Contextualization cues, situated inferences

The words people exchange in verbal encounters are linked in a myriad of ways to the situational and cultural context in which they occur. Thus, for example, A’s words to B:”I need to get in there. Can you open the door?” will have meaning for B only if he knows English and is able to grasp the semantic meanings of A’s utterance; but, he must also relate the “I” to the friend he knows and recognize him by his voice and his outward appearance; he must relate the “there” to a room he knows lies behind the door which he sees from where he is standing; he must recognize that “the” in “the door” that A wants opened indicates the same door that he sees; from A’s smile, tone and intonation, and from the preceding statement of A’s needs, he must understand that this is a justified, friendly request for help and not a fortuitous inquiry. In other words, beyond the semantic meaning of A’s individual words, B has to understand how these words relate to the pragmatic context of their utterance. These verbal, paraverbal (stress and intonation, tempo and laughter) and non-verbal signs (gaze direction, gesture, body posture, tone of voice), that help speakers hint at or clarify or guide their listener’s interpretations of what is being said among the infinite range of potentially relevant factors of the context, are called contextualization cues.

These cues help listeners make the relevant situated inferences, i.e. evoke the cultural background and social expectations necessary to interpret speech. Situated inferences are mental links made by participants in verbal exchanges between the words spoken and the relevant context of situation and context of culture.

Pragmatic coherence

Efforts to make the words uttered meaningful within the situational and cultural context of the exchange are efforts to establish pragmatic coherence. Coherence is created in the minds of the speakers and hearers by the inferences they make based on the words they hear. Thus, semantic coherence relates word to word, pragmatic coherence relates speaker to speaker within the large cultural context of communication.

An African-American student has been sent to interview a black housewife in a low-income, inner-city neighborhood. The contact has been made over the phone by someone in the office. The student arrives, rings the bell, and is met by the husband, who opens the door, smiles, and steps towards him:

Husband: So y’re gonna check out ma ol lady, hah?

Student: Ah, no. I only came to get some information. They called from the office.

(Husband, dropping his smile, disappears without a word and calls his wife).

Failing to infer from the husband’s stylistic cues (intonation, pronunciation typical of Black English Vernacular, lexical choice) – the husband’s offered solidarity from one Afro-American to another, the student responds in White Standard English showing that he is from an academic culture. The interview was stiff and quite unsatisfactory. In this case student had to choose between his identity as an Afro-American and his identity as a professional academic.

Between people from different national cultures, the same contextualization cues may lead to different inferences and may occasion serious misunderstandings, since they tend to be attributed to personal attitudes or character traits. The resulting lack of pragmatic coherence generally leaves the participants baffled and perplexed, or frustrated and angry.

The co-operative principle

A term coined by the philosopher Paul Grice to characterize the basic expectation that participants in informational exchanges will co-operate with one another by contributing appropriately and in a timely manner to the conversation. People can generally assume that in conversations in which, for example, the exchange of information is primary, speakers will not say more than is necessary for the purpose of exchange and will say what is necessary to convey the information required. They generally expect that what their interlocutor says is relevant to the topic at hand; that the message will be clear and understandable; and under normal circumstances she/he will not state something which is not true. The expectations of speakers and hearers in informational exchanges are in part shaped by these maxims of the co-operative principle in conversation.

Speakers from different cultural backgrounds may have different interpretations of what it means to be true, relevant, brief or clear with regard to conversations. They may have different definitions of the speech activity itself.