Professional Documents
Culture Documents
North-Holland
11 (1987) 561-588
561
OF
1. Introduction
Recent inquiries into understanding how people derive what is meant from
what is said in conversation have generally assumed that listeners make use of
various extralinguistic information. For example, consider the following brief
conversation.
(la) Would you like a piece of cake?
(lb) Im on a diet.
Understanding that ( lb) is meant as a refusal of the offer stated in (la)
requires that listeners go through a chain of reasoning regarding the speakers
intentions because (lb) does not follow logically from the question in (la).
Most current theories of conversational inference appeal to the idea that conversation is a cooperative venture, governed by certain rules which constrain
how listeners determine the intended implications of any utterance. Implicit in
this view is the assumption that speakers and listeners must share knowledge of
each others beliefs and attitudes which guides not only how speakers design
* Preparation
of this article was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the University of
California,
Santa Gruz. I wish to thank Kevin Brailey, Robert Cox, Gayle Gonzales,
Rachel
Mueller, Guy Van Orden, and Patrick Whitnell for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Authors address: R.W. Gibbs, Jr., Program
in Experimental
Psychology,
Clark Kerr Hall,
University of California,
Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, USA.
037882166/87/$3.50
B.V. (North-Holland)
562
their utterances to meet the specific demands of their audience, but also how
listeners figure out the right inferences to make from speakers utterances.
My purpose in this article is to assess the role of mutual knowledge and
beliefs in a psychological theory of conversational inference. I will attempt to
support what I call the mutual knowledge hypothesis, which assumes that listeners use the knowledge and beliefs they share with speakers in the process of
interpreting utterances in conversation. The idea that mutual knowledge plays
some role in conversational inference is widely assumed (see Bach and Harnish
(1979), Clark (1985), Brown and Yule (1983), Leech (1983), Levinson (1983));
however, there is little direct psychological evidence to support such an assumption. One of my aims is to briefly review some of the existing data, as well as to
present some new empirical findings, which support the mutual knowledge hypothesis. I will also suggest that many kinds of utterances can not be interpreted
without explicit reference to the shared beliefs existing between speakers and
listeners.
A related goal is to challenge what I call the relevance hypothesis, recently
formulated by Sperber and Wilson (1982,1986), and Wilson and Sperber (in
press) which suggests that problems inherent in establishing mutual knowledge
are great enough so that utterance interpretation may work without the benefit
of mutual knowledge. Although the relevance hypothesisstill characterizes conversation as essentially cooperative, it suggests that utterance interpretation can
be explained by a single Principle of Relevance which works without appeal to
the notion that speaker and listeners mutually assume certain knowledge and
beliefs. I shall demonstrate that there are a number of difficulties with the
relevance hypothesis and will conclude that it is premature to accept this alternative theory of utterance interpretation as a psychologically valid model of
conversational inference.
2. Conversational
How do listeners make the right inference about what is meant in conversation?
Consider again, the exchange in (la,b).
(la) Would you like a piece of cake?
( lb) Im on a diet.
What is the chain of reasoning that allows a hearer to recognize that (lb) is
meant as a refusal of the offer in (la)? Perhaps the most influential model of
how listeners derive inferences during utterance interpretation is that proposed
I will use the terms knowledge and belief somewhat interchangeably
throughout
although it should be noted that belief is a wider term than knowledge (Hintikka
this article,
(1962)).
563
the maxims.
cm
consider
( la,b),
restated
here,
564
565
pants beliefs and assumptions, including the beliefs the participants have about
each others beliefs and assumptions. Having decided that something is being
conveyed over and above what has been said, the listener has to infer what this
is on the basis of contextual information shared with the speaker. But what
constitutes this shared or mutual knowledge?
In the past, the concept of mutual or shared knowledge has been considered
as part of the analysis of speaker meaning and convention in philosophy (Lewis
( 1969) Schiffer ( 1972)). By definition, a speaker S and an addressee A mutually
know a proposition P if and only if
(8) S knows that
A knows that
S knows that
A knows that
. . . and so on
P
P
A knows P
3. Conversational
Sperber and Wilson (1982,1986), and Wilson and Sperber (in press) argue that
conversational inferences can be worked out deductively and done so without
mutual knowledge. They attempt to demolish the validity of the notion of
mutual knowledge as a viable part of a theory of communication by suggesting
that even if mutual knowledge can be truly established between speaker and
listener, which they argue is unlikely, this does not tell us (a) what role it
plays in the interpretation process, and (b) how particular items of mutual
knowledge are selected for the interpretation of utterances. Sperber and
Wilsons alternative account posits that the selection of contextual assumptions
used in utterance interpretation can be constructed without reference to mutual
knowledge.
