Cooperation and Negotiating Meaning in Communication
Cooperation and Negotiating Meaning in Communication

Summary/Abstract: In communication, meaning is not inherent to words alone, but is affected by a multitude of factors pertaining to the linguistic and situational context.Furthermore, as J.L. Austin suggests in his Theory of Speech Acts, or as Paul Grice argues with his Cooperative Principle and his Theory of Conversational Implicature, in the act of communication there is often a gap between what the speaker (S) says and what the speaker means. Austin demonstrates that the speaker’s meaning is not carried by their words, but by their communicative intention. In his turn, Grice focuses on the way the hearer (H) manages to interpret S’s message correctly despite all the indirectness that characterizes ordinary communicative exchanges. And yet, there are numerous cases when H does not manage to decode S’s intended meaning successfully. The paper analyzes such instances, focusing on the causes that generate misunderstanding and on ways to solve them by negotiation.

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