scholarly journals Conversational Implicature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Allott
Keyword(s):  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Cooperative Principle ◽  
Linguistic Pragmatics ◽  
Conversational Implicatures ◽  
Pragmatic Inference ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Chocolate Cake ◽  
Fail Safe ◽  
Working Out

Conversational implicatures (i) are implied by the speaker in making an utterance; (ii) are part of the content of the utterance, but (iii) do not contribute to direct (or explicit) utterance content; and (iv) are not encoded by the linguistic meaning of what has been uttered. In (1), Amelia asserts that she is on a diet, and implicates something different: that she is not having cake. (1) Benjamin:Are you having some of this chocolate cake?Amelia:I’m on a diet. Conversational implicatures are a subset of the implications of an utterance: namely those that are part of utterance content. Within the class of conversational implicatures, there are distinctions between particularized and generalized implicatures; implicated premises and implicated conclusions; and weak and strong implicatures. An obvious question is how implicatures are possible: how can a speaker intentionally imply something that is not part of the linguistic meaning of the phrase she utters, and how can her addressee recover that utterance content? Working out what has been implicated is not a matter of deduction, but of inference to the best explanation. What is to be explained is why the speaker has uttered the words that she did, in the way and in the circumstances that she did. Grice proposed that rational talk exchanges are cooperative and are therefore governed by a Cooperative Principle (CP) and conversational maxims: hearers can reasonably assume that rational speakers will attempt to cooperate and that rational cooperative speakers will try to make their contribution truthful, informative, relevant and clear, inter alia, and these expectations therefore guide the interpretation of utterances. On his view, since addressees can infer implicatures, speakers can take advantage of their ability, conveying implicatures by exploiting the maxims. Grice’s theory aimed to show how implicatures could in principle arise. In contrast, work in linguistic pragmatics has attempted to model their actual derivation. Given the need for a cognitively tractable decision procedure, both the neo-Gricean school and work on communication in relevance theory propose a system with fewer principles than Grice’s. Neo-Gricean work attempts to reduce Grice’s array of maxims to just two (Horn) or three (Levinson), while Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory rejects maxims and the CP and proposes that pragmatic inference hinges on a single communicative principle of relevance. Conversational implicatures typically have a number of interesting properties, including calculability, cancelability, nondetachability, and indeterminacy. These properties can be used to investigate whether a putative implicature is correctly identified as such, although none of them provides a fail-safe test. A further test, embedding, has also been prominent in work on implicatures. A number of phenomena that Grice treated as implicatures would now be treated by many as pragmatic enrichment contributing to the proposition expressed. But Grice’s postulation of implicatures was a crucial advance, both for its theoretical unification of apparently diverse types of utterance content and for the attention it drew to pragmatic inference and the division of labor between linguistic semantics and pragmatics in theorizing about verbal communication.

Relevance Theory

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deirdre Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Close Link ◽  
Cooperative Principle ◽  
Implicit Communication ◽  
Procedural Information ◽  
Pragmatic Inference ◽  
Comprehension Process ◽  
Processing Effort

Relevance theory is a cognitive approach to pragmatics which starts from two broadly Gricean assumptions: (a) that much human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, involves the overt expression and inferential recognition of intentions, and (b) that in inferring these intentions, the addressee presumes that the communicator’s behavior will meet certain standards, which for Grice are based on a Cooperative Principle and maxims, and for relevance theory are derived from the assumption that, as a result of constant selection pressures in the course of human evolution, both cognition and communication are relevance-oriented. Relevance is defined in terms of cognitive (or contextual) effects and processing effort: other things being equal, the greater the cognitive effects and the smaller the processing effort, the greater the relevance. A long-standing aim of relevance theory has been to show that building an adequate theory of communication involves going beyond Grice’s notion of speaker’s meaning. Another is to provide a conceptually unified account of how a much broader variety of communicative acts than Grice was concerned with—including cases of both showing that and telling that—are understood. The resulting pragmatic theory differs from Grice’s in several respects. It sees explicit communication as much richer and more inferential than Grice thought, with encoded sentence meanings providing no more than clues to the speaker’s intentions. It rejects the close link that Grice saw between implicit communication and (real or apparent) maxim violation, showing in particular how figurative utterances might arise naturally and spontaneously in the course of communication. It offers an account of vagueness or indeterminacy in communication, which is often abstracted away from in more formally oriented frameworks. It investigates the role of context in comprehension, and shows how tentative hypotheses about the intended combination of explicit content, contextual assumptions, and implicatures might be refined and mutually adjusted in the course of the comprehension process in order to satisfy expectations of relevance. Relevance theory treats the borderline between semantics and pragmatics as co-extensive with the borderline between (linguistic) decoding and (pragmatic) inference. It sees encoded sentence meanings as typically fragmentary and incomplete, and as having to undergo inferential enrichment or elaboration in order to yield fully propositional forms. It reanalyzes Grice’s conventional implicatures—which he saw as semantic but non-truth-conditional aspects of the meaning of words like but and so—as encoding procedural information with dedicated pragmatic or more broadly cognitive functions, and extends the notion of procedural meaning to a range of further items such as pronouns, discourse particles, mood indicators, and affective intonation.

