ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how the limits of pragmatics – as long as it is restricted to one utterance – are overcome by including the hearer not only as interpreter who tries to understand the speaker's utterance but as an interlocutor who tries to come to an understanding with the speaker. It explains what inner developments in the pragmatics paradigm have made it necessary to move in a dialogic direction, specifically emphasizing the importance of evaluating speaker meaning from the perspective of the speaker rather than from the perspective of the hearer and the double role of the interlocutor (speaker–hearer). The chapter shows how a dialogue approach can lead to better understanding of actions of interlocutors in communication. When looking at the dialogic sequence from the speaker's perspective it appears that recipient design usually requires an inductive process that is carefully planned while salience effect generally appears in the form of a deductive process that may contain repairs and adjustments.
