That linguists are in general aware of this problem is evidenced by the
major and long-running controversy within generative semantics as to
whether the illocutionary potential of an utterance should in some way be
incorporated into a formal grammar (Ross, 1975) or whether the interpretation
of utterances in context should be accounted for by separate sets of
conversational rules (Sperber and Wilson, forthcoming; Smith and Wilson,
1979; Gordon and Lakoff, 1971). More recently, attempts have been made
to resolve empirically the issue of how far the social and situational context
affects understanding and judgement (Ervin-Tripp, n.d.). Preliminary findings
suggest that some, but not all, listeners rely heavily on routine nonIinguistic
knowledge, and on what might be described as "pragmatic intelligence''.
Stimulus utterances are decoded by applying linguistic rules only if
something unusual or discordant occurs ( cf. the notion of the "linguistic
archive", discussed above).