Victoria Escandell-Vidal
Understanding how languages work in communication is a matter of unravelling a complex tangle of factors, including structural rules and restrictions, cognitive abilities, social and cultural preferences, and individual features. Just like any other human institution, language is extremely sensitive to its environment, so despite the universality of our mental architecture, there is a wide range of variation in communication practices, among both different languages and different varieties of the same language. Pragmatics can help teachers and learners by providing a general frame of reference for establishing the relative weight and contribution of each of the various aspects involved in language use, as well as the tools necessary to describe and explain the principles underlying this complexity.
A quick search for the word pragmatics in the literature will produce a relatively high number of definitions, with partial overlaps, but also with significant differences. The object of pragmatics as a discipline has been identified as meaning in use, speaker’s meaning, cognitive abilities involved in utterance interpretation, or meaning in a social context. (For an overview, see among others Leech 1983; Levinson 1983, 2000; Green 1989; Kerbrat-Orecchioni [1990] 1994; Mey 1993; Reyes 1994; Grundy 1995; Thomas 1995; Escandell-Vidal [1996] 2006, 2014; Yule 1996; Verschueren, Östman, and Blommaert 1995; Verschueren 1999; Horn and Ward 2004; LoCastro 2003; Márquez-Reiter and Placencia 2005; Chapelle 2012; Huang 2012).
But what is special about language in interaction? Consider the following Whats-App dialogue between an adolescent (J) and his mother (M). After having had lunch at his friend’s house, he writes:
(1) J: Me quedo un rato más, que vamos a ver una peli.
M: ¿Y los exámenes?
J: Tengo mañana y pasado.
M: Tú mismo.
For both the mother and the son it is clear what they mean by their utterances and how they fit together, considering the whole conversational setting and the shared knowledge they have. The interpretation of this conversation can be clear for other people as well, to the extent that they know (or can imagine) the situation. The dialogue in (1) can be reported as follows: the son is informing his mother that he intends to stay at his friend’s home to watch a movie. Both of them know that the date for the son’s exams is approaching, so the mother reminds him of this fact to suggest that he should come home and study some more. The son then rejects this suggestion on the basis that he has two more days before the exams, ample time to study. The mother, rather reluctantly, leaves the responsibility on her son and ends the conversation.
It is evident that what we understand in (1) goes well beyond what has been put into words. For example, the boy does not specify where he wants to stay, but nevertheless we recover this information; the mother only mentions the exams, without stating how they are relevant, but we can easily add this information; the boy says he has two days, though he does not say what for, and we can recover the missing details. In addition, we also understand that the boy’s opening utterance is not a way of asking for permission, that the mother’s reply is a hint not to stay and that the mother is not happy with her son’s decision.
There are, thus, various kinds and levels of information recovered that are not directly encoded by the linguistic form. The crucial question, then, is how all this extra information has been obtained. The obvious answer is, of course, it comes from the context. But then new questions arise: What is “the context”? How do we know what can count as context? How can participants anticipate what others will understand? How do they recognize each other’s intentions and emotions? The main problems that pragmatic theories aim to explain are brought to light in questions like these.
Several facts emerge from this simple example. First and foremost—and contrary to what is sometimes assumed—there is much more to communication than encoding and decoding messages. Human communication is not a mechanical activity of exchanging linguistic signals, in which participants merely wrap up all they wanted to convey; rather, speakers communicate by providing clues (both linguistic and non-linguistic) of their intended message, and hearers are able to use such clues, together with their knowledge of the situation, to infer additional content and reconstruct the communicative intention (Grice 1957, [1967] 1975). This is, in fact, exactly what we have in (1): each participant gives partial indications to guide the addressee toward the representations they want to convey. Thus, when used in communication, linguistic expressions actually work as pointers to information, rather than as packages containing all the information. In other words, in our interactions, symbols are used as indexes. This feature is unique to human communication.
A second fact that emerges is that linguistic expressions are very sensitive to the environment in which they occur. It is very easy to find that the same words have different communicative imports depending on the surrounding words and the situational setting. Consider the excerpt in (2), an exchange between two faculty colleagues (A and B):
(2) A: Hoy he tenido la última comisión para juzgar trabajos de fin de curso.
