H.P. Grice

Meaning-making is at the center of all human communicative events. Communication is an exchange of meanings encoded in written or spoken words, non-verbal cues, signs, symbols, and so on. Creating, exchanging, and interpreting meaning is ingrained in human nature since prehistoric times. Language is the most sophisticated medium of communication. It is through language that we set meanings or in other words — refer, define, and signify the things in nature and the ideas in our mind. (Griffiths, 2017)
The term ‘meaning of meaning’ was first coined by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in 1923. According to him meaning is related to multiple phenomena. It has various facets and these features are related to the external world (extra-linguistic factors) and the linguistic properties (phonetics, morphology, syntax, and semantics)
The concept of meaning is vast and has many moving parts. Questing for the answer — ‘what is the meaning of meaning’ makes us take a multi-disciplinary approach; from linguistics, philosophy, neurology, to semiotics. In this essay, I will reflect on the meaning of ‘meaning’ from a multidisciplinary approach, discuss the challenges of doing meaning, and the role of context in understanding the meaning of words and sentences.

In their recent book, Imagination and Convention, Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone defend a radical version of conventionalism, according to which conventions determine all of the properties of a communicative act that a hearer must interpret the act as having in order for communication to succeed. Purported  examples of unconventional communicative acts either are revealed to be governed by hitherto-unnoticed conventions, or aren't communicative acts at all, but merely invitations to open-ended imaginative reflection. In this paper, I argue that Lepore & Stone's defense of conventionalism fails, on several grounds. On one hand, they fail to account for the many ways in which intention recognition is involved in communication. On the other hand, their argument that unconventional utterances are used to provoke imaginative reflection rather than to communicate suffers from serious flaws. One problem with the argument is that it overgenerates, entailing that most literal and direct linguistic communication is impossible. But the argument is also incompatible with Lepore & Stone's own view that communication often involves becoming competent with new conventions on the fly, since the task of acquiring a new convention is roughly the same as the task of interpreting an unconventional communicative act. I conclude that although Lepore & Stone’s treatments of particular semantic and pragmatic phenomena are fascinating and possibly correct, their broader defense of conventionalism in the philosophy of language is not one about which we should be optimistic.

Cognitive pragmatics is a mature field of research, characterized by robust theories and a growing amount of experimental work. In particular, Relevance Theory has provided a rich framework for research in the field. However, this theory makes a number of assumptions that are rooted in a modular view of cognition. This book provides a detailed analysis of such assumptions, arguing for an alternative model which has, however, some support in ideas explored by relevance theorists. First of all, inferences are explained in terms of associative pattern completion within associative networks, based on the schematic organization of memory. This explanation is shown to apply to a number of cognitive domains besides pragmatics, including mindreading. Moreover, such a view is compatible with a general understanding of the neurocomputational machinery of our cortex, suggesting a general argument to the effect that modularity in its standard version cannot be right. Second, the book argues for a crucial role of conscious attention in pragmatics as well as in most cognitive processes. In the end, what is proposed is not only a revision of Relevance Theory but also a fresh analysis of reasoning, which vindicates some Gricean intuitions.

Jaka jest definicja semantyki i pragmatyki? Od kilkudziesięciu lat odpowiedź na to pytanie pozostaje źródłem licznych sporów i kontrowersji. Istnieje wiele różnych definicji obu terminów. W zależności od przyjętego wyjaśnienia, granice pomiędzy semantycznymi i pragmatycznymi elementami języka mogą przebiegać w bardzo zróżnicowany sposób. Z tego względu praca ta posiada trzy główne cele. Po pierwsze, przytoczone zostaną możliwe definicje pragmatyki oraz ich bezpośrednie konsekwencje dla definiowania semantyki. Po drugie, przytoczone zostaną kontrowersje związane z przebiegiem dokładnej granicy pomiędzy zjawiskami pragmatycznymi i semantycznymi. Wreszcie, spróbuję pokazać, dlaczego przesuwanie granic zjawisk pragmatycznych w sposób redukujący zakres zjawisk semantycznych może być interesujące dla teoretyków prawa.

