Children learn to distinguish registers for different roles: talk as child versus as adult, as girl versus boy, as parent versus child, as teacher, as doctor, marking each “voice” with intonation, vocabulary, and speech acts. They learn to mark gender and status with each role; what counts as polite, how to address different people, how to mark membership in a speech community (e.g., family, school, tennis players, chess players), and how to convey specific goals in conversation. They reply on experts for new word meanings and identify some adults as reliable sources of such information. They mark information as reliable or as second-hand, through use of evidentials. They adapt their speech to each addressee and take into account the common ground relevant to each from as young as 1;6 on. They keep track of what is given and what new, making use of articles (a versus the), and moving from definite noun phrases (new) to pronouns (given). They learn to be persuasive, and persistent, bargaining in their negotiations. They give stage directions in pretend play. And they start to use figurative language. They learn how questions work at school. And they learn how to tell stories.

As children learn more about language, they use it more effectively to achieve their conversational goals. They choose appropriate speech acts, establish joint attention, contribute new information, take up information from others, and take turns. They learn how to enter an exchange among others from as young as age two. Their intrusions in ongoing exchanges typically contain new information. Planning an utterance takes time, and children learn to plan what to say so as to take turns on time. This can be tracked in their answers to yes/no and wh- questions, where they get faster with age. They plan pretend play, assigning roles, assigning actions, and also utterances for each character enacted. They track common ground and design referring expressions for their addressees, and they repeat new words to mark uptake. They distinguish requests from offers, and, on occasion, persist in making repeated requests themselves. They clarify what they mean when asked and offer spontaneous repairs as well. In all this, they track what the others in the exchange say and choose when to enter the exchange themselves.

This chapter considers the treatment of context in relevance theory, a cognitively oriented pragmatic theory which sees human communication and cognition as governed by the search for relevance. Utterance interpretation crucially relies on context, and a central question for pragmatics is about how hearers find the right contextual information to use in interpreting an utterance, and thus succeed in identifying the speaker’s meaning. According to relevance theory, utterances raise precise and predictable expectations of relevance which guide the hearer in every aspect of utterance interpretation, from disambiguation and reference resolution to the choice of contextual information and the derivation of implicatures (i.e. intended implications). After outlining the main assumptions of Relevance Theory, the chapter illustrates with examples how these different aspects of interpretation fit together, and compares Relevance Theory’s treatment of context with some alternative treatments discussed in the pragmatic literature, including those based on a notion of “common ground.”

Ths chapter examines compromise as a face of moderation and shows how compromise properly understood can help us address the deep affective and ideological polarization in American society today. The compromsing mindset open to conciliation and bargaining is opposed to the uncompromising one that borders on authoritarianism.

The Convention contains an inherent tension between, the one hand, the aim to provide effective protection of Convention rights and, on the other hand, the need for the ECtHR to allow sufficient freedom to the States and respect their special abilities and powers to make choices and decisions, also in light of the inherent indeterminacy of the Convention provisions. It is against this backdrop that the Court has developed its famous yet complex margin of appreciation doctrine, on which this chapter is focused. Insight is given into the development of this doctrine in the Court’s case law, its main rationale and functions, and the types of cases where the doctrine is (and is not) applied. In addition, the main factors determining the scope of the margin and their interaction are explained (common ground facter, better placed factor, nature and intensity of the interference). Finally, some attention is paid to the difference between doctrine and reality in the Court’s case law.

Chapter 11 opens by asking readers to imagine what different kinds of people likely know and don’t know. For example, everyone knows that things fall when you drop them. But details of social etiquette and childhood memories will vary across people. This exercise relates to the Maxim of Manner, which focuses on brevity, clarity, and orderliness for contributions to successful conversations. Information structure is central here: Learning is enhanced when learners meet given or familiar information before new or unfamiliar information. In other words, we build on what we already know. One reason that this point is critical to public engagement is that we compute meaning for words and sentences as we hear/read them. The Worked Example uses a demonstration in which we write people’s names in the International Phonetic Alphabet to compare two orders for presenting critical information. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to write down an ideal interaction they want with the demonstrations they are developing and then to change the order of the elements around.

