SUMMARY OF IMPLICATURE II

4.6 FLOUTING MAXIM

A flout occurs when a speaker blantantly fails to observe a maxim at the level of whait is said, with the deliberate intention of generating an implicature.

4.6.1 Flouts Necessitated by a Clash Between Maxims

A speaker flouts the maxim of quantity by blantantly giving either more or less information than the situation demands.

4.6.2 Flouts which Exploit the a Maxim

According to Grice’s theory, interlocutor operate on the assumption that, as a rule, the maxims will be observed. Most of the Grice’s own examples of flouts involve this sort of ‘exploitaton’

 4.6.2.1 Flouts exploiting maxim of quality

Flouts which exploit teh maxim of quality occur when the speaker says something which is blantantly untrue or for which he or she alcks adequate evidence.

4.6.2.2 Flouts exploiting the maxim of quantity

It occurs when a speaker blantantly gives more or less information than the situation requires.

1.6.2.3 Flouts exploiting the maxim of relation

It is exploited by making a response or observation which is very obviously irrelevant to teh topic in hand,

4.6.2.4 Flouts exploiting the maxim of manner

The important thing to notice maxim of manner is by observing the blantancy of the non-observance which triggers the search for an implicature.

4.7 OTHER CATEGORIES OF NON-OBSERVANCE OF THE CONVERSATIONAL MAXIMS

Grice listed three ways in which a participant in a talk exchange may fail to fulfil a maxim: the speaker may fluot a maxim, violate a maxim or opt out of observing maxim. He later added infringing a maxim, and suspending a maxim.

4.7.1 Violating a Maxim

Grice defines ‘violation’ very specifically as the unostentatious non-observance of a maxim. Is a speaker viloates maxim s/he will be liable to mislead.

4.7.2 Infringing a Maxim

A Speaker who, with no intention of generating an implicature and with no intention of deceiving, fails to observe a maxim is said to ‘infringe’ the maxim.

4.7.3 Opting out of a Maxim

A speaker opts out of observing a maxim by indicating unwillingness to cooperate in the way the maxim requires.

4.7.4 Suspending a Maxim

Several writers have suggested that there are occasions when there is no need to opt out of observing the maxims because there are certain events in which there is no expectation on the aprt of any participant that they will be fulfilled.

4.8 TESTING FOR IMPLICATURE

Grice discussed six ‘tests’ for distinguishing semantic meaning from implied meaning:

4.8.1 Non-detachability and Non-conventionality

Some aspect of meaning are semantic and can bee cahnged or removed by relexicatization or reformulation (replacing one word or phrase with another closely related one, but lacking the supposedly unpleasant connotation).

4.8.2 Implicature Changes

Implicature are the property of utterance, not of sentences and therefore teh same words crry different implicature on difefrent occasions.

4.8.3 Calculability

The same words may convey, in different circumstances, very different implicature. The implicature conveyed in one particular context is not ramdom, however, it is possible to spell out the steps a hearer goes through in order to calculate the intended implicature.

4.8.4 Defeasibility

The notion of ‘defeasibility’ means that an implicature can be cancelled. This allows the speaker to imply something, and then deny that implicature.

REFERENCE:

Thomas, Jenny. 1996. Meaning in Interaction. New York: Longman. P. 55-86.

QUESTIONS:

1.    What is the difference between conventional and conversational implicature?

2. How does the interlocutor observe the existance of implicature in the conversation?

SUMMARY OF IMPLICATURE I

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4.1 INTRODUCTION

There are times when people say or write exactly what they mean, but, they are not generally explicit. Since, on the other occasion, they manage to convey far more than their words mean. The term is known as implicature; what is meant different from what is said.

4.2 H.P GRICE

Grice theory is an attempt at explaining how a hearer gets from what is said to what it meant, from the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning.

4.3 IMPLICATURE

Grice distinguished two different sorts of implicature: conventional implicature and conversational implicature. They both convey an additional level of meaning, beyond the semantic meaning of the words uttered. However, conventional implicature is always conveyed, regardless of context. Whereas conversational implicature; what is implied varies according to the context of utterance.

4.3.1 Conventional Implicature

There are comparatively few examples of conventional implicature; levinson (1983: 127) lists four: but, even, therefore and yet.

4.3.2 Conversational implicature

This type of implicature arises only in particular context of utterance.

4.3.3 Implicature and Inference

Before i go further into Grice’s theory of conversational implicature, i want to interpolate a discussion of the difference between implicature and interference, implying and inferring. There are two reasons for doing this. The most important is that it is the confusion of these two levels of interpretation which is at the root of some misunderstandings of Grice’s theory. The second is that in Britain, if not in other parts of the English-speaking world, there is widespread misuse of the terms themselves – people frequently say inferring when they really mean implying. To imply is to hint, suggest or convey some meaning indirectly by means of language. An implicature is generated intentionally by the speaker and may (or may not) be understood by the hearer. To infer is to deduce something from the evidence (this evidence may be linguistic, paralinguistic or non-linguistic). An inference is produced by the hearer.

