The Yunshan Chair Professor of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies Istvan Kecskes from New York State University (Albany) was invited to give an open lecture “Is there anyone out there who really is interested in the speaker?”, at the National Research Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics on June 13th, 2013.
The lecture is mainly about speaker’s perspective in pragmatics. It contains three parts: the hearer-centeredness in pragmatics, the need for speaker’s perspective and the interplay of audience design and salience, and the underdeterminacy of what is said from the speaker’s perspective.
Professor Kecskes concluded that (1) speaker production is the result of the interplay of recipient design and salience; (2) in a speaker-focused approach linguistic underdetermincacy of what is said may not work the way it does in a hearer-centered approach; (3) Speaker (intended) meaning which pertains to the subjective processing domain and the utterance level, and joint meaning which pertains to the interpersonal domain at the discourse level.
In the Question & Answer section, the participants discussed with Professor Kecskes about collective salience, the differences among privatized, prioritized and personalized knowledge, speaker meaning and joint meaning, ans so on.
