Leaving ongoing conversations and taking a more generic view instead opens up perspectives to be dealt with now. Observing communication in its general design and different patterns and describing and systematizing the observations is the per- spective that constitutes a first-level step away from conversation; theorizing about the conditions, presuppositions and implications of such endeavors constitutes a second-level step. While the second level is reserved for the professional linguist (cf. 3.2), the first level is open to both the professional and the ordinary conversa- tionalists (cf. 3.1).
3.1. Metapragmatics as the study of people’s abstracting from interacting Through their participation in all sorts of conversations, members of a speech com- munity gather in the course of time knowledge about conversation in general, their genres, patterns, styles, norms, etc. Since this knowledge relates to the pragmatic dimension of communication, it may be specified as metapragmatic knowledge. Some similar metapragmatic knowledge may be obtained by the scientist who
studies the conversations of this speech community as an outsider yet in the role of a participating observer. In other words, it is hardly possible to clearly distinguish between the scientific metapragmatic knowledge and the metapragmatic knowl- edge of the users of a language. The assumption of a continuum between both stances, as made by Caffi (2006: 87), might therefore seem quite appropriate;19 the
difference consists merely in a smaller or greater distance from the object, viz.: the use of the language and a lower or higher degree of explicitness.
Folk theories, however, call for the mediating linguist, the linguist, that is, who elicits folk knowledge or elaborates on their shorthand versions. Gumperz (1982) identifies as mediating linguists in particular those working in the fields of dis- course analysis or ethnography of communication. Folk-linguistics is a separate discipline (cf. Niedzielski and Preston 2000), but has roots in both. In any case the task is “to come to grips with the varying ways in which linguistic behavior is con- ceptualized by those engaged in it” (Verschueren 1998: 60–61). Of the folk-lin- guistic topics, speakers’ awareness of and knowledge about pragmatic issues is, of course, particularly relevant for the current context. Two areas and modes (cf. Pre- ston 1996) shall be considered in greater detail.
(1) A major source of information about people’s metapragmatic knowledge could be the lexical repertoire they have at their disposal for referring to aspects of speech; it is not an autonomous language, but a subset of the ordinary language. Speech act verbs are a favorite research area (where folk taxonomies merge with the empirical-conceptual approach of speech act theories and the ethnography of speaking, cf. Caffi 2006: 85). But other lexical expressions relating to other se- lected aspects of communication could also be common ground where folk- and empirical-conceptual linguistics meet. Lexical expressions, in general, can be in- terpreted as a means that a speech community uses for coding cognitive and cul- tural models, which consist in more or less coherent sets of concepts for structuring experience (cf. also Gee 1999: 40 ff.). Experience also includes acting by com- municating, and this, in turn, calls for adequate conceptualizations of a metaprag- matic kind and their storage in words.
One of the most comprehensive collections of English speech act verbs is the dictionary compiled by Ballmer and Brennenstuhl (1981).20 Its comprehensiveness
derives from two decisions. (a) They apply a much wider definition of ‘speech act verb’ by including “all those verbs which designate (aspects of) speech activities” (Ballmer and Brennenstuhl 1981: 3), no matter whether they can be used per- formatively or not; thus lie and persuade, for example, are speech act verbs just as well as admit or promise. (b) They include literal as well as metaphorical ex- pressions, as, for example, contradict and reject. Of particular interest is the auth- ors’ ordering of the gathered material into a huge word field and its many subfields, because these can be understood as identifying the metapragmatic aspects of com- munication that the English speaking community takes recourse to. The word fields in their entirety unfold a global metapragmatic conceptualization whose
main constituents delineate models entering into an integral system of speech ac- tivities. Each model has as its linguistic correlate a set of verbs, which again have substructures. The ‘enaction model’, for example, consists of verbs, of which wish, aim at, or anticipate expressVOLITION, alert s. o., indicate, or refer toPUTTING INTO FOCUS, while expressions of offering, asking, commissioning, ordering, warning
etc. are instances ofENACTION, and verbs like accept, refuse, or obey instances of REACTIONS ON ENACTIONS. At the most refined level, we find sets of verbs that show
a high degree of synonymy; for the enactment categorySURPRISING, for instance,
the following verbs are listed: amaze, astonish, astound, bewilder, disconcert, flab- bergast, shock, stagger, startle, strike, surprise. Taken together they delineate, if we will, how the English language community conceptualizes acts of surprising somebody by words; seen in a differentiating way, each single item contributes a special nuance to the overall-concept, in comparison to the others.
