Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragmaJournal of Pragmatics 48 (2013) 112--122

The duality of speaker meaning: What makes self-repair,insincerity, and sarcasm possible

Robert E. SandersDepartment of Communication, Social Science 351, University at Albany, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12222, United States

Received 13 November 2012; accepted 14 November 2012

Abstract

Speaker meaning is defined as a speaker’s communicative intention about what his or her utterance means in context. However, if weregard speakers’ communicative intentions as individual-level cognitive phenomena, we end up focusing on individuated processes asthe basis of speaker meaning that do not account for the achievement of communication. The claim here is that there is, and theoreticallymust be, a shared, impersonal, basis for forming, implementing, and recognizing speakers’ communicative intentions. This does notsubsume speakers’ personal communicative intentions but is intertwined with them to create a duality of speaker meaning. On one handthere is the speaker’s personal communicative intention, and on the other, the communicative intention anyone from the speaker’s andhearer’s community would have in producing that utterance in that context, not just that speaker in particular. What is interesting is whenthe two sources of communicative intention diverge, the personal and the impersonal, and the generic speaker meaning of an utterance isnot one that the speaker stands behind or endorses. This creates a variety of phenomena that only exist because of this divergence. Thisincludes the occurrence and detection of understanding troubles and self-initiated self-repair when the divergence happens by accident,and the social reality of deception, insincerity, sarcasm and joking when the divergence is deliberately produced. Naturally occurring dataare examined in which speakers observably attend to the communicative intention of a generic speaker of their utterance with which theutterance credits them.© 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Speaker meaning; Self-repair; Insincerity; Sarcasm; Intention

1. Introduction

There is general agreement that ‘‘speaker meaning’’ involves a distinction between:

What an utterance, Ui, in itself reports or describes or asks or directs across speakers and situations by virtue of itssyntax and lexical content and its material context;

versus

A. What the speaker in this situation means, i.e., intends to be talking about, in producing Ui, with that syntax andlexicon, within the limits of what Ui’s syntax and lexicon make it possible for the speaker to be talking about;

E-m

0378-2http://d

B. What the speaker in this situation means, i.e., intends to bring about, by producing Ui, where producing Ui in that

situation to that hearer just then counts as an action in that it has a social consequence, whether to change thesituation or make something known, or (most commonly) both.

ail address: r.sanders@albany.edu.

166/$ -- see front matter © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.x.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.11.020

R.E. Sanders / Journal of Pragmatics 48 (2013) 112--122 113

The two senses of speaker meaning in Version A and Version B both tie speaker meaning to the speaker’s

communicative intention for the utterance to be about something in particular, or bring about something in particular, orboth. As Searle (1969:43) put it, echoing Grice (1957):

In speaking . . . I achieve the intended effect on the hearer by getting him to recognize my intention to achieve thateffect, and as soon as the hearer recognizes what it is my intention to achieve, it is in general achieved.

In tying speaker meaning to speakers’ communicative intention, as Grice and Searle did, theoretical difficulties arise ifthey are understood to be referring to a particular speaker’s actual, subjective intention. And I consider that they havegenerally been understood in that way, and perhaps they thought of it that way themselves, because it seems true bydefinition that a communicative ‘‘intention’’ is a cognitive state---a want or goal---and therefore something private that‘‘causes’’ the particular speaker to produce that utterance to that hearer just then. But as I elaborate below, thisconceptualization of communicative intention is unworkable, or at least inadequate. It is at the heart of efforts toreconceptualize it or step around it (see Haugh, 2008a; Haugh and Jaszczolt, 2012).

My agenda here is to bring into the foreground and call attention to a different concept of communicative intention that Ibelieve has run under the surface of pragmatic theory all along, and complements the more visible one, but has not beengiven due recognition. This does not depart from the idea that a communicative intention is a cognitive state, but doesdepart from the idea that this is a private state that belongs uniquely to individuals.

This other concept of communicative intention rests on knowledge of discursive means to ends shared amongmembers of a community that warrants (as opposed to causes) any such speaker as this one to produce that utterance tothat hearer just then with the communicative intention that the utterance will have a certain speaker meaning. This makesthe source of a speaker’s communicative intentions primarily discursive and social, not primarily psychological.

These two conceptualizations of the source of speakers’ communicative intentions do not compete. It is empiricallyobservable and theoretically necessary that they are complementary and overlaid, and my interest here is theirinterconnection. The discursive and social sources of speakers’ intentions give speakers an impersonal, shared, basis forassessing whether an utterance’s speaker meaning is the one they personally intend, and stand behind and endorse.Without that, we could not explain self-initiated self-repair, nor the deliberate production of utterances whose speakermeaning is not one the speaker actually stands behind, as when speakers are insincere or sarcastic.

What follows has two main parts. One sets the conceptual groundwork, including most importantly the interconnectionbetween two sources of communicative intention in producing an utterance---the cognitive state of an individual and thesocial warrant of a community. The second provides empirical support for attention to them both and their interconnection,including the analysis of naturally occurring examples.

2. Conceptual groundwork

2.1. The discursive and social foundation of speaker meaning

When ‘‘intention’’ is understood as a cognitive state of individuals, the centrality of intentions in Searle’s (and Grice’s)approach seems unworkable. First, introspection will bear out research findings that people are not always conscious oftheir intentions, communicative and otherwise, and so they can hardly be expected to consistently make an active effort to‘‘get’’ hearers to recognize them (cf. the distinction between mindful and mindless conduct: see Kellerman, 1992; Langer,1992; Langer and Moldoveanu, 2000). In addition, it is not apparent from the observation of natural speech that speakerstypically add something extra to each utterance dedicated to ‘‘getting’’ hearers to recognize what they intend thepragmatic meaning of the utterance to be, or what effect they intend it to have. And third, absent any guidance from thespeaker, it does not seem possible that the hearer can reliably recognize (or infer) the speaker’s often tacit and privateintention. Most utterances do not include a discourse marker indicating what the speaker intends (e.g., an illocutionaryforce indicating device), and many times the speaker and hearer are strangers, depriving the hearer of any basis in pastexperience with the speaker to infer his or her intention from the utterance.

