Discourse processing

The question of how users understand pragmatic meaning can also be approached from the perspective of the emergent notion of Verständigung (“coming to an understanding”). Consider, for instance, how in the following recording of a conversation between two friends, they reach a converging understanding over a number of turns that Charlie won’t be able to give a ride to Ilene, despite having previously promised to do so:

Charlie outlines potential trouble for their forthcoming trip to Syracuse when he reports that Karen is going away (lines 1–7), and so he doesn’t have anywhere to stay (line 11). This is taken by Ilene as indicating that Charlie won’t be able to go up to Syracuse, an understanding that is evident from her formulation of the upshot of his reporting (line 13), and subsequently confirmed by Charlie (line 14). Note, however, that Charlie has managed to indicate to Karen that he won’t be able to give her a ride without having said as such, and, more importantly, that this joint understanding only emerges over a number of turns of talk.

In the above example we can see that the interpretation of utterances and turns by the two participants proceeds in an incremental fashion, and is dependent on what precedes and follows in sequence. Work on understanding pragmatic meaning from a discourse perspective thus focuses on the incremental and sequential intertwining of two or more participation footings. Incrementality refers to the processing of elements or components of pragmatic meaning within the same utterance or turn, while sequentiality refers to the processing of meaning across different speaker turns. Utterer and recipient representations of speaker meaning (as well as recipient meaning) become intertwined through participants incrementally interpreting utterances and displaying those understandings in sequences. The question of whose meaning is at issue, which we have discussed, thus proves critical to any discourse-based account of how users understand pragmatic meaning.

The importance of incrementality in understanding meaning can be seen from the way in which users can use emerging syntax to project future talk, for instance. Consider the following excerpt from a recording of a conversation between Dianne and Claica, who are talking about a pie Jeff made.

Dianne and Claica manage to accomplish simultaneously a positive assessment of Jeff’s pie, namely, that they both think it was delicious. In order for Claica to chime in at the right time she must have been able to anticipate what Dianne was meaning here. One resource Claica likely drew from here, alongside the non-verbal cues, is the emerging syntax, where the intensifier “s::so:” occurs in a construction through which Dianne is obviously about to attribute something to the pie (by means of the referring expression “it”). The occurrence of an intensifier in an attribution syntactic construction primes an understanding of Dianne’s utterance not only as an assessment (what Dianne does with her utterance), but also that this assessment is going to be a positive one (what Dianne means by her utterance).

The incremental and sequential nature of discourse processing is also clearly illustrated through the phenomenon of co-construction, where more than one participant contributes to the uttering of a single syntactic unit (either what is said or what is implicated). Take, for instance, the following excerpt from a conversation in the British National Corpus between an older married couple talking about fuchsias:

Here, in response to Nina indicating through the hesitation token erm that she is struggling to find the right word (line 3), Clarence completes the clause begun by Nina in the next turn (line 4). Nina then further expands upon the previously co-constructed utterance with the addition of which I’m glad (line 5). In this way, these two speakers can be seen to be co-constructing a single, complex syntactic unit through both completion and expansion of the prior speaker’s utterance.

It can be argued from a discourse-processing perspective, then, that

[m]eaning lies not with the speaker nor the addressee nor the utterance alone as many philosophical arguments have considered, but rather with the interactional past, current, and projected next moment (Schegloff et al. 1996: 40).

Such a perspective should not be taken to entail, however, that speakers are not generally held accountable for what they are taken to mean (a point to which we will return). Even in situations where utterances are co-constructed, the speaker who initiated the utterance (first speaker) nevertheless generally displays “ownership” of such meanings after the second speaker has “completed” the utterance, either through expressing agreement or disagreement with that utterance, or by repairing the co-constructed utterance (Haugh 2010; Lerner 2004). What a speaker is taken to have meant by participants, as opposed to how participants come to such understandings, are two distinct questions.