Pragmatics

Pragmatics

1. Conversational implicature

   • Inferences that depend on the existence of norms for the use of language, such as the widespread agreement that communicators should aim to tell the truth.
     • the communicational norms
       • Quality – try to be truthful when communicating
         • Quantity – give appropriate amounts of information, not too little and not too much.
           • Manner – utterances should be clear: brief, orderly and not obscure.
             • Relevance – contributions should be relevant to the assumed current goals of the people involved.

2. Implicatures from the quantity maxim

   • An implicature relating to the low end of the quantity maxim – giving too little information

3. Implicatures from manner

   • Part of Grice’s maxim of manner makes brevity a goal. The indirect causative is longer than the direct causative.

4. is longer than the direct causative

   • Grice’s relevance maxim lays down that contributions should be relevant to the assumed current goals of the interlocutors.

5. Presupposition distinguished from entailment

   • Presuppositions are not affected by negation of the asserted part of a sentence, and questioning the main drift of a sentence leaves the presuppositions intact too.
     • A presupposition triggered by a word or construction in a sentence is supposed to be background information assumed to be already known by the addressee, so it does not count as having been communicated

6. Speech acts

   • the term for what is going to be discussed in this section.
     • Speech acts can be done in writing, not only in speaking. For instance, would be equally appropriate printed in a card or spoken.

7. Content and force in speech acts

   • Force is mainly about the different ways the content propositions are involved in speech acts.