MARIANA NEAGU CLAUDIA PISOSCHI

FUNDAMENTALS OF SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS

MARIANA NEAGU CLAUDIA PISOSCHI

FUNDAMENTALS OF SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS

(second edition revised)

EDITURA UNIVERSITARIA
Craiova, 2018

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Referenți ştiinţifici: prof. univ. dr. Ioana Murar
prof. univ. dr. Adriana Costăchescu
prof. univ. dr. habil. Cecilia Condei

FOREWORD

The intention of the authors was to design a book for the background of all
those who want to get (more) acquainted with the essential aspects of
communication from the perspective of the intricate relationship between form and
meaning, on the one hand, and between these two facets of language and the user,
on the other.
The fields of Semantics and Pragmatics are very broad and diverse and the
duration of the course required a strict selection of the topics. Therefore, the book
is structured in two complementary parts, one dealing with the major topics of
English semantics, and the other with the traditional domains of pragmatics.
Part I. Semantics is broken up in five chapters and can be conveniently
used in a one-semester course on English Semantics. Chapter 1 outlines the scope
of semantics and presents an overview of the main semantic theories: diachronic
semantics, structuralist semantics, semantics in generative linguistics and cognitive
semantics. Chapter 2 looks into the relationship between language, thought and
reality and presents two major models of the sign: the Saussurean model and the

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Peircean model. Chapter 3 focuses on types of linguistic meaning and emphasizes
their importance in practice (e.g. translation). Chapter 4 deals with the
paradigmatic sense relations studied by the two major branches of semantics:
semasiology and onomasiology. Chapter 5 looks at semantic organization by
discussing the issues of mental lexicon and semantic field.
Part II Pragmatics comprises six chapters dealing with the traditional
domains of pragmatics: deixis, conversational implicatures, presuppositions and
speech acts, politeness. Chapter 1 is an introductory one, approaching the study
area of pragmatics, explaining its main concepts and terms. Chapter 2 explains the
concept of deixis and its basic types, providing cross-linguistic examples. Chapter
3 approaches the domain of implicatures, focusing on conversational implicatures
and conversational maxims. Chapter 4 discusses presuppositions as pragmatic
inferences, their types and triggers. Chapter 5 enlarges upon speech acts (concept,
levels, felicity conditions) and performativity. Chapter 6, the last one is an analysis
of the relationship between the concept of politeness as a social and linguistic
phenomenon and the previously discussed pragmatic domains: deixis, pragmatic
inferences and speech acts.
A special section of the book contains topics for discussion and
applications, addressing each chapter of those mentioned above. Their variety and
different degree of difficulty should meet a wide range of needs and tastes. The
book also includes a glossary of terms meant to help scanning and skimming for
relevant information in order to solve the activities proposed.
To conclude, by combining theoretical considerations, commented
examples (sometimes allowing cross-linguistic comparisons) and topics for
discussion or applications meant to develop competences and creativity, the writers
of the present volume intended it to be synthetic, but dense, clear and systematic,
also requiring a deep understanding and challenging the reader to reflect on the
issues approached. If it succeeds in doing that, it means that they have achieved the
most important purpose: to arouse and/or increase the interest for language in
general and the desire to be equally accurate and creative in communication.
Considering the various types of requirements specific to such a book, we
are trully endebted to our peer-reviewers, Professor Ioana Murar, Professor
Adriana Costăchescu and Professor Cecilia Condei, and express our deep gratitude
for their accurate reading and pertinent observations.
Our persistence in writing this second edition is proof that we believe
perfection should be, even if never attained, at least aimed at. We thank all those
who encouraged us in this belief and attempt.

The authors

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CONTENTS

PART I. SEMANTICS (Mariana Neagu)

1. INTRODUCTION...................................................................................
1.1. Scope and beginnings of semantics.....................................................
1.2. An overview of main semantic theories..............................................
1.2.1. Diachronic semantics............................................................
1.2.2. Structuralist semantics........................................................
1.2.3. Semantics in generative linguistics.....................................
1.2.4. Cognitive semantics.............................................................
Conclusions..................................................................................................

2. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE,

THOUGHT AND REALITY....................................................................
2.1. Intension and extension and related dichotomies............................
2.2. Sign – sense – reference.......................................................................
2.3. Models of the sign.................................................................................
2.3.1. The Saussurean model.........................................................
2.3.2. The Peircean model..............................................................
2.4. Types of signs........................................................................................
Conclusions..................................................................................................

3. LINGUISTIC MEANING: TYPES AND DIMENSIONS..................36

3.1. Lyon’s classification: descriptive, social
and expressive meaning ............................................................................
3.2. Leech’s seven types of meaning..........................................................
3.3. Descriptive meaning.............................................................................
3.4. Non-descriptive meaning.....................................................................
3.5. Social meaning......................................................................................
3.6. Evoked meaning...................................................................................
Conclusions..................................................................................................

4. SENSE RELATIONS............................................................................. 49
4.1. Semasiology and onomasiology- two basic
approaches to the study of words and their senses .................................. 49
4.2. From word to concept: polysemy and homonymy ............................ 50
4.2.1. Polysemy ............................................................................... 50
4.2.2. Homonymy.............................................................................. 52
4.2.3. Polysemy vs. Homonymy...................................................... 52
4.2.4. Polysemy in Cognitive Linguistics....................................... 55

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 4.2.5. Polysemy vs. Vagueness....................................................... 56
4.2.6. Polysemy and semantic change .......................................... 57
4.3. From concept to word: synonymy and antonymy ............................. 58
4.3.1. Synonymy ............................................................................. 58
4.3.2. Antonymy .............................................................................. 60
4.4. Hierarchical sense relations: hyponymy and meronymy ................. 63
4.4.1. Hyponymy ............................................................................. 63
4.4.2. Meronymy .............................................................................. 65
Conclusions ................................................................................................. 67

5. SEMANTIC ORGANIZATION............................................................ 69
5.1. The lexicon............................................................................................. 69
5.1.1. Views of the lexicon ............................................................. 69
5.1.2. Lexical vs conceptual knowledge ....................................... 70
5.1.3. Lexical item, lexical unit and lexical entry .......................... 71
5.2. Semantic fields ...................................................................................... 71
5.2.1. Field theories ......................................................................... 71
5.2.2. Lexical gaps .......................................................................... 73
5.2.3. Conceptual field, lexical field and semantic field .............. 74
Conclusions ................................................................................................. 78

PART II. PRAGMATICS (Claudia Pisoschi)

1. THE DOMAIN OF PRAGMATICS ……………………….………….. 79

1.1. The specificity of pragmatics…………………………………………. 79
1. 2. Why do we need pragmatics?
Correctness vs. acceptability ………………………………………… 80
1. 3. Connections to the other linguistic branches …………………….. 84
1.3.1. Connections form-pragmatic meaning/
pragmatic interpretation……………………………………….... 85
1. 3.2. Connections sense - pragmatic meaning ………...……... 86
1.4. Some basic pragmatic terms and concepts …………………………
1.5. Subdomains of pragmatics…………………………………………...
Conclusions ………………………………………………………………..

2. THE CONCEPT OF DEIXIS. TYPES OF DEIXIS ............................ 97

2.1. The term and concept of deixis.
Types of deixis ................................................................................. 97
2.2. Person deixis ........................................................................................ 99
2.2.1. Means of expressing person deixis.
Personal pronouns system ............................................................ 97

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 2.2.2. The reference of pronouns. Deixis vs anaphora................. 97
2. 3. Time deixis ........................................................................................... 100
2.3.1. Definition ................................................................................ 100
2.3.2. Linguistic markers of time.................................................... 101
2.3.3. From time to tense ................................................................ 102
2.3.3.1. Absolute and relative tenses .................................. 108
2.3.3.2. Tense and Aspect .................................................... 111
2.3.4. Deictic vs. non-deictic lexical time markers ...................... 113
2.3.5. Tenses and lexical time markers......................................... 116
2.3.6. Time vs space deixis............................................................. 117
2.4. Space deixis........................................................................................... 118
2.4.1. Definition and importance .................................................... 118
2.4.2. Classification of space deictics ........................................... 118
2.4.3. Main values of space markers.............................................. 120
2.4.4. Combined values .................................................................. 122
2.4.5. On time and space deixis (again). Which was first? ......... 122
2.5. Social deixis .......................................................................................... 123
2.6. Discourse/ textual deixis ...................................................................... 126
2.7. Empathetic deixis ................................................................................. 128
Conclusions ................................................................................................. 129

3. CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES…………………………… 133

3.1. Logic of Conversation. To say vs to imply. From logical
connectors to Cooperative Principle ………............................................. 133
3.2. Classification of implicatures ……………………………………….. 135
3.3. Conversational implicatures. The Cooperative
Principle and conversational maxims……………………………….. 139
3.4. Domains of manifestation of conversational maxims ………………. 142
3.5. Types of non-observance of conversational maxims ………………. 143
3.6. Tests for conversational implicatures. Drawbacks ………………… 150
Conclusions ……………………………………………………….……….. 153

4. PRESUPPOSITIONS …………………..……………………………… 153

4.1. A philosophical approach of presuppositions …………..…………... 153
4.1.1. Presupposition and reference ……………….……………. 153
4.1.2. Presuppositions and entailment ………………………….. 154
4.2. Presuppositions as pragmatic inferences ………………..…………. 156
4.3. Linguistic triggers of presuppositions ……………………………… 158
4.4. Types of presuppositions ………………………………..…………… 159
4.4.1. Existential presuppositions ……………………….………. 160
4.4.2. Factive presuppositions …………………………………… 160
4.4.3. Lexical presuppositions ……………………….………….. 160
4.4.4. Structural presuppositions ………………..……………… 160
4.4.5. Non-factive presuppositions ……………..……………….. 161

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 4.4.6. Counterfactual presuppositions ………………………….. 161
4.5. The Projection Problem …………………………………………….. 161
4.6. Tests for presuppositions …………….……………………………... 164
Conclusions ………………………..……………………………………… 167

5. SPEECH ACTS ……………………………………………………..… 169

5.1. Introduction …………………………………………………..……… 169
5.2. From performative utterances to SAs or vice versa
The Performative Hypothesis ………………………..…………………. 169
5.3. SA Levels. Speech Act Schema ……………………………………... 173
5.3.1. SA Levels …………………….……………………………. 173
5.3.2. Speech Act Schema (SAS) …………………….…………. 176
5.4. The concept of Speech Act in communication …………….…….... 176
5.5. SA classification: from Austin to Searle ………….………………. 178
5.5.1. Direction of fit ……………………..…………………….. 178
5.5.2. Illocutionary point …………..…………………………... 180
5.5.3. Felicity (Happiness) Conditions ………………………… 181
5.5.3.1. Felicity Conditions with Austin ………………... 181
5.5.3.2. Felicity Conditions with Searle ………………… 182
5.5.3.3. Counterarguments to Felicity
Conditions frame……………………………………... 184
5.6. Indirect Speech Acts ………………………..………………..……...... 185
Conclusions ………………………………………………………………… 187

6. POLITENESS ………………….……………………………………….. 189

6.1. The concept of politeness ……………………………………..……… 189
6.1.1. Politeness − a social phenomenon …………..…………….. 189
6.1.2. The conversational maxim view on politeness …….…….. 191
6.1.3. The face-saving view …………..………………...………... 192
6.2. Politeness ‘in its own right’. Politeness Principle
and its maxims ……………………………………………………….. 193
6.3. Politeness and deixis ………………………………………….……… 196
6.3.1. Person deixis markers and politeness…………………...... 196
6.3.2. Social deixis and politeness................................................... 197
6.4. Politeness and conversational implicatures ………………………… 199
6.5. Politeness and presuppositions ……………………………………… 201
6.5.1. The problem of negative ambiguity……..………….……. 201
6.5.2. Structural presuppositions and hearer’s manipulation …. 202
6.6. Politeness and (indirect) speech acts ………….……………………... 203
Conclusions…………………………………………………………….…… 206

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SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS AT WORK. TOPICS FOR
DISCUSSION

Part I SEMANTICS (Mariana Neagu)

Chapter 1 Introduction..........................................................................
Chapter 2 The relationship between language, thought and reality........
209
Chapter 3 Linguistic meaning: types and dimensions.............................
213
Chapter 4 Sense relations.......................................................................
215
Chapter 5 Semantic organization.............................................................
221
Revision Exercises..........................................................................................
233
235
Part II PRAGMATICS (Claudia Pisoschi)
Chapter 1 The domain of pragmatics....................................................
Chapter 2 The concept of deixis. Types of deixis.................................... 243
Chapter 3 Conversational implicatures................................................... 249
Chapter 4 Presuppositions............................................................................ 255
Chapter 5 Speech acts............................................................................ 259
Chapter 6 Politeness................................................................................ 262
266
GLOSSARY OF TERMS ............................................................................
Part I SEMANTICS (Mariana Neagu)…………………………………… 273
Part II PRAGMATICS (Claudia Pisoschi)………………………............. 273
288
BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………….……………………………
Part I SEMANTICS (Mariana Neagu)……………………………………

Part II PRAGMATICS (Claudia Pisoschi)……………………….............

301

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 1. INTRODUCTION

1. Introduction
1.1. Scope and beginnings of semantics
1.2. An overview of main semantic theories
1.2.1. Diachronic semantics
1.2.2. Structuralist semantics
1.2.3. Semantics in generative linguistics
1.2.4. Cognitive semantics
Conclusions

1.1. Scope and beginnings of semantics

Semantics is the major branch of linguistics which studies meaning

communicated through language (words and sentences). It is concerned primarily
with lexical meaning, grammatical meaning and sentence meaning. Generally, it is
recognized that one cannot account for lexical meaning without accounting for
sentence meaning and viceversa. Thus the meaning of a sentence depends upon the
meaning of its constituent lexemes and the meaning of some, if not all lexemes
depends upon the sentence in which they occur. Lyons (1995: 144) discusses the
importance of grammatical meaning as a further component of sentence meaning.
The term 'semantics' is of relatively recent origin, being coined in the late
nineteenth century from a Greek verb meaning 'to signify'. This does not mean that
scholars first turned their attention to the investigation of meaning of words less
than a hundred years ago. On the contrary, from the earliest times down to the
present day grammarians have been interested in the meaning of words and
frequently more interested in what words mean than in their syntactic function.
Lyons (1985/1968:400) argues that the practical manifestation of this interest is the
production of innumerable dictionaries throughout ages, not only in the west but in
all parts of the world where language has been studied.
In spite of the interest in meaning manifested by philosophers, logicians
and psychologists, linguists doubted that meaning could be studied as objectively
and as rigorously as grammar and phonology and thus semantics came to be
neglected and has received proper attention only since the 1960s.
The beginnings of semantics as an independent linguistic discipline go as
far back as early 19th century, to the works of the German linguists Ch. C. Reisig
and Hermann Paul. Reisig was the first to formulate the object of study of the new
science of meaning which he called semasiology and conceived the new linguistic
branch of study as a historical science studying the principles governing the
evolution of meaning. Hermann Paul also dealt extensively with the issue of
change of meaning.

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 The ‘birth date’ of semantics as a modern linguistic discipline was marked
by the publication of Essai de sémantique (1897) where the French linguist, Michel
Breal, defines semantics as ‘the science of meanings of words and of the changes
in their meanings’. However, in 1887, that is ten years ahead of Michel Breal,
Lazăr Şăineanu published a remarkable book called Încercare asupra
semasiologiei limbei române. Studii istorice despre tranziţiunea sensurilor (Essay
on Romanian Semasiology. Historical Studies on the Transition of Meanings). This
is one of the first works on semantics to have appeared anywhere. Şăineanu amply
used the contributions of psychology in his attempts at identifying the semantic
associations established among words and the logical laws and affinities governing
the evolution of words in particular and of languages in general.
Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between the two basically different
ways in which language may be viewed, the synchronic or descriptive and the
diachronic or historical approach introduced a new principle of classification of
linguistic theories. The next section will make an overview of the major theoretical
trends in semantics, trying to show how linguists have been doing word meaning in
the last century and a half.

1.2. An overview of semantic studies

Starting from the presence or absence of the referent in discussing the

linguistic sign, semantic theories can be grouped in two major general approaches:
(1) language-intrinsic or language–immanent approaches to semantics that exclude
extra linguistic objects (referents) and relations and (2) referential or denotational
(language-extrinsic) approaches to semantics that focus on the properties of the
referents denoted by the linguistic signs. In what follows, the former group will be
illustrated by structuralist and generative semantics while the latter group will be
represented by diachronic and cognitive semantics.

1.2.1. Diachronic semantics

Diachronic or historical semantics developed through the literature on

semantic change which had a golden period between the last twenty years of the
19th century and the 1940s (the 1880s and the 1940s). One of the longest treatises
on semantic change is Gustaf Stern's book Meaning and Change of Meaning,
published in 1931. Stern's principal aim was to establish a theoretically tenable and
practically workable system of classification comprising all known types of sense
change.

Stern’s classification of semantic changes

Stern defines change of meaning as

“the habitual modification, among a comparatively large number of
speakers, of the traditional semantic range of a word...to denote one or more

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 referents which it has not previously denoted or to express a new manner of
apprehending one or more of its referents”. (Stern 1968/1931:162)

Stern starts by classifying a large number of authentic sense changes and then
formulates a theory to account for the existence of the different classes. In other
words, the classes were established inductively rather than deductively. He
analyses historical instances of sense change mainly with regard to the psychic
processes involved and identifies seven main classes of change: substitution,
analogy, shortening, nomination, (regular) transfer, permutation and adequation.
Substitution is a change of meaning due to an external, non-linguistic cause.
For instance, alterations in the design of ships have brought about changes of
meaning in the word ship. It once meant only a sailing vessel; now it can mean a
steam-driven vessel of quite different appearance. Therefore, the referents of a
word undergo some change so that new referents are added to or substitute old
ones.
Analogy occurs when a word assumes a new meaning on the analogy of
some other word with which it is connected derivationally (e.g. the adjective fast has
borrowed the sense “quick” from the middle English adverb faste), semantically (e.g.
the special meaning of low, “non-dogmatic” in Low Church on the analogy of High
Church where high means “dogmatic”.
Shortening is the omission of a word from a compound expression, the
remaining words carrying the total meaning that formerly belonged to the whole
expression: e.g. private is a shortening of private soldier (common soldier),
periodical is a shortening of periodical paper/ review.
Nomination is a change of meaning in which a name is intentionally
transferred from one referent to another. Stern gives as example of nomination the
convention of using proper names for units of measurement, inventions, or
discoveries (e.g. volt, sandwich). Other examples include place names for products
(e.g.champagne, a jersey), article of dress for person (e.g. mackintosh), habitual
expressions for persons (e.g. jingoes “music-hall patriots who sing jingo songs”).
(Regular) transfer is the unintentional transfer of a word from one type of
referent to another one resembling it. Examples are root as in root of hair and bed
as in river bed.
Permutation is the unintentional shift from a referent to another brought
about by the possibility of interpreting a word in two ways in some context. Beads
in He is counting his beads can mean either “prayers” (the original sense) or “little
balls on a rosary”.
Adequation is the change of meaning resulting from the adaptation of the
meaning of a word to the actual characteristics of the referents. Stern’s main
example is horn, which, in order of historical development of meaning, denotes (i)
“animal horn”, (ii) “animal’s horn used for music”, (iii) “musical instrument made
from animal’s horn” and finally (iv) ”instrument for producing a certain kind of
sound”. The change from (ii) to (iii) is an instance of adequation. Adequation
differs from substitution in that the immediate shift does not lie in the referent, as

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in the change from (i) to (ii) or in the change from (iii) to (iv) but in the speaker’s
apprehension of the referent. As can be noticed, adequation occurs after other sense
changes (e.g. substitution) have taken place.

Ullmann’s classification of semantic changes

Stephen Ullmann (1962) proposes a "better" version of Stern's

classification of semantic changes. Concerning the causes of semantic changes,
Ullmann distinguishes two main approaches: A. Meillet's theory and Sperber' s
theory. In his article Comment les mots changent de sens (1904-1905) Antoine
Meillet maintains that there are three main causes of semantic change, viz.
linguistic, extralinguistic and social. Sperber's approach is different from other
approaches in that he emphasizes the role of emotion. By seeking in emotive forces
the clue to changes in meaning, Sperber (1923) focuses exactly on what the French
philologist had disregarded. Although Sperber neglected the non-expressive
functions of language, he introduced a new perspective for the understanding of
changes of meaning and their spread. Following Ullmann (1962) we conclude that
the two theories mentioned above are mutually complementary rather than
exclusive.
Ullmann (1962) distinguishes between semantic changes due to linguistic
conservatism and linguistic innovation. When we keep a word, in spite of the fact
that the character of its referents has changed, we have - in Ullmann’s terminology
- an instance of linguistic conservatism. Warren (1992: 9) rightly notices that
Ullmann’s linguistic conservatism corresponds to Stern’s substitution.
The semantic changes due to linguistic innovations are grouped into three
main subclasses: transfers of names, transfers of senses and composite changes.
Considering the word a union of name (form) and sense (content), Ullmann
assumes that there are two possibilities: either the name or the sense of the word
may change or be transferred. Both transfers of names and transfers of senses occur
due to contiguity or similarity relations.
A case of name transfer through sense similarity is overlook which is
related to the sense of oversee. Instances of sense transfer through sense similarity
are antropomorphic transfers like leg of a table, eye of a needle, bridge head, etc.
Sense transfers through contiguity are sail meaning ”ship”, town meaning “its
inhabitants”. Such sense transfers based on similarity and contiguity correspond to
the ancient categories of metaphor and metonymy.
The third subgroup, composite changes, includes all asssociative links that
can be conceived: composite name transfers, composite sense transfers and sense-
name transfers.
In general, more recent approaches to sense change list generalization
(Hughes1989, Berndt 1989, Ungerer and Schmid 1996), specialization (Hughes
1989, Warren 1992, Ungerer and Schmid 1996), figurative use (Berndt 1989,
Warren1992) and substitution /semantic shift (Berndt 1989).
Specialization of meaning can be illustrated by the Old English word fugol
which referred to all kinds of birds. Gradually fugol was replaced by the word bird

15
whose meaning underwent the process of generalization (OE bryd ‘young bird’ ->
Mod. E bird ‘any bird’)
Concerning figurative use we further consider the category BIRD and the
attribute ‘locked in a cage’ characterizing parrots, budgerigars, and the attribute ‘exotic
appearance’ which applies to ostriches, flamingoes, peacocks.
As can be noticed, the metaphorical uses of bird ‘prisoner’ and rare bird
‘strange person’ rely predominantly on peripheral attributes rather than on central
attributes such as ‘can fly’ and ‘has wings’ which are at the basis of bird
‘aeroplane, missile, spacecraft’.
The major attributes of good examples of the BIRD category (‘can fly’ and
‘has wings’) in Anglo-Saxon times were probably similar to what they are today.
However, there are instances where central attributes of a category are replaced,
normally as a result of extralinguistic changes. This type of meaning change is
traditionally called substitution or semantic shift or, in cognitive linguistics terms,
prototype shift.

1.2.2. Structuralist semantics

Besides diachronic or historical semantics, we also have to consider

synchronic or descriptive semantics which displays the applications of the principles
of structuralist linguistics to the study of meaning (hence the name of “structuralist
semantics”). The central idea of linguistic structuralism is that natural languages are
symbolic systems with properties and principles of their own and that the form of
lexical items is generally arbitrary; the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign impels
the linguist to describe language as a conventional system of rules. As the language
sign is part of the language system, it is characterized within the system, in its
relations to other signs in the system. The main strands that have been identified
within structuralist semantics (Geeraerts 2009) are lexical field theory, componential
analysis and relational semantics.

Lexical field theory

The most influential book which was published in lexical field theory is
Der Deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes. Die Geschichte eines
Sprachlichen Feldes (1931) by Jost Trier. Jost Trier’s books, as well as his other
studies, which are influenced by W. von Humboldt’s ideas on language, represent
an attempt to apply some of the Saussurean principles to semantics. Analyzing a
set of lexical items having related meanings and thus belonging to a semantic field,
Trier concludes that they are structurally organized within this field. For the first
time words were no longer approached in isolation, but analyzed in terms of their
position within a larger unit - the semantic field - which in turn, is integrated,
together with other fields, into an even larger one. The process of subsequent
integrations continues until the entire lexicon is covered. So, the lexicon is seen as

16
a huge mosaic with no piece missing 1. Although Trier's ideas are enveloped in a
mystical cloak (Chițoran 1973: 17) and although he believed that there would be no
gaps or overlaps in a lexical field, his book is a valuable starting point for
subsequent lexical field theories.

Componential analysis

The second strand in structuralist semantics, componential analysis (CA)

or the (semantic) feature approach 2 goes as far back as 1953 to the Danish linguist
Louis Hjemslev and has a long tradition both in European structuralism and
American anthropology3. Hjemslev and Jakobson were the first to maintain that
componential analysis could and should be extended from phonology into both
grammar and semantics.
This approach assumes that all meanings can be analysed into semantic
components, distinctive semantic features or semes. Semes are the minimal
semantic features which work within a particular semantic field and serve to
structure the field in terms of different kinds of opposition. They can be
expressed with the help of a binary feature notation using ‘+’ and ‘-‘. Classemes
are very general sense-components shared by lexical items belonging to different
semantic fields, e.g. “animate” / “inanimate”, “male” / “female” 4.
Analyzing chaise, fauteuil, canapé, tabouret (roughly equivalent to chair,
armchair, sofa and stool) Bernard Pottier (1964) identifies the following semes 5, i.e.
“for sitting upon”, “with legs”, “with a back” , “with arms” and ”for one person” .
The common components of the set under discussion are “artifact”, “piece
of furniture” and “for sitting upon”. The features that provide the contrasts, i.e.
diagnostic features refer to:
(a) the occurrence or lack of “legs”
(b) the occurrence or lack of a “back”
(c) the occurrence or lack of “arms”
(d) the number of “persons” for which the piece of furniture is designed.

1
See Chapter 5. Semantic organization where the issues of semantic field and the lexicon
are discussed in detail.
2
The name ”feature approach” comes from the basic idea that word meanings are given by
sets of features.
3
In the 1950s American anthropologists devised a technique for the analysis of kinship
vocabulary.
4
The distinction between semes and classemes concerned scholars that noticed the
interdependence between field theory and componential analysis: Coșeriu, 1967; Pottier,
1974; Lyons, 1977.
5
Pottier (1974:28) proposes an interesting distinction between specific semes (sèmes
spécifiques), generic semes (sèmes génériques) and connotative semes (sèmes connotatifs). He
uses the term sémantème for the set of sémes spécifiques, classème for the set of sèmes
génériques and virtuème for the set of sèmes connotatifs.

17
 The seme/classeme distinction drawn by European structuralists can be
associated with the distinguisher/marker distinction that has been postulated by the
American generative linguists Jerold J. Katz and Jerry A. Fodor. Semantic features like
(HUMAN), (MALE) express general semantic properties, enter into the analysis of
very many items in the vocabulary, and are involved in the statement of syntactic rules
and of semantic restrictions. They are usually referred to as markers. Distinguishers
represent ‘what is idiosyncratic about the meaning of a lexical item’ (Taylor 1989: 34).
According to Lyons (1987/1977: 327) they are merely ‘the residue of lexical meaning’
that is not accounted for in terms of markers.
Roughly markers would correspond to what Nida (1975) had called
diagnostic components and distinguishers to what he had labeled as supplementary
components. A famous example of analysis in terms of semantic markers and
distinguishers is the noun bachelor:
bachelor {n}
a. (human) (male) [one who has never been married]
b. (human) (male) [young knight serving under the standard of another knight]
c. (human) [one who has the first or lowest academic degree]
d. (animal) (male) [young fur seal without a mate in the breeding season]
As can be noticed we can separate out the feature basis of the different senses of
bachelor listing the markers (enclosed in parentheses) and the distinguishers (noted
within square brackets) for each sense.
The similarity between classemes and markers is stressed by Lyons
(1987/1977: 327) who shows that they both represent the part of the meaning that is
systematic for the language. For instance, some of Katz’ markers (e.g.”male”) are
systematic for the language because they play a role in selection restrictions. Thus,
“pregnant” cannot combine with a noun whose meaning contains the component
“male”: *That man is pregnant6. In a comparable way, Pottier and Coșeriu emphasize
that it is the classemes that determine the semantically-based interdependences
between nouns and adjectives or nouns and verbs. For instance, it is the classeme
“male” that determines the selection of the Italian ammogliarsi (rather than maritarsi)
or Romanian a se însura (rather than a se mărita).
Consequently, one of the apparent advantages of the componential approach
has to do with the semantic acceptability of syntagmatic combinations of words and
phrases, i.e whether a given combination is to be generated as significant or excluded
as meaningless. The second advantage refers to semantic relations reformulated
within a componential theory of semantics. Lyons (1985/1968: 476) rightly maintains
that “componential analysis is a technique for the economical statement of certain
semantic relations between lexical items and between sentences containing them”.
In other words, componential analysis is especially effective when it comes to
representing similarities and differences among words with related meanings (synonyms,
antonyms) or between related meanings of the same word (polysemantic words). The
most comprehensive approach to polysemantic items in terms of the componential
6
Similarly, it cannot combine with an item which has the component “inanimate” such as
table ( * pregnant table).

18
analysis of meaning is provided by Nida (1975). He views the relations between various
types of meanings as being systematic and argues that there is a close relation between:
a) an instrument and the activity associated with it: brake, chain, hoe, hammer, knife,
motor, rake, rope, saw.
b) a place and the activity associated with it: board a ship, tree a racoon, bank
money.
c) an entity (affected) and the activity of which the entity is the goal: to fish, to
barbecue, to handle, to behead, to go birding.
d) agent- action: governor, learner, student, etc.
The limitations of the CA originate in the fact that in some cases semantic
features cannot provide any insight into the nature of the meaning they are supposed
to represent. For instance, the meaning of dog can be characterized in terms of the
features “animal”, “canine” but there is no further analysis of the concept underlying
the feature “canine”.
In Coşeriu’s view, lexical field theory has to be supplemented with the
functional doctrine of distinctive oppositions. According to him, structural analysis
should focus on the functional language that is homogeneous, leaving aside
geographic (diatopical), social (diastratal) and stylistic (diaphatic) variation.
Lexical items are opposed to each other and this oppositional contrast yields
specific distinctive features or semantic components. He uses the term Archisemem
to characterize the semantic features common to all members of a word field and
Archilexem for cases of lexical units representing such features
The third approach in structuralist semantics, relational semantics, was
believed to provide a different type of meaning description apparatus, i.e. one that is
more purely linguistic7, thus being more adequate to the structuralist conception of
meaning. Relational semantics, introduced by John Lyons (1963), considers that sense
relations can provide a more independent description of linguistic meaning, thus
realizing the structuralist intentions:

“a theory of word meaning will be more solidly based if the meaning of a

given linguistic unit is defined to be the set of (paradigmatic) relations that
the unit in question contracts with other units of the language (in the context
or contexts in wich it occurs) without any attempt being made to set up
‘contents” for these units.”

In our view, relational semantics can also be called ‘paradigmatic’ (Bidu-

Vrânceanu et al. 1997: 435) because it studies meaning through paradigmatic sense
relations (i.e. relations between two or more linguistic elements belonging to the
same grammatical category that are mutually exclusive within one and the same
linguistic sequence) such as synonymy, antonymy, homonymy, polysemy and
hyponymy.
7
In the Componential Analysis model, descriptive features such as “gender” and
“generation” in the kinship semantic field are real world features, describing characteristics
of the referents, not of the language structures.

19
 Like the previous two strands, i.e. lexical field theory and componential
analysis, relational semantics has the disadvantage of not being able to
systematically make a distinction between the linguistic level and the referential
(encyclopedic) level of content description. For instance, hyponymy is a genuine
sense relation, because it can be defined in terms of inclusion between senses,
while meronymy (partonymy) holds between entities (e.g. hand-finger), not
between senses. Another semantic relation whose understanding relies on situated
(contextual) knowledge that is “encyclopedic and textual rather than structural and
purely linguistic” (Geeraerts 2009: 84) is oppositeness of meaning. For instance,
nature may contrast with art in one context or with civilization in another.
Consequently, the explicit aim of providing a truly structuralist account of
meaning, involving an independent level of description, is hard to attain.

1.2.3. Semantics in generative linguistics

A turning point in the history of lexical semantics is the formulation of a

semantic theory by Jerrold J. Katz and Jerry A. Fodor (1963), who introduced
componential analysis into generative grammar 8. Their paper, entitled “The
structure of a semantic theory” raised significant questions about the use of formal
methods in the description of meaning and about the cognitive (psychological)
reality of meaning. Besides, the incorporation of lexical semantics into a formal
grammar adds syntagmatic relations (i.e. relations that hold between members of
different grammatical categories which are simultaneously present in a single
syntactic structure) to the set of phenomena to be considered (e.g. the lexical
properties and the semantic relations between the terms in a lexical field).
As initially there was no place reserved for semantics in generative
linguistics (See Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, 1957), Katz and Fodor’s
incorporation of a formalized semantic description into the formal theory of
grammar brought about a major shift of perspective for generative linguistics.
Geeraerts (2009: 103) observes that

“Katz and Fodor demonstrated that a formalized semantic description could

be incorporated into the generative framework. They were successful to the
extent that, next to the traditional syntactic and phonologic component,
Chomsky explicitly incorporated a semantic component in his Aspects of the
Theory of Syntax (1965), the so-called Standard Theory of generative
grammar.”

Interpretive (syntagmatic) semantics holds that the basic structure of a

sentence is a syntactic one and semantics only comes in as an interpretation of

8
In his Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, David Crystal (1992: 151) defines
generative grammar as „a set of formal rules which projects a finite set of sentences upon
the potentially infinite set of sentences that constitute the language as a whole and it does
this in an explicit manner, assigning to each a set of structural description.”

20
those syntactic structures. The main focus of interpretive semantics is syntagmatic
semantic relations; this is why interpretive semantics is also called syntagmatic
semantics. The representatives of interpretive/syntagmatic semantics (Jerrold J.
Katz and Jerry A. Fodor 1963, Noam Chomsky 1965 and Ray Jackendof 1986 are
concerned with possible combinations of particular words and with restrictions on
possible combinations of meaning, the so-called “selection restrictions”, i.e.
semantic restrictions on the choice of individual lexical units in construction with
other lexical units (e.g. pregnant will typically ”select” a subject referring to
someone or some animal that is female). Syntagmatic semantics also deals with the
meaning of complex linguistic expressions, including sentences. This explains why
some scholars refer to this type of semantics as ‘sentence semantics’.

Generative semantics, by contrast with interpretive semantics, assumes that

the underlying representation of a sentence is a semantic one. One of its main
concerns is lexical decomposition, i.e. the analysis of word meanings into smaller
units which are seen as standing to one another in constructions like those of
syntax.
Generative semanticists such as James D. McCawley (1968, 1973), and
George Lakoff (1970, 1971) argue that lexemes have an internal structure like the
syntactic structure of sentences and phrases. For example, the sense of kill can be
analysed into CAUSE, BECOME, NOT and ALIVE; these elements are not simply
conjoined but are combined in a hierarchical structure which may be represented as
(CAUSE (BECOME (NOT ALIVE))).
As in their concept of meaning they do not normally look beyond
language, the schools of interpretive and generative semantics must also be
considered language-immanent approaches to semantics.

1.2.4. Cognitive semantics

Cognitive semantics has developed in the 1980’s on the basis of findings in
cognitive psychology. The main difference between structuralist semantics and
cognitive semantics is that the former analyzes meaning from a purely language-
internal perspective (i.e. on the basis of semantic networks connecting lexemes),
whereas cognitive semantics explains meaning primarily in terms of categorization
(i.e. the grouping of similar phenomena into one class). Concerning the structure of
word meaning, the classical approach advocates that lexical concepts 9 are well
delineated entities whose definitions are expressed in terms of an invariable set of
necessary and sufficient features applicable to all instances in that concept.
Cognitive semantics does not exclude that some lexical concepts may be analysed
in terms of necessary and sufficient features. For example, the necessary and

9
Evans, Vyvyan (2006), in his article 'Lexical concepts, cognitive models and meaning
construction' published in Cognitive Linguistics (17: 491-534) defines lexical concept as “a
linguistically encoded concept, conventionally associated with a wide range of forms that
provides access to conceptual knowledge. Lexical concepts exhibit polysemy and have their
own selectional (semantic and grammatical) requirements”.

21
sufficient features of the concept square are: “closed figure”, “four sides”, “sides
equal in length”, and “equal angles”.
On the cognitive view instances of a concept may not be linked because
they all share the same features, but because they share different sets of features
with each other. The features linking the various instances of a lexical concept
have been called ‘the family resemblance relationship’.
Cognitive semantics is the semantic approach of linguists who see no
separation between linguistic knowledge and general thinking, or cognition.
Cognitive linguists tend to adopt a functional view of language, as opposed to the
more formal accounts favoured by Chomsky and similar generative linguists. They
argue that no adequate account of grammatical rules is possible without considering
the meaning of elements. As such, the difference between language and other mental
processes is viewed as one of degree rather than kind.
In cognitive semantics, meaning is considered to be inextricably linked to
human cognition, to the way we perceive the world and group phenomena into
conceptual categories. All linguistic meaning is conceptual in nature and the
structure of linguistic categories is held to reflect the structure of conceptual
categories (e.g. in the sense that the meaning of a word is the cognitive category
connected with it). On the cognitive view, word meaning is not determined by the
language system itself, but reflects how people interact with, perceive and
conceptualize the world. Cognitive semantics suggests that all conceptual
information associated with a lexical item is broadly encyclopedic, that is, it is part
of and needs to be understood against broader cognitive structures. These cognitive
structures have been labeled by using a diverse range of terms: prototype (Rosch,
1978), schema (Barlet, 1932), script (Schank and Abelson, 1977), experiential
gestalt (Lakoff and Jonhson, 1980), global pattern (de Beaugrande and Dressler,
1981), frame (Fillmore, 1982), idealized cognitive model (Lakoff, 1983), mental
model (Jonhson-Laird, 1983), cognitive domain (Langacker, 1987).
For Langacker (1987) a prototype is a typical instance of a category, and
other elements are assimilated to the category on the basis of their perceived
resemblance to the prototype; there are degrees of membership based on degrees of
similarity; a schema is an abstract characterization that is fully compatible with all the
members of the category it defines (so membership is not a matter of degree).
Schemas are generalizations extracted from specific instances, involving elaboration
rather than extension, as in the case of prototypes. Script is usually applied to a
stereotyped sequence of actions that constitute a global event, such as a visit to a
restaurant or dentist, a birthday party, etc. Experiential Gestalts are, according to
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, “the natural products of our bodies, our
interactions with the physical environment, and our interactions with other people
in our culture” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:117). Taylor (1989: 87) defines frame as
“the knowledge network linking the multiple domains associated with a linguistic
form” and maintains that frames are static configurations of knowledge. An
Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM) is a theoretical construct developed by George
Lakoff and refers to a conventionalized mental representation of reality as
perceived and interpreted by our senses or as determined by culture. They are

22
called idealized because “they abstract across a range of experiences rather than
representing specific instances of a given experience” (Evans 2006: 104). Johnson-
Laird (1983)10 views mental model as “a form of semantic representation that plays
a central and unifying role in representing objects, states of affairs, sequences of
events, the way the world is, and social and sociological actions of daily life. It
relates words to the world by way of conception and perception” (Johnson-Laird
1983: 397). Finally, a cognitive domain or conceptual domain has been defined as
a conceptual area relative to which a semantic unit is characterized.
Through the introduction of new models of description and analysis of
meaning such as prototype theory and frame semantics, and through the renewal of
metaphor studies by the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, cognitive semantics has had
a wide appeal among lexical semanticians. An idea central to Cognitive Linguistics
is that of construal, a cover term referring to the nonobjective facets of linguistic
meaning that has come to be used for different ways of viewing a particular
situation. Arie Verhagen (2007)11 considers that

“At a very elementary level, construal is a feature of the meaning of all

linguistic expressions, if only as a consequence of the fact that languages
provide various ways for categorizing situations, their participants and
features, and the relations between them. Speaking thus always implies a
choice. … The fact that a particular situation can be construed in alternate
ways should, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, not come as a big
surprise or require extensive justification. What is more important
linguistically is that languages systematically provide means for different
kinds of construal.” (Verhagen 2007: 49)

Prototype semantics

According to prototype semantics, word meanings contain the properties of

cognitive categories, i.e. we can distinguish central and more peripheral meanings
of a lexeme; word meanings are not rigid, there are often gradual transitions
between word meanings. Prototype semantics is closer to psychological reality than
traditional feature semantics (or all or nothing semantics).The advantages of
prototype semantics over feature semantics does not diminish the usefulness of the
latter for the description and comparison of word meaning, especially for
identifying semantic structures like lexical fields and sense relations. Prototype
theory and the family resemblance model cannot do without a feature-based

10
Johnson-Laird, Philip. 1983. Mental Models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11
Verhagen Arie. 2007. “Construal and Perspectivization” in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive
Linguistics (eds. Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 48-
81.

23
classification. Ultimately, prototype and feature semantics complement each other,
in the sense that feature semantics receives a sounder psychological basis.
Although prototype semantics is particularly adequate for the description
of concrete (extra linguistic) objects, especially those in which shape and size are
relevant, it cannot capture connotative feature or deal with deictics, relational
words and syntagmatic relations (restrictions or transfer of features). Nevertheless,
it has clear advantages in comparison with feature (Aristotelian) semantics. Thus,
the prototype approach can explain: (1) vague, fuzzy category boundaries; (2)
gradual category membership; (3) categories with prototypical kernels; (4) the
different importance attributes.
What is ultimately needed in semantic theory is an integration of both
language-intrinsic and denotational /referential approaches. It is only in this way
that the limits and boundaries of either traditional structuralist semantics or
prototype semantics can be transcended.

Conclusions

In this chapter we have taken a brief look at some major developments in

the history of linguistic semantics. We noted that, in its initial stage, semantics
focused mainly on changes of meaning; thus, historical semantics has a lasting
theoretical significance as it highlights the dynamic nature of meaning: meanings
do not stay the same, as language is applied in new circumstances and contexts.
The second major approach in the history of semantics, structuralist semantics,
was discussed in terms of three main strands or methodologies: lexical field theory,
componential analysis and relational semantics. Shifting the focus on semantic
change, specific to historical/diachronic semantics, to the description of synchronic
phenomena, structuralist semantics had a major impact on lexical semantics through
its change from a semasiological (from expression to meaning) to an
onomasiological perspective (from meaning to expression). It viewed the vocabulary
of a language as a network of expressions that are reciprocally related by various
semantic links.
The third development presented in the chapter, semantics in generative
linguistics, showed that the incorporation of semantics into generative grammar could
lead to discussions of issues regarding both cognitive and formal adequacy.
Finally, the approach emerged in the 1980s and known as cognitive semantics,
successfully transferred research results in cognitive psychology on the internal
structure of categories onto the structure of lexical categories. Two of its main
tenets, the first related to the internal structure of lexical categories (prototype
structure, family resemblance structure and radial network structure) and the
second related to the polysemous nature of lexical items and the cognitive
principles motivating the relations between the different senses of lexical items
will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4.

24
2. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE,
THOUGHT AND REALITY

2.1. Intension and extension and related dichotomies

2.2. Sign – sense – reference
2.3. Models of the sign
2.3.1. The Saussurean model
2.3.2. The Peircean model
2.4. Types of signs
Conclusions

Long before linguistics existed as a discipline, thinkers were speculating

about the nature of meaning. For thousands of years, the question ‘what is
meaning?’ has been considered central to philosophy. More recently it has come to
be important in linguistics, as well. The next subchapter discusses three pairs of
key concepts in semantics, which are more or less overlapping: intension and
extension, sense and reference, denotation and connotation.

2.1. Intension and extension and related dichotomies

Contributions to semantics have come from a diverse group of scholars,

ranging from Plato to Aristotle in ancient Greece to Putnam and Frege in the
twentieth century.
The impossibility of equating a word's meaning with its referents has led to
a distinction between intension and extension or Sinn (sense) and Bedeutung
(reference), a distinction introduced by Gottlob Frege (1892).
The extension of a term corresponds to the set of entities that it picks out in
the real world while the intension of an expression is those properties which define
it, its mental content independent of context. For instance, the extension of "tiger"
is the set of tigers in the real world, while its intension corresponds to the inherent
sense of the term, to the concept that is associated with it: „large carnivore of the
cat family, having an orange-yellow coat with numerous back stripes”.
The term reference designates the relation between an entity in the external
world and the word/expression that is used to pick out this entity (e.g. person, object,
event, place, point in time, etc.). The referent is the entity referred to by an expression in
a particular context; it is a member of the class of objects that constitutes the word’s
extension12.
The sense13 of a linguistic expression is its content without reference, those
features and properties which define it. For example, the sense of “girl” is a bundle
of semantic features: /+human/, /-adult/, /+female/.
The reference of a sign may differ from the sense as in the example given in Frege
(1892): The Bedeutung of 'Evening Star' would be the same as that of 'Morning
12
Sometimes the term extension is used interchangeably with the term denotation.
13
Kortmann (2005: 197) believes that the sense of an expression is „its descriptive meaning.”

25
Star', but not the sense. The expressions morning star, evening star and planet Venus
refer to the same object, i.e. they have the same reference. Their sense, however, is
different, because they do not have the same defining properties. Thus,
- morning star could be defined as „bright planet seen in the eastern sky when
the sun rises”;
- evening star as “bright planet seen in the western sky when the sun sets”;
- Venus as “the planet second in order from the Sun and nearest to the Earth”.

Types of reference
Non-referring expressions
There are cases when to the sense does not correspond a reference, i.e. in
grasping a sense one is not certainly assured of a reference: e.g. sign words such as
unicorn, Santa Claus, hobbit, dragon, elf, fairy, World War III, have no referents in
the real world even though they are far from being meaningless.

Expressions with constant reference

Some expressions have the same referent across a range of utterances: e.g.
the Eiffel Tower and the Pacific Ocean. Expressions of this type are called
„expressions with constant reference”.

Expressions with variable reference

Other expressions have their reference entirely dependent on context: e.g.
the Pope, The President of Romania, my neighbour, I, you, here, there, now,
tomorrow). These expressions are called „expressions with variable reference”. To
identify who is being referred to by pronouns like “I”, “you”, etc., we certainly
need to know a lot about the context in which these words were uttered. These
words whose denotational capability requires contextual support are called deictic
words14. Actually, most acts of referring rely on some contextual information. For
example, to identify the referent of the nominal the President of Romania, we need
to know when it was uttered.
Denotation and connotation

‘Denotation’, like ‘reference’, is the relationship that exists between an

expression and entities, properties and situations external to the language system.
However, unlike ‘reference’, ‘denotation’ is not bound to the context, and “holds
independently of particular occasions of utterance” (Lyons 1987/1977: 208). For
example, the expression the cow is context-dependent, and ‘refers to’ a particular
cow in the way the expression cow alone, which ‘denotes’ the class of all cows,
cannot. It follows that reference’ indicates the actual persons, things, places,
properties, processes and activities, i.e. ‘referents’, in a particular context of
utterance whereas ‘denotation’ indicates “the class of persons, things, etc.,
generally represented by the expression” (Palmer 1986/1976: 18).

14
The term deixis comes from Greek and means roughly ‘pointing’.

26
 Connotation is the variable, subjective, often emotive part of the meaning
of an expression. For example, the connotations of the lexical item night might
include romantic, lonely, uncanny. Connotations are secondary meanings which
can vary according to culture, religion, social class and which are often restricted to
particular contexts.

2.2. Sign-sense-reference

In their book, The Meaning of Meaning (1923), Charles Ogden and Ivor
Richards represent meaning as a model that shows how linguistic symbols are
related to the objects they represent. Ogden and Richards argue that the symbol
corresponds to the Saussurian "signifiant" (E. signifier). They use the term reference for
the concept that mediates between the symbol/ word/expression and the referent. The
triadic concept of meaning was represented by Ogden and Richards in the form of a
triangle.
thought/reference

symbol referent

Most linguists agree that a sign (word, expression or symbol) expresses its
sense, stands for and designates its reference. Coşeriu (1981) stresses the
importance of the distinction between signification or meaning (“Bedeutung”) and
designation (“Besiechnung”). Designation, for him denotes the relationship
between the full linguistic sign, combining signifier (French signifiant) and
signified (French signifié) and the extralinguistic object or referent. The signifier is
the "shape" of a word, provided by the sequence of phonemes (e.g. /d/, /o/, /g/ or
the sequence of letters that make it up (d-o-g). The signified is the ideational
component, the concept that appears in our minds when we hear or read the
signifier, e.g. a small domesticated feline. The signified is not to be confused with
the "referent". The former is a "mental concept", the latter the "actual object" in the
world. As signification (meaning or Bedeutung) alone is believed to be significant
for structural semantics, Coşeriu’s theory excludes extralinguistic objects and
relations and is therefore restricted to language itself; therefore, it can be
characterized as a “language-intrinsic” or “language- immanent approach to
semantics” (Lipka 1990: 99).
The regular connection between a sign, its sense and its reference is of
such a kind that to the sign there corresponds a definite sense and to that in turn a
definite reference, while to a given reference (an object) there does not belong only
a single sign. The same sense has different expressions (lexicalizations) in
different languages (E. table, Fr. table, G. Tisch, It. tavola) or even in the same

27
language (pass away, die, kick the bucket). The association of two or more forms with
the same meanings (synonymy) and the association of two or more meanings with one
form (homonymy and polysemy) show that one can hardly find an ideal language in
which words are defined by a one-to-one relation between signified (Fr. signifié) and
signifier (Fr. signifiant).
The arbitrariness of the link between the signifier (Fr. signifiant) and the
signified (Fr. signifié) or the arbitrary nature of the sign, was, for Ferdinand de Saussure
(1916), the first principle of language. This principle states that there is no inherent,
essential, transparent, self-evident or natural connection between the signifier and the
signified – between the sound of a word and the concept to which it refers 15: „the
process which selects one particular sound sequence to correspond to one particular idea
is completely arbitrary” (Saussure 1983/1916: 111).
Along with Chandler (2007: 25), we believe that the arbitrariness of the sign is
a radical concept because it establishes the autonomy of the language in relation to
reality.
However, if linguistic signs were to be totally arbitrary in every way, language
would not be a system and its communicative function would be destroyed. While the
sign is not determined extralinguistically, it is subject to intralinguistic determination in
the sense that signifiers must constitute well formed combinations of sounds which
conform with existing patterns within the language in question. In the same Cours de
linguistique générale, De Saussure introduces the idea of degrees of arbitrariness:

Not all signs are absolutely arbitrary. In some cases, there are factors which allow
us to recognize different degrees of arbitrariness, although never to discard the
notion entirely. The sign may be motivated to a certain extent.
(De Saussure 1983/1916: 130)

As an example we can mention onomatopoeic words that are not completely arbitrary,
although different languages use different words for the sounds made by familiar
animals.

The famous triangle of meaning of Ogden and Richards (1923) stands for a
model of an analytical and referential definition of meaning; it has been referred to in
hundreds of subsequent works and has had a powerful influence on semantic thinking.
Nevertheless, Ullmann (1962: 56) contends that "for a linguistic study of
meaning the basic triangle offers too little or too much". As a diachronic semanticist,
he observes that the meaning of words may change as new knowledge is generated
without a corresponding change in the referent or real world entity (for example,
atoms remain unchanged while our knowledge of their structure has increased
considerably in the present century).
Ullmann indirectly advises linguists to confine their attention to the left-hand
side of the triangle, i.e. on what he calls name and sense, corresponding to the set

15
For example, there is nothing „treeish” about the word tree.

28
'lexeme-concept' (Magnusson and Persson16 1986: 257) or 'form - content' (Warren
1992: 76). The implication is to neglect the right-hand element, i.e. the thing (Ullmann
1962: 56), entity (Magnusson and Persson 1986: 257) or referent (Warren 1987: 76),
leaving us with a simplified model.

sense

name thing

This model corresponds to an intra-linguistic attitude to the study of meaning

where there is no room for extension, i.e. the relation between the symbol and the real
world entities to which it refers. More recently, cognitive linguists have shown that
the various beliefs that people may have about real world entities are crucial to their
understanding of word meaning.
It is possible that we can use different expressions to identify the same
referent. For example, William Shakespeare can be identified by the expressions the
writer of the play „Hamlet” or the Elisabethan playwright born at Stratford-upon-
Avon. These two expressions share the same referent but have different meanings. A
description that uniquely describes an individual was called a definite description. In
the description theory associated in various forms with the philosophers Bertrand
Russel (1967), and Gottlob Frege (1989) a name is taken as a label or shorhand for
knowledge about the referent. In this theory, understanding a name and identifying the
referent are both dependent on associating the name with the right description. For a
description to be a definite description, it almost always has to be accompanied by
the definite article. In addition, the description needs to be singular. For example,
the description “the children” is not a definite description.

2.3. Models of the sign

Any communication, whether it is between animals or humans, takes place by

means of signs and is studied in semiotics. Semiotics is the systematic study of signs
which analyzes verbal and non-verbal systems of human communication as well as
animal communication. The adjective semiotic was coined by the English philosopher
John Locke in the early 17th century. In its widest sense, a sign may be defined as a form
associated with meaning.

16
Magnusson, U. and G. Persson.1986. Facets, phases and foci: studies in lexical relations
in English. Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell.

29
 Present-day semiotics arises from the independent work of two linguists, one in
Switzerland, the other in the United States. In Switzerland, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857
- 1913) coined semiology as part of his interest in language as a system of signs, while
Charles Sanders Peirce (1834 - 1914) used the term to describe the study of signs and
symbolic systems from a philosophical point of view.
Semiotics is a comprehensive discipline, in that almost anything can be a sign:
clothes, hair-styles, type of house or car owned, accent and body language. All send
messages about such things as age, class, and politics. Therefore, signs may take the
form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, etc., and become signs only when we
invest them with meaning. The two major models of what constitutes a sign are those of
the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and of the American philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce.

2.3.1. The Saussurean Model of the Sign (1916)

Focusing on linguistic signs, De Saussure defined a sign as being composed of

a signifier (Fr. signifiant), i.e. the form that a sign takes and a signified (Fr. signifié), i.e.
the concept to which it refers. De Saussure referred specifically to the signifier as a
sound pattern (Fr. image acoustique)17.
He stressed that sound and thought (or the signifier and the signified) were as
inseparable as the two sides of a piece of paper. Saussure’s model brackets the referent,
i.e. it excludes reference to objects existing in the world. His view of meaning is
structural (any sign has two structural levels, that of signifier and of signified) and
relational rather than referential: the meaning of signs was seen as lying in their
systematic relation to each other rather than deriving from any inherent features of
signifiers or any reference to material things. For example, the meaning of tree depends
on its relation to other words within the system, such as bush, therefore his relational
conception of meaning is differential as he emphasizes the differences between signs.
Saussure’s view of the relational identity of signs lies at the heart of linguistic
structuralism.
With De Saussure, the principle of arbitrariness, already discussed in
section 2.2, does not mean that an individual can arbitrarily choose any signifier for
a given signified. The relation between a signifier and its signified is not a matter
of individual choice; if it were, then communication would become impossible.
What has to be stressed is that the relationship between the signifier and the
signified is conventional, i.e. it depends on social and cultural conventions that
have to be learned.

2.3.2. The Peircean Model of the Sign (1931)

17
Roman Jakobson and other subsequent theorists refer to the form of a sign as either
spoken or written.

30
 Unlike the Saussurean model that is dyadic, i.e. has a twofold structure, the
Peircean model of the sign is triadic18, i.e. it has three parts: (1) the form which the sign
takes; (2) the sense made of the sign and (3) a referent. The sign is a unity of what is
represented (the referent or the object), how it is represented (the form or the
representamen) and how it is interpreted (the sense or the interpretant). The
representamen is similar in meaning to Saussure’ s signifier (Fr. signifiant) while the
interpretant interpretant
is analogous to the signified (Fr. signifie):

representamen object

The broken line at the base of the triangle is intended to indicate that there is not
necessarily any observable or direct relationship between the sign vehicle and the
referent. What is also interesting to note is that Peirce’s object is not confined to
physical things; it can include abstract concepts and fictional entities. A variant of the
Peircean model of the sign was adopted by Charles Ogden and Ivor Richards (1923). As
we have seen in the previous section, it is presented as the semiotic triangle.

2.4. Types of signs19

According to Charles Sanders Peirce, the relationship between a form and what
it represents (or, in Saussurian terminology between a signifier and its signified) can be
of three types: (1) a relationship of similarity (e.g. between a portrait and its real life
object or a diagram of an engine and the real life engine); (2) a relationship of close
association, not infrequently causal association (e.g. the smoke as an indication of fire)
and (3) a conventional link, an arbitrary relation. Starting from these types of
relationship that may hold between a sign and the object it represents, C. S. Peirce
makes a distinction between iconic, indexical and symbolic signs.
An iconic sign or icon (from Greek eikon 'replika') resembles the referent and
provides a perceptual, e.g. visual, auditory, or any other perceptual image of what it
stands for: a portrait, a cartoon, onomatopoeia, metaphors, sound effects in radio drama,
a dubbed film soundtrack, imitative gestures. This type of sign is a highly motivated
one.

18
Prior to Peirce, a triadic model of the sign was employed by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics,
Francis Bacon etc.
19
A distinction between conventional signs i.e. the names we give to people and things and
natural signs (e.g. pictures resembling what they depict) dates back to ancient Greece (Plato).
Later, St. Augustine, distinguished natural signs from conventional signs on the basis of an
immediate link to what they signified, e.g. smoke indicating fire.

31
 An indexical sign or index (from Latin index 'pointing finger') stands for what it
points to; this link can be observed or inferred: medical symptoms (spots indexical of a
disease like measles, fever indexical of flu, a rash, pulse-rate), smoke, thunder, footprints,
echoes, measuring instruments (weathercock, thermometer, clock, spirit level), signals (a
knock on the door, a phone ringing), pointers (a pointing index finger, a directional
signpost), recordings (a video, an audio-recorded voice), personal trademarks
(handwriting, catch-phrases). An index is partially motivated to the extent that there is a
connection, usually of causality, between sign and referent.
A symbol (from Greek symbolon 'a token of recognition') or symbolic sign does
not have a natural link between the form and the thing represented, but a conventional
link. Peirce's symbol is the most arbitrary kind of sign: the word in language, the
formula in mathematics and chemistry, a military emblem, the dollar sign, a flag, red
circles in television, the traffic sign of an inverted triangle, etc. The last example does
not have a natural link between its form and its meaning “give right of way.”
In language, the notion of arbitrariness holds true for most of the simple words;
however, new words (compounds, derivatives) built on already existing linguistic
material are partially motivated. The notion of motivation refers to non-arbitrary links
between a form and the meaning of linguistic expressions.
In terms of their degree of abstraction, the three types of signs can be ordered
from the most 'primitive' to the most abstract. Indexical signs, which are said to be the
most 'primitive' (Dirven and Verspoor 1998: 3) are restricted to the 'here' and 'now' and
are based on a relation of contiguity between form and meaning. Body language, traffic
and advertising are areas providing examples of such signs.
Iconic signs are more complex in that their understanding requires the
recognition of similarity between form and meaning. Road signs picturing children,
animals or various vehicles or scarecrows in the fields which birds take for real enemies,
onomatopeic words such as cock-a-doodle-doo, ding-dong are some instances of iconic
signs.
Symbolic signs, based on a relation of convention between sign and meaning,
are the exclusive prerogative of humans. As it has been acknowledged, people have
more communicative needs than pointing to things and replicating things; we also want
to talk about things which are more abstract in nature such as events in the past or
future, objects that are distant from us, hopes about peace, etc. This can only be
achieved by means of symbols which humans all over the world have created for the
purpose of communicating all possible thoughts (Dirven and Verspoor 1998: 4).
Besides language which stands for arbitrary symbolism, as pointed out by De
Saussure, mathematics is also an instance of the symbolic mode as it does not refer to an
external world; its signifieds are concepts and mathematics is a system of relations.
The three types of signs are not mutually exclusive, that is, a sign can be an
icon, a symbol, or any combination. For instance, the fact that there are three elements
in the Roman numeral III is an example of iconism, but their vertical orientation (as
opposed to horizontal) is arbitrary. Roman Jakobson (1968) argues that many deliberate
indexes also have a symbolic or indexical quality, such as traffic lights or the pointing
gesture that is not always interpreted purely indexically in different cultural contexts.

32
Jakobson notes that the dominance of one mode (or type of sign) is determined by
context, in the sense that the same signifier may be used iconically in one context and
symbolically in another. A sign may be treated as symbolic by one person, as iconic by
another and as indexical by a third. Signs may also shift in mode/category over time,
that is, the relation between signifier and signified is subject to dynamic change.

Conclusions

In this chapter we have looked at three central pairs of concepts used in

semantics, which are more or less overlapping: intension and extension, connotation
and denotation and sense and reference. The first mentioned terms in these pairs
(intension, connotation and sense) relate to the conceptual side of meaning and to the
issue of how to provide a language-intrinsic definition of meaning. The second
mentioned terms (extension, denotation, reference) relate to extralinguistic reality, to the
relation between language and the world and to the issue of how to provide a language-
extrinsic definition of meaning. For a better understanding of the difference we have
presented the two major models of the sign, the Saussurean model and the Peircean
model. Last, but not least, we have seen the distinction between iconic, indexical and
symbolic signs.

33
3. LINGUISTIC MEANING: TYPES AND DIMENSIONS

3.1. Lyon’s classification: descriptive, social and expressive meaning

3.2. Leech’s seven types of meaning
3.3. Descriptive meaning
3.4. Non-descriptive meaning
3.5. Social meaning
3.6. Evoked meaning
Conclusions

In the context of language the issue of meaning requires reference to

nonlinguistic factors, such as thought, situation, knowledge, intention and use.
These factors might explain why other disciplines are involved in the study of
meaning along with linguistics: philosophy, psychology, logic, sociology,
theology, etc. David Crystal (1992: 214) rightly observes that “within linguistics,
the role each level plays in the interpretation of a sentence is often referred to as
the meaning of that level”. Thus, we can identify lexical meaning, the meaning of
lexical items or lexemes that belong to one of the four lexical classes: nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs.
Grammatical meaning is the meaning of grammatical structures such as
inflections, constructions or any other units that form closed classes. For instance,
of, in a wall of silence marks the syntactic relation between wall and silence; or, -s
in walls marks the plural of the noun wall. By contrast with lexical meaning that is
frequently concrete, grammatical meaning in general is abstract: e.g. the meanings
of case or tense morphemes or definiteness marked with the help of a and the.
Sentence meaning is the meaning a sentence has by virtue of the words it
contains and their grammatical arrangement, and which is not dependent on
context. By contrast, utterance meaning is “the meaning a sentence carries when it
is used in a particular context, with referents assigned to all referring
expressions…” (Cruse 2006: 164). The present work will focus on the first and last
types of meaning, i.e. lexical meaning and utterance meaning, respectively. Several
linguists (Lyons 1987/1977, Leech 1987/1974, Cruse 2004) have proposed ways of
classifying meaning into types and the various proposals are more or less
overlapping.

