Introduction
Philosopher of Linguistics, Paul Grice was one of the first linguistics to systematically address the difference between what is expressed literally in an utterance, and what is implied or suggested in the same sentence. Grice’s paper published in 1975 was popular because it was the first to address this problem and also because he set out a clear framework with which he could characterize different utterances. Grice’s theory consisted of 3 main subcategory’s; Conversational implicature, conventional implicature and generalised conversational implicature.
Account of grices basic theory
According to Grice there were two contrasting elements within a sentence, which combined to make up the total significance of an utterance; ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’. Grice never really fully explained ‘what is said’ in much detail but he does state however that ‘given a knowledge of the English language, but no knowledge of the circumstances of the utterance, one would know something about what the speaker had said’ (Grice 1975:25) . By this he meant that upon hearing the utterance the hearer would have understood or gained some kind of knowledge of what the speaker was saying even if it was not the intended meaning. For Example in [1] seeing it from a ‘what is said’ point of view the hearer would believe that perhaps Annes ex-husband is in fact a usually a considerate man and she says that in surprise.
[1] Anne: My ex-husband has just told me he cant look after our daughter tomorrow after all
Bess: He’s such a considerate man!
The other half, ‘What is implicated’, is what Grice called an Implicature. Grice coined this term, as he believed that using an already existing word might confuse people because of the wo...
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...example of violating a Quality maxim
[15] Supervisor: Did you read the articles and write up the review of literature?
Supervisee: I certainly read the articles. Weren’t they captivating!
[16] A: You stained my dress with red wine, you klutz!
B: Nobody will notice.
[17] A: did you like my presentation?
B: The attendance was impressive, wasn’t it?
Infringing a maxim consists of a speaker failing to observe the maxim, even if he has no intention of generating an implicature and no intention of deceiving. This generally occurs as a result of imperfect linguistic performance, for example in the case of a young child of foreigner, or also from impaired linguistic performance, caused by excitement, disability, nervousness or drunkenness.
A speaker opts out of observing maxim whenever they indicate unwillingness to cooperate in the way that the maxim requires.
6. Irony - the use of words that mean the exact opposite of their actual meaning
Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation, edited by G. Jefferson, Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell.
Success. Seven letters, two syllables, and essentially, the goal of almost every person to walk the planet. The interesting thing about success is that it isn’t a set in stone goal, but an ideology. With each person, success is redefined, argued, and tried. Success comes in different forms and levels, but at the end of the day every person who has been deemed successful mentions one word: failure. Yet, it isn’t failure in of itself that produces success, but the determination and desire to work through it. Failure can only indoctrinate when an individual decides to work past it and improve from it. Often, however, the strenuous process of failure and grit is glamorized, and the true factors that play into success are forgotten. For example,
Pages 261- 267. doi: 10.1016/j.pec.2011.10.006. Cameron, D. (2001). The 'Case Working with spoken discourse and communication. London: Thousand Oaks & Co. Carson, C., & Cupach, W. (2000).
o An example is “business is business.” The 1st business invokes denotes the transaction under discussion and the 2nd invokes the connotations of the word.
Knobe, Joshua. "Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language." Oxford Journals 63.3 (2003): 190-94. JStor. Oxford University Press.
...t the object is an actual constituent of that proposition. The proposition contains merely the constituents of those words contained in the denoting phrase.
Donnellen (1966) criticized the Russell and Strawson’s view. He claimed that there are attributive and referential uses of definite description. The former is about attributively using definite description in an assertion which stating something about “A is B”. The latter is about speaker using the description to let the audience to know what is “A is B” about. Donnellen claimed that Russell focus on former and Strawson focus on latter.
Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism has significantly influenced the study of language and several other disciplines.
