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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Pragmatics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
The cooperative nature of communicative acts
Wendelin Reich *
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Linneanum, Thunbergsvägen 2, 75238 Uppsala, Sweden
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history:
Received 2 November 2009
Received in revised form 9 October 2010
Accepted 23 October 2010
Communicative interaction is a form of social interaction where individuals use overtly
intentional acts, such as utterances, gestures or controlled facial expressions. The available
evidence from the fields of animal communication and paleoanthropology suggests (1)
that humans are the only primates that are naturally able and motivated to engage in
communicative interaction, and (2) that this ability evolved for the purpose of permitting
more complex forms of social cooperation in early Homo. I argue that these considerations
should prompt us to rethink the basic functional anatomy of communicative acts. The
hypothesis offered here is that most communicative acts can be reconceptualized as
proposals or requests for the addressee to carry out a cooperative response. This
hypothesis turns out to work effectively for many imperative as well as interrogative acts. I
show that it also extends to a large class of declarative acts, with the exception of a welldefined residual category. The suggested reconceptualization of communicative acts, I
argue, is not only compatible with evolutionary theory. It is also more ‘‘social’’ than
Austin’s and Searle’s original conception of speech acts because it explains how the agency
of addressees is implied by the performance of many communicative acts.
ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Pragmatic theory
Evolutionary theory
Communicatively coordinated
collaboration
Agency
Co-act proposal (CAP)
‘‘[T]he most dramatic innovation introduced with the rollout of our species is not the prowess of individual minds, but the
ability to harness that power across many individuals.’’ (Jason Mitchell1)
1. Introduction
In comparison to other primates, humans are an extraordinarily cooperative species. Recent studies from biology,
evolutionary psychology and anthropology show how deeply cooperation with conspecifics is built into human nature
(Henrich and Henrich, 2007; Tomasello, 2009), predisposing us to help non-threatening strangers, to feel guilt and
embarrassment when we fail to cooperate, to improve our personal health by displaying kindness in regular and meaningful
ways, and even to conduct war and compete with out-group individuals through sophisticated cooperation with in-group
members (Keltner and Anderson, 2000; Thoits and Hewitt, 2001; Fehr and Fischbacher, 2003; Bowles, 2006). Attention has
also been devoted to the fact that most face-to-face cooperation occurs either in or through communicative interaction, that
is, usage of overtly intentional signals2 by which humans, and perhaps no other species (Tomasello, 2006), coordinate their
social activities. Conversely, sociologists and philosophers argue that communicative interaction, even in antagonistic forms
* Tel.: +46 73 6482401.
E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected].
1
In What’s Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science, edited by Max Brockman, Vintage, 2009:83.
2
That is, signals whose communicative purpose is ‘‘on record’’ between signaler and addressee (Pinker et al., 2008). For the purposes of this article, I prefer
using ‘‘overtly intentional’’ instead of ‘‘reflexively intentional’’ (see Grice, 1957:385) or ‘‘ostensive’’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) in order to avoid committing the
theory presented here to the ontological and cognitive assumptions which are normally incurred by Griceans and Relevance Theorists (Reich, 2009).
0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.10.024
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such as verbal conflict, rests on a deeply cooperative understructure (Reich, 2011). The connection between cooperation and
communicative interaction is so tight in humans that it would be no strong exaggeration to say that Homo interagens
(Levinson, 1995) and Homo cooperans are one and the same creature (Tomasello, 2008).
For pragmatics, a reasonable hypothesis is hence that the structure of communicative exchanges, and that of individual
communicative acts, might reflect their evolutionary-functional roots in social cooperation. The shape of communicative
acts and the way they assemble into larger units could be ‘‘geared towards’’ social cooperation, echoing the fact that they are
devices which support coordinated activities. Pragmatic theories in the tradition that runs from Grice (1957) and Austin
(1962) to Clark (1996) and Levinson (2000) address this fundamental intuition chiefly through the notion of a cooperative
speaker. Grice gave this notion its most widely recognized formulation when he coined his ‘‘Cooperative Principle’’ (Grice,
1975:45). Although the precise meaning of the principle is subject to debate (Lindblom, 2001; Mooney, 2004; Davies, 2007;
Terkourafi, 2007; Lumsden, 2008), it seems to require at a minimum that the speaker intend to make the informational
content of the signal comprehensible to the hearer. This means, for instance, that a promise is only a ‘‘promise’’ if it is worded
in a way which allows the hearer to comprehend it as a promise in the given context (compare Searle, 1969:63; Goffman,
1976:263).
The main thesis of this article is that the Austinian-Searlean model of communicative acts is conceptually incomplete and
needs a revision that is informed by recent advances in the life sciences. I shall argue that the model is incomplete for two
reasons. Firstly, it is built on the assumption that communicative acts are used principally for the purpose of sharing
meanings, as opposed to exerting social influence.3 In theoretical biology, which approaches the topic of animal
communication through an evolutionary framework, it is frequently pointed out that any phenotype, such as human
interaction competence, can only be selected for by evolution if it increases the reproductive fitness of individual organisms
or genes. The view of communication-as-influence can easily be fitted into this framework, whereas the view of
communication-as-informing is difficult to fit to it on a general level (Dawkins and Krebs, 1978; Krebs and Dawkins, 1984;
Markl, 1985). Secondly, the Austinian-Searlean model is confined to situations where the cooperativeness of a speaker who
intends to inform a hearer can be taken for granted by the analyst. It thus misses a core aspect of interactional situations, that
is, the way in which a speaker (more generally, a signaler) uses an overtly intentional signal to solicit cooperation from a
hearer (addressee). This omission, too, turns out to conflict with evolutionary theory. Admittedly, most researchers within
pragmatics are not currently involved in evolutionary thinking, but given the explanatory successes of Neo-Darwinian
evolutionary theory in other behavioral sciences (see Pinker, 2002; Henrich and Henrich, 2006), it would seem advisable to
scrutinize any situation where core theories of our field might violate well-tested scientific knowledge (more elaborate
versions of this argument can be found in Scott-Phillips, 2006; Dessalles, 2007).
The revision which I develop in this paper starts with a brief review of the speech act-concept in section 2. Drawing on a
line of criticism that goes back to Gu (1993), my main objection will be that the concept fails to address how signalers try to
influence addressees in order to make them carry out acts, be they acts that are in addressees’ interest or not. The alternative,
therefore, is to theorize overtly intentional communicative acts as ‘‘overt influence attempts’’. These come in two main
flavors: proposals for an addressee to carry out a ‘‘cooperative response act’’ (which may be either in the signaler’s or in the
addressee’s interest, or both), and ‘‘self-realizing communicative acts’’ (which do not rely on the agency of the addressee in
order to achieve their effect). Section 3 provides an introduction to these new concepts and highlights how they differ both
from the speech act-concept and from Clark’s (1996) notion of joint projects. Finally, section 4 discusses some issues of future
research.
The present article is part of a larger theoretical effort to align research on the cognitive comprehension of communicative
acts with recent developments within the life sciences. In my view, such a project cannot be confined to evolutionary
research per se, but must also draw on experimental results from the cognitive and neurosciences. For example, research
within these fields suggests that ‘‘inference’’ (in the sense of social meta-reasoning along the lines of, ‘‘When she4 said X, she
knew that I knew that she knew. . .’’) could play a smaller role than predicted by Neo-Gricean theories (Reich, 2009).
Limitations of space have required the omission of a systematic discussion of the cognitive and neurocomputational
assumptions and constraints behind the theory presented here; I plan to address these in future work.
2. How to use words to make hearers do things
If we hypothesize that communicative interaction is an evolutionarily adaptive infrastructure for achieving social
cooperation, we can scrutinize pragmatic theories with respect to their ability to account for the coordinative potential of
communicative acts. How do such acts achieve ‘‘social causality’’, that is, how are they able to influence a hearer and perhaps
even make him do things? In this section, I will confine myself to a brief examination of classical speech act theory (SAT) with
respect to this question. To be fair, the problem of ‘‘social causality’’ was never at the heart of Austin’s and Searle’s thoughts
(see Austin, 1962:[1_TD$IF]103; Levinson, 1983:[2_TD$IF]278); however, their views on the matter can be reconstructed from their works.
