Re: RT list: the 'forthright negotiator' principle

Dear all,

Happy New Year, and thanks to Nick for his recent postings on matters of
both content and procedure. I'd like to respond briefly to both.

On the point Nick raised about the relation between pragmatic theory and legal
interpretation, I wanted to draw attention to a forthcoming book by Alan Durant
on Meaning in the Media: Discourse, Controversy and Debate (OUP, April 2010),
which offers a very nice analysis of disputes about meaning in public
life, and of
the interacting linguistic, legal and social factors that affect
their resolution. I've read
a fair amount on the language of advertising, and generally been
disappointed by
both the lack of theoretical sophistication on the
semantics-pragmatics end and the
rather anecdotal nature of the analyses offered. By contrast, I was
quite ignorant
about legal issues connected with defamation, offensiveness,
blasphemy, etc, and
had no idea about how meaning disputes in these areas might be resolved, or
what intuitive pragmatic principles are brought into play by lawyers
in such disputes.
I think the book does a great job of setting out the linguistic and
pragmatic background in
a very clear and sophisticated way, and of going on to show
convincingly that these
disputes invariably go beyond the purely linguistic or pragmatic, and
can't be resolved
without taking (possibly unintended) audience effects into account. I
was reading it
thinking about the implications for pragmatics, and I do think the
book draws attention
to an interesting set of cases in which speakers' intentions are
constrained by the fact
that they will be held legally responsible for the foreseeable
effects of their utterances.

On the procedural matter of how we can organise the list so as to maximise the
chances of good discussion, I agree with Dan's suggestion (in a
posting a while back)
that we should restrict our postings in general to (a) brief
announcements of forthcoming
events/activities/publications likely to interest many members of the
list, and (b) substantive
comments/queries/discussions focusing mainly on relevance theory and
its applications.
I know of several members (including me) who have wanted to share
questions with the
list at various points, but have refrained for fear of being swamped.
So thanks to Nick and
Dan for raising this issue (and to Dan and Robyn for their recent
postings, which I agree with),
and let's try and make the list fun again.

All the best,
Deirdre

At 14:20 14/01/2010, Nicholas Allott wrote:
>Mark Liberman, blogging on legal interpretation in 'a case where "some
>of the best lawyers in the world, and the Delaware courts, couldn't
>work out the meaning of what they had written"':
>
>http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2045
>
>The judge in the case wrote: "under the forthright negotiator
>principle, the subjective understanding of one party to a contract may
>bind the other party when the other party knows or has reason to know
>of that understanding."
>
>Liberman comments: '[this] "forthright negotiator principle" ... is
>certainly something that normal humans presuppose in their
>communicative exchanges. It's part of why "theory of mind" reasoning
>is hard."
>
>
>It seems to me that there may be interesting things to say about this
>(and that people on this list are likely to be able to say them). The
>comments on the blog so far have mostly focussed instead on why (and
>whether) judges write better than other lawyers.
>
>
>By the way, there have been several interesting posts about legal
>interpretation in the last couple of years on Language Log, most or
>all of which are essentially case studies in applied pragmatics.
>
>Nick
>(trying to practise what I preach)
>
>
>
>Nicholas Allott
>Postdoctoral research fellow
>CSMN
>University of Oslo
>
>n.e.allott@csmn.uio.no
>nicholas.allott@gmail.com
>
>
>
>
>
>

-----------------------------
Deirdre Wilson

UCL Linguistics
Room 114
Chandler House
2 Wakefield Street
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-----------------------------
Tel (0)20 7679 4021
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Home phone/fax (44) (0)1865 862470
Home page URL: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/deirdre/index3.html
Received on Sun Jan 17 12:10:49 2010