Interaction-based conceptualisations of context are based on the premise of indexicality of communicative action, relating an exclusively product-oriented conception of context-as-given to an inherently dynamic process of contextualisation which is interdependent on a conversational contribution and its surroundings. Within this framework, the pragmatics of meaning-making processes in discourse is examined, focussing not only on the interpretation and processing of linguistic contributions, but also on their production in context. Expanding the concept of meaning potential to a discourse-pragmatic frame of reference, the chapter argues for supplementing the interpretation-based processes of contextualisation, re- and decontextualisation with production-based entextualisation of discursive meaning. The argument put forward is illustrated with meaning-making processes in mediated political discourse.
It is widely assumed that in communicative interactions, participants formulate utterances based on a backdrop of shared knowledge, including information provided by the situation of interaction. This view clashes with the reality of the individual mindsets, and the notion of egocentrism that has been found to be a significant factor in everyday interaction. Taking into account that approaches to a shared situation may differ and need to be converged, I will argue in this chapter that the interactive situation is an achievement of the ongoing interaction itself, and it is therefore emergent common ground. This is demonstrated by analyses of two original interactions from digital media, where situations are established independently of shared circumstances, from previous knowledge and available affordances.
Is it possible to account for the deep intersubjectivity (“ultra-sociality”) that is special to humans, in terms of the cognitive-individual notion of goal schemas? I provide a (partially) affirmative answer to this question, through an analysis of Grice’s Cooperative Principle based on that notion. On the one hand, goal schemas have a conceptual-predicative structure that is key to understanding pragmatic inferences, but also phenomena such as the embedding of utterances in activity types, and short-circuiting of implicatures. On the other hand, by incorporating affective evaluations, goal schemas may account for the social-cultural systems of motivations that shape individual subjects — well beyond the “motivation to share” that enable joint actions.
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.
It is argued that the situation, taken within a pragmatic perspective, is an essential component within a model of utterance interpretation with a clear role in binding together relevant aspects of context and common ground. The function of a situation is to provide us with the means to relate a subset of context and common ground to the resolution of underdetermined components of the speech act, and the construction of what is meant meaning from language-in-use. Consequently, a speech act needs to be interpreted via a given situation, along with context and common ground. An advantage of employing a situation in the analysis of a speech act is that it relates the input utterance through to the output of speech act meaning.
A number of contextual variables have been argued to influence whether a quantity implicature is available, including the speaker’s knowledge state, the relevance of the stronger alternative, and whether the speaker is wholly cooperative. In real-life contexts, however, the hearer may not know the status of these variables. Most strikingly, it may be unclear whether the speaker is attempting to present information selectively in order to advance an argumentative agenda. In this chapter, I use these ideas to motivate a model of conversational implicature in terms of joint inference, with the hearer aiming to establish a probabilistic view not only about the world state but also about the other relevant contextual features.
Cognitive schemas, scripts, or frames — chunks of information that are frequently used and are therefore highly accessible and easily retrieved — are often appealed to by theories of utterance comprehension to explain conventional patterns of inferences. In this chapter I show that schemas are employed not just to integrate context with the utterance, but are also needed to infer context-specific interpretations of the individual words or phrases within the overall sentence. I further argue that there is no stable meaning encoded by linguistic expressions but that, instead, the cognitive schemas invoked by utterances are required for the hearer to recover what is explicitly communicated (or ‘what is said’), and show how this supports a contextualist approach over a semantic minimalist one.
This chapter unfolds the notion of the inferential significance of ascription and attribution (of intentionality) as an analytical concept derived from some crucial remarks of Robert B. Brandom’s normative pragmatism. Significance (not to be confused with meaning) is considered as an associative potential for effecting interpreting inferences related to situated assigning elements. It is regarded as the associative potential of actual utterances, based on associatively linked verbs of social actions and interactions in a broader sense — at this stage, independent of standard classifications of speech act verbs. These verbs of social action and interaction can be functionally analysed as connectors between further discursive units in texts or interactions, potentially realising what we refer to as pragmatic patterns. Such pragmatic patterns can be described as semiosis-based heuristics that explain others’ actions as normative and socially communicative (cf. Section 3). For instance, if the observed linguistic behaviour between two people is interpreted and described as a dispute, the intentionality attributed to individuals remains vague. However, continuous descriptions that attribute intentionality to individual actions during the argument should fall within a range of inferential plausibility — from probable to incompatible.