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Sperber and Wilson (1986) acknowledge that any account of human communication must incorporate
some notion of shared information.
They argue that
there are a set of facts or assumptions
which an individual is capable of mentally representing and accepting as true which correspond to his or her cognitive
environment. To the extent that any cognitive environment
is manifest to two
or more individuals,
then there is a mutual cognitive environment. The idea
of mutual manifestations
differs from mutual knowledge or mutual assumptions because to say that an assumption
is mutually
manifest is a
claim about cognitive environments
rather than mental states or processes. As
Sperber and Wilson (1986: 45) state Human
beings somehow manage to
communicate
in situations where a great deal can be assumed about what is
manifest to others, a lot can be assumed about what is mutually manifest to
themselves and others, but nothing can be assumed to be truly mutally known
or assumed. When people communicate,
they ostensively intend to alter the
cognitive environments
of their addressees. Every act of ostensive communication carries with it a guarantee of relevance, and this fact, which Sperber and
Wilson call the Principle of Relevance, makes manifest the speakers ostensive
intentions.
The Principle of Relevance generally states that speakers try to be as relevant
as possible in a given situation. This single principle presumably can handle the
full range of phenomena
@rices maxims were designed to explain. Formally,
Wilson and Sperber (in press) define relevance as follows:
(9) A proposition
one contextual
in Cr. . . C,.
On what ground might the speaker of (lob) have thought her utterance to be
relevant to the listener? Wilson and Sperber assume that the speaker in (10a)
would not have asked his question if he had not had a context immediately
accessible in which the information
that the addressee could (or could not)
drive a Buick would be relevant. By providing this information
directly, the
addressee would therefore be satisfying the Principle of Relevance. Nonetheless,
the speaker in (lob) does not provide the information
directly, and the listener
must supply the contextual assumption
in ( 1 la) in order to derive the conclusion in ( 1 lb).
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A Buick is a car.
Susan can drive a Buick.
Although most pragmatic theories assume that the context for comprehension of an utterance is determined
in advance, Sperber and Wilson argue that
the determination
of the context is not a prerequisite for comprehension,
but a
result of it. They suggestthat
the search for the interpretation
of which an
utterance will be viewed as most relevant involves a search for the context that
will make this interpretation
possible. The listener constructs an interpretation
by looking at what contextual
implications
can be derived from the initial
context provided by the interpretation
of the immediately
preceding utterance
in the conversation.
If the resulting inferences fail to satisfy the Principle of
Relevance, the listener can then go further back in the conversation
and add
that information
to the context. The listener may also add encyclopedic knowledge from memory to the concepts mentioned in the utterance itself. The information in a given encyclopedic entry is only accessed, however, via the presence
of that concept being in a set of propositions
currently being processed. For
example, the utterance in (lob) gives the hearer immediate access to his encyclopedic entry for car, which should in turn provide access to various propositions
of the form (12a-c).
(12a) A Volkswagen is a car.
(12b) A Mercedes is a car.
( 12~) A Buick is a car.
. . . and so on.
Wilson and Sperber (in press) state that given normal assumptions
about the
organization
of memory, the previous mention of a Buick in (1 la) should act
as a prompt, making (12~) the most accessible proposition.
The speaker of
(lob) assumes that her utterance is relevant since she expected it to be processed
in a context where ( 12~) was a contextual assumption
which yielded ( 11 b) as a
contextual implication.
In each case, there is no need for the listener to worry
whether these additions to the context are mutually known or believed by the
speaker.