3.1. Lyons’ classification: descriptive, social and expressive meaning

Speaking of language functions, semanticists have mentioned that

language is used for (1) the communication of factual information (2) the
establishment and maintenance of social relationships (3) the expression of our
attitudes and personality. Lyons (1987/1977) correlated each of these functions 20,
20
Roman Jakobson refer to these functions as referential, phatic and expressive.

34
with different kinds of semantic information that is encoded in language utterances:
descriptive, social and expressive:

“Descriptive information or descriptive meaning is factual in the sense

that...it can be explicitly asserted or denied and in the most favourable
instances, objectively verified. An example of an utterance with descriptive
meaning is the statement It is raining here in Edinburgh at the moment.”
(Lyons 1987/1977: 51)

Other terms listed by Lyons used to refer to this type of meaning are referential,
cognitive, propositional, ideational, and designative.
As the distinction between expressive and social meaning is far from
clear-cut, and many authors subsumed both under a single term (emotive,
attitudinal, interpersonal, expressive, etc), Lyons (1987/1977: 51) proposes the
term interpersonal for what is common to the social and expressive functions of
language.

3.2. Leech’s seven types of meaning

While Lyons (1987/1977: 51) distinguishes descriptive meaning from social

and expressive meaning, Leech (1987/1974: 23) separates conceptual meaning from
various types of associative meaning (connotative, social, affective, reflected,
collocative) and from thematic meaning.
Conceptual meaning, sometimes called ‘denotative’, ‘cognitive’ or
‘descriptive’ is widely assumed to be the central factor in linguistic
communication. We will discuss this type of meaning in more detail in section
3.3.
Associative meaning is the meaning which becomes attached to a word
because of its use, but which is not part of its core sense. The principal types of
associative meaning are connotative meaning, social meaning, affective meaning,
reflected meaning and collocative meaning.
Leech (1987/1974: 12) defines connotative meaning as „the communicative
value an expression contains by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely
conceptual content”. Connotation is the variable, subjective, often emotive part of
the meaning of an expression. Connotations are relatively unstable, i.e. they vary
considerably according to culture, historical period and the experience of the
individual. For example, the connotative meaning of woman embraces the putative
properties of the referent according to the viewpoint adopted by an individual (e.g. a
feminist or misogynist) or a group of people and varies from age to age or from
society to society.
Social meaning refers to what is communicated of the social circumstances
of language use. It relates to the use of language to establish and regulate social
relations and to maintain social roles. This type of language use is alternatively
described as social or phatic communication. The notion of phatic communication

35
emphasizes experiences of social interaction and the participation in social
linguistic rituals such as greetings, apologies, condolences, etc. In phatic
communication the verbal interaction has little information value, but instead plays
an essential role in handling social interaction. Examples of words with social
meaning include greetings like hello, goodbye and forms of address such as sir,
madam, pal, mate, love.
Closely related to social meaning, affective meaning consists in what is
communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/writer, including his
attitude to the listener, or his attitude to something he is talking about. In a manner
comparable to social meaning, affective meaning is only indirectly related to the
conceptual representation. Affective meaning is more directly a reflection of the
speaker’s personal attitude or feelings towards the listener or the target of the
utterance. Affective meaning can be noted in gosh! and in the differences between
father and daddy, policeman and cop, horse and nag, very small and tiny, etc.,
Reflected meaning is that type of meaning which arises in cases of multiple
conceptual meaning, when one sense of a word forms part of our response to
another sense. We sometimes find that when we use a word with a particular sense,
one or more of its senses is reflected in it. Reflected meaning allows speakers to
indulge in innuendo, ambiguity and the generation of puns as in I have the body of
an eighteen year old. I keep it in the fridge.
Collocation is the habitual co-occurrence of particular lexical items,
sometimes purely formally (e.g. eke out), sometimes with some semantic
implication (e.g. slim chance). Collocative meaning is the type of meaning that
“consists of the associations a word acquires on account of the meanings of words
which tend to occur in its environment” (Leech 1987/1974:17). For example,
strong has a completely different meaning in strong coffee than it does in strong
language where it is usually a euphemism for swearing.
Therefore, the meaning of an expression containing more than one
meaningful element can be worked out by combining the meanings of its
constituents21. This is what the principle of compositionality actually states: the
meaning of a complex expression in natural language depends on (and can be
reconstructed from) the meanings of its parts and the syntactic relations holding
between these parts. This important principle of syntagmatic (sentence) semantics is
attributed to the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege (1848-
1925); hence the name of Frege’s Principle.
The last meaning type in Leech’s classification is thematic meaning,
namely, the type of meaning that is communicated by the way in which a speaker
or writer organizes the message, in terms of ordering, focus and emphasis. Its name
points to the notion of theme, used in linguistics as part of an analysis of the
structure of sentences. Theme refers to the way speakers identify the relative
importance of their subject matter and is defined as the first major constituent of a
sentence, seen as a string of constituents. The process of moving an element of the
sentence to the front of the sentence (fronting) to act as theme, is called
21
Idioms seem to be an exceptional case.

36
thematization or topicalization22. For example, John was sacked last Thursday and
What happened to John last Thursday was that he was sacked are propositionally
identical, but thematically different, i.e. they differ in terms of thematic meaning.

3.3. Descriptive meaning

Descriptive meaning refers to those aspects of meaning which relate

directly to denotations of lexical items and the propositional content of sentences
and thus corresponds to an intellectual level of interpretation, as opposed to one
where emotional and subjective interpretation is involved. This type of meaning
has been given various labels such as logical, propositional, referential, objective,
conceptual, denotative, cognitive and ideational. Each of these labels seems to be
accounted for by the defining characteristics identified by Cruse (2004: 44), in his
book, Meaning in Language. An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics.

a. That aspect of the meaning of a sentence which determines whether or not any
proposition it expresses is true or false justifies the labels logical and propositional.
For example, in the utterance Somebody has turned the bloody lights off which
contains both descriptive and non-descriptive meaning, bloody makes no
contribution to the truth or falsity of the statement. However, in a situation where
Somebody’s turned the lights off is true, Somebody’s turned the lights on would be
false; therefore, what off signifies is part the descriptive meaning of the utterance.

b. That aspect of the meaning of an expression which constrains what the expression can
be used to refer to, or, from another point of view, which guides the hearer in identifying
the intended referent, motivates the label referential.

c. Descriptive meaning is objective, that is, it is not bound to the here-and -now of
the current speech situation.

d. It is fully conceptualized in the sense that it provides a categorization which

effectively “describes” aspects of experience.

e. The descriptive meaning of a sentence can potentially be negated or questioned.

Dimensions of descriptive meaning

In discussing descriptive meaning, David Alan Cruse (2004: 47) assumes

that the dimensions along which descriptive meaning can vary are quality,
intensity, specificity, vagueness, basicness and viewpoint.
The dimension of quality can be seen in the differences between red and green,
dog and cat, apple and orange, run and walk, hate and fear, here and there. Pure

22
The distinctions topic vs. comment and given vs. new information are other ways of
analyzing the sentence structure of a message.

37
differences of quality are to be observed only between items which are equal on the
scales of intensity and specificity which are discussed below.
Intensity characterizes items that designate the same area of semantic
quality space such as, warm-lukewarm-hot-boiling, dirty-filthy, etc. Variation in
intensity is not confined to the domain of qualities, it is also possible in other areas:
scare-fright-horror-terror, mist-fog, beat-thrash.
Specificity shows up when one term (the more general one) designates a
more extensive area of quality space than the other: animal-dog, kill-murder-execute.
Specificity is a property which distinguishes a hyponym from a hypernym 23: the
hyponym is more specific, the hypernym more general. The hyponym gives more
detailed information and denotes a narrower category. Thus, scarlet is more
specific than red, sprint than run, slap than hit, etc. Besides type-specificity, when
the more specific term denotes a subtype included within the more general term,
Cruse (2006: 197) believes that there is also part specificity which holds between a
meronym and a holonym24: finger, for instance, is more specific than hand.
Vagueness can be noticed in terms which designate a region on a gradable
scale such as middle-aged in She’s middle-aged vs. She’s in her fifties. Similarly
young in Jane is a young woman vs Jane is in her twenties.
For the notion of basicness, Cruse (2004: 50-51) provides several
interpretations. First, he relates it to concrete vocabulary items whose meanings
„are fixed by their relations with observable properties of the environment”.
Second, basicness involves the distinction between independence and dependence:
dependent meanings, being more complex, build on more basic meanings. For
example, acceleration depends on the notion of speed, which in turn presupposes
the notion of movement, which builds on basic notions such as physical object,
location, change and time. And thirdly, basicness, viewed in terms of cognitive
psychology, corresponds to basic level category, i.e the level of the ordinary
everyday names for things (e.g. chair), creatures (e.g. cat), actions (e.g. eating) and
properties (e.g. tall)25.
The last dimension of descriptive meaning mentioned in Cruse (2004) is
viewpoint (or vantage point, according to Ronald Langacker) which refers to the way
something is described, depending on the position of the speaker relative to the thing
being described. For example, a box next to a tree, can be viewed in a number of
ways, depending on the posion of the speaker: The box is in front of the tree, The
box is behind the tree, The box is to the left of the tree and The box is to the right of
the tree. The linguistic expressions which encode as part of their meaning the
viewpoint of the speaker at the moment of the utterance are deictic expressions such
as this, that, here, there, now and then26.

3.4. Non-descriptive (affective) meaning

23
For a full discussion of hyponymy see Chapter 4, section 4.4.
24
The topic of meronymy is discussed in more detail in section 4.4.
25
For more details on levels of categorisation, see Chapter 3 in Mariana Neagu. 2005.
Cognitive Linguistics. An Introduction. București: EDP.
26
For a full discussion of the topic of deixis see Chapter II in Part II. Pragmatics.

38
 Affective meaning is that type of meaning that shows how language
reflects the personal feelings of the speaker, including his attitude to the listener, or
his attitude to something he is talking about. Alternative terms for affective
meaning are attitudinal, emotive or expressive meaning. This type of meaning is
often held to fall within the scope of stylistics or pragmatics. It can also be found in
(suprasegmental) phonology as intonation is one way of conveying attitudes and
emotions27. As English does not have a rich system of grammatical moods
(subjunctive, optative, dubitative), it encodes expressive meaning in much of its
vocabulary and in the prosodic structure of spoken utterances. For instance, words
that are not necessarily expressive, such as still, yet, already, may become
expressive if appropriate intonation and stress are added:

Does she still live in Manchester?

Has the postman been yet?
The railway station had already been closed when we came to live here.
Cruse (2004: 58) maintains that these sentences seem to be expressively neutral,
but feeling can be expressed prosodically:

Are you still here?

You mean you haven’t done it yet?
Surely she hasn’t gone already?

However, what still, yet and already basically express is not an emotion proper but
an expectation or a set of expectations on the part of the speaker. Similarly,
implicit superlatives such as huge, tiny, beautiful, brilliant, which are expressively
neutral if not stressed, seem to be able to acquire an expressive element if stressed:

It was absolutely huge.

It was absolutely tiny.

However, there are cases when not all the members of a synonymic series can be
expressively stressed: e.g. baby vs. infant, child, neonate:

Mother and baby are doing well.

Oh, look! It’s a baby! Isn’t it lovely?
? Oh, look! It’s a child/infant/neonate! Isn’t he lovely?

As can be noticed, baby is capable of quite neutral employment and can also be
invested with emotive expressive meaning, usually prosodically. In contrast, child,

27
The attitudinal function of intonation is described in Mariana Neagu and Roxana Mareș.
2013. Contemporary English Language. Phonetics, Spelling and Vocabulary. București:
ProUniversitaria, pp. 108-110.

39
infant and neonate are incapable of expressive use, although their denotative
meaning is very close to that of baby.
According to the type of meaning they possess, words may be divided into
(1) those that have only expressive and no descriptive meaning - the so-called
expletives and (2) words that have both descriptive and expressive meaning.
Expletives can be interjections

Wow! Oops! Ouch! O, hell! Hell’s Bell’s! Bother! Ace! I’ll say!

or they may have an emphasing role within a sentence, expressing anger:

Get that damn dog off my seat!

It’s freezing – shut the bloody window!
You can blooming well put it back where you got it.

Taboo words lend themselves readily to expletive use :

Holy shit! Balls! My arse! Piss off! Bugger me!

Some expletives are historically merely euphemistic alterations of taboo items:
Gosh (God), Heck (Hell) Gee whiz (Jesus)

Lexical items that have both expressive and descriptive/propositional traits are
daddy, mummy, paw (in the sense of “hand”), mug (in the sense of “face”), blubber
(in the sense of “weep”), damn (in the sense of “extremely”), rag (in the sense of
“paper of poor quality”):

It was damn cold.

Stop blubbering!
Don’t read that - it’s a rag!

In the last example, rag expresses contempt for the paper in question. It is
fairly common to find pairs of words whose meanings differ only in that they express
different evaluative judgments on their designated referents28 (or one expresses a
judgment while the other is neutral): horse-nag, car-banger, clever chap-a smart alec,
careful with money-mean. That some of the evaluative meaning may well be
expressive is obvious in the following example sentences:

A: Arthur tried to sell me an old nag.

B: No, he didn’t - it was a perfectly good horse.

A: I hear Arthur’s very mean.

B: No, he isn’t - he’s just careful with his money.
28
In French linguistics (Pottier, Kerbrat-Orecchioni), these differences are called
“connotative”

40
A: Arthur’s a smart alec.
B: No, he isn’t – but he is clever.

It seems that lexical items characteristic of informal style and slang are
more likely to have expressive meaning than items belonging to more formal
styles. Propositional and expressive meanings are considered the most important
types of meaning in language and we can think of them as what a speaker
principally utilizes and directly manipulates in order to convey his intended
message.
Cruse (1986: 274) rightly believes that “every communicative utterance
must transmit as part of its meaning an indication of intended propositional
attitude. Without this, an utterance would be communicatively dead - it would
resemble a proposition ‘entertained’ by a logician”.

3.5. Social meaning

Many semanticists consider expressive meaning and social meaning not to

be clearly separated. The interconnection between expressive meaning and social
meaning can be understood if we realize that the rules of conduct constraining the
expression of feelings or attitudes in certain social situations and the use of
expressive terms, in particular swear words as terms of address may have severe
social consequences.
When dealing with meaning and social interaction in his book
Understanding Semantics, Sebastian Löbner (2002) looks at social meaning as
being „part of the lexical meaning of certain words, phrases or grammatical
forms”. He further states that „an expression or grammatical form has social
meaning if and only if its use is governed by the social rules of conduct or, more
generally, rules for handling social interaction (Löbner 2002: 29). Expressions with
social meaning include forms of address, phrases of greeting or saying good-bye,
phrases of apologizing, acknowledging or answering the phone. We believe that the
importance attached to the use of these expressions depends on the speaker’s
background and the culture he belongs to.
In today’s European languages, with the exception of English where the
you form has come to dominate the entire spectrum of addressing, most languages
possess a distinct deferential form used in addressing people of higher social status
or in order to mark distance. Languages that use respectul forms of address,
identical with the second person plural are: French (vous), Romanian
(dumneavoastra) Czech and other Slavic languages (vy), Finnish (te).
In other languages, the forms of respectful address are based on a third
person plural form, e.g. German Sie and Danish/Norwegian De or on frozen
paraphrases of an original honorific such as Spanish Usted, plural Ustedes. In
Italian, the 3rd person singular (male or female) pronoun Lei and the 3rd person

41
plural pronoun Loro are used in more formal situations to address strangers,
acquaintances, older people, or people in authority.
The so-called ‘majestic’ plural is commonly used by cardinals, popes,
(Your Eminence, Your Holiness), the royalty (Your Grace), governors of states,
ambassadors (Your Excellency). These address forms that indicate social standing
in addition to identifying the person addressed, represent a form of social deixis29,
to use a term coined by Levinson (1983: 89). The informal variants tu (in
Romanian) and du (in German) have the same descriptive meaning (i.e. they
designate the hearer/ the addressee) as Dumneavoastra and Sie but differ in social
meaning. By the choice of the pronoun the speaker indicates his social relationship
to the addressee(s). The distinction between the two kinds of relationship relevant
for choosing either dumneavoastra or tu in Romanian and Sie or du in German is
also relevant in other respects: it coincides with the use of surnames with titles vs.
first names as vocative forms of address.
In American English, idiomatic, colloquial speech is heavily used on most
occasions, except for public events and fairly formal situations when they use
formal speech. When meeting strangers for the first time Americans use first
names; even the simple greeting Hi is a badge of informality.
In most Latin American and European societies there are levels of formality
attached to status differences. In Asian cultures, formality is demanded by greater
age as well as by higher status. High formality is a characteristic of the teacher-
student relationship in countries such as Egypt, Turkey and Iran. The use of personal
titles is a way the Germans and the Mexicans show their position in the social
structure, show respect and mark formality.
Two further expressions with social meaning are please and thanks (thank
you, containing you might be considered as referring to the addressee and to this
extent it also has descriptive meaning). Please marks a request as polite (it is a
formality marker) and indicates, similar to the forms of address, a certain kind of
social relationship between speaker and addressee(s). Interestingly, phrases like
I’m sorry and Nice to meet you which literally represent descriptions of attitudes,
are primarily social and not expressive.

3.6. Evoked meaning: dialect and register

Approaching the issue of synonymy in his Lexical Semantics, David Alan

Cruse (1986: 282) finds that a potential source of variation among cognitive
synonyms is provided by evoked meaning which is the result of the existence of
different dialects and registers within a language.
Dialectal variation, which is variation in language use according to
speaker, can be of three types: geographical, temporal and social. 30 (Cruse 1986:
282). Lexical items that exemplify geographical dialectal variation are the Scots
words glen (valley), loch (lake), wee (small) and dram (melancholy) that are
29
A detailed presentation of social deixis is given in Section 2.5., Part II. Pragmatics.
30
In Romanian, the term dialect is mostly applied to the geographical varieties of language.

42
familiar to most speakers of English outside Scotland and recognized as Scottish.
Other lexical items that have the power of evoking images and associations of their
home surroundings are Americanisms such as fall (autumn), elevator (lift),
apartment (flat). Temporal dialectal variation is illustrated by the synonymic pairs
wireless – radio and swimming bath - swimming pool. Social dialectal variation
involves variation according to the social class of the speaker. The phrase “U and
non-U” has been coined to refer to upper-class and non-upper class words:

U non-U

dessert afters, pudding

relation relative
potatoes spuds
perspire sweat
sitting room lounge
writing paper note paper
dinner tea
dinner lunch
sofa settee

Kate Fox, in her famous Watching the English. The Hidden Rules of English
Behaviour makes a very interesting remark about the relation between linguistic
choices and social status in England:

“The linguistic codes we have identified indicate that class in England has
nothing to do with money and very little to do with occupation. Speech is all
important. A person with an upper-class accent, using upper-class
terminology will be recognized as upper-class even if she is earning poverty
line wages, doing grubby menial work and living in a run-down council flat.
Or even unemployed, destitute and homeless. Equally, a person with
working class pronunciation, who calls his sofa a settee, and his midday
meal dinner, will be identified as working class even if she is a multi-
millionaire living in a grand country house. There are other class indicators
such as one’s taste in clothes, furniture, decoration, cars, pets, books,
hobbies, food and drink but speech is most immediate and most obvious. …
Words are our preferred medium, so it is perhaps significant that they should
be our primary means of signaling and recognizing social status. “ (Fox
2004: 82)

The second type of variation which contributes to what Cruse (1986) calls ‘evoked
meaning’ is register variation, that is, variation (within the speech of a single

43
community) according to situation31. Whereas dialects are language varieties
associated with different characteristics of users, (e.g. regional affiliation, age and
class), registers are varieties of language (used by a single speaker) which are
considered appropriate to different occasions and situations of use.

Components of register

Register is usually divided into three main components: field, mode and
32
style . Field refers to the topic or field of discourse: there are lexical (and
grammatical) characteristics of, for instance, legal discourse, scientific discourse,
advertising language, sales talk, political speeches, football commentaries, cooking
recipes and so on. The difference between expert (technical) terms and their
correspondents (synonyms) in ordinary language is that the former may have
stricter definitions (e.g. extirpate) while the latter are more loosely defined (e.g.
take out). Terms that differ only in respect of the fields of discourse in which they
typically appear are cognitive synonyms. For instance, matrimony may be
considered a field-specific synonym most frequently encountered in legal and
religious contexts of one of the senses of marriage (state of being married);
wedlock overlaps with matrimony, but is more likely to be heard in church than in a
court of law.
The second dimension of register, that is, mode, is concerned with the
manner of transmission of a linguistic message – whether it is written, spoken,
telegraphed or emailed. For example, further to is specific of written language,
whereas like is used in the spoken language (e.g. I asked him, like, where he was
going.)
The third dimension of register, that is, style, is a matter of the
formality/informality of an utterance. Style spawns the most spectacular
proliferation of cognitive synonyms, especially in taboo areas such as death, sex,
excretory functions, money, religion, power relations, etc. For instance, pass away
belongs to a higher (more formal) register than die and kick the bucket and croak
belong to a lower register. The synonymic series of die contains items that may be
differentiated in respect of field as well as style: kick the bucket, buy it, snuff it, cop
it, pop off, peg out, expire, perish, die, pass away, decease, etc.

Conclusions

In this chapter we have identified a number of meanings that were

distinguished in terms of various criteria: (1) language level (e.g. lexical,
grammatical, sentence, utterance meaning) and (2) language function (e.g.
descriptive, social, expressive). One main difference between lexical meaning and
31
Hence, the association of register with context of situation, a key concept in Halliday’s
(1985) approach, defined as the immediate environment in which a text is actually
functioning.
32
Or tenor in Halliday’s terminology.

44
grammatical meaning is that the former is generally more concrete than the latter.
Another essential difference relates to the fact that the number of grammatical
meanings expressed in a language is by far smaller (and finite) in comparison with
the number of potential lexical meanings. The distinction drawn between different
types of meaning can be useful for translators since one of their most difficult tasks
is to perceive the meanings of words and utterances very precisely in order to
render them into another language.

45
4. SENSE RELATIONS

4.1. Semasiology and onomasiology - two basic approaches to the

study of words and their senses
4.2. From word to concept: polysemy and homonymy
4.2.1. Polysemy
4.2.2. Homonymy
4.2.3. The distinction between polysemy and homonymy
4.2.4. Polysemy in Cognitive Linguistics
4.2.5. Polysemy vs. vagueness
4.2.6. Polysemy and semantic change
4.3. From Concept to Word: Synonymy and Antonymy
4.3.1. Synonymy
4.3.2. Antonymy
4.4. Hierarchical Sense Relations: Hyponymy and Meronymy
4.4.1. Hyponymy
4.4.2. Meronymy
Conclusions

4.1. Semasiology and onomasiology - two basic approaches to the study of

words and their senses

The terminological pair onomasiology/semasiology is a traditional one in

European lexicology and lexicography. This pair is generally regarded as identifying
two different perspectives for studying the relationship between words and their
semantic values. A brief look at the etymology of the terms semasiology and
onomasiology points to a distinction between meaning and naming.
Semasiology comes from the Greek sema, "sign" and takes its starting point
in the word as a form and describes what semantic values it may have.
Onomasiology comes from the Greek onoma "name" and accounts for the opposite
direction in the study of meaning, that is, it starts from a semantic value and
investigates by which expressions a particular concept can be designated.
Actually, semasiology studies the semantic structure of single expression
(e.g. polysemy and homonymy), while onomasiology is concerned with sets of
related concepts (expressed by sense relations such as synonymy, antonymy,
hyponymy). Dirk Geeraerts, Stefan Grondelaers and Peter Bakema (1994) in their
book “The Structure of Lexical Variation. Meaning, Naming and Context” include
semasiological and onomasiological variation among the four main kinds of lexical
variation they identify: semasiological, onomasiological, formal and contextual.
The first two types are placed under the general heading conceptual variation.

46
 Semasiological variation involves the situation that one particular lexical
item may refer to distinct types of referents. Onomasiological variation involves
the situation that a referent or type of referent may be named by means of various
conceptually distinct lexical categories.
While the poststructuralist phase in the history of lexical semantics had a
predominantly semasiological focus (concentrating as it did on the changes of
meaning of individual words), the structuralist stage stressed the necessity of
complementing the semasiological perspective with an onomasiological one. A
number of scholars, Kurt Baldinger among them, emphasized the importance of a
semasiological perspective next to an onomasiological one. In his 1964 article
entitled “Semasiologie et onomasiologie” he concludes that diachronic semantics
should neither be based exclusively on a semasiological, word-oriented method,
nor exclusively on an onomasiological, structure-oriented method. Later, in his
“Semantic Theory” he stresses the complementarity of the onomasiological and
semasiological perspectives as follows:

"Each linguistic evolution is produced on the one hand within the framework
of a semasiological structure and on the other within the framework of an
onomasiological structure." (Baldinger 1980: 308)

An important idea that should receive more systematic attention nowadays

is a contextualized, pragmatic conception of onomasiology, based on the view that
onomasiology approaches problems from the viewpoint of the speaker, who has to
choose between different names of expression33.

4.2. From word to concept: polysemy and homonymy

4.2.1. Polysemy

Polysemy is the phenomenon whereby a linguistic unit exhibits multiple

distinct yet related meanings. Being a common feature in any language, polysemy
is justly considered to be a necessary means of language economy. This idea is
stressed by Steven Ullmann in Principles of Semantics (1964:118): “polysemy is
an indispensable resource of language economy. It would be altogether
impracticable to have separate terms for every referent”. The topic of polysemy has
attracted linguists’ attention and interest and has posed special problems both in
semantic theory and semantic applications, such as lexicography or translation.
Thus, it has been found that dictionary entries for some words tend to inflate the
number of sense categories beyond those normally distinguished by speakers. The
difficulty people will have in using the dictionary is in distinguishing major and

33
Semasiology, on the other hand, can be viewed as approaching problems from the
viewpoint of the listener, who has to determine the meaning of the words he hears, from all
the possible meanings.

47
minor senses because most dictionaries treat all senses as equally important, which
is confusing.
Besides lexicographers, translators may also face some difficulties when
polysemy is used as a source of ambiguity and is explored in various forms of
humour (e.g. jokes, puns). Apart from these cases, polysemy is seldom a problem
for communication among people. In fact, language users select the appropriate
senses of polysemous words effortlessly and unconsciously because they perceive
analogies and make natural associations using the cognitive tools of metaphor and
metonymy.
In the book Categories in Natural Languages: the Study of Nominal
Polysemy in English and Romanian (Neagu 1999) the hypothesis is that language
users find it easier to learn an extended meaning than learn a meaning that is
unrelated to a familiar one. In other words, the psycholinguistic function of
polysemy is to facilitate the acquisition of lexical categories. Starting from the
premise that polysemy is not the result of a random process, but of systematic
meaning extensions based on metaphor and metonymy I analysed meaning
extension in nouns belonging to three different semantic fields: (1) animal nouns
(2) deverbal nouns (3) social status nouns. In what follows we will consider only
the first and the second semantic field.
The main finding relative to the first group is that animal nouns favour
metaphor as a polysemy creating mechanism. For instance, some nouns denoting
animals have metaphorical uses (based on similarity of appearance) in technical
domains: mouse ”pointing device invented by Dong Eglebart, used in computing),
cat „a nautical term denoting the contrivance by which the anchor is raised out of
water to the deck of a ship”, spider „a part of a machinery, instrument or apparatus
having radiating arms or spokes”, crab „a machine with claws used for hoisting or
hauling heavy weights”.
For the second group, i.e. deverbal nouns (labeled as the least nouny
nouns), I demonstrated that they develop metonymic meanings where a semantic
role/participant such as RESULT, INSTRUMENT, AGENT, LOCATION may
stand for another one. For example, the AGENT-for-INSTRUMENT metonymic
pattern can be noticed in a deverbal noun like reader where S1 denotes “a person
who reads, especially one who spends much time in reading” and S2 designates “a
book intended to give students practice in reading”.

4.2.2. Homonymy

Unlike polysemy that is property of single lexemes, homonymy is the

semantic relation that holds of two or more distinct lexemes. It may be regarded as
a proof of the Saussurean principle of conventionality. The term homonymy is used
in semantic analysis to refer to “lexical items which have the same form but differ
in meaning” (Crystal 1992: 166). Homonymy exists in many languages but in
English it is particularly common especially among mono-syllabic words: e.g. fair,
bow, ball, sew, row, plot, match, etc.

48
 As causes or sources of homonymy, Steven Ullmann (1962) acknowledges
the following: (1) divergent sense development and (2) convergent sound
development. The first cause, i.e. semantic divergence, is illustrated by flower and
flour that originally were one word. The second cause, i.e. phonetic convergence
(when two or three words of different origin coincide in sound), is exemplified by
ear34 and case.
John Lyons (1986/1981: 43), in Language Meaning and Context draws a
distinction between two types of homonymy: (1) absolute homonymy and (2)
partial homonymy. Absolute homonyms must satisfy the following conditions:
(1) their form must be unrelated in meaning
(2) all their forms must be identical
(3) identical forms must be syntactically equivalent.
Examples of absolute homonyms include bank1 „financial institution”, bank2
“sloping side of a river”; sole1 ‘bottom of foot/shoe’, sole2 ‘kind of fish’, tattoo1 ‘an
ink drawing in the skin’, tatoo2 “a military drum signal calling soldiers from their
quarters”.
Partial homonyms fail to satisfy the second and third requirements for
absolute homonymy: found, last, lie. Finally, homonymy can be related either to the
pronunciation of the lexemes (homophony) or to their spelling (homography).
Examples for words that are homophones are tail/tail, story/storey, cue/queue,
threw/through, write/rite, their/there, whole/hole and so on. Examples of
homographs include bow, row, bear, tear, etc.

4.2.3. The distinction between polysemy and homonymy

In traditional approaches of semantic analysis represented by Ullmann 1962,

Weinreich 1963, 1966, Lehrer 1974, Leech 1987/1974, Lyons 1987/1977, 1995 and
Lipka 1990, polysemy is usually discussed in conjunction with homonymy. If two
lexical items have either 1) etymologically distinct meanings or 2) semantically
unrelated meanings, they are regarded as homonyms. In contrast, if the meanings
concerned are related by metaphorical or metonymic extension, they are considered
to be one single lexeme with two senses.
Several criteria have been suggested to distinguish polysemy from
homonymy, such as the formal identity or distinctness, etymology and close
semantic relatedness, but none of them seems to be satisfactory.

Etymology and spelling

Ullmann (1962)35 has proposed two criteria for distinguishing homonymy

and polysemy: etymology and spelling36. As has already been shown in the
34
The ear example is discussed at length in the next subsection.
35
Ullmann, Stephen. 1962. Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.
36
These criteria rely on diachronic structure and are not workable for languages that are
unwritten or for which the history is unknown (cf. Adrienne Lehrer.1974. “Homonymy and

49
previous section, he rightly notes that it is impossible to imagine a language
without polysemy. By contrast, a language without homonymy is not only
conceivable; it would in fact be a more efficient medium.

The maximized homonymy view

Uriel Weinreich, in his “Explorations in Semantic Theory”, more or less

side-steps the issue of the difference between polysemy and homonymy by treating
every sense as a separate word. In fact, this stand corresponds to the maximized
homonymy view or ‘lexicographic approach’ as George Miller (1978) 37 calls it.
Considering the possibility of metaphor, Miller shows that there is no limit at all to
drawing conceptual distinctions among the senses of a word. That is why, he says,
“sooner or later it will become necessary to stop drawing distinctions and to start
grouping minimally different senses together.” (Miller 1978: 101). The
disadvantages of the maximized homonymy view are also presented by John Lyons
(1987/1977)38 who argues that, by following this approach, which has been
proposed by certain linguists, we will end up with many more lexical entries than
are recognized in the standard dictionaries of the language described. And, most
importantly, many of these entries will duplicate the phonological and grammatical
information that is attached to other entries.

The maximized polysemy view

The opposite alternative, that is, the maximized polysemy view is also
discussed in Lyons (1987/1977: 554) who maintains that, out of the two radical
maximizing views it is preferable to maximize polysemy. This will have the effect
of producing a lexicon with far fewer entries than are to be found in our standard
dictionaries. Finally, John Lyons favours polysemy because “polysemy - the
product of metaphorical creativity is essential to the functioning of languages as
flexible and efficient semiotic systems. Homonymy, whether complete or partial, is
not.” (1987/1977: 567).

Etymology and relatedness of meaning

The criteria that are invoked traditionally in the literature to distinguish

between polysemy and homonymy are etymology and relatedness of meaning. In
terms of the former criterion, that is etymology, lexical items with the same origin
are considered polysemic, whereas if they have evolved from distinct lexemes in
some earlier stage of the language then they are regarded as homonymous.

Polysemy. Meaning. Similarity of Meaning”. In Language Sciences. 25: 33- 38).

37
Miller, George. 1978. “Semantic Relations among Words”. In George Miller, ed.
Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press,
pp. 60-118.
38
Lyons, John. 1988.[1977]. Semantics. 2 volumes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

50
 This condition is not always relevant and therefore decisive, because the
history of the language does not always reflect its present state: there are instances
of words that come from the same source and cannot be considered polysemantic,
but homonymic. For instance, in present-day English, the lexemes pupil1 "student"
and pupil2, "iris of the eye" are not semantically related but they both come from
Latin pupillus, pupilla "ward, orphan-boy" which is a diminutive of pupus "child".
The opposite case is also fairly common, namely when two lexemes derived from
different roots in an earlier state of the language are seen as related. For example,
ear1 "organ of hearing" comes form Latin auris 'ear', while ear2 "spike of corn" is
derived form Latin acus, aceris 'husk'. Synchronically, most people take these two
lexemes for one polysemous word and explain their relation by means of metaphor,
i.e. the ear corn was felt to be a metaphor of the type "the eye of a needle", "the
foot of the mountain", etc. Therefore, the etymological criterion can be misleading
when deciding between homonymy and polysemy.
The latter criterion, that is, relatedness vs. unrelatedness of meaning is
questioned by Lyons (1987/1977) who argues that relatedness of meaning appears
to be a matter of degree, together with the fact that sometimes native speaker's
intuitions are far from being the true interpretations as has been seen with the ear
example. The criterion of relatedness or similarity of meaning is sometimes
associated with another one, i.e. comparing semantic components. Unfortunately,
componential definitions of the type [physical object], [concrete], [inanimate] for
the description of lexemes such as bank or mouth are not sufficient for the
polysemy - homonymy problem. In Katz’ theory 39 all features are of equal value
and thus it is not clear how to count differences - whether they should be ignored
or subtracted from the similarities. For instance, the two senses of bank “bank for
money” (bank1) and “bank of a river” (bank2) are classic homonyms, but they share
the features [Physical Object], [Concrete], [Inanimate]. Since these features are
generic, high-level components, one cannot consider them instances of polysemy.
Besides, the two meanings cannot be traced to a common etymology: bank1
“financial institution” comes from Italian ‘banco’ through the French ‘bangue’,
while bank2 “slope, elevation in sea or river” is of Scaninavian origin. By contrast ,
two meanings of mouth - of a person and of a river - which seem to be related
semantically, also share the feature [Physical Object], [Concrete] and [Inanimate].
In the case of mouth relatedness of meaning is based on similarity that is
metaphorical.
Therefore sense relatedness should be viewed in terms of conceptual
connections rather than as a matter of shared properties. This is why we next turn to
discussions of polysemy in the context of cognitive linguistics.

4.2.4. Polysemy in cognitive linguistics

39
Katz, Jerrold J. 1972. Semantic Theory. New York: Harper and Row.

51
 While in traditional approaches polysemy is assumed to be a property of
lexical categories only, in cognitive linguistics 40 the notion of polysemy is
essentially extended and is applied to both lexical and grammatical language
levels. Linguistic categories that have been shown to be polysemic include:

 nouns (e.g. head)

 verbs (e.g. climb, turn)41
 prepositions (e.g. over)
 verb particles (e.g. in, out)42
 constructions (e.g. there is)
 the diminutive suffix (e.g. -ling)
 the grammatical case

In cognitive linguistics, polysemy is viewed as a category and is

analysed by means of models such as: prototypes, radial categories and schematic
networks, all of these sharing a concern for the flexibility of meaning. The
prototype model has been used in the discussion of the concept lie and the concept
bachelor. Coleman and Kay (1981) discuss the concept lie in terms of (a)
falsehood, (b) deliberateness and (c) intent to deceive. As these three elements may
possess different degrees of importance, there may be prototypical lies, when a
statement is characterized by properties (b) and (c) and partial lies that include
instances of social lie (e.g. 'Drop in any time'), white lie, exaggerations, joke, etc.
A social lie is a case where deceit is helpful and a white lie is a case where deceit is
not harmful.
Fillmore (1982) analyses bachelor that is usually defined as an unmarried
adult man by bringing into discussion less typical examples of bachelors such as
male participants in long-term unmarried coupling, boys abandoned in the jungle
and grown to maturity away from contact with human society, some priests or
homosexuals. Such cases are regarded as deviations from prototypical
bachelorhood, marginal examples of bachelors that stand for ‘prototype effects’,
namely “asymmetries within categories and gradiations away from a best
example”. (Lakoff 1987: 59)
Lakoff (1987) describes the radial set model in the following terms: (a)
polysemic words consist of a number of radially related categories; (b) the central
radial category member provides a cognitive model that motivates the noncentral
senses and (c) the extended senses clustered around the central category are related
by a variety of possible links (e.g. metaphor, metonymy, etc). Lakoff (1987: 76)
analyses the concept mother and concludes that it cannot be defined "in terms of
common necessary and sufficient condition approach" that can be associated with
40
See, for example, Lakoff 1987, Taylor 2003, Croft & Cruse 2004 and Evans & Green 2006.
41
The polysemy verbs of perception has also been investigated (e.g. Sweetser 1991).
42
In Neagu M. 2007. „English Verb Particles and Their Acquisition” (published in Revista
Espanola de Linguistica Aplicada, vol. 20, pp. 121-138) I demonstrate that English verb
particles disclose figurative related meanings derived from a central/prototypical locative
meaning.

52
Componential Analysis (CA) in structuralist semantics. His argument is the
existence of marginal or less typical cases of mother: biological mothers, donor
mothers (who donate an egg), surrogate mothers (who bear the child but may not
have donated the egg), adoptive mothers, unwed mothers who give their children
up for adoption, and stepmothers.

4.2.5. Polysemy vs vagueness

Another polysemy-related issue that is approached in studies devoted to

polysemy concerns the distinction between polysemy and vagueness, that is, the
question of how different two usages of the same form need to be in order to count as
distinct polysemous senses rather than different instantiations of a single underlying
sense. One of the cognitive linguists who dealt with the issue is David Tuggy (1993) 43
who believes that homonymy, polysemy and vagueness form a continuum and the
place on the continuum depends on two factors: (i) the presence of a subsuming
schema and (ii) the relative conceptual distance of such a schema from the structures.
Vagueness involves meanings which are not well entrenched such as the
gender distinction (female/male) in the English words student, doctor, neighbour,
etc., but whose schematic meaning is relatively well entrenched and elaboratively
close. Other examples of vague words are lexical forms that profile parts of
different domains in their respective semantic base. For instance, the adjective fast
in a fast car as opposed to fast in a fast drink or the noun window understood either
as a glass pane or a wooden frame 44 evoke different domains and profile different
attributes of the things they refer to. Such examples as fast or window involve
profiling of parts associated with an object within one conceptual domain, hence
the name ‘‘(partial) segment profiling’’ for vagueness.

4.2.6. Polysemy and semantic change

The notions of polysemy, homonymy and vagueness cannot be clearly

defined and understood without bringing into discussion the issue of diachronic
change. The importance of the relation between polysemy and semantic change has
lately been emphasized by Dirk Geeraerts (2009) in his valuable book Theories of
Lexical Semantics where he compares cognitive linguistics with diachronic
semantics:

“To what extent, in fact, can we say that cognitive semantics is a return to
the fundamental position of historical-philological semantics? First,
cognitive semantics and traditional historical semantics share, by and large,
a psychological conception of meaning. Second, both approaches start from
an encyclopaedist conception of meaning, in the sense that lexical meaning

43
Tuggy, David. 1993. “Ambiguity, Polysemy and Vagueness”. In Cognitive Linguistics, 3-4,
273-290.
44
See the topic of automeronymy, a variety of polysemy, discussed in section 4.4.

53
 is not considered to be an autonomous phenomenon, but is rather
inextricably bound up with the individual, cultural, social, historical
experience of the language user. Third, both are specifically interested in the
flexibility and polysemy of meaning and the mechanisms underlying those
phenomena; in the case of historical-philological semantics, the perspective is
almost exclusively diachronic, whereas cognitive semantics also considers
polysemy and flexibility from a synchronic point of view”. (Geeraerts 2009:
243-4).

This last idea regarding the close interrelation between synchronic and
diachronic linguistic phenomena has been observed and explained by Eve Sweetser
(1990: 9) who rightly notes:

“synchronic polysemy and historical change of meaning really supply the

same data in many ways. No historical shift of meaning can take place
without an intervening stage of polysemy. If a word once meant A and now
means B, we can be fairly certain that speakers did not just wake up and
switch meanings on June 14, 1066. Rather, there was a stage when the word
meant both A and B, and the earlier meaning of A eventually was lost.”
(Sweetser 1990: 9)

When analysing the semantics of social status nouns (Neagu 1999: 200-
243) I start from the premise that polysemy is a synchronic phenomenon that
cannot be understood without referring to the relations between historically earlier
and later senses of a word. For instance, sense 3 of knave „an unprincipled man,
given to dishonorable and deceitful practices” developed as a result of the
implication/connotation [dishonest servant], contained by sense 2 „a boy or lad
employed as a servant”.

4.3. From Concept to Word: Synonymy and Antonymy

4.3.1. Synonymy

As stated earlier, onomasiology deals with cases in which the same

concept or similar concepts are expressed by different words or expressions.
According to one definition (usually attributed to Leibniz), two expressions are
synonymous if the substitution of one for the other never changes the truth value of
a sentence in which the substitution is made. By that definition, true or absolute
synonyms are rare, if they exist at all.

Absolute and partial synonymy

Absolute synonyms are defined (Lyons 1986: 51) as "expressions that are
fully, totally and completely synonyms" in the sense that

54
(a) all their meanings are identical (full synonymy)
(b) they are interchangeable in all contexts (total synonymy)
(c) they are identical in all relevant dimensions of meaning (complete synonymy)
Actually the very terms 'absolute synonymy', ''full synonymy", ”total
synonymy" and "complete synonymy" (not to mention exact synonymy) are
themselves used as synonyms whether absolute or partial in standard works in
semantics or lexicology, usually without definition. Without favoring the hair-
splitting terminological distinctions, Lyons (1986/1981: 51) insists upon the
importance of (a) not confusing near synonymy with partial synonymy and (b) not
making the assumptions that failure to satisfy one of the conditions of absolute
synonymy necessarily involves the failure to satisfy either or both of the other
conditions.
To exemplify the first condition, i.e. same range of meanings, required by
absolute synonymy or full synonymy, we will consider the pair big - large, where
the former term has at least one meaning that it does not share with the latter one.
If we compare the sentence "I will tell my big sister" with "I will tell my large
sister" we notice that the polysemy of big does not perfectly overlap with the
meaning of large.
The second condition for absolute synonymy, i.e. interchangeability of
terms in all contexts (total synonymy) refers to the collocational range of an
expression (the set of contexts in which it can occur). For example, the members in
the pairs busy-occupied, decoration-ornamentation, liberty -freedom do not always
have the same collocational range. There are many contexts in which they are not
interchangeable without violating the collocational restrictions of the one or of the
other. For instance, freedom cannot be substituted for liberty in 'You are at liberty
to say what you want'.
In his approach of cognitive synonymy, i.e. the relation defined in terms of
truth conditional relations, D.A.Cruse defines collocational restrictions as “co-
occurrence restrictions that are irrelevant to truth conditions – that is to say, those
in respect of which lexical items may differ and still be cognitive synonyms”
(Cruse 1986: 279). He assumes that collocational restrictions are not logically
necessary, unlike selectional restrictions, i.e. semantic co-occurrence restrictions
which are logically necessary 45. Examples of cognitive synonyms that carry the
same propositional traits, have the same selection restrictions, but differ in terms of
collocational restrictions are die - pass away, grill - toast, customer - client. The
difference between die and pass away in My grandfather died yesterday and My
grandfather passed away yesterday lies in the greater semantic cohesion of the
latter sentence, i.e. its subject is more predictable from the rest of the sentence.
Cruse (1986: 281) believes that generally, collocational restrictions behave as
presuppositions46 of the selecting item.
45
For example, the semantic features “organic”, “alive” and “mortal” are logical pre-requisites
of the meaning of die.
46
The topic of presupposition is approached in section 3.2 of Part II.Pragmatics.

55
 Relative to the third condition for absolute synonymy, i.e.
identity/similarity of all dimensions of meaning (complete synonymy), Lyons
(1986/1981: 55) distinguishes descriptive synonymy and expressive synonymy. Two
expressions are descriptively synonymous, i.e. they have the same descriptive
propositional/cognitive/referential meaning, if and only if statements containing the
one necessarily imply otherwise identical statements containing the other and vice
versa. For example, big can be substituted for large in 'I live in a big house'.
However, in particular instances, synonymous expressions may differ in
terms of the degree or nature of their expressive meaning. Expressive
(affective/attitudinal/emotive) meaning, already discussed in Section 3.4 is the kind
of meaning by virtue of which a speaker expresses, rather than describes his
beliefs, attitudes and feelings. For example, words like huge, enormous, gigantic,
colossal are more expressive of their users' feelings towards what they are
describing than very big or very large with which they are perhaps descriptively
synonymous (Lyons 1986: 54).
As languages seem to vary considerably in the degree to which they
grammaticalize expressive meaning, to choose the right word /expression out of a
wide range of synonymic terms differing in their degree of expressivity is a very
demanding task for translators. It is the expressive rather than the descriptive
component of meaning that is dominant when we decide to use terms that imply
approval or disapproval: statesman vs. politician, thrifty vs. mean/stingy vs.
economical, stink/stench vs. fragrance vs. smell, crafty/cunning vs. skillful vs.
clever. In order to attract the reader and listener's attention headline and
advertisement writers have to be very skillful at using expressive synonymy.
Knowing the expressive meaning of a lexeme is just as much a part of one's
competence in a language as knowing its descriptive meaning.
Although synonymy is fairly irrelevant for the structure of the lexicon of a
language, i.e. a language can function without synonymy, language learners cannot use
the language properly without knowledge of all its synonymic resources.

4.3.2. Antonymy

Although there is no logical necessity for languages to have lexical

opposites at all (English would be just as efficient as semiotic system if there were
such pairs as good - ungood, wide - unwide, far - unfar), antonymy reflects the
human tendency to think in opposites, to categorize experience in terms of binary
contrast (Lyons, 1987/1977 : 276).
Antonyms have received a good deal of attention from linguists such as
Sapir (1944), Duchacek (1965), Bierwisch (1967), Lyons (1985/1968, 1987/1977),
Cruse (1976, 1986), Bolinger (1977), Lehrer (1982).
Lyons (1987/1977) replaces the term “antonymy” in the wider sense by
"oppositeness" (of meaning) and distinguishes three different types of
oppositeness: a) complementarity b) antonymy (in the narrower, restricted sense)
and c) converseness.

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Complementarity

Complementarity can be exemplified by pairs of words) like male and

female, single-married. It is characteristic of complementaries that the denial of the
one term implies the assertion of the other and vice versa. For instance, John is not
married implies that John is single and also John is married implies that John is
not single.
Although complementaries (or binary antonyms) are not gradable
opposites there are instances that do not cover all possible cases in real life. Thus
there may be other possibilities besides complementaries, e.g. male and female
namely hermaphrodite.
Cruse (1986: 202) claims that complementaries are not normally gradable,
that is, they are odd in the comparative or superlative degree or when modified by
intensifiers such as extremely, moderately or slightly (e.g. extremely true,
moderately female, etc). Nevertheless, he states, there are instances where one
member of the pair lends itself more readily to grading than the other. Thus, alive
is more gradable than dead (very dead, moderately dead, deader than before vs.
very alive, moderately alive, more alive than before). For example, if someone says
to us ‘Is X still alive then?’. And we reply ‘Very much so.’ or ‘And how!’ we are
not thereby challenging the ungradability of dead : alive in the language system.
What we are grading, Lyons (1987/1977: 278) assumes, are various secondary
implications or connotations of alive. Finally, David Alan Cruse (1986) maintains
that

“the relation between dead and alive is not at all affected by medico-legal
uncertainty as what constitutes the point of death. Such referential
indeterminacy afflicts all words, without exceptions. The point about
complementaries is that once a decision has been reached regarding one
term, in all relevant circumstances a decision has effectively been made
regarding the other term, too.” (Cruse 1986: 199)

The idea that complementarity is to some extent a matter of degree is

supported by examples such as ghosts and vampires that existed in a state which
was neither death nor life. Similarly, Cruse (1986) says, the existence of
hermaphrodites and animals of totally indeterminate sex weakens the relationships
between male and female. An even weaker relationship would hold between terms
such left-handed and right-handed.
Complementaries are, generally speaking, either adjectives or verbs.
According to Cruse (1986: 200), an interesting feature of verbal complementaries
which distinguishes them from adjectival complementaries is that the domain
within which complementarity operates is often expressible by a single lexical
item: e.g. the verb command sets the scene for the complementarity of obey and
disobey.
Further examples are born: live - die, start: keep on - stop, learn:
remember - forget, arrive: stay- leave, earn: save- suspend, request: grant - refuse,

57
invite: accept - turn down, greet: acknowledge - snub, tempt: yield - resist, try:
succeed- fail, compete: win- lose, aim: hit - miss.
A final example of lexical triplets involving verbal complementaries are
attack: defend - submit, change: refute - admit, shoot (in football): save- let in,
punch: parry - take.
As can be noticed, the members of the complementary pair represent an
active and a passive response to the original action or perhaps more revealing,
counteraction or lack of counteraction.

Antonymy proper

Antonymy in the narrow, restricted sense of Lyons (1987/1977) is the

second subclass of oppositeness of meaning. The logical relationship is based on
the fact that the assertion of one member does imply the negation of the other, but
not vice versa. In other words, for pairs of antonyms like good - bad, big - small,
high - low, only one of the relations of implication (entailment) stated for
complementarity holds.
Thus, John is good, implies John is not bad. But John is not good does not
necessarily imply John is bad. Therefore, the negation/ denial of one term does not
necessarily imply the assertion of the other.
In the case of antonymy proper, a third possibility exists. The two
expressions involved in gradable antonymy constitute opposite poles of a
continuum. The great majority of gradable antonyms are pairs of adjectives that
behave like comparatives, i.e. they are fully gradable. Some of these pairs reveal a
certain asymmetry in the sense that one member appears in more contexts than the
other. For instance, if we want to know a person’s age, or the length of an object
we use old (How old are you?) and long (How long is it?) rather than young and
short. The members of the antonymic pairs old - young, long – short or tall – short
differ in markedness. The term with the wider range of uses is called unmarked
(old, long, tall) and the one with a more limited range marked (young, short).

Converseness (relational oppositeness)

Converseness is the third subclass of oppositeness of meaning which

describes the same situation from different perspectives or viewpoints. Converses
are expressions which represent the same event or the same relation from
contrasting perspectives. Thus, if we are told that John owns this book we
automatically know that This book belongs to John.
Lyons (1985/1968) argues that the logical criterion used for the sense
relation of converseness is the possibility of permuting noun phrases functioning as
arguments (semantic roles) in sentences which remain otherwise equivalent; the
sentences imply each other and thus have the same meaning. For example, John
bought the car from Bill implies Bill sold the car to John and vice versa.
Schematically, the sentences may be represented in the following way:

58
NP1 bought NP3 from NP2.
NP2 sold NP3 to NP1.

As can be noticed, the substitution of lexical converses causes a

permutation of NPs functioning as arguments.
Examples of converses (relational opposites) include pairs of nouns such as
teacher - student, doctor – patient, grandparent - grandchild, deverbal nouns
ending in –ee and –er (employer - employee, examiner – examinee, interviewer –
interviewee), pairs of verbs like give - take, buy – sell, rent – let, pairs of
prepositions like above – below or comparative forms of adjectives (older -
younger, taller – shorter).
The three types of oppositeness of meaning (i.e. complementarity,
antonymy proper and converseness) proposed by Lyons (1985/1968) are based on
the relation of lexical implication or entailment, a notion that will be defined
below, in section 4.4.1.

Directional oppositeness (reverseness)

This fourth subclass of oppositeness of meaning discussed in more recent

works of semantics (Saeed 2000) is based on the notion of contrary motion (i.e.
motion in opposite direction): up - down, in - out, right – left come - go, arrive -
depart, ascend – descend, rise- fall, pull – push, marriage – divorce.

4.4. Hierarchical Sense Relations: Hyponymy and Meronymy

4.4.1. Hyponymy

Hyponymy, like incompatibility and antonymy has been one of the topics
of lively interest for lexical semantics since the structuralist period. Although
Lyons (1985/1968) declared that all sense relations were context dependent, they
have almost universally been treated (by Lyons himself) as stable properties of
individual lexical items.
Traditionally, sense relations are defined in terms of entailment, i.e. of the
logical relation between two sentences, such that the truth of the second sentence
follows from the truth of the first. On this approach, a sentence like It’s a dog
unilaterally entails It’s an animal so dog is a hyponym of animal. Similarly, I
always avoid the red skirts unilaterally entails I always avoid the scarlet skirts and
John punched Bill unilaterally entails John hit Bill. As can be noticed, the normal
direction in the entailment is from hyponym to superordinate.
Hyponymy is one of the most fundamental paradigmatic relations,
corresponding to the inclusion of one class in another. For example, terms such as
daisy, daffodil and rose all contain the meaning of flower. That is to say, they are
all hyponyms of flower.

59
 Living things

Animal Vegetable

Animal
Bird Fish Insect

Animal Human

The set of terms which are hyponyms of the same superordinate term are
co-hyponyms; for example, red, black and yellow, in the colour system, or ox, bull,
calf that are covered by the superordinate term cattle. Another way of describing
the relationship is to say that the individual colours are sisters of the parent term
colour or sisters of the parent term cattle.
A hyponym is a word that is more specific (less general), which has more
elements of meaning and is more marked than its superordinate. For example, it
can be marked for age (puppy, kitten, calf, piglet, duckling and cygnet are marked,
while dog, cat, cow, pig, duck, swan are unmarked) or for sex (bitch, drake, bull,
hog, sow, cob, are marked, while dog, duck, cow, pig, swan are unmarked). Hence,
we can define hyponyms in terms of the hypernym plus a single feature, as in stallion
= ’male horse’, kitten = ’young cat’.
The more general term with reference to which the subordinate term can be
defined, as is the usual practice in dictionary definitions (‘a cat is a type of
animal…’) is called the superordinate or hypernym. Sometimes a word may be
superordinate to itself in another sense. This is the case with animal, as shown in
the figure below. The first occurrence, opposed to vegetable, is the sense contained
in the phrase ‘the animal kingdom’. The second occurrence is synonymous with
mammal, and the third with beast.
Superordinate terms in turn may become hyponyms in relation to a more
general superordinate term: e.g. cattle is a hyponym of animal. Pairs of lexical
items related by hyponymy are far more frequently found among nouns than
among adjectives or verbs. Hyponymy is a vertical relationship which is
fundamental to the way in which we classify things. Most dictionaries rely on it for
the provision of definitions where the superordinate or hypernym corresponds to
„genus proximum” and the specific properties are described in „differentia

60
specifica”. For example, flower is the hypernym which appears in the definition of
daisy „a flower which is very common, small and white with a yellow centre”.
Hyponymy offers a good organizing principle for vocabulary learning and
teaching. Most language coursebooks use this feature of organization implicitly or
explicitly in grouping names of flowers together or garments or articles of
furniture.

Autohyponymy

Autohyponymy is a variety of polysemy (Cruse 2004: 108) and occurs

when a word has a default general sense and a contextually restricted sense which
is more specific in that it denotes a subvariety of a general sense. For example, dog
has two senses, a general sense, ‘member of the canine race’ as in Dog and cat
owners must register their pets and a more specific meaning as in That’s not a dog,
it’s a bitch.
What is interesting to note is that in the lexicalization of a distinction of
sex, for some species it is the lexeme denoting males (e.g. drake), and for other
species the lexeme denoting females (e.g. sow) that is semantically marked. An
instance of generalization of a feminine term is the use of cow as in those cows
over there or a field full of cows to refer to bovines of both sexes, especially when
there is a mixed group.

4.4.2. Meronymy

Meronymy is a term used to describe a part-whole relationship between

lexical items. For instance, cover and page are meronyms of book (the holonym).
We can identify this relationship by using sentence frames like X is part of Y, or Y
has X, as in a page is a part of a book or a book has pages.
The lexical relation of meronymy, sometimes referred to as „partonymy”,
is usually informally described as ‘part-whole relation’. Croft and Cruse (2004:
151) claim that meronymy is a relation between meanings, whereas the part-whole
relation links two individual entities and generates chains of elements: A is a part
of B, B is a part of C, C is a part of D and so on.
For instance,
A fingertip is a part of a finger.
A finger is a part of hand.
A hand is a part of arm.
An arm is a part of a body.
An important point is that the networks identified as meronymy are lexical:
it is conceptually possible to segment an item in countless ways, but only some
divisions are coined in the vocabulary of a language. Every language has a range of
ways of referring to parts of things. Many of these ways involve specialized lexical
items.

61
 Meronymy is similar to hyponymy because it reflects a hierarchical and
asymmetrical relationship between words, represented by the ‘less than’ sign. For
example, stanza is a meronym of poem, but poem is not a meronym of stanza. Or,
sonnet is a hyponym of poem but poem is not a hyponym of sonnet. However,
unlike hyponymic relations, meronymic hierarchies are less clear cut and regular.
Meronyms may vary in how necessary the part is to the whole. Some are for normal
examples, for example, nose is a meronym of face, others are usual but not
obligatory, like collar, as a meronym of shirt, still others are optional, like cellar for
house.
Meronymy also differs from hyponymy in transitivity, a relational property
that can be described like this: if a relation R is transitive, then the truth of aRb and
bRc guarantees the truth of aRc. Hyponymy is always transitive, but meronymy
may or may not be. A transitive example is nail, a meronym of finger and finger of
hand. We can see that nail is a meronym of hand as we can say A hand has nails.
A non-transitive example is: pane is a meronym of window (A window has a pane)
and window of room (A room has a window); but pane is not a meronym of room,
for we cannot say A room has a pane. Or hole is a meronym of button and button
of shirt, but we wouldn’t say that hole is a meronym of shirt (A shirt has holes).
Meronymy and hyponymy involve completely different types of
hierarchies. While meronymy relates to individual referents of meronymic terms,
hyponymy involves a relation of inclusion between classes: the extension of the
hyponym is included in that of the hypernym.

Automeronymy

Cruse (2004: 104) argues that automeronymy, like autohyponymy, is a

variety of polysemy. While in the case of autohyponymy the more specific reading
denotes a subtype, in the case of automeronymy the more specific reading denotes
a subpart. For instance, door can refer to either the whole set-up with jambs, lintel,
threshold, hinges and the leaf panel as in Go through that door or just to the leaf, as
in Take the door off its hinges. Further, a sentence such as We took the door off its
hinges and walked through it illustrates zeugma, a type of semantic anomaly which
appears when a single occurence of an expression has to be interpreted in two
distinct ways simultaneously.

Hyponymic and meronymic enrichment

The effects of context on the meaning of a word can be seen in what Cruse
(2004: 119) calls ‘contextual modulation’ that can manifest itself in two forms or
varieties: enrichment, i.e. the addition of semantic content to the meaning of a
word, and impoverishment, i.e. the removal of semantic content from the meaning
of a word.

62
 Hyponymic enrichment arises when the context adds features of meaning
to a word which are not made explicit by the lexical item itself:

Our maths teacher is on maternity leave (gender is determined)

My brother always bumps his head when he goes through the door (height
is determined)
My coffee burnt my tongue. (temperature is determined)
Our house was burgled while we were away. They only took the video,
though (legality is determined)

Sometimes the context points to a specific kind of the class normally

denoted by the lexical item employed, rather than adding a feature, like in I wish
that animal would stop barking/miaowing or John is going well in the 1500–metres
freestyle.
Meronymic enrichment arises when someone specifies the part of what the
lexical item used normally refers to. This part may be definite and identifiable (e.g. a
tyre as in A car has a puncture) or less definite (e.g. a car’s damaged area as in The
car was damaged when John drove it into a tree).
Cruse (2004: 120) argues that this kind of narrowing down to a part, that is,
meronymic enrichment, is widespread in language use and speakers are not usually
aware of this. For instance, a red book has red covers, not red letters, whereas a
red warning sign most likely has red letters. Further examples include noun phrases
made up of a colour adjective and a head noun; very often the colour does not apply
globally to the object denoted by the head noun but only to a part: a red apple (a
significant portion of outer skin is red), a yellow peach (inner flesh is yellow), a pink
grapefruit (inner flesh is pink), red eyes (white of eyes is red), blue eyes (iris is blue).
In all these examples the colour adjective indicates that the referent of the head
noun is distinctive by virtue of its possession of an area with certain perceptual
properties.

Conclusions

This chapter contains a discussion of two opposite ways of studying

meaning: one which proceeds from a given form and asks for its meanings
(semasiology) and the other which starts out from a given meaning and asks for the
kinds of forms that are used to express this meaning (onomasiology). Regarding the
paradigmatic semantic relations studied by each of these two branches of
semantics, we have seen that semasiology studies polysemy and homonymy, while
onomasiology is concerned with synonymy and antonymy. The last paradigmatic
semantic relations approached in the chapter, hyponymy and meronymy, involve
hierarchies in the vocabulary, i.e. super- and subordination. Hyponymy, “a type of”
relation, differs from meronymy “a part of“ relation, mainly because the former is a
relation of inclusion between classes, while the latter relates to individual referents.

