Indirect reports as semantic-pragmatic games

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-475
Author(s):  
Sepideh Yasrebi
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Reported Speech ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Main Condition ◽  
Situational Context ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Common

Abstract This paper examines indirect reports from the lens of socio-cognitive approach (SCA) to pragmatics. Indirect reports have the capacity to re-mold the substance of the original utterance as a whole. In direct reporting, the original utterance is produced in an actual situational context, and then, it is being reported by a different speaker in a new situational context. So, the utterance which was initially produced is only interpretable in the light of the common ground A whereas the reported utterance is only interpretable in the light of common ground B. We have it from Kecskes (2013. Intercultural pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press: 159) that “common ground is both an a priori existing and a cooperatively constructed mental abstraction. Likewise, the main condition of reporting is the need of the hearer: there would be no need for reported speech if the audience were already aware of the content of the report. For that reason, the process of meaning making in reporting, that is, the transmission and simultaneously creation of meaning is inextricably bound with the question of context, salience, common ground, pragmatics, semantics and syntax, not to mention all those bodily gestures and expressions that can, or more importantly, cannot be registered in language.

Negotiation of Wit in Facebook Humour

2016 ◽  
pp. 20-37
Author(s):  
Akin Odebunmi ◽  
Simeon Ajiboye
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Ground Theory ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Cultural Experiences ◽  
The Common ◽  
Asymmetrical Relationships

This chapter unpacks the humorous contents of selected Facebook-based Akpos jokes which have received inadequate attention in the scholarship with respect to wit negotiation which mostly indexes the jokes. Six out of fifteen sampled jokes have been analysed with the theoretic aid of Istvan Kecskes' Socio-Cognitive Approach (SCA), aspects of the common ground theory, aspects of conversation analysis and elements of selected humour theories. The analysis shows three forms of wit negotiation: negotiation of mis-oriented twists, negotiation of dis-preference and negotiation of un-designed twists. In the respective cases, the talk initiating speakers have their logic flawed by recipient speakers, usually Akpos, and consequently get outsmarted; earlier sequentially dispreferred social choices are re-negotiated as preferred options in the light of new discursive realities; and the interactive designs or expectations of talk initiating participants receive undersigned or unexpected sequential responses in symmetrical or asymmetrical relationships. The paper argues that the joke characters' situationally adaptive orientation to apriori or emergent common ground and intention demonstrates the Akpos jokes' recontextualisation of particular Nigerian social and cultural experiences through the characters' socio-cognitive designs in the mediated encounters. It concludes that while these designs offer the relaxant effects jokes are naturally meant to yield, their negotiation mechanisms provide resources for the application of Kecskes' SCA in Facebook humour and produce sarcasm with a wing of moral lessons.

Activating, seeking, and creating common ground

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Istvan Kecskes ◽  
Fenghui Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Mental Representation ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Emergent Property ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Construction Process ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
The Core ◽  
Communicative Process ◽  
Integrated Concept

This paper argues that current pragmatic theories fail to describe common ground in its complexity because they usually retain a communication-as-transfer-between-minds view of language, and disregard the fact that disagreement and egocentrism of speaker-hearers are as fundamental parts of communication as agreement and cooperation. On the other hand, current cognitive research has overestimated the egocentric behavior of the dyads and argued for the dynamic emergent property of common ground while devaluing the overall significance of cooperation in the process of verbal communication. The paper attempts to eliminate this conflict and proposes to combine the two views into an integrated concept of common ground, in which both core common ground (assumed shared knowledge, a priori mental representation) and emergent common ground (emergent participant resource, a post facto emergence through use) converge to construct a dialectical socio-cultural background for communication.
Both cognitive and pragmatic considerations are central to this issue. While attention (through salience, which is the cause for interlocutors’ egocentrism) explains why emergent property unfolds, intention (through relevance, which is expressed in cooperation) explains why presumed shared knowledge is needed. Based on this, common ground is perceived as an effort to converge the mental representation of shared knowledge present as memory that we can activate, shared knowledge that we can seek, and rapport, as well as knowledge that we can create in the communicative process. The socio-cognitive approach emphasizes that common ground is a dynamic construct that is mutually constructed by interlocutors throughout the communicative process. The core and emergent components join in the construction of common ground in all stages, although they may contribute to the construction process in different ways, to different extents, and in different phases of the communicative process.

Strategies of vanity

Maska ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (200) ◽  
pp. 111-119
Author(s):  
Blaž Kavšek
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Temporal Distance ◽  
Social Mechanisms ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common

The article, first published on historical Radio Študent show Repetitio, deals with three distinctive historical ideal types (the New York intellectual, the honnête homme and the dandy), focusing on two of them (the honnête homme and the dandy). As their common ideological core, it identifies a distinct, in two cases even explicitly contradictory relationship with the social mechanisms of self-promotion. Despite the great geographical and temporal distance between these three ideal types, it seeks in their self-presentation manoeuvres the common ground between the opposing imperatives of modesty and the need for communicating personal virtues and achievements to the wider public.

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