In communication, there are a set of rules applied to make a successful conversation. The rules help both the speaker and the hearer in delivering their messages and conveying the meanings of their messages. Grice (1975) introduced the Cooperative Principle to throw light on how people use language. It acts as a device for the speaker and the hearer in their communication. The Cooperative Principle (CP) contains four sub-principles, called maxims: Maxim of quality, quantity, relevance, and manner. The interlocutors in order to achieve a successful conversation adhere to those maxims. For sustained and healthy relationship they should not violate or flout the four maxims. Speakers usually obey them to reach the purpose of conversation so that they can avoid any miscommunication. Flouting of maxims is a situation wherein a speaker manipulates a particular maxim that results in a conversational implicature. Ideally, the speaker and the hearer need to cooperate to convey and to understand each other’s speech clearly in each turn. Hence, the speaker can deliver his/her massage in an understandable fashion and the hearer can understand the speaker’s intended massage. Otherwise, the speaker and hearer might misunderstand each other and finally fall into a breakdown in their communication. However, one should be aware that there are layers of meanings to a speech.

""From the OUP Catalog:

* Ambitious original study of a fascinating aspect of human nature
* The most serious and systematic account of the notion of self-expression in thirty years
* Blends approaches from experimental psychology, linguistics, evolutionary biology, and central areas of philosophy

Mitchell S. Green presents a systematic philosophical study of self-expression - a pervasive phenomenon of the everyday life of humans and other species, which has received scant attention in its own right. He explores the ways in which self-expression reveals our states of thought, feeling, and experience, and he defends striking new theses concerning a wide range of fascinating topics: our ability to perceive emotion in others, artistic expression, empathy, expressive language, meaning, facial expression, and speech acts. He draws on insights from evolutionary game theory, ethology, the philosophy of language, social psychology, pragmatics, aesthetics, and neuroscience to present a stimulating and accessible interdisciplinary work.""

Quella di implicatura è una nozione chiave nella filosofia del linguaggio contemporanea; la sua precisa natura resta tuttavia controversa, e molti sono i nodi teorici irrisolti o problematici.  In questo articolo vorrei segnalarne alcuni, che si condensano attorno alla concezione di significato del parlante e di intenzioni comunicative, e alla relazione fra dimensione normativa e dimensione psicologica delle implicature.

Grice's proposals have aroused much interest in researchers during the last
decade, especially since Sperber & Wilson applied those ideas to a new
Principle of Relevance. Grice developed a set of conversational postulates -
maxims in his terminology- that accounted for the speakers' overall effort to
develop their conversational interactions in a cooperative way (his so-called
Cooperative Principle). In this article we propose a new application of
Grice's maxims in a medium which is both verbal and visual: English
alternative comics. The main hypothesis underlying this paper is that comic
artists, willing to outline a clear-cut three-fold picture of English social
classes (low, middle, high), tend to characterize their characters' speech in
such a way that Grice's maxims are violated in class-specific ways according
to what social stratum they belong to. Therefore, Grice's maxims turn out to
acquire a social significance which was not intended in Grice's conversational
maxims.

Describing Monty Python’s Flying Circus as a ground-breaking comedy act almost seems like an understatement. As a unit, Monty Python framed absurd situational discourses to frequently subvert the social and cultural norms that a society abides by. The result: a series of short-sketch, nonsensical scenarios that became endeared to the British public. Even after 30 years, that level of popularity is still felt in the modern day: no less than four Python sketches making the Radio Times’ Top Ten Alternative Comedy Sketches poll in 2004 (BBC News, 2004). Top of that list, receiving twice as many votes as second place (Four Yorkshiremen – another famous Python segment), was the Dead Parrot sketch.

In this essay, the Dead Parrot sketch will be analysed as a scripted piece of discourse, designed to appear as a natural, unrehearsed conversation between customer and shopkeeper – a format that most cultures would be directly familiar with, if not aware of. The source of the humour is derived from the viewers’ preconception of the cultural context, and here, we will see how the overturning of these conversational expectations is intrinsically linked to our inherently-formed knowledge of what is and is not appropriate in this form of discourse. Two pragmatic politeness models will be applied to the speech acts found in this discussion: Grice’s Cooperative Principle (1975) and Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory (1987). Culpeper’s revised Impoliteness Model (2009) will also be drawn upon in the occasional instances of impoliteness.

