Plenary by Peter Grundy

Dear Marija,

Thanks for your comment. Broadly I agree with your view of language as vague (although not as vast - more on that in my talk). But I don't think I agree that this means that we need to try and fix some small part of it. This is because I'm not sure what you'd fix it to given that our thoughts / the concepts we have in our minds, while being related to words in some way, are very much more precise than those words. The phrase 'my computer', for example, would have had to be fixed to several different objects at different stages over the last twenty or more years and would currently have to be fixed to three very different objects that I regularly use. And this is a really simple case compared to some others, as suggested below.

You say "Given no context, a foreigner is likely to miss most of the sense that a native perceives in conversation." In my opinion, everyone, whatever their speaker status, will find it difficult to understand what is communicated without a context, except perhaps at the level of literal meaning (although even this is a problematic notion as I shall try to show in my talk). More importantly, my argument is that literal meaning isn't what we set out to communicate in the real world - rather it's a thought which can only be guessed at when sufficient context is available. One of the examples I'm going to use in my talk is, 'Does your boyfriend know where you are?' You might like to imagine the thought the speaker tries to convey with this utterance. When I contextualize it in my talk, it'll be interested to see if you imagined the message conveyed on the occasion I'm going to describe. (In fact, I'm so confident that you won't that I'll buy you a drink if you do!)

Within utterances like, 'Does your boyfriend know where you are?', there are also words like 'your', which everyone agees only partially encodes the meaning that will be conveyed in any context in which it's used. But words like 'boyfriend' are also problematic - for example, I know someone who says her dog is her boyfriend, and this thought is always in my mind when she uses the word 'boyfriend'. Similarly with 'know', whose meaning varies in phrases like 'know someone', 'know where someone is', 'know something about someone', etc., etc., etc. And then 'your boyfriend' also conveys a different relationship between the two terms than would be conveyed by 'your message' (sometimes the message you sent, sometimes the message meant for you) or 'your dog' (the dog you own), etc., etc., etc. It's clearly impossible to teach anyone these 'meanings' because they are in fact thoughts or concepts in the minds of our students, many of which are particular to each of them and very much more precise than anything we can say in the public language available to us. Moreover, lots of our thoughts don't really lexicalize at all.

When you think about it, collecting words in dictionaries or vocabulary lists and giving them simplistic definitions (e.g., 'electronic device for storing and processing data according to instructions given to it in a variable program') is a very odd thing indeed to do, especially when you think about what we do with words when we use them. Also quite recent in the English speaking world. And of course we didn't have a learners dictionary of English till 1948, although it seems that quite a lot of people learnt English successfully before then.

Thanks again! Peter

Dear Nurdanny,

Thanks for your endorsement. At precisely the moment when you posted this message, I was wondering how on earth I was going to give a decent talk two days later and thinking that perhaps it would be better if I did a runner.

Peter

Dear Vanuza,

Thanks for your message. Yes, very exciting to be a parent and to watch, first the acquisition of phonology, and then see, as you describe, the early stages of the lifelong struggle to go public with the thoughts we have that so exceed the power of language to describe them. If you read Sperber and Wilson's paper, you'll see how they discuss effability - I've been thinking about this notion for several years now and am forcefully stuck by the opening words of St John's gospel and how strange that the evangelist should have thought of 'the word' as being in the beginning and yet we have no word for God, favouring instead metaphors such as 'lord', 'shepherd', etc. And in the Islamic faith too, the notion of the hundredth name reminds us of the ineffability of the divine.

To share a language acquisition memory. Almost the first word our son produced (in mid-1979) was 'ay-to-to'. He was watching television (I know Sue Palmer doesn't approve, but there you go) and for weeks there had been pictures from Iran of the revolution that toppled the Shah, so that when the Ayatollah appeared, one day Eddie suddenly volunteered 'ay-to-to'. It seemed that this early utterance had a good deal of pragmatic meaning too and that he sought to convey something like, 'Look, it's that wretched Ayatollah again!'

Thanks again for your message. Best! Peter

Dear Olwyn,

Thanks for your message.

First of all, I don’t see inference as a problem. Inference enables us to use a relatively small language to convey a much larger number of messages. If we didn’t have the possibility of using a word like ‘you’ to refer to every other individual on the planet and to every set of individuals, we’d have to remember everyone’s names and so would need to have a huge head to carry them around in.

We use writing for many different purposes. In literature, for example, writers often want to invite multiple interpretations. But we expect a lawyer to draft a will that can be interpreted in only a single way so that, in Sperber and Wilson’s terms, the encoded message and the concept communicated will coincide. You seem to be suggesting that academic writing is at the encoded message = concept communicated end of the continuum. I can think of lots of counter-examples, but I know what you mean.

In suggesting that inference was a defining characteristic of pragmatic meaning, I was careful to say that this included default utterance and gave examples like ‘How French is (French) wine’ and ‘you know what x is like’. This helps us to see that no use of language is purely literal and that every sign is plurifunctional in that, as well as having referential properties, it also has an indexical character. In your message, for example, you use the word ‘ideas’. I kind of know what the word ‘ideas’ might refer to and I also know that you chose it with the intention of directing my interpretation in a way differently from the way you’d have directed it if you’d chosen ‘thoughts’ or ‘perceptions’ or ‘notions’ or had used your chosen term in the singular. In fact, as I look at your message, I see that it’s riddled with metapragmatic (that’s to say, interpretation-directing) terms like ‘wonder’, ‘challenges’, ‘pose’, ‘multiple’, ‘less of a problem’, ‘aims’, ‘explain .. clearly’, ‘so that’, etc. We call this ideology. I wonder if in teaching EAP, you are hoping that your learners’ writing will reflect your ideology, which is of course very far from neutral, or that they will use language is a way that invites me to try to figure out the thoughts that their writing points to.

From a teaching point of view, every lexical item invites default inferences. What makes someone a ‘good writer’, amongst other things, is that the sequence of default inferences their writing invites creates a coherent series of conceptualizations. It’s difficult to achieve (no, I don’t like the ideology of ‘achieve’) – it’s difficult to ‘do’ this when you’re a apprentice writer, and very difficult indeed to do this in a second language.

I hope these disturbing thoughts help to prevent you from joining those who would deny the metapragmatic dimension of even the most dry-biscuit attempt to be an academic writer.

Best! Peter