Speaker - hearer


Speaker: says/explicates, implies
Hearer: implicates, interprets
What is implied in the following utterances?
A. - Hey, get me another beer, will you?
- No way, dude! Get it yourself!
B. - Do you like that guy over there?
- Well, I would not go to Hawaii with him.
C. - Thank you for your kindness.
- You bet.
D. - What on earth has happened to that roast beef?
- Well, the dog looks happy.
Context
Please read the following expressions and then write down the
meaning that first comes into your mind, or give the situation in
which you would use it:
Help yourself.
Give me a hand.
Bless you.
Hot stuff.
Come on.
Give me a break.
Be my guest.

What do you think about this quote?







When a diplomat says yes, he means ‘perhaps’;
When he says perhaps, he means ‘no’;
When he says no, he is not a diplomat.
When a lady says no, she means ‘perhaps’;
When she says perhaps, she means ‘yes’;
When she says yes, she is not a lady.
Voltaire
Socio-cognitive approach (SCA)


Interlocutors are considered social beings
searching for meaning with individual
minds embedded in a socio-cultural
collectivity.
SCA takes into account both the societal
and individual factors including
cooperation and egocentrism that are not
antagonistic phenomena in interaction.
Cooperation and egocentrism
Human beings are just as egocentric (as
individuals) as cooperative (as social beings).
“Egocentrism” in the SCA refers to attentionbias that is the result of prior experience of
individuals. It means that interlocutors activate
and bring up the most salient information to the
needed attentional level in the construction (by
the speaker) and comprehension (by the
hearer) of the communication.
The term “socio-cognitive”



Integrated cognitive and social properties of
systems, processes, functions, and models.
Human functioning is the product of a
dynamic interplay of personal, behavioral,
and environmental influences.
How people interpret the results of their own
behavior informs and alters their
environments and the personal factors they
possess which, in turn, inform and alter
subsequent behavior (Bandura 1986).
Positivist vs. social constructivist


Positivist: research focuses on procedural measures
rather than interpretive perspectives. It is usually
assumed that stored knowledge provides templates
for thinking as well as acting. Meaning is embedded
in words and symbols rather than in the mind that
perceives them.
Social constructivist perspective holds that
knowledge and meaning are socially constructed.
Knowledge and practice






The difference is between words and texts whose
meaning lies in the objective things they refer to,
versus words and texts whose meaning lies in the
practices they are used in.
NNS1 (Thai female), NS1 (American female)
NNS1:
°I love sports.°
NS1:
What sports do you love?
NNS1:
I love football: (0.5) op- in here we call
soccer.
NS1:
↑Oh okay.
Collective knowledge








exists but it is interpreted, “privatized”
(subjectivized) differently by each
individual (Kecskes 2008).
Son:
- I met someone today.
Mother: - Good. Oh, you got the broccolini? Thank you.
Son:
- She is a woman.
Mother: - You did not have to tackle her too, did you?
Son:
- She is a police officer.
Mother: - Are you in trouble?
Son:
- I don’t think so.
While the positivists put more emphasis on the
individual, social constructivists focus on the collective


How does all that individuation get
integrated and leveled out in the
collective?
How is the collective acquired,
preserved, and passed on by
individuals?
Differences between current
pragmatic theories and SCA

Features of SCA
1) Cooperation and egocentrism are
not conflicting

, such that the a priori mental state
supporting intention and common
ground versus the post factum
emergence of intention and common
ground may converge to a body of
integrated background knowledge for
the interlocutors to rely on in pursuit of
a relatively smooth communication.
Example (Movie: “Angel Eyes”)







Situation: A policewoman in uniform is driving the car, and the
man sitting beside her is starring at her.
PW: - What?
M: - I was trying to picture you without your
clothes on.
PW: - Excuse me?
M: - Oh no, I did not mean like that. I am trying
to picture you without your uniform.
PW: - Okaay?
M: - I mean, on your day off, you know, in
regular clothes.
2) Speaker meaning as important as
hearer implicature

No “impoverished” speaker meaning in
SCA. The speaker utterance is a full
proposition with pragmatic features reflecting
the speaker’s intention and preferences and
expressing the speaker’s commitment and
egocentrism (in the cognitive sense). The
proposition expressed is “underspecified”
only from the hearer’s perspective but not
from the speaker’s perspective.
Example


- How is John doing at his job at the
bank?
- Oh, quite well. He likes his colleagues
and he has not been sent to prison yet.
3) Communication is characterized by the interplay of
two sets of traits that are inseparable, mutually
supportive, and interactive:
Individual traits:
Social traits:
prior experience
actual situational experience
salience
relevance
egocentrism
cooperation
attention
intention
Interaction between traits

Individual traits (prior experience
salience egocentrism attention)
interact with societal traits (actual
situational experience relevance
cooperation intention). Each trait is
the consequence of the other.
Operation

Prior experience results in salience
which leads to egocentrism that drives
attention. Intention is a cooperationdirected practice that is governed by
relevance which (partly) depends on
actual situational experience.
Privatalization


Communication is the result of the interplay of
intention and attention motivated by socio-cultural
background that is privatized individually by
interlocutors.
Privatalization (making something private,
subjectivize something), a process through which the
individual blends his prior experience with the actual
situational (current) experience, and makes an
individual understanding of collective experience.
Example







Son:
- I met someone today.
Mother: - Good. Oh, you got the broccolini? Thank you.
Son:
- She is a woman.
Mother: - You did not have to tackle her too, did you?
Son:
- She is a police officer.
Mother: - Are you in trouble?
Son:
- I don’t think so.
Intention in SCA



Intention is considered a dynamically changing
phenomenon that is the main organizing force with
attention in the communicative process.
Intention is not only private, individual, pre-planned
and a precursor to action; it is also emergent and
social.
Not dichotomy: rather, a priori intention and
emergent intention are two sides of the same
phenomenon that may receive different emphasis at
different points in the communicative process.
Emergent intention
John: Want to talk about your trip?
Peter: I don’t know. If you have questions…
John: OK, but you should tell me…
Peter: Wait, you want to hear about Irene?
John: Well, what about her?
Peter: She is fine. She has…well…put on some
weight, though.
Attention motivated by salience



As a semiotic notion, salience refers to
the relative importance or prominence
of signs.
The most probable out of all possible.
In SCA prior experience results in
salience that leads to egocentrism that
drives attention.
Graded Salience Hypothesis



Salient information is superior to less salient
information and often (Giora 2003: 15), though not
always, to unstored information, such as novel
information or information inferable from context
(see Giora 2003:10–11).
Salient meanings of lexical units (e.g., conventional,
frequent, familiar, or prototypical meanings) are
processed automatically, irrespective of contextual
information and strength of bias.
Gay, cool, patronize, penitrate
Canceling highly salient meaning:
sexual connotation
In one of his films (“Survivors”) Robin
Williams says the following:
- I had to sleep with the dogs.
Platonically, of course…”

Difference between GSH and SCA
1)
2)
3)
Since interlocutors both produce and interpret
language their linguistic behavior is affected by
salience both in production and comprehension.
GSH emphasizes the importance of stored
information, while SCA considers salience to be both
a stored (inherent salience and collective salience)
and an emergent entity (actual situational salience).
Salience is language and culture specific.