what is speech event in pragmatics

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Spoken english: speech event.

Lecture notes

Course: Spoken English

Lecturer: Keith Richards

Topic: The Speech Event

These notes are extracts only and do not include the arguments developed in the lectures. Neither do they include handouts or workshop activities. They are an additional resource designed primarily for those who attended the relevant lectures.

Important note

The subject of these notes is the speech event rather than the ethnography of communication, which is the broader field of which it is a part. My choice has been determined partly by considerations of time and practicality but also by a consideration of the place that the speech event plays in the ethnography of communication. It is generally accepted as the central concept and in my view represents the best introduction to the field. Duranti sums up the situation succinctly:

For many researchers, the speech event still represents a level of analysis that has the advantage of preserving information about the social system as a whole while at the same time allowing the researcher to get into details of the personal acts

Duranti 1988:219

In view of this, I strongly advise you to follow up the lecture and workshop by reading either Saville-Troike’s excellent brief introduction to the broader field in the McKay collection (1996) or her earlier book (1989) dedicated to the subject. Alternatively, or in addition, you could read Keating (2001).

Review and introduction

In the first week we looked at aspects of communicative competence at the broadest level. This week we’ll move on to attempt to identify appropriate models for describing specific instances of language in use. Just by way of a general reminder and as an indication of the task ahead, here is one attempt to capture the range of relevant components:

Components of communication

1 Linguistic knowledge

(a) Verbal elements

(b) Nonverbal elements

(c) Patterns of possible variants (in all elements and their organization)

(e) Meanings of variants in particular situations

2 Interaction skills

(a) Perception of salient features in communicative situations

(b) Selection and interpretation of forms appropriate to specific situations, roles, and relationships (rules for the use of speech)

(c) Discourse organization and processes

(d) Norms of interaction and interpretation

(e) Strategies for achieving goals

3 Cultural knowledge

(a) Social structure

(b) Values and attitudes

(c) Cognitive maps/schemata

(d) Enculturation processes (transmission of knowledge and skills)

(Saville-Troike 1989: 24)

If we listen to the way people speak, it soon becomes apparent that there are certain activities where interaction seems to be organised in recognisable ways, with rules about what can and cannot be said. We know, for example, that there are accepted ways of issuing and accepting invitations, of making a toast, of making introductions, and so on. This is what lies behind the idea of a speech event, the subject of this week’s sessions.

Speech events in everyday talk

In fact, we use terms which refer to speech events all the time, and these carry a useful semantic load; for example, each of the following utterances refers to a specific speech events. Decide what the relevant interactional rules are:

‘I was late for her lecture .’

‘We had a wonderful chat .’

‘Did you hear the announcement? ’

Sometimes we take for granted that others know the relevant rules and therefore leave them unstated. If I say, W didn’t have much of a conversation — all he wanted to talk about was his model soldiers,’ I take it as understood that topics of conversation are normally negotiated by participants and that as a result they usually cover different subjects.

The interesting thing about speech events is that they bring together social and linguistic aspects, as Hymes noted:

A general theory of the interaction of language and social life must encompass the multiple relations between linguistic means and social meaning. The relations within a particular community or personal repertoire are an empirical problem, calling for a mode of description that is jointly ethnographic and linguistic.

Hymes 1986:39

Towards a definition

Various definitions of speech events have been offered, and the following discussion is based on those taken from core texts. We begin with three that, taken together, provide a reasonable overview:

The basic unit for the analysis of verbal interaction in speech communities is the speech event ... The speech event is to the analysis of verbal interaction what the sentence is to grammar. When compared with the sentence it represents an extension in size of the basic analytical unit from single utterances to stretches of utterances, as well as a shift in focus from emphasis on text to emphasis on interaction. Speech event analysis focuses on the exchange between speakers

Gumperz 1986: 16-17

At the level of ethnographic description, verbal behavior in all societies can be categorized in terms of speech events: units of verbal behavior bounded in time and space. Events vary in the degree to which they are isolable. They range from ritual situations where behavior is largely predetermined to casual everyday talk. Yet all verbal behavior is governed by social norms specifying participant roles, rights and duties vis-?-vis each other, permissible topics, appropriate ways of speaking and ways of introducing information. Such norms are context and network specific, so that the psycholinguistic notion of individuals relying on their own personal knowledge of the world to make sense of talk in context is an oversimplification which does not account for the very real interactive constraints that govern everyday verbal behavior.

Gumperz 1982: 164-5

A single event is defined by a unified set of components throughout, beginning with the same general purpose of communication, the same general topic, and involving the same participants, generally using the same language variety, maintaining the same tone or key and the same rules for interaction, in the same setting.

Saville-Troike 1989: 27

Gumperz’s comment on the way in which social norms govern verbal behaviour is particularly important, since this is the relationship upon which the concept is based. It is also the reason why the analysis of speech events has played such a central role in the ethnography of communication. Notice, too, his emphasis on the interactive nature of such events within what is a very wide range, from the entirely predictable (ritual) to the more or less open (casual talk). Valuable as these insights are, however, when we look for a definition of the speech event, Gumperz is able to offer nothing more specific than, ‘units of verbal behavior bounded in time and space.’ Taken with the proviso that such events may not be isolable, this leaves the issue of definition pretty much in the air. For a more positive formulation we need to turn to Saville-Troike, whose repetition of the term ‘same’ makes her definition nothing if not consistent. Even so, working from this definition alone, I’m not sure that it would be easy to provide examples of speech events.

Duranti’s comments are worth noting because of their reminder that speech is central to so many of the social activities we engage in, to the extent that some are actually constituted through talk:

The basic assumption of a speech-event analysis of language use is that an understanding of the form and content of everyday talk in its various manifestations implies an understanding of the social activities in which speaking takes place ... Such activities, however, are not simply ‘accompanied’ by verbal interaction they are also shaped by it: there are many ways, that is, in which speech has a role in the constitution of a social event. The most obvious cases are perhaps gossip sessions and telephone conversations, neither of which could take place if talk were not exchanged. But even the most physically oriented activities such as sport events or hunting expeditions rely heavily on verbal communication for the participants' successful coordination around some common task.

Duranti 1988: 218.

Although it does not mention this issue, one of the questions this raises is that of definition because while some of the activities we engage in are very easy to label and to describe, others are more problematic. The same might be said of speech events.

I’ve chosen the following because I found it amusing when I first read it and because it raises the interesting question of how precise our labels need to be. It could just be categorised as ‘small talk’, but in this case it’s clear that certain extra rules are in play that apply to talking to royalty, so I suppose we might characterise it as ‘making small talk with the reigning monarch’. Try to work out the rules yourself and compare your conclusions with mine.

01 Q: Have you been riding today, Mr Greville?

02 G: No, Madam, I have not.

03 Q: It was a fine day.

04 G: Yes, Ma’am, a very fine day.

05 Q: It was rather cold though.

06 G: ( Like Polonius ) It was rather cold, Madam.

07 Q: Your sister, Lady Francis Egerton, rides, I think, does she not?

08 G: She does ride sometimes, Madam.

09 ( A pause, when I took the lead, though adhering to the same

10 same topic .)

11 G: Has your Majesty been riding to-day?

12 Q: ( With animation ) Oh, yes, a very long ride.

13 G: Has your Majesty got a nice horse?

14 Q: Oh, a very nice horse.

Brett, S. (ed). 1987. The Faber Book of Diaries . London: Faber & Faber.

One way of checking the rules you’ve identified is to find an example where they’re broken and see what the interactional consequences of this are. The following is just such a case, and you might like to see which of the rules you’ve identified are being violated here.

The exchange in question took place in 1960s in England and involved a very popular comedian, Tommy Cooper. Traditionally, the monarch would attend a number of ‘important’ national events, including the Royal Variety Performance and, a few weeks later, the (football) Cup Final. At the end of the former, stars of the show would line up to meet the Queen, having first been informed of the relevant interactional rules (identical to those which applied in the above exchange). Upon being told by the Queen that she had found him very funny, Cooper asked her whether she had really found him funny and, receiving a positive reply, sought further confirmation, to the noticeable discomfort of her attendants and others in the party. At this point, the conversation developed along these lines:

Cooper: May I ask your majesty a personal question?

(Awkward silence)

Queen: (Frostily) So far as I may allow.

Cooper: Do you enjoy football, ma’am?

Queen: No, as a matter of fact I don’t.

Cooper: Well in that case can I have your Cup Final tickets?

(General laughter)

Goffman (1974) has described such behaviour in terms of ‘frames’, which answer the question ‘What is happening here’ and represent the way in which we structure our experience. In the example above Tommy Cooper is ‘breaking frame’. The awkward silence here and the frosty reception are significant both socially and as part of the setting up of the punchline, but the joke has already been prepared for in the earlier establishment of Cooper’s role as a ‘funny man’. We can see a contrast between his behaviour here and that of Greville, whose tortuous efforts to keep to the rules make the earlier example so amusing. It seems to me that the rules in the Queen Victoria example (which don’t seem to have changed) are pretty straightforward: let the Queen take the lead unless a pause in the conversation indicates that a switch is permissible, but make sure you keep to the same topic — and whatever happens, don’t disagree. Tommy Cooper not only takes the lead but selects his own topic (and marks this as a ‘personal’ one).

The SPEAKING model

This is the best known model for analysing speech events. Hymes, who developed it, referred to it as an etic grid and explained the need for such descriptive apparatus as follows:

Even the ethnographies that we have, though almost never focused on speaking, show us that communities differ significantly in ways of speaking, in patterns of repertoire and switching, in the roles and meanings of speech ... Since there is no systematic understanding of the ways in which communities differ in these respects, and of the deeper relationships such differences may disclose, we have it to create. We need taxonomies of speaking, and descriptions adequate to support and test them

Hymes (1986:42-43)

S ituation 3 Setting

P articipants 5 Speaker, or sender

6 Addressor

7 Hearer, or receiver, or audience

8 Addressee

E nds 9 Purposes — outcomes

10 Purposes — goals

A ct sequence 1 Message form

2 Message content

K ey 11 Key

I nstrumentalities 12 Channels

13 Forms of speech

N orms 14 Norms of interaction

15 Norms of interpretation

G enres 16 Genres

The order here is based on the acronym, but numbers refer to the order in which these components are introduced in Hymes (1986).

Speech event components

One of the things which has always impressed me about Hymes’ SPEAKING model is the subtlety of the distinctions within it: the beauty of the description lies in the divisions within each of the main components. The following comments highlight the main points I made in the lecture:

Hymes’ distinction between setting and scene is an important one. Setting refers to the physical context in which the interaction takes place and may influence the sort of talk that is allowable (e.g. religious building vs bar or caf?). Scene is also part of the situation but its locus is psychological rather than physical. Hymes points out that the same physical setting might be the location for different psychological scenes. Within the same setting participants may move from formal to informal, festive to serious etc.

Participants

The distinctions here are along the same lines as Goffman’s ‘production format’ involving the ‘animator’, who produces talk, the ‘author’, who creates talk, and the ‘principal’, who is responsible for talk. The first distinction is between speaker (or sender ) and addressor . The former is responsible for the message while the latter is the person who physically delivers it. Normally these are the same, but not always. For example, when in the United States the presidential spokesperson delivers an unpalatable message, nobody points the finger of blame towards the deliverer: it is the President who must bear the brunt of any backlash. The second distinction, which parallels the first, is that between the hearer (or receiver , or audience ) and the addressee . The receiver of ‘Now do this in pairs’ in a coursebook may be the students but the main addressee is the teacher.

The distinction which Hymes draws here between outcomes and goals is perhaps less easy to pin down in practice. Outcomes refers to what is conventionally expected or publicly stated as the object of the event from the point of view of the community, whereas the reference to goals recognises that the parties involved may have purposes which are related but not identical to this. Hymes is careful to point out that, for both outcomes and goals, we must be careful to distinguish what is conventionally recognised from what is purely personal or situational.

Act sequence

This refers to the sequence of acts which makes up a speech event. Hymes draws a distinction between message form and message content offering an example of this distinction in terms of ‘He prayed saying “....”’ (where the words appearing between double quotation marks represent the form) and ‘He prayed that he would get well’ which reports the content only. Presumably the difference between the two could be much greater. For example, the message form, ‘Have you seen the time?’ would, in the right context, have a message content which would be represented as, ‘He said it was time they were going.’ This seems to be essentially the same as the locutionary form and illocutionary force distinction originally made by Austin and a key distinction in Speech Act Theory.

The term is used in its conventional sense, to refer to ‘the tone manner, or spirit in which an act is done’ (Hymes 1986:62).

Instrumentalities

These are, again, conventional. Channel is used in the conventional sense, so it would be important, for example, to distinguish face-to-face communication from talk on the telephone. Forms of speech Hymes identifies as language and dialect, codes, and varieties and registers. It is interesting to note that Saville-Troike includes non-verbal elements under message form, which is surely legitimate. But to represent these (e.g. 1989:166; 169; 173) in general terms as ‘kinesics’ or ‘proxemics’ or ‘eye gaze’ is less acceptable, even when specific examples are provided in the analysis itself. Research in the area of non-verbal communication has demonstrated conclusively that it is an important feature of all face-to-face communication, and detailed studies (e.g. Goodwin 1981 on gaze direction) have revealed that its role is a subtle and complex one. The dilemma for speech event analysis is that this aspect cannot be ignored but there is simply not the space to do it full justice. Selection of ‘relevant’ non-verbal features is therefore inevitably, to some extent, arbitrary.

The two components under this head are particularly important, and many cross-cultural comparisons tend to focus on these areas. Norms of interaction refer to the conventional rules relating to the conduct of the speech event. These will include rules about floor holding, turn-taking, delivery, topic etc. Norms of interpretation are also of crucial importance in speech events and in cross-cultural interaction generally. These refer to the rules which determine the interpretation of particular acts. A failure to understand relevant norms of interpretation was responsible for some very expensive mistakes when the US first engaged in large scale business negotiations in Japan.

The final element is genre, which is not necessarily an element at all. This is not Hymes’ stated position, and he explicitly argues (1986:65) that genres can be invoked within specific events, as when the ‘sermon’ is invoked for humorous purposes within another event. However, it seems to me that this is a special case, and that unless a genre is exploited in this way, it is more likely to be a super-ordinate descriptive category. This is, in fact, how Hymes himself uses it, as the genre (‘Scoring’) within which certain events (shaman’s retribution, girl’s puberty rite, testing of children) are located (1986:67-68).

The model in Perspective

‘The spirit of the model is heuristic, that is, it is designed as an aid to noticing, formulating and organizing materials, and it is designed so as to become itself an object of data- and experience-based critique.’

Philipsen, G. & Coutu, M. 2005. The ethnography of speaking. In K. L. Fitch & R. E. Sanders (eds.), Handbook of Language and Social Interaction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Pages 355-379. (Page 365)

Basic elements

A number of other writers have developed similar models, all very similar. There’s no need to explore these in depth, but it’s worth noting that the common elements seem to be the first three in Hymes’ list (situation, participants and ends), so you could say these are the core elements, though as far as I know nobody has actually claimed that.

To see how these elements might work when it comes to interpreting an utterance, try working out the purpose (ends) of the following utterance, given the situation and the setting:

Do you know where today’s paper is?

1. Participants: colleague → colleague

Setting: Senior Common Room.

2. Participants: master → servant

Setting: breakfast table

3. Participants: husband → wife

Setting: living room

You should have found the first two very straightforward, but the last one is more problematic, as we saw in the first week:

Husband: Do you know where today’s paper is?

Wife: I’ll get it for you.

Husband: That’s OK Just tell me where it is. I’ll get it.

Wife: No, I’LL get it.

(Gumperz 1982: 135)

This is not an issue we need to explore, but it does serve as a reminder of the points I covered in the first week about the many dimensions of spoken language, which means that it often resists a priori categorisation. As we’ll see next week, this is a position that conversation analysis takes up.

Situation and Event

So far I’ve concentrated on the defining characteristics of the speech event, but the event itself is part of a hierarchy of descriptive terms used by those in the field. Hymes himself offers a fairly extensive list of ‘social units’, but I’ll like to concentrate on the three main elements. Two of these, situation and event, seem to me to be fairly unproblematic, but the speech ‘act’ does throw up a number of problems. For the purpose of discussion we’ll use a slightly adapted example from Saville-Troike (1989:28-29):

SITUATIONS: Party

Religious service

EVENTS: Call to worship

Reading of scriptures

Announcements

Benediction

ACTS: Summons

Supplication

Closing formula

In this example, the element in italics is carried on to the next level, where it is broken down, so that the situation religious service is represented by the list of events, and from these prayer is chosen as the element to be broken down into acts.

The distinction between (speech/communicative) situation and (speech) event is a straightforward one. The term situation here is used in its conventional sense to stand for the general social context in which communication occurs. A situation is not defined by speaking, although speaking may normally be expected to occur within it. So, for example, speaking would be expected to occur at a party (although it is just about possible to imagine a party where the loudness of the music makes speaking ‘at’ the party impossible), but there will also be other activities, such as dancing, where speaking may not feature. A speech event, however, is defined in terms of speaking, at least in the sense of being governed by the norms relating to this:

The term speech event will be restricted to activities, or aspects of activities, that are directly governed by rules or norms for the use of speech.

Hymes 1986:56

So within the speech situation ‘religious service’, prayer may be a speech event. Obviously, there are forms of prayer which do not involve speech, but the focus here is on ‘spoken’ or ‘public’ prayer. For obvious reasons, Saville-Troike has chosen a clear cut example, and I’ve followed her, but this is not to say that speech events are always so easy to identify, and, as Gumperz notes (1982:164), they may not be easy to isolate. It may also be possible to find one event embedded within another (e.g. an announcement within a lecture) and they may be discontinuous (the lecture may be briefly interrupted as other business is transacted). They can also range from single utterances (‘Fire!’) to extended sequences (e.g. a lecture).

Gumperz’s observation (1982:164) that speech events can range from ritual situations to casual talk seems particularly relevant to TESOL, where coursebooks seem to be to be guilty all too often of ignoring this continuum. We often find them treating as ritual — and therefore subject to precise specification — what properly belongs to the more open end of the range.

Despite these minor reservations, the concept of the speech event is reasonably well-defined, and as an analytical unit it has proved its worth. However, the status of ‘speech act’ is much more problematic. In the end, I think we probably have to accept that the concept of an ‘act’ in EC is far from clear, but it does represent a unit of description below the level of the event. For this reason it seems safest, and perhaps most sensible, to think of acts as part of an ‘act sequence’, which is what Saville-Troike does in her book (e.g. 1989:163). In this way attention is drawn to the fact that they are essentially descriptive units. Having said this, I’d now like to point to what is problematic about the concept, starting with Hymes’ own acknowledgement of the difficulty of labelling acts:

The labelling of the acts is unavoidably somewhat arbitrary.

Hymes 1986:68

The most serious problem associated with the speech act is that its status is by no means clear. Saville-Troike (1996:371) says that it is ‘generally coterminous with a single interactional function, such as a referential statement, a request, or a command, and may be either verbal or nonverbal.’ The problem with this is that the idea of a single interactional function is pretty vague, and ‘generally’ coterminous allows plenty of space for alternatives. The situation isn’t helped by the fact that Hymes states that a joke can be a speech act within a conversation:

The term speech event will be restricted to activities, or aspects of activities, that are directly governed by rules or norms for the use of speech. An event may consist of a single speech act, but will often comprise several. Just as an occurrence of a noun may at the same time be the whole of a noun phrase and the whole of a sentence (e.g. ‘Fire!’), so a speech act may be the whole of a speech event, and of a speech situation (say, a rite consisting of a single prayer, itself a single invocation). More often, however, one will find a difference in magnitude: a party (speech situation), a conversation during the party (speech event), a joke within the conversation (speech act). It is of speech events and speech acts that one writes formal rules for their occurrence and characteristics. Notice that the same type of speech act may recur in different types of speech event, and the same type of speech event in different contexts of situation. Thus, a joke (speech act) may be embedded in a private conversation, a lecture, a formal introduction. A private conversation may occur in the context of a party, a memorial service, a pause in changing sides in a tennis match.

Hymes 1977: 52

I have to admit that I’m not at all comfortable with the idea that a joke is a speech act because jokes can be very extended affairs. There’s also the disturbing possibility that a speech event (e.g. an announcement) might find itself embedded, albeit artificially, within a speech act (it’s easy to imagine it featuring as part of a joke, for example). This is why I feel that the much looser term ‘act sequence’ is useful, since it recognises — perfectly reasonably, it seems to me — that events can sometimes be broken up into a sequence of acts (‘phases’ or ‘stages’ might serve just as well to capture this idea). The precise status of such elements then does not need to be spelt out.

There is another problem with the use of the term ‘speech act’ which arises from its better known use within a related but distinct field. Speech Act Theory developed from the work of the philosopher, Austin, who recognised that certain utterances are used to do more than convey information. He demonstrated that they also perform particular acts. Subsequently, a great deal of work in pragmatics centred on the analysis of such ‘speech acts’, which are always specific utterances. Such work is related indirectly to the concerns of the ethnography of communication, but its treatment of isolated examples, often invented, marks it as coming from a different tradition. Duranti summarises the essential differences between the two fields:

What usually distinguishes the ethnographic approach from pragmatic analysis is a stronger concern for the socio-cultural context of the use of language, with the specific relationship between language and local systems of knowledge and social order, and a lesser commitment to the relevance of logical notation to the strategic use of speech in social interaction.

Duranti 1988:213

Where two traditions use exactly the same term for a central concept, the potential for confusion is considerable, and its not helped when the key figures in each tradition (Austin and Hymes) choose examples which could easily be interchanged. This seems to provide a very good reason for referring to an ‘act sequence’ or following Saville-Troike in using the term ‘communicative act’.

Acts and events

While there is potential for confusion in the use of the term ‘speech act’, it’s also true to say that the connection between event and act is an intimate one. The best way of illustrating this is to ask you to match the following ‘acts’ to the events in which they might occur:

‘Five past ten — is that the time!’

‘It is five minutes past ten, Mr James.’

‘It is 10.05.’

Announcement

The first thing to notice in these examples is that the form of the utterance is different in each case. It would be very odd, for example, to find someone in a conversation giving the time as 10.05. Perhaps more importantly in view of the issue of acts and their function, it seems clear that a knowledge of the relevant speech event enables us to identify quite clearly the ‘message content’ of these utterances (what Speech Act Theory would call their ‘illocutionary force’). In the first case we know that lectures begin and end at specified times, that the speaker and audience are expected to remain in situ throughout, and that the lecturer is expected, within reasonable limits, to keep to the subject of the lecture. So when Mr James arrives five minutes late and the lecturer reminds him of the time, we know that this is not part of the lecture as such but is an aside which serves as an admonition. In the case of the announcement, which is designed to present information, a bare statement of the precise time achieves the necessary communicative end.

The relationships in the examples are therefore as follows:

Lecture: “It is five minutes past ten, Mr James.”

Chat: “Five past ten — is that the time!”

Announcement: “It is 10.05.”

The ‘chat’ example is perhaps a little more subtle than the others because conversation is the least predictable (in terms of content at least) of all events. However, we know that conversations have to open and close, and if we reflect we will realise that sometimes speakers signal that a conversation has to come to an end (using ‘pre-closers’). In this case the speaker expresses surprise — even alarm — about the time, and from what we know of conversations we can safely assume that it announces that something needs to be done which will either interrupt or end the conversation.

There is, then, a relationship between the interpretation of specific acts within a speech event and the event itself as a representation of shared understandings of the relevant social context; and whatever the shortcomings of the notion of ‘act’ as Hymes represents it, these shouldn’t blind us to the fact that his etic grid offers is a subtle and insightful representation of the components which make up a speech event.

In fact, I think it’s well worth making an effort to get to grips with this concept and with the use of etic grids, but I’m less convinced by some of the more general claims of the ethnography of communication. If you’d like to pursue this (and this very much depends on where your particular interests lie), you’ll need to read Saville-Troike’s 1996 paper in the light of my suggestions in the next section.

Issues in the ethnography of communication

If you’re interested in exploring this field further, Saville-Troike (1996) makes a very good starting point. You might like to read this, noting the following:

• any apparent contradictions in the statements the author makes;
• definitions or descriptions which seem to you to be vague or very general in scope;
• proposals which seem to you to be optimistic;
• any other problems.

You might also consider how much of what she says here is relevant to TESOL as opposed to TESL or first language teaching.

If you’re interested in my own thoughts on the subject, these can be accessed at:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/celte/staff/richards_k/se2lecturenotesrichards_k/issuesinec/

Duranti, A. 1988. Ethnography of speaking: towards a linguistics of praxis. In F. Newmeyer (ed), The Cambridge Linguistic Survey, Part IV, pp.210-28 . Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gumperz, J. 1982. Discourse Strategies . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gumperz, J. 1986. Introduction. In Gumperz & Hymes (eds), pp.1-25.