63
5. SEMANTIC ORGANIZATION

5.1. The lexicon

5.1.1 Views of the lexicon
5.1.2 Lexical vs. conceptual knowledge
5.1.3 Lexical item, lexical unit and lexical entry
5.2. Semantic fields
5.2.1. Field theories
5.2.2. Lexical gaps
5.2.3. Conceptual field, lexical field and semantic field
Conclusions

5.1. The Lexicon

5.1.1. Views of the lexicon

In linguistic terminology, the lexicon of a language is a collection of all the

words, more precisely, lexemes, of that particular language.
Lehrer (1974:190) maintains that the lexicon is an unordered set of lexical
entries and as such it can be arranged in a number of ways – alphabetically, as a
dictionary, by semantic fields, as a thesaurus. According to Lyons (1987/1977:
516), the information that is found in a typical lexical entry in a conventional
dictionary is of three kinds: morphological, syntactic and semantic.
In generative grammar, the lexicon has a special status and it refers to the
component containing all the information about the structural properties of the
lexical items in a language. Thus, a lexical entry includes phonological, semantic
and syntactic information. Certain syntactic theories ascribe a more significant role
to the lexicon, some claiming that much of the syntax is projected from the lexicon

64
(e.g. Chomsky 198147). In other words, the semantic organization of the lexicon
can predict and explain at least some regularities.
The sum of all the lexemes an individual speaker has in his mind is often
referred to as the mental lexicon. Jean Aitchinson (1994), in Words in the Mind. An
Introduction to the Mental Lexicon, points to the difference between an ordinary
dictionary and the mental lexicon:

”Unlike ordinary dictionaries which are limited in scope, have an oversimple

organization, a fixed and outdated content and contain only a relatively small
amount of information about each item, the mental lexicon has a large and
complex content organized as a structured network of intersecting defined
classes and governed by a number of rules”. (Aitchinson 1994:15)

The idea that the mental lexicon has an internally structured nature and
contains a number of rules for creating new lexical items or for extending the meaning
of given lexical items is also present in Dirven (1985)48. New lexical items are formed
by the rules of compounding, derivation, borrowing, the creation of neologisms,
acronyms. The meaning of given lexical items can be extended by processes such as
metaphor and metonymy.
Starting with the 1990s there has been a surge of interest in the lexicon.
The demand for a fuller and more adequate understanding of lexical meaning
required by developments in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence and
cognitive science has stimulated a refocused interest in linguistics, psychology and
philosophy.

5.1.2. Lexical vs. conceptual knowledge

The basic problem that distinguishes the different views of the lexicon
relates to the nature of the information in the lexicon. Murphy49 (2003) argues that
knowledge about words (i.e. lexical knowledge) does not always overlap with
knowledge about the things words denote (conceptual knowledge). The lexicon
contains information that is necessary for linguistic competence, i.e. our capacity to
produce grammatical and interpretable sentences.
The fact that we can fail to make the association between things that we
recognize and words that we know for those things indicates that our means of
storing and/or accessing the name of that thing is the same as our means of storing
and/or accessing other knowledge about the thing. The piece of evidence for this is
tip-of-the tongue syndrome, i.e. the case when we have complete access to the
47
Chomsky, Noam.1981. Lectures on government and binding. (Studies in Generative
Grammar.9) Dordrecht: Foris Publ.
48
Dirven, René (1985): “Metaphor as a basic means for extending the lexicon”, in: Wolf
Parotté & René Dirven.eds. The Ubiquity of Metaphor (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory
29). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 85-119.
49
Murphy, M Lynne (2003) Semantic relations and the lexicon: antonymy, synonymy, and
other paradigms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

65
concept, because we can picture it, reason about it and describe it, but we are not
able to access its name. Other evidence for the separation of lexical and conceptual
information is related to the lack of the one-to-one relationship between words and
concepts proved by the existence of polysemy and synonymy in language. Words
can be used to indicate more than a single concept, and the name that we attach to a
thing may vary by context. To use the examples given by Murphy (2003:14), in the
first case, the word knife can refer to things like scalpels, daggers, butter knives and
letter openers; in the second, a single kind of furniture may be referred to by a
variety of terms like table, bedstand, and chest of drawers.
Although they are two distinct types of knowledge, lexical knowledge and
conceptual knowledge interact in the processes of language production and
comprehension.

5.1.3. Lexical item, lexical unit and lexical entry

The lexicon contains both linguistic expressions that are greater than words
and ones that are smaller than words. Phrasal expressions like throw up or paint
that town red and morphemes such as – ness and pre – are also to be included in
the definition of lexical item or lexeme (Murphy 2003: 14). A lexical item in the
lexicon is an abstract representation that is instantiated as a lexical unit in language
use, which has a particular form and a particular sense. For example, highest in the
phrase the highest note in the song and high in I threw the ball high are both lexical
units instantiating the lexical item high. The term lexical entry denotes the
collection of information (phonological, morphological and semantic) about a
lexeme that is included in the lexicon.
Most linguists agree that the lexicon is the repository of what is
exceptional and idiosyncratic in language (the part that has to be learned), while
grammar expresses the regularities of a language. Psychologically, the lexicon is a
more tangible entity than grammar because speakers are aware that they know and
use words, but they are hardly aware that they know and use rules of the grammar
(Cornilescu 1995: 95).

5.2. Semantic fields

Unlike diachronic linguistics in which a language was seen primarily as a

collection of individual elements such as words, syntactic patterns, etc.,
structuralist linguistics views language as a system of relations between
interdependent elements. Semantic field theory applies structuralist ideas to the
study of the lexicon of languages.

5.2.1. Field theories

Trier’s view of lexical fields

66
 Semantic field theory derives very largely from the work of German and
Swiss scholars in the 1920s and 1930s. Among the German linguists, Jost Trier
was the most important and influential50. He postulated that no item in the
vocabulary can be analyzed semantically unless one takes into account the
relationships and oppositions it enters with the other words in a given subsystem or
system. Trier advanced the idea that vocabulary as a whole forms an integrated
system of lexemes interrelated in sense, a huge mosaic51 with no loopholes52.
Semantic fields with a more restricted number of terms are incorporated
into larger ones, the latter are themselves structured into even larger ones, until the
entire lexicon of a language is integrated into a unitary system. In Trier's opinion,
therefore, semantic fields act as intermediaries between individual lexical entries,
as they appear in a dictionary, and the vocabulary as a whole.
According to field theory, meanings of words cluster together to form
fields of meaning, which in turn cluster into even larger fields until the entire
language is encompassed. So, for example, we can identify a semantic field of
madness containing words like insane, demented, batty, schizophrenic, paranoid,
some of which are synonyms of mad, and others which are types of madness. This
field belongs in turn within a larger one of mental states, which includes a wider
selection of words. Similarly we can identify a field of running including words
such as sprinting, running and jogging, which itself clusters into the field of human
motion and so on.
One of the procedures followed by Trier was to compare the structure of a
lexical field at time t1 with the structure of a lexical field at time t 2. He pointed out
that the slightest change in the meaning of a term in a semantic field brings about
changes in the neighbouring terms as well. Therefore, a word acquires its meaning
by its opposition to its neighbouring words in the pattern.
Although Trier opened a new phase in the history of semantics (Ullmann
1962: 7) he has been criticised for a number of assumptions that are highly
controversial. First he has been challenged for assuming that lexical fields are
closed, well-defined sets. The disagreement is founded especially if one considers
peripheral items in a field53. For example, in the semantic field of cooking verbs,
we have bake, boil, fry, but scald, caramelize (e.g. caramelize fruits), render (e.g.
render fat) and clarify (e.g. clarified butter) are peripheral. Second, he has been
50
Jost Trier’s most significant contribution is his 1931 monograph Der Deutsche
Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes. Die Geschichte eines sprachlichen Feldes.
51
Here is Dirk Geeraert’s comment on Trier’s idea: „ His use of the mosaic image was not
a happy one. To begin with, the image suggests that the mosaic covers the whole surface of
the field, i.e. that there are no gaps in the lexical field, that no pieces are lacking in the
mosaic. (Geeraerts 2009: 66)
52
Trier distinguished between lexical and conceptual fields, whereby the lexical field
divides the conceptual field into parts, like a mosaic.
53
Relative to clearcut boundaries between fields, Geerarets (2009) argues that „it is often
difficult to indicate exactly where a field ends; discreteness will usually only be found in
the core of a field, whereas there is a peripheral transition zone around the core where field
membership is less clearly defined. (Geerarets 2009: 67)

67
criticized for maintaining that there are no gaps or overlaps in a lexical field (we
will turn to the issue of lexical gaps in section 5.2.2). The third and last objection
regards his concentration upon paradigmatic relations of sense to the exclusion of
sintagmatic relations.
Nevertheless, to a greater or lesser extent, Trier’s original ideas certainly
contributed to the development of the subsequent semantic field theory.

Lehrer’s view of semantic fields

Lehrer (1974) believes that the study of linguistic field should prove to be a
rich source about human conceptualization and that the correct or at least the best
semantic analysis is one that describes a speaker’s conceptual structure. In
Semantic Fields and Lexical Structure, Adrienne Lehrer (1974: 8) defines a
semantic field as a group of words closely related in meaning, often subsumed by a
general term.
For instance, the words in the field of colour in English fall under the
general term COLOUR and include red, blue, green, white, scarlet and dozens
other. In their study of colour terms (1970) Brent Berlin and Paul Kay 54 found that
speakers disagree among themselves as to where to draw the line between colours,
e.g. red and orange. Moreover, the judgments of a single speaker differ at various
times. The solution the two American scholars have proposed is that of focal points
for colours, e.g. the most typical red or the best example of yellow. The prototype –
based model has to be more useful for the analysis of semantic fields because it
allows for fuzzy borders among lexical items. The study by Berlin and Kay also
shows that there are some parts of the colour spectrum that are not happily covered
by any term or at least by any basic term. Lehrer (1974) rightly states that a very
interesting question to investigate is what speakers do when they want to express
some concept not covered by any lexical item in the language. Her analysis of
cooking verbs (1974: 100) reveals lexical gaps in the field: some of the
systematically present conceptual possibilities are simply left unfilled: for instance,
there is no word for the preparation of food in a pan without water and oil, nor for
cooking with oil on a flame.

5.2.2. Lexical gaps

The absence of a lexeme at a particular place in the structure of a lexical

field is generally referred to as a lexical gap. For instance, in English there is a
word corpse meaning roughly ‘body of a dead human being’ and a word carcass
meaning ‘body of a dead animal’, but no word which is applied to dead plants. In
general, conceptual fields are heavily lexicalized. When part of a field is
unlexicalized, it constitutes a lexical gap. For instance, it can be argued that there is
a gap for a term superordinate to aunt and uncle and another for niece and nephew.
Another instance of a lexical gap, occurring when the coverage of the conceptual
54
Colour categories have been investigated by Brent Berlin and Paul Key (1969), two American
cognitive anthropologists who contributed to the development of prototype theory.

68
field by the lexical field is not complete is the absence of a cover term for bull and
cow (for stallion and mare such a cover term exists: the hypernym horse).
A natural consequence of field theory is the idea that words, or more
particularly the senses of words, define themselves against each other. So, for
example, in the field of medical personnel, part of our understanding of doctor is
‘not nurse/surgeon/matron or orderly’.
Therefore, the meanings of words must be understood, in part, in relation
to other words that articulate a given content domain. The goal of the analysis of
semantic fields is to collect all the words that belong to a field and show the
relationship of each of them to one another and to the general term.

5.2.3. Conceptual field, lexical field and semantic field

For John Lyons, (1987/1977: 253) a conceptual field is a structured

conceptual area while a lexical field is a set of lexical items that covers a specific
conceptual field. In his definition of “lexical field”, Geeraerts (2009) also includes
the idea of semantic relatedness and mutual interdependence of the items:

“A lexical field is a set of semantically related items whose meanings are

mutually interdependent and that together provide conceptual structure for a
certain domain of reality”. (Geeraerts 2009: 56)

The distinction Lyons makes between lexical field and semantic field is
based on the absence or presence of other linguistic units (besides words) in the
field, i.e. whether the set of expressions that covers a conceptual field consists only
of words or also contains other units, such as idiomatic expressions. For instance, if
the field of anger terms includes expressions like to look daggers or to boil over
besides rage, fume, seethe, etc. the field could be called semantic rather than
lexical.
Basic to field theory is the view that words occupy a certain amount of
semantic space within the language, which is distributed among the specific lexical
items available. So, for example, the field of residences is divided up into castle,
maisonette, home, bungalow and flat, to name just a few. These terms constitute
the lexical set, or lexical field which realises the semantic field. The meaning of
any one of them is affected by the other terms to which it is related. As a
consequence, fields are constantly expanding and contracting. If the term
maisonette were removed from the set, then one of the others, possibly house, or
flat, would expand to occupy the space.
Field theory is very useful in the contrastive analysis of different
languages. Languages differ quite widely even in apparently basic lexical
divisions, and fields such as temperature, kinship, colour, parts of the body, and
animal and vegetable worlds, divide the semantic space differently with respect to
them. For instance, some languages like English use eleven colour terms which
name the following colour categories: BLACK, WHITE, RED, YELLOW, BLUE,
BROWN, PURPLE, PINK, ORANGE, and GREY. Other languages use only two

69
basic colour terms (black and white), three basic colour terms (black, white and
red), etc. Actually, when there are fewer than eleven basic colour terms 55 in a
language, one basic term names a union of basic colour categories; for example,
BLUE + GREEN.
According to the cognitive linguistics view the words of a language reflect
conceptual distinctions made by a particular culture. Dirven and Radden (1997:4)
illustrate how the Anglo-Saxon culture and the German culture carve up the
conceptual continuum atmospheric conditions for which the German culture
provides two categories:

Anglo-Saxon culture fog mist

haze
German culture Nebel Dunst

As a result, speakers place their experience of visibility and air moisture under one
of the categories provided by their culture.
The cognitive approach claims that meanings do not exist independently of
human perception and cognition but are created by the way in which humans
experience and think of the phenomena that surround them. The cognitive view
could account for the flexibility of word meaning and explain why definitions of
words are often too difficult to make precise. It concentrates on how language is
shaped by human experience and cognitive processes. Cognitive linguists argue
that categories are conceptual in nature and that many, if not all of our conceptual
categories are laid down in language as linguistic categories.

55
For a colour term to be basic it must meet the following requirements (Lakoff 1987: 25):
- it must consist of one morpheme, like blue, rather than one, as in dark-blue.
- the colour denoted by the term must not be contained in another colour. Scarlet, is,
for example, contained within red.
- it must not be restricted to a small number of objects; for example blond.
- it must be common and generally known, like yellow as opposed to saffron.

70
An illustration: the semantic field of cooking terms

Lehrer (1974) illustrates the theory of semantic fields with words from two
lexical fields: cooking and sounds. One of her arguments for this choice is that the
sets seem to contain many of the subtleties, asymmetries and indeterminacies
which are characteristic of other lexical fields.
The basic words in the field of COOKING are cook, bake, boil, roast, fry
and broil (or grill for British English) and for some speakers, steam. Grill and toast
denote the same action or process from the point of view of the agent, but different
patients are involved. Grilling is a method of cooking, whereas toasting is not;
things that get toasted are normally already cooked, whereas items for grilling are
raw. The set also includes simmer, stew, poach, braise, sauté, French fry, deep fry,
barbeque and charcoal. The most general are cook and bake; words such as deep-
fry sauté, parboil, plank, shirr, scallop, flamber, rissoler or compounds like steam-
bake, pot-roast, oven-poach, pan-broil, pan-fry and oven-fry are considered
peripheral.
The first three basic cooking terms, i.e. cook, bake and boil have both
general and specific senses (they represent instances of autohyponymy, the
semantic relation discussed in 4.4). It is interesting to note that only basic words
show this characteristic. Cooking words can be placed in a chart like in the figure
below:

cook 1
bake1
cook2
steam boil 1 fry broil
roast bake2
simmer boil 2 sauté deep-fry grill grill
barbeque
French-fry
charcoal
poach stew braise

As can be noticed, words are synonyms if they appear in the same square
and hyponyms appear directly under the superordinate term. Thus, steam, boil fry,
broil, roast and bake2 are hyponyms of cook2. French fry and deep fry are
synonyms, etc.; cook1 and bake1 differ from the rest in that they refer to human
activities – in one case the preparation of food for meals and in the other the
preparation of a number of items commonly called bakery products – bread, pastry,
cookies, etc. Only cook1 and bake1 freely occur intransitively with human subjects.
I cook and He bakes are more acceptable than *John simmered yesterday or Helen
is frying.
Cook2 and all the words under it are process words which can be analysed
grammatically as causatives. Boil1 and its subordinates differ from others in the

71
semantic field in that water or some water-based liquid must be used (wine, stock
milk) while the absence of water is necessary for fry, broil, roast, and bake.
Simmer differs from boil2 by specifying that the liquid is just below the boiling
point, without the rolling bubbles that characterise boil2. The hyponyms of simmer
bring in highly specific aspects of meaning. Poach specifies that the food is slowly
cooked in water carefully so that the shape is preserved. Stew is applied when the
food is to be cooked slowly for a long time usually until it is soft. Braise is even
more complex – the food is first browned (quickly fried on the outside) and then
allowed to cook slowly in a tightly covered pot with a small amount of water.
In general, the more specific the meaning of the word, the fewer
collocational possibilities there are: boiled meat, boiled eggs, boiled vegetables are
linguistically acceptable, but poached vegetables and stewed eggs are less so
(Lehrer 1974: 33). Steam and boil are closer in meaning than to any other basic
term. Steam contrasts with boil in that the food, which must be a solid, is not
submerged; it is cooked by the rising vapours. Fry and its hyponyms contrast with
others in the field by requiring the presence of fat or oil in the cooking process
although the fat can be in the food itself. Like bacon. Deep-fry and its synonym
French-fry require a large amount of oil or fat – enough to cover the item being
cooked. Sauté, on the other hand, refers to quickly cooking something in a frying
pan with a small amount of fat. Fry is used when food is cooked in a frying pan
whether or not fat is added (in the latter case there is some fat in the food cooked,
e.g. steak, or a non-stick frying pan is used). Broil and its hyponyms refer to
cooking something directly under a heating unit or over or under an open fire. Grill
has a range of meaning that overlaps with fry slightly, since grilled cheese
sandwiches are fried, not broiled. Grill also applies to cooking food on an open
grill, but sometimes it is used synonymously with broil. Barbeque, in one of its
senses is synonymous to charcoal, and both refer to cooking food over hot coals.
Bake2 is applied to cooking food in an oven, such that the heat is indirect, rather
than direct as in broiling. Roast and broil are close in meaning.
The semantic field of cooking verbs can finally be set up to look like a series
of +/- features as in the table below, where 0 means that the feature does not apply
distinctly one way or the other. For example, frying is as a kind of cooking that
involves the use of fat in contact with a flame and is not usually gentle.

72
 water fat oven flame
gentle
Cook 0 0 0 0
0
Boil + - - +
-
Simmer + - - +
+
Fry - + - +
0
Roast - - + -
0
Toast - - - +
0
Bake - - + -
0

Metaphorical extension

Most of the terms in the field of COOKING may have metaphorical

extensions in other semantic fields. They may be used for states of emotions ( boil,
burn, simmer, steam, stew) or temperature (bake, steam, roast).
Sentences like She was boiling with rage and He was burning with
excitement prove that some verbs of cooking develop metaphorical meanings in the
field of EMOTIONS. Other verbs of cooking may have metaphorical extensions in
the semantic field of TEMPERATURE: Our apartment on the top floor bakes in
the summer or It’ s steaming/roasting in this room.

Conclusions

In this chapter we have seen that the mental lexicon has an internally
structured nature and contains a number of rules for creating new lexical items or
for extending the meaning of given lexical items. In structuralist theories of
semantic fields the meaning of lexical units is specified in terms of lexical relations
(hyponymy or antonymy) to other units constituting the same field. Fundamental to
field theory is the assumption that words can belong to more than one field. This is
possible due to the polysemy creating devices of metaphor and metonymy.

73
PART II. PRAGMATICS

1. THE DOMAIN OF PRAGMATICS

1.1. The specificity of pragmatics

1. 2. Why do we need pragmatics? Correctness vs. acceptability
1. 3. Connections to the other linguistic branches
1. 3.1. Connections form - pragmatic meaning
1.3.2.Connections sense - pragmatic meaning
1.4.. Some of their basic terms and concepts
1.5. Subdomains of pragmatics
Conclusions

1.1. The specificity of pragmatics

To circumscribe the domain of pragmatics means considering the stages of

its development, from its beginnings to present times, including the recently-
appeared areas of research. The foundation of any attempt of defining pragmatics
should be Morris’s taxonomy having semiotics as the hyperordinate term that
comprises syntax, semantics and pragmatics as components. The terms syntax and
semantics are used considering a logical and philosophical perspective: syntax
comprises morphology, because logical languages, unlike natural languages, have
no morphology; semantics refers to denotational meaning (see Part I Semantics,
2.1.; 3.2.) i.e. to the relationship sign-referent. According to Morris, pragmatics
means ‘the study of the relation of signs to interpreters’ (Morris 1938: 6).
Becoming more specific in referring to linguistic signs combined to form
words and emphasizing the concrete character of the elements studied, Mey’s
definition is a clear reflection of Morris’:

‘Pragmatics is the science of language seen in relation to its users. […] the
science of language as it is used by real, live people, for their own purposes
and within their limitations and affordances’. (Mey 1993: 5)

Pragmatics is equally based on understanding and on the cooperation of the

interlocutors. It is a theory of the users comprising

‘everything that characterizes the user as a person whose use of language

depends on the rules and norms that are valid at any time, in any place, in the
community in which he or she is living.’ (Mey 1993: 37)

Limitations and affordances are linked to objective and subjective factors.

Objective factors include the potential represented by the syntactic rules and the

74
lexicon of a given language. Subjective factors comprise the users’ competences:
linguistic competence, encyclopedic competence and communicative competence.
All these types of competence depend on the users’ context of culture and life.
Therefore, pragmatics ‘tells us it’s all right to use language in various,
unconventional ways, as long as we know, as language users, what we’re doing’
(Mey 1993: 4). Language is a form of behaviour and our idiolect (the specific,
unique linguistic variant each of us uses) represents the sum of our particular forms
of linguistic behaviour in various contexts.

‘Pragmatics is the study of the conditions of human language uses as these

are determined by the context of society.’ (Mey 1993: 42)

Levinson’s definition of pragmatics seems to give a description at a more

general level, by implicitly acknowledging the role of variable factors and
considering just those relevant, grouped together as context; a similar process of
further generalization and essentialization is operated at the level of the relations
language − context; Levinson views pragmatics as inevitably linked to linguistic
structures and accounting for the infinite potential of languages in point of
expressivity:

‘Pragmatics is the study of those relations between language and context that
are grammaticalised56, or encoded in the structure of a language’. (Levinson
1983: 9)

1.2. Why do we need pragmatics? Correctness vs. acceptability

A new direction of research appears out of necessity when all the others
already existent prove not to be enough. Sometimes, in the beginning, the tendency
is to include all still unsolved issues within the domain of the new science. Imagine
the domain of pragmatics like a huge recipient where the problematic linguistic
issues are stored in order to be clarified.

‘Pragmatics is the waste-basket of linguistics;’ that is: ‘whenever you cannot

explain a phenomenon in language using regular, accepted linguistic
theories, then you must have recourse to something else, something that is
supposedly as undefined as it is tangible, namely, pragmatics.’ (Mey 1993:
5)

Starting from Mey’s half-ironical statement, it is obvious that linguists

were at a deadlock when trying to interpret some linguistic realities strictly within

56
Lexicalization involves changes in the way ideas are expressed, whereas
grammaticalization involves changes in the expression of orientation in space, in time or
from the epistemological viewpoint (including sources of knowledge, reliability and
factuality) (Chafe 2000 in Butler 2003: 72).

75
the frame offered by the ‘regular, accepted linguistic theories’, whether they
pertained to phonetics or morphology, syntax or semantics. It means that a new
frame had to be created in order to adequately interpret those realities. Therefore,
what looked rather vague, in spite of being ‘tangible’, i.e. very concrete and present
in our daily life but with hardly clear-cut borders, turned out to be a necessity.
We shall try to prove that in the analysis of some examples of sentences
used by speakers with a precise intention. Moreover, we will show that the
syntactic structure preferred by the user, whenever there are more options, and also
his/her lexical choices (involving register and field, which account for synonyms)
influence the interpretation of the sentence.
Let us consider the next example when discussing syntactic structure
choices:

‘I brought some sushi home and cooked it; it wasn’t bad.’ (Chicago alternative
cultural weekly reader, 21 August, 1992, in Mey (1993: 4))

The information necessary in order to interpret the utterance adequately is

that it is an ad to a cocktail lounge. Is this relevant? Is the text effective?
To cook means to prepare by using heat, and sushi is to be eaten raw.
Cooked sushi is a contradiction in terms and cooking sushi would seem odd, if not
a sign of some mental disorder. The message sent would be unfavourable to the
speaker. Of course, a person can do what he/she wants as long as that does not
affect negatively other people, but the type of behaviour mentioned above is totally
illogical according to the laws of reason: sushi means raw fish possibly combined
with other ingredients and foods, but definitely ‘not cooked’.
All these considerations remain true, but totally inadequate, when someone
says such a reply after visiting that cocktail lounge. The text makes implicit
reference to a cocktail lounge and such an establishment should advertise its
alcoholic drinks. Doing that directly would not have any effect on a reader: Our
drinks are the best! Try them! At best, the reply would be No kidding! Do you take
us for fools? You would say anything to sell your stuff! So, the message of the text is
much more effective if conveyed indirectly: [After having a drink at that cocktail
lounge, I couldn’t stop any more, that good the drink was. I got so drunk that] I
brought some sushi home and cooked it; it wasn’t bad (= I have enjoyed it). Not
everybody would enjoy such an ad, but its effectiveness cannot be denied, since people
wouldn’t go to a place where food and drinks are bad.
Therefore, the purpose, the intention of the speaker when using the
sentence is essential for its interpretation; the declarative sentence expresses an
assertion: our lounge is one of the best. Outside this interpretation, the whole reply
would seem just an example of stupidity or ignorance in terms of general
knowledge, on the part of the speaker.
Let’s consider another example, taken from a literary text by David Lodge:

76
‘I just met the old Irishman and his son, coming out of the toilet.’ (David Lodge,
Paradise Lost, in Mey 1993: 7)

This first part of a dialogue can be the beginning of some type of joke,
since it is based on the structural (syntactic) ambiguity of the complex sentence,
resulted from the fact that it is elliptical, and it can be interpreted in two ways, that
is two semantic interpretations can be associated to it. Apparently, syntactic
ambiguity has nothing to do with pragmatics, but it is the semantic interpretations
of the sentence that require the use of a pronoun-subject or another for
disambiguation. And personal pronouns may have a pragmatic dimension,
depending on the situational context.
One interpretation of the sentence is I just met the old Irishman and his
son when I was coming out of the toilet, in which case the time subordinate can be
reduced to a participial clause that is better placed at the beginning of the sentence,
to avoid ambiguities: Coming out of the toilet, I just met …. It is obvious that the
subjects of the two clauses are I, in other words, they are co-referential and
therefore, the subject of the first can be omitted.
Another interpretation is I just met the old Irishman and his son when they
were coming out of the toilet. By reducing the finite clause to a participial one, we
obtain the initial structure quoted by Mey.
Our considerations might lead to the conclusion that the word order chosen
prevents any ambiguities, but a possible reply of the type When were you at the
toilet? shows that the interlocutor might not always be competent or attentive
enough to interpret the sentence correctly simply on the grounds of its syntactic
pattern, especially since we are dealing with the deep structure of that sentence.
Syntactic ambiguity was commented on by Chomsky in relation to the different
deep structures having the same surface structure. In our case, the surface structure
corresponds to the elliptical sentence quoted and the deep structure corresponds to
the two possible interpretations.
Both semantic interpretations are correct, but the identification of the
adequate deep structure in a particular case is a process which involves the context
of utterance. If the interlocutor knows that the speaker went to the toilet, he might
disambiguate the sentence more easily. Ambiguities imply a cognitive cost, i.e. the
interlocutor makes an effort to understand the meaning of an utterance.
Following Kroeger (2005) this means that ‘the form of an utterance by itself
(ignoring context) does not determine its function’ (Kroeger 2005: 2). At the same
time, the need of expressing a certain meaning or communicative function does not
necessarily lead to a unique linguistic form.

‘In other words, we cannot fully explain the form of an utterance while
ignoring meaning and function; at the same time, we cannot account for the
form of an utterance by looking only at its meaning and function’ (Kroeger
2005: 2).

77
 It is necessary to find the devices which allow a fuller, deeper account of
these replies. If we must observe the grammar rules when structuring a sentence, in
order to obtain a logical combination of the linguistic elements, attention must also
be paid to the conversational restrictions and tendencies which make the users
combine certain linguistic elements in a particular way to express a particular
message.
We will next refer to lexical choices and to the way in which they
influence the message to be conveyed to the hearer.
For instance, in the example

Don’t concern yourself with that, things are settled, and anyway, what are friends
for?

the speaker has to observe the rules of forming the negative form of the Imperative
Mood, use the right preposition with the verb concern, apply the concord subject-
predicate in the second and third sentence, and form the interrogative of the third
sentence verb. All these syntactic rules are not optional, but in a concrete situation
of communication, if the speaker chooses to speak in the colloquial register, a
double negation or the use of the invariable Present Tense negative form of be,
ain’t, are accepted even if they are not correct in standard language: No sweat, it
ain’t no problem, you’re my buddy.
Grammatical correctness often collides with the users’ perception as to
what is correct. To describe the grammar of a language essentially means trying to
explain why speakers recognize certain forms as being “correct” but reject others
as being “incorrect”. Correctness is an umbrella covering both syntactic structures
(formed according to the rules specific to a language) and logical semantic
combinations (according to semantic rules): the latter are expressed by the former.
Both require the linguistic competence of the user.
Acceptability is at the border between correctness and incorrectness, and
only the criterion of frequency tips the scales in favour of the acceptance, integration
and generalisation of a certain use, or, on the contrary, of its rejection. In terms of
linguistic domains, acceptability brings together semantics, socio-linguistics,
psycho-linguistics and pragmatics. If the last is to be defined as implying the
speaker’s choice, then all the other domains are subsumed to it. The user’s
competences remain the basic criterion in his choices. Of course, some would
argue that the domain of pragmatics is thus dilluted. Our aim is not to favour one or
another of the viewpoints, but to show the interfaces of pragmatics with other
linguistic domains. The conclusions remain to be drawn accordingly.
Kroeger (2005: 2) stresses on the acceptability of the form itself, rather
than on the meaning or function which it expresses. ‘A native speaker of a
language will often be able to understand a sentence perfectly well even if it is not
grammatically correct [...].’ The examples provided by Kroeger involved elliptical
sentences, non-observance of subject-predicate agreement or of Past Tense
Interrogative forming rules:

78
Me Tarzan, you Jane.
Those guys was trying to kill me.
When he came here?

Conversely, the form of a sentence may be accepted as correct even when

the meaning is obscure or absurd. We will discuss that in the chapter about
presuppositions: to say something about somebody/something implies the
existence of that person/thing. Semantically, the two sentences below are
contradictory, but, pragmatically, the second utterance makes sense in a context
such as:

U1/S1 ‘How is Bill’s wife?’

U2/S2 ‘His wife is fine, actually he is not married.’

The first reply implies that Bill is married. This implied meaning is contradicted
explicitly by the content of the last sentence, actually he is not married.
Similarly to morpho-syntactic choices, at lexical level the range of choices is
even greater, depending on the competence and communicative intention of the
speaker: friend and buddy are synonyms, bother, concern, sweat, worry are also
partial synonyms having various degrees of intensity and formality.
The conclusion to be drawn from the analysis of the examples above is that
grammar is rule-dependent, even if at formal level there is to be made a distinction,
too. There are some rules about using language that must be consciously learned,
the kind of rules learned in school. They are prescriptive rules and define a
standard form of the language, which some authority must explicitly state for the
benefit of all speakers. There are also rules that the native speaker is usually not
aware of because they comprise that kind of knowledge about the language that
children learn from the speakers they are surrounded by and interact with, in a
natural and unconscious way, descriptive rules.
According to Leech’s assertions (1983: 5), there is a contrast between
grammar and pragmatics: grammar is based on rules, conventional in nature,
generally allowing no exception, prescriptive, focusing on form, ideational and
describable in terms of discrete and determinate categories; pragmatics is governed by
principles, generally non-conventional in nature and motivated by conversational
goals, interpersonal and textual in nature, describable in terms of continuous and
indeterminate values.
In Kroeger’s view, studying the interdependence among form, meaning and
function means defining grammar as the totality of these non-prescriptive rules rather
than ‘all the structural properties of the language except sound structure(phonology57)’,
i.e. the structure of words, phrases, sentences, texts, etc. Word-order facts within any
given language tend to show interesting patterns of correlation, and the patterns
57
If emphasis is linked to language use, then phonetics too is linked to pragmatics, and
some linguists consider the phonetics-pragmatics interface.

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observed in different languages tend to vary in limited and systematic ways (Kroeger
2005: 7).

‘All languages, whether standardized or not, have rules of this kind [non-
prescriptive], and these rules constitute the grammar of the language. The
term grammar is often used to refer to the complete set of rules needed to
produce all the regular patterns in a given language’ (Kroeger 2005: 5).

It is interesting to notice how during a timespan of almost 30 years, the

concept of grammar was re-defined and broadened so as not to be equated simply
to correctness and formality. Kroeger’s view was presented here as an example of
an extreme viewpoint, which implies that grammar is an all-encompassing term
and domain comprising semantics, pragmatics and the cognitive mechanisms
rsponsible for correct/incorrect language use).
Beyond such extreme opinions, we should adopt the general and accepted
view expressed concisely by Leech in his introduction to Principles of Pragmatics
(1983): following Morris, Leech defines pragmatics as the study of the use of
language that is distinct from and complementary to the language itself seen as a
formal system. In spite of the differences between grammar and pragmatics, ‘one
must develop theories and methods of description which are peculiar to pragmatics
itself, and show that these have to be different from those which are appropriate to
grammar’ (Leech: 1983: x).

1.3. Connections to the other linguistic branches

According to Morris (1938), syntax, semantics and pragmatics are included

into the domain of the general science of signs, semiotics. Signs have origin, uses
and effects within the communicative behaviour they occur in (see Part I Semantics,
2.3., 2.4.). That implies psychological, biological and sociological phenomena
studied indirectly by linguistic pragmatics.
Language is a communicative complex able to perform various functions,
but should be seen as made up of concrete means for concrete users at concrete
moments in time. That cannot be accomplished in the absence of a structure having
a sense. Consequently, the basic relations to be discussed are between linguistic
form and pragmatics, and between semantic meaning/sense and pragmatics. To
Morris, pragmatics is the superordinate term, comprising semantics which in its turn
includes syntax.
Verschueren’s opinion (2001: 83) summarizes the relationship among
linguistic branches:

‘If it is the case that pragmatics approaches language as a form of behavior,

there must indeed be a pragmatic way of looking at any aspect of language at
any level of structure. In other words, unlike the traditional components of a
linguistic theory, pragmatics does not have its own privileged object of

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 investigation. And if this emphasis on behavior implies psychological,
biological, and sociological considerations, pragmatics must by definition be
highly interdisciplinary, thus rubbing against the hyphenated disciplines
(psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and the like) while differing from them
by its lack of a correlational object of its own (the mind, society, and the
like).’ (Verschueren 2001: 83)

1.3.1. Connections form - pragmatic meaning/pragmatic interpretation

Linguistic forms are the material carrying semantic and pragmatic

meaning58, even if some would agree with Green (2004) that pragmatic information
depends not on linguistic forms in themselves, but on their use as an act resulted
from their uttering.
To Ariel (2008) the connection grammar-pragmatics ultimately means the
connection code – inference, whenever the latter is involved in interpreting the
message. Language is a code and its signs are combined into structures which in a
certain situation make the users infer implicit meanings. Of course, when it comes
to deictic elements or to speech acts, they don’t have implicit meaning, but are to
be interpreted in the context of use.

‘Codes and inferences do make contact, or we wouldn’t be able to explain

many cases of historical change59. The fact that so much of the linguistic
code can be pragmatically motivated stems from the origin of grammar, the
extralinguistic factors guiding interlocutors. Codes commonly develop out of
(salient, recurrent) speaker-intended inferences associated with specific
forms.’ (Ariel 2008: 306).

Furthermore, Ariel (2008: 117) considers that

‘(some) interpretative aspects traditionally classified as pragmatic do not

merely complement the grammar’ [...]. Rather, some extralinguistic
generalizations regarding forms must constitute part of the grammar (e.g.
definite NPs encode Given/identifiable information, Left Dislocated
sentences introduce discourse-new entities) [...]’.

In other words, the content of the referring expressions is identified also as

a result of considering the situational context, and both the processes involved and
the result led to the formation of a pattern. Ariel argues that grammars routinely
evolve as a response to extragrammatical forces and, consequently, there are
linguistic conventions associating linguistic expressions with extralinguistic

58
Mira Ariel uses the term referring to the pragmatic interpretation of an utterance.
59
You might consider the tendency towards simplification, resulting in paradigm
simplification by leveling or losing inflections, vs. the tendency towards expressibility,
accounting for suppletive and irregular forms.

81
factors, which leads to the finite number of grammatical forms, referring to
morphology. Generalising, all of grammar could be motivated pragmatically, since
discourse patterns are so.
Hyman’s conclusion, quoted by Ariel (2008: 117) might be agreed to by
some researchers, “when pragmatic factors become part of grammar, the result is
syntax and morphology” (Hyman 1983: 71–72). In the same line, Kuno (1987)
believes that the syntax chosen for a given sentence corresponds to the perspective
of the speaker.
The patterns referred to in the previous paragraph imply similar cognitive
processes and linguistic uses of the whole community of language users. As early as
1933, Bloomfield explicitly acknowledged the fundamental role played by two
concepts: speech community and speech utterance. The members of a speech
community produce speech-utterances which, if repeated in rather similar situations,
acquire a certain degree of conventionality and are almost automatically decoded by
the users precisely because of their conventional character: for instance, the use of
declarative sentences, which apparently offer information on the speaker, to express
a refusal:

Shall I bring you something to eat?

I’m not hungry./ I have a headache. = I don’t want anything.

Ariel (2008: 118) firmly stated that

‘we must distinguish between functionality and extralinguistic motivation.

Grammar is functional if it is adequate for its speakers for their
communicative purposes. Arbitrary grammatical conventions pose no
obstacle for successful communication’.

Any linguistic change is determined by some communicative needs and this is

what makes a user innovate at structural level. The motivated character of grammar
is determined by its being ‘a natural historical product’ (Ariel 2008: 118).

1.3.2. Connections sense - pragmatic meaning

Discussing semantic meaning/sense (we chose Ariel’s use of the term

semantic meaning which is synonymous to the concept of sense; see Part I
Semantics, 2.2., 3.2., 3.3.) presupposes the presence of a phonetic form. If we agree
to Bloomfield (1933), a linguistic form is a phonetic form which has a meaning,
therefore meaning is necessarily attached to form. Bloomfield follows Humboldt
and Saussure, and continues an idea stated by the antiquity grammarians, more
precisely, Aristotle, and, later, medieval speculative grammars. In this light,
semantics has to establish what meanings are attached to phonetic forms.
Bloomfield implicitly makes no difference between the semantic meaning and
what we call now pragmatic meaning when defining the meaning of a linguistic

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form as ‘the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response it calls forth in
the hearer’ (1973: 138-139).
The interdependence between semantic and pragmatic meaning is the very
idea underlying the definition of pragmatics: we typically say (i.e. mean) more than
we say. In other words, literal meaning (i.e. denotative lexical meaning) is the
foundation on which various layers of pragmatic meaning (i.e. interpretations) are
added. The example I’m not hungry is an utterance which contains some
information about the speaker’s state at the moment of uttering, but linked to the
first utterance (Shall I bring you something to eat?) whose reply it is, counts as a
refusal. Outside this situation, such an utterance would seem out of place.
A conclusion of this argumentation can be considered Leech’s definition of
pragmatics as an approach attempting to link the two types of meaning: ‘general
pragmatics relates the sense (or grammatical meaning) of an utterance to its
pragmatic (or illocutionary) force’ (Leech 1983: 5).
The selection of certain linguistic elements and the rhetorical structure of a
sentence, the latter accounting for the semantic-pragmatic interface, depend on the
characteristics of the user and contribute to conveying the intended meaning. The
connection between pragmatics, semantics and socio-linguistics is, thus, obvious.
Register plays an important part in this respect (for more on register see Part I,
Semantics, 3.6.).
Let’s consider the next three examples:

1. No sweat, it ain’t no problem, you’re my buddy.

2. Don’t worry, it’s ok, we’re friends!
3. Don’t concern yourself with that, things are settled, and anyway, what are
friends for?

Syntactically, example 1 is made up of three sentences which are juxtaposed, but

that is of no direct relevance. It is more relevant what each of them expresses and
the result of combining them from the perspective of the interlocutor. The first two
sentences are synonymous, the first containing a slang expression no sweat, which
has a figurative meaning ‘don’t worry’ (for more on synonymy, see Part I,
Semantics, 4.3.). Its meaning is resumed in the second sentence by using a more
neutral structure but still in the colloquial register, since it contains two negations.
The register used connotes [+closeness], [+informality] [+trust], [−vanity] and is
justified by the content of the third sentence, in its turn containing a colloquial
term, buddy.
The first two sentences reinforce each other, expressing the message to be
conveyed to the interlocutor, objectively justified by the third sentence: S1 + S2 ←
S3. This choice of expressing the message is not the only one possible, but it is the
one selected by the speaker because it seemed the most appropriate to him.
Examples 2 and 3 are variants of 1 which express the same message, even if the
register used is different; 2 is rather neutral and 3 uses more formal structures.
More variants can be added to the ones above, the sentence meaning
remaining basically the same, but the interpretations triggered vary to a great

83
extent. Generalizing from the analyses of the examples above, a strictly descriptive
frame based on formal reasoning cannot fully explain the concrete meaning of the
previous examples.

1.4. Some basic pragmatic terms and concepts

Utterance
Any pragmatic study has the concept of utterance as the basic dual
(structural & functional) unit. While a sentence is the basic unit of analysis in
syntax, where the focus is equally on form and semantic meaning, i.e. logical
meaning, utterance is a key term in pragmatics, since it is the result of the process
of uttering. The structure of the utterance is relevant only since it has a certain
pragmatic function, it is the communicative goal underlying it that matters. The
fact that we are dealing with an elliptical sentence or with a complex sentence is
secondary, what matters is their appropriacy to the intended message:

‘No.’ ‘Not me.’ ‘I would never do such a thing if I were you and you should know
better than that.’

Whether we talk about an utterance which structurally is made up of a

sentence or a complex of linguistic forms larger than the single sentence, a
discourse, which in the written mode of a language constitues a text, language use
is action, and investigating it requires attention paid both to language and to action
(Hanks 1996). ‘Real language’ (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981; Brown and
Yule 1983) means linguistic structures actually used by people. This conception of
discourse, broadly speaking, underlies the development of contemporary linguistic
pragmatics (Blommaert 2005: 2).
But language operates differently in different environments, and to
understand how language works, we need to contextualise it properly, to establish
the relations between language usage and the particular purposes for which and
conditions under which it operates (Blommaert 2005: 14).

Context
The essential role of the context is transparent from Mey’s assertion that
‘ambiguity exists only in the abstract’ (Mey 1993: 8). Due to the linguistic and
mainly situational context, any utterance could be disambiguated, at least partly.
The context has to be taken into account to determine what an ambiguous sentence
means, but there is an indefinite number of elements playing a role in the
production and interpretation of utterances.
The context should be established in connection to the ongoing interaction
between the interlocutors, since the dynamic development of the conversation
offers also some necessary clues to its understanding Consequently, the context is
dynamic (an environment in steady development) and pro-active (it creates
meaning, determines the course of the verbal exchange), according to Mey.

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 The context is not ‘just a widening of the sentential perspective: it is the
total social setting in which the speech event takes place’, what Mey (1993: 31),
following Bilmes, calls context of use. Mey distinguishes between societal context,
primarily determined by society’s institutions, and social context, primarily created
in interaction.

It’s a long time since we visited your mother. (Mey 1993: 39)

Context 1: uttered by the husband to his wife, in the married couple’s living room,
in the morning.
Context 2: uttered by the husband to his wife, at the zoo, in front of the
hippopotamus enclosure.
Context creates the conditions for the interpretation of an utterance,
depending on the competences of the interlocutors, and also on their motivation.
Referring to agency and cause-effect relationship, Hanks (1996) concludes that

‘if a feature of the context …is encoded, then speakers using the language
are habituated to take notice of the corresponding aspect of context.’ (Hanks
1996: 179)

The first context leads to a neutral, literal interpretation (in the absence of
any other elements proving the contrary), whereas, the second, has a definite
ironical interpretation.

Relevance
The very presence of a linguistic element in a sentence means that it had been
selected by the user because it is important in the context, i.e. it is relevant.
Paralinguistic devices, i.e. stress, intonation, pause, can highlight that importance. In
the previous example, the relevant phrase is your mother, since it is to be interpreted
in relation to the interlocutor and in relation to the situational context. Relevance is a
feature expressing the importance assigned by the speaker/hearer to a certain
constituent of an utterance, to an utterance as a whole or to any element of the
situational context and identified as such by the users. It aims at producing the
optimal level of information with the least level of effort.

Pragmatic inference
Starting from the literal meaning of a sentence, which is standard,
conventional, (‘type’ or ‘token’ meaning in Grice’s terminology), the hearer
sometimes draws on pragmatic inferences based on his/her best guesses as to what
the speaker intends to convey. Those inferences help to speakers’ meanings, in
Grice’s terminology). They are non-literal or indirect meanings, impossible to be
deduced only by the sum of the meanings of the linguistic elements making up the

85
utterance. Pragmatic inferences are to be calculated by both the speaker and the
interlocutor according to their common ground, i.e. their shared knowledge
regarding the topic of the discussion, sometimes considering the presence of a
certain linguistic element or structure. The basic types of inferences are
implicatures and presuppositions.
In Mey’s example

It’s a long time since we visited your mother.

the interlocutors’ relationship is crucial, and so is the place where the utterance is
made. But, irrespective of that, it is obvious that the interlocutor has a mother, and
that the two persons talking visited her previously, which in its turn, implies that
they are not living together. The implicature could be: you don’t behave like a
loving daughter, or you look like your mother, being here reminds me of that.

Oops! She did it again.

The iterative adverb again presupposes that the action had been performed at least
one more time before. The presupposition triggered by the adverb is she had done
it before.

Indeterminacy
Indeterminacy denotes the indefinite value of a referential expression,
whose reference is ambiguous in the linguistic context, and is disambiguated only
if decoded against the background represented by the situational context. What
linguistic elements have the feature [+indeterminacy] in the examples below? How
is the problem solved?

Betty’s father gave her a present. Cf Both Mary’s and Jane’s father gave her
presents.

In the example above, the personal pronoun in the Dative Case, her, can be
coreferential with Betty, or not, depending on the situational context which
disambiguates the reference. Of course, the first interpretation readily accessible
seems to be that of their coreferentiality. If they are not coreferential, her will be
stressed in speech and will imply a contrast (to her, not to somebody else). In the
example where the synthetic Genitives determine identical nouns coordinated it is
obvious that the Dative Case pronoun is not coreferential with any other nominal
element in the sentence.
In the example

Yesterday’s events troubled the President.

the time deictic yesterday and the nominal phrase the President have variable
reference, depending on the time corresponding to now, and on the place of the

86
utterance (in a certain place/institution etc, at a certain time, there was a unique
referent having the function of president). (see also Part I, 2.1.)

Appropriacy
Appropriacy refers to the competence of the users to make the most
adequate choices in point of word selection and combination, so as to best express
their communicative goals.

You are not Mrs. Brown, you are my daughter.

This example proves the connection between the deictic you and the address
term Mrs. Brown, on the one hand, and the referential expression my daughter. The
referent denoted by you can be described from various perspectives, and expressed
by various linguistic expressions but the speaker chooses the variant which seems the
most relevant in the situation of communication. The structure Mrs. Brown connotes
distance, independence, even estrangement if interpreted in opposition to the NP my
daughter.

My dear, you should listen to these people, because they certainly mean well.

The deictic you is correlated to the address term my dear, a term of

endearment, which connotes a close relationship and thus marks the authority of
the speaker. The speaker has to use his/her authority because the whole utterance
functions as a request. The modal verb should used with deontic value enhances
the desired effect. The deictic these and the personal pronoun they designate the
same referents, who are obviously present in the situation of communication, and
the speaker can point at them during the speech event. Their use, corroborated with
the content of the adverbial clause of reason, has a cumulative persuasive effect (or
is meant to).
One should notice that all the elements enumerated as basic for a
pragmatic analysis coexist at the level of the utterance, they don’t exclude one
another, but together, contribute to the adequate expressing of the message
intended by the speaker and to its understanding by the hearer.
For example, in the utterance I’m here now there are three elements whose
reference is variable, i.e. indeterminate, unless disambiguated according to the
situational context: I, here, now. I can be any speaker, any member of the linguistic
community; here can have a narrower or wider area of reference (a part of a
building, the building, a part of a locality, the locality, a geographical area –county,
region, district, country, continent); now can refer to the exact time of the day, to
the day of the week, date, week, month, year, or to any moment in time which is
relative in relation to some events known by the interlocutors.

Speech Act (SA)

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 A speech act implies using some words in structures which are correct and
meaningful in the language used, in order to perform a certain action via the words
used and to obtain a certain effect on the interlocutor.

Illocutionary force (IF)

The communicative goal or illocutionary force of an utterance is what the
utterance counts as, and implicitly the message conveyed by the speaker in point of
his action through words; the communicative goal is supposed to be adequately
interpreted by the interlocutor.

1.5. Subdomains of pragmatics

‘[...] definitional efforts, therefore, have been stranded either on vague and
impracticable distinctions (such as semantics studies meaning out of context,
while pragmatics studies meaning in context) or on ad hoc lists of topics that
were supposed to belong to the province of pragmatics (in particular: deixis,
conversational implicatures, presuppositions, speech acts, and conversational
structures’ (Verschueren 2001: 83).

In spite of the implicit simplification characterising any attempt of

systematization, for pedagogical reasons, it is useful to approach pragmatics by
discussing its major domains mentioned by Verchueren and agreed upon by most
linguists (deixis, conversational implicatures, presuppositions, speech acts). On the
other hand, it remains true that these domains intertwine and in many cases we are
confronted with the circularity of definitions and explanations.
Describing the domain of pragmatics as a science in its own right includes
mentioning its subdomains, and they reflect the main concerns of interlocutors
during and regarding the verbal exchange: focusing on some elements of discourse
(grammaticalised in the form of deictics), implying a meaning beyond the semantic
one, but not independent of it (inferences, be they implicatures or presuppositions),
sending the intended message to the interlocutor (IF) by means of a speech act
(SA) performed in the uttering process.

Deixis
Deixis is a Greek term, synonymous to the Latin term demonstrative,
which refers to those elements making up the situation of communication
(participants and the relationships among them, time, place, topic) on which the
interlocutor’s attention is drawn by means of various linguistic devices. Deictics
are the concrete elements pointed out in a certain utterance. Such elements are
implicitly stressed because they are considered relevant by the speaker. Let’s
consider the example

I’m here now.

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In this case, all the elements making up the utterance are deictics. The speaker
points out his/her presence by the use of the first person personal pronoun I, at the
moment of speaking (both grammatical and lexical means are employed: the
former represented by the use of Present Simple, the latter by the use of the adverb
of time now), in a certain place, where the uttering process occurs (by using the
adverb of place here).
The utterance above can be interpreted in many ways by the interlocutors
in different situations, depending on the circumstances of communication; some
variants are:
a. I am in my hotel room today.
b. I am in Bucharest at present.
c. I am at the supermarket at the moment.
d. I am at my parents’ this week.
If the interlocutors are aware of the reference ascribed to each deictic (here
and now), there is no need to be so specific as in the above utterances.
If the interlocutor does not have the necessary shared information, then the
speaker should be more specific and give all the necessary details explicitly.
Subjective reasons, on the other hand, may prevent the speaker from being specific
enough, and he/she might avoid precision on purpose, in order to hide that relevant
information from the interlocutor (imagine a discussion parent-child). Therefore,
deictics can be intentionally used with a certain degree of indeterminacy (which is
in itself relevant) in a certain context, to make the interlocutor draw a certain
inference (the parent would know that the child is in a place he/she is not supposed
to be, a friend/a business partner would know that the speaker is not able to meet
him/her or to speak on the phone).

Inferences are a type of pragmatic deductions. They account for the

indirect additional meaning of an utterance, beyond its semantic meaning, but not
independent of it, deduced from the linguistic and situational context and
calculated by interlocutors according to their common ground. They are the result
of applying pragmatic rules based on contextual factors, on The Communicative
Principle and its maxims in accordance with the degree of relevance associated to
the utterance and its elements by the interlocutors.

He took his umbrella when he left. The utterance presupposes that he left.
‘How are youn feeling?’ ‘Did Napoleon win at Waterloo?’ (the implicature is
‘Don’t even ask, the situation is far from good’.)

Speech Acts
Uttering something, means action, the action of expressing a certain
message to be understood by the interlocutor. There is no one to one
correspondence between a linguistic structure and a certain type of speech act. The
role of the context is essential in the process of message understanding. The
variants of illocutionary values associated to the utterance below are a proof in this

89
respect. The speech act is part of the thematic deictic center included in the
situation of communication (with all its components and features). From this
perspective, the verbal exchange consisting of successive speech acts is (the core)
part of a speech event.

I congratulate you on your birthday.

I’m exhausted.

Structurally, the utterance I’m exhausted is a simple sentence made up of:

- the first person singular personal pronoun I, designating the speaker in the
situation of communication;
- the link verb be, connecting the grammatical subject to the property assigned to
him/her;
- the adjective functioning as a predicative, exhausted.
The intensity of the adjective helps conveying the message of the utterance:
a. reproach if the interlocutor caused the subject to overwork;
b. excuse/refusal if the interlocutor has some expectations of the subject;
c. request if the speaker wants the interlocutor to perform a certain action
on his/her behalf.
etc.
These interpretations represent indirectly conveyed communicative goals,
since the utterance is an assertion typically meant to express a fact.
Beyond the domains encompassed traditionally by pragmatics,
Verschueren proposes a more flexible and open-minded view on pragmatics as an
approach, rather than a domain, whose boundaries and area are to be strictly
delimited:

‘An alternative view, going back radically to Morris and gaining ground
slowly, is to treat pragmatics as a specific identifiable perspective on
language, in particular a functional perspective studying language from the
point of view of its usage phenomena and processes (see Verschueren 1999).
Since language use involves human beings in all their complexity, the
perspective in question is necessarily interdisciplinary, touching on aspects
of cognition, society, and culture in a coherent and integrated approach,
without privileging any of these specific angles. For the same reason, the
perspective in question must pay attention to flexible processes of making
linguistic choices, both in production and in interpretation, from a variable
(and in principle infinite) range of options, in a manner that is negotiable and
dynamic rather than mechanical, thus betraying a high degree of
adaptability’ (Verschueren 2001: 83-84).

Conclusions

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 Pragmatics offers a new and distinct perspective on utterance
interpretation, representing a necessary direction of analysis. Any utterance has a
literal meaning, a structural meaning, i.e. the sum of the meanings of the linguistic
items that make it up, and that is the basis to which the speaker adds his/her own
meaning (speaker’s meaning), depending on the context (linguistic and situational)
that plays a disambiguating role, solving the issues linked to indeterminacy and
relevance. In their turn, deictics are essential in offering the interlocutor the frame
necessary to draw the appropriate inferences and interpret an utterance.

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2. THE CONCEPT OF DEIXIS. TYPES OF DEIXIS

2.1. The term and concept of deixis. Types of deixis

2.2. Person deixis
2.2.1. Means of expressing person deixis. Personal pronouns system
2.2.2. The reference of pronouns. Deixis vs anaphora
2. 3. Time deixis
2.3.1. Definition
2.3.2. Linguistic markers of time
2.3.3. From time to tense
2. 3.3.1. Absolute and relative tenses
2.3.3.2. Tense and Aspect
2.3.4. Deictic vs. non-deictic lexical time markers
2.3.5. Tenses and lexical time markers
2.3.6. Time vs. space deixis
2.4. Space deixis
2.4.1. Definition and importance
2.4.2. Classification of space deictics
2.4.3. Main values of space markers
2.4.4. Combined values
2.4.5. On time and space deixis (again). Which was first?
2.5. Social deixis
2.6. Discourse/ textual deixis
2.7. Empathetic deixis
Conclusions

2.1.The term and concept of deixis. Types of deixis

Starting inductively, we can consider an example such as:

I told you to come here tomorrow.

All the elements that we should point out in this utterance are related to the speaker
(I) and make up an ensemble called deictic center. I is always the speaker, in the
same way as you is always the hearer/listener/interlocutor. The infinitive to come
and the adverb of place here refer to an action of moving towards the speaker, and
to the place where the speaker is, respectively. The adverb of time tomorrow refers
to a moment in time which is posterior to t 0, the uttering moment. As can be seen,
all these elements depend on the context to be interpreted concretely, beyond their
person/space/time dimension.
Consequently, it can be said that

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 Deixis is a discourse structure property,

‘the single most obvious way in which the relationship between language
and context is reflected in the structures of languages themselves.’
(Levinson 1983: 54)

‘Aspect fundamental al organizării pragmatice a discursului, desemnând

faptul că referinţa anumitor componente ale unui enunţ nu poate fi
determinată decât prin raportare la datele concrete ale situaţiei de
comunicare./ A fundamental aspect of the pragmatic discourse structure,
which designates the fact that the reference of some utterance components
can be determined only by relating it to the concrete data of the situation of
communication. (our translation)
(Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu 2001: 157)

Both definitions point out the essential value of deixis in communication,

as an inherent and necessary aspect of discourse structure/language structure. As a
process, deixis can be said to be the encoding of the utterance context.
We can conclude that ‘deixis abounds in language use and marks one of the
boundaries of semantics and pragmatics’ (Fromkin & Rodman 1998: 201).

Types of deixis

Types of deixis can be grouped into the basic subgroup including person,
time and space deixis, and a newer subgroup, rather 'parasitical' in nature, including
social deixis, discourse deixis and empathetic deixis. The last three can be
considered parasitical since they rely on the deictic markers specific to the other
types of deixis and even their existence implies the manifestation of the basic ones.
Person deixis encodes the reference made to the participants in the speech
event.
Time deixis encodes the reference made to the time when the speech event
takes place.
Place deixis encodes the reference made to the place where the speech event
takes place.
Social deixis encodes the relationships among participants in the speech event.
Discourse deixis encodes the manner in which the components of a text
acquire coherence.
Empathetic deixis, connected to social deixis, expresses some affective
meaning involving the attitude of the speaker towards a certain referent, be it
positive or negative.
Any type of deixis is expressed by some linguistic markers,

‘ways in which languages encode or grammaticalize features of the context

of utterance or speech event.’ (Levinson 1983: 54)

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 They are deictic words or pointers (Mey 1993: 92), in many cases
acquiring multiple functions, which made Jakobson call them shifters. Such deictic
markers can be specific or non-specific to a certain type of deixis (conjunctions are
typical discourse deictic markers but personal and demonstrative pronouns can
function as markers of various types of deixis).
Regarding their nature they can be lexical or grammatical, i.e. they are
words or simply morphemes.

2.2. Person Deixis

This type of deixis takes into account the participants in the speech event.
They can be active (speaker, hearer) or passive (by-standers; eavesdroppers –
voluntary participants, the former visible, the latter apparently not present during
the dialogue; over-hearers – involuntary participants).

2.2.1. Means of expressing person deixis. Personal pronouns system

Person deixis is instantiated by indexical expressions

‘a particular kind of referential expressions, where the reference is not just

“baldly” semantic, but includes a reference to the particular context in which
the semantics is put to work’. (Mey 1993: 91)

For person deixis, the basic indexical elements in English are personal
pronouns.

2.2.2. The reference of pronouns. Deixis vs anaphora

Pragmatically, what matters with personal pronouns is their reference and

role in communication. Pronominal reference is variable and recoverable either due
to the linguistic context or to the situational context: first and second person
pronouns are deictic by nature, their reference being identifiable strictly within the
situation of communication, third person pronouns have a reference which can be
generally recovered only within the linguistic context.

I was walking, you were running.

With I the role in communication is a stable feature, whereas its reference

can be variable; the same is true for you:

‘Everybody can say I, and whoever says it points to another object than
everybody else; one needs as many proper names as there are speakers, in

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 order to map the intersubjective ambiguity of this one word into the
unambiguous reference of linguistic symbols.’
(Bühler 1934: 103 apud Mey 1993: 90, Mey’s translation)

First person personal pronoun always refers to the speaker, second person
personal pronoun refers to the interlocutor, hence their communicative role 60 is
automatically established: that would be their reference (cf Saussure’s signifié); the
referent’s recoverability can pose some problems, whenever there isn’t a face to
face type of communication, in written texts or when people talk on the phone etc.
The speaker is also the source of the message or just the messenger, the addresser;
in the same way, the hearer is the addressee or just the receiver of the message:

You are to wait here. This is the rule. (the addresser is not the source)
The teacher to the students: ‘Everybody, Mary must come at once.’ (the hearer is
not the addressee)

First and second person personal pronouns can be used ostensively (their
uttering is accompanied by the gesture of pointing towards the referent), but this
type of use is not meant to help recovering the referent, which is obvious in the
situational context; it expresses emphasis and an implicit contrast between the
referent and others:

I (uttered while pointing towards oneself) know what to do. You (uttered while
pointing towards the interlocutor) don’t.

Third person pronouns have no role in communication attached, since they

refer to people generally not present, or not involved in the communicative event.
It is only their reference which can cause some ambiguities in interpretation. The
person referred to by using a third person pronoun may be present in the situation
of communication and the speaker can refer to him/her/them with various
intentions, depending on whether he/she can hear the speaker:

People don’t know when to stop, do they?

He is rude to his guests.

Third person pronouns have anaphoric or cataphoric value, anticipating or

resuming the reference made usually by means of a noun/noun phrase in the
linguistic context, the two, noun and pronoun, being co-referential; in other cases
the condition of co-referentiality is not met, the interpretation of the pronoun
relying on the situational context (see Pisoschi 2012: 156-157 ):
Anaphoric value:

60
Fromkin &Rodman (1998: 201) state that ‘The pronoun I certainly has a meaning
independent of context – its semantic meaning, which is “the speaker”; but context is
necessary to know who the speaker is, hence what “I” refers to.’