Along these lines, Goossens (1987) has made an analysis of some such near- synonymous verbs. His treatment of the speech act verbs say, tell, talk and speak can well illustrate how much an in-depth analysis is able to reveal about people’s metapragmatic models, though it explicitly tries just “to answer a typically Fill- morean question, namely, how do linguistic action verbs frame the scene of lin- guistic (inter)action?” (Goossens 1987: 95). Thus, native English speakers assign different roles to receivers, encoding in tell and say the receptor who plays a more passive part, and in talk the interactor who plays a more active, participative part; in the case of speak, the English speaker accounts for the two roles by using dis- tinct prepositions, with where the receptor acts as interactor, to where as receptor (cf. Goossens 1987: 103). The four verbs reveal, furthermore, that native English speakers differentiate messages according to the degree to which they have been condensed. This is reflected in the facts that, for example, say “freely combines with direct enunciations,” while tell “is considerably restricted in taking them” (Goossens 1987: 103); the differentiation is in principle even reflected where the distributional pattern is reversed, in other words where more extreme conden- sations go with tell, but not with say (e.g., tell the truth vs. *say the truth).
Lexical expressions that belong to certain metaphorical concepts offer particu- larly rich information about people’s cognitive metapragmatic models.21 Meta-
phors have in general attracted much attention by linguists because they seem to offer insights into how the human mind operates. As Lakoff and Johnson state in their pivotal study of 1980: “[M]etaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 3); and metaphors that conceptualize communication in one respect or another have been paid attention to right from the very beginning.
For an illustration, we may turn to two of the most widely known examples, i.e., the so-called conduit metaphor, identified by Reddy (1979) and differentiated later by Vanparys (1995) and Semino (2006), and the ‘argument is war’ concept
proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and modified by Grady (1998) and Semino (2006). The results of these investigations, derived from a close analysis of sets of metaphorical expressions in general use and subsequently supplemented by corpus data, can be understood as reconstructions of native English speakers’ conceptual- izations of certain aspects of how they communicate and what their form of com- munication is like. These conceptualizations are metapragmatic in nature.
As far as communication between communicators in general is concerned, the dominant meta-pragmatic model people have developed shows three main consti- tuents: the speaker/sender puts an idea-object into a word-container and sends it (through a conduit) to the receiver, who extracts from the word-container the idea- object.
Discussion/argumentation represents a specific form of communication/dis- course. The corresponding metaphors widely in circulation reveal that English speakers share a (metapragmatic) model of argumentative discourse that centers around physical conflict; debatants have two positions, attacking the other’s opinion, while defending one’s own; we have phases of maneuvering and retreat; the outcome amounts to truce or victory/surrender.
(2) Another important source for gaining insights into people’s understanding of communication would consist in information that researchers are able to elicit directly from members of the speech community; this is a method which is often applied by discourse analysts, where “the aim is to produce ideotypical descrip- tions [of concrete discourses] that can be dissected into significant components” (Gumperz 1982: 157). But the results are on the whole quite unsatisfying; ordinary conversationalists are obviously “poor descriptors” (Gumperz 1982: 157),22 and
this should hold true even more, were they confronted with a more abstract and complicated task. Alternatively, an experimental way of eliciting metapragmatic knowledge may be feasible (similar to the method that sociologists, e.g., Goffman, occasionally deploy, for discovering certain norms which people subscribe to in ‘relations in public,’ i.e., by confronting them with transgressions), but has not, to my knowledge, been pursued. The use of questionnaires seems to be the relatively more reliable method.
