PRAGMATICS, DISCOURSE,AND COGNITION

LAURENCE HORNYale University

ISTVAN KECSKESState University of New York at Albany

While the field of pragmatics includes a great variety of approaches to language use, most pragmatic research can be related to two fairly broad traditions and one recent development : linguistic-philosophical pragma-tics (or so-called Anglo-American pragmatics), sociocultural-interactional pragmatics (or so-called European-Continental pragmatics) and inter-cultural pragmatics. Linguistic-philosophical pragmatics seeks to inves-tigate speaker meaning within an utterance-based framework focusing mainly on linguistic constraints on language use. Socio- cultural interac-tional pragmatics maintains that pragmatics should include research into social and cultural constraints on language use as well. The link between classical philosophically-oriented pragmatics and research in intercultural and inter-language communication has led to the development of inter-cultural pragmatics, focusing on the roles and functions of language and communication within a world-wide communication network. Inter-cultural pragmatics attempts to combine the two traditions into one explanatory system that focuses special attention on characteristics of intercultural interaction.

1. LINGUISTIC-PHILOSOPHICAL PRAGMATICS

As a domain of linguistic inquiry, pragmatics first explicitly appears as one fork of the semiotic trichotomy developed by Morris, Carnap, and

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Peirce in the 1930’s (cf. e.g. Morris 1938), according to which syntax addresses the formal relations of signs to one another, semantics the rela-tion of signs to what they denote, and pragmatics the relation of signs to their users and interpreters. More generally, pragmatics deals with the study of the context-dependent aspects of meaning that are systematically abstracted away from in the construction of logical form.

Within the Anglo-American tradition—as represented e.g. in the papers in Horn & Ward 2004—the landmark event in the development of a systematic framework for pragmatics was Paul Grice’s delivery in 1967 of his William James lectures (Grice 1989), a masterful (if incom-plete) program that showed how a regimented account of language use facilitates a simpler, more elegant description of speaker and utterance meaning. Since then, one primary goal of pragmatics has been that pres-cribed in Bar- Hillel’s celebrated dictum (1971 : 405) : “Be careful with forcing bits and pieces you find in the pragmatic wastebasket into your favorite syntactico-semantic theory. It would perhaps be preferable to first bring some order into the contents of this wastebasket.” Beyond orga-nizing the wastebasket, work in theoretical and applied pragmatics has extended from the goal of rescuing syntax and semantics from their own unnecessary complexities to other domains of linguistic inquiry ranging from historical linguistics to the lexicon, from language acquisition to computational linguistics, and from intonational structure to ellipsis (see chapters in Horn & Ward 2004).

A landmark in the evolution of pragmatic thought was Paul Grice’s delineation of a cooperative principle (“Make your contribution such as is required for the current purposes of the talk exchange”) and the four associated maxims of conversation (Grice 1989 : 26), which are exploited to yield conversational implicatures. In a real sense, though, the principles underlying what we now know as pragmatics can in fact be traced back to the rhetoricians of the ancient world who recognized that what we mean is systematically underdetermined by what we say. For the fourth century rhetoricians Donatus and Servius, litotes (not slow for ‘very quick’ ; no small matter for ‘a matter most important’) is a figure in which we say less and mean more—minus dicimus et plus significamus (see Hoffmann 1987 : 28-29 and Horn 1991 for discussion), neatly foreshadows Grice’s celebrated contrast between what is said and what is meant. Grice’s maxims of conversation too were similarly presaged by the rhetoricians : Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s “natural principle” (1st c. BCE) that “events

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earlier in time are mentioned earlier in the order of words than those which occurred later” anticipated Grice’s Be orderly maxim invoked to explain the different understandings ascribed to They got married and had a baby and They had a baby and got married, while Quintilian’s rule (2nd c. CE) of “not saying less, but not saying more than the context requires”, prefi-gured Grice’s maxim of quantity dictating that the speaker be as informa-tive as, but no more informative than, is required (see Horn 2004).

