UPRG Lesson 5/w2022

Introduction to Pragmatics
LESSON 1:
INTRODUCTION. DEFINING PRAGMATICS.
SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS. BASIC CONCEPTS.

1. Language and communication. Models of communication.

Simplified model of communication: language as a code (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1–14;
Akmajian 2001, 361ff.)
How is communication achieved?

(1) -.-./.-/.-../.-..//..-/…//-…/./..-./---/.-././/-.--/---/..-//-../../--./.-.-.-//
-.--/---/..-//--/.-/-.--//-./---/-//-…/.//.-/-…/.-../ .//-/---//.-/..-./-/./.-./.--/ .-/.-./-../…/.-.-.-//

Call us before you dig you may not be able to afterwards

(de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981, 8; hereafter cited as B&D)

Code (Message) model of communication: This model accounts for certain commonsense
features of talk exchanges: it predicts that communication is successful when the hearer
decodes the same message that the speaker encodes; and as a corollary it predicts that
communication breaks down if the decoded message is different from the encoded message.
Likewise, it portrays language as a bridge between speaker and hearer whereby ‘‘private’’
ideas are communicated by ‘‘public’’ sounds, which function as the vehicle for
communicating the relevant message. (Akmajian 2001, 364)
What metaphors are used to describe communication?
a) Try to get your thoughts across better
b) You still haven’t given me any idea of what you mean
c) Try to pack more thoughts into fewer words
d) The sentence was filled with emotion
e) Let me know if you find any good ideas in this essay

According to Reddy (1979, 290), the major ideas structuring this metaphor are:
(1) language functions like a conduit, transferring thoughts bodily from one person to another;
(2) in writing and speaking, people insert their thoughts or feelings in the words;
(3) words accomplish the transfer by containing the thoughts or feelings and conveying them
to others; and
(4) in listening or reading, people extract the thoughts and feelings once again from the
words.

Problems with the code (message) model of communication:

??? Does the communicative process end with decoding meaning?
1. dig
DISAMBIGUATION
2. us, you;
UNDERDETERMINATION
OF REFERENCE (by meaning)
3. Call us before you dig.
UNDERDETERMINATION OF COMMUNICATIVE INTENTION (by meaning)
4. INDIRECTION
[It] must assume that
(1) the language is unambiguous,
(2) what the speaker is referring to is determined by the meaning of the referring expressions
uttered,
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(3) the communicative intention is determined by the meaning of the sentence,
(4) speakers only speak literally, and
(5) speakers only speak directly

The inferential model of communication: communication is achieved by producing and

interpreting evidence of the communicator’s intentions.
To infer is to deduce something from evidence (what the hearer needs is the knowledge of the
world, and in particular their knowledge of the speaker and the situation, and their general
reasoning abilities)

The inferential model of communication takes into consideration that

• there are different ways of communicating the same message (and the same string of
words can convey different messages);
• the active participation of the addressee sometimes allows a lot to be communicated
with just a little having been said or written.
• mistakes are possible. (Griffiths 2006, 3)

2. Delimiting pragmatics
♫1 What are the areas syntax, semantics, and pragmatics are concerned with? See Yule
(1996, 6–8)
Syntax deals with relationship between linguistic forms, their arrangement in a sentence, and
which sentences are formed well.
Semantics deals with the study of the relation between linguistic forms and entities in the
world.
Pragmatics deals with the study of linguistic forms and their relation with the people that
produce them.

Are the following sentences correct?

(2a) The duck ran up to Mary and licked her.
(b) Up duck to the Mary ran.
(c) The bottle of ketchup ran up to Mary. ‼️
(d) The duck licked Mary and ran up to her. (Yule 1996, 6–8) ‼️

Clearly (c) and (d) are well-formed, but not “OK”

Is this a sentence?
(3) I want that he tell me truth.
(4) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Chomsky 1957, 15)
(5) My sister is my role model, and I have a sister. #
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A syntactically unacceptable sentence is said to be ungrammatical, and is marked with an

asterisk (*), whereas a semantically inappropriate sentence is said to be anomalous, and is
marked with a question mark (?), and a pragmatically inappropriate utterance is said to be
infelicitous, and is
marked with a crosshatch (#).

Grammaticality (grammaticalness) vs. acceptability.

Semantic unacceptability (anomaly) vs. pragmatic unacceptability (infelicitousness)

3. Division of labour between semantics and pragmatics

In order to know the meaning of a sentence, is it enough to know the meanings of the words
(semantics)?
(6) I’m cold.

In order to know the meaning of a sentence, is it enough to know the meanings of the words
(semantics) and how they have been strung together into a sentence (syntax)?
(7) Sharks hunt seals.

Semanticists often describe this by saying that sentence meaning is compositional.

This term means that the meaning of an expression is determined by the meaning
of its component parts and the way in which they are combined.

In order to know what someone meant by what they said, is it enough to know the meanings
of the words (semantics) and how they have been strung together into a sentence (syntax)?

(8) This book is really amazing.

There is a considerable difference between the meaning of linguistic elements and what their
use might imply in a particular context.

Verbal vs. para-verbal vs. non-verbal communication.

There are “aspects of linguistic communication that are not part of language per se, but
are nonetheless somehow involved with the message or meaning a communicator conveys”

Prosody encodes both linguistic and paralinguistic [“affective”] meaning. Subtle changes in
the tone and quality of voice, and the range of pitch variation we use, ... (pause), the tempo of
delivery, all convey attitudinal information and information about our physical, mental or
emotional state.
These variations work closely with facial movements, which often reflect the pitch
movements in our voice, and hand gestures and other kinesic behaviours [extralinguistic]

4. Sentence vs. utterance vs. proposition (Saeed 2016, 11-3)

♫2 Each utterance is unique, having been produced by a particular sender in a specific situation.
Because they are tied to a sender and a time, utterances can never be repeated. (Griffiths 2006, 4ff.)

The Utterance always involves its contextualization (Lyons 265).

♫3 The abstract linguistic object on which an utterance is based is a sentence . The essential
difference between sentences and utterances is that sentences are abstract, not tied to
contexts, whereas utterances are identified by their contexts. (Griffiths 2006, 4ff.)
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Now recall that there are different ways of communicating the same message (and the same
string of words can convey different messages):

a) Different sentences can carry the same meaning:

(9) a. Sharks hunt seals.
b. Seals are hunted by sharks.
c. Seals are prey to sharks.

From a logician’s perspective, these sentences are equivalent, share a description of the same
state of affairs: whenever (9a) is true, so is (b) and (c). (see Saeed 2016, 11ff.)

b) The same sentence can convey different messages:

(10) She took the right turn.

In order to account for (9) and (10), the term is used: the term for a kind of core
sentence meaning, the abstract idea that remains the same in cases such as (9) a–c) (Griffiths
2006, 16).

The sentences in (9)

“share a description of the same state of affairs. If one is true all are true, and if one is false
then all are false. To capture this fact, logicians identify a common proposition. The only
feature that all propositions have – and this is a litmus test for propositions – is that it is
reasonable to wonder whether they are true or false. I am not saying that anybody need be
well enough informed to
know for certain whether or not a given proposition is true, just that propositions are, in
principle, either true or false.

5. Sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning.

♫4 What is the difference between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning (see Saeed
2016)? The sentence meaning is what we understand for literal meaning, whereas the
speaker’s meaning would be the non-literal meaning, as the hearers understand them
differently due to pragmatics.

Sentence meaning
• is compositional
• this means that the meaning of an expression is determined by the meaning of its component
parts and the way in which they are combined.
• “words and sentences have a meaning independently of any particular use, which meaning is
then incorporated by a speaker into the particular meaning she wants to convey at any one
time” (Saeed 2016, 16
Speaker’s meaning:
the meaning that the speaker or writer intends to convey by means of an utterance. Sender’s
meaning is something that addressees are continually having to make informed guesses about.
Addressees can give indications, in their own next utterances, of their interpretation. ...
Sender’s meanings, then, are the communicative goals of senders and the interpretational
targets for addressees.
Sender’s thoughts are private, but utterances are publicly observable. (Griffiths 2006, 9)

Sentence meaning is typically also

• literal: The literal meaning of a sentence is based on just the semantic information
that you have from your knowledge of English (or any language)
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• context-independent (meaning independent of any particular use or user)
• truth-conditional meaning

♫5 What is the difference between literal and non-literal meaning (see Saeed 2016)?
Literal meaning is common facts and non-literal meaning is something that could not be true
or common.

What are truth-conditions?

(11) He only dates women who are tall and smart.

(12) He only dates women who are tall or smart.

Speaker’s meaning: the meaning that the speaker or writer intends to convey by means of an
utterance. Sender’s meaning is something that addressees are continually having to make
informed guesses about. Addressees can give indications, in their own next utterances, of their
interpretation. ... Sender’s meanings, then, are the communicative goals of senders and the
interpretational targets for addressees.
Sender’s thoughts are private, but utterances are publicly observable.
(Griffiths 2006, 9)

Speaker’s meaning can also be

• context-dependent
• non-literal
• non-truth-conditional
• inferential
• or even all of the above

(13) I’m hungry.

(14) I’m starving.
(15) I could eat a horse.
(16) It's a nice dress. However, it creases very easily.
(17) A: I think I’ll go and get some fresh air.
B: It’s raining.

♫6 Four areas of pragmatics according to Yule (1996, 4):

1. Study of speaker meaning
2. Study of contextual meaning
3. Study of how more gets communicated than is said
4. Study of the expression of relative distance

Semantics is the study of the “toolkit” for meaning: knowledge encoded in the vocabulary of
the language and in its patterns for building more elaborate meanings, up to the level of
sentence meanings. Pragmatics is concerned with the use of these tools in meaningful
communication. Pragmatics is about the interaction of semantic knowledge with our
knowledge of the world, taking into account contexts of use (Griffiths 2006, 1)

(18) Call us before you dig.

Pragmatics may be roughly defined as the study of language use in context – as compared
with semantics, which is the study of literal meaning independent of context (although these
definitions will be revised below). (Birner 2013, 2)

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Why are the definitions revised?
The overlap between truth-conditional and context-independent meaning is imperfect:

a) the idea that truth-conditional meaning is context-independent meaning assumes that there
is no context-dependent input into truth conditions. Is this really the case?

Cf. pronouns and reference:

(19) My uncle told me that he was a war hero.
What are the truth conditions of this sentence? “the truth conditions of the utterance appear
to be dependent on pronoun resolution, which in turn is dependent on the inferred intent of the
speaker, which is a pragmatic issue” (Birner 33)

b) There are some aspects of meaning that are context-independent but not truth-conditional:
(20) Clover is a labrador retriever. She’s very friendly.
Clover is a labrador retriever, and she’s very friendly.
Clover is a labrador retriever, but she’s very friendly.
(21) She’s rich, but nice.

c) There are some aspects of meaning that are non-literal but conventional(ized):
(22) I’m starving.
(23) I could eat a horse.

“Non-literal uses of language are traditionally called figurative and are described by a host
of rhetorical terms including metaphor, irony, metonymy, . . . On closer examination, though,
it proves difficult to draw a firm line between literal and nonliteral
uses of language. For one thing, one of the ways languages change over time is by speakers
shifting the meanings of words to fit new conditions. One such shift is by metaphorical
extension, where some new idea is depicted in terms of something
more familiar. After a while such expressions become fossilized and their metaphorical
quality is no longer apparent to speakers.” (Saeed 15)

A similarly difficult distinction is between semantics and pragmatics. These terms denote
related and complementary fields of study, both concerning the transmission of meaning
through language (Saeed 2016, 15)

??? Only through language?

6. What is the job of pragmatics?

It is interested in the “principles we follow in producing and interpreting language in light of
the context, our intentions, and our beliefs about our interlocutors and their intentions. ... The
study of pragmatics looks at such interpretive regularities and tries to make explicit the
implicit knowledge that guides us in selecting interpretations.” (Birner 2013, 3)

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In his book Whose Language?, Mey argues for a “context-oriented, pragmatic view of
language”, which should not be “walled-off” from the rest of linguistics or treated as a separate
component (1994, 125).

To Verschueren (1999, 2) pragmatics does not constitute an additional component of

a theory of language on a par with syntax or semantics, rather it is viewed as offering a
different functional) perspective from which to approach language data. In his opinion, there
are definitely no linguistic phenomena, at any level of structure, that a pragmatic
perspective can afford to ignore (1999, 3).