95
Ann1 is here and she1 is waiting for you. (Ann and she are co-referential) cf Rom.
‘Ana e aici şi te aşteaptă.’
Non-anaphoric, contextual value:
Ann1 is here and she2 is waiting for you. (Ann and she are not co-referential) cf
Rom. ‘Ana e aici şi te aşteaptă şi ea (de acolo).’
Cataphoric value:
She1 is here, Ann1.
In the following case, the pronoun has a cataphoric value, too, since it anticipates
the referent expressed by the noun.

When she is home, Ann is always painting, it is her passion. cf Rom. ‛Când e
acasă, Ana întotdeauna pictează.’

Second and third person pronouns can have a generic value in contexts
where the reference is made to an indefinite group of people or to the whole class
of human beings; pragmatically, universal truths are thus expressed in the form of
proverbs, sayings etc.

You never know.

He who laughs last, laughs best. = Whoever laughs last, laughs best.
It’s a he says, she says kind of talk.
They believe it. = It is believed.

Personal pronouns in the plural have some specific referential

characteristics. Even if, typically, we doesn’t always correspond to a plural I
(Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1999: 46), we is ‘more than one I; its plural’ (Wales 1996:
59).
The exceptions are represented by:
a. We = I.
The two extremes are the plural of modesty and the plural of majesty:

We, the author, would like to thank all our readers. (plural of modesty)
We, the Queen of the United Kingdom... (plural of majesty)

The three subtypes of the plural of modesty, authorial we (Crystal 1985),

lecturing we and doctor we, have each some distinctive features. Authorial we has
the feature [- addressee] and [+ ego] (Wales 1996: 66), collocating with declarative
or mental verbs:

We discuss the problem of pollution in contemporary society.

Lecturing we can be applied to lectures proper, conferences etc to denote

politeness, lack of imposition on the audience (as in 1), but it can also be found in
examples where the speaker intends to impose his authority but makes that more
acceptable by giving the utterance a generic value, the reference of the pronoun
including the speaker as an act of solidarity (as in 2):

96
(1) We don’t want to cover all the aspects of the problem in such a short time as
the one alloted to our presentation..
(2) We don’t do such things, son.

Doctor we also relies on human solidarity and empathy, which makes the pacient
follow doctor’s advice more easily:

We should examine your arm now.

b. We = you when implying the moral authority of the speaker, in interactional

utterances, and when the communicative goal is persuasion, empathy or reproach:

Shall we go now?
Are we better today? We should take the medicine every day at the same hour.
Aren’t we extremely unfair?

c. we = he/she when ironizing a person present in the situation of communication

without the speaker exposing himself and choosing to address the message to
somebody other than the interlocutor:

A. (to B and C): Everybody at this party is dressed so awfully out of fashion!
I’m out of here. Bye!
B. (to C): Aren’t we shallow in saying that?

English does not have an inventory of pronouns of politeness, the degree of

politeness attached to the personal pronoun in a certain context depending on the
referential expressions (NPs) present in the linguistic context of the utterance
containing the pronoun:

You, boy/ Mr. Smith/ doctor/ etc, are required to come to the manager’s office.

Such situations are to be discussed under social deixis.

2.3. Time Deixis

2.3.1. Definition

As a subtype of deixis, time deixis is an abstract category comprising the

linguistic means which have in common their relation to the speech time. In other
words, they encode the reference made to the time when the speech event takes
place (present).

2.3.2. Linguistic markers of time

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 Before discussing deictic markers of time, we should refer to the larger
category they are part of, i.e. linguistic markers of time.
The latter can be classified primarily according to their nature
(grammatical or lexical) and to their character (absolute or relative). For the first
classification we used a formal criterion, for the second, a semantic criterion.
We will analyse below some examples of grammatical and lexical markers
in general, and later approach their absolute or relative nature and also the meaning
of the two terms. What should be clear is that grammatical markers of time can be
absolute or relative, and so can lexical markers.
In English, grammatical time markers include two grammatical categories
specific to verbs, tense and aspect (which can also express features of modality).
That is because the verb is a word whose meaning includes a double time
reference: implicit, inherent due to its very nature, that of expressing an action/state
unfolding in time, and explicit by tense and aspect markers, the markers helping to
place that action/state on the time axis.
Tense can be explicitly marked at morphological level in English either by
inflectional suffixes (-ed) or by analytical means (auxiliary verbs). In many cases,
the aspect of the verb can just be implicitly marked (for instance, the
simple/indefinite aspect does not have a distinct marker in English; the tense
marker –ed is a portmanteau morph, which marks all the verbal categories of a
past tense form: voice, mood, tense, aspect, person, number).
We discuss below some examples containing grammatical time markers:

I like flowers.
(like is a verb in the present tense, simple/indefinite aspect; tense is implicitly
marked, and so is the aspect, since there are no inflectional suffixes to mark them;
the example can be read as expressing a cvasi-permanent characteristic, a durative
action, unfinished, covering the past, the present (it includes the moment of
speaking, t0) and, maybe, the future.

I am teaching English.
(am teaching is a verb in the Present Continuous and expresses a durative but
temporary action, not completed, in progress during a period of time which
includes the moment of speaking, t 0. Unlike in the previous example, here tense
and aspect are marked: the former implicitly by the Present Tense form of the
auxiliary, the latter explicitly by the auxiliary and (in this case) the grammatical
suffix –ing.

They were walking [when I saw them].

(the verb in the main clause is in the past continuous, expressing an action in
development at the moment when the action in the time clause took place. The two
actions were simultaneous in the past and implicitly anterior to present, the speech
time. The time clause marks the time frame for the action in the main clause (hence
its name: adverbial clause of time).

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 Morphologically, lexical time markers are notional words (having form
and sense) representing various parts of speech:
a. nominal expressions (nouns, numerals) sometimes preceded by prepositions
(thus forming prepositional phrases) and functioning as time modifiers;
b. adverbs/adverbial phrases having the same syntactic function.

See you on Thursday/ next month/ in January/ on the 31-st.

In many cases, grammatical and lexical time markers are combined to

convey a clearer message:

I saw them yesterday, not two days ago.

(saw is a grammatical time marker, yesterday and two days ago are lexical time
markers). The former is an adverb, the latter a noun phrase, both being
syntactically adverbial modifiers of time. These two markers are defined by their
relative nature, since they depend on the moment of speaking (now). Yesterday can
be defined only in relation to today, which is in itself a notion with reference
relative to t0, the speech moment. The same is true for the structure two days ago.
Also the form saw depends on t0, the speech moment, since it expresses an action
which is anterior to it.
That feature makes the three elements in the sentence of concern to us from
the deictic point of view.

2.3.3. From time to tense

Tense is the deictic marker of time, it is by nature a deictic category, which

means that all tenses have basically a deictic anchoring, i.e. are in relation to the
time of speech, whether it is called S, CT or t0.
But any analysis of the category of tense should imply the discussion of
physical time, described by physicists, logicians, and, later, referred to by linguists.
If physical/cosmic/natural time is to be seen as ‛a uniform, linear continuum,
segmentable upon wish’ (Benveniste 1966: 5), there results its combination of
objective and subjective features. The objective coordinate is perceptible by
everybody and, consequently, measurable. What we can measure is the passing of
time, its going in a forward direction. ‛Direction’ means going through a
succession of moments in time, each a possible ‛anchor’ for other moments.
Therefore a continuum is a succession of infinite static moments. That can be
represented by an axis ending with an arrow pointing towards the direction of
movement: from left to right.

It is the subjective coordinate that is of interest to us, since it involves time

‛anchors’ specific to individuals or to communities (F. Popescu op. cit.: 15). The
result of subjective segmentation of time is personal/subjective (Benveniste

99
ibidem) and social/public time. For Bull (1963: 5 in Popescu op. cit.: 16) the latter
is the basis of the former, since social time is marked by anchors represented by
repeated, cyclic events, easily observable, and easily used by most as personal time
anchors.
Time anchors, be they personal or social, are actually relevant events that
help us define and give a concrete dimension to chronological time. Physical time
is made to be understood by people and relevant to their lives as individual and
members of a community through chronological time. From concrete moments in
time, people abstractize time, placing actions and states in time according to their
succession and in relation to a certain anchor, a reference moment. Thus, time is
objectivised, explained as a chronology of moments. The time axis comprises three
segments: past, present and future.

PAST PRESENT FUTURE

Chronological/socialised time is supposed to give a general view on time

passing by using common anchors: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months,
years, decades, centenaries, millennia, ages etc. This is a result of seeing time as
stative, directive and measurable.

Such units can either be used as measures, relative to some fixed point of
interest (including, crucially, the deictic centre), or they can be used
calendrically to locate events in ‛absolute’ time relative to some absolute
origo, or at least to some part of each natural cycle designated as the
beginning of that cycle (Fillmore 1975 in Levinson 1983: 73)

Among the possible anchors, communities have chosen highly relevant

events (including cosmic phenomena) turned into origo points, determining a
course of events, hence the direction of time, as it is perceived by humans: before a
certain event, during it, after it. This is how calendars have appeared. Within the
calendrical frame, a reflection of chronological time, in its turn a reflection of
physical time, personal experiences and personal time perception occur. It is the
latter that gains relevance at individual level, and then at collective level.
Both subjective and (more) objective time dimensions are important in
social practice, they have to be referred to in communication, thus linguistic means
of expressing them have appeared. The basic grammatical means are associated to
the lexical category of verbs (Dubois et al 1973: 483 in Popescu op. cit.: 17) and
include tense and aspect.

Physical time

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 Chronological time

Linguistic time (tense) – abstractized representation of the former

Grammatical Lexical

To conclude, time is a philosophical category, a continuum which is rendered

linguistically by means of the category of tense, hence Comrie’s concise definition:
“Tense is grammaticalised expression of location in time” (Comrie, 1985). The
three subdivisions of chronological time led to Jespersen’s definition of tense
(1924: 254): ‛tenses deal with the linguistic expression of time and its
subdivisions’.
The placement of events on the time axis, their succession depend on the
speaker’s perception of those events. Moreover, the making of the utterance which
predicates about the events at a certain time is also dependent on the speaker. The
verb has a double time reference, resulting from its semantic features and its
grammatical marking. It is related to language as a code, to its inventory and
grammar rules, but it is also related to language in use, to its pragmatic dimension,
because of the connection with the deictic center (the speaker, the moment of
utterance, the place where the speaker is when makig an utterance).
Hence, tense is a deictic category by nature (see Lyons 1977), closely
linked to the concept of predication, since it characterizes it. Boogart & Janssen
(2007: 803) also emphasize this property of tense: ‛when using a tensed clause, the
speaker indicates that the situation described in the clause relates to an evaluative
situation (usually the speech situation)’ and how it does that. Thus, the speaker
‛contextualizes the situation described into the current discourse’. Because of its
contextualizing function, tense is called ‛a deictic/grounding category’ (ibidem).
The point of reference for the situation described (what is called the deictic
center/ground61) is the evaluative situation.
But how can the tense system of a language be accounted for?
Jespersen (1924) was the first to describe tenses by referring to the moment
of utterance, S, and to the moment of action, E.
The moment of utterance/moment of speech is NOW. The adverb of time
now is considered by Levinson (1983: 74) one of ‛pure’ deictics of time, where
‛there is no direct interaction with non-deictic methods of time reckoning.’ It
designates the pragmatically given span including the moment of speech (ibidem). It
61
Langacker (1984, 1994) considers that the concept of ground includes the speech event,
the participants and the setting.

101
can designate an interminable period, as in Levinson’s example, I’m working on my
PhD, but it can also designate the instant associated to the production of the word
now as in Pull the trigger now! (ibidem). Now is to be opposed to then = ‛not now’
[+Past/Future reference]: He visited the town then. vs. You’ll tell me then.
Between the moment of utterance and the moment of action there can be a
relation of simultaneity or succession:

(I say that) you are right. S and E are simultaneous

(I say that) you were right last week. S and E are successive

Starting from Jespersen’s view, Fleischman (1983: 184) defined tense as

the category meant ‛to relate the time of an event E or situation predicated in an
utterance U or in a discourse to some other time’, i.e. reference time. Among the
Romanian linguists discussing tense, Ștefănescu (1988) shared the same view
regarding its definition.
Actually, Fleischman is just one of the linguists who used as a starting
point Reichenbach’s basic notions used in tense description (1947). The moment of
uttering is not enough in characterising an action or a state and that is why
Reichenbach, from the perspective of tense logics, created a system based on three
basic notions: the speech time, the event time, the reference time; we also give
below as synonyms the synonymic terms used by Levinson (1983) and which we
will use throughout the book:
- S the moment of speech; synonym: coding time (CT), the moment of
utterance;
- E the moment when the event described takes place; synonym: event time
(ET);
- R the reference moment, the absolute time t 0 in relation to which all the
other events are interpreted in point of their location on the time axis and
expressed linguistically; synonym: reference time (RT).
In addition to Reinbach’s concepts, Levinson introduced the receiving time
(RT), referring to the time when the message of the utterance reaches the
addressee. In the canonical (typical) situation of utterance RT=CT; this is deictic
simultaneity (Lyons 1977: 685).
According to Reichenbach’s schema there result nine verb forms in
English:

Type of Anterior Simple Posterior

relation E-R E=R R-E
Time E-R
domain

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 Past (R-S) Anterior Past Simple Past Posterior Past
(Past Perfect) left (Future in the Past)
had left would leave
Present (S=R) Anterior Present Simple Posterior Present
(Present Perfect) Present (Future)
have left leaves will leave
Future (S-R) Anterior Future Simple Future Posterior Future
(Future Perfect) will leave will be going to
will have left leave

Note: The symbol – means „precedes”, and = „coincides with”.

The term event, used so far and referred to in different classifications of

tenses, actually covers basically actions but we can also refer to states, which made
necessary to find a proper terminology. Events (actions) and states are included in
the concept of eventuality by Bach (1981, 1986) and Carlota Smith 62 (1980). The
term was formed out of the need to designate an all-encompassing concept,
comprising verbs having different semantic features.
This leads to our presenting some of the main critics addressing
Reichenbach’s system, considered as very rigid, since it interprets events and states
time dimension only in relation to speech time and reference time. Other semantic
and pragmatic factors are to be taken into consideration, too.
One major observation is that the semantic features of verbs are
disregarded, while they account for tense interpretation. Secondly, Rechenbach’s
system does not take into consideration the category of aspect, which expresses the
actions’/states’ duration or perfectiveness, features in many cases unseparable from
time marking.
Kleiber (1993, 1997) and Moeschler (2001, 2002), among others,
differentiate between the conceptual sense expressed by a predication and the
procedural sense, containing the instructions regarding the interpretation of the
utterance in point of time deixis. Conceptual sense is descriptive, characterised by
the dimension of meaning [+/- true] and refers to the interval during which the
predication manifests. Procedural sense refers to the inferences to be made by the
interlocutor in order to interpret the utterance time reference.

62
‛I propose here a new classification of situation entities that recognizes several types of
non-dynamic, stative situations. This extended notion of situation entities distinguishes the
five discourse modes and is perhaps their most important feature. There are three main
types of situation entity: Eventualities, or specific events and states; General Statives, or
generics and states that involve a pattern or regularity; and Abstract entities, facts and
propositions.’ (Carlota Smith, ‛Aspectual Entities and Tense in Discourse’, p.4.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a329/665c4428fcd56ab5603de731e9b41547cf88.pdf/
accessed 3/18/2018. In Press in P. Kempchimsky & S. Roumyana (eds), The Syntax,
Semantics and Acquisition of Aspect. Kluwer.

103
 Reichenbach’s system explains the semantic/theoretical category of tense,
what Levinson (1983: 77) calls metalinguistic tense (M-tense), following Lyons
(1977: 682). The concrete tense system of a language, including their concrete
realizations, represents L-tenses. L-tenses generally encode aspectual and modal
features but most of them contain a pure deictic M-tense component (Levinson,
op.ct.: 78).
Actually, L-tenses show that some inherent or semantic properties of
lexical verbs ‘interact with other aspectual oppositions, either prohibiting certain
combinations, or severely restricting their meaning’ (Comrie 1976: 41). These
properties may include punctual/durative, telic/atelic, stative/dynamic situations
(Comrie 1976: 41-51). All these elements are part of the cognitive perspective on
vebs’ time dimension.
To simplify, the major semantic features of lexical verbs are duration,
stativity, telicity (result), to which habit and repetition can be added (see Novakov
2009, following Vendler 1967, in classifying verbs into activities, states,
accomplishments and achievements).
The system was somehow simplified by preserving the opposition deictic ≠
non-deictic and the concept of reference/anchor time. It is not our purpose to
describe each English tense in detail, therefore, for a clear and accurate
presentation of the English tense system see Murar (2004) and Trantescu (2018).
The examples below illustrate how deixis and verb morphology intertwine.
English has just two morphological tenses, past and non-past. Of course, not all
languages mark tense by inflectional morphemes.

I’m waiting for them.

Coding time (CT) Present
Receiving time (RC) usually Present
Eventuality time (ET): am waiting simultaneous with CT and RT
Reference time (RT= CT=ET) Present

He has been working hard and is tired.

Coding time (CT) Present
Receiving time (RC) usually Present
Eventuality time (ET): ET1 has been working; anterior to CT; ET2 is tired
Reference time (RT) is tired (simultaneous to Coding Time; ET2 = RT.

It is normal for one of the events/states described in the utterance to be the

point of reference used to mark linguistically the chronological order of the events.

He will work hard.

Coding time (CT) Present
Receiving time (RC) usually Present
Eventuality time (ET): ET will work; posterior to CT and RT
Reference time (RT) implicitly Present (CT = RT).

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2.3.3.1. Absolute and relative tenses

Some tenses are absolute, i.e. they relate only to speech time t 0 to be
interpreted correctly, others are relative, i.e. they depend on their connection to the
previous category of elements. In other words, relative tenses express anteriority or
simultaneity in relation to an absolute tense.
Absolute tenses (Present, Past Tense, Future Tense) are deictic, since they
are defined strictly in relation to t 0. They are absolute in that they don’t require a
time anchor. For them, CT = RT. In English, absolute tenses are not necessarily
simple forms; they can also contain aspectual and modal features: for instance,
Future Tense is a compound form, the modal auxiliary having various modal
values.

You deserve to get the prize. (event simultaneous to CT=RT)

They will win. (event posterior to CT=RT)
They left at 3 p.m. (event anterior to CT=RT)

Relative tenses are Present Perfect, Past Perfect, Future Perfect, Future-in-
the-Past.
Past Perfect, Future Perfect and Future-in-the-Past are by definition non-
deictic, being interpreted as a result of relying on the linguistic context which
contains the clause with the anchor action/state or an adverbial modifier of time
functioning as anchor for an anterior action. Their anchor time has the feature
[−Present]. For non-deictic relative tenses RT ≠ CT.

Present Perfect

Present Perfect illustrates the grammaticality of the category of tense

(Thomson & Martinet 1992; Huddleston & Pullum 2002). The latter consider this
tense as a non-deictic one, a secondary tense system member, a perfect marked
member, to be opposed to non-perfect (unmarked member) (Huddleston & Pullum
2002: 139), idea shared by Quirk et al. (1985: 90). To Comrie (1976: 52) ‛perfect is
an aspect which tells us nothing about the situation in itself, but rather relates some
state to a preceding situation.’
Temporal components, semantic verb features and context create interdependencies
and influence the type of Present Perfect in different ways (Novakov 2009). In
point of its temporal features, on the time axis Present Perfect occupies a portion of
the past, sometimes reaching up to the moment of speech, and maybe a portion of
the future. Its anchor is present time, i.e. speech time, in its case RT=CT.

I have been to Paris twice.

They have finished the project.
She has studied/have been studying English for three years.

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 Costăchescu (2018) agrees that the Romanian correspondent of Past Tense
and also future tenses are deictic tenses63.
There have been ample debates regarding the feature [+/- deictic] of Present
Perfect. Harder (1996: 326) makes a time-based analysis of tense and assumes only
two deictic tenses: present and past. To Harder, the meanings of Present and Past
Tense denote directions-of-pointing, not actual tenses (idem: 327-328). On the
other hand, Costăchescu (2018: 110) agrees with Rauh (1983: 236) regarding the
deictic value of Present Perfect, which expresses a perfective (anterior) action in
relation to CT, also having a telic feature (present results/consequences):

The Present Perfect designates a time interval which is contiguous with the
coding time. Since the deictic system to which the Present Perfect belongs
describes the retrospective time axis it is, in addition, semantically marked
by a feature expressing the relation “before”. Thus the Present Perfect is
marked deictically as well as semantically (Rauh 1983: 236).

To the two linguists, the simple contiguity of an event tense to t 0 makes that tense
deictic, since a part of its anchor interval contains t0.
There are cases in which the speakers use Past Tense and Present Perfect
interchangeably from the strictly grammatical perspective, the viewpoint being
different. We give below some relevant examples from literature:

Have you eaten yet? vs. Did you eat yet? (American English) (Leech & Svartvik
2002: 66)
Where did I put my glasses? vs. Where have I put my glasses? (Leech 1987: 43)

I always said (= have said) that. cf. Întotdeauna am spus asta. (adapted from Leech
&Svartvik 2002: 67)
I’ve been to the dentist this morning (= today this morning). (uttered in the
evening) (Leech 1987: 46)
I’ve been to Vienna in 1980. (Leech 1987: 37)
63
‛ne referim la o ancorare deictică când vorbim (i) despre ‘timpurile trecutului’ (de
exemplu un perfect compus sau un imperfect) ce exprimă anterioritatea față de t 0; (ii)
despre prezent pentru relația de simultaneitate față de t 0; sau (iii) despre ‘timpurile
viitorului’ (cel mai des viitorul simplu) ce desemnează un interval posterior față de t 0.’/‛we
refer to a deictic anchoring when describing (i) „past tenses” (for instance, the Rom. perfect
compus or the imperfect), which express anteriority to t0; (ii) present tense, due to its
simultaneity to t0; or (iii) „the future tenses” (mostly Future Simple), which designate a
time span posterior to t 0’. (Adriana Costăchescu 2018: 273-331), (our translation and
emphasis marking)

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We’ve lost so much [...] in the 1980s and early 1990s. (uttered in 1998) (Carter &
McCarthy 2006: 618)
A man has been arrested last night and will appear in court tomorrow. (ibidem)

Past Perfect

The rehersal had started by noon/by 3 o’clock.(the adverbial modifiers express the
anchors)
The rehersal had started by the time/when/before you came. (the time clause
expresses the anchor, the reference time)

Perfect of experience expresses repeated actions in the past up to the anchor

moment. The actions have no connection to the moment of uttering, therefore this
type of Past Perfect is also non-deictic.

I had been there twice when we met. (Fusesem acolo de două ori când ne-am
întâlnit.)

Past Tense as a non-deictic verb form

Past Tense can be used instead of Past Perfect, in which case the former loses its
deictic value; the use of the two tenses in certain contexts without any semantic
difference (i.e in free variation) can be accounted for by pragmatic reasons:
avoiding redundancy (in expressing anteriority) or just using simple instead of
compound verb forms, if possible:

I (had) arrived by the time/before you called me. (before expresses anteriority,
therefore it is felt redundant to express the same semantic feature by a grammatical
means, i.e. tense)

If there is no lexical marker of anteriority, in the form of a conjunction, the perfect

tense is obligatory, otherwise the meaning would be different:
I had arrived when you called me. ≠ I arrived when you called me.

Future Perfect

They will have won by midnight/by the time you come. (CT-Present, RT the future
moment/event expressed by the adverbial modifier of time/Adverbial Clause of
Time; RT is posterior both to CT and ET)

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 CT ET RT
Present Future Perfect Future

Future in the Past

She was to leave the next day.

They said that they would go the next day.

RT ET CT
Past Tense Future in the Past Present
said would go

For Future in the Past, both RT and ET are anterior to CT. This verb form
expresses posteriority on the past axis of time in relation to a past moment/action.
It is symmetrical to Past Perfect in relation to the Past Tense (RT).

2.3.3.2. Tense and Aspect

‘The terms Tense, Aspect, and Modality refer to three kinds of information
that are often encoded by verbal morphology. Tense marking indicates, to
varying degrees of precision, the time when an event occurred or a situation
existed. In other words, it specifies the situation’s “location” in time. Aspect
relates to the distribution of an event over time: is it instantaneous or a long,
slow process?; completed or ongoing? once only or a recurring event? [...]In
many languages, we find that a single affix actually encodes information
from more than one of these domains, e.g. tense and aspect; or tense and
modality. For this reason, many linguists prefer to treat Tense–Aspect–
Modality (TAM) as a single complex category.’ (Kroeger 2005: 147)

Tense and aspect combine in order to fully characterize an action, or a

state, considering that an event implies that something happens, there is a
development in the state of affairs, whereas states imply lack of change. Moreover,
tense-oriented languages like English and Romanian, have different grammatical
oppositions, within the category of tense, often combining it with the category of
aspect.
Aspect refers to the ‘internal organization’ of an event (Bybee 1985) or
state. The series of features characterising an event cover the concepts of

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continuity, anteriority, completion64/ perfectiveness, result, frequency. Comrie
(1976) also refers to the aspectual information in a clause as providing information
on how the user conceives of the internal temporal constituency of the situation
described: it can be bounded/limited or unbounded. Aspect is not a
deictic/grounding category, but ‛in the absence of tense marking, [...] can have a
deictic effect’ (Boogart & Janssen 2007: 803).
There is disagreement among linguists over classifying the perfect as tense
or aspect, since it shares features of both completion (subsumed to the aspect) and
location relative to some temporal reference point (subsumed to the concept of
tense). Kroeger (2005: 159) quotes Comrie who identifies four major uses of the
perfect: (a) perfect of result (a perfect verb is used to describe a result state); (b)
experiential perfect; (c) perfect of persistent situation; (d) perfect of recent past.
These cases describe the values of Present and/or Past Perfect. In point of
terminology, perfect should be used to refer to tenses (Present Perfect, Past Perfect,
Future Perfect), whereas perfective is synonymous to completed.
The latest research in the field considered only the opposition perfective ≠
non-perfective as pertaining to the domain of aspect.
Perfective aspect is subdivided into progressive/continuous and habitual.
Tense and aspect are considered independent categories, allowing combinations
between them:

‘a language with three tenses and four aspectual categories could potentially
have twelve distinct tense–aspect combinations. In practice, however, there
are often restrictions on which combinations are possible in a particular
language’ (Kroeger 2005: 161).

He has been working hard and is tired.

The features of the first verb form are [+continuative],
[+completion]/[+perfective], [+resultative] [+anteriority]

I’m waiting for them.

The features of the verb form are [+continuative], [- completion]/[-perfective]

Perfect tenses combine temporal and aspectual values.

Past Perfect can be combined with progressive aspect in order to designate a
continuous past action, whose beginning is anterior to a past moment/action and
going on till that anchor time, its value doesn’t change. We give below such
examples of continuative perfect:

64
Completion should not always be interpreted as perfectly synonymous to the lexically
marked completed aspect, by the aspectual verb finish, expressing the end of an
action/state: I finished working as a driver. [−repeatable] vs. I have worked as a driver.
[+repeatable]; I (‘ve) finished cleaning the house. = I’ve cleaned the house. Compare I
finished cleaning the house before 3 p.m. and I had cleaned the house by 3 p.m.

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They had been working for ten hours when they finished the job. (Munceau de
zece ore când au terminat treaba./Munciseră zece ore ca să/până să termine treaba.)
I had lived here for a long time when we met./I had been living here for a long
time when we met. (Locuiam acolo de multă vreme când ne-am cunoscut.)

Resultative perfect (anterior past action with a past result) can allow placing
emphasis on duration,in which case a continuous form is used, or just on the result,
implicit or explicit (as in the examples below):

I had washed the car when you arrived. It was clean. (Spălasem maşina când ai
venit. Era curată.)

I had been washing the car for some time when you arrived. It was clean. (Spălam
maşina de ceva vreme când ai venit. Era curată.)

Sequence of Tenses applied in case of Indirect Speech is a clear case of

deictic shift from ‘near speaker’ meaning (direct Speech) to ‘away from speaker’
meaning (Indirect Speech) (Yule 1996: 16):

He said he had been working hard and was tired.

Coding time (CT) Present
Receiving time (RC) usually Present
said Reference Time (RT), deictic tense
had been working ET1 anterior to RT, non-deictic tense
was tired ET2 simultaneous to RT, anterior to t0 , deictic tense

The Past Tense form is to be interpreted in relation to Main Clause Past Tense, its
anchor. Thus, in itself, Past Perfect resumes the reference to the previous Past
Tense form; in other words, it is an anaphoric tense. Starting from Partee’s (1984)
concept of anaphoric properties of tense, Carlota Smith (2008) states that the
semantic information of tense requires information from the context. According to
her, two simple pragmatic principles contain direct temporal interpretation: the
default interpretation of present tense sentences as located in the Present, and the
‘bounded event constraint’, since bounded events cannot be located at speech time.
In our case, all the events described are bounded.
Narrative texts, fictional or not, offer a vast area of study in point of tense
interpretation (see Costăchescu 2018: 290-310).

2.3.4. Deictic vs. non-deictic lexical time markers

Some lexical time markers are absolute in nature, i.e. they correspond to
calendrical time divisions, even if a certain level of relativity is implicit in their
case, too (consider the various calendars specific to various cultural spaces − the
criterion was either the duration of the solar year, hence the difference between the

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Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar in use at present, or a religious event,
hence the creation of the Christian calendar, the Hebrew calendar, the Mayan
calendar, each having a different origo point). When we refer to calendrical time,
we imply primarily the year; within the timespan of a year, there are the
subdivisions (months, days etc) that become absolute only in relation to that
particular year:

They will move out on the 15-th of May 2015. (non-deictic value, absolute time
marker)
In 1821 the former emperor died.(non-deictic value, absolute time marker)

The battle took place in 1600 A.D. (the underlined expression is non-deictic,
anterior to its Anchor Time - the year 1 A. D. (birth of Jesus)

Others are relative, i.e. deictic, depending on t0.

See you the day after tomorrow./ See you two days from now.
We’ll meet tomorrow. (the future action described are posterior to the Coding Time
/Anchor Time –Present, therefore it is deictic)
No ambiguity arises in the following examples where the past action and
the future actions, respectively, are implicitly anterior or posterior to the present
moment when the utterance is made.
Relativity is clear in an example containing a time marker representing a
day of the week, i.e. a repetitive time division, since any week ends with a Sunday:

See you on Sunday. (i.e. next Sunday, the closest Sunday to the day when the
utterance is made)
It is only natural for a user to link the relative time marker to the anchor
represented by the time of speaking, t0. That makes the time marker deictic.
If the relative time marker (having a repetitive value) is associated to
another deictic, i.e. to a relative time marker, whose definite value is established
also in relation to t0, the combination will preserve the same feature:

See you on the 3-rd of March next year.(deictic value) ≠ See you on the 3-rd of
March 2018.(non-deictic)
See you on the 3-rd of March (implicitly this year).(deictic value)

Sometimes, two variants are possible, the latter being more emphatic and formal,
the emphasis being meant to convince the interlocutor that the timespan is rather
short, which can have a positive effect on him/her.

See you next month (i.e. the month following this one, that today, the CT, is part
of)/ in May.

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The same happens in I’ll be back soon. The speaker is not informative enough,
maybe because he/she cannot give the precise time when he/she returns, therefore
the focus is on giving the interlocutor the impression that the timespan referred to
will be extremely short in relation to the CT, which is also RT.
If the CT is not clear from the situational context of utterance, such a
notice is not informative enough and can cause various reactions, from smile to
anger, if we find it on a shop window, for instance:

Eng. I’ll be back soon. vs. Rom. Vin imediat. Fr. Je reviendrai immédiatement.

In the following three examples time divisions are used either for precision
(the first example) or as interpersonal pragmatic markers meant to assure the
interlocutor that the delay won’t be long (the second and the third example). In
examples 2 and 3, the perlocutionary effect is that of making the interlocutor
benevolent in relation to the delay, getting his approval etc. The last two time
markers are [-definite], since the speaker cannot possibly be back in a minute or the
interlocutor won’t be asked to wait just a second:

1. See you in one hour (from now).

2. I’ ll be back in a minute. vs Rom. Mă întorc într-un minut.
3. Wait (just) a second! vs Rom. Aşteaptă o secundă! Stai o clipă!

Calendrical time divisions (proper names designating months and

weekdays) are relative time deictics, unless they are combined with an absolute
time marker, in which case they lose their deictic feature:

Eng. This Sunday/Next Sunday/ we’re staying at home. vs. Rom. Duminica
asta/Duminica viitoare stăm acasă. (relative calendrical deictic)

See you on Sunday, April 12. (Sunday and April 12 are relative calendrical time
markers, they depend on today, the speech moment, therefore are deictic)

We meet on Sunday. (the time adverbial is interpreted either as a relative deictic

meaning ‘this Sunday’ (the closest to CT ; RT= CT) or as non-deictic if it means
‘every Sunday’.

The meeting is on January 28, 2018.

In Romanian there is no ambiguity because the two meanings are

lexicalized differently, i.e. the noun gets the definite article or not, depending on
the meaning intended: Ne vedem duminică (prima duminică care urmează)/
duminica (în fiecare duminică).

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 In English the ambiguity (resolved anyway at the level of the situational
context) can be avoided structurally by adding the grammatical affix –s to the noun
making it acquire a repetitive value and a permanent character:

Eng. We meet on Sundays. vs Rom. Ne întâlnim duminica/ în zilele de duminică.

The time adverbial can be associated to a past tense verb, in which case the
indefinite value of the adverbial narrows, referring to a past interval. All the
argumentation above remains valid:

We met on Sunday(s).

Greetings are a type of deictic time marker:

Good morning! is used till midday, Good afternoon! between 12 p.m. and
6-7 p.m. etc.
Other greetings can be considered in our view discourse or empathetic
pragmatic markers. Levinson (1983: 79) mentions the interaction of time and
discourse deixis with the first example below:
Good evening! is a relative time deictic but it also marks the beginning of a
possible discussion.
Good night! is its counterpart marking the end of the conversation. The
analogy principle was at work in this case too, and the speakers tend to use a
symmetrical greeting, saying Good evening! both at the beginning and at the end of
the encounter. If a discussion is to follow, or took place, such greetings could be
considered discourse markers.
Good day! is both a discourse and an empathetic deictic, its features being
[+ end of a conversation], [+authority], [+annoyance]/[+boredom] etc.
An extension of the previous structure is the expression Good day and
good riddance! cf Rom. Drum bun şi cale bătută!, the negative connotation being
the same.

2.3.5. Tenses and lexical time markers

Paraphrasing an idea expressed by Floriana Popescu (2000: 52) verb forms

can enrich their portfolio of values depending on their context of use and on the
time markers which are part of the context. That results in the necessity of studying
grammatical time markers in close connection to lexical ones.
We give below some examples of combinations lexical-grammatical time
markers.
In time clauses, Past Perfect is never used, even if the situation might
require it, lexical markers of anteriority or simply the context indicating the
succession of actions:

I arrived after/as soon as you called me.

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I thought it was sure that I had arrived after you called me.

They will have won by midnight/by the time you come/before you come.(before,
by the time, etc express anteriority, doubling thus the value of the perfect tense.

There are a series of adverbs which can be used with Past Tense or Present
Perfect verbs, depending on the viewpoint of the speaker: examples of such
adverbs are today, recently, this morning/afternoon/evening/week/month/year (see
Leech & Svartvik 2002: 69; Leech 1987: 46), just vs just now (used with Past
Tense) (see Leech ibidem), already, still, yet, before (see Leech idem: 47; Carter &
McCarthy 2006: 615). Compare:

I saw you today. vs. I’ve seen you today.

I just saw yout friend./I’ve just seen your friend. BUT I saw your friend just now.
We discussed this matter recently. vs. We’ve discussed this matter recently.
The manager already finished the meeting. vs. He has already finished it.

2.3.6. Time vs space deixis

Kroeger (2005: 148) points out the thinking patterns specific to a number
of languages which illustrate that we find it easier to think to the spatial dimension,
since spatial location is someting that we can observe directly. The next step is to
extend the linguistic means of referring to it so as to include the time dimension.
The conclusion would be that time expressions are metaphorical extensions of
space expressions: ‘when we talk about time reference we often use the vocabulary
of spatial location: on the table vs. on Tuesday; in the house vs. in ten minutes; at
school vs. at midnight; next door vs. next week; plan ahead, think back, etc’.
We provide a series of examples to illustrate the previous idea:

We go back a long time.

They want further explanations!
What do you intend to do further?
See you shortly.

Short basically refers to distance in space but it can be used metaphorically

to refer to distance in time. A series of expressions include it as a modifier of nouns
denoting time: for/ after a short while, in a short time, to make it short etc. All
mean ‘a small amount of time’.
In temporal deixis, the remote/distal form can be used to communicate not
only distance from current time, but also distance from current reality or facts
(Yule 1996: 15). This is the explanation of metaphors such as: the coming winter,
the past week.

‘Our experience of space is normally three-dimensional, with no one

direction having a specially favored status. Time is one-dimensional and

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 moves in only one direction. Picture yourself traveling down a one-way
street with no turn-offs, and you will have a good spatial analogy for
thinking about tense systems. Another possible analogy, reflected in the
words used to refer to time in some languages, is to picture yourself sitting
on the bank of a river facing downstream. Time flows past in one direction,
like the water of the river. You can “see” what has flowed past, but not what
is flowing toward you (Kroeger 2005: 148).’

2.4. Space deixis

2.4.1. Definition and importance

Space deixis means the encoding of the spatial location of the elements
referred to in the discussion. Its importance derives from the fact that spatial
location is the basic constitutive part of the canonical deictic dimension of any
utterance (Lyons 1977: 637-638; Levinson 1983: 63). Spatial information specifies
the position of an object in relation to an element which constitutes its space
anchor (Costăchescu 2013: 81). Given the egocentric organisation of deixis, space
reference indicates the location of the referents designated by various linguistic
expressions, always in relation to the participants in the speech event (i.e. the
discussion).
Consequently, space markers are as important as definite descriptions
(nouns preceded by the definite article) or proper names. In other words,
definiteness is an essential deictic notion. Morphologically, this is reflected by the
mutual exclusion between two central determiners: demonstatives (which are space
deictics) and the definite article:

Meet them in the park/ in that park.

I want the/ this pen.

2.4.2. Classification of space deictics

Space deictics can be classified according to a series of factors, having to

do with their form and role. We attempt to order them rather traditionally, starting
from their form and continuing with their functional characteristics:

a. they belong to various morphological classes: they are demonstrative pronouns

and adjectives, adverbs and adverbial particles, nouns sometimes preceded by a
preposition (NPs and PPs), verbs of movement:

This does not belong here. (pure deictics)

Move on! (i.e. from this state, figuratively from the location we are now)

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Put it away! [+location proximal to the speaker (and hearer)/movement away from
them]

You come and go. (deictic) vs. They come to London every week. (non-deictic
since the location is not related to that of the speaker; proper names are by nature
non-deictic, unless they become part of addressing terms)

b. pronouns and adverbs share the feature [+/-proximity], i.e. being [+proximal], or
[-proximal/+distal], generally, in relation to the speaker, therefore they can be
considered ‘pure’ deictics; nouns and verbs are rather ‘impure’ since their deictic
dimension is not so obvious or pattern-observant:

This matter is not to be discussed here. [+indirect and metaphorical proximity to the
speaker, i.e. to a topic known by/familiar to/shared by the speaker]; here can refer
strictly to the place or to the stage of the discussion.

Take this away (from me). (the Prepositional Phrase is optional and has strictly an
emphatic value, since it is implicit anyway)

Come and fetch me some milk. It’s on the top shelf on the right.
Come implies movement towards the speaker, and fetch movement away from the
speaker; the PP on the right has the feature [-proximity], too– the right side is
defined strictly in relation to the position of the speaker, and to any person facing
the fridge.

The cat’s behind the car. (Levinson 1983: 82)

Behind can refer to the rear part of the car, which remains so irrespective of the
location of a speaker, or can refer to the position of the cat relative to the car seen
as a whole, not as a sum of part, sides etc; depending on that, behind the car can be
interpreted deictically or non-deictically, according to Levinson; we think the most
frequent interpretation has in view the direction of movement.

Most deictic systems are binary, expressing the opposition proximity to the
speaker vs. distance from the speaker: here ≠ there. Some other languages, i.e.
Italian or Romanian (at dialectal level), display a tertiary system which
differentiates between proximity to the speaker ≠ proximity to the hearer ≠ distance
from them both. Generally, languages tend to simplify the system of space deictics,
operating with a binary opposition. In English, yonder expresses some distance
from the speaker, hither ‘to this place’ implies movement toward the speaker, and
thence ‘from that place’ implies movement away from the speaker.

c. in point of their autonomy, space markers can be absolute or relative, similarly to

time markers. Relative ones are deictic and imply the reference to the location of

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the speaker, whereas the others express a space location whose point of reference is
generally familiar to the community of users, thanks to their general knowledge.
Absolute spatial relations express either direction or distance from the point of
reference (the Equator, the Greenwich Meridian). Cardinal points, the geographical
position of any place on the planet, according to the latitude and longitude
corresponding to it, are elements marking space in an absolute way:

They live in the south.

The city is located at 45 degrees east longitude.

Direction is expressed in the example:

You come and go. vs. They come to London every week. (the speaker is in London,
otherwise he would say They go to London.)
In the first example the verbs are deictics: come expresses [-proximity] and go
[+proximity]). These features are intrinsic to the verbs, therefore this type of
reference is relative intrinsic reference. The meaning of the utterance is ‘You come
and go from me/ my place/ my location.’ In the second example come preserves its
feature but is combined with the absolute space marker to London, defined as non-
deictic.

Distance from the point of reference is expressed in the examples:

They live fifty miles from here. (deictic expressing the implicit reference to the
location of the speaker)
The bag is behind me, on the table. (the absolute location expressed by the NP on
the table is completed with the explicit linguistic marking of the relation between
that location and the speaker’s location.

d. space deictics are generally subdivided into gestural/ostensive and symbolic.

The second type is maybe less obvious but much more frequent because the
situations of communication require such uses.

That pen is not working. (ostensive use, the uttering is accompanied by the gesture
of pointing towards the object)
This atmosphere is fascinating. (symbolic use)

2.4.3. Main values of space markers

Most values have already been mentioned throughout the previous

subchapter, therefore we will just summarize them. The major opposition is
between deictic (ostensive or symbolic) and anaphoric values, though they can
coexist in some contexts.

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 Deictic use (relative reference)

‘I want that’, she said pointing at the doll. (deictic ostensive value)
This week is great! (deictic symbolic value, since not the seven day time span is
referred to, but the events taking place etc)

Around the corner there is a gas station. (deictic reference, [-proximal] since it is
obvious that the speaker refers to a place far from him/her; non-anaphoric
reference since there is not a previous mention of the PP around the corner in the
linguistic context, the interlocutors relying on the situational context to interpret
the structure)

Non-deictic use (absolute reference)

Look at this side of the tree! (Levinson 1983: 82) (intrinsic non-deictic spatial
orientation)

At the corner of 53rd Street and 10th Avenue there is a gas station.

They visit London frequently.

I did this and that.

this and that (Levinson 1983: 66) becomes an idiomatic expression having the
features [-definite], [+informality], [+annoyance at the interlocutor because of
his/her curiosity]/ [+neutral attitude].
I did this and that can be interpreted as a deictic use of the demonstratives if an
ostensive use is implied (the speaker points at two referents), at the same time, the
empathetic use is added, the speaker being either proud of or disappointed at
his/her accomplishment. The structure can be used as an ostensive deictic if the
speaker points towards two objects etc.

Deictic + anaphoric value

A (handling the album to the hearer): I wanted you to have the album because this
album is everything to me. (ostensive deictic and anaphoric value)
They have bought several roses: these ones. (ostensive deictic value and anaphoric
value
We were born in Paris and have lived here/there ever since. (anaphoric value and
symbolic deictic value; the speaker is in Paris or away.)

There is a man waiting for you in the lobby.

(there has a double anticipatory role: it anticipates the logical subject a man
postposed to the verb, and it also anticipates the adverbial modifier of place
expressed by the Prepositional Phrase in the lobby; therefore, as a grammatical

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subject there is a simple nominal substitute, having cataphoric value; but as a
substitute of the adverbial modifier, it preserves its adverbial value expressing [-
proximity] and thus it cumulates a cataphoric and deictic value. The structure in
the lobby is to be interpreted in relation to the position of the speaker.

BUT
I called him at the office but he wasn’t there.
(in this case, the point of reference is the home-base, i.e. the office; there occurs
with a non-deictic/anaphoric use, if we consider that the adverb there becomes a
simple substitute of at the office and is void of any deictic dimension; the point of
referecne is the location of the referent he, and the utterance will have the same
structure and meaning, wherever the speaker is)

Following Levinson’s examples (1983: 67) it is obvious that deixis and anaphora
are not always mutually exclusive.

2.4.4. Combined values

In many cases, space deictics can cumulate two or even three values which
merge:
- place + empathetic deictic:

Move on! I’m fed up with it.

- symbolic space deictic + social deictic + empathetic deictic (Levinson considers

this example a non-deictic occurrence in point of place deixis:

I met this weird guy. (Levinson 1983: 66)

this [-definite], [-pleasant]; combined, this and weird enhance the negative
connotation.

2.4.5. On time and space deixis (again). Which was first?

That question cannot be answered since both time and place deictics can
replace each other metaphorically in various contexts, taking over each other’s
values. The use of the pure place deictics this and that as time deictics, and also
that of time modifiers expressed by NPs in the same way (but adding the time
adverb ago) as in

See you later this week.

The shop is ten minutes from here.
You should have got off ten miles ago/ two bus stops ago.
I’ll see you shortly/ in a short time.

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makes Lyons (1977: 609) take sides in favour of localism, a theory which reduces
non-spatial to spatial expressions, therefore, considering the latter more basic.
Actually Lyons considered the argument that demonstratives can be used as
discourse markers, making reference to a previous or following part of discourse.
On the other hand, Levinson (1983: 85) argues that place deixis always
incorporates a covert time deictic, while the converse is not true, i.e. mentioning
the time related to an event does not necessarily imply that the interlocutors will
share the knowledge about the place of that event; in conclusion, time deictics
seem more basic:

We met at school. (implicitly when we were there)

In conclusion, time deictics might seem to some more basic, even if at an

implicit level, whereas space deictics seem more easily perceptible by users
because of the specificity of space dimensions.

2.5. Social deixis

Social deixis comprises all the linguistic elements which mark the
relationships which are built among the participants in the verbal exchange
constituted as a speech event. Social deixis is concerned with direct or oblique
reference to the social status and the role of those participants in the verbal
exchange. They cannot be analysed without considering the notion of politeness as
a linguistic phenomenon, i.e. all the aspects of the discourse which are rule-
determined and are meant to preserve the harmonious character of interpersonal
relationships. Consequently, it is equally important to discuss the type of distance,
horizontal and vertical, established between the interlocutors and the means by
which politeness functions.
The distance characterising the verbal exchange among interlocutors
depends mainly on:
a. the number of participants in the verbal exchange;
b. individual characteristics (age, sex, health state etc);
c. mutual relations, which in their turn, depend on the level of knowledge
(stranger, acquaintance, friend, relative etc) and also on the type of relation
developed (professional, personal, i.e. a family relation or a relation based on
mutual interests and affection).
a. The number of participants should be correlated with their typology to
explain the linguistic choices in point of social deictics. Goffman (1967) mentions
the active and passive participants in a conversation, their roles not being
obligatorily unchangeable, but definitely influencing the linguistic behaviour of the
speaker at any moment in the course of the verbal exchange:
- interlocutors: they are active participants, the speaker having the feature
[+/- source] and the hearer being the direct or indirect receiver, i.e. having the
feature [+/-addressee];

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- bystanders: passive participants who can become active at any moment if they
choose to, since their presence is obvious and acknowledged at the moment of the
verbal exchange;
- overhearers can also become active participants unless they transgress politeness
norms, since they are not hiding their presence at the place of the discussion;
- eavesdroppers are not legally present in the situation of communication and,
consequently, they are not making their presence known to the others and they
don’t normally become active participants.
Uttered by the speaker, in front of the hearers who are the receivers, but
not necessarily the addressees, an utterance can be meant for bystanders or
overhearers:

Look at her! (the person can hear and is meant to hear the utterance)
Somebody didn’t clean up after himself. (Yule 1996: 11)

Such an utterance might trigger the verbal reaction of the addressee(s):

Ann: They never stop plotting, some people/John and Mary.

John or Mary: Who are you referring to?

b. The individual characteristics of the interlocutors, i.e. sex, age, status,

determine the speaker to adopt a certain attitude towards the hearer and that results
in the linguistic choices made in order to express respect, familiarity, superiority,
etc.
c. A horizontal relationship means that the interlocutors are relatively
equal. This is reflected in the addressing formulas (first name use, polite reference
to the sex and status of the person – Mr. Brown, Miss Smith, Mrs. Johnson −,
reference to the professional status and the surname – Dr. Johnson, Professor
Brown –), in turn-taking (none of the participants dominates the conversation). It is
essential to mention the fact that these quasi-equalitarian relationships do not
automatically presuppose informality, but can be associated with various levels of
politeness.
In many contemporary societies, what we call interpersonal distance is
not set once and for all: its boundaries are variable and, frequently, within a
conversation the tendency might be towards a progressively increasing level of
informality.
The equal status of the interlocutors associated with informality may result
in conversational overlaps, when one participant in the conversation does not wait
for his/her turn and speaks before the speaker has finished his/her utterance. The
interlocutors may share the same points of view and they interpret correctly the
deictic elements used by them both, and they make the correct inferences, or, on
the contrary, they might jump to conclusions, and interpret each other’s sayings
inappropriately in point of deictic markers, inferences or communicative goals.

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 On the other hand, vertical relationships are based on a position of power,
of authority, held by one of the participants who might tend to dominate the verbal
exchange. Such relationships are usually hierarchical and asymmetrical, since one
participant adopts a [-distant] attitude and an adequate linguistic behaviour, while
the other(s) are distant, polite. They allow interruptions and overlaps because of
their inferior status, and also conversational gaps when they don’t dare to express
their ideas, to disagree or to change the topic of discussion.
Proximity is associated with somebody placed lower on the social scale or
in a social hierarchy, younger, or less powerful, and that is linguistically encoded
in the form of informal, familiar style structures. In opposition, distance is
associated to a high position, to an older age and to more power (Yule 1996: 10-
11). In defining what he calls the Principle of Politeness, Leech (1983) mentions
social distance and power/authority as the extra-linguistic variables, which,
together with interferences in the speech act, result from our simultaneous wish for
autonomy and approval.
Conversational principles to be followed for good communication can be
both general and culture-specific. Also, they are the result of a systematic
acquisition; we involuntarily acquire them in social practice unless we fail on a
certain occasion. Then learning starts. Not only politeness strategies may be
different, but also the linguistic means that a language can use in order to express
various relationships: personal pronouns, demonstratives, addressing terms, verb
agreement.
As far as addressing terms are involved, English uses nominal phrases that cover
the range of attitudes from extreme politeness to the total lack of politeness:
- honorifics: Your Majesty, Your Highness,Your Excellency, Your/His /Her
Grace, Mr. President, Mr. Brown, Dr. Smith etc; indirect address can be made by
using third person reference: We invite Her Majesty the Queen65 to share Her
impressions...;
- kinship terms, sometimes in variants which connote affection, becoming
also terms of endearment: Mother,Uncle, Auntie, Sis66etc;
- terms of endearment: dear, darling, Billy, love etc;
- insults: you fool etc.
Goffman introduced for the first time in linguistics a notion used initially in
sociological research, face. It refers to the self-image that we all want to be taken into
account in verbal/non-verbal interaction. We can lose face, maintain it or enhance it,
all the result of a constant concern. Face, our public image, has a dual nature (Brown
& Levinson 1987). It is what Goffman called Politeness Conflict: we manifest a
positive face, including the desire that our self-image should be appreciated by the

65
A case of acknowledging the monarch as a country’s ruler is represented by the English
referential expressions designating the official name of a British ship/submarine: HMS
Queen Elizabeth.
66
The addressing term is also used to denote equal status and, implicitly, solidarity in point
of social or ethnic group/community cf Rom. ‘frate’ ‘soro’, and not a sibling relationship: Lasă-
mă, frate! Ce vorbeşti, soro?

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interlocutors and a negative face which means acting according to our intentions.
Goffman mentions that if the strategies used to keep a positive face are explicit and
include keeping distance to gain appreciation and approval, those specific to the
negative face mean apparent integration and are implicit.
Accordingly, polite addressing terms used below are examples of positive
face, whereas familiar ones are negative face markers:

George/ Johnson, you are expected to finish in time. Do you think you can do that?
Mr. President, we are delighted to have you here.
Professor Brown, can you give us some details about your future plans?
Mr. Ambassador, you have repeatedly expressed your opinion on this matter.
Lady, mind your step!

Addressing terms become deictic in nature whenever they are used for
direct communication and the referent is [+definite] in every concrete context: we
address the person in office, unless, out of politeness, we preserve the addressing
structure when the referent is out of office (for instance, in case of former country
presidents, former ministers etc).
Successful reference means that an intention was recognized via
inference67, indicating a kind of shared knowledge and, hence, social connection
(Yule 1996: 24). Similarly, a successful interpretation of an addressing term by the
interlocutor indicates shared knowledge and (non)acknowledgement of the social
relationship established. For instance, the last example Lady, mind your step! can
be interpreted as corresponding to various levels of politeness, cf Rom.
translations:

Doamnă, fiţi atentă pe unde mergeţi!

Fii, madam, atentă, pe unde mergi!
Uită-te, cucoană, pe unde mergi!

2.6. Discourse/ textual deixis

Discourse/textual deixis brings us to the discussion about the concepts

denoted by the terms discourse and text, regarding the use of the former when
referring to speech, and of the latter when referring to the wrriten mode, or, the use
of discourse as a superordinate term including both speech and writing. No matter
what position we adopt, whether we consider the oral or written form of a language,
it remains true that, in many situations, the speaker finds it necessary to make
reference to a whole part of a discourse/text and, thus, he/she points to that part.
Therefore, discourse markers are deictic elements, since they express the emphasis
placed on them by the source.
At the same time, they help creating and preserving the coherence of the
text, i.e the logical ordering and progress of the ideas expressed.
67
a pragmatic deduction.

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 Discourse/textual deictics are related to the deictic center in point of the
discourse topic dimension, i.e. the speaker links every utterance to the topic under
discussion.
In point of their nature, such deictics cannot be specific, ‘pure’, because
this type of deixis is not a basic one, therefore, its devices won’t be either: the job
of making reference to a certain part of a context is performed by personal and
demonstrative pronouns, by adverbial phrases and prepositional phrases:

In the following, we will refer to....

Next, we will be visiting another interesting sight. next ≠ previously
The author enlarges upon that aspect in the next chapter, chapter two.

Technically, pronouns will send us back or forth to the part of the

discourse/text which is brought back to the interlocutor’s attention. They ensure the
coherence of the whole discourse/text, by avoiding a repetition which would be in
fact, almost impossible if one intends to keep communication concise and clear:

[They came to us to ask for our help] S and the fact [that they came to us to ask for
our help]S forces us to act responsibly.
[They came to us to ask for our help]S and thatS forces us to act responsibly.

Typically, they will have an anticipatory value and their function will be
cataphoric: it68 and this are such instances, even if plural forms are possible, too:

It was incredible that everybody agreed on the new plan.

It was Ann who asked for you.
This was our reason for leaving: the hotel was fully booked and no spare room
could be found in the neighbourhood.
These are our arguments:the hotel was full, there was no vacancy, we were too
tired to remain there.

It acts as the formal subject of a complex sentence whose logical subject

was extraposed, in order to topicalize it, since it carries relevant information. Cleft
constructions are included in this category. Demonstratives behave similarly, in
that they need a clear specification of their reference in the form of a subject
clause.
In other cases, the pronoun anticipates a direct object after cognition verbs
(see Pisoschi 2010: 86):

We found it hard to believe such a story.

Accordingly, some grammarians consider it to be a semantically void

category, and treat it simply as a grammatical morpheme filling a thematic role, and
68
For a detailed account of the values of it, see Pisoschi (2012: 158-160).

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not as a pronoun in its own right (Fromkin &Rodman 1998: 200). A discussion of
Bolinger’s view on the deictic value of it is in Pisoschi (2010: 86-87).
The personal pronoun it can anticipate a finite or a non-finite subject clause
and Larreya (1993) points out the cases of subject repetition for emphasis and
enumerates the basic possible patterns: it anticipating a gerund and an infinitive
(ibidem):

It’s nice, sitting around and talking.

It was nice meeting you.
It was nice to meet you.

Pronouns as discourse/textual deictics can also have an anaphoric value,

when they resume the reference made by means of a whole sentence/clause. We
mention two extreme positions regarding the discourse deictic and anaphoric
values: Levinson argued in favour of keeping them separate as phenomena, while
Lyons (1977: 670) opinionated that anaphora makes reference to entities already
mentioned, whose identity and order of introduction are discourse-dependent. We
totally agree with Vîlceanu (2005: 116-117) in that ‘there is significant overlap
between anaphora, cataphora and discourse deixis as the anaphoric/ cataphoric
elements are embedded in the discourse’. Such a perspective makes deictics more
basic, and anaphoras dependent on them.
In English it and that share the resuming role and anaphoric function
typically, even if the plural demonstrative those is possible:

They left abruptly. It/ That annoyed everybody.

He says he saw you. I don’t believe it. cf Rom. Spune că te-a văzut. Eu nu cred
(asta)/Eu n-o cred. (Pisoschi 2010: 88)
It was late and the hotel was full. Those were our arguments.

2.7. Empathetic deixis

Empathetic deixis, as it is apparent from its name, is a category referring to

the attitude of the speaker in showing his/her empathy, i.e. sharing the state of
mind of the interlocutor. There are no pure empathetic deictics, personal pronouns
and demonstratives being used to convey the intended attitude. Some linguists
consider that we are dealing with indirect anaphora cases, since the basic value of
pronouns is deviated from, being performed a metaphorical extension.
If for personal pronouns the positive or negative attitude is to be inferred
from the context, with demonstratives a metaphorical extension of their
characteristics is made: the feature [+proximity] connotes positive attitudes,
whereas [-proximity] connotes negative states and feelings:

That’s it! I don’t want to hear anything more. (negative connotation)

This is the book! (positive connotation)

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 To Chaika (2000: 27) that refers to a less immediate circumstance; that
does not imply focus on it, the event referred to may be over, whereas this implies
reference to the deictic center - here and now:

That bothers me. vs This bothers me.

Chimombo and Roseberry (1998), too, show that demonstrative pronouns

can indicate emotional closeness or distance. Their example was

This was a very naughty thing to do.

uttered while telling a story to a child. In this case, emotional closeness is

associated to a negative connotation, the proximal demonstrative is meant to draw
the hearer’s attention. Psychologically, this implies emotional closeness, how vivid
something still is in the speaker’s mind. Haiman (1998) considers that language
may be alienated from the emotions that produced it: people control their emotions
enough to be able to use language in that context, and, by doing so, they both
express and describe those emotions. Thus, in his opinion, they are no longer,
primarily, participants, but observers and exorcists of their emotions.
In some idiomatic expressions, the demonstratives are markers of opposite
empathetic values (see also Pisoschi 2012: 186-187):

a. That’s it! Enough is enough! (negative connotation)

That’s it! I’m done! (positive connotation)
b. This is too much!
This I really want on my birthday.
c. You are leaving tomorrow and that’s that.

For examples of the merged values of linguistic markers, see 4.4.

Conclusions

Deictic elements are indispensable in establishing the ‘coordinates’ of an

utterance; only in this way can the utterance make sense; small in size, highly
frequent, and having a wide range of possible uses, deictic expressions always
communicate more than is said (Yule 1996: 15); specific and non-specific deictics
are to be used and interpreted within the linguistic and situational context; when
analyzing person deixis markers, reference (variable by definition) and role in
communication (stable in its basic coordinates) are of paramount importance. As
social deixis markers, personal pronouns are decoded in relation with other
nominal structures, expressing a certain level of politeness. Time deictics take into
account t0, the speech time, while space deictics set up the spatial position of
various objects according to the position of the speaker. Both time and space

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deictics are interpreted in relation to the deictic center, generally presupposing each
other and, in most cases, behaving as each other’s complements or, frequently,
replacing each other metaphorically. Empathetic deictics associate reference with a
certain attitude of the speaker and interpret its proximity/distance metaphorically.

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 3. CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES

3.1. Logic of Conversation. To say vs to imply. From logical connectors to

Cooperative Principle
3.2. Classification of implicatures
3.3. Conversational implicatures. The Cooperative Principle and
Conversational Maxims
3.4. Domains of manifestation of conversational maxims
3.5. Types of non-observance of conversational maxims
3.6. Tests for conversational implicatures. Drawbacks
Conclusions

3.1. Logic of Conversation. To say vs to imply. From logical connectors to

Cooperative Principle

In his lectures delivered at Harvard in 1967, Paul Grice aimed at proving

that human action and rationality result in a system of principles which determine,
in their turn, a system of conversational principles that account for the differences
in the meaning of logical connectors (and, or, if …then) in logic and ordinary
language.
Logical connectors analysis offered the starting point in extending the area
of linguistic analysis. Conversation analysis shows that the speaker often means
more that he (explicitly) says. Token (literal) meaning, i.e. the denotative meaning of
the linguistic elements making up a sentence, together with speaker’s meaning (a
term introduced by Grice to refer to the speaker’s communicative goal), constitutes
the unity represented by the utterance meaning. It is not an abstract meaning, but a
meaning depending on a particular context and directed towards a certain listener.

I’m tired is an example which can be associated to many speaker’s meanings, but
in a conversation, only one of them will be appropriate:
a. as an answer to the question How are you? is an assertion meant to inform;
b. as a reply to a request is a refusal ‘I can’t do what you are asking me to (because I
am tired);
c. uttered by the speaker while sitting down is an excuse ‘(let me sit because) I am
tired’ etc.
Describing the state is the basic meaning, the literal meaning, but in different
contexts the description of the state is the reason for denying, refusing, excusing
oneself etc.

In everyday communication, interlocutors are rarely very direct and

explicit so that their communicative goal should be fully understood. Such a
strategy would be perceived as impolite and chances are that the interlocutor would
have an opposite reaction to the expected one. Indirect meaning is the choice

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preferred by speakers in many situations, the interlocutor having to make a
pragmatic inference.
The distinction to be made is between what is said and what is implied,
suggested, meant. A meaning which is conveyed indirectly, distinctly from what is
said directly, is called an implicatum. What an utterance conveys in context falls
into two parts: what is said (the logical-semantic explicit content) and the
implicatures (the cognitive, intended meaning). (for more on types of meaning, see
Part I, 3.1.)
Sometimes, the intended and the explicit meaning coincide (‘How are
you?’ ‘ I’m tired.’)- this is what Grice called natural meaning. But, in most cases,
the two types of meaning don’t coincide and Grice referred to this situation as
being characterized by non-natural meaning: (I can’t do what you ask because) I
am tired; Can you open the window? meaning ‘I require you to open the
window.’
Grice’s example is: A and B are talking about a mutual friend C, now
working in a bank.

