Universidad Tecnológica De Pereira

Facultad De Bellas Artes y Humanidades

Licenciatura en Bilingüismo con énfasis en inglés

Semantics and Pragmatics course

Reading report format

Name of student(s): Nayades Patiño and Daniel Serna

Chapter: 8 Part 1

Unknown words: add phonetic transcription + definition

-Quarreling: an angry disagreement between two or more people or groups /ˈkwɔːr.əl/

-Labeled:having a label (= a piece of writing or material that gives you information) or labels attached
telling you what something is or what its parts are /ˈleɪ.bəld/
-Prolixity: the fact of using too many words and therefore being boring or difficult to read or listen to
prəˈlɪk.sə.t̬ i/
-Slavishly: obeying completely; without any ideas of your own /ˈsleɪ.vɪʃ.li/
-Willingness: the quality of being happy to do something if it is needed /ˈwɪl.ɪŋ.nəs/
-Perspicuous: the quality of being happy to do something if it is needed /ˈwɪl.ɪŋ.nəs/

Sections and summary

Sometimes we mean more than we say
-The utterance meaning is the totality of what the
speaker intends to convey by making an utterance.
- The utterance meaning includes the semantic
content plus any pragmatic meaning created by
the use of the sentence in a specific context.

Conversational implicatures -The statement

conveys the intended meaning only in response to
that specific question. In a different
different context
-When the same sentence is used in two different
contexts, these are two distinct utterances which
may have different utterance meanings.
-Grice referred to the kind of pragmatic inference
illustrated in these examples as conversational
implicature.
-characteristics of conversational implicatures:
● The implicature is different from the literal
sentence meaning, what is implicated is
different from “what is said.
● The speaker intends for the hearer to
understand both the sentence's meaning

Grice’s Maxims of Conversation
and the implicature; and for the hearer to
be aware that the speaker intends this.
● Are context-dependent.
● Are often unmistakable, but they are not
“inevitable”. In Grice’s terms we say that
conversational implicatures are defeasible,
meaning that they can be canceled or
blocked when additional information is
provided.
-The connection between what is said and what is
implicated, taking context into account, cannot be
arbitrary.
- A conversation is a cooperative activity.
-To carry on an intelligible conversation, each party
must assume that the other is trying to participate
in a meaningful way.
-The Cooperative Principle: 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.
-The Maxims of Conversation:
● QUALITY: make your contribution one that
is true. You must be sure that the
information is true, do not say that for which
you lack adequate evidence.
● QUANTITY: Make your contribution as
informative as is required. Do not make
your contribution more informative than is
required.
● RELATION: Be relevant.
● MANNER: Be perspicuous.
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief.
4. Be orderly.
-The Cooperative Principle is not a code of
conduct, in which speakers have a moral obligation
to obey.
-The Cooperative Principle is a kind of background
assumption what is necessary in order to make
rational conversation possible is not for the
speaker to follow the principle slavishly, but for the
speaker and hearer to share a common awareness
that it exists.
 Types of implicatures

Generalized Conversational Implicature -Two different types of conversational implicatures:

● Particularized conversational implicatures,
meaning that the intended inference
depends on particular features of the
specific context of the utterance.
● Generalized conversational implicatures.
This type of inference does not depend on
particular features of the context, but is
instead typically associated with the kind of
proposition being expressed.
-Generalized conversational implicatures are
motivated by the same set of maxims discussed
above, but they typically do not involve a violation
of the maxims. Rather, the implicature arises
precisely because the hearer assumes that the
speaker is obeying the maxims; if the implicated
meaning were not true, then there would be a
violation.
-A widely discussed type of generalized
conversational implicature involves non-maximal
degree modifiers, that is, words which refer to
intermediate points on a scale.
NAYAAAA

Conventional Implicature -Grice identified another type of inference which he

called conventional implicatures; but he said very
little about them, and never developed a full-blown
analysis. In contrast to conversational implicatures,
which are context-sensitive and motivated by the
conversational maxims, conventional implicatures
are part of the conventional meaning of a word or
construction.
-This means that they are not context-dependent
or pragmatically explainable, and must be learned
on a word-by-word basis.
-Conventional implicatures do not contribute to the
truth
conditions of a sentence, and for this reason have
sometimes been regarded as
involving pragmatic rather than semantic content.