Speaker-Hearer Divergence
The Backdrop to Meaning Negotiation in Successful Communication
Henry Whittlesey [Schroeder]
Abstract on relevance to perypatetik project
This paper argues that trust expectations are higher in English than in German and Russian because of differences in the transposition of indirect discourse. If these findings are extrapolated to the values and norms of pragmatists and romantics, the higher trust expectations for pragmatists (English speakers) correlate with the importance of success (in understanding communicated content accurately), the focus on ends (i.e., understanding), and identification with self-determination (by having correct information). Contrast them to romantics who do not expect the speaker’s understanding of sentences to track their own. This (romantic) mindset dovetails with their view of life as a process (here of understanding the speaker’s meaning), acceptance of fate (that they might not understand) and lack of concern for success: it’s good if they understand the speaker, and it’s good if they don’t.
Abstract of paper
How does meaning arise from a sentence? Convention? Speaker intention? Is the hearer merely a passive interlocutor expected to understand the speaker’s meaning commensurately or an active interpreting collaborator free from convention or the speaker? If a speaker misuses the words agreement/contract, calls out a “twin” who is definitely not a biological one or refers to the vertical axis of the head and a hearer picks out a surely divergent meaning of these words, the hearer seems to be an active participant in the speech act if it succeeds, but not on the basis of convention (Lewis), intention recognition (Grice) or reproduction and precedence (Millikan).
In this paper I will primarily attempt to show that trust is not necessary for a Lewisian language convention except in the case of function words without a real-world referent. This is a consequence of each utterance by a speaker being reprocessed in the hearer’s consciousness in accordance with the rules for indirect discourse in that language. The ensuing duality of each utterance allows for one meaning attribution by the speaker and another by the hearer. Alignment is partially present, but not fully. Depending on the language, the interlocutors will approach the success of communication divergently. In English, this dynamic is fraught with tension; in German and Russian, interlocutors have lower expectations for alignment. The reason lies in the grammatical rules for indirect discourse.
Background and breakdown of argument
In Convention and “Languages and Language,” David Lewis proposes that meanings are established by a population consenting to use a given language, i.e., the meanings generated by it, to solve coordination problems. Underlying this convention is the regularity of truthfulness among speakers and the trust of hearers (Lewis 1975, 2002). Essentially, Lewis regards language as tapping into an abstract object adverted to as “languages” or (L), which then manifests itself in a specific language convention, say, that of English, German or Russian, which is “sustained by a certain sort of interest on the part of members of a population: an interest in communication, in being able to control one another’s beliefs and actions, to some extent, by means of sounds and marks” (Lewis 2002: 181).
By contrast, Ruth Garret Millikan argues in “Language Conventions Made Simple” (1998) that conventions, including the conventionality of language, do not require coordination, regular conformity or rational underpinnings (Millikan 162). What she calls natural conventionality[1] and natural conventions are composed of two characteristics: “First, natural conventions consist of patterns that are ‘reproduced’… Second, the fact that these patterns proliferate is due partly to weight of precedent, rather than due, for example, to their intrinsically superior capacity to perform certain functions” (162). A conventional act is an act of reproducing or helping to reproduce a conventional pattern – they are patterns of perfectly ordinary activity, like putting a letter in the mailbox and then putting up the flag (176-7).
For philosophers holding a social conception of language, but dissatisfied with Lewis’s account of conventionality, Gricean speaker intentions are used for the analysis of illocutionary speech acts (Millikan 178). According to Grice’s model, each sentence posits a speaker making an utterance to a hearer with the intention to get the hearer to recognize the speaker’s intention. If the speaker succeeds, then the hearer will recognize the intention in the utterance. The speaker means something by making the utterance and has the intention to get a present or non-present hearer to grasp the intention or the implicature of the intention (Grice 1969, Camp 2018, Harris 2019, Harris 2020). Some cases of intention recognition will be easier than others. In cases of implicature according to Camp and Grice, the speaker and hearer assume truthfulness, and the meaning should be understood by the hearer in accordance with the Principle of Cooperation and the maxims of quantity, quality, relation, manner (Grice 1989, 28; Camp 2018).
In all of these models, the hearer is a passive recipient fundamentally relegated to (hopefully) recognizing the locutionary and illocutionary act of the speaker on the basis of convention (Lewis), reproduced patterns (Millikan) or intention (Grice/Camp/Harris). Furthermore, Lewisian truthfulness (of the speaker) and trust (of the hearer) are also assumed in each case. As I will attempt to show in this paper, the trust of the hearer is a hitch. And once the trust in an utterance is undermined, the hearer must determine a meaning on their own. That meaning assigned by the hearer may well be misaligned with the speaker’s meaning, but at least in German and Russian this dynamic does not appear to hamper communication. It is different in English, but why?
The paper is broken down into five sections. Sections one to three consist of background information to set up the argument. The core thesis is presented in sections four and five.
I commence in section one with a summary of Lewis’s theory of convention in general and language convention in particular. This is followed, in section two, by trust-relevant objections. The first (section 2.1) is Dale Jamieson’s objection to the claim that “a convention is a regularity in behavior, sustained by a system of preferences and expectations, that has a possible alternative” (Jamieson 73). The second objection (2.2) relates to the social competence considerations that Lepore and Stone think are needed to update Lewis’s insights into linking coordination and communication (Lepore/Stone 16). Third, Higgenbotham and Chomsky’s implied objection by way of their idiolectal conception of language in section 2.3 shows how little is necessary for communication to succeed, a point salient for my argument of success in communication despite divergent speaker/hearer meaning. Because my argument is grounded in associations of tense with trust and reliability, section three briefly addresses this topic within the context of narratology.
Section four lays out the argument. I start by explaining the duality of each utterance due to a direct- and indirect-discourse form (4.0). This is followed by the relevance to meaning (4.1) and what the divergence in trust constitutes in English relative to German and Russian (section 4.2 and subsections).
