LIMBA ENGLEZ CONTEMPORAN.

PRAGMATIC
Conf. univ. dr. Ilinca CRINICEANU
Semestrul II
Course 1. The Domain of Linguistic Pragmatics
For characterizing the subject matter of (linguistic) pragmatics, the
conceptions of Morris (1971) regarding the three branches of semiotics still turn
out to be basic. Semiotics is a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols
that deals with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages
and comprises syntax, semantics and pragmatics.
According to Morris, pragmatics deals with the relation of signs to their
users. In more precise terms, pragmatics is that portion of semiotics which deals
with the origin, uses and effects of signs within the behaviour in which they occur.
As such, pragmatics deals with all the psychological, biological and sociological
phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs.
Therefore, social aspects of signs (sociolinguistics) and psychological aspects
of signs (psycholinguistics) are part of the domain of pragmatics. Morris had in
view the pragmatics of any semiotic system. We will, of course, restrict ourselves
to linguistic pragmatics, simply pragmatics from now on.
From the above description of the subject matter of pragmatics it appears
that linguistic pragmatics finds itself at the borderline between linguistics and
disciplines that characterise the language users: psychology, sociology, biology.
Lieb (1976) attempts a more precise specification of the domain of
pragmatics. He starts from the apparent truism that the subject matter of linguistics
consists of the semiotic properties of natural language and of communication in
natural language. A natural language is a special kind of communicative complex,
which, in its turn, is a set of means of communication. Any means of
communication is a means of communication for somebody during a certain time.
As examples of pragmatic properties Lieb mentions any relation between
communicative means (that is, linguistic structures), users (that is, human
organisms) and some space-time portion. The introduction of the specification
and some space-time portion is highly relevant. It points out to the importance of
the concept of context in pragmatics. Thus, the study of the determination of
meaning in context is a matter of pragmatics. For example, David Lodge in his
novel Paradise News gives the following piece of conversation:
Speaker A: I just met the old Irishman and his son, coming out of the toilet
Speaker B: I wouldnt have thought there was room for the two of them
Speaker A: No silly, I meant I was coming out of the toilet. They were waiting.
It is the larger context (not just one sentence) that helps us sort out
ambiguities in spoken or written language.
Context is a dynamic not static concept: it stands for the surroundings that
enable the participants to interact in the communication process. Context is a
matter of reference and understanding what things are about.
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Another example to prove the point is the following one due to Peter Grundy
(1995):
Speaker A: Its a long time since you visited your mother
This sentence, when uttered at a coffee table after dinner by a married couple
in their living-room has a meaning different from the one it has when uttered by a
husband to his wife while they are standing in front of the chimp enclosure at the
local zoo.
The context is also of paramount importance in assigning the proper value to
such phenomena as deixis, presupposition, implicature, speech acts and the
whole set of context-oriented features.
We shall say a few words about these domains of pragmatics as schetchy
introductory remarks.
Deixis. Take the following example: I am the British Prime Minister.
To interpret this sentence we have to know what the referent of I is. What is
referred to by I depends on who says the word I at a particular time. The sentence is
true now if it is uttered by Tony Blair but false if it is uttered by John Major. Not
only is who utters the sentence important but also when the sentence is uttered. There
is a class of words whose referents depend crucially on the time, place and
participants in the speech events. These words are called deictic terms or simply
deictics and the phenomen in general is called deixis.
Besides the personal pronouns, deictics include reference to location (this,
that, here, there) and time (now, then, yesterday, tomorrow).
Presupposition. The basic intuition behind the notion of presupposition is the
relationship between something that is actually said and something else which has to
follow for the sentence to make sense: p q. Karttunen (1979) offers the following
definition to presupposition: a proposition p presupposes another proposition q if and
only if p entails q (we infer q) and the negation of p also entails q. For example:
factive predicates:
presupposition
e.g. John regrets insulting Ann
John insulted Ann
change of state verbs:
e.g. Sally stopped smoking
Sally had been smoking
iteratives:
e.g. Johns rash came back
John had a rash earlier
cleft constructions:
e.g. It was John who kissed Ann
Someone kissed Ann
Implicature. By conversational implicature, we understand, roughly speaking,
the principle according to which an utterance, in a conventional setting, is always
understood in accordance with what can be expected. Thus, in a particular situation
involving a question, an utterance that on the face of it does not make sense can
very well be an adequate answer.
If two people are in a bus stop and one of them asks the other: What time is it?
and receives the answer: The bus has just went by, makes perfect sense, although
there are no strictly gramaticalized items that could be identified as carriers of such
information about the context. It follows that the hearer makes inferences about
meaning based on context.
Speech acts. It has been proposed (Austin, How To Do Things with
Words, 1962) that communication involves the performance of utterance acts or
speech acts. Any utterance act or SA is a complex act including the following:
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1). a locutionary act (=LA) - this is an act of saying something to an audience,

an act of uttering a sentence with meaning (sense and reference).
2). an illocutionary act (=IA) - this is an act of doing something, it is what the
utterance counts as.
3). a perlocutionary act (=PA) - the speakers utterance affects the audience
in a certain way, it has a certain intended or unintended effect on the hearer.
These acts are intimately related. In uttering some sentence the speaker S says
something to a hearer H; in saying something to H, S does something, and by doing
something S affects H. Austin mostly focuses on IAs and has but little to say about
the LAs and PAs. The locutionary act should be kept distinct from the illocutionary
act. This is proved by the fact that a sentence may have a perfectly clear meaning
(sense and reference) without being clear at the illocutionary force level.
For example:
Speaker A: What do you mean by saying that you are driving to London
tomorrow?
Speaker B: Well, I was offering to take you allong.
Pragmatic competence. While syntax and semantics (as parts of the grammar)
give an account of language structure, pragmatics gives an account of language use.
The term language use may be misleading, since it might suggest that
pragmatics is simply an account of performance phenomena. Pragmatics is not only
concerned with linguistic performance but also with pragmatic competence, that is
with the speakers knowledge of how to use language. Pragmatic competence
should roughly be understood as communicative competence which may also
include the speakers stylistic or rhetoric competence, his textual competence a.s.o.
Thus, what we call linguistic competence in a broad sense appears to include
linguistic competence proper (grammatical competence), conceptual competence
(intimately related to the speakers knowledge of the world), and finally
communicative competence.
EXERCISE: USING AND UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE
Checking understanding (1)
Try to identify the main features of the following piece of conversation heard
on the radio:
A1: Mr. Majors going to be at Wincanton today
B1: Oh, he is, I didnt know that
A2: No, the horse, not the Prime Minister
B2: Oh, the gray
A1 calculates that B1 will take Mr. Major to refer to the Prime Minister
although the true referent is a horse.
ANSWER: Oh implies that B has just heard some surprising news.
Although B has nowhere indicated that he takes Mr. Major to refer to the
Prime Minister, A assumes it and uses No, the horse, not the Prime Minister to
contradict something that B has never stated.
B implies that the Prime Minister is a gray character.
Course 2. Deixis
Introduction. The most obvious way in which the relationship between
language and context is reflected in the structures of language is through the
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phenomenon of deixis. The term is borrowed from the Greek word for
pointing or indicating, and has as prototypical exemplars the use of
demonstratives, first and second personal pronouns, tense and specific time
and place adverbs.
Essentially, deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode or
grammaticalize features of the context of utterance or speech event. Thus, the
pronoun this does not name or refer to any particular entity on all occasions of use;
rather it is a variable for some particular entity given by the context (e.g. by a
gesture, for example).
The importance of deictic interpretation of utterances is perhaps best illustrated
by what happens when such information is lacking (Fillmore, 1975). Consider, for
example, finding the following notice on someones office door:
(1) Ill be back in an hour.
As we do not know when it was written, we cannot know when the writer
will return.
The many facets of deixis are so pervasive in natural languages, and so
deeply grammaticalized, that it is easy to think of them as only pertaining to the
domain of semantics. If semantics is taken to include all conventional aspects of
meaning, then most deictic phenomena are properly considered semantic.
However, on the view that pragmatics deals with those aspects of meaning that can
not be captured in truth-conditional semantics but are anchored to aspects of the
context, deixis will probably be found to straddle the semantics/pragmatics border.
Deixis is organized in an egocentric way. Deictic expressions are anchored to
specific points in the communicative event which constitute the deictic centre:
(i) the central person is the speaker.
(ii) the central time is the time at which the speaker produces the
utterance.
(iii) the central place is the speakers location at speech time.
(iv) the discourse centre is the point which the speaker is currently at
in the production of the utterance.
Descriptive approaches. Although the importance of deixis can hardly be
questioned, there has been surprisingly little work of a descriptive nature in the
area. The most important linguistic works in the topic are due to Fillmore (1966)
and Lyons (1968). The traditional categories of deixis are person, place and time.
These categories are understood in the following way.
Person deixis concerns the encoding of the role of participants in the speech
event: the category first person is the grammaticalization of the speakers
reference to himself, second person the encoding of the speakers reference to one
or more addressees, and third person the encoding of reference to persons and
entities which are neither speakers nor addressees. It is important to note that third
person is quite unlike first or second person in that it does not correspond to any
specific participant-role in the speech event: it is negatively defined with respect to
the other two participant-roles. Third person participant-roles are not deictic words.
Participant-roles are encoded in language by pronouns and their associated
predicate agreements. Pronominal systems generally exhibit this three-way distinction.
Pronominal systems may exhibit other superimposing distinctions based on
plurality or sometimes on sex of the referent and social status of the referent (as it
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is the case in Japonese). For example, in English we distinguish (indirectly) between

