ABSTRACT

In a pair of articles (Hopper, 1981a, 1981b) synthesizing theory and research from diverse areas of social science and philosophy, Robert Hopper formulated the nature and functions of taken-for-granteds (TFGs), unspoken yet ordinarily understood between-the-lines aspects of talk. Emphasizing that TFGs were not to be equated with nonverbal messages, Hopper noted the essentially incomplete and often telegraphic nature of much face-toface interaction. He pointed out similarities between missing premises in enthymemes, pragmatic implications of utterances inferred from felicity conditions and conversational maxims, and other well-studied categories of unspoken messages as the parts that when presumed to form coherent patterns, constitute communicative frames (Bateson, 1972; Goffman, 1974). The concept of TFGs put forth in those articles has proved a powerful analytic tool in communication studies and related disciplines, and was recently the theme of a Northwest Communication Association convention.