We lie and deceive on a regular basis. To make clear that we are so doing, though, is subject to some kind of infelicity. This paper develops a conceptual analysis of lying and deceiving in a reciprocal fashion by pointing their anti-griciness as a common logical factor, despite their obvious differences. Lying is anti-gricy, for to make clear that one’s lying is a non-play considering assertion but assertion is required for lying. Deceiving is anti-gricy, for to make clear that one’s is deceiving is tantamount to expel oneself of the communicative chain one’s is trying to take advantage of.

Oversupply of information, irrelevance, and repetition in political and administrative text and talk have received considerable scholarly attention, but the tendency to date has been to analyse these phenomena separately. In this article, I argue that it would be fruitful to explore these aspects in combination, as constitutive dimensions of calculated overcommunicative behaviour in public administration.

Based on a multidisciplinary review of literature on cognitive manipulation, prolixity, (ir)relevance, discourse repetition, and administrative behaviour, I propose an original ‘overcommunication framework’ for explicating certain discursive macro-strategies of positive self-presentation used by public officeholders. In particular, I discuss how governments may use calculated overcommunication to avoid or deflect blame, to signal democratic openness, and to perform swiftness.

By problematising the notion of ‘overcommunication’ and introducing it into discourse studies, I seek to open up new avenues of understanding and investigating political and organisational communication.

Il comico, l’umorismo, l’ironia sono dei concetti abbastanza simili tra loro ma che sembrano sfuggire a ogni tentativo di classificazione “scientifica”. Molti autori fanno confusione, e usano questi termini, spesso impropriamente, come sinonimi. Fin dall’antichità diversi scrittori e filosofi hanno tentato di formulare delle definizioni, eppure nessuno ci è riuscito in modo soddisfacente.
Un argomento così seducente non poteva risparmiare un grande pensatore contemporaneo come Umberto Eco, che, armato di strumenti semiologici, ha in più riprese analizzato vecchie ipotesi, mostrandone i punti deboli, fornendo nuovi spunti e proponendo nuove teorie. Certo, un libro che analizzasse sistematicamente il comico non lo ha scritto, ma i saggi che dedica all’argomento possono essere considerati pochi soltanto se paragonati alla sua vastissima bibliografia. In più – questo non va trascurato – Eco è un raffinato scrittore e pubblicista, e le sue concezioni del comico, dell’ironia e dell’umorismo (ma anche le sue perplessità e i suoi dubbi) si riflettono sulle prose letterarie, nei romanzi, e in molti interventi pubblicati sulla stampa.
Ci troviamo, così, di fronte a due aspetti di Umberto Eco: il primo appartiene a un Eco semiologo e studioso, autore del Trattato e di tantissime altre pubblicazioni accademiche; il secondo, invece, è l’ironico e arguto Eco, grande narratore di storie e aneddoti scherzosi, autore di virtuosismi e di giochi linguistici, abile parodista e opinionista dallo spiccato sense of humour. Ovviamente questa è una distinzione di comodo, forse persino troppo rozza, e scevra del benché minimo intento di gerarchizzazione tra Eco semiologo ed Eco scrittore: semplicemente intendiamo analizzare questi due aspetti separatamente, senza far confusione tra testi accademici e testi non scientifici, distinguendo tra Eco teorico del comico e Eco produttore di comico.
Noi non interrogheremo gli scritti umoristici e le parodie di Eco per trovare risposte di livello teorico, questo vogliamo ribadirlo. Al contrario, li analizzeremo soltanto dopo aver inquadrato teoricamente quei problemi sul comico ai quali Eco si è dedicato in altra sede.

Common ground is a problematic concept. It is a necessary part of any pragmatic theory because it names the context that speakers take for granted in carrying out a communicative act, or in other words the background against which a signal shows up as a particular pattern of sounds or shapes, words, and social effects. But it is too often either ignored or treated as a stative body of information, a definition which makes it impossible to understand how common ground is used and instantiated in actual conversations. This essay remedies this problem by presenting a novel account of common ground which subsumes most extant theories by approaching the topic separately on each of three levels of explanation. I begin by presenting a dynamical definition of common ground based on elements of Stalnaker’s theory of speaker presupposition, on which common ground is the information presented by a speaker as not-at-issue in the process of carrying out some speech act. I then justify and enrich this approach with a psycholinguistic account of the uses of common ground in conversation based on Clark’s work on joint action, and show that common ground underlies both egocentric and cooperative communication. I then justify and enrich the psycholinguistic account by showing how it is instantiated on a biological level as intra- and interpersonal synergies in a conversation. Finally, I use an analysis of referring to illustrate the relations between these three levels of description, which between presupposition and joint action and between joint action and synergies I take to be one of coherence, clarification, and specifying the object of explanation. In the other direction - from synergies to joint action and joint action to presupposition - the relation is one of grounding and providing naturalistic credentials via mechanistic details. The originality and generality of this explanatory strategy suggest tremendous opportunities for pragmatic research from a dynamical perspective.