This study focuses on German body-reflexive Instagram posts as contextualising stance patterns, thus focusing on multimodal texts of everyday digital life used to construe and negotiate (female) bodies. The study pays particular attention to the potential of these texts to create sociocultural contexts, always under digital conditions. The context concept, as developed by Fetzer in numerous studies, as well as works on (discourse) common ground serve as a theoretical basis. At the same time, an urgent desideratum of internet linguistics is addressed: the largely missing diachronic perspective. By comparing two Instagram corpora from 2013 to 2016 and 2020 to 2023, we not only gain insights into digital stance patterns as utterance-context pairings but can also observe how contexts change.
Messages about occupancy restrictions appear in contexts that essentially present the same situational features. However, at a different level, these situations are either normal or rigid, or unusual in some respect. Taking this into account, we define these situations as related. Messages referring to these situations display the same core information in terms of semantic schemes. However, the specific expressions used vary according to whether the sender perceives the situation as normal and predictable or not. The sender can then choose between two discourse genres: technical or non-technical. In this study, we demonstrate this adaptable message-situation pairing through the analysis of occupancy restriction messages in lifts and Parisian cafés during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The contribution explores the role of complex viewpoint networks in utterance interpretation. In a single utterance multiple viewpoints are invoked. Therefore, several viewpoints and the relation between them have to be considered in the process of interpretation. I apply the framework to analyse two constructions used in German online discourse: (un)popular opinion and XAdj reminder, showing how their use invokes stable viewpoint networks. The analysis demonstrates that viewpoints different than the subjective one are accessed on the basis of contextual cues incorporating social and cultural contexts such as knowledge shared by the members of a discourse community. Correspondingly, multiple viewpoints conveyed allow to draw on knowledge from context and common ground adding to the global interpretation of the utterance. This serves as evidence for treating multiple viewpoints in an utterance as an addition to modelling utterance-context-pairings.
Interaction-based conceptualisations of context are based on the premise of indexicality of communicative action, relating an exclusively product-oriented conception of context-as-given to an inherently dynamic process of contextualisation which is interdependent on a conversational contribution and its surroundings. Within this framework, the pragmatics of meaning-making processes in discourse is examined, focussing not only on the interpretation and processing of linguistic contributions, but also on their production in context. Expanding the concept of meaning potential to a discourse-pragmatic frame of reference, the chapter argues for supplementing the interpretation-based processes of contextualisation, re- and decontextualisation with production-based entextualisation of discursive meaning. The argument put forward is illustrated with meaning-making processes in mediated political discourse.
It is widely assumed that in communicative interactions, participants formulate utterances based on a backdrop of shared knowledge, including information provided by the situation of interaction. This view clashes with the reality of the individual mindsets, and the notion of egocentrism that has been found to be a significant factor in everyday interaction. Taking into account that approaches to a shared situation may differ and need to be converged, I will argue in this chapter that the interactive situation is an achievement of the ongoing interaction itself, and it is therefore emergent common ground. This is demonstrated by analyses of two original interactions from digital media, where situations are established independently of shared circumstances, from previous knowledge and available affordances.
Is it possible to account for the deep intersubjectivity (“ultra-sociality”) that is special to humans, in terms of the cognitive-individual notion of goal schemas? I provide a (partially) affirmative answer to this question, through an analysis of Grice’s Cooperative Principle based on that notion. On the one hand, goal schemas have a conceptual-predicative structure that is key to understanding pragmatic inferences, but also phenomena such as the embedding of utterances in activity types, and short-circuiting of implicatures. On the other hand, by incorporating affective evaluations, goal schemas may account for the social-cultural systems of motivations that shape individual subjects — well beyond the “motivation to share” that enable joint actions.
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.
It is argued that the situation, taken within a pragmatic perspective, is an essential component within a model of utterance interpretation with a clear role in binding together relevant aspects of context and common ground. The function of a situation is to provide us with the means to relate a subset of context and common ground to the resolution of underdetermined components of the speech act, and the construction of what is meant meaning from language-in-use. Consequently, a speech act needs to be interpreted via a given situation, along with context and common ground. An advantage of employing a situation in the analysis of a speech act is that it relates the input utterance through to the output of speech act meaning.