B: ¿Y los exámenes?
A: Tengo mañana y pasado.
B: Ah, entonces terminas enseguida.
The segments in italics in (2) are identical to the question/answer pair in (1); however, here their import is quite different, as can be seen in (3):
(3) A: Hoy he tenido la última comisión para juzgar trabajos de fin de curso.
B: ¿Y [cuándo tienes] los exámenes?
A: Tengo [mis exámenes] mañana y pasado.
B: Ah, entonces terminas enseguida.
The answer contains the same words, but their interpretation radically changes: here the predicate tener is enriched, invoking a different conceptual (and syntactic) frame, taking a non-overt argument, mis exámenes, as its object with mañana y pasado as adverbial modifiers, whereas in the previous case the object was mañana y pasado. Besides, in (3) tener [un examen] is interpreted from the point of view of the teacher, thus meaning “giving an exam to the students,” not “doing an exam,” as when the situation is seen from the perspective of the student. Furthermore, in (3) the question asks for unknown information, and the answer provides the new information required, while this was not the case in (1).
All these cases show that the situation (including previous context, prior general and specific knowledge, situational expectations, etc.) contributes to modelling the interpretation in a way that if the situation is changed, the very same segment can receive a different interpretation. This is why taking someone’s words out of context can be a strategy for changing the intended import of their message.
The role of the context is not thus merely that of a fixed scenario where the plot develops. The extralinguistic information has a leading role at least at two different levels. On the one hand, it completes what has been linguistically encoded by providing further details for vague expressions or unspecified constituents. For instance, we understand “ Me quedo un rato más” as meaning “I’m staying here (at my friend’s) for a while,” so we conceptually add the indication of a particular location to the event of staying, and we do so on the basis of the information we have about the place where the speaker is. The inferential processes that enrich the encoded content and develop it into a more detailed proposition, even by adding “missing” arguments and predicates when needed, are known as “primary processes” (Recanati 2004, p. 17); the resulting level has been called “explicature” (Sperber and Wilson [1986] 1995, p. 182; Wilson and Sperber 2012; see also Carston and Hall 2012 for a general overview).
On the other hand, the interpretation also includes several representations that are formally independent: These are added pieces of general knowledge invoked for the occasion to make sense of what has been said by relating it to the intentions or the attitudes of the users. For example, when we interpret that the mother’s question is a reminder and that she would prefer that her son come home earlier to prepare his exams, in order to relate her words to her intentions we are resting on unspoken assumptions about preparing exams and parents’ preferences. The new assumptions added in the interpretation are known as “implicatures” (Grice [1967] 1975, pp. 49–50; see also Carston and Hall 2012) and the inferential operations by which we retrieve, build, and integrate them with the encoded content are “secondary processes” (Recanati 2004, p. 17).
Finally, and again contrary to what is usually assumed, exchanging information is not necessarily the major goal of all instances of linguistic communication. If the first utterance of the dialogue in (1) is excluded, the rest of the exchange does not consist of information new to any of the participants: neither the mother’s question asks for unknown information, nor does her son’s answer offer new data. Actually, both of them know that he has to study for his exams, when these exams will take place, and that it is the son’s responsibility to do his best. The relevance of these ideas to the ongoing exchange comes not from their novelty, but from the impact they will have on the shared context: it is precisely because its content is shared that we will understand the question as a reminder with an implicit suggestion, and the answer will count as a refusal. The interaction in (1) is thus not an exchange of information, but rather a power game, where each contender struggles to keep his or her position.
The aim of pragmatic theories is explaining the regularities found in human communication: once it is established that words and grammar rules fall short of accounting for its complexity, the next step is understanding how the various factors involved relate to each other. The interaction between the external factors and the structural properties of language cannot be random and inconsistent. Actually, though not completely fail-proof, human communication is mostly predictable, at least when some previous background is shared, which suggests that it must be governed by some kind of regularities. It is the task of pragmatics to uncover the source for such regularities.
