THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

CONVERSATIONAL STRATAGEMS

A STUDY IN THE PRAGMATICS OF LANGUAGE

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO
THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES
IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS

BY
ANN WEISER

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

DECEMBER, 1975

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The primary motive for communication is love.
--Clover Carroll

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

"There is no work of science which is created by only one person."

– Brecht's Galileo

It is a pleasure to be able to thank some of the people who

helped make this dissertation possible, even though I realize I
won't be able to thank all of them, or adequately convey my debt
to those I do thank.
First must be Professor Jerrold M. Sadock. It was for a
course of Jerry's over three years ago that I wrote the paper,
which eventually led, by a tortuous route, to this dissertation,
and he has been my mentor at every stage of the process. His clear
and rigorous thinking has always been a model and an inspiration
to me, and his suggestions and encouragement have been invaluable.
Second, I am happy to acknowledge the help of the other two
members of my dissertation committee, Professors James D. McCawley
and Kostas Kazazis. Besides giving me the benefit of their
encouragement and expertise, they both helped by giving me a
surprising number of anecdotes and strategic intuitions, and they
each deserve the title of Master Strategist.
Of the many other teachers who have been important to me on
the road leading to this day, I would like to mention especially
Professor Victor H. Yngve, who guided me to much of the reading
that has been important to this dissertation, and Professor
Beatrice Hall of SUNY at Stony Brook, one of the best teachers I
have ever known, who was convinced I would make a good linguist
long before I was [ambiguity deliberate].
I have benefitted from discussions with other linguists and
interested parties, some of whom are George Lakoff, Don Forman,
Kenneth Rocke, Anthony Bruck, and Anthony Woodbury. Of course none
of them, or anyone but myself, is responsible for my mistakes.
For needed financial support during most of the time this
dissertation was in preparation, I would like to thank the
National Science Foundation and the University of Chicago.
At this point I had intended to list the dear friends without
whose love and emotional support I would be nowhere, who listened
patiently for hours to strange theories about conversation, and
who appear pseudonymously in most of the anecdotes in these pages.
But the list became too long, and the chance that I might leave
someone out was not worth taking. Anyway, you know who you are. I
love you.
For typing this dissertation so beautifully, I would like to
thank my friend Mrs. Verva Rocke, who also typed my father's
dissertation at the University of Chicago twenty years ago.
And, finally, Mark, with whom a stratagem has never been
necessary.

Ann Weiser
Purdue University
October, 1975

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Chapter
I. INITIATING STRATAGEMS

II. RESPONDING STRATAGEMS

III. MULTIPLE INTERPRETATION

IV. RELATED WORK ON CONVERSATION AND PRAGMATICS

V. WHAT IS A CONVERSATIONAL STRATAGEM?

APPENDIX

REFERENCES

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 INTRODUCTION

This work is an examination of some of the aspects of the

phenomenon of conversational stratagems in language. It is an
expansion and continuation of previous research by the same
author, reported in Weiser 1974 and Weiser 1975.
The investigation reported here is as much a demonstration
that a certain phenomenon exists and that it can be fruitfully
studied as it is a study of that phenomenon. Because of this, it
would be premature to begin with a definition of a conversational
stratagem. That will come later. Let us begin instead by
characterizing the work in certain ways.
This is a study of the pragmatics of language in two senses.
In one sense, it participates in the recent tendency in works of
linguistics to be concerned with the relation of linguistic
systems to facts about the "real world" in which they occur. This
relation and the study of it have both been called "pragmatics."
This work is also pragmatic in the sense of "practical"; it has to
do with the language-user's ability to use linguistic knowledge as
part of a calculation or plan aimed at accomplishing a purpose.
Thus, it has to do with a kind of "pragmatic" application of
linguistic (and conversational and social) knowledge.
A word about language and purpose: once we begin to talk
about purpose we are ineluctably committed to talking about the
speaker-hearer, the language-user. The word "purpose" can be used
in three ways that are relevant to this study. Consider: A person
(A) uses an utterance (B) with the intention of bringing about a
state of affairs (C). We can say that A has the PURPOSE1 of using
B to accomplish C, or that A has the PURPOSE1 of accomplishing C.
We can also say that B has the PURPOSE2 of accomplishing C. And we
can say that accomplishing C is a PURPOSE3. This is not to say
that PURPOSE2, and PURPOSE3, are distinct senses of the word
(PURPOSE3, at least, is not) but that it is possible to use the
word "purpose" without mentioning the originator, or holder, of
the purpose. In this work, however, the use of the word "purpose"
in any of these ways will always imply a human being behind the
purpose; when "purpose" is used as PURPOSE2 and PURPOSE3 are used
above, it will always be a convenient form of a statement which
would specify a human being and use PURPOSE1.1
When we ask the question, "What are the purposes that a
person could have in uttering a sentence?", we find that several
of the most immediate answers take us outside of the scope of this

1 This use of the word "purpose" is close to "intention." I prefer

"purpose" because of its stronger connotation of an intended
change in the world, as intended "bringing something about," but
either word would do as well; in fact, I will use "intention" when
syntax and convenience require it.

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work. "To communicate; to get the meaning across" is an informal
and intuitively primary answer. The entire concern of linguistics
with the relation between form and meaning is only the beginning
of an answer to the question, "How does saying something
communicate something?" The conversational work of H. P. Grice and
those who have followed him is the beginning of an answer to the
question, "How does not saying something communicate something?"
Such questions are not central to this work, although we owe a
great deal to those for whom they are.
A second, and related, answer to the question, “What are the
purposes a person could have in uttering a sentence?", might be
"To perform the illocutionary act corresponding to the
illocutionary force of the sentence used." This answer is related
to the previous one because the illocutionary force of a sentence
is considered by many to be part of its meaning, and thus
performing an illocutionary act is related to, and dependent on,
"getting across the meaning" of the sentence. If the sentence used
is not understood, the illocutionary act will not be performed.
The question of how the acts performed upon uttering a sentence
are related to the form of that sentence is a fascinating and
vexed one in modern linguistics; see, among others, Sadock 1974,
Searle 1975, Gordon and Lakoff 1975 (or 1971), and Labov and
Fanshel forthcoming. Again, however, the present work does not
directly involve the study of illocutionary acts (although the
works cited here, along with Grice 1975 and others, will be
discussed in a later chapter).
What purposes, then, are we interested in? To cover the
purposes mentioned above we will use the term semantic purposes.
It is a semantic purpose to intend to convey the propositional
content of a sentence. It is a semantic purpose to intend the
hearer to recognize the illocutionary force of a sentence. The
purposes we are interested in are outside of but connected to
these purposes, and therefore we will call them para-semantic
purposes.
For example, when I say, "I wish there wasn't so much ozone
in the air," my utterance is intended to convey that I am wishing,
that there is a lot of ozone in the air, and that my wish is for
the opposite of that fact to be the case. I may also intend to
convey that I would like the hearer to do something to bring my
wish about. All these are semantic purposes. On the other hand,
some para-semantic purposes that such an utterance might have are:
to impress the hearer with my consciousness about the environment,
to show the hearer that I know the word "ozone," to keep the
conversation going, to change the subject, and so on.
It is clear that most para-semantic purposes depend on the
achievement of semantic purposes. However, this is not always the
case. We can point to the common experience, especially at noisy
gatherings, of knowing that someone has told a joke and laughing
as a consequence of that knowledge, without actually having heard

6
the joke.2 Here the joke-teller has succeeded in the para-semantic
purposes of making people laugh and possibly adding to a
reputation as one who tells jokes, without succeeding in the
semantic purpose of conveying the content of the joke.
This work, then, concerns itself with para-semantic purposes,
and in particular, with the kind of para-semantic purposes that
involve deception and concealment.
Very little attention has been paid, in studies of
conversation both inside and outside of linguistics, to the
concealment of purpose in human interaction. In the chapter on
previous work we will see just how little this aspect of
conversation has been noticed, and we will note the few places
where it has. The main body of this work will concern itself with
para-semantic purposes that the speaker wishes to keep hidden.3 In
particular, we will be looking at how a speaker selects an
utterance that will (he hopes) accomplish all of the purposes he
is interested in, and what kinds of knowledge he uses to make this
selection.
The advantage of dealing with concealed purposes for such an
endeavor is that this rules out the possibility that the purposes
are accomplished merely because the other person knows they are
wanted. Thus, we can discuss mechanisms of conversation that work
with such regularity that they can be taken advantage of in the
language-user's concealed calculations. When we have ruled out
grace, or the generosity of the other, as reasons why one can
expect to achieve purposes, we are left with mechanisms regular
enough to yield to scientific study.
In this dissertation we hope to demonstrate clearly that such
mechanisms exist. We will not be able to do more than indicate
what a more formal description of them would require; such a
formal description, which would be extremely interesting if it
could be done, is a work for the future.

2 I am not referring to the case where one laughs because others

are laughing; here the semantic purpose may have been accomplished
with someone. I mean the case in which one is the sole audience to
the joke.
3 It should also be noted that the intention to keep a para-
semantic purpose hidden is itself a para-semantic purpose.

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 CHAPTER I

INITIATING STRATAGEMS

Consider the following anecdotes:

I. The morning after an elaborate New Year's party, Mrs.
Benson remembered that someone, the night before, had brought her
a plant as a gift – but she couldn't remember who it was. Not
being willing to admit that she had forgotten, she called one of
the possible donors and said, "I found the most gorgeous plant in
my front room this morning."
II. One day in the park an older man sat down next to a
younger man with the hope that the younger man might want to have
sex with him. Not being willing to ask for this in any direct way,
he started a conversation about the heat, and then added, "It's a
good day to be indoors."
III. Georgette saw Margaret in the evening, after a reading
of Margaret's poetry was to have been held in the afternoon.
Georgette had not tried to be there and was not sure if the
reading was actually held. Not being willing to admit her
ignorance, she said, "I'm sorry I didn't get to hear you read your
poetry."
IV. A young woman, having been rescued from danger by a
handsome policeman, is now standing with him at her back door. She
would like to get to know him better, but does not want to risk
rejection. She says, "I probably shouldn't ask you in for a
drink."
These anecdotes are examples of a certain type of
conversational stratagem: the initiating stratagem. This chapter
and portions of the following chapters will be devoted to finding
answers to these questions: What are the characteristics of this
type of stratagem? What makes it work? What are its similarities
and dissimilarities to other types of stratagem? What kinds of
knowledge must a person be using in order to devise a stratagem?
And, ultimately, what is a conversational stratagem, and what is
its relationship to non-stratagem-containing talk?
Let us begin our analysis of these anecdotes by looking at
the kind of situation each of them describes. Each of the
anecdotes contains a central character who is confronted with a
social problem to which he wishes to find a conversational
solution. In analyzing the stratagems we will call this person the
user of the stratagem, or User. At this point, the other
participant will be called the Other.
In each case, the "social problem" referred to above breaks
down into several parts. The User is, for some reason, next
speaker. In the cases given above, the User is next speaker
because his purpose requires some kind of initiatory utterance. In
the next chapter we will look at cases where the User is next
speaker for a sequential reason, such as having been selected as

8
next speaker by the preceding utterance.4 In either case, the
problem which is solved by the use of a conversational stratagem
is always the problem of what to say, given situation plus purpose
plus linguistic resources; it is at the point of being next
speaker that the User is faced with this problem.
Another part of the User's problem which we can assume for
the moment to be invariably present is an uncertainty (lack of
certain knowledge) about something for which knowledge is required
by the "what to say" problem. In most cases we will say that it is
"what to say" plus this uncertainty about crucial knowledge that
makes a stratagem necessary. We will call this aspect the Crucial
Uncertainty (CU).
As a further breakdown of the "what to say" problem we will
separate, in our analysis, the three factors mentioned above.
The specification of situation can be a voluminous operation,
but here we will be concerned only with what in the situation
seems to be relevant for the User's calculations. Purpose we will
divide into two parts: negative purpose (NegP) is the intent of
the User to prevent or avoid something, and positive purpose
(PosP) is the intent of the User to bring something about.
Linguistic resources will be demonstrated as follows: we will
display alternative utterances among which the User could have
chosen. These utterances will differ according to whether they
accomplish both types of purpose, or whether they accomplish one
and fail the other. The display of alternative utterances will
emerge as an extremely important analytic tool in this type of
work. We will also see that awareness of alternative utterances is
one of the types of knowledge a person uses in devising a
stratagem.

Formalization: Anecdote I
SITUATION: The morning after a New Year's party given by User
on telephone with Other, who was a guest at the party. Someone
gave User a plant at the party.
CRUCIAL UNCERTAINTY: Was it or was it not Other who gave User
the plant?
POSITIVE PURPOSE: To find out if Other is the donor or not
(resolve the CU), and if so, to thank her.
NEGATIVE PURPOSE: To conceal the CU. (If Other is the donor,
not to reveal not knowing. If Other is not the donor, not to thank
inappropriately.)

4 Extensive preliminary work on speaker-selection techniques has

been done by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and their colleagues
at the University of California at Irvine. (See, for example,
Sacks 1967 and Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974.) They have
demonstrated that one of the properties of the sequential ordering
of conversation is the ability of one speaker (in some cases) to
select the next speaker (this has relevance in more-than-two-party
conversations) and to select what kind of act the next utterance
will be.

9
 ALTERNATIVES: "I wanted to thank you for giving me that
gorgeous plant." Inappropriate and embarrassing in case it was not
Other who gave User the plant.
"Someone gave me a gorgeous plant last night – was it you?”
Reveals that User is uncertain about the donor – fails to
accomplish negative purpose.
"I found the most gorgeous plant in my front room this
morning." This accomplishes all the purposes because it is
appropriate whichever way the uncertainty is resolved. If it was
Other who gave the plant, this can be seen as coy pre-thanks. If
it was not Other who gave the plant, this can be seen as the
beginning of an informative sequence.

Formalization: Anecdote II
SITUATION: a hot afternoon in a public park. User and Other
are both men, strangers to each other. User sits on a park bench
where Other is already sitting. Previous conversation: a few
remarks about the weather.
CU: Is or is not Other open to sexual approach?
PosP: If Other is open, to approach, and move the situation
towards bed.
NegP: If Other is not open, to conceal the PosP.
ALTERNATIVES: "Let's screw." Fails to accomplish NegP.
"I hear they're having a heat wave in Canada." Doesn't move
toward PosP.
"It's a good day to be indoors." Accomplishes NegP in that it
could be an innocent remark, no ulterior motive. Will tend to move
situation toward PosP if Other is open to approach and thus alert
to innuendo.

Formalization: Anecdote III

SITUATION: User and Other are friends, but not close friends.
An event of Other reading her poetry had been scheduled for
earlier that same day. User did not attend.
CU: Was or was not the reading actually held?
PosP: To make a polite expression of regret about the poetry.
NegP: To conceal the CU. (Thus, if the reading was not held,
to conceal that User didn't even try to go.)
ALTERNATIVES: "I'm sorry you didn't get to read your poetry."
Inappropriate in case poetry reading was held; reveals CU.
"I'm sorry I wasn't there to hear you read your poetry."
Inappropriate in case poetry reading wasn't held; reveals CU.
"I'm sorry I didn't get to hear you read your poetry."
Succeeds because it fits either situation.

Formalization: Anecdote IV
SITUATION: User is a woman. Other is a man, and a member of a
profession which makes a distinction between being on or off duty,
and he is, at the time of the speech situation, on duty. They are
alone together, at night, outside the door of User's home. They
have come to be there in the course of Other's duty. There is,
within that duty, no further reason for them to be together.

10
 CU: Is or is not Other willing to do something as undutiful
as coming in for a drink?
PosP: If he is willing, to invite him in.
NegP: If he is not willing, to make it easy for him to stick
to his duty in a face-saving way by not actually inviting him in.
ALTERNATIVES: "Won't you come in for a drink?" Fails NegP.
"Well, thank you very much, officer. Good night." Fails PosP.
"I probably shouldn't ask you in for a drink." This is almost
an invitation. It will succeed in getting the policeman in for a
drink if he wants to come. To see that it is not quite an
invitation, notice that it is not open to the criticism, "You
shouldn't have invited me." Thus it succeeds in the NegP as well.

Several interesting points arise from these formalizations.

