Professional Documents
Culture Documents
CHAPTER 1
PRAGMATICS AND OTHER AREAS OF LINGUISTIC INQUIRY
1.1 Introduction 8
1.2 Syntax – semantics – pragmatics 9
1.3 The American vs. the Continental approach to pragmatics 11
CHAPTER 2
DEIXIS
2.1 Introduction 14
2.2 Deictic expressions in semantic theory 15
2.3 Types of deixis 18
2.3. 1 Person deixis 19
2.3.2 Time deixis 21
2.3.3 Spatial deixis 23
2.3.4 Discourse deixis 24
2.3.5 Social deixis 24
2.4 The deictic centre 26
2.5 Deictic usages 27
2.6 Non-deictic usages 28
2.7 Conclusions 29
CHAPTER 3
PRESUPPOSITION
3.1 Introduction 30
3.2 Theories of presupposition 31
3.2.1 The Frege-Strawson tradition 31
5
3.2.2 Pragmatic presupposition 33
3.3 Types of semantic presupposition 34
3.4 Presupposition triggers 37
3.5 Projection 39
3.6 Cancellability 42
3.7 Current issues in presupposition theory 45
3.7.1 Local contexts 45
3.7.2 Presupposition and anaphora 49
3.7.3 Accommodation 51
3.7.4 Presupposition failure 54
3.8 Conclusions 56
CHAPTER 4
IMPLICATURE
4.1 Introduction 57
4.2 Natural vs. non-natural meaning 58
4.3 The Cooperative Principle and the maxims of conversation 60
4.4 Generalized vs. particularized conversational implicatures 62
4.5 Properties of conversational implicatures 65
4.6 Scalar implicatures 68
4.7 Conventional implicatures 73
4.8 Relevance 77
4.8.1 Ostensive-inferential communication 78
4.8 2.The concept of relevance 79
4.8 3 Implicatures and explicatures 81
4.9 Conclusions 83
CHAPTER 5
THE THEORY OF SPEECH ACTS
5.1 Introduction 84
5.2 Austin’s theory of speech acts 85
5.2.1 Locutions, illocutions, and perlocutions 85
6
5.2.2 Felicity conditions 88
5.2.3 The performative formula 89
5.2.4 Austin’s revised approach to
the constantive vs. performative distinction 91
5.3 The influence of Grice 93
5.3.1 Strawson’s objection to Austin 93
5.3 2.Searle’s defense of Austin 94
5.4 Indirect speech acts 98
5.4.1 Indirect speech acts and politeness 100
5.4.2 Indirect speech acts and sentence type 101
5. 5 Conclusions 102
CHAPTER 6
CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
7
CHAPTER 1
PRAGMATICS AND OTHER AREAS OF
LINGUISTIC INQUIRY
1.1 Introduction
If you want to know what a particular human activity is all about, you may
ask questions like: ‘What are the rules of tennis?’ or ‘What is cricket like?
And then you will get to the point where you want to figure out what these
sports enthusiasts are actually doing when playing out there in the field.
Similarly, if you want to know what a particular religion is all about, you are
of course entitled to ask what its beliefs are; but you will be more interested
in, and enlightened by the practices that are said to be characteristic of such a
religion. A similar line of reasoning could be applied to a religion, a system
of beliefs or any human endeavour.
Any pragmatician who is asked what pragmatics is all about will
answer that it is a science that has to do with language and its users. But in
order to have an understanding of what pragmatics really stands for, one
must try and find out how the game is played, what pragmaticians do for a
living and what makes them different the people working in other related
branches of language studies such as syntax or semantics. So the relevant
question that arises is ‘What could be called a typical pragmatic perspective
on matters of language?’
To get an idea of how pragmatics works consider the example in (1)
taken form 21 August, 1992 issue of The Chicago cultural weekly Reader.
This particular issue of the magazine included an advertisement for a
downtown cocktail lounge ‘Sweet Alice’. The ad carried the text given in
(1):
(1) I brought some sushi home and cooked it, and it wasn’t bad at all.
What can be made of the example in (1)? If we take a look at the syntax of
the sentence, the sentence is well-formed. However, there is something
funny about the sentence. It is obvious that the sentence is intended as a joke
since everybody knows that sushi is eaten raw, and that you are not supposed
to cook it. Cooking sushi may strike someone as funny or stupid or
outrageous, depending on one’s point of view. In an informal way, the
8
sentence above makes no sense. And a linguist familiar with other bizarre
sentences might argue that since everybody knows that sushi is defined as
being eaten raw, a sentence such as the above is wrong in the same way as
are sentences of the type ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ which
made a certain American linguist famous in the early sixties. The linguist
might go on to argue that the sentence is semantically wrong; it does not
make sense because the semantics of one its parts (the sushi) clashes with the
semantics of another part (the cooking).
But, then, why should such a silly sentence be used in advertisement
for a cocktail bar? This is where pragmatics sheds new light. Pragmatics tells
us it is alright to use language in surprising unconventional ways, as long as
we know, as language users, what we’re doing. As language users we can let
ourselves be semantically shocked if there is a reason for it, or if it serves a
purpose.
In this particular case, the shocking semantics is a reflection of a
euphoric effect. It can be interpreted as invoking the silly state of mind that
becomes our privilege after a couple of drinks. This is precisely the reason
why the ad felicitously achieves its illocutionary force (i.e. it is effective as
an invitation to join the crowd at Sweet Alice’s) and has appropriate
perlocutionary effects on the audience (transmitting a feeling of euphoria).
Thus, pragmatics is where action is. But what is the action that goes
with the above ad? Obviously the ad in (P) is an attempt to ‘sell’ something:
a cocktail bar, a particular ambiance, a particular clientele, a promise of good
times. The ad invites us in, so to speak. But it doesn’t do that by saying
‘Come into my parlour/or cocktail bar’, such an invitation would be too
blatant to be effective or to arise our interest. It talks to us in a voice that
appeals to us as individual language users with a particular history and
understanding of the world and living within a particular context. The
parlour or the cocktail bar is sketched as a desirable place and the invitation
is by innuendo only: a pragmatic act of inviting.
10
Pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning. In other words,
pragmatics involves the interpretation of what people mean in a particular
context and how the context influences what is said. It requires a
consideration of how speakers organize what they intend to say in
accordance with such aspects of the speech event as who they are talking to,
where, when and under what circumstances.
Pragmatics is the study of how more gets communicated than is said.
This branch of linguistic investigation also explores the way addressees draw
inferences about what is said in order to arrive at an interpretation of the
speaker’s intended meaning.
Pragmatics is the study of the expression of relative distance. The
choice between what is said and what remains unsaid may be tied to the
notion of distance, not necessarily distance in space, but also social distance.
Closeness whether it is physical, social or conceptual implies shared
experiences and a more or less similar world view. Taking into account how
close or distant the addressee is, speakers determine how much needs to be
said (Mey 1993).
13
CHAPTER 2
DEIXIS
2.1 Introduction
The term deixis comes from the Greek word for ‘pointing’. Its equivalent
philosophical term indexicality comes from the corresponding Latin word.
Deixis is the phenomenon whereby some linguistic expressions are
systematically dependent on the context for their interpretation. Consider the
utterance in (1):
(1) Put this book over there.
Establishing the identity of the referent, i.e. which book is being referred to,
and which place it is to be put, depends on features of the context outside the
utterance itself. In this particular case the features of the context are typically
gestures pointing to the referent of this and there.
A similar point could be argued about the personal pronoun in the
example in (2):
(2)
A: Who’s there?
B: It’s me.
The utterance ‘It’s me’ is always true but is totally uninformative when it
comes to establishing the speaker’s identity. The referent of the pronoun I
changes with the person uttering it. Everybody can say I and whoever says it
points to another object than everybody else. Just the same point could be
made about first- and second-person pronouns we and you, about
demonstratives and specific time and place adverbs like now, here or there,
to mention just a few. These lexical items are referred to as deictic
terms/indexical expressions or simply indexicals. They are a particular kind
of referential expressions where the reference is not just semantic but
includes a reference to a particular context in which the semantics is put at
work. In other words, one should always refer to the context if in order to
establish the proper reference of deictic words.
14
In this chapter the terms ‘deixis’ and ‘indexicality’ will be used co-
extensively, since they simply come from different traditions (Bühler 1934
and Peirce 1955) and have become associated with linguistic and
philosophical approaches respectively. However, a technical distinction will
be made: indexicality will be used to label the broader phenomena of
contextual dependency, and deixis the narrower linguistically-relevant
aspects of indexicality.
(3)
15
Situation semantics (Barwise and Perry 1983) provides us with
another version of the two-stage theory. Within the framework of situation
semantics utterances are interpreted with respect to three situations (or states
of affairs): the utterance situation (corresponding to Montague’s indices), the
‘resource situation’ (which handles other contextually determined reference
such as anaphora) and the ‘described situation’ (corresponding to the
propositional content). Indexicals get their variables fixed in the utterance
and/or resource situations. The value of the variables (e.g. the referent of I or
that) is then transferred to the described situation (e.g. “I gave him that
book” has the described content, say, ‘Bill gave him that book’). Meaning is
relational, and the meaning of an indexical is characterized as the relation
between utterance/resource situations and described situations.
The central tenet of two-stage theories is that indexicals do not
contribute directly to the proposition expressed, the content of what is said,
or the situation described. Instead, they is take us to an individual, a referent,
which is then slotted into the proposition expressed or the situation
described, or as Nunberg (1998:159) puts it: “The meanings of indexicals are
composite functions that take us from an element of the context to an
element of a contextually restricted domain, and then drop away”.
The literature lists several empirical properties of indexicals. Firstly,
Wettstein (1984), among others, argued that pure indexicals such as I, now,
here have their semantico-pragmatic content exhausted by a specification of
the relevant index (speaker, time and place of speaking respectively).
However, if one considers closely related indexicals such as we, today,
nearby, it becomes apparent that these deictic expressions convey additional
semantic conditions (“at least one person in addition to the speaker”, “the
diurnal span which contains the coding time”, “a place distinct from here but
close to here”, respectively). Thus, deictic expressions may exhibit both
descriptive properties and contextual variables. In addition, nearly all deictic
expressions heavily depend on pragmatic resolution (Levinson 2000:177ff).
Consider the example in (4):
The place deictic item may refer, say, to this sofa or to this city according to
context.
Secondly, Cresswell (1973:111ff) points out that the relevant
contextual features cannot be determined in advance. Consider the example
in (5):
In (7) the speaker doesn’t refer to the current bottle, but the type of container,
and asserts that tokens used to be of a different shape. Thus, in both (6) and
(7) the object the speaker is pointing to is not the object referred to.
Another empirical feature would be that third-person, non-deictic
expressions can have indexical uses, as when the speaker says, pointing to a
man in a black tuxedo, “He is President Linton’s nephew”.
Indexicals have projection properties which follow from the fact that
demonstratives and many other deictic expressions have no substantial
descriptive content, so that once the contextual parameters have been fixed
they are ‘directly referential’ (Kaplan 1990). A true demonstrative remains
transparent in an intensional context. Consider the utterance in (8):
In (8) the referent of that can only be identified as the object the speaker is
pointing at, at speaking time, and not the object John pointed at.
Deictic expressions cannot be assigned attributive meanings.
Compare the utterances in (9):
(9a) The man who can lift this sword is our king.
17
(9b) That man who can lift this sword is our king.
The utterance in (9a) has both referential and attributive reading (i.e.
“Whoever can lift this sword is our king”). By contrast, the utterance in (9b)
has only a referential reading.
Finally, deictic expressions do not generally fall under the scope of negation
or modal operators. The utterance in (10) cannot be understood as ‘I am not
indicating X and X is a planet’ (Enç 1981).
Pragmaticians (Mey 1993; Horn and Ward 2004) also mention the
case of reminder or recognitional deixis. Consider de examples in (12):
In the utterance in (12a) this girl is used to refer to ‘a certain young lady’
whose identity needs no further introduction because either her identity is of
no interest to the story, or because her identity has already been established
in some other way.
The grammatical category of person directly reflects the different roles that
individuals play in the speech event: speaker, addressee and audience. When
these roles shift in the course of conversational turn-taking the deictic centre
shifts with them (hence Jespersen’s 1922 term shifters for deictic
expressions): A’s I becomes B’s you, A’s here becomes B’s there and so
forth.
Person deixis concerns the encoding of the role of participants in the
speech event in which the utterance is delivered. The category first person is
the grammaticalization of the speaker’s reference to himself, the second
person is the encoding of the speaker’s reference to one or more addresses1,
the third person is the grammaticalization of the speaker’s reference to
persons and entities that are neither speakers nor addresses of the utterance in
question2. The traditional paradigm of first, second and third persons can be
captured by the two semantic features of speaker inclusion [S] and addressee
inclusion [A]: first person [+S], second person [+A, -S], and third person [-
S,-A], which is therefore a residual, non-deictic category. Most languages
directly encode these participant-roles in pronouns and/or verb agreement, as
well as vocative. The majority explicitly mark third person [-S, -A].
Although the traditional notions 1st, 2nd and 3rd persons hold up
remarkably well, there are many kinds of homophony, or different patterns
of syncretism, across person paradigms (Cysouw 2001). Much of this
complexity is due to how the notion of ‘plurality’ is conceptualized within
the paradigm: first-person plural clearly does not entail more than one person
in [+S] role. ‘We’ notions are especially troubling, since many languages
distinguish such groups as: [+S+A] vs. [+S+A+O] (where O is Other, i.e. one
1
There are also exceptions to the alleged universality of 1st and 2nd person marking. For
instance, in some S. E. Asian languages like Thai there are titles (on the pattern of ‘servant’
for 1st person, ‘master’ for 2nd person) used in place of pronouns and there is no verb
agreement (Cooke 1968).
2
Some languages have no third person pronouns, although they often indirectly mark third-
person by zero agreement markers. Yélî Dnye, a Papuan, i.e., non-Austronesian language, is
a case in point.
19
or more persons that are neither speakers nor addresses), vs. [+S-A], vs. +S-
A+O. In some pronominal systems ‘plural’ can be neatly analyzed as
augmenting a minimal deictic specification with ‘plus one or more additional
individuals’ (AUG). Thus the distinction between I and We might be
analyzed as (+S,-Aug), (+S,+AUG). In some contexts, the English personal
pronoun we may be ambiguous between an inclusive (i.e. including the
addressee) or an exclusive (i.e. excluding the addressee) interpretation.
Most languages evince a number of intriguing details that show that
the roles of speaker and addressee roles can be motivated by such
grammatical detail (Levinson 1983; Goffman 1981). Consider the utterance
in (13):
The utterance in (13) is appropriately said to a person who will then run
along and tell Bill “Get ready now!”3. In such a scenario, the speaker is
analytically dividing the notion of an ‘addressee’ into two distinct sub-roles:
a person actually spoken to by the speaker, and an illocutionary target of the
utterance, who, as with any imperative, is expected to perform the action. In
a similar way, some languages have specific ways of indicating that the
speaker is merely the mouthpiece for someone else, thus distinguishing the
actual speaking role from the illocutionary source of the message. Compare
the utterances in (14):
The imperative form in (14a) indicates that the speaker is not the originator
of the message, but rather the speaker conveys the message on someone
else’s behalf.
Another important phenomenon related to person is the whole field of
honorifics, which typically make reference to speaking and recipient roles,
but which will be dealt with under social deixis. Last but not least, in some
contexts third-person pronouns are distal forms in terms of person deixis;
using a third-person pronoun where a second-person one could be possible is
a way of communicating distance, not necessarily spatial, but emotional and
social distance.
3
Some languages have a category of 3rd person imperative covering such a scenario.
20
2.3.2 Time deixis
Within the deictic centre the central time, i.e. the temporal ‘ground zero’, is
the moment at which the utterance is issued or the ‘coding time’ in
Fillmore’s (1997) terminology. Time deixis concerns the encoding of
temporal points or spans relative to the time at which an utterance was
spoken, that is relative to coding time. Time deixis is grammaticalized in the
system of tenses deictic adverbs of time, such as now, yesterday, this week,
last year, etc.
Thus, now means some span of time including the moment the
utterance is delivered, today refers to that diurnal span in which the speaking
event takes place. Similarly we count backwards from coding time in
calendrical units in such expressions as yesterday, three weeks ago, or last
years or forwards in tomorrow, or next Friday. These deictic expressions of
time depend for their interpretation on knowing the coding time. In written
or recorded uses of language, a distinction is made between coding time and
receiving time4.
If we don’t know the coding time of a note on an office door such as
the one given in (15) we won’t know if we have a short or a long wait ahead:
The deictic expression this week may refer to a span of seven days from
utterance time or to the calendar unit beginning on Sunday (or Monday)
including utterance time. Similarly, this year means the calendar year
including the time of utterance, but this May tends to mean the next monthly
unit so named (or alternatively, the May of this year, even if past), while this
4
In some languages there are often conventions about whether one writes ‘I am writing this
today so you will receive it tomorrow’ or something more like ‘I wrote this yesterday so that
you receive it today’.
