A proposal for a new legal framework for the advertising of food supplements and functional foods

As Horn & Ward note, “The landmark event in the development of a systematic framework for pragmatics was the delivery of Grice’s (1967) William James lectures” (2004: xi). One of the basic concepts in Gricean Pragmatics is speaker meaning. Grice makes a distinction between natural meaning, which is devoid of human intentionality¹, and non-natural meaning (meaning –nn), which has to do with intentional communication.

There is a second intention which is implicit in the definition of meaning -nn, i.e. the recognition, on the part of the addressee, of the speaker’s communicative intention. Thus, for instance, if a child says “I like that toy” to her mother, the meaning –nn would be that she wants her mother to buy that toy for her (and therefore she expects her mother to recognize her “hidden” intention or wish of having that toy). This type of meaning is closely connected to another of the central concepts in Gricean Pragmatics: the notion of conversational implicature, which is considered to be one of the single most important ideas in Pragmatics. This notion has provided linguistic analysts with an explicit account of how it is possible to mean more than what is actually “said”. Normally, what a speaker intends to communicate is far richer than what s/he says or directly expresses, and thus s/he exploits pragmatic principles that the hearer can invoke in order to bridge the gap between what was said (the literal content of the uttered sentence, determined by its grammatical structure) and what was meant (i.e. what was really communicated).

Conversational implicatures are a kind of inference that can be derived from an utterance in order to work out the “meant” from the “said”, and they are related to what Grice called the Cooperative Principle and its Maxims. Given the fact that our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks (and would not be rational if they did), the remarks are characteristically cooperative efforts and each participant recognizes in them a mutually accepted direction (Grice, 1975:

45). Speakers are assumed to be cooperative and to follow the maxims, which are reproduced herein:

A) THE COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE:

Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

1 As in, for example, Those dark clouds mean rain.

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1) THE MAXIM OF QUANTITY

i) Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).

ii) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

2) THE MAXIM OF QUALITY

Try to make your contribution one that is true, specifically:

i) Avoid obscurity of expression.

ii) Avoid ambiguity.

iii) Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).

iv) Be orderly.

(Grice, 1975:45-46) Grice explains that people do not always follow these guidelines to the letter, and here is where conversational implicatures play their part. When a speaker violates or “flouts” one of the maxims, the hearer assumes that the speaker is nevertheless trying to be cooperative and looks for the meaning at some deeper level. In doing so s/he makes an inference, namely a conversational implicature.

One area in which conversational implicatures are fully at work is in the use of verbal irony. For example, if, after having a terrible argument with a friend, a woman responds:

You’re a fine friend indeed!

the friend will readily understand that the woman is trying to get across a meaning which is different from the literal one, conveyed by her proposition. She is in fact violating the Quality Maxim, for her friend should reach the conclusion, by means of implicature, that the woman does not think she is a fine friend but, on the contrary, a bad/ disloyal/

selfish friend.

According to Grice, in order to work out the presence of a conversational implicature, the hearer will draw on:

• The conventional meaning of the words used, together with the identity of any references that may be involved.

• The Cooperative Principle and its Maxims.

• The context, linguistic or otherwise, of the utterance.

• Other items of background knowledge.

• The fact (or supposed fact) that all relevant items falling under the previous headings are available to both participants and both participants know or assume this to be the case (1975: 50).

There are, however, cases in which the conventional meaning of the words used will determine what is implicated. Consider the following examples:

a) She is a woman and therefore she is not a good driver.

b) The math problem was so easy that even Tom could solve it.

By using the connector therefore in a) we support the notion that the fact of driving badly is a consequence of the fact of being a woman. Likewise, in b), the conventional meaning of the word even makes the hearer infer that Tom must not be very intelligent or at least is not very good at maths.

This kind of inference, induced by therefore in a) and by even in b), is what Grice has called a conventional implicature. Conventional implicatures deal with detachable but non-cancellable aspects of meaning, and they are akin to pragmatic presuppositions².

One of the main characteristics of conversational implicatures, as opposed to conventional implicatures, is that they are cancellable, a feature that Grice explains in the following manner:

To the form of words of the utterance of which putatively implicates that p, it is admissible to add “but not p”, or “I do not mean to imply that p”, and that it is contextually cancellable if one can find situations in which the utterance of the form of the words would simply not carry the implicature (1978: 115-16).

