Page 48 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

26 John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz

of which the speaker’s words made sense. Both “activity type” and “activity”
refer to such evoked envisionments, and the interpretation of communicative in-
tent rests on these envisionments. They can be seen as 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. In the
envisioning process actors rely, among other things, on ideologically based and
contextually specific presuppositions about mutual rights and obligations, as-
sumptions about individuals’ personal characteristics apart from their knowl-
edge of grammar and the indexical function of specific signs to get their mess-
age across. This implies that, in addition to meaning assessments in the
established sense of the terms, inferencing always depends on constantly ne-
gotiated and renegotiated interpersonal relationships by means of the same ver-
bal signaling process with which content is assessed.
Note that we have used the term ‘activities’ rather than ‘genre’ in this chapter
to highlight our emphasis on ongoing communicative practices as the main ob-
ject of analysis. The notion of genre has become a part of many recent analyses of
texts, largely as the result of the influence of Bakhtin’s writings, known in Eng-
lish through two key compendium translations (1981; 1986). As we see it, Bak-
hin’s use of genre was intended as part of his critique of early structuralist lin-
guistics, and as such can be seen as having some commonality with the idea of
speech activities. A fuller discussion of this point must wait for a later paper (see
Günthner and Kotthoff’s preface to section II for the use of ‘genre’)
By revealing the underlying interpretive process at work in an encounter,
which is otherwise bound to remain hidden, such analyses of key situations in
institutional life can provide insights into the interpretive bases of communi-
cative assessments. At the same time, such analyses can enable participants to
learn from the difficulties that arise in an encounter.

7. Conclusion

The encounters discussed here constitute a range of settings that are marked by
historically and linguistically quite distinct traditions. Examples like these are
useful in illustrating how inferential processes are grounded in both linguistic
and other background knowledge. They also show how the social outcomes and
consequences of communicative alignment or misalignment can be far more ex-
tensive than any one analysis can show. Over time such miscommunication can
seriously affect individuals’ ability to adapt to new communicative circum-
stances and therefore their life chances. Discourse conventions are learned
through interpersonal contact. Learning requires a great deal of feedback, and it
is the quality of the learning situation that determines learning. Most favorable
to learning are peer situations, where speakers can give each other the benefit of