This article really covers censoring. The Golden Age of Free Speech analyzes how different censoring is compared from now to a few years ago. Tufekci’s audience for this article is more toward the younger generations that use the internet and social medias. With most of our social media, there is very little censoring as of to back then when what was displayed on television and newspapers were carefully advised. Now, this is our golden age of speech because anyone has access to social media and post their opinions and thoughts.Sometimes because everyone can post news, opinions, thoughts or experiences online and sometimes you have to decide whether it’s true or not. Then, with everything people post they have an audience. There are different types of audiences where people can love, hate or mock a person; the ability of posting stuff for the the world to see takes responsibility on what is morally right to post online. In this century being able to spread ideas and have an audience is no longer limited because of the attention people give to social media platforms and with these platforms they are based off of free speech. Freedom of speech is necessary to keep
He argues that one may be able to note the intentionality but he/she may not be able to know the intention, and this makes it important to differentiate between text and discourse. Discourse is responsible for finding the intention of the text by relating its content to the extralinguistic reality. The process of relating the text to the extralinguistic reality, which is the discourse, results in the text. Widdowson thus defines discourse as “the pragmatic process of meaning negotiation” and the text as “its product” (p.8). Other scholars who distinguish between text and discourse in terms of product and process are Brown and Yule (1983). They state that “the discourse analyst treats his data as the record (text) of a dynamic process in which language was used as an instrument of communication in a context by a speaker/ writer to express meanings and achieve intentions (discourse)’ (Brown and Yule, 1983:26). It can be noted that Brown and Yule’s description of text and discourse is similar to that of
The Pragmatic Theory. Searle proposed an account of metaphor that takes Davidson’s theory even further than the Naïve theory and rejects the idea of linguistic ambiguity idea (Lycan 184). Metaphorical utterance is taken to be a linguistic communication and it posits a cognitive mechanism that computes something that could be called metaphorical meaning. This theory of metaphor is the most compelling because metaphor is seen as simply of species of Gricean communication. The problem of explaining how we understand metaphor is a case of explaining how speaker meaning and sentence meaning can be divergent. Gricean logic can provide an instructive way to break down the problem of metaphorical meaning. This theory is the most plausible and overcomes Davidson’s leading objections to metaphorical meaning.
Pragmatics Aspects: Deixis and Distance, reference and inference, conversational implicature, anaphoric and cataphoric reference, presupposition, entailment, direct and indirect speech acts and speech events, cultural context and cross cultural pragmatics, conversational analysis and background knowledge, denotation and connotation meaning, the four maxims and hedges.
White, A. (2003). Women’s usage of specific linguistic functions in the context of casual conversation: Analysis and discussion. Retrieved from http://www.bhamlive3.bham.ac.uk /Documents/college-artslaw/cels/essays /sociolinguistics/White5.pdf
“Speech act” is a term coined by Searle, who, being a disciple of Austin, perfected the theory, presented in his book How to do things with words, published in 1962. Speech acts are defined as what we do when we speak with words (Austin, 1962), such as performing a request, ordering or refusing. The concept of speech acts was first proposed by philosophers of language as Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1975, 1976), and subsequently, the concept was adapted to studies of sociology, psychology and applied linguistics. Austin notes that some statements are in their own right acts, which he called “performative” statements. By issuing a performative statement the speaker, rather than state or describe something actually performs an act. For example, statements like “I do” in a wedding ceremony said by the couple and “I name this ship Queen Elizabeth” (P. 49), the speaker explicitly performs a speech act. In light of this verbs such as to do and in this case to name, belong to the category of performative verbs as far as Austin is concerned. Austin believes that every speech act has three dimensions: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. Locution is where the literal meaning of the statement is taken as the overall meaning of what is being communicated. “I’m thirsty” is a statement that expresses that the speaker is thirsty. The illocution has to do with the value that speaker gives to the locutionary act. I’m thirsty can be expressed and understood as simple the physical state of the speaker but it can also refer to a request being made for something to drink. The speaker has added an illocutionary meaning or illocutionary force to his statement. The perlocutionary aspect deals with the effect the statement has on the listene...