Conversational Implicature

For the remainder of this chapter I shall pursue the complementarist position further, and this means that I shall find it useful to make a distinction between the sense of an utterance (its conceptual or logical meaning) and its force (or more fully, its illocutionary force). It is the task of a semantic model to account for the former, and the task of a semantic model allied with a pragmatic model to account for the latter.

In performatives, the marriage between semantics and pragmatics is a very unequal one: the force of the utterance is explicitly given as part of its sense, so that need for a complementary model of pragmatics is not evident. But there arc oilier, perhaps more typical cases where the gap between sense and force is wider, and where pragmatics has a good deal to explain. Consider:

(13) Is that your coat on the floor?

(14) Waiter, there's a fly in my soup.

Both of these are likely to have a force which is a mixture of a complaint and a directive. If a parent asks a child (13), it is not likely to be just a request for information, but an utterance whose purport might be roughly expressed as follows: 'If that is your coat on the floor, I am displeased with you for leaving it there, and I want you to pick it up.' If a customer says (14) to a waiter, he is not just passing on some gratuitous information, but may well be implying something like this;

'I am outraged at the standards of this restaurant, and you'd better hurry and bring me a new bowl of soup, or else ...' Of course, intonation has an important semantic role here; but the main point is that there is a clear discrepancy between what the sentence says and what the speaker of the sentence intends the hearer to understand by it.

It may seem that the relation between sense and force is unsystematic and infinitely variable according to context. To some extent, we must acknowledge this. But a promising approach to pragmatic explanation is offered by H. P. Grice in his 'Logic and Conversation' (1975). As we have already noted (pp. 296-7), Grice argues that certain aspects of conversational behaviour cannot be accounted for unless we assume that (i) people arc cooperative, and tliat (ii) people assume that other people are cooperative. He therefore proposes a Cooperative Principle, which I shall from now on abbreviate to CP. He also proposes that, under this general principle, a number of distinct maxims are subsumed. Four categories of maxims are distinguished:

quantity: Give the right amount of information; i.e.

1. Make your contribution as informative as is required.

2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true; i.e.

1. Do not say what you believe to be false.

2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. relation: Be relevant. manner: Be perspicuous; i.e.

1. Avoid obscurity of expression.

2. Avoid ambiguity.

3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).

4. Be orderly. [Adapted from Grice (1975, pp. 45 ft).]

In claiming that these maxims are ordinarily observed, Grice is interested in explaining why utterances often seem to mean more than they say. His contention is that only if we assume that people are trying to be cooperative in these ways can we work out how a given utterance is intended, and interpreted, in a particular way. Take, for example, this dialogue (cf. dark and Clark 1977: p. 122):

(15) A: I saw Mr X having dinner with a woman yesterday. B: Really? Docs his wife know about it? A: Of course she docs. She was (lie woman lie was having dinner with.

B has reason to feel cheated, deliberately misled, by A. From A's opening remark B has reasonably drawn the conclusion:

(16) The woman Mr X was having dinner with was not his wife.'

If we ask why B has drawn this conclusion, it is plausible to suppose • him to have argued rouglily as follows:

(17) A has stated that Mr X was having dinner with a woman. A has withheld the identity of the woman, thereby giving less information than is desirable. Therefore A appears to be breaking the Maxim of Quantity. But A is observing the CP, I assume. Therefore A will not break the Maxim of Quantity unless, by doing so, he can uphold the CP at a deeper level. This will be the case if A does not know the identity of the woman concerned, for to specify the identity of a woman when you do not know who she is is to break ihe Maxim of Quality

('Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence'). Therefore A does not know the identity of the woman. But it is unlikely that A docs not know the wife of Mr X; therefore I conclude that (16).

It is to conclusions like (16) that Grice gives the name conversational IMPl.ICATURE. Such inferences, it will be noted, are arrived at on the basis of

(a) The conventional conceptual meaning of the utterance.