21
morning refers to the first half of the diurnal unit including coding time, even
if that is in the afternoon (Fillmore 1975).
The most pervasive aspect of temporal deixis is the system of tenses.
The grammatical categories called tenses usually encode a mixture of deictic
time distinctions and aspectual distinctions. Linguists tend to set up a series
of pure tense grammatical distinctions that roughly correspond to the extra-
linguistic time distinctions, and then catalogue the discrepancies (cf. Comrie
1985:18ff). For example, one might gloss the English present tense as
specifying that the state or event holds or is occurring during a temporal span
including the coding-time; the past tense as specifying that the relevant span
held before coding-time; the future as specifying that the relevant span
succeeds coding-time; the preterite (as in He had gone) as specifying that the
event happened at a time before an event described in the past tense. It is
clear that there is a deictic temporal element in most of the grammatical
distinctions linguists call tenses, although the system of tenses captures only
partially the English usage (The soccer match is tomorrow; John will be
sleeping now; I wondered whether you were free now, etc.). Tenses are
traditionally categorized as ‘absolute’ (deictic) versus ‘relative’ (anterior or
posterior to a textually specified time), so that the simple English past (He
went) is absolute and the preterite (He had gone) is relative (anterior to some
other, admittedly deictically specified, point). Absolute tenses may mark two
(e.g. past vs. non-past) or they may mark up to nine distinct spans of time
counted out from coding-time (Comrie 1985).
The interpretation of tenses often involves Gricean implicatures5. The
example in (17a) implicates that that he no longer does so, although this is
clearly defeasible as shown in (17b):
5
See Levinson (2000: 95) for a relevant framework of analysis, and Comrie (1985) for the
role of implicature in the grammaticalization of tense.
22
2.3.3 Spatial deixis
However, not all cases when the ‘towards the deictic center’ feature
is lexicalized in verbs of coming are crystal-clear. Firstly, speakers may
project themselves into other locations prior to their actually being in those
locations, as shown in (19):
(19) I’ll come later – come signals movement towards the addressee’s
location
Secondly, there are cases when what they encode turns out to be quite
differentiated (Wilkins and Hill 1995, Wilkins, Hill and Levinson 1995). If
someone comes towards the speaker but stops short before he arrives at the
tree which is near the speaker, the speaker can say ‘He came to the tree’ in
English, but not Italian, where he would say the equivalent of ‘He went to
the tree’.
There is another aspect that is relevant to place deixis. Many analysts
have drawn attention to the ambiguity of the utterance in (20):
6
However, not all languages lexicalize the ‘towards the deictic center’ feature in their verbs.
23
The dog could be at that side of the television opposite from the screen, or it
could be on the other side of the TV from the speaker, whichever side the
speaker is on. The former interpretation is called the ‘intrinsic’ frame of
reference or perspective in the literature, and the latter mostly ‘deictic’.
(21a) I bet you haven’t heard this story – this story refers to a forthcoming
portion of discourse
(21b) That was the funniest story I’ve ever heard – where that refers to a
preceding portion of discourse.
(21c) “‘You are wrong’. That’s exactly what she said” – that refers to a
preceding portion of discourse.
(21d) “It sounded like this: whoosh” – this refers to a forthcoming portion of
discourse
Table 2.1 shows that the distinction between (1) and (2) is crucial. In (1)
‘honour’ (or a related attitude such as respect, deference) can only be
expressed by referring to the entity to be ‘honoured’, i.e. the referent. In (2),
on the other hand, the same deferential attitude may be expressed while
talking about unrelated matters. Thus, the relation in (2) encodes respect to
the addressee without referring to him. In this scheme, respectful pronouns
like Vous, Sie, dumneavoastră used to when addressing singular addressees
are referent honorifics, which happen to refer to the addressee. In S. E. Asian
languages the elaborate honorifics systems are built up from a mixture of (1)
and (2). Examples include humiliative forms replacing the first person
pronoun (on the principle that lowering the self raises the other) honorific
forms for referring to the addressee or third parties (both referent honorifics),
and suppletive forms for such verbs as eating or going, which give respect to
the addressee regardless of who is the subject of the verb (see Brown and
Levinson 1987, Errington 1988, Shibatani 1999)7.
The relation between speaker and bystander, given in (3), is encoded
in‘bystander honorifics’, used to convey respect to a non-addressed party
who is, nevertheless, present in the interaction. In some Australian languages
there are taboo vocabularies used in the presence of real or potential in-laws,
or those who fell in a marriagable section for ego but were too close to marry
7
See Errington (1988), Agha (1993) for a detailed account of the ten-level of Javanese
etiquette.
25
(Dixon 1980:58-65, Haviland 1979). The Papuan language Yélî Dnye, a
Papuan language, evinces a similar taboo vocabulary related to in-laws,
especially parents and siblings of the spouse. This involves a replacement
vocabulary for body-parts and items like clothing and baskets associated
with the taboo person, and special indirect ways of referring to such people
in their presence (Levinson 1983).
The relation the relation between speaker and setting, given in 4,
involves respect – or some other special attitude – conveyed to the setting or
event. The German system of address includes the following options Du vs.
Sie and First Name vs. Herr/Frau + Last Name which hold across formal or
informal contexts. By contrast, British English speakers generally switch
from First Name to Title + Last Name according to the formality of the
situation (see Brown and Gilman 1960, Lambert and Tucker 1976). Although
most languages are used differently in formal settings (e.g. eat is replaced by
dine, home becomes residence, etc), in some the distinction formal vs.
informal is firmly grammaticalized in the existence of high and low diglossic
variants, with distinct morphology for formal and literary uses. The relations
mentioned in (1), (2) and (3) concerns relative rank and respect.
The second type of socially deictic information is is not relational but
absolute and concerns the use of (a) the forms reserved for certain speakers,
i.e. authorized speakers (e. g. the British royal we, the Thai the morpheme
khrob as a polite particle that can only be used by male speakers, or the
Japanese Emperor’s special first-person pronoun) and (b) forms reserved for
authorized recipients (e.g. restrictions on most titles of address such as Your
Honour, Mr President).
Levinson (1979) argues that the social deictic contents of honorifics
should be considered to be conventional implicatures overlaid on the
referential content, since the deictic content is not deniable and does not fall
under the scope of logical operators.
However, deictic words may be used in ways that shift this deictic center to
other participants. This state of affair is referred to as deictic projection
(Lyons 1977) or shifts in point of view (Fillmore 1971). Contrast the
utterances in (22):
In (22b) the deictic centre is organized around the addressee, since the verb
come indicates movement towards the deictic centre and the speaker is
clearly outside London. Moreover in some languages distal terms can be
used to distinguish between ‘near to the addressee’ and ‘away from both the
speaker and the addressee’.
27
It should be pointed out that the property of indexicality is not
exhausted restricted to the use of inherently indexical expressions. Just about
any referring expression can be used deictically, as illustrated by the
examples in (24):
(24a) The funny noise is our old dishwashing machine – said pointing chin to
kitchen
(24b) What a great picture! – said looking at a picture
In non-deictic usages, the deictic terms are interpreted relative to the text and
not relative to the situation of utterance. Central to non-deictic usage is the
phenomenon of anaphora. An anaphoric usage is when some term picks out
as referent the same entity or class of objects that some prior term in the
discourse picked out. Consider the sentence in (26):
(27) I’ve been living in Vienna for 5 years and I love it there.
In the utterance in (28), this one refers picks out the same referent as a finger
does, which accounts for its anaphoric non-deictic usage. However, the
utterance should be simultaneously must be accompanied by a presentation
of the relevant finger, if it is to be felicitously used.
Another boundary problem is posed by contexts where indexical
expressions are not so clearly demarcated. Consider the example in (29):
In the example in (29) nearby is clearly used deictically, since it locates the
utterance close to the speaker’s location. However, in (30) nearby is used
non-deictically since it may be interpreted relative to some preceding portion
of the discourse text or it may presume some point of measurement in the
same way in which the adjective tall is relative to some implicit standard.
2.7 Conclusions
29
CHAPTER 3
PRESUPPOSITION
3.1 Introduction
When engaging in conversation speakers take a lot for granted. In other
words, they presuppose information. Presupposing information applies not
only to spoken discourse, but also to written discourse. As I wrote this, I
presupposed that readers would understand English. But I also presupposed,
as I wrote the previous sentence, repeated in (1), that there was a time when I
wrote it, for otherwise the clause as I wrote this would not have identified a
time interval.
(1) As we wrote this, I presupposed that readers would understand English.
Moreover, I presupposed that readers would be able to identify the reference
of the demonstrative this, i.e., the chapter itself. And I presupposed that there
would be at least two readers, for otherwise the bare plural readers would
have been inappropriate.
The presupposition that an interlocutor would understand English
corresponds to an assumption I made in using English words, but it has
nothing to do with the meanings of any of those words. On the other hand,
the existence of a time when I wrote the chapter is a requirement associated
with the use of a specific word, as. It is a requirement built into the meaning
of the temporal preposition as that in a phrase as X, the X has denote some
time. Thus, the lexical item as is said to be a presupposition trigger.
Similarly, the demonstrative this is a presupposition trigger requiring
something to refer to, the bare plural is a presupposition trigger requiring
existence of multiple individuals, and the modal auxiliary would is a
presupposition trigger requiring a salient future or hypothetical circumstance.
Following Stalnaker (1972; 1974), one can say that the
presupposition that the interlocutor speaks English or the presupposition that
the interlocutor is interested in what the speaker (or writer) has to say is
speaker presupposition or pragmatic presupposition. The presuppositions
associated with specific triggers are said to be conventional or semantic. This
terminological distinction is of theoretical import.
To call presuppositional expressions “conventional” or “semantic” is
not necessarily to imply that the presuppositions they trigger don’t depend on
the context in any way. As we shall in the following sections, the
30
interpretation of conventional presupposition triggers depends on the context
in significant ways. Some theorists regard it as an open question whether
there are any purely conventional presuppositions.
What makes presuppositions of special interest is their ubiquity in
both spoken and written discourse and their behavior that differs
significantly from other aspects of meaning.
31
(ii) A sentence and its negative counterpart share the same set of
presuppositions;
(iii) In order for a sentence or assertion to be true or false its
presupposition must be true or satisfied.
32
constancy under negation (Levinson 1983). Given a sentence, in order to
identify the presupposition(s), we simply negate it (i.e. negate the verb in a
simple sentence or the verb of the main clause in a complex sentence) and
see what inferences are shared by both the positive and the negative
sentence. Consider the sentence in (5).
(5) John managed to stop in time
The sentence in (5) has the following inferences:
(6) John stopped in time
(7) John tried to stop in time
From the sentence in (8), which is the negation of (5), one cannot infer (6)
since the main point of (8) is to deny (6).
(8) John didn’t manage to stop in time
On the basis of the constancy under negation test and the assumption of its
sufficiency (7) is the presupposition of both (5) and (8), whereas (6) is the
entailment of (5). Thus, negation alters the entailments of a sentence or
statement, but it leaves its presuppositions untouched.
A semantic entailment can be defined as follows:
A semantically entails B (A║—B) if and only if every situation that makes A
true, makes B true i.e. in all worlds in which A is true, B is true.
3.2.2 Pragmatic presupposition
33
One consequence of Stalnaker’s view is that presupposition failure
need not produce a semantic catastrophe. There are, however, two weaker
types of failure that can occur: (i) a speaker uttering some sentence S can fail
to assume that some proposition P is in the common ground, even though
most utterances of S would be accompanied by the presupposition that P; and
(ii) a speaker can presuppose something that is not in the common ground.
The former idea was used by Stalnaker to account for some tricky examples
of Karttunen (1971b), involving a subclass of factive verbs that Karttunen
referred to as “semifactives”. The naturally occurring examples in (9a) and
(9b), which involve the (semi-)factive verb know, illustrate the point. The
sentence in (9a) involves a first person, present tense use of know, and there
is clearly no presupposition that Mullah Omar is alive. On the other hand,
(9b) involves a past tense, third person use of know, and in this case it does
seem to be presupposed (at least in the fictional context of the story) that
Luke was alive.
(9a) I don’t know that Mullah Omar is alive. I don't know if he’s dead either.
(General Dan McNeill, Reuters, 19 May 2008)
(9b) Vader didn’t know that Luke was alive, so he had no intentions of
converting Luke to the Sith. (Web example)
Examples like (9) led Karttunen to propose that know only triggers a
presupposition in some person and tense forms; hence the term
“semifactive”.
In the context of his pragmatic approach to presupposition, Stalnaker
argued that these examples are not problematic. In the pragmatic account, the
verb know does not necessarily have to presuppose that its complement is
true. When an addressee hears the sentence in (9a), he will realize that if it
were in the common ground that Mullah Omar was alive, then the speaker
would know this, and so the speaker’s claim would be false. Therefore the
hearer can reason that the speaker is not presupposing the complement of
know to be true. On the other hand, when a hearer hears the sentence in (9b),
it is consistent to assume that Luke was alive. Since speakers using know
typically presuppose the truth of the complement, one can assume that this is
the case here.
35
structural presuppositions which are triggered by sentence structures. In
this case, certain sentence structures are interpreted conventionally and
regularly presupposing that part of the structure is already assumed to be the
case. For example, a wh- interrogative construction is conventionally
interpreted with the presupposition that the information after the wh- form is
assumed to be true.
(13a) When did he leave? → He left.
(13b) Where did you buy that book? →You bought the book.
(13c) Who is the professor of linguistics at MIT? → Someone is the
professor of linguistics at MIT.
Yes/no interrogatives and alternative interrogatives presuppose the
disjunction of their possible answers:
(14a) Is there a professor of linguistics at MIT? → Either there is a professor
of linguistics at MIT or there isn’t.
(14b) Is Newcastle in England or is it in Australia? →Newcastle is in
England or Newcastle is in Australia.
36
3.4 Presupposition triggers
Associated with these types of presuppositions are various lexical items or
aspects of surface structure. These presupposition-generating linguistic items
are referred to as presupposition triggers. The following list includes
various types of presupposition triggers:
Definite descriptions (Strawson 1950)
(17a) John saw the man with two heads. → There exists a man with two
heads.
(17b) The Prime Minister of Italy stood up and waved his hand. → Italy has
a (unique) prime minister.
Proper names names (van der Sandt, 1992)
(18) The author is Julius Seidensticker. → Julius Seidensticker exists.
Factive verbs (Kiparsky and Kiparsky, 1970)
(19a) Berlusconi knows that he is signing the end of Berlusconism.
→ Berlusconi is signing the end of Berlusconism.
(19b) Martha regrets going to John’s party. → Martha went to John’s party.
(19c) John was aware that Martha was at home. → Martha was at home.
(19d) John realized that he was in debt. →John was in debt.
(19e) It was odd how proud he was. → He was proud.
Further factive verbs include: know, be sorry/indifferent/sad/glad +
that- clause.
Implicative verbs (Levinson 1983)
(20a) John managed to open the door. →John tried to open the door.
(20b) John forgot to post the letter. → John ought to have posted the letter/
intended to post the letter.
Aspectual verbs (Simons, 2001; Abusch, 2002; Lorenz, 1992)
37
(21a) China has stopped stockpiling metals. → China used to stockpile
metals.
(21b) Joan began to beat her husband. → Joan hadn’t been beating her
husband.
(21c) Bush continued to rule the world. → Bush had been ruling the world.
Further aspectual verbs: start, finish, carry on, cease, leave, enter, arrive,
come.
Iteratives (Levinson 1983)
(22a) The flying saucer came again. → The flying saucer came before.
(22b) Clinton returned to power. → Clinton held power before.
Further iteratives: another time, come back, repeat.
Manner adverbs (Abbott, 2000)
(23) Jamie ducked quickly behind the wall. → Jamie ducked behind the wall.
Quantifiers (Roberts, 1995; Gawron, 1995; Abusch and Rooth, 2000;
Cooper, 1983)
(24) I have written to every headmaster in Rochdale. → There are
headmasters in Rochdale.
Sortally restricted predicates of various categories (e.g., bachelor)
(Thomason, 1972)
(25) Julius is bachelor.→ Julius is an adult male.
Temporal clauses (Beaver and Condoravdi, 2003; Heinämäki, 1974)
(26a) The dude released this video before he went on a killing spree. → The
dude went on a killing spree.
(26b) While Chomsky was revolutionizing linguistics, the rest of social
science was asleep. → Chomsky was revolutionizing linguistics.
(26c) Since Churchill died we’ve lacked a leader. → Churchill died.
(26d) As John was getting up, he slipped. → John was getting up.
38
Cleft sentences (Delin, 1995; Prince, 1986)
(27) It was Jesus who set me free. → Somebody set me free.