Those remarks segue to the main findings: (i) why a population with transposed indirect discourse would be better served by adopting a different regularity, namely, untransposed indirect discourse, to facilitate congruity in meaning and synchronize the truthfulness of the speaker and the trust of the hearer (4.3.1); (ii) how transposed indirect discourse in German undermines trust and facilitates hearer-determined meaning (4.3.2); (iii) why reliability expectations are greater in English (4.3.3); and what causes Russian utterances to be more closely aligned with German than English ones (4.3.4).
Against this backdrop, section five reinserts Lewis’s convention and Millikan’s precedence, but only for function words without real-world referents to ensure minimal alignment between the speaker and hearer. It shows how real-world referents of non-function words become grounds for negotiation because the speaker attaches one meaning and the hearer another. For communicators in English, this circumstance presents difficulties due to the expectation for reliability, while interlocutors in German and Russian accept minimal alignment. Again, the factor determining the divergence is traced back to structural differences in indirect discourse. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the three main facets of the argument, and the aporia ponders the relevance to other work I have done.
1. The convention of language – David Lewis
In Convention, David Lewis presents a model for defining semantic properties (Lewis 2002: 173). A population uses a language when there is a convention of trust and truthfulness in it (177). Lewis separates a verbal signaling language from a possible language (160-1), as the former is used for a particular activity, an interest in coordination, with little free choice and no idle conversation (160). By contrast, the possible language can be interpreted (162). An utterance (U) is analytic in language (L) if and only if (L) assigns to (U) on every possible occasion of the speech act a single fixed interpretation (mood, truth condition) and the truth condition holds in every possible world (175). (U) is synthetic in language (L) if and only if (L) assigns to (U) on every possible occasion of the speech act a single fixed interpretation (mood, truth condition) and the truth condition holds in some possible worlds but not others (175).[2]
In “Languages and Language,” building on Convention, Lewis proposes that the convention by which a population (P) uses a language (L) is based on truthfulness and trust in (L) (Lewis 1975: 7). He defines truthfulness as never uttering any sentence of (L) unless it is true in (L), and “to be trusting in L is to form beliefs in a certain way: to impute truthfulness in (L) to others” and by believing that uttered sentences are true in (L) (7). He then imagines a case of perfect language use by a population (P) to outline how a convention of truthfulness and trust prevails in (P) (8-9): (i) there is a regularity of trust and truthfulness in the language used; (ii) everyone believes that everyone else acts in accordance with the regularity of truthfulness and trust in the language; (iii) members of the population generally prefer conformity; (iv) regularity’s existence gives everyone a reason (together with other goals) to continue conforming to regularity; (v) the purposes of population would be served just as well by some other regularity as by the existing regularity; (vi) there are alternatives.[3]
Before we turn to the indirect discourse puzzle, it will be illuminating to recapitulate some critical responses to Lewis’s theory that are relevant to trust. These arguments, the first two titled “David Lewis on Convention,” question the importance of a convention and especially trust in it, which opens the door for the hearer to negotiate meaning with the speaker, as described in sections four and five.
2. Critique of convention
2.1 Objections – Jamieson
In “David Lewis on Convention,” Dale Jamieson disputes the regularity of a convention sustained by preferences and expectations with a possible alternative (73).[4] He first shows that point (iii) in Lewis’s formulation above[5] is not true because there are often conventions that no one conforms to, such as an office rule dictating where page numbers should go, but not followed by employees (75).[6] Jamieson subsequently takes issue with point (ii) above[7] by referencing how we eat soup with a spoon simply because it does not occur to us to eat it any other way (75), a point that Lepore and Stone will also discuss under the aspect of “hardwired strategies” (making conformity to regularity impossible).[8],[9] Next, he asserts a counterexample to point (iv) above[10] where the existence of a regularity for apostrophe conventions – I’d take the example of the Oxford comma – would not give a person any particular reason to adopt that convention themselves (77).[11]
Finally, and most adamantly, Jamieson objects to points (v) and (vi)[12] on the grounds that it is not a necessary condition for something to be a convention that members of a population with that convention have knowledge of a hypothetical alternative situation (77).[13] One of the examples he gives is a so-called primitive society with a particular marriage custom that has established itself without consideration of alternatives (78-9). The same criticism is made even more lucidly by Tyler Burge (2007) who imagines a small, isolated, unenterprising linguistic community whose population spoke a language, i.e., had a language convention, without knowing “there are humanly possible alternatives to speaking their language” (33). This criticism will also be levelled by Lepore and Stone, with examples, in section 2.2.
2.2 Updating coordination and communication – Lepore and Stone
Lepore and Stone’s concerns about Lewis’s model, in a paper likewise titled “David Lewis on Convention,” are centered on the argument that “improvised meanings are not conventional because they are not yet established; innate meanings are not conventional because they are not established through the right mechanisms” (13).
Improvised meaning is defined as cases where we coin new words, modulate established meanings and arrive at creative understandings of one another that do not rely entirely on conventional semantic properties (10). An example of this improvisation that I currently see in the Plato whatsapp group at Hunter College is the use of the word “twin” in the sense of “friend,” metaphorical “brother” or likeminded person.[14]
Innate meaning ties into Lepore and Stone’s view that Lewis is at least implying by convention that language is entirely learned, since he holds that the conventions could be different if our experiences and choices had deviated from what they were (11). Drawing on the Chomskyan tradition,[15] Lepore and Stone advert to the possible operation of a language faculty that guides linguistic choices (rather than deliberative rationality) and could explain both the origin of language (which must have gotten off the ground without coordination) and the reason why an isolated tribe can convey meaning without knowing an alternative (11-13). The authors also offer the example of children quickly acquiring their native language despite limited linguistic interactions in early life as support for innate meaning (11).
Improvised and innate meaning suggest that Lepore and Stone are at least in part amenable to an idiolectal conception of (some?) language. It is from this direction that we encounter a strong objection to social conceptions such as Lewis’s. Furthermore, meaning is individual according to the internalist idiolectal view and would thus entirely forego the need for trust.