Perhaps as a result, the tie of an utterance’s speaker meaning to individual speakers’ actual intentions about thespeaker meaning of each utterance has been neglected in some quarters or openly rejected (Arundale, 2005; Haugh,2008b; Schegloff, 1988). Some have replaced it with attention to individuated psychological processes and cognitions thatunderlie speaking, perhaps starting with Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance theory. From those perspectives,‘‘speaker meaning’’ can be understood either as an emergent and negotiated construct and not necessarily a matter of thespeakers’ actual cognitions, or as referring just to what particular, individual speakers mean, what they have it in mind tobe talking about, and perhaps doing, in producing an utterance without concern for the hearer’s understanding. Theseindividuated cognitions and processes include the speaker’s linguistic (lexical and syntactic) and practical knowledge andexperience, habits, focus of attention, level of involvement, mindfulness, egocentrism, and so forth. (e.g., Giora, 2003;Kecskes, 2008; Keysar, 2007).

R.E. Sanders / Journal of Pragmatics 48 (2013) 112--122114

Prior to the emergence of attention to such matters, pragmatic theories tended to overlook sites of individual difference.They were thus insensitive to speakers’ and hearers’ difficulties in, and the special demands of, intercultural and cross-linguistic communication, or more broadly the consequences of asymmetries of knowledge and experience regarding thematter and persons at hand for producing meaningful utterances and understanding them. And pragmatic theories havebeen insensitive as well to the attentional and focus issues that may arise in composing and understanding utterances incomplex social environments and situations. We now know something about these psychological processes andcognitions and work on them is ongoing.

There is no doubt about the empirical and theoretical value of the work being done along these lines. But such workdisattends something vital. In order to communicate, and engage others in a common undertaking or activity, speakershave to be reliably understood as they intend, and reciprocally, hearers’ (range of) contingently relevant understandingsand responses have to be reliably foreseeable by speakers who speak for effect---as pragmatic theories in generalassume speakers do, along with centuries of rhetorical theory. Some have proposed as a solution a type of intention thatbelongs to cooperating pairs jointly undertaking something, a ‘‘we-intention’’ (Bratman, 1992; Pacherie, 2007). But settingaside whether this is a sound idea in itself, it does not solve the problem here. It shifts us away from a focus on thecommunicative intention of each speaker about the speaker meaning of his or her own utterances, something thatlogically precedes and provides the basis for their cooperation in interaction.

Instead, we must start with the premise that speakers and hearers know something in common that bridges theirindividual differences and makes speakers’ communicative intentions recognizable from the objective facts of theutterance and the context. The question is, what does that consist of and where does it come from? To get at the answer, Iwill emulate Erving Goffman’s (1967) program of going as far as possible to explain what people do and what happensbetween them in terms of the discursive and social foundations of their talk and interaction that speaker and hearer knowand orient to in common, pushing into the background for now speakers’ personal motives, individual differences andidiosyncrasies of knowledge, disposition, and processing, and the anomalies and coordination troubles these mayproduce.

Let us posit that people produce utterances only when they are enmeshed with others in some joint undertaking oractivity, where their utterances will function as discursive means to discursive and social ends within that undertaking oractivity. To be a component of some joint undertaking or activity, an utterance has to either be responsive to what haspreceded it for the purposes at hand, or functional in moving the parties forward toward one or another of the few possibleend states of their current undertaking or activity, or (most commonly) both (Sanders, 1987, 1997, 2012). This functionalvalue of an utterance guides its production by the speaker and also its interpretation by the hearer, and provides both withan impersonal basis on which utterances are linked to intentions. Speakers’ communicative intentions then become aproperty of utterances in context, not a property of individual speakers.

Without that shared, impersonal basis for tying utterances (as means to ends) to intentions (to achieve some end),there could be no communication. The most general such basis for tying utterances to intentions is arguably formalrelations among interpreted utterances that interconnect them into discursive wholes, where utterances that have beenproduced in a sequential progression constrain what utterances, with what speaker meaning, can relevantly,meaningfully, be produced next (Sanders, 1987, 1997). However, work by ethnographers (e.g., Gumperz, 1982) andethnomethodologists (Garfinkel, 1967, 2002), coupled with some pragmatic theories, especially Wittgenstein’s (1953),indicate that the speaker meaning of specific utterances arises most basically from shared knowledge of discursivemeans to discursive and social ends that is specific to a culture’s, family’s, organization’s, or profession’s or workplace’sestablished undertakings and activities---to forms of life and their language games. This includes knowledge of thedefining tasks, goals, and practices of such undertakings, as well as knowledge of types and categories of persons whoparticipate, and what they are respectively entitled or obligated to bring about just then. We can then predict, correctly, thatunderstanding troubles are more likely when speaker and hearer are natives of different communities, even if they havesome personal knowledge of each other, than when they are strangers who know nothing about each other’s individuatedcognitions and processes as long as they are natives of the same community.

For example, suppose a speaker utters the question ‘‘How are you doing?’’ whose linguistic meaning (with somelicense for its colloquial aspect) is to request to be told how the hearer is currently faring. There is a difference inunderstanding and response to this question when it is asked by an acquaintance in passing versus asked by a doctor onentering one’s hospital room. When uttered by an acquaintance, the conventional speaker meaning is to acknowledgeand greet the hearer, but not (per its linguistic meaning) to ask for information (at least, not in the U.S.). When uttered by adoctor to a patient, however, it may still have the speaker meaning of a greeting, but mainly its speaker meaning is to askfor information (coinciding with its linguistic meaning). It would be commonplace for the casual acquaintance to respondwith something like ‘‘Fine; and you?’’ but it would be odd if the patient did.

One knows the difference in the respective speaker meanings and communicative intentions of types of people whoutter ‘‘How are you doing?’’ from one context to the next without having to know anything about the private cognitions ofthose particular speakers. One only has to know the speaker’s role-identity and the discursive and social context, and of

R.E. Sanders / Journal of Pragmatics 48 (2013) 112--122 115

course the knowledge of discursive means to ends in those communities that speaker and hearer share as members. Thisis because we are dealing with the speaker meaning and communicative intention of a generic speaker, not a particularspeaker---the communicative intention of any role- and rule-following member of the community that both speaker andhearer inhabit who has that role-identity who produces that utterance just then.

