anchors his concept of a prosodic generator to the segmentation of the sentence level and to the segmentation of the word level in order to

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identify (1) phrasing and boundary markers, such as a high boundary tone and a low boundary tone, prefinal lengthening and pause insertion, and (2) accentuation, accent positions and accent types. In the framework of functional grammar, Halliday (1996) explicitly deals with intonation and rhythm, which he allocates to the domain ‘beside the clause’ thus indicating that phonology represents an independent system. Halliday’s systemic functional grammar differentiates between the domain below the clause, which investigates groups, such as nominal or verbal groups, the domain above the clause, which examines clause complexes, the domain beside the clause, which analyzes intonation and rhythm, the domain around the clause, which examines cohesion and discourse, and the domain beyond the clause, where metaphorical modes of expression are investigated. In this framework, intonation is explicitly connected with the information unit of given and new, and it is explicitly connected with the phonological units of tone and key. Brazil’s (1985) work is also anchored to functional grammar, but extends the frame of investigation from single phonemes and syllables to the investigation of tone units. Fretheim’s (1998) approach to intonation in context is firmly anchored to relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1996). He bases his investigation on the unit of an intonational utterance (IU) and of an intonational phrase (IP). In his frame of reference, the IP is the immediate constituent of an IU. Due to the relevancetheoretic frame of reference, context is not conceived of as something already given and independent of an utterance. Rather, cognitive context is constructed in communication, and intonation has a key function in the procedural process, or to employ Fretheim and van Dommelen’s own words: Context is not something given, it is something that the addressee of an utterance must actively select in his quest for the cognitive effects that make an utterance relevant. The speaker can assist the hearer in his inferential processing work by using a specific intonation which will constrain the search for those contextual premisses that satisfy utterance interpretation guided by the principle of relevance must be based on. If an intonation contour were something that always had to be adjusted to an independently existing extralinguistic context, then intonation would not be the important transmitter of procedural meaning that it is. (Fretheim and van Dommelen 1999: 466)

Thus, a shift in perspective from autonomous phonology to a relational conception of phonology which accommodates the connectedness between phonology, context and communication, leads to more refined results. That is, phonology is not only important to highlight relevant information. It also plays a major role in the construction of internal contexts. Pierrehumbert and


Hirschberg take the matter one decisive step further. They propose that in communication: … a speaker (S) chooses a particular tune to convey a particular relationship between an utterance, currently perceived beliefs of a hearer or hearers (H), and anticipated contributions of subsequent utterances. We claim that these relationships are compositional — composed from pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones that make up tunes. We further propose that the different aspects of tune meaning can be associated with different phonological domains. We assume the intonational phrase as our primary unit of meaning analysis. (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1992: 271)

Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg explicitly point out that intonation is something which is not selected at random. Rather, it is selected in accordance with a specific speaker intention, or to employ their own words: “We propose that S chooses an intonational contour to convey relationships between (the propositional content of) the current utterance and previous and subsequent utterances — and between (the propositional content of) the current utterance and beliefs H believes to be mutually held. These relationships are conveyed compositionally via selection of pitch accent, phrase accent, and boundary tone” (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1992: 308). The basic building blocks of tunes “are described as sequences of low (L) and high (H) tones” (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1992: 272). The building block of stress “manifests itself in the duration, amplitude and spectral characteristics of the speech segments” (ibid.), and pitch accents mark the lexical item they are associated with as prominent. According to Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg: There are six different types of pitch accent in English (…): two simple tones — high and low — and four complex ones. The high tone, the most frequently used accent, comes out as a peak on the accented syllable. It is represented as H*. (…) L* accents occur much lower in the pitch range than H* (…). The other English accents have two tones, of which one is selected to align with the stress. Using the diacritic “*” to indicate this alignment, these accents can be represented as L*+H, L+H*, H*+L, H+L*. Accents with two like tones do not exist. (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1992: 275)

As regards phrasing, they argue that … two levels of phrasing in English are involved in the specification of tune. These are the intermediate phrase and the intonational phrase. A well-formed intermediate phrase consists of one or more pitch accents, plus a simple high or low tone (either H or L), which marks the end of the phrase. (…)

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Intonational phrases are composed of one or more intermediate phrases. The end of an intonation phrase is marked with an additional H or L tone which we will refer to as the boundary tone. (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1992: 277)

In spite of their premise of compositionality, they point out that there is no one-to-one mapping between a specific configuration of the building blocks of a tune and a particular communicative intention. Rather, “the many-to-one mapping between attitudes and tune suggests that attitude is better understood as derived from tune meaning interpreted in context than as representing that meaning itself” (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1992: 284). The impact of intonation on utterance meaning has also been investigated in the conversation-analytic frame of reference. Despite the radically different conceptions of the two frameworks, that is the intentional framework on the one hand, e.g. relevance theory and speaker-intended communication, and the empirical frame of reference of conversation analysis the other hand, they obtain similar results, namely that the meaning and function of intonation is relational, or to employ Selting’s own words: “The “meaning” and function of intonation is … assumed to be a relational one. Intonation is conceived of as an autonomous signaling system which is mapped onto locutionary textual structures. (…) Intonation in co-occurrence with syntactic, semantic and other locutionary properties is used as a contextualization device in conversational activities to signal the status and contextual presuppositions of segments and utterances” (Selting 1992: 237). Selting is even more precise about the impact of intonation on utterance meaning. According to her, intonation functions as a contextualization device and anchors segments of talk to both linguistic context and sociocultural context. This is also reflected in the gender-specific, but not gender-exclusive, norms of interpretation and production for female and male speech (Caplan 1997; Coates 1994; Fasold 1990; Holmes 1992; Wardhaugh 1993). 2.4.3 Conclusion Phonology is a rather diverse field of investigation, which is due to its particular status in linguistics, which Halliday calls ‘besides the clause’. Phonological information provides additional information to the linguistic domains of syntax, morphology and semantics/pragmatics, which can coincide with the latter, but it can also be different to it. This is due to the two diverse types of meaning expressed by phonological units, namely the top-down information provided by prosody, which Clark (1996: 182) calls iconic, and the bottom-up meaning provided by linguistic meaning.


Phonemes in context has examined the minimal unit of a phoneme in the formal and functional frameworks and discussed its status as a discrete concept and refined it with regard to its realization in context, where it must be assigned the status of an unbounded concept. It has further introduced the combinatory and context-dependent phenomena of assimilation and reduced forms (or weak forms), and shown that the latter are not solely conditioned by the phonological system. Rather, they are interdependent on information structure and on communicative needs. The interactive nature of phonology has been further refined in Prosody in context where intonation has been decomposed into the basic building blocks of pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones that construct tunes, and where an intonational phrase and an intonational utterance have been assigned the status of a primary units of meaning analysis. Additionally, intonational contours have been examined in functional grammar, and assigned the function of providing parallel information. The results obtained in this section provide convincing evidence that phonological information which is anchored to prosody plays a key role in the calculation of utterance meaning.

2.5 Context in semantics/pragmatics7 The first part of the header, context in semantics, is generally interpreted as containing two mutually exclusive concepts and, for this reason, seems to represent a contradiction par excellence. This is due to the fact that semantics has been described as the investigation of context-independent meaning, viz. sentence meaning, propositional meaning, literal meaning or conventional meaning, and it has been distinguished from pragmatics which has been anchored to the investigation of meaning in context, namely utterance meaning. In mainstream linguistics, pragmatics has frequently been neglected and it has been attributed to the realms of linguistic performance and language use. This is also reflected in the module-based approaches to grammar, where pragmatic competence is not explicitly dealt with. Instead, it is allocated to the domain of communicative performance and only of relevance to the evaluation of acceptability, to the evaluation of non-anomalous meaning and to the

7.In more recent context-based approaches to semantic meaning and to pragmatic meaning, the differentiation between semantics and pragmatics has become rather controversial.

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calculation of appropriateness. Semantic competence has, however, gained a lot of attention and is defined by Radford as follows: “Among the semantic abilities which form a part of the native speaker’s grammatical competence are his intuitions about the semantic well-formedness or ill-formedness of sentences (…) A second type of semantic intuition which native speakers have about their language concerns semantic structures, and semantic relations” (Radford 1981: 4). The first type of semantic competence refers to the native speaker’s competence and to their ability to identify semantically well-formed sentences, such as entailments, and to distinguish them from semantically ill-formed sentences, such as contradictions. The second type of semantic competence concerns semantic structures, such as coreferentiality. The generative-grammar-based conception of semantic competence goes beyond the traditional field of lexical micro semantics and lexical macro semantics. It extends the frame of reference to sentence semantics and examines sentences and propositions with regard to their truth conditions. In this respect it also differs from the cognitivesemantic approach to meaning, where meaning is conceived of as being interdependent on society and culture which provide a network in accordance with which entities are perceived and classified into prototype-based scenarios. Cognitive semantics explicitly establishes the connectedness between lexical expressions, classification, networks, sociocultural meaning and sociocultural context (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987). In lexical semantics, the minimal unit of investigation is the lexical expression or the word. In the domain of formal semantics, the minimal unit of investigation is the sentence or the proposition. Yet sentences are constructed of lexical items (or of words), which need to be well-formed themselves. Against this background, semantics is also firmly anchored to the paradigm of partswhole relations. Moreover, as has already surfaced in the investigation of context in morphology, which is intrinsically connected with syntax, if it comes to grammaticality judgements, the individual modules of grammar cannot be assigned the statuses of completely autonomous modules in semantics/pragmatics either, as is shown in the analysis of sentence (37): (37) Peter doesn’t do anything to change his life.

Sentence (37) does not contain any contradictions, it does not contain any semantically ill-formed expressions and the whole sentence is not ill-formed either. For this reason, (37) is assigned the status of a semantically well-formed sentence. Example (38), however, is not considered to be semantically wellformed in standard English:


(38) Peter doesn’t do nothing to change his life.

The semantic ill-formedness of (38) is not due to the fact that (38) contains a semantically ill-formed lexical item, such as *ungrammaticalless, which represents a case of morphologically based double negation, or *beautiless and *deathless, which are morphologically well-formed but they do not (yet) represent conventional meaning. Rather, the semantic ill-formedness of (38) is due to the fact that it contains a double negation, which, from a logic-oriented perspective, cancels the negation and attributes an affirmative reading to it. Yet, in social and regional dialects of English (Milroy and Milroy 1993; Trudgill 1999) sentence (38) is considered to be semantically well-formed, and it is assigned the status of expressing semantic negation. Analogously to grammaticality judgements or well-formedness judgements regarding the domains of syntax and morphology, semantic well-formedness is connected with linguistic, social and sociocultural contexts. Moreover, the investigation of meaning beyond the lexical word, such as propositional meaning, conventional meaning, literal meaning or direct meaning, has to take into consideration the fact that a linguistic string which is to be evaluated must be examined with regard to the semantic well-formedness of the individual parts and with regard to the well-formedness of the linguistic string as a whole. Against this background, the evaluation of the semantic well-formedness of an expression goes beyond the individual lexical word. Rather, it is a contextdependent endeavour anchored to linguistic context and to its constitutive parts-whole connectedness (Malpas 2002). Further evidence for the contextdependency of semantic constructions is provided by the semantic meaning of clausal, phrasal and discourse comparatives and their interpretation (Hendriks 1997), as is shown for the sentences (39), (40) and (41): (39) Anne has more children than John thought. (40) Anne is taller than John. (41) John was a disaster. Anne hired a more competent child minder.

The clausal and phrasal comparatives (39) and (40) compare an amount, a number or a degree associated with the first part of the sentence with another amount associated with the than-clause or than-phrase. The discourse comparative (41) compares the first amount with an amount implicit in the linguistic (or extra-linguistic) context. From a processing-viewpoint, the respective amount has to be retrieved from the cognitive context. Yet, if the comparison

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scenario is made more complex by integrating multiple head comparatives, as is the case with (42), the two comparative operators seem to interact: (42) Special driving licenses for trucks should be eliminated so that more people can drive more trucks.

In (42) the number of people who are allowed to drive a truck interacts with the number of people who will be entitled to drive a truck. Semantic ambiguity provides further evidence for the context-dependency of semantic constructions and may be due to the hearer’s or reader’s lack of contextual information, as is the case in (43), where the lexical expression her can be seen as a constitutive part of the NP her duck thus expressing possessive case, namely some female person’s animal, or where the lexical expression her can be seen as forming a constituent itself which is coreferential with a female person who must have been introduced to the discourse domain before thus expressing accusative case and denoting the way the female person was moving: (43) We saw her duck.

A pragmatic investigation of meaning has traditionally been anchored to context, while semantic investigations have been considered to be contextindependent operations. The traditional differentiation between semantics and pragmatics does no longer obtain in a frame of reference which goes beyond the individual lexical expression. Rather, sentence- or proposition-based approaches to semantics have to accommodate the underlying parts-whole relations, which are context-dependent operations par excellence. In the following, the premises for a context-independent definition of meaning are compared and contrasted with context-dependent approaches to meaning, and special reference is given to the basic premises of the theoretical frameworks of formal semantics, discourse representation theory and dynamic semantics. 2.5.1 Context-independent meanings in context Semantic meaning is investigated in a great number of theoretical frameworks which have different goals and objectives in their analyses of linguistic meaning. The paradigm of corpus linguistics (Stubbs 19998, 2001) looks at the meaning of lexical expressions in linguistic and sociocultural contexts, the paradigm of cognitive semantics (Lakoff 1987) searches for prototypes and networks and classifies them with regard to cognitive, linguistic and sociocultural contexts,


and the paradigm of truth-conditional semantics seeks to find context-independent meaning (Palmer 1997). While the corpus- and prototype-based approaches are anchored to the domain of lexical expressions, the truth-conditional frame of reference’s unit of investigation are sentences, propositions or discourse. Against this background, an investigation of context-independent meanings in context does not seem to be contradictory any longer, because the truth-conditional frame of reference represents a parts-whole relation and is, for this reason, inherently context-dependent. In formal semantics, the central ideas are that linguistic expressions have a fixed meaning, and that sentences, propositions and discourse have well defined truth conditions. This is reflected in the clear-cut differentiations between intension and extension, between denotation and connotation, and in the fundamental premise of the semantic enterprise that a proposition consists of reference and predication, whose interpretation does not require any extralinguistic meaning. These clear-cut categories and boundaries are contrasted with the pragmatic paradigm and its foundation of pragmatic inference, which represents a context-dependent operation par excellence. Against this background Brandom postulates his conceptions of semantics and pragmatics which are firmly anchored to holism and to meaning in practice: One of the leading ideas of this enterprise is that developing an account of how semantics is rooted in pragmatics (meaning in use, content in social-functional role) is an exercise not only in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of the mind but also in the philosophy of logic. Discursive practice is understood in terms of reasoning and representing but above all in terms of expressing — the activity of making it explicit. (Brandom 1994: 649, 650)

As a necessary consequence of Brandom’s (1994: 326) expressive approach to semantics, the traditional semantic vocabulary of ‘true’ and ‘refers’ has to be reinterpreted (or recontextualized) as expressing ‘true’ and as expressing ‘refers’. Put differently, ‘true’ and ‘refers’ do not exist independently of the coparticipants who express ‘truth’ and ‘reference’ in context. Another differentiation between semantics and pragmatics along different lines is provided by Bell who spells out their implicit and explicit connectedness to context as follows: For the present purposes we will say that semantics is concerned with context-free meaning, while pragmatics is concerned with context-dependent meaning. (…) The distinction extends to reasoning. Semantic reasoning, traditionally called deductive reasoning, aims at certainty. It is concerned with what follows

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from the given by virtue of its semantic meaning alone, with what follows from the given regardless of the context in which it occurs. By contrast, pragmatic reasoning is concerned with drawing reasonable or appropriate conclusions on the basis of the given. It thus depends on finding appropriate interpretation(s) of the given. And this, it is suggested, amounts to progressively inferring the appropriate context(s) in which to interpret the given. The process of inferring a context involves making assumptions about what is normal or typical or conventional on the basis of the given context, and using pragmatic (contextsensitive) rules to extend the given context on the basis of these assumptions. (Bell 1999: 42, 43)

Not only differentiates Bell between semantics and pragmatics with regard to linguistic meaning and reasoning. He also extends the frame of investigation to the domain of context. Here he comes to the conclusion that pragmatics is always anchored to a particular (or a given) context, whereas semantics is anchored to a default context (or what is conventional or normal). The default context of a sentence or of a proposition is then extended to the domain of discourse, which Bell explicates as follows: Kamp and Reyle show how discourses (sequences of English sentences) can give rise to semantic representations which they call discourse representation structures (DRSs). The construction of a DRS proceeds sentence by sentence, each sentence being interpreted in the context of the existing DRS. This incremental nature of interpretation reflects what they call the ‘semantic cohesiveness’ of discourse. The sentences of a coherent discourse are typically connected by various kinds of cross-reference, so it is often impossible to analyse the meaning of the discourse as a simple conjunction of the separate meanings of individual sentences that make it up, ‘The meaning of the whole is more, one might say, than the meaning of its parts.’ (Bell 1999: 44, 45)

In Kamp and Reyle’s conception of discourse representation theory, the domain of discourse is represented by the truth conditions of the individual DRSs and of their relation. The extension of the frame of investigation from single sentences or single propositions to the domain of discourse has introduced a dynamism to the primarily product-oriented outlook in semantics. Hinzen explicates that process in the framework of Dynamic Semantics as follows: Semantics, the study of linguistic meaning, often makes language-world relations its topic, but has also tried to explicate meaning in terms of the relation of sentence to the mind of the speaker who is using it. (…) the idea of content is given a dynamic twist in that the semantic value of a sentence uttered in conversation is defined as an update function that


expands the body of shared presuppositions of the participants into such a new body. (Hinzen 1999: 186)

Thus, discourse does not only mean a change in perspective with regard to the quanitification of propositions and with regard to the nature of the connectedness amongst the propositions. Rather, it also means the accommodation of conversation-oriented and dialogue-oriented viewpoints and thus the integration of functional values anchored to (1) minimally two coparticipants, (2) linguistic meaning and its presuppositions, and (3) discourse. This shift of perspective has the necessary consequence, that linguistic meaning can no longer be assigned an autonomous status but must be conceived of as relational. A similar stance is taken by Pustejovsky (1995) in his investigations of the generative lexicon. He adopts a dynamic outlook on the lexicon in which the numbers of and distinctions between senses within an entry are not static and frozen. Rather, he bases his conception of the lexicon and his conception on the resolution of ambiguity as a process of not selecting from a set of predetermined senses, but of highlighting certain lexical properties brought forth by, and relevant to the current context. That is already reflected in Kac’s (1992) investigation of grammaticality in which he claims that a necessary condition for the investigation of anaphora resolution, which also represents a kind of ambiguity scenario, is a relational frame of reference which must account for both discourse and context. The relational nature of semantic meaning is also referred to as dynamic or as underdetermined, which is examined in the following section. 2.5.2 Context-dependent meanings in context The previous section has demonstrated that the traditional differentiation between semantics expressing context-independent meaning and pragmatics expressing context-dependent meaning can no longer be sustained. This is succinctly argued for by Claudia Bianchi and her examination of formal semantics, in which, as she argues, linguistic meaning is underdetermined by definition: “Top-down dependence generalizes the underdetermination — which becomes a property of linguistic meaning in general: linguistic meaning underdetermines truth conditions of any utterance. (…) the generalization of underdetermination to all linguistic expressions is in fact a kind of metadependence: the idea that the mode of dependence itself depends on context” (Bianchi 1999: 68). Against this background, she draws the conclusion that the introduction of context to the field of semantics makes the original distinction

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between semantics and pragmatics redundant. Instead, she proposes to distinguish between strong contextualism which makes the premise of linguistic meaning redundant, and weak contextualism: The application of the contextualist approach in semantics blurs the semantics/ pragmatics distinction: subjects make use of the pragmatic processor to determine the semantic core itself, i.e. to determine truth conditions of any utterance. Two ways of integrating pragmatics to semantics are possible: – Weak Contextualism maintains the notion of the linguistic meaning of an expression, but stresses the distinction between this meaning and the semantic value that expression takes in context; – Strong Contextualism abandons the very notion of linguistic meaning. (…) The main thesis of Strong Contextualism is that a word is not associated in a primitive way to a set of application conditions (as in the Fregean model) — its conventional meaning — but to a set of applications: meaning is built up from contexts of use. The semantic potential of a word w is the set of applications of w to situations, or objects, or contexts, applications accepted by the linguistic community. This set can be interpreted in different ways: sets of objects (…), sets of real situations (…), or of schemas of situations (…), sets of traces of cognitive episodes stored in the memory. (Bianchi 1999: 74)

Bianchi explicates the connectedness between meaning and context by referring to the domains of cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics and cognitive pragmatics, and argues that a conception of autonomous linguistic meaning does no longer seem reasonable. Instead, a context-dependent conception of meaning is required. This is also manifest in Akman and Alpaslan’s examination of the connectedness between linguistic meaning and context: However, isn’t it unrealistic to suppose that all meanings of a particular word are listed priorly in X’s ideal lexicon? Consider the interpretation of a morphologically complex word w. To put it mildly, the linguistically specified meaning of w may and frequently goes beyond what is available from its compositional subparts. (…) Recanati uses the term contextual sense construction to refer to the general problem. He notes that sometimes the conventional sense of the subparts of a complex phrase and the way they are syntactically brought together is insufficient to evaluate the semantic value of the complex phrase. (Akman and Alpaslan 1999: 8)

Akman and Alpaslan then elaborate on the deficiencies of an autonomous linguistic module by examining the meaning of the relational adjective large:


In dealing with subjective (a.k.a relative in linguistics literature) adjectives such as ‘large’, the context contributes to meaning in a decisive way. (…) Stephen built a large snowman — here the meaning of ‘large’ depends on the identity of Stephen. If Stephen is a toddler, the snowman is probably at most as big as Stephen himself. If Stephen is a philosopher, ‘large’ generally means something like bigger or as big as Stephen himself. (…) here a context is assumed which provides us with a set of comparison classes. But still, with a sentence like ‘A large ant is not a large animal’ the situation is tricky; in the same context different comparison classes are needed for the first and the second occurrences of the adjective. (Akman and Alpaslan 1999: 10)

Akman and Alpaslan show in a persuasive manner that a context-independent conception of semantic meaning is extremely problematical and argue for a pragmatic conception of meaning instead. The notion of pragmatic meaning is further refined by Thomason who argues for an interdisciplinary conception of pragmatics anchored to both philosophy and linguistics: It is semantics that has to do with the interpretation of phrases relative to a context. Pragmatics should deal with the use of interpreted phrases: with what acts a speaker performs by using a phrase in a certain context. Among theses acts are things like saying, implicating, insinuating, and presupposing — thus, the message that a speaker gets across by saying something in a given context also belongs to pragmatics. (…) If, as Grice feels, the source of such phenomena lies in principles of rational conversation, it should be possible to single out certain important types of reasoning mechanisms and data structures that figure in communication among intelligent agents, and that work together to make implicature possible. These features should be independently motivated by linguistic and philosophical considerations, and should be theoretically central. I wish to nominate the following implicature-enablers: speaker meaning as a sort of coordinationoriented intention, accommodation, and the notion of the conversational record. (Thomason 1992: 330)

Thomason’s suggestion to focus on both cooperation and intention recognition in communication and to accommodate both the product and the process of inferring meaning has the consequence that meaning can no longer be conceived of as being independent of the coparticipants of a communicative scenario. Rather, meaning in communication is assigned a dynamic status and it is reconstructed with regard to an utterance’s underlying reasoning processes. Another dynamic, but primarily cognitive-oriented conception of meaning in communication is found in the relevance-theoretic frame of reference, which sees pragmatics as a primarily cognitive endeavour. It characterizes the goal of

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communication as the extension of mutual cognitive contexts (Sperber and Wilson 1996). This field of cognitive pragmatics is based on the premise that there exists a direct or ‘natural linkage’ between linguistic form and pragmatic interpretation, or, to employ Robyn Carston’s own words: Not everyone agrees with (…) that the interpretative effects of these elements of linguistic form are all to be explained of arbitrarily linguistic encodings. For example, Sperber and Wilson (…), argue instead for a ‘natural linkage between linguistic form and pragmatic interpretation’ without any intermediate level of semantic or pragmatic description. Their idea is that the way in which the truth-conditional content of an utterance is organised syntactically (and also phonologically) directly affects on-line processing. (Carston 2000: 103)

In a relevance-theoretic investigation of the mapping between the mental and the public lexicon Sperber and Wilson (1998) claim that the presence of a word in an utterance serves as a starting point for a relevance guided inferential process that results in the construction of contextually appropriate sense. And they go even further by presuming that the linguistically encoded sense of a word does not serve as its default interpretation because language users have more mentally represented concepts than there are linguistically encoded concepts. Sbisà (1999) shifts the frame of reference from cognitive pragmatics to a conception of pragmatics based on a dynamic relation between text and context. She accounts for the discursive nature of communication and its underlying dynamism by integrating the concept of a default acceptance, that is an assertion — and thus the meaning communicated by the assertion — is accepted by default if it is not explicitly rejected. Regarding the difference between presupposition and implicature, and their connectedness with context, Sbisà comes to the conclusion that: Presuppositions play a specific role in the ways in which we project the representation of context from our acquaintance with a text. Presuppositions convey that a certain content has to belong to the representation of the context, irrespective of whether it does already belong to it or not and of whether inferences going beyond the rearrangement of linguistic material contained in the text are needed. The ways in which implicatures contribute to the representation of context are undoubtedly different: they aim at bringing about updates of the representation of context, either by contributing to the content of assertions, or by suggesting supplementary information, and typically require inferences going beyond the linguistic material contained in the text. (…)


Therefore, the development of a conceptual framework in which presupposition and implicature coexist, receiving separate, complementary definitions, turns out to be highly desirable. (Sbisà 1999: 336)

2.5.3 Conclusion The investigation of the connectedness between context on the one hand and semantics/pragmatics on the other hand, has shown that the traditional differentiation between semantics representing context-independent meaning and pragmatics expressing context-dependent meaning can no longer be sustained. This is due to the fact that sentences, propositions and discourse are conceived of as expressing a parts-whole relation, and are, for this reason, inherently context-dependent. The examination of Context-independent meanings in context has compared and contrasted the formal paradigms with context-based frameworks and argued for a dynamic and relational conception of meaning. Context-dependent meanings in context has extended the frame of investigation from single sentences and propositions to discourse and dialogue. Adapting Heritage’s (1984) conception of utterances as ‘doubly contextual’ to the connectedness between sentences, propositions and utterances, and context means that sentences, propositions and utterances are assigned a doubly contextual status: firstly they are shaped by context. This means that their meaning cannot be fully inferred or interpreted unless the context in which they operate is taken into account. Second, sentences, propositions and utterances are context-renewing. That is, every sentence, proposition or utterance will form the subsequent context for some following sentence, proposition or utterance in a sequence; it will thus contribute to the contextual framework. Additionally, each sentence, proposition and utterance will function to renew context, where ‘renewal’ is understood as one or more of the processes of maintaining, adjusting, altering, and so on. The shift in perspective from individual sentences and propositions to discourse and dialogue requires an interdisciplinary approach which accommodates cognition and reasoning, action and intention, conversational records and discourse common ground, and cooperation and coordination, and it is in these intentionality-based domains, where grammaticality and context meet.

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2.6 Conclusions The connectedness between grammaticality and context has been investigated in the framework of linguistics and its constitutive modules (or systems) of syntax, morphology, phonology and semantics/pragmatics. It has been compared and contrasted with the closely related concepts of well-formedness and ill-formedness, acceptability and unacceptability, and appropriateness and inappropriateness. Depending on the theoretical frameworks employed, grammaticality is assigned a dual status, viz. it represents the competence-based premise of a generative grammar and it is at the same time the product of a process of evaluating sentences as grammatical and as ungrammatical; or it is the outcome of the process of sentence evaluation only, as is the case in functional grammar. The evaluation of a sentences as grammatical and as ungrammatical is carried out in the framework of grammaticality judgements where native speakers of a particular language evaluate sentences as good or as bad. These tests are not without drawbacks because it is the phenomenon of communicative performance which is evaluated, and it is these performance-based results which are transferred to the domain of linguist competence, which, as has been claimed, is independent of communicative performance. Grammaticality is conceived of as anchored to the domain of syntax where a sentence is evaluated as being constructed in accordance with the syntactic rules of a particular language and where it is assigned the status of a grammatical sentence, or where it is evaluated as not having been constructed in accordance with the rules of syntax and where it is assigned the status of an ungrammatical sentence. In spite of the implicit dichotomy of grammatical and ungrammatical, it has been shown that grammaticality must be conceived of as a scalar concept and, for this reason, must be anchored to a default context. The introduction of a default context is a necessary condition because the process of sentence evaluation is not carried out in a void but rather against the background of some presupposed grammatical construction, with which the sentences in question are compared and contrasted. Thus, the presupposed ‘good grammatical construction’ represents the default context, against which grammatical constructions are evaluated. Furthermore, grammaticality is anchored to the sentence as the unit of investigation, and an extension of the frame of investigation does not seem reasonable because discourse and dialogue require different evaluation criteria, such as the macro-semantic constraint of discourse coherence and the pragmatic constraints of relevance, and logic and conversation (Sperber and Wilson 1996; Grice 1975).


The sentence as the unit of investigation is also a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for the linguistic surface-based concept of acceptability. Unlike competence-based grammaticality, acceptability is a performancerelated notion which is anchored to linguistic context and to social context. It is not generally assigned a dual status as premise and product, but rather evaluated with regard to performance only. Due to the complex nature of communicative performance, which manifests itself in interfacing linguistic modules (or systems), the process of utterance evaluation as acceptable and as unacceptable is based on an interactive framework consisting of the syntactic, morphological, phonological, semantic/pragmatic modules (or systems). Analogously to competence-based grammaticality, acceptability is a scalar concept and therefore anchored to a default context, against which particular constructions are evaluated with regard to the nature of their degree of comprehensibility and with regard to their embeddedness in a particular linguistic context and in a particular social context. Because of the embeddedness in context, acceptability may also be applied to longer stretches of talk, which is not possible with sentence-based grammaticality. Sentences, are, however, not only evaluated as grammatical or as ungrammatical, but they are also judged with regard to being well-formed or ill-formed. The notion of well-formedness has been introduced as an in-between concept in order to constrain the purely structural concept of grammaticality, which could, in principle, be applied to construct never ending sentences. Wellformedness is supplemented with the speaker- and hearer-oriented category of sentence processing and its underlying notion of pragmatic relevance. Thus, a sentence can be assigned the status of a grammatical, but an ill-formed sentence (if it overburdens the speaker’s and hearer’s cognitive domains) but not vice versa. Moreover, a sentence can be acceptable in a particular context, but ungrammatical from a purely structural perspective. Pragmatic considerations are not only of importance to psycholinguistic sentence processing. They also play a major role in the performance of communicative actions. The communicative action performed through one or more utterances in a sociocultural context is no longer evaluated as grammatical or ungrammatical, well-formed or ill-formed, and acceptable or unacceptable. Instead, it is appropriate or it is inappropriate. Appropriateness is a social- and communicative-action-based construct which is calculated with regard to the connectedness between the force of the communicative action, its propositional content, its linguistic representation and their embeddedness in the immediate linguistic, sociocultural and social contexts, and their embeddedness in the remote

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linguistic, sociocultural and social contexts. Appropriateness is a constitutive part of practical reasoning and manifests itself in felicitous communication in which the coparticipants’ information wants and face wants are satisfied. Analogously to the concepts of acceptability and well-formedness, appropriateness covers both the micro domains of a sentence, utterance or communicative action and the macro domains of dialogue and discourse. In the extended frame of discourse and dialogue the concept of grammaticality is no longer of prime importance. Instead the evaluation of ‘good dialogue’ is based on the sentence-processing notion of well-formedness on the one hand, and the semantic concept of discourse coherence on the other hand. Naturally, discourse is also evaluated with regard to its connectedness with linguistic and social contexts as acceptable or as unacceptable, and with regard to its connectedness with linguistic, social and sociocultural contexts as appropriate or as inappropriate. Thus, different frames of investigation require different guiding (or evaluation) principles. This also holds for the type of language investigated: natural-languages are generally characterized by grammaticality, acceptability, well-formedness and appropriateness, while non-natural languages are generally evaluated with regard to grammaticality only. The analysis of the modules (or systems) of syntax, morphology, phonology and semantics/pragmatics has been anchored to the principle of compositionality and its implicit parts-whole relations, which requires the accommodation of relational and context-dependent perspectives. Against this background, syntactic structure has been examined in Context in syntax, where a linguistic string is no longer looked at as an independent entity but rather as a partswhole configuration. Thus, linguistic meaning cannot be based on an autonomous conception of syntactic structure or on strong compositionality, but rather requires the accommodation of context and the guiding principle of weak compositionality in order to retrieve the intended interpretation. Syntactic ability and syntactic structure are connected with grammaticality and with linguistic competence, which does not only consist of the ability to differentiate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Linguistic competence also contains knowledge about the structure of the sentence and knowledge about the connectedness between the parts of the sentence and between the parts and the whole. To retrieve linguistic meaning, native speakers (or their artificial equivalents) interpret the connections, and they interpret what these connections count as. The connectedness between context and morphology is of immense importance for the investigation of word formation and for the investigation of


linguistic meaning regarding both a purely additive-relational outlook and a parts-whole-relational outlook, and their respective word-internal and wordexternal contexts. In a context-based investigation of word formation, a functional-grammar approach has been evaluated as more appropriate because it explicitly accounts for the connectedness between linguistic knowledge, knowledge of the external world and knowledge of culture. The accommodation of word-external contexts shows the interdependence between a particular rule of grammar, such as an inflectional rule regarding verb syntax, and its domains of validity, such as particular social- and sociocultural contexts. That is, depending on the linguistic context, inflectional and derivational word formation is considered to be grammatical or ungrammatical, depending on the social and sociocultural contexts, inflectional and derivational word formation is evaluated as grammatical, acceptable or appropriate, or as ungrammatical, unacceptable or inappropriate. The connectedness between phonology and context is of a rather diverse nature because of its particular status in linguistics, which could be illustrated as ‘besides the clause’ (Halliday 1996). In other words, phonological information provides additional information to the linguistic domains of syntax, morphology and semantics/pragmatics, which may coincide with the latter, or which may be different to it. This is due to the two diverse types of meaning, namely the top-down information provided by prosody, and the bottom-up meaning provided by linguistic meaning. Phonemes have been assigned a dual status, namely the status a discrete concept and, if realized in context, the status of an unbounded concept. The examination of the connectedness between context on the one hand and semantics/pragmatics on the other hand, has shown that the traditional differentiation between semantics representing context-independent meaning and pragmatics expressing context-dependent meaning can no longer be sustained. This is due to the fact that sentences, propositions and discourse are conceived of as expressing a parts-whole relation and, for this reason, are inherently context-dependent. Context-independent meanings in context has compared and contrasted the formal paradigms with context-based frameworks and argued for a dynamic and relational conception of meaning. Contextdependent meanings in context has extended the frame of investigation from single sentences and propositions to discourse and dialogue, and demonstrated that sentences, utterances or speech acts in discourse are doubly contextual. Thus, the shift in perspective from individual sentences, propositions, utterances or speech acts to discourse and dialogue requires an interdisciplinary

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approach which accommodates cognition and reasoning, action and intention, conversational records and discourse common ground, and cooperation and coordination. A context-based approach to grammar and grammaticality seems very promising as it does not only account for the rules and regularities of a particular language, such as English, German or French. It also demonstrates the connectedness between language and linguistics, language and linguistic context, language and language users, and language, linguistics and social and sociocultural contexts. And it is in these intentionality-based domains, where grammaticality and context meet. There is, however, a further extremely important aspect in the analysis of the connectedness between language and context, which requires close examination, namely the connectedness between context and its content. This is succinctly spelled out by Gregory Bateson: Of special interest (…) is the relationship between context and its content. A phoneme exists a such only in combination with other phonemes which make up a word. The word is the context of the phoneme. But the word only exists as such — only has ‘meaning’ — in the larger context of the utterance, which again has meaning only in a relationship. The hierarchy of contexts within contexts is universal for the communicational (or ‘emic’) aspect of phenomena and drives the scientist always to seek for explanation in the ever larger units. It may (perhaps) be true in physics that the explanation of the macroscopic is to be sought in the microscopic. The opposite is usually true for cybernetics: without context, there is no communication. (Bateson 1972: 402)

The connectedness between context and communication is examined in detail in the following chapter on context and appropriateness. Appropriateness is conceived of as a social- and communicative-action-based construct, which is calculated with regard to the connectedness between the force of the communicative action, its propositional content, its linguistic representation and their embeddedness in the immediate linguistic, sociocultural and social contexts, and their embeddedness in the remote linguistic, sociocultural and social contexts.

Chapter 3

Context and appropriateness

We discursive creatures — rational, logical, concept-using ones — are construed here in expressive terms; we are the ones who can make it explicit. (Brandom 1994: 587)

Context is differentiated with regard to a common-sense notion, which refers to a meaningful, bounded and determinate entity, and with regard to its status as a theoretical construct which is conceived of as a relational concept and is further refined with respect to the four subcategories of cognitive context, linguistic context, sociocultural context and social context, which may further categorize into relevant subsets. Like context, appropriateness is conceived of as a pragmatic concept and is, for this reason, a context-dependent notion par excellence. Regarding its use, appropriateness also differentiates into a common-sense notion and into a theoretical construct: the former refers to the product of a process of evaluation based on the nature of the connectedness between coparticipants, communicative actions and their linguistic realizations in linguistic and sociocultural contexts. If the performance of a communicative action is seen as produced and interpreted in accordance with a speech community’s ethnographic norms and strategies for a particular communicative action, it is assigned the status of an appropriate communicative action. Should it violate one or more of the norms and strategies, and their underlying rules and regulations, it is assigned the status of an inappropriate communicative action. As a theoretical construct, appropriateness is conceived of as a relational concept which is far more complex. It is informed by the contextual constraints and requirements of (1) coparticipants, (2) communicative actions, (3) communicative genres, and (4) the ethnographic norms and strategies of a speech community. Naturally, these categories are interdependent on other social and sociocultural norms, conventions and strategies, which themselves are interdependent on the social and sociocultural norms, conventions and strategies of subsocieties and subcultures. For each of the subsets, there are subset-specific norms, conventions and strategies for the production and interpretation of a communicative action.

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Appropriateness supplements and refines the notion of context-dependent pragmatic meaning by the accommodation of social-context and socioculturalcontext perspectives. Pragmatic meaning is not only inferred with regard to its illocutionary goal and force. Rather, it is calculated with regard to the connectedness between pragmatic meaning, coparticipants, their social statuses, their interpersonal relationships and communicative setting. As a necessary consequence of the connectedness between contexts, coparticipants and communicative actions, appropriateness is anchored to the dyad of (minimally) a speaker and a hearer seen from both I-we (Searle 1995) and I-thou perspectives (Brandom 1994). Or, to adopt Linell’s (1998) distinction between monologue and dialogue, appropriateness represents a dialogical concept par excellence. It is a social concept, whose frame of reference goes beyond the individual contribution. This is due to the fact that the appropriateness of dialogue cannot be calculated in the framework of individual contributions only. It requires a collectively oriented framework, as is explicated by Vanderveken and Kubo: “Conversations are language games that several speakers play by performing together a joint action rather than several distinct individual activities” (Vanderveken and Kubo 2002: 16). It is in the theoretical construct of appropriateness, where the domain of linguistics, that is both linguistic competence and communicative performance, and the domain of natural-language communication, viz. both sociocultural competence and sociocultural performance, meet. Here, the production and interpretation of a contribution is anchored to cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural and social contexts, which are referred to in the contribution. These references can be spelled out explicitly in the linguistic surface, or they can be represented implicitly and assigned a presuppositional status. But appropriateness and dialogue do not only account for the individual coparticipants and their individual communicative actions. They also account for the coparticipants’ connectedness with one another, they account for the connectedness between coparticipants and their contributions seen as parts, and they account for the connectedness between coparticipants, contributions and dialogue seen as a whole. Thus, appropriateness and dialogue also account for intersubjectivity, reciprocity and collective action. The following section presents an introduction to the nature of the connectedness between appropriateness and context by comparing and contrasting the concepts of grammaticality, well-formedness, acceptability and appropriateness, and their units of investigation: sentence, utterance, contribution and dialogue.


Then the connectedness of these core concepts with linguistic context, social context and sociocultural context is made explicit, and it is extended to the cognitive domain and to cognitive context.

3.1 Introduction In the investigation about the impact of context on the conception of grammaticality, linguistic-competence based grammaticality has been compared and contrasted with performance-based acceptability. Implicit in the dichotomy of grammaticality and acceptability is the view that the grammarian examines the linguistic concept of grammaticality whereas acceptability reflects the coparticipants’ perspectives. Yet acceptability does not only express a common-sense notion. Analogously to grammaticality, it denotes a dual concept which refers to (1) the product of a process of evaluating an expression as more or less acceptable, and (2) the premise of a performance-based approach to grammar in the field of applied linguistics (Widdowson 1978) and in the field of sociolinguistics (Greenbaum 1977). Unlike grammaticality, acceptability has never been conceived of as a binary concept. Rather, it has always been conceived of as a scalar term, that is an expression or utterance is judged as more acceptable or as less acceptable — according to its contexts. Unlike the calculation of grammaticality, which is based on one or more violations of the phrase structure of a sentence, there are various criteria for determining the acceptability of an expression or utterance, such as ungrammaticality, a complex sentence structure which involves repeated encapsulating or repeated self-embedding constructions, semantic contradiction, unsuccessful reference of one expression or of more expressions to linguistic, social or sociocultural contexts; it may also involve stylistic incompatibility. In other words, assigning an utterance or an expression the status of an unacceptable utterance or of an unacceptable expression means that its use is considered not permissible or not normal, while an acceptable utterance or an acceptable expression is considered permissible or normal. As has been pointed out by Crystal (1997), deciding on the acceptability of an utterance may be full of difficulties in practice, where native-speakers often disagree as to whether an utterance is normal, or even possible. One reason for this is that native-speaker intuitions differ because of variations in regional and social backgrounds, age, personal preferences and so on. As has been shown with English dialect syntax, an utterance is considered normal in one dialect, such as the East-Anglian dialect, which deviates from the person-number

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system of standard English for the Present Tense because it does not (overtly) represent the inflectional morpheme for the 3rd person singular, but unacceptable in another dialect, such as the South-Western dialect, which overtly represents the s-morpheme irrespective of person and number. But who decides whether an utterance or expression is acceptable or unacceptable? Unlike the generative-grammar approach to acceptability, which is anchored to native-speaker performance and participant introspection, sociolinguists generally differentiate between an ordinary native-speaker’s acceptability judgement and a linguist’s acceptability judgement. For the latter, an utterance is acceptable if a section of a community uses it consistently in speech or in writing. Here the analytic problem is to determine what section of the community uses what utterance on what occasion. To deal with this, linguists have devised several techniques for investigating the acceptability of linguistic data. Analogously to the practice of grammaticality judgements, native-speakers are asked to evaluate sets of utterances which contain those language features over whose acceptability there is some doubt, and to provide information about the contexts in which the data in question are used (Cheshire and Edwards 1993). Furthermore, experiments are designed which trigger the actual use of the linguistic expression in question, such as the employment of a specific type of phonological realization, for instance the pronunciation of postvocalic /r/, or the employment of a particular lexical expression, for instance a euphemism, which is then documented and examined accordingly (Fasold 1990; Holmes 1992; Wardhaugh 1993). So, linguistic expressions are judged with regard to linguistic-competence based grammaticality and with regard to performancebased acceptability anchored to the field of sociolinguistics. But are linguistic expressions only evaluated with regard to linguistic structure and with regard to the connectedness between an expression and its linguistic and social contexts? In the research paradigm of sociopragmatics,1 context, appropriateness and pragmatics are seen as intrinsically connected with one another: pragmatics refers to an investigation of meaning beyond what has been said and thus to context-dependent meaning, and appropriateness supplements and refines the notion of pragmatic meaning by a social-context perspective and by a sociocultural context perspective, where pragmatic meaning is not only inferred with regard to its illocutionary goal and force. Rather, pragmatic meaning is calculated with regard to the connectedness between pragmatic meaning, coparticipants, their 1.Analogously to the employment of discourse and dialogue, sociopragmatics and pragmatics are used as functional synonyms in this work.


social roles and statuses, their discursive roles and statuses, their interactional roles, interpersonal relationships and communicative setting (Fetzer 1999a, 2002a/b; Mey 1996; Sarangi and Slembrouck 1996). Thus, appropriateness is not only conceived of as a context-dependent, but also as a sociocultural notion, as has been succinctly stated by Saville-Troike: “Shared cultural knowledge is essential to explain the shared presuppositions and judgements of truth value which are the essential undergirdings of language structures, as well as of contextually appropriate usage and interpretation” (Saville-Troike 1989: 22). Since appropriateness is anchored to contextually appropriate language usage (Saville-Troike 1989: 22), it entails the concepts of illocutionary force, communicative goal and communicative intention. But can appropriateness also be assigned a dual status, viz. the status of a basic premise of a theory of grammar, and the status of the product of calculating a contribution as being appropriate for a particular communicative goal? In the framework of generative grammar, grammaticality is assigned a dual status: firstly, it represents the foundation of the grammar of a particular language and thus is intrinsically linked to the domain of competence. In this setting, grammaticality denotes a discrete category. Secondly, it is the outcome of a grammaticality judgement, that is, the product of a process of evaluating a sentence as more grammatical or as less grammatical. Here, competence-based grammaticality is transferred to the domain of communicative performance to a sentence in its context, where it no longer denotes a discrete category, but rather is conceived of as a scalar concept. Yet linguistic competence does not entail communicative competence, as is pointed out by Muriel Saville-Troike in her reference to the Dell Hymes: Hymes (…) observed that speakers who could produce any and all of the grammatical sentences of a language (per Chomsky’s 1965 definition of linguistic competence) would be institutionalized if they tried to do so. Communicative competence involves knowing not only the language code, but also what to say to whom, and how to say it appropriately [my italics, A. F.] in any given situation. It deals with the social and cultural knowledge speakers are presumed to have to enable them to use and interpret linguistic forms. A child who uses a taboo expression in public and causes embarrassment is said not to ‘know better’, i.e. not to have acquired certain rules for certain conduct in the use of language (the embarrassment itself presupposes the existence of this competence). (Saville-Troike 1989: 21)

Against this background, a grammatical sentence does not necessarily represent an appropriate contribution. That is to say, grammaticality is not a sufficient

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condition to assign a sentence the status of an appropriate contribution. Moreover, a less grammatical, if not an ungrammatical sentence may be assigned the status of an appropriate contribution if it is produced and interpreted in accordance with the rules and regularities of its immediate linguistic, sociocultural and social contexts and with the felicity conditions for the performance of a particular type of speech act. As has been pointed out above, almost all of the regional-dialect grammars of English deviate from the standard with regard to their employment of agreement features, tense and negation. The following examples are adopted from Beal’s (1993) investigation of Tyneside and Northumbrian English, and from Edwards’ (1993) analysis of Southern British English: (44) Things has changed. (45) I has the answer for that (46) You couldn’t say nothing bad about it (47) I ain’t telling you (48) He couldn’t find none nowhere.

