NOTES ON THE NOTIONS OF ‘COMMUNICATION’ AND
‘INTENTION’ AND
THE STATUS OF SPEAKER AND ADDRESSEE IN
LINGUISTICS
Frank Scheppers
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Center for
Linguistics (CLIN)
Some
notions remain unquestioned throughout otherwise highly divergent schools of
thought within the domain of linguistics and in neighboring disciplines. One
such central complex of notions is the standard view of linguistic
communication. Although many differences can be noted between competing
approaches (for an -incomplete- overview, see Berge 1998), most models have,
often implicitly, at least the following core features in common (for a remarkably
explicit version of this ‘standard’ view, see Levelt 1989):
- communication is localized in two
distinct psychological units (two subjects), the speaker and the addressee;
- these units interact by means of
the transfer of information:
- the speaker codes (‘packages’,
...) a ‘prelinguistic intention’ of his in such a way that this content
(‘message’) becomes available to the addressee;
- the addressee in his turn
‘decodes’ (‘interprets’, ...) the message;
- the message itself is conceived of
as being an object with an independent status from both speaker and addressee.
Of course,
lately, the psycholinguistic modelling of this coding-decoding process has
evolved into a much more complex matter than the classic semiotic model: the
attention has shifted away from the speaker towards the addressee, in that the
coding process on behalf of the speaker is now conceived of as implying
extensive monitoring of the addressee’s cognitive state (see e.g. Brown 1995).
Still, the psychological subject is the ultimate locus of the ‘sense’ of
discourse, in that it is defined in terms of the intentions of the speaker and
the interpretation of these intentions by the addressee. Furthermore, the
psychological subject is nowadays often understood as corresponding to an
underlying biological organism, mostly only considered in neurological terms,
i.e. mainly as a brain.
The purpose
of this paper is a modest one. It is not intended to offer conclusive evidence
against any of the views under scrutiny, and no systematic attempt will be made
to offer a full-grown alternative for the prevailing paradigm. However, I will
bring together various elements that point toward an alternative conception of
the phenomena, and thus will try and show that the speaker-addressee doctrine
is not a necessary one and depends on specific methodological/epistemological
choices.
1. Coherence, sense and intentions
There are
serious arguments for claiming that the ‘sense’ of behavior (as in ‘this
behavior makes sense’ or in ‘sensible behavior’) can be interpreted in terms of
its ‘pragmatic coherence’, i.e. in terms of the specific ways its component
actions make up a more complex action.
The ‘point’
of a particular action (its pragmatic function) cannot be isolated from its
position within a more global sequence of actions: it depends both on when it is executed with respect to
actions that precede and follow it and on the qualitative relation it has with its neighbors and with respect to
the more complex encompassing action. I have argued elsewhere (Scheppers 2003)
that this feature of coherent behavior can be represented by assigning a
hierarchical structure to behavior (insofar as it is coherent).
Consider
the following example. Someone reaches for his pocket. The point of this action
becomes apparent as he grasps for and takes out a box of matches. The point of
this more complex action ‘taking a box of matches’ in its turn depends on the
way it fits within a more global sequence of actions. If the agent has already
fetched a kettle, filled it with water and now uses the matches to light a
burner of the kitchen range to cook the water, the point of these actions and
the encompassing action ‘heating water’ may get their point from the fact that
he’s e.g. cooking tea. On the other hand, if he takes out his matches to light
a cigarette, the pragmatic function of this action does not go beyond the
encompassing action ‘smoking a cigarette’ and it would (normally) be fruitless
to try and link it with any of the preceding or following actions.
Observe
that exactly the same elements that enter into an analysis of the internal
hierarchical structure of a complex action also serve as answers to the
question as to why the agent does
whatever he does, i.e. as an analysis of his intentions: he reaches for his
pocket in order to take out a box of matches, because he wants to light a match, with the intention of lighting a
cigarette, so as to smoke. Insofar as
this line of argument is adequate, what an agent is doing is indistinguishable
from why he is doing whatever he
does. In order to understand behavior (of an observed agent or -for that
matter- one’s very own), intentions do not enter the game as separate items,
apart from what makes the behavior coherent and recognizable in the first
place.[1]
Furthermore,
the recognition of the ‘sense’ of certain sequences of actions -as e.g.
reflected in the act of naming the actions- involves the recognition of the
type of action this particular action token belongs to. Even if one chooses to
formulate the sense of the action tokens of an agent in terms of his
intentions, this formulation will necessarily imply reference to action types
(making sense of ‘this agent cooking tea’ implies knowing what it is to ‘cook
tea’).[2] The type-token distinction holds as
well for ‘novel’ or ad hoc behavior: even if some aspects of observed behavior
are ‘new’ to the observer or the agent (e.g. while trying to make sense of an
object s/he has never seen before), in order to be perceived as
sensible/coherent, its component actions and the relations that hold between
them should be of recognizable general type (grasping, lifting, moving, ...).
Obviously, these action types are not reducible to the particular agent’s
intentions, rather the inverse is true: one cannot intend to perform an action
without somehow knowing what it is to do so.
Thus, both
the stereotyped and the ad hoc or novel aspects of an agent’s behavior -insofar
as they can be interpreted as ‘making sense’- depend on structural features of
the behavior itself in which no reference needs to be made to the particular
intentional states of the agent. The same structuring mechanisms accounting for
the coherence and sense of behavior can be repeated over and over again in
different token actions, across different agents and different observers. Both
from the point of view of the agent and from the point of view of the observer,
‘making sense’ is a matter of managing the coherence relations between the
actions that make up a more complex action, and these coherence relations have
an independent status with respect to the subjects (or organisms) involved and
can accordingly be analyzed in an insightful way without making reference to
the cognitive states of these subjects.[3]
2. Sense and communication
This way of
analyzing the coherence of behavior applies to verbal behavior, i.e. to
discourse, as well. Within the field of Discourse Analysis and (linguistic)
Pragmatics the kind of coherence relations that can hold between discourse
segments are an object of ongoing research (for references and discussion, see
Scheppers 2003; also see e.g. Mann & Thompson 1988 and Roulet & al.
2001). This research involves more or less elaborate typologies including
relations such as the one between a claim and evidence for that claim, between the
two members of a contrast, between the setting in which an event takes place
and the event itself, topic-comment relations, etc. Again the coherence
relations constituting the internal structure of discourse can be interpreted
so as to represent the point of its different segments and hence the
intentionality of the discourse as a complex action.
