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Evolving Discourse
Speech Acts and Sequentiality
Jacob L. Mey(Professor Emeritus)
University of Southern Denmark

In traditional beliefs, words have been considered as having immanent, magic powers: ofhealing or destroying, of salvation or damnation, and so on. In a more analytic mode, theidea of human acts of speech having an inherent, illocutionary 'force' has been exploredby the speech act theorists. Speech acts have usually been thought of as having to do withthe words spoken; consequently, the focus has been on the illocutionary force, respectively
their perlocutionary effect of an act. The theorists, however, could not always convincingly show what this 'illocutionary force' or 'perlocutionary effect' stood for in a concrete
speech situation. To complement the classic theory (as developed by Austin, Searle, Grice,
Levinson, and oth ers), I have introduced the notion of 'situated speech act', or pragmaticact (Mey 2001). Here, the stress is on the total context of speech (the 'situation'), rather
than on the words themselves. However, if we consider human speech as it develops in asituation, we also n eed to pay attention to the evolving aspects of discourse, by which thesituational conditions for pragmatic acting relate to the temporal and spatial aspects of
our acts. The present paper tries to show how pragmatic acts in discourse (in addition to
the spatial dimension) need the temporal dimension of sequentiality, in order to becorrectly understood and effectuated, that is : to function properly in accordance with theshared co-construction practiced by the participants of the situation, through their cowording the situation and their acting correspondingly.

INTRODUCTION
In Peter Mayle's novel Chasing Cezanne, a young photographer named Andre is staying at a hotel in the South of France on business trip, to be joined for dinner by Camilla,
the editor of the fashion magazine for which he is freelancing. While Andre is visibly tired
after a day of hard preparatory work, Camilla (who has just arrived from New York on-53-

the Concorde) is full of energy, making plans for the days a h ead. The following dialogue
develops over coffee:''You're fading, sweetie," she said, as the bill was placed on the table. "Do you
want to go to bed?" The waiter, whose English covered the essentials, raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.
Andre looked at h er. She looked back, with a half-smile that didn't reach hereyes. He had an uncomfortable feeling that an invitation had been extended. Officegossip had it that Camilla maintained a liaison with a wealth y lover and possibly
enjoyed discreet matinees now and then with Garabedian [an art dealer] Why not theoccasional photographer? Editor's comforts while on location .
"I h aven 't had an offer like that for week s." And then he laughed, and themoment passed. "Some more coffee?"
Camilla tossed her napkin on the table and stood up. "Eight o'clock tomorrow. In
the lobby."
Andre watched h er leave the restaurant, a woman declined. He wondered if he'djust jeopardized his meal ticket.
(Peter Mayle, Chasing Cezanne, pp. 34-35)

The question Camilla is asking can obviously be interpreted in a variety of ways.
Among other possibilities, Camilla could be inquiring about Andre's physical state inorder to make sure h e is up to the task ahead of them; or the question could contain asexual innuendo; and so on.

The ambiguity of the question can only be resolved in th e context: Editor Camilla has
noticed that Andre, the photographer who sh e is supposed to be working with on an
important project, has appeared a bit absent-minded over dinner; hence a question as tohis b eing tir ed and wanting t o go to bed, is entirely appropriate in t h e one context.
However , Andre, the eternal male, sees the question in a different light (the other context: 'Is she coming on to me?'), and parries it humoristically but decisively by indirectly
declining the implied offer ("Some more coffee?"). The inference that he makes from his
denial is that he might put himself out of a job by declining th e advances of his employer(who is known for h er sexual bravado). H ence Andre's quizzical musing ("I might justhave lost my meal ticket").

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Evolving Discourse

My wife, who was reading Peter Mayle's book aloud to me in bed, commented on
Andre's continued reflections in which he explicitates the hidden implicature of invitation("He had an uncomfortable feeling that an invitation had been extended") as follows:"Camilla's words did not represent an invitation until Andre had turned it down". In
other words, the invitation came only 'to light' sequentially, as it were; the temporalprogress of the conversation was a necessary factor in the proper 'decoding' of the message.