Even though examples (44) to (48) are assigned the statuses of ungrammatical sentences in standard English, they are seen as grammatical in Tyneside and Northumbrian English and in Southern British English: sentences (44) and (46) are considered to be fully grammatical in these Northern dialects, and sentences (45), (47) and (48) are considered to be fully grammatical in this variety of southern dialects. Furthermore, following Beal (1993), Edwards (1993) and Trudgill (1999), all of the sentences occur consistently in those dialects, which assigns them the statuses of acceptable utterances. But what would be required to assign them the statuses of appropriate contributions? Crystal’s (1997) conception of appropriateness as referring to a variety of form which is considered suitable or possible in a given situation is in accordance with the stance taken in this work, where appropriateness is seen as connected with linguistic variation and with sociolinguistic variation, and with linguistic, sociocultural and social contexts. It is, however, not in accordance with Crystal’s claim that appropriateness conditions are synonymous with felicity conditions. In this work, felicity conditions are conceived of as a subset of appropriateness conditions. While the former represent the necessary and sufficient conditions which must obtain for the successful performance of a speech act, the latter additionally spell out the particularities of its micro linguistic and macro linguistic contexts, and of its micro sociocultural and


macro sociocultural contexts. Adopting Searle’s framework, speech acts and their felicity conditions are categorized into five and only five different types of illocutionary points: the assertive illocutionary point, the directive illocutionary point, the commissive illocutionary point, the expressive illocutionary point and declarations (Searle 1999: 148–150). Appropriateness conditions entail a speech act’s felicity conditions and adapt them to the contextual constraints and requirements for its linguistic realization, as is pointed out by Saville-Troike: “The choice of appropriate language forms is not only dependent on static categories, but on what precedes and follows in the communicative sequence, and on information which emerges within the event which may alter the relationship of participants” (Saville-Troike 1989: 53–54). Appropriateness conditions do not only accommodate the constitutive systems of a particular type of speech act. They also accommodate the systems required for its linguistic realization, viz. the syntactic, morphological, phonological and semantic systems. They further accommodate the systems required for its expression and interpretation, that is the interpersonal system, which is defined by the socialpsychology category of face (Goffman 1955; Brown and Levinson 1987) and the participation framework (Goffman 1974; Levinson 1988), the interactional system, which is based on the premise of adjacency, namely adjacency pair, adjacency position and adjacency relation (Levinson 1983), and the textual system, which is based on the Gricean CP, the maxims and the conversational implicature (Fetzer 1999a/b, 2002a). The discursive conception of appropriateness (or inappropriateness) adopted here goes beyond the common-sense notion of a linguistic-surface category. Instead, appropriateness is assigned the status of a theoretical construct2 which, in accordance with Brandom (1994), is firmly anchored to the cognitive (or subjective) world and to the social world: But there is a second sort of expressive power anaphora contributes to discursive practice that arises only in the social context of interpersonal communication of information. For information (whether true or false) to be communicated is for the claims undertaken by one interlocutor to become available to others (who attribute them) as premises for inferences. Communication is the social production and consumption of reasons. So communication (giving and asking for reasons) involves the interaction of the inferential articulation of

2.Note that this position is in disagreement with Stalnaker’s claim that appropriateness is not a theoretical category (1999: 8).

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contents that is at the center of semantics presented here and the social articulation of discursive commitments that is at the center of pragmatics presented here. (Brandom 1994: 474)

A necessary condition for conceiving language as a social construct and for seeing communication as giving and asking for reasons is the premise of rational agents, as is explicitated by Brandom: “In a weak sense, any being that engages in linguistic practices, and hence applies concepts, is a rational being; in the strong sense, rational beings are not only linguistic beings but, at least potentially, also logical beings” (Brandom 1994: xxi). Brandom is even more explicit about his conception of rationality: “Rationality consists in mastery of those practices [the game of giving and asking for reasons, as Sellars calls it]. It is not to be understood as a logical capacity. Rather, specifically logical capacities presuppose and are built upon underlying rational capacities” (Brandom 1994: 117). Against this background, it is no longer possible to see communicative performance as an activity independent of the mind. Instead, communicative performance is reevaluated (or recontextualized) as expressing or as making manifest a discursive community’s underlying rules and regularities. Thus, appropriateness denotes a far more complex phenomenon than had been anticipated: it is anchored to (1) the linguistic units of sentence and utterance, (2) the performance of a speech act, (3) the coparticipants of (minimally) a speaker and a hearer seen from I — we and I — thou perspectives (Brandom 1994: 508), and (4) the micro and macro cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural and social contexts. As a consequence of this change of perspective, the differentiation between competence and performance3 does not only denote a coparticipant’s ability to differentiate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences and to produce and interpret grammatical sentences, it also denotes her/his ability to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate contributions, and to produce appropriate contributions and to interpret contributions in an appropriate manner. Moreover, competence entails the coparticipant’s ability to differentiate between coherent and incoherent dialogue, and her/his ability to produce coherent dialogue and interpret dialogue in a coherent manner:

3.In accordance with more recent trends in the fields of pragmatics (Parret 1994), sociolinguistics (Grimshaw 1980) and the philosophy of language (Brandom 1994; Searle 1995, 1999) and their re-assessments of the role of the hearer, Hymes’s conception of communicative competence (1974) is extended to cover both the domains of speaker, i.e. the producer of a speech act or an utterance, and of hearer, viz. the actual addressee and other potential coparticipants, such as ratified and unratified audience.


Communicative competence extends to both knowledge and expectation of who may or may not speak in certain settings, when to speak and when to remain silent, whom one may speak to, how one may talk to persons of different statuses and roles, what appropriate nonverbal behaviors are in various contexts, what the routines for turn-taking are in conversation, how to ask for and give information, how to request, how to offer or decline assistance or cooperation, how to give commands, how to enforce discipline, and the like — in short, everything involving the use of language and other communicative dimensions in particular social settings. (Saville-Troike 1998: 21)

To adopt Per Linell’s (1998) distinction between monologue and dialogue explicated in his seminal work on dialogue and dialogism, grammaticality denotes a monological concept and appropriateness represents a dialogical concept. That is, the appropriateness of dialogue cannot be calculated in the framework of linguistic competence only. Rather, it must be conceived of as a relational concept which connects the domain of linguistics, viz. both linguistic competence and communicative performance, with the domain of naturallanguage communication, that is sociocultural competence and sociocultural performance. Moreover, appropriateness is a social concept whose frame of reference goes beyond the individual sentence. That is, both the production and interpretation of a contribution requires cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural and social contexts. References to context can be realized in the explicit mode in the linguistic surface, and they can be represented implicitly and assigned a presuppositional status. As a consequence of this, the appropriateness of dialogue must be calculated with regard to (1) a dialogue’s textual domain, namely its linguistic representation, (2) a dialogue’s interpersonal domain, viz. the linguistic representation of references to the coparticipants regarding their social, interactional and discursive statuses, and regarding their face-wants and face-needs, and (3) a dialogue’s interactional domain, i.e. the linguistic representation of adjacency relations regarding the dialogue as a whole and the coparticipants’ employment of the turn-taking system. But dialogue does not only account for the individual coparticipants. It also accounts for their connectedness and thus for intersubjectivity and reciprocity, as is claimed by Brandom: “Putting a claim forward as true is putting it forward as one that it is appropriate for others to take as true, that is to endorse themselves” (Brandom 1994: 170). That extension of frame is also manifest in Esther Goody’s socialpsychology conception of appropriate role behaviour: “A definition of appropriate role behavior includes both the proper behavior of ego, and the proper reciprocal responses of the role partner. In this way it makes AIP [anticipatory

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interactive planning, AF.] more powerful, since acting in a clearly defined role makes the behavior of both members of the dyad more predictable” (Goody 1995: 14). So, natural-language communication does not only consist of ego putting a claim forward and other taking it as true, but also of ego’s and other’s performances in accordance with clearly defined roles. A formal approach to appropriateness is presented by Kasher. Unlike Brandom and Linell, Kasher’s conception of appropriateness is anchored to monologue, and is defined as follows: Holding that the spirit of any linguistic use is a linguistic institution, I would suggest the following criterion of adequacy of pragmatical theories: (CA) For every context of utterance C, every sentence S of a natural language L, and every ideal speaker Alpha of that language, the following biconditional should be a true theorem: Context C is linguistically appropriate for speaker Alpha to utter in it sentence S of language L, if, and only if, there is a linguistic institution of L which grants Alpha an institutional role which enable him (or her) to achieve a literal purpose he (or she) entertains in C, by uttering in it sentence S. I shall call this adequacy condition “Criterion A” of appropriateness. (Kasher 1998: 89)

Analogously to a sentence grammar’s premise of grammaticality, a dialogue grammar’s premise of appropriateness is assigned a dual status: firstly, it denotes the foundation to which the dialogue grammar of a particular language is anchored, and secondly it refers to the outcome of the evaluation of a dialogue as more appropriate and as less appropriate. Unlike linguistic-competence based grammaticality, which is conceived of as a discrete category, communicative-competence based appropriateness is conceived of as a prototype and thus as a scalar concept which is anchored to a default context (Recanati 1989) conceived of in a prototype manner (Givón 1999). The implementation of a default context or of a prototypical context is not only a necessary condition for the instantiation of one or more particular contexts. It is also a necessary condition for the transition between different contexts. But what are default contexts, and what are particular contexts? Where do they meet and where do they depart? In traditional accounts of social context, one thinks of the immediate features of a speech situation, that is time, location, speaker, hearer and preceding discourse. But social context must be a wider and more transcendental notion than


what these accounts imply. Social context is a relational concept relating communicative actions and their surroundings, relating communicative actions, relating the individual coparticipants and their individual surroundings, and relating the set of individual coparticipants and their communicative actions to their surroundings. Against this background, coparticipants select and construct the appropriate contexts for their communicative actions. Thus, social context is seen as given as is reflected in the presuppositional approach to context and which is also referred to as common ground or background information. But social context is not only conceived of as given. It is also conceived of as interactionally organized, which manifests itself in the joint construction of social contexts (Schegloff 1991). A more precise account of social context is offered by the research paradigm of ethnomethodology. It is based on the premise of indexicality of social action and examines the questions of how separate individuals are able to know or act within a common world, and of how members negotiate or achieve a common context. That type of common context is synonymous with social context, which is further distinguished with regard to a micro or local social context and a macro or global social context. Social contexts are further distinguished with regard to a number of intermediate layers, such as meso social contexts, bureaucratic contexts and institutional contexts (Boden and Zimmerman 1993; Drew and Heritage 1992 Sarangi and Slembrouck 1996). Constitutive elements of social context are, for instance, coparticipant, which subcategorizes into the domains of speaker, hearer, addressee and their respective participation roles (Goffman 1974, 1981; Levinson 1988), micro context, that is the immediate concrete, physical surrounding including time and location, and the macro contextual levels, such as institutional vs. non-institutional domains. Deixis is also anchored to social context and further categorized with regard to temporal, local, participant, discourse and social deixis. While discourse deixis is anchored to social context, anaphora resolution requires linguistic context. Linguistic context denotes the expressions or language forms which surround a particular linguistic string. Depending on the goal of investigation, linguistic context is generally restricted to the immediately adjacent clauses, immediately adjacent sentences and immediately adjacent utterances. In conversational interaction, linguistic context refers to the language produced or formulated, and interpreted or decoded by the coparticipants. Here, it is assigned a dual function: on the one hand, it invokes linguistic context by constructing it itself, and on the other hand, its sole production and interpretation provide the context for the subsequent talk. That is, the act of speaking and

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interpreting constructs contexts and at the same time constrains the construction of contexts, or to employ John Heritage’s own words, the production of talk is doubly contextual (Heritage 1984: 242). That is to say, an utterance relies upon existing context for its production and interpretation, and it is in its own right an event which shapes a new context for the action that will follow. Contrary to a conception of language as autonomous, as is the case, for instance, in generative linguistics, the ethnographic framework assigns language the status of a sociocultural and context-dependent means of communication. It is based on the premises that language is (1) embedded within a context of situation, (2) practical action, and (3) a socially situated cultural form. It is of relevance that these investigations do not refer to social context but rather to sociocultural context This is due to the fact that language is seen as a socially situated cultural form and thus as a specification of the more generally conceived social and linguistic contexts. Yet linguistic context is not only conceived of from a local or micro perspective. Global or macro linguistic context manifests itself in the categories of an activity type (Levinson 1979), a communicative genre (Luckmann 1995) or a communicative project (Linell 1998). However, there are also numerous investigations which focus on the cognitive processes of speakers and hearers which are required for the performance of communicative actions, viz. for the production or formulation and for the interpretation or decoding of the linguistic code in a sociocultural setting (Gumperz 1991; Saville-Troike 1989). Cognitive context denotes a set of premises, and cognitive environment denotes a set of facts, namely true or probably true mental representations. Constitutive elements of cognitive context in a relevance-theoretic frame of reference (Sperber and Wilson 1996) are mental representations, propositions, contextual assumptions which may vary in strength, and factual assumptions. Assumptions are read, written and erased. Against this background, contextual implications are raised in strength, lowered in strength or erased from memory. Since cognitive contexts are anchored to an individual but are also required for a cognitively based outlook on communication, they must contain assumptions about mutual cognitive environments and further differentiate into individual cognitive contexts and collective cognitive contexts. The phenomenon of intention is also anchored to cognitive context. Following Sperber and Wilson, intention is a mental representation capable of being realized in the form of actions. It differentiates into an informative intention, namely the intention to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions, and a second-order informative intention, a communicative intention, viz. the


intention to have the informative intention recognized and to make it mutually manifest to the audience and the communicator that the communicator has this informative intention (Sperber and Wilson 1996: 54–64). Yet, intention is not only seem from a cognitive perspective. Intention is also considered to be a constitutive element of social action and action theory (Cohen, Morgan and Pollack 1992), and it is at the interface of intentionality and collective intentionality, where linguistic, social, sociocultural and cognitive contexts meet. Regarding the connectedness between these types of context, it is assumed, that cognitive context contains information about linguistic, sociocultural and social contexts. Cognitive context also administers the constant flow of information in communication by updating the corresponding systems. However, intentionality and collective intentionality are not only constitutive elements of the coparticipants and of their individual and collective minds, or of their individual and collective cognitive systems. Intentionality and collective intentionality are also constitutive parts of contexts, and analogously require delimination, as is originally exemplified by Gregory Bateson: But what about “me”? Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of my stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable. If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behavior, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then, for this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; (…) But when the man sits down to eat his lunch, the stick is no longer relevant (…). And in addition to what I have said to define the individual mind, I think it necessary to include the relevant parts of memory and data “banks”. (Bateson 1972: 459)

In the following sections, the nature of the connectedness between default contexts and between particular contexts is examined in detail in the frameworks of speech act theory, conversation analysis and discourse analysis. Section 3.2 Speech acts and context examines default contexts and particular contexts in the pioneering works of John L. Austin (1980), John R. Searle (1969) and in more recent developments by Sbisà (2002b) and by Cohen, Morgan and Pollack (1992). The discussion focusses on their conceptions of the core notion of communicative intention, on their differentiations between

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default and particular contexts, and cognitive, objective and social contexts, and on their conceptions of the role of language, language production and language interpretation. Section 3.3 Utterances and context investigates the status of an utterance with regard to the intentionality of producing and interpreting utterances in immediate linguistic and social contexts. Special attention is given to the impact of linguistic and sociolinguistic variation on the formulation and interpretation of an utterance, to the cognitive and social nature of utterances, and to joint production and to joint projects. Section 3.4 Dialogues and context adapts the principles of linguistic variation and sociolinguistic variation and the premise of intentionality of social action to a dialogue frame of reference. It investigates basic dialogue principles and refines the notions of default context and particular context by rethinking boundaries, by comparing and contrasting Searle’s concept of we-intention (1991, 1992), Dascal’s concept of collective weintention (1992), and Brandom’s (1994) differentiation between I-we relations, and I-thou relations. Section 3.5. Conclusions summarizes and systematizes the results obtained.

3.2 Speech acts in context In speech act theory, two of the most fundamental domains of investigation have centred around the questions of how to do things with words (Austin 1980) and of what the necessary and sufficient conditions for the felicitous performance of a speech act are (Searle 1969). Implicit in the first question is the claim that things can actually be done with words, and that the things being done with words can be performed in a number of ways: they can be done well (or felicitously) and they can be done not so well (or infelicitously), and they can be done in a more direct manner, they can be done in a less direct manner and they can be done in a more or less indirect manner. The first research question indicates a scalar conception of how things actually can be done with words. Its research design, however, would also allow for a binary conception of the underlying notion of felicity. The second question does not predominantly concentrate on the performance of a speech act and on its social consequences, but rather on the contextual systematics required for the felicitous performance of a speech act. While Austinian speech act theory is generally assigned to the paradigm of language as social action, Searlean speech act theory is attributed to the domain of language and cognition (Sbisà 2002a). In spite of the two radically different approaches to language as action, speech act theory has

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shifted the focus of investigation from the autonomous word, proposition or sentence to words, propositions and utterances in context, namely to speakers and hearers (or, to employ sociopragmatic terminology, to coparticipants), to their actions, and to language and to the coparticipants’ employment of words. So, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a producer of language and for an interpreter of language to be assigned the status of a coparticipant? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for one or more words to be assigned the status of an utterance, and what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for an utterance to be assigned the status of a speech act? Before these questions are examined in detail, some brief introductory comments are given on the connectedness between speech acts and context. In pragmatics, speakers and hearers are conceived of as rational agents who perform and interpret speech acts intentionally. It is beyond the scope of this investigation to discuss the philosophical background of rationality, intentionality and practical reasoning in an appropriate manner (Brandom 1994; Cohen, Morgan and Pollack 1992; Habermas 1987; Searle 1983, 1999). Instead, Searle’s conception of intentionality is adopted, in which intentionality manifest itself in the intentional performance of a speech act, and where it is a constitutive component of perception and action: Intentionality is that feature of the mind by which mental states are directed at, or are about or of, or refer to, or aim at, states of affairs in the world. It is a peculiar feature in that the object need not actually exist in order to be represented by our intentional state. Thus, the child can believe that Santa Claus will come on Christmas Eve, even though Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Not all conscious states are intentional, and not all intentional states are conscious. (…) Nonetheless, though not all conscious states are intentional, and not all intentional states are conscious, there is an essential connection: we only understand intentionality in terms of consciousness. There are many intentional states that are not conscious, but they are the sort of thing that could potentially be conscious. (Searle 1999: 64–65)

In his seminal work on intentionality, Searle (1983) is more precise about the nature of an intentional state: “Intentional states with a direction to fit have contents which determine their conditions of satisfaction. But they do not function in an independent or atomistic fashion, for each Intentional state has its content and determines its conditions of satisfaction only in relation to numerous other Intentional states” (Searle 1983: 141). Thus, intentionality is not conceived of as an atomistic but rather as a context-dependent notion. As


a consequence of this, speech acts must also be conceived of in a contextdependent manner. Yet, the notion of context-dependence does not refer to the same type of context which is required for intentional states and for intentional speech acts. Adopting Penco’s (1999) differentiation between objective context, viz. a set of features of the world we can express as, e.g. time, place or speaker, and cognitive context, namely a set of assumptions about the world we can express as language, axioms or rules, to our notion of context-dependence above, the context-dependence of intentional states and intentions is necessarily anchored to cognitive context, where the coparticipant’s “subjective states relate [him or her] to the rest of the world, and the general name of that relationship is ‘intentionality’ “(Searle 1999: 87). At this stage, it is important to differentiate between a subjective representation of the world and an individual representation of the world. That is to say, a conception of context as a subjective or as a cognitive (epistemic) representation of the world does not refer to an individual’s set of beliefs, but rather to an individual set of beliefs which may belong to an individual or to a community. Yet, the two types of contexts are not independent of one another. Rather, they are connected through the linguistic device of an indexical: “Indexicals are the linguistic elements which connect us directly to the external world. (…) There is no use of demonstration without anaphora; but with anaphora we build a conceptual link around our terms and use them always inside a kind of theory (right or wrong) about what is happening” (Penco 1999: 275). It is the employment of indexicals in the performance of a speech act which connects a cognitive context with an objective context. For this reason, the context-dependence of speech acts is not only anchored to a cognitive context, but also to an objective context. But are speech acts anchored to cognitive and objective contexts only? In spite of the fact that “context is one of those linguistic terms which is constantly used in all kinds of context but never explained” (Asher 1994: 730), context has been examined with regard to possible deliminations and possible decontextualizations. Yet context is always relative because “[t]here is no ultimate outer context, but it is always possible to transcend the context in which we are. This gives rise to the possibility of an infinite regress, but it seems that this infinite regress is harmless, and represents our condition of limited humans” (Penco 1999: 280). In addition to the categories of cognitive context relevant to the field of cognitive science, for instance psychology, distributed cognition, cognitive semantics or relevance theory, and objective context relevant to the field of philosophy, e.g. computational linguistics, dynamic interpretation theory, discourse representation theory or formal semantics,


context has been further categorized into the categories of social context and sociocultural context in the fields of ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics and ethnography of speaking. Here, social context is distinguished from objective and cognitive contexts insofar as social context can be conceived of as a subset of both objective context and cognitive context, and sociocultural context can be conceived of as a subset of social context.4 Moreover, context is differentiated with regard to an entity which is already given and thus static, if not independent from an action or object, and with regard to a phenomenon which is dynamic and thus interactionally organized. In addition to the categories of cognitive, objective, social and sociocultural contexts, context is further distinguished with regard to a default context and with regard to a particular context. While the former is based on default positions, viz. “views we hold prereflectively so that any departure from them requires a conscious effort and convincing argument” (Searle 1999: 9), and “taken-for-granted presuppositions” or “the Background of our thought and language” (Searle 1999: 10), the latter is based on deviations from the default or unmarked context. Adapting the functional-grammar conception of markedness (Givón 1993) to the differentiation between marked and default contexts, the calculation of the connectedness between a communicative action and a marked context requires additional cognitive effort. Or, to employ Searle’s own words: “In the normal case, I take for granted that I am an embodied agent engaged in all sorts of encounters with the world around me. Any single experience only makes the kind of sense to me that it does because it is part of a network of other experiences, and it goes on against a Background or taken-for-granted capacities I have for coping with the world” (Searle 1999: 30, 31). Against this background, language can no longer be assigned an autonomous status. Adopting Penco’s position about indexicals and Searle’s conception of language as describing and constituting institutional facts (Searle 1999: 115, 135) and of linguistic symbols as being symbolic, public and conventional (Searle 1995: 66), the role of language in speech act theory needs to be reassessed. That is, the necessary and sufficient conditions required for the felicitous performance of a speech act can no longer be reduced to the intentional performance of an illocutionary and a propositional act, and the corre-

4.This is not to say that those fields of sociolinguistics define their conceptions of social and sociocultural contexts as subsets of an objective context. From context and contextualization-based viewpoints, however, social context is one specific interpretation of objective context.


sponding inference processes involved. Instead, it must be conceived of as a speaker constructing an utterance in a social context, viz. s/he selects lexical items, grammatical constructions and phonological realizations and intonational contours stored in her/his cognitive context, and intends her/his utterance to count as one particular speech act. Analogously, a hearer interprets the utterance with regard to the words, grammatical constructions and phonological realization and intonational contours employed and with regard to what particular speech act the utterance counts as. This is due to the fact that the concept of a speech act is a theoretical construct or, by analogy to the generative approach to language, a deep-structure phenomenon, which is anchored to the cognitive system. For this reason, it is not the actual speech act which is exchanged in natural-language communication or in conversational interaction. Rather, a speaker intends her/his linguistic surface-structure to count as a particular speech act, for instance as a promise, as a request or as an assertive. Or, to adopt the hearer perspective, the hearer encounters, viz. perceives a linguistic surface-structure, and decides what to do with it and how to proceed. That is, s/he decides whether the linguistic surface is directed at her/him. If the answer is yes, the linguistic surface is assigned the status of a contribution and the hearer interprets it with regard to (1) what the linguistic surface expresses, and (2) what action the linguistic surface performs. In the relevance-theoretic framework (Sperber and Wilson 1996), a linguistic surface-structure which is seen as directed at a hearer, is assigned the status of an act of ostensive communication. Only then is its communicative meaning inferred and assigned the status of a contribution whose interpretation results in a relevant contribution. Depending on the theoretical frameworks employed, the connectedness between speech act and context has focussed on cognition and on cognitive effects embedded in cognitive contexts, or on convention and on social and conventional effects embedded in linguistic and social contexts, such as entitlement and obligation. In this extended frame of reference, the actions performed by the coparticipants through language can no longer be evaluated as true and false, grammatical and ungrammatical, or acceptable or unacceptable only. Rather, the triadic relation between the three constitutive parts of speaking, that is coparticipant, language and context, has to be examined with regard to the following questions: – –

what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a producer (speaker) and interpreter (hearer) of language to be assigned the status of a coparticipant? what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for one or more words to be assigned the status of an utterance?


–

what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for an utterance to be assigned the status of a speech act?

To analyse these questions adequately, the following aspects are also taken into consideration, namely how things are done with words, what types of context are required, whether contexts are given or constructed, what action the coparticipants intend to perform, whether the coparticipants achieve their communicative goal, and what lexical items, grammatical constructions and phonological realizations and intonational contours they use to do things with words and to achieve things with words. In the following, the connectedness between speech acts and contexts is investigated in the section How to do things with words or a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, which analyses the status of intentions in Austin’s and Searle’s conceptions of speech act theory as regards the constitutive parts of coparticipants, language, and context. In Intentions in communication further developments of the speech-act-theoretic frame of reference are examined, and special attention is given to the works of Brandom (1994), Gibbs (1999), Goody (1995), Levinson (1995) and to the contributors of the volume intentions in communication edited by Cohen, Morgan and Pollack (1992). Attempt and achievement, and process and product examines the connectedness between the different types of intention examined and explicitly connects them with the constitutive elements of coparticipant and context. The investigation of speech acts in context closes with an analysis of the status of language in speech act theory. 3.2.1 How to do things with words or a set of necessary and sufficient conditions Austin’s and Searle’s conceptions of speech act theory have paved the way for an investigation of ordinary language in pragmatics by shifting the focus of investigation from the rigid framework of formal semantics to the actiontheoretic premises of rationality, intentionality and communication. But how are these basic premises accounted for and how do they manifest themselves in communication: do they manifest themselves in the actual performance of a speech act regarding locution, illocution and perlocution, respectively propositional and illocutionary acts, or are they already manifest at the levels of language production and language interpretation, and utterance formulation and utterance interpretation? In speech act theory, speakers, and, of course, hearers as Grimshaw (1980)


has convincingly shown, act in a rational manner by performing intentional actions, such as speech acts and other social acts. As speech acts are done with words, language can no longer be assigned an autonomous status. Rather, language is conceived of as a relational construct anchored to coparticipants and to linguistic and social contexts. For this reason, an investigation of speech acts has to account for speakers, hearers and the world, in which they exchange information and about which they exchange information. Austin’s and Searle’s conceptions of speech act theory accommodate these basic connections, albeit in a different manner. In his 1955 lectures, Austin anchors his conception of a speech act to conventions, as is reflected in his conception of felicity conditions: (A.1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further (A.2) the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. (B.1) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and (B.2) completely. (Γ.1) Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend to conduct themselves, and further (Γ.2) must actually so conduct themselves subsequently. (Austin 1980: 14, 15)

In spite of the then revolutionary connection between convention on the one hand and meaning on the other hand, Austin’s felicity conditions are too general to be systematized and classified for a felicitous investigation about the connectedness between language, action and context. Searle’s conception of speech act theory (1969) is more explicit about the status of convention. He anchors a speech act to a set of necessary and sufficient conditions regarding language, semantics and convention. Here, a speech act is the minimal unit of communication and consists of an illocutionary force and a propositional content. It is defined by a list of constitutive rules, which realize underlying conventions. In this framework, the use of language is regular and systematic. Thus, speaking a language is engaging in a (highly complex) rule-governed form of intentional behaviour, and the performance of a speech act is carried out in accordance with a conventional procedure defined by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. In order to achieve some conventional effect, the


procedure must be executed sincerely, correctly and completely. Analogous to Searle’s conception of ordinary-language communication, the minimal unit of linguistic communication in Austin’s framework consists of a speech act. Unlike Searle’s definition, interlocutors exchange speech acts by performing locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts (Austin 1980). While locution and illocution, whose force can be made explicit by a performative formula, are defined in a framework based on conventions, the perlocution is defined by the achievement of non-conventional effects. From an intention viewpoint, locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, respectively propositional and illocutionary acts, are all actions and therefore are performed intentionally. As regards their sequential organization, they are performed simultaneously. While the locutionary act determines sense and reference, the illocutionary act bridges the gap between the individual coparticipants by the illocution’s “invited response” (Austin 1980: 118). The perlocutionary act, by contrast, manifests itself in the “achievement of a perlocutionary object (convince, persuade) or the production of a perlocutionary sequel” (ibid.). The Searlean conception of a speech act is even more explicit about the intentionality of the illocutionary act, propositional act and utterance act.5 The internal sequential organization of the utterance act, propositional act and illocutionary act is explicated by Searle as follows: I am not saying, of course, that these are separate things that speakers do, as it happens, simultaneously, but rather that in performing an illocutionary act one characteristically performs propositional acts and utterance acts. Nor should it be thought from this that utterance acts and propositional acts stand to illocutionary acts in the way buying a ticket and getting on a train stand to taking a railroad trip. They are not means to ends; rather, utterance acts stand to propositional and illocutionary acts in the way in which, e.g., making an ‘X’ on a ballot paper stand to voting. (Searle 1969: 24)

But what status do Austin and Searle assign to a coparticipant and how do they account for the connectedness between language and context? Austin’s conclusion that ordinary-language utterances, which are produced by a speaker and directed at a hearer, do not simply describe the world, but are employed to perform a speech act was very radical at that time. Unlike Searle’s unilateral conception of a speech act, Austin’s notion is not restricted to the

5.The status of intentionality in Searle’s framework is discussed in detail in the following section Intentions in communication.

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speaker’s domain. Rather, Austin stresses the dialogical and thus sequential nature of a speech act which manifests itself in the speaker’s intention to achieve some effect: “an effect must be achieved on the audience if the illocutionary act is to be carried out. (…) Generally the effect amounts to bringing about the understanding of the meaning and of the force of the locution” (Austin 1980: 116). Thus, speech acts are directed at one or more coparticipants in order to achieve and secure uptake. The dialogue-orientation of a speech act is also implicit in Austin’s differentiation between intended and unintended effects, and between attempt and achievement. But on what premises are these distinctions based? And do they refer to a particular action? In a simplified semiotic setting, a speaker encodes a message and sends signals to a hearer who decodes them. If that is adapted to a speech-act scenario, a speaker performs a communicative action by formulating one or more utterances thereby realizing locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. While the locution is attributed to the speaker’s domain only, the illocution, due to its conventional status, fulfils a bridging function between the speaker’s and the hearer’s domains. Because of its non-conventional status, the perlocution can neither be anchored to the speaker’s or to the hearer’s domains, nor can it be assigned a bridging function. Instead, it is anchored to the set of a speaker and a hearer, and therefore represents a dialogue principle par excellence, as is illustrated below. In the following dialogue, which is adopted from Levinson (1983: 292), speakers A and B exchange four speech acts, namely an assertion (A-1), an acceptance (B-1), another assertion (A-2), and an apology and the indirect speech act of a rejection (B-2): (49) A-1: B-1: A-2: B-2:

I have a fourteen year old son Well that’s all right I also have a dog Oh I’m sorry

In (A-1), the speaker refers to her/himself by the indexical expression I and predicates that s/he has a fourteen year-old son. Due to the assertive force, s/he bridges the gap between herself/himself and speaker B by inviting her/him to respond. This is complied with by speaker B in her/his contribution6 (B-1), in which s/he refers to the previous contribution by the indexical expression that and predicates that s/he does not object to the information transmitted in and

6.In this contribution the term speech act denotes an individual communicative act whereas the term contribution denotes a communicative act embedded in discourse.


through (A-1); this is also manifest in B’s employment of the discourse marker well in (B-1), which establishes local coherence by signifying some kind of contrast, such as a different set of assumptions (Smith and Jucker 2002). As the contribution (B-1) does not contain any further information, it invites uptake and initiates another sequel, namely (A-2), in which speaker A provides further information about her/his family. From a linguistic-surface viewpoint, the contribution (B-2) seems to realize a prototypical apology — but is this really the case? To answer this question in a satisfactory manner, we have to adopt Searle’s differentiation between direct and indirect speech acts (1975), Levinson’s differentiation between indirect speech acts and conventionally indirect speech acts (1983), Morgan’s distinctions between speech acts and the performance of a speech act, and language and language usage (1992), and Austin’s differentiation between intended and unintended effects. That is, we have to extend the frame of investigation from a unilateral speech act to dialogue and conversation (Grice 1975; Searle 1975, 1992), and differentiate between local sequentiality manifest in the conditional-relevance concepts of adjacency position and adjacency pair (Levinson 1983), and non-local sequentiality manifest in the concept of adjacency relation, such as an adjacency relation between a topical-sequence section and an opening or closing section, and adjacency relations between discourse topics and subtopics. Furthermore, we need to distinguish between local perlocutionary effects anchored to the immediate linguistic and social contexts, and non-local perlocutionary effects anchored to more remote linguistic and social contexts. As regards the dialogue examined above, the perlocutionary effects anchored to the immediate context of the contribution (B-1), which is represented by (A-1), (A-2) and the immediate physical environment shared by speakers A and B, consist of the response to the information provided and they consist of the coparticipants’ attitudes towards the contribution exchanged, for example. In successful communication, these local perlocutionary effects are generally not explicitly related to the global social and linguistic contexts represented by the communicative genre, the political system, ideology or gravity;7 they may, however, become relevant and may be explicated in a negotiation-of-validity sequence, where the validity of a specific reference, predication or presupposition is at stake. But does the framework of speech act theory allow for the accommodation of the differentiation between micro and macro domains? 7.Bratman(1992) discusses the complexity of intentional and unintentional effects in a strategic-bomber setting with regard to intended and unintended casualties.

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In his conception of felicity conditions, Searle specifies the immediate linguistic and social contexts required for the felicitous performance of a speech act with regard to normal input and output conditions, propositional content and preparatory conditions, and the sincerity and essential conditions. These rules are supplemented by the following two requirements: firstly, that the speaker intends that her/his utterance will produce in the hearer a belief that the sincerity and essential conditions obtain by means of the recognition of the intention to produce this belief, and that the speaker intends that recognition to be achieved by means of the recognition of the sentence as one conventionally used to produce such beliefs. Secondly, that the semantical rules of the dialect spoken by the speaker and hearer are such that the utterance is correctly and sincerely uttered if and only if all of the previous conditions obtain. As regards their internal sequential organization, the rules are ordered. For this reason, Searle’s felicity conditions and Austin’s differentiation between intended and unintended effects are based on the implicit premise that a speech act is part of an exchange, if not embedded in a larger sequence. Moreover, a speech act is always anchored to a specific set of felicity conditions and therefore is context-dependent. In the following, more recent developments of the speech-act-theoretic frame of reference are examined, and special attention is given to the connectedness between intention and unilateral speech act, and the connectedness between intention and communication. 3.2.2 Intentions in communication In a speech-act theoretic framework, a speech act and its constitutive acts, that is locutionary or propositional acts, illocutionary acts, perlocutionary acts, and utterance acts or phatic and rhetic acts, are performed intentionally. Regarding their sequential organization, they are performed simultaneously. The intentional performance of a speech act is anchored to the action-theoretic premises of rationality, intentionality and communication. But is intentionality really such a clear-cut matter? In the examination of intentionality in speech act theory, the complexity of this phenomenon has already surfaced. In the following, the conceptions of intentionality in the field of philosophy of language is analysed in the works of Bach (1992), Morgan (1992), Sadock (1992), Thomason (1992) and Brandom (1994), and the conceptions of intentionality in the field of social interaction and social intelligence are examined in the works of Brown (1995), Goody (1995), Drew (1995) and Levinson (1995). In the original conceptions of speech act theory, intention has been


anchored to the speaker’s domain as is reflected in the categories of speakerintended meaning, speaker intention, and a speech act’s constitutive acts, such as utterance act, propositional act and illocutionary act, and phonetic act, phatic act, locution, illocution and perlocution. Yet both rationality and intentionality are hardly ever explicitly referred to in the performance of a speech act, as is the case in (50) and (51), for example: (50) I have the intention to inform you that I am not going to attend your course on pragmatics. (51) I act in accordance with the principle of rationality and the conclusion which I have just drawn is therefore also in accordance with the principle of rationality.

Rather, rationality and intentionality are amongst the basic premises of naturallanguage communication, where they are assigned a presuppositional status. For this reason, they are generally not spelled out in communication. Explicit references to rationality and intentionality, as is the case in (50) and (51), generally occur in marked contexts, critical situations or negotiation-of-validity sequences, where something has gone wrong. That is, when a student has been requested to make her/his position clear as is the case in (50), or when a speaker’s status does not seem quite clear as is the case in (51). The attribution of explicit references to one or more basic pragmatic presuppositions to a marked context is even more obvious in the contributions (52) and (53): (52) I did not have the intention to insult you when I called this department a pigsty. I was simply referring to all the rubbish on the floor. (53) I don’t think you should take it that way. Aren’t you being a bit irrational?

In (52) and (53) references to intentionality and rationality occur in so-called negative contexts. Here, the existence of a particular speaker intention is denied in (52), and the attribution of rationality to their coparticipant is queried in (53). Both contributions are instances of self-correction and interpersonal reformulation (Fetzer 1994: 220), and they repair the perlocutionary effects of an infelicity by recontextualizing a prior contribution and in the mean time they provide a solution to a misunderstanding induced by the speaker. In (52) an evaluation (‘pigsty’) anchored to the locution or proposition has been interpreted as referring to the force or to the illocutionary act and thus to the interpersonal domain. Here, the speaker makes it unambiguously clear, that her/his previous contribution was not intended as an insult, but rather as a negative evaluation of some external state of the world. Contribution (53) is

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also intended to solve a misunderstanding. Unlike (52), however, rationality is at stake. That is, the speaker expresses some doubts about whether their coparticipant’s behaviour can be seen as being in accordance with the principle of rationality; what is of interest is the reference to the negative counterpart (irrational) of rationality. But what is rationality? It is beyond the scope of this investigation of the connectedness between context and appropriateness to analyse the phenomenon of rationality in detail. Instead, Brandom’s (1994) approach and Vanderveken’s (1992) operational definition are adopted, which are supplemented by Goody’s (1995) and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) socialinteraction perspectives. Vanderveken defines rationality as follows: Competent speakers are rational. Language is the work of reason, and from the point of view of speech act theory, rationality is built up in the use of language for at least two reasons. First, speakers are minimally consistent. (…) Second, there is a restricted law of compatibility of strong implication with respect to illocutionary points with a nonempty direction to fit. (Vanderveken 1992: 211)

Rationality manifests itself in rational agents who perform speech acts and in rational agents who infer the illocutionary force of speech acts. But rationality is not restricted to the production and interpretation of a speech act, it is also manifest in Goody’s (1995) conception of anticipatory interactive planning (AIP), that is in the coparticipants’ calculation of perlocutionary effects: “Rational agents [are] calculating beings who are able to calculate the consequences of their own behavior” (Goody 1995: 2). The extension of rationality to the domain of social interaction has its roots in Brown and Levinson’s seminal work on politeness (1987), where the traditional notions of a rational speaker and a rational hearer are replaced by a model person and their rational face wants and their rational information wants, and where the traditional notion of a speech act is replaced by the communicative act of a face-threatening act (FTA), which accommodates both the model person’s face wants and the model person’s information wants: “In this Brown and Levinson framework, then, sociolinguistic variation (different kinds of language use in different situations) is portrayed as rationally tied — via demonstrable means-ends reasoning links — to the kinds of things people are trying to do when they speak, and crosscultural parallels are viewed as attributable to the existence of similar rational processes underlying human interaction” (Brown 1995: 154). The differentiation between expressive rationality and an understanding of


rationality exclusively on the model of instrumental or means-end reasoning is thoroughly examined by Brandom, who refers to Kant’s distinction between natural and rational beings: “As natural beings, we act according to rules. As rational beings, we act according to our conceptions of rules” (Brandom 1994: 30). He then explicitates two important consequences of that distinction, namely first, “this [distinction] involves implicit acknowledgment of norms in practice” (Brandom 1994: 36), and second, “taking or treating performances as correct or incorrect, approving or disapproving them in practice, is explained in terms of positive and negative sanctions, rewards and punishments” (ibid.). Against this background, Brandom explicates the connectedness between rationality and communication, and between rational and linguistic practioners as follows: In the deontic scorekeeping model of inferentially articulated linguistic social practices, asserting is making a knowledge claim. The attitudes in terms of which the hybrid deontic status of knowledge is understood are just those in terms of which the significance of assertions is specified. Assertional practice is accordingly a version not only of the game of giving and asking for reasons but also of the game of making and defending claims to knowledge. Practioners who can produce and consume assertions are linguistic beings. Practioners who can produce and consume reasons are rational beings. On the account presented here, these are three ways of talking about the same practices and the same capacities. Underlying all of them is the inferentially and socially articulated notion of discursive commitment. (Brandom 1994: 203)

Brandom’s conception of communication is discursive. He explicates it in the framework of the game of giving and asking for reasons, and making and defending claims to knowledge. He argue that because “things [are] done intentionally. … One can act with a reason, but unintentionally … But only what is done intentionally can be done for a reason” (Brandom 1994: 244). Thus, it stands to reason that knowledge claims8 are also performed intentionally. But what is an intention? Analogously to the examination of rationality, the focus of the investigation is going to be on the question of how intentionality manifests itself in communication. In the following, the works collected in Intentions in Communication

8.Brandom’s conception of communication as giving and asking for reasons is adapted to the definition of the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim, which is introduced in Sections 3.4.2 and 3.4.2.1. In a validity-claim setting, communication is defined as postulating and ratifying validity claims.

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(Cohen, Morgan and Pollack 1992) are examined with regard to their conceptions of intention. Bratman (1992) contextualizes the concept of intention and differentiates between prior intentions and future-directed intentions. Thus, an intention is necessarily connected with other intentions, which are related as follows: “Prior intentions constrain further intentions” (Bratman 1992: 20). Due to the inherent complexity regarding the scenario as a whole, he postulates a holistic approach to practical reasoning, choice and intentionality, which he defines as follows: Principle of the holistic conclusion of practical reasoning. If I know that my A-ing will result in E, and I seriously consider this fact in my deliberation about whether to A and still go on to conclude in favor of A, then I am rational, my reasoning will have issued in a conclusions in favor of the overall scenario that include both my A-ing and my bringing about E. (For short, I will call this the principle of holistic inclusion). Principle of holistic choice. The holistic conclusion (of practical reasoning) in favor of an overall scenario is a choice of that scenario. The choice-intention principle. If on the basis of practical reasoning I choose to A and to B and to … then I intend to A and B and to … Principle of intention division. If I intend to A and to B and to …. and I know that A and B are within my control, then if I am rational, I will both intend to A and to B. (Bratman 1992: 25)

Like the social-interaction concept of AIP, Bratman’s conception of intentionality goes beyond the individual action. This extension of frame is also reflected in Cohen and Levesque (1992), who differentiate between futuredirected intentions which constrain planning, and present-directed intention which causally produce behaviour. Again, Cohen and Levesque see intentions as interconnected, but unlike Bratman, they define intentions as contents of plans. Litman and Allen (1992) take the procedure one step further and anchor their conception of intention to higher-order discourse. They postulate the existence of discourse intentions and attribute them to higher-order plans. Perrault’s (1992) conception of intention is also inherently discursive. Unlike Litman and Allen, he does not focus on discrete individuals but rather on the dyad of speaker and hearer. This is reflected in his differentiation between an intention and the commitment or willingness to accept the consequences of an utterance, to which he assigns the status of default consequences. The extension of frame from monologue to dialogue and the introduction of default consequences is also of relevance to the investigation of intentions in communication because defaults are defeasible. As regards the contributions


(52) and (53) examined above, the defeasibilty of the commitment to accept the consequences of a communicative contribution is reflected in the speaker’s explication of her/his intended illocutionary force, namely as I did not have the intention to insult you (…) I was simply referring to and I don’t think you should take it that way. By making the assumed hearer-intended force explicit, the speaker cancels the inferred force, and by cancelling the hearer’s inferred force, the speaker cancels the inferred consequences that would have resulted from the speech act of an insult, for instance. The complexity of intentions is also reflected in the multifunctionality of a speech act which, following Sadock (1992), has a representational function, an expressive function and a social function. Sadock’s representative function is anchored to describing a state of affair, as is the case with the reference pigsty in (52), the expressive and social functions manifest themselves in the expression of illocutionary intentions (and its interrelated intentions), of perlocutionary effects and of the corresponding AIP: “When participants engage in conversation, any move or turn is accountable; that is, inferring what an utterance means and selecting an appropriate response involves ascribing intentions to our co-interactants” (Drew 1995: 112). Thus, intentionality is not only ascribed to the performance of a speech act or to a communicative contribution but also to its perlocutionary effects and to possible responses. Or, to employ Jerry Morgan’s own words : Intentionality is surely fundamental to the interpretation by ordinary people of the communicative acts they encounter. In fact, to classify some event as an act is to attribute certain intentions to the event, as far as I can see. (…) Rather, in human practice the strategy is to maximize attribution of intention; everything that could be taken as intentional is taken as intentional, unless there is some good reason to believe otherwise. (Morgan 1992: 189)

According to Bach (1992), the premises that there exist different intentions and that speaker meaning is a matter of reflexive intention are widely accepted in the field of pragmatics. Yet the question of how their recognition relates to their fulfilment is still rather controversial. Thomason (1992) and Levinson (1995) attempt to solve the problem by explicitly connecting intention and action on the one hand, and intention, action and coordination on the other hand. Following Thomason (1992), speaker meaning is a sort of coordinationoriented intention. It is intrinsically connected with accommodation,9 which

9.Thomason adopted the concept of accommodation from Lewis (1979).

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regulates the removing of obstacles to achieve the desires and goals we attribute to others. Moreover, speaker meaning is neither produced nor interpreted in isolation. Rather, it is anchored to a conversational record which contains (1) information that is public, (2) presumptions, and (3) an update operator. Levinson goes one crucial step further and accommodates both the speaker’s and the hearer’s perspectives. According to him, natural-language communication is in need of a reasoning mechanism which accommodates both viewpoints: The Schelling-cum-Grice model of coordination and communication relies on the recognition of intentions: That is the need to compute not only from intention to action (as in a logic of action planning) but also in reverse as it were, from behaviour to intention that lies behind it. (…) For the nature of logical inference in general, and practical reasoning in particular, is that there can be no determinate way of inferring premises from conclusions. Inferences are asymmetrical things. (…) Simple though the point is, it establishes a fundamental asymmetry between actor-based accounts and interpreter-based accounts, between acting and understanding other’s actions. (Levinson 1995: 231)

To summarize the discussion, intentions are expressed and ascribed, and actions are classified as intentional or as done with intention (Gibbs 1999). Intentions have representational, expressive and social functions, and are differentiated with regard to – – – – – – – – –

prior and future-directed intentions behaviour-controlling intentions intentions as contents of plans higher-order discourse intentions intentions and default consequences reflexive intentions coordination-oriented intentions intentions and conversational records intentions and up-date mechanism

Thus, felicitous or successful communication depends on the recognition of the speaker’s intention in context and requires the corresponding reasoning mechanisms, as has been succinctly argued for by Levinson (1995). In the following, intentionality is further examined with regard to Austin’s differentiation between attempt and achievement, which are anchored to a speech’s acts perloctionary effects, and with regard to the context notions of process and product.


