Los creadores 1. Dámaso Lapetra

Semantics views meaning from the compositional perspective: the meaning of a sentence is built up from the meanings of its parts. The smallest parts get their meanings from the lexicon, and then these meanings get put together according to rules which pay attention to the grammatical struc-ture of the sentence. However, not all aspects of meaning can be explained by this compositional “bottom-up” approach, and a complementary “top-down” view of meaning has focused on the intentions of language users.

More precisely, when A says something to B, A intends for B to be affected in a certain way. If A says “It’s raining,” for example, A may intend for B to believe that it’s raining (and perhaps to open an umbrella or come inside).

This perspective helps us understand many aspects of speaker’s meaning.

Pragmatics 2: meaning and the intention

to communicate

Implicature

The idea that meaning is based in the intentions of speakers is most clearly revealed in H. P. Grice’s theory of conversationalimplicature(Grice 1957, 1975). Very often, when someone says something, he or she doesn’t mean exactly what the words literally mean. That is, the (speaker’s) meaning dif-fers from the (semantic) meaning. For example, the semantic meaning of

“There’s a bear sneaking up behind you!” doesn’t involve the concept of warning; it just reports a fact. However, it’s quite likely that a warning is part of what the speaker means. This “extra meaning” which goes beyond what the words literally say is an implicature of the sentence. Grice explained how speaker’s meaning can be determined in such cases by positing a Cooperative Principle that all speakers and hearers assume when speaking to each other:

Cooperative Principle: speaker’s meaning can be calculated on the basis of semantic meaning and the assumption that speakers are behaving rationally and cooperatively.

Grice broke this general principle into four conversational maxims to explain what rationality and cooperativeness are:

The maxim of Quality: make your contribution one that is true rather than false.

The maxim of Quantity: provide the information that is required for the purposes of the conversation, but no more.

The maxim of Relevance: make your contributions relevant.

The maxim of Manner: be clear and orderly in your talk.

These maxims are not rules to be followed in the sense that traffic laws are. Rather, they are assumptions which we use to try to make sense of what people say. That is, we assume that people follow the four maxims when they talk, and this helps us figure out what they mean. Consider (36), for example:

(36) There are three students in the class: Mary, Bob, and Jill.

A: Which students passed the exam?

B: Mary and Bob.

In this conversation, in addition to concluding that Mary and Bob passed the exam, A is likely to infer that Jill didn’t. However, B never said that Jill didn’t pass the exam, so why would A infer this? By assuming that B is following the four maxims, A can figure that B gave as much true infor-mation as was required and relevant (maxims of quality, quantity, and rel-evance). Since it would be relevant to say that Jill passed if she actually had passed, A can infer that B didn’t include Jill in the list of people who passed because B doesn’t think that Jill passed (so long as other assump-tions hold, such as that B knows Jill is in the class). Moreover, B knows that A would figure this way, and so said “Mary and Bob” with the understanding that A would conclude that Jill didn’t pass. In this way, the idea that Jill

didn’t pass becomes part of the speaker’s meaning of B’s utterance. That is, B uses the Cooperative Principle and maxims to implicate that Jill didn’t pass.

Another example of implicature was hinted at earlier in example (12):

(12) Elvis Presley made a peanut butter sandwich and sat down beside the pool.

This sentence seems to mean that Elvis made the peanut butter sandwich before going to the pool. This ‘before’ meaning is not part of the semantic meaning of and (as given by truth conditions); it is an implicature.

According to Grice’s maxim of Manner, we should present information in an orderly way, and in most cases that includes mentioning events in the order in which they occurred. Therefore, a hearer can conclude that the speaker means to say that Elvis made the sandwich before sitting down by the pool.

Because the Gricean maxims are not rigid rules, like rules of law, but are rather flexible assumptions about how speakers behave, they can be broken, or flouted, to implicate further meanings. Flouting a maxim occurs when a speaker uses language in a way which appears, in an obvi-ous way, to violate a maxim. For example, if you ask me whether I think your new shirt is attractive, and I say “It was probably inexpensive,” my reply seems to violate the maxim of relevance – I didn’t answer your ques-tion. However, because you assume that, despite appearances, I am con-forming to relevance, you try to figure out how what I said could be rele-vant. Since my utterance avoided answering your question by mentioning a reason why you might have bought an unattractive shirt, you will infer that I don’t like the shirt. This inference can become an implicature of the sentence, that is, part of my speaker’s meaning.

Box 4.5 Culture-specific implicature

Cultural assumptions can be crucial in determining speaker’s meaning.

For example, if two Chinese people are looking at the dessert display in a French restaurant, and one says to the other, “That tart is not too sweet,” she almost certainly intends this comment as praise of the tart.

She might intend to implicate that her dinner partner should order a tart, as opposed to the éclair or mousse. This speaker’s meaning arises, in part, from the fact that it is common knowledge among Chinese peo-ple that most of them find western desserts too sweet. Among some other groups, the same comment (“That tart is not too sweet”) could be interpreted as a criticism, rather than a compliment. Notice that the cultural specificity of the speaker’s meaning in this example is not a fact about the Chinese language. The implicature could arise whether or not the two people are speaking Chinese; they might happen to be speaking French or English. What’s crucial is the common assumption that people like them don’t enjoy sweet desserts.