scholarly journals The implication of violation of cooperative principle in discourse on corruption of Indonesia Lawyers Club

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Mangatur Sinaga ◽  
Dahnilsyah Dahnilsyah
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Cooperative Principle ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Conversational Implicatures ◽  
Selection Test ◽  
Regional Elections ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This article discusses the violation implicature of cooperative principle of discourse on corruption of Indonesia Lawyers Club. The applied theories are: (1) Searle’s speech acts (1969); (2) Austin’s Locutionary, Illocutionary, and Perlocutionary (1962); (3) Grice’s conversational implicatures and cooperative principles (in Leech,1993); (4) Levinson’s pragmatics and semantic deviation  (1983), Parker’s pragmatics (in Rahardi, 2005;48); (5) Spencer and Wilson’s relevance theory (in Rahardi, 2010). Data were gathered by means of listening and recording. The speeches were analyzed by employing the maxim violation and implicatures theories. The violation of cooperative principle implies (1) the speakers fully comprehend the speech, (2) Government has insufficient budget to pay the judges of regional anti-corruption court, (3) Government seems skeptical about the regional judge selection test, (4) The speakers are fully confident that they posses capability of eradicating corruption, (5) Both payment and allowance of the regional judge of anti-corruption court do not receive scholarly attention that have made difficult for them to work as  law enforcers and as justice enforcers, (6) Some negative effects emerged by virtue of the poor planning of the establishment of the regional court, (7) The anti-corruption court lost dignity; The role of Judicial commission is not effective in providing guidances to the judges, (9) All elements have committed corruption like termites keep encircling nation, (10) issues on corruption are not seriously discussed (11) regional elections indirectly trigger corruption.

Pohľad Na Pomenovanie Cez Prizmu Teoretických Rámcov A Slovníkového Hesla

2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-301
Author(s):  
Alexandra Jarošová
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Extended Model ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Departure Point ◽  
Lexical Meaning ◽  
Linguistic Pragmatics ◽  
Situational Contexts ◽  
Methodological Procedures

Abstract The first part of this paper outlines the relevant aspects of functional structuralism serving lexicographers as a departure point for building a model of lexical meaning useable in the Dictionary of Contemporary Slovak Language. This section also points to some aspects of Klára Buzássyová’s research on lexis and word­formation that have enriched the functional­structuralist paradigm. The second section shows other theoretical and methodological frameworks, such as linguistic pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics (all of them departing in some respect from the structuralism and, in other aspects, being complementary with it) that can enhance the structuralist basis of the model. The third section outlines an extended model of lexical meaning that represents a synthesis of all those theoretical frameworks and, at the same time, represents a reflection of three language constituents: 1. The social constituent is present in consideration of communicative functions of utterances, naming functions of lexical units, functional styles and registers, language norms, and situational contexts; 2. The psychological component takes the form of consideration of the prototype effect, the abolition of boundaries between linguistic meaning and other parts of cognition; 3. Thanks to the structural/systematic component, a description of paradigmatic and syntagmatic behaviour of words can be performed, and an inventory of formal­content units and categories (lexemes, lexies, word­forming and grammatical structures) can be provided. In our dictionary practice, the above­mentioned model is reflected in the methodological procedures as follows: 1. Systemization of repetitive (regular, standardized) phenomena; 2. Prototypicalization of meaning description; 3. Contextualization/encyclopedization of meaning description; 4. Pragmatization of meaning description; 5. Continualized presentation of language phenomena, i.e., introduction of numerous phenomena of transient and indeterminate nature and indicating the existence of a semantic­pragmatic and lexical­grammatical continuum; 6. “Discretization” of combinatorial continuum, i.e., identification and description of entrenched word combinations with naming functions.

scholarly journals Relevance theory, pragmatic inference and cognitive architecture

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-122
Author(s):  
Wen Yuan ◽  
Francis Y. Lin ◽  
Richard P. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Architecture ◽  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Pragmatic Inference

Experimental Pragmatics

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond W. Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Experimental Methods ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Important Research ◽  
Experimental Pragmatics ◽  
Linguistic Pragmatics ◽  
Conversational Implicatures ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Discourse Understanding

This chapter describes some of the important research in experimental pragmatics, most notably studies related to recovering speakers’ intentions, inferring conversational implicatures, and the role of common ground in discourse understanding. My aim is to demonstrate the utility of different experimental methods for studying pragmatics, and how research findings in the field are relevant to traditional concerns within the linguistic pragmatics community. But I will also argue that experimental pragmatic studies show great regularities and significant variation, both within and across individuals, in the ways people speak and understand language. My alternative view claims that dynamical, self-organizing processes form the critical background from which meaningful pragmatic actions emerge. The implications of this position for interdisciplinary pragmatic research will be discussed.