Generally, the more contextual implications
a proposition
has in some context, the more relevant it will be, and, all other things being equal, the greater
processing effort required to derive these implications,
the less relevant it will
be. Processing effort is determined by three main factors: (1) the complexity of
the utterance (the more complex the utterance the greater the processing effort);
(2) the size of the context (the larger the context, the greater the processing
effort), and (3) the accessibility of the context (the less accessible the context,
the greater the processing effort). Sperber and Wilson suggest, then, that there
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and minimizing
569
possess tacit knowledge which is difficult to consciously access, as in our knowledge of grammar. But, we still think of our knowledge of grammar, for
instance, as knowledge no matter how tacit it may seem. Even though
this knowledge is somewhat indeterminate and difficult to specify as a set of
mutually-held propositions, this doesnt imply that speakers and listeners are
unable to mutually recognize the existence of this shared knowledge. Listeners
do not have to consciously access a relevant assumption before a speaker says
something like ( 13) in order to comprehend an utterance, as long as it is
mutually known to both parties that the listener is capable of utilizing this
tacitly shared information at the right moment. The possession of this mutual
knowledge, whether tacitly held or otherwise, does not guarantee that communication will always be successful. No failsafe algorithm exists for verbal communication and problems in assuming what is mutually known will, of course,
result in various miscommunications, particularly when part of this mutual
knowledge is tacit and difficult to specify in a propositional form.
My main contention, then, is that Sperber and Wilson are sneaking mutual
knowledge in the backdoor of their theory of conversational inference by
appealing to the idea of mutual cognitive environments which can be manifest
but not known. At a psychological level, it appears that Sperber and Wilson
have adopted a framework for describing verbal communication which crucially depends on the very concept that they wish to abandon.
Nonetheless, it is important, for the moment, to accept Sperber and Wilsons
claim that utterance interpretation can work without mutual knowledge and go
on to seriously consider the psychological consequences of their proposal. The
relevance hypothesis poses a direct challenge to psychologists interested in
human language processing because it suggests a process-model of how people
derive conversational inferences. It remains to be seen, though, whether or not
the relevance hypothesis can meet the requirements of a psychological theory.
Although Sperber and Wilson are explicitly concerned with utterance interpretation as a psychological issue, they overlook crucial psycholinguistic evidence
which casts doubt on the validity of the relevance hypothesis. In what follows,
I review some of this evidence and outline some recent experimental findings
that support, instead, the mutual knowledge hypothesis. Experimentally testing
the predictions of either the relevance hypothesis or the mutual knowledge hypothesis is a difficult problem; nevertheless, the weight of the available evidence
goes against aspects of the relevance hypothesis, enough so to question its value
as a psychological theory of conversational inference.
The first task facing a listener in understanding an utterance, according to
Sperber and Wilsons relevance hypothesis is to identify its propositional form.
Of course, the idea is to recover the correct propositional form, one which is
intended by the speaker. Sperber and Wilson (1986) suggest the propositional
form a listener wants to recover is that which is consistent with the Princ@e of
Relevance. They assume that the initial parse of a sentence begins in some sort
570
knowledge
of input module (in Fodors (1983) sense), which results in its literal, contextfree, representation. This propositional representation is subsequently examined by a central processor containing general encyclopedic information in
order to find a context in which that proposition is viewed as most relevant.
Generally, sentences are considered to have specific semantic representations,
or literal meanings, with as many semantic representations as there are ways in
which a sentence is ambiguous.
This sketch of how utterances are initially processed to form propositional
representation is somewhat problematic and can be criticized on psychological
grounds (see Gibbs (1982,1984)). An immediate difficulty arises when a speaker
says an utterance that is not literally well-defined. Consider the following set of
indirect directives (14a,b).
(14a) Get in, whycha?
(14b) Sit over here, ya wanna?
Ervin-Tripp (1976) has noted that indirect directives spoken with casual pronunciation, like (14a,b), are abundant in both childrens and adults speech. It
is unlikely that understanding such requests requires listeners to first expand
these utterances to their full grammatical forms to analyze their literal meanings
before figuring out their intended interpretations. Similarly, it seems implausible to suggest that other innovative phrases and expressions, such as (15a,b),
must be fully expanded into complete literal sentences before being understood.
(15a) John porched the newspaper.
(15b) John did a Napoleon for the camera. (Meaning: John posed for the
camera with one hand tucked inside his jacket a la Napoleon.)
Many metaphoric utterances,
strictly literal sense.
is waiting
571
massacred
the Redskins.
the listener must (a) compute the literal meaning of the utterance, (b) decide
if the literal meaning is the intended meaning of the utterance, and (c), if the
literal meaning is inappropriate
for the specific context, compute the conveyed
or metaphoric
meaning via a cooperative
principle or by the rules of speech
acts.
Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds and Antos (1978) tested the psychological implications of this model by having subjects read sentences like (19) in either a
literal or metaphoric
context.
(19)
Regardless
of the danger,
the troops
marched
on.