3.2.3 Attempt and achievement, and process and product Austin offers another very promising aspect to the investigation of speech acts, namely the differentiation between attempt and achievement. If these notions are compared and contrasted with the dialogical conception of context as process and of context as product (Duranti and Goodwin 1992), the notion of achievement focusses on the actual outcome of the speaker-intended speech act and thus is retrospective and both product- and dialogue-oriented, while the notion of attempt is prospective and speaker- and process-oriented. As regards the examples examined above, all of the speech acts performed in the dialogue (49) can be classified as attempts to communicate the illocutionary acts of assertion (I have a fourteen year old son; I also have a dog), the illocutionary act of acceptance (Well that’s all right), the illocutionary act of rejection (Oh I’m sorry), the illocutionary act of commissive (I have the intention to inform you that I am not going to …) in (50). The speech act performed in (51) can be classified as the illocutionary act of assertion (I act in accordance with the principles of rationality …). And the speech acts performed in (52) and (53) can be classified as the illocutionary acts of expressive (I did not have the intention to insult you …; I don’t think you should take it that way …). Regarding the question of whether the attempted illocutionary acts have been achieved, the subsequent communicative contributions have to be taken into consideration. In dialogue (49), all of the attempted illocutionary acts are achieved. This is manifest in the subsequent responses, namely the acceptance of an assertion and the rejection of an assertion which both are relevant responses. Other possible responses which signify achievement are questions referring to the content or to the force of a previous contribution, or to employ Brandom’s terminology, asking for reasons, which initiates a negotiation-of-validity sequence. Regarding the distinction between process and product, all of the examples are instances of a process of communication, they all initiate or respond to a previous discursive move. But not all of them are instances of a product: all of the four contributions of dialogue (49) constitute the product, namely the dialogue. Regarding the speech acts (50) to (53), the question whether they can be assigned the status of a product cannot be answered because there is no evidence about subsequent behaviour or talk which may signify whether the attempted illocutionary acts of (50), (51), (52) and (53) have been ratified through an acceptance or through a rejection and therefore constitute an achievement, or whether a negotiation-of-validity sequence has been initiated. Thus, the discursive notions of attempt and achievement, and

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the context notion of process are calculated with regard to the immediate discursive context whereas the context notion of product requires a framework going beyond local adjacency, such as a communicative project or a local communicative project (Linell 1998), discourse topic or communicative genre.10 But on what premises are the differentiations between attempt and achievement, and between discourse as process and discourse as product based? From a semantic viewpoint, the concept of achievement presupposes an attempt to achieve some goal. But ‘what’ is actually achieved or attempted in dialogue, and how is it calculated? As regards the local level of exchange, coparticipants generally attempt to achieve a micro communicative goal by realizing a micro communicative intention11 through one or more speech acts in a single dialogue exchange. As regards the non-local level of a communicative project, coparticipants generally attempt to achieve a macro communicative goal by realizing a macro communicative intention. Or, to employ Litman and Allen’s (1992) terminology, coparticipants generally attempt to realize a discourse intention. Both the discourse intention and the macro intention are anchored to a set of necessary and sufficient speech acts, which constitute the larger-scale communicative project. Thus, the differentiation between attempt and achievement is based on the higher-order principle of communicative goal, which cannot be defined in the framework of a single speech act. Instead, it requires a dialogical frame of reference, in which speech acts are not only performed but also taken up by the hearer’s response(s). Only then is it possible to conclude whether a communicative goal has been achieved through the realization of one or more communicative intentions, or whether the attempt has been unsuccessful. So, are the notions of locution, illocution and perlocution, respectively propositional act and illocutionary act, the differentiation between discourse as process and discourse as product, and the differentiation between various types of micro communicative intentions, default consequences and various types of macro communicative intentions sufficient conditions for explicitating the connectedness between speech acts, contributions and context? In the examination of How to do things with words or a set of necessary and

10.In spite of the fact that Linell’s notion of a communicative project (1998) is less precise than the concept of a communicative genre (Goody 1995; Luckmann 1995), communicative project and communicative genre are used as functional synonyms in this work. 11.Since the investigation takes place in a discursive frame of reference, the use of the speech act notion of illocution seems inappropriate. Instead, Recanati’s concept of communicative intention (1986) is adopted.


sufficient conditions and of Intentions in communication, it has already been pointed out that there is hardly any explicit account of the relevance of language in speech act theory and its more recent developments — in spite of the fact that speech acts and contributions are done with words. Moreover, there is neither an account of the interdependence of linguistic and social contexts and of language and language use, nor is there an investigation of the question of how language is selected in order to perform a speech act or a communicative act in communication. From a speaker viewpoint, the question of a speech act’s linguistic surface is of no immediate relevance. However, if the hearer perspective is adopted, doing things with speech acts is no longer such a simple matter, as Grimshaw has convincingly shown in his work on misunderstandings (1980) and in his categorization of the most important nodes where communication can go wrong. He differentiates between the linguistic level of surface-structure, i.e. the linguistic representation of speaker-intended meaning, and the intentional level of deep structure, i.e. the force of a speech act. Moreover, he argues for the accommodation of the discursive category of interactional intention to the investigation of natural-language (mis)communication and thus for the differentiation between discourse as process and discourse as product. The question of the linguistic surface of a speech act has also been referred to in Levinson (1995) who claims that natural-language pragmatics requires a nonmonotonic reasoning mechanism. In the following the status of language in speech act theory and its more recent developments in the contributions of the volume edited by Cohen, Morgan and Pollack (1992), and in Recanati (1998) are closely examined with regard to the question of what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for a sequence of words to be assigned the status of a contribution. 3.2.4 Speech acts and language In the discussion of locutionary, respectively propositional, and illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, we have distinguished between speech acts and the performance of a speech act, and between language and language use. Despite the fact that speech acts are generally performed through language, the status of language in speech act theory has not been explicitly accounted for. So, what status do the pioneers of speech act theory, Austin and Searle, assign to language? According to Austin, to say anything is to perform a phonetic act through which utterances or phones are produced. In addition, another act, namely the phatic act “of uttering certain vocables or words, i.e. noises of

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certain types belonging to and as belonging to a certain vocabulary, in a certain construction, i.e. conforming to and as conforming to a certain grammar, with a certain intention, &c.” (Austin 1980: 92) is performed, and both phonetic and phatic acts are used with a “certain more or less definite ‘sense’ and a more or less definite ‘reference’ “(Austin 1980: 93). Analogously, Searle explicates the status of language by postulating an utterance act which consists of uttering words, which are composed of morphemes, and words compose sentences. Thus, speaking a language, according to Searle means formulating utterance acts and performing propositional and illocutionary acts: “Thus, in performing different utterance acts, a speaker may perform the same propositional and illocutionary acts. (…) Utterance acts consist simply in uttering strings of words. Illocutionary and propositional acts consist characteristically in uttering words in sentences in certain contexts, under certain conditions and with certain intentions” (Searle 1969: 24, 25). Implicit in Searle’s characterization of an utterance act is the principle of sociolinguistic variation (Brown 1995), which states that an illocutionary act can be performed with a number of different linguistic surface-structures, or to employ Searle’s terminology, with different utterance acts. In spite of the fact that Searle himself explicates the fact that a speaker may perform one specific illocutionary act through different utterance acts, he is not very precise about how a speaker designs or formulates her/his utterance acts. But is the uttering of strings of words really an appropriate description of the performance of an utterance act? In the following, the phenomenon of a linguistic string is investigated in detail with regard to the necessary and sufficient conditions required for assigning a sequence of words the status of an utterance act. In natural-language communication, the strings of words, through which speech acts are performed, are generally not picked randomly. For instance, to perform a directive, we can neither refer to the hearer’s desire as is the case in (54), nor can we refer to some past event as is the case in (55):12 (54) You want some chocolate fudge cake. (55) You went to Paris.

12.This is not to say that these utterances may not be assigned the illocutionary force of a directive. To be assigned that function, however, they require a particular contextual configuration, such as a negotiation-of-validity sequence or some kind of interrogation. There, they can request the addressee to provide reasons for a particular type of request — but they cannot function as request for more cake or for a trip to Paris.


It also seems impossible to select rather poetic strings of words, such as (56) or (57): (56) A rose is a rose. (57) I was wandering lonely as a cloud.

Thus, the concept of an utterance act and the performance of an utterance act seems to be more complex than simply uttering of a string of words — even if the string of words is produced in accordance with normal input and normal output conditions (Searle 1969: 57), and therefore is in accordance with the norms of the language system. As a consequence of this, we need a refined framework which explicitly connects communicative intention, language and language use with the linguistic and social contexts. In functional grammar (Givón 1993; Halliday 1996) and in sociolinguistics (Fasold 1990; Holmes 1991; Wardhaugh 1998) language and language use are investigated with regard to their connectedness with linguistic and social contexts, and the connectedness between language and language use is defined by a set of paradigmatic and syntagmatic choices (Halliday 1996) and by sociolinguistic variation (Brown 1995), which state that the employment of particular ‘bits-and-pieces’ of language, of particular grammatical constructions and of particular phonological realizations and intonational contours — and thus of a particular string of words — transmits specific semantic meanings and specific social meanings. This is due to the fact that language use is anchored to social and linguistic contexts. For instance, the address terms sir and madam signify both formal and institutional contexts, whereas the terms of endearment mate and sugar are restricted to informal and non-institutional contexts.13 This is also manifest in the employment of other lexical items, such as intensifiers and nouns, which can be classified with regard to fairly neutral contexts, such as very, quite or rather, and police officer, and fairly informal contexts, for instance, friggin or absolutely, and cop. If the principle of sociolinguistic variation is adapted to the communicative-action paradigm, coparticipants may, in principle, realize their communicative goals and perform illocutionary acts by formulating an infinite number of possible utterance acts. If this is adapted to the Searlean premise that constitutive rules create the possibility of

13.This is not to say that terms of endearment do not occur in institutional or formal contexts. If they occur in such settings, they generally indicate a shift of frame, e.g. a momentary informal episode.

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new forms of behaviour, the refined principle of sociolinguistic variation is of even greater importance. That is, new forms of behaviour do not only manifest themselves on the local level of an illocutionary act. They also manifest themselves on the more remote level regarding the reconstruction of social context. So, do coparticipants really pick strings of words at random for the realization of their communicative intentions and of their communicative goal(s)? To perform an indirect speech act or to get in a conversational implicature (Grice 1975), coparticipants frequently exploit the semantic meaning of one or more lexical expressions or of one or more grammatical constructions by assigning them the function of an inference trigger. Furthermore, coparticipants may also select to spell out the force of an illocutionary act to signify a specific institutional context, where the explicit representation of force is a constitutive part of discourse, as is the case in a courtroom interactions or in a wedding ceremony, for example. Or, they may select to make implicit meaning explicit in a negotiating-of-meaning sequence, where the appropriateness of a specific lexical item, such as the reference pigsty in (52), of a grammatical construction or of a communicative action is at stake. For these reasons, strings of words, grammatical constructions and phonological realizations and intonational contours are not picked at random. Rather, “[t]he imposition of intentionality on a certain type of physical structure determines both a formal structure — the syntax — and a meaningful content — the semantics.” (Searle 1995: 99). For this reason, grammatical constructions, lexical items and phonological realizations and intonational contours are selected with regard to the linguistic representation of a communicative intention which is, of course, interdependent on the contextual constraints of a higher-order communicative goal. So, how are things done with words? In general, speech act theory does not explicitly account for the status of language — despite the fact that speech acts are performed with words. In both frameworks language is described as a rule-governed system which contains words, vocables, grammatical constructions and phonological representations, and both frameworks are based on the implicit premise that the construction of sentences or utterances without a particular intention is meaningless, that is that the linguistic strings are only meaningful if constructed with a particular intention. Following Recanati, this position is also prevalent in the semiotic differentiation between sign-type, sign-token and symbol. Here, the sign-token is the actual lexical expression in a linguistic surface-structure, whereas the sign-type expresses deep-structure meaning:


A type is an abstract entity consisting of that which is common to the many tokens that instantiate it. (…) And a sign is a symbol, according to Peirce, when its type is conventionally associated with the thing it represents. It is in virtue of the convention associating the sign-type with the thing represented that each token of the sign represents that thing. In contrast, a sign is said to be an index when its tokens are “existentially” associated with the thing represented, that is when the association is a matter of fact rather than convention. (…) Because indexical meaning depends on an empirical or causal relation between signs and things, it is obvious that only sign-tokens, not sign-types, can have such meaning. (Recanati 1998: 128, 129)

The premise that the actual construction of an utterance act (Searle 1969) or the actual constructions of a phonetic act and of a phatic act (Austin 1980) as regards the selection of grammatical constructions, lexical items and phonological realizations and intonational contours is not really relevant to the investigation of a speech act has been widely accepted in the field of pragmatics. Yet the conclusion that the construction of sentences or utterances is irrelevant to a felicitous performance of a speech act does not seem to be valid. First of all, intentions are expressed in communication (Brandom 1994) and for their felicitous expression speakers must select appropriate grammatical constructions, appropriate lexical items and appropriate phonological realizations and intonational contours. The expression of the illocutionary point of directive by the declarative sentence (58) The blue dog is barking.

does not result in the addressee being able to infer the illocutionary force of a directive, and in the addressee being able to ratify it and possibly to perform it. Yet drawing the conclusion that directives cannot felicitously be expressed by declarative sentences is neither valid. For instance, the utterance (59) The blue telephone is ringing.

will generally result in the addressee being able to infer the illocutionary point — if the context, more precisely the cognitive, linguistic, social and sociocultural contexts, are appropriate. Second, lexical items, such as the pronoun I, demonstratives or tense markers and the like, are neither pure index nor pure type, as is pointed out by Recanati: A token-reflexive expression is an expression-type whose conventional meaning contains a reference to the token instantiating it. Thus, a token of “I” refers to the person who utters that token. Each token of the word “I” reflects

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the fact of its own utterance: the meaning of the word-type is such that, in order to determine what one of its tokens refer to, one must take into account the specific occasion of the token’s utterance and the surrounding pragmatic context. (Recanati 1998: 131)

And he goes even further. He explicitly refutes the widely accepted claim that there is nothing collective about parole and that its manifestations are individual and momentary: “But to this we can now reply that there exist, ‘deposited in each brain’, rules for the game of speech, common to all and existing independently of the will of the individual” (Recanati 1998: 133). Against this background, he differentiates between descriptive meaning and the corresponding conditions of satisfaction, and pragmatic meaning and the corresponding conditions of use, and exemplifies this distinction with regard to the adverbial even: “Because these expressions [e.g. even AF] have conditions of use, using them amounts to indicating that the appropriate conditions of use have been met. The pragmatic meaning of an expression is what its use indicates in virtue of these conditions” (Recanati 1998: 138). He then concludes: Pragmatic meaning as I have just defined it is very different (…). The traditional view holds that the linguistic meaning of a sentence type is purely descriptive and that pragmatic meaning is just an additional meaning conveyed by a token of the sentence-type. Pragmatic meaning is therefore not a conventional meaning attached to a particular linguistic form, but a non-conventional and non-linguistic meaning tied to the utterance act itself, which is seen as a ‘meaningful’ event in the same way that an infant’s crying ‘means’ that it is upset. Against this view, we have seen that certain expressions have conventional pragmatic meanings that combine with their descriptive meanings to constitute what may be termed their overall linguistic meanings. (Recanati 1998: 139)

Austin’s and Searle’s conceptions of speech act theory assign a presuppositional status to rationality and intentionality. For this reason, speakers — and, of course, hearers — are ideally rational and competent, and know how to perform speech acts in a rational manner. However, speech acts do not only consist of illocutionary acts, but also of utterance acts. As has been pointed out in the discussion above, it does not seem reasonable to assume that utterance acts are formed by selecting grammatical constructions, lexical items and phonological realizations and intonational contours randomly. Rather, utterance acts are composed of more or less grammatically correct clauses and sentences. As a necessary consequence of this, interlocutors do not only require an ideal rational competence, but also an ideal linguistic competence (Chomsky 1965),


which contains rules concerning syntactical, morphological, phonological and semantic well-formedness; and they need, of course, communicative competence and sociocultural competence (Hymes 1974). Yet grammaticality or grammaticalness is not an intrinsic feature of a language. Instead, grammaticality is expressed, as Searle succinctly claims: “Similarly, one can establish that a given sequence of words is a grammatical or ungrammatical English sentence, but one cannot establish that English as a language is grammatical or ungrammatical, because English sets the standard for grammaticality in English” (Searle 1995: 178). In his work on the connectedness between mind, language and society, Searle’s criticism of the Chomskyean conception of universal grammar is even more precise. He counters that [t]his conception of the unconscious runs counter to the prevailing views in cognitive science. Chomsky, for example, believes that when a child learns a natural human language, they do so because they are following a set of unconscious rules of Universal Grammar, but these rules are not the sort of things that a child might bring to consciousness. The rules are ‘computational’ rules of Universal Grammar. The linguist might formulate the rule in a technical vocabulary. The linguist might say the child follows the rule ‘move alpha’, but the child is thereby not assumed to be quietly thinking to himself or herself, ‘Move alpha’. Indeed, the child is not even assumed to have the capacity to think ‘Move alpha’. No, the formulation ‘Move alpha’ is the linguist’s way of representing processes in the brain that neither the child nor anyone else could bring to consciousness. What is going on in the child’s consciousness is purely computational, a sequence of zeroes and ones; or some neurofunctional equivalent of zeroes and ones is being processed in the brain. (…) But unconscious rule-following, like conscious rule-following, must be a matter of following the intentional content of the rule, and it must operate in real time. The time of the operation of the rule and the time of the behavior governed by the rule are the same. These features are typically not preserved in those cognitive science explanations that postulate unconscious rule-following of rules that could not become conscious even in principle. (Searle 1999: 88, 89)

Searle’s adaption of intentionality to linguistic competence is further refined by Daniel Vanderveken, who extends linguistic competence to the realm of performance: “In that approach [Vanderveken’s approach, AF] meaning and use are logically related and linguistic competence is not dissociated from performance. On the contrary, linguistic competence is construed as the speaker’s ability to understand which illocutionary acts can be performed by literal utterances of sentences in the various possible contexts of use of his language” (Vanderveken 1992: 196). Yet, speech acts are not performed in isolation, but instantiated in


linguistic and social contexts and therefore have to accommodate the corresponding contextual constraints and requirements. For instance, the performance of an indirect speech act to express acceptance in a wedding ceremony seems quite inappropriate, if not infelicitous. So, there must exist some rules, maxims or guidelines, which explicate when, where and how certain speech acts are performed. The appropriateness conditions of an utterance, or Gumperz’s (1977, 1992) and Hymes’ (1974) conceptions of communicative competence, are going to be examined in detail in the following section Utterances and context. According to Gumperz’s and Hymes’ positions, interlocutors are not only linguistically competent. They are also socioculturally competent, which manifests itself in their knowledge of how to produce appropriate utterances and appropriate contributions, and of how to interpret utterances and contributions in an appropriate manner. While linguistic competence is anchored to the unit of a sentence, sociocultural competence necessarily accommodates sequentiality. This is due to the fact that the appropriateness of an utterance and of a contribution is not only calculated with regard to the question of how propositional content and illocutionary force are linguistically represented. It is also calculated with regard to the questions of where and when they are realized, for instance in the opening section of an encounter, or in pre- or reformulation sequences. Thus, the performance of actual speech acts in context is far more complex than anticipated and requires the accommodation of the differentiation of context with regard to social, sociocultural, linguistic and cognitive contexts, and the selection of appropriate linguistic items, grammatical constructions and phonological realizations and intonational contours for the production of utterance acts. 3.2.5 Conclusion The examination of the connectedness between context and speech act theory can be summarized as follows. Austin’s frame of reference is characterized by the interdependence between individual participants and conventions with regard to procedures and conventional effects, procedures and execution of social actions, and their correct and complete performance by sincere and responsible individuals. Here, the necessary and sufficient conditions for language users to be assigned the status of a coparticipant are intentionality and rationality as well as sincerity and responsibility. The necessary and sufficient conditions for a linguistic string to be assigned the status of an utterance are that it is produced and interpreted in accordance with the corresponding


conventional procedure, and that it is produced and interpreted with a certain sense and reference. The necessary and sufficient conditions for an utterance to be assigned the status of a speech act is that it is produced and interpreted in accordance with the felicity conditions A1, A2, B1, B2, Γ.1 and Γ.2. In Searle’s frame of reference, the meaning of a sentence is determined by rules specifying the conditions of utterance, and what the utterance counts as. Here, the meaning of a speech act is calculated with regard to intended effects on the hearer, what the speaker means, what the sentence uttered means, what the speaker intends, what the hearer understands, or in Searle’s own words: “S intends to produce IE in H by means of getting H to recognize S’s intention to produce IE” (Searle 1969: 47). The necessary and sufficient conditions for a producer of a speech act and for an interpreter of a speech act to be assigned the statuses of coparticipants are, again, rationality and intentionality, and the necessary and sufficient conditions for a linguistic string to be assigned the status of an utterance act are that it is produced and interpreted in accordance with normal input and output conditions. The necessary and sufficient conditions for an utterance act to be assigned the status of a speech act are that it is produced and interpreted in accordance with a speech act’s felicity conditions. Rationality and intentionality have further been refined by the accommodation of the results from research in the fields of social intelligence and social interaction with respect to the calculation of AIP, with respect to the coparticipants’ face wants and the coparticipants’ information wants, and with respect to their statuses in Brandom’s discursive game of giving and asking for reasons. Intentions have been differentiated with regard to their scope and their semantics into the categories of prior and future-directed intentions, behaviourcontrolling intentions, intentions as contents of plans, higher-order discourse intentions, intentions and default consequences, reflexive intentions, coordination-oriented intentions, intentions and conversational records, and intentions and up-date mechanism. Moreover, intentions have been distinguished with regard to their status as a theoretical construct and with regard to their expression in communication, where they are assigned a presuppositional status. Speech acts have been further refined in a discursive setting and differentiated with regard to attempt and achievement, and with regard to process and product. This extension of frame requires the introduction of the discursive notion of communicative contribution and communicative intention. The connectedness between language and language use, and their status in speech act theory has been based on Recanati’s position that parole and communicative performance must be assigned the status of a rule-governed system.


This is supported by a more recent investigation of Searle (1995), in which he specifies the notion of language as follows: “A public language presupposes a public world in the sense that many (not all) utterances of a public language purport to make references to phenomena that are ontologically objective, and they ascribe such and such features to these phenomena” (Searle 1995: 186). Searle explicates the connectedness between public language and his conception of external realism (ER) as follows: But the presupposition of a mind-independent reality already contains the presupposition of a representation-independent reality, and that presupposition is just external realism. ER, so construed, is a purely formal constraint. It does not say how things are but only that there is a way that they are that is independent of our representations. The argument so far can be summarized in a series of steps: 1. The normal understanding of utterances in a public language requires the utterance to be understandable in the same way by any competent speaker and hearer of the language. 2. A large class of utterances purport to make reference to phenomena that exist outside of, and independently of the speaker, the hearer, and their representations, and indeed, in some cases independently of all representations. 3. Features 1 and 2 require that we understand our utterances of many of these sentences as having truth conditions that are independent of our representations. By purporting to make reference to public phenomena, phenomena that are ontologically and not merely epistemically objective, we presuppose the truth or falsity of the statements is fixed by how the world is, independently of how we represent it. 4. But that presupposition amounts to the claim that there is a way things are that is independent of our representations, and that claim is just (one version of) external realism. (Searle 1995: 188)

In the following section Utterances and context, the immediate linguistic and social contexts of an utterance are examined in the framework of conversational analysis, and special reference is given to the questions of how the principle of sociolinguistic variation is accommodated, and whether utterances are produced intentionally. It closes with an examination of Clark’s cognitive-oriented approach in using language with regard to its accommodation of linguistic and social contexts.


3.3 Utterances in context In the fields of anthropology, linguistics, philosophy of language, psychology and sociology, an utterance denotes a linguistic string that is generally of the size and format of a sentence and produced and interpreted in particular linguistic and social contexts. For this reason, an utterance represents a contextdependent concept par excellence; or to employ Kasher’s own words: “Since the use of any sentence is restricted to a suitable family of contexts of utterance, an utterance of a sentence is characterizable as a pair: a sentence and a context” (Kasher 1998: 88). In spite of the fact that all of the research paradigms listed above anchor their definition of an utterance to actually occurring language data, their actual employment of the term ‘utterance’ serves different purposes. Anthropology and sociology tend to focus on longer linguistic strings and analyze them with regard to social and cultural aspects of conversation and with respect to how conversation is interactionally organized and managed by its participants. Linguistics, psychology and the philosophy of language look at sentence-like utterances and restrict their investigation to the linguistic string of one or two utterances. In linguistics, utterances are examined with regard to the linguistic premises of grammaticality, well-formedness and acceptability, and special reference is given to the question in what respect the utterances in question deviate from those ideal sentences. The results obtained are contextualized in the fields of applied linguistics, such as second-language learning, lingua-franca research, media studies or intercultural communication. In psychology and psycholinguistics, an utterance is examined with regard to language production and language reception, such as sentence processing and the corresponding inference processes involved. The investigations generally focus on individual coparticipants and on their cognitive contexts, and they do not explicitly account for social or linguistic contexts. In the philosophy of language, an utterance is seen as a vehicle for the performance of a speech act, metaphorically speaking, and therefore of no immediate relevance to the research paradigm because it is not the performance of a speech act which is of importance, but its theoretical construct. Or, an utterance is seen as the expression — or as the making explicit (Brandom 1994) — of a speech act’s fundamental premises. Here, an utterance is of relevance and therefore is seen as connected with its immediate (and more remote) cognitive, linguistic and social contexts; the type of utterance is called a contribution in this investigation. But how are utterances conceived of in the different theoretical frameworks: are they anchored to some larger cognitive network and thus assigned a relational status, or are they seen as autonomous entities?

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In linguistics, the differentiation between an internal grammar, such as universal grammar’s premise of linguistic competence and its specification as I-language (Sharwood Smith 1994), functional grammar’s prototypical categories (Givón 1993, 1999) or Saussure’s notion of langue, which is distinguished from its realization in context as parole, language use, external language or E-language, or communicative performance, has been widely accepted. The distinction is a consequence of the nature of a natural language, whose internal grammar can never be directly observed, but only be reconstructed from linguistic data. Put differently, the grammar of a natural language represents an idealized construct and therefore is assigned a hypothetical status. Depending on the theoretical frameworks employed, the reconstruction of the internal grammar is based on different, if not mutually exclusive premises: generative grammar and other related formal frameworks, such as Lexical Functional Grammar (Dalrymple 1999) or Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Borsley 1987) base their conception of internal grammar on discrete categories, whereas functional grammar (Givón 1993; Halliday 1996) bases its conception of an internal grammar on fuzzy categories. As a consequence of the discrete frameworks, the internal grammar is assigned an almost context-independent, if not autonomous status. By contrast, the non-discrete setting is anchored to a cognitive network and therefore is context-dependent by definition. In both frameworks, however, the internal grammar provides the rules, or the principles and parameters, for the production and interpretation of context-dependent utterances, and both frameworks require utterances to reconstruct their own models of a sentence grammar or of a discourse grammar. Thus, utterances in context allow for different conceptions of internal grammars; or, different internal grammatical configurations can result in identical external utterances. This is due to the fact that both the production and interpretation of an utterance are generally constrained by external factors, such as slips of the tongue (Fromkin 1980; Hokkanen 2001; Poulisse 1999), limitations to memory, stress or emotional disorder. Unlike internal-language sentences, external utterances are neither required to be absolutely grammatical nor are they required to be completely well-formed. But how can the gap between internal sentences and external utterances be bridged? Utterances do not exist as such, but rather are produced by speakers in specific social, sociocultural and linguistic contexts, where speakers direct them at addressees who interpret them. Against this background, utterances are generally neither produced nor interpreted at random as has been claimed by some representatives of the research paradigms of speech act theory, socio-


pragmatics and ethnomethodology, where the questions of how coparticipants perform social actions, and of how they employ language to perform social actions have been investigated thoroughly. In all of these research paradigms, coparticipants are assigned the status of rational agents, who perform social actions intentionally and thus use language in a strategic manner in order to achieve their communicative goals. This is manifest in the ethnomethodological premise of accountability of social action (Drew 1995; Garfinkel 1994), according to which coparticipants not only perform social actions, but are also able to account for their actions as they know, at some level, what they say and what they mean by their utterances. Furthermore, it is implicit in Recanati’s availability principle, which is based “on a specific cognitive hypothesis, according to which what is said is consciously accessible” (Recanati 1989:328). This is further specified by Brandom and his explicitation of the communicative function of speaking in natural-language communication: “That is making something explicit is saying it: putting it into a form in which it can be given as a reason, and a reason demanded for it. Putting something forward in the explicit form of a claim is the basic move in the game of giving and asking for reasons” (Brandom 1994: xviii). In natural-language communication, or in the game of giving and asking for reasons, utterances are conceived of as realizations of speech acts in contexts. As a consequence of this, they are assigned a central role in Brandom’s theory on discourse: The fundamental unit of language is the sentence, since it is by uttering freestanding sentences that speech acts are performed. Thus sentences are fundamental in the sense that it is coherent to interpret a community as using (its practices conferring content on) sentences but not subsentential expressions, while it is not coherent to interpret any community as using subsentential expressions but not sentences. But in fact there are good reasons why any community that uses sentences should also be expected to use subsentential expressions, indeed subsentential expressions of a particular kind. (Brandom 1994: 399)

Brandom does not only refer to the fact that utterances perform speech acts in context and that utterances are performed with a particular intention, but he extends the strategic employment of utterances to the strategic employment of indexicals, viz. to context-dependent linguistic items par excellence. This requires him to assign rationality and intentionality not only to speakers, who perform utterances and speech acts intentionally, but also to hearers who interpret their coparticipants’ utterances and their indexical expressions intentionally by retrieving the relevant contextual information which is

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required to assign the linguistic strings in question the corresponding referents and illocutionary forces. Thus, utterances do not exist in isolation, but are anchored to context. For this reason, they are not produced and interpreted at random. Instead, they are produced by rational and linguistically (and socioculturally) competent coparticipants in a strategic manner. The premises of rationality and intentionality manifest themselves in actual discourse in the both meaningful and purposeful production and interpretation of indexical expressions and of utterances. Against this background, utterances are assigned the status of contributions. In the following sections the multilayered status of an utterance is examined in detail in the frameworks of a sentence- and dialogue grammar, speech act theory and conversation analysis. Utterances and sentences examines the connectedness between the internal-grammar concept of a sentence and the communication-oriented notion of an utterance. Here, special reference is given to the necessary and sufficient conditions for the definition of an utterance, to the connectedness between language production and language use, and to Levinson’s conception of presumptive meaning. The section Utterances and speech acts investigates the multilayered status of an utterance by specifying the connectedness between an intentional communicative action and the production or formulation of the linguistic string, and of its interpretation. The discussion is further refined by the integration of a social-interaction and socialintelligence outlook on natural-language communication. Utterances, turns and turn-constructional units extends the frame of investigation from individual utterances to longer linguistic strings and spells out the connectedness between the empirical concept of a turn and its micro building block of a turn-constructional unit on the one hand, and between the empirical concepts of turnconstructional unit and an utterance on the other hand. Utterances: Social and cognitive presents Herbert H. Clark’s (1996) conception of Using language and introduces the bridging point between external linguistic surface-structures and internal language and reasoning, namely dialogue. The Conclusion summarizes the results obtained. 3.3.1 Utterances and sentences In the first part of this investigation, the concept of grammaticality has been anchored to the domain of a sentence and to a sentence grammar, such as an English grammar from a generative perspective (Haegeman and Guéron 1999), an English grammar from a descriptive viewpoint (Brinton 2000; Greenbaum


1990; Nelson 2001; Quirk and Greenbaum 1977, 1975; Sinclair 1995) or an English grammar from a functional perspective which goes beyond the minimal unit of a sentence (Bloor and Bloor 1995; Givón 1993; Halliday 1994) by additionally accounting for a sentence’s linguistic, social and cognitive environments. The notion of acceptability, on the other hand, has been anchored to the domain of an utterance, or more precisely, to the employment of a sentence in context, and to a grammar of use, such as a communicative grammar of English (Svartvik and Leech 1994), Real English (Milroy and Milroy 1993) or the dialects of England (Trudgill 1999). If the two frameworks are compared and contrasted, the sentence-in-context paradigm represents a subset of the sentence-grammar paradigm: it applies to a subset of English sentences and, for this reason, has a restricted domain of validity.14 That delimitation of frame is due to the fact that acceptable utterances are considered to be permissible or normal in particular contexts only. Yet, the theoretical construct of a sentence and the performance-related notion of an utterance can be distinguished even further. Brandom differentiates between “what is represented by sentences” (Brandom 1994: 70), that is a sentence’s descriptive or denotational function, and “what is expressed by sentences” (ibid.), viz. a sentence’s discursive function which attributes a sentence to the performance-related paradigm of language-asaction. Thus, sentences are not only examined with regard to their grammatical status, they are also examined with regard to their representative function. Moreover, sentences are employed to perform speech acts, and it is this multilayered structure, which is reflected in Levinson’s conception of an utterance as being multifunctional: “Single sentences can be used to perform two or more speech acts in different clauses, and each clause … may perform more than one speech act at the same time” (Levinson 1983: 291). Tsui (1994), who has been strongly influenced by the Birmingham School (Coulthard 1985), does not agree with Levinson’s conception of an utterance as being multifunctional. According to her, Levinson’s conception is itself the result of a speech-act theoretic interpretation of an utterance which does not explicitly take into consideration the impact of linguistic and social contexts.15 This is reflected in speech act theory’s stance of taking utterances in isolation, and the

14.It is not quite appropriate to apply the term utterance to a grammar of use because as soon as an utterance is parsed, interpreted or decoded, it no longer represents a linguistic surface only. 15.The connectedness between utterances and speech acts will be thoroughly investigated in the following section.

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kind of speech act performed is determined by considerations like the meaning conveyed by the words and the structures of the utterances and the psychological conditions of the speaker. Yet, unlike Sinclair and Coulthard (1975), Tsui adopts Levinson’s structural conception of an utterance as a sentence-like linguistic string: The term utterance as used by Sinclair and Coulthard is a technical term referring to everything said by one speaker before he/she stops speaking and another speaker starts to speak (except in cases of overlap of speech). It is equivalent to a turn. In the discussion of this volume [English Conversation, AF], the word ‘utterance’ is used to refer to the issuance of a sentence-fragment in a particular context of situation (see Levinson 1983: 18). (Tsui 1994: 261)

Unlike Levinson’s multifunctional conception, which goes beyond the speechact-theoretic paradigm, Tsui’s linguistic investigation of conversational data focusses on the necessary and sufficient conditions for the characterization of conversational utterances, which are categorized into the initiating acts of elicitation, requestive and directive, and into the responsive acts of response and follow-up act. Thus, an utterance can be characterized as follows: (1) it can be acceptable or unacceptable, (2) it can be well-formed or ill-formed, (3) it can represent some state of affair, and (4) it can be either an initiating or a responsive act, which subcategorizes into one of Tsui’s categories presented above. In the following, the multilayered status of an utterance is illustrated by a close examination of the verbal exchange (60), which is adopted from a political interview from the programme On The Record (BBC1, 20.05.1990):16 (60) A B

They don’t get very excited about nuclear-free zones, do they? No well, I can’t say that I do myself.

Here, the utterances A and B are evaluated as acceptable and well-formed because they neither contain any anomalous collocations nor any ungrammatical constructions. As regards their connectedness with the constraints and requirements of the communicative genre of a political interview’s linguistic and social contexts, they do not display any stylistic deviations either, such as

16.The communicative genre of a political interview represents a dyadic encounter between an interviewer (here: A) and an interviewee (here: B), and is characterized by question- and answer sequences. In a prototypical interview, the interviewer employs the question format to perform the communicative action of a request for party-political information and/or opinion, and the interviewee employs the answer format to comply with the request by putting forward party-political information and opinions (Fetzer 2000a).


swearwords, emotional involvement or terms of endearment (Fetzer 1999c). As regards their discourse functions, A is an initiating act and the tag do they? has the function of eliciting further information; B is a responsive act and expresses agreement with A’s negated proposition by the negative operator not. As regards their representative function, A realizes a reference to the discourse identity they whose referent is retrieved from linguistic context, and attributes a particular emotional disposition to ‘them’ which is, however, negated [NOT excited]. The indexical expression they and its anaphoric referential function connects the utterance A with prior linguistic, cognitive and social contexts.17 Utterance B contains the indexical expression I which realizes a reference to the producer of the utterance, namely the interviewee, thus connecting the utterance with its immediate social and cognitive contexts. Again, a particular emotional disposition is attributed to the speaker. Unlike A, however, the emotional disposition is realized by another indexical expression, namely by do, whose referent, that is exited is retrieved from the immediate linguistic and cognitive contexts. From a languageof-use viewpoint, the truncated utterance is more appropriate than the nontruncated version (61), which would infringe on the Gricean maxim of manner: (61) A B

They don’t get very excited about nuclear-free zones, do they? No well, I can’t say that I get excited about nuclear zones myself.

Are there further linguistic features which anchor the exchange to immediate linguistic and social contexts? As regards the reconstruction of linguistic context, utterance A contrasts two possible worlds: one with people who get excited about nuclear-free zones, and another one with people who do not get excited about nuclear-free zones, and it focusses the get-excited-about-nuclearfree-zones world. Moreover, the two possible worlds presuppose another possible world, in which nuclear-free zones exist. This is a necessary conditions because without the existence of nuclear-free zones, people could neither get excited about them, nor could they not get not excited about them. To adapt the cognitive-context principle of inclusion (Sperber and Wilson 1996) to the ascription of sentence- and utterance meaning of the exchange (60), the possible world which is defined by the existence of nuclear-free zones can only be accessed through the implicitly contrasted possible worlds. This procedure

17.I adopt a standard interpretation of ‘they’ here. That is to say, in the context of a recent political interview ‘they’ refers to animate entities who are capable of experiencing emotions. For this reason, ‘they’ must refer to a subset of citizens. There may, however, exist other possible worlds in which ‘they’ refers to emotion-experiencing robots, for example.

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differs from the traditional top-down approach, which classifies the two contrasted possible worlds as a subset of the possible world defined by the existence of nuclear-free zones. From a social-context viewpoint, nuclear-free zones index institutional and public domains of society and therefore anchor utterance A and the expressed discourse topic to public and institutional contexts. This does, however, not necessarily mean that the actual social context, in which the utterance is produced, is public because a discussion about nuclear-free zones can also occur in the private domains of a society. As regards the linguistic context’s presupposed retrospective elements, utterance A presupposes a prior exchange about the relevance of nuclear-free zones, while from a prospective viewpoint, the question tag indicates that the producer of A intends to elaborate on the discourse topic. Thus, not only does A establish local coherence with prior talk. It also establishes coherence with upcoming talk by indicating the speaker’s preferences with regard to the continuation of discourse. Another means of establishing local coherence is represented by negation, which signifies disagreement with some prior utterance or with some part of it. But is it also possible to reconstruct plausible contexts in which A is employed to initiate a topical sequence or a conversation? In natural-language communication, it seems almost impossible to reconstruct such a situational context — the only feasible micro situation is a setting in which ‘they’ is part of the shared immediate physical environment and being pointed at by the speaker. In that specific setting, ‘they’ would represent new information which would be commented on. Linguistics differentiates between I-language and E-language and thus between internal sentences and internal propositions, and external utterances. So, is language production, language use and language interpretation just a matter of translating internal sentences and internal propositions into external utterances and vice versa? The examination of the verbal exchange (60) has shown that natural-language communication is far more complex than is suggested by the simple encoding and decoding procedure. Utterances do not just describe some state of the world, they are firmly embedded in their immediate (and more remote) linguistic, cognitive and social contexts, and in that scenario, they are assigned the status of contributions. In the following, the question of how utterances are produced and used is examined in detail. 3.3.1.1Language production and language use Aijmer (1996) and Erman and Warren (2000) have investigated language


production and language use in great detail by focussing on the connectedness between convention and creativity on the one hand, and on the connectedness between language production and language use on the other hand. As regards language production, the grammar provides us with the mechanism to produce an infinite number of grammatical sentences (Chomsky 1965) and, for this reason, it provides us with the mechanism to produce an infinite number of utterances. That is, however, constrained by the maxims and conventions of language use, in accordance with which acceptable, appropriate and idiomatic utterances are produced. Adopting Sinclair’s approach (1987), Erman and Warren differentiate between an open choice principle, in accordance with which coparticipants produce an utterance in a word-for-word manner, and an idiom principle, which constrains the word-for-word formulation because of convention, idiomatic language and linguistic- and social-context requirements. This does not mean that coparticipants are completely free to select any grammatical construction, lexical item or phonological realization and intonational contour for their production of an utterance. Rather, language production is always explicitly connected with firstly, a speech community’s conventions regarding language use, and secondly, the constraints and requirements of a particular linguistic context and communicative genre, and the constraints and requirements of a particular social context. For instance, the communicative task of thanking someone, is realized differently in spoken and written interactions in British English. While the written setting uses a number of variants, such as very many thanks, many many thanks or I should like to thank you, spoken British English expresses thanking either as ‘thank you + intensifier’, for example thank you very much, thank you very much indeed or thank you ever so much, or a ‘thanks + intensifier’, e.g. thanks very much, thanks a lot or thanks awfully (Aijmer 1996: 33–79). And again, there is variation with regard to expressing thanks in the framework of a face-to-face conversation and in the framework of a telephone conversation, which employ both the spoken mode, and there is even more variation in email communications. Thus, thanking someone can, in principle, be expressed by the fabricated linguistic string (62) where it can be accompanied by the non-verbal act of falling on one’s knees: (62) I hereby intend to express my profoundest gratitude to you, my beloved husband.

In present-day British English, the utterance (62) is highly inappropriate in both formal and informal face-to-face encounters, and would, if not taken in a


jokey manner, cause embarrassment to the addressee.18 Aijmer extends the argumentation to apologies: From a linguistic point of view, it is natural to try to link form and strategies with function and the social situation, even if there are examples that are difficult to classify. (…) I have argued that there is a distinct set of apology strategies which are associated with a relatively fixed wording. Links have been developed between grammatical form and situation or function, as well as between intonation and situational features. Speakers do not only know what form an apology has, but also what types of offence it is used with and whether it has a disarming or a remedial function. The speaker’s knowledge can be represented as frames consisting of semi-restricted collocations with constrained conditions of use which speakers match with the extralinguistic situation they perceive. (Aijmer 1996: 122)

Thus, the open choice principle is a valid concept. It manifests itself in the fact that coparticipants can choose from an internal list of conventionalized expressions, but there is no absolute open choice with regard to the selection of grammatical constructions, lexical items or phonological realizations and intonational contours because the employment of linguistic expressions is constrained by conditions of use and conditions of appropriateness.19 The open choice principle differs from the idiom principle in so far as the idiom principle’s internal list consists of prefabs, that is preconstructed multi-word combinations, which are defined by Erman and Warren as follows: “A prefab is a combination of at least two words favored by native speakers in preference to an alternative combination which would have been equivalent had there been no conventionalization” (Erman and Warren 2000: 31). Erman and Warren categorize prefabs, which can often be extendable, into lexical, grammatical and pragmatic prefabs. Lexical prefabs subcategorize into a great number of fuzzy categories, such as idioms (to kick the bucket, to call a spade a spade), compounds (sexual activity, once again), habitual collocations (to the best of, for some reason), prepositional verbs (be in touch with, get the hang of s.th.) or phrasal verbs (get on, switch off). Grammatical prefabs subcategorize into the a number of fuzzy categories, for instance quantifiers (a few, a great deal of), links (for

18.The degree of embarrassment would be even greater, if there was the additional coparticipant of an unratified audience (Goffman 1974; Levinson 1988). 19.Poetic or literary language tends to exploit those constraints in order to coin new expressions or nonce meaning. It can thus be described as being parasitic on the conventionalized, everyday use.


instance, instead of), determiners (some of, that sort of), tense (be going to) or introductors (there are). Pragmatic prefabs consist of a number of fuzzy categories, such as performative routines (thank you), hedges (sort of, I should think), discourse markers (and then) or feedback signals (yeah quite). Erman and Warren explicitly state that a prefab is not the same as a construction in Construction Grammar, even though the two are closely related. Rather, a linguistic string is assigned the status of a prefab, if it fulfills the criterion of restricted exchangeability: “At least one member of the prefab cannot be replaced by a synonymous item without causing a change of meaning or function and/or idiomaticity” (Erman and Warren 2000: 32). Language production and language use are intrinsically connected with cognitive, linguistic and social contexts, and thus with a linguistic string’s degree of conventionalization, which is examined in the following section in the frameworks of grammaticalization and in Levinson’s original study on Presumptive meanings. 3.3.1.2Presumptive meanings Pragmatics and semantics are generally differentiated with regard to the examination of particular domains of meaning. While semantics focusses on the investigation of discourse meaning from a truth-conditional perspective, word meaning, sentence meaning, propositional meaning or literal meaning, viz. on what is said, pragmatics examines meaning beyond what has been said, namely speaker-intended meaning, utterance meaning, communicative meaning, functional meaning, nonce meaning or what is meant. Yet meaning is not only investigated from a primarily product-oriented point of view or from a synchronic perspective. It is also examined from a more process-oriented perspective. The framework of grammaticalization (Brinton 1996; Hopper and Traugott 2000; Jucker 1995; Traugott 1988) takes a dynamic outlook on language and focusses on its status as both process and product. Traugott and Schwenter (2000) base their analysis of the adverbial in fact on its gradual development from a VP-level adverbial to a discourse marker. In their frame of reference, the development of semantic meaning involves the following stages: when the semantic meaning of a lexical expression is used in different linguistic and social contexts, it acquires an additional nonce utterance-token meaning. The semantic refinement is the result of language use, that is the employment of a lexical item in more and more linguistic and social contexts, which entails its employment in cognitive contexts. If a lexical item, or coded meaning-1, for instance the VP-level adverbial in fact, is employed both consistently and

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systematically in the respective contexts, its additional meaning as an adversative sentence adverbial becomes conventionalized and is assigned the status of an utterance-type meaning, which, if employed consistently and systematically in context, is then assigned the status of a second coded meaning, namely coded meaning-2. In the following, the gradual development of meaning is illustrated with respect to the semantic change of the adverbial in fact. The discussion is based on Traugott and Schwenter’s research and data (2000: 11–12) and on their argumentation that the VP-level adverbial in fact has acquired the additional meanings of an adversative sentence adverbial and of a discourse marker. The coded meaning-1 of the VP-level adverbial in fact is ‘in practice, as far as can be told from evidence, in actuality’: (63) Humanity, comfortably engaged elsewhere in the business of living, is absent in fact but everywhere present in feeling.

