[MD] What we say vs. what we mean

X Acto xacto at rocketmail.com
Wed Aug 22 02:28:02 PDT 2018


By Maria Kasmirli
When we convey a message indirectly like this, linguists say that we implicate the meaning, and they refer to the meaning implicated as an implicature. These terms were coined by the British philosopher Paul Grice (1913-88), who proposed an influential account of implicature in his classic paper ‘Logic and Conversation’ (1975), reprinted in his book Studies in the Way of Words (1989). Grice distinguished several forms of implicature, the most important being conversational implicature. A conversational implicature, Grice held, depends, not on the meaning of the words employed (their semantics), but on the way that the words are used and interpreted (their pragmatics).
 
Grice argued that conversational implicatures arise because speakers are expected to be cooperative – to make contributions appropriate to the purpose of the conversation in which they are engaged. More specifically, they are expected to follow four conversational maxims, which can be summarised as: (1) give an appropriate amount of information (the maxim of quantity); (2) give correct information (the maxim of quality); (3) give relevant information (the maxim of relation); and (4) give information clearly (the maxim of manner). According to Grice, a conversational implicature is generated when an utterance flouts one or more of these maxims, or would do so if the implicature weren’t present. In such cases, we can preserve the assumption that the speaker is being cooperative only by interpreting their utterance as conveying something other than, or additional to, its literal meaning, and this is its implicated meaning.
https://qrius.com/what-we-say-vs-what-we-mean-what-is-conversational-implicature-2/

Sent from my iPhone


More information about the Moq_Discuss mailing list