3
To be sure, Grice (1957:385) phrased his definition of overtly intentional communicative behavior (‘‘meaningNN’’, in his terminology) in terms of the
‘‘effect’’ which a speaker intends to have on an audience. However, it is generally assumed – and clearly explained in Grice’s own works – that he conceived
of this effect in informational rather than causal terms, that is, in terms of the propositional meaning which a hearer infers from the communicative
behavior.
4
As an arbitrary convention that is meant to increase readability, I will identify signalers/addressees by female/male pronouns (and graphical icons)
throughout the article, respectively.
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Fig. 1. The three components of a speech act, following Austin (1962).
To recall, the architecture of SAT is based on the idea that when people make utterances, they actually carry out three
‘‘acts’’ at one and the same time: a locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary act. Later readings of the theory have tended
to see these three ‘‘acts’’ as aspects, or levels of analysis, of one and the same speech act; I will follow this interpretation here
(e.g., Bach and Harnish, 1979). Fig. 1 shows a very simplified rendering of the three levels. The locutionary level is only
concerned with what the speaker says and what the words in her utterance refer to. The illocutionary level is the central
research object of SAT. It concerns the SAT-related ‘‘meaning’’ of an utterance, which consists of (1) the speech act category
(promise, threat etc.) which can be assigned to it in a given context, and (2) the propositional content within the assigned
category (e.g., speaker promises[3_TD$IF]/[4_TD$IF]threatens to do X under condition Y). Thus, both Austin and Searle believed that an
utterance such as ‘‘Shoot him!’’, uttered in the right context, could objectively – without a psychological investigation into
participants’ cognitive states – be assigned to the speech act category ‘‘command’’.5
Although neither Austin nor Searle seemed to be particularly interested in the perlocutionary level of analysis per se
(Marcu, 2000), they were careful to note the difference between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts through examples and
explanations. Their prototype examples for perlocutionary acts include ‘‘convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say,
surprising or misleading’’ (Austin, 1962:[5_TD$IF]109) as well as, more generally, ‘‘getting him to do something’’ (Searle, 1969:[6_TD$IF]25). To
oversimplify a bit, the illocutionary level thus refers to the meaning of the speech act and the perlocutionary level to its
effects on the hearer. Austin uses the prepositions ‘‘in’’ and ‘‘by’’ to underscore the distinction. For instance, in uttering
‘‘Danger!’’ under the right circumstances, the speaker warns the hearer in the objective sense of SAT, but by doing so, she
may have the effect of scaring him or of making him run away.
A crucial characteristic of both Austin’s and Searle’s conception of speech acts must now be mentioned: It is the speaker,
and only the speaker, who is regarded as the causal driving force behind, hence responsible for, the creation of both
illocutionary and perlocutionary effects (Searle, 1969:[7_TD$IF]43, 49f). The hearer does contribute to these effects, but only as an
essentially static and predictable condition for their successful realization (i.e., through comprehension and ‘‘uptake’’ in the
illocutionary case; through a physiological, cognitive and[8_TD$IF]/[9_TD$IF]or behavioral response in the perlocutionary case). It is thus
irrelevant from the perspective of SAT whether the hearer’s contribution is of a voluntary nature.6 This has led some authors
to object that SAT does not endow the hearer with agency (Gu, 1993:[10_TD$IF]420; Marcu, 2000:[1_TD$IF]1726).
5
On the explicitly anti-cognitivist design of classical SAT, see Sbisà (2002). Conversely, theories within the cognitive camp of pragmatics have tended to
be wary of SAT, dismissing not only the notion of illocution, but also that of perlocution (Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Airenti, 2005).
6
I am grateful to two anonymous referees for helping me clarify this point.
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Some of Austin’s and Searle’s examples of perlocutionary acts work well with the presumption of a hearer without
agency. For example, contemporary neuroscience confirms that threat-detection is largely an automatic process, and that
‘‘being scared’’ (by a warning etc.) is thus not something one chooses to do (Öhman, 2002). But other examples and
applications lead to theoretical problems, as Gu (1993) has pointed out most forcefully. Specifically, any discussion of a
perlocutionary act that makes the hearer carry out a behavioral (e.g., verbal) response begs the question of how the speaker
managed to take control over the hearer’s body. ‘‘Treating H’s response-act as a consequence of S’s speech act denies H’s
status as agent of the response-act’’ (Gu, 1993:[12_TD$IF]420).
In my view, the problematic status of perlocutionary acts in SAT can only be rectified if we give up the assumption that
speech acts are produced by speakers alone, together with the related assumption that meanings (illocutionary level) rather
than effects (perlocutionary level) are all that matters. However, as Searle realized, any attempt to assign greater theoretical
importance to the perlocutionary level would shake SAT at its core.
’’If we could get an analysis of all (or even most) illocutionary acts in terms of perlocutionary effects, the prospects of
analyzing illocutionary acts without reference to rules would be greatly increased. The reason for this is that language
could then be regarded as just a conventional means for securing or attempting to secure natural responses or effects. [. . .] As is
obvious from everything I have said, I think this reduction of the illocutionary to the perlocutionary and the consequent
elimination of rules probably cannot be carried out.’’ (Searle, 1969:71, my emph.)
The reasons behind Searle’s skepticism are discussed in the secondary literature on SAT (e.g., Levinson, 1983, ch. 5). In
spite of his skepticism, I believe that such a ‘‘reduction’’ would be a necessary consequence of aligning more and more
research within pragmatics with evidence from the life sciences (although I do not think that it would have to result in an
‘‘elimination of [social] rules’’). Research within these fields – including animal communication, physical anthropology,
evolutionary social psychology and social neuroscience – generally subscribes to the idea that communication is primarily
about social influence, not information exchange (Pollick and de Waal, 2007; the idea was first put forward by Dawkins and
Krebs, 1978; Krebs and Dawkins, 1984). Translated into the terminology of SAT, this implies that the illocutionary level
would have to be reconceived as organized in terms of the perlocutionary. It implies that speech act categories and their
felicity conditions are essentially a shared medium which signalers invoke in order to ‘‘use words to make hearers do things’’
(to rephrase Austin). The next section will offer a new set of concepts which try to circumnavigate the fundamental neglect of
the hearer in classical SAT and the consequently ‘‘asocial’’ (Schegloff, 1992:1339) design of the theory.
3. Co-act proposals (CAPs): [13_TD$IF]the basic model
This section introduces a model of communicative acts which casts them as overt attempts to influence an addressee,
either in the form of soliciting specific and momentary cooperation or in the form of providing it. I begin by motivating the
model from a functional, evolutionary point of view (section 3.1). I then introduce the concept of a cooperative response act
(co-act) and contrast it to Clark’s joint projects (section 3.2). The final two sections show, firstly, that a surprisingly large class
of communicative acts can be theorized as ‘‘co-act proposals’’ (section 3.3) and, secondly, that communicative acts which do
not constitute such proposals can plausibly be conceptualized as ‘‘self-realizing communicative acts’’ and hypothesized to be
(evolutionarily and empirically) derivative of co-act proposals (section 3.4).
3.1. Hypotheses about the evolution of cooperation requests/proposals in genus Homo
A premise behind evolutionary research is that traits of the members of a species are to be investigated in terms of their
possible functions (Buss et al., 1998; Tooby and Cosmides, 2005). What is meant by ‘‘function’’? The Neo-Darwinian theory of
evolution provides a simple and consistent answer: A trait is functional if it is adaptive, that is, if it increases the reproductive
success of an organism’s genes. The simplicity of this answer is sometimes perceived as reductionist, yet natural selection is
‘‘the only anti-entropic force known to scientists that builds functional machinery into organisms’’ (Cosmides and Tooby,
2003:54; against the critique of reductionism see Pinker, 2002). As of today, only Darwinism can spell out precisely what is
meant by the claim that, say, eyes are ‘‘for’’ seeing or Broca’s cortical area is (inter alia) ‘‘for’’ syntax processing.
