The duality of speaker meaning: What makes self-repair, insincerity, and sarcasm possible

Abstract

Speaker meaning is defined as a speaker's communicative intention about what his or her utterance means in context. However, if we regard speakers’ communicative intentions as individual-level cognitive phenomena, we end up focusing on individuated processes as the basis of speaker meaning that do not account for the achievement of communication. The claim here is that there is, and theoretically must be, a shared, impersonal, basis for forming, implementing, and recognizing speakers’ communicative intentions. This does not subsume speakers’ personal communicative intentions but is intertwined with them to create a duality of speaker meaning. On one hand there is the speaker's personal communicative intention, and on the other, the communicative intention anyone from the speaker's and hearer's community would have in producing that utterance in that context, not just that speaker in particular. What is interesting is when the two sources of communicative intention diverge, the personal and the impersonal, and the generic speaker meaning of an utterance is not one that the speaker stands behind or endorses. This creates a variety of phenomena that only exist because of this divergence. This includes the occurrence and detection of understanding troubles and self-initiated self-repair when the divergence happens by accident, and the social reality of deception, insincerity, sarcasm and joking when the divergence is deliberately produced. Naturally occurring data are examined in which speakers observably attend to the communicative intention of a generic speaker of their utterance with which the utterance credits them.