First, even allowing for vast differences in situation, none of
them are exactly alike. Beyond the similarities picked out by the
formalization, there is a great deal of variety. The NegP may be
concealment of PosP (II), concealment of CU (I and III), or
something unanalyzable as either of these (IV).
Note also that the NegP and PosP differ in quality. NegP can
always be accomplished, at least in these examples, by silence. It
is the existence of the PosP that requires speech. It is the
simultaneous existence of NegP and PosP that requires careful
choice among alternatives; that requires, in fact, a stratagem.
The formalizations, though pinpointing several properties of
the stratagems discussed so far, leave some important questions
unanswered. Before going on to analyze a contrasting type of
conversational stratagem, I would like to deal with the most
important of these questions, namely: How do these stratagems
work?
We will begin our answer by explicitly formulating the User's
positive and negative purposes in terms of the notion of "possible
appropriate response." We first defined negative purpose as "the
intent of the User to prevent or avoid something," and positive
purpose as "the intent of the User to bring something about." Now
notice that each of these purposes can be discussed in terms of
the expected following utterance: in the case of the negative
purpose, the User wishes to prevent or "block" a certain type of
response, and in the case of the positive purpose the User wishes
to encourage or make more likely a certain type of response.
Let us make this explicit by displaying a representative
subset of possible responses, using Anecdote I as an example and
showing how each response is or is not appropriate for each of the
alternatives given in the formalization above.

Anecdote I: Alternatives and Responses

(1) I wanted to thank you for giving me that gorgeous plant.
(2) Someone gave me a gorgeous plant last night – was it you?
(3) I found the most gorgeous plant in my front room this
morning.
(4) Did you?
(5) I'm so glad you liked it – last night you were so rushed

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I wasn't sure you even got a good look at it.
(6) You mean you didn't remember I gave it to you?!
(7) What do you mean? I didn't give you any plant.
(8) Yes, it was really sweet of Sally to bring that to you.
(9) Nope. Must have been mice.
We have here three candidates for first utterance and six
candidates for second utterance in a two-utterance sequence. This
gives a theoretically possible count of eighteen combinations.
Only seven of them, however, are well-formed conversational
sequences. (For a further discussion of this notion, see
Appendix.) The combinations we can rule out as ill-formed are 1 -
4, 1 - 8, 1 - 9, 2 - 4, 2 - 5, 2 - 7, 2 - 8, 3 - 6, 3 - 7, 3 - 9.
Turning to the seven well-formed sequences, we can assign each a
valuation based on the User's purposes as specified in the
anecdote. A rating of -OK means that the negative purpose failed,
OK means that the negative purpose succeeded, and OK+ means that
both the negative and positive purposes succeeded.5

(1) I wanted to thank you for giving me that gorgeous plant.

(OK+)(5) I' m so glad you liked it – last night you were so

5 This formulation does not allow for the possibility that the
PosP may succeed while the NegP fails. In most cases, including
Anecdote I, it is a disaster when the NegP fails whether the PosP
succeeds or not. Thus, we would want to rate the following
responses as equally undesirable, even though (i) reveals that the
Other is the donor and (ii) does not:
(i) You mean you didn't remember I gave it to you?
(ii) You mean you didn't remember who gave it to you?
In other cases, it is possible to imagine a response that
apparently fails in the NegP while succeeding in the PosP. James
D. McCawley has suggested such a response to "It's a good day to
be indoors." in Anecdote II: "No, it's a lousy day to be indoors.
Let's go to the beach and screw there." However, this does not in
fact violate the NegP as stated for Anecdote II: "If the Other is
not open (to sexual approach), to conceal the PosP." Thus, the
NegP is conditional on the state of the Other; it states that the
PosP need only be concealed if revealing it would be unwelcome to
the Other and have possibly unpleasant consequences for the User.
This conditional property of NegP is actually present for all
the stratagems. The NegP exists because there is a reason to want
to avoid a certain type of response. If that reason is removed,
the NegP disappears and a stratagem becomes unnecessary. Imagine,
for Anecdote I, the unlikely case that in the conversation before
the stratagem the Other were to say: "I never mind if people
forget that I give them things. I do it all the time." Then the
User could abandon all calculation and say, "Well, I'm glad to
hear it, because I wanted to ask you if it was you that gave me
the plant last night."

12
rushed I wasn't sure you even got a good look at it.

(1) I wanted to thank you for giving me that gorgeous plant.

(-OK)(7) What do you mean? I didn't give you any plant.

(2) Someone gave me a gorgeous plant last night – was it

you?
(-OK)(6) You mean you didn't remember I gave it to you?

(2) Someone gave me a gorgeous plant last night – was it

you?
(OK+)(9) Nope. Must have been mice.

(3) I found the most gorgeous plant in my front room this

morning.
(OK) (4) Did you?

(3) I found the most gorgeous plant in my front room this

morning.
(OK+)(5) I'm so glad you liked it – last night you were so rushed
I wasn't sure you even got a good look at it.

(3) I found the most gorgeous plant in my front room this

morning.
(OK+)(8) Yes, it was really sweet of Sally to bring that to you.

From this we can clearly see that only one of the three
initial utterances (3) admits6 no -OK responses and at least one
OK+ response. Thus, it always succeeds in the negative purpose
and has a chance of succeeding in the positive purpose. Utterance
(1) has a chance of succeeding in the positive purpose, but it
also has a chance of failing in the negative purpose. The same is
true of utterance (2).
In these terms, a good stratagem admits no -OK responses and
at least one OK+ response. Stratagems work because there is some
mechanism governing what utterance may follow another (see
Appendix). The User can choose an utterance with the reasonable
expectation that no undesirable response will occur and with the
reasonable hope that a desirable response may occur.
But this still leaves a question begged. Even given that the
mechanisms for connectedness in conversation are not well known,
may we not ask what it is about the situations given above, each
with its crucial uncertainty, that makes them particularly
stratagem-prone? At one level, of course, it is the crucial
uncertainty, coupled with the fears and wants of the User that we
have called negative and positive purposes, that makes a stratagem
necessary. We have seen, now, how the negative and positive
purposes are used in the selection of an utterance which can be

6 For a discussion of this use of the term "admits" see Appendix.

It derives from Karttunen 1974.

13
expected to achieve both. How is the crucial uncertainty used?
Here are restatements of the CU for each anecdote:
I. Is the person I am addressing the one who recently gave me
a plant, and thus a person who can expect my thanks for that
plant?
II. Is the person I am addressing willing to engage in sexual
activity with me, and thus a person who would be ready to receive
a sexual invitation?
III. Is the person I am addressing one who has recently read
poetry at a gathering where I could be expected to be present but
was not, and thus a person who can expect me to perform something
like an apology for not having been there?
IV. Is the person I am addressing someone who is zealous
about his duty, and thus someone who expects others not to ask him
to circumvent it?
In every human interaction there are always things each
person is uncertain about the other. What makes an uncertainty
crucial is that it is uncertainty about something the User would
have to know in order to accomplish the positive purpose without a
stratagem. The crucial uncertainty interacts with the positive
purpose in that, in each case, if the crucial uncertainty were not
present the User would either be able to accomplish the positive
purpose without a stratagem, or the User would know it was useless
to try.
The crucial uncertainty interacts with the negative purpose
in that, because of something he is afraid of, the User is not
willing to clear up the crucial uncertainty by asking the Other
about it. In some cases this is because the User does not want the
Other to know that he has the uncertainty (as in I); in some cases
the User does not want the Other to know that he has the positive
purpose, and a question about the crucial uncertainty would reveal
this (as in II).
Another way of expressing the fact that there is a crucial
uncertainty is to say that there are two possible states of the
world, or two possible states of the addressee, or two possible
contexts. We noted above that an utterance in conversation admits
certain responses and does not admit others. The mechanisms
governing this are unclear, but it is clear that some sequences
are well-formed and others are ill-formed (as, for example, 1 - 9
above: "I wanted to thank you for giving me that gorgeous plant,"/
"Nope. Must have been mice."). Now we will say in addition that a
context admits certain utterances and does not admit others (see
Appendix for a comparison of this notion to Karttunen's admission-
by-context, which inspired it). In the anecdotes given above, the
User's problem is that he is faced with two possible contexts,
each of which admits certain utterances and not others. Now the
method open to a stratagem-deviser is clear. He must choose an
utterance that would be admitted by both possible contexts.
This in itself is enough to ensure that no -OK response will
occur. To make it possible that some OK+ responses might occur,
the User must do some additional calculation based on the possible
responses admitted by his utterance, as detailed above. To

14
illustrate that merely selecting an utterance admitted by both
possible contexts is not enough, let us analyze the alternatives
and responses for Anecdote II.

Anecdote II: Alternatives and Responses

(10) Let's screw.
(11) I hear they're having a heat wave in Canada.
(12) It's a good day to be indoors.
(13) Keep your tendencies to yourself, buddy.
(14) The park is nice, too.
(15) So they tell me.
(16) Your place or mine?
(17) It depends on where indoors.
Possible sequences:
(10) Let's screw.
(-OK)(13) Keep your tendencies to yourself, buddy.

(10) Let's screw.

(OK+)(16) Your place or mine?

(11) I hear they're having a heat wave in Canada.

(OK) (15) So they tell me.

(12) It's a good day to be indoors.

(OK) (14) The park is nice, too.

(12) It's a good day to be indoors.

(OK+) (17) It depends on where indoors.7

Utterance (10) does not fit both possible contexts, and thus has
the chance of being followed by a -OK response. Both (11) and
(12), on the other hand, do fit both possible contexts, yet (11)
has no chance of occurring with an OK+ response. Of the three,
only (12) is a good stratagem, admitting no -OK responses and at
least one OK+ response.
Thus, in devising a useful stratagem, a User must be aware of
permissible-sequence-combinations in two directions. The utterance
chosen must fit (and be admitted by) both possible contexts, and
must admit, in turn, at least one desired response. The use of a

7 Some readers of earlier versions of this work have objected that

they do not see why (17) is OK+. In reply, I must apologize for
this dissertation's neglect of paralanguage. Of course, bare words
on a page are not enough to convey what actually occurs in
conversation. Unfortunately, intonation, facial expression, and
other paralinguistic features are very difficult to transcribe,
and the plea is offered that in a preliminary work such as this,
scope, rather than depth or completeness, is what is aimed for.
If you are one of those who have trouble hearing (17) as OK+,
imagine how it would sound spoken by Marlene Dietrich or Mae West.

15
conversational stratagem demonstrates orientation both to possible
preceding context and to possible following response.
Before leaving the chapter on initiating stratagems let us
look at an interesting variation: the complex audience stratagem.
The application of conversational stratagems to complex audiences
was first brought to my attention by Don Forman (personal
communication), who gave me what has to be considered a classic
example, the "black sociolinguist" example cited as Anecdote VI.
In simple audience stratagems, there is a crucial uncertainty
having to do with whether the Other is in one state or another.
Remember that "crucial uncertainty" was our term for the User's
attitude toward a situation in which there are actually two
possible “contexts.” We saw that the state of the Other was
crucial in selecting an utterance; a difference in state would
mean a different context, which would then admit a partially
different set of utterances. An utterance is selected which will
fit either state, and ideally the response of the Other reveals
which state the Other is in. In the case of a complex audience
stratagem, more than one person is present (in "hearing
distance"), some of whom are in one state and some in another. (It
should be noted that "simple audience" can also refer to an
audience of more than one person, if all the persons are in the
same state and the User just doesn't know what it is.) Each
person, or each group of people sharing a relevant state,
represents a different context with respect to what utterance will
be admitted. Even more important, each context not only admits
certain utterances and does not admit others, but each context
also determines to some extent how the utterances will be
understood. The way to use one sentence to say two different
things to two different people is to choose a sentence which is
oriented to the differing states the two people are in. This will
become clearer when we give some examples.

Anecdote V
007 1/4 must give his colleague a signal that he has
succeeded in stealing the microfilm. The signal is "blue roses."
To be seen talking to his colleague is too dangerous; they are not
supposed to know each other. He goes to lunch with an acquaintance
at a time when his colleague is eating at a nearby table. In the
course of the conversation he says, "Yes, I did enjoy the
Botanical Gardens – but I looked all over and I didn't see any
blue roses."8

8 Of course this remark will only suit 007 1/4's purposes if it is

a naturally occurring part of the conversation, i.e., if it is
admitted by the acquaintance's preceding remark. In this case we
can imagine that the acquaintance has just asked if he enjoyed the
Botanical Gardens. 007 1/4 need not wait for such a question in
order to use his stratagem. With a little ingenuity he can turn
the conversation to his purposes whatever course it takes. For
example, if the acquaintance asks how he likes his apartment, he

16
 Let us see how the formalism previously developed applies to
the complex audience stratagem. The category CU will be called
instead "Audience States," where one or more members of the
audience are in one state listed and one or more are in the other
state listed.
AS: Member of the same spy organization: privy to the signal.
Not a member of the same spy organization: not privy to the
signal.
PosP: To get the message across to the right person.
NegP: To hide from anyone else the fact that a clandestine
message is being sent.
ALTERNATIVES: "Blue roses." Fails NegP; very suspicious as an
independent utterance because not conversationally relevant.
"CONVERSATION NOT CONTAINING THE WORDS 'BLUE ROSES"' Fails
PosP.
"I'd like to tell that person over there that I stole the
microfilm." Fails purpose behind NegP!
"Yes, I did enjoy the Botanical Gardens – but I looked all
over and I didn't find any blue roses!" Succeeds in PosP and NegP.
In this case the negative purpose was to completely conceal
that any double communication was taking place. Other examples,
wherein the content of the hidden communication is concealed but
the fact that there is a hidden communication going on is
apparent, are so common that they will readily leap to the
reader's mind. These are such things as the use of pig-latin,
communication in a language unknown to other hearers, parents
spelling words over the heads of their children, etc.

Anecdote VI (Forman's Black Sociolinguist)

SITUATION: User is black and has strong loyalties to fellow
blacks. As a sociolinguist he has knowledge of both standard black
and standard white dialects, but knows that the white members of
the complex audience have knowledge only of standard white
dialect. (He has also read Labov 1972, where Forman got his data,)
The conversation, as I suppose often happens when men get together
(remember I didn't make up this example!), is about who can beat
up whom.
AS: Whites, speaking and understanding only white dialect.
Blacks, speaking and understanding black dialect.
PosP: To say to the blacks: "NO WHITE MAN CAN BEAT UP ANY
BLACK MAN" (caps for semantics). To say to the whites: "IT ISN'T
TRUE THAT NO WHITE MAN CAN BEAT UP ANY BLACK MAN"
NegP: For the whites, at least, to be unaware of the double
communication.
ALTERNATIVES: (I'll give just the stratagem; the others
should be obvious.)
"It ain't no white man can't beat up no black man."

can reply, "Oh, it's fine, except for some hideous wallpaper
that's crawling with blue roses."

17
 In the area of responses this example reveals its
implausibility, because if the blacks make their appropriate
response of "Right on!" or the like, the whites will know that
something is going on. They, like the spy's colleague in Anecdote
V, must be in on the ploy and keep silent. In fact, it is for the
very reason that responses are so revealing about what
information/act has been received, that in complex audience
stratagems that involve keeping a hidden communication hidden, the
person receiving the hidden communication must not respond to it.
The next anecdote is a very good example of this.

Anecdote VII
This is from a Humphrey Bogart movie called "Dead Reckoning."
Bogey is in the inner sanctum of his enemy, a powerful nightclub
owner called Martinelli. Martinelli offers him a drink, and when
the drinks come they are brought by a waiter Bogey already knows,
by the name of Louie. As he hands Bogey his drink, Louie says,
"Mr. Martinelli's private stock." The paraverbal accompaniments
include a low, "serious" tone of voice and eye-contact for a
"meaningful" length of time. We realize, as does Bogey, that Louie
is trying to communicate to Bogey that the drink is drugged
without revealing to Martinelli, who can hear him, that he is
doing so. Martinelli tells Louie to get out, glances at him as he
goes, then says to Bogey as he raises his own drink, "This is also
from my private stock." Martinelli cannot be certain whether Louie
was up to something, or if so, whether Bogey got the message, but
within that uncertainty he is trying to select, by his utterance,
the innocent interpretation of Louie's utterance, thus allaying
Bogey's possible suspicions. Now it's Bogey's move. Aware of all
that has occurred, he is also aware that if he demonstrates, by
not drinking, that he got a hidden message from Louie, he will
prove Louie's disloyalty to Martinelli, with fatal consequences to
Louie. We are able to follow this calculation explicitly, because
the soundtrack at this point takes us into Bogey's thoughts. He
decides to try to save Louie, drinks, is drugged, and wakes up
later beside Louie's dead body. Good try.
From our analysis of other complex audience stratagems we can
see why Louie was likely to fail in his negative purpose (i.e.,
keeping the hidden communication from Martinelli). There was
nothing inherent in the utterance he used that guaranteed that
Bogey would take it one way and Martinelli another. He could only
hope that this would happen, but he had very little to back up his
hope except the eye-contact which Martinelli wasn't in a good
position to see and the fact that Martinelli probably didn't know
he and Bogey were previously acquainted.
In the next chapter we will be looking at stratagems of the
type that Martinelli is using here when he says, "This is also
from my private stock," in the hope that this will select the
innocent interpretation of Louie's utterance. We will call this
contrasting type of stratagem the responding stratagem.

