How Do Speakers Define the Meaning of Expressions? The Case of German x heißt y (“x means y”)

ABSTRACT

To secure mutual understanding in interaction, speakers sometimes explain or negotiate expressions. Adopting a conversation analytic and interaction linguistic approach, I examine how participants explain which kinds of expressions in different sequential environments, using the format x heißt y (“x means y”). When speakers use it to clarify technical terms or foreign words that are unfamiliar to co-participants, they often provide a situationally anchored definition that however is rather context-free and therefore transferable to future situations. When they explain common (but indexical, ambiguous, polysemous, or problematic) expressions instead, speakers always design their explanation strongly connected to the local context, building on situational circumstances. I argue that x heißt y definitions in interaction do not meet the requirements of scientific or philosophical definitions but that this is irrelevant for the situational exigencies speakers face.

Acknowledgments

I thank Arnulf Deppermann, Nadine Proske, Jörg Zinken, and Silke Reineke as well as all anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. FOLKER is an annotation tool developed for the transcription of natural, multipart interaction (see Schmidt & Schütte, 2010).

2. By exemplifying sprachstil with this simple dichotomy, he also characterizes the task as a simple one, thus maybe enticing somebody to volunteer.

3. There are no video recordings of that lesson, but we can assume the teacher disambiguates the deictic expression da (“there”) by some sort of pointing gesture to the head.

4. Kognitive is not the basic form (which would be kognitiv) but a conjugated one, either apt for a feminine singular noun (e.g., intelligenz, lines 21 and 25) or apt for a plural noun (e.g., fähigkeiten, “abilities,” line 05).

5. In only one single case in my collection a foreign word is explained in a clausal formulation; in all other cases the x and the y correlate grammatically (i.e., a noun is substituted with a noun, e.g., in the native language), an adjective with an adjective, and so on.