The individual in interaction: Why cognitive and discourse-level pragmatics need not conflict

Abstract

Those who study language in interaction often reject what has been called cognitive-philosophical (mostly neo- and post-Gricean) pragmatics. Recent criticisms have centered on the role of speakers' intentions, but in the context of broader arguments that human linguistic interactions cannot be adequately characterized or understood in terms of how individual agents approach the production and interpretation of individual utterances. On this view, the existence of “emergent” aspects of meaning demands the adoption of an irreducible “interactional achievement” approach, according to which the linguistic interaction itself is the most basic object of analysis. This position is flawed in several ways. It fails to appreciate the inherent dynamism of a fully developed cognitive approach to utterance interpretation, such as Relevance Theory, and its consequent sensitivity to interactional factors. Conversely, to ignore individual-level and utterance-level processes is to obscure important elements of interactional phenomena. Meanwhile, criticism of theoretical uses of speakers' intentions often assumes an excessively narrow and deterministic definition. There remains work to be done within cognitive pragmatics to fully elucidate the appropriate notion of intention, but some such notion is ineliminable from the theory of communication, and is accordingly shown to be implicit in interactional achievement models themselves.