Of course, this tie of speaker meaning to what a generic speaker would intend cannot just apply to conventionalizedutterances such as ‘‘How are you doing?’’ It must apply to any linguistically meaningful utterance in its social anddiscursive context. The following example illustrates that it does. Two tugboat captains were socializing on two-waymarine VHF radio as each piloted his vessel between ports. In this part of the conversation they were gossiping about athird captain they both knew. (The ‘‘#’’ symbol at the end of each turn indicates the audible electronic burp produced whenthe speaker releases the transmit button on his microphone; in line 105, it is audible that M2’s transmit button has beenpressed, but he is silent for 0.5 s before he starts laughing. This example is from Sanders, 2003, on the adaptation oflaughter to the technology in use.)

(1) Ed and Spike, Tugboat Captains

101 M2: He never remarried again, huh? # 102 M1: No:::: he was going with that eh:: (1.0) hh that retired 103 t- (0.2) third grade teacher of his but I think he put her 104 in a nursing home. # 105 M2: (0.5/open mic) eh:: heh- heh- heh- heh. (.) h- heh. (.) heh. 106 hh ((smiley voice)) ‘At sounds like a (.) good date. #

What is of interest is M1’s turn in lines 102--104. He did not just answer the question about whether their friendremarried, but appended a report about their friend’s romantic life. Given its sequential placement and its content, thisreport has the generic speaker meaning of an account, and more than that, of an account that provides a tacit assessmentof their friend’s love life. And we know that without knowing anything about M1’s actual cognitions, just the types of peopleM1 and M2 are, and the discursive and social context.

M1 reports that their friend had been ‘‘going with’’ a woman whom he conventionally implicates is elderly by the detailthat she is a retired teacher, whom he also conventionally implicates came to have disabling health issues presumablytied to her age by the detail that the relationship ended when their friend ‘‘put’’ her in a nursing home. Based on my informalexposure to it, in the East Coast, blue collar community to which these men belong, it is odd, or not ‘‘normal,’’ for a manwho is young enough to still be working to become romantically attached to an elderly and infirm woman rather thansomeone younger than himself or at least a peer. Hence, this report in this sequential place has the speaker meaning of anaccount that explains why their friend had not remarried, but more than that an account that implicates (by the details itprovides) that what stands in the way is an unconventional romantic preference. This naturally occurring report isreminiscent of one of Grice’s hypotheticals (1975:43) in which a friend’s oddity is implicated in a report: ‘‘Suppose that Aand B are talking about a mutual friend, C, who is now working in a bank. A asks B how C is getting on in his job, and Breplies, Oh quite well I think; he likes his colleagues and he hasn’t been to prison yet.’’

This brings us---or more precisely, returns us---to a concern with speaker meaning as rooted in speakers’ and hearers’shared social and discursive realities, apart from its basis in speakers’ and hearers’ private psychological realities. It‘‘returns us’’ to this because this is where pragmatics started, it is not something I am inventing for present purposes.Wittgenstein’s (1953) language games and forms of life belong to communities and institutions, not individuals. Much ofAustin’s (1962) and Searle’s (1969) writing about speech acts link speakers’ intentions to the functions of utterances inpublic or interpersonal (thus shared) social contexts, not personal, psychological ones. Grice’s (1975) maxims of theCooperative Principle are about what hearers presume the intention of any rational person would have to be, notspecifically or only that person, to produce that utterance just then to meet the conversational demand at that moment thatthe parties have co-constructed.

But it is not just a hypothetical, generic speaker whose speaker meaning is based on shared knowledge of discursivemeans to ends. A particular speaker’s actual intentions---and the utterances he or she goes on to produce---stand to beconstrained by the same shared social and discursive knowledge that constrains a generic speaker. It is for that reasonthat much work in pragmatic theory seems to take the hearer’s perspective and not the speaker’s, when in fact it is actuallytaking the perspective of both. When we are dealing with the communicative intention of a generic speaker, and theshared social and discursive knowledge on which it is founded, there is no difference between the speaker’s and hearer’sperspectives.

We can expect each particular speaker to be constrained on the same basis as a generic speaker for three reasons.One is that most speakers are actually role- and rule-following members of the same communities as their hearers, at leastmost of the time. Another reason is that for a particular speaker to form an intention regarding the meaning of an utterance,he or she must have beliefs about utterances as means to ends, and people generally grow up in a social environment

R.E. Sanders / Journal of Pragmatics 48 (2013) 112--122116

where these beliefs are modeled by and learned from others and shared. Related to this, empirically, there seems to be adearth of the communicative chaos that would result if such beliefs were idiosyncratic rather than shared. Third, it is onlyby relying on, and there actually being, shared beliefs about discursive means to ends that a particular speaker could ‘‘get’’the hearer to recognize his or her communicative intention from the utterance itself in context.

Reciprocally, hearers, in inferring what would have been intended by a generic speaker with that role-identity inproducing that utterance just then in this undertaking, have to presume that that is also, precisely, what this speaker inparticular actually did intend. Hence, we can say that the meaning a generic speaker would intend an utterance to have isthe meaning a particular speaker is held accountable for having intended, and is credited with having intended, whether ornot the speaker actually intended it.

The speaker’s intention that his or her utterance have a certain meaning therefore starts with the utterance’s discursiveand social context, not the speaker’s personal, subjective context. This claim echoes Goffman’s (1967) thesis that people(social beings with identities) do not produce the situations they are in, but rather, situations produce the people (theidentities of participating social beings) who actualize them. This is not a claim about what the psychological processesare of individual speakers in forming communicative intentions. Rather, my claim is about the logical and theoreticalprimacy of shared social and discursive knowledge and context in these psychological processes. While particularspeakers undeniably form subjectively real intentions about what their utterances will mean, they are not free to form justany intention in the moment, nor free about what utterance to produce that will recognizably fulfill that intention. Intentionsare constrained by what the speaker (and presumably the hearer) knows about discursive means to ends with that role-identity in that context. One empirical manifestation of this is the many findings by ethnographers and conversationanalysts of recurring details and practices of situated talk across speakers that each function consistently as discursivemeans to some end.