・SUMMARY
In this paper, I trace the origin and historical vagaries of the term pragmatics from Morris' and Carnap's development of the notion down to its place in the work of John Austin, a leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy and a key figure in contemporary philosophy of natural language. First, the origin of the term pragmatics will be briefly summarized, in order to indicate some usages of the term that are divergent from the usage in this article. Secondly, we will review some definitions of the field, which will serve to indicate the rough scope of linguistic pragmatics. Thirdly, some reasons for the our interest in this field will be explained, and we finally will illustrate some basic kinds of pragmatic phenomena. Using a method to study performative utterances and the theory of speech acts, I provide some indications about the scope of linguistic pragmatics, situating it within three major philosophical systems —those of Austin, Grice, and Searle— and delineating its development from one system to the next. In passing, some analytical notions that are useful as a background will be introduced. Ultimately, my comparison of their systems reveals that the concept of the pragmatics, however specific its role in each system, remains linked to a communicative strategy.

・RÉSUMÉ
L'objectif de cet article est tout d'abord de montrer le réseau des contraintes conceptuelles dans lequel l'acte de langage se déroule. Je vais tout d'abord retracer l'origine et l'arrière-plan historique de la notion de pragmatique, telle qu'elle a été élaborée par Morris et Carnap, jusqu'aux travaux de John Austin, principal représentant de la philosophie contemporaine du langage ordinaire ou naturel. Dans un premier temps, l'origine de la pragmatique sera brièvement récapitulée, afin de faire apparaître quelques utilisations de ce terme qui diffèrent de celles que nous retenons dans notre article. Nous passerons ensuite en revue les définitions de ce champ pragmatique proposées par certains auteurs. Nous expliquerons enfin pour quelles raisons cette discipline nous intéresse et nous illustrerons les aspects essentiels des phénomènes pragmatiques. En utilisant la méthode d'approche de l'énonciation performative et la théorie des actes de langage, je ne présenterai que les visées essentielles de la pragmatique linguistique, au travers notamment de trois systèmes philosophiques (Austin, Grice, Searle), et je retracerai brièvement l'évolution des critères méthodologiques d'un système à un autre. Chemin faisant, un certain nombre de notions analytiques seront introduites. La comparaison des systèmes fera en fin de compte apparaître que le concept de pragmatique est inséparable des intentions contingentes des locuteurs et de leurs stratégies de communication.

Intentional ambiguities are frequently used as humor by many entertainment media to maintain its serious nuance. However, since they are ambiguous, most of the humor fails to be recognized by audience. Under this circumstance, the researcher is attracted to analyze humorous ambiguities found in each season of ‘Sherlock Holmes BBC Series’ and how they produce humor as they violate Grice’s maxims of Cooperative Principle. There found three from four maxims violated by Sherlock to produce ambiguities as humor. Those are maxim of quantity, maxim of relation, and maxim of manner. By violating those maxims, utterances become ambiguous and construct several possible meanings which are potentially humorous. The study is expected to improve entertainment media’s creativity to produce similar kinds of humor. At the same time, it offers a great help for the audience to recognize and understand ambiguities, thus regain them better sense of humor.

I want to start my response paper by importance of philosophy of language in understanding the nature of meaning in natural language: “In the 20th century, logic and philosophy of language are two of the few areas of philosophy in which philosophers made indisputable progress”. Some philosophers have regarded philosophy of language as some kind of ‘first philosophy’ and I think they were quite right because it holds the key to all advancement. The 20th century was the century of “linguistic philosophy” because areas of philosophy that involved meaning and content became immeasurably more sophisticated. Moreover, I can confirm that it is very important topic still in 21st century

How do we know when someone is being sarcastic online? And, is there a dialect when it comes to sarcasm and implicational impoliteness? This MA thesis researches the pragmatic function of sarcasm in online communities, specifically those on Reddit.