Gumperz, J. J. and Hymes, D. (eds). 1986. Directions in Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hymes, D. 1977. Foundations in Sociolinguistics. London: Tavistock.

Hymes, D. 1986. Models of the interaction of language and social life. In Gumperz. and Hymes (eds), pp.35-71.

Keating, E. 2001. The ethnography of communication. In P. Atkinson, A, Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland and L. Lofland (eds), Handbook of Ethnography , pp.285-301. London: Sage.

Saville-Troike, M. 1989 The Ethnography of Communication (Second Edition). Oxford: Blackwell.

Saville-Troike, M. 1996. The ethnography of communication. In S.L. McKay (ed), Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching, pp.351-80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

I suggest that you approach this in the following way:

1. Read Labov’s treatment of the subject, either in his book or in the extract reprinted in Joworski and Coupland.

2. Read my brief notes below to check that you have identified the essential elements.

3. Study my analysis of the ‘James Bond’ story.

4. Study the ‘Students as villains’ story and identify any interesting elements in it. Compare your findings with mine in my 1999 paper.

If you plan to write your assignment on this topic, you should explore the papers that appear in the Reading section below (Thornbury & Slade includes a useful chapter). You could also search the Journal of Pragmatics to see whether there have been any studies of narrative in your own language.

Some definitions

We define narrative as one method of recapitulating past experience by matching

a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it is inferred)

actually occurred. Labov 1999: 225

• A minimal narrative is a sequence of two narrative clauses that are temporally ordered.
• A narrative clause is confined by temporal juncture. This means that if the order is changed the inferred temporal sequence is changed.
• A free clause is not confined by any temporal juncture.

Here is an example from Labov 1977/1999. Identify the narrative clauses then check your answer against Labov’s analysis:

a. I know a boy named Harry.

b. Another boy threw a bottle at him right in the head

c. and he had to get seven stitches.

Labov 1999: 227

Story Structure

Labov describes the elements in narratives, then sums these up in terms of the questions to which they respond:  

Abstract What was this about?

Orientation Who, when, what, where?

Complicating Action Then what happened?

Evaluation So what?

Result What finally happened?

Note that the coda is a signal that the narrative has finished and therefore does not respond to a question. Labov says that if you ask the question, ‘And then what happened?’ after a coda, the only possible response is, ‘Nothing; I just told you what happened.’

Types of Story

Narrative As above

Anecdote Notable event and reaction

(resolution not expected)

Exemplum Told to make a moral point

(typically incident and interpretation)

Recount Essentially expository

(record of events)

(Thornbury and Slade 2006: 152-158)

Here is the story on the handout (but note that the alignment on this webpage version is less accurate than on the original):

All of the following are available from Warwick library:

Jefferson, G. 1978. Sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation. In J. Schenkein (ed.), Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction , pp.219-248. New York: Academic Press.

Johnstone, B. 2003. Discourse analysis and narrative. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen and H. E. Hamilton (eds), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis , pp.635-649. Oxford: Blackwell.

Labov, W. 1977. Language in the Inner City . Oxford: Blackwell. Reprinted in A. Jaworski and N. Coupland (eds), The Discourse Reader , London: Routledge, 1999. Pages 221-235.

Norrick, N. R. 2001. Discourse markers in oral narrative. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(6): 849- 878

Norrick, N. R. 2005. Interactional remembering in conversational narrative. Journal of Pragmatics, 37(11): 1819-1844.

Schiffrin, D. 1981. Tense variation in narrative. Language , 57 (1): 45-62.

Tannen, D. 1982. Oral and literate strategies in spoken and written narratives. Language , 58(1): 1-21.

Thornbury, S. and Slade, D. 2006. Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Toolan, M. J. 2001. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (2 nd Edition). London: Routledge.

Wolfson, N. 1979. The conversational historical present alternation. Language , 55(1): 168-182.

The following is available from the Applied Linguistics Resources Centre:

Richards, K. 1999. Working towards common understandings: Collaborative interaction in staffroom stories. Text , 19(1): 143-174.

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Pragmatics & Discourse at IU

Speech acts.

Although the idea that language is used to express social action was initially conceptualized in Plato’s Cratylus (1875), our current understanding of language, speech act theory and communicative action, dates back to modern philosophical thinking (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Wittgenstein, 1953/1957). These philosophers stated that the function of language is to perform speech acts or actions (or Wittgenstein’s concept of “language-games”), such as describing or reporting the weather, requesting a letter of recommendation from a professor, apologizing for arriving late, or complaining to our boss about an unfair work load. This view of language rejected the ideas of logical positivism of the 1930s that believed that the main function of language was to describe true or false statements. However, it was in the mid-1950’s that philosophical thinking brought speech act theory to life with the seminal work on speech acts by J. L. Austin and John Searle, two language philosophers who were concerned with meaning, use, and action. Speech acts represent a key concept in the field of pragmatics which can be broadly defined as language use in context taking into account the speaker’s and the addressee’s verbal and non-verbal contributions to the negotiation of meaning in interaction.

Although speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) was not designed to examine stretches of talk in social interaction, it provided the foundation for the analysis of social action. Austin proposed a three-way taxonomy of speech acts: (i) a locutionary act refers to the act of saying something meaningful, that is, the act of uttering a fragment or a sentence in the literal sense (referring and predicating); (ii) an illocutionary act is performed by saying something that has a conventional force such as informing, ordering, warning, complaining, requesting, or refusing; and (iii) a perlocutionary act refers to what we achieve ‘ by  saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading’ (1962: 109 [emphasis in original]).

Austin’s main interest was in utterances used to perform actions with words (e.g. ‘I pronounce you husband and wife’). For these actions to be accomplished, they must be executed under the appropriate conditions: (i) a conventional procedure and effect; (ii) the appropriate circumstances; (iii) the correct and complete execution of the procedure by all persons; and (iv) certain thoughts and feelings about the realization of the act on the part of persons involved [Austin: 1962: 14-15]). The notion of ‘performative action’ is fundamental to the analysis of formal and non-formal institutional interactions because it considers both speaker and hearer co-constructing joint actions in specific sociocultural contexts.

Searle’s (1976) classification of speech acts classified according to the illocutionary point, psychological state, and the direction of fit (word to world or world to word)

Pragmatics & Discourse at IU resources

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Pragmatics of Speech Actions

• Edited by: Marina Sbisà and Ken Turner
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Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.

• Language: English
• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Copyright year: 2013
• Audience: Libraries, Academic Institutes and Scholars who are interested in Pragmatics, Linguistics, Philosophy and allied disciplines
• Front matter: 13
• Main content: 733
• Keywords: Applied Linguistics ; Pragmatics ; Linguistics
• Published: July 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9783110214383
• Published: July 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9783110214376

Learning to effectively perform communicative acts is essential in accurately conveying and interpreting meaning in any language.

Remember, meaning is the key to pragmatics. You may have all the proper language skills, but ineffective pragmatic strategies will limit your ability to accurately express and interpret meaning.

PRAGMATIC STRATEGIES can be divided into two types:

• Sociocultural Strategies —understanding the sociocultural norms of behavior underlying the communicative act
• Language Strategies —understanding the appropriate language behavior (e.g., grammar, vocabulary, structures) for performing the communicative act

Both types of strategies are necessary in order to convey and interpret the proper meaning of a communicative act.

Let's look at a real-life situation to get an idea of how these pragmatic strategies apply to communication in Spanish.

A passenger boards the bus in Madrid, Spain and asks a stranger to switch seats. He/She says:

Perdón, ¿Le importaría cambiarse de sitio?

Many sociocultural strategies are needed for this situation.

For example...

• The boarding passenger must know whether or not it is even appropriate to ask the person to change seats. Is it different for elderly people? Young people?
• The boarding passenger must also decide how to ask based on the social relationship and imposition of the request. How would it be different if there was only one other seat next to a bunch of screaming kids?

Knowing how to handle these situations requires the necessary sociocultural knowledge of the society you are in (in this case, Madrid) as well as the different options available for making the request.

There are also many language strategies that are necessary.

• You would need to know the conditional form (typically, but not always, more polite between strangers in Spanish)
• The proper vocabulary (i.e., perdón vs. lo siento )
• The other linguistic elements involved in the request ( por favor )

As you can see, it requires a complex set of skills, even for a relatively straightforward situation. This website is designed to help you learn some pragmatic strategies (sociocultural and language) for successfully maneuvering communicative acts (e.g., inviting, requesting, apologizing) in Spanish.

*Note: The technical term for communicative acts is speech acts . However, for the purposes of this site, we will use the term communicative acts since it conveys a more comprehensive view that includes verbal and non-verbal pragmatic features.

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Home » Blog » General » Understanding Pragmatic Skills Therapy: A Comprehensive Guide

Understanding Pragmatic Skills Therapy: A Comprehensive Guide

Welcome to my blog! In today’s post, we will be diving deep into the world of pragmatic skills therapy. Social emotional learning plays a crucial role in our everyday lives, and developing strong pragmatic skills is essential for effective communication and social interactions. Whether you are a parent, educator, or professional working with individuals who struggle with pragmatic skills, this guide will provide you with valuable insights and practical strategies to support their growth and development.

Understanding Pragmatic Skills

Before we delve into pragmatic skills therapy, let’s first understand what pragmatic skills are. Pragmatic skills refer to the social communication skills that allow us to navigate social interactions effectively. These skills involve both verbal and nonverbal communication, understanding social cues and context, turn-taking and conversation skills, problem-solving and conflict resolution, as well as empathy and perspective-taking.

Now that we have a clear understanding of what pragmatic skills entail, let’s explore the common signs and symptoms of pragmatic skills difficulties and the impact they can have on daily life.

Identifying Pragmatic Skills Challenges

Children and adults with pragmatic skills challenges may exhibit various signs and symptoms. They may struggle with maintaining eye contact, understanding nonverbal cues, taking turns in conversations, or interpreting social situations accurately. These difficulties can have a significant impact on their relationships, academic performance, and overall well-being. Early identification and intervention are crucial to help individuals overcome these challenges and thrive in social settings.

Pragmatic Skills Therapy Approaches

There are several evidence-based therapy approaches that speech language pathologists (SLPs) use to address pragmatic skills challenges. These approaches include Social Thinking®, Social Stories™, Social Skills Training, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). SLPs play a vital role in providing pragmatic skills therapy, working collaboratively with educators, parents, and other professionals to ensure a holistic and comprehensive approach to intervention.

Pragmatic Skills Therapy Techniques and Strategies

Pragmatic skills therapy involves a range of techniques and strategies tailored to the individual’s needs. These may include setting individualized therapy goals and objectives, role-playing and using social scripts, utilizing video modeling and social skills videos, engaging in social problem-solving exercises, participating in group therapy and peer interactions, and focusing on the generalization and transfer of skills to real-life situations.

Benefits and Outcomes of Pragmatic Skills Therapy

Engaging in pragmatic skills therapy can lead to numerous benefits and positive outcomes. Individuals who receive therapy often experience improved communication and social interactions, enhanced self-esteem and self-confidence, better academic performance and classroom participation, and strengthened relationships and friendships.

In conclusion, pragmatic skills therapy is a valuable intervention for individuals who struggle with social communication. By understanding the definition and significance of pragmatic skills, identifying challenges early on, and implementing evidence-based therapy approaches and techniques, we can support individuals in developing the necessary skills to thrive in social settings.

If you or someone you know is facing pragmatic skills challenges, I encourage you to seek professional help from a speech language pathologist. Ongoing support and practice are essential for long-term success. Start your EverydaySpeech Free trial today and embark on a journey towards improved pragmatic skills and social emotional learning!

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Article contents

Politeness in pragmatics.

• Dániel Z. Kádár Dániel Z. Kádár English Language and Linguistics, University of Huddersfield
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.218
• Published online: 29 March 2017

Politeness comprises linguistic and non-linguistic behavior through which people indicate that they take others’ feelings of how they should be treated into account. Politeness comes into operation through evaluative moments—the interactants’ (or other participants’) assessments of interactional behavior—and it is a key interpersonal interactional phenomenon, due to the fact that it helps people to build up and maintain interpersonal relationships. The operation of politeness involves valences: when people behave in what they perceive as polite in a given situation, they attempt to enactment shared values with others, hence triggering positive emotions. The interactants use valenced categories as a benchmark for their production and evaluation of language and behavior, and valence reflects the participants’ perceived moral order of an interactional context/event, that is, their perceptions of ‘how things should be’ in a given situation. Thus, the examination of politeness reveals information about the broader in-group, social, and cultural values that underlie the productive and evaluative interactional behavior of individuals. As politeness is a social action that consists of both linguistic and non-linguistic elements and that embodies a social practice, the research of politeness also provides insights into the social practices that surround individual language use.

Pragmatics-based research on politeness started in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and has become one of the most popular areas in pragmatics. The field has undergone various methodological and theoretical changes. These include the “first wave” of politeness research, in the course of which researchers either attempted to model politeness across languages and cultures by using universal frameworks, or engaged in culture-specific criticism of such frameworks. In the “second wave” of politeness research, researchers attempted to approach politeness as an individualistic, and often idiosyncratic, interactionally co-constructed phenomenon. A key argument of the second wave is that politeness can only be studied at the micro-level of the individual, and so it may be overambitious to attempt to model this phenomenon across languages and cultures. In the “third wave” of politeness research, scholars attempt to model politeness across languages and cultures, without compromising the endeavour of examining politeness as an interactionally co-constructed phenomenon.

Key phenomena studied in politeness research include, among others, impoliteness, intercultural interaction, cross-cultural similarities and differences of politeness, the gendered characteristics of politeness behavior, and convention and ritual. Politeness research is a multidisciplinary field that is engaged in the examination of a wide variety of data types.

• interaction
• intercultural interaction
• cross-cultural pragmatics
• the moral order

1. The Field of Politeness Research

Politeness research is the study of the interactional ways through which people build up and maintain their interpersonal relationships. Politeness covers behaviors through which people indicate that they take others’ feelings of how they should be treated into account, and it comes into operation through evaluative moments. While productive intention is important in politeness behavior (Ruhi, 2008 ), and both the production and the evaluation of politeness tend to follow conventionalized and mutually agreed patterns by default (see Section 2.2), it cannot be taken for granted that the producer and the recipient of an utterance perceive its politeness value on common grounds (Enfield, 2006 ), and so ultimately the operation of politeness cannot be separated from evaluative moments (Eelen, 2001 ).

Politeness is one of the most popular areas in pragmatics (Culpeper, 2011a ), with a history dating back to the 1970s. It is worth noting that, in many cultures, such as the Chinese and Roman, politeness was subject to proto-scientific research (Dickey, 2012 ; Pan & Kádár, 2011 ), as academic inquiries carried out in historical societies. The modern pragmatic research of politeness started under the influence of the language philosopher Paul Grice’s ( 1975 ) Cooperative Principle (henceforth CP). The CP stipulates that, in meaning making interactants tend to collaborate with each other, by following the four Maxims set out by the CP: Quality, Quantity, Relevance, and Manner. Politeness sets into operation if one or more of these Maxims are flouted with the intention of triggering polite inferences. For example, one may inform one’s speech partner about some bad news by being more verbose than usual, in order to make the other perceive one’s sympathy. In this way, one will flout the Maxim of Quantity by saying more than what is needed, but this flout may be perceived by the other as serving polite means. There are two key theories in the field that have utilized this means-to-ends approach to the operation of politeness, including Brown and Levinson ( 1987 ) and Leech ( 1983 ).

Brown and Levinson’s framework has had an unprecedented impact on the field up to the present day, as it provides a universal(istic) model to capture politeness across languages and cultures. Brown and Levinson approach politeness behavior as a highly rational phenomenon; it is claimed to come into operation if the speaker needs to threaten the hearer’s face, their public self-image. Politeness comes into existence with the other’s face needs in mind: a speech act can threaten the other’s “negative face,” their wish to be left unimpeded, or “positive face,” their wish to be appreciated; the speaker chooses politeness “strategies” according to the other’s perceived face needs. According to Brown and Levinson, while there is cultural variation in terms of interactional behavior, this model—based on the concept of face—is valid to capture the logic of politeness in any language and culture. While less explicitly universal in scope, Leech’s theory models politeness in terms of Maxims of Politeness, which work in parallel with the Maxims of Grice’s CP: whenever the speaker observes a Maxim of Politeness (s)he flouts a Maxim of the CP, and the hearer may draw inferences accordingly. A fundamental argument of both Brown and Levinson, and Leech is that people observe the CP in means-to-ends ways across cultures.

Along with their extraordinary impact, Brown and Levinson ( 1987 ), and Leech ( 1983 ) have generated a significant amount of criticism. In particular, scholars who are native speakers of languages other than English (or Western languages in a broader sense) have pointed out that these theories rely too heavily on the Western concept of individual mean-to-ends rationality behind the operation of politeness—the notion that an individual freely chooses a certain form of behavior in order to achieve a desired interpersonal effect in a given context. Since in some cultures, such as Japanese, the use of a form of politeness may not be bound to individual choices (Ide, 1989 ), but rather it is regulated by strict interactional norms, frameworks that operate with Grice’s CP are thus claimed to be unsuitable for studying politeness in a universal way. In addition, various researchers have pointed out that the concept of face in Brown and Levinson’s work does not coincide with various culture-specific understandings of this notion, which invalidates the applicability of Brown and Levinson to these languages and cultures (see for example, Gu, 1990 ; and Mao, 1994 ). The above-discussed high-impact universalistic frameworks and their criticisms are often referred to in the field as the “first wave” of politeness research (see Culpeper, 2011a ).

The first wave of politeness research has been thoroughly criticized in the second wave or “discursive turn” within the field, which gained momentum in the 2000s. While various elements of second wave politeness research were present in the field earlier, it received significant academic attention after Eelen’s ( 2001 ) seminal monograph, which was followed by Watts ( 2003 ), Mills ( 2003 ), and the Linguistic Politeness Research Group (Ed., 2011 ), to mention some representative works. The second wave of politeness research pointed out a fundamental problem with the first wave, namely, that universalistic theories (and, in fact, their criticisms as well) are based on invented utterances; using such examples assumes that the effect of politeness on the hearer is predictable. However, politeness comes into operation in a co-constructed way within longer stretches of interaction, often in idiosyncratic ways, and so its in-depth examination presumes the use of naturally occurring data. In addition, due to its interactions of its co-constructed nature, politeness comes into existence through the evaluative moments of the hearer, and so it is insufficient to focus on the speaker’s productive intention, in the manner of Brown and Levinson ( 1987 ), and Leech ( 1983 ).

While the second wave of politeness research has brought groundbreaking ideas into the field, it has left politeness research in a state of limbo: while second wave research points out the weaknesses of universalistic frameworks, it has not provided any alternative framework by means of which politeness could be examined on the macro-level. Due to the importance of idiosyncratic behavior in the second wave, this research trend has tended to focus on politeness as a puntuated phenomenon—a form of behavior without long-term interactional trajectories and constraints, which is co-constructed in a relatively free-flowing way. Various researchers argued that, while there is no doubt that politeness can come into existence in a punctuated or isolated form—and as such, second wave research has addressed a key knowledge gap—this does not invalidate the possibility of describing politeness on the macro-level, by attempting to create models that capture practices of the production and evaluation of politeness. Thus, there is a third wave within the field—even though the label “third wave” has not been widely used—which is represented by a number of recent publications, such as Haugh ( 2007 ), Culpeper ( 2011b ), Kádár and Haugh ( 2013 ), and Kádár ( 2017 ).

Politeness research has developed into a multidisciplinary field, with a journal dedicated to it ( Journal of Politeness Research ), and another journal with a strong interface with it ( Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict ). In addition, the first handbook dedicated to the field, edited by Culpeper, Haugh, and Kádár ( 2017 ) is due to be published soon after the appearance of the present article.

2. Key Topics

2.1. face and politeness.

Face—a person’s public self-image—has been a key topic in politeness research since Brown and Levinson’s ( 1987 ) seminal work. Brown and Levinson borrowed face, and the concept of politeness as an interpretation of face-work, from Erving Goffman’s ( 1967 , p. 12) work, in which the concept of “facework” refers to “the actions taken by a person to make whatever he is doing consistent with face.” In Goffman’s theory, face-work thus includes a wide variety of practices, including among others, corrective face-work and avoidance face-work. Universalist theories of politeness gave pre-eminence to these (corrective and avoidance) forms of face-work, but in doing so excluded many other aspects of face-work originally noted by Goffman. In addition, the concepts of addressing others’ face needs and protecting one’s own face have been approached primarily through the concept of rationality that is assumed as part of the modus operandi of the CP, even though Goffman himself emphasizes that face-work has a strong emotive element. It is worth noting that emotions are also rational, as social psychologists such as Haidt ( 2012 ) argue, but their rationality differs from the calculated nature of ‘rationality’ in Brown and Levinson’s ( 1987 ) sense.

After the emergence of the second wave of politeness research, various scholars questioned the straightforward connection between face and politeness. More specifically, while perhaps no researcher has denied that face and politeness are strongly interrelated phenomena, it has been broadly agreed that the operation of face and face-work cannot simply be drawn under the politeness umbrella, as groundbreaking research by Bargiela-Chiappini ( 2003 ) has illustrated. In fact, it is even possible to conduct face research without venturing into the realm of politeness, as a recent edited collection by Bargiela-Chiappini and Haugh ( 2010 ) has shown in an insightful way. The following example, cited from Kádár and Haugh ( 2013 , pp. 51, 52) illustrates the reason why researchers argue that face and politeness should be treated as different, albeit interrelated, phenomena:

• Chris: Well, can I please wear something else?
• Julius: As long as I don’t have to pay for it.
• Rochelle: Just find something to wear and I’ll take a look at it, okay?
• Chris: I don’t have anything special.
• Julius: When I was a kid we didn’t need any special clothes. Just having clothes was special.
• Narrator: The only way I was going to get my mom to spend money on me was if not doing it would embarrass her .
• Chris: Mom, I’m the only black kid in the whole school. They already think I’m a crack baby. Wearing this sweater they’ll probably think we’re on welfare.
• Rochelle: Who said we were on welfare? Be home from school on time tomorrow. We’re gonna go shopping.
• Julius: I thought you said we didn’t have the money?
• Rochelle: Oh, I’ll get it. Not havin’ people think we on welfare. (“Everybody Hates Picture Day,” Everybody Hates Chris , Season 1, Episode 13, 2006 )

This interaction is cited from the American comedy series Everybody Hates Chris . Here, Chris is trying to convince his parents, Rochelle and Julius, to buy some new clothes for him to wear to the school picture day. After pleading to wear something other than what his mother has picked out, his father indicates that he is not allowed to buy anything new. His mother suggests that he find something else (i.e., that he already owns or can borrow from his brother). It is at this point that the narrator (the grown-up version of Chris) comes up with a strategy, namely, alluding to the potential embarrassment, or threat to his family’s and thus his mother’s face , if people were to think they are too poor to buy new clothes. Rochelle reacts strongly to this potential face threat, and decides they will buy new clothes for Chris in spite of protests from Julius. However, despite the obvious salience of face in this interaction, it is quite clear that evaluations of politeness (or impoliteness) are not at issue here. Rochelle does not decide to get new clothes for Chris because it would be polite to do so, but because she wants to avoid having others think badly of their family. In other words, she wants to protect their face.

It is pertinent to note that academic interest in the concept of face has generated some noteworthy research on equivalents of the English ‘face’ across modern languages and cultures, such as Thai (Ukosakul, 2005 ), and Chinese and Japanese (Haugh & Hinze, 2003 ), and also in historical cultures (Ruhi & Kádár, 2011 ). Such metalexical research helps scholars to tease out culture-specific understandings of this notion. Such explorations have revealed that cultures and times have varying conceptions of face, and these differences also influence the ways in which politeness behavior—which has a strong intersection with face, in particular in popular culture—is conceptualized across language and cultures. In addition, face continues to be in the center of cutting-edge research on the interactional formation of interpersonal relationships (see Arundale, 2006 ; Spencer-Oatey, 2008 ). Recent research has also explored face beyond its understanding on the individual level (see e.g., Kádár, 2013 ).

