Text 11

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 465.

J. l.morgan: 'Two types of convention in indirect speech acts' in P. Cole (ed.): Syntax and Semantics Volume 9: Pragmatics. Academic Press 1978, pages 277-8

Just above I presented cases involving particular expressions and the conventionalization of their use for certain implicatures, as in the case of If you've seen one, you've seen them all, or the original example, Can you pass the salt? I said in the latter case that it had become a convention of usage to use this expression, with its lit­eral meaning, to convey an implicature of request. The question

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now arises, can there be this kind of conventionalization of rules of conversation? I think there can. For example, it is more or less conventional to challenge the wisdom of a suggested course of action by questioning the mental health of the suggestor, by ANY appropriate linguistic means, as in:

(37) Are you crazy?

(38) Have you lost your mind?

(39) Are you out of your gourd?

and so on. Most Americans have two or three stock expressions usable as answers to obvious questions, as in:

(40) Is the Pope Catholic?

(41) Do bagels wear bikinis?

But for some speakers the convention does not specify a particu­lar expression, and new ones are manufactured as they are needed. It seems that here a schema for implicature has been con­ventionalized: Answer an obvious yes/no question by replying with another question whose answer is very obvious and the same as the answer you intend to convey.

In a similar way, most speakers have a small number of expres­sions usable as replies to assertions, with the implicature that the assertion is transparently false—(42), for example:

(42) Yes, and I'm Marie the Queen of Romania.

But again, for some speakers the convention specifies only a general strategy, rather than a particular expression: To convey that an assertion is transparently false, reply with another asser­tion even more transparently false.

I> Do you know any other 'stock expressions' for these types of occasions (request, challenge, answer to obvious questions, reply to a false assertion)? How would you explain (to some­one learning English as a foreign language, for example) how to work out the communicated meaning from the literal meaning?

[> The author uses the term 'convention' in talking about the kinds of implicatures involved here. Do you think that the examples presented here can be analyzed in terms of conven­tional implicatures (as discussed in Chapter 5, pages 45-6)?

O What do you think about the idea that an implicature may begin by being based on inference, but can become so conven­tionalized that no one has to make the inference any more? Is that the same process as we use in interpreting idioms?

Chapter 6

Speech acts and events