-F. Di Lorenzo Ajello, Mente, azione e linguaggio nel pensiero di John R. Searle, FrancoAngeli, 1998

-J. L. Austin, Come fare cose con le parole, a cura di C. Penco e M. Sbisà, Marietti, 1987

- J. Habermas, Teoria dell’agire comunicativo, Il Mulino, 1986

-J. Locke, Saggio sull'intelletto umano, a cura di N. Abbagnano, UTET, 1982

-L. Wittgenstein, Ricerche filosofiche, Einaudi, 2009

-P. Grice, Logica e conversazione. Saggi su intenzione, significato e comunicazione, Il Mulino, 1993

This dissertation deals with the phenomenon of the Conversational Implicature which was highlighted by the Scientist Paul Grice. It presents this phenomenon in accordance with Grice’s interest in pragmatics studies and the process of communication, within the general principle that he assumed for that process of communication which is the Cooperative Principle and its subsidiary conversational maxims.

The dissertation provides an explanation to the theoretical framework of the Conversational Implicature and its relation to the four sub-rules created by Grice. It also provides a highly detailed application to analyze that concept through Ahmad Shawky’s poetic plays, which showed a rich use of the Conversational Implicature and how to involve it in the play’s dialogues.

يتناولُ هذا البحثُ ظاهرةَ الاستلزامِ الحواريّ Conversational Implicature التي سلّطَ الضوءَ عليها العالمُ بول جرايس Paul Grice، ويقدمُ البحثُ هذه الظاهرة في إطارِ اهتمامِ جرايس بالدراساتِ التداوليةِ والتخاطبِ، في إطارِ المبدأ العامِ الذي افترضّهُ لعمليةِ التخاطب -وهو مبدأُ التعاون cooperative -principle، وما يتفرعُ عنه من قواعد فرعية conversational maxims.
يقدمُ البحثُ ضبطًا للإطارِ النظريّ لمفهومِ الاستلزامِ الحواريّ، وما يتعلقُ بعلاقتِه بالقواعد الفرعية الأربعة التي وضعها جرايس، كما يقدمُ ثراءً تطبيقيًّا، وتحليليًا لهذا المفهوم، من خلالِ مسرحياتِ أحمد شوقي الشعرية، التي أظهرتْ ثراءً في استخدامِ الاستلزامِ الحواريّ وتوظيفِه في الحواراتِ المسرحية.

This dissertation gives a survey of reception theory in film, followed by a detailed account of the work of Wolfgang Iser and his work on The Act of Reading, incorporating the counter-arguments of Stanley Fish.  The roots of this are traced in Rudolf Arnheim and EH Gombrich’s work on visual perception in art.  It then explores theories of comic-book readership, and from these strands proposes a theory of ‘reader reception’ as it might apply to film, incorporating HP Grice’s theories of implicature and Daniel Dennett’s commentary on ‘filling in’.  This theory is then applied to a range of film texts.

Implicating, as it is conceived in recent pragmatics, amounts to conveying a (propositional) content without saying it – a content providing no contribution to the truth-conditions of the proposition expressed by the sentence uttered. In this sense, implicating is a notion closely related to the work of Paul Grice (1913-1988) and of his precursors, followers and critics. Hence, the task of this article is to introduce and critically examine the explicit/implicit distinction, the Gricean notion of implicature (conventional and conversational) and its recent developments and connections with the speaker's intentions, communicative responsibility and rationality.

This volume contains essays that explore explicit and implicit communication through linguistic research. Taking as a framework Paul Grice's theories on “what is said,” the contributors explore a number of areas, including: the boundary between semantics and pragmatics; the concept of implicit communication; the idea of the logical form of our assertions; the notion of conventional meaning; the phenomenon of deixis, which refers to when an utterance require context in order to be understood fully; the treatment of definite descriptions; and the different kinds of pragmatic processes.
REVIEW on DIsputatio: http://www.disputatio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Grindrod_What-is-said-by-Penco-and-Domaneschi.pdf

Since in modern day most of the information is conveyed through written communication, and media play a significant role in the conveyance of hot issues of the day, the language of the news has attracted the attention of both media researchers and linguists for decades. This descriptive-analytical study aimed to compare the adoption and violation of Grice " s (1975) cooperative principles (CPs) in news reports published in Tehran Times and identify which of these four CPs (quality, quantity, manner, and relation) has been violated most and which of them has been violated least. In this regard, 120 news stories were selected randomly from the newspaper Tehran Times, in which the adoption and violation of these CPs were studied by two independent raters. Ten reports were selected from whatever published in the 12 months. Results revealed that maxim of quality was violated most, and its highest amount among five news categories was related to social news. Also, findings showed that maxim of relation was violated least, and the lowest amount among five news categories was related to cultural news, that the second highest violated maxim was the maxim of quality, and that in total maxims in the economic and social news were profoundly violated compared to the other three news categories. Findings of this study can be used by EFL learners and teachers as well as report writers in multimedia.

