Negotiated Meanings, Norms, Cooperation, and Conflict in Linguistic Interaction

The workshop “Negotiated Meanings, Norms, Cooperation, and Conflict in Linguistic Interaction” brings together researchers working at the intersection of philosophy of language, pragmatics, and linguistics to reconsider how meaning is produced, stabilized, contested, and transformed in communicative practice.

For several decades, the dominant paradigm in pragmatics and philosophy of language has been the broadly Gricean model of communication, according to which communicative exchanges are fundamentally cooperative transactions structured by the expression and recognition of reflexive communicative intentions. On this view, discourse meaning is largely determined by the speaker’s intention and the hearer’s ability to recognize it within a framework of shared rational expectations. This approach has proven remarkably fruitful, enabling systematic explanations of implicature, indirect speech, and context-sensitive interpretation.

At the same time, a growing body of work highlights phenomena that are difficult to capture within a strictly intention-cantered and cooperation-based framework. These include the normative organization of discursive practices, the diversity of commitments undertaken in conversation, non-cooperative or only partially cooperative exchanges, and processes of meaning negotiation and conceptual change in discourse that cannot easily be reduced to miscommunication.

The keynote lectures illustrate these challenges from complementary perspectives. Manfred Krifka proposes a model of conversational dynamics cantered on commitments, blockings, and performative updates to the common ground. Marina Terkourafi develops a theory of Hearer’s Meaning that does not depend on the recognition of speaker intention as a necessary condition for interpretation. Marco Mazzone examines how communicative conflict may arise both according to norms and over norms, arguing for an integration of Gricean and Austinian insights. Kasia M. Jaszczolt introduces the concept of generalized unsaying, understood as dynamic metalinguistic denegation, to systematize a range of phenomena involving the undoing of communicated content and to illuminate how such processes contribute to the negotiation and regulation of meaning in discourse. Mitchell S. Green presents a model of the cultural evolution of speech-act norms, emphasizing how communicative practices emerge, stabilize, and change over time.

The workshop aims to develop theoretical frameworks that extend and enrich the Gricean picture of communication by integrating insights about social norms, commitment structures, hearer-cantered interpretation, conflict, and cultural evolution. More broadly, it seeks to explore how communicative transactions and discourse meanings are shaped not only by intentions and their recognition, but also by conventions, institutional roles, negotiated interpretations, and evolving communicative practices.

Keynote Lectures

• Mitchell S. Green (University of Connecticut, USA), TBA
• Kasia M. Jaszczolt (University of Cambridge, UK), Generalized Unsaying
• Manfred Krifka (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany), Committing, blocking and de-committing propositions as basic steps in conversation
• Marco Mazzone (University of Catania, Catania, Italy), Save Private Grice: Conflicts According to Norms – or Over Norms?
• Marina Terkourafi (Leiden University, The Netherlands), Hearer’s Meaning 2.0: Meaning without speaker intention

Organizers

• Maciej Witek, University of Szczecin, website, contact Maciej
• Artur Kosecki, University of Szczecin, website, contact Artur

Funding

The organization of this workshop is supported by the National Science Centre, Poland under grant 2024/53/B/HS1/00590, “Lexicalized Concepts from the Perspectives of Meaning Eliminativism and Dynamic Conventionalism. An Austinian Approach to Conceptual Change and Amelioration”, and by the Institute of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Szczecin.