SPACE, TIME AND ACTS
What this snippet of dialogue shows is that a speech act cannot be pinned down,
locally and temporally, to one particular defining place and moment. It has to be interpreted in the flow of conversation, as evolving together with the situation(s) in which it isused. The invitation, if it had been one, both loses its 'force' and reinstates its 'point' after
having been produced (and as far as the invitation goes, rejected). This defining aspect I
will call the 'evolving temporal quality' of speech acting.

The first thing we have to do is to reintroduce the notions of time and space into ourthinking on speech acts (cf. Cooren et al. 2005). Speech acts are often conceptualized anddescribed in abstract terms: given these words, what effects can they have in an hypothetical context? The context is neither 'spatialized' nor 'temporalized': and this is thecase both statically and dynamically. Statically, the context is robbed of its space andtime coordinates; speech acts happen in a never-never (or always-already) time-space.
Dynamically, this means that a speech act is practiced as some kind of 'one-night stand':the act is executed ('magically') without taking any previous history into consideration,neither are any consequences envisioned (just as for what Anthony Burgess, in his classic
film script and novel, A Clockwork Orange, characterized as the "old in-and-out").

It is as if we are saying: Do this and the perlocutionary effect will appear, as if bymagic, no matter what your personal or social placement in time and space. In consequence, any evolution of the speech act as to e.g. its proper intentionality is a priori
excluded. And thus we arrive at this doubly sealed, hermetically encapsulated notion of
speech act as it is commonly understood in the pragmatic literature (with a few, rare
exceptions; compare Mey, 2001: ch.8, on the 'pragmeme', a notion I will revert to in thesequel).

-55 -BIRTH, LIFE AND DEATH OF A SPEECH ACT
To make this clearer, I want to consider the 'life and death' of a particular speech act:
the classical act of baptizing. Perhaps it would be better to speak of birth and reincarnation, rather than of birth and death, since speech acts (like the poet's old soldiers) neverreally die, they just go away and come back in a different appearance, as we may see from·considering the speech act of 'baptizing' in its historical (spatial and temporal) dimensions.

First historical stage: the preliminary discourse. Before we had baptism, we had
John the Baptist preaching: "the voice of one crying in the wilderness .. ." (Matthew 3:3;
Luke 3:4; Mark 1:3; John 1:23). The intentionality is hidden h ere: we're looking at a protospeech act, one could say, an act having to do with preparation for a big event, such as
the coming of the Messiah (compare Isaiah 40:3ff).

Place: the J u dean desert.
Time: sometime around the year 25 AD.

Second historical stage: the act of baptizing. John is pouring water over people's
heads on the banks of the River Jordan, telling them to go home and mend their ways. It
is not certain that Jesus himself actually did baptize (see Chilton 1994; Mey 2006); at thevery least, he told his disciples to go out into the world and teach "the one baptism of forgiveness of sins" (as the Nicean Creed formulates it) '> .

Place: the River Jordan.
Time: some time around the year 30 AD.

Third historical stage: the magic of the fully fledged speech act kicks in. Baptism is
now institutionalized as the entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven, and the magic formula 'I
baptize thee in the name ofthe Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost' is proclaimed as theuniversal (sufficient and necessary) condition of salvation (see Matthew 28:19).

Baptism is now a fact of life, as are the words accompanying it; the speech act assuch has gone underground, to be resurrected by John Langshaw Austin in Oxford, a couple of thousand years later, when language again became an object of 'meta-interest'.

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Evolving Discourse

Time: from AD 33 to present.
Places: Palestine, Asia Minor, Rome, then the world (including Austin's Oxford).

Now what does this foreshortened bit of history teach us about speech acts?

First of all, a speech act never comes alone. It has a history and a context of use, afact that Austin saw correctly (but did not fully exploit as to its implications).

Second, speech acts evolve over time and in space. There is no knowing whether St.
J ohn the Baptist's speech acts, in particular his words (in case h e actually did use
words-this is som ething we don't know) were the same in expression and content as thewords uttered by a Catholic priest today .

Third, and most importantly, the magic is not just in the words: it is conditioned by
the acceptance of the person who submits him-/herself to the magic. Compare what St.
Paul says about another sacrament, with another 'magic' force, the Eucharist: whoever
partakes of the Lord's t able unworthily, "he eateth and drinketh damn a tion [or: j udgment] to himself' (I Cor. 12:29): the speech act of salvation ('may your soul be con served
unto eternal life')' 1 turns into one of damnation ('eating and drinking yourself a judgment').

