Anticipation and Violin Strings

The overall framework of this article concerns the social stabilization of linguistic meaning in the no-man’s land between pragmatics and semantics. I show how some fundamental dimensions – power, initiative, anticipation, all related to expectations – contribute to this stabilization. The result of this empirical investigation of an easy expert–novice instruction task – how to change violin strings – is a typology of instruction strategies. The analysis of these strategies is based on expectations. The strategies fall into three different analytic domains: recipient design, anticipation and labelling. The main contrast found is between on one hand opportunism – minimal knowledge, only for the current purposes –, and on the other hand anticipation – the use of present knowledge for future purposes.