2.3 The idiolectal objection – Chomsky and Higginbotham
Lewis’s approach is to be viewed in contrast to positions such as those of Noam Chomsky and, drawing on him, scholars who have an (internalist or non-internalist) idiolectal conception of language such as James Higginbotham (Higginbotham 2008). Chomsky holds that a Universal Grammar and/or language faculty reflects a richness of innate endowment despite impoverished input (Chomsky 1995: 16-17) and thereby implies that Lewisian language conventions are not necessary for linguistic meaning.[16] Higginbotham seconds this evaluation: “It is perfectly conceivable that assignments of structure and meaning, even as made in rational response to external speech and perceptual situations, proceed blindly, that is, without motivation, or any recognizable striving for success. Success is achieved…, but it would be the kind of ‘success’ associated with, say, the maturation of small motor control, rather than self-conscious learning. In much of the contemporary literature, the picture of language is not that of the learner’s passing through stages of partial learning, or of learning only part of the language to be acquired, but rather as passing through a triggered sequence of individual competences, tending toward a steady state, thereafter elaborated only little” (Higginbotham 146-7). For Higginbotham, the social conception of language and thus the influence of the community of language speakers follows after the development of one’s individual grammar (142). This point is demonstrated in a thought experiment where a fully competent person, Adam, uses an expression incorrectly (“oral agreement, but no contract”), is corrected (an oral agreement is a contract) and stands corrected. It is a case where the “internalized assignment of meaning goes astray; and in those cases the speaker’s intentions actually conflict with their internal assignments of meaning” (145). In Higgenbotham’s non-internalist, idiolectal conception, the speaker’s contribution to meaning is part of the story, one in which his assignment of meaning deviates from a norm (145-6). The meaning Adam adopted, however, does facilitate communication, albeit without him tapping into a convention. Although Higginbotham does not claim this specifically in regard to the example, such a case could develop into a regularity that presents itself in the “common background and interaction among individual speakers” (143). Assuming this risk of miscommunication is true for German contract law, that would also explain why the salvatorial section of contracts almost always states that something to the like of “this contract/agreement replaces any prior ancillary or oral agreements made by the parties.”[17] Higginbotham’s thought experiment supports his claim at the beginning of the paper that the social conception is built up through regularities that present themselves in the common background and interaction among individual speakers (143).
Similar to Jamieson, Lepore and Stone, trust is not involved in the success of communication. The hearer (rightly) in the case of Adam assigns divergent meaning, yet communication succeeds.
3. Trust and tense
In the argument that follows, a crucial distinction will be made between the present and past tense. To keep the scope manageable, I will only discuss what is referred to as the simple present tense and the simple past tense in English.
If an indicative sentence is in the present tense, the speaker attaches a present-tense meaning to it, which I will refer to as positing. By contrast, the past tense will be regarded as documentary.[18]
The positing meaning is viewed as less reliable than the documentary. In anticipation of an objection, it is necessary to clarify why the past tense is more reliable than the present.
This topic deserves a paper in itself, but some brief remarks will have to suffice for our purposes here. One approach to accessing the perceived attitude toward tense is to analyze 19th-century Russian literature. All discourse in Russian, as we are about to examine, is untransposed and therefore usually in the present tense; narration in the 19th century was exclusively in the past tense. There are few narratives from this period that lack reliability, but Gogol’s Dead Souls, especially chapter nine, reveals the importance of past-tense reliability. The focalization shifts from Chichikov to two gossiping women who relate a stream of lies about Chichikov. The salacious discourse, both direct and indirect, in the present tense is extensive, but the narration remains purely a documentation of movements, surroundings. The care to which this is done is remarkable: the women have strange, hardly plausible names. Often names are introduced in narration, but the narrator only refers to them as two ladies. The reader learns these implausible names through discourse (Gogol: 179). When the women go to warn the town about Chichikov, the same pattern repeats itself: narration in the past tense for facts; discourse in the present for opinion (Ibid: 188; Whittlesey [Schroeder] unpublished manuscript: 95-6).[19]
Gogol’s narratorial practice testifies to the importance of reliability in the past tense: it is the tense of documentation. Although the present tense is used for the (unreliable) opinions of the two women above, it is by no means limited to dubious opinion. On the contrary, again based on the practices of 19th-century Russian authors, it is often used by the lead protagonist in indirect discourse and the narrator in commentary to convey messages to the reader. The pinnacle of this approach materializes in Anna Karenina when Levin cuts hay in the field and the narrator, for only the second time in the novel,[20] switches to the present tense (Tolstoy 775/823 in translation). The present tense simply lacks clarity in regard to reliability, and, perhaps most salient for the success of communication and the position of speakers and hearers, it has a long history of being everything from a reliable law or regulation[21] to an unreliable opinion.
Now we can return to trust and meaning.
I would like to present two utterances by a speaker communicated over the phone to a hearer in a different location:
(1) It is sunny [today].
(2) It was sunny [yesterday].
Both could be factual statements, but (1) is also associated with a (less reliable) opinion or belief, since the present tense is often used for this purpose, as the examples from Gogol demonstrate. By contrast, (2) seems to be a reliable statement about the past. There is no hard-and-fast rule or convention here: a speaker can express opinions in the past tense (e.g., “he was a good writer”), but there is a certain documentary nature to the past tense that is absent from the present. Again, the practices of writers underscore this point. If I am right in this regard, then the tense will also affect trust. The truthfulness of an opinion will be trusted less than the truthfulness of a documentary fact. So when the hearer encounters (1), they will trust the utterance less than (2).
This distinction becomes all the clearer when we take a blatantly false utterance:
(3) James Joyce is a great American writer.
(4) James Joyce was a great American writer.
Each sentence is false if each sentence is a claim to fact. James Joyce was Irish, and no (factual) argument can be made that he was American. Both sentences are also false from the perspective of the speaker, even if the speaker has misspoken or wants to express an idiosyncratic view along the lines of, say, metaphor (e.g., if the speaker viewed Joyce’s short sentences to be typical of American fiction and thus called him “American” in this sense). From the perspective of the hearer, (4) is, at least instinctively, perceived as a documentary fact about the past (and thus false), but (3) could be construed by the hearer as an opinion subject not to real-world truth values and thus false, but rather to the idiolectal conception of meaning reserved for the speaker. The hearer may know it is false as a fact, but true as an opinion/belief or a figure of speech (e.g., metaphor) or a mistake or something else. And at this moment, in the tension between false fact and true opinion/belief/figure of speech, just like the “false” use of “twin” in the Plato whatsapp group at Hunter or Adam’s false use of “contract/agreement,” the hearer assumes the active role of determining the meaning and the success of communication. Furthermore, this is independent of trust.
