Pragmatics Reading Group

Speaker: Kirstine La Cour (UCL)

Title: Exchange Fetishism

Abstract: Richard Moran (The Exchange of Words, 2018) contends that telling someone that P is importantly different from providing them with evidence for P. What accounts for the difference is that a special kind of interdependence of speaker and audience is required for the former, but not the latter; in a slogan, telling takes two. This interdependence, Moran holds, is the at the heart of the social or interpersonal character of testimony and is what distinguishes it as a genuinely communicative phenomenon. The objective of this paper is to investigate this interdependence claim by evaluating Moran’s account of what a hearer has to provide for a telling to take place. I first show that Moran’s characterisation of speaker-audience interdependence is open to two contrasting interpretations, which I term Active and Passive. The point of contention between these is whether the audience’s contribution to a telling (i.e. their recognition and uptake of the speaker’s intention) is something that can be supplied or withheld at will.
I argue that only an Active interpretation, on which the audience’s contribution is voluntarily offered, coheres with the rest of Moran’s position and with his criticism of the so-called Unilateral Model (broadly speaking, a traditional Gricean model) of telling. This matters because the Active interpretation faces a number of explanatory challenges that make it difficult to defend. In particular, Moran’s model will struggle to explain the fact that we can be told things against our will. Communication, I argue, is not a free and fair exchange, and our theorising about it needs to account for this fact.

The talk will take place online on Zoom - a link will be sent out nearer the time. 

For further information and future updates on the seminars, go to the Pragmatics Reading Group web page: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/research/linguistics/linguistics-events/pragmatics-reading-group