Abstract

The presentation argues that current pragmatic theories are usually hearer-centered. The reasons of hearer-centeredness are as follows: 1) Misinterpretation of the Gricean implicature, which is an aspect of speaker meaning rather than a meaning inferred by the hearer. 2) There has developed a powerful theory of utterances interpretation (Relevance Theory) whose focus is mainly on the hearer. I will argue that speaker utterance should be analyzed on its own rights and make three claims: 1) Speaker utterance is not just recipient design. It is the result of the interplay of recipient design and salience, which will be discussed from a socio-cognitive perspective. 2) In a speaker-focused approach linguistic underdeterminacy of linguistic signs may not work the way it does in a hearer-centered approach. The speaker’s utterance from the speaker’s perspective is a full proposition and does not need any enrichment and/or saturation. Underdeterminacy makes sense only from the hearer’s perspective. 3) In order to get as close as possible to what the speaker actually means we often need to go beyond utterance.