4. The reprocessed utterance – the overarching implications of transposed indirect discourse
One necessary condition of a speech act with a speaker and hearer seems prima facie potentially irrelevant, yet has far-reaching implications on my view: the speaker communicates in direct discourse, but the hearer (re-)processes the utterance in their (access) consciousness or higher-order thoughts (HOTs).[22] The reprocessing unfolds in indirect discourse. And this always happens in the interpretation of a possible language (Lewis 2002: 162) where communication involves two parties.[23] Such reprocessing in indirect discourse involves transposition in many languages, including English and German. Because the tense changes as a result of transposition, the meaning of the sentence diverges in terms of verb tense associations.
4.1 How does indirect discourse relate to meaning?
As a category of grammar or linguistics, indirect discourse seems to be only indirectly, pun intended, related to meaning. If anything, it seems more pertinent to Chomsky’s Universal Grammar when his theory is built out, as done by Frances Egan, with a division between content and a vehicle or mechanism (the language faculty) that produces arguments and values of the function it is computing, with the content or meaning following as a gloss demonstrating the capacity to explain how meaning arises (Egan 129-130).[24] Accordingly, indirect discourse, coupled with other grammatical constituents, might be regarded as part of the vehicle (albeit not the one described by Egan),[25] but this will not work with Lewis where meaning through convention is based on truthfulness and trust.
Indirect discourse, however, does not just impact grammatical constituents or vehicles. It also shifts the assignment of meaning at least in part to the hearer due to the associations tied to the verb tense. If I say
(5Eng) “The state university students are unspoiled,”
I, as the speaker, make a positing utterance. The present tense form of the verb “be” is associated with positing or opinion in the sense of putting something forward.
When I hear this sentence (and thereby implicitly reprocess it in my consciousness), it becomes
(6Eng) [they said that] “The state university students were unspoiled.”
Now the verb is in the past tense and thus interpreted as a documentary utterance. The meaning divorced of the original utterance has changed due to the tense.[26]
4.2 An indirect utterance in English, German and Russian
To understand differences in meaning and trust from one language to another, we must first compare the utterance directly to the respective formulations in German and Russian:
(6Eng) The state university students were unspoiled.
(6Ger) Die Studenten an den staatlichen Universitäten seien unverwöhnt.
(6Russ) Студенты из государсвтенных университетов – неизбалованные.
In direct discourse, each of these sentences would assume at least an implied present-meaning (I say “implied” because the Russian sentence does not contain a verb – this will be discussed below).
4.2.1 English
In English, the central association entails a shift for such an indicative sentence from positing to documentary. This duality gives rise to two different truth values for the sentence: one for the direct-discourse utterance, another for the reprocessed utterance in indirect discourse. From the utterance in its transposed form is imputed a truth value greater than the one for an untransposed positing utterance because of the ostensibly greater reliability of the past tense (see section three). Furthermore, while it seems redundant to mention this point, the utterance is strongly tied to the speaker in both direct and indirect discourse because the present and past tense are used in the discourse of this world of speakers and hearers (compare to German case in section 4.2.2).
It follows from these points that meaning in every utterance involving communication has two layers: the direct discourse meaning and the indirect discourse meaning. And English utterances harbor a truth value that both the speaker and recipient are aware of, causing each positing utterance to be viewed against the truth value of the documentary backdrop and thereby elevating expectations for the positing utterance. This also makes the direct discourse utterance inferior to the past-tense backdrop that is the context of a present-tense English sentence, which becomes understandable in sections 4.3.1 and 4.3.3 against the reference points of German and Russian indirect discourse.
4.2.2 German
If the verb form in indirect discourse transposed from a present-tense indicative deviates from the past tense, the truth value will change. Exactly this happens with Konjunktiv I in German. As we see in (6Ger), any reliability accorded to the utterance due to the past tense is lost. In (6Ger), the timeless Konjunktiv I causes the utterance to be detached from this world. For example, the verb “sein” (“be”) is transposed to seien and conjugated as sei, seiest, sei…, all of which are inflections only found in indirect discourse in German. Accordingly, the Konjunktiv I inflection of the transposed verb places it outside of time-space: between the positing associations (direct discourse) and indefinite art, and certainly far removed from the documentary past tense.
The speaker and hearer of an utterance are conscious of a modulation between the positing of direct discourse
(5Ger) Die Studenten an den staatlichen Universitäten sind unverwöhnt.
and the undefinable tense of Konjuktiv I that I will refer to as art:
(6Ger) Die Studenten an den staatlichen Universitäten seien unverwöhnt.
The inflected verbs do not correspond to forms used for the present, past, future or even subjunctive moods in written or spoken German. The meaning of such a sentence with respect to space is undefinable.
This also changes the hearer’s relationship to the truth value and meaning of sentences in general. A false utterance like
(3Ger) James Joyce ist ein anerkannter amerikanischer Autor
does not meet with any dismay at the speaker against this backdrop because the truth value of each present-tense utterance is tinged by the indirect discourse form:
(4Ger) James Joyce sei ein anerkannter amerikanischer Autor
Under the assumption that the hearer knows that James Joyce is Irish, that hearer will ask themselves what the speaker could possibly mean or attribute the sentence to another source.[27] Contrary to the English case, the speaker does not expect documentary reliability in a speech act. Neither the present-tense foreground of the utterance nor the inflected background (tense) is associated with reliability (of the past tense). This dynamic undermines trust, as we shall examine in section 4.3.2, but simultaneously liberates the hearer from the dictates of convention (Lewis), speaker intention (Grice) or precedent (Millikan).
