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

150 Marcella Bertuccelll Papl

NonconventionaJ implicata of the conversational type are in a systematic correspon· dence Y.ith the assumptions required in order to maintain the supposition that the interactants areobserving the Cooperative principle and its maxims. TheCooperative Principle is formulated as follows:

Make )'Our conversational contributaon such as is required. at the stage at which at occurs, b)' the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you arc engaged.

and it is articulated into four maximsprescribing that the speaker should be infonna· tive (the maxim ofQuantity). sincere (the ma.xim ofQuality), relevant {the maxim of Relation or Relevance) and perspicuous {the maxim ofManner}.

Thecooperativeprincipledoesnotaim atdictatingthelaws ofoursocial behavior: it aims instead at de,c;cribing the rational working ofour mind in finding out what a speaker means when he says something.

Aparticipant ina talkexchangemay violatethemaxims) andinsodoinghemaybe misleading.He/she mayalso optout from cooperativeness, that is, he/she ma)r decide not tosayanything. not tocontribute to theongoinginteraction. Or he/shemayflouta n1axim,byblatantly failingtofulfilit. Now, ifaspeakerisable tofulfilthe requirements ofa maxhn, if he/she is not trying to mislead. and is cooperating, then the hearer is faced with a problem: How can the utterance he/she has produced be reconciled with the overall Cooperative Principle? It is this situation which typically gives rise to a conversational implicature, and when a conversational implicature isgenerated in this way, it is said thata maxim hasbeen exploited.

Grice's famous examples will be repeated here for the sake ofargumentation.

A person is standing by an obviously immobilized car)someone approaches him and the following exchange take,c; place:

A:I am out ofpetrol

B:There is a garage round the corner.

On theassumption that B iscooperating, A Y.ill try to figureout how his/herutterance may be made to fulfill the Quality maxim. He will therefore recover the implicated meaning that the garage is open and has petrol to sell.

The following is an example that mvolves exploitation, that is a procedure by which a maxim is flouted for the purpose ofgetting in a conversational implicature by means ofsome figure ofspeech.

A is writing a testimonial about a candidate for a philosophy job, and his letter readsas follows:

"Dear Sir, Mr X's command o(English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorial has been regular. Yours, etc:·

lmpiiCttMSS 1S1

Clcarlr. A is not ophng out, he is cooperating, but he ts netther givmg the requested informatwn nor is he glvmg the right <luanht)' of mformatton, thereby implicating that Mr X is not good at phtlosophy and that ts rductant to wntc this down.

The maxim ofquality is flouted by means ofiron)' and metaphors: e.g., when you say ofsomeone you trusted completely but who has betrayed your trust that "He is a fine friend' or when we use such expressions as "You are the cream in my coffee': which characteristically involve categorial falsity.

Finally, the maxim ofmanner is flouted bydeliberate ambiguities, or by failures to be brief, like in the comment ofa reviewer who chose to write

"Miss X produced a s rics of sounds that corr spond closely with th scor ofHome sweet home' " instead o(wnting " iiss X sang 'I lome sweet home'·:

The implicature triggered by the selection ofa longer .expression in lieu ofthe concise verb "to sing'' amowlts to the information that it is impossible to properly call the performance ofMissX ..singing"; hence the conclusion that Miss X's performance was verypoor.

2.4.1Generalizedandparticularizedlmplicatures

The implicatura'i discussed so far derive from the unerance of particular utterances in particular contexts, but there are other sorts of conversational implicature which remain constant in all contexts. This is what happens for example in (36).

(36) George went into a hotuc: p:stc:rday and found a lurtoise msidc the front d<>or.

The implicature arising from the use of ..into a house" is that it was not George's house. Similarly, ifa man says (37) he is implicating that it was not his 'Aife that he went out with.

As this kind of implicatur.es remain constant under all circumstances of utterance1 theyarecalled 'generalized implicatures' and as such theyare contrasted with the ones exemplified above, which are called 'particularized implicatures: A Generalized impli­ cature can. ofcoursebe cancelledorsuspended incontextsthat explicitlydeny it. thus behaving in this respect like particularized implicatures. They cannot, however, be

..detached", that is, it will not be possible to find another way ofsaying the same thing whichsimplylacks the implicature in question.

Implicatures are tl1erefore characterized by Grice as implicated meanings that can be worked out on the basis of (1) the conventional meanings ofthe words used, together with the identityofany references that maybe involved; (2) the Cooperative Principle and its maxims; (3) the context, linguistic or otherwise, of the utterance;

(4) other items ofbackground knowledge; and (5) the fact (or supposed fact) that all

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relevant items falling under the previous headings are available to both participants andboth participants know or assume thisto be the case.

