General pragmatics is set firmly in the research paradigm of philosophy, consider- ing cooperation, action theory, intentionality, rationality and context, thus provid- ing relevant bridging points for language-anchored linguistic pragmatics. Both re- search paradigms analyse pragmatic universals and pragmatic mechanisms, such as speech act and implicature (e.g. Austin 1971; Bach 1992, 2006; Grice 1975; Sbisà 2002; Searle 1975; Vanderveken and Kubo 2002), indexical and deixis (Re- canati 2004; Levinson 1983), common ground and presupposition (Akman et al. 2001; Bouquet et al. 1999), focussing on the connectedness between parts and wholes, and between content and context (Stalnaker 1999). While general prag- matics adopts an action-based frame of reference, linguistic pragmatics examines the form and function of speech acts in various languages.
In general pragmatics, action and cooperation are analysed in the framework of an ideal pragmatic situation in which communication is neither distorted by social factors, e.g. institutional constraints, unequal social hierarchies and other forms of oppression (e.g., Habermas 1998, cf. Cooke this volume), nor by interpersonal considerations, such as face-wants and face needs (Brown and Levinson 1987), politeness or etiquette (Watts, Ide and Ehlich 1992). The high degree of idealiz- ation inherent in this research paradigm is also reflected in its conception of lan- guage and language use, which does not refer to natural language as spoken by or-
dinary language users in context but rather an ideal language built in accordance with the language-system specific constraints and requirements. In an ideal prag- matic situation, all necessary felicity conditions obtain, such as normal input and output conditions, propositional content and preparatory conditions, sincerity and essential conditions (Searle 1969). Consequently, rational agents have ideal lin- guistic, communicative and cognitive competence as well as an ideal world knowl- edge (cf. Cohen, Morgan and Pollack 1992).
Pragmatic universals can be assigned the status of basic building blocks of communication. Among the most prominent ones are the speech act and its consti- tutive acts, viz. propositional act composed of further constitutive acts and illocu- tionary act (Searle 1969; Vanderveken and Kubo 2002), indexicals, for instance pure and impure indexicals, intentionals and perspectivals (Recanati 2004), and presuppositions and presupposition triggers (Huang 2007; Levinson 1983; Stal- naker 1999). Another basic ‘building block’ is the rational agent or model user, who employs building blocks in a strategic manner to speaker-intend communi- cative meaning, thus achieving particular goals in context. The model user can be a natural user, that is speaker and hearer of a natural language, or an artificial user, such as a robot or a dialogue system. In accordance with the fundamental prag- matic premises of rationality and intentionality, the model user is equipped with a reasoning device, accommodating pragmatic inferencing and default inferencing, top-down reasoning and bottom-up reasoning, and abduction. This is a necessary condition for a model user to calculate and formulate speaker-intended implica- tures and to perform the hearer-intended logical operations of inference and abduc- tion (Cohen, Morgan and Pollack 1992; Givón 1989, 2005; Huang this volume; Sperber and Wilson 1995).
3.1. Presupposition and common ground
Presupposition refers to a proposition or an inference whose validity is taken for granted for a sentence to be true or for a speech act to be felicitous. Philosophy and linguistics distinguish between pragmatic presupposition and semantic presup- position. The satisfaction of semantic presupposition is a necessary condition for the truth value of a sentence, and the satisfaction of pragmatic presupposition is necessary for a speech act to be appropriate in context. Pragmatic presuppositions are accommodated in speech act theory’s felicity conditions, which are considered as linguistic and social context categories and their satisfaction is assigned the status of a default configuration (Sbisà 2002). Presuppositions are generated by presupposition triggers, for instance definite descriptions, factive verbs, aspectual verbs, change of state verbs, iteratives and clefts (cf. Huang 2007, this volume; Le- vinson 1983).
Some contexts allow presupposition neutralisation, and more recently presup- position triggers have been classified as hard presupposition triggers and soft pre-
supposition triggers. Presuppositions are connected intrinsically with propositions and assumptions which are taken for granted and therefore do not need to be made explicit. They are organized and administered in the framework of context sets (Stalnaker 1999), which serve as common ground in communication. Conse- quently, pragmatic presupposition may be seen as a restriction on common ground. Common ground is indispensable for philosophical and cognitive conceptions of knowledge where it serves as background for reasoning and for retrieving speaker-intended meaning and other types of implicit meaning, such as indexical expression or implicature. In the field of computer science, common ground and world knowledge are frequently conceptualized as a database. It is seen as com- prising a set of propositions, which serve as a resource for the understanding of ut- terances. Common ground is implicit but can be made explicit via propositions, and model users presuppose its validity and fall back on it when they retrieve im- plicatures (cf. Bublitz 2006).