Similarly, in our own daily lives, speech acts such as promises tend to lose their efficiency in u se, depending on wh ere and when they are being uttered. In order to establish
a modicum of security, we anchor these fleeting acts by converting them into the codified
speech acts of the theorists, or by committing them to a more durable medium; rather
than relying on the spoken word, we resort to written instruments of promising: memosof intention, contracts, promissory notes, and so on. This 'embodiment' of th e speech act
or 'incarnation', as Com·en calls it (Cooren et al. 2005: 275), finds its apogee in the artifactof the organization, a 'monster' embodying in itself the various manifestations of its acting out in the dialectic constructive movement of organizational discourse (Cooren et al.
ibid. ).

Fourth, if one can say that speech acts are 'jelled discourse', it is equally true that thepieces of spatial and timely embodiment we construct through our speech acts are noth-- 57-ing but jelled action'. To undo the jelling, to make the dry bones come to life again (cf.
Ezekiel 37:3), we have to extend the notion of speech acts, making them reappear as'pragmatic acts', that is to say, pieces of (partially verbally constructed) action that represent our temporal and spatial continuity as we are embodied in the material world.
Again, these pieces are not 'givens', once and for all; as speech acts develop over time andin space, we see "a continuous reconfiguration of human intentions as the contingencies
of practice unfold and impose a revision of the past and the future", in a movement aptly
called 'tuning' by Andrew Pickering (1995; see Cooren et al. 2005: 272, from which the quotation is taken).

PRAGMATIC ACTS, SPEECH ACTS AND THE TIME/SPACE AXIS
The theory of pragmatic acts (Mey 2001: 206ff.) has been developed to capture an
essential element in the theory of speech acts that had gone missing from the standard
accounts.

Starting from what I have called the 'indirect speech act paradox' (the fact that people use indirectness in the majority of their speech acting, preferring a more complicated
act to a simple, canonical one), I have shown that the original idea of a speech act is inextricably bound up with the traditional notion of the speaker-hearer dyad, where one 'talking head' formulates an intention, to be captured and 'decoded' by the other on th e basisof the provided linguistic material.

The question asked here is: What do the words mean when uttered by a speaker inthe presence of a hearer, and how does the hearer interpret them? In contrast, the question I have suggested should be asked is: In a situation of speaking and hearing, whatwords will fit the bill? My notion of the pragmatic act (or 'situated speech act') captures
the affordances of the users and the situation and seeks to incorporate these situational
constraints with regard to the admissible and effective utterance. In this case, the movement of analysis is from the outside in, rather than from the inside out, as in the classicalcase described above.

While the theory of pragmatic acts correctly identifies the one glaring omission of traditional speech act theory, viz., its disregard for the situation as determining both theavailability of, and the restrictions imposed on, our acting, it does not explicitly specify-58-

Evolving Discourse

the conditions of the situation. Or maybe better: it focuses more on the 'spatial' aspect of
the situation (who is present, what are their affordances, what are the constraints
imposed by the constellation, what are the social and other conditions of the location, andso on), and does not pay enough attention to the other, 'temporal' aspect of the 'embodiment': speech acts have to undergo a process in time in order to become fully valid.

Above, I have shown how historically the speech act of baptizing h as undergone significant changes both as to its form and as to its content. Any living speech act will
undergo such changes, and if we con sider pragmatic acts, it is clear that they are differentiated according to the progression of time. Even the most horrendous criminal acts are
subject to a process of 'superannua tion', by which a particular act is 'decommissioned', soto speak: it loses its particular virulen ce wh en considered in a temporal perspective, suchthat the p erpetrator after a certain number of years can no longer be prosecuted for his orh er act. 3 ) But even in non-criminal cases, the 'statute of limitation' applies, albeit differently in different surroundings. A particularly inter esting case is the legal definition of
wh at constitutes 'statutory rape'.