Consider
e.g. a discourse segment like ‘Yesterday I was at the bank, and there was a
guy, and ...’, after which follows a story with the ‘guy’ as the main
character. It is quite obvious that producing this stretch of discourse gets
its point from being the introduction to the ensuing story (introducing its
setting and its main character): it is normally only interpretable as the
opening of such a story (and only at its opening!), and it would not normally
be produced at all if not as the beginning of that story. Likewise, discourse
segments presenting the different actions that make up the plot of the story
(e.g. ‘and suddenly he pulled a gun’ or ‘and then he ran away’) get their
respective points from the position they take within that plot. The intention
to produce this particular segment and the intention to produce that particular
story are interdependent.
As in the
case of non-verbal behavior, the type-token distinction can be applied. As is
shown by the analyses in the fields of rhetoric, narratology and discourse
analysis, different genres of discourse (an anecdote, a joke, a fairy-tale, a
forensic speech ...) imply specific ways of sequencing and articulating the segments
and sub-segments the genre implies. Each segment gets its point from the
position it has within the overall structure of the discourse (e.g. the
punch-line with respect to the joke, the narration with respect to the forensic
speech, “Once upon a time ...” and “They lived happily ever after” with respect
to the fairy-tale, etc.), and, conversely, the discourse is coherent and makes
sense insofar as the necessary structural relations between its segments are
maintained.
Understanding
(‘making sense of’) discourse is then to a large extent analogous to
understanding (observed or experienced) non-verbal behavior, in that both
fundamentally imply the ability to construct the coherence relations between
the action segments that make up the behavior, and hence their ‘point’ or
‘sense’. In both cases, the explicit reconstruction of the agent’s intentions
(incl. one’s own) as something separate from the structurally inherent ‘sense’
of the behavior itself is not necessary for an insightful analysis.
Levelt (1989,
58) states: “It is generally assumed, and it seems to be supported by
introspection, that speakers produce utterances in order to realize certain
communicative intentions”. It is clear from the above that I simply deny the existence of ‘communicative
intentions’ as specific to and necessary for verbal behavior, as well as the
purported evidence from introspection. Consider what actually happens while
watching someone cooking tea or listening to someone telling a story about what
happened at the bank the other day. Phenomenologically, understanding what
other people are doing/saying is not normally experienced as if it implies the
decoding of a message and the subsequent interpretation of its underlying
intentions (what would be the message of cooking tea?). Rather, what the
observer sees/hears presents itself to him as a matter of ‘following’ what the
observed agent is doing/saying: he recognizes the observed actions as being a
coherent whole of a familiar type and he experiences their ‘sense’ or ‘point’
in the same way as if he were performing the actions himself. Understanding
others is -so I claim- largely homologous to self-understanding, but the
converse is also true: understanding one’s own actions involves the very same
mechanisms as understanding observed behavior.[4]
The
viability of the notion of ‘communicative intention’ depends on the viability
of the notion of ‘intention’ in general: if one denies that the sense of
behavior depends on pre-behavioral intentions, this goes for communicative behavior
as well. If self-understanding on behalf of an agent/speaker is not
fundamentally different from what it takes for an observer/addressee to
understand what is going on, the specificity of communication looses a lot of
its intuitive charm.
Thus, if one
chooses to stress the structural features of coherent behavior that are
constitutive of its sense as an alternative to the (rather foggy) concept of
‘(an agent’s) intention’, the sense of communicative behavior (i.c. discourse)
as it is experienced appears to be largely analogous to the sense of
non-communicative behavior as it is experienced.[5]
3. Cross-speaker coherence
The
structural interpretation of the coherence/intentionality of behavior in terms
of its internal coherence can be extended to multi-agent (‘co-operative’,
including antagonistic) behavior. Think e.g. of the coordination of the actions
of different agents implied by dancing, or of boxers in a boxing match or the
players in a football game (both within a team and between adversaries).
For the
present purposes the most important type of co-operative multi-agent behavior
is conversational discourse. In this section I will review a few structural
features of conversation that are not limited to one speaker.
(a) adjacency and
sequentiality
The internal structure of conversation has from the outset been one of
the major issues in Conversation Analysis as founded by Harvey Sacks’s classic
analyses (Sacks 1992/1995a, 1992/1995b). Sacks’s analysis of the sequentiality
of utterances in conversation gave rise to the familiar notion of ‘adjacency
pair’ (e.g. Greeting-Greeting, Summons-Compliance, Question-Answer, etc.), but
included also more complex forms of sequentiality.
Furthermore, some of the cross-speaker coherence relations bear a close
resemblance to regular one-speaker counterparts. Thus e.g. the relation between
a wh-question and the answer to it functions almost exactly like a
topic-comment relation. Conversely, many typical dialogic structures can be
used within a one-speaker discourse: e.g. the rhetorical use of questions in a
monologue as a means of marking topic-comment relations (compare “Now, what
about the theoretical implications of this model? ...”, and “As far as the
theoretical implications of this model are concerned, ...”).
Genre-specific patterns also determine the different conversational
roles which the participants assume; for instance, the roles of patient and
doctor are inherent features of the discourse genre(s) which are typical in a
medical context: these roles are not features of the participants in the
interaction in se but of the type of interaction (‘genre’) itself (the very
same persons may engage in quite different interactions as well, e.g. as
friends); entire branches of discourse analysis are concerned with the
investigation of the functions of discourse within wider interactional contexts
(cf. various contributions to Schiffrin, Tannen & Hamilton 2001), i.a.
focusing on the functions of verbal behavior as part of essentially non-verbal
behavior (e.g. on the workfloor, or in the context of the sociological features
of different groups of teenagers, etc.). For the present purposes it is
interesting to note that the genre-specific roles of the participants often
directly reflect into structure of the conversation. Thus, the different roles
in a conversation may be generally ‘symmetrical’: the participants have a more
or less equal status and power in the group, the conversational genre in which
they engage does not imply a specifically different role for the different
participants, etc. In these cases, the overall pragmatic structure of the
conversation itself will often be made up of structurally symmetrical
cross-speaker patterns, e.g. some dialogic genres require antagonism between
the participants (e.g. debates, quarrels, bluffing sessions ...); this
role-assignment will reflect into the discourse structure under the form of
highly frequent contrast-like adjacency pairs. Conversely, an asymmetrical
relation between the different roles typically reflects into structurally
asymmetrical patterns in the discourse, as in the following cases: (i) some
dialogic genres (‘interviews’ in the broad sense) imply that one of the
participants (the ‘elicitor’) does all the questioning, whereas the other
participant(s) do(es) all the answering; in some cases this asymmetrical
distribution is obviously related to a role-distribution which is pre-existing
with respect to the local discourse context (e.g.
journalist/researcher-interviewee; police-detainee; doctor-patient); (ii) meetings
in a professional context are often presided over by a ‘chairman’, which (often
but not always) is hierarchically superior in the organization, and whose role
implies for him to regulate the interactions; likewise, the contributions of
the host at a party reflect his special status in that e.g. it typically is his
role to introduce new participants and to generally regulate the overall
development of the interactions.