Common ground in the sense of background also plays a fundamental role in dialogue system modelling. According to Vanderveken and Kubo (2002), model users negotiate the compatibility of background with utterances and their felicity and satisfaction conditions in and through the process of communication. How- ever, background and context are not identical because possible contexts of utter- ance can have different backgrounds. As a consequence of this, background con- tains not only mutual knowledge of facts about the conversational background but also knowledge about the world and of the world, such as ethical norms and socio- cultural values, transcending the common sense notion of context. Searle (1995) considers background to be a necessary condition both for literal and non-literal meaning, thus assigning it the status of a basic premise for felicitous communi- cation. He defines background as an open-ended set of skills, pre-intentional as- sumptions and practices, which are not representational but rather enable inten- tional acts and states to be made manifest.
In Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), common ground is conceived of as a common set of premises for inference rules. The relevance-theoretic con- ception differs from the traditional notion of mutual knowledge by its attempt to avoid the logical consequence of infinite regress, which follows from the code model of communication. To avoid infinite regress, Sperber and Wilson base their theoretical framework on an approximation of mutual knowledge, namely cogni- tive environments and mutual manifestness.
Common ground is a presupposed common knowledge base, which is a necess- ary condition for felicitous communication. To that base, model users anchor their communicative action and they fall back on it, should they require further in- formation, which may not be encoded explicitly. The overall encompassing con- cept of common ground has been given a context-dependent interpretation as con- versational record (Thomason 1992) based on Lewis’s concept of accommodation (Lewis 1979). Conversational record contains public information, presumptions,
and an update operator. Other context-dependent subsets of common ground are Clark’s notions of personal common ground, which contains a model user’s sub- jective experience, and communal common ground, which stores social experience (Clark 1996), and Fetzer’s dialogue common ground, which is differentiated in in- dividual dialogue common ground, containing a model user’s representation of her/his dialogue common ground, and collective dialogue common ground, viz. the model user’s representation of the set of model users’ representation of dialogue common ground (Fetzer 2004). All of the subsets need to be interconnected, con- stantly updated and, if necessary, revised.
3.2. Context
The analysis of context-dependent meaning is at the heart of pragmatics, and for this reason context is one of its key objects of investigation. The theory, practice and implementation of context are also of relevance to diverse fields of investi- gation, ranging from philosophy and computer-mediated communication to cogni- tive science, in particular dialogue management, artificial speech production, artificial intelligence, distributed knowledge representation, robotics and in- formation technology.
The heterogeneous nature of context and the context-dependence of the con- cept itself have made it almost impossible for the scientific community to agree upon one commonly shared definition or theoretical perspective, and frequently, only a minute aspect of context is described, modelled or formalized (cf. Akman et al. 2001; Blackburn et al. 2003; Bouquet et al. 1999). Because of its multifaceted nature and inherent complexity, context is no longer considered an analytic prime but rather seen from a parts-whole perspective as an entity containing sub-entities (or sub-contexts).
The multilayered outlook on context contains a number of different perspec- tives. First, context is conceived as a frame of reference whose job it is to frame content by delimiting the content while at the same time being framed and de- limited by less immediate adjacent frames. The nature of the connectedness be- tween the different frames is a structured whole composed of interconnected frames (Goffman 1986). The gestalt-psychological figure-ground scenario prevails in psychological and psycholinguistic perspectives on context. It is also adopted in cognitive pragmatics as is reflected in the relevance-theoretic conception of con- text as an onion, metaphorically speaking. The individual layers are interconnected and their order of inclusion corresponds to their order of accessibility (Sperber and Wilson 1995), as is reflected in inferencing and other kinds of reasoning.