18
 CHAPTER II

RESPONDING STRATAGEMS

Consider the following anecdotes:

VIII. Trudie and Alice are lovers, but they are not ready to
tell Faye so. One day Faye says to Trudie, "I notice you and Alice
both wear beaten-silver rings." Trudie replies, "Oh, yes, our
neighbor who does jewelry makes them."

IX. Jack is going outside to play. As he opens the door his

mother calls, "Are you going out to play with Billy?" He replies,
"No, not with Billy," and disappears.

X. Georgette arrives at her dental appointment on her way to

a fancier engagement and is thus dressed more elaborately than
usual. The dentist, after admiring her dress, says, "Now, would
you like to take it off so I can work on you?” Georgette replies,
"If we cover it well I'm sure it will be all right."

XI. Abe and Lady Margaret, old lovers, are meeting again
after five years. He is being sued for libel because of a book he
has written, and they have been discussing that. Then he says, "I
want to kiss you but I'm scared." She says, "I'm scared, too."
Pause, then she again, "What are you going to do?" He says,
"Probably wind up kissing you." (From the television adaptation of
QB VII by Leon Uris.)

How do these anecdotes differ from those given in Chapter I?

Note that in each of these anecdotes there is more than one
utterance quoted. It is the last utterance in each case that is
the interesting one – the stratagem. In Chapter I we used other
utterances in the formalization and analysis of the anecdotes, but
only one utterance was needed in the first description. Chapter I
dealt with initiating stratagems – stratagems in which the
strategic utterance was the beginning of a sequence. Often this
utterance occurred after a previous conversation, but the previous
conversation was not specifically relevant – not relevant enough
to be quoted exactly. In this chapter we are looking at responding
stratagems. These are stratagems which are specifically oriented
to a preceding utterance.
Because of this, the formalizations we will use for these
anecdotes will differ from the formalizations used in Chapter I.
Following the formalizations, we will have to compare the types of
stratagem to see what they have in common despite the fact that
they need to be formalized differently.
In responding stratagems the preceding utterance is crucial.
What happens is that the User takes advantage of the possibility

19
of interpreting the preceding utterance in more than one way.
As we mentioned in the previous chapter, when the
interpretation of an utterance changes, the set of admitted
responses to it also changes. It is possible to demonstrate, by
responding a certain way, that the utterance responded to was
interpreted in a certain way.
This is a stratagem (in a stratagem there is always an
intention to conceal) when the User intends that the Other will
not be aware that he saw two interpretations and chose one.
In formalizing the anecdotes in this chapter, then, we give,
briefly, the situation. Then we will give the utterance of the
Other that precedes the User’s stratagem, and attempt to
characterize the multiple interpretation that the stratagem will
make use of. We will then display a series of appropriate
responses, one which selects the preferred interpretation (the
stratagem), one which selects the unwanted interpretation, and
occasionally other alternatives which will be noted as undesirable
in other ways.

Formalization: Anecdote VIII

SITUATION: User and Other are talking. User does not want
Other to know that she and Alice are lovers. User is wearing a
beaten-silver ring.
PREVIOUS UTTERANCE (Other): "I notice you and Alice both wear
beaten-silver rings." The multiple interpretation here is based on
the purpose for saying such a thing.
"Noticing" utterances are common small talk. "I notice you
got your dog clipped.” "I see you've had a paper in Language." are
the sorts of things that can be said with very little purpose: any
response from "M-hm, isn't it nice?" to a long story is
appropriate and cooperative. On the other hand, the very same
things, given a certain kind of previous history, can be said with
the expectation that an explanation will follow. If my neighbor
and I have recently had a discussion in which we agreed that
getting dogs clipped is a needless extravagance in this day and
age, and the next time we meet I notice he's had his dog clipped,
I can say, "I notice you've had your dog clipped," with the
expectation that something will follow like, "Well, I had to, he
got into a lot of burrs." Given the situation, a reply of "M-hm,
isn't it nice?" would not be appropriate. "I notice you and Alice
both wear beaten-silver rings.” has its multiple interpretation
because it could be either of these things.
ALTERNATIVES: "Oh, yes – our neighbor who does jewelry makes
them." Selects preferred interpretation.
"We wear the same kind of ring because we're in love with
each other, Faye." Selects unwanted interpretation.
"What are you implying?” Challenging: forces discussion of
unwanted interpretation unless Other backs down.

Formalization: Anecdote IX
SITUATION: User is Other's ten-year-old son. User wants to
get out the door without telling Other where he is going.

20
 PU (Other): “Are you going out to to play with Billy?" Again,
the multiple interpretation has to do with the utterer's purpose:
in this case, the reason for asking. This question can have the
purpose of finding out if the addressee is going out to play with
Billy, or of finding out where and with whom the addressee is
going out to play.
ALTERNATIVES: "No, not with Billy." Selects preferred
interpretation.
"No, mother, I'm going to play by the railroad tracks."
Selects unwanted interpretation.
"I don't want to tell you where I'm going." Refusing – forces
discussion of unwanted interpretation.

Formalization: Anecdote X
SITUATION: User is Other's dental patient at a regular
appointment. User is dressed differently from usual in a way that
provokes favorable comment. The next step in the order of business
is for User to sit in the dental chair; User is still standing.
PU (Other): "Now, would you like to take it off so I can work
on you?” Our culture is blessed with a large gray euphemistic area
surrounding sexuality. In the course of ordinary conversation a
great many things are said which could be viewed as having sexual
connotation; as Tom Lehrer has it, "When correctly viewed/
Everything is lewd." Harvey Sacks, in a lecture dated November 14,
1967, notes the observation by anthropologist E. R. Leach that a
great many ordinary words are homonyms with tabu words, and that
these ordinary words can be used without embarrassment because the
obscene connotations are just not heard (in most cases). When
somebody invites you to a cocktail party, you do not blush and
giggle before accepting. Sacks goes on to observe that once such a
pun, either deliberate or inadvertent, has been pointed out, the
conversation following becomes one pun after another – not because
more possible-double-entendres are being uttered, but because the
veil over hearing them has been lifted. "Now, would you like to
take it off so I can work on you?” where “it” is a primary article
of clothing and the speaker and the addressee are of opposite
sexes, is such an utterance.
ALTERNATIVES: "That’s the best offer I've had all day."
"That's an invitation that's hard to refuse." Either of these will
bring the sexual connotation into the open. If the Other was
unaware of the double-entendre in his utterance, bringing it to
his attention in this way might either amuse or embarrass him.
"If we cover it well I'm sure it will be all right." This is the
reply the User would have given if she hadn't noticed the double-
entendre. If the double meaning wasn't intentional, this reply
avoids possible embarrassment for the Other. If the double meaning
was intentional, this reply avoids whatever consequences of
sharing a sexual joke might be.

Formalization: Anecdote XI
SITUATION: User and Other are old lovers who haven't seen
each other for five years previous to the speech situation.

21
Previous conversation has to do with User's involvement in a libel
suit. User: "I want to kiss you but I'm scared." Other: "I'm
scared, too."
PU (Other): "What are you going to do?” The multiple
interpretation of this utterance has to do with which of the two
preceding topics it is connected to. It might be, "What are you
going to do about being scared of kissing me?” or "What are you
going to do about the libel suit?”
ALTERNATIVES: "Probably wind up kissing you."
"Fight it."
"What do you mean, 'What am I going to do?"'
(We have not categorized the alternatives in Anecdote XI
because it is a special case which will be discussed later. It
should be clear, however, that the first and second alternatives
select very different interpretations of the PU, while the third
alternative does not select any.)
Leaving Anecdote XI aside for the moment, let us see how the
categories of Chapter I apply to these anecdotes. In discussing
the complex audience stratagems we saw that the term "crucial
uncertainty" is not the best description of what is going on in
all cases. This becomes even clearer after we look at responding
stratagems. We need something more on the order of "possible
states of the Other." What seems to be going on in all the cases
is that, at the point when the stratagem is used, the situation
(including the immediately preceding utterance, if any) could be,
if fully specified, one of two possible contexts, each of which
would admit partially different sets of following utterances.
Take, for example, the case of one’s roommate returning home after
finding out the results of a test. The door is opening. One knows,
at this point, that there are two possible contexts. The sets of
utterances admitted by each are partially different. One will
include "Congratulations"; the other will include "Tough luck.”
Both will include, perhaps, "How about a beer?”
In responding stratagems it is the previous utterance (PU
above) that introduces or leaves open the possibility of two or
more contexts and therefore two or more partially different sets
of responses. Thus, the varying interpretations of the previous
utterance in this chapter correspond to the category of Crucial
Uncertainty in the first chapter.
The Positive Purpose, in all cases (VIII, IX, and X), was to
select the preferred interpretation. The Negative Purpose was
always to conceal that two interpretations were seen and that a
selection was made. Thus, the categories used in Chapter I are
indeed relevant for responding stratagems, but PosP and NegP do
not need to be specified because they are the same in each case,
and what corresponds to CU is shown in the differing
interpretations of the PU.
It should be made clear at this point that whether or not the
multiple interpretation of the PU was deliberate on the part of
the Other does not matter for the User of a responding stratagem.
We were assuming, for the anecdotes given above, that the utterer
of the PU was not aware of the multiple interpretation in his

22
utterance – until, of course, the stratagem picked out the
interpretation that may not have been intended. (In the section on
misunderstanding we will have more to say about why a person, on
being interpreted in a way he didn't intend, will often choose to
let it stand rather than make a correction.) So a responding
stratagem is most often used when the multiple interpretation of
the PU was not deliberate.
However, an initiating stratagem and a responding stratagem
can occur in sequence; a responding stratagem is a way of dealing
with an initiating stratagem. To illustrate this, let us try
formulating Anecdote VIII with the roles switched, with User as
Other and Other as User.

Formalization: Anecdote VIII as Initiating Stratagem

SITUATION: User and Other are acquaintances. User knows that
Other and Alice are roommates and that they wear matching rings.
User suspects that they are lovers.
CU: Is or is not Other willing to say that she and Alice are
lovers?
PosP: To start a discussion of this, if Other is willing.
NegP: To conceal CU and PosP, or at least to allow Other to
behave as if they are concealed.
ALTERNATIVES: "Are you and Alice lovers?" Fails NegP,
"I notice you and Alice both wear beaten-silver rings."
Succeeds NegP; possibly will succeed PosP.

Notice that this is not the only possible formalization,

given the situation and the utterances. For example, rather than
the above, the PosP might be: "To let Other know she suspects
something without forcing Other to respond." This is true of all
the formalizations: the formalizations are meant to display some
plausible combination of purpose and possible contexts compatible
with the situation and text. To claim any more than this would be
to claim that, given any situation plus the text of the
conversation, we could tell what the participants are intending,
which is clearly impossible. What we can do is tell what they
could be intending, which we do through our insight into human
"pragmatic competence," or what people know how to do with
language.
Another interesting point arises from looking at this second
formalization of Anecdote VIII. Notice the NegP: “To conceal PU
and PosP, or at least to allow Other to behave as if they
are concealed." We have been talking up to this point as if a
stratagem could only succeed in its negative purpose of
concealment if the Other were totally unaware of any possibility
of skullduggery. But, of course, since the Other is also a
language-user with the same abilities (if not always the same
ingenuity) as the User, we can expect that the Other may often be
aware of the possibility at least of a stratagem being used. To
consider Anecdote VIII again: Trudie may be well aware, when Faye
says, "I notice you and Alice both wear beaten-silver rings," that
Faye may be giving her a chance to say something about her

23
relationship with Alice if she wants to, or not, if she doesn't
want to. Faye may be well aware, when Trudie replies, "Oh, yes –
our neighbor who does jewelry makes them" that Trudie is politely
declining the chance to speak on a more personal level. We can
recognize that this sort of thing happens in business
negotiations, diplomacy, and all kinds of situations in everyday
life. But how is it that we can call something a stratagem when it
doesn't really involve concealment? Are there two kinds of
stratagem, those that involve concealment and those that do not?
The answers to these questions take us into another area of
conversational competence, into a concept called "smooth flow."
This concept was introduced in Weiser 1974. It is a
cooperative maxim derivable from H. P. Grice's Cooperative
Principle of Conversation (Grice 1975). It involves, essentially,
responding to what the other person is asking you to respond to.
Every utterance carries (or perhaps "rests on” would be a better
way of saying it) certain assumptions about the world of the
speaker-hearer. Some of these are clear enough to be called
"presuppositions,” others are vaguer. A response to the
assumptions, to the background rather than the foreground, is
often felt as "challenging" or even "attacking." It is much more
cooperative not to do it. Another reason why people do not respond
to assumptions is that they go by very quickly; it is harder to
respond to assumptions. Some psychologists seem to be saying that
a lot of what parents do to their children is done on this level.9
The reason why it is so maddening when someone "lays a trip" on
you, is that they do it on a level where it is difficult to fight.
An analogy to smooth flow might be someone reaching toward you a
tray of cookies. You are being asked to take a cookie. It is not
likely to occur to you to take the tray instead.
A good example of the use of smooth flow is a stratagem a
little different from those this dissertation is mainly concerned
with. This one is called "How to Not End a Conversation." The
following two dialogues will illustrate it. It should be clear
that in the second dialogue the objective is being achieved more
easily.

A. Prue: Well, I have to hang up now. It's getting late and

I have things to do in the morning.
Sue: Oh, can't you talk a little longer? I'm not tired.
Prue: No, I really have to go. I’ll call you t

B. Prue: Well, I have to hang up now. I have things to do

9 See, for example, the classic paper on the Double Bind

Hypothesis of schizophrenia by Bateson, Jackson, Haley, and
Weakland, reprinted in Bateson 1972: "Toward a Theory of
Schizophrenia." It would be vastly simplifying the double-bind
situation to say that it is a case of crucial information being
put into assumptions so that it cannot be challenged; yet this
seems to be at least a partial description of what occurs.

24
 Sue: OK. Oh, by the way, did you ever get that new chair
you wanted?
Prue: No – the store has it on order and it might take
up to three months.
Sue: It's really terrible how hard it is to get things
these days. What are you doing in the meantime?
Prue: Oh, I moved the couch over a little and it looks
all right…
and so on. In the first dialogue, Sue's response to Prue's sign-
off is "about" hanging up. Since Prue wants to hang up, any
conversation about hanging up is likely to lead to the obvious
conclusion. In the second dialogue, Sue agrees to hang up — no
argument – and then asks a question about something else. Think
how extremely unlikely it is that Prue will say in response: "I'm
not going to answer that; I said I'm going to hang up and that's
what I'm going to do." It is not only that this is impolite and
bodes ill for the friendship. It will probably not even occur to
Prue. When you're asked a question, you answer it. This is smooth
flow.
With this in mind, let's look again at Anecdote VIII, in
which we agreed that both sides might be aware that something
might be going on. If Faye is aware that Trudie is aware that "I
notice you and Alice both wear beaten-silver rings" might mean
"I'd like you to tell me about your relationship with Alice if you
want to," then how is saying the first different from saying the
second? Smooth flow provides us with the answer. To see this
clearly let us display each of the sentences above along with
their relevant appropriate responses.

Faye: I'd like you to tell me about your relationship

Trudie: Well, Faye, since you ask, it's like this…
Or As a matter of fact, I don't want to.
Or What relationship?

And compare:

Faye: I notice you and Alice both wear beaten-silver

Trudie: We wear the same kind of ring because we’re in love
with each other, Faye.
Or Oh, yes – our neighbor who does jewelry makes them.