Note that the above remarks apply equally well to the structure of
antagonistic behavior. The antagonism implied in e.g. a debate is a structural
feature of such a discourse genre, which implies recurrent Contrast patterns
opposing two contrasted claims.
Beside and
beyond the structural relations that express the coherence of the contents of a
conversation, some other cross-speaker regularities can be observed.
(b) echoism,
cross-speaker utterance completion
In spontaneous conversation, it is a quite common phenomenon that the
addressee echoes the last word(s) of the previous speaker’s utterance, or
finishes the previous speaker’s utterance before he can (see Sacks 1992a,
647-655, on what he calls “appendors”). Obviously, the addressee (the second
speaker) does not take up a role different from the one the first speaker
occupies; the execution of the same role seems to be divided between both
speakers.
(c) “uh huh” and other
other-speaker fillers
In his May 24 1971 lecture, Sacks starts from the remark that “uh huh”,
like “uh”, ‘fills a pause’, but -unlike “uh”- fills a pause in the other
person’s talk. Sacks then adds a few remarks (Sacks 1992/1995b, 410-412): “uh
huh” does not occur after the other
person has paused, but typically occurs in such a way that their is ‘no gap and
no overlap’ between speakers and thus seems to anticipate the other speaker’s
pause; “uh huh” does then not simply mean “go on”, but anticipates the other’s
intention to go on (as well as his intention to pause). What is interesting
about this phenomenon is that, although in some sense different speakers contribute
to the discourse, intuitively, these interventions can hardly be said to
constitute a separate turn in any real sense at all. The discourse of the
current main speaker is not interrupted by these interventions, no separate
pragmatic point is carried by ‘uh huh’, (arguably) not even a regulatory one,
and accordingly no separate ‘intention’ can be attributed to the speaker in any
real sense of the term. This seems to point in the direction of an
interpretation in which the different participants do not really each
contribute their share to the development of the discourse, but rather seem to
‘embody’ the very same discourse. More lexicalized fillers, like “yeah”, “yes”,
“o.k.”, etc., and echoic phenomena as the ones mentioned above can be observed
to have comparable functions.
(d) no gap, no overlap
The very fact that different speakers’ utterances in fluent conversation
often follow each other without there being any gap between them and quite
often (though not always) without there being any overlap, has been considered
as a feature of verbal communication that deserves attention. As has been noted
by Sacks (Sacks 1992b, passim),
contributions of speakers overlapping each other is all in all rarer than could
be expected, and this ability for speakers to time their utterances in a very
meticulous manner (if they want to) should be accounted for. Again, this
feature a priori seems to fit in nicely with our notion that pragmatic
structure somehow transcends the individual participant.
These
features of conversation, which taken together are not marginal at all,
obviously do not fit very comfortably with the standard
speaker-message-addressee picture of linguistic communication. The notion of
‘communicative intention’ becomes rather unappealing if applied to the ‘uh huh’
phenomenon: an analysis in terms of highly complex (and very fast) monitoring
procedures of the other participant’s intentions would seem inelegant and
uneconomical for an apparently ‘basic’ and reflex-like behavior. On the other
hand, from the point of view adopted here above, the coherence between more
obviously contentful structural features of conversation is not qualitatively
different from (fits in the same picture as) the “uh huh” phenomenon. According
to this picture, these structures cannot be located exclusively in either one
of the participants. They suggest structuration mechanisms that are not
reducible to the intentions of the participants as autonomous psychological
units, but rather as patterns beyond the individual unit in which these units
take part.
These
observations, again, can be extended to non-verbal interaction: think e.g. of
the motor coordination involved in structurally coupled behaviors such as
dancing or physical combat, in which the major task of the participants is to
‘blend in’ with the other’s actions.
4. ‘Communication’ beyond the psychological
subject or the biological organism
In the
previous sections I have followed two different lines of thought that converge
with respect to the implications they have for the locus of the ‘sense’ of
action in general and discourse in particular:
(1) in section 1 I have argued that
the sense of the behavior/discourse of an agent/speaker depends on structural
features of that behavior which have a status that is independent of the
cognitive state of both the agent/speaker and the observer/addressee; in
section 2 I have tried to show that, as a consequence of this, the sense of
so-called communicative behavior (i.c. monologic discourse) need not be
fundamentally different from the sense of non-communicative behavior;
(2) in section 3 I have argued that
the sense of multi-agent verbal behavior (i.e. conversation) can convincingly
be analyzed in terms of structural patterns that account for the coherence of
the segments that make up the conversation, and that the actualization of these
patterns in conversation is not reducible to the properties (intentions,
cognitive states, etc.) of the participants.
The notion
that the proper level of analysis for communication is not the speaker and/or
addressee is not completely absent from the literature. I will now briefly
review a few approaches in which this notion is implied.[6]
(a) ethnology and
ethnolinguistics
Within the ‘ethnological’ tradition out of which emerged Conversation
Analysis, it has been claimed that verbal interactions (‘speech events’) have a
proper status which is independent of the participants which engage in it (cf.
Erving Goffman’s aphorism “Not men and their moments, rather moments and their
men”). Although extreme and too simple formulations of this claim have been
replaced by more complex models, the ‘structural’ bias has remained a
fundamental feature of ethno-linguistics, conversation analysis and related
disciplines (for a historical review, see Heritage 2001).