In the Gricean model, such implicatures characteristically arise from what the speaker didn’t say but (in the same context, given general prin-ciples of rationality and cooperation) would have been expected to say if she had been in a different epistemic position. While associated with Grice’s William James lectures, this point was actually made exactly a century earlier. In the locus classicus, a speaker uttering Some F are G implies that (for all she knows) not all F are G because the hearer would have expected her to have expressed the stronger proposition had she been in a position to do so. The key insight is recognized in John Stuart Mill’s objection to Sir William Hamilton’s (1860) treatment of some as logically expressing ‘some only, some but not all’ :

No shadow of justification is shown…for adopting into logic a mere sous-entendu of common conversation in its most unprecise form. If I say to any one, “I saw some of your children today”, he might be justi-fied in inferring that I did not see them all, not because the words mean it, but because, if I had seen them all, it is most likely that I should have said so : though even this cannot be presumed unless it is presupposed that I must have known whether the children I saw were all or not. (Mill 1867 : 501)

Note the invocation of the two-stage process involved in the computation of implicature, the hearer’s move from recovering a weak implication (‘for all the speaker knows, not all…’) to inferring a stronger one (‘the speaker knows that not all…’) when epistemic circumstances permit.

Mill’s allusion to a tacit principle requiring the speaker to use the stronger all in place of the weaker some when possible, and invites the hearer to draw the corresponding inference when the stronger term is eschewed, is echoed by others in his own time (“Whenever we think of the class as a whole, we should employ the term All ; and therefore when we employ the term Some, it is implied that we are not thinking of the whole, but of a part as distinguished from the whole—that is, of a part only”—

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Monck 1881 : 156) and in Grice’s (e.g. Nowell-Smith 1954, Fogelin 1967 ; see Horn 1990, 2012a,b and Chapman 2005 for discussion).

The principle tacitly invoked by Mill and Monck for generating such implications is formulated by Strawson (1952 : 178-79) as a “general rule of linguistic conduct” he attributes to “Mr H P Grice” : “One should not make the (logically) lesser, when one could truthfully (and with greater or equal clarity) make the greater claim.” Grice’s contribution was to ground the operation of conversational implicatures, a regimentation of Mill’s “sous-entendus of common conversation”, within an overall account of speaker meaning and the exploitation of principles based on assumptions of the rationality and mutual goals of the interlocutors. Later work has focused on extending this account to the exploration of lexical relations, meaning change, constraints on lexicalization (e.g. the non-existence of lexical items corresponding to *nall ‘not all’ and *nand ; cf. Horn 2012c), the nature of “what is said”, and the role of non-truth- conditional seman-tics. See Gazdar 1979, Hirschberg 1991, Levinson 2000, Bach 2001, Carston 2002, Huang 2006, Chapman 2011, Horn 2009, 2012a,b for a range of approaches to these and related issues.

More recently, a good deal of empirical work has been devoted to the question of how the implicature mechanism is learned, how implicatures are processed online, the status of defaults, and what the implications of these findings are for pragmatic theory ; see Noveck and Sperber 2004, Sedivy 2007, and Katsos 2008 for overviews of the burgeoning field of experimental pragmatics. On the more theoretical side, the interaction of speaker and hearer in generating and recovering implicatures has been analyzed with tools from game theory and bidirectional optimality theory ; van Rooij (2009) offers for a useful summary of these efforts.

While the work of scholars like Levinson (2000), Bach (2001) and Horn (1989, 2009) can be seen as extending and sharpening the Gricean paradigm, research in Relevance Theory (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1986, Carston 2002, Blakemore 2002) have viewed pragmatics from a perspec-tive of communication and cognition and a focus on utterance interpreta-tion rather than (or in addition to) speaker meaning and intention. Rather than retaining the four maxims (or nine, depending on how one counts) of the Gricean model, or reducing them merely to Levinson’s three heuristics or Horn’s two principles (Levinson 2000, Horn 1989), relevance theorists have argued that one principle is all that is required, the Communicative Principle of Relevance. Their Presumption of Optimal Relevance is based

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on a trade-off between cognitive effects and processing effort operating within a given context. While agreeing with neo-Gricean approaches in stressing the undetermination of assertive content by linguistic meaning, relevance theorists also invoke an enriched notion of propositional content (= what is said) that incorporates pragmatically derived material irredu-cible to classical implicatures ; such pragmatically enriched contents are termed explicatures. (See also Bach 1994, 2001 on ‘implicitures’ and Recanati 2010 on ‘truth- conditional pragmatics’.) The prism of Relevance Theory has also helped illuminate of a range of pragmatic issues including irony, metaphor, and metarepresentation.

