Pragmatic acts in interaction

The form of pragmatic acts depends not only on whatever prior plan or agenda the speaker may have in mind, but, crucially, on the responses of the other participant(s) and the broader activity or event in which they occur. This has three important consequences. First, the development of pragmatic acts is inevitably incremental and thus fundamentally sequential in nature, a point we have previously made in relation to pragmatic meanings (see an attempt to bring together speech act theory and conversational analysis). Second, pragmatic acts are jointly constructed through the efforts of not just the speaker but also the recipient(s), sometimes termed co-construction. Third, the ways in which pragmatic acts arise is constrained by (but also in itself constitutive of) the broader activity types in which they are framed.