Recipient meanings

Thus far we have focused on the intersection of perspectives on speaker meaning, and suggested that a distinction between utterer and recipient representations of speaker meaning is necessary in order for us to fully explore the question of whose meaning we are (and in some cases should be) analyzing. Another question that has started to emerge in considering utterer and recipient representations of speaker meaning is whether we also need to consider other participant loci of pragmatic meaning. As we noted, Relevance theorists have quite rightly pointed out that implicatures lie on a kind of continuum ranging from strongly implicated to weakly implicated (Sperber and Wilson [1986]1995). Some implicatures are fairly determinate and speakers appear at least ostensibly committed to them, while other implicatures, namely, weak implicatures, are quite indeterminate both in regard to their content and the degree to which the speaker appears committed to that content. At a certain point, then, it can be argued that weak implicatures no longer lie within the provenance of the speaker’s intentions, and so can no longer be regarded as a form of speaker meaning. In such cases, we must necessarily invoke a different kind of meaning representation, namely, recipient meaning.

Recipient meanings are not well understood and have not yet been adequately theorized in pragmatics. They can be roughly characterized as encompassing meaning representations of recipients that arise independently of the speaker’s intentions. In literary texts such as poetry, for instance, the writer may leave the choice of possible implicatures open to the reader (Haugh and Jaszczolt 2012). The understanding of the themes of short stories has also been shown to be constructed by readers rather than residing in the text (Kurtz and Schober 2001), which means a key meaning representation occasioned by reading a story is not as much a construct of the writer so much as it is that of the readers. This is not to suggest that writers do not have intentions to mean particular things, but rather that the meanings occasioned by texts are not exhausted by these intentions. In other words, readers can form all sorts of interpretations of texts that were not necessarily intended by the writer.

Recipient meanings are not restricted to non-co-present participants (i.e. those reading literature, watching television and so on), however. They are also to be found in spoken interactions. Clark (1997) divides them into two types: misconstruals and elective construals. Misconstruals may involve situations where the speaker accepts another understanding by the recipient, which was not necessarily intended by him or her. Consider the following example reported by Clark:

Here we can see that Clark is taken to be ordering Earl Grey tea by the waitress, and thus what he has said is that he would like Earl Grey contrary to what he has just said1. He notes that “I initially intended to be taken as meaning one thing, but I changed my mind” (ibid.). Here it is the recipient’s understanding of the meaning representation of what is said, rather than that of the speaker, which has taken precedence.

Misconstruals may also involve situations where the speaker is not able to block another understanding by the recipient. While the speaker might claim a particular implicature was unintended, this may not be accepted by the recipient (Haugh 2008). In such a situation, the recipient’s meaning may overshadow that of the speaker. Take the following excerpt from The Sopranos, for instance:

The excerpt begins with Little Carmine bringing up the death of Phil Leotardo’s brother, Billy. Phil becomes incensed by the fact that Little Carmine has brought this topic up, and insults Tony Soprano when Tony tries to calm him down. Little Carmine then attempts to correct Phil’s “misconstrual” of what he meant by his question whatever happened there, but he is interrupted by Phil, who emphatically rejects such a claim. Tony’s subsequent utterance after Phil and his gang leave lays the blame not on Phil for misunderstanding what Little Carmine meant by his question, but rather on Little Carmine himself. What takes precedence here, then, is the recipient’s meaning in spite of what the speaker claims to have intended.

Elective construals involve instances where speakers offer recipients a choice of interpretations. In making a choice, the recipients thereby help determine what is meant by the speaker’s utterance (Clark 1997). In a study of responses to indirect speech acts, Clark (1979) examined how 200 managers of restaurants would respond to the utterance “Do you accept credit cards?” 44% of managers treated it as a polar question by responding with something like “Yes, we do.” 16% treated it as a request for information, that is, the names of credit cards they accept, by responding with something like “We accept Visa and Mastercard”, while 38% treated it as both a polar question and a request for information, by responding with something like “Yes, we accept Visa and Mastercard.” Clark (1997) argues that what the speaker is taken to mean by the managers is not determinate. Instead, the study shows that it is established through the managers choosing amongst the options that are presented to them (i.e. as a question, request or both), because the speaker has “put herself in the position of being taken to mean whichever of the options the manager chose” (Clark 1997: 589).

In some cases the line between speaker and recipient meanings becomes somewhat blurred. Consider, for instance, an excerpt from Everybody Hates Chris, an American comedy. Just prior to the excerpt Chris (a semi-fictional younger version of Chris Rock, the actor/comedian) has helped Tasha, a person he likes, who lives next door, get rid of a mouse. She gives him a kiss on the cheek to thank him, a kiss which is witnessed by an older boy, Jerome, who then goes up to Chris.

Chris responds to Jerome’s assumption that he is going out with Tasha with a fairly formulaic non-committal response, “well, hey, you know”. He thus allows Jerome to continue to maintain this assumption, although he hasn’t actually said that he and Tasha are going out.

He just has not said that they are not going out. This constitutes an interesting case of pragmatic meaning, as Chris is believed by Jerome to be going out with Tasha (a recipient meaning). Yet when given the chance to correct this assumption Chris does not do so, although he doesn’t strictly endorse it either. The formulaic response well, you know seems to imply here that something does not need to be said as it is already mutually known (i.e. common ground). The question, then, is whether Chris can be understood to have implied he is going out with Tasha. In other words, does it count as a speaker meaning as well?

Chris continues to respond in this way whenever Tasha is mentioned, until fi nally he is overheard by Tasha herself.

Here Chris is held to account for a response that Tasha seems to interpret as suggesting that something has been left unsaid. This is evident from her demand that Chris complete the utterance.

It becomes clear, then, that one can be taken as saying2 something by not saying1 something when the opportunity arises. This kind of “not saying” is a type of pragmatic meaning which does not fall under the received definition of implicature as a thought, or in this case a belief of the speaker that is intended by the speaker to be recognized by the recipient as intended (Haugh 2013d). Yet the characters, or at least Tasha and Jerome, nevertheless treat it as a kind of speaker meaning. This illustrates how raising questions about whose meaning we are talking about can pose challenges for the way in which we define speaker meaning in pragmatics. The way in which some utterances can offer a set of possible interpretations amongst which a recipient can choose is also a feature of many pragmatic acts, a point that will be discussed in further detail.

We have suggested through the examples above that pragmatic meaning is not exhausted by speaker meaning, proposing that it needs to be complemented by the notion of recipient meaning. Here, we go even further in suggesting that there are likely to be yet other kinds of pragmatic meaning, which have not yet been fully explored. One example is the normative kind of pragmatic meaning that Grice was proposing to tap through his notion of conversational implicature, and the attendant Cooperative Principle and conversational maxims. A normative notion of pragmatic meaning is rooted neither in the speaker nor the recipients, but across groups of users. The conversational maxims provide plausible accounts of what we might expect to be implicated in certain situations, or at least they arguably do so in English. However, in being inherently normative, it remains an open question, and a relatively under-explored one at that, just how applicable they are across languages.