(b) The assumption that the speaker is observing the CP, and is assuming the hearer to assume that too.

(c) Relevant background knowledge.

(d) Informal reasoning.

Two points to note about this explanation in terms of the CP are (i) it is assumed that the relation between sense and force is not arbitrary, but can be 'worked out' rationally, on the basis of(a)-(d); (ii) the maxims arc not absolute rules: they can be flouted, they can conflict with one another, and the speaker can decide to uphold the one at the expense of another, as when, in (17) above, A is assumed to uphold the Maxim of Quality at the expense of the Maxim of Quantity. This preference can be exercised within the ambit of the CP; yet there is the further possibility that the speaker may take a more drastic step of abandoning the CP - of not being cooperative at all. Only on this basis could we understand A's second remark in (15), a joke at B's expense. We have already noted (p. 295) the crucial property of implicature - that it can be cancelled by contradictory information - and this cancellation of implicature is illustrated in (15), when B's second remark cancels the implicature (16).

Here are two more examples of how implicatures can derive from the breaking of maxims of the CP:

(18) A: Someone's eaten all the chocolates. B: Well, I like that!

(19) A: Where's my box of chocolates?

B: The children were in your room this morning. [Example (19) is from Smith and Wilson (1979, p. 175).]

In (18), the remark I like that will almost certainly implicate its negative:

'I don't like that.' This kind of implicature, to which the name 'sarcasm' or 'irony' is given, involves a breach in the Maxim of Quality, in that the speaker does not tell the truth. In (19), on the other hand, there is an apparent breach of the Maxim of Relation, since there seems to be no conversational connection between the contributions of A and B. Clearly a relevant response to A's question would be a proposition informing A where the chocolates are. The fact that B does not give such a reply implicates that B does not know where the chocolates are; and moreover, the fact that B says "The children may be guilty of removing in this context implicates that B thinks the children may be guilty of removing or eating the chocolates.

Questions for self-examination

1. What kinds of analogies may be made between semantics and pragmatics?

2. What is the language performance?

3. What is the language competence?

4. How are semantics and pragmatics referenced?

5. Argue the assumption, that semantics and pragmatics are connected. Use your own examples!

6. What is your view at the referring between semantics and pragmatics? Why is it?

7. What is the illocutionary force?

8. What are the communication intentions?

9. What is the presupposition?

10. What are the predication and proposition?

11. What factors did Austin call "happiness" or "felicity" conditions?

Why did Austin use these denominations?

12. What are the performatives?

13. Why are performatives attracted the attention of linguistics?

14. What is the principle difference of J. R. Searle's position referring to pragmatics?

Tasks

1. Find out the presupposition and predication in the next sentenses.

I have been waiting for you two hous! Where have you been?

Tom had translated all the artcles when his friend phoned him.

2. Go into the model of analyze of discourse and make so analyze.

3. Read the texts referring the interpretation and translation texts. Prepare for the debuts these problems.

A theoretical account of translation - without a translation theory

Gutt, Dr Ernst-August (1990) A theoretical account of translation - without a translation theory. Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 2 (2):pp 135-164.

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the phenomenon commonly referred to as "translation" can be accounted for naturally within the relevance theory of communication developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986a): there is no need for a distinct general theory of translation. Most kinds of translation can be analysed as varieties of interpretive use. I distinguish direct from indirect translation. Direct translation corresponds to the idea that translation should convey the same meaning as the original. It requires the receptors to familiarise themselves with the context envisaged for the original text. The idea that the meaning of the original can be communicated to any receptor audience, no matter how different their background, is shown to be a misconception based on mistaken assumptions about communication. Indirect translation involves looser degrees of resemblance. I show that direct translation is merely a special case of interpretative use, whereas indirect translation is the general case. In all cases the success of the translation depends on how well it meets the basic criterion for all human communication, which is consistency with the principle of relevance. Thus the different varieties of translation can be accounted for without recourse to typologies of texts, translations, functions or the like.