In addition to implicature and its relatives, the primary areas for research on context-dependent yet rule-governed aspects of meaning include deixis, speech acts, presupposition, reference, and information structure. Given that pragmatics is ‘the study of linguistic acts and the contexts in which they are performed’ (Stalnaker 1972 : 383), speech-act theory constitutes a central subdomain. It has long been recognized that the propositional content of an utterance U must be distinguished from its illocutionary force, the speaker’s intention in uttering U. The identi-fication and classification of speech acts was initiated by Wittgenstein, Austin, and Searle. In an explicit performative utterance (e.g. I hereby promise to marry you), the speaker does something, i.e. performs an act whose character is determined by her intention, rather than merely saying something. For Austin (1962), performatives are problematic for truth- conditional theories of meaning, since they appear to be devoid of ordi-nary truth value ; another view is that performatives are automatically self-verifying when felicitously uttered, constituting a contingent a priori truths as with I am here now. Of particular linguistic significance are indi-rect speech acts (Searle 1975), where the form of a given sentence (e.g. the yes-no question in Can you pass the salt ?) belies the actual force (here, a request for action) standardly conveyed by the use of that sentence ; in many cases, only certain (typically idiomatic) forms are standardly or conventionally used for indirect illocutionary act functions, with distribu-tional correlates as in the contrast illustrated in {Can you/#Are you able to} please shut the window ?

Like implicatures, presuppositions may represent a non-logical infe-rence within pragmatic reasoning. While a semantic or logical presupposi-tion constitutes a necessary condition on the truth or falsity of statements (Frege 1892, Strawson 1952), a pragmatic presupposition is a restriction

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on the common ground, the set of propositions constituting the current context. Its failure or non-satisfaction results not in truth-value gaps or non-bivalence but in the inappropriateness of a given utterance in a given context (Stalnaker 1974, Karttunen 1974). In presupposing f, I treat f as a non- controversial element in the context of utterance ; in asserting y, I propose adding the propositional content of y to the common ground or, equivalently, discarding ~y from the set of live options, winnowing down the context set of possible worlds consistent with the shared beliefs of the speaker and hearer by discarding the ¬y worlds.

A close relative of pragmatic presupposition is the notion of conventional implicature (Grice 1989, Karttunen & Peters 1979) as a non-truth- conditional aspect of encoded content, applying to the contribution of discourse particles like but (vs. and) or even, the social meaning of T (familiar) vs. V (formal) second person singular pronouns or epithets (that bastard Sam), or the added meaning introduced by affec-tedness markers or ethical datives as in I need me a new truck. See Potts (2005, 2007) and Horn (2008, 2012a) for recent (and distinct) elaborations of conventional implicature.

While speech acts and presuppositions operate primarily on the propo-sitional level, reference operates on the phrasal level. Reference involves the use of a linguistic expression (typically an NP) to induce a hearer to access or create some entity in his mental model of the discourse corres-ponding to the actual individual (event, property, relation, etc.) that the speaker has in mind and is saying something about. One traditional view in philosophy regards reference is a direct semantic relation between linguistic expressions and the possible or real world objects they can or do denote. Researchers in computer science and linguistics, however, have tended to view this relation as mediated through the (assumed) mutual beliefs of speakers and hearers, and therefore as essentially pragmatic. On this view, the form of a referring expression depends on the assumed information status of the referent, which in turn depends on the assump-tions that a speaker makes regarding the hearer’s knowledge store as well as what the hearer is attending to in a given discourse context (cf. Birner & Ward 1994, Abbott 2011 and references therein).

Given that every natural language provides its speakers with various ways of referring to discourse entities, two questions arise for the prag-matics of reference : (i) What are the referential options available to a speaker of a given language ? (ii) What are the factors that guide a speaker

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on a given occasion to use one of these forms over another ? The speaker’s choice among referring expressions (e.g. zero forms, pronominals, indefi-nites, demonstratives, definite descriptions, proper names) is constrained by the information status of discourse entities. Unidimensional accounts (e.g. Gundel et al. 1993) provide a single, exhaustively ordered dimen-sion (“assumed familiarity”, “accessibility”, “givenness”) along which the various types of referring expressions are arranged. In Prince’s (1992) more fine-grained two-dimensional framework, entities are classified as either discourse-old or discourse-new (based on whether or not they have been evoked in the prior discourse) and as either hearer-old or hearer-new (based on whether they are assumed to be present within the hearer’s knowledge-store). Nunberg’s work (e.g. Nunberg 1977) points to the role of pragmatics in deferred reference, as in his classic example The ham sandwich [i.e. the customer who ordered one] at Table 7 wants his check.