Non-restrictive relative clauses (Levinson 1983)
(28) Hillary, who climbed Everest in 1953, was the greatest explorer of our
day. → Hillary climbed Everest in 1953.
Intonation (e.g., focus, contrast) (Jackendoff, 1972; Geurts and van der
Sandt, 2004; Roberts, 1998)
(29) HE set me free.→ Somebody set me free.
3.5 Projection
The most thoroughly researched presuppositional phenomenon is projection
(Langendoen and Savin, 1971). There is a basic expectation that the
presupposition of a simple sentence will continue to be true when that simple
sentence becomes part of a complex sentence. This expectation is related to a
more general view proposed by Frege that the meanings of sentences are
compositional, i.e. the meaning of the whole expression is a function of the
meaning of the parts. However, the set of the presuppositions of a complex
sentence is not the simple sum of the presuppositions of the parts; some
presuppositions of the component sentences do not survive to become
presuppositions of the complex sentence. Moreover, a theory that will predict
correctly which presuppositions of component sentences will be inherited by
the complex sentence is difficult to formulate. This compositional problem is
known as projection and it is a distinctive feature of presuppositions.
Two issues should be considered in relation to presuppositional
projection. First, presuppositions survive in linguistic contexts where
entailments cannot, i.e. the presuppositions of component sentences are
inherited by the whole complex sentence where the entailments of those
components would not be. Second, presuppositions disappear in other
contexts where we might expect them to survive and where entailments
would.
Consider the sentence in (30). The sentence in (30) has all the
presuppositions in (31). The presuppositions in (31) all follow from
utterances of the sentence in (30). The entailments of the sentence in (30) are
given in (32). A speaker who sincerely uttered (30) is expected to be
committed to the truth of (31) and (32).
From the negation of (34), as in (37), one cannot entail (36); the
presupposition in (35), however, does survive negation.
(38) It’s possible that the chief constable arrested three men.
The same behaviour occurs under deontic modalities such as ought, should
and the like. Consider the example in (39):
(39) presupposes “There is a chief constable”, but does not entail “The chief
constable arrested two men”.
Another set of contexts in which presuppositions survive while
entailments do not, are complex sentences formed by the connectives and,
or, if......then their equivalents. Consider for example in (40):
41
(41) A thief was caught last night
(43) If the two thieves were caught again last night PC Brown will get an
honourable mention.
(44) Either the two thieves were caught again last night, or PC Brown will be
losing his job.
3.6 Cancellability
(45) John doesn’t regret doing a useless PhD in linguistics, because in fact he
never did one!
(46) John didn’t manage to pass his exam, in fact he didn’t even try.
42
(47) #John doesn’t regret doing a useless PhD because in fact he does regret
doing a useless PhD.
(48) #John regrets doing a PhD because in fact he never did one
#Joan has stopped beating her husband and in fact she never did beat him.
(49) #It’s the boy that stole the apples, but he didn’t do anything illegal.
The fact that presuppositions associated with unembedded triggers are not
cancellable is one of the features that distinguish most presuppositions from
conversational implicatures (Grice, 1989). For instance, the example in (50a)
might ordinarily lead to the scalar implicature in (50b). But while this
implicature is cancelable, as shown in (50c), the presupposition of existence
that there is a boy is not cancelable, as shown by the oddity of (50d).
(51)
43
In addition to the cancellation of presuppositions by overt denial,
there is the possibility of what Horn (1986) has called suspension. The use of
a following if-clause can suspend the speaker’s commitment to
presuppositions as shown in (52) and (53):
(58) The mechanic didn’t tell me that my car would never run properly again
(59) My car used to run properly.
Here (58) continue to presuppose (59) despite the presence of plugs. Thus
the existence of plugs is questionable.
One of the most troublesome aspects of the projection problem is the
behaviour of presuppositions in complex sentences formed by using the
connectives and, or, if….then, and related expressions such as but,
alternatively, suppose that, etc. Karttunen (1973) calls these connectives
filters because they let some presuppositions through but not others.
44
It has been shown that presuppositions tend to survive in disjunctions
and conditionals where entailments do not. Thus one might argue that these
constructions are holes that let presuppositions through. However,
counterexamples can be supplied to show that this behaviour does not always
apply. Consider the example in (60):
In (60) the main clause, by itself, would presuppose (61). However, the
whole conditional sentence does not presuppose (61) because presupposed
content mentioned in the subordinate if-clause and is therefore made
hypothetical. This turns out to be general. Similarly, consider the disjunction
in (62).
(62) Either John will not in the end do computational linguistics, or he will
regret doing it.
In (62) the second clause alone presupposes (61), but the whole does not.
The presupposition seems to be cancelled because the alternative expressed
in the first clause is the negation of the presupposition of the second clause.
(63) Mary told Jim that the King of France was bald.
(64) Perhaps the King of France is bald.
Karttunen’s filters include the binary logical connectives “if then”, “and”,
and “or”. These constructions are analyzed as allowing only some
presuppositions to project. Thus the example in (65) shows that the
presupposition that there was a knave does not project because it is
embedded in a conditional or, to use Karttunen’s metaphor, filtered out.
However, the presupposition that there are (or, at least, there were) some
tarts triggered by the definite description the tarts does project from the
conditional.
(66) Either Geraldine is not a mormon or she has given up wearing her holy
underwear.
(Karttunen, 1973)
In (66) the second half contains two presupposition triggers: the definite
description “her holy underwear” and the aspectual verb “give up”, which
trigger the presuppositions that Geraldine had and she used to wear holy
underwear, respectively. The filtering condition that Karttunen proposes for
disjunctions removes from the right disjunct any presuppositions that are
entailed by a combination of the context and the negation of the left disjunct.
If the sentence in (66) is uttered within a context that supports the
proposition that all mormons have holy underwear which they wear
regularly, it follows from this proposition and the negation of the left
disjunct (i.e., the proposition that Geraldine is a mormon) that Geraldine has
46
holy underwear and has worn it regularly. But these are exactly the
presuppositions triggered in the right disjunct, so they are filtered out.
Consequently, (66) has no presuppositions.
Karttunen’s study (1973) did not clarify why certain presuppositions
should be filtered out if they were entailed by additional context. However,
Karttunen (1974) proposes an alternative treatment of presuppositional
projection based on the idea of local contexts of evaluation. According to
Karttunen (1974), the parts of a sentence are not necessarily evaluated with
respect to the same context as that in which the sentence as a whole is
evaluated. He argues that a local context may be more informative than
the global context. For instance, when evaluating a conjunction, the second
conjunct is evaluated in a local context which contains not only the
information in the global context, but also whatever information was
supplied by the first conjunct. Karttunen (1974) defined local contexts of
evaluation for a range of constructions. Moreover, he suggested the
following requirement: presuppositions always need to be entailed or
“satisfied” (as he puts it) in the local context in which the trigger is
evaluated. As a result of this requirement, the overall presuppositions of a
sentence will be whatever propositions must be in a context of an utterance
in order to guarantee that the presuppositions associated with presupposition
triggers are satisfied in their local contexts of interpretation.
For each connective or operator he considered, Karttunen spelled out
how local satisfaction should be calculated. Recent developments such as
Schlenker (2008) and Beaver (2008) provide a general way of calculating
what the local context should be. The following reformulation draws on
Karttunen’s model and incorporates Schlenker’s insights along the lines
proposed by Beaver (2008).
As an illustration, let us say that some clause in a complex sentence
is redundant relative to some context of utterance if it can be replaced that
clause by a tautology without affecting the amount of factual information
conveyed by the sentence in that context. For example, in (67), the first
conjunct is redundant in any context of utterance. Here, the same factual
information would be conveyed by “John is John and John owns a horse”,
where the first conjunct is replaced by the tautology “John is John”.
(70) Either Geraldine is not a mormon or she has given up wearing her holy
underwear.
(Karttunen, 1973)
8
More generally, anything entailed by a combination of propositions in the context and the
negation of the left disjunct will be satisfied in the right disjunct.
48
3.7.2 Presupposition and anaphora
Modal subordination
9
The symbol # indicates the sentence is pragmatically infelicitous in the given context.
10
The example is due to Kamp (1981).
49
(73b) John might have left. Lucy would know that John has left.
(73c) #A bear might come to the door. It’s brown.
(73d) #John might have left. Lucy knows that John has left.
(74a) Either there’s no bathroom in this house, or else it’s in a funny place11.
(74b) Either John didn’t leave, or else Lucy knows that he left.
(74c) #Either there is a bathroom, or else it’s in a funny place.
(74d) Either John left, or else Lucy knows that he left.
In order to account for these parallels, van der Sandt proposed a unified
treatment of presupposition and anaphora, applying Discourse
Representation Theory so as to deal with both phenomena. Presupposed
information is information that is presented as given, and in van der Sandt’s
theory this means that presuppositions need to have discourse referents to
bind to. However, whereas pronouns used anaphorically can rarely be
interpreted in the absence of an antecedent, the same does not hold for all
presupposition-inducing expressions. For instance, a speaker may
felicitously assert that he met “John’s sister” even if he knows that his
audience wasn’t aware that Fred has a sister. In such cases, presuppositions
are generally accommodated, which means that the addressee accepts the
information as given, and revises his representation of the context
accordingly.
Van der Sandt’s theory (1989; 1992) incorporates the notion of
accommodation as follows. Presuppositions, according van der Sandt,
introduce information that is linked to discourse referents that are already
available in the hearer’s representation of the discourse, and in this respect
they behave like pronouns. However, if a suitable discourse antecedent is not
available, a new one will be accommodated, and the presupposition is linked
to that. Being told that “she” is wonderful is not particularly helpful or
informative if it isn’t clear who the pronoun is refers to. By contrast, if the
speaker refers to “John’s sister” there is more to go on, and accommodation
becomes feasible. Van der Sandt hypothesizes that pronouns make up a
special class of presuppositional expressions. While all presupposition
triggers prefer to be linked to antecedents, pronouns almost always must be
linked to antecedents, because cannot be construed by way of
accommodation. Consider the example in (75).
11
The example is due to (Partee 1984).
50
(75) If Bill is gay, then his son is gay, too.
This sentence contains the definite NP his son and the focus particle too.
Assuming that the antecedent of the pronoun is “Bill”, the definite NP
triggers the presupposition that Fred has a son, while the focus particle
triggers the presupposition that someone other than Bill’s son is gay. Note
that in this example the presupposition triggered by the definite NP is
“inherited” by the sentence as a whole, while the one triggered by too is not.
The example in (75), when uttered, would license the inference that
(according to the speaker) Bill has a son, but not that someone else besides
Bill’s son is gay.
3.7.3 Accommodation
Ordinary conversation does not always proceed in the ideal orderly fashion
described earlier. People do make leaps and shortcuts by using sentences
whose presuppositions are not satisfied in the conversational context. This is
the rule rather than the exception […] I think we can maintain that a sentence
is always taken to be an increment to a context that satisfies its
presuppositions. If the current conversational context does not suffice, the
listener is entitled and expected to extend it as required.
(76) John read a book about Schubert and wrote to the author.
Here c0 refers to the global context in which a given sentence is uttered, and
c1and c2 are local, contexts. In (77a), the modal operator maybe creates an
local context of possible states of affairs in which Betty is trying to give up
smoking; the same applies to (77b), mutatis mutandis. The presupposition
triggered in (77a), that Betty used to smoke, can be accommodated globally,
i.e., in c0, or locally, in c1. In the former case, the utterance is construed as
meaning that Betty used to smoke and may be trying to kick the habit; in the
latter, it conveys that, possibly, Betty used to smoke and is trying to give up
smoking. Similarly, in (77b), the presupposition that Wilma is married may
be accommodated globally, or locally in the most deeply embedded context.
But here there is a third option, as well: if the presupposition is
accommodated in c1, the sentence is interpreted as “Maybe Wilma is married
and she thinks that her husband is having an affair”, and we speak of
intermediate accommodation.
The examples in (77b) illustrate cases when the PGA (preference for global
accommodation) clearly holds: non-global interpretations may be possible,
but they require special contexts. One such context may be that the
presupposition contains a variable which is bound by a quantifier. Consider
the example (78).
52
In (78), with the possessive presupposition trigger their lawn, there is a
global context (outside of the scope of the quantifier most), a local context
corresponding to the scope of the quantifier (occupied by the VP mow their
lawns on Saturday), and also an intermediate context in the restrictor of the
quantifier (occupied by Americans). The most natural interpretation of this
sentence is that most Americans who own a lawn mow it on Saturday. So in
this case intermediate accommodation seems to be the preferred option.
There are other cases where intermediate accommodation is virtually
impossible, as shown in (79).
(79) (c0) If (c1) Bill is coming to the reception, (c2) he may (c3) bring his
wife.
Confronted with the classical example, “The king of France is bald”, we may
well feel it natural to say, straight off, that the question whether the statement
is true or false doesn’t arise because there is no king of France.
However, Strawson points out that speakers who subscribe to this judgment
may want to reconsider their verdict if the context is set up the right way. For
instance, if Russell’s sentence is used to answer the question, “What
examples, if any, are there of famous contemporary figures who are bald?”,
one may be more inclined to say that the answer is simply false.
These facts are accounted for by Strawson in terms of topicality. The
most likely purpose of a sentence like (81a) is to describe what Jones has
54
been doing in the morning, rather than, say, refer to the local swimming
pool. That is, in the absence of further information about the context in
which this sentence is uttered, its topic will be Jones’s exploits. Similarly, a
sentence like (81b) will normally be used to convey information about the
exhibition. If so, although the sentence purports to refer to the king of
France, it is not about him; the king of France is neither the topic of
discourse, nor part of the topic. On this view, presupposition failure results in
infelicity only if it affects the topic of a sentence; otherwise the sentence will
be judged true or false, as appropriate.
Strawson’s analysis takes into account the context-dependence of
speakers’ intuitions. Strawson argues that Russell’s sentence in (82) is by
default construed as being about the king of France, and consequently there
is a strong tendency to judge the sentence infelicitous because the
presupposition that there is a present king of France is not met.
If, however, the discourse is about royal baldness in general, the grammatical
subject of (82) is used to say something about that topic, and Strawson’s
account predicts that the sentence is more likely to be judged false, which
seems correct. Word order may play a crucial role in speakers’ intuitions
about presupposition failure. As Strawson (1964:91) points out, if we
compare (81b) with (83), where the defective description is in subject
position, we would be “a shade more squeamish” to say that the sentence is
simply false. This is precisely what one should expect if speakers’ intuitions
were topic-dependent.
Given that there is only one incumbent pope and that it can’t have taken
Carnap any effort to be born on May 18, 1891, both (85a) and (85b) suffer
from presupposition failure.
3.8 Conclusions
The aim of this chapter was to outline an overview of the major strands of
work on presupposition. A question that still remains to be addressed is
whether presupposition triggers form a natural class of linguistic expressions.
This is a possibility that has only just begun to be explored in detail, with
several theorists proposing to dichotomize presupposition triggers in some
way or other (e.g., Zeevat 1992, Geurts 1999b, Abusch 2002).
There are several philosophically and linguistically interesting
dimensions along which the set of presupposition triggers can be classified,
such as referentiality, anaphoricity, ease of accommodation, ease of
cancellation, and maintenance of truth under presupposition failure. Such
dimension of classification might a more complex taxonomy of different
types of triggers.
56
CHAPTER 4
IMPLICATURE
4.1 Introduction
(1)
A: Can I get petrol somewhere around here?
B: There’s a garage around the corner.
[A can get petrol at the garage around the corner.]
(2)
A: Is Karl a good philosopher?
B: He’s got a beautiful handwriting.
[Karl is not a good philosopher.]
57
4.2 Natural vs. non-natural meaning
The concept of implicature was first proposed by Grice in the William James
Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1967 and still only partially published
(Grice, 1975, 1978). Before we outline his key ideas, it would be useful to
briefly review his other major theory, namely his theory of non-natural
meaning as it sheds new light on his theory of implicature.
In his seminal paper ‘Meaning’ (1957), Grice proposed a distinction
between natural(N) and non-natural(NN) meaning. The distinction reflects what
he later describes as “a reasonably clear intuitive distinction between cases
where the word ‘mean’ has what we might think of as a natural sense, a
sense in which what something means is closely related to the idea of what it
is a natural sign for (as in ‘Black clouds mean rain’), and those where it has
what I call a non-natural sense, as in such contexts as ‘His remark meant so-
and-so’.” (1989: 291). Cases of each kind are given in (3) and (4) below:
Quantity
(i) Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current
purposes of the exchange)
(ii) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required
Quality
Make your contribution one that is true.
(i) Do not say what you believe to be false.
(ii) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
Relation: Be relevant
61
Manner: Be perspicuous
(i) Avoid obscurity of expression
(ii) Avoid ambiguity
(iii) Be brief (Avoid unnecessary prolixity)
(iv) Be orderly
Consider example (10) again, repeated here for convenience and the
inferential chain proposed by Grice in order to calculate conversational
implicatures.
