прагматика и медиа дискурс / 语用学关键概念 Key Notions for Pragmatics (2009)

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circumstances, their communications will be intended to be informative. Thatassump· tion is instantiated in the cooperative principle (CP):

Make )'Our conv(•rsational contribution such as 1S r mred. at the stage at which it occurs. br the accepted purpu..<:eord1rcchon of the talk exchange in which you arc engaged. (Grice

There exist several kinds ofvaguene,4iS in the above. which (as will be discussed below) contribute to t11e continuing debate over its author's intentions.

To clarify the working of CP. Grice provtded several exemplifications of it, not intended as an exhaustive list: the maxims of colfversatio,. As he stated them in 1975 (45ff.), they are:

I . Quantity; split into two submaxims:

a.Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the purposes of

the exchange).

b.Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

2.Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true; split into two submaxims:

a.Do not sa}' what you believe to be false.

b. Do not sa}' that for which you lack adequate evidence.

3.Relation (sometimes called 'relevance'): Be relevant.

4.Mmmer: Be perspicuou split into various submaxims. such as:

a.Avoid obscurit)' ofexpression.

b.Avoid ambiguity.

c.Be brief

d.Be orderly.

It has been argued bySperber & \ \filson (1986) that all ofthe maxims can be subsumed under one giant maxim of relevance (that is. an extended maxim 3); but among other problems, that would make it more difficult to discuss conflicts ('clashes') between •relevance' and the other ma.xims. Additionally. the maxims seem to have different social and intellectual valuations. Blatant failure to observe 'quality' often appears as a moral rather than an intellectual lapse; failure of'quantity', as a lack ofcommunicative competence; while failures in 'manner' suggest aesthetic shortcomings.

A communication framed exactly according to the above maxims would, to be sure, be perfectly logical> but almost any discourse carried out entirely according to the maxims would be most unusual and perhaps even unintelligible. So. in order to incorporate into his S}'Stem the idea Ulat human communication could be more or less 'illogical' and }'et be perfectly intelligible, Grice added a second subsystem to the

104RobinTolmach Lakoff

cooperative principle: conversational implicature. It is sometimes assumed that the maxims comprisetheCP ;, toto, with implicatureexternaltoit.Grice hirnselfdoesnot discuss theexact relationship among CP.maxims. andimplicature..:;. Butsinceimplica­ ture is intended as one means ofmakingco1wersational contributions 'cooperative it makes sense toseethemassubsumedunderCP. Hearersfirstattempt to make senseof an utterance byrecourse to the maximsalonei ifthis fails. they resort to implicatures to determine its meaningand its speaker's intentions.

Strict adherence to the maxims guarantees clarity and efficiency (in some sense of those terms). But (again, in contradistinction to some assumptions about CP), it does notnecessarily represent'ideal'commm ication, even froma purelyEurocentric or western point ofview. Maxim-observant utterances do exactlyand succinctly express pure semantic meaning; but they may not incorporate many ofthe pragmatic signals that orient participants to significant aspects of the message: discourse genre, deictic situation, seriousness. level of intimacy. mutuality of trust, delicacy of subject mat· ter, and much more. Implicature provides that information, often as important in the full understanding of a communication as its explicit denotation. In that sense, an utterance that fails to incorporate implicature when it is culturally expected might be uncooperative and so liable to misunderstanding - hardl)' 'ideal And part ofthe communicative competenceexpected ofa speakersituated in a culture istheability to knowwhen toexpectpure maxim observance, when tobeonthealert forimplicature,

and how to process implicature based utterances.

Implicature, then, is a failure to be fully informative, entirel)' truthful, totally rei· evant, or utterlyclear but in such a way. and under such discourse conditions, that an interlocutorcan reasonably beexpected to have anticipated the implicature and be able lO relate the contribution to the maxim-observant form intended by its utterer. That suggests that implicature is rule-governed. 1here have been several attempts at the formal description ofimplicature (cf. Ho:rn 1984; \.Vainer & Maida 1990), but they are at best partial. and perhaps antithetical to Grices stated agenda in proposing CP in the first place.

So Grice's system ofconversational logic is composed of three equally necessary parts: the maxims of conversation, the rules of conversational implicature, and the principles stating when the latter are to be invoked. An 'ideal' communication is one that uses each aspect ofCP when, and how, and to the degree. and in the form, that would best enable the hearer to understand the communication as intended by the speaker. It could be argued that maxim observant utterances are closer to an 'idear than those requiringthe useofimplicature,smcetheinvocationofthe latterdoesneed to be explained by additional principles. as maxim-observant utterancesdo not.

Much discussion within the literature on this topic concerns the way in which non-fully maxim·observant utterances are to be related to one another. as well as to their maxim-observant equivalents. As Grice notec;. there are many ways in which

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utterances can fail to be fully described in termsofthe maxims alone. Gricedistinguishes

(a bit confusingly) among violntiou. exploitation, flouting. opting out, and coping with

claslus between maxims ( 1975: 49). A speaker can fail to observe the maxims, yet remain within CP through the use of implicature:

1 . by quiedy and unostentaHously violating a maxim:

A:I am out ofgas.

