Pragmatics, Common Ground, and Mediated Interaction

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering pragmatics, common ground, grounding techniques, media constraints, attention negotiation, availability management, self-presentation affordances, audience types, and online social contagion.

Pragmatics

The social conventions and assumptions that govern how language is used and interpreted in context.

Common Ground

What is assumed to be shared between people who are communicating, including shared knowledge, shared beliefs, and shared assumptions.

Categorical Common Ground

Shared information that communicators assume based on mutual membership in a social, cultural, or other community category.

Grounding Criterion

The level of understanding that conversational participants mutually believe is sufficient for their current communicative purpose.

Grounding

The collaborative negotiation process through which participants achieve mutual understanding sufficient for their communicative purpose.

Presentation Stage

The first stage of grounding, in which Person A presents a message for Person B to understand.

Acceptance Stage

The second stage of grounding, in which Person B provides evidence of understanding, allowing both participants to treat the message as sufficiently understood.

State 0 (Grounding)

The grounding state where the recipient does not notice that the speaker uttered any message at all.

State 1 (Grounding)

The grounding state where the recipient notices that the speaker spoke, but does not hear the words correctly.

State 2 (Grounding)

The grounding state where the recipient hears the words correctly, but does not understand what they mean.

State 3 (Grounding)

The grounding state where the recipient fully understands what the speaker meant and responds appropriately.

Positive Evidence

Information that gives a speaker reason to believe their message has been received and understood.

Negative Evidence

Information indicating that a message was not adequately received or understood.

Acknowledgement

A verbal or nonverbal signal (such as 'mhm,' 'yeah,' nodding, or a thumbs up) indicating that the recipient is following the message.

Relevant Next Turns

A response appropriate to the preceding utterance that demonstrates understanding by making contextual sense.

Referential Identity

The mutual belief that conversational participants have correctly identified the specific person, object, place, or other referent being discussed.

Alternative Descriptions

Using a different description of a referent to check or demonstrate that both participants refer to the same entity.

Indicative Gestures

Using physical actions such as pointing, looking, or touching to establish which referent is intended.

Referential Installments

Breaking the identification of a referent into sequential stages, confirming mutual understanding before continuing.

Trial References

Offering a tentative reference or candidate identification to seek confirmation from the conversational partner.

Grounding Verbatim Content

Grounding where participants must understand the exact sequence of words, letters, or numbers rather than just general meaning.

Verbatim Displays

Repeating or reproducing exact content to demonstrate that it was received accurately.

Principle of Least Collaborative Effort

The principle that conversational participants attempt to minimize the combined, total effort expended by both parties to achieve mutual understanding.

Communication Constraints

Characteristics of communication media that determine and shape the grounding techniques available to participants.

Copresence

A medium constraint where participants share the same physical space and environment.

Contemporality

A medium constraint where the receiver receives a message at the exact moment the sender produces it, rather than after it is completed.

Simultaneity

A medium constraint where both participants can send and receive messages at the same time without turn-taking barriers.

Sequentiality

A medium constraint where conversational turns cannot get out of order and remain in a connected sequence.

Reviewability

A medium constraint where participants can look back at and reread previously received messages or conversational history.

Revisability

A medium constraint where the sender can privately edit or alter a message before their interaction partner sees or hears it.

Attention Negotiation

The process through which communicators establish and coordinate expectations regarding how much scarce attention they will allocate to each other.

Social Attention

Any attention directed toward another person or toward information concerning their behavior, online or offline.

Gathering (Social Attention)

Actively seeking information regarding another person's attention, availability, or willingness to interact.

Displaying (Social Attention)

Providing outward evidence or signals of your own attention, presence, or willingness to interact.

Joint Action

A shared activity in which people coordinate their behavior by responding to or anticipating signals from one another.

Ambient Attention Level

The ongoing, background level of mutual attention and availability maintained between people even when not actively communicating.

Strategic Escalation

Deliberately using specific communication tactics or switching media channels to increase someone's attention when earlier attempts fail.

Competing Attention Goals

A situation where communicators want conflicting amounts of attention from each other, such as one attempting to continue an exchange while the other disengages.

De-escalation (Attention)

Attempting to decrease the level of mutual attention or terminate an interaction, either explicitly or implicitly.

Platform Transparency

The degree to which a communication platform exposes information about a user's availability, attention, or behavior (e.g., read receipts, active status).