we-inclusive-of-addressee and we-exclusive-of-addressee as in:
(2) Lets go to the cinema (we-inclusive-of-addressee)
(3) ?Lets go to see you tomorrow (we-exclusive-of-addressee)
Sometimes, morphological agreement can make further distinctions not
overtly made by the pronouns themselves in languages that exhibit no distinction
between their polite second person singular pronoun from their second person
plural pronoun (as it is the case in Romanian and French):
(4) Vorbiti frantuzeste? / Sunteti profesorul de franceza?
(5) Vous parlez franais? / Vous tes le professeur?
A further point to be noticed in connection with person deixis is that where
face-to-face contact is lost, languages often enforce a distinct mode of selfintroduction. Thus, whereas in a face-to-face meeting I can say Im John, on the
phone I must say This is John or John is speaking with third person verb
agreement; in contrast in Romanian (and other languages) we use the first person
agreement: Sunt Ion.
Time deixis.
Time deixis concerns the encoding of temporal points and spans relative to
the time at which an utterance was spoken (or a message was written). This time is
called coding time or CT (Fillmore, 1971) which may be distinct from receiving
time or RT (as in our former example: Ill be back in an hour). Time deixis is
commonly grammaticalized in deictic adverbs of time (like English now, then,
yesterday, this year) but above all in tense.
To understand the complexity of time deixis it is first necessary to have a good
understanding of the semantic organization of time in general (although this topic lies
beyond the scope of this elementary introduction). Briefly, the basis for systems of
measuring time in most languages seems to be the natural (objective) cycles of day
and night, lunar months, seasons and years. Such units can either be used as
measures (relative to some fixed point of interest, including the deictic centre: today,
this month, etc.) or they can be used calendrically to locate events in absolute time
(relative to some absolute origio, as in this August which means the August of the
calendar year that includes the coding time (CT) and not necessarily the month we
are now in, different from this week which ordinarily means the week that we are
now in). Complexities arise in the usage of tense, time adverbs whenever there is a
departure between the moment of utterance or coding time (CT) from the moment of
reception or receiving time (RT). This happens in letter writing or the pre-recording
of media programmes. In this event, a decision has to be made about whether the
deictic centre will remain with the speaker and CT as in
(6) This programme is being recorded today, Wednesday April 1th, to
be relayed next Thursday.
I write this letter while chewing gum.
or will be projected on the addressee and receiving time (RT) as in (6) below:
(7) This programme was recorded last Wednesday, April 1th, to be
relayed today.
I wrote this letter while chewing gum.
Moreover, we become aware that the whole process of sequence of tenses is a
matter of deixis as tenses in the subordinate clauses are a semantic reflex of the
temporal value of the two temporal standpoints (the present tense, on the present
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axis of orientation, and the past tense, on the past axis of orientation). In the same
way temporal adverbials change their paradigm according to the time axis on
which they appear: today vs. yesterday, tomorrow vs. the next day a.s.o.
Finally, we should mention that time deixis is relevant to various other
deictic elements in a language. Thus, greetings are usually time-restricted, so that
good morning and good evening can only be used in the morning or in the
evening, respectively. Curiously, while the above can only be used as greetings,
good night can only be used as a parting, and not as a greeting.
Place deixis. Place or space deixis concerns the encoding of spatial locations
relative to the location of the participants in the speech event. Most languages
grammaticalize at least a distinction between proximal (close to speaker) and distal
(or non-proximal, sometimes close to the addressee) deixis. Such distinctions are
commonly encoded in demonstratives ( like this [+proximal] vs. that [-proximal])
and in deictic adverbs of place (like here [+proximal] vs. there [-proximal]).
Lyons (1977) argues that there seem to be two basic ways of referring to
objects: by describing or naming them on the one hand, and by locating them on
the other hand. As far as the latter way of referring to objects, locations can be
specified relative to other objects or fixed reference points:
(8) The station is two hundred yards from the cathedral.
(9) Kabul lies at latitude 34 degrees, longitude 70 degrees.
Alternatively, objects can be deictically specified relative to the location of
participants at the time of speaking as in
(10) Its two hundred yards away.
(11) Kabul is four hundred miles West of here.
Besides demonstratives and deictic advebs of place, there are some motion
verbs that have built-in deictic components. English come vs. go / bring and take
make a distinction between the direction of motion relative to participants in the
speech event. Thus,
(12) Hes coming
seems to gloss he is moving towards the speakers location at CT while
(13) Hes going
glosses as he is moving away from the speakers location at CT. In contrast
(14) Im coming
cannot mean the speaker is moving towards the location of the speaker, but
rather means the speaker is moving towards the location of the addressee at CT.
Such a usage may have dichronically arisen from a polite deictic shift to the
addressees point of view. However the above sentences do not exhaust the
contexts in which come may occur. Consider sentence (15) below:
(15) When Im in the office, you can come to see me.
In the sentence above, come glosses as movement towards the location of the
speaker at the time of some other specified event (called reference time). Such a
usage is ultimately deictic in that it makes reference to participant-role; but it is not
directly place-deictic in that there is no anchorage to the location of the present
speech event.
There is even another deictic usage of come that is based not on participants
actual location, but on their normative location or home-base. Hence the
possibility of saying (16) when neither speaker nor addressee is at home:
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(16) I came over several times to visit you, but you were never there.
Further complexities in place deixis arise if the speaker is in motion - it then
becomes possible to use temporal terms in order to refer to deictic locations, as in:
(17) I first heard that ominous rattle ten miles ago.
(18) There is a good fast food joint just ten minutes from here.
EXERCISES and COMMENTS: The deictic use of language has two properties:
a) it picks out a referent and b) it relates that referent to a kind of common ground
that exists between speaker and addressee.

