Guidelines for bridging the gap between literal sentence meaning and communicative intention

By the performance of language acts, participants in an organisation initiate action and report about results. An unambiguous interpretation of these language acts is important for the modelling of business communication. In the actual realisation of business conversations the communicative intention of the speaker often differs from the grammatical meaning of the sentence. This paper focuses on the gap between the meaning of a speaker’s utterance and the meaning of the sentence in more detail. Several phenomena are discussed, which play a dominant role in the expression of action initiating language acts and language acts that report about action. Based on these phenomena some guidelines are proposed, which stand at the interface between the grammatical meaning of the sentence and the communicative function of the expression involved in the encompassing business conversation. These guidelines are helpful for the analyst who uses a communication centred modelling approach in analysing organisations.