2.2. Valency and the Moral Order

The rationale for politeness to operate is the existence of valence, which the interactants use as a benchmark for their production and evaluation of politeness. As Haugh argues,

[e]valuations in interpersonal settings […] involve the casting of persons and relationships into particular valenced (i.e., positive-neutral-negative) categories according to some kind of perceived normative scale or frame. (Haugh, 2014 , p. 159)

The notion of valenced categories, which plays a key in the politeness theory of Kádár and Haugh ( 2013 ), reveals that (im)politeness as a situated interactional phenomenon cannot exist in a vacuum; its operation presupposes the existence of some common ground between the interactants as regards the value of interactional messages. On the operational level, the enactment of a valenced category showcases the interactants’ polite intentions situated in a particular context. To illustrate the way in which valency operates, let us refer to an interaction, which has been analysed in Kádár ( 2017 ):

A couple is arguing in the park. Bystanders overhear the argument but seem conflicted over intervention. An elderly female bystander decides to intervene.

Boyfriend: Stop crying. Shut up!

Elderly female: Hey buddy ! Cool it!

Boyfriend: Ma’am, can you just let us do my own thing? It’s my girlfriend. Can you just leave us alone?

Elderly female: No. That’s not how you treat someone. How about I call the cops?

This interaction occurs in the reality show Primetime: What Would You Do? The scene features public abuse, which triggers intervention from an elderly woman who draws the attention of the wrongdoer with “Hey buddy ! Cool it!”, the inclusion of “buddy” with an accentuated and ironic prosody is clearly conflictive in that it conveys the opposite of its literal meaning: the person addressed is not a friend of the intervener. While “buddy” is not necessarily used to belittle, it is pragmatically appropriate to signal disagreement or opposition, and this meaning is even stronger in this interaction due to the emotive context and also to the age gap between the wrongdoer and the intervening person. In order for the elderly woman’s evaluative utterance “That’s not how you treat someone” to take place, she needs to have a valenced category of the fair treatment of others; reference to this category implies that a) the wrongdoer is behaving in an unacceptable (and, as such, impolite) way, and b) the intervening person has the right to intervene, and so her interruption is not impolite. Observers of this interaction may understand clearly why the woman makes this evaluative utterance—which illustrates that valence tends to entail a common ground either between the participants of an interaction, or a participant and an observer of an interaction, or both.

Valenced categories are not only shared by certain individuals: their operation assumes that they reflect the interactants’ undelaying perceptions of what counts as (in)appropriate in an event in a communal sense. Such perceptions can be defined through the concept of the “moral order.” The moral order is often approached in the field by following Garfinkel’s ( 1964 ) study of routinized activities (see an overview in Kádár & Haugh, 2013 ). That is, the moral order tends to be interpreted as a set of conventions in the form of valenced categories that become visible if and when they are violated. For example, if someone’s greeting is not responded to, this person is likely to notice this lack and voice it in terms that reflect his understanding of the other’s behavior as inappropriate. Along with this definition of moral order, recent research by Kádár and Marquez Reiter ( 2015 ) and by Kádár ( 2017 ) use the moral order in Douglas’ ( 1999 ; see this concept also in Douglas, 1968 , 1986 , 1991 ) and Whutnow’s ( 1989 ) social anthropological and sociological sense, as a collective term for the normative flow of events and perceived social good, which are often animated and maintained by communal actions (see rituals in Section 3.5). As Douglas ( 1999 , p. 299) argues, “people all over the world contrive to incorporate nature into the moral order”; in terms of interaction this implies that any individual is surrounded by a cluster of perceived of moral orders, and uses or evaluates language according to the moral order that a given context or interpersonal relationship triggers. These moral orders count as normative from the perspective of the language user, and they are moral in the most common sense of the word: if someone violates the moral order, this violation triggers the feeling that something is inappropriate, and this sense of inappropriateness tends to be voiced in some form on the evaluative level. For example, in the interaction studied above, the intervening person’s valenced category reflects the belief that the on-going event would be perceived as immoral by the broader society (which provides the right for this person to intervene), and as such the act of intervention is needed in order to restore the normative flow of things. Importantly, politeness often co-occurs with moralizing comments even in non-conflict scenarios, as moral orders underlie norms of politeness (Terkourafi, 2011 ); that is, the moral order tends to be referenced even in cases when it is not breached.

Note that moral orders reflect situated (inter)personal values, and the studying of this notion helps researchers to examine culture-specific politeness values. For example, as Kádár and Marquez-Reiter ( 2015 ) argue, the moral order in the interaction above reflects the Judeo-Christian importance of being a good Samaritan and treating others fairly.

2.3. Politeness as a Social Action and Practice

Politeness is a social action (Goodwin, 2000 ), which embodies a social group’s practice. The operation of politeness involves evaluations prompted by social actions and meanings that are recognizable to participants (Haugh, 2013 ). Being associated with a certain practice does not imply that a certain social action is predestined to be interpreted in a certain way. Rather, it suggests that the act’s contextually situated evaluation may be influenced by the recipient’s perception of the social practice that the given action embodies, and the relationship between this social practice and the perceived moral order.

Approaching politeness as a social action helps analysts to go beyond the boundaries of language, which is key when it comes to politeness, as politeness phenomena often come into existence in interaction through a combination of linguistic, paralinguistic and nonlinguistic behavior (Arndt & Janney, 1985 ). The need to avoid limiting politeness to the boundaries of language has been emphasized since the 1980s; for instance, Ambady, Koo, Lee, and Rosenthal ( 1996 ) illustrates this point by the following narrative example:

Consider the following scenario (familiar to some): Mary, a graduate student getting ready to face a dismal job market, receives a letter informing her that a paper coauthored with her advisor, a fellow graduate student, and a senior undergraduate has just been accepted by a prestigious journal with very few revisions. Mary rushes to share the good news with her coauthors. Consider another alternative: Mary reads that the article has been rejected. She knows that the paper will need major revisions if it is to be accepted in any journal. She has the unpleasant task of conveying the news to her coauthors. How will Mary convey the good and bad news? And how will she convey the news differently to her advisor, to her peer, and to the undergraduate? […] She might say, “Well, guess what? The editors said ‘no’—looks like it’s back to square one!” with a confident vocal tone, directly gaze at the listener, shrug her shoulders, and smile, or she could say the same thing with a downcast gaze, a hesitant tone of voice, and no smile. Even though the linguistic content is the same, the two scenarios will be interpreted quite differently. ( 1996 , pp. 996, 997)

As this example shows, language is just one, albeit important, element of politeness behavior.

2.4. Interactional Co-Construction

Although politeness is a social action that embodies social practices, hence animating the perceived moral order(s) of the interactants, this does not mean that the production and evaluation of politeness always follow regular and predictable patterns—interactants may agree or disagree about what counts as polite, and interpersonal politeness may come into existence in the form of interactional negotiations, as a co-constructed outcome of an interaction. The study of co-construction has gained momentum in the second wave of politeness research, as a criticism of the universalistic frameworks that operate with straightforward and invented utterances (e.g., Mills, 2003 ). Yet, it is pertinent to note that the concept of co-construction is present in third wave frameworks that do not limit their focus to the micro-level of interpersonal behavior. On the one hand, experts of interactional style, perhaps most notably the works of Cook ( 2006 , 2008 ) have pointed out that switches between interactional styles, which are associated with different types of politeness behavior, tend to follow the dynamics of interactions. For example, in a Japanese academic consultation, lecturers and students may continuously make switches between formal (honorific) and informal styles, in order to index distance and sympathy at the same time; according to Cook, this kind of behavior is the norm rather than the exception; that is, the interactional co-construction of politeness is not necessarily an idiosyncratic form of behavior. On the other hand, third wave theories, such as Kádár’s ( 2013 ) recent framework, argue that co-construction can be observed even in recurrent and seemingly straightforward practices associated with politeness—it is a phenomenon that should be incorporated into theories that aim to capture politeness on both the macro and the micro levels. Politeness, as it unfolds in interaction, tends to operate with the interactional features of incrementality and sequentiality. Incrementality refers to the way in which speakers’ adjust or modify their talk in light of how the progressive uttering of units of talk is received by other participants. In other words, the fact that social actions and meanings are produced incrementally in interaction means they are inevitably subject to ongoing evaluation as they are produced, and so can be adjusted accordingly in real time. Sequentiality, on the other hand, refers to the way in which current turns or utterances are always understood relative to prior and subsequent talk, particularly talk that is contiguous (i.e., immediately prior to or subsequent to the current utterance). This means that next turns are a critical resource for participants in reaching understandings of the evaluations of others, including inferences of one’s interactant’s understandings of one’s own evaluations (see also Kádár and Haugh, 2013 ). Another aspect of sequentiality is that certain recurrent form of interaction are expected to follow strict sequential characteristics, and deviations from these characteristics tend to be sanctioned by default. This does not imply that incrementality does not operate in such interactions, but rather that it is more constrained than in punctuated and relatively free-flowing interactions (see Kádár, 2017 ).

Note that the first, second, and third waves do not necessarily follow a temporal order. Ideas of the second wave have been present within the first wave of politeness research, and the same applies to the third wave.

2.5. Understandings of Politeness

A key criticism that second wave politeness research has made about the first wave is that researchers impose their own understandings of politeness onto the data studied. As Eelen ( 2001 ) has pointed out, politeness can be divided into first-order and second-order types, the first including the language users’ understandings of politeness, with the latter covering theoretical/the theoretician’s understandings of it. This essential distinction—which recurs in various forms in various politeness theories, such as Watts ( 2003 ), Locher ( 2004 ), and Locher and Watts ( 2005 ), just to mention a few representative examples—is key to disentangling the interactants’ evaluative moments from the theoretician’s own evaluations. This distinction becomes particularly important if researchers focus on longer chunks of interaction. In the second-order conceptualization of politeness, researchers have used various technical terms, such as politic behaviour (Watts, 2003 ) and rapport management (Spencer-Oatey, 2000 ) to distinguish their own academic definitions and understandings from that of popular ones.

This bipartite approach has been further elaborated by Kádár and Haugh ( 2013 ), who propose a more complex approach to various understandings of politeness. As they argue, from a user perspective, there are four inter-related perspectives from which the nature of politeness, as an assumed part of our social reality, can be understood:

The notion of ‘meta-participant’ includes participants who do not actively engage in an interaction, but who may contribute to evaluations of (im)politeness behavior. The concept of ‘emic’ refers to insider understandings, while ‘etic’ refers to outsider understandings of (im)politeness.

From an observer perspective, there are four inter-related ways by which we can account for how we evaluate something to be polite, not polite, impolite, and so on in the first place.

Thus, there are four important loci, not just two as commonly thought, that constitute the first-second-order distinction, namely, participation (participant/meta-participant) and expectancies (emic/etic), which are first-order loci of understanding, and observation (analyst/lay observer) and conceptualization (theoretical/folk theoretic), which are second-order loci of understanding.

3. Key Areas of Politeness Research

3.1. politeness and impoliteness.

In first wave approaches, impoliteness plays only a small role, supposedly due to the focus of these works on rational behavior and conflict avoidance through facework. Research on impoliteness in pragmatics was started by Culpeper’s ( 1996 ) groundbreaking paper, which models impoliteness behavior through pragmatic lenses. With the emergence of second wave approaches to politeness, impoliteness has gained momentum in the field, and a number of high-impact studies have been published on this area, including Culpeper, Bousfield, and Whichmann ( 2003 ), Culpeper ( 2005 ), Bousfield ( 2008 ), Bousfield and Locher ( 2008 ), and Culpeper ( 2011b ).

Impoliteness research has brought a large number of key innovations into the field. For example, it has brought fresh blood into academic discussions on the concept of intentionality, which has been a recurring theme in politeness research. It is clear that a range of impoliteness behavior comes into existence when someone intends to offend the other; however, as Culpeper ( 2011b ) points out, (full) intentionality is not necessarily a precondition for impoliteness to operate. It is possible to be impolite unintentionally. Impoliteness has also contributed to research on emotions (see Kienpointer, 2008 ; Locher & Langlotz, 2008 )—an emerging and important area within the field—due to researchers’ focus on the reactions (usually: the feeling of being upset) triggered by impoliteness behavior (see Işık-Güler & Ruhi, 2008 ). Impoliteness has also generated interest in culture-specific behavior: at the moment, researchers know relatively little about impoliteness behavior in certain languages and cultures, such as Chinese and Arabic, and it can be rightly supposed that a variety of high-impact studies are yet to appear on this area in the near future. The study of impoliteness has also triggered research on phenomena, like abuse and bullying, that have been relatively ignored in pragmatics in spite of their importance in other fields such as social psychology (see Kádár, 2013 ). Finally, impoliteness research has generated some noteworthy interest in metapragmatics: on the one hand, researchers have pursued interest in metapragmatic behavior triggered by impoliteness (see e.g., Ferenčík, 2015 ), and on the other hand they have undertaken thought-provoking research on metalexemes, words that are used about politeness (e.g., rudeness vs. impoliteness; see Culpeper, 2011b ).

It can be argued that impoliteness research is an area with importance beyond its own borders because it is challenging to study politeness without discussing impoliteness, and vice versa. Due to this fact, researchers in the field often use the label (im)politeness when they discuss politeness phenomena in general.

3.2. Intercultural Politeness

When it comes to the concept of culture, it is not far-fetched to argue that politeness research at the moment is a heavily cross-cultural rather than intercultural field: while a large number of studies have explored politeness across cultures in a comparative way, relatively few studies have been engaged in the examination of how people from different cultural backgrounds interact with each other. In addition, since Eelen’s ( 2001 ) seminal study, culture has been treated in the field as a problematic term, due to the fact that first wave theories tend to associate culture with national culture (see a detailed discussion in Spencer-Oatey & Franklin, 2009 ). Yet, the exploration of intercultural politeness is a key task, considering the importance of politeness behavior in intercultural interactions.

The existing key studies within this area mostly focus on politeness in interaction between native speakers of English and speakers of exotic languages such as Chinese (Chang & Haugh, 2011 ; Pan & Kádár, 2011 ), Japanese (Nakane, 2006 ), and Korean (Murphy & Levy, 2006 ). A characteristic of these studies is that analysts usually focus on the difficulties that arise from intercultural communication, that is, they implicitly interpret culture on the national level, as a potential barrier of communication. While works such as Sifianou ( 2013 ) have shown in a powerful way that this is not necessarily the case, and culture is often an addition to many factors that influence interpersonal interaction in the globalized world, it remains a task for future research to integrate intercultural communication—in which culture tends to be interpreted in more complex ways than in pragmatics—with politeness research. The recent project by Spencer-Oatey & Kádár ( 2016 ) aims to address this knowledge gap. It is hoped that future studies will contribute to the development of this area by examining intercultural politeness in a wide range of naturally occurring interaction types across various languages and cultures.

An additional area of interest is the relationship between politeness, intercultural communication, and English as a lingua franca. For instance, in recent work on politeness in English as a lingua franca, House ( 2008 ) found convincing evidence that challenges the view that intercultural interactions inevitably give rise to perceptions of impoliteness, as participants of interactions tend to strategically reinterpret utterances that may cause misunderstandings and that would thus trigger impolite inferences.

3.3. Cross-Cultural Politeness

Cross-cultural politeness has played a central role in the field since its foundation: in Brown and Levinson ( 1987 ) and other high-impact theories, the notion of culture has been present as a starting point for conducting comparative analyses of politeness behavior. Various frameworks, perhaps most importantly Sifianou ( 1992 ), have tested the applicability of Brown and Levinson on culture-specific data. Cross-cultural politeness has become one of the most high-profile areas in the field due to Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper ( 1989 ) Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project , which compares requests and apologies across cultures with the aid of discourse completion tasks. Along with publications of pragmatic theoretical scope, a number of works have engaged in the empirical mapping of politeness across cultures; a most representative example is Hickey and Stewart ( 2005 ).

Cross-cultural research has also played some role in second wave politeness research. A mainstream publication is Kádár and Mills ( 2011 ), which compares politeness behavior across East Asian cultures by using a strictly second wave approach to politeness. Yet, culture has remained a relatively low-key issue in the second wave of the field, due to researchers’ focusing on politeness as a co-constructed and idiosyncratic form of behavior: as the volume of Bargiela-Chiappini and Kádár ( 2010 ) has found, it is challenging to conduct a large-scale cross-cultural politeness research project by rigorously following the methodologies of second wave politeness research. This might be the reason why the bulk of theoretical research that was published in the first decade of the 2000s is heavily English-centred (although this has always been the case in the field to some extent).

Conceptualizing culture as a rigorous notion to be used in cross-cultural analysis remains key in politeness research, including third wave approaches such as Culpeper ( 2011b ) and Kádár and Haugh ( 2013 ). It is pertinent to note that the examination of culturally-situated politeness is significant beyond the realm of politeness research, namely, that the examination of culturally situated understandings of politeness can contribute to attempts to extend pragmatic theory beyond Anglo-academic conceptualizations and debates; such attempts tend to be defined within the scope of emancipatory pragmatics (see Hanks, 2014 ). It is pertinent to note that, while in-depth pragmatic research on politeness has been carried out in various languages such as Spanish and Chinese, it is very often the case that research in these languages still utilizes notions that come from the Anglo-academia.

3.4. Historical Politeness

If culture is a suitable testing ground for politeness theory, the same can be argued about historical data: by exploring temporally (and spatially) different cultures, researchers can explore the validity of frameworks that reflect modern understandings of interpersonal politeness. History has been present in the field throughout its development. Some works, such as Gu ( 1990 ), have attempted to link modern norms of politeness behavior with historical ones, while others such as Watts ( 1999 ) have examined historical data in order to illustrate the validity of politeness frameworks. Furthermore, in historical pragmatics, historical politeness has been studied for its own sake: key topics of such inquiries include historical terms of address (see e.g., Taavitsainen & Jucker, 2003 ), ideological understandings of politeness (see e.g., Klein, 1994 ), the historical sociology of politeness (see e.g., Carter, 2001 ), and so on. In addition, Ehlich’s ( 1992 ) noteworthy study has examined historicity—the concept that all actions and understandings of politeness are situated in time—as a philosophical concept in politeness theory.

Historical politeness research has recently been established as an independent field, with the appearance of the two books that Culpeper and Kádár ( 2010 ), and Bax and Kádár ( 2012 ) dedicated to this theme. These books attempt to promote the use of historical data in politeness theorization, and they propose methodologies by means of which researchers can bridge the seeming gaps between modern and historical politeness research (in particular, in terms of methodology). Since many modern practices of politeness have roots in history, it is perhaps not too ambitious to argue that no theory of politeness can be complete without engaging in some form of historical research. In addition, the concept of historicity also plays a key role in the examination of politeness in modern narrated and mediated data, such as news reports on peoples’ (im)politeness behavior.

Recent key areas of historical politeness research include historical metapragmatic research on politeness related terms (see Kádár & Paternoster, 2015 ) and the examination of politeness in ancient languages (see Ridealgh, 2016 ).

3.5. Politeness, Convention, and Ritual

Politeness often comes into existence in recurrent forms of behavior, which are referred to in the field as convention and ritual. As Terkourafi and Kádár ( 2017 ) argue, convention and ritual differ in a number of ways:

Audience: Convention is primarily carried out for the benefit of the interactants, while rituals are designed to be carried out in front of an audience other than the interactants themselves; that is why ritual is a performance that constitutes one’s face for either a real or imaginary audience.

Salience: Conventions tend to be salient (or marked) only for those who are outside of the group or culture in which the convention operates. Rituals, on the other hand, are salient primarily to those who perform them or take part in them as an audience, while culture or group outsiders may or may not perceive their salience.

Time and place: Conventions are only loosely constrained by context, while rituals can only take place at certain times and places. In addition, a ritual interaction has limitations of length, as it triggers intense emotions and affect. Consequently, conventions operate within a minimal context (Terkourafi, 2009 ); that is, they are latently present in any interaction, whereas rituals require maximal (or enriched) contexts (Kádár, 2017 ), as they can only operate in specific interactions and for a restricted period of time.

Ratification: Usually, ratification (in the sense of Goffman, 1979 ) is not an issue when it comes to convention, as it occurs implicitly when all interactants follow situated conventional practices (and there are no formal consequences when it does not). Ritual, on the other hand, can only be operationalized by ratified (official) personae, and non-ratified performance of a ritual tends to be sanctioned (Bell, 1997 ).

At the same time, the two phenomena have a number of shared characteristics, including the following:

Recurrence: Both convention and ritual are recurrent practices.

Normativity: Both carry penalties in case of non-compliance or defective performance; these penalties can range from negative evaluation to more serious ones.

Formality and sequentiality: Both convention and ritual have certain formal and sequential properties, which make them recognizable and differentiate them from other practices.

Due to these shared characteristics, convention and ritual play key roles in politeness behavior.

Convention has been broadly studied in the field since Grice’s work, while ritual has only been examined by a limited number of researchers, perhaps the most outstanding one being Bax ( 2010 ) (see an overview in Terkourafi & Kádár, 2017 ). The recent monograph of Kádár ( 2017 ) models the relationship between interpersonal (im)politeness and ritual from the perspective of ‘mainstream’ politeness theory.

3.6. Politeness and Society

As politeness is a socially situated phenomenon, it may not be surprising that social variables have received significant attention in the field. Such variables include, for example, age (He, 2012 ) and social class (Deutschmann, 2003 ; Mills, 2003 ). However, the most broadly studied social variable in the field has been gender, which has been studied since the formation of politeness research. First wave research tends to approach gender and politeness in categorical ways, by clearly distinguishing masculine and feminine forms of politeness behavior (see e.g., Holmes, 1988 ; Ide, 1982 ); while such research reflects a stereotypical and overgeneralized view of gendered language, it is important to emphasize that politeness research at the time followed broader trends in gender and language research (see e.g., Tannen, 1993 ). In the second wave of politeness research, gendered politeness received significant attention, following Mills’ ( 2003 ) monograph: a number of studies, including Mullany ( 2004 ), Mills ( 2005 ), and others have pointed out that gendered language is subject to interactional negotiations, instead of being a pre-existing phenomenon. Yet, various researchers such as Holmes ( 2005 , 2006 ) have maintained that, while gendered language is subject to negotiations and interactional co-construction to some extent, the gender of the interactants tends to define politeness behavior at least to some extent. Along with mapping gendered language, research on gender has also contributed to understandings of the relationship between language and ideology in terms of politeness (see e.g., Okamoto, 2016 ).

4. Methodology and Data

4.1. methods of data collection and data types.

The first wave of politeness research has devoted much attention to the utterance level of interaction. This focus brought along with it certain preferred methods of data collection: in order to obtain data that is as illustrative as possible, various studies use carefully selected pieces of either (allegedly) naturally occurring or, more often than not, elicited data; the former refers to utterances that arise in spontaneous interaction, and the latter refers to utterances that arise in discourse or interaction facilitated through intervention by the researcher. Careful selection of data refers to the fact that many researchers set out with the methodological assumption that certain naturally occurring utterances can and must be excluded from the analysis on theoretical grounds. In practice this means, for example, that the analyst can ignore an utterance that deviates from what is defined as the standard usage of politeness. This methodology of data collection also presupposes reliance on a certain analytical stance—namely, observer (analyst) coding of linguistic politeness. It is pertinent to note that elicited data continues to be regarded as important in certain areas of politeness research, such as research on speech acts (see Marti, 2006 ), even though in theoretical research on politeness this methodology is generally regarded as problematic (Eelen, 2001 ).

Since the 2000s, a large body of politeness research has explored politeness in naturally occurring interaction, by focusing on both the production and the evaluation of politeness. Data types include face-to-face interaction (e.g., Pan, 2000 ; Watts, 2003 ), computer-mediated communication (e.g., Graham, 2015 ; Locher, 2010 ), and written texts such as news items (e.g., Neurauter-Kessels, 2011 ); note that current scholarship does not usually set up strict borderlines between written and spoken communications, and so this listing primarily aims to indicate that politeness research examines a wide variety of data types. It can be argued that, in terms of data, politeness is a broad church: politeness researchers with discourse analytic backgrounds have examined various datasets, spanning family data (e.g., Locher, 2004 ), through reality shows (Blitvich, Bou-Franch, & Lorenzo-Dus, 2013 ), to business letters (e.g., Pilegaard, 1997 ); critical discourse analysts have studied politeness in a range of institutional scenarios, such as political speeches (e.g., Harris, 2001 ), care homes (Backhaus, 2009 ), and police interviews (e.g., Thornborrow, 2002 ); conversation analysts such as Hutchby ( 2008 ) tend to examine politeness in data types preferred in their field such as counselling sessions and phone calls. While it is beyond the scope of this article to overview all data types studied in the field, the present discussion might have illustrated the variety of data involved in politeness research. One concept that keeps all these various datasets and research methodologies together is the interpretation of politeness as an interactional phenomenon. It is pertinent to note that the interactional view of politeness can be extended to the analysis of monologic texts, such as letters, by setting claiming that a monologue is a dialogue in a broader context (see several studies in Culpeper & Kádár, 2010 ). Thus, the interactional analysis of politeness can, in principle, include any text type.