Second, context is seen as a dynamic construct, which is interactionally organ- ized in and through the process of communication. This view prevails in ethnome- thodology (Garfinkel 1994; Goodwin and Duranti 1992; Heritage 1984), interac- tional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1996, 2003) and sociopragmatics (Bublitz 2009;
Fetzer 2007, Schmid 2003), where context is assigned the dual status of process and product. The dynamic outlook is based on the premise of indexicality of social action, and the joint construction of context. In the primarily qualitatively oriented paradigms, context is connected intrinsically with adjacency pair, conditional rel- evance and the turn-taking system on the micro level, and with institution on the macro level, whose order is captured through context-independent and context- sensitive constraints and requirements. Closely related to the conception of context as a dynamic construct is its relational conception, which conceives it as relating communicative actions and their surroundings, relating communicative actions, relating individual participants and their individual surroundings, and relating the set of individual participants and their communicative actions to their surround- ings (Fetzer and Akman 2002).
Third, context is seen as given as is reflected in the presuppositional approach to context, which is also referred to as common ground or background information (Stalnaker 1999). Here, context is seen as a set of propositions, which participants take for granted in interaction. This allows for two different conceptions of con- text: a static conception in which context is external to the utterance, and an inter- active one, in which context is imported into the utterance while at the same time invoking and reconstructing context.
The context-dependence of context is reflected in its status as given and exter- nal to the utterance, reconstructed and negotiated in communication, indexical, and never saturated. A further classification of context is anchored to a holistic concep- tion of context embedding its constitutive parts of model user, conversational con- tribution, surroundings and their presuppositions, viz. cognitive context, linguistic context and social context (Fetzer 2002, 2004).
Linguistic context comprises language use and is delimited by the constraints and requirements of genre. Language is composed of linguistic constructions (or parts) embedded in adjacent linguistic constructions (further parts), composing a whole clause, sentence, utterance, turn or text. Linguistic context is functionally synonymous to co-text (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981; Widdowson 2004), de- noting a relational construct composed of local and global adjacency relations. Analogously to speech-act-theoretic constitutive rules and regulative rules (Searle 1969), linguistic constructions constitute text. The production and interpretation of linguistic constructions is constrained by the rules of grammar, and the production and interpretation of speech acts are constrained by felicity conditions.
Cognitive context is the foundation on which inference and other forms of rea- soning are based. Constitutive elements of cognitive context are mental represen- tations, propositions, contextual assumptions and factual assumptions. Since cog- nitive contexts are anchored to an individual but are also required for a cognitively based outlook on communication, they need to contain assumptions about mutual cognitive environments. Thus, cognitive context is not only defined by represen- tations but also by meta-representations. In the social-psychological paradigm,
cognitive context is conceptualized along the lines of the gestalt-psychological dis- tinction between figure and ground and the related metacommunicative concepts of frame and framing (Bateson 1972; Goffman 1986). Frame is seen as a delimiting device, which “is (or delimits) a class or set of messages (or meaningful actions)” (Bateson 1972: 187). Because of its delimiting function, “psychological frames are exclusive, i.e. by including certain messages (or meaningful actions) within a frame, certain other messages are excluded” and they are “inclusive, i.e. by exclud- ing certain messages certain others are included” (ibid.). This also holds for con- text which, analogously to frame is also structured and metacommunicative, or to use Bateson’s words: “the hypothesis depends upon the idea that this structured context also occurs within a wider context – a metacontext if you will – and that this sequence of contexts is an open, and conceivably infinite, series” (Bateson 1972: 245).
Social context comprises the context of a communicative exchange and is de- fined by deducting linguistic context and cognitive context from a holistic concep- tion of context. Constituents of social context are, for instance, model users, the immediate concrete, physical surroundings including time and location, and the macro contextual institutional and non-institutional domains. The connectedness between language and language use on the one hand, and linguistic context, social context and cognitive context on the other is reflected in deixis, viz. temporal dei- xis, local deixis, participant deixis, discourse deixis and social deixis (Hanks 1996). Furthermore, the category of model user (as speaker and hearer) can no longer be conceived of as an analytic prime but needs to be refined by the accom- modation of footing (Goffman 1981; Levinson 1988). The importance of social context to communication is spelled out by Hanks as follows: “Hence it is not that people must share a grammar, but that they must share, to a degree, ways of orient- ing themselves in social context. This kind of sharing – partial, orientational and socially distributed – may be attributed to the habitus, or relatively stable schemes of perception to which actors are inculcated” (Hanks 1996: 235).