If the predictions
of serial-process model are correct, subjects should take
longer to process sentences like (19) in metaphorical
contexts than in literal
ones. Presumably,
when people determine the literal meaning of (19) in a literal
context they are essentially done. On the other hand, once the literal meaning
of (19) is determined in a metaphorical
context, listeners must go on to derive
the utterances nonliteral interpretation.
This extra processing should result in
subjects taking longer to read (19) when it is used metaphorically
than when it
is intended literally. Ortony et al.% (1978) alternative hypothesis was that given
sufficient context subjects would not analyze the literal interpretations
of the
metaphorical
sentence before deriving their intended, metaphorical
meanings.
Subjects should therefore
take no longer to read metaphorical
sentences
than to read literal ones. The results of Ortony et al.s study showed this to be
512
true. However, when subjects read the target sentences with minimal context,
metaphorical
targets took significantly longer to read than literal sentences.
These results strongly demonstrate
that context plays a crucial role in the
interpretation
of metaphoric language. With sufficient linguistic and social context, people understand
the nonliteral interpretations
of metaphoric utterances
directly without first analyzing their putative literal meanings. Similar findings
have been reported for interpreting
other kinds of figurative utterances,
such
as indirect requests (Gibbs (1979,1982,1983,1984)),
idioms (Gibbs (1980)
Swinney and Cutler ( 1979)), proverbs (Kemper ( 198 l)), and sarcasm (Gibbs
(1986a,b)). Other studies have even demonstrated
that people are unable to
ignore metaphorical
meanings when they are explicitly instructed to verify their
literal meanings (Glucksberg,
Gildea and Bookin ( 1982)).
In general, understanding
utterances whose intended meanings depart from
their literal interpretations
does not necessarily
introduce
any additional
difficulty. If people do not automatically
analyze the literal meanings of utterances, then Sperber and Wilson are incorrect in assuming that conversational
inferences (conveyed
meaning)
can be determined
by finding a contextual
assumption which makes some proposition
(or literal meaning) most relevant.
Making the right inferences about speakers ostensive intentions
can be done
in an expectation-driven
manner (Riesbeck and Schank (1978)) so that people
can infer exactly what is meant directly by relying on a contextual
framework partially composed of the knowledge and beliefs shared by speakers and
listeners.
It is surprising that Sperber and Wilson do not refer to this large body of
psycholinguistic
research on figurative language understanding
in their discussion of the importance
of relevance for interpreting
metaphor and irony (Sperber and Wilson (1986)). For example, Sperber and Wilson regard irony as one
of a variety of utterance types in which the speaker does not express his or her
belief, but echoes the beliefs of someone else, and perhaps, expresses his or her
attitude to those beliefs. Compare (20a,b) and (21a,b)
(20a)
(20b)
(21a)
(21b)
He:
In each instance, the response in (b) echoes the opinion expressed in (a).
However, the speaker of (20b) clearly endorses the opinion in (20a), but the
speaker of (2 1b) is ridiculing the opinion in (2 1a). The utterance of (2 1b) is seen
as ironic because its point is to show how silly the speaker of (21a) was to hold
his opinion. Sperber and Wilson ( 198 1,1986) argue that there is no more reason
513
The relevance hypothesis proposes that there are general processing principles
determining
the accessibility of senses and referents which should enable the
speaker to predict with some confidence the order in which interpretations
of
(23) are likely to come to a listeners mind. Exactly what is meant by accessibility here is unclear, although Wilson and Sperber (in press) state that psycholinguistic research has shown that certain meanings
of ambiguous
words and
phrases are more common and accessed more quickly than other meanings. The
word hot in (23) for example, will refer to the temperature
so that (23) will
mean something like His food is not warm enough to eat, rather than a spicy
interpretation
of hot. Presumably,
the context may make it immediately accessible to anyone there that the food served was not hot enough and should have
enough contextual implications
to satisfy the Principle of Relevance.
However, the correct interpretation
of ambiguous
words and phrases depends on information
other than which meanings are most accessible from
semantic memory. This is particularly
true in cases where speaker and hearer
share certain idiosyncratic
information
about each others beliefs and attitudes
(cf. Gerrig (1986)). For instance, in a situation where two people are eating
514
at a Mexican restaurant, and it is mutually known that the speaker in (23) loves
his food spicy hot, the listeners interpretation
of (23) will immediately
be that
the food is not spicy enough for the speakers taste. Most importantly,
the
speaker of (23) knows that he can state this utterance with the understanding
that the listener will take the mutually held belief about spicy food into account
when interpreting
(23). It is this coordination
between speaker and listener
which makes for the easy interpretation
of ambiguous utterances such as (23),
not simply that certain interpretations
of ambiguous
phrases and words are
more accessible from semantic memory. Kess and Hoppe (1985) review a variety of experiments
which show that the interpretation
of ambiguous
lexical
items, such as hot, are indeed affected by context. This contextual information
is composed
of both common knowledge and other idiosyncratic
shared
knowledge that exist between particular speakers and hearers.
