What are communicative intentions?

Language is typically used within the social context of joint activities (e.g., Clark Reference Clark1996; Kashima & Lan, in press). As Bratman (Reference Bratman1992) noted, commitment to a joint activity and readiness to be responsive to the intentions and actions of one's partner are integral to an intentional joint activity. The participants in a joint activity hold joint intentions, or intentions to carry out their individual parts of the joint activity to attain their joint goal while coordinating each other's actions (e.g., Bratman Reference Bratman1999; Pacherie Reference Pacherie and Seemann2012; Tuomela Reference Tuomela2007). By communicative intentions we mean intentions to carry out largely the linguistic part of the joint activity by performing illocutionary and locutionary acts to attain its goal.

Indeed, P&G briefly alluded to the importance of joint intentions in language use: “linguistic joint action is more likely to be successful and well-coordinated than many other forms of joint action, precisely because the interlocutors communicate with each other and share the goal of mutual understanding” (target article, sect. 3.3, para. 8). Echoing their sentiment and building on it more explicitly, we argue that intentional communicative mechanisms can partly regulate the comprehension-production processes, and this can have significant sociocultural implications.

Intentions and perception-action link

The modulation of perception-action link by shared intentions was suggested by Ondobaka et al.'s (Reference Ondobaka, de Lange, Newman-Norlund, Wiemers and Bekkering2011) work. In this experiment involving a confederate and a naïve participant, the confederate first performed an action (e.g., selecting the higher of two numbers) on each trial, and the participant performed an action congruent or incongruent with the confederate's action intention, that is, doing the same thing (selecting a higher number) or the opposite (selecting a lower number). However, the correct action for the participant was motorically congruous with the confederate's action in some cases (selecting the number displayed on the same side), but incongruous in others (selecting the number on the opposite side). If the perception-action link is fixed and not intentionally modulated, the participant's perception of an action should facilitate a motorically congruent action, but interfere with a motorically incongruent action regardless of action intentions. On the contrary, this occurred only when action intentions were congruous (i.e., the co-actors shared the same goal). When action intentions were incongruous, congruity of motor actions had no effect. These results are consistent with Carpenter's (Reference Carpenter1852) original proposal of the ideomotor principle, which goes beyond perception-guided movement and stresses the importance of conceptual action intention and expectation in the guidance of voluntary behaviour (see Ondobaka & Bekkering Reference Ondobaka and Bekkering2012, for a recent review).

Analogously, communicative intentions may modulate the linguistic perception-action link. For instance, conversants' accents often converge (e.g., Giles et al. Reference Giles, Coupland, Coupland, Giles, Coupland and Coupland1991), and this can be interpreted within P&G's framework. However, there is evidence to suggest that accent convergence depends on the conversant's communicative intentions. Bourhis and Giles (Reference Bourhis, Giles and Giles1977) examined bilingual English-Welsh speakers' accent change in a conversation with an English interviewer. When their Welsh identity was threatened, their accent depended on their personal goals. Those who were learning Welsh to extend their careers showed a convergence to the interviewer's accent, whereas those who were learning the language because of their Welsh identity showed a divergence, strengthening their Welsh accent. Babel's (Reference Babel2010) recent study partly replicated this finding. Native speakers of New Zealand English listened to an Australian English speaker and pronounced the same words (i.e., shadowed productions). Despite the similarities between New Zealand and Australian English dialects, there are detectable and systematic differences. The participants who had more-negative implicit attitudes towards Australia (vs. New Zealand) showed less convergence to the Australian accent.

These findings in language use as well as nonverbal mimicry (e.g., Castelli et al. Reference Castelli, Pavan, Ferrari and Kashima2009) suggest that communicative and action intentions can modulate the verbal and nonverbal perception-action link in joint activities. This raises at least two classes of critical questions. First, how do communicative and action intentions regulate the embodied substrate of social interaction? What are the mechanisms for the dynamic and mutual influences between the conceptual strata of intentions and the embodied strata of perception-action link? Second, what social and cultural processes contribute to the shaping of the two strata, which in turn can have a long-term impact on the evolution of macro structures such as culture and society (e.g., Holtgraves & Kashima Reference Holtgraves and Kashima2008)? In particular, the interaction of intentions and embodiment may play a critical role in intergroup differentiation (e.g., Welsh vs. English; Australian vs. New Zealander), the maintenance and dissolution of the intergroup boundary, as well as intergroup and intercultural communication and understanding.