Person Deixis
You can be used both deictically (when the context is required to determine the
reference) and non-deictically (when the reference is general rather than particular).
You is also used in English in a wider range of social contexts than would be
represented by a single second-person reference term in other languages. Foe
example, most languages have at least two forms, an informal one for use when
talking to friends and a more formal one used for showing respect to the person
addressed (because they are older or more important than the speaker). In most
languages the second-person plural form (vous in French, dumneavoastra = voi in
Romanian) or the third-person plural form (Sie in German) has this honorific
function. Levinson (1983) points out that deixis like vous and Sie are oriented to
the referent (the person being referred to) rather than to the addressee (the person
being addressed). This explains why it makes sense to describe the person we are
talking to as you (plural) or they without appearing contradictory.
There are similar strategies in English as well. When saying Shall we do x? or
We could do y to someone more important than yourself, the interrogative form
and the use of the modal auxiliaries shall and could convey respect to the addressee.
Place deixis
- Consider the following utterance:
You just have to read this chapter
The reference of the demonstrative description this chapter can only be
determined if the context indicates which of several chapters of a book is picked
out. This makes it different from non-deictic descriptions like the second chapter.
Other place deictics include: here, there, where, left, right, up, down, above,
below, in front, behind, come, go, bring, take.
Is somewhere else deictic? Somewhere is clearly non-deictic because there
is no context to check in order to determine the place referred to. Somewhere
else is also non-deictic as it indicates that no speaker-determined place is being
picked out.
Time deixis
Here is a list of some of the deictic items whose reference can only be
determined in relation to the time of the utterance in which they occur:
this/last/next Monday/week/month/year.
The use of time deictics is not always straightforward.
If I say to my son at the beginning of September:
I hope you are going to do well this year
he knows that this year refers to (the school year)
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If I say the same thing on 1st January, it refers to (the calendar year)
If I say it on 20th October, his birthday, it refers (to the year up his next
birthday).
- A related phenomenon occurs in the case of utterances including the
deictic item today. If I say:
Ill do it today, today refers to (some unspecified moment in the portion of
that day that is not expired).
If I say:
I filled up with petrol today, today refers to (some unspecified moment in
the portion of that day that is expired).
- The use of yesterday, today and tomorrow is privileged over the use of the
names of the days. So, we cannot say:
Im going to finish this book on Thursday
if today or tomorrow is Thursday.
Course 3. Conversational Implicature Grices Analysis of Conversation
Preliminaries. Unlike many other topics in pragmatics, implicature does not
have an extended history. The key ideas were proposed by Paul Grice in his lectures
delivered at Harvard in 1967; they are still only partly published (1975,1978).
Grices original intention in developing his now famous Logic of Conversation
was to show that apparent differences in the meaning of logical connectors: and, or,
if-then, as used in logic and in ordinary language, could be explained away because
they naturally follow from certain conversational principles, in their turn derived
from general principles of human action and rationality.
From a narrow linguistic perspective, Grices analysis of conversation shows
how to mean more than one says while also meaning what one says.
Grice starts with the following type of examples: suppose that A and B are
talking about a mutual friend C, who is now working in a bank. A asks B how C is
getting along in his job and B replies:Oh, quite well. I think he likes his
colleagues, and he hasnt been to prison yet. At this point, A might well inquire
what B was implying, or even what he meant by saying that C has not been in
prison yet. The answer might be anyone of such things as that C is the sort of
person likely to yield to temptation provided by his occupation, that Cs colleagues
are really very unpleasant and treacherous people a.s.o. It might, of course, be quite
unnecessary for A to make such an inquiry of B, the answer to it being in the
context clear in advance. I think it is clear that whatever B implied, suggested or
meant is distinct from what B said, which was simply that C has not been to prison
yet (Grice, 1975). A proposition which is conveyed indirectly, distinct from what
is said directly, is called an implicatum. One of the possible implicata in the
example above is that C is the sort of person likely to yield to temptation.
Thus, Grice argues, what an utterance conveys in context falls into two parts:
what is said (i.e. the logical cognitive content) and the implicatures.
Grice distinguishes two types of implicatures:
a) conventional implicatures - these are inferences made possible by the
meaning of particular lexical items (e.g. too, however, moreover, well, still,
although, so, therefore or syntactic constructions). Grices example is:
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1. He is an Englishman, therefore he is brave

where the conventional implicature carried by therefore is that he is brave because
he is an Englishman.
b) conversational implicatures are inferences determined not only by the
conventional content of the utterance, but also by the conversational context in which
the utterance is located. They are inferences derived from the content of the sentence
and owe their existence to the fact that participants in a conversation obey a
Cooperative Principle, i.e. are constrained by the common goal of communication
to be cooperative. The following is Grices formulation of the Cooperative Principle:
Cooperative Principle(=CP). Make your conversational contribution such as
is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of
the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
On the basis of the CP, Grice also formulates certain specific maxims of
conversation, falling under the general categories of Quantity, Quality, Relation
and Manner.
1. The Maxim of Quantity relates to the quantity of information as is
required for the current purpose of the exchange; under it there fall the following
submaxims:
a. Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current
purpose of the exchange.
b. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
2. The Maxim of Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true.
This has two more specific submaxims:
a. Do not say what you believe to be false.
b. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
3. The Maxim of Relation: This maxim is simply Be relevant.
4. The Maxim of Manner: This has to do with how things are said. The
supermaxim is Be perspicuous and the submaxims are:
a. Avoid obscurity.
b. Avoid ambiguity.
c. Be brief.
d. Be orderly.
In short, these maxims specify what participants have to do in order to
converse in a maximally efficient, rational, cooperative way: they should speak
sincerely, relevantly and clearly, while providing sufficient information.
To this view of the nature of communication there is an immediate objection:
the view may describe a philosophers paradise, but no one actually speaks like that
all the time! But Grices point is subtly different. It is not the case, he readily
admits, that people follow these guidelines to the letter. Rather, in most ordinary
kinds of talk, these principles are adhered to by the hearers such that, contrary to
appearences, these principles are observed at some deeper level. An example
should make this clear:
1. A: Wheres Bill?
B: Theres a yellow BMW outside Sues house.
Here Bs contribution, taken literally, fails to answer As question, and thus
seems to violate at least the maxims of Quantity and Relevance. We might
therefore expect Bs utterance to be interpreted as a non-cooperative response. Yet,
it is clear that despite this apparent failure of cooperation, we interpret Bs
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utterance as nevertheless cooperative at some deeper level. We do this by assuming

that it is in fact cooperative, and then asking ourselves what possible connection
there could be between the location of Bill and the location of a yellow BMW, we
arrive at the suggestion (which B effectively conveys) that, if Bill has a yellow
BMW, he may be in Sues house.
In cases of this sort, inferences arise to preserve the assumption of
cooperation; it is only by making the assumption contrary to superficial indications
that the inferences arise in the first place. It is this kind of inference that Grice dubs
an implicature, or more properly a conversational implicature. So, Grices point is
not that we always adhere to these maxims on a superficial level but rather that,
whenever possible, people will interpret what we say as conforming to the maxims
on at least some level.
But what is the source of these maxims of conversational behaviour? Are
they conventional rules that we learn as, say, table manners? Grice suggests that
the maxims are in fact not arbitrary conventions, but rather describe rational means
for conducting cooperative exchanges. If this is so, we would expect them to
govern aspects of non-linguistic behaviour too, and indeed they seem to do so.
Consider, for example, a situation in which A and B are fixing a car. If the maxim
of Quality is an invitation to produce a sincere act (a move we need to make
anyway to extend the maxim to questions, promises, invitations, etc.) then B fails
to comply with it if, when asked for brake fluid, he knowingly passes A the oil.
Similarly, A would fail to observe the maxim of Quantity, if, when B needs three
bolts, A purposely passes him only one, or alternatively passes him 200. Likewise
with Relevance: if B wants three bolts, he needs them now not half an hour later.
Finally, B would fail to comply with the maxim of Manner (i.e. clarity of purpose)
if, when A needs a bolt of size 8, B purposely passes him a bolt of size 10.
In each of these cases the behaviour falls short of some natural notion of full
cooperation, because it violates one or another of the non-verbal analogues of the
maxims of conversation.
However, the reason for linguistic interest in the maxims is that they generate
inferences beyond the semantic content of the sentences uttered. Such inferences
are, by definition, conversational implicatures, where the term implicature is
intended to contrast with terms like entailment and logical consequence which are
generally used to refer to inferences that are derived solely from logical or
semantic content. Implicatures are not semantic inferences, but rather inferences
based on both the content of what has been said and some specific assumptions
about the cooperative nature of ordinary verbal interaction.
These inferences come about in at least two distinct ways. If the speaker is
observing the maxims in a fairly direct way, he may nevertheless rely on the
addressee to amplify what he says by some straightforward inferences based on the
assumption that the speaker is following the maxims. For example:
A (to passer by): Ive run out of petrol
B: Oh, theres a garage just around the corner
Here Bs utterance may be taken to implicate that A may obtain petrol there, and
he would certainly be less than fully cooperative if he knew the garage was closed or
was sold out of petrol. These inferences that arise from observing the maxims are
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called generalized implicatures (Grice) or standard implicatures (Levinson, 1983)

