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Introduction to Linguistics II Ling 2-121C, group b

Lecture 10

Eleni Miltsakaki

AUTH

Spring 2006

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Review and extensions of the Cooperative Principe

• Whose theory is the Cooperative Principle?

• What does the Cooperative Principle say?

• What are the conversational maxims of the cooperative principle?

• What is conversational implicature?

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Exercise

• Explain the implicated meaning in what follows and the maxim that accounts for it

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– John has one leg– Mary has three children– The dress is white

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• John has a PhD in mathematics

• Does your brother live in Athens?

• -- Where is John?

• -- Well, there’s a red VW outside Mary’s home

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• John went to the store and bought some wine

• (nice for semanticists, they don’t need to claim there’s two meanings of ‘and’ in English)

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Flouting maxims

• Explain the implicated meaning in what follows and the maxim whose violation accounts for it

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• Quantity

– War is war (terrible things happen in war, that’s the nature of it, no point lamenting

this particular disaster)

– Either John will come or he won’t (calm down, no point worrying about whether John will come because

there’s nothing you can do about it)

– If he does it, he does it

(it’s no concern of ours)

• Asserting tautologies is not informative some informative inference must be made

• Still, it’s not quite clear yet exactly how the appropriate implicatures in these cases are predicted

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• Quality

• Irony

--Teheran’s in Turkey isn’t it, teacher?

-- And London’s in Armenia I suppose

• Rhetorical questions

-- Was Hitler going to be nice?

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• Relevance

-- I do think John is a jerk, don’t you?

-- Huh, lovely weather for March, isn’t it?(watch out what you’re saying, John’s sister is behind you)

John: Hey Sally let’s play marbles

Mother: How is your homework getting along, Johny?

(you may not yet be free to play)

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• Manner

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

(Miss Singer was bad)

• Miss Singer sang an aria of Rigoletto

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Definition of conversational implicature

S’s saying that p conversationally implicates q iff:

(i) S is presumed to be observing the maxims, or at least (in case of flouting) the co-operative principle

(ii) in order to maintain this assumption it must be supposed that S thinks that q

(iii) S thinks that both S and the addressee H mutually know that H can work out that to preserve the assumption in (I) q is in fact required

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Review and extension of speech act theory

• What do we mean by performative verbs? What do they do?

• Give examples of performative sentences?

• What do we mean by implicit performatives?

• Give examples

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• Define and explain the differences– Utterance act– Locutionary act (propositional)– Illocutionary act– Perlocutionary act

• All utterances not only serve to express propositions but also to perform actions.

– Speech acts are illocutionary acts

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Indirect speech acts

• I want you to close the door• I’d be much obliged if you’d close the door• Can you close the door?• Are you able by any chance to close the door?• Would you close the door?• Won’t you close the door?• Would you mind closing the door?• May I ask you to close the door?• Would you mind awfully if I was to ask you to close the

door?

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Presuppositions

• What are presuppositions?

• Give examples

• What do we mean by ‘accommodation’?

• Give examples

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Deixis

• Some words can only be interpreted in context• These words are called deictic (or indexical

expressions):– My mine you your yours we ours us (personal deixis)– This that these those (demonstratives)– Now, this/that X, X time ago, tomorrow, last X, next X

(time deixis)– Here, there, this/that X, (place deixis)– Before/behind, left/right front/back (directional deixis)

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Types of deixis

• You, you, but not you, are dismissed (gestural deixis)

• What did you say? (symbolic)

• You can never tell what sex they are nowadays (non-deictic)

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Discourse deixis

• …

• That was the funniest story I’ve ever heard

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• Deixis is common in language and marks one boundary between semantics and pragmatics

• I, behind me, an hour from now: have meaning to the extent that they have reference, to determine their reference you need context

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• The facts of deixis should act as a constant reminder to theoretical linguists of the simple but immensely important fact that natural languages are primarily designed, so to speak, for use in face-to-face interaction, and thus there are limits to the extent to which they can be analysed without taking this into account (Lyons, 1977)

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Summary points in pragmatics

• The cooperative principle– Four maxims of conversation

• Speech acts

• Presuppositions

• Deixis

• Pronouns and other pro-forms