An act of sexual nature involving a minor is in most countries legally defined as'rape', that is , forced sexual contact, either physically or verbally. The differen ce between
various legislations is in the age of the persons involved. A rape is considered 'statutory'
if, e.g., the sexually assaulted p erson in question is under the age of 16 in a state su ch as
Massachusetts or Florida, whereas the District of Columbia imposes a stricter limit,
namely 17 years. The difference became clear when US Representative Mark Foley (RFL) was accused of having m ade sexual overtures to an under-age White House page boy,and he defended himself by saying that in his home state, Florida, the particular casewould not fall under the legal sanctions valid in the District of Columbia (where the US
Congress is located).

Leaving aside the legal tangle of the defense and its counter-moves by the prosecutors (which will be interesting to watch in this election year)') , I want to concentrate on
the temporal aspect of the sexual act. If Rep. Foley had waited for a certain number ofmonths to send his now notorious 'over-friendly' email messages to the young man inquestion, there would have been no offense. The act simply loses its moral status as atransgression, due to the progression of time. Conver sely, it is important to pinpoint the-59-exact time when a crime is p erpetrated or an arrest is made, precisely because the police
and the judiciary know that the temporal dimension plays an all-decisive role in the evaluation and interpretation of certain acts in order to have them qualified as criminal.

WHY ARE THE SPACE-TIME DIMENSIONS IMPORTANT?
The dimen sions of space and time are not only important as definit ional parameters
for a particular speech act; they constitute the very framework in which t he pragmatic
acts can be undertaken. In this respect, it is not sufficient to consider the abstract localities and temporalities surrounding a particular act; we must take into consideration thesequentiality and localization as they express the interaction of the participants. Verysimply, I cannot execute a speech act without speech of some kind; if I am not heard, thenthere will be no acting. Even the act of belief in God is not possible without having h eard
the gospel: Fides ex auditu, "faith cometh by hearing", as St. Paul advises us in h is letter·..

to the Romans (10:17). And in all this, the intention of the speaker is not the only criterion
by which the speech acts have to be judged (pace Austin and Searle and their theory of'illocutionary point', which is basically based on speaker intention). The recipient(s), theh earer(s), and their interpretation of the acts are equally important, n ay indispensablefor the successful performance of the act.

Consider the following example, adapted from Haugh (2007 in press, ex. (7)):(A mother and daughter are walking towards a railway stat ion in Tokyo)
Mother: mama hankachi mottekita to omottanda kedo
[mother (= 'I') handkerchief bring-come-past thought but ... ]('I thought I had brought a handker chief but ... )[Daughter passes handkerchief]
Mother: A doomo('Oh thanks')

The mother's remark, taken in isolation, could be interpreted as a completely neutral('constative') verbal expression of a state of affairs, or, as Haugh suggests, "to make amental note not to forget next time or to express frustration at forgetting and so on"(2007: 14). However, the sequ el of the conversation shows that the dau ghter 'gets' hermother's hint and produces a handkerchief; in other words, the mother's utter ance is n ow

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Evolving Discourse

retrospectively classified as a request. Note that withou t the temporal and spatial dimensions of this conver sation, the r equest would not have materialized, just as was the casein our first example, where the expression 'going to bed' had to be 'disambiguated', in theparlance of the linguists.

What we have here is a classical example of an 'indirect speech act', as it has been
d escribed by a variety of authors, beginning with Searle (1975), Leech (1983), andLevinson (1983), all the way through Mey (1993, 2001). As I say in my 2001 book, thenotion of 'indirect speech act' is insufficient to explain occurrences such as the ones cited
a bove: it only describes the fact that something is said, something else is intended(Searle's 'primary' and 'secondary' illocu tion, Searle 1975: 62; cf. Mey 2001: 113). H ow thish appens, and why, is never specified. In my theory of pragmatic acts, I str ess the factthat properly speaking, there are no speech acts as such , but only speech acts spoken in aparticular situation. Such situated speech acts are dependent, for their interpretation, on
the 'history' of the act, that is to say, not only th at which comes before, but also, and mostimportantly, on what comes after (in the 'retrospective' account mentioned above). But
without a conversational participant, there is no 'after': indirect speech acts are dependent on the interpretation th at the hearer gives to it, possibly in a renewed exchange withthe original utterer, as in the following example (also adapted from Haugh 2007, ex. (1)):[A visitor to the Edo-Tokyo Museum is sitting down on a bench, starting to unwrap a
paclcage offood. A museum attendant, upon seeing this, approaches the visitor and says):(Attendant) Mooshiwake gozaimasen . .. mooshiwake gozaimasen ...
('I'm very sorry ... I'm very sorry .. .')(Visitor) A, ikenai?
(Oh, it's not allowed?')(Attendant) Mooshiwake gozaimasen ...