A: How is C getting along in his job?

B: Oh, quite well, I think he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet.

Implicatures: C is likely to yield to temptation; C’s colleagues are unpleasant and

treacherous, or, on the contrary, C is a bad person and his colleagues are right, etc.
Any utterance is to be analysed as a means of conveying two types of
information:
- a set of propositions deducible from the sentence uttered by linguistic, i.e.
semantic, rules;
- a further set of propositions deducible from the sentence uttered, together with
some items of non-linguistic knowledge shared by the speaker and the hearer, plus
a set of shared inference rules (Smith & Wilson 1990: 174)
In order for the hearer to infer the right (i.e. relevant) implicatures the
speaker intended him to, the interlocutors must be cooperative at every moment
during their verbal exchange69. Any implied meaning can be misunderstood by the
hearer, if the two don’t have the adequate types of competence and don’t share a
common ground (the necessary types of information able to facilitate
communication, implicature inference included). The hearer is able to hypothesise
about the speaker’s meaning, based on the literal meaning of the sentence uttered,
on contextual assumptions and, on general communicative principles.
Grice expressed that in the form of 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.
This is a principle, not a rule, ‘a convention of communicative practice’
without which there would be no communication; of course, the user can choose
69
Our point of interest is verbal communication, even though The Cooperative Principle is
the necessary condition of any type of human interaction.

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not to give a reply, i.e. to be non-cooperative. The Cooperative Principle is also a
norm against which violations (lying is a case of violation) or deviations
(exaggerations) can be measured (Finch 2003: 157). Without the underlying
cooperative convention there would be no way of registering deviations, and, also,
the general manifestations of an ‘unspoken pact to cooperate in communicating’ so
as to understand and be understood (Finch 2003: 159; 157).
In conclusion, communication, and pragmatics itself, as a science which
studies the process of communication, can be correlated with the process of inferring,
since to understand an utterance means to produce inferences, i.e. to appropriate the
interpretation of the utterance to the context of communication (basically, to the
participants, time and place, but not necessarily only to them). According to
Levinson (1983), context itself should be defined in connection to inferences: it is
everything that can trigger inferences.
On the other hand, Armengaud (1985: 60 in Dragoş 2000: 23) refers to
four types of context70, including presuppositional context consisting of all the
presuppositions of the interlocutors - their beliefs, expectations, intentions. It
represents a common ground, either preexistent to the verbal exchange, or in
making throughout it.

3.2. Classification of implicatures

Grice distinguishes two types of implicatures: conventional and

conversational.
The former are much more dependent on the linguistic structure of the
utterances, being more easily inferred due to the presence of certain lexical elements:
adverbs, conjunctions, and syntactic constructions such as still, moreover, however,
although, so, therefore etc. Being related to the words used, they are also related to
the conventional meanings expressed by those words.
Conventional implicatures do not contribute to the truth conditions of the
sentences, but have a constant component, i.e. they convey the same extra meaning
regardless of contexts.
They don’t even need to appear in a conversation, a single reply is
enough:

Some people believe in God. (the word some means ‘an indefinite number of’, so, it
is partially synonymous to not all. The implicature would be Not all people believe
in God. Depending on the context, an implicature could also be I am among those,
even if you aren’t.

70
The types of contexts are: the circumstantial, factual, existential or referential context –
including the identity of the interlocutors, the time and place, i.e. indexicals; the situational or
paradigmatic context, culturally shared – it includes the situation, the purposes associated to it
and the sense mutually acknowledged by the interlocutors; the interactional context consisting
of the speech acts organized within a coherent discourse; the presuppositional context,
explained above.

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Drink responsibly. The additional premises are: most people drink without
considering their health, drinking alcohol heavily affects health. The implicature is:
don’t ruin your health by drinking in excess.

Conventional implicatures are always lexicalized, i.e. associated to specific

words, the additional conveyed meaning requiring no calculation.
Yule (1996: 45) provides examples with even and yet as implicature
triggers. The adverb even is also a trigger of presupposition and Yule mentions the
fact that this type of implicatures are not unlike lexical presuppositions:

Even John came. The implicature is that the fact was contrary to our expectations
and, according to the speaker(s) beliefs, John was the less likely to come; the
presupposition is someone came.
He didn’t come yet. The implicature is that the fact is contrary to our expectations,
he should have been here by now.

In the same line, the conjunction and can be explained as meaning either
‘in addition, plus’ or ‘and then’:

She entered the room turned on the light.

Moreover, this type of implicatures are not cancelled by the following

linguistic context, and are detachable, i.e. they are not preserved in case of using
synonyms in the original utterance.

John is an Englishman, therefore he is brave.

Premise 1: John is an Englishman.
Premise 2: Englishmen are brave.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conclusion (implicature): John is brave.

We exemplify below non-cancellability and detachability:

John is an Englishman, therefore he is brave, even if he might be overwhelmed by

the circumstances.
(non-cancellable implicature – the implicature John is brave is maintained, even if
we add another premise - he might be overwhelmed by the circumstances)
? John is an Englishman, and, as a result of that, he is brave. (the implicature is
detachable, if a synonym is used. The conjunction would imply a logical relationship
cause-effect, which is not confirmed in this case.)

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He is poor but honest.
Premise 1: He is poor. (premise to be corroborated with the presupposition poverty
is valued negatively and poor people try to do anything to improve their situation)
Premise 2: He is honest. (premise to be corroborated with the presupposition
honesty is positively valued.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Conclusion (implicature): Honesty is a virtue, more important than richness, and he
is among the few poor people who are not willing to do anything to become rich,
therefore he is a worthy man.
But adds the contrast dimension between the two adjectives; this is what
differentiates the example from the variant He is poor and honest.

Yule (1996) comments on such examples stating that the interpretation of

any utterance of the type p but q will be based on the conjunction p & q , plus an
implicature of ‘contrast’ between the information on p and that in q.

John, my colleague, and, nevertheless, my friend (cf Armengaud 1985: 71 in

Dragoş 2000: 26)
The lexical marker of implicature is the adverb nevertheless, conveying the idea that
the feature [+colleague] does not necessarily include the feature [+friend]. We add that
the original relationship concerning the two linguistic elements, between which a
relation of reciprocal presupposition is established, could have been initially one of
opposition, i.e. of mutual exclusion:

John is my rival, and, still, my friend.

Conversational implicatures rely on objective elements (the context) and

on subjective factors (the degree of cooperation between the interlocutors). They
follow from sentence meaning, but considering the background of the suitable
circumstances (including knowledge and beliefs), which give relevance to the
utterance. Smith &Wilson (1990: 179) define conversational implicatures as

‘pragmatic implications71 which follow from a remark only on the

assumption that it was intended as relevant, together with additional
premises which do not form part of shared knowledge, but which the speaker
expects the hearer to construct for himself’.

The additional premises themselves will become part of the pragmatic

implications of the remark.

71
The quotation contradicts Grice’s view; he created the term implicature, precisely to
distinguish them from an implicatum; an implicatum p ® q is always true when q is true,
irrespective of the truth value of p; what is called an implication should be called a possible
inference.

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 In their turn, conversational implicatures can be generalized or
particularized (Yule, 1996). The latter are the more frequent, therefore they are
usually simply called conversational implicatures. They can be inferred on the
basis of a single reply:

I’m a woman.
Uttered by a male professor in front of his students, or by an actor in front
of his public, the additional premise is let’s imagine that I’m a female
character… . The implicature, exploiting the apparent false assertion, is that he
thinks and feels like a woman, for the sake of demonstration (assuming the
qualities and flaws typically associated to women, considering a social and cultural
feminine prototype); the sexual orientation of the professor/actor is irrelevant,
unless some incident occurred and he declares publicly that he is psychologically a
woman.

You are here now.

The additional premises that can be inferred are: in the past, maybe when I
needed you, you weren’t here, but you are here now. In this case, the implicature is
that present is more important than past, we start anew, let bygones be bygones.
This could be considered a generalized conversational implicature.

Generalized conversational implicatures don’t require any special

knowledge in the context to calculate the additional conveyed meaning. Yule
(1996: 40) gives examples which:
-at first sight, seem to illustrate the lack of sufficient information:

‘Did you invite Bella and Cathy?’ ‘I invited Bella.’

The implicature is I didn’t invite Cathy.

-oppose the indefinite article to the definite article or possessive adjectives, in

terms of identifying the referent in the context:

I was in a garden one day. A child looked over the fence.

Yule (1996: 40) explains that a garden, a child exclude the variant my
garden, my child. Still, if the speaker intends to indirectly remind the interlocutor
of their first encounter when they were kids, then maybe the structures under
discussion could be interpreted as a garden = ‘a known garden (yours etc)’, a child
= ‘you’. Of course, our counterargument is just an illustration of the variety,
complexity and indeterminacy of utterance interpretations.

Scalar implicatures can be included into the same category of examples,

generalized conversational implicatures: some is more than a little, or less than all,
possible is less than probable, cool is less than freezing:

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I have borrowed some money (not all the sum we need). vs I have borrowed all the
money we need.

3.3. Conversational implicatures. The Cooperative Principle and

Conversational Maxims

Grice formulates certain specific maxims of conversation, referring to the

quantity, and quality of information, to the coherence of the dialogue and to the
manner of expressing oneself to get the results expected.
In point of their characteristics, conversational maxims are not arbitrary
conventions, but describe rational means for conducting cooperative verbal
exchanges and, more generally, relational human behaviour. It is to be expected
that they would govern non-linguistic behaviour, too, and, indeed, they do so: if
two people are fixing a car, and one of them requires a certain tool and is given
another, or a number of spare parts and is given a different number, or after a
while, all these are cases of non-compliance with the maxims. If a wrong tool is
handled, then the maxim of quality is not observed, because the tool is not the one
required; if the number of spare parts is wrong, then the maxim regarding the
quantity is not observed.
Implicatures can be established by envisaging the four conversational rules
or ‘Maxims’ complementing the CP:

I. Maxim of Quantity
1. Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current
purposes of the exchange.
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

When speaking to someone, one feels obliged to give enough information

so as the interlocutor should understand the message. At the same time, one should
avoid providing too much information and obscure the intended meaning. Setting
the boundary between too little and too much is a measure of our communicative
competence. This type of competence is not innate, it must be learned.
Once we learn it, as adults, we also learn how to manipulate this
convention about quantity to our advantage. Sometimes, we also think not to retain
one’s attention for too long. We are ‘economical with the truth’ (Finch 2003: 158).

II. Maxim of Quality

Try to make your contribution one that is true.
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Finch (2003) considers this maxim as a supermaxim, all the others being
logically subsumed to it. ‘White lies’ are an exception, in that they are precisely
meant to preserve cooperation, politeness ensuring the willingness of the

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interlocutor to remain a participant in the verbal exchange. Finch’s position is
opposed to that of Sperber and Wilson, among others, who consider relevance
maxim as the supermaxim. If being cooperative is the most important thing in
communication, politeness is a way of ensuring cooperativeness and, sometimes,
out of politeness, the speaker avoids the truth; then truthfulness ranges the second
after relevance.

III. Maxim of Relation

Be relevant.

Relevance is to be linked to the topic of the conversational exchange.

Changing the subject abruptly or divagating can mean rudeness or
uncooperativeness. Relevance takes many forms, the users trying to make sense of
any apparently ‘odd’ reply in relation to the verbal exchange.
Sperber and Wilson (1986) considered this maxim as being the most
important, subsuming all the others, since the quantity, the quality of the
information and the manner of organizing it are meant to make the reply relevant in
the situational context, directly or indirectly.
Relevance plays a very important role in pragmatic interpretation. Remarks
can be of two types: informative, adding new information to the stock of shared
knowledge, assumptions and beliefs, and uninformative, which convey a meaning
that is not directly deducible from their structure. Two remarks are relevant to each
other, if, combined, they convey new information, not derivable from them
separately:

‘A remark P is relevant to another remark Q if (and only if) P and Q,

together with background knowledge, yield new information not derivable
from either P or Q, together with background knowledge’ (Smith &Wilson
1990: 177).

Let’s consider the example:

A: ‘If you drive, I’ll join you’.

B: ‘I’ll drive.’

The implicature is A will join B.

There is considerable debate about the role played by shared knowledge,
on the one hand, and inferences, on the other hand, in the process of turning from
an overt message reply to a tacit message one. Smith and Wilson (1990) consider
that judgements of relevance are essential, besides the systems of knowledge and
inference. The interpretation of an utterance will depend on the hearer’s judgement
about how relevant it was intended to be:
a. If so, the hearer will make the necessary efforts to interpret it as such,
even if this means reading into it a certain amount of information which it does not
overtly convey (Smith &Wilson 1990: 175):

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A: Where is the chocolate?
B:I was feeling hungry. [so I ate it.]/ The children saw it [and ate it].

b. if the hearer decides that the utterance was intended as irrelevant, he

may still gather some relevant information from it (Smith &Wilson 1990: 175), as
long as it is seen as directed at the basic remark:

A: Where is the chocolate?

B: I’ve got a train to catch. →’I don’t have time to talk about such trifles.’/’I’m
guilty and I prefer to run away.’

c. the third possibility is that A’s utterance is accidentally irrelevant: the

first utterance was misheard, objectively irrelevant, unworthy of consideration etc
(Smith &Wilson 1990: 176). We interpret Smith and Wilson’s statement as
meaning that speaker A’s utterance was accidentally irrelevant in relation to the
expectations of speaker B (but it was relevant from A’s point of view).
Consequently, B changes the subject, introducing new information unconnected to
the previous remark of A:

A: Where is the chocolate?

B: I’ve got a train to catch. (→I need to focus on that. Help me prepare!)
The children saw it, (→Maybe we should be more careful with the kids, they
shouldn’t be allowed to enter your room.)

IV. Maxim of Manner: Be perspicuous (‘comprehensible’, ‘clear’,

‘unambiguous’)
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
4. Be orderly.

An orderly manner of organizing information can be seen as a condition

for its assimilation by the listener. Nevertheless, flouting it (Finch uses the term
violation72 (2003: 160), even if it is clear that he refers to cases of flouting) is a way
‘in which strength of feeling is communicated’ (Finch 2003: 159), and not only in
literature.
Horn (1972, 1984, 2004) simplifies CP and its maxims, reducing them to
two: the Quantity Principle and the Relation Principle. The Q Principle is– say as
much as you can (given R); we believe can is to be interpreted both objectively, in
point of the ability and possibility, and subjectively, in point of permission,
72
He makes the difference between apparent and real violations.

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according to the norms of politeness - say as much as you can afford. The R
Principle is say no more than you must (given Q).
The example of Horn quoted by Mey (1993: 79)

I cut the finger yesterday.

illustrates the speaker’s truthfulness, but, also, tact and consideration for the
interlocutor, by making the utterance informative enough, but not as informative in
point of scaring details as to worry the hearer.
Referential expressions, definite or indefinite, also illustrate the intention
of the speaker to be polite by being accurate about the identity of the referents,
marking the distinction [+definite] ≠ [-definite] reference: (the finger = my finger,
a woman ≠ his woman):

I cut the finger yesterday.

John met a woman last week.

We consider that Horn adopts implicitly a viewpoint similar to that of

Grice, considering that, essentially, truth ranks first for the speaker.

3.4. Domains of manifestation of conversational maxims

It is not the case that people follow these guidelines to the letter. Rather, in
most ordinary kinds of talk, these principles are observed by interlocutors at a deeper
level, contrary to appearances. Whenever possible, people will make sense of what
they hear, i.e. they will interpret what is said conforming to the maxims, at least on
some levels. It is precisely because of the need to make assumptions contrary to
superficial indications that conversational implicatures appeared. Let’s consider the
example:

‘Where is Bill?’ ‘There’s a yellow BMW outside Sue’s house.’

Beyond its literal semantic interpretation, provided by grammar, an

utterance has three main types of pragmatic implications (Smith & Wilson 1990:
179):
- those following from the utterance itself, together with a preceding remark and
any item of shared knowledge needed to establish a connection between the two; in
our example, the shared knowledge means:

Bill is our common friend/acquaintance.

Bill has a yellow BMW.
We know Sue and the house she lives in.

The implicature is Bill may be visiting Sue.

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- those additional premises, not already part of the shared knowledge, needed to
establish the connection; if the speaker has knowledge of none, he will construct
one:

Even if he is our friend, we have no idea where Bill is, he didn’t tell us.
Sue and Bill know each other. Bill knows Sue well enough to visit her at home and
park his car in front of her house.

- those inferences that follow from the additional premises, together with all the
above, under the first entry:

Bill and Sue might be involved (in something).

All those elements contribute to establishing the relevance of the utterance

as intended by the speaker, and none will follow unless the utterance is treated by
the hearer as relevant (Smith & Wilson 1990: 179).
A hearer will attempt to get out of a remark ‘just what he believes the
speaker put into it’, and the judgement made about the intended relevance of the
utterance ‘will crucially affect the amount of work he is prepared to do to get a
message out of it’ (Smith & Wilson 1990: 176).

3.5. Types of non-observance of conversational maxims

‘The idea that someone may be misleading us in some way, either

intentionally or unintentionally, seems alien to this concept [of
communication]. Of course, people often do mislead us in all sorts of ways,
but the fact that we recognize this as a misuse of language is an indication
that communication has as its raison d’être a strong social, and moral,
basis.’ (Finch 2003: 154)

To establish the major types of non-observance of conversational maxims,

one should consider the following features: /intentionality/ and /misleading/.
Unintentional non-observance accounts for infringement; it is caused by
objective causes making the interlocutor unable to comply with all the maxims.
Generally infringing stems from imperfect linguistic performance (in the case of a
young child or a foreigner) or from impaired linguistic performance brought about
by nervousness, drunkenness, excitement, disability:

‘Hello!’ ‘Nice weather indeed!’ cf Rom. “Bună ziua, babă surdă!” „Duc la piaţă
nişte urdă!”

Grice (1999: 82; 84) includes into this category clashes; for instance, there
is a clash between the maxim of quality and the maxim of quantity; to observe one
of them would mean to infringe the other one. The maxim of quality is considered

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to be more important, therefore the speaker will choose not to observe the maxim
of quantity:

‘Where does C live?’ ‘Somewhere in the south of France.’

The hearer is not opting out, but his answer is less informative than required,
simply because he does not have the necessary information; of course, there is also
the possibility of intentionally misleading the first speaker, pretending not to know
the right address, because giving that piece of information contrasts with the
interlocutor’s interests.
Intentional non-observance can be misleading and this accounts for the
violation proper of one of the maxims. The speaker is deliberately and secretly
subverting the maxim and the CP, usually for some self-serving purpose. Violation
is defined as the unostentatious or ‘quiet’ non-observance of a maxim. Violating a
maxim is quite the opposite of flouting a maxim because it rather prevents or at
least discourages the hearer from seeking for implicatures and rather encourages
his taking utterances at face value.

Violation of the Quantity Maxim:

Supervisor: Did you read the articles and write up the review of literature?
Supervisee: I certainly read the articles. Weren’t they captivating!

A: Who’s eaten the biscuits?

B: I’ve had some. (Finch 2003: 158)
If some does not mean ‘all’, then the speaker is cooperative; if not, he
withholds information and violates the Quantity Maxim.

Violation of the Quality Maxim

A: You stained the tablecloth all over! What will the guests think?
B: Nobody will notice.

Violation of the Relation Maxim

A: Did you like my article?
B: That page of the newspaper was impressive, wasn’t it?

Violation of the Manner Maxim

.
A: He’s schizoid.
B: He sits on two sofas.

The interpretation involves the figurative meaning of schizoid. The

meaning accounting for its specialized use in psychiatry is overtly cancelled, the
receiver being encouraged to consider the literal meaning of the word, with
humoristic effects.

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 Intentional non-misleading non-observance of the maxims comprises opting
out of a maxim, suspending it and flouting (exploiting) it.

A speaker opts out of observing a maxim whenever s/he indicates

unwillingness to cooperate in the way the maxim requires. Examples: a suspect
exerts his/her right to remain silent or a witness chooses not to impart information
that may prove detrimental to the defendant.

Detective: Has the defendant ever told you she hated her father and wanted him
dead?
Shrink: Such information is confidential and it would be unethical to share it with
you.

Journalist: Have you accepted bribe?

Suspect: No comment.

Suspending a maxim implies that the interlocutors have no expectations

regarding its observance. Under certain circumstances, there is no expectation on
the part of any participant that one or several maxims should be observed (and non-
fulfillment does not generate any implicatures). In many cases, conversational
maxim suspension is culture-dependent, i.e. some words, structures are considered
taboo, their uttering signifying an ill omen: Macbeth is ‘The Scottish Play’ in the
British acting community. In the same way, one should not tell an actor ‘Good
luck!’, but ‘Break a leg!’
Let’s consider funerals, obituaries, poetry, telegrams and jokes and notice
that in each case a certain maxim is suspended.
For example, in case of funerals, the deceased is praised and the priest and
the family and close friends deliver laudatory speeches, even if the referent could
not have been flawless. Only good things should be said about the deceased people,
it is a cross-cultural belief. Therefore, the maxim of quality is not observed, if not
by lying, at least by omission (in which case the maxim of quantity is not
observed). The same considerations are true for obituaries.
Telegrams obviously don’t observe the maxim of quantity, whereas poetry
and jokes allow for any type of maxim non-observance.

Flouting a maxim means exploiting it, adding new tinges of meaning, and
giving the interlocutor clues in order to be able to interpret the utterance correctly,
i.e. to make the right inferences.

a. Flouting the maxim of quality results in the intentional

non-misleading non-observance of the maxim, which is actually exploited at a
deeper level, the result being:
- a metaphor

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Queen Victoria was made of iron. (the interpretation can involve a positive
connotation, iron meaning [+determination], or a negative one, iron meaning
[+inflexibility], [+insensitivity]
You are a lion. (cross-culturally, lion is the symbol of bravery and majesty)
He is a Casanova. (cross-culturally, the proper name came to designate any
womanizer, the negative connotation becoming part of the denotative meaning of
the name)

The examples above are nominal metaphors (Levinson 1983: 152), which, together
with predicative metaphors, are categorically false; unlike them, sentential
metaphors are irrelevant to the surrounding discourse when literally construed:

‘What kind of mood did you find the boss in?’

‘The lion roared.’ (Levinson 1983: 153) (the lion roaring is like the boss displaying
anger)

- a piece of irony
‘What if Russia blockades the Gulf and all the oil?’ ‘Come on, Britain rules the
seas!’ (Levinson 1983: 109)
The reply is an example of using a famous poem title and song lyric ironically, to
express the contrary of what is stated literally.

- meiosis
He was a little intoxicated. (of a man known to have broken up all furniture; this is
an example of meiosis) (Grice 1999: 86)

- hyperbole
Every man must have written a poem.(obviously, ths can’t be true for everybody)

All the examples above require background information, shared by the

interlocutors, the information necessary for an appropriate interpretation being
historical, cultural or political.
The previous examples prove that maxim flouting can give rise to figures
of speech, many of which have a cross-cultural character, becoming standardized
in point of meaning, and , thus, losing some of their originality, of their power of
suggestion. On the other hand, they are more easily understood by all the members
of that linguistic community. They are motivated and calculable, i.e. whenever a
speaker utters such a structure and it is not meant literally, a certain figurative
meaning is intended.

b. Flouting the maxim of quantity

War is war.
Either John will come or he won’t.
If he does, he does it.

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 Flouting this maxim can result in tautologies, which, not only that aren’t
annoying, but convey a variety of meanings.

War1 is war2.
The first term is used with its denotative meaning [+battle, confrontation],
while the second, identical in form with the first, can refer to any connotation of
the basic term: [+death], [+destruction], [+damage], [+sufferings] etc. The
semantic richness of such structures accounts for the existence of proverbs of this
type in many cultures: Fr. À la guerre, comme à la guerre. Rom. La război, ca la
război.

Either John will come or he won’t. ‘There isn’t much we can do about it,
we have to take things as they are.’

If he does, he does it. ‘Even if he does it (and we can’t stop him), it’s not
the end of the world.’

c. Flouting the maxim of relation/relevance

‘Have you finished your homework, John?’ ‘Mum, can I have a piece of
cake?’ (the kid changes the subject, meaning that he hasn’t)
‘Your son is really taken to Annette.’ ‘He used to play with snails.’ (Smith
&Wilson 1990: 178)

There is indeterminacy regarding the implicatures: one implicature is ‘a

normal person wouldn’t like Annette, but his son has strange tastes, Annette being
just an example’; another is ‘Annette is like a snail.’
Therefore, ambiguities arise regarding implicatures, since several
inferences may be made, even if all unfavourable to the referent Annette. The
hearer cannot be certain: ‘the hearer has to supply additional premises of his own,
which he does not necessarily believe, yielding pragmatic implications, which, he
also need not necessarily believe’ (Smith &Wilson 1990: 178).
Grice (1999: 86) gives an example of a real, not apparent,
flouting/violation (the two terms are synonymous to him, in this case) of the
relevance maxim:

‘Mrs. X is an old bag.’ ‘The weather has been quite delightful this summer,
hasn’t it?’

To us, the term ‘real’ seems to contradict the very nature of the
phenomenon of flouting; moreover, the example looks rather as an illustration of
uncooperativeness, since the linguistic contribution should be made considering the
purpose or direction of the verbal exchange; changing the topic abruptly, when the
speaker expects for an answer to his reply, might not be the best illustration of the
Cooperative Principle definition.

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 On the other hand, the speaker should be as gentle as possible with the
positive and the negative face of the hearer. We put this idea in connection with
what Kerbrat-Orecchioni called interactional synchronization (1990: 20-25), since
Grice’s framework expresses the harmony between interlocutors. If the above
example, which illustrates a topic change, is also the illustration of the speaker’s
attempt to be polite and to preserve harmony, then the perspective on the CP
should be changed.
Costăchescu (2014) makes such an attempt: starting from the analysis of
what she calls ‘inadequacy markers’, i.e. elements which express the speaker’s
opposition to the discourse or to the behaviour of the person talked to. She
discusses the question of the infringement of the Cooperative Principle in those
cases when the speaker does not refuse to carry on the talk, but rejects the topic
(Costăchescu 2014: 50). The conclusion of the author is that the CP is too strong
and it should be changed as follows: the contribution of the speaker must be as
‘required’ by the direction of the talk exchange ‘if the speaker agrees’
(Costăchescu 2014: 59). The interlocutors do not violate the CP if their
disagreement is explicitly expressed.
The example above does not contain an explicit inadequacy marker,
therefore it is debatable if the change of topic unmarked linguistically can be
considered a case of uncooperativeness, or just a case of CP infringement.

d. Flouting the maxim of manner

-flouting the submaxim ‘avoid obscurity’:
In the following examples the answers to the question are, at the same
time, obscure since the speaker uses a variant of the word which the interlocutor or
the by-stander doesn’t recognize, and, too long, since the words not to be
recognized are spelled:

Father: ‘Let’s get kids something!’

Mother: ‘Ok, but I veto I_C_E C-R-E-A-M/ il gelato.’

The kids don’t know the spelling of the word ‘icecream’ and neither the
Italian for the English word, so, the parents are safe if using them, without the kids
protesting against their decision.

‘Where are you taking the dog?’ ‘To the V-E-T.’

The last example is similar to the one given by Yule (1996) in order to
explain that, in the local context of the speakers, the dog is known to recognize the
word ‘vet’, since he hates to be taken there, the speaker produces a more elaborate,
therefore, less brief, and more obscure version to the dog, so that the latter won’t
know the destination.

-flouting the submaxim ‘avoid prolixity’

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Miss Singer produced a series of sounds corresponding closely to the score of an
aria from Rigoletto.

In this case, the formal register, vague meanings and rather long sentence
convey the negative meaning intended, but expressed euphemistically, and with a
tinge of irony. Therefore, the maxims of quantity, quality and manner, submaxim
“be precise” are flouted.

-flouting the submaxim ‘be precise’73:

Is the Pope Catholic?

Does a bear shit in the woods?

Such structures mean ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ and they can be associated as

replies to any utterance functioning as an interrogation.

A distinct category of examples of maxim flouting is represented by the use

of hedges (Yule 1996). Some structures partly contradict the implicature that the
speaker tells the truth (all of it), they flout the maxim of quality:

To my knowledge, nothing happened.

As far as I know, nothing happened.
I’m not sure it’s (entirely) true, but she was seen in town.

Other hedges denote the non-observance of the maxim of quantity: We

don’t intend to bother you with all the details….
The maxim of relation can also be flouted:
Not that I change the subject, but…
To stick to the point…
Well, anyway, …
I’ll try to be clear and brief….

Yule (1996: 37) mentions three purposes of hedge use, all circumscribed to the
condition of cooperation: they show that the speaker is aware of the CP and its
maxims, that he/she observes them, and that he/she is aware that the hearer
considers him/her cooperative in conversation (has such expectations from the
speaker).

3.6. Tests for conversational implicatures. Drawbacks

73
Such an example could also exemplify the flouting of the maxim of relevance, since there
is no obvious connection between an utterance such as “would you like something to
drink?” and the replies under discussion.

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 Such tests are meant to characterize implicatures as a distinct class,
compared to entailments (logical inferences) and to presuppositions. The tests are
designed so as to prove that the inference has the features specific to conversational
implicatures.
Conversational implicatures are:

-calculable (predictable)
This property is the result of the fact that logical meaning corroborated
with the Cooperative Principle lead to inferring a certain implicature.

We present below the steps in calculating an implicature (Levinson 1983:

113-114). The line between the first three steps and the following was introduced
by us for pedagogical reasons, in order to make the distinction between the stages
involving just the speaker and those which concern both interlocutors and the
relationship between them:

1. S said that p
2. There is no reason to think S is not observing the maxims, or at least the
Cooperative Principle
3. In order for S to say p and be indeed observing the maxims or the
Cooperative Principle, S must think that q (he is aware of what his words imply)
4. S must know that it is common knowledge that q must be supposed if S
is to be taken to be cooperating
5. S has done nothing to stop me, the addressee, thinking that q
6. therefore S intends me to think that q, and in saying that p has implicated
q.

A counter-example given by Lewis (1973) is the class of standard

metaphors and all clichés which become rather opaque, non-calculable in the
linguistic community. Non-calculability means that their meaning is almost
automatically deducible cross-culturally because of the overuse of the structures.
Their meaning is so general, without being obscure, that they can be used in any
context:

You are a lion.

Is the Pope a Catholic? (‘Isn’t it obvious? cf Rom. “Mănânci , calule, ovăz?”)
To be or not to be. (There are only two possible solutions, there isn’t a third one.)

-cancellable/defeasible (by addressing further premises); a necessary, but

not sufficient condition (if we consider grammatical homonymy)
He is seeing a woman tonight, but it might well be his mother.
‘What did you do?’ ‘Woke up, got angry, read my mail, had a coffee, but not
necessarily in that order’.

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 -non-detachable – the implicature is attached to the semantic content, not
to the linguistic form. The synonyms used in an utterance don’t change the
conversational implicatures:

You are a genius/ a mental prodigy/ a big brain.

Esti un geniu/ o minte sclipitoare/ Ai un creier…! Geniule!

In addition to the implicature features implicitly assigned to this type of

inferences by Grice (calculability, defeasibility, non-detachability), Ariel (2008:
13) adds three more: indeterminacy, universality and reinforceability.

- non-conventionality (indeterminacy)
The speaker associates the structure to various pragmatic meanings,
depending on the background knowledge and situational context. Ambiguity can be
intentional and can contribute to the preservation of the positive public image of
the speaker:

He is a machine.

Two implicatures can be calculated, i.e. two pragmatic meanings can be inferred in
relation to the utterance, depending on the context. The maxim of quality is flouted
and the result is a metaphor, in its turn ambiguous. It can imply the feature
[+efficiency], because the major characteristic of a machine/device is that it can
work for a long time at a constantly high level of precision. Such an interpretation
is preferable, since it does not damage the image of the speaker.
Secondly, the metaphor can imply the feature
[-human], including the seme [+cold heart], in which case, the speech act threatens
the public image of the speaker, and, of course, aims at doing so with the referent’s
public image, too.
Ariel’s example of indeterminacy (2008: 10) is an originally Hebrew
verbal exchange:

Boss: You have small children. How will you manage long hours?
HD: I have a mother. (Hebrew, June14, 1996)

The woman’s reply can imply two things: ‘My mother can help me with the kids
whenever I need it’ or ‘My mother can help me with the kids when
I work late.’
So much of utterance meaning depends on implicature, that one can never
be entirely certain of the full extent of meaning (Finch 2003: 156). It is the users
who decide on the pragmatic meaning, they are the arbiters, therefore it is
impossible to prove linguistically who is right and who is wrong.

- universality

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 Conversational implicatures are universal because no specific linguistic
form is involved in the triggering of the inference (see non-detachability). We
consider that Ariel makes a step forward compared to Grice, in that she might refer
to the cognitive patterns underlying the uttering process. Other than that, non-
detachability and universality are quasi-synonymous.

-reinforceability
Inferences may be reinforced explicitly, since they are implicit, without
causing the speaker to sound redundant (Ariel 2008:14):

He passed away in the arms of a woman, not his [wife]. (originally Hebrew, Hair,
March 13, 2003) (a woman means indefinite reference, therefore, an unknown
referent, this implicit meaning being reinforced explicitly by the structure not his
wife)
According to Yule, the opposite of explicit reinforceability is explicit
denial (Yule 1996: 44). Sometimes, we add, there isn’t actually a question of
denial, but a suspension of the inference deduced from the first utterance:

A: ‘I won 5 dollars.’ (I won only five dollars and no more)

B: ‘You won at least 5 dollars.’ (My conviction is that you won more, so I am not
committed to the truth of your assertion. If we want to keep using the term denial
in this case, what B denies is the existence of just one winning variant; B considers
there is a whole range of possibilities regarding the sum won.)

-suspendable (Yule 1996)

‘Where is Bill?’ ‘There’s a yellow BMW outside Sue’s house. Or am I wrong?’

The interlocutor is uncertain regarding the implicature to be inferred.

Conclusions

Communicative competence means interpersonal intentionality (Parret

1976 in Dragoş, 2000: 25), which is subject to the restrictions imposed by
conversational implicatures. It implies differentiating between literal and figurative
(metaphorical) meaning, i.e. between what is explicitly meant (and stated) and
what is implicit.
The way we choose to cooperate in communication is responsible both for
the rhetorical strategies we employ as addressers, and for the interpretative
difficulties we experience as addressees (Finch 2003: 160); such difficulties result
in ambiguities, indeterminacy, uncertainty.
Relevance is the key element in initiating and supporting the process of
interpretation, considering the literal meaning of the replies, shared knowledge,
additional premises and their implicatures.

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 Cooperative Principle and its maxims are observed at a deeper level, their
flouting being a source of linguistic creativity.
What a speaker implicates is distinct from what he says and from what his
words imply (shared knowledge and a series of inferences are added); a speaker
can make an utterance and intend to mean something else or something more by
exploiting the fact that he may be presumed to be cooperative, i.e. to be speaking
truthfully, informatively, relevantly, or, otherwise, appropriately.
The hearer relies on this presumption to make contextually relevant
inferences from what the speaker says to what he means.
Taking the utterance at face value may be incompatible with this
presumption, which means that the speaker intends the listener to figure out what
he means by searching for an explanation regarding the reason why the utterance
was made.

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4. PRESUPPOSITIONS

4.1. A philosophical approach of presuppositions

4.1.1. Presupposition and reference
4.1.2. Presuppositions and entailment
4.2. Presuppositions as pragmatic inferences
4.3. Linguistic triggers of presuppositions
4.4. Types of presuppositions
4.4.1. Existential presuppositions
4.4.2. Factive presuppositions
4.4.3. Lexical presuppositions
4.4.4. Structural presuppositions
4.4.5. Non-factive presuppositions
4.4.6. Counterfactual presuppositions
4.5. The Projection Problem
4.6. Tests for presuppositions
Conclusions

4.1. A philosophical approach of presuppositions

Historically speaking, presuppositions were first discovered as a result of a

philosophical approach, the purpose being to differentiate them from semantic
entailments. Hence, the relationship presupposition-reference and presupposition-
entailment are to be paid full attention, in order to give an adequate description of
presuppositions.
Discussing presuppositions from a pragmatic perspective makes sense,
since they are to some extent related to conversational implicatures, and, to some
linguists, the border between the two types of inferences, and/or the relationship
between them, are not clarified. Subchapter 4.2. illustrates that.

4.1.1. Presupposition and reference

Presuppositions imply that something is implicitly true; that implicit

assertion means assigning a property to an existing entity. Frege (1892) was the
philosopher who discussed referential expressions and time clauses from that point
of view (see Levinson 1983: 169 for the discussion of Frege’s example – the first
below):
Kepler died in misery. ≫ Kepler existed.
The existential presupposition is independent of the meaning of the sentence,
which is proven by the fact that it resists the negation of the sentence verb:
Kepler didn’t die in misery. ≫ Kepler existed.

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The discussion continued after you left. ≫ You left. (the presupposition remains
true if the sentence is negated)
The discussion didn’t continue after you left. ≫ You left.
Even in this case, there is an existential presupposition, you exist, otherwise, there
wouldn’t be an agent to perform the action of leaving. (see 4.3. Linguistic triggers
of presuppositions)

In his paper ‘On Denoting’ (1905), Russell proposed the theory of

descriptions, holding that the definite descriptions occurring as grammatical
subjects in natural languages are not logical subjects, too, but correspond to
conjunctions of propositions (see 4.1.2.). Almost 50 years later, Strawson (1950)
rejects the complex logic form underlying definite descriptions as it appears with
Russell, but he cannot explain an example such as

The king of France is not wise, because there is no such person.

Strawson showed that the sentence The king of France is wise is neither
true nor false, if there is no such person (in 1905 when Russell wrote his paper,
France was a Republic). The truth value of a sentence presupposes the existence of
the entities spoken of. At the same time, Strawson acknowledges that one of the
main purposes for which we use language is that of stating facts about things,
persons and events (Strawson 1990: 228).
As a conclusion to this part, we mention Levinson ‘s observation (1983:
173) that presuppositions and theories on them are in line with our linguistic
intuitions, therefore, if we utter something, there is a foreground assertion that the
referent about whom we assert something exists (or existed, we should add,) in the
context set (of worlds). In conclusion, existential presuppositions are background
assumptions.

4.1.2. Presuppositions and entailment

Knowing the truth of a sentence S1 necessarily implies the truth of another

sentence S2. It would be logically impossible for S1 to be true and S2 false. If S1 is
the first sentence below, and S2 the second, the relationship is clear.
He is a bachelor74. ≫ He is a man. (Fromkin & Rodman 1998: 180)
S2 is an entailment of S1. Knowing the entailments of true sentences is how the
knowledge about the world is acquired. A contradiction is a false entailment: for
the previous example, a contradiction would be He is not a man.

74
He replaces a common noun or proper name designating a male referent: John/the man is
a bachelor. Of course, bachelor is used here with the meaning ‘unmarried man’, not ‘owner
of the first university degree’; in this latter case, the noun bachelor is a common gender
noun.

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 The sense of a declarative sentence allows us to know under what
circumstances it is true. The ‘circumstances’ are the truth conditions of the
sentence. For declarative sentences, they are the same as their senses. Sense
facilitates the study of the world and finding out facts. The truth or falsehood of a
sentence S is its reference, but knowing its truth conditions is not the same as
knowing facts (Fromkin & Rodman 1998: 179).
Presuppositions are facts whose truth is required for an utterance to be
appropriate (Fromkin & Rodman 1998: 198). They presuppose a relationship
between two propositions:

Mary’s dog is cute (=p)

Mary has a dog. (=q)
p≫ q
The relationship manifests constancy under negation (Mary’s dog is not cute≫
Mary has a dog) and the same is true for a proposition expressed by an embedded
clause: I think Mary’s dog is cute. ≫ Mary has a dog.
Therefore, a presupposition means a double entailment: p ≫ q, non-p ≫ q.
Levinson (1983: 168) discusses presuppositions defined as ‘any kind of
background assumption against which an action, theory, expression or utterance
makes sense or is rational’, a definition which is to be contrasted with the
perspective of presuppositions as pragmatic inferences ‘built into linguistic
expressions and isolated using linguistic tests’.
Strawson referred not to sentences, but to statements, i.e. to the use of
sentences to express something true, but defined presuppositions in the same way,
as double entailments. He clarifies the conceptual, and, consequently,
terminological ambiguity existing with Frege in discussing presuppositions. The
basic ambiguity concerns the sentence vs. the assertion. Strawson points out that a
sentence is different from its use (for example, an assertion), in point of their basic
feature, truthfulness: sentences can’t be true/false, statements are. The truth/falsity
of an assertion depends on conventions about the use of referring expressions,
conventions which lead to pragmatic inferences (presuppositions), in their turn,
preconditions to judging an assertion as true/false.
Statement A presupposes statement B iff B is a precondition of the truth or
falsity of A (Strawson 1952: 175 in Levinson 1983: 172).
Considering Russell’s point of view, he refers to assertions, i.e. his p.o.v.
inclines towards the concept of statement, rather than towards that of sentence. To
him, an assertion is a conjunction of conditions and negating it may imply negating
one of those conditions: negation has a wide and a narrow scope, i.e. it is
ambiguous – a wide scope negation means denying that an entity x exists; a narrow
scope negation only denies that the predicate applies to that entity. The nature of
this ambiguity remained to be discovered, even if Levinson disagrees with this
idea, mentioning that there is no proof of ambiguity regarding negation in natural
languages. Nevertheless, Russell’s merit consists in discussing what are now called
scope ambiguities. We illustrate Russell’s theory with his example:

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King of France is wise.
There is a king of France.
There is a unique king of France.
If there is a king of France, and he is unique, then he is wise.

Negating the basic sentence, means negating any of its three components.
Generalising,

The F is G is the conjunction of the following three assertions:

X has property F
There is no other entity y, y ≠ x, which to have property F.
X has property G.

So far, we referred to linguists who associated presuppositions to sentences

as structural and semantic units, or to assertions/statements as logical-semantic
entities. To other linguists, presupposition is something that the speaker assumes to
be the case prior to making an utterance. Speakers, not sentences, have
presuppositions, while, by contrast, an entailment is something that logically
follows from what is asserted in the uttterance (Yule 1996: 25-26). Yule’s example
is meant to show that entailments follow from the sentence, irrespective of the
speaker’s beliefs, be they right or wrong, whereas presupppositions can be false if
the speaker’s beliefs are wrong:

Mary’s brother bought three horses.

Presupp. Mary exists.
Mary has a brother.
Mary has only one brother.
He has a lot of money. (this presupposition can be false; some would
consider this an implication (a possible inference), not a presupposition)
Entail. Mary’s brother bought something.

4.2. Presuppositions as pragmatic inferences

Though presuppositions were first approached in literature from a

philosophical (and, implicitly, semantic) perspective, we continue with the
pragmatic approach of this class of inferences, in order to point out their
similarities with conversational implicatures, previously discussed in chapter 3.

‘Presuppositions are the assumed or shared knowledge which exists between

speaker and hearer. […] Presupposition and inference are part of the logical
machinery we use to interpret utterances. […] they need the raw material of
shared knowledge and cultural understanding on which to operate’. (Finch
2003: 156)

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 Presuppositions are best treated as conversational implicatures: this idea
was first stated by Karttunen & Peters (1975, 1979) and mentioned by Levinson
(1983: 131), who disagrees to it. But even Levinson agrees that both
presuppositions and implicatures are pragmatic inferences which cannot be thought
of as semantic (in the narrow sense), because of their sensitivity to contextual
factors. Those factors make such inferences relevant.
We further provide two examples illustrating how presuppositions are
calculated:
I went THERE. ≫ (presupposes I went somewhere. The focus is on the adverbial of
place, stressed by phonological means, which makes the presupposition relevant in
the context.)

I imagine you are/do. (depending on the context, the verb imagine means ‘making
a mental projection including a certain referent & action’ ≫ you arent’/don’t etc.
etc, or simply means ‘believe’, in which case, the verb refers to the speaker’s
commitment to a belief ≫ you really are/do etc.

Stalnaker (1974) pointed out that the speaker presupposes something about
the addressee and/or the context, i.e. takes it to be understood that presupposition is
true, since it is assumed, believed. There is a permanent acceptance by the
interlocutors regarding the informative presuppositions, assumed to be true; the
updating is not necessary previously to the sentence uttered.
According to Stalnaker, ‘a speaker pragmatically presupposes that p by
uttering an expression e in a certain context just in case:
a. the speaker assumes or believes that p;
b. the speaker assumes or believes that in a given context his
addressee assumes or believes that p;
c. and the speaker assumes or believes that in the context his
addressee will recognize that the speaker is making these assumptions or has those
beliefs;
d. or the speaker acts as if or pretends that all the above
conditions are true’.
Moreover, as already mentioned, the context includes the shared
knowledge of the interlocutors. Pragmatic presuppositions imply shared, common
ground information (Lakoff 1972) and any further inferences which are taken to be
understood by the speaker and the hearer to contribute to the relevance of an
utterance. Presuppositions must be true in a context if a sentence is felicitously
used. Making an assertion means assuming pragmatic presuppositions, i.e.
imposing requirements on the common ground. A sentence cannot be used to
update a common ground unless it has a determinate semantic value in all of the
worlds of the context set described by the common ground (Burton-Roberts 1989;
Gauker 1998).
It should be said that the common ground of a conversation at a particular
time is the set of propositions that the participants in that conversation at that time

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mutually assume to be taken for granted and not subject to (further) discussion. The
common ground describes a set of worlds, i.e. the so-called context set: those worlds
in which all propositions in the common ground are true, and the actual world is such
a world. Any assertion (for instance, I’m tired.) can be true or false in a certain
context (state of affairs).
Assertions are meant to update the common ground and are added to it, if
the sentences expressing them are accepted by the participants. In other words, the
context set is updated by removing the worlds in which this proposition is false and
by keeping the worlds in which the proposition is true (von Fintel 2000).

4.3. Linguistic triggers of presuppositions

Since it is generally acknowledged that presuppositions are derived from

the linguistic meaning of a sentence containing a lexical element acting as a
presupposition trigger, there are a series of such elements that we enumerate
below, following Levinson (1983: 181-182), who himself selected the triggers
from a comprehensive list of Karttunen:

- definite expressions (proper names, NP – definite article/ possessive adj.

(+ adjective) + noun):
The new neighbour has come. ≫ there is a new neighbour known to us
John is here. ≫ John exists
My car is broken. ≫ there is a car that belongs to me

- factive verbs (which presuppose the truth of the content of the subordinate clause
following them): regret, realize, know, be aware of, be odd, be proud/ glad/ sad/
indifferent that…:
I know what you did. ≫ You did something.
They will realize their mistake. ≫ They made a mistake.

- implicative verbs: manage, try, forget, happen, avoid etc:

We managed to come earlier. ≫ We tried to come earlier.
She forgot talking to us. ≫ She talked to us.

- change of state verbs: stop, begin, start, continue, cease, leave, enter, come, go,
arrive etc:
They stopped working. ≫ They worked.

- iteratives: again, another time, the x-th time, come back, restore, repeat etc:
The students repeated the question. ≫ They asked the question before.

- verbs of judging: accuse of, criticize for etc:

He was accused of theft. ≫ Something was stolen. Stealing is bad.

- temporal clauses and constructions; clauses are introduced by after, before, while,
since, as, whenever, whereas time adverbials are introduced by during etc:

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I’ve been waiting for you since you called. ≫ You called.
During the party, everybody talked to everybody. ≫ There was a party.

- cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions:

It is him who saved them. ≫ Somebody saved them.
What they want is freedom . ≫ They want something.

- implicit clefts with stressed constituents:

She was called by MARY. ≫ Somebody called her.

- comparisons and contrasts:

I am better than you. ≫ You are good.
HE called HER, not the other way round. ≫ Somebody called somebody else.

- non-restrictive relative clauses (they are not semantically closely linked to the
main clause, and are separated from it by a comma:
Her friend, who graduated in France, owns a restaurant in our town. ≫ Her
friend graduated in France.

- counter-factual conditionals:
If he had done it, we would have known. ≫ He didn’t do it.

- questions; yes/no questions presuppose an either... or… inference, whereas wh-

questions introduce the presupposition obtained by replacing the wh- word by
somebody/something/somewhere etc:

Did you finish? ≫ Either you did, or you didn’t.

When did you finish? ≫ You performed an action and you finished it (at a certain
moment in time).

As a conclusion and justification of this enumeration, it remains true that,

as Levinson pointed out, the list of presupposition triggers depends on one’s
definition of presupposition.

4.4. Types of presuppositions

The interdependence between the linguistic meaning of a sentence and the

situational context of use makes Yule (1996) refer to all presuppositions triggered
by linguistic expressions as potential presuppositions, actualized in concrete
situations of communication (Yule 1996: 27). The linguistic triggers were
enumerated in the previous subchapter, so, at this point, we discuss only the
corresponding type of presupposition introduced by each class of triggers.

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4.4.1. Existential presuppositions were analysed in the previous subchapters, due
to their importance in establishing the basis of any assertion; linguistically, such
presuppositions are triggered by structures containing Noun Phrases made up of
proper names, or of common nouns preceded by determiners, such as the definite
article or possessive adjectives. The speaker is assumed to be committed to the
existence of the entities named:
Mary finished her job. ≫ (presupposes) Mary exists.
My cat left. ≫ My cat exists.
The window is broken. ≫ There is a window in that room/ nearby.

4.4.2. Factive presuppositions are triggered by verbs expressing a high level of

certainty regarding the information stated in the clause following the main clause
verb. Such verbs are, thus, factive verbs, i.e. strong epistemic quantifiers,
according to Caton (1981), they are placed high on a scale measuring the degree of
propositional certainty expressed by the clause governed by them:

I’m aware that you are tired.

(to be aware presupposes the truth of the statement you are tired; that is
considered certain, a fact, therefore, the structure in the main clause – to be aware-
is a factive one)

It’s odd that they left.

(it’s odd represents the speaker’s qualifying of the event described in the
subordinate clause; it presupposes that the event happened, it was a fact)

We regret telling you that your reservation is no longer valid.

(the factive verb to regret presupposes performing the action of telling, and the
action of telling is determined by the state of affairs; therefore the verb regret takes
scope over the subordinate THAT Clause, too)

4.4.3. Lexical presuppositions are triggered by aspectual/change of state verbs.

The lexical form (i.e. the verb) and the asserted meaning presuppose that another
non-asserted meaning (another concept) is understood, by convention:
You stopped laughing. ≫ You laughed.
They started laughing. ≫ They did not do that previously.
She laughing again. ≫ She laughed before.

4.4.4. Structural presuppositions

Certain sentence structures conventionally and regularly presuppose that

part of the structure is already assumed to be true. The information is assumed to
be true by the speaker and to be accepted as such by the hearer. Temporal clauses
are such structures, since they provide the information implicitly assumed to be
true about the circumstances of the event described. Time coordinate is essential in
interpreting an utterance, as it was presented in the chapter 2 about deixis.

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They left before we returned. ≫ We returned.

The information is assumed to be true even if it can lead the interlocutor to believe
that they are necessarily true. Wh- questions assume the truth of the event referred
to in point of circumstances. Questions (during an interrogation, but not only) can
be asked so as to subtly manipulate the hearer to necessarily believe what the
speaker believes (see 6.5.2. Structural presuppositions and hearer’s manipulation):
Where were you when you heard the noise? ≫ You heard the noise. (it’s to my
interest to make you believe so)

4.4.5. Non-factive presuppositions are triggered by verbs which semantically

denote a state of affairs which is possible, but not actualized: dream, imagine etc.

I dreamed I was at the seaside. (obviously, at present I am not there)

I imagined the house was ready. (the house is not ready, otherwise,
I needn’t have imagined that)
Still, the verb imagine can be interpreted as a synonym of believe, in which case it
is no longer a non-factive presupposition trigger: I imagine you can’t do that.

4.4.6. Counterfactual presuppositions are a special type of non-factive

presuppositions, only that they cannot be actualized any more, since they refer to a
past moment and events that could have happened then, but didn’t. Conditional
sentences type 3 illustrate syntactically and semantically this kind of
presuppositions:
If I had known you were in trouble, I would have helped you. ≫ I didn’t know you
were in trouble.

4.5. The Projection Problem

Technically, the presupposition of a whole utterance is the sum of the

presuppositions of the components (Langendoen & Savin 1971). As a result of that,
presuppositions survive when part of a more complex sentence, it is a basic
expectation on the part of the users. But, sometimes, the meaning of some
presuppositions as ‘parts’ doesn’t survive to become the meaning of complex
sentences as ‘wholes’. This means the Projection Problem (Yule 1996: 30).
Some presuppositions don’t ‘project’ because they are weaker than
entailments (necessarily following from what is asserted). This is one reason of
presupposition cancellation. The power of entailment also cancels existential
presuppositions:

‘Jane was here, in your house.’ ‘I know nobody called Jane!’

‘Santa Claus is coming to town!’ ‘There is no Santa!’

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 All presuppositions should be treated as potential presuppositions,
actualized only if the speaker intends them to be recognized as such within
utterances.
Yule asserts that an existential presupposition introduced by a NP
containing a possessive adjective can be suspended, i.e. turned into a potential
presupposition, by adding the structure or something
(Yule 1996: 32) cf Rom. sau ceva de felul ăsta/ceva de genul (ăsta)/ sau cam aşa
ceva:
He is mending his car. ≫ He has a car. cf Rom. Îşi repară maşina. ≫ Are maşină.
He is mending his car or something. ≫ Maybe he has a car to mend or he does a
similar job. cf Rom. Îşi repară maşina sau ceva de genul ăsta. ≫ Poate are
maşină şi o repară sau face vreo muncă de acest fel.
Yule’s example is questionable, since the structure or something can refer
to the action of mending, not to the relation of possession.

Another reason of presupposition cancellation is the semantic nature of the

embedding predicate (main clause predicate). The first to discuss the matter was
Karttunen (1973, 1977). At this point, it would be useful to enumerate the types of
presupposition triggers which, depending on their linguistic meaning, behave as
operators with a variable potential to preserve presuppositions in case of
embedding. Levinson (1983) talks about presupposition ascending, i.e. the
presuppositions of the parts (of the subordinate clauses) become presuppositions of
the whole, i.e. of the entire utterance:
- holes (factive verbs, modals, aspectual verbs) that allow presupposition
ascending; presuppositions and entailments survive in different contexts:
I regret that you are mistaken. ≫ You are mistaken.
You must have seen Jane, (because) only she knew that information. ≫ Jane knew
the information.
They continued looking for a solution. ≫ They began looking for a solution.

Existential presuppositions certainly survive under negation, and in modal

contexts. A modal context means the presence of a grammatical or lexical marker
of modality. In case of epistemic modality (expressing various degrees of
certainty), modality markers are to be seen as quantifiers (Caton, 1981): strong-
know, must, be certain, be sure etc-, moderate – think, be likely etc- or weak- be
possible, maybe etc-, depending on the degree of certainty expressed:

The manager hired ten employees. ≫ there is a manager

The manager didn’t hire ten employees. ≫ there is a manager
It’s possible that the manager hired ten employees. ≫ there is a manager
He should have hired ten employees. ≫ there is a manager

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 - plugs are the opposite of holes, they may block the ascending of the
presupposition; declaratives and attitudinal verbs are included in this class: say,
declare, be convinced etc:
He said/ assured us that everything will be ok. ≫ Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.
I was convinced that his friend was right. ≫ Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t.

The presupposition introduced by the subordinate clause is turned into a belief of

the speaker; if we agree that presuppositions characterise the speaker, and not a
sentence, then the presupposition is his friend was right; if we define a
presupposition as deriving from a sentence, then, objectively, his friend was right
does not become a presupposition!

- filters are actually connectives that behave selectively in point of

presupposition preservation; such connectives are and, if, either... or..., but,
alternatively, suppose that. ‘Presuppositions may be filtered in specifiable contexts
when they arise from sentences that are part of compounds formed by the use of
the connectives or, if...then and others.’ (Levinson 1983: 198)

You’ll help her and you’ll pay for it.

The first sentence explicitly states what the second presupposes – so, of course, the
presupposition is preserved)

Either she will not go abroad, after all, or she will regret doing it.
To regret is a factual verb, technically presupposing she went abroad, but the
connective either…or… takes scope over the second sentence and the
presupposition is not preserved.

If she takes up Chinese, she will regret it. (the same explanation as before, if
cancels the presupposition triggered by regret – she took up Chinese)

But in a sentence of the type

If they were caught cheating again, they will be expelled. ≫ They were caught
cheating before.
the lexical element is stronger than the conditional structure; again takes scope
over if.
Nevertheless, we may enconter a presupposition suspension even in such a
case, but, generally, not at the level of an utterance; a verbal exchange is necessary:

‘If they were caught cheating again, they will be expelled.’ ‘If, indeed, they were
ever caught cheating before.’

‘In a sentence of the form if p then q, and perhaps, p & q, the presuppositions of
the parts will be inherited by the whole unless q presupposes r and p entails r.
The same is true for a structure of the type p or q: the presuppositions of the

159
 parts will be inherited by the whole unless q presupposes r and non-p entails r’
(Levinson 1983: 197).

For example, in the utterance

John is going to do linguistics or he is going to regret it.

the first sentence asserts what the second presupposes. A sentence can both entail
and presuppose the same proposition. Thus, a presupposition of the second clause
is filtered by entailing it. Presuppositions are not entailed by the context, but must
be consistent with it.

4.6. Tests for presuppositions

Such tests involve, actually, assessing presuppositions in point of their

preservation or non-preservation, in various linguistic and discourse contexts (or
including making assumptions contrary to them). Consequently, the presupposition
properties and their nature itself can be established.

Non-detachability (see also 4.5.1., 4.5.2., 4.5.4.)

Factive verbs, modals and time clauses illustrate presupposition

preservation in embedded clauses.
Nevertheless, there are counter-examples proving that the test is not
entirely reliable:
Presupp. Presupposition preservation Presupposition
trigger non-preservation
Factive I regret telling him. I regret to tell him…
verbs He won’t have to regret that…
He knows it’s too late. I don’t know that it’s so late .
Modal He should leave. ≫ he exists It should rain but you can never
know…
Time She left before I came. ≫ I She left before we could talk to
clause came. her.

‘[…] it can be reasonably claimed that the positive sentences constructed

with holes (factives, modals), in fact entail their alleged presuppositions, and
it is only in the negative, disjunctive or conditional contexts that the
uniquely presupposition survival behaviour manifests itself’. (Levinson
1983: 193)

Presuppositions are preserved under negation, in questions and

imperatives:

a. existential presupposition maintained in case of negation or exclamation:

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The manager didn’t hire ten employees. ≫ there is a manager cf The manager
hired ten employees. ≫ there is a manager
The manager hired ten employees! ≫ there is a manager

b. presupposition preserved in a question:

When did you finish? ≫ You finished.

Presuppositions are also preserved, at least, sometimes, if synonyms are

used, which partly contradicts their dependence on certain lexical triggers:

I regret telling /am sorry that I told/am unhappy about telling/etc him the truth. ≫
I told him the truth.

Defeasibility/Cancellability

This property cannot be analysed independently of its counterpart, non-

detachability, that is why the basic ideas regarding the topic have already been
stated. Technically, any presupposition can be cancelled, if there is a linguistic or
discourse context which causes that (there is an entailment which cancels the
presupposition). Potential presuppositions are cancelled if they conflict with
entailments, implicatures, or other presuppositions whose truth has already been
established in the context.
The discourse context can cancel the presupposition:

‘How is your brother?’ ‘Fine, but I have no brother.’ (this verbal exchange is
possible if the two interlocutors don’t know each other very well; the reply ‘Fine,
but I have no brother.’ could express the interlocutor’s intention to be polite, i.e.
not to contradict the speaker from the beginning, and, also, depending on the
context, to add a positive connotation of joyfulness and humour, or, on the
contrary, of irony. The tone and the intonation make the difference, in this case.)

The linguistic context can also cancel the presupposition:

He won’t have to regret that he left, because he didn’t leave at all.

Suspension

Presuppositions can be not only denied, but also suspended (Horn 1972),
and the most frequent and efficient way of doing it is by adding an if-clause, or a
coordinated sentence containing a weak epistemic quantifier:
We resume an example given under 4.6, pointing out that the last
conditional clause suspends the presupposition they were caught cheating before,
making it uncertain:

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‘If they were caught cheating again, they will be expelled.’ ‘If, indeed, they were
ever caught cheating before.’
‘Did he call any more?’ ‘No, and I doubt that he called in the first place.’/ ‘No,
and maybe he never did, in fact.’

The description of presuppositions in their basic features and theoretical

approaches would not be complete without making a contrastive analysis of them
and of conversational implicatures:

Characteristic Implicature Presupposition

Their nature Pragmatic in nature (types of inferences)
Semantic/pragmatic Felicitous/infelicitous True/false*
general feature
Connection to No connection to sentence More connected to
sentence meaning, but to sentence sentence meaning and/or
meaning/lexical usage speaker’s meaning; it is
item meaning conventionally
associated to the
meaning of some lexical
items

There may be lexical There are presupposition

elements triggering carriers/triggers
conventional implicatures
Type of source The speaker (source) gives The speaker and the
(internal–the it to be understood that… hearer take it to be
speaker/external) understood that…
Context- Variable They are context-bound,
dependency (generalised/standard deriving from
implicatures are context conventions about the
independent, while use of referring
particularized expressions
conversational implicatures
are context-bound
Properties Calculable Identifiable starting
from the hypothesis of
common ground
Non-detachable (presuppositions only in some
cases –under negation, in questions, imperatives,
embedding)
Cancellable
Indeterminate meaning for Suspension→
conversational implicatures uncertainty

*assumed to be true in a context, consistent with it (i.e. not contradicted by it)

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Conclusions

Whether presuppositions are considered as pertaining to sentences,

sentence uses or speakers, it remains true that they are pragmatic inferences to a
great extent linked to the linguistic structure of the basic sentence.
As a result of that, presuppositions are triggered by certain linguistic
carriers, whose list depends on how presuppositions are defined; the type of
linguistic carriers determines the type of presupposition inferred.
Presuppositions have a series of features which become tests, in order to
determine if the inference under discussion is a presupposition or not; such tests are
also a result of the relationship between presupposition carriers and presuppositions
and they include cancellability, non-detachability and, last but not least, suspension.
The contrastive description of conversational implicatures and
presuppositions may give an idea about the reason why there are controversies
regarding their illustrating a paradigmatic, i.e. taxonomic, type of relationship.