Here, in fact does not invoke a scale but rather refers to the manner or respect in which humanity is absent. Yet, in fact does not only function as a VP-level adverbial in present-day English. It also functions as an adversative sentence adverbial, where its coded meaning-2 expresses primarily the epistemic modal meaning of certainty: (64) The levels of dioxin appear to be small, but in fact they have been found to be higher in paper tissues than in some other things.

In (64), in fact indexes the coparticipant’s strong epistemic commitment to certainty as regards her/his proposition that there are high levels of dioxin in paper tissues even though they may appear to be small. The third type of coded meaning of in fact in present-day English is anchored to its function as a discourse marker. Here, the adverbial indicates that a stronger argument is going to follow while in the mean time cancelling the preceding argument: (65) … though these statements may provide useful, in fact, compelling evidence for such a theory.

In (65) the coded meaning-3 of in fact is anchored to its function as a discourse marker which is set off from its immediate linguistic context by the employment of commas — or in spoken discourse, by a pause. Unlike more traditional diachronic studies, grammaticalization emphasizes the process of language change and explicates the different stages of meaning,


that is coded meaning-1, nonce utterance-token meaning, utterance-type meaning and coded meaning-2. A somewhat similar, but quite distinct position is put forward in Levinson’s seminal work on presumptive meaning (2000); it also allows for different stages of meaning by going beyond the dichotomy between what-is-said and what-is-meant. Levinson’s theory of presumptive meaning is based on the premise that utterance meaning subcategorizes into three layers: the said, the particularized conversationally implicated or nonce meaning and the generalized conversationally implicated meaning or the preferred default interpretation. The latter is, as has been pointed out in the chapter on Speech acts in context, context-dependent by definition and therefore defeasible. Levinson’s theory of presumptive meaning is anchored to a relational conception of meaning which manifest itself in the premise that utterances and context are intrinsically connected. For this reason, it allows for a dynamic conception of meaning and therefore is of great importance to the investigation of utterance meaning. Originally, utterance meaning has been examined in the frameworks of speech act theory with regard to the expression of a direct speech act and the expression of an indirect speech act, in relevance theory with regard to the transmission of optimal relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1996), in discourse analysis with regard to non-truth-conditional discursive meaning (van Dijk 1981, 1985) and in conversation analysis with regard to conversational meaning (Drew and Heritage 1992). In speech act theory, an utterance can realize a direct speech act and it can realize an indirect speech act, and the inferences required for the latter have been anchored to the Gricean paradigm of logic and conversation and its premise of speaker-intended meaning: In Grice’s scheme, speakers implicate, but in my parlance, utterance-types carry generalized implicatures (and the talk of heuristics suggests a comprehension perspective); does this signal a category mistake? Not at all: rational speakers meannn both what they say (except in non-literal uses of language) and what that saying implicates; different layers of meaning all come under the umbrella of meaningnn. (Levinson 2000: 373)

Analogously to Recanati’s conception of pragmatics and Brandom’s conception of discourse discussed in the previous chapter on Speech acts in context, there is the implicit premise that speakers are — at some level — aware of what they say, and that they can give reasons for what they have said. Against this background, the actual formulation of an utterance, or the linguistic realization of a communicative intention, is of great importance for the investigation of presumptive meaning, because a speaker could, in principle, have selected a


different lexical item, a different grammatical construction or a different phonological realization and a different intonational contour. In the following, the linguistic realization of meaningnn, i.e. the linguistic realization of a communicative intention, is going to be examined. The request to pass the vinegar, for instance, can be realized by a number of variants, such as (66) Pass me the vinegar, please. (67) Pass me the vinegar, will you? (68) Could you please pass me the vinegar? (69) Could you pass me the vinegar? (70) Have you got any vinegar? (71) Don’t you eat your chips with vinegar?

All of the variants above can be used to express the communicative intention of a request to pass the vinegar, and it will be almost impossible to construct a context in which the utterances (66) to (70) are interpreted as expressing a different type of communicative intention or as expressing a different meaningnn. They do, however, differ in their expression of illocutionary force: (66) expresses a rather strong pragmatic force, which is due to the lack of attenuation devices, such as the epistemic modality of possibility or the employment of lessfuzzy hedges (sort of, somehow). (67) expresses a slightly weaker pragmatic force, which is due to the alternative question tag will you?, which is employed to attenuate the strong pragmatic force of the imperative construction (Svartvik and Leech 1994), and (68) expresses an even weaker pragmatic force, which is due to indexing the speech act’s preparatory condition (Searle 1975) and to the employment of the epistemic modality of possibility. In spite of the degree of attenuation expressed and in spite of the fact that (68) could, potentially, be taken literally and trigger a negative response, such as my arms are too short or an affirmative response yes indeed, my arms are long enough,20 the pragmatic force of (68) is fairly strong. (69) is a prototypical example of a conventionalized indirect speech act (Brown and Levinson 1987), whose pragmatic force is equivalent to the force of a direct speech act. This also holds for a generalized conversational implicature or a default interpretation, which can, in principle, also be taken literally. But a literal interpretation of (69) is extremely unlikely —

20.It has to be pointed out, however, that that reading is rather unlikely because of the additional illocutionary-force indicating device please


unless we presume a therapeutic setting in which the function of some joint is being examined. Unlike the default interpretations of (66) to (70), the communicative meaning of (71) is less determinate, and its communicative function of a request to pass the vinegar is anchored to a particular sociocultural setting, in which chips are generally eaten with vinegar. Only then will (71) function as an indirect request to pass the vinegar. In a different sociocultural setting, it could be assigned the communicative function of an offer to have some vinegar, or of initiating a discourse topic about eating habits. A default interpretation of communicative meaning is necessarily connected to context: a default interpretation requires a default context, as has been the case with (66) to (70), and a particularized interpretation requires a particularized context, as has been shown with (71). Moreover, a non-default interpretation is only possible against the background of a default interpretation, with which it is implicitly compared and contrasted, and both types of utterance meaning are anchored to the third level of meaning, to what is said. Put differently, a default interpretation presupposes a non-default interpretation because only then is it possible to differentiate between the employment of a marked expression and the employment of an unmarked expression, or between an infringement of one or more of the Gricean maxims and an observance of the Gricean maxims. The linguistic surface of an utterance is the foundation for the calculation of utterance meaning which expresses particularized conversationally implicated or nonce meaning, generalized conversationally implicated meaning or direct-speech-act or literal meaning. Against this background, the utterance is assigned the status of a contribution. In the following, the connectedness between default interpretations and speech acts, and between utterances and speech acts is further elaborated on. 3.3.2 Utterances and speech acts Speech act theory is based on the premises of rationality and intentionality which manifest themselves in the speaker’s rational and intentional performance of a speech act and in the speech act’s constitutive acts of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, or utterance, propositional and illocutionary acts; and each of them is, to some extent, ‘done with words’. In spite of the fact that ‘words’ are a constitutive part of the performance of a speech act, the question whether a speech act’s premises of rationality and intentionality are inherited to the actual production of an utterance in context has not deserved much attention. The non-observance may have been due to the

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allocation of an utterance to the domains of parole or performance, which have been assigned the status of a non-rule-governed, arbitrary agglomeration of linguistic surface-structures. As regards utterance interpretation, however, there is no controversy about the fact that utterances are interpreted in an intentional manner because only then is it possible to retrieve the speaker-intended meaning of the underlying communicative action (Grice 1975; Grimshaw 1980; Searle 1975). This is also reflected in Goody’s research on social intelligence and its basic foundation that “[t]here seems to be a universal premise that other people’s behaviour will be goal-oriented” (Goody 1995: 24). So, the question whether the production and formulation of an utterance is a rational and an intentional act with regard to the selection of lexical items, grammatical constructions and — in spoken interaction — prosodic features, such as pitch, stress and intonational contours for the realization of a specific communicative intention, remains to be answered. In the following the connectedness between an utterance and a speech act is examined with regard to the social-context notion of sociolinguistic variation and with regard to the interdependence of actions and interactions. 3.3.2.1Sociolinguistic variation In the fields of the sociolinguistics, ethnography of speaking, conversational analysis and ethnomethodology, language is intrinsically linked to language use and to social practice, and seen as a means to influence, determine or reconstruct social structure, social reality, social and sociocultural contexts, and their constitutive parts. As a consequence of this, it is no longer possible to conceive language solely in an autonomous manner. Rather, language and language use mean social practice, and they represent context-dependent notions and context-dependent activities par excellence. Depending on the theoretical frameworks employed, the connectedness between language use, social practice and context can be spelled out by the connectedness between language use and social and linguistic contexts, and between language use, discursive practice and social, linguistic and cognitive contexts. Brandom refers to this connectedness in his seminal work on Making it explicit as follows: Conceptual content is understood in this work as what can be made explicit in discursive practice. Discursive practice has as its defining core claiming. Claims are a kind of commitment that can be understood in terms of the functional role things of this kind play in social scorekeeping practices — practices and practical attitudes that accordingly can be thought of as instituting this sort of deontic status. Commitments of this kind are in turn appealed both to pick out


specifically propositional contents and to pick out specifically sentential locutions used to express them. Because it must incorporate performances with the pragmatic significance of claimings, discursive practice is linguistic practice. Linguistic practice is what makes it possible for something to be made explicit (and logical practice is what makes it possible for linguistic practice itself to be made explicit). Making anything explicit, saying it, requires using one linguistic expression rather than another. Specifying the content of a discursive commitment by using a particular sentence involves undertaking an expressive commitment concerning the inferential role of the locution employed. (Brandom 1994: 586)

In the field of sociolinguistics, making it explicit, namely the “saying it” which “requires using one linguistic expression rather than another” is referred to as sociolinguistic variation. Depending on the frameworks employed, the underlying connectedness of a linguistic expression and its implicitly compared and contrasted counterpart on the one hand, and between language use, social practice and context on the other hand, is spelled out by the connectedness between language use and social and linguistic contexts, and between language use and social, linguistic and cognitive contexts. The actual interdependence between language use, social practice and context is calculated with regard to sociological and sociolinguistic variables, such as ethnicity, age, gender21 or social class, which do not exist independent of social interaction, but rather are reconstructed in social interaction. For instance, the interactional organization and reconstruction of gendered identities is reflected in the sex-exclusive and sex-preferential employment of the linguistic code and social practice (Caplan 1997; Coates 1994; Fetzer 2000b; Tannen 1993): men and women employ gender-preferential, if not gender-specific pitch and intonational contours, gender-preferential taboo words or gender-preferential colour terms. The sociocultural construct of gender is further reflected in gender-preferential conversational styles with regard to the employment of politeness strategies, interruptions, attenuation devices and backchannels.22 It is not only gender,

21.Gender denotes a sociocultural construct which is represented by a fuzzy category. Sex, by contrast, denotes a biological category. 22.In the Anglo-American context, the reconstruction of gender is considered to adhere to a sex-preferential employment of gender-specific conversational styles, rather than to a sexexclusive employment of gender-specific conversational styles. A conversational style is a fuzzy construct which is context- and activity-dependent. In a number of Eastern contexts, such as Japan or Taiwan, the reconstruction of gender feeds on both sex-preferential and sexexclusive employments of the linguistic code and social practice.


which is interactionally organized and reconstructed in social and sociocultural contexts, but also other constitutive social and discursive identities of the individual,23 viz. ethnicity, age or social class. The variables are anchored to the coparticipant-specific employment of the linguistic code, conversational style and social practice (Holmes 1991; Fasold 1990; Wardhaugh 1993). The diversity is also reflected in Goffman’s (1974) and in Levinson’s (1988) subcategorization of the speaker and hearer roles with regard to a production and a reception format, for instance author, principal and figure, or addressee, overhearer or target, and with regard to their ratified and unratified statuses. As has been shown above, language, language use and social practice are intrinsically related to one another and therefore require a network- and context-based frame of investigation which does not only account for a coparticipant’s linguistic competence, but also for her/his sociocultural competence. In the following Hymes’s concept of a speech community, communicative competence and its operationalized components of ‘speaking’, which has been one of the most prominent interactive frameworks, are examined. A speech community does not only have to share the linguistic code but also the corresponding discursive and social practices for speech production and speech interpretation in context. For instance, the British English conversational closings (72) See you (73) Take care (74) Leave it with us (75) Nice talking to you

require particular settings. (72), (73) and (75) generally occur in informal settings between intimates and are employed in a reciprocal manner. (74) is restricted to the context of a business telephone conversation and indicates the termination of the conversation by the (dominant) business partner. For this reason, it cannot be used reciprocally. Hymes anchors a speech community’s knowledge about linguistic code and social practice to the components of situation, that is the physical setting and the psychological scene, participants,

23.The theoretical stance adopted in this investigation is based on the premise that a coparticipant is no longer represented by a discrete category. Instead, a coparticipant’s discursive and social identities are constituted out of a number of interactive sociolinguistic variables, such as gender, age, ethnicity and social class, to name just the most relevant ones.


viz. speaker, hearer and audience and their statuses in the above-mentioned participation framework, ends, namely the goal and the purpose of the speech event from a sociocultural viewpoint, act sequence, that is how something is said as regards message form and what is said as regards message content, key, i.e. mock or serious, instrumentalities, viz. channels (spoken, written or email) and forms (vernacular, dialect or standard) of speech, norms of interaction and interpretation, and genres or communicative projects. Hymes’s speaking grid and his then revolutionary conception of communicative competence has been refined by Gumperz’s (1977) conception of conversational inference, which is anchored to his notion of contextualization cue. Quoting Gumperz, SavilleTroike refers to it as follows: Gumperz builds on this [the extent to which speakers must share experience to successfully develop conversational exchanges of any length and depth, AF] in proposing the outline of a theory of how social knowledge is stored in the mind, retrieved from memory, and integrated with grammatical knowledge in the act of conversing. Conversational inference is ‘the “situated”’ or contextbound process of interpretation, by means of which participants in a conversation assess others’ intentions, and on which they base their responses’ (Gumperz 1977: 191). Because of its cultural base, the ‘meaning’ that emerges in a conversation is likely to be different for participants if they are not members of the same speech community. (Saville-Troike 1989: 131)

Not only conversational closings and, of course, conversational openings, but also the norms of production and interpretation for the expression of politeness vary among different speech communities and their subcommunities.24 Above, the utterances (66) to (71) have been examined with regard to the expression of a stronger, respectively weaker pragmatic force manifest in the request to pass the vinegar. Frequently, politeness is equated with indirectness and the communicative strategy of attenuation. This is, however, far too simplistic. It is not only the strength of the pragmatic force which has to be considered, but also the type of illocutionary force and the context in which the speech act is produced. For instance, the attenuation of an offer, such as (76): (76) Would you kind of want some chocolate fudge cake?

24.The term ‘politeness’ refers to both positive and negative politeness thus entailing references to solidarity, i.e. the want to be liked and appreciated, and references to independence and respect, viz. the want not to be impeded on.


seems quite inappropriate in an Anglo-American context, while its German counterpart (‘möchtest du so etwas wie ein Stück Schokoladentorte?’) appears to be quite acceptable. As a consequence of the connectedness between language, language use, social practice and context, Brown points out that “one cannot mechanistically apply the Brown and Levinson model of politeness strategies to discourse data; particular linguistic realizations are not ever intrinsically positively or negatively polite, regardless of context. Politeness inheres not in forms, but in the attribution of polite intentions, and linguistic forms are only part of the evidence interlocutors use to assess utterances and infer polite intentions” (Brown 1995: 169). She then elaborates on the necessary and sufficient conditions for a linguistically and socioculturally competent coparticipant. In order to speaker-intend politeness, speakers have to be able to monitor their coparticipants’ and their own actions and possible perlocutionary effects in the framework of AIP: “To operate according to the model, speakers have to be able to modify the expression of their communicative intentions so as to take account of what they see as their interlocutor’s views of what they might be taken to be wanting to communicate, including what impositions to face might be on the table, as well as his or her assessments of the speaker’s and hearer’s relative power and social distance” (Brown 1995: 154). The foundations, on which AIP is based, are firstly the calculation of the coparticipants’ social actions; secondly, the calculation of possible perlocutionary effects and thirdly, the calculation of the degree of politeness communicated. According to the view taken here, this is only possible if coparticipants act in accordance with the principle of sociolinguistic variation thus selecting lexical expression, grammatical constructions and phonological realizations and intonational contours in a both rational and intentional manner; or to employ Brown’s own words: “In this Brown and Levinson framework, then, sociolinguistic variation (different kinds of language use in different situations) is portrayed as rationally tied — via demonstrable means-ends reasoning links — to the kinds of things people are trying to do when they speak, and cross-cultural parallels are viewed as attributable to the existence of similar rational processes underlying human interaction” (Brown 1995: 154). What is of interest is the fact that the principle of sociolinguistic variation is not restricted to the domains of language use and social practice. It is also inherent in the paradigm of philosophy of language, and explicated by Brandom as follows: A language cannot refer to an object in one way unless it can refer to it in two different ways. This constraint will seem paradoxical if referring to an object by using a singular term is thoughtlessly assimilated to such activities as using a car to


reach the airport or using an arrow to shoot a deer: even if only one car or one arrow is available and impossible to reuse, what one is doing can still genuinely be driving to the airport or shooting the deer. (Brandom 1994: 425)

The principle of sociolinguistic variation is of immense importance for naturallanguage communication. It is a constitutive part of intentional and rational communication and manifests itself in the coparticipant’s anticipatory interactive planning. Against this background and against Brandom’s insight that a language must provide the means to “refer to it [an object, AF] in two different ways”, there is even more evidence for the inheritance of intentionality and rationality to the formulation of an utterance. In the following the linguistic-surface phenomenon of an utterance is investigated with regard to its connectedness with action and interactions. 3.3.2.2Actions and interactions In a sociopragmatic frame of reference, speakers do not only produce and exchange utterances but also perform social actions. As a consequence of this, there are two sides to the coin ‘utterance’, namely its linguistic surface-structure and the social action performed through it. Or, to employ speech-act-theory terminology: a speaker intends her/his utterance to count as a particular illocutionary act, for instance s/he intends the utterances (66) to (71) to count as a request to pass the vinegar. Yet a speaker does not only speaker-intend her/his utterance to count as a particular social action, but s/he also directs it at one or more particular hearers. And it is those hearers who assume that the utterance in question is directed at them and who, for this reason, intentionally interpret the two sides of the coin ‘utterance’ by assigning utterance meaning to them. In this scenario, utterances are assigned the status of contributions. In natural-language communication, utterances and the social actions performed through them do not exist in isolation, but are constitutive parts of larger units, such as an adjacency pair,25 a sequence,26 a communicative project or a communicative

25.Levinson (1983: 303–304) defines adjacency pairs as follows: Adjacency pairs are sequences of two utterances that are: (i) adjacent, (ii) produced by different speakers, (iii) ordered as a first part and a second part, (iv) typed, so that a particular first part requires a particular second (or range of second parts) — e.g. offers require acceptances or rejections, greetings require greetings, and so on and there is a rule governing the use of adjacency pairs, namely: (19)

Having produced a first part of some pair, current speakers must stop speaking, and the next speaker must produce at that point a second part to the same pair.

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genre, which again are constitutive elements of more remote linguistic contexts which are constitutive elements of sociocultural contexts. Due to the layered or framed status of an utterance, which is also referred to as its context-dependent status, a speaker’s communicative intention is generally not represented explicitly by the employment of an explicit performative, such as I hereby reject in (77) and I hereby claim in (78), which, in naturally occurring data, are restricted to marked instances of communication, such as lingua-franca communication or a negotiation-of-validity sequence in which they have the function of solving some serious misunderstanding: (77) I hereby reject the validity of what you’ve just claimed. (78) I hereby claim that Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands.

In ordinary or unmarked instances of natural-language communication, a communicative intention is embedded in its immediate linguistic and sociocultural contexts, from which it is inferred by the hearer. This is manifest in the verbal exchange (49) examined in the previous chapter, which is felicitous despite the fact that neither coparticipant A nor coparticipant B explicate the social actions performed through her/his utterances by saying, for instance (79) or (80): (79) I hereby request you to ratify my claim and put forward your own point of view. (80) I hereby ratify your claim and agree.

In the examination of the connectedness between an utterance and a speech act it has been pointed out that it is not really appropriate to map one utterance onto one speech act. Rather, because of the context-dependency of an utterance and because of its embeddedness in the immediate linguistic and sociocultural contexts, the connectedness between an utterance and a speech act must be conceived of in a framework going beyond a single utterance, respectively a single speech act. That is, it must be conceived of as a relation between more than one utterance and between one or more communicative actions. The extension of frame requires a shift in perspective from “what people do to what they mean, from their practice to the contents of their states and expressions”

26.Meierkord and Fetzer (2002) critically examine the concept of a sequence and its context-dependent definitions with regard to the connectedness between sequence, sequencing, sequential organization and sequentiality.


(Brandom 1944: 134). Thus, the frame of investigation should be extended from an intrapersonal setting to the interpersonal domain of social practice: So one fundamental question is, What makes something that is done according to a practice — for instance the performance or the acquisition of a status — deserve to count as inferring? The answer developed here is that inferring is to be distinguished as a certain kind of move in the game of giving and asking for reasons. To say this is to say that inferring should be understood in an interpersonal context, as an aspect of essentially social practice of communication. (Brandom 1994: 158)

What is of relevance for the investigation of context is the fact that social practice does not only manifest itself in the performance of social actions and therefore is external only. Rather, social practice is also reflected in the coparticipant’s inferencing processes. For this reason, it is of immediate relevance to her/his inferencing products: “To grasp or understand a concept is, according to Sellars, to have practical mastery over the inferences it is involved in — to know, in the practical sense of being able to distinguish, what follows from the applicability of a concept, and what it follows from. The parrot does not treat “That’s red” as incompatible with “That’s green”, nor as following from “That’s scarlet” and entailing “That’s colored” (Brandom 1994: 89). The relationship between an utterance and a speech act or a communicative action is rather complex and cannot be described in an intrapersonal framework of one single speech act and one single utterance only. Rather, an utterance should be conceived of in a social-practice setting where is makes a particular speech act explicit, and where it is assigned the status of a contribution. As a consequence of the interpersonal perspective, inferencing is no longer solely intrapersonal but also influenced by social practice. In the following, the status of an utterance is examined in the research paradigm of conversation analysis which goes beyond the single utterance and investigates longer stretches of talk with regard to their sequential organization. 3.3.3 Utterances, turns and turn-constructional units Unlike speech act theory, conversation analysis is anchored to an empirical frame of investigation and focusses on a predominantly structural perspective with regard to the interactional organization of discourse. Because of their emphasis on social interaction, linguistic and pragmatic aspects of natural-language communication have not been explicitly accounted for: “The bulk of work in conversation analysis has been carried out by sociologists and anthropologists who are

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interested in the social and cultural aspects of conversation. Their studies of conversational data have focused largely on how conversation is socially organized and managed by participants, and how participants are observed to do this” (Tsui 1994: 3). In the following, the connectedness between a conversation’s constitutive elements of a turn-constructional unit (TCU), a turn, which is constructed out of one or more of TCUs, and the interactional domain of turn-taking are going to be examined in detail. 3.3.3.1Turn-taking In conversation analysis, turn-taking is assigned the status of an organizing principle, and discourse is investigated with regard to a context-sensitive employment of the turn-taking system. The model of turn-taking is explicated by the founding figures of conversation analysis as follows: First, speaker-change occurs. A single person does not continue speaking indefinitely; instead one person stops talking and another begins. Second, ‘overwhelmingly’, one party talks at a time. Third, in spite of this overwhelming tendency, occurrences of more than one speaker at a time are common, but brief. Fourth, exchanges of turn (transitions from one to the next) with no gap and no overlap are common. […] Fifth, there are turn-allocation techniques; the person currently speaking can select the next person (for example, by directing a question to a particular individual), or the next speaker may selfselect. In addition, there is typically no preplanning: neither the order nor the length of individual speakers’ turns is specified in advance, and the length of the conversation, what will be talked about, how many people participate, or the relative distribution of turns is not predetermined. (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974: 700–1)

The context-independent definition of the turn-taking mechanism applies to conversation in general. In natural-language communication, however, interactions do not occur out of social and sociocultural contexts, but are generally framed by communicative encounters, communicative genres (Luckmann 1995) or communicative projects (Linell 1998), such as a political interview, an argumentation, a discussion or small talk. For this reason, conversations are also defined by a context-sensitive employment of the turntaking system. For instance, the communicative genre of political interview is interactionally organized by the coparticipant-specific employment of the turntaking system: the interviewer selects the interviewee as next speaker, but not vice versa. Additionally, political interviews are generally preplanned events in which the length of the turns, the discourse topics, the number of participants


and the relative distribution of turns are predetermined (Fetzer 1999c, 2000a). This is not the case in small talk, where participants are free to self-select and where there are no restrictions on length, number of participants and relative distribution of turns; there is, however, a preference for so-called safe and non-controversial discourse topics. But is it possible to integrate the concepts of an utterance and a social action into the conversation-analytic model of turn taking? In conversation analysis, the rules which account for turn taking and context-sensitive instantiations of the turn-taking mechanism are differentiated with regard to (1) turn allocation, which has been explicated above, and (2) turn construction. From a structural viewpoint, turns are the elementary building blocks of the turn-taking system. But can the elementary building block of a turn accommodate the concept of an utterance? Since the length of a turn is generally not specified in advance, it may, in principle, be of any length. In contrast, an utterance is defined with regard to syntactic structure, grammatical constructions, lexical items and prosodic features. For this reason, its length is less indeterminate. As a consequence of this, an utterance cannot be mapped onto a turn in a direct manner. However, turns are constructed of turn-constructional units which are defined with regard to phonological, syntactic and semantic units: tone units, lexical expressions, grammatical constructions, phrases, clauses, information units and idea units. Moreover, each unit has a projectable completion point, i.e. a transition-relevance place, at which turn taking and speaker change may occur: The components of which turns-at-talk are composed we have in the past (SSJ 1974: 702–4) termed “turn constructional units”. By “turn constructional unit” (…) we meant to register that these units can constitute possibly complete turns; on their possible completion, transition to a next speaker becomes relevant (although not necessarily accomplished). (…) The (or one) key unit to language organization for talk-in-interaction is the turn constructional unit; its natural habitat is the turn-at-talk. (Schegloff 1996: 55)

Turn-constructional units are the most important elementary building blocks with regard to information management. Depending on the amount of information transmitted, a turn can consist of a single lexical expression, a single phrase or a single clause, as is the case in (81), (82) and (83): (81) Fire (82) Nice dress (83) When I’m older

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Turns may, however, also be quite complex and contain numerous clauses, such as (84): (84) Even though she was wearing a nice dress, which she bought at a jumble sale on Saturday, she did not want to go to the opera as she considers operas to be very posh and therefore as politically incorrect.

But how are utterances connected with the concepts of turn, turn-constructional unit and turn taking? In a sociopragmatic framework, coparticipants perform communicative actions through the exchange of one or more utterances. In this setting, (81) refers to the concept of fire and in the meantime performs the social action of a warning. (82) refers to the concept of dress and attributes the predicate ‘nice’ to it, and in the meantime performs the communicative action of complimenting. (83) expresses a prediction and is in the meantime used to perform the communicative action of a partial rejection, viz. ‘yes, but not now’, as is illustrated with the verbal exchange (85): (85) A B

Shall we go to France? When I’m older

Example (84) characterizes a female and in the meantime performs the communicative action of giving an account and providing reasons for her non-compliance. It has been shown that the conversation-analytic conceptions of a turn and a turn-constructional unit can be connected with the linguistic and pragmatic concepts of an utterance and of a communicative action,27 if the predominately structural outlook on conversation is abandoned and if interlocutors are assigned the status of rational agents who perform communicative and linguistic actions in accordance with the rules and logic of conversation based on discursive commitment: In the deontic scorekeeping model of inferentially articulated linguistic social practices, asserting is making a knowledge claim. The attitudes in terms of which the hybrid deontic status of knowledge is understood are just those in terms of which the significance of assertions is specified. Assertional practice is accordingly a version not only of the game of giving and asking for reasons but also of the game of making and defending claims to knowledge. Practioners who can produce and consume assertions are linguistic beings. Practioners who can

27.Szczepek’s (2000: 25) investigation shows that intonational and pragmatic completions are nearly always also syntactic completions — yet the reverse is not necessarily the case.


produce and consume reasons are rational beings. On the account presented here, these are three ways of talking about the same practices and the same capacities. Underlying all of them is the inferentially and socially articulated notion of discursive commitment. (Brandom 1994: 203)

In the refined frame of investigation, an utterance and its conversation-analytic counterpart of a turn-constructional unit represents one of the most important elementary building blocks of discourse. This is due to firstly, its dual status as linguistic surface-structure and communicative action; and secondly, its communicative function in the game of giving and asking for reasons. However, an investigation of discourse should not only focus on turn-constructional units. It should also take into consideration larger units, such as communicative genre and its opening, topical-sequence and closing sections. From a sequential-organization viewpoint, conversation is investigated with regard to the coparticipants’ employment of the turn-taking mechanism in micro situations. In this setting, coparticipants infer and calculate the appropriate employment of the turn-taking mechanism by identifying turn-constructional units whose boundaries function as transition-relevance places in order to avoid inappropriate interruptions, overlaps or silence.28 That is to say, a transition-relevance place does not only have an interactional function by indicating that the next speaker may claim a turn. It also establishes local coherence by signalling that the current speaker considers her/his ‘conversational contribution’ and the information transmitted through it to be “such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of direction of the talk exchange” (Grice 1975: 45). In addition to pointing backwards, transition-relevance places also have a forward-pointing function by signalling that new information or a different perspective may be added to the ongoing discourse. For this reason, turns and utterances display both prospective and retrospective elements, which do not only establish local coherence by indexing local discourse topics and micro situations. They also index the macro domains of communicative genre and institution.

28.The question whether a deviation from the prototypical employment of the turn-taking mechanism is interpreted as appropriate or inappropriate depends on the corresponding sociocultural norms. Overlaps and interruptions can be interpreted as cooperative and thus as an instance of joint production. They can, however, also be interpreted as attempts to gain the floor and thus are seen as disruptive. Tannen (1981) describes overlaps as the most salient characteristics of a high-involvement style, where they are not interpreted as an attempt to interrupt but are given a cooperative interpretation.

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In the following, the point made in Actions and interactions that utterances should be investigated in an interpersonal framework is taken up again with regard to the joint construction of a turn, and the joint construction of larger frameworks, such as a sequence, a communicative project or a communicative genre. 3.3.3.2Joint construction The ethnomethodological outlook on conversation and social and sociocultural contexts as interactionally organized phenomena is based on the premise of indexicality. That is to say, social actions, utterances, turn-constructional units and turns are assigned the function of social indexes to which immediate and remote layers of social, sociocultural and linguistic contexts are anchored. Indexicality is a relational concept, which is necessarily anchored to an interpersonal frame of reference and thus to joint action. This is due to the fact that the coparticipants involved are expected to act in accordance with the rules of the game of giving and asking for reasons and they are expected to explicitate the indexical expressions’ reference points and to act in accordance with the rules of the game of making and defending their claims. If the joint-action and interpersonally oriented outlook on natural-language communication is adapted to the verbal exchange (61), which has been examined in the section on Utterances and sentences and is repeated here as (86), the coparticipants A and B jointly reconstruct the communicative genre of a political interview: (86) A B

They don’t get very excited about nuclear-free zones, do they? No well, I can’t say that I do myself.

This is due to (1) the employment of the adjacency pair of question and answer, which itself is part of a larger question and answer sequence, (2) the implicit request to ratify the political-discourse topic of nuclear-free zones, which anchors the turn to the sociocultural context of the peace movement, if not to the so-called ‘loony left’, and (3) the acceptance of both the political-discourse topic and its implicit evaluation, which is elaborated on by the interviewee. In other words, A and B produce utterance meaning by anchoring their utterances and turns to contextual frames, and they infer utterance meaning by retrieving the meaning of anaphora and other indexical expressions from the corresponding contextual frames. The underlying principle of framing requires an utterance and a turn to contain both prospective and retrospective elements. Only then is its possible to establish coherent links with prior and upcoming discourse. However, anaphoric reference not only establishes local coherence. It also has the communicative


function of implicit ratification. Prospective elements, on the other hand, such as the question tag do they prepare for a response by indicating A’s local preferences with regard to the continuation of discourse. As regards A’s turn in (86), the employment of the question tag realizes an implicit request to comment on the claim; and the affirmative tag do they signifies that the speaker would prefer the addressee to agree with the claim (Leech and Svartvik 1994). Moreover, prospective elements are intrinsic to the concept of an adjacency pair. That is to say, A’s employment of the first part of the adjacency pair of question and answer indicates that the corresponding second part is forthcoming. Thus, prospective elements may also function as constraints on possible hearer contributions. Yet, it is not only adjacency pairs, sequences, communicative projects and communicative genres which are jointly produced. Also, utterances and turns can be jointly produced, as has been shown by Szczepek’s analysis of the collaborative production of English conversation: “The investigation has shown how speakers who jointly create an utterance can share the turn. They do not treat each other as interrupters into one another’s turn space but as collaborators in the production of an interactional unit. This occurs on various levels of conversation” (Szczepek 2000: 29). The investigation of context-dependent utterance meaning requires an interpersonal and therefore dialogue-oriented frame of reference which accounts for the reflexive relation of local units, namely utterance and social action, and turn-constructional unit and turn. Moreover, the coparticipant’s construction of a turn, that is the selection of the corresponding turn-constructional units seems to be connected with her/his communicative intention, as is indicated by Paul Drew: There can be little doubt that whilst structures of sequences of turns/actions are part of the cognitive processes through which the coherence of those sequences was produced in the first place in the course of interaction, the mental model of such structures may not be conscious, articulated resources. Sequential structures are some of the procedures whereby co-participants discover the meaning in, and goals behind, one another’s utterances: that is, they are procedures which lie behind participants’ analysis of meaning/action. (…) But although participants’ analyses of one another’s behaviour are certainly part of the ‘conscious’ level of conversation, the procedures which lie at the back of those analyses or understandings may not be. (Drew 1995: 132)

In the following, the connectedness between an utterance’s constitutive cognitive and social domains is examined in Clark’s approach to natural-


language communication with regard to the connectedness between Signals, language and language use and between Joint projects and common ground. 3.3.4 Utterances: Social and cognitive Clark’s seminal work on using language (1996) is anchored to a both social and cognitive outlook on language and language use. This is reflected in his conception of language as being deliberately used in an interpersonal setting and as being fundamentally used for social purposes. The former is reflected in Clark’s relational conception of meaning which is communicated by the coparticipants’ intentional and goal-directed employments of signals: “Signals are built on signs that speakers deliberately create for their addressees — words, gestures, noises, and more” (Clark 1996: 156). The latter manifests itself in the coparticipants’ coordination and cooperation in order to perform joint actions. As a consequence of that dual orientation, language use is necessarily anchored to joint action and it always involves speaker’s meaning and addressee’s understanding, which is also implicit in Austin’s conception of uptake and in Habermas’s (1987) notion of ratification of validity claim, which is going to be elaborated on in the following section Dialogues in context. Moreover, the basic setting for language use is a face-to-face conversation and, for this reason, language use is, in the majority of cases, a multi-layered activity. In the following the connectedness between Clark’s conception of signals, language and language use is examined. 3.3.4.1Signals, language and language use Analogously to researchers in the huge field of discourse and dialogue analysis, Clark does not conceive of language as an autonomous entity anchored solely to the speaker’s domain. Instead, he anchors language to an interpersonally oriented frame of reference, in which coparticipants act in a rational and intentional manner and perform communicative acts accordingly. Unlike the research paradigm of speech act theory, according to which a speaker speakerintends her/his utterance to count as a particular speech act through the performance of an utterance act, of a propositional act and of an illocutionary act, or of a locutionary act, of an illocutionary act and of a perlocutionary act, Clark explicitly anchors his conception of language and language use to both the speaker and the addressee. Because of the interpersonal orientation, a coparticipant’s utterance and her/his underlying communicative action can no longer be conceived of as a discrete unit. Rather, it must be seen as a partially


joint, if not a joint production: “Utterances are the most tangible products of language use. They have traditionally been treated as autonomous acts by speakers, but that isn’t right. Although speakers may assume the major responsibility, they cannot present utterances without the coordination of their addressees” (Clark 1996: 253). Clark points out that the coordination between speaker and addressee manifests itself in the production and interpretation of an utterance. This observation refines the notion of a context-dependent utterance, which has traditionally been seen as anchored to linguistic contexts and to the temporal and spatial domains of social and sociocultural contexts. As a consequence of this, producers and recipients of an utterance are assigned the status of a constitutive part of an utterance each. This interpersonal outlook on communication and on speaking is also reflected in Goffman’s approach to social interaction, which Clark summarizes as follows: “In Goffman’s view, speaking decomposes into three levels of action: meaning, formulating, and vocalizing” (Clark 1996: 20). While speaking denotes the actual production and interpretation of utterances, viz. utterance meaning in a context, its linguistic counterpart of a sentence is anchored to a symbolic domain of meaning. Clark compares and contrasts the two units of investigation as follows: “Utterances, however, are not sentences. Recall that signs are types, and they signify types of things, not individual things. Whereas sentences are entirely symbolic, utterances of sentences can never be, because they are particular occurrences and are used to refer to particular objects, states and events” (Clark 1996: 161, 162). But how are utterances conceived of in this cognitive and social outlook on language and language use, and how are they constructed? In linguistics, a sentence and its actual linguistic surface, the utterance, is constructed out of lexical expressions, which are linearized in accordance with the rules of a particular grammar regarding the domains of phonology, morphology, semantics and syntax.29 In speech act theory, utterances are used to perform speech acts, and they consist of a number of particular acts, such as reference acts and predications (Searle 1969) or phatic and rhetic acts (Austin 1980). In Austin’s and in Searle’s conceptions of speech act theory, the construction of an

29.Depending on the model of grammar, the base is represented by syntax or by semantics. If syntax is seen as the foundation of the grammar, as is the case in generative grammar and in minimalism, the syntactic rules are instantiated and interface with the rules of morphology, phonology and semantics. If semantics is seen as the heart of the grammar, as is the case in functional grammar, the semantic rules are instantiated and interface with the rules of phonology, morphology and syntax.

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utterance has to be carried out — or must be performed, as is argued for in this work — in accordance with the rules of a particular grammar and with the conventions of use. In conversation analysis, utterances are constructed out of one or more TCUs, and their linguistic realization must also be carried out in accordance with the rules of a grammar and with the conventions of use. Unlike speech act theory, conversation analysis and mainstream linguistics, Clark decomposes an utterance with regard to its communicative functions: “In conversation, most utterances are composites of the three methods — describing-as, indicating, and demonstrating — not just one or two” (Clark 1996: 183). He schematizes the basic communicative functions of linguistic and nonlinguistic signals, which he calls methods, with regard to the linguistic and nonlinguistic signs created, with regard to the cognitive memory resources and with regard to their basic cognitive processes as follows: Method

Sign created

Memory resource

describing-as

symbols

indicating

indices

mental lexicon activating rules grammatical rules representation of spatial, tempo- locating entities ral surroundings

demonstrating

icons

memory for appearances

Basic process

imagining appearances (Clark 1996: 184)

The descriptive function of language relies on the employment of linguistic symbols which are retrieved from the mental lexicon. They map onto lexical expressions or words and they construct sequences, such as phrases, clauses or sentence, in accordance with the rules of a particular grammar. As regards language use, the production and interpretation of one or more utterances activate the corresponding cognitive domains of the mental lexicon and the grammar. Thus, symbols are connected with linguistic context and with cognitive context. Indices, by contrast, serve to indicate particular spatial and temporal entities and therefore are anchored to social, sociocultural, linguistic and cognitive contexts. They map onto deictic expressions and other indexicals, whose references points are constitutive parts of the cognitive, linguistic, social and sociocultural contexts and therefore express relational meaning; without their reference points and their connectedness with context, the meaning of indices would be void. Icons serve to demonstrate appearances and therefore are also anchored to cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural and social contexts. They


map onto collocational and idiomatic expressions and evoke particular cultural meanings; without these contextual frames, the meaning of icons would be infelicitous. In addition to the constitutive expressions of symbols, indices and icons, Clark postulates a further category, the category of contextual constructions, which are defined as follows: “Contextual constructions rely on an appeal to context — to the participants’ common ground. They always require nonconventional coordination for their interpretation” (Clark 1996: 71). For instance, contextual constructions in English30 include types as indirect descriptions, such as You’ll have to call a zero or I bought a Wittgenstein, compound nouns, such as I want a finger cup or sit on the apple-juice chair, denominal nouns, for instance he’s a waller or she’s a cupper, denominal verbs, such as my friend teapotted a policeman or she Houdini’d her way out of the closet, denominal adjectives, such as he’s very Churchillian or she’s very San Francisco, nonpredictating adjectives, for instance that’s an atomic clock, not a manual one, possessives, such as let’s take my route or that’s Calvin’s side of the room, the main verb do, for instance he did the street or he did a Clinton, the pronoun one, such as he has one, and the pro-adjective such, for instance she has such a car. According to Clark, these “[c]ontextual constructions offer a convincing demonstration of the cumulative view of discourse: They can only be understood against the current state of the discourse” (Clark 1996: 79). In natural-language communication, symbols, indices, icons and contextual constructions are used to construct utterances. As has been pointed out above, Clark does not conceive of an utterance in a solely linguistic manner. Rather, he emphasizes its multi-layered status. As a consequence of this, an utterance functions as a signal which realizes a deliberate action. In order to be felicitous, a deliberate action must be performed in accordance with the rules of language and in accordance with the conventions of language use. Or, in Clark’s own words: “We cannot talk about a signal having meaning without assuming an agent or speaker behind it” (Clark 1996: 129). Clark’s conception of language and language use is both social and cognitive. It is based on the coparticipants’ production and interpretation of utterances in an interpersonal setting, where utterances are employed to signal meaning. Furthermore, utterances are seen as a kind of joint language use and therefore must be embedded in the larger sequence of a verbal exchange, if not a communicative project. Against this background, he explicitly points out that

30.The examples listed here are adapted from Clark (1996: 79).


conversations can never be purely additive: “Although conversations are created from utterances, they are more than the sum of their parts” (Clark 1996: 318). In the following, the joint production of talk is examined with regard to the connectedness between joint projects and common ground. 3.3.4.2Joint projects and common ground An interpersonal conception of language based on the (partly) joint production of utterances and the performance of joint projects can no longer be based on an autonomous outlook on language. Instead, it requires some sort of commonly shared context or some type of common ground to which coparticipants anchor their utterances and the communicative acts performed through them, and on which they base their calculation of utterance meaning. The prerequisite of ‘commonly shared’ makes a definition of common ground extremely difficult: is it only the (true) propositions which are commonly shared, or is it also the propositional attitudes which are commonly shared? As regards the former, commonly shared (true) propositions do not cause a serious problem because a (true) proposition which has not been shared can always be added to the coparticipants’ common ground. But what happens with false propositions: is it also a necessary condition for ‘shared common ground’ that they have to be shared? Moreover, what happens when a proposition which has been held true can no longer be assigned that truth value? In a relevance-theoretic framework, common ground consists of true propositions only and false propositions are simply eradicated. But the question of how common ground is organized and stored remains to be answered. That is to say, is common ground stored in a simple additive manner, or is it stored in a kind of network? From a processing viewpoint, it seems more plausible to adopt a network perspective which employs parallel distributed processing (Searle 1995, 1999). It is beyond the scope of this section, however, to elaborate on the nature and structure of common ground as regards both its content and its organization. Instead, an operational stance is adopted. Common ground and context are notions which are extremely hard to define and they are frequently compared and contrasted (Akman et al. 2001; Bouquet et al. 1999). The connectedness between context and object, such as a lexical expression or an utterance, is frequently compared with the gestaltpsychological dichotomy of figure and ground, that is ground denotes context or common ground, which is generally assumed to denote knowledge, beliefs and suppositions that are shared, and figure denotes the object or sequence with which it is connected. Or, to employ Clark’s own words: “Two people’s common


ground is, in effect, the sum of their mutual, common, or joint knowledge, beliefs and suppositions” (Clark 1996: 93). Thus, common ground is generally represented as (1) shared basis, as (2) reflexive, and as (3) iterated propositions. What is of relevance for the investigation of natural-language communication is the fact, that without presupposed common ground, viz. the common domain to which symbols, indices, icons and contextual constructions are anchored, communication as signalling meaning for the addressee would not be possible. Moreover, joint utterances, the minimal joint project of an adjacency pair and other joint projects are only possible against the premise that there exists common ground: The suggestion is that people are ordinarily able to justify their common ground. They believe or assume each piece has a basis that meets the requirements for CG-shared: The principle of justification. In practice, people take a proposition to be common ground in a community only when they believe they have a proper shared basis for the proposition in that community. (Clark 1996: 96)

Common ground is thus an extremely general notion, which, if applied to actual language use, may cause a lot of difficulties because of its dual status as cognitive and social. While the former is generally seen as purely intrapersonal, the latter is seen as interpersonal. As regards their connectedness, the former manifests itself in the performance of joint action through language, as is convincingly argued for by Goody: “Another way of putting this social reality of language is to note that a Secondary Representational Stem does far more than multiply the power of the individual’s primary representational system; it gives every individual the power to enter into the linguistic representation of others, and to use these shared secondary representations to model cognitively the understandings as well as the intentions of others” (Goody 1995: 6). The dual status of common ground as both cognitive and social is not restricted to the domains of knowledge, beliefs and suppositions. It is also reflected in the domain of cognitive operations, namely in individual intelligence and in social intelligence. The cognitive and social domains of common ground depart with regard to the intrapersonal domain of cognition and they meet in the performance of coordinated verbal and nonverbal social actions, as is explicated by Goody from an evolutionary perspective: If sociality does prove central to hominid cognition, then evolutionary account must also give it a key role. A parallel development of hominid intelligence and of language invites us to ask in what ways early language might have facilitated


social intelligence. Among the most obvious effects would be: a. Reference by name to things and actions permits joint attention, and thus coordination of complex activities. i. This reference would then have to be mentally represented. ii. The processes of coordinating joint activities would also have to be mentally represented. b. The emerging structures of grammar and syntax permit much more complex and more rapid conversation. i. These grammar and syntax structures have to be cognitively represented. ii. Grammar and syntax processes have presumably become standardized, then routinized and finally automatized as has the motor control of speaking. We are not aware of how we articulate and produce the sounds in our speech. (…) Nor are we conscious whether we put subject or verb first in a sentence. Automatization appears to free many complex processes from awareness, as car drivers are often startled to realize. (Goody 1995: 5)

If Goody’s argumentation is adapted to a dynamic conception of common ground with regard to its content and internal organization, the calculation of utterance meaning can be seen as a highly automatized operation. It has to be pointed out, however, that a high degree of automatization with respect to the production and interpretation of utterances and with respect to the internal organization of common ground does not mean that a coparticipant cannot be aware of the cognitive operations and processes involved (Searle 1999). Rather, automatization is considered to be the default case, which is only queried if coordination problems or communication problems arise. As regards the content of common ground, the stance adopted here is that it is not only true propositions, but also propositional attitudes which are part of the common ground. And it is the latter, which may cause problems because attitudes are generally conceived of in a scalar manner. As a consequence of the dilemma, Clark differentiates between an individual’s personal common ground and her/his communal common ground: the former is primarily intrapersonally oriented and the latter is primarily interpersonally oriented. The two types of common ground are interconnected and constantly updated and, if necessary, revised by the cognitive operation of grounding which is anchored to a logic of upward completion and downward evidence: “Levels of action form what I have called action ladders, which have the properties of upward causality, upward completion, and downward evidence” (Clark 1996: 389). An interpersonal outlook on language and language use requires an extended frame of investigation with common ground as one of its constitutive


parts. In this refined framework, common ground can no longer be conceived of as consisting of one domain only. Instead it must be differentiated into (minimally) two interacting dynamic domains, namely a coparticipant’s personal common ground where her/his subjective and privileged experience is stored, and a coparticipant’s communal common ground where social or joint experience is stored. Only then is it possible to cooperate and coordinate actions and perform joint actions. 3.3.5 Conclusion Natural-language communication is a rather complex endeavour which has traditionally been described as speakers and hearers exchanging utterances in micro situations, which are embedded in more remote sociocultural contexts. In this frame of reference, coparticipants and utterances are assigned the status of constitutive parts of social, sociocultural and linguistic contexts. The status of Utterances in context has been investigated with respect to the relation between the language-use notion of an utterance and the language-domain concept of a sentence. Language production and language use has compared and contrasted word-for-word constructions and prefabricated constructions and has argued for an outlook on language production and language use as intentional action, which is, of course, highly automatized. This line of reasoning has been supported by Levinson’s postulation of presumptive meaning, which represents a preferred interpretation and has the status of default meaning. Utterances and speech acts has introduced another decisive aspect of utterance production and language use, the principle of sociolinguistic variation which opens the gate for an interpersonal outlook on utterances. This perspective is supported by the differentiation between Actions and interactions and the attribution of an utterance to the realm of an interaction. Utterances, turns and turn-constructional units has further developed the interpersonal and interactive outlook on language and has introduced the turn-taking mechanism and the joint production of utterances and turns. The examination of Utterances in context closes with the section Utterances: Social and cognitive which is based on H. Clark’s conception of language and language use as both cognitive and social. Clark’s stance is supported and further refined by the accommodation of Goody’s work on social intelligence and the specific roles of language, cooperation and coordination. Coparticipants produce and interpret utterances and thereby perform communicative actions in context. In these scenarios, utterances are assigned


the status of contributions. Yet, coparticipants do not only perform communicative actions. They also reconstruct the corresponding social, sociocultural, linguistic and cognitive contexts. The accommodation of both an interpersonal and a cognitive outlook on language and language use requires a frame of reference which accounts for (1) the production and interpretation of utterance meaning, (2) the production and interpretation of joint projects and their sequential organization, (3) the interactional roles of the coparticipants, (4) the inferencing strategies required to calculate utterance meaning and establish coherence. Such a frame of reference, the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim, is presented in the following section Dialogues in context.

