Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T13:11:22.007Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Speaker Meaning, Commitment and Accountability

from Part I - Fundamentals of Sociopragmatics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2021

Michael Haugh
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Dániel Z. Kádár
Affiliation:
Hungarian Research Institute for Linguistics, and Dalian University of Foreign Languages
Marina Terkourafi
Affiliation:
Leiden University
Get access

Summary

Building on Grice’s seminal work on ‘speaker meaning’, this chapter explores three different approaches to meaning in communication in light of how they view the relationship between ‘speaker meanings’ and ‘speaker commitments’: (1) inferential accounts of intentional meaning (stemming from Relevance Theory), (2) normative commitment-based approaches to communication and (3) interactional achievement accounts. It examines how these different perspectives yield different results regarding the meanings that speakers are committed to, held committed to by others or held normatively committed to in virtue of conventions of language use. Finally, it demonstrates how the concept of ‘reflexive accountability’ from talk-in-interaction provides the link in the sociopragmatic toolkit between questions about meaning recovery and the questions of why and how speakers choose to formulate their utterances in different ways for different purposes.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ariel, M. (2016). Revisiting the typology of pragmatic interpretations. Intercultural Pragmatics, 13(1), 135.Google Scholar
Arundale, R. B. (1999). An alternative model and ideology of communication for an alternative to politeness theory. Pragmatics, 9, 119–53.Google Scholar
Arundale, R. B. (2008). Against (Gricean) intentions at the heart of human interaction. Intercultural Pragmatics, 5(2), 229–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arundale, R. B. (2020). Communicating and Relating: Constituting Face in Everyday Interacting. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Austin, J. L. (1975). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Boulat, K. (2015). Hearer-oriented processes of strength assignment: A pragmatic model of commitment. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 29, 1940.Google Scholar
Boulat, K. and Maillat, D. (2017). She said you said I saw it with my own eyes: A pragmatic account of commitment. In Blochowiak, J., Grisot, C., Durrleman, S. and Laenzlinger, C., eds., Formal Models in the Study of Language. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 261–79.Google Scholar
Brandom, R. B. (1994). Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. (1997). Dogmas of understanding. Discourse Processes, 23(3), 567–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Brabanter, P. and Dendale, P. (2008). Commitment: The term and the notions. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 22, 114.Google Scholar
Drew, P. (1987). Po-faced receipts of teases. Linguistics, 25(1), 219–53.Google Scholar
Dynel, M. (2016). With or without intentions: Accountability and (un)intentional humour in film talk. Journal of Pragmatics, 95, 6798.Google Scholar
Elder, C. (2019). Negotiating what is said in the face of miscommunication. In Stalmaszczyk, P., ed., Philosophical Insights into Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 107–26.Google Scholar
Elder, C. (2020). Trump vs. Clinton: Implicatures as public stance acts. In Berlin, L. N., ed., Positioning and Stance in Political Discourse. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, pp. 7191.Google Scholar
Elder, C. and Haugh, M. (2018). The interactional achievement of speaker meaning: Towards a formal account of conversational inference. Intercultural Pragmatics, 15(5), 593625.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elder, C. and Savva, E. (2018). Incomplete conditionals and the syntax-pragmatics interface. Journal of Pragmatics, 138, 4559.Google Scholar
Geurts, B. (2019a). Communication as commitment sharing: Speech acts, implicatures, common ground. Theoretical Linguistics, 45(1-2), 130.Google Scholar
Geurts, B. (2019b). Commitments continued. Theoretical Linguistics, 45(1-2), 111–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hamblin, C. L. (1970). Fallacies. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. (2008). Intention and diverging interpretings of implicature in the uncovered meat sermon. Intercultural Pragmatics, 5(2), 201–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haugh, M. (2013). Speaker meaning and accountability in interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 48, 4156.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. (2017). Prompting offers of assistance in interactions. Pragmatics and Society, 8(2), 183207.Google Scholar
Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Jary, M. (2013). Two types of implicature: Material and behavioural. Mind and Language, 28(5), 638–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kecskes, I. (2008). Dueling contexts: A dynamic model of meaning. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 385406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kecskes, I. (2010). The paradox of communication – socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics. Pragmatics and Society, 1, 5073.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kecskes, I. (2017). The interplay of recipient design and salience in shaping speaker’s utterance. In de Ponte, M. and Korta, K., eds., Reference and Representation in Thought and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 238–73.Google Scholar
Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mazzarella, D., Reinecke, R., Noveck, I. and Mercier, H. (2018). Saying, presupposing and implicating: How pragmatics modulates commitment. Journal of Pragmatics, 133, 1527.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moeschler, J. (2013). Is a speaker-based pragmatics possible? Or how can a hearer infer a speaker’s commitment? Journal of Pragmatics, 48, 8497.Google Scholar
Morency, P., Oswald, S. and de Saussure, L. (2008). Explicitness, implicitness and commitment attribution: A cognitive pragmatic perspective. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 22, 197219.Google Scholar
Sanders, R. E. (1987). Cognitive Foundations of Calculated Speech. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Sanders, R. E. (2015). A tale of two intentions: Intending what an utterance means and intending what an utterance achieves. Pragmatics and Society, 6(4), 475501.Google Scholar
Schegloff, E. A., Ochs, E. and Thompson, S. A. (1996). Introduction. In Ochs, E., Schegloff, E. A. and Thompson, S. A., eds., Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 151.Google Scholar
Searle, J. (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5(1), 123.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. ([1986] 1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (2002). Pragmatics, modularity and mind‐reading. Mind and Language, 17(1-2), 323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (2015). Beyond speaker’s meaning. Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 15, 117–49.Google Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2014). The importance of being indirect: A new nomenclature for indirect speech. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 28, 4570.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×