ENG508 Treasure

Topic – 114 What Is Implicature?

The term “Implicature” accounts for what a speaker can imply, suggest or mean, as distinct from what the speaker literally says (Grice, 1975). Implicature - ―any meaning conveyed indirectly or through hints, and understood implicitly without ever being explicitly stated‖ (Grundy, 2000). It covers the family of verbs such as ‗imply, suggest, mean‘, which refer to the meaning of an utterance as understood in a given context.

The fact that ―what we literally say and what we clearly mean often differ is intuitively obvious but difficult to describe or explain systematically‖ was the driving force behind Grice‘s work. He was interested in developing a systematic explanation of how and why literal and intended meaning differs. Implicatures are context-dependent -

Generalized Implicature · Scalar Implicature · Particularized Conversational Implicature

In generalized conversational implicature ―no special background knowledge of the context of utterance is required in order to make the necessary inferences‖ (Yule, 1996). It is a conversational implicature that is inferable without reference to a special context (glossary of English terms).

One common example in English involves the expressions with the form an X, usually imply that X is not closely related to the speaker or subject, as in the following expression: John walked into a house yesterday and saw a tortoise. This expression implies that the house is not John‘s house A scalar implicature is a quantity implicature based on the use of an informationally weak term in an implicational scale. Scalar implicatures arise in examples e.g. ‗Some professors are famous‘ where the speaker‘s use of ‗some‘ typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g. ‗all‘. Some professors are famous, therefore, gives rise to the implicature that not all professors are famous. Similarly, in the utterance, ‗Some of the boys went to the party‘, the word ‗some‘ implicates "not all of the boys went to the party."

Classic examples of scales include numerals (< … three, two, one>), modals (<necessarily, possibly>, <must, should, may>), connectives (<and, or>), adverbs (<always, often, sometimes>), degree adjectives (<hot, warm>) and verbs of ranking (<know, believe>, <love, like>) or completion (<start, finish Particularized conversational implicatures (PCIs) are the inferences which are worked out while drawing totally on the specific context of the utterance. Most of the time, our conversations take place in a very specific context in which locally recognized inferences are assumed (Yule, 2002).

Consider an example: A: I‘ m going to the prison tomorrow. B: Will 200 Dollars do? [context: A is visiting a prison and proposing to B to help in funding the shopping for that prison] Topic – 119 Properties of Conversational Implicature

Cancellability is one of the properties of conversational implicature. It is also known as defeasibility. Presence of a conversational implicature relies on a number of factors such as the conventional meaning of words used, the linguistic and situational contexts, etc. So if any of them changes, the implicature will also change.

Non-detachability - 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. It will not be detached from the utterance as a whole, even though the specific words may be changed.

Reinforceability - Implicatures can be reinforced, e.g. John answered most of the questions. But he wasn‘t able to answer the last question. (not redundant)

Non-conventionality - implicature is not carried by what is said, but only by the saying of what is said, or by ‗putting it that way.‘

Calculability – speakers try to convey conversational implicatures and hearers are able to understand them suggests that implicatures are calculable.

Topic – 120 Conventional Implicature

Conventional implicature is not based on the cooperative principle or the maxims. They do not have to occur in a conversation. They do not depend on special contexts for their interpretation. However, they are associated with specific words that result in additional conveyed meanings when used. The English conjunction ‗but‘ is one of these words.

The interpretation of any utterance of the type ‗p but q‘ will be based on the conjunction ‗p & q‘ plus an implicature of ‗contrast‘ between the information in ‗p‘ and the information in ‗q‘. Other English words such as ‗even‘ and ‗yet‘ also have conventional implicatures.

Topic – 121 Properties of Conventional Implicature

Non-truth-conditionality - conventional implicature do not make any contribution to truth conditions e.g. a) we want peace and they want war. b) we want peace but they want war. Both ‗a‘ and ‗b‘ shares the same truth conditions. Conventional implicature is associated with speaker or utterance rather than a sentence. Conventional implicatures are not derived from Grice‘s Cooperative principle and its component maxims but are attached by convention to a particular lexical item or linguistic construction. They are, therefore, an arbitrary part of the meaning, and must be learned ‗ad hoc‘. Conventional implicatures are not calculable via any natural procedure but are rather given by convention, thus they must be stipulated. They are not cancelable i.e. they cannot be defeated. They are (arguably) detachable because they are depending on the particular linguistic items used.

Topic – 122 Strong Implicature

Strong implicature is a communicated implication of an utterance which is the main communicative point of the utterance. The idea is that sometimes a speaker intends that her hearer grasp a particular implication without which the utterance would not be relevant. Strong implicature is implicature that is related directly by the spoken utterances or is that premises and conclusions which the hearer is strongly encouraged but not actually forced to supply.

Topic – 123 Weak Implicature

Weak Implicature is a communicated implication of an utterance which is not by itself the main communicative point of the utterance. The idea is that for some utterances a hearer can understand what a speaker is trying to communicate even if he fails to get one or more implicatures. 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.

Topic – 125 Spatial Deixis

Spatial deixis are used to indicate the relative location of people and things. Also known as ‗place deixis‘. Some pure place deictic words are: here and there (adverbs); this and that (demonstrative pronouns).

A deictic projection is accomplished via dramatic performance when we use direct speech to represent the person, location and feelings of someone or something else e.g. while visiting a pet store, says, I was looking at this little puppy in a cage with such a sad look on its face. It was like, ‗oh, I am so unhappy here, will you set me free?‘ The ‗here‘ of the cage is not the actual physical location of the person uttering the words, but the location of that person performing in the role of the puppy.

Topic – 126 Person Deixis

Person Deixis an expression used to point to a person (me, you, him, them) is an example of person deixis. 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). A speech event includes at least two persons: First person = speaker and Second person = addressee.

Topic – 127 Social Deixis

Social deixis is concerned with the codification of the social status of the speaker, addressee, or a third person or entity referred to as well as the social relationships holding between them (Levinson 1983; Fillmore 1997; Manning 2001). It may include social class, kin relationship, age, sex, profession, and ethnic group.

―The pronoun systems of some languages also grammaticalize the information about the social identities or relationships of the participants in the conversation‖ , Levinson (1983) call this phenomenon a social deixis. Social deixis refers to expressions which clearly encode social meaning. ―Address terms‖ i.e. social status is indexicalized through the linguistic terms, for example, ‗Madam‘, ‗Sir‘, ‗Professor‘, ‗Doctor‘.

Topic – 128 Temporal Deixis

Temporal deixis is also known as ‗time deixis‘. It is concerned with the encoding of the temporal points and spans relative to the time at which an utterance is produced in a speech act (Huang, 2014). It includes time adverbs e.g. now, then, soon, last week, today, tonight, yesterday, tomorrow, etc. ‗Now‘ indicates both the time coinciding with speaker‘s utterance and the time of the speaker‘s voice being heard.