Some important consequencesfollowfrom such a characterization:

a.Implicatures are not part ofthe conventional meaning ofan expression• rather, they presuppose it;

b.Calculating a conversational implicature is not a matter oftruth conditions: the validityofan implicature is not required by the truth ofwhat is said (which may be true while its implicature(s) maybe false): implicaturesare notcan-ied bywhat issaid, but only by the saying ofwhat is said;

c.As a consequence ofthe fact that to calculate implicature.<; is to calculate what has tobesupposed in ordertopreservethesupposition that theCooperativeprinciple isbeingobserved, implicatures turn out to be essentiall)' indeterminate in nature: there may in fact bemore than one possible explanation for them.

Of course there may be clashes among the maxims: thus a doctor who says of his patient that "one ofthe valves ofhis hearr has narrowed, and consequently the blood no longer flows well.. instead ofsimply sa)•ing that he has had a ''mitral stenosis" will certainly violate the quantity maxim because he speaks longer while he could have used ashorterway, buthewill dothat in ordertofulfill the maxim ofmannerprescrib ing "not tobe obscure".

2.4.2Conventionalimpllcatures

Griceidentifiesanotherkindofnon-truth-conditional inference)which hecalled 'con· ventional' implicature. Conventional implicatures are non·truth-conditional aspects ofmeaning which differ radicallyfrom conversational implicatures in that theydo not derive from any superordinate pragmaticprinciplessuch as the Cooperativeprinciple and its maxims: rather, they are conventionally associated with some expressions or lexical items. Grice( 1961/1989) suggested that lmr can beanalyzedashavingthe same truth functional content as a11d, and, additionally, a conventional implicature that there is some contrast between the two conjuncts: thus (38) implicates that 'poverty1 normally contrasts with (hone,o;tf, and asserts that Ceorge is both poor and honest.

(3S) Georg is poor but honest.

Analyses in terms of conventional implicatures have been provided for therefore (Grice 1975/1989: 44), e en (Kempson 1975; Karttunen & Peters 1979). and yet (\.Yilson 1975).

It follows from the fact that they are independent of pragmatic principles that conventionalimplicatures cannot becalculated in thewayconversational implicatures are• nor can they be cancelled when thecontext varies, as they do notdepend on the contextbuton thelexical items. Finally. they can bedetachedfrom theexpression they

lmpllc.tn ss 153

are attached to: we can replace but witll and, and the implicature vanishes while the truth conditions remain constant.

In a sense, as Levinson ( 1983) noticed, if such are their defining properties, con· ventional implicatures are not especially interesting objects: their conceptualization amounts to nothing more than the acknowledgment that truth-conditional semantics is incapable of dealing 'Aith the meaning of natural language expressions which indeed is the starting point of Grice's reflections on meaning.

The few examples discussed in the literature actually seem to encourage a dismis· sive attitude towards this notion: Kempson (1975) claims that in any case there are too many candidates for one category. and Karttunen & Peters (1975) propose that conventional implicatures areequivalent to pragmatic presuppositions, while Marconi {1979) has looked at them with suspicion and Blakemore ( 1987) has openly criticized their theoretical legitimacy.

2.5Scalar implicatures

Not all ma.xims enjoy the . ame status. Some seem to have a privileged status, but there is no agreement as to which ones. Grice himself acknowledged that the first maxim of quality "does not seem to be just one among a number of recipes for pro· ducing contributions....other maxims come into operation only on the assumption that this maxim of Quality is satisfied'' (Grice 1975/1989: 371 ). Sperber & \.Viison ( 1986), on the contrary, have elaborated a theory entirely based on the primacy of the maxim of Relation.

Among the other maxims, the one that has most attracted the semanticists• atten­ tion is the maxim ofQuantity. It is from discussions on this maxim that the notion of

..scalar implicature'' has arisen. Horn (1972, 1973) and Gazdar (1979) have contributed to show that we can find in the lexicon of a language items which can be arranged in scales. A linguistic scale is a set oflexical expressions belonging to the same grammati cal category, which can be arranged in a linear order along a gradient of informativity or semantic force. A scale has the general form of an ordered set of 'scalar predicates', included, according to the notation of classical logic, between hooks: (i 1, i2, i3 ....in). The scale states a semantic relation between the predicates: i1 entails i2, i2 entails i3, and the relation holds for any sentence constructed with these predicates, but the reverse is not true. Here are some examples ofsuch scales:

(all, most. man)·· some, few); (and. or}; (excellent, good); (hot, warm);{alwa) . oncn, sometunes);{know.believe);{certam. probable, poss1ble).