and do not require particular contextual conditions in order to be inferred.
Another way in which inferences may be generated by the maxims is where
the speaker deliberately breaches or flouts the maxims. Consider the example:
A: Lets get the kids something
B: Okay, but I veto I-C-E C-R-E-A-M-S
where B ostentatiously infringes the maxim of Manner (i.e. be perspicuous) by spelling
out the word ice-creams, and thereby conveys to A that B would rather not have icecream mentioned directly in the presence of kids, in case they demand some.
Both kinds of implicature are of great interest. However we shall not offer
further examples containing generalized implicatures/standard implicatures but
concentrate on the second type of implicatures that come about by overtly and
blatantly not following some maxim, in order to exploit it for communicative
purposes. As mentioned above, Grice calls such usages floutings or exploitations
of the maxims. They can be seen to give rise to many of the traditional figures of
speech. These inferences are based on the remarkable robustness of the
assumption of cooperation: if someone drastically deviates from maxim-type
behaviour, then his utterances are still read as underlyingly cooperative. Thus, by
infringing some maxim, the speaker can force the hearer to do extensive
inferencing to some set of propositions, such that if the speaker can be assumed to
be conveying these, then at least the encompassing cooperative principle would be
sustained. Here are some examples:
The Maxim of Quality. This maxim may be flouted in the following exchange:
A: What if Russia blockades the Gulf and all the oil?
B: Oh come now, Britain rules the seas!
Any reasonably informed participant will know that Bs utterance is blatantly
false. That being so, B cannot be trying to deceive A. The only way in which the
assumption that B is cooperating can be maintained is if we take B to mean
something rather different from what he actually said. In fact he conveys the
opposite of what he liteally said-namely that Britain does not rule the seas, and thus
by way of Relevance to the prior utterance, B suggests that there is nothing that
Britain could do. Hence, Grice claims, ironies arise and are successfully decoded.
Similar remarks can be made for at least some examples of metaphor. For
example, if we say the following sentence:
Queen Victoria was made of iron
we express a categorial falsehood (i.e. a semantic selectional violation).
Either we are being non-cooperative or we intend to convey something rather
different. The straightforward interpretation is that since Queen Victoria in fact
lacked the definitorial properties of iron, she merely had some of the incidental
properties like hardness, non-flexibility or durability. Which particular set of such
properties are attributed to her by the above sentence are in part dependent on the
context: said by an admirer it may be a commendation, conveying the property of
toughness; said by a detractor it may be taken as a denigration, conveying her lack
of flexibility, emotional impassivity or belligerence.
The Maxim of Quantity. The uttering of tautologies (i.e. redundant, true by
virtue of its logical form alone) should, in principle, have absolutely no
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communicative import. However, utterances such as those below can in fact

convey a great deal:
War is war.
Either John will come or he wont.
If he does it, he does it.
Note that these, by virtue of their logical forms (respectively: x (W(x)
W(x)); p v p; p p) are necessarily true; moreover, they share the same truth
conditions, and the differences we feel to lie between them must be almost entirely
due to their pragmatic implications. An account of how they come to have
communicative significance, and different communicative significances, can be
given in terms of the flouting of the maxim of Quantity. Since this requires that
speakers be informative, the asserting of tautologies blatantly violates it. Therefore,
if the assumption that the speaker is actually cooperating is to be preserved, some
informative inference must be made. Thus, in the case of War is war it might be:
terrible things always happen in war, thats its nature and its no good lamenting
that particular disaster; in the case of Either John will come or he wont it might
be: calm down, there is no point in worrying about whether he is going to come
because there is nothing we can do about it; and in the case of If he does it, he
does it it might be: its no concern of ours.
The Maxim of Relevance. Exploitations of this maxim are, as Grice notes, a
little harder to find, if only because it is hard to construct responses that must be
interpreted as irrelevant. Grice provides the following example:
A: I do think Mrs Jenkins is an old windbag, dont you?
B: Huh, lovely weather for March, isnt it?
where Bs utterance might implicate in the appropriate circumstances hey, watch
out, her nephew is standing right behind you.
Another example will be something of the following kind:
Johnny: Hey Sally, lets play marbles
Mother: How is your homework getting along Johnny?
where Johnnys mother can remind him that he may not yet be free to play.
The Maxim of Manner. One example of the exploitation of this maxim will
suffice here. Suppose we find in a review of a musical performance something like
a) below where we might have expected b):
a) Miss Singer produced a series of sounds corresponding closely to the
score of an aria from Rigoletto.
b) Miss Singer sang an aria from Rigoletto.
By the flagrant avoidance of the simple b) in favour of the prolix a) (and the
consequent violation of the sub-maxim be brief), the reviewer implicates that
there was in fact some considerable difference between Miss Singers performance
and that to which the term singing is usually applied.
So far we have roughly indicated how implicatures actually come about.
Grice tries to tighten up the notion of implicature by providing a way for the
addressee H to be able to calculate the implicature q. The general pattern for
working out an implicature may be the following:
(i) S has said that p
(ii) there is no reason to think S is not observing the maxims, or at
least the cooperative principle
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(iii) in order for S to say that p and be indeed observing the

maxims or the cooperative principle, S must think that q
(iv) S must know that it is mutual knowledge that q must be
supposed, if S is to be taken to be cooperating
(v) S has done nothing to stop me, the addressee, thinking that q
(vi) therefore S intends me to think that q, and in saying that p has
implied q
From the ways in which implicatures are calculated, Grice suggests that the
essential properties of implicatures are largely predictable.
EXERCISES and COMMENTS:
Implicit Meaning
N.B. (the comments are included between brackets and are typed in bald
characters).
- The implicit meaning of an utterance is concerned with the following
problem: how is it that the reader of Gerald Durrells book My Family and Other
Animals knows that the author is making fun of his family when the title does not
say this?
- Take another example: the advertisement for Coca-Cola promotes its
product with the legend:
Its the taste
By itself this statement means very little, because we are not told what the
taste is or does. And yet we understand it to mean that the taste is good. How can
this be? And more puzzling still, when a schoolboy comes home from school and
his mother asks him why he has not eaten his sandwiches and he replies:
Its the taste
she understands him to mean exactly the opposite: that the taste is not good.
- In order to solve this problem we have to draw a distinction between
literal (natural) and non-literal (non-natural) meaning of utterances (cf. Paul
Grice). The non-natural/non-literal/non-conventional meaning of utterances
was called an implicature by Grice. He deliberately coined this word to cover any
non-conventional meaning that is implied, i.e. conveyed indirectly or through hints,
and understood implicitly without ever being explicitly stated.
- What implicatures are associated with the following utterances?
Some people believe in God (not everyone does)
Damon Hill did well in his first session in Formula 1 (he did not win the
championship otherwise I should have said so)
Ive got 100 dollars in the bank (I do not have more money in the bank).
- Grice formalized the observation that when we talk we try to be
cooperative (the Cooperative Principle). Within this principle, Grice suggested
four maxims:
1. Quantity
(i) Make your contribution as informative as is required
(ii) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required
Thus:
Chelsea are having a good season
gives rise to the implicature(they arent leading the championship)
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My jobs OK
gives rise to the implicature.(the speaker is not happy in his/her job)
2. Quality
(i) do not say what you believe to be false
(ii) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
Thus:
Smoking damages your health
gives rise to the implicature(the speaker has evidence that it does)
When will dinner be ready?
Gives rise to the implicature.(assuming to be a sincere question, the
speaker does not know, wants to know and thinks the addressee knows)
3. Relation
(i) Be relevant
Thus:
We have got to here now
uttered in our class of pragmatics, would give rise to the implicature(here
pgrather than Grices third maxim and now: at this stage in our pragmatics
class rather than today, 2002)
4. Manner
(i) Be perspicuous (Avoid obscurity of expression, Avoid ambiguity, Be brief,
Be orderly)
Thus:
They washed and went to bed
gives rise to the implicature.(it is an orderly representation of the world, i.e.
in that order)
Time flies
gives rise to the implicature(tempus fugit is intended: the N + V structure is
expected rather than the structure V + N: you take a stopwatch and use it to
time flies).
- Grice observes that we are cooperative in other endeavours besides talk.
Imagine two people working together on a single task such as changing a light-bulb.
Can you think of any cooperative strategies they might use that are similar to those
that apply in talk? (quantity the helper will pass just one light-bulb rather than
two; quality the helper will supply a new light-bulb rather than a burnt out
one; relation the helper will provide assistance that is relevant to the stage in
the operation: will secure the stepladder when his colleague is climbing it rather
than before or after; manner the helper will be clear with respect to his
assistance: will make it evident that he is really securing the ladder rather than
being ambiguous about it).
- Decide whether the following utterances are flouts, and if so, of which
maxims?
1. Easy read, Finnegans Wake (James Joyces novel ironical remark, the
opposite is intended; flouts Quality, not sincere)
2. Me: Have you done your homework?
My daughter: Mom, you know you said we could have a dog! (the response
is not an answer to the question asked; it flouts Relevance)
3. Ahead of current thinking (National Power advertisement) (flouts the
maxim of Manner as current is ambiguous: uzual, obisnuit vs. care curge)
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4. In cordless technology we have the lead (advertisement) (flouts the maxim