(b) system-theoretical
cognitive biology
As a starting point for their approach to biology, Maturana and Varela
defined the biological unit (or unity) as an autonomous item characterized by
an ‘autopoietic’ (self-creating) organization, i.e. a set of relations between
its components that allows for the maintenance of its autonomy and identity
through the structural transformations it may undergo: even if all the actual
components change, the unit remains recognizable as being ‘the same’ for an
observer. The most simple living unit in this sense is the cell. Recurrent
interactions between cells may give rise to a second-order unit that again has
an autopoietic organization, i.e. that in its turn retains its identity for the
observer throughout the structural changes it undergoes (‘structural
coupling’); this is the case for meta-cellular organisms like humans. Cognition
is then a matter of changes within the internal structure of the organism, just
like growth or action.
Within this framework, communicative behavior (linguistic or not) cannot
be described in terms of input and output of information by both units, since
they are defined as autonomous closed systems; the interactions of these
systems with their environment are fully determined by their own internal
organization and the domain of perturbations that this organization allows for
without loss of identity (i.e. by their ‘plasticity’). The regularities that an
observer perceives between the behaviors of both units and their common
environment, which he interprets as ‘communication’, cannot be ascribed to a
flux of information between these items, but has to be formulated as the
creation of a third-order structural coupling, by virtue of which both
organisms participate in a higher-order organism with a common domain of
perturbations (a common ‘world’).[7]
Attributing intentions to communicating organisms is then always the
work of an observer seeing both organisms and their environment at the same
time, without taking into account the fundamental internal organization of the
organisms.[8]
Although
communication or social interaction in general are not basic issues in the
Anglo-Saxon tradition of Philosophy of Mind (characterized by a certain
preoccupation with empirical data from neuro-psychology as well as from
Artificial Intelligence and related disciplines), some recent developments in
that field are pertinent to the present discussion in that they seem to
undermine the status of the psychological subject (as coinciding with a
neuro-biological mind) as the fundamental locus of cognition (and hence of
communication). Interestingly, the post-phenomenological philosophy of Derrida
(characterized by a close reading of the classics of the continental
philosophical tradition) has come to very similar results.
(c) Derrida
In La voix et le phénomène
(Derrida 1967) Derrida formulates a detailed critique on Husserl’s notion of
‘pure (i.e. pre-expressive) intentionality’. According to Husserl,
intentionality (in the sense of ‘sense’) has the ‘Cartesian’ subject as its
ultimate source: something is meaningful if it proceeds from an intentional act
by a consciousness. Derrida shows that meaning crucially involves an
intrinsically iterable procedure for making differences, which is incompatible
with a unitary source of meaning: a difference implies a boundary between at
least two items; the making of such a difference implies an (iterable)
procedure. In Derrida’s work these notions are connected to a reflection on the
notion of ‘writing’: many of the attributes which are traditionally ascribed to
writing (iterability, potential decontextualization, potential absence of the
writing subject, mediateness ...) can in fact be extended to ‘live speech’ and
-for that matter- soliloquy.[9]
(d) Philosophy of Mind
In his best-seller Consciousness
Explained (Dennett 1991/1993), Daniel Dennett assumes an empirical stance
in his investigation of how the phenomena which constitute so-called
consciousness relate to the functions of the brain as a neuro-biological item,
adducing arguments from neuro-psychology (incl. the classic pathological
cases), artificial intelligence and traditional philosophical-analytical
argumentation. For the present purposes the following of his findings are
interesting:
- neurobiologically speaking, nothing
in the functional architecture of the brain corresponds to the psychological
notion of ‘self’ or ‘psychological subject’ as the locus of ‘consciousness’,
supposedly the central level of cognition where all the specialized types of
information are brought together; rather, the functioning of the brain consists
of a ‘pandemonium’ of parallel processes, shaped by biological evolution and
performing different functions directly related to the survival of the
organism;
- the apparent stream-like character
and the apparent unity of consciousness are largely post hoc effects of the way
people (‘we’) represent ourselves in discourse; this self-representation
crucially involves behavioral patterns which have evolved through interaction
and are transmitted by culture, and thus cannot be defined in terms of the
individual brain alone (see section 5 below).
In the same broad research tradition, Susan Hurley’s excellent book Consciousness in Action (Hurley 1998)
deals with issues in neuro-psychology and philosophy of mind (the mind-body
problem; the input-output picture of the distinction between perception and
action, etc.) but also with philosophical issues in the interpretation of Kant
and Wittgenstein. Amongst many other things, Hurley shows the following:
- the distinction between perception
and action (conceived of as an input-output relation) does not account for the
phenomenology of human cognition and is not tenable from a
(neuro-)psychological point of view, in that the well-attested interdependence
between action and perception in everyday settings proves to be not just
instrumental but intrinsic;
- the causal paths involved in
cognition cannot be construed in terms of a strict inside-outside distinction
with respect to the brain or the central nervous system, but crucially involve
loops through the context in which the brain functions (both inside and outside
the organism as a whole), which is particularly clear in the case of
proprioceptive/kinesthetic perception; thus, neurologically speaking, there is no
need to maintain the brain (or the central nervous system) as the sole
substratum for cognition;
- the interwovenness between action
and perception suggests that the neurological correlates of behavioral
phenomena may be reformulated in terms of a “horizontal modularity”, i.e. in
terms of task-based patterns, shared by different cognitive modes, rather than
“vertical” modules based on representation-mode; this cross-modal task-based
modularity essentially involves context-dependent factors.
These quite
different lines of argument all bear upon the standard view of communication
under scrutiny in that they all seem to indicate that the psychological subject
or biological organism need not be the relevant substratum to which a
scientific explanation of ‘sensible’ behavior can be reduced; in other words,
there need not be any similarity at the level of the organism between different
cases of what is understood as being ‘the same (type of)’ behavior.
5. Mimesis
Thus, the
problem arises of how to integrate two notions which both have an intuitive
appeal: (i) the structure of the discourse (or any other action) as an iterable
pattern as the locus of sense (‘intentionality’, ‘meaning’, etc.), and (ii) the
‘person’ (‘subject’, ‘organism’) as the basic unit for psychology and (some
types of) biology, as well as for jurisprudence, politics and ethics. In other
words: how can we integrate the concept of ‘the individual’ (person, subject,
organism) with the higher-order (‘supra-individual’) forms of structuration?
In this
context, the notion of mimesis can be
introduced. In Ancient Greek, the word m€mhsiw, often translated as ‘imitation’
(or ‘representation’), is connected with theatrical performance, and does not
necessarily imply an explicit model which is imitated. Thus, the notion can be
linked with the metaphor of ‘performing a role’, well-established in sociology,
but should be extended beyond the sociological usage, so as to include the
psychologically and biologically important notion of imitation.
