Chapter Eight Language in Use 2 Contents ◇ Definition of Pragmatics ◇ Speech Act Theory ◇ The Theory of Conversational Implicature ◇ Post-Gricean Developments.

Chapter Eight

Language in Use

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Contents

◇ Definition of Pragmatics

◇ Speech Act Theory

◇ The Theory of Conversational

Implicature

◇ Post-Gricean Developments

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1. Definition of Pragmatics

• The study of language in use.

• The study of meaning in context.

• The study of speakers’ meaning,

utterance meaning,

& contextual meaning.

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• Speaker’s meaning

(A father is trying to get his 3-year-old daughter to stop lifting up her dress to display her new underwear to the assemble.)– Father: We don’t DO that.– Daughter: I KNOW, Daddy.

You don’t WEAR dresses.

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• Utterance Meaning vs.

Sentence Meaning

• Utterance vs. Sentence

– Sentence: abstract units of the

language system.

– Utterance: units of language in

use.

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• Sentence meaning: What does X mean?• Utterance meaning: What do you mean

by X?– Dog!

– My bag is heavy.

– “Janet! Donkeys!” (David Copperfield)

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• Contextual Meaning: meaning in

context

– The meaning of the sentence depends

on who the speaker is , who the hearer

is, when and where it is used.

– It was a hot Christmas day so we went

down to the beach in the afternoon and

had a good time swimming and surfing.

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• Semantic meaning: the more constant,

inherent side of meaning

• Pragmatic meaning: the more

indeterminate, the more closely related

to context

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1. A: Are you going to the seminar?

B: It’s on linguistics.

2. A: Would you like some coffee?

B: Coffee would keep me awake.

3. A: 我带的钱不够，今天买不了。

B: 那就下次再买吧。

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2. Speech Act Theory

• John Austin (1911-1960)

• How to Do Things with Words (1962)

• speech acts: actions performed via utterances

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• 2.1 Constatives vs. performatives

• Constatives: utterances which roughly

serves to state a fact, report that

something is the case, or describe what

something is, eg:

– I go to the park every Sunday.

– I teach English.

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• Performatives: utterances which are

used to perform acts, do not describe or

report anything at all; the uttering of the

sentence is the doing of an action; they

cannot be said to be true or false.

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• I do.• I name this ship Queen Elizabeth.• I bet you sixpence it will rain

tomorrow.• I give and bequeath my watch to

my brother.• I promise to finish it in time.• I apologize.• I declare the meeting open.• I warn you that the bull will

charge.

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• Felicity conditions: A. (i) There must be a relevant

conventional procedure. (ii) the relevant participants and

circumstances must be appropriate.B. The procedure must be executed

correctly and completely.C. Very often, the relevant people must

have the requisite thoughts, feelings and intentions, and must follow it up with actions as specified.

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• Problems with felicity conditions

– No strict procedure for promising.

– I promise.

– I give my word for it.

– I bequeath my watch to my brother. (T or F?)

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• Features of performatives

• First person singular

• Speech act verbs / performative verbs:

– The present tense

– Indicative mood

– Active voice

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• I promise to be there.– I’ll be there.

• I admit I was wrong. – I was foolish.

• I warn you, this gun is loaded. – This gun is loaded.

• I thank you. – I’m very grateful.

• I apologize. – I’m sorry.

• I order you to sit down. – You must sit down.

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• Conclusion:

• The distinction between constatives &

performatives cannot be maintained.

• All sentences can be used to do things.

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2.2. Illocutionary Act Theory

• John Searle (1932- )

• Speech acts can be

analyzed on 3 levels:

• A locutionary act: the act of

saying something in the full

sense of “say”.

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• An illocutionary act: an act performed in

saying something. To say sth is to do

sth.

– In saying X, I was doing Y.

– In saying “I will come tomorrow”, I was

making a promise.

• Illocutionary force

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• A perlocutionary act: the act preformed by or as a result of saying, the effects on the hearer.– By saying X and doing Y, I did Z.

– By saying “I will come tomorrow” and making a promise, I reassure my friends.

– Shoot her!