Exercises:
1.
FOUND A SCOOTER
723 654 234

2. Discuss the importance of contextual information in understanding an utterance of the

following sentences:
a. Take another shot.
b. The Tigers beat the Bulldogs again.
c. Isabel is tall.
d. It’s too hot in here.
e. Everyone has gone home.

3.

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LESSON 2:
CONTEXT AND INFERENCE.

Two crucial questions: 1. Is it possible to determine in any principled way what aspects of
context are relevant to these different interpretations of the same 'utterance' on different
occasions?
2. listeners actively participate in the construction of meaning, in particular
by using inferences to fill out the text toward an interpretation of speaker meaning (Saeed
208). How do they do it?

♫1 Revision (Lesson 1): What are the main aspects of speaker’s meaning? The sentence
meaning is what we understand for literal meaning, whereas the speaker’s meaning would be
the non-literal meaning, as the hearers understand them differently due to pragmatics.

“It is by now widely recognized that much (if not all) of the meaning production that takes
place through language depends fundamentally on context and further, that there is no single
definition of how much or what sorts of context are required for language description. There
is therefore no reason to expect that any single model or set of processes will be analytically
sufficient for all research (and good reason to be skeptical of universal claims). At the same
time, it is clear that there are principles and kinds of relations that recurrently organize
contexts.”
(CEP, s.v. “Context, communicative”)

(24) Call us before you dig. You may not be able to afterwards. (de Beaugrande and Dressler
1981, 8)

‘… we identify a stretch of language as text when we recognize that it is intended to be related

to a context. How we interpret a text is a matter of realizing that relationship’ (Widdowson
2004, 36).

♫2 ‘The use of a linguistic form identifies a range of meanings. A context can support a
range of meanings. When a form is used in a context, it eliminates the meanings possible to
that context other than those the form can signal; the context eliminates from consideration
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the meanings possible to the form other than those the context can support.’ (Hymes 1968,
105; cf. Brown and Yule 37f.)

Language in context and as context

Mey (1993, 10): Context is ‘ dynamic , that is to say, it is an environment that is in steady
development, prompted by the continuous interaction of the people engaged in language use.’

Lyons (1995, 258): ‘[T]ext and context are complementary: each presupposes the other. Texts
are constituents of the contexts in which they are produced; and contexts are created, and
continually transformed and refashioned, by the texts that speakers and writers produce in
particular situations.’

(25) We went on a hunting expedition.

We shot two bucks. (qtd. in Brown and Yule 1988, 242)

‘Context interacts with the semantic content of an utterance in two fundamental ways: It is
crucial in determining the proposition (or question, command, etc.) that a speaker intended to
express by a particular utterance, and it is in turn updated with the information conveyed by
each successive utterance. The first role – the context-dependence of interpretation – is
most obvious when phenomena like anaphora, ellipsis, and deixis are involved. When these
occur in an utterance, its semantic interpretation is essentially incomplete, and the intended
truth conditions can only be determined on the basis of contextual clues. . . .
[T]he other way that an utterance interacts with its context during interpretation is by inducing
an update of that context . The fact of each utterance in a discourse and the content of
the utterance itself is added to the information contextually available to the interlocutors.’
(Handbook of Pragmatics, s.v. ‘Context in Dynamic Interpretation’)

British school of contextualists: Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), J. R. Firth (1890–1960),

M. A. K. Halliday (*1925)

(26) Flaherty is in the bar. O’Reilly says to him, ‘Pat, your glass is empty. Would you like
another?’ Flaherty replies: ‘And why would I be wanting two empty glasses?’

Werth (1984, 36): ‘Informally, we can divide the context of an utterance into three broad
types’:
CONTEXT

LINGUISTIC SITUATIONAL ( EXTRALIGUISTIC )

( CO-TEXT )

IMMEDIATE CULTURAL
( CON-SITUATION )

Even more informally: speakers calculate how much information their hearers need to make
successful references, and where they can, they economize. This is known as the principle of
language economy

Three main sources for the knowledge a speaker has to estimate the hearer has (Saeed 198):
1. that computable from the physical context
2. that available from what has already been said
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[=DISCOURSE AS CONTEXT)
3. that available from background or common knowledge.
[=KNOWLEDGE AS CONTEXT)

Mey (1993, 184): ‘Usually, one defines the co-text of a (single or multiple) sentence as that
portion of text which (more or less immediately) surrounds it. (Unfortunately, there are no
agreed limits as to what “immediately” is supposed to mean here.) However, such a co-text of
utterance is insufficient for our understanding of the words that are spoken, unless it includes
an understanding of the actions that take place as part of, and as a result of, those words. …
This means that we must extend our vision from co-text to context: the entirety of circumstances
(not only linguistic) that surround the production of language.’

On the other hand, Levinson (1983, 22–3) says that ‘… one needs to distinguish between actual
situations of utterance in all their multiplicity of features and the selection of just those features
that are culturally and linguistically relevant to the production and interpretation of utterances’.

Halliday and Hassan (1976, 21): ‘The term SITUATION, meaning ‘context of situation’ in
which a text is embedded, refers to all those extra-linguistic factors which have some bearing
on the text itself. A word of caution is needed about this concept. At the moment, as the text of
this Introduction is being composed, it is a typical English October day in Palo Alto, California;
a green hillside is visible outside the window, the sky is grey, and it is pouring with rain. This
might seem part of the ‘situation’ of this text; but it is not, because it has no relevance to the
meanings expressed, or to the words or grammatical patterns that are used to express them.’

Context: An essential factor in the interpretation of utterances and expressions. The most
important aspects of context are: (1) co-text, (2) the immediate physical situation, (3) the
wider situation, including social and power relations, and (4) knowledge presumed shared
between speaker and hearer. (cf. Cruse 2006, s.v. ‘Context’)

ad 1) co-text
♫3 Explain the term: the part of linguistics in which the hearer understands what will be said
next in a conversation environment.

ad 2) context of situation
(27) (Brown and Yule 42)
a. Place two fingers in the two holes directly to the left of the finger stop. Remove finger nearest
stop.
b. He seemed to resent them on that occasion and will not wear them today.

♫4 Hymes (1964): what are the features of context which may be relevant to the
identification of a type of speech event? Do not just list them, but provide a brief description
as well (cf. Brown and Yule 38) Addressor, addressee and, audience. The addressor is the
person that produces the utterance, either spoken or written. The addressee is the oerson that
receives the utterance, either by hearing it or by reading it. Audience is just overhearers.

ad 3) the wider situation

… and something that must be … ‘identified by the parties concerned as a culturally familiar
type of occasion’ (Widdowson 2004, 43).

(28) A: Thank you for a wonderful evening. The meal was delicious.
B: No, it wasn’t.
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A: Yes, we enjoyed it enormously.
B: It was disgusting, and I was pathetic. (Cruse 2000, 377-8)

(29) A: Oh, Jane, that was a delicious meal.

B: Thank you. I’m glad you enjoyed it. (Cruse 2000, 368)

ad 4)
Brown and Yule (1988, 44): ‘shared presuppositions’, ‘encyclopaedic knowledge’,
‘intention/purpose in uttering’, ‘experience of previous similar text’

Types 3 and 4 are closely related: This type of knowledge “has been called many things,
including background, common sense, encyclopedic, sociocultural, and real-world
knowledge. What is usually meant is the knowledge a speaker might calculate others would
have before, or independently of, a particular conversation, by virtue of membership in a
community.” (Saeed 199)

(30) A: I’m hungry.

B: I’ll lend you some money.

(31) A: Shall we go and get some ice cream?

B: I’m on a diet.

Brown and Yule (1988, 58ff):

Explain the following terms:
♫5 Principle of local interpretation: what tells the hearer not to construct a context where they
can arrive to an interpretation.
♫6 Principle of analogy: what provides an environment where it is secure for the hearer‘s
interpretation following what is expected.

(32)
I stopped to get some groceries but there weren’t any baskets left so by the time I arrived at the
check-out counter I must have looked like a juggler having a bad day. (Yule 1996, 86)

(33) The baby cried.

The mommy picked it up.

Context and inference (Cruse 2000, 370-378)

Language economy: ‘What can be understood without being said is usually, in the interest of
economy, not said’ (Doyle 1951, 382)
Not everything that is communicated is fully encoded in an explicit linguistic form; there is a
gap between what is said and what is actually communicated.
The filling out of the gaps on the path towards the speaker meaning (put informally) is known
as inference.

The proper context for the interpretation of an utterance is not given in advance; it is chosen by
the hearer. The speaker assumes certain facts about the hearer’s knowledge and its organization,
in particular, the relative accessibility of facts. (Cruse 2000, 370)

Inference

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A quick overview (all of the types below will be discussed later in the course)
1. Reference assignment
(34)
A: my uncle’s coming home from Canada on Sunday +
he’s due in +
B: how long has he been away for or has he just been away?
A: Oh no they lived in Canada eh he was married to my mother’s sister + + + well
she’s been dead for a number of years now +
(Brown and Yule 28)

(35) A: I’ll make the salad dressing.

B: The oil’s on the top shelf.
A: I can’t see it.

2. Disambiguation
(36) She has a mole on her left cheek.
(37) They managed to place a mole in the rival organization.
(38) I missed you last night
ambiguity: An expression (strictly, an expression form) is said to be ambiguous if it has
more than one possible distinct meaning.
The process of selection from ambiguous alternatives is known as ‘disambiguation’. (Cruse
2006)

3. Enrichment “the meanings of words are frequently pragmatically adjusted and fine-
tuned in context, so that their contribution to the proposition expressed is different from their
lexically encoded sense” (Wilson and Carston 2006)
Well-known examples include lexical narrowing (e.g. ‘drink’ used to mean ALCOHOLIC
DRINK) and approximation (or loosening) (e.g. ‘flat’ used to mean RELATIVELY
FLAT)
(39) A: When you’ve finished the dishes will you post these letters?
B: I will.
(40) The petrol tank exploded some time after the impact.
(41) It was no secret that the couple’s relationship had been in trouble for some time.
(42) Have you seen Gone with the Wind?
(43) I've brushed my teeth.

(44) Brown and Yule (1988, 52f.)

a. There’s another worn section which needs repair here.
b. You’ve got a very nice room here.
c. It’s a really nasty day here.
d. You have a comparatively mild climate here.

(45) Brown and Yule (1988, 52f.)

a. Clap altogether NOW. (gym mistress to class)
b. I think you should begin the next chapter now. (supervisor to student)
c. Now I’m getting older I really do find policemen look younger.
d. From the iron age till now, man has been making increasingly complex artefacts.

4. Implicatures (cf. the Cooperative Principle, to be discussed soon. See e.g. Brown and
Yule 31ff.)
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These are parts of the meanings of utterances which, although intended, are not strictly part
of ‘what
is said’ in the act of utterance, nor do they follow logically from what is said.
They must be inferred, for which contextual information is crucial (conversational
implicatures), such as the implied negative in B’s reply in:
A: Can I speak to Jane? B: She’s in the shower.
(46) A: Why wasn’t I invited to the conference?
B: Your paper was too long.
(47) A: Did I get invited to the conference?
B: Your paper was too long.

LESSON 3:
INTENTIONALITY. LANGUAGE AS ACTION. SPEECH ACTS

I. Introduction
We have specific communicative intentions while interacting and communicating:
How are intentions correlated with the form and meaning of utterances? Is there a one-to-
one relation between the form of a linguistic expression and its communicative intention?

(1) The road is icy.

(2) Where is my laptop?
(3) Could you lend me your laptop for a couple of days?
(4) I’ll bring it tomorrow.
(5) Thank you, you’re always so kind.
(6) I now pronounce you husband and wife.

♫1 What is a speech act? An action performed via an utterance. The term speech act refers to
an utterance and the “total situation in which the utterance is issued.

♫2 What is a speech event? The circumstances surrounding the utterance. An speech event is
an activity in which participants interact via language in some conventional way to arrive at
some outcome.

Language as action: John L. Austin (1911-1960); John R. Searle (1932)

Austin thinks that any feature of a speech act and of the situation in which it occurs may be
relevant to its meaning and to the assessment of the speech act’s felicitousness, which,
according to him, can never be reduced to the logician’s assessment of truth and falsity
John L. Austin (1911-1960); How to Do Things with Words (1955; 1962)
Language does not consist of statements only;
Some sentences do not describe anything, they

To what extent are the following sentences felicitious?

