Full Title: 19th International Pragmatics Conference Panel: "Speakers, hearers, and their respective meanings: the limits of common ground"
Short Title: IPC19

Date: 22-Jun-2025 - 27-Jun-2025
Location: Brisbane, Australia
Contact Person: Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2025

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Cognitive Science; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Sociolinguistics

Call Deadline: 01-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

Panel: "Speakers, hearers, and their respective meanings: the limits of common ground"

Call for Papers:

Organizers: Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (Manchester), Marina Terkourafi (Leiden)

The idea that messages encoded in speakers' utterances are subsequently decoded by hearers has long been abandoned within pragmatics in favor of an inferential model which views meaning derivation as an interactional process to which the subjectivities, emotions, and cognitive environments of both speakers and hearers (as well as eventual third parties) actively take part. This inferential approach to communication assumes, if only implicitly, that the meanings entertained by speakers and hearers cannot be expected to be identical but are at best a matter of overlap. We wish to explore the limits of this overlap: to what extent, and based on what factors, do speakers' and hearers’ meanings overlap and what is the point beyond which we may talk of a communication break-down (miscommunication)?
The panel will explore the extent to which there may be pluralities of meaning in interaction, i.e. different meanings entertained by different participants, without entailing any overt (noticed) breakdown of communication. We invite contributions addressing the issue from a range of perspectives and using diverse methodological approaches, including – but not limited to – philosophical, experimental, corpus-based, and/or CA approaches.

Contributions should consider one or more of the following questions:
• How common is it for multiple tracks of meaning to be active within a given communicative encounter? How persistent may such discrepancies be?
• To what extent do participants notice discrepancies, and how do they deal with them if they do notice?
• How much plurality of meanings can be tolerated before an interaction breaks down? Are there cross-cultural differences in this respect?
• Are there kinds of meaning that are particularly susceptible to being intended vs interpreted differently by speakers and hearers? Conversely, are there types of meaning which must be part of common ground in order for interaction to proceed?
• When discrepancies fail to surface within the interaction that triggers them, to what extent can they be shown to have repercussions for future communicative encounters involving (a subset of) the same participants? What kinds of repercussions?
• Is the establishment and continuous maintenance of common ground a pre-requisite for “genuine” communication to take place, or is it merely a (possibly more or less culture-bound) philosophical ideal? How do we define “communication” and “common ground” so as to ensure sufficient conceptual independence between the two to enable the study of the interaction between them.
• To what extent are the notions of common ground and/or plurality of meanings relevant to human-machine communication? What consequences – if any – does this form of communication have for theories of meaning in communication?

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