(a) mimesis as imitation
First, it
is important to stress the fundamental importance of ‘imitation’ as a basic
reflex-like feature of human behavior (cf. Hurley
1998, 409-412, 416-417):
- the ability to imitate implies the
ability to recognize the perceived behavior and
the ability to relate this perceived behavior to motor-patterns of one’s own
(e.g. infants are able to imitate ‘sticking out one’s tongue’ very early on);
thus, this ability must be innate, because it seems to be a prerequisite for
acquisition and apparently is a reflex-like reaction, even in infants;
recently, a neurological basis for this reflex-like imitating behavior has been
discovered by the discovery of the so-called ‘mirror neurons’ (for references
and discussion, see e.g. Hurley 1998, 411-418);
- the acquisition of culturally
transmitted patterns implies the ability to imitate the perceived behavior of
elders, i.e. acquisition is a process of ‘becoming more like the others’, or to be able to
assume a recognizable role in the community in which one lives;
- pure imitation plays a similar
role in quite simple and basic forms of group behaviour, such as singing and
dancing at parties, contagious laughing, or crowd behavior in mass events
(applauding, chanting, ...); see also what has been said about echoism in
conversation; likewise, imitation is constitutive of more complex phenomena
like the spread of cultural patterns, as e.g. involved in language change;
- psycho-pathological cases suggest
that ‘rational’ or more generally ‘normal’ behavior seems to imply the
inhibition of directly and simply imitative behavior (Hurley 1998, 410), i.e.
the ability to assume one’s role in a more complex fashion; this shows -again-
that imitation as a simple reflex is one of the primary factors in human behavior.
(b) mimesis as the basic communicative
mechanism
In section
2 above I have argued that understanding the other’s behavior (say: as an
observer) is not a matter of decoding either (nor just empathy), but of the
active ‘following’ of this behavior. Likewise, multi-agent actions such a
conversation (or football) can be described insightfully without reference to
the internal states of the participants: it suffices to indicate the roles they
take in the action (or ‘game’) at hand.
In any
case, sensible behavior involves access to the action-type of which the
observed behavior is a token, but need not involve ‘representations’ in the
usual ‘informational’ sense of the word.[10] Furthermore, the patterns which
constitute such action-types intrinsically involve structural ‘roles’ which
cannot be reduced to the individuals who assume them in any particular
action-token. In this sense, mimesis can be construed as the basic
communicative mechanism - not only in acquisition, but also in ‘mature’ social
behavior
(c) mimesis as constitutive of person-hood
It follows
from the above that the psychological subject (as the locus of consciousness)
does not coincide with the biological organism (or its neurological system) as
such. It is impossible to describe person-hood (incl. consciousness,
intentionality etc.) on the level of the bio-chemistry of the organism:[11] these notions essentially involve
the ‘normative’ notions which enter into the interpretation of behavior as
sensible action. For there to be consciousness, there needs to be mimesis: the
construction of subject-hood implies the recognition that one is ‘like the
other one’ (cf. notions such as the ‘mirror stage’ in the psycho-analytical
literature; cf. e.g. Kristeva 1977, 377-379 et passim) and the stuff which makes
up the contents of consciousness crucially involve supra-individual patterns.
(d) mimesis as constitutive of culture (memes)
In the
context of trying to account for human behavior within a broader biological
frame-work, the problem of the phylogenetic origin as well as the propagation
and survival of recurring and historically determined patterns as invoked in
the above has been addressed in terms of the notion of ‘meme’, which has been
coined on the basis of the root of ‘mimesis’: what genes are for the biological
organism, is called memes for the higher order structural couplings which
constitute social life. Action types (in the sense of sections 1, 2 and 3
above) can be considered as memes; language in general and a language in
particular can be viewed as a prototypical instance of a system of memes (for
references amd discussion, see e.g. Dennett 1991/1993, 199-226).[12]
Thus, the
notion of ‘mimesis’ may be construed so as to cover all relations between the
subjects and as the fundamental mechanism underlying both society and
person-hood:
- mimesis is the basic reflex-like
behavioral pattern underlying social behavior;
- mimesis constitutes the actual
structure of communicative behaviour;
- mimesis is the ontogenetical and
phylogenetical basis for the emergence of subject/person-hood;
- mimesis accounts for the
phylogenetic emergence and transmission of supra-individual patterns.
6. Apparent arguments in favor of the
subject-based view
In the
previous sections, I have pointed out various lines of thought which converge
in that they yield a conception of communication which does not start from the
speaker-message-addressee picture. Still, the fact remains that this picture
has prevailed for quite some time and still seems to function properly as a basis
for many branches of scientific research. Thus, the question has to be
addressed as to when the speaker-addressee picture does seem to be attractive. Three recurrent types of situations
immediately come to mind as at first sight incompatible with the alternative
views:
(a) meta-behavior (explaining one’s intentions, ...);
(b) faked communication (deceit, fiction, ...);
(c) failed communication (misunderstandings, ...).[13]
These cases
seem to support the notion of the speaker’s intention as the source of the
meaning of communication rather than rather than the superordinate practice in
which both participants participate, in that they appear to involve a
distinction between the overt form of the message and the underlying intention
of the speaker. Furthermore, the last two cases apparently show a clear
asymmetry between speaker’s meaning and addressee’s meaning.
(a) meta-behavior
In many
cases (though by no means in all cases) people are able to give some account
for why they do whatever they do. In some cases (but by no means in
prototypical ones) they also perform some explicit planning of what they are
going to do, before actually performing the intended action. These phenomena
suggest that intentions are pre-existent with respect to the behavior itself,
which in its turn may suggest that the sense of actual actions resides in this
kind of pre-behavioral intentions.
However,
the link between explicitly formulated intentions and the actual behavior is a
complicated one, as has been extensively pointed out by Wittgenstein (see
footnote 1 above). It should be noted that expressing one’s intentions (whether
aloud or while thinking about what one wants to do) is a behavior that is of a
different type (‘meta’-behavior) as the explained behavior itself and is by no
means an essential part of it. Note that in many cases one finds it difficult
to adequately express one’s intentions in any detail, beyond rather dubious
stock explanations (cf. also notions like ‘sub-conscious’ or ‘unconscious
intentions’, etc.). These particular kinds of meta-behavior (‘planning one’s
actions’, ‘accounting for one’s actions’ or ‘expressing one’s intentions’) and
the relation they have with the ‘actual’ actions intended can be compared with
other kinds of meta-behavior, such as praying or performing magical rituals
before embarking on an action: though they are felt to have a particular
relation to or even to be an integral part of the ‘real’ action they are
connected with, they actually constitute an independent action and nothing
garanties that these actions are direct reflections of how the action they are
combined with actually function.