of Manner as to have the lead is ambiguous: a da cuiva un exemplu, pilda)
5. The best 4 x 4 x far (Land Rover advertisement) (flouts the maxim of
Manner; pun)
6. First and fourmost (Land Rover advertisement) (the spelling of fourmost
suggests the number four and reminds us that a Land Rover is a vehicle).
- The following ways of using language have been considered flouts of
Gricean maxims. Which maxim do you think each flouts?
1. Tautology:
At the end of the day the Church can only afford to pay the number of people
it can afford to pay (a bishop speaking on the Sunday program when asked whether
there would be job cuts in the Church) (Quantity)
2. Metaphor:
Money does not grow on trees but it blossoms at out branches (Lloyds
advertisement) (Quality)
3. Overstatement:
Now, weve ALL been screwed by the Cabinet (Sun headline) (Quality).
Course 4. Presupposition
After conversational implicature which is a special kind of pragmatic
inference, we turn now to the study of another kind of pragmatic inference, namely
presupposition, that seems to be based more closely on the actual linguistic
structure of sentences. Presupposition is, or rather used to be, an extremely
fashionable and all encompassing concept. Although there is fairly general
agreement about when a given sentence carries a presupposition (e.g. that sentence
(1) presupposes sentence (2) below), there are widely differing views about how
exactly one should define presuppositions and what are the consequences of
presupposition failure (i.e. what happens if one asserts (1) and (2) is false:
1. Chomsky has written Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
2. Chomsky exists.
Historical background. Once again, concern with this topic in pragmatics
originates with debates in philosophy, specifically debates about the nature of
reference and referring expressions. The first philosopher, in recent times, who
dealt with such problems was Frege, the architect of modern logic. When he
discussed singular referring expressions (proper names and definite descriptions)
he said: If anything is asserted there is always an obvious presupposition that the
simple or compound proper names used have a reference. If one asserts Kepler
died in misery, there is a presupposition that the name Kepler designates
something. Moreover, Frege put forth the idea that the presuppositions of a
sentence are not contained in the sense of the sentence and that the presuppositions
of a sentence and its negation are the same: But it does not follow that the sense of
the sentence Kepler died in misery contains the thought that the name Kepler
designates something. If this were the case, the negation would have to run not
Kepler did not die in misery but Kepler did not die in misery or the name Kepler
has no reference. That the name Kepler designates something is just as much a
presupposition for the assertion Kepler died in misery as for the contrary
assertion. Moreover, Frege shows, whoever does not admit that the name has a
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reference can neither apply nor withhold the predicate. It seems to follow from this
that when a singular term in an assertion fails to refer, nothing true or false can
have been asserted.
The pragmatic view on presupposition. From the rather numerous definitions
of pragmatic presupposition that have been proposed, we have selected two which
seem to express the prevailing opinions.
Stalnaker (1974), who devoted a series of stimulating papers to the concept
of pragmatic presupposition, proposes the following definition:
(13) A speaker pragmatically presupposes that p by uttering an expression e
in a certain context just in case:
(i) the speaker assumes or believes that p
(ii) the speaker assumes or believes that in a given context his
addressee assumes or believes that p.
Thus, the primitive notion of pragmatic presupposition is that of a speaker
presupposing something about the addressee or/and the context, not that of a
sentence having a certain presupposition. Presupposing that p as an act contrasts
with saying or implicating that p. Huntley (1976) analyses saying and implicating
that p as instances of giving it to be understood that p, while presupposing is a
case of taking it to be understood that p.
For example, the president of a republic might respond to a question about
the possibility of a pardon for a convicted criminal by saying (14):
(14) I dont think that people would stand for it.
The presidents intention is to give it to be understood by implication that he
would not pardon the criminal or at least that a pardon was not likely.
Compare (14) with the sentences below: (15a) presupposes (15b):
(15) a. John has stopped beating his wife
b. John has been beating his wife.
To presuppose something is not to attempt to communicate it or to give it to
be understood. A presupposition is something that the speaker is taking to be
understood. Presuppositions are believed or assumed to be true, they cannot be
false in a context. Some evidence that the belief/assumption that p, indicated in
(13i), is associated with the concept of taking it to be understood that p is
afforded by the fact that take to be understood cannot be modified by falsely:
(16) Nixon falsely gave/*took to be understood that he was not involved in
the cover up.
The second sort of definitions of pragmatic presuppositions (e.g. Lakoff
(1972), Karttunen (1973), among others) focuses on the fact that pragmatic
presuppositions represent shared, common ground information. They are
propositions that must be true in a context if a certain sentence is to be felicitously
used. Such a definition is (17):
(17) Sentence A pragmatically presupposes proposition B, iff it is felicitous
to utter A in order to increment a common ground C, only in case B is already
entailed by C.
Again, it appears that one cannot require the presupposition to be (strictly
speaking) entailed by the existing contexts, nor can we always claim that the
presupposition is shared by the addressee. Rather, S pretends that conditions (13iiii) are satisfied. However, this is satisfied only if, by dropping the requirement that
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pragmatic presuppositions should be entailed by the context, we maintain the

