Understanding meaning

Pragmatic meanings can arise through what people say, but ultimately always go beyond what is said. The question, then, is: how do users understand such meanings? Approaches to this issue have often been framed in terms of the processing of meaning. This generally refers to the cognitive operations that underpin or give rise to pragmatic meaning representations. The focus in pragmatics has traditionally been on how we understand or process meanings that arise from utterances. This reflects the folk view in English that an understanding is something we reach or come to. There is, however, an interesting distinction that can be made (in German) between “understanding” (Verstehen) and “coming to an understanding” (Verständigung) (Weigand 2009: 30). The former refers to a punctuated perspective on understanding as something which a participant reaches, subsequent to hearing an utterance. It generally comes under the rubric of utterance processing. The latter refers to a more dynamic perspective on understanding as something that emerges through the intertwining of actions and reactions in discourse. It is generally assumed in this approach that a two-party interaction is the most basic unit of analysis. This perspective generally falls within the scope of discourse processing. We assume that treating understanding as a particular point we reach in time (Verstehen), or as spread across a span of time – and thus across participants – (Verständigung) both represent valid, albeit quite different, viewpoints on pragmatic meaning. In order to better appreciate how pragmatic meanings are understood by users, we thus approach this question from the perspectives of both utterance and discourse processing.