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In:Patterns of Context: Modelling cultural and contextual influence in utterance interpretation
Edited by Elke Diedrichsen and Frank Liedtke
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 356] 2026
► pp. 100–122

Choosing words and using templates

 | University of Leipzig
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
When choosing words to communicate, one customarily relies heavily on sources which are provided by the context. These sources permit the construction of parsimonious utterances that are structured in such a way that they provide exactly the information that the context does not supply. The notion of a pragmatic template is introduced to capture this systematic relationship between utterance and context. A pragmatic template is considered as a basic or minimal unit of communication, being conceived as a holistic structure consisting of pairs of an utterance type and a situation type. In contrast to widespread notions of unarticulated constituents, it is not assumed that contextual sources are extensions of the respective utterance.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Unarticulated constituents and Austinian propositions
  • 3.Two types of information
  • 4.Speech acts, knowledge, and information
  • 5.The structure of a pragmatic template
  • 6.How pragmatic templates work
  • 7.Emergence and ad hoc templates
  • 8.Summary and outlook
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
References (42)
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