3.4 Dialogues in context Dialogues are described as being represented by one macro sequence which is itself constructed of a (finite) number of micro sequences (Meierkord and Fetzer 2002). Depending on the theoretical frameworks, the micro sequences are called dialogue acts, discourse representation structures, sentences, propositions, utterances, speech acts or turns. Accordingly, they are defined with regard to frame-of-investigation specific constraints and requirements, and with regard to frame-of-investigation-specific purposes. Micro sequences are conceived of as expressing semantic contents, they are conceived of as expressing communicative functions, they are conceived of as expressing semantic contents and communicative functions, they are conceived of as changing the context by adding propositional content (Fetzer 1999a; Sbisà 2002a/b; Stalnaker 1999), or they are conceived of as reconstructing communicative genres (Luckmann 1995). In text linguistics, texts and dialogues are constructed of sentences and propositions, and they are investigated with regard to cohesion and coherence (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981; Halliday and Hasan 2000). In the field of sociopragmatics, dialogues are constructed of utterances which are employed in an intentional and strategic manner in order to perform communicative acts (Fetzer 2000a; Mey 1996; Sarangi and Slembrouck 1996). In conversation analysis, dialogues are constructed of turn-constructional units, turns and topical sections (Boden and Zimmerman 1992; Drew and Heritage 1992; Schegloff 1996), in discourse representation theory, discourse is constructed of discourse representation structures (Kamp and Reyle 1993), and in dynamic interpretation theory, dialogue is constructed of dialogue acts which have semantic contents and communicative functions (Bunt 1999). Irrespective


of the different goals and purposes, dialogue is commonly seen as jointly produced by minimally one speaker and one addressee.31 For this reason, it represents an instance of collaborative behaviour, or to employ Grosz and Sidner’s own words, who refer to discourse in general: “Discourses are fundamentally examples of collaborative behavior. The participants in a discourse work together to satisfy various of their individual and joint needs” (Grosz and Sidner 1992: 418). In dynamic interpretation theory, the dialogue manager fulfils the function of coordinating this kind of collaboration and is described by Bunt with respect to a formalization of dialogue as follows: Dialogue management is the process of deciding what to do next in dialogue. In human communication, dialogue is a process that seems to go unnoticed much of the time; only rarely are we aware of having to make a decision on what to say next, or whether to say anything at all. When designing a computer dialogue system, however, we either have to pre-program the possible dialogues according to a certain fixed sequence of utterances, or else we have to define a ‘dialogue manager’, who decides what the system should do next, based on a model of current dialogue context. (Bunt 1999: 77)

What is of interest for the investigation of the connectedness between dialogue and context is not only Bunt’s comparison between natural-language communication and human-machine or machine-machine interaction, but also his conception of a dialogue manager, which has the function of regulating the flow of discourse, or, to employ Grosz and Sidner’s terminology, which coordinates and regulates the collaboration of the two animate or inanimate communicating parties. Unlike Bunt’s observation, however, the dialogue manager of natural-language communication does not go ‘unnoticed’ and is not out of work, metaphorically speaking. Rather, it is based on the premise of implicit knowledge, viz. on knowing how. The implicitness is reflected in the fact that there are hardly any explicit references to how natural-language discourse or dialogue is structured with regard to what has happened before and what is going to happen next. Yet the lack of explicit references to the dialogue management does not mean that conversation is something which ‘goes unnoticed’ or

31.As regards the number and statuses of coparticipants, the research paradigm of naturallanguage dialogue requires minimally two coparticipants who are both linguistically and socioculturally competent. This does not hold for the research paradigm of non-natural language dialogue, such as dynamic interpretation theory or discourse representation theory; they require minimally one ideal speaker. In the non-natural paradigms, sociocultural competence is not assigned the status of a necessary condition.


which does not adhere to any particular rules and regularities. Rather, the dialogue manager is highly automatized in natural-language communication and, for this reason, is assigned a default status: it is only explicitly referred to when something has gone wrong, i.e. when something has not been performed in accordance with the implicit knowledge. Against this background, the function of a dialogue manager in natural-language communication can be equated with the social-intelligence concepts of interactive thinking (Brown 1995) and AIP (Goody 1995), and with the social-interaction notion of a learned program which underlies social intelligence (Drew 1995). The dyadic and dialogic conception of AIP is explicated by Goody as follows: Both through inner speech, which is the sort of dialogue with ourselves (between me and I), and through our close attention to conversational partners, spoken language seems to have constructed a dialogue template for social cognition. In inner speech and in conversation, dialogue and the dyad are built into human cognition. (…) This highlights the complexity of AIP, which must both model contingent responses and model strategies for securing actions from others which are favourable to ego’s goals. AIP moves constantly back and forth between modelling and strategic action. (Goody 1995: 12)

The dialogue manager and its implicit knowledge of how to conduct, produce and interpret a conversation and its constitutive contributions contains dialogue-specific information with regard to the interpersonal domains of the participation framework and politeness, and with regard to the interactional organization of dialogue. In the following, the explicit and implicit realizations of references to the dialogue manager are examined. In the verbal exchange (87), the majority of references to the interactional and interpersonal domains are realized in the explicit mode: (87) A

B

I, the current speaker, intend to initiate a verbal exchange by asking you, current hearer, a question. The question is also intended to show politeness: Where did you, current hearer, spend your holiday? Would you please answer my, the current speaker’s, question now Thank you so much for the initiation of a verbal exchange and the polite question which you as the previous speaker posed to me as the previous hearer. As the present speaker I respond to you, present hearer, and your initiated verbal exchange manifest in your question as follows: I, the current speaker, spent my holiday in France. Does that answer your question or do you want to ask further questions regarding this matter?


In an Anglo-American setting, that verbal exchange is considered to be extremely strange and thus is assigned a marked status. But why is that so? First of all, it seems almost impossible to reconstruct a plausible sociocultural context in which the conversation might have happened, unless we adopt a parasitic setting, such as a non-serious, mocking encounter. Secondly, explicit references to the participation framework, such as I as the current speaker or you as the present hearer are considered to be redundant in both a face-to-face interaction and in a written setting as they infringe on the Gricean maxims of quantity and manner. Instead, references to the participation framework are generally realized implicitly by the indexical expressions I, you and we; only in very specific institutional settings, such as parliamentary debates or courtroom hearings, explicit references to the participation framework are employed, for instance does the Prime Minister wish to respond or does the accused wish to add anything else. Thirdly, explicit references to the sequential status of an utterance and its communicative function are also generally realized implicitly. This is due to the embedded nature of utterances in local and in more remote sequences. These larger sequences, for instance a communicative project or a communicative genre, constrain the production and interpretation of talk-in-interaction. Only in particular institutional settings, such as courtroom or medical interactions, explicit references to the sequential status or to the communicative function of an utterance are part of the interactional procedure, such as would you please answer my question by not asking a question but by stating what happened on January, 4th 2000 or by how are you feeling this morning. Fourthly, explicit references to politeness or to a polite attitude do not generally express politeness in an Anglo-American setting (Watts et al. 1992). Rather, explicit references to politeness, such as I was only trying to be polite only occur when speaker-intended politeness has been infelicitous and when s/he attempts to repair the damage done. As can be seen from the examination of (87), the linguistic realization of the dialogue manager’s knowledge adheres to different rules and regulations in natural-language communication. In an AngloAmerican setting, the dialogue-manager specific information regarding the participation framework, politeness and interactional organization of (87) is realized implicitly, for instance, by (88) or (89): (88) A B

Where did you spend your holiday? In France.

(89) A B

Where did you spend your holiday? We went to France.

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In (88) and (89), references to the participation framework are realized implicitly by the indexicals I, you and your, references to politeness are realized by the actual question about A’s holiday destination, and references to the interactional organization are realized by the sequential slot, in which the utterance is realized. That is, A’s wh-question where did you spend your holiday is assigned the discursive function of initiating a phatic-communication or social-chit-chat section (Zegarac and Clark 1999). Due to the immediately adjacent position, B’s utterance is realized in the interactional slot of a response, and because of this ratifies A’s contribution. Additionally, it expresses coherence with a prior question by taking up the pronominal references (you and we) and the semantic field of holiday destinations (France). For these reasons, B is assigned the communicative function of a response with respect to the adjacency pair of question (A) and answer (B). The comparison between the realization of dialogue-manager specific information in the natural-language paradigm and in the formal paradigm has shown that in natural-language communication references to the dialogue manager are generally realized implicitly by indexical expressions, by cohesive links and by the discursive functions of an utterance. The implicit realization is only possible if utterances are seen as multifunctional and if the dialogue manager is assigned a presuppositional status. Against this background, the dialogue manager is only explicitly referred to in particular institutional settings or when something has gone wrong. Moreover, implicit references to the interactional and interpersonal domains cannot be allocated to particular indexical expressions, for instance to the so-called politeness marker please in English. While please expresses politeness by attenuating the pragmatic force of the request in (90), it boosts the pragmatic force of the directive in (91), where it does not express politeness at all: (90) Could I have some change, please? [rising intonation] (91) Stop it, please! [falling intonation and accentuated]

So, interpersonal and interactional meaning is relational meaning par excellence which is calculated with regard to the nature of the connectedness between an utterance, which is assigned the status of a contribution, and its references to context. As a consequence of this, natural-language communication must be conceived of as a multifunctional endeavour where an utterance or an indexical expression realizes implicit references to different domains, such as dialogue-


specific interactional and dialogue-specific interpersonal information.32 For this reason, language use in dialogue is not only multifunctional and an instance of collaborative behaviour, it is also context-dependent. To be more precise, speakers, hearers and their utterances reconstruct cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural and social contexts while being constitutive parts of the contexts themselves. In spite of their common cores, the nature of the macro sequence of dialogue and its constitutive units, the micro sequences, is more than controversial. While the application of sentence grammar to dialogue in the framework of text linguistics and the application of speech act theory to dialogue (Sbisà 2002b) is based on discrete units, the production of joint utterances and joint turns can no longer be anchored to discrete units only. Instead, it requires a dynamic frame of reference in which communication is seen as both process and product. So, what necessary and sufficient conditions are required for the definition of such a refined frame of reference, and how is the nature of the connectedness between language, language use, communicative action, coparticipant, communicative intention and dialogue accounted for? The goal of this section is to investigate the connectedness between naturallanguage dialogue and context with regard to (1) dialogues and coparticipants, (2) dialogues and language, (3) dialogues and intentionality, and (4) dialogues and context. Section 3.4.1, The dialogue principle of cooperation, examines the Gricean cooperative principle, the conversational maxims and implicature, and the notion of communicative intention, and their connectedness with language, language use and social practice. Section 3.4.2, Validity claims in context, systematizes the results obtained in the framework of an interactive tripartite system of The dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim: objective, social and subjective worlds, and examines the status of a communicative intention as a social- or as a subjective-world construct by distinguishing between a bottom-up perspective to dialogue and a top-down perspective to dialogue. Section 3.4.3, Micro and macro communicative intentions, compares and contrasts the notions of a micro communicative intention and of a macro communicative intention. It argues for a differentiation between individual I-intentions, individual presuppositions and individual sense-making on the one hand, and the dialogue categories of I-thou-sociality, collective we-intentions, collective co-

32.The multi-functional stance adopted here is radically different to dynamic interpretation theory, where “every communicative function corresponds to a particular set of features of the communicative behaviour that dialogue participants display” (Bunt 1999: 78).

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suppositions, collective dialogue common ground, collective coherence and collective communicative genre on the other hand. 3.4.1 The dialogue principle of cooperation The Gricean approach to natural-language communication is based on the premise that conversations are rational endeavours and cooperative efforts, in which participants realize and recognize a common purpose or set of purposes, or, at least, some mutually accepted direction. The CP is the solid base of rational dialogue and therefore, by definition, not open for negotiation; coparticipants may, however, employ the strategy of opting out, which is generally accompanied by explicit references to some higher-order moral principle, such as confidentiality or trust. When they opt out, they generally spell out the reasons for their non-compliance. Analogously to speech act theory, the Gricean approach to natural-language communication is based on the premise of rationality and intentionality. Unlike speech act theory, the Gricean approach postulates cooperation as the fundamental premise of communication. The CP, on which the calculation of intersubjective meaning is based, reads as follows: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. (Grice 1975: 45)

In this framework, cooperation is manifest in the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange. But on what premise is the notion of accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange based? Is it based on the concept of a unilateral speech act or is anchored to dialogue? From a sequential-organization viewpoint, the notion of accepted purpose cannot be defined with regard to one coparticipant only. Instead, it presupposes a set of speaker and hearer, who must somehow have agreed to accept a — more or less specific — direction of the talk exchange. And it is that acceptance which presupposes an already postulated and ratified speech act and thus the minimal unit of an exchange, if not a larger dialogue sequence. As a consequence of this, the cooperative principle is anchored to the micro level of an exchange — but is it restricted to the micro level? The CP does not explicitly differentiate between micro and macro domains. However, Grice’s reference to the stage, viz. the points in time, place and discourse, at which a communicative contribution occurs presupposes an extended frame of reference, in which a talk exchange is embedded in a


larger dialogue sequence, such as the dialogue category of a communicative project or of a communicative genre. Thus, the purpose or direction to which contributions are anchored does not only require local coherence, but also communicative-project-oriented coherence or macro coherence. For these reasons, the Gricean CP represents a dialogue principle par excellence, which does not only account for the sequential organization of dialogue on the micro level of an exchange, but also on the macro level of a communicative project. But does the dialogue principle of cooperation only manifest itself on the levels of a contribution and of a communicative project or communicative genre? In his work on using language, Clark (1996) argues for natural-language communication to be conceived of as anchored to both cognition and collaboration. As regards the semantics of collaboration, collaboration is only possible against the background of agents who cooperate. It has to be pointed out, however, that cooperation does not mean that the two agents coordinate their actions in a harmonious manner. Rather, cooperation refers to the agents’ agreement on some goal which they intend to achieve in a harmonious or in a disruptive manner.33 Thus, an antagonistic argument is also seen as an act of cooperation and coordination. The cognitive orientation towards language and language use is reflected in Clark’s language-specific building blocks of symbols, indices, icons and contextual constructions, and their communicative functions of describing-as, indicating and demonstrating. In his frame of reference, collaboration does not only manifest itself in the joint construction of discourse. Rather, it is already manifest in the act of referring, which is seen as a collaborative process (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs 1992). This radically different conception of reference to the prevailing one in mainstream linguistics — or in the literal model, as Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs call it, is explicated as follows: “(1) The reference is expressed linguistically with one of the three standard types of noun phrase — a proper noun (…), a definite description (…), or a pronoun(…). (2) The speaker uses the noun phrase intending the addressee to be able to identify the referent uniquely against their common ground. (3) The speaker satisfies her intention simple by issuing that noun phrase. And (4) the course of the process is controlled by the speaker alone” (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs 1992:465). Unlike the product- and speaker-oriented interpretation of referring, Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs conceive of the act of referring as a collaborated action.

33.Conflict talk, controversial argumentation and war are only possible if the parties involved have agreed to cooperate in their performance of the activities and goals.

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For this reason, referring cannot consist of one single act anchored to one single coparticipant only. Instead, the process of referring is seen as initiating a reference by the speaker and passing a judgement on presentation by the hearer, which can be an acceptance, a rejection or a postponement of judgement. The act of referring is thus interpreted against the background of general conversational principles, namely the principle of mutual responsibility: “The participants in a conversation try to establish, roughly by the initiation of each new contribution, the mutual belief that the listeners have understood what the speaker meant in the last utterance to be a criterion for current purposes” (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs 1992: 488). The principle of mutual responsibility is implicit in Austin’s concept of uptake. But it goes beyond it by explicitly accounting for the set of coparticipants thus bridging the gap between two discrete individuals and paving the ground for Clark’s differentiation between personal common ground and communal common ground. The principle of mutual responsibility is further refined by the principle of distant responsibility: “The speaker or writer tries to make sure, roughly by the initiation of each new contribution, that the addressee should have been able to understand his meaning in the last utterance to a criterion sufficient for current purposes” (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs 1992: 490). Analogously to the implicit realization of references to the dialogue manager’s interactional and interpersonal domains, references to the principles of mutual responsibility and of distant responsibility, are generally not realized in the explicit mode either. Only in cases where the hearer’s judgement on presentation is a rejection or a postponement, references to the two principles are realized explicitly, as can be seen in the verbal exchange (92), where B has not been able to retrieve the referent of definite description car from their communal common ground, and in the verbal exchange (93), where D has not been able to retrieve the referent of the pronoun him from their communal common ground: (92) A B

… and you know that car almost ran me down which car

(93) C … since I’ve met him my life has changed dramatically D who

According to Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs, the felicity of referring and its allocation to the communal common ground is a necessary condition for a contribution to be felicitous:


In this view the two partners assume a unit of conversation we have called the contribution. It consists, minimally, of the utterance of one sentence on the topic of conversation, where the sentence can be full or elliptical, or even a quasi-sentence like Coffee, please. But to become a contribution, the utterance has to be mutually accepted before the initiation of the next contribution, and that process may require repairs, expansions, and replacements of all or part of the initial presentation. (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs 1992: 490)

A cooperation- and collaboration-oriented outlook on language and language use is not restricted to the macro categories of dialogue, communicative genre or communicative project and their building blocks of utterance, sentence, speech act, dialogue act or turn, Rather, the dialogue principle of cooperation already manifests itself in the act of referring and is thus a constitutive part of an utterance, or rather of a contribution. Moreover, referring seen from a cooperation viewpoint is not restricted to the semantic domain of a proposition but also applies to the interpersonal and interactional domains of dialogue. In the following, the status of the dialogue principle of cooperation and possible operationalizations are examined in the framework of the Gricean logic and conversation. 3.4.1.1Logic and conversation In the previous section, the Gricean CP has been defined as a dialogue principle par excellence which is valid in the micro domain of a contribution and in the macro domain of a communicative project or of a communicative genre. The dialogue orientation is reflected in Grice’s notion of such as is required and accepted purpose. But what do these notions actually mean, and how can they be operationalized? As has already been pointed out in the sections Speech acts in context and Utterances in context, contributions are not produced and interpreted at random in natural-language conversation. Rather, they adhere to particular sociopragmatic constraints and requirements, such as the turn-taking system or speech act theory’s felicity conditions. In the framework of the Gricean CP, contributions are expected to be dovetailed (Grice 1975: 48), i.e. linked by one or more common goals manifest in prior and succeeding talk. Thus, Grice specifies the sociopragmatic constraint of such as is required by the concept of dovetailed-ness, which is also implicit in the textlinguistic and discursive concept of coherence and its linguistic-surface counterpart of cohesion (De Beaugrande and Dressler 1981; Halliday 1996; Halliday and Hasan 2000). Furthermore, dovetailedness is reflected in the interactional-organization


principles of turn-taking and adjacency, which manifest themselves with regard to adjacency position, adjacency relation and adjacency pair, and in the microand macro-semantic phenomena of discourse topic and subtopics, and cataphoric and anaphoric references. For these reasons, dovetailedness is assigned the status of a dialogue constraint regarding both local and global coherence. But are the sequential phenomena of turn-taking, adjacency, and micro and macro coherence sufficient conditions for the definition of the dialogue constraint of dovetailedness? Dialogue has been defined as both cognitive and social, and for this reason, the dialogue principle of cooperation and its operationalization as dovetailedness must also be social and cognitive. While the social component of dialogue is generally conceived of as its actual realization in context, its cognitive component is generally conceived of as the inferencing processes required for the interpretation and calculation, as is argued here, and for the production of utterance meaning. The social and cognitive components meet in the cognitive organizations of common ground and of context, and in the sociocognitive organization of communal common ground and of context. The dual status of communication as cognitive and social, and its consequences for the actual production and interpretation of utterances in context is succinctly formulated by Levinson (1995: 238): Linguistic communication is fundamentally parasitic on the kind of reasoning about others’ intentions that Schelling and Grice have drawn attention to: noone says what they mean, and indeed they couldn’t — the specificity and detail of ordinary communicated contents lies beyond the capabilities of the linguistic channel: speech is a much too slow and semantically undifferentiated medium to fill that role alone. But the study of linguistic pragmatics reveals that there are detailed ways in which such specific content can be suggested — by relying on some simple heuristics about the ‘normal way of putting things’ on the one hand, and the feedback potential and sequential constraints of conversational exchange on the other. (Levinson 1995: 238)

The inferencing processes involved in natural-language communication are the standard ones, namely deduction, by which one infers specific instances from a general rule, induction, by which one presumably discovers the general rule from a representative sample of specific instances, and abduction, by which one reasons by hypothesis from instances or general rules to their wider context. As regards the connectedness between these modes of inference and the degree of certainty, deductive processing of information is associated with maximum certainty, and inductive-abductive processing of information is associated with


lower certainty (Givón 1989: 241). The importance of abductive reasoning is also stressed by Levinson’s reference to Aristotle: “As Aristotle argued, the logic of action is a distinct species of non-monotonic (defeasible) reasoning, a practical reasoning (PR) as it has been dubbed by philosophers” (Levinson 1995: 230). The nature of practical reasoning is further specified by Givón: “Practical reasoning and abduction by which one reasons by hypothesis from instances or general rules to their wider context” (Givón 1989: 238). Givón stresses the decisive difference between abduction and the deductive procedure of inferring specific instances from a general rule, “[t]his mode of hypothesis [abduction, A. F.] often involves analogical reasoning, and thus the pragmatic, context-dependent notions of similarity and relevance” (Givón 1989: 14). So far, reasoning has been primarily seen from a hearer viewpoint who calculates the meaning of an utterance with regard to the question of what the speaker intends to communicate. But what happens if a dialogue stance is adopted? Brandom’s work Making it explicit is discursive and thus dialogue-oriented. Because of his extended frame of reference, Brandom differentiates between an I-we perspective and an I-thou sociality and adapts the respective requirements to practical reasoning by distinguishing between “two kinds of practical attitudes one can adopt toward a commitment: acknowledging it (oneself) and attributing it (to another)” (Brandom 1994: 55). The fundamental difference between acknowledging something with regard one’s own personal domain and attributing it to others also holds for the notion of truth in practical reasoning, which, in Brandom’s own words: “is treated, not as a property independent of our attitudes, to which they must eventually answer, but rather as a creature of taking-true and treating-as-true. The central theoretical focus is on what one is doing when one takes something to be true — that is, our use of ‘true’, the acts and practices of taking things to be true that collectively constitute the use we make of this expression” (Brandom 1994: 287). Thus, truth is not assigned the status of an objective foundation of a theory of reasoning according to which all judgements are evaluated. Rather, it is conceived of from an action-theoretic viewpoint and therefore assigned the status of a context-dependent notion. The connectedness between truth as the premise and outcome of a deductive reasoning process and the status of truth in practical reasoning is spelled out by Brandom as follows: “We are believers, and believing is taking-true. We are agents, and acting is making-true. To be sapient is to have states such as belief, desire, and intention, which are propositionally contentful in the sense that the question can appropriately be raised under the circumstances what is believed, desired, or intended would be true. Understanding such a content is grasping


the conditions that are necessary and sufficient for its truth” (Brandom 1994: 277). While the connectedness between truth and making-true is still anchored to the individual speakers and hearers and to the attitudes they attribute to one another, the consequences for a conception of dialogue based on practical reasoning are explicated by Brandom as follows: Such correlation of the substitution-inferential commitments (and hence doxastic commitments) undertaken by the scorekeeper with those attributed to others is a necessary part of the interpretation that is the uptake by a scorekeeping audience of some speaker’s claim. It is an essential part of being able to use others’ judgements as reasons, as premises in the scorekeeper’s own inferences (even just hypothetically) to assess their significance in the context of those collateral commitments. Interpretation in this sense is necessary even in those cases where all parties share a language. The reason communication requires interpretation of this sort is twofold. First, speaker and audience typically have different sets of collateral commitments — if they did not, communication would be superfluous. Second, the inferential significance of a claim (what its consequences are and what would count as evidence for it) depends on what auxiliary hypotheses are available to serve as collateral premises. So differences in background beliefs mean that a remark may have one inferential significance for the speaker and another for each member of the speaker’s audience. (Brandom 1994: 475)

A conception of dialogue as a game of giving and asking for reasons presupposes a conception of dialogue as cooperation and is only possible against the background of a “theoretical route (…) made available from what people do to what they mean, from their practice to the contents of their states and expressions” (Brandom 1994: 134), which can only be anchored to a holistic approach, or to use Brandom’s own words: “Holism about inferential significances has different theoretical consequences depending on whether one thinks of communication in terms of sharing a relation to one and the same thing (grasping a common meaning) or in terms of cooperating in a joint activity (coordinating social perspectives by keeping deontic score according to common practices)” (Brandom 1994: 479). Practical reasoning is also a core concept in the research paradigm of ethnomethodology, where the “real” world is seen as interactionally organized and as represented by everyday-life activities and by practical actions. For this reason, social and practical actions are indexical by definition and characterized by the reflexibility (Garfinkel 1994: vii) of the following commonplace everyday activities: practical actions, practical circumstances, common-sense knowledge


of social structures and practical reasoning. Practical reasoning manifests itself in the ethnomethodological premise of accountability of social action, which states that social agents know, at some level, what they say and what they mean by their social actions, as is formulated by Garfinkel as follows: If the above description is correct, decision making in daily life would thereby have, as a critical feature, the decision maker’s task of justifying a course of action. The rules of decision making in daily life, i.e., rules of decision making for more or less socially routinized and respected situations, may be much more preoccupied with the problem of assigning outcomes their legitimate history than with the question of deciding before the actual occasion of choice the conditions under which one, among a set of alternative possible courses of action, will be elected. Several fugitive remarks are thereby in order: 1. The procedure of deciding, before the actual occasion of choice the conditions under which one, among a set of alternative possible courses will be elected, is one definition of a rational strategy. (Garfinkel 1994: 114)

Against this background, practical actions do not exist as such. Rather, they are performed by social actors who act in a rational manner. Due to their statuses as rational agents, they are in a position to account for their social actions. Garfinkel explicates the process and product of the accountability of social action as follows: Whenever a member is required to demonstrate that an account analyses an actual situation, he invariably makes use of the practices of “et cetera”, “unless” and “let it pass” to demonstrate the rationality of his achievement. (2) The definite and sensible character of the matter that is being reported is settled by an assignment that reporter and auditor make to each other that each will have furnished whatever unstated understandings are required. Much therefore of what is actually reported is not mentioned. (3) Over the time for their delivery accounts are apt to require that “auditors” be willing to wait for what will have been said in order that the present significance of what has been said will become clear. (4) Like conversations, reputations, and careers, the particulars of accounts are built up step by step over the actual uses of and references to them. (5) An account’s materials are apt to depend heavily for sense upon their serial placement, upon their relevance of the auditor’s projects, or upon the developing course of the organizational occasions of their use. (Garfinkel 1994: 3)

As regards the chronology of accounting for one’s actions and of accounting for performing actions, social actors can only account for their social actions once

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they have processed and contextualized them by filling the gaps and finding the grounds on whose basis they can argue for the appropriateness of a social action. Through the process and product of accounting for social actions, which are anchored to a retrospective-prospective outlook on communication, social actors demonstrate substantive rationality and daily life rationalities. If an action is interpreted as being performed in accordance with the sociocultural norms of a particular verbal and nonverbal practice, such as the examples (66) to (71) discussed in the previous section, which realize a request to pass the vinegar and are repeated for convenience as (94) to (98), they do not require any extra cognitive work and therefore are attributed to the unmarked format: (94) Pass me the vinegar, please. (95) Pass me the vinegar, will you? (96) Could you please pass me the vinegar? (97) Could you pass me the vinegar? (98) Have you got any vinegar?

In this setting the “et cetera” strategy applies, that is to say, the micro actions interact with the respective macro realms and confirm the status quo. If the social actions are interpreted as being performed in disaccordance with the sociocultural norms of a particular practice and thus as deviations from expected sociocultural behaviour, they are attributed to the marked format. However, if they deviate in only in a minor and irrelevant manner, the social actors are still in a position to consider the particular instance of deviant behaviour as being performed in accordance with a practice and transfer the minor deviance from the marked to the unmarked format. In this case, the strategy “let it pass” is employed so that the procedure may follow the “et cetera” pattern. This has been shown for the realization of a request to pass the vinegar by the following linguistic surface which has been classified as an indirect speech act: (99) Don’t you eat your chips with vinegar?

From a processing-effort viewpoint, any deviation requires more ‘cognitive work’, yet only an unreasonable deviation from the assumed norm and thus an unreasonable amount of cognitive work represents a marked format. That is, the utterance (99) is considered reasonable if there exists one sociocultural contextual frame which contains the information that chips and vinegar collocate, from a semantic viewpoint. Should a social action deviate from the


expected sociocultural mode of behaviour in an ‘unreasonable’ manner, as is the case with the employment of utterance (100) as a request to pass the vinegar, the social actors have to account for the degree of deviation: (100) Vinegar consists of seven letters

They may either employ the “unless” strategy or practice “ad hocing” (Garfinkel 1994: 21). The “unless” strategy regulates the acceptance of some social action under some specified conditions only and therefore partly accepts its validity in the micro frame. That is, if the speaker is a linguist, a philosopher or a psychologist and her/his coparticipants knows that s/he is fond of employing the principle of linguistic creativity to daily life, her/his request may be felicitous and s/he might receive the vinegar. In a different setting, however, the addressee of (100) might just ignore the utterance altogether or s/he might start a conversation about a spelling reform. In general, the contextualization of social actions with regard to the attribution of explicatures to the propositional content of a social action on the one hand (Sperber and Wilson 1996), and with regard to the attribution of accounts to indexical actions on the other hand, is carried out in the unmarked format. However, should an interpretation be inconsistent and therefore not hold, the status of the explicated presuppositions has to be reassessed. That is to say, the social actors have to make further explicatures in order to license a recontextualization of the respective indexicals. From the discussion of these practices we can draw the conclusion that the relationship between micro and macro realms is represented by the explicatures of social actions and by accounts of indexical social actions, which give more explicit information about their contents and about their communicative status with regard to the question of what the contents of the explicatures and what the contents of the accounts count as. Explicatures provide information about a proposition’s semantic status and its embeddedness in the immediate linguistic and social contexts. They are generally accompanied by accounts, which provide reasons for the performance of a communicative action thus justifying why and for what purpose the action has been realized. Thus, coparticipants do not only select the most appropriate strategy for realizing their communicative intentions and for achieving their communicative goal(s). They also select the most appropriate linguistic surface for the representation of their communicative intention in order to achieve that goal. In the research paradigm of mainstream linguistics, sentences are either well- or ill-formed and evaluated with regard to phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic constraints. Unlike the discrete linguistic categories, the

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sociopragmatic notion of appropriateness and the concept of pragmatic wellformedness are anchored to fuzzy categories, which are calculated with regard to social context, sociocultural context, linguistic context, cognitive context, communicative action, propositional content and linguistic realization. As a consequence of this, a contribution does not only have to be such as is required with regard to interactional, interpersonal and semantic coherence, but also with regard to its linguistic realization. In the following the calculation of such as is required is further refined with regard to the Gricean maxims of quality, quantity, manner and relation, and their refinement with regard to the accommodation of the constraints and requirements of dialogue. 3.4.1.2Conversational maxims The Gricean approach to conversation is based on rational and intentional coparticipants who firmly stand on the CP to which the maxims of quality, quantity, relation and manner are anchored. In case of an infringement of one or more of the maxims, a conversational implicature is triggered in order to infer and calculate the speaker-intended meaning. The Gricean CP, the maxims and the implicature are schematized as Figure 1:

Conversational Implicature

Manner

Relation

Quality

Quantity

Cooperative Principle

In conversation, the CP is the solid base to which a communicative action must be anchored. It represents the fundamental premise of dialogue and, for this reason, is illustrated as the foundation of a house, the maxims are illustrated as the walls and the implicature is illustrated as the roof in order to ensure that the conversational implicature is calculated within that ‘house’. Without the copartici-


pants’ acceptance of the validity of the CP, the communicative act is void. The Gricean maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner read as follows: Maxim of quantity The category of QUANTITY relates the quantity of information to be provided, and under it fall the following maxims: 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purpose of the exchange). 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Maxim of quality Under the category QUALITY falls a supermaxim — “Try to make your contribution one that is true” — and two more specific maxims: 1. Do not say what you believe to be false. 2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Maxim of relation Under the category of RELATION I place a single maxim, namely, “Be relevant”. Maxim of manner Finally, under the category of MANNER, which I understand as relating not (like the previous categories) to what is said but, rather, to HOW what is said to be said, I include the supermaxim — “Be perspicuous” — and various maxims such as: 1. Avoid obscurity of expression. 2. Avoid ambiguity. 3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). 4. Be orderly. (Grice 1975: 45, 46)

In action theory and pragmatics, some notion of the CP, if not the CP itself, has been widely accepted (Cohen et al. 1992). In spite of the tacit agreement, there is some controversy about the status of the implicature as regards the validity of the differentiation between a conventional and a conversational implicature, and about the number of maxims required for the calculation of the conversational implicature. In the following, Levinson’s interpretation of the Gricean maxims of quality, quantity, relation and manner as specifications of some unmarked communicative context, where they represent the pillars on which the conversational implicature is calculated, is examined. Levinson’s (1979) investigation of the connectedness between language and activity types, and between language games and episode is anchored to a sociocultural frame of investigation. Unlike main-stream linguistics and pragmatics, which tend to investigate the meaning of a contribution in a bottom-up manner with regard to the speaker-intended meaning, the meaning

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of the contribution and the meaning of their embeddedness in the immediate linguistic and extra-linguistic context, Levinson draws our attention to the fact that the meaning of a contribution is connected to, if not determined by, its particular meaning in the macro category of a language game: “The common feature of course is the extent to which understanding of what is said depends on understanding the ‘language game’ in which it is embedded, over and beyond whatever meaning the words or sentences may have in vacuo” (Levinson 1979: 367). Following Levinson, a language game is not only a social category defined as a “fuzzy category whose focal members are goal-defined, socially constituted, bounded events with constraints on participants, setting and so on, but above all on the allowable contributions” (Levinson 1979: 368), but rather both a social and cognitive frame of reference: “Now there is another important and related fact, in many ways the mirror image of the constraints on contributions, namely the fact that for each and every clearly demarcated activity there is a set of inferential schemata. These schemata are tied to (derived from, if one likes) the structural properties of the activity in question” (Levinson 1979: 370). It is this dual orientation, which is of relevance for a context- and dialogue-oriented investigation of the Gricean CP, the maxims and implicature. That is to say, the CP constraint of such as is required with respect to the common purpose can be specified with regard to the macro category of an activity type or a language game, namely as such as is required for the common purpose specified in the constraints of the language game. As a solution of the possible conflicts resulting from Grice’s general principles and the particular requirements of a language game, Levinson proposes the following refinement: There are two ways in which the conflict between Grice’s general principles of conversation and the particular expectations of specific activities can be reconciled. The first is to seek for a more sophisticated statement of Grice’s principles that will allow differing degrees of application of each maxim and the corresponding adjustment of implicatures. The second is to accept Grice’s maxims as specifications of some unmarked communication context, deviations from which however common are seen as special or marked. (Levinson 1979: 376)

The consequences of following the second path, namely “Grice’s maxims are seen as specifications of some unmarked communication context”, and “deviations” from it are seen as “special or marked”, have already surfaced in the introduction, where the functional-grammar conception of markedness has been spelled out. In Givón’s conception of functional grammar, markedness is


anchored to the cognitive domain and to the external or linguistic-surface domain, and it is calculated with regard to structural complexity, discourse distribution and cognitive complexity: the marked category is more complex and less frequent, and it is harder to process (Givón 1993: 178). Against this background, the Gricean CP and the maxims can be seen as unmarked because they are rather minimalist in their conception: the maxims of quality, quantity, manner and relation explicitly state that only taken-for true information should be uttered, that the taken-for-true information should not be longer than required, that the short-taken-for-true information should be relevant, and that the short, relevant and taken-for-true information should be linguistically realized in a straight-forward or direct manner. For this reason, particular or marked instances of communication signify that the speaker intends to communicate conversationally implicated meaning. Conversational implicatures are manifest in the exploitation of one or more of the maxims or when the coparticipant is faced with a clash. In these cases, the speaker intends a conversational implicature and communicates something beyond what has been said, which is calculated through a process of inferencing in which the speaker’s communicative intention is reconstructed in accordance with the constraints of the language game. Thus, the calculation of the communicative meaning of a contribution is not only based on the observance of the maxims, but also on possible infringements. In spite of the minimalist design of the Gricean CP, the maxims and the conversational implicature, numerous refinements of the maxims and the CP have been proposed. Leech (1983: 149) differentiates between the first-order principles of the Cooperative Principle, the Politeness Principle, the Interest Principle and the Pollyana Principle, the higher-order principles of Irony and Batter, and the contributory maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner allocated to the CP, and the contributory maxims of tact, generosity, approbation, modesty, agreement and sympathy allocated to the Politeness Principle. Lakoff’s (1973: 296–298) conception of rules of pragmatic competence is anchored to the principles of be clear and be polite. The principle of be polite subcategorizes into the maxims don’t impose, give options and make A feel god — be friendly and dominates the be clear principle. In addition to the social-interaction oriented refinements of the CP and the maxims, there have been modifications with regard to a dialogue-oriented interpretation of the maxims34 and a

34.In this work Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory is not seen as a refinement of the


speaker-oriented specification and a hearer-oriented specification, namely the I-Principle and the M-Principle. Levinson defines the I-Principle as follows: I-Principle Speaker’s maxim: the Maxim of Minimization. “Say as little as necessary”; that is produce the minimal linguistic information sufficient to achieve your communicational ends (bearing Q in mind). Recipient’s corollary: The Enrichment Rule. Amplify the informational content of the speaker’s utterance, by finding the most specific interpretation, up to what you judge to be the speaker’s m-intended point, unless the speaker has broken the maxim of Minimization by using a marked or prolix expression. Specifically: a. Assume the richest temporal, causal and referential connections between described situations or events, consistent with what is taken for granted. b. Assume that stereotypical relations obtain between referents or events, unless this is inconsistent with (a). c. Avoid interpretations that multiply entities referred to (assume referential parsimony); specifically, prefer coreferential readings of reduced NPs (pronouns or zeroes). d. Assume the existence or actuality of what a sentence is about if that is consistent with what is taken for granted. (Levinson 2000: 114, 115)

What is of interest is the fact that Levinson explicitly refers to the linguistic realization of speaker-intended meaning and thus to the speaker-intended linguistic realization of information. References to the domain of linguistics, that is to linguistic expressions, are also found in his conception of the M-Principle and his explication of the notion of markedness employed in his investigation: M-Principle Speaker’s maxim: Indicate an abnormal, nonstereotypical situation by using marked expressions that contrast with those you would use to describe the corresponding normal, stereotypical situation. Recipient’s corollary: What is said in an abnormal way indicates an abnormal situation, or marked messages indicate marked situations, specifically: Where S has said “p” containing marked expression M, and there is an unmarked alternate expression U with the same denotation D which the speaker might have employed in the same sentence-frame instead, then where U would have I-implicated the stereotypical or more specific subset d of D, the marked expression M will implicate the complement of the denotation d, namely d of D.

Gricean logic and conversation. Instead, it is seen a pioneering work in the domain of cognitive pragmatics.


The notion of markedness employed here is a generalization of the Prague School concept (…). On the formal side, marked forms in comparison to the corresponding unmarked forms, are more morphologically complex and less lexicalized, more proflix or periphrastic, less frequent or usual, and less neutral in register. On the meaning side, such forms suggest some additional meaning or connotations absent from the corresponding unmarked forms. (Levinson 2000: 136, 137)

Not only refers Levinson to the linguistic realization of speaker-intended meaning. He also anchors the realization of speaker-intended meaning to context. His reference to ‘an unmarked alternate expression U with the same denotation D which the speaker might have employed in the same sentenceframe instead’ is functionally equivalent with the principle of sociolinguistic variation (Brown 1995), that is the speaker-intended realization of her/his communicative meaning with respect to the selection of lexical expressions, grammatical constructions and phonological realizations and intonational contours. Against this background, the linguistic realization and interpretation of speaker-intended meaning is necessarily anchored to sociocultural, linguistic and cognitive contexts, which is also reflected in Grice’s definition of a conversational implicature and its connectedness with context, which he specifies as linguistic and otherwise, and with background knowledge. In the following, the status of a communicative intention and its connectedness with context, language and dialogue is examined in the Gricean logic and conversation, in Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory and in Recanati’s approach to pragmatic meaning. 3.4.1.3Communicative intentions Analogously to speech act theory and relevance theory, Grice’s approach to natural-language communication is based on the premise of rationality, which is not only manifest in intentionality, but also in cooperation as is explicated by the CP. Against this background, felicitous communication is anchored to cooperation, which manifests itself in the accepted purpose or direction of talk exchange. If the CP is compared and contrasted with the relevance-theoretic approach to communication and cognition, Grice is more radical than the relevance-theoretic premises of mutual manifestness and reflexivity, which only require uptake, i.e. to have the communicator’s informative intention recognised by the audience (Sperber and Wilson 1996: 161). Moreover, the Gricean premise of cooperation does not only refer to a single contribution. It also refers to the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange. For this reason, a contribution


is anchored to a unit of investigation larger than the utterance act, such as the language-game category of an activity type, the dialogue categories of a communicative project or of a communicative genre. That extension of frame is also manifest in Grice’s reference to the stage, that is the point in time, place and discourse, at which the communicative contribution occurs. This requirement for the production of an appropriate contribution is based on the premise of sequentially organized communicative projects and sequentially organized conversation or discourse. As a consequence of the sequential organization of dialogue, a contribution does not only have to be such as is required with regard to its content and its illocutionary force, but also with regard to its sequential status in the corresponding macro category. This contextualization of the Gricean CP, which is based on his references to the dialogue notions talk exchange and accepted purpose or direction of talk exchange, requires further refinements with regard to the question of what such as is required actually means: does it refer to the sequential status, to the communicative action or to the linguistic representation of the communicative action? Furthermore, the question of what accepted purpose actually means has to be examined: does it refer to the speaker’s acceptance, the hearer’s acceptance, or the acceptance of set of speaker and hearer? In the research paradigms of action theory and pragmatics, some notion of the CP, if not the CP itself, has been widely accepted. From a dialogue viewpoint, it represents a dialogue principle par excellence. Despite the tacit agreement, there is some controversy about the status of the conversational implicature and the number of maxims required for the calculation of the implicature as has been discussed in the previous section. Following Levinson (1979, 1983), the conversational implicature is characterized by some degree of indeterminateness because it is, by definition, defeasible, non-detachable, calculable and non-conventional, and the Gricean maxims are interpreted as specifications of some unmarked communicative context representing pillars on which the conversational implicature is calculated. For this reason, deviations, however common, are seen as special or marked and signify that the speaker intends to communicate conversationally implicated meaning. The signalling is only possible against the background of Grice’s premise of a reflexive intention, which is succinctly explicated by Levinson: “What distinguishes a Gricean reflexive intention from other kinds of complex reflexive intention is that the communicator’s goal or intention is achieved simply by being perceived: recognition exhausts or realizes the intention” (Levinson 1995: 228). Before a dialogue-oriented interpretation of the CP is undertaken,


the concept of a communicative intention is examined. Francois Recanati’s article On Defining Communicative Intentions (1986) critically investigates the Gricean conception of communicative intention and distinguishes between three subintentions and their respective premises and perlocutionary effects, namely (1) the intention (G1) that the utterance produces in the addressee a certain response, (2) the intention (G2) that the addressee recognize the intention (G1), and (3) the intention (G3) that the fulfilment of (G1) depend on its recognition. Unlike Grice, Recanati refines the concept of communicative intention by explicating the interdependence between an utterance act and a communicative intention as follows: “an utterance act (…) manifests an underlying communicative intention” (Recanati 1986: 214). As a consequence, “the communicative intention is intrinsic to the communicative act and cannot be divorced from it” (Recanati 1986: 235). In other words, it is not possible to communicate without having, or making manifest that one has the communicative intention, and for this reason, verbal communication is intentional. But which status does Recanati assign to language, coparticipants and context? In Recanati’s frame of reference, coparticipants communicate by producing and interpreting utterance acts, which manifest an underlying communicative intention. But how does an utterance act manifest the underlying intention: is the underlying intention assigned a presuppositional status, or is it inferred or calculated in the process of communication and thus both process and product? In Recanati’s philosophy-of-language framework, there is no explicit account of the status of language and language usage with regard to the intentional or nonintentional production and interpretation of utterance acts even though utterance acts are performed through the coparticipants’ production and interpretation of language. So, does language usage entail the performance of an utterance act: is the language employed to perform one or more utterance acts selected intentionally, or are the linguistic items which are employed to construct the utterance selected at random? If language was selected at random, any linguistic surface structure could represent any communicative intention. For instance, the communicative intention of requesting someone to open the door could be realized by the utterance (101): (101) Colourless blue dogs bark at midnight.