(7) A: I promise that I will do my best.
B: That’s not true.
(8) I bet you 50p you can’t tidy my bedroom in half an hour.
B: That’s not true.
(9) I hereby sing.

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Performative verbs: Performative verbs: admit, bet, congratulate, swear, advise, claim,
promise, thank, apologise, command, urge, ask, name, warn, beg, order, suggest, welcome
etc.
Some speech act verbs can be used not only to denote but also to perform a particular speech
act. To test whether a given speech act verb may be used in this way, Austin suggested that it
be substituted for the variable x in the formula ‘I (hereby) x . . .’. Any verb that may be used
as a part of this formula may be used performatively (Austin, 1962: 67). Examples of
performative verbs are to order, to promise, to inform, to criticize, and to assert. The
performative formula is often part of the institutionalized procedure by which a speaker brings
about a particular institutional fact. (CEP, s.v. "Speech act verbs")

How to do things with words?

II. The structure of a speech act:

♫ 3Explain the following terms:
♫ 1. Locutionary act The basic act of utterance, the production of a linguistic expression with
meaning.
• performance of an act of saying something; related to the utterance of a sentence with
determinate sense and reference; to perform a locutionary act – to produce an utterance with a
particular form and meaning
• recall “sentence meaning”

♫ 2. Illocutionary act An utterance that is formed with some kind of function in mind.
• all uses or functions of language belonging to the illocutionary level (where illocutionary is
derived from in+locutionary)
• recall “speaker’s meaning”

♫ Illocutionary force When we make an utterance to make a statement, an offer, an

explanation, or in order to achieve another communicative purpose.

(Searle’s term) – different types of function of utterances What functions?

Are there universal categories?
Some categories are quite general (statement, question, directive etc.), some are more
specific (informing, ordering, warning etc.)

Are there universal categories?

(10) I’d like a cup of tea, please.

♫ What are IFIDs? Also known as Illocutionary Force Indicating Decice, IFID is an
expression where there is a slot for a verb that explicitly names the illocutionary act being
performed.

(= the Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices)

• there are a number of linguistic and extralinguistic devices indicate how the utterance is to
be taken, or to make clear its illocutionary force
• The IF may be grammaticalized (indicated) in different ways:
a) Performative verbs
b) Clause type (sentence modality, mood) c) Word order
d) Stress and intonation
e) Lexical means

Locutions cannot occur alone: one cannot perform a locutionary act without performing
some illocutionary act at the same time. This establishes some kind of a primacy of the
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illocutionary act over the locutionary act: the utterance of a complete sentence can never
only be the expression of a proposition and thus the mere saying of something.
Recall e.g. The coffee is strong. or The tea is cold.

♫ 3. Perlocutionary act – The creation of an utterance with a Function without intending it

to have an effect.
• performance of an act by saying; to perform a perlocutionary act – to bring about effects on
the audience by means of uttering the sentence, such effects being special to the
circumstances of utterance.
For example, by uttering something, you can persuade, convince, annoy, intimidate, impress
...
Perlocutionary act: linked non-conventionally with the previous two

Does failure to achieve the effect deprive the utterance of its illocutionary force? Failure to
achieve the effect does not deprive the utterance of its illocutionary force (you can argue
without convincing anyone, you can tell a joke without amusing anyone).
Still, there are default effects.
??? What is the default effect of a statement? Of a directive?

Verbs which denote illocutionay acts can normally be used performatively, like
promise;
verbs which denote prelocutionary acts (e.g. persuade, convince, annoy, intimidate,
impress) normally cannot:
(11) I warn you that the car is unroadworthy.
(12)?? I persuade you that the car is unroadworthy.
(13) Are you asking me or telling me?
(14) Is that intended to intimidate me?
(15) Are you trying to annoy me or to amuse me?

Example: (16) Shoot her. (Austin 101)

Locutionary act: uttering (=saying or writing) Shoot her, observing the grammatical rules
and lexicon of English, determining the meanings of ‘shoot’ and reference of ‘her’.
Illocutionary act: ordering, advising, urging... In saying Shoot her, he was giving me an order.
Perlocutionary act: persuading, intimidating, ...
By saying Shoot her, he persuaded me to shoot her.

What are the conditions for the ‘happy performance’?

(17) I now pronounce you husband and wife.
(18) They were pronounced husband and wife.
(19) Happy birthday.

Unlike (18), (17) can change social reality, but only if some conditions are met:
Felicity conditions
Searle’s discussion of felicity conditions:
What conditions must obtain before a speech act can be said to have an illocutionary effect?
Felicity conditions. There are conditions for the ‘happy performance’, i.e. conditions which
must obtain before a speech act can be said to have an illocutionary effect.

♫4 What are the major types of felicity conditions? General conditions, content conditions,
preparatory conditions, sincerity conditions, and essential conditions.
Felicity conditions – circumstantial conditions that allow a
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speaker to make a successful speech act
• general
• content
• preparatory
• sincerity
• essential (the condition requiring that the speaker have the intention to perform just that type
of illocutionary act)

Example: to make a promise,

• GENERAL: e.g. knowledge of English; not play-acting etc
• CONTENT: future event
• PREPARATORY:
– 1. the event will not happen by itself
– 2. S must be able to fulfil it
– 3. the event will have a beneficial effect
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• SINCERITY: S genuinely intends to carry out the future action
• ESSENTIAL: the utterance counts as an undertaking to do A (to carry out the action as
promised): S undertakes an obligation to do act A
I promise it will snow tomorrow.

III. Speech act classification

John R. Searle (1932); Speech Acts (1969)
♫5 Taxonomy of speech acts: Fill in the slots with appropriate labels
Representatives: describe a state of affairs in the world (the speaker makes an assertion or a
statement, gives a description or asks an information question)
(20) Sam smokes a lot.

Directives: attempt to make the hearer’s actions fit the propositional content (the speaker
gives an order or makes a request)
(21) Get out. I want you to leave.

Commissives: commit the speaker to a course of action as described by the propositional

content (the speaker makes a promise or an offer)
(22) I promise to come tomorrow.

Expressives : express the ‘sincerity condition of the speech act’ (the speaker expresses
gratitude, congratulations, praise)
(23) Congratulations on your 60th birthday.

Declarations: attempt to change the world by ‘representing it as having been changed’ (the
speaker declares a social fact)
(24) I hereby take you as my lawful wedded wife.

Some of the five speech acts are closely related (CELL 164-167)
Informative acts (assertives) – convey information to the hearer, ask information of the
hearer etc
Obligative acts (directives/ commissives) – commitment to some future action
Constitutive acts (expressives/ declaratives) – ritualized social context – the mere utterance
of a ritual formula in the appropriate circumstances may change the situation

The size of a speech act:

(25) That's just his wacky sense of humour and his regular listeners understand that. He’s not
anti-gay and had no intention of offending anyone. If they have been offended, we are very
sorry and apologise on his behalf. (CELL 168)

IV. Direct and indirect speech acts

♫ 6 What are the basic sentence types in English? Declarative sentences, interrogative
sentences, and imperative sentences.

Is an interrogative sentence the same as a question?

Why (not?)
??? are mutually exclusive, ??? are not.
Statements etc. are ??? : we are concerned with the way the speaker is using the
sentence when uttering it in a particular context.

• There is not a one-to-one relation between the form of a linguistic expression and its
communicative intention.
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• Sentence types are mutually exclusive, illocutionary categories are not.
• Statements etc. are pragmatic categories: we are concerned with the way the speaker is using
the sentence when uttering it in a particular context.

♫7 What is a direct speech act? When we find a direct relationship between a structure and a
function.
♫8 What is an indirect speech act? When we find an indirect relationship between a structure
and a function.

Indirect speech act (Birner 192f.):

one in which there is a mismatch between the linguistic
form and the illocutionary force
(a) Open the window.
(b) I would like you to open the window. (c) Can you open the window?
(d) It’s so hot in this room.
All of these could be used if S wants H to open the window; (a) would be a direct speech act,
(b-d) would be indirect.

Sentence type and characteristic use

Declarative Statement
Interrogative Question
Imperative Directive
Exclamative Exclamation

Which sentences types can be used to express which speech acts?

declarative constitutive
interrogative informative
imperative obligative (based on CELL 185)

♫ 9 What is said to be one of the most common types of indirect speech acts in English?
Interrogative sentences, but not used as a question. An action is expected out of it.

Indirect speech acts: ‘immensely pervasive phenomenon’ (Huddleston 859)

Why? Politeness

(26) Do you know what time it is?

Yes.

A case study: direct vs. indirect requests

Requesting as an example of a speech event:

Tasks:
1. In telemarketing, sales people are often trained to use certain types of speech acts and
strategies so that their potential customer, whom they call unexpectedly, will not break off the
conversation immediately. The following are two examples of tele-sales training
conversations for agents. Analyze each extract in terms of speech acts and other possible
strategies and suggest why one might be more successful than the other.

A)

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Agent: It’s Pat Searle, Mr Green, and I’m calling from the Stanworth Financial Services
Company.
Mr Green: Oh, yes.
A: I wonder, Mr Green, would you be interested in getting a better return on your
investments?
G: I’m sorry – no I am not. I am quite happy with my current situation. Good night.

B)
A: This is Stanworth Financial Services Company. With the current low interest rates, getting
a reasonable return on your investments is something of a challenge these days.
G: Weeell, yeeees.
A: This is why I felt you might be interested in a new investment product my company has
recently launched. It provides a considerably better return than all building society accounts
and most other similar types of investment products.
G: Yes.
A: Tell me, Mr Green, how would you feel about receiving details of our new investment
product that could provide you with a return up to nine percent? (CELL 190-191)

L E S S O N 4:
Reference and inference. Deixis.
I. REFERENCE AND INFERENCE

What is r e f e r e n c e ? (Cruse 2011, 381)

“Under the heading of reference we encounter one of the most fundamental and vital
aspects of language and language use, namely, the relations between language as a medium
of communication 3between human beings, and the world about which we communicate.
One of the most basic things that we do when we communicate through language is to pick
out entities in the world and ascribe properties to them, or indicate relations between them.
Refence is concerned with designating entities in the world by linguistic means.”

Reference and denotation/designation.

(48) He tried to steal my lunch, the dirty dog.
(49) He tried to steal my money, the dirty dog.
“Some writers, like John Lyons (1977: 396–409), separate the terms refer and denote. For
these writers denote is used for the relationship between a linguistic expression and the world,
while refer is used for the action of a speaker in picking out entities in the world. In other
words, referring is what speakers do, while denoting is a property of words.”
“Another difference, which follows from these definitions, is that denotation is a stable
relationship in a language that is not dependent on any one use of a word. Reference, on the
other hand, is a moment-by-moment relationship: what entity somebody refers to by using [a
word] depends on the context.” (Saeed 24)

♫ 1 Do words themselves refer? (Yule 1996, 17): Words do not refer to anything in
particular, people do. “referring is what speakers do”

♫ 2 “For successful reference to occur, we must also recognize the role of inference” (Yule
1996, 17) ... and “collaboration”. What does that mean? That there is no direct relationship
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between entities and words. This means that the listener is the one that has to interfer in order
to identify the entity.
To infer is to deduce something from evidence (what the hearer needs is the knowledge of the
world, and in particular his knowledge of the speaker and the situation, and his general
reasoning abilities)
Recall the inferential model of communication:
Linguistic communication is successful if the hearer recognizes the speaker’s communicative
intention. Linguistic communication works because the speaker and the hearer share a system
of inferential strategies leading from the utterance of an expression to the hearer’s recognition
of the speaker’s communicative intent.

♫ 3 What is a referring expression? Linguistic forms that the speaker uses in order to enable
another person to identify the entity

♫ 4Attributive and referential use (Yule 1996, 18-19): what is the difference? The
attributive use occurs when we give information through a description or by adding
information. In the referential use, the speaker adds the information they believe it is relevant.

Are the following sentences examples of the attributive, or referential use? (Or both?)
(50) She wants to marry an Englishman.
(51) The murderer must have known the house well.
(52) John is a politician.
(53) Nobody asked for permission, but later a local politician asked the farmer on the
family's behalf.

♫ 5 What is a “truly pragmatic view of reference”, according to Yule? The way a person or
object is identified by an expression or a name.

Reference and conventional meaning (Yule 1996, 19–21):

(54) A: Can I borrow your Shakespeare?
B: Yeah, it’s over there on the table.

(55) A: Where’s the cheese sandwich sitting?