4.2.3 Russian
The practice for indirect discourse after inquit phrases preferred by Russian writers of literary fiction[28] offers one entirely plausible alternative to the convention adopted in both English- and German-speaking countries. Furthermore, it would, at least prima facie, largely resolve the utterance duality infiltrating German and English communication: Russian indirect discourse is not transposed. The tense of the verb remains the same in direct and indirect discourse.[29]
In the absence of transposition, there is no divergence in meaning on account of the verb(s) of the utterance produced by the speaker in direct discourse and the one(s) reprocessed by the recipient in indirect discourse. If no pronoun appears, the syntax and grammar are identical:
Direct discourse
(5Russ) Студенты из государсвтенных университетов – неизбалованные.
Indirect discourse
(6Russ) Студенты из государсвтенных университетов – неизбалованные.
Accordingly, such present-tense indicative sentences are positing in each case. Meaning does not change. The truth conditions for each are identical. It might be noted that no verb is present in these sentences due to the absence of a form for the verb “be” in Russian. That is true and adds an intriguing wrinkle to Russian in general and specifically, in our context, trust of the hearer of an utterance, but the lack of transposition is also observed in sentences with verbs. For example, the sentence “State university students work a lot” would be formulated in both direct and indirect discourse as “Студенты из государсвтенных университетов много работают.”
4.2.4 Summary
The corollary of these remarks for Lewis’s theory of convention is: should the trust of the hearer be foundational for a convention, it would seem that Russian practice would be an alternative to the preference for conformity to the existing regularity of transposed indirect discourse and serve the purpose of the population better. Since this does not happen in German and English, at least with the language spoken and written in professional circles, it also supports the argument that trust is not necessary for a language convention, as asserted by Millikan and explained below in successful communication despite divergence in speaker-hearer meaning.
4.3 Indirect discourse’s impact on Lewis’s theory of convention
4.3.1 Another regularity is better in the case of languages with transposed indirect discourse
The above-mentioned duality of meaning in utterances in English and German suggests that trust is unstable with a convention of transposed indirect discourse. First, the level of trust in direct discourse differs from that of indirect discourse, and, second, despite this, a population coordinates and solves problems, possibly still by convention. Third, there are alternatives that could ensure consistent levels of trust, that is, congruence between direct and indirect discourse. Russian, as we just noted, does not require the transposition of verbs in indirect discourse. Surely tenseless languages like Thai adopt a similar practice. In these cases, the meaning of a sentence would not change – at least in terms of tense meaning – when transposed in indirect discourse by the recipient/hearer.
This better alternative in terms of trust raises questions about points (iv-vi) in Lewis’s principles because (iv) the regularity of duality in transposed indirect discourse gives everyone a reason to stop conforming to the regularity (so as to adopt untransposed indirect discourse), as (v) the purposes of the population would be better served by the other regularity (untransposed indirect discourse) and (vi) there is an alternative, namely, untransposed indirect discourse, where meaning remains the same when a sentence is uttered by the speaker and heard by the recipient.
If the language of communication is changed to German, the conflict between established practice and principles (iv-vi) leads to a clear hitch: transposed indirect discourse draws meaning away from the utterance, away from both positing and documenting toward an undefined place referred to here as art.[30] In both cases, however, there is a disconnect within the utterance itself: divergent truth values.
4.3.2 How indirect discourse undermines trust in German and facilitates hearer-determined meaning
German indirect discourse, as we saw above, stipulates a tenseless, reality-divorced inflection for its transposed verbs (Konjunktiv I). Accordingly, German indicative utterances in the present tense may posit, in the sense meant here, from the perspective of the speaker, but are in part neither positing nor documentary from the reprocessed perspective of the hearer.
Konjunktiv I, a remnant of the optative mood found in only a few languages, attaches its part of the meaning of the utterance, the indirect formulation, to art as follows. The speech act
(6Ger) “Die Studenten an den staatlichen Universitäten seien unverwöhnt”
[“The state university students [timeless verb “be”/“are”] unspoiled”]is trusted by the hearer only in the sense that it is something that has been stated. It cannot be “placed” because the transposed verb is not associated with anything posited or documented. The inflected verb does not belong to the same world as the one in which speakers and hearers communicate. This loosens the tie between the statement and the speaker. Lurking in the background is the author saying (from their perspective):
(5Ger) “Die Studenten an den staatlichen Universitäten sind unverwöhnt.”
In its direct discourse capacity, it stems from them; in its indirect discourse form, that connection is lost. The utterance is effectively viewed like a building or any other manmade object encountered: the hearer/viewer knows it has an “author” or “authors,” but does not know who they are, so that hearer/viewer regards the object independently of them. The hearer/viewer gives the object their own meaning.
The German hearer is in a unique position. If the direct discourse form were the full and sole formulation, as it is in Russian (see section 4.3.4 below), the hearer would exhibit the trust in the utterance to the extent permitted by positing utterances. When the verb inflects to the past tense, as we saw in English transposition, the utterance becomes quasi-documentary, with the attendant lower truth value for direct discourse meaning than its indirect discourse counterpart. In German, however, the inflection shifts the meaning of the sentence in part to an entirely different realm due to Konjunktiv I. There can be no higher truth value for the meaning of such transposed sentences, as there was in English (end of section 4.2.1 and 4.3.3 below). On the contrary, the truth value is indeterminate with respect to the Konjunktiv I part.
This example is a strong indication that Lewisian trust is not analytic or necessary for a convention of meaning pertaining to an utterance. Not only is there no fixed interpretation (Lewis 2002: 175, 78; Lewis 1975: 8), but there cannot be regularity, preference or conformity for a part of speech divorced from a population’s experiences: they never experience Konjunktiv I. So how should they trust it? Notwithstanding these conundrums or perhaps because of them, coordination succeeds; the hearer finds meaning, although not necessarily the same meaning as the speaker had in mind (see section five).
4.3.3 Raising expectations – an objection and the counterintuitive consequences of documentary/positing utterances (English)
An argument might be made that the positing/documentary duality of English utterances potentially reinforces trust (contrary to what I extrapolated from the findings in section 4.2.1), as there is more trust in the documentary past than the positing present.