In the first case, Faye says she is giving Trudie a chance to

talk about the relationship only if she wants to. But in fact, any
reply Trudie gives, including silence, must inevitably be
about the relationship. Only in the second is Faye really giving
Trudie a chance not to talk about the relationship if she doesn't
want to, because she is giving her a chance to behave as if the
relationship was never mentioned (which it wasn't).10

10 This is related to the sort of thing discussed in R. Lakoff

25
 The notion that stratagems can exist on two levels, and need
not involve complete concealment in order to "succeed," brings us
back to Anecdote XI. Anecdote XI, it turns out, is not really a
conversational stratagem at all. Instead, it is a case of
something that works just the same way except that it does not
involve concealment. It is a special case of the use of more than
one level: play.
Being playful is much more complex than being serious. In his
paper, "A Theory of Play and Fantasy" (Bateson 1972), Gregory
Bateson demonstrates that performing a playful action indicates
the ability to make not one but two levels of abstraction from the
same action when it is serious. The playful action denotes the
serious action – the nip denotes the bite, to use Bateson's
example – but at the same time says, "This does not mean what a
bite would mean."
Let's look at the dialogue of Anecdote XI, including the two
lines that follow the "stratagem in the television script.
(follows talk about the libel suit)
Abe: I want to kiss you but I’m scared.
Lady Margaret: I’m scared, too. What are you going to do?
Abe: Probably wind up kissing you.
Lady Margaret: (smiles and shakes head) Abe.
Abe: Fight it.
If "Probably wind up kissing you." had been a responding stratagem
like the others discussed in this chapter, Abe would have wanted
Lady Margaret to believe, for some reason, that he had interpreted
her "What are you going to do?” in such a way that "Probably wind
up kissing you." was an appropriate response. When her next action
somehow makes him answer the question again, giving it the other
interpretation, this could only mean that the stratagem had
failed. Instead, we do not sense a failure here. The motivation
behind this conversation is more plausible when we assume that his
purpose is to amuse and to talk "about kissing," rather than to
make her believe that he thought her question had to do with
kissing. Her response makes most sense when we assume that she
sees play as his intention. Her smile is the display of her
amusement and non-anger, her head-shake and her speaking his name
mean, "Yes, but now answer my question.” The important thing to
note here is that his playful response depends just as much on the
multiple interpretation of the previous utterance as do responding
stratagems. In the next chapter we will look again at the
comparison of play with conversational stratagems.
If play involves several levels of abstraction above

1973. One of her proposed maxims of politeness is "Give options."

She also discusses cases where someone pretends to give options. A
question preceded by "May I ask…" pretends to give options but
actually does not (p. 299). In contrast to this, the sentence used
above ("I notice you and Alice both wear beaten-silver rings.")
actually does give an option, and thus according to Lakoff would
be more polite.

26
"straight talk," so do conversational stratagems. Stratagems
succeed when they “look like," and thus could be taken far,
utterances that are not stratagems. You do not hide something by
throwing a cloth over it; you merely hide what it is. But you can
hide a horse by making it look like a cow, in a place where cows
belong but horses do not. Stratagems succeed when they are made to
look exactly like non-stratagems that could occur in the very same
place. (Exceptions to this are the rather uninteresting cases
listed in the last chapter of pig-latin, spelling out words in
front of non-spellers, etc.) In devising stratagems speakers are
using their knowledge of what normal conversations look like. The
difference between stratagems and play is whether the other
participants are allowed to be "in on it."
So far we have looked at responding stratagems that take a
previous utterance with a possible multiple interpretation and
select one interpretation or the other. However, there are
responding stratagems that do just the opposite. Consider the
following anecdote:

XII. Barbie and Hugh have been "going together" for two
months. Barbie is not sure whether Hugh would be willing to take
her on a vacation with him. One day as Hugh is glancing through
the travel ads in the Sunday paper he says, "Could you dig a
Florida vacation?” Barbie says, "Helen was down there last year at
this time and she said it was terrific."

What has happened is that Barbie is unable to tell whether

Hugh's utterance was a suggestion about something they could do
together, or an idle comment on the level of "Wouldn't it be great
to he able to go to the moon?” There are appropriate responses to
each interpretation, responses that would commit her to having
taken his utterance one way or the other. For example:
"But how could you get away from work?”
"Oh, thank you, darling, I'd love it!"
or,
"Yeah, that's something to dream about.”
Even asking him to clear up her uncertainty, as in:
"Are you saying we should go?”
would show that she had entertained the possibility that it might
have been a serious suggestion. At some stages of some
relationships this can be a very scary thing to do. If he was
seriously suggesting something, she doesn't want to miss the
chance to take him up on it. But if he wasn’t, she certainly
doesn't want to show that she thought he might have been. So she
chooses an utterance that could be appropriate in response to
either interpretation of the previous utterance. This is
preserving the ambiguity. This type of responding stratagem can
also be done in response to an initiating stratagem, just as the
other could.
This “Preserving the ambiguity" type of responding stratagem
is also more like the initiating stratagems given in Chapter I
than the earlier responding stratagems are. To see that this is

27
so, consider the following synthesis:

SITUATION: Foregoing, including previous utterance if any,

leaves open the possibility of two or more states for the
Other.

COROLLARY OF CONVERSATIONAL WELL-FORMEDNESS: For each

possible state there is a set of utterances which will be
admitted as next utterance, and these sets are partially
different (A ≠ B, a ∩ B ≠ 0)).

A A–B A∩B B–A B

CHOICES FOR SPEAKER OF NEXT UTTERANCE: (1) Select an

utterance from A ∩ B (the intersection of the two sets; those
utterances that are admitted by both possible states). This
is the responding stratagem of preserving the ambiguity
(Anecdote XII); it is also the initiating stratagems we have
looked at.
(2) Select an utterance from A - B, or B - A (the relative
complement of B in A, or A in B; those utterances that are
admitted by one possible state and not the other). This is
the responding stratagem shown in Anecdotes VIII through XI.

The lacuna revealed by this synthesis is the absence of an

initiating stratagem that selects one or the other of the possible
contexts. There is no theoretical reason why this could not
occur; so far, however, I have been unable to think of a
motivation for it. Without motivation, stratagems do not arise.
The reason that responding stratagems are often of the
"relative complement" type rather than the "intersection" type has
to do with the Sacks-Schegloff notion of adjacency pairs
(discussed in Sacks 1967, Schegloff and Sacks 1973, Schegloff
1968). Sacks and Schegloff point out that certain types of

28
utterance set up a situation where a following utterance of a
corresponding type is required. (The most common example of this
is the fact that questions require answers.) This means that there
is a much greater constraint on choice for the speaker following
such an utterance, than when the immediately preceding utterance
is not of this type. The user of a responding stratagem has been
"put on the spot"; silence is not an alternative, as it is for the
user of an initiating stratagem (though not an OK+ alternative).
There may be no positive purpose that can be stated in terms of
making something happen; instead, the primary objective may simply
be to avoid having to answer in a certain way. For a more complete
discussion of this point, see Weiser 1975.
In the next chapter we will look at multiple interpretation
in more detail, and compare conversational stratagems with some
other things that happen with multiple interpretation in talk.

29
 CHAPTER III

MULTIPLE INTERPRETATION

In Chapters I and II we used, in our analysis of conversational

stratagems, a concept of multiple interpretation that could be
stated roughly as follows:

When an utterance in context admits two partially different

sets of following utterances, so that some following
utterances are admitted by one interpretation of the
utterance but not by the other, we say that the utterance has
a multiple interpretation in that context.

By this definition "multiple interpretation" is a much broader

term than "ambiguity" as it is used in linguistics. Within a given
linguistic theory, a sentence is ambiguous if it must be
assigned more than one semantic representation in that theory.
Linguistic theories vary as to what aspects of a sentence they
consider to be included in its semantic representation11. However,
I know of no current theory which would call a sentence such as
“It's a good day to be indoors" ambiguous, and assign it two
semantic representations, one of which had an element of sexual
reference and the other of which did not. Thus, our concept of
multiple interpretation includes things which no linguistic theory
would consider to be ambiguous. It also, of course, includes
things which linguistic theories do consider to be ambiguous. This
will become clear when we list some types of multiple
interpretation below.
In the preceding chapters we saw examples of multiple
interpretation that were intentional (as in the initiating
stratagems) and unintentional (as in the "previous utterance"
oriented to by responding stratagems). Let us now widen our
perspective to all conversation, not just conversation containing
stratagems, and see where and how multiple interpretation occurs.
It should be clear that, given the above definition, a great many
utterances have multiple interpretations. But most often a speaker
intends a single interpretation and is unaware of the others, and
the response is from the set of utterances admitted by the
intended interpretation, so that neither of the participants need

11 An example of this variation would be two theories which

differed only in that one included a specification of the
illocutionary force of the sentence as the highest agentive
predicate in its semantic representation, and the other did not.
Since the performative analysis is not accepted by all, this is a
possible state of affairs. In one theory the sentence "Can you
close the window” would be ambiguous; in the other it would not
be.

30
ever be aware of the other possible interpretations. This is the
“unmarked” condition for conversation, which I will call straight
talk.
When the multiple interpretation is unintentional, but the
response is from the set of utterances admitted by the
interpretation that the first speaker did not intend, we have a
deviation from straight talk. If this state of affairs is
calculated on the part of the responder, we have a responding
stratagem. If, however, the responder mistakenly believes he is
responding to the intended interpretation, what is occurring is a
misunderstanding.
We can distinguish two types of misunderstanding,
corresponding to the two types of responding stratagem. In one,
the response is from the relative complement of the intended set
of responses in the unintended set of responses. In this case, the
fact that there has been a misunderstanding will be obvious to the
initial speaker. In the other type, the response is from the
intersection of the intended set of responses and the unintended
set of responses. In this case, the misunderstanding will be
undetectable until revealed by further conversation.
We will look at examples of each of these types of
misunderstanding. For examples of misunderstandings of the type
that can be cleared up immediately, I'm going to use data from a
paper by Sara Garnes and Zinny S. Bond in CLS 11: "Slips of the
Ear: Errors in Perception of Casual Speech." Garnes and Bond give
a great many examples of misunderstanding on the phonological
level. They do not state, for most of their examples, how the
misunderstanding was brought to light, since their concern is
rather with what was heard than with how the correction was made.
We can guess, however, that for most of their examples, what was
heard had no plausible interpretation (thus, no appropriate
responses) and therefore was immediately questioned, as (their
numbering, my speculated response):

2.2.4 I’m going over to cinema and photography.

Resp. For a minute there, I thought: you said "cinnamon
photography."

2.2.4. does not have a multiple interpretation by our definition

(at least not on the axis we’re concerned with here), and this
means that the responder needs no help to know that what he heard
was not what the speaker intended; this is not the sort of thing
that we are calling "a misunderstanding."
In other cases, what was heard made a little more sense, but
still not enough, given the context, so that the responder would
not question what he heard:

2.1.23. It really turned wet out.

Resp. (heard: "It really turned white out.")
You mean it's snowing?

The cases that will really interest us, however, are those in

31
which the responder replies without suspecting that a
misunderstanding has occurred. Then, it is only the fact that the
responder chooses an interpretation that was not intended (replies
from the wrong set of responses) that will make the initial
speaker realize that a misunderstanding has occurred. Example:

2.2.10. She's working for the Jewish charity committee.

Resp. (heard: "She’s working for the judiciary
committee.")
I always thought she would get into legal work
someday.

This response is from the set of appropriate responses for what

was heard, but not for what was said. The initial speaker uses
this information to conclude that a misunderstanding has occurred,
and he will usually then proceed to clear it up.
But this is not always so. Sometimes the initial speaker will
see that a misunderstanding has occurred, and choose to say
nothing about it. This amounts to letting the unintended
interpretation of his initial utterance stand as what he intended.
To see how and why this might happen, consider again Anecdote III
from Chapter I. The relevant conversational sequence was the
following:

(1) I'm sorry I didn't get to hear you read your poetry.
(2) I'm sorry you couldn't be there.

When we used this as an example of a conversational stratagem, the

utterer of (1) did not know whether or not the poetry reading was
held, and selected (1) to be appropriate whether the poetry
reading was held or not. Let us now imagine a different situation.
Let us say that the utterer of (1) believes that the poetry
reading was not held. Several utterances are appropriate to such a
belief, including both (1) and (3).

(3) I'm sorry you didn't get to read your poetry.

Our heroine chooses to utter (1). But the response is,

surprisingly, (2). The initial speaker realizes that her belief
was mistaken, that there was in fact a poetry reading, also
realizes that she has not revealed that she labored under a
misapprehension (as she would have if she'd uttered (3), and moves
on to the next stage in the conversation, choosing to utter (4)
instead of (5).

(4) How did it go?

(5) Oh, you mean you had it after all!

What this means is that in this sort of case the initial

speaker retroactively changes his intentions concerning the
interpretation of the initial utterance. The initial utterance was
interpretable as A or B, but this multiple interpretation was

32
unintentional and the speaker just intended A. Then the other
person responds as if it had been B. Hearing this, the initial
speaker chooses to say tacitly, "Oh, it was B." He is now
committed, for all purposes of later interaction, to having said
and done B, even though at the time of the utterance this was not
his intention.
The other type of misunderstanding, the "intersection" type,
can be called "perpetuated misunderstanding." Here is an example:

(6) Marie: There’s a special on /weylz/ this week.

(7) Virginia: Oh, good, I love /weylz/.
(8) Marie: So do I.
(9) Virginia: Have you ever been – to Europe or anything?
(10) Marie: No, /weylz/ /weylz/.
(11) Virginia: I know. I asked if you'd ever been to Europe.
(12) Marie: I mean oceangoing /weylz/.
(13) Virginia: Oh, /hweylz/!
(14) Marie: Yes, I'm sorry.

Marie means "whales" and Virginia thinks she means "Wales."

For two turns beyond the first the misunderstanding goes
undetected, and if they had stopped there it might have remained
so. (7) is a response from the intersection of the set of
appropriate responses to “There's a special on whales this week,"
and the set of appropriate responses to "There's a special on
Wales this week." (8) has the same relation to its preceding
utterance. (9) breaks the series. Either it is a change of subject
or it is from the set of appropriate responses related to "Wales.”
Marie correctly assumes the latter and tries to clear the matter
up by emphasizing her pronunciation of "whales" (which obviously
is not Virginia's). This is not enough to make Virginia see that a
misunderstanding is occurring. Next Marie tries a disambiguating
adjective, which does work. Virginia's next response is as much as
to say, "This whole thing could have been prevented if you'd only
pronounced it right!", which Marie acknowledges by apologizing.
Perpetuated misunderstandings can go on for much longer, and
we can speculate that many are never detected – hopefully the less
important ones. A case of perpetuated misunderstanding used by an
author for humorous effect is found in Georgette Heyer's
historical romance Arabella:

Background: Members of the fashionable world of London in the

early 19th century have been given the false impression that
Arabella, the heroine, is a great heiress. She has become
very popular, partly because of this. Her cousin, young but
pompous Lord Bridlington, begins to go around telling people
that Arabella's fortune has been exaggerated. The following
passage makes the point that Arabella's suitors think Lord
Bridlington is spreading lies in order to keep Arabella for
himself.

… Even Mr. Warkworth, a charitably-minded gentleman, shook

33
 his head over it, and remarked to Sir Geoffrey Morecambe that
Bridlington was doing it rather too brown.
“Just what I was thinking myself,” agreed Sir Geoffrey,
scrutinizing his necktie in the mirror with a dissatisfied
eye. “Shabby, I call it. Do you think this way I have tied my
cravat has something of the look of the Nonpareil's new
style?”
Mr. Warkworth directed a long, dispassionate stare at
it. “No,” he said simply.
“No, no more do I,” said Sir Geoffrey, sad but
unsurprised. “I wonder what he calls it? It ain't precisely a
Mailcoach, and it certainly ain’t an Osbaldeston, and though
I did think it had something of the look of a Trone d’amour,
it ain’t that either. I can tie every one of them."
Mr. Warkworth, whose mind had wandered from this vital
subject, said, with a frown, “Damn it, it is shabby! You're
right!”
Sir Geoffrey was a little hurt. “Would you say it was as
bad as that, Oswald?”
“I would,” stated Mr. Warkworth. “In fact, the more I
think of it the worse it appears to me.”
Sir Geoffrey looked intently at his own image, and
sighed. “Yes, it does. I shall have to go home and change
it.”
“Eh?” said Mr. Warkworth, puzzled. “Change what? Good
God, dear boy, I wasn’t talking about your necktie! Wouldn’t
dream of saying such a thing to my worst enemy! Bridlington!
[p.101]”

Although the situation is contrived to get the maximum amount of

humor out of the misunderstanding, and at the same time to show
what sort of thing is important to these young men, it is humorous
at all only because it could happen: it is a possible
conversation. Heyer is a master of the perpetuated
misunderstanding, and uses it as a dramatic device as well as a
comic one. In The Reluctant Widow the initial plot device involves
a misunderstanding between a man who wants to hire someone to
marry his dissolute cousin and a woman who is looking for work as
a governess. The conversational part of this misunderstanding is
perpetuated for fifty-three turns, the fifty-third being, “Oh,
there has been some dreadful mistake” (pp. 10-13).
So unintentional multiple interpretation can be a part of
straight talk, or it can be taken advantage of with a responding
stratagem, or it can lead to various types of misunderstanding.
What about intentional multiple interpretation? One type of
intentional MI is used in initiating stratagems, as we saw in
Chapter I. The other type is used in play.
The kind of play we saw in Anecdote XI was another use of
unintentional multiple interpretation. Play can also be done with
intentional MI. The most common and well-known examples of this
are puns, which are jokes that turn on lexical MI. The difference
between play and conversational stratagems is that in play both

34
participants are “in on it”; in conversational stratagems, one
participant wants to keep the other in the dark.
These dimensions of talk – intentional and unintentional
multiple interpretation and their various uses and manifestations
– can occur at every level of language. To illustrate this, and to
give some idea of the variety of the phenomenon, let us now set
out some types of multiple interpretation.
Orthographic MI occurs when a written or printed character is
visually indeterminate between one symbol and another. Generation
of schoolchildren have dreamed of taking advantage of this type of
MI by achieving something intermediate between T and F for use on
true-false tests. In handwriting it is fairly easy to produce
something in between a and o if one is uncertain about the
spelling of a word (cocoon vs. cacoon, for example); in fact, an
astounding number of letters can be combined by making it appear
that one has been corrected to the other – but leaving it unclear
which is which. This kind of indeterminacy can be unintentional as
well.
Phonological12 MI depends on indistinctness or
indeterminateness in the spoken language at the phonological
level. An example of its use in a stratagem: A man is uncertain
whether the name of the person he has just been introduced to is
Leone or Leona. He can still address her by name if he can achieve
a pronunciation intermediate between the two.
Another example of this sort of thing, carried to an extreme,
is found in Proust’s Swann’s Way:

…As she was entirely uneducated, and was afraid of mistakes

in grammar and pronunciation, she used purposely to speak in
an indistinct and garbling manner, thinking that if she made
a slip it would be so buried in the surrounding confusion
that no one could be certain whether she had actually made it
or not; with the result that her talk was a sort of
continuous, blurred expectoration, out of which would emerge,
at rare intervals, those sounds and syllables of which she
felt positive [p. 156].

