Re-examinining Conceptualisations of Communication in Pragmatics

The conceptualisation of language use in the field of pragmatics continues to be dominated by the view that communication involves 'transfer of meaning' from speakers to hearers. While there are numerous theories of meaning in pragmatics, most of the key approaches involve the view that communication involves inferences about the intentions of the speaker to guide the way in which speakers encode their meanings and others recover them through decoding. Their point of departures are in (1) how they classify different types of meaning, and (2) their explanation of how these intentions are recognised by hearers.

Drawing from the seminal work of Grice (1967, 1989), those who can be loosely described as continuing Grice's 'philosophical approach' to pragmatics have developed a view where truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning is communicated by the use of the Cooperative Principle and associated maxims, modified in various ways, to infer the reflexive intentions of speakers (Atlas 2005; Bach in press; Horn 2004; Levinson 2000; Potts 2005). Relevance theorists, on the other hand, who represent a more 'cognitive approach' to pragmatics, claim that the communication of meaning is dependent on an overarching principle of 'relevance' to infer speaker intentions (Sperber and Wilson 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2004). Even approaches which have developed a more 'semantic approach' to pragmatics tend to regard the recognition of speaker intentions as a key element underlying the 'transfer of meaning' between speakers and hearers (Davis 2003, 2005).

However, the dominant paradigm in pragmatics in relation to the conceptulisation of communication has not been without critics, most notably those who have argued that "social interaction is remarkable for its emergent properties which transcend the characteristics of the individuals that jointly produce it" (Brown and Levinson 1987: 48), and thus communication involves more than the 'transfer of meaning' or the recognition of speaker intentions (Gauker 2001, 2002). The Co-Constituting Model of Communication proposed by Arundale (1999, 2004, 2005) offers an alternative to previous approaches to conceptualisating communication in pragmatics, as it is built on the assumption that emergence or interactional achievement is a key characteristic of communication, a view that has emerged from the large body of work in conversation analysis. This paper thus utilizes the Co-constituting Model in discussing how 'politeness implicature', a pragmatic phenomenon that is not easily accounted for within the 'transfer of meaning' paradigm dominating pragmatics, emerge from interdependently co-constituting sequences of interpretings in conversation.

The paper begins by first introducing some of the main conceptualization of communication in pragmatics, highlighting their dependence on view of communication as 'transfer of meaning' and as involving inferences about speaker intentions, and then pointing out some of the inherent weaknesses of these assumptions. It next introduces an alternative to this view, the Co-constituting Model of Communication, outlining its three main principles, namely the Sequential Interpreting Principle (SIP), the Recipient Design Principle (RDP), and the Adjacent Placement Principle (APP). These three broad principles are then applied in explaining how politeness implicature (defined as instances where by implying something, politeness is generated) is co-constituted, drawing from examples in English and Japanese. The implications of this approach for theorizing about the conceptualization of communication are then considered.