I also am not working up to a claim that an empirical and theoretical concern with particular speakers’ personalintentions is unproductive or redundant, and that our focus should be on just the shared discursive and social knowledgefrom which speakers’ intentions arise. To the contrary, what is of interest here depends precisely on the duality of speakermeaning, comprising the meaning a generic speaker would intend, and the meaning a particular speaker does intend.Despite fundamental technical differences, there is a rough correspondence of what is involved here meta-theoreticallywith Chomsky’s (1965) distinction between a theory of competence and a theory of performance. But now we are talkingabout pragmatic competence (the shared knowledge of discursive means to ends in the speaker’s and hearer’scommunity), and pragmatic performance (individuated processes, knowledge, and experience regarding the matter athand). Accordingly, it is not in question here whether speakers form intentions about the speaker meaning of theirutterance on some personal basis, or on the basis of communally shared knowledge. I regard it as a given that bothhappen. Rather, the question is how the two interconnect.

Although the speaker meanings intended by a generic and by a particular speaker are usually the same, they do nothave to be and sometimes are not. They diverge most commonly when the generic speaker meaning of an utterance fromthe perspective of the hearer (and the hearer’s community) may not be one the particular speaker intended, or standsbehind and endorses. When it is not what the particular speaker intended, the result is an understanding trouble. Morethan that, for such a thing as an understanding trouble to even exist (where the speaker and hearer understand theutterance differently), and for self- and other-repair to occur, speakers and hearers have to be able to differentiate, andcompare and contrast, what a generic speaker would intend the utterance’s speaker meaning to be, given that utterance inthat context just then, versus what the particular speaker actually (claims to have) intended.

2.2. The duality of speaker meaning

To clarify terms, I will refer to what a particular speaker actually, subjectively, intends an utterance to mean as theindividual speaker meaning based on the speaker’s personal intention, or intentionpers. And I will refer to what a genericspeaker would intend this utterance in this context to mean as the generic speaker meaning based on the speaker’sgeneric intention, or intentiongen. In these terms, we can clarify Searle’s (1969:43) statement that ‘‘I achieve the intendedeffect on the hearer by getting him to recognize my intention to achieve that effect.’’ The seeming circularity of thatstatement is resolved if we consider that he is tacitly drawing on the duality of speaker meaning. A more precise version ofthat statement would then be: the speaker achieves the intendedpers effect on the hearer by getting him or her to recognizefrom the utterance an intentiongen to achieve that effect. This restatement highlights that in general, as noted, thespeaker’s personal communicative intentionpers is to produce an utterance with the speaker meaning a generic speakerwould intendgen.

But again, it does not always happen that an utterance’s generic speaker meaning is a meaning that the particularspeaker stands behind and endorses, and we could not attend to this fact or explain it without taking the duality of speakermeaning into account. It can happen by accident or on purpose that the speaker produces an utterance whose genericspeaker meaning is not one he or she endorses or stands behind. When this happens accidentally, the speaker does not

R.E. Sanders / Journal of Pragmatics 48 (2013) 112--122 117

realize that the speaker meaning he or she intendspers the utterance to have is not what the generic speaker meaningwould be in the hearer’s community. Such accidental divergences of what the speaker intendspers and what a genericspeaker in that community would intendgen are manifested as understanding troubles. Such accidental divergences mustresult from individuated cognitive processes and cognitions---inattention, a cognitive slip, a cognitive bias or mental set, ora mismatch between the particular speaker’s knowledge about discursive means to ends and the hearer’s knowledge, asin cross-cultural and cross-linguistic interactions, expert-novice interactions, and so forth.

But what is of particular interest here is that such a divergence can be produced on purpose, where a particular speakerexploits shared knowledge of discursive means to ends with the intentionpers of producing an utterance whose genericspeaker meaning is not one he or she stands behind and endorses. This happens when speakers intendpers to bedeceptive or insincere, and they produce an utterance in such a way as to conceal that they do not endorse or standbehind the speaker meaning a generic speaker would intendgen. It also happens when speakers intendpers to be sarcasticor joking, and they produce an utterance in such a way as to reveal that they do not endorse or stand behind the speakermeaning a generic speaker would intendgen.

For example, a person may insincerely congratulate a successful rival. To say that the speaker was insincere is to saythat the particular speaker’s intentionpers was to produce an utterance that both credits him or her with the intentiongen togive social support and approval to the hearer, and also conceals his or her ill will, frustration or jealousy. Or a person mayoffer congratulations with the intentionpers of doing so sarcastically. In such cases, the utterance again credits the speakerwith the intentiongen to give the hearer social support and approval, but this time in such a way that the generic speakermeaning is undermined, revealing that the speaker does not stand behind or endorse it. This may be done by over-building the utterance’s positive assessment to create an incongruity such that the particular speaker could not be creditedwith standing behind or endorsing the utterance’s generic speaker meaning. Bringing the duality of speaker meaning intothe foreground is thus essential to making theoretical sense of empirical phenomena such as understanding troubles andrepair, deception and insincerity, and sarcasm and joking. All of these involve divergences between what a particularspeaker actually intendspers and what a generic speaker would intendgen an utterance’s meaning to be in that context. Butthere are additional theoretical benefits from bringing the duality of speaker meaning into the foreground, and with it, thedefault expectation (of analysts, speakers and hearers alike) that when speakers produce an utterance, their intentionpersand what the generic speaker would intendgen are the same.

One theoretical benefit we get from this is that the consciousness of speakers about their intentions (or lack ofconsciousness) no longer has to be an issue for pragmatic theory. In practice a speaker can always be, will always be,credited with being a role- and rule-following member of the community with an intentiongen for his or her utterance to havea certain speaker meaning even if the speaker is not conscious of intendingpers it. We also get the benefit of being able toaccount for hearers’ general success in recognizing what the generic speaker would intendgen and presumably thereforethe particular speaker’s intentionpers, from the details of the utterance, the context, and the speaker’s role-identity alone,as strangers have to do. This liberates us from being faced with the mystery of how hearers manage to discern what thespeaker actually, privately, intends. Another benefit of attending to the duality of speaker meaning is that it accounts for theobserved tendency by native speakers to form ethnocentric understandings of the intentionspers of nonnative speakers. Inthe terms here, this involves crediting the nonnative speaker with what a generic native speaker in the hearer’s communitywould intendgen who produced that utterance, overlooking that this might not be what a generic speaker in the non-native’scommunity would intendgen and therefore not the intentionpers of that particular speaker (as in Gumperz, 1982; Scollon andScollon, 1981). Such ethnocentric bias is an inevitable byproduct of each hearer’s standard practice of utilizing, andprojecting onto everyone else, the communally shared basis of speaker meaning that underlies speaking in theirrespective communities.

