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

Abstract

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.

Confession to Make: Inadvertent Confessions and Admissions in United Kingdom and United States Police Contexts

“…According to Grice, understanding the meaning of an utterance consists of retrieving the speaker’s intentions behind it. Here, we adopt a somewhat different definition of meaning and consider it to be an output of a negotiation between the interlocutors in concrete conversational situations ( Elder and Haugh, 2018 ), whereby multiple interlocutor turns may be needed in order to determine if agreement (i.e., shared understanding) has been achieved in the negotiation. This is because conveying meaning consists of something more than just retrieving speakers’ intentions – it is also the hearers’ subsequent responses and their intentions that count, which may or may not align with the speakers’, and this is when miscommunication takes place.…”

“…However, more recent research has brought the hearer to the fore and argued that it is equally legitimate to assume that the meaning that is conveyed is indeed what the hearer inferred, which is not always in line with what the speaker intended. Thus, meaning is seen as the product of negotiation (see e.g., Elder and Haugh, 2018 ), which, like any negotiation, may or may not result in agreement. We shall see that the consequence of apparent (but not explicit or clear) agreement on what was meant, and possible disparities between interlocutors regarding what was (potentially or actually) inferred, creates miscommunication that can cause serious adverse outcomes for those involved as well as for the criminal justice system as a whole.…”

The Value of Vale: Negotiating the Progressivity of Service in a Market Restaurant

“…An interactional pragmatics analysis (Márquez Reiter, 2009;Chi-Hé Elder & Haugh, 2018) primarily informed by conversation analysis (e.g., Sacks, The Value of Vale Contrastive PragmaticS 3 (2022) 59-88 Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974) was carried out on the data in order to identify differences in the deployment of vale that contributed to the identification of given actions in particular sequential slots during the activities at the restaurant. This, in turn, allowed for the identification and contrast with alternatives to vale in comparable sequential contexts.…”

Functional proposition: A new concept for representing discourse meaning?

“…it is interactively achieved in conversation. As Elder and Haugh (2018: 593) put it, it is a 32 See e. g. Haugh 2007Haugh , 2008Haugh , 2009Haugh and Jaszczolt 2012;Elder and Haugh 2018. 'joint endeavour of complex inferential work'. It is propositional but pertaining to what we called a multimodal propositiona proposition that is a conceptual, not a linguistic, structure, a structure that describes the cognitive act of processing various inputs and putting them, normally subdoxastically, together.…”