Different theories focus on different aspects of the problem, depending on what facet of language and communication they prioritize: some of them bring interpretive abilities to the foreground and search for rationality principles and heuristics (Grice 1957, [1967] 1975; Horn 1984, 2004; Levinson 2000); others focus on the cognitive mechanisms that make it possible to manage the variety of information sources, anticipate interpretive hypotheses, and attribute mental states and intentions (Grice 1957, [1967] 1975, 1989; Sperber and Wilson [1986] 1995; Blakemore 1992; Carston 2002, 2004); finally, others concentrate on social practices and on the way in which communication contributes to creating, maintaining, enhancing, or cutting off social relations among individuals (Mey 1993; Thomas 1995; Verschueren 1999).
A major divide has usually been established between cognitive and social pragmatics. Cognitive approaches analyze communication and its regularities as a product of the design of the human brain as it has been shaped by evolution: our mental architecture determines the possibilities and limitations of human processing capacities, including the mechanisms that allow us to acquire, retrieve, store, and combine information, and the principles governing the operation of these abilities. Social pragmatics, on the other hand, aims at identifying social conventions on the use of the language in different social groups; to this end, the communicative behavior of large population samples is analyzed to extract statistical generalizations.
The approach taken here is intended to go beyond this divide and to identify the basic concepts and distinctions. Cognitive and social notions are intrinsically interwoven and cannot be understood without each other (Escandell-Vidal 2004, 2009, 2014; Kecskés 2014; Amenós, Ahern, and Escandell-Vidal 2018). The next three sections are devoted to presenting an overview of the main tools needed to understand the various factors involved in linguistic communication, with special attention to their implications for teaching and learning.2
The relation between linguistic meaning, on the one hand, and world knowledge, on the other, is intuitively the key to understanding our ability to communicate in such an efficient way, with encoded content working as a convenient hint for the more complex set of assumptions that are actually conveyed. The crucial point is then how linguistic and non-linguistic information interact. Linguistic information can be seen as a set of propositions, but what about non-linguistic knowledge?
The factors that can be relevant for utterance interpretation come in different forms and from different sources: the identity of the people we are talking to and our relationship with them, our goals and intentions, the situational setting where the exchange takes places, the nature and the amount of shared knowledge . . . Of course, the list is not exhaustive, but can give an idea of the complexity of the factors involved. It is easy to see that these factors are not all of one kind (i.e., there are individuals, relations, mental states, situations, knowledge . . .), so it is not easy to figure out how they can interact with each other and with linguistic representations: the challenge is, then, dealing with the heterogeneity of all these factors.
This problem can be solved by employing the same strategy that speakers actually use, i.e., by treating these factors not as external pieces of reality, but as internal representations that individuals have about the surrounding world. For us speakers, the whole set of data from the extra-linguistic situation (including the relationship among the participants, their knowledge, and their intentions) have the same status in our minds: they are all internal representations (Kosslyn and Pomerantz 1977; Fodor 1981; Johnson-Laird 1983; Chalmers 2004). In fact, if any of the external factors determine our behavior at all, they do so not on the basis of their intrinsic, objective properties, but rather in the way they have been perceived and conceptualized. Individuals have their own way of seeing situations, other individuals, objects, and beliefs: it is not the world as it is that counts, but the world as we see it.
Thus, even if our cognitive systems are designed to yield accurate representations of the world, this is not always the case, so we can be driven by misconceptions and inaccurate representations. This has been largely exploited in fiction. For example, the interaction between Oedipus and Jocasta in the well-known Greek myth is based on several wrong assumptions, particularly on the misjudgment of both characters about their relationship to each other. Neither of them knows that they are mother and son, so their behavior is driven by false assumptions about the actual state of affairs. Human behavior, then, is determined by the way in which we see the world and by the internal representations we entertain about it.
By resorting to the notion of mental representation, we can give a common format to all the external factors that can be brought to bear on the interpretation of communicative behavior. We are no longer dealing with individuals, relationships, mental states, and knowledge, but rather with representations of individuals, relationships, mental states, facts, and so on. This uniformity of format facilitates the interplay between the representations transmitted by linguistic means (which also have a propositional form) and the representation of all the external factors mentioned before. As we will see later, combining linguistic and non-linguistic information can be modelled using well-established inferential patterns.
