Negotiating What Is Said in the Face of Miscommunication

Elder, Chi-Hé

doi:10.1515/9783110628937-006

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Several terminological dichotomies with slight differences in meanings are in use: sentence / direct / semantic / locative / literal meaning or explicature vs utterer’s (speaker’s) / indirect / pragmatic / illocutive / non-literal meaning or implicature (for overviews with interesting new insights, see e.g. Börjesson, 2011; Carston, 2009; Elder, 2019).…”

Section: Forms Of Risk-takingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Avoidance of cognitive efforts as a risk factor in interaction

Mustajoki

Baikulova

2022

Discourse Studies

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In an ordinary interaction, communicants have various, mostly unconscious goals which reflect their interactional, social and personal needs. In these interactions, people’s minds try to find a balance between reaching these goals and consuming cognitive energy. If a speaker puts too little effort into speech production, she risks not achieving her communicative goals. This is especially typical when the atmosphere is relaxed, a good example of which is family discourse. An analysis of recorded conversations shows that there are certain regular manifestations of risk-taking in family discourse, such as expressing immature thoughts, raising a large variety of topics and overguessing. A substantial amount of risk-taking in family discourse is in one way or another connected with false confidence in the interlocutors’ common ground. Family members know each other well, which results in an overestimation of the similarity of their understanding of words and objects. This attitude leads them to use cryptic, hard-to-comprehend speech. Quick, everyday interactions are mostly automated, and the speakers do not recognise that their speech is full of implicitness and underdeterminacy.

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Section: Forms Of Risk-takingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Avoidance of cognitive efforts as a risk factor in interaction

Mustajoki

Baikulova

2022

Discourse Studies

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“…Of course it does matter whether hearers interpret speakers' utterances in a way that the speaker would accept having communicated; it is not that any interpretation will do (Haugh 2013;Sanders 1987). However, if the hearer recovers a message that is compatible with what the speaker intended (Elder 2019), such misalignments are 'benign', and any repair work would be likely unnecessary as long as the interlocutors were satisfied that the cost of the misalignment was low enough that there was no trouble in understanding.…”

Section: Misalignment As the Default State: Low Cost Of Misalignmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“We’re running out of fuel!”: When does miscommunication go unrepaired?

Elder

Beaver

2022

Intercultural Pragmatics

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We introduce a framework for studying repair initiation in the face of miscommunication. Our aim is to seed development of models that both predict when conversational repair is a likely communicative strategy and explain why interlocutors would not engage in repair in the face of conversational difficulty. We identify three factors as critical to the predictability of repair: (i) the extent to which a misalignment is (un)recognized by participants (ignorance); (ii) the significance of misalignment relative to some cluster of goals (cost of misalignment); and (iii) the significance of engaging in repair relative to some cluster of goals (cost of repair). We offer a simple method for graphically depicting relevant aspects of communicative situations and exemplify the framework with examples of non-repaired miscommunication before discussing its applicability to different empirical domains.

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“…What we can say for sure is that whatever her intentions might have been, the`speaker meaning' that the two participants make operative is the one that they ultimately interactionally achieve over a series of interlinked turns of talk. So, then, in terms of propositional meaning, it doesn't really matter what Mary intended, but rather that at t 3 she makes it clear whether Mike displayed an inference that was compatible with what she plausibly could have intended (Elder forthcoming;Sanders 2015).…”

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The interactional achievement of speaker meaning: Toward a formal account of conversational inference

Elder¹,

Haugh

2018

Intercultural Pragmatics

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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.

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Negotiating What Is Said in the Face of Miscommunication

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Avoidance of cognitive efforts as a risk factor in interaction

Avoidance of cognitive efforts as a risk factor in interaction

“We’re running out of fuel!”: When does miscommunication go unrepaired?

The interactional achievement of speaker meaning: Toward a formal account of conversational inference

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