Notice h ere that the expression Mooshiwake gozaimasen ('I'm very sorry') h as nothing to do with the actual situation as such; it is a very gen eral, super-polite way of saying'Sorry'. No mention is made of r egulations, prohibitions, propriety, food & drink; noappeal is made to a uthority, visitor beh avior, sanctions, and the like. Yet, this 'indirect
sp eech act' of admonishing/r eminding/prohibiting and so on is immediately taken up by
the visitor, who interpr ets the utterance of 'apologizing' as an indirect speech act of 'not-61-

:.,.o.;ojallowing'.

PRAGMATIC ACTS AND SEQUENTIALITY
Above, I referred to the so-called 'indirect speech act problem': How can it be that our
speech acts more often than not are executed by verbal expressions having very little to
do with the literal interpretation of those expressions, but rather much with their conventional interpretation (either as idioms, or by using certain rules of inference; Levinson
1983: 268-272; 2000: 16)? The answer is, in accordance with what I said above, that thoseso-called 'indirect' speech acts derive their force not just from the speaker's intention, norfrom the actual words uttered, but rather from the situation in which they are appropriately uttered.

The next step is to generalize this answer to speech acting in general. All speech acts
have to be situated; thus, situated speech acts come close to the speech event as it isdefined in ethnography and anthropology (see, e.g., Bauman and Sherzer 1974). Here,speech is seen as centered around an institutionalized social activity of a certain kind,such as teaching, visiting a doctor's office, participating in a tea-ceremony, and so on,where certain utterances can be expected and will thus be acceptable, others are 'ou t'.
Conversely, by accepting their own and others' utterances, the participants in the situation establish and reaffirm the very situation in which the utterances are uttered, as wellas themselves as utterers whose speech both relies on, and actively creates, the social situation.

The emphasis is thus no longer on describing individual speech acts (as it was for Searleand his followers). What the speech event does is understandable only in terms of the language used; conversely, the individual speech acts make sense only in the event. This viewhas gained further support among anthropologists and linguists; thus, US anthropologist
William Hanks states that "meaning arises out of the interaction between language and circumstances, rather than being encapsulated in the language itself' (1996: 266), that is to say,encoded in semantic units and administered by way of syntactic rules. s>This "radically pragmatic view" (to use Levinson's expression; 1995) deals with theindirect speech act problem by moving the focus of attention from the words being said tothe activities that are performed. The 'indirectness' of speech acting derives in a straightforward manner from the situation; at the same time, the speech acts depend on the situ-

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Evolving Discourse

ation for their correct interpretation. No speech act, in and by itself, makes any sen se;there are, strictly speaking, no such 'things' as speech acts as such, but only situatedspeech acts, or pragmatic acts.

If there are no speech acts as such, but only situated speech acts, it follows that it isa mistake t o believe (as most philosophers and linguists still do) that one can isolate, andexplain, our u se of words by referring t o individual speech acts, having well-defin ed properties (such as illocutionary force), to be assigned strictly in accordance with philosophicaland linguistic criteria (semantic, syntactic, perhaps even phonological).

It further implies that all efforts expended in trying to break out of this linguistic
and philosophical straitjacket in the end must be frustrated, since no single theory of language or of the mind will ever be able to explain the activities of the human language
user in a concrete situation. Such a situation depends neither on the mind n or on language exclusively, and cannot be expressed in terms intended to specifically operate with in, and describe, the mental or linguistic.

By contrast, a pragmatic approach to speech acting will always, as its first and mostimportant business, raise the question of the user's possibilities (or 'affordances', to use aterm due to the US psychologist James J. Gibson) in any given situation.