(10)
A: Can I get petrol somewhere around here?
B: There’s a garage around the corner.
[A can get petrol at the garage around the corner.]
According to Grice (1975 [1989] :39-40), B in (10) would violate the Maxim
of Relation (Be relevant!) if she were to mean only what she says: B would,
in such a case, be uncooperative. Thus, assuming that B adheres to the CP,
we must interpret her utterance in (10) as carrying a conversational
implicature: B means to convey more than what she says. More specifically,
B must, in this particular case, be interpreted as conversationally implicating
that A can get petrol around the corner, for otherwise she would convey
irrelevant information. According to Grice, the implicature generated by the
conversational exchange in (10) can be calculated as follows:
62
rational or logical principles that, by their observance or their apparent
violation, generate conversational implicatures. When these principles are
not adhered to on a superficial level, hearers still assume that they are
adhered to at some deeper level. The inferences that arise in order to preserve
the assumption of cooperation and to bridge what is said to what is meant are
called by Grice conversational implicature.
There are two ways in which conversational implicatures can be
created: speakers may either abide by the maxims, in which case they
generate what Levinson (1983) calls standard implicature, or they may
flout one or several maxims, giving thus rise to floutings or exploitations.
Grice further distinguished between generalized and particularized
conversational implicatures. Generalized conversational implicatures
arise irrespective of the context in which they occur. In other words, they do
not depend on particular features of the context and if any of those features
changes this does not trigger a change in the inferred meaning. The
utterances in (11) illustrate generalized conversational implicatures.
(11a) I walked into a house.
Conversational implicature: The house is not mine.
The utterances in (11) always give rise to the same implicature, no matter
what the context.
Particularized conversational implicatures, on the other hand, are
derived not from the utterance alone, but from the utterance in context.
Consider the excerpt in (12):
(12)
A: What on earth has happened to the roast beef?
B: The dog is looking very happy?
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The state of looking very happy in reference to the dog would ordinarily not
convey anything about the roast beef. So the implicature in this case depends
on the context as well as the utterance itself. In this particular context the the
utterance The dog is looking very happy may generate the implicature
Perhaps the dog has eaten the roast beef.
Generalized conversational implicatures are inferred irrespective of
the context of utterance and result from the speaker’s abiding by maxims of
Quantity and Manner. Particularized conversational implicatures are inferred
in relation to a particular context and result from the existence of the Maxim
of Relation. In both cases, however, these inferences arise from the
assumption that the speaker is observing the maxims of conversation and the
CP. Thus both generalized and particularized conversational implicatures can
be regarded as instances of standard implicature.
Conversational implicatures can also be derived on the basis of the
speaker’s intentionally or unconsciously flouting or exploiting a maxim (i.e.
on the speaker’s not abiding by the maxim) as in the following examples
where the speaker flouts the maxim of quantity:
(13a) If he does it he does it.
Conversational implicature: It’s no concern of ours.
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Moreover, Grice argues that, for the addressee H to be able to
calculate the implicature q, H must know, or believe that he knows the facts
in (15):
(15)
(i) the conventional content of the sentence (P) uttered
(ii) the co-operative principle and its maxims
(iii) the context of P (e.g. its relevance)
(iv) certain bits of background information (e.g. P is blatantly false)
(v) that (i) – (v) are mutual knowledge shared by speaker and addressee
From all this a general pattern of working out an implicature can be
adduced:
(16)
(i) S has said that p
(ii) there’s no reason to think S is not observing the maxims, or at least the
co-operative principle
(iii) in order for S to say that p and be indeed observing the maxims or the
co-operative principle, S must think that q
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the utterance of the form of words would simply not carry the
implicature”
(Grice 1989:44)
Consider the example (17) and its straightforward implicature (18) which
results from the Maxim of Quantity:
(17) Mary has three cats.
(18) Mary has only three cats and no more.
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determination of an implicature (in virtue of one of the maxims of
manner)”
(Grice 1989:39)
As an illustration of this property, consider the ironic interpretation (25) of
(24):
(24) John’s a genius.
(25) John’s an idiot.
The same implicit meaning can be conveyed by any of the sentences in (26)
in a context in which it is mutually known that (24) is false:
12
Gloss: There is no reason to suppose B is opting out; his answer is, as he well knows, less
informative than is required to meet A’s needs. This infringement of the first maxim of
Quantity can be explained only by the supposition that B is aware that to be more
informative would be to say something that infringed the maxim of Quality, ‘Don’t say what
you lack evidence for’, so B implicates that he does not know in which town C lives.
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an informationally weak term on an implicational scale. Consider the
following standard examples of scalar implicature:
(32)
A: Who ate the cookies?
B: I ate some of the cookies.
[B didn’t eat all of the cookies.]
(33)
A: Who is the best in class?
B: John is sometimes the best in class.
[John isn’t always the best in class.]
While Grice was aware that implicatures such as those in (32) and
(33) are generalized conversational implicatures, it is important to emphasize
that they are generalized conversational implicatures of a rather special type.
To see their special status it should be pointed out that the lexical items some
and sometimes are members of what Horn (1972) calls an implicational
scale – that is, a set of lexical items that form a linear ordering according to
their informational (or even, as in the case of ‘some’, logical) strength.
Consider the following examples of implicational scales or Horn scales:
(34)
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Horn scales, defined first in Horn (1972), are more or less
conventionalized scales of lexical items organized by informativity (in some
sense). Levinson (1983) gives the examples in (35), which should be handled
with care (some theorists argue, for instance, that few should not be included
in the first one, since it has different polarity/monotonicity than the others):
(36)
Some theorists distinguish between the more or less lexicalized scales that
follow from some general definition of entailment and the more
particularized – “pragmatic” – scales that can crop up with particular
speakers, or given particular discourse situations.
Even for apparently standard lexical scales like those in (35) and
(36), one needs to be aware that the order of the scale is context dependent:
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(37)
a. <cold,warm, hot> coffee/champagne
b. <gain, lose >20 pounds while dieting/weight-lifting
c. <gain, lose> 20 dollars
(38)
a. morality: <bad, evil>; food: <bad, rotten>; abilities: <bad, useless>
b. morality: <good, divine>; food: <good, delicious>; abilities: <good,
skilled>
(32*)
A: Who ate the cookies?
B: I ate at least one of the cookies.
[B didn’t eat all of the cookies.]
(33*)
A: Who is the best in class?
B: At times, John is the best in class.
[John isn’t always the best in class.]
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contribution to the conversation as informative as is required13. The
implicature in (14/32), for instance, can be calculated as follows:
In response to my question of who ate the cookies, B just said that she ate
some of them. If B had eaten all of the cookies, then her contribution to our
conversation would not be as informative as is required. But B is cooperative
and wouldn’t keep information from me that I asked her for. Moreover, B
has done nothing to prevent me from thinking that she didn’t eat all of the
cookies. So that must be what B meant to convey by her utterance.
13
Scalar implicatures also allow for what Horn has called metalinguistic negation: ‘A didn’t
eat some of the cookies, she ate all of them!” For interesting discussion see (Horn 1984;
1989, pp. 362-375).
73
which do not affect the truth or falsity of what is said but they generate
implicatures, by virtue of their conventional meaning.
Grice is usually credited with the discovery of conventional
implicature. However, it was actually Frege’s idea and Grice merely labeled
it. In “On Sense and Reference”, Frege pointed out:
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(40)
adverbs: already, also, barely, either, only, scarcely, still, too, yet
connectives: but, nevertheless, so, therefore, yet
implicative verbs: bother, condescend, continue, deign, fail, manage, stop
subordinating conjunctions: although, despite (the fact that), even though
Karttunen and Peters offer one piece of evidence in support of the CI-
thesis, namely the occurrence of even in (41):
They argue that “the truth of what (41) says depends solely on whether Bill
likes Mary” (Karttunen and Peters 1979:12). Suppose (41) is embedded in
(42):
(42) John just noticed that even Bill likes Mary.
The crux of the argument is that (42) “does not mean that he has just noticed
that other people like Mary or just noticed that Bill is the least likely person
to do so” (1979, p. 13). Karttunen and Peters assume that noticing a complex
fact requires noticing its constituent facts. Their reasoning is that since (42)
does not entail that John just noticed that other people like Mary or that Bill
is the least likely person to do so, (42) says merely that John just noticed that
Bill likes Mary, i.e., that ‘even’ does not contribute to what John is being
said to have noticed.
Bach (1999) refutes Karttunen and Peters’ line of argument by
supplying the example (42).
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(44) Bill managed to finish his homework.
In Bach’s view the same point made above about noticing applies to the
example in (44): one could notice that Bill managed to finish his homework
even if one already knew that finishing it would be difficult.
4.8 Relevance
Over the past twenty years, relevance theory has become a key area of study
within semantics and pragmatics. Relevance theory is an approach to
implicature developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995) as part of a
broader attempt to shift pragmatics into a cognitive framework. In relation to
implicature, as conceived by Grice (1975), relevance theory can be viewed
as a reductionist theoretical approach for two reasons. Firstly, it reduces all
pragmatic principles that have been proposed to underlie conversational
implicature to a single ‘Principle of Relevance’. Secondly, it reduces all the
different species of meaning in the Gricean/neo-Gricean framework (such as
what is said, conventional implicature, scalar implicature, generalised
conversational implicature, particularised conversational implicature and so
on) to two broad categories: explicature and implicature.
Relevance theory is based on the assumption that human beings are
endowed with a biologically rooted ability to maximize the relevance of in-
coming stimuli (linguistic utterances or nonverbal behavior). Relevance is
not only a characteristic property of external stimuli (e.g. utterances), but
also of internal representations and thoughts, all of which may become inputs
for cognitive processing. Assessing relevance is a typical mental activity of
human beings, always geared to obtaining the highest reward from the
stimuli which they process.
The following sentences summarize Sperber and Wilson’s relevance
theory: (a) in a given context, the decoded meaning of the sentence is
compatible with a number of different interpretations; (b) these
interpretations are graded in terms of accessibility; (c) hearers rely on a
powerful criterion when selecting the most appropriate interpretation; and (d)
this criterion makes it possible to select one interpretation among the range
of possible interpretations, to the extent that when a first interpretation is
considered a candidate to match the intended interpretation, the hearer will
stop at this point.
In what follows I will examine the basic tenets of Sperber and
Wilson’s relevance theory. The central focus of the discussion is on such key
concepts as ostensive-inferential communication, the dichotomy implicature-
explicature, and the notion of relevance.
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4.8.1 Ostensive-inferential communication
14
Intentions can be roughly defined as mental representations of a desired state of affairs.
15
Sperber and Wilson (1986:39) define the term manifest as follows: “A fact is manifest to
an individual at a given time if and only if he is capable at that time of representing it
mentally and accepting its representation as true or probably true.”
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Relevance theory explains the addressee’s inference of the speaker’s
intended meaning by resorting to a claim that is central to Grice’s theory of
implicature: ostensively communicated utterances generate expectations
which activate the addressee’s search for the speaker’s intended meaning.
Unlike Grice, who explained these expectations in terms of the assumptions
hearers make that speakers are following the cooperative principle and its
maxims, Sperber and Wilson account for these expectations in cognitive
terms and propose a Cognitive Principle of Relevance, without relying the
Co-operative Principle.
In Sperber and Wilson’s view, Gricean maxims are required to bridge
the gap between what is said and what is meant. Sperber and Wilson have
shown that people are normally loose when they speak and only on very
specific occasions do they intend their utterances to be regarded as literally
true. They propose a single explanatory framework based on general
expectations of relevance that will account for all loose uses of language
(metaphor, hyperbole, irony, vagueness, etc.).
(45)
A: Are you coming to the rock concert?
B: I’ve got a meeting at half past six.
If this all the information that we have, we cannot know with any certainty
what B implies by delivering the utterance in (45). We are not certain
whether she will go to the rock concert or not. If (45) is processed in a
context containing the assumptions in (46):
(46)
a. The rock concert starts at 7 o’clock and finishes at 8 o’clock.
b. B’s meeting will last at least one hour.
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From the utterance in (45) considered within context in (46), the contextual
implication in (47) will follow:
(47)
B is not going to the rock concert.
Thus, (47) does not follow from the propositional content of (45) alone or
from the assumptions in (46), but from the inferential combinations of both.
The example in (48) illustrates the strengthening of existing
assumptions:
(48)
A: I have the impression that Paul’s new girlfriend is a foreigner.
B: I guess she is, she speaks with a French accent.
In (48), A indicates that he is not totally sure of the truth of his utterance.
Assuming that A’s context contains the following premise:
then B’s utterance supplies information that can serve as further evidence
that supports the truth of A’s assumption.
The contradiction of existing assumptions can be illustrated by the
exchange in (50):
(50)
A: I think Bill and Jane have split up.
B: Nope, they are just coming down the street kissing each other.
(a) The set of assumptions {I} which the communicator intends to make
manifest to the addressee is relevant enough to make it worth the addressee’s
while to process the ostensive stimulus.
(b) The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one the communicator could
have used to communicate {I}. (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 158)
Principle of relevance:
Thus, the principle of relevance expresses the assumption will make his
utterance as relevant as possible in the circumstances in which it is produced.
This does not necessarily mean that a satisfactory degree of relevance is
always achieved. Some utterances do not yield any contextual effect and
consequently they are not relevant.
One of the key differences between Grice’s model and Sperber and Wilson’s
lies in the distinction between explicatures and implicatures. The meaning
explicitly communicated by means of an utterance is an explicature and the
content that is derivable from the proposition expressed by the utterance in a
context called an implicature. The term explicature is used by Sperber and
Wilson to cover aspects of meaning which Grice included in the term
implicature (e.g. the so-called generalized conversational implicatures,
most of which are now pictured as explicit information, see Carston, 2002).
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Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/95, 182) definitions are as follows:
(51)
On the basis of the definitions above, it seems relatively clear that (52a) is an
explicature of B’s utterance and (52b) is an implicature.
(52) a. Mary did not pass enough university course units to qualify for
admission to second year study and, as a result, Mary cannot continue with
university study.
b. Mary is not feeling very happy
4.9 Conclusions
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CHAPTER 5
5.1 Introduction
Making a statement may be the paradigmatic use of language. However,
there are all sorts of other things we can do with words such as from
aspirating a consonant, constructing a relative clause, insulting a guest,
starting a war, making a declaration of love, making a promise, giving
thanks, etc. Pre-theoretically, these are acts done in the process of speaking.
The theory of speech acts, however, is especially concerned with those acts
that are not completely covered under one or more of the major divisions of
grammar – phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics – or under
some general theory of actions (Sadock 1974).
Within a theory of speech acts, any speech act is actually the
simultaneous performance of several acts, distinguished by different aspects
of the speaker’s intention: there is the act of saying something, what one
does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to
affect one's audience. The theory of speech acts is partly taxonomic and
partly explanatory. It offers a systematic classification of types of speech acts
and it accounts for the ways in which they can succeed or fail. A major task
for the theory of speech acts is to account for how speakers can succeed in
what they do despite the various ways in which linguistic meaning
underdetermines use (Bach and Harnish 1979).
Real-life acts of speech usually involve interpersonal relations of
some kind. By saying certain words to an audience, a speaker affects I a
certain way the interpersonal relation with that audience. Thus it would seem
that ethnographic studies of such relationships and the study of discourse
should be central to speech act theory, but in fact, they are not. Such studies
have been carried out rather independently of the concerns of those
philosophers and linguists who focused their attention on speech acts. This is
perhaps not a good thing, as Croft (1994) has argued, but since it is the case,
anthropological and discourse-based approaches to speech acts will not be
covered in this chapter.
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5.2 Austin’s theory of speech acts
The modern study of speech acts begins with Austin’s (1962) widely
acclaimed study How to Do Things with Words, the published version of his
William James Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955. In his William James
Lectures, Austin attacked the doctrine of logical positivism which flourished
in the 30s. According to logical positivism, unless a sentence can be tested
for its truth or falsity, it is strictly speaking meaningless. Thus according to
this doctrine, most ethical, aesthetic and literary discourses, not to mention
most everyday utterances are viewed as meaningless.
Austin argues that certain sorts of sentences, e.g., I christen this ship
the Joseph Stalin; I now pronounce you man and wife; and the like, seem
designed to do something, here to christen and wed, respectively, rather than
merely to say something which can be assed as true or false. Thus, these
sentences are not used to describe states of affaires, but are rather actively
used to do things. Austin refers to these special sentences and the utterances
realized by them as performatives, in contrast to what he calls constatives,
the descriptive sentences that until Austin were the principal concern of
philosophers of language. Performatives, unlike constatives which can be
assessed in terms of truth or falsity, cannot be true or false.
While the distinction between performatives and constatives is often
invoked in the literature, by the end of the book Austin revises this
distinction. Austin argued that this distinction is not ultimately defensible.
The point of Austin’s lectures is, in fact, that every ordinary utterance has
both a descriptive and an effective aspect: that saying something is also
doing something.
