On Coordination in Dialogue: Sub-sentential Talk and its Implications

Abstract

According to a standard view of linguistic communication, a speaker who has a certain proposition in mind manages to express it by the performance of a speech act where the speaker employs a sentence in the expectation that the hearer will be able to infer the proposition they have in mind. Stainton (2006) and Elugardo and Stainton (2001) have questioned the assumption that use of sentences is an essential precondition for successful communication. This chapter shows that examination of the extensive use of ellipsis in dialogue, especially the phenomenon of split utterances, suggests a more radical view: the mechanisms of the grammar can themselves directly serve this function—the performance of intelligible speech acts—without requiring steps of inference or recovery of propositions. Since these mechanisms are low-level unconscious processes that do not plausibly involve propositional inference or standard notions of ‘rationality’ and ‘cooperation’, this chapter concludes that the assumption that communication is achieved through manipulation of propositional intentions via (conscious or unconscious) conceptual reasoning processes needs to be reconsidered.

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