A number of contextual variables have been argued to influence whether a quantity implicature is available, including the speaker’s knowledge state, the relevance of the stronger alternative, and whether the speaker is wholly cooperative. In real-life contexts, however, the hearer may not know the status of these variables. Most strikingly, it may be unclear whether the speaker is attempting to present information selectively in order to advance an argumentative agenda. In this chapter, I use these ideas to motivate a model of conversational implicature in terms of joint inference, with the hearer aiming to establish a probabilistic view not only about the world state but also about the other relevant contextual features.
Cognitive schemas, scripts, or frames — chunks of information that are frequently used and are therefore highly accessible and easily retrieved — are often appealed to by theories of utterance comprehension to explain conventional patterns of inferences. In this chapter I show that schemas are employed not just to integrate context with the utterance, but are also needed to infer context-specific interpretations of the individual words or phrases within the overall sentence. I further argue that there is no stable meaning encoded by linguistic expressions but that, instead, the cognitive schemas invoked by utterances are required for the hearer to recover what is explicitly communicated (or ‘what is said’), and show how this supports a contextualist approach over a semantic minimalist one.
This chapter unfolds the notion of the inferential significance of ascription and attribution (of intentionality) as an analytical concept derived from some crucial remarks of Robert B. Brandom’s normative pragmatism. Significance (not to be confused with meaning) is considered as an associative potential for effecting interpreting inferences related to situated assigning elements. It is regarded as the associative potential of actual utterances, based on associatively linked verbs of social actions and interactions in a broader sense — at this stage, independent of standard classifications of speech act verbs. These verbs of social action and interaction can be functionally analysed as connectors between further discursive units in texts or interactions, potentially realising what we refer to as pragmatic patterns. Such pragmatic patterns can be described as semiosis-based heuristics that explain others’ actions as normative and socially communicative (cf. Section 3). For instance, if the observed linguistic behaviour between two people is interpreted and described as a dispute, the intentionality attributed to individuals remains vague. However, continuous descriptions that attribute intentionality to individual actions during the argument should fall within a range of inferential plausibility — from probable to incompatible.
This study focuses on German body-reflexive Instagram posts as contextualising stance patterns, thus focusing on multimodal texts of everyday digital life used to construe and negotiate (female) bodies. The study pays particular attention to the potential of these texts to create sociocultural contexts, always under digital conditions. The context concept, as developed by Fetzer in numerous studies, as well as works on (discourse) common ground serve as a theoretical basis. At the same time, an urgent desideratum of internet linguistics is addressed: the largely missing diachronic perspective. By comparing two Instagram corpora from 2013 to 2016 and 2020 to 2023, we not only gain insights into digital stance patterns as utterance-context pairings but can also observe how contexts change.
Messages about occupancy restrictions appear in contexts that essentially present the same situational features. However, at a different level, these situations are either normal or rigid, or unusual in some respect. Taking this into account, we define these situations as related. Messages referring to these situations display the same core information in terms of semantic schemes. However, the specific expressions used vary according to whether the sender perceives the situation as normal and predictable or not. The sender can then choose between two discourse genres: technical or non-technical. In this study, we demonstrate this adaptable message-situation pairing through the analysis of occupancy restriction messages in lifts and Parisian cafés during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The contribution explores the role of complex viewpoint networks in utterance interpretation. In a single utterance multiple viewpoints are invoked. Therefore, several viewpoints and the relation between them have to be considered in the process of interpretation. I apply the framework to analyse two constructions used in German online discourse: (un)popular opinion and XAdj reminder, showing how their use invokes stable viewpoint networks. The analysis demonstrates that viewpoints different than the subjective one are accessed on the basis of contextual cues incorporating social and cultural contexts such as knowledge shared by the members of a discourse community. Correspondingly, multiple viewpoints conveyed allow to draw on knowledge from context and common ground adding to the global interpretation of the utterance. This serves as evidence for treating multiple viewpoints in an utterance as an addition to modelling utterance-context-pairings.