A fourth benefit of attending to that duality is that it accounts for the occurrence and general success of speaker initiatedself-repair, as noted. Keysar (1994, 2007) has interpreted the results of experiments he and others conducted as evidencethat speakers have an egocentric bias, where, in the terms here, speakers cannot readily detach themselves from their ownintentionspers sufficiently to assess what intentiongen their utterance credits them with from the perspective of their hearer.And yet, speakers evidently do precisely that, and actively attend to the intentiongen that the details of their utterance creditthem with, when they observably mitigate, qualify, rephrase, expand, or wholly replace their utterances in media res.

Finally, by assuming that the default expectation of analysts, speakers and hearers alike is that speakers’ actualcommunicative intentionpers are the same as a generic speaker’s intentiongen, we get the benefit of accounting for theotherwise mysterious fact that hearers are as privileged as speakers to make claims about the speaker’s privatecommunicative intentionpers. This is the basis for psychotherapy, much interpersonal conflict, and damage repair bypoliticians and other public figures whose utterances had a generic speaker meaning that credited them with acommunicative intentionpers they denied when they received negative publicity (e.g., in U.S. politics, to allude to or exploitracial or gender stereotypes). It also accounts for speakers observably having the burden of proof if they claim to haveactually had any other intentionpers about the meaning of their utterance than the intentiongen a generic speaker wouldhave had with which they were credited.

R.E. Sanders / Journal of Pragmatics 48 (2013) 112--122118

3. Empirical support

I turn now to naturally occurring data in which the duality of speaker meaning empirically manifests itself. What these datahave in common is the evident importance to the speaker of being credited with, or not being credited with, actually having thecommunicative intentionpers for the utterance to have its generic speaker meaning. If there were no duality of speakermeaning, or if the particular speaker’s meaning were necessarily always the same as the generic speaker meaning, this wouldnot be an issue, theoretically or practically. But because speakers do not necessarily stand behind or endorse the genericspeaker meaning of their utterances as they are expected to, speakers may consider at times that they have to do somethingin producing an utterance to be credited with actually intendingpers the utterance to mean what a generic speaker wouldintendgen it to mean---or avoid being so credited. We see indications of this concern in each of the examples analyzed here.

In the first example, we do not know whether the speaker is sincere and wants to be credited with that, or insincere andwants to conceal it. Either way, through the succession of utterances he produces, each arguably repairing a defect in aprior utterance, the speaker seems to make a discursive effort to be credited with actually intendingpers what a genericspeaker would intendgen the speaker meaning of his utterances to be. In the other three examples, each speaker makesan assessment sarcastically. What is of interest is that the speaker builds the utterance so as to reveal that the speakerdoes not personally stand behind or endorse the generic speaker meaning.

3.1. Self-repair to ensure being credited with intendingpers the generic speaker meaning

The first example is a telephone conversation between Gordon and Denise (from Hopper and Drummond, 1990), whereGordon tells Denise that he thinks they should stop dating each other. He goes about this, however, in a way that shows thatbreaking up is indeed hard to do, communicatively as well as emotionally. In successive turns he produces utterances that ageneric speaker would intendgen to thereby end their dating relationship, and at the same time, make known that he holdsDenise (and himself) blameless, and that his action of breaking it off with her is regretful and friendly, not hostile.

Gordon introduces the topic of their relationship in line 30 in Example (2) by telling Denise he received her card, a cardin which Denise evidently asked whether something was wrong, or reported an impression that it was. When he says inline 33 that she read him right, that ‘‘It pro’ly is some’n wrong,’’ the generic speaker meaning is to pre-announce that he hasbad news or at least to initiate relational work. Denise evidently credits Gordon with intendingpers the utterance to have thatgeneric speaker meaning, in that she responds by saying that she is going to switch phones before they continue,presumably to a more private phone, and she does so. When she and Gordon resume, he produces a second utterancewhose generic speaker meaning is also to pre-announce talk on a delicate matter, saying (lines 44--46) that he wouldrather talk to her in person but can’t get away to ‘‘a meeting’’ with her. This also conventionally implicates that what he hasto say is sufficiently important, or grave, that it calls for talk face to face, and more than that, that it is so urgent that it couldnot wait. He then delivers the bad news (lines 48--49), that he would like them to stop dating.

(2) A Lapse for Words (A32.3)

30 GOR: We:ll. I got your card. h 31 (0.2) 32 DEN: Yeah. uhhh 33 GOR: A::nd snff I guess: you prob’ly read me right. It pro’ly is some’n wrong 34 (0.5) 35 DEN: Hang on jis second okay I’m a switch phone.

((Denise switches phones and comes back on the line))

43 Den: Okay. 44 GOR: I- actually w’d rather talk to you in person but I don’t think I’m 45 gonna be able make a meeting cause I- (0.2) now have a 46 headache and- [fever and everything 47 DEN: [Yeah hh 48 GOR: hhhhhhhhh Bu:t u:m (0.6) I think maybe u- u I w- (0.2) um 49 would like tuh- stop really goin ou:t- at least for right no:w 50 DEN: Yeah.

When Gordon delivers his news in lines 48--49, his utterance has the generic speaker meaning of thereby breakingit off with Denise, and that segment of his utterance is produced relatively directly and fluently: ‘‘I w- (0.2) um would liketuh- stop really goin ou:t’’. However, he makes known that his action is regretful and friendly first by surrounding it with ahedged, dysfluent, mitigated preface that marks it as having the generic speaker meaning of a dispreferred utterance

R.E. Sanders / Journal of Pragmatics 48 (2013) 112--122 119

(Pomerantz, 1984). In addition, he expresses uncertainty about his own wants (lines 48--49: ‘‘I think. . . I w- (0.2) um wouldlike tuh- stop’’). And when he delivers the news that he would like to stop going out, he mitigates it by adding ‘‘at least forright no:w.’’ The generic speaker meanings of this dysfluency and mitigation, coupled with the generic speaker meaning ofpre-announcing that he has bad news, make it recognizable that Gordon’s communicative intentionpers is to make knownthat his action of breaking up is being done regretfully, with good will.

