My research focuses on integrating the social with the linguistic aspects of communication and miscommunication. To do this, I use and adapt resources from semantics and pragmatics to understand social linguistic phenomena and explore what norms govern these phenomena. I am particularly interested in exploring how social relations and structures can influence how communication takes place. For instance, what are the communicative effects of power differentials in an exchange? Does systematic racism or sexism influence the communicative processes that take place within those systems? My methodology in answering these questions can be understood as a non-ideal theoretic approach to philosophy of language: I consider whether common tools, assumptions, and conclusions in philosophy of language give us the right results when applied to messy real-world cases. In pursuing this approach, I draw new connections between philosophy of language and social, political, moral, and feminist philosophy.
Papers
Please feel free to email me for drafts of unpublished papers/papers without links
Conversational Goals and Internet Trolls (Forthcoming in Conversations Online, edited by Patrick Connolly, Sanford Goldberg, and Jennifer Saul):
In this chapter, I argue that internet trolling offers a challenge to the idea, common in linguistic theorizing, that communication is an essentially cooperative activity. To establish this claim, I propose a characterization of trolling in terms of the goal structure of internet trolls. In particular, trolls’ goals typically involve the disruption of existing goals of their targets through the exploitation and undermining of those goals. I show that this structure is incompatible with various accounts of cooperation put forward by action theorists and language theorists.
Conversational Goals and Internet Trolls-Final Draft
Conversational Cooperation Revisited (2021):
It is commonly accepted that conversation is, in some sense, cooperative. This is due in part to Paul Grice’s articulation of the Cooperative Principle, which states that participants should “make [their] conversational contributions such as is required…” (Grice 1989, 26). Yet the significance of this principle, as well as the notion of cooperation that is entailed, is up for interpretation. For example, there are several ways of understanding what kind of force the Cooperative Principle is supposed to have: it could be meant as a requirement on the behavior of speakers, a description of the way speakers behave, or an articulation of what speakers assume of one another’s contributions. I consider each of these options, and I argue that the first, which is often seen as a naïve interpretation, is worth considering. Although I ultimately reject the prescriptive interpretation of the Cooperative Principle, it offers a jumping off point for exploring other prescriptions on conversational behavior, such as the Requirement of Interlocutor Responsiveness, which I offer as an explicitly prescriptive conversational principle.
Conversational Cooperation Final Draft
Papers in Progress
Authority, Accommodation, and Success in Speech Acts (In progress)
I argue against an account I call the “authority accommodation analysis.” This account is a solution to the “Authority Problem,” which is the problem that arises when speakers who lack authority successfully perform speech acts that require for their felicity that the speaker stands in a position of authority. I argue that the authority accommodation analysis faces a number of problems, and that in fact, there is no real Authority Problem. The appearance of the problem relies on a conflation between felicity and success. Yet a speech act can be successfully performed even in the absence of felicity. While authority is often a felicity condition for certain speech acts, I argue that it need not be a success condition. In making this argument, I defend the claim that there are very few, if any, conventional preconditions for success in speech acts.
Dissertation
In my dissertation, I establish a framework for investigating miscommunication. Philosophers of language are often focused on successful communication. As a result, these views are significantly limited in their ability to say much about what happens when communication goes wrong. My dissertation makes two contributions in an effort to fill this gap: first, I defend a new account of communicative context according to which contexts are relativized to individual conversational participants. This account of context can capture both idealized, successful cases of communication, as well as cases of partial or full miscommunication. Second, I argue that there are prescriptive communicative norms that govern the formation of these individualized contexts. These norms distinguish innocent miscommunications–such as the miscommunication that results when someone asks for directions to the store, but I mishear, thinking they asked for directions to the “shore”–and those miscommunications that strike us as legitimately criticizable–such as the miscommunication that occurs when a man interprets a woman’s refusal of his sexual advances as lacking linguistic content, or as expressing sexual interest.
I end my dissertation by considering whether my account is consistent with a widely accepted principle adopted by many theorists–Grice’s Cooperative Principle. I suggest that, if we adjust the principle to be a Coordinative Principle rather than a Cooperative Principle, it is.
Gretchen Ellefson 