A little less conversation – On the completeness of discourse-initial action-guiding subsententials

Abstract

This study analyzes the relation between utterances and human activities with a view to determining how and under what conditions discourse-initial verbless utterances can be considered pragmatically, semantically, and grammatically complete. The study is empirically based on a set of observations of discourse-intital action-guiding verbless speech acts, which for a large part have been observed in a cognitive ethnographic field study of the activity of gliding. Using the concept of illocutionary acts and ecological value theory as an overarching framework, the analysis shows how discourse-initial action-guiding subsententials are enabled and constrained by the activity, i.e. the lawful constraints, the available affordances, the information that specify affordances, and the values that guide the activity. The analysis shows that a discourse-initial action-guiding subsentential is a response to a present or emerging discrepancy between the state of variation a current action causes and the state of variation that the values that guide the activity requires. The conventional effect and the contextual conditions for the effect of discourse-initial action-guiding subsententials is specified and provide the criteria for what constitutes a meaningful unit and thus also the criteria for semantic completeness. The semantic structure of discourse-initial action-guiding subsententials is identified as a specification. On the basis of this semantic analysis, the grammatical patterns that realize this semantic unit is identified. It is a single-word focus construction. Based on this grammatical analysis, another more complex grammatical construction that realizes two communicative tasks is identified: a specification of an affordance and an indication of the condition for rightness of the action possibility. It is argued that this combination of communicative tasks is conducive to the performance of activities, and hence, may exert a functional pressure on the conventionalization of grammatical construction. In this way, it is shown how subsentential constructions can emerge from non-conversational, practical activities.