B: He’s over there by the window.
“A truly pragmatic view of reference allows us to see how a person can be identified via the
expression, ‘the cheese sandwich’, and a thing can be identified via the name, ‘Shakespeare’.”
(Yule 1996, 19-20)
[NOTE: this is not a definition of a pragmatic view of reference, but exemplification]

The role of context

“It is ... misleading to think of reference being understood solely in terms of our ability to
identify referents via the referring expressions” (Yule 1996, 19–21). Why?
What types of context are involved? The referring expression actually provides a range of
reference, that is, a number of possible referents. (Yule 1996, 121)

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(56) The president will be arriving Friday afternoon at Palm Springs International Airport.
Several roads in Palm Springs near the airport will be closed for Obama's visit.

“We shall therefore adopt Searle’s position, and say that reference is not an inherent property
of expressions, but is a speech act.” (Cruse 1999, 381)
(recall the importance of communicative intention, speech event and felicity conditions in
speech acts)

♫ 6 Types of referring expressions (cf. Yule 1996):

I. Proper nouns:
Proper names are definite in that they carry the speaker’s assumption that the audience can
identify the referent. So if someone says to you:
A little girl lives with a rare condition which causes her to have 'Einstein hair'.
the speaker is assuming you can identify the famous physicist (and his hair).
II. Definite noun phrases:
“It has been sometimes claimed that the way definite descriptions work is to provide
sufficient information to distinguish the referent from all other possible referents, that is, to
render it unique” (Cruse 393)
III. Indefinite noun phrases
IV. Pronouns

Referring expressions:
Ad I. & II:
(57) A: Have you seen Pride and Prejudice?
B: No, but I've read the book.
There is not enough information given overtly within the definite NP to uniquely
distinguish the intended referent, yet it refers successfully.
What principles govern the amount of information the speaker has to provide
explicitly?
There has to be enough information to uniquely specify the referent ...
within some limited domain.

What principles govern the amount of information the speaker has to provide explicitly?
There has to be enough information to uniquely specify the referent

Are they so fundamentally different? The case of naming is not fundamentally different
from the case of describing , where a speaker gives enough descriptive information to
render the referent unique in sime relevant domain . Something similar is true of the use
of proper names : the speaker uses a proper name when only one referent within the
most relevant domain bears it; in other words, the name renders the referent
unique within the domain. In a definite description, it is the descriptive information which
performs the act of selection . (Cruse 396)

Ad III. Indefinite NPs

a) Specific (referring)
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b) Non-specific (non-referring)

(58) To get the automatic door to open you have to say a word.
(59) A: Why was Mary angry?
B: Because John talked to a woman at the party.

The “Specific indefinite” readings share with the meaning of a corresponding definite
expression that the identity of the referent, as opposed to merely the class of the referent, is
relevant to the situation described; what distinguishes these readings from definites is that
the speaker does not signal to the hearer that the identification of the referent is essential to
the message being conveyed (Cruse 385).

(ad IV) Pronouns (index ical)

(60) Every female skier loves her father.
(a) Referential use:
A. Deictic (extralinguistic)
B. Phoric (intra-textual)
(b) Bound Use

Explain the following terms:

♫ 7 Anaphoric reference It is the initial reference in a text. It usually comes before the
antecedent
♫ 8 Cataphoric reference It usually appears before the antecedent in a text, which may
give us trouble with the identification of the reference.

What is phoric reference?

a relation between two linguistic elements, in which the interpretation of one is in some way
determined by the interpretation of the other
ANAPHORA can be defined as
‘a relation between two linguistic elements, in which the interpretation of one (called an
anaphor) is in some way determined by the interpretation of the other (called an antecedent)’
(Huang 2005).
CATAPHORA is the coreference of one expression with another expression which follows it.
The following expression provides the information necessary for interpretation of the
preceding one.
Anaphora and deixis:

II. DEIXIS
I. Introduction
♫ 9 Etymology of the word deixis: It comes from Greek and it means “pointing via
language”

♫ 10 What is deixis? What are deictic expressions? A term used for basic things we do with
utterances.

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“Deictic expressions are interpreted in relation to certain features of the utterance-act – the
place, time, and participants”

‘Deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode or grammaticalize features of the
context or speech event , and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation
of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance ’ (Levinson 54).

Which of the definitions of pragmatics/areas of pragmatics (Yule 1996) apply to

deixis? Pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning.
Pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning.
Pragmatics is the study of how more gets communicated than is said.
Pragmatics is the study of the expression of relative distance. (Yule 1996, 3)
All of them

♫ 11 What is the most basic distinction between deictic expressions? They are the first
form to be spoken by very young children and can be used to indicate people via person
deldeixis, location via spatial deixis, or time via temporal deixis

♫ 12What is a deictic centre? Term to refer to the speaker’s location when talking about
the interpretation of proximal terms.

II. Several disclaimers:

1. Is pointing necessary (or possible) in the cases below?
(61) I hurt this finger.
(62) What is this?
(63) What was that?

Not only can gestures be reduced to directed gaze or a nod (or in some cultures to a pursing of
the lips - see Enfield 2002), they may be rendered unnecessary by the circumstances (consider
“What was that?” said of a noise, or “This is wonderful” said of a room).

2. Yule (1996, 9) says that deixis is “clearly a form of referring”. Are deictic expressions
only referring expressions?

(64) I’ll be back tomorrow.

(65) Graham Greene wrote 24 novels.

The term 'deixis' (which comes from a Greek word meaning "pointing" or "indicating") is
now used in linguistics to refer to the function of personal and demonstrative pronouns, of
tense and of a variety of other grammatical and lexical features which relate utterances to the
spatio-temporal co- ordinates of the act of utterance.

3. Deictic centre:
The unmarked anchorage points anchorage points are egocentric: speaker, utterance
time , speaker’s location , current speaker’s point in the text production,
speaker’s social status.

(66) Come in. (face-to-face conversation)

BUT (67) The door of Henry’s lunchroom opened and two men came in.

As Fillmore (1997) puts it, deixis may be relativized to text [the person of the protagonist at
the relevant time and place in a narrative].
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III. Types of deixis participants in the speech event

A. PERSON DEIXIS concerns the encoding of

The grammatical category of person directly reflects the different roles that individuals play in
the speech event: speaker , addressee , and other

There is a difference between the notion of plurality applied to the role of speaker and to non-
speaker roles. (Saeed 195)
♫ 13Who is we? Inclusive and exclusive we: Exclusive we is the we that actually refers to
only the speaker/s and not the hearer/s. Inclusive we refers to both, speaker and hearer.

B. SOCIAL DEIXIS concerns the encoding of social distinctions that are relative
to participant-roles, particularly aspects of the social relationship holding between
speaker and addressee/ some other referent (Levinson 2003).
♫ 14How is it expressed linguistically? The discussion of the circumstances which lead to
the choice of the honorifics

♫ 15What is the T/V distinction? The distinction between forms used for a familiar versus
a non-familiar addressee in some language.

C. SPACE DEIXIS concerns the encoding of spatial locations relative to the

location of the participants in the speech event (Levinson 2003).
This and that:
(68) Look at those flowers.

♫ 16 What is a deictic projection? When speakers are temporally away from their home
locations and often continue using “here” to mean the home location, as if they were still in that
place. When the speaker is able to project themselves into other locations prior to actually being
in those locations.
(69) I am not here now.

(70) The cat is in front of the tree.

(71) The cat is in front of the church.
(72) Let’s meet in front of the Zbrojnice library.
(73) Obchod Gran Moravia se stěhuje naproti radnici. [The cheese shop will be moved
opposite the town hall.]

Come and go:

(74) He’s coming to fetch me.
(75) [The bell rings] I’m coming.
(76) Are you coming to the funeral tomorrow, Tess?
What happens if you translate these sentences into your native language? “’Come’ is a
verb of locomotion which indicates a change of location from some point of origin to some
destination, this latter conceived of as place where the speaker or addressee is located at the
time of the speech act or at the reference time” (Fillmore 19).

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D. TIME DEIXIS concerns the encoding of temporal points and spans relative to the
time at which an utterance was spoken (Levinson 2003).

♫ 17 Deictic adverbs: e.g. Yesterday, tomorrow, today, tonight, next week, last week, this
week

(77) Matthew Sweney’s class cancelled today.

The most pervasive means of temporal deixis is tense .

♫ 18 English has 2 [how many?] basic tense forms? Which ones? Present and
past.
The past tense is deictic because it establishes a relation between the point of speech and the
point of reference. When it is argued that ‘a past verb form does not say anything about the
present time’ (Rivière 1980: 112), it must be kept in mind that the use of the past tense in
contexts in which the present perfect can occur as well may ‘say something about the present
time’.

Uses of the remote forms: do they only indicate past situations?

(78) If I was rich ...
(79) What did you say your name was?
(80) I was wondering ...

E. TEXTUAL (DISCOURSE) DEIXIS concerns the encoding of reference to

portions of the unfolding discourse in which the utterance is located.
Both temporal deictic terms and spatial terms are employed:
(81) Here our argument runs into some difficulties.
(82) At this point we have to look back to our initial premises.

Discourse markers:
What is the function of the expressions in bold?

(83) A: I like him. B: So, you think you’ll ask him out then.
(84) Will you go? Furthermore, will you represent the class there?
(85) Sue isn't here. As a result, we won't be able to see the video.

Discourse markers relate a current contribution to the prior utterance or portion of text.

IV. Deixis and grammar:

“languages vary in the type of semantic information that is obligatorily included in deictic
terms. When semantic distinctions are obligatory in this way we will say that they are
grammaticalized .” (Saeed 193)

e.g. Spanish: three zones of proximity to the speaker: aquí “here,” ahí “(just) there,” and allí,
“(over) there.”

Direct vs. indirect (reported) speech:

What is the difference? Direct reported speech purports to give the actual wording of the
original, whereas indirect reported speech gives only its content’ (Huddleston and Pullum
1023).

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“When the time reference of the original utterance (or mental activity) no longer applies at the
time that the utterance (or mental activity) is reported, it is often necessary to change the tense
forms of the verbs” (Quirk et al. 1026) ... as well as other deictic expressions.
(86) “Are you planning to be here this evening?”
I asked her if
He asked me if
What happens if you translate these sentences into your native language? Does the same
principle apply?

V. Deixis and narratives.

Rapaport: ‘Interestingly, deictic terms occur in third-person narratives, even though, strictly
speaking, there is no relevant “act of utterance”. They are not understood in terms of a
speaker and an addressee. The “here” and “now” of the story do not derive from the spatio-
temporal co-ordinates of the author at the time of writing, nor of the reader at the time of
reading. Instead, there is a narrative deictic center consisting of a narrative WHO, a narrative
WHEN, and a narrative WHERE, which the reader must keep track of, if deictic terms are to
be understood properly.’ ‘Moreover, the reader “looks” at the narrative from the perspective
of a particular character, temporal location, or spatial location—the WHO, WHEN, and
WHERE.’

(87) The four beggars in front of the church knew everything in the town. They were students
of the expressions of young women as they went in to confession, and they saw them as they
came out and read the nature of the sin. They knew every little scandal and some very big
crimes. They slept at their posts in the shadow of the church. (J. Steinbeck, The Pearl)

L E S S O N 5:
PRESUPPOSITION AND ENTAILMENT
I. Revision
According to Yule (1996, 17), “words themselves don’t refer to anything. People refer.”
Moreover, “For successful reference to occur, we must also recognize the role of inference.”
What is i n f e r e n c e?
“To achieve successful comprehension, the comprehender must often fill in details that are
not explicitly presented in the discourse.” (CEP, s.v. “Discourse processing”)
“[P]ragmatic inference enables an addressee to determine a speaker meaning from a sentence
meaning, typically taking account of the context of the utterance and his own encyclopedic
knowledge.“ (Grundy 2014)

“Reference is a social act” (Yule 1996, 17). Why?

???Is it only in the case of reference that more is being communicated than is said?
(88) I just rented a house. The kitchen is really big.

What else is communicated but not said? (Yule 1996, 25)

Provide brief descriptions of the following terms:

♫1Presupposition: Something the speaker assumes to be the case prior to making an
utterance.
♫2Entailment: Something that logically follows from what is asserted in the utterance

(89) Mary’s brother bought three horses.