One key aspect of information status is the notion of definiteness. Research into the meaning of the English definite article has gene-rally maintained either that the referent of the NP be familiar within the discourse (or the hearer’s knowledge store) or uniquely identifiable to the hearer (or a combination of the two ; cf. Roberts 2003). On the familiarity view, the referent of a novel definite must be accommodated (Lewis 1979) into the discourse model by the hearer. This dispute is reviewed by Horn & Abbott (to appear), who argue that uniqueness (or maximality, for plural definites) constitutes a conventional implicature associated with definites and that the relationship between a and the is one of scalar implicature, as proposed earlier by Hawkins (1991) ; a speaker using an indefinite impli-cates that she could not have used the stronger definite without an appro-priateness violation.

Research into the discourse functions of syntax is based on the observa-tion that every language provides its speakers with various ways to struc-ture the same proposition. That is, a given proposition may be variously realized by a number of different sentence-types, or constructions, each of which is associated with a particular function in discourse. Consider the sentences in (1) :

(1) a. Chris ordered the fondue. b. The fondue was ordered by Chris. c. The fondue, Chris ordered. d. It’s Chris who ordered the fondue.

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The same proposition expressed by the canonical-word-order sentence in (1a) can also be expressed by the passive sentence in (1b), by the ‘topica-lization’ in (1c), and by the ‘cleft’ sentence in (1d), among others, each of which reflects the speaker’s view on how her statement is to be integrated by the hearer into his discourse model. For example, the topicalization (1c) allows the speaker to situate familiar or discourse-old (Prince 1992) information in preposed position, thus marking the preposed constituent as related or linked to the prior discourse, while the use of the cleft in (1d) reflects the speaker’s belief that her hearer is aware that somebody ordered the fondue. Finally, with the passive in (1b), in which the canonical order of arguments is reversed, information that is relatively familiar within the discourse may be presented before information that is relatively unfami-liar. Such constructions serve an information-packaging function in that they allow speakers to structure their discourse in a maximally accessible way, thereby facilitating the incorporation of new information into the hearer’s knowledge-store (Lambrecht 1994, Birner & Ward 1998).

Notions like topic, theme, and focus, and given/new information have long been studied within discourse pragmatics, especially since the Prague School’s investigations of “functional sentence perspective” (cf. e.g. Firbas 1966). Roberts (1996) has stressed the importance of the “question under discussion” in shaping the structure of discourse. An influential recent attempt to establish consistency of terminology for information structure is given in Krifka 1998 ; the papers in Schiffrin et al. 2003 provide a broad perspective of the field of discourse analysis.

2. SOCIOCULTURAL-INTERACTIONALPRAGMATICS

As discussed above, pragmatic theories have traditionally highlighted the roles of intention, rationality, cooperation, common ground, mutual knowledge, relevance, and commitment in the formation and execution of communicative acts (see chapters in Horn & Ward 2004). While not neglecting the central role of these factors, some current approaches to pragmatic research seek to extend the range of the discipline to allow for a more comprehensive picture of their functioning and interrelationship within the dynamics of both intracultural and intercultural communication. What these approaches attempt to do can be summarized as follows :

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1) They all attempt to broaden the scope of pragmatics by focusing not only on the linguistic and semantic constraints of communication but also on the social and cultural constraints.

2) They question Gricean intentionality as the main driving force of communication.

3) They try to solve the problem of “impoverished” speaker meaning of Gricean pragmatics by looking for speaker cues not only in the imme-diate context but also beyond it, in the discourse segment and/or dia-logue sequence.

Sociocultural-interactional pragmatics has been defined in several diffe-rent ways. It is considered “a general cognitive, social, and cultural pers-pective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behaviour” (Verschueren 1999 : 7). According to Mey’s definition, prag-matics is “the study of language in human communication as determined by the conditions of society” (Mey 2001 : 6). Haugh (2009) argues that in sociocultural-interactional pragmatics the study of communication is not exhausted by the expression and recognition/attribution of intentions, and pragmatics should include research into social and cultural constraints on language use as well (e.g. Marmaridou 2000 : 219 ; Verschueren 1999 : 164). But speaker intention to some extent still remains in the center of conceptualizations of communication underlying such research (e.g. Haugh 2009 ; Mey 2001 : 85).