But evidently this is not enough. Gordon follows his announcement with a succession of turns that in one way oranother counter possible skepticism about his sincerity that he is breaking it off regretfully, with good will. The question iswhat motivated him to produce those further turns. Rather than speculate about Gordon’s feelings in that moment, or hisinsecurity about the adequacy of his utterances for the purpose at hand, we can take note of Denise’s responses. Aftereach of Gordon’s turns, Denise’s response is minimal and uninformative, mostly consisting of ‘‘Yeah.’’ These are eachsaid in a quiet and intonationally, emotionally, flat way, resembling back channel responses from their placement and oralquality. In not saying anything more than that, and saying just that in so unemotional a way, Denise’s responses have thegeneric speaker meaning of implicating (by the maxim of quantity) that she does not regard what he has said so far asenough or complete, and expects him to say something more. In that it is unmistakable that Gordon wants to stop goingout with her, the question is what else she expects---or what else Gordon infers she wants.

The possibility to which Gordon seems oriented is that Denise had not heard enough from Gordon to be willing to credithim with being sincere that his action of breaking it off with her is regretful and friendly, not hostile. Each of the successiveturns Gordon produces after he announces his desire to break off have in common that they remedy that putative defect.In that sense, each of these successive utterance then repairs a defect he found in the prior utterance that might be in theway of Denise crediting him with the generic speaker meaning he intendedpers her to.

First, whether or not he had already planned to do so, Gordon may have realized after Denise’s ‘‘Yeah’’ in line 50 that hehad not told her what was wrong, the ‘‘cause’’ of his wanting to stop going out with her. Without that she could not know if hewas breaking up with her for some negative reason, thus preventing her from crediting him with the generic speakerintentiongen to make known that he is breaking up with her regretfully, with good will. Rather than having attributed thehesitations and dysfluencies of Gordon’s announcement to his regret and good will, she could just as well have attributedthem to awkwardness and guilt about his action. And so Gordon goes on to provide an account which first makes hisemotions explicit (line 51: ‘‘I feel really ba:d’’), although this could still equally well could be an expression of guilt, not regret.However, he goes on to state the reason he feels bad, the cause of his not wanting to date her anymore in lines 52--53.

(3) A Lapse for Words (A32.3)

51 GOR: hhh U::m I jus- hhhhhh (0.5) u::h hh I feel really ba:d cause I- 52 u:m (1.0) .snff I wish- I think I just we don’t have as much in 53 common as: I think we both tho:ught hhh 54 DEN: Yeah.

In proposing that both he and Denise had been mistaken about how much they had in common, Gordon’s accountholds both of them equally responsible and equally blameless, victims of an innocent, mutual, miscalculation. It is worthnoting the self-correction in line 52 where he seems to be on his way to saying ‘‘‘‘I wish [we had more in common]’’ andreplaces it with ‘‘we don’t have as much in common as: I think we both tho:ught’’. To have said he wishes they had more incommon would not foreclose the possibility that Denise was somehow blameworthy, or at least that Denise had fallenshort in having qualities that made her attractive to Gordon. The corrected version avoids this.

However, Denise’s response to this account is again minimal (line 54: ‘‘Yeah’’). And Gordon again seems to haveregarded this as continued unwillingness to credit him with sincerely intendingpers the generic speaker meaning of hisannouncement that his wanting to break up is regretful, with good will, and holds her blameless. If so, then it seems fromhis next turn in example (4) that Gordon analyzed the problem this time as a lack of evidence to support his account thatthe problem was not having enough in common. Gordon goes on to offer evidence (line 55) that they do not have as muchin common as they both thought:

(4) A Lapse for Words (A32.3)

55 GOR: Bu:t- u:m cause I know sometimes we’re both at just a lapse for 56 words and 57 DEN: huh huh

But Denise’s uptake at line 57 again is minimal and emotionally flat (‘‘Huh huh’’). And so again Gordon cannot tellwhether she credits him at last with sincerely intendingpers the generic speaker meaning that he is breaking up with herregretfully, with good will. Perhaps for that reason, Gordon goes on to then profess his regret and his good will moreexplicitly in a succession of further utterances. He states that (line 60) ‘‘I wish I had more time-and tu:h even to get to know

R.E. Sanders / Journal of Pragmatics 48 (2013) 112--122120

you better’’; (line 63) ‘‘I’m- so busy and you’re so busy and I feel ba:d that I can’t do anything and so I’ll hhh feel bad’’; (line71) ‘‘But uh (1.2) I still wanna be in good friend with ya.’’

In short, it seems that sincerity is not easy to demonstrate and sometimes becomes the focus of communicative effortwhether the speaker is actually sincere or not. This is because speakers and hearers know that it is always possible for aspeaker to communicatively intendpers to be credited with endorsing or standing behind the generic speaker meaning ofhis or her utterances when in fact this is not the case.

3.2. Composing an utterance to not be credited with intendingpers its generic speaker meaning

Sarcasm trades on insincerity. But rather than conceal the insincerity, the speaker makes it visible that he or shepersonally does not endorse or stand behind the communally based speaker meaning of his or her own utterance, and sosubverts, and generally reverses, that speaker meaning. There are echoes here of Goffman’s (1961) concept of ‘‘roledistance’’ where an actor may take on a role but in such a way as to exhibit disdain for it or at least psychological distancefrom it at the same time. There are probably several ways vocally, gesturally, and compositionally for speakers to makevisible that they dissociate themselves from the generic speaker meaning of their own utterance. While attention has beengiven to some of these, especially vocal ways, I am not aware of efforts to inventory them all nor analyze them in terms ofwhat it is about them that exposes the speaker’s insincerity.

From data I have examined, it seems that a compositional way of dissociating oneself from the generic speakermeaning of one’s own utterance is to create incongruities in the utterance’s content. It is then presumably the speaker’scommunicative intentionpers for the utterance to have these incongruities, such that, in the spirit of Grice’s (1975) Maxim ofQuality, the hearer could not credit the speaker with personally standing behind the generic speaker meaning of theutterance. In that way the speaker reveals that he or she is insincere, and does not endorse or stand behind theutterance’s generic speaker meaning. There seem to be different ways of producing such incongruities compositionally.

