Using background assumptions to negotiate misunderstandings in interaction
Chi-He Elder
University of East Anglia
Abstract
In post-Gricean pragmatics, communication is expected to depend on hearers successfully recovering speakers intended messages. However, Grice (1975) admitted that utterances can give rise to an open list of potential explanations, hinting that information flow is not always this simple. This paper contributes to a recent revival of this line of argument (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 2015), considering cases in which speakers are deliberately vague leaving no clear message to be recovered, or in which speakers accept a hearer's misconstrual even though the speaker didn’t intend it. Specifically, it considers the cognitive mechanisms at play such that a hearer's inference will be accepted by the speaker, even in the absence of a determinate speaker intended meaning.
In case a hearer infers a meaning that the speaker does not overtly intend, I suggest that the speaker is likely to accept the hearer's construal just in case the hearer activates a 'presuppositional bias' (de Saussure 2013). That is, when a speaker produces an utterance, they not only potentially give rise to a range of explanations that are compatible with the uttered content, but they also make manifest a set of background assumptions, or 'discursive presuppositions', that the speaker intends the hearer to consider but which are not communicated by the utterance (cf. Ariel 2016). Then, communication can still be considered successful as long as the hearer derives an inference that is truth compatible (and speaker endorsed) with the background assumptions; not necessarily with the explicit content, and not necessarily with the speaker's determinate communicative intention. Rather than speakers and hearers aligning at the level of the utterance meaning, alignment can occur as long as the relevant discursive presuppositions are accommodated through an activation of the presuppositional bias—even when some aspect of the content of the utterance is not.
References
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