The widespread adoption of indirect discourse in fiction during the 19th and 20th century seems to support this claim: authors such as Jane Austen, Henry James, James Joyce, Wolfgang Goethe, Theodore Fontane, Franz Kafka – to name but a few – allowed their characters to speak with equal authority to the narrator by integrating indirect discourse into the narrative report on a large scale (see Whittlesey [Schroeder] 2007a-d, 2009). The past tense of the narrative report was implicitly regarded as more reliable, so characters were given access to it for the diversification of the represented world. Their discourse disguised as the narrative report gained a truth value equal to the narration of the narrator (ibid).
The trouble with this analogy is that the prevailing tense of narration is the past and the baseline tense of utterances is a mixture of the present, past and future. It is also unclear what exactly the positing/documentary duality entails for trust in the utterance from the perspective of the hearer: does a present-tense indicative sentence gain reliability as a result of the past-tense reprocessing in the consciousness of the hearer, as the objection proposes, or is such an indicative sentence held to a higher standard, namely that of the documentary past tense? It looks like the latter is the case with utterance (3) (James Joyce is a great American writer). As I pointed out in section three, the hearer will concede a truth value ascribed in accordance with opinion/belief (i.e., unreliable), but there is an expectation that the speaker is truthful in the sense of documentary reliability and the speech act is tied to the speaker: Learning that James Joyce is not American, if the hearer did not know that, would dismantle trust. Should the hearer know that, the meaning is left to the interpretation of the hearer, but the hearer’s attitude toward the speaker will be fraught with friction due to the expectation of reliability.
This is also suggested by a cultural comparison of English expectations for truth and trust in a sentence relative to German ones. It is a bit counterintuitive since the German utterance is modulating between positing and art. The explanation for the English hearer’s lack of trust must lie in experience. Too often have they experienced utterances that fall short of the documentary standard of the past tense. Consequently, a value judgement is quickly attached by the hearer to each utterance. By contrast, German speakers do not have this expectation vis-à-vis the utterance in the first place (the divergent backdrop is art). Accordingly, they do not attach a value judgement to an utterance, but view it like a building. Then there is no long history of experiencing deception in utterances. Something analogous must also be happening in Russian.
4.3.4 The implications of positing/positing utterances (Russian)
The truth values of direct and indirect discourse, as we saw in section 4.2.3, are identical as long as no pronouns are present. The congruence of the discourse for the speaker and hearer would seem to support Lewis’s claim about the necessity of truthfulness and trust for coordination. Naturally, were it not for languages with transposed indirect discourse, such as English and German, the argument made in this paper would be inconceivable. If we probe outside of linguistics, as we did in section three with the brief analysis of Gogol and Tolstoy, the practices of Russian writers with respect to indirect discourse and narrated monologue also support the attribution of a truth value to utterances. There is a long tradition dating back at least to the nineteenth century of Russian narrators standing in close proximity to the lead protagonist (герой/hero) of their narratives and clearly marginalizing other discourse, as we saw with the two ladies in chapter nine of Dead Souls. I have argued that this circumstance is due to the threat posed by unaligned characters since their (untransposed) indirect discourse could otherwise potentially come into conflict with the present-tense commentary of the author (see Whittlesey [Schroeder] 2007a-d, 2009). If the narrator and lead protagonist are not aligned, then their present-tense (interpreting) discourses might express different views on the past-tense narrative report. Russian writers seem to view this as more unsettling than their English and German counterparts who opened up the narrative report to characters through narrated monologue.
Such a dynamic, if it is a factor shaping the perception of speakers of Russian, would explain why despite the equal truth value of direct and indirect discourse the trust of hearers tends more toward the German than English mindset. The documentary backdrop of English utterances is also missing in Russian, and, as we have seen, positing utterances are regarded less strictly.[31]
5. Convention and precedent for function words; idiolects for meaning subject to negotiation
If trust is superfluous for successful communication and the hearer can assign a different meaning to the utterance than the speaker, how would interlocutors not be communicating at cross purposes? How does communication get off the ground?
I can think of no way but to reinsert Lewis’s convention and Millikin’s precedence, but not to the utterance as a whole. That cannot be. As we saw in direct discourse and its reprocessing in indirect discourse, there is congruity between the two formulations and the meanings attributed by the speaker on the one hand and the hearer on the other. The associations simply diverge. This is what happens in language generally – some parts align; others do not. There are certain meanings that do enjoy a convention of truthfulness and trust, but they are not the ones with referents in the real world. Let us look at this example:
(7) The effect on the vertical axis is from electromagnetic frequencies.
Pretend that I made this remark to you. Picture something to yourself here first. I’m guessing that it is not the following picture: A person sitting at a computer. But that is what I had in mind (truly). I’m also guessing, however, that you imagined something from (7), inferred some meaning from those words. That something does not align perfectly with what I picture and mean, but we can have successful communication as long as you picture something where X impacts Y. This might be a person playing under high voltage power lines.
We succeed in communication with (7) because two forces are at work in an utterance:
(i.) our meanings and/or referents of “vertical axis” (for sure) and “electromagnetic frequences” (probably) diverge;
(ii.) our meanings of function words such as the definite articles “the” and the prepositions “on” and “from” will be largely congruent; the verb “be” also lands in this category.
Language consists of, inter alia, marks and symbols designating referents in the real world and functions to facilitate communication such as verbs, prepositions, definite and indefinite articles (in languages with them), adverbs, etc. For sentential meaning and successful communication, as Higgenbotham (146-7) rightly noted, very little congruence is required. It will suffice in (7) for the speaker and hearer to share the meaning of the functions (ii), that is, the definite articles, prepositions and verb, to construct the picture of X impacts Y. As long as this congruity holds, the speaker and hearer can mean different referents under “vertical axis” and “electromagnetic frequencies” and have successful communication.