Throughout its history, the study of language came up with many theories and approaches which attempted to explore the variable dimensions that control its use and structure. Conversational principles are one of these dimensions, for they were proposed in order to determine the principles and rules which a speaker should take into account while communicating with another. The theory of the cooperative principle and its maxims was created by H. Paul Grice in an attempt to show how it is necessary for speakers to cooperate with each other in their conversations, so that they can have appropriate conversations. However, speakers usually do not observe the rules which were set by Grice when they tend to lie, mislead, or to be humorous and sarcastic. This study tries to examine different cases
in which flouting the Gricean maxims is possible and it also studies the generated implicatures which result from such flouting. The study examines these cases in the American medical series House M.D. where Dr. House, the protagonist, flouts Grice's maxims in the favor of sarcasm and generating metaphors.

Abstract: What a speaker says and thereby means, and how her words are best interpreted, can be influenced in complex ways by the conventional meanings of those words, the intentions with which she speaks, and by the conversation in which she is participating. In this chapter we first lay out certain of the principal mechanisms involved in this process, and then invoke them to help account for some communicative phenomena. In aid of the former task, we will explore the relations among illocutionary force, speaker meaning, and semantic content; develop a taxonomy of conversational projects; elucidate some conversational norms and the concept of common ground; and consider the context-sensitivity of certain expressions. These tools will then be used to illuminate four pragmatic phenomena: quantity implicature, presupposition accommodation, domains of discourse, and illocutionary silencing.

This paper argues that a language can exist and flourish in a community even if none of of the members of the community has any communication intentions; and that reference to the notion of communication intention can therefore be dispensed with in the core account of the nature of linguistic meaning. Certainly one cannot elucidate the notion of linguistic meaning without reference to psychological notions; the communication-intention theorists are right about this. They are, however, wrong about which psychological notions are needed. It is not possession of the ability to (intentionally) mean something that is crucial—the possession and exercise of communication intentions. What is crucial is rather the possession of certain semantic psychological attitudes. To possess such semantic psychological attitudes (semantic attitudes for short) is to be disposed to take certain publicly observable phenomena—such as sights and sounds—as (non-naturally) meaning something. The paper argues that it is possible to describe circumstances in which one can in so doing be said to understand their meaning.

Abstract
Grice’s theory of implicature has been considered ethnocentric, but this paper will argue that it is highly relevant to intercultural analysis. The Principle of Cooperation, and its subordinate maxims, focus on the rationality of discourse, but Grice also includes linguistic and nonlinguistic context, conventional meaning and “other items of background knowledge” in the inferential process. This notion of background knowledge is radically refined by Sperber and Wilson. Within a theory of relevance, interlocutors share only some contextual clues in a “mutual cognitive environment”. In intercultural negotiation a high level of awareness of assumptions about what is “mutually manifest” is of central importance to performance.
Teachers of intercultural communication skills attempt to establish a balance between providing meaningful practice and a useful rationale for improving theoretical awareness of the inferential process. This paper uses recordings of a classroom simulation involving foreign and Japanese students of intercultural communication taking part in a traffic accident insurance negotiation. Two data extracts are examined in detail, in which the failure by a foreign student to recognize radically different background assumptions had a decisive negative impact on his ability to negotiate, but a positive impact on his ability to analyse his own intercultural performance.

