Communicative Anchoring in Latin Devices and strategies for common ground management

In order for a speaker to get across her/his message successfully, (s)he will somehow have to anchor the conceptual content into the common ground. This article serves as an introduction to a collection of papers which all deal with aspects of ‘communicative anchoring’ and ‘common ground management’ in Latin. In the first part of the article the concept common ground is introduced in the form of a brief discussion of Herbert Clark’s common ground theory, and further explained by means of an illustration from two Dutch commercial advertisements. In the second part the attention turns to Latin. I will first discuss the variety of linguistic devices and strategies involved in an instructive instance of common ground management in Cicero’s letters to Atticus. Next, I will show how in Livy’s historiography the present tense functions as a subtle grammatical marker of communicative anchoring, evoking or emphasizing common ground between the mental states involved in a particular cognitive space.