Producing (101) to request someone to open the door seems to cause more problems than offer solutions — unless we construct a highly marked context in which (101) was assigned the default meaning of expressing a request to open

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the door. However, if language usage is defined as coparticipants communicating in context, that is as coparticipants performing communicative actions in context, then language can no longer be defined as constituting an autonomous system only. Instead, the employment of language must be anchored to the paradigm of social interaction, where coparticipants employ language in a strategic manner to achieve their communicative goals. Thus, they perform utterance acts by selecting appropriate linguistic surface structures composed of specific lexical expressions, specific grammatical constructions and specific phonological realizations and specific intonational contours, and by arranging them in a specific linear structure which is in accordance with their communicative goals.35 If language is defined with regard to both the linguistic system and language usage in the framework of strategic interaction, language constitutes a primarily social construct. This is also manifest in Recanati’s conception of communicative intention, which is examined in the following. In his definition of communicative intention Recanati spells out the reflexive orientation of communicative intentions as follows: “S’s intention is default reflexive if and only if S has no intention inconsistent with any of the (infinite number of) intentions that his intention would entail if it were genuinely reflexive” (Recanati 1986: 239). The inherent differentiation between reflexive intention, namely the intention to be recognized, and default reflexive intention, namely not to have a certain type of intention, does not only accommodate the dialogue principle of hearer ratification, viz. communicative acts are either accepted or rejected (Fetzer 1999a), but also Searle’s sincerity condition. Moreover, it indicates that communicative intentions are not anchored to unilateral speech acts, but performed in context, which is spelled out by Recanati’s revised or contextualized account of the Gricean communicative intention and the three subintentions: (1) the intention (G2a) that the utterance provides the addressee with reason to believe that the prototypicality conditions obtain, (2) the intention (G2b*) that the communicative intention be recognized and that the addressee recognize the intention as open, and (3) the intention (G2c) that the fulfilment of (G2a) depends on its recognition. Thus, the interdependence between communicative intention and context is explicitly accounted for by the introduction of the concept of reason to believe and by the introduction of prototypicality conditions, which anchor the cognitive concept

35.The chronological order which this linguistic surface-structure implies is not ‘author’intended. Instead, language production and language interpretation in context are conceived of as simultaneous processes.


of intention to internal context(s), where the reasons to believe are stored, and to the social concept of a communicative action. Recanati explicates the necessary and sufficient conditions for the successful performance of a communicative act are as follows: “A communicative act is performed by means of an utterance U if and only if U makes such a complex intention manifest; a communication succeeds when this intention is actually recognized by the hearer” (Recanati 1986: 239). Again, Recanati differentiates between the unilateral interpretation of the performance of a communicative act and the dialogue-oriented interpretation of successful performance, which depend on the hearer’s recognition of the communicative intention and not on their actual compliance. Recanati’s conception of communicative intention bridges the gap between unilateral speech acts and dialogue by explicitly accounting for the interdependencies between communicative intention and utterance act, and context and communicative act. In the following, Sperber and Wilson’s conception of a communicative intention in their relevance-theoretic framework is investigated. Sperber and Wilson’s seminal work on communication and cognition has been influenced by Gricean pragmatics and by speech act theory. Unlike the philosophy-of-language paradigm, it is firmly anchored to cognitive science, cognitive linguistics and the premise of ostensive-inferential verbal communication. But what status does relevance theory assign to a communicative intention? In the research paradigm of relevance theory, context represents a primarily cognitive concept which is intrinsically linked to the mental representation of meaning and to the calculation of implicatures with regard to the generation of implicated premises, and the deduction of implicated conclusions, which may vary in strength each. Thus, implicatures do not exist in isolation. Instead, they are generated in context. However, Sperber and Wilson do not only investigate inference processes, they also look at their contextual effects. In general, contextual effects result from the retrieval of explicatures with regard to reference assignment, disambiguation and enrichment, and the corresponding inferencing processes involved. As a consequence, internal context is permanently updated: it is modified and improved by contextual strengthening, such as lowering the strength of a contextual implication, raising the strength of a contextual implication or erasing a contextual implication. Thus, the relevance-theoretic conception of context is intrinsically linked to ostensive-inferential communication and represented by a set of mutual assumptions and assumptions about mutual manifestness.


As regards the status of coparticipants in relevance theory, they are represented by rational agents who produce and interpret evidence in order to exchange information. Unlike the philosophy-of-language paradigm, a coparticipant’s communicative goal does not primarily consist of the performance of a communicative action, but rather of the achievement of contextual effects which manifest themselves in changed beliefs and enlarged mutual cognitive environments. In this setting, a speaker’s utterance represents an interpretative expression of thought, and the hearer’s understanding is the interpretative assumption about the speaker’s informative intention. As regards the status of language, Sperber and Wilson adopt Fodor’s modular conception of the linguistic system, that is language is represented by syntactic, morphological, phonological, semantic and pragmatic modules. Additionally, ostensive inferential communication is context-dependent by definition as the inferencing processes required for the interpretation of evidence in verbal communication are pragmatic endeavours. For this reason, the actual language employed for the production of evidence is also contextdependent. As regards language understanding, coparticipants interpret evidence by assigning a unique propositional form to one or more utterances through reference assignment, disambiguation and enrichment. Furthermore, they assign mood and propositional attitude. However, evidence is not produced at random in natural-language communication. Rather, it is constrained by the principle of relevance which is calculated in the framework of costbenefit optimization. Moreover, every communicative act carries a presumption of optimal relevance concerning both processing and production efforts. The status of intention in relevance theory is explicated by Sperber and Wilson as follows: “From a psychological viewpoint, intentions are mental representations capable of being realised in the form of actions” (Sperber and Wilson 1996: 31) Here, a bridging point is established between the cognitive and actiontheoretic research paradigms. On the one hand, natural-language communication is anchored to the cognitive concept of mental representation, and on the other hand, intentions may be realized in the form of the social concept of action — should the coparticipant’s communicative goal requires such a step. Yet, how is the action-theoretic concept of intersubjectivity accounted for in Sperber and Wilson’s framework of ostensive-inferential verbal communication? From a coparticipant-domain oriented viewpoint, the concept of intention is anchored to an individual coparticipant. In order to accommodate the requirement of intersubjectivity, Sperber and Wilson refine the concept of intention with regard to the first-order concept of informative intention, i.e. “the


intention to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set of assumptions” (Sperber and Wilson 1996: 58), and the second-order concept of communicative intention, i.e. “the intention to have the informative intention recognised and to make it mutually manifest to the audience and the communicator that the communicator has this intention” (Sperber and Wilson 1996: 61). Again, it is possible to establish a bridging point between the psychological construct of intention and the social construct of action, namely to make manifest a set of assumptions to the social construct of audience, and to make the intention mutually manifest to the audience. Moreover, if Sperber and Wilson’s reference to the set of audience and communicator is adapted to the constraints and requirements of a dialogical framework, both speakers and hearers do not only represent individual categories, but also the social-world construct of a collective we. So, how is the utterance meaning of a communicative intention calculated in relevance theory? Analogously to speech act theory, the relevance-theoretic research paradigm bases their investigations on the premises of rationality, intentionality and ostensive communication. Unlike speech act theory and Gricean pragmatics, relevance theory is firmly anchored to a cognitive frame of reference and the corresponding inference processes involved. For this reason, verbal communication means production and interpretation of evidence. As regards the goals of natural-language communication, coparticipants do not primarily intend to perform a social action, but rather to enlarge mutual cognitive environments through the transmission and exchange of information. In this framework, the default speech act is of the assertive type. Yet coparticipants do not produce assertions at random. Instead, the transmission of information is governed by the principle of relevance which is assigned a dual status: first, it has a presuppositional status. Therefore, evidence comes with a presumption of relevance. Second, the interpretation of evidence is calculated with regard to the optimization of relevance: the less processing effort is required, the more relevant the evidence is. Another decisive difference to the philosophy-of-language paradigm is the fact that coparticipants employ both deductive and inductive reasoning strategies for the interpretation of evidence, which, from a languageuse viewpoint, is represented by the actual surface structure of an utterance. This requires a refinement of the relevance-theoretic inferencing processes employed with regard to the retrieval of reference and predication carried out during the production of an explicature, and with regard to speaker-intended meaning represented by the concept of implicated conclusion. While the production of an explicature fleshes out the propositional form with regard to


reference assignment, disambiguation and the pragmatic process of enrichment, the retrieval of an implicature is distinguished with regard to the retrieval of implicated premises from memory and the corresponding encyclopaedic entries, and with regard to the retrieval of the implicated conclusions which are deduced from the explicature. In the relevance-theoretic framework, implicatures are represented by a determinate set of intended inferences and therefore assigned a fully determinate status. Implicatures may, however, vary in strength. Again, this is different to the Gricean framework, where a conversational implicature is not assigned a fully determinate status because conversational implicatures are, by definition, non-conventional, non-detachable, calculable and defeasible and can be cancelled by adding another premise. The investigation of the connectedness between communicative intentions, dialogues and context, has shown that the Gricean CP represents a dialogue principle par excellence. To account for both communicative action and cognition, however, it needs to be supplemented by Recanati’s conception of communicative intentions, in which the gap between unilateral speech acts and dialogue is bridged by the interdependencies between communicative intention and utterance act, and context and communicative act. Communicative intentions in relevance theory represent second-order concepts and are therefore intrinsically linked to first-order informative intentions. Intentions are firmly anchored to individual interlocutors and defined in a cognitive frame of reference with regard to cognition, cognitive contexts, deductive and inductive reasoning strategies and cognitive linguistics. In ostensive-inferential verbal communication, the individual interlocutor’s communicative and informative intentions are calculated in terms of the principle of relevance and cost-benefit optimization, and are, for this reason, context-dependent by definition. Recanati refines the relevance-theoretic definition of communicative intention and explicitly accounts for the context-dependence of communicative intentions by introducing the decisive categories of default reflexivity and prototypicality condition. Additionally, he spells out the connectedness between communicative intention and utterance act. Despite the fact that Sperber and Wilson, and Recanati anchor their definitions of verbal communication to evidence and utterance acts, neither of them is very explicit about the status language in their frameworks. Thus, the question of how language and intentionality are related, and whether the linguistic representation of an utterance act constitutes an intentional action still remains to be answered. In the following, the status of language is examined with regard to the connectedness between cooperation, linguistic acts and pragmatic well-formedness.


3.4.1.4Cooperation, linguistic acts and pragmatic well-formedness In his seminal work in the research paradigm of philosophy of language, Grice not only elaborates on cooperation and social action, but also on the relationship between social action and language. In utterer’s meaning and intentions he explicitly refers to the “hideous oversimplification” (Grice 1989: 87) in the examination of intentions and “doing a linguistic act” (ibid.). But what does the notion of ‘doing a linguistic act’ actually refer to? In the investigation of the relationship between language and speech acts in the section Speech acts in context, ‘doing a linguistic act’ was interpreted as consisting of a number of subacts, such as a phonetic act, a rhetic act and a phatic act, or an utterance act. In logic and conversation, Grice does not explicitly refer to any phonetic, morphological, syntactic or lexical acts. However, his maxim of manner, which is repeated here for convenience, can be interpreted as referring to language use as is reflected in “[a]void obscurity of expression”, which entails the claim that linguistic expressions and constructions can be employed to obscure the speaker’s communicative intention: Finally, under the category of MANNER, which I understand as relating not (like the previous categories) to what is said but, rather, to HOW what is said to be said, I include the supermaxim — ‘Be perspicuous’ — and various maxims such as: 1. Avoid obscurity of expression. 2. Avoid ambiguity. 3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). 4. Be orderly (Grice 1975: 46)

But how does an underlying intention manifest itself in the performance of an utterance act, that is to say, is a communicative intention assigned a presuppositional status, or is it calculated in the process of communication and thus both process and product? Again, there is no explicit account of the status of language and language use with regard to the intentional or non-intentional production and interpretation of utterance acts in spite of the fact that utterance acts are performed by the coparticipants’ production and interpretation of language in context. So, does language use entail the performance of an utterance act? And is the language employed to perform one or more utterance acts selected with regard to the realization of a specific communicative intention, or are the linguistic items picked at random? If language was picked at random, any linguistic surface structure could, in principle, represent any communicative intention, as has been demonstrated above. Yet this does not seem plausible because, according to Grice, the recognition of the communicative intention is “at least in part” connected to an utterance:


“U meant something by uttering x” is true iff: 1. U intended, by uttering x, to induce a certain response in A 2. U intended A to recognize, at least in part from the utterance of x, that U intended to produce that response 3. U intended the fulfillment of the intention mentioned in (2) to be at least in part A’s reason for fulfilling the intention in (1). (Grice 1989: 94)

Thus, language use — at least in part — has an impact on the recognition of a communicative intention, and can, for this reason, no longer be defined as an autonomous system only. Instead, the employment of language is anchored to the language-as-social-action paradigm, where coparticipants use language in a strategic manner to realize their communicative intentions and to achieve their communicative goals. But which consequences does that have for the conception and investigation of natural-language communication? Following Searle, language is “not used merely to describe the facts but, in an odd way, is partly constitutive of the facts” (Searle1999: 115). This holds particularly for performative utterances which “are very common in the creation of institutional facts” (ibid.). In his investigation of The Construction of Social Reality, he takes an even more radical stance: Language is itself an institutional structure because it involves the imposition of a special kind of function on brute physical entities that have no natural relation to that function. Certain sorts of sounds or marks count as words and sentences, and certain sorts of utterances count as speech acts. The agentive function is that of representing, in one or other of the possible speech acts modes, object and states of affairs in the world. Agents who can do this collectively have the fundamental precondition of all other institutional structures. (Searle 1995:228)

Not only language, but also coparticipants are conceived of as social constructs which have institutional structure. Against this background, language use must be conceived of as a rule-governed activity which expresses the underlying premises of rationality, intentionality, cooperation and institutional structure. In the following, the verbal exchange (49), which has been analyzed in Speech acts in context and is repeated here for convenience as (102), is examined accordingly; special reference is given to the calculation of pragmatic wellformedness and sociolinguistic appropriateness: (102) A-1: B-1: A-2: B-2:

I have a fourteen year old son Well that’s all right I also have a dog Oh I’m sorry


From a sequential-organization viewpoint, the verbal exchange must be embedded in a larger sequence, such as an interview, in which the identities of speaker A and B have already been identified and assigned a presuppositional status. As regards the exchange (A-1/B-1), the communicative contribution B-1 (“Well that’s all right”) realizes an acceptance of the contribution A-1 (“I have a fourteen year old son”), in which the propositional content and the assertive force are accepted. If the speech-act scenario is supplemented by the Gricean paradigm, the contribution (B-1) additionally accepts (A-1) as is required at the stage at which occurs. Moreover, it does not infringe on any of the maxims and gives the information that s/he has only one child, not more. The response (B-1) does not query the validity of (A-1) and therefore accepts the communicative action of an assertion, and the appropriateness of the linguistic representation. Furthermore, it signifies discourse coherence: the discourse marker well indexes the previous contribution (A-1) and indicates that (B-1) is commenting on A’s family status. To be more precise, well is an instance of anaphoric reference regarding the exchange level of dialogue. The indexical expression that refers to the previous contribution’s proposition, and B’s acceptance of the proposition is realized by the predication is all right. The acceptance does not only accept the utterance, viz. the actual linguistic representation, but also the underlying presuppositions and communicative intention. In the contribution A-2 (“I also have a dog”), speaker A comments on her/his family status and elaborates on it. This is signified by A’s employment of the adverbial also, which introduces the additional family member of a dog. From a local-coherence viewpoint, the elaboration is dovetailed. But does this also apply to the domains of social context, communicative action and linguistic representation? From a ratification viewpoint, B-2 (“Oh I’m sorry”) acknowledges the contribution (A-2) with regard to the exchange level by the employment of the indexical oh. As there is no explicit rejection referring to the social context, communicative action or linguistic representation, as is the case with (103), (104), (105) or (106), the contribution is accepted as such as is required: (103) The animal you are referring to is a wolf (104) I don’t know why you’re saying that (105) What do you mean by ‘also’ (106) Is that supposed to be a compliment?

But what does speaker B intend to communicate with her/his contribution (B-2)? Generally, the indexical oh does not signify unequivocal acceptance.


Rather, it signals some kind of unexpectedness (Schiffrin 1987) as is manifest in the second part of the contribution, namely I’m sorry. But what is the intersubjective meaning of the contribution? The calculation of intersubjective meaning is a context-dependent activity by definition and therefore can no longer be based on a single speech act. Instead, it requires the dialogical framework of the CP. As regards the intersubjective meaning of (B-2), there is neither a reference to a higher-order moral principle, nor does B give any reasons for terminating the conversation in order to opt out. Thus, the CP and the accepted purpose obtain. But are the maxims of quality, quantity, relation and manner observed? There is no reason to assume that the information contained in (B-2) is not true, that it is not informative and that it is not perspicuous. Thus, there is no infringement on quality, quantity and manner. However, if we calculate the communicative meaning of (B-2) with regard to relation, the contribution does not really constitute a relevant response because a relevant response to an assertion is either its acceptance as true or its rejection as false. That is, it is not relevant how the speaker feels about the information postulated as is expressed by (B-2). As a consequence of this, the non-relevant response (B-2) triggers the following process of inferencing in which the conversationally implicated meaning is retrieved: A ‘person’ who, by (in, when) saying (or making as if to say) that p [speaker is sorry. AF] has implicated that q [hearer’s communicative goal can not be realized. AF], PROVIDED THAT (1) he is to be presumed to be obeying the conversational maxims, or at least the cooperative principle; (2) the supposition that he is aware that, or thinks that, q is required in order to make her/his saying as if to say p (or doing so in THOSE terms) consistent with this presumption; and (3) the speaker thinks (and would expect the hearer to think that the speaker thinks) that it is within the competence of the hearer to work out, or grasp intuitively, that the supposition in (2) IS required. (Grice 1975: 49)

As a result, the contribution (B-2) is assigned the status of a rejection. But what is actually being rejected: the proposition that A has a dog or the assertive force? This question can only be answered if the linguistic context, the sociocultural context and the macro communicative intention, to which the communicative project is anchored, are taken into consideration, namely the interview setting regarding the question whether speaker A qualifies for the tenancy of the apartment. In the Gricean framework coparticipants are represented by rational agents who base their communicative performance on the CP, the maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner, and on the conversational implicature. Here,


coparticipants perform social actions in linguistic and social contexts, and their performance is constrained by the dialogue principle of the CP and the constraint of dovetailedness regarding both micro and macro domains. If the CP is supplemented by the principle of sociolinguistic variation discussed above and by Searle’s premise that constitutive rules can create new forms of behaviour, a coparticipant has an almost infinite number of possible linguistic surface structures for the realization of her/his communicative intention in context at her/his disposal. For instance, the communicative intention of rejection realized by the contribution B-2 (“Oh I’m sorry”) could also have been realized by (107) You cannot have the apartment (108) A dog (sarcastic tone) (109) The apartment is a pet-free zone (110) Excellent (sarcastic tone) (111) I really love dogs but the neighbourhood is not very open-minded

But are these utterances interchangeable? From a social-context viewpoint, they are definitely not interchangeable as they transmit different types of social meaning, such as different degrees of formality, different degrees of solidarity, different degrees of social distance and different degrees of power. That is, the contributions (107), (108), and (110) signify social distance and power by attributing the status of a powerless tenant to the coparticipant (A). By contrast, the contribution (109) shifts the responsibility for the non-acceptance to some indeterminate authority in context, and contribution (111) signifies solidarity by the partial agreement (“I really love dogs”) but nevertheless shifts the responsibility for the refusal to some anonymous authority. Thus, the premise of the intentionality of a communicative action does not only entail the intentionality of an utterance act, but also the intentional selection of a linguistic representation in accordance with a specific communicative intention and a specific communicative goal. This is also implicit in Recanati’s availability principle which is based “on a specific cognitive hypothesis, according to which what is said is consciously accessible” (Recanati 1989: 328) and in Levinson’s conception of language interpretation: “One needs too to stress that it is cooperative intersubjective background that makes language interpretation possible (as shown by the need of all those heuristics) — not, as non-semanticists may assume, language which makes intersubjectivity possible (although it obviously vastly increases its scope)” (Levinson 1995: 253). The following section systematizes the results of the discussion in the


framework of the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim, which is based on a micro analysis and contextualization of Habermas’s theory of communicative action (1987), and supplemented by the results of the face and politeness research (Brown and Levinson 1987; Goffman 1974) and the conversationanalytic research on sequentiality (Atkinson and Heritage 1984; Duranti and Goodwin 1992). 3.4.2 Validity claims in context Action theory is based on the premise that social actors act in a rational, intentional and cooperative manner and perform social actions, such as speech acts, accordingly. Unlike the more traditional conception of rationality, which is restricted to the dichotomy between truth and falsehood, Brandom (1994) and Habermas (1987) refine that framework. Brandom adopts an expressionbased approach to truth in making it explicit, and Habermas postulates a sociocultural interpretation of rationality in his theory of communicative action, where rationality manifests itself in the performance and interpretation of a communicative action in accordance with sociocultural values and norms. They are defined in a tripartite system of truth represented by the objective world, normative rightness represented by the social world, and subjective truthfulness represented by the subjective world. As regards the concept of action, Habermas differentiates between the one-world based concepts of teleological action and strategic action, and the concepts of norm-regulating action and communicative action which are anchored to the objective and social worlds. But are the concepts of communicative action and speech act synonymous? Analogously to the pragmatic and ethnomethodological research paradigms examined above, Habermas’s conception of natural-language communication is based on the premise that social agents act in a rational and intentional manner. That is, speakers postulate validity claims which are ratified by hearers through their acceptance or rejection. In Habermas’s frame of reference, the hearer’s ratification of a postulated validity claim is a constitutive part of communicative action and therefore a necessary condition for felicitous communication. This extension of frame from monologue to dialogue anchors a communicative action explicitly to both speaker and hearer, and therefore assigns the two of them the status of necessary conditions. However, the ratification of a validity claim is not a sufficient condition for dialogue because validity claims are not only postulated and ratified, but also accepted or rejected. In the case of an acceptance, the validity claim is attributed to the dialogue common ground, which is


explicitly investigated in the section on Co-suppositions, dialogue common ground and communicative genres, and in the case of a rejection, a negotiationof-validity sequence is initiated in which the non-accepted claims and presuppositions are explicated (Fetzer 1999b). In spite of the fact that Habermas investigates communicative action from a macro perspective, his theoretical framework can be adapted to the contextual constraints and requirements of a micro analysis and account for ‘what’ is postulated and negotiated in a face-toface encounter. In the following, the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim is examined. 3.4.2.1The dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim: objective, social and subjective worlds The definition of the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim is based on the premise of the rationality and intentionality of communictive action which manifests itself in the performance of a plus/minus-validity claim in context, viz. its production and interpretation, and its ratification through an acceptance or rejection in accordance with the corresponding sociocultural norms and conventions. As a consequence of this, the postulation and ratification of a validity claim is intrinsically linked to its linguistic representation and cannot be separated from it. However, the concept of a validity claim is not synonymous to an utterance: an utterance refers to a linguistic surface-structure through which a speech act is performed. For instance, the communicative contribution (A-1) examined above has been assigned the status of the linguistic surface ‘I have a fourteen year old son’ and the status of the communicative action of an assertion. In the framework of the dialogue act of a plus/minusvalidity claim, the dialogical concept of a validity claim manifests itself in a plusvalidity claim or in a minus-validity claim. In the case of a plus-validity claim, the postulated claim has been accepted and the plus-validity claim and its presuppositions are attributed to the dialogue common ground, which is not the case if the validity claim is rejected. Here, the non-accepted claim is assigned the status of a minus-validity claim and a negotiation-of-validity sequence is initiated in which the non-accepted claims, references and presuppositions are explicated and negotiated. Only then is it possible to attribute them to the dialogue common ground. Analogously to Habermas’s conception of a validity claim, the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim is anchored to an interactive tripartite system of objective, subjective and social worlds and their presuppositions. References to the three worlds and their presuppositions can be realized linguistically in the


explicit and implicit modes. The tripartite system of the objective, social and subjective worlds and their premises of truth, appropriateness and sincerity is schematized in Figure 2. plus/minus-validity claim

objective world: true/false

social world: appropriate/inappropriate

subjective world: sincere/insincere

explicit representation only

explicit and implicit representation

simultaneously explicit and implicit representation

The interactive framework of the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim is defined as follows: –

–

The objective world is determined by the dichotomy of true/false. References to this world are characterized by theoretical claims represented in the propositional format, i.e. reference and predication. Their mode of linguistic representation is direct/explicit. The non-acceptance of a validity claim’s references to the objective world is represented by syntactic and semantic negation. The subjective world is determined by the premise of sincerity, i.e. speaker’s communicative intention(s) meant as uttered, and interpreted as meant. References to this world represent emotive information and their mode of representation is non-linear, i.e. simultaneously explicit/implicit, e.g. nonor paraverbal behaviour. While the acceptance of a validity claim’s reference to the subjective world is manifest in sincere communication, a nonacceptance is generally referred to as lying.36 The subjective-world premise of sincerity is also implicit in Recanati’s definition of reflexive intention, which is defined by default reflexivity and refers to not a certain type of intention, namely deception or insincerity (Recanati 1986: 234). Furthermore, it is implicit in the ethnomethodological principle of the sanctioned use of doubt (Garfinkel 1994).

36.The attribution of lying to the subjective world and to its guiding principle of communicative intention meant as uttered differs from the everyday notion of lying which generally means not telling the truth.


–

The social world is determined by the paradigm of appropriateness. References to this world are represented both explicitly and implicitly. It subcategorizes into another tripartite system of an interpersonal system, a textual system and an interactional system, as is schematized in Figure 3: social world

textual system: Gricean CP

interpersonal system: face, coparticipant status

interactional system: adjacency

The textual, interpersonal and interactional systems are defined as follows: –

–

The textual system is governed by the Gricean maxims and the conversational implicature. It covers both explicit and implicit modes of linguistic representation. While an explicit representation does not infringe on the maxims of quality, quantity, relation and manner, an implicit representation infringes on one or more of the maxims thus generating a conversational implicature in order to retrieve the speaker-intended meaning, which additionally feeds on the interpersonal and interactional subsystems. The interpersonal system37 is determined by the production and reception format, that is Goffman’s (1974, 1981) speaker categories of source, principal, originator, emitter and animator, and Levinson’s (1988) refinement with regard to the production roles and their distinctive features of transmission, participationship, message origin, motive and form. Furthermore, the interpersonal system is determined by the coparticipants’ face wants/needs (Brown and Levinson 1987), which are represented by the employment of on-record and off-record strategies. Analogously to the textual system, meaning represented off-record is retrieved through a process of inferencing. The participation format covers the coparticipants’ production, reception and participant roles. Implicit references are represented by personal pronouns and proper names, and explicit references

37.The interpersonal orientation of natural-language communication is also emphasized by Recanati (1998: 132) and his observation that “[i]n performing an illocutionary act, a speaker takes on a certain role and assigns a corresponding role to the hearer.”


–

spell out the corresponding participant roles. The coparticipants’ face wants/needs manifest themselves in references to positive face and negative face, which are represented in the explicit and implicit modes. In general, implicit references to the coparticipants’ face wants are manifest in conversationally implicated meaning and in the employment of communicative strategies which attenuate the pragmatic force of a communicative action. The interactional system is governed by the sequential organization of discourse. It is based on the principles of conditional relevance and adjacency (Levinson 1983), and is only explicitly referred to in a negotiation-ofvalidity sequence. References to this subsystem are represented implicitly by a validity claim’s sequential position and by discourse markers, and explicitly by references to the constraints and requirements of specific adjacency pairs or of communicative projects with regard to the macro level.

References to the textual, interpersonal and interactional subsystems are not only represented explicitly. They are also represented implicitly by the following system-specific contextualization cues (Fetzer 1994, 1999b): Hedges refer to the textual system and trigger a process of inferencing to retrieve the corresponding intersubjective meaning. While less-fuzzy hedges (e.g. strictly speaking, the reality of it is) generally boost the pragmatic force of a validity claim, morefuzzy hedges (e.g. sort of, something like) attenuate it. Interpersonal markers refer to the interpersonal system and are differentiated with regard to participant orientation. Speaker-oriented interpersonal markers either attenuate or boost the pragmatic force of a validity claim, e.g. the markers I (don’t) think/ suggest/assume attenuate the pragmatic force, while the marker I (don’t) believe boosts the pragmatic force. Hearer-oriented interpersonal markers, e.g. with (all due/due) respect, and collective markers, such as let us, generally attenuate the pragmatic force. Interactional markers refer to the interactional system. They are differentiated with regard to cataphoric reference, such as the discourse marker now, and anaphoric reference, for instance, the discourse markers well and but. The former has the function of focussing the coparticipants’ attention on upcoming talk, while the latter initiates a negotiation-of-validity sequence thus signifying that the validity of a prior contribution is at stake. Systemspecific contextualization cues and other metalinguistic comments, such as this is off the record, represent indexical validity claims. They index the corresponding systems and trigger a process of inferencing to calculate and specify the speaker’s communicative intention(s) with regard to textual, interpersonal and interactional meaning.


In natural-language communication, coparticipants postulate and ratify validity claims by accepting and rejecting them and by assigning them the status of a plus-validity claim or of a minus-validity claim. Contrary to Habermas’s conception of communication, the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim is anchored to all of the three worlds and to their presuppositions, and it is all of the three worlds which have to be ratified. As regards a plus-validity claim, all of the references to the tripartite system and its three subsystems are accepted. As regards a minus-validity claim, one or more references to the tripartite system or to its three subsystems are not accepted. The calculation of communicative meaning with regard to appropriateness is also of great importance in social-intelligence research, as is stated by Goody: Thus a definition of appropriate role behaviour includes both the proper behaviour of ego, and the proper reciprocal responses of the role partner. In this way it makes AIP more powerful, since acting in a clearly defined role makes the behaviour of both members of the dyad more predictable. (…) Roles also facilitate AIP through increasing predictability on another level by implying sanctions if one or another member of the dyad does not behave in the correct, predictable way. (Goody 1995: 14–15)

In the following, the theoretical construct of the dialogue act of a plus/minusvalidity claim is applied to the examination of language use, that is to the verbal exchange about qualification for the tenancy of the apartment. Here the postulated validity claim (A-1) is assigned the status of a plus-validity claim: it consists of an accepted claim referring to the objective world based on the dichotomy of truth and falsehood, viz. a reference to her/himself by the personal pronoun I and the predication have a son. The claim interacts with another accepted claim referring to the subjective world based on sincerity, namely A’s communicative intention is meant as uttered and interpreted as meant. Additionally, the plus-validity claim (A-1) entails another accepted claim referring to the social world based on the appropriateness of the social action. This is calculated with regard to the appropriateness of the interactional system, namely the sequential slot of (A-1) in the conversation, with regard to the interpersonal system, viz. the fairly neutral degree of face work communicated by (A-1) and A’s and B’s interactional and participant roles, and with regard to the textual system, namely the linguistic representation of the claims in accordance with the Gricean maxims of quality, quantity, relation and manner. From a sequentiality perspective, coparticipants do not postulate their claims to the three worlds in a consecutive manner by representing them linguistically in a consecutive manner, such as (112):


(112) I hereby refer to the current speaker and predicate that s/he has a son. I predicate that that son is fourteen years old. I also refer to the place and time in discourse, i.e. to the first part of a question and answer sequence …

Instead, they postulate claims referring to three worlds and their presuppositions simultaneously by representing them linguistically in the explicit and implicit modes, as has been demonstrated for the communicative contribution (A-1). In the following, the three worlds and their linguistic representation is examined in detail. As regards the conversation examined above, validity claims referring to the objective world are realized by speaker has a son, communicative contribution is all right, speaker has a dog and speaker is sorry. References to the subjective world have not been accounted for explicitly. In general, they are realized by the coparticipants’ tone of voice and other paralinguistic and nonverbal signals. References to the social world subcategorize into references to the textual system which are realized explicitly by a fourteen year old son, that’s, I’m and implicitly by also. References to the interpersonal system are realized by the indexical I referring to the coparticipants and their statuses in the participation framework as speaker and hearer, and to their participant roles as interviewer (or landlady/landlord) and interviewee (or potential tenant). They are also realized by the predications be all right and be sorry which refer to the coparticipants’ face wants. While the rather informal expression all right indexes the participant’s positive face and establishes solidarity, the latter indexes the participant’s negative face. References to the interactional system are realized by the indexicals well and oh referring to the prior communicative contributions (A-1) and (A-2) thus establishing local coherence; and they are also realized by the contributions’ sequential slots. In natural-language communication, coparticipants postulate, ratify and negotiate the communicative status of a validity claim anchored to the three worlds. They postulate at least three validity claims in their communicative contribution: claims referring to the objective world, claims referring to the social world and claims referring to the subjective world; and each validity claim requires ratification. In the case of accepting all of the references to the three worlds, the overall validity claim is assigned the status of a plus-validity claim and attributed to the coparticipants’ dialogue common ground. Moreover, it is not only the overall validity claim, which is attributed to the dialogue common ground, but also the validity claims referring to the individual worlds. In the case of rejecting one or more references to the three worlds, the overall validity


claim is assigned the status of a minus-validity claim and not attributed to the dialogue common ground. Instead, a negotiation-of-validity sequence is initiated, in which the non-accepted claims are made explicit. Only then is it possible to negotiate and reject them (Harnish 1991). Once agreement has been reached about their statuses, it is possible to re-establish the dialogue common ground and attribute the accepted claims and the non-accepted claims and their presuppositions to it. In the framework of the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim, the speaker’s and the hearer’s communicative intentions represent the pillars of the individual coparticipants’ subjective worlds. However, communicative intentions do not only manifest themselves at this level. They also manifest themselves at the level of an utterance formulation in a context with regard to the selection of an appropriate style, an appropriate register and their explicit and implicit modes of linguistic representation. So, is a communicative intention a social-world construct? 3.4.2.2Communicative intention: A subjective-world concept or a social-world construct? In Habermas’s frame of reference, actions are always anchored to the objective world and to the premise of truth. They may, however, also be anchored to the social world and to the premise of normative rightness. Unlike Habermas’s framework, the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim requires references to all of the three worlds because natural-language communication is not only characterized by the transmission of information but also by cooperation and by the coordination of communicative actions. Thus, speakers postulate validity claims by linguistically representing their references to the constitutive systems of objective, subjective and social worlds in the explicit and implicit modes. Regarding ratification, hearers interpret and ratify the postulated claims by explicating their contextual references thereby calculating the speaker’s communicative intention and, following Habermas, her/his reason(s) of why the communicative action has been performed. Even though intentions are generally allocated to an individual’s cognitive domains, that is, to their subjective worlds, they manifest themselves in the dialogue principles of cooperation and ratification. So, does a communicative intention represent a subjective-world concept or does it represent a social-world construct? There is no clear-cut answer to that question. Rather, the status of a communicative intention as a subjective-world construct or as a social-world construct is interdependent on the frame of reference. If communicative actions


are defined as unilateral acts, a communicative intention is represented by a subjective-world concept, and its performance is anchored to the social world. But is this distinction, which is based on discrete categories, really valid? In his work on speech acts, Austin’s concepts of securing uptake, taking effect and inviting a response display an implicit hearer orientation and indicate a speech act’s orientation towards dialogue. Similar concepts are implicit in Searle’s definition of illocutionary effect, i.e. to get the hearer to recognize S’s intention to produce the illocutionary effect. For these reasons, the concept of a speech act cannot be unilateral. Instead, it is based on speakers performing speech acts and on hearers interpreting speech acts. Or, to employ Searle’s terminology, the meaning of a sentence is determined by rules: rules specifying (1) the conditions of utterance, and (2) what the utterance counts as. But ‘counts as’ for whom: the speaker, the hearer, or the set [speaker, hearer]? In their cognitive-science oriented relevance theory, Sperber and Wilson explicate the status of an intention as follows: “From a psychological viewpoint, intentions are mental representations capable of being realized in the form of actions” (Sperber and Wilson 1996: 31). From a coparticipant-domain oriented viewpoint, their concept of intention is anchored to an individual coparticipant and thus to their subjective world. In order to accommodate the requirement of intersubjectivity, Sperber and Wilson refine the concept of intention with regard to the first-order concept of informative intention and the second-order concept of communicative intention. Thus, the bridging point between their psychological construct of intention and the social construct of action consists of making manifest a set of assumptions to the social construct of an audience, and to make the intention mutually manifest to the audience. Moreover, if Sperber and Wilson’s reference to the set [audience, communicator] is adapted to the constraints and requirements of a dialogical framework, both the speaker and the hearer do not only represent individual categories, but also the socialworld construct of a set [speaker, hearer] or a collective we and their collective we intention (Searle 1999). But can a communicative intention also accommodate the constraints and requirements of a collective we? In the following, the sociopragmatic premise of intentionality is examined with regard to the differentiation between We-intentionality and I-thou-sociality and with regard to the connectedness between the collective intentionalities and Co-suppositions, dialogue common ground and communicative genres.


3.4.3 Micro and macro communicative intentions Natural-language communication has been defined by individual interlocutors, their individual I-intentions, their performance of unilateral speech acts and individual sense-making, and by coparticipants exchanging, ratifying and negotiating the communicative status of validity claims. So far, the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim has been defined by its references to the immediate linguistic and sociocultural contexts. Context, however, represents a relational concept and therefore cannot be restricted to a micro context. Rather, context is represented by interdependent layers, to employ the onion metaphor (Sperber and Wilson 1996), or by interdependent frames (Goffman 1974). For this reason, the retrieval of a validity claim’s micro contextual references and a validity claim’s status as a plus- or as a minus-validity claim is also connected with the macro category of a communicative project and its constitutive discourse topic(s) and sequences, and with other macro constraints, such as institutional discourse or non-institutional discourse. The extension of frame and the change of perspective from a microcontextual, bottom-up approach to a macrocontextual, top-down frame of reference which also accommodates particular macrocontextual references, such as communicative-genre specific practices or the constraints and requirements of bureaucratic discourse (Sarangi and Slembrouck 1996), has the necessary consequence that the coparticipants’ production and interpretation of intersubjective meaning can no longer be restricted to their individual intentions only. Rather, the production and interpretation of communicative meaning has to be based on the Searlean conception of collective intentionality and the corresponding we-intention (1990, 1991, 1995, 1999), on Dascal’s (1991) conception of a collective we-intention and on Brandom’s (1994) conception of I-thou sociality. Against this background, the calculation of utterance meaning is based on the coparticipants’ negotiation of micro validity claims, whose references to the tripartite system of the objective, social and subjective worlds and the interpersonal, interactional and textual systems are not explicated in an unmarked manner, but rather in accordance with the macro constraints of a particular communicative project. In other words, the negotiation of validity claims and their constitutive contextual references is interdependent on the negotiation of the constraints and requirements of a communicative project (or a macro validity claim) and its specified macro contextual references, which filter the production and interpretation of intersubjective meaning accordingly. But are communicative projects also performed intentionally?

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In the examination of the verbal exchange about the qualification for tenancy, the relevance of the macro category of a communicative project and its constitutive constraint of a discourse topic has already been shown for the calculation of the intersubjective meaning of the communicative contribution B-2 (“Oh I’m sorry”). Here, the macro constraints of the discourse topic of qualifying for the tenancy of the apartment canalizes and filters the production and interpretation of the intersubjective meaning of (B-2) as the realization of a rejection. Unlike the polite rejection, the response “how nice” would signify an acceptance if produced by B, and would indicate positive emotions if uttered by A; or A’s employment of a proper noun would indicate the introduction of another family member characterized by the semantic feature ‘+human’. But does the macro category of a communicative project and its constitutive constraints of a discourse topic, discourse identities and discourse sequences have any consequences for a dialogue conception of communicative intention? In the following, the intersubjective status of a communicative intention is compared and contrasted with Searle’s conception of collective intentionality (or we-intentionality) and with Brandom’s conception of I-thou relations. 3.4.3.1We-intentionality and I-thou-sociality The intentionality of action is not only a core concept in the research paradigm of natural-language communication. It is also a core concept in the field of artificial intelligence with respect to the question of how longer stretches of talk are processed. What is of relevance for this investigation about the connectedness between intentions and context is Litman and Allen’s process-oriented differentiation between discourse intentions or plans of a speaker and plans generated by those plans: “Discourse intentions are purposes of the speaker, expressed in terms of both the task plans of the speaker (the domain plans) and the plans recursively generated by the plans (the discourse plans)” (Litman and Allen 1992: 376). Put differently, a speaker may have a particular discourse intention, for instance to conduct an interview with regard to the qualification for tenancy, but s/he cannot plan every single action or task by her/himself because a plan is a dynamic construct which may generate different subplans, if the immediate context requires a change of action. Moreover, if Litman and Allen’s conception of a discourse intention is adapted to a dialogue setting, discourse intentions are not only postulated, but also have to be ratified by accepting or rejecting them. Furthermore, like any other pragmatic presupposition, discourse intentions can be represented both explicitly and implicitly. Analogously to the explicit or implicit linguistic representation of intentions in


speech act theory, Dascal (1991) differentiates between overt and covert collective we-intentions.The dynamic nature of discourse is also reflected in the processing mode employed. Unlike the bottom-up processing of single actions, discourse processing, as is argued by Litman and Allen, requires a top-down approach: “Once a set of discourse and domain plans is recognized, each is expanded top down by adding the definitions of all steps and substeps (based on the plan libraries), until there are no unique expansions for any of the remaining substeps” (Litman and Allen 1992: 380). If the artificial-intelligence setting is adapted to the constraints and requirements of natural-language communication, the recognition of ‘a set of discourse and domain plans’ can be compared and contrasted with the hearer’s calculation and recognition of the speaker’s communicative intention and the corresponding inference processes involved. But are the two tasks really equivalent? As regards non-complex plans, such as a request to pass the vinegar, the two domains can be equated. As regards complex plans, however, for instance the performance of the communicative genre of an interview, we have to differentiate between a discourse intention or a macro intention anchored to the macro category of a communicative project or a communicative genre as a whole, and a communicative intention or micro intention anchored to the performance of an individual communicative action as a part (of a whole). Yet what kind of relationship is there between a micro or an individual I-intention and a macro or a collective we-intention? In his investigation of the connectedness between intentionality and conversation Searle explicitly stresses the fact that: “Collective intentional behavior is a primitive phenomenon that cannot be analyzed as just the summation of individual intentional behavior; and collective intentions expressed in the form “we intend to do such-and-such” or “we are doing suchand-such” are also primitive phenomena and cannot be analyzed in terms of individual intentions expressed in the form “I intend to do such-and-such” or “I am doing such-and-such” (Searle 1991: 400). Against this background, weintentions of collective intentionality cannot be reduced to the summation of individual I-intentions. Rather, collective intentions seem to be intrinsically linked to the macro categories of communicative project and communicative genre, or to employ Searle’s own words: “The reason that we-intentions cannot be reduced to I-intentions, even I-intentions supplemented with beliefs and beliefs about mutual beliefs, can be stated quite generally. The notion of a weintention of collective intentionality, implies the notion of cooperation” (Searle 1991: 406). For this reason, we-intentions are necessarily anchored to dialogue,

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viz. to a frame of reference that goes beyond the individual communicative act, which, if conceived as a part in a whole, “is derivative from the collective intentionality ‘we are doing act A’ “(Searle 1991: 403). The part-whole connection is further refined with regard to means-ends reasoning: In the case of the individual action there is a single intention that encompasses the by-means-of relations. I intend to fire the gun by means of pulling the trigger. One intention, one action. The relation of the means-intention to the overall intention is simply part whole; the whole intention represents both the means and the ends, and it does that by representing the by-means-of relation according to which one achieves the end by means of the means. (Searle 1991: 410, 411)

Thus, the concept of we-intentionality is a context-dependent notion par excellence. Yet it is not only anchored to cognitive contexts but also, as explicated and specified in Searle (1995), to social contexts and social reality, which are further refined in Searle (1999: 109) into background presuppositions anchored to sociocultural context that vary from culture to culture. Social reality, social context and sociocultural context are constructed through collective representation in accordance with constitutive rules and collective acceptance. Moreover, Searle anchors we-intentionality to the dialogue principle of cooperation: “Collective intentionality presupposes a Background sense of the other as a candidate for cooperative agency; that is, it presupposes a sense of the others as more than just conscious agents, indeed as actual or potential members of a cooperative activity” (Searle 1991: 414). The premise of cooperation, on which Searle’s definition of we-intentionality is based, is further refined by Brandom with regard to the more basic category of I-thou sociality: The social distinction between the fundamental deontic attitudes of undertaking and attributing is essential to the institution of deontic statuses and the conferral of propositional contents. This is, (…) an I-thou sociality rather than an I-we sociality. Its basic building block is the relation between an audience that is attributing commitments and thereby keeping score and a speaker who is undertaking commitments, on whom score is being kept. The notion of a discursive community — a we — is to be built up out of these communicating components. (Brandom 1994: 508)

Brandom’s conception of I-thou sociality is implicit in the definition of the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim which is also an I-thou construct. The implicit I-thou sociality manifests itself in its ratification and in the


assignment of the status of a plus- or a minus-validity claim. Only then, viz. only after the ratification of the implicit I-thou sociality, is the plus- or the minus-validity claim assigned the status of a product of we-intentionality. Against this background, Trognan’s (2000) conception of discourse as irreversible makes perfect sense, that is once a communicative contribution has been accepted or rejected and assigned the status of a plus- or a minus-validity claim and the resulting status of a product of we-intentionality, its status can only be changed through a negotiation-of-validity sequence, where reasons are provided for the non-acceptance of a once accepted plus-validity claim. The purpose of the negotiation-of-validity sequence is to re-establish the coparticipants’ dialogue-common ground. Communicative intentions are interdependent on both social antecedents and social consequences and can no longer be interpreted in the frameworks of individual speakers and hearers, and single speech acts only. Rather, they are a basic prerequisite for achieving coordinated social action and therefore require both a bottom-up approach manifest on the level of a single exchange, and a top-down approach manifest on the level of a communicative project or communicative genre and its contextual constraints, which filter the production and interpretation of intersubjective meaning accordingly. The connectedness between micro and macro communicative intentions and co-suppositions, dialogue common ground and communicative genres is examined in the following section. 3.4.3.2Co-suppositions, dialogue common ground and communicative genre In the previous section, the examination of language use has been compared and contrasted with regard to a monological perspective and with regard to a dialogical perspective. While the monological setting is firmly anchored to individual speakers and hearers, I-intentions, speech acts, individual sensemaking, presuppositions and common ground, a dialogue-oriented frame of investigation requires refined categories, such as coparticipant and her/his participation roles regarding production and reception, communicative intentions, collective we-intentions, dialogue acts and collective coherence. Since dialogue is context-dependent by definition and context is a relational concept, an investigation of dialogue requires the accommodation of further relational categories, namely collective coherence, the coparticipants’ dialogue common ground, their co-suppositions and the dialogue category of a communicative project or of a communicative genre. In the following, these notions are examined and illustrated with regard to the interview about the qualification about tenancy.

