Relevance and layered ostension in multi-participant interactions

Work in relevance-theoretic pragmatics has, for the most part, focused on dyadic interactions between one speaker and one hearer. However, it has long been acknowledged that this ‘two-party paradigm is inadequate’ (Goffman, 1981, p. 132), and that the ‘[m]any more dimensions of how [a pragmatic theory] can model mass-communications deserve closer analysis in future research’ (Forceville, 2020, p. 115). According to relevance theory, it is the addressees of ostensive acts who can use the presumption of optimal relevance in their interpretation. However, interactions often involve non-addressees (third parties, overhearers, eavesdroppers, etc.), and in digitally mediated and broadcast communication, the addressees may be both ‘imagined’ (Marwick and boyd, 2011) and part of a mass audience. How can the role of non-addressees be understood in relevance-theoretic terms, what role does ostension play in multi-participant interactions, and what are the implications when coordinating more than two cognitive environments?
In this paper, I address these issues via the notion that ostensive acts can be layered. As Sperber and Wilson (1987, p. 751) suggest, ‘a first-level act of ostensive communication can serve as an ostensive stimulus for a second-level act of ostensive communication’. I demonstrate that, in multi-participant discourse, communicators can perform a first-level act addressed to one participant, while simultaneously showing that first-level act to another participant via second-level ostensive act of showing. Furthermore, I will show how, in some cases, a communicator also simultaneously performs a third-level ostensive act in which her second-level act of showing is shown to the first-level addressee. This layering of ostensive acts makes the speaker’s communicative intentions mutually manifest to all participants, thereby fostering the mutual cognitive environment necessary for successful group discourse.

References
Forceville, Charles. (2020). Visual and Multimodal Communication: Applying the Relevance Principle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goffman, Erving. (1981). Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Marwick, Alice E., and boyd, danah. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13 (1): 114–33.
Sperber, Dan, and Wilson, Deirdre. (1987). Précis of Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10 (4): 697-710.