Noncompositional

I don’t often shop at Sears – in fact, as far as I can remember I’ve walked into one less than five times in my life. But recently I was looking for an item that I thought might be sold at Sears (turned out, it’s not, at least not at the one I went to), and we now live not far from one, so I went over to do some shopping. While up in the tools and hardware section, I heard a really interesting message over the PA system. Paraphrasing:

> Attention, Sears sales associates. Make sure your areas are well organized. Walk through the aisles and make sure your inventory is tidy and that everything is visible. Remember, we pride ourselves on good service, and always put the customer first!

I’d never heard anything like this before. For the first half of the announcement, I was thinking, “why am I hearing this?” Then it became clear – this public announcement, on the surface aimed at employees (I have no idea if what was in the message was actually supposed to be immediately relevant to sales associates), was designed to be overheard by customers.

It’s an interesting question how (or if) one can tell that a message that was not explicitly addressed to them is meant to be overheard by them. It seems as though the biggest cues are semantic and pragmatic, but it seems like there could be some more grammatically constructions that do the job. I’m thinking of utterances like *Well, I would have gone to the show but _someone_ wanted to stay home and unpack all evening.* It seems as though conversation analysts would have covered this topic in their work, but after a quick search the [closest thing](http://books.google.com/books?id=jCgOAAAAQAAJ) I could find was the idea that conversations in play-by-play sports commentary are dialogues meant to be heard by a non-participating audience. Then there’s the more [recent idea](http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hasegawa/Papers/EmbeddedSoliloquy.pdf) that some instances of self-directed or soliloquial utterances are in fact meant to be overheard by nearby potential addressees. But I don’t know of any real generalizations that have been made about saying things with the intention that someone other than the addressee receives a message.

As I continue to move in to my new apartment, I constantly think, “I should be working on my presentation in Chicago in a few weeks.”

This leads me to wonder, what’s going on in the linguablog world in Chicago?