Cooperation, common ground and mutual knowledge

As stated above, lingua franca speakers demonstrated a very egocentric approach to language production and comprehension. It is not that they did not want to be cooperative, or relevant, or committed to the conversation. Rather, in the first phase of communication, instead of looking for common ground, they articulated their own intentions with whatever linguistic means they had immediate access to. This does not mean, of course, that lingua franca communication is not a collaborative phenomenon. Rather collaboration happens in a different way than in native-native communication.

It is not just lingua franca speaker behavior that has directed attention to the egocentric behavior of speaker-hearers as well as to the problems with the interpretation of cooperation, common ground and mutual knowledge.

They depend on familiarity, frequency and conventionality. What the speaker says relies on prior conversational experience reflected in lexical choices in production, and how the listener understands what is said in the actual situational context also depends on his/her prior conversational experience with the use of lexical items applied in the speaker’s utterances. Smooth communication depends primarily on the match between the two. Cooperation, relevance, and reliance on possible mutual knowledge come in to play only after the speaker’s ego is satisfied and the listener’s egocentric, most salient interpretation is processed. In comprehension it is not that we first decode the language and then try to make sense of it but we try to make sense of it right away and make adjustments if language does not make sense. In production the speaker’s primary goal is to formulate the message according to her/his intention.

It appears that mutual knowledge is most likely implemented as a mechanism for detecting and correcting errors instead of an intrinsic, routine process of the language processor. The following excerpt from the database support this assumption:

Brazilian: – Have you ever heard about au pair before?

Columbian: – No, what is au pair?

Hong Kong: – It’s a French word.

Brazilian: – We come as an exchange to take care of kids.

Columbian: – What kids?

Brazilian: – Kids in the host family. We live with the host family.

Hong Kong: – By the way, how about the kids? How do you know what

to do with theme?

Brazilian: – We have to go to training.

The participants of this interaction are girls from Brazil, Columbia and Hong Kong. The Brazilian girl works as an “au pair”. As the conversation unfolds they say what they think with simple linguistic means. They create mutual knowledge on the spot, making sure that their interlocutors really understand their intention.

It is important, therefore to rethink exactly what it means to be cooperative, a concept that is at the heart of most theories of language use. For one, the supposition that speakers strive to be maximally informative in lexical selection does not seem to fit what they actually do. Perhaps a better description of what they do is simply to rely on their past and current discourse experience and select the terms that are most strongly available to them. It is not through the individual sentence by which language users demonstrate they are cooperative, but rather it is how they behave over the course of the conversation. So cooperation and relevance may be discourse level rather than sentence-level phenomena.

The pragmatically enriched content is a partially pragmatically determined proposition which may accommodate different degrees of explicitness and implicitness. It appears to be necessary to distinguish this level because in most cases the proposition literally expressed is not something the speaker could possibly mean. For instance at a gas station:

– I am the black Mercedes over there. Could you fill me up with diesel, please.

– Sure.

Mutually salient information (unless it is connected with the ongoing speech situation as we saw it when ELF speakers created their own formulas) is something ELF speakers lack because they speak several different L1s and represent different cultures. For them mutually salient information should be directly connected with the actual speech situation and/or encoded in the linguistic code so that it can be “extracted” by the hearer without any particular inference based on non-existing common prior experience in lingua franca communication. Inferencing for the lingua franca hearer usually coincides with decoding. This is why they avoid formulaic language that usually expresses some kind of collective salience to the members of a particular speech community.

Phrasal units, situation-bound utterances, and idioms do not convey the same message to lingua franca communicators because they come from different language backgrounds and different cultures, and their prior experience with those fixed expressions in the lingua franca is quite limited and differs from one individual to the next. We can almost be sure that native speakers will understand as a matter of fact, welcome aboard, piece of cake, have another go in a similar way because they have relatively similar prior experience with those expressions in conversation, which has resulted in the development of a salient meaning for the whole speech community (collective salience). However, this is not the case in lingua franca communication where what is common for each interlocutor is what the linguistic item actually says.