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In natural-language communication, the coparticipants’ macro communicative intentions are anchored to the macro categories of a communicative project or of a communicative genre, and in artificial intelligence, the agents’ macro intentions are represented by a discourse intention (Litman and Allen 1992), or they are retrieved with regard to plan recognition: “Plan recognition is the process of inferring an actor’s plan on the basis of partial information about a portion of it. Plan recognition for discourse concerns the recognition of plans that are intended to be recognized” (Grosz and Sidner 1992: 419). In spite of the different frames of investigation, similar problems have to be solved in natural-language communication and in artificial intelligence. That is, both paradigms are confronted with the problem, that “there is no simple mapping between linguistic expressions and the intentions and plans underlying discourse” (ibid). So how do agents and coparticipants solve that problem? Grosz and Sidner’s approach is based on the premise that “a speaker must mark those cases where two actions are not part of the same plan. By marking such shifts, a speaker provides the information needed to reduce the incremental search when two actions do not fit” (Grosz and Sidner 1992: 424). If this observation is transferred into a natural-language-communication setting, the markers would be referred to as metapragmatic comments.38 The specific interpretation of metacommunicative comments and of their employment is only possible, if language production is seen as an intentional action. Moreover, Grosz and Sidner specify the Litman and Allen approach by explicitly referring to the cooperative and collaborative nature of dialogue: “To account for extended sequences of utterances, it is necessary to realize that two agents may develop a plan together rather than merely execute the existing plan of one of them. That is, language use is more accurately characterized as a collaborative behavior of multiple active participants” (Grosz and Sidner 1992:427). Collaborative behaviour is also a key concept in the language-as-social action paradigm, where it applies to the joint production of a communicative genre, the joint production of turns and the joint production of utterances. Here, the macro categories of a communicative project and a communicative genre are conceived of as “socially constructed models for the solution of specific types communicative problems” (Goody 1995: 26). That is, a speech community provides particular

38.In the heterogenous field of pragmatics, metapragmatic comments are referred to by a multitude of terms, such as disjuncts, subjuncts, discourse markers, contextualization cues, gambits, conversational routines, compromisers, pragmatic formatives, pragmatic expressions, pragmatic markers, discourse signal, focus particle and so forth (Fetzer 1994, 2002).


‘plans’, or particular we-intended macro propositions, in and through which specific types of communicative actions are performed. For instance, the task of seeking and providing information is generally performed in and through the communicative genre of an interview, the task of influencing and persuading people is generally performed in and through the communicative genres of a speech or a debate. The functions and forms of the macro category of a communicative genre are explicated by Thomas Luckmann as follows: Communicative genres operate on a level between the socially constructed and transmitted codes of ‘natural’ languages and the reciprocal adjustment of perspectives, which is a presupposition for human communicative interaction. They are a universal formative element of human communication. (…) Human communicative acts are predefined and thereby to a certain extent predetermined by an existing social code of communication. This holds for both the ‘inner’ core of that code, the phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic structure of the language, as well as for its ‘external’ stratification in styles, registers, sociolects and dialects. In addition, communicative acts are predefined and predetermined by explicit and implicit rules and regulations of the use of language, e.g. by forms of communicative etiquette. (Luckmann 1995:177)

In the research paradigm of social interaction, a communicative genre is interactionally organized in accordance with a specified (or marked) sequential organization regarding opening, closing and topical-sequence sections, with the communicative-genre specific degree of face work and participation roles, and with the communicative-genre specific textual specifications regarding style, degree of explicitness and discourse topics, as has been demonstrated for the communicative genre of a political interview (Fetzer 2000a). For these reasons, a communicative genre is performed in an intentional and rational manner. But is it sufficient to define a communicative genre as a sequence of intentionally performed actions? As has been shown above, the calculation of intersubjective meaning cannot be restricted to single validity claims. Rather, it is based on the contextual constraints of a communicative genre, according to which the coparticipants perform communicative actions. Moreover, a communicative genre, which also makes manifest an accepted purpose (Grice 1975: 45), must have been — tacitly — agreed upon for coordinated action and felicitous communication, as has been shown in the previous section. Thus, the performance of a communicative genre requires a higher-order communicative intention than the performance of a micro communicative action, namely a collective we-intention. The collective we-intention is anchored to the categories of a communicative genre, to a communicative project and to a macro


validity claim, whereas an individual I-intention is anchored to the postulation of a validity claim. And it is the extension of frame from monologue to dialogue, which requires the accommodation of further collectively oriented categories, such as, collective inferencing and reasoning strategies, practical reasoning or the ethnomethodological accounting practices, which provide the ground for coparticipants to reason from instances or general rules to their wider contexts (Givón 1989: 238). In the following, the monologue-anchored individual I-intention and the dialogue-oriented collective we-intention approach to natural-language communication is compared and contrasted with regard to the verbal exchange about the qualification for tenancy. In speech act theory, the communicative contributions A-1 (“I have a fourteen year old son”), A-2 (“I also have a dog”) and B-1 (“Well that’s all right”) are representatives, and the contribution B-2 (“Oh I’m sorry”) represents an expressive. The categorization is the result of individual sense-making which is based on the allocation of individual I-intentions to unilateral speech acts. That is, providing information about one’s family, as is the case with the contributions (A-1) and (A-2), is anchored to the act of asserting the truth about the information provided, and agreeing with the information provided, as is the case with the contribution (B-1), is anchored to the act of concluding. The act of expressing the psychological state of apologizing is realized by the contribution (B-2). As has been explicated in the examination of Utterances in context, speech acts are generally not investigated in social or linguistic contexts. Rather, their definition is based on the postulation of a default context, which is defined by the speech act’s felicity conditions. Unlike the unilateral speech-act perspective, the contribution (A-1) also ratifies a previous contribution (B-0) in a dialogical framework, which either refers to an actually realized contribution, or it ratifies the collective we-intention anchored to the communicative project, which, in this case, is represented by the interview and its discourse topic of qualification for tenancy. More precisely, in a dialogue frame of reference, each contribution is related to one or more prior contributions (and their underlying communicative intentions) and to one or more succeeding contributions; if there is no explicit or no overt prior contribution, as is the case with an opening move of a communicative genre, the initial contribution (and its underlying communicative intention) is connected to the constraints and requirement of the macro validity claim, viz. the communicative genre, and to the corresponding macro intention or discourse intention. This extension of frame is due to the conditional-relevance criterion of adjacency and its subcategories of adjacency relation, adjacency position and adjacency pair. As regards


the dialogue examined above, the contribution (A-1) ratifies (B-0).39 Since (A-1) does not contain any negation particles nor any other negative cohesive links, no negotiation-of-validity sequence is initiated, in which the nonaccepted claims and their presuppositions are made explicit. Instead, the validity of (B-0), that is the macro validity claim, is accepted and (B-0) is assigned the status of a plus-validity claim and it is allocated to the coparticipants’ dialogue common ground, where it is assigned a co-suppositional status. But what exactly is a dialogue common ground? The category of dialogue common ground postulated in this work is both process- and product-oriented. It is a dynamic sociocultural construct which contains all of the ratified validity claims of a dialogue and all of their ratified presuppositions. Unlike the widely accepted notion of common ground examined in the chapter on Utterances in context, a dialogue common ground does not only contain accepted validity claims, viz. plus-validity claims, but also rejected validity claims, namely minus-validity claims. From a functional perspective, dialogue common ground can be equated with Thomason’s (1992) concept of a public conversational record, where the dialogue-specific information is stored. In natural-language communication, a dialogue common ground is permanently updated in the process of communication, and all of the ratified validity claims and their ratified presuppositions are allocated to the dialogue common ground where they are assigned a co-suppositional status. Analogously to the differentiation between common ground and dialogue common ground, presuppositions and co-suppositions differentiate along similar lines. As regards its validity, dialogue common ground is valid in the restricted domain of a particular dialogue only, but may, if strengthened through ratification in further dialogues, become valid in an extended frame of reference. Unlike presuppositions, co-suppositions can be both true and false, that is they contain information about something which is the case, and they contain information about something which is not the case. Against this background, co-suppositions are valid in the restricted domain of a particular dialogue only, but may, if strengthened through ratification in further dialogues, become valid in a more extended frame of reference. As regards the comparison between the monological and dialogical examination of the interview about qualification for tenancy, where the contribution

39.From a sequential-organization viewpoint, the communicative contribution B-0, or some prior communicative contribution, has to contain explicit information about A’s and B’s identities, which are indexically referred to in (A-1).


(A-1) has been examined with regard to the process and product of ratification of (B-0), (A-1) additionally postulates information about A’s family, which is ratified, interpreted and accepted by the contribution (B-1). Thus, (A-1) and its presuppositions are attributed to the dialogue common ground and assigned a co-suppositional status. But does the contribution (B-1) accept the validity of the communicative contribution (A-1) only? From an intersubjective-meaning viewpoint, (B-1) also requests the coparticipant A to provide further information regarding their communicative project, which A complies with. The contribution (A-2) postulates further information about A’s family by extending the set [parent, child] to the set [parent, child, dog]. Again, the intersubjective meaning of the contribution (A-2) is ratified and interpreted by (B-2). But does the contribution (B-2) accept or reject the validity of (A-2)? From an intersubjective-meaning perspective, (B-2) realizes a non-acceptance, as has been shown in the previous sections. But is the validity of the intersubjective meaning postulated by (A-2) really rejected and therefore allocated to the dialogue common ground as a negative co-supposition? From a linguistic-surface viewpoint, the contribution (B-2) does not contain any negative particles nor any negative operators which refer to A’s extended family set. That is, there are no explicit cohesive links referring to the additional family member of a dog, such as that the animal ‘dog’ referred to does not exist. Thus, the contribution (B-2) does not reject the validity of (A-2), which is added to the dialogue common ground and assigned a co-suppositional status. But what is not being accepted by (B-2)? Since there is no explicit rejection of the contribution (A-2) with regard to the criterion of local adjacency, the rejection must be anchored to some deeper level and to some additional constraint, namely to the collective we-intention of the communicative project. As regards their communicative project, the coparticipants discuss possible qualifications for the tenancy of the apartment. And it is that additional constraint, viz. the discourse topic of qualifying for the tenancy of the apartment, which ‘filters’ the production and interpretation of the intersubjective meaning of the contribution (B-2) accordingly. That is, an applicant with one child still qualifies for tenancy of the apartment whereas an applicant with one child and one dog does not qualify for the tenancy of the apartment any longer. Furthermore, the collective we-intention and the corresponding communicative project specify which types of speech acts are acceptable in a communicative project, and which ones are not. For instance, an exchange of explicitly or implicitly realized questions and answers, as is the case with the interview setting, is acceptable whereas an exchange of compliments would not be


acceptable. However, not only are there constraints regarding the employment of specific types of speech acts but there are also constraints regarding the employment of discourse topics. For instance, in a qualifying-for-the-tenancyof-an-apartment setting the set of acceptable questions asked by the landlord or landlady generally refers to the domains of family, pets, profession, income or smoking habits, and not generally to the domains of politics, personal diet or religious beliefs. As regards the prospective tenant, the set of acceptable questions covers the domains of rental cost or additional expenses. Generally, questions about the capital of France, the status of the maxims in the Gricean CP, or the fact whether some child was born on a Thursday or a Friday seem quite inappropriate. This applies also to metapragmatic aspects, such as the correction of A’s pronunciation of the back vowel in ‘dog’. Unlike the inconsistencies which result from the collective we-intention and the communicativeproject constraints, individual sense-making of individual speech acts does not result in these kinds of inconsistencies. Thus, the construction of coherence goes beyond the attribution of sense by individual speakers. Rather, the concept of coherence is anchored to the set of coparticipants, intersubjective meaning, collective we-intention, communicative project or communicative genre and dialogue common ground. Collective we-intentions, collective inferencing strategies and collective coherence require the accommodation of collective co-suppositions, a collective dialogue common ground and one or more collective communicative goals. Unlike the concepts of presupposition and common ground, the dialogue categories of dialogue common ground and co-supposition are contextdependent and thus valid in restricted domains only. Here, they represent a filter, which canalizes what-has-been-said accordingly by guiding the interpretation and production of intersubjective meaning in the prespecified manner, or to employ Levinson’s own words: I have argued that intersubjectivity requires peculiar computational properties, which may then bias many aspects of human thinking. On the one hand, one finds the presumption of deterministic solutions, what one may call the ‘crossword puzzle effect’ (problems are treated as if they were designed to be solved): hence the presumption that patterns can’t be random, exemplars are prototypical, samples are ‘representative’ and conclusions can be certain. On the other hand, one finds evidence that attention and memory are geared to interaction tempo: humans presume single-stranded clausal chains, respond (usually) to the immediately previous event, expect brief action-response intervals and very short sequential patterns. (Levinson 1995: 252, 253)


3.4.4 Conclusion Dialogues in context are anchored to the premises of rationality, intentionality, cooperation, coordination and ratification. In the extended frame of reference, unilateral speech acts, individual I-intentions, individual presuppositions and individual sense-making no longer represent sufficient conditions for felicitous communication. Instead, the dialogue categories of a dialogue act, coparticipant, co-supposition, dialogue common ground, communicative project, collective we-intention and collective coherence require the accommodation of both bottom-up and top-down perspectives. The dialogue principle of cooperation has been examined in the framework of Grice’s cooperative principle and its premise that conversations are rational endeavours and cooperative efforts, in which participants realize and recognize a common purpose or set of purposes, or, at least, some mutually accepted direction. The notion of the dialogue principle of cooperation has been refined with regard to the differentiation between natural-language logic and formal logic, and with regard to a dialogue-oriented interpretation of the Gricean maxims. The results obtained have been applied to a dialogue-oriented conception of communicative intentions and their relevance to the production and interpretation of pragmatically well-formed utterances and of the production and interpretation of pragmatically well-formed dialogue. Language is thus no longer conceived of as an autonomous entity but rather as being intrinsically connected with language use and context. The deliberate employment of language to perform communicative actions is supported by Goody’s observation that “[l]anguage permits the individual to act much more effectively on his social world in two modes: information and control” (Goody 1995: 7). Thus, the cooperative principle has retained its status as the solid base of any rational interaction regarding both the micro level of a communicative contribution and the macro level of communicative genre. The dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim has been introduced as a dialogue category, which captures both the process-oriented and productoriented outlook on natural-language communication. It is based on the contextualization of Habermas’s theory of communicative actions and adapts his outlook on communication as postulating, ratifying and accepting or rejecting validity claims. Unlike Habermas’s top-down perspective, it defines the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim by the microcontextual references of an utterance. They are systematized in a tripartite system of objective, social and subjective worlds; the social world subcategorizes into another


tripartite system of interpersonal, textual and interactional systems. In this dialogue setting, communicative intention is assigned a dual status: it represents both a subjective- and a social-world construct. Micro and macro communicative intentions refines the investigation of communicative intentions by anchoring the basic premise of intentionality of social action to both the micro domain of a contribution and to the macro domain of a communicative genre. The extension of frame requires a further distinction, namely the distinction between an individual communicative intention, an I-thou sociality and their respective foundations, to which they are anchored, namely Co-suppositions, dialogue common ground and communicative genres. The constraints and requirements of natural-language communication are succinctly summarized by Levinson as follows: To sum up: human interaction, and thus communication depends on intention-ascription. Achieving this is a computational miracle: inferences must be made way beyond the available data. It is an abductive process of hypothesis formation, yet it appears subjectively as fast and certain — the inferences seem determinate, though we are happy to revise them when forced to do so. The extraordinary thing is that it seems, for all practical purposes, to work most of the time. (Levinson 1995: 241)

3.5 Conclusions The examination of the connectedness between the sociocultural construct of appropriateness and context is firmly anchored to a relational conception of two of the key concepts in the research paradigm of pragmatics. Building on the results obtained in the analysis of the connectedness between grammaticality and context, the theoretical construct of context has been further refined with regard to its conceptions in speech act theory, in the Gricean CP, in conversation analysis and discourse analysis, and in sociopragmatics and cognitive pragmatics. In the research paradigm of speech act theory, context is systematized with regard to a speech act’s felicity conditions and used as a functional synonym. It is explicated by the coparticipant-specific constraints and requirements for a speech act and categorized with regard to their psychological dispositions and their positions in society, with regard to social and institutional constraints and requirements, such as routines, practices, conventions and social status, and with regard to linguistic-context constraints and requirements, such as normal in- and output conditions. In speech act theory, speech acts are performed


felicitously, or they are performed infelicitously, which is further categorized by Austin (1980) into misfires, misapplications and abuses. Against this background, the sociocultural construct of appropriateness manifests itself in the felicitous performance of a speech act and thus is functionally equivalent with the necessary and sufficient conditions for its felicitous performance. So, appropriateness and context meet in the contextual configurations which are required for a felicitous performance of a speech act. Because of this, both theoretical constructs must be anchored to the premise of intentionality of communicative action. Context and appropriateness depart, when speech acts are not performed felicitously. In that case, the contextual configurations do not correspond to the necessary and sufficient conditions. However, this does not mean that inappropriateness is not a context-dependent notion. Rather, the sociocultural construct of appropriateness manifests itself in context and therefore is entailed in the theoretical construct of context. So, in speech act theory, appropriateness and appropriate contexts are conceived of as subsets of context, and inappropriateness and inappropriate contexts are also seen as subsets of context — albeit on different levels and on different meta-levels. The Gricean CP conceives of context and appropriateness along similar lines. Unlike speech act theory, context and appropriateness are no longer seen as anchored to one speech act, but rather as anchored to a conversational contribution which is a necessary constituent of an exchange. The extension of frame requires extended notions. Instead of the speech-act-theoretic felicity conditions, the Gricean CP bases its implicit notions of context and appropriateness on (1) cooperation, (2) conversational maxims, (3) conversational logic and implicatures, and (4) dovetailedness. All of the premises are anchored to some kind of dyadic concept: cooperation requires minimally two coparticipants, conversational maxims are both self- and other-oriented and self- and other-directed, conversational logic requires minimally two propositions in order to obtain a valid conclusion, and dovetailedness is necessarily anchored to a sequence composed of minimally two constituents. Moreover, all of these premises are not seen as analytic primes. Rather, they are conceived of in a relational manner. That is, cooperation is intrinsically connected with conversational maxims, conversational logic and implicatures are intrinsically connected with cooperation and conversational maxims, and dovetailedness is intrinsically connected with cooperation, conversational maxims and conversational logic and implicatures. In the Gricean CP, context is conceived of as the surroundings of a conversational contribution, which include coparticipants, their psychological dispositions, the physical setting and background assumptions,


and appropriateness is seen as ‘such as is required at the stage’. Analogously to speech act theory, appropriateness is seen as a relational concept and is assigned the status of a subset of context, and context entails both appropriate contexts and inappropriate contexts. Furthermore, both frameworks share the premise of intentionality of communicative action, and both do not explicitly differentiate between the different types of context: social context, sociocultural context, linguistic context and cognitive context. Conversation analysis and discourse analysis examine longer stretches of talk and therefore have to account for context in a more explicit manner. The conversation-analytic and discursive notions of context refer to a kind of objective or external context and are distinguished with regard to social and sociocultural contexts on the one hand, and linguistic context on the other hand. Linguistic context is functionally equivalent to the phenomena of linguistic surface structure, text or talk, and social and sociocultural contexts contain information about coparticipants, their turns and TCUs, social and institutional structures, to name but the most relevant ones. What is of importance to the examination of the connectedness between context and appropriateness is the conversation-analytic premise that context is doubly contextual and thus a phenomenon which shapes talk, which is being shaped by talk and which shapes upcoming talk. Against this background, the theoretical constructs of context and appropriateness, but also other pragmatic constructs, are assigned the status of interactionally organized phenomena, and it is the coparticipants who do a particular interactional role, who do a particular social role or who do a particular pragmatic construct in and through the process of communication, for instance the roles of interviewer or judge, or the construct of rationality or sincerity. The introduction of the micro perspective to context is of immense importance for the differentiation between a bottom-up approach and a top-down approach. Unlike speech act theory and Gricean logic and conversation, conversation analysis does not see context as connected with any kind of intentionality. Yet discourse analysis and conversation analysis provide valuable tools for the classification of longer stretches of talk (or longer stretches of context) with regard to their opening, topical-sequence and closing sections, main sequences and side sequences on the one hand, and with regard to discourse topics and subtopics, and discourse coherence and cohesion on the other hand. Because of their strong empirical orientation, the construct of appropriateness is of no immediate relevance to conversation analysis. In discourse analysis, appropriateness is seen as functionally equivalent to discursive well-formedness and to discourse coherence. Analogously to conversation


analysis, intentionality is of no immediate relevance to discourse analysis. Cognitive pragmatics and sociopragmatics have adapted the results obtained from the pioneering works in speech act theory, conversation analysis and discourse analysis. Cognitive pragmatics explicitly accounts for the necessary and sufficient cognitive operations for valid inferencing processes in conversational logic, and it has refined the differentiations between cognitive context, linguistic context, social and sociocultural contexts. Context is no longer solely seen as an external phenomena. Instead, it has become internalized and systematized with regard to interdependent frames or the interdependent layers, metaphorically speaking. Context is thus conceived of as a structured and complex entity, and it is the individual coparticipants, who structure and administer their individual cognitive contexts, which naturally contain information about social phenomena and therefore subcategorize into sociocognitive context and sociocognitive sub-contexts. Cognitive pragmatics focusses on the examination of the cognitive operations required for felicitous communication. Communication and context are no longer conceived of as external phenomena, but rather as internal ones that need to be externalized in the process of communication. Sociopragmatics has extended the domains of speech act theory and the Gricean logic and conversation to the investigation of institutional discourse and to bureaucratic discourse, and refined the results obtained with regard to a context-sensitive employment of more general rules, constraints and requirements, such as the context-sensitive employment of the turn-taking system in institutional discourse or the context-sensitive sensemaking in bureaucratic discourse. Both cognitive linguistics and sociopragmatics explicitly account for the theoretical constructs of context and appropriateness and refine them with regard to a context-sensitive interpretation of two already context-dependent phenomena. The theoretical constructs of context and appropriateness meet in the fundamental pragmatic premise of the intentionality of communicative action. This is due to the fact that appropriateness, if examined from a bottom-up perspective is something that coparticipants do in communication. Thus, appropriateness is an interactionally organized phenomenon and manifests itself in and through the process of communication. That is not to say, that communication is appropriate per se. However, if coparticipants act in accordance with particular constraints and requirements, their communicative performance is seen as appropriate and they do appropriateness, and if they act in disaccordance with the constraints and requirements, their communicative performance is seen as inappropriate and they do inappropriateness. But how


exactly does appropriateness manifest itself in communication? In naturallanguage communication, coparticipants communicate by exchanging linguistic strings, which due to the research paradigms of cognitive pragmatics and sociopragmatics, are no longer seen as autonomous linguistic surfaces only. Rather, they are conceived of as anchored to the coparticipants’ communicative intentions. These linguistic strings have been examined in numerous frameworks and are referred to as sentences, utterances, speech acts, communicative acts, contributions, conversational contributions, turns or validity claims, to name but a few. All of the units are — more or less — connected with linguistic strings, many of them account for the interpretation of the linguistic string, but only few of them explicitly account for the production and formulation of a linguistic string. In pragmatics, there is wide agreement about the fact that in communication coparticipants do not exchange sentences, because sentence is considered to denote a context-independent phenomenon. Instead, they exchange utterances and the like. However, the context-dependent notion of an utterance is frequently restricted in its use and denotes a linguistic-surface phenomenon only, such as the realization of a sentence in a context without taking into consideration that an utterance is produced by a coparticipant and directed towards another coparticipant in order to achieve a particular goal in communication. So, the speech-act-theoretic premise that things are done with words, that is that coparticipants act in an intentional manner and in a rational manner by performing illocutionary and locutionary/propositional acts must be taken into consideration in the analysis of the connectedness between language, appropriateness and context. The stance taken in this work is, that the implicit accommodation of the formulation and interpretation of linguistic strings manifest in its references to utterance acts and phatic acts, must be explicitly accommodated so that the premise of the intentionality of communicative action is already manifest at the level of linguistic string formulation with respect to the selection of lexical items, grammatical constructions and phonological realizations and intonational contours. This stance is supported by the principle of sociolinguistic variation, according to which coparticipants have the competence of not only producing acceptable utterances but also of performing appropriate communicative actions. The employment of the term utterance in this context makes it functionally synonymous with the pragmatic concepts of contribution and conversational contribution, and depending on the frames of reference employed, with the refined notions of communicative act, communicative action, social action and validity claim. Language production and language formulation


and interpretation are necessarily anchored to coparticipants, to communicative intentions and to context. This refinement and the resulting extension of frame require the accommodation of default contexts, prototypicality conditions and frequency, and of presumptive meanings. Against this background, a process- and product oriented framework is needed, which accommodates both a top-down approach with a focus on the theoretical constructs of context and appropriateness and a bottom-up approach with a focus on the necessary and sufficient conditions for their felicitous interactional organizations. A monological or monadic framework cannot accommodate both a topdown approach and a bottom-up approach. Because of this constraint, the frame of investigation has been extended to cover the domain of dialogue and its building blocks of joint production, co-construction and dialogue common ground. Here the fuzziness of the categories is a necessary requirement because the focus is no longer on discrete units but rather on cooperation and joint projects which manifest themselves in the co-construction and negotiation of meaning. The basic building block of a process- and product oriented framework is the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim which is postulated, ratified and negotiated in context. This category cannot be anchored to one coparticipant only. Therefore, one coparticipant is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. In order to be assigned the status of felicity, the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim must be ratified by another coparticipant, who must assign to it the status of a plus- or a minus-validity claim. Plusvalidity claims are accepted claims, and minus-validity claims are non-accepted claims. Therefore, a second coparticipant is another necessary condition, and the ratification through an acceptance or through a rejection is another necessary condition. So, the building block of the dialogue act of a plus/minusvalidity claim is defined by the following conditions: minimally two coparticipants, and a minimal sequence of postulation, ratification and acceptance or rejection. Validity claims represent the two sides of the coin utterance: on the one hand, they are linguistic strings based on references to a validity claim’s three worlds, on the other hand, they represent communicative action. Both the communicative action and the linguistic string are based on the premise of the intentionality of communicative action. In a validity framework, it is also the production and formulation of a linguistic string in context, which is performed intentionally. The dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim is anchored to the objective, social and subjective worlds. It systematized the local contextual references of an utterance in the tripartite system and its corresponding presuppositions.


Because of its embeddedness in context, it accommodate both bottom-up and top-down approaches and therefore is the building block of both micro and macro frameworks anchored to both micro and macro communicative intentions. The necessary consequences of the extension of frame from monologue and its monological concepts to dialogue and its dialogical concepts are reflected in the dyadic (or the multi-party-oriented) conceptions of the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim with micro and macro orientations. They are also reflected in the conception of intentionality and its differentiation with regard to I-intentionality, We-intentionality, and I-thou-sociality. But it is not only the basic unit of communication and the basic unit of coparticipant which require modification. The extension of frame requires further modifications anchored to the pragmatic premises of presupposition and common ground. They are also adapted to the constraints and requirements of the dyad and differentiated with regard to individual-based presupposition and dyad-based co-suppositions, individual-based common ground and dyad-based dialogue common ground, and individual-based speech act and dyad-based validity claim. In any pragmatic framework, the premise of intentionality of communicative action is key to the definition of the theoretical constructs of context and appropriateness. It is at the locus of intentionality, where grammaticality, appropriateness and context and all of its subcategories meet. And it is that fundamental pragmatic premise which is inherited from a top-down perspective to the micro domain, and which is interactionally organized from a bottom-up perspective and thereby connected with the macro domain. The final part Conclusion: Sentence grammar and dialogue grammar revisited compares and contrasts the results obtained in this work about the connectedness between context, grammaticality and appropriateness and offers insights on a conception of dialogue grammar.

Chapter 4

Conclusion Sentence grammar and dialogue grammar revisited

The goal of a sentence grammar is to investigate the necessary and sufficient conditions which are required for the production and interpretation of grammatical sentences and of grammatical constructions. In a sentence grammar, the underlying premise of grammaticality is given both a narrow and a wide interpretation. The narrow interpretation refers to the structural notion of grammaticality, that is sentences and constructions produced in accordance with the rules and constraints of a grammar, and covers only those sentences which are produced accordingly. The wide interpretation includes grammatical sentences and constructions, and well-formed sentences and well-formed constructions, that is linguistic strings which must be grammatical but may be constrained by psycholinguistic sentence-processability and pragmatic relevance. It also includes acceptable sentences and constructions, that is linguistic strings which are seen as ungrammatical from a narrow-interpretation perspective, but are nevertheless employed regularly by language users. Regarding their embeddedness in context, well-formed sentences are anchored to cognitive and linguistic contexts, and acceptable sentences are functionally equivalent to context-dependent utterances. They need particular linguistic-context and social-context configurations, which make their production and interpretation meaningful. Here, context is a necessary condition for them to be assigned the status of an acceptable sentence. Investigations of the grammar of language and of the grammar of particular languages, such as English, German or French, have often been restricted to the domain of a sentence, where language-specific rules and constraints have been identified and where they have been further specified with regard to the language’s syntactic, morphological, phonological and semantic/pragmatic subsystems. Against this background, grammar is generally understood as a model of the speaker, or to employ Kac’s own words: “the grammar is taken to describe the workings of a hypothetical machine


capable of producing sentences of the language, and the speaker is viewed (metaphorically) as a machine of the requisite form” (Kac 1992: 47). However, it is not only the speaker’s production of grammatical sentences and speaker’s the production of grammatical constructions, which are at the heart of a grammar. The hearer has also become the focus of investigation, and her/his role with regard to language understanding and language interpretation has moved away from a merely passive role towards the role of a hardworking agent who can no longer be reduced to a reception device of linguistic strings. Instead, the hearer has been assigned the role of a sense-attributing agent who employs her/his cognitive system in order to decode linguistic strings, to infer meaning, to calculate implicatures and to reconstruct contexts, to name but a few of their most relevant activities. And it is the coparticipants’ statuses and their roles in the language system, which make conceptions of grammar and models of grammar diverge. On the one hand, there is a shift towards ideal speakers and ideal hearers so that “grammar is to be taken neutral with regard to production and recognition” (Kac 1992: 48). Implicit in this framework is the premise that language is independent of its users and thus autonomous. It has been this move which made it possible (1) to examine language irrespective of the question whether natural-languages and non-natural languages have different constraints and requirements, and (2) to adopt a monological perspective to language and attribute pragmatics the domain of language use. On the other hand, language users, that is both speakers and hearer, have been integrated into grammar, and the models of grammar have become dynamized. Here, grammatical sentences and grammatical constructions are not primarily looked at with regard to the questions of whether they are produced in accordance with the rules and constraints of a grammar, or of whether further specifications of rules need to be accommodated. Rather, sentences and constructions are examined with regard to the questions of whether they are meaningful, and what kind of meaning they express. These endeavours are, however, only possible if language, language use and language users are seen as interdependent phenomena, and if language is conceived of as a context-dependent relational system. So, depending on the grammatical frameworks employed, language is conceived of as an autonomous system which consists of discrete modules, and it is conceived of as a dynamic system with interacting prototype-based subsystems. The premise of interactive categories is inherently dialogue-oriented and context-sensitive. It not only accounts for the interactive processes themselves but also for the outcome(s) and product(s) of the interacting systems. For this reason, the

Conclusion 233

functional paradigm is strongly anchored to semantics and pragmatics, and to discourse and dialogue. The conception of language as autonomous is attributed to generative linguistics and to other formal approaches to language, and the conception of language as a dynamic system is attributed to the functional and emergenist paradigms. The two opposing views are systematized by Givón as follows: generative extreme

emergenist extreme

modular domain-specific innate/evolved invariant generative/rigid discrete input-independent context-free

distributive domain-general emergent variable emergent/flexible scalar/graded input-driven context-sensitive (Givón 1999: 107)

Givón (1999: 83) explicates the implicit reasoning of the two radically opposing paradigms with regard to their platonic conception of rule, namely that a rule must be exceptionless. This means that if the rules of grammar are not 100% flexible, then the rules of grammar must be 100% rigid, or, if the rules of grammar are not 100% rigid, then they must be 100% flexible. Givón comes to the conclusion that if language is conceived of accordingly, it must be represented by a binary system. From a purely logic-oriented perspective, the argument that natural language is represented by a binary system holds for both the extremist generative paradigms and for the extremist emergenist paradigms. However, the models of grammar anchored to a binary conception of a rule can only account for very restricted domains of investigation, or for parts of the grammar of a language. In order to account for language as a whole, the two perspectives have to merge, as is succinctly pointed out by Givòn: They are both reductionist perspectives on a complex domain that fairly cries for a non-reductionist approach, an approach that would recognize both extremes as facets of a complex, interactive whole. The mind-brain is both modular and interconnected. It depends on both domain-specific (sensory, motor) and domain-general (executive attention, episodic memory) capacities. Parts of it are mature at birth (thus ‘innate’), others mature during — and in interaction with — lifetime experience (emergent). It has highly automated (invariant, rigid, discrete, input-independent, context-free) modules. But they


interact with more flexible (context-sensitive, input-dependent, scalar) mechanisms. (Givòn 1999: 107)

Givón’s conclusions are reflected in the results obtained in the examination of the nature of the connectedness between grammaticality, well-formedness, acceptability and appropriateness, and in the examination of the nature of the connectedness between grammaticality and context, and between context and appropriateness. The premise of discrete categories could neither account for the well-formedness, acceptability and appropriateness of linguistic strings larger than a sentence, nor could it account for the interactions between units of sentences or between units of constructions in order to construct a whole, such as the interactions between morphemes and word formation, and between phonemes and syllables. This is due to the fact that discourse (or a whole) is not a purely additive endeavour. Rather, a whole is always more than the sum of its parts, and for this reason, the investigation of a whole requires the accommodation of both monological and a dialogical perspectives. In spite of the fact that a sentence grammar based on discrete categories can account for the grammaticality of a sentence with respect to the sentence’s structure as a whole and with regard to the relations between its constituents, it cannot account for the well-formedness of a sentence. This is because, unlike grammaticality, well-formedness is not primarily seen as a production-oriented concept but rather as a reception-oriented notion. Against this background, well-formedness can no longer be conceived of as a monological principle. Instead, it requires the accommodation of a dialogical perspective in order to account for the interactions between the language system and the cognitive domain of psycholinguistic sentence processing on the one hand, and the sociocognitive domain of pragmatic relevance on the other hand. For these reasons, the concept of well-formedness is assigned the status of a dialogue principle. The extension of frame from monologue to dialogue is also a necessary condition for the performance-based and context-dependent category of acceptability, which is evaluated with regard to an utterance’s embeddedness in linguistic and social contexts, and it is a necessary condition for the conception of the sociocultural construct of appropriateness which is anchored to the coparticipants, to their communicative intentions, and to their communicative actions and linguistic realizations. The appropriateness of a communicative action is inferred from cognitive and sociocognitive contexts and calculated with regard to its embeddedness in linguistic, sociocultural and social contexts. The analyses of well-formedness, acceptability and appropriateness require a frame of investigation which goes beyond the constraints and requirements of

Conclusion 235

a sentence grammar and its context-independent unit of investigation: the sentence. Instead, they require a context-sensitive approach to the investigation of language and language use which leads to more refined results with regard to both the expression of meaning and the validity of grammatical rules. Moreover, a dialogue grammar requires a re-conception and recontextualization of boundaries and rules, where boundaries and rules are no longer anchored to individual-based categories, for instance to speaker, hearer and sentence. Rather, rules and boundaries explicitly accommodate individual- and collectivebased notions of context and contexts, of individual- and collective-based language and languages (or varieties), of individual- and collective-based coparticipant and coparticipants, and of individual- and collective-based utterance and utterances. This relational setting is flexible enough to account for individual parts, such as coparticipant, utterance or language variety, and for their connectedness with the whole, such as coparticipants, utterances or standard language. Against this background, the English language is no longer seen as a homogeneous entity. Instead, it is conceived of as a heterogenous phenomenon based on linguistic and sociolinguistic variation. Linguistic variation manifests itself in regional and national varieties of English, and sociolinguistic variation is reflected in official and social varieties of English, for instance General American English, Australian English, Northumbrian English or Southern British English, as well as in English-based Creoles, such as Patois. Functional varieties of English, such as English as an international language, academic English or business English are attributed to sociolinguistic variation, too. A dialogue grammar of English, for instance, does not only account for the production and interpretation of language in context, but also for its varieties and their regional-, social- and functional-variety-specific rules. In dialogue grammar, the investigation of parts, such as grammatical constructions or sentences, is seen as a necessary, but not as a sufficient condition for the definition of the rules and regularities of a grammar. Rather, parts are always explicitly connected with their local and global contexts. Only then do grammatical rules and regularities achieve significance. That is to say, language production is no longer conceived of as the production of phonemes in order to construct morphemes, which construct phrases, which construct sentences. Rather, in a dialogue framework the production of language is necessarily connected with a coparticipant, with her/his communicative intention and with his/her selection of an appropriate linguistic surface structure for the expression of their communicative intention. Thus, the production of phonemes, morphemes, constructions and sentences is always connected with a communicative


intention and with a contribution. Analogously, language interpretation is no longer seen as the decoding and deconstruction of sentences into phrases, of phrases into morphemes, and of morphemes into phonemes. Rather, in a dialogue framework, the interpretation of language is necessarily connected with a coparticipant who attributes sense to her/his coparticipant’s communicative contribution by inferring the contextual references of linguistic strings and by calculating her/his communicative intention with regard to its embeddedness in linguistic, social and sociocultural contexts. A conception of language production and language reception from a holistic viewpoint does not only look at the units of investigation, such as phonemes or morphemes. It also considers the products of their interactions, such as word formation or assimilation. The holistic stance, which is manifest in the dialogue-grammar premise of the connectedness between a communicative intention and the system of grammar, is also of relevance to prosody, which cannot be examined independent of speaker intentions and speaker-intended meaning. A holistic framework is further indispensable for semantic-pragmatic analyses which focus on the expression of meaning, and it has the necessary consequence that the traditional borderline between the two domains, that is between context-dependent meaning on the one hand and between contextindependent meaning on the other hand, can no longer be obtained. Moreover, the traditional sentence-grammar units of speaker and hearer, and sentence, clause and phrase are re-conceptualized and recontextualized into the dialogical and context-dependent categories of coparticipant, contribution, validity claim and utterance. They are anchored to default contexts which themselves are anchored to preferred interpretations and to presumptive meanings, and for this reason are connected with the dialogical concepts of common ground, dialogue common ground and joint production of talk. An investigation of dialogue requires both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. This also holds for the dialogue categories of coparticipant, contribution, validity claim, utterance and dialogue common ground, which are not allocated to one agent only. Rather, they are jointly produced, and their evaluation as good or as bad is also a joint endeavour. Against this background, the Gricean CP is recontextualized in a dialogue frame of reference, where the CP is assigned the status of a dialogue principle. Additionally, the Gricean maxims and the conversational implicature are adapted to a dialogue frame, and the production and interpretation of conversation is seen as expressing basic dialogue principles. For this reason, the production and interpretation of talk are conceived of as intentional actions which express the coparticipants’

Conclusion 237

communicative intentions. The dialogue principle of the CP and the dialogue categories of coparticipant, contribution, validity claim and utterance serve as the foundation for the definition of the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim which is based on the contextualization of Habermas’s theory of communicative action. It classifies the immediate contextual references of an utterance in a tripartite system of subjective, social and objective worlds: the objective world is anchored to the guiding principle of truth, the subjective world is anchored to the premise of sincerity, that is communicative intention meant as uttered and interpreted as meant, and the social world is anchored to the premise of appropriateness and subcategorizes into another tripartite system of textual, interpersonal and interactional systems. The dialogue act of a plus/ minus-validity claim accommodates the basic requirement of representing both process and product: it is process with regard to the speaker’s postulation and linguistic representation of a validity claim, and it is product with regard to the hearer’s interpretation and ratification, and her/his assignment of a plusvalidity claim in case of acceptance and of a minus-validity claim in case of rejection. This dynamic and interactive frame of reference bridges the gap between the primarily subjective (or cognitive) concept of a communicative intention and its primarily social status gained through the process and product of ratification. Moreover, the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim allows for the accommodation of micro communicative intentions, which are calculated in a bottom-up manner, and macro communicative intentions, which are calculated in a top-down manner thus accommodating another crucial differentiation between individual I-intentions and collective we-intentions, to which the dialogue categories of co-supposition, dialogue common ground and communicative genre are anchored. Like sentences, dialogue is hierarchically structured. While a sentence grammar is based on an individual’s outlook on grammar and anchored to unilateral sentences, unilateral utterances and unilateral speech acts, a dialogue grammar is anchored to a collective outlook on grammar based on collective dialogue acts, jointly constructed utterances and jointly constructed grammatical constructions. As regards intentionality, a sentence grammar is based on individual I-intentions, individual presuppositions, individual sense-making and individual reasoning strategies, such as inferencing and deduction, and a dialogue grammar is based on collective we-intentions, collective co-suppositions, collective reasoning strategies, such as abduction, practical reasoning, and collective coherence. Against this background, a context-independent conception of grammaticality has been refined by the accommodation of default


contexts, and the context-dependent conception of appropriateness has been refined with regard to a micro and macro orientation. That is to say, a sentence is grammatical if coparticipants can construct a default context, and a contribution is appropriate, if the participants can reconstruct a context, in which the contribution is used to communicate a specific communicative intention. More precisely, in order to calculate appropriateness, we have to make the implicit explicit, or to employ Brandom’s own words: The members of a linguistic community who adopt the explicit discursive scorekeeping stance to one another achieve thereby a kind of interpretative equilibrium. Each one interprets the other as engaging in just the same sort of interpretative activity, as adopting just the same sort of interpretative stance, as one does oneself. This symmetric taking of others to adopt just the same sorts of attitudes one is oneself adopting, characteristic of the discursive scorekeeping stance, contrasts markedly with the asymmetric relation obtaining between an interpreter who adopts the simple intentional stance and the nonlinguistic creature interpreted as a simple intentional system. (…) Such a community not only is a we, its members can in the fullest sense say ‘we’. (Brandom 1994: 642, 643)

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Name index

A Aijmer 28, 138–140 Akman 5, 80, 81 Allen and Seidenberg 44–46 Austin 107–112, 119, 121, 122, 125, 126, 128, 160, 161, 176, 210, 224 B Bateson 88, 101 Bell 77, 78 Bianchi 79, 80 Biber 8, 42 Brandom 47, 77, 89, 90, 95, 96, 115, 129, 131, 133, 135, 146, 147, 150, 151, 153, 157, 179, 180, 202, 212, 214 Brown 40, 114, 123, 150, 170, 189 Brown and Levinson 95, 114, 144, 150, 205 C Carston 82 Chafe 42 Chomsky 14, 34, 35, 55, 58, 93, 127, 139 Clark 72, 130, 160–167, 175–177 Cohen 107, 185 Crystal 91, 94 D Dascal 102, 213 Drew 112, 117, 133, 159, 170 F Fretheim 70

G Garfinkel 133, 180, 181, 183, 204 Gibbs 28, 118, 175–177 Givón 15, 20, 22–25, 40, 53, 54, 59–61, 64, 98, 105, 179, 186, 187, 218, 233, 234 Goffman 7, 11, 95, 99, 148, 161, 205, 211 Goodwin and Duranti 3, 119 Goody 97, 98, 112, 114, 120, 146, 165–167, 170, 207, 216, 222 Grice 16, 81, 111, 118, 124, 143, 157, 174, 177, 178, 185, 186, 189–191, 197, 198, 200, 217, 222 Grimshaw 96, 107, 121 Gumperz 10, 128, 149 H Habermas 103, 160, 202, 203, 207, 209, 222, 237 Haegeman and Guéron 13, 14, 21, 52, 53, 56, 134 Halliday 70, 72, 87, 132, 135 Harnish 209 Heritage 6, 83, 100 Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 71, 72 Hopper and Traugott 61, 141 Horn 25 Hymes 10, 68, 69, 93, 148, 149 J Jucker 57, 111, 141 K Kac 14, 38, 52, 54–56, 58, 79, 231, 232 Kasher 98, 131 Kubo 5, 90


L Labov 24, 40 Lakoff 29, 74, 76, 187 Leech 35, 135, 144, 159, 187 Levinson 6, 35, 100, 110–112, 117, 118, 134–136, 141, 143, 144, 148, 151, 178, 179, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 201, 206, 221, 223 Linell 6, 90, 97, 98, 100, 120 Litman and Allen 116, 120, 212, 213, 216 Luckmann 6, 100, 120, 217 M Malpas 57, 75 Milroy and Milroy 19, 66, 135 R Radford 55, 56, 65, 74 Recanati 7, 29, 80, 98, 124–126, 129, 133, 143, 191–193, 196, 201, 204, 205 S Sacks 154 Sbisà 82, 83, 102, 168, 173

Schegloff 8, 99, 154, 155 Schiffrin 57, 200 Searle 27–30, 37, 44, 46, 47, 90, 95, 101–105, 107–109, 112, 122–127, 129, 130, 166, 198, 210, 212, 213, 214 Selting 72 Sperber and Wilson 17, 27, 30, 82, 100, 101, 106, 137, 143, 183, 187, 189, 193, 194–196, 210, 211 Stalnaker 95, 168 T Thomason 81, 117, 219 Traugott 24, 45, 141, 142 Tsui 135, 136, 154 U Ungerer 51 V van Dijk 6–8, 19, 143 Vanderveken 5, 29, 90, 114, 127 W Watts 171