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♫3According to Yule, the speaker may have several presuppositions when s/he utters (89)
Which ones? That a person called Mary exists and that she has a brother, and that Mary has
only one brother and that he has a lot of money.
♫4What does sentence (89) entail? That Mary´s brother bought something , bought three
animals, bought two horses, bought one horse, and many other similar logical
consequences.

The role of presupposition and entailment in today’s semantics and pragmatics:

II. E n t a i l m e n t
What is the relationship between the following sentences?
(90) (a) Pete killed the beetle. (b) The beetle died.
(91) (a) John got a new dog. (b) John got an animal.
(92) (a) Pete killed the beetle. (b) The beetle didn’t die.
(93) (a) John got a new dog. (b) John didn’t get an animal.

We could say that if somebody tells us [a] and we believe it, then we know [b] without being
told any more.
Or we could say that it is impossible for somebody to assert [a] but deny [b].

Is there inference involved in entailments? “... such information will generally not be stated
and consequently will count as part of what is communicated but not said.” (Yule 1996, 25)
“What such definitions have to try to capture is that entailment is not an inference in the
normal sense: we do not have to reason to get from [a] to [b], we just know it instantaneously
because of our knowledge of English.” (Saeed 94f.)
Are entailments context-dependent?
Is entailment a pragmatic concept?

Two main properties of entailments:

1. not context-dependent
... the relation between “It’s a dog” and “It’s an animal” is independent of any particular
contexts.

2. the truth of the entailed proposition must follow inescapably from the truth of the
entailing proposition. It is not enough for it to be usually true, or even almost always true; it
has to be unthinkable that it might be false:

Does (94) entail (i) or (ii)?

(94) It's a dog.
(i) It’s a pet.
(ii) It can bark.

Definition of an entailment:
To say that proposition P entails proposition Q means that the truth of Q follows
logically and inescapably from the truth of P , and the falsity of P follows likewise
from the falsity of Q . (Cruse 2011, 28)

In the examples (a)-(f) below, does the first proposition entail the second one?
(95) (a) Molly is a cat. Molly is an animal. ENTAILMENT

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(b) Molly is a cat. Molly is not an animal. ANOMALY

(CONTRADICTION)
(c) Molly is an animal. Molly is a cat. NO ENTAILMENT
(d) Molly is not a cat. Molly is an animal. NO ENTAILMENT
(e) Molly is not an animal. Molly is not a cat. ENTAILMENT
(f) Molly is not a cat. Molly is not an animal. NO ENTAILMENT

What happens to an entailment under negation? If P is false (=not P) , can be say anything
about Q? It’s not a cat.
Compare again:
(96) (a) Molly is a cat. Molly is an animal
(b) Molly is not a cat. Molly is an animal.

Can an entailment be cancelled?

Compare again:
(97) (a) John killed the wasp. The wasp died.
(b) John killed the wasp. The wasp didn’t die.

What is the notion of entailment used for? Which semantic relationship are exemplified in the
following pairs of sentences? (Cruse 2011, 28ff.)

A. Equivalence (synonymy)
(98) John killed the wasp. The wasp was killed by John.
(99) The wasp is dead. The wasp is not alive.
(100) It began at 10 o'clock. It commenced at 10 o'clock.
If it is true that John killed the wasp, then it is also true that the wasp was killed by John and if
it is true that the wasp was killed by John, then it is also necessarily true that John killed the
wasp; a parallel two-way entailment holds between the members of the other two pairs.

B. Contradictory propositions
(101) The wasp is dead. The wasp is alive.
Contradictory propositions must have opposite truth values in every circumstance: that is,
they cannot be either both true or both false.

C. Hyponymy (inclusion of sense)

(102) It’s a dog. It’s an animal.
(103) It’s a tulip. It’s a flower.

II. P r e s u p p o s i t i o n
The term “presupposition” is used in a broad as well as a narrow way. Some of Yule’s
examples exemplify the broad concept of a presupposition, closely related to the “common
ground”.

“People talking to each other take much for granted. They assume a common language. They
assume shared knowledge of such things as cultural facts, news stories, and local geography.
If they know each other, they assume shared knowledge of earlier conversations and other
joint experiences. And if they are talking face to face, they assume shared knowledge of the
scene around them. ‘Common ground’ is the sum of the information that people assume they
share.” (CEP, s.v. “Context and Common Ground”)

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(104) Peter to Mary: I’m glad you got the job.

What is the communicative intention here? Or, to put it differently, how would you report the
content of what Peter said to Mary?

(105) BRANKA: When will you be back

PETER: I should be back by eight but you know what trains are like
(Peter Grundy reporting a Saturday morning exchange between himself and his wife
[Grundy 2008, 48])

In semantics and pragmatics, presupposition is used in the narrow sense as a more specific
term.

(106) Speaker A: May’s dog is cute. (p)

(107) Speaker B: Mary’s dog is not cute. (non p)
(108) Mary has a dog. (q)

♫5What is the relationship between (106) and (107), between (106) and (108), and between
(107) and (108)? Sentence 19 contains the proposition p and sentence 21 contains the
proposition q, then using the symbol >> to mean “presupposes”, so, p>>q. When we produce
sentence 20, by negating it (non p), we find that the relationship of presupposition does not
change. That is, the same proposition q, repeated as 20, continues to be presupposed by non p,
as in non p >> q.

Even if speakers disagree about the validity of p, they both

One of the most important properties of a presupposition exemplified above is

Definition of presupposition:
Presupposition has also been described as “aspects of meaning that must be pre-supposed,
understood, taken for granted for an utterance to make sense” (Verschueren 1999, 27)

“Roughly speaking, the presuppositions of a speaker are the propositions whose truth he takes for
granted as part of the background of the conversation . . . Presuppositions are what is taken by the
speaker to be the common ground of the participants in the conversation, what is treated as their
common knowledge or mutual knowledge” (Stalnaker 1978, 320).

But does this mean that it has to be known to the hearer beforehand?

(109) Pete has stopped smoking.

A: Why is Peter so nervous? B: He has
stopped smoking.
“A presupposition is a proposition whose sentence to make a bona fide literal statement
truth is taken for granted by the producer of takes it for granted that Pete was previously a
an utterance and which must be known and smoker, although this is not explicitly stated.
taken account of for the utterance to make And the presumption that Pete had been a
sense to an interpreter. Take the case of Pete smoker is necessary for the sentence to make
has stopped smoking. Someone using this sense to a hearer, even if that fact was not
previously known.”

Types of presupposition
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♫6 Yule (1996, 27) talks about indicators of potential presuppositions. What does that mean?
Large number of words, phrases, and structures that can only become actual presuppositions in
contexts with speakers.

♫ 7 What types of indicators of potential presuppositions (aka “presupposition

triggers”) does Yule (1996, 27f.) mention? Explain briefly what is typical of each type
and supply an example for each:
a) Existential presupposition: the speaker is committed to the existence of the entities
named. E.g.: the King of Sweden, the cat, the girl next door.

b) Fictive presupposition: the presupposed information following a verb like “know“ can be
treated as a fact. E.g.: verbs as “realize”, “regret”, etc. > “She didn’t realize he was ill”

c) Lexical presupposition: the use of one form with its asserted meaning is conventionally
interpreted as the presupposition that another meaning is understood. E.g.: “stop”, “start”,
“again”, etc. > “She stopped smoking”

d) Structural presupposition: Certain sentence structures have been analyzed as

conventionally and regularly presupposing that part of the structures is already assumed to be
true. E.g.: wh- questions > “When did he leave?”

e) Non-fact I’ve presupposition: one that is assumed not to be true. E.g.: “dream”,
“imagine”, and “pretend” > “I dreamed that I was rich”

f) Counter-factual presupposition: What is presupposed is not only not true, but is the
opposite of what is true, or “contrary to facts”. E.g.: “If you were my friend, you would have
helped me.”

Why are the indicators only potential?

In semantics, it is assumed that the meaning of the whole sentence is a combination of
the meanings of its parts. However, what happens if presupposition triggers become
parts of more complex sentences?

(110) I don’t regret going to Culinary Arts school; I have to admit that was the best time I
had going to school.
(111) If you don’t apologise, you’ll regret it.
(112) He suffered a series of illnesses before he made a will.
(113) He died before the made a will.

Or, to put it more generally, how does context influence presuppositions?

Presupposition and manipulation

Presupposition triggers can be “potential”, i.e. presuppositions can evaporate (as in e.g.
(25) when they become part of more complex sentences (i.e. the role of linguistic
environment)
Presuppositions are sensitive to facts about the context of utterance, linguistic as well as
extralinguistic.
Presupposition triggers can be “potential”, i.e. presuppositions can evaporate or be
cancelled (under certain circumstances), e.g. by overt denial:

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John doesn’t regret doing a useless PhD in linguistics because in fact he never did do
one!

What is said is open to objection; what is assumed, i.e., the ground, is “shielded from
challenge” (Givón 1982, 101, qtd. in CEP, sv. “Pragmatic presupposition”).

Cf. e.g. cross-examination in court:

(114) How fast was the car going when it ran the red light? Such structurally-based
presuppositions may represent subtle ways of making information that the speaker beliefs appear to
be what the listener should believe. (Yule 1996, 29)
What is said is open to objection; what is assumed, i.e., the ground, is “shielded from challenge”
(Givón 1982, 101, qtd. in CEP, sv. “Pragmatic presupposition”).

III. P r e s u p p o s i t i o n vs. e n t a i l m e n t
What is the relation between the following propositions?
(115) (a) The medicine has cured her uncle.
(b) The medicine hasn’t cured her uncle.
(c) Her uncle was ill. Both (a) and (b) presuppose (c)

(116) (a) The medicine has cured her uncle.

(b) The medicine hasn’t cured her uncle.
(c) Her uncle is well. (a) entails (c)

DISTINCTION 1: Unlike entailments, presuppositions survive negation

Is this a contradiction? Can we “cancel” a presupposition?

(117) Pete hasn’t stopped smoking because he never did smoke.

Can we cancel an entailment?

(118) Pete killed the beetle, but it did not die.

DISTINCTION 2: Unlike entailments, presuppositions can be cancelled

DISTINCTION 3: Are entailments semantic, while presuppositions are a pragmatic

phenomenon?
Entailments are context-independent, related to specific encoded meanings and
structures, and cannot be cancelled.
SEMANTICS
Which of these properties apply to presuppositions?
Presuppositions are also related to specific encoded meanings and structures (cf.
triggers) SEMANTICS BUT also...
context sensitive and cancellable
PRAGMATICS

Grundy’s (2008) summary:

The role of presuppositions in pragmatics:

“Presupposition affords us economy. It’s very convenient that we can rely on addressees to
accommodate beliefs that would otherwise have to be elaborated .” (Grundy 50)

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Tasks:
1. What are the presuppositions? (there may be more than one for each sentence)
a) I want to meet the winner of yesterday's egg-and-spoon race.
b) I was amazed that he turned up.
c) He managed to escape.
d) It wasn't Mary who stole the caviar.
e) If only we had listened to him, he would still be alive.
f) It matters that they lied to us.
g) You should have explained that your train was late.
h) The email that Admin sent us said Thursday.
i) Lesley plays the clarinet brilliantly.
j) Lesley will graduate next year.
k) Lesley is sorry for all the trouble she has caused.
l) It was Lesley who wrote the letter.
m) When Lesley was ill, Jane deputized for her on the committee.

Task 2: What is the presupposition of the following?

Persil removes dirt AND odours.

Task 3: FLIGHT ATTENDANT to the passenger: Would you like something to drink?
Something is very strongly favoured over anything in such contexts. Why should this be?

Task 4:

LESSON 6:
Cooperative Principle and Implicatures
I. Introduction
Sentence meaning vs. speaker meaning.

(119) The following incident, which occurred at a seaside resort in Kent, was reported in
several national newspapers in July 1994.
Kent Coastguard reports that a girl, drifting out to sea on an inflatable set of false teeth, was
rescued by a man on a giant inflatable lobster.

(120) “We must remember your telephone bill,” she said, hinting that Louise had talked long
enough. “Goodbye,” said Louisa, ringing off. It takes the rich to remind one of bills, she
thought.

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(121) Late on Christmas Eve 1993 an ambulance is sent to pick up a man who has collapsed
in Newcastle city centre. The man is drunk and vomits all over the ambulanceman who goes to
help him. The ambulanceman says:
“Great, that’s really great! That's made my Christmas!” (examples from Thomas 2013)
Irony

There are times when people say (or write) exactly what they mean, but generally they are
not totally explicit. Since, on the other occasions, they manage to convey far more than their
words mean, or something quite different from the meanings of their words, how on earth do
we know, on a given occasion, what a speaker means? For we do, on the whole, communicate
very successfully. (Thomas 56)

But how do we know when people mean what they say, and if they don’t mean what they say
literally, how is the gap bridged?

