Context and Conversation

What is it about?

What a speaker says and thereby means, and how her words are best interpreted, can be influenced in complex ways by the conventional meanings of those words, the intentions with which she speaks, and by the conversation in which she is participating. In this chapter we first lay out certain of the principal mechanisms involved in this process, and then invoke them to help account for some communicative phenomena. In aid of the former task, we will explore the relations among illocutionary force, speaker meaning, and semantic content; develop a taxonomy of conversational projects; elucidate some conversational norms and the concept of common ground; and consider the context-sensitivity of certain expressions. These tools will then be used to illuminate four pragmatic phenomena: quantity implicature, presupposition accommodation, domains of discourse, and so-called illocutionary silencing.

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Why is it important?

What a speaker says and thereby means, and how her words are best interpreted, can be influenced in complex ways by the conventional meanings of those words, the intentions with which she speaks, and by the conversation in which she is participating. In this chapter we first lay out certain of the principal mechanisms involved in this process, and then invoke them to help account for some communicative phenomena. In aid of the former task, we will explore the relations among illocutionary force, speaker meaning, and semantic content; develop a taxonomy of conversational projects; elucidate some conversational norms and the concept of common ground; and consider the context-sensitivity of certain expressions. These tools will then be used to illuminate four pragmatic phenomena: quantity implicature, presupposition accommodation, domains of discourse, and so-called illocutionary silencing.