B:There is a garage around the corner.

2. by optiug out ofobserving a maxim:

A:Is Harry sleeping with Sally?

B:My lips are sea ed.

3.by negotiating a d'.asiJ between two maxims:

A:Where does Max live?

B:Somewhere in France.

(in which it is assumed that B is failing to observe the :first submaxim ofquantity in order to observe the second submaxim of quality)

4.byflouting or exploiting a maxim: that is, •blatantly failing to fulfill it'.

A:Is X a good candidate for the professorship?

B:His handwriting is very legible.

Grice does not discuss a further situationi i.e.• cases in which understanding fails entirely because the entire S)'Stem is abrogated, whether intentionally by the speaker (e.g.. in lying) or unintentionally (in case speaker and hearer are members of cul­ tures with very different rules. or speaker assumes knowledge on the hearer part that the latter does not ha\•e. or is insane). We can coin the term noncooperation to cover these cases. In passing, we might note a distinction with respect to the CP observant cases, 1, and perhaps 3 and 4, as opposed to 2. In the first set, 'understanding' is taken as referring to the content of the speaker's contribution itself: implicature allows the hearer to reconstruct an informative reply. But in 2 (and n1aybe 3 as well), what the hearer (A) 1s informed of is the speaker (B)'s unwillingnes or inability to cooperate: it is a statement of B's noncompliance \\'ith CP. In lhat sense it is infonnative in that it allows A to draw relevant and useful conclusions, even if not the ones A might have been looking for in framing the question.

Another sort of avoidance occurs in case there is a clash, not between two max­ ims, as in Grice's3, but between informativeness and other communicative desiderata. Some of these concerns are: politeness (the avoidance of problen-.atic confrontation, cf.Section 5), selfAdefense (avoiding providing unfavorable information about oneself),

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relling counterexample (as a linguist would). Had CP remained witJlin the domain ofordinary language philosophy. these issues would not havebecome vexatious. But Grices own vagueness becomes a problem when attempts are made to use CP in the rigorous description oflinguistic behavior.

Therefore contrroversy exists (cf. Green 1990 for useful clarification) over how to interpret and utilize CP: must we keep within the explicit boundariesofGrice (1975)? Or can (should) we e)..'Pandand clarify the system to meet the needs ofother theories, other disciplines, other discovery procedures than those of Grice's field? I would answer that question by giving assent to the second option: CL is still CL even when it becomes, strictly speaking. non-Gricean or at least meta-Gricean. From a linguist's perspective, GriceI\Jimselfprovided an architect:c; sketch. but the full-fledged habitable edifice is still under construction; the original blueprint must be continuallyextended and reinterpreted to meet the needs ofthose who v.•ill actually inhabit it. Viable theo­ ries necessaril)rgrowbeyond their creators' original intentions.

Other difficult problems arise in transferring a theory frorn a. discipline like philosophy, whose methodology is largely intuitive and introspective, into another which is empirical (e.g.• ethnomethodology and, increasingly, linguistics proper). A clash ensues with no obvious compromise. Similarly, the universalist perspective ofphilosophy combines poorly with the typological stance ofanthropology and its allied disciplines. The methodological problems entailed in bringing the findings of one field into another were not immediately apparent when CL was first mcorpo· rated into transformational generative grammar in the late 1960s, under the aegis of generative semantics. Both philosophy oflanguage and TGG were introspective and interpretive disciplines; both derived data via introspection; both were universalist in focus. So questions that were to arise later and continue to cause confusion \'/ere not considered.

Linguistics, unlike philosophy. is a sometimes uneasy amalgam of several dis­ ciplines, whose methods range from the high!)' introspective (e.g.• most theories of S)'ntax) to the strongly empirical (e.g.. sociolinguistics and conversation analysis). As generative .semanticsbroadened its focus to consider social and psychological context as factors influencing surface syntactic form) as sociolinguistics came to maturity,and as Ule anal}'Sisofconversation played an increasingly important role within linguistics proper,introspectionand intuition becameincreasingly.suspect, especiallywhenused in isolation (as with TGG and its offspring). Similarly, questions arose concerning other assumptions ofGrice's CL. The questions linguistsask in investigating language. and what linguistsconsider to be satisfactoryand complete answers to those questions differ from Ulose of philosophy. Linguistics requires exhaustiveness: a grammatical rule must be shown. to apply in all relevant case-S, or at least plausible reasons must be adduced for the existence ofcounterexamples. On the other hand, to demonstrate the vatidity ofa claim, a philosopher of language need only show that a proposed thesi. applies tosome relevantcircumstance. Linguistsdeal in rigorousgeneral and universal