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5. SPEECH ACTS

5.1. Introduction
5.2. From performative utterances to SAs or vice versa? The
Performative Hypothesis
5.3. SA Levels. Speech Act Schema
5.3.1. SA Levels
5.3.2. Speech Act Schema (SAS)
5.4. The concept of Speech Act in communication
5.5. SA classification: from Austin to Searle
5.5.1. Direction of fit
5.5.2. Illocutionary point
5.5.3. Felicity (Happiness) Conditions
5.5.3.1. Felicity Conditions with Austin
5.5.3.2. Felicity Conditions with Searle
5.5.3.3. Counterarguments to Felicity Conditions frame
5.6. Indirect Speech Acts
Conclusions

5.1. Introduction

A basic model of verbal communication must involve the following

factors, shared by the interlocutors (Smith & Wilson 1990: 173):
- a body of linguistic knowledge (grammar);
- a body of non-linguistic knowledge and beliefs (an encyclopaedia);
- a set of inference rules (a logic).
Linguistic knowledge makes the interlocutors deduce a set of propositions
from the sentence uttered by purely linguistic (semantic) rules; they will be
entailments. Up to this point, formal syntax and ‘truth-functional’ semantics can
account for linguistic behaviour; but these domains study predominantly
declaratives, which express a logical-semantic content (a proposition) that can be
True/False. But language is more than sound and meaning; the shared non-linguistic
knowledge and the shared set of inference rules account for the propositions
deducible directly or indirectly from the sentence uttered (Smith & Wilson 1990:
174). Speech, i.e. uttering, but also the oral/written expression of it, i.e. the utterance,
mean action, conveying a certain message to the interlocutor. This is how the
concept of speech act appeared.

5.2. From performative verbs to performative utterances or vice versa? The

Performative Hypothesis

Austin (1962) made the distinction between constative utterances, which

describe an existing state of affairs and performative utterances, by which the

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speaker performs the act expressed by the verb, at the moment of uttering.
Performatives are self-referential, they have a token (i.e. occurrence)-reflexive
nature:

The door is open.

I promise to come back soon.

The first utterance is descriptive, it presents a state of affairs which is not

to be changed, whereas the second refers to an action performed by the speaker at
the very moment of uttering, the action of promising. This example contains
explicitly a verb whose meaning is compatible with expressing the action while
uttering that the speaker is doing it: promise. It is a performative verb, and the
utterance is an explicit performative utterance. The verb has to be in the first
person singular, Indicative Mood, Active Voice; such conditions of form are
obvious, since only so the speaker can perform the action he states. If the form of
the verb is changed, and the pronoun-subject accordingly, then the performative
property is annulled:

She promises/promised to be back soon.

I promised to be back soon.
(the pronoun change and the past tense form turn the utterance into a descriptive
one)

Therefore, the property of a verb to express a performative value is a function of its

sense, but also a function of its form. Of course, we shouldn’t forget that it is first
of all a function of its use: the utterance is performative only if the speaker utters it
in order to make a promise (see 5.5.3.).
As far as sense with its performative feature is concerned, it can change in
time, the performative dimension, inherent at first, disappearing in some cases; but
the change of the sense will be accompanied by an obligatory change of morpho-
syntactic behaviour:

(1) I bet you six pence that you will lose. (performative)
(2) I bet you still love her.(non-performative)

In (1), as a performative, the verb has an obligatory direct object, whereas,

in (2), as a non-performative, it becomes a strong epistemic quantifier, expressing a
high degree of certainty: ‘I’m sure you will lose’. Moreover, in the first sentence,
for the speaker to claim his money, in case the prediction is correct, the interlocutor
has to ‘take on’ the bet, by saying ‘You’re on’. This is performing a corresponding
SA expressing ‘uptake’. Otherwise, the parties will not have had the right
intentions and/or conduct.
In his book, Austin (1962) tried to classify verbs according to this property,
but such a list would be impossible to make, therefore, Searle (1989) preferred to

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discuss the case of performative utterances, and not of performative verbs. More so
as there were some reasons for that: a performative utterance needn’t necessarily
contain a performative verb: some utterances are what Austin called primary
performatives, not explicit ones, as in the example I promise to come back soon:

Come back! vs I order you to come back.

You may come! vs I allow you to come.
You have come! vs I rejoice at your coming!
Could you have come? vs I am asking if you could have come.

As a conclusion, Austin made a deductive analysis, starting from

performative utterances and getting into the deeper level of performative verbs
analysis. Searle actually focused on performative utterances, since the same
utterance can have various values in the context. Moreover, every utterance can be
turned into a clause containing an explicit performative which makes the
illocutionary force, i.e. the value of the utterance, explicit, as in the second
example of each of the pairs above.

I (hereby) Vperformative you [(that) U]

As mentioned at the beginning of this subchapter, the subject has to be in

the first person singular in order for the subject to have the semantic role of agent
performing the action expressed by the Main Clause verb; the verb must be in the
Present Tense Simple or Continuous, Active Voice.
Optionally, the discourse marker hereby, an adverb, can be added to
indicate the certainty that the utterance counts as the action denoted by the main
clause verb. Hereby is, thus, an interpersonal theme marker, i.e. it aims at
establishing a relationship with the interlocutor, a relationship which involves full
trust in the action expressed by the main clause verb. Such adverbs are attached
mostly to explicit performatives. Searle’s classification mainly rests on features of
representation, i.e. a semantic trait (Mey 1993: 132 cf Lyons 1977: 5), other
features rely on morpho-syntactic traits.
Exceptions to these remarks and cases are given by Levinson (1983). We
adapted them:

The company hereby undertakes to make the changes… (the subject is not in the
first person singular)
We regret that we are forced to hereby request you… (the adverb is not placed in
the main clause, the one containing the performative verb)
Nevertheless, explicit and primary performative versions might not be
equivalent:

Have a sandwich! (offer) vs. *I order you to have a sandwich. (impossible

pragmatically, unless the relationship is a vertical one and the speaker chooses this

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variant to force the hearer to perform the action to his own good; it could be uttered
like that by a parent to his child who is fussy about food.)

Could you do that? (request) vs. I’m asking you if you could do that. (the use of an
explicit performative could express the speaker’s irritation about the interlocutor’s
avoiding to give an answer).

The fact that any utterance could be turned into a performative one made
Gazdar (1979) and Levinson (1983) generalize and formulate this idea as The
Performative Hypothesis, which states that all sentences have a performative clause
as the highest clause in their deep structure. This highest clause can be deleted, and
the result is an implicit performative. The message to be conveyed (the
illocutionary force) is simply the performative clause, which is true by the simple
uttering of it. Truth/falsehood is not an issue.
As a result of that, Austin’s constatives become primary performatives
with the illocutionary force (i.e. the communicative goal) of a statement:

It’s raining. → I state/assert that it is raining.

The Extended Performative Hypothesis (Sadock 1974) refers to the fact that
the illocutionary force of an indirect speech act can be appropriately formalized in a
performative deep structure (Leech 1983: 193-194):

Can you close the window? means ‘I request you to close the window.’ (see 5.6.)

To quote Mey (1993: 133)

‘there is a certain asymmetry in the relationship between SAVs (speech act

verbs - our note) and speech acts (SAs) proper: first of all, not all SAs are
represented by a specific SAV, but may be represented by several
[…]second, and conversely, nor every SA has a corresponding, custom-
made SAV of its own’

I promise to help you (PF) ≠ I/He promised to help you./He promises to help you.
(non-PF)
The same can be said about the value of the adverb hereby which is not
always performative and does not render a sentence a performative value by its
simple presence. The examples are adapted from Mey:

I hereby declare the session open.

*I hereby adore you.
*I hereby declare that two and two is four.
I hereby declare my innocence.

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Mey’s conclusion is that, at best, the adverb hereby is an indicator of SAVs in
general, not of performativity.
Also, there are verbal expressions which deny what they are doing or do
what they are denying:

1. I don’t want to bother you, but could you help me with the luggage?
2. I hate to disturb you but I need to know…
3. I don’t want to scare you, but it’s too late to leave now all by yourself.

All the examples contain a first sentence with verbs performing the action of not
disturbing or presupposing it (ex. 2), which are then denied by the second sentence
of each example.
A SA can be performed without a SAV and, in some cases, the speaker
cannot even properly perform that very SA technically expressed by that verb if
he/she explicitly mentions it:

*I threaten you that I’ll come again.

Therefore, performativity is a property that is not specifically bound up

with SAVs; Mey refers to Verschuren’s opinion that we are dealing with a
performativity continuum, running all the way from ‘institutionalised’ SAVs such
as ‘to baptize’, to everyday verbs that occasionally can take on a performative
character’ (Mey 1993: 137).
Katz (1977) explained SA force in terms of what he called, following
Chomsky, grammatical competence and pragmatic performance; in other words,
contextual factors interact with the embodied illocutionary force to create speaker’s
meaning (Holtgraves 2002: 19). That is why Levinson thought there is no need for
a SA dimension of the illocutionary force, while Leech agrees with the following
idea:

‘given a set of conventional maxims, a literal interpretation of the utterance,

and a specification of its context of use, it is in principle possible to infer its
illocutionary force.’ (Miller &Johnson-Laird 1976: 636 in Leech 1983: 172)

The question to be asked is if the (rather) conventional character of those

inferences can be linked to Austin’s belief that IF is conventional by nature.

5.3. SA Levels. SA Schema

5.3.1. SA Levels

John Longshaw Austin, was the first who, in his lectures delivered at
Harvard in 1955, described the three levels of a performative utterance; the lectures
were put together in the volume How to Do Things with Words published in 1962.

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He was the adept of the study of ordinary language philosophy, considering the
distinctions and connections worth drawing by people throughout time.
To him, any SA has three levels:
a. the locutionary act, the act of saying;
b. the illocutionary act, the act performed in saying;
c. the perlocutionary act, the act performed by saying.

a. According to Austin, in its turn, the locution means:

-a phonetic act, that of uttering noises;
-a phatic act – uttering words made up of those noises, words used as pertaining to
a vocabulary and combined according to rules as pertaining to a grammar;
-a rhetic act – the word was used having sense and reference, i.e. meaning.
John Searle (1976) preferred to replace the term locution by proposition,
which included reference and predication, i.e. the use of a word to designate an
object in reality and to assign a property to it. He didn’t think it necessary to make
reference to phonetics, grammar or vocabulary, probably considering that these
levels were implicit, the user being a competent one.
In conclusion, a SA is proposition + illocutionary force (IF); a SA is
constructed according to some constitutive rules based on a set of necessary and
sufficient conditions which make it successful, i.e. felicitous.

b. By it we assess the function of what is said (the illocutionary force of an

utterance). The illocutionary force is what turns literal meaning into a SA. To
Searle,
SA meaning = propositional content + Illocutionary Act (illocutionary force –
IF)
This led to formulating the Principle of Expressibility: it is an analytical
truth about language that whatever can be meant can be said. IF contains the
complex communicative intention/goal, ‘the securing of the uptake’, or, according
to Grice, the speaker’s meaning. Two basic properties characterize an illocutionary
act: its communicative character and its conventional character. These two
properties made Bach & Harnich (1979) formulate The Communicative
Presumption: following the CP, there is a mutual belief that S (the speaker) states a
proposition p to H (the hearer) meaning q.

I’ll come can count as

-a promise: ‘The party won’t be the same without you.’ ‘I’ll come.’
- a threat, which can be subsumed to promises, since it is a promise that something
detrimental to the hearer (having the speaker as source) will happen: ‘If you don’t
behave yourself, I’ll come and get you.’
-an offer: ‘I have to leave and find someone to come and take aunt Mary home.’
‘I’ll come.’

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- an assertion, if everything has been arranged and the action has high chances to
happen: ‘Who comes to the meeting?’ ‘I’ll come.’

c. According to Austin, saying something produces consequences

(therefore the act of uttering functions as a cause), this being a frequent and normal
phenomenon. The consequences involve the thoughts, feelings and/or actions of
the audience, speaker, or other persons, and the speaker has some design, intention
or purpose of producing them (Austin 1962: 101 in Cobley (ed.) 2001: 235). Austin
referred to the illocutionary uptake meaning that the hearer is supposed to hear,
register and react to what has been said for a SA to ‘come off’:

A: ‘I promise I’ll come.’

B: ‘Ok, I trust you. (positive reaction)/ You always say that.(disbelief, negative
reaction)

A: ‘I’ll come.’
B: ‘Do you promise?’ (disbelief)/ Do you mean that? (idem)/ What do you mean
by that? (checking understanding or reacting negatively)/ Don’t bother.’ (refusal or
irony)

To Levinson, the perlocutionary aspect deals with ‘the bringing about of

effects on the audience by means of uttering the sentence, such effects being
special to the circumstances of the utterance’ (1983: 236).
Searle (1969) left perlocutionary effects largely undiscussed for two major
reasons: they are not part of the linguistic system and their characteristics cannot be
considered stable and predictable, but random.
Other pragmaticians tried to preserve the role of the notion because all
illocutionary act types must have certain effects typically associated to them,
though their emergence is not predictable; those effects can be regarded as
illocutionary points: assertives inform, questions elicit answers, promises generate
trust, directives make the hearer do something.
The same utterance can have different illocutionary force values; getting
the perlocutionary effect intended means getting the hearer recognize the
illocutionary force. This can be done by means of the Illocutionary Force
Identification Devices (IFID) and Felicity Conditions.
IFIDs include lexical items, such as PF verbs, adverbs etc, and also
grammatical means such as moods (indicative, imperative) and modal verbs; also,
paralinguistic means, intonation and stress can be indicators of the illocutionary
force of an utterance. Last, but not least, sentence type can be considered an IFID.
It shouldn’t be overlooked that the context is the disambiguating element
which helps the users decode the utterance appropriately (see also 5.4.)

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5.3.2. Speech Act Schema (SAS)

Speech Act Schema was formulated by Bach & Harnisch (1979) to account
for the way in which the hearer derives the IF of an utterance; it is an inferential
chain:
L1 S is uttering some expression e
L2 S meant such and such by e L1 –L3 locutionary act
L3 S is saying that so and so

S is doing such and such in uttering e L4 illocutionary act

The levels involved are partly based on the SA structure as described by

Austin: they comprise the formal level L1 + the semantic level – sense and
reference) making up the phatic act –L2, the literal meaning of the expression e
when contextualized – the rhetic act (L3) and the illocutionary level (L4).
The schema is based on semantic rules, but the IF of an utterance depends
on the speaker’s intentions and on the context of use, it can’t be just a function of
semantic rules. (see also 5.5.)

5.4. The concept of Speech Act in communication

A speech act was defined by Searle as the minimal and basic unit of
communication, based on constitutive (semantic) rules, leading to conventional
realizations. It is not the symbol, the word or the sentence, or, even the token
(occurrence) of those, which is the minimal unit of communication, but rather the
production or issuance by the speaker of the symbol, the word or the sentence in
accordance with the intentions of the interlocutors (Searle 1969: 16 in Mey 1993:
111).
In other words, generally, the speaker has the literal meaning as the basis in
producing a SA. Throughout time, some SAs have been conventionalized in point of
the correspondence structure-pragmatic meaning:

I promise to come back soon.

Some patterns have been automatically associated to a SA even when we talk

about indirect SAs, for example, questions used to make a request:

Can you open the window?

Mey agrees with Searle that it is the context which determines whether an
expression counts as a SA (Searle 1969: 52). Something counts as something only
within a specified set of rules. In producing a SA, the speaker must have appropriate
communicative intentions. This fundamental idea is to be found in the description of
the Felicity Conditions determining a successful SA. The essential role of the

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speaker, makes the study of SAs the study of langue, i.e. of language as used by the
members of the linguistic community, it is a functional study of language. Reference
is made to speaking, but in writing, the basic principles of successful communication
remain the same; speaking is a rule-governed form of behaviour. In discourse
analysis, the speech act is the minimal unit of the taxonomy:

encounter → phase → exchange → movement → speech act

The encounter can be said to represent the speech event, comprising the
replies and the circumstances of the event. Phases represent the stages of the verbal
interaction, the general term used for that being (verbal) exchange. It implies all the
replies and the properties of turn-taking as part of cooperativeness.
A speech act (SA) should be defined against the background of the speech
situation (SS) and speech event (SE).
The speech situation is the situation of communication, the context of
utterance, which comprises the scene (the cultural context) and the setting (the
physical context).
A speech event, part of a speech situation, is the functional dimension of
the verbal exchange and is made up of speech acts. The SE means the utterance,
plus the circumstances (including other utterances); the nature of a SE determines
the interpretation of an utterance as performing a certain SA (Yule 1996: 48). A SE
is an activity in which participants interact via language in some conventional way
to arrive at some outcome. Levinson quotes Bauman & Scherzer (1974) in
referring to the SE as a culturally recognized social activity in which language
plays a specific, and often rather specialised role (1983: 279). It can comprise a
central SA and other utterances ‘leading up and subsequently reacting to that
central action’ (Yule 1996: 57).
For instance a speech event involving complaining:

A: ‘This is the restaurant.’

B: ‘It looks strange. There are few people in here. The food smell is unpleasant.’
A: ‘Now, you’re exaggerating things.’
B: ‘I’m just tired and I don’t think I can put up with it.’
A: ‘Give it time.’
B: ‘I don’t like it.’

The central SA is represented by the last utterance, but all the others contribute to
the interpretation of the descriptive part, either negatively (the food smell is
unpleasant, it looks strange) or adopting a neutral attitude which conveys negative
implicatures (there are few people because it’s a bad restaurant). Initially, the
sentences making up the circumstances are indirectly expressing the message
intended (both complaint and reproach), for reasons of politeness, but B’s replies
are interpreted in relation to the speaker A’s intended message, as non-
acknowledgements, not as instances of cooperative behaviour.

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 Therefore, a speech act is the act of uttering something with a certain
intention and expecting a certain reaction from the interlocutor.
We give below some examples of corresponding speech situations, speech
events and speech acts:

SS SE SA
supermarket transaction offer/demand
conversation story assertion
wedding ceremony prayer invocation

5.5. SA classification: from Austin to Searle

A speech act classification is necessary because ‘we must ask, first of all,
when exercising our power of speech, what effects our speech acting has, or can
have, when performed in actual social, institutional or other surroundings.’ (Mey
1993: 148)

5.5.1. Direction of fit

Austin (1962) refers to the onus of match and the direction of fit. The onus
of match involves matching two categories, X and Y: X can be matched to Y, or Y
to X. ‘Fit’ expresses the fact that our words both match the world we live in, and
that they, at least potentially, though not always visibly, are able to change that
world. (Mey 1993: 131)
The concept of direction of fit is to be used when discussing the situations
of matching words to a state of affairs, or vice versa.
Within the philosophy of the mind, the opposed terms are mind vs. world
(mental states are to be changed in accordance with the state of the world), and
world to mind (the state of the world is to be changed in accordance with mental
states). The first opposition is more general, the second is narrower.
Beliefs, perceptions, hypotheses and fantasies are states with a mind-to-
world direction of fit, states that exist currently. In other words, if the mental state
is in some sense false or wrong, it should be changed in accordance with reality.
Intentions and desires are states with a world-to-mind direction of fit, states
that don’t exist currently, but can exist in the future. Therefore the existing state of
the world should be changed sometimes, to fit the states of the mind.

‘The term direction of fit refers to two ways in which attitudes can relate
propositions to the world. In cognitive attitudes [such as belief], a
proposition is grasped as patterned after the world; whereas in conative
attitudes[such as desire], the proposition is grasped as a pattern for the world
to follow. (Velleman 1992: 8)

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 Searle & Vanderveken (1985) assert that there are four possible directions
of fit in language:
- the word to world direction of fit: the propositional content of the
utterance fits an independently existing state of affairs in the world: assertions
illustrate that: They are tired.
- the world to word direction of fit: the world must change to match the
propositional content of the utterance; it is a possible state of affairs which is
envisaged; linguistically the conative attitudes are expressed by using modals, and
attitudinal verbs: You’d better sell the house! I want to sell it! Will you sell it?
- the double direction of fit: the world is thereby altered to fit the
propositional content by representing the world as being thus altered; Searle calls
such sentences declarations: I declare you man and wife. I declare the meeting
open. We find the defendant not guilty.
An existing state of affairs, including the necessary circumstances, cause the
speaker to utter a certain sentence intended to change that state of affairs (word to
world direction of fit) and the state of affairs is changed by the simple uttering of
those particular words (world to word direction of fit).
- the null or empty direction of fit: there is no question of achieving
success of fit between the propositional content and the world, because the success
is presupposed by the utterance itself, which reflects the speakers’ emotional
reaction to something real, to a fact: I’m happy that they came.
We summarize the above considerations in a table; it contains the basic
types of illocutionary acts:

SA type Fit direction Message Examples

intended
Declarations Words change S causes x I pronounce you
the world man and wife.
Representatives/ Words are made S believes x I think you are
assertions to fit the world right.

Expressives Words are made S feels x I’m impressed!

to fit the world
Directives The world is S wants x Close the window!
made to fit the
words
Commissives The world is S intends x I promise to do
made to fit the that.
words

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5.5.2. Illocutionary point

Searle (1979) introduces the concept of illocutionary point. Illocutionary

point is a parameter to distinguish classes of IAs:

SA type Illocutionary point

Declaratives To bring something about in the world

I declare the session open.

Assertives To represent a state of affairs

It’s raining.

Expressives Express a psychological state

I feel sad.

Directives Make the hearer do something

Come here!

Commissives The speaker commits himself to do something

I will come.

Interactants (i.e. interlocutors) need not recognize the illocutionary point of

each utterance. People are viewed as rational agents possessing goals and plans
designed to achieve those goals. Mutual awareness of this fact prompts interactants
to attempt to recognize each other’s plans and goals, as well as possible obstacles
to those goals (Cohen & Levesque 1990 in Holtgraves 2002: 20). Recognition
involves general plans of action designed to achieve particular goals and the
discrete illocutionary forces.
There are SAs with the same illocutionary point, among which the
interlocutors make distinctions: the criteria involved to do that are:
-felicity conditions (see 5.5.3.);
-the degree of strength (i.e. the sincerity condition of the SA –it refers to
the speaker’s belief /desire strength) and the differences in the specific means used
for achieving a particular illocutionary point: command/require/beg. (Holtgraves
2002: 15).
A small set of conditions, including ability and desire on the part of the
speaker, determine the illocutionary force recognition: implicit performative verbs
are activated during comprehension and are part of the comprehender’s
representation of the remark (Holgraves & Asheley 2001 in Holtgraves 2002: 19).

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5.5.3. Felicity (Happiness) Conditions

Descriptive utterances are true or false, performatives are felicitous or

infelicitous. Felicity Conditions are expected or appropriate circumstances which
ensure that the performance of a SA is recognized as intended.

5.5.3.1. Felicity Conditions with Austin

Considering conventional procedures, Austin (1962) introduced three types

of felicity (happiness) conditions meant to make a SA successful. The first type
concerns the elements involved in the procedure, the second refers to the manner of
executing the procedure and the third concerns the sincere intention of the
participants to perform the act:
(A.1) There must be an accepted conventional procedure having a certain
conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by
certain persons in certain circumstances, and further
(A.2) the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate
for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked.
(B.1) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and
(B.2) completely.
(C.1) Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain
thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the
part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure
must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to
conduct themselves, and further
(C.2) must actually so conduct themselves subsequently.

Therefore, normally, within a conventional speech event, there is a

conventional procedure which implies certain participants, certain words to be
uttered and certain circumstances characterizing the speech event. Locutionary acts
without illocutionary force occur when the speaker lacks the intention to perform
the respective illocution, if the speaker or hearer are not of the right kind, or other
circumstances do not meet the conventions of the act.
If these conditions are fulfilled, then the SA has certain intended effects; if
not, it becomes a misinvocation:

e.g. during a marriage ceremony, the priest is not a person who has the right to
serve or one of the future spouses is already married; the baptizing ceremony of a
ship does not take place in an office or by uttering the sentence ‘Your name is X’;
during a trial a defendant is not officially declared guilty or not guilty by his
neighbours.

Generally, by convention, the procedure must be executed by all

participants completely and correctly, otherwise the act is a misexecution. Both
misinvocation and misexecution lead to a void act.

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 Last, but not least, the persons must have the designed feelings and
thoughts, otherwise the act is insincere, which makes it unfelicitous, but not void.
An exception, referred to by Mey (1993: 114-115), is the intention of a spouse-to-
be, if the marriage is to take place according to the rules of the Catholic Church.
The intention (expressed or not before or during the ceremony) that includes the
desire not to consummate the marriage or not to have kids, or the withholding of
one’s intention regarding the marriage counts as a speech act which makes the
marriage null and void. Another example of an insincere act is a false promise that
the speaker does not intend to keep.

5.5.3.2. Felicity Conditions with Searle

For a SA to happen ‘felicitously’ or ‘happily’, and to prevent it from

‘misfiring’ there have been proposed some necessary and sufficient conditions.
SAS can be classified according to their basic properties resulting from these
conditions, which are also tests of their validity, i.e. of success, since it is not a
question of them being true /false.
In analyzing the SA of promising, Searle considered two basic questions,
valid for any SA and cross-linguistically:
1. What conditions can be formulated for a SA to count as a promise?
2. What rules govern a successful use of this SA?
We took the liberty of adapting Searle’s conditions for promises so as to
account for any SA:

C1 Normal conditions must obtain for input and output (no jokes, no
acting, linguistic competence, no disabilities)
C2 The SA must have a content –the propositional content
C3 At the moment of uttering, the content must refer to a future, possible
action of the speaker
C4 What is performed refers to an action to the advantage of the hearer
C5 The content of the utterance must not be something which will happen
anyway
C6 The sincerity of the speaker in carrying out the act
C7 The speaker intends to put himself under the obligation of carrying out
the promised act (recognition of an obligation to perform the action of carrying out
the act)
C8 The uttering of the words making up the sentence functioning as a SA
determines the hearer’s understanding of it as a SA. This is explained by the fact
that the circumstances of uttering must be conventionally right: ‘the speaker
assumes that the semantic rules which determine the meaning of the expression
uttered are such that the utterance counts as the undertaking of an obligation
(Searle 1969: 61)
C9 The sentence is the one which by the semantic rules of language is used
to make that SA.

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 It is obvious that:
C4 and C5 are the preparatory conditions involving the participants, the
words chosen and the appropriate circumstances;
C6 is the sincerity condition
C7 is the essential condition, involving the commitment of the subject
C1-C3 are the general conditions mostly referring to the propositional
content of the utterance

These conditions made Searle formulate a series of rules characterizing the act of
promising, since Searle analysed this type of SA, but which can be generalized.
Searle’s intention was to link the performative verbs to felicity conditions
systematically. He proposes the following types of rule: propositional content
rules, preparatory rules, sincerity rules and the essential rule. The propositional
content rules concern the fact that many acts seem to be about a proposition that
something has happened (thanking, reproaching etc) or will happen in the future
(promising , ordering etc). Preparatory conditions include all the circumstances
necessary for the act to be performed. The sincerity rule specifies to which respect
the speaker (and, maybe, the hearer, too) are required to be sincere. The essential
rule is in line with Austin’s observation that an utterance of a certain type, under
the appropriate circumstances, counts as a certain SA for the members of the
language community, as a result of a convention.

R1 The act is to be uttered only in the context of a sentence x and it

predicates some future act of the speaker.
R2 The uttering is determined by the preference of the hearer for the
speaker to do the act.
R3 The act is performed only if the action will not take place in the natural
course of events.
R4 The speaker must intend to act.
R5 Uttering counts as the undertaking of an obligation to do the action.

Semantic rules determine what a sentence may mean, not what it must
mean. The IF is determined in context. Most conditions enumerated by Searle can
be criticized as being irrelevant because the speaker has no control on them: there
can’t really be made a differentiation (by the hearer) between a possible action and
one which will be definitely performed by the speaker. The users should be able to
make the distinction between a real performative, on the one hand, and polite,
conventional, ritual expressions, on the other. It is a difficult task, and, ultimately,
we should rely on the psychological profile of the speaker, on his/her relationship
with the interlocutor, and on a whole series of contextual factors (time, place,
obstacles in performing the act etc):

‘Don’t postpone your visiting us, again! ‘I promise.’

‘I declare open the plenary session of the 15-th Congress of….’ (verbs expressing a
verdict, a decision are ambiguous as to their performativity)

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I welcome you. (welcome is described as a semi-descriptive verb, unlike the
structure to bid welcome, considered performative)

Even a performative verb such as promise can be used as a non-

performative if it refers to a habitual action. We adapted an example from
Levinson (1983: 133):

‘How do I make you convince me to throw all these parties?’ ‘I [always] promise
to come./ [Each time] I promise to come.’

Generally, criticisms of Felicity Conditions are linked to the performativity of

utterances, therefore the arguments are somehow common to those used in discussing
performativity and PF verbs (see 5.3. and 5.4.)

5.5.3.3. Counterarguments to Felicity Conditions frame

Leech (1983: 171-172) believes that it is unnecessary for pragmatics to

include special speech act rules, such as those stipulated by Searle: essential
conditions, preparatory conditions and sincerity conditions of illocutions do not
have to be independently stated, they can be arrived at just corroborating the sense
of the utterance and conversational maxims.
We present some counterarguments to felicity conditions frame:
-felicity conditions may characterize non-performative examples, too:

Jane’s brother is brown-haired.

When Jane has no brother, it is neither true, nor false, but void.

- a non-performative utterance can be insincere, including the case when

insincerity is determined by the speaker’s desire to be polite, the result being the
‘white lies’ meant to protect the face of the hearer:

Jane’s dress, the one that you bought for her, suits her fine. (when the speaker
knows that the dress looks awful on Jane)

-truth/falseness considerations may affect performatives, too:

I warn you that the box will fall off that wardrobe.
If the speaker does not appreciate distances well, his warning can prove false if the
box does not fall off; we don’t think that it is relevant that the misleading effect is
unintentional (the speaker is sincere in expressing the warning, but it’s a false
warning, unless reality proves the speaker to be right, which is not the case.) The
issue here is that the truth or falseness concerning the proposition referred to by the
SA is not in contradiction with the speaker’s sincerity in performing the SA.
Felicity Conditions are a consequence of applying semantic concepts (the
propositional aspect of meaning, or the literal meaning) in defining both

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descriptive and PF uses. The felicity conditions of various SAs are part of the
meaning of the PF verbs. The IF is semantic in the truth-conditional sense and is
fully specified by the meaning of the PF clause; there appear problems with
assertions and declaratives, though.
PF utterance theory is sustained by syntactic and semantic reasons, but has
its flaws.

5.6. Indirect Speech Acts (ISAs)

The notion of ISA makes sense only if one subscribes to the notion of
literal force, i.e. to the view that IF is built into sentence form (Mey 1993: 263).
Literal force will be a consequence of Performative Hypothesis (PH).
An indirect illocution is a case of a sentence ‘masquerading’ as a sentence
of a different type (Austin 1962). Following this line of reasoning, a sentence has a
literal force determined by semantic rules and an inferred indirect force.
Continuing in Austin’s line, for Searle, indirect SAs have a double
illocutionary force. For instance in the example Can you do that? the primary
illocutionary act is that of request, it is what the utterance stands for, and the
secondary illocutionary act, functioning as prep condition for the primary one, is
that of question.
According to Grice, the former is the non-natural meaning and the latter
the natural meaning. The pre-condition is: the hearer can perform the action. The
content condition is: reference is made to a future action of the hearer. Asking
about preconditions doesn’t come as a direct request, but makes the hearer react as
if that had happened: the variant chosen is more tactful, more polite and saves the
face of both interlocutors.
(see also 6.6. Politeness and (indirect) speech acts)

Leech (1983: 195) disagrees with Austin, analyzing the latter’s examples
and considering that:
- representing the indirect force by means of a PF verb is a simplification which
does not account for the complexity and subtlety of human communication;
- indirect IF is a matter of degree:

Can you help me?

Can you help me, please?
Would you mind closing the window?
Close the window, would you?
Can’t you close the window?

- the relationship sense-force should be considered from a functional perspective;

- direct and indirect force are not an illustration of grammatical ambiguity, but a
matter of two coexisting meanings.
Levinson claims that most usages are indirect (Levinson 1983: 264) and
tries to analyse critically the solutions proposed. ISAs often have syntactic or, at

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least, distributional reflexes associated not only to their surface-sentence-type, but
also with their indirect or effective IF.
The distribution of please, obviously, I believe, etc proves that they are
restricted to utterances sharing the IF of an assertion, no matter the sentence type:

I want you to leave, please.

Can you, please, leave?
Please, leave!
In the three examples above, the assertion is I want you to leave; that is the IF
indirectly conveyed in the form of an interrogation or of an imperative sentence.

May I tell you that I believe that you’re wrong? (tell is a PF verb, but, in this case,
it is used in an interrogative main clause containing a modal expressing permission
to help expressing an indirect IF; the assertion which represents the IF of the
utterance is I believe that you’re wrong; it appears as a subordinate clause. That is
the proposition, i.e. the logical semantic content that the SA refers to. These
comments remain true for the following example:

Let me tell you that I believe you’re wrong.

The modifier in the last two examples (the parenthetical clause I believe) seems
restricted, according to Levinson, to utterances that have the force of an assertion,
whatever the sentence type of the linguistic expression that performs the assertion.
The sentence types in this case were interrogative and, respectively, imperative.
Two basic kinds of theories have been proposed ‘to rescue Literal Force
Hypothesis’ (postulating the existence of the literal force of a sentence, based on its
literal meaning): the idiom theory and the inference theory (Levinson 1983: 268).
For example, the former implies that a structure of the type Can you VP? is a
standard format for indirect requests and shall be treated as an idiom, i.e. as a
whole, not analysed into components. According to this theory, there would result
an infinite list of such idioms, and, also, structures can be ambiguous, or both
readings could be possible and the hearer might not know which to choose:

‘Can you fetch me a glass of water?’ ‘Yes, I can. (Here you are.)’

The inference theory states that the indirect illocutionary force should be
inferred whenever the literal meaning is blocked by the context: Can you fetch me
a glass of water? (the speaker is aware that the hearer is physically apt to fetch the
water, that there is running water in that place, there are glasses, the hearer has the
linguistic competence to understand the words, etc).
Obviously, the conclusion is that there is a pragmatic conditioning of some
syntactic or distributional processes. Levinson argues that:

‘Illocutionary force belongs firmly in the realm of action and the appropriate
techniques for analysis are therefore to be found in the theory of action, and

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 not in the theory of meaning, when that is narrowly construed in terms of
truth-conditional semantics.’ (Levinson 1983: 246)

An argument in favour of the pragmatic approach of SAs is a quotation from

Mey: ‘if we want to be secure in our expectations, we should concentrate on the people
who promise, than on what they say’ (Mey 1993: 115).
Interlocutors need not recognize the illocutionary point of each utterance,
but each other’s plans and goals, possible obstacles to those goals (Cohen &
Levesque 1990 in Holtgraves 2002: 20) and the discrete illocutionary forces. (see
also 5.5.2.)
Levinson (1983: 274-275) refers to conversational postulates and to the
process of mapping SA force onto sentences in context. For example, to state or
question a Felicity Condition on a SA where the Literal Force of such a statement
or question is blocked by context counts as performing that SA:

I want more ice-cream. (this is a speaker-based felicity condition, the literal force
is not to inform in the speaker’s wish, it is not an answer to the question ‘What
would you like to have in life?’; it is a condition of making a request, a request
implies that the speaker desires the required thing.)

Can you pass me the ice-cream? (it is a hearer-based Felicity Condition; the ability
of the hearer is implicit, it is a condition, not the topic of a genuine question; see
the example Can you fetch me a glass of water? for similarities)

IF can be viewed as entirely pragmatic and has no direct and simple

correlation with sentence-form and sentence-meaning: there are no isolable
necessary and sufficient conditions for questionhood, for instance, and explicit
performatives can be assigned truth-conditions that are as general as is consistent
with their actual use.

Conclusions

A SA is generally acknowledged by linguists as the basic minimal unit of

analysis in pragmatics, and its three levels (locutionary, illocutionary,
perlocutionary), are the starting point in discussing the link sentence form -
sentence meaning - sentence IF. The form of the sentence and its literal meaning
are realities from which the IF can be derived, according to a series of Felicity
Conditions, or the IF is to be distinguished from the literal meaning and linked to
the speaker’s competence and intentions and to the entire context. The strategies of
verbalizing a SA vary not only from culture to culture, but also from user to user,
changing conventional patterns being a proof in this respect.

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6. POLITENESS

6.1. The concept of politeness

6.1.1. Politeness − a social phenomenon
6.1.2. The conversational maxim view on politeness
6.1.3. The face-saving view
6.2. Politeness ‘in its own right’. Politeness Principle and its maxims
6.3. Politeness and deixis
6.3.1. Person deixis markers and politeness
6.3.2. Social deixis and politeness
6.4. Politeness and conversational implicatures
6.5. Politeness and presuppositions
6.5.1. The problem of negative ambiguity
6.5.2. Structural presuppositions and hearer’s manipulation
6.6. Politeness and (indirect) speech acts
Conclusions

6.1. The concept of politeness

6.1.1. Politeness − a social phenomenon

Politeness can be seen as a social phenomenon based on the social values

of a particular community. This corresponds to the social norm view on politeness,
which reflects the historical understanding of the phenomenon; that is what is
called ‘first-order politeness’, different from ‘second-order politeness’ which is a
theoretical construct: ‘This normative view considers politeness to be associated
with speech styles, whereby a higher degree of formality implies greater
politeness’ (Fraser 1990: 221).
Social values determine the social status of the participants in the verbal
exchange, better said, their perception and assigned value. In its turn, social status
shapes the influence (established prior to interaction) that external factors, such as
age and power, have on the verbal exchange. Other factors, such as amount of
imposition, or friendliness degree, are often negotiated during an interaction (Yule
1996: 59). Both types of factors determine what we say and how we interpret
utterances.
In spite of the importance of the concept of social values, Mey draws
attention on the fact that language (and, we would add, the language user, by
extension) is not supposed to be virtuous in the moral sense (Mey 1993: 67).
Certain forms of behaviour are preferred and rewarded, others are subject to
sanction, but these are not moral issues (Mey 1993: 74-75). Nevertheless, moral
values shape communicative behavior and, consequently, the level of politeness.

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The social values talked about are not rigid moral values, but the complex result of
the type of culture characterizing a community, itself subject to changes in time.
Social values are, to a large extent, cultural values, even if the moral criterion
might be the cause of some cross-cultural values. At least in some respects, cultures
can be seen as a macroscopic family-like structure, its members behaving much like
members of a family, and cultural values can be understood like points on a
continuum, in the sense that the degree of importance of a common value and the
(linguistic) behaviour it triggers vary.
Nevertheless, each culture has some systematic and repetitive
characteristics which make up a cultural pattern, reflecting the conditions that
contribute to the perception, way of thinking and lifestyle of a community.
Depending on the type of culture, several factors shape the social values
and, thus, also the profile of a verbal exchange. Hofstede (1980) enumerated four
such factors, organized as antonymic pairs:
- individualism vs. collectivism: concern for individual rights vs. concern
for duty, for what is owned to the group; collectivism triggers indirectness,
individualism triggers directness and explicitness (see Hall’s criterion below);
- power distance: there may be a preference for unequally distributed
power (tendency for lower power distance or for large power distance); in large
power distance cultures, it is believed that people are not equal in this world and
that social hierarchy is prevalent. In these countries’ organizations and institutions
there is a greater centralization of power, a lot of importance being placed on status
and ranks. At the other pole, in small power distance cultures people believe they
are close to power and should have access to that power. Hierarchy is a convention
implying inequality of roles, but subordinates consider superiors to be the same
kind of people as they are, and vice versa;
- uncertainty avoidance: it means avoidance of the nervousness at
unstructured, unclear and unpredictable situations, situations which tend to be
avoided by maintaining strict codes of behaviour and a belief in absolute truths.
Low uncertainty avoidance countries accept uncertainty in life and tolerate the
unusual; members of these cultures are more willing to take risks, are more
flexible, more relaxed and less tense;
-masculinity vs. femininity; male oriented traits are ambition, achievement,
acquisition of money; in a masculine society, men are taught to be domineering,
ambitious and assertive. Cultures that value feminity tend toward a feminine world
view by stressing caring.
To these criteria, Hall (1959) adds the role of the context (including gestures,
silence, and the use of space): there are high context cultures and low context
cultures. For high context cultures, meaning does not need to be conveyed by words.
High context culture members are more reliant on and tuned in to non verbal
communication. Status (age, sex, education, family background, title, affiliations)
and an individual’s friends and associates also add meaning to what is said. In low
context cultures most of the information is contained in the verbal message and very
little is embedded in the context or in the participants; communication style tends to
be as direct and explicit as possible.

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 Three other criteria cannot be overlooked:
- formality vs. informality; formality is manifested at the level of verbal
communication, by using titles, honorifics; on the other hand, informality concerns
postures, way of dressing, and, most of all, a verbal style in accordance with non-
verbal communication: avoidance of the use of titles and honorifics and preference
for idiomatic, colloquial speech, first name address, informal greetings;
- assertiveness has to do with masculine societies: being assertive, i.e.
expressing oneself by presenting events as factual, certain, or almost, gives the
impression of control, of competence, of safety. Politeness, on the other hand,
makes people be more tentative and use non-assertive markers (moods, lexical
items) in order to win the interlocutor’s benevolence and willingness to act in the
direction intended by the speaker:

It is best if you do your homework now! cf It would be maybe better if you thought
to do your homework now rather than later.

-interpersonal harmony has to do with the equilibrium to be maintained

throughout a conversation, by permanently negotiating meaning and attitudes,
beliefs, impressions, etc.
The Anglo-Saxon society tends to be rather individualist, assertive,
masculine, informal - except for official events -, favouring small power distance,
at least apparently, and showing low uncertainty avoidance. The British society
tends to behave more like most European cultures, emphasizing more formality
and power distance.
The Romanian society, on the other hand, is rather a mixture of
individualism and collectivism, is masculine, and favours high power distance,
high uncertainty avoidance and formality.
To summarize, from this perspective, politeness is a concept comprising a
set of principles regulating the communicative behaviour in a certain cultural
space.

6.1.2. The conversational maxim view on politeness

It is based on the work of Grice (1975), on his foundation of The

Cooperative Principle (CP) and on Leech’s formulation of the Principle of
Politeness (PP).
Some politeness phenomena have been considered indirectly by Grice,
whose Cooperative Principle and maxims of conversation were formulated on the
assumption that the main purpose of conversation is ‘the effective exchange of
information’ (Grice 1989: 28). CP may not be directly related to politeness but its
formulation has constituted a basis of reference on which other principles, such as
The Politeness Principle and its maxims, have been stated.
Leech adopts Grice’s construct of conversational principles and elaborates
a thorough analysis of politeness in terms of principles and maxims, seeing
politeness as a regulating factor in interaction, and The Politeness Principle (PP) as

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a necessary complement to the CP. His PP is constructed in a very similar format
to the CP and is analysed in terms of maxims: the Tact Maxim, the Generosity
Maxim, the Approbation Maxim, the Modesty Maxim, the Agreement Maxim, the
Sympathy Maxim. Leech’s maxims are related to the notions of cost and benefit
and each of them is stated as a pair of submaxims (see 6.2.). Politeness appears as
the key pragmatic phenomenon for indirectness in order to obtain the
perlocutionary effect intended. That would be one of the reasons why people
deviate from the Cooperation Principle. Leech (1983) considers that we should
minimize the effects of impolite statements (negative politeness) and maximize the
politeness of polite illocutions (positive politeness), bearing in mind the intentions
that accompany all conversations (Leech 1983: 80).
Moreover, the PP and the CP can conflict. If the speaker sacrifices the PP in
favour of the CP, he will be putting at risk the maintenance of ‘the social
equilibrium and the friendly relations which enable us to assume that our
interlocutors are being cooperative in the first place’ (Leech 1983: 82). But Mey
considered that ‘it is not at all plausible that PP is able or ever needed to rescue CP;
CP may not even need to be rescued’ (Mey 1993:70).
Mey also criticizes Levinson in point of the general rationality of
cooperation between humans as a general, inviolable and indisputable maxim;
also, cultures can be very different with respect to cooperative behaviour, and,
last, but not least, certain forms of behavior are preferred, or even rewarded,
others, subject to sanctions, beyond moral principles (Mey 1993: 74-75). (see also
6.1.1.)
Another criticism (Wierzbicka 1985) is that studies on English should not
be considered as proving universal principles of politeness. Features of English,
which have been claimed to be due to universal principles of politeness, are shown to
be language-specific and culture-specific. Linguistic differences are associated with
cultural differences such as spontaneity, directness, intimacy and affection vs.
indirectness, distance, tolerance and anti-dogmaticism.

6.1.3. The face-saving view

It was proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) and has been, up to now,
the most influential politeness model. It converges in many ways with the
conversational-contract view presented by Fraser (1990):

‘Upon entering a conversation, each party brings an understanding of some

initial set of rights and obligations that will determine, at least for the
preliminary stages, what the participants can expect from the other(s).
During the course of time, or because of a change in the context, the two
parties may readjust what rights and what obligations they hold towards each
other’. (Fraser 1990: 232)

Returning to the face-saving view, considering the concept of face - ‘public

self image’, politeness comprises the means used to show awareness of another

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person’s face that is to be described in relation to social distance/closeness (Brown
& Levinson 1978). Respect and deference are opposed to friendliness, camaraderie
and solidarity. Relative social distance is connected to face wants. As a result of
that, within everyday social interaction, the speaker may say something which
preserves his face and/or that of the interlocutor, or something that threatens it. (see
also 2.5.; 6.3.2.)

6.2. Politeness ‘in its own right’. Politeness Principle and its maxims

Leech (1983) stated the Politeness Principle as having two submaxims:

Minimize the expressions of impolite beliefs.
Maximize the expression of polite belief.
The principle was rather general, cross-cultural, and meant to complement
the Cooperative Principle. The PP is supposed to operate on the same level as, and
to collaborate with, the CP. Politeness maxims are neither theoretically, nor
practically, on the same level as the CP, but can be subsumed to it, since they
ensure cooperation, the basis of conversation. (Mey 1993: 70)
Its component maxims give a better view of what Leech (1983) intended to
explain in this way:

The Tact Maxim

The Tact Maxim (TM) consists of (a) Minimize cost to other (b)
Maximize benefit to other.
This maxim is applicable in impositives (e.g. ordering, requesting,
commanding, advising, recommending) and commissives (promising, vowing,
offering).
The first aspect to be considered is the size of imposition to the hearer, and
that can be reduced by using minimizers such as just, a second, a bit of, as in these
examples:

Wait a second!
We’ve got a bit of a problem here.
I think you are a little unfair.

Imposing less can mean offering optionality. Allowing options or, better
said, giving the appearance of allowing options is a measure of politeness.
Otherwise, the interlocutor would feel under pressure and might react contrary to
the speaker’s expectations:

Please, teacher, could you check my spelling mistakes?

The third aspect of the Tact Maxim is the cost/benefit scale: if something
is perceived as being to the hearer’s benefit, it can be expressed politely without
employing indirectness:

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Have a beer! cf May I offer you a beer? or I authorize you to order a beer which
will be paid by me.

The next example combines various linguistic devices in order to observe

the tact maxim:

You know, I really do think you ought to move out. It’s costing you too much
money to keep this apartment.

The speaker minimizes the cost to the addressee by using two discourse markers,
meant to diminish the imposition on the interlocutor: one appeals to solidarity
(you know) and establishes a common ground: the speaker tries to convince the
interlocutor that his opinion is, in fact, similar to the way the interlocutor thinks.
The formal modal verb (ought) gives options to the interlocutor and stresses the
idea of necessity, not of subjective imposition; the modifying hedge (really) and
the attitudinal predicate (think) belong to the epistemic domain and are correlated
to the explanation explicitly uttered by using an assertive utterance: the speaker
maximizes the benefit to the addressee in the second part of the turn by indicating
that (s)he could save a lot of money by moving out.

The Generosity Maxim

The same application characterizes the Generosity Maxim (GM) which

consists of submaxim (a) Minimize benefit to self and submaxim (b) Maximize
cost to self.
Leech points out that some cultures attach more importance to the
Generosity Maxim than others, suggesting that expressing generosity linguistically
is particularly important in Mediterranean cultures.
This maxim prevails over the indirect illocutionary value considered more
polite in invitations; this justifies the use of the imperatives in the examples
below:

You must come and spend the night with us if your house is being repaired.
Help yourself with some cakes.

or when the speaker gives a piece of advice:

It’s none of my business, really, but you’d better change the reservations. That
restaurant is by no means good.

In the first part of the utterance, the speaker reduces his benefit by using a
parenthetical clause, this strategy being stressed by the use of the hedge really. His
authority, i.e. his benefits, are again diminished by the use of a hypothetical form

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’d better; the objective reasons are presented explicitly in a separate assertive
sentence: That restaurant is by no means good.

The Approbation Maxim

The Approbation Maxim (AM) is applicable in expressives such as

thanking, congratulating, pardoning, blaming, praising, condoling, etc., and in
assertives like stating, boasting, complaining, claiming, reporting. Its submaxims
are: (a) Minimize dispraise of other and (b) Maximize praise of other:

It was very thoughtful of you to invite us here. (the speaker maximizes praise of
the addressee)
I was wondering if you can prescribe me something else. I’m finding it very hard
to tolerate this medicine. (the speaker minimizes dispraise of the addressee)

The action of this maxim is obvious if we think that we prefer to praise

others; if not, we can change the subject, give some minimal sort of response
(Well, …) or simply remain silent.

The Modesty Maxim

The Modesty Maxim (MM) only applicable in expressives and assertives,

consists in submaxim (a) Minimize praise of self and submaxim (b) Maximize
praise of others.
Excellent! What a wonderful painting! I wish I could paint as well as that. (the
speaker belittles her/his own abilities in order to highlight the achievements of the
addressee)

This maxim varies in its application from culture to culture: in English-

speaking societies, it would be customarily more polite to accept a compliment
graciously (e.g. by thanking the speaker for it) rather than to go on denying it.
English speakers would be inclined to find some compromise between violating
the Modesty Maxim and violating the Agreement Maxim.

The Agreement Maxim

The Agreement Maxim (AM) is only applicable in assertives: (a) Minimize

disagreement between self and other and (b) Maximize agreement between self and
other.

I know we haven’t always agreed in the past and I don’t want to claim that we are
friends, or anything, but I believe we can solve this matter together if we want to.

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 The Sympathy Maxim

The Sympathy Maxim (only applicable in assertives) points to the speaker

making an effort to minimize the antipathy between himself and the addressee and
to maximize sympathy:

Despite our very serious disagreements, I have done my best to understand your
points of view, but, so far, I see that we haven’t been able to find any common
ground.

The maxims can be viewed as making up three pairs, since each pair of
maxims applies to the same type of utterances, is based on the same criterion and
represents the perspective of the speaker/hearer, with the exception of the pair
agreement maxim - sympathy maxim, which regards both the speaker and the
hearer, equally.
The table below illustrates those aspects:

Maxims Criterion Perspective Tendency Type of

utterances
where it
applies
Generosity cost-benefit benefit of self ↓ Impossitives
Tact scale benefit of other ↑ Commissives
Modesty praise scale praise of self ↓ Assertives
Approbation praise of other ↑ Expressives
Agreement Agreement agreement of ↑ Assertives
+sympathy* other
Sympathy scale disagreement of ↓
other
sympathy of ↑
other
antipathy of ↓
other

* sympathy can be seen as a step further once agreement is reached; sympathy is

more subjective, and, if genuine, not achievable if there is obvious disagreement.

6.3. Politeness and deixis

6.3.1. Person deixis markers and politeness

Personal pronouns can be interpreted as politeness markers in association

with verb forms and with addressing terms. Such combinations convey a certain

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degree of politeness to the whole structure they are part of. English does not have
politeness pronouns and does not use the plural verbal forms in order to mark
distance in relation to the interlocutor.
Therefore, pronominal forms are to be interpreted strictly in relation to the
other nominal phrases whose semantic structure includes politeness semes; in the
example below the pronominal forms of the emphatic pronouns themself, ourself
were created to express the plural of modesty, which can be interpreted as an
expression of politeness in relation to the hearer:

‘You won’t be the first or last man or woman who gets themself involved in a
holiday romance. We find ourself…’ (Biber 1999: 340)

The following example can be translated into Romanian in various ways,

which denote the differences and similarities between two structurally different
languages:

Who are you? cf Rom. Cine eşti tu? Cine eşti dumneata?Cine sunteţi
dumneavoastră?

Only the linguistic context (nominal phrases denoting the referent) and the
situational context, meaning the relationships among the interlocutors can provide
the necessary information in order to interpret the utterance appropriately in terms
of formality level. Formality features are not explicitly marked in English in such a
sentence and they are to be inferred considering the elements mentioned.

6.3.2. Social deixis and politeness

Social deixis is ‘that aspect of sentences which reflects or establishes or is

determined by certain realities of the social situation in which SA occurs’ (Fillmore
1975: 76 in Levinson 1983: 89); it is concerned with the meaning and grammar (e.g.
honorific concord) of linguistic expressions (Levinson 1983: 93). The rather constant
element is the social identity of the participants (see 2.5. social deixis). Besides that,
social deixis is concerned with the social relationship between the interlocutors or
between them/one of them and persons or entities referred to; Levinson considers
relevant only those which are grammaticalised: polite pronouns and titles of address.
All titles of address and vocatives ‘seem invariably marked for speaker-referent
relationship: there is no such thing, it seems, as a socially neutral summons or address’
(Levinson 1983: 93).
Social deictics are absolute or relational. Absolute deictics include
authorised recipients (Your Honour, Mr. President) and self-reference (≠
authorized speaker, to express self-irony):

Our Majesty is sad today.

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 Relational social deictics have the speaker as the source of the attitude of
social distance or closeness which manifests itself in relation to a referent which
may be: the addressee (but the addressee is not necessarily the target of respect),
bystanders or the setting. Social deictics range from honorifics, to dishonorifics and
intimacy markers. Only this type of relationship can be encoded in the form of
referring expressions and morphological agreement with them. Honorific concord
can and does become a topic of morphology.
Sometimes, the same expression can express different politeness degrees:
My lady, please, do us the honour of accepting our present! (the term of addressing
expresses deference cf Rom. ‘Excelenţă/ Alteţă, faceţi-ne onoarea de a acepta darul
nostru!’)

You are talking to a lady. (a ‘standard’ level of politeness is expressed here, where
the sense of the lexeme lady contains the semes [+human], [-male] and the seme
[+respect] cf Rom. ‘Vorbeşti cu o doamnă.’)

This lady doesn’t know when to stop. (the lexeme lady becomes a dishonorific cf
Rom. ‘Femeia asta/ cucoana asta nu ştie când să se oprească.’

Lady, mind your businesss! (the degree of disrespect increases compared to the
previous example, to express the opposition between the sense of the lexeme lady
and the context of use, including the referent’s behaviour in relation to the
speaker’s expectations and background, cf Rom. ‘Vezi-ţi de treaba ta, cucoană!’)

I’m listening, my lady, said the girl, looking at the cat. (the addressing term becomes a
term of endearment, an intimacy marker, when associated to a
[-human] referent, the cat, for whom the speaker feels an attachment and whose
authority she also ironizes affectionately, cf Rom. ‘Ascult, stăpână, …’).

Diminutives can be a marker of positive politeness, of solidarity, in some

cultures more than in others, as Wierzbicka (1985) states:

‘Rich systems of diminutives seem to play a crucial role in cultures in which

emotions in general and affection in particular is expected to be shown
overtly. By contrast, the Anglo-Saxon culture does not encourage
unrestrained display of emotions and this could explain why expressive
derivation has not developed to that extent in English.’

Hey, kitty, kitty, kitty!

Who’s your daddy?

The problem of the relation between presuppositions and social deixis is

tackled by Levinson in the line of Keenan (1971). Levinson defines pragmatic
presupposition as the relation between a sentence and the appropriateness of a

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sentence in a context, adding that this type of inference is an aspect of social deixis
encoded as a conventional implicature (1983: 177):

Tu es Napoléon.
Vous êtes Napoléon.

The two examples have the same presupposition (Napoléon exists/ existed,
since we don’t know what referent Levinson had in mind, the Napoléon, i.e. the
emperor, or any other male referent bearing the same name), but the variant chosen
is appropriate in the context or not, i.e. it is relevant or not, depending on the
relationship between the interlocutors, and, consequently, on their communicative
expectations.
Social distance or closeness can be considered as informative elements
necessary to observe the maxim of quantity: making one’s contribution as
informative as necessary would mean including linguistic elements which to mark
the acknowledgement of the social distance/closeness. Failure to do so might cause
the lack of cooperativeness of the interlocutor.

6.4. Politeness and conversational implicatures

Green (1989) notices that the maxims have various weightings in people’s
minds. A greater moral value is attached to the maxim of quality than to the others:
‘violating it amounts to a moral offense, whereas violating the others is at most
inconsiderate or rude.’ (Green 1989: 89 in Mey 1993: 77)
When discussing Grice’s maxims, we provided an example for generalized
conversational implicatures in Yule’s view (see under 3.2. the example ‘Did you
invite Bella and Cathy?’ ‘I invited Bella.’). The same example can prove that
observing the quality maxim is a proof of politeness, and, to maintain the level of
politeness expected in point of not saying something that you know it’s not true,
the speaker is prepared to flout the maxim of quantity:

‘Did you remember to buy bread and milk?’ (= Did you buy …) ‘I brought bread
all right.’

Horn’s example quoted by Mey (1993: 79),

I cut the finger75 yesterday.

is, in our view, linked to the Politeness Principle in point of not bothering the
interlocutor with disturbing details, avoiding a more elaborate and impressive
variant, such as I accidentally hurt myself awfully while cutting … Horn’s

75
The finger, i.e. my finger; the exceptions (the finger = his/her finger) are to be treated as such.
Anyway, the definite article means definite reference, the referent being recovered in the
context.

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R(elation) Principle – say no more than you must – can be interpreted as
corresponding to politeness requirements, in some situations.
An example such as

I saw John with a woman at the opera last night, but maybe she was his sister.

can be an illustration of flouting the maxim of quantity, if the woman was, indeed,
John’s sister, in which case the NP a woman is inappropriate in the context. The
first sentence implies the presupposition the woman was not his girlfriend/ fiancée/
wife etc, therefore John presumably had a date. This presupposition has a positive
or a negative connotation, depending on the context, but, irrespective of that, it is
anyway suspended by the second sentence. Nevertheless, the connotative value of
appraisal, in case John is not married and the speaker is a friend encouraging John
to go on dates, means neutrality in point of politeness. But, if John is married, the
whole sentence threatens John’s positive face, hence it is impolite.
The link between politeness and conversational implicatures is also
established by discourse markers. The following example is from Smith &Wilson
(1990: 180) and we generally took over their comments regarding the values of the
parenthetical structures placed in front position, because they are native speakers of
English, exposed to the patterns of use of such elements. Nevertheless, there can be
other points of view regarding the possible interpretations. (see 6.2. politeness
maxims).

A: I really disliked that man you introduced me to.

B: 1. Actually, he is your boss.
2. Anyway, he is your boss.
3. After all, he is your boss.
4. Still, he is your boss.
5. Well, he is your boss.

1: ‘reconsider your attitude because the perspective is different, you are compelled to
do so’; it is a discourse marker which functions as a disagreement minimizer,
focusing on the objective reasons: he is your boss;
2: ‘it’s irrelevant’; technically, it expresses the same pragmatic message as the previous
utterance, only that the authority of the speaker seems stronger, since it is an element
which minimizes antipathy; the idea of the irrelevance of the reaction is present in both
first two examples, but speaker B tries to save his face;
3: reproach: ‘you say you dislike him, but it is because he is your boss; you have to
tolerate him, why do you expect to like him?’ Speaker B is losing face by using
that discourse marker, even if he uses an antipathy minimizer. He threatens A’s
face by being more authoritative.
4: ‘make the most of it’; the hedge still is a tact marker;
5: ‘you’ve got problems if you think like that’; the speaker is rather neutral, i.e. he
does not express disagreement as strongly as in the previous variants; the last two

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variants are milder in our view: the speaker tries to save both his face and that of
the hearer. The last variant is the mildest.
Our comments are just suggestions; we are aware that discourse markers can
express some conventionalised attitudes of the speaker within the linguistic
community, but there may be variations due to the context, too.

6.5. Politeness and presuppositions

6.5.1. The problem of negative ambiguity

Returning to the problem of existential presuppositions and their resistance

to negation, theoretically, they can be cancelled, but practically, it is background
assumed knowledge that they are true. Asserting something about something else
has as a precondition (presupposition) the existence of the entity referred to.
In real life communication, politeness can determine the confirmation of a
state of affairs implying the presupposition, followed by its cancellation:

‘Have you visited Fairytown?’ ‘No, actually, there is no such place76.’

We go further and dare assert that there may be cases of affirmative

sentences whose existential presuppositions are cancelled similarly:

‘How is your brother?’ ‘Fine, but I have no brother.’

The reply contains two parts: the speaker makes a FSA, seeking for acceptance
fine, followed by the FTA expressed by the second sentence; it is not the relevant
point that, in fact, the first part of the reply is neither true, nor false, since it does
not correspond to reality, because at the moment when it is heard by the first
speaker, for a second or two, it is taken as such, i.e. as corresponding to a real
situation. The intention of the speaker may be, in some cases, to be ironical, even
sarcastic, in relation to the interlocutor who asks an inappropriate question (under
the circumstances) that he might not be aware of – in this case, that the interlocutor
does not have a brother and he misses that, or he had one, but he is dead, etc.
To illustrate cases of affirmative sentences whose existential
presuppositions are cancelled, we adapt an example from Yule (1996: 36):

A man and a woman are sitting on a bench in a park. Nearby, there is a

dog sitting rather close to the woman. The man asks:
Man: Utterance 1 ‘Does the dog bite?’
Lady: Utterance 2 ‘No.’ (the dog bites the man.)
Man: Utterance 3 ‘You said it doesn’t.’
Lady: Utterance 4 ‘It doesn’t, but this is not my dog.’

76
We refer stricly to a real place, not to fictional worlds, to possible worlds in general, or to
metaphors of the actual world.

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 U1 Shared knowledge: dogs are not always calm in the presence of
strangers.
U1 Context circumstances: the dog sits next to you and it is calm.
U1 Referent recoverability: Considering the above, I presuppose it’s yours.

