The discovery of what we mean

In Chapter 3, through a detailed analysis of portions of the discussion of a Samoan fono, readers were introduced to a discursive universe where someone’s intentions are not evoked even when they might seem relevant and needed to defend someone who is blamed for someone else’s lack of fulfillment of a public commitment. In Chapter 5, I reviewed how the ways in which we understand the role of intentions in communication and the criteria for assessing truth claims are affected by the audience, the context, and the medium of interaction, including the specific speech genre used by speakers.

In this chapter I will extend my discussion of speakers’ intentions to contents and contexts that are likely to feel more familiar to many of my readers, namely, public speeches made during a political campaign in 1995–1996. But the point I will make is similar to what I discussed in previous chapters: there are contexts and interactions where it is difficult for speakers to control the meaning of their utterances. Audience members may have interpretations that a speaker cannot predict or change. Speakers, in turn, can “repair” what they just said or modify some of their message the next time they happen to talk about the same topic. By giving us the opportunity to examine speeches that were meant to be the “same” speech, political campaigns make evident what also goes on in everyday life. We often repeat the same story or make the same argument on different occasions. Each time, we make some adjustments to our audience.