As with ambiguous language, the search for the acceptable interpretations
of
most metaphors will involve a large range of cultural conventions
and mutually
held beliefs, some of which may be quite idiosyncratic
to particular people and
contexts. In many instances of conversation,
a speaker will not merely fall back
on what can be generally taken to be shared, nor will s/he simply tailor his/her
utterance to the mind of the listener. Instead, the speaker will be inclined to
select from whatever s/he shares with the other person just those topics that
allow him/her to employ allusive phrases that only the recipient will immediately understand.
Clark (1983) provides examples of such phrases, called
contextual expressions. Thus, if two people use the word teapotted to mean
something unique such as rubbing the back of someones leg with a teapot,
then the expression in (24) can only by interpreted
correctly by people who
share this intimate knowledge.
(24) John teapotted
the policeman.
575
premature
to accept the relevance hypothesis as a reasonable
model of the
psychological
processes used in working out conversational
inferences. Nevertheless, many of Sperber and Wilsons difficulties with the mutual knowledge
hypothesis remain and at this point it is necessary to consider in more detail
whether or not mutual knowledge is possible to establish.
576
that only one piece of evidence is really needed to establish some mutual belief
as long as it is the right kind of evidence. For example, if A and B agree before
a foot race to start running when a gun fires, this agreement can serve as the
only grounds necessary for their mutual beliefs that the firing of a gun is when
they are both to start running. It can be formalized by the mutual induction
scheme as follows:
(264 Aand B have reason to believe that the agreement holds that they will
both start running when the gun fires.
(26~) The agreement indicates to A and Beach that the firing of a gun indicates
that they are to start running.
These three conditions provide the grounds for A and B to individually
infer the mutual belief that they are to start running when the gun is fired.
There is no need to draw on a potentially infinite number of pieces of
evidence.
But what counts as the grounds G which are used as the basis for the mutual
induction scheme? Clark and Marshall propose that people ordinarily rely on
three kinds of co-presence heuristics as evidence for inferring mutual beliefs.
The first source is linguistic co-presence. Here the listener takes as common
ground all of their conversation up to and including the utterance currently
being interpreted. A second source for common ground is physical co-presence.
Here the listener takes as common ground what s/he and the speaker are
currently experiencing and have already experienced. The final source of evidence is community membership. This includes information that is universally
known in a community and can be represented by mental structures such as
frames (Minsky (1975)), scripts (Schank and Abelson (1977)), and schemata
(Rumelhart and Ortony ( 1977)), etc. Moreover, it also covers mutually known
conventions governing the phonology, syntax, and semantics of the sentence
uttered.
Normally, mutual knowledge is established by some combination of physical
or linguistic co-presence and mutual knowledge based on community membership. Whatever the case, these co-presence heuristics show that mutual induction can occur without having to rely on an infinite number of pieces of
evidence. People search for evidence that they, their listener, and the objects
they refer to are openly present together, physically, linguistically, or indirectly (Clark and Marshall (198 1)). With this evidence they can infer mutual
knowledge directly by means of the induction scheme. Clark and Marshalls
idea shows that mutual knowledge can be viewed as a single mental entity,
instead of an infinitely long series of more complex mental entities.
517
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together
at noon.
Understanding
of the definite reference the airport in (28) may appear to be
a trivial problem, but it requires that the two friends both mutually recognize
which airport is being referred to (similar to recognizing which statistics the
peasant was referring to). In this case, there are two airports nearby, and each
person (unbeknownst
to the other) actually is supposed to fly out of a different
one. It was only after they started heading toward one airport that it becomes
clear that there has been a misunderstanding,
specifically due to each persons
incorrect assumption
that some proposition
was mutually known (i.e. what
airport they were going to). The interpretation
of mundane utterances such as
(28) shows that mutual knowledge
is necessary in order to insure that the
definite reference in (28) will be properly understood.