Evolutionary explanations are inherently past-oriented. In order to know how adaptations came about, we must look at
the past environments in which they evolved. For species within the taxonomic genus Homo, this may involve having to go
backwards in time all the way to the divergence of Homo from the other genera within the Hominina subtribe (most notably
the genus Australopithecus) about 2-3 million years ago (Reich, 2011). Among the most conspicuous new traits of early Homo
was not only increased brain size, but also a diverse set of features, including reduced jaw muscles and reshaped dentition,
which collectively indicate that members of the new genus relied on a meat-rich diet (Domínguez-Rodrigo, 2002; Geary,
2004; Ungar, 2006). Through various sources of indirect evidence, paleoanthropologists infer from this fact that individuals
were forced to rely on significantly more complex forms of cooperation than their ancestors. For one, Hominina were (and
are) very slow short-distance runners and ill-equipped for physical fights with competing predators, such as large cats. It is
therefore likely that early Homo compensated these deficiencies by hunting and/or scavenging cooperatively, and by
dynamically assigning different, complementary roles to team members during the foraging activity (which other primates
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apparently do not do; see Tomasello, 2006:521). In addition, the lengthened period of infant care in early Homo, itself a sideeffect of increased postnatal brain growth (Bogin and Smith, 1996), meant that mothers and possibly fathers were not always
able to participate in foraging excursions. This, in turn, indicates that caregiving individuals relied on support by other group
members (Hill and Hurtado, 2009). More so than in other primate species, foraging and parenting among the species within
genus Homo were/are thus cooperative undertakings and based on transient and negotiated divisions of labor (Hrdy, 1999;
Bickerton, 2002).
Unlike purely individual traits such as body-size or foraging skill, cooperative behaviors can only emerge if a
complementary set of psychological and behavioral traits evolves in a group of organisms (Henrich and Henrich, 2006). For
instance, individuals have to know how to initiate cooperation and how to respond to such initiation attempts by other group
members. They must be sufficiently tolerant of each other’s physical proximity and have the cognitive skills which allow
them to balance the egalitarian logic of cooperation against the intrasexual dominance hierarchies which permeate social life
in group-living primates (Mazur, 2005; Hare et al., 2007; Tomasello, 2009). Also, complex forms of cooperation, those that
span a certain amount of time or apply a functional division of labor, require surprisingly intricate cognitive and social
mechanisms that guarantee all participants that the reproductive success of their genes (‘‘inclusive fitness’’) increases – at
least on average, for otherwise, natural selection should weed out cooperating individuals and replace them by more
antagonistic ones (Cosmides and Tooby, 2005; West et al., 2007).
Taken together, all these circumstances impose very restrictive conditions on the evolvability of complex cooperation in
primates (Henrich and Henrich, 2006; Reich, 2011). Mechanisms must be in place which prevent stronger cooperators from
exploiting weaker ones (Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981). In hindsight, we know of course that early species within genus Homo
somehow were able to overcome the restrictions and to evolve such mechanisms. My thesis, following Tomasello (2008,
2009) in spirit if not letter, is that communicative interaction played a key role in this transition, and that communicative
interaction therefore constitutes a crucial part of how evolution responded to the increased pressures towards cooperative
behavior in early Homo. To substantiate this thesis, let me point out the following qualitative differences between
communicative interaction and the various forms of communication that can be found in other primates.
1. Voluntary control over the communicative act. Humans exert a high degree of intentional, ‘‘voluntary’’ control over the
production of communicative acts, whether these are made verbally, gesturally, facially (winks etc.) or posturally.7
Vocalizations in non-human primates, on the other hand, tend to be closely tied to emotional arousal (Burling, 2005, ch. 2).
Only the great apes and some small ape species are able to use a small amount of brachiomanual gestures in a controlled
manner (Tomasello and Call, 2007).
2. Voluntary control over behavioral responses to a communicative act. Cognitive and neuroscientific studies have shown that
pragmatic comprehension is largely an automatic process, with higher-level processes coming into play only when the
message is too difficult or indirect to be processed at lower levels (Wang et al., 2006; Blakemore et al., 2007; Pulvermüller
et al., 2008). Nonetheless, human hearers exert a comparatively high degree of voluntary control over their behavioral
responses to communicative acts. This, too, distinguishes communicative interaction from primate calls, which tend to
produce highly schematic and often emotional responses in hearers (see Cheney and Seyfarth, 2007:217ff).
3. Targeting of communicative acts. Communicative acts tend to be highly targeted at specific addressees, whereas signals by
non-human primates are usually not aimed in this way. In that sense, the notion of an ‘‘addressee’’ is very frequently
meaningless outside the context of communicative interaction.
4. Overt intentionality of communicative acts. The very occurrence of communicative acts is overtly intentional. When an
individual produces a communicative act, the fact that she does so is ‘‘on-record’’ and therefore not plausibly deniable
(Pinker et al., 2008). It constitutes a social fact which can be recurred to at a later point in time (‘‘’But you said X!’’). This
can be contrasted to, say, communication through warning calls, where the fact that communication (as opposed to mere
arousal) is occurring may not always be evident and certainly not enforceable.
5. ‘‘Speaking’’ as a valued resource. As pointed out by Miller (2000) and Scott-Phillips (2006), humans in different cultures
tend to value opportunities for speaking higher than opportunities for listening: ‘‘People compete to say things. They
strive to be heard [. . .] those who fail to yield the floor [. . .] are considered selfish, not altruistic. Turn-taking rules [. . .]
regulate not who gets to listen, but who gets to talk’’ (Miller, 2000:350; cited in Scott-Phillips, 2006). Also, speaking is
physiologically supported by a series of species-unique, sophisticated and evolutionarily ‘‘costly’’ (i.e., potentially fitnessreducing) traits, including a reshaped and descended larynx (which entails a significant risk of choking), enhanced
respiratory and labial control and various cognitive and motor adaptations in the brain (MacLarnon and Hewitt, 1999;
Fitch, 2000). Human hearing, on the other hand, is good but not better than that of other higher primates (see already
Masterton et al., 1969).
6. Complex cognitive-affective and socio-cultural infrastructures that equalize payoffs from cooperation. Humans have evolved a
rich set of social emotions which are associated with the enforcement of reciprocity in (or after) cooperative encounters.
7
In the following, I use the term ‘‘voluntary’’ as a shorthand for the expression ‘‘due to the agency of person X’’ and without making assumptions about
the neuropsychological status of ‘‘free will’’ or even ‘‘agency’’. Various recent works in cognitive science suggest that free will is sometimes an illusion (for an
overview see Wegner, 2003). Also, it is currently unclear whether ‘‘agency’’ should refer to the involvement of high-level control processes as typically
associated with the prefrontal cortex, to processes (possibly low-level) that include some kind of reference to the agent’s identity/self-concept, or to
something entirely different.
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They include gratitude, embarrassment, shame and guilt, love, envy, contempt, moral outrage, pride and admiration
(Fessler and Haley, 2003). In addition, all human societies seem to furnish socio-cultural norms and mechanisms for
dealing with people who frequently solicit cooperation without reciprocating it (Brown, 1991). Although neither of these
psychological and social mechanisms are exclusively tied to communicative interaction, they constitute a crucial
infrastructure for supporting cooperation in the medium of communicative interaction.
The point here is that collectively, these six properties cohere well with the hypothesis that communicative acts evolved
primarily (a) to initiate and coordinate social cooperation, and (b), more specifically, to allow signalers to perform overt
attempts to influence addressees. Specifically, properties (1) and (2) permit communicative interaction to be highly flexible
and context-specific, even though comprehension itself is an essentially automatic process.8 Properties (3)–(5) put any
communicative act under the (operative) ‘‘presumption’’ that the signaler wants the addressee to ‘‘do something’’ –
something which proximately or ultimately coheres with her interests.9 Because of (2), the addressee can then choose
‘‘voluntarily’’ (see Footnote 7) whether or not to respond in the desired manner, which is taken to mean here that he can
integrate relatively complex social and personal information about the signaler and the current context into this decision.
