Volume 5, Issue 2

This paper is a critical examination of the theory of self-expression developed by Green (2007), adjudicating some of the principal differences between it and the theory I have developed (e.g., in Davis 2003). Green seeks to show how self-expression is related to the fundamental linguistic notions of speaker meaning, assertion, and implicature, and how self-expression enables others to know our minds. Green defines self-expression in terms of showing, and speaker meaning in terms of reflexively intending to show. I agree that self-expression does sometimes show what our mental state is, but deny that self-expression entails showing. I argue that speaker expression as well as speaker meaning depends on intention, but deny that reflexive intentions are involved. The central intention in both is providing an indication of ones mental state. Mitchell Green has developed a highly original and illuminating theory of self-expression. He is motivated by the laudable conviction that understanding self-expression is an integral part of understanding who we are, and the key to understanding a wide variety of disparate phenomena. He therefore seeks a theory that shows how self-expression is related to the fundamental linguistic notions of speaker meaning, assertion, and implicature, and how self-expression enables others to know our minds. He proposes to define self-expression in terms of showing, and speaker meaning in terms of reflexively intending to show. I have developed a theory that accords with Green's in many respects, from general orientation to specific details. I will here focus on adjudicating some of the principal differences. I agree that self-expression does sometimes show what our mental state is, but deny that self-expression entails showing. I argue that speaker expression as well as speaker meaning depends on intention, but deny that reflexive intentions are involved. The central intention in both is providing an indication of ones mental state.

A much discussed feature of Grice's (1957) account of intentional communication is the line he drew between showing and meaning NN , where meaning NN typically involves a linguistic convention or code. This distinction has had substantial effects on the development of pragmatics: pragmatists have focused on the notion of meaning NN and abstracted away from cases of showing. This paper explores the central differences between Gricean meaning NN intentions and relevance theory intentions. Firstly, relevance theory does not attempt to draw the line Grice drew, and recognizes both showing and meaning NN as instances of overt intentional or ostensive-inferential communication. Rather than there being a sharp cut-off point between the two notions, there is a continuum of cases in between. Secondly, in contrast to the kind of intention proposed by Grice, the relevance-theoretic informative intention is not characterized as an intention to modify the hearer's thoughts directly–“to produce a particular response r.” This intention, it is argued, is not always reducible to an intention to communicate simply a single proposition and propositional attitude (or even a small set). This second move sheds new light on how better to analyze some of the weaker, vaguer aspects of communication, including the communication of impressions, emotions, attitudes, feelings and sensations.

Language use and communication cannot be equated entirely, since verbal communication is not the only form of language use. There are several other kinds of language use including the use of language to inform, think, memorize, learn, take notes, play, sing for fun or in psycholinguistic experiments, as has been exemplified and argued for in some grammatical and pragmatics traditions. The present paper attempts to characterize a non-communicative form of language use, namely, informative language use. First, with the help of re-analyses of various example types previously analyzed from different perspectives in the pragmatics literature, the paper illustrates the real, independent existence of informative language use. Second, relying on these re-analyses of examples, and also applying a definition of ostensive-inferential communication, informative language use and communicative language use are distinguished. Third, the paper characterizes informative language use in detail and demonstrates what similarities and differences informative versus communicative forms of language use have. The conclusion of the research presented here is, on the one hand, that people's verbal behavior cannot be evaluated independently of their intentions, and, on the other hand, that utterances in a verbal interaction should be analyzed individually, and relying on the speakers' intentions that can be identified only by considering various linguistic and non-linguistic factors. For example, one and the same utterance can be treated as a manifestation of communicative language use toward an addressee and at the same time, as a manifestation of informative language use toward another person. It should also be emphasized that making a distinction between the informative and communicative forms of language use, first, has indisputable advantages in explaining the phenomena in language use, and second, results in a more comprehensive modeling of pragmatic competence.

The relationship between intentions and actions is approached as a topic in and for the social practices of talk-in-interaction. The idea that actions may be based on prior intentional states, and have intended consequences, is considered not as a feature of actions themselves, but as a practical concern in how actions are reported. The article starts with examples from mundane conversation, in which overt mention of intentions is tied to circumstances in which the intended actions are in some way balked, unfulfilled, or a departure from expectation. The study then focuses on the special cultural setting of police interrogations, where vernacular descriptions of actions are oriented to the status of those actions as possible instances of some category of crime as defined in English law. The role of intentionality (in legal terms, mens rea ) is an essential feature of this activity. In contrast to everyday conversation, the intentionality of criminal actions requires no “balked action” relevance for its topicalization but, rather, arises as part of the systematic practices of establishing intent regarding an action's effects, relevantly to legal requirements of criminal evidence for the alleged offense.

The standard model of communication in linguistic pragmatics is founded on the assumption that “successful” communication involves the addressee making inferences about the intentions of the speaker. Miscommunication of implicatures thus presumably arises when the addressee does not correctly infer the speaker's intention. In this paper, however, it is argued that this view of the (mis)communication of implicatures does not adequately account for the manner in which intentions may become the subject of discursive dispute in interaction thereby giving rise to diverging interpretings of implicatures. Drawing from an analysis of the “uncovered meat” comments made by Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali and the ensuing controversy over what was implied by them, it is argued that to label such an incident as simply a misunderstanding of the speaker's intentions is misleading. Instead, it is suggested that the way in which Hilali's comments were shifted from a specific audience in the Muslim community to wider Australian society by the media engendered discursive dispute over Hilali's intentions, and thus gave rise to the co-constitution of diverging interpretings of what was implied by Hilali. Building a model of the communication of implicatures must therefore move beyond the received view that it involves “correctly” inferring the intentions of speakers to encompass a broader view where both converging and diverging interpretings of implicatures emerge through their conjoint co-constitution in interaction.

Human communication has long been explained as a speaker's encoding of meanings using linguistic forms, and a hearer's decoding those forms to recover the speaker's meanings. Contemporary theorists in language pragmatics reject this encoding/decoding model as descriptively inadequate. Drawing on Grice's philosophical analysis, they argue instead that communication occurs when the hearer recognizes the speaker's meaning-intention. I argue that intention recognition explanations are likewise descriptively inadequate because they are framed within the same conceptualization of communication as encoding/decoding models. Drawing on a model of communication grounded in empirical research on ordinary conversation, I develop an alternative to the view that intentions and intention recognition lie at the heart of human interaction.