4.5. Politeness and Metapragmatics

Politeness is not only important on the level of production, but also in the way in which interactants reflect on it; language that reflects upon language use is metapragmatics (see an overview in Lucy, 2004 ). There are three metapragmatic areas that are particularly relevant to politeness research:

Metalexicon/metalanguage: words and expressions that interactants use about politeness;

Metacommunication: Reflections on politeness that take place within a given interaction;

Metadiscourse: Post-event discourses on politeness.

Focusing on metapragmatics helps researchers to tease out perceptions and understandings that underlie politeness behavior.

Metapragmatic research on politeness started relatively early (see Blum-Kulka, 1992 ), and is one of the key research methodologies (see e.g., Meyer, 1995 ; Spencer-Oatey, 2011 ).

4.6. Units of Analysis

As Eelen ( 2001 ) explains, first wave approaches tend to use the individual as a unit of analysis to make projected descriptions of politeness in languages, societies, or cultures. This is a top-down approach, in the sense that it does not analyze politeness behavior on the level of localized individuals and smaller groups, and then build up their macro-views on cultures and societies on the basis of this. Instead, it is usually assumed that politeness phenomena associated with the given culture or society manifest themselves in the language use of the individuals. Most commonly, first wave theories have adopted culture as the key notion for explaining differences in politeness forms and strategies. As Eelen notes,

in Brown and Levinson’s discussion of ‘cultural variation’… the terms ‘culture,’ ‘society,’ and ‘group’ are used interchangeably. Sometimes the term ‘subculture’ is also encountered, although it is not clear how it relates to the other three. ( 2001 , pp. 159–160)

The problem with this approach is its normative characteristics, that is, an essentialist approach to culture and politeness presupposes that members of a certain culture tend to share these claimed values. This concept has often been criticized by second wave politeness scholars.

Due to this problem, various alternative units of analysis have been proposed. Perhaps most important among these units is the concept of “community of practice” (see Wenger, 1998 ); this refers to a group of people, who are brought together through engagement in a joint (often but not always professional) activity or task. A recurrent issue in the field, however, is that community of practice is a concept that has been created for the analysis of organizational discourse, and so it cannot be used to describe politeness behavior in all kinds of interaction. An alternative unit has been relational networks. This refers to sets of intersecting social links between persons who collectively form the basis of an identifiable group, such as pupils at a certain school, or residents of a certain area (see Milroy and Milroy, 1992 ).

In current politeness research, particularly in third wave approaches, politeness tends to be approached in a bottom-up manner, as researchers attempt to capture the regularities of politeness production and evaluation by examining large datasets of interpersonal interaction. Focus on individual productive and evaluative moves in interaction does not entail that the object of politeness research can only be individualistic behavior: as politeness is often situated in organizations and institutions (Harris, 2003 ), by examining politeness behavior, researchers can gain insight into norms of power and other sociopragmatic factors that motivate situated interactional behavior, and, as a next step, the cultural and social understandings that underlie the operation of such norms (see e.g., Schnurr, Marra, & Holmes, 2007 ).

Focusing on politeness situated in relational networks, organizations, and other situated settings also motivates research to go beyond analyzing politeness within the speaker–hearer dyad. Certain interactions operate within complex participation frameworks (Goffman, 1981 ); because of this, the production and evaluation of politeness comes into existence through a) the involvement of participants beyond the dyad of the speaker and the hearer, and b) with awareness of the presence of such participants (see an overview in Kádár, 2017 ). For example, someone’s interpersonal behavior tends to change significantly if this person is aware of the presence of bystanders, eavesdroppers, etc.

4.7. Politeness Beyond Pragmatics

While politeness is predominantly a pragmatics-related field, it has emerged in other fields as well, and it can be argued that politeness research has an essentially multidisciplinary nature. To mention a few key examples, politeness has been studied through the lenses of language acquisition and socialization (see e.g., Ochs & Schieffelin, 2009 ), cognition (see e.g., Escandell-Vidal, 1996 ), social psychology (see e.g., Holtgraves, 2005 ), and sociolinguistics (see e.g., Morand, 1996 ).

Links to Digital Materials

The Linguistic Politeness Research Group .

Jonathan Culpeper’s academic website, Impoliteness: Using and Understanding the Language of Offence , is dedicated to impoliteness.

The Historical Politeness Network for Ancient Languages .

TEDxSussexUniversity—Lyne Murphy: American and British Politeness . Lynne Murphy’s lecture on British and American politeness reflects a noteworthy, popular insight into politeness behavior.

University of East Anglia Autumn 2015 Public Lecture Series, Linguistic (Im)Politeness Research: the State of Art , Daniel Kadar’s public lecture at the University of East Anglia.

From Monty Python’s Flying Circus , Episode 18: The Man Who Is Alternately Rude And Polite .

Further Reading

• Bargiela-Chiappini, F. , & Kádár, D. (Eds.), (2010). Politeness across cultures . Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Brown, P. , & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Culpeper, J. , Haugh, M. , & Kádár, D. (Eds.), (2017). The Palgrave handbook of linguistic politeness . Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Eelen, G. (2001). A critique of politeness theories . Manchester, U.K.: St. Jerome.
• Holmes, J. (1995). Women, men, and politeness . London: Longman.
• Kádár, D. , & Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding politeness . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Kádár, D. (2017). Politeness, impoliteness, and ritual: Maintaining the moral order in interpersonal interaction . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Leech, G. (1983). Principles of pragmatics . London: Longman.
• Locher, M. (2004). Power and politeness in action . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Watts, R. (2003). Politeness . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Ambady, N. , Koo, J. , Lee, F. , & Rosenthal, R. (1996). More than words: Linguistic and nonlinguistic politeness in two cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 70 , 996–1011.
• Arndt, H. , & Janney, R. (1985). Politeness revisited: Cross-modal supportive strategies. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching , 23 , 281–300.
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Pragmatics in English Language Learning

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Peter Grundy, Pragmatics in English Language Learning, ELT Journal , Volume 77, Issue 4, October 2023, Pages 522–526, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccad032

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that an intelligent reader in possession of an edited collection of papers must have a real treasure chest in hand. However little known the feelings or views of such a reader may be on their first turning the pages of such a volume, this truth is so well fixed in the mind of the writer of the foreword that the reader’s approbation is considered as the rightful property of some or all of the contributors.

Despite the foregoing and despite its title, there’s probably more that’s directly useful in Pragmatics in English Language Learning to researchers in applied pragmatics than to English language teachers, teacher trainers and materials writers. Nevertheless, the contributions in this collection raise many important issues about the relationship of pragmatics and L2 learning and teaching, so pieces of eight for all of us.

The book opens with a brief introduction (well, there’s a foreword that I’ll come back to later) in which the editors define pragmatic competence as ‘making socially appropriate linguistic choices’ (p. 1) and closes with a brief conclusion in which they call for ‘more systematic approaches to pragmatics instruction’ (p. 229). In the first chapter, Naoko Taguchi charts the development of L2 pragmatics from its beginning in the 1980s to the present day. This is followed by four chapters that study the longitudinal development of pragmalinguistic knowledge in educational contexts, grouped together under the title ‘Pragmatics in Action’, and three further chapters under the title ‘Instructed L2 Pragmatics’, which investigate classroom learning in experimental situations.

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These lines — also attributed to H. L. Mencken and Carl Jung — although perhaps politically incorrect, are surely correct in reminding us that more is involved in what one communicates than what one literally says; more is involved in what one means than the standard, conventional meaning of the words one uses. The words ‘yes,’ ‘perhaps,’ and ‘no’ each has a perfectly identifiable meaning, known by every speaker of English (including not very competent ones). However, as those lines illustrate, it is possible for different speakers in different circumstances to mean different things using those words. How is this possible? What's the relationship among the meaning of words, what speakers mean when uttering those words, the particular circumstances of their utterance, their intentions, their actions, and what they manage to communicate? These are some of the questions that pragmatics tries to answer; the sort of questions that, roughly speaking, serve to characterize the field of pragmatics.

1. Introduction

2.1.1 austin, searle, and speech acts, 2.1.2 grice and conversational implicatures, 2.1.3 bach, harnish, and a unified theory, 2.2.1 kaplan on indexical and demonstratives, 2.2.2 pragmatic puzzles of referentialism, 2.2.3 stalnaker on context and content, 3.1 two models of linguistic communication, 3.2.1 the principles of relevance, 3.2.2 implicated premises and conclusions, 3.3 levinson's theory of utterance-type-meaning, 3.4 literalists, minimalists, contextualists and others, 4. some definitions of pragmatics (versus semantics, usually), 5. glossary, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries.

Pragmatics deals with utterances , by which we will mean specific events, the intentional acts of speakers at times and places, typically involving language. Logic and semantics traditionally deal with properties of types of expressions, and not with properties that differ from token to token, or use to use, or, as we shall say, from utterance to utterance, and vary with the particular properties that differentiate them. Pragmatics is sometimes characterized as dealing with the effects of context . This is equivalent to saying it deals with utterances, if one collectively refers to all the facts that can vary from utterance to utterance as ‘context.’ One must be careful, however, for the term is often used with more limited meanings.

Different theorists have focused on different properties of utterances. To discuss them it will be helpful to make a distinction between ‘near-side pragmatics’ and ‘far-side pragmatics.’ The picture is this. The utterances philosophers usually take as paradigmatic are assertive uses of declarative sentences, where the speaker says something. Near-side pragmatics is concerned with the nature of certain facts that are relevant to determining what is said. Far-side pragmatics is focused on what happens beyond saying : what speech acts are performed in or by saying what is said, or what implicatures (see below for an explanation of this term) are generated by saying what is said.

Near-side pragmatics includes, but is not limited to resolution of ambiguity and vagueness, the reference of proper names, indexicals and demonstratives, and anaphors, and at least some issues involving presupposition. In all of these cases facts about the utterance, beyond the expressions used and their meanings, are needed.

We can divide these facts into several categories. For indexicals such as ‘I,’ ‘now,’ and ‘here’ basic facts about the utterance are required: the agent, and when and where it occurred. For other indexicals and demonstratives, speaker intentions are also relevant. While it seems the referent of ‘you’ must be a person addressed by the speaker, which of several possible addressees is referred to seems up to the speaker's intentions. Within syntactic and semantic constraints, anaphoric relations seem largely a matter of speaker's intent. Speaker's intentions and the way the speaker is connected to the wider world by causal/historical ‘chains of reference’ are relevant to the reference of proper names.

Far-side pragmatics deals with what we do with language, beyond what we (literally) say. This is the conception according to which Voltaire's remarks belong to pragmatics. It's up to semantics to tell us what someone literally says when they use expressions of a given type; it's up to pragmatics to explain the information one conveys, and the actions one performs, in or by saying something.

Pragmatics is usually thought to involve a different sort of reasoning than semantics. Semantics consists of conventional rules of meaning for expressions and their modes of combination. Locke supposed that communication was basically a matter of a speaker encoding thoughts into words and the listener decoding words back into thoughts. The same basic picture is found fairly explicitly in Saussure and other influential theorists. This picture seems to fit reasonably well with the picture that emerged from the logicians and philosophers of language in the tradition of logical analysis, of language as a system of phonological, syntactic and semantic rules, of which competent speakers and interpreters have implicit mastering. Paradigmatically, the sincere speaker plans to produce an utterance with the truth-conditions of a belief he wishes to express; he chooses his words so that his utterance has those truth-conditions; the credulous interpreter needs to perceive the utterance, and recognize which phones, morphemes, words and phrases are involved, and then using knowledge of the meanings, deduce the truth-conditions of the utterance and of the belief it expresses.

In contrast, pragmatics involves perception augmented by some species of ‘ampliative’ inference — induction, inference to the best explanation, Bayesian reasoning, or perhaps some special application of general principles special to communication, as conceived by Grice (see below) — but in any case a sort of reasoning that goes beyond the application of rules, and makes inferences beyond what is established by the basic facts about what expressions are used and their meanings.

The facts with which pragmatics deals are of various sorts, including:

• Facts about the objective facts of the utterance, including: who the speaker is, when the utterance occurred, and where;
• Facts about the speaker's intentions. On the near side, what language the speaker intends to be using, what meaning he intends to be using, whom he intends to refer to with various shared names, whether a pronoun is used demonstratively or anaphorically, and the like. On the far side, what he intends to achieve by saying what he does.
• Facts about beliefs of the speaker and those to whom he speaks, and the conversation they are engaged in; what beliefs do they share; what is the focus of the conversation, what are they talking about, etc.
• Facts about relevant social institutions, such as promising, marriage ceremonies, courtroom procedures, and the like, which affect what a person accomplishes in or by saying what he does.

We will divide our discussion, somewhat arbitrarily, into the ‘Classic Pragmatics’ and ‘Contemporary pragmatics.’ The Classic Period, by our reckoning, stretches from the mid-sixties until the mid-eighties.

2. Classical Pragmatics

2.1 far-side pragmatics: beyond saying.

Our initial focus will be on the traditions in pragmatics inaugurated by the J.L. Austin and H.P. Grice. Both of these philosophers were interested in the area of pragmatics we call ‘beyond saying.’ In the classic period, these phenomena were studied on the premise — a premise increasingly undermined by developments in pragmatics itself — that a fairly clear distinction could be made between what is said, the output of the realm of semantics, and what is conveyed or accomplished in particular linguistic and social context in or by saying something, the realm of pragmatics. What is said is sort of a boundary; semantics is on the near side, and those parts of pragmatics that were the focus of the classic period are on the far side.

The British philosopher John Langshaw Austin (b. 1911–d. 1960) was intrigued by the way that we can use words to do different things. Whether one asserts or merely suggests, promises or merely indicates an intention, persuades or merely argues, depends not only on the literal meaning of one's words, but what one intends to do with them, and the institutional and social setting in which the linguistic activity occurs. One thing a speaker might intend to do, and be taken to do, in saying "I'll be there to pick you up at six," is to promise to pick his listener up at that time. The ability to promise and to intend to promise arguably depends on the existence of a social practice or set of conventions about what a promise is and what constitutes promising. Austin especially emphasized the importance of social fact and conventions in doing things with words, in particular with respect to the class of speech acts known as illocutionary acts .

Austin began by distinguishing between what he called ‘constatives’ and ‘performatives.’ A constative is simply saying something true or false. A performative is doing something by speaking; paradigmatically, one can get married by saying "I do" (Austin, 1961). Constatives are true or false, depending on their correspondence (or not) with the facts; performatives are actions and, as such, are not true or false, but ‘felicitous’ or ‘infelicitous,’ depending on whether or not they successfully perform the action in question. In particular, performative utterances to be felicitous must invoke an existing convention and be invoked in the right circumstances.

However, a clear delimitation between performatives and constatives proved to be difficult to establish. There are explicit performatives; a verb used in a certain way makes explicit the action being performed: "I bet that there is a dangerous animal there," "I guarantee that there is a dangerous animal there," "I warn you that there is a dangerous animal there." But the same action could be performed implicitly: "There is a dangerous animal there," where both issues of (in)felicities and issues of truth/falsity are simultaneously present. Instead of pursuing the distinction between performatives and constatives, Austin (1962a) proposed a new three-fold distinction.

According to this trichotomy, a speech act is, first of all, a locutionary act, that is, an act of saying something. Saying something can also be viewed from three different perspectives: (i) as a phonetic act: uttering certain noises; (ii) as a phatic act: uttering words "belonging to and as belonging to, a certain vocabulary, conforming to and as conforming to a certain grammar"; and (iii) as a rhetic act: uttering words "with a certain more-or-less definite sense and reference" (Austin, 1962a, 95). Now, to perform a locutionary act is also in general to perform an illocutionary act; in performing a locutionary act, we perform an act with a certain force : ordering, warning, assuring, promising, expressing an intention, and so on. And by doing that, we will normally produce "certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons" (ibidem, 101) that Austin calls perlocutionary . At the point of his untimely death, Austin's work on speech act theory was far from complete. His main work, How to do things with words was published posthumously, based on lecture notes of Austin and his students.

Austin's student, John R. Searle (1969) developed speech act theory as a theory of the constitutive rules for performing illocutionary acts, i.e., the rules that tell what performing (successfully) an illocutionary act (with certain illocutionary force and certain propositional content) consists in. The rules are classified as (i) propositional content rules, which put conditions on the propositional content of some illocutionary acts; (ii) preparatory rules, which tell what the speaker will imply in the performance of the illocutionary acts; (iii) sincerity rules, that tell what psychological state the speaker expresses to be in; and (iv) essential rules, which tell us what the action consists in essentially .

Let's return to our case of promising. According to Searle's analysis, for an utterance by S to H to count as a promise must meet the following conditions:

• The propositional content represents some future action A by S ;
• H prefers S 's doing A to her not doing it, and S believes that to be so; and it is not obvious both to S and H that S will do A in the normal course of events;
• S intends to do A ; and
• Promising counts as the undertaking of an obligation of S to do A .

If someone, then, wants to make a (felicitous) promise she must meet these conventional conditions. The study of the these conventional conditions for illocutionary acts, together with the study of the their correct taxonomy constitutes the core of speech act theory.

Based on their essential conditions, and attending to the minimal purpose or intention of the speaker in performing an illocutionary act, Searle (1975a) proposes a taxonomy of illocutionary acts into five mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes:

• Representative or assertive . The speaker becomes committed to the truth of the propositional content; for example, asserting: "It's raining."
• Directive . The speaker tries to get the hearer to act in such a way as to fulfill what is represented by the propositional content; for example, commanding: "Close the door!"
• Commissive . The speaker becomes committed to act in the way represented by the propositional content; for example, promising: "I'll finish the paper by tomorrow."
• Expressive . The speaker simply expresses the sincerity condition of the illocutionary act: "I'm glad it's raining!"
• Declarative . The speaker performs an action just representing herself as performing that action: "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth."

Speech act theory, then, adopts a social or institutional view of linguistic meaning. This is sometimes opposed to the intentionalist view favored by Grice (1957) and Strawson (1964), but there need be no inconsistency. (For an interesting discussion on the relationship between intentionalist and social, institutional and intersubjective views on meaning and communication by Searle, Bennett, Habermas and Appel, see part I of Lepore & Van Gulick 1991.)

Herbert Paul Grice (b. 1913-d. 1988) emphasized the distinction Voltaire makes, in our opening quotation, between what words mean, what the speaker literally says when using them, and what the speaker means or intends to communicate by using those words, which often goes considerably beyond what is said. I ask you to lunch and you reply, "I have a one o'clock class I'm not prepared for." You have conveyed to me that you will not be coming to lunch, although you haven't literally said so. You intend for me to figure out that by indicating a reason for not coming to lunch (the need to prepare your class) you intend to convey that you are not coming to lunch for that reason. The study of such conversational implicatures is the core of Grice's influential theory.

Grice's so-called theory of conversation starts with a sharp distinction between what someone says and what someone ‘implicates’ by uttering a sentence. What someone says is determined by the conventional meaning of the sentence uttered and contextual processes of disambiguation and reference fixing; what she implicates is associated with the existence to some rational principles and maxims governing conversation (setting aside "conventional implicatures" which we discuss below). What is said has been widely identified with the literal content of the utterance; what is implicated, the implicature, with the non-literal, what it is (intentionally) communicated, but not said, by the speaker. Consider his initial example:

A and B are talking about a mutual friend, C, who is now working in a bank. A asks B how C is getting on in his job, and B replies: Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn't been to prison yet. (Grice 1967a/1989, 24.)

What did B say by uttering "he hasn't been to prison yet"? Roughly, all he literally said of C was that he hasn't been to prison up to the time of utterance. This is what the conventional sentence meaning plus contextual processes of disambiguation, precisification of vague expressions and reference fixing provide.

But, normally, B would have implicated more than this: that C is the sort of person likely to yield to the temptation provided by his occupation. According to Grice, the ‘calculation’ of conversational implicatures is grounded on common knowledge of what the speaker has said (or better, the fact that he has said it), the linguistic and extra linguistic context of the utterance, general background information, and the consideration of what Grice dubs the ‘Cooperative Principle (CP)’:

Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. (Grice 1967a/1989, 26.)

According to Grice, the CP is implemented, in the plans of speakers and understanding of hearers, by following ‘maxims:’

• Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
• Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
• (Supermaxim): Try to make your contribution one that is true.
• Do not say what you believe to be false.
• Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
• Be relevant.
• (Supermaxim): Be perspicuous.
• Avoid obscurity of expression.
• Avoid ambiguity.
• Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
• Be orderly.
• Frame whatever you say in the form most suitable for any reply that would be regarded as appropriate; or, facilitate in your form of expression the appropriate reply (added by Grice 1981/1989, 273).

Grice sees the principles governing conversation as derived from general principles governing human rational cooperative action. There has been much discussion about the CP and the maxims. Are all of them necessary? Do we need more? Are they normative or descriptive? What's their exact role in the theory of implicatures: Are they principles that speakers and hearers are assumed to observe in rational communication, or simply theorist's tools for rational reconstruction? Does the CP require from speaker and hearer further cooperation towards a common goal beyond that of understanding and being understood? What is clear is that Grice attributes to these principles an essential role for the definition and the interpretation of conversational implicatures.

Implicatures

The paradigmatic kind of reasoning on the part of the hearer for the determination of implicatures, according to Grice, follows this pattern:

He has said that p ; there is no reason to suppose that he is not observing the maxims, or at least the CP; he could not be doing this unless he thought that q ; he knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that he thinks that q is required ; he has done nothing to stop me thinking that q; he intends me to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that q ; and so he has implicated that q . (Grice, 1967a/1989, 31.)

Applied to the earlier example, about the banker, A would reason in the following way:

B has said that C has not been to prison yet ( p ); he is apparently flouting the maxim of manner, but I have no reason to suppose that he is opting out CP; his violation of the maxim would only be apparent if he is thinking that C is potentially dishonest ( q ); B knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I can figure out he is thinking that q ; …; so he has implicated that q .

Conversational implicatures have the following characteristics:

… a putative conversational implicature that p is explicitly cancelable if, to the form of words the utterance of which putatively implicates that p , it is admissible to add but not p , or I do not mean to imply that p , and it is contextually cancelable if one can find situations in which the utterance of the form of words would simply not carry the implicature. (Grice, 1967b/1989, 44.)

… it will not be possible to find another way of saying the same thing, which simply lacks the implicature in question, except where some special feature of the substituted version is itself relevant to the determination of an implicature (in virtue of one of the maxims of Manner). (Grice 1967a, 1989, 39.)

The presence of a conversational implicature must be capable of being worked out; for even if it can in fact be intuitively grasped, unless the intuition is replaceable by an argument, the implicature (if present at all) will not count as a conversational implicature. (Grice 1967a, 1989, 31.)

This last property is what Grice considers crucial for distinguishing between conversational and conventional implicatures. Conventional implicatures are generated by the meaning of certain particles like ‘but’ or ‘therefore.’ Consider the difference between (1) and (2):

• He is an Englishman, therefore he is brave.
• He is an Englishman, and he is brave.
• His being brave follows from his being English.

According to Grice, a speaker has said the same with (1) as with (2). The difference is that with (1) he implicates (3). This is a conventional implicature. It is the conventional meaning of ‘therefore,’ and not maxims of cooperation, that carry us beyond what is said.

Grice's concept of conventional implicatures (which has antecedents in Frege; see Bach 1999b) is the most controversial part of his theory of conversation for many followers, for several reasons. According to some, its application to particular examples runs against common intuitions. By using the word ‘therefore’ is the speaker not saying that there is some causal connection between being brave and being English? Isn't he saying and bot merely implying that one's being brave follows from one's being English. Moreover, the category of conventional implicatures blurs the distinction between what is said, usually conceived as determined by the semantic conventions of language, and what is implicated, usually thought of as a matter of inference as to a speaker's intentions in saying what he or she does. Conventional sentence meaning contributes crucially to what is said, which is considered essentially different from implicatures; but now we have the result that some elements of conventional meaning do not contribute to what is said but to implicatures (albeit conventional). Finally, it places the study of the conventional meaning of some expressions within the realm of pragmatics (study of implicatures), rather than semantics, usually conceived as the home of conventional meaning.