4.4 THE COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE

In order to explain the mechanism by which people interpret conversational implicature, in ‘Logic and conversation’ Grice introduced four conversational maxims and the Cooperative Principle (CP). The CP runs as follow: “which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.”

Consider the following example:

The speaker has accidentally locked herself out of her house. It is winter, the middle of the night and she is stark naked:

A: Do you want a coat?

B: No, I really want to stand out here in the freezing cold with no clothes on.

On the face of it, B’s reply is untrue and uncooperative, but in fact this is sort of sarcastic reply we encounter every day and no problem at all in interpreting. According to Grice, if A assumes that, in spite of appearances, B is observing the Cooperative Principle and has made an appropriate response to his question, he will look for alternative interpretation. Grice argues that without the assumption that the speaker is operating according to the CP, there is no mechanism to prompt someone to seek for another level of interpretations. The observation that the speaker has said something which is manifestly untrue, combined with the assumption that the CP is in operation sets in motion the search for an implicature.

4.5 THE FOUR CONVERSATIONAL MAXIM

Grice Propose four maxims:

Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purpose of the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false.

Relation: Be relevant.

Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid Ambiguity. Be Brief. Be orderly.

4.5.1 Observing the Maxims

Example:

Husband       : Where are the car keys?

Wife                : They’re on the table in the hall.
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The wife has answer clearly (Manner), Truthfully (Quality), has given just the right amount of information (Quantity), and has directly addressed her husband’s goal in asking the question (Relation).

4.5.2 Non-observance of the Maxims

There are four ways of failing to observe a maxim: Flouting a maxim, Violating Maxim, Infringing a maxim, Opting out a maxim, and suspending a maxim.

 

The Summary of Deixis

Deixis is a technical term (from Greek) for pointing or indicating, and has prototypical or focal exemplars the the use of demonstratives, first and second person pronouns, tense, specific time and place adverbs like now and here, and variety of other grammatical features tied directly to the circumstances of utterance. It concerns the way in which languages encode or grammatical features of the context of utterance or speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance. Thus, the pronoun ‘this’ does not name or refer to any particular entity on all occasion of use; rather it is a variable or place holder for some particular entity given by the context.

Deixis belongs within the domain of pragmatics, because it directly concerns the relationship between the structure of languages and the contexts in which they are used. Because pragmatics concerns the aspect of meaning and language structure that cannot be captured in a truth-conditional semantics, the grammatical category of deixis will probably be found to straddle the semantics/pragmatics border.

Philosophical Approches

The topic of deixis, or as philosophers usually prefer, indexical expresssions (or just indexicals), may be useful approached by considering how truth-conditional semantics dels with certain natural language expressions.

However, none of these philosophical approcehes does justice to the complexity and variety of the deictic expressions taht occur in natural language, and we should now turn to consider linguistic approaches and findings.

Descriptive Approaches

The traditional categories of deixis are person, place and time. Person deixis concerns the encoding of the role of participants in the speech event in wich the utterance in question is delivered: the category first person is the grammaticalization of the speaker’s reference to himself, second person the encoding of the speaker’s reference to one or more addressees, and the third person of encoding of reference to persons and entities which are neither speaker nor addressees of the utterance in question.

Social deixis concerns the encoding of social distinction that are relative to participant-roles, particularly aspects of the social relationship holding between speaker and addressee or speaker and some referent.

Here is the more example of person deixis, time deixis, place deixis, discource deixis, and social deixis.

Person Deixis

Person deixis is reflected directly in the grammatical categories of person, it may be argued that we need to develop an independent pragmatic framework of possible participant-role, so that we can then see how, and to what extent, these roles are grammaticalized in different language.

Time Deixis

Time deixis concerns the encoding of temporal points and spans relative to the time at which utterance was spoken. For example: now and then, yesterday and this year.

Place Deixis

Place or space deixis concerns the specification of locations relative to anchore points in the speech events. The importance of locational specifications in general can be gauged from the fact that there seem to be two basic ways of refering to objects – by describing or naming them on the one hand, and by locating them on the other (Lyons, 1977a:648).

 Discourse Deixis

It concerns the use of expressions within some utterance to refer to some portion of the discourse that contains that utterance (including the utterance itself).

Social Deixis

Social deixis is reference to the social characteristics of, or distinctions between, the participants or referents in a speech event. The distinction, found in many Indo-European languages, between familiar and polite second person pronouns is an expression of social deixis. Absolute deixis reference to some characteristic of referent (especially a person) a part from any relative ranking of referents. Relational deixis is deictic reference to social relationship between the speaker and an addressee, bystander or other referent in the extralinguistic context.

Reference:

Levinson, S.C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP

Questions: 

1.      What is the differences between discourse deixis and reference? 

2.      Why indexical expressions is included in pragmatic?