Lexical MI involves the use of homonyms: different lexical

items that are not distinguished by sound. An example, which can
be either play or a responding stratagem, is the following:

(15) A: What's the color of her hair?

(16) B: As far as I know, she doesn't have any rabbits.

The sentence used in Anecdote V in the first chapter, “Yes, I

did enjoy the Botanical Gardens – but I looked all over and I
didn't find any blue roses,” is a special case of lexical MI.
The phrase “blue roses” can be said to have two meanings, one of

12 I am indebted to Anthony Woodbury for first calling my

attention to orthographic and phonological MI.

35
which is a specialized meaning within an artificial system shared
by two of the participants. What happens in the stratagem rests on
the fact that the phrase has both the specialized meaning and the
ordinary meaning, and is used in a sentence in which the ordinary
meaning makes sense.
Structural and derivational MI involve the use of a sentence
which is ambiguous for syntactic reasons, in a context which
preserves the ambiguity. The following anecdote is an example of a
stratagem using this kind of MI:

XIII. Dora came to the party with John, but he has been
flirting with Mary all evening. Not wanting anyone to notice her
chagrin, she goes to the kitchen to help with the canapés.
Upon returning, she sees that John and Mary are not in the room.
She does not want to assume that they left together, nor does she
want to assume that they didn’t leave together; she wants to find
out which is the case. So she asks, “Have John and Mary left?”
This sentence has an ambiguity which has been explained as
derivational, between a reading in which John and Mary left
together and one in which they did not. No one, hearing Dora's
question, will know which state of affairs she was assuming, but
the answer may give her the information she is after.

Referential MI occurs when an expression used to refer has

two or more possible referents in the context. Example: Lord
Chumley comes into the drawing room with a stormy expression on
his face and announces to his wife that their son and the
gardener’s daughter are in the garden cutting flowers too close to
the roots. Lady Chumley does not have to know whether he is angry
about the two of them being together or about what they're doing
to the garden when she replies, “You'll just have to put a stop to
it, dear.” The “it” in the sentence she uses has two possible
referents in the context.
Reference to previously occurring elements is one of the
manifestations of connectedness in discourse. Referential MI is
perhaps a subset of all occasions of MI based on this
connectedness. In an Anecdote in Chapter II, we had the sentence,
“What are you going to do?”, whose multiple interpretation was
based on whether it was connected to one previous topic or
another. Even though it does not contain a referring expression,
it seems to involve the same type of multiple interpretation as
the referential.
Pragmatic MI is the basket category into which I am dumping
all cases of multiple interpretation which do not seem connected
to formal linguistic properties. Further study will certainly
reveal many interesting subcategories with useful names, but at
the moment this has not been done.
One such subcategory would probably be sexual innuendo. There
were two sentences in the anecdotes given above, “It's a good day
to be indoors.” and “Now, would you like to take it off so I can
work on you?” in which one of the interpretations implied a sexual
interest, whether jokingly or not. The reason we are ready to see

36
such things as sexual – talk about being indoors, or about taking
off clothes – has to do with the place of sex in our society. It
has the double property of being constantly near awareness and
rarely spoken of directly. Thus, topics that are circumstantially
related to sex, such as beds or sleeping, are often used to refer
to sexual activity. “They slept together” never has its literal
meaning unless the sexual one is excluded, either pragmatically,
as with two young children, or explicitly: “They slept together,
but that’s all.” With other expressions there is more of a
possibility that the topic may not be sexual, so that the sexual
implication is optional rather than obligatory. Hence the multiple
interpretation in the two cases mentioned.
Another subcategory of pragmatic MI has to do with questions
and the reasons for asking them. Weiser 1975 explores the fact
that questions have a multiple interpretation associated with the
purpose for which they are asked. A satisfactory answer to a
question requires more than just a knowledge of the literal
meaning of the question. The answerer must, in addition, do an
analysis of the questioner’s reason for asking. The ordinary
unsatisfactoriness of a sequence like: “Do you know what time it
is?” “Yes.” can be explained in this way. If the person questioned
knows a reason the questioner might have for asking “Do you know
what time it is?” that would be satisfied by the reply “Yes,” then
this reply is perfectly cooperative. An example is a wife wishing
to remind her husband that he is about to be late for an
appointment. She can do this by saying, “Do you know what time it
is?” and in this case his reply can be "Yes." The reason we can
see the sequence as amusingly uncooperative at first glance is
that “Do you know what time it is?” is ordinarily used with the
purpose of finding out the time. An actual example of a response
to a question based on the purpose of the question was given to me
by James McCawley. At a certain point in giving a guest lecture he
asked, “What time is it?” The perfectly appropriate reply was:
“Why don't you finish the stuff on definite descriptions and then
take a break?”
Two of our anecdotes involve this kind of multiple
interpretation of a question. In Anecdote IX, “Are you going out
to play with Billy?” can have the purpose of finding out if the
addressee is going out to play with Billy, or of finding out where
and with whom the addressee is going out to play. In Anecdote XII,
“Could you dig a Florida vacation?” has a multiple interpretation
at least partially based on the question having more than one
possible purpose.
James McCawley has pointed out to me that certain of these
questions-for-a-purpose are very difficult to answer without
getting into hot water. He says it was difficult to develop a good
answer to: “Have you got a minute”, where a simple “No” is rude
and usually false, but a simple “Yes” may get one into a half-hour
discussion. His solution, apparently worked out over a long period
of time, is to reply: “Yes, in the sense of sixty seconds.” I have
felt the same dilemma when a friend has asked me: “Are you going
by a mailbox?” I cannot deny that I am going by a mailbox, but

37
that doesn't mean I want to carry three manila envelopes for nine
blocks. Like replying “Yes” to “Will you do me a favor?”, one is
never sure what one is getting into. The difficulty people find in
refusing a request led up to by such a question may be one reason
for their use.
The multiply interpretable utterance in Anecdote I, “I found
the most gorgeous plant in my front room this morning,” is of yet
another subtype. Descriptions of something done with an object, or
concerning the object, especially when the object is described
enthusiastically (as “I drove all over town in my beautiful new
Ferrari this morning.”) are often used as a preliminary to
thanking the one who made the use of the object possible. On the
other hand, they are also commonly used whenever describing one’s
actions or experiences is appropriate, as might also be something
like: “I bought a toaster yesterday that turned out to be a real
dud.” In the latter case, any interest-showing response is
appropriate; in the former case the response is expected to
demonstrate an awareness that one is thankable (“Glad you liked
it.”)
The utterance used in the Bogart anecdote, “Mr. Martinelli's
private stock,” has a multiple interpretation dependent on
conversational implicature. Louie is hoping that Martinelli and
Bogart will subject his utterance to two very different kinds of
analyses. Martinelli, ideally, will reason as follows: “Louie’s
reason for mentioning that it’s my private stock is just to be
especially gracious and perhaps impress me with his graciousness.”
Bogey, on the other hand, is expected to see this as a violation
of the maxim of quantity.13 “Hmm. Louie said more than was
necessary if the drink wasn't drugged, yet less than was necessary
if the drink was drugged. Why doesn't he say, ‘The drink is
drugged.’? Oh, because Martinelli would hear him. O.K., the drink
is drugged.” Unfortunately for Louie, Martinelli knows the
Cooperative Principle as well as Bogart does.
We have seen how multiple interpretation manifests itself in
many ways and at every level of language. Multiple interpretation
is always an indeterminacy in what was said, where the hearer has
the option, for whatever reason and at whatever level of
awareness, of taking the utterance one way or the other.
In this chapter we have seen that conversation can be viewed
as a series of utterances which may be multiply interpretable,
that participants may conceal their uncertainty about the
interpretation of an utterance by another speaker, and that
participants may change their commitment to what act was performed
by their own utterances. In the next chapter we will see that no
previous account of what is going on in conversation is equipped
to handle this constantly shifting assessment by all the
participants of what has really been said and done.

13 See Chapter IV for a discussion of Grice's Cooperative

Principle and the associated maxims.

38
 CHAPTER IV

RELATED WORK ON CONVERSATION AND PRAGMATICS

In this chapter we will look at various studies in

conversation and pragmatics and their relation to the present
work. The order we will take them in is based on nothing but
convenience.

Grice
It is certainly most convenient to begin with the work that
is probably the most widely influential among linguists interested
in conversation: "Logic and Conversation" by the philosopher H. P.
Grice.
Grice's concern in this work, which was part of his William
James lectures delivered at Harvard in 1967, was to show that
ordinary language is more logical than either logicians or
linguists think it is. In the service of this aim he wanted to
explain why it is that people normally understand more from
sentences in conversation than the sentences actually say.
He begins by pointing out that conversations (“talk
exchanges") are cooperative efforts, in which each participant is
aware of and accommodates to the general purpose of the
conversation. It is this general purpose, he says, that makes some
conversational moves unsuitable. Participants are expected to bow
to the cooperative aspects of conversation in choosing what to say
and how to say it. Grice formulates this as his Cooperative
Principle:

Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at

the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or
direction of the talk-exchange in which you are engaged.

He then subdivides this principle into four categories, with

specific maxims under each. These are:

QUANTITY
1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for
the current purposes of the exchange).
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is
required.
QUALITY
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
RELATION
Be relevant.
MANNER
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
4. Be orderly.

39
 He says that the reason we follow these maxims, in general,
and expect others to follow them, is that we have a right to
expect, and a duty to engage in, reasonable behavior when we are
involved in cooperative activities.
Of course, people do not always follow the maxims, and it is
when Grice turns to some cases in which the maxims, at first
glance, are not being followed, that the really exciting part of
his work emerges. The existence of the Cooperative Principle as
something that all parties are aware of, and the expectation that
people behave reasonably in speaking, gives rise, under certain
conditions, to something called conversational implicature. To put
it more simply than Grice does: if someone does not appear to be
following the Cooperative Principle, and is neither trying to hide
this or excuse it, and if there is some fact which, if we assume
it, would mean that the person is actually following the
Cooperative Principle, then we say that the person is
conversationally implicating that fact. An example that Grice
gives is the following dialogue:

A: How is C getting on in his job?

B: Oh, quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he
hasn't been to prison yet.

A is entitled to reason that B thinks C is capable of being

dishonest, and that B is in fact conversationally implicating that
C is capable of being dishonest. B appears to be breaking the
maxim “Be relevant,” for his remark about C not having been to
prison yet is not, at first, relevant. But, assuming that B is
following the Cooperative Principle, his remark must be relevant,
so he must be implicating that C is the kind of person likely to
have been to prison already.
What the concept of conversational implicature means is that
people are able to mean more than what they explicitly say. If
there is some assumption we must make about someone in order to
see his behavior as reasonable, then we will make that assumption.
When people use this tendency of their co-participants (to make
assumptions based on the belief that their behavior is reasonable)
in order to communicate something, then this is conversational
implicature. If I want you to refill the humidifier, I don't have
to say, “Please refill the humidifier.” All I have to do is say
“The humidifier needs water.” in a context in which I could have
no other reason for saying it except that I want you to refill the
humidifier.
Grice's work is a cornerstone of linguistic pragmatics for
several reasons. One is that it explains an important and common
way in which the literal meanings of sentences are extended in
conversation. Another is that it incorporates several notions that
need to be recognized as vital in work on pragmatics:
(1) The indispensability of context. There is no
conversational implicature out of context; sentences, in the
abstract, do not conversationally implicate.

40
 (2) The importance of seeing speaking as an activity. The
maxims called conversational are followed in any cooperative
activity, whether it be speaking with someone or repairing a car
with someone.
(3) The fact that people use what they know about the
mechanisms of conversation.
From Grice’s work, we see that people use their knowledge of
the Cooperative Principle and their awareness that others know it
too to do more with their utterances than just convey literal
meanings.
My work on conversational stratagems, while it also
incorporates these three vital notions, is almost completely out
of Grice's realm. One could say that I am dealing with the other
side of the coin. I am concerned with hidden purposes and how they
can be accomplished. Grice is concerned with things that are
accomplished because something has not been hidden. On Grice’s
view, we can only say that something has been implicated when the
implicator is not only violating a maxim, but when he obviously
wants everyone to notice that he is violating a maxim. Grice’s
work explains how it is that a meaning is conveyed even when it is
not the literal meaning of what is said. As I noted in the
Introduction, I am not interested here in what is conveyed, but in
what is done without having been conveyed.
An interesting point, suggested to me by Jerrold Sadock,
arises from the comparison of the conversational stratagems
discussed in this work with Grice's conversational maxims. Many of
the stratagems discussed above can be described as cases where a
maxim is violated but where, of course, the violation is meant to
remain hidden. The initiating stratagems and the second kind of
responding stratagem involve choosing an utterance that has a
multiple interpretation; they are hidden violations of the maxim
“Avoid ambiguity.” Some of the other responding stratagems seem to
involve a hidden violation of the first maxim of Quantity: “Make
your contribution as informative as is required.” For example,
when the mother says, “Are you going out to play with Billy?” and
the son replies, “No, not with Billy.” The son is pretending not
to know that he is not being as informative as required; he is
pretending to think that his answer is exactly what was asked for.
What about the other maxims? Are there other conversational
stratagems which are hidden violations of any of the other maxims?
Yes: there are stratagems which we have not yet discussed which
can be related to some of Grice's other maxims. Consider:

XIV. Gemma has met an interesting young man at work and they
are having a casual chat. She would like to let him know that she
isn’t married, but she doesn’t want to say, “Oh, by the way, I’m
not married.” So in the course of a conversation about antiquing
furniture, she says: “My roommate and I redid a table a couple of
months ago; she's really good at that sort of thing.”

This stratagem can be considered to be a hidden violation of

the second maxim of Quantity: “Do not make your contribution more

41
informative than is required.” Information is sneaked in; after
the stratagem, the young man has the information, but he will not
think, “She told me she wasn’t married so that must mean she wants
to get together.”
In Anecdote XIV, the information that the User is not married
is available to the Other as a likely assumption based on the fact
that a presupposition of her utterance is that she is living with
another woman as a roommate, and when people are married they
ordinarily live with their spouses. However, the crucial
information doesn't have to be in a presupposition, as long as the
User can demonstrate a putative reason for giving the information
other than the reason he wishes to conceal. For example, in the
situation given in Anecdote XIV, the User might, if it fit
naturally into the conversation, say, “Do you understand the
employee insurance plan here? You see, I’m not married, and the
specifications for single people are really unclear.” Again, the
Other will not make the assumptions that he would have made if she
had said to him, “By the way, I'm not married,” and yet he has the
information. On the surface, of course, Grice’s maxim of Quantity
is not violated, because the utterance is not apparently more
information than is required. It is only for this reason that the
formative violation can be hidden, if in fact we are to consider
these as violations at all.
Other stratagems appear to be hidden violations of one or
both of the maxims of Quality, which are: “Do not say what you
believe to be false.” and “Do not say that for which you lack
adequate evidence.14 Consider:

XV. T.B. and A.H, are roommates who have just eaten dinner
together in their apartment. There is no understanding as to who
will do the dishes. A.H. goes to the sink to get a drink of water,
and T.B. says, “Why don't you wait to do the dishes until after
dessert?”