Finally, property (6) increases the overall likelihood that addressees respond cooperatively rather than antagonistically. Due
to various external infrastructures (norms etc.), they are more likely to gain from their cooperative behavior in the long run
(e.g., because the signaler reciprocates at a later point in time, or because other group members now view the addressee as a
preferable cooperation partner; West et al., 2007). In the language of evolutionary theory, properties (1)–(6) ensured that
communicative interaction was able to become an evolutionarily stable strategy of behavior during the emergence of Homo
(Maynard-Smith, 1982) – not only for signalers, but also for addressees.
3.2. Co-act proposals versus joint projects
The hypothesis developed in the preceding section was that communication via communicative acts, which is speciestypical in humans, evolved as a device for eliciting very specific responses in an addressee, responses over which the
addressee’s brain has a comparatively high degree of high-level control (‘‘’volition’’/‘‘agency’’). This is a thesis about the
function, rather than the structure, of such acts. Nonetheless, it may guide us in developing an alternative to the idea that
they can be understood as Austinian-Searlean speech acts, because section 2 showed that the speech act-concept does not do
justice to the cooperative nature of communicative acts. Based on this critique, I begin with a reconsideration of the social
relationship between the participants, A and B, in a simple cooperative encounter.
Some cooperative tasks are organized in a manner which allows both participants to profit immediately from their
collaboration. For instance, A and B are carrying a large deer which they plan to share and which neither of them could have
carried home by themselves. Herbert Clark has offered an alternative to (or elaboration of) speech act theory which views
such win-win situations as paradigmatic. In Clark’s (1996) terminology, A and B are executing the joint project of carrying a
deer. Examples of joint projects which Clark uses himself in order to motivate the design of his theory are, most notably,
dancing and making music together (see already Clark and Carlson, 1982). These examples as well as Clark’s theoretical
explication of the joint project-concept show that Clark regards prototypical communicative interaction as a socially
symmetrical happening. To be sure, either A or B must take on the role of ‘‘projecting’’ (i.e., initiating) a joint project. But in
virtue of its ‘‘uptake’’ by the other party, the joint project is then assumed to serve a ‘‘joint purpose’’ of both parties (Clark,
1996:191–203). In that sense, Clark regards joint projects as a deeply balanced form of collaboration.10 My own attempt at
rendering Clark’s concept graphically is given in part (i) of Fig. 2.
For the following reason, the joint project-concept does not convince me as a general model or even just a guiding
metaphor for the analysis of communicative acts. The empirical fact that one party initiates and the other responds should
not be seen as accidental. For instance, if I am the foreman of a construction site, you are my subordinate and I point at a beam
that still needs to be carried to the pile (or, more explicitly but with the same gist, I tell you to ‘‘Carry that beam to the
pile please’’), it is awkward to say that you and I are pursuing the joint project of you-transferring-the-beam. Likewise,
when I happen to know that you are thirsty and point at the water bottle behind your back, it would hardly be meaningful to
say that you and I are executing the joint project of making-you-aware-of-the-water-bottle. Whatever is symmetrical about
(some) communicative encounters occurs at a higher level of organization – at the level of multi-turn sequences rather than
individual initiation-response pairs. People sometimes do engage in harmoniously symmetrical activities like dancing or
making music together, but these are a poor metaphor for the basic event sequences from which communicative interactions
are built.
8
Indeed, according to evolutionary psychologists, involuntary (automatic) cognitive processes, though fast and neurocomputationally cheap to
implement, have the disadvantage of being less flexible than consciously controlled processes (Cosmides and Tooby, 2000).
9
For instance, if I whisper ‘‘Watch!’’ in order to warn you of a lion behind your back, you may be the proximate beneficiary of my altruistic act.
Ultimately, the warning may well be in my interest or in the ‘‘interest’’ of my genes (e.g., because you and I are related, because I need you as a cooperation
partner, because my altruistic act increases my social standing vis-à-vis others, and so on). See the vast evolutionary literature on selfishness and altruism in
human behavior (e.g., Keltner and Anderson, 2000; Burling, 2005; Tooby and Cosmides, 2005; West et al., 2007).
10
I am not suggesting that Clark (1996) denies the general possibility of power and domination in communicative interaction, but it is clear that he does
not regard it as a challenge to the joint project-concept.
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Fig. 2. The joint project-concept and the CAP-concept.
The broad concept of overt influence attempt (OIA, see Fig. 3) is an alternative to the joint project-concept that coheres
better with properties (1)–(6) from section 3.1 and that also addresses the theoretical aporias of the speech act-concept as
discussed in section 2. The concept builds on Dawkins and Krebs’ view of communication-as-social-influence while
simultaneously incorporating the fundamental insight of Gricean pragmatics that communicative acts achieve their effects
by way of their overtness (i.e., the fact that they are meant to be understood). Taken by itself, however, the concept is too
broad to be of much use. The remainder of the article therefore focuses on the two types of OIAs which constitute an
exhaustive categorization of the spectrum of possible OIAs. Let us go through them in order. More detailed explanations as
well as examples are given in sections 3.3 and 3.4.
CAP:
A co-act (short for: cooperative response act) can be defined as an act that an addressee carries out (a) voluntarily
(b) because he comprehends that the signaler proposes that he carry it out (see Fig. 2). A CAP (short for: co-act
proposal) is an OIA that conveys such a proposal. Note that the ‘‘cooperative nature’’ of a CAP can lie either in the
addressee cooperating with the signaler (middle part of Fig. 2), or vice-versa (right part of Fig. 2), or both. If it is
the addressee who renders the cooperative service, one might also say that the signaler made a ‘‘co-act request’’.
Instead, I shall use the term ‘‘co-act proposal’’ in a general way that leaves out who offers a service and who
benefits from it. From an evolutionary point of view, however, this question is often crucial, and I shall return to
it below.
SCA:
A SCA (short for: self-realizing communicative act) is an OIA that realizes its effects in virtue of the addressee’s
automatic comprehension system alone. That is, a SCA does not depend on a voluntary decision by the
addressee, instead circumventing the addressee’s agency.
These new concepts open up a host of questions, some of which can be addressed right away. First of all, as in most
classifications which claim to have empirical relevance, the sharpness of the distinction between CAPs and SCAs is
somewhat diluted in naturally occurring data (see below), a circumstance which does not diminish its analytical utility.
Secondly, I shall argue that SCAs are a residual phenomenon which was able to evolve only after the emergence of CAPbased interaction in genus Homo. My intuition is that SCAs are not very frequent or at least not dominant in naturally
occurring interactions (see section 3.4). Thirdly, the term ‘‘cooperative’’ should not be read in a normative fashion. In
theoretical biology, ‘‘cooperative behavior’’ is a technical phrase denoting behavior that is proximately beneficial for an
individual other than the agent (West et al., 2007). Reasons for carrying out such behavior may still be selfish – indeed, they
often are, because ‘‘selfishness’’ (in the technical sense of: probable enhancement of the individual’s ‘‘inclusive fitness’’) is a
precondition for the evolvability of any behavior.
The notion of a co-act is of crucial importance within the evolutionarily informed framework of the present article. As
shown in Fig. 2, a co-act is – unlike a joint project – a socially asymmetrical micro-event. It is proposed by one interactant and
executed by the other. The addressee may, by definition, choose whether or not to complete the co-act, but if he does, he lets
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Yes
CAP
(co-act proposal)
OIA
(overt influence aempt)
Relies on
addressee's
agency?
No
SCA
(self-realizing communicave act)
Fig. 3. Classificatory relationship between the three new concepts.
the signaler determine his next act, thus placing himself voluntarily under momentary causal control of the signaler. We may
therefore say that the completion of a co-act turns the addressee into an ‘‘agent tool’’ of the latter.11
A co-act can involve the execution of an act which the signaler could, in principle, have performed herself. For instance, if I
ask you to ‘‘Carry that beam to the pile please’’ because you happen to stand close to the beam, it is possible that I could
have walked over myself and carried the beam. (Austin makes a similar point about perlocutionary acts; see Austin,
1962:119). In other cases, it does not make sense to assume that the signaler’s use of the addressee as an agent tool functions
as an alternative to carrying out the act herself. For instance, if I ask, ‘‘Have you ever been to Hamburg?’’ and you answer
‘‘No!’’, I could probably not have performed an alternative act in the same situation (say, reading your mind) in order to
acquire this knowledge. Nonetheless – and this is crucial – the notion of an agent tool makes sense even in cases such as this
one, where the realization of the co-act depends entirely on the cooperativeness of the addressee. Humans have extended
their control over the physical world immensely through technical tools, performing actions which would never have been
imaginable without technology. The use of agent tools extended their causal reach in an analogous manner to new domains.