Paul Grice ... attempted to explain how, by means of shared rules or conventions, competent
language- users manage to understand one another. (Thomas 56)

Communication seems to raise some expectations:

(122)
Man: Does your dog bite?
Woman: No.
(The man reaches down to pet the dog. The dog bites the man’s hand.)
Man: Ouch! Hey! You said your dog doesn’t bite.
Woman: He doesn’t. But that’s not my dog.
Yule (1996, 36)
• What are the man’s unexpressed assumptions? The dog belongs to the woman.
• What did the man mean by saying Does your dog bite? Just that, or something else as well?
May I stroke your dog provided he doesn’t bite?
• If she said, No, and the dog was actually hers. Would she be only informing him that the dog
doesn’t bite, or would she communicating something else as well?
He doesn’t bite (and you can touch him)
• Did the woman lie when she said her dog didn’t bite? Strictly speaking, she didn’t.
• Could she have known what the man meant?
The situation is not unusual, so she probably could. If she understood the man’s mistaken
assumption, it was uncooperative not to correct him
(the expectation under the influence of which we communicate is that people will do their best
to be cooperative)

H. P. Grice (1913–1988) was among the first to systematically study cases in which what a
speaker means differs from what the sentence used by the speaker means.

II. Cooperative Principle and Maxims

Explain the following terms (in this case, it would make sense to try to keep the wording
of the CP and maxims precise)

♫ 1 CP: COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE: The assumption of cooperation when it is

pervasive

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Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by
the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged (Grice
[1967] 1989, 26).
Already we have a problem. The fact that Grice expressed the CP in the imperative mood has
led some casual readers of his work to believe that Grice was telling speakers how they ought
to behave. What he was actually doing was suggesting that in conversational interaction
people work on the assumption that a certain set of rules is in operation, unless they receive
indications to the contrary.
(Thomas 62)
A useful analogy is driving a car. When we drive, we assume that other drivers will operate
according to the same set of regulations as we do (or, at the very least, that they know what
those regulations are). If we could not make such assumptions the traffic system would
rapidly grind to a halt. Of course, there are times when we do have indications that another
driver may not obey the rules (a learner, a drunk, a person whose car is out of control, an
ambulance or fire tender with its lights flashing and siren blaring) or that they may be
following a different set of rules (a car with foreign number plates) and on these occasions we
reexamine our assumptions or suspend them altogether. And, of course, there are times when
our assumption that others are operating according to the same set of rules is misplaced, and
then an accident may occur.
(Thomas 62)

The same is true of conversation. ... For, in setting out his Cooperative Principle, Grice was
not (as some commentators have erroneously assumed) suggesting that people are always
good and kind or cooperative in any everyday sense of that word. He was simply noting that,
on the whole, people observe certain regularities in interaction
(Thomas 62)

♫ 2 Maxim of Quality. (Try to make your contribution one that is true)

Submaxims:
1. Do not say what you believe to be false
2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence

(123) A: Do you happen to know who won yesterday?

B1: No, I don’t.
B2: I bet Chelsea did.
B3: Chelsea did.

♫ 3Maxim of Quantity.
Submaxims:
1. Make your contribution as informative as it is requiered
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required

(124) A: What did you have for lunch today?

B1: Food.
B2: Baked beans on toast.
B3: I had 87 warmed-up baked beans (although eight of them were slightly crushed)
served on a slice of toast 12.7 cm, which had been unevenly toasted.

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♫ 4 Maxim of Relation: Be relevant

(125) A: I am out of petrol.

B: There is a garage round the corner.

Maxims of Manner: Be perspicuous

♫ 5 Supermaxim:
Submaxims:
1. Avoid obscurity of expression
2. Avoid ambiguity
3. Be brief )avoid unnecessary prolixity)
4. Be orderly

(126) We bought a tandem bicycle and sold our car. vs. We sold our car and bought a
tandem bicycle.
The reason is that the assumption that utterers are orderly when they recount events invites
listeners or readers to assume that if two events are presented in a particular order – without
markers of sequence (like before, first, then and after) being used – then the utterance
ordering directly reflects the order of the events (Griffiths 139)

♫ 6 What is a hedge? The expressions we use to mark that they may be in danger of not
fully adhering to the principles.
♫ 7 Types of hedges related to the maxims (supply examples):
1. Quality. E.g.: “As far as I know, they´re married”
2. Quantity. E.g.: “As you probably know, I am terrified of bugs”
3. Relation. E.g.: “I don’t know if this is important, but some of the files are missing”.
4. Manner. E.g.: “This may be a bit confused, but I remember being in a car”

Four ways to fail to fulfill a maxim:

1. Violation: A participant may quietly and unostentatiously violate a maxim.
(9) An English athlete pulled out of her opening race and returned to England. Caroline
Searle, press officer for the England team, said: “She has a family bereavement; her
grandmother has died.”
[The next day it was announced that the athlete had been sent home following a positive test
for drugs.]
There are two possibilities here: either it is not true that the grandmother died (=violation of
the quality maxim), or,
the grandmother died but the information about the positive test was witheld (=violation of
the quantity maxim)

2. Opting out: He may opt out from the operation of the maxim and of the CP; he may make
it plain that he is not willing to cooperate.
(127) My lips are sealed.

3. Clash: He may be faced by a clash. It may be impossible to fulfill one maxim without
violating another.
(128) A: When’s he supposed to be coming?
B: Sometime next week.

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4. Flouting a maxim: He may flout a maxim: that is he may blatantly fail to fulfill it.
(129) Letter of recommendation: ‘Dear Sir, Mr. X’s command of English is excellent, and his
attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc.’
(130) A hamburger is a hamburger.
(131) A: Does he want a new car?
B: Is the pope catholic?

Each one of these ways of behaving has the potential to license an inference on the part of the
hearer: the speaker
wishes to prompt the hearer to look for a meaning which is different from, or in addition to,
the expressed meaning.
This is knows as ...
an implicature

III. Implicatures
♫ 8 What in an implicature? The basic assumption in conversation that, unless
indicated, the participants are adhering to the cooperative principle and the maxims.

= bridge between what a speaker says

(conventional meaning of the uttered sentence determined by its grammatical structure with
the reference of indexicals resolved) and what s/he communicates (implicates)

The situations which chiefly interested Grice were those in

which a speaker blatantly fails to observe a maxim, not with any intention of deceiving or
misleading, but because the speaker wishes to prompt the hearer to look for a meaning which
is different from, or in addition to, the expressed meaning. This additional meaning he called
'conversational implicature' and he termed the process by which it is generated 'flouting a
maxim'.
A flout occurs when a speaker blatantly fails to observe a maxim at the level of what is said,
with the deliberate intention of generating an implicature.
(Thomas 65)

♫ 9 What is a conversational implicature? When no special background knowledge is

required in the context of the utterance to make necessary interferences.

(132) Charlene: I hope you brought the bread and the cheese.
Dexter: Ah, I brought the bread. (Yule 1996, 40) Implicature:

How does one “work out” an implicature?

General pattern:

“Speakers implicate, hearers infer.” (Horn 2005)

To implicate “is to hint, suggest or convey some meaning indirectly by means of language.
We have seen how this operates in example 2, where the speaker hints or indicates indirectly
that she wants to finish the telephone conversation; ... To infer is to deduce something from
evidence (this evidence may be linguistic, paralinguistic or non-linguistic).’” (Thomas 58)

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There are guiding principles which govern cooperative talk. Knowing these principles
(maxims) enables an addressee to draw inferences as to the implied meaning (implicatures) of
utterances. ...
[Implicating] is a way “of getting an addressee to draw an inference and hence recover an
implicature.”
Grundy (100)

Implicatures from the maxims:

According to Grice's theory, interlocutors operate on the assumption that, as a rule, the
maxims will be observed. When this expectation is confounded and the listener is confronted
with the blatant non- observance of a maxim (i.e. the listener has discounted the possibility
that the speaker may be trying to deceive, or is incapable of speaking more clearly,
succinctly, etc.), he or she is again prompted to look for an implicature.
(Thomas 67)

1. Implicature from the quality maxim:

(133) “Oh, this is wonderful.” (The American actress Halle Berry after receiving a Razzie – a
golden raspberry – for “worst actress”.)
Flouts which exploit the maxim of Quality occur when the speaker says something which is
blatantly untrue or for which he or she lacks adequate evidence. In the 'ambulanceman'
example I gave (example 3), an implicature is generated by the speaker's saying something
which is patently false. Since the speaker does not appear to be trying to deceive the listener
in any way, the listener was forced to look for another plausible interpretation.
(Thomas 67) Examples: irony, figures of speech

2. Implicature from the quantity maxim:

(134) A: “Can anyone use this car park?”
B: “It’s for customers of the supermarket.” Implicature:

If the car park was for the use of everyone, then that would include the supermarket’s
customers and there would be no need to mention them; so B’s utterance appears to offer
superfluous information. An assumption that B is abiding by the quantity maxim – and
therefore not giving more information than needed – invites an implicature that it is necessary
to specify supermarket customers – it is for them and not for other motorists, which amounts
to an informative negative answer to A’s question.
(Griffiths 138)

3. Implicatures from the maxim of manner

(135) This interaction occurred during a radio interview with an unnamed official from the
United States Embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti:
Interviewer: Did the United States Government play any part in Duvalier’s departure?
Did they, for example, actively encourage him to leave?
Official: I would not try to steer you away from that conclusion.

The official could simply have replied: 'Yes'. Her actual response is extremely long-
winded and convoluted and it is obviously no accident, nor through any inability to speak
clearly, that she has failed to observe the maxim of Manner. There is, however, no reason to
believe that the official is being deliberately unhelpful (she could, after all, have simply
refused to answer at all, or said: 'No comment').

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The hearer must therefore look for another explanation...

In fact, this exchange was widely reported and the implicature spelt out in news
broadcasts later the same day: 'Although they have not admitted it openly, the State
Department is letting it be known that the United States was behind Jean-Paul Duvalier,
"Baby Doc's", decision to quit the island.‘
Thomas (71f.)

4. Implicatures from the maxim of relation

(136) A: (Picking up a book from a display in a bookshop) “Have you read Long Walk to
Freedom?”
B: “I find autobiographies fascinating.” Implicature:

♫ 10 Conventional vs. conversational implicatures: what is the difference? Unlike the

conversional implicatures, the conventional implicatures are not based on the cooperative
principle of the maxims. It’s not necessary for them to occur in a conversation context, or,
depend on special contexts in order to be interpreted.
(137) It’s a husky, but he’s friendly. Assertion:
Implicature:

(138) A: Smith doesn’t seem to have a girlfriend these days.

B: He has been paying a lot of visits to New York lately.
Implicature:

Unlike conventional implicature, conversational implicature is not part of the conventional

meaning of the sentence uttered, but depends on features of the conversational context. What
does that mean?

(Non-)cancellability: mark the acceptability:

(139) ??? It’s a labrador, but he’s friendly. All labradors are friendly.
(140) ??? Denis is not here yet, but I don’t expect him to come.
(141) A: Smith doesn’t seem to have a girlfriend these days.
B: He has been paying a lot of visits to New York lately.
But perhaps it is work-related.

Properties of conversational implicatures:

IV. Criticism of Grice:

‘Would we want to have dinner with such a person, such an impeccably polite maxim
observer?’ (Campbell 2001, 256)
[I]n setting out his Cooperative Principle, Grice was not (as some commentators have
erroneously assumed) suggesting that people are always good and kind or cooperative in any
everyday sense of that word. He was simply noting that, on the whole, people observe certain
regularities in interaction
(Thomas 62)

(142) A: Are you from America?”

B: No. (followed by silence).

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(143) A: Excuse me, can you tell me where the post office is?
B: No.
(144) A: Can you tell me where Mr Campell’s office is?
B: Not here.
(145) A: Did I get invited to the conference?
B: Your paper was too long.
How can we distinguish between different types of non- observance?
a) How do we know when S is deliberately failing to observe a maxim and hence that an
implicature is intended?
b) What is the motivation for deliberately failing to observe a maxim? (see Thomas 1995, 87ff.)
Sometimes an utterance has a range of possible interpretations. How do we know which
implicature was the intended one? (see Thomas 1995, 87ff.)