In this case, T.B. certainly lacks adequate evidence for a

belief which is a presupposition of his utterance; namely, that
A.H. intends to do the dishes. Notice that if he said, “You are
going to do the dishes after dessert.” he would be flouting a
maxim of Quality and this could only be taken as a rather crude
order (or an attempt at hypnotism). Another similar example:

XVI. At a meeting of a playreading club there is much

dissension over what play should be read next. Ada is a proponent
of Some Like It Hot. At some point in the discussion she says,
“Let's do a serious play after we do Some Like It Hot.”

In both these cases the user of the stratagem is assuming

14 A superficial example of a stratagem which violates these

maxims is lying. For a discussion of lying as a conversational
stratagem, see Weiser 1975.

42
facts which he is not entitled to assume. In these two anecdotes,
the purpose for doing this is to cause others to do something
which the User wants done, either to do the dishes or to read a
certain play. This kind of stratagem can also be used to elicit
information without asking for it.

XVII. (From Thornton Wilder's play, The Matchmaker.) A

personable woman has just been introduced to young Mr. Hackl as
“Mrs. Molloy.” He says, “Is there… Have you a … Maybe Mr. Molloy
would like to see Yonkers, too.” And she replies, “Oh, I’m a
widow, Mr. Hackl.”

Wilder makes it perfectly clear that this is a stratagem and

what it’s for by having Mr. Hackl reject two alternatives before
he hits on what he wants. Most likely these are: “Is there a Mr.
Molloy?” and “Have you a husband?” Both these, however, would be
“personal questions” not permitted at their stage of acquaintance.
So by assuming something that he obviously isn’t sure of, namely
that there is a Mr. Molloy, he gets the information he wants.

Illocutionary Acts and Formal Linguistics

In 1962 a book of lectures by the philosopher J. L. Austin

appeared, called How to Do Things with Words. Starting with the
familiar distinction between constatives – sentences that can be
true or false – and performatives – sentences that can be used to
perform acts which are felicitous or infelicitous – Austin
explored the various ways in which the utterance of sentences may
also be the performance of acts. He established three types of
speech acts. The first is the locutionary act: to say anything is
to utter sounds that make up words that function in grammatical
relation to each other and that have “sense” and “reference.” The
second is the illocutionary act, which is the conventional act
accomplished in saying something whenever certain pre-conditions
(and possibly some after-conditions) are met. Third is the
perlocutionary act, which is the achieving of certain non-
conventional acts by means of speaking. Correlated with
illocutionary acts are performative verbs. These are the verbs
that would specify the illocutionary force of each sentence if
that sentence were fully realized. Austin ended by repudiating the
performative/constative distinction, saying that all sentences are
liable to felicities and infelicities and all sentences have a
true/false dimension.
Austin's insights and his terminology began to be adopted by
formal linguistics in the late 60's. J. R. Ross's paper, “On
Declarative Sentences,” presented a series of persuasive syntactic
arguments supporting the inclusion of a predicate representing
illocutionary force in the semantic representation of all
sentences. Jerrold Sadock's dissertation, “Hypersentences,”
presented a different set of arguments for the same conclusion.
Their proposals were widely adopted and the performative analysis
became commonly used by the heterogeneous group of linguists known

43
as “generative semanticists.”
The various developments of performative theory within formal
linguistics are not directly relevant to the present work, but it
will be in our interests to show why they are not directly
relevant and to contrast them with other views on the relation
between speaking and acting. In particular, in this section and
the following sections we will be concerned with the question:
When a person utters a sentence, what act or acts can we say that
person has performed?15
Formal linguistic theory has only one answer to this
question: In uttering a sentence, a person is performing the
illocutionary act that corresponds to the illocutionary force of
the sentence uttered, if the felicity conditions for that act are
met. This view rests on the following assumptions:
(1) Illocutionary force is independent of context or
occasions of use.
(2) The illocutionary force of a sentence (or forces, in the
case of an ambiguous sentence) is determinable on the basis of its
formal properties.
(3) Every unambiguous sentence has one and only one
illocutionary force.
There are controversies connected to each of these points.
For example, Gordon and Lakoff 1975 and Sadock 1974 are in
disagreement over which formal properties of a sentence count
toward determining its illocutionary force. Given a sentence such
as (1)
(1) Why paint your house purple?
Gordon and Lakoff conclude that this sentence has the
illocutionary force of a question (i.e., “is” a question) but can
only be used in contexts where it conveys a judgment. Thus, for
Gordon and Lakoff the formal property of this sentence which
determines its illocutionary force is the question word “Why” and
the subject-verb inversion in the related sentence (2).
(2) Why do you paint your house purple?
For Sadock, on the other hand, sentence (1) is a judgment (or a
“weak negative suggestion”) rather than a question. The formal
properties on which he bases his analysis include the deletion of
“do you” from one of the structures underlying (2), which is
ambiguous as to whether it is a straightforward question or a
negative suggestion.
Whichever of these views one accepts (and I am inclined
toward the latter), it is clear that both follow tenet (2) above,
though in different ways.
Let us consider tenet (1), that illocutionary force is
independent of context or occasions of use. Gordon and Lakoff,
interested in extending Grice's insight about conversational

15 From now on, in considering this question, we will leave aside

the locutionary acts performed in uttering a sentence, since there
is no important controversy over them.

44
implicature to formal theory, developed a set of conversational
postulates to describe the phenomenon of entailment of acts by
other acts in certain contexts. Thus, a statement about the chill
in the air is seen to entail a request to close the window, in the
proper context. However, tenet (1) remains unchanged, since the
statement about the chill in the air is still a statement – it
merely conveys a request. Context has an effect on what is
conveyed, but it has no effect on illocutionary force.
Gordon and Lakoff also hold to tenet (3). Their treatment
explicitly rules out the possibility of any sentence performing
two illocutionary acts at the same time. Their conversational
postulates are statements of what will be entailed in a given
context, and part of that context is explicitly stated to be an
assumption by the hearer that the speaker does not intend to
perform the illocutionary act that the sentence would ordinarily
be used to perform.
(3) Can you take out the garbage?
A sentence like (3) can convey a question or it can convey a
request; never both.
A philosopher who has written on indirect speech acts, John
R. Searle, appears to disagree with this point (Searle 1975). In
the introduction to his paper he claims that there are cases in
which an utterance has two illocutionary forces. According to this
part of his paper he would seem to disagree with both Sadock and
Gordon and Lakoff and say that a sentence such as (3) has both a
question force and a request force. However, in a later part of
the paper this point becomes less clear. On page 67 he states that
the sentences in question (sentences similar to (3)) do not have
an imperative force as part of their meaning. After this he avoids
the use of the term “illocutionary force” and refers instead to
the request sense being the “primary illocutionary point” of the
sentence, although the difference between illocutionary force and
illocutionary point is never clarified. In the remainder of his
paper he develops a set of “Generalizations” that appear quite
similar to the conversational postulates of Gordon and Lakoff.
Since it is not clear exactly how he differs from the linguists
working with speech acts, I will leave Searle aside for the
remainder of this discussion.
What is the relevance of the formal linguistic view for the
study of conversation? Let us assume that someone could tell us,
given any sentence, what its illocutionary force was. Let us then
look at the phenomenon of multiple interpretation, which we found
to be pervasive in conversation and essential to the working of
initiating and responding stratagems.
Take a multiple interpretation at the phonological level: the
stream of sounds that can be heard as either “She's working for
the Jewish charity committee” or “She's working for the judiciary
committee.” The theory of speech acts does not provide an
explanation for the difference; these are both informative
statements.
Take one now on the referential level: “You'll just have to
do something about it, dear,” where the “it” might be referring to

45
the son and the gardener’s daughter being together, or to whatever
it is they are doing to the flowers. In either interpretation the
illocutionary force is the same.
Turn now to the pragmatic level: “I notice you and Alice both
wear beaten-silver rings.” We have seen that “noticing” sentences
count as requests for explanation in certain contexts. I doubt
that anyone would say that the sentence in question here is
related to two underlying structures, one specifying statement-
force and one specifying request-force, since there is no formal
property that would distinguish the two senses. However, it might
be claimed that illocutionary force is important in explaining the
multiple interpretation in that a conversational postulate that
accounted for the fact that a request is conveyed in certain
contexts would need to specify illocutionary force in its
formulation. It is difficult to see, though, how this situation
could be handled by a conversational postulate. Conversational
postulates state that a sentence with a given force counts as a
related sentence with a different force in a given context; that
is, whenever certain conditions about the world are the case. It
is generally agreed that these cannot be conditions about the
world as it really is (as seen from the throne of God, so to
speak) but must be conditions about the world that are believed to
be true by the conversational participants. Grice states
explicitly that a speaker, in planning to utter a sentence which
will conversationally implicate something, must believe that the
hearer is aware of those conditions of the world that must hold in
order for the sentence to conversationally implicate that thing.
The “context” for conversational postulates must be stated in
terms of what the speaker and hearer both believe, and each
believes that the other believes. Furthermore, conversational
postulates are stated as yes/no, black/white conditions. Either
the relevant context is the case, and the sentence conveys a
request, or the relevant context is not the case, and the sentence
conveys a statement. If there is some doubt in either person's
mind as to whether the relevant context is the case, then clearly
the relevant context is not the case, for a contextual statement
formulated in terms of shared beliefs cannot admit doubts.
Faye says to Trudie, “I notice you and Alice both wear
beaten-silver rings.” Let us suppose that Faye intentionally
chooses this sentence for its multiple interpretation. This means
that she could not be thinking that the sentence will certainly
convey a request, nor could she be thinking that the sentence will
certainly not convey a request. She could only be thinking that
the sentence plus the context allows Trudie to take it either way,
for that is the purpose for which she chose it. So again, neither
a statement of illocutionary force or a statement of a
conversational postulate in terms of illocutionary force will take
us as far as we need to go in explaining the phenomenon of
multiple interpretation.
Sentences truly ambiguous in illocutionary force have their
place in the continuum of multiple interpretation. Sadock (p. 138)
gives a misunderstanding which might arise from a multiple

46
interpretation of this sort (slightly changed):

(4) A: Do you know what today is?

(5) B: Sure, it's the start of National Pickle Week.
(6) A: Aw, I was going to surprise you.

Here, A’s question could be either a request for information or a

way of setting the addressee up for surprising information. The
sets of appropriate responses to these two interpretations are
almost entirely distinct. Notice that A would not have to admit
that he intended the other interpretation from the one that was
responded to. He could do a retrospective stratagem by replying to
B: “Thanks, I was wondering.”16
My contention here is that multiple interpretation arising
from ambiguity of illocutionary force is one of many sources of
multiple interpretation, perhaps parallel to multiple
interpretation arising from lexical ambiguity. When illocutionary
force is defined as invariable for every sentence, tied to formal
properties, and independent of context (as it must be to serve the
purposes of formal theoretical linguists) it leaves large areas of
what goes on in conversation completely untouched.

Labov and Fanshel

A book by William Labov and David Fanshel, Therapeutic

Discourse: Psychotherapy as Conversation, currently in manuscript,
is probably the most extensive work using the technique of
comprehensive discourse analysis. Discourse analysis is defined as
the study of the rules connecting sentences in conversation. Labov
and Fanshel take a single small stretch of conversation from a
therapeutic interview and attempt to give a detailed account of
all the actions and connections between actions that occur in that
stretch. “We use the term ‘comprehensive discourse analysis’ to
indicate that we are not merely trying to extract one or two
themes or tendencies from the recorded conversation. We will not
focus on any one kind of organization or sequencing, but rather
aim at the comprehension of the whole set of actions taking place”
(p. II-3).
Their research shows several similarities to the present
work:

16 James McCawley has observed (personal communication) that if

the misunderstanding had been the other way around, no
retrospective stratagem would have been possible. Thus, if A had
actually intended (4) as a request for information, but B heard it
as a set-up question and replied with (7):
(7) No, what is it?
A would have no recourse but to admit the miscommunication, since
he would lack the necessary information to reply informatively to
B's question.

47
 (1) We have in common a concern with discovering the
connections between utterances in conversation. Labov and Fanshel
attempt to formulate some of these connections; this dissertation
is an attempt to show that these connections can be used by
participants to accomplish hidden purposes.
(2) There is a common tendency to focus on an utterance-pair;
i.e., a sequence of two utterances by alternate speakers in
conversation. This is generally true although Labov and Fanshel
also examine larger units.
However, their data, methodology and goals differ from those
of the present work in several important ways:
(1) The material they examine in most detail is the report of
a conversation between intimates, a mother and daughter sharing a
long and complex interactional history.
(2) They do not admit intuitional data about the purposes or
calculations of the interactants; they do not discuss concealed
purposes. (They claim to do without intuitional data entirely; we
will see in a moment if this is true.)
(3) They examine only a single short conversation.
Other differences, mainly related to these, will be uncovered
as we discuss their results.
Labov and Fanshel state that the central problem of discourse
analysis is to discover the connections between utterances, and
that their work has led them to the belief that there are no
connections between utterances. They are able to make this
dramatic statement by dissociating utterances and the actions
performed in speaking. Their contention is that it is not
utterances, in the sense of the uttering of sentences, that are
sequenced, but actions. “We found that sentences are not
necessarily connected at the utterance level, but that sequencing
in conversation takes place between actions which may be far
removed from the words as literally spoken, both in time, and in
degree of abstraction” (pp. 1-12).
Because Labov and Fanshel are concerned with "actions which
may be far removed from the words as literally spoken," a central
problem for them should be the question posed in the previous
section: When a person utters a sentence, what act or acts can we
say that person has performed? And, in fact, a large portion of
their presentation is devoted to developing "rules of discourse"
which relate actions which can be deduced from grammatical form to
other actions which will be performed if given contextual
conditions are the case. In all but detail these are quite similar
to conversational postulates, and suffer from the same defects of
inapplicability to situations of calculated use of multiple
interpretation.17 The main difference between Labov and Fanshel’s

17 Both the "Rules of Discourse" and conversational postulates are

obligatory, which means that they apply if the specified context
holds and do not apply if it does not. No such system of
obligatory rules can describe the way conversation actually works,

48
view of conversation and Gordon and Lakoff’s is that Labov and
Fanshel consider that the basic action and any and all derived
actions are performed simultaneously, whereas for Gordon and
Lakoff only one action is performed at a time.
According to Labov and Fanshel, the actions performed by a
given utterance are hierarchically structured, in that some are
derivable from others by rules of discourse, and one is not
derived by rules of discourse. This one, from which the others are
derived, they call the "first and most immediate action" – not,
however, implying any precedence in time. The "immediate" or basic
action is determined, in their system, on the basis of two things.
The first is the grammatical form of the utterance used;
interrogative form indicates a request. (See Sadock 1974, p. 111-
139, for evidence that this equivalence will yield the wrong
result in many cases.) The second is intuition: “our general
understanding of the English language” (p. II-16). This general
understanding can take a sentence and tell what one action it
would perform in any context. ("Any persons asking this question
anywhere would have to be understood in the same way at this lower
level of analysis.") This basic action is quite similar to
illocutionary force, both in its context-independence and in its
determination by grammatical form, but Labov and Fanshel do not
discuss illocutionary force.
Rules of discourse are then used to derive other actions from
the basic action. Here is a rule of discourse (which I have
condensed from a more general rule) for deriving a request for
action from a request for information about time of action:

If A makes to B a request for information about the time T

that an action X might be performed and all other
preconditions are in effect, then A is heard as making a
valid request of B for the action X (III-26).

Labov and Fanshel discover at least seven simultaneous actions

performed by an utterance that is part of a report of another
conversation in a therapeutic interview. The utterance is: “Well,
when do you plan to come home?” and the seven actions are:
continuing, giving information, requesting information, requesting
action, challenging, admitting, and asserting. Three of these, the
first two and the last, are performed only in the retelling of the
utterance to the therapist.
In my opinion the most questionable part of their analysis
has to do with how they determine which discourse rules are
correct. They state that as full as possible a knowledge of
context is necessary in order to know whether the rules apply.
"…to know they are the right rules, we must have enough contextual
knowledge to be sure they are applying in any given case." This

where there are large gray areas, large areas of choice about how
to take something. We know this because these areas of choice are
used in conversational stratagems.

