Volume 15, Issue 5 -

Dominant accounts of “speaker meaning” in post-Gricean contextualist pragmatics tend to focus on single utterances, making the theoretical assumption that the object of pragmatic analysis is restricted to cases where speakers and hearers agree on utterance meanings, leaving instances of misunderstandings out of their scope. However, we know that divergences in understandings between interlocutors do often arise, and that when they do, speakers can engage in a local process of meaning negotiation. In this paper, we take insights from interactional pragmatics to offer an empirically informed view on speaker meaning that incorporates both speakers’ and hearers’ perspectives, alongside a formalization of how to model speaker meanings in such a way that we can account for both understandings – the canonical cases – and misunderstandings, but critically, also the process of interactionally negotiating meanings between interlocutors. We highlight that utterance-level theories of meaning provide only a partial representation of speaker meaning as it is understood in interaction, and show that inferences about a given utterance at any given time are formally connected to prior and future inferences of participants. Our proposed model thus provides a more fine-grained account of how speakers converge on speaker meanings in real time, showing how such meanings are often subject to a joint endeavor of complex inferential work.

What is intended by the communicator and what is recovered by the addressee could be inconsistent, even if the informative intention is recognized. To account for misunderstandings in emotive communication, an extended relevance theory is proposed by including the analysis of “emotive effects” and “affective intention”. The extended relevance theory allows for analyzing the production of emotive misunderstandings. The influences of interlocutors’ egocentrism on the expression and recognition of affective intention are also presented.

This article argues for frequent targeted teaching of relational language use or (im)politeness in the L2 classroom. The approach presented here draws on authentic data in the target language and in the language of instruction, which are readily available online. It encourages the learner to make use of their multilingual resources and is exploratory in nature, allowing for a deep engagement with (im)politeness, viz., an extensive array of semiotic features invested in the co-construction of social relations in every social interaction. Working at the interface of (im)politeness studies, intercultural pragmatics, interlanguage pragmatics, and language pedagogy, and undertaken from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics and relational work, the qualitative analysis focuses on the collaborative work products from participatory learning activities of intermediate to advanced learners of German at a large North-American university. Results show the learners’ raised awareness and broadened knowledge. In particular, learners became aware that what is judged as (im)polite is dependent on the relationship of the interactants, the gender of the interactants, the sociocultural background, norms, values, and believes of the interactants, the context of the interaction, the affiliations of the evaluator, the sociocultural background, norms, values, and believes of the evaluator, etc. Results also suggest that some of the learners need to develop their pragmalinguistic skills further to fully participate in the evaluation of pragmatically rich target language discourse. Additional studies are needed to explore the impact on the learners’ interactional competence.

Back in the early 1990s, Gu Yueguo formulated the Politeness Principle and its maxims to explain Chinese politeness phenomena, as a counter reaction to Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, which claims that politeness is a universal phenomenon in language usage. Despite the fact that Gu’s illustration of politeness phenomena in Chinese has attracted considerable attention from pragmaticians, this paper points out that there are at least three major issues in his study: failure to provide a generalized high-level definition of politeness, improper construction of some of the maxims, and inadequate adoption of Leech’s theoretical framework for analysis of Chinese data. With the increasing call for culture-specific research on im/politeness, it is of great necessity to rethink these issues regarding Chinese politeness phenomena. Therefore, this paper attempts to reconstruct the Politeness Principle in Chinese by reexamining and clarifying Gu’s approach. It argues that politeness can be defined as appropriate behavior in social interaction. Based on this definition, the Politeness Principle and four maxims of Modesty, Respectfulness, Friendliness, and Refinement are coherently reconstructed in a clarified and refined form. The reconstruction demonstrates that polite behavior in Chinese is exhibited in an appropriate or acceptable way in accordance with these maxims as social norms or regularities.