Grice and his influence. Criticism of Grice

Neo-Gricean theory (Horn, Levinson, Bach)
Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson)
Principle of Relevance (Sperber & Wilson 1986, 1995, 2005):
Relevance theory may be seen as an attempt to work out in detail one of Grice’s central claims:
that an essential feature of most human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, is the
expression and recognition of intentions.
The goal of inferential pragmatics is to explain how the hearer infers the speaker’s meaning on
the basis of the evidence provided.
Relevance theorists share Grice’s intuition that utterances raise expectations of relevance, but
question several other aspects of his account, including the need for a Co-operative Principle
and maxims
The central claim of relevance theory is that the expectations of relevance raised by an utterance
are precise enough, and predictable enough, to guide the hearer towards the speaker’s
meaning.

Tasks:
(1) A: How was that new restaurant you went to last night?
B: The walls were a nice colour.
(2) A: Would you like some more dessert, or coffee, perhaps?
B: I’d like to go to the lavatory.
(3) A: Where’s Bill?
B: There’s a yellow VW outside Sally’s house.
(4) The plumber made a reasonable job of fitting our new boiler.
(5) It must be somewhere.

(7) Fill in A’s statement in two different ways so that B’s reply gives rise to three different
implicatures:
A:
B: It’s seven o’clock.
Implicature 1:

A:
B: It’s seven o’clock.
Implicature 2:

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8. Advertisements are often said to flout Manner. Can you say in which way each of the
following advertisements does this?
a) Ahead of current thinking (Advertisement, National Power)
b) Acts on the spot (Advertisement for an acne preparation)
c) You just can’t help yourself (Written message accompanying a television advertisement for
McCain pizzas in which the cook takes a piece of pizza for herself. She then tries to make it
look as though the pizza is still intact before serving her guests).

L E S S O N 7: Politeness

I. Preliminary remarks
Yule’s (1996) account of politeness is largely based on
Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson (1987): Politeness. Some universals in language
usage
However, on p. 60, Yule provides an inconspicuous summary of another theory of politeness
by Geoffrey Leech (1983):

Is “etiquette” the same phenomenon as politeness? Politeness as a real-world goal (i.e.

politeness interpreted as a genuine desire to be pleasant to others, or as the underlying
motivation for an individual's linguistic behaviour) has no place
within pragmatics. We can have no access to speakers' real motivation for speaking as they
do (Thomas 150)
Instead, we will be dealing with linguistic politeness:
i.e. “linguistic expression of social relationships” (Brown and Levinson (1987, 49)

How does politeness fit into pragmatics? Recall the areas of pragmatics according to Yule
(1996, 4): Pragmatics is the study of
1. speaker meaning
2. contextual meaning
3. how more gets communicated than is said 4. the expression of relative distance
As we will see, politeness involves all of these areas

“Politeness phenomena also extend the notion of indexicality because they show that every
utterance is uniquely designed for its context.” (Grundy 189)

(146) Give me a sheet of paper fathead (Grundy 189)

(147) You couldn’t let me have a bit of paper by any chance could you (Grundy 189)

“Among the aspects of context that are particularly determinate of language choice in the
domain of politeness are the power-distance relationship of the interactants and the extent to
which a speaker imposes on or requires something on their addressee.” (Grundy 187)

This function of language, to imply the most appropriate speaker-addresses relationship, is at

the heart of linguistic politeness.” (Grundy 189)

Is politeness redundant?

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(148) You couldn’t let me have a bit of paper by any chance could you (Grundy 189) Unlike
presupposition ... which encourage[s] economical communication by allowing shared
propositions to be taken for granted without being stated, politeness phenomena frequently
go in the opposite direction. (Grundy 189)
But it is not redundant pragmatically:

“To put matters at their most basic: unless you are polite to your neighbour, the channel of
communication between you will break down, and
you will not be able to borrow his mower.”

Are there any inherently polite expressions? If uttered by a relative stranger that I only met
ten minutes before, “this would be a well-judged way of offering me dinner. But had my wife
said it to me, I’d be visiting a lawyer on the way home.” (Grundy 186)

(149) I don’t know if you’re likely to be back in time for dinner, but if you are, I’d be
delighted to take you to a local restaurant. (Grundy 186)

“It only becomes pragmatics when we look at how a particular form in a particular language
is used strategically in order to achieve the speaker's goal. ‘Doing’ pragmatics crucially
requires context. This leads to the second issue: as soon as we put a speech act in context, we
can see that there is no necessary connection between the linguistic form and the perceived
politeness of a speech act.” (Thomas 156)

II. Basic concepts in politeness

Factors which relate to politeness:
♫ 1. external factors: Involve the relative status of the participants, based on social values,
toed to such things as age and power.

♫ 2. internal factors negotiated during interaction: Can result in the initial social instance
changing and being marked as less, or more during its course.

♫ Politeness seems to be operating on the scale between deference and solidarity. Explain the
terms: The tendency to use positive politeness forms, emphasizing closeness between
speaker and hearer, can be seen as solidarity strategy. The tendency to use negative politeness
forms, emphasizing the hearer’s right to freedom, can be seen as a defense strategy.

Deference and politeness: Are they identical? “Deference is frequently equated with
politeness, particularly in discussions of Japanese. Deference is connected with politeness,
but is a distinct phenomenon; it is the opposite of familiarity. It refers to the respect we show
to other people by virtue of their higher status, greater age, etc. Politeness is a more general
matter of showing (or rather, of giving the appearance of showing) consideration to others.”
(Thomas 150)
In other words, showing solidarity (social closeness) is also part of politeness.

Some languages have deference built into the grammar: “speakers of languages which make
the T / V distinction are obliged, because of the linguistic choices they must make, to signal
either respect or familiarity towards their interlocutor. In the grammar of present-day
English, which, in its standardized form, ceased to make the T / V distinction (thou/you)
between three and four hundred years ago, virtually no deference forms remain. Exceptions
are address forms (Doctor, Professor, etc.) and the use of 'honorifics' such as Sir or Madam

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(these are used very rarely in British English, but rather more frequently in American
English) which may be used to indicate the relative status of the interactants.
(Thomas 150)

“If the use of a particular form is obligatory in a particular situation, as in example 2, it is

of no significance pragmatically; it is only when there is a choice, or when a speaker
attempts to bring about change by challenging the current norms, that the use of deferent or
non-deferent forms becomes of interest to the pragmaticist. Address forms, the use of T or V
forms (tu versus vous), etc., are pragmatically interesting only when a strategic choice is
made; for example, when, you suddenly start to address someone by his or her first name or
using a T form with the deliberate aim of changing the social relationship. ” ((Thomas
152)

(150) The speaker was the Academy Sergeant Major (one of the few ranks of non-
commissioned officer normally addressed as ‘Sir’). He was talking to a newly-arrived
group of officer cadets:

‘You will address me as “Sir” at all times and I will also address you as “Sir”. The
difference is that you will mean it!” (Thomas 152)

III. Geoffrey Leech’s theory of politeness in a nutshell

(151) A: Did I get invited to the conference?
B: Your paper was too long.

Leech’s major motivation: Leech sees politeness (and the related notion of 'tact') as
crucial in explaining 'why people are often so indirect in conveying what they mean' and
(1983: 80) as 'rescuing the Cooperative Principle' in the sense that politeness can
satisfactorily explain exceptions to and apparent deviations from the CP.

In his theory, Leech postulates the Politeness Principle and maxims of politeness along the
lines of Grice’s Cooperative Principle:

Politeness Principle: Minimize the expression of impolite beliefs.

In his theory, Leech postulates the Politeness Principle and maxims of politeness along the
lines of Grice’s Cooperative Principle.
“Often in pragmatics (and in linguistics in general) we only become aware of the fact that a
norm or regularity exists when someone (often an immature member of, or an outsider to, a
particular group) fails to observe the norm.” (Thomas 163)

Which norms (if any) do you think are violated in the following examples (152)-Error!
Reference source not found.)?

• The Tact Maxim: Minimize Minimize cost to other

The operation of this maxim can be clearly seen in the context of directives, that is,
utterances which have the function of getting the hearer to do something
(152) Close the window. Can you close the window?

• The Generosity Maxim: Minimize Minimize benefit to self

(153) I want to borrow your coat. You can borrow my coat.

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The greater the benefit A to self (and correspondingly, the greater the cost to other), the
greater will be the need ... for indirectness

• The Aprobation Maxim: Minimize Minimize dispraise of other.

(154) A: Do you like my new haircut?
B: No.

• The Modesty Maxim: Minimize Minimize praise of self

(155) I’m a very stable genius.

• The Agreement Maxim: Minimize

(156) Betty wants to marry him,' she said.' That's why she was talking about marriage.''
You're such a fantasist, Lydia,' said Finn, predictably. This Lydia was prepared to quarrel
about.' Do you mean that in your opinion Betty doesn't want to get married?' she asked.'
Or do you mean she doesn't want to marry Beuno? Because I can assure you that you are
entirely wrong on both counts.'' Nonsense,' said Finn, and Lydia decided that even had he
not gone off with the duck their relationship would have had no future (Unexplained
laughter by Alice T. Ellis)

The weight of these maxims cross-culturally: The Tact maxim: Allowing options (or giving
the appearance of allowing options) is absolutely central to Western notions of politeness,
but again, as Spencer-Oatey (1992: 17) notes, has little place in the Chinese conception of
politeness. Just as a polite Chinese host will choose your dishes for you in a restaurant
without consulting you (and will often go so far as to place the choicest pieces directly onto
your plate), so the linguistic expression of optionality in, say, inviting someone to one's home,
is not seen as polite. (Thomas 161)
The Modesty maxim: Leech (1983a: 137) notes that in Japan the operation of the Modesty
maxim may, for example, lead someone to reject a compliment which had been paid to them
(Thomas 163)

Benefits of the theory:

(157) Come here for a second.
(158) You must come and have dinner with us.

Problems with Leech’s theory: “there appears to be no motivated way of restricting the
number of maxims. In theory it would be possible to produce a new maxim to explain every
tiny perceived regularity in language use” (Thomas 167)

IV. Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness (presented in Yule 1996)

♫ Central to their system is the concept of face. What is it and how does it relate to
politeness? Face means the public self-image of a person. It refers to that emotional and
social sense of self that everyone has and expects everyone to recognize. Politeness, in an
interaction, can then be defined as the means employed to show awareness of another
person’s face.

♫ What are face wants?

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Within their everyday social interactions, people generally behave as if expectations

concerning their public self’image, or their face wants, will be respected.

♫ Positive face vs. negative face: What is the difference? A person’s negative face is the
need to be independent, to have freedom of action, and not to be imposed on by others. A
person’s positive is the need to be accepted, even liked, by others, to be treated as a member
of the same group, and to know that his or her wants are shared by others. Negative face is
the need to be independent and positive face is the need to be connected.

♫ Face threatening acts (FTAs) vs. Face saving acts: What are they?

Task 1 (based on Yule 1996, 65ff): At a lecture. You’ve forgotten your pen. How do you get
your neighbour to lend you one?

Based on the previous task:

♫ What are the five major strategies one can choose to achieve his/her goal? Positive
politeness strategy, negative politeness strategy, solidarity strategy, deference strategy.

Task 2: Comment on the following strategies:

(159) The speaker knows that a bomb has been planted in the stands at his racecourse. He
thinks his young nephew is hiding in the stands:
… Toby, get off the stands. The stands are not safe. Toby, for Christ’s sake do what I
say. This is not a game. Come on, you little bugger … for once in your life, be told.
(Thomas 170)

(160) Male first-year student calling to female-first year student (whom he didn’t know) in
their college during ‘Freshers’ Week’:
Hey, blondie, what are you studying, then? French and Italian? Join the club!
(Thomas 172)

(161) Could we perhaps meet for a coffee?

(162) It is necessary to request senders of ‘junk’ e-mail, e.g. ‘chain’ letters, to desist.
(Thomas 173)

(163) “I'm so tired. A cup of coffee would help.”

♫ There are three superstrategies among the strategies which can be used as face-saving
strategies. Which ones?
1. Ppositive PS: signals to the hearer that the speaker appreciates the hearer’s needs
2. Negative Politeness: the speaker respects the hearer’s desire not to be imposed upon
3. Off Record (roughly, the avoidance of unequivocal impositions)

♫ Which face-saving strategy is said to be more common in most English-speaking contexts?

