Toward a pragmatics of relating in conversational interaction

Abstract Across a range of widely cited articles and books, Michael Haugh has advanced insightful, empirically grounded perspectives on implicature, intention, conversational interaction, social practices, im/politeness, face, cultural perspectives, meta-linguistics, corpora, and more as core issues in pragmatics. Among these perspectives are Haugh's argument that if scholars of language pragmatics are to continue to advance their understandings, research must focus not only on the phenomena involved in forming action and meaning for utterances in conversational interaction, but also on key socio-cognitive phenomena entailed in forming actions and meanings. Tracing Haugh's careful, long term development of this argument reveals that it is one essential basis for his argument that im/politeness phenomena are best understood not in terms of inferring intentions, but as evaluative social practices constituted by persons in everyday interaction. Engaging im/politeness practices requires at least two persons, just as do the practices through which persons constitute relationships in everyday interacting. It follows that Haugh's argument for studying the pragmatics of forming actions and meanings within conversational interaction is also one essential basis for advancing research on the pragmatics of human relating in conversation.