Among conversational implicatures, Grice distinguished between ‘particularized’ and ‘generalized.’ The former are the implicatures that are generated by saying something in virtue of some particular features of the context, "cases in which there is no room for the idea that an implicature of this sort is normally carried by saying that p ." (Grice 1967a/1989, 37) The above example of conversational implicature is, then, a case of particularized conversational implicature. A generalized conversational implicature occurs where "the use of a certain forms of words in an utterance would normally (in the absence of special circumstances) carry such-and-such an implicature or type of implicature." (Ibid.). Grice's first example is a sentence of the form " X is meeting a woman this evening." Anyone who utters this sentence, in absence of special circumstances, would be taken to implicate that the woman in question was someone other than X 's "wife, mother, sister, or perhaps even close platonic friend" (Ibid.) Being an implicature, it could be cancelled, either implicitly, in appropriate circumstances, or explicitly, adding some clause that implies its denial.

Particularized conversational implicatures have a wide range of applications that Grice himself illustrates: the informative use of tautologies, irony, metaphor, hyperbole, meiosis and, in principle, any kind of non-literal use that relies in special circumstances of the utterance can be explained in terms of them. But generalized conversational implicatures apply to philosophically more important issues, in particular, to what, according to the introduction to Logic and Conversation , was Grice's most important motivation: the issue of the difference of meaning between logical constants of formal languages and their counterparts in natural languages, or the alleged meanings of verbs like ‘to look like,’ ‘to believe’ or ‘to know.’ Generalized conversational implicatures are also at the heart of Grice's Modified Occam's Razor (" Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity ," Grice 1967b/1989, 47), which has served as a criterion for distinguishing semantic issues from pragmatic uses and for preferring, in general, an explanation in terms of implicatures rather than a semantic one that postulates ambiguity.

Grice is probably best known in the philosophy of language for his theory of implicatures. It is surely his most influential body of work for those parts of linguistics, psychology, cognitive science and computer science that share philosophy's interest in language. His theory of meaning, however, is indispensable for understanding his overall philosophical vision and his ‘big picture’ of language and communication. We will not explain this project, which consists in part of ultimately reducing all semantic notions to psychological ones. But we will say a bit about its central concept of ‘M-intentions,’ in order to develop an important aspect of his pragmatic theory, the concept of a communicative intention .

Communicative intentions

Grice conceived that semantic notions like word and sentence meaning were ultimately based on speaker's meaning, and this on speaker's intention, what he called M-intentions . What he conceived as a study of the ontology of semantic notions has been received, however, as a characterization of communicative intentions, the mental causes of communicative acts, and those that the hearer has to understand for the communicative act to be successful.

So conceived, communicative intentions have these characteristic properties:

• They are always oriented towards some other agent — the addressee.
• They are overt, that is, they are intended to be recognized by the addressee.
• Their satisfaction consists precisely in being recognized by the addressee.

These properties are already pointed out in the first version of Grice's M-intentions:

"A meant something by x" is (roughly) equivalent to "A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention." (Grice 1957/1989, 220.)

Grice later reformulated this definition, giving rise to a hot debate about the precise characterization of communicative intentions, mainly about two points:

But even this rather modest subgoal may be too much to require for the success of the communicative action qua communicative action. Suppose I say that it is raining, and you hear me and understand the meaning of my words. But you don't think I am being sincere; you don't believe that I believe what I said. But still, I have said it. My overall plan to help insure that you don't get wet and catch cold may fail, but I do seem to have succeeded in saying what I set out to say. It seems that the only new mental state needed is the audience's recognition of the speaker's communicative intention; his understanding of the speaker's utterance. This is what has been called ‘illocutionary uptake’:

In the case of illocutionary acts we succeed in doing what we are trying to do by getting our audience to recognize what we are trying to do. But the ‘effect’ on the hearer is not a belief or a response, it consists simply in the hearer understanding the utterance of the speaker. (Searle 1969, 47.)

So the most common answer has been to follow Searle on this point and exclude perlocutionary results, beyond uptake of this sort, from the content of communicative intentions.

The understanding of the force of an utterance in all cases involves recognizing what may be called broadly an audience-directed intention and recognizing it as wholly overt, as intended to be recognized. (Strawson 1964, 459.)

The exact formulation of this requirement has been a subject of intense debate, some arguing for a reflexive (self-referential) definition, others for a potentially infinite but practically finite number of clauses in the definition, with conceptual, logical or psychological arguments. What seems to be a matter of consensus is that every covert or even neutral (with respect to its intended recognition by the addressee) aspect of the speaker's intention must be left out of the definition of communicative intentions.

A short but comprehensive way of concluding would be to say that the fulfillment of communicative intentions consists precisely in being recognized by the addressee. (For this debate, see Searle 1969; Schiffer 1972; Harman 1974; Blackburn 1984; Sperber and Wilson 1986; Recanati 1986; Bach 1987 or Neale 1992.)

After the founding work made in parallel by Austin-Searle, on the one side, and by Grice, on the other, Kent Bach and Robert Harnish ( Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts (1979)) made an important attempt to integrate the founders' insights in a unified theory.

On the whole, if choosing the appropriate label for their theory between either ‘neo-Gricean’ or ‘neo-Austinian/Searlean,’ the first seem the most appropriate: their theory might be taken to lean toward the Gricean conception of inferential understanding of the speaker's communicative intentions rather than to the Austin-Searle view of speech acts as performed according to some conventional or ‘constitutive’ rules. To obtain a unified theory they developed their own conceptual framework, based on the ideas of Grice, Austin and Searle but including many important innovations of their own. Here it is a brief description of some of them:

Locutionary acts

Like Austin, but unlike Searle, Bach and Harnish argue for the concept of locutionary acts: acts of using sentences with "a more or less definite ‘sense’ and a more or less definite ‘reference,’" in Austin's words. They are more explicit than Austin, and argue that determining what someone has (locutionarily) said by uttering a sentence amounts to determining

• the operative meaning of the sentence uttered
• the referents for the referring expressions
• the properties and relations being ascribed
• the times specified

With this information the hearer identifies what a speaker has said, at the locutionary level. From a contemporary perspective, the most remarkable point here is, in our opinion, that they see the determination of the locutionary act by the hearer, not as a matter of merely decoding the conventional meaning of the sentence uttered, but as a matter of inference that has to be based on linguistic meaning plus contextual information concerning the speaker's intentions. Grice did not claim that what a speaker said was determinable without consideration of the speaker's intentions; quite the contrary. But he was not particularly explicit about the way it was done, and the received view, anyway, has been that inference was exclusive to the ‘calculation’ of implicatures.

The distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts of saying also offers Bach and Harnish a useful conceptual tool for treating potentially problematic cases of discordance between utterance content and speaker's intentions, such as slips of the tongue, false referential beliefs, and irony.

To go from the locutionary to the illocutionary content, if there is any, the hearer has to infer the communicative intention of the speaker, and to do that, the hearer needs more information. Among other things, the hearer will have to make use of the Communicative Presumption (CP) that they state as follows:

The mutual belief in the linguistic community C L to the effect that whenever a member S says something in L to another member H , he is doing so with some recognizable illocutionary intent. (Bach and Harnish 1979, 61.)

The taxonomy of illocutionary acts

Bach and Harnish accept most of Searle's (1975a) critiques of Austin's taxonomy as well as his criteria for grouping illocutionary acts in terms of basic illocutionary intentions and expression of mental attitudes; but they make some amendments. To begin with, they discard Searle's class of declarative illocutionary acts (basically covering Austin's explicit performatives), because they take them to be basically assertives or constatives (see Searle 1989, Bach and Harnish 1992 for a further discussion of this issue). Then, the communicative illocutionary acts are (Bach and Harnish 1979, ch. 3):

• constatives , that express a speaker's belief and his desire that the hearer forms a similar one.
• directives , that express some attitude about a possible future action by the hearer and the intention that his utterance be taken as reason for the hearer's action.
• commissives , that express the speaker's intention to do something and the belief that his utterance obliges him to do it.
• acknowledgments , that express feelings toward the hearer (or the intention that the utterance will meet some social expectations regarding the expression of feelings).

Bach and Harnish make a distinctions between communicative illocutionary acts , the category to which these four types belong, and the category of conventional illocutionary acts , which they take to be fundamentally different. Communicative acts are acts performed with certain communicative intentions whose recognition by the hearer is necessary for the acts to be successful. In conventional acts, on the other hand, no communicative intention need be involved. Success is a matter of convention, not intention. Conventional acts determine and produce facts of institutional nature, if performed according to conventions that do not require any communicative intention on the part of the speaker and, a fortiori, neither its recognition on the part of any hearer. Among conventional acts, Bach and Harnish (1979, ch. 6) distinguish between two classes:

• effectives , that when produced by the appropriate person in appropriate circumstances produce a change, a new fact in an institutional context; an example might the President of the United States statement that he vetoes a piece of legislation.
• verdictives , do not produce facts, but determine facts, natural or institutional, with an official, binding effect in the institutional context; an example is a jury's verdict of guilt; it does not create the fact of guilt, but settles the issue of guilt in a binding way.

The Speech Act Schema (SAS) gives the form of the required inference by the hearer to understand fully the speaker's utterance from the meaning of the sentence used to the perlocutionary act performed, using, besides linguistic information, a system of communicative and conversational presumptions, together with contextual mutual beliefs. Bach and Harnish think that inference is involved, from the beginning, in the determination of the locutionary act. The next step is to infer the literal illocutionary intentions and from here, in the simplest case, go for the (intended) perlocutionary ones, if any. Roughly, an illocutionary act is literal when its propositional content coincides with the content of the locutionary act, and the force of the former is within the constraints imposed by the latter.

But it may happen that the literal illocutionary act cannot be taken as a reasonable thing to have been done by the speaker in some specific circumstances (say, the literal claim is false and obviously so), and the hearer has to search for another non-literal act. Someone speaks non-literally when she does not mean what she says but something else instead.

It can also be the case that the speaker is doing more than merely performing a literal act. She means what she says but she means more. The hearer will have to infer the indirect act being performed. It must be noticed that indirect acts can also be based on non-literal acts. Then the SAS extends to account for the intentional perlocutionary effects of the speech act.

Bach and Harnish's SAS offers a detailed study of the structure of utterance interpretation as an inferential process. Taken as an attempt of unification of the two main roots of pragmatics, it can be considered as the closing of the ‘Classic Pragmatics' period and the transition from ‘philosophical’ pragmatics to linguistic and psychological pragmatics. They can be still located within far-side pragmatics but their clear idea of the role of pragmatic ‘intrusion’ in the determination of what is said is announcing the arrival of near-side pragmatics.

2.2 Near-side Pragmatics

In logic and in many of the investigations of logical empiricists in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, artificial languages were the focus of attention. First the predicate calculus, and then various extensions of it incorporating modal and temporal operators seemed the appropriate linguistic vehicles for clear-thinking philosophers. Issues about the use of natural languages were often thought to be beyond the scope of the proof-theoretic and model-theoretic tools developed by logicians. As Stalnaker put it in 1970,

The problems of pragmatics have been treated informally by philosophers in the ordinary language tradition, and by some linguists, but logicians and philosophers of a formalistic frame of mind have generally ignored pragmatic problems … . (Stalnaker 1970/1999, 31.)

(For an important exception, see Reichenbach's Elements of Symbolic Logic (1947).)

The idea that techniques of formal semantics should be adapted to natural languages was forcefully defended by Donald Davidson, on general philosophical principles, and Richard Montague, who applied the techniques of possible worlds semantics to fragments of English in a body of work that was influential in both philosophy and linguistics.

These attempts make clear that, on the near side of what is said, semantics and pragmatics are quite enmeshed. The interpretation of indexicals and demonstratives seems squarely in the realm of pragmatics, since it is particular facts about particular utterances, such as the speaker, time, and location, that determine the interpretation of ‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘now’ and the like. But the relevance of these varying factors is determined by a non-varying rule of meaning, as Bar-Hillel (1954) had already observed.

In his essay "Pragmatics" (1968), Richard Montague generalized the concept of a possible world to deal with a number of phenomena, including indexicals. An index combines a possible world with other factors relevant to the truth value of a sentence. To study tensed sentences, for example, one incorporates times into indices. A sentence like "Elwood went to the store," is true in a world, at a time. A sentence like "I went to the store," would be true in a world, at a time, for a speaker: roughly, if the speaker went to the store prior to the time in the world.

If we ignore time, we can think of the meaning of "I am sitting" as a function from pairs of speakers and worlds to truth-values. Suppose Moe is sitting in the actual world w and standing in alternative world w ′, while Curley is standing in w and sitting in w ′. "I am sitting" is true at <Moe, w > and <Curley, w ′>.

A somewhat different approach to indexicality, implemented in different ways by David Kaplan and Robert Stalnaker, has been much more influential, however. Here is how Stalnaker put the key idea:

The scheme I am proposing looks roughly like this: The syntactical and semantical rules for a language determine an interpreted sentence or clause: this, together with some features of the context of use of the sentence or clause determines a proposition; this in turn, together with a possible world, determines a truth-value. An interpreted sentence, then, corresponds to a function from contexts into propositions, and a proposition is a function from possible worlds into truth-values. (Stalnaker 1970/1999, 36.)

Both of these philosophers develop a‘two-tiered’ approach to the content of utterances of sentences containing indexicals. "I am sitting" expresses the proposition that Moe is sitting in a context with Moe as speaker, a different proposition, that Curley is sitting, in a context with Curley as speaker. Thus we have two functions involved. The character (Kaplan) or propositional concept (Stalnaker) is a function from contexts to propositions. And, at least within possible worlds semantics, propositions are conceived as functions from worlds to truth-values.

This ‘two-tiered’ approach brings out what Moe's utterance of "I am sitting," has and doesn't have in common with Curley's utterance of "You are sitting," directed at Moe. They both have the same truth-value, of course, but more importantly both express the same proposition.

There are, however, important differences in the way Kaplan and Stalnaker implement this idea, which reflect the very different ways in which they think about context.

The most influential treatment of indexicals and demonstratives has probably been David Kaplan's monograph Demonstratives (1989), versions of which were circulated in the seventies. Kaplan's basic concepts are context , character , and content . Character is what is provided by sentences with indexicals, like "I am sitting," or "You are sitting," a function from contextual features to contents.

For Kaplan, a context is a quadruple of an agent, location, time and world; intuitively, these are the speaker of an utterance, the time and location of the utterance, and the possible world in which it occurs; the beliefs of the speaker as to who he is, where he is, and when it is, and what the real world is like are irrelevant to determining content, although not of course to explaining why the speaker says what he does. (The possible world is the contextual feature Kaplan uses to deal with "actually"). A proper context is one in which the agent is at the location at the time in the world, which is of course the characteristic relation among the speaker, time, location and world of an utterance.

Kaplan did not officially take his theory to be a theory of utterances. He thought of his account, or at least of the formal theory he supplies, as a theory of occurrences , or sentences-in-context , which are abstract objects consisting of pairs of contexts and expression types. Utterances, Kaplan argues, are an unsuitable subject matter for logical investigation. Utterances take time, for one thing, so it would not be possible to insist that all of the premises of an argument share the same context, but this stipulation is needed for logic. For another, since any utterance of "I am not speaking" would be false, we might have to conclude that "I am speaking" is a logical truth, an unwelcome result.

Kaplan does not call what he is doing "pragmatics" but the semantics of indexicals and demonstratives.

Kaplan's theory was part of a movement in the philosophy of language that developed the sixties and seventies, which we will call ‘referentialism.’ For our purposes, the salient aspects of referentialism are (i) in some forms, heavy reliance was made of the concept of ‘what is said,’ — often equated with ‘the proposition expressed’ — by a particular utterance of a suitably declarative sentence; (ii) referentialists argued persuasively that ‘what is said’ or ‘the proposition expressed’ depends on reference of names, indexicals and demonstratives, rather than any descriptive ‘backing’ or identifying conditions speakers or hearers might associate with them. More controversially, Donnellan argued that in the case of ‘referential’ uses of definite descriptions, the reference of the description, rather than the descriptive condition, is a constituent of the proposition expressed.

The question naturally raises, then, how does the referentialist conception of what is said fit with Grice's theory of conversation, which, as we have seen, pertains to the reasons the speaker has for saying what he does.

It can be argued that Kaplan's concept of content fits in with Grice's theory of conversation. For the purposes of formal semantics and logic, the context (in Kaplan's sense) can be taken as given. Kaplan treats both the sentence and the context as abstract objects, and all of the rules of interpretation are suitably deductive. Pragmatics begins when we apply Kaplan's theory to utterances. Semantics and near-side pragmatics resolve reference, and so what proposition is expressed, that is, what is said, by an utterance involving the use of a sentence in a context. Then Grice's theory of conversation, and the Austin-Searle theory of speech acts, takes over to tell us what else the speaker has implicated by saying what she did, and what else she has accomplished in or by saying what she did.

This picture is not without problems, however. Referentialism seems to bring in its wake various version of Frege's problem of identity, and these are relevant to pragmatics.

Consider the statements "Hespherus is visible in the eastern sky" and "Phosphorus is visible in the eastern sky." On referentialist principles, the two statements express the same proposition, the one that is true in all worlds in which Venus (the planet that ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ are two names for) is visible in the eastern sky. But they seem to convey different information. And, most dramatically, "Hesperus is Hesperus" seems trivial, while "Hesperus is Phosphorus" or "Phosphorus is Venus" seem to convey valuable information. And yet, on referentialist principles, all three identity statements express the same proposition.

Paradigmatically, according to Grice's theory, the input to the hearer's reasoning about implicatures is what is said. Referentialism would seem to imply that different ways of saying the same thing should be conversationally equivalent. But this does not seem correct. If Elwood says, "I can't reach the salt," this has the implicature that he would appreciate someone passing it to him. But what if he says, "Elwood can't reach the salt"? The implicatures are not so clear. Elwood seems to have flouted the maxim of quantity, in both its submaxims, giving us information we don't need (the name of the person who can't reach the salt), and denying us information we do need, namely that the speaker is the person whose relation to the saltshaker is at issue. Grice's maxims of manner allow the theory of conversation to deal with information that depends on how something is said, rather than only what is said ; it seems these maxims may have to be exploited beyond what Grice envisaged to explain how co-referential names and indexicals can give rise to non-equivalent implicatures, if we adopt the referentialist account of what is said.

In his seminal article "Pragmatics" (1970) Stalnaker proposed a conception of semantics and pragmatics that would allow the tools and traditions of formal semantics to be extended to pragmatics. The pragmatic phenomena he mainly had in mind are what we are calling "near-side pragmatics," involving the way in which, in the setting of natural language, contextual factors interact with conventional meaning to determine what is said, or the proposition expressed. Stalnaker uses his pragmatic theory to deal with issues that might be thought to require a semantic explanation, such as the informativeness of identity statements ("Hesperus is Phosphorus") and the import of negative existentials ("Homer did not exist"); in doing so he saw himself as continuing in a Gricean tradition:

… I think the general Gricean strategy of trying to reduce the burden on semantics by explaining as much of the phenomena as possible in terms of truisms about conversation as a rational activity remains as fruitful and promising as it was when he first proposed it. (Stalnaker 1999, 113.)

Formal semantics, as Stalnaker sees it, can be conceived as the study of propositions within a possible worlds framework. Artificial languages are designed to fit the meanings they are to express, so the connection between language and proposition should not be a tricky issue. But with natural languages,

it is a semantical problem to specify the rules for matching up sentences of a natural language with the propositions that they express. In most cases…the rules will not match sentences directly with propositions, but will match sentences with propositions relative to features of the context in which the sentence is used. These contextual features are a part of the subject matter of pragmatics… (Stalnaker 1972/1999, 34.)

Presupposition, Common Ground and Context

Like Kaplan, Stalnaker has a two-tiered picture: sentence meanings provide a function from contexts to propositions; propositions themselves are functions from worlds to truth-values. Stalnaker, however, has a quite different picture of context, which he bases on the concept of presupposition . Intuitions about what is said are accompanied by intuitions about what is not said, but merely presupposed. If Elwood says,

• The Queen of England has several palaces

he does not say that there is a Queen of England, but he presupposes that there is. And consider

• Peter knows the sea is salty
• It was James Madison that led America to defeat in the war of 1812
• Bush regrets invading Iraq
• Clinton resumed cheating on his wife

In saying (2), Elwood would not say, but merely presuppose, that the sea is salty. In saying (3) he would presuppose, but not say, that some led America to defeat in the War of 1812. In saying (4) Elwood would presuppose that Bush invaded Iraq, and in (5) he would presuppose that Clinton had cheated on his wife, and then stopped doing so for a period of time (possibly rather short).

Presupposition has been treated as a semantic phenomenon and as a pragmatic phenomenon. Arguably, the negation of each of (1)-(5) would have the same presupposition. This has led to the semantic conception of presupposition as a non-trivial entailment that is shared by a statement and its negation. Semantical approaches to presupposition encounter some tricky problems, the most important of which is "the projection problem." If presupposition is semantic, then it seems the presuppositions of complex sentences should be a function of the presuppositions of the simple sentences that make them up, but it is at least not obvious that this is so. Consider, for example,

• The king has a son
• The king's son is bald
• If the king has a son, the king's son is bald

(6) presupposes that there is a king, (7) that there is a king and that the king has a son. (8) contains both (6) and (7). It seems to inherit the presupposition of (6) but not of (7); that is, (8) presupposes that there is a king, but not that he has a son. A correct theory of just how presuppositions are inherited from simple to complex sentences would solve the projection problem, and doing so seems to be required for a semantic account of presupposition. A number of interesting theories have been put forward; it is not our purpose to claim that they are or are not successful. (See Kartunnen 1973, 1974; Kartunnen and Peters 1979; Gazdar 1979; Soames 1989; Burton-Roberts 1989a-b, 1999; Heim 1992; Horn 19995; Asher and Lascarides 1998; Carston 1998, 1999a; Kamp 2001; Beaver 2002.)

Stalnaker recognizes semantic presupposition in the case of simple sentences (1)-(5). And he thinks that semantic presuppositions are also pragmatically presupposed; that is, if P is a semantic presupposition of what the speaker says, then the speaker will in fact take P for granted and take his audience to do so too; he will treat P as part of the common ground :

There is no conflict between the semantic and pragmatic concepts of presupposition; they are explications of related but different ideas. In general, any semantic presupposition of a proposition expressed in a given context will be a pragmatic presupposition of the people in the context, but the converse clearly does not hold. To presuppose a proposition in the pragmatic sense is to take its truth for granted, and to assume that others involved in the context do the same… The set of all the presuppositions made by a person in a given context determines a class of possible worlds, the ones consistent with all the presuppositions. This class sets the boundaries of the linguistic situation. (Stalnaker 1972/1999, 38.)

Stalnaker emphasizes that when we make assertions (the paradigmatic use of language, conceived as a tool for exchanging information), there is a natural division into what the speaker presupposes and what the speaker says. If Elwood says, "The Queen of England has charming grandchildren," he presupposes that there is a unique queen of England, and says that her grandchildren are charming. In the ordinary case, the presupposition would be shared by the conversational participants, but not everyone would already know, or believe, what Elwood says about her. The presuppositions that are shared are the common ground , which is an important part of the context of an utterance. Elwood's assertion is an attempt to add to the common ground that additional content that the queen's grandchildren are charming. Of course, someone may deny that this is so, in which case it wouldn't become part of the common ground. Nevertheless, we can conceptualize the meaning of a sentence, or a central part of the meaning of a sentence, in terms of the change a use of it attempts to make to the common ground.

Propositional Concepts

Unlike Kaplan, Stalnaker has a homogeneous theory of contexts and contents. Both context and content can be conceived of as propositions, or equivalently as sets of worlds. A context is a set of worlds, that capture the common ground in a conversation, the presuppositions that all of the participants share. The point of an assertion is to change the common ground. An utterance tokens is associated with a propositional concept, which characterizes the context-change potential of an assertion.

A propositional concept is a function from possible worlds into propositions, or, equivalently, a function from an ordered pair of possible worlds into a truth-value.

The truth-value of a statement like "That man is sitting" will depend on two issues: (i) who is being referred to as ‘that man’; (ii) who is sitting. The propositional concept corresponding to this statement will yield the truth for any pair of worlds w , w ′ such that there is an x that is referred to as ‘that man’ in w , and x is sitting in w ′.

Suppose for example, we are talking about Albert. The common ground will include such things as that ‘Albert’ names a certain person that attended Stanford last year, that this person was from Bonn, and that he intended to return and teach in Germany. The common ground leaves open whether he is, as we speak, in Germany or not. I say, "Albert isn't in Germany, but in Switzerland, this month." If no one objects, the common ground will change; the worlds in which Albert is anywhere but in Switzerland will be eliminated. The propositional concept of an utterance can be seen as the effect it will have on the various contexts in which it might occur. Which worlds my assertion adds or deletes from the common ground will depend on who we are talking about (the reference of ‘Albert’) and which month it is when I speak, for example. The proposition expressed by a statement, what is asserted, will be a proposition that captures the change proposed for the context in which it occurs.