Frey argues that this analogy is supported by shared neural mechanisms for the use of (what I call) technical and agent tools.
‘‘‘[. . .] the neural overlap between tool use and communicative gestures is actually much more extensive and distributed.
As for why this might be, an interesting possibility to consider hinges on the fact that both classes of behavior can be viewed
as goal-directed, manipulative acts. Rather than affecting inanimate objects through direct application of force,
communicative gestures often target individuals in whom we hope to evoke a certain behavioral response.’’ (Frey,
2008:1954, my emph.)
The question is hence not whether addressees can function as agent tools, but why they would want to let any signaler
determine their next acts – in other words, why they would want to cooperate. Rephrased in terms of (evolutionarily)
ultimate rather than (physiologically) proximate causes (see section 3.1), this is a question about the evolvability of a certain
type of behavior. The answer is implied by properties (1)–(6) discussed in that section. Cooperation by the addressee with
the signaler became an evolutionarily stable strategy because of the specific properties which communicative interaction
offers to its participants. Communicative acts are overt (i.e., ‘‘on record’’) and targeted, addressees control essential aspects of
their behavioral response to them, and there are external mechanisms (norms etc.) that frequently guarantee addressees
who cooperate with signalers (or signalers who offer help to addressees) a reward at a later point in time.
Consider the following modification of the examples in Fig. 2. If I yell at you to ‘‘Carry that beam!’’, you may feel
threatened, but the crucial aspect of your response – whether you carry the beam – is underdetermined by my yelling,
because it requires an act of choice on your part. This choice will likely take into account cultural norms, our relative social
positions, and so on. In contrast to Austin’s notion of illocutionary acts, co-acts are thus never fulfilled by the signaler’s
agency alone. The utterance itself is just a proposal for you to carry out a co-act; in other words, it is a CAP. This answers Gu’s
(1993) objection to speech act theory, discussed in section 2 and concerning the latter’s neglect of the agency of the
addressee. By way of distinguishing co-acts and CAPs, the different contributions of addressee and signaler to the
accomplishment of a basic interactional unit become clear.
3.3. Co-act proposals in three domains
The question, now, is which of those communicative events that are usually called speech acts can fruitfully be seen as
CAPs instead. Here and in section 3.4, I will make the case that most communicative events – save for the well-defined
residual category of self-realizing communicative acts (SCAs) – can be reconceptualized in this way. There are, of course,
many events for which the new concept already has self-evident plausibility. They include simple imperative and
interrogative sentences or gestures (see Table 1).
11
A fortunate term coined by Bates et al. (1998 [1975]); the phrase ‘‘social tool’’ works equally well (see Bard, 1994).
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Table 1
Simple examples of CAPs.
Communicative act (+ context)
Possible paraphrase of conveyed CAP
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Walk-away.
Help-yourself-to-cookies-from-the-jar.
Pass-mom-the-salt.
Tell-passerby-what-time-it-is.
Give-signaler-cookies-from-the-jar.
‘‘Leave me alone!’’ (Uttered by ex-girlfriend).
(Signalee just said that he is hungry.) Signaler points her finger at cookie jar over signalee’s head.
‘‘Can you pass me the salt?’’ (Uttered by mom at dinner.)
‘‘What time is it?’’ (Uttered by a passerby.)
(Signaler just said that she is hungry.) Signaler points her finger at cookie jar over signalee’s head.
In the theory developed in this article, it is basic imperative gestures and utterances – as opposed to basic declarative ones
which are favored by linguists (Belnap, 1990) – which serve as prototypical examples of CAPs. Imperative gestures/utterances
exhibit perhaps the simplest possible relationship between the ‘‘usage’’ of another human being as an ‘‘agent tool’’ (see
section 3.2) and the communicative act necessary to recruit him for this purpose.12 The applicability of the CAP-concept
extends smoothly to simple interrogative gestures/utterances, which are thus viewed as proposals for an addressee to make
a statement in the following turn that fulfills the signaler’s specified informational need. Incidentally, this idea is not new, as
it has been suggested by Bates et al. (1998 [1975]).
The first real challenge, however, is to assimilate utterances that use a declarative format – assertions, warnings, promises
etc. – to the new concept. Again, there are easy cases from which we can begin. Consider the following utterance by a
shoplifter who has just been stopped and handcuffed by a police officer: ‘‘Officer, I swear I’m innocent.’’ Expectably,
the thief does not only want the officer to acquire a belief, she also wants to affect the course of the interaction and be
released. Yet in most circumstances, it would probably be false to say that the ‘‘meaning’’ of the thief’s utterance is the
imperative CAP, ‘‘Let-go-of-the-speaker’’. Instead, she wants the officer (a) to acquire a belief about her innocence, and then,
based on his newly acquired belief, take the additional act (b) of letting go of her. Her proximate goal (conveyance of a belief)
is thus organized and comprehensible in terms of an ultimate interactional goal (being released by the officer).13
Importantly, both goals depend entirely on the agency of the hearer – in (a), he has to decide whether to believe the speaker,
and in (b), he has to decide whether to unlock the handcuffs. Insofar as (a) is directly covered by the intended scope of the
thief’s utterance, it is meaningful to say that she is making a (declarative) CAP that asks the signaler to carry out an act (here:
acquire a belief) because she wants him to. Goal (b), on the other hand, is not covered by the CAP, even though it may be seen as
implied by it. (As a litmus test, consider that later in court, the shoplifter could plausibly deny having requested the officer to
unlock the handcuffs.)
For speech act theorists, the idea of a declarative CAP may seem strange and unnecessary. Is it not awkward to say that the
signaler is ‘‘proposing for the addressee to acquire a belief’’? Would it not be easier to say, in line with speech act theory and
Gricean pragmatics, that she is simply making an assertion and thereby conveying a belief? For the following two reasons, I
maintain that these questions must be answered in the negative.
1. The agency of the addressee. As discussed in section 2, classical speech act theory ignores the extent to which speech acts
are co-realized by addressees. This holds true even in the case of declarative speech acts. A belief which a signaler wants an
addressee to acquire can strike the addressee as plausible or not, and if he is unable to judge its plausibility, he can consider
whether he finds the signaler credible or not. Put in more psychological terms, acquisition of discrete and explicit beliefs is
often a high-level process in the sense that it uses high-level checking mechanisms to safeguard the addressee from
acquiring erroneous or fraudulent beliefs (Miller and Cohen, 2001). Hence all the signaler can usually do is propose the
addressee to decide to acquire a belief – directly (or even indirectly) copying it into the addressees brain is not an option. I
will argue in section 3.4 that the class of declarative utterances that are truly able to bypass the agency of the addressee is
relatively small.
2. The problem of propositionality. The paradigmatic status of declarative utterances in much of contemporary linguistics
(Belnap, 1990) has tempted many pragmatists, especially those in the Gricean tradition, to assume that comprehension of
communicative acts is an essentially propositional process. For instance, standard textbooks frequently claim (or
presuppose) that implicatures are processed in a manner which transforms a given utterance (e.g., ‘‘Some people have
already left the party’’) into a new proposition (e.g., ‘‘Not all people have already left the party’’; this
example being taken from Blakemore, 1992). However, there is considerable cognitive and psycholinguistic evidence
against the notion that propositionality always and necessarily plays an important role in the comprehension process (for
an overview, see Pinker, 2007; see also section 4.2). The continuity between gestures and verbal utterances provides
another case in point – there is just no evidence suggesting that, say, a pointing gesture (e.g., the signaler points at the
cookie jar over the signalee’s head) results in an internal proposition like ‘‘She wants me to give her the cookie jar’’ (see
Airenti, 2005). But once we give up the idea that comprehension is essentially a propositional process, the declarative
paradigm and the underlying notion that declarative speech acts automatically convey beliefs lose much of their
attraction.