To repeat: the theory of pragmatic acts does not explain language use from the inside

out, that is, from words having their origin in a sovereign speaker and going out to an
equally sovereign hearer (who then may become another sovereign speaker, and so on
and so forth). Rather, its explanatory movement is from the outside in: the focus is on theenvironment in which both speaker and h ear er fmd their 'affordances', such that theentire situation is brought to bear on what can be said in the situation, as well as on whatis actually being said. Most importantly, the situation should not be seen as a once-given,
one and only collection of affordances, but as a continuously changing, interactional
process, in which speakers and hearers, as inter-actants, participate on an equal footingin the process of meaning-making, of co-constructing the interpretation of the situationand its occurring utterances (df. Mey 2001: 221).

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EXTENDING THE MODEL: POLITENESS AND SEQUENTIALITY
Not unexp ectedly, much of the literature on indirect speech acting has centeredaround the notion of politeness, focusing especially on how politeness is exercised in various cultural surroundings. The pioneering work of scholars such as Sachiko Ide andElinor Ochs is well known, and h as contributed to a better understanding not only ofpoliteness itself, but also of the mechanisms that are involved in making politeness happen.

The on e aspect that has not caught the attention of most sch olars (including myselOis the way pragmatic acts 'develop' over time. By this, I mean that the outcome of a particular case of pragmatic acting is not given instantaneously, in th e very moment of acting; the collaboration and co-construction of th e interpretation that is necessary to ar riveat a satisfactory interpretation (for all participants) has to develop over time, h ence th eimportance of introducing the notion of 'sequentiality' into our thinking about pragmaticacts.

Robert Arundale (2005, 2006) has developed several theoretical instruments for dealing with this aspect of human linguistic interaction. The 'retrospective co-con stituting' ofa pragmatic act (Haugh 2007: 14) is only possible if we take the time dimension into consideration . People n eed time to collaborate; and it is often only after a few interchanges
that th e 'real' meaning of an utterance becomes clear. 'Acting out of context' is just as
dangerous and impermissible as 'quoting out of context'; and since the context is continuously ch anging, our actions cannot be pinned down to wh at they were defined as on thebasis of th e actual words spoken on on e particular occasion. Therefore, wh at we need isprinciples that take this temporal (and spatial) aspect of the interaction into account; onesuch principle is precisely what Arundale calls th e SIP, the 'Sequen tial Interpreting
Principle' (Arundale 2005; Arundale and Good 2002), which allows for the h earers to integrate the utterances into a 'r evolving' (not just 'evolving', as Arundale has it) interpretation of the situation and its concomitant and constituent utterances.

Arundale and his co-workers examine th e workings of sequencing in particular as tothe creation of what they call 'politeness implicatures', that is to say, implicatures th atarise in conversation beyond the explicitly expressed or implicit intentions of th e speakers, but are co-constructed by the interactants in dialogue. In the context of my presenta--64 -Evolving Discourse

tion, however, there is no need to focus on, or exclusively deal with politeness phenomena, as the mechanisms that Arundale identifies for the creation of implicatures are notlimited to conversation or politeness as such, but have universal validity across humaninteraction.

Here is an example, again due to Haugh (2007: 13, ex. (6)).

(M is staying at S's house. In the morning, they both are on their way to the (only)
bathroom. The following conversation takes place outside the bathroom door:
S: What time are you leaving this morning?
M: Oh ... in about an hour, I suppose. Are you in a hurry to leave?
S: No, no. Just asking.
[two seconds pause]
M: Would you like to use the bathroom first?
S: Yeh, sure, if you don't mind.

The sequentiality involved in this conversation (accentuated by the unusually longpause of 2 sees.) is an essential element in the correct 'uptake' of S's first speech act andM's varying replies. The 'information' request is duly answered, according to the book, bya concrete specification of the item queried: the time of leaving the house ("in about anhour") qualified by a 'ballpark' marker ("I suppose"). The conversation could have ended
h ere, but clearly, more is involved than a simple question. In the situation (two people
waiting at the bathroom door), the pragmatic act (or 'pragmeme', as I call it; Mey 2001:
221) of 'establishing one's queue rights and duties' kicks in. This can happen only after
the first utterance has been delivered and identified by the hearer as belonging to thispragmeme; this becomes clear when M utters a question ("Are you in a hurry to leave?"),which (inside this pragmeme) aims at establishing an order of priorities with regard to·~

one's place in the (virtual) queue. Normally, one would expect a 'true' (YIN) answer tosuch a question; and not the waffling one that S produces, with its 'pooh-poohing' theoriginal request and making it appear as if it had been uttered out of pure curiositysomething which in the current pragmeme makes no sense at all, as it is not related to
the 'queue-establishing' act, but actually seems to 'opt out' of the pragmeme altogether.