The special issue Intercultural Pragmatics on intention in pragmatics (Haugh Ed., 2008) was motivated in response to Levinson’s (2006) call to elevate Gricean intentions to the center of cognition in interaction, given that Levinson’s call seemed, in Haugh’s view, a “somewhat reactionary move”. The aim of this special issue was to stimulate discussion about both the characterisation and scope of intention in pragmatics. Haugh (2008) and Arundale (2008) argue that one problem facing current models of inference that privilege the speaker’s intention in determining whether communication has occurred (whether in moving from speaker intentions to communicative acts or vice-versa) is the failure to “address how the participants themselves could come to know whether the recipient’s infe-rence and attribution regarding that intention is to any extent consistent with it” (Arundale 2008 : 241). This means that there is no account in

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current intention-based models given as to how speakers and hearers determine something has indeed been communicated.

Interactional pragmatics also attests to the difficulty of locating inten-tions relative to meanings in discourse (rather than simply relative to utterances). Haugh & Jaszczolt (2012) argue that in tracing intentions in conversational interaction it becomes apparent that intentions can also be characterised as being “emergent”, as both the speaker and the hearer jointly co- construct understandings of what is meant (Haugh 2008 ; Kecskes 2010 : 60-61). To demonstrate this, Haugh & Jaszczolt (2012) use Kecskes’example (2010 : 60) arguing that John’s initial intention to give Peter a chance to talk about his trip is not realised in the excerpt in (2).

(2) John : Want to talk about your trip ? Peter : I don’t know. If you have questions… John : OK, but you should tell me… Peter : Wait, you want to hear about Irene ? John : Well, what about her ? Peter : She is fine. She has…well…put on some weight, though.

Kecskes suggests that John’s original intention is sidelined by Peter talking about Irene, perhaps because he thinks John might want to know about her (being his former girlfriend). He argued that “it was the conversational flow that led to this point, at which there appears a kind of emergent, co- constructed intention” (Kecskes 2010 : 61).

Haugh & Jaszczolt (2012) point out that there is growing evidence that we need to make clearer distinctions between speaker (intended) meaning which pertains to the subjective processing domain and the utterance level, and “joint meaning”, which pertains to the interpersonal domain at the discourse level (Carassa & Colombetti 2009 ; Kecskes 2008, 2010). Different types of intentions arguably have different roles to play relative to these different types of meaning.

3. INTERCULTURAL PRAGMATICS

Intercultural pragmatics is rooted in the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) thatcombines the intention-based approach with the attempt to incorporate emerging features of communication (Kecskes 2010, 2012). In this approach interlocutors are considered as social beings searching for

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meaning with individual minds embedded in a socio- cultural collectivity. Individual traits (prior experience salience egocentrism attention) interact with societal traits (actual situational experience relevance cooperation intention). Each trait is the consequence of the other.

Prior experience results in salience which leads to egocentrism that drives attention. Intention is a cooperation-directed practise that is governed by relevance which (partly) depends on actual situational expe-rience. Kecskes (2010, 2012) argues that SCA integrates the pragmatic view of cooperation and the cognitive view of egocentrism and empha-sizes that both cooperation and egocentrism are manifested in all phases of communication, albeit to varying extents.

Intercultural pragmatics is based on the understanding of interculturality as a phenomenon that is not only interactionally and socially constructed in the course of communication but also relies on relatively definable cultural models and norms that represent the speech communities to which the interlocutors belong. Consequently, interculturality can be considered an interim rule system that has both relatively normative and emergent components. Intercultures are situationally emergent and co- constructed phenomena that rely both on relatively definable cultural norms and models as well as situationally evolving features (Kecskes 2011).

Kecskes (2012 ; forthcoming) argues that the communicative assump-tions underlying standard pragmatics presuppose commonalities and conventions between speakers and hearers that can hardly be counted on interculturally in the same way as in intracultural communication. Commo-nalities, conventions, norms, common beliefs, shared knowledge and the like all create a core common ground on which intention and coopera-tion-based pragmatics is built. (Of course, there is plenty of variety within those communalities.) However, when this core common ground appears to be absent or limited, as is the case in intercultural communication, inter-locutors cannot take them for granted ; rather, they need to co- construct them, at least temporarily. So, for instance, we can ask the question : will implicatures and presuppositions work the same way as they do in intra-cultural communication ?

