ABSTRACT
The term strategy is frequently used in language research. Its wide application appears to be due to the vague idea that people have of it, as it is often taken as a synonym for other, related phenomena. Rhetoric provides a precise definition that, inherently, focuses on the speaker. The applicability of the rhetorical definition to the hearer’s role in communication is therefore questionable. In the present chapter, we combine the rhetorical definition with central notions of Relevance Theory by Sperber and Wilson, and we offer a pragmatic definition of strategy that is compatible both with its use in many linguistic studies concerned with language production, language processing, and second-language learning and with the speaker’s and the hearer’s roles in communication. In particular, we want to show under what circumstances so-called hearer strategies and inferences that are drawn as a response to (speaker) implicatures and explicatures are, in fact, applied strategically. We investigate hearer action more closely in two case studies within everyday language use (synchronic) and language change (diachronic) and discuss whether the term hearer strategy meets the requirements of our pragmatic definition.