12
There are also strong ethological, ecological and sociological reasons to hypothesize that communicative interaction evolved initially via
conventionalization of imperative signals – reasons which cannot be detailed here.
13
Compare Gumperz’ distinction between local and global interactional strategies (Gumperz, 1990:431).
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Fig. 4. Three domains for the execution of a co-act by the addressee.
So far in this section, I hope to have convinced readers that many imperative and interrogative utterances, and at least
some declarative utterances, are CAPs. Does this leave additional types of utterances unaccounted for in the broader picture?
No, because the theory presented here can explain the three mentioned types, from a functional point of view, as an
exhaustive disjunction. If we look at the CAPs which are conveyed functionally14 through imperative, interrogative and
declarative utterances, we get a classification of three domains within which the addressee is suggested to make a difference
by way of executing the co-act (see Figs. 4 and 5). He may either make a difference to his own mind (by way of acquiring a
belief, attitude etc.; this is the declarative domain because simple declarative clauses are typically targeted at it); or a
difference to the signaler’s mind (by way of providing her with information; interrogative domain); or a difference ‘‘anywhere
else’’ in the world (by way of performing a material action; imperative domain). It is true that some languages provide
additional clause types beyond the triad of declarative, imperative and interrogative ones, but these are accounted for in the
suggested functional reconceptualization of utterances because of its logical exhaustiveness (e.g., Korean promissives have a
tendency to convey declarative CAPs, etc.).15
The classification of CAPs into declarative, imperative and interrogative CAPs answers the question of what kinds of such
proposals are empirically possible. It does not establish, of course, whether all or even most communicative acts can
meaningfully be classified as CAPs in the first place. Yet the classification is a helpful tool for addressing this problem, to
which I now turn.
3.4. Co-act proposals and self-realizing communicative acts
In both Grice (1957) and Searle (1969), an utterance involves a speaker who tries to express a proposition or speech act by
conveying an overt communicative intention. In the preceding sections, I suggested adding the stipulation that utterances
(and communicative acts more generally) frequently also target the agency of the addressee, who is expected to choose to
carry out a co-act. Yet it is certainly meaningful to conceive of overtly intentional signals which do not refer to his agency. I
will designate such signals as self-realizing communicative acts (SCAs). A SCA is an attempt to overtly influence an addressee
without giving him a choice in the matter. As mentioned above, cognitive and neuroscientific research shows that pragmatic
comprehension is largely an automatic process. In order to work at all, SCAs must exploit this automaticity, which leads to
two important cognitive constraints on the possible scope of SCAs.
1. Behavioral responses to SCAs. It is very difficult to make a person carry out an involuntary physical action when all one has
at one’s disposal are communicative signals. It might be possible to construct extreme examples here (involving fear etc.),
14
As opposed to syntactically. Linguists generally distinguish between the syntactic level of clauses (which can be declarative, imperative, interrogative
etc.) and the functional level of utterances (assertions, directives, questions etc.). It is a well-known result of pragmatic research that the functional type of
utterances is underdetermined by their clause type (Wilson and Sperber, 1998 [1988]). However, there is no well-established terminology to describe the
functional level, so I shall continue to speak of declarative, imperative and interrogative utterances when referring to this level.
15
Comparative linguistic research on clause type systems in the world’s languages has previously suggested that imperative, interrogative and declarative
clauses are the only types with a claim to universality (König and Siemund, 2007). Interestingly, a pragmatic explanation as to why these three should be
universal is still lacking (but see Portner, 2004, for a non-pragmatic explanation). The theory offered here has the unintended benefit of explaining the global
prevalence of the three mentioned clause types in terms of functional pressures which arise from the fact that languages have to be useful as media of
interaction (on this type of argument, see Levinson, 2006b; De Ruiter and Levinson, 2008). Apparently, being able, as an addressee, to project the kind of act
which the signaler proposes (‘‘acquiring a belief’’ versus ‘‘informing the signaler’’ versus ‘‘making a material change in the world’’) is a recurrent
interactional problem. Languages have thus evolved – and continue to evolve and change – under the subtle (statistical) pressure of making the domain (in
the sense of Fig. 4) of the co-act proposal easily recoverable to the addressee within the communicative situation. For instance, note that most European
languages make imperative (vs. declarative) types rapidly projectable through clause-initial changes (‘‘Run!’’ vs. ‘‘You run.’’), and certain interrogative
types through clause-initial wh-words.
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Fig. 5. The four types of communicative acts.
but for the purposes of this article, I will assume that SCAs are essentially barred from the interrogative and imperative
domain (see again Fig. 4). Conversely, this means that it is only by way of CAPs, rather than SCAs, that a signaler can get an
addressee to carry out a physical action (imperative domain) or even to respond with a communicative act (interrogative
domain).
2. Cognitive responses to SCAs. A SCA which forces the addressee to involuntarily acquire a belief, an attitude, an emotion or
another mental state is certainly conceivable. However, adults with average intellectual abilities exert a certain degree of
high-level control over some of their mental states (Miller and Cohen, 2001). This holds especially true for beliefs, which
are filtered by the addressee’s high-level judgments of plausibility and credibility as well as motivational factors (see
section 3.3).
SCAs are therefore much more confined than CAPs in the types of responses they can elicit from addressees. I do not claim
to have a general theory of which kinds of (cognitive) responses they can create, but I have attempted an inductive and
probably incomplete classification in Table 2.
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Table 2
Three (five?) types of SCAs.
Types of SCA-performing utterances
Example utterances
1. Ritual utterances
Some greetings/farewells/excuses/. . ., ‘‘filling material’’
(‘‘Well’’, ‘‘Umm’’, ‘‘Right’’, . . ., but see Schiffrin, 1987) etc.
The signaler is a police officer who has just arrested a
criminal. She now gives him his Miranda warning:
‘‘You have the right to remain silent. Anything you
say can and will [. . .]’’.
Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson’s hitman character in the popular
movie Pulp Fiction) enjoys giving his victims an intimidating biblical speech
right before he shoots them: ‘‘And I will strike down upon thee with
great vengeance and furious anger [. . .]’’.
The signaler looks at her grocery list and says, as if talking to herself, ‘‘I wonder
whether I forgot something’’.
The signaler has just hurt her finger and shouts, ‘‘Dammit!’’ – as opposed to
‘‘Help!’’, which would usually be considered a CAP, and also as opposed to a
mere scream induced by pain, which would not be a communicative act.
2. Institutional utterances
3. ‘‘Overtly subliminal’’ utterances
(i.e., psychological manipulations
that merely use the façade of a CAP)
4. (?) ‘‘Thinking aloud’’ utterances
5. (?) Affective-exclamative utterances
The question marks behind types 4. and 5. are meant to mark them as borderline cases. Neither ‘‘thinking aloud’’ nor
proper exclamatives need an audience, which means that they are not necessarily overt influence attempts. Also note that,
under special circumstances, any form of behavior can become a CAP. For example, uttering ‘‘Dammit!’’ in a deliberately
controlled and reproachful manner could conceivably serve as a declarative CAP to have the addressee acquire a belief along
the lines of ‘‘I-hurt-myself-and-it-is-all-your-fault’’. When reading Table 2, readers are therefore asked to imagine contexts
in which the examples work. All in all – unless readers are able to think of a large class of SCAs which I have overlooked – I
hope that Table 2 shows that SCAs are, compared to CAPs, a relatively minor interactional phenomenon. From an evolutionary
point of view, this is entirely unsurprising, as the ability to comprehend SCAs renders humans socially manipulable without
giving their deliberate cognitive systems (‘‘executive function’’) a say in the matter. One could therefore predict that human
interaction competence evolved under the constraint of keeping involuntary manipulability low. However, for an empirical
answer, which I cannot offer here, a range of corpus studies would be needed in order to estimate (a) the ratio of SCAs to CAPs
in various communicative activity types as well as different cultural contexts, and (b) the relative social momentousness of
SCAs versus CAPs (where my hypothesis would be that socially highly consequential acts are less frequently carried out by
way of SCAs).