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4. BEYOND THE UTTERANCE

Both sociocultural-interactional pragmatics and intercultural prag-matics have been making attempts to broaden the scope of pragmatics. This has proceeded mainly in two directions, discourse and cognition. Discourse represents the socio- cultural perspective, an interest in socially determined linguistic behavior, while cognition puts emphasis on how individual features and egocentrism affect utterance production and the shaping of this social behavior. Pragmatics is essentially an utter-ance-based discipline. But because utterance is hard to define and because utterance meaning is shaped both by the linguistic elements of a particular utterance (lexical units) and subsequent utterances, pragmatics—which is also defined as the study of meaning in context—has sought out meaning “ingredients” both inside and outside the utterance. As a result, currently there seem to be three different approaches represented in the field of pragmatics (Kecskes 2012).

Firstly, there is a strong pragma-semantics approach, as pursued by Griceans and post-Griceans (including relevance theorists ; cf. Sperber & Wilson 1986, Carston 2002, and discussion above) and other scholars with a referential-logical background and with a concern for the role of truth- conditionality (e.g. de Saussure 2007). These programs, as discussed in the first part of this essay, investigate both speaker meaning (intention) and the construction of meaning by the hearer (utterance interpretation), through cognitive and/or formal models.

Secondly, there is pragma-dialogue, which calls attention to the dialogic nature of communication by emphasizing that interlocutors are actors who both act and react. So the speaker-hearer not only interprets but also reacts to the other interlocutor’s utterance (cf. Cooren 2010 ; Weigand 2009, 2010). The dialogic principle defines dialogue as a sequence of actions and reactions.

Thirdly, there is another view that looks beyond the utterance and pays specific attention to socially determined linguistic behavior. This trend can be called “pragma-discourse”. The basic difference between prag-matics proper and discourse is that while pragmatics analyzes individual utterances (organized set of words) in context, discourse focuses on an organized set of utterances. The relationship between the constituents of utterances (organized sets of words) and the constituents of discourses

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(organized sets of utterances) is quite similar. Analysts assume that utte-rances have properties of their own (distinct from the properties of single lexical items) and discourses also have their own properties (distinct from the properties of single utterances). Consequently, an utterance is not the sum of lexical items that compose it, nor is discourse is the sum of utte-rances that compose it. We need both the single utterances and span of utterances (dialogic sequence, discourse-segment) approaches if we want to give a full analysis of what is communicated by interlocutors. Single utterances are reflections of individual human cognition while span of utterances in the discourse-segment reflect socio- cultural, environmental, background factors. Research in cognitive psychology and pragmatics (e.g. Barr & Keysar 2005 ; Giora 2003) has directed attention to elements of cognition such as egocentrism, attention and salience that, intertwining with socio- cultural and contextual factors, play decisive roles in the communicative process.

All the approaches to pragmatics described above attempt to tackle the issue of speaker meaning, which is the basis of all of pragmatics. Grice ([1957]1989, Essay 14) defines his central notion of speaker meaning as follows : a speaker S means something by an utterance U just in case S intends U to produce a certain effect in a hearer H by means of H’s recognition of this intention. The speaker meaning of U in such a case is the effect that S intends to produce in H by means of H’s recognition of that intention. The main idea is that a speaker means something by inten-ding that the hearer recognise what is meant as intended by the speaker. The problem is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. Consequently, the goal is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged.

Most attempts in linguistic-philosophical pragmatics to revise or correct the problems of the modular view and to recognize additional prag-matic features of the speaker’s meaning (e.g. Sperber and Wilson 1986 ; Carston 2002 ; Moeschler 2004 : explicature/implicature ; Burton-Roberts 2005 : what-is-A-said/what-is-B-said ; Bach 2001 : what is said/implici-ture/implicature) have arguably not gone far enough because the authors have restricted their purview primarily to speaker meaning and utterance interpretation, without paying due attention to private knowledge, prior experience, salience, and the emergent, rather than just the a priori inten-tions of the speaker per se. The proposition the speaker produces will

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hardly be the same as that which will be recovered by the hearer because interlocutors are individuals with different cognitive predispositions, prior experiences, and different histories of use of the same words and expres-sions (Kecskes 2011).

In sociocultural interactional pragmatics there is an alternative way in which speaker meaning can be developed. According to Haugh (Forthco-ming) and Haugh and Jaszczolt (2012), intention can be understood not as only a theoretical or a cognitive notion, but also as a deontological notion where the focus is on what the speaker is committed to, or taken to be committed to. This kind of deontic treatment of speaker meaning shifts the focus to moral or ethical concerns such as rights, obligations, responsi-bilities, permissibility and so on. This approach sees speaker meaning as socially consequential in interaction.