The study by Simon-Vandenbergen (1995) shall be used to further illustrate the point at stake, even if it is not exactly made for such a purpose. Its aim was to ob- tain assessments of linguistic behavior from English native speakers. The method consisted in having natives evaluate selected aspects and forms of communicative behavior through evaluating corresponding (metaphorical) expressions, which, as we saw, embody parts and aspects of folk models of behavior. The questionnaire applied included expressions covering social functions of talk (e.g., conversation, chat, or prattle), turn-taking (e.g., run on, cut someone short, step in), topic man- agement (e.g., bring up, move unto, meander), and manner of speaking (e.g., rattle, babble, or air, thunder, or tell someone flat out, wrap up one’s meaning). The ques- tions/tasks that were to stimulate statements about people’s metapragmatic views
had three formats: 1. (social) assessments in terms of positive – negative – neutral, 2. (aesthetic) assessments in terms of light – heavy – neither, and 3. the same as format 1 but supplemented by (a) a question asking why the subject rated the ex- pression the way s/he did and (b) the request to give an ‘example sentence’.
While certainly all tasks can be interpreted as throwing light on people’s under- standing of communication, it is the supplementary task (a) which should elicit the most; unfortunately, Simon-Vandenbergen does not provide any cue as to what and how subjects met this task. Nevertheless, some of the results she obtained allow conclusions. Speech tempo is a good case in point. This is the picture emerging for native English conversationalists (cf. Simon-Vandenbergen 1995: 108): Speed is an important criterion; high and low speeds are often negatively evaluated as ‘too fast’ and ‘too slowly’ respectively, in which case they tend to be talked about in metaphorical terms.
One could, of course, object and claim that the negative evaluations elicited by the questionnaire were just triggered by the metaphoricity of the expressions them- selves. Any such objection, however, would not be justified. As Simon-Vanden- bergen already seems to imply, it is the perceived marked value of the communi- cative phenomenon in relation to norms and standards in a given community that triggers metaphorical expressions and assessments, and not the metaphorical ex- pression that triggers a corresponding evaluation. Besides, in the case of speed, there is even some independent support from social-psychological research for the claim that the negative evaluations relate, indeed, to speed and are not simply trig- gered by the metaphoricity of the lexical expression. Smith et al. (1975), for example, had subjects listen to recordings of speakers performing one and the same text with different speeds; in reality, it was just one speaker whose natural speech tempo had been technically manipulated. The subjects had to judge the ‘speakers’ as to ‘benevolence’, a social criterion which aligns well with Simon-Vanden- bergen’s positive-negative scale. The authors found that “[t]he benevolence/rate plot reveals an inverted U-relationship, with the mean for normal voices […] being rated more benevolent” (Smith et al. 1975: 150), while high- and low-speed ‘speakers’ scored significantly low in benevolence.
The insights obtained by metapragmatic research outlined so far can be en- riched (and maybe even relativized) by widening the scope so as to also include possibilities of variation, always applying the same analytical parameters.23 Of the
three main types of variation, i.e., social, developmental, and historical, the social variant has not yet received due attention. Illustrations will therefore be restricted to the other two, turning to the lexicological source first.
As Geeraerts and Grondelaers (1995) point out,
if cognitive models are also cultural models, they are also cultural institutions, and as such, they carry their history along with them: their institutional nature implies their his- torical continuity. It is only by investigating their historical origins and their gradual transformation that their contemporary form can be properly understood. (1995: 177)
In line with this stance, Arnovick (1999) has examined changes in the conceptual- ization of promising:
The frequency of promises rendered defective at inception or follow-through has cre- ated a practical (if not moral) dilemma, a problem with promises. People do not always trust the promises they hear. As a result, the need to convince the hearer is often as- sumed by the speaker. To perform a promise that satisfies the hearer, the speaker often has to emphasize his or her commitment. (Arnovick 1999: 60)
She notes that even a performative use of promise, which is already a very strong form of promising (cf. Traugott 1997), is nowadays often felt to be insufficient and to require some further declarations, such as those observed with George Bush: Read my lips, I guarantee it, Believe you me. “A simple ‘I will’ nowadays works only in a promissory situation and an extra-linguistic institution for its force” (Ar- novick 1999: 58), in contrast to OE times when both the use of sculan (expressing a subject’s obligation) and wilan (expressing a subject’s intention) were binding on the speaker. Nowadays, promises usually undergo relativizations and rationaliz- ations: promises merely express honorable intentions; changing circumstances can render vows unrealistic; insincerity is politically motivated, deception is com- mitted ‘for the sake of the task’ pursued. Such views are further warranted by ref- erences to independent proposals (by Muck 1989 and Rawls 1955) for constructing “theories of promising that incorporate a limit on speaker responsibility” (Arno- vick 1999: 60).