In sum, the theory of co-act proposals recognizes four types of overtly intentional communicative acts – three kinds of
CAPs plus the rather strange phenomenon of SCAs. A graphical synopsis is given in Fig. 5. I have tried to show in this section
that the classification is empirically relevant, but I reiterate that its design is analytical and therefore guaranteed to be
exhaustive (see Fig. 3). What I have essentially ignored are those signals which are not overtly intentional influence
attempts, and which are thus neither CAPs nor SCAs. For example, participants in sociable conversation continuously
coordinate their movements and vocalizations through a process called interactional alignment (Pickering and Garrod,
2004). Also, some discourse particles, including certain cases of ejaculations and interjections, are perhaps not produced
voluntarily and hence do not share a central characteristic of communicative acts. They are therefore ignored by the theory
discussed in this article.
4. Beyond speech act theory: [15_TD$IF]open questions and research opportunities
‘‘The box that conversation stuffs us into is Pandora’s.’’ (Goffman, 1976:311)
Classical speech act theory (SAT) originated as an attempt to contradict the notion that utterances are nothing but
factual statements, arguing instead that they are social acts. I have tried to show that this view needs an upgrade.
Frequently, communicative acts (utterances, gestures etc.) are not just social acts, but more specifically attempts to procure
cooperation from, or provide it to, an addressee. I have tried to marshal different types of theoretical and empirical evidence
in support of this claim; nevertheless, I am fully aware that my hypotheses do not yet constitute a full-fledged alternative to
SAT. In fact, many issues need to be resolved before the theory of co-act proposals (CAP-theory, from here onward) can be
used for exhaustive analyses of empirical interactions. In this section, I want to mention the challenges which I see as the
most pressing.
4.1. First complication: [16_TD$IF]the relationship between utterances and co-act proposals
I mentioned earlier that the relationship between overtly intentional signals and co-act proposals is not one-to-one,
insofar as some utterances are self-realizing communicative acts (SCAs), and others are not even communicative acts
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(because they are not recipient-designed). But it turns out that the relationship is even more complex. To illustrate this point,
it will be helpful to have empirical data at our disposal. The following transcripts reproduce the starting sequences of two
sales encounters.16
Example 1 [SynFE-5.33.50, Swedish]. First turns
of a talk between a customer and a vendor (both male)
at a kitchen store.
Example 2 [SynFE-2.13.40, Swedish]. First turns
of a talk between a customer and a vendor
(both male) at a mobile phone store.
(Individuals are not the same as in Example 1.)
1. Vendor:
hello, can I help you
with anything\
1. Vendor:
hello
2. Customer:
yes umm: I would like to look
at espresso machines
2. Customer:
right, I would like to look
at a mobile telephone/
3. Vendor:
mm:/, we have those over there
3. Vendor:
mmm::/
4. Customer:
yes\, I can follow you
4. Customer:
I have a, 3410 Nokia
5. Vendor:
\mm:/
6. Customer:
do you sell Nokia as well\
or what
Turns 1–4 in Example 1, and turn 2 in Example 2, each contain more than just a single CAP. ‘‘Hello’’ is a ritual expression
which I would classify as a SCA insofar as it does not require the addressee to ‘‘do’’ anything in response. The remaining part
of turn 1 in Example 1, ‘‘can I help you with anything’’, is obviously an interrogative CAP, and it is sequentially treated as
such. The second turns in both examples consist of two declarative CAPs each.
Turn 3 in Example 1 is, in my view, a declarative CAP (‘‘mm:/’’) followed by a phrase (‘‘we have those over there’’)
which could reasonably be classified as a multi-domain CAP (see Fig. 4). It obviously contains a declarative CAP, insofar as it
provides the addressee with new information that can be believed or not (at least in principle). It also suggests an imperative
CAP, because it seems to convey the vendor’s wish to have the costumer walk with him ‘‘over there’’. (Note that the
customer’s ‘‘yes\, I can follow you’’ supports this interpretation, as it responds to two different CAPs at once.) Nothing in
the theoretical design of the CAP-concept speaks against the notion of a multi-domain CAP, and I therefore suggest adding it
to our conceptual stock.
4.2. Second complication: [17_TD$IF]the interlocking of cognition and communication
Like previous theories in the cognitivist camp of pragmatics (Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Tirassa, 1999; Levinson, 2006a),
but with slightly different results, I have tried to make sure that CAP-theory coheres with current knowledge of the
architecture of the comprehension system in the human brain. Instead of providing an extensive review here, I must confine
myself to mentioning the most important areas which, I believe, ought to be taken into account in the further elaboration of
CAP-theory (a fuller discussion is given in Reich, 2009).
1. Unlike Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:243ff) or the Turin-school of Cognitive Pragmatics (Airenti et al.,
1993; Tirassa, 1999; Airenti, 2005; Bara, 2010), CAP-theory tries to preserve the basic intuition of SAT that most overtly
intentional signals are acts (more specifically: proposals). This choice has an intriguing consequence which seems to
have been overlooked by speech act theorists. A crucial feature of action-recognition in higher animals lies in the fact that
observed behavior is comprehended under the hypothesis that the observee pursues a causal goal (Gallese et al., 1996;
Gallese and Metzinger, 2003; Grafton and Hamilton, 2007). Indeed, goal-directed cognition is an extremely ancient and
pervasive characteristic of animal brains (Hills, 2006), whereas the processing of propositional meaning is a very recent
innovation in the human lineage (Hauser et al., 2002). In addition, a sizeable class of overtly intentional signals is not
propositional (the pointing gesture, the ‘‘wink’’, certain simple vocalizations etc.). CAP-theory can therefore hypothesize
that comprehension of overtly intentional signals is cognitively organized as a form of causal goal-recognition, rather
than a form of (propositional) ‘‘meaning-calculation’’. Propositional meaning may very frequently, but not always, play
an intermediary computational role in this process. In rather blunt but intuitively clear terms, the guiding question
which the brain of a comprehending agent ‘‘asks itself’’ could thereby be paraphrased as: ‘‘What causal goal (co-act) does
the signaler want me to accomplish?’’ Unsurprisingly, however, this hypothesis solves some problems while introducing
new ones. For one, there exists almost no experimental neurocognitive literature which could help us determine how the
brain represents goals (research on the so-called mirror-neuron system being a notable exception, see Gallese and
Metzinger, 2003). In addition, my hypothesis does not specify the cognitive mechanism through which the brain
16
From a corpus of 70 sales encounters audio-recorded in Sweden in 2004-5. Translation by the author. Transcription follows the usual conventions:
‘‘hello:’’ = prolonged pronunciation, ‘‘hello,’’ = short pause, ‘‘/hello\’’ = rising/falling intonation, ‘‘hello’’ = stress.
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reconstructs the proposed co-act – is it abductive inference, statistical pattern recognition, constraint satisfaction, or
something which nobody has yet thought of?
2. Once we replace a theory of speech acts with a more general theory of communicative acts (e.g., Airenti, 2005), it
becomes impossible to ignore the problem of context. Both SAT and Grice’s implicature theory are vague with regard
to what context is, how it is internally structured, how it is anticipated by the signaler during the production process,
and how it is used in the comprehension process. Later research has attempted to mend this deficit (see Goodwin and
Duranti, 1992; Gumperz, 1992; Sbisà, 2002; Terkourafi, 2009), but to my knowledge, only the Turin-school has
approached the problem in a systematic experimental, cognitivist manner (Bosco et al., 2004; Tirassa et al., 2006). I
believe that one way of increasing the pace of progress in this area of research would be to investigate more
methodically the comprehension of (evolutionarily) basic communicative acts, such as the pointing gesture, the
summons gesture, object-offering- and object-request gestures, and primitive one-word utterances like ‘‘Yes’’ and
‘‘No’’. All of these are culturally universal (though conveyed by signs that vary between cultures) and able to convey
complex social information (e.g., see Tomasello, 2006, on varieties of pointing). Indeed, sophisticated forms of
communicatively coordinated collaboration can be carried out by way of such acts alone, which leads me to suggest
that they are evolutionarily basic insofar as they played an important role in the early evolutionary scaffolding of
communicative interaction in genus Homo (Reich, 2010a). Also, since they are semantically trivial, a reasonable
hypothesis is that context plays a relatively dominant role in their comprehension. What is the precise nature of this
role, and what can it tell us about the cognitive organization of context?