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Illocutionary acts, Austin’s central innovation, are acts done in
speaking (hence illocutionary), including and especially that sort of act that
is the apparent purpose for using a performative sentence: christening,
marrying, and so forth. Illocutionary acts have illocutionary forces indicated
by the performative verb they include or by their explicit performative
paraphrase.
The third of Austin’s categories of acts is the perlocutionary act,
which can be viewed as a by-product of speaking, whether intended or not.
The perlocutionary act is the bringing about of effects on the audience. The
perlocutionary act has perlocutionary effects. According to Austin,
perlocutionary acts consist in the production of effects upon the thoughts,
feelings, or actions of the addressee(s), speaker, or other parties, such as
causing people to refer to a certain ship as the Joseph Stalin, producing the
belief that Sam and Mary should be considered man and wife, convincing an
addressee of the truth of a statement, etc.
To take an example, consider the utterance in (1) uttered by a
husband to his wife at a party:
(1) It’s getting late
The locutionary meaning of the utterance in (1) is a simple reference to the
lateness of the hour; the illocutionary force of the act, which constitutes a
suggestion or a proposal, is equivalent to saying ‘Let’s go home now’; the
perlocutionary effect may be that of persuading the addressee to perform the
suggested action.
Though it is crucial under Austin’s system that we be able to
distinguish fairly sharply among the three types of acts, in practice the
distinction is often beset with problems and it is difficult to draw the
requisite lines. Austin argues that the locutionary act and the illocutionary act
are detachable and therefore the study of meaning may proceed
independently but is necessarily supplemented by a theory of illocutionary
acts. More troublesome is the distinction between the illocutionary act and
the perlocutionary act.
Austin suggests an operational test that allows us to distinguish
between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary acts. Under this test, if the
hypothetical illocutionary force can be paraphrased as an explicit
performative, then the act performed is an illocutionary act; if this is not
possible , then the act performed is a perlocutionary act.
Austin (1962:101) illustrates the distinction between these kinds of
acts with the example in (2).
86
(2) Shoot her!
Locutionary Act
Illocutionary Act
Perlocutionary Act
and thereby warns the addressee of impending danger, the utterance in (3)
can be interpreted as a speech act of warning, i.e. an illocutionary act of
warning because the explicit performative paraphrase could be “I warn you
that the bull is about to charge”. Another reasonable interpretation would be
that in this case, the warning of the addressee, i.e., the production of a feeling
of alarm, is a perlocutionary by-product of asserting that the bull is about to
charge. Many authors, such as Searle (1969, 1975a) and Allan (1998), seem
87
to accept the idea that potential expression by means of a performative
sentence is a sufficient criterion for the recognition of illocutions, while
others, e.g., Sadock (1977), do not.
he may not succeed in so christening the vessel, if, for instance, it is already
named otherwise or his not the appointed namer or there are no witnesses or
bottles of champagne.
Performatives have to meet certain conditions if they are to succeed
or be happy. Austin refers to these conditions as felicity conditions and
distinguishes the following three categories:
e.g, the absence of an uptake in the case of bets i.e. the procedure is not
carried out completely (violation of B)
C. Abuses, where the act succeeds, but the participants do not have the
ordinary and expected thoughts and feelings associated with the happy
performance of such an act. Insincere promises, mendacious findings of fact,
unfelt congratulations, apologies, etc. come under this rubric.
At this point, Austin’s theory of speech acts can be summed up along the
following lines:
89
Consider, as an illustration, the examples in (6):
(6a) I bet you 5 pounds it will rain tomorrow.
(6b) I am betting you 5 pounds it will rain tomorrow.
(6c) I betted you 5 pounds it would rain the following day.
(6e) He bets you 5 pounds it will rain tomorrow.
Only the example in (6a) is a performative, the others are constatives.
However, there are plenty of other uses of first person indicative sentences in
the simple present that can be said in demonstration, as a report of a
concurrent action. Consider the example in (7):
(7) I now beat the eggs till fluffy
Moreover, there are sentences which fit the formula in (5) but which can be
descriptive of activities under a variety of circumstances. Consider the
examples in (8):
(8a) I bet him every morning that it will rain – constative
(8b) On page 29 I protest against the verdict – constative
Consequently, Austin proposes another criterion in order to isolate
performatives alone: namely the self-referential adverb hereby:
(9) “I hereby verb-present-active X …”
Austin calls the forms that follow the formula in (9) explicit performatives,
opposing them with primary performatives (rather than with implicit or
inexplicit performatives.)
A contentious issue, however, seems to be cases when performative verbs
can be used non-performatively, as in the example (10), below:
(10)
A: How do you get me to throw all these parties?
B: I promise to come.
Although “I promise to come” fit the performative formula, nevertheless the
utterance is used non-performatively, i.e. descriptively.
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Apparently the formula is not a necessary criterion, since there are many
forms that differ from this canon and nevertheless seem intuitively to be
explicit performatives. The examples in (11) are performatives that deviate
from the performative formulae:
(11a) You are fired - passive voice
(11b) The court finds you guilty - the subject is not first person
(11c) You did it! – no performative verb
(11d) Guilty! – no verb
Austin therefore concluded that the performative formula was neither a
necessary nor a sufficient condition in order for a sentence to be called
performative.
There still are numerous clear cases that fit the performative formulae, but
the fact that explicit performatives seem to shade off into constatives and
other non-performative sentence types greatly weakens the utility of the
formulae as as a litmus for illocutionary force. The example in (12) is still
another case when the illocutionary act cannot be accomplished in terms of
an explicit performative formula.
(12) *I fire you.
5.2.4 Austin’s revised approach to the constantive vs. performative
distinction
In view of all these problems, Austin eventually rejects what he proposes at
the beginning. First, there is a shift from the view that performatives are a
special class of sentences with peculiar syntactic and pragmatic properties to
the view that there is a general class of performative utterances. This general
class of performative uttereances include explicit performatives (the old
familiar class) and implicit performatives or primary performatives, the
latter including lots of other kinds of utterances, if not all. Thus, there is a
shift from the dichotomy performative vs. constative to a general theory of
speech acts in which constatives are just particular members of a special sub-
case of performatives.
Explicit performatives such as I hereby warn you are interpreted as a
relatively specialized way of being unambiguous or specific about the act
one is performing in speaking. Instead of explicit performative, one can
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employ implicit performatives that make recourse to less explicit devices
that mark the illocutionary force, as shown in (13) below:
(13)
- mood as in:
e.g. Shut it! – instead of ‘I order you to shut it’
- adverbs
e.g. I’ll be call you without fail – instead of ‘I promise to call you’
- particles
e.g. Therefore X – instead of ‘I conclude that X’
- intonation to distinguish between a warning a question or a protest in
It’s going to charge
An important feature of implicit performatives, according to Austin, is that in
principle any implicit performative can be put into the form of an explicit
performative.
Initially Austin claimed that the only kinds of utterances that are not
doing actions as well as, or instead of reporting facts or events are
statements/constatives. Later in his William James Lectures, Austin rejects
the dichotomy between perfomatives and constatives and argues that there is
no incompatibility between utterances being truth-bearers and
simultaneously performing actions. An utterance like the one given in (14)
seems simultaneously to perform the action of warning and to issue a
prediction, which can later be assessed as true or false.
93
certain communicative goal and to get the addressee to reach this conclusion
on the basis of his or her having produced a particular utterance.
95
Table 5.1 The constitutive rules for assertion, thanking and warning (based
on Searle 1969)
Assert Thank (for) Warn
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force, and therefore referred to as illocutionary force indicating devices,
include: claim, assert, report, confirm, confess, etc.; e.g. – statements; they
carry the value true or false: they should match the world in order to be true;
their illocutionary point is to commit the S to something being the case, to
the truth of the expressed proposition.
Directives – direct the addressee towards doing something, i.e. they get the
H to do some volitional act; they a world-to-word direction of fit, i.e. the
world is adapted to the uttered words (they make the world fit words via the
hearer); the psychological state expressed: a wish, a desire; examples of
directives include orders, wishes; performative verbs: ask, order, command,
implore, beg, challenge, etc.
Commisives are those kinds of speech acts that speakers use to commit
themselves to some future action; they have a world-to-word direction of fit,
i.e. they make the world fit words via the speaker; the psychological state
expressed: an intention (they express what the speaker intends); examples of
commisives include promises, threats, refusals, pledges, etc.; performative
verbs: promise, swear, vow, etc.
Expressives are speech acts that state what the speaker feels. They express a
wide range of psychological states and can be likes, dislikes, statements of
pleasure, pain, joy, sorrow. They have no direction of fit; examples of
expressives include congratulations, condolences, etc.; performative verbs:
thank, congratulate, apologize, condole, etc.
Declarations are those kinds of speech acts that change the world via their
utterance. They correspond to Austin’s original class of performatives (i.e.
explicit performatives). They express no psychological state; they heavily
rely on extralinguistic conventions: the speaker has to have a special
institutional role, in a specific context in order to perform a declaration
felicitously; they have two directions of fit: word-to-world (make words fit
the world) and world-to-word (make the world fit words i.e. words change
the world); examples of declarations include excommunication, christening,
etc.; performative verbs: declare, baptize, name, appoint, elect, pronounce,
etc.
Two further features of Searle’s (1969) theory deserve a special
mention. First, he embraces Austin’s idea that a sufficient test for
illocutionary acts is that they can be performed by uttering an explicit
performative. He argues that more than one illocutionary act can be
accomplished by the utterance of a single, simple sentence. To illustrate this
point he gives as an example the case of a wife who says at a party, “It’s
97
really quite late”. In doing so the wife simultaneously performs the
illocutionary act of stating a fact and the illocutionary act of making a
suggestion equivalent to “I suggest that we go home.” Second, he noticed
that an illocutionary act is typically performed with a certain perlocutionary
effect in mind, an effect that follows from the essential condition: “Thus
requesting is, as a matter of its essential condition, an attempt to get the
hearer to do something …” (Searle 1969:71).
In uttering it the speaker is performing two speech acts: the literal act and the
indirect speech act. Interrogative sentences are used to formulate questions,
which in their turn are requests for information. In our example the
information is about the ability of the H to pass the salt and the relevant
answers are ‘yes, I can’ or ‘no, I can’t’. This is the direct/literal act such an
utterance is doing. However, this is not the speaker’s primary illocutionary
intent. The intended meaning/interpretation is that of an indirect speech act,
i.e. a request for action or a directive the explicit performative being ‘I
request of you to pass the salt’. In order to arrive at the interpretation
intended by the speaker we need to draw a series of inferences. This
inferential chain includes the following steps:
1) S could not be merely asking whether I (the addressee) have the ability to
pass the salt because it is mutually believed that the answer is ‘yes’; so the
question will be irrelevant, it will flout the maxim of relevance and it will
also sin against the maxim of quality by breaching the sincerity condition
associated with yes/no questions, namely S does not know and he sincerely
wants to know whether something is or is not the case.
2) Since S is believed to be cooperative (he is believed to be abiding by the
CP) than there is another illocutionary act that he is performing and that links
the circumstances to asking whether I (the addressee) have the ability to pass
the salt, such that in asking this question S is performing that act.
(a) A preparatory condition for any directive is H’s (the addressee’s) ability
to perform the act predicated, in this case passing the salt.
(b) Therefore S has asked me a question, the affirmative answer to which
would entail that the preparatory condition for requesting me the salt is
satisfied
99
(c) Since S has alluded to the satisfaction of a preparatory condition for a
request, then it is likely that he wants me to bring about the obedience
conditions for that request.
Thus applying this line of reasoning we reach the conclusion that:
3) S is asking me (H) whether I have the ability to pass the salt and is thereby
requesting me (H) to pass him the salt.
Consider the following statement which can be used as an apology.
Only the derivation of the indirect speech act is discussed:
I should never have done that.
1) S could not be merely stating that S should never have done that. Because
it is mutually believed by S and H that the act affected H in some negative
way, that S should not do such things. So S is not conveying information and
would be violating the maxim of quantity.
2) Since S is believed to be cooperative, there is another illocutionary act that
S is performing and that links the circumstances to stating that one should
never have done that act, such that in stating that one should never have done
that act, S could also be performing a second act.
3) S is stating that S should never have done that and thereby apologizing for
having done it. Basis for this inference: it is mutually believed that people
often regret doing things they believe they should not have done. Therefore
S’s primary illocutionary intent under these circumstances is to apologize for
doing A.
100
Requests are, by definition, impositions. Thus, they are likely to
trigger a clash with the principle of politeness. One way of resolving this is
the use of indirect forms. The direct imposition can be mitigated by avoiding
a direct demand and instead asking whether the addressee is willing to or
capable of carrying out the act. This gives the addressee the technical option
of not carrying out the implied request without losing face. Hence Would you
pass the salt? or Can you pass the salt? are more polite than Pass the salt.
These studies of politeness have given rise to a considerable interest in cross-
cultural comparisons of indirection strategies, and intercultural
communication in naturally occurring conversation.
5. 5 Conclusions
Speech act theory has been developed mainly by Austin (1962) and Searle
(1969, 1979). The theory of speech acts is based on the assumption that the
minimal unit of human communication is not a sentence or other expression,
but rather the performance of certain kinds of communicative acts, such as
requests and promises. For instance, the communication of a request by a
speaker (S) to a hearer (H) is an attempt by S to get H to do something. This
communication is successful or felicitous if H does perform the requested
act.
For philosophy of language in particular, the theory of speech acts
underscores the importance of the distinction between language use and
linguistic meaning (i.e. the distinction between pragmatics and semantics).
This distinction sharpens the formulation of questions about the nature of
linguistic competence, by separating issues related to capacities exercised in
linguistic interaction from those specific to knowledge of language itself.
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CHAPTER 6
CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
6.1 Introduction
16
Ethnomethodology is a sociological perspective pioneered by Harold Garfinkel which
concerns itself, among other things, with talk viewed as a means of sustaining reality being
at the same time part of that reality. Ehnomethodologists focus on various bits and pieces of
everyday life in an attempt to show how those who deal with such bits and pieces go about
doing so. As Leiter (1980:5) states, ‘the aim of ethnometodology […] is to study the process
of sense making (idealizing and formulizing) that members of society […] use to construct
the social world and its factual properties (its sense of being ready-made and independent of
perception).’
17
For a discussion of the boundaries of pragmatics and sociolinguistics, see Levinson
(1983).
103
Interactional sociolinguistics as articulated by Gumperz 18 and
Goffman 19 has been extensively applied within linguistics by Brown and
Levinson (1987), Schiffrin (1987), and Tannen (1989, 1994). Despite the
different sets of interest advanced by the two main proponents of
interactional sociolinguistics, Gumperz and Goffman, some stemming from
concerns about language and culture20 (Dil 1971; Gumperz 1982; Gumperz
1985), others from concerns about self and society (Goffman 1963; 1967;
1974) the underlying issues providing unity to interactional sociolinguistics
are the interaction between self and other, and self and context.
Both conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics are
necessarily analyses of language in use. As such, they cannot be restricted to
the description of linguistic forms independent of the purposes or functions
which these forms are designed to serve in human affairs. In contrast to
analysts whose work fits into one of the previously established subfields of
linguistics (and we refer here to theoretical linguistics), conversation analysts
and particularly sociolinguists of interactional orientation tend to focus on
the fact that language is designed for communication and varies according to
the contexts of use, being situated in particular circumstances of social life,
reflecting and adding meaning and structure in those circumstances
(Schiffrin 1987: 3; Schiffrin 1994a: 97).
In fact, it so is difficult to draw a clear dividing line between these
two approaches to discourse that some linguists refer to conversation
analysis as interactional sociolinguistics (Mercer 2000). Both conversation
analysis and interactional sociolinguistics draw upon naturally occurring
interactions (in institutional settings or among friends) for data and both
approaches to discourse pay a great deal of attention to transcriptions of
features of talk likely to serve as contextualization cues. Within this body of
research, social life is viewed as being constituted at the micro-level of social
interaction. Thus the major focus of concern is on the interpretive and
inferential processes whereby interactants acting in real time are able to
adopt the most appropriate strategies to achieve their desired social
meanings, including their identities, footings and alignments with others.
18
Gumperz’s work focuses on how interpretations of context are instrumental in the
communication of information and in understanding the speaker’s intention and/or discourse
strategy.
19
Goffman’s work focuses on how the organization of social life (in institutions,
interactions, etc.) provides contexts for making sense of both the conduct of self and the
communication with another.
20
Dil (1971) is a collection of Gumperz’s essays through 1971. The research reported in it is
grounded in an assumption basic to social and cultural anthropology: the meaning, structure
and use of language are socially and culturally relative.
104
These analytic approaches, together with the ethnography of speaking21,
have certain crucial elements in common, identified by Schiffrin as follows:
21
For a discussion of the points of contact and the differences in terms of methodology and
analysis of data see A. Duranti (1988).