Suppose now that you and I are talking, and not far in the distance are Elwood and Ambrose. Elwood is clearly standing; it's not so clear whether Ambrose is standing or sitting. I point to Ambrose and say, "that man is sitting." Given that I am pointing to Ambrose, my statement will be true only if he is sitting, and so perhaps you change your beliefs accordingly; what was not part of the common ground, that Ambrose was sitting, now becomes part of the common ground.

Another possibility is that you think you see Ambrose at least as clearly than I do, and it is not at all clear that I am right. So you reject my proposal to modify the common ground, and say, "Ambrose may not be sitting."

But there is a third possibility, too. Suppose you took me as pointing to Elwood. But if I am pointing to Elwood, I am saying something patently false, for it is clear that he is standing. To make sense of my remark, the simplest thing to do is change your view of whom I am pointing at: Ambrose rather than Elwood. Now the change is not in who you think is sitting or not, but whom you think I am pointing to. Given the propositional concept of the utterance "that man is sitting", it works, in the paradigmatic case, to convey information about who is sitting, and it also has the capacity, in a different situation, to convey information about to whom I am pointing.

The concept of a propositional concept allows Stalnaker to accommodate the facts that, as we saw above, seemed to pose a problem for referentialists. Suppose I say "Bill Clinton was a boy in Hope, Arkansas." On a referentialist analysis, I have expressed a proposition that is true in all and only worlds in which Bill Clinton was a boy in that town, no matter what he is called in the worlds or what the town is called. Now suppose I am lost in Arkansas, drive into Hope without knowing it, and see a sign: "Bill Blythe was grew up in this town." I say to myself, "Bill Blythe was a boy in this town." On referentialist principles, the content of this remark is the same: the proposition true in all and only worlds in which Bill Clinton (who was called "Bill Blythe" when young) grew up in Hope. But the two statements seem importantly different.

Now consider the propositional concepts P BC and P BB of "Bill Clinton was a boy in Hope, Arkansas" and "Bill Blythe was a boy in this town." Take the first argument to be the actual world, which we can call @, the context in which both statements actually occur. The facts of the world (including the facts about the utterances) determine that the same person is referred to with "Bill Clinton" and "Bill Blythe" and the same town with "Hope, Arkansas," and "this town." So, no matter what world w we put in as second element, P BC (@, w ) and P BB (@, w ) will be the same, true if Clinton grew up in Hope in w , false if he did not. This accommodates the referentialism.

But in the actual situation, the actual world is not part of my presuppositions, my common ground. I don't know that I am speaking in a world in which "Bill Blythe" is a name of Bill Clinton, and "this town" refers to Hope, Arkansas. The set of worlds that captures my context will include the actual world, but many other worlds as well, such as worlds in which I am lost in Combs, Arkansas, rather than Hope, and in which "Bill Blythe" was the boyhood name of Orval Faubus.

Now suppose someone tells me, at this point, "Bill Blythe is Bill Clinton; this town is Hope, Arkansas." The effect will be to eliminate worlds like the ones just mentioned from my presupposition set; all worlds in which "Bill Blythe" stands for anyone but Clinton, and all worlds in which I am anywhere but in Hope.

3. Contemporary Pragmatic Theory

Most current pragmatic theorists are neo-Griceans in that they adopt at least some version of his main three contributions:

• a fundamental distinction of what a speaker says and what he implicates;
• a set of rules or principles, derived from general principles of rationality, cooperation and/or cognition, that guide, constrain or govern human linguistic communication (there are differences among neo-Griceans on the exact nature of these principles and of pragmatic reasoning generally, as we shall see); and
• a notion of communicative intention (called M(eaning)-intention by Grice) whose fulfillment consists in being recognized by the addressee.

Given these similarities, there are many differences. One important dimension involves disciplines and methodology. Following Carston (2005) there are at least three different general tendencies: those who see pragmatics, much in Grice's vein, as a philosophical project; those who concentrate on its interaction with grammar; and those who see it as an empirical psychological theory of utterance interpretation.

A second dimension has to do with the relative importance given to two models of communication. One is the coding-decoding model of Locke and Saussure, as developed in the twentieth century logic and philosophy in compositional theories of meaning and truth. The other model, which we owe mostly to Grice, also has Lockean roots, in that communication of belief from speaker to hearer lies at its center. But the mechanism of discovery is not decoding according to conventional rules, but intention-recognition and discovery based on ampliative inference. The two models are not inconsistent, and all theorists accept elements of each. The issue is their relative centrality and importance in the phenomenon of human communication with language.

According to the coding model, communication consists in a sender and a receiver sharing a common code or language and a channel, so that the former encodes the message and sends it for the latter to decode it. Communication is, following this picture, quite an easy matter. It just amounts to knowledge of language and a safe channel — i.e., without too much ‘noise.’ If sender and receiver share the knowledge of the code and the message makes its way through the channel the success of communication is guaranteed.

One of Grice's major contributions to the theory of communication was provision of an alternative to the Locke-Saussure model of communication as a coding and decoding of thoughts. One can think of the alternative either as a supplement or a replacement for the coding model.

Intentions and their recognition are at the heart of Grice's alternative. Even if the interpreter's reasoning is guided by the conversational principle or maxims, as Grice thought, intention-recognition is not basically a matter of following conventional rules, but ampliative reasoning about what is going on in other minds.

But how do the two models fit together? Is language mainly and centrally a matter of deduction, of coding and decoding according to the conventions of meaning, with a little intention-recognition around the near and far edges to take care of ambiguity and implicature? Or is communication mainly a matter of acting in ways that get one's intentions recognized, with the conventions of language being just a helpful resource for accomplishing this?

In the classical period, near-side pragmatics tended to be ignored, and the Gricean model applied only to issues beyond saying; all of this is consistent with the first picture. Many neo-Griceans still adopt much of the first picture, and see the core of language as an autonomous realm studied by semantics, in which the meanings of parts compositionally determine the meanings of wholes, the fundamental concept of meaning being the truth-conditions of sentences. Grice's work is often used to bolster this picture; Gricean considerations serve as a sort of shock-absorber, where apparent data that are difficult to handle on the autonomous-semantics picture are treated as merely apparent, resulting from mistaking implicatures for ‘semantic content.’ Recanati calls such theorists ‘minimalists;’ while no one denies that contextual facts and pragmatic reasoning are needed at the near side of what is said, according to these theorists, there is minimal intrusion of such considerations on autonomous semantics.

3.2 Relevance Theory

According to relevance theory this is a mistake. Sperber and Wilson (1986) see things the second way. Following Grice's model, understanding what someone means by an utterance is a matter of inferring the speaker's communicative intention: the hearer uses all kinds of information available to get at what the speaker intended to convey. The semantic information obtained by decoding the sentence uttered is but one example of such information. But much more information has to be used to infer what the speaker meant — that includes both what she said and what she implicated — by her utterance. So central is intention-recognition to understanding language that the code model, with autonomous semantics at its core, should largely be abandoned in favor of the inferential model. One kind of pragmatic reasoning pervades language use, near-side and far-side, and the areas in which the code model is applicable are basically marginal.

The need for supplementary information is too pervasive and too important to be a matter of something specifically linguistic, as might be suggested by Grice's conversational principle and maxims. Sperber and Wilson see the fundamental mechanism of such inferences as going well beyond language, and beyond humans. In terms of Carston's distinctions, relevance theory departs from Grice's philosophical project, and aims at an empirical psychological theory of human cognition and communication. They see the phenomenon they call ‘relevance’ as a psychological phenomenon basic to the lives not only of humans but of all animals with a cognitive repertoire sophisticated enough to have choices about which environmental cues to attend to. Evolution shapes the phenomenon of relevance; an animal's attention is drawn to environmental cues that provide the most crucial information. Sounds of an approaching cat grabs a bird's attention away from a worm; parents are alert to the sounds of their baby's crying. The phenomenon is extended through learning; the squeal of brakes grabs a driver's attention away from a pretty sunset. And the cues can be conventional; the dinner bell grabs the attention of the hungry child. The phenomenon of relevance in language is another manifestation of this very general phenomenon. ‘Relevance’ in relevance theory, then, should not be taken to be just our ordinary conception of relevance; nor should it be equated with the ‘relevance’ of Grice's maxim, although it is connected to that and intended to provide a deepened understanding of what underlies the maxim.

Relevance theory emphasizes that the rules of language leave all sorts of issues open. Some words have too many meanings: ambiguity. Others have too little meaning: ‘he,’ or ‘that.’ Decoding alone won't determine which meaning the speaker is using, or which object he intends to refer to with a pronoun. So even before we get to what is said, communication involves intentions on the part of the speaker that go beyond what he "codes-up" into language, and inferences on the part of the hearer that go beyond decoding. And of course when we consider what is conveyed beyond saying, the coding model is even less adequate. In all of these ways in which knowledge of convention falls short, relevance fills the gap.

A second difference rooted in the psychological conception of pragmatics is reliance on the representational theory of mind. The tenets of relevance theory are couched in talk of processing representations, rather than, and sometimes in addition to, the ordinary terminology of philosophical psychology.

Thus, instead of Grice's cooperative principle and conversational maxims, relevance theory postulates principles of relevance, which stem from the applicability of the general phenomenon of relevance to linguistic situations in the context of a representational theory of mind. There are two fundamental principles.

Pragmatic relevance is a property of utterances as a particular case of inputs to cognitive processes:

An input is relevant to an individual when it connects with available contextual assumptions to yield POSITIVE COGNITIVE EFFECTS: for example, true contextual implications, or warranted strengthenings or revisions of existing assumptions. (Sperber & Wilson forthcoming: 7)

The relevance of an input for an individual is a matter of degree. In general, the greater those positive cognitive effects with the smaller mental effort to get them, the greater the relevance of the input for the individual. Sperber and Wilson conjecture that the cognitive architecture of human beings tends to the maximization of relevance. This is what their first principle of relevance states:

First (cognitive) principle of relevance : Human cognition is geared towards the maximization of relevance (that is, to the achievement of as many contextual (cognitive) effects as possible for as little processing effort as possible).

This is the general cognitive principle that serves as background for communication in general and linguistic communication in particular. This applied to linguistic communication involves the following: For a communicative act to be successful, the speaker needs the addressee's attention; since everyone is geared towards the maximization of relevance, the speaker should try to make her utterance relevant enough to be worth the addressee's attention. This leads us to the

Second (communicative) principle of relevance : Every act of ostensive communication (e.g. an utterance) communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance.

By ‘ostensive’ relevance theorists make reference to the ‘overt’ or ‘public’ nature of the speaker's communicative intentions in acts of communication. Communication will be successful (i.e., understanding will occur) when the addressee recognizes those intentions. This process is mostly inferential and it has costs. So, the addressee would not start the inferential process without a presumption that it will report her some benefits, that is, without a presumption that the input is not only relevant, but as relevant as it can, ceteris paribus . Then, when someone utters something with a communicative purpose, she does it, according to relevance theory, with the presumption of optimal relevance, which states that

• The utterance is relevant enough to be worth processing.
• It is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator's abilities and preferences.

Although the principles of relevance account for near-side and far-side inferences, relevance theory acknowledges a fundamental distinction. On the near side, ambiguities, references, and issues of vagueness will be resolved so as to make the ‘explicature’ — the relevance theoretic replacement for ‘what is said,’ or ‘the proposition expressed’ — maximally relevant. A somewhat more complex sort of reasoning then derives implicatures. But these processes are not sequential. The ‘choice’ of explicature will be affected by the need to come to an understanding of everything that is communicated, explicature and implicature, as maximally relevant.

The addressee's understanding process starts then when she perceives an ostensive stimulus and stops when her expectations of relevance are satisfied, that is, when she has the most relevant hypothesis (the one with the most positive cognitive effects at the least processing costs) about the speaker's communicative intention. After decoding the sentence uttered and getting at the proposition expressed, the hearer will built a ‘context’ of ‘implicated premises' or assumptions for getting the cognitive positive effects that make the utterance relevant. Remember that those effects can be the reinforcement or revision of those assumptions but also conclusions obtained deducing then from the proposition expressed plus the context of premises. This context building will also be highly constrained by relevance, looking for as many positive effects as possible with the fewer inferential steps as possible. In addition, the hearer has to look for the contents or assumptions the speaker ostensively intends her to consider.

Consider the following exchange between A and B:

• Have you seen The Da Vinci Code ?
• I don't like action movies.

It is reasonable to think that in B's response has the following implicatures, as implicated premise and conclusion, respectively:

• Premise : That The Da Vinci Code is an action movie.
• Conclusion : That B has not seen it and, maybe, does not intend to see it.

A retrieves the premise that together with the content of B's response allows her to deduce a conclusion that is reasonable to think B intends her to make, given that it seems the most relevant (the one with more cognitive positive effects — as implicatures in this case — with low processing costs).

This is how relevance theory re-interprets the Gricean notion of particularized conversational implicatures: they are treated as implicated premises and conclusions, communicated beyond what the speaker says. On the other hand, relevance theorists abandon the category of generalized conversational implicatures. The phenomena Grice took to be as generalized conversational implicatures belong on the near side according to relevance theorists. They are not part of what is implicated by the speaker in making her utterance, but part of the explicature.

According to this view, pragmatics in general and the principle of relevance in particular have a lot to say about what happens on the near side of the explicature. It is probably fair to say that relevance theorists are mainly responsible for contemporary pragmatics focusing not only on what is conveyed beyond saying but also on saying itself, and for the fact that, as we shall see below, contemporary philosophical pragmatic theory tends to focus on the extent to which pragmatics ‘intrudes’ upon the traditional turf of semantics.

Together with Horn's (1984, 1989, 2004), Levinson's work (2000) is a good representative of grammar-oriented pragmatics. Levinson is only marginally a neo-Gricean. He is not committed to Grice's fundamental two-fold division between what is said, on the one hand, and implicatures, on the other — he proposes a third level of default or preferred interpretation. He does not provide a theory of utterance comprehension based primarily on recognition of communicative intentions, for default interpretations are not concerned with that. However, he does assume conversational principles and maxims, formulating a series of heuristics inspired in Grice's maxims of quantity and manner for a theory of Generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCIs) that, as important as they were in Grice's program, have been neglected by many post-Gricean authors. Levinson's GCI theory is not a philosophical theory of human communication, nor a psychological theory of utterance understanding, but a partial theory of utterance-type meaning with its focus on linguistics. As he puts it:

In the composite theory of meaning, the theory of GCIs plays just a small role in a general theory of communication… It is just to linguistic theory that GCIs have an unparalleled import. (Levinson 2000, pp. 21-22.)

The two-layered view of utterance content consisting, according to Levinson, of a level of encoded meaning ( sentence-meaning ) and a level of inferential meaning ( speaker's or utterance-(token)-meaning ), must be supplemented by a third intermediate layer of utterance-type-meaning which is not based "on direct computations on speaker-intentions but rather on general expectations about how language is normally used" (p. 22). These expectations are formulated by Levinson as a series heuristics, that have a clear connection with Grice's maxims of quantity and manner:

First (Q) Heuristic : What isn't said, isn't (i.e., what you do not say is not the case)

This is related to Grice's first maxim of quantity ("Make your contribution as informative as required") and is held responsible for the inference of so-called scalar implicatures, among others. So from an utterance of "Some students came to the party" it is inferable by default that not all the students came. It is not part of the meaning of ‘some,’ yet, in general — by default from the utterance-type — it is what one would infer in absence of evidence to the contrary. In this case, the heuristic has to be restricted to a set of alternates in a ‘scale,’ so that the use of one implicates the non-applicability of the other.

Second (I) Heuristic : What is expressed simply is stereotypically exemplified

This is related to Grice's second maxim of quantity ("Do not make your contribution more informative than necessary"), and is taken to be involved in cases of interpretation of conditionals as bi-conditionals, the enrichment of conjunctions with the expression of temporal and causal relations among the conjuncts, ‘bridging’ inferences, collective reading of plural noun phrases, and so on.

Third (M) Heuristic : What is said in an abnormal way, isn't normal (i.e., marked message indicates marked situation)

This heuristic is related to Grice's maxim of manner and, specially, to the first submaxim ("Avoid obscurity of expression") and the fourth ("Avoid prolixity"). If according to the second heuristic an unmarked utterance gives rise to a stereotypical interpretation, now we have that this interpretation is overruled if a marked utterance is produced. One of the clearest examples is double negation versus simple positive assertion. Compare "It's possible the plane will be late" with "It's not impossible that the plane will be late."

When conflict among these three heuristics arise, Levinson argues that these are resolved in the following way: Q defeats M , and M defeats I .

Contemporary philosophical approaches to pragmatics are often classified by their view of the two models discussed in Section 3.1 . ‘Literalists’ think that semantics is basically autonomous, with little ‘pragmatic intrusion’; ‘contextualists’ adopt the basic outlines of the Relevance Theory view of the importance of pragmatics at every level, while perhaps demurring on many of the details and the psychological orientation.

Take, for example, an utterance of "It is raining" by John now in the CSLI patio in a telephone conversation with Kepa, who is in Donostia. John is talking about the weather in Stanford. Arguably, what John says is that it is raining in Stanford . This is what he intends for Kepa to understand, and it is the content of the belief, formed by looking at the weather around him, that motivates his utterance. Stanford, then, seems to be a constituent, part of the subject matter, of John's remark. But how did it get there? It seems that it is a matter of pragmatics; it is a fact about the context of John's remark that the conversation is about Stanford, and that suffices. This is an example of what Perry (1986) calls ‘unarticulated constituents,’ and an instance of a more general phenomenon we will call ‘unarticulated content.’

The same basic choice, about what to do with apparently unarticulated content that seems to be part of what is said, presents itself in connection with a number of other phenomena: ‘enriched’ uses of logical operators and numerals ("Mary got married and [ then ] had [ exactly ] three children), quantifier domain restriction ("Nobody [ in the class ] was paying attention"), comparative adjectives ("John is short [ for a football player ]"), and a long list of phenomena reconsidered now as possibly being part of what is said, the explicature or the content of the utterance, but not in terms of implicatures.

Most contemporary theorists would acknowledge that in such cases one might describe ‘what is said’ in terms of the unarticulated content: John said that it was raining at Stanford ; the speaker said that Mary got married and then had children, and so forth. And there is general agreement that intuitions about ‘what is said’ cannot by themselves carry much theoretical weight, and there is considerable disagreement about theoretical intepretation of unarticulated content.

Literalists argue that the important divide, traditionally marked by ‘what is said,’ should be maintained, although marked by new terminology. Cappelen and Lepore's (2005) term is ‘semantic content.’ On the near side of semantic content will be only the factors acknowledged by Grice: conventional meaning of words and modes of composition; resolution of ambiguity (including, perhaps, issues of standards of precision and vagueness), and resolution of reference of indexicals, demonstratives and names. On the far side are Gricean implicatures.

Among literalists, we may distinguish between minimalists and ‘hidden indexical’ theorists. Literalists, do not accept any pragmatically determined element in utterance content that is not triggered by grammar, i.e., by a particular context-sensitive element in the sentence used. Minimalists try to keep context-sensitive expressions to a minimum — Cappelen and Lepore (20045, forthcoming) are in this camp — and those who pose a context-sensitive expression whenever is needed. The latter, ‘hidden indexicalists,’ admit the ‘unarticulated’ content into the proposition literally expressed by the utterance, but hold that it is not ‘really’ unarticulated, since below the surface grammar, at some deeper level, say logical form, the sentence provide an indexical to be resolved pragmatically (Stanley 2000; Stanley and Szabo 2000).

Cappelen and Lepore are both literalists and minimalists. They use the term ‘semantic content’ for propositions determined solely by conventions of meaning, precisification, disambiguation and reference fixing. They allow that semantic content, so conceived, is often not what ordinary speakers would identify as ‘what is said’; but they take what is said to be a pragmatic concept, and so do not see this as an objection to their scheme. The semantic content of John's utterance above, for example, is something like the proposition "Rain is occurring," a relatively trivial proposition, that will be true if it is raining anywhere on earth (or perhaps, anywhere in the universe). (See Cappelen and Lepore (forthcoming) and Perry (forthcoming).) The triviality of John's remark, literally interpreted, sets Kepa on the search of some relevant proposition he may have meant to convey, and this proposition, that it is raining in Palo Alto, is what satisfies our intuitive concept of ‘what is said.’ But that shows only that ‘what is said’ is basically a pragmatic concept, that shouldn't be used to delineate true semantic content. On the near side of semantic content we find only conventional meaning, disambiguation, and resolution of reference and vagueness. On the far side we find implicatures, that contribute not only what is suggested, conveyed, and the like, but even what is said, as ordinarily conceived.

Those over on the Contextualist side, in contrast, see the level corresponding to Grice's ‘what is said’ as determined not only by semantics, disambiguation and reference-fixing, but also by a number of other pragmatic processes that ‘intrude’ on the near side and enrich semantic content. Contextualists include relevance theorists and such philosophers as Recanati (2004), Travis (1997), Korta and Perry (2006, forthcoming-a-b-c-d) and Neale (2004). Contemporary contextualists do not insist on the term ‘what is said,’ but provide other criteria for the boundary between the proposition more or less directly expressed and implicatures. Recanati argues that this level — which he sometimes calls ‘what is said max ’ in contrast of the ‘what is said min ’ of minimalists — should consist of a proposition that is consciously available to the speaker and the proposition he intends to express, and that any planned implications should also be consciously accessible. Cappelen and Lepore's proposition would not usually pass this test. In our example, John would not be consciously aware of having expressed a proposition that would be true if it was raining on Venus, nor would he at any remotely conscious level have planned for Kepa to reason from the triviality and irrelevance of the proposition that rain occurs to the one he meant to convey, that it rains at Stanford.

In Korta and Perry's ‘Critical Pragmatics’ (forthcoming-d), the concept of ‘what is said’ is replaced with two concepts. The ‘reflexive content’ of an utterance is its truth-conditions, as determined by the conventional meanings of the words used and modes of composition, and thus corresponds to the ‘semantically determined content.’ This content will not be the proposition expressed, but rather a set of conditions on the utterance and the proposition it expresses, with quantification over all relevant factors not determined by meaning — including factors that resolve ambiguity and reference. At this level, then, Critical Pragmatics is radically minimal. For example, an utterance u of "Elwood touched that woman" will be true (roughly) if and only if there is an x and y such that the speaker of u refers to x with ‘Elwood,’ refers to y with ‘that woman,’ and uses ‘touches’ with for some action A permitted by the conventions of English, and at some time prior to the time of u, x A'ed y . The condition on the utterance given to the right of the ‘if and only if’ comprise the reflexive content of the utterance. On the other hand, the referential content of u , will be the proposition that, say, Elwood put his hands on Eloise, if the actual facts about u provide Elwood, Eloise as the referents and putting one's hands on as the relevant sense of ‘touches.’ Critical Pragmatics emphasizes the speaker's plan, a hierarchy of intentions, as the main source of the facts that supplement conventional meaning to get us from reflexive to incremental meaning.

The second concept employed to do the traditional work of ‘what is said’ is ‘locutionary content.’ The intended locutionary content is basically the referential content the speaker intends to express, given his conception of the context — that is, roughly, the speaker, time, place and whom and what he points at. The locutionary content is fixed by the actual contextual facts, so a speaker's intended locutionary content may not be the locutionary content of the utterance he produces.

An intermediate position — called ‘syncretic’ by Recanati (2004) — has been subtly defended by Kent Bach (1994, 1999a, 2001). Bach is on the literalist, minimalist side of the spectrum with respect to semantic content (for which he continues to use the term ‘what is said.’) But he agrees with contextualists that these unarticulated contents are not implicatures, and are not triggered by the meaning of the sentence uttered. He introduces an intermediate category between what is said, in his minimalist sense, and implicatures, which he calls ‘implicitures’ — with an ‘i’ — to include these elements.

Contemporary pragmatics is a large, active, interdisciplinary field. The work we have considered here merges into important work in logic, computer science and other areas we have not been able to discuss. Philosophers, the founders of the discipline, continue to play an important role in this field. Philosophically oriented pragmatists (to give an old term a new meaning) usually consider pragmatic issues with an eye towards large issues in the philosophy of language and beyond. But in the course of this, they provide detailed analyses and consider a wide variety of cases that continue to provide ideas and inspiration for pragmatists from other disciplines.

Morris 1938 . Semantics deals with the relation of signs to … objects which they may or do denote. Pragmatics concerns the relation of signs to their interpreters. By ‘pragmatics’ is designated the science of the relation of signs to their interpreters. (…) Since most, if not all, signs have as their interpreters living organisms, it is a sufficiently accurate characterization of pragmatics to say that it deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs.