According to our definition, a sentence like (39) entails the proposition in (40).

(39) All lingutsts hkc sex. (40} Somelingutsts like sex.

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That is, when one is true the other is also true. But another general consequence can be predicted as following from a scale: ifa speakerasserts something about a lower. or weaker scalar predicate,s/he thereby implicates thats/he is not in the position to assert the stronger one. Thus, ifsomeonesays (40), not only is sentence (39) not entailed, it is also implicated that the speaker does not know whether all linguists love sex. In order to demonstrate that lhe latter is an implicature, in fact a special subtype ofimplicature called a 'scalar implicature we should recall Grice•s characterization ofimplicatures as non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning which can be computed on the basis ofthe Cooperative principle and its maxims. Indeed, a plausible argument built upon such premises might read as follows:

"The speaker id p:

There is an expression q whic:h is more informative than p (such that q entails p);

q is not essentiall)' longer or more complex than p: therefore the ch01ce of p ts not dictated br obedience to the ma:'(Jm ofmanner ("be bnd'');

by choo.smg p instead of q. the speaker has v10lated the maxim of quanhty, which prt'Scribcs that one should be adequately mforrnatwc;

assuming that the speaker is cooperating, we must conclude that s/hc wants us to conclude that s/he knows that q docs nut hold, or at least that s/htdocs not know whc:ther q holds or not;

m so domg s/he is followmg the maxim ofQualit)',according to whtch oneshould not say things for which one tacks ad«}uatc evidence...

It is worth noticing that scalar implicatures thus generated derive from what has OT been said. and that they are epistemically qualified, tl1at is they bring into play the state ofknowledge of the speaker.

Quantity-based scalar implicatures - inviting someone to infer from the use of some. .. that for all one knows not all... are therefore driven by some sort of shared knowledge, namely by your knowing (and by my knowing that you know) that I expressed a weaker proposition in lieu of an equally unmarked utterance that would have expres..ed a stronger proposition entailing the one I did express.

Another way ofexpressing this intuition is that scalar predicates, and related scalar propositions, can be viewed as having a lower and an upper bound. The lower bound si entailed (some= at least some) while the upper bound is implicated (some= at most some) as a cancelable inference generated by the first maxim of quantity.

Scalar implicatures are an important contribution to the treatment of lexical meanings. as they allow to po,o;it one central meaning for words which are then subject to carqr implicatures of various kinds in different contexts. They are not, however, without problems. Consider an utterance like {41). The invited inference would normally be what is explicated in (42).

(41) [{you tidr up your room, then yuu can go to the cmt-ma.

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the territory of implicature. As a matter of fact, the linguistic decoding of an utterance takes variable amounts ofproce ing efforts depending on the length and complexity of the utterance itself. Moreover, further energy is absorbed by the setting up ofa context of assumptions (selected out ofall the pre-existing assumptions and possibly others drawn from the physical environment) against which the cognitive impact ofthe utterance can be assessed. The interaction of the explicature with the context involves a variable num­ ber ofapplications ofa variable number ofinferential rule, : the more ofeach. the greater the global cost ofutterance understanding. It is therefore a need of our cognitive system to limit the enrichments to the ones which provide the relevant proposition, that is. the most economic and at the same time the infonnationalty richest one.

If carried to its extreme consequences, the discussion on explicatures turns out to be potentially subversive of Grice's overall program, in that it shows that the dis· tinction between what is said and what is implicated does not neatly correspond to the domains of semantics and pragmatics as Grice wanted to have it. Instead. there is a penumbra area between what is said and what is implicated. which involves that implicitness is a matter of degrees, and that subtler analyses are needed in order to cope with this state ofaffairs.

2.8lmplicitures

For one thing, as Bach (1994} points out, the phenomenon of semantic indeterminacy. or semantic generality and nonspecificity, better known assemantic underdetennina· tion, is pervasive and multifaceted. Such sentences as (44) and (45)

are perfectly well·formed syntactically. but do not express a complete proposition: for

them to express a complete proposition it would be necessary to specify 'for what' steel is not strong enough in (44), and something like the scope of•atmost' in (45). The latter

sentence may in fact cornmunicate that Willie tried and nearly succeeded in robbing a bank or that he robbed something else which was only less big than a bank, or possibly that he did something to the bank which was nearly a robbery.

The two exanlple, therefore highlight two different ways in which a sentence can be semantically underdetermined: (44) is a case of constituent underdetermination, (45) a case of structural underdetennination (see also Bertuccelli Papi 1995). Some more examples ofconstituent underdetermination are listed below: