Dominant accounts of “speaker meaning” in post-Gricean contextualist pragmatics tend to focus on single utterances, making the theoretical assumption that the object of pragmatic analysis is restricted to cases where speakers and hearers agree on utterance meanings, leaving instances of misunderstandings out of their scope. However, we know that divergences in understandings between interlocutors do often arise, and that when they do, speakers can engage in a local process of meaning negotiation. In this paper, we take insights from interactional pragmatics to offer an empirically informed view on speaker meaning that incorporates both speakers’ and hearers’ perspectives, alongside a formalization of how to model speaker meanings in such a way that we can account for both understandings – the canonical cases – and misunderstandings, but critically, also the process of interactionally negotiating meanings between interlocutors. We highlight that utterance-level theories of meaning provide only a partial representation of speaker meaning as it is understood in interaction, and show that inferences about a given utterance at any given time are formally connected to prior and future inferences of participants. Our proposed model thus provides a more fine-grained account of how speakers converge on speaker meanings in real time, showing how such meanings are often subject to a joint endeavor of complex inferential work.
Rationale and objectives'Unsurprising' in that the lack of such bi-uniqueness is also pervasive in other domains, such as those of other sentential vis-à-vis logical connectives, temporal reference (where we find tense-time mismatches), or of illocutionary forces and their realisations by illocutionary verbs. With reference to conditionals, on the one hand, (i) conditional sentences are not the only way to express conditional thoughts, as (1) and ( 2) demonstrate, and on the other, (ii) conditional sentences can be put to a variety of uses other than expressing conditional thoughts, as shown in ( 3) and (4). 1,2 Approximations at the main intended meaning are given in ( 1a)-(4a) respectively.(1)Touch her iPad and she'll scream.(1a) If you touch her iPad, she'll scream.(2) Your money or your life.(2a) If you don't give me your money, I will take your life.(3) If you wouldn't mind, could you close the door?(3a) Please close the door.(4) If that's a real diamond I'll eat my hat! (4a) That is definitely not a real diamond.This discrepancy in the primary intended meanings of conditional sentences provides the first warning sign for delimiting an object of study for a pragmatic, and on our contextualist account also semantic, analysis. Perhaps, to make use of Kratzer's (1991Kratzer's ( /2012) famous dictum, "[t]he history of the conditional is the story of a syntactic mistake" 3 , but, what is of greater interest to us is that it is also a story of a semantic and a pragmatic mistake, in that the assumption that conditional sentences should drive semantic investigation has largely persisted to this day. 4 Some breakthrough can be noticed in Horn's (2000: 292) critical discussion of Geis and Zwicky's (1971) proposal of conditional perfection (CP) in which he
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