The Psychological Foundations of the Grammar 59
between the interlocutors communication is likely to fail. As a result, some
scholars have proposed that for communication to succeed, interlocutors
must recognize that they possess mutual knowledge or mutual beliefs. A
problem with this view was raised and two purported fi xes were described.
However, it was demonstrated that neither fi x is entirely satisfactory. A weaker
view that speakers only need to recognize that they and their hearers hold
shared beliefs was described, but was shown to be not entirely convincing.
Finally a view which circumvented the problems inherent in the claim that
it is possible to gaze at the contents of another’s mind was described, and
was shown to be robust enough to account for success and failure in conver-
sation. Thus, Brazil’s claim that all used language can be divided into telling
and asking increments no longer rests on the imprecise notion of speakers’
comprehension of the extent of shared speaker/hearer state of convergence
but rather on the fi rmer grounds of their understanding of their own
individual cognitive environments. Speakers decide what requires telling
not by evaluating the extent of their shared knowledge or by peering
into their interlocutor’s minds but rather through their own experiences
and memories which they have gleaned from a lifetime’s residence in their
particular speech communities.
3.3 Speech is Purposeful
Brazil (1995: 26) states that speech is characteristically used in pursuit of
individual daily purposes which are essential for the ‘management of
human affairs’. Brazil acknowledges (ibid. 36) that his view builds upon
the insights of numerous scholars of whom Austin and Searle were the
pioneers. Austin (1975: 3–7) noted the distinction between speech as
description and speech as action, and distinguished constatives: descriptive
utterances which are judged to be true or false from performatives: utter-
ances which do not report and cannot be judged to be true or false. He
claims that a participant in a legally constituted marriage ceremony who
says ‘I do’ performs a speech act which instantiates the marriage; it does
not report it. Leech (1983: 180), however, argues that such acts are not
communicative but are instead ‘the linguistic parts of rituals’ which have
communicative value only because of convention. To illustrate Leech’s
sage observation, in an English speaking jurisdiction which adopted Sharia
law the utterance I divorce thee repeated three times is performative and
instantiates a divorce but it does not do so in other English speaking
jurisdictions.