Many of the representations we have will be individual, having to do with very situation-specific details and with our desires and preferences; this explains why behaviors and interpretations are subjective to a greater or lesser extent, and why different people can have partially different views on the same situation. A large number of representations, however, are shared with other members of the same social group, thus promoting a sense of commonality and affiliation, and also facilitating a smooth interaction among the co-members. In fact, during our process of socialization, we tend to replicate a significant part of the ways of thinking and perceiving that are characteristic of our community.
The representations that we share are not simply isolated propositions; on the contrary, they form more complex knowledge structures known as scripts, frames, or schemata (Schank and Abelson 1977; Rumelhart 1980). “A script is a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation” (Schank and Abelson 1977, p. 41). Scripts consist of variable slots, actions, and scenes that make it possible to establish temporal and causal connections between events. Entering a college canteen opens up a script with a sequence of events and a set of objects and participants that is quite different from the script of a fancy restaurant: each provides its own reference framework that facilitates interaction and processing by providing ready-to-use information on how to classify situations, understand the various events and actions, and anticipate what comes next at any given point. Scripts are networks of associations in the memory that create predefined patterns of activation and routes for interpretation. A simple cue will suffice to evoke the whole chain of temporal and causal relations. Once expectations have been internalized, they automatically determine behavior, with no need for conscious access to any sort of explicit representation.
The failure to use an adequate script may result in misconceptualizations and miscommunication. As it has been pointed out, “the lack of applicability of available scripts would make it harder (and take more time) for a hearer to understand” (Schank and Abelson 1977, p. 41). If two individuals have different scripts for the same situation, this can result in misunderstandings, and the participants can find themselves unable to behave as expected or to understand what is going on.
Any internalized script can thus be seen as a set of expectations, internalized images of the general sequences of events and participants for each situation. Expectations can be characterized as “brain states that reflect prior information about what is possible or probable in the forthcoming sensory environment” (Summerfield and Egner 2009, p. 403). Expectations lie at the heart of what we perceive as normal, “smooth interaction.” When the participants share a similar script and act according to it, the events go almost unnoticed; if the participants do not conform to the expectations, in contrast, their behavior becomes salient and frequently results in misunderstandings and triggers an evaluation—typically, a negative one (Escandell-Vidal 2017). Expectations arise as the result of social practice, but cannot be understood without considering their cognitive foundation.
One of the most popular theoretical proposals is Speech Act Theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1965, 1969, 1975a, 1975b; Searle and Vanderveken 1985; Tzohatzidis 1994), a model that underlies a significant area of the teaching of communicative competence. The theory emphasizes the character of activity of linguistic utterances, which are seen as actions (i.e., speech acts). Like any other kind of action, speech acts are carried out with a certain goal, so intentionality plays a major role in characterizing linguistic activity.
The felicity and success of a speech act depends on many different factors, both internal and external. For a wedding formula to take legal effect, it has to be uttered by a person with the recognized right to marry. Similarly, like other forms of action, speech acts have social consequences: promises and oaths, for instance, create a commitment for the speaker, who is bound by her own utterance to take a certain course of action in the future. Thus, requirements and consequences show that speech acts are not merely a matter of linguistic performance, but a form of social action embedded in a social context.
There are common practices that speakers of a particular community recognize as their own. Thus, what we usually call “culture” is a set of widely shared representations and expectations. The role of culture in shaping conversational styles is well known, and intercultural studies have largely benefited from the insights of linguists, sociologists, and ethnographers (Ting-Toomey 1999; Hofstede 2001; Nisbett 2003; Spencer-Oatey 2005, 2007; Samovar, Porter, and McDaniel 2006; Kecskés 2014; Wolfson 1989).
Competent speakers have internalized the guidelines for dealing with different speech acts in different situations and are able to apply those guidelines in a flexible and appropriate way (see Hymes 1971; Canale and Swain 1980; Canale 1983; Llobera 1995; Kecskés 2000, 2006, 2010): they “are able to interpret the intended meanings of what is said or written, the assumptions, purposes or goals, and the kinds of actions that are being performed” (Yule 1996, pp. 3–4). An individual can belong to different circles of various sizes, depending on the scale that we are considering. Individuals who are able to interact in various circles can count on a wider repertoire of formulas, conceptualizations, and conditions, allowing them to be at ease in many different situations.