The first speaker doesn’t observe the maxim of quantity, because in this
case, the (i.e. this dog) ≠ your dog. Linguistically, the definite article and the
possessive adjective belong to the class of central determiners, having anaphoric
situational function in this case; pragmatically, it is a background assumption that
when the speaker uses the in such a situation, he means the closest referent, which,
under the circumstances, is identified as yours/my/his/her etc. Otherwise, the
utterance would be irrelevant.
U2: the lady replies considering that U1 is the result of observing the
maxims; the woman is polite and assuring; she doesn’t contradict the first speaker
by saying: that is not my dog.
In such a dialogue, the man favoured relevance, the woman favoured the
truth (referring to her own dog, as a result of the wrong referent recoverability).
The linguistic effect is humoristic, but in real life it can cause ambiguity and
misunderstanding.

‘Can you lend me the car?’ ‘What car?’ cf Rom. ‘Îmi împrumuţi maşina?’ ‘Care
maşină?’

In the example above, we refer to contexts in which it is common

knowledge that the referent has a car, and just one, therefore, the reply should not
be interpreted as a genuine question implying selection (which of them?).
Apparently, this is a case of non-recoverability of the referent. The presupposition
is there is a car; there is a car that you can lend; for you to lend me something,
you must own it.
Therefore, in this case, the car means your car. The interlocutor’s
linguistic knowledge should ensure him the correct recoverability of the referent
designated by the definite description the car. The reply seems to buy the
interlocutor some time, but, in fact, more important, it is a more indirect, and, thus,
a more polite way of denying the request.

6.5.2. Structural presuppositions and hearer’s manipulation

The speaker can manipulate the hearer, if the role of the hearer makes the
speaker resort to this strategy: a witness can be made to believe what the speaker
presupposes to be true because this serves the latter’s purposes. The imperative
mood is a direct linguistic manner of imposing the presupposition on a felony
witness:

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Police investigator: ‘Where were you standing when you saw the suspect attack
them and steal the car?’
Witness: ‘I didn’t quite see that.’
Police investigator: ‘Just answer the question. Where were you standing?’
Witness: ‘At the bus stop.’

The relationship existing between interlocutors must be a vertical-type one,

with the speaker having authority and exerting his authority, on the hearer:

Parent: ‘What did I tell you about being late for school?’
Child: ‘But I wasn’t, honestly.’
Parent: ‘I didn’t ask you that. I asked you to tell me if you remember what I said
about that.’

The parent is in a position of authority and he takes it to be understood that

his child was late. This simple strategy functions as a reproach and the focus is on
the possible consequences.

6.6. Politeness and (indirect) speech acts

Politeness is an important missing link between Cooperative Principle and

the problem of relating sense to illocutionary force (Leech 1983: 104).
Illocutionary facts relate to politeness in their contribution to establishing and
maintaining cooperation throughout the verbal exchange. The illocutionary force,
i.e. the communicative goal, and the social goal can be in one of the following
types of relationship:
-convivial: illocutionary and social goal coincide in case of offers, invitations,
congratulations, greetings, thanks;
-collaborative: illocutionary and social goal are indifferent to each other in case of
assertions, information notes, reports, instructions, announcements;
-competitive: the two types of goals compete, as in orders, begging etc;
-conflicting: the two types of goals are opposed, as in case of threats, accusations,
curses.
Mey (1993: 68) argues against Leech’s remark ‘some illocutions (orders) are
inherently impolite, and others (offers) are inherently polite’ (1983: 83).
Politeness is asymmetrical: what is polite with respect to the hearer or to
some third party will be impolite with respect to the speaker and vice versa. This
piece of criticism turns out to be against the perception of politeness as an abstract
quality. Mey provides two counterarguments:
1. the social position of the speakers relative to one another may indicate
different politeness values for individual cases: e.g. the existence of a social
hierarchy may preempt (i.e. act contrary to) the use of politeness. An order in the
military can’t be said to be polite, but it is vindicated (proven true) if it conforms to
the demands of the military hierarchy; commands are neither polite, nor impolite;

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 2. the politeness of an order may depend on the positive/negative effects on
the person who is given the order. Kunst-Gnamuš has shown that the cost-benefit
scale is decisive in assigning politeness value to ‘bald’ imperatives (Kunst-Gnamuš
1991: 59 in Mey 1993: 68).
Offers (we include here invitations, which, in our opinion, are basically
offers to receive somebody as a guest, to give a person something etc) can be
expressed by an imperative, in two cases: when the relationship between
interlocutors is a vertical one, i.e. the speaker has some authority on the
interlocutor, be it only moral, or the interlocutors have a horizontal type of
relationship implying equality, but the speaker takes advantage of the interlocutors
attitude/ feelings towards him. Either way, imperatives can be a form of
manipulation:

Have another cake!

In all the examples above, the tact and generosity maxim are involved, and
the speaker makes a FTA to himself and a FSA in relation to the interlocutor,
maybe anticipating his desires.
Unlike the previous examples, the utterances below illustrate cases when
the action referred to is not necessarily to the benefit of the interlocutor. This
speech act threatens the positive face of the speaker, i.e. his need to be accepted
socially, and the negative face of the interlocutor, i.e. his wishes:

Peel the potatoes! (this example is in favor of the speaker, he expresses his
negative face, avoiding to perform the action himself)
Come and visit us!
You must see my new apartment! (in this case, the imperative is enhanced by the
use of a strong deontic verb, must, which intensifies the illocutionary value,
apparently increasing the costs to the speaker’s face; but in the long run, the effects
of the actions of inviting the interlocutor to visit him will improve his positive
face). (for more on this see Leech 1983: 104-128)

Levinson (1983: 274) refers to the concept of interactional pessimism,

grammaticalised in an example such as

I don’t suppose that you would by any chance be able to lend me some cash, would
you?

The speaker uses the negative form of the verb in the main clause, this form being
contradicted by the implicature I suppose it, obvious as a result of the message of
the utterance, which is a request. The same mitigating value is held by the
epistemic quantifiers, would, by any chance, which induce the idea of strong
uncertainty. Would be able to lend is another structure which focuses apparently on
the objective conditions necessary for the hearer to perform the action: ability and

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possibility (favorable circumstances).The example is relevant for the strategies
used by the speaker in order to get the intended effect.

The elements discussed in this chapter can be illustrated in point of their

use in a dialogue:

A: Mr. Brown, have you read our project? What do you think of it?
B: Ann, I’m not interested in something like that for the moment.
A: Mr. Brown, Mr. President, I’m aware of your priorities, I can understand your
attitude, but, still, I would reconsider my position, if I were you. I’d really
appreciate it if you could take the trouble of reading it, sir.
B: Ann, don’t insist. I made a decision and that’s that.
A: Please, sir, it would mean a lot to all those who contributed to this project. We
worked a lot on it.
B: Ok, Annie, I’ll look it over.
A: Thank you, Mr. President. You won’t regret it. May I suggest you to start reading it
as soon as possible, so that we could discuss it at our 3 o’clock meeting?

The dialogue exhibits the features of Anglo-Saxon society: individualist,

assertive, informal (partly), favouring small power distance (from the perspective
of the person with authority) and showing low uncertainty avoidance, and, last but
not least, masculine.
Speaker A, the subordinate woman, uses a formal address term, to
minimize the costs of the hearer, counterbalancing the directness of the questions.
She risks to lose her face, but observes the tact maxim by the address term.
Speaker B, the man in a position of power, favours small power distance
because it is to his advantage. Using the first name as an address term is a
minimizer of the effect of non-observing the Agreement Maxim. He bluntly refuses
to discuss the matter, and the address term can be interpreted not only as a
minimizer, but as a maximizer, too, in the sense that the man emphasizes his
position of authority in relation to her. He might want to make her feel inferior, not
liked. The Anglo-Saxon culture does not encourage unrestrained display of
emotions, therefore, it would be more likely for the address term to function as a
FTA (Face Threatening Act) for the man and a FSA (Face Saving Act) for the
woman: ‘I appreciate you, we have known each other for some time, but its’s my
call and I say no’.
Still, there are some politeness devices: another minimizer is the time
adverbial for the moment, which somehow acts as a tact maxim marker, creating
the illusion of a further discussion (and agreement) on the topic.
Speaker A, uses a double address term, getting from individual reference to
social reference – an absolute deictic Mr. President-; they are combined with
sentences expressing the praise (she observes the Approbation Maxim) and
agreement, at the same time. She tries not to lose her face by being tactful: she uses

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indirect linguistic expressions – conditional forms, If clauses. In the end she
reiterates her respect by using a polite address term, sir.
The reply Ann, don’t insist. I made a decision and that’s that reiterates the
same message as his first reply: the address term is the minimizer, the tact marker
is meant to reduce the effect of the imperative, reinforced by an assertive sentence
containing an impolite structure that’s that, which should not allow for a
continuation of the discussion.
Out of despair, speaker A adopts an attitude of submitting to the authority
of the interlocutor in point of accepting his point of view; she observes the
Generosity Maxim by using the softener please and the formal address term. She
continues by applying the Modesty Maxim using the pronoun we with reference to
the collective effort; thus, she turns what seems to be a confrontation between two
people into a possible act of acknowledgment and reward towards a group of
people. She takes distance from the group (they) – it is a manifestation of the
Generosity Maxim, only to emphasize the effort put into it by all of them,
including her.
This complex strategy pays off, the interlocutor gives in, the term of
endearment used (Annie) is a marker of the Approbation Maxim: I acknowledge
your efforts in order to convince me. The reply could also be an illustration of the
sympathy gained by speaker A throughout the discussion.
But the discussion is not over; speaker A risks once more losing her face,
in order to speed things up. The Approbation Maxim is observed by the thanking,
and the use of the address form, sir, contributes to that. The next sentence, You
won’t regret it is an expression illustrating the Tact Maxim, and also, indirectly,
praises her own efforts, and those of the group. The Maxim of Modesty is, thus,
flouted, but for a good reason, since it tactfully refers to the benefits of the other in
the long run. This first part of the utterance is counterbalanced by the second part,
which, similarly to the reply that begins the discussion, is an indirect request. The
manipulation of the interlocutor is done by using modal verbs (may), attitudinal
verbs (suggest), a false question, a solidarity we.
The text above was intended as an illustration of the complex strategies
used by interlocutors to obtain a certain perlocutionary effect without losing their
face.

Conclusions

The concept of politeness is, above all, a social phenomenon, but, not only:
it is based on the interlocutors’ identity and types of relationships. During the
verbal exchange, a series of strategies can be used and they were systematized in
the form of the Politeness Principle and its maxims; at the same time, the main
concern of the interlocutors is their public image, their face, which they manage to
save or, on the contrary, they lose during the verbal exchange. Linguistically,
politeness interferes in all the domains of pragmatics, it is the super-ordinate term,

200
in a way, since all linguistic devices pertaining to pragmatics are exploited for the
speaker to remain polite, against the background of his cultural space specificity:
deictics, inferences, illocutionary values.

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 SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS AT WORK. TOPICS FOR
DISCUSSION

Part I SEMANTICS (Mariana Neagu)

Chapter 1 Introduction

I. Answer these questions:

1. What is the etymology of the term ‘semantics’?

2. When did semantics become a science?
3. Why is historical semantics significant in the evolution of linguistic
semantics?
4. What is the main concern of structuralist semantics?
5. Which are the main methodologies that have been identified within
structuralist semantics?
6. Are word-meaning and sentence- meaning interrelated? How?
7. What distinguishes generative semantics from interpretive semantics?
8. Who are the representatives of interpretive semantics?
9. What is linguistic semantics concerned with?
10. Mention the two major approaches to semantics.
11. What is the difference between a language-intrinsic approach and a
referential approach?
12. Which approach does Eugen Coseriu’s view belong to?
13. What is the distinction between signification and designation according to
Coseriu?
14. What are the types of semantics that belong to the language intrinsic
approach?
15. What does referential semantics focus on?
16. What is prototype semantics especially suited for?
17. Does prototype semantics have any flaws (limits)? What are they?
18. Is prototype semantics superior to feature (Aristotelian) semantics? Why?
19. How can we cope with the disadvantages of either structuralist
or prototype semantics?

20. How does cognitive semantics analyse meaning?

II. Which of the following statements are true, which are false?

1. Formalist theories of meaning separate linguistic knowledge from world

knowledge
2. Relations that hold between members of different grammatical categories
which are simultaneously present in a single syntactic structure are called
paradigmatic relations.

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 3. Both componential analysis and generative semantics deal with semantic
decomposition but in different ways.
4. The main difference between structural semantics and cognitive semantics
is that the former defines and analyses meaning from a purely language-
internal perspective whereas the latter explains meaning primarily in terms
of categorization.
5. Prototype semantics and traditional feature semantics exclude each other.
6. Componential analysis is a technique that describes both the denotative
and the conotative meaning of a word.
7. Formalist theories of meaning are not able to meet the complexity of
semantic phenomena in natural language.
8. Semes are semantic components shared by lexical items belonging to
different semantic fields.
9. The choice/selection of individual lexical units in construction with other
lexical units is determined by classemes or markers.
10. The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is relevant for cognitive
semantics.

III. Fill in the blanks, using the words given:

semantic components, cognitive semantics, conceptual semantics, semantic

structure, structuralist semantics.

1. ... considers meaning relational, that is, it is determined by its position in a

network in which it is related to other expressions.
2. The atomistic conception of meaning assumes that the meaning of a word
can be determined in isolation by its ... and not by its relations with other
words in the language, as in holistic theories.
3. In ... the meaning of an expression is a concept in the speaker’s mind. An
expression has a conceptual structure with argument slots.
4. Meaning is representational in ... as it is viewed as linked to a particular
mental representation, called a concept.
5. The conceptual structure is the concept which stands for the thing
experienced. The ... is the meaning which stands for the conceptual
structure and it is expressed by a linguistic form.

IV. Match the type of meaning conception given in column A with the type of
premise given in column B.

Conception (A) Premise (B)

a. Representational 1.Linguistic meaning derives from its reference

to an actual object in the external world

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 b. Componential 2.Linguistic meaning derives from its mental
representation of the external world which is
subjectively represented

c. Referential 3.Linguistic meaning derives from the semantic

components which it comprises

d. Relational 4.Linguistic meaning derives from its relation to

other linguistic expressions in the same lexical
field.

V. Following the relational conception of meaning, the verbs given below express
the concept of theft, and so are placed in the same semantic field. Nevertheless,
there exist meaning differences among them. Can you pinpoint them?

1. rob 2. steal 3. pilfer 4. filch 5. purloin 6. snitch. 7. swindle

VI. Notice that the following nouns share the same referent: a watcher. However,
there exist meaning differences which are sometimes overlooked. Can you identify
them?

1. sightseer 2. viewer 3. observer 4. spectator 5. onlooker

VII. Do a componential analysis illustrating the features the words in the pairs have
in common ( their markers ) and the features that distinguish them:

a. hammer / mallet c. depressed / disappointed

b. chicken / duck d. wallet / purse

VIII. Make the componential analysis of these terms from the semantic field of
SOUND: rattle, clatter, clang, screech, crack, click, ring, chime, trill, toll, pop.

IX. Make the componential analysis of these terms:

a) stool d) bench
b) chair e) sofa
c) armchair

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X. Consider the following adjectives that express the concept of „weakness”. Each
of them corressponds to a different semantic value. Can you point to the meaning
differences? Provide examples of phrases to illustrate these differences.

1. frail 4.fragile
2. weak 5. decrepit
3. feeble

XI. Following the componential view (CA) of meaning, notice that the following
nouns share the semantic components: /human/, /adult/ and /male/. Can you
diagnose the distinguishing semantic components for each of them?

1. juror 4. surveyor
2. referee 5. arbitrato\r
3. reviewer

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Chapter 2 The relationship between language, thought and reality

I. Answer these questions:

1. What is the distinction between extension and intension?

2. Can two terms have the same extension and differ in intension? Give
examples.
3. Can two terms have the same intension and differ in extension?
4. Can intension determine extension?
5. Can extension be influenced by the speaker ̉̉s psychological state?
6. How can extension be determined socially?
7. What is Frege ̉̉s definition of sign ?
8. Does a reference/ referent always belong to a single sign? Give examples.
9. What does Ogden and Richards’ triangle of meaning stand for?
10. What is Ullmann’s proposal regarding Ogden and Richards’ triangle of
meaning?
11. Compare the Saussurean Model of the Sign (1916) with the Peircean
Model of the Sign (1931).
12. Which category of signs does the linguistic sign belong to?
13. How are indexical signs viewed in terms of their degree of abstraction?
14. Which type of signs require the recognition of similarity between form
and meaning? Give examples.
15. Can signs be always included within the same category?
16. What factors may determine the nature (type) of a sign?

II. Which of the following statements are true, which are false?

1. Unlike reference which changes each time a linguistic expression is

applied to a different referent, sense does not change when the expression
takes on a different referent.
2. The difference between reference and denotation is that the latter is bound
to the context and depends on particular occasions of utterance.
3. Sense is derived from its semantic relationships with other expressions in
the vocabulary of the language.
4. Denotation is the literal, constant and basic meaning of an expression.
5. The set of properties an expression has is known as its extension.
6. Intension is the relation between the symbol and the real world entities to
which it refers.
7. The Saussurean model of the sign is dyadic, that is it has a twofold
structure: a form (the signifier) and a content (the signified).
8. Ferdinand de Saussure’s view of meaning is referential.
9. The Peircean model of the sign assumes that there is an observable and
direct relationship between the sign vehicle and the referent.

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 10. Symbolic signs are based on a relation of convention between sign and
meaning.

III. Fill in the blanks, using the words given:

indexical sign(s), sense(s), connotation(s), iconic sign(s), symbol(s).

1. The word reader has three ...: „someone who reads something”, „a book
designed for reading” and „a device that reads very small writing”.
2. The ... of the words pig, fox, mule, sheep and snake point to disapproving
traits of persons.
3. There is a connection, usually of causality, between sign and referent, in
the case of....
4. ... are the most abstract and the least motivated type of sign.
5. An... resembles the referent and provides a perceptual image of what it
stands for.

IV. Match the notions in column A with the explanations in column B.

A B

a. extension 1. thing picked out by uttering an expression in a

particular context
b. referent 2. the relationship between an expression and its
extension
c. connotation 3. set of things which could possibly be the
referent of an expression
d. denotation 4. the mental concept of an expression,
independent of context
e. intension 5. the emotional overtones a speaker usually
associates with each individual use of a word

V.What are the referents of the following expressions?

a) the teacher of this course

b) the person who is answering this question
c) where you ate lunch last
d) a child of your parents

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Chapter 3 Linguistic meaning: types and dimensions

I. Answer these questions:

1. How does lexical meaning differ from grammatical meaning?

2. Is sentence meaning dependent on context?
3. What is the distinction between the sentence meaning and the utterance meaning
of I am tied up?
4. What types of meaning correspond to what Roman Jakobson called the
referential, the phatic and the expressive functions of language?
5. How does Geoffrey Leech group the different kinds of meaning?
6. Which type of meaning is central in linguistic communication?
7. Is information value relevant in the case of social interaction/meaning?
8. Which words and phrases have social meaning?
9. How can forms of address differ across cultures, when communication involves:
a. student to professor
b. younger to older
10. When does reflected meaning arise? Give examples.
11. What is the difference in meaning between the collocations of sensual and
sensuous, cause and bring about?
12. What is evoked meaning?
13. What types of variation contribute to what Cruse (1986) calls “evoked
meaning”?
14. Mention and exemplify the three types of dialectal variation.
15. What is register variation?
16. Discuss the three components of register.
17. How can the meaning of a complex expression be reconstructed?
18. Does the principle of compositionality have any limit?
19. Is thematic meaning important? Why?
20. What components of language usually encode expressive meaning in
English? Give examples.

II. What is utterance meaning? Discuss the utterance meaning of the

following sentences:

1. You have been working hard!

2. That is just what I needed!
3. You have been of great help!
4. You are a very tidy cook, I see!
5. That will be extremely useful

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III. Define the descriptive meaning of each of the following words:

1. blue 2. ring 3. relax 4. linguist

IV. Below is a list of some interjections in English. Say what each of them
expresss.

1. ah!
2. alas!
3. hey!
4. ugh!
5. wow!

V. Mention the social ritual of each of the following utterances and then indicate
the level of formality each represents.
1. a.Hi!
b. Good morning.

2. a. How is it going?
b. How are you?

3. a Thanks!
b. I am grateful to you!

4. a. What?
b. I beg your pardon?

5. a. What’s the time?

b. Could you tell me the time, please?

VI. Give the descriptive and expressive meaning of the following words:
1. idiot 2. baby 3. Communist 4. Muslim.

VII. Comment on the collocational range of these terms:

a) liberty – freedom
b) busy – occupied
c) decoration – ornamentation

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VIII. Point to the correct collocational range of dish, cigarettes, beer, cheese and
coffee by using one of these adjectives: light, heavy, strong, weak, mild.

IX. On what dimension of descriptive meaning do the following differ?

(a) 1. The prisoner was killed.

2. The prisoner was murdered.
(b) 1. The prisoner was murdered.
2. The prisoner was executed.
(c) 1. The shirt was not clean.
2. The shirt was filthy.
(d) 1. Lesley is a young woman.
2. Lesley is in her twenties.
(e) 1. We’re coming up to the exams.
2. The exams will soon be here.

X. On what dimensions of non-descriptive meaning do the following differ?

(a) 1. Are you leaving?

2. You’re not leaving, surely?
(b) 1. He’s been dismissed.
2. He’s got the sack.
(c) 1. He has a fractured humerus.
2. He has a broken arm.
(d). 1. Get lost.
2. Please go away.

XI. Complete the pairs of synonyms in British and American English

BE AE

1. lift .......
2. ........ sidewalk
3. sweet .....
4. ... faucet
5. .... apartment
6. ....... trashcan
7. holiday ....
8. .... zipcode
9. cab ...

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10. .... grade
11. petrol ...
12. chips ...
13. ..... yard
14. ...... drugstore

XII. Here is a list of Anglo - Saxon words that might be associated with colloquial
language. Suggest a more formal synonym for each of them and find out the origin:

begin, before, burn, funny, gift, kiss, last, odd, stop, think.

XIII. Look at the list of technical words and suggest an ordinary language
synonym for each of them:

cardiac, convulsion, cranium, incision, lesion, mamillary, neurosis ocular /

ophthalmic / optic, patella, psychotic, trachea; auditory, lexeme, orthography,
phoneme, semantic.

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Chapter 4 Sense relations

I. Answer these questions:

1. What do semasiology and onomasiology generally study ?

2. What is the distinction between semasiology and onomasiology ?
3. What is the focus of semasiological research ?
4. What semantic relations are associated with onomasiology ?
5. What does semasiological variation refer to ?
6. What does onomasiological variation imply ?
7. How does onomasiology differ from semasiology ?
8. What are the criteria used in distinguishing polysemy from homonymy?
9. What are the conditions required for absolute synonymy?
10. Why is knowledge of the expressive component of the meaning of a
lexeme important?
11. What do lexical opposites in a language reflect?
12. Which types of oppositeness of meaning does John Lyons (1987/1997)
distinguish?
13. How do verbal complimentaries differ from adjectival complementaries,
according to David Allan Cruse (1986)?
14. What logical criterion lies at the basis of converseness?
15. How does entailment operate in the case of hyponymy?
16. Is autohyponymy an instance of polysemy?
17. What semantic relation does hyponymy resemble? In what sense?
18. How does meronymy differ from hyponymy?

II. Explain the mechanism of sense extension in these words:

a) climb d) writing
b) mouth e) tongue
c) beaver f) reader

III. Explain the mechanism of sense extension in these examples:

a) this land belongs to the Crown.

b) We need some new faces around here.
c) He elbowed me out of the queue.

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IV. Explain the type of sense extension in these polysemantic words:

a) paper e) snarl
b) board f) purr
c) dry g) grunt
d) sharp

V. Give the homonyms of these words and then use them in sentences

of your own:

a) through d) steal
b) storeys e) ball
c) sew f) stare

VI. Consider the following English words and decide whether they are thought
of in terms of homonymy or polysemy and why. Try translating them into any
other language you know; are there several possible translation equivalents or will
one word do for the different meanings the English word has?

cap face row club

way bed match plot

VII. How many meanings or senses do you know for the following English
words? Do some senses seem more basic or central than others? If so,
which ones and why?

top page button ring

VIII. Complete the following examples of polysemy in English. Note the degree
to which they correspond with your own language

leg of a person / chair

mouth of a person /
branch of a tree /
top ...
tail ...

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IX. Consider the sentences below and comment on the polysemy of HEAD by
explaining which meaning extensions are metaphors and which are
metonymies:

a) My head is full of strange thoughts.

b) That joke went over his head.
c) The queen is still the head of state.
d) I prefer my beer without a head of foam.
e) We paid ten pounds a head for the meal.

X. Comment on the metaphorical extension of these terms:

a) warm – icy – frosty – cold

b) white – black – blue – yellow – red
c) see – hear – taste – touch

XI. The words in the HOT-COLD domain aren’t always used literally. They don’t
always refer to TEMPERATURE. Discuss the meanings of the expressions below:

a. a warm personality e. a scorching criticism

b. a hot- tempered person f. a blistering attack
c. a red-hot idea g. a luke-warm response
d. an icy stare h. a frosty reception

XII. Consider some idioms with HAND exemplifying these metonymies:

a) The hand stands for the activity.

b) The hand stands for control.
c) Control is holding in the hand.
d) The hand stands for the person.

XIII. Mention the type of metonymy you can identify in these idioms:

a) give somebody a big hand d) gain the upper hand

b) from hand to hand e) keep a strict hand upon a person
c) keep one ’s hand(s) in f) an old hand

Exemplify the idioms above in sentences of your own.

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XIV. The noun length refers to the general dimension in which the adjectives long
and short describe regions. Find such ‘abstract nouns’ for the following pairs of
adjectives.

a. tall: short g. fast: slow

b. thick: thin h. clever: stupid
c. heavy: light i. broad: narrow
d. wide: narrow j. hot: cold
e. old: young k. warm: cool
f. far: near

XV. Sometimes verbs that express ANIMAL SOUNDS are used as metaphors for
features of HUMAN SPEECH in English. Fill in the blanks with the appropriate
sound term. Choose from this list: bark, hiss, grunt, snarl, twitter, squeal, purr,
growl:

1. My mother is so cute when she ... about her grandchildren.

2. ‘Stop crying’, the police officer ...at the drug dealer.
3. The actress ... her answer to the reporters.
4. The prisoner ...his reply to the guard.
5. The sergeant ... his orders to the new soldiers.

XVI. Comment on the reading of the italicized items in the following pair
sentences:

1. a. It is man that is responsible for environmental pollution.

b. That man entered the room in a hurry.
2. a. You must not drink anything on the day of the operation
b. John doesn’t drink – he’ll have an orange juice.

XVII. Are the following pairs of items exact synonyms which can be interchanged
in all contexts? If possible, create examples of sentences where the words cannot
be interchanged:

a) hurry / hasten b) exit / way out c) confess / admit

d) consider / regard e) injure / damage f) customer/client
g) pavement / sidewalk h) spud / potato i) little/small j) peak/summit

XVIII. Look up the following pairs of synonyms in your dictionary and make a
note of the origin of each lexeme:

help – aid heaven – sky kingdom – realm

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 teach – instruct first – initial annoy – irritate

XIX. Consider the following pairs of synonyms. Can you think of any sentence
context in which one member of a pair may be used and the other member not?
Make sentence frames to illustrate this point.

e.g. I am not at .... to tell you (the word liberty may be inserted but not its synonym
freedom)

discover – find
busy – occupied
decoration – ornamentation
keep – retain
frequently – often

XX. Look up the following regional dialect words in your dictionary to discover
the standard dialect synonyms (see Collins English Dictionary):

butty, culch, diddle, heartsome, lease, mullock, pawky, snap, stob, tum

XXI. Consider the following groups of synonyms and say how the members of
each group differ in their connotation:

crowd - mob
pleased – delighted - glad
look at - stare at - gaze at
modern - up to date
boring - monotonous – tedious - dull

XXII. Give the colloquial or slang equivalent for these euphemistic synonyms: a.
pass away; b. liquidate; c. intoxicated (inebriated)

XXIII. Group these words into triplets of lexemes with overlapping meanings, i.e.
sets of partial synonyms: brim, crush, decorate, edge, enlist, genuine, fire, income,
make up (vb), mash, paint, pound (vb), real recruit (vb), rim, salary, sincere,
wages.

XXIV. Comment on the collocational range of these synonyms:

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edge – border – rim – brim – brink – margin – verge.

Which of these words can be used metaphorically?

XXV. Comment on and exemplify these ideographic (denotational) synonyms:

a. gaze – gape – glare – stare – glimpse – glance – peep – peer – eye.

b. chuckle – giggle – smile – simper – smirk – grin – chortle – titter – snicker.

c. surprise – astonish – astound – amaze – bewilder

d. warm – lukewarm – hot – boiling

XXVI. Comment on and exemplify in sentences of your own these ideographic

synonyms:

a. fear – scare – fright – horror – terror

b. convention – agreement – contract – treaty – pact
c. irritation – anger – fury – rage

XXVII. What kind of antonymy is represented by each of the following pairs of

antonyms?

a) behind - in front; b) captive - free; c) fast - slow; d) fixed - loose; e) high - low;
f) in - out; g) leave - stay; h) north of - south of; i) parent - child; j) rich - poor; k)
teacher - pupil; l) thin - fat;

XXVIII. List the antonyms of the following lexemes. Mention the class of
antonyms they belong to: alive, male, narrow, open, over, receive, relinquish, sell,
small, tall, weak, wife.

XXIX. What are the possible opposites of the words hard and high in these
phrases? Which has the most contextual variation:

high marks hard exam

high opinion hard chair

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high building hard journey
high price hard work
high temperature hard person
high winds hard drugs

XXX. A word may have different opposites in different contexts. What are the
opposites of light and rough in these phrases:

a. light bag
b. light wind
c. light colours
d. rough sea
e. rough calculation
f. rough area
g. rough person
h. rough texture

XXXI. What are the complementaries of the following:

a.dead c.same e.imperfect

b.true d.animate

XXXII. Consider the following verbal complementaries and find out the lexical
items that set the scene for complementarity:

a) refute – admit f) stay – leave

b) defend – submit g) accept – turn down
c) obey – disobey h) yield – resist
d) live – die i) win – lose
e) remember – forget

XXXIII. Fill in the gaps in these lexical triplets involving complementarity:

a) shoot (in football) – save – ……

b) punch – ………– take
c) …… – keep on – stop
d) request – ……. – refuse
e) greet -……. – snub
f) aim – hit – ……

XXXIV. Transform the sentences below by using converse terms:

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1. Tom is Mary’s brother. Mary is ...
2. David is Margaret’s nephew. Margaret is ...
Use the pattern above in further examples.

XXXV. To each of the following gradable antonyms add the rest of the scale:

e.g. BIG : huge/ very big/ BIG / quite big/ medium-sized/ quite small/ SMALL/
tiny
1. hot/ cold (water) 3. interesting/ boring (a film)
2. love/ hate 4. good/ bad (a book)

XXXVI. Decide whether the following pairs contain gradable terms or not:

a) male – female e) top – bottom

b) true – false f) clever – stupid
c) hot – cold g) married – unmarried
d) love – hate h) dead – alive

XXXVII. Decide whether the following pairs are converses or not:

a) below – above d) conceal – reveal

b) like – dislike e) greater than – lesser than
c) grandparent – grandchild f) own – belong

XXXVIII. Build up the hierarchy of terms for birds in English, including chicken,
eagle, sparrow, duck, hen, humming bird, chick, ostrich, fowl, owl, penguin, robin,
falcon. Find names for each group.

XXXIX. Construct the meronymy tree for car. What is the superordinate term
and what co-meronyms can you find?

XL. Make up hyponymy- trees for the following words:

a) tomato b) hammer c) bench
What are the most general words that you have included?
What are the most specific?

XLI.Construct the hyponymy tree for bird.

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Chapter 5 Semantic organization

I. Answer these questions:

What is the basic issue that distinguishes the different views of the lexicon?
What is the evidence for the separation of lexical knowledge from conceptual
knowledge?
What is a lexical item or lexeme?
What is a lexical unit or word form?
What does the term lexical entry denote?
What is a semantic field?
What is a lexical gap?

II. List as many verbs as you can think of in English for the notion of LAUGH

(e.g. giggle, chuckle). Does your native language offer more or fewer words for the
overall field, and to what extent are there one-to-one correspondences? For further
practice do the same with these semantic notions:

- ways of WALKING
- words in the TALK domain
- words indicating the SPEED of an action.

III. Some of the verbs in the WALK domain can be used figuratively to refer to
TALKING (e.g. ramble, stumble, plod ). Make up sentences to illustrate their
figurative meanings.

IV. Discuss these verbs of cooking in terms of componential analysis: boil –

simmer – fry – roast – toast – bake.
Analyse them using these oppositions:
a) [+water] /[ -water];
b) [+fat]/ [-fat];
c) [+oven]/ [-oven];
d) [+flame]/ [-flame].

V. Consider what features of the meaning of the following pairs of words

220
(their common features and distinguishing features ) you readily know without
having to return to a dictionary. To what extent and to whom might a full CA of
the words be useful?
a. falcon/hawk c. copse/spinney
b. polythene/polyurethane d. sybaritic/hedonistic

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Revision Exercises

I. Explain the difference between:

1. structuralist semantics – cognitive semantics
2. meaning – sense
3. extension – intension
4. denotation – connotation
5. seme – classeme
6. lexical item – lexical unit
7. lexical field – semantic field
8. polysemy – homonymy
9. hyponymy – meronymy

II. Discuss the semantic relations holding between these terms:

a) hot (weather) – hot (potato)

b) coat – raincoat
c) plot (of the novel) – plot (of land)
d) cheese – cottage cheese
e) room – waiting room
f) flower – daisy – dandelion

III. Discuss the semantic relations holding between these terms:

a) robbery – highway robbery – gang robbery

b) have a row – row of seats
c) face – to face
d) dog – terrier – bull terrier
e) mad – crazy – loony
f) keyboard – key

IV. Comment on the type of semantic relation holding between:

a) speed – velocity d) spouse – wife

b) force – intensity e) teacher – student
c) hole – orifice/ cavity f) cent – scent –sent
Use the terms in sentences of your own.

222
V. Comment on the type of semantic relation holding between:

a) cop – policeman d) peace – war

b) seek – look for e) in – out
c) bloke – guy f) soul – sole

VI. Explain the semantic relations holding between these terms:

a) cold (weather) – cold (person)

b) bank (of the Danube) – (commercial) bank
c) red – scarlet – crimson – vermilion
d) peep – stare – glimpse
e) finger – fingertip
f) cat – European shorthair
g) serviette – napkin
h) car – bonnet
i) buy – sell
j) up – down

VII. Consider the following senses of skirt(s):

1.a piece of outer clothing worn by women and girls which hangs down from the
waist
2. the part of a dress or coat that hangs down from the waist
3. the flaps on a saddle that protect a rider's legs
4. a circular flap as around the base of a hovercraft
5. 'a bit of skirt': an offensive expression meaning "an atttractive woman"
6. skirts of a forest, hill or village, etc. the outside edge of a forest, etc.
7. a new road skirting the suburb
8. they skirted rounded the bus.
9. He was skirting the issue. (= avoid)

(i) What is likely to be the prototypical meaning and point out which process of
meaning extension (generalization, metaphor, metonymy, specialization) you find
in each of the other cases. Give reasons for your answers.

(ii) How are the meanings in 6, 7, 8, 9) related to the prototypical meaning? What
is the difference between (6) versus 7, 8, 9)?

(iii) Which of these meanings would lend themselves for a classical definition?
Which of them would not? Give reasons for your answers.

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VIII. In English, the same form may sometimes be a member of up to five
different word classes. Specify the word class of round in each of the following
examples:

1. My friend is coming round the corner.

2. That was the first round table I saw.
3. She came round when they got something to drink.
4. Let's round off with an exercise.
5. After school we can play a round of golf.

IX. Test your knowledge of the meanings of OUT by giving synonyms, antonyms
or paraphrases for the following:

1. an outpatient. 6. an outing 11. an outgrowth 16. at the outset

2. the outskirts 7. a sell-out 12. an outline 17. an outsider

3. a dropout 8. an outburst 13. a bleak outlook 18. an outlet

4. a handout 9. a blackout 14. an outpouring 19. an outfit

5. an outcry 10. a nuclear fallout 15. an output 20. the outcome

X. Comment of the meanings of the prepositions at, with, about and over in these
sentences:

1. Mrs. Smith was very pleased about the arrangement.

2. We had words over the fact we had fought.
3. The captain wasn’t very pleased about my having seen it.
4. I had clashed with him over Percy’s kneeling figure.
5. Amy seemed pleased at the idea of leaving early.
6. The boy whimpered over his smashed head.
7. They were all very pleased with the news.
8. They fell in disgrace over their father’s debts.
9. I nearly lost a stripe over you.
10. Why do you take so much care over your students?

XI. Comment on the metaphorical extensions of these terms:

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1. see – hear - taste – touch
2. warm – icy – frosty – cold
3. white – black – blue – yellow - red

XII. The word head has more than sixty senses and contexts of usage. Consider the
small selection below and explain which meaning extensions are metaphors and
which are metonymies:

1. your mind: My head is full of strange thoughts.

2. understanding: That joke went over his head
3. leader or person in charge of a group or community: The queen is still the head
of state.
4. top or front of something: I prefer my beer without a head of foam
5. (for) each person: We paid ten pounds a head for the meal.

XIII. Consider the meanings of tea recorded by Collins Dictionary (1979: 1490).
Comment on how the original sense was extended, viz. metaphor or metonymy:

1. an evergreen shrub or smaller tree

2. the dried shredded leaves, used to make a beverage by infusion in boiling water
3. such a beverage served hot or iced
4. any of various plants that are similar or that are used to make a tealike beverage
5. any such beverage
6. afternoon tea, chiefly Brit. A light meal eaten in the afternoon, usually consisting
of tea and cakes, biscuits or sandwiches
7. high tea, Brit. and Austr. the main evening meal
8. US a slang term for ‘marijuana’

XIV. Explain the mechanism of sense extension in the figurative uses of these
words: climb, mouth, beaver, writing, tongue, reader, paper, board, dry, sharp,
snarl, purr, grunt.

XV. Comment on the type of semantic relation holding between:

a) fab – fabulous e) donate - award

b) hubby – husband f) sodium chloride - salt
c) wally – nerd g) inebriated - groggy
d) prison – nick h) steal – pilfer - filch

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XVI.Comment and exemplify the figurative uses of these terms:

a) ramble – stumble – plod

b) bark – hiss – grunt – twitter – purr

XVII.Explain the semantic relations holding between these terms:

a) walk – limp – stroll – stride

b) Pole (inhabitant of Poland) – South Pole
c) mad – crazy – loony
d) doggy – canine
e) sweat – perspiration
f) animal – dog – terrier
g) purloin – snitch - swindle

XVIII. Mention what kind of DISH, CIGARETTES, BEER, CHEESE and

COFFEE you prefer. Make up correct collocations by using one of these
adjectives: light, heavy, strong, weak, and mild.

XIX. Fill in the matrix. Indicate normal collocations with a tick; doubtful or
unusual ones with a question mark, and unacceptable ones with a cross.

a laugh a smoke an experience a trip

take

make

have

do

XX. Here are some examples of sentences written by learners of English. Identify
any odd or unacceptable collocations and suggest alternatives:

1 His books commanded criticism from many people.

2 There was a high difference between the two teams.
3 I am doing this exam because I want to achieve a step in my career.
4 He had been found guilty of some slight crimes.
5 She won many competitions, formatting fame in the process.
6 I was very grateful, because he had rescued my life.

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XXI. Here is a list of words that can be associated with informal style or slang.
Can you provide a more formal synonym for each of them?

a. to croak b. boozy c. dough d.cabbage. e. bread

XXII. What are the basic level categories that subsume these subordinate
categories: leggings, T-shirt, pleated skirt, culottes, push chair, poppy, collie,
bungalow

XXIII. For the notion of footwear think of or find as many words as you can,
including such terms as boots, slippers, trainers, pumps, flip-flops, mountain boots,
shoes, wellingtons, and add terms such as indoor footwear, sportswear, etc.

(a) Which of these words are superordinate terms and which ones subordinate
terms?

(b) Which of these terms could be considered basic level terms? Give reasons for
your answer.

XXIV. Try to build up the taxonomic hierarchy of terms for birds in English,
including at least chicken, eagle, sparrow, duck, hen, humming bird, chick, ostrich,
fowl, owl, penguin, robin, falcon. Find names for each group.

XXV. Discuss antonymy in English semantics in general and as applied to the

fragment below:

Robin’s slim, dark good looks, his soft, supple clothes of velvet corduroy, suede
and cavalry twill, his cool self-assurance and his dry, understated conversation,
were to her the quintessence of Englishness, the culture which her family affected
to despise but secretly admired. (David Lodge, Souls and Bodies)

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XXVI. Discuss synonymy in English semantics in general and as applied to the
fragment below:

But she wasn’t scary, not really. Not in the posh way. She wasn’t really what you’d
call a brainbox. Or maybe that’s not fair, because it wasn’t like she was stupid.
(Nick Hornby, Slam)

XXVII. Discuss hyponymy in English semantics in general and as applied to the

fragment below:

Teenager smoked pot and had too much to drink

By our entire staff

A 16-year-boy went several times to a pub and smoked a joint in a shed outside.
(Reuters)

XXVIII. Discuss meaning representation in English structuralist semantics in

general and as applied to the fragment below:

It was enough. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama undersood everything. All spirit left him,
and he deflated completely. Mr. Kalamanja, returning home in the evening, found a
darkened living room and his guest slumped in a chair beside a cold fire with an
empty bottle of Johnnie Walker rolling at his feet.
(Salman Rusdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

XXIX. Discuss meaning representation in English cognitive semantics in general

and as applied to the fragment below:

My mother’s intuition proved to be correct. Born in his dead twin’s shadow, Ormus
Cama turned out to be what the ancients called a psychopomp, one concerned with
the retrieval of lost souls, the souls of the beloved dead.
(Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

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229
PART II PRAGMATICS

Chapter 1. The domain of pragmatics

1. How are correctness and acceptability related to pragmatics? Give an example.

2. Enumerate and explain the perspectives on pragmatics as they result from the
definitions presented.

3. Which are the basic subdomains of pragmatics? Can you think of a

justification?

4. Mention the characteristics of the concept of context and justify how they led
to its subdivisions.

5. Illustrate the relationship between register and appropriacy.

6. According to Field77 (2004: 76) context is a term sometimes used loosely to

cover:
- the immediate situation: the knowledge of the speaker/writer; the analogy
with a similar linguistic exchange;
- meaning representation built up from the text so far;
- topic: world knowledge in the form of pre-established schemas;
- co-text: a group of words which provides syntactic or semantic evidence for
the words which occur next.
Can the opposite terms situational–linguistic context subsume the above
meanings?

7. Contextual information appears to be used by interlocutors/readers in two

different ways. Some can use it in order to compensate for inadequate
decoding skills (those accounting for poor linguistic competence), while others
use it to justify their interpretation of the text. Of course, any user can find
himself in any of the two situations at one time or another. Consider the next
text and refer to the adequate decoding of puff, cheesy, would have, analysing
the situational and linguistic context of occurrence.
'You might have thought that, after conducting an interview with Donald
Trump that read like a celebrity puff piece for an airline inflight magazine
and then posing for a cheesy, sleazy photo under a Playboy cover,
Michael Gove might have wanted to lie low for a bit to recover from the
embarrassment. Not a bit of it. Gove’s narcissism will not be contained
and he spent Monday morning doing a tour of any media outlet that
would have him to boast about his underachievement.'
77
John Field, Psycholinguistics. The Key Concepts, London &NY, 2004, p. 76.

230
 (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/16/michael-gove-
cheesy-puff-donald-trump-interview)

8. Do you agree to the next statement? 'A speech community cannot be conceived
as a group of speakers who use all the same forms, it is best defined as a group
of speakers who share the same norms in regard to language.' (Labov, 1972a:
158 in Graddol et al78, 1994: 23)

9. Context plays a role in resolving ambiguity: it can simplify the process by

enabling the listener to choose the appropriate sense for a polysemous or
homonymous word or the listener/reader automatically accesses all possible
senses before appealing to the context to determine the correct one. Research
suggested that the latter is the case. Recent findings indicate that only the
dominant sense is retrieved when a context indicates the dominant one, and
both senses of a word are retrieved when a context indicates the subordinate
one. Nevertheless, it is possible that all senses are retrieved – but foregrounded
to different degrees depending upon their frequency and contextual
appropriacy. Identify the ambiguous words and explain how you retrieve their
meaning.
I can’t stand worms. Whenever I see one, I feel sick.
He is always gay, very gay, indeed.
Pardon my French, madame.
Tend to the bazaar.

10. Distinguish the sense (semantic and grammatical content) of I wouldn’t mind
another cup of tea from its pragmatic meaning/interpretation. In discussing the
pragmatic meaning of the statement, briefly describe a context in which the
statement would be likely to occur. Compare it to the following structurally
similar examples:
I wouldn’t mind us winning this war.
I wouldn’t mind you closing the door behind you.
I wouldn’t mind wearing such a dress to the party.

Which expressions in the conversation below are utterances? Which are

grammatically well formed sentences? Explain your choices.
Speaker A: I really like white roses.
Speaker B: Me too. My second favorite rose color is yellow.
Speaker A: I don’t care for yellow roses. Too strident, in my opinion.
Speaker B: Really? I think they mean great taste.

78
David Graddol et al., Describing Language, 2-nd edition, Open University Press,
Buckingham, 1994, p. 23.

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11. Identify and discuss the lingustic expressions which have the feature
[+indeterminacy]. Comment on their role:
a. One man’s ill-luck is another man’s good fortune.
b. You never know.
c. Tonight, in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while
our road has been hard,[...], we have picked ourselves up, [...]and we
know in our hearts that for the United States of America, the best is yet to
come. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/07/barack-obama-
speech-full text/accessed 29.01.2017)
d. “Remember me to one who lived there,
For once she was a true love of mine.” (a fragment from the ballad
Scarborough Fair)
e. If not us, then who, if not here, then where, if not now, then when?

12. Consider the utterance if not now, then when? It’s a Hillel’s maxim. Comment
on its meaning in the following contexts. The Babylonian Talmud describes
how different rabbis used to celebrate the annual water festival at the Temple
in Jerusalem. Among them was Hillel the Elder, whose reply allegedly was: 'If
I am here, everyone is here; but if I am not here, who is here?’
 The former Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu addressed the
United Nations in 2012: “If not now, when are we supposed to act in
unity? And if it is not the United Nations, who is to lead? If it is not us,
then who will shoulder the responsibility to protect the innocent
civilians?”
 In 1963, Michigan governor George Romney pleaded for his tax reform
plan across the state “If not now, when? If not us, who?”
 The „Harry Potter” series actress Emma Watson used the reply in her 2014
UN speech: „You might be thinking who is this Harry Potter girl? And
what is she doing up on stage at the UN. It’s a good question and trust me,
I have been asking myself the same thing. I don’t know if I am qualified to
be here. All I know is that I care about this problem. And I want to make it
better. [...] In my nervousness for this speech and in my moments of doubt
I’ve told myself firmly—if not me, who, if not now, when. If you have
similar doubts when opportunities are presented to you I hope those words
might be helpful. [...] Because the reality is that if we do nothing it will
take 75 years, or for me to be nearly a hundred before women can expect
to be paid the same as men for the same work79.
 Reagan deployed the reply in an appeal to his cabinet.
 The quotation becomes a line in Tracy Chapman’s and Basia’s songs (If
not now). Contextualize the line and explain its pragmatic meaning
(speaker’s meaning).

79
See more at: http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2014/9/emma-watson-gender-
equality-is-your-issue-too#sthash.otWtUYpS.dpuf/accessed February 17, 2017

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 Refer to it being misattributed80:
 In 2012, the Republican National Convention party platform preamble
included the quotation: “We must answer Ronald Reagan’s question: If not
us, who? And if not now, when?”
 In 2010, in a Saturday Night Live sketch the line was attributed to Robert
F. Kennedy. In his book Revival, an account of Barack Obama’s first term,
a journalist, Richard Wolffe, also misattributed the quotation, later
associated to John F. Kennedy.
 Ivanka Trump misattributed the quotation to Emma Watson.
Explain the phenomenon.

13. Consider the utterance One man’s ill-luck is another man’s good fortune.
Replace the pair of noun phrases ill-luck ≠ good fortune by the pairs loss –
gain, meat – poison, trash/junk – treasure. Are there any structural
differences among the utterances obtained? What about semantic
differences? To justify your answer, characterize the series ill-luck, loss,
poison, trash/junk and good fortune, gain, meat, treasure.
What is the relationship among the elements of the series? Consider the
criterion of the user’s competence and then describe each pair in point
of its relevance in context.
Compare the variants of the proverb above and mention if those variants
result in different effects on the interlocutor, i.e. refer to their
appropriacy.

14. Consider the TV commercial whose text is rendered below in the source
language. Analyse it structurally and pragmatically, referring to the inferences
(implicit pragmatic deductions characterizing each utterance) and to the
relevance of the whole text. Translate it into English and mention the
differences.

„Te-ai întors așa repede?” “Da, mamă-soacră, am venit.” „Ai cumpărat

Supramax articulații?” „Nu mai aveau Supramax. Mi-au dat altceva.”
(Soacra bătu cu pumnul în masă.) „De ce? Supramax articulații conține cea
mai mare doză de colagen bioactiv cu eficiență dovedită științific.” „Ai
dreptate, am plecat la altă farmacie.”

15. How does the vagueness of some lexemes influence the interpretation of the
utterance they are part of? Consider ok, issue, nice, gorgeous, thing. Then
replace them by more precise synonyms, in accordance with your expectations
and text specifications:

80
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/213190/if-not-now-when-a-recent-history-of-hillels-
misattributed-maxim-from-ivanka-trump-to-ronald-reagan/accessed February 17, 2017

233
a. The results are ok. The reaction of the public was ok. She looks ok. The
homework is ok. Our discussion was ok. The food and the view are ok. The patient
is ok now.
b. We need to solve our issues, said the wife to her husband. There are some issues
not yet approached in our foreign policy. The issue is the computer software. Let’s
not make our odd choices an issue.
c. She is a nice person. Nice dress you’re wearing! It’s such nice weather here in
spring! Nice work! „I’ll be late. Don’t wait me up.” „Nice!”
d. gorgeous painting/lady/car/landscape/book/idea.
e. One thing I don’t understand.
They have a thing.
(The) Thing is we can’t find tickets to this show.
How are things with you?
She did the thing. Nobody knows of the thing. I need to talk to you about
our thing.
Find Romanian/ French counterparts or equivalents of the English
examples above.

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Chapter 2. Deixis

1. Compare the two definitions of deixis on page 96 and notice if there is any
similarity.
2. Which are the synonymic terms for deictic markers? Do you think that the
selection of these terms was motivated? How?
3. Which are the categories of participants in a speech event?
4. Consider Mey’s definition of indexicals on page 97. How does that modify the
concept of reference? For instance, can I ever have just semantic reference and
not pragmatic reference, too? Can role in communication be equated to
pronouns’ semantic reference? See Fromkin and Rodman’s description of I on
page 98.
5. Two colleagues are gossiping about a third, who is also their friend, and one of
them says: 'He is always late for work. I don’t understand how he manages not
to get fired. I think this time he’s really going to get into deep trouble.’ The
person talked about is approaching and the former speaker comments abruptly
and loudly: 'He cannot be trusted, believe me, this brother of mine.’ What can
you say about the reference of the pronoun he?
6. Analyse the value and reference of personal, possessive and emphatic
pronouns or of their corresponding determinative adjectives (“adjective
pronominale”):

Model: Jane, you always exaggerate. Your opinion is biased.

Jane is an addressing term and coreferential with the pronoun you. Thus, you is
an anaphora, but it is also deictic in nature since it makes reference to the
interlocutor in the situation of communication. Your is a possessive adjective
coreferential with the antecedents you and Jane. It has also deictic value.

Whenever they are home, the Robinsons receive guests and welcome them
themselves.
It is in your hands, your chance.
'I, Harry, take you, Jane, to be my lawful wedded wife...’
'Shall we give up spending on new shoes, my dear?’
'I’m never wrong.’ '«I’m never wrong», says he”.
'Aren’t we conceived if we imagine we are always right?'
'Are we recovered?’ 'I don’t know about you, but I am.’
It’s not a HE-says-SHE-says discussion.

7. Rephrase using generic value pronouns:

It is believed that this is just the beginning.
There is a strong conviction that things can be reversed.
Rumour has it that more people invested in the business.

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8. Explain the difference between absolute and relative time markers. Give
examples.
9. Can absolute and relative time markers be combined? Give examples.
10. Correct the mistakes:
I’ve seen them yesterday.
We had accepted the proposal after we were explained the details of the
matter.
I’ll have talked to him two days ago.
They’ve settled things at the office.
We did that and this.

11. Identify and analyse the person, space, time and social deictic markers in the
next fragments:

Tonight, in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our
road has been hard,[...], we have picked ourselves up, [...]and we know in our
hearts that for the United States of America, the best is yet to come.
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/07/barack-obama-speech-full
text/accessed 29.01.2017)
I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father,
particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged,
almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing; [...]. Such I was, from eight to
eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest,
loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard
indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled.
(Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice)
If ever two were one, then surely we./ If ever man were loved by wife, then
thee;/ If ever wife was happy in a man,/ Compare with me ye women if you
can. [...]/ Thy love is such I can no way repay;/ The heavens reward thee
manifold, I pray./ Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,/ That when we
live no more we may live ever. - (Anne Bradstreet, To My Dear Loving
Husband)
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
(W.B. Yeats, When You Are Old)

12. Identify and comment on the values of this, that and it in the following
examples:

236
 Model:
‘That it should come to this!’ (Hamlet, Act I, scene 2)
It - meaningless it in impersonal constructions; it has simply a grammatical
value.
This – deictic marker of space and empathetic deictic expressing the strong
emotional reaction of the speaker.

Note: here that is a conjunction corresponding to the Rom. că.

‘This above all: to thine own self be true.’ (W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I,
scene 3)
‘That’s it! Get out of here right now!’
‘This is it/ That’s it, I’m sure of it. I’ve seen it before!’
‘I’ve brought you some coffee for the road. Take it or leave it, I don’t care!’
Take it or leave it.
‘You don’t go out that late and that’s that.’
‘To be or not to be: that is the question.’ (W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III,
scene 1)

13. Rephrase using discourse deictics:

What will happen next is not known by anybody.

John objects to whoever has another idea. His objection irritates me.
Reminiscing with you was most enjoying.
To believe people is sometimes so easy.
She opened the meeting. She presented the facts. She drew the conclusions.

14. Analyse the values of the deictics.

Model: Call us again this month.

us – deictic pronoun referring to the speaker and other referents not present in
the situation of communication; inclusive we.
this month – relative time marker, nominal phrase, deictic value (proximity to
the moment of speaking –present).

There were many advices at the door: all these.

The bus stop is a few minutes’ walk from here.
This strange youngman came this afternoon looking for a friend of his.
Oh, this perfume!
Go on and finish up your work, otherwise you will hold us back.

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15. Identify and comment on the type and values of the social deictics:

a. ‘Frailty, thy name is woman!’ (W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene 2)

b. ‘My Lord Bishop of Canterbury…’
c. VIOLA : I see you what you are, you are too proud.
But, if you were the devil, you are fair.
My lord and master loves you. (W.Shakespeare, Twelfth
Night, I, 5)
d. The Lord Mayor of London is the City of London's mayor and leader of
the City of London.
e. But Eliza took advantage of the first convenient pause to ask if I had
lately seen Mrs.Graham, in a tone of merely casual inquiry, but with a
sidelong glance — intended to be playfully mischievous — really,
brimful and running over with malice.‘What! are you beginning to tire
already? I thought so noble a creature would have power to attach you
for a year at least!’
‘I would rather not speak of her now.’
‘Ah! then you are convinced, at last, of your mistake — you have at
length discovered that your divinity is not quite the immaculate — ‘
‘I desired you not to speak of her, Miss Eliza.’
‘Oh, I beg your pardon! I perceive Cupid’s arrows have been too sharp
for you: the wounds, being more than skin-deep, are not yet healed,
and bleed afresh at every mention of the loved one’s name.’
‘Say, rather,’ interposed Miss Wilson, ‘that Mr. Markham feels that
name is unworthy to be mentioned in the presence of right-minded
females. I wonder, Eliza, you should think of referring to that
unfortunate person — you might know the mention of her would be
anything but agreeable to any one here present.’ [...]
Mr. Lawrence and his pony had both altered their positions in some
degree. The pony had wandered eight or ten yards further away; and he
had managed, somehow, to remove himself from the middle of the road:
I found him seated in a recumbent position on the bank — looking very
white and sickly still, and holding his cambric handkerchief (now more
red than white) to his head. ‘Here, you fellow — scoundrel — dog —
give me your hand, and I’ll help you to mount.’
(Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)

16. a. Consider the text below. Identify social deixis markers, characterize
them and then mention if they are still in use. Provide examples of such uses in
contemporary English.
b. Identify the discourse deictics in the fragment below and analyse
them.

238
 Tranio: Master, you looked so longly on the maid (W. Shakespeare, Taming of
the Shrew, I,1)
Tranio: Softly, my masters. If you be gentlemen,
Do me this right, hear me with patience. (ibidem)
Bianca: Good sister, wrong me not, nor wrong yourself […]
If you affect him, sister, here I swear
I’ll plead for you myself but you shall have him (ibidem, I, 2)
Petruccio: Father, and wife, and gentlemen, adieu (ibidem, II, 1)
Messenger: Mistress, your father prays you leave your books (ibidem, III, 2)
Baptista: Go, girl, I cannot blame thee now to weep (ibidem)
Petruccio: You logger-headed and unpolished grooms, […]
You peasant swain, you whoreson, malthorse drudge, […]
Go, rascals, go and fetch my supper in. (ibidem, IV, 1)
Lucentio: Now, mistress, profit you in what you read?
Bianca: What, master, read you? First resolve me that [...]
And may you prove, sir, master of your art.
Lucentio: While you, sweet dear, prove mistress of my art (ibidem)
Hortensio: Come, Mistress kate, I’ll bear you company. (ibidem, IV, 3)
Katherine: You budding virgin, fair, and fresh, and sweet (ibidem, IV, 4)
Pardon, old father, […] (ibidem)
Vincentio: What, you notorious villain, didst thou never
See thy master’s father, Vincentio? (ibidem, V,1)
Katherine: Come, come, you froward and unable worms, […] (ibidem, V,2)

17. Identify time and space markers and specify their deictic or non-deictic nature;
analyse them morphologically:

[...] The grass, being sodden with rain, afforded the young gentleman a rather
inhospitable couch; his clothes were considerably bemired; and his hat was
rolling in the mud on the other side of the road. [...] I dismounted, however, and
having fastened my own animal to the nearest tree, first picked up his hat,
intending to clap it on his head; but either he considered his head unfit for a hat,
or the hat, in its present condition, unfit for his head; for shrinking away the one,
he took the other from my hand, and scornfully cast it aside. [...]
(Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)

239
Chapter 3. Implicatures

1. What is the nature of The Cooperative Principle (CP)? Why is it useful?

2. What is the relation between CP and pragmatics? And between context and
inference?
3. Which are the characteristics of conventional implicatures? Exemplify.
4. How is CP related to conversational maxims?
5. Why can The Maxim of Quality be considered a supermaxim? Explain. The
same question for The Maxim of Relation.
6. How does relevance affect interpretation?
7. In about half a page mention, explain and exemplify the four types of
intentional non-observance of conversational maxims. Give one example for
each case.
8. Why can the maxim of quality be considered as a supermaxim? Give an
example to make your point.
9. Calculate the generalized conversational implicatures:

Model:
“Have you bought the medicine?” “I remembered that you asked me to.”
Conversational implicatures mean that the hearer makes inferences based on
the situational context; generalized conversational implicatures represent cases
which facilitate the inferring process, they don’t actually need to be calculated
since the inference(s) is/are almost automatical because of the frequent
correspondence between a linguistic structure and a certain communicative
goal, the role of the context becoming secondary. In this case, the reply to the
question seems to flout the maxim of quantity; one variant of interpretation is
that the speaker says too little, is not specific enough, leaving relevant
information out because that is precisely what he/she wants to do and the
implicature is I didn’t, in spite of your request. The additional premises could
be I was busy/ I forgot all about it later etc.
Another variant is that the speaker says too much, gives irrelevant information;
thus, the maxim of manner, submaxim “avoid prolixity” can also be said to be
flouted. What would the effect be? What is the implicature linked to the
performance of the action?
Which of the two variants seems more probable to you? What other
implicatures can be drawn for each variant?

“Have you done your homework?” “We have read the course.”
It’s possible that they may be late.
They are less and less trusting.
You are a lamb in front of wolves.

240
 Which example(s) of the above represent linguistic contexts which suspend(s)
the implicature?
Provide further contexts to cancel all the implicatures. Then do the opposite, i.e.
reinforce the implicatures explicitly.
Prove that they are non-detachable by using synonyms of the linguistic
structures used.
10. Comment on the conversational maxim non-observance (mention the type of
non-observance and the maxim non-observed:
1. ‘Have you bought me Channel no.5?’ ‘I’ve bought you some perfume, all
right.’
2. The journalist: ‘What can you declare about the latest events?’ The
addressee (on opening his car door): ‘Please, take care, don’t let the car
door hit you!’
3. A: ‘How are you, ma’am?’ B: ‘You are looking good today, my dear.
Don’t worry.’
4. ‘Come quickly. Stop. Change of plans. Stop. Meet at home. Stop.’
5. The teacher: ‘I’m sorry, you are late. Please, wait outside till your
colleagues finish the test.’ The student: ‘It’s ok, you don’t need to
apologize. I don’t mind waiting in here.’
6. A new L’Oréal Préférence. Because you deserve it.
7. ‘The alleged victim doesn’t look so scary in the light of day, in the
courtroom witness chair, all dressed up, cleaned up. But that is not the
circumstance when my client used force, is it? The man came at my client
in a dark alley behind a tavern, and no one knew or could have known his
intentions. And my client decided that he wanted to go home that night,
that he wanted to survive.’ (http://spokanewaduilawyer.com/mock-trial-
defense-closing-argument-example-1/accessed 03/05/2017)

11. Discuss if and how formal written English style norms require the observance
of Grice’s conversational maxims. Consider word order, vagueness, stylistic
inversion etc.
12. Think of the latest cases when you changed the topic during a conversation and
analyse the effects.

13. Conversational Maxims and literary texts

Poetry represents one of the typical cases when conversational maxims are
suspended, i.e. neither the speaker/the interlocutor (as characters), respectively
neither the writer nor the reader, have any expectations regarding the
observance of the maxims. But, within this general convention, the message of
a poem can be adequately decoded if referring to the flouting of the various
maxims and to the effects that it has on the interpreter of the message.