M is naturally confused by this r eply ('what the hell is S on about, and why did he-65 -ask me about my departure time in the first place---it couldn't just have been small talkso early in the morning' and so on). The lengthy pause is also significant: two seconds
may not seem much of a break, but try to insert such a pause in any normal conversationand it will clearly provoke a reaction from your interlocutor (such as 'Are you listening?'
or 'H ey, wake up, I'm talking to you').

In this case, S is apparently aware of the effect his 'non-utterance' h as had on M, andhe chooses the safe path of watching which way the cat jumps-which happens in thenext interchange, where M forces S's hand, so to speak, by coercing him back into thepragmeme of 'queue making' by a blunt question, thereby offering S the possibility of'jumping to the front of the line' ("Would you like to use the bathroom first?"). It is only atthis point, after several interchanges and a long pause, that the pragmeme becomesentirely explicit as to its nature: S grabs the opportunity offered him to be first in line
and sequentially confirms the order conveyed by the pragmemic interaction ("Yeh, sure, if
you don't mind").

What this example shows is two things. For one, the individual utterances (or speechacts) make no sense in themselves, but only in the situation: they are (parts of) a situated(or pragmatic) act. And second, the acts come into the proper perspective of the pragmeme by being treated sequentially: the temporal dimension enters into the pragmatic
acting as a substantial component without which the pragmeme could not function properly, or even exist.

These observations are of course not new. As to the first, it can be found in a wide
variety of works in the pragmatic literature, including Leech (1995), Levinson (2000),Cooren et al. (2005) and many others. And as to the second, the grand old man ofConversation Analysis, Manny Schegloff, had as early as 1968, discovered and described
the sequentiality that is involved in conversational openings (Schegloff 1968; now also2006); later, he expanded his insight to comprise the now universally accepted notion of'adjacency' as a condition for proper conversational sequencing. In the present context,
however, I want to stress that my view of sequentiality in pragmatic acting is, if not different from, at least at variance with some of the other tenets held by conversation analysts. In particular, the notion of 'strict' adjacency and 'local' organization seem to me
irrelevant to a pragmemic analysis: the sequentiality involved in the pragmeme is easily-66-

Evolving Discourse

extended beyond the narrow confines of strict adjacency as th ey are evident in the definitions and u ses ofthe CA notion of 'adjacency pair'.

SPEECH ACTING, DYADIC INTERACTION AND THE 'JANUS PRINCIPLE'
From what we have seen thus far, it becomes clear that the notion of speech act is not
the only, and probably not the best way of making sense of conversation, and in general,verbal interaction. Conceiving of text as a 'macro-speech act' (van Dijk 1977), or of conversation as a concatenation of speech acts, all have the inherent deficiency pointed out inthe preceding: that they focus on the individual speaker or hearer as the locu s of action,and by the same token have a limited understanding of what interaction in time andspace is all about. (I criticized this conception, which I dubbed the 'talking heads', as early
as 1985 in my book Whose language?)

In fact, as Arundale and Good remark, "accounts .of conversation as sp eech act
sequences are not adequate" (2002: 134; emphasis original); the reason is that speech acts,
as they are usually understood, rest on a conception of the speaker a nd h earer as
autonomous, 'monadic', individual agents, who produce conversation in a "chess-likesequence of moves" (Arundale and Good ibid.: 124, 135), in their capacity of "sovereign
speakers and hearers" (Mey 2001: 221). This monadic notion the authors then seek toreplace by one of'dyadic cognizing', understood as "the dynamically interdependent cognitive processing of two individuals engaged in interaction" (Arundale and Good 2002: 127).

While this description, as such, fits well in with my idea of conversation and in general, speech activity, as 'pragmatic acting', it seems to me that the choice of the term
'dyadic' is less felicitous, especially when seen against the background of the authors' own
definition. Instead, I would suggest using a term that is both better known in linguistic
and literary studies, and also captures the interactive aspect of cognizing better thandoes the term 'dyadic', with its unfortunate associations to its counterpart 'monadic' (adyad can be seen as consisting of two independent monads, a conception that Arundale
and Good naturally reject; ibid.)