In the socio-cognitive approach (SCA), the speaker’s utterance is the result of an intention that is a private reaction to a communicative situation as it is expressed in lexical items whose selection is affected by salience. This understanding of speaker’s utterance is different from explicature, the latter being a proposition explicitly expressed by the speaker (cf. Sperber and Wilson 1986 ; Carston 2002 ; 2004). Explica-ture is distinguished from ‘what is said’ linguistically, in that it involves a considerable component of pragmatically derived meaning, which is added to the linguistically encoded meaning. In SCA, the speaker’s utte-rance is still further enriched. According to Carston (2004), the derivation of an explicature may require ‘free’ enrichment, that is, the incorporation of conceptual material that is wholly pragmatically inferred, on the basis of considerations of rational communicative behavior (cf. also Recanati 2010). In SCA, this enrichment of the uttered sentence is the result of the speaker’s private and subjective treatment of the utterance in an actual situational context (Kecskes 2012). How the hearer will infer this spea-ker-subjectivized commitment is another issue. While admitting that an explicature is defined as committed to and endorsed by the speaker, SCA stresses that the enriched proposition is actually owned by the speaker ; it is not something recovered by the hearer as result of the latter’s inference, as it is the case in RT. The speaker’s utterance is the speaker’s product, his private reaction to an actual communicative situation. It is based on the speaker’s prior and emergent knowledge and intention. There is an intuitive possibility of a distinction between what a speaker says and what he actually implicates. Kecskes (2012) argues that salience, or what’s on

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our mind (Giora 2003), which operates subconsciously and automatically, may lead us to a wrong choice of words and what we call “slips of the tongue” (see also Saul 2002). People speaking emotionally, concentrating on what they want to say rather than how they say it, often need to apolo-gize for their poor wording. For instance, in a recent speech Mitt Romney, running for President in the U.S., said the following : “I am not concerned about the very poor.” He wanted to say that the poor are usually taken care of in the U.S. because there are a great variety of programs helping them. However, a presidential candidate just cannot say that he is “not concerned about the poor.” Presumably, this is not what he wanted to say. However, that was on his mind and the subconscious rather than conscious formulation resulted in poor wording. This happens all the time. What is implicit and what is explicit in what we say, the propositional content that we are responsible for, the commitment toward our interlocutors that we express by saying something : choosing those particular words in those particular circumstances is an essential issue, not only in our philosophical and linguistic theorizing, but also in our everyday life.

If we look at speaker accountability and commitment we often need to go beyond the utterance level. Haugh (forthcoming) argues that to be held interactionally accountable differs from inferring commitment. To be held interactionally accountable requires an understanding of speaker meaning as developing through incremental, sequentially-grounded discourse processing (cf. Arundale 2008, 2010 ; Gregoromichelaki and Kempson, forthcoming). Inferred commitment is a particular view of speaker meaning that is tied to the level of utterance processing. Weigand (2009 : 30) distinguishes a “discourse-processing view of meaning” as something we are incrementally “ coming to” from an “utterance-processing view of meaning” as something we “reach” or “ come to” (see also Kecskes 2012). This distinction, however, does not render the two mutually exclusive. The opposite is true ; they are, in fact, mutually supportive. This is especially the case in intercultural pragmatics where we need both the single utte-rance and the span of utterances (dialogic sequence, discourse-segment) approaches if we are to give a successful analysis of what is communicated by interlocutors. Single utterances are reflections of individual human cognition while span of utterances in the discourse-segment reflect socio- cultural, environmental, and background factors. It is important to note that we need the discourse-segment analysis (discourse as a structured entity) because a sequential, utterance-by-utterance analysis (discourse as

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a process) may not result in the right interpretation, since utterances can be attached to utterances other than the directly preceding ones.

There is no doubt that pragmatics has been the fastest growing subfield of linguistics in recent years. It no longer resembles the field pioneered by Grice and Austin. Several studies have distinguished “narrow pragma-tics” and “wide pragmatics” in discussing the relationship of pragmatics, dialogue (e.g. Weigand 2009, 2010 ; Cooren 2010), and discourse analysis (e.g. Puig 2003 ; Taboada and Mann 2006 ; de Saussure 2007). However, no new perspective on or research line of pragmatics can neglect the fact that all these branches have grown (directly or indirectly) out of classical pragmatics.

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