One naturally occurring example comes from Example (1), the VHF radio conversation of two tugboat captains. M2comments on the news that a friend has had a romantic attachment to an elderly woman whom he moved to a nursinghome by saying ‘‘‘At sounds like a (.) good date.’’ The generic speaker meaning of the utterance is a positive assessmentof the relationship, but as noted the relationship is sufficiently nonstandard in that community, even abnormal, that aspeaker from that community would not be credited with actually standing behind or endorsing that generic speakermeaning. M2’s insincerity is underscored by his initial response of laughter to the report of this relationship, as somethinghe found to be amusing or funny, and thus not something he could actually communicatively intendpers to endorse as a‘‘good date.’’

A similar example of including incongruities in an utterance that reveals the speaker’s insincerity involves the reactionsof two listeners to a radio news item about suspects in connection with an IRA bomb attack in Manchester, England.Although I regard all three of their reactions as sarcastic, I focus on the third of these, in line 6, which relies mostly oncompositional means of displaying insincerity, more so than the other two.

(4) McCarthy and Carter (2004), p. 153, n. 5

1 radio: In the IRA bomb attack on Manchester ten days ago 2 they say two or more Irish men may have been together 3 in the Greater Manchester area. 4 P1: Oh right. 5 P2: Oh great. [Laughs] Oh bloody brilliant! 6 P1: Well that’ll narrow it down a bit won’t it!

P1’s utterance in line 6 has the generic speaker meaning of a positive assessment of what was reported, in that it refersto a desirable quality of information about a crime, that it narrows the search for those responsible. However, no speakerfrom that community would believe that the sighting of two or more Irish men seen together in Greater Manchester narrowsthe field of suspects. For a particular speaker to produce an utterance whose generic speaker meaning is at odds withwhat the particular speaker presumably believes as a member of that community reveals insincerity. In producing such anutterance, then, the particular speaker reveals a communicative intentionpers to make known that he or she does not standbehind or endorse the generic speaker meaning of the utterance, and in revealing it, produces sarcasm.

A quite different way of producing an incongruity is provided by the third example. This was produced by a studentparticipating in an experiment where participants were asked to create a text message that expressed a fictional person’sparticular thought ‘‘sarcastically.’’ The message in this case was to be the report of a dog sitter in response to the owner’squery about how things had gone in his absence. Participants were told that this dog sitter, David, was feeling frustratedbecause the dog ignored him the entire time. Many of the messages the participants produced comprised internal

R.E. Sanders / Journal of Pragmatics 48 (2013) 112--122 121

incongruities between an initial positive assessment (it was ‘‘a blast’’) followed by examples that belied it (‘‘He was SOenthusiastic just sitting there while I watched TV. He even looked at his toy after I threw it.’’). The result made the genericspeaker meaning of a positive assessment one that the actual writer would not stand behind or endorse, thus revealing theactual writer’s intentionpers to reveal his or her insincerity, and therefore sarcasm.

However, one participant produced an incongruity in quite a different way. The text message this person wrote aboutthe dog, Casey, was:

(5)

Casey has been. . . well, pleasant.

The utterance’s generic speaker meaning is a positive assessment (the dog was pleasant), but it includes twoincongruities that belie the assessment. One of these is that the assessment term is off the mark. There are a variety ofconventional descriptors of positive or desirable comportment by a pet, especially a dog, at least in my community, forexample, ‘‘playful,’’ ‘‘affectionate,’’ ‘‘well-behaved,’’ ‘‘smart,’’ ‘‘cute,’’ ‘‘energetic,’’ ‘‘fun’’ and ‘‘funny,’’ and so forth.‘‘Pleasant’’ is not one of them. To characterize a dog’s positive quality with the vague and non-standard descriptor‘‘pleasant’’ implicates (by the maxim of manner) that the writer could find no better descriptor. This implicature isunderscored by the communicator’s use of a graphic way to display a word search before producing ‘‘pleasant’’---theellipsis that conventionally mimics a vocal pause or hesitation---and also prefacing the word with ‘‘well’’ as a display ofsettling on that word as the best that came to mind. The incongruity of the assessment term as a best term for the purposereveals that the writer’s communicative intentionpers was to make known that he or she did not stand behind or endorse thegeneric speaker meaning of his or her own utterance.

4. Reprise

Even though it seems self-evident, something built into our lexicon and our intellectual truisms, that speakers’communicative intentions are purely psychological phenomena, this cannot be the case. Speakers’ communicativeintentions would then be inherently private and idiosyncratic, a product of wants and experiences and psychologicalprocesses to which few hearers have access, if any, making successful communication a rare exception and not the rule.Instead, if we want to account for the facts of everyday communication, there must also be an impersonal basis for formingand implementing communicative intentions that speakers and hearers know in common. The obvious candidate for thatis communal, shared, knowledge of discursive means to discursive and social ends by which an utterance in context islinked to a communicative intention. This is knowledge that speakers utilize to compose and produce their utterances withthe intention that they will have a certain speaker meaning, a generic speaker meaning, and on that basis, an expectationthat their utterance’s speaker meaning will be recognizable to the hearer from their having produced that utterance in thatcontext addressed to that hearer just then. And conversely, this is knowledge that hearers utilize to discern an utterance’sspeaker meaning based on the objective facts of the utterance and the context.

These two sources of speakers’ communicative intentions---the personal, psychological source and the impersonal,discursive and social source---are intertwined in practice to produce a duality of speaker meaning. The speaker meaning ofan utterance is first and most basically its generic speaker meaning, but then there is the standing issue of whether thespeaker stands behind and endorses that. In general, I believe speakers do stand behind the generic speaker meaning oftheir utterances, but it is an empirical question to what extent, probably something that varies individually, situationally, andculturally. Whatever the extent, however, it is generally normatively expected, but optional and not obligatory, that speakersstand behind the speaker meaning of their utterances. When a speaker does not stand behind the utterance’s genericspeaker meaning, it may be by accident or design. When it is an accident, then either the speaker has in some waymisspoken but has the shared knowledge to detect and repair his or her mistake, or the speaker is a non-native in the presentcontext (linguistically, culturally, practically, and/or experientially) and does not share the communal knowledge on which thehearer and others rely who are native to that context or acculturated in it. In such cases, the result is an understanding trouble.