Given that scripts have a culture-specific component, interacting with members of a different culture in a different language usually involves dealing with different structures of knowledge (Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989; Cohen and Olshtain 1989; Oleksy 1989; Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993; Scollon and Scollon 1995; Gass and Neu 1996; Ishihara and Cohen 2010; Cohen 2005; Samovar, Porter, and McDaniel 2006; Mey 2007; Cohen and Sykes 2013; Kecskés 2014; Escandell-Vidal 2014; Amenós, Ahern, and Escandell-Vidal 2018). People who learn a foreign language need to be aware of the differences existing between L1 and L2, and know the guidelines governing the new system if they want to have a smooth interaction and avoid misconceptions and misunderstandings; similarly, native speakers interacting with L2 learners should also be aware to detect possible differences (Scarcella, Andersen, and Krashen 1990; Ellis 1994; Byram 1997; Rose and Kasper 2001; Amenós, Ahern, and Escandell-Vidal 2018). These differences can affect a wide range of aspects, including the identification of the communicative intention, verbal and non-verbal expectations, and the perception of politeness. This is the point where cognitive aspects merge with the social side of communication.
The tendency to use one’s own native social norms and cultural expectations when speaking a different language is known as “pragmatic transfer” (Kasper 1992; see also Thomas 1983; Odlin 1989; Kasper 1992; Escandell-Vidal 1996b; Bou Franch 1998). Such transfer may produce inappropriate linguistic behavior and lead to misunderstandings and miscommunication. When dealing with transfer, the first examples that come to mind are those involving the choice of linguistic formulas from L1 to L2. In some stereotyped situations, L2 learners can often be inclined to use the exact equivalent to the formulas in their L1. For example, it is not surprising that a German or an Italian learner of Spanish can greet someone who is eating with the expression ¡Buen apetito!, a literal translation of the formula used in their L1 ( Guten Appetit!, Buon appetito! ), rather than with the more idiomatic Spanish formulas ¡Buen provecho! or ¡Que aproveche!—all of which can be situationally equivalent to ‘Enjoy your meal!’ This kind of transfer has been called “pragmalinguistic” (Leech 1983; Thomas 1983): it is the direct use of the forms from L1 in L2. They are easy to recognize and usually have no serious consequences for social relations.
However, learning idiomatic expressions is often not enough. The non-linguistic aspects of communicative interaction also have to be taken into account. For instance, native speakers have internalized where, how, and under which circumstances it can be felicitous to greet someone who is eating. There are sure to be cultural differences in the conceptualization of the situations, so there is the risk of having learned the right words but still using them in the wrong circumstances. In this case, a failure can arise when the expectations related to a certain situation in the culture associated to L1 are not equivalent to those governing the corresponding situation in the culture of the L2. Here, the transfer is “sociopragmatic” (Leech 1983; Thomas 1983). This kind of transfer is more difficult to perceive and its consequences can be more serious because unexpected behavior tends to be assessed as if it were intentional.
In L2 teaching and learning it is usual to concentrate on single sentences as the exponents of a given communicative function, rather than on whole communicative exchanges. However, in many occasions, the main speech act is expected to be carried out by means of a number of different subacts. Take, for instance, the case of apologies (Olshtain and Cohen 1983; Cohen and Olshtain 1985; Trosborg 1995). When asked about how to apologize in Spanish, L2 learners typically claim that they would say lo siento ‘I regret it’ or perdone ‘Forgive (me)’, and this is also what most teaching materials indicate. Of course, these two expressions can indeed be used to apologize, but usually saying lo siento will not suffice to offer an adequate apology: it can be enough if you have stepped on somebody’s toe, but not in many other circumstances. When the situation involves a greater risk to the social relationship, using the bare formula can even yield the opposite effect and be perceived as a further offense. In Spanish, more complex forms of apology typically include at least some of the following components: a) expression of apology (nucleus); b) acknowledgment of responsibility; c) explanation or justification; d) offer of repair; e) concern for the consequences; and f) promise of forbearance. The greater the offense, the longer and more intense the apology is.
The example in (4) can illustrate this point. This is an apology offered by a native speaker whose parked car had been blocking someone else’s car for quite a while:
(Pragmaticks corpus)
Here the speaker resorts to accumulating different formulas, emphasizes the sincerity of the apology, provides more than one explanation and shows gratitude to the interlocutor for not having taken revenge.