In most English-speaking contexts, a face saving act is more commonly performed via a
negative politeness strategy.

♫ Yule (1996) also mentions solidarity and deference strategies. How do they relate to the
positive and negative politeness strategies? The tendency to use positive politeness forms,
emphasizing closeness between speaker and hearer, can be seen as solidarity strategy. The

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tendency to use negative politeness forms, emphasizing the hearer’s right to freedom, can be
seen as a defense strategy.

Politeness strategies and speech acts:

♫ What are pre-sequences? What is their function? Face saving behavior is often at work
well before such utterances are produced, in the form of pre-sequences.

Criticism of Brown and Levinson:

Your notes:

L E S S O N 8: Pragmatics of interaction

I. Introduction: The study of conversational interaction

The study of conversational interaction is now approached in a multitude of different ways

in pragmatics, reflecting in part the ever increasing diversity of the field. Approaches range
from the study of the field. Approaches range from the study of the structure and
management of talk as a form of social order itself in conversation analysis, through to
the study of a wide variety of pragmatic phenomena that occur in conversational interaction,
including formulaic language, discourse/pragmatic markers, reference and deixis,
presupposition, implicature, speech and pragmatic acts, humour, im/politeness and beyond
to issues of identity and power , to name just a few. (Haugh 2012, 251)

Within this complex analytical landscape two key trends can be discerned in relation to the
place of conversational interaction in pragmatics. (Haugh 2012, 251f.)
1. Ordinary language philosophers
2. Conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics

What is meant by “conversation”? ... while much of the interest in pragmatics and CA
was initially focused on conversation in the folk sense of ordinary or everyday uses of talk
between family, friends or acquaintances,
conversation has since garnered a more technical definition, encompassing all types of
face-to-face or telephone-mediated interaction that use language, including that occurring
in institutional settings such as the classroom or workplace.
More recently still it has been extended again to include various forms of computer-
mediated communication (CMC), particularly those which allow (close to) real-time
exchange of messages. The latter more technical notion of conversation is sometimes called
talk-in-interaction in CA in order to distinguish this broader, academic notion from the
ordinary sense of conversation. (Haugh 2012, 252)

Conversational interactions can be classified relative to four different dimensions (cf.

Haugh 2012, 254):
1. degree of institutionality
2. activity type/genre
3. channel
4. participation framework

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Ad 1. degree of institutionality
Mundane or ordinary conversation is thus generally defined in contrast to institutional talk.
Levinson (1983), for instance, defines (ordinary) conversation as ‘the predominant kind of
talk in which two or more participants freely alternate in speaking, which generally occurs
outside specific institutional settings’ (p. 284).
More specifically, such mundane conversation involves ‘organization of talk which is not
subject to functionally specific or context-specific restrictions or specialized practices or
conventionalized arrangements’ (Schegloff 1999: 407, original emphasis). Yet despite being
defined relative to institutional forms of conversational interaction, ordinary conversation
is regarded as primordial.

Types of institutional conversational interaction examined in this way range from

courtroom talk, classrooms and workplace meetings and interactions through to broadcast
interviews and debates, police interviews, medical consultations and various forms of
counselling, including phone-in help-lines (Heritage 2005). Key differences between
ordinary and institutional forms of conversational interaction include their overall structure
and turn allocation. While institutional talk generally has particular phases (e.g. a
recognisable beginning and end), ordinary talk has no such recognisable phases or formal
procedures.
(Haugh 2012, 254f.)
Ad 2. activity type/genre
These involve ‘practised patterns of language use’ that are constitutive of different
communicative activity types or genres, such as intimate talk, family dinner-table
conversation, troubles telling (or troubles talk), small talk, negotiation talk, consultation,
advice giving and so on (Hakulinen 2009). However, while activity types or genres are
clearly an important dimension of analysis, there is no principled way of classifying
conversational interactions in this way, with such categorisations often being based on
commonsense or vernacular terms that inevitably overlap in some respects.
(Haugh 2012, 255)
Ad 3. channel
The channel in which conversational interaction takes place was, up until recently,
restricted to auditory (e.g. telephone conversations) or audio-visual (e.g. face-to- face
conversations) modes of communication. However, in recent years the notion of
conversational interaction has been extended to encompass various forms of computer-
mediated communication, particularly those that occur in real-time (or near to it). ... Early
studies of turn-taking systems in various forms of computer- mediated communication
(CMC) indicated that the turn- taking system in ordinary face-to-face conversation cannot
always be straightforwardly mapped onto that occurring in CMC.
(Haugh 2012, 255)
Ad 4. participation framework
Multiparty interactions tend to have more complex instantiations of turn allocation
practices as opposed to dyadic interactions where turn-taking can be more smoothly (albeit
not always) accomplished (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974). In addition, multiparty
interactions afford different discourse roles for participants ranging from straightforward
speakers and addressees through to virtual speakers (who invoke what could have been said
by someone at some point) and non-addressed participants, who include side- participants,
bystanders and overhearers (Levinson 1988; Verschueren 1999).
(Haugh 2012, 256)

What are the key contributions of Conversation Analysis?

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II. Pragmatics of interaction: Conversation Analysis (CA)

♫ 1 Which metaphors are used to describe conversation structure? “Conversations are
like a dance, with the conversational patterns coordinating their movements smoothly. For
others, it’s like traffic crossing an intersection, involving lots of alternating movements
without crashes”

♫ 2 Explain the following terms used in CA:

Floor Can be defined as the right to speak. It’s a scarce commodity.
Turn Is having the control of the scarce commodity (floor) at any time
Turn-taking Where the control of the scarce commodity (floor) is not fixed in advance,
anyone can attempt to get control, this is turn talking, and is a form of social group
Local management system Is a set of conventions for getting turns, keeping them, or giving
them away
Transition relevance place (TRP) At those points where there is a possible change in who
has the turn, any possible change-of-turn point is calle Transition Relevance Place.
Overlap When both speakers talk at the same time

1. Turn-taking
Can you identify examples of the terms given above in the following sample(s)?
(164)
1. Mr. Strait: What’s your major Dave?
2. Dave: English—well I haven’t really decided yet.
(3 seconds)
3. Mr. Strait: So—you want to be a teacher?
4. Dave: No—not really—well not if I can help it.
(2.5 seconds)
5. Mr. Strait: What—//Where do you— go ahead
6. Dave: I mean it’s a—oh sorry //I em—

♫ 3 What does an overlap signal? When two people attempt to have a conversation and
discover that there is no flow or smooth rhythm to their transitions, much more is
being communicated than is said.
♫ 4 Markers of TRP: the end of a structural unit (phrase or clause) and a pause
♫5 What are floor-holding devices?

(165)
I wasn’t talking about—um his first book that was—uh really just like a start and so—uh
isn’t—doesn’t count really (Yule
75)

These seems to be an overlap in the following sample. Is it the same kind of overlap as in
the first sample?

(166)
Caller: if you use your long distance service a lot then you’ll

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Mary: uh-uh (Yule 75)

♫ 7 The role of backchannels: Within an extended turn, however, speakers still expect
their conversational partners to indicate that they are listening. There are many different
ways of doing this, including head nods, smiles, and other facial expressions and gestures,
but the most common vocal indications are called backchannel signals, or
backchannels.

2. Adjacency pairs
♫8 Adjacency pairs: what are they? Despite differences in style, most speakers seem to
find a way to cope with everyday business of social interaction. They are certainly helped in
this process by the fact that there are many almost automatic patterns in the structure of
conversation. This automatic patterns or sequences are called adjacency pairs.

Are adjacency pairs limited to two turns only? Adjacency pairs are not limited to two
turns, however, as they can also be expanded in various ways, the main ones being pre-
expansion (e.g. pre-request, pre-invitation, pre-offer) [and] insert expansion (e.g. pre-
second insert expansion for request)

♫ 9 a) What are pre-expansions? (e.g. pre-request, pre-invitation, etc.)? What are their
roles? One type of indication that not all first parts necessarily receive the kind of
second parts the speaker might anticipate.
♫ b) What are insertions? The insertion sequence is one adjacency pair within another.
Although the expressions used may be question - answer sequences, other forms of social
action are also accomplished within this pattern.

Adjacency pairs represent social actions, and not all social actions are equal when they
occur as second parts of some pairs.

♫10 What is meant by preference structure? Is the division of second parts into
preferred and dispreferred social acts. The preferred is the structurally expected next act
and the dispreferred in the structurally unexpected next act. '

Yule talks about patterns associated with a dispreferred second. Which patterns are they?

The effect of a dispreferred:

“However, it is important to note that while reference has been made to adjacency pairs in
explicating the sequential architecture of this particular excerpt, this is not to say that all
conversational interaction can be reduced to adjacency pairs or expansions thereof.”
(Haugh 258)

(167)
Jan: Dave I’m going to the store.
(2 seconds)
Jan: Dave?
(2 seconds)
Jan: Dave—is something wrong?

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Dave: What? What’s wrong?

Jan: Never mind.

♫ 11Which of the silences in the samples above can be regarded as attributable silences?
Why? The non-response of Dave is treated as possibly communicating something The
speaker turned over the floor to another and the other (Dave) does not speak, the silence is
attributed to the second speaker and becomes significant.

♫ 12 Conversational styles:
High involvement style vs. high considerateness style The high involvement style is a
conversational style that speaking rate will be relatively fast, with almost no pausing
between turns, and with some overlap or even completion of the other's turn. The high
involvement style differs substantially from another style in which speakers use a slower
rate, expect longer pauses between turns, do not overlap, and avoid interruption or
completion of the other's turn. This non-interrupting, non-imposing style has been called a
high considerate style.

III. Pragmatics of interaction: situated interaction and cultural schemata

“It also has implications for the way in which we approach the analysis of various
pragmatic phenomena in conversational interaction. In particular, the situatedness of
conversational interaction needs to be taken into account, especially in cases where speakers
in local, situated interaction also invoke particular schemata and orders of indexicality that
are variously distributed across social networks.” (Haugh 269)

♫ 13 What is meant by schemata? A schema is a pre-existing knowledge structure In the

memory.

(168) I just rented a house. The kitchen is really big.

(Recall the principles of analogy and local interpretation we discussed in Lesson 2)

Explain the following terms:

♫14 Frame A fixed, static pattern to the shema, it is sometimes called a frame. A frame
shared by everyone within a social group would be something like a prototípicas version.

♫ 15 Script A script is a pre-existing knowledge structure involving event sequences. We

use scripts to build interpretations of accounts of what happened.

♫ 16 What is a cultural schema? When our background knowledge structures Are

culturally determined

Task: Think of e.g. a restaurant in terms of a frame or a script

IV. Pragmatics of interaction: Cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics

♫ 17 According to Yule, what is the difference between cross-cultural and intercultural
(interlanguage) pragmatics? The study of differences in expectations Based on cultural
schemata is part of a broad area of investigation generally known as cross-cultural

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pragmatics. In intercultural pragmatics, the investigation focuses on the communicative

behavior of non-native speakers.

a) Speech acts from the cross-cultural perspective:

It was argued that with offers, the preferred social act in the second part is “accept”.
Does this apply to both English and Czech?

What about compliments?

b) Politeness from the cross-cultural perspective:

Thomas (1995, 161) says that a Japanese student, whose MA thesis she was supervising,
would regularly send her drafts of her work with a note such as the following:

(169) This is a draft of chapter 4. Please read it and comment on it.

Thomas says that the fact the student “spelt out what she wanted done used to infuriate” her.
Why would the Japanese student do it? (British students would just say, “Please could you
look at this draft.”)

Intercultural pragmatics:
A case study: requesting a drink in lingua franca English (Grundy 239)

(170)
We’re on our way to Warsaw. The Polish passenger across the aisle from me
wants another drink and calls out to the Dutch stewardess:
PASSENGER: Excuse me lady can I have a drink
STEWARDESS: One moment while I come back
PASSENGER: Sure

What do you make of the following conversation? Is HM a native speaker of English?

(171)

HM: but the old lady at Chester-le-Street (. .) I think I said to you bad chest (.)
<demonstrates by coughing>=
CS: =oh yes=
JS: =yes <laughs>
HM: I – think – she – will – go – to – her

Task 1: Analyse the following conversation:

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Task 2: To what extent does this interaction correspond to the face-to-face conversational
interaction described by Yule?

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(Haugh 259)

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