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3. Conversational Implicature

• People do not usually say things directly but tend to imply them.

• Herbert Paul Grice (1913-1988)

• William James lectures at Harvard

in 1967

• Logic and Conversation in 1975

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• Grice’s theory Logic and Conversation is an attempt at explaining how a hearer gets from what is said to what is meant, from the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning.

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• The Cooperative Principle (CP)

• Make your contribution such as required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

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• Maxim of Quality– Do not say what you believe to be false.– Do not say something if you lack adequate

evidence;

• Maxim of Quantity– Make your contribution as informative as

required (for the current purposes of the exchange).

– Do not make your contribution more informative than required.

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• Maxim of Relation: Be relative.

• Maxim of Manner: Be perspicuous.– Avoid obscurity of expression.

– Avoid ambiguity.

– Be brief.

– Be orderly.

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• CP is meant to describe what actually

happens in conversation.

• People tend to be cooperative and

obey CP in communication.

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• However, CP is often violated.

– Since CP is regulative, CP can be violated.

• Violation of CP and its maxims leads to

conversational implicature.

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Violation of the maxims (Quantity)

1. Make your contribution as informative as is required.

A: 昨天上街买了些什么 ?

B: 就买了些东西。

> I don’t want to tell you what I bought.

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Dear Sir,

Mr. X’s command of English is excellent,

and his attendance at tutorials has been

regular.

Yours

> Mr. X is not suitable for the job.

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2. Do not make your contribution more

informative than is required.

Aunt: How did Jimmy do his history exam?

Mother: Oh, not at all well. Teachers asked

him things that happened before the

poor boy was born.

> Her son should not be blamed.

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A: Your kid broke the window.

B: Boys are boys.

>

War is war.

>

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Violation of the maxims (Quality)

1. Do not say what you believe to be false.

• You are the cream in my coffee.

• X runs as fast as a deer.

• He is made of iron.

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2. Do not say that for which you lack

adequate evidence.

A: Beirut is in Peru, isn’t it?

B: And Rome is in Romania, I suppose.

> It’s ridiculous.

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Violation of the maxims (Relation)

Be relevant.

A: Prof. Wang is an old bag.

B: Nice weather for the time of year.

> I don’t want to talk about Prof. Wang.

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Violation of the maxims (Manner)

1. Avoid obscurity of expression

A: Let’s get the kids something.

B: Ok, but I veto C-H-O-C-O-L-A-T-E.

> Don’t give them chocolate.

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2. Avoid ambiguity

A: Name and title, please?

B: John Smith, Associate Editor and

professor.

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3. Be brief

A: Did you get my assignment?

B: I received two pages clipped together

and covered with rows of black

squiggles.

> not satisfied.

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Characteristics of implicature

• Calculability: hearers work out

implicature based on literal meaning, CP

and its maxims, context, etc.

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• Cancellability / defeasibility: If the linguistic or situational contexts changes, the implicature will also change.

A: Do you want some coffee?

B: Coffee would keep me awake. I do not like coffee.

B: Coffee would keep me awake. I want to stay up.

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• Non-detachability: implicature is attached to the semantic content of what is said, not to the linguistic form; implicatures do not vanish if the words of an utterance are changed for synonyms.

A: Shall we go the cinema tonight?

B: There’ll be an exam tomorrow.

I’ll take an exam tomorrow.

Isn’t there an exam tomorrow?

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• Non-conventionality: implicature is different from its conventional meaning of words. It is context-dependent. It varies with context.

A1 ：下午踢球去吧！A2 ：老王住院了？ B ：上午还在换草皮。A3: 足球场安装了一个新门柱。

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4. Post-Gricean Developments

• Relevance Theory: – Dan Sperber (Jean Nicod Institute)– Deirdre Wilson (UCL)

• The Q- and R-principles: – Laurence Horn (Yale)

• The Q-, I- and M-principles: – Stephen Levinson (Max Planck)

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4.1 Relevance Theory

• 1986, 1995

• All Gricean maxims, inc. the CP itself, should be reduced to a single principle of relevance:– ‘Every act of ostensive communication

communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance.’