This chapter unpacks the complex stitching that makes up the reference tapestry by reviewing theories of indefiniteness and definiteness and by examining the complex issues of in-/definiteness. The chapter argues that definiteness is a speaker-centred concept, including whether the speaker expects the addressee able to share a sufficiently similar conceptualisation of the referent and that the entire discourse event contributes to the establishment of an entity as definite or not. For this reason, we argue for the separation of reference (function) from the expression (form). An indefinite expression (form) can be used for definite reference (function) and a definite expression (form) can be used for indefinite reference (function). There is no one-to-one relationship between the lexicogrammatical realisation of the expression and its function in an act of reference. The chapter includes discussion of various types of referential choice including lexical expressions, pronouns, and proper names.

This chapter investigates how scholars have previously challenged dyadic reductions and directly or indirectly embraced polylogue – often simply called “multiparty conversation” – as an alternative ontology for communication. The chapter is divided into two basic parts. First, the varied understandings of polylogue produced in the literature are discussed. This review reveals some key limitations of the extant literature on polylogues and clarifies terminological confusions. Second, drawing from a variety of relevant literature a nonexhaustive but compelling list of eleven polylogical facts instrumental to understanding what is at stake when people engage in polylogues is presented. These polylogical facts extend the framework by demonstrating both what is reduced in dyadic reductions of argumentation while the complex communicative phenomena that are at stake when people engage in polylogues.

The theory of common ground is an important analytical tool in linguistics and intercultural pragmatics. Common ground has applicability in the characterization of speech acts and allows for distinguishing, for example, between an assertive, which requires a dynamic common ground, and a declarative that depends more on appropriate contextual factors for a successful realization. The theory of common ground is intrinsically linked to how knowledge relates to language and how a discourse advances between interlocutors. As such, the creation and maintenance of common ground has consequences for our stance on knowledge and what we KNOW, BELIEVE, DESIRE, and our INTENTIONS for action. There are many kinds of knowledge and a relevant portion of these are framed within a discourse situation, with common ground. We discuss the interfaces and relationship between situation, context, common ground, and knowledge including cultural knowledge, drawing on the thinking of Malinowski and Firth, and others. The challenges addressed are: (a) how do we ground the notions of context and common ground and their contents, with the appropriate level of specificity? (b) how do we represent them in such a way to become operationally useful in linguistic analysis? and (c) how do we show how context and common ground contribute to utterance meaning?

The chapter presents the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) to communication that serves as a theoretical frame for intercultural pragmatics. SCA was developed to explain the specific features of intercultural interactions and thus offers an alternative to the Gricean approaches that can be considered monolingual theories. There are two important claims that distinguish SCA from other pragmatic theories. First, SCA emphasizes that cooperation and egocentrism are not antagonistic features of communication. While (social) cooperation is an intention-directed practice that is governed by relevance, (individual) egocentrism is an attention-oriented trait dominated by salience that refers to the relative importance or prominence of information and signs. Second, SCA claims that pragmatic theories have tried to describe the relationship of the individual and social factors by putting too much emphasis on idealized language use, and focusing on cooperation, rapport, and politeness while paying less attention to the untidy, messy, poorly organized and impolite side of communication. SCA pays equal attention to both sides. The first part of the chapter explains the main tenets of SCA. The second part discusses how context, common ground and salience are intertwined in meaning creation and comprehension. The chapter closes with suggestions for future research.

Most metaphors are highly conventionalized expressions that are typically read and understood by native speakers effortlessly. For instance, while reading the brightest child in the classroom native speakers naturally understand that the speaker is not referring to a child who is literally shiny, but rather, a smart child.