The historical and culture-bound relativity of metaphorical concepts on the pragmatics of language can well be illustrated by two investigations of mine. In Hübler (1998), I showed that the predominant spatial metaphorization relating to the notion of ‘express,’ which represents the first constituent within the conduit paradigm resulted from a change that had taken place around the turn from the 16th
to the 17th centuries. The argument centered around the change in the use of prep-
ositions going with the notion of ‘express;’ it was a change from the instrumental ‘with’ to the spatial ‘in’ (words). The former conceptualization aligns well with and foreshadows the tools-paradigm proposed by Reddy (1979) as a possible alter- native to the predominance of the conduit metaphor. And in Hübler (ms), I exam- ined data from the 16th and 17th centuries which show that argument was conceived
during that period in less fierce and more playful terms, more specifically in terms of a tennis match; Grady’s (1998) findings can be taken as a diluted late version of this early concept.
A discoursal source is tapped on by Gotti (2006). He shows for the 16th/17th
century that neologizing (in contrast to the practice nowadays) was still a matter to talk and write about; it was the time when a scientific language developed in Eng- land, by taking over elements from the common code. The following passage can be read as an instance of the public discourse about it, particularly about using new words of foreign origin in English.
But now as touching myne entent in writing this treatise in the English. Though this cause might seme sufficient to satisfy many men that I am an englysh man, and therefore may more easely and plainly write in my natyue tonge, rather then in any other: yet vnto them that know the hardness of the mater, this answer shuld seme vnlykely: considering that it is more harder to translate into such a tonge, wherein the arte hath not ben written before, then to write in those tongues that are accustomed, and (as I might say) ac- quainted with the termes of the science (Recorde 1547, quoted in Gotti 2006: 218) Recorde was a physician and mathematician. His topic in this passage (probably from the preface) is metalinguistic and concerns the (un-)availability of English words for certain concepts. But the discourse itself could be a case for metaprag- matics (in the sense discussed in section 1); the passage is metacommunicative in that the writer raises the problem of effability in English and thus justifies his use of un-English words in the treatise to follow. In the current context, however, the quotation can be seen as documenting metapragmatic knowledge about the limits and chances of informing an uninformed readership about specific and new states of affairs. Representing the metapragmatic knowledge of a member of an educated 16th-century English speech community, the document could also give grounds for
comparing it with (in-)effability treatments by speakers from different social-cul- tural backgrounds; but I do not know of any such investigation.
The developmental type of variation in metapragmatic knowledge is, in contrast, well investigated. For the purpose of illustration, the article by Bernicot and Laval (1996) has been chosen, because it focuses, again, on promises. Their subjects are children of three age groups, around 3, around 6 and around 10 years of age. The children’s metapragmatic knowledge is defined as their capacity to talk and think about acts of keeping and breaking promises and tested by examining their verbal comments stimulated by a series of cartoon stories; each story consists of a promise (by a child or a parent) and the subsequent fulfilment or non-fulfil- ment; the effect of sadness (as sign of dissatisfaction) and happiness (as sign of sat- isfaction) respectively, which the (non-)fulfilment has on the person to whom the promise was made, has then to be determined by the subjects themselves and sub- sequently justified. The authors summarize their results thus:
Metapragmatic knowledge was found to evolve with age. At the ages of 3 and 6, children’s metapragmatic knowledge mainly concerns the execution of the action. At age 6, the listener’s desires start being added in cases where [this] preparatory condition is not satisfied. At age 10, explanations pertaining to action accomplishment completely disappear, and explanations about the speaker’s intentions alone or about both the speaker’s intentions and the listener’s desires appear. (Bernicot and Laval 1996: 120) The metapragmatic knowledge of adults would at least also comprise the sincerity condition of promises, i.e., that the speaker intends to accomplish the future action (cf. Gibbs and Delaney 1987).
3.2. Metapragmatics as metatheory of pragmatics
So far, we have dealt with cases where speakers provide the data/material, which linguists then process, refine (as was the case with metacommunication) or elabor- ate on (as in the case of speakers’ theoremes). We now leave the sphere where lin- guists occupy themselves with other people’s products and turn to their own activ- ity, subjecting it to reflection.24 That portion of such reflections which becomes
manifest constitutes a professional theoretical dialogue (mainly in the written