When the speaker deliberately produces an utterance whose generic speaker meaning he or she does not stand behindand endorse, he or she is exploiting shared communal knowledge to be credited with a certain communicative intention thathe or she does not actually have. When the speaker is deceptive or insincere, this is done in a way to conceal that he or shedoes not stand behind the generic speaker meaning. When the speaker is sarcastic or joking, it is done in a way to reveal thathe or she does not stand behind the generic speaker meaning, and to implicate a different speaker meaning.

We find empirical evidence of the duality of speaker meaning in a variety of phenomena that could not occur without it. Thisincludes the occurrence and detection of understanding troubles, self-initiated self-repair, the hearer being just as privilegedas the speaker to make a claim about the speaker’s communicative intention, and again, the social reality of deception,insincerity, sarcasm and joking. These phenomena indicate something that Hofstadter (1979) made clear in regard toartificial intelligence, and that Chomsky (1965) made clear in his distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic

R.E. Sanders / Journal of Pragmatics 48 (2013) 112--122122

performance. An intelligent (and for our purposes a communicating) being must have a basis for standing outside his or herown mental operations regarding the matter at hand, and assessing, self-regulating, and repairing the result, or building on it.The claim here is that this applies to speaker meaning and pragmatic theory as well. The individuated cognitive processesinvolved in speaking and understanding language in context must operate on something that is functionally external andindependent of them besides a grammar. Hymes (1964) suggested that this is ‘‘speaking rules’’ that his later work (Hymes,1974) indicates are specific to peoples and their speech events. The proposal here is that this is something whose applicationis more open-ended and subject to creativity, the shared knowledge of formal and conventional links between discursivemeans and ends that tie utterances to communicative intentions and to speaker meaning.

References

Arundale, R.B., 2005. Pragmatics, conversational implicature and conversation. In: Fitch, K.L., Sanders, R.E. (Eds.), Handbook of Language andSocial Interaction. Erlbaum Assoc, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 41--63.

Austin, J., 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press, New York.Bratman, M.E., 1992. Shared cooperative activity. The Philosophical Review 101 (2), 327--341.Chomsky, N., 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.Garfinkel, H., 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.Garfinkel, H., 2002. In: Rawls, A.W. (Ed.), Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,

Lanham, MD.Giora, R., 2003. On Our Mind: Salience, Context and Figurative Language. Oxford University Press, New York.Goffman, E., 1961. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Bobbs-Merrill, Oxford, England.Goffman, E., 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behavior. Anchor Books, New York.Grice, H.P., 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 66, 377--388.Grice, H.P., 1975. Logic and conversation. In: Cole, P., Morgan, J.L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. Academic Press, New York,

pp. 41--58.Gumperz, J., 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Haugh, M., 2008a. Intention in pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics 5 (2), 99--110.Haugh, M. (Ed.), 2008b. Intention in pragmatics (Special issue of Intercultural Pragmatics, vol. 5, 2). Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin.Haugh, M., Jaszczolt, K.M., 2012. Speaker intentions and intentionality. In: Allan, K., Jacszczolt, K.M. (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of

Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 87--112.Hofstadter, D.R., 1979. Gödel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Basic Books, New York.Hopper, R., Drummond, K., 1990. Emergent goals at a relational turning point: the case of Gordon and Denise. Journal of Language and Social

Psychology 9 (1--2), 39--65.Hymes, D., 1964. Formal discussion. In: Bellugi, U., Brown, R. (Eds.), The Acquisition of Language, vol. 29, 1 (serial no. 92) University of Chicago

Press, Chicago, pp. 110--112.Hymes, D., 1974. Foundations of Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.Kecskes, I., 2008. Dueling contexts: a dynamic model of meaning. Journal of Pragmatics 40 (3), 385--406.Kellerman, K., 1992. Communication: inherently strategic and primarily automatic. Communication Monographs 59 (3), 288--300.Keysar, B., 1994. The illusory transparency of intention: linguistic perspective taking in text. Cognitive Psychology 26, 165--208.Keysar, B., 2007. Communication and miscommunication: the role of egocentric processes. Intercultural Pragmatics 4 (1), 71--84.Langer, E., 1992. Interpersonal mindlessness and language. Communication Monographs 59 (2), 324--327.Langer, E.J., Moldoveanu, M., 2000. The construct of mindfulness. Journal of Social Issues 56 (1), 1--9.McCarthy, M., Carter, R., 2004. ‘‘There’s millions of them’’: hyperbole in everyday conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 36 (2), 149--184.Pacherie, E., 2007. Is collective intentionality really primitive? In: Penco, C., Beaney, M., Vignolo, M. (Eds.), Explaining the Mental: Naturalist and

Non-naturalist Approaches to Mental Acts and Processes. Cambridge Scholars Press, Newcastle, UK, pp. 153--175.Pomerantz, A., 1984. Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In: Atkinson, J.M.,

Heritage, J. (Eds.), Structures of Social Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 57--101.Sanders, R.E., 1987. Cognitive Foundations of Calculated Speech: Controlling Understandings in Conversation and Persuasion. SUNY Press,

Albany, NY.Sanders, R.E., 1997. The production of symbolic objects as components of larger wholes. In: Greene, J.O. (Ed.), Message Production: Advances

in Communication Theory. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 245--277.Sanders, R.E., 2003. Conversational socializing on marine VHF radio: adapting laughter and other practices to the technology in use. In: Glenn,

P., LeBaron, C., Mandelbaum, J. (Eds.), Studies in Language and Social Interaction. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 309--326.Sanders, R.E., 2012. Strategy and creativity in dialogue. In: Lorda, C.-U., Zabalbeascoa, P. (Eds.), Spaces of Polyphony. John Benjamins,

Amsterdam, pp. 11--24.Schegloff, E.A., 1988. Presequences and indirection: applying speech act theory to ordinary conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 12, 55--62.Scollon, R., Scollon, S.B.K., 1981. Narrative, Literacy and Face in Interethnic Communication. Ablex, Norwood, NJ.Searle, J.R., 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press, London.Sperber, D., Wilson, D., 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.Wittgenstein, L., 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell, Oxford.

Robert E. Sanders is author of Cognitive Foundations of Calculated Speech, co-editor of Handbook of Language and Social Interaction, andeditor from 1988 to 1998 of Research on Language and Social Interaction. His published work is about the social influence people exert on eachother by discursive means through the strategic management of interactional constraints on what each can relevantly say next.