Subject index

A abductive reasoning 179 see also reasoning acceptability 12, 15, 19, 20, 34, 40, 56, 64, 85, 90–92, 135, 234 see also appropriateness see also grammaticality see also well-formedness acceptance 82, 110, 119, 128, 158, 176, 190, 199–204, 215, 228, 237 see also accepted purpose see also non-acceptance see also plus-validity claim accepted purpose 157, 174, 177, 189, 190, 200, 217 accountability 133, 181 achievement 109, 110, 119–120 see also attempt activity type 6, 100, 186, 190 adjacency 3–6, 95, 97, 99, 111, 158, 159, 165, 172, 178, 206 pair 95, 111, 151, 158, 159, 165, 172, 178, 206 anaphora 7, 25, 99 appropriateness 12, 19, 20, 22, 27, 64, 84–86, 88–90, 92–98, 114, 128, 140, 184, 199, 204, 205, 207, 223–229, 234, 237, 238 conditions 12, 94, 95, 128 see also acceptabilityy see also grammaticality see also well-formedness assertion 82, 110, 199, 200 attempt 119, 120 see also achievement audience 7, 8, 149

see also coparticipant see also hearer see also participation see also participation role automatization 166 B bottom-up 28, 68, 69, 72, 185, 211, 213, 215, 225, 226, 228, 229, 236, 237 see also top-down C co-construction 228 see also construction see also contextual construction see also grammatical construction see also joint construction see also she-construction code 1, 8, 36, 40, 53, 54, 59, 61, 93, 147, 148, 217 see also linguistic code code-switching 8 cognitive context 4, 7, 10–12, 17, 63, 70, 89, 100, 101, 104–106, 137, 146, 147, 162, 168, 189, 196, 214, 226 see also context network 131, 132 pragmatics 80, 82, 188, 223, 226, 227 coherence 15, 24, 59, 138, 157–159, 168, 175, 177, 178, 222, 237 see also collective coherence see also discourse coherence


see also global coherence see also local coherence collective action 90 coherence 174, 215, 221, 222, 237 communicative goal 221 dialogue common ground 174, 221 inferencing strategy 221 intentionality 101, 211–214 we-intention 173, 211, 213, 215, 217, 218, 220–222, 237 commissive 95, 119 common ground 83, 88, 99, 160, 163–167, 174–176, 178, 208–210, 219–223, 228, 229, 236, 237 see also dialogue common ground communication 5–7, 9–11, 15–17, 22, 81, 82, 90, 95–98, 100, 101, 106–109, 111–113, 115, 118, 119, 121, 122, 125, 129, 131, 133, 134, 151–154, 158, 160, 161, 163, 165–167, 169–175, 178, 180, 186, 187, 189, 191, 193–198, 202, 204, 205, 207–209, 211–213, 216–219, 223, 225–227, 229 see also institutional communication communicative act 3, 17, 20, 22, 110, 114, 117, 121, 160, 164, 168, 191–194, 227 action 47, 85–88, 124, 134, 146, 153, 157, 190, 193, 194, 196, 201–203, 206, 209, 213, 217, 224–229, 234, 237 competence 10, 93, 96, 97, 127, 128, 148, 149 contribution 117, 129, 174, 190, 199, 203, 215, 219, 220, 222, 236 genre 3, 6, 100, 111, 120, 139, 154, 158, 159, 168, 174, 175, 190, 213, 215–218, 221–223, 237

goal 93, 107, 120, 123, 124, 133, 183, 192, 194, 198, 200, 201, 221 see also collective communicative goals intention 3, 11, 27, 72, 93, 100, 101, 120, 124, 129, 143, 146, 152, 159, 173, 183, 187, 189, 191–193, 195–201, 204, 206, 207, 209–213, 223, 223, 234–237 meaning 9, 43, 51, 68, 106, 141, 145, 187, 189, 200, 207, 211 see also language function performance 7, 8, 35, 44, 73, 84, 85, 90, 93, 96, 97, 129, 132, 200, 226 project 6, 100, 120, 149, 151, 158, 159, 163, 171, 175, 177, 190, 200, 211, 212, 213, 215–218, 220–222 see also joint project status 51, 183, 208, 211 competence 10, 12, 18, 20, 33, 34, 37, 44–47, 53, 55, 57, 58, 65, 73, 74, 84, 85, 86, 90–93, 96–98, 126–128, 132, 148, 149, 169, 187, 227 see also communicative competence see also linguistic competence see also native-speaker competence see also sociocultural competence see also syntactic competence compositionality 50, 52, 57, 58, 60, 72, 86 connectedness 3, 8, 12, 19, 20, 22, 27–30, 35, 36, 39, 40, 50, 56–70, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 82–92, 103, 105–109, 112, 114, 115, 120, 123, 127–130, 134–136, 145–147, 150–152, 160, 164, 165, 169, 178–180, 196, 210, 212, 213, 223, 225, 227, 229, 234–236 constitutive rules 37, 108, 123, 201, 214

Subject index 257

construction 12–16, 18, 20, 21, 23–25, 38, 42–45, 62, 64, 75, 82, 84, 100, 123–126, 139, 140, 141, 155, 158, 159, 161, 163, 175, 189, 197, 198, 221, 227, 228, 231, 232, 234, 235, 237 see also co-construction see also grammatical construction see also she-construction context 1–12, 25–30, 33–35, 43–46, 48–50, 56–60, 62–70, 72–93, 97–109, 111–114, 118–120, 124–126, 130–139, 142–150, 152–155, 158–164, 171–173, 177–180, 184–186, 189–194, 196–203, 211, 212, 214, 221–229, 231–238 see also cognitive context see also default context see also linguistic context see also social context see also sociocultural context see also word-external context see also word-external linguistic context see also word-external social context see also word-external sociocultural context context-dependent meaning 2, 3, 77, 79, 83, 87, 92, 236 context-independent meaning 2, 73, 77, 79, 83, 87, 236 contextual information 5, 6, 11, 22, 76, 133, status 83 contextualization cue 149, 206, 216 see also recontextualization contribution 5–7, 16, 17, 90, 93, 116, 117, 119–121, 128, 129, 131, 134, 153, 157, 159, 168, 174–177, 184–187, 189, 190, 199–201, 203, 206, 215, 222–224, 227, 236–238 see also communicative contribution

conversation 2, 3, 5, 10, 33, 72, 81, 97, 111, 131, 134, 136, 138, 139, 143, 148, 149, 153–160, 162, 166, 168–171, 176, 177, 184, 186, 188–190, 202, 207, 208, 213, 223, 225, 226, 236 analysis 3, 72, 134, 143, 153–155, 162, 168, 223, 225, 226 see also ethnomethodology conversational implicature 2, 16, 30, 95, 124, 184, 185, 187, 189, 190, 196, 200, 205, 236 inference 10, 149 maxims 173, 184, 200, 224 record 81, 118, 219 cooperation 81, 83, 88, 97, 160, 167, 174–175, 177, 178, 180, 189, 196–198, 209, 213, 214, 222, 224, 228 cooperative principle 28, 174, 187, 200, 222 coparticipant 4, 7–9, 22, 81, 89–92, 96, 99, 103, 104, 106–111, 113, 114, 128, 129, 131, 133, 140, 150–154, 158, 159, 160, 166–169, 176, 191, 194, 198, 211, 227–229, 235–237 see also audience see also hearer see also language user see also participation see also participation role see also speaker co-supposition 219–223, 229, 237 see also co-suppositional status see also presupposition culture 3, 4, 10, 65, 74, 87, 214 D decontextualization 6 see also recontextualization deductive processing 178 see also processing default 44–46, 48, 49, 59, 78, 82, 84, 85, 98, 101, 102, 105, 116, 118,


120, 129, 143–145, 166, 167, 170, 191, 192, 195, 196, 204, 218, 228, 236–238 consequences 116, 118, 120, 129 context 9, 29, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 58, 78, 84, 85, 98, 101, 102, 105, 145, 218, 228, 236, 238 interpretation 82, 143–145 status 170 deixis 7, 99 dialogue 22–29, 49, 79, 83, 87, 92, 96, 97, 98, 102, 110, 111, 115, 116, 119, 120, 159, 168–180, 184, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 193, 196, 201–204, 209–216, 218–223, 228, 229, 231–237 act 202–204, 207, 209, 211, 215, 222, 228, 229, 237 see also validity claim common ground 174, 202, 203, 208–210, 215, 219–223, 228, 229, 236, 237 see also collective dialogue common ground grammar 98, 134, 229, 231, 235, 237 manager 169–172, 176 principle 102, 110, 173–175, 177, 190, 192, 196, 201, 209, 214, 222, 234, 236, 237 discourse coherence 15, 24, 40–42, 86, 225 see also coherence intention 116, 118, 120, 129, 212, 213, 216 see also intention processing 27, 28, 213, 247 see also processing discourse representation theory 78, 168 topic 22, 28, 29, 111, 120, 157, 158, 178, 211, 212, 217, 221, 225 discursive meaning 29, 143 distributed processing 27, 54, 164

see also processing dovetailedness 177, 178, 201, 224 dual status 84, 85, 87, 93, 98, 157, 165, 178, 195, 223 dynamic semantics 78 see also semantics E ethnomethodology 3, 8, 99, 105, 133, 146, 180 see also conversation analysis explicature 17, 183, 193, 195, 196 see also implicature explicit 47, 56, 69, 77, 89, 96, 97, 108, 109, 113, 117, 121, 124, 131, 133, 146, 147, 152, 153, 169–171, 176, 179, 183, 202, 204–206, 208, 209, 212, 217–220 see also speech act expressive 57, 77, 89, 95, 114, 117–119, 147, 218 rationality 114 external language 14, 20, 132 see also language F face 86, 95, 97, 114, 129, 139, 150, 160, 171, 202, 203, 205–208, 217 wants 86, 114, 129, 205, 206, 208 face-threatening act 114 face-to-face conversation 17, 26, 139, 160 see also negative face see also positive face see also politeness felicity conditions 4, 12, 94, 95, 108, 112, 129, 177, 218, 223, 224 see also appropriateness conditions force 85, 88, 90, 92, 93, 108–110, 113, 114, 117, 119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 128, 144, 149, 172, 190, 199, 200, 206 see also illocutionary force see also pragmatic force

Subject index 259

formal language 41 see also language frame 2, 3, 7–9, 36, 81–84, 90, 97, 106, 107, 112, 116, 120, 135, 140, 141, 148, 151–153, 157–160, 163, 166, 173–175, 182, 183, 186, 188–191, 202, 211, 214, 215, 216, 226, 227, 228, 229, 234, 236, 237 functional grammar 15, 20, 24, 29, 35, 54, 57, 59, 60, 70, 73, 84, 123, 132, 161, 186, see also grammar information 52, 53 see also information future-directed intention 116, 118, 129 see also intention G gender 43, 72, 147, 148 generalized conversationally implicated meaning 143, 145 see also meaning generative grammar 14, 17, 18, 35, 37, 42, 48, 84, 93, 132, 161 see also grammar genre 3, 6, 10, 89, 100, 111, 120, 136, 139, 149, 154, 157, 158, 159, 168, 174, 175, 177, 190, 211, 213, 215–218, 221–223, 237 see also communicative genre global coherence 178 recontextualization 6 goal 8, 9, 81, 90, 92, 93, 99, 107, 118, 120, 123, 124, 133, 146, 149, 159, 160, 169, 170, 175, 177, 183, 186, 190, 192, 194, 195, 198, 200, 201, 221, 227 see also communicative goal see also micro communicative goal see also macro communicative goal gradient grammaticality 39 see also grammaticality

grammar 12–18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 29, 33–39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47–49, 52–62, 70, 73, 74, 87, 88, 91–94, 98, 105, 127, 132, 135, 139, 162, 166, 231–237 see also dialogue grammar see also functional grammar see also generative grammar see also sentence grammar grammatical construction 13, 16, 25, 38, 42, 44, 84, 123,-126, 139, 140, 144, 231, 232, 235, 237 see also construction grammaticality 12–23, 25, 26, 33–49, 52, 54, 56, 58, 63–65, 68, 74, 75, 79, 83–86, 88, 90–93, 97, 98, 127, 131, 134, 223, 229, 231, 234, 237 judgement 12, 14, 19, 23, 26, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 44–48, 74, 75, 84, 92, 93 see also acceptability see also gradient grammaticality see also well-formedness grammaticalization 15, 24, 45, 57, 61, 63, 141, 142 Gricean maxims 145, 171, 184, 185, 190, 205, 207, 222, 236 see also conversational maxims see also cooperative principle grounding 166 H hearer 7, 10, 11, 85, 90, 96, 98–100, 107, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116–118, 120–122, 129, 130, 133, 148–150, 159, 170, 171, 174, 176, 179, 180, 188, 190, 192–195, 200, 202, 205, 206, 208–210, 213, 215, 232, 235, 236, 237 see also audience see also coparticipant see also language user see also participation see also participation role hedge 141, 144, 206, 243


see also less-fuzzy hedge see also more-fuzzy hedge I I-intention 173, 211, 213, 215, 218, 222, 237 see also intention illocutionary act 5, 29, 109, 110, 112, 113, 119, 120, 122, 124, 126, 127, 145, 151, 160, 205 see also communicative act see also dialogue act see also speech act force 8, 93, 108, 114, 117, 122, 125, 128, 144, 149, 190 see also force implicature 2, 16, 17, 30, 81–83, 95, 124, 143, 144, 173, 184–187, 189, 190, 193, 196, 200, 205, 224, 232, 236 see also conversational implicature see also explicature see also generalized conversationally implicated meaning see also indirect speech act implicit 2, 3, 23, 34, 38, 47, 48, 51, 54, 62, 75, 77, 84, 86, 91, 102, 110, 112, 115, 122, 124, 133, 143, 158–160, 169, 170, 172, 176, 177, 201, 204, 205, 206, 208–210, 212, 214, 215, 217, 224, 227, 232, 233 see also indexical see also indirect speech act indexical 5, 24, 25, 104, 105, 110, 125, 133, 134, 137, 158, 162, 171, 172, 180, 183, 199, 206, 208 expression 5, 24, 25, 110, 133, 134, 137, 158, 171, 172, 199 see also implicit indexicality 8, 99, 158 indirect speech act 110, 111, 124, 128, 143, 144, 182 see also conversational implicature

see also dialogue act see also implicit see also speech act individual intelligence 165 see also intelligence see also social intelligence inductive-abductive processing 178 see also processing inference 10, 35, 36, 77, 82, 95, 106, 118, 124, 131, 143, 149, 153, 178, 180, 193, 195, 196, 213, 223 see also collective inferencing strategies see also conversational inference trigger 35, 124 information 5–8, 16, 17, 21, 22, 40, 42, 52–54, 59, 61, 68–70, 82, 86, 87, 92, 95, 97, 101, 108, 114, 118, 129, 133, 136–138, 178, 185, 187, 188, 194, 195, 204, 209, 216–220, 222, 225, 226 wants 86, 114, 129 see also contextual information see also functional information see also interactional information see also interpersonal information see also lexical information see also propositional information informative intention 11, 100, 101, 189, 194, 195, 196, 210 see also intention institution 3, 98, 157, 214 institutional communication 7 intelligence 112, 129, 134, 146, 165–167, 170, 207, 212, 213, 216 see also individual intelligence see also social intelligence intended meaning 1, 2, 6, 20, 30, 35, 113, 121, 141, 143, 146, 184, 185, 188, 189, 195, 205, 236 see also explicature see also generalized conversationally implicated meaning see also implicature

Subject index 261

see also indirect speech act intention 2, 3, 7, 9, 11, 12, 27, 28, 71, 72, 81, 93, 100–102, 104, 109, 112, 113, 115–124, 129, 133, 143, 144, 146, 159, 165, 175, 178, 179, 183, 189–201, 206, 207, 209–214, 216–218, 220, 221, 222, 223, 235–237 see also collective we-intention see also communicative intention see also dialogue intention see also I-intention see also informative intention see also future-directed intention see also macro communicative intention see also micro communicative intention see also reflexive intention see also we-intention intentionality 4, 5, 11, 31, 83, 88, 101–104, 107, 109, 112, 113, 115–118, 124, 126–129, 133, 134, 145, 151, 173, 174, 189, 195, 196, 198, 201, 203, 210–215, 222–229, 237 of action 212 see also collective intentionality see also we-intentionality interactional information 22 meaning 172, 206 system 95, 205–208 see also social world interface 8, 33, 37, 44, 58, 62, 101, 161 internal language 14, 20, 134 see also language interpersonal information 22, 173 system 95, 205–208 see also social world intersubjectivity 8, 90, 97, 194, 201, 210, 221 intonation 53, 66, 68–73, 140, 172

J Joint action 90, 158, 160, 165, 167 construction 99, 158, 175 see also co-construction knowledge 165 project 102, 160, 164, 165, 168, 228 see also communicative project utterances 165, 173 see also utterance L language 3–11, 13–16, 18–22, 27–31, 33–37, 39–47, 52, 54–58, 61, 65–68, 82, 90, 92, 93, 95–100, 102–109, 111–114, 121–124, 127–135, 137–143, 146–148, 152–155, 158, 160–175, 177, 178, 180, 185–187, 189–198, 201, 202, 205, 207–209, 211–213, 215–219, 222, 223, 227, 231–236 see also external language see also formal language see also internal language see also natural language see also non-natural language form 43, 44, 46, 95, 99 function 43, 44, 46 see also communicative meaning processing 27 see also processing use 3–5, 7–9, 33, 34, 43, 73, 114, 121, 123, 129, 132, 134, 138, 139, 141, 146–148, 150, 160–163, 165–168, 173, 175, 177, 197, 198, 207, 215, 216, 222, 232, 235 user 15, 34, 82, 88, 128, 231, 232 see also coparticipant see also hearer see also native speaker see also speaker less-fuzzy hedge 144, 206 see also hedge


lexical information 52, 53 see also information linguistic code 54, 147, 148 see also code competence 12, 18, 30, 33, 44, 46, 55, 58, 65, 86, 90, 93, 97, 126, 127, 128, 132, 148 see also competence context 4–12, 14–16, 48, 63–65, 70, 72, 87–89, 99, 100, 123, 131, 132, 137–139, 146, 147, 152, 158, 161, 162, 186, 200, 218, 225, 226, 231 see also context performance 33, 73 see also performance variation 24, 40, 43, 94, 102, 235 see also variation local coherence 111, 138, 157, 158, 208 see also coherence locutionary act 109, 160 see also speech act M macro communicative goal 120 communicative intention 31, 120, 173, 200, 211, 215, 216, 223, 229, 237 proposition 217 sequence 168, 173 validity claim 6, 211, 218, 219 see also micro main sequence 225 see also macro sequence see also micro sequence see also sequence see also sequential organization see also sequential status making-true 179, 180 see also truth marked 9, 29, 64, 72, 105, 113, 145, 152, 171, 182, 186–191, 217 see also default

see also unmarked markedness 29, 105, 186, 188, 189 maxim 16, 35, 95, 128, 137, 139, 145, 171, 173, 184–188, 190, 197, 199, 200, 205, 207, 221, 222, 224, 236 see also conversational maxims see also cooperative principle see also Gricean maxims meaning 1–3, 10, 12, 17, 27–30, 40, 41, 45, 46, 49–52, 54, 57, 59–62, 70–83, 86–88, 108, 110, 113, 117, 118, 123–127, 129, 134, 140–143, 145, 149, 160–168, 174, 176, 178–180, 184–191, 197, 200, 205–207, 210–212, 217, 221, 232, 235, 236 see also communicative meaning see also context-dependent meaning see also context-independent meaning see also discursive meaning see also generalized conversationally implicated meaning see also intended meaning see also interactional meaning see also interpersonal meaning see also nonce meaning see also presumptive meaning see also speaker-intended meaning see also utterance meaning means-end reasoning 115 see also reasoning micro communicative goal 120 communicative intention 120, 173, 237 sequence 168, 173 situation 138, 157, 167 validity claim 211 see also macro minus-validity claim 31, 115, 168, 173, 202–204, 207, 209, 211, 214, 215, 219, 222, 228, 229, 237

Subject index 263

see also plus-validity claim see also validity claim monologue 49, 90, 97, 98, 116, 202, 218, 229, 234 more-fuzzy hedge 206 see also hedge morpheme 52–55, 57, 59–63, 67, 92, 122, 234–236 morphology 14, 24, 30, 41, 47, 49, 53, 58–66, 68, 72, 74, 75, 84, 86, 87, 161 multifunctional 135, 136, 172, 173 mutual responsibility 176 see also responsibility N native speaker 12–14, 18, 33, 36, 38, 39, 42, 44, 46, 47, 49, 55, 56, 65, 74, 84, 86, 140 see also language user see also speaker competence 20, 44, 46, 47 see also competence natural language 13, 21, 22, 24, 30, 36, 40, 42, 44, 50, 57, 58, 63, 65, 86, 98, 132, 169, 232, 233 see also language negation 25, 48, 52, 60, 75, 94, 138, 204, 219 see also non-acceptance see also rejection see also semantic negation negative face 206, 208 see also face see also positive face negative politeness 149 see also face see also politeness negotiation of meaning 17, 228 see also negotiation-of-validity sequence negotiation-of-validity sequence 111, 113, 119, 122, 152, 203, 206, 209, 215, 219 see also negotiation of meaning

see also validity claim see also sequence network 27–30, 46, 59, 60, 74, 76, 105, 131, 132, 148, 164 see also cognitive network non-acceptance 1, 201, 204, 215, 220 see also acceptance see also minus-validity claim see also rejection non-natural language 30, 36, 42, 86,169, 232 see also language nonce meaning 3, 140, 141, 143, 145 see also meaning normative rightness 202, 209 see also social world see also validity claim O objective world 202, 204, 207–209, 237 see also social world see also subjective world see also validity claim optimality theory 35, 38 opting out 174 see also cooperative principle see also Gricean maxims P participation 7, 10, 95, 99, 149, 170–172, 205, 208, 215, 217 role 7, 99, 215, 217 see also coparticipant performance 7, 8, 14, 33–35, 37, 40, 44–46, 53, 56, 69, 73, 84, 85, 91–94, 97, 102–105, 108, 111–113, 121–123, 127, 128, 131, 132, 135, 160, 165, 183, 191, 193, 194, 217, 234 see also communicative performance see also linguistic performance perlocutionary act 109, 110, 112, 121, 145, 160 see also speech act


phatic act 113, 121, 122, 125, 197, 227 see also speech act phoneme 4, 49, 66–70, 73, 87, 88, 234–236 phonetic act 113, 121, 125, 197 see also speech act phonology 14, 24, 30, 41, 47, 49, 61, 65–70, 72, 73, 84, 86, 87, 161 plus-validity claim 203, 207, 208, 215, 219, 228, 237 see also minus-validity claim see also validity claim politeness 114, 147, 149, 150, 170–172, 187, 202 strategies 147, 150 see also negative face see also positive face see also negative politeness political interview 136, 137, 154, 158, 217 positive face 206, 208 see also face see also politeness possible world 62, 137, 138 see also semantics practical reasoning 86, 103, 116, 118, 179–181, 218, 237 see also reasoning pragmatic force 144, 149, 172, 206 see also force pragmatic meaning 73, 81, 90, 92, 126, 189 see also meaning pragmatics 1–3, 33, 41, 47, 49, 73, 74, 77–83, 87, 89, 96, 103, 107, 117, 121, 125, 141, 143, 178, 185, 188, 190, 193, 195, 216, 223, 226, 227, 231–233 see also cognitive pragmatics see also sociopragmatics presumptive meaning 134, 143, 167 see also meaning presupposition 82, 83, 93, 105, 113, 130, 203, 207–209, 212, 214, 215, 217, 219, 220, 221, 228, 229, 237

see also co-supposition see also presuppositional status presuppositional status 17, 18, 90, 97, 113, 126, 129, 191, 195, 197, 199 processing 15–19, 21, 22, 26–28, 36, 54, 70, 75, 82, 85, 86, 131, 164, 178, 182, 194, 195, 213, 234 see also discourse processing see also distributed processing see also inductive-abductive processing see also deductive processing project 6, 100, 102, 120, 154, 158, 159, 163, 164, 165, 168, 175, 177, 190, 200, 211–213, 215–218, 220–222, 228 see also communicative project see also joint project proposition 4, 11, 17, 22, 26, 53, 59, 74, 76–78, 100, 164, 165, 166, 200, 217, 224 see also macro proposition see also micro proposition see also propositional information propositional information 22, 59 see also information purpose 7, 8, 10, 77, 98, 101, 131, 149, 157, 160, 168, 169, 174, 175, 177, 185, 186, 189, 190, 200, 212, 215, 217, 222, 223 see also accepted purpose R ratification 159, 160, 192, 199, 202, 203, 208, 209, 214, 215, 219, 220, 222, 228, 237 see also dialogue act see also validity claim rationality 96, 103, 107, 112–115, 119, 126, 128, 129, 133, 134, 145, 151, 174, 181, 182, 189, 195, 198, 202, 203, 222, 225 see also expressive rationality reasoning 12, 54, 62, 77, 78, 81, 83, 86, 88, 103, 114–116, 118, 121, 134,

Subject index 265

150, 167, 178–181, 195, 196, 214, 218, 233, 237 see also abductive reasoning see also means-end reasoning see also practical reasoning reciprocity 90, 97 recontextualization 2, 6, 183, 235 see also context reference 9, 11, 17, 26, 28, 29, 45, 47–49, 76–79, 81, 82, 90, 91, 93, 97, 100, 114, 124, 125, 128–131, 137, 141, 149, 151, 158–162, 166–168, 173–176, 179, 188, 189, 193–196, 203–209, 222, 227, 236, 237 reflexive intention 117, 118, 129, 190, 192, 204 see also intention regulative rules 37 see also constitutive rules see also rule rejection 110, 119, 151, 156, 176, 199–203, 212, 220, 228, 237 see also minus-validity claim see also non-acceptance relevance theory 17, 28, 70, 72, 104, 143, 187, 189, 193–196, 210 responsibility 128, 161, 176, 201 see also mutual responsibility rule 12–18, 33–39, 41–49, 54, 56, 96, 108, 127, 132, 163, 188, 198, 231, 232, 233, 235 see also constitutive rules see also regulative rules S semantic competence 74 see also competence negation 75, 204 see also negation semantics 47, 58, 61, 62, 73–81, 87, 96, 104, 107, 108, 124, 129, 141, 161, 175, 233 sentence grammar 31, 98, 132, 134, 173, 229, 231, 234, 235, 237 see also dialogue grammar

sequence 6, 10, 21, 22, 40–42, 54–56, 71, 78, 95, 122, 149, 151, 152, 157, 158, 164, 168, 169, 174, 175, 203, 206, 209, 211, 215, 216, 217, 219, 224, 225, 228 see also macro sequence see also main sequence see also micro sequence see also negotiation-of-meaning sequence see also negotiation-of-validity sequence see also sequential organization see also sequential status sequential organization 24, 25, 40, 41, 109, 112, 152, 153, 168, 175, 190, 206, 217 status 22, 171, 190 she-construction 43 sincerity 31, 112, 128, 192, 204, 207, 225, 237 see also subjective world see also validity claim situation 4, 5, 7–10, 80, 81, 93, 98, 100, 114, 136, 140, 150, 157, 167, 181, 188 see also micro situation see also social context see also sociocultural context social context 4, 7–10, 20, 28, 89, 92, 95, 98–100, 108, 128, 130, 131, 162, 173, 214, 225, 234 see also context intelligence 112, 129, 146, 165–167, 170 see also intelligence practice 1, 115, 146–148, 150, 153, 156, 173 see also communicative act see also dialogue act world 95, 202, 205, 207–210, 222, 237 see also interactional system see also interpersonal system see also textual system


see also validity claim sociocultural competence 55, 57, 90, 97, 127, 128, 148, 169 see also competence context 4, 9–12, 65, 72, 74, 85–89, 91, 92, 100, 146, 154, 161, 162, 211, 214, 225, 226, 236 see also context variation 24, 40, 43, 94, 102, 114, 122–124, 130, 146, 147, 150, 151, 167, 189, 201, 227, 235 see also variation sociopragmatics 3, 92, 133, 168, 223, 226, 227 see also pragmatics speaker 7, 8, 10, 12–14, 34, 38, 46–48, 55, 56, 69–72, 78, 81, 93, 96, 98, 99, 100, 103, 106, 107–114, 118, 126, 127, 133, 140, 143, 145, 146, 148–151, 154, 155, 159–161, 169, 174–176, 180, 183–185, 187–190, 194, 195, 197, 202, 204–206, 209, 210, 212–214, 215, 232, 235–237 see also coparticipant see also language user see also native speaker see also participation speaker-intended meaning 2, 20, 30, 35, 113, 121, 141, 143, 146, 184, 185, 188, 189, 195, 205, 236 see also implicature see also indirect speech act see also meaning see also speech act speech act 4–6, 46, 101–114, 119–122, 127, 129, 134–136, 143–146, 160–162, 198, 202, 203, 210, 211, 213, 223–227, 229, 237 see also dialogue act see also locutionary act see also illocutionary act see also indirect speech act see also perlocutionary act see also phatic act

see also phonetic act see also speech act theory see also utterance act act theory 4, 31, 101, 102, 105, 107, 108, 111, 112, 114, 121, 124, 126, 128, 129, 132, 134, 135, 143, 145, 153, 160–162, 173, 174, 177, 189, 193, 195, 213, 218, 223–226 community 10, 64, 89, 139, 148, 149, 216 subjective world 202, 204, 207, 208, 210, 237 see also validity claim syntactic competence 55 see also competence syntax 14, 21, 24, 30, 34, 41, 47, 49, 50, 53, 56–58, 61, 65, 66, 68, 72, 74, 75, 84, 86, 87, 91, 124, 161, 166 T textual system 95, 205–208 see also dialogue act see also interactional system see also interpersonal system see also social world see also validity claim top-down 28, 29, 68, 69, 72, 79, 87, 138, 173, 211, 213, 215, 222, 225, 228, 229, 236, 237 see also bottom-up transition-relevance place 155, 157 truth 31, 59, 74, 77–80, 82, 93, 130, 141, 143, 164, 179, 180, 202, 204, 207, 209, 218, 237 see also making true turn 5, 31, 33, 38, 55, 97, 117, 134, 136, 146, 153–159, 167, 168, 173, 177, 178, 216, 225, 226, 227 turn-constructional unit 31, 134, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157–159, 167, 168 turn-taking 97, 154, 155, 157, 167, 177, 178, 226 mechanism 154, 155, 157, 167 system 97, 154, 155, 177, 226

Subject index 267

U unmarked 9, 21, 29, 105, 145, 152, 182, 183, 185–190, 211 see also marked see also markedness unratified status 7 see also ratification utterance 2–6, 19, 20, 33–35, 45–47, 69–73, 79–83, 85–88, 90–92, 106, 107, 122, 123, 126, 128–139, 145, 146, 158–164, 188, 190, 192–199, 203, 209–211, 222, 227, 228, 234–237 see also joint utterances act 5, 109, 122, 113, 122, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 160, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196, 197, 201, 227 see also dialogue act see also speech act see also validity claim meaning 2, 3, 72, 73, 137, 141, 143, 145, 151, 158, 159, 161, 164, 166, 168, 178, 195, 211 see also meaning V validity 34, 115, 119, 211, 217–220, 235–237 claim 6, 31, 115, 160, 168, 173, 202–204, 206–209, 211, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 222, 227–229, 236, 237 see also dialogue act see also micro validity claim see also macro validity claim see also minus-validity claim see also plus-validity claim

variation 8, 24, 40, 43, 66, 68, 94, 102, 114, 122–124, 130, 139, 146, 147, 150, 151, 167, 189, 201, 227, 235 see also linguistic variation see also sociolinguistic variation W we-intention 102, 173, 211, 213, 215, 217, 218, 220–222, 237 see also intention we-intentionality 31, 210, 212, 214, 215, 229 see also intentionality well-formedness 12, 15–23, 26, 27, 30, 31, 41, 48, 56, 65, 66, 74, 75, 84–86, 90, 127, 131, 184, 196–198, 225, 234 see also acceptability see also grammaticality word-external context 63 see also context see also morphology word-external linguistic context 64 see also context see also morphology word-formation 61, 62, 64, 65 see also morphology world 8, 40, 62, 65, 78, 87, 95, 99, 103–105, 108, 109, 130, 180, 195, 198, 202–204, 205, 207–211, 222, 223, 237 see also possible world see also social world see also subjective world see also textual world see also validity claim

In the PRAGMATICS AND BEYOND NEW SERIES the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 1. WALTER, Bettyruth: The Jury Summation as Speech Genre: An Ethnographic Study of What it Means to Those who Use it. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1988. 2. BARTON, Ellen: Nonsentential Constituents: A Theory of Grammatical Structure and Pragmatic Interpretation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 3. OLEKSY, Wieslaw (ed.): Contrastive Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1989. 4. RAFFLER-ENGEL, Walburga von (ed.): Doctor-Patient Interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1989. 5. THELIN, Nils B. (ed.): Verbal Aspect in Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 6. VERSCHUEREN, Jef (ed.): Selected Papers from the 1987 International Pragmatics Conference. Vol. I: Pragmatics at Issue. Vol. II: Levels of Linguistic Adaptation. Vol. III: The Pragmatics of Intercultural and International Communication (ed. with Jan Blommaert). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 7. LINDENFELD, Jacqueline: Speech and Sociability at French Urban Market Places. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 8. YOUNG, Lynne: Language as Behaviour, Language as Code: A Study of Academic English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 9. LUKE, Kang-Kwong: Utterance Particles in Cantonese Conversation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 10. MURRAY, Denise E.: Conversation for Action. The computer terminal as medium of communication. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 11. LUONG, Hy V.: Discursive Practices and Linguistic Meanings. The Vietnamese system of person reference. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 12. ABRAHAM, Werner (ed.): Discourse Particles. Descriptive and theoretical investigations on the logical, syntactic and pragmatic properties of discourse particles in German. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 13. NUYTS, Jan, A. Machtelt BOLKESTEIN and Co VET (eds): Layers and Levels of Representation in Language Theory: A functional view. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1990. 14. SCHWARTZ, Ursula: Young Children’s Dyadic Pretend Play. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 15. KOMTER, Martha: Conflict and Cooperation in Job Interviews. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 16. MANN, William C. and Sandra A. THOMPSON (eds): Discourse Description: Diverse Linguistic Analyses of a Fund-Raising Text. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1992. 17. PIÉRAUT-LE BONNIEC, Gilberte and Marlene DOLITSKY (eds): Language Bases ... Discourse Bases. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 18. JOHNSTONE, Barbara: Repetition in Arabic Discourse. Paradigms, syntagms and the ecology of language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 19. BAKER, Carolyn D. and Allan LUKE (eds): Towards a Critical Sociology of Reading Pedagogy. Papers of the XII World Congress on Reading. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1991. 20. NUYTS, Jan: Aspects of a Cognitive-Pragmatic Theory of Language. On cognition, functionalism, and grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1992. 21. SEARLE, John R. et al.: (On) Searle on Conversation. Compiled and introduced by Herman Parret and Jef Verschueren. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1992. 22. AUER, Peter and Aldo Di LUZIO (eds): The Contextualization of Language. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1992.

23. FORTESCUE, Michael, Peter HARDER and Lars KRISTOFFERSEN (eds): Layered Structure and Reference in a Functional Perspective. Papers from the Functional Grammar Conference, Copenhagen, 1990. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1992. 24. MAYNARD, Senko K.: Discourse Modality: Subjectivity, Emotion and Voice in the Japanese Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1993. 25. COUPER-KUHLEN, Elizabeth: English Speech Rhythm. Form and function in everyday verbal interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1993. 26. STYGALL, Gail: Trial Language. A study in differential discourse processing. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1994. 27. SUTER, Hans Jürg: The Wedding Report: A Prototypical Approach to the Study of Traditional Text Types. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1993. 28. VAN DE WALLE, Lieve: Pragmatics and Classical Sanskrit. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1993. 29. BARSKY, Robert F.: Constructing a Productive Other: Discourse theory and the convention refugee hearing. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1994. 30. WORTHAM, Stanton E.F.: Acting Out Participant Examples in the Classroom. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1994. 31. WILDGEN, Wolfgang: Process, Image and Meaning. A realistic model of the meanings of sentences and narrative texts. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1994. 32. SHIBATANI, Masayoshi and Sandra A. THOMPSON (eds): Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1995. 33. GOOSSENS, Louis, Paul PAUWELS, Brygida RUDZKA-OSTYN, Anne-Marie SIMONVANDENBERGEN and Johan VANPARYS: By Word of Mouth. Metaphor, metonymy and linguistic action in a cognitive perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1995. 34. BARBE, Katharina: Irony in Context. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1995. 35. JUCKER, Andreas H. (ed.): Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic developments in the history of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1995. 36. CHILTON, Paul, Mikhail V. ILYIN and Jacob MEY: Political Discourse in Transition in Eastern and Western Europe (1989-1991). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 37. CARSTON, Robyn and Seiji UCHIDA (eds): Relevance Theory. Applications and implications. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 38. FRETHEIM, Thorstein and Jeanette K. GUNDEL (eds): Reference and Referent Accessibility. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996. 39. HERRING, Susan (ed.): Computer-Mediated Communication. Linguistic, social, and crosscultural perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996. 40. DIAMOND, Julie: Status and Power in Verbal Interaction. A study of discourse in a closeknit social network. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996. 41. VENTOLA, Eija and Anna MAURANEN, (eds): Academic Writing. Intercultural and textual issues. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996. 42. WODAK, Ruth and Helga KOTTHOFF (eds): Communicating Gender in Context. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1997. 43. JANSSEN, Theo A.J.M. and Wim van der WURFF (eds): Reported Speech. Forms and functions of the verb. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996. 44. BARGIELA-CHIAPPINI, Francesca and Sandra J. HARRIS: Managing Language. The discourse of corporate meetings. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1997. 45. PALTRIDGE, Brian: Genre, Frames and Writing in Research Settings. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1997.

46. GEORGAKOPOULOU, Alexandra: Narrative Performances. A study of Modern Greek storytelling. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1997. 47. CHESTERMAN, Andrew: Contrastive Functional Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 48. KAMIO, Akio: Territory of Information. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1997. 49. KURZON, Dennis: Discourse of Silence. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 50. GRENOBLE, Lenore: Deixis and Information Packaging in Russian Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 51. BOULIMA, Jamila: Negotiated Interaction in Target Language Classroom Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1999. 52. GILLIS, Steven and Annick DE HOUWER (eds): The Acquisition of Dutch. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1998. 53. MOSEGAARD HANSEN, Maj-Britt: The Function of Discourse Particles. A study with special reference to spoken standard French. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 54. HYLAND, Ken: Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 55. ALLWOOD, Jens and Peter Gärdenfors (eds): Cognitive Semantics. Meaning and cognition. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1999. 56. TANAKA, Hiroko: Language, Culture and Social Interaction. Turn-taking in Japanese and Anglo-American English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1999. 57 JUCKER, Andreas H. and Yael ZIV (eds): Discourse Markers. Descriptions and theory. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 58. ROUCHOTA, Villy and Andreas H. JUCKER (eds): Current Issues in Relevance Theory. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1998. 59. KAMIO, Akio and Ken-ichi TAKAMI (eds): Function and Structure. In honor of Susumu Kuno. 1999. 60. JACOBS, Geert: Preformulating the News. An analysis of the metapragmatics of press releases. 1999. 61. MILLS, Margaret H. (ed.): Slavic Gender Linguistics. 1999. 62. TZANNE, Angeliki: Talking at Cross-Purposes. The dynamics of miscommunication. 2000. 63. BUBLITZ, Wolfram, Uta LENK and Eija VENTOLA (eds.): Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. How to create it and how to describe it.Selected papers from the International Workshop on Coherence, Augsburg, 24-27 April 1997. 1999. 64. SVENNEVIG, Jan: Getting Acquainted in Conversation. A study of initial interactions. 1999. 65. COOREN, François: The Organizing Dimension of Communication. 2000. 66. JUCKER, Andreas H., Gerd FRITZ and Franz LEBSANFT (eds.): Historical Dialogue Analysis. 1999. 67. TAAVITSAINEN, Irma, Gunnel MELCHERS and Päivi PAHTA (eds.): Dimensions of Writing in Nonstandard English. 1999. 68. ARNOVICK, Leslie: Diachronic Pragmatics. Seven case studies in English illocutionary development. 1999. 69. NOH, Eun-Ju: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Metarepresentation in English. A relevance-theoretic account. 2000. 70. SORJONEN, Marja-Leena: Responding in Conversation. A study of response particles in Finnish. 2001. 71. GÓMEZ-GONZÁLEZ, María Ángeles: The Theme-Topic Interface. Evidence from English. 2001.

72. MARMARIDOU, Sophia S.A.: Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition. 2000. 73. HESTER, Stephen and David FRANCIS (eds.): Local Educational Order. Ethnomethodological studies of knowledge in action. 2000. 74. TROSBORG, Anna (ed.): Analysing Professional Genres. 2000. 75. PILKINGTON, Adrian: Poetic Effects. A relevance theory perspective. 2000. 76. MATSUI, Tomoko: Bridging and Relevance. 2000. 77. VANDERVEKEN, Daniel and Susumu KUBO (eds.): Essays in Speech Act Theory. 2002. 78. SELL, Roger D. : Literature as Communication. The foundations of mediating criticism. 2000. 79. ANDERSEN, Gisle and Thorstein FRETHEIM (eds.): Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude. 2000. 80. UNGERER, Friedrich (ed.): English Media Texts – Past and Present. Language and textual structure. 2000. 81. DI LUZIO, Aldo, Susanne GÜNTHNER and Franca ORLETTI (eds.): Culture in Communication. Analyses of intercultural situations. 2001. 82. KHALIL, Esam N.: Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse. 2000. 83. MÁRQUEZ REITER, Rosina: Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. A contrastive study of requests and apologies. 2000. 84. ANDERSEN, Gisle: Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation. A relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents. 2001. 85. COLLINS, Daniel E.: Reanimated Voices. Speech reporting in a historical-pragmatic perspective. 2001. 86. IFANTIDOU, Elly: Evidentials and Relevance. 2001. 87. MUSHIN, Ilana: Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance. Narrative retelling. 2001. 88. BAYRAKTAROG LU, ArFn and Maria SIFIANOU (eds.): Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries. The case of Greek and Turkish. 2001. 89. ITAKURA, Hiroko: Conversational Dominance and Gender. A study of Japanese speakers in first and second language contexts. 2001. 90. KENESEI, István and Robert M. HARNISH (eds.): Perspectives on Semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse. A Festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer. 2001. 91. GROSS, Joan: Speaking in Other Voices. An ethnography of Walloon puppet theaters. 2001. 92. GARDNER, Rod: When Listeners Talk. Response tokens and listener stance. 2001. 93. BARON, Bettina and Helga KOTTHOFF (eds.): Gender in Interaction. Perspectives on femininity and masculinity in ethnography and discourse. 2002 94. McILVENNY, Paul (ed.): Talking Gender and Sexuality. 2002. 95. FITZMAURICE, Susan M.: The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English. A pragmatic approach. 2002. 96. HAVERKATE, Henk: The Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Spanish Mood. 2002. 97. MAYNARD, Senko K.: Linguistic Emotivity. Centrality of place, the topic-comment dynamic, and an ideology of pathos in Japanese discourse. 2002. 98. DUSZAK, Anna (ed.): Us and Others. Social identities across languages, discourses and cultures. 2002. 99. JASZCZOLT, K.M. and Ken TURNER (eds.): Meaning Through Language Contrast. Volume 1. 2003. 100. JASZCZOLT, K.M. and Ken TURNER (eds.): Meaning Through Language Contrast. Volume 2. 2003.

101. LUKE, Kang Kwong and Theodossia-Soula PAVLIDOU (eds.): Telephone Calls. Unity and diversity in conversational structure across languages and cultures. 2002. 102. LEAFGREN, John: Degrees of Explicitness. Information structure and the packaging of Bulgarian subjects and objects. 2002. 103. FETZER, Anita and Christiane MEIERKORD (eds.): Rethinking Sequentiality. Linguistics meets conversational interaction. 2002. 104. BEECHING, Kate: Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French. 2002. 105. BLACKWELL, Sarah E.: Implicatures in Discourse. The case of Spanish NP anaphora. 2003. 106. BUSSE, Ulrich: Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus. Morpho-syntactic variability of second person pronouns. 2002. 107. TAAVITSAINEN, Irma and Andreas H. JUCKER (eds.): Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. 2003. 108. BARRON, Anne: Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics. Learning how to do things with words in a study abroad context. 2003. 109. MAYES, Patricia: Language, Social Structure, and Culture. A genre analysis of cooking classes in Japan and America. 2003. 110. ANDROUTSOPOULOS, Jannis K. and Alexandra GEORGAKOPOULOU (eds.): Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. 2003. 111. ENSINK, Titus and Christoph SAUER (eds.): Framing and Perspectivising in Discourse. 2003. 112. LENZ, Friedrich (ed.): Deictic Conceptualisation of Space, Time and Person. 2003. 113. PANTHER, Klaus-Uwe and Linda L. THORNBURG (eds.): Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing. 2003. 114. KÜHNLEIN, Peter, Hannes RIESER and Henk ZEEVAT (eds.): Perspectives on Dialogue in the New Millennium. 2003. 115. KÄRKKÄINEN, Elise: Epistemic Stance in English Conversation. A description of its interactional functions, with a focus on I think. 2003. 116. GRANT, Colin B. (ed.): Rethinking Communicative Interaction. New interdisciplinary horizons. 2003. 117. WU, Ruey-Jiuan Regina: Stance in Talk. A conversation analysis of Mandarin final particles. n.y.p. 118. CHENG, Winnie: Intercultural Conversation. 2003. 119. HILTUNEN, Risto and Janne SKAFFARI (eds.): Discourse Perspectives on English. Medieval to modern. 2003. 120. AIJMER, Karin and Anna-Brita STENSTRÖM (eds.): Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora. n.y.p. 121. FETZER, Anita: Recontextualizing Context. Grammaticality meets appropriateness. 2004. 122. GONZÁLEZ, Montserrat: Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narrative. The case of English and Catalan. n.y.p. 123. MÁRQUEZ REITER, Rosina and María Elena PLACENCIA (eds.): Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish. n.y.p. 124. VINE, Bernadette: Getting Things Done at Work. The discourse of power in workplace interaction. n.y.p. 125. LERNER, Gene H. (ed.): Conversation Analysis. Studies from the first generation. n.y.p.

Recontextualizing Context: Grammaticality Meets Appropriateness (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

Context and Appropriateness: Micro meets macro (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Cognitive Semantics: Meaning and Cognition (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

Impoliteness in Interaction (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

South Slavic Discourse Particles (Pragmatics and Beyond. New Series)

Humor in Interaction (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

Cognitive Semantics: Meaning and Cognition (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Style Shifting in Japanese (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

Second Language Interaction (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

Constraints in Discourse 2 (Pragmatics and Beyond. New Series)

Youngspeak in a Multilingual Perspective (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

Constraints in Discourse (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, 172)

Connectives As Discourse Landmarks (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

Metapragmatics in Use (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

Rethinking Sequentiality: Linguistics Meets Conversational Interaction (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Creativity and Convention: The pragmatics of everyday figurative speech (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

Perspectives on Semantics, Pragmatics and Discourse: A Festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Hedging in Scientific Research Articles (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Context and Contexts: Parts Meet Whole? (Pragmatics & Beyond)

Cyberpragmatics: Internet-mediated communication in context (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Essays in Speech Act Theory (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Conversation Analysis (Pragmatics & Beyond New)

Contrastive Functional Analysis (Pragmatics & Beyond New)

The Grammar-Pragmatics Interface: Essays in Honor of Jeanette K. Gundel (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

When Listeners Talk (Pragmatics & Beyond New)

Beyond Misunderstanding: Linguistic Analyses of Intercultural Communication (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

New Adventures in Language and Interaction (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Web Advertising: New Forms Of Communication On The Internet (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

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