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• Ostensive communication: – They agree with Grice that communication

is not simply a matter of encoding and decoding, it also involves inference.

– But they maintain that inference has only to do with the hearer. From the speaker's side, communication should be seen as an act of making clear one's intention to express something. This act they call ostensive act. In other words, a complete characterization of communication is that it is ostensive-inferential.

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• Presumption of optimal relevance:– Initial version: An assumption is relevant

in a context if and only if it has some contextual effect in that context.

• But what exactly is context?– All the background info– Sometimes some info must be excluded—

chosen relevance– Generally the assumption people are

processing is relevant

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• Revised version: An assumption is relevant to an individual at a given time if and only if it is relevant in one or more of the contexts available to that individual at that time. – Relevance is not just a property of

assumptions in the mind, but also a property of phenomena (stimuli, e.g. utterances) in the environment which lead to the construction of assumptions.

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• A communicator cannot directly present an audience with an assumption. All a speaker, or a writer, can do is to present a stimulus in the form of a sound, or a written mark.

• The presentation of this stimulus changes the cognitive environment of the audience, making certain facts manifest, or more manifest.

• As a result, the audience can mentally represent these facts as strong or stronger assumptions, and even use them to derive further assumptions.

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• Final version: A phenomenon is relevant to an individual if and only if one or more of the assumptions it makes manifest is relevant to him.

• Thus, by presumption of optimal relevance is meant:– The set of assumptions {I } which the

communicator intends to make manifest to the addressee is relevant enough to make it worth the addressee's while to process the ostensive stimulus.

– The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one the communicator could have used to communicate {I }.

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• Every utterance comes with a presumption of the best balance of effort against effect. – On the one hand, the effects achievable will

never be less than is needed to make it worth processing.

– On the other hand, the effort required will never be more than is needed to achieve these effects. In comparison to the effects achieved, the effort needed is always the smallest.

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• This amounts to saying “of all the interpretations of the stimulus which confirm the presumption, it is the first interpretation to occur to the addressee that is the one the communicator intended to convey.

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• George has a big cat.

• George has a tiger, a lion, a jaguar, etc.

• George has a tiger.

• George has a tiger or a lion, I'm not sure which.

• George has a felid.

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• Second ed. (1995): two relevance-based principles

• Communicative Principle of Relevance: – Every act of ostensive communication

communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance.

• Cognitive Principle of Relevance: – Human cognition tends to be geared to the

maximisation of relevance.

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• The presumption of optimal relevance is revised as follows:– The ostensive stimulus is relevant enough

for it to be worth the addressee’s effort to process it.

– The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities and preferences.

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4.2 The Q- and R-principles

• Laurence Horn (1984): – Toward a New Taxonomy for Pragmatic

Interface: Q-Based and R-Based Implicature.

• Laurence Horn (1988): – Pragmatic Theory.

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• The Q-principle: – The first of Grice's maxim of Quantity --

Make your contribution as informative as required (for the current purposes of the exchange).

• The R-principle: – The Maxim of Relation

• But the new principles are more extensive than the Gricean maxims.

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• The Q-principle (Hearer-based):– MAKE YOUR CONTRIBUTION SUFFICIENT

(cf. Quantity1)

– SAY AS MUCH AS YOU CAN (given R)

• The R-principle (Speaker-based):– MAKE YOUR CONTRIBUTION NECESSARY

(cf. Relation, Quantity2, Manner)

– SAY NO MORE THAN YOU MUST (given Q)

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• The hearer-based Q-principle is a sufficiency condition in the sense that information provided is the most the speaker is able to.

• For example, (a) below implicates (b):– (a) Some of my friends are

linguists. – (b) Not all of my friends are

linguists.

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• The R-principle encourages the hearer to infer that more is meant. Typical examples are speech acts like:– Can you pass the salt?

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• The Q-principle is concerned with the content. – The speaker who follows this principle

supplies the sufficient information.

• The R-principle is concerned with the form. – The speaker who employs this principle

uses the minimal form, so that the hearer is entitled to infer that the speaker means more than he says.

