Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Fundamentals of Sociopragmatics
- 2 Sociopragmatics
- 3 Inference and Implicature
- 4 Speaker Meaning, Commitment and Accountability
- 5 Social Actions
- 6 Stance and Evaluation
- 7 Reflexivity and Meta-awareness
- 8 Participation and Footing
- 9 Conventionalization and Conventions
- 10 Synchronic and Diachronic Pragmatic Variability
- 11 Activity Types and Genres
- 12 Social Groups and Relational Networks
- Part II Topics and Settings in Sociopragmatics
- Part III Approaches and Methods in Sociopragmatics
- Index
- References
4 - Speaker Meaning, Commitment and Accountability
from Part I - Fundamentals of Sociopragmatics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2021
By
Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Fundamentals of Sociopragmatics
- 2 Sociopragmatics
- 3 Inference and Implicature
- 4 Speaker Meaning, Commitment and Accountability
- 5 Social Actions
- 6 Stance and Evaluation
- 7 Reflexivity and Meta-awareness
- 8 Participation and Footing
- 9 Conventionalization and Conventions
- 10 Synchronic and Diachronic Pragmatic Variability
- 11 Activity Types and Genres
- 12 Social Groups and Relational Networks
- Part II Topics and Settings in Sociopragmatics
- Part III Approaches and Methods in Sociopragmatics
- Index
- References
Summary
Building on Grice’s seminal work on ‘speaker meaning’, this chapter explores three different approaches to meaning in communication in light of how they view the relationship between ‘speaker meanings’ and ‘speaker commitments’: (1) inferential accounts of intentional meaning (stemming from Relevance Theory), (2) normative commitment-based approaches to communication and (3) interactional achievement accounts. It examines how these different perspectives yield different results regarding the meanings that speakers are committed to, held committed to by others or held normatively committed to in virtue of conventions of language use. Finally, it demonstrates how the concept of ‘reflexive accountability’ from talk-in-interaction provides the link in the sociopragmatic toolkit between questions about meaning recovery and the questions of why and how speakers choose to formulate their utterances in different ways for different purposes.
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- The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics , pp. 48 - 68Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
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