Misunderstandings and explicit/implicit communication

Abstract

Human beings have a wide range of linguistic choices to communicate their thoughts, ranging from the explicit to the implicit. In either case, the utterances chosen are often less fine-grained than the actual thoughts (i.e., assumptions) that the speaker intends to communicate with these utterances, which implies that a certain percentage of success in human conversational interaction is the hearer=s in supplying the missing elements in the speaker=s utterance. In this paper I address the interpretive problems that may arise when trying to select the intended explicit/implicit interpretation of an utterance, which basically have to do with (a) deciding whether the intended interpretation is explicit or implicit, and (b) deciding to what extent that interpretation is explicit or implicit (interpretations may be more or less explicit and more or less implicit depending on the contextual information required for their recovery). The paper begins with a short review of interpretation within relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986a; henceforth RT) in section one, the cognitive model which will be adopted in this article together with its ad hoc terminology. Section two briefly addresses the fact that speakers have a choice of explicit and implicit means to communicate their thoughts. Section three deals with the notion of continuum and to what extent we can apply this term to explicit/implicit communication (are we dealing with one explicit-implicit continuum, two sub-continua, or two independent continua?). The discussion in this section is important to explain the hearer=s interpretive choices which eventually lead to non-or misunderstandings. In section four misunderstandings (as understood in this paper) are defined, and in the next section the scope of analysis in this article is delimited. These five sections make up the theoretical background on which the remaining sections are based. These are devoted to a description and illustration of particular problems that the hearer may face when interpreting explicitly communicated information (section six) or implicitly communicated information (section seven).