(b) fake communication
Similarly,
phenomena like lying and deceit but also fiction and irony seem to be more
easily compatible with a subject-based notion of sense, in that they imply an
opposition between the prima facie sense of the behavior on the one hand and
the ‘real’ (but concealed) intentions which underlie it on the other hand.
Thus, deceit implies an asymmetry between speaker/manipulator and
addressee/victim which seems to support the notion that the speaker’s intention
is the main locus of the sense of his behavior.
But then
again, these actions are structural patterns themselves, implying the embedding
of a ‘basic’ first degree structure in an encompassing second degree structure.
In order to be able to understand deceptive (or playful) behavior as such, it
takes the construction of a superordinate pattern in which the prima facie
pattern is embedded. Obviously, the resulting complex patterns are in se
iterable as well. In fact, it is always possible to continue adding
superordinate interpretative frames on top each other (as is exemplified by the
practice of paranoiacs but also by hermeneutic practices such as
psycho-analysis).
Consider
the following analogy. The functioning of an animated cartoon is in its effects
dependent/parasitic on the way actual people/creatures move, and its success as
a ‘representation’ depends on how well it mimics the movements it is intended
to represent, but the actual procedures of making such a cartoon do not teach
us anything on how actual creatures move. Likewise, deceit (or faked
communication in general, including theatrical fiction), if it is to function,
depends on the fact that it can be perceived as ‘regular’ communication, i.e.
on the fact that it retains the relevant ‘surface’ features of regular
communication.
A
description of deceptive communication that does not take into account the
deceptive aspects of it is in a way still a correct, though incomplete,
description of it; as a matter of fact, a correct description should even start from its non-deceptive
surface. Again, mimesis can be invoked as the relevant mechanism: the speaker
who tries to deceive actually takes on a role that is understandable as such;
in order to understand the deceit as such one has to understand that taking up
this role in its turn part of a more complex meta-role. Thus, the problem only
arises if one chooses to equate a role with a psychological subject and a biological
organism.
(c) failed communication
Misunderstanding,
infelicitous communication or even overt differences in the presuppositions
underlying different interacting speakers’ utterances are intuitively best
understood in terms of a divergence in the representations that these
participants have of the situation at hand. In the same vein as the comparisons
between verbal and non-verbal behavior made in the above, one can compare this
situation to dancing off-beat or to the knock-out punch which ends the coordinated
behaviors between boxers. In all these cases, accounting for the sense of the
behavior implies a supra-individual pattern, but at the same time a failure for
that pattern to establish itself or the breakdown of such a pattern.
In terms of
the system-theoretic biology of Maturana and Varela (see above), this could be
formulated as follows: the behaviors of two or more second-order organisms
enter into a structural coupling which may give rise to the establishment of a
third-order organism; in some cases however the structural coupling seems to be
less complete (?) than in other comparable cases, or the pattern may be
short-lived. These situations may be compared to phenomena which are called
‘death’ or ‘procreation’ in the case of second-order organisms: death is a
limit to the persistence of biologic units as units for an observer; similarly,
procreation is a matter of shifting the boundaries of such units: what was part
of a certain biological unit, the next moment is better analyzed as a biologic
unit of its own. Thus, the problems concerning the proposed ‘third-order
organsisms’ have exact parallel at the level of the familiar second-order
organisms.[14]
Note
that this problem has
a single-speaker counterpart as well: many phenomena of monologic speech
which are perceived as performance dysfluencies (afterthoughts,
digressions, grammatical dysfleuncies, ...) crucially involve the
recognition of the ‘normative’ pattern which constituets the sense of
the performance, but also the fact that other (non-normative? individual?
cognitive?) factors have disturbed the ‘normal’ realization of that pattern (cf.
the notion of ‘paracoherence’ discussed in Scheppers 2003). Again, these
phenomena illustrate the problem of how to relate the supra-individual with what
seems to be individual cognitive factors.
It is obvious that some of these
problems are genuine problems which seriously challenge the type of approaches
suggested in the above: the common sense notion of the individual substratum
for cognition is hard to do without, and it is obviously not my purpose to
argue that one should try to do without it at all cost.[15] Still, I hope to have shown that
the notion of a supra-individual level of patterning is indispensable and that
a reductionist stance with respect to the relationship between the individual
and the supra-individual is highly problematic.
7. Conclusions
By way of
conclusion, I will point out a few of the consequences which the lines of
thought sketched in the above may have for various rather general issues in
linguistics and neighboring disciplines.
(a) psycholinguistics, psychology and
neuro-psychology
The
alternative views to communication suggested in the above seem to be in direct
contradiction not only with ‘common sense’ psychology but also with the most
fundamental presuppositions of the standard neuro-approaches to cognition.
However, we have pointed out that at least some authors working in that
tradition have argued precisely against the traditional views, starting from
neuro-psychological data. Furthermore, with the discovery of the so-called
‘mirror neurons’, interesting neurological data have come into view which seem
to support the viability of the present mimesis-based approach, while at the
same time bridging somewhat the seemingly enormous gap between this account and
the neuro-sciences.
Of course,
I do not mean to suggest that technical research issues in psycho-linguistics
and (neuro-)psychology in general would immediately benefit from the lines of
thought sketched in the above. Thus, for instance, the important problem of
language acquisition (and acquisition in general) obviously necessarily
involves the learner as an individual of which several consecutive states are
compared; on the other hand, it also involves the ‘normative’ supra-individual
behavioral patterns which s/he is acquiring (or not). It should be noted that
the available frameworks for addressing technical issues in language
acquisition do not address any of the issues touched upon in the above.
Although -of course- no clear picture as to how to tackle the more technical
issues concerning acquisition emerges from the above a priori considerations,
it seems worthwhile to try and broaden the debate in this field by taking into
consideration contemporary critiques on the input-output picture of cognition
and the more pragmatically oriented view on cognition as well as e.g. the
accounts of acquisition and growth in terms of plasticity and mimesis, as
briefly sketched in the above.