105
the findings of conversation analytic works and the research practices
underlying those findings.
106
- the same system is equally functional both in face-to-face
interaction and in the absence of visual monitoring, as on the
telephone,
- the same system holds across various types of conversations
(small talk, conflict talk, business talk, etc.); it also holds
across things like gender, occupation, social class, political
persuasion, etc. (e.g. the fact that one party talks at a time and
speaker change recurs is not a feature of , say male
conversation or female conversation, or of middle-class
conversation)
(Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974)
22
The main bibliographical resources in this area are Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974)
on turn-taking and Schegloff (1882, 1996) on turn-organization, but also Sacks (1992),
Jefferson (1973, 1984), Lerner (1991, 1996a), and Schegloff (1999, 2000, 2002).
107
The number of TCUs that make up a turn can vary according to the
position of the turn. Second position turns in a sequence may be more
expansible than first position turns. For example, many turns following
questions appear to provide for multi-unit answers. Similarly, some practices
such as story preface work not to get an additional TCU in the turn, but to
neutralize the transition-relevance place of the possible completion of TCU
until some projected feature is delivered, e. g. until something that can be
analyzed as “funny” or “strange”, or the like has been told. This is the key
feature of the production of many discourse units in conversation such as
narratives or other types of extended units of talk (Schegloff 1996).
As pointed out by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974:701-3), the
turn-taking organization is composed of two types of resources, plus a set of
rules in which they are integrated. One resource is the turn-constructional
resource, composed of a set of types of units of talk – the TCUs mentioned
above. The second resource is the turn-allocational resource comprising
turn-allocational practices ordered as follows: the self-selecting practices are
invocable only when the other-selecting ones have not been employed. In
addition the following set of rules governs the transition of speakers so as to
minimize gap and overlap and they apply at a TRP:
When rule 1(c) has been applied by current speaker, then at the next TRP
rules 1(a)-(c) apply recursively until speaker change is effected.
108
selects himself to speak. Among the most commonly used turn-allocational
techniques we can mention the following:
(1)
Two competing theories have been proposed to account for how turn-taking
is achieved. More specifically, they explain how next speakers know when to
start talking. The theory proposed by Sacks and co-workers, known as the
projection theory. Its main tenet is that a next speaker anticipates or projects
when the current speaker will finish on the basis of contextual information,
and then starts talking at the projected TRP (Sacks et al., 1974). Within the
projection theory the notion of no-gap–no-overlap is a key concept.
The second turn-taking theory is known as the reaction or signal
theory, the proponents of which include, among others, Duncan (1972),
Kendon (1967), Yngve (1970). According to the reaction theory, a next
speaker starts talking as a direct reaction to a signal that the current speaker
is finished, or is about to finish.
Apparently, some of the followers of Sacks and colleagues have
interpreted no-gap–no-overlap in a narrow sense as literally zero gap and
zero overlap. This understanding of no-gap–no-overlap has then been taken
as support for a stronger claim: that turn-taking must rely entirely on the
ability to project upcoming turn-endings.
Typically, those who interpret no-gap–no-overlap as literally zero
gap and zero overlap argue that prosodic or other acoustic turn-taking signals
immediately before the silence cannot be of any relevance, simply because
there is no time to react to such signals (e.g. Bockgard, 2007; de Ruiter et al.,
2006; Levinson, 1983). Instead, it is argued that turn-taking is so precise and
next speakers manage to start with no gap and no overlap because they rely
on anticipating the end of the current turn on the basis of its syntactic
features and contextual cues.
Crucially, for projection to result in zero gap and zero overlap, next
speakers have to project not only what the current speaker will say, but also
the exact point in time when the current finishes. Between-speaker interval
distributions provide empirical evidence that can support or challenge the
claims of precision timing in turn-taking.
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In their seminal article on turn-taking and in subsequent work, Sacks,
Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) acknowledge the existence such turn-taking
irregularities as silence and overlapping talk. The next two sections focus
these deviations from no-gap-no-overlap feature as they are conceptualized
and integrated in the main turn-taking system advanced by the projection
theory.
23
In the relevant literature any combination involving the following three factors has been
used in the description and classification of silences in conversation: (ii) turn/speaker, and
(iii) silences/pauses/intervals/transitions have been used for concepts similar to gaps and
duration of gaps at some point in time (e.g. Bull, 1996; Roberts, Francis and Morgan, 2006;
ten Bosch, Oostdijk and Boves, 2005; ten Bosch, Oostdijk and de Ruiter, 2004b). Regarding
the terminology for silences the literature is rich in terms such as alternation silences (Brady,
1968), switching pauses (Jaffe and Feldstein, 1970), (positive) switch time or switch pauses
(Sellen, 1995), transition pauses (Walker and Trimboli, 1982), (positive) floor transfer
offsets (de Ruiter et al., 2006), or just silent or unfilled pauses (e.g. Campione and Veronis,
2002; Duncan, 1972; Maclay and Osgood, 1959; McInnes and Attwater, 2004; Weilhammer
and Rabold, 2003).
24
Various factors have been shown to influence the distribution of pause, gap and overlap.
Empirical research has shown that increased stress (induced in an interview situation
designed to elicit information of an intimate and embarrassing nature) is associated with
markedly shorter gaps (Jaffe and Feldstein, 1970). Similarly, competitive conversations, for
example conversations involving arguments, have significantly shorter gaps than
cooperative conversations, such as friendly chats (Trimboli and Walker, 1984). Some
studies reported that gap durations tend to increase with cognitive load (Cappella 1979). It
112
Subsequent work by the same authors has shown transitions with
slight gap to occur with greater frequency. For example, Jefferson (1984: 8),
argued that transitions with slight gap ‘‘of all the transition-place points, this
is the most frequently used. A recipient/next speaker does not start up in
‘terminal overlap’, nor ‘latched’ to the very point of possible completion, but
permits just a bit of space between the end of a prior utterance and the start
of his own’’. As a result of its high frequency, this position is viewed as the
unmarked one and described by Jefferson as (1984:8-9) a position when “one
doesn’t get a sense of a next utterance being ‘pushed up against’ or into the
prior, nor of its being ‘delayed’. It simply occurs next’’. Similarly, Schegloff
(2000) who uses the term normal value of the transition space for the same
case, quantifies ‘‘just a bit of space’’ as roughly one syllable, corresponding
to a silent interval of about 150–250 ms.
(a) By allocating a turn to the self-selector who starts first, Rule 1b can
encourage an earliest possible start for each self-selector, providing thus for
overlap by competing self-selectors for a next turn, if each calculates his start
to be earliest possible start at a possible TRP and generating simultaneous
starts.
(b) Overlap can also derive from the projectability of possible completion or
transition-relevance places. Variation in the articulation of the projected last
part of a last component in a turn’s talk is likely to produce overlap between
a current turn and a next turn.
has been shown that more complex tasks and lack of familiarity with tasks result in longer
gaps (Bull and Aylett, 1998). Several studies have furthermore observed longer gaps in
dialogues where the participants have eye contact than in dialogues without eye contact
(Beattie and Barnard, 1979; Bull and Aylett, 1998; Jaffe and Feldstein, 1970; ten Bosch,
Oostdijk, and de Ruiter, 2004).
25
It becomes apparent that there are two ways of conceptualizing gaps and overlaps in the
previous literature. Gaps and overlaps may be treated as entirely different phenomena. Or,
alternatively, they are conceptualized as two sides of a single continuous metric (with
negative values for overlaps, and positive values for gaps) that measures the relationship
between one person ending a stretch of speech and another starting one (de Ruiter et al.,
2006; Norwine and Murphy, 1938; Sellen, 1995).
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Overlapping talk has been divided into two classes: competitive – i.e.
problematic, in need of overlap resolution system26 - and non-competitive.
The following configurations of simultaneous talk are treated as non-
problematic:
Most overlaps are over very quickly. Others, however, persist at great
length. The latter are managed and resolved by participants by means of an
overlap resolution device, which is composed of three elements: a set of
resources (i.e. departures from the normal course of production) for overlap-
oriented turn production, a set of places where these resources come into
play, and a so-called interactional ‘logic’ according to which those resources
in those places are “moves of a describable sort in a competitive sequential
topography” (Schegloff 2000a).
The disruptive nature of competitive overlapping talk is easily
recognizable as it is reflected in deflections from the normal course of
production such as louder volume, higher pitch, faster or slower pace,
repairs of certain items within the same turn (when, for instance, a speaker
repeatedly cuts off a word or a phrase in progress and the repeats it only to
cut it off at the same point and redo the entire operation).
It has been argued by those concerned with language and gender
research that men and women view overlapping talk differently and use it for
different purposes: men tend to use overlapping talk to grab the floor and to
26
For an extensive account, see Schegloff (2000a, 2002).
114
dominate the conversational space while women use it as means of showing
involvement in the conversation and in their conversationalist partner (cf.
Maltz and Borker 1982; Eckert 1990; Coates 1993; Fishman 1997).
However, this is where the argument stopped. Although they supplied
excerpts from naturally-occurring conversations to support their statement, in
the analysis of these excerpts participants to conversation were not actually
shown to orient themselves to one interpretation or another.
Conversation analytic resources and practices can prove fruitful to
language and gender research on overlapping talk since it supplies a
theoretical framework that broadens our understanding of gender-related
overlapping talk by showing participants in talk-in-interaction as selecting
and deploying conversational strategies to accomplish one recognizable
action or another (i.e. doing competitive or cooperative overlapping talk).
- adjacent,
- produced by different speakers,
- ordered as a first part and a second part,
- typed, i.e. they belong in certain types, so that a particular first part requires
a particular second or range of second parts
Having produced a first part of some pair, current speaker must stop
speaking, and next speaker must produce at that point a second part of the
same pair.
6.5 Pre-sequences
Conversation analysts claim that adjacency pairs are the fundamental unit of
conversational organization. Although conversation proceeds in a pair-wise
fashion, there are also ways that a pair can be expanded before its initiation
though the use of pre-sequences, after its completion by means of post-
elaborations, or even during its creation, through the use of insertion
sequences.
Pre-sequences are usually, and in some cases always, felt to be
precursors to some other utterance or a sequence of utterances. Technically,
they can be viewed as purely formal tools of conversation management, as
techniques for selecting next speaker. However, they are more than that.
They occupy a position which is midway between formal and content-related
aspects of conversation, since they may or may not forward a sequence to its
prefigured action according to the category of response they elicit.
116
Types of pre-sequences
(2)
(3)
A: Are you studying?
B: No, I’m just reading.
(4)
A: Guess what?
B: What?
A: Professor Smith came in this morning and put another book on his order
117
The analysis of empirical data has shown that pre-sequences evince the
following structure:
(Schegloff 1988)
T1 – as above
T2 – answer indicates that the precondition on action does not obtain often
so formulated as to discourage the foreseeable action
T3 – withholding the prefigured action, usually with a report of what would
have been done in T3, by way of explanation of T1
(Schegloff 1988)
The example in (5) illustrates a pre-arrangement which does not forward the
sequence to the prefigured actions. The turn in position 2 shows that
arrangements for future contact cannot be made their function is to check
whether arrangements for future contact can be made.
(5)
118
6.6 Repair
27
Relevant bibliographical resources include among others Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks
(1977); Schegloff (1979, 1987a, 1992, 1997a, 1997b, 2000b) and Jefferson (1974, 1987)
28
For an extensive analysis of these two types of floor, see Edelski (1993).
119
Consistent use of these strategies (or their non-deployment) would reinforce
participants’ orientation towards communal or agentic conversational styles
respectively.
Some tying techniques, especially those mentioned in (1) and (2) can
be used as a means of building sentences collaboratively. In producing a
120
collaboratively built sentence, a speaker A produces a syntactically and
semantically complete turn made up of a single sentence which is then turned
by another party B into a seemingly incomplete turn which then B completes
by adding a dependent clause or prepositional phrase which are syntactically
and semantically consistent with the initial turn. The first utterance is a
complete sentence on its own, but the second utterance is not a sentence. It
only becomes a sentence together with the first one. The example in (W/6),
due to Sacks (1995), illustrates the use of collaboratively built sentences in
teenagers’ discourse:
(6)
(Sacks 1995)
As Sacks (1995) put it: “If you want to find a way of showing somebody that
what you want is to be with them, then the best way to do that is to find some
way of dividing a task that is not easily dividable and which clearly can be
done by either person alone”. Thus, collaboratively built sentences can be
used as strategic devices to show that the people who produce them are close
to each other and they know what is on each other’s minds.
121
Another strategy that can be used in the monitoring of conversation,
especially when silence seems to be present is asking questions. Apart from
functioning as requests for information or clarification, questions can be used
as strategic devices for keeping the flow of conversation going.
As a rule, a person who asks a question in ordinary conversation has
the right to talk again after the addressee talks. This rule provides a
convenient way of generating blocks of talk. On the other hand, one can
produce an answer to a question and append to it another question and thus
taking over, i.e. gaining the floor and therefore being in control of the
conversation.
Sacks (1995) points out that there can be a sense in which, while one
is asking questions they could not be said to be in control. Consider the
examples in (7) and (8):
(7)
A: Is your husband a police officer?
B: No. (the questioner is in control of the conversation)
Sacks (1995)
(8)
Sacks (1995)
(9)
122
(10)
(11)
Thus, a first person starts an utterance that can be a complete sentence and
the second person appends a prepositional phrase to it, which is syntactically
coherent with the previous sentence and may have question intonation.
Another way of speakers’ going about monitoring when they want or
ought to be talking or when embarrassing silence seems to be present is the
use of floor seekers. A characteristic feature of floor seekers is that they are
utterances that have as their feature relative to selection, that they are
attempts to have their speaker selected as next speaker in the next turn. They
normally do not select a next speaker (anyone can answer them). Their
function, however, is to have the person who produces them reselected by
whoever self-selects as next speaker (Sacks 1995). The example in (12) is an
illustration of floor seekers.
(12)
They are the first part of an adjacency pair which regularly takes the format
of a pre-sequence, namely a pre-announcement. Like various other first part
members they do not necessarily question intonation. They can be delivered
simply flat out as “I heard a good joke”. Moreover, if they are not responded
123
they are repeated. By producing a floor seeker one can get the floor, i.e. the
right to deliver the next turn. Even if what they get is ‘Big deal’ that is a
good enough take-off point.
Floor seekers are used as strategic devices to get an occasion to tell a
story or a joke. One can take almost anything said and use it in a controlled
fashion, turning it thus into a way of getting the floor. Consider the example
in (13):
(13)
(Sacks 1995)
This strategy enables us to distinguish between: (i) having the floor in the
sense of being a speaker while others are hearers, something which floor
seekers achieve; and (ii) having the floor in the sense of being a speaker
while others are doing whatever they please.
Within an extended turn one way of indicating that one is listening
includes head nods, smiles, facial expressions, gestures and most commonly
vocal indications referred Minimal responses, also referred to as back-
channel communication (Yngve 1970), assent terms (Woods 1988) or
accompaniment signals29(e.g. uh-uh, yeah, mm, etc.). These types of signals
provide feedback to the current speaker that his message is being received.
Schegloff (1982) identifies two usages of minimal responses. The
most common usage is to exhibit on the part of its producer an understanding
that an extended unit of talk is underway by another and that this unit is not
yet complete. When so used utterances such as uh huh are termed
continuers30. In producing a minimal response functioning as a continuer,
speakers display their understanding that an extended turn is underway and
29
Throughout the literature two main characterizations have been offered to deal with
minimal responses. According to one, they are evidence of attention and understanding on
the listener’s part. Thus according to Kendon (1967:44), in producing a minimal response
the addressee ‘…appears to do no more than signal that he is attending and following what
is being said’. A second characterization of such behaviour is that it ‘…keeps the
conversation going smoothly’ (Dittman and Llewellyn 1967:342) or ‘… appears to provide
the auditor with a means for participating actively in the conversation thus facilitating the
general coordination of action by both participants’ (Duncan and Fiske 1977: 202-203).
30
Other researchers have used the term facilitative for a continuer (Reid 1995).
124
show their intention to pass the opportunity to take a turn at talk and in so
doing they facilitate the continuation of the turn that is underway. As an
illustration of the use of minimal responses as continuers consider the
excerpt in (14) which shows Maria to be attending to the ongoing talk at
lines 2, 8, 13, and 18. This involves, on the one hand, Maria’s refraining
from initiating a turn in order to show that she does not object to her
partner’s having the floor and producing an extended unit of talk.