Non-native speakers and language learners, however, may find some metaphoric expressions difficult to understand, if expressed in a language that they do not master fluently. Moreover, they may try to use conventional metaphoric expressions translated directly from their own native or first language, into another language. This can create problems in intercultural settings, where the expression may sound unheard before, and possibly unclear. For instance, the arguably unclear expression climbing up on mirrors is actually a direct translation of a highly conventional Italian metaphoric expression, frequently used to say “finding excuses”. In this chapter I elaborate on the way in which metaphoric expressions are understood, and how such comprehension processes vary in relation with metaphor conventionality, aptness and deliberateness. I then take these observations into the field of intercultural communication, explaining how the pragmatics of metaphor comprehension may be affected by intercultural settings.

This chapter presents the most influential linguistic approaches to presupposition. Going beyond the traditional analyses of the problem of presupposition projection, it also considers recent developments in linguistics that link the analysis of presuppositions to general processes of cognition and reasoning, such as attention, probabilistic reasoning, theory of mind, information structure, attitudes and perspectival structure. I discuss some outstanding questions: whether presuppositions form one coherent group or should be thought of as different types of phenomena, why we have presuppositions at all, and why we see the presuppositions that we see (aka the triggering problem). Overall, the chapter stresses the need to consider the intricacies of the interaction of presuppositions with the broader discourse context.

I argue that rejection cannot be reduced to assertion. Adapting an observation by Huw Price, I argue that rejection is best conceived of as the speech act that is used to register that some other speech act is (or would be) violating a rule of the conversation game. This can be understood as registering norm violations where speech acts are characterized by their essential norms. However, rejection itself cannot be characterized by a norm. Instead, registering violations is a necessary condition for grasping the conversation game. The core observation is that the concept of an ‘illegal move’ is intelligible, so a speech act can be (say) an assertion, despite violating the essential norm of asserting. Rejection has the function of pointing out that a move is illegal. Registering rule violations is a precondition of playing games with rules (it is part of the concept ‘game’), not itself a rule in a game. A similar special role of rejection (that it is not explicable in the terms provided by a conceptual framework, but needed to grasp these terms) likely occurs in other frameworks as well, e.g. when one characterizes speech acts by commitments or their effect on a common ground.

Chapter 7 provides a detailed discussion of cognitive context, communication context, and how they interact in conversation.It covers framing and relevance theory, and introduces politeness and facework.

This chapter analyses how we give linguistic expression to counting as a cognitive process of interpretation in context with a focus on the interaction between aspectual adverbs and phrases with numerical DPs. For example, the use of already or no longer in there are already/no longer three students here conveys the speaker’s knowledge of the recent past of the described situation and gives rise to indexical inferences, for example, that three students were here. In order to capture these indexical inferences, ter Meulen proposes a DRT analysis that models both the information that utterances presuppose in the common ground and the inference triggered by the aspectual adverb in the context. Ter Meulen then considers how this approach could be extended to polar question uses of aspectual adverbs (Still?/Already?), and discusses the interesting and intricate differences between uses of aspectual adverbs and numerical DPs cross-linguistically.

The chapter shows how interlocutors achieve alignment of dialogue models -- that is, both situation models and dialogue game models. Such alignment is the basis of successful dialogue. We discuss the importance of co-reference for alignment of situation models. We then consider the role of meta-representation of aiignment in dialogue and how this controls what people choose to say next. We consider the relationship between focal alignment of dialogue models and what is in the shared workspace. Finally, we discuss the relationship between alignment and common ground.

This chapter examines vocabulary explanations during Swedish as a second language (L2) lessons for beginner learners in a primary school classroom, attended by 10- to 12-year-old children with immigrant backgrounds. It shows how teachers elaborated word meanings through short narratives and descriptions that demonstrated uses of words to students as prospective users. It argues that vocabulary-related explanations were dynamic activities in which teachers mediated not only linguistic forms but also culturally appropriate meanings and values, ways of thinking and behaving in new communities of practice, and provided affordances for shaping the lifeworlds and identities of the second language learners. The students’ responses reveal that, rather than simply appropriating the teachers’ norms and values, they engaged in a process of actively negotiating, disagreeing, and even resisting the teachers’ narrative exemplifications. The findings show how vocabulary explanations are a locus for socializing children into appropriate language use and cultural membership in the target-language community, attesting to the negotiated and, at times, resistant process of becoming an L2 speaker.