(b)
ethico-political consequences
On
different occasions on which I presented my arguments about coherence and
intention (as summarized in section 1 and 2 here above; also see Scheppers
2003) to different audiences with different backgrounds (philosophy, cognitive
psychology, linguistics), different interlocutors have formulated ‘humanistic’
objections against my views on action and discourse and especially against the
views on the status of the speaker/agent elaborated in the above; these
objections invariably argued that the theoretical ‘abolition of the subject’
implies de facto an infringement of the irreducible status of the individual
human as the basis of the Western political and ethical values. I agree that
the choice of basic assumptions is not politically innocent. But from the point
of view of the approach presented here, I argue that the notion of ‘individual’
is -precisely- a strictly political or juridical one: it occurs as an
irreducible ground only in contexts in which the responsibility for this or that effect is at issue; in most human
activities, outside these ‘forensic’ contexts the notion hardly plays a role;
e.g. for the scientific description of human behavior, I have extensively
argued that it is not a viable notion. But it should be noted that science is a
different genre of action from politics or jurisprudence, and hence can be
expected not to imply the same cognitive content or basic categories. Thus, the
views suggested in the above are not only fully compatible with insisting on
the importance of defending the irreducibility of the individual human in
political and ethical matters, but could even be the starting point for arguing
against the mitigation of this principle on the basis of ‘scientific’
arguments, e.g. the role psychiatry/psychology plays in forensic matters and
the role ‘sociological’ notions such as ethnicity increasingly play in
politics.
(c) status of the message/text
On a more
theoretical level and in a closer connection with linguistics proper, the
alternative views on communication have consequences for the status of the
‘message’ or ‘text’ as well. These aspects cannot be dealt with here and can
only be mentioned.
First, the
blurring of the difference between content (locution) and action (illocution)
as described in sections 1, 2 and 3 above has for a consequence that the
‘message’ has to be described as less independent of the agents’ intentions.
>From the point of view of the structure of the message (‘text’) itself (the
point of view adopted in the above), the text qua discourse itself constitutes
the speaker as such:[16] the speaker becomes one of the
structural positions within the overall iterable pattern which constitutes the
text as a discourse; the text thus cannot be viewed as a pure object,
independent from its ‘realization’ (interpretation, utterance ...).[17]
Likewise,
as a consequence of the more holistic view of discourse, the difference between
‘text’ and ‘context’ becomes a highly problematic one: if discourse is viewed
as a structural pattern which intrinsically involves the speaker and addressee
as part of its structure, the ‘outside’ of discourse becomes a very relative
notion.[18]
*
In this
paper, the convergence has been noted of a few different lines of thought which
all point in the direction of a view on communication in which speaker and
addressee qua psychological subjects or biological organisms are not the main
locus for the sense. It has been argued that the intentional/sensible behavior
(incl. communicative behavior) can be described in terms of the structural
features of the behavior itself and need not involve the level of the
individual organism/subject as such. On the other hand, a few of the many
puzzles which -at least apparently- involve both the supra-individual and the
individual level have been summarily described.
8. References
Anscombe, G.E.M.
1976 (2nd edition). Intention.
Oxford, Blackwell.
Bennington, Geoffrey & Derrida, Jacques. 1991. Jacques Derrida. Paris, Seuil [Coll.
Les contemporains].
Berge, K.L. 1998.
“Communication”. Mey (ed.) 1998, 140-147.
Brown, Gillian.
1995. Speakers, listeners and
communication. Explorations in discourse analysis. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Denyer, Nicholas.
1991/1993. Language, Thought and
Falsehood in Ancient Greek Philosophy. London-New York, Routledge.
Dennett, Daniel C.
1991/1993. Consciousness Explained.
London, Penguin.
Derrida, Jacques. 1967. La voix et le phénomène. Introduction au problème du signe dans la
phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
Derrida, Jacques. 1990. Limited Inc. Paris, Galilée.
Heritage, John.
2001. “Ethno-sciences and their significance for conversation linguistics”.
Brinker, Klaus & Antos, Gerd & Heinemann, Wolfgang & Sager, Sven F.
(eds.), Text- und Gesprächslinguistik.
Linguistics of Text and Conversation. Volume 2, 908-919. Berlin, de
Gruyter.
Hoekstra, Marieke
& Scheppers, Frank. 2003. “ÖOnoma, =∞ma et lÒgow dans le Cratyle et le Sophiste de Platon. Analyse du lexique
et analyse du discours”. Antiquité Classique 72, 55-73.
Hurley, Susan L. 1998. Consciousness
in Action. Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1977. Polylogue. Paris, Seuil.
Levelt, Willem. J.
M. 1989. Speaking: from intention to
articulation. Cambridge (Mass.), MIT press.
Mann, William C.
& Thompson, Sandra A. 1988. “Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a
functional theory of text organization”. Text 8, 243-281.
Maturana, Humberto R. & Varela, Francisco J. 1980.
Autopoiesis and Cognition. The Realization of
the Living. Dordrecht-Boston-London, Reidel.
Maturana, Humberto R. & Varela, Francisco J. 1992.
The tree of knowledge: the biological roots of
human understanding. Boston, Shambhala.
Mey, Jacob L. 1993.
Pragmatics: an introduction. Oxford,
Blackwell.
Mey, Jacob L. (ed.)
1998. Concise encyclopedia of pragmatics.
Amsterdam, Elsevier.
Mey, Jacob L.
1998a. “Pragmatic acts”. Mey (ed.) 1998, 701-703.
Mey, Jacob L. 2001
(2nd edition). Pragmatics: an
introduction. Oxford, Blackwell
Roulet, Eddy &
Fillietaz, Laurent & Grobet, Anne & Burger, Marcel. 2001. Un modèle et un instrument d’analyse de
l’organisation du discours. Bern, Lang.
Sacks, Harvey.
1992/1995a. Lectures on Conversation.
Volume I. [edited by Gail
Jefferson; with an introduction by Emanuel A. Schegloff]. Oxford, Blackwell.
Sacks, Harvey.
1992/1995b. Lectures on Conversation.
Volume II. [edited by Gail
Jefferson; with an introduction by Emanuel A. Schegloff]. Oxford, Blackwell.
Schank, Roger C.
& Abelson, Robert P. 1977. Scripts,
Plans, Goals, and Understanding. An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures.
Hillsdale, Erlbaum.
Scheppers, Frank.
2003. “P(ragmatic)-trees. Coherence, intentionality and cognitive content in
discourse and non-verbal behavior”. Journal
of Pragmatics 35, 665-694.