Availability Management

The practice of controlling and communicating when, how, and whether others can initiate or sustain interactions.

Temporal Ambiguity

Uncertainty regarding exactly when a recipient received, opened, or acted on a message.

Activity Ambiguity

Uncertainty regarding what an interaction partner is actually doing at any given moment.

Location Ambiguity

Uncertainty regarding an interaction partner's true physical whereabouts.

Butler Lies

Deceptive statements used to manage entering, exiting, or arranging social interactions, typically to protect face and maintain relationships.

Entering Butler Lies

Deceptive statements used to manage whether an interaction begins, either by initiating or avoiding a new exchange.

Exiting Butler Lies

Deceptive statements used to terminate an ongoing interaction without causing offense.

Arrangement Butler Lies

Deceptive statements used to schedule, negotiate, or coordinate future interactions.

Face

The positive social image and reputation that individuals desire to maintain in their interpersonal interactions.

Constrained Cues

The limited contextual information provided by a medium regarding another person's real-time activities, location, or message status.

Strategic Deception

Deliberately exploiting another person's lack of information by uttering intentional falsehoods to shape how they interpret one's behavior.

Strategic Use of Ambiguity

Deliberately leveraging a lack of contextual information to manage behavioral expectations without necessarily uttering an explicit lie.

Self-Presentation

The process of communicating aspects of oneself to others to establish a recognizable social identity or role in a specific context.

Roles

Socially recognizable identities associated with particular expectations regarding how an individual should act.

Performance (Self-Presentation)

The outward actions and expressions through which an individual presents a specific social role to an audience, encompassing setting, appearance, and manner.

Production Context

The circumstances under which content is originally produced and shared, including the author's physical setting, intentions, and intended audience.

Consumption Context

The setting and circumstances under which an audience encounters, views, and interprets digital content.

Platform Physics

The architectural rules and affordances that govern how information behaves, circulates, and is structured within a digital platform.

Formal Associations

Explicit connections between users, behaviors, or content that are indexed and stored in a platform's database.

Informal Associations

Connections between users, behaviors, or content that people infer or recognize socially, but which are not indexed by a platform's database.

Identity Alignment

The degree to which an online platform profile corresponds to and reveals an individual's authentic offline identity.

Negative Disinhibition

Reduced online behavioral restraint that leads to harmful, abusive, or socially inappropriate conduct due to reduced perceived accountability.

Positive Disinhibition

Reduced online behavioral restraint that enables people to share personal, sensitive, or stigmatized experiences more openly.

Identity Persistence

The extent to which an online user identity remains stable, continuous, and recognizable across interactions over time.

Identity Flexibility

The degree of freedom a platform grants a user to adopt different personas, accounts, or representations of themselves.

Audience Transparency

The extent to which a platform informs a user about who is potentially capable of viewing their shared content.

Display Transparency

The extent to which a platform shows a user who has actually viewed or accessed their shared content.

Face Threats

Information, cues, or behaviors that undermine, contradict, or challenge the positive social image an individual seeks to present.

Imagined Audience

The specific group of people an individual mentally envisions or has in mind when composing and publishing content.

Potential Audience

The total group of people who are technically able to view shared content based on platform permissions and architecture.

Actual Audience

The specific subset of people who actually see or consume the shared content.

Active Audience

The subset of viewers who visibly engage with content by liking, commenting, sharing, or responding.

High Self-Monitor

An individual who actively attends to social cues and adapts their self-presentation across different audiences and settings.

Low Self-Monitor

An individual whose self-presentation is primarily directed by internal values and feelings rather than changing social cues.

Lowest Common Denominator Strategy

An audience management approach in which a creator shares only content that is deemed suitable and unobjectionable to their widest, most diverse group of connections.

Social Influence

A change in an individual's thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behaviors resulting from interaction with another person or group.

Simple Contagion

The transmission of information, rumors, or news across a network where a single exposure from one source is sufficient for adoption.

Complex Contagion

The spread of behaviors or beliefs that requires repeated reinforcement from multiple independent sources, especially when adoption is risky, costly, or controversial.

Moral Outrage

An emotional response to perceived breaches of shared moral norms, frequently manifested through public shaming, gossip, or condemnation.

Radicalization (Social Media)

A process of escalation toward increasingly extreme beliefs and violent social action, fueled by preexisting attitudes, selective exposure, and online social reinforcement.