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A cognitive pragmatic perspective on communication and culture 31

3. A cognitive pragmatic perspective
on communication and culture 1

ˇ
Vladimir Zegarac

1. Introduction

I would define a social situation as an environment of mutual monitoring possibil-
ities, anywhere within which an individual will find himself accessible to the naked
senses of all others who are ‘present’, and similarly find them accessible to him.
Goffman ([1964] 1972: 63)

The impact of Erving Goffman’s work on the development of social approaches
to human interaction has been immense, but the fundamentally cognitive char-
acter of his definition of “social situation” – clearly reflected in the notion of
“mutual monitoring” – has been largely ignored. This is apparent in the way the
term situation is characterized within Fishman’s (1972: 48) sociolinguistics (as
“the co-occurrence of two (or more) interlocutors related to each other in a par-
ticular way, communicating about a particular topic, in a particular setting”), in
Halliday’s (see Halliday and Hasan 1976: 22) functionalist view of language
(where field, mode and tenor are the key determinants of situations), in Hymes’
(1972) ethnographic approach to communication (in which the categories of set-
ting, participant, end, act sequence, key, instrumentalities, norms of interaction
and interpretation, and genre provide a template for analysing communicative
events) and in much other work in the loosely defined field of (social) prag-
matics. To be sure, these authors are aware of the psychological nature of situ-
ation. Thus, Halliday and Hasan (1976) observe:

The term SITUATION, meaning the ‘context of situation’ in which a text is em-
bedded, refers to all those extra-linguistic factors which have some bearing on the
text itself. A word of caution is needed about this concept. At the moment, as the text
of this Introduction is being composed, it is a typical English October day in Palo
Alto, California; a green hillside is visible outside the window, the sky is grey, and it
is pouring with rain. This might seem to be part of the ‘situation’ of this text; but it is
not, because it has no relevance to the meanings expressed, or to the words or gram-
ˇ
matical patterns that are used to express them [emphasis VZ].
Halliday and Hasan (1976: 21)

Despite the general awareness that the concept of (communication) situation
calls for a psychological explanation, existing definitions of this term tend to
have a distinctly externalist-descriptive, rather than an internalist-explanatory
flavour. The main aim of this article is to provide an introductory internalist,