Register and the redemption of relevance theory

Pragmatics ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Goatly
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Genre Theory ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Linguistic Pragmatics ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cross Fertilization

The argument I wish to advance in this paper is that Gricean theory (Grice 1968, 1969, 1975, 1978, 1981) and, in particular, the potentially useful relevance theory which developed from it (Sperber & Wilson 1986), are flawed through their failure to consider cultural and social context; but that attempts to relate linguistic pragmatics to more socially-conscious models of language use, such as register/genre theory (Ure and Ellis 1977; Halliday 1978; Gregory and Carroll 1978; Ghadessy 1988, 1993; Swales 1988; Martin 1985, 1992 etc.) may produce interesting cross-fertilization and be beneficial to both. This essay falls into three sections. The first is a brief introductory critique of Grice's theory as an asocial idealized construct. The second section brings relevance theory and genre/register theory face to face and under the spotlight, hoping to reveal the weaknesses of each and show how, theoretically, they could compensate for and complement each other. In the third section I consider the case of metaphor, arguing that and demonstrating how the account of metaphor provided in Relevance: Communication and Cognition can be supplemented in practice by considering the kinds of register/genre in which metaphors find expression.

Lying in Different Cultures

2018 ◽  
pp. 564-578
Author(s):  
Fumiko Nishimura
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Japanese People ◽  
Cooperative Principle ◽  
Individualism And Collectivism ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
New Zealanders

This chapter reviews key issues related to lying within the framework of a cross-cultural context. First, important notions such as individualism and collectivism are discussed. Various definitions of lying are then introduced based on semantics and pragmatics frameworks (e.g., Grice’s Cooperative Principle). Next, the motivations and acceptability of lies are addressed by referring to values and assumptions found in different cultures. Finally, the chapter examines conversational data collected from Japanese people and New Zealanders. The data contain lies that are used as strategies to manage undesirable situations. The examples illustrate how people would choose different types of lie by following their own cultural protocols and preferences.

scholarly journals Panel on: Maintaining Identity in the Virtual World Virtual Fraud and Misinformation in the New Age: Revisiting Grice’s Cooperative Principle

10.28945/2731 ◽  
2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hong Wang ◽  
Xin-An (Lucian) Lu
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Internet Technology ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Cooperative Principle ◽  
Conversational Implicatures ◽  
Online Deception ◽  
Use Of The Internet

Naturally, humans seek physical and psychological joy. Romance, for instance, is one of the means. People are making quick use of the Internet technology to facilitate their seeking of romantic and quasiromantic experience via “virtual reality.” In this paper we concern ourselves mainly with meaning generation and interpretation in the virtual world. With analysis of a reported case of online deception as empirical evidence, we question in the conditions and assumptions Grice based on for his theoretical proposition of the Cooperative Principle. Our research suggests that deception in online romance is hard to find out because the virtual reality does not provide sufficient conditions for generation of conversational implicatures as suggested by Grice’s Cooperative Principle.

Linguistic Pragmatism and Weather Reporting

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Collins
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Interpretation ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Domain Restriction ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Semantics And Pragmatics ◽  
Full Analysis ◽  
The Common ◽  
Quantifier Domain Restriction

Linguistic pragmatism claims that what we literally say goes characteristically beyond what the linguistic properties themselves mandate. In this book, John Collins provides a novel defence of this doctrine, arguing that linguistic meaning alone fails to fix truth conditions. While this position is supported by a range of theorists, Collins shows that it naturally follows from a syntactic thesis concerning the relative sparseness of what language alone can provide to semantic interpretation. Language–and by extension meaning–provides constraints upon what a speaker can literally say, but does not characteristically encode any definite thing to say. Collins then defends this doctrine against a range of alternatives and objections, focusing in particular on an analysis of weather reports: ‘it is raining/snowing/sunny’. Such reporting is mostly location-sensitive in the sense that the utterance is true or not depending upon whether it is raining/snowing/sunny at the location of the utterance, rather than some other location. Collins offers a full analysis of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of weather reports, including many novel data. He shows that the constructions lack the linguistic resources to support the common literal locative readings. Other related phenomena are discussed such as the Saxon genitive, colour predication, quantifier domain restriction, and object deletion.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document