weaker requirement that they should be consistent with the context. The
requirement of consistency, proposed by Gazdar (1979) is further refined by Caton
(1981) in light of his concept of epistemic quantification (EQ). The EQ of a
proposition is the modification of it in such a way as to involve Ss state of
knowledge with respect to the proposition, i.e. whether he knows it, believes it or
thinks that it is true. There are variations of strength in the EQ of a proposition, so
that one can speak of strong, moderate and weak epistemic quantifiers:
A. strong EQs: I know / am certain that p
It is certain / undoubtedly true that p
flat statement [one cannot assert something unless one has
adequate evidence, i.e. one knows that it is true].
B. moderate EQs: I believe / think / reckon that p
It is likely / probable that p
The chances are that p.
C. weak EQs: Its possible that p; it may be that p; perhaps p etc.
Caton claims that presupposed propositions, which are taken to be understood,
must have strong or at least moderate EQ. To understand his claim, let us remember
that ordinary flat statements have strong EQ. Hence, it is paradoxical to asset (18):
(18) *I think Ive been to Grautchester, but I havent.
in which the strong EQ of the flat statement in the second conjunct is ruled out by Ss
having just advanced the opposite proposition with moderate EQ in the first conjunct.
There is an obvious reason why a language has such a principle: it is that
propositions that are strongly or moderately EQ-ed exclude other propositions.
This becomes a principle for the construction of coherent texts.
Therefore, we will be interested here only in those cases where the
presuppositional inference is conventionally associated with the meaning of certain
lexical items or syntactic constructions. Thus, while presuppositions are not part of
what the speaker means (in Gricean terms, i.e. says or implicates) it is part of the
meaning of certain syntactic forms or lexical items.
Linguists began to be interested in presuppositions in the late sixties;
McCawley (1968) is one of the first important papers that used the concept. Linguists
have contributed to the study of presuppositions in three ways: a). they have uncovered
a wide range of presuppositional phenomena, extending the area of presuppositions;
b). they have suggested a variety of tests that are indicative of a presuppositional
relations between propositions; c). they have studied the behaviour of presuppositions
in discourse, that is, what has come to be known as the projection problem for
presuppositions, and the phenomena of presupposition suspension and cancellation.
A. We assume that pragmatic presuppositions are induced either by some
lexical item or by some syntactic constructions which are said to be presupposition
carriers. In the examples below we start from the core of presuppositional cases
(existential and factive presuppositions) and move to more controversial cases.
1. Proper names, definite descriptions - presuppose existence of their referents
(and uniqueness); this is the oldest case, discussed by Frege:
(19) The King of Buganda / John washed his hands
There is a King of Buganda
John exists.
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2. Factive verbs. They presuppose the truth of their complement proposition.

From the present perspective, what is more interesting is that there are degrees of
factivity. One may distinguish fully factive verbs (e.g. regret, resent, desire, be
tragic, be odd) and semi-factive verbs (e.g. realize, discover). Semi-factives lose
factivity in certain enviromnents, for instance, if-clauses. Thus, regret is factive
(sentence c), realize is semi-factive:
20. a. Bill resents / does not resent (it) that people are always comparing him
with his brother.
People are always comparing Bill with his brother.
b. John realized / *claimed that the earth is flat. (claim is not factive)
The earth is round.
c. If I later regret that I did not tell the truth, Ill apologize
I did not tell the truth
d. If I later realize that I did not tell the truth, Ill apologize
I did not tell the truth.
2. Syntactic constructions. We present one syntactic construction that has
proved to be presuppositional:
Temporal clauses (first discussed by Frege (1892)):
1. Before Strawson was even born, Frege noticed / did not notice
presuppositions.
Strawson was born.
2. As John was getting up, he slipped
John was getting up.
Therefore, temporal clauses introduced by when, after, as, before, during etc.
presuppose the truth of the time clause.
EXERCISES and COMMENTS:
N.B. (the comments are included between brackets and are typed in bald
characters).
- Presupposition is concerned with the existing knowledge that the speaker
presupposes in the addressee and therefore does not need to assert. This
presupposed knowledge is then taken, together with the entailed meaning of the
utterance and the addressee's knowledge of the world.
- Presupposition as shared assumptions. When someone says something to
us, we make all sorts of assumptions about the background of the utterance which
we presume to be mutually known before the utterance occurred. If someone says:
1. Tell George Im at lunch
there would be no point in saying this unless the speaker expected George to turn
up in the near future and assumed the hearer knew who George was and was
willing to pass the message on. Unless these conditions are met, there is something
wrong with saying sentence (1). We can assume that these conditions on saying (1)
are presupposed. We shall call this sort of background assumption a pragmatic
presupposition, because it is clearly non-linguistic in nature.
- What is pragmatically presupposed in each of the following?
2. Could I have a twenty pence coin in the change, please? (the speaker has
paid for something; the addressee is going to give change amounting to more
than 20 pence; the addressee will be sympathetic to the request and has a
variety of coins available)
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3. Thank you for not smoking (notice posted on a door) (some people will
want to smoke; the person who wrote the notice does not want these people to
smoke; these people will be sympathetic to the request).
- Shared assumptions: definite descriptions, iteratives, questions There is a
further presupposition which is not related to the context of utterance: namely, there
is such a person as George. In fact, whenever a proper name like George or a
definite description is used, the existence of some referent that matches the description
is presupposed. For the moment, let us call this kind of presupposition a conventional
presupposition (= associated with words and syntactic structures). For example:
4. My book
although indeterminate with respect to whether the speaker is referring to a book he
owns or is the author of, my book presupposes the existence of a book in any
context in which the description is used.
- Other structures that give rise to presuppositions include iteratives:
5. Hes made another of his monumental blunders
which presupposes that the person referred to had made monumental blunders
before. To the same extent, questions such as:
6. Who gave Paul two chocolate eggs?
presupposes that someone gave Paul two chocolate egg.
- Identify the (conventional) presuppositions in the following lines taken
from Shakespeares plays:
7. In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband (Alls Well That
Ends Well) (my son existed definite description; the speaker had a husband
before second is iterative)
8. Come here my varlet, Ill unarm again (Troilus and Cressida) (my varlet
exists definite description; the speaker has unarmed before again is iterative)
9. When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightening or in rain?
(Macbeth) (the three referred to had met before again is iterative; they will
meet again question introduced by when).
10. Who keeps the gate here? Ho! (Henry IV) (someone keeps the gate
question introduced by who; the gate exists definite description).
11. I wonder how the king escaped our hands (Henry VI) (the king exists
definite description; the king escaped our hands embedded question
introduced by how).
12. If music be the food of love, play on (Twelfth Night) (the food of love
exists definite description; the musicians were playing before play on is a
continuing state description closely related to iteratives).
- Other phenomena that have been claimed to give rise to (conventional)
presuppositions include change of state predicates (begin, continue, stop). For
example:
13. I began jogging after a visit to the doctor
presupposes that.(I did not jog before)
14. I continued jogging after my son became a faster runner than me
presuppose that.(I was jogging before my son became a faster runner than me)
15. I stopped jogging after a visit to the doctor
presupposes that.(I used to jog before the visit to the doctor)
- Cleft constructions give rise to presuppositions:
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16. It was the Scots that invented whisky

