Meaning, Intention, and Responsibility in Rai Divinatory Discourse

In linguistic theories of what constitutes meaning in communication, or the purpose of a "speech act," the notion of intention has been a crucial ingredient. If there were no intentions, so the general argument in the field of linguistic pragmatics goes, one could not distinguish meaningless words, like babbling, from meaningful speech. This position has been expressed in formal terms by the language philosopher H. Paul Grice: "'A meant something by x' is (roughly) equivalent to 'A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of a recognition of this intention'" (Grice 1973:46, also Du Bois 1993, emphasis mine).