The Handbook of Discourse Analysis

222 John J. Gumperz
ongoing exchange. What sets them apart from communicatively similar lexicalized
signs is that they are intrinsically oral forms. Since no utterance can be pronounced
without such signs, contextualization cues are ever present in talk, and to the extent
that they can be shown to affect interpretation, they provide direct evidence for the
necessary role that indexicality plays in talk. Moreover, contextualization strategies
signal meaning largely by cueing indirect inferences. In conversation, we could not
possibly express all the information that interlocutors must have to plan their own
contributions and attune their talk to that of their interlocutors, so it is easy to see the
reason for this indirectness.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, indirect (not overtly lexicalized) signaling
mechanisms are for the most part culturally or subculturally specific. In fact prosody
and “accent” (in the sense of phonetically marked features of pronunciation), for example,
are among the principal means by which we identify where people are from and
“who” they are, and assess their social identity, as happened in the above examples.
The reason we can do this is that contextualization strategies are learned primarily
through direct personal contacts of the kind characteristic of family, peer-group, and
close friendship relations, where background knowledge is likely to be shared and
speakers can be confident that others will understand their indirect allusions.
I will give some additional concrete examples to show how I view the process of
understanding. Some time ago, while driving to the office, my radio was tuned to
a classical radio station. At the end of the program, the announcer, a replacement
for the regular host who was scheduled to return the next day, signed off with the
following words: “I’ve enjoyed being with you these last two weeks.” I had not been
listening very carefully, but the extrastrong focal accent on “you” in a syntactic position
where I would have expected an unaccented pronoun caught my attention. It
sounded as if the announcer was talking to someone else. Yet there was no other
person with him on the program. This led me to call on past communicative experience
to construct an alternative, more plausible scenario which might suggest an
interpretation. The speaker’s words reminded me of a leave-taking exchange, where
a first speaker might begin with “I’ve enjoyed being with you” and the second might
respond with “It was fun being with you.” I therefore inferred that the announcer, by
accenting the personal pronoun as one would in the second part of the exchange, was
actually implicating the first.
In the above examples, participants’ as well as my own interpretations relied
on background knowledge to construct possible scenarios or envisionments or to
intertextually retrieve specific expressions in terms of which the speakers’ words
made sense. I use the term activity type or activity to refer to these evoked envisionments.
My claim is that interpretation of communicative intent always – that is, not just in
intercultural encounters – rests on such constructs. These imagined activities function
like Goffman’s frames, abstract representations of the actions of actors engaged in
strategically planning and positioning their moves in order to accomplish communicative
ends in real-life encounters.
I am not claiming that IS analysis can solve the problem of interpretive ambiguity.
The aim is to find likely solutions, i.e. solutions that are plausible in that they show
how constituent actions cohere in light of the event as a whole, and the assumptions
in terms of which we assess the event’s significance. This is of course quite different
from determining the truth or falsity of specific interpretations. The method resembles