ENG508 Objective Notes Lessons 23-43

Lesson 23 to 43

1. The term Implicature accounts for what a speaker can imply, suggest or mean, as distinct from what the speaker literally says (Grice, 1975). 2. Implicature - “any meaning conveyed indirectly or through hints, and understood implicitly without ever being explicitly sta ted” (Grundy, 2000). 3. Implicature covers the family of verbs such as ‘imply, suggest, mean’, which refer to the meaning of an utterance as understood in a given context. 4. British language philosopher, Paul Grice (19131988), made remarkable contributions to the field

of pragmatics

5. Implicatures are context dependent. 6. Conversational Implicature is implied by the speaker in making an utterance; it is part of the content of the utterance; it does not contribute to direct (or explicit) utterance content, and it is not encoded by the linguistic meaning of what has been uttered. 7. Sara: will you eat some of this chocolate cake? Amna: I’m on a diet. is an example of Conversational implicature. 8. GCI stands for generalized conversational implicature 9. In generalized conversational implicature - “no special background knowledge of the context of utterance is required in order to make the necessary inferences” Yule, 1996

10. GCI is a conversational implicature that is inferable without reference to a special context.
11. John walked into a house yesterday and saw a tortoise is an example of GCI. (understood that this is not John’s house)
12. A scalar implicature is a quantity implicature based on the use of an informationally weak term in an implicational scale.
13. Scalar implicatures arise in examples e.g. ‘Some professors are famous’
14. Classic examples of scales implicatures include numerals modals and adjectives
15. PCI stands for Particularized conversational implicatures.
16. Particularized conversational implicatures (PCIs) are the inferences which are worked out while drawing totally on the specific context of the utterance.
17. In PCIs most of the time, our conversations take place in a very specific context in which locally recognized inferences are assumed (Yule, 2002).
18. Cancellability is one of the properties of conversational implicature. It is also known as defeasibility.
19. A conversational implicature is attached to the semantic content of what is said, not to the linguistic form i.e. it is possible to use a synonym and keep the implicature intact.
20. Speakers try to convey conversational implicatures and hearers are able to understand them suggests that implicatures are calculable.
21. Conventional implicature is not based on the cooperative principle or the maxims.
22. Conventional implicature do not have to occur in a conversation (but in context). They do not depend on special contexts for their interpretation.
23. Conventional implicature are associated with specific words that result in additional conveyed meanings when used. The English conjunction ‘but’ is one of these words.
24. English words such as ‘even’ and ‘yet’ also have conventional implicatures.
25. Conventional implicature do not make any contribution to truth conditions.
26. Conventional implicature is associated with speaker or utterance rather than a sentence.
27. Conventional implicatures are an arbitrary part of the meaning, and must be learned ‘ad hoc’.
28. Conventional implicatures are not calculable via any natural procedure but are rather given by convention, thus they must be stipulated.
29. Strong implicature is a communicated implication of an utterance which is the main communicative point of the utterance.
30. Strong implicature is implicature that is related directly by the spoken utterances
31. Strong implicature is that premises and conclusions which the hearer is strongly encouraged but not actually forced to supply.
32. Weak Implicature is a communicated implication of an utterance which is not by itself the main communicative point of the utterance.
33. Weak implicature is the weaker the encouragement, and the wider the range of possibilities among which the hearer can choose, the weaker the implicatures. For example, John: What are you planning to do today? Mary: I’m tired.
34. Any linguistic form that we use to accomplish the task of ‘pointing out’ is called deixis expressions.
35. When you notice a strange object and ask, ‘What is that?’, you are using a deictic expression (that) to indicate something in the immediate context.
36. Deixis is also called indexical expressions.
37. The function of indexical expressions is to tell us where to look for a reference.
38. Reference is mostly related to a particular person, place or time.
39. Deixis is also known as the ‘Indexicality of language’ as it operates as indexes of specific meaning in a context.
40. Spatial deixis include (here, there, this, that)
41. Temporal deixis include (now, then)
42. Person deixis include (you, me, she, him)
43. Spatial deixis are used to indicate the relative location of people and things.
44. Spatial deixis is also known as ‘place deixis’.
45. Some pure place deictic words are: here and there (adverbs); this and that (demonstrative pronouns).
46. Pragmatic basis of spatial deixis is actually psychological distance.
47. Physically close objects will tend to be treated by the speaker as psychologically close.
48. Sometimes, speaker marks physically distant thing, generally, as psychologically distant e.g. that man over there.
49. A speaker may also mark something physically close as psychologically distant e.g. (a perfume being sniffed by the speaker) ‘I don’t like that’.
50. Person Deixis an expression used to point to a person (me, you, him, them) is an example of person deixis.
51. Person deixis operates on a basic three part division, exemplified by the pronouns for first person (“I , me, mine”), second person (you, your, yours), and third person (he, she, it).
52. A speech event includes at least two persons: First person = speaker and Second person = addressee.
53. Usually, the third person is not grammatically marked, because the only two persons of importance are the first person and the second person.
54. There is an exclusive ‘we’ where speaker plus other(s), excluding addressee.
55. Inclusive ‘we’ include speaker and addressee included.
56. The inclusive-exclusive distinction may also be noted in the difference between saying.