Negotiating What Is Said in the Face of Miscommunication

Elder, Chi-Hé ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3702-5397 (2019) Negotiating What Is Said in the Face of Miscommunication. In: Philosophical Insights into Pragmatics. Philosophical Analysis . De Gruyter, pp. 105-126. ISBN 9783110628937

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Abstract

In post-Gricean pragmatics, communication is said to be successful when a hearer recovers a speaker’s intended message. On this assumption, proposals for ‘what is said’ – the semantic, propositional meaning of a speaker’s utterance – are typically centred around the content the speaker aimed to communicate. However, these proposals tend not to account for the fact that speakers can be deliberately vague leaving no clear proposition to be recovered, or that a speaker can accept a hearer’s misconstrual even though the speaker didn’t intend it. In such cases, identifying ‘what is said’ is more contentious, even though communication is arguably no less successful. Building on recent interactionist approaches to meaning, this chapter offers a proposal for ‘what is said’ that can account for cases of ‘imperfect’ communication in which the recovery of a speaker’s intention goes awry. This involves taking ‘what is said’ as the co-constructed meaning that the speaker and hearer jointly agree on, giving ‘grounded meanings’ – those mutually and manifestly accepted into the discourse by speaker and hearer – higher precedence in a theory of communication than simply the speaker’s intended meaning. In such cases, rather than speaker and hearer converging at the level of explicit utterance content, communication is expected to be successful just in case the hearer recovers a proposition which is compatible with the speaker’s higher-order discursive goal. The hearer’s uptake is then allowed to override the content of the speaker’s intended meaning in the process of negotiating ‘what is said’.

Item Type:	Book Section
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies (former - to 2024)
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Language and Communication Studies
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	13 Jul 2018 12:30
Last Modified:	24 Sep 2024 08:08
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/67623
DOI:	10.1515/9783110628937-006

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