presupposes that.(someone invented whisky)
- Unlike real conditional, counterfactual conditionals presuppose that
propositions mentioned in the if-clause did not occur:
17. If you had sent me a Christmas card last year, I would have sent you one
this year
presupposes that.(you did not send me a Christmas card last year)
- Factive predicates (is odd, is significant, is exciting, is tragic, regret, be
aware) presuppose the truth of their embedded clauses:
17. His friends regret that Pat wants to talk to Stephan
18. Pats wanting to talk to Stephan is significant
19. That Pat wants to talk to Stephan is odd
Make up sentences of your own that presuppose that Pat wanted to talk to
Stephan (use the following factive predicates: is exciting, be aware, matters) (its
exciting that/that Pat wanted to talk to S, His friends were not aware that
Pat., Pats wanting to talk to S matters to me)
Course 5. Speech Acts
The first full-fledged account of Speech Acts Theory is due to Austin who
developed it in his book entitled How to Do Things with Words (1962).
Austins pioneering work must be judged against the background of his epoch: a
time when semanticists systematically ignored the social and pragmatic dimension
of language. Starting with Wittgenstein (who said that language is use), we
witness a reaction within analytical philosophy aimed at criticising the descriptive
fallacy and the undue privilege granted to the descriptive function of language.
Austin stresses the institutional dimension of language, the fact that discourse
activity is human action seen as institutional behaviour.
1. The special theory - Constatative vs. Performative Utterances.
1.0. Austins first important contribution is his distinction between constatative
utterances (1) and performative utterances (2):
(1) a. The cat is on the mat
b. Its raining
(2) a. I do (cf. take this woman to be my lawful wife, as uttered in the course
of a marriage ceremony).
b. I name this ship Queen Elizabeth (as uttered when smashing
the bottle against the stern)
c. I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow
Examples (1) are constatative utterances. To utter a constatative sentence is to
describe a certain pre-existent state of affairs; the utterer intends to give information
on a given state of the world. The description may or may not agree with the facts.
Thus, constatative utterances are naturally evaluated as true or false. Examples (2)
are performative utterances. To utter a performative (= PF) sentence is not to convey
information, to state something or to describe a pre-existing state of affairs. To utter a
performative sentence is to do something, to do things with words. Thus, when one
says I do in (2a), one is doing something, namely marring, rather than reporting
something, namely that he is marring. The uttering of a PF sentence constitutes, or is
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part of, the doing of a action (marring, christening etc.). Since PF sentences are not
used to say or state something, they are not true or false.
1.1. To successfully perform the act specified by the PF sentence the context
should satisfy certain conditions - the so-called felicity (happiness) conditions of
the speech act. Austin gives a detailed presentation of these conditions which he
established by checking what can go wrong with a PF utterance, i.e. in what way it
can be infelicitous.
Felicity conditions: a) there must exist an accepted conventional procedure,
having a certain conventional effect, a procedure which includes the uttering of
certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances. If one of these
conditions is violated, the act is misinvoked. For instance, in the course of time
certain practices may be changed or abandoned, e.g. the code of honour involving
duelling. Thus, a challenge may be issued by saying: My seconds will call on you
and the interlocutor may simply shrug it off. This was a case of misinvocation. This
gereral position is exploited in the unhappy story of Don Quixote; b) The
procedure must be executed by all participants both completely and correctly. If
one of these conditions is violated, the act is misexecuted. For instance, a mans
attempt to marry is abortive if the woman says I will not. In cases (2a) and (2b), if
conditions b) are not met, the purported act is void; c) if the procedure is designed
for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, then a person participating
in the procedure must have those thoughts or feelings. If this condition fails to
obtain the act is not void, but it is infelicitous, mostly because it is insincere. Here
are a few examples of insincere acts:
(3) I congratulate you (said when I am not pleased)
I promose (said when I do not intend to do what I promise)
I bet (said when I do not intend to pay).
2.1. A PF sentence may show with greater or less precision what act is
accomplished in uttering it. From this point of view, Austin distinguishes between
primary PFs and explicit PFs:
(4) a. Go there!
(5) a. I order you to go there
b. Did he come?
b. I ask you whether he came
c. I shall be there
c. I promose that I'll be there
In examples (5) there is a PF verb which makes explicit what act is being
performed, what is the force of the utterance. Sentences with PF verbs in the
first person of the indicative present, having the form 'I VPF that', 'I VPF to'
or 'I VPF' are all called explicit PF sentences. They are to be contrasted with
primary PFs, illustrated in (4). By virtue of their syntactic form, primary PFs
show that some act is being performed in uttering them, but they do not indicate
which act it is.
2.2. In addition to PF verbs, there is a wide range of linguistic means that can
be used to make (more) precise the force of the utterance, i.e. how it is to be taken
or what it counts as. Austin lists the following:
(6) moods:
a. Shut it, now!
I order you to shut it
b. Very well, then shut it!
I consent to your shutting it
c. Shut it, if you like!
I permit you to shut it.
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(7) modal verbs:

a. You must go there at once!
I order you to go there
b. You may leave now!
I allow you to leave now
(8) intonation, cadence, emphasis:
a. It's going to change!
(a warning)
b. It's going to change?
(a question)
(9) the circumstances of the utterance:
a. Coming from him, I took it as an order.
2.3. This enumeration of force indicators already shows that the precise force
of a PF utterance can be satisfied only in the context of utterance. The force of an
utterance, what it counts as, is an aspect of its meaning which is not fully
determined by the sense of the sentence.
2.4. On the explicit performative sentences [EPFS]. EPFSs have the property
of realizing the acts that they denote, that is they verify the schema:
(10) The speaker says: I (hereby) V" The S Vs.
Thus, sentences (11), which verify the schema, are PFs, while (12) are not. In
(11) we have also indicated the three characteristic syntactic patterns of EPFs (I V
that, I V to, I V).
(11) a. I promise that I will be there
b. I order you to be there
c. I appoint you president.
(12) a. I believe that I will be there
b. I know that I will be there
An interesting question raised by Austin was whether the EPFSs of a
language constitute a syntactically delimited class. i.e. whether there are syntactic
features that characterize all and only EPF utterances.
2.4.1. EPF utterances are typically voiced in the first person of the simple
present tense, in the active voice (examples (11)). Yet also characteristic is the use
of a passive sentence with second person subjects (sometimes this is the only
acceptable construction, e.g. (13b)):
(13) a. You are hereby requested to leave the city at once
b. You are fired (?? I fire you)
Hence, it is customary to add adverbials like hereby, here and now etc. as
unambiguous markers of performativity. Such adverbs are normally used only in
formal style.
It is often (not always) requested that EPFSs do not employ the continuous
present which is descriptive, while the simple form is or may be performative:
(14) a. I promise to come
He is promising to come
(performative)
(constatative, description of what he is doing)
b. I refuse to go
He is shaking his head, he is refusing to go.
2.4.2. Austin notices an important asymmetry in the use of the PF verbs: used
in the first person of the simple present these verbs are (or may be ) performative;
used in other persons or tenses they are descriptive: 'I betted' and 'he bets' are not PF,
but describe actions on my and his part, respectively. However, this is not always
true: there are certain propositional attitude verbs such as believe, think, imagine,
suppose that are ambiguous between a descriptive reading (as in I believe God is
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love) and a weak reading which chiefly occurs in the first person and in which the
main assertion is made in the complement clause (as in I believe he's over thirty).
3.0. Criticism of the Performative / Constatative Distinction. We have seen
that in the widest acceptation we call PF any utterance which is not a true or false
description of reality, but which in-forms the world, instantiating the reality of the
accomplished act (ordering, appointing, naming, asking etc. as in I order you to go
away, Go away, Is he back?). A PF utterance constitutes a new state of affairs,
while a constatative utterance merely attempts to correspond to the world.
PF utterances are felicitous or infelicitous, constatative utterances are true or false.
3.1. However, on closer scrutiny, Austin finds that the distinction is not really
hard and fast.
3.1.1. To begin with, constatative utterances may be liable to certain
infelicities very similar to those that affect PFs. For instance, constatative
utterances may be insincere. Suppose one says 'The cat is on the mat' when it is not
the case that one believes that the cat is on the mat. Clearly it is a case of
insincerity. The unhappiness here, though affecting a statement, is exactly the same
as the unhappiness infecting 'I promise.', when I do not intend to keep my word.
Consider now the constatative 'John's children are bald' uttered when John has no
children. The statement is not true or false, but void.
3.1.2. Let us turn to PFs now: connected with the PF 'I warn you that the bull
is about to charge' is the fact that the bull is about to charge. If the bull is not about
to charge, then the PF utterance 'I warn you that the bull is about to charge' is open
to criticism. This is not because it is unhappy (void or insincere) but because it was
a false warning. Therefore, considerations of the type of truth or falsity may infect
performatives.
3.1.3. Austin's decisive argument against the constatative / performative
opposition is the following: to detect the performativity of pragmatically ambiguous
sentences, Austin used the EPF paraphrase. (15b) is certainly a paraphrase of (15a):
(15) a. The earth is round
b. I state that the earth is round
Thus, (15a) which describes a state of affairs is paraphrasable by (15b) which
performs the act of stating something. If (15a) is pragmatically equivalent to (15b),
Austin concludes that every utterance instantiates a new reality, namely the
pragmatic reality of the accomplished speech act. Hence, Austin concludes that all
utterances are performative, in the sense that in uttering a sentence the speaker
performs an illocutionary act - ordering, stating, promising, baptizing etc.
Constatatives are primary performatives having the illocutionary force (= IF)
of statements.
4. The General Theory. Consequently, Austin proposes that communication
involves the performance of utterance acts or speech acts. Any utterance act or SA
is a complex act including the following:
1) a locutionary act (=LA) - this is an act of saying something to an audience,
an act of uttering a sentence with meaning (sense and reference).
2) an illocutionary act (=IA) - this is an act of doing something, it is what the
utterance counts as.
3) a perlocutionary act (=PA) - the speakers utterance affects the audience
in a certain way, it has a certain intended or unintended effect on the hearer.
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These acts are intimately related. In uttering some sentence the speaker S says
something to a hearer H; in saying something to H, S does something, and by doing
something S affects H. Austin mostly focuses on IAs and has but little to say about
the LAs and PAs. The locutionary act should be kept distinct from the illocutionary
act. This is proved by the fact that a sentence may have a perfectly clear meaning
(sense and reference) without being clear at the illocutionary force level.
For example:
Speaker A: What do you mean by saying that you are driving to London
tomorrow?
Speaker B: Well, I was offering to take you allong.
5. Austin on Illocutionary Acts. In uttering a sentence, S performs a certain
type of institutional act defined by a certain relation established between S and H
by means of the utterance. To perform an illocutionary act (IA) is to produce an
utterance with a certain illocutionary force (IF), where IF is defined as a complex
communicative intention or communicative goal. The IA is happily performed only
if a certain effect on the hearer is obtained. Generally, the effect amounts to
bringing about the understanding of the meaning (sense and reference) and of the
IF of the locution. So, the performance of an IA involves the securing of the
uptake" (i.e. understanding, comprehension). As first noticed by Strawson (1964)
there is a strong similarity between Austin's notion of uptake and Grice's notion of
speaker meaning. Understanding the IF is knowing what a speaker meant by his
utterance. When one intends to make a statement or make a promise, one wants to
obtain a certain effect on the audience by virtue of the audience's recognition of
one's intention to get that effect. Part of S's intention is that H should identify the
very act S intends to perform and successful communication requires fulfillment of
that intention. In particular, since the H's primary but not exclusive basis for
identifying the IF is what S says, the theory will have to spell out the connection
between the LA and the IA; thus, H can reasonably be expected to identify the IA.
Bach-Harnisch (1979) suggest that in deriving the IF of utterances, H tacitly relies
on the following Communicative Presumption (= CP):
Communicative Presumption: This is the mutual belief that whenever a
member S says something in language L to another member H, he is doing so with
some recognizable intention.
In interpreting the notion of uptake, it will be useful to make a distinction
between communicative IAs (stating, requesting, asking, promising etc.) which
involve intentions of S and conventional IAs (acts like voting, resigning, marring,
baptizing, arresting, acquitting etc.) which involve extralinguistic conventions. In
the case of conventional acts the utterance is embodied in some ceremonial act
constituting part of it:
(16) a. I baptize you in the name of the Holy Father, of the Son
and the Holy Spirit.
b. I sware to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
c. I pass (while playing bridge).
Acts like those in (16) are conventional. They exist only with respect to an
extralinguistic institution and their performance is governed by the conventions of
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that institution. Communicative IAs are successful if uptake is secured through the
mechanisms of intentions. Communicative IAs are acts expressing attitudes. To
express an attitude is S's intention for his utterance to be taken as reason to think
that he has a certain attitude (belief, desire, etc.). Thus, communicative IAs are
transactions which introduce new interaction conditions among S and H (e.g. H's
obligation to fulfill a command, S's commitment to fulfill a promise) while
conventional acts bring about institutional changes. To give Austin's example if I
name the ship Queen Elizabeth, this has the effect of naming or christening the
ship; then certain subsequent acts such as referring to it as Generalissimo Stalin
will be out of order.
EXERCISES and COMMENTS:
SPEECH ACTS: LANGUAGE AS ACTION

