Disentangling Public from Non-Public Meaning

Abstract

Analyses of interaction need to characterize not solely’ success conditions’, a traditional and important means of analyzing action, but also ‘clarification potential’, the range of potential clarification requests (CRs) available in the aftermath of a conversational move. After briefly considering the very productive and effective ways of producing CRs relating to the grammatically governed content of an utterance, I turn to CRs that pertain to a conversational participant’s non-public intentions, the commonest being the bare Why?, dubbed here Why_meta. I demonstrate that Why_meta shows distinct behaviour from CRs that pertain to grammatically governed content. The most prominent feature perhaps being that, whereas the latter are almost invariably adjacent to the utterances whose clarification they seek, non-adjacency is quite natural for Why_meta. It can occur at a stage where a second part adjacency pair response has been provided to the utterance it pertains to, suggesting that the information Why_meta is seeking is a ‘useful extra’, not an essential ingredient required for providing an appropriate response. Rather than treat Why_meta as clarifying a contextually instantiable goals/plan parameter, I propose that it be treated as an instance of a metadiscursive utterance like I don’t want to talk about this.

The research described here is funded by grant number R00022269 from the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom and by grant number GR/R04942/01 from the Engineering and Physical Seiences Research Council of the United Kingdom. Portions of this paper have been presented at Stuttgart and Gθreborg. For many helpful comments I would like to thank Robin Cooper, Jan van Kuppevelt, Staffan Larsson, and David Traum.