Carnap 1942 . If in an investigation explicit reference is made to the speaker, or, to put it in more general terms, to the user of a language, then we assign it to the field of pragmatics. (…) If we abstract from the user of the language and analyze only the expressions and their designata, we are in the field of semantics. And if, finally, we abstract from the designata also and analyze only the relations between expressions, we are in (logical) syntax.

Bar-Hillel 1954 . I believe, therefore, that the investigation of indexical languages and the erection of indexical language-systems are urgent tasks for contemporary logicians. May I add, for the sake of classificatory clarity, that the former task belongs to descriptive pragmatics and the latter to pure pragmatics (in one of the many senses of the expression)?

Stalnaker 1970 . Syntax studies sentences, semantics studies propositions. Pragmatics is the study of linguistic acts and the contexts in which they are performed. There are two major types of problems to be solved within pragmatics: first, to define interesting types of speech acts and speech products; second, to characterize the features of the speech context which help determine which proposition is expressed by a given sentence. … It is a semantic problem to specify the rules for matching up sentences of a natural language with the propositions that they express. In most cases, however, the rules will not match sentences directly with propositions, but will match sentences with propositions relative to features of the context in which the sentence is used. Those contextual features are part of the subject matter of pragmatics.

Katz 1977 . [I] draw the theoretical line between semantic interpretation and pragmatic interpretation by taking the semantic component to properly represent only those aspects of the meaning of the sentence that an ideal speaker-hearer of the language would know in an anonymous letter situation,… [where there is] no clue whatever about the motive, circumstances of transmission, or any other factor relevant to understanding the sentence on the basis of its context of utterance.

Gazdar 1979 . PRAGMATICS = MEANING-TRUTH CONDITIONS. What we need in addition is some function that tells us about the meaning of utterances. (…) The domain of this pragmatic function is the set of utterances, which are pairs of sentences and contexts, so that for each utterance, our function will return as a value a new context: the context as changed by the sentence uttered. (…) And we can treat the meaning of the utterance as the difference between the original context and the context arrived at by utterance of the sentence. [This applies to only] a restricted subset of pragmatic aspects of meaning.

Kempson 1988 . Semantics provides a complete account of sentence meaning for the language, [by] recursively specifying the truth conditions of the sentence of the language. … Pragmatics provides an account of how sentences are used in utterances to convey information in context.

Kaplan 1989 . The fact that a word or phrase has a certain meaning clearly belongs to semantics. On the other hand, a claim about the basis for ascribing a certain meaning to a word or phrase does not belong to semantics… Perhaps, because it relates to how the language is used, it should be categorized as part of … pragmatics …, or perhaps, because it is a fact about semantics, as part of … Metasemantics .

Davis 1991 . Pragmatics will have as its domain speakers' communicative intentions, the uses of language that require such intentions, and the strategies that hearers employ to determine what these intentions and acts are, so that they can understand what the speaker intends to communicate.

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Fotion 1995) . Pragmatics is the study of language which focuses attention on the users and the context of language use rather than on reference, truth, or grammar.

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Lycan 1995) . Pragmatics studies the use of language in context, and the context-dependence of various aspects of linguistic interpretation. … [Its branches include the theory of how] one and the same sentence can express different meanings or propositions from context to context, owing to ambiguity or indexicality or both, … speech act theory, and the theory of conversational implicature.

The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy (Davies 1995) . The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is, roughly, the distinction between the significance conventionally or literally attached to words, and thence to whole sentences, and the further significance that can be worked out, by more general principles, using contextual information.

Carston 1999 . The decoding process is performed by an autonomous linguistic system, the parser or language perception module. Having identified a particular acoustic stimulus as linguistic, the system executes a series of deterministic grammatical computations or mappings, resulting in an output representation, which is the semantic representation, or logical form, of the sentence or phrase employed in the utterance. (…) The second type of cognitive process, the pragmatic inferential process (constrained and guided by the communicative principle of relevance) integrates the linguistic contribution with other readily accessible information in order to reach a confirmed interpretive hypothesis concerning the speaker's informative intention.

Bach 2004 . Semantic information is information encoded in what is uttered — these are stable linguistic features of the sentence — together with any extralinguistic information that provides (semantic) values to context-sensitive expressions in what is uttered. Pragmatic information is (extralinguistic) information that arises from an actual act of utterance, and is relevant to the hearer's determination of what the speaker is communicating. Whereas semantic information is encoded in what is uttered, pragmatic information is generated by, or at least made relevant by, the act of uttering it.

Ambiguity In general, an expression is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. When a word (e.g., ‘bank’) has multiple meanings, we have lexical ambiguity. A sentence can be ambiguous even if none of its words is ambiguous. Sometimes the ambiguity is considered syntactic because the alternative meaning correspond to a alternative syntactic configurations (e.g., ‘Mary saw John with a telescope’). If there is only one syntactic configuration, the ambiguity is structural (e.g., ‘Every man admires a woman’). It is not always clear what kind ambiguity is at stake, or even if there is any ambiguity at all (Grice's theory of implicatures and his Ockham's modified razor had a great impact on this issue). In any case, ambiguity — the existence of several meanings for an expression — should be distinguished from nambiguity (the existence of many different bearers of a proper name), from vagueness (meanings with unclear boundaries of application), and underdetermination (failure to fully specify a meaning). It is usually assumed that resolving ambiguity is a pragmatic process, involving determining which meaning the speaker intends to be exploiting, although ambiguity itself is a semantic condition.

Attitude report ‘Propositional attitude’ is Bertrand Russell's term for designating mental states with propositional content, conceived as relations between an agent and a proposition. Propositional attitude verbs include ‘believes,’ ‘wants,’ ‘desires,’ ‘intends’ or ‘knows’ and many others — basically, the core of our vocabulary for describing minds and language.

Sentences like ‘Kepler thought that the Earth was spherical’ embed other sentences — ‘the earth was spherical’ — in oblique (or opaque or intensional (with an ‘s’)) contexts. Oblique context are not truth-functional. Substituing other true sentences for ‘the earth was spherical’ will not necessarily preserve truth. Moreover, even substituting co-designative terms for ‘the earth’ may not preserve truth. Kepler did not, one supposes, think that Frege's favorite planet was spherical (assuming the earth was Frege's favorite planet).

According to Frege, in such contexts the usual sense of the sentence, the ‘Gedanke’ or proposition expressed, becomes the reference. Since Frege's "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" (1892) and Russell's "On Denoting" (1905) the study of reports of these attitudes has been one of the central topics of the philosophy of language, semantics and pragmatics.

Character/Content Since Kaplan's work on indexicals and demonstratives, (Kaplan 1989) it is commonplace to distinguish between the character of an expression and the content of an utterance of an expression. For example, the character of the word ‘I’ in English doesn't change from context to context, although the content does. Knowing the character of a sentence like ‘I am a philosopher’ doesn't imply knowing the content of a particular utterance of that sentence; for the latter, you need to know the ‘semantic’ context of the utterance. Character is a property of linguistic expressions (types); content is a property of utterances —sentences-in-context — (tokens) of them.

Context ‘Context’ is an all-pervasive concept in pragmatics. For some authors ‘context’ is the defining concept of pragmatics. But many, perhaps too many, different concepts are included under this term.

In Linguistics, ‘context’ commonly means the previous and subsequent linguistic material in a given text. In Kaplan's scheme, the context is objective, it comprises the actual basic facts about an utterance: the speaker, time, place, and possible world in which it occurs. In Stalnaker's scheme, context is basically subjective: a matter of common ground: that is, shared beliefs that serve as common presuppositions for the interpretation of assertions. Often the term is used for anything in the indefinitely large surrounding of an utterance, from the intentions of the speaker to the previous topics of conversation to the object discernible in the environment.

Here are a number of distinctions that have been made with respect to the concept(s) of context that the reader may find helpful. The list is not intended to be exhaustive, mutually exclusive, or to represent a single coherent view of pragmatic phenomena.

Linguistic context versus extralinguistic context Considering the context of an utterance, one of the most intuitive distinctions is between the context as consisting of its previous and subsequent utterances — the linguistic contexts — and any other extra-linguistic circumstance surrounding the utterance. In the case of ellipsis and anaphoric (and cataphoric) pronouns the designation is determined, or at least constrained, by the linguistic context of the utterance, while the designation of deictic demonstratives is fixed by contextual extralinguistic facts.

Narrow versus broad Narrow context is usually understood as the list of parameters for basic indexicals, parameters that correspond to basic facts about the utterance. Speaker, place and time are on almost everyone's list, as required for the interpretation of ‘I,’ ‘here,’ ‘now’ and tense. Kaplan adds the possible world, for the interpreation of ‘actual.’ Arguably, every utterance occurs in a world, at a time, in a place, and with a speaker.

In contrast, wide or broad context is understood as all other kinds of information, in particular, information relative to the speaker's communicative intention, used for the interpretation of ‘pragmatic aspects' of the utterance. In Bach's words:

Wide context concerns any contextual information relevant to determining the speaker's intention and to the successful and felicitous performance of the speech act… Narrow context concerns information specifically relevant to determining the semantic values of [indexicals]… (Bach 1999a)

Bach goes on to say,

Narrow context is semantic, wide context pragmatic.

But on this there would be some disagreement, as many would hold that information about the speaker's intentions, and perhaps also about causal and informational chains, ongoing topics of conversations, and much else, are needed for semantics.

Epistemic versus doxastic It is sometimes assumed, particularly by writers with a psychological orientation, that, together with speaker's intentions, it is speaker's beliefs what determine the content of expressions in her utterance, with the issue of the truth (or falsity) of her beliefs having no relevance. So, belief rather than knowledge is the relevant concept to characterize context. According to this view, there would not be a significant difference between ‘intending to say’ (and, for that matter, ‘believing that it having had said’) and ‘saying,’ which goes about some truths of intentions and general: one usual way of failing to perform an action comes from the falsity of some agent's belief. This is related to another possible distinction between objective and subjective contexts.

Objective versus subjective There are a number of cases, however, in which the speaker's beliefs, even if shared by everyone in the conversation, do not seem to determine content. Suppose, for example, that Elwood's hero worship of John Searle has reached such a point that he now takes himself to be John Searle. He introduces himself to the new class of Stanford graduate students by saying, "I'm John Searle, from across the Bay." It seems that even if he and everyone in the conversation believes he is Searle, what he has said is the falsehood, that Elwood is John Searle. Or, suppose a group of golfers is standing on the small portion of the Stanford golf course that juts into San Mateo County, but none of them realize it. "The county seat of this county is San Jose," one of them says, for some reason or other. He believes he has informed them of the truth that the county seat of Santa Clara County is San Jose, and in fact the other members of the foursome learn this fact from what he says. Nevertheless, many would argue, what he said was false, and only fortuitous ignorance led his partners to learn a truth from the falsehood he uttered.

Pre-semantic context Pre-semantic context provides information for identifying the utterance: which words in which language with which syntactic structure, and with which meanings are being used.

Semantic context Semantic context comprises those contextual features that determine or partly determine the content of context-sensitive expressions. This is the case of pronouns, whose linguistic meanings do more or less strictly constrain but do not determine their designata. Their meaning direct us to the context (linguistic context, in cases of anaphoric co-designation; extra-linguistic context in cases of indexicals and deictic uses of demonstratives) to look for the designation of the pronoun. But there are more context-sensitive expressions than indexical, deictic and anaphoric pronouns. Sentence mood, for instance, is an indicator of illocutionary point, but it does not determine the precise illocutionary force of an utterance without the help of contextual factors. The contribution to utterance-content of some particles like ‘but’ (that, according to Grice, produce ‘conventional implicatures) are another case in point.

Post-semantic context Third, there is (or may be) what Perry (2001) calls post-semantic context. This comprises facts that provide unarticulated content . For example, the fact that a conversation is about Palo Alto may determine, perhaps together with speaker intentions, that the statement "It is raining," has the content that it is raining in Palo Alto. Arguably, such contextual contributions are not triggered by the meaning-rules of the words used, but more global considerations. The fact that we usually are talking about rain in a particular place has to do with the nature of rain and the way humans are concerned with it and conceptualize the phenomena, rather than the syntax of ‘rain.’

(Far-side) Pragmatic Context It comprises those contextual factors needed to get at (calculate, infer) what is communicated or done in and by saying what one says. This importantly concerns the speaker's intentions concerning indirect speech acts, implicatures, and non-literal contents. It may also include institutional facts and indeed, all sorts of other things relevant to the effects of the utterance.

Communicative intention Communicative intention is what characterizes, an action as communicative. Following Grice's definition of M(eaning)-intention, it is widely agreed that communicative intentions have three particular properties: (i) it is perlocutionary , that is, it is an intention that seeks a mental effect (certain belief(s) or intention(s)) on the part of the addressee; (ii) it is overt, that is, the speaker wants the addressee to recognize his communicative intention; and (iii) the satisfaction of a communicative intention consists precisely in its recognition by the addressee. Communicative intentions need not be carried out by linguistic means (see Clark 2003). In human linguistic communication planning and inference processes have a role at least as important as besides coding and decoding processes. The speaker plans his speech act according to his communicative intention; the addressee uses, among other sources, the information decoded to infer (recognize) the speaker's communicative intention.

Implicature (conventional, conversational, particularized, generalized) Grice distinguished what the speaker says from what she implicates by an utterance. The category of implicature refers to what the speaker suggests, implies or communicates beyond what she says. Among implicatures he made a further distinction between conventional, generated by the conventional meaning of certain words, and non-conventional ones. Within non-conventional implicatures, he distinguished between conversational, affected, among other factors, by conversational principles and maxims, and non-conversational. And finally, among conversational implicatures between particularized, occurring in particular contexts, and generalized ones. Grice pointed out that conversational implicatures have the following properties: (i) they are calculable, that is, inferable from, among other things, the cooperative principle and the conversational maxims; (ii) they are cancelable either explicitly (adding something like "but I did not meant that") or contextually, by changing the context; and (iii) except those implicatures based on the maxims of manner, they are non-detachable, i.e., there is no way of saying the same thing that would not carry the implicature. The last two features, cancelability and non-detachability are known as the ‘tests’ for the presence of an alleged implicature.

Implicit/explicit meaning In the traditional Gricean picture, ‘explicit meaning’ corresponds to the sentence's conventional meaning; or to the meaning obtained by the combination of conventional meaning and those contextual aspects required by the conventional meaning; in other words, to the result of sentence conventional meaning+disambiguation+reference fixing, i.e., what is said . The remaining of utterance meaning, in particular presuppositions and implicatures, would be regarded as implicit meaning within the Gricean picture. Grice's categories of conventional implicature and generalized conventional implicatures, however, pose problems to the distinction between the explicit and the implicit. After Grice, the limits between them are not very clear yet, despite relevance theorists's notion of ‘explicature’ or Bach's ‘impliciture.’

Indexical To determine the reference of an indexical expression (that is, to determine what a speaker is referring to by the utterance of an indexical expression), the interpreter must resort to context. This is the most prominent property of indexical expressions: without varying their meaning, they can change their content from context to context. Paradigmatic indexical expressions are personal pronouns (‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘she’…), demonstratives (‘this,’ ‘that’), time and place adverbs (‘here,’ ‘there,’ ‘now,’ ‘yesterday,’ ‘tomorrow’…). But indexicality is a more general phenomenon: verb tense and aspect point to context for determining the relevant temporal point or interval. The semantic information of some indexical expression leaves little room for doubts about what to look for in context: ‘I’=the speaker, ‘here’=the place the speaker is in, ‘tomorrow’=the day starting at midnight of the day of utterance. These are called ‘pure’ or ‘automatic’ indexicals, in contrast to ‘discretionary’ indexicals, whose semantic information does not determine the referent, and it is necessary to appeal to speaker's intentions to do so (Perry, 2001). Indexical expressions have been called ‘deictic,’ ‘egocentric particulars' and ‘token-reflexive expressions.’

Intention It is a kind of mental state, like belief and desire, for example. From the point of view of the mental cause theory of action, it is intention the cause of action, and it is precisely this, to be caused by an intention what distinguishes movements (or absences of movement) which are actions from mere events, and, among bodily movements, those which are (intentional) actions from mere reflexes. The object of intention can be represented as a proposition representing the movements (he moved his arm on purpose), or as various results expected or hoped for as a result of the movement (he checkmated his opponent, and made him cry, on purpose).

Intentionality The word "intention" is relatively unambiguous outside of philosophy. But philosophers use the word "intention" and especially the adjective "intentional" to refer to a feature of a class of mental states that includes but is not limited to intentions ordinarily understood. This is the property of being about or directed at objects, including not only real concrete objects, but also abstract and fictional objects, properties, and states of affairs. Thus believing that it is raining, hoping to get a computer for Christmas, talking about Sherlock Holmes, figuring out the square root of six hundred and twenty five, are all intentional states and activities, as is intending to bake a cake. It is often assumed that minds, mental states, have intrinsic intentionality, and that utterances and sentences have only intentionality in a derived sense: they have it from the intentionality of the mental state they express.

Intentionality (with a ‘t’) should not be confused with intensionality (with an ‘s’). The latter is another technical expression of logic and philosophy; intensions are opposed to extensions. Russell's example is that the intension of "featherless biped that is not a plucked chicken" is quite different than the intension of "human being," although their extensions are the same. Extensions include classes, sets, and functions considered as sets of ordered pairs and truth-values. Intensions are meaning, rules, properties, functions as ordinarily conceived, and propositions. In possible-worlds semantics intensions are often identified with sets of possible worlds or functions that take possible worlds as arguments. A property, for example, might be identified with a function from worlds to set of objects (those that have the property in the world), and a proposition with a set of world (those in which it is true). Whether such an identification is meant as a reduction or explanation of intensions as extensions, or simply as a way of modeling intensions as extensions, varies from theorist to theorist.

Literal/non-literal Some take this to be a distinction about word meaning. According to this view, beyond their conventional or literal meaning, words can have figurative or non-literal meanings: metaphoric, ironic, metonymic meanings. After the rise of pragmatic studies, the distinction is considered mostly to be one at the speaker's meaning level. When the speaker's meaning is closed to the conventional meaning of the sentence uttered the speaker is said to be speaking literally. When it departs from conventional meaning is considered non-literal. Of course, the distinction is not clear cut: how much must the speaker's meaning depart from conventional meaning to be considered as non-literal? Some authors prefer to talk about a continuum rather than a two-side distinction.

Locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary In terms of Austin's speech act theory these are three main levels to be distinguished in a speech act. Every speech act is an act of saying something. This is the locutionary level. Within it Austin distinguished other three: the phonetic act (the act of producing some sounds), the phatic act (the act of uttering some words pertaining to the vocabulary of a certain language organized according to the rules of its grammar), and the rhetic act (the act of using those words with a certain sense and reference). But in saying something one does something. This is the illocutionary level . And, finally, by saying something one gets some (intended or unintended) effects in the audience. This is the perlocutionary level. Searle casts doubt on the distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts, not seeing the necessity of the former category. As it has developed, speech act theory has been almost entirely devoted to study of the illocutionary level.

Performative utterance Austin contrasted between statements, traditionally considered as the only utterances with any philosophical importance, with performative utterances that would not be considered as being true or false, and rather than merely saying something are better considered as acts of doing something. He further distinguished between explicit and implicit performative utterances. The first are those whose main verb, called ‘performative verb,’ makes explicit the particular act that the speaker is performing in producing the utterance. These verbs usually present a canonical form: (in English) the first person singular in the present active, or the second person of the passive. Not all implicit performative utterances can be made explicit through a performative utterance. Following Austin discussion, all utterances end up being performative, so that the contrast between them and statements seems to make no sense any more. The concept of performative utterance was supplanted in the development of speech act theory by the concept of speech act.

Sentence It is traditionally defined as the (grammatical) complex expression capable of expressing a complete thought or proposition. This definition is questioned by the assumption that thoughts or propositions are expressed by utterances (or speakers). According to the contextualist thesis, no sentence expresses a complete (truth-evaluable) proposition; i.e., there are no ‘eternal’ sentences. From the viewpoint of pragmatics, sentences can be conceived as utterance-types, resulted from abstracting all elements except the linguistic expressions used. The issue of what counts as a complete (grammatical) sentence opposed to a sub-sentential complex expression pertains to syntax, rather than to semantics or pragmatics.

Speech act Speech acts are communicative acts performed through the oral or written use of language. Within speech acts, Austin distinguished among locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary levels, but speech act theory has been devoted almost exclusively to the illocutionary level, so that ‘speech act’ and ‘illocutionary act’ are in practice synonymous terms. An elementary speech act consists of a propositional content and an illocutionary force. Illocutionary force concerns the act the speaker intends to do in performing the speech act. All illocutionary forces, in Searle's version of speech act theory, can be grouped into five classes, according to their basic intention or illocutionary point: assertives, commissives, directives, declaratives and expressives. The illocutionary force and the propositional content of a speech act determine its conditions of success and satisfaction.

Type-Token ‘Alabama’: how many letters has this word? If we count letter tokens, the answer is 7. If we count letter types, the answer could be 4 (‘a,’ ‘l,’ ‘b,’ ‘m’) or 5 (if we distinguish between capital and small letters). The distinction between types and tokens has been applied to the distinction between sentences and utterances of sentences. The utterance is the token, the historical event with causes and consequences; the sentence is the type, the type of utterances of a sentence; an abstract entity. Meaning (character) would be a property of types; content, a property of tokens.

Utterance In pragmatics, an utterance is most often taken to be a linguistic action performed by a certain speaker in a certain place at a certain moment. It has, then, the ontological status of actions: each utterance is a unique historical event; it is a token, not a type; an utterance made by one speaker cannot be made by another one; an utterance made here and now cannot be made there later. In Linguistics, ‘utterance’ is often used for the action of pronouncing orally a sentence, but philosophers tend to also include writing, signing, and other modes of language use, and for the action of using a sub-sentential expression. It is the view of many but not all pragmatists that the primary bearers of truth-conditional contents are utterances, not sentences; or, even better, that truth-conditional contents or propositions are expressed by the speakers who utter sentences, not by the sentences themselves. Utterances of declarative sentences are called ‘statements.’ ‘Utterance’ suffers from the product/process ambiguity. That's why Perry (2001) distinguishes between ‘utterance’ (action) and ‘token’ (product).

• Asher, Nicholas and Alex Lascarides, 1998, "The semantics and pragmatics of presupposition." Journal of Semantics , 15 , 239-299.
• Austin, John L., 1956, "A plea of excuses." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LVII : 1-30. Reprinted in Austin 1961. (Presidential address to the Aristotelian Society in 1956. Austin expresses his views on ordinary language and ordinary language philosophy.)
• Austin, John L., 1961, "Performative Utterances," in J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (eds.) Philosophical Papers , Oxford: Clarendon. (Austin presents the distinction between performative and constative utterances.)
• Austin, John L., 1962a, How to Do Things with Words . Oxford: Clarendon. (Written version of Austin's William James Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955. He starts with the distinction performative/constative, then he blurs it to ground the ‘general theory of speech acts.’)
• Austin, John L. 1962b, Sense and Sensibilia . Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Reconstructed from his manuscript notes by G.J. Warnock. Austin's critique of sense data theories of perception.)
• Bach, Kent, 1987, "On Communicative Intentions: A Reply to Recanati," Mind and Language 2 : 141-154.
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• Grice, H. Paul, 1989, Studies in the Way of Words . Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. (Posthumously published volume collecting most Grice's papers on language, meaning and communication and some other topics.)
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• Horn, Laurence R., 1989, A Natural History of Negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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• Stalnaker, Robert, 1970, "Pragmatics." Synthese 22 . Also in Davidson and Harman (eds.) 1972, Semantics for Natural Language . Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 380-97. Reprinted in Kasher (ed.) 1998, Pragmatics: Critical Concepts . (6 vols.) London: Routledge, pp. 55-70. Also in Stalnaker 1999, ch. 1.
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• Rich Thomason's BibTex Bibliographies

action | -->Austin, John Langshaw --> | defaults in semantics and pragmatics | descriptions | Grice, Paul | implicature | indexicals | -->metaphor --> | -->presupposition --> | propositional attitude reports | quotation | reference | speech acts | Strawson, Peter Frederick

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Kansas city chiefs kicker harrison butker slams biden’s ‘delusional’ stance on abortion in commencement speech.

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Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker recently called out President Biden over his “delusional” support for abortion as a practicing Catholic. 

The three-time Super Bowl winner laid into the 81-year-president during a fiery commencement speech Saturday at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan., where the NFL star also criticized the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and aired out his frustrations with a litany of other political, religious and cultural issues. 