This dialogic •> character of conversation consists in the participants both anticipating and reflecting on what their partners say, have said, would have said, could have
said, and prospectively will (be able to) say. In other words, this interactive cognizing-67-depends as much on the input of the individuals as on their relationship and the common
affordances that they share. In addition, this sharing is not just a 'give-and-take', or an
exchange of 'moves' in a game: the participants, in interacting, act upon one another suchthat the outcome of the conversation or other speech activity is always a 'co-construction',a collaborative effort, never a purely static product: "a dynamic process", rather than a"product of interaction", as Arundale and Good themselves point out (ibid.: 128). This,
finally, comprises also the 'dialectic' aspect that many authors belonging to theBakhtinian tradition have stressed as the specific mark of truly human interaction. In
such a conception, neither what I say is important, nor what the other says, taken in isolation. In contrast, what importantly results from the process is an understanding thathas to b e negotiated again and again, against the backdrop of the situation and thechanging conditions of the interaction.

Naturally, these changing conditions incorporate the temporal (in addition to the
local) aspect that I started out by mentioning. Time (and history, in general) cannot be
defined as a unidirectional flow of events: history is just as much about what has been as
it is about what is, and about what is to come. History, to borrow the apt terminology ofArundale and Good, has a 'Janus-like' aspect: like the old Roman god Janus, it looks bothback (into 'history' as it is usually understood) and forth (into the 'future' part of history).
This, incidentally, is what I think the historian George Santayana meant by his famous
dictum: 'Whoever fails to learn form history will have to repeat it'. So, rather than h avin ghistory 'repeat itself, as it is often said, we ourselves must 'r epeat' it, by proj ecting history'back into the future', or: learning to live the instant time in the anticipation of the coming. In Kierkegaard's words, life has to be lived in a forward move, but it h as to be understood by moving backWhat do these philosophical musings h ave to do with the question at hand, the cognizing that happens in the interaction between people? Quite simply this : the 'Janus principle' (Arundale and Good 2002: 134-135) applies to conversation as well: "foresight andhindsight are fundamental to the interactional achievement of conversation" in a "simultaneous and dyadic operation" (ibid.: 134) The temporal dimension of pragmatic actingthat I started out talking about is nothing but an application of this principle: "in interacting, the participants continually both proactively afford and retroactively constrain
one another 's comprehending and producing of every utterance" (ibid.: 135). And again,-68 -Evolving Discourse

this process continues throughout the interaction; which is why a pragmatic act in itself
is not enough, but has to be subsumed under a more general conception of the individual
acts as belonging to a superordinate sequentiality, the 'pragmeme', as I have called it(Mey 2001: 222).

CONCLUSION
What I hope to have shown in this paper is that speech acting, and in general, theinteractive relationships of humans with each other are not just abstract phenomena, tobe studied and analyzed as 'frozen points of time', as moments fixated, as it were, by aphotographic lens (to use Saussure's well-known description of the 'synchronic' aspect oflanguage, 1916: 15). The point of making sequ encing a part of pragmatic acting is tounderscore the importance of the temporal (in addition to the local) component of the situation. As a Danish psycholinguist friend of mine once expressed it, "we don't really knowwhat we are saying until someone else has understood it for us" (Hermann 1989: 94). It is
this dialogic (and indeed dialectic) aspect of pragmatic acting that in my opinion is themain contribution that pragmatics has to offer to a theory of verbal and nonverbal interaction.
Notes1 ) "[Credo in] unum baptisma in remissionem peccatorum".

2) "May the body of Jesus Christ Our Lord guard your soul to eternal life" (Corpus Domini Nostri

Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam ceternam J; from the Catholic lit urgy of theCommunion).
3) Under certain circumstances, the legal practice of limiting liability to a determined span of time
may be preempted, as it was the case for most of the war crimes committed during WWII.
4 ) Rep. Foley resigned his seat in the House "in disgrace", as the newspapers had it, on September
29,2006.

5) See Enfield (1998) for an enlightening discussion of this issue.
6) Or even 'polylogic', as suggested by Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2004).
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