ABSTRACT
Language is used in interaction, and this interaction starts from the cognitive functioning of various situation participants, who at moments of communication interlock their cultural and personal common ground. These latter we see as represented by their current mental models (cf. Clark 1996; Johnson-Laird 1983, 1993). The Chinese particle le, we argued, is a coordination device. This however is not a linguistic concept, it is borrowed from psychological literature, and defines the general nature of human language, the mutual conversion on a joint project (Schelling 1960; Clark 1996). We need to conclude, therefore, that the Chinese particle le has all the characteristics of a ‘co-ordination device’; it is not used for general communicative purposes, however, but for specific moments in the adaptation process. These moments we called ‘co-ordination points’, and in this study we specified the nature of these co-ordination points in procedural, narrative and conversational discourse. They deal in essence with moments of ‘deviation’ in a procedure, event line, or conversational minimal project. Alternatively, when a ‘deviation’ was activated, co-ordination points indexed a moment of ‘solutionhood’. Moments of ‘deviation’ in conversational exchanges also could take the form of ‘construals’, ‘confrontation’, and ‘confirmation’. What remains to be done is to position our study in relation to the so-called theoretical and functional paradigms, and we will do this in the first section (9.1). Thereafter, we will review the hypotheses formulated in the opening part of this book, while still strongly relying on previous research and theoretical modelling, and judge their strength and shortcomings (9.2). In the third section we review common-ground constituent structure and its relation to mental model theory (9.3). Those principles then make it possible to compare our analysis with previous proposals, and indicate where the similarities and differences are (9.4). The main part of the chapter is the formulation of a theory of language use, which, in our view, is an alternative for the study of sentence structure (9.5), and we round off with an overview of findings and issues in need for further study (9.6), before presenting some concluding remarks (9.7).