(14)
1 Alina: şi acum io ştiam c-aveam nişte oase în frigider de vită
and now I knew I had some beef bones in the fridge
2 Maria: mhm
mhm
3 Maria: şi zic lasă din oasele alea fac ciorbă şi din carne fac spaghete
and I thought I’d make some soup with those bones and spagetti with the
meat
4 şi cînd dimineaţa am constatat că de fapt aveam aveam numai carne
but in the morning I noticed that in fact I had only meat
5 şi zic a:: şi ciorbă din carne de vită şi spaghete tot–
and I thought, well, beef soup and spagetti as well
6 toate sînt prea cu carne de vită
too much beef in everything
7 lasă o să fac p[ui
well, I’ll cook some [poultry
8 Maria: [mhm=
mhm
9 Alina: =cu spaghete=
with spaghetti
10 Alina: =şi le-am făcut
so I cooked them
11 le-am fiert pe ele
I‘ve boiled them
12 apoi am făcut un sos cu ceapă, usturoi, bulion şi un cub de Knorr de pui
then I made a sauce with onion, garlic, tomato paste and a Knorr poultry
cube
13 Maria: mhm
mhm
14 Alina: ca să aibă cît de cît gust de pui
to taste a little bit like poultry
15 Maria: [((laughing))
16 Alina: [((laughing))
17 Alina: aşa şi apoi am pus carne de pui tăiată aşa fîşii lun[gi
so, and next I put some beef carved in long strips
18 Maria: [mhm
125
mhm
(Hornoiu 2016)
(15)
1 Raluca: dacǎ ar fi totul prea frumos aşa ştii cînd e prea bine ştii cǎ a greşit undeva
if everything was too good, then, you know, when it’s too good, you know
that he’s done something wrong
2 Mona: mhm
mhm
3 Raluca: ştii şi te şi plictiseşti la un moment dat
you know, and you get bored at some point
126
4 Mona: mhm
mhm
5 Raluca: de atîta bine omu’ se plictiseşte
if everything is too good, one gets bored
(Hornoiu 2016)
(16)
(Hornoiu 2016)
In line 1 Iulia uses her first question (“ai fost la croitoreasă”) to establish a
topic (i.e. the dressmaker) on which to talk. Since Maria seems to be
unwilling to discuss it, Iulia makes a second attempt to launch the
conversation in line 3 where she makes use of another question to invite
Maria to participate. Maria’s answer in 5 seems to be more encouraging,
offering a piece of information that can be turned into a good take-off point.
From this point on, Iulia asks a series of questions in lines 6, 8 and 18. Our
assumption is that Iulia is not as much interested in the information these
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questions elicit as she is in ensuring that conversation goes on. In other
words, these questions are rather phatic in intent: what exactly is talked
about seems to be less important than the fact that talk itself occurs.
Apparently Iulia has achieved her aim of keeping the conversation
flowing: Maria seems to be willing to contribute to the topic as her turns at
speaking become longer. Both conversational exchanges demonstrate how
questions can be used to keep the flow of conversation going when
willingness to engage in interaction is equivalent to being part of a
relationship.
In the absence of some obvious reason for the conversation to take place, by
virtue of two persons being co-present and nothing else, one can initiate an
exchange by making use of a type of question whose function is to indicate
that although it does not seem to be the case, there is indeed a reason. Sacks
(1995) is the first to draw attention to this strategy which he calls accounts
for conversations The examples in (17) illustrate this conversational
strategy:
This type of questions provides for the fact that the speaker and the
addressee seem to know each other, even though this is not the case. If,
however, it turns out that they do, then the conversation in question can take
place as a ‘further conversation’. They make up a class of questions which
provide an account for a conversation to take place and develop. Other
examples include the utterances indicated by ‘→’ in (18):
(18)
These questions are standardized in that they provide for the relevance of the
turn-taking rules, such that one knows what an answer to such a question
looks like, so that one who has asked the question can know when the
utterance that stands for an answer will have been finished providing thus
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that the other can talk again. Unlike discursive talk, where it may not be clear
when the speaker has finished, this type of standardized questions is
convenient when someone makes an effort to get acquainted to the other
person, as they do not need to wait too long after the other has stopped. Thus,
accounts for conversation are an efficient strategy that enables the
conversation to unfold smoothly with no or very little silence (waiting too
long may imply withdrawal from the interaction and may be perceived as
withdrawing from the relationship) or overlapping talk (interrupting the
interlocutor is generally viewed as being rude).
6.10 Conclusions
Because this book does not focus on conversation analysis, certain key areas
of CA research such as preference organization and repair have not been
addressed; even topics for topics that we have considered, such as turn-
taking, sequential organization, overlapping talk, it provided a cursory
examination. It is, therefore, advisable for readers to familiarize themselves
with more in-depth introductions to CA.
Good comprehensive accounts can be found in Hutchby and Wooffitt
(1998) and ten Have (1999). Short, sophisticated chapter-length
introductions can be found in Drew (1994) and Heritage and Atkinson
(1984). Heritage (1984a) offers an excellent introduction to CA in his superb
account of ethnomethodology and its origins. A short but useful discussion
of the relationship between CA, Goffman and Garfinkel can be found in
Heritage (2001).
On the relationship between CA and ethnomethodology should first
consult Garfinkel (1967), Heritage (1984a) and Clayman and Maynard
(1995) offer useful. In order to explore how the origins of CA were
influenced by Goffman’s studies of the moral and social order of everyday
life, an extended and focused treatment can be found in Schegloff (1988a).
Manning (1992) offers a very good oveview of Goffman’s work.
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A GLOSSARY OF PRAGMATICS
A
ADDRESSEE see under speech event participants
ADJACENCY PAIRS see under conversational analysis
AGREEMENT MAXIM One of the maxims of politeness proposed by Leech.
The maxim is fairly straightforward. It instructs the speaker to:
Maximise agreement with hearer.
Minimise disagreement with hearer.
The effect of this maxim is illustrated in the following:
A: Do you agree with me?
B: Yes. (slightly less polite); Absolutely. (more polite)
A: Do you agree with me?
B: No (less polite); Up to a point, but … (more polite)
ANAPHORA, ANAPHOR An anaphor is an expression that must be interpreted
via another expression called the ‘antecedent’, which typically occurs earlier
in the discourse. The term ‘anaphora’ refers to this phenomenon. In the
examples below, the anaphor and its antecedent are given in bold type:
1. John came in and he lit the fire.
2. Pete was driving a blue car. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t insured.
3. Barack Obama arrived in London this morning. The President will
address the Cabinet tomorrow.
This type of anaphora is called ‘coreferential anaphora’, because anaphor
and antecedent share the same referent.
In ‘non-coreferential anaphora’, as in John shot a fox; Mike shot one, too,
the default interpretation is that anaphor and antecedent have different
referents. In some cases, the antecedent occurs later in the discourse; this is
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sometimes called ‘cataphora’. A distinction should be made between
anaphoric and exophoric expressions. The latter refer directly rather than
through antecedents:
(Woman pointing to a man) He was the one who snatched my bag.
APPROBATION and MODESTY MAXIMS These belong in the set of maxims
of politeness proposed by Leech. The former being oriented towards the
hearer, while the latter towards the speaker. Leech’s formulations of these
maxims (slightly modified) are as follows:
Approbation Maxim: Maximise praise of hearer.
Minimise dispraise of hearer.
Modesty Maxim: Minimise praise of self.
Maximise dispraise of self.
‘Dispraise’ includes criticism, blame, belittlement, etc. These two maxims
are self-explanatory: exaggerate anything that puts the hearer in a relatively
good light, and understate anything that puts the hearer in a relatively bad
light. These maxims instruct participants in the speech event that self-
directed boasting is impolite and self-belittlement is polite:
A: You were brilliant!
B: Yes, wasn’t I? (less polite)/ I was lucky. (more polite)
A: What a fool I’ve been!
B: Indeed. (less polite)/ These things happen. (more polite)
B
BYSTANDER see under speech event participant
C
CATAPHORA see under anaphora
CLAUSAL IMPLICATURES see under generalised vs. particularized
conversational implicatures
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COMMON GROUND This refers to aspects of knowledge that participants in
the speech event assume to be shared and therefore do not need to be spelled
out. It includes what can be perceived in the immediate context, together
with knowledge of the language, general world knowledge, shared attitudes,
shared world views, and so on.
COMPETENCE VS PERFORMANCE This distinction is proposed by Chomsky.
Competence is conceived as the neutral representation of the system as it
exists in the mind of an ideal language user. Performance basically refers to
the processes involved in the production of utterances, rather than the
produced utterances themselves.
COMPOSITIONALITY (PRINCIPLE OF) According to the principle of
compositionality, the meaning of a complex expression is a compositional
function of the meanings of its parts. In other words, we work out the
meaning of an expression containing more than one meaningful element by
combining the meanings of its constituents. So, to get the meaning of, say,
The cat ate the fish, we add together the meanings of the individual items:
‘The cat ate the fish’ = ‘the’ + ‘cat’ + ‘ate’ + ‘the’ + ‘fish’
However, not all expressions of a language conform to this principle. Those
that do are described as ‘compositional’; those that do not are described as
‘non-compositional’ or ‘semantically opaque’. Semantic opacity (which is a
matter of degree) is a prototypical characteristic of idioms.
CONSTRAINTS ON RELEVANCE This notion is used by proponents of
Relevance Theory to account for certain aspects of non-propositional
meaning, especially the meanings of elements such as but or what’s more.
For instance, compare the pair but vs. and. Clearly, the sentences Liz is
blonde and beautiful and Liz is blonde but beautiful do not convey the same
meaning. Yet they have the same propositional content: they are true and
false in the same circumstances. The difference between but and and relates
to the relevance of what follows. The word but indicates that the information
that follows it contradicts some belief or assumption on the part of the
hearer. Similarly, what’s more is interpreted as indicating that what follows,
in the speaker’s opinion, reinforces some prior belief or opinion.
CONTEXT An essential factor in the interpretation of utterances and
expressions. The most important aspects of context are: (1) preceding and
following utterances and/or expressions (‘co-text’), (2) the immediate
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physical situation, (3) the wider situation, including social and power
relations, and (4) knowledge presumed shared between speaker and hearer.
CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURES These are components of the meanings of
utterances which are not propositional in nature, but which have a stable
association with particular linguistic expressions and which therefore cannot
be cancelled without causing anomalous sentences or utterances. For
instance, John hasn’t registered yet and John hasn’t registered are
propositionally identical, but the presence of yet in the former implicates that
John is still expected to arrive. Contradicting this implicit meaning leads to
oddness: ?John hasn’t registered yet and I know for a fact he does not intend
to.
CONVERSATIONAL ANALYSIS This is an area of study, nowadays usually
considered a branch of pragmatics, concerned with the structure of naturally
occurring conversation. The approach is strictly empirical. The empirical
data consist of recordings and transcripts of naturally-occurring
conversations. The empirical data are analyzed without theoretical
preconceptions, whether semantic, philosophical, or deriving from other
branches of pragmatics. The aim is to extract regularities of regarding the
overall organization and aspects of turn-taking. The basic unit of description
in conversational analysis is the ‘turn’ (sometimes called the ‘turn
constructional unit’). This is an uninterrupted contribution of one speaker to
a conversation, generally followed and preceded by a change of speaker
unless it represents the beginning or end of the conversation. Turns are said
to be ‘latched’ if there is no detectable gap between the end of one turn and
the beginning of the next. Sometimes turns, or parts of turns may be
delivered in ‘overlap’. When overlapping talk occurs a resolution system is
applied to deal with it, since the main point of conversational structure is to
minimize gap and overlap. A slight pause may signal a ‘transition-relevance
place’, a place where speaker change may occur. A speaker may start to say
something, then change their mind about what to say; this phenomenon is
known as a ‘repair’. Conversations are structured in a number of ways. For
instance, certain utterances serve to initiate a conversation (e.g. Hi!), while
others serve to terminate them (e.g. See you later!). Some turns form natural
pairs, called ‘adjacency pairs’. Examples of these are question and answer,
greeting and response greeting, invitation and acceptance or refusal, and
apology and acceptance or rejection.
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES One of two basic types of implicature
(the other type being conventional implicatures). Conversational
implicatures have four main characteristic properties:
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1. They are not entailments, that is, they do not follow logically from what
is said. For instance, we can infer from ‘Pete has a cousin’ that ‘At least one
of Pete’s parents is not an only child’, but since this is an entailment it is not
a conversational implicature. In the example below:
A: Can I speak to Jane?
B: Jane’s in the shower.
the inference from B’s answer, that Jane is not able to take a telephone call,
is not an entailment, but an implicature
2. They are ‘cancellable’ (or ‘defeasible’). They are relatively weak
inferences and can be denied by the speaker without contradiction. For
instance, B’s reply in the following would normally be taken to mean ‘I
don’t intend to tell you’:
A: How old is she?
B: That’s none of your business.
If B added ‘But I’ll tell you, anyway’ this would cancel the inference, but no
self-contradiction arises. This is a characteristic feature of conversational
implicatures. In contrast, an attempt to cancel an entailment leads to a
contradiction:
?Pete has a cousin, but both his parents are onlychildren.
3. Implicatures are context dependent or ‘context sensitive’, in that the same
proposition expressed in a different context can give rise to different
implicatures. Compare the two exchanges below:
A: Can I speak to Jane?
B: Jane’s in the shower.
vs.
A: I think I’ll take a shower.
B: Jane’s in the shower.
In the latter B’s utterance implicates ‘You can’t take a shower just yet’, not
‘Jane can’t accept a phone call’.
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4. They are ‘non-detachable’. In a particular context the same proposition
expressed in different words will give rise to the same implicature. In other
words, the implicature is not tied to a particular form of words (cf.
conventional implicatures). For instance, if B in 2 above had said ‘That
doesn’t concern you’, the implicature would be the same.
5. They are ‘calculable’. They can be worked out on the basis of using
general principles (e.g. the co-operative principle and the Gricean
conversational maxims) rather than requiring specific knowledge, such as a
private arrangement between A and B that if one says X it will mean Y. (See
also under generalised vs particularised conversational implicatures.)
CO-OPERATIVE PRINCIPLE This principle was proposed by the philosopher
Grice, in his theory of implicature, to account for how conversational
implicatures arise. In Grice’s view, a conversation is a co-operative activity
in which participants tacitly agree to abide by certain norms. His formulation
of the general principle runs as follows: “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.” Grice spelled out the norms in greater detail in the form of a set of
maxims of conversation.
COREFERENTIAL ANAPHORA see under anaphora
COST-BENEFIT SCALE see under Tact and Generosity Maxims
CO-TEXT see under context
D
DECLARATIVE This is usually considered to be grammatically the most
basic sentence form (John is lazy, as opposed to Is John lazy?, Don’t be lazy,
John! or How lazy John is!). Prototypically, the declarative form encodes a
statement, that is, a proposition, together with a commitment to its truth.
The basic meaning of a declarative is related to the meanings of explicit
performative verbs such as state, assert, declare, aver, announce, and so
on, but is more general than any of these. A declarative sentence can acquire
additional illocutionary force through implicature, as in There’s ice on the
road uttered as a warning.
DEIXIS, DEICTIC EXPRESSIONS Deictic expressions form a subtype of
definite referring expressions. They can be viewed as expressions which
‘point to’ their referents. Usage of the term ‘deixis’ is variable, but most
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typically it designates referring expressions which indicate the location of
referents along certain dimensions, using the speaker (and time and place of
speaking) as a reference point or ‘deictic centre’. The deictic centre is
generally organized in an egocentric way, i.e. the referents of these
expressions are established relative to the speaker, the time when the speaker
delivers his utterance (i.e. the coding time) and the speaker’s location at
coding time. An example is the use of this and that. In Can you pass me that
newspaper, the newspaper in question is typically relatively distant from the
speaker; however, once the speaker receives the newspaper, any further
reference to it will require a different deictic element: I’m going to have to
stop buying this newspaper. A change of this sort, made necessary by a
change in the relation between the referent and the speaker, is diagnostic for
a deictic element (items like this and that are sometimes called ‘shifters’).
Certain verbs of motion encode direction relative to one of the participants in
a speech situation, and may thus be called deictic. For instance, come
denotes motion towards either speaker or hearer (Come and see me
sometime, I’ll come and see you tomorrow), while go denotes motion
towards a third person (You/I should go and see him). The verbs bring and
take have a similar relation (I’ll bring it to you, I’ll take it to him). There are
three main sub-types of deixis: spatial, temporal, and person deixis, and
two minor sub-types: social and discourse deixis. Occasionally, the deictic
centre is not the speaker (see under projected deixis).
DISCOURSE DEIXIS It concerns reference to discourse items which occur
either before or after the current time of speaking. When functioning as
discourse deixis, that typically refers to a previously occurring item, and this
to something which is still to come: That was the best story I’ve heard for a
long time, Wait till you hear this … Expressions such as therefore, however,
on the other hand, anyway which relate portions of earlier discourse to
portions of later discourse, are also included under discourse deixis. They
express how the utterance is related to surrounding discourse.
DISCOURSE MARKERS A category of expressions which includes such items
as well, oh, then, so, but. They are grammatically optional, in that omitting
them does not result in ungrammaticality, and they mark boundaries between
units of discourse. Their typical functions include:
1. They carry expressive meaning (they may also have propositional
meaning).
