INTRODCTION
In this article, we shall be considering some more
concepts associated with Grice’s theory of implicature and how they enable us to understand better how speakers and hearers are able to communicate effectively. We shall also consider some reactions by scholars to the Gricean
notion of implicature.
Types of Conversational Implicature
Grice identifies two
types of implicature (i) generalized conversational implicature (ii)
particularized conversational implicature. Generalized conversational
implicature occurs irrespective of the context. For example:
(ii)
5
litres of fuel starts my engine
The two statements above give rise to the same generalized implicatures regardless of the context they occur. And they remain implicatures rather than entailment because in statement
(i) some Zambians are Muslims, it is clear that the statement may be denied. The implicature is that not all Zambians are Muslims; in fact we have more Muslims in the north than there are in the south. Statement
(ii) 5 litres of fuel starts my engine, may as well be
denied because the statement didn’t say that 5 litres is all my engine needs to
start. The engine actually requires 70 litres. The case of the generalised
implicature is that the same inference,
(iii) not all Zambians are Muslims and that my engine needs more than 5 litres
to run, are the most likely irrespective of the context.
However, statement (i)
above may give rise to other forms of implicatures which depends on the
context. For example some Zambians are Muslims, while some are Christians; some
are neither Muslims nor Christians, some are traditional religionists etc.
Similarly for statement (ii) someone might even conclude that less than 5
litres may start my engine or more etc. Because these implicatures depend on
the context of use, Grice calls them ‘particularized implicature.’ A particularized
implicature is different from the generalized implicature that is associated
with words like some since they are the inferences we need to make as
they relate to some particular contexts.
You will recall that one of the conversational maxims is relation or relevance, i.e. make your contribution relevant to the conversation/context. If all implicatures were particularized, one can reasonably argue that the maxim of Relation (relevance) is enough to account for all implicatures, because the implicature would be what the addressee has to assume to render the utterance relevant to the context.
But generalized conversational implicature does not
rely on how relevant an utterance is to a context, rather on quantity (maxim of
Quantity) and manner (maxim of Manner). When a speaker uses the word ‘some’ it
is because s/he is not in position to use the word ‘all’ and is therefore taken
to imply ‘not all’ by the Maxim of Quantity. This is explained
in the figure below:
Zufferey, S., Moeschler, J., & Reboul, A. (2019).
Generalized Conversational Implicatures: Gricean, Neo-Gricean and Post-Gricean
Pragmatics. In Implicatures (Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics,
pp. 111-140). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316410875.006
The above data gives rise
to what is known as ‘scalar implicature.’ According to Gazdar (1979)
implicature therefore operates with scales, so that one scale would include
‘some’ and ‘all’ and another ‘do brilliantly’ and ‘make progress.’ What this
means is that if you take any item on a scale, the items above or below it is
automatically excluded. In other words you cannot choose ‘some’ and ‘all’ at
the some time. It you choose ‘do’ you automatically exclude ‘make’. Gazdar gave
other hypothetical scales as
<certain...probable...possible><and...or> and <must.. .may..
,might> (Grundy, 2000). This explains why you are not likely to get confused
if I ask you:
(iii)
Would
you like Coke or Fanta?
Of course you know that
I’m not asking you to choose both. My choice of ‘or’ has excluded the
possibility of ‘and’ so you’re sure I’m saying it’s either Coke or Fanta and
not both. By the notion of scalar implicature, because ‘or’ is on the scale
below ‘and’ a speaker selecting ‘or’ (as I have done) would be implying ‘not
and.’ Thus either Coke or Fanta or both is an entailment and either Coke or
Fanta but not both is an implicature (Grundy, 2000). If you listen to people
converse, you will notice that they apply the notion of these scales without
even realizing it.
Non-Conversational Implicature
Another term for
describing ‘non-conversational implicature’ is ‘conventional implicature’ which
according to Levinson 1983:127 is the ‘non-truth conditional inferences that
are not derived from superordinate pragmatic principles like the maxims, but
are simply attached by convention to particular lexical items or expressions.’
Let me illustrate with this advert by the First Bank of Zambia:
(iv)
First
Bank: truly the first.
The lexical item ‘truly’
is a conventional implicature because (i) the word ‘truly’ has a general
meaning or entailment, i.e. certainly, in actual fact, or factually (ii)
the word also conveys an implied meaning or implicature like this may be
contested, or this is not really true. So the word ‘truly’ is conventional
because it is closely associated with particular lexical items, i.e. ‘the
first.’ While it is the first bank in Zambia, the second idea of ‘first’ is the
implicature though conventional because we can’t really say that it is ‘truly’
the first or not.
Explicature
The term “explicature”
was first used by Sperber and Wilson in their book titled: Relevance:
Communication and Cognition, 2nd edition, (1995). They argue
that the single principle of relevance is enough to explain the process of
utterance interpretation and understanding. They replaced the Gricean notion of
implicature (a non-conventional meaning recovered by making some inferences)
with a two-stage process in which the hearer recovers first an explicature
which is an inference or series of inferences that enrich the
under-determined form of the utterance to a full propositional form, and then
an implicature - an inference which provides the hearer/reader with the most
relevant interpretation of the utterance. We can then say that
explicature is an enrichment of an original utterance to a fully elaborated
propositional form. Look at the following examples:
(i)
First
Bank: truly the first
The above adverts may be explicated as follows: (i) First Bank is the first indigenous Zambian Bank, and has proved to be the first in terms of its highest standard of customer service delivery (ii) Limca soft drink is first among all others for taste. Sperber and Wilson believe that Gricean implicature leaves the addressee with too many probabilities and therefore propose a Relevance theory that goes beyond these probabilities to enable addressees to be sure that they have recovered the most relevant of a all possible set of inferences.
If an addressee is able
to recover the explicature of a proposition, it becomes easier for him/her to
make the right inference. Sperber and Wilson also identified a “higher level
explicature” which seeks to reveal the propositional attitude of the speaker to
his/her utterance. In other words, the speech acts description for the
utterance. This means that even where an utterance is explicit enough (may be
associated with an explicature) there is still a higher level explicature which
the addressee needs to recover. Speech acts are therefore treated as attitude
to propositions rather than as actions.
It is argued that explicature (i.e.
inference/series of inferences that enrich/elaborate the under-determined
form...to a full propositional form) are motivated by the indeterminacy of
language . This indeterminacy is as a result of the economy of
expression which characterizes natural language. A lot of expressions may
represent or mean other things which require inferential process to be able to
arrive at their full interpretation. Even where utterances with straightforward
grammatical relations are made, there may still be some possible semantic
relations that may be inferred with different uses of the expression. So
utterances require some degree of enriching or fleshing for the
most relevant inference to be made about their meaning.
CONCLUSION
Grice’s conversational implicature
stems from the fact that people communicate meaning or assumptions explicitly
(clearly, overtly or plainly) or implicitly (totally completely though often
indirectly). What is said or entailed (what our words mean) is distinguished
from what is implicated (what we mean by using some particular words). So
implicatures are simply a matter of more being communicated than said. For a
conversational implicature to take place it is assumed that some cooperative
principles are in operation, which of course are usually violated.
No comments:
Post a Comment