The Emergence of Intentional Meaning: A Different Twist on Pragmatic Linguistic Action

Abstract

Recovering what speakers intend to communicate is widely recognized as the fundamental goal of linguistic understanding. Most scholars within linguistic pragmatics assume that intentions are private mental acts that operate prior to the performance of linguistic actions, and that listeners, once again, must somehow infer people’s inner intentions to understand what they mean in context. This article outlines some of the experimental evidence suggesting that intentions are critical in communication. However, my main goal is to suggest that intentional meaning is not necessarily a prior mental act that occurs before people speak, nor is the recovery of a person’s so-called intentions the main goal of linguistic interaction. I describe a self-organizational approach that explains how linguistic utterances may be enacted in an intentional way without there being underlying intentions driving these actions. This perspective offers a vision of pragmatic linguistic action that encompasses the totality of people’ s behaviors when coordinating with others.