2. They contribute to, or emphasize coherence relations in discourse.
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3. They act as constraints on relevance. (These are not mutually exclusive.)
E
EAVESDROPPER see under speech event participant
F
FELICITY CONDITIONS These are conditions that must be satisfied for a
speech act to be successfully performed. They can be grouped under three
headings: preparatory conditions, sincerity conditions, and essential
conditions.
1. Preparatory conditions define an appropriate setting for the act, including
the speaker’s intentions and qualifications. For instance, someone uttering
the words I pronounce you man and wife has not sealed the union of a man
and a woman unless he or she is properly qualified, and does so in the course
of an official marriage ceremony; the issuer of a command must have
authority over the addressee, and the act must be both possible and not
already carried out. If the preparatory conditions are not satisfied, the speech
act has not been validly performed. In other words, it is said to have
‘misfired’.
3. Essential conditions define the essential nature of the speech act. For
instance, if someone makes a promise, they must intend their utterance to
count as putting them under an obligation to carry out what is promised; in
the case of I name this ship … the speaker must intend the utterance to count
as conferring a name on the ship; in making a statement, a speaker must
intend it to be taken as true, and so on. If the essential conditions for a
particular speech act are not met, then merely producing the right form of
utterance does not result in the speech act being performed. For instance,
producing The King of France is bald in a logic class would not normally
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count as a statement committing the speaker to its truth. Notice that this is
different from sincerity: someone telling a lie intends their statement to be
taken as the truth.
Notice that these different forms not only highlight different items, but also
introduce different presuppositions. Foregrounding can also be achieved
grammatically:
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It was Pete who did the washing up yesterday.
It was yesterday that Pete did the washing up.
What Pete did yesterday was the washing up.
It was the washing up that Pete did yesterday.
Structures like those illustrated above are called ‘focusing devices’, and the
foregrounded part of the utterance is called the ‘focus’.
G
GENERALIZED VS PARTICULARIZED CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
These implicatures arise on the basis of the speaker’s following the maxims
of conversation. A distinction can be drawn between two types of
conversational implicature. An implicature counts as ‘generalized’ if it is a
default reading, that is to say it arises unless it is explicitly cancelled and is
to that extent independent of context. For instance, Some of the parents came
to the meeting will normally imply that not all of them did. But in Some of
the parents, if not all of them, came to the meeting the implicature ‘not all’ is
cancelled. The fact that this is not anomalous shows that we are not dealing
with an entailment. A ‘particularized’ implicature is one that depends on
specific contexts and is not a default message component. For instance, Jane
is in the shower does not convey a default message component ‘She cannot
come to the telephone’. This requires a particular context, such as the one
given below:
1. I-implicatures depend on the notion that we do not need to spell out what
the hearer would expect to be normally the case. For instance, in the case of
This car costs £15,000, we do not need to be told that the price includes the
wheels.
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2. M-implicatures are based on the principle that if a speaker avoids a
standard way of saying something, then they do not wish to convey the
standard meaning. For instance, if an offering at breakfast is described as
‘partially charred pieces of bread’, rather than ‘toast’ we are entitled to
assume that it somehow falls short of standard expectations for toast.
Pete washed the dishes. (in answer to Who washed the dishes?)
Pete washed the dishes. (in answer to What did Pete do?)
H
HEDGE An expression which weakens a speaker’s commitment to some
aspect of an assertion:
She was wearing a sort of turban.
I’ve more or less finished the job.
As far as I can see, the plan will never succeed.
She’s quite shy, in a way.
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I
IMPLICATURES These are related to the meanings of utterances which,
although intended, are not strictly part of ‘what is said’ in the act of
utterance, nor do they follow logically from what is said. There are two basic
sorts of implicature: (a) those which have a stable association with particular
linguistic expressions (conventional implicatures), such as the element of
surprise associated with yet in Haven’t you finished yet? (speaker does not
actually say he or she is surprised), and (b) those which must be inferred in
relation to a context and the maxims of conversation (conversational
implicatures), such as the implied negative in B’s reply in:
INDIRECT SPEECH ACT This is an utterance that has the typical form of one
kind of speech act, but which functions, either typically or in specific
contexts, as a different type of speech act. Many instances of indirect speech
acts are highly conventionalized. The following are typical:
1. You will do as I say has the form of an assertive (i.e. makes a statement),
but commonly functions as a directive (i.e. tries to get someone to do
something).
2. Would you mind if I opened the window? superficially is a question
inquiring about the hearer’s attitude to a hypothetical event, but is a frequent
way of requesting permission.
3. Could you lend me a hundred pounds? literally is a question regarding the
hearer’s ability to do something, but is conventionally used as a (relatively
polite) directive or request.
4. What did I tell you? is literally a question, but conventionally functions as
an equivalent to I told you so!
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INTENSIFIERS These are words or expressions which strengthen or weaken
the degree of a property indicated by a relative adjective (or adverb).
Examples are: very, extremely, slightly, quite, rather, fairly, a little, a bit, on
the X side. Very and extremely strengthen the property (relative to the degree
indicated by the bare adjective) and slightly, a little, a bit weaken it. The
interpretation of several of these items depends on how they are pronounced.
Compare the following (stress indicated by upper case): This is QUITE
SUPERB; Well, it was QUITE good; I thought it was quite GOOD.
L
LANGUE VS PAROLE This is a distinction first drawn by Saussure, one of the
founding fathers of modern linguistics, which had a profound influence on
the development of the subject. It is basically a distinction between a
language as an abstract system, which is the true object of the study of
linguistics, and the use made of that system, in the sense of what speakers of
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the language actually say on particular occasions, which, for one reason or
another, may not conform precisely to the underlying system. See also a
related distinction between competence and performance.
M
MAXIMS OF CONVERSATION These spell out in greater detail the
consequences of the Co-operative Principle. They were proposed Grice:
Maxim of Quantity, Maxim of Quality, Maxim of Relation, and Maxim of
Manner. They are rules of conversational conduct that people do their best to
follow, and that they expect their conversational partners to follow. They
have a rational basis, and are not matters of pure convention.
There are many occasions when this maxim seems not to be followed (see,
for instance, under politeness), but it is arguable that it represents a valid
default position, that is to say we do not depart from it without good reason.
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3. Maxim of Relation: Be relevant.
The truth of a statement is no guarantee that it is an appropriate contribution
to a conversation: it must also connect suitably with the rest of the
conversation. (According to some scholars, a suitable version of this maxim
renders the others unnecessary: see under Relevance Theory.) These three
maxims can be combined into one: make the strongest statement that can
relevantly be made that is justifiable by your evidence.
N
NATURAL VS CONVENTIONAL SIGNS Conventional signs are those which
are established for communicative use in some community and which have
to be specially learned (and often taught). Linguistic signs are obvious
examples; so are traffic signs and the like. There are two interpretations of
‘natural’ in respect to signs. According to one interpretation, natural signs
are based on causal connections in the natural world. In this sense we say
that smoke is a sign of fire and dark clouds are a sign of rain. According to
another interpretation, natural signs are signs produced by communicating
beings that do not have to be learned but are instinctive, like animal cries and
human signs such as smiling, weeping, and gasping.
O
OVERHEARER see under speech event participant
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P
PARTICULARISED CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES see generalized vs
particularised conversational implicatures
PERSON DEIXIS Person deixis designate the basic roles in a speech event,
namely the speaker (‘first person’), the person(s) spoken to (‘second
person’), and the person or persons who are neither speaker nor addressee
(‘third person’). Person deixis include pronouns (I, you, him; mine, yours,
hers; myself, yourself, herself), possessive adjectives (my, your, her), and
verb inflections (Latin amo, amas, amat, ‘I love, you love, he or she loves’).
Personal pronouns can have singular and plural forms. A plural form may
apply even if only one referent is designated, provided that the referent can
be taken to represent a group. For instance, the first person plural we is
normally produced by a single speaker who represents a group. Some
languages have a different first person plural form according to whether the
represented group includes both the speaker and the addressee (‘inclusive’
form) or the speaker and others, but not the addressee (‘exclusive’ form).
First person plural pronouns refer directly to a plurality of speakers only in
the case of choral speaking.
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POLITENESS Insofar as linguistic behaviour is concerned, politeness is a
matter of minimizing the negative effects of what one says on the feelings of
others and maximizing the positive effects (known as ‘negative politeness’
and ‘positive politeness’ respectively). Politeness can also be either speaker-
oriented or hearer-oriented. Speaker oriented politeness involves not saying
things about oneself that would place one in a favourable position relative to
the hearer; boasting, for instance, is for this reason inherently impolite.
Utterances which directly involve the hearer fall into the domain of hearer-
oriented politeness. Leech proposes a general ‘Politeness Principle’:
Minimize the expression of impolite beliefs. This principle both constrains
and is constrained by the Cooperative Principle. Clearly, there are
occasions when it is more important to convey relevant true information
even if it has negative effects on the hearer. Like the cooperative principle,
the politeness principle is expanded by means of a set of maxims (see the
entries for Tact and Generosity Maxims, Approbation and Modesty
Maxims, Agreement Maxim, Sympathy Maxim). There are, in addition,
three minor principles: Banter Principle: this allows us to be polite while
being superficially rude, as when one says to a good friend Look what the
cat’s brought in! The underlying message is ‘We are such good friends we
don’t need to be polite.’ Irony Principle: this allows us to be impolite while
being superficially polite, as in You should be very proud of yourself, said to
someone who has made a mess of something. Pollyanna Principle: this
enjoins us to avoid drawing attention to things ‘which are not mentioned in
polite company’. It is this principle which underlies the use and development
of euphemisms. Politeness also enters into ways of addressing people. Many
languages have a choice of pronouns for designating the addressee according
to the relationship between speaker and addressee and, to some extent, the
situation (these are sometimes called ‘T/V pronouns’). Examples are French
tu/vous, Italian tu/Lei, German du/Sie, and Turkish sen/siz. The exact
conventions for using these forms differ from language to language, but we
may take French as an example. We may first distinguish asymmetrical
usage from symmetrical usage. Asymmetrical usage is relatively rare in
modern French but it can still be observed in, for instance, a school setting,
where pupils will address a teacher as vous and the teacher will address a
pupil as tu. The distinction marks a difference of social status. In the more
common symmetrical use, vous (sometimes called the ‘polite form’) marks
either psychological distance (respectful or otherwise) or a formal situation
(or both), while tu (the ‘familiar form’) indicates intimacy/familiarity or an
informal situation (or both). (The rules are quite subtle – the foregoing is a
first approximation.) English does not use T/V pronouns, but, as in many
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languages, politeness enters into the choice of forms of address, such as Pete,
Smith, Mr Smith, Professor Smith, Sir Peter, and so on.
PROJECTED DEIXIS This is when deictic expressions are used in their usual
way, but the deictic centre is not the speaker but some other participant in the
speech event, most commonly the addressee. For instance, the verb come has
deictic properties in that its basic use is to denote movement towards the
speaker, as in Come here! However, in Shall I come and see you? the
movement in question is towards the addressee.
150
R
RATIFIED PARTICIPANT see under speech event participant
151
B: Yesterday.
SOCIAL DEIXIS Social deixis concerns the use of expressions whose function
is to indicate the position of the referent on the scales of social status and
intimacy relative to the speaker. A prototypical example is the use of the so-
called T/V pronouns. For more details, see under politeness.
SPEECH ACTS These are acts which crucially involve the production of
language. The theory of speech acts was originally proposed by Austin who
distinguished three basic types: locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and
perlocutionary acts.
1. Locutionary act: the production of an utterance, with a particular sense and
reference.
2. Illocutionary act: an act performed by a speaker in saying something (with
an appropriate intention and in an appropriate context), rather than by virtue
of having produced a particular effect by saying something. For instance, if
someone says I order you to leave now they have performed the act of
ordering, simply by virtue of having uttered the words, whether or not the
addressee acts in the desired way.
3. Perlocutionary act: a speech act which depends on the production of a
specific effect. For instance, for the verbal act of persuasion to have
occurred, in Pete persuaded Liz to marry him, it is not enough for Pete to
have uttered certain words – what is essential is that a previously reluctant
addressee is caused to act in an appropriate way. Every illocutionary act has
a particular ‘illocutionary force’. This may be explicitly signalled by the use
of a performative verb such as beg, promise, command, suggest,
congratulate, or thank, or a particular grammatical form, as in Go away!,
Have you seen Pete?, or it may be implicit, in which case it must be inferred,
largely on the basis of contextual evidence. For instance, an utterance such as
You will never see me again may function, in different circumstances, as a
threat, a promise, a simple statement of fact, or a prediction. For a particular
illocutionary act to be successfully performed, it is typically the case that
certain contextual conditions need to be satisfied. These conditions are called
felicity conditions.
A will infer from B’s answer that this is an inconvenient time to speak to
Jane, although B does not explicitly say so. A’s inference is due to B’s
assumption A is obeying the Maxim of Relation, and that the answer is
therefore relevant. The most obvious relevance is that calling Jane to the
phone would cause inconvenience. Or take the following example:
A: Did Pete post the letter and pay the newspaper bill?
B: He posted the letter.
B’s answer implicates either that Pete did not pay the newspaper bill, or that
B does not know whether he did or not (more context would be needed to
154
choose between these). B appears not to be following the Maxim of
Quantity, in that the utterance does not provide the required amount of
information. However, assuming that B is nonetheless obeying the Co-
operative Principle, we can infer that there is good reason for the poverty of
information. One possibility is adherence to the Maxim of Quality: B is
giving as much information as he or she has evidence for. A might therefore
infer that B does not know whether or not Pete paid the paper bill.
And in (3), the implicature of exactness (‘four minutes and no less than four
minutes’) is probably absent altogether:
3. A: You have to be able to do the 1000 metres in three minutes to enter.
B: I can do it in three minutes.
SYMBOLIC DEIXIS This refers to the use of a deictic expression where close
monitoring of the situation by the hearer is not required because the relations
between the speaker and the things referred to are relatively stable and do not
change over the course of a conversation or discourse: I’ve lived here all my
life, Nobody cares these days, Those bastards are just out to get you.
155
they should be played down. Consider the following utterances delivered
after an accident that someone experienced due to carelessness:
T
Tact and Generosity Maxims These are members of the set of Maxims of
Politeness proposed by Leech. The former is oriented towards the hearer,
while the latter is oriented towards the speaker. The following is a slight
modification of Leech’s formulation:
Tact Maxim: Minimise cost to the hearer. Maximise benefit to the hearer.
Generosity Maxim: Minimise benefit to self. Maximise cost to self.
Both of these maxims apply particularly to speech acts which are directives
or commissives. Both of them relate to the idea of a ‘cost-benefit scale’.
Actions (requested or offered) can be ranked according to the cost or benefit
(physical, psychological, financial, or whatever) to the person carrying them
out. For instance, digging the garden probably represents a greater (physical)
cost than mowing the lawn, which in turn is greater than picking some
flowers. The cost-benefit scale operates in conjunction with a ‘scale of
indirectness’, which applies to the way a command, request, offer, (and so
on) is formulated. In the case of directives, for instance, the most direct form
is the imperative: Wash the dishes. Progressively more indirect are: I want
you to wash the dishes; Can you wash the dishes?; Could you wash the
dishes?; I wonder if you would mind washing the dishes. The general
principle for both commissives and directives is that, for politeness, anything
which involves cost to the hearer or benefit to the speaker should be
‘softened’ by being expressed indirectly, and the greater the cost the more
the indirectness required. Conversely, anything that involves benefit to the
hearer or cost to the speaker should be expressed directly. Thus, Could you
wash the dishes? and I’ll do the dishes are more polite than Wash the dishes
and Maybe I should wash the dishes respectively.
156
period overlapping with the time of speaking, and then, which basically
means ‘not now’, and can point either into the future or the past: I was much
younger then; You’ll be somewhat older by then. Many temporal deictic
expressions give additional information, such as tomorrow (‘the day after the
day which includes the time of speaking’) and last year (‘the (calendar) year
previous to the one which includes the time of speaking’). The system of
verb tenses is also deictic (I washed the dishes, I am washing the dishes, I
will wash the dishes) since it relates the utterance to the coding time. It is
useful, when speaking about tenses, to distinguish three points in time: the
time at which the event occurred (ET), the time at which the utterance was
produced (UT), and the reference time (RT). In the so-called primary tenses,
past, present and future, UT and RT are the same. There are also secondary
or compound tenses in which UT and RT are different. In the case of the past
preterite, RT is in the past relative to UT: Liz had already left when I arrived
(Liz’s leaving preceded my arrival, which preceded the time of speaking). In
the ‘future perfect tense’, RT is in the future relative to UT: By the time I
arrive, Liz will have left. It is also possible to have a ‘future-in-the-past
tense’: Liz was about to leave when I arrived. Some languages have different
past tense forms according to how far back in time the denoted event
occurred.
157
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