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• Example: negation usually means ‘less than’. – He didn't eat three carrots. – He ate less than three carrots.

• Metalinguistic negation:– He didn't eat THREE carrots.– He ate FOUR of them.– You didn't eat SOME of the cookies—

you ate ALL of them.– It isn't POSSIBLE she'll win—it's

CERTAIN she will.

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• I didn't break a finger yesterday.

• I broke a finger, but it wasn't one of mine. (Q-based)

• I broke a finger yesterday.

• I broke a finger of mine yesterday.

(R-based)

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• John had a drink.

• The secretary smiled.

• John had an alcoholic drink.

• The female secretary smiled.

• John didn't have a drink—that was a Shirley Temple.

• *My secretary didn't smile—I have a male secretary. 

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• Horn argues that this exception is more apparent than real. – Both speakers' intuition and

lexicographers' practice suggest that the implicature associated with drink, i.e. “alcoholic drink”, has become part of the conventional meaning, while that of secretary, i.e. “female secretary” has not.

– In other words, the interpretation of drink in the sense of “alcoholic drink” is no longer an implicature.

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• Synonym avoidance:– There are many terms formed with the

adjective pale and colour words, such as, pale green, pale blue, pale yellow, but pale red sounds odd.

– This oddity may be attributed to the existence of the word pink.

– Unless one wants to designate a colour which is paler than red, but not yet as pale as pink, the term pale red would not be used.

– Because of the existence of pink the use of pale red is limited in a way that pale blue and pale green are not.

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• Black Bart killed the sheriff.• Black Bart caused the sheriff to die.

• Lee stopped the car.• Lee got the car to stop.

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• Horn observes that the Q-based and R-based principles often directly collide. – “A speaker obeying only Q would tend to

say everything she knows on the off-chance that it might prove informative, while a speaker obeying only R would probably, to be on the safe side, not open her mouth. In fact, many of the maxim clashes Grice and others have discussed do involve Quantity1 vs. Relation”.

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• But “it is perhaps in the resolution of the conflict between them that they play their major role”.

• He suggests this resolution comes from a division of pragmatic labour as follows:– The use of a marked (relatively complex

and/or prolix) expression when a corresponding unmarked (simpler, less “effortful”) alternate expression is available tends to be interpreted as conveying a marked message (one which the unmarked alternative would not or could not have conveyed).

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4.3 The Q-, I- and M-principles

• Stephen Levinson (1987): – Pragmatics and the Grammar of

Anaphor: A Partial Pragmatic Reduction of Binding and Control Phenomena

• Stephen Levinson (1989):– Review of Relevance by Sperber

and Wilson

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• The Q-, I- and M-principles are Grice's two maxims of Quantity and a maxim of Manner reinterpreted neo-classically.– The maxims of Quality, as is the case in

Horn's theory, are kept intact. – Levinson does not agree with the

treatment in both Sperber & Wilson's and Horn's accounts to subsume the second maxim of Quantity under a principle of relevance, or relation.

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• In his view, the maxims of Quantity have to do with the quantity of information, while – relevance is a measure of timely

helpfulness with respect to interactional goals, and

– is largely about the satisfaction of others' goals in interaction, and the satisfaction of topical and sequencing constraints in discourse, as in the expectation that an answer will follow a question.

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• It is not, at least not primarily, about information. – So he renames the second maxim of

Quantity the Principle of Informativeness, or I-Principle;

– and the first maxim of Quantity the Principle of Quantity, or Q-Principle.

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• The M-principle:

• Levinson mixes the presentation of his own ideas with the criticism of Horn's principles.

• He accuses Horn of failing to draw a distinction between two kinds of minimization: – a semantic minimization and – an expression minimization.

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• The semantic, or content, minimization is equivalent to semantic generality: – the more general terms are more minimal in

meaning, having more restricted connotation (in contrast to the more extended denotation); and

– the less general, the more specific, are less minimal, more maximal.

• For example, ship is more general than ferry, flower than rose, animal than tiger. – The choice of the former instead of the latter

is a process toward minimization.