Hatten (1994) writes that if musical passages are “inappropriate to the context of the movement . . . an ironic
interpretation would be one way to reconcile that inappropriateness as a compositional effect rather than a flaw” (185). Is
there something systematic that prompts listeners to interpret musical “inappropriateness” as ironic? Building upon Hatten’s
work, this article explores how a listener might infer irony in Beethoven’s music by drawing on cognitive principles and
analogies shared by music and language. I create an analytical framework that draws conditions from language psychologists’
empirical studies of verbal and situational irony (Colston 2001, Lucariello 1994). The first condition is a violation of
expectations established through a norm or schema. I use Caplin’s (1998) theory of formal function, Gjerdingen’s (2007)
schema theory, and Hepokoski and Darcy’s (2006) Sonata Theory to measure violation of expectation as defined by
Beethoven and his audience’s shared stylistic knowledge. Since listeners develop expectations in music simply by listening
(Meyer 1956), this paper incorporates “common ground,” Clark’s (1996) term for the information, knowledge, and cultural
norms that the composer and listener share. The second condition is blatantly failing to fulfill one or more of the “maxims”
defined by the linguist H.P. Grice (1975), who argues that a person implicitly follows the maxims in any “cooperative”
conversation. I apply this framework to analyze three Beethoven string quartet movements that Hatten and others have
described as “ironic”: op. 95/iv, op. 131/v, and op. 130/i. I close by discussing implications for musical communication as a
whole.

This paper tests the applicability of Brown and Levinson's concept of off-record politeness on a specific subset of patterned dialogues in Sophocles' extant tragedies, i.e., those involving the participation of female speakers. Brown and Levinson's framework still provides the most suitable model for empirical analysis, but with refinements concerning the interrelation between emic and etic politeness, the notion of face, the extension of analysis to longer stretches of conversation, and the absolute ranking of the super-strategies. The survey suggests that a strict connection between the use of off record and the mitigation of FTAs can be established quite straightforwardly and that the hear-er's reactions to off record can help to identify the valid instances of the phenomenon. Moreover, it is argued that (a) female speakers frequently resort to off record, most notably in cross-sex interactions with men invested with high power; (b) few restricted categories of male speakers, i.e., strangers and lower-status characters, do use off-record politeness towards women; (c) off record in same-sex interactions among female characters is limited to when the imposition is of extraordinary seriousness.

Assertion is here approached as a social practice developed through cultural evolution. This perspective will facilitate inquiry into the questions what role assertion plays in communicative life, what norms it is subject to, and whether every viable linguistic community must have a practice of assertion. Our evolutionary perspective will, further, enable us to ask how assertion relates to other communicative practices such as conversational implicature, indirect speech acts, presupposition, and, more broadly, the kinematics of conversation. It will also motivate a resolution of debates between conventionalist and intentionalist approaches to this speech act by explaining how those who make assertions can embody their intentions to perform an act of a certain kind. We will close with a discussion of how assertoric practice can be compromised by patterns of malfeasance on the part of a speaker and by injustice within her milieu.

In her stylistic analysis of modern drama, Deirdre Burton (1980) argues that the linguistic frameworks used in the field of conversation analysis are suitable to be applied to dramatic texts due to the performative element that is inherent within them. Modern play texts are written in a style imitating naturally occurring speech because, whether or not the production is intended to be naturalistic, the narrative will take the form of spoken conversation in performance. However she warns against assuming that play texts operate in exactly the same way; plays are unlikely to contain the ‘hesitation-phenomena, repetitions, false starts and stammers that characterise almost any transcript of naturally occurring talk.’ (4) Despite this, the performative element allows the reader or viewer to ‘relate the language used in a text, or by an author, to the conventions of the language as a whole’ (5). Burton’s argument is sound and thereby gives the justification for the use of conversational techniques in the analysis of drama texts.

The aim of this paper is to support the position that what is implicated is not determined by speaker intention, a claim which runs counter to the widely accepted position that what is implicated is determined by speaker intention. This paper argues for the conclusion that communication of conversational implicatures can be unintended by presenting three examples in which Grice’s criteria for the completion of conversational implicature are satisfied but the speaker does not intend to implicate anything. The paper ends with the suggestion that rules governing implicatures are importantly normative and that linguistic communal norms account for their normativity.

Em "Lógica e Conversação" H. P. Grice sugere um método para a recuperação dos elementos implícitos e usos indiretos da linguagem, que são "geradores de significado" mas estão fora do alcance de qualquer análise puramente semântica ou sintática, já que estes elementos estão ocultos (não explícitos no discurso). O método sugerido por Grice permite, sob certas condições, recuperar as intenções do falante, tornando passível de estudo a parte não literal da comunicação.