ABSTRACT
The question of how listeners know or work out what speakers mean or intend to convey is of course central to any consideration of human interaction. In this chapter, we discuss the application of two approaches that originate in the philosophy of language, namely, Grice’s pragmatics of conversational cooperation and speech act theory (e.g., Grice, 1957, 1975; Searle, 1969, 1975, 1979). In many textbooks on discourse or pragmatics, these two approaches are explored in separate chapters. However, we find it useful to integrate them into one chapter, because both deal with fundamental principles of conversation, albeit from a theoretical-philosophical rather than an applied-practical stance. Neither approach was, in its origins, particularly concerned with the application of its theoretical principles to authentic, contextualized data. Rather, the philosophy of language being geared more toward the general principles of the human ability to use language as a sym120
bolic system and the relationship between language use and formal logic, the classic writings in Gricean pragmatics, and speech act theory tend to use constructed examples within constructed contexts to illustrate points of theory. Therein lies a potential problem in applying the constructs thus arrived at as a tool to analyze conversational interaction and particularly clinical data, and we return to this issue in our data analysis later in this chapter (see also Schiffrin, 1994, pp. 61 and following, 203-204).