Varela, Francisco J. 1979. Principles
of biological autonomy. New York, North Holland.
Wittgenstein,
Ludwig. 1989. Werkausgabe Band 1.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Tagebücher 1914-1916. Philosophische
Untersuchungen. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.
© Frank
Scheppers. Círculo de Linguística Aplicada a la Comunicación 19,
September 2004. ISSN
1576-4737.
http://www.ucm.es/info/circulo/no19/scheppers.htm
[1] This remark obviously reminds one
of the analyses of the notion ‘intention’ (‘Absicht’) in Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen
(Wittgenstein 1989, 343 et passim; cf. also Anscombe 1976). See section 6
below.
[2] The classical approach to action
types in the cognitive sciences is of course Schank and Abelson’s ‘script’
model (Schank & Abelson 1977).
[3] Cf. the analyses of the so-called
‘private language’ argument by both Wittgenstein and Derrida. See Bennington
& Derrida 1991.
[4] This has an important
epsitemological corollary: the sense (the coherence) of an action can only be
observed if the observer and the observed agent are sufficiently alike.
[5] Of course the present line of
argument is entirely parallel to a quite traditional line of thought in
linguistics, as exemplified by Saussure’s langue-parole dichotomy. Obviously,
e.g. word meaning is not inherently “private”, can be repeated indefinitely and
retains its type-identity across an indefinite number of reiterations, within
or across speakers. Here I propose to generalize the
non-private/reiterable/etc. character of language to the whole of sensible
behavior. It is interesting to note that the lines of argument in sections 1
and 2 remind one of some of the developments in -at first sight- quite
different philosophical traditions. The notion that sense depends on
repeatability within or across speakers/agents (or even in the absence of the
speaker himself) and the denial of any privileged position for the
psychological subject with respect to the sense of his own acts are, on the one
hand, central to the early works of Derrida, especially in his careful analyses
of Husserl. Interestingly, quite analogous considerations are, on the other
hand, present in recent developments in the Anglo-Saxon, more empirically and
epistemologically oriented tradition (e.g. Dennett 1990/1993 and Hurley 1998);
see below sections 4 and 5. Some of the issues I am addressing here closely
remind of the rather fierce discussion (?) between Derrida and Searle (as
related in Derrida 1990), which concerned precisely such issues as the
‘iterability’ of contents, the status of the status of the speaker, as well as
some related issues such as the status of the notion of ‘context’ in general
and the ‘normality’ of some realizations of a text as opposed to other
‘abnormal’ realizations (see also sections 4, 6 and 7 below).
[6] It should be noted, for that matter,
that is significant that linguistics in its traditional form of ‘grammar’ has
been alive for centuries without there being any particular doctrine on how it
operates within the language user.
[7] Cf. Maturana & Varela 1992,
195: “We call social phenomena those
phenomena associated with the participation of organisms in constituting
third-order couplings”; and: “As observers we designate as communicative these behaviors which occur in social coupling, and
as communication that behavioral
co-ordination which we observe as the result of it”. For a critique of the
notion ‘transmitted information’, cf. Maturana & Varela 1992, 196.
[8] This system-theoretical approach
presents interesting epistemological aspects as well, in that it takes into
account the fundamental role which the observer, an autopoietic unit himself,
plays in determining what the relevant facts are. Furthermore, this theory
implies a self-referring epistemology: the theory is fully applicable to
itself; something similar goes for the pragmatic approach to ‘sense’, as
sketched in Scheppers 2003 and sections 1 and 2 above: scientific practice can
be analyzed as a ‘genre’ of human behavior on a par with other types of
activity.
[9] For an accessible introduction to
Derrida’s work, see Bennington & Derrida 1991.
[10] One may construe the notion of
‘representation’ in terms of the plasticity of the organism as a whole, but
then ‘breathing’ is a representation of the air and walking a representation of
the floor.
[11] Note that the etymology of the word
‘person’ belongs to the same semantic field as ‘mimesis’: (Latin ‘persona’
means ‘mask’, ‘role’, ‘character in a play’)
[12] It should be noted that some of the
approaches and ideas described in the above (esp. the system-theoretical
biology of Maturana and Varela, but also the notion of ‘meme’) emerged from or
were influenced by work in the field of cybernetics. These cybernetic lines of
thought continue developing as well and some arguments parallel to the present
ones can be found in that field; for references, cf. e.g. the Principia Cybernetica Web website (by F.
Heylighen, C. Joslyn, V. Turchin), http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/.
[13] An interesting epistemological
parallel can be noted. The prevailing conception of semantics in logic and
linguistics in terms of truth-value, and with this the problem of
reference/denotation as the main issue, emerged quite late in the history of
mankind (to be exact: with Plato’s Sophist,
see Hoekstra & Scheppers 2003), whereas previously the possibility of
falsehood (errors or lies) was the main conceptual problem (see Denyer
1991/1993). Likewise, the conception of communication in terms of speaker’s and
addressee’s intentions seems to be mainly motivated by infelicitous or
deceptive cases.
[14] Other conceptualizations in
system-theoretical biological terms may be possible, e.g. the competition
between third order couplings to impose themselves.
[15] Note that one can regard this
epistemological problem as an avatar of the old mind-body problem as well as of
the old langue-parole or competence-performance problems.
[16] Cf. the article “La fonction
prédicative et le sujet parlant”, in Kristeva 1977, 323-356 et passim.
[17] Note that if one chooses to look at
discourse from the point of view of the speaker as a biological organism or a
psychological subject, the discursive process should be construed as a process
within this organism/subject, which -if one pursues this point of view in a
systematic way- makes the message as an independent object (and hence as an
iterable and understandable/sensible one) disappear as well: the ‘classical’
view of communication (as described at the beginning of this paper) thus is
necessarily à cheval between two points of view, the compatibility of which is
highly questionable.
[18] Cf. also Jacob Mey’s theory of
‘Pragmatic acts’ (Mey 1998a; Mey 2001, 206-235), which stresses the notion that
textual and contextual aspects involved in any adequate analysis of discourse
should be viewed as an integral part of a complex structure which he calls a
‘pragmatic act’ (or ‘pract’), which -as its name indicates- is of a primarily
pragmatic nature, and which is to be conceived of as an iterable pattern,
involving all the pragmatically relevant elements (including speaker and
addressee, referents, etc.).