One of the most significant variables in the contextualization of situations and the shaping of utterances is the social relation among the participants in the interaction. Social distance is the representation that individuals have about their place in society and their relationship to each other (Brown and Gilman 1960; Brown and Levinson 1987; Spencer-Oatey 1996, 2007; Escandell-Vidal 2014). This image is determined by the way in which each group conceptualizes it. Social distance is usually analyzed in two axes of coordinates, which define a two-dimensional space:
As for hierarchy, all societies show a certain degree of stratification of their members. The criteria to categorize individuals and the system of values behind them vary from culture to culture. In general, the relative position of two individuals can be measured according to two main categories:
The hierarchical relationships can be both symmetrical and asymmetrical, depending on whether two individuals occupy similar positions or not.
As for familiarity, the distance between two individuals can be measured according to two new parameters:
By their very nature, familiarity relations tend to be symmetrical.
The reason why social distance is important for communication is that it determines the conceptualization of the situations and the appropriateness of linguistic choices; the greater the social distance, the greater the linguistic distance. Linguistic distance manifests itself in various ways, such as the choice of forms of treatment (formal vs. informal) (Brown and Gilman 1960), the selection of words (high register vs. colloquial register) and, to a lesser extent, the pronunciation (careful diction vs. relaxed pronunciation) and syntactic construction (elaborated structure vs. casual construction).
Social distance is also relevant to the conceptualization of the situation. The very same communicative intention can be perceived differently depending on the relationship between the participants in the interaction. For example, a suggestion from the boss to an employee is very different than a suggestion from the employee to the boss. This difference has to do with the asymmetry in their social roles. The impact on the relationship between the two participants is different, so the linguistic resources used are also different.
The content of the actions is also crucial. A promise and a threat, for example, both belong to the class of acts in which the speaker commits to carrying out a certain action; the obvious difference, of course, is that in the case of the promise, the act is presented as positive or favorable to the hearer, while in the case of the threat, the consequences are negative. Similarly, asking something always imposes an obligation on the hearer, to a greater or lesser extent, and this may have a social cost.
Human interaction is thus highly sensitive to the effects and the consequences that communicative choices may have on social relations among individuals. The linguistic resources used to perform a certain speech act can be exploited to moderate this impact, either by enhancing the positive effects, mitigating possible impositions, avoiding unwanted consequences, or even stressing negative effects and breaking the relationship (Kaul de Marlangeon 2008; Clyne, Norrby, and Warren 2011).
The linguistic strategies for managing social relationships are analyzed under the label of “politeness (studies)” (see Fraser 1990; Kasper 1990; Sifianou 1992; Watts, Ide, and Ehlich 1992; Ide 1993; Haverkate 1994; Escandell-Vidal 1995, 1996a, 1998; Fukushima 2000; Márquer-Reiter 2000; Placencia and Bravo 2001; Félix-Brasdefer 2008; Escandell-Vidal 2009; Amenós, Ahern, and Escandell-Vidal 2018). One of the most influential works in politeness theory is Brown and Levinson (1987). The authors base their theory on the notion of “face,” an individual’s self-image. Face is made up of both positive and negative sides. The positive side includes the desire that one’s self-image be appreciated and approved of by others, whereas the negative side of the notion of face includes the desire for freedom of action and freedom from imposition (Brown and Levinson 1987, pp. 61–62).
Politeness strategies are claimed to be universal. This does not mean, of course, that all languages adopt the same linguistics resources to the same ends; after all, speech acts grow from social conventions, so we can expect that they vary from culture to culture. In most cases, what is different is not the strategy itself, but rather the conceptualization of the action (and hence the degree of redress needed). The parameters by which an action is evaluated as costly or beneficial to the hearer can be different. For example, in most Western cultures, giving a present has positive implications both for the person who gives the gift and for the person who receives it. In contrast, in some Eastern cultures, the action of giving is perceived as an imposition on the recipient, to whom the need to correspond to the gift has been imposed. Therefore, it is not surprising that in these cultures linguistic resources used when giving a present usually do not have the properties and the ingredients of offers, but those of apologies instead, to compensate for the imposition, even with an overt minimization of the present.