The same dynamic unfolds here as in indirect discourse (ex Russian): one utterance, more than one meaning. For the meanings of referents in the real world, the speaker has one, the hearer another; but for the functions, there is, indeed, a convention of truthfulness and trust in the Lewisian sense and an established precedent a la Millikan. “The” is “the” for both the speaker and hearer. “From” equates to “from.”
For the meaning of the sentence as a whole, especially its constituents with real-world referents, however, whatever comes out of the mouth of the speaker is interpreted by a hearer informed by the background awareness of indirect discourse rules. The speaker knows this too, of course. As described in sections three and four, these rules have consequences: the documentary expectations of English communicators cause them to seek a higher level of alignment, one going beyond the mere function words and extending into referents – there must be reliability; meanwhile, German and Russian interlocutors confine their desire for common ground to the function words, with speakers granting freedom of meaning attribution and hearers readily acknowledging the unlikelihood of alignment.
To see this difference, we need only to return to the apprehension of the false utterance I have discussed repeatedly:
(3) James Joyce is a great American writer.
The falsity of this statement is met with far greater intolerance by an American hearer than their German or Russian counterparts. The documentary reliability of language perceived by the former due to indirect discourse extends naturally to meaning, and not to a part of it. The American expects congruence in the meaning of not only function words, but also real-world referents – nouns and, especially in this case, adjectives (such as “American”). The German and Russian interlocutors are less demanding due to their linguistic framework: they require only common ground with the verb and indefinite article (if present). They do expect “X is Y,” but with the speaker and hearer each possibly attributing their own (different) meanings to X and Y. The backdrop of positing/art (German) and positing/positing utterances (Russian) facilitates this flexibility.
This frequent misalignment in communication is not a failure, however; it does not result in a lack of meaning. It is simply the state of communication and meaning in an unmoored modern-day world. Some let it impede communication; others are more relaxed and willingly enter into the vortex of meaning negotiation. The mindset is determined by language.
Conclusion
I am making this argument or trying to explain this point because communication in German and Russian fundamentally differs from English, especially in regard to a hearer’s willingness to engage a speaker without necessarily agreeing with them.
The first aspect of this attempt to find a theoretical basis for the divergence is that a hearer exhibits less trust vis-à-vis the utterance in German and, possibly, Russian, because the documentary form is absent from reprocessed speech acts in these languages. Counterintuitively, this is ultimately advantageous for the success of communication.
Second, English utterances modulate between positing and documenting. This dynamic raises the expectations for reliability in the utterance because the documentary formulation in consciousness is regarded as reliable due to associations with the past tense established by literary fiction. Because positing speech acts often involve opinions and beliefs that prove to be wrong, English hearers have excessively high expectations for trusting speech acts and therefore withhold trust on the primary positing level (direct discourse) due to awareness of the underlying, more reliable documentary level (indirect discourse).
In no language is the truthfulness of an utterance fundamentally doubted. It would be like doubting the truthfulness, i.e., existence, of the building or house you are looking at. Nonetheless, hearers’ trust vis-à-vis the utterance will vary depending on the truth value of its two components (direct and indirect discourse) and the ramifications of the truth value in the hearer’s context: English hearers place an absolute truth value on utterances; German hearers refrain from this because the utterance is in part colored by the non-documentary art of Konjunktiv I.
The third point is that when trust is withheld, the hearer contributes to the meaning of an utterance. They construe their own meaning as a matter of course due to transposition in indirect discourse, but also outside of this framework. With normal referents such as “electromagnetic frequencies” and idiosyncratic ones like “twin” in the Plato whatsapp group, Adam’s use of agreement/contract or the false communication of (3), meaning is still conveyed. The social conception of language based on convention (Lewis) and precedence (Millikan) accounts for success via the function words with no real-world referent, while the idiolectal conception drives the speaker and hearer into a negotiation on the real-world referents and the meaning of the utterance as a whole. That is because the hearer determines meaning for themselves. In German and Russian, this is done without the expectation of complete alignment between speaker and hearer meaning: positing or art communication succeeds and serves as the basis for negotiating the meaning of referents. In English, the documentary-tinge of communication entails an expectation of reliability that is less accommodating to divergent meanings.
It is not a great leap to understand from these findings why conversation in professional, educated circles has become so difficult in America, especially with differences of opinion, and why Lewis, Grice and Millikan focus on fixing meaning beyond function words.
Aporia
Aside from the ramifications discussed above, the documentary/positing duality in English, positing/art duality in German and positing/positing singularity in Russian may also be reflected in literary fiction and act as a contributing factor to differences observed between English fiction and that of other languages. Does literary fiction become more fact-based, reliability-focused in English because the corresponding writers are shaped by the documentary bent of their utterances? Do German and Russian writers not exhibit this tendency because of positing and art as the backdrop to their utterances, allowing the reader/hearer to determine meaning independently of the author?
Interestingly, a thematic analysis of the stories published in the perypatetik project suggests exactly this.[32], [33] That study, along with the case studies in section three of the paper “The Purpose of Literary Fiction at the Beginning of the Third Millennium” (Smirnov/Whittlesey [Schroeder] 2022), reveals a sharp divergence in the content of the American and British authors on the one hand and all the other authors. Does this also correlate with a trust-tied or trust-divorced approach to writing? I cannot say at this point, but there is substantial trust in the materiality of facts in the English-speaking texts, i.e., things we purportedly know: writers composing in English languages exhibit an overwhelming tendency to draw on themes, motifs, plots and character traits related to what we call pragmatic values and norms, whereas literary production in those languages in which communication is influenced by a foreign language is shaped by what is called romantic values and norms (Friedrich/Whittlesey [Schroeder] 2023).[34], [35] Such authors in the project – of note are the Russian and Ukrainian ones – prefer processes, freedom, fate, living, i.e., less documentary sides of life.
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[1] As opposed to “stipulated language” (162).
[2] The third truth condition is not relevant to the paper.
[3] Lewis (1975), 8-9; Lewis (2002), 177-181.
[4] Although Jamieson is basing his critique on the 1969 edition of Lewis’s book Convention, specifically page 78 of the version cited in this paper and reprinted in 2002, the remarks apply mutatis mutandis to the definition of convention for language purpose in “Languages and Language.” I will indicate the correspondence with footnotes.
