Mateusz Włodarczyk

In this paper, I examine two non-Gricean approaches to the evolution of human communicative abilities: Mitchell S. Green’s ac- count of organic meaning and Dorit Bar-On’s account of expressive communication. I argue that the non-Gricean approaches in question face certain problems: i) they focus on the adaptive function of communicative behaviours and ignore questions about their mechanisms, ontogeny and phylogeny; ii) the notion of organic meaning does not constitute an intermediate form between natural and non-natural meaning but should rather be understood as a special case of natural meaning; iii) the non-Gricean approaches under scrutiny cannot ex- plain the transition from dyadic to triadic communication. I also outline the differences between Gricean and non-Gricean approaches and argue against the usefulness of the non-Gricean approaches discussed in this paper in explaining the evolution of human communicative abilities.

In this paper we evaluate the role of prosodic information in inferring dialogue-specific functions of speech acts. We report the results of an empirical study in which participants are exposed to recordings of certain utterances and, next, asked to recognize discursive contexts from which the heard utterances may come. The recorded utterances are quotations: staged utterances produced by speakers asked to read aloud dialogues specially constructed for the study. We analyse prosodic cues produced by recorded speakers and argue that they play a key role in depicting demonstrated target utterance. We assume that participants’ decisions manifest their implicit understanding of dialogue-specific functions of target utterances. The empirical part of our study shows that the efficiency rate of the prosodic cues produced by recorded speakers is 76%. We use the results of our prosodic analysis of recorded utterances to account for some cases of incorrect interpretations reported in the study.