49
implies that the test of accuracy for their rules would be as
follows: Given a context as cited in the rule, and a basic action
as cited in the rule, is the utterance understood as the derived
action as the rule predicts? If the answer is yes, so far so good;
if the answer is no, back to the drawing board for a new rule. The
trouble with this is that it assumes that we have some method of
determining the actions performed by an utterance in context apart
from using the discourse rules. At times Labov and Fanshel seem to
use the response of the other as a clue to what actions are
performed,18 and once they explicitly state that this is their most
important criterion.19 At other times they are clearly using their
intuitions as language-users to determine what actions are
performed, and in a footnote on p. III-13 they acknowledge this,
stating that “we as analysts will frequently ‘stand’ for the
listener, projecting how he might have responded to the utterance
under slightly different conditions.” It seems unlikely, however,
that such intuition could be kept independent of the researcher’s
own internalized discourse rules, or worse, his biases about which
discourse rules ought to be operating. This seems to be an
important flaw in their methodology.
Labov and Fanshel refuse to set foot in the area of hidden
purposes. They do discuss a kind of multiple interpretation: they
feel that intonational contours are used to communicate signals
which can later be denied if necessary. However, this deniableness
does not mean that the intent to produce a deniable signal is
hidden: “Speakers are permitted to deny the communications which
they have just made even though they and the hearers may be
perfectly well aware of what has been done” (p. II-67). In other
places they acknowledge the existence of ambiguity and its
possible intentionality, but go no further: “There are …
conflicting actions which are not easily accepted as taking place
simultaneously, so that the entire performance may be heard as
ambiguous. … The analyst … is in no position to say how much of

18 “If this is heard as a simple request for information, and

nothing more, we would expect that the simple rule of sequencing
would apply. … We would then expect Rhoda’s mother to either name
the time or say something like “I don't know” or “I haven't made
up my mind.” But we do not encounter anything of the sort.
Instead, Rhoda’s mother answers “Oh, why-y?” with a falling and
then rising intonation. Whatever our analysis of this response may
be, it tells us immediately that there is more to Rhoda's
utterance than a simple request for information – at least as her
mother reportedly perceived it" (p. II-17).

19 By far the most important role is played by the responses of

the other person involved. It is generally true that the speech
actions being performed are those that are realized cooperatively
by the speaker and the listener'(p. II-90).

50
this ambiguity was consciously intended or could even be perceived
by the speaker if she were to study her own words. The entire
question of speaker’s intentions does not play a significant role
in our analysis” (p. IV-26, their emphasis).
Two other factors contribute quite naturally to Labov and
Fanshel's neglect of hidden purpose. One is the dissimilarity
mentioned above: that they are dealing primarily with a
conversation between intimate family members. In an intimate
family situation, with a long history of interaction, there may be
very little that is truly uncertain, and therefore little chance
of success for the stratagems I have discussed. The other factor,
a more serious one, is their commitment to a single small body of
data. It has been my experience that conversational stratagems
that somehow reveal themselves occur rarely enough so that the
likelihood of finding one in any single fifteen minute stretch is
quite small. When they do not reveal themselves they are, of
course, undetectable. The talk containing them appears identical
to stratagem-free talk. Unless the discourse analyst uses the same
knowledge of the potentials of language that the conversational
participant must use, he will be unable to say what hidden purpose
might have been calculated. Labov and Fanshel state that they are
seeking universal principles of conversation; they should not let
their commitment to a single conversation lead them to the
conclusion that a single analysis, leaving out possible purposes,
is sufficient.

Goffman
Erving Goffman is a sociologist who has written widely in the
area of co-present behavior, of which conversational interactions
are a subset. Although many of his works provide valuable insights
for the researcher in conversation who wants to see how
conversation fits into the larger picture of social interaction
(cf., Behavior in Public Places, Interaction Ritual, Relations in
Public), I will be concerned here with one paper which has
particular relevance to the issues at hand: “Strategic
Interaction” (in Goffman 1969).
In this paper, Goffman first outlines an approach to
interaction which uses framework and terminology adopted from game
theory, and then examines its applicability to a special case of
interaction, “the center of communication, face-to-face informal
conversation.” Goffman begins by saying that individuals, in
situations, engage in rational decision-making: they make an
assessment of possible outcomes and choose a course of action
based on this assessment. As we have seen, this is precisely what
the language user does when devising a stratagem (and, we assume,
at other times as well).
Game theory, as Goffman uses it, includes what we have called
purposes in interest. Interest is a broader term than purpose
because it includes the possibility of a series of purposes aimed
at a long-term goal such as maintaining the existence of some
entity. In studying conversational stratagems we have been
concerned mainly with short-term goals, such as could be

51
accomplished in a single conversational interchange. These could
be included in interest as Goffman uses the term.
Something with a unitary interest to promote is a party; an
individual agent for a party is a player. Goffman notes that the
party and the player are often included in the same person, but
that game theory requires this division between the one who has
the interest and the one who acts to promote it. In the study of
conversational stratagems this distinction is not important;
individuals always act for their own interest and are thus both
party and player.
The primary unit of individual action is the move. A move is
“a course of action with direct physical consequences that gives
rise to objective and concrete alterations in the player’s life
situation. … Furthermore, a move is a course of action chosen from
a small number of radically different ones in the situation” (p.
90-91).
In general, the concept of “move” is quite relevant to
conversational stratagems. Utterances in conversation which are
calculated to have certain effects can easily be viewed as courses
of action. The requirement that the move be a course of action
chosen from a small number of radically different alternatives is
not as obviously applicable. At most points in conversation, the
number of alternative utterances admitted is quite large, and many
of these alternatives will have differing consequences in terms of
what is admitted as a following utterance. However, only a few of
the alternatives will have significantly different consequences.
Take the following sentences:
(8) Would you like to go to a movie?
(9) Do you want to go to a movie?
These have a large part of their response-sets in common, as:
(10) Yes.
(11) I'm busy.
(12) Which movie?
But they differ in that (8) could be followed by (13) but not
(14), and (9) could be followed by (14) but not (13).
(13) Yes, I would.
(14) Yes, I do.
We would not, however, want to consider this a significant
difference, unless we could think of some purpose for which one
might want to hear (13) rather than (14) (or (14) rather than
(13)) as a response. Thus, it is quite possible that Goffman's
concept of move will be useful as it stands in the study of
conversational stratagems.
Goffman illustrates the game-theoretical approach with a
series of little scenarios, culminating with one in which two
human beings are involved. In this scenario, two native tribesmen
from hostile tribes, out hunting with their spears, suddenly find
themselves confronting each other across a clearing. The trouble
is, each one is in the other person's territory, so retreat is cut
off. How do they get home?
Each person must now consider possible moves and their
consequences. To throw the spear at the other would include the

52
possibility of missing and being left without a spear. To suggest
a temporary peace treaty leaves open the possibility that the
other will not believe one’s peaceful intentions, or, believing,
will take advantage of one’s own voluntary defenselessness to make
an easy kill. Goffman points out that the most interesting aspect
of a game situation involving two human beings – two rational
decision-makers – is that each one must take into account the fact
that the other is assessing possible moves, including the fact
that the other is assessing one in turn. This leads to what
Goffman calls the “famous recursive problem”: Each person is
trying to figure out what the other is thinking, which includes
trying to figure out what he is thinking about one's own thinking
about what he is thinking, and so on.
Following the presentation of the recursive problem Goffman
gives his definition of strategic interaction. “Two or more
parties must find themselves in a well-structured situation of
mutual impingement where each party must make a move and where
every possible move carries fateful implications for all the
parties. In this situation, each player must influence his own
decision by his knowing that the other players are likely to try
to dope out his decision in advance, and may even appreciate that
he knows this is likely. … An exchange of moves made on the basis
of this kind of orientation to self and others can be called
strategic interaction” (pp. 100-101).
The conversational situations presented in the preceding
chapters of this work seem to fit this definition of strategic
interaction quite accurately – with a difference. Conversational
stratagems allow one to find a loophole in the game situation, a
loophole Goffman does not appear to have considered. A
conversational stratagem is a concealed move. It has quite
definite consequences for the purposes of the User, but the Other
need never be aware that it was performed. It is possible that
game theorists would not consider the situations given in our
anecdotes “fateful” enough – life and death are not at stake, but
merely such prosaic interactional consequences as embarrassment
and anger. However, such consequences are important enough to
individuals who find themselves risking them in actual situations.
This “loophole” characteristic of conversational stratagems will
become clearer when we look at what Goffman calls the enforcement
system.
The enforcement system includes four types of constraints
operating in game activity. The first is the constraint to play.
This refers to the fact that once one is in the game situation,
one cannot refuse to play; doing nothing becomes a move. As we
have seen, responding stratagems have this characteristic but
initiating stratagems do not. Possibly Goffman would say that, for
this reason, responding stratagems are gamelike but initiating
stratagems are not. However, the differences between these two
types of stratagem are minimal; both involve choice of utterances
based on assessment of consequences, and we would want to say that
the similarities are more important than the differences.
Second, there are constraints regarding courses of action.

53
This is the specification that there be only a finite number of
clearly distinct courses of action, which we have already
discussed.
Third, there is self-committal. This means that once a move
is made, one is committed to it. Here we have the most important
reason why conversational stratagems provide loopholes in
strategic situations; they provide a way of making a move without
being committed to it. In the case of initiating stratagems in
particular, a sentence is uttered that has the potential of
performing one or two possible acts depending on aspects of
context which the User is crucially unaware of. However, this
deliberate “ambiguity” is not ordinarily noticed by the Other; to
the Other, the utterance appears to be some definite act. As far
as the Other is concerned, the User has performed an act to which
he is then committed. The double nature of the utterance is
concealed. As we have seen in this chapter, the possibility of
this occurring has been ignored in all the major research on
conversational interaction which we have looked it.
The fourth factor in Goffman's enforcement system is the
payoff, which may be either intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic
payoffs are physically inseparable from the move, as when the
swordsman’s lunge succeeds as a move and gives an injury at the
same time. Extrinsic payoffs in general involve extrinsic judges.
This is the case in modern competitive fencing, where a system of
rules for scoring is administered by judges who may have to make
borderline decisions about what counts as a successful hit.
It is difficult to decide which type of payoff is involved in
conversational stratagems. Certainly no external system of rules
or judge is involved. When a stratagem succeeds, its success is
indubitable to the User; no one must make a decision about whether
some consequence counts as success. On the other hand, the
consequences are not physically inseparable from the moves. If
they were, an accurately executed stratagem would always succeed,
which is certainly not the case. Perhaps this category is simply
not applicable. This illustrates a way in which strategy involving
talk, with its problems of uptake, is fundamentally different from
interactions involving physical contact. If I punch
you, you are punched. If I promise you something, you are only
promised if you hear, understand, and believe me.
At the end of his paper Goffman discusses the applicability
of game theory to conversational interactions, and in general
finds it inadequate. However, his reasons for this decision are
different from what ours would be. In looking at conversation,
Goffman finds that his enforcement system has broken down. He
finds that much of what goes on in conversation is “banter or
verbal jousting” in which verbal moves are significant in spite of
the fact that participants are not committing themselves to
anything. In addition, he notes that promises and threats are made
in conversation when the party does not really intend to carry
them out, and the other participants are aware of this and don’t
seem to mind. These things bother Goffman because he sees in them
an imperfect or unreliable connection between acts and

54
consequences. What he seems to be ignoring is the fact that,
although conversational acts may have unreliable “physical”
consequences, they have quite predictable conversational
consequences. An utterance in conversation has an incontrovertible
and predictable effect on what utterance may follow it. It is this
type of consequence that makes conversational acts quite as
amenable to strategy as the more physical variety.
In spite of the fact that I do not think Goffman goes as far
as he could in discussing the strategy of conversation, I hope it
is clear that I owe him a tremendous debt for clarifying my
thinking strategy and for providing a useful framework for
analysis. Let me summarize the aspects of strategic interaction
that have relevance for the study of conversational stratagems.
(1) Individuals have interests which are not necessarily the
same as the interests of those with whom they are dealing.
(2) These interests may be concealed.
(3) Individuals have the ability to assess the consequences
of their alternative courses of action; part of this ability
involves being able to see the situation from the other’s point of
view.
(4) Individuals choose from alternative courses of action,
based on projected consequences compared with personal interests.
Conversation is not only a cooperative activity. It is also a
strategic one.

Comments
As we have seen, researchers in linguistics and other fields
have given attention to the topic of the acts performed in
uttering sentences. However, no productive answer has yet been
given to the question of how to determine what act or acts have
been performed, given an utterance in context. Although I do not
have an answer to this question, I suggest that progress toward
answering it can only be made within a framework that allows for
the following facts:
(1) A speaker may intentionally utter a sentence with two or
more potential act-consequences (as one or the other of two acts)
so as to be uncommitted to one act or the other until
circumstances favorable to one of the acts select it as the act
performed (as in initiating stratagems).
(2) A speaker may retrospectively reverse his own decision
about what act he performed in a past utterance (as in possible
responses to responding stratagems and to misunderstandings).
(3) A speaker may perform acts which have definite and clear-
cut consequences, and yet the fact that he has done so may remain
concealed from all other participants (as in all successful
conversational stratagems).
Until these types of acts and intentions concerning acts are
included in a treatment of conversational interaction, there can
be no comprehensive analysis of conversation which deals with what
people actually do when they speak.
The issue of concealed purposes in conversation has,
surprisingly, been almost totally ignored. Goffman discusses

55
concealment of information, but does not discuss the possibility
that acts may be successfully performed and yet remain concealed.
Labov and Fanshel discuss the fact that acts may be performed to
which the speaker is not committed, but do not admit the
possibility that the other participants are ever unaware of these
acts. Only a few recent papers have dealt with “sneakiness” in
conversation. In Corum 1975 there is a discussion of the “devious”
use of parenthetic adjuncts such as obviously with sentences which
the speaker does not believe are obvious. If this is a
conversational stratagem, it is most closely akin to lying.
Charlotte Baker has written a fascinating paper on the use of a
prefacing remark to block an unwanted response. Baker points out
that when a speaker prefaces an utterance with a remark such as,
“I know this is a bit fuzzy, but…” the addressee is unable to make
the challenge that the utterance was a bit fuzzy. This is a clear
example of speaker orientation to the set of possible appropriate
responses (Baker 1975).
In general, however, calculation and concealed purposes have
been ignored, even when attention to them might suggest an
explanation for otherwise puzzling facts. A good example of this
is a paper by Ivan Sag and Mark Liberman, “The Intonational
Disambiguation of Indirect Speech Acts.” Sag and Liberman
undertake a much needed investigation into the use of intonation
to disambiguate sentences such as (15) and (16).
(15) Would you stop hitting Gwendolyn?
(16) Who opened the restaurant?
(15) has a reading in which it is a request for information (the
literal reading) and one in which it is a request for the
addressee to stop hitting Gwendolyn. The literal reading of (16)
is, again, one in which it is a request for information, and the
indirect reading is one in which it is an accusation that the
addressee (or someone) opened the restaurant inappropriately. Sag
and Liberman investigate the question of whether there is some
intonation which would disambiguate utterances in favor of the
literal reading, and some other intonation which would do the same
for the indirect reading – with very interesting results. They
discover that while there is, in fact, an intonation that will
select the literal reading of sentences such as (15) and (16),
there is no intonation which will do this for the indirect
reading. They offer no explanation for this interesting one-
sidedness to the disambiguation problem.
However, once we are aware of calculation and purpose in the
use of language, we are in a position to offer, if not an
explanation, at least a justification for this state of affairs.
We can ask why a person would choose to utter a sentence such as
(15) with its non-literal or indirect reading, rather than, say,
(17), which would appear to mean the same.
(17) Please stop hitting Gwendolyn.
In other words, why do indirect speech acts exist? The work on
conversational stratagems suggests that a speaker may utter (15)
instead of (17) for the very reason that it is multiply
interpretable; in this case, the speaker would want it to remain

56
undisambiguated.
As I said, this is not an adequate explanation, since there
do exist methods of disambiguating (15) in favor of the indirect
reading that are not intonational; the most common is the addition
of please. (Nor is it ever an explanation for the nonexistence of
something to show that it is unnecessary; lots of things exist
that are unnecessary.) But this does suggest the possibility of
giving a functional explanation for intonational facts, once
conversational stratagems have been included in the picture.

57
 CHAPTER V

WHAT IS A CONVERSATIONAL STRATAGEM?