The fact that all conversational implicatures are non-conventional and therefore can be cancelled gives them a certain “slippery” condition.

However, they constitute a crucial part of both speaker and hearer communicative competence: being able to work out implicatures, among

2 See 3.6.

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other things, makes a speaker proficient and capable of interacting successfully. It is a crucially important part of the pragmatic knowledge necessary to communicate efficiently in any language.

Many authors (e.g. Hirschberg 1991, Levinson 2000, Carston 1995) have debated the significance of two main kinds of conversational implicature, namely 1) generalized conversational implicature, and 2) particularized conversational implicature. Examples a) and b) illustrate the difference between the two types:

a) (A conversation between Robert and John, when talking about some beautiful, attractive women they met in their youth)

Robert: Remember Paula?

John: Ah!! Paula!! She was glorious, gorgeous! What a beautiful girl! She always hung out with Susan, remember?

Robert: Yeah, Susan was a nice person.

Implicature a Susan was not attractive or beautiful (or glorious, or gorgeous)

b) My brother is now in Rome or in Venice.

Implicature b I don’t know for a fact that my brother is in Venice.

The inferences induced in both a) and b) are non-conventional and therefore, cancellable. Thus, in both cases we are dealing with conversational implicatures. But what distinguishes implicature a from implicature b is the generality of the circumstances in which the inference was worked out. The inference drawn in a) is a case of particularized conversational implicature because it is only in the context of a conversation like the one between Robert and John (i.e. a conversation about beautiful women) that the hearer will normally be expected to infer the content of implicature a, i.e., that Susan was not beautiful. That is to say, the implicature is worked out in this particular context and would not apply to a general context (where nobody would question Susan’s beauty and would just consider the fact that she was nice). On the contrary, the inference drawn in b), that the speaker does not know for sure whether her brother is in Venice or in Rome, is induced in the absence of a special context. Implicature b then, has a default nature and it represents the concept of generalized conversational implicature. It is important to note that in both examples the crucial elements to take into account for

inducing the relevant implicatum are the speaker or utterance, NOT the proposition or sentence.

Having said the above, I want to remark that it is not within the objectives of this work to theorize about the difference between the two types of conversational implicature. For the sake of our analysis, it will suffice to be able to identify the conversational implicatures of a given discourse, whatever type they belong to, and thus from now onwards we shall simply refer to conversational implicatures as a general category, regardless of their type.

3.2.1. Examples and analysis

In the above section (3.2.) we saw an example of an implicature that was worked out after the violation of the Quality Maxim (You’re a fine friend indeed!). The following examples show the violation of the other three maxims and the implicatures this violation triggers in each case.

1) Maxim of Relation: A: Could you pass me my jacket, please?

B: It’s not cold.

In this example, speaker B flouts the maxim of relation by not giving the expected affirmative answer and simply passing A the jacket. Instead, B says something which, on the surface, does not seem to be relevant to the question asked; but on the assumption that B continues to observe the Cooperative Principle, it must be deduced that she intends to be relevant.

Thus A has to infer that B implies that she does not need to wear her jacket because it is not cold.

2) Maxim of Quantity:

A: I’ll call all my friends and ask them to come to my party next weekend.

B: Mark and Paula will be in town next weekend.

A: Great, I’ll call Paula.

In this example, speaker A flouts the maxim of quantity because his response attends only to part of the topic initiated by A. Consequently, the deliberate omission can be said to imply that A is not going to invite Mark to his party, and even more, that he probably does not like Mark and that is why he does not want to invite him.

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3) Maxim of Manner:

A: I don’t think you’ve met Sally on the fourth floor.

B: No, what’s she like?

A: Well, she’s not of the kindest variety.

Here, speaker A is being ambiguous and a bit obscure (and therefore she is flouting the Manner Maxim) in order to avoid uttering a direct criticism, for she is not clearly saying that Sally is unkind. But this would precisely be the implicature triggered by the violation, i.e. that Sally is not a kind person at all.

Having touched upon Grice’s central ideas, which are, in turn, central to Pragmatics, we now turn to other aspects of the speech situation which are considered to be essential within Pragmatic studies.