A Review of A Grammar of Speech 15
Asking exchanges: Askers initiate, but their purpose is not achieved
until hearers make an appropriate contribution;
initiators may then acknowledge (or not acknow-
ledge) the achievement. (p. 41)
According to Brazil, there is no formal grammatical or intonational
distinction between telling and asking exchanges. The difference lies in
the division of knowledge assumed by speakers to exist between themselves
and their hearers. He states (p. 250) that the sequence of word-like elements
required to satisfy a communicative need in a telling exchange is a telling
increment. In an asking exchange, the communicative need is only achieved
after the intervention of another participant, i.e. the sequence of elements
produced cooperatively by the speaker and the hearer which meets the
speaker’s communicative need is an asking increment (p. 250).
Brazil’s second premise is that speech is interactive. By interactive Brazil
means that speakers always pursue their purposes with respect to second
parties. He claims that all forms of discourse are jointly constructed by
speakers and hearers. Even monologists are engaged in interactive commun-
ication in that they frame their messages with respect to their projection of
their hearers’ perspectives.
The third premise is that speakers and hearers assume sensible and
co-operative behaviour from their interlocutors. Hearers, for the most part,
can assume that speakers will neither deliberately mislead them nor stop
short and fail to complete their messages. Once a telling increment
has begun an expectation is created that the speaker will continue until
something relevant to the hearer’s communicative needs has been told.
Each word-like element, uttered prior to the achievement of the intended
telling, alters the expectation of what remains to be told.^3
The fourth premise is that speakers’ words must be interpreted on the
basis of the existential value they have for both parties in relation to the
immediate and unique context they occur in. For example, Brazil (pp. 34
and 35) argues the use of the word friend in an actual communicative
situation may signify a lexical choice which realizes the communicative
value of any of the following: not my enemy, not my brother, not my partner, not
an acquaintance, etc. He claims that:
We shall take it that it is this temporary, here-and-now opposition that
provides the word with the value that the speaker intends and that the
listener understands. (p. 35)