3.3. Cooperation
The pragmatic principle of cooperation is connected intrinsically with coordi- nation and collaboration on the one hand (Clark 1996; Cummings 2005; Grosz and Sidner 1992), and with the pragmatic principles of rationality and intentionality (Cohen, Morgan and Pollack 1992; Searle 1983) on the other. The principles are examined in philosophy as regards their contents, function and status (Brandom 1994; Penco 1999), and they are analysed in psychology as mental representations, mental states and beliefs (Bouquet et al. 1999; Sperber and Wilson 1995). Against this background, language and language use are seen as fundamentally cooper- ative, and subsequently as intrinsically discursive and social (e.g., Grice 1975; Lewis 1979; Clark 1996).
The connectedness between cooperation and intentionality, and the differenti- ation between I-intentions and we-intentions are at the heart of Searle’s conception of speech act theory. To use his own words: “Collective intentionality presupposes a Background sense of the other as a candidate for cooperative agency; that is, it presupposes a sense of the others as more than just conscious agents, indeed as ac- tual or potential members of a cooperative activity” (Searle 1991: 414). In his work, Searle is very explicit about the nature of the parts-whole connectedness of individual speech acts and I-intentions on the one hand, and of a conversation or discourse and we-intentions on the other: “The reason that we-intentions cannot be reduced to I-intentions, even I-intentions supplemented with beliefs and beliefs about mutual beliefs, can be stated quite generally. The notion of a we-intention of collective intentionality implies the notion of cooperation” (Searle 1991: 406).
In the Gricean approach to natural-language communication, in which lan- guage is seen as both purposive and social, and rational and cognitive, cooperation counts as the fundamental premise of communication. As a philosophical concept, cooperation is anchored to the premise of rationality and intentionality. Conse- quently, conversations are rational endeavours and cooperative efforts, in which model users realize and recognize a common purpose or set of purposes, or, at least, some mutually accepted direction. This is reflected in the Gricean cooper- ative principle which reads as follows: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or di- rection of the talk exchange in which you are engaged” (Grice 1975: 45). The co- operative principle is a necessary requirement for the calculation of pragmatic meaning or meaningnn, and is for this reason not open for negotiation. Model users may, however, employ the pragmatic strategy of opting out, which is generally ac- companied by explicit references to some higher-order moral principle, such as confidentiality or trust. When they opt out, they generally spell out the reasons for their non-compliance, thus acting in accordance with the cooperative principle on a deeper level. The cooperative principle subsumes four conversational maxims, the maxim of quality, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of relation, and the maxim of manner (Grice 1975: 45–46). Further constitutive parts of the cooperative prin- ciple are the conventional and conversational implicatures, which are dealt with below in the section 4.2 on linguistic pragmatics.
A cooperation-anchored outlook on language and language use not only is manifest in a conversation as a whole, but also in its building blocks of speech act and in the act of referring and predicating. Reference operates on the phrasal level and involves a speaker’s use of a linguistic expression, which tends to be a noun phrase, to induce a hearer to access or create some entity in her/his mental model of the discourse. Reference may be performed directly with a noun phrase and indi- rectly as deferred reference in the contexts of pars-pro-toto configurations, mean- ing transfer and figurative meaning. Referring seen from a cooperation viewpoint is not restricted to the semantic domain of a proposition but also applies to the in-
terpersonal and interactional domains, viz. negotiation of meaning and common ground.
The status of cooperation as a universal pragmatic principle has been examined extensively in general pragmatics, and there seems to be a general agreement on its validity. However, the claim that the Gricean cooperative principle is universal has been under severe attack. There have been modifications as regards the adoption of a further constitutive pragmatic principle on the same level, the politeness prin- ciple (Leech 1983), and there have been various modifications of the number of conversational maxims required for the calculation of pragmatic meaning as well as their speaker- and hearer-oriented conceptualizations and interpretations (Horn 1984; Lakoff 1973; Levinson 2000).
Pragmatics is a field of research which intersects with various paradigms. As regards meaning, it cannot but consider semantics. As regards rationality, it cannot but consider cognitive science, and as regards cooperation, it cannot but consider philosophy. Thus, pragmatics needs linguistics – and linguistics needs pragmatics. For a thorough investigation of meaning, we need to examine how things are done with words, and how conversational contributions are structured to achieve par- ticularized goals in context. This is done in linguistic pragmatics, where general- pragmatic principles and pragmatic universals undergo language- and culture-spe- cific modification.