Sperber and Wilson
(1982) suggest that situations like the one in which (28) occurs are unnatural
and that such misunderstandings
are unlikely to occur. But scenarios like this
one are not uncommon
and demonstrate
that misunderstandings
do occur
because of the failure to correctly coordinate
speakers and listeners mutual
beliefs. Misunderstandings
of this type are frequently noted in native/nonnative
speakers conversation
where the participants
roughly speak the same language,
but do not have the same underlying
beliefs and cultural knowledge
(see
Varonis and Gass (1985)).
Perhaps the most fundamental
difference between the mutual knowledge
hypothesis and the relevance hypothesis concerns the constraints
each places on
the kinds of inference generated during utterance interpretation.
Consider the
following exchange:
(29a)
(29b)
tonight?
580
581
7. Recent experimental
evidence
3 In discussing the relationship between implicature and linguistic style Sperber and Wilson (1986:
217-218) state . . . a speaker not only aims to enlarge the mutual cognitive environment she shares
with the hearer; she also assumes a certain degree of mutuality, which is indicated, and sometimes
communicated,
by her style. This seems quite true, but, again, raises the problem of how mutuality
is established and assumed, the very thing Sperber and Wilson want to avoid.
582
583
their first utterance relevant to the context, but exactly how is this done? What
determines the exact wording used in situations where the precise context has
yet to be established?
Clark et al.s findings show that the surface form of a
question influences its interpretation.
I have recently gathered some evidence
from my own laboratory
demonstrating
that people use mutual knowledge
information
in formulating
the precise surface forms of questions in conversation.4 The hypothesis tested was that speakers specify their utterances,
even
from the beginning of conversation,
to best fit what the listener knows and what
the listener knows about what the speaker knows, etc.
In this study subjects read short scenarios involving two or more characters.
The scenarios were systematically
manipulated
to depict different degrees of
mutual knowledge between two of the main characters. The subjects task was
to read each story and choose from a set of three alternatives the question that
best fits the context. Consider the following story:
Bob and Ann are eagerly waiting for a weekend visit from their friend, Ken, who is
supposed to arrive in time for dinner on Friday evening at a local restaurant. On Friday
morning, however, Ken phones Ann at work and tells her that he will not be arriving in
town until Saturday morning due to engine problems with his car. Ann phones Bob at
work and leaves a message with a co-worker, Sally, for Bob concerning Kens delay.
Later on Ann runs into Sally who says that she gave Bob the message. That evening
when Ann and Bob meet at home Ann says to him. . .
Do you still want to go out to dinner with me tonight?
(b) Did you find out that Ken wont arrive until tomorrow?
(c) Shall we go out even though Ken wont arrive until tomorrow?
(a)
Whitnell.
with Rachel
Mueller,
Kevin
Brailey,
Robert
Czx, and
584
town until Saturday morning due to engine problems with his car. Ann phones Bob at
work and leaves a message with a co-worker, Sally, for Bob concerning Kens arrival.
Later that evening Ann sees Bob and says to him . .
In this case the mutual knowledge between Ann and Bob can be characterized as S knows p, but S doesnt know if A knows p. After all, Bob might not
have received Anns message about Kens late arrival. Consequently,
the utterance Ann is most likely to use here should take this uncertainty
into account,
which is best reflected in choice (b). Once again, the data supported this expectation as subjects chose alternative
(b) significantly
more often that they did
either of the two other possibilities.
Consider now the last story context which describes another state of mutual
knowledge between the participants.
Bob and Ann are eagerly waiting for a weekend visit from their friend, Ken, who is
supposed to arrive in time for dinner on Friday evening at a local restaurant. On Friday
morning, however, Ken phones Ann at work and tells her that he will not be arriving in
town until Saturday morning due to engine problems with his car. Ann phones Bob at
8. Concluding remarks
Sperber and Wilson have correctly recognized that pragmatics,
the study of
utterance interpretation,
is a branch of cognitive psychology. The main aim of
pragmatic theory is to produce an explicit account of how human beings interpret utterances
(Sperber and Wilson ( 198 1: 28 1)). The purpose of this article
has been to evaluate the competing claims of the mutual knowledge hypothesis
and the relevance hypothesis in light of the very goals Sperber and Wilson state
for a pragmatic theory of utterance interpretation.
585
References
Bach, Kent and Robert Harnish,
1979. Linguistic communication
and speech acts. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Bennett, Jonathan,
1976. Linguistic behavior. Cambridge:
Cambridge
University Press.
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