Communicative acts: Intentionality, contextuality and reciprocity

Reich (2011) presents a theoretical model in which communicative acts are construed as “overt attempts to influence an addressee, either in the form of soliciting specific and momentary cooperation or in the form of providing it”. Reich's pragmatic model of communicative acts is constructed through the introduction of two key notions, “cooperative response act proposal” and “self-realizing communicative act”. With the three attributes (i.e., intentionality, reciprocity and contextuality) of communicative acts in mind, we discuss in this article some inadequacies as well as problems with Reich's pragmatic theory. With regard to Reich's criticism of Clark's notion of “joint project”, we demonstrate that both Reich's notion of “co-act proposals” and Clark's notion of “joint project” can account for pragmatic phenomena surrounding communicative acts, albeit their pragmatic frameworks have distinct focuses: Reich's co-act proposal lays emphasis on the initial part of a communicative act, namely the initiation, whereas Clark sets his sights on the whole process of a communicative act; hence there is little justification for Reich criticizing Clark's framework. We also demonstrate that, whether in theory or in application, there is some difficulty in making a clear-cut distinction between the two notions “cooperative response act proposal” and “self-realizing communicative act”.