In the preceding chapters we have examined various types of

conversational stratagem from the point of view of what properties
they have, what situations they are used in, and how they work. It
is time now to determine the defining characteristics of
conversational stratagems. In this chapter we will ask: What do
all conversational stratagems have in common? What does this tell
us about the general properties of conversation and of people as
language-users? And in what way are conversational stratagems
particularly linguistic?
Let us begin by recapitulating stratagems representative of
the main types we have encountered. Typical of initiating
stratagems is Anecdote I, in which the User wishes to conceal the
fact that she does not know whether the Other gave her a plant,
yet wishes to thank the Other if appropriate. The utterance used
as a stratagem is, “I found the most gorgeous plant in my front
room this morning.”
Next we looked at responding stratagems, of which a typical
example is Anecdote VIII. The Other has just said, “I notice you
and Alice both wear beaten-silver rings,” and the User does not
want to respond to the interpretation in which this is a request
for an explanation of the circumstance mentioned. The utterance
used as a stratagem is, “Oh, yes – our neighbor who does jewelry
makes them.”
In Chapter IV we noted a stratagem for imparting information.
In Anecdote XIV the User wants the Other to know that she is not
married, but she doesn't want to tell him that she’s not. The
utterance used is, “My roommate and I redid a table a couple of
months ago; she’s really good at that sort of thing.”
Then there are stratagems in which the User assumes facts
which he does not really believe to be true. Examples are Anecdote
XV, in which the User wants the Other to do the dishes but does
not believe the Other intends to do the dishes. The utterance used
is, “Why don’t you wait to do the dishes until after dessert?” And
Anecdote XVII, in which the User wants to find out whether the
Other’s husband is living. The utterance used is, “Maybe Mr.
Molloy would like to see Yonkers, too.”
As we already noted in Chapter III, all of these stratagems
have one outstanding factor in common: concealment of purpose. The
intent to perform the stratagem is meant to remain hidden from the
Other, and the stratagem is designed so that this concealment is
possible. The key to the further commonality of conversational
stratagems is found here: How does a person know, when planning a
stratagem, that it is possible that the purpose will be
accomplished and the intent to accomplish it remain hidden?
At this point it is worth noting how often this is not
possible. There are a great many purposes in conversation that

58
cannot be accomplished when the intent to accomplish them is
hidden. For example, it is an essential characteristic of the
successful performance of an illocutionary act that the addressee
must be aware that the speaker intended to perform it. One has not
successfully completed the act of asking a question until the
person asked has recognized one’s intention to ask that particular
question. This is also true of many acts classified as
perlocutionary (and non-illocutionary). The act of insulting
someone cannot be accomplished unless that person recognizes one’s
intention to insult him. This is evidenced by the fact that when
an accused insulter pleads believably, “I didn't mean to insult
you,” the insultee is no longer entitled to feel that he has been
insulted. So the recognition of the Other's intention in uttering
the sentence is crucial to the performance of these acts. For
illocutionary acts this recognition is both necessary and
sufficient. If I recognize that the purpose of your utterance was
to ask a question (and it is clear what question it is) then I
have been asked a question. For non-illocutionary perlocutions the
recognition of intention is necessary but not sufficient. If I
recognize that your intention is to insult me, I may or may
not be insulted. But if I do not recognize that your intention is
to insult me, I cannot be insulted.
The purposes accomplished by conversational stratagems are
different in that they do not require recognition to succeed. In
fact, the negative purposes succeed only when concealed. It would
be self-defeating and somewhat paradoxical to say to someone,
sincerely, “I hope you never find out that I don’t know whether or
not you gave me a plant.” The positive purposes, taken separately
from the negative purposes of concealment, are independent of
recognition. Whether they succeed does not depend, one way or the
other, on whether they are recognized, except that the other
person may choose to thwart a positive purpose when he recognizes
it, and a concealed positive purpose is not open to this kind of
risk. Examples of this kind of purpose, some of which we have seen
in anecdotes, are: changing the subject, directing the talk toward
a particular topic, impressing the other person with one’s
expertise (knowledge, modesty, etc.), imparting information,
excluding certain possible responses, and turning the conversation
away from a closing sequence, to name but a few.
So there is an essential difference between acts like
promises and insults on the one hand, and acts like accomplishing
the purposes just mentioned on the other. The former require
recognition by the addressee of the intention to perform the act.
When they succeed, it is always to some extent because this
intention has been recognized. The latter do not require
recognition of intention in order to succeed. We are faced with
the question, then: Why do they succeed?
Let us ask this question in turn of the stratagems of each
type. In Anecdote I, the utterance, “I found the most gorgeous
plant in my front room this morning,” is chosen for two reasons.
First, it fits both possible situations: it could be said to a
person who didn’t give the User a plant, or to a person who did

59
give the User a plant, and therefore it does not reveal the
crucial uncertainty. Second, it admits at least some possible
responses that will give the User the information she needs. Thus,
its success as a stratagem depends on mechanisms of conversational
well-formedness which are independent of recognition of intention.
These mechanisms can be stated as follows:
(1) For any given fully-specified context, there is a set of
utterances which it admits, and a set of utterances which it does
not admit.
(2) For any given utterance in context with a single
interpretation, there is a set of responses which it admits, and
another set of responses which it does not admit.20
I hope it is clear that choosing a sentence so that a certain
set of responses will be admitted is quite different from asking
the addressee to respond from a certain set of responses. They are
as different from each other as saying, “So what else is new?” is
from saying, “Let's change the subject.”
In Anecdote VIII the utterance used, “Oh, yes – our neighbor
who does jewelry makes them,” is chosen because it is a member of
the set of appropriate responses to one of the interpretations of
the previous utterance and not the other, and the User wishes to
behave as if the Other intended the former interpretation. Again,
the success of the stratagem depends on the mechanisms of
conversation just mentioned. The User is using her knowledge of
conversational well-formedness to participate in a conversation
that is indistinguishable from the conversation that would occur
if a certain state of affairs were the case; namely, that she only
recognized one interpretation in the previous utterance, the one
she responded to.
In Anecdote XIV, the User has the intention of changing the
information-state of the Other without revealing that intention.
The utterance used is, “My roommate and I redid a table a couple
of months ago; she's really good at that sort of thing.” This
stratagem succeeds in its purpose because of another mechanism of
conversation, which is related to Grice's work on the Cooperative
Principle. Every utterance which demonstrates its utterer’s
cooperation with the accepted purposes of the talk-exchange, has
some purpose within the talk-exchange. This can be referred to as
its “point.” If the point is not obviously present, the other
participants are entitled to ask for it: “What's your point?” “Why
did you say that?” Or, instead, as Grice demonstrates, the other
participants will infer a point. On the other hand, when there is
some obvious point, the other participants need seek no further.
This means that providing an utterance with a point allows one to
accomplish other things with that utterance without those other

20 The similarity between these two statements is quite apparent,

and I call them two mechanisms instead of one primarily for
convenience, since it is not clear at this point whether they
should be stated separately, together, or as part of an even
larger formulation.

60
things being seen as the point. As in the previous examples, there
is a masquerade being performed. The conversation in Anecdote XIV
will look exactly like a conversation in which the User is
entirely indifferent to whether the Other gets the information
that she is not married. And yet he does get the information.
In Anecdote XV, the User hopes that the Other will do the
dishes. In pursuit of this aim he pretends to assume that it is
settled that the Other will do the dishes, and behaves in a way
that will demonstrate that assumption. (“Why don’t you wait to do
the dishes until after dessert?”) I should note, in all fairness,
that I have never known this stratagem to succeed in getting
someone to do the dishes. However, it can be quite successful in
concealing what it attempts to do. The reason for this is
identical to the one for the previous example: the apparent point
of the utterance is quite different from what is actually being
attempted.
In Anecdote XVII, a combination of the mechanisms of “point”
and of admitted responses contributes to the success of the
stratagem. The utterance used is “Maybe Mr. Molloy would like to
see Yonkers, too.” The User depends on the set of admitted
responses to his utterance to ensure that the response will
probably get him the information he wants. And he can conceal this
intention because his utterance has an apparent point that is not
asking if the Other’s husband is living.
Looking back over the examples cited, we can see that the
mechanism of “point” is operative in all the cases. It is actually
another explanation for why the concealment succeeds. It can be
stated informally as follows: “To hide what you are doing, do
something else that you don’t mind revealing.” It is only those
stratagems that occur (1) because the User has been placed in the
position of having to respond to a previous utterance, or (2)
because the User would like a certain type of response, that use
in addition the mechanism of admitted response.
Let us now summarize what we have found to be the general
characteristics of conversational stratagems:
(A) All conversational stratagems are used to accomplish
purposes the intent to accomplish which the User wishes to
conceal.
(B) All conversational stratagems succeed in concealing their
real purposes because the utterances used have some other apparent
purpose.
In addition, many conversational stratagems – the initiating
and responding stratagems with which the bulk of this work has
been concerned – make use of conversational mechanisms involving
what utterances are admitted by a context or by an utterance in a
context.
Language-users devising stratagems, then, are making use of
certain kinds of knowledge about conversation. They know in what
way conversations reflect the assumptions and intentions of the
participants, and therefore they can behave so that certain of
their assumptions and intentions are concealed. They know what
alternative responses are admitted by any utterance, and therefore

61
they can speak in a way that will make possible or block a given
response. The study of conversational stratagems reveals
simultaneously the fact that there are regular mechanisms in
conversation and that people make use of these mechanisms.
We turn now to a very interesting question: How linguistic
are conversational stratagems? Don't these sorts of things happen
in situations that have nothing to do with language?
The answer to the second question is “yes.” A very good
example occurs in a story by Agatha Christie called “The Horses of
Diomedes,” in The Labors of Hercules. The detective, Hercule
Poirot, suspects that the man he is questioning doesn’t really
have gout. He wants to find out without arousing the suspect’s
suspicions. So, after distracting the suspect with a startling bit
of news, he pretends convincingly to lose his balance and falls
against the supposedly gouty foot. The suspect forgets to wince,
and Poirot has his information. This stratagem partakes of the two
essential elements of conversational stratagems given above
(except, of course, that it is not conversational). The User has a
purpose which he wishes to conceal, and he conceals it by
apparently acting with some other purpose. Now, why does the
concealed purpose succeed? It succeeds because of immutable
physical and biological laws. When you fall against something, you
put a strong and sudden pressure on it. When a gouty foot
experiences a strong and sudden pressure the owner of the foot
feels pain. When a person feels pain, he cannot avoid giving some
evidence of it. Poirot devised the stratagem using his knowledge
of these physical mechanisms.
Conversational stratagems are linguistic because, in
comparison with Poirot's stratagem, the mechanisms they depend on
are not physical or biological but conversational. What is
astounding is that conversational mechanisms work with so much
regularity that they are as dependable as the so-called natural
laws in forming the basis for stratagems.
We cannot, in conversation, say anything we want, unless we
are willing to get any response or face any inference. A
conversation proceeds in an orderly fashion, with each participant
contributing to its unfolding under orderly laws of connectedness
and inference. At any point, an utterance used is to some extent
the result of all that has come before. It is generally true that
in situations where events depend on other events, any result
could have been planned toward (but not necessarily absolutely
determined) by anyone who had control of one of the steps leading
to that result. Thus, when we see that some event, such as an
utterance in conversation, is to some extent dependent on what has
come before, we can show that that event could have been planned
toward by any previous speaker. And therefore the very fact that
people are able to plan and execute conversational stratagems
demonstrates that conversations follow orderly laws of
connectedness, which can in turn be studied and lead to a greater
knowledge of human interaction. Such a study would contribute to
many fields, but above all to linguistics, because so many
linguists are finding it necessary to turn to the “environment” of

62
utterances in order to understand what is really going on in
language. What people can do with language, how they can use it to
accomplish hidden purposes, how utterances depend on previous
utterances and on the various understandings obtaining between
speaker and hearer – all these must form a necessary part of the
modern study of language, and this dissertation has been an
attempt to contribute to such a study. I have tried to show that
conversational stratagems exist, that they present problems for
any conversational researcher not oriented toward speaker purpose,
and that their existence demonstrates that language-users make use
of orderly laws of conversation. I have tried to suggest
informally what some of those laws and mechanisms must be. Above
all, I hope that I have shown that further research in the area of
concealed purposes and the laws of well-formedness in conversation
would be immensely valuable for linguists, sociologists,
psychologists, and for anyone who wants to know more about that
most mysterious of all phenomena: the human being.

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 APPENDIX

On the Notion, "Well-Formed Conversational Sequence"

In an important work on presupposition (Karttunen 1974),

Lauri Karttunen proposed an ingenious method for stating the
relationship of sentences to the conversational contexts in which
they may occur. It had long been noted that a sentence such as:

(i) I chased my dog around the room.

presupposes, among other things, that I have a dog. Earlier

proposals for talking about presupposition (including earlier
proposals of Karttunen's) would have stated this roughly as
follows:
“I chased my dog around the room” presupposes that the
speaker has a dog if and only if it can be felicitously uttered
only in the case that the speaker’s having a dog is part of the
context.
Karttunen proposes that this definition be turned upside-
down. Instead of defining presupposition, he defines a notion of
satisfaction-of-presupposition, which is a property of a context
relative to a sentence. His formulation:

Context X satisfies-the-presuppositions-of A just in case X

entails all of the basic presuppositions of A.

He also suggests that the term “admits” be substituted as

equivalent to “satisfies-the-presuppositions-of.” I would like to
use “admits” in a larger sense, as will be seen.
A context, then, by Karttunen's proposal, can be considered
to admit a sentence (as the next utterance in that context) if it
entails all the presuppositions of that sentence. “I chased my dog
around the room” will be admitted by a context in which I have a
dog. It may also be necessary to allow it to be admitted by a
context in which I am believed to have a dog, or in which my
having a dog is reasonable and unsurprising, even if this would
not be strict entailment.21
Encouraged by this proposal, I feel it should be possible to
set up a notion of “well-formed conversational sequence,” in which

21 It is not clear what counts as part of the “conversational

context.” As we showed in Chapter II, facts that both participants
know are not necessarily part of the context for conversational
purposes. Karttunen is aware of this difficulty, and notices, in
particular, that the use of a sentence like, “I’d like you to meet
my wife,” does not require a context in which the existence of a
wife of the speaker is entailed. These are both aspects of the
problem of what is involved in something being included in the
conversational context.

64
the basic unit is a pair of successive utterances in a discourse,
the second of which is admitted by some context which admits the
first plus the increment to the context given by the utterance of
the first. (Karttunen develops something like this to deal with
the presuppositions of complex sentences.) Short for this, we can
say “The second is admitted by the first.” A well-formed
conversation can be defined as consisting of only well-formed
sequence pairs – at each point, each utterance being admitted by
the preceding utterance.
Such a well-formedness metric for conversation is delightful
to contemplate; the means for elaborating it, however, are not
within our grasp at the moment. That it may one day be possible is
suggested by the following considerations:
(1) We are able to give intuitive judgments about well-formed
conversations and well-formed sequence pairs. We know when someone
has done something “wrong” in conversation, when someone has
violated a condition on what makes a proper sequence. For example:
(ii) a. My wife had a baby boy last night.
b. Congratulations! What did you name her?
There are endless examples of violations of various types, in
which each sentence taken separately is grammatical, sensible,
clear, etc., but the sequence-pair is ill-formed as part of a
conversation. The fact that we share intuitions about ill-
formedness of sequences is a strong indication that there is some
regularity to be captured.
(2) The work that has been done on presupposition, and in
particular Karttunen's notion of admission by a context, should do
at least some of the work of a theory of well-formedness. For
example, another sequence we would judge to be ill-formed is the
following:
(iii)a. I’m not going to finish writing the report, boss.
b. Just put the report on the desk and beat it.
Part of the explanation for the ill-formedness of this sequence is
that the second presupposes the existence of a report, and the
existence of this report is clearly ruled out of the context
created by the uttering of the first.
(3) Another contribution to a conversational well-formedness
theory would come from the work on the sequencing of acts that has
been done by researchers like Sacks, Schegloff, Labov and Fanshel,
among others. These researchers have been concerned with what acts
can follow what acts in conversation. For example, they agree that
an answer generally follows a question, a defense usually follows
a challenge, and so on. Leaving aside for the moment the difficult
question of how we know what act an utterance is, the study of the
sequencing of acts should provide us with further material for
understanding well- and ill-formedness in conversation. An example
partially explainable as a violation of rules of act-sequencing
might be:
(iv) a. Thank you so much for giving me a ride.
b. I didn't mean any harm by it, I'm sorry.
If (iv-a) is really thanks for a good deed – not sarcasm for a
ride that turned out badly – then this sequence is ill-formed, and

65
its ill-formedness has something to do with what act each
utterance is performing.
(4) The conversational work of H. P. Grice and the many who
have been influenced by him would provide us with a way of
explaining the well-formedness of sequences that our treatment
might otherwise mark as ill-formed. Take, for example, a sequence
from Grice's material:
(v) a. I am out of petrol.
b. There is a garage around the corner.
Grice points out in this case that the utterer of (v-b) would be
infringing the maxim of relevance unless he believed that the
utterer of (v-a) would be able to get some petrol at that same
garage. Thus, the Gricean maxims can be used as a means of
explaining our understanding of sequences that would be well-
formed if an additional assumption was made.
Gricean maxims can also be used to explain ill-formedness.
Take the following sequence:
(vi) a. I had a terrible day.
b. Poltergeists make up the principle form of
spontaneous material manifestation.
This sequence is ill-formed because it violates the maxim, “Be
relevant.”
Part of the value of a theory of conversational well-
formedness would be in its bringing together of these diverse
strands of pragmatic research. As I hope this dissertation has
shown, there are regularities in the use and understanding of
language that can only be treated at a super-sentential level –
regularities which are undeniably part of the language-user's
knowledge about the mechanics of his own language.

66
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