Similarly, there are different perceptions about the conditions in which gratitude has to be expressed. In the Spanish culture, thanking is compulsory when receiving a favor or a gift, but also when people do something for you as part of their job; in these latter cases, other cultures do not have the need to express gratitude. For some social groups, gratitude is expressed to strangers but not among close relatives, and this can cause misunderstandings and lead to uncomfortable situations when members of different cultures interact.
Cognitive approaches have shown that a principle of economy governs many aspects of interaction, including the interpretation of verbal behavior: the processing of communicative stimuli follows a path of least effort (Sperber and Wilson 2002). Thus, when we interpret a certain action, we do so by using the assumptions that are more accessible. Speakers from a social community have been exposed to certain patterns. The degree of accessibility of a set of assumptions depends, among other things, on the frequency of use: the more frequent a behavior in a given situation, the more accessible it will be when the situation arises. As a result, if an individual is used to behaving in a certain specific way in the culture of his/her L1, this pattern of action and interpretation will be highly accessible and used by default as a guide for behavior and interpretation no matter the language.
Consider again the case of apologies. In Spanish culture, the greater the offense, the more complex and elaborate the apology. Now, faced with a situation that requires an apology, the first (i.e., the most accessible) schema that comes to the natives’ minds is the one they have internalized in their native language. If the interlocutors belong to the same group or culture, they all have internalized the same basic pattern, so they find each other’s behavior to be predictable to some extent. If one of the participants belongs to a different culture and has internalized a different schema, the schema is easily accessible for the speaker, but its content does not match the content of other participants, nor will the speaker’s behavior comply with their expectations. The result may be perceived as “deviant” and can be interpreted as insulting, arrogant, or disrespectful.
Words also have an essential role in the activation and accessibility of the assumptions used in interaction. A word does not merely activate a concept; it also makes all the encyclopedic information and world knowledge associated with it accessible (Kecskés 2014). Thus, lexical units provide access to a set of experiential contents that are also highly culture-dependent. The way in which knowledge is structured in the human mind explains why a single word can open and activate entire frames and scripts for common situations. Learning the words of a language is therefore more than learning new forms to refer to the same realities; rather, it is learning new realities, resetting the contents of many seemingly equal concepts. Concepts such as “food,” “wedding,” or “work” can be very different in Spain, the USA, Japan, or Cameroon. Even when we use the correct equivalent word in another language, it is quite possible that the background assumptions we are activating are not the same, so the inferential processing will not yield the same results.
Pragmatics can provide a theoretical basis for understanding a significant number of facts about language use in interaction—facts that cannot be accounted just from a grammatical perspective. Communication involves many other non-linguistic factors, both cognitive and social.
Learning a second language is more than acquiring new grammatical rules: it crucially includes gaining awareness to understand how native speakers tend to perceive and evaluate situations and social relations. L2 teachers are expected to have a thorough knowledge of the structure of the language and cultural tendencies in order to anticipate potential difficulties and choose activities that can facilitate the acquisition of the new strategies. For L2 learners, managing the interaction in a successful way is more important than producing grammatically correct sentences; while grammatical failures can be easily amended in interpretation, pragmatic inadequacies are not detected or corrected with the same ease. Misunderstandings may arise and they usually create negative stereotypes about people from a different culture. The main goal of L2 teaching is to facilitate the process of consciousness-raising to enable L2 learners to acquire intercultural abilities and be more cognizant of the various factors involved in interaction.
1 This research has benefited from grants from the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad to the projects “Semántica procedimental y contenido explícito III” (SPYCE III; FFI2012–31785) and “The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface and the Resolution of Interpretive mismatches” (SPIRIM; FFI2015–63497). I am very grateful to José Amenós, Aoife Ahern, Manuel Leonetti, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and discussion on a previous version. Thanks to Aoife Ahern again for checking my English. Needless to say, any remaining shortcomings are my own.
2 For a general discussion of the development of linguistic communication, see also Richards and Schmidt 1983; Bardovi and Hartford 1997; Bardovi, Brasdefer, and Omar 2006; Kasper and Rose 2002.
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