Communicative contributions and communicative genres: language production and language understanding in context

This contribution examines the connectedness between the production and understanding of language, and between language use and context. It is firmly anchored to a relational conception of context and adapts Clark’s [4] conception of language use as both cognitive and social. The introduction spells out the basic premises for assigning language production and understanding the statuses of social actions. The second part discusses the connectedness between language production, language understanding and communicative contribution by examining the premises for the differentiation between linguistic competence and communicative performance. The third part extends the micro frame of investigation by accommodating a further layer of context and contextual constraints: communicative genre [18]. Contrary to a communicative contribution, communicative genre is a collectively oriented macro category based on collaboration, cooperation [13], We-intentionality [23] and social intelligence [12]. It functions as a filter by constraining the production and understanding of possible micro communicative contributions in accordance with a particular macro goal.