[5] This is point (i) in the 1969 edition, according to Jamieson’s citation.
[6] An example from our modern-day NYC environment would be the convention of stopping at a red light that is, however, rarely followed if one is a pedestrian.
[7] Point (ii) in the 1969 edition
[8] See Lepore and Stone, 8.
[9] In language, the soup example would be analogous to saying “how are you?” in response to the question “how are you?”, a practice that New Yorkers have adopted without thinking about how illogical it is to respond to a question with a question.
[10] Also point (iv) in the 1969 edition.
[11] And, indeed, I do not use the Oxford comma, although it is the norm in academia.
[12] Formulated somewhat differently and lumped together under (v) in the 1969 edition.
[13] A point Chomsky would also certainly agree with, as his example of a child learning language shows (see remarks on Lepore and Stone below).
[14] To be honest, I am not entirely sure about the scope of its meaning, but it is used by a very wide range of students.
[15] For example, Chomsky 1995: 16-17, where he points out the richness of innate endowment in children (their language faculty) despite impoverished input.
[16] Chomsky cites examples such as a person who learned languages easily, but lacked other cognitive capacities and learned an invented language with the exception of some strange rules in it, such as an emphatic marker on the third word of the sentence. According to Chomsky, this shows the “austerity” of the language faculty, which barred the discovery of a simple structure-independent rule (16). Based on work by Gleitman, he also notes young children who can determine the meaning of a nonsense word from syntactic information in a sentence (17).
[17] I am a professional translator; this formulation appears in every contract; it may be required by law or case law.
[18] Positing should be read merely in the sense of “putting forward”; by contrast, “documentary should be understood as something factual. This terminology is tentative and must be explained in a separate paper.
[19] For similar findings, see Whittlesey [Schroeder] 2007a-d.
[20] The first time is the famous opening sentence: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way.”
[21] For the perceived authority of the present tense relative to the past in the case of law-like utterances, see Barbara Johnstone (1987), “‘He says … so I said’ Verb tense alternation and narrative depictions of authority in American English.”
[22] See Rosenthal 2002.
[23] In contrast to a verbal signaling language.
[24] On my reading of Egan, there seems to be a gap between the mathematical function of the mechanism/vehicle, based on Marr and Shadmehr/Wise, and the content of language meanings the function is to be applied to, but that is not salient for this argument.
[25] Indeed, I think this line of thought is promising for Chomsky’s theory.
[26] Perhaps it is important to point out that we are working with two senses of meaning here: one being the meaning of the verb and the other the meaning of the sentence: Both sentences contain the same words with the sole change being the inflection of the verb, so the meaning of the verb “be” does not change in the first sense of, say, “to have a specified characterization” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary); but the meaning of the sentence as a whole changes due to the associations tied to the verbs. In the following, I will be working with “meaning” in the second sentence sense.
[27] This is, incidentally, very common in German when someone says something incorrect. The hearer correcting the speaker says that the latter probably has the statement from somewhere else. The hearer does not accuse the speaker of uttering a false statement, but attributes falsity to another world. By contrast, a hearer correcting an American speaker will make no such attempt to justify the falsity graciously.
[28] This is formulated somewhat cautiously because some narratologists argue that narrated monologue or free indirect discourse differs from governed indirect discourse with inquit phrases (he said that…, he thought that… etc.). Lyudmila Sokolova and Roy Pascal make arguments for viewing narrated monologue and несобственно-прямая речь (the Russian equivalent) as unrelated to grammar and potentially adopting any tense or even no tense in the form of introjections, snippets, single words, etc. The widespread practice in both Soviet and post-modern Russian literary fiction is to adopt untransposed indirect discourse for both governed indirect discourse and narrated monologue (see, e.g., Kataev, Time, Forward!, Olesha, Envy, and Dmitriev, Turn in the River; see also Whittlesey [Schroeder] 2007a-d, 2009). For Sokolova’s refusal to address this issue directly (“На вопросе о том, почему смену форм времени, их занчений и оттенков следует считать признаком нес.-пр. речи, а также на возможных вариантах последовательности времени, мы не останавливаемся”), see pages 48-49 and 51-52, and for Pascal’s position, see the chapters on Jane Austen and Dostoevsky in The Dual Voice.
[29] The only change occurs if there is a first-person subject in the direct discourse conveyed indirectly. As in English and German, the pronoun would shift from the first to third person and the verb would be conjugated accordingly (but in the same tense as it appeared in direct discourse).
[30] This will not be addressed here.
[31] Another factor may be the absence of central verbs in the present tense (“be” and possessive “have”), replaced by hyphens or nothing, and a general eschewing of acting subjects, replaced by events happening to one (e.g., “I thought” (я думал) is often expressed as “it occurred to me” ((мне) пришло на ум, (мне) вздумалось, etc.). These factors also remove utterances from the documentary base that secures discourse and raises reliability expectations in English. At any rate, the case of Russian needs to be studied in greater depth with a broader range of language idiosyncrasies.
[32] See Friedrich/Whittlesey [Schroeder] 2023, “An Analysis of the Values and Norms of Romanticism and Pragmatism in Literary Fiction”.
[33] The perypatetik project collects stories and other texts by ordinary people around the world (mostly translators). Besides the theory of transadaptation partially pursued in this context, no ideological constraints are placed on the writers. No specific types of works are curated – authors are basically chosen randomly and allowed to compose as they wish.
[34] See Friedrich, Smirnov, Whittlesey (Schroeder), Peripatetic Alterity. Especially, chapters two, three and six. The terms pragmatic and romantic have nothing in common with conventional understandings in the fields of literature, philosophy, culture, etc. They are defined in Peripatetic Alterity.
[35] For a detailed study of the divergence with literary fiction case studies of pragmatism and romanticism, see Friedrich and Whittlesey (Schroeder), “An Analysis of the Values and Norms of Romanticism and Pragmatism in Literary Fiction”. In particular, sections two and three.