3. Until this point, the present article has quietly ignored the problem of communicative indirectness. Partly due to the
historical influence of Grice’s paper on conversational implicature (Grice, 1975), the major theories within contemporary
pragmatics have a tendency to view indirectness as somehow more interesting and investigable than directness. I hope to
have shown here that we can and must improve our understanding of even simple and simple communicative acts. I also
believe that such an improved understanding is needed before we can make significant progress in the analysis of
indirectness. My main evidence for this claim is the well-known problem of pragmatic underdetermination: All
communicative acts, whether direct or indirect, logically underdetermine the effect they intend to have on the addressee
(Levinson, 1995; see also Carston, 2002, on ‘‘linguistic underdetermination’’). Levinson argues that this problem is solved
algorithmically by the comprehending brain through heuristics and biases which lead it to go ‘‘beyond the data’’. I agree
with the gist of this claim, but add that it implies that the brain must have a preconceived idea of the computational result
of the comprehension process. My own hypothesis is, of course, that the brain assumes by default (i.e., unless it encounters
contradictory evidence) that it has to compute a CAP. If I am right, then indirectness presupposes a comprehension system
which is already attuned to the reconstruction of CAPs.
[18_TD$IF]
4.3. Third complication: sequentiality
Most communicative acts come packaged into sequences. Empirical discourse researchers generally, and conversation
analysts in particular, object to the practice of many linguists and speech act theorists of carving out utterances from their
sequential surroundings and analyzing them as if they were singular events (Schegloff, 1988, 1996). Speech act theorists
counter that any successful investigation of real-world communicative interaction must be able to analyze its basic
component, the individual communicative act (van Rees, 1992). In addition, not all communicative acts have sequential
contexts, and conversation analysts have ignored such monadic acts about as studiously as the classical speech act theorists
had ignored conversational sequences. That said, however, I agree with the basic spirit behind the conversation analytical
objection. No theory of communicative acts should ignore the fact that conversational sequences are a privileged
interactional context, one that can play a significant role in defining the social import of individual turns (Schneider, 2000;
Fetzer and Meierkord, 2002).
According to CAP-theory, a basic form of sequentiality is implied in the anatomy of individual communicative acts. After
successful comprehension of a CAP, the addressee is expected to carry out a co-act on the signaler’s behalf or on his own
behalf. This means that two-turn sequences in which the second turn is nothing but a completion of the preceding
imperative or interrogative CAP are already analyzable in the framework of section 3. Furthermore, some two-turn
sequences consist of a declarative CAP in turn 1 and a simple acknowledgment token in turn 2 (e.g., I say ‘‘Obama is a great
president’’ and you say ‘‘Yes’’). This token is also a declarative CAP, but its content – the belief which the signaler asks the
addressee to acquire – is functionally derivable from the first turn. Its purpose is merely to render the unobservable
execution of the proposed co-act socially observable (Reich, 2010b).
Beyond these simplistic cases, new theoretical gunpowder is going to be needed before CAP-theory can accommodate
sequential analyses. Progress here will depend, in turn, on the resolution of the cognitive questions discussed above in
section 4.2. Suffice it to mention the following two issues.
1. Sequential expectations. In Examples 1 and 2 of section 4.1, the second turns are remarkably similar, but they are responded
to in different ways by the respective vendors’ third turns. Only the vendor in Example 1 chooses to respond both with an
acknowledgement token and with new relevant information (‘‘we have those over there’’). Assuming, for the sake of
argument, that the examples are otherwise essentially identical up to this point, does this mean that the vendor in
Example 2 does not fulfill the customer’s CAP? My answer is: no; the vendor in Example 1 simply chooses to not only
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acknowledge the completion of a declarative co-act proposal (‘‘mm:/’’), but also to conform to an implicit sequential
expectation which has been made relevant by the customer. In most real-world sales encounters, customers predictably
have certain desires and goals, but this does not mean that all their putative goals must be satisfied by vendors in each
interactional turn. It is thus context, rather than the local CAP, which ‘‘creates’’ sequential expectations – hence only a
precise, cognitive theory of context will allow us to answer in more or less objective terms which sequential expectations
‘‘exist’’ in a specific interaction at a specific point in time.
2. Hierarchical organization of interactional goals. The notion of sequential expectations can be generalized. In each
interactional encounter, participants pursue a variety of hierarchically organized goals. A customer, for instance, may have
the strategic goal of buying a cheap bicycle, and at a certain moment of the sales encounter, she may have the tactical goal
of convincing the vendor to lower the price of a particularly attractive mountain bike. Thus, any given communicative act
may only be comprehensible as a specific CAP in virtue of the entire goal-hierarchy which is pursued by the signaler and
known by the addressee. For instance, due to this hierarchy, a question like ‘‘What if I also purchase insurance for
the bike?’’ may become understandable as an indirect attempt to make the addressee offer a lower price in case the
signaler also gets insurance. Again, the example illustrates that any explanation or even prediction as to what kind of CAP
is conveyed by a given utterance in the middle of a complex conversational sequence will depend on scientific progress
with regard to the stated cognitive issues.
5. Conclusion
‘‘Modern culture has a remarkable ability to transform adaptive behaviors so completely that it makes it difficult to
comprehend why certain behavioral propensities exist at all.’’ (Polimeni and Reiss, 2006:359)
The evolution of complex cooperation has left many traces in the innate structure of the human mind and in the ways in
which humans organize their social relationships. Hence, some seemingly disparate characteristics of Homo sapiens can only
be comprehended if one realizes that they have been naturally selected for cooperation, including the social emotions
(Fessler and Haley, 2003), innate moral intuitions (Haidt and Joseph, 2008) and culture (Henrich and Henrich, 2006). The
premise of the present paper was that our ability to engage in communicative interaction is yet another characteristic that
must be investigated in terms of cooperation. This premise motivated a reconceptualization of the notion of communicative
acts in sections 2 and 3. My basic suggestion here was that communicative interaction should be investigated as organized in
terms of cooperative proposals and responses to such proposals. Section 4 then tried to point out some of the major questions
that will have to be answered in order to turn ‘‘co-acts’’ and ‘‘co-act proposals’’ into tools for sophisticated empirical analysis.
In the long run, I believe that our scientific understanding of the cooperative understructure of communicative
interaction will have to become much more technical than is currently the case. It is only in virtue of such a technical
understanding that the precise relationship between interactants, communicative acts and context can be spelled out. The
history of pragmatic thought over the last 40 years shows that formal modeling tends to follow theoretical innovations in the
field, adding to them as well as deepening them. At the same time, formal modeling tends to be constrained by the current
computational paradigms within artificial intelligence and related fields. The last major effort to formalize and implement
dialogue, the one initiated by Allen, Cohen, Perrault and colleagues (see the summary statements in Cohen et al., 1990), drew
heavily on the logic-based formalisms which were en vogue until the early 1990s and which have witnessed decreasing
interest since then. The theory presented in this article was designed with a different paradigm in mind, that of current
statistical techniques of pattern recognition and machine learning (Hastie et al., 2009; Koller and Friedman, 2009). Such
techniques are now being used to implement goal-recognition as well (e.g., (causal) Bayesian networks, POMDPs), which
would seem to make them a good fit for a formal model of CAP-comprehension.
Acknowledgments
The theoretical ideas behind this article took several years to develop. During this period I received generous funding from
a number of agencies, including the Swedish Research Council (VR dnr 2007-1638) and the Swedish Council for Working Life
and Social Research (FAS dnr 2006-0729). Visits to Cornell University and the University of Cambridge provided me with
extremely forthcoming working environments, and I remain grateful for their hospitality. For comments on, or inspiration
for, various earlier incarnations of the manuscript, I would like to thank Tom R. Burns, Wolfgang Ludwig Schneider, Jacob L.
Mey, Werner Schirmer and three anonymous referees.
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Wendelin Reich is an Associate Professor in Social Psychology at Uppsala University and a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study
(SCAS). He will be a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University in 2011–12.
Please cite this article in press as: Reich, W., The cooperative nature of communicative acts, Journal of Pragmatics (2010),
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.10.024