“As a group, you witnessed firsthand how bad leaders who don’t stay in their lane can have a negative impact on society,” Butker, 28, said early in his 20-minute address to the graduates of the small Catholic liberal arts school, referring to the COVID-19 lockdowns. 

“While COVID might have played a large role throughout your formative years, it is not unique,” the kicker argued. 

“Bad policies and poor leadership have negatively impacted major life issues. Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values and media, all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder.”

And the buck stops with Biden, according to Butker. 

“Our own nation is led by a man who publicly and proudly proclaims his Catholic faith, but at the same time is delusional enough to make the sign of the cross during a pro-abortion rally,” he said. 

The line was a reference to Biden’s bizarre use of the gesture , which Catholics often make before and after prayer, while listening to pro-abortion remarks delivered by Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried last month. 

 Biden is America’s second-ever Roman Catholic president.

“He has been so vocal in his support for the murder of innocent babies that I’m sure to many people it appears that you can be both Catholic and pro-choice,” Butker went on.   

“He is not alone. From the man behind the Covid lockdowns, to the people pushing dangerous gender ideologies onto the youth of America, they all have a glaring thing in common — they are Catholic. This is an important reminder that being Catholic alone doesn’t cut it,” he argued. 

The NFL player urged the new grads to “stop pretending that the ‘Church of nice’ is a winning proposition,” encouraging them to speak out in opposition to what he called declining morals.

Biden has repeatedly called on voters to re-elect him in 2024 and to elect a Democratic House and Senate that will codify the right to an abortion nationwide since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

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• Society and culture

Culture Secretary speech at GREAT Futures

Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer delivers keynote speech at the GREAT Futures event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Good morning everyone and thank you for that kind introduction, Louise.

It’s a pleasure to be here and to be part of this brilliant day.

I must start by thanking the patron for GREAT, His Excellency Majed AlQassabi, and all of the teams behind this excellently crafted event.

Yours is a Kingdom that is on the move and we, as a Government and as a country, want to move with you.

We recognise that few places on earth have changed more in the past decade.

Our two countries have always found common ground in spheres such as international development and security cooperation, but it is clear today - in 2024 - that there are huge new opportunities available to us both.

Days like this really underscore the immense cultural and creative ambitions of the Kingdom in its Vision 2030. 

That Vision is bold, it is ambitious and I am here today because I believe Britain can play a role in that story.

Because, like Saudi Arabia, we too are unapologetically ambitious in capitalising on our strengths to grow our economy and improve lives for people in Britain and around the world.

But before I speak to the huge opportunities for collaboration, I want to touch on the exceptional job the Kingdom has done over the past decade of growing and expanding the Saudi Creative Industries.

For years, other Arab capitals - like Cairo, Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad - stood out as the Arab cultural beacons where blockbuster movies were made, chart-topping songs were recorded and books that got intellectuals talking hit the shelves.

But today, in 2024, Riyadh has started to seize that mantle and the Kingdom is now at the forefront of shaping the region’s culture.

Yours is a country of 29 million people, two thirds of which are under 30, and it is clear you recognise the immense power that culture, sport and tourism have to drive up people’s quality of life at home, and to bolster soft power abroad.

The Ministry for Tourism, Ministry for Culture and Ministry for Sport, as well as the General Entertainment Authority, have combined to broaden and diversify your cultural offering.

To draw in some of the biggest names in sports like boxing, golf and football to play in your leagues and entertain millions, to expand and grow your sectors from film and TV to tourism, design and music, and to create countless new opportunities with events from Riyadh Design Week and Riyadh Soundstorm to Comic Book Festivals and the Red Sea International Film Festival.

And I know the level of ambition is sky high, backing 100 new films, commissioning 26 new museums, increasing the contribution of the Creative Industries GDP to 3%, generating $20 billion in revenue and creating over 100,000 jobs - and all by 2030.

We are already seeing the transformation in regions like AlUla - an area synonymous with heritage, as the Kingdom’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site.

And a place awash with sand dunes, desert oases and ancient ruins that date as far back as the Neolithic period of the Stone Age - become centrepieces of your tourism and creative industries, with major investments to build state-of-the-art film, music and recording facilities.

And those investments are already paying off, with the big Gerard Butler film Kandahar becoming the first big budget US production to be shot solely in Saudi Arabia, and mainly in AlUla.

That film is a sign of what is to come. The starting gun for what is certain to be a huge number of films and TV shot, directed, produced and edited in Saudi Arabia in the coming years.

And this is all part of why I believe the Creative Industries are among the most exciting potential areas for further and deeper collaboration between our two great countries.

As UK Culture Secretary, Sport, Media and Tourism Secretary, I could not be prouder of our vibrant Creative Industries.

As far back as Shakespeare, culture has always been one of the defining parts of the British national character.

But today our great authors, our great playwrights, our great musicians and designers are not just enriching lives, they are driving our economy.

To put things into perspective, the GVA of our Creative Industries was £124.6bn in 2022 alone.

These Industries account for 2.4 million jobs in Britain and they grew faster than our whole economy between 2021 and 2022.

And obviously much of the credit for that phenomenal growth belongs to the extraordinary talent we have at our disposal.

But it is also the case that we, as a Government, have consistently recognised the power of these industries and sought to maximise its true potential, at every turn.

Tax reliefs.

Incentives to invest.

Support through the pandemic.

Support to bounce back from the pandemic.

And most recently a dedicated blueprint - our Creative Industries Vision - designed to realise the untapped potential of sectors like video games, VFX and grassroots music.

We have successfully created an environment where competition and talent is thriving.

And that’s why, from music and design to TV and film, we are now home to some of the most dynamic creative businesses in the world.

Today in 2024 companies are choosing to come and invest in our clusters of excellence, like video games in Leamington Spa, TV in Leeds and Birmingham, VFX in London.

And big studios want to establish and grow their footprint in the UK, with Disney, Netflix, Amazon and Apple making landmark investments into studios like Pinewood in Hertfordshire and Shinfield in Berkshire.

To put things in perspective, analysis by The Times last year showed within two years there will be more studio facilities and square footage of studio space in the UK than the whole of Los Angeles.

And a major factor in why companies are making those inward investments, is because they recognise the expertise and the skills we now have at our disposal, across the creative ecosystem.

Underneath the big name productions like Bond and Barbie, or the superstar musicians like Ed Sheeran and Dua Lipa, we have production teams who know how to scale up, to deliver first class productions and events and to take cottage industries and turn them into world-beaters.

To my mind, few countries are better placed than Britain to help support the Kingdom as you look to transform your economy. 

Building out and developing your Creative Industries, cementing your status as a major player in sports and expanding your reputation as a tourist destination.

And I know that these kinds of collaborations are already off the ground in some areas, like Esports - with British Esports and the Saudi Esports Federation committing last year to greater cooperation on education and cultural exchange.

And are seeing the beginnings of cultural and creative exchange, with the world renowned British composer and impresario, Andrew Lloyd Webber, recently taking Phantom of the Opera in Riyadh.

And a fortnight ago the British Council deepened its relationship with the Saudi Cinema Association at the 10th edition of the Saudi Festival - with the British Council showcasing a curated selection of UK short films and using the festival to give a platform for filmmakers to engage with Saudi Arabia audiences and forge meaningful connections.

And we have seen new connections between our museums, with the Science Museum Group and the Saudi Ministry of Culture Executive Programme having signed an agreement on a Museums Hub.

And with SOAS University launching a Postgraduate Diploma in Museum Studies, sponsored by the Museums Commission, and jointly awarded by SOAS and Effat University.

And most significantly of all, in tourism.

In 2022, the UK welcomed over 200,000 visitors from the Kingdom and Visit Britain’s latest forecast predicts 240,000 visits from Saudi Arabia this year.

And this is another area where you are investing in the fundamentals - building up the tourism infrastructure needed to make Saudi Arabia a magnet for visitors. Doing what is needed to increase the number of annual travellers to the Kingdom from 14 million to 60 million in the next five years.

This is an area where Britain has deep expertise, for example, in vocational training, and I know that members of our delegation will be well placed to speak to this during some of the planned sessions.

Yours is a Kingdom with a huge amount of heritage and I have no doubt that countless people will look to take the chance to come and see and experience that heritage.

To support you in that journey, I can confirm that Historic England and the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture are  actively exploring a new partnership to cooperate in the field of cultural heritage.

This exciting new programme of cooperation will bring benefits to both of our countries and could involve some of our leading heritage experts sharing knowledge and skills to support the preservation of cultural landmarks in the Kingdom.

All of this is why events and programmes like Futures are so important.

Bringing together Government and businesses with a common goal - to find new areas for partnerships and mutually beneficial opportunities to grow our relationship.

As Government Ministers and as senior leaders of industries, it is in our gift to welcome in a new era of investment, partnership and growth between our two countries.

I want to finish by paying tribute to our hosts Saudi Arabia who are among our oldest friends in this region.

We admire your young and vibrant people. We value your spirit of enterprise and ambition.

So I’d like to thank you all, once again, for being here and for being part of the Futures programme.

By being part of what we are doing here this week, each of you will be writing your own contribution to a new chapter in British-Saudi relations.

One defined by security and prosperity.

By cooperation and collaboration.

By the exchange of knowledge, ideas and investment.

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Biden to hold 2024 campaign event day before Morehouse commencement speech

ATLANTA — President Joe Biden will have a packed schedule in Atlanta this upcoming weekend.

The White House announced that Biden will hold a re-election campaign event on Saturday, the day before he will deliver the commencement speech at Morehouse College.

The White House did not say where or what time the event will be held.

[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks ]

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Morehouse’s decision to invite Biden to give the commencement speech has been met with mixed reaction.

Some members of the faculty, alumni, and students have signed an online petition about Biden and the speech.

“The general feeling on the ground is that we don’t want him here,” student Malik P. said. “It’s very obvious that we’re being used to score political points and get more Black votes. It is so obvious that it’s just about the presidential campaign.”

Morehouse President Dr. David A. Thomas said the university is honored to have him, citing his administration’s investments for historically Black colleges and universities.

“This moment transcends Morehouse; it coincides with a critical juncture in our nation’s history as we navigate an election year marked by contention and divisiveness. As an institution and a community, we bear a profound responsibility and obligation to be the beacon of hope and progress in these challenging times. We must take intentional, strategic action that serves the present moment and the collective future of our country and the world,” Thomas said.

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Trump's speeches follow a familiar playlist, featuring greatest hits among new tunes

Stephen Fowler

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally on May 1 at Avflight Saginaw in Freeland, Mich. Nic Antaya/Getty Images hide caption

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally on May 1 at Avflight Saginaw in Freeland, Mich.

In 2024, a Donald Trump campaign speech is many things: a forum to air grievances against his opponents and ongoing criminal proceedings, a safe space to test his popularity among supporters and a lengthy stream of consciousness responding to political news of the day.

A Trump speech also gives insight on how he would govern in a second term if he wins the election this November.

Like a Phish concert but with more grievance, this is what it's like at a Trump rally

The former president's campaign events are surreal to experience: all-day affairs that are equal parts religious revival and massive pep rallies, powered by an infamous musical playlist that runs for hours before he speaks.

It's an eclectic mix of songs that reflects Trump's personal tastes, ranging from Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" to music from Phantom of the Opera to Village People's "Y.M.C.A.," culminating with Lee Greenwood's country classic "God Bless The U.S.A." as he walks on stage to thunderous applause.

It's also helpful to think of what Trump says at these events as its own curated playlist: never the same topics in the same order, heavy on the greatest hits but with plenty of space left for new tracks that riff on what's popular.

Familiar refrains and one-hit wonders

Plenty of Trump's speech is tied to where he is, who he's talking to and how it fits in the political moment.

Picture this: it's the night before the first presidential primary contest, so Trump's remarks in Indianola, Iowa, feature diss tracks against top rivals Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, plus crowd pleasing mentions of tariffs and increased access to ethanol, both topics important to Iowa's farmers.

But there's also plenty of typical Trumpian fare that could've been delivered anywhere:

"These caucuses are your personal chance to score the ultimate victory over all of the liars, cheaters, thugs, perverts, frauds, crooks, freaks, creeps, and other quite nice people," Trump said.

It can be hard for even seasoned observers to track what's new or notable in his speeches. The run time is often more than an hour and can switch tone and topics at random.

Donald Trump's campaign speeches feature familiar attacks against opponents like Joe Biden, plus one off riffs on his policy proposals. Scott Olson/Getty Images hide caption

Donald Trump's campaign speeches feature familiar attacks against opponents like Joe Biden, plus one off riffs on his policy proposals.

Still, there are common threads, including attacks against the array of criminal charges against him, as prosecutors allege everything from election interference to business fraud to mishandling classified documents.

For example, in 15 major speeches reviewed by NPR from this year, Trump says his indictments far outpace the reputation of a notorious gangster: Al Capone — or, as Trump affectionately refers to him, "Alphonse."

"This was the roughest, meanest gangster in history," Trump said at the Black Conservative Federation's gala in Columbia, S.C., earlier this year. "I've been indicted more than Alphonse Capone, Scarface. If he had dinner with you, and if he didn't like the tone of your voice, he would kill you that night. You would never see your family again. You were dead."

At that February event, Trump also mused that his indictments help him appeal to Black voters.

Remixing his favorite tunes

The tone and tenor of Trump's campaign speeches have taken a darker turn in 2024, like in Dayton, Ohio, where he warned of a "bloodbath" for the auto industry if he loses the election. Scott Olson/Getty Images hide caption

The tone and tenor of Trump's campaign speeches have taken a darker turn in 2024, like in Dayton, Ohio, where he warned of a "bloodbath" for the auto industry if he loses the election.

Trump's 2024 campaign speeches have many commonalities — like verses that mock President Joe Biden's age, appearance, activities and actions as president.

"I mean the guy can't put two sentences together, he can't find the stairs to a platform," Trump said in Richmond, Va.

There's also unique riffs that raise eyebrows and make headlines, like the time in Conway, S.C., where Trump said he wouldn't defend some NATO allies against Russia .

"If we don't pay and we're attacked by Russia, will you protect us?" Trump said another NATO leader asked him one time. "'No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.'"

Republicans play cleanup on aisle Trump after former president's NATO comments

Then, in Dayton, Ohio, Trump warned his defeat could be terrible for the automotive industry.

"If I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole ... that's going to be the least of it," Trump said. "It's going to be a bloodbath for the country. That'll be the least of it."

As the year has progressed, Trump's rallies have taken a darker, more defiant tone, and his "greatest hits" are increasingly hitting back at groups that he feels have wronged him, or aren't on board with the "Make America Great Again" vision.

In North Carolina and Virginia, Pennsylvania and Nevada to hear Trump tell it, there will be no America unless he is in charge and Biden is vanquished.

"He's a demented tyrant who is trying to destroy our democracy," Trump said of the president in Schnecksville, Pa.

In Las Vegas, Trump told a roaring crowd to think of the 10 worst presidents in American history.

"They would not have done near the destruction to our country as Crooked Joe Biden and the Biden administration have done," he said.

"He's destroying our country," Trump said, echoing his remarks in Pennsylvania.

The hostile phrasing around the promise to implement hardline policies like mass deportations — and expanding the powers of the presidency to punish opponents — is a feature, not a bug, of Trump's campaign message.

It's a message that says the stakes are too high to ignore.

"We will fight for America like no one has ever fought before," he intoned in Greensboro, N.C., as an instrumental with ties to the QAnon movement played underneath. "2024 is our final battle."

While no two rallies are exactly the same, the final notes of a Trump speech are like a catchy political earworm as he vows to make America powerful, wealthy, strong, proud and safe once more, ending with his signature promise to "Make America great again."

Former President Donald Trump and attorney Susan Necheles attend his trial at the Manhattan Criminal court, Tuesday. Less than a week after a pair of campaign rallies, Trump is mandated to be back in court almost everyday, making the Manhattan courtroom his campaign trail stop of necessity. Win MacNamee/AP hide caption

Former President Donald Trump and attorney Susan Necheles attend his trial at the Manhattan Criminal court, Tuesday. Less than a week after a pair of campaign rallies, Trump is mandated to be back in court almost everyday, making the Manhattan courtroom his campaign trail stop of necessity.

Trump's last two rallies last week were held on the only day of the week his New York trial was not in session. But, in his first stop, he largely avoided talking about that trial that has kept him off the campaign trail .

In front of his biggest fans once again, Trump's verbal playlist in Waukesha, Wis., featured comedic asides, like telling a protester to "Go home to mom!"

Away from his New York trial, Donald Trump's campaign rallies are business as usual

Between his usual comments about closing the southern border, deporting migrants and claiming global conflict would cease if he was in charge, Trump made inflammatory remarks about Palestinian refugees that garnered little media attention .

"Under no circumstances shall we bring thousands of refugees from Hamas-controlled terrorist epicenters like Gaza to America," he said.

Trump reiterated support for a travel ban from Muslim-majority countries, and implied an influx of migrants to the U.S. would lead to a terrorist attack similar to the Oct. 7 attack in Israel.

"We do not need a jihad in the United States of America," he added to cheers from the crowd.

A few hours later, Trump curated a different vibe in Freeland, Mich., making no mention of Gaza. He did, however, give significant airtime to his criminal proceedings and how much they cramped his campaign style.

"As you know, I have come here today from New York City where I'm being forced to sit for days on end in a kangaroo courtroom with a corrupt and conflicted judge enduring a Biden sideshow trial," he said.

And because it's the Trump show, that applause line was soon followed by a familiar refrain.

"Has anyone ever heard of Al Capone? Scarface!" he quipped.

Until the New York hush money trial has wrapped, Trump's main act will be headlining the inside (and outside) of a Manhattan courtroom.

He'll take his show on the road again Saturday in New Jersey, where you can expect familiar tunes, both verbal and musical, like the Sam and Dave song "Hold On, I'm Comin'" that typically ends his rallies.

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At Donor Retreat, Trump Calls Biden Administration the ‘Gestapo’

The speech by Donald J. Trump at a Republican National Committee fund-raising retreat came during his criminal trial in New York. He faces a total of 88 criminal charges across four indictments.

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By Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher

• May 4, 2024

Fresh from his criminal trial in New York, Donald J. Trump delivered a frustrated and often obscene speech, lasting roughly 75 minutes, at a Republican National Committee donor retreat in Florida on Saturday, attacking one of the prosecutors pursuing him and comparing President Biden’s administration to the Nazis.

“These people are running a Gestapo administration,” Mr. Trump told donors who attended the event at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times. “And it’s the only thing they have. And it’s the only way they’re going to win, in their opinion, and it’s actually killing them. But it doesn’t bother me.”

Before making the comparison, Mr. Trump baselessly insisted that the various indictments against him and his allies in several states were being orchestrated by the Biden administration.

He said that, before his indictment, he was gentler on Mr. Biden, despite the outcome of the 2020 election. “You have to respect the office of the presidency,” Mr. Trump said. “And I never talk to him like this.”

Mr. Trump entered the event to the recording of the national anthem that he made with a group of people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob seeking to disrupt the certification of Mr. Biden’s electoral college win. Mr. Trump praised the song.

In his speech, he complained repeatedly about the criminal trial in Manhattan, to which he will return on Monday, insisted that Democrats use “welfare” to cheat in elections and said he would need an attorney general with “courage” as he mocked his former attorney general, William P. Barr, who recently endorsed Mr. Trump after having spoken critically of him since the administration ended.

Mr. Trump also indulged in conspiracy theories around his 2020 loss, and said that his handpicked chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Whatley, would prevent “cheating” in the upcoming election.

Mr. Trump’s comments about welfare to wealthy donors at the event called to mind remarks caught on tape by Mitt Romney during his 2012 presidential run, when he dismissed 47 percent of voters as off-limits because they did not pay taxes.

“When you are Democrat, you start off essentially at 40 percent because you have civil service, you have the unions and you have welfare,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday. “And don’t underestimate welfare. They get welfare to vote, and then they cheat on top of that — they cheat.”

But Mr. Trump focused more on his own legal jeopardy, as he faces four different indictments and 88 criminal charges. On Friday, he had to listen in court to his former communications adviser, Hope Hicks, testify in the trial in which he is accused of falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments made to a porn star.

He also spent several minutes acknowledging Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois whose lengthy prison sentence after being convicted of corruption charges was commuted by Mr. Trump, and who was at the R.N.C. event.

The former president said that he came to the decision to issue the pardon after seeing Mr. Blagojevich’s wife on television advocating his release, and that it was sealed that he would intervene when he learned that James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director whom Mr. Trump fired amid an investigation into Mr. Trump and his campaign, was connected to the Blagojevich investigation.

Mr. Trump also mocked the physical appearance of Jack Smith, the special counsel who has indicted him twice.

“He’s unattractive both inside and out,” Mr. Trump said. “This is one unattractive dude.” He then used two expletives to describe Mr. Smith.

He praised House Speaker Mike Johnson, who, in his own remarks, said the nation needed “a strong man” in the White House.

At another point, Mr. Trump said that if anyone wanted to donate $1 million to the R.N.C. on the spot, “I will let you come up and speak.” He sounded disappointed until someone accepted the invitation.

Mr. Trump laid blame for the slim margin in the House on the issue of abortion, after he appointed the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, for which he has repeatedly taken credit. “We had a rough thing because of the, you know, the issue of abortion largely. I think we would have had 45 seats more,” Mr. Trump said.

The meandering remarks drew a sharp contrast with the specifics provided by Mr. Trump’s top advisers at a presentation earlier on Saturday. His advisers said that Mr. Trump’s campaign and the party were projected to raise $76.2 million in April, according to two people who attended the briefing.

Mr. Trump’s three top advisers — Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita and Tony Fabrizio — briefed donors, presented a slide show and took questions afterward, the attendees said. The attendees were not authorized to speak publicly about the event, which was a closed-door briefing and gathering for party donors.

Mr. Trump’s advisers presented a bullish case for the candidate that included the possibility of expanding the electoral map to include the Democratic-leaning states of Minnesota and Virginia. They also noted that Mr. Trump has remained mostly ahead in polls even while being outspent by President Biden, just as the former president was outspent in the primary by his rivals.

The Federal Election Commission will not receive fund-raising reports until later this month, meaning the numbers can’t be verified until then. In March, Mr. Trump and his allied groups reported raising $65.6 million — a significant amount, but still well below what President Biden and his affiliated outside groups have raised.

The slide show presentation included three different electoral college maps, the attendees said. The first was dismissed as “the media’s version,” which included seven swing states: Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina across the Southwest and the Sun Belt, plus Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in the industrial north.

A second slide described “the actual current reality” as only having three swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

And a third slide described an “expanded reality” in which both Minnesota and Virginia would be in play for Mr. Trump — an ambitious view of states not widely seen as among the most competitive, but in which the Trump team insists the former president has gained ground.

Mr. Trump’s advisers also described some of their strategy for the general election in the presentation, including reaching 2016 levels of support with white voters and expanding support among Black and Latino voters, particularly among urban men.

The campaign strategists also outlined a plan to prevent the kinds of losses that occurred in 2022 that have been linked to the issue of abortion and the backlash from the Supreme Court’s overturning of federal abortion rights before the midterm elections.

Mr. Trump has proudly claimed ownership of the end of Roe v. Wade as the president who appointed a conservative supermajority to the highest court in the country. But he has struggled to answer questions about it since, waffling in discussions with advisers about whether to back a national ban, before ultimately saying in a video he posted a few weeks ago that it’s up to states to decide how to handle the issue.

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

Shane Goldmacher is a national political correspondent, covering the 2024 campaign and the major developments, trends and forces shaping American politics. He can be reached at [email protected] . More about Shane Goldmacher

Our Coverage of the 2024 Election

Presidential Race

Donald Trump leads President Biden in five crucial battleground states, a new set of polls shows , as young and nonwhite voters express discontent with the president over the economy and the war in Gaza.

Biden’s campaign brushed off the findings of the new polls , dismissing their significance and arguing that the president still has six months left before Election Day to persuade voters to support him.

The new polls showed that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is polling stronger than any third-party candidate has in decades , sapping support from both Biden and Trump.

Trade War With China:  Biden ran for the White House as a sharp critic of Trump’s crackdown on trade with China. In office, though, he has escalated Trump’s trade war  with Beijing, albeit with a very different aim .

A Return to Normal?:  Biden has argued for years that he is the politician to restore normalcy to American politics. But a subset of American voters, have argued that they do not want his version of it .

Trump’s Exaggerated   Emails:  Trump’s campaign has sent supporters a steady stream of fund-raising solicitations that depict a highly dramatized account of his actions at his criminal trial .

Split Over Israel:  Democrats’ divisions over the war in Gaza flared in New York as a tense debate between Representative Jamaal Bowman and his primary opponent, George Latimer, exposed sharp divisions in their party .