N.B. (the comments are included between brackets and are typed in bald
characters).
This chapter of pragmatics explores the property that utterances have of
counting as actions (such as the action of reassuring, warning or apologizing).
There are times when actions are preferred to words, such as when flagging down
a taxi; or times when either action or language (or both) may be used, such as when
greeting someone in the street; or times when both language and actions required, as in
the complicated ritual of introducing people to one another. These examples show that
there is no clear-cut boundary between using language to count as actions.
Knowing the literal meaning of the sentences is not enough to determine
what they count as doing when they are used.
Although the following utterances all express the same proposition, they are each
used to perform a range of different acts. Try to list some of the situations in which
each might be used and decide what speech act would be effected in each case:
Sorry (you invite the speaker to repeat his utterance)
Im sorry (you dare the speaker to do this)
I am sorry (apology)
It is important to notice that three different aspects of meaning can be
distinguished in the utterance (Austin 1962, How To Do Things With Words):
Its me again
a) it conveys the proposition that the speaker has returned to a place he/she
was in on a previous occasion the locutionary act (i.e. uttering a sentence with
determinate sense, non-ambiguous meaning and reference)
b) it has the force of, or counts as, an apology the illocutionary act (i.e.
performing an act by uttering a sentence).
c) the utterance will have effects or consequences that are not entirely
foreseeable the perlocutionary act (i.e. the effect the utterance might have). For
example, the speaker wants to appease, soften the addressee or, on the contrary, to
make him/her angry.
Austin drew attention to the performative or action-accomplishing use of
certain language formulas. A good example would be:
Pass
as uttered by contestants in a television contest. In this context, Pass is clearly a
shorthand for the explicitly performative:
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I (hereby) pass
Uttering Pass count as allowing himself the right not to answer a question; it
is not a statement (true or false) about the world. Moreover, it is only felicitous
under narrowly defined circumstances, such as when taking part in a television
contest or in a game of bridge. (Try walking down the street nodding at people and
saying Pass, and it will be only a matter of time before someone sends for a van
and get taken away).
I hereby pronounce you man and wife
counts as an action it is explicitly performative; vs.
I sneeze
which is not.
Yet, as Austin points out, utterances do not need to contain an explicitly
performative verb to be performative. Take the case of promising. It would be
distinctly odd for us to say to a friend:
I hereby promise to pick you up at 8 oclock
Even:
I promise to pick you up at 8
would only be natural if ..(we failed to meet such an agreement on a previous
occasion).
It would be much more natural to say:
Ill pick you up at 8
Or:
Ill pick you up at 8, honestly (intensifying the Quality/sincerity maxim), or
Would you like me to pick you up at 8?
All these sentences count as a promise and commit us to the promised action.
Thus, we see that non-explicit, even very implicit, ways of using language
performatively are the norm.
At this stage we need to be clear about some basic distinctions:
1. It is important to distinguish:
from:
sentences that describe states of the world
doing things with words
Thus:
Its me again
could be thought of
as describing a state of affairs in the world
or as an apology
2. It is important to distinguish:
from:
the truth or falsity of sentences
the felicity of sentences
Thus, when President Kennedy said:
Ich bin (ein) Berliner
it may not have been literally true
but it was felicitous
3. It is important to distinguish:
from:
truth as a source of meaning
performative effect as a source of meaning
Thus, the meaning of:
This is a no smoking zone
when addressed to someone smoking in a prohibited area, is
a true description of the area referred to
or is understood in terms of the
effect it has on the addressee.
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4. It is important to distinguish:
the locutionary act

from:
the illocutionary act and the
perlocutionary act.

Thus, saying
Im going on holiday next week
conveys the proposition that.
and, when the addressee is the
(the speaker will be on holiday next week) milk-man, it.(instructs him
to suspend milk deliveries)
Bibliography
1. Levinson Stephen (1983), Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press.
2. Grundy Peter (1995), Doing Pragmatics, Edward Arnold, A member of the
Hodder Headline Group.
3. Thomas Jenny (1995), Meaning in Interaction (An Introduction to Pragmatics),
Longman Group Limited.

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