Speaker meaning and accountability in interaction

Abstract

Speaker meaning is generally defined in pragmatics in terms of the speaker's intentions. The received view is that a speaker means something by intending that the hearer recognise what is meant as intended by the speaker, thereby grounding speaker meaning in a presumed cognitive reality. In this paper it is proposed that speaker meaning can also be conceptualised from a social, deontological perspective where the speaker is held accountable to the moral order for what he or she is taken to mean in interaction. Speaker meaning in this sense encompasses moral or ethical concerns such as rights, obligations, responsibilities, permissibility, and thus is a real-world, consequential concept for participants in interaction. One result of this real-world consequentiality is that the degree of accountability for speaker meanings can be observed to be disputed by participants in both institutional and everyday talk. A second consequence is that the degree of accountability for speaker meanings can be modulated through various meaning-actions that either increase or decrease a speaker's level of accountability for particular meanings. The practice of not-saying is argued to be one relatively neglected meaning-action through which speakers may decrease their level of accountability in interaction. It is concluded that work remains to investigate whether a deontic conceptualisation of speaker meaning can be reconciled with the received view.

Journal of Politeness Research: Introduction

“…Thus, when one interactant in the dataset is asked about an interlocutor's negative response, he makes it clear that his evaluation of the response is derived from him exercising agency in choosing how to respond. Their argument is grounded in the idea that evaluations of impoliteness necessarily involve evaluators as construing the speaker's action as a particular kind of social action, and holding them accountable for that particular kind of social action in relation to particular aspects of the moral order (Haugh 2013(Haugh , 2015. They support their claims by a close interactional analysis of instances of potentially impolite actions in interactions between Australians and Americans.…”

The ironist’s intentions

“…Bara 2011;Haugh 2008Haugh , 2012Haugh , 2013Haugh and Jaszczolt 2012;Jaszczolt 2009;Kecskés 2012): a priori -post facto (temporal order), proximal -distal (orientation), iintentions -we-intentions (speaker-interlocutor interplay), as well as primary -secondary intentions (communicative priority). The centrality of these distinctions in a model of analysis of pragmatic meaning (and pragmatic phenomena like irony, in particular) depends on the theoretical goals of said model, which may range from philosophical approaches to intentions and intentionality (Anscombe 1957) to socio-cognitive (Kecskés 2010) and interactional (Arundale 2008) approaches to communication and utterance processing.…”

Inferential Practices in Social Interaction: A Conversation-Analytic Account

“…This paper contributes to the study of how cognition matters in social action and for its analysis. It is part of an attempt to bridge the gap between pragmatics and conversation analysis (e.g., Bilmes 1993;Haugh 2013) by showing how traditional topics in pragmatics inform social interaction as members' relevancies. It will be a task for future studies to show in much more detail for which phenomena of social interaction the notion of 'inference' is necessary and likely to yield new insights from a CA point of view.…”

“…Implied and inferred meanings are implicit and cancelable without logical selfcontradiction (Grice 1975;Levinson 2000). However, it is up to discursive negotiation whether disclaiming inferred meanings as not having been meant will be accepted by interlocutors (Haugh 2013 However, these distinctions are not as straightforward as they seem. The identification of propositional content often itself requires inferences, as in the case of ambiguity resolution and also in many cases of reference, e.g., as we could see in Extract 1, in some instances of deixis (see Récanati 2002).…”

“…While these latter approaches of experimental pragmatics and relevance theory explicitly treat inferences as cognitive processes, Grice (1975) and Neo-Griceans (Levinson 2000) derive them from principles of rational cooperation. A different understanding of the ontology of inferences, which is more akin to the methodology of conversation analysis, is to consider them within the framework of the socio-normative accountability of meanings, which speakers can be held accountable for in discourse (Haugh 2013(Haugh , 2015. Inferences in interaction matter well beyond implicatures, explicatures, etc., because the "inferential substrate" (Haugh 2017) in social interaction concerns all sorts of attributions of participants' motives, knowledge, common ground, identity claims, self-and other-positioning, etc., which can be associated with their discursive actions.…”