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• The expression, or form, minimization is some measure of surface length and complexity. – It is concerned with the phonetic and

morphological make-up of a term. – The normally stressed terms are more

minimal than their abnormally stressed counterparts.

– The shorter terms are more minimal than longer ones, provided they are synonymous, such as frequent and not infrequent, to stop a car and to cause a car to stop.

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• Only the semantic minimization has to do with the I-principle.

• The expression minimization, in contrast, is the domain of the principle of manner, as it concerns the form of a linguistic unit, the way to express something rather than what is expressed, or how much is expressed.

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• Recently, Levinson calls his principles “heuristics”.

• Levinson (2000): Presumptive Meaning. MIT.– Heuristic 1. What isn’t said, isn’t.– Heuristic 2. What is simply described is

stereotypically exemplified. – Heuristic 3. What’s said in an abnormal

way, isn’t normal; or Marked message indicates marked situation. 

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• Heuristic 1: Q-Heuristic • “more or less transparently related to

Grice’s first Maxim of Quantity”• Responsible for two types of

implicatures: scalar implicatures and clausal implicatures– Some of the boys came. (scalar) – Not all the boys came. – If eating eggs is bad for you, you should

give up omelets. (clausal) – Eating eggs may be bad for you, or

it may not be bad for you.

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• Scalar implicatures are the implicatures which involve the Q-principle in Horn’s sense. – Words like all and some form a scalar

contrast set <all, some>, in which all is the more informative, or stronger, term, and some the less informative, or weaker, term.

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• Clausal implicatures involve the use of different clauses. – Since eating eggs is bad for you, you

should give up omelets. – Eating eggs may be bad for you, or it may

not be bad for you.

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• Two clausal alternates:– If eating eggs is bad for you, you should

give up omelets.– Since eating eggs is bad for you, you

should give up omelets.

• which may be expressed as – <(since p, q), (if p, q)>

• The clause using since is the more informative, or stronger, alternate, and the one using if the less informative, or weaker, alternate.

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• Heuristic 2: I-Heurisitc• “may be related directly to Grice’s second

Maxim of Quantity, ... The underlying idea is, of course, that one need not say what can be taken for granted”. (a) John turned the key and the engine started. (b) John turned the key, and then the engine

started.

John turned the key, therefore the engine started.

John turned the key in order to start the engine.

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(a) If you mow the lawn, I'll give you $5. (b) If and only if you mow the lawn, I'll give

you $5. (a) John unpacked the picnic. The beer

was warm. (b) The beer was part of the picnic. (a) John said “Hello” to the secretary and

then he smiled. (b) John said “Hello” to the female

secretary and then John smiled. 

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(a) Harry and Sue bought a piano.

(b) They bought it together, not one each. 

(a) John came in and he sat down.

(b) John1 came in and he1 sat down.

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• Heuristic 3: M-Heuristic– can be related directly to Grice’s maxim of

Manner (‘Be perspicuous’), specifically to his first submaxim ‘avoid obscurity of expression’ and his fourth ‘avoid prolixity’...

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• The underlying idea here is that there is an implicit opposition or parasitic relationship between our second and third heuristics: – what is said simply, briefly, in an

unmarked way picks up the stereotypical interpretation;

– if in contrast a marked expression is used, it is suggested that the stereotypical interpretation should be avoided.

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• Thus, (a) below should be interpreted in the stereotypical way by the I-Heuristic, say the probability is n, then (b) should be interpreted in the marked way by the M-Heuristic, i.e., the probability is less than n.– (a) It’s possible that the plane will be late.– (b) It’s not impossible that the plane will be

late.

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• In the same way, the use of a longer alternative to a simple causative verb suggests some deviation from the normal situation.– Bill stopped the car. – Bill did it in the stereotypical manner with

the foot pedal.

– Bill caused the car to stop. – Bill did it indirectly, not in the normal way,

e.g., by the use of the emergency brake.

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• If the speaker uses a marked expression the man instead of an unmarked expression he, then John and the man will not be coreferential.– John came in and the man laughed. 

• There is still a long way to go before we find a solution to all the problems we have in the study of language in use, and there are new attempts to improve on all these principles.

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