ABSTRACT
Keywords: account, formulation, hedge, logical encoding, metalinguistic awareness, metapragmatic, metasequential, method, repair, troubles talk
7.1 Introduction Because utterances serve different purposes in the different contexts in which they occur, their pragmatic interpretation will sometimes be effortful and even problematic. When speakers feel that this is likely, they typically use metapragmatic marking to guide addressees in the way they want what they say to be understood. So the pharmacist who wants to be sure that I understand ‘they make you drowsy’ as a warning adds the metapragmatic marker ‘mind’ to her utterance. And because I want to be sure that the colleague who reads my letter understands the relationship of what I write to the previous discourse, I say, ‘There must therefore be a very good case for not allowing anyone to proceed to Year 3.’ And when I answer Branka’s question about the time of my return, I use ‘but’ to indicate that the second part of what I say is to be contrasted with the first part:
(1) BRANKA: When will you be back PETER: I should be back by eight but you know what trains are like
I need to use ‘but’ because the unusual relationship between the first part of what I say and the second part isn’t otherwise easy to recover, as (1) shows:
(1) BRANKA: When will you be back PETER: I should be back by eight. You know what trains are like
‘But’ therefore functions as a processing instruction, constraining the possible interpretations that (1) would invite and reducing the inferential effort required to recover the meaning I intend. As we might expect, this procedural instruction applies before the inferential process begins: in (1), ‘but’ indicates a relationship between ‘I should be back by eight’ and ‘you know what trains are like’, not between the Q-inferred ‘I probably won’t be back by eight’ and ‘you know what trains are like’, as (1) shows
(1) BRANKA: When will you be back PETER: I probably won’t be back by eight but you know what trains are like
So it seems that the meta-function applies not only to the literal level but also to the pragmatic. That’s to say, we can both ask what a particular expression means (a metalinguistic inquiry), and ask what someone means by using a particular expression (a metapragmatic inquiry). And we can use items like ‘mind’, ‘therefore’ and ‘but’ metapragmatically in a way that shows our awareness of the effects of language and its appropriate use. If we define pragmatics as the study of what we do with words in the contexts in which we use them to accomplish acts and to convey meanings beyond what is stated literally, then metapragmatics affords us ways of signalling our awareness of what we do with words to accomplish acts and to convey meanings beyond what is stated literally. This chapter explores the way this signalling is accomplished and the effects it has.
