Conversational Implicature
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE
INTRODUCTION
During the time doing this assignment, I accidentally brought back a memory when I was a student. My roommate was a very charming girl, who made many boys’ hearts beat. One day, a boy came to see her and said, “Would you like to go to the cinema with me tonight?” She replied, “Well, that’s a good idea. But I’ve got some folks coming over tonight.” He insisted on asking her, “So you are still able to go with me, right? Please, there’s a very good film on tonight. I’ll pick you up, OK?” That drove my roommate mad, because the boy didn’t recognize her intention that she wanted to refuse his invitation. From this situation, it dawns on me that understanding an utterance is far from proposition analysis and literal meaning interpretation. It is the unity of what is said and what is implicated. Therefore, I chose conversational implicature to present in the final assignment of semantics. Herein, I drew special attraction to Grice’s theory of conversational implicature which provides some explicit account of how it is possible to mean more than what is literally expressed by the conventional sense of the linguistic expressions uttered. In this theory, the “Cooperative Principle” and associated “Maxims” play a central role. Using this theory, we can infer the speaker’s real intention, appreciate figure of speech in literary work, and improve our communicative competence.
DEVELOPMENT
1. Implicature H. P. Grice (1913–1988) was the first to systematically study cases in which what a speaker means differs from what the sentence used by the speaker means. Consider the following dialogue. Alan: Are you going to Paul 's party? Barb: I have to work. If this was a typical exchange, Barb meant that she is not going to Paul 's party. But the sentence she uttered does not mean that she is not going to Paul 's party. Hence Barb did not say that she is not going, she implied it. Grice
INTRODUCTION
During the time doing this assignment, I accidentally brought back a memory when I was a student. My roommate was a very charming girl, who made many boys’ hearts beat. One day, a boy came to see her and said, “Would you like to go to the cinema with me tonight?” She replied, “Well, that’s a good idea. But I’ve got some folks coming over tonight.” He insisted on asking her, “So you are still able to go with me, right? Please, there’s a very good film on tonight. I’ll pick you up, OK?” That drove my roommate mad, because the boy didn’t recognize her intention that she wanted to refuse his invitation. From this situation, it dawns on me that understanding an utterance is far from proposition analysis and literal meaning interpretation. It is the unity of what is said and what is implicated. Therefore, I chose conversational implicature to present in the final assignment of semantics. Herein, I drew special attraction to Grice’s theory of conversational implicature which provides some explicit account of how it is possible to mean more than what is literally expressed by the conventional sense of the linguistic expressions uttered. In this theory, the “Cooperative Principle” and associated “Maxims” play a central role. Using this theory, we can infer the speaker’s real intention, appreciate figure of speech in literary work, and improve our communicative competence.
DEVELOPMENT
1. Implicature H. P. Grice (1913–1988) was the first to systematically study cases in which what a speaker means differs from what the sentence used by the speaker means. Consider the following dialogue. Alan: Are you going to Paul 's party? Barb: I have to work. If this was a typical exchange, Barb meant that she is not going to Paul 's party. But the sentence she uttered does not mean that she is not going to Paul 's party. Hence Barb did not say that she is not going, she implied it. Grice
References: 1. John Saeed: “Semantics”, Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 2. Nguyễn Hòa: “Understanding English Semantics”, Vietnam National University Publisher, 2004. 3. Edward Finegan: “Language: Its Structure and Use” (4th ed.), Thomson Wadsworth, 2004. 4. Kate Kearns: “Semantics”, St. Martin’s Press LLC, 2000. 5. http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/implicature/#6 (Copyright © 2005 by Wayne Davis )