Anchoring Utterances

Abstract

For people to communicate with each other, they must tie, or anchor, each of their utterances to the speaker, addressees, place, time, display, and purpose of that utterance. Doing this takes coordination. Producers must index each of these entities for their addressees, and addressees must identify each of the entities the producers are indexing. When people are face to face, they have a battery of resources for doing this—speech, gestures of all kinds, and interactive strategies. But when addressees are separated from producers in space, time, or worlds, as on the telephone or in print, the available resources are more limited. The problem is that research on comprehension, production, and communication has often ignored, disguised, or distorted anchoring. As a result, accounts of these processes are often incomplete, misleading, or incorrect.