Fictive interaction and the nature of linguistic meaning

Abstract

One may distinguish between three broad conceptions of linguistic meaning.One conception, which I will call "logical", views meaning as given in reference (for words) and truth (for sentences). Another conception, the "monological" one, seeks meaning in the cognitive capacities of the single mind. A third, "dialogical", conception attributes meaning to interaction between individuals and personal perspectives. In this chapter I directly contrast how well these three approaches deal with the evidence brought forth by fictive interaction. I examine instances of fictive interaction and argue that intersubjectivity in these instances cannot be reduced to either referential-logical or individual-cognitive semantic notions. It follows that intersubjectivity must belong to the essence of linguistic meaning.

Viewpointed morphology: A unified account of Spanish verb-complement compounds as fictive interaction structures

“…when referring to the fictive topic or the fictive addressee of the imagined conversation expressed in the compound itself). That is, we regard Spanish VC compounds as lexically stored form-meaning pairs in the sense of Construction Grammar models (see Pascual 2014: 115-140 andSandler &Pascual 2019 for a similar analysis of other perspective-indexing structures), and particularly the recent proposal by Jackendoff & Audring (2020).…”

Heightened Discourse and Dialogical Syntax in Tojol‐ab'al Conversation

“…It is the utterance, as found in interaction, in engagement with other utterances that is of significance. It follows that “the conversational turn—the basic unit of intersubjective communication—should be considered the fundamental unit of linguistic structure and analysis” (Sandler :27). Utterances are not solitary: their natural habitat is in interactive discourse.…”