Reflection: Production footing beyond the speaker

The different production roles are not limited, however, to speakers per se. In some instances, talk may depict someone who is co-present or involve attributing utterances to others (including others who are co-present). Let us consider the following example taken from a recording of conversation amongst some (African-American) children in the United States, where Chopper has just been asked what Tony said when confronted by a group of boys on the street.

In lines 40 and 42, Chopper is attributing an utterance to Tony, namely, I ain’t got no money. This means that although Chopper is the animator (or utterer) here, the figure is Tony. Thus, me in line 40 refers to Chopper, while I in line 42 refers to Tony, even though they’re part of one and the same utterance. It also means Tony is the author and principal of the utterance quoted (at least so Chopper alleges). However, there are also laughter particles interspersed through this quotation of what was said by Tony. These laughter particles are attributable to Chopper, who is therefore the author and principal for what is implicated by attributing this statement to Tony, namely, that Tony is a coward. Through this laughter, Chopper also implicates that this is a laughable matter, both in the sense of laughing at what was said by Tony, as well as at Tony himself. Since Tony (the figure) is also present during this telling, he also becomes a target of the derision that arises through what is implicated here. In analyzing the speaker meaning that arises in this case, then, we have two distinct footings: that of Chopper as the animator as well as the author and principal of what is implicated, and Tony as the author and principal of what is said.

A consideration of production roles opens up many interesting questions about the nature of speaker meaning, and a more nuanced understanding of whose meaning representation we are analyzing, as earlier noted by Bertuccelli-Papi (1999). There is also, however, the issue of participation status to be considered, or what might be termed reception roles (Levinson 1988). Goffman (1981) made a distinction between recipients who are ratified and those who are not. This was based on the intuitive distinction we can draw in English between hearing and listening, where the latter entails some responsibility to respond to or participate in the talk, even if that only means showing one is paying attention to the talk and not something else. A ratified recipient (or participant) is an individual who is expected to not only hear but also listen to the talk. An unratified recipient (or non-participant) is an individual who can hear the talk but is not expected to listen. These two types of recipients, or participants, were further subdivided by Goffman into different footings. A participant may either be an addressee or an unaddressed side participant. An addressee is a person (or persons) to whom the utterance is (ostensibly) directed, but both addressees and side participants have recognized entitlements to respond to the utterance, although their degree of responsibility to do so varies (at least ostensibly). Unratified recipients, or non-participants, on the other hand can be divided, following Verschueren (1999: 82–86) into bystanders and overhearers. The former encompasses a person (or persons) that can be expected to be able to hear at least some parts of the talk, but is not ratified as a participant. A waiter who is standing next to a table while guests talk in a restaurant can be considered a bystander, for instance. An overhearer, on the other hand, refers to a person (or persons) that might be able to hear some parts of the talk. Overhearers include listener-ins, that is, persons who are in view, such as guests at an adjoining table in the restaurant, and eavesdroppers, that is, persons who are secretly following the talk.

There is experimental work that has demonstrated that the understandings of participants and non-participants cannot be assumed to be synonymous, even in situations where the non-participants can hear everything that is said by the participants (Schober and Clark 1989). In their experiments, Schober and Clark (1989) examined the understandings of addressees (the participants) of conversations between strangers about an unfamiliar topic versus the understandings of eavesdroppers (the non-participants) of those conversations. They found that the eavesdroppers’ understanding of the conversation was significantly less than that of the addressees, despite the former having full access to all the same utterances, and sharing the same common ground as that existing between the participants, since they were all strangers in both cases. This shows that we cannot assume different recipients will all reach the same understandings of meanings arising in a particular conversation. In other words, depending on one’s reception footing, a person’s understanding of pragmatic meaning may vary.