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 Identify the cases of conversational maxim flouting in the following two
stanzas from the ballad Scarborough Fair. Comment on the intention of the
speaker which results in those flouting cases; also refer to the role of deictics in
expressing the communicative goal:
Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.
Remember me to one who lived there,
For once she was a true love of mine.

Tell her to make me a cambric (i.e. soft cotton) shirt –

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme –
Without any seam or needlework.
She shall be a true love of mine.

Guidelines: The first two lines apparently don’t observe the maxim of
relevance, the speaker utters the first line as a rhetorical question, whose answer he
already knows to be affirmative or, at least, so he hopes. This premise is stressed
by the second line, which has the function of a chant, and thus the whole poem
becomes an incantation for everlasting true love, one that surpasses death.
The recurrent refrain includes the reference to four elements (plants)
having strong magic powers and it also anticipates the request bluntly stated in the
third line: ‘find the one I loved and remind her of me.’ What is the role of deictic
elements, especially of the past tense forms? What is their significance in relation
to the loved woman?
Returning to the symbolism of the invoked plants, each adds a new
significance. In some magic rituals, parsley is associated to erotic love, fertility,
strength, vitality love and death rituals; it means good luck, protection, purification,
good health; future predictions.
Sage, “Virgin Mary’s palm” is a symbol of protection (it protects people’s
health as it protected Virgin Mary); it neutralizes negative energies, it gives
immortality and youth, wisdom and wit.
Rosemary, “Virgin Mary’s rose”, was also used in magic rituals for love,
longevity and happiness, purification; it is associated to passion.
Thyme is a symbol of effort and long journeys: it accompanies people in
the most important moments of their lives: victorious athletes were crowned with
thyme twigs, and also brides. In ancient Greece thyme twigs were put on the family
and friends’ graves. In Rome they were used to preserve good health and prevent
drunkenness. For Christians, it is the plant consecrated to St. Peter. In the Middle
Ages, it was associated to witchcraft, the witches’ brooms being made of its twigs,
and only bad people could cultivate them. According to other beliefs, they were
associated to fertility, were meant for holidays and only a woman could plant them
so that they could grow.

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Consider how the symbolism of these plants becomes relevant in relation to the
speaker’s intentions.

14. Identify the cases of conversational maxim flouting which account for figures
of speech. Comment on the intention of the speaker:
As I walked out one evening,/ Walking down Bristol Street,/ The crowds upon
the pavement/ Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river/ I heard a lover sing/[…]

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you/ Till China and Africa meet,/ And the river
jumps over the mountain/ And the salmon sing in the street…’

(an extract from W.H. Auden’s As I walked out one evening)

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Chapter 4. Presuppositions

1. Presuppositions as inferences
Inferences refer to the process of adding information which is not
linguistically present in a text, but is implicit from ther context. This process takes
place only to the extent to which a speaker/writer considers that information easily
recoverable by the interlocutor/reader, if they are cooperative. We can distinguish
among: logical inferences (entailments), bridging inferences and elaborative
inferences81. This psychological approach can be corroborated with the theoretical
background provided in the chapter on presuppositions (chapter 4).
Logical inferences (i.e. entailments) are based on the properties of a word;
those properties can be semantic or grammatical features: for instance, I has the
feature [+speaker], spinster has the feature [‒male], knight [+male], alive
[+Predicative]; therefore, any referent denoted by those words must have the
mentioned characteristics.
Considering the example and quotation from Fromkin and Rodman (1998:
180, respectively 1998: 198) on page 154, what is the relationship between
entailment and presupposition?

Bridging inferences (the terms necessary, backward or integrative are used

as synonyms of bridging). Consider the example:
The stew smells great. Bring the casserole, I want to look at it, it must
include many vegetables and spices.
We infer that: the stew is in the casserole (because people cook and keep
food in casseroles, as a rule); the vegetables combined with the spices make the
stew smell great, the smell and the aspect of the food are appealing. Such
inferences are basically pragmatic, deriving from general experience and also
implying the speaker’s knowledge of the senses of each of the words used in the
utterance.
The users try to make sense of what they hear. Text coherence is achieved
by the 'given’ information, signalled by the use of the definite article, having
anaphoric value, either linguistic or situational, and being, in most cases, an
indirect anaphora. In many cases, the ‘given’ information is expressed by a term
functioning as a component of another referent expressed by an earlier word (the
meronym). In our example, the meronym stew is the 'given' information.
In sum, bridging inferences refer to the previous encyclopaedic
competence of the speaker and the interlocutor (based on their experience,
including communicative experience), and also to their integrative competences of
connecting the elements referred to in the linguistic context, according to the
concrete circumstances.
'Bridging inferences are made on-line during text processing. They are
stored as part of an ongoing mental representation, that is maybe why listeners
81
John Field, Psycholinguistics. The Key Concepts. London & NY: Routledge, 2004.

244
often fail to distinguish what they have inferred from what they have heard’ (Field,
2004: 130).
Field mentions an experiment which illustrates the previous idea: many of
the subjects who were presented with the sentence He slipped on a wet spot and
dropped the delicate glass pitcher on the floor, 'later recalled being told that the
pitcher broke' (ibidem).

Comment on the bridging inferences :

a. She went into the hall. The walls were covered with paintings.
b. The doctor checked the emergency supplies. The medicines were
expired.
c. We got some beer out of the trunk. The beer was warm. (ibidem)

However, there is disagreement as to the extent to which bridging

inferences are integrated. A constructivist approach would hold that all bridging
inferences are added to propositional information from the text, whereas a
minimalist approach would argue that only a minimal number is stored in this way.

Think of the presuppositions (themselves representing a type of pragmatic

inferences) which derive from the examples a-c. Keep in mind that both the
speaker and the hearer should take the inferences to be understood, given their
shared knowledge.

Elaborative inference (also termed forward or predictive inference). It

would be also associated to written texts interpretation, precisely because it implies
further reflection on the part of the reader who 'hears’ the text in mind. The reader
might exploit this type of inference to enrich his interpretation; this means that
elaborative inferences are not essential to understand the text/discourse; they can
be cancelled or adjusted, even reversed, if later information indicates their
incorrectness. Cancellation does not cause disruption to the representation of the
text that has been constructed.
Elaborative inferences differ from bridging ones in that they do not appear
to form part of the mental representation. It has been suggested that elaborative
inferences may not be made until later, during recall. Some apparent elaborative
inferences may represent no more than the effects of the automatic process of
spreading activation, in which a recent encounter with a word speeds up the
recognition of associated ones.
'The word SHOVEL turned out to be a good cue for recalling the sentence
The grocer dug a hole with a pitchfork because of its association with the verb
DIG’ (Field, 2004: 130).

245
 The next poem was written by Walt Whitman. It is called Think of the
Soul.82 What is the word soul associated with in the text? Can you think of
elaborative inferences meant to help interpreting this poem?

Think of the Soul;

I swear to you that body of yours gives proportions to your Soul somehow to live in
other spheres;
I do not know how, but I know it is so.

Think of loving and being loved;

I swear to you, whoever you are, you can interfuse yourself with such things that
everybody that sees you shall look longingly upon you.

Think of the past;

I warn you that in a little while others will find their past in you and your times.

The race is never separated—nor man nor woman escapes;

All is inextricable—things, spirits, Nature, nations, you too—from precedents you
come.

Recall the ever-welcome defiers, (The mothers precede them;)

Recall the sages, poets, saviors, inventors, lawgivers, of the earth;
Recall Christ, brother of rejected persons—brother of slaves, felons, idiots, and of
insane and diseas’d persons.

2. Starting from Frege’s example, can you illustrate the relationship among
definite descriptions and time clauses, on the one hand, presupposition and
negation, on the other?

3. Which is the requirement imposed on presuppositions for an utterance to be

appropriate?

4. Which is the sense of a declarative sentence (i.e. statement)? And its reference?

5. Discuss the oppositions sentence – assertion/statement – sentence use and the

relevance of these terms in relation to presuppositions. Consider the utterance:
It’s 5 o’clock.

6. Starting from Yule’s example on page 156, comment on the different views
that oppose false presuppositions to implications as semantic inferences.

82
http://www.bartleby.com/142/319.html

246
7. Which are the features of presuppositions whose presence or absence counts as
a test in establishing the class boundaries?

8. Which of the presupposition triggers are dependent on the type of time

reference? Analyse the next examples to draw a conclusion:

a. You will realize some day that I was right.

You realized that I was right.
'Do you realize that I am right?’ 'I realize you may be right.’
You’ll realize that I will be the only one to help them.

b. The students will repeat/ had repeated the question again.

c. He is arriving/ has arrived/ will arrive.
d. He is being criticised/ was criticized/ will be criticised for your
inappropriate conduct.
e. We’ll talk after we get back.
We talked after we got back.
We always talk after we get back from work.
We’ll talk about this after we get back together.
f. The text, which was published many times during the first half of
the decade, was highly appreciated by the critics.
The text, which will be published one day, is highly appreciated by
those who heard it read by the author.
g. It’s Mary who came to greet us at the station.
It’s Mary who will come to greet us at the station.

9. Which of the presupposition triggers are dependent on the feature [+assertion]

of the verb in the subordinate clause under their scope? Analyse the next sets
of examples.
It’s odd that he left. It’s odd that he should have left.
He’s sad that his father has not got in time for the party. He’s sad that his
father might not get in time for the party.
I know that it is too late. I know that it will be too late if we don’t leave now. I
know it could be too late to change jobs, but I still want to try.

10. Calculate the potential and actualized presuppositions. Explain how they are
influenced by the lingustic context (influences which include cancellation and
suspension):

A: 'The new neighbour has come to take back the VCR that you borrowed from
him.’
B: 'What neighbour? We are the only people living in the building at the
moment. There is no neighbour.’

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 A: 'The plan was changed again, my best friend said so.’
B: 'If it were changed, we would find out. They would give us a call.’

A: 'I remembered. It was your cousin that I saw at the store this afternoon.’
B: 'My cousin is not in town. Unless he canceled his business trip.’

A: 'You never listen to reason.’

B: 'Have you finished criticising me?’
A: 'I haven’t started yet.’

A: 'Have you seen? I am a better swimmer than you, aren’t I?’

B: 'I can’t swim.’

A: 'During the discussion, this argument was brought up.’

B: 'There was no discussion. Nobody discussed anything.’

11. Use the examples above to prove that presuppositions resist embedding.
12. Compare the indeterminate meaning of conversational implicatures and
presupposition suspension. Are they related? In what way? Exemplify.

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Chapter 5. Speech Acts

1. Which are the factors involved in (hopefully successful) verbal

communication? Consider both Smith & Wilson’s and Miller and Johnson-Laird’s
(p. 173) points of view. Are they similar?

2. How did the concept of SA appear?

3. What is a SA? Which are the elements involved in defining it? Can we link
the concept of SA to Austin’s classification of utterances into descriptive and
performative?

4. Illustrate how the feature [+performative] of an utterance depends on the

tense of the Main Clause verb. What other restrictions of morpho-syntactic nature
are to be imposed on an utterance to assign it a PF value? What conclusion can be
drawn regarding the connection form-sense-PF value?

5. Analyse the next verbal exchange, pointing out the nature of each
utterance: descriptive, primary PF, explicit PF:

A: It’s raining.
B: What do you insinuate?
A: I’m simply pointing out that it’s raining.
B: I’d say.
A: I’d say you’re pointing out a fact, too. I bet you are.
B: Don’t bet, you’ll lose.

6. What are the disadvantages of Austin’s direction of analysis: from PF utterances

to PF verbs? Think of the examples with bet on page 170. How is language
creativity at work in that case and how does that contradict Austin’s view?

7. Are explicit and primary PF versions of the same SA always equivalent?

Compare:

Have a break! Have a Kit-Kat! (it is the text of an ad) We are ordering you to eat
a Kit-Kat.
Are you deaf? I’m asking you if you are deaf.
Use the conclusions to discuss The Performative Hypothesis and The Extended
Performative Hypothesis.

8. What is the relation between primary PFs and indirect SAs, and also, between
explicit PFs (and PF verbs) and direct SAs? Is it a 1: 1 correspondence? Consider
the quotation from Mey on page 172.

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9. Describe Searle’s classification of PF utterances. What is the performativity
continuum?

10. Match the construction in the left-hand column with the speech act with which
it is associated in the right-hand column. They were inspired by Meyer 83 (2009:
77):

Utterance Speech act expressed

The English language originated in c. Commissive

England

I promise to do the work e. Expressive

I hereby declare the meeting open b. Directive

Don’t take too long a. Assertive/Representative

I’m sorry I broke the crystal glass d. Declaration

11. Analyse the SA levels characterizing the next utterances:

'You’ve finished the painting! I’m impressed!’ ‘Don’t be!’

I name you Mary-Jane.
I hereby declare you my heir.
‘Let me tell you that I strongly trust John.’ ‘Do you? I don’t care.’
‘I want more time.’ ‘You can’t buy time.’
‘Can you fetch me a coffee?’ ‘I can, but I won’t.’

12. Discuss whether the speech acts listed below would be direct or indirect.

A teacher says to her students: 'Please leave your papers on my desk.’

One person saying to another sitting next to an open door leading to the backyard
of a house: 'Lots of mosquitoes are getting into the house.’
A son says to his mother: 'I’ll take out the garbage later.’ 'Did I ask you anything
about that?’
A guest says to another guest at a dinner party: 'Could you please pass the salad?’

83
Charles F. Meyer, Introducing English Linguistics, Cambridge, CUP, 2009.

250
13. Analyse the next text in point of the illocutionary acts performed. Mention if
they are direct or indirect:

a. 'My client faces a serious offense. He is charged with a violent crime. His life is
on the line. You think the police would have done a more thorough job in the
investigation. You really would. You would think my client would be entitled to a
fair investigation before people would pass judgment on him. The police should
have tried to find independent witnesses who were at the tavern that night. They
did not. How come none of the bartenders were subpoenaed? Instead the police
relied on the word of the alleged victim and his friends. And you know the kind of
people they are. None of their stories matched. Half of them admitted to drug use
on the night in question. Is that the type of scant proof that can send a man to jail?
Doesn’t my client deserve better? Don’t we all? Hold the state to its burden. A
conviction in this case would be a travesty. Do the right
thing.’(http://spokanewaduilawyer.com/mock-trial-defense-closing-
argumentexample-1/accessed 03/05/2017)

b. Tranio: Master, you looked so longly on the maid

Perhaps you marked not what’s the pith of all.
Lucentio: O, yes, I saw sweet beauty in her face, […] (W. Shakespeare, Taming
of the Shrew, I, 1)
Baptista: How now, my friend, why dost thou look so pale?
Hotensio: For fear, I promise you, if I look pale.
Baptista: What, will my daughter prove a good musician?
Hortensio: I think she’ll sooner prove a soldier.
Iron may hold with her, but never lutes. (idem, II, 1)
Petruccio: You lie, in faith, for you are called plain Kate
And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst,
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom, […] (ibidem)
Katherine: Asses are made to bear, and so are you.
Petruccio: Women are made to bear, and so are you. (ibidem)

14. What is a SS? And a SE? What is their relation to SAs? Consider the next SA
and think of possible Speech Situations and Speech Events in which it can be used:

It is 9 a.m.
This brand is famous for its taste.
He was injured.
Let’s give them a big round of applause!

15.Discuss the direction of fit. Then analyse the SA levels:

I should stop talking to the likes of you.

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They’ve just arrived.
We arrest you on the charge of conspiracy.
I fire you for disobedience. Will you need references?

16. Discuss the next utterances in point of felicity conditions:

‘We have power on our side and we declare you guilty of trespassing this
property.’
‘Dear beloved, we have gathered here to marry these people.’
The flight-attendant to the passengers: ‘Please, fasten your seat belts, or else!’
‘Darling, I’ll give you anything you want!’
‘You shouldn’t hit other kids. And you shouldn’t lie.’ ‘I promise.’
I declare the meeting open. vs I declare you the most sincere person in the world.’
I welcome your response.
I warn you that you’ll feel sick if you stay up till late.

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Chapter 6. Politeness

1. What is politeness? Distinguish between first-order and second-order

politeness. Provide examples illustrating each category.

2. What categories of factors influence second-order politeness? What

components can you include in each category? Establish them in relation to
the interaction.

3. Characterize social values. Do you agree to Mey’s opinion referring to

them?

4. What factors shape social values according to Hofstede (1980)?

5. Can politeness be related to the feature of age? Is slang a form of impolite

communication? Are younger speakers still more likely to use slang than
older speakers? Think of examples from your mother tongue: analyse the
slang terms in point of their lexical class and make a hypothesis regarding
the same tendencies in English and, if possible, to other languages.

6. Think for example of the ever wider use of the second person singular
personal pronoun in Romanian in everyday communication, instead of the
corresponding politeness pronoun. This opposition is non-existent in
English. Does that affect communication in general? How? Can you agree
with Aitchison (2001: 148) that „politeness can affect the structures of the
language” and „accelerates present tendencies”?

7. Comment on the next quotation from Aitchison (op.cit.: 149): „Politeness

phenomena, then, are likely to accelerate tendencies already present, and
may eventually cause imbalances which can disrupt the language in
various ways.”

8. Describe the relation between The Cooperative principle and The

Politeness Principle as it appears from the sources quoted (see subchapter
6.1.2.).

9. How is the tact maxim observed in the next examples? Consider the size of
the imposition, the options offered and the hearer’s benefits:
(Mary), close the door, (will you)?
Have a break, you will feel better.
I’ve just missed a few seconds from the presentation.
We have to agree on a minor detail: your wages.

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10. Consider the Agreement Maxim example on page 195. Comment on the
strategies and devices used to express (apparent) agreement. Disagreement
is directly expressed by negating the verb of the statement under
discussion. Turn affirmative verbs into their negative counterparts and
vice-versa and see the effects. Comment on them.

11. The following example is inspired from Meyer (2010: 77). A patron has
brought to the reception desk in a company some correspondence that was
addressed to the company and had been misplaced. Discuss the extent to
which the patron and the worker follow the maxims of politeness.
Patron: I found these in the administration building. They’re addressed to
the accounting department, so I thought they must go to you.
Worker: Well, if you have the time, you could take them to the accounting
department, or you could just leave them here.
Patron: For all I care, you can very well throw them out altogether.

12. Comment in point of (non-)observed politeness maxims:

Would you mind taking the trouble of helping yourself with the cakes?
I will make it my business to convince you to sell the house. Its costs are
huge.
It would be a real accomplishment if she would accept our proposal and
marry John/and drink a glass of wine with us.
Go to your room and lie down if you are feeling dizzy! I’ll help you, it’s no
trouble.

13. Illustrate the connection between deictic markers and politeness. Consider
the questions and remarks below:
a. When can the use of personal pronouns be perceived as impolite?
b. Can deictic tenses be markers of politeness/impoliteness?
c. Re-read the chapter on deixis (subchapters on social and empathetic
deixis) and exemplify the connection between demonstrative
pronouns/adjectives and politeness.
d. The role of mood as politeness marker.

14. Identify the connection between the conversational implicatures specific to

each example and the manifestation of politeness/impoliteness:

1. A: Are you happy? B: Who knows what happiness is? A: This is not what
I asked you. B: It is the only answer that you will get.

2. A: What is wrong with our host? He seems intoxicated.

B: Can you be so kind as to bring me my shawl? It’s getting chilly.

254
3. A: Why are you so late? B: There seems to be a bad line/the signal is
bad. I can’t hear you any more.

4. A: Our friend just told you that he had lied to us, didn’t he? B: I can
neither confirm nor deny that.

5. A: Congratulations, under the circumstances, it is a real victory. You

shouldn’t complain.

6. A: I haven’t seen a totally rude person for a long time! B: Maybe you
should go out more.

7. There are questions which are better to remain unanswered.

15. Explain the link between presupposition triggers and politeness in the
examples below:

The Big Mamma has come.

A: Can we offer you something similar? We don’t have that model of shoes
in your size. B: It is those shoes that I want.

I’ve been staying here waiting for you since you called and told me to
wait.

They don’t want him living in the same building with them. They say he
was accused of theft.

Wife to the husband: Her husband, who earns three times as much as you,
reserved the whole restaurant on her birthday.

Did you finish?

16. Exemplify how factive, lexical or structural presuppositions can be

markers of politeness or impoliteness:

A: Wake up! I hear noises in the other room! B: It’s odd that you should
hear anything.

A: We regret telling you that we cannot join you tonight.B: But you told us
last night that you would.
Stop talking on th phone! I cannot work!

255
 You are asking the same question again and again.

Where were you when we needed you?

You must have seen Jane because only she knew that information.

A: Somebody left the door open this morning. B: I left before you.

17. How is politeness related to the next examples and to their

presuppositions? Analyse if politeness maxims are observed:

A: It will be a busy summer. B: I dreamed I was at the seaside. A: Dream

on! It saves money!

A: I’m so sorry for your money loss. If I had any idea about that, maybe I
could have helped you. B: You can still do that. A: Now is not a good
moment.

A: If your friend is caught stealing again, he will be fired. B: If he is

indeed the thief. And he is your friend, too.

A: Does the train arrive in time?B: It should, but you never know. A: I
don’t, you should.

A: Did you repair your car? It makes a terrible noise. B: No, I didn’t but I
have no car. A: I apologize, if it is indeed so.

A: I am so unhappy about telling him your secret. B: Don’t be, it was a lie,
I don’t have a rich aunt.

18. Politeness and speech acts. Discuss the relationship between the social and
the communicative goal in the next examples. Identify politeness markers:

Congratulations, you have conquered everybody with your speech. It was

even very difficult, they are very stupid and naive.

Come and see my rose garden!

A: I don’t suppose that you would by any chance be able to lend me some
cash, would you? B: But you do, and I would but I won’t.

Eject now!

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GLOSSARY OF TERMS

PART 1 SEMANTICS (Mariana Neagu)

autohyponymy A variety of polysemy where the more specific reading of a lexical

item denotes a subtype.

automeronymy A variety of polysemy where the more specific reading of a

lexical item denotes a subpart.

absolute antonyms Type of antonyms where oppositeness of meaning is expressed

by root words.

absolute homonyms Words that are unrelated in meaning and are identical in
form (spoken and written) and in grammatical status (i.e. they must belong
to the same part of speech).

absolute synonyms Expressions that are semantically equivalent in the sense that:
a) all their meanings are identical b) they are interchangeable in all
contexts c) they are identical in all relevant dimensions of meaning.

affected role The semantic role of an entity that is not the agent but is directly
involved in or affected by the happening denoted by the verb in the clause.

affective meaning Type of meaning that shows how language reflects the personal
feelings of the speaker, including his attitude to the listener, or his attitude
to something he is talking about.

agentive role The semantic role of the animate entity that instigates or causes the
happening denoted by the verb in the clause.

ambiguity A phenomenon whereby an expression has more than one meaning,

thus causing confusion.

amelioration of meaning A semantic process by which a word loses an

unfavourable sense.

antonymy Type of sense relations recognized in some analyses of meaning along

with synonymy, hyponymy, polysemy and homonymy. In its most general
sense it refers to all types of semantic oppositeness.

257
arbitrariness Lack of physical correspondence between linguistic forms and their
referents in the real world.

associative meaning The meaning which becomes attached to a word because of

its use but which is not part of its core sense. The principal types of
associative meaning are connotation, collocation, stylistic meaning, and
reflected meaning.

basicness Dimension of descriptive meaning relating to words which are close to

concrete everyday experience.

benefective role The semantic role of the intended recipient who benefits from the
happening denoted by the verb in the clause.

binary antonyms Antonyms that express a relation that holds between two
incompatible terms; the assertion of one of the items implies the denial of
the other. Also called complementary/incompatible/ contradictory
antonyms.

classeme Very general semantic component characterizing lexemes which belong

to different semantic fields.

cognitive domain Conceptual area relative to which a semantic unit is

characterized.

cognitive meaning Meaning of a denotative or propositional kind, objectively or

intellectually verifiable. It is the meaning of a sentence considered in
abstraction from affective or emotive meaning, stylistic nuances, the
meaning of word order in specific contexts.

cognitive semantics Type of semantics which sees language as part of our general
cognitive ability rather than as a set of separate, specialized competencies.
Innovations brought to the study of word meaning by cognitive semantics
include prototype theory, conceptual metaphors and frame semantics.

co-hyponyms Terms that are hyponyms of the same superordinate term.

258
collocation Habitual co- occurrence of particular lexical items, sometimes purely
formally, sometimes with some semantic implication.

collocational range The distribution of a word within a language.

collocational restriction An arbitrary co-occurrence restriction.

collocative meaning Type of meaning that consists of the associations a word

acquires on account of the meanings of words which tend to occur in its
environment.

co-meronyms Words which name the parts of the same whole.

complementarity Type of oppositeness in meaning where the assertion of one

term implies the denial of the other e.g. dead/ alive, married/single.

complementary model of meaning Semantic model based on a combination of a

core model that is often associated with componential analysis and a
prototypical model.

componential analysis Method of breaking up the meaning of an expression

into a finite set of semantic components or semantic features.

compositional meaning The meaning of a syntactic unit seen as derivable from

those of the smaller units of which it is composed.

concept A mental representation which is realized in language by means of

symbolic structures.

conceptual field A structured conceptual area, a structure of concepts on the

semantic level.

conceptualization The mental process of construing and expressing a situation in

alternate ways.

conceptual meaning Type of meaning that refers to those aspects of meaning

which relate directly to denotations of lexical items and the propositional
content of sentences and thus corresponds to an intellectual level of
interpretation, as opposed to one where emotional or subjective
interpretation is involved.

conceptual semantics Decompositional theory of meaning which identifies a

number of universal semantic categories, including Event, State, Thing (or
Object), Path, Place and Property.

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connotation Variable, subjective, often emotive part of the meaning of an
expression.

connotative meaning Type of meaning that is the communicative value an

expression has by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely
conceptual content. In comparison with conceptual meaning, connotative
meaning is relatively unstable, i.e. it varies according to culture, historical
period and the experience of the individual.

construal The mental ability of a speaker to describe a situation in alternate ways

and express them in language by using different linguistic items.

contextual meaning The meaning which a linguistic expression has in a context.

contextual modulation One of the effects of context on the meaning of a word

which consists either in adding semantic content to the meaning of a word
or in removing semantic content.

contradictory antonyms Pair of antonyms for which the negation of one

necessarily implies the other.

contrary antonyms Two antonyms for which the negation of one does not
necessarily imply the other.

converse antonyms The relation between two words in which the existence of
one implies the existence of the other.

converseness Type of oppositeness of meaning obtaining between two terms

which presuppose one another. This semantic relation is extremely
frequent in the sphere of social roles, kins relations, temporal and spatial
relations.

core (model of) meaning Abstract, general concept (meaning) shared by all the
senses of a polysemantic term: e.g. the notion of exit from a container is
shared by all the meanings of the preposition out.

degradation of meaning A semantic process in which a word takes on a negative

evaluation: e.g. officious which originally meant ‘kindly’ and now means
‘interfering’.

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denotation Relationship that holds between a given lexeme and whatever persons,
things, places, properties, processes and activities it is used to refer to.

denotative meaning The literal, context-independent, ‘objective’, basic meaning

of a word.

denotatum The class of entities, properties, etc. referred to by a linguistic

expression.

deontic modality Senses of modals that express obligation, permission or

ability.

derivational antonyms Antonyms that are expressed by words having the same
root and between which the relation of opposition is established by means
of negative affixes (dis-, un-, il-, ir-, im-, a-, ab-, -less).

designation Relation between the full linguistic sign and the extralinguistic
referent.

diachronic semantics Type of semantics that focuses on the semantic evolution of

words. Its interest lies in changes of meaning that are mainly based on
mechanisms such as metaphor, metonymy, generalization and
specialization.

dialectal synonymy Synonymy associated with different characteristics of users,

such as regional affiliation, age and social class.

disambiguation The process of establishing a single interpretation for an

ambiguous word or sentence.

distinguisher Semantic component that provides idiosyncratic semantic

information about the meaning of a lexical item.

distribution Full range of environments in which a lexical or grammatical form

can occur.

domain A knowledge background with respect to which concepts can be properly

described, a coherent area of conceptualization relative to which the
meanings of lexical items can be characterized.

encyclopedic knowledge Real world knowledge.

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encyclopedic meaning Knowledge or beliefs merely associated with a word or
category i. e. inessential for its use, which may be said to be connotative.

encyclopedic semantics Approach in which the meaning of a linguistic expression

is believed to potentially reach into any aspect of a person’s conceptual
life, without being restricted to a tightly circumscribed linguistic-semantic
definition.

entailment Relation between sentences such that the truth of the second sentence
necessarily follows from the truth of the first sentence, but the falsity of the
second sentence does not necessarily follow from the falsity of the first
sentence.

epistemic modality Metaphorical extensions (derived from root or deontic

meanings of modal verbs) that denote necessity, probability or
possibility/impossibility.

evoked meaning Type of meaning which provides a potential source of variation

among cognitive synonyms. It is a consequence of the existence of
different dialects and registers within a language.

expressive meaning Type of meaning that refers both to its emotional content and
to any identity it might have in terms of the personality or individual
creativity of the user.

extension of a sign The set of entities to which a term applies.

extension of meaning Term used for the development of a new sense of a lexical
unit.

feature semantics Type of semantics that holds the traditional view of

categorization according to which an object counts as an X just in case it
possesses all the features that define an X.

field (of discourse) Area of discourse characterized by the use of technical

vocabulary to refer to things which have everyday names.

figurative extension An extension of a basic or literal meaning.

formal semantics Branch of linguistics that approaches meaning using the notion
of truth, which has been inherited from logic. It attempts to formalize the

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 meaning of sentences and the relations that hold between them, such as
synonymy, paraphrase, tautology, contradiction, anomaly, entailment and
presupposition.

frame Knowledge network linking the multiple domains associated with a

linguistic form.

frame semantics Theory of meaning according to which word meanings can only
be properly understood and described against a frame, i.e. a particular body
of knowledge.

generative semantics Type of semantics that is concerned with lexical

decomposition; its proponents argue that lexemes have an internal structure
like the syntactic structure of sentences and phrases.

gradable antonymy Relation of oppositeness of meaning between terms that

usually refer to qualities or quantities.

gradable antonyms Terms in which the degree of opposition is said to be

'gradable': Gradable antonyms normally have one item which can be more
widely used, or in linguistic terms, is unmarked.

grammaticalization Process whereby a lexical category may over time develop

into a functional category.

grammatical meaning Type of meaning which contrasts with lexical meaning that
is frequently more concrete. In general, it is abstract and refers to the
meaning of function words (pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions), the
meanings of case or tense morphemes or of definiteness marked with the
help of a and the, the meanings of constructions, of other units forming
closed classes.

holonym The word which names the whole and includes parts.

homonymy Semantic relation holding of two or more distinct lexemes which have
the same form but differ in meaning.

homograph Word that is spelled the same as another but has a different meaning.

homophone Word that is pronounced the same as another but with a different
meaning.

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hyper(o)nym Superordinate term with reference to which a subordinate term can
be defined, as is the usual practice in dictionaries.

hypernymy The opposite of hyponymy.

hyponymy Asymetrical relation of sense between words in which the first is a

member of a taxonomy and the second is the name of that taxonomy.

iconicity Principle by which semantic relations are reflected in the formal patterns
by which they are realized. Thus a direct object is a complement of a verb
while an adverb such as today is not: in that sense the semantic relation of
verb to object is closer.

iconic sign Type of sign based on the resemblance between the referent and the
perceptual image (visual, auditory) of what it stands for.

ideographic synonyms Synonyms that differ conceptually.

incompatibility A sense relation which exists between words in a semantic field

where the choice of one excludes the other.

indexical sign Type of sign restricted to the ‘here’ and ‘now’ which is partially
motivated because there is a connection, usually of causality, between sign
and referent.

instantiate Find an instance of a word or particular usage of a word.

instrumental role The semantic role of the entity (usually inanimate) that the
agent uses to perform an action or start a process.

intension of a sign The set of properties of an expression.

intensity Dimension of variation within descriptive meaning.

interpretive semantics Type of semantics that is concerned with syntagmatic

semantic relations.

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kinship terms Words identifying the relationship of other members of a person’s
family.

language-extrinsic approach Semantic approach that focuses on the properties of

the referents denoted by the linguistic signs.

language-intrinsic approach Semantic approach that focuses on the study of

language and meaning in itself, neglecting extra-linguist referents.

lexeme Abstract unit that combines an expression with one distinct meaning and
that is conventionally listed in dictionaries as a separate entry.

lexical ambiguity Ambiguity explained by reference to lexical meanings.

lexical blocking Phenomenon by which the use of a word is prevented by the prior
existence of another word.

lexical category A class of units which have lexical meaning or are, in general,
treated in the lexicon.

lexical decomposition The analysis of word meanings into smaller units.

lexical field A set of semantically related lexical items whose meanings are
mutually interdependent and that together provide conceptual structure for
a certain domain of reality.

lexical gap Part of a lexical field that is not lexicalized.

lexical item An abstract representation in the lexicon that is realized as a lexical

unit in language.

lexical meaning The meaning of a lexeme that belongs to one of the four lexical
word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs)

lexical relation A pattern of association that exists between words in a language.

Lexical relations can be paradigmatic or syntagmatic.

lexical rule Any rule that expresses a generalization over sets of entries in a
lexicon. One widespread application is in derivational morphology.

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lexicalization A process of language change broadly defined as the adoption of
items into the lexicon (e.g. a former suffix becomes an independent item) .
Some scholars have viewed it as the reverse process of grammaticalization

lexical semantics Branch of semantics which deals with the meanings of words.

lexicon A number of structured sets of lexical items that is only theoretically finite
and contains a number of rules for creating new lexical items or for
extending the meaning of given lexical items.

linguistic semantics Type of semantics that studies meaning in natural languages

and is concerned primarily with lexical meaning, grammatical meaning and
sentence meaning.

locative role The semantic role of the noun phrase that designates the place of the
state or action denoted by the verb.

markedness Phenomenon by which a form differs from another with which it

stands in a paradigmatic relationship. For example, goddess is marked for
gender while god is unmarked.

marked term Term which has a greater semantic specificity (e.g. the noun bitch is
marked with respect to its superordinate, dog) and consequently a greater
rarity in language. Generally, the marked term is special and contains a
negative element that makes it special. Normally, a usual question uses the
unmarked term of an antonymic pair (e.g. How old is John? is more normal
than How young is John? where young is the marked term).

meaning Semantic content associated with a linguistic form.

meronym Word which names the part of another word.

meronymy Term used to describe a part-whole relationship between lexical items:

e.g. cover and page are meronyms of book.

metaphor Sense extension device in polysemy based on a similarity relationship.

It involves the mapping between two things from distinct areas of
knowledge, where one is compared with the other.

metonymy Polysemy-creating mechanism consisting in a ‘stand-for’ relationship.

It involves mapping between two things within the same area of

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 knowledge, where the name of one is substituted for the name of the other
with which it is connected in some respect.

mode One of the three dimensions of register which is concerned with the manner
of transmission of a linguistic message – whether it is written, spoken,
telegraphed or emailed.

natural kinds Term in the philosophy of language for nouns denoting classes
which occur in nature.

non-gradable antonymy Lexical relation between two words in which the degree
of opposition is absolute.

objectivist theories of meaning Theories of linguistic meaning that understand

objective reality as independent from human cognition.

onomasiology Approach to meaning which starts from a semantic value and

investigates by which
expressions a particular concept can be designated.

paradigmatic relation Relation between two or more linguistic elements

belonging to the same grammatical category that are mutually exclusive
within one and the same linguistic sequence.

paraphrase Relation between two or more sentences that have the same truth
conditions and hence mutually entail one another.

paronyms Words which are linked by a similarity of form.

philosophical semantics Type of semantics that examines the relations between

linguistic expressions and phenomena in the world to which they refer, and
considers the conditions under which such expressions can be said to be
true or false, and the factors which affect the interpretation of the language
as used.

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polysemy Synchronic linking of multiple related senses to a single form.

presupposition Relation between sentences such that the truth of the second
sentence (the presupposed sentence) is implied (presupposed) by the truth
and by the falsity of the first sentence (the presupposing sentence).

procedural semantics Theory of meaning in which the sense of a word is

represented as a procedure, a set of operations for deciding where the
word can and cannot apply.

prototype A member of a category whose characteristics make it typical of that

category, its best representative.

prototype semantics Type of semantics that is particularly adequate for the

description of concrete objects and where the analysis of word meaning is
made in terms of prototypes as a means of overcoming the difficulties
raised by word categories having fuzzy (indefinite) boundaries.

prototypical sense Nuclear, focal or central sense of a lexical item.

recipient role The semantic role of the animate entity that is passively involved in
the happening denoted by the verb in the clause.

redundancy rule Rule that expresses how one semantic component rule
necessarily implies another: e.g. Human (X)→Animate (X).

reference Relationship that obtains between a linguistic expression and what it

stands for or denotes on any particular occasion of utterance.

referent Entity in the real world picked out by uttering the expression in a
particular context.

referential Involving reference to entities, events, states of affairs, etc.

reflected meaning Type of meaning which arises in cases of multiple conceptual

meaning, when one sense of a word forms part of our response to another
sense.

resultant role The semantic role of the noun phrase whose referent exists only by
virtue of the activity denoted by the verb in the clause .

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S

selection restrictions Semantic restrictions on the choice of individual lexical

units in construction with other lexical units.

selectional features Features that specify the restrictions on the permitted

combinations of lexical items within a given grammatical context.

semanteme A linguistic sign with lexical meaning as opposed to a morpheme with

grammatical meaning.

semantic change Change in the meaning of words. Types include extension or

widening of meaning and restriction of meaning, ameliorative and
pejorative changes; also figurative changes which involve a metaphor or
some other of the traditional figures of speech.

semantic components Features of meaning which combine to form a complex

meaning.

semantic field Set of linguistic items that correspond to concepts in a conceptual

field.

semantic field theory Semantic theory which holds that the sense of a word does
not exist as an isolated unit, but rather clusters together with semantically
related words, forming a semantic field.

semantic marker Any semantic feature seen as systematic in a given language:

e.g. in words like man vs. boy, woman vs. girl, horse vs. foal, a marker
‘Adult’ is systematically opposed to ‘Non-Adult’ (syn. classeme/diagnostic
component).

semantic primitives Universal meaning elements that are by nature self-

explanatory and cannot be defined in terms of other elements.

semantic relation The semantic connection a word contracts with other words.

semantic roles The semantic relations that link a verb to its arguments. Also called
thematic roles.

semantic (semiotic) triangle Particular model of meaning which claims that

meaning is essentially a threefold relationship between linguistic forms,

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 concepts and referents. So, a symbol and the thing it symbolizes are related
indirectly via a thought or concept.

semantics The study of the meanings of words and sentences.

semasiology Approach that takes its starting point in the word (Fr. signifiant/Engl.
signifier) as a form and describes what semantic values/senses
(Fr.signifiés/Engl. signifieds it may have.

seme The minimal distinctive semantic feature functioning within a single

semantic field, defining narrow distinctions.

sememe Term used by various scholars for a basic unit of meaning: e.g. the
meaning of the plural morpheme –s “more than one”.

semiotics A general science of ‘signs’, of which, according to many scholars in

the 20th century, linguistics is part. Thus, words and morphemes are
‘signs’, specifically linguistic signs. So are traffic lights or gestures, or
anything else that in the broadest sense ‘has meaning’.

sense Content of an expression without reference, those features and properties

which define it.

sense relations Relations among word senses that are represented in the lexicon
with other knowledge of words.

sentence meaning The literal meaning of a sentence taken out of context, which is
built up from the meanings of the words it contains.

sentence semantics Type of semantics that deals with the meanings of sentences.

sign Any designation representing a name which has as its reference a definite
object, not a concept or a relation.

signifiant vs. signifié Saussure’s terms, sometimes rendered into English as

’signifier’ and ‘signified’, for the two sides of a linguistic sign.

signification Relationship between sign and referent, or sign and concept.

Signification is determined by the communicative context, and is thus
studied by both semantics and pragmatics.

social meaning Type of meaning which a piece of language conveys about the
social circumstances of its use.

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source domain (of a metaphor) The area of experience from which the various
expressions of the metaphor are drawn.

structuralist semantics Type of semantics which displays the application of the

principles of structuralist linguistics to the study of meaning. Its main focus
is on lexical fields, paradigmatic sense relations (homonymy, polysemy,
synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy) and componential analysis.

stylistic meaning Type of meaning linked to the idea of register.

stylistic synonyms Synonyms that differ stylistically.

symbolic sign Sign that does not have a natural link between the form and the
thing represented, but a conventional link.

syntagmatic relation The pattern of relation between the words of a linguistic

structure in a linear worder. It is based on the criterion of juxtaposition.

synchronic semantics Type of semantics that displays the applications of the

principles of structural linguistics to the study of meaning and studies
meaning through paradigmatic sense relations such as synonymy,
antonymy, homonymy, polysemy and hyponymy.

synonymy Semantic relation holding between two or more forms that can be
substituted one for the other without changing the truth value of a sentence.

syntagmatic relation Relation holding between members of different

grammatical categories which are simultaneously present in a single
syntactic structure.

target domain (of a metaphor) The area to which the expressions of a metaphor
are applied.

temporal role The semantic role of the noun phrase that designates the time of the
state or action denoted by the verb.

thematic meaning Type of meaning that is communicated by the way in which a

speaker or writer organizes the message, in terms of ordering, focus and
emphasis.

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thematic roles Semantic relations that connect entities to events (more
particularly, arguments to predicates ). There are two broad classes of
thematic roles: participant roles (obligatory and tend to be coded in direct
grammatical relations such as subject, direct object and indirect object) and
non-participant roles (circumstantial, optional, tend to be coded in
oblique grammatical relations and in grammatical adjuncts).

theme Semantic role corresponding to the direct object in traditional grammar.

transitivity (in logic and mathematics ) A relation between three elements such
that if it holds between the first and second and it also holds between the
second and third it must necessarily hold between the first and third.

truth conditional semantics A theory of semantics that defines meaning in terms

of truth conditions of sentences, i.e. the conditions that must be fulfilled in
any world for the sentence in question to be true.

typical attributes Set of attributes that are considered characteristic of the best
examples of the category. For example, the typical attributes of
womanhood are “can bear children”, has feminine features”, ”has breasts
and a womb”, ”has a high-pitched voice”.

vagueness Lack of referential clarity which arises from giving little information
about something.

widening of meaning Enlargement of the class of entities that a word denotes.

word meaning The literal meaning of a word taken out of context, which is
derived from the morphemes it consists of.

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PART II
PRAGMATICS (Claudia Pisoschi)

absolute tense deictic tense, requiring no time anchor to be interpreted correctly,

but constituting itself as anchor for relative tenses.

acceptability the property of a linguistic expression to be considered adequate and

used accordingly by the speakers to contribute to expressing a certain
message.

The Agreement Maxim (AM) is only applicable in assertives: (a) Minimize

disagreement between self and other and (b) Maximize agreement between
self and other.

ambiguity a property of a linguistic structure to express two different meanings; a

property of a phrase or sentence to have two possible semantic structures
corresponding to it.

anaphora an element whose reference is recovered because of its previous

mentioning in the linguistic context; anaphoric reference type of
reference characterized by the recoverability of the referent due to the
linguistic context pre-posed in relation to the anaphora.

appropriacy a concept referring to the property of a word, phrase, sentence etc to

be adequately selected by the user in order to convey a certain message in
the context.

appropriate the property of a linguistic expression to be relevant in the context. It

is the result of the competence of the speaker to make the right linguistic
choices.

The Approbation Maxim applicable in expressives and assertives has two

submaxims (a) Minimize dispraise of other and (b) Maximize praise of
other.

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B

binary deictic system system of deictic elements organized according to the

binary opposition [+proximal] – [+distal].

bound use property of pronouns to refer to a series of referents, i.e the referent is
not a definite value assigned but a series of values resulted from the
antecedent being a quantifier.

bystanders type of passive participants in the speech event who can become active
at any moment during the verbal exchange.

cancellability1 property of implicatures that refers to the fact that they can be
cancelled by adding further premises.

cancellability2 property of presuppositions that refers to their cancellation in case

they conflict with entailments, implicatures, or other presuppositions
whose truth has already been established in the context.

calculability this property of implicatures refers to the fact that logical meaning
corroborated with the Cooperative Principle lead to inferring a certain
implicature.

cataphoric reference type of reference characterised by the recoverability of the

referent due to the linguistic context placed in post-position in relation to
the cataphora.

clash type of conversational maxim non-observance, subsumed by Paul Grice to

the category of infringements. It refers to the cases when the observance of
a maxim would mean the infringement of another. Usually the two maxims
in question are The Quantity and The Quality Maxim.

coding time the time when the utterance is uttered, usually Present.

common ground the necessary types of information able to facilitate

communication, implicature inference included.

The Communicative Presumption considering the Cooperative Principle, there is

a mutual belief that the speaker states a proposition p to the hearer meaning
q.

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constative utterance an utterance which describes an existing state of affairs.

context a concept referring to the dynamic, pro-active, multiple elements making-

up the environment of the speech event. It includes the linguistic and the
situational dimension; it can be defined as everything that triggers
inferences.

contextual assumptions propositions derived by the speaker (and hearer) from

interpreting an utterance in accordance with its context.

conventional implicatures a subtype of pragmatic inference that is always

lexicalized, i.e. associated to specific words, the additional conveyed
meaning requiring no calculation and being, thus, more easily deducible;
they do not contribute to the truth conditions of the sentences, but have a
constant component, i.e. they convey the same extra meaning regardless of
contexts.

conversational implicature subtype of pragmatic inference which depends on the

context of utterance and on the cooperativeness of the interlocutors.

Cooperative Principle a principle formulated by Paul Grice; it is a convention of

communicative practice which should ensure successful communication,
i.e. the interlocutors’ willingness and ability to understand and be
understood.

cooperativeness principle of communication which is essential in making it

efficient; it implies the involvement of the interlocutors in expressing and
interpreting the utterances messages correctly, i.e. in accordance with the
communicative intentions.

coreferentiality the property of two referential expressions to designate the same

referent.

correctness the property of a word, phrase, sentence to be well-formed according

to the syntactic rules of a language.

counterfactual presuppositions a type of non-factive presuppositions that cannot

be actualized any more, since they refer to a past moment and events that
could have happened then, but didn’t. Conditional sentences type 3
illustrate syntactically and semantically this kind of presuppositions.

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D

defeasibility see cancellability

deictic (n) linguistic expression which refers to the elements making up the
situation of communication (participants and relationships among them,
time, place, topic). Synonyms: shifter, deictic marker, pointer.

deictic addressing terms addressing terms used for direct communication to a

[+definite] referent in a concrete context.

deictic center ensemble consisting of the speaker, the place where he/she is, the
time of uttering, the topic of discussion.

deixis the single most obvious way in which the relationship between language
and context is reflected in the structures of languages themselves; the
encoding of the utterance context.

discourse deixis type of deixis that encodes the manner in which the components
of a text acquire coherence, i.e. logical ordering and progress; it is linked
to the discourse topic dimension.

detachability property of presuppositions referring to their non-preservation in all

contexts (exception: negation, embedding, questions, imperatives).

direction of fit concept to be used when discussing the situations of matching

words to a state of affairs, or vice versa.

eavesdroppers people not legally present in the situation of communication, who

hide their presence, and cannot become active participants in the speech
event.

empathetic deixis – type of deixis connected to social deixis, that expresses some
affective meaning involving the attitude of the speaker towards a certain
referent, be it positive or negative.

event time the time of the events referred to in an utterance.

eventuality category referring to events or states; synonym: predicative situation.

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existential presuppositions type of presupposition triggered by structures
containing Noun Phrases made up of proper names, or of common nouns
preceded by determiners, such as definite article or possessive adjectives.

explicit performative utterance utterance containing a performative verb which

makes its value explicit.

face notion used initially in sociological research and referring to the self-image to
be taken into account in verbal exchanges.

face saving act (FSA) a speech act which has a positive impact on the public face
of the speaker/interlocutor.

face threatening act (FTA) a speech act which has a negative impact on the
public face of the speaker/interlocutor.

the face-saving view the most influential politeness model which comprises the
means used to show awareness of another person’s face that is to be
described in relation to social distance/closeness.

factive presuppositions type of presuppositions triggered by verbs expressing a

high level of certainty regarding the information stated in the clause
following the main clause verb (factive verbs, i.e. strong epistemic
quantifiers).

Felicity Conditions expected or appropriate circumstances which ensure that the

performance of a SA is recognized as intended

filter type of presupposition trigger consisting in connectives that behave

selectively in point of presupposition preservation.

flouting (of a maxim) apparent non-observance of conversational maxims, both

intentional and non-misleading. It encourages the interlocutor to make the
right inferences.

free use type of pronoun use characterized by the recovering of the referent from
the situational context.

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G

generalized conversational implicatures type of conversational implicatures

which don’t require any special knowledge in the context to calculate the
additional conveyed meaning; that is almost automatically deduced by the
interlocutor because the association linguistic structure – communicative
goal has been standardized as a result of the frequent use.

The Generosity Maxim (GM) consists of submaxim (a) Minimize benefit to self
and submaxim (b) Maximize cost to self.

grammatical deictic markers – deictics which are grammatical in nature, i.e.

prepositions, conjunctions, particles, modal verbs, auxiliary verbs, etc

hearer– active participant in the speech event, who decodes the message sent by
the speaker and can turn himself into a speaker; synonyms:
listener/interlocutor.

honorifics linguistic structures used as direct and indirect addressing terms and
marking the highest level of politeness.

hole type of presupposition trigger comprising verbs which behave as operators

that allow presupposition ascending (factive verbs).

The Idiom Theory implies that a structure which is a standard format for indirect
illocutionary values shall be treated as an idiom, i.e. as a whole, not
analysed into components.

illocutionary force the complex communicative intention/goal conveyed by an

utterance, given a set of conversational maxims, the literal interpretation of
an utterance and its context of use; speaker’s meaning. It has a
communicative and conventional character.

Illocutionary Force Identification Devices (IFID) devices include lexical items

(such as PF verbs, adverbs etc), grammatical means - such as moods

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 (indicative, imperative) and modal verb-, paralinguistic means (intonation,
stress), sentence type.

illocutionary point effects typically associated to an illocutionary value, though

their emergence is not predictable: assertives inform, questions elicit
answers etc.

implication a possible inference type of presupposition trigger comprising the

class of verbs behaving as operators that allow presupposition ascending

implicatum a true proposition which follows naturally from the existence of

another proposition (true or false).

implicature type of felicitous/infelicitous pragmatic inference intended by the

speaker, which has no connection to sentence meaning, but to its use and is
generally context-bound.

indeterminacy the property of a nominal expression to denote an indefinite value,

i.e. to have a series of possible references in the linguistic context.

indexical expressions referential expressions having both semantic and contextual

reference.

indirect speech act message conveyed indirectly by the speaker and deducible by
the interlocutor only by means of inference rules (a request expressed by a
declarative sentence). A sentence ‘masquerading’ as a sentence of a
different type (Austin 1962). Following this line of reasoning, a sentence
has a literal force determined by semantic rules and an inferred indirect
force.

inference the indirect additional meaning of an utterance beyond its semantic

meaning but not independent of it, deduced from the linguistic and
situational context and calculated by interlocutors according to their
common ground.

The Inference Theory states that the indirect illocutionary force should be
inferred whenever the literal meaning is blocked by the context.

inference rules pragmatic rules based on contextual factors, on The

Communicative Principle and its maxims in accordance with the degree of
relevance associated to the utterance and its elements by the interlocutors.

infringement (of a maxim) type of conversational maxim non-observance which

is unintentional and non-misleading, being caused by imperfect or
impaired linguistic performance.

279
interlocutors active participants in the speech event.

interpersonal theme marker linguistic expressions which aim at establishing/

maintaining or ending a relationship with the interlocutor at a certain point
during the verbal exchange.

kinship terms linguistic items denoting family relationships and connoting

sometimes affection and always familiarity.

lexical deictic markers – notional/full semantic words encoding context of

utterance features.

lexical presupposition type of presupposition triggered by aspectual verbs.

linguistic markers ways in which languages encode or grammaticalize features of

the context of utterance or speech event; synonyms: deictic (words),
pointers, shifters.

Literal Force Hypothesis postulates the existence of the literal force of a sentence,
based on its literal meaning

locution the use of a word to designate an object in reality and to assign a property
to it. Synonym: proposition.

locutionary act the act of saying; the first level of a speech act.

L-tenses The concrete tense system of a language, including their concrete

realizations, represents. L-tenses generally encode aspectual and modal
features but most of them contain a pure deictic M-tense component.

maxims (conversational maxims) set of pragmatic principles complementing The

Cooperative Principle and regulating communicative efficiency in point of
quantity and quality of information, relevance and manner of expression.

280
message the speaker’s meaning to be conveyed in the uttering process and to be
understood by the hearer; the intention of the speaker expressed in the form of the
utterance.

The Modesty Maxim (MM) only applicable in expressives and assertives,

consists in submaxim (a) Minimize praise of self and submaxim (b)
Maximize praise of others.

M-tense (metalinguistic tense) the semantic/theoretical category of tense

narrow scope negation (in discussing sentence presuppositions) implies denying

the predicate (property) applied to an entity

natural meaning the explicit (literal) meaning of an utterance which coincides

with the speaker’s intended meaning.

negative face self-image constructed so as to meet one’s desires.

non-deictic reference type of reference which does not depend on the situational
context of utterance; partly synonymous to anaphoric reference or to
absolute reference.

non-detachability1 property of implicatures which refers to the fact that the

implicature is attached to the semantic content, not to the linguistic form.
The synonyms used in an utterance don’t change the conversational
implicatures.

non-detachability2 property of presuppositions referring to their general

preservation in a linguistic context containing factive verbs, modals and
time clauses.

non-conventionality property of implicatures, whose meanings depend on the

background knowledge and situational context. In this case, ambiguity can
be intentional. Synonym indeterminacy

non-factive presuppositions type of presuppositions which are triggered by verbs

which semantically denote a state of affairs which is possible, but not
actualized: dream, imagine etc.

281
non-natural meaning a meaning conveyed indirectly, different from the explicit,
literal meaning, i.e. from what is said directly, as a result of deducing some
propositions from what is said within the context.

onus of match involves matching two categories, X and Y: X can be matched to

Y, or Y to X.

opting out (of a maxim) intentional non-misleading non-observance of one or

more conversational maxims because the speaker avoids to give any
information, but remains cooperative in that he gives a reply strictly out of
politeness, without actually saying anything.

ostensive space marker linguistic marker of space linked to the situational context
by the use of gestures. Synonym: gestural deictics.

overhearers type of passive participants in the speech event who can become
active at any moment during the verbal exchange if they transgress
politeness norms.

P
particularized conversational implicatures typical conversational implicatures
deriving from interpreting the utterance meaning within the context
(including additional premises and the
shared knowledge of the interlocutors).

perfect tenses tenses containing the feature [+anteriority].

perfective aspect grammatical category expressing the feature [+completion].

The Performative Hypothesis a pragmatic principle (Gazdar 1979, Levinson

1983) which states that all sentences have a performative clause as the
highest clause in their deep structure. This highest clause can be deleted,
and the result is an implicit performative.

performative utterance an utterance in which the speaker performs the act

expressed by the verb at the moment of uttering; performatives are self-
referential.

performative verb a category of verbs whose property is to express a performative

value; it is a function of its sense, form and use.

282
performativity continuum general property of performative verbs, from
‘institutionalised’ ones to those functioning occasionally as performatives.

perlocutionary act level of a speech act which deals with the bringing about of
effects on the audience by means of uttering the sentence, such effects
being special to the circumstances of the utterance; usually these effects
are random, neither conventional, i.e. stable, nor predictable.

person deixis type of deixis that encodes the reference made to the participants in
the speech event.

phatic act component of a locutionary act consisting in uttering words and

combining them according to grammar rules.

phonetic act component of a locutionary act consisting in uttering noises.

place deixis type of deixis that encodes the reference made to the place where the
speech event takes place.

plug type of presupposition trigger comprising verbs that behave as operators

which block presupposition ascending (declarative and attitudinal verbs)

politeness a social phenomenon based on the social values of a particular

community; synonym: first-order politeness. A concept that comprises a
set of principles regulating the communicative behaviour in a certain
cultural space. The key pragmatic phenomenon for indirectness in order to
obtain the perlocutionary effect intended.

Politeness Principle (PP) Minimize the effects of impolite statements (negative

politeness) and maximize the politeness of polite illocutions (positive
politeness), bearing in mind the intentions that accompany all
conversations. Briefly, the principle contains two submaxims: Minimize
the expressions of impolite beliefs. Maximize the expression of polite
belief.

positive face self-image linguistically constructed so as to get people’s approval

and appreciation.

pragmatics the branch of linguistics which studies the relationship language –

user, i.e. the meaning linguistic structures acquire in a certain context.

pragmatic markers linguistic expressions having a value in context and

expressing the relationship between interlocutors within that context or the
attitude of the speaker in relation to the topic.

283
presupposition any kind of interlocutors’ background assumption against which
an action, theory, expression or utterance makes sense or is rational; a
double entailment; a pragmatic inference in line with our linguistic
intuitions, derived from the linguistic meaning of a sentence containing a
lexical element acting as a presupposition trigger and isolated using
linguistic tests.

presupposition trigger lexical element (word, phrase, clause) which helps making
the adequate assumptions in interpreting an utterance.

primary performative utterance utterance which does not contain a performative

verb to make its value explicit; nevertheless, that value can be deduced due
to the pragmatic experience of the user (for example, to express a request
by means of an imperative sentence).

Principle of Expressibility: it is an analytical truth about language that whatever

can be meant can be said.

procedural sense designates the instructions regarding the interpretation of the

utterance in point of time deixis. It is opposed to the conceptual sense of
predication is descriptive, characterised by the feature [+/- true] and refers
to the interval during which the predication manifests.

The Projection Problem the issue created when the meaning of some
presuppositions as ‘parts’ doesn’t survive to become the meaning of
complex sentences as ‘wholes’, as it was expected.

Q Principle it was formulated by Horn, who revised Grice’s maxims; the

principle is say as much as you can [given R].

receiving time the time when an utterance is heard by the listener; usually identical
to Coding Time, unless the text is recorded.

recoverability the process of identifying the referent associated to a certain

expression.

284
reference the relation between a linguistic expression and what it designates in the
real or conceptual world.

reference time the absolute time in relation to which all the other events are
interpreted in point of their time location; anchor time.

reinforceability property of implicatures referring to their possible explicit

reinforcement (by expressing the same meaning in other words), without
causing the speaker to sound redundant.

relevance importance acquired by a linguistic structure in the context of uttering,

identified by the users and aiming at producing the optimal level of
information with the least level of effort; it determined the meaningfulness
of a sentence, phrase, word.

relation connection between elements which influences their behavior at various

levels.

relative tense a deictic tense which requires the presence of absolute tenses as
anchors.

relative space marker linguistic markers of space implying reference to the

location of the speaker.

rhetic act component of the locutionary act referring to uttering words having
sense and reference.

role in communication term referring to the participant in the speech event

designated by personal pronouns.

R Principle principle formulated by Horn to complement Q Principle: say no more

than you must [given Q]

S
scope ambiguities types of ambiguities related to sentence negation, when the
sentence expresses a statement which is represented as a conjunction of
conditions (propositions).

second order politeness a theoretical construct which considers politeness to be

associated with speech styles, more precisely with a higher degree of
formality.

285
semantic rules purely linguistic rules pertaining to syntax and ‘truth-functional’
semantics which allow the interlocutor to deduce propositions from the
sentence(s) uttered.

sentence syntactic unit containing at least one predicate.

The Sympathy Maxim (only applicable in assertives) points to the speaker

making an effort to minimize the antipathy between himself and the
addressee and to maximize sympathy.

social deixis the use of forms which reflect the social status of a speaker in
relation either to the addressee or to someone else referred to; type of
deixis that encodes the relationships among participants in the speech event,
including direct or oblique reference to the social status and role of
interlocutors.

space deictic space marker specifying the position of an element in relation to an

anchor (the speaker, his/her position) within the context.

speaker’s meaning the communicative goal expressed by the speaker beyond the
literal meaning of a sentence.

speech act the action performed by the speaker in uttering something with a certain
intention and expecting certain reactions from the interlocutors; the minimal
and basic unit of communication, based on constitutive (semantic) rules,
leading to conventional realizations.

Speech Act Schema (SAS) an inferential chain accounting for the way in which
the hearer derives the illocutionary force of an utterance.

speech situation is the situation of communication, the context of utterance;

besides the utterance(s) making up the speech event, it comprises the scene
(the cultural context), the setting (the physical context).

speech event part of a speech situation, is the functional dimension of the verbal
exchange and is made up of speech acts; a culturally recognized social
activity in which language plays a specific, and often rather specialised
role, i.e. a speech event is norm-governed. The SE means the utterance(s),
plus the circumstances which determine it/them (purpose of
communication, topic, participants, language variety).

statement assertion, utterance expressing a fact or an event/state viewed as a fact.

286
suspension1 (of a maxim) type of intentional non-misleading case of maxim non-
observance caused by the need/wish of the interlocutors to cease any
expectation in point of maxim observance.

suspension2 (of an implicature) refers to the cases when the speaker is uncertain
about the implicature to be inferred and asks for the confirmation of the
interlocutor by using different means, the most obvious being an
interrogation.

suspension3 (of a presupposition) property referring to the process of turning a

presupposition into a potential one, in the presence of weak epistemic
quantifiers or if clauses.

symbolic space deictic space deictics making indirect, sometimes metaphorical,

reference to the speaker’s location.

T
time deixis – type of deixis that encodes the reference made to the time when the
speech event takes place.

The Tact Maxim (TM) applicable in impositives and commissives consists of

two submaxims (a) Minimize cost to other (b) Maximize benefit to other.

U
universality property of implicatures referring to their universal character
resulting from the fact that no linguistic form is involved in triggering the
inference.

user a speaker who uses language in a certain context; his/her linguistic choices
implicitly mean that he/she interprets language according to his/her
competences and communicative goals.

utterance a particular piece of language be it a word, phrase or sentence, spoken

by a specific speaker on a specific occasion; the basic structural and
functional unit of analysis in pragmatics.

utterance meaning the unity between the literal (token) meaning of a

sentence/expression and the non-literal meaning of that
sentence/expression/word or sentence, derived from the context of uttering.
According to other linguists, it is identical the speaker’s meaning.

287
V
violation (of a maxim) type of intentional misleading non-observance of
conversational maxims. The speaker is deliberately and secretly subverting
the maxim and the CP, usually for some self-serving purpose